Macron prepares enabling act to slash contracts, labor rights in France

Alex Lantier 

Newly-elected French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing a historic assault on jobs, wages and labor legislation, to be rammed through by presidential decree in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

Details of Macron’s plans emerged Monday in the run-up to his meetings Tuesday with trade union and business representatives at the Elysée Palace.

After next month’s legislative elections, Macron will demand an enabling act from parliament authorizing the president to decree changes in French labor law. “The reform of the Labor Code has been well planned,” incoming Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told the Journal du Dimanche. “We will now discuss it to enrich it and explain it. This means discussions with the trade unions, which are indispensable, and a parliamentary discussion which will take place during the vote on the enabling act that will allow the government to impose decrees in a context defined by the parliament.”

Philippe said that he and Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud would work closely with the trade unions and meet bilaterally with each of the major union confederations. “But once the discussion has taken place,” he added, “we will have to act fast. We cannot wait two years to finish the job. Emmanuel Macron has heard the anger of the French people. He also knows how urgent it is to transform the country.”

The decrees being discussed indicate that Macron aims to tear up the entire framework of labor relations in France as they emerged from the liberation from Nazi occupation and the social concessions of the immediate post-World War II period.

Many of these decrees aim to re-introduce provisions into the 2016 labor law that the previous Socialist Party (PS) government removed in order to halt strikes and protests against the law. The PS rammed the law through without a parliamentary vote in the face of opposition from 70 percent of the French population, as riot police were sent under the state of emergency to assault protesters and striking workers. Nevertheless, in order to prevent a social explosion, many provisions favored by Macron were removed. He now wants to reinstate them. They include:

● Placing a ceiling on the fines that labor courts can assess employers for illegally firing employees. It was widely feared that the imposition of low fine ceilings would emasculate the labor courts: bosses could simply foresee and incorporate the fine for firing employees “without real or serious cause” into the cost of doing business. According to Le Parisien, the ceiling Macron is considering, three months’ wages, is half the current minimum fine of six months’ wages. The goal is clearly to allow businesses to hire and fire at will.

● Enabling individual firms to negotiate contracts violating industry-level contract agreements and the national Labor Code. Currently, firms can only negotiate contracts that are more beneficial to the workers. Macron’s decree would turn all this labor legislation into a dead letter, since firms could blackmail workers, threatening their jobs if they did not accept contracts inferior to the wages and benefits supposedly guaranteed by industry-level and national agreements.

● Enabling employers who are proposing contracts supported by only a minority of trade unionists at the workplace to demand a referendum of the workers at the site on whether or not to accept the contract despite union opposition. Insofar as yellow unions are present in the vast majority of workplaces in France, this would effectively allow employers to dictate contracts, obtain minority support and then demand that workers accept the contract or face the loss of their jobs.

Other proposals backed by Macron are inspired by anti-social legislation elsewhere in Europe, notably the Agenda 2010-Hartz IV laws imposed by Germany’s Social Democratic Party. These include pushing workers to enter into supplementary private pension schemes, a step towards eliminating the right to a state-funded pension, and enforcing strict testing of workers claiming unemployment benefits. This would allow the state to kick workers off unemployment unless they meet stringent tests to prove they are looking for work.

The Macron administration is trying to present these proposals as part of a plan to “modernize” France, notably by playing up policies ostensibly aimed at defending women’s rights. All of France’s different maternity leave programs would be combined into one, whose features, according to one proposal, will be “aligned on the most advantageous program.” There would also be random testing of workplaces, supposedly to check that bosses do not discriminate against women.

This is a reactionary fraud, however. The legislation is a massive step backwards, submitting all workers, including women workers, to the diktat of the bosses and the state. The fact that proposals on gender equality include anti-democratic restrictions on religious liberty at work, and a ban on “proselytizing,” are an ominous sign: they could be used to allow employers to fire veiled Muslim women and generally to feed anti-Muslim and pro-war hatreds.

The capitalist crisis and the austerity drive the European Union (EU) launched after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and accelerated after the 2008 Wall Street crash, are undermining democratic forms of rule.

The Macron government has no mandate whatsoever to carry out the program it is proposing. The labor law was deeply unpopular even without its most controversial provisions. Former PS President François Hollande’s economic policy, which Macron helped formulate, had a 4 percent approval rating. Now Macron is advancing such a program after an election that he won largely by default, because he was facing the deeply unpopular neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen.

Macron, a former investment banker at the Rothschild bank, aims to impose the arrogant diktat of the banks. Under Hollande’s presidency, as workers’ living standards fell, the wealth of top French multi-billionaires like Liliane Bettencourt and Philippe Arnault nearly doubled. With the world economy still mired in crisis, however, and France’s economic position and its weight in world trade continuing to fall, the ruling class is determined to squeeze even more money out of workers and place it in the hands of the super-rich.

The working class is faced with a political struggle against an absolutely ruthless government that is willing to resort to forms of repression unseen in France since the 1940s in order to ram through the diktat of the banks. The new administration is aware that it faces massive popular opposition and is making detailed plans to crush strikes and protests.

Last week, the media revealed that the PS had made plans for a coup d’état after the presidential elections to be implemented had Marine Le Pen won. Its purpose would not have been to topple Le Pen, but to crush anti-fascist protests and suspend normal parliamentary procedure by imposing a PS government on Le Pen.

Incoming Interior Minister Gérard Collomb said on Friday that he will review the state of emergency and that he would support extending it yet again past its current expiration date, July 15. “I think at some point we will have to end the state of emergency. But is now the right time? Maybe not right after the formation of the government,” Collomb told RTL.

Under the state of emergency, workers exercising constitutionally-protected rights to strike and protest can be targeted with bans on demonstrations, arbitrary detentions and house arrest by police. That is to say, the French capitalist class is repudiating the promises it made in the aftermath of World War II never to return to the arbitrary and unrestrained oppression of working people that characterized the Nazi occupation.

This situation vindicates the Parti de l’égalité socialiste’s call for a boycott of the second round of the presidential election between Macron and Le Pen. The PES argued that Macron was not an alternative to Le Pen and that the critical question was presenting a politically independent and revolutionary perspective on the basis of which the working class could fight the attacks of whatever president was elected. This position has been confirmed in the aftermath of Macron’s election.

Trump calls for $1.7 trillion in social cuts

Kate Randall

The Trump administration will unveil a fiscal year 2018 budget today that includes $1.7 trillion in cuts to major social programs. The plan marks a new stage in a bipartisan social counterrevolution aimed at eviscerating what remains of programs to fight poverty and hunger and provide health care for millions of workers.

The unveiling of the budget underscores the reactionary character of the Democrats’ response to a gangster government headed by a fascistic-minded billionaire and composed of Wall Street bankers, far-right ideologues and generals. The Democratic Party has chosen to base its opposition to Trump not on his assault on working and poor people, his attacks on democratic rights, or his reckless militarism, but on his supposed “softness” toward Russia.

In the political warfare in Washington, the Democrats are aligned with those sections of the intelligence apparatus and the “deep state” that are determined to compel Trump to abandon any notion of easing relations, and instead continue the Obama administration’s policy of escalating confrontation with Russia. As the Democrats and the so-called “liberal” media pursue their anti-Russia campaign, the Trump administration continues to advance its brutal domestic agenda.

Trump’s budget is the opening shot in a stage-managed tussle between the two big business parties over social cuts that will end with the most massive attack on core social programs in US history.

The budget includes a cut of $800 billion over a decade in Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people jointly administered by the federal government and the states. More than 74 million Americans, or one in five, are currently enrolled in Medicaid, including pregnant women, children and seniors with disabilities.

Like the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed earlier this month by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Trump’s budget plan would put an end to Medicaid as a guaranteed benefit based on need, replacing it with per capita funding or block grants to the states.

The AHCA would also end the expansion of Medicaid benefits under Obamacare and allow states to impose work requirements for beneficiaries. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that an earlier version of the Republican plan would result in 10 million people being stripped of Medicaid benefits.

Trump’s budget would also cut $193 billion over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, a 25 percent reduction to be achieved in part by limiting eligibility and imposing work requirements.

Welfare benefits, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, would be cut by $21 billion. Spending on the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, which benefit mainly low- and middle-income families, would be reduced by $40 billion.

The budget reportedly includes changes in funding for Social Security’s Supplemental Security Income program, which provides cash benefits to the poor and disabled.

While gutting social programs, Trump proposes to sharply reduce taxes for the wealthy. In addition to slashing income tax rates for the rich, he is proposing to dramatically cut estate, capital gains and business tax rates. At the same time, he is demanding a huge increase in military spending.

While Democrats will make rhetorical criticisms of the Trump budget, the fact is that the administration is escalating a decades-long assault on the working class overseen by both big business parties.

The outcome can be seen in the reality of social life in America:

Poverty

More than 13 percent—some 43.1 million Americans—were living in poverty in 2015. Of these, 19.4 million were living in extreme poverty, which means their family’s cash income was less than half of the poverty line, or about $10,000 a year for a family of four. The poverty rate for children under 18 was 19.7 percent.

These are the official poverty rates, based on absurdly low income baselines. In reality, at least half of the population is living in or on the edge of poverty. These are precisely the people targeted by Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid, welfare and food stamps.

Hunger

Almost one in eight US households, 15.8 million, were food insecure in 2015, meaning they had difficulty providing enough food for all their members. Five percent of households had very low food security, meaning the food intake of household members was cut. Three million households were unable to provide adequate, nutritious food for their children.

Lack of health care

In 2016 under Obamacare, 28.6 million people of all ages, or about 9 percent of the US population, remained uninsured. Many of those insured under plans purchased from private insurers on the Obamacare exchanges were unable to use their insurance because of prohibitively high deductibles and co-pays. Many who gained insurance under Obamacare did so as a result of the expansion of Medicaid. Trump plans to reverse this, throwing millions of people back into the ranks of the uninsured.

A bipartisan assault

In the wake of Trump’s budget proposal, the Democrats have responded with their standard empty rhetoric. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer—one of Congress’ biggest recipients of Wall Street campaign money—decried Trump’s “hard-right policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of the middle-class.” Just three weeks ago, Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were hailing the passage of a bipartisan fiscal 2017 budget that cut food stamps by $2.4 billion, slashed funding for education and the environment, and added billions more for the military and border control.

Obamacare paved the way for the present assault on Medicaid and the coming attacks on Medicare and Social Security by further subordinating health care to the profit demands of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and imposing higher costs for reduced benefits on millions of workers.

Nothing less than a mass movement of the working class will prevent the destruction of Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, public education and every other social gain won by the working class. But this movement must be completely independent of the Democratic Party, the historic graveyard of social protest in America. That includes left-talking demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

It is not a matter of appealing to or seeking to pressure the Democrats or any other section of the political establishment. They are all in the pocket of Wall Street.

The working class needs its own program to secure its basic social rights—a decent-paying job, education, health care, a secure retirement. These rights are not compatible with a capitalist system that is lurching inexorably toward world war and dictatorship.

Workers and youth must intervene in this crisis with a socialist and revolutionary program geared to the needs of the vast majority, not the interests of an obscenely rich and corrupt financial oligarchy.

Trade splits emerge at APEC meeting

Nick Beams

The meeting of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers held in Hanoi, Vietnam, over the weekend was the third major international meeting to abandon a commitment to resist protectionism, following similar decisions at G7 and G20 summits over the past two months.

Like the earlier decisions, the statement issued by the 21 APEC trade ministers was a response to the “America First” program of the Trump administration in the US. Since coming to office Trump has scrapped the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and demanded the renegotiation of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada.

After somewhat tense back-and-forth negotiations on the wording of the text, leading to conjecture as to whether there would even be a statement, the meeting simply called for officials to “deepen APEC’s structural reform agenda to remove barriers to trade and investment.”

It was very different from the statement issued at the last APEC meeting held in Peru in November last year.

That statement had declared: “We reaffirm the pledge made by our leaders against protectionism through a standstill commitment that we recommend be extended until the end of 2020 and to roll back protectionist and trade-distorting measures, which weaken trade and slow down the progress and recovery of the international economy.”

What has changed between the two meetings is the coming to power of the Trump administration in the US and its insistence that international agreements, including the operations of the World Trade Organisation, have disadvantaged the US. The White House wants to pursue bilateral agreements, rather than all-embracing arrangements and commitments.

The role of the US at the meeting, which was attended by trade representative Robert Lighthizer, was the subject of some pointed remarks by Russia’s economy minister Maxim Oreshkin.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Saturday, in the midst of discussions over the text, he said there was a risk there may not even be statement as there was one country opposed to a commitment to fight protectionism. “When there were talks about the memorandum of the forum, there were 20 countries that agree on everything and one country that has not agreed on anything,” he said.

Asked what country that was, he replied: “You can guess.”

Lighthizer said the US faced a huge trade deficit and it would fight against what he called “unfair trade,” reiterating the commitment to pull out of the TPP.

“This does not mean we will not engage in this region,” he said. “The president thought it was so important that I come here and demonstrate to this region how important it is to the US to be involved.”

Trade talks and economic arrangements, however, have been thrown into disarray because no one is sure how the “America First” agenda of the Trump administration will play out and what exactly it is demanding.

“It’s not only us, it’s everybody on this forum wants to get clarity on what the US thinks about its trade policy,” Oreshkin told Bloomberg .

These views were echoed by He Weiwen, a former Chinese trade diplomat in San Francisco and New York.

“They claim that US policy is free trade but what they say they want is what they call fair trade. They haven’t explained what fair trade really is and are just claiming that it is something different. This is certainly not workable. It won’t help APEC, the G20 or the whole course of the global economy. It is a pretext for protectionism.”

There were other expressions of concern. Vietnam’s industry and trade minister Tran Tuan Anh told a press briefing that the APEC group strongly support a multilateral trading environment, and warned of “signs of protectionism.”

Some countries tried to avoid the threat posed to the trade environment posed by the US administration, and downplay the significance of the scrapping of the commitment to resist protectionism.

Canadian trade minister Francois-Pilippe Champagne said the focus should be on actions rather than statements and that economies have agreed to maintain rules-based, open and free trade. It was necessary to look at the “big picture,” he asserted, and the countries represented at the meeting had expressed a desire to strengthen the system that exists in the Asia-Pacific.

The New Zealand trade minister, Todd McClay, said that “we should not become overly concerned where we can’t reach agreement on a statement, clearly and quickly, at every meeting.” There would only be concern, he said, when countries were not willing to come back and talk to each other.

He said the US had “different views” about what fairness in trade meant and “from what I have seen I have a lot of sympathy for the view that seems to be forming in the US.”

Notwithstanding such attempts to downplay the significance of the Trump agenda, the divisions are widening. The commitment to resist protectionism was introduced at the G20 heads of state meeting which followed the global financial crisis of 2008. It was endorsed in recognition of the enormous dangers of a return to the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour policies which played such a disastrous role in the Great Depression.

Now such a commitment is not able to be made at any major international economic gathering. It is a sign of the growing division of the world into rival trade groups and the abandonment of a multilateral approach.

On the sidelines of the meeting, Japan held talks with other members of the TPP in pursuit of its push to make the agreement effective even without the participation of the United States. The Japanese desire to continue with the agreement, which excludes China, signifies an intention to advance its interests against the growth of Chinese economic power.

China held discussions at the conclusion of the meeting with the 16 members of its proposed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Beijing is presenting itself as the champion of free trade against the growing protectionism emanating from the US.

Oreshkin, who warned protectionism was the greatest threat to global growth, said he had not approached Lighthizer about a meeting and that “it’s more important to contact our Asian partners rather than the US.”

For the US part, Lighthizer held discussions on the sidelines of APEC with individual countries, in line with the Trump administration’s pursuit of preferential bilateral deals.

While the global economy continues to operate under the multilateral agreements that characterised the post-war international economic order, the APEC meeting was another indication that it is starting to fracture.

Political tensions in Albania destabilise the Balkans

Markus Salzmann

The conflict between government and opposition in Albania, which has been going on for months, has been temporarily resolved with the Socialist (PS) and Democratic (PD) parties agreeing to postpone parliamentary elections scheduled for 18 June and form a joint government.

As the opposition the PD are to receive the office of deputy head of government, as well as four important ministries and the presidency of the state electoral commission.

On May 13, tens of thousands of followers of the PD took to the streets in the capital city, Tirana, to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama (PS) and the formation of an all-party government. Lulzim Basha, chairman of the PD, declared that this would be the only way to a “fair and free parliamentary election.” Otherwise the opposition would boycott the elections, he threatened.

Alarmed about recent developments the American deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, Hoyt Brian Yee, traveled to Albania for all-party talks. He met first with Rama and parliamentary president Ilir Meta of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LIS), which had formed a coalition with the PS. Afterwards he met with Basha.

The European Union also sent emissaries to Tirana. An agreement was reached allegedly based on proposals made by David McAllister, a former conservative (CDU) premier in the state of Lower Saxony and current member of the European Parliament.

The crisis began in February, when the PD called for a boycott of the upcoming election, the resignation of Rama and the formation of a “cabinet of experts” to ensure a regular election. After Rama refused to resign, the party boycotted parliament and did not register for the election. On April 24, several thousand of its followers blocked numerous motorways.

PD leader Basha has accused the government of being dependent on criminals and drug traffickers, and “turning the entire country into a cannabis plantation.” According to the Austrian Standard, many people in parliament, in city halls, and in public institutions, were “formerly inmates in European prisons prosecuted for trafficking in drugs, women, weapons, for prostitution and murders.”

For his part Rama accused the PD of preventing a reform of the judiciary because of their close links to corrupt judges and prosecutors.

Rama had also been subject to heavy criticism from EU representatives because he used the nationalist card and threatened to form a “small union” with Kosovo, in the absence of any perspective of accession to the EU. This was “not his wish, but just a possible alternative if the EU closed its doors”.

The formation of a “Greater Albania” could once again set the entire region ablaze. Serbia, in particular, which has never recognized Kosovo’s independence, is vehemently opposed to any merger with Albania.

There are no fundamental differences between the policies of the PD and the PS. Both parties, which represent a small upper class elite and are up to their necks in corruption, nepotism and openly criminal activities, are widely despised. They are both committed to rapprochement with the EU and business friendly policies.

The PS is largely made up of Stalinists from the former party of Enver Hoxa, while the PD evolved from a right-wing movement that emerged in the early 1990s. Both parties have participated in government. Basha has formerly occupied ministerial posts and was formerly mayor of Tirana. In 2013 the Socialists won the election and replaced the Democrats.

The result of the rule of both parties is a social catastrophe, as is the case throughout the Balkans.

Following the collapse of the Stalinist bloc in the early 1990s mass emigration took hold. As of 2011 Albania had 2.9 million inhabitants, down from 3.3 million in 1990 and the number of those emigrating remains high. The World Bank ranked Albania at ninth place among countries with the highest emigration rate in relation to the population in 2015—before Barbados and behind Tonga.

The main motivation for the exodus is widespread poverty. Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe. According to the Finance Ministry, GDP per capita amounted to about 3,400 euros in 2015. The average monthly wage is only 390 euros. The unemployment rate is over 35 percent and is even higher for young people. The majority of Albanians simply could not survive were it not for a flourishing black market economy.

The main concern of the US and the EU is not for the conditions affecting those poor and low-paid workers in the region. Rather, their main concern is growing instability in the Balkans.

Two decades after the US and Europe broke Yugoslavia apart and waged war, nothing has been resolved, the region is once again descending into political crisis and is dominated by nationalist elites. Warnings of the danger of new wars in the Balkans are mounting. Once again the Balkans resembles a social and political powder keg.

The Serbian government has threatened that ethnic Serbs in Kosovo will be defended by military means when necessary. In Macedonia, nationalists stormed the parliament and attacked representatives of the Albanian minority and Bosnia-Herzegovina is more divided than it was at the time of the 1995 Dayton Agreement.

Vulture capitalists fight over pickings from bankrupt Puerto Rico

Rafael Azul 

Federal US court proceedings began May 17 in San Juan on Puerto Rico’s $123 billion bankruptcy. New York District Court is handling the bankruptcy. As with the Detroit bankruptcy of 2013-2014, the island faces privatization and cutbacks that will exacerbate a mass wave of emigration and further sink its economy into depression.

The court hearing took place two weeks after Puerto Rico’s federal oversight board filed for Title III bankruptcy protection, on May 3, to tackle the mountain of debt and a public pension crisis.

The opening of the bankruptcy negotiations began with a dispute over which of two groups of creditors will have priority over sales tax revenue and other assets. According to the New York Times, the courtroom was packed with lawyers, signaling “intractable battles” ahead.

They may be fighting over who will be first in line to be paid, but they all agree that workers, pensioners and the poor will have to sacrifice their jobs and living standards. In fact Title III, a provision in the Puerto Rico relief law (Promesa) that the US Federal Legislature passed last year, was specifically designed to make possible an attack on public employee pensions.

Barred from the opening meeting, however, were the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican workers, retirees, and residents who have already suffered savage cuts in wages, health and educational benefits, pensions and government services; and are being told to brace for even more.

The lawyers, according to the Times “told Judge Swain about looming deadlines and said that certain fundamental disputes had to be resolved almost immediately or else nothing could happen.” Among the bondholders are so-called “vulture” speculative hedge funds, which, having acquired bonds at fire-sale prices, now are demanding a return of one hundred cents on the dollar.

Puerto Rico’s $123 billion debt is the result of over a decade of recession and mass emigration. Since 2007, the economy has shrunk 17 percent. It is expected to fall by another two percent this year. Its debts in default now exceed those of any municipal bankruptcy in US history. In addition to defaulting on tax-exempt bonds held by Wall Street financial institutions, Puerto Rico confronts $50 billion in unfunded pension obligations to its retired public employees. In all, the per capita debt burden on this island of 3.4 million inhabitants, amounts to $34,000 for every man, woman and child.

Puerto Rico is one of the most socially unequal US territories. Half the population is under the dismal poverty line, and the current official rate of unemployment is 11.5 percent. Average annual pension benefits are $14,000. One-third of workers are ineligible for Social Security benefits. The median household income of $19,350 compares very unfavorably with $53,889 for the US. These conditions are driving the migration of tens of thousands to Miami and other US cities. A record 400,000 Puerto Ricans have left since 2007, another 240,000 are expected to leave by 2025.

Given its status as a commonwealth, or associated state—a self-governing US colony with no representation in the US legislature—Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy is being handled under special federal legislation, known as the Promise Act.

The bankruptcy is at the same time a warning to US rust belt states that may be considering asking for bankruptcy protection from their creditors. Such states, particularly Illinois, are teetering on the edge of default for many of the same reasons as Puerto Rico; these include accelerating pension costs, crumbling infrastructure, deindustrialization and the migration of younger workers. They will also face a Puerto Rican-style “solution” of draconian attacks on jobs and living standards.

Under the terms of the Promise Act, the debt burden can only be resolved through savage austerity measures that involve the dismantling of public budgets and social services. As in Detroit, Greece and elsewhere, the intention of Wall Street banks and hedge funds is that the poor and working class make good on their bonds. Most importantly, Wall Street continues to insist that there are enough resources to pay off the bondholders in full, providing that the government of Governor Ricardo Roselló becomes more efficient at collecting taxes, that it sack thousands more public employees, including education and health workers, and that pensions be sharply reduced.

Retirees are among the most vulnerable. Three years ago, the Puerto Rican government changed the retirement system that guaranteed public sector workers a full pension after 30 years of employment to a system that forces workers to work up to 15 additional years for full benefits. Driving discussions in bankruptcy court over public pension cuts is that the system is scheduled to run out of money this July. It is anticipated that ten percent or more may by slashed from existing pensions.

Informant Claude Hermant implicates French state in Charlie Hebdo attacks

Anthony Torres

Claude Hermant, a police informant arrested in the case of the January 7, 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, has implicated the French state in the preparation of the attack. Hermant, who allegedly sold weapons used by Amédy Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers to commit the attacks, is reportedly charging that three gendarme military policemen and two customs officials, as well as organized crime circles, were involved.

The case shatters the official narrative, according to which terror attacks in France, Belgium, and Germany since 2015 have been the work of isolated Islamists.

Hermant’s lawyer, Maxime Moulin, does not dispute the fact that weapons that passed through the hands of his client, who was acting for the customs’ intelligence agency until 2013 and then worked for the gendarmerie, reached Coulibaly. The media and established political parties covered up this fact, together with Hermant’s arrest after the attacks due to his relations with Coulibaly. The interior minister in 2015, Bernard Cazeneuve, even invoked the states secrets privilege in regard to investigations of the relations between Hermant and the Islamists.

Moulin filed a suit with the state prosecutor’s office in Lille on May 2, accusing the interior minister of endangering his client’s life. He stated, “We are demanding the lifting of the states secrets privilege. Things are being hidden, this was the solution that we found to obtain the truth. … We want to have access to this information. We are officially asking that the Interior Ministry lift the states secrets privilege on all contact reports [between the gendarmerie and Claude Hermant]. We want to know what reports were handled, what information was not transmitted, what reports were ignored, and why.”

Moulin said that Hermant had acted purely in the interests of the customs service and of the gendarmerie: “We cannot accept when the gendarmerie ’s work is really borderline. When things work out, they are happy, but when things don’t, they hang you out to dry in the ruins. They can’t abandon a soldier in the field like this.”

According to the daily Libération, Moulin justified his client’s suit by citing “a Médiapart article of March 2017. Claude Hermant had warned the gendarmerie that a convoy with weapons was passing through the tollbooths on the Lille to Paris highway, but the gendarmerie only succeeded in intercepting half of the vehicles. The second convoy, which had been warned that the gendarmes had been alerted, managed to evade them. And those weapons were used by Coulibaly.”

The Voix du Nord daily published a few extracts of emails exchanged between Hermant and a gendarme in November 2014: “Hey Claude, we talked it over with our superiors. … We’re giving you a green light for the two cases you showed us (weapons—[the city of]Charleroi) ...”

These emails suggest that Hermant may have received official approval from some intelligence agency for his actions in the Coulibaly-Kouachi affair. The Voix du Nord encourages its readers to draw their own conclusions: “Suppose you ran across this type of message (of a dozen or so in total), that a gendarme allegedly sent to Claude Hermant on 20 November 2017 at 8:47 a.m., and that a close friend of the accused insists that ‘Claude Hermant has all his bases covered.’”

It is by now quite clear that far broader forces besides a few Islamist networks were involved in the processes that led up to the attacks. The government’s recourse to the states secrets privilege and the deafening silence of the major media has produced a false and one-sided narrative of the attacks, which incites anti-Islamic racism and whitewashes the role of the state and far right.

The state of emergency, imposed after the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, is based on this lie, which the capitalist media do not challenge because it is at the heart of official politics in France. The attacks served to justify former President François Hollande’s shift towards relations with far-right forces—with the state of emergency, creating a new ‘national guard’ police agency, the electronic spying law, and legitimizing neo-fascism by inviting National Front leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée presidential palace.

The 2015 attacks were carried out by Islamist networks known and followed by French intelligence, who were using them as foot soldiers in the NATO war in Syria. The Kouachi brothers, Coulibaly, and the leader of the November 13 attack squad, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, were all known to the intelligence services for their ties to Al Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) militia.

The Kouachi brothers were closely followed from 2010 to 2015 and considered extremely dangerous due to their direct contacts with leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula. Chérif Kouachi and Amédy Coulibaly repeatedly visited Djamel Beghal, a member of Al Qaeda in Algeria, who was under house arrest in France.

Abaaoud, a leading IS member well known as the public face of its Facebook recruitment campaign, was allowed to freely travel across Europe to prepare the November 13 attacks.

Salah Abdeslam, one of the survivors of the attack squad, supposedly Europe’s most wanted man, was in fact located in December 2015 by a policeman in the city of Malines. His report was inexplicably lost by his superiors, and police only arrested him in March 2016, a few days before the March 22, 2016 attacks in Brussels.

As for the terrorists who planned those attacks, they were allowed to organize the attacks even after Turkish, Israeli and Russian intelligence had warned their European counterparts of their identity as well as their targets.

Commentary on these various attacks by the media and the established political parties was manipulated in order to terrorize the public and push the political atmosphere further and further to the right.

Hermant’s revelations emerged between the two rounds of the French presidential elections, a few days after the murder of a policeman by IS sympathizer Karim C. The latter had been in prison for attempted murder against policemen in 2001 and was known both to police and counterterrorism officials. According to press reports, he had remained in prison until shortly before the attack and, after leaving prison, he soon began threatening police again.

It is impossible to understand how the security and intelligence services decided to leave such a figure at large, unless it was by a conscious decision, assuming he would commit a crime that would prove politically useful.

The media and the political establishment reacted to the murder of the policeman, Xavier Jugelé, with law-and-order hysteria that cut across rising antiwar and anti-austerity sentiment among youth and workers after the April 7 US strikes in Syria. In this climate, Emmanuel Macron, the preferred candidate of the dominant factions of the ruling class, was falling in the polls as Jean-Luc Mélenchon rose. The attack thus served to shift the political and media atmosphere to the right, stabilizing Macron and the neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen in the polls.

The state of emergency is not aimed at the terrorists, but to suspend democratic rights and undertake unpopular policies through repression of opposition, as during the police attacks on last year’s protests against the labor law and the arbitrary searches and seizures in immigrant suburbs.

UK Conservative manifesto outlines stepped up austerity and militarism

Robert Stevens

The Guardian described the manifesto of the ruling Conservative Party as a “break with Thatcherism,” while the Financial Times declared that it “rejected Thatcherite free-market economics.”

The manifesto proclaims that Tory leader and Prime Minister Theresa May will oversee “the world’s Great Meritocracy.”

These are transparent lies. Despite its many references to the plight of “working people” and “working families” being hardest hit by the crisis, the manifesto is centred on its commitment to Britain exiting the European Union (EU) and becoming a “global nation that is competitive, outward-looking and open for business.”

This is a pledge to intensify austerity and attacks on the working class carried out over the last decade. None of the austerity measures planned by May’s predecessor, David Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, are reversed, with £9 billion in brutal welfare cuts to come. This is on top of a freeze on working age welfare benefits, which is retained in the manifesto, which will cost the most deprived more than £7 billion over four years.

The manifesto states that the next “Conservative government will continue the difficult but necessary work of restoring our public finances.”

Unprecedented attacks are to be imposed on pensioners—including ending the “triple lock” on pensions. This meant the state pension rose in line with earnings or inflation based on whichever was higher, underpinned by a pledge from Cameron guaranteeing an annual pension increase of at least 2.5 percent. This latter condition is to be removed.

Up to £3 billion annually will be slashed from public spending, with an estimated 10 million people to lose their winter fuel allowance, which will now be means tested. Paid to help with additional heating costs during the winter, it is worth up to £300 to some households. According to research by the Resolution Foundation, just 2 million pensioners will continue to receive the payment.

Millions of people will be forced to pay for the bulk of their own social care in later life. A £72,000 cap on costs, set to be enacted in 2020, will be replaced by a system allowing each family to keep just £100,000 in assets, with the rest, including homes, having to be sold in order to pay for social care costs.

Only three local authorities in England have median house prices below £100,000. In many parts of the country property prices have rocketed, with houses worth £1 million pounds in London not unusual. Not only will a pensioner have to sacrifice tens, if not hundreds of thousands of their savings, but they will leave nothing to pass on to their children—many of whom will now never have a possibility of buying a home.

Pensioners constitute the main part of the Tories’ electoral base, leading to fears that the party will haemorrhage support in the run-up to June 8.

The youngest in society will also suffer further cuts in living standards, with the poorest being hit disproportionately as the Tories commit to scrapping free lunches for infants. In a move estimated to save around £650 million a year, families will lose out by £440 a year for each child affected. The Education Policy Institute found that 100,000 children losing the free lunch are from families living in “relative poverty,” and 667,000 from “ordinary working families.”

The claim that May is ditching Thatcherism is based on the constant referencing of the section of the manifesto stating, “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.”

Such nonsense is regurgitated without reference to the Tories’ record in office or what the manifesto actually outlines. It also requires drawing a veil over the hymn of praise to the profit system, which insists, “Capitalism and free markets remain the best way to deliver prosperity and economic security, lifting millions of people out of poverty around the world.”

The harsh reality is that the world is more unequal than at any time in history, with a few billionaires owning more wealth than the majority of its population and billions of people barely able to survive. In Britain, tens of millions have been plunged into dire poverty by successive governments, including those led by Cameron in which May played a pivotal role.

While millions will be made to suffer, the super-rich and corporations will continue to have money shovelled into their gaping maw. The manifesto states, “Corporation Tax is due to fall to seventeen per cent by 2020—the lowest rate of any developed economy—and we will stick to that plan…”

Confederation of British Industry Director-General Carolyn Fairbairn supported the manifesto, stating, “With the world watching, now is the time to send a clear signal that the UK is open for business. Firms will be therefore heartened by proposed increased R&D spending, planned corporation tax reductions and a commitment to act on business rates.”

While slashing billions from benefits and from pensioners, the manifesto commits to almost unlimited military spending in preparation for war. It states, “As a global power, we have a responsibility to sustain our fine armed forces so that they can defend the realm, our overseas territories and our interests around the globe... We will play a leading role in NATO and maintain the ability to conduct strike operations, peacekeeping, security missions and the deployment of a joint expeditionary force. We will maintain the overall size of the armed forces, including an army that is capable of fielding a war-fighting division. We shall expand our reach around the world.”

The manifesto commits to the renewal of the £200 billion Trident nuclear missile system and boasts that Britain has the “biggest defence budget in Europe and the second largest in NATO. We will continue to meet the NATO commitment to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defence and we will increase the defence budget by at least 0.5 percent above inflation in every year of the new parliament.”

Fully £178 billion in spending on new military equipment is outlined, with the document stating, “Two new aircraft carriers will project British military power for the next fifty years.”

To facilitate British imperialism’s war crimes, the manifesto confirms that UK troops will no longer be subjected to the European Court of Human Rights, and “persistent legal claims... which undermine the armed forces…”

The manifesto’s pledge to protect and even increase workers’ rights, post-Brexit, is the most contemptible of all its claims. What is being prepared is a massive onslaught against the working class, with a bonfire of every regulation that impedes the global competitiveness of big business. Following more than a year of strikes by workers at rail companies, who are opposing the introduction of driver-only operated trains and the loss of thousands of jobs, the manifesto pledges, “We will work with train companies and their employees to agree minimum service levels during periods of industrial dispute—and if we cannot find a voluntary agreement, we will legislate to make this mandatory."

The anti-immigrant measures of the government are to be stepped up, as a central means of dividing the working class. The manifesto states, “It is our “objective to reduce immigration to sustainable levels, by which we mean annual net migration in the tens of thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands we have seen over the last two decades.” It pledges to “continue to bear down on immigration from outside the European Union.” “Leaving the European Union means, for the first time in decades, that we will be able to control immigration from the European Union too,” it declares.

Just a few years after the newspapers owned by pro-Brexit oligarch Rupert Murdoch were found to have committed criminality on an “industrial scale,” the manifesto scraps the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into the media, which was to have looked into corporate malpractice at Murdoch’s titles. May can be assured of ongoing, favourable coverage by Murdoch et al. as a result.

Iran’s president wins reelection

Keith Jones

Hassan Rouhani has won a second four-year term as Iran’s president. He polled 57.1 percent of the more than 41 million votes cast in Friday’s election, eliminating the need for a runoff election on May 26.

Rouhani, who has been part of the Islamic Republic’s ruling cadre since its creation in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah’s bloody US-backed dictatorship, appealed for votes by casting himself as a proponent of peace and moderation.

He in fact speaks for the sections of the Iranian bourgeoisie most eager for a rapprochement with the European imperialist powers and Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Rouhani held up the nuclear accord Iran reached with the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union as the signal achievement of his first term in office. Under the accord, which came into force in January 2016, Iran dismantled or rolled back key elements of its civilian nuclear program. In exchange, the European powers lifted all, and the US suspended some, of the punishing economic sanctions that they had jointly imposed on Iran.

Rouhani and Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, insisted during and after the negotiations that Iran was “open for business” and ready to partner with the imperialist powers in stabilizing the broader Middle East.

To woo Western investors, Rouhani’s administration solicited IMF advice, revised the rules governing investment in Iran’s energy sector to make them more favorable to foreign-based energy companies, and stepped up privatization. It also slashed what it derided as “unproductive” and “wasteful” social spending, vowing, to use Rouhani’s expression, that it would not “foster beggars.” Shortly after completing the phasing out of subsidies on basic foodstuffs, gasoline and cooking fuel and replacing them with meager cash handouts of less than $20 per month per household, the government raised energy prices by 30 percent.

In its second term, Rouhani’s administration will intensify these right-wing, anti-working class policies, while seeking to cultivate a base of support by loosening the reactionary restrictions that the Shia religious establishment has imposed on dress, gender mixing, and access to foreign culture and media.

In his victory speech Saturday evening, Rouhani emphasized his government’s eagerness to expand economic and strategic ties with the Western powers. Iran, he declared, “is ready to expand its relations with the world based on mutual respect and national interests.” He added, “Today, the world knows that Iranians have chosen the path of interaction with the world away from extremism and violence.”

In an interview Sunday with Agence France Presse, a top official with the Iranian Privatization Organization and key Rouhani aide, Farid Dehdilani, enthused about how the reelected president will “aggressively pursue his economic agenda, with productive investments to attract foreign capital.”

“A lot of investors I hadn’t heard from for three months were suddenly phoning me this morning,” added Dehdilani. “Some are already booking their tickets.”

In Friday’s election, Rouhani drew support from all sections of Iranian society, increasing his total vote from the last election by five million to 23.5 million. But, as in 2014, his support came disproportionately from the most privileged sections of Iranian society. As a whole, these wealthy layers are either indifferent to the impact or, citing Thatcherite nostrums, enthusiastically support the government’s drive to eliminate the little that remains of the social concessions made to the working class and rural poor in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution.

They believe they will benefit from Iran’s increased economic integration with Europe and North America, including through access to better consumer products, high-paid professional jobs and business opportunities.

Rouhani’s principal challenger was Ebrahim Raisi, a former prosecutor-general who in recent years has headed a major religious foundation. He won 15.7 million or 38.3 percent of the votes cast Friday, leaving the two remaining candidates to share just 2 percent of the vote between them.

Raisi was the standard-bearer for the Principalists and other factions tied to more socially conservative elements in the clerical political establishment. He also reputedly had the backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Raisi made a calibrated appeal to socioeconomic discontent. He attacked “the 4 percent” who he said are monopolizing Iran’s wealth and promised to increase taxes on the rich and triple the cash payments now provided in lieu of price subsidies for the poorest 30 percent of Iranian households.

Raisi pledged that he would uphold the Iran nuclear accord, but suggested that the government had made too many concessions to secure it. Pointing to Iran’s official 12.5 percent jobless rate and 27 percent youth unemployment rate, he lampooned Rouhani’s and Zarif’s claims that the nuclear accord would produce an investment boom.

Although there is mounting anger over rampant social inequality, growing poverty, especially in rural areas, and mass joblessness, Raisi’s attempt to cast himself as the votary of the poor and downtrodden had limited traction at best. The Iranian working class and poor have a long experience with the claims of various factions of the Islamic Republic’s political elite to support “social justice.”

The Principalists and other conservatives have participated in and profited from the privatization drive. They joined hands with their rivals from the Rouhani-Rafsanjani and “reformist” camps to press Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to eliminate all price subsidies, and they savagely oppose any efforts by the working class to assert its independent class interests.

Friday’s election saw a record participation rate, with 73.5 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. Detailed analyses of the voting results have yet to be published in English, but it appears that Rouhani did especially well in Tehran. In the local elections, which were held simultaneously with the presidential poll, Rouhani’s supporters swept the board, winning all 21 seats on Tehran’s city council, ending 14 years of Principalist/conservative domination of the municipal government of Iran’s largest city.

As balloting was underway Friday, Iran’s theocratic supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, called for “national unity,” saying all Iranians should accept the results. Such appeals only underscore the extent to which the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite is divided as it confronts an increasingly explosive social and geopolitical situation.

For decades, Khamenei has played a Bonapartist role, maneuvering between competing ruling factions. He has repeatedly supported attempts to reach an accommodation with Washington. In 2003, with his blessing, secret emissaries offered the Bush administration a “grand bargain,” including recognizing Israel and halting all military aid to Hamas and Hezbollah in exchange for a US pledge to renounce regime change.

Rouhani, himself for decades a close adviser of the supreme leader, was able to conclude the nuclear accord only because Khamenei endorsed it and ordered the entire state apparatus and political establishment to rally round it.

But Khamenei has voiced increasing anger over the sweeping economic sanctions the US continues to impose on Iran on other pretexts. These sanctions, along with the prospect that the US-fomented regime-change war in Syria could lead to a broader conflict, have caused European big business to shy away from making major investments in Iran.

Rouhani vowed during the election campaign that he would secure the removal of all remaining US sanctions. But he offered no explanation as to how this would be possible.

Continuation of the sanctions and preparations for war with Iran are strongly supported by the Pentagon and Republican and Democratic Party leaderships. Speaking from Saudi Arabia, US Secretary of State and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson responded to the Iranian election Saturday with a vituperative denunciation, labeling Iran a state sponsor of terrorism and abuser of human rights.

Tillerson was in Riyadh along with Trump to reaffirm US imperialism’s decades-long partnership with Saudi’s absolutist regime, sell it tens of billions of dollars in new armaments, and discuss a US proposal for a NATO-style Arab alliance against Iran.

Today the US president will fly to Israel, where he will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, like Trump himself, has condemned the nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated with Iran in the most strident terms.

Under Trump, the US continues to formally adhere to the nuclear accord, including last week authorizing the temporary waiving of some US sanctions. But the new administration has signaled that if and when it judges it opportune, Washington will repudiate the agreement and/or find another pretext, such as Iran’s ballistic missiles program or the fighting in Syria or Yemen, to rapidly escalate tensions with Iran.

Further underscoring Washington’s menacing attitude toward Iran, US officials have boasted that the pro-Syrian militia that US fighter planes bombed in southern Syria last week was Iranian-backed, i.e., had Iranian logistical and command support.

Report accuses Pentagon of running multi-billion dollar slush fund for military operations

Jordan Shilton

A report in Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post accuses the Pentagon of operating a multi-billion dollar slush fund which it has accrued over the past seven years by overcharging the armed forces for the cost of fuel purchases. The $5.9 billion it has built up since 2010 has been used to fund military operations in Syria and Afghanistan, effectively avoiding any of the budgetary oversight requirements necessary to obtain additional funding from Congress.

The most significant expenditures from the fund identified by the Post were a total of $1.4 billion used in 2016 to maintain the United States’ brutal occupation of Afghanistan and the use of $80 million to train Islamist militias in Syria in 2015 with the aim of toppling the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

The explosion in spending on the Afghan war illustrates the deepening crisis of the more than 15-year-old US occupation of the impoverished, war-torn country.

Billions of dollars have been spent on waging a ruthless counter-insurgency war against the resistance of the local population to the US presence, led by the Islamist Taliban. This has included the expenditure of vast sums of money to establish and prop up a corrupt puppet regime in Kabul, which is struggling to exercise authority over more than a few major cities, is deeply reviled by wide sections of the population, and is losing ground to the Taliban. Just last month, Taliban fighters carried out their bloodiest attack on the Afghan army since 2001, killing upwards of 200 soldiers.

The $80 million redirected by the Pentagon to Syria helped continue to fund a US training program to create a Sunni militia capable of fighting ISIS and ousting Assad. The program proved to be an unmitigated disaster, managing to train only 150 of the original target of 5,000 fighters. Most of these fighters were captured by al-Qaida or other groups when they were sent into Syria, or deserted.

This setback only caused Washington to intervene even more aggressively, first by funneling aid through its Gulf allies and the CIA to Jihadi proxy forces to wage war in Syria, and later by bolstering the presence of US ground forces. Under President Trump, the number of US ground forces in Syria has more than doubled and he has relaxed restrictions on airstrikes, leading to a dramatic spike in civilian casualties.

The sharpest criticism of the Pentagon’s slush fund came from Navy officials, who described the surplus built up by the Pentagon as a “bishop’s fund.”

The Post noted that the Defense Logistics Agency, the body responsible for selling fuel, sets a fixed price which is often substantially higher than the commercial rate and is intended to remain in place for a year. Before 2009, no major discrepancies arose, but from 2010 onwards, the DLA began setting prices at levels sometimes $1 per barrel above the commercial rate.

A review of Pentagon purchasing data found that the branches of the armed forces had been charged $23 billion more for fuel between 2010 and 2016 than commercial airlines would have paid.

While Pentagon officials acknowledged that around three-quarters of this covered additional costs, such as specialized fuel requirements and overheads, this still left a $5.9 billion surplus. The only time Congress appears to have directly intervened was in 2015, when it requested the Pentagon to return $1 billion to reflect reduced fuel prices.

The Defense Department’s use of such a fund to meet the costs of military operations is only the latest example of the increasing ability of the military-intelligence apparatus to act outside of any accountability to Congress. Despite the US gargantuan defense budget, which dwarfs those of all of its nearest competitors, the Pentagon has over recent years taken advantage of accounting methods to allocate tens of billions more in funding to military operations beyond the funds approved by Congress.

Under the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans included a so-called parity regulation as part of their 2011 budget deal which stipulated that any increase in defense spending had to be accompanied by a corresponding rise in domestic budgets. To avoid this requirement, the Pentagon increasingly relied on Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding, which is designed to cover the costs of foreign wars. Reports suggest that the Pentagon now uses $30 billion of OCO annually to supplement its base budget.

Such developments could only take place under conditions where there is a bipartisan consensus to retain the US military as a force capable of waging war around the globe. Both the Democrats and Republicans, speaking on behalf of the super-rich oligarchy in the United States, are fully committed to the increasing resort to military violence in a desperate bid to offset Washington’s economic decline and retain its hegemonic position against its geopolitical rivals in every region of the world. Under conditions in which Washington has been waging virtually uninterrupted war for a quarter-century, the maintenance of even a semblance of democratic control over the military’s operations is increasingly impossible.

President Obama initiated the US intervention in Syria, expanded the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched air and drone strikes on at least eight countries across the Middle East and North Africa, and facilitated the bloody Saudi onslaught on Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died.

In a revealing finding that shows how routine the waging of war has become for the US military, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Pentagon’s accounting systems do not recognize a difference between wartime operations and routine expenditure, which was traditionally covered by the base defense budget.

The GAO wrote that the Defense Department internally reallocated $146 billion in operations and maintenance (O&M) funding between 2009 and 2015, but added, “[T]he effects of such realignments on base obligations were not readily apparent because DOD did not report its O&M base obligations to Congress separately from its O&M overseas contingency operations (OCO) obligations used to support war-related programs and activities.”

Even greater sums of money are to be allocated to the military under Trump’s budget proposal, to which the Democrats have offered virtually no opposition, of an annual defense spending increase of $54 billion, equivalent to almost 10 percent of the existing budget. Such additional funds will pay for the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, where the US is seeking to maintain its dominance over one of the most energy-rich regions of the world against its chief rivals, Russia and China.

On Friday, Defense Secretary James Mattis put forward a plan for the waging of war by the US across a region stretching from Central Asia to West Africa. Presented as a fight against Jihadi “terrorism,” it is in reality only one step in the global military strategy of US imperialism, which carries the increasing risk of triggering a catastrophic world war between the major powers.