Haringey social cleansing exposes Labour’s hypocrisy over Grenfell Tower fire

Paul Mitchell 

Labour politicians have echoed popular denunciations of Conservative controlled Kensington and Chelsea Council for its responsibility for the Grenfell Tower fire. This includes raising the underlying aim of its Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) to socially cleanse existing occupants from this potentially high value real estate.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn declared, “What the tragedy of Grenfell Tower has exposed is the disastrous effects of austerity” and a “disregard for working class communities.”

Labour MP for Kensington, Emma Dent Coad, said TMO tenants had “a real fear that the development of the estates is part of a social cleansing programme” that would result in them being rehoused miles from London.

All true—but Labour is just as guilty as the Tories of imposing austerity and implementing social cleansing—especially of London’s council estates and social housing.

Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy lost a friend in the Grenfell fire and has since portrayed himself as a man seeking justice. But his key political role is in attempting to divert class-based opposition to the social murder at Grenfell Tower into the dead-end of racial politics.

His main expressed concern was that the inquiry into the fire announced by Prime Minister Theresa May would be led by “a white, upper middle class man”—judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick. “I think the victims will also say to themselves when push comes to shove there are some powerful people here—contractors, sub-contractors, local authorities, governments—and they look like this judge,” Lammy declared. “Whose side will he be on?”

Moore-Bick’s loyalties are clear for all to see. The issue being more carefully concealed is whose side is Lammy and the Labour Party really on?

Lammy’s own political record epitomises the two-faced response of Labour to Grenfell. Since he began his career as a rising star in the Blair government, he has been cultivated by such people (the likes of Moore-Bick) and profited both politically and personally. He has been a key figure in the gentrification and social cleansing process being pursued by Labour-controlled council in Haringey, in which his Tottenham constituency is located.

On July 3, the Guardian ran a major article on how two Labour MPs, Lammy and Catherine West, were urging Haringey Council to “pause” a £2 billion plan to privatise council houses, public buildings and land amid fears residents could be forced out. A joint letter to the council reads, “...in light of the fire at Grenfell Tower we write today with the utmost urgency to urge caution and call on the cabinet to pause and reflect further on whether entering into a public-private partnership is the correct decision for the borough and its residents.”

But Lammy’s overarching concern is with the timing of Haringey’s decision, taken this week with hundreds of demonstrators outside, to ratify what is the biggest ever act of social cleansing by a local authority in the UK.

Haringey’s plans will provide a bonanza to developers, who have set their sights on the area, regularly describing it as London’s “next big growth opportunity.” They gloat how property is being snapped up and fortunes made because of low prices brought about by endemic poverty and exacerbated by the stigma attached to the 2011 riots following the police killing of Mark Duggan.

Under the leadership of Labour’s Claire Kober and eight hand-picked Labour councillors, a 20-year public private partnership, the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) will be created, owned 50/50 by the council and global developer Lendlease. Through this mechanism, virtually all of Haringey’s assets—17 housing estates (including the huge Northumberland Park and Broadwater Farm estates), schools, clinics and 500 commercial buildings—valued at £2 billion will be privatised.

Lendlease is notorious for its recent public–private partnership (PPP) with Labour-controlled Southwark council in London which 1,200 social homes on the Heygate estate were demolished and replaced by expensive private apartments. Only 82 social homes were replaced and just three of the original households have returned.

Under Haringey’s HDV, reports suggest that of the 1,092 council houses on the Northumberland Park Estate, a maximum of 183 will be replaced. Of the 2,500 or so new homes that will be squeezed into the area, the council claims that 40 percent will be “affordable.” However, most of these will be for sale rather than rent. Moreover, the idea of “affordability” is a fraud. It can mean people having to pay up to 80 percent of the market rate for rent, typically £1,155 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in London—double the national average.

In practice, virtually nowhere do the much publicised levels of “affordable” housing that herald the announcement of regeneration schemes materialise—including in Haringey.

In 2012, Haringey council agreed to Premier League Tottenham Hotspur Football Club’s demands that planning permission for the redevelopment of the club’s ground be revised. The club wanted its legal obligation to provide affordable housing removed and its “Section 106” contribution—the money paid to help the public costs associated with the redevelopment such as new or improved roads, stations, schools and health facilities—reduced from £16 million to £500,000.

The council agreed, scrapping the original 100 affordable homes and upping the number of homes for sale by 85. The council, together with the London mayor, agreed to take over the club’s section 106 obligations and other costs to the tune of £27 million—a subsidy to one of the world’s richest football clubs, whose profit last year was £63.3 million.

Lammy played his part. Alarmed at the possible loss of “the only international brand in my constituency,” he lobbied the government to contribute funding for the new ground.

At Tottenham Hale, the same thing happened, with Haringey Council again agreeing under threats from the developer to pull out, to “re-negotiate” the Section 106 agreement linked to outline planning permission granted in 2007.

Lammy has no qualms about accepting the financial help of such property developers. Indeed the majority of the donations for his 2015 bid for London Mayor came from this milieu—two donations of £15,000 from “London’s leading property developer” Galliard Holdings, £20,000 from Sager House (Almeida) Limited, two £5,000 cash payments from Killian Hurley, co-founder of luxury property developer Mount Anvil and £2,000 from Beauchamp Estates. Jonathan Goldstein, the head of European investments for US investment house Cain Hoy, which had attempted a takeover of Tottenham Hotspur in 2014, told City A M that he was backing Lammy financially.

Lammy also accepted £10,000 in December 2016 from Lee Valley Estates, the company redeveloping Tottenham Hale.

Lammy was up to his neck in the MP expenses scandal that emerged in 2009, taking credit for claiming the largest expenses of any MP—£173,922 in 2010-11. But while having no qualms about his own dependence on public subsidies and dubious relations with property developers, he blames the 2011 riots on loss of morality and responsibility. Brushing aside any talk of the riots having anything to do with police brutality, poverty and social inequality, Lammy railed against young men who haven’t followed in his own exalted footsteps. “Today’s youth have other ideas,” he declares. “To work for low wages in a uniform you hate is seen as naive, not sensible or dignified.”

At last year’s Labour Party conference, Corbyn boasted, “Across the country, Labour councils are putting Labour values into action in a way that makes a real difference to millions of people, despite cynical government funding cuts that have hit Labour councils five times as hard as Tory-run areas. It is a proud Labour record, and each and every Labour councillor deserves our heartfelt thanks for the work they do.”

That is the rhetorical spin from Corbyn on the Labour Party. The actions taken by Haringey Council, with the de facto collusion of Lammy and the Parliamentary Labour Party, is the reality.

Japan using North Korea as pretext to acquire offensive weapons

Ben McGrath 

Japan is using the recent test launch of a North Korean long-range missile to drastically step up its remilitarization drive and cast off the constitutional restrictions on its military. This longstanding goal of Japanese imperialism is being dressed up in the language of self-defense even as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government seeks the capability to launch “pre-emptive” attacks on North Korea.

The Abe government is working in close coordination with the US administration under the banner of “collective self-defense.” On Wednesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga stated, without elaborating, that Japan and the US had agreed to take “specific actions to improve our defense systems and our ability to deter North Korea.”

After a meeting of the US, Japanese and South Korean leaders the day before the G20 summit in Hamburg, Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Norio Maruyama said: “North Korea now constitutes a new level of threat to Japan and a clear provocation to Japan and also to the international community.”

Tokyo is in the process of acquiring cruise missiles, including Tomahawks, from the US. Citing an American official involved in talks with Japan, the New York Times reported on July 5 that the purchase of these missiles was being discussed. Japan’s defense ministry denied it, conscious of public opposition.

However, the Japan Times similarly reported at the beginning of May that the Abe government was interested in buying Tomahawk missiles and was considering setting aside money in the draft 2018 defense budget in preparation. These missiles would be deployed on naval vessels and could attack any part of North Korea from the Sea of Japan.

Japan is looking also at purchasing the Joint Strike Missile (JSM), another type of cruise missile jointly produced by US and Norwegian companies. It would be fitted on newly acquired F-35A stealth fighter jets, obtained through the US Foreign Military Sales Program. Japan is slated to receive 42 F-35As but will likely purchase additional fighters in the near future.

Other plans include buying ballistic missile systems from the US, either the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) or more likely the land-based Aegis Ashore. This would further integrate Japan into Washington’s anti-ballistic missile system and war plans in the region. Japan already has naval versions of Aegis fully deployed on four warships, with upgrades to two more in the works, as well as plans for another two Aegis vessels.

The acquisition of cruise missiles would be a major step in Japan’s remilitarization. Until now, Tokyo has been cautious in obtaining offensive weaponry for waging overseas wars, such as aircraft carriers and long-range bombers.

The actions of the North Korean regime, however, enable Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to whip up a climate of fear to try to overcome widespread opposition to remilitarization. The government wants to avoid the mass protests that occurred during the summer of 2015 against new military legislation allowing “collective self-defense.” At their height, some 120,000 people demonstrated in front of the National Diet building in Tokyo, with tens of thousands of others joining in around the country.

Plans for conducting “pre-emptive” attacks on North Korea are not new. Abe stated at the end of January that Japan had the right to attack North Korea in “self-defense.” In March, the LDP’s defense policy council proposed obtaining cruise missiles “to further improve deterrence and response as part of the Japan-US alliance.”

Hiroshi Imazu, the head of the LDP’s security committee, declared in the same month: “Japan can’t just wait until it’s destroyed. It’s legally possible for Japan to strike an enemy base that’s launching a missile at us, but we don’t have the equipment or the capability.”

Imazu also claimed the right to launch an attack if an ally was supposedly being targeted. A war with North Korea or even China, instigated by the US, could provide the pretext for a Japanese assault on either country. This is the reality of the Abe government’s “collective self-defense,” first announced in July 2014 and codified in the military legislation passed in September 2015.

“Pre-emptive” self-defense directly contradicts Japan’s constitution. Article 9 specifically states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes,” and “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” With US support, this article is being cast aside.

US President Donald Trump spoke with Abe by phone last Sunday. They agreed to apply even more pressure on China, which undoubtedly includes flexing their combined military might. Trump, Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in released a joint statement Friday emphasizing their intention “to continue to cooperate to apply maximum pressure on the DPRK [North Korea] to change its path, refrain from provocative and threatening actions, and take steps necessary to return to serious denuclearization dialogue.”

They “also called on the nations that border the DPRK [i.e. China and Russia] to make further efforts to convince the DPRK regime to abandon its current threatening and provocative path and immediately take steps to denuclearize and to halt its ballistic missile program.”

Ultimately, as Washington pursues its policy of applying “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang while increasingly denouncing China for not doing more, the risk of a catastrophic war on the Korean Peninsula and in the region becomes more likely. Japan is rapidly expanding its military so it can once again assert its imperialist interests in Asia and internationally.

The Japanese bourgeoisie has never reconciled itself to the constitution imposed by the US after World War II. Abe and the LDP have not only sought remilitarization, but the rewriting of the country’s constitution and laws to strip away democratic rights, while building up the power of the state, including the emperor.

The Japanese bourgeoisie is not satisfied playing second fiddle in the region to the US. Japan’s remilitarization will intensify the danger of war between Tokyo and Washington just as conflicting interests between the two powers led to the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific more than 75 years ago.

The oligarchs assemble in Hamburg

Alex Lantier

The events of this week’s G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany reveal the two basic conflicts tearing apart contemporary capitalist society. There is the intensifying struggle between rival national cliques of bankers and billionaires and the growing struggle of the international working class against all of them.

While the rulers of the world’s 20 leading economies gathered in Hamburg to fight amongst one another over the division of the loot extracted from the working class, they were completely united behind the violent suppression of popular opposition to their attacks on living standards and democratic rights.

On Thursday, as 100,000 people began to assemble for “Shut Down Capitalism” protests, police assaulted a central march of 12,000 people, arresting many and attacking others with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and water cannons.

At least 11 protesters were hospitalized with serious injuries, as tens of thousands of police turned downtown Hamburg into a war zone patrolled by SWAT teams with automatic weapons. Protesters traveling from Switzerland, the Netherlands and France were branded “left extremists” and turned back by authorities at the German border.

The brutal crackdown was escalated on Friday.

Police officials justify the police state operation by pointing to the actions of rioters. But given the well documented infiltration of political organizations by German police agencies, one can safely assume that any rioting that occurred was carried out with the involvement of police provocateurs assigned the task of creating a pretext for a massive show of force. The great majority of protestors remained peaceful.

Authorities in Germany and across the European Union fear the growth of social anger and a rising revolutionary mood among the youth. Over half of young Europeans told an EU-sponsored poll this year that they would join a “large-scale uprising” against the political system. The German authorities aim to terrorize not only protesters who are still gathering in Hamburg, but the expanding ranks of people around the world who oppose the capitalist system.

The police operation in Hamburg exposes the political and class content of the opposition of the EU, Berlin and Paris to the Trump administration. While posing as enlightened, anti-nationalist supporters of democracy and the environment, the European leaders oversee a vicious assault on demonstrators protesting social inequality. The suppression of opposition from below is central to their bid to challenge the United States for imperialist supremacy.

The fact that the Hamburg crackdown takes place in a city run by the Social Democrats and the Greens simply underscores that this is the policy not of a faction of the ruling elite, but of the entire capitalist class and all of its political servants.

The heads of state assembled at the G20 personify an entrenched capitalist oligarchy that is driving the world to disaster. All of them—including Rothschild banker-turned French president Emmanuel Macron; the representatives of the oligarchs who emerged from capitalist restoration in Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping; the Saudi oil sheikhs; and the multi-billionaire US president—are yes-men of Wall Street, the City of London and the stock exchanges of Frankfurt and Paris.

The billionaire financial elite has enriched itself massively since the 2008 Wall Street crash, when their criminal speculation in the US housing market sank the world economy, plunging it into its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With contempt for rising social distress and popular anger, they funneled trillions of dollars and euros from the public coffers into the banks, the stock exchanges and their own pockets.

The major powers launched the G20 summit in 2009 to show their supposed unity and celebrate their success in handling the crash via these bank bailouts. In the communiqué from its 2009 Pittsburgh summit, the G20 hailed the transfer of massive sums to the super-rich, declaring: “It worked… Our forceful response helped stop the dangerous, sharp decline in global activity and stabilize financial markets.”

Faced with the exposure of corporate criminality that had impoverished billions of people worldwide, bourgeois politicians held up the bailouts and the establishment of the G20 as proof of capitalism’s historic viability. “The crisis of financial capitalism is not the crisis of capitalism… The crisis of capitalism calls for its moralization, not its destruction,” then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed, while former French Socialist Party Prime Minister Michel Rocard hailed capitalism as the most “democracy-compatible” social system.

The wars and financial eruptions of the last decade have given the lie to the defenders of capitalism. The bailouts did not halt the industrial collapse or prevent future financial crises. Rather, they consolidated an international aristocracy whose privileges are based on staggering levels of social inequality. In 2017, the wealth of the world’s eight richest billionaires surpasses that of half of the world’s population.

Over the same period, the struggle among the ruling classes over the division of the world’s wealth has escalated to the point of all-out global conflict. With political and geo-strategic conflicts openly pitting the major powers—whether enemies or “allies”—against one another, the Hamburg summit is on the verge of concluding without reaching an agreement on a final communiqué. The current debacle may very well be the last such gathering.

In the run-up to the summit, Washington reiterated its rejection of the Paris climate accord in the face of protests by European and Asian officials, while Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping mounted dueling tours of Europe. Trump gave a speech in Warsaw to back Poland’s far-right, anti-EU regime even as Xi held talks in Berlin to consolidate growing EU-China economic ties.

On Friday, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held an inconclusive meeting, agreeing to another shaky cease-fire in southern Syria, where NATO and Russian forces have on several occasions nearly clashed. However, they failed to reach any agreement on the US military stand-off with nuclear-armed North Korea, which borders Russia and China. After the two met, US press commentary soon focused on incendiary allegations of Russian hacking of the American elections.

Explosive conflicts between the G20 powers exist in virtually every corner of the globe, including the current face-off between Indian and Chinese troops over disputed territory in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Perhaps the most destabilizing conflicts, however, are the growing threats of trade war between the imperialist states at the heart of the world financial system.

After Trump threatened the EU with tariffs on its steel exports to the United States, EU officials indicated that they are preparing a list of retaliatory tariffs on US goods. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker commented, “We are ready to take up arms if need be.”

Bitter experiences like the Hamburg protests are driving the working class, across Europe and internationally, onto the road of world socialist revolution. The financial oligarchy is beyond reform. The only way forward is a genuinely revolutionary policy, mobilizing the working class in struggle for a direct assault on the capitalist class, with the aim of confiscating its obscene fortunes, seizing control of the major banks and corporations, and placing them under the democratic control of working people.

Japan’s ruling party trounced in Tokyo regional election

Ben McGrath

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was soundly defeated in the July 2 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly elections in what is broadly seen as a referendum on the policies of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his cabinet. The outcome suggests trouble for his party ahead of national parliamentary elections next year.

Voters were choosing members for the assembly in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which includes the capital city itself and surrounding suburbs, home to approximately 38 million people. Tomin First no Kai (Tokyo Citizens First Association), a regional party, seized 49 seats. Its electoral ally Komeito won 23. A handful of independents, who joined Tomin First after the election, also won seats, giving the bloc 79 seats out of 127.

The LDP took only 23 seats, down from 57 and well below previous record lows of 38 seats in 1995 and 2009. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP) won 19 seats, while the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) took a paltry 5, underlining its complete disarray. Voter turnout was higher than in the previous election, with 51.3 percent of voters going to the polls compared to 43.5 percent in 2013.

Significantly Komeito, a junior partner in Abe’s government, aligned with Tomin First, rather than the widely disliked LDP, in the Tokyo election. The LDP has been reliant on Komeito, which promotes itself as a Buddhist, pacifist party, to push through laws that make deep inroads into democratic rights and remove restrictions on the country’s military, or Self-Defense Forces (SDF).

LDP heavyweight and former defense minister Shigeru Ishiba exploited the party’s losses to question Abe’s legitimacy, saying, “We must recognize this as an historic defeat,” he said. “Rather than a victory for Tomin First, this is a defeat for the LDP.”

Ishiba, who formed his own inner-party faction in 2015 to challenge Abe, is positioning himself for a run at the party’s presidency and thus the prime ministership. He has been critical recently of Abe’s proposed revision of Article 9 of the constitution—the so-called pacifist clause—demanding far more sweeping changes to accelerate Japan’s remilitarization.

Support for the Abe government is dropping rapidly. According to an Asahi Shimbun poll, the Abe cabinet’s rating has fallen to 38 percent, well down from 54 percent in January, while non-support rose to 42 percent.

Much of the support for Tomin First was a protest vote against the LDP and its policies. The LDP has been embroiled in scandals, including one surrounding Kake Gakuen, a veterinary school set up in a special economic zone. Abe allegedly intervened on behalf of his friend and the school’s director, Kotaro Kake, to win approval for the school’s establishment.

Kono, a 40-year-old voter, told the Japan Times: “I cannot trust the LDP after the recent scandals, such as the gaffes by the party’s lawmakers. So I voted for Tomin First, hoping that many of the assembly seats held by the LDP will be replaced by Koike’s party.”

Defense Minister Tomomi Inada also angered voters after she overtly invoked the SDF in a campaign speech in support of an LDP candidate in the Tokyo election. “I ask for your support on behalf of the Defense Ministry, the Self-Defense Forces, myself and the LDP,” she said. Legally, the SDF—Japan’s military—is required to be politically neutral.

Despite calls for Inada to resign or be replaced, Abe defended her, though she may not retain her post in a likely upcoming cabinet reshuffle. The reaction to her comments reflects broader anti-war sentiment in Japan and hostility to the Abe government’s agenda of remilitarization.

Tomin First is no less right-wing than the LDP. It is led by Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike, a longstanding LDP politician who now postures as an outsider and was elected to lead the city last July. She served in the cabinets of Junichiro Koizumi as environment minister and Shinzo Abe as defense minister in 2007 during his first stint as prime minister. She challenged the preferred LDP candidate for governor and went on to establish her new party.

Koike was hailed by the domestic and foreign media for becoming the first female governor of Tokyo. During the latest election campaign she confined herself to local issues, creating controversies over the relocation of the Tokyo fish market and the cost of the 2020 Olympic Games in the city.

The governor promotes herself as an opponent of the elderly, male political establishment and vested interests. In reality, she has a long pedigree in establishment politics, entering parliament in 1992 as a member of the Japan New Party, a breakaway from the LDP. She won a lower house seat in 1993, which she held until 2016. She joined the LDP itself in 2016.

During the Tokyo election, Koike kept quiet about her right-wing, pro-militarist views. She is a senior member of Nippon Kaigi, the ultra-nationalist organization that seeks to whitewash the crimes of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s. It opposes gender equality as well. Abe, the majority of his cabinet, and many other lawmakers, are also members of Nippon Kaigi.

Along with this organization, Koike advocates the revision of Article 9 of the constitution to allow a standing army and the ability to wage war overseas. She supports visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, which symbolically inters the dead from Japan’s past conflicts, including 14 class-A war criminals.

After the Tokyo election, Koike stepped down as head of her party, ostensibly to focus on being governor. However, she is likely attempting to use her party’s victory to pursue her goal of becoming prime minister. She previously ran for LDP president in 2008 before supporting Abe’s rival Shigeru Ishiba in the post four years later.

Tomin First is not the first regional party to gain country-wide prominence. A plethora of parties and independents have emerged to exploit the widespread disgust and alienation from the major parties. None of them has any solution to the deepening economic and social crisis confronting the majority of working people.

Zambian President Edgar Lungu seizes emergency powers

David Brown

The Zambian president, Edgar Lungu, invoked article 31 of the constitution granting emergency powers and abridging democratic rights on Thursday. Lungu is trying to secure his grip on the country amid a deepening economic and political crisis.

Under the Preservation of Public Security Act the police can detain anyone without trial, ban public meetings, censor publications, and forcibly move populations. The emergency measures must be ratified by the National Assembly within seven days, and renewed by the assembly regularly thereafter.

These sweeping measures were enacted on the flimsy reason of combating “vandalism of strategic installations bordering on economic sabotage.” The immediate pretext was a fire Wednesday that burned down a city market in the capital, Lusaka. Lungu presented this as part of a string of alleged arson cases over the past year.

In the immediate aftermath of the city market fire, members of the president’s Patriotic Front (PF) accused the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) of being responsible. Although he did not name the UPND, Lungu said the intention of the arsonists was to “make the country ungovernable.”

For their part, members of the UPND accused the PF of setting the fire to justify the emergency measures.

Whatever the actual source of the fire, it is being used by Lungu as a means of cracking down on political opposition and preparing the police to forcibly suppress any mass protests that erupt over new austerity measures being planned as part of a new International Monetary Fund loan. The real target of emergency measures to ban public meetings or close newspapers is not criminal arsonists, or the businessmen leading the UPND, but social opposition in the working class.

The leader of the UPND, Hakainde Hichilema, ran against Lungu in the tightly contested elections in 2015 and again in 2016, and accused Lungu both times of rigging the election.

August 2016 saw violent clashes between the supporters of both parties, particularly after the government suspended The Post, one of the few independent newspapers in the country. Hichilema has been seeking to overturn the election result through the courts without success.

In April, Hichilema was arrested on absurd treason charges, a capital offense, after Hichilema’s motorcade failed to pull over and let Lungu’s pass while they were both on their way to a traditional ceremony. According to police, it endangered the president’s life when Lungu’s motorcade passed Hichilema’s, thus justifying the charge of treason.

Refusing to recognize Lungu’s presidency, 48 UPND members of parliament boycotted the president’s address to the National Assembly in June, and were suspended for 30 days. They are set to resume their seats in the 166-member legislature on July 12.

Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in Zambia in 1991, the ruling capitalist parties have generally resolved their disputes within the electoral system. The recent shift to dictatorial, police-state measures points to the deep economic and social crisis within the country.

Since its existence as the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, Zambia has relied economically on the export of copper to the world market; copper today remains 75 percent of the country’s exports. The collapse of copper prices after the 2008 world economic crisis hit the country hard, and even though prices have rebounded slightly, it continues to trade well below its historic high.

Even when copper prices spiked, that wealth went to enrich a thin layer of international companies and Zambian intermediaries after the entire industry was privatized in 1999. The poverty rate in Zambia remains around 60 percent of the population and hunger, malnutrition, and anemia are widespread.

Health care remains a particularly sharp expression of social inequality. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 2003, life expectancy fell to the lowest in the world at just 33 years.

Initial privatizations and austerity measures sparked a wave of strikes among public sector workers and miners. In 2001, 90 percent of the country’s civil servants went on strike. Disputes between heavily exploited miners and international corporations regularly break out into violence.

Zambia has been seeking a $1.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2014 in order to cover its budget deficit. Final agreement on the loan has been delayed so no candidate would have to be associated with massively unpopular budget cuts. A taste of future measures was given in June when Zambia’s public energy company ZESCO raised rates 75 percent.

Lungu directly connected the emergency measures to the IMF loan, telling reporters: “I don't think the IMF would like to see this country go up into flames. The measures we are taking are intended to safeguard the IMF program, if it comes to be.”

The actual political differences between Lungu and Hichilema are rarely discussed in the press, but under the current crisis have become particularly sharp.

Lungu’s predecessor, Michael Sata, was elected in 2011 by appealing to popular outrage over working conditions in Chinese-run mines. He particularly exploited the shooting of 11 miners by two Chinese managers in October of 2010.

First elected in 2015 to finish out Sata’s term after he died in office, Lungu softened the government’s anti-Chinese posturing and sought increased investment in the country’s mines. Between 2000 and 2016, bilateral trade between Zambia and China has skyrocketed from just $100 million to $4 billion.

During the 2016 campaign, Hichilema picked up the anti-Chinese mantle and included a call for bringing back the hated Anglo-American company to invest in Zambia’s mines. Anglo-American withdrew their investments from Zambia in 2002 claiming they could not make the mines profitable.

Hichilema and Lungu are both in agreement that they need to cut social spending in Zambia in order to secure the IMF loan and attract foreign investment, but they disagree over how much of that investment should come from China and which of them should profit from the deals.

Tensions mount in India-China Himalayan border standoff

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones 

Indian and Chinese troops remain in a tense standoff on the remote Doklam or Donglang Plateau in the Himalayas, in what is being described as the most serious border dispute between New Delhi and Beijing since the two countries fought a month-long border war in 1962.

Both countries have made repeated bellicose statements, insisting that the other must stand down.

Yesterday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang reiterated Beijing’s demand that India immediately withdraw its 3,000 troops from the contested area, so “as to avoid there being an even more serious situation, creating more serious consequences.”

Only after an Indian withdrawal would negotiations on the border dispute begin, said Geng. He went on to dismiss any possibility of a meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi on the sidelines of this weekend’s G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, saying that the “atmosphere is not right” for bilateral talks.

At issue is control of an 89-square kilometer (34.5-square mile) section of Himalayan grassland that China says is hers and India insists rightfully belongs to the tiny kingdom of Bhutan.

While nominally an independent state, Bhutan is effectively a protectorate of India. It does not have formal diplomatic relations with China, Britain, the US or any other major power apart from Japan and India.

Only on June 29, days after Indian troops had intervened to stop Chinese labourers building a road on the Doklam Plateau, did Bhutan’s Foreign Ministry issue a statement charging that the construction was on its territory.

India is accusing China of trying to push the tri-junction of the Indian-Chinese and Bhutan border further south. This, it claims, would place Chinese troops in a much better position, in the event of war, to seize control of the strategic Siliguri corridor—a narrow slice of Indian territory, squeezed between Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and China, that connects West Bengal and the rest of India to its seven northeastern states.

India and Bhutan are also charging Beijing with violating a 1998 accord between Bhutan and China committing them to maintaining peace, tranquillity, and the status quo in disputed areas pending a final settlement of their common border.

Beijing counters that India long ago recognized Chinese sovereignty over the whole plateau, pointing to the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1890 and a 1959 letter from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to his Chinese counterpart accepting the validity of that Convention.

China also notes that not until the fourteenth round of Sino-Bhutan border negotiations, held in November 2000, did Bhutan even extend its border claim to include the Doklam area. Implicit in this is the suggestion that it was India that pressured Bhutan to expand its territorial claims.

The flaring up of the Sino-Indian border dispute is only the latest in a long and rapidly growing list of bilateral disputes.

Whatever the immediate issue, they are being propelled forward by the polarization of the region’s geopolitics, with India under Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party-led government emerging as a veritable “frontline state” in American imperialism’s military-strategic offensive against China, and Beijing responding by deepening its military-strategic partnership with India’s archenemy, Pakistan.

China publicly denounced India for intruding on its territory and blocking its road-building project in Doklam June 26, the very day Modi met US President Donald Trump at the White House and vowed to further expand the Indo-US alliance.

Beijing has long been aware that Washington is intent on building up New Delhi as a strategic counterweight to China and making it the fourth member, along with Japan and Australia, of a US-led NATO-style anti-China alliance.

Until recently, Beijing responded to the expansion of strategic ties between India and the US with offers of investments and collaboration, choosing not to push back aggressively for fear of propelling India into Washington’s embrace.

But over the past two years—with India parroting Washington’s provocative line on the South China Sea dispute, throwing open its military bases and ports to use by the Pentagon, and the US proclaiming India a “Major Defense Partner”—Beijing has adopted an increasingly aggressive stance.

During the current border dispute, Chinese officials have repeatedly made threats of military action. These have included direct references to the 1962 border war, as well as to the provocative comments of India’s new army chief, General Bipin Rawat, who has repeatedly proclaimed India ready to fight a two-front war against China and Pakistan.

On July 5, China’s Ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, made a strongly worded statement saying that there was no scope for “compromise” in the standoff in Doklam and that the only way to defuse the “grave” situation was for India to “unconditionally” withdraw its troops.

When asked about suggestions in the media that the conflict could end in war, Ambassador Luo sought to give the impression that China is not fazed by such a possibility. “There has been talk about that option,” said Zhou. “It is up to your government to decide whether to exercise (the) military option.”

The day before, the People’s Liberation Army website had published a comment by a prominent strategic analyst affiliated with Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, Wang Dehua, that said those in India seeking “confrontation” with China over the border “should be fully aware … another armed conflict between China and India is not completely out of the question.” Wang went on to boast, “The Indian side didn’t get the upper hand in the past. And it won’t get an advantage today when the Chinese military has made remarkable progress on modernization over the past few decades.”

China’s state-owned press, especially the Global Times, have been churning out belligerent anti-Indian commentary. On Wednesday, the Times published an editorial titled “China can rethink stance on Sikkim, Bhutan.” It denounced the “unequal treaties” between India and Bhutan, saying they should be “abolished,” and said China should consider revoking its 2003 recognition of Indian sovereignty over Sikkim, a neighbouring one-time Himalayan kingdom, that New Delhi annexed in 1975.

The Times’ editorial said Beijing would have “a powerful card” in dealing with New Delhi were it to “fuel pro-independence appeals in Sikkim” and should not refrain from doing so because of fears about India interfering in Tibet, as “this card is already overplayed.”

India’s government and military were quick to raise the threat of military action when the Doklam border dispute first flared. Army chief Rawat personally flew to Sikkim to meet with Indian commanders and Defence Minister Arun Jaitley boasted that India in 2017 is very different from 1962—a reference both to its nuclear-armed military and its strategic partnership with the US.

In recent days, Indian government and military officials have been somewhat more restrained in public, but they have also underlined that they consider India’s strategic interests to be at stake in the dispute and will not back down.

“Across the table we can solve all the problems,” Indian Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre told a press conference Wednesday, then added, “China is approaching towards Bhutanese territory. We want them not to come forward. This is our security concern and this is our stand.”

The Indian media, for its part, has been whipping up a bellicose anti-China atmosphere. This includes repeatedly showing footage of Indian and Chinese troops jostling each other, while concealing that this incident happened long before the recent events in Doklam.

The Indian government and elite are also seeking to exploit the situation to gain US support for their hegemonic ambitions in South Asia.

Writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Harsh V. Pant of the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation hails Modi for “standing up to China,” including by refusing to support its One Belt One Road initiative, but says Washington must do more to assist it. “The Trump administration,” he claims, “may have inadvertently given China a green light to bully its neighbors,” “by signaling that it is ready for a transactional relationship with Beijing.” “As Washington reviews its stance on China,” he continues, “it needs to be aware that Asia is being shaped by China’s rise much faster than many anticipated even a few years back.”

India’s opposition parties, especially the Congress Party, are urging the BJP government to take a tough stand against China. At a July 3 press conference, Congress spokesperson and parliamentarian Dr. Abhishek Manu Singhvi complained of a “humongous number” of Chinese border violations, and demanded that the BJP “take strong, corrective measures on national security for national interest, with respect to our border situation.”

The Stalinist Communist Party of India or CPM, which last fall endorsed the Modi government’s reckless and illegal “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan, has not made a single statement or comment about the current border crisis, which exemplifies how the Indian bourgeoisie’s alliance with US imperialism threatens to embroil the people of Asia in catastrophic military conflict.

Trade conflicts hang over G20 summit

Nick Beams 

As the Trump administration seeks to place its offensive against North Korea and China at the centre of the two-day G20 summit of world leaders that begins in Hamburg, Germany, today, trade conflicts will be very much present.

The most explosive issue is whether the US takes action under 1962 legislation that allows the president to limit steel imports on “national security” grounds. This has been described as the “nuclear option” on trade.

The US administration has been considering a report ordered by Trump in April on the impact of steel imports. It was initially thought the president would make an announcement on whether to invoke the legislation before the G20 met, but a decision has been delayed until after the summit.

While Chinese imports are the main target, any measures will also hit European steel producers, amid warnings such action would provoke retaliatory action by the European Union. Speaking on conditions of anonymity, a French official told reporters in a briefing on the summit that if measures were directed against European exports, “we would obviously react very quickly, and we are getting prepared.”

The Trump administration’s threatened measures on steel, part of its “America First” agenda, are being driven by major US steel corporations, with the support of the steel industry trade union bureaucracy.

Speaking to Bloomberg, John Ferriola, the chief executive officer of Nucor, the largest US steel producer, said that for US steel firms to make the necessary return on capital they needed to operate at 85–87 percent capacity. This meant that imports should occupy 10–15 percent of the market. At present, imports make up about 26 percent of the US market.

Apart from China, the countries most affected would be Brazil, Canada, South Korea and members of the European Union. China maintains that its exports to the US are largely lower-grade steel, which US firms do not want to produce.

The steel issue is only the sharpest expression, to this point, of a much wider conflict that goes to the very nature of trade relations among the major powers.

This underlying conflict broke into the open at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in March when US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vetoed communiqué wording that spoke of the need to “resist protectionism.”

Since then, a form of words has been used at other high-level economic meetings, including the G7 summit in late May, to cover up the breach by referring to free trade that is “fair and mutually beneficial.” Some variation of this wording is likely to be adopted at Hamburg.

While the drafters of the G20 communiqué haggle over the wording, however, the differences are widening as evidenced by the US withdrawal from the Paris climate change accord. Following the G7 summit in May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that the days when Europe could rely on “others” were “over to some extent” and “we Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.”

The differences with the US have become even more explicit since then.

Last week, Merkel predicted “very difficult” talks over trade and climate change at the G20 meeting and spoke of “obvious” disagreements with the US. “Whoever believes the problems of this world can be solved by isolationism and protectionism is making a tremendous error,” she told the German parliament.

In an interview with Die Zeit, published on Wednesday, Merkel elaborated further. “While we are looking at the possibilities of co-operation to benefit everyone, globalisation is seen by the American administration more as a process that is not about a win-win situation but about winners and losers,” she said.

The Trump administration is particularly targeting Germany, China and, to some extent, Japan—the countries with the largest trade surpluses with the US—insisting that the present global trade order is working to their benefit at the expense of the US.

On the European side, in the lead up to the German elections in September, Merkel is under pressure from the opposition social democrats, who are calling for a more aggressive stance against the US. On Wednesday, SPD parliamentary leader Thomas Oppermann urged Merkel to isolate Trump at Hamburg, saying “appeasement” would lead “to the erosion of Western values.”

The growing tensions between the US and Europe were underscored on Wednesday when the European Union and Japan announced overall agreement on a trade deal. Both sides have agreed to the broad framework of a pact, with many details still to be worked out.

The timing of the announcement, on the eve of the summit, was highly significant. Negotiations have been underway for more than four years and many issues have still to be ironed out. The announcement was made in order to send a clear message to the US.

Claudia Schmucker, head of the globalisation program at the German Council on Foreign Relations said: “In my view it will be 19 against one at the G20, and the European Union will try to take over the role of the US in respect to trade. It’s a direct answer to what Trump stands for.”

The EU-Japan talks were effectively put on hold while Japan negotiated with the Obama administration over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But Trump’s scuttling of the TPP, in one of his first presidential acts, and the breakdown of negotiations between the EU and the US over a trade and investment agreement, clearly led to decisions in Tokyo and Brussels to push ahead.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), has tried to tread a fine line between the conflicting interests of the US, Europe and other major powers. In a briefing note to the summit, IMF head Christine Lagarde said that while growth prospects for the world economy were strengthening, they could be jeopardised without greater co-operation.

In remarks directed to the US, she said “no country is an island” and called on the G20 “to strengthen the global trading system and reaffirm our commitment to well enforced rules.”

On the other hand, reflecting the Trump administration’s criticism of Germany’s persistent trade surpluses, she called for Germany to undertake greater public spending. A “more expansionary fiscal stance in Germany” would raise potential output and have “positive spillover effects to other euro area economies where there is still cyclical slack.”

Such calls for a greater balancing of the world economy will fall on deaf ears. The Trump administration will take no notice of pleas to reverse its “America First” agenda, any more than Germany will ease its constrictions on government spending and the maintenance of budget surpluses, which it regards as the foundation of its economic and financial strength.

The G20 became the premier global economic forum following the 2008 financial crisis, with pledges to promote greater collaboration. Almost a decade on, it has become a battleground for the assertion of the economic interests of each against all.

Trump speech in Poland fans conflict with Germany, Russia

Patrick Martin

Donald Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw Thursday morning, but it will be studied far more carefully in Berlin and Moscow. So hostile was the population of the Polish capital to the visit by the US president that the ruling (Law and Justice) PiS party, which shares Trump’s outlook of semi-fascistic nationalism, had to bus in supporters from the rural areas to make a respectable—and suitably enthusiastic—crowd.

The speech touched several bases required of any US president, and particularly Trump, battered by months of allegations by the intelligence apparatus and media—aimed at pushing him to take a more aggressive stance against Moscow—that Russia intervened into the US presidential election to favor his candidacy. He reaffirmed, in categorical fashion, the obligation of the US government under Article Five of the NATO charter to respond militarily to any attack on any member of NATO.

Trump had previously cast doubt on the possibility of the US going to war with Russia, a potential nuclear cataclysm, in response to a border clash in Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia, the three Baltic republics ruled by viciously anti-Russian right-wing governments. Article Five does not cover Ukraine, which is not a NATO member.

The US president claimed that his previous criticisms of NATO were sparked by the disparity between the US financial contribution and those of its European allies, and that this had been vindicated by a flood of promises of greater military spending from these countries. He then added, “To those who would criticize our tough stance, I would point out that the United States has demonstrated not merely with words but with its actions that we stand firmly behind Article 5, the mutual defense commitment.”

Trump also singled out Russia for criticism, declaring, “We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in the Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran, and instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and defense of civilization itself.”

The most important passages in the speech, drafted for Trump by his foreign policy team and delivered without any obvious deviations, declared sympathy for the plight of Poland, trapped geographically between more powerful nations, Germany and Russia, sometimes partitioned or overrun by them. The speech was delivered at the site of a memorial to the Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home Army in 1944, which was bloodily suppressed by the Nazis.

Trump himself knows next to nothing of the geography or history of Poland, or any other country, for that matter. These lines were undoubtedly prepared for him by the National Security Council and fascistic aides like Stephen Bannon, and the clear purpose of the material was to fan the flames of anti-German and anti-Russian sentiment, both in Poland and more broadly in Europe.

This is in keeping with the new orientation of US foreign policy, which regards the European Union as a major economic and (potentially) strategic adversary dominated by Germany, and therefore makes common cause with the EU members most antagonistic to Brussels—first of all Britain, which is pursuing Brexit, and secondly Poland, which has repeatedly clashed with the EU over the ultra-right and antidemocratic measures of the PiS government.

Trump deliberately associated himself with the viciously anti-immigrant policies of the PiS, claiming that, like his own administration, the government in Warsaw was not persecuting immigrants but rather fighting terrorism, which both Trump and the PiS identify with the Muslim countries and Muslim minorities in Europe and the United States.

Trump invoked religion repeatedly as the key to the history of the Polish people, claiming that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes should be dated on June 2, 1979, when “one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope,” and “one million Poles sang three simple words: ‘We Want God’.”

He continued, “Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out ‘We want God’.” Actually, Europe is a largely secular society, and Poland is a relative backwater with its powerful Roman Catholic hierarchy and priest-ridden rural population—the price paid for decades of persecution of socialist and left-wing thought by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

From his glorification of (Christian) religion, Trump went on to demonize Muslims, declaring, “We are confronted by another oppressive ideology—one that seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe. America and Europe have suffered one terror attack after another.” He urged Russia to join the Western powers “in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.”

In perhaps the most remarkable passage of a fascistic speech, Trump announced he has identified “yet another danger … invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.”

In one paragraph, the US president managed to conflate the danger of ISIS terrorism and the apparently equal menace of environmental regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. He told his audience, “We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”

There was a definite anti-Semitic subtext in the speech, thinly disguised by a perfunctory one-sentence reference to the Holocaust and the extermination of the Jews of Poland. But there was no mistaking the undertones of an address that hailed the Polish people, their culture and religion—the word “Polish” appears 25 times in the seven-page text of the speech—and makes exactly one reference to the Jews, and no mention of anti-Semitism. In addition, Trump did not visit either the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews, honored as the 2016 European Museum of the Year.

The speech referred to the Holocaust—the systematic murder of six million Jews, half of them in Poland—as merely one in a list of “evils beyond description.”

The speech was concluded on a note likely supplied by Bannon, a devotee of the pronouncements of Mussolini and other Italian fascists. Trump argued “the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.”

The evocation of “will” as the decisive category is significant. It is not for nothing that Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film on the German Nazi Party’s 1934 congress in Nuremberg was given the title “Triumph of the Will.” Trump may not know, but Bannon certainly does, the fascist pedigree of this particular piece of right-wing rhetoric.

Bitter conflicts dominate G20 summit in Germany

Bill Van Auken

The two-day G20 summit convenes in Hamburg, Germany today, dominated by global economic and political crises, threats of military confrontation and multisided geostrategic conflicts. The atmosphere resembles nothing so much as a meeting between greater and lesser mobsters in which no one knows who will be the first to shoot.

First held in 2009 in London, the G20 Summit was supposed to serve as a forum for a collective effort by the major powers to rescue world capitalism from the financial meltdown begun on Wall Street in 2008 and to ward off the danger of protectionism. Today, under the impact of the ever-deepening and insoluble capitalist economic crisis, the conflicts between these powers have become so advanced, severe and unconcealed that there is every reason to believe that this could be the last of these world gatherings.

US President Donald Trump set the tone for a summit of bitter and open confrontation by preceding his arrival in Germany with a trip to Poland, which has been sharply at odds with Germany’s rise as the new hegemon in Europe. Hosted by one of the most right-wing governments on the European continent, he delivered a fascistic speech warning of the collapse of “our civilization” and calling for a struggle “for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.” Invoking Polish resistance to German occupation in the Second World War, Trump left no doubt that he was seeking to align the US with Poland in order to pursue American imperialism’s present-day rivalry with Germany.

Trump also addressed the 12-central and eastern European nation “Three Seas Initiative Summit” in Warsaw, a body that follows in the tradition of the so-called Intermarium alliance formed in the 1920s by various fascistic and nationalist regimes directed against both the Soviet Union and Germany and supported by the US.

The agenda of the White House echoes the statement of then-US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in 2003 denounced France and Germany for failing to support the US drive to war against Iraq, dismissing them as “old Europe” and indicating that Washington was oriented to a “new Europe” composed of the former Warsaw Pact states in the east.

A decade and a half later, the geostrategic conflicts exposed by the divisions over Washington’s criminal war against Iraq have metastasized, affecting every area of relations between Europe and America and playing out on a global stage.

Trump comes to Hamburg as the personification of the backwardness, criminality and parasitism of America’s ruling financial oligarchy. His aim is to use the threat of war, from a potentially world catastrophic attack on North Korea to an equally dangerous confrontation with Iran and Russia in Syria, to bludgeon US imperialism’s rivals into submission to his administration’s economic nationalist, “America First” agenda.

Trump, however, is by no means alone in pursuing an aggressive imperialist agenda. German Chancellor Angela Merkel held her own meeting in the run-up to the G20 summit with China’s President Xi Jinping, both invoking free trade and climate change, condemning protectionism and implicitly opposing the policies of the Trump administration. Merkel embraced Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” project of developing infrastructure for transport and energy networks linking China to Central Asia, Russia, all of Europe and the energy resources of the Middle East, an initiative viewed by Washington as an existential threat.

Xi’s government, confronting growing military pressure from Washington both on the Korean peninsula and in the South China Sea, is seeking to forge closer bonds with a rising and increasingly independent—both politically and militarily—German imperialism.

To the same end, he preceded his trip to Germany with a two-day visit to Moscow, where he and Putin defied Washington’s demands that China starve North Korea into submission after Pyongyang’s test firing of an ICBM. Instead, they issued their own demands for the US to remove its antiballistic missiles from South Korea and halt its provocative military exercises on the peninsula.

Meanwhile, on the very eve of the summit, the European Union and Japan announced the conclusion of a free trade pact that would encompass a third of the world’s GDP. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared that the agreement demonstrated “our strong political will to fly the flag for free trade against a shift toward protectionism.”

“Although some are saying that the time of isolationism and disintegration is coming again, we are demonstrating that this is not the case,” European Council President Tusk added.

The agreement has been struck at the expense of US-based transnationals and both statements were clearly directed against Trump, who on the eve of the summit wrote on Twitter: “The US made some of the worst trade deals in world history. Why should we continue these deals with countries that do not help us.”

With the continuously escalating conflicts between the economic powers that constitute the core of the world economy, the increasingly open and acrimonious divisions within the NATO alliance itself, and the forging of multiple pacts directed at furthering the interests of one or another power against its rivals, the situation resembles more and more that described by Lenin during World War I in which the imperialist powers were “enmeshed in a net of secret treaties with each other, with their allies, and against their allies.”

The rising threat of war and the breakdown of international institutions that were created in the aftermath of the United States’ emergence from World War II as the dominant imperialist power are the end product of processes that have matured over the quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The emergence of what US strategists described as a “unipolar moment” set the stage for a series of imperialist wars and interventions in which US imperialism sought to exploit its military advantage to counterbalance its declining position in the world economy.

While these wars shattered Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and other countries, claimed millions of lives and unleashed the greatest refugee crisis since World War II, they utterly failed to alter the fortunes of US imperialism.

Now, a new stage of the crisis has been reached in which Washington’s global rivals are challenging US imperialism’s global hegemony.

Underlying these increasingly dangerous developments are the fundamental contradictions of the world capitalist system between, on the one hand, globally integrated and interdependent economy and its division into antagonistic national states, and, on the other, between the socialized character of global production and its subordination, through the private ownership of the means of production, to the accumulation of private profit by the ruling capitalist class.

Imperialism’s only means of resolving these contradictions is through a new world war that poses the destruction of humanity. These same contradictions, however, are laying the foundations for a revolutionary upsurge of the working class on an international scale.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International spelled out in its 2016 statement “Socialism and the Fight Against War”:

“The great historical questions arising from the present world situation can be formulated as follows: How will the crisis of the world capitalist system be resolved? Will the contradictions wracking the system end in world war or world socialist revolution? Will the future lead to fascism, nuclear war and an irrevocable descent into barbarism? Or will the international working class take the path of revolution, overthrow the capitalist system, and then reconstruct the world on socialist foundations? These are the real alternatives confronting humanity.”

D-Prize Innovation Challenge for Poverty Intervention in Developing Countries 2017

Application Deadlines: 

• Early decision round: 30th July, 2017 at midnight PT (Pacific Time)
• Regular submission deadline: 20th August, 2017 at midnight PT
• Extension deadline (limited to 200 people who register): 10th September, 2017

About the Award: D-Prize funds new entrepreneurs who increase access to proven poverty interventions. D-Prize is exclusively interested in ventures that will scale distribution of an already proven poverty intervention in the developing world. We do not fund prototypes of promising new interventions.

D-Prize Challenges :

• GIRL’S EDUCATION
• AGRICULTURE
• ENERGY
• GLOBAL HEALTH
• EDUCATION
• GOVERNANCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
• CUSTOM

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: 

• D-Prize challenges are open to anyone or any teams. The sole restriction is that individuals and their immediate family on the judging panel may not participate as a contestant.
• D-Prize is also open to any business model (for profit, non-profit, and everything in between).

Selection Criteria: 

• You should have enormous ambition, and can imagine yourself as a successful entrepreneur. You are ready to launch your new venture, and – if a pilot proves successful – you are excited to grow it into a world changing organization.
• If you are still a student or have existing commitments, you should have a clear idea how to transition into a full-time founder.
• D-Prize is exclusively interested in ventures that will scale distribution of an already proven poverty intervention in the developing world. We do not fund prototypes of promising new interventions.

The D-Prize judging panel is composed of individuals with professional experience distributing life-changing technologies in the developing world.
Contestants are evaluated based on:
● Passion and potential for candidate’s success, as evident by their academic and professional background, relevant skills, and quick leadership trajectory.
● Focus on distribution. Proposals must focus on distributing a proven poverty solution that needs greater access in the developing world.
● Potential for scale, based on the organizational model proposed in the concept note and the entrepreneur’s desire to commit and grow.

Number of Awards: Up to 25 of the most promising proposals will be selected for funding awards, regardless of which challenge track was selected.

Value of Award: All winners will be awarded up to $20,000. The award is offered in the form of a convertible grant

How to Apply: It is important to read the application instructions on the Program Webpage (see link below) before applying

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: D-Prize