National Australia Bank to eliminate 6,000 jobs

John Harris

The National Australia Bank (NAB), one of the country’s big four banks, last week announced a restructuring that will cut 6,000 jobs over the next three years, while unveiling a record $6.642 billion profit. As of September 30, NAB employed 33,422 full-time staff, so the losses amount to nearly one in every five workers.

The job destruction is part of a broader transition throughout the financial sector, moving further away from over-the-customer service to automated and digitally-based operations. This has widespread implications. About 168,000 people are employed in banking across Australia, and finance and insurance sector as a whole is the country’s 11th largest employer.

NAB’s overall profit was up 2.5 percent from $6.483 billion last year. According to the Australian Financial Review, the rise was fuelled by continued growth in housing and business lending plus stronger margins on sales. Revenue rose 2.7 percent to $9 billion.

The redundancies are calculated to cut costs by more than $1 billion by 2020. The beneficiaries will be the major financial corporations that dominate the bank’s share register, although NAB’s stock price initially fell because of the feared expenses involved in the $1.5 billion three-year restructuring program.

The restructure aims to channel 60 percent of NAB’s business onto a digital platform, up from the current 10 percent. It also seeks to halve the number of financial products the company sells and reduce the number of IT applications by 20 percent.

CEO Andrew Thorburn attempted to ameliorate the shock by saying 2,000 new digitally-focused jobs would be created. He told the media, however, that the entire banking industry was coming under enormous pressure to reshape its workforce. NAB’s move, he declared, would put pressure on its “main rivals” to make “similar cost cuts.”

Bell Potter Securities analyst TS Lim told the Sydney Morning Herald, “Australian banks still have too many branches and too many head office staff.” If they were to remain competitive, banks would have to make deeper cuts, especially the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Westpac, which have the largest branch networks.

A few days later, Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer unveiled an $8 billion profit, while indicating that banking jobs are becoming more precarious. Commenting on Westpac’s results, Martin North, principal of Digital Financial Analytics, said “the volume of transactions [face-to-face] across the branch network fell 23 percent in the last two years.” The bank had closed 59 branches and sacked about 500 people.

On top of the technological shifts, the banks are vulnerable to any crash in the over-heated housing market. Already they are reportedly bracing for much slower growth in the market, which accounts for approximately 60 percent of their loans.

Ian Pollari, the head of banking at KPMG Australia, said slowing credit growth, long-term pressure on margins and competition from financial tech firms were all pushing banks to look hard at costs.

The redundancies at NAB are the latest in an endless series of job cuts. In November 2005, NAB carried out a three-year global restructure that destroyed 4,500 jobs, announcing an annual net profit of $4.13 billion that year.

Earlier this year, the once publicly-owned Commonwealth Bank cut 150 jobs from a processing centre in Brisbane as part of a broader restructure. Back in 2003, the Commonwealth Bank cut 3,700 jobs.

Similarly, ANZ bank is conducting an ongoing restructure which has seen 1,500 jobs lost over the past 12 months, following up 1,000 job losses in 2012.

The number of staff employed by banks is already well below the peak of 189,000 in 1991, despite a 40 percent increase in Australia’s population since then. That was the year in which the Keating Labor government began the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, laying the groundwork for the gutting of jobs and services.

The trade unions covering bank workers have been fully complicit in this process, both in backing Labor governments and smothering all resistance to redundancies. Typically, the Financial Sector Union (FSU) presented NAB’s latest cuts as a fait accompli. FSU national secretary Julia Angrisano said 80 of the 6,000 jobs had gone already and “there will be more line ups along the way.”

In a media statement, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) restated its support for the Labor Party’s call for a banking royal commission. ACTU president Ged Kearney said that the move to sack 6,000 workers came after “countless scandals” in the banking and finance sector.

Any such inquiry would cover-up the pivotal roles played by Labor governments and the unions in the carve-up of jobs and conditions of banking and finance workers, as well as the underlying driving forces in the corporate profit system.

The extraction of extraordinary profits by the banks at the expense of jobs highlights how capitalism subordinates all developments in technology and infrastructure to the interests of a wealthy elite, preventing them being used for the benefit all.

Five million people in UK earn less than £8.10 an hour

Thomas Scripps

More evidence has emerged of the desperate conditions faced by millions of low-paid workers across the UK.

Even as the Conservative government increases the voluntary UK Living Wage to £8.75 an hour (£10.20 in London), the Resolution Foundation reports that a quarter of low-paid workers were permanently stuck in low-wage jobs over the last decade.

Nearly half fluctuated in and out of the low-pay bracket, while just one in six escaped into more gainful employment. Low pay is defined by the foundation as less than two-thirds the median hourly wage of £12.10. This means more than 5 million people are earning £8.10 an hour or less.

The emergence of such a low-wage workforce, just 70 pence less than the new supposedly living wage, reflects broader structural changes in the British and world economy following the 2008 financial crash. Full-time employment is now out of reach for many, with growing numbers forced into precarious part-time and self-employment, lacking even basic protections including sick pay. According to the report, 64 percent of those permanently stuck in low-pay were working part-time.

For the British working class, the period of austerity since 2008 has been one of continued and drastic decline in real wages: down 11 percent in 2017 compared with 2007, and with inflation continuing to outstrip wage growth throughout this year. The only section of the workforce to improve its pay was the poorest 15 percent, thanks to the abysmally low level at which these workers started. The Resolution Foundation report highlights sharp divisions in these “gains.” The 25 percent of those in low pay who are trapped there saw their wages increase by just 40p an hour—well behind the £4.83 increase for the one in six who escaped and pointing to the creation of a permanent poverty-wage sector of the labour force.

For low-paid workers aged under 25, even this picture is too rosy. They are not entitled to the National Living Wage (£7.50/hour)—instead earning the minimum wage of between £4.05/hour and £7.05/hour depending on age, or £3.50/hour for apprentices. Young workers are being underpaid by between £820 and £6,300 a year for carrying out the same work as older workers, according to a report by the Young Women’s Trust. A survey of more than 4,000 young people conducted by the charity found that raising the apprentice minimum wage and extending the National Living Wage to under 25s were the two most popular suggested policies (with 83 percent and 79 percent in favour.)

According to a study by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), 16- to 17-year-olds working 40 hours a week for the minimum wage were £300 a year worse off in real terms compared to 2008, with those aged 18-20 £250 worse off.

Both young and older low-paid workers have been particularly sharply affected by welfare cuts and the rising cost of living, far outstripping meagre wage gains.

Among the more punitive increases in living costs over the past decade has been childcare. Young women in their early to mid-20s are highlighted by the Resolution Foundation as one of the most vulnerable groups when it comes to low-pay.

According to recent research by the TUC, the average cost of childcare increased 48 percent between 2008 and 2016. A single parent in full-time work in 2016 spent, on average, one fifth of their wages to place a one-year-old in nursery for 21 hours a week—compared to one sixth in 2008. Two parents in full-time work saw a jump from 8 percent to 11 percent of their income spent on childcare from 2008 to 2016.

Speaking for the Family and Childcare Trust, Ellen Broome explained, “Low-income families claiming Universal Credit typically take home just £1.96 per hour after childcare costs have been paid, and some get even less than this.”

Crippling expenses, combined with poor wages, have led to serious levels of indebtedness. Total consumer debt from car finance, personal loans and credit cards stands at £200 billion. The annual growth rate of consumer credit stands at 10 percent, compared to a 2 percent annual household income growth. Working people are being forced to borrow money on an unprecedented scale to simply get by. There are 8.3 million people in the UK with problem debts, according to the Money Advice Service. Half of all UK adults are “financially vulnerable—highly reliant on credit or unable to cope with small rises in bills,” according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The greatest problems are faced by young people and renters, both typically among the low-paid. Those aged 25-34 hold, on average, five times more unsecured debt as a ratio of income than over-55s (twice as much as 35- to 44-year-olds) and are three times more likely to use credit to pay for essential items like food. Compared to mortgage holders, renters are twice as likely to resort to credit to pay for essential items. Figures from the FCA released in October show that 55 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds are in debt, as are 63 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds, owing an average of over £8,000. Moreover, 20 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds have no savings at all, with an additional 33 percent having less than £1,000.

With the Bank of England beginning to raise interest rates, millions of people are standing on the precipice.

In the light of these figures, the miserly increases planned for the UK and National Living Wage are exposed as a fraud. The recent increase to the UK Living Wage means only 150,000 workers will be affected, with many major companies refusing to pay the higher rate. The plans to increase the enforced minimum for over 25s to £8.75 an hour will still leave an estimated 4.3 million workers in low pay, according to the Resolution Foundation. In addition, the numbers of workers clustered within 1 percent of the wage floor is expected to double to 3.7 million by 2020.

Labour’s proposal is to increase the minimum to £10 an hour, but neither Labour nor the TUC are prepared to seriously challenge employers on low-pay.

Responding to the recent increase in the voluntary minimum, Labour’s Mayor of London Sadiq Khan appealed to businesses, “Paying the London living wage is not only the action of a responsible organisation, but a successful one too. Many of the accredited employers I speak to tell me of the increased productivity and reduced staff turnover that they’ve experienced since signing up.”

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady, on the other hand, continues to petition the Tory Government to take up Labour’s plan, “by raising the minimum wage to £10 an hour as soon as possible.”

The Labour and trade union bureaucracy are wholly incapable of addressing the fundamental cause of low-pay, rising living costs and debt: the more and more forcible exertion of the laws of capitalist economy. According to an Institute for Public Policy Research report into wealth inequality in Britain, “Every generation since the post-war ‘baby boomers’ has accumulated less wealth than the generation before them had at the same age.” This is not a question of intergenerational conflict, but of the collapse of the post-war order and a deepening capitalist crisis which recent entrants to the labour market are feeling most sharply.

Saudi crisis threatens wider war in the Middle East

Bill Van Auken

The recent mass arrests in Saudi Arabia combined with the kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister, the escalation of the war against Yemen and Riyadh’s charge that both Iran and Lebanon have “declared war” against it point to an immense regional crisis that threatens to erupt into a wider conflict.

After more than a quarter century of uninterrupted US wars of aggression, occupations and regime-change operations that have claimed the lives of over a million people and driven many millions more from their homes, the Middle East is a powder keg.

Entire societies have been decimated by these interventions, from Iraq to Libya, Syria and Yemen. This immense bloodletting has as its primary driving force the attempts by US imperialism to offset the relative decline in its dominance over the capitalist world order by means of military force, particularly through the assertion of its hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East.

Despite the immense destructive power of the means employed, however, they have failed to achieve Washington’s ends. After expending roughly $2 trillion in resources and sacrificing the lives of over 4,400 US troops in Iraq and bringing tens of thousands back seriously wounded, the US has failed to achieve its aims of unquestioned dominance in the region. In Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, the US faces Iran as a significant regional rival, with Russia and China also challenging American capitalism for control of markets and energy resources.

The US response has been the stoking of ever-widening conflicts that threaten to drag the entire region into war, with the potential of drawing in the world’s major nuclear powers as well.

The Trump administration has deliberately sought to provoke a direct conflict with Iran, refusing to certify its compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord negotiated with the Obama administration and the other major powers. The nonsensical claims that Iran is not living up to the “spirit” of the agreement, i.e., bowing to US demands for the country’s disarmament and complete subordination to American interests in the Middle East, have led to a ratcheting up of tensions with Tehran and are setting the stage for direct military conflict.

With his trip to Riyadh last May, Trump laid the foundations for a Sunni sectarian alliance against Iran based upon the reactionary oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf led by Saudi Arabia. This US policy has essentially given a carte blanche to the Saudi regime to carry out repression at home and escalate military violence and provocations throughout the region.

This orientation has been confirmed by the reaction of the White House to the sweeping purge launched by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman involving the arrest of some of the most powerful figures in the kingdom, including a dozen princes, current and former ministers and one of the country’s wealthiest billionaires, all under the pretext of battling “corruption.” In reality, the crackdown, accompanied by the placing of allies of the crown prince in key positions, is part of a consolidation of power in the hands of the most bellicose and anti-Iranian faction within the regime.

This was accompanied with the Saudi regime’s summoning last week of Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri to Riyadh, from which he has not returned. Credible reports indicate that when Hariri arrived in the Saudi capital, his plane was surrounded by police, his cellphone confiscated and he was detained until he read a prepared speech over the Saudi state media resigning his position and denouncing both Iran and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah. The Saudi monarchy apparently decided Hariri, a Sunni who holds joint Saudi-Lebanese citizenship, had to be removed because he failed to adopt a policy of breaking with Hezbollah, which forms a major part of his government. He and his family appear to remain hostages of the House of Saud.

The initial response of the Trump administration, as well as that of the corporate media, to these extraordinary developments was to essentially echo the line from Riyadh, casting bin Salman as a “reformer.”

“I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing,” Trump tweeted in response to the arrests.

Similarly, the Trump administration unconditionally backed unsubstantiated claims that a rocket fired from Yemen toward Riyadh’s international airport had been supplied by Iran. The Saudi response, also fully supported by Washington, has been to escalate its near-genocidal war against the Yemeni people, stepping up bombings and closing all of the country’s borders and ports to relief supplies. The UN has warned that this tightening of the US-backed blockade threatens to unleash a famine of world-historic proportions, claiming the lives of millions.

While succeeding in killing some 12,000 Yemenis and razing the poorest society in the Arab world to the ground, the Saudi military has proven incapable of conquering the country. This failure is of a piece with its unsuccessful attempt to blockade Qatar into submission and the disintegration of the Islamist Al Qaeda-linked “rebels” that it sponsored in Syria. Its response is to up the ante with threats of war with Iran.

In recent days, sections of the ruling establishment and the media have begun to voice concern over these events, largely from the standpoint that the shakeup in Riyadh and Saudi provocations in the region could expose the House of Saud as a house of cards. Attempting to consolidate power in his own hands, bin Salman risks destabilizing the regime and opening up the threat of a revolt from below in a country that is one of the most unequal on the face of the planet and is plagued by mounting economic, social and political crises driven by the fall in oil prices.

Thus, the New York Times published an editorial noting that if Iran had been carrying out actions similar to those of the Saudi regime, there would have been expressions of “outrage” from Trump, the US Congress and others within the ruling establishment. The Times hastens to add, however, “There’s a big difference, of course, between Saudi Arabia and Iran; the former is an American ally, the latter an antagonist.” This recalls nothing so much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s explanation of US support for the blood-soaked Nicaraguan dictatorship of General Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

The Washington Post, for its part, drew parallels between the House of Saud and the House of Trump, noting the US president’s “disdain for courts and for the media” and “scorn for ethical norms” and pointing to the trip by his son-in-law Jared Kushner to Riyadh shortly before the arrests.

To the extent that these rather muted expressions of concern express disagreements within US ruling circles, they are of an entirely tactical character. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported the Saudi monarchy, one of the most reactionary regimes on the face of the planet, as a linchpin of US policy in the Middle East for more than seven decades, arming it to the teeth.

Differences revolve around whether the headlong rush to a regional war in the Middle East will only undermine broader US strategic interests in relation to its buildup toward confrontation with China and Russia. It also threatens to further provoke conflict with Washington’s erstwhile European allies in NATO, who have shown little inclination to follow Washington down the path to war against Iran, a country where they are seeking profitable markets and investments.

Whatever these tactical differences, the political events in the Middle East, with the kidnapping of a prime minister, provocative statements about “declarations of war,” and, of course, the US and Russia pursuing diametrically opposed aims in Syria by military means, more and more echo the kind of regional conflicts, particularly in the Balkans, that gave rise to the First World War.

The threat of mankind being dragged into a Third World War, this time with nuclear weapons, can be countered only by the international working class, mobilizing its independent strength on the basis of a socialist program aimed at putting an end to capitalism, the source of war and social inequality.

GM Food Crops Illegally Growing in India

Colin Todhunter

The GM Contamination Register database is run by Genewatch and Greenpeace and contains cases of genetically modified (GM) contamination dating from 1997. The authors of a 2014 paper, published in the International Journal of Food Contamination, analysed 400 or so cases in the database by crop and country.

GM rice accounted for about a third of contamination cases, despite the fact there is officially no GM rice grown anywhere in the world. They also focused on cases of contamination arising from unauthorised GM crops: those without any authorisation for commercial growing anywhere in the world. Nine cases were discovered of GM contamination of these unauthorised (non-commercialised) GM crops that haven’t undergone any environmental or food safety analysis. The authors argue that once GM contamination has happened, it can be difficult to contain.

Don Westfall, biotech industry consultant and vice-president of Promar International back in 2001, was at the time quoted by the Toronto Star (9 January 2001) as saying that the hope of the GM industry is that over time the market is so flooded with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that there’s nothing you can do about it; you just sort of surrender.

It is not just a vague hope. It is an intentional strategy.

GM wheat is not approved to be grown for commercial use in the US or anywhere else in the world. Yet in 2013, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that unapproved GM wheat had been found growing in an Oregon wheat field. Since 1994, Monsanto has conducted 279 field trials of Roundup Ready wheat over more than 4,000 acres of land in 16 US states. The USDA has admitted that Monsanto’s GMO experiments from 1998 to 2005 were held in open wheat fields. The GM wheat escaped and found its way into commercial wheat fields in Oregon (and possibly 15 other states), causing self-replicating genetic pollution that now taints the entire US wheat industry.

Prior to this, in 2006, the USDA granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy.

The GMO agritech industry’s strategy has been to first spread seeds illegally or contaminate supplies and then obtain regulatory approval. It has not only happened in the US, but in India too.

Unremitting fraud in India to contamination by all means necessary

In India, four high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops:

The ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal;

The ‘Sopory Committee Report’ [August 2012];

The ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ [PSC] Report on GM crops [August 2012]; and

The ‘Technical Expert Committee [TEC] Final Report’ [June-July 2013]).

These reports advocate this approach because the story of GM crops in India has thus far been a case of blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight mechanisms.

Despite these reports, the push to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. The case is still held up in the Supreme Court even though the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) deemed it necessary to give it the nod.

This mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests or no tests and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. This crop is also herbicide-tolerant (HT) (to be reliant on Bayer’s non-selective weedkiller Basta – glufinosate, a neurotoxin), which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application.

Despite the ban on GM cops, in 2005, prominent biologist Pushpa Bhargava alleged that there were reports that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers in India. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant ‘special seed’ of all sorts of vegetables.

In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in Kolkata and elsewhere against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. As predicted, in 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh, which that country had gone ahead with commercial releasing.

At the time, Pradeep Majumdar, agriculture advisor to State Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, stated: “Commercial seeds may have infiltrated… they might have been smuggled in. We have to ascertain the various effects of Bt brinjal on local indigenous species before taking any step else farmers will suffer.”

Bt brinjal had never undergone independent safety testing but the industry’s own tests show it is toxic.

In 2017, the illegal cultivation of a GM food crop – GM soyabean – which is HT, has been reported from Aravalli district in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, has claimed that Gujarat farmers have been cultivating HT crop illegally as there is no clearance from the government for any GM food crop. There are also reports of HT cotton illegally growing in India too, prompting calls for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies.

The Times of India reports BKS general secretary Badrinarayan Chaudhadry as saying: “The HT soyabean was cultivated this year in three villages in the Modasa taluka in Aravalli district in Gujarat. The farmers produced three tonnes of the soyabean. Someone had given the farmers a buy back guarantee at four times the price of the soyabean in the market. This became the talk of the town and BKS came to know about it. We informed the state agriculture department which enquired into the issue and seized the seed material on Diwali day. The test results by government lab were found to be positive for the Roundup (glyphosate-the herbicide) of Monsanto.”

Chaudhary said that BKS had also alerted the GEAC, but the committee has taken no notice.

In the same report, Coalition for GM Free India (CGMFI) spokesperson Kavitha Kuruganti said that the regulators have been caught sleeping. She says that India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally by the biotech industry. The GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt GM crops were still underway. In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability was fixed for the illegal spread which presented a fait accompli to the regulators.

Once the GM genie is out of the bottle, there could no going back. The genetic core of food crops will have been irreversibly changed. Lead petitioner in the Supreme Court for a moratorium on GM crops Aruna Rodrigues says, “This technology is a classic case of ‘unforeseeable systemic ruin’, which means that we will know we are ruined after it happens. As they say, the dead cannot make a comeback.”

The CGMFI says:

“The regulatory system in the country is in tatters. Incident after incident shows that with the current regulatory regime, citizens’ interests cannot be protected. If the regulators had acted decisively in the past with severe deterrence against illegal Bt cotton and later HT cotton cultivation and other illegal imports of GM foods, this situation could have been prevented. The government has to think of a serious overhaul of the entire set-up and significant improvements in the inter-agency coordination are required to ensure that no illegal GM cultivation or sales takes place in the country.”

It continues:

“GM HT soy cultivation in other countries is well documented to cause numerous problems–agri-chemical usage increase, soil health effects, impact on beneficial organisms like bees and monarch butterflies, health impacts from glyphosate used on the HT crop, increase in resistant ‘super weeds’, farmers caught in the trap of proprietary/patented treadmill technologies and decrease in yields. In India, the additional socio-economic issue of huge employment loss for poor agricultural household by the deployment of herbicide-tolerant seed technology is also an important matter of concern. Numerous official committees have repeatedly recommended against the introduction of such HT crops in the country, keeping all of this in mind.”

There are strong calls to make seed suppliers and regulators legally liable.

Certain pro-GMO activists want to celebrate the current state of affairs, saying that farmers have taken the decision to act in favour of GM crops in response to official dithering caused by the anti-GMO faction in India. This position says as much about their contempt for democracy and democratic procedures as it does for their ignorance of the reality of farming in India.

Professor Glenn Stone has noted where GM cotton has been concerned, any decision by farmers to plant GM seeds was not necessarily based on objective decision-making. There was no experimentation or the testing of seeds within agroecological contexts by farmers as has been the case traditionally. Farmers found themselves at the mercy of seed vendors who sold whatever seed they had in stock, regardless of what the farmers wanted. Without agricultural support services from trusted non-governmental organisations, farmers had to depend on local shopkeepers. They believed they were buying the latest and best seeds and created a rush on whatever supplies were available.

In other words, traditional knowledge, testing and evaluations by farmers in the field has been undermined or has broken down and seems to have given way to an unregulated industry-orchestrated free for all. All the more alarming now that we are dealing with HT crops and the possible runaway use of dangerous biocides.

Given the failure to win the debate on GM and the democratic pushback against this technology, isn’t the current situation what the GM agritech industry have wanted all along? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time that the not-so-hidden hand of powerful agri sector players have set out to profit from the destruction of Indian agriculture.

Mexico’s Indigenous Governing Council: Actually Existing Anti-Capitalism for the 21st Century

Mara Kaufman

In the midst of the multiple hurricanes battering North America and the Caribbean, the fires burning in the US west, two major earthquakes in September, and a flurry of neglect and opportunism around emergency disaster aid and rescue, a rather different storm gathers in Mexico. The anti-capitalist Indigenous Governing Council and its spokeswoman, Maria de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy), a Nahuatl woman who will run as an independent candidate in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections, have just begun a national tour of Mexico, starting in the southernmost state of Chiapas in what has become a bastion of self-government and an inspiration for the world—Zapatista territory.

The Indigenous Governing Council (CIG) is an initiative of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), created through a referendum approved by 523 communities in 25 different Mexican states and proposing to collectively govern the country according to the CNI/EZLN’s seven principles of “Rule by Obeying.”* The CIG represents 42 indigenous peoples and 39 indigenous language groups—the majority of originary peoples in the country—and proposes to organize the (self)government, healthcare, education, and defense of indigenous and non-indigenous communities across Mexico. The CIG tour and its presidential campaign, as stated repeatedly by the CNI, does not aim to win votes but to harness the electoral limelight to denounce Mexico’s entire political class and the capitalist system which it holds responsible for the devastating violence, crumbling institutions, environmental destruction, and thriving organized crime that now dominate Mexico. According to CNI delegate Mario Luna of the Yaqui Tribe of Sonora, this campaign intends to enter the realm of elections—what has otherwise become “an internal negotiation among political parties”—with the explicit aim of promoting the expansion of assembly-based community self-organization across the country. The choice the CNI wants to provide the Mexican people, then, is not among candidates, but among entirely different forms of government.

From October 14-19 of this year, a caravan of dozens of vehicles carrying Marichuy, 156 CIG council members, and several hundred more delegates of Mexico’s originary peoples wove through the mountains of Chiapas where they were met by tens of thousands of Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas across all five zones of Zapatista territory. The historic significance of the first indigenous woman presidential candidate was matched only by the stunning series of speeches given by indigenous women at every level of Zapatista authority: women representatives of the Good Government Councils, women regional authorities of the Zapatista Army, and women members of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee which commands the army—to name just the most prominent—a broad and powerful base of women’s leadership across both military and civilian entities in a place where just a few decades ago both indigenous women and men worked in slave-like conditions of permanent peonage for large landowners across the state.

An Electoral Turn?

The CNI, formed in 1996 as a result of the convergence of indigenous peoples all over the country around the demands of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, is the first nationally organized and representative indigenous body fully independent of state and party forces. The CNI’s deep community roots and autonomous organizing process stand in stark contrast to the tokenism and clientelism that characterized the past century of indigenous subjugation to the Mexican state. The CNI’s radical political independence make it an extremely inconvenient presence for the Mexican political class and thus a frequent object of total erasure and misrepresentation. This new initiative is no exception.

In fact when the Indigenous Governing Council has been mentioned, it has often been in the context of either condemnations or congratulations directed at the EZLN for having supposedly left behind a politics of autonomy and joined the electoral arena. Many within the Mexican government have long pushed the account that the EZLN had either fallen apart due to faulty leadership (inevitably attributed to then Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, today SupGaleano) or faded into irrelevance due to isolation in their remote community strongholds. The CIG and the launch of its tour over the past weeks however has illuminated not a tired and outdated EZLN as some sources so desperately hoped for, but a wide range of flourishing community institutions and self-governing bodies that displayed, even at a glance, the breadth of Zapatista organization across multiple generations, multiple language groups, and multiple geographical contexts, articulated together as a large-scale, assembly-run, community-based social order with unparalleled organizational capacity.

More specifically, each stop in Zapatista territory revealed autonomous heath clinics staffed with trained health promoters and medical equipment; autonomous school systems which had educated the young people now running their own media teams, governing bodies, and production cooperatives; tens of thousands of hectares of productive land worked collectively to provide sustenance for hundreds of thousands of people across Zapatista territory; independent transportation infrastructure; and thousands of Zapatista civilian army reserves that provided unarmed but formidably disciplined security rings around the CIG and its spokeswoman at every step. Noticeably, it was the Zapatista men who served visitors steaming plates of beef stew and homemade tortillas, organized lodging and distributed blankets, and washed dishes for the next busload of hungry travelers—this as Marichuy, the CIG councilwomen, and women authorities of the EZLN addressed the crowds from the stage.

Unsurprisingly, it seems that the political class doesn’t actually believe its own lies about the EZLN. They instead seem to be panicked that this form of collective self-emancipation will gain influence across Mexico. As evidence of this panic, and while the CIG initiative has been met with noticeably scarce media coverage, those who did try to cover the CIG’s tour of Chiapas ran up against the obstacle that as the caravan moved through the state, internet service, cellphone signals, and even landline service were cut across entire regions that would normally have robust communications, making timely media coverage nearly impossible. In addition to this communications blockade, the political class has done everything possible to inhibit the collection of the over 860,000 citizen signatures required by law for an independent candidate to appear on the ballot. The cellphone application made available by the National Electoral Institute (INE) for this purpose has proven not to function adequately except on high-end devices with new operating systems that cost well over the monthly earnings of the majority of the Mexican population. In a country lacking adequate internet service over large portions of the national territory, the application itself, as denounced by Marichuy on October 18, takes hours to download and once installed can take up to 16 hours to register a single signature (instead of the 4 minutes and 30 seconds claimed by the INE). There are many more examples, all of which point to an enormous amount of energy expended on subverting the reach of an organization and an anti-capitalist form of governing which the political class insists doesn’t exist.

Mexico’s Decomposition and the Urgent Need for an Alternative

In May of this year, the International Institute for Strategic Studies named Mexico the second deadliest country in the world, surpassing the violence in war zones like Yemen and Afghanistan and following only Syria in its death toll. Much of the violence in Mexico is attributed to the drug war launched in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón, but the numbers of dead (well over 200,000) and disappeared (30,000 by official estimates) and the utter impunity (around 98%) for these crimes display a more profound problem and the state’s complicity—when not direct involvement—in the violence. In addition, some 90% of productive land in Mexico has been ceded to foreign mining or logging companies and the paramilitary violence and state repression that tend to accompany such extractive industries to clear lands of resistant populations has resulted in millions more people subject to forced migration or internal displacement.

It is in this context that indigenous communities across the country have established autonomous self-governments and community self-defense units, expelling both drug cartels and political parties from their towns and cities, including (but not limited to) Cherán (Michoacán), Santa Maria Ostula (Oaxaca), an extensive network of community police forces in the state of Guerrero, hundreds more CNI communities that are actively organizing to kick political parties out of their towns, and of course, as of almost a quarter century ago, the Zapatistas in Chiapas whose territory remains impenetrable to narco-control. In fact, practically the only places in the country not overrun by narco-related violence, trafficking, extortion, and joint rule by political party and cartel forces are these small sites of autonomous self-government where an intact or rebuilt social fabric and community self-defense mechanism has prevented such forces from taking hold. Such experiments in self-government constitute not an untouched outside to the otherwise grim reality of narco-state and capitalist mafia that stands in for government in Mexico, but an actual propositional alternative that relies on democratic processes and mass civil participation. It is in the context of a generalized social collapse that we can make sense of the CNI’s insistence that the Indigenous Governing Council is for all of Mexico, not just indigenous people, and they have invited non-indigenous people to join this initiative. In the words of Marichuy:

“That’s why we the indigenous peoples of the National Indigenous Congress and our brothers and sisters of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation have said that we won’t allow this anymore, that we are going to struggle and fight for everyone, not just for the indigenous peoples […] It is time for us to walk this path together with our brothers and sisters from the countryside and the city.”

Isn’t There Already a Left Presidential Candidate in Mexico?

As is standard across electoralist perspectives where the “least worst” establishment candidate is marketed as the only viable option to stop the reactionary right, that title in this case belongs to MORENA party founder and presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). As three-time presidential candidate for the PRD (defrauded of a presidential win in 2006 and possibly 2012), AMLO has consistently promised to maintain “macroeconomic stability” and protect the interests of private capital while giving lip service to poverty reduction, a standard recipe for applying neoliberal policy behind a leftist veneer. One might ask, if “the left” has been characterized by its critique of capitalism, how is it that we have come to a point where a project for the attempted stabilization of capitalism can still be touted as on the left? In any case, the EZLN/CNI understand that given the crisis dynamics of contemporary capitalism, accepting a “lesser evil” logic means accepting the continued disintegration of Mexico and the disappearance of their peoples, and they thus recognize that Mexican society and the world have little choice today but to directly confront capitalism and all of its devastating consequences.**

An Indigenous Governing Council for the World

As the failures of “progressive” electoralist forces pile up across the world—Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the PT in Brazil, renascent Peronism in Argentina, to name just a few—it becomes clear that we are not experiencing a battle between a reactionary right set on implementing xenophobic policies and protecting the class structure and a progressive left dedicated to inclusion and redistributive policies. Rather, where we are all going together is deeper into capitalist crisis and the disintegration of the system as a whole, with increasingly unstable global economic conditions, skyrocketing levels of inequality, scapegoating, and an alarming acceleration of environmental destruction. Under these conditions, the problem is not one of the political will of any individual politician or party; all kinds of cartels accompany systemic collapse and any political class under the imploding capitalist system merely becomes another. There are few places in the world where not only is the dissolution of the system clear, but an alternative already in formation with years (centuries!) of practice in collective decision-making and self-government. The insistence of the Indigenous Governing Council that the only alternative is not another political class but the elimination of the political class altogether is what makes this initiative not only the only viable organized possibility for the survival of indigenous communities in Mexico, but the path out of the disaster that is capitalism for all of us.

We must convince ourselves, as the CIG has, that no one will save us from the ruins but ourselves. As the EZLN’s Comandanta Miriam explains:

“But let’s not think, compañeras, that the Indigenous Governing Council or our spokeswoman are going to save us. We, each of us, has to work to save all of us, because if we don’t do anything our spokeswoman will not be able to save us either. She’s not the one who rules: it is the people who have to give the strength to our spokeswoman; it is the people who rule and our spokeswoman and our Governing Council have to obey the people.”

The Return of the Kings: Saudi Arabia’s Squalid Court is Indicative of the Age

GILES LONGLEY-COOK

The current purge enveloping the Saudi state is not actually as unprecedented as some are making it out to be. Whilst it is easy to view the kingdom as a stagnant, immobile place where time has frozen forever in the 7^th century, it’s entire establishment and upkeep as property of the Saudi family has occasionally had to be reasserted through alarmingly swift and violent shifts. Not long after the state was united in its modern form, the founding King Ibn Saud rewarded the fanatical soldiers who had conquered it for him by machine-gunning them en masse. In 1979 equally fanatical students seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and tried to spark an Islamic revolution. The state responded with ruthless violence, then further embraced the Wahhabi ideology espoused by the rebels themselves, as well as the nation’s religious establishment. More recently the state has seen off threats from Al Qaeda, and taken extraordinary brutal (and extraordinarily under-reported) measures against the oppressed Shia population in the East of the Country.

So if anything, the image of Saudi Arabia as a country where nothing can change, and the people live in a state of docile somnambulism is a mirage. And it is a mirage largely fashioned by the ruling family itself to justify their legitimacy over a supposedly monolithic society.

There are of course major differences between the current crisis and those that came before, and not in ways that should be seen as encouraging. Whilst the willingness to target members of the royal family and billionaires has been seen by some as a sign of Mohammed bin Salman’s reforming seriousness, it also displays a more squalid, fraternal-squabble character to his power-grab. Unlike the previous uprisings and confrontations, which all entailed battles of ideas and class warfare, this current fight is between equally corrupt members of a palace elite. The supposed reformer himself is famed for living a luxurious lifestyle at the cost of the state, as well as for masterminding the bellicose and inhumane foreign policy against his neighbours. The very fact that he is aiming for the throne indicates the futility of his reforming endeavour (if he’s even serious about it). The Saudi state is based upon a contract between religious extremism and nepotistic tribal dominance. There is only so far he can reform that without simply abolishing himself.

And yet, in our age of extrapolation, the relatively minor nature of this ‘revolution’ has not stopped it gaining a global significance. One of the apparent casualties of the coup is Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon. The joint Saudi citizen suddenly resigned in a trip to Riyadh, and then farcically went on to accuse Iran of excessive interference in Lebanon’s affairs. The act is guaranteed to  destabilise Lebanon, ensuring a major rift between Hezbollah and other elements of the Lebanese government. Other losers from this coup have been Syrian opposition leaders the Saudis once supported but now want arrested.

And all this for a family squabble? It would seem that there is no state bin Salman will not undermine in order to win power in his own.

The silence and signs of tacit support this move has garnered from the Trump White House also speak to the devaluation of international relations currently shaping the region’s destiny. Theories about the US government’s acquiescence can include anything from its monomaniacal obsession with anything that might harm Iran, to its preoccupation with equally petty squabbles at home, to plain ignorance about the situation. It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility that Trump was quite happy with any plan that got rid of his past critic Prince Al Waleed bin Talal.

Saudi Arabia has been notorious in recent years for it’s attempts to spread Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world, aiming to turn Islamic communities into copies of itself. This was one of the most far-reaching effects of the 1979 conflict between Saudi Arabia’s religious fanatics and its corrupt monarchy. But while this campaign has in many ways failed to make Wahhabism a dominant world force, the Saudi style has become normalised in another sense. The petty Ancien Regime court politics of personal slight and favouritism has moved from being an embarrassing vice of world politics to an unashamed driver of it. World-changing events from Brexit, to the triumph of the Trump Presidency, to the endless interventions in the Syrian Ragnarok, have all been driven less by a firm belief in executing popular will and more by transparent desires to rescue the credibility of atrophying parties and settle personal scores. One could look at President Barzani drafting the notion of an independence referendum for the Kurds, or the British Conservative party’s plotting out of Brexit proposals, and see political milestones that will shape the lives of millions being toyed with by shallow visionless Lilliputians acting like spoiled princelings. It is an utter disgrace that such important issues as the future of Europe and the Kurdish question are being decided by such shallow, small-minded types. Only amid this return to personal, monarchic politics can a man like bin Salman be considered a statesman of note.

Is Israel Winning “The War Between The Wars” with Hezbollah/Iran?

Franklin Lamb 

Israeli commanders, stationed along Syria’s southern border and the Golan Heights and Quneitra Valley, with some of their forces now operating daily more than 14 km inside Syrian territory, are reportedly expressing a fair bit of confidence these days.

One reason is that they believe that Iranian-Hezbollah forces are losing the high stakes struggle to win the hearts and minds of Syria and Lebanon’s civilian population. A conflict referred to by Israel and some others in the region as the “war between the wars.”  A contest which has undergone some dramatic changes in recent months. The idea of the war between the wars involves Tel Aviv’s calculation that Israel needs to operate, far beyond Israel’s borders if necessary, to contain Iran and Hezbollah.

And as tensions escalate across the Syria-Israel border, the IDF is trying to win over some of its Syrian civilian population enemies. On 11/1/2017 the Israeli military announced that henceforth it will protect certain Syrian Druze towns such as Hader, located just across the Israel-Syria border from Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. Whether the attacks on the Druze villages are by jihadists or pro-government militia. The Druze communities in Syria, Lebanon and Israel have publicly welcomed this protection while some pro-Zionist groups are claiming another ‘hearts and minds’ victory for Palestine’s occupiers.

Another element related to “the war between the wars” was reiterated last week by members of the US Congressional Israeli lobby explaining that Israel is now able to stop virtually all of Iran’s arms shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And additionally that Israel’s military knows the location of hundreds of small-sized Hezbollah military/weapon bases across Lebanon and monitor them hourly. More than 122 attacks on Iran-Hezbollah convoys or weapon depots over the past few years being mainly small signature, late-night-early morning bombings are claimed to be major successes. Lobby spokespersons emphasize that Israel will continue this measure with likely impunity because serious retaliation from Hezbollah or its allies would mean major escalation which Tehran cannot risk.

In addition to claiming that Iran and Hezbollah are now largely contained in Syria, Israeli officials apparently believe that time is on Israel’s side during a cold war but not during a hot one.  This, as the war in Syria continues to kill evermore Iranian and Hezbollah fighters creating political problems for both among their population bases.

Israel, as part of the cold war is also expanding its recruitment of additional intelligence sources. The alleged intensive spy recruitment is focusing on Hezbollah neighborhoods across Lebanon as many in the formerly supportive population continue losing faith in the “Resistance “and succumbed to large sums of cash-no questions asked- being offered by Washington and Tel Aviv. Several claimed Israeli spies have been arrested by Hezbollah and Lebanese intelligence agents. In the past year hundreds of Israelis have started making pilgrimages to holy sites in Lebanon using special “Palestinian passports” issued with the cooperation of Israel’s government and accepted by Lebanon’s. Groups comprising approximately 50 people, spend a week in Lebanon on trips discretely organized under the radar by Christian clergymen.

Hezbollah suspects that some of the ‘pilgrims’ may be spies and their movements, from the moment of arrival at Beirut’s Hariri airport are closely monitored. Especially when the Israeli’s make ‘side-trip’ contacts with Lebanese Christian ‘ Pilgrimage representatives’ or while on ‘shopping trips.’

Israel is also recruiting spies among Syrians, particularly in South and North Syria and recently has taken to revealing ID’s and personal information of Hezbollah and Iranian commanders that earlier would not be disclosed. One example is last week the IDF “outed” Munir Ali NaimShati, (known in this observers Dahiyeh neighborhood of Haret Hreik as Hajj Hashem) the head of Hezbollah’s southern command in Syria. Mr. Shati is in charge of Hezbollah’s

3000-plus fighters in southern Syria and of the “Resistance” project to establish a military base near the Israeli border in the Golan Heights.

Several Iranians IRCG officers, as well as Hezbollah’s Jihad Mughniyeh (son of Imad, Hezbollah’s military commander killed in Damascus in 2008 by a joint CIA-Mossad operation) and Samir Kuntar, were killed in 2015 allegedly by Israeli air strikes. Some claim both were killed by friendly forces for political reasons. Some hold Iran’s Al Quds force of responsibility for the killings in order to send a message to Hezbollah’s leadership about towing the Tehran line more assiduously. Another claimed victim of the same Tehran-Dahiyeh tension was Mustafa Badreddine, whose role was being in charge of Hezbollah forces since the beginning of the rebellion in 2011 when Hezbollah quickly entered Syria. He was allegedly killed in May of 2016 on orders of Iran’s IRGC commander Qassim Soleimani. Badreddine reportedly complained that Al Quds commander Qassim Soleimani, a political rival of Nasrallah’s, was sending Hezbollah fighters needlessly to their death in Aleppo’s front to spare risks to Tehran’s IRGC fighters.

Some of Hezbollah’s recent actions involving its erstwhile unquestioning Shia supporters in Lebanon have also encouraged Tel Aviv in ‘the war between the wars.’ One example was documented on 10/23/2017  when Lebanese police, green-lighted by Hezbollah, raided unlicensed street vendors near the main headquarters of Hezbollah, resulting in vitriolic expressions of discontent targeting the Party of God. Lebanon’s  politicized Internal Security Forces (ISF) supportive of Hezbollah, was instructed to use bulldozers to demolish stores in the Hay al-Sollom neighborhood, where the residents for years have sold coffee and mobile phones. In reaction to the destruction of their livelihoods, scores of mainly Shia residents poured into the streets and began burning tires and blocking roads. Several of the protesters were shown on Lebanese media cursing, not the Lebanese government, but rather condemning Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah, who they blamed for the loss of their livelihoods and involvement in Syria’s civil war. One woman addressed Nasrallah directly after she discovered her shop — her family’s only source of income – a pile of rubble: “We all provided martyrs for you in Syria. I have three injured sons. And this is how you’re treating us?” Another man yelled at the camera, “Syria can go to hell, along with Hassan Nasrallah!”

One veteran Lebanese journalist, HaninGhabber explained recently: “It is no coincidence that this exceptional act of revolt occurred in one of Dahiya’s poorest neighborhoods. As much as the Syria war has changed Hezbollah militarily and expanded its regional role, it has also changed the Lebanese Shia community and its perceptions of the group. Class divisions in Dahiya are more drastic than ever — the poor neighborhoods are providing fighters while the upper middle class and rich neighborhoods are benefiting from the war. “

Some Lebanese analysts argue that Hezbollah is paying the price for getting involved in Syria on orders from Tehran. And part of that price is its lost image as a “Resistance” organization as well as costing the lives of thousands of young Shia men. And since Hezbollah became focused on fighting in Syria, it could no longer offer law and order given the growing number of the drug cartels, petty criminals, and illegal construction and growing lawlessness. Shia street clashes are increasing in Dahiya and criticisms of Hezbollah are escalating. Lebanese Shia seeks a reasonable livelihood and basic services and have little interest in Hezbollah’s battle against so-called “Takfires” in Syria.
Israel’s accelerating “Hearts and Minds” initiatives in South Syria are also undermining support for Hezbollah and Iran. In early 2013, seven injured Syrians appeared at the border fence separating Syria from Israel, pleading for help. Israeli forces, after deliberations that reportedly reached some top military and government officials decided to treat the Syrians who reportedly would have died without immediate emergency medical care.

Four years later, the IDF claims it is providing medical and food assistance and various types of humanitarian aid to thousands of Syrians both inside Syria and within Israel as part of what it calls its “Good Neighbor” policy. An Israeli official defines this initiative as intended to assist desperate Syrians ravaged by years of civil war, and in the process stabilize the border region by showing Syria’s heretofore enemy population that Israel is not, in fact, the devil. Reportedly, no ID’s are asked for by Syrian’s arriving at the border and medical teams are advised not to inquire about patients political affiliations.

The destitute population in South Syria, some rebels and some supporters of the government, as well as increasing numbers who claim to be apolitical, plus countless thousands of internally displaced Syrians, are learning of Israel’s “Good Neighbor” policy. Consequently, the number seeking and receiving aid is growing.  One reason is the failure over the past seven years of the International Community to deliver humanitarian aid including food, water, clothing, and medical aid to Syria’s besieged civilian population.

Whether this is a significant advantage for Israel in its still cold war against Iran and Hezbollah remains to be seen, but it is unlikely to be a game changer given the deepening involvement in Syria of regional and global powers.  As well as the fact that all sides continue to largely ignore the Syrian civilian population unless a clear political advantage is certain to result.