The War on Plastic

Binoy Kampmark

Few documentaries have had quite this impact, so much so that it has ushered in the unfortunate combination of war and plastic, two terms that sit uneasily together, if at all.  Tears were recorded; anxiety levels were propelled as Sir David Attenborough tore and tugged at heart strings in his production Blue Planet II.  The oceans, warned the documentary maker, is becoming a toxic repository, and humans are to blame.

More than eight million tons of plastic eventually finds an oceanic destination.  Decomposition will take centuries.  For Attenborough, one scene from the series stood out.  “In it, as snowflakes settle on the ground, a baby albatross lies dead, its stomach pierced by a plastic toothpick fed to it by its own mother, having mistaken it for healthy food.  Nearby lies plastic litter that other hungry chicks have regurgitated.”

For Attenborough, plastic supplies a certain demonology for the environmental movement, a vast and urgent target that requires mass mobilisation and action. “There are fragments of nets so big they entangle the heads of fish, birds, turtles, and slowly strangle them.  Other pieces of plastic are so small that they are mistaken for food and eaten, accumulating in fishes’ stomachs, leaving them undernourished.”

To firstly declare war against something deemed valuable, even indispensable, to preservation, distribution and storage over a multitude of products, to name but a few purposes, is lofty.  To also identify the casus belli against the inanimate again finds haunting resonance with other failed conflicts: the war against drugs, for instance, or that against terrorism. Will this war go the same way?

Guilty consciences are powerful motivators, and fewer guiltier than the affluent, or mildly affluent.  Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May is one, a figure who has decided to embrace the environmental cause with vote grabbing enthusiasm.  “In the UK alone,” she intoned, “the amount of single-use plastic wasted every year would fill 1,000 Royal Albert Halls.”

May’s direction is far from surprising.  There is Attenborough propelling a movement, and there are the votes that went begging in 2017.  A Tory think-tank, Bright Blue, found that many who refused to vote for her party in the last general election considered environmental initiatives key.  Its polling “shows that climate change is the second highest issue younger people want senior politicians to discuss more, second only to health, and actually the top issue for 18- to 28-year-olds.”

In getting on the cart against plastic, May has attempted, unconvincingly, to reassure critics that moving Britain out of the EU would not result in a lowering of environmental standards.  Britannia will remain responsible.  Her government, she spoke with confidence at London Wetland Centre, would “leave the natural environment in a better state than we found it”.

What Sir David says, goes, though May has suggested a slow approach that would eradicate all avoidable plastic waste in the UK by 2042.  (What, then, is unavoidable?  The question remains unanswered.)  “Plastic-free” aisles are to be encouraged; taxes and charges on takeaway containers are being proposed.  None of these, it should be noted, entails Parliamentary regulation, retaining the old British approach of gradualism in action. No revolutions, please.

Supermarket chains smell climbing profits, luring the ecologically minded to shelves and fridges like willing prey.  One such outlet is Iceland, a chain that wasted little time getting on the radio and airwaves to ride the green belt.  Targets have been advertised, and it promises to remove plastic packaging from all its own labelled products over the next five years.  Even better, goes the fine print, it will enable those with less heavily laden wallets to shop and stay green.

Companies such as Proctor & Gamble, makers of Head & Shoulders Shampoo, have collaborated to produce a recycled shampoo bottle using plastic found in beaches.  This, in turn, pads out it advertising campaigns.  Use our shampoo, and feel good about yourself.

The guilty consciences were whirling and emoting on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday as callers spoke of efforts to spend a week free of plastic, but ignobly failing before their friends, neighbours and fellow citizens, all of whom had managed to go one day further.  There were accounts about how French and German supermarkets ensure that fruits and vegetables are free, emancipated from the confines of plastic, and, it would seem, ready to salve the conscience of the green consumer.

In Britain, Attenborough’s environmental influence has become priestly for such individuals as Oswestry schoolteacher Mandy Price.  She has roped her daughter in as well in what has become a social media campaign featuring #doitfordavid, shared 125,000 times within a matter of hours.  “It has been shared on every continent apart from Antarctica,” praises Emily Davies of the Border Counties Advertiser.

This arms race of satisfying a bruised conscience has an undeniable merit in so far as it acknowledges some of the disastrous consequences of humanity’s addiction to the accessible and the easy.  Ambitious Mandy, for instance, speaks of her Facebook page “receiving photographs from lots of different people who are collecting plastic, even from holidaymakers in Cuba who have seen the posts and have recorded their own two-minute beach clean on the beautiful oceans there.”

But within such wars lie the seeds of, if not failure, then the coming of another problem.  In the British case, enduring snobbery is pointed to.  In Australia’s Northern Territory, environmental groups conceded in dismay that a ban single-use plastic bags less than 35 microns in thickness introduced in 2011 had not reduced plastic bag litter at all. On the contrary, the amount had increased.

This is a battle against human behaviour, against patterns of consumption and use in the human estate. It is, if nothing else, an attempt at behavioural adjustment and revolution.  Such a tall order, such a mission, but one that provides Mandy with rosy affirmation rather than dimming scepticism.

Corporate Monopolies Will Accelerate the Globalisation of Bad Food, Poor Health and Environmental Catastrophe

ROSEMARY MASON - COLIN TODHUNTER

If the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger goes through, the new company would control more than 25 per cent of the global supply of commercial seeds and pesticides. Monsanto held a 26% market share of all seeds sold in 2011. Bayer sells 17% of the world’s total agrochemicals and also has a seeds sector. If competition authorities pass the deal, the combined company would be the globe’s largest seller of both seeds and agrochemicals.

It marks a trend towards consolidation in the industry with Dow and DuPont having merged and Swiss seed/pesticide giant Syngenta merging with ChemChina. The mergers would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector.

In response to the Monsanto-Bayer merger, after it was announced in 2016 the US National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson issued the following statement:

“Consolidation of this magnitude cannot be the standard for agriculture, nor should we allow it to determine the landscape for our future… We will continue to express concern that these megadeals are being made to benefit the corporate boardrooms at the expense of family farmers, ranchers, consumers and rural economies… [there is an] alarming trend of consolidation in agriculture that has led to less competition, stifled innovation, higher prices and job loss in rural America.”

For all the rhetoric that we often hear about ‘the market’ and large corporations offering choice to farmers and consumers, the evidence is restriction of choice and the squeezing out of competitors. Over the years, for instance, Monsanto has bought up dozens of competitors to become the largest supplier of genetically engineered seeds with seed prices having risen dramatically.

Consolidation and monopoly in any sector should be of concern to everyone. But the fact that the large agribusiness conglomerates specialize in a globalised, industrial-scale, chemical-intensive model of farming should have us very concerned. Farmers are increasingly reliant on patented corporate seeds, whether non-GM hybrid seeds or GM and the chemical inputs designed to be used with them. Monsanto seed traits are now in 80% of corn and more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US.

By its very nature, the economic model that corporate agriculture is attached to demands expansion, market capture and profit growth. It might bring certain benefits to those farmers who have remained in agriculture, if not for the 330 farmers in the US who leave their land every week (according to data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service).

But in the US, ‘success’ in agriculture has largely depended on over $51 billion of taxpayer handouts over a 10-year period to oil the wheels of a particular system of agriculture designed to maintain corporate agribusiness profit margins. And any ‘success’ fails to factor in all the external social, health and environmental costs. It is easy to spin failure as success when the parameters are narrowly defined.

Moreover, the exporting of Green Revolution ideology and technology throughout the globe has been a boon to transnational seed and agrochemical manufacturers, which have benefited from undermining a healthy, sustainable indigenous agriculture.

The main players in the global agribusiness sector rank among the Fortune 500 corporations. These companies are high-rollers in a geo-politicised, globalised system of food production whereby huge company profits are linked to the worldwide eradication of the small farm (the bedrock of global food production), bad food, poor health, rigged trade, environmental devastation, mono-cropping and diminished food and diet diversity, the destruction of rural communities, ecocide, degraded soil, water scarcity and drought, destructive and inappropriate models of development and farmers who live a knife-edge existence and for whom debt has become a fact of life.

Does the world need it?

Britain is a leader in intensive, corporate-dominated agriculture. But is this the model of agriculture the world should rely on?

Let us turn to campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason to appreciate some of the consequences of this model. She has just written an open letter to Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government. Although written to Davies, the letter is intended for the four Chief Medical Officers of Health for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and Public Health England.

Her letter is essentially a plea to highly placed officials to act.

Mason provides a stark reminder of the impacts of the agrochemical/agribusiness sector, its political power and its effects on health. She draws attention to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, which states unequivocally that the storyline perpetuated by the likes of Bayer’s Richard van der Merwe (in this piece) saying we need pesticides and (often chemical-dependent) GMOs to feed the world is a myth.

The report is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”.

The authors of the report call for a comprehensive new global treaty to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming and move towards sustainable agricultural practices. They say:

“excessive use of pesticides is very dangerous to human health, to the environment and it is misleading to claim they are vital to ensuring food security.”

Mason notes that chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility. Certain pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat to the entire ecological system on which food production depends.

One of the report’s authors, the UN expert on Toxics Baskut Tuncak, wrote in the Guardian:

“Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible. The only way to protect citizens, especially those disproportionately at risk from exposure, is for governments to regulate them effectively, in large part by adhering to the highest standards of scientific integrity.

Mason offers Sally Davies and her colleagues evidence that suggests rising UK Mortality rates point to a critical, unprecedented health epidemic. Arguing that the heavy use of agrochemicals in the UK is a major contributory factor, she notes Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is protecting the agrochemical industry due to its strategic influence. As a result, the mainstream narrative on cancer focuses on the role of alcohol (see this also) and ‘lifestyle choices’ while sidelining the strong evidence that agrochemicals are having.

Rosemary Mason asks Sally Davies if she is aware that the UK Department of Health is working with industry, again citing evidence in support of her claim.

As someone who has written extensively on the adverse impacts of glyphosate, Mason refers Davies to research that links Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup with liver damage.

If the National Health Service in the UK is experiencing a crisis – as indeed it is – due to rising rates of morbidity (not withstanding the effects of poor funding and creeping privatisation), surely these spiralling rates of diseases must be addressed. And where better to start by shining the light on agrochemicals rather than blaming individuals for lifestyle choices and alcohol consumption?

For instance, a report by ‘Children with Cancer UK’ in 2016 said there were 1,300 more cases per year of cancers in children, particularly in young adults, compared with 1998. While the medical correspondent from The Telegraph has mentioned pesticides as a possible cause, a spokesperson from CRUK said there is no evidence of environmental factors.

Among the various statistics Mason provides are those indicating that colon cancer had risen by 200%, thyroid cancer has doubled, ovarian cancer is up by 70% and cervical cancer is up by 50% since 1998.

Yes, despite the evidence, the corporate media in Britain is silent about pesticides, which partly results from the corporate sponsorship of the UK Science Media Centre; so any science against the corporations can be suppressed by interested parties, including AstraZeneca, Coca Cola, Syngenta, BP and Monsanto.

While Mason produces figures to show the massive increase in a range of agrochemicals over the years, the Chief Scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Ian Boyd, points out that once a pesticide is approved there is no follow up. There is also no follow up as to the impacts of not just one chemical but the cocktail of agrochemicals out there and how they interact when in the human body and within the environment.

And let’s not forget that many of these agrochemicals were fraudulently placed on the commercial market in the first place without proper testing.

Readers can read Mason’s letter in full here, where she also discusses a potential UK-US trade deal with the US and the impacts on the lowering of food and environmental standards and subsequent relations with the EU.

The impacts of the Monsanto-Bayer deal and the contents of Rosemary’s letter to the Chief Medical officers of the UK are just the tip of an iceberg. There is a lot more that could and has been said on the impact of agribusiness giants on the globalisation of bad food and poor health, ecological degradation, soil health, ocean dead zones as well as the chemical contamination of our food by the handful of food conglomerates that now increasingly dominate the supply chain.

Alternative approaches and solutions exist but the political influence and financial clout of transnational corporations means that ‘business as usual’ prevails.

Dubious Partnership: The US and Saudi Arabia

Mel Gurtov

In recent months Donald Trump has shown no hesitation to comment critically on political developments in Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, and North Korea. He supported protests in Iran against “the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.” He deplored the many years of US military aid to Pakistan, for which “they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. . . . No more!” His criticisms of the Maduro government in Venezuela were accompanied by the threat to use the “military option,” reminiscent of what Trump had once said when talking about Mexico. And of course his personal insults directed at North Korea’s Kim Jong-un are now legendary.

Such interference is now taken for granted, for in Trump’s world, relying on diplomacy and abiding by the principle of noninterference in others’ affairs have no currency in Washington. Of course trying to destabilize other countries, even to the point of seeking regime change, has been part and parcel of US foreign policy for a long time. The difference now may be the constancy of Trump’s interference, and the undiplomatic language he uses.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Trump reserves his harshest tweets for governments he dislikes. When it comes to friends like Israel, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, the operating principle is “hands-off.” They are allowed to use every trick in the book to buy influence in Washington: gaining special access to decision makers, investing in the US economy and offering investment opportunities in their own country, hiring former US officials to lobby, inviting American opinion leaders to lavish conferences, putting on opulent displays of affection when top US officials visit. These folks know Americans will bite at a chance for profit and attention, and pay back with access and influence. Russia’s successful hookups with Trump’s campaign and administration officials in order to end US sanctions are only the latest and most glaring examples of a longstanding problem of influence-buying. They haven’t succeeded so far, but the effort has literally cost them peanuts.

Saudi Arabia has played the influence game just as aggressively as the Russians, and for much longer. Saudi money has effectively lobbied in Washington for many years, often relying on former members of Congress. The Saudis also seek to influence US politics by funding NGOs (e.g., the Clinton Foundation), think tanks, law firms, social media, and even political action committees. Saudi investors, including members of the royal family, may have as much as a half-trillion dollars invested in US real estate, the stock market, and US treasury bills. At the time of Trump’s visit in May the Saudi leadership committed to another $40 billion in infrastructure investments, though whether or not that will actually happen is another matter.

The payoff for the Saudis is arms acquisitions that have usually put Saudi Arabia first on the US arms export list. The $110 billion arms deal announced while Trump was in Saudi Arabia came on top of billions more weapons sold during the Obama years—and consistent US political support since before World War II of the royal family’s authoritarian rule. The Saudis have also bought continued US support of the Saudi air war in Yemen—a humanitarian disaster that probably amounts to war crimes. For the US, cultivating Saudi Arabia yields not only low oil prices and a reliable arms customers but also an easing of Arab pressure on Israel and leadership in Sunni confrontation of Shiite Iran and Iran’s partner, Hezbollah.

Now comes Crown Prince Mohammad bin-Salman’s coup, or purge if you like, to solidify his power and eliminate rivals to the throne. We cannot take seriously the proclaimed reasons for Salman’s purge—in order to modernize the country and fight corruption. To Saudi leaders, modernization means dictating the content and timing of social and economic change, a method almost sure to fail. Women may now drive, the cultural scene may look more permissive, and education may open up a bit. But such changes fall well short of removing the ruling family’s control of the courts and the press. Likewise fighting corruption: It clearly doesn’t apply to King Salman and family, who run a blatantly corrupt system that controls many key businesses, nor to the crown prince, who thinks nothing of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on yachts and chateaux while ordering the detention of 320 wealthy citizens. Conflicts of interest are rampant, and ignored. No wonder the Trump family adores these people.

Trump’s Man in Riyadh

Donald Trump was all in on Salman’s coup, tweeting his support: “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing. Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!” (Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury has Trump and Jared Kushner boasting, “We’ve put our man on top!”) Was it merely coincidental that Jared Kushner had just visited Saudi Arabia (from October 25-28), and reportedly met with Trump’s buddy, the crown prince? (The trip, Kushner’s third to Saudi Arabia in 2017, was unannounced, supposedly linked to his Middle East peace efforts. But perhaps meetings with other Middle East leaders were merely a cover, since among those purged was a frequent critic of Trump, the billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, who once called Trump a “disgrace” to America, after Alwaleed had twice bailed out Trump financially.

It’s all about Iran.

For the Saudis, as for Trump and Kushner, Iran is the main target of the current Saudi-US honeymoon. The Kushner-led regional “peace plan” he supposedly leads—one that is short on substance and even shorter on qualified people (they’re all businessmen) to sell it—is riveted on Iran’s “aggression.” In Lebanon, where Hezbollah is entrenched, Iran seems to be the proxy target. Might Iran have been correct in accusing Kushner of being responsible for the surprise (actually, forced) resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister the following weekend—a resignation announced in Riyadh, where the prime minister was apparently held against his will because he was considered too soft on Hezbollah? The Saudis are ratcheting up the pressure on Lebanon, telling its citizens to leave and dangling the prospect of kicking out around a half-million Lebanese workers in Saudi Arabia who send home some $3 billion annually in remittances.

Salman’s moves against Qatar, which Trump (but not Tillerson), condoned, and now against Hezbollah and Iran, will inevitably further complicate the US position in the Middle East, where “stability” is already so far out of reach. As one astute commentator argues, the Washington-Riyadh axis against Iran “seems to mistake presidential and princely preference and mutual agreement for statecraft and implementation.” But that critique merely suggests that Saudi Arabia be “less aggressive” in its hostility to Iran. More creative statecraft would involve a Saudi diplomatic initiative on Iran to moderate their rivalry in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria. But now, with Trump on board in place of Obama, who in fact urged just such a Saudi initiative, diplomacy is out the window. Iranian nationalism is on the rise even among the educated anticlerical class. Trump and Salman have succeeded in generating “widespread support for the [government’s] hard-line view that the United States and Riyadh cannot be trusted and that Iran is a strong and capable state . . . .”

If Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury is accurate, Donald Trump believes that by getting close to the Saudis, he can resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Fantasy; it’s the Saudis who have Trump just where they want him. They have to be as satisfied as Russia over what their money has bought: a US Middle East policy that relies on continued arms sales, confrontation with Iran in company with Israel, and acceptance of massive human rights violations in Yemen—in short, further chaos in the Middle East. Fareed Zakaria is correct to conclude: “With Trump so firmly supporting the Saudi strategy, the United States could find itself dragged further into the deepening Middle East morass.” That morass might well include war with Iran, the common obsession of Trump and his national security team. Better to jettison Saudi Arabia; like Pakistan, it is a dubious partner that promises endless trouble for the United States and no help in dealing with terrorism.

Students and staff to bear brunt of latest Australian university funding cut

Mike Head 

Ever-larger class sizes, closures of courses and campuses, thousands more staff job cuts and accelerated pro-business restructuring. These are some of the already known impacts of the latest multi-billion funding cuts to Australia’s public universities, which the federal government announced just a week before Christmas.

The Liberal-National Coalition government was unable to get a $2.8 billion package of cost-cutting over four years through the Senate, because Labor, Greens and right-wing populist senators feared the intense hostility of students, staff and the wider population and refused to support it. So, instead, the government used the December 18 release of its mid-year budget review to impose $2.2 billion in cutbacks by decree.

The most immediately damaging measure is a two-year freeze on funding for undergraduate enrolments. Universities Australia, the peak management body, estimates this will mean nearly 10,000 student places going unfunded in 2018.

Then, from 2020, new “performance targets” will make any funding increases depend on universities “realigning” their course offerings to be more in tune with the requirements of the corporate elite. Universities must do more to meet “the expectations of employers,” Education Minister Simon Birmingham declared.

Despite the political posturing by opposition and “crossbench” politicians, this is part of a protracted bipartisan assault on students and staff, and the basic right to higher education. The latest package is on top of funding reductions exceeding $4 billion since 2011, mostly inflicted by the previous Labor government, which was kept in office by the Greens.

Over the same period, universities increasingly have been transformed into corporate entities as a result of that Labor government’s market-driven “education revolution,” which compelled universities to compete with each other to attract students to courses tailored to satisfy business needs.

The December 18 announcement also directly hit students by lowering the threshold at which graduates must start repaying the massive debts incurred during their studies under the government’s HECS/HELP fee deferment scheme. The threshold, calculated in terms of annual income, will be reduced from $52,000 to $45,000. Many more young people, on relatively low wages, will be forced to commence paying off the loans, adding to the financial stresses produced particularly by sky-high rents and housing prices.

By announcing the cuts so late, the government gave the universities no time to change their enrolment and other plans for 2018. Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson said this week: “The cuts were announced on 18 December and took effect from 1 January. Many universities had already made detailed plans by that time on how many places they would offer in 2018.”

Robinson said some universities would be forced to offer fewer student places “to avoid a budget black hole.” Others would have to dig into critical maintenance funds or shut down facilities and outreach programs.

Global ratings agency Moody’s also warned last week that the funding freeze would create greater funding volatility and risks for the universities, which borrow funds on the financial markets to build new facilities. Moody’s said regional and expanding universities would be most affected.

Seven regional universities this week listed programs that could be shelved as a result of the freeze. They included some facilities in working class areas, such as a new University of Southern Queensland health sciences campus at Ipswich, west of Brisbane, and University of the Sunshine Coast campuses at Hervey Bay, Caboolture, Petrie and the Sunshine Coast University Hospital.

Sweeping cutbacks, as yet unspecified, are threatened across the country. In an ominous email to all staff members on December 19, Western Sydney University (WSU) vice-chancellor Barney Glover said: “Preliminary modelling by the University’s Finance and Resources Division estimates that the impact of the changes would be approximately $5.7 million in 2018. More detailed analysis is being conducted to obtain a fuller assessment of the impacts on the University.”

Students and staff at WSU, like every other university, are already reeling from the effects of constant rounds of pro-market restructuring that have slashed administrative and academic jobs, sent class sizes soaring, reduced face-to-face teaching and consultation, and driven up staff casualisation rates.

Labor, the Greens and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the main trade union covering universities, criticised the December 18 bombshell but they are primarily responsible for enforcing the corporate transformation of higher education over the past decade.

Labor’s shadow education minister, Tanya Plibersek, said: “Billions of dollars’ worth of cuts to universities mean a higher-cost education for students or a poorer-quality education or probably both.” Yet the latest cuts just intensify those imposed by the 2007–13 Labor government. Labor lifted caps on enrolments, but only to produce a new “competitive” education “marketplace”—in reality, a business-driven regime.

NTEU national president Jeannie Rea complained that the government had drawn up its cuts “behind closed doors and without public debate” or “discussion with universities, their staff and students.” The NTEU spent most of 2017 strenuously stifling or shutting down industrial action. It pushed through new enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) at individual universities—11 so far—to assist managements to prepare to make the cuts being demanded.

The EBA provisions vary from place to place, precisely to help each university survive in the “marketplace” at the cost of rival universities. But the agreements have common features, designed to allow managements to impose closures, redundancies and more onerous workloads, while cutting real wages.

At James Cook University in northern Queensland, for example, the NTEU reached an agreement with the management in November that increased the “redeployment period” of most professional staff from 15 to 20 weeks. In other words, the management was given a green light for further retrenchments, as long as it gives affected staff a few more weeks to apply for any alternative positions that might be offered.

NTEU Queensland division secretary Michael McNally called the EBA “a win for all staff at James Cook University,” yet it also delivers a real pay cut for the next five years. There is an increase of 8.6 percent over that period—or about 1.7 percent per year—far below the rising cost of living.

The NTEU’s main concern is to retain its position, together with the Labor Party, as the policing agency for the underlying corporate program, with which the union entirely agrees. In her media statement last month, Jeannie Rae accused the government of conducting a “crude money-saving exercise” that “flies in the face of the objectives” of the previous Labor government’s “demand driven funding model.”

Rae said the NTEU had “proposed the need for a better planned and managed allocation” for funding student places through “Public Accountability Agreements.” These agreements, outlined in NTEU budget submissions, would require student enrolments to be determined by the “national interest,” that is essentially in the interests of the capitalist ruling class.

Once universities resume their full operations next month, students and staff alike will face ever-more intolerable conditions, driven by this big business agenda.

Australian power workers vote for industrial action

Terry Cook 

More than 93 percent of the 2,800 workers employed at Ausgrid, the partly privatised urban electricity distribution network in New South Wales (NSW), have voted for industrial action over new enterprise agreements (EBAs). Ausgrid operates the distribution network providing power in Sydney, Newcastle, the Central Coast and the Hunter Valley.

Like the NSW rail workers, who have voted to strike on January 29, the Ausgrid workers face an escalating corporate-government offensive, after years of job cuts, workload increases and declining real wages. However, the unions are intent on preventing any genuine campaign to fight for decent wages and conditions.

The current EBAs expired in December 2014, when Ausgrid was still fully owned by the NSW state government. Since then, a controlling interest in the company has been sold to a consortium of superannuation funds, led by former trade union bureaucrats, who are demanding stepped-up productivity.

But the unions involved—the Electrical Trades Unions (ETU), United Services Union (USU), Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and Professionals Australia (PA)— dragged out negotiations, effectively imposing a wage freeze on workers. They have only held a ballot for industrial action now to contain the widespread anger that is reflected in the overwhelming vote to strike.

ETU organiser Mark Buttigieg told the media last week the Ausgrid workers “were fed up with the inaction” and the voting results showed “a high degree of frustration pent up.” Yet he insisted that the workers did not want to take action, saying: “We still prefer to have a negotiated outcome.”

Buttigieg’s comments are a warning that the unions are working behind the scenes to reach a “negotiated outcome” and call off any strike action. Such a deal will inevitably be another sell-out paving the way for another round of “productivity increases” and “restructuring” and further cuts to jobs and conditions.

Ausgrid CEO Richard Gross told the Australian Financial Review this week that the company had achieved in-principle agreement with the unions on “virtually all of our proposal.” He boasted: “The new agreement would realise greater productivity and ensure success and sustainability in the new energy market.”

The result of the strike ballot was announced on January 10, but the unions have delayed any action by the Ausgrid workers until after a meeting of delegates on January 31. The limited options that workers were given to vote on included eight-hour work stoppages and 30 different types of work bans, such as refusing to do overtime, callouts or work on the light rail network.

Already, since 2014, Ausgrid has eliminated nearly 2,000 jobs and driven up productivity by an estimated 43 to 62 percent, all with the assistance of the unions, which have facilitated redundancies and stifled any resistance.

In return for further speed-up, the four unions are seeking a 3 percent annual pay increase over three years and changes to the company’s classification system, which underrates skills and makes promotions difficult. Ausgrid is offering to raise wages by just 7 percent over three years—a further real pay cut—with a one-off $1,000 payment as a sop.

At the same time, the company wants a two-tier workforce, with new employees receiving lower rates of pay, thus putting continuous downward pressure on all wages. Meanwhile, Ausgrid has awarded its executives salary rises averaging 5.3 percent a year and annual bonuses averaging more than $50,000 each in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

In 2016, the Liberal-National state government sold off the network via a 99-year lease of 50.4 percent of Ausgrid for $16 billion to an Australian Super and IFM Investors superannuation consortium. The government retained the remaining shares but could offload them at any time.

Former Australian Council of Trade Union (ACTU) secretary and key Labor minister Greg Combet is deputy chair of IFM Investors. Another ex-ACTU secretary, David Oliver, is deputy chair of Australian Super, whose board includes current union leaders Paul Bastian (Australian Manufacturing Workers Union) and Daniel Walton (Australian Workers Unions).

In other words, the Ausgrid workers not only confront their own unions, but an employer led by present and former union bureaucrats, who direct its demands for greater cost-cutting and higher profits.

In 2016, the state government also privatised the regional electricity distributer Endeavour Energy and the state’s high-voltage network company Transgrid. Rural provider Essential Energy remains state-owned for now, but it has been subjected to severe restructuring, including the slashing of more than 1,300 jobs.

The power unions facilitated the privatisation and job cuts. They worked to prevent any unified response by power workers and kept them divided on an enterprise-by-enterprise basis. All attempts by workers to take action were systematically blocked by the unions, which supported the Fair Work industrial laws that ban virtually all action by workers.

The overriding concern of the unions has been to maintain their role as labour brokers, bargaining away workers’ jobs, conditions and wages.

When, for example, Essential Energy workers moved in April 2016 to strike to oppose cuts to working conditions and jobs, the unions, without consulting the rank-and-file, called off the action at the eleventh hour, enforcing a directive by the federal government’s industrial tribunal, the Fair Work Commission.

Opposition by workers was also diverted into dead-end protests and parliamentary channels, such as pleas to the right-wing Christian Democratic Party (CDP) to block legislation enabling the privatisations or to secure phoney “job protection” clauses. A deal brokered by the CDP and the unions allowed the government to proceed unhindered.

Above all, the unions urged workers to vote for yet another pro-business Labor government in the 2015 state elections, on the basis of the lie that Labor will defend their interests. In reality, Labor began the privatisations before it was thrown out of office in 2011. Once the 2015 election was over, state Labor leader Luke Foley flagged his support for privatisation, declaring “private and not-for-profit sectors should play a significant role in the delivery of our public services.”

Ausgrid workers need to draw lessons from past bitter experience and break decisively with the unions, which always defend the private profit system from which the officials derive their privileged positions and life styles.

Any fight for wages, jobs and conditions necessarily involves a political struggle against the entire establishment—including Coalition, Labor and the Greens—that will stop at nothing, including using the police and the courts, to suppress the eruption of a movement of the working class.

Ausgrid workers should take matters into their own hands and establish independent rank-and-file committees to organise the campaign and turn out to other sections of workers—across the steel, mining, transport and engineering industries—in Australia and internationally facing the destruction of jobs and conditions.

This struggle can only succeed to the extent that it is guided by a socialist perspective, that is, the fight for a workers’ government that will place the banks and basic industries in public ownership and under the democratic control of the working class.

UK, France boost military, intelligence ties at Sandhurst summit

Robert Stevens & Alex Lantier

On Thursday, UK Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron held a summit meeting at the UK military officers training academy, Sandhurst. The meeting was aimed at boosting UK-French military and intelligence ties, in line with the strategy developed in the 2010 Lancaster House Treaty, amid growing tensions with the Trump administration and inside NATO, and the crisis caused by Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU).

They agreed on a series of reactionary measures, including stepped-up military spending, joint spying operations, and attacks on immigrants trying to reach Britain from the French port of Calais. They pledged to intensify cooperation on nuclear weapons programmes, aircraft carriers, and naval deployments to the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean sea. Also agreed were provisions for draconian Internet censorship.

The Financial Times noted that Sandhurst was chosen as a venue since it “underlined a two-decade old defence pact between Britain and France.” Highlighting the strategic character of the meeting, the heads of the UK’s main domestic and international intelligence agencies—MI5, MI6 and General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)—and of their French equivalents, the General Directorates of External Security and Internal Security (DGSE, DGSI), all attended.

Pointing to “an increasingly unstable and uncertain world,” the summit communiqué declared that the “Lancaster House Treaty is the bedrock of our relationship. Since 2010 we have improved our collective capabilities and seen unprecedented levels of integration between our armed forces, intelligence agencies and diplomatic and development authorities.”

It added, “There is no situation in which we could envisage a circumstance where the vital interests of either the United Kingdom or France could be threatened without the vital interests of the other being also threatened.” As vital interests are those that states will go to war to protect, this essentially means that Britain and France are building a separate, smaller alliance inside NATO. France’s Le Point magazine expressed satisfaction at this “simple principle outlined already in 1992,” after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.

The foreign policy compact document contained bullet points outlining the positions of British and French imperialism on key global flashpoints, in particular those where Washington is threatening to trigger major wars. It commits them to defending the 2015 Iranian nuclear peace deal, which the Trump administration is signalling it will scrap, amid growing US war threats against Iran. It called for “meaningful and unconditional dialogue” with North Korea, which Washington is threatening with nuclear annihilation.

In an apparent concession to the UK by Macron—who began his presidency by inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to France and calling for improved relations with Moscow—the compact document sharply attacked Russia.

It declared that the UK and France “share a common assessment of Russia’s more assertive foreign and defence policy, … strategic intimidation, including the use of disinformation, malicious cyber activity, and political subversion.” It denounced Russia’s annexation of Crimea and endorsed the Minsk peace deal in Ukraine negotiated by Berlin, Paris, Kiev and Moscow: “Until Russia complies with its Minsk obligations, economic sanctions [on Moscow] cannot be lifted.”

The two countries agreed to a pair of overseas interventions to illustrate their alliance. Britain is to send three helicopters and 50 to 60 support staff to assist thousands of French soldiers fighting a neo-colonial war in Africa’s Sahel region. For its part, France will send more troops to NATO’s “enhanced Forward Presence” in 2019, “as part of the UK-led battlegroup in Estonia, building on the successful joint deployment in 2017 . ” The UK currently has 800 soldiers in Estonia.

In addition, May stated that a combined UK-French expeditionary force would be ready to deploy up to 10,000 troops “quickly and effectively to face any threat” by 2020.

Both countries agree on the necessity to clamp down on democratic rights as they build up their war machines, with Internet censorship at the top of their agenda. Under the guise of fighting “terrorism” and “criminals,” the summit was presented with a report containing proposals to “ensure the automation of detection and deletion of illegal content within 1-2 hours of upload,” and “prevent its dissemination…”

London and Paris also haggled over the financing of the repression of immigrants in Calais, where France accepted responsibility for policing Britain’s border along the Channel tunnel in the 2003 Le Touquet treaty. At Sandhurst, the two countries agreed to joint action to “increase the number of illegal migrants who are returned to their own country.”

Under pressure from Macron, May agreed to “support France in its provision of accommodation in facilities located outside the Calais and Dunkirk areas, such as Reception and Assessment Centres,” and to increase Britain’s payment to France for policing the border to €50 million.

Macron hypocritically declared at the summit’s press conference that the new treaty on migrants would ensure a “more humane approach.” In fact, what is being implemented is a speeding up of the deportation process, with the time to process migrants to be reduced from six months to one month for adults, and 25 days for children. The UK refused to specify how many migrants it would accept into the UK.

The summit pointed to both the escalating collapse of the international political framework that existed in the era of US imperialism’s world hegemony, and the turn to repression and anti-immigrant hate-mongering as the imperialist powers again prepare for war. Fundamental differences separate the major European powers from Washington over countries in the Middle East and Asia, where they have major economic and strategic interests, and where US policy could provoke a major regional or world war.

At the same time, the EU is rapidly disintegrating, particularly since the Brexit vote. It is significant that Paris organised a high-level military summit with London amid rising concern over its relations with Germany, Europe’s leading power, after the crisis unleashed by the September 2017 German elections. The Grand Coalition (Christian Democratic Union-Social Democratic Party) government that favoured close ties with Macron suffered a humiliating loss of votes, and with Berlin still unable to form a government, Paris must fear that a more hostile government may emerge in Berlin.

Both the Leave and Remain factions of the British bourgeoisie supported closer ties with France. In a pre-summit editorial, the Remain-supporting Financial Times wrote effusively of the previous decade of military and intelligence cooperation but warned, “In the era of Brexit, however, these bonds will be re-examined.” Given the UK’s historically close ties with the US, it wrote, “There is deep scepticism in Britain about integrating the country’s armed forces with those of Europe.”

Macron made no move whatsoever to support Britain in its contentious Brexit talks with the EU, however, pointing out that the EU, and not France, is negotiating Brexit. Asked why he opposed including financial services in any EU-UK free trade agreement, he said, “I am here neither to punish nor to reward. I want to make sure that the single market is preserved because that is very much the heart of the EU.”

If Britain wanted full continuing access to the EU’s single market, Macron added, “The choice is up to Britain: it’s not my choice—but they can have no differentiated access to financial services. … it means that you need to contribute to the budget and acknowledge European jurisdiction”.

Britain would not be able to pick and chose a Canada-style trade deal that would allow access to the single market, he insisted. “There should be no hypocrisy in this respect, or it would not work and we would destroy the single market.”

Pentagon unveils strategy for military confrontation with Russia and China

Bill Van Auken

The Trump administration’s defense secretary, former Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, rolled out a new National Defense Strategy Friday that signals open preparations by US imperialism for direct military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

Speaking at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, Mattis made clear that the strategy, the first such document to be issued by the Pentagon in roughly a decade, represented an historic shift from the ostensible justification for US global militarism for nearly two decades: the so-called war on terrorism.

“Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security,” Mattis said in his speech, which accompanied the release of an 11-page declassified document outlining the National Defense Strategy in broad terms. A lengthier classified version was submitted to the US Congress, which includes the Pentagon’s detailed proposals for a massive increase in military spending.

Much of the document’s language echoed terms used in the National Security Strategy document unveiled last month in a fascistic speech delivered by President Donald Trump. Mattis insisted that the US was facing “growing threat from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models.”

The defense strategy goes on to accuse China of seeking “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

Russia, it charges, is attempting to achieve “veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor.”

“China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea,” it states. “Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors.”

In what appeared to be a threat directed against both Russia and China, Mattis warned, “If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day.”

Both Moscow and Beijing issued statements condemning the US defense strategy. A Chinese spokesman denounced the document as a return to a “Cold War mentality.” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meanwhile, told a United Nations press conference: “It is regrettable that instead of having a normal dialog, instead of using the basis of international law, the US is indeed striving to prove their leadership through such confrontational strategies and concepts.” A government spokesman in Moscow characterized the document as “imperialistic.”

Like the National Security Strategy released last month, the defense strategy also singles out North Korea and Iran as “rogue regimes,” charging them with destabilizing regions through their “pursuit of nuclear weapons or sponsorship of terrorism.” It accuses Tehran of “competing with its neighbors, asserting an arc of influence and instability while vying for regional hegemony.”

The document calls for the preparation for war across what it describes as “three key regions”: the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. The document also makes brief references to Latin America and Africa, asserting the necessity of US imperialism striving for hegemony on both continents. It makes clear that these continents are arenas for the global “great power” struggle that forms the core of the strategy, asserting that a key aim in Africa is to “limit the malign influence of non-African powers.”

What emerges clearly from the Pentagon document is a vision of US imperialism besieged on all sides and in mortal danger of losing global dominance. It reflects the thinking among the cabal of retired and active-duty generals that dominate the Trump administration’s foreign policy that the past 16 years of unending wars in the Middle East and Central Asia have failed to further US strategic interests, creating a series of debacles, while grinding down the US military.

“Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding,” the document states. “We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”

The Pentagon’s aim, according to the defense strategy, is to ensure that the US remains “the preeminent military power in the world” able to “ensure the balance of power remains in our favor,” “advance an international order that is most conducive to our security and prosperity” and “preserve access to markets.”

The thrust of the document is a demand for a vast buildup of the American war machine, which already spends more than the next eight countries combined, including nearly triple the military spending of China and roughly eight times the amount spent by Russia.

A failure to implement the huge military spending increases that the Pentagon is demanding—the Trump White House has called for a $54 billion increase in the military budget, while Congressional leaders have suggested an even bigger hike—will result “in decreasing U.S. global influence, eroding cohesion among allies and partners, and reduced access to markets that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living,” the declassified summary of the defense strategy warns.

Despite having siphoned trillions of dollars out of the US economy to pay for the past 16 years of war, Mattis and the defense strategy present the American military as an institution that has been virtually starved of resources, unable to meet “readiness, procurement, and modernization requirements.”

The overriding objective in terms of modernization is the buildup of the US “nuclear triad”—Washington’s array of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, capable of destroying life on the planet many times over.

The document said the Pentagon will seek to upgrade all aspects of its nuclear war-fighting apparatus, “including nuclear command, control, and communications, and supporting infrastructure.” It added that “Modernization of the nuclear force includes developing options to counter competitors’ coercive strategies, predicated on the threatened use of nuclear or strategic non-nuclear attacks.” In other words, the US military is prepared to launch a nuclear war in response to a conventional or cyberattack.

Tellingly, the Pentagon document uses the words “lethal” and “lethality” 15 times to describe the aims of Mattis and his fellow generals in regard to their proposed military buildup. Clearly, what is being prepared is a level of mass killing far beyond the bloodbaths carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

In Mattis’s speech there was a strong element of resentment toward the civilian government and its constitutional control over the military. He described US troops being compelled to “stoically carry a ‘success at any cost’ attitude, as they worked tirelessly to accomplish the mission with inadequate and misaligned resources simply because the Congress could not maintain regular order.”

Mattis warned that the war plans outlined in the document will require “sustained investment by the American people,” noting that “past generations” had been compelled to make “harsher sacrifices.”

These new “sacrifices” will take the form of savage cuts to essential social services, including the gutting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with the transfer of resources to the military, the arms industry and the financial oligarchy.

The National Defense Strategy released Friday constitutes a grave warning to working people in the US and throughout the world. Driven by the crisis of their system, America’s capitalist ruling class and its military are preparing for a world war fought with nuclear weapons.

US budget charade causes government shutdown

Eric London

The annual back-and-forth budget charade between Democrats and Republicans dragged on late into the night on Friday when Senate Republicans failed to secure enough Democratic votes to pass a four-week federal funding extension. As a result, what has been called a “government shutdown” went into effect at 12:01 AM Saturday morning.

Talks between congressional Democrats, Republicans and President Trump will continue this weekend over protection for 800,000 recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, increased spending for border militarization and deportation roundup squads, disaster relief, and funding for most federal agencies. Whatever deal emerges from the kabuki theater in Washington will shift the entire framework of American politics further to the right.

Knowing that their so-called “continuing resolution” was doomed to fail in the Senate, House Republicans cynically added an extension of the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) while excluding DACA protection in order to blame Democrats for prioritizing “illegal immigrants” over US citizen children. Five Senate Democrats voted for the Republican measure, including Doug Jones, whose victory in last month’s Alabama Senate race was called “a triumph for decency and common sense” by the New York Times editorial board.

Politico reported that Democrats made a counterproposal Friday that included an additional $50 billion in military funding in exchange for protection for DACA recipients as well as already agreed-upon increases for border militarization. Republicans called this right-wing proposal a “nonstarter.”

Late Friday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York) visited the White House for a parley with Trump, his old friend and benefactor. Schumer said he “made some progress” with Trump during the meeting. Trump called the session an “excellent preliminary meeting” in which he and the Democratic Senate leader were “working on solutions for security and our great military.”

Whatever is taking place behind closed doors, the American people will never hear the half of it. The Democratic demands likely center around foreign policy and increased surveillance of social media, two themes that are technically not related to the budget debate. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke some truth when he said of the Republican proposal, “Its content is bipartisan; there are no provisions that my Democratic friends oppose.”

Schumer and the Democrats want to shut down government operations over the weekend when the impact on Wall Street will be negligible in order to posture as defenders of DACA beneficiaries. A CBS poll released this week showed that 87 percent of Americans want a pathway to citizenship for these young people.

The phony character of the Democratic Party’s position is revealed by the fact that US stock indexes rose Friday, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 reaching new records even as the likelihood of a deal declined throughout the day. Hank Smith, co-chief investment officer at Haverford Trust, said, “I would characterize a shutdown as just the kind of political news that the market has demonstrated, over the past year, a willingness to ignore.” In other words, there is no question that the two parties will reach an agreement favorable to Wall Street.

In contrast to the presentation in the bourgeois press, many functions of the US government do not shut down during a budget impasse. Immigration agents and border patrol will continue to round up families for deportation, American warplanes will carry out their sorties over Middle Eastern countries, and the National Security Agency will continue its mass surveillance of the American and world population.

However, some 850,000 federal workers, many of whom are mid- and low-level domestic agency staff, as well as janitors, cafeteria workers and other service employees will stop receiving paychecks. These workers do not always receive back pay for furloughs and many face economic devastation as a result of even a brief shutdown.

Over 60 percent of Centers for Disease Control employees will be furloughed in the midst of the worst flu epidemic in years. Members of Congress, however, will be paid for days the government is technically closed down.

The short-term continuing resolution would have been the fourth extension of the government funding deadline since September. At each stage, the Democrats have failed to secure protection for DACA recipients, who are spending the weekend in a profound state of anxiety. One DACA recipient posted on a popular Facebook page for young immigrants that she has “lost sleep over this issue with DACA and the votes and Congress etc… Here we are stressing about something that is totally out of our hands. What really matters is our happiness. I’m tired of feeling sick, tired of losing sleep over this whole situation.”

The Democrats have already made clear that they are willing to support construction of a border wall and massive expenditures for militarizing the border as part of a deal that includes extensions for DACA recipients. Last week, Bernie Sanders declared, “I don't think there’s anybody who disagrees that we need strong border security. If the president wants to work with us to make sure we have strong border security, let’s do that.”

The assurances by Sanders and the Democrats of support for added security comes as videos published this week by the pro-immigrant No More Deaths organization showed border guards pouring out over 3,500 gallons of water left by rights groups in the harsh borderlands desert. In the last 20 years, up to 27,000 immigrants have died of dehydration, starvation, heat stroke and hypothermia while attempting to escape the violence and poverty in Mexico and Central America.