NATO is a Goldmine for the US/Military Industrial Complex

Brian Cloughley

Countries of the NATO military alliance have been ordered by President Trump to increase their spending on weapons, and the reasons for his insistence they do so are becoming clearer. It’s got nothing to do with any defense rationale, because the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, has admitted that “we don’t see any imminent threat against any NATO ally” and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recorded in its 2018 World Report that “Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016.”

Even Radio Free Europe, the US government’s official broadcaster, acknowledged that “Russia, one of the world’s top military spenders, reduced its defense budget by 20 percent in 2016-2017 to $55.3 billion” compared, for example, to the $56.3 billion of France.  As SIPRI records, “together, the European NATO members spent over 4 times more on the military in 2017 than Russia,” and Nato Watch summed it up by pointing out that the 29 US-NATO countries “collectively spent over 12 times more on the military in 2016 than Russia.”

There is demonstrably no threat whatever to any NATO country by Russia, but this is considered irrelevant in the context of US arms’ sales, which are flourishing and being encouraged to increase and multiply as a result of Congressional and Pentagon scare-mongering.

On July 12, the second and final day of the recent US-NATO pantomime gathering, Reuters reported Trump as saying that “the United States makes by far the best military equipment in the world: the best jets, the best missiles, the best guns, the best everything.”  He went on “to list the top US arms makers, Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp by name.”

On July 11 the Nasdaq Stock Exchange listed the stock price of Lockheed Martin at $305.68.  The day after Trump’s speech, it increased to $318.37.

On July 11 the Nasdaq Stock Exchange listed the stock price of Boeing at $340.50.  The day after Trump’s speech, it increased to $350.79.

On July 11 the New York Stock Exchange listed the stock price of Northrop Grumman at $311.71. The day after Trump’s speech, it increased to $321.73.

To further boost this bonanza, the State Department did its best to make US arms sales even easier by enabling weapons manufacturers to avoid the well-constructed checks and balances formerly in place to ensure that at least a few legal, moral and economic constraints would be observed when various disreputable regimes anted up for American weapons.

But these regulations no longer apply, because on July 13 the State Department announced new measures to “fast-track government approval of proposals from defense and aerospace companies” which action was warmly welcomed by the President of the US Defence and Aerospace Export Council, Keith Webster, who is “looking forward to continued collaboration with the White House on initiatives that further expand international opportunities for the defense and aerospace industries.”

There was yet more boosting by Lt-General Charles Hooper, Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, who declared on July 18 that “Defense exports are good for our national security, they’re good for our foreign policy. And they’re good for our economic security.”  He then proposed that his agency cut the transportation fee charged to foreign military sales clients, which would be a major stimulant for sales of “the best jets, the best missiles, the best guns” so valued by Mr Trump. Then the General went on to remind the media that “as the administration and our leadership has said, economic security is national security.”  This man might go places in Trump World.

But he won’t go as far as the arms manufacturers, whose future growth and profits are assured under Trump and the Washington Deep State, which is defined as “military, intelligence and government officials who try to secretly manipulate government policy.”  US weapons producers have realized, as said so presciently two thousand years ago by the Roman statesman, Cicero, that “the sinews of war are infinite money,” and their satisfaction will continue to grow in synchrony with their financial dividends.

The Voice of America joined the chorus of reportage on July 12 and observed that “with Thursday’s renewed pledge by NATO countries to meet defense spending goals, some of the biggest beneficiaries could be US weapons manufacturers, which annually already export billions of dollars worth of arms across the globe.”

Within European NATO, the biggest spenders on US arms, thus far, are Poland, Romania, Britain and Greece, and the amounts involved are colossal.  Poland, whose economy is booming, has signed an agreement to buy Patriot missile systems for $4.75 billion, adding to the purchase of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles for $200 million, Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, costing $250 million, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems for the same amount.  Delivery of its 48 F-16 multi-role strike aircraft ($4.7 billion) began in 2006, and Warsaw has proved a loyal customer ever since.  Who knows what exotic new pieces of US hardware will be ordered as a result of Mr Trump’s encouragement?

Romania, a country with only 750 kilometers of motorway (tiny Belgium has 1,700 km), has been seeking World Bank assistance for its road projects but is unlikely to benefit because it is so gravely corrupt. This has not stopped it purchasing US artillery rocket systems for $1.25 billion and Patriot missiles for a colossal $3.9 billion, following-on from construction in May 2016 of a US Aegis missile station, at Washington’s expense.  It forms part of the US-NATO encirclement of Russia, and its missiles are to be operational this year.

The message for European NATO is that the US is pulling out all stops to sell weapons, and that although, for example, “about 84% of the UK’s total arms imports come from the United States”, there is room for improvement.  Slovakia is buying $150 millions’ worth of helicopters and paying a satisfying $2.91 billion for F-16 fighters, although most other NATO countries appear to have been less disposed, so far, to purchase more of “the best jets, the best missiles, the best guns” that Mr Trump has on offer.

The mine of NATO gold is there for exploitation, and following Trump’s enthusiastic encouragement of his arms’ manufacturers it seems that extraction will be effective. The US Military-Industrial Complex stands to gain handsomely from its President’s campaign to boost the quantities of weapons in the world.

Adulterated Food and Fake Medicine

Mohammad Ashraf

The worst calamities for Kashmir apart from natural disasters are the adulteration in food products and the sale of fake medicine!

Kashmiris have now become used to both natural and man-made disasters striking one after the other. In fact, Nature has been rather very kind and it is the fellow human beings whose material greed has turned into the instruments of disaster for the entire society. The journal of the Indian Law Institute carries an article about the survey conducted regarding food adulteration in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The article is in vol. 31 of March-April 1989. (pp 91-105). The survey about food adulteration conducted at that time about sends shudders through one’s body. Imagine how much “progress” and “sophistication” has been achieved by these adulterers! There is a legislation to check food adulteration. It is the duty of the Health Officer of the Municipal Corporation to check food adulteration and take action under the act. The cases are tried in the Municipal Court. One does hear off and on about action taken to check adulteration. In fact, sometimes even major companies get hauled up. Unfortunately, the material greed has become so much widespread that it is impossible to fully check food adulteration. The worst suffers are the people from the lower strata of the society including the large number of slum dwellers. It is shocking how some of the human beings administer virtual poison to their fellow human beings just for material greed.

A few decades back in early fifties one would not hear so much about food adulteration. Yes, one would come to know about water being added to milk to increase its quantity. Even that too was rare. Those days the Municipal Authorities would be emptying pitchers of milk into River Jhelum because the milk in these was diluted with water! The Municipal Health Officer of those days was a nightmare for all these criminals! Not now! People can get away with anything because of corruption having entered the Kashmiri blood stream. There have been instances of detergent and blotting paper being added to milk, powdered bricks, saw dust and many other dangerous and poisonous materials being added to some spices. Even the bakers have been adding some chemical agents to bread and other confectionary to make it crisp and presentable.  Sometime back there were some cases registered against big firms dealing with various food products like milk and spices. However, after sometime the companies involved continued as before! One does not know what happened to those cases?

Adulterated food products are naturally bound to induce sickness among the consumers and they would need to be treated. The height of irony is that the drugs being prescribed for such and other illnesses too are fake! There is a massive racket of fake drugs in the State. There can be nothing more criminal than this! Again the cases of fake drugs have been there for quite some time. In 2013 there was a massive scam of fake drugs being supplied by the Jammu & Kashmir Medical Supplies Corporation to various hospitals. Two major supplies of life saving drugs to Kashmir-based government hospitals – antibiotic Maximizen-625 and Curesef – were found unfit and spurious by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation, Ministry of health and family welfare, and the local drug control department. In another case, chalk and clay were found mixed in these drugs which had been supplied almost for two years. In fact, 500 babies that had died could be because of drug adulteration. The medical superintendent of the Children Hospital had admitted that the babies could have died due to spurious drugs. Some of the well-known brands of medicine including anti-biotics are reportedly faked in Jammu and then supplied in the valley through various outlets. They are not ordinary criminals but real murderers! They deserve to be hanged in public. Unfortunately the procedures to prosecute these criminals are so lengthy that they have every chance of getting scot free. One cannot depend solely on the government for getting rid of the menace. It needs social awareness and a strong peoples’ movement not only to ensure the trial and prosecution of the caught criminals but a total social boycott and complete ostracization of these criminals from the society. All the Civil Society groups should take up these issues and ensure prosecution of the persons caught adulterating food products and manufacturing and selling fake drugs. There is also urgent need for not only political leaders but all the religious leaders to take up the issue of food adulteration and manufacture and the sale of fake drugs. People have not only to be made aware of the widely present menace but also motivated to ensure hauling up and prosecution of the persons found guiltyof indulging in these offences.

Fascist Relations in India

Anandi Sharan

Brijesh Thakur is the man accused of sexually abusing 34 out of 44 young women in his care as sex slaves, and terrorising 11 others to flee from another care home run by him. Aman Sharma in the Economic Times on August 1 2018 sums up the fascist reality of rape in India in his article about this man, describing how he co-opted the district child welfare committee that was supposed to supervise his NGO that got government contracts to provide shelters for homeless girls. Thakur’s palatial house in the town has an adjoining printing press that houses his three newspapers and a small staircase leads up to the shelter home. Thakur co-opted the district child welfare committee, which is supposed to survey such child shelter homes and raise red flags in case of maladministration. Till 2015, there were five people on this committee including three women. But since 2015, only three men have been on the committee. “No surveys were done. The committee chairman, Dilip Verma, is on the run while one member, Vikas Kumar, is in jail. The local child protection officer, Ravi Roshan, is in jail too for covering up these crimes,” a senior Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) official in Muzaffarpur told ET. A key person whom the CBI is also looking for is a woman named Madhu, who ran Thakur’s shelter.

Fascists, from the days of the Austrian Empire onwards, – if not from the days of the Roman Empire on which the entire miserable system of law and money today is founded,- are very often male children who were systematically tortured by military training officers during their formative years to toughen them up for war. They become perverts who cannot live without torturing weaker creatures; they express themselves by co-opting similar but weaker personalities who fall into their pattern of cruelty as if it were normal, not only in war but in civilian life too. They see nothing wrong in touching the body of another against the other’s will for their own gratification. In India fascist behaviour is not confined to those who have gone through such formal indoctrination in schools. The behaviour is inculcated through caste and class systems of power through the family. The young boy and his same class and caste sister are brought up to exert random and willful psychological and physical power over boys and girls from lower castes. This behaviour has become so normal that boys and girls from lower castes who are tortured in this way are usually forced to laugh off this systematic mental and physical cruelty inflicted on them. The unspoken assumption expressed through their laughter is that it is common knowledge that everyone (like me) is tortured all the time, haha haha, and nothing can be done.

This is this depraved country India, in which Hindutva ideology merges seamlessly with fascist gender and caste and class violence inculcated in people like Brijesh Thakur down the centuries and in his family members who are so vociferously denying he did any wrong, despite the public recorded statements from the victims accusing Thakur of rape and pimping. Yes the man like any other accused should get bail. All accused have a right to bail. It is wrong to confine the millions of accused in India in jail pending trial. That said, the fascist system of state administered suffering in India is completely out of control and bail or no bail the rot is much deeper than just at the bail or no bail level. The crime would not have occurred without the active involvement of those public servants of the district child welfare committee with fascist personalities. And on July 26 2018 believe it or not, the President of India accorded his assent to the Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act, 2018, that bars an “enquiry or inquiry or investigation” by an anti-corruption agency (CBI included) against a public servant in matters relatable to the discharge of his official duties, without the prior approval of the Centre or the state government, as the case may be, or the disciplinary authority. This provision would apply to all public servants, including the lowest rungs of administration.

Such decisions when combined with the new law passed by the BJP government allowing complete secrecy in political contributions by corporations to political parties cement the power of the Brijesh Thakur’s of this world. Millions are dying of arsenic poisoning from drinking arsenic infested groundwater supplied by public servants of the Brijesh Thakur variety. They simply do not care about other human beings and see nothing wrong in inflicting suffering as part of their daily work for their own gain and gratification.

It is in this context that one is especially saddened to have to note that the Chief Justice of India himself lives in cloud cuckoo land. With millions of pending cases, in courts staffed by around 17’000 judges at all levels, one for every 75’000 Indians, he gave a talk on 28 July 2018 in which he managed to list 15 changes in behaviour the officers in the courts of India should make to speed up disposal of cases without once mentioning shortage of funds as the primary let alone secondary and tertiary cause of the collapse of the administration of India let alone the dispensation of justice. The perpetuation of the state by and for those employed in it, – and benefiting from its corruption and collapsed condition, – cements fascist rule in India. This fascist rule in India is nothing other than the daily exploitation of the backward castes through social, political, economic and gender violence. The BJP government at the centre and their Sangh Parivar crowd mobilisers not only condone but actively promote this fascism, not least by underfunding the administration and judiciary, combined with maintaining and reinforcing the power of upper castes and the capitalist class businessmen in India in all spheres of life.

Thriving on Dark Web: The My Health Record and Data Insecurity

Binoy Kampmark

Data is rarely inert.  It moves, finds itself diverting, adjusting and adapting to users and distributors. Ultimately, as unspectacular and banal as it might be, data sells, pushing the price in various markets whoever wishes to access it.  Medical data, given its abundance, can do very nicely in such domains as the Dark Web.  With governments attempting to find the optimum level of storing, monitoring and identifying the medical health of citizens, the issue of security has become pressingly urgent.

Britain’s National Health Service is a case in point.  Last year, that venerable, perennially criticised body of health provision received the full attention of the WananCry virus. Much of this was occasioned by carelessness: a good number of organisations were running on out-of-date Windows XP software.  The principle of insecurity was, however, affirmed.

Last month, the Singaporean government faced the grim reality that 1.5 million health records had been accessed by hackers including, audaciously, the records of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. This well landed blow riled all the more for that state’s heralded insistence on the merits of its own cybersecurity.  In the words of the government statement, “Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack.”

Lee, in an obvious effort to reassure, perhaps more himself than anybody else, claimed that his data had nothing of value.  (If a thief takes your goods, make sure they are worthless.)  “My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but there is nothing alarming in it.”

Obtaining medical data enables a stealthy plotting for the attacker, hoarding information clandestinely then deploying it with maximum effect.  “Patients who have had their medical information stolen,” goes Aatif Sulleyman for The Independent, “might not realise it’s even happened until the attackers have already set their plans in motion.”

Patient profiles can be built, with credentials mustered for reasons of impersonation to obtain health services.  Medical equipment and drugs can be duly purchased, and claims with insurers lodged.  That prospect is somewhat bleaker than one whose credit card details have been pinched; the bank, at the very least, might be able to put a halt on transactions with immediate effect.

Such excitement turns in anticipation and worried focus to the My Health Record proposition of the Australian government, which, it must be said, belies the usual blissful ignorance about what such an invitation tends to be.  Here, information utopia is paraded and extolled: to have such material in one spot, rather than diffused and intangible; to have the picture of one’s medical being in one location for those providing health care services.

Australia’s political representatives and bureaucrats have assumed a certain cockiness far exceeding health providers in other jurisdictions, making the My Health Record scheme a pinnacle of insecurity in medical care.  A pervasive sense exists that privacy concerns will simply vanish in a bout of extended apathy.  The scheme is astounding for the scope it enables prying of medical data that would otherwise be deemed private.

Deficiencies were spotted early on.  Far from being clinically-reliable as a record, it is dated and far from comprehensive.  Any such record would be, at worse, a distraction in an emergency.  Nor is there a track on who has seen it, except institutions en bloc.

If Australians do not opt out of the centralised medical scheme by October 15, a record by default will created, stored and used.  This will mean that those in the healthcare provision business, be it pharmacists, nurses or podiatrists, not to mention a whole string of unknown providers, will have automatic access to the medical record without patient consent.  The notions of express and fully informed consent have been given a dramatic, contemptuous heave ho, with a focus on the patient’s volition to avoid the scheme altogether. The Australian government’s refusal to engage the public in any meaningful way, be it through a sustained advertising or information campaign, has been patchy, and, in some instances, entirely absent.

Such an approach flies in the face of such recommendations as those made by the UK Information Governance Review from 2013 acknowledging “an appropriate balance between the protection of the patient user’s information, and the use and sharing of such information to improve care”.  This balance was struck on principles derived in the 1997 Review of the Uses of Patient-Identifiable Information, chaired by Dame Fiona Caldicott.  While admitting that information governance might at stages have to give way to sharing confidential patient information for the sake of that patient’s welfare, the principles of data security remain fundamental.

A skirt through the My Health Record system yields the extent of its shabbiness, and the level of its aspiration.  The My Health Record privacy policy is hardly glowing, acknowledging the problems with having such a database in the first place. “In any online platform, including the My Health Record system, there are inherent risks when transmitting and storing personal information.” Then comes the mandatory, if hollow reassurance: “Despite this, we are committed to protecting your personal information, and ensuring its privacy, accuracy and security.”  A rich opportunity for the prying and the pilfering await.

Bangladesh: Police and government thugs attack protesting students and teachers

Rohantha De Silva

Bangladesh’s Awami League-led government has deployed police and young thugs to suppress students, unemployed graduates and teachers who are demanding changes to the civil service jobs quota system. The “quota reform movement” wants the 56 percent quota for civil jobs reduced to 10 percent.

More than half the 56 percent quota is reserved for the children and grandchildren of veterans of the 1971 fight against Pakistan. The remainder is reserved for disadvantaged groups, such as ethnic minorities, residents of socially deprived districts and physically challenged people.

Demonstrators also want the remaining civil service jobs awarded according to merit, the abolition of special exams for those on quotas and age-limit uniformity in government recruitment processes.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina initially ignored students’ demands, but when demonstrations spread across the country in April, she promised to abolish the quota system. Her government, however, has mobilised police to suppress the protests and encouraged the notoriously violent Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), the ruling party’s youth organisation, to attack students and teachers involved in the protests.

On July 15, at Dhaka University, BCL members assaulted hundreds of students as they demonstrated to demand a safe campus and the immediate release of detained leaders of the quota reform movement.

When Professor Fahmidul Haq, Associate Professor Abdur Razzaque Khan of the Mass Communication and Journalism faculty and Associate Professor Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan of International Relations intervened to protect the students, they were also assaulted. Photos published on social media show BCL members attacking female students and tearing their clothes, while male students were hit with poles and steel rods. X-rays published on social media show broken leg bones and serious spinal injuries.

Ain o Salish Kendra, a Bangladeshi human rights organisation, denounced the “the reckless behavior of BCL, as revealed in the media,” describing it as “highly unacceptable and condemnable.” It demanded immediate government action against the perpetrators. Other NGOs, including Gonoforum and Pahari Chhatra Parishad, also spoke out against the attacks.

Professor Fahmidul Haq contacted Dhaka University proctor Professor A.K.M. Golam to register his concern about the assaults. The proctor blamed him for joining the protest. “Those who were involved in the chaos, even if he or she was a teacher, would be punished as per the university rules,” Golam said.

Government authorities are continuing efforts to intimidate and frame-up quota reform movement members on bogus charges. Students say they have received death threats by phone and on social media.

On July 15, Dhaka metropolitan court magistrate Sadbir Chowdhury rejected a bail petition for quota reform leader Faruk Hassan. Police have filed frame-up charges against Hassan, a joint convener of the Bangladesh General Students Rights Protection Council, along with Jashim Akash and Moshiur Rahman, who have been charged for their involvement in April’s demonstrations.

Foreign Minister Mahmood Ali justified the BCL violence, declaring that the quota reform movement was a “ploy” by the opposition Bangladesh National Party and the Islamic fundamentalist Jammat-e-Islam to undermine “stability” and “progress.”

Public outrage over the thugs’ attacks, has grown, however. On July 18, over 70 academics and teachers from several universities, including Dhaka University, joined in solidarity with 300 students to protest.

Demonstrators denounced the BCL assaults and called for punishment of those responsible. They also demanded the release of the quota reform leaders.

On Tuesday this week, over 400 students and teachers demonstrated again over the same demands.

While job quotas are divisive and retrogressive, quota reform leaders are not challenging the capitalist system, which is the source of endemic joblessness and social misery. Instead, they are appealing to the ruling elite for a more “equitable” distribution of mass unemployment.

The student protests are driven by worsening joblessness. Although the economy recorded 7.28 percent growth for the 2017-18 financial year, this has failed to boost employment opportunities. According to trendingeconomics.com, the official unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent last year, unchanged from the previous year and almost double the rate of 2.2 percent in 1991.

With general elections due later this year, the government’s repression is an attempt to preempt an expansion of the protests into broader struggles involving the working class.

Australia: Nine-Fairfax Media merger threatens jobs

Oscar Grenfell 

Nine Entertainment and Fairfax Media, two of Australia’s largest media organisations, announced last week a $4 billion merger. The deal—being described as one of the most significant changes in Australian media over several decades—must still be ratified by shareholders and federal competition authorities.

The agreement foreshadows sweeping cuts to jobs and conditions at Fairfax. While it has been presented as a merger, many Fairfax staff members have noted that it is effectively a takeover, with the new entity set to drop the Fairfax name and adopt Nine’s branding.

The deal marks a new stage in a protracted restructuring of corporate media organisations, dictated by the financial elite. It follows years of cost-cutting at Fairfax, designed to make the company attractive to a potential buyer amid declining newspaper sales and increasing market pressures.

The proposed takeover has been facilitated by decades of legislative changes by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments, enabling unprecedented concentration of media ownership.

A Fairfax reporter told the WSWS that employees were only informed of the planned merger by email on July 26, at the same time it was publicly announced. He said the news had left Fairfax employees “in shock” and “upset” at not being consulted beforehand.

In comments to the media last week, Nine CEO Hugh Marks refused to rule out “consolidation” of editorial positions within the merged organisation, i.e., sweeping job cuts targeting journalists. He foreshadowed sackings of office workers and other staff, declaring that the agreement would facilitate the “de-duplication of back office functions.”

Marks and Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood both signalled that the deal would involve widespread cost-cutting, aimed at saving up to $50 million in two years. Marks stated that this was, “all about ensuring that this business has the resources, the revenue model and the revenue mix that go to be able to fund what needs to be funded because content ain’t cheap.”

Executives of both companies have indicated that the new entity will invest in digital platforms, such as Fairfax’s Domain real estate website, and the Stan streaming service, currently jointly owned by Nine and Fairfax, both of which are major sources of advertising revenue. The inevitable corollary will be cuts to print publications and investigative journalism that does not yield sufficient financial returns.

The Fairfax journalist who spoke to the WSWS said there were fears that Fairfax’s 160 regional newspapers “could just go” once the new entity was established. In many instances, they were the “only source of information” in regional and rural areas. They were already “operating on very tight budgets and probably wouldn’t offer the same scale of advertising” as larger newspapers in the company.

The journalist also noted that while the merged entity might retain Fairfax’s mastheads, including the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, for some time, “a future board may turn around and close them, especially if the newspapers become marginal and advertising revenue declines.”

In a sign of what is to come, the merger was preceded by an announcement this month that Fairfax and Murdoch-owned News Corp publications will begin sharing printing facilities. The agreement will result in the destruction of at least 100 printing jobs.

Fairfax is also negotiating a new enterprise agreement covering staff across the country. Management has reportedly pushed for cutbacks to leave allowances and payments, and marginal wage increases, as low as 2 percent per annum—well below the rising cost of living.

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), which covers media employees, issued toothless denunciations of the merger. At the same time, the union signalled it will help implement the cuts, calling only for them to be realised through “back office rationalisation” and the “trimming” of executive pay.

The MEAA has prepared the ground for the effective takeover by enforcing years of sackings and cuts to conditions.

In May 2017, the union shut down a seven-day strike of Fairfax employees called in opposition to the company’s announcement of 125 sackings. The MEAA subsequently facilitated the job destruction, which was followed by talks between Fairfax management and TPG, a private equity firm, for a takeover that did not eventuate.

The MEAA previously oversaw the destruction of 160 positions at Fairfax’s regional newspapers in 2015–16, and the shutdown of print facilities in 2014. It also imposed 80 editorial job cuts that year, following the gutting of 1,900 editorial and print positions in 2012, 90 jobs in 2011, and 500 editorial roles in 2008.

The record underscores that the defence of journalists’ and media workers’ jobs requires a complete break with the MEAA.

The union has sought to channel widespread anger over the sackings into support for Labor, a party of big business which has overseen attacks on jobs, wages and conditions, when in office at the state and federal levels.

The MEAA has claimed that the merger is solely the result of the Liberal-National Coalition government’s changes to media legislation last year. These amendments removed previous restrictions on any media company or individual owning two out of three media platforms in radio, print and television, across a single licensing area.

The changes, however, only deepened a protracted concentration of media ownership, presided over by Labor and Coalition governments alike. When Labor was in government in 2012, the Finkelstein inquiry found that “Australia’s newspaper industry is among the most concentrated in the developed world.”

A 2016 report by IBIS World, a market research firm, estimated that News Corp Australia, along with Fairfax Media, Seven West Media and APN News and Media, took more than 90 percent of total newspaper revenues over the previous financial year.

The MEAA has also sought to present Fairfax as a bastion of an independent press, contrasting it with Murdoch-owned publications.

In reality, Fairfax journalists are under ever-greater pressure to promote the line of the political establishment on every question. In the most recent example, Fairfax publications have played a central role in a McCarthyite campaign, alleging, without any evidence, a far-reaching Chinese government plot to dominate Australian politics, business and virtually every aspect of social life.

The media witch-hunt paved the way for draconian “foreign interference” laws, jointly pushed through federal parliament in June by the government and the Labor Party opposition. The legislation is aimed at creating the conditions to illegalise anti-war activities and organisations, and cracking down on whistleblowers and publications, such as WikiLeaks, that expose war crimes, diplomatic intrigues and government wrongdoing.

Spain’s conservative Popular Party shifts further to the right

Alejandro López

Pablo Casado was chosen as the new leader of the Popular Party (PP) in the party’s primaries. His election marks a return by the PP, Spain’s main opposition party, to its Francoite roots under conditions where all mainstream parties, including the ruling minority Socialist Party (PSOE) government and the pseudo-left Podemos, are rapidly turning to the right.

Casado is 37 and served as the party’s communications vice-secretary and was also chief of staff to the former prime minister José María Aznar. He took the leadership by defeating his rival, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, former deputy prime minister. Casado won the support of 57.2 percent of voters.

Casado is taking over from Mariano Rajoy, the former PP leader and prime minister who was recently ousted in a no-confidence vote in Congress by the PSOE, with the backing of Podemos and nationalist forces. Soon after, Rajoy resigned, and he refused to handpick his successor, the traditional way the Spanish right has selected its leaders. He also refused to back Santamaria, his deputy prime minister in government, wanting to maintain neutrality to avoid a split in the party.

In the past years, the PP’s support has plummeted to levels not seen since the 1980s, when the PP’s predecessor, Popular Alliance, was known as “the party of 25 percent” because of its electoral results. The PP has gone from nearly 8 million votes in June 2016 (33 percent of the votes and 137 seats) to 4.7 million votes, according to the calculations and polls by El Confidencial. In other words, the PP has lost around 3.2 million votes, or 40 percent of its electorate in two years. It means the PP would become the fourth parliamentary force.

Most of its traditional electorate has gone to the other major right-wing party, Citizens, or the far-right VOX. Both have emerged as the staunchest advocates of the “defence of Spain” against regionalists and nationalists, criticizing the former PP government under Rajoy for not carrying out more severe repression against the secessionist Catalan parties.

During the party’s primaries, while Santamaria represented the line of continuity with the previous PP government and Mariano Rajoy, Casado promised to make the PP return to its Francoite roots. He called for the need to “reconcile [the PP] with the history of the party,” a party founded in 1976 by seven former Francoite ministers during the transition from fascism to bourgeois democracy, and do it “without shame”.

His programme is a combination of ultra-Catholic demands, support for the dismantling of the welfare state and intensification of attacks on democratic rights.

In a direct appeal to the most right-wing Catholic religious bigotry, Casado advocates rolling back abortion rights 30 years to the 1985 law which made pregnancy termination practically illegal and calls for opposition to the new euthanasia law. Casado has also called for a struggle against “gender ideology” —a favourite term used by the Catholic Church and ultra-right—to mean democratic rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and women.

In education and healthcare, Casado advocates “freedom to choose.” He said that no “bureaucrat” should “tell” which hospital or what school to go to. “I want the freedom of choice,” he said during the campaign. These are code words for opening the education and healthcare sectors to the market for profiteering, in addition to slotting children into private and semi-private schools, most of which are controlled by the Catholic Church.

Casado’s contempt for the pioneering of free, tax-funded and public education and free public healthcare was expressed in his call to “reverse the heritage of socialist party governments” to prevent “society from radicalizing to the left.”

The PSOE was the main party to implement nationwide public healthcare and education in the 1980s, while combining it with deindustrialization, labour reforms, privatisations and free market policies. Casado’s words reflect unveiled preparations for a confrontation with the working class by eliminating the concessions the ruling class was forced to make after the revolutionary situation which erupted in the 1970s in the dying days of Francoism.

Casado also promises traditionally neo-liberal measures such as lowering taxes and personal income tax, abolishing inheritance taxes, and introducing new tax breaks for companies.

The new PP leader unveiled a programme of police-state measures under the pretext of defending the state against Catalan and Basque nationalists.

During the campaign, he indirectly accused Rajoy’s government of having mismanaged the situation in Catalonia and the secessionist referendum on independence last October, when the PP government tried and failed to crush the referendum, mounting a massive police crackdown on peaceful voters that left nearly 1,000 people injured.

For Casado, however, the police crackdown, the installation of an unelected government in Catalonia and the arrests of the main secessionist leaders under fraudulent charges of “rebellion” were not enough.

Casado wants to outlaw pro-independence parties altogether to avoid future breakaway referendums, strengthen the penal code with new laws against “improper sedition” and the “illegal calling of referendums,” and incorporate a 50-seat bonus to the winner of the elections—to prevent situations where minority governments must rely on nationalist forces to push legislation through. He has also called on the PSOE government to reimpose Article 155 to depose the democratically elected Catalan government.

During the Catalan crisis, Casado compared the future fate of former Catalan Premier Carles Puigdemont with that of Lluís Companys, president of the regional government of 1934 that declared independence. Exiled after the Spanish Civil War, Companys was captured by the Gestapo in Paris and handed over to the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, who had him executed by firing squad in 1940.

In Spanish politics, the whipping up of anti-Catalan and anti-Basque sentiment by political forces like the PP, Citizens and the Socialist Party has historically been tied up with the attempt by the ruling class to suppress class tensions by promoting Spanish nationalism and patriotism under conditions of growing social polarisation.

Casado is following a well-trodden path by the Spanish right, while attempting to outflank Citizens which has become the main party promoting Spanish chauvinism and anti-regionalist sentiment.

Something widely ignored in the media coverage of Casado’s election is his foreign policy programme. Casado wants Spain to become a great power once again because of “our historical role, our Atlantic link, our position in Latin America and the Mediterranean, our position as a non-permanent member in the Pacific Alliance and our vicinity with the African continent.” He added, “If there is isolationism, if there is protectionism, Spain has to return to being the center of action of the European Union, but also of the Atlantic Axis.”

Casado is also known for his pro-Trump statements, seeing the US administration as an opportunity for Spanish imperialism. Last year, Casado stated that Spain should replace the UK as the new “priority partner” of the US in the European Union following Brexit, when the UK officially leaves.

This turn to the right does not reflect any broad sentiment among the masses, especially in the case of the younger generation, which is characterized by secularism, a defence of public education and healthcare, hostility to US imperialism and broad opposition to Spanish militarism and attacks on democratic rights, and a defence of abortion, euthanasia and LGBT rights.

Rather, it reflects the bankrupt reaction of bourgeois and wealthy middle-class layers to the break-up of the world economy into competing trading blocs, to the ongoing disintegration of the nation-state system, along with increasing wars and social tensions. The fomenting of Spanish nationalism, chauvinism and Catalanophobia serves to prepare new wars and suppress the class struggle through police state methods.

Facebook deletes 87 accounts linked to Brazilian right as WhatsApp restricts messaging

Miguel Andrade

On July 25, Facebook announced it was deleting 87 accounts linked to the Brazilian far-right Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL - Free Brazil Movement) organization, due to violations of the platform’s “authenticity” rules, adding, in a remarkably blunt, dystopian language, that the spreading of “fake news” was not the central issue in the removal, but instead it was due to the existence of “a coordinated hidden network with the use of false accounts” used for “the goal of sowing divisions.”

Among the deleted accounts were those personally used by some of the organization’s most well-known leaders.

Facebook’s investigation of the accounts, which would have been analyzed by Mexican, US, Dutch and Indian experts, concluded that their goal was to “manipulate public debate,” through “non-authentic, coordinated behavior, in which multiple accounts work together to mislead people.”

The news came only five days after the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging app announced that, worldwide, it would cut the maximum number of recipients for forwarded messages from 250 to 20, under the pretext of limiting the spread of fake news after the Indian government alerted the company to a series of incidents of mass hysteria and lynchings supposedly coordinated with the use of the app.

Both measures are the most aggressive so far in a back-to-back campaign by the press and the government, first and foremost major conglomerates built with state support that used to exercise a monopoly over public discourse, such as Globo, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, helped by “experts” in academia, to promote the need for “gatekeepers” to control public debate due to the supposed backwardness of the Brazilian population, and the working class in particular.

According to a Reuters Institute survey from 2016, 72 percent of Brazilians get their news through social media, far outstripping television news.

These measures must be understood by the working class as a direct response to the widespread use of social media, principally WhatsApp, in the May-June truckers strike. Involving more than 500,000 truckers in opposition to fuel hikes imposed over the last two years, it was largely coordinated by WhatsApp and developed against the open hostility from the unions and the largest part of the pseudo-left.

The strike, which brought the country to a halt and had, even in the face of massive shortages, 87 percent support from the Brazilian population, highlighted the explosive political situation amid persistent economic crisis after an 8 percent GDP drop between 2015 and 2016. These conditions have led to the dismal 3 percent approval rating for the current administration of President Michel Temer, the most widely despised president during any democratic period in Brazil’s history.

Under such conditions, there are an ominous political calculations behind the supposed targeting of hate speech and the despicable far-right figures of the MBL who, after making populist appeals to bring down the government of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, have dedicated themselves to stoking the most backward forces. This has included gate-crashing exhibitions containing nudism in name of fighting pedophilia, propping up the “Escola Sem Partido” (No Parties in Schools) campaigns to persecute history, literature and arts teachers and professors all over the country over allegations of spreading “leftist” views and slandering the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco, who was executed by unknown assailants for her criticism of police violence.

The goal of this political operation by Facebook, in deep coordination with the state and US imperialism, is to erode democratic consciousness and legitimize police-state measures against social unrest and political opposition—i.e., the “sowing of divisions,” “manipulation of public debate,” “coordinated actions” and “non-authentic behavior” which doesn’t conform to the government’s view of legitimacy.

Amid a hopeless economic situation generating the highest levels of internecine warfare, the ruling class in Brazil is ever more rapidly preparing for a dictatorship. This has been evident from former Workers Party (PT) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s “war on drugs” to the brutal government repression of the 2013 demonstrations against the rising cost of living and the army’s operations in Rio’s favelas, all of which have been supported by both the PT and the former right-wing opposition parties. This has further extended from the ouster of Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budget manipulations, to the sting operation against Temer by the Federal Police in 2017 and the threats of a military coup on the eve of a Supreme Court ruling on Lula’s freedom in April.

Under the pretext of guaranteeing the “fairness” of the October general elections, on June 28, the Brazilian state, through its highest ranking official on the matter, Supreme Court Justice and Electoral Court President Luiz Fux, signed with Facebook and Google an empty and generalized “memorandum” on the spread of “fake news.” O Estado de S. Paulo reported a day later that the records of the six months of meetings between the state and the two companies, beginning last December, are classified. The action against the far right is the first shot across the bow.

The supposed struggle against “fake news” has also exposed the absence of any democratic constituency within—and the dismally low level of political culture among—the middle class layers obsessed with identity and lifestyle politics united around the pseudo-left PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) and much of the “alternative media,” including outlets such as Nexo, Agência Pública and Piauí magazine. With social media a primary source of information for Brazilians, it is ever more on the shoulders of the “alternative media” to give a left cover for the machinations of the ruling class, whose traditional outlets have been largely discredited in Brazil, as internationally.

These outlets had already, in early November, built a platform for Google’s and Facebook’s lies with the “i3 Journalism Festival,” which was predictably funded by the CIA front, the Ford Foundation. The festival, in which much was said, predictably, about “black,” “feminist” and “green” journalism, paved the way for the adherence of Piauí magazine to the Facebook “fact-checking” program designed to flag content not conforming to “authoritative sources”–in Facebook’s Orwellian newspeak, CIA mouthpieces such as the  New York Times and the  Washington Post.

Two months later, in his Nexo column of January 18, Denis Burgierman, also a writer for HBO Brazil’s “Greg News” comedy show, modeled on the conformist US “comic news” genre, offered a rationale for the adherence to the CIA and “democratic imperialism,” writing of Russia that “its agents are in power everywhere,” and “they share lies and cheat social media algorithms in favor of Putin’s global strategy,” concluding that “they won, even here.”

Facebook’s first notorious right-wing operation was its mid-June flagging as “fake” news the report by Brasil247 and other Workers Party mouthpieces that Pope Francis had sent the jailed former president Lula a rosary through a Vatican official, Juan Grabois.

Since the PT, which traces its origins in part to the Liberation Theology factions of the Catholic Church, considers the Dirty War Pope a great progressive, it hailed the report as proof of its thesis that Lula is a political prisoner, and the criminal charges against him are unrelated to the generalized corruption of bourgeois rule in Brazil.

Acting as mouthpieces for Brazil’s most right-wing layers, for whom the Pope’s demagogic relations with “social movements” is both implausible and unacceptable, and the charge of political motivations in Lula’s case intolerable, Piauí’s “fact-checking” branch, Lupa, flagged the news and prompted Facebook to threaten the Brasil247 and others with disciplinary action. A series of corrections of official statements by Vatican News later settled the matter, with the story that Grabois had asked the Pope for the rosary, a sufficiently ambiguous answer so as to feed the PT’s populist appeals and not compromise Vatican diplomacy.

Facebook’s announcement of the deletion of MBL’s accounts prompted both the Maoist-Stalinist Communist Party of Brazil and the Pabloite-Morenoite consortium of PSOL to fall into line with the intelligence agencies. Their respective presidential candidates, Manuela D’Ávila and Guilherme Boulos, both called for further state action to expose the “financing” of the accounts and called Facebook’s actions “belated.”

Their endorsement of Facebook’s actions—for violation of authenticity rules—is in essence an adoption of the CIA line of delegitimizing any recourse to anonymity in political discussions, a bedrock of oppositional politics in the face of repression, a policy that furthermore allows the far-right to demagogically pose as defenders of democratic rights.

Lafarge investigation exposes US-French collusion with ISIS in Syria

Francis Dubois

Investigations of Franco-Swiss cement and construction firm Lafarge on charges of “financing terrorism” over its ties to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militia are bringing to light the political criminality of the French ruling elite and NATO. French government and business circles financed and defended ISIS in a war for regime change targeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while denouncing it as terrorist to the population.

The 2015 terror attacks in Paris and similar terror attacks across Europe were thus prepared with the financial and political aid of powerful forces within the ruling class. Its policies of neo-colonialist militarism in the Middle East and deep austerity in Europe are overwhelmingly opposed by working people, so Paris covertly used ISIS to wage a dirty war in Syria and justify police state repression in France. If police did not arrest ISIS members traveling across Europe to wage terror attacks, it was because they enjoyed state protection as useful proxy forces for war in Syria.

French President Emmanuel Macron declared in 2017 that “my enemy is ISIS.” It is ever clearer, however, that officials at the highest summits of the state have made themselves guilty of collaboration with this enemy, which was in fact a tool of their filthy imperialist policy in Syria. The question is raised: what was the role of then-French President François Hollande, his adviser Emmanuel Macron, his defence minister (now foreign minister) Jean-Yves Le Drian, or of Hollande’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius?

Investigations had already established in 2017 that Lafarge, a multibillion-dollar transnational, had made financial deals with terrorist groups including ISIS and the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front in 2012–2014, handing $15 million to ISIS in “donations,” “taxes” and “commissions.” Lafarge also brought petrochemicals from ISIS and raw materials for cement from ISIS-held mines.

Eight top Lafarge executives have been charged and two of its directors have resigned. Over the last month, the investigation has been widened to include not only individual executives but the transnational as a whole. Charges of “complicity in crimes against humanity” have been added to the charges of financing terrorism.

To defend themselves, Lafarge executives are now laying blame for this policy on state officials they worked with. Many such statements have now been corroborated. Lafarge was constantly in touch with French intelligence officials in Syria and worked with them so closely that it seems impossible to delineate their cement-making from their intelligence activities.

Lafarge security chief Jean-Claude Veillard, who testified most recently in April 2018, said Lafarge security staff provided information that they sent en bloc to different intelligence agencies. At this time, they were also in touch with Hollande’s military liaison staff. Asked by investigating magistrates whether Lafarge security staff “had to meet leaders of armed groups,” Veillard replied, “Their main mission was to get intelligence. If such meetings could help them to obtain information, they could do it.”

Apparently, various French intelligence services continued to closely follow events at the factory after it was taken over by ISIS on September 19, 2014. Veillard even says that ISIS proposed through an intermediary to reopen the factory under ISIS control.

In the summer of 2013, moreover, as the Hollande administration was preparing a military strike on Syria with the Obama administration, Paris was in continuous contact with Washington.

According to Le Monde, “Laurent Fabius had multiple exchanges with his US counterpart, John Kerry, to set up a military intervention against Damascus.” The same day after ISIS seized the Lafarge factory, Lafarge executives Christian Herrault and Jean-Claude Veillard went to the foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay and asked them to contact Washington to ensure the factory was not bombed by the US Air Force.

Speaking as a witness in the inquiry, Hollande’s foreign minister in 2012–2016, Laurent Fabius, said he had not received any information on the operations of Lafarge—a multibillion-euro firm listed on the CAC-40 index of France’s 40 largest firms—in Syria while he was in office.

On July 20, he told investigating magistrates that he had never “seen an issue concerning Lafarge raised, I am categorically sure of that.” He insisted, “If the question is to determine whether or not I knew that there was a Lafarge factory in Syria, I have no precise memories.”

These statements of Fabius have no credibility whatsoever. Already in 2014, two years before he left the foreign ministry, the press was reporting on Lafarge’s operations in Syria. It is not credible to claim that the foreign minister was unaware of the existence of this factory that was at the heart of US-French intelligence cooperation in Syria, which was a subject of communications between Paris and Washington at the highest levels.

If Fabius claims not to have heard anything about it, moreover, it simply raises the question: Who were the top officials who in fact did know something about Lafarge’s operations in Syria? What did Hollande, Macron, Le Drian or other top ministers and advisers know?

Investigators are also examining another devastating aspect of the case: the sale of cement to ISIS. Three months after ISIS seized the factory, Lafarge chiefs were still apparently discussing the prospect of selling cement to the terrorist group.

The lawyer of Sherpa, the NGO that brought the complaint against Lafarge, asked: “Does this mean that in France, a foreign minister was voluntarily kept in the dark about a crucial affair like a French corporation’s decision to stay in a war-torn country beset by terrorism, which meant it would have no other choice than to finance ISIS in order to continue its business operations?”

All available information points to official and corporate complicity with groups, like Al Qaeda and ISIS, whose members were preparing terrorist attacks in France and across Europe. The Kouachi brothers, members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who organized the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, had their four-year surveillance lifted in the summer of 2014. The ISIS members who led the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris were allowed to freely travel to and from Europe and prepare their attacks, even though they were known to the state.

It is impossible to understand these developments outside of the broader strategic objectives of the PS government: regime change in Syria at all costs and the imposition of bitterly unpopular austerity measures inside France itself.

In the summer of 2013, the military attack on Assad that Hollande was plotting with Washington did not take place, as London and Washington backed down at the last minute. The two best organized enemies of Assad on the ground were Al Nusra and ISIS, which were occupying a large portion of the country, financed from Qatar and Saudi Arabia with US logistical support.

While the PS claimed to the French people it was backing “democratic forces” struggling against “a dictator,” it was in fact waging a neo-colonial war backing spies and terrorists in a violent attempt at regime change targeting a former French colony.

The details emerging in the Lafarge investigation also invalidate the reasons invoked for suspending democratic rights under the November 2015 state of emergency, transformed into the so-called anti-terrorist law by Macron. The state of emergency served to establish the structure and practices of a police state and fight workers’ opposition to the austerity policies of Hollande. Now, this continues in the form of Macron’s labour decrees, moves to privatise the railways and to slash public health care, pensions, unemployment insurance and other essential social services.

This assault on basic social and democratic rights is led by government officials who oversee the organization, behind the backs of the people, of entirely criminal operations whose murderous consequences they used to justify repressing legitimate working-class opposition.