Argentina’s Macri responds to fourth general strike with yet another IMF package

Andrea Lobo

On Tuesday, all the major cities of Argentina came to a virtual standstill during the fourth general strike against the right-wing government of President Mauricio Macri, as the country’s economy sinks deeper into recession and an inflationary spiral.

During the last three years, millions of Argentines have fallen into unemployment and ever more desperate economic conditions, with one-third of the population and almost two-thirds of children living under the official poverty line, according to the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA). Sixty-two percent of households suffer from the lack of at least one basic human need, whether it is food, health care, education, utilities, housing or access to information.

The government expects inflation to reach 42 percent this year and the economy to contract 2.4 percent, but it has imposed wage increase limits of 25-28 percent, which the trade unions have enforced.

On Wednesday, Macri signed a new $7.1 billion loan with the International Monetary Fund, promising draconian cuts to bring the public deficit to zero. This adds to a series of desperate measures, including a previous $50 billion IMF loan and the hiking of interest rates to 60 percent, with the aim of curbing capital flight.

Enormous social anger was reflected in the strike, which by all accounts had the highest participation yet and brought all public transport, including airports, ports and trucks, vast sectors of private industry and services, along with schools, hospitals, and other services to a halt on Tuesday. Several sectors extended the strike into Wednesday.

Militant student movements have also sprung up in protest against the austerity policies and threats of privatization. Several faculties in the University of Córdoba and University of Buenos Aires, along with high schools in major cities, have seen students strike and carry out occupations of the facilities this month.

Macri’s approval rating, moreover, has fallen from over 50 percent throughout 2017 to 36 percent last month.

The trade union bureaucracies, most of which had agreed to a truce with Macri during the beginning of his term, are containing social anger by calling one-day strikes and walkouts that are mostly sectoral or regional.

The main faction of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), led by Héctor Daer, continues to support the government, but has threatened further demonstrations against the IMF deal.

Other dissident unions, including the two branches of the Argentine Workers Confederation (CTA) and the Truckers union under Hugo Moyano have begun to consolidate a new front, re-branded last week as the Trade-Union Front for a National Model. For their part, they have threatened “a thousand marches and strikes” to force the ruling Cambiemos coalition to hand power to the Peronist sectors still around the ex-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who began the ongoing austerity drive back in 2014.

During the strike, Macri was in the United States talking to potential investors and negotiating the latest IMF disbursement in the context of the UN General Assembly.

Tuesday night, the Washington-based think tank, the Atlantic Council, handed Macri the “Global Citizen Award 2018.” Far from an honor, the recognition is a warning to Argentine workers and youth opposing Macri’s right-wing policies. The Atlantic Council has provided a platform for strategizing the most vicious war crimes and neocolonial intrigues of US imperialism, and it is currently one of the chief agencies coordinating globally the online censorship of left-wing, socialist and anti-war views.

This gesture is only the latest of a series of steps taken by the US ruling elite to prop up the Macri government. On top of the IMF loan, favorable credit scores by Wall Street and smaller loans from the World Bank, Donald Trump himself has expressed support for Macri’s “engagement.” Accepting the prize, Macri thanked “the level of support that Argentines have received from the world, and especially from the United States.”

The EU European Bank of Investments has also endorsed Macri’s policies and offered special credits.

Despite this political backing and the enormous potential payouts, investors remain skeptical. Argentine newspapers worriedly reproduced a front-page piece in Wednesday’s printed edition of the Financial Times titled “Argentina crisis deepens as bank chief quits after 3 months in post” and warning about the strike and opposition to the “drastic” austerity plans.

This happened two days after Macri himself visited the New York offices of the UK-based newspaper, where he reportedly argued that he had “great popular support.”

Argentina is proving to be one of the weakest links of the international economy, currently the hardest hit by a combination of factors: higher international interest rates, the US trade war against China, the slowdown of the Chinese economy, and higher oil prices, which are expected to jump dramatically from US sanctions against Iran next month. There is also the continued economic crisis in Brazil, Argentina’s main trade partner.

The strong US institutional backing is largely driven by fear of the possible chain reaction and international political and social consequences of a debt default and economic free fall in Argentina.

At the same time, as Trump’s “America First” economic nationalism accelerates the shattering of the global economy into rival spheres of trade, currencies, and military alliances, Washington is seeking to consolidate its control over Latin America, particularly against China’s growing trade ties and massive loans. Speaking to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his government’s intentions to defend US hegemony globally through economic and military means, including against “the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers” into the Western Hemisphere.

The “resignation” of Central Bank chief Luis Caputo reveals some of the deep political and economic contradictions faced by Argentina. Reports indicate that Caputo, a personal friend of Macri, was virtually thrown out by the IMF because the agency opposed his constant selling of foreign reserves, including from the fresh IMF loans, to keep the peso somewhat afloat.

The appointment as Caputo’s replacement at the Central Bank of Guido Sandleris, who has worked at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, the Inter-American Development Bank and the IMF, demonstrates that Argentina’s economy is increasingly being administrated like the Wall Street-appointed fiscal board that virtually rules Puerto Rico.

From the direct price controls under the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner administration (2007-2015), to Caputo’s sales of foreign reserves, and now to Sandleris—who promises “to leave behind exchange-rate interventions”—Wall Street is ordering an even looser leash to an increasingly unwieldy exchange rate and inflation, in turn allowing for faster capital outflows.

Given the deepening crisis, including the exacerbating influence of the IMF’s policies, the entire house of cards rests on one factor. Earlier this month Michael Camilleri, former Obama-era National Security Council chief for Andean Affairs, told Infobae: “Beyond the specific details of the talks with the IMF, the biggest question at hand is whether president Macri will keep his public support and political space necessary to execute the adjustment plan”—i.e., suppressing political opposition by any means.

The present crisis is shaped by Argentina’s volatile history. During the 1960s, the Onganía military dictatorship froze wages and imposed sharp austerity in response to an incipient downturn in the global economy and a growing debt, which had been largely used to finance a rapid industrialization and growth. Massive social upheavals toward the end of the decade brought down Onganía and four other de facto heads of state.

The 1973 election of Juan Domingo and Isabel Perón led to a short-lived shift back to infrastructure and social spending only allowed by a still thriving industrial export sector aided by a depreciated currency, but that was quickly undermined by the oil crisis that same year.

Throughout the previous decade, the Stalinist, Social-Democratic, Castroite and Pabloite leaderships of the workers movement derailed the increasingly favorable conditions nationally and internationally for proletarian revolution by subordinating radicalized workers and youth behind petty-bourgeois and suicidal guerrilla movements or the bourgeois-nationalist Peronist parties and trade unions.

The Peronist government quickly accelerated spending cuts and political repression until the March 1976 coup that installed a US-backed military dictatorship, which subsequently killed, disappeared and tortured tens of thousands of workers and youth.

The international and national economic conditions are even less forgiving today. Despite the sharp devaluation of the peso, which should make exports more “competitive,” the commercial balance has dropped for 20 months straight and industrial production fell 8.1 percent during the first six months of 2018, compared to the same period last year.

Regardless of whether Macri survives his term, or if Peronism or some “left” populist coalition comes to power, if workers and youth don’t develop an independent and internationalist revolutionary movement against imperialism and the entire capitalist setup in Argentina, including its corporatist trade unions, it will face a future of endless poverty, war, police-military dictatorship and fascism.

Congress readies band-aid measure for opioid crisis

Tom Eley

Late Tuesday congressional Democrats and Republicans approved compromise legislation that purports to address the opioid crisis, which claimed more than 70,000 lives last year. The House might approve the measure this week. Assuming Senate approval, it could be signed into law by President Donald Trump as early as next week.

The 653-page bill, reconciled from two previously-adopted Senate and House bills, is primarily focused on law enforcement. One measure contained in the legislation targets the importation of synthetic fentanyl and other illegal opioids through the mails. It will require anyone sending a package to the United States to provide their own name and address and to describe the package’s contents. If this is not done, the parcel could be detained or destroyed.

It also creates provisions for monitoring the dispensation of prescriptions and puts in place packaging rules designed to limit prescription abuse.

The bill would allow physicians’ assistants and certain categories of nurses to prescribe buprenorphine, an anti-addiction medication that, currently, only 5 percent of physicians nationwide can prescribe. It provides a modest amount of temporary funding for health experts to research less addictive forms of pain relief.

However, the most immediate factor driving the spike in drug overdose deaths—which, according to the CDC, increased last year to 72,000, most of which were caused by opioids—is a lack of both in-patient and out-patient treatment. The bill’s only provision in this regard is a measure that lifts a rule blocking Medicaid reimbursements for some forms of inpatient treatment at mental health care facilities with more than 16 beds.

Funding in the bill can only be called derisory, given the dimensions of the epidemic. Its precise cost is not clear, but one early version would have earmarked about $8 billion over five years, or roughly $1.6 billion per year—a figure, that were it translated into personal wealth, would not make the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. It would also be less by a factor of about 600 than the amount doled out to the American military—a figure expected to reach $1 trillion in the coming years—which politicians of both parties endlessly justify by the claim that it “protects American lives.” In fact, while the opioid crisis last year killed more Americans than died in the entire Vietnam War, the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian governments—the primary targets of the US military build-up—have not killed a single American in decades.

Advocates roundly criticized the bill for not providing adequate funding. “Without real money, it’s just lip service,” said John Rosenthal of the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery. “This disease has been raging for more than a decade without any serious federal response. Now they’re playing catch-up.”

Chuck Ingoglia of the National Council for Behavioral Health told Politico that the level of funding does not meet the dimensions of the crisis. “The data keeps showing us we have more and more people dying, so what’s the reluctance to actually spend money and actually do something?” he asked.

In general the media has hailed the bill as an example of “bi-partisan cooperation.” However, it has also been admitted in some quarters that the legislation is largely for public consumption prior to the upcoming November elections.

In the words of the Washington Post online health industry blog, “Regardless of the disagreement over the bill’s effectiveness, it’s really come down to a question of optics. The fact that Congress rushed to finish this work before the midterms shows how eager lawmakers on both sides are to be able to go home with this victory in their back pockets.”

As it worked its way through Congress the bill very nearly added a $4 billion windfall for the giant pharmaceutical corporations in the form of relief from a budget law passed last February that required them to give elderly Medicare recipients a discount on expensive prescription drugs that fall in the Medicare Part D “doughnut hole.” However, lobbyists for the pharmaceuticals were opposed by those representing the major health insurance corporations, as well as the American Hospital Association, and the measure was excluded by a narrow margin.

This is the second piece of legislation addressing the opioid epidemic in as many years. The crisis has grown dramatically worse since 2016, when President Barack Obama signed into law the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which allotted paltry grants to states for rehabilitation and prevention.

US wars claim soaring civilian casualties in Yemen and Afghanistan

Bill Van Auken

Two reports issued in recent days have provided a searing indictment of the US war in Afghanistan and the US-backed and Saudi-led assault on Yemen. In both countries, civilian casualties are soaring, the vast majority of them caused by US bombs and missiles dropped upon defenseless populations.

Both reports were issued in the midst of the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, where Trump and his aides set out to bully the entire population of the planet.

In his speech to the UN, Trump indicted Iran for sowing “chaos, death, and destruction” in the Middle East, while portraying Washington as a force for “peace and stability” in the region. The facts, however, show that the greatest force for death, terror and destruction remains US imperialism, whose multiple wars have claimed well over a million lives over the past 17 years.

Trump also absurdly credited the UAE and Saudi Arabia with “pursuing multiple avenues to ending Yemen’s horrible, horrific civil war,” even as they continued to bombard the country, murdering hundreds of civilians.

A report issued by the Armed Location and Event Data Project (ALEDP) this week has revealed that the number of civilians slaughtered in Yemen has soared by 164 percent since June, when the Saudi-led coalition launched its brutal siege against the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah.

The average monthly death toll has risen to 116 since the onset of the siege. August was the bloodiest month, so far, with the International Rescue Committee reporting that nearly 500 people were killed over the course of just nine days.

The International Rescue Committee issued a report based on the ALEDP’s findings pointing out that “since 2015, the [US-backed] coalition has undertaken 18,000 airstrikes–one every 99 minutes–one third of which have hit non-military targets.” These strikes are responsible for the great majority of the deaths of more than 16,000 civilians since the war began. Tens of thousands more have died from disease and hunger, and an estimated 8.4 million Yemenis are confronting famine.

Washington gave the greenlight for the siege of Hodeidah, which is aimed at cutting off the lifeline for food, medicine and other basic supplies to the majority of the population that lives in areas of the country controlled by the Houthi rebel movement that overthrew the US and Saudi-backed puppet regime of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2014.

The United Nations has warned that the siege could claims as many as a quarter of a million lives outright and push millions more over the brink of starvation.

The report also comes just weeks after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo formally certified to Congress that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking steps to alleviate Yemen’s humanitarian crisis and protect civilian lives. The certification, required under a toothless amendment attached to the US military spending bill, was required as a condition for continuing the midair refueling that US Air Force tanker planes provide for Saudi warplanes so that they can conduct their round-the-clock bombing of Yemen’s population.

The refueling operation is only one of the means by which Washington makes possible the Saudi-led siege of Yemen. The Pentagon provides critical intelligence and targeting assistance from a joint command center in Riyadh and has deployed US warships that back up the Saudi-UAE blockade of the starving country. It also, of course, provides tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry being used to attack Yemen.

Pompeo’s cynical certification came in the wake of a pair of bloody massacres in August in which Saudi jets struck a school bus in a crowded market area, killing 51 people including 40 children, as well a truck packed with refugees fleeing the siege of Hodeidah, killing four women and 22 children.

The Wall Street Journal last week published a report based upon a leaked classified State Department memo, revealing that Pompeo brushed aside concerns expressed by department officials over the bloodbath unfolding in Yemen based upon a warning from his legislative affairs aides that failure to provide the human rights certification “will negatively impact pending arms transfers” and “may also negatively impact future foreign military sales and direct commercial sales to the region.”

Of particular concern was a deal struck by Raytheon Co. to sell more than $2 billion worth of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It was a Raytheon missile that killed the bus full of school children last month

Nearly half of arms sales by the US–the greatest weapons exporter in the world–now go to the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia its largest customer, accounting for 18 percent of sales. Total weapons exports set a new record in fiscal 2017, rising to $75.9 billion.

While the profit interests of US arms manufacturers are no doubt a critical concern, Washington, under both the Obama and the Trump administrations, has supported the war on Yemen based upon the pursuit of definite geostrategic interests in curbing Iranian influence in the region and pursuing regime change in Tehran.

This policy of reckless aggression has intensified under the Trump administration, which abrogated the international nuclear agreement with Tehran and has imposed punishing economic sanctions that are tantamount to an act of war.

Both Washington and Riyadh see the survival of any regime in Yemen that is not under their thumb as an unacceptable challenge to their dominance of the region and the curtailment of Iran. Both US and Saudi authorities have sought to cast the Houthi rebels that overthrew the US, Saudi puppet regime of President Hadi as Iranian “proxies,” while claiming, without any evidence, that Tehran is supplying them with arms.

Meanwhile, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has reported a 52 percent increase in civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes by US warplanes and the US-controlled Afghan air force in the first six months of this year. The number of bombs dropped by the US Air Force has nearly doubled over this period, to nearly 3,000.

The escalation of the 17-year-old US war in Afghanistan claimed the lives of 1,600 civilians between January and June–according to the UN’s undoubtedly low count–and forced another 160,000 to flee their homes.

The UNAMA report found tragic fresh confirmation after it was issued with a pair of US bombings that claimed the lives of at least 25 Afghan civilians. The agency reported on Wednesday that 12 people, 10 children and two women, were killed in a bombing in the central province of Maidan Wardak late on Monday. This followed an airstrike on Saturday that demolished the house of a teacher in the eastern province of Tagab, killing 13 civilians, most of them women and children.

On Wednesday, angry residents of the Chardara district of Kunduz Province carried the bodies of the victims of yet another airstrike that killed a 45-year-old woman and two teenage girls into the provincial capital, chanting slogans against the government and the US occupation forces.

“They martyred three women. My son, who is a university student in economics faculty, and my daughter, Atifa, are wounded—they are in a serious condition in hospital currently,” Mohammed, a teacher in the village school, told the New York Times. “They destroyed my life.”

In Afghanistan, as in Yemen, US imperialism is pursuing definite geostrategic interests. The war begun 17 years ago as a supposed response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington has from its outset been directed at establishing a US beachhead in Central Asia, near the strategic oil fields of the Caspian Basin and on the border of China. Recent attempts by Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan to jointly broker a peace process in Afghanistan have only fueled Washington’s military violence in the country.

The horrific war crimes in both Yemen and Afghanistan and the prospect of millions of Yemenis dying of starvation as a result of US-backed military operations have received virtually no coverage in the US media. Neither are they an issue in the upcoming midterm elections, in which the Democrats are running as no less a war party than the Republicans, advancing a field of ex-CIA and military candidates and demanding a harder line against Russia.

To press its campaign against Iran, Russia and China, US imperialism is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions and is preparing for far bloodier wars. This eruption of US and world imperialism, threatening the destruction of humanity, can be prevented only by the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class to put an end to capitalism.

Krypto Labs EdTech Innovation Start-up Contest 2018 for Projects in Edtech (US$150,000 Prize)

Application Deadline: 14^th October, 2018.

Eligible Countries: All

To be taken at (country): Krypto Labs Abu Dhabi, UAE

About the Award: Krypto Labs EdTech 2018 is open to both individual innovators and team-based projects or companies from anywhere in the world (subject to certain restrictions – see our terms for further details).
We are interested in applications across different spheres including K-12, High-ed, Vocational, Lifelong Learning, among others. Applications should impact direct or indirect learners. The contest will be open to individuals, teams, university students and companies from around the world.

Categories: 

1. Curriculum Applications
2. Universal Access to Classrooms
3. Data Applications
4. Lifelong Learning Applications
5. Supplemental Applications
6. Behavioural Analytics Applications

Type: Contest

Eligibility: The project must be centred around education technology and must leverage the technology to meet the following.

• It must be categorised as part of the EdTech industry.
• It must have Artificial Intelligence on the forefront or as part of the application.
• Fall within on elf the listed categories.
• It should impact learning or enable better management of the education process.
• It can disrupt or supplement current education settings or ecosystems.
• It must be for-profit.
• It must have commercial applications.
• It must be inventive, innovative or disruptive.
• The business proposal must be original work and applicants must hold all applicable rights.
• It must be submitted in English.
• A team of up to three people, or the individual representing the idea or start–up, must be available to pitch the project in person on December 12, 2018 at Krypto Labs Abu Dhabi.

Selection: Submissions will be reviewed by Krypto Labs board of experts, who will select a maximum of 20 shortlisted entries by November 1^st, 2018. From these shortlisted businesses, a jury of global experts in Education technology will select six finalists who will be invited to pitch to EdTech 2018 jury members on the final day event, which will take place in Abu Dhabi on December 12^th, 2018.

Value of Award: EdTech 2018 Entrepreneur Hero (winner of the contest) will receive US$150,000. EdTech 2018 category star (winner of each of the 6 categories) will each receive US$20,000.
All 6 Semifinalist Will Receive:

• An opportunity to grow their business networks through Krypto Labs
• Increased visibility for their business
• A round-trip flight for up to 2 team members from home country to Abu Dhabi

How to Apply: To enter, team-based start-ups, projects, or companies must select one person to submit the application and to serve as the team’s representative throughout the competition.

Apply Now

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

The Rise of the Intellectual Pornstar

Camilo Gómez

The recent book Philosophy, Pussycats and Porn by the pornstar known as “Stoya” certainly isn’t the first someone in the porn industry has penned. Instead, this new collection of essays that discusses different topics from technology to religious iconography, is just the latest product from a new generation of porn performers taking an intellectual stand on social issues. They’re filling a niche that, in many ways, has been created by modern capitalism—an economic system that robustly supports human desire. In a way, these intellectual porn stars have turned into the avant-garde academics in this field, philosophers of the flesh and some of society’s most serious thinkers on human sexuality.

Porn is now more mainstream than it has ever been. Pornstars appear everywhere from blockbuster TV shows like Game of Thrones to political podcasts. But the industry’s unique complexity breeds. Of course, the porn industry remains a contradictory place where feminism and sexism intermingle and the line between public and private is constantly erased. Yet it’s precisely this complexity that has empowered these pornstars to become intellectuals, who help us all to understand the nuanced world in which they live.

Award-winning, U.S.-based Australian pornstar Angela White is known for her advocacy of women’s rights and body positivity. She consistently pushes for a culture that celebrates diversity in both bodies and genders. Conner Habib, an American gay pornstar of Middle Eastern and Irish descent, was a college lecturer of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before he began shooting porn scenes. Now he’s also known for his writing and his thought-provoking podcast “Against Everyone with Conner Habib,” in which he interviews guests about different issues and articulates his own thoughtful views on the intersection of philosophy, sex, and anthroposophy.

And this isn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. In Europe, similar characters are appearing. Valentina Nappi in Italy and Amarna Miller of Spain are both porn stars who attended art school and grew up in countries where the Catholic Church held a firm grip on the social and political life. Yet these women have boldly voiced a feminist and hedonistic worldview, pushing the boundary of public opinion.

In the Trump era, porn’s political connotations are particularly important—and ironic. Despite the 2016 GOP resolution dubbing porn a “public health crisis,” Republican president Donald Trump is accused of having had an affair with pornstar Stormy Daniels. Many conservatives have spoken critically of Daniels—former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani has mocked her job and her looks. Despite the attacks, Stormy has been able to capitalize on her moment in the sun, running a strip club tour and releasing a book about the affair. Unlike many Trump critics, she hasn’t been silenced by the president or his loyalists. Indeed, she has persisted with her version of the story, disallowing anyone from shaming her and transforming herself into a feminist hero of sorts.

That isn’t to say the porn industry is a beacon of morality in the fallen world. In spite of its status as a pioneer in the world of social change, there remain issues stemming from the #MeToo movement as stories of sexual abuse inside the industry start to emerge. Reports of racism in the industry, too, have cropped up, and performers, on the whole, are making less than they have at any prior time. Indeed, there have even been some efforts to unionize the adult entertainment industry in order to change this reality.

Porn, of course, is always a complex issue—one that has generally been ignored in academia, with few exceptions. This seems neglectful since porn is often at the forefront of significant social change. Recently, it has embraced body positivity and the sexual empowerment of mature women. But historically, the industry has been busy depicting interracial, gay and trans relationships that, for a long time, weren’t featured in more mainstream media.

The porn industry used to thrive only in society’s marginal areas, but it has successfully managed to develop into a billion-dollar business. Now, the porn has the room to reinvent itself every day while poking fun at the deepest taboos of society. It can laugh at both presidential candidates and social activists, comment on the social problems of today and push for reforms in areas that other industries are scared to. After all, there is simply a market for everything.

Illegal US Nuclear Weapons Handouts

John LaForge

The US military practice of placing nuclear weapons in five other countries (no other nuclear power does this) is a legal and political embarrassment for US diplomacy. That’s why all the governments involved refuse to “confirm or deny” the practice of “nuclear sharing” or the locations of the B61 free-fall gravity bombs in question.

Expert analysts and observers agree that the United States currently deploys 150-to-180 of these nuclear weapons at bases in Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Turkey and Belgium. The authors of the January 2018 report “Building a Safe, Secure, and Credible NATO Nuclear Posture” take for granted the open secret that nuclear sharing is ongoing even though all six countries are signatory parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

In a paper for the journal Science for Democratic Action, German weapons expert Otfried Nassauer, director of Berlin’s Information Center for Transatlantic Security, concluded, “NATO’s program of ‘nuclear sharing’ with five European countries probably violates Articles I and II of the Treaty.”

Article I prohibits nuclear weapon states that are parties to the NPT from sharing their weapons. It says: “Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly….” Article II, the corollary commitment, states says: “Each non-nuclear weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly … or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices….”

What nuclear sharing means in practice

The five NATO countries currently hosting US H-bombs on their air bases are officially “non-nuclear weapons states.” But as Nassauer reports, “Under NATO nuclear sharing in times of war, the US would hand control of these nuclear weapons over to the non-nuclear weapon states’ pilots for use with aircraft from non-nuclear weapon states. Once the bomb is loaded aboard, once the correct Permissive Action Link code has been entered by the US soldiers guarding the weapons, and once the aircraft begins its mission, control over the respective weapon(s) has been transferred. That is the operational, technical part of what is called ‘nuclear sharing.’”

This flaunting of the NPT is what peace activists on both sides of the Atlantic refer to when calling the US bombs in Europe “illegal.” Nassauer notes, “The pilots for these aircraft are provided with training specific to use nuclear weapons. The air force units to which these pilots and aircraft belong have the capability to play a part in NATO nuclear planning, including assigning a target, selecting the yield of the warhead for the target, and planning a specific mission for the use of the bombs.”

“NATO nuclear sharing,” Nassauer writes, “was described in 1964 by one member of the US National Security Council … as meaning that ‘the non-nuclear NATO-partners in effect become nuclear powers in time of war.’ The concern is that, at the moment the aircraft loaded with the bomb is on the runway ready to start, the control of the weapon is turned over from the US, a nuclear weapon state, to non-nuclear weapon states. … To my understanding, this is in violation of the spirit if not the text of Articles I and II of the NPT.”

How Do the US and its Allies Explain their Lawlessness?

An undated, 1960s-era letter from then-US Secretary of State Rusk explained the US ‘interpretation’ of the NPT. The pretext for ignoring the treaty’s plain language, the Rusk letter “argues that the NPT does not specify what is allowed, but only what is forbidden. In this view, everything that is not forbidden by the NPT is allowed,” Nassaure explained.

In its most absurd section, Rusk simply denies the treaty’s obvious purpose and intent. “Since the treaty doesn’t explicitly talk about the deployment of nuclear warheads in countries that are non-nuclear weapon states,” Nassaure writes, “such deployments are considered legal under the NPT.”

It is so easy to show that the United States and its nuclear sharing partners are in violation of the NPT, the governments involved work hard pretending there are nothing to worry about, no lawbreaking underway, no reason to demand answers. This is why so many activists across Europe have become nonviolently disobedient at the air bases involved.

The transparent unlawfulness of NATO’s nuclear war planning is also the reason why prosecutors in Germany don’t dare bring serious charges against civil resisters; even those who have cut fences and occupied hot weapons bunkers in broad daylight. Some Air Force witness might testify at trial that US nuclear weapons are on base.

Facebook’s New Propaganda Partners

Alan MacLeod

Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).

Reuters (9/19/18) described two branches of the National Endowment for Democracy, set up by the Reagan administration during the Cold War to promote US foreign policy objectives, as “two US nonprofits.”

In a previous FAIR article (8/22/18), I noted that the “fake news” issue was being used as a pretext to attack the left and progressive news sites. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced traffic significantly for progressive outlets like Common Dreams (5/3/18), while the pages of Venezuelan government–backed TeleSur English and the independent Venezuelanalysis were shut down without warning, and only reinstated after a public outcry.

The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey (Jacobin, 3/7/18). That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.

Facebook’s collaboration with the NED organizations is particularly troubling, as both have aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas. The NDI undermined the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and continues to do so to this day, while the IRI claimed a key role in the 2002 coup against leftist President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, announcing that it had served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…. We stand ready to continue our partnership with the courageous Venezuelan people.

The Reuters report (9/19/18) mentioned that Facebook was anxious to better curate what Brazilians saw on their feeds in the run-up to their presidential elections, which pits far-right Jair Bolsonaro against leftist Fernando Haddad. The US government has a long history of undermining democracy in Brazil, from supporting a coup in 1964 against the progressive Goulart administration to continually spying on leftist President Dilma Rousseff (BBC, 7/4/15) in the run-up to the parliamentary coup against her in 2016 (CounterSpin, 6/2/17).

Glenn Greenwald (Intercept, 12/30/17) reported that “Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials.”

Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept(12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.

Progressives should be deeply skeptical that these moves have anything to do with their stated objective of promoting democracy. Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebook headquarters for discussions with US companies about how it could use the platform for recruitment and micro-targeting in the 2017 elections. AfD tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.

Public trust in government is at 18 percent—an all-time low (Pew, 12/14/17). There is similar mistrust of Facebook, with only 20 percent of Americans agreeing social media sites do a good job separating fact from fiction. And yet, worldwide, Facebook is a crucial news source. Fifty-two percent of Brazilians, 61 percent of Mexicans, and 51 percent of Italians and Turks use the platform for news; 39 percent of the US gets their news from the site.

This means that, despite the fact that even its own public mistrusts it, the US government has effectively become the arbiter of what the world sees and hears, with the ability to marginalize or simply delete news from organizations or countries that do not share its opinions. This power could be used at sensitive times, like elections. This is not an idle threat. The US created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the Guardian(4/3/14).

That a single corporation has such a monopoly over the flow of worldwide news is already problematic, but the increasing meshing of corporate and US government control over the means of communication is particularly worrying. All those who believe in free and open exchange of information should oppose Facebook becoming a tool of US foreign policy.

Augmenting Brains: Google Turns Twenty

Binoy Kampmark

“Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you an answer.”

Larry Page, co-founder of Google

The Verge starts with a statement that has become commonplace, the compulsory nod to power one has come to expect when engaged with that whole mammoth enterprise known as Google.  “No technology company is arguably more responsible for shaping the modern internet, the modern life, than Google.”

The story of Google is all minted Silicon Valley: the modest research project birthed in computer lingo and networking, the serendipitous meeting of graduate students, and the finding of auspicious and enormously productive garage locations.  The names tell a story: fresh, childish but hopeful.  Alphabet spawned Google, and so forth.  These were the products of, scorned Jonathan Taplin in his sharp Move Fast and Break Things, spoiled, ignorant brats.

In a sense, the Google experiment is all homage to behavioural tendencies writ large, an attempt on the part of the founders less to control than predict. (This distinction, it must be said, has been lost.)  How do people search for what is important?  Who tells them?  The PageRank algorithm of Google is moderate blessing and heavily laden curse, reducing the conduct of human searches to a dimension of repetition and faux enlargement of knowledge.  But the paradox of such behaviour is not so much a broadening of mind as a reconfirmation of its narrowing. You are fed results you expect; in time, you are delivered the results you expect.  Variety is stifled within the very system that supposedly promotes a world of seamless access.

But there it is. The Google search engine commodifies and controls choice, thereby leaving you with little.  The impression of a world with abundance is essential, and draws out the curse of plenty:  your choice is pre-empted, and typing in a search term generates terms you might wish to pursue.  Even the traditional library is hard to retreat to in certain respects given that librarians are becoming allergic to matters of paper, covers and book spines, a catalogue outsourced beyond its walls. The modern library has become the product of such market management fetish as knowledge centres, which is far more in line with Google speak.

Google has also reduced us to phone-reaching idiocy, an impulsive dive into the creature of all knowing answers that lies in the pocket and is procured at a moment’s notice.  Few conversations go by these days without that nasty God of the search engine making its celebrated entry to dispel doubts and right wrongs.  Not knowing a “fact” is intrinsically linked to the rescue of finding out what Google will tell you.

Larry Page has made little secret of its all-conquering, cerebral mission manifested through the all-powerful search engine.  It verges on the creepily totalitarian, but more in the fashion of Brave New World seductiveness than 1984 torture and stomping.  “It will be included in people’s brains,” he explained to a veteran observer of the company, Steven Levy.  “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”  Similarly for fellow founder Sergey Brin, Google is viewed “as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world.”

There is the other side: company concentration, exquisitely vast power that has wooed critics, and a self-assumed omniscience that crushes competition.  It is such characteristics that determine Google as a sovereign exception that seems to trounce the prerogative of many states: there are regulations made by elected officials, but these can, and will be subverted, if needed. But there is another side of the Google phenomenon: calculated compliance, and collaboration verging on the obsequious.  Business remains business, and having such a concentrated entity exerting dominion over the Internet and the market is the very thing that should trouble anti-trust specialists.

This very fact struck the Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry as relevant. If Google was to be dealt with in any feasible way, it would have to be through the traditional weaponry of the anti-trust suit (think, he reminds us, of Standard Oil 1910).  “This can’t be fixed legislatively,” suggested Landry to Baton Rouge’s The Advocate. “We need to go to court with an antitrust suit.”

The European Union has already taken up the matter, fining Google $5 billion for antitrust violations relating to its Android market dominance, notably its bundling of the search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system while also making “payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

The suggestion for some form of antitrust action against Google and other technological giants in the US itself is now being lost in the political opportunism of the Trump Whitehouse.  On Tuesday, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened a gathering of various officials to consider “a growing concern” about how certain companies might “be hurting competition an intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms”.

The problem here is not the premise Sessions is pursuing.  What matters is the reason he is taking such an interest, pressed by the sledgehammer approach advocated by President Donald J. Trump.  That ever sensitive leader of the confused free world claims that the search engine has developed a bias against him, yet another rigged entity in action.

Trump’s critics also have issues with social media sites and Google’s search engine.  Like Hillary Rodham Clinton, they argue, conversely, that such entities promoted the forces of reaction.  Had they not been so easily susceptible to those wicked Russians in spreading misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump would never have gotten the keys to the White House.  That proposition has been given some academic ballast with Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President – What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, though it remains qualified at best.

Reaching the age of 20 has certainly brought Google to the summit of criticism and a certain pervasive idolatry. There are those who feel erroneously slighted (Trump and Clinton); there are those who wish their records erased from the search engine in an effort to make their lives anew (the right to forget the foolish error); and then there are those who simply could not be bothered to do a bit more digging for something that is so effortlessly available.  “Google is the oracle of redirection,” claims James Gleick.  In due course, its own influence will, in time, require redirection, and the brats may have to be disciplined accordingly.

Spanish police harass, spy on Catalan separatist party

Alejandro López

The Catalan separatist Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP) party has publicly denounced a coordinated and overt campaign of police spying directed against it.

At a press conference last Thursday in front of CUP headquarters, National Secretary Núria Gibert and former deputy Mireia Boya explained that the police have been spying on them for over a year, since before last October’s Catalan independence referendum, and are continuing to do so.

Boya said that “the repression is from well before last September [when the crackdown on Catalan secessionists started].” She continued: “To this day, we are suffering police monitoring of our headquarters. There are undercover policemen watching us, watching and monitoring each one of our movement.”

In the course of the press conference, various CUP members showed photos to the media of the alleged spies. According to Boya, the “undercover officers write down notes and take photographs of those who come in and out of the premises.”

It would be unusual if the police carried out physical surveillance without also systematically intercepting phone calls and digital communications.

Boya said the espionage targeting the CUP has been reported to the Interior Department of the Catalan regional government, so that the regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, can investigate. They have not yet received a reply, however.

The CUP warned that they intend to find out who has ordered the spying and why, “since this is a serious violation of democratic rights and freedoms.” According to Boya, there are “1,200 people persecuted by the Spanish justice system, with eavesdropping, espionage and monitoring.”

Gibert recalled last year’s siege of CUP headquarters, when police tried to enter the building without a warrant during the September 20 crackdown, in the course of which high-ranking civil servants were arrested for preparing the October 1 independence referendum. When the CUP refused, and crowds of people started a sit-down protest in front of CUP headquarters to keep police from entering, the cops provocatively stood outside the premises for eight hours in full anti-riot gear (See video).

This action was part of Madrid’s strategy to provoke violence. A clash would have allowed the judiciary to frame the Catalan referendum as an act of “rebellion,” which, under the law, must involve a public show of violence. The intervention of hundreds of protestors to peacefully defend the headquarters thwarted this attempt. However, it did not prevent Madrid from charging Catalan nationalist leaders with rebellion after the referendum, even though they had constantly appealed for the protests to be peaceful.

Gibert said their complaint filed last year had been rejected by the judge, but that they have appealed the decision.

Boya announced that the CUP will undertake “new legal measures” against “the Spanish state over serious violation of fundamental rights.”

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposes and denounces the police spying and repression of the CUP and the Catalan nationalists. The ICFI has unbridgeable and well documented political differences with the CUP. Its bourgeois separatist programme and promotion of nationalism divide working people on the Iberian peninsula, and its support for Catalan pro-austerity governments underscores its hostility to the working class. However, police spying and threats against the CUP violate democratic principles and basic democratic rights, and establish a precedent that will be turned most savagely against the working class.

Claims that the CUP is a terrorist group and an instigator of violent attempts to overthrow the state are a political fraud. Over the past year, the CUP’s activities against Madrid’s repression of the Catalan nationalist movement has consisted of peaceful protests, strikes, blockades of roads via sit-ins and the display of yellow ribbons throughout major cities and towns.

Madrid’s violence is well documented, however. Under the previous right-wing Popular Party government, supported by the Socialist Party, the state sent 16,000 policemen to storm polling stations, assault peaceful voters and confiscate ballot boxes and voting papers to try to halt the October 1 referendum. This left over 1,000 injured, including children and elderly people.

In the weeks before the referendum, over 100 websites were closed, ballots were confiscated, millions of posters and leaflets were seized, newspapers were searched and meetings were banned.

Madrid-based media overwhelmingly endorsed these anti-democratic and repressive measures. Official chauvinism reached levels not seen since the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

The media hailed far-right protestors gathering in front of police stations and calling for Spanish police to “go for them” [the Catalans]. The press depicted them as concerned citizens defending Spanish unity.

Spain’s right-wing ABC even called for the banning of the CUP and its youth wing, Arran. In an editorial, it stated: “The law of political parties allows the banning of a party once it has been demonstrated that it engages in antidemocratic and unconstitutional behavior, without the need to charge it with a specific crime.”

Soon after the referendum, Madrid dissolved the Catalan regional government, imposed an unelected regional government, and moved to arrest the main secessionist leaders. Apart from those such as former Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont who fled to Belgium, the rest are still in jail.

Anna Gabriel, a CUP leader and former MP, fled to Switzerland, having left the country believing she could not get a fair trial from the Spanish judiciary.

Her suspicion was confirmed last week when eldiario.org posted leaked messages from several Spanish judges’ corporate email accounts. One October 6 email read: “As a Spaniard, a Catalan and a judge, what happened on September 6 and October 1 was a coup d’état… You can’t negotiate with those who carry out a coup, nor engage in dialogue with them.”

Another judge said that “a coup has winners and losers,” and stated that “the bloodshed that [pro-independence leaders] aimed for can’t go unpunished.” Several messages slandered the Catalan nationalists as Nazis. “It’s the same that occurred in Germany long ago,” reads one comment.

Another judge hailed king Felipe VI and the police agencies, writing, “Long live the Spanish police, long live the Guardia Civil, long live Spain and long live the colleagues who truly look after our legal system.”

The repression has continued under the Socialist Party (PSOE) government, backed by the pseudo-left Podemos party. While calling for “dialogue” with the Catalan separatists, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has threatened to re-invoke article 155 and dissolve the Catalan regional government. He has ordered the new attorney general to continue prosecuting Catalan nationalists under fraudulent rebellion charges.

Within Catalonia there is mass opposition to the ongoing repression. Up to one million protestors joined a mass march in the streets of Barcelona on September 11, Catalonia’s National Day, calling for the release of those in jail and return of those exiled.

The operation against the CUP is a transparent attempt to step up the state terror campaign targeting any and all opposition to Madrid under conditions of a growing radicalization of the working class against social inequality, militarism and police repression.