Washington calls for Yemen ceasefire as Saudis escalate siege of Hodeidah

Bill Van Auken

Despite calls by the US secretaries of state and defense for a ceasefire in Yemen, the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition is carrying out a massive buildup of troops laying siege to the country’s critical Red Sea port of Hodeidah, threatening an offensive that could kill many thousands while plunging millions more into outright starvation.

The developments came as the United Nations issued fresh warnings that some 14 million people in Yemen are threatened with a famine that is eclipsing anything the world has seen for the past century.

Speaking at the US Institute of Peace in Washington on October 30, Pentagon chief Gen. James Mattis stated in relation to Yemen, “We have got to move toward a peace effort here, and we can’t say we are going to do it sometime in the future. We need to be doing this in the next 30 days.”

Mattis’ peace appeal was laced with lies placing the principal blame for the near genocidal war that has been raging in Yemen for the last three and a half years on the Houthi rebel movement that overthrew the US and Saudi-backed puppet regime of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. He repeated unsubstantiated US allegations that the Houthis are a proxy force for Iran, and that Tehran is supplying them with missiles, something for which the US and its allies have presented not a shred of evidence.

The US defense secretary insisted that the peace talks would be aimed at “demilitarizing the border so that Saudis and Emirates [sic] do not have to worry about missiles coming into their ... homes, and cities and airports.”

He went on to denounce Iran declaring that their alleged shipment of missiles to the Houthis had “interrupted freedom of navigation” and charging that: “They are the ones who keep fueling this conflict and they need to knock it off. They may do it through proxies as they do so often in the Middle East, but they do not escape accountability for what they’re doing through proxies and surrogate forces. We still will hold them accountable.”

This belligerent nonsense turns the situation in Yemen inside out. Saudi Arabia recently claimed that a little over 100 of its civilians—a grossly inflated figure—had been killed by Houthi missiles. No one has died in the UAE. Meanwhile, the estimates of the number of Yemenis killed—the vast majority of them by Saudi airstrikes—ranges between 50,000 and 80,000.

While there is no evidence that Iran is “fueling” the conflict, Washington is literally doing just that. US Air Force tanker planes have been deployed over the Arabian Peninsula to enable Saudi bombers to carry out continuous strikes against Yemen. US military intelligence officers help run a joint command center in Riyadh providing the Saudi military with targeting information and other intelligence and the US Navy provides crucial support for a Saudi-led blockade that is starving the country of food, medicine and other essential supplies. Meanwhile, virtually all of the billions of dollars’ worth of bombs, warplanes and other military equipment being use in the war on Yemen is supplied by the arms manufacturers of the US, the UK and other NATO allies.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed the statement by Mattis, declaring that the “time is now for the cessation of hostilities.” He added that “America stands by the kingdom” of Saudi Arabia.

The state-run media in Saudi Arabia portrayed the statements by Mattis and Pompeo as support for

Riyadh. “America stands by the kingdom against the Houthi’s Iranian ballistic missiles,” was the headline of the major daily Al Riyadh.

Even as these duplicitous calls for a ceasefire were being made in Washington, the Saudi-led coalition was reportedly bringing as many as 10,000 fresh troops, including Sudanese regulars, mercenaries and Saudi and Emirati troops to the outskirts of Hodeidah for a fresh offensive that is expected to unfold within days.

The size of this buildup makes clear that it could not have been carried out without US knowledge and logistical backing.

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 who live in areas of the country controlled by the Houthi rebel movement. The Red Sea port is the entry point for 70 percent of the country’s food imports and international aid.

Despite continuous airstrikes, the Saudi-led forces have until now been unable to break the resistance of the Houthis and the city’s residents. Aid organizations have reported that food is running out in the city, while thousands of families have been driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The aid groups and the United Nations have warned that the overrunning of the city by the Saudi-led forces would entail massive civilian casualties, while threatening millions of Yemenis with death by starvation by cutting off the flow of food aid.

The Western media has largely blacked out reports of the Yemen war, while the meager reporting that has appeared repeats a years’ old estimate of 10,000 civilians killed. The UN has since raised this estimated death toll to 16,000.

However, a new report issued by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, has established that the Saudi-led war has claimed the lives of at least 56,000 Yemenis.

That figure is itself a significant underestimate. Andrea Carboni, who researches Yemen for the ACLED, told Patrick Cockburn of the Independent that it includes only those killed between January 2016 and October 2018. Adding the victims claimed from the start of the Saudi-led war in March 2015 until the end of that year, he said, would likely bring the real toll to between 70,000 and 80,000.

The death toll from hunger and preventable diseases like cholera caused by the US-backed blockade of the country and the systematic destruction of basic infrastructure, including water and sewer systems and healthcare facilities, is far higher.

The aid group Save the Children has released an estimate that 100 children on average are dying every single day in Yemen from preventable causes like extreme hunger and disease. At least half of the 14 million Yemenis threatened with famine are children. UNICEF reports that 1.8 million children under the age of five are facing acute malnutrition, and 400,000 are affected by severe acute malnutrition.

This massive human catastrophe is the product of policies pursued under both Obama and Trump, without which the war in Yemen would have been impossible. The aim under both the Democratic and Republican administrations has been to further US imperialism’s drive for hegemony over the Middle East, by assuring that Yemen remained under the control of a US-Saudi puppet regime and preventing any expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

The calls for a ceasefire—while giving a 30-day deadline to allow the murderous siege of Hodeidah to proceed and continuing US arms shipments and logistical support—signals a tactical shift in this imperialist policy. Washington is attempting to utilize the crisis provoked within the Saudi monarchy by the exposure of the brutal assassination in its Istanbul consulate of journalist Jamal Khashoggi to put a tighter leash on the House of Saud and its de facto chief, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

There are also reports that the US government is pressing Riyadh to end its economic blockade of Qatar, which hosts the largest US military facility in the Middle East, the Udeid airbase, from which US warplanes have carried out their bombardments of Syria and Iraq.

What is to be done about the plutocrats?

Patrick Martin

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, made public Tuesday, underscores the role of inherited wealth in the growth of social inequality in the United States. The report, titled, “Billionaire Bonanza: Inherited Wealth Dynasties in the 21st-Century United States,” analyzes the Forbesmagazine list of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States, and finds that one-third of them derived their wealth primarily from inheritance from their parents or from an even older generation of the super-rich.

The three wealthiest of the dynasties, the Waltons, the Koch brothers and the Mars family, saw their combined wealth increase nearly 6,000 percent since 1982, while average household wealth in America actually declined slightly. These three families, based in retailing, oil production and food manufacturing respectively, had a combined wealth of $348.7 billion in 2018, up from $5.84 billion in 1982, adjusted to 2018 dollars.

Besides the seven Waltons, two Kochs and six Mars, the report notes nine Cargill heirs on the Forbes 400 list, along with five Johnsons (Fidelity Investments), nine Pritzkers (Hyatt Hotels), five heirs to the Cox media fortune, four heirs to the Duncan oil fortune, four Lauders (perfumes), five billionaires from the Johnson & Johnson empire, four Bass brothers (oil), three Strykers (medical equipment), and so on. The top 15 billionaire dynasties had a combined wealth of $618 billion.

In the 100 years since the first US “Gilded Age,” the vast wealth of the original dynastic families like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and DuPonts has been dispersed among large numbers of descendants, as well as diluted by progressive taxation (before 1980) and, in a few cases, by transfer to foundations. Few heirs of the original “robber barons” now make the Forbes 400 list. But the report notes, “Now several decades into the second Gilded Age, dynastic wealth families once again appear in force on the Forbes 400 list. And like previous dynasties, a segment of these families use their considerable wealth and power to rig the rules of the economy to protect and expand their wealth and power.”

These wealthy families have pushed through major changes in the tax and inheritance laws that will allow them to pass on their wealth to the next generation virtually without hindrance—changes which will be taken advantage of by the new layer of super-rich, personified by the trio of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose combined wealth is greater than that of the bottom half of the American population.

But their impact on American social and political life goes well beyond the immediate accumulation and preservation of family fortunes. The report begins by citing a warning by Paul Volcker—who, as the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, was intimately familiar with the political and social psychology of this layer—about the dangers of the rule over society by a tiny elite of the fabulously rich.

“The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy,” Volcker said. “We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government and they don’t like to pay taxes.” Hence the agenda of tax-cutting and deregulation carried out by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.

This is the fundamental class reason for the dramatic and seemingly unending shift to the right in American politics over this period. Well-paying jobs, long-term job security, decent public schools, the social infrastructure of transportation, health care, housing, even water and sewage systems—all these have been sacrificed to the maniacal and never-ending self-enrichment of the plutocrats.

The destruction of jobs, living standards and social benefits for working people is constantly and invariably justified by Corporate America and the capitalist politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties with the declaration that “there is no money.” This mantra is repeated even as the fortunes of the super-rich swell to previously unthinkable dimensions. What it really means is “there is no money for you, because we want it all.” The plutocrats bear the same relationship to modern society as a cancerous tumor does to the human body.

The Institute for Policy Studies has done a public service by publishing these figures, which dovetail with the findings of economists like Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. But the policies advanced by the IPS, tepid liberal reforms such as the reinstitution of the inheritance tax and a 1 percent annual wealth tax, have a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted under the present social order. They are proposed to bolster illusions in the Democratic Party, and in particular to promote politicians of the Bernie Sanders stripe.

The reality is that the Democratic Party is just as beholden to the billionaires and just as devoted to the defense of capitalism as the Republican Party. The financial aristocracy will never permit such measures to be adopted through the mechanisms of Congress and the presidency, which it controls from top to bottom. On the contrary, the open turn to authoritarianism by both corporate-controlled parties is a powerful demonstration that economic inequality on the scale that exists today in the United States is incompatible with democracy.

The only realistic alternative to the dictatorship of the billionaires is the independent political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist program. The banner of the working class cannot be “restore modest taxation on the super-rich.” It must be, “Expropriate the super-rich.” The working class must set as its goal the confiscation of the wealth of the billionaires—which was produced in the first place by the workers—to provide the resources needed for the common good. This would be the first and most decisive step in the socialist reorganization of economic life to serve human needs and not private profit.

Royal African Society’s Africa Writes 2019 for Talented Writers

Application Deadline: 6th November 2018

Eligible Countries: African countries and Africans in other countries

To be Taken at (Country): The British Library, London

About the Award: The Royal African Society’s annual celebration of contemporary literature from Africa and the diaspora returns! Established in 2012, Africa Writes is now the UK’s biggest celebration of contemporary African writing. The festival aims to showcase both established writers and newcomers to a UK audience, provide an opportunity for African literature fans to meet and connect, and to encourage people to develop their interest in literature and their own creative skills.
We aim for the process to be open and inclusive, to reflect the broad community that makes up Africa Writes. All the individuals and organisations whose submissions are part of the 2018 programme will be fully acknowledged and credited.
– Do you represent an author that you think would be perfect for Africa Writes?
– Are you buzzing with an idea for a book launch or workshop that you would love to see at the festival?
– Do you have an idea for a performance event or panel discussion?

From the seeds of an idea to a fully-fledged plan, we would like to invite you to submit whatever suggestions you might have, to influence and help create the festival in 2019. The submissions will be then reviewed and some will be developed, to work towards shaping the programme for Africa Writes 2019. This in turn, will inform our applications to secure funding for the festival to take place.

Type: Contest

Eligibility: The Society aims for the process to be open and inclusive, to reflect the broad community that makes up Africa Writes! All the individuals and organisations whose submissions are part of the 2018 program will be fully acknowledged and credited.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Duration of Program: 
LONDON – Friday 5 July – Saturday 6 July, The British Library
BRISTOL – late June (final dates TBC)

How to Apply: Go to submission form

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

ICFJ/ONE Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling 2019

Application Deadline: 2nd December 2018 at 11:59pm EST

Eligible Countries: African countries

About the Award: In its third year, this prestigious award will honor an up-and-coming journalist in Africa who tells important stories through quality reporting.
This award, given in Mike’s name, will provide the winner a $5,000 cash prize to pursue an in-depth reporting project. In a special study tour organized by ICFJ, the winner will spend time in U.S. newsrooms to learn new skills and share knowledge. In order to take full advantage of the study tour, applicants must speak English, even if they work in another language.

Type: Contest

Eligibility: 

• The contest is open to up-and-coming, English-speaking journalists working in Africa for print, broadcast and online news media.
• Applicants must have no more than 10 years of journalism experience.
• Applicants must submit one published story that reflects top-notch storytelling about important issues.
• The submission can be a feature story; an in-depth, investigative or explanatory piece; or a multimedia report or documentary.
• The published story or broadcast must be submitted in English. Works in other languages must include English translations.

Selection: A distinguished international jury will select the winner.

Number of Awards: 1

Value of Award: 

• This award will provide the winner with a US$5,000 cash prize to pursue an in-depth reporting project.
• In a special study tour organized by ICFJ, the winner will spend time in U.S. newsrooms to learn new skills and share knowledge.
• The winner will also complete a two-week internship at the headquarters of The Economist in London.

How to Apply: Submit your application if you meet the criteria above.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), ONE and the Elliott family

Machel-Mandela Fellowship Program 2019 for Study in South Africa

Application Deadline: 30th November 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Countries in Africa or abroad

To be taken at (country): Johannesburg, South Africa

Eligible Field of Study: None

About the Award: The Machel-Mandela Fellows programme aims to be the most prestigious of its kind in Africa. It helps sharpen the Brenthurst Foundation’s focus on Africa’s burgeoning youth population and helps nurture Africa’s future leaders.
The Fellowship runs full-time for a minimum of six months and is open to both South African and international candidates, with the selected candidate expected to take up the appointment at the Foundation’s headquarters in Johannesburg in April 2019. Fellows will work directly with and assist the Foundation’s staff on a range of projects and activities, some of which will require foreign travel.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

• Under 30 years of age
• Undergraduate or Masters degree with track record of academic excellence
• Excellent English communication skills required, with copy-editing and proof-reading skills an asset
• Enthusiastic and reliable self-starter who requires minimal oversight and management
• Able to balance deadlines and attention to detail
• A passion for Africa and keen interest in strengthening Africa’s economic performance
• Familiarity with the work of The Brenthurst Foundation

Value of Scholarship: An all-inclusive stipend per month and accommodation (subject to Foundation policy) will be provided. Other work-related expenses may also be covered subject to agreement with the Foundation.

Duration of Scholarship: The programme will be available full-time for a minimum of six months and the selected candidate will be expected to take up the appointment in January 2019.

How to Apply: Please address your application to Ms Leila Jack at leila.jack@thebrenthurstfoundation.org, quoting ‘Application: Machel-Mandela Fellow’ in the subject line.
You will need to send:

• An up-to-date CV with references
• A covering letter of no more than 500 words, outlining your interest in the position and relevant skills
• A writing sample, for example an essay or a published article of any length.
• The earliest date you would be able to start
• Details of where you saw the post advertised.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details


Award Provider: The Brenthurst Foundation

World vertebrate populations have fallen 60 percent since 1970

Bryan Dyne

The most recent Living Planet Report reveals that the world’s populations of vertebrate—those species with a spine—have fallen by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014 as a result of human-induced global environmental changes. Put another way, the available data for all species and regions reveals that the number of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians across the world has fallen by “well over half in less than 50 years.” At the same time, the report notes, this threatens the economic activity that ultimately depends on nature, “estimated to be worth around $125 trillion a year.”

This decline is especially sharp in South and Central America, a region which has experienced a vertebrate population decline of 89 percent, and in freshwater populations worldwide, which have dropped by 83 percent. The decline is slower in North America and the Eurasian landmass, which have suffered population declines of 23 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Other data presented in the report indicate the same sobering trends. While Earth’s environment was relatively stable during the past 11,700 years, an era known as the Holocene, the past 50 years in particular have seen enormous changes to the planet’s ecosystem. “In the last 50 years, global average temperature has risen at 170 times the background rate,” the report says. “Ocean acidification may be occurring at a rate not seen in at least 300 million years. Earth is losing biodiversity at a rate seen only during mass extinctions.”

First published in 1998 and every two years since, the Living Planet Report and its primary statistic, the Living Planet Index, serve as a benchmark for biodiversity—the number of species in an ecosystem and the populations of those species—across the world. It is a collaborative effort between the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London which analyzes the impact human activity is having on the environment and in turn how the various changes of Earth’s environment impact animal and human life.

The study tracks 16,704 populations representing 4,005 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians currently used as the sample for Earth’s wildlife. All the populations in the study come from one of five major regions, which roughly correspond to North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa and Oceania. The divisions are based on the types of species found in the regions and provide a somewhat more granular understanding of the health of different regions around the globe, which in turn indicates whether the effects on a specific section of wildlife are local or global in scope.

The regions are then subdivided by taxonomic group—birds, mammals, fishes, reptiles and amphibians—and threats such as habitat degradation and loss, overexploitation, invasive species and disease, pollution, and climate change. This allows for an at-a-glance analysis of both what species in a given region are being most affected by the changing environment and what is driving their population loss.

On a global scale, the most common reasons for declining animal populations are habitat loss and overexploitation, which account for approximately three-quarters of global vertebrate population loss. This includes a combination of agricultural, residential, industrial and commercial development, logging, damming, and mining, as well as mass hunting, poaching and harvesting.

Climate change, in contrast, only accounts for less than 10 percent of the decrease in wild populations. The Living Planet Report notes, however, that this will increase as climate change accelerates and that “losses of wild species already suffering from more ‘traditional’ threats like habitat loss and overexploitation may be exacerbated by compromising a species’ ability to respond to changes in climate.” This interconnection is stressed throughout the report and is shown for climate change and every other impact humans have had on the environment.

The analysis showing the consequences of the deteriorating environment on human life are no less devastating. The cost that humans face, the report notes, is not just measured by the direct monetary loss caused by a lack of natural resources. There are natural processes that regulate air, water and soil, between 50,000 and 70,000 plants used industrially, as well as numerous cultural benefits that are being eroded as various ecosystems suffer collapse.

One noted direct cost on humans is the loss of pollinators, which threatens at least $500 billion of crop production per year. Another, not discussed in the report, is the impact of extreme weather events such as wildfires, hurricanes and typhoons, made more common and stronger as a result of climate change, which kill thousands of people every year and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damages globally.

Overall, a clear picture emerges of a planet in crisis. The biosphere of Earth, the “infrastructure” for all life on the planet, is collapsing. The massive expansion of human activity since the Industrial Revolution is the primary cause. What then are the solutions?

To its credit, the authors of the Living Planet Report never suggest a Malthusian approach, never suggest that perhaps the only road for a healthy planet is to eradicate some large percentage of the human race in order to restore some sort of equilibrium. On the contrary, the appeal to its readers is that the natural world should be preserved and strengthened in order for a “modern, prosperous human society to exist, and to continue to thrive.”

What they do not challenge is the socioeconomic form of political organization that helped propel the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and the division of the world into rival nation-states. In contrast to the global approach taken to the science they present, the authors appeal to the United Nations and its member states, all of whom have material interests in exploiting and ravaging the planet’s resources. This has been proven again and again by industrial/ecological disasters such as the BP oil spill and the radiation leakage from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

As such, the crisis of the environment is ultimately a political crisis, one that can only be solved by a turn to the working class. Only through this social force, one which is inherently international and for which a healthy environment is a social necessity, can the restoration of Earth’s ecosystems even begin.

Ukraine’s depopulation crisis

Jason Melanovski

As fascist far-right nationalist groups regularly parade through the country demanding “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” Ukraine faces a massive depopulation crisis. Millions of people of all ethnicities are leaving the country, fleeing poverty and war.

Since the restoration of capitalism in 1991, the overall population of Ukraine has declined from just over 52 million to approximately 42 million today, a decrease of nearly 20 percent. If the separatist-controlled provinces of the Donbass region and Crimea are excluded, it is estimated that just 35 million people now live in the area controlled by the government of Petro Porosehnko.

Ukrainian governments, including the current one, have been loath to carry out an official census, as it is widely believed that the population estimates reported by the country’s State Statistics Service (SSS) are inflated by including deceased individuals. One aim of this is to rig elections. An official country-wide census has not been held since 2001. In late 2015, the Poroshenko government postponed the 2016 census until 2020.

Despite the lack of reliable official numbers, all independent reports point to a sharp reduction in the population. According to Ukraine’s Institute of Demography at the Academy of Sciences, by 2050 only 32 million people will live in the country. The World Health Organization has estimated that the population of the country will drop even further, to just 30 million people.

Ukraine’s SSS has acknowledged that so far this year, the population has already decreased by 122,000.

Such data are a testament to the monumental failure of capitalism to provide a standard of living that matches, much less exceeds, that which existed during the Soviet period over 25 years ago.

While the country’s low birth rate of approximately 1 birth for 1.5 deaths is a contributing factor to the country’s depopulation, emigration is by far the biggest factor.

Between 2002 and 2017, an estimated 6.3 million Ukrainians emigrated with no plans to return.

Facing poor employment prospects, deteriorating social and medical services, marauding far-right gangs, and the ever-present prospect of a full-scale war with Russia, Ukrainian workers are fleeing the country in great numbers, either permanently or as temporary labor migrants.

According to a report from the Center for Economic Strategy (CES), almost 4 million people, or up to 16% of the working-age population, are labor migrants. Despite having Ukrainian citizenship and still technically living in Ukraine, they actually reside and work elsewhere. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has put the number of Ukrainian migrant workers even higher, at 5 million.

Through 2015 and 2017, as a result of the ongoing war in the Donbass region and the plunging value of the Ukrainian hryvnia, migration increased notably: 507,000 people went to Poland; 147,000 to Italy; 122,000 to the Czech Republic; 23,000 to the United States; and 365,000 to Russia or Belarus.

The easing of visa-free travel by the European Union (EU) in September 2017 only increased the flow of Ukrainians to countries such as Poland, which is facing its own demographic crisis and in need of workers. In 2018 alone, more than 3 million Ukrainians applied for passports that would allow them to work in Poland. Poland is the only EU country that allows Ukrainians to obtain seasonal work visas with just a passport. Ukrainians have received 81.7% of all work visas issued in Poland this year.

Between 1 and 2 million Ukrainian workers now reside in Poland, where they are often forced to take jobs “under the table,” are easily exploited by employers, and work in dangerous conditions. Many Ukrainian laborers are recruited to Poland by scam offers of employment, only to then find themselves stranded and forced to work for whatever wage they can get.

While migrant workers in Poland are constantly subjected to anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right-wing PiS government in Warsaw, the Polish state classifies Ukrainian laborers as “refugees” in order to comply with EU quotas and reject refugees from Syria and elsewhere.

According to polls of Ukrainian migrants in Poland, over half are planning to move to Germany if the labor market there is ever open to them.

While Russia is constantly demonized in the Ukrainian and Western press as the eternal enemy of Ukraine, 2 million Ukrainian citizens now live or work in Russia. According to Olga Kirilova, between 2014 and 2017, 312,000 Ukrainians were granted Russian citizenship and Ukrainians make up the vast majority of immigrants to Russia.

The dearth of a working-age population in Ukraine is putting further strain on an already struggling pension system. According to Ukraine’s SSS, as a result of widespread labor migration, only 17.8 million out of 42 million Ukrainians are economically active and paying into the pension system.

The migration of Ukrainian workers abroad has reached such a level that remittances from migrants now constitute 3 to 4 percent of the country’s GDP. They exceed the amount of foreign investment in Ukraine. Nonetheless, such transfers are not nearly enough to make up for the negative impact of the currency’s falling value, inflation, and the disappearance of skilled workers.

The Ukrainian ruling class acknowledges that the country is in serious trouble. “One of the main risks of the current scenario is the continuation of the outflow of labor from Ukraine, which will create a further increase in the imbalance between demand and supply in the labor market,” noted a report from the country’s national bank.

However, the government can do nothing to slow the mass emigration, as it is thoroughly under the control of international finance capital and committed to implementing the austerity programs demanded by Western states and banks.

Despite assurances from the Poroshenko regime that the economy will improve, the emigration and emptying of the country shows no signs of slowing.

Protests and strikes signal mounting hostility toward Italian government

Allison Smith

A wave of strikes and protests across Italy this month reflects widespread and increasing hostility toward the coalition Five Star Movement-Lega government and increasing concerns over the rapidly deteriorating standard of living for the vast majority of Italians.

This past Saturday, nearly 10,000 Romans marched to protest against the crumbling infrastructure in Italy’s capital city. The protest, organised by a group of women that founded Roma Dice Basta (Rome Says Enough), put forward demands for Rome to return to a city that is “inclusive, liveable, welcoming, and forward thinking.”

There is widespread disgust for Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement, who was elected on an anti-establishment campaign with promises to clean up the city and significantly improve its infrastructure, but has been mired in scandal since taking office and hasn’t fulfilled any of her election promises. Raggi was indicted last month on charges of making false statements regarding the appointment of Renato Marra as director of Rome’s tourism department.

Residents and visitors are rightly shocked that garbage has been left to pile up, to the point that rats and wild boar regularly feast on the fetid mess, and that maintenance and improvement of transport services has been all but abandoned, with 35 percent of the bus and tram fleet out of commission and at least 30 buses in the city’s aging fleet catching fire between 2017 and 2018.

Rome’s problems, however, began many years ago, and since the onset of the 2008 world financial crisis, the city has been faced with increasing challenges as its administrators have either sought to find short-term solutions or been involved in shady financial derivative transactions that have further deepened the Eternal City’s budgetary crisis.

Contrary to the common mantra echoed by the servile media that workers as well as inept administrators are the main cause of Rome’s budget imbalances, the role of finance capital and derivative schemes is largely responsible for Rome’s—and Italy’s—crisis. Raggi is merely a continuation of this trend.

The protest in Rome followed on the heels of a 24-hour “Black Friday” general strike by public sector workers in transportation, hospitals, and schools across Italy who walked off the job in protest over “salary, welfare, representation in the workplace, universal rights, against privatisation and liberalisation, the abolition of inequalities, and health and safety.”

The four largest unions (USI, CUB, SGB, COBAS), sensing unrest among their membership, put forward workers’ requests for “real increases in pay, provisions for sufficient staff, respect for the dignity of staff, and the right to retirement at 60 or with 35 years of contributions.”

Since the 2012 Jobs Act, pushed through by the Democratic Party, public sector workers have faced increasingly harsh conditions. Citizens interviewed by local media outlets on the day of the strike were overwhelmingly sympathetic with the strikers, even as they expressed frustration over service interruptions.

Last month’s protests and strikes took place as the coalition government continued its crackdown on immigration and submits the latest austerity national budget for approval by the European Union (EU).

While there is widespread concern among Italians about immigration, there is also mass sympathy for the plight of immigrants and an understanding that the significant increase in immigration is due to the unending wars and economic destruction abroad.

Last week, upon visiting the site in Rome where a young woman was allegedly murdered by a group of Italian and immigrant men, Lega Party leader Matteo Salvini was met by hundreds of protesters who roundly jeered him as a “jackal” for taking political advantage of human tragedy to further vilify immigrants.

At the beginning of October, nearly 6,000 people demonstrated in Riace(southern Italy), Rome and Milan, to denounce the arrest of Riace’s immigrant-friendly mayor and the “fascist” anti-immigrant policies of the coalition government. Contrary to the government’s accusation that Riace’s immigrants represent a threat to Italy, the town’s immigrant policies are widely viewed as a role model for how immigrants can be integrated into society.

As the Italian government builds up a vast police state apparatus to carry out mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, it is implementing further austerity through the latest national budget that pledges billions of euros for the military and the police, and tax breaks for businesses, while promising a miserly €780 per month “basic income” for Italian citizens, which comes with so many strings attached that it will be virtually impossible to qualify.

On October 24, the WSWS noted that a violent struggle is set to unfold on the summits of European bourgeois politics, as both pro-EU and far-right populist forces fight to impose their version of austerity while trying to avert a financial panic that could provoke an Italian and global market crash. The central question is a perspective for independent political opposition by the working class, uniting workers’ struggles against austerity in Italy and across Europe.

Japanese PM visits China in bid to improve relations

Peter Symonds

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe late last week made his first visit to China since taking office in December 2012. The trip, aimed at further thawing the frosty relations between the two countries, took place as both China and Japan are being affected by the Trump administration’s trade war measures.

Abe took the first steps toward ending the standoff with China by suggesting, in June 2017, that Japan could provide conditional support for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aimed at linking East Asia with Europe and Africa.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited Japan in May, after years of bitter exchanges, particularly over the disputed rocky outcrops in the East China Sea known as the Senkakus in Japan and the Diaoyu islands in China. Li, however, barely referred to these divisive issues and stressed instead the value of economic cooperation between two countries.

Following Li’s visit, Abe declared that he wanted “to lift the Japan-China relationship to a new stage” and described Li’s trip as “an important first step toward a dramatic improvement.” Abe reiterated that theme when he met Li and Xi in Beijing last week, saying: “From competition to coexistence, Japanese and Chinese bilateral relations have entered a new phase… With President Xi Jinping, I would like to carve out a new era for China and Japan.”

Responding in kind, Xi said the two countries should move in a “new historic direction” and work together at a time of growing global “instability and uncertainties.” Abe was welcomed with all the pomp of a state visit, including a 19-gun salute, an honour guard, the playing of the two national anthems, and a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People.

China faces aggressive moves by the Trump administration on all fronts—trade war measures, accusations of Chinese interference in American politics and US military provocations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

Japan has been hit by US trade threats, both directly and indirectly through its exports to China, which is Japan’s largest trading partner. Last financial year, Japan exported $137 billion worth of goods into Chinese markets—much of it semiconductors and other components that are incorporated into items sold in the US.

For China, hi-tech imports from Japan are vital as the US seeks to choke off access to such goods on the grounds of “national security.” In the name of halting the alleged theft of American technical secrets, the Trump administration is seeking to undermine China’s efforts to become a global leader in advanced technology. Abe and Li agreed to start talks about cooperation in state-of-the-art technology, while protecting intellectual property rights—a move that Washington will not welcome.

Abe brought 500 corporate executives as part of his entourage. According to Li, Chinese and Japanese companies signed deals worth $18 billion during the visit. At the same time, the two central banks signed a three-year credit swap agreement allowing them to exchange $30 billion worth of each others’ currencies and helping to facilitate trade.

Abe and Xi announced 50 joint infrastructure projects, although these are not formally part of China’s BRI. This is another move that will displease the US. Washington regards the BRI as undermining its efforts to isolate China and has been pressuring countries not to participate.

Other deals concluded during Abe’s visit included cooperation between stock exchanges and a pledge by Japan to promote the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership led by China.

This warming of relations, however, remains tentative. While both sides played down long-festering disputes during Abe’s visit, the potential for a sudden deterioration of relations remains. “Without stability in the East China Sea, there can be no true improvement in bilateral relations,” Abe reportedly told his hosts. He sought assurances that China would stop sending vessels into waters around the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, regarded by Japan as its territory.

Nevertheless, the first tentative steps were taken to defuse the dispute. Tokyo and Beijing signed an agreement to cooperate in maritime search and rescue operations. They also agreed to open a hotline to avoid accidental clashes at sea and in the air, and resume talks on the joint development of gas fields in the East China Sea.

Japan remains dependent on the US-Japan Security Treaty and is not about to take steps that would endanger it. As such, Tokyo is vulnerable to pressure from the Trump administration to distance itself from Beijing. President Donald Trump last year publicly suggested that Japan and South Korea had to pay more of the costs of US military bases, and could press the issue again.

While resting on the US military alliance, Abe has been remilitarising Japan—boosting the defence budget and removing legal restraints on the use of the military overseas. He also has pushed for a revision of the country’s post-war constitution, under which Japan nominally renounces war and pledges never to maintain “war potential.”

Beijing is deeply suspicious of Abe, a right-wing militarist who defends the war crimes of the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s in China and elsewhere in Asia. Abe’s visit in 2013 to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, a symbol of Japanese militarism that inters the remains of class A war criminals, marked a low point in relations with Beijing. China branded the visit “absolutely unacceptable.

During his trip to Japan in May, Premier Li pointedly pushed these fractious issues to one side and used the formula favoured in Tokyo that the two countries should “look to the future”—that is, not dwell on the past. Nonetheless, the bitter experiences of Japan’s brutal invasion of China in the 1930s continues to colour relations between the two countries and form a core component of the Chinese nationalism that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits to buttress its rule.

Moreover, like the US, Japan is deeply concerned that Chinese economic expansion is undermining its own ambitions to become the dominant power in Asia. The Japanese ruling class was shaken in 2010 when China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy and has never reconciled itself to being eclipsed. Japan’s remilitarisation is above all to ensure the ability of Japanese imperialism to aggressively prosecute its economic and strategic interests in Asia and internationally.

These underlying tensions continue to simmer and could rapidly erupt, ending the present moves toward economic cooperation.

GM makes record quarterly profit as US corporations accelerate cost-cutting

Jerry White

General Motors saw a 25 percent rise in third quarter profits to a record $3.2 billion, the US automaker announced Wednesday. The spike in profits, despite falling sales in GM’s two largest markets, North America and China, is the result of relentless cost-cutting, which has been enforced through the collaboration of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which saw a sharp decline throughout October on fears of trade war with China, rising interest rates and a minuscule uptick in wages, rose 241 points Wednesday in response to profit reports from GM, Facebook and other companies.

US corporations are averaging around a 20 percent increase in profits chiefly through the suppression of workers’ wage demands, the intensification of work and the spread of part-time and temporary employment. This has been the principal strategy pursued by corporations in the US and around the world since the global financial crash of 2008 and the brutal reality behind the so-called economic recovery.

Just hours after announcing its profit results, GM said it had sent out voluntary buyout packages to 18,000 of its 50,000 North American salaried employees, or 36 percent of its white-collar workforce. Workers will have until November 19 to decide on whether to take the offers, a GM spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, and layoffs were possible if the buyout effort and other cost-reduction measures did not achieve GM’s targets, he said.

While GM made $500 million in profits in China, offsetting losses in South America, the center of the company’s money-making operations was North America where profits shot up 37 percent to $2.8 billion. The company’s North American profit margin was 10.2 percent despite an 11 percent fall in US sales.

GM reported earnings per share were up 41.7 percent from the same period last year. The profit report, which beat investors’ expectations, and the job cutting announcement drove GM shares up 3 percent Wednesday. GM is continuing to spend billions on stock buybacks and dividend payments to its richest investors after squandering $6.7 billion on buybacks last year.

Like GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) are relying on North America for the bulk, if not all, of their profits. Although net third quarter profits for FCA fell 38 percent—due to an expected settlement with the federal government over the illegal manipulation of emission results—the Italian-American company’s operating profit in the US and Canada surged 51 percent, to $1.9 billion, and it had a profit margin of over 10 percent.

Ford Motor Co. reported North American operating profits of $2 billion during the July to September period. With Wall Street punishing the company’s stock for achieving a profit margin of just 8.8 percent, Ford announced plans to reduce its salaried US workforce of about 70,000 employees, without specifying a number. The company has already temporarily laid off 2,000 production workers at its Kansas City assembly plant from October 22 to November 4.

US automakers are facing increasing difficulties due to rising costs associated with Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and the rise of the US dollar, which undermines their exports to Asia and other regions. The companies have increasingly relied on sales of higher priced SUVs and pickup trucks in North America, but sales have already declined since their peak in 2016. This could turn into a rout as interest rates on car loans and gas prices rise, resulting in a new round of factory closings, mass layoffs and demands for wage and benefit cuts for the industry’s hundreds of thousands of workers.

The huge profits in North America are due largely to the collaboration of the United Auto Workers union, which has suppressed all resistance by workers to speed up and the decimation of autoworkers’ living standards and working conditions.

The American ruling class, which never forgave autoworkers for their powerful struggles—from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the militant wildcats of the 1970s—that wrenched significant concessions from the corporations, used the 2008 crash as an opportunity to intensify its attack on these gains and set a precedent for the whole working class.

During the 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler, the Obama administration and the gang of Wall Street investors on Obama’s auto task force collaborated with the UAW to destroy the hard-won gains of generations of autoworkers, including halving the wages of new “second tier” workers, abolishing the eight-hour day and eliminating income security for laid off workers. UAW backed the purging of higher-paid “legacy” workers and their replacement with temporary part-time employees who can be fired at will without paying supplemental unemployment benefits or other costs.

The transformation of autoworkers—once the highest paid industrial workers in the US, if not the world—into a largely casual and disposal workforce epitomized the historic change in class relations overseen by the Obama administration and continued under Trump. In exchange for its collaboration, the UAW was handed billions in corporate shares and given control of a vast retiree health care trust. In addition, top UAW executives were showered with millions in luxury items and other bribes to sign pro-company labor agreements, as federal prosecutors have exposed.

Angela, a Fiat Chrysler transmission worker in Kokomo, Indiana, who is on temporary layoff, denounced the UAW for collaborating in the ever-greater exploitation of workers, saying the UAW is “nothing but a tool of management” that has ignored Kokomo workers’ unanimous vote to strike over unresolved safety grievances. She also denounced efforts by Trump to scapegoat immigrants for the loss of jobs and wages while all the money was going to corporate executives and Wall Street. “It’s time we wake up and realize there are powerful forces trying to divide us,” she declared. “They’re using smoke and mirrors to distract us. My mother was a wage slave at Chrysler; my father at GM; and I’m a wage slave too. All workers, no matter where we are from, bleed the same and want the same thing: peace and security for our loved ones. The working class is the majority and we have more in common with workers of all nationalities and races than we do with the people dictating our lives.”

Other major corporations, such as United Parcel Service (UPS) and US Steel, are also making enormous profits even as they demand more sacrifices from workers. UPS recently reported a 20 percent year-on-year increase in third quarter profits to $1.5 billion dollars, while US Steel, benefiting from Trump’s tariffs, has seen profits rise by 20 percent.

At both companies, the unions are doing everything to prevent strikes, with the Teamsters going so far as to defy a majority vote by UPS workers in order to impose a deal that will establish a new lower-paid tier of drivers and maintain poverty wages for part-time warehouse workers who make up 70 percent of the workforce. At US Steel, the United Steelworkers union is trying to push through a sellout deal that would raise wages by 14 percent over the next four years, barely above the rate of inflation, and shift more health care and pension costs onto workers.

Far from the profit boom leading to workers recouping the wages they have lost over the last decade, total compensation costs—both wages and benefits—for private and public sector workers rose by only 2.8 percent in the 12-month period ending September 2018, according to report by the US Labor Department released Wednesday. For manufacturing workers, compensation costs were only 1.9 percent, while teachers and other state and local government workers got a miserly raise of 2.5 percent.

The current inflation rate for the United States is 2.3 percent for the 12 months ending in September 2018, according to the Labor Department. This means workers have seen a rise in real wages of only 0.5 percent, while manufacturing workers suffered a fall in real income.

After a decade in which the unions limited the number of strikes to historically low levels and facilitated the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the corporate and financial elite, millions of workers in the US and around the world are coming into struggle. Since the beginning of the year the number of major work stoppages in the US has nearly tripled since 2017, including walkouts by more than five percent of all K-12 public education employees, the largest number in more than a quarter of a century.

The fight for living wages, safe working conditions and fully funded health and pension benefits requires the building of new organizations of struggle: rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, which are independent of the corporate-controlled unions and democratically controlled by ranks of workers themselves. In addition to taking up the responsibilities long ago abandoned by the unions, including opposition to speed-ups, management abuse and victimization, these committees must link up workers across industries and fight for the establishment of industrial democracy and workers’ control over production.

The development of a powerful industrial movement, including the preparations for a general strike, must be combined with a new political strategy to unite American workers with their class brothers and sisters around the world to fight for socialism and the democratic and collective ownership of the wealth produced by the labor of the working class.

The American oligarchy’s attack on birthright citizenship

Eric London

The Trump administration’s proposal to end birthright citizenship for all people born on United States soil, enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, is another milestone in the assault on democratic rights.

With this move, the American oligarchy is repudiating the basic democratic principle upon which the American republic was founded, embodied in the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal.” If the American president can, by executive fiat, strike out the 14th Amendment, what is to stop him from overturning the entire Bill of Rights, which guarantees free speech, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, due process, and the right to counsel, among other fundamental protections?

Trump’s proposal, which comes in the final days of the midterm election campaign, is a provocation by the administration and its fascist staffers aimed at whipping up xenophobic sentiments and creating a constituency for a right-wing extra-constitutional movement. Such a movement is deemed necessary to implement Trump’s pro-corporate, pro-war, anti-immigrant agenda.

The impact of rescinding birthright citizenship on the working class and on immigrants would be disastrous. It would place 300,000 infants born in the US to noncitizen parents at risk of detention and deportation each year.

It would produce an underclass of immigrant families afraid to send their children to school, give birth in hospitals, or send their sick children to the doctor’s office. Millions of children would become stateless, lacking citizenship in any country. Slum districts and even walled ghettos with third world, apartheid conditions would become commonplace.

If applied retroactively, the rescission of birthright citizenship would reportedly place over 10 million people at immediate risk of deportation. Either way, the government will respond to the growth of the undocumented population with further moves toward martial law, including the construction of more detention camps and the deployment of more immigration agents and soldiers, not only to the border but to major metropolitan areas.

As the American Immigration Council wrote yesterday, the decision “would also impose hardship on all Americans, who could no longer point to a birth certificate as proof of citizenship. If place of birth no longer guaranteed citizenship, then all Americans—not just those whose parents were undocumented—would be forced to prove their parents’ nationality to the government in order to be recognized as a US citizen.”

Workers and the poor would have the most difficult time tracing family heritage and would therefore be denied the right to due process, the right to vote and access to social services.

The move reveals the extent of the erosion of democratic principles within the ruling class. Nearly 20 years after the stolen election of 2000 and the launching of the “war on terror,” both parties have already torn the Bill of Rights to shreds, bombing countries under false pretenses, assassinating thousands with drones, conducting torture, mass surveillance and mass deportations.

The Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic corporate media have either supported Trump’s birthright citizenship rescission or deliberately downplayed it.

Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana announced yesterday that he was supportive of the repeal of birthright citizenship, while Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri told CNN, “I support the president 100 percent doing what he needs to do to secure the border.”

NBC reported that Bernie Sanders, speaking Tuesday at a campaign rally for a Democratic Senate candidate in Maryland, deliberately avoided referencing Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship.

The day before, Sanders downplayed the danger of the extreme right, denouncing those who attempted to link Trump’s fascist rhetoric with Saturday’s shooting of 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. “I’m not going to sit here and blame the president” for the shooting, Sanders said.

Of the 28 editorials and op-eds featured on yesterday’s online editions of the New York Times and Washington Post, just three addressed Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship.

Of those, one Post op-ed by George Conway and Neil Katyal offered the soporific that Trump’s move will “undoubtedly” be stopped by the courts, while the other, by Megan McArdle, defended Trump, claiming it is “offensive lunacy” to say his moves against immigrants have anything to do with fascism or dictatorship. “It is nonsense to argue this way, and the left-wing folks ought to knock it off,” she wrote.

The response of the Democratic Party and Democratic Party-aligned newspapers proves that this faction of the financial aristocracy is just as hostile to democratic rights as Trump and the Republicans, although they have different priorities.

While the Republicans and Trump seek to instigate backward elements of the population to create a pogrom atmosphere against immigrants, the Democratic Party’s chief aim is to work with the military-intelligence agencies and tech companies to censor the Internet and gag any political views that the corporations and the CIA deem “non-authoritative.”

Replace “foreign meddling” and “Russia” with “immigrant invaders” and “bad hombres” and the right-wing hysteria promoted by the Democrats and Republicans becomes indistinguishable. In both cases, the most vicious attacks on democratic rights are justified by endless warnings of threats to “national security.”

Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified by three-fourths of the states just over 150 years ago, on July 28, 1868.

The amendment begins with the words, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States,” and goes on to establish that, bound up with this right, no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Defending his proposal, Trump tweeted yesterday, “This case will be settled by the United States Supreme Court.”

The “case” of birthright citizenship was already settled—by a Civil War that claimed the lives of over 600,000 people. As President Abraham Lincoln explained in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, the war, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, tested whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…might long endure.”

The 14th Amendment is known as one of the three “Civil War amendments.” Along with the 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, and the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed adult men the right to vote, the Civil War amendments enshrined in law what the Grand Army of the Republic accomplished in fact.

The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment rejected the conception that rights and citizenship derive from blood, race or noble status. It was specifically a response to the notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that persons of African descent were not citizens and could not exercise basic rights such as the right to due process.

The ultimate target of this and related moves is the American and international working class. Amid rising social inequality, a growing strike movement and broad disillusionment with the political establishment, those truths the bourgeoisie once held in its revolutionary era to be “self-evident” it now loathes as incompatible with its drive for corporate profit and world military domination.

The right to free speech and the right of immigrants to enjoy citizenship and its associated rights on US soil—alongside all other democratic rights—can only facilitate, in the eyes of the ruling elite, the unification and education of the world working class, laying the basis for what they fear most—socialist revolution and the expropriation of their wealth for the benefit of mankind.