International Conference Against US/NATO Military Bases

Roger Harris

The elimination of poverty could be at hand for the first time in the history of humanity. World hunger could easily be abolished with only a small diversion from military budgets. Yet, military spending is expanding, and with it global poverty.

On November 16-18, some 300 peace activists representing over 35 countries gathered in Dublin, Ireland for the first International Conference Against US/NATO Military Bases to address this tragic paradox of the technical ability to serve humanity and the political proclivity to do the opposite. Roger Cole of the Irish peace organization PANA identified the twin threats to humankind of global warming and global war, both driven by accelerating militarization.

Ajamu Baraka of the US-based Black Alliance for Peace highlighted the reactionary role of the US and its allies, which have by far the largest military expenditures in the world. The material basis for the absence of peace and the accelerating proliferation of military bases, in his words, is US imperialism.

Guantánamo was the first of the world network of US foreign military bases, according to keynote speaker Dr. Aleida Guevara from Cuba, daughter of Che. Cuba opposes this violation of national sovereignty. Today the US possesses some 1000 foreign military bases with troops stationed in over 170 countries.

Australian Annette Brownlie of IPAN warned of a new Cold War. The recent US National Security Strategy document, focusing on “great power confrontation,” signals open preparations for direct military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China.

David Webb of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK explained that the US is the only nation with nuclear weapons based outside its soil. US policy is to develop “usable” nuclear weapons in an enhanced first-strike capacity. Missile defense, he reproved, is the shield for the sword of nuclear weapons. The purpose of missile defense is to protect the aggressor against the inevitable retaliation after a first nuclear strike.

Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance reported that the recent US midterm elections brought in more Congressional representatives with military or security state backgrounds. The duopoly of the two US “war parties” is united in supporting an accelerated arms race. Well over half of the US government’s discretionary budget now goes to the military.

Unlike so much liberal and progressive political discourse in the US, which is obsessed with the personality of President Trump, the international perspective of this conference penetrated that distracting fog and concentrated on the continuity of US militarism regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

The session on the environmental and health impacts featured testimony on the toxic effects of military bases in Okinawa, Czech Republic, and Turkey. The US Department of Defense is the world’s largest polluter.

National Coordinator of the Irish Trade Union Federation and Secretary of the People’s Movement, Frank Keoghan, described the transformation of the European Union (EU) into a war project with the recent rush to create a single EU army. Ilda Figueiredo from the Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation and another activist from France warned that the drive for an EU army would transform all national military bases into NATO bases and would in effect allow “nuclear bomb sharing.”

Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report chaired the Africa session. South African Chris Matlhako and Kenyan Ann Atambo discussed the dependency of African states on foreign aid, which is used as a tool to facilitate the occupation of Africa by foreign militaries.

Paul Pumphrey of Friends of the Congo described the development of US strategy in Africa, which has used African proxies to allow domination and extraction of valuable resources such as coltan from the Congo. Now the strategy also includes direct occupation by the US military. George W. Bush established AFRICOM in 2008 with just a single acknowledged US military base on the continent, followed by an explosion to some 50 bases and a military presence in practically every African nation under Obama.

The session on Latin America and the Caribbean outlined the immediate threat of military intervention in Venezuela, caught in the crosshairs of US imperialism. Veteran Cuban peace activist Silvio Platero of MOVPAZ condemned the continuing US blockade of Cuba and the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Speakers from Colombia (now a NATO partner), Argentina, and Brazil reported that their right-wing governments are cooperating militarily with the US.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire from Ireland made an impassioned plea for all-out support of WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange, “our hero of truth,” lest he die in a US prison.

The conference concluded on a high note of unity among the international peace forces. Conference coordinator Bahman Azad of the World Peace Council closed with a call to first educate and then mobilize.

Actions are being planned in Washington, D.C., around the 70^thanniversary of NATO on April 4^th. Coincidentally that is the date of the assassination of Martin Luther King and of his famous speech a year before when he presciently admonished, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.”

Emmanuel Macron’s Fuel Problem

Binoy Kampmark

Governments and ruling regimes tend to face revolution in the face of harsh hikes in prices. Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Britain was rocked by the poll tax.  In France, the once enthusiastically embraced Emmanuel Macron has decided to leave the ground rich with challenges against his administration. The Yellow Vests, the gilet jaunes, have decided to take up the chance protesting with such intensity it has led to death and serious injury.

The pretext was an old one.  An increase in carbon taxes was imposed in 2017 as part of a push to support renewables.  “Support for renewable energy,” announced the environment ministry, “will be increasingly financed by a tax on fossil fuel consumption.” In 2018, the amount rose from 30.5 euros to 44.6 euros per ton, rising to 55 next year.  Diesel and petrol have been affected, a matter than proves less of a problem for those in city environs, serviced by public transport, than rural areas, where the car remains essential.  “Macron has to understand,” came the familiar sentiment from demonstrator Patrick Perez, “that Paris is not France.”

Macron is now being accused of being icily out of touch, a self-conscious creature of arrogance who insists on the dignity of his office even as he attempts to dismantle the pride of others.  But his current approval rating – with 25 percent, according to Ifop, is strikingly accurate, given the share of the vote he garnered in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections.  A mere 24.01 percent favoured him, with Marine Le Pen of the National Front breathing down his neck with 21.3 percent, followed by the Republicans choice of François Fillon with 20.01 percent and the left wing Jean-Luc Melenchon with 19.58 percent.

In the second round, France duly divided along the lines of favouring Le Pen or fearing her, hence Macron’s deceptively bolstered victory. The grand centrist was born, a person who had been warned in 2008 by friends that joining the Rothschild investment bank would mar his political prospects.  The “Mozart of finance” is finding the job of governing France a far more complex prospect than the cold business of debt restructuring, mergers and acquisitions.

He has shown himself to be a keen moderniser, if a frustrated one, of the French labour market, earning the ire of unions and the spluttering contempt of the French labour movement.  Like other French leaders, he has also stumbled into observations more fitting to amateur anthropology, suggesting that the French “Gauls”, by way of example, were a stubborn lot resistant to the influence of other labour models. (He is rather keen on the Nordic example.)

To his Romanian hosts, he explained with the relief of someone away from a troubled home that France was “not a reformable country… because French and women hate reform”.  Many leaders had failed in the effort to buck this trend.  To his Danish hosts, he was similarly heaping upon the French some manured derision while praising his audience in Copenhagen. “What is possible is linked to a culture, a people marked by their own history. These Lutheran [Danish] people, who have lived through the transformations of recent years, are not exactly Gauls who are resistant to change.”

But part of the issue with tarnished presidential popularity has been a diminishing of a position that always demanded a certain, high-peak majesty.  The French president, gravitas and all, was also a European, if not global statesman. Macron’s predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, were also victims of the 2000 referendum which reduced the period of the presidency from seven years to five.  (This is not to say these characters were not, in of themselves, defective in character or policy.) Then, as now, the French authorities also faced a national revolt over high fuel taxes.

While seen as a necessary mercy for a modern time, le quinquennat had the added effect, according to historian Jean Garrigues, of encouraging the leader to be seen as temporary commodity, easily purchased, irritably used, then disposed of. “Voters no longer believe in ideology, they consume and then reject their elected representatives, including the President of the Republic.”  A clue was in the 2000 referendum turnout: 70 percent preferred to stay away from the polls. “A little yes, but a big slapdown,” came the observation of le Parisien.  As ever, the French, masters of the strike, had initiated something similar at the ballot box.

The Yellow Vest movement is not a Gallic shrug but a shaking roar.  The initial target was increased fuel taxes, but the indignation has become a broader church of disaffection on living in general.  It is also being given a ringing endorsement by political opportunists who argue that the movement has no political roots.  Le Pen has been there, fanning matters while providing Christophe Castaner, the interior minister, a distracting if shaky alibi. “The ultra-Right is mobilised and is building barricades on the Champs-Elysées.” For him, such protests are the work, not of a broad movement but a few casseurs, or troublemakers.

Macron is doing his level best to avoid confronting the movement, but his Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is attempting to bribe the protesters into silence, or at the very least a more timorous form of disagreement.  Energy subsidies to 5.6 million households, up from the current number of 3.6 million, are being proposed.  France’s poorest families will also see fuel credits directed to those whose livelihood depends on car travel.  These measures, alone, will be no panacea for Macron’s declining influence.

Egyptian Kangaroo Courts on death sentences spree

Abdus Sattar Ghazali 

An Egyptian Kangaroo Court Sunday (Nov. 25, 2018) confirmed the penalty after being convicted in the death of Hisham Barakat, who was killed in a car bombing in eastern Cairo in 2015, according to the official MENA news agency.

The son of senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Taha Wahdan was among those condemned to death.

There have been no credible claims of responsibility for the deadly bombing that killed the state prosecutor just outside his house. However, the authorities point the finger at members of Egypt’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood movement.

Barakat was responsible for thousands of controversial prosecutions, including several widely deemed as politically-motivated resulting in death sentences, for hundreds of members of the movement.

The Egyptian government has been cracking down on opposition since the country’s first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted in a military coup led by General and current President Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013.

Hundreds of Morsi supporters have been sentenced to death, while the former president and top Brotherhood figures have also faced trial.

Human Rights groups say the army’s clampdown on the supporters of Morsi has led to the deaths of over 1,400 people and the arrest of 22,000 others, including some 200 people who have been sentenced to death in mass trials.

Following the coup, Cairo also labeled the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist organization” in December 2013 and Egyptian courts have sentenced hundreds of Brotherhood members to death, including Morsi himself.

Egyptian military junta led by US-client Field Marshall Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has executed 32 people since al-Sisi overthrew the first democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

According to the New Khaleej, Egyptian authorities have executed 32 people in nine cases since the coup d’e’tat while 64 people are awaiting the death penalty in 13 other cases.

There is no precise count of the number of death sentences pending appeals in Egypt, however human rights organizations say they amount to hundreds.

Since 2013, Egyptian courts have sentenced hundreds to death, with most of the sentences appealed, while few were carried out.

Egypt upholds death sentence against 80-year-old Quran tutor

The Egyptian government has upheld a death sentence against Sheikh Abdel Halim Gabreel, an 80-year-old Quran tutor, with Amnesty International campaigning for him to receive a presidential pardon.

On 24 September, Egypt’s Court of Cassation upheld the death sentences of 20 Egyptians, including Gabreel, who had been convicted of killing 13 policemen during a 2013 attack on a police station in the Giza suburb of Kerdasa in 2013.

Gabreel was arrested while he was in the mosque and was put on trial after six months of investigations, all whilst he was denied a lawyer. Despite not having any political affiliation and stating that he was not involved in the Kerdasa attack, with two witnesses for the prosecution affirming his story, he was sentenced to death.

Some 156 defendants were also either sentenced to death or to lengthy imprisonment in the first trial, for their alleged involvement in the “Kerdasa Massacre” in which 13 police officers were killed.

The 80-year-old grandfather’s health has deteriorated in prison since his detention; he has received inadequate treatment for his psoriasis and cannot walk long distances. Wadi Al-Natrun prison authorities have also prevented his family from bringing him medication.

The latest ruling by the Court of Cassation cannot be appealed. Amnesty has consequently called on the international community to write letters to Egyptian President Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and the country’s public prosecutor, urging for Gabreel to be granted a presidential pardon and that he is given regular and adequate access to qualified medical professionals.

They also urge Egyptian authorities “to halt any planned executions, to commute all existing death sentences and immediately establish an official moratorium on executions, with a view to abolishing the death penalty”.

According to Amnesty, since the ousting of democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Egyptian civil and military courts issued more than 1,400 death sentences, mostly related to incidents of political violence, following grossly unfair trials, with testimonies often obtained through torture.

The global human rights watchdog has described the situation in Egypt as the worst human rights crisis in the country in decades, with the state systematically using arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances to silence any criticism of the government. Hundreds of journalists and human rights activists have also been arrested and held without trial.

Egypt has justified its crackdown on opponents as necessary to protect national security. Last year, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi told US officials in New York that human rights should not be judged from a Western perspective, arguing that Egypt had taken numerous measures to ensure the economic and social wellbeing of its citizens.

World economic slowdown hits Peruvian exports

Cesar Uco

The Peruvian daily El Comercio published an article on November 23 titled “Increase in the number of Peruvian companies that stopped exporting.” According to the report, although the physical volume exported is growing at the meager rate of 0.40 percent so far this year, according to ADEX (Association of Exporters) “the ‘mortality’ of the export companies in the country has accelerated.”

The newspaper reports that “between January and September some 2,402 companies stopped exporting, a figure that is four percent higher than that registered in the same period of 2017.” With these companies representing 18 percent of the 13,122 exporters, the Foreign Trade Society (ComexPeru) concludes that one in five has failed.

The majority of these bankruptcies belongs to the so-called MYPES (Medianas Y Pequeñas Empresas: medium and small businesses). But ADEX reports that 60 companies classified as medium and large have also stopped exporting.

El Comercio ’s revelations indicate that behind the mushrooming corruption scandals and settling of scores within the political establishment during the last months lies the breakdown of the “large-scale privatizations and free market economic model” introduced in the 1990s.

Corruption is such that four former presidents of Peru, as well as, prominent leaders of political parties, could end up in jail for many years, mainly on charges of money laundering. This is the case of Keiko Fujimori, longtime leader of the right-wing populist fujimorista movement and its party Fuerza Popular (FP), which dominates the Peruvian Congress. She was sentenced to 36 months of “preventive detention” while being investigated for forming a “criminal organization” inside FP and using it as a cover for laundering money received from the giant Brazilian construction multinational Odebrecht.

MYPES were originally presented as an alternative to the limited employment generated by large capital intensive companies and, above all, as a solution to the poverty prevailing in the economy’s large so-called informal sector. The idea was the brain-child of Peruvian economist and internationally renowned cheerleader for capitalism, Hernando De Soto, and his Institute of Freedom and Democracy (in Spanish, ILD).

De Soto made a name for himself in the late 1980s authoring the book El Otro Sendero (The Other Path) in which he set out his fundamental ideology: in order to combat informality every citizen could become an entrepreneur, beginning with granting property rights for their urban and rural real estate holdings and using these to obtain bank loans to start a business.

De Soto’s claims that MYPES constituted a successful way out of poverty are fundamentally fraudulent. The number of MYPES that “die” testifies to the falsity of his scheme.

Among those who praise his pro-capitalist ideology in the so-called “emerging” countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia are former Democratic US President Bill Clinton and Republican Governor Jeb Bush.

It is well known that De Soto influenced the inexperienced and newly installed president Alberto Fujimori in 1990 to change his Keynesian initiatives and follow the US-dictated neoliberal agenda. He has also served as economic advisor to figures such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

De Soto’s model for the conversion of the country to a free market economy over the last three decades was accompanied by the growth of labor informality, with the majority located in the MYPES.

MYPES labor informality is 79.9 percent, according to ComexPeru. That is to say, “of the 8.13 million jobs that the Peruvian MYPES generate, at least 6.5 million are informal.”

MYPES “is a very labor-intensive sector that generates the main source of employment in Peru,” Minister of Production Pérez-Reyes told the Andina news agency. Therefore, the disappearance of thousands of MYPES means a sharp increase in unemployment.

Mining is the other sector that dominates economic life in Peru. The mining sector, in the hands of large transnationals, monopolizes the export of raw materials, which constitute 60 percent of total exports and have been the cornerstone of the economic policy of all neoliberal governments, from Fujimori’s in the 1990s to the current administration of President­ Martin Vizcarra.

The trend in mining is to use state-of-the-art technology, achieving high productivity. There are dozens of mining projects each valued in billions of dollars. According to data from the Ministry of Energy and Mines, in 2016, the mining sector generated 174,126 direct jobs, representing about 1.1 percent of jobs nationwide.

In the same period, 1,567,138 indirect jobs were created. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, for each direct job generated by the mining sector, nine indirect jobs are created, dedicated to supplying products or services for the different activities related to mining.

The mining sector also suffered a sharp decline in the month of September. Compared to September 2017, copper exports fell 27 percent. Another negative economic factor is the slowdown in construction, which previously had been the strongest of the private sectors. In the last year, more than 100,000 jobs were lost. And construction continues to suffer from the huge scandals involving the bribery of public officials and private entrepreneurs by the Brazilian mega-construction company Odebrecht.

The causes behind the MYPES high “mortality” are to be found in the economic forces that dominate world markets. The Peruvian economy is suffering from the downward trend of the US dollar and the volatility of world markets in recent months, resulting from trade wars between the great powers.

Peru’s national economy is subordinated to the interests of international capital, which dominates the country by means of the multi-billion dollar investments in mining, relegating the country to the role of supplying raw materials to the developed capitalist world.

Within this global context, the MYPES, rather than decreasing informality, have become a major focus of it, leading to increasing social and economic inequality in Peruvian society.

Falling building debris causes injuries and deaths while profits mount for UK developers

Charles Hixson 

Under signs advertising “Exclusive Skyline Collection—Move In This Year,” lay a man’s body, the upper half covered in a blanket. A broken metal window unit covered his lower half, with broken glass and blood scattered nearby.

Last month, a 53-year-old father, Mike Ferris, became the latest fatality of the frenzied corporate construction industry. Ferris, a coach driver for Clarkes of London, had just used the toilet at the Riverbank Plaza when he was struck by a windowpane falling 250 feet from the penthouse level of the 27-storey Corniche tower block.

Only last year, two carpenters were nearly killed when another window from the same luxury flats collapsed and fell. A spokesman for developer St. James, part of the Berkeley group, said this resulted in a full investigation, which led to a design alteration.

Some days later, senior staff at structural engineer Davies, Maguire and Whitby simply told a junior to declare “no comment.” Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has begun an investigation that first must establish whether the accident was work-related. The three towers of the Corniche are aimed at a rich clientele with the 253 apartments in an “exclusive riverside address” priced between £2.7 million and £6.25 million. Restaurants, a bar, pool, spa and gym are available for its residents.

The This Week in Facilities Management website described images of the accident as “disturbing” and is among the groups investigating it. It observed, “The living spaces of the apartments extend into the deep bays that give the scheme its distinctive character—but the curves may also have caused stresses capable of blowing a window panel from its fixings. Another possibility is if the fallen element sheared in high winds.”

This tragedy on London’s South Bank is only part of a wider epidemic of building failures. In August, a 31-year-old woman, Heidi Boyle, narrowly missed being crushed by a huge glass panel falling 10 floors from the roof of Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. Similar incidents occurred in May and June last year, making it the third time a panel had fallen from the £842 million building since its opening in April 2015.

Boyle said she could only be thankful that her mother and children hadn’t been accompanying her as they normally would.

A National Health Service (NHS) spokesman stated only that “It is not at this time clear why this happened.” Later in the month, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde continued to insist that it wasn’t possible to divine the cause of the panel’s fall: “The shattered pieces recovered were not large enough to analyse and determine the cause.” Safety netting has now been installed around the building to catch any additional wayward panels.

These incidents only serve to demonstrate the perilous state of health and safety regulations that were revealed so tragically in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy.

On July 4, the HSE released its annual workplace fatalities report, which counted 144 casualties across all industries between April 2017 and March 2018. The construction industry accounted for 38 of those deaths. Over the last five years, the rate in construction has been four times as high as that across all other industries. The largest numbers from all deaths have been falls from a great height.

Two months earlier, a survey of its members by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) found 75 percent of those surveyed believed that quality management was inadequate. Past-president and chair of the investigative committee Paul Nash observed, “Construction projects should always have sufficient resources allocated to quality management, both financial and human. But a focus on price and programme has driven the wrong behaviours, leading to quality being neglected.”

The main criticisms in the survey were directed towards the construction companies. The issues of sign-off procedures (84 percent), workmanship standards (82 percent), and supervision (76 percent) were overwhelmingly found inadequate. More than half of declared existing codes and standards encompassing building regulations were unfit for purpose.

One commented, “It’s all about building to a cost rather than building to a quality,” while some condemned the “privatisation” of building control bringing “an element of competitiveness into the role, based on price rather than quality.” Another charged, “Developers often use private building control surveyors to circumvent regulations.” Many called for a quality inspector to be present on all projects.

Rather than being random tragedies, such accidents are the direct result of deliberate government policies. Despite Baroness Donaghy’s 2010 call for more funding for the regulatory HSE, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government cut its budget by 35 percent the following year. This “ticking timebomb,” as she called it, aided by the increasing number of casual labourers, ensures an increase in accidents and deaths.

A Freedom of Information request by the Ucatt construction workers union showed that between 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, the number of unannounced inspections of construction sites fell by 7 percent, while the number of employers prosecuted for security offenses fell from 456 to 410. Ucatt predicted that deaths on sites would “tragically rise,” yet HSE chief inspector of construction Heather Bryant insisted the organisation was “adequately resourced” and construction remained one of their “priority areas.”

Meanwhile, the corporate pressure and influence continues. In November 2017, the G15 group of landlords and other builders called for supporting Conservative MP John Penrose’s “Build Up Not Out” campaign. Framed as “an immediate and effective step towards solving the housing crisis,” they called for an automatic right to build up to the height of the tallest buildings or trees in the same block without need for planning permission.

Accentuating this trend, in January, the government appointed Esther McVey as secretary of state for work and pensions (DWP), including oversight of the HSE. She had formerly overseen HSE as minister of state for employment in 2013, but had that portfolio removed when it arose that as a director of her father’s demolition company, J.G. McVey and Co., she had been served with two immediate prohibition notices in 2002 and 2003. The first was

for scaffolders working without any guardrails, hi-viz jackets or harnesses at a demolition site in Liverpool, and the second given for personnel working at height outside protective scaffolding.

This month, McVey resigned as DWP secretary over the government’s Brexit policy.

London is just one of the cities in a global rush to construct buildings for the super-rich oligarchy at the expense of the working class. The profits to be had in construction projects are immense, and the quicker these buildings can be erected, the greater the fortunes to be made.

In New York, the city Buildings Department reported eight construction deaths in the first seven months of 2018, double that of the previous year. Injuries increased 17 percent, with 469 victims during the period.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has actively sought projects and wooed investors. As the result of unprecedented construction projects in the city, including the vast Hudson Yards development along West 33rd Street, and lax regulations, there have been 12 accidents this year.

More than 50 people in the city have been hit and injured by falling debris. In May, a 67-year-old security guard died and a 27-year-old construction worker was hospitalised when they were struck by a large glass panel from the construction of a 1,550-foot tower. In July, falling scaffolding killed a worker in the Morningside Heights district.

In February, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health reported that rampant safety violations were responsible for the rising number of worker fatalities. The majority of deaths occurred on non-union worksites, with falling as the most common cause of death.

The group found a 62.6 percent decrease in Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) inspections between 1986 and 2017. Safety violations took place at 82 percent of OSHA-inspected construction fatality sites in 2016, it said, adding, “Employers regularly endanger their workforce by disregarding regulations, and workers die as a result.”

Given the encouragement to rapacious property developers by the UK government and others, injury and fatality figures will only continue to rise. UK legal firms proudly advertise the £80,000 and other settlements they have won for injured construction workers—a sum that is laughably negligible to a multinational conglomerate seeking to maximise profits by rapid construction.

How many more people must die unnecessarily for the sake of their corporate agendas? Working class people, including victims of these policies and construction workers themselves, must organise independently and call for an end to these hazardous and deadly conditions.

US immigrants go hungry for fear using food stamps will lead to deportation

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

The inhumanity of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies has been exposed even more nakedly with new reports on the effects of its changes to the “public charge” rule, introduced last month. It connects the qualifications for visas or permanent resident status to the applicants’ usage of various government programs including housing, subsidized health care or food stamps covered by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Anti-hunger advocates and Food Bank workers report that many immigrant families are choosing to go hungry rather than use food stamps or register at various food banks for fear of being deported or denied permanent residency or citizenship.

These reports are based not merely on anecdotal evidence. In the most comprehensive study done on the issue, new research presented this month at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting reveals that SNAP usage by immigrant families has fallen dramatically in the past year, after having steadily increased for a decade.

The study, led by Boston Medical Center Deputy Director of Policy Strategy, Allison Bovell-Ammon, surveyed 35,000 mothers with young children in five US cities—Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Little Rock—from 2007 through the first half of 2018. The study found that SNAP participation amongst eligible immigrant families rose steadily in the decade between 2007-2017, regardless of whether the parent had been in the United States for five years or less.

The trend, however, changed dramatically in the first half of 2018. Preliminary survey results showed that only 34.8 percent of families in the US for less than five years participated in SNAP, representing a nearly 10 percent drop. Among families with mothers who lived in the US for more than five years, SNAP participation declined to 42.7 percent, a 2 percent drop.

In addition, the study also found that household food insecurity increased from 9.9 percent in 2007 to 17.8 percent among immigrant families in the US for less than five years, and rose from 10.8 to 17.5 among families residing in the US for more than five years over the same period.

The survey was conducted prior to the announcement of the changes to the public charge rule, meaning that the growth of food insecurity is undoubtedly far more dire today.

In the press release introducing the study, Bovell-Ammon said: “It’s important to note that the eligibility rules for SNAP remained unchanged between 2017 and 2018... These findings demonstrate that rhetoric and the threat of policy changes, even before changes are enacted, may be causing families to forego nutrition assistance. Some immigrant families may be forced to make agonizing choices between enrolling in critical nutrition programs and jeopardizing their future immigration status. These tradeoffs are likely to have a negative impact on children’s and families’ health.”

Bovell-Ammon’s concerns are not mere conjecture. Officials associated with Food Banks and NGOs focused on food insecurity issues have already reported a dramatic and visible trend of migrant families avoiding seeking any assistance in the current holiday season.

A recent ABC News report drew together accounts of this trend from different parts of the country. Rodrigo Aguirre, a case worker at the Spanish Catholic Center in Washington, told ABC News that about half the families he talks to are not comfortable applying for benefits, for fear that their information would be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mothers in particular, he said, were afraid of being separated from their US-born children.

Immigrants, many of whom already belong to the most vulnerable sections of society, are now being terrorized by the ominous connections being made between usage of government programs and the path to legal residency and eventual citizenship. As Joel Berg, head of Hunger Free NYC told ABC News: “It’s not like things were hunky-dory for immigrants before then, and now it’s just gotten so much worse... you take people that are already scared and are coming from countries and are scared of their government—for good reason—and throw this on top of that, and it’s truly a massive calamity.”

Apologists for the administration have tried to present the changes to the public charge rule merely as a way to streamline the immigration process while making sure that those who qualify for assistance programs continue having access to them. They have also tried to shrug off mounting evidence of migrant families choosing to stay away from government assistance programs even when it is critically needed, as a case of “misinformation and hysteria.”

Jessica Vaughn, a former consular official and director of the pro-Trump Center for Immigration Studies, told ABC News that there could be many reasons why people might be opting out of programs like SNAP. “The rule does not aim to deny benefits to US citizen children or others who might qualify for them,” she said. “Its purpose is to create a better way to evaluate which applicants for immigration benefits are going to qualify by showing that they’re self sufficient.” Such claims are patent lies.

While most people who enroll in programs like SNAP tend to be American citizens, over 9 million are legal immigrants or citizens whose parents were born outside the US. Even as the changes to the public charge rule were discussed, government officials were aware of the potential impact on immigrant communities. In a proposal discussing the issue, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) even estimated that over half a million migrants would disenroll from public programs should the change be instituted.

With the new public charge rule, that reality is far worse than the scenario outlined by the DHS. Migrant communities, already vulnerable and threatened by the plethora of policies attacking their survival, now face the real danger of hunger and food insecurity.

Australian parliamentary inquiry discusses intensifying internet censorship

Oscar Grenfell

A little-reported federal parliamentary hearing last week became a forum, involving Labor, Liberal-National and Greens MPs, media representatives and academics, on expanding the censorship of the internet.

The November 20 session was part of an inquiry into the “conduct of the 2016 federal election and matters related thereto.” Its ostensible purpose was to review whether social media or the internet had been used improperly to “influence” that election. None of those who testified, however, provided any evidence that it had.

Instead, those who spoke claimed it was necessary to combat “fake news.” This is the banner under which the major technology giants, operating in lockstep with the US government, have sought to restrict access to progressive, anti-war and socialist content online.

The speakers warned against growing suspicion of the mainstream media among broad layers of the population and the accompanying interest in alternative sources of information.

Dr Michael Jensen claimed, without any evidence, that Twitter accounts-linked to Russia had sought to “influence” discussions on Australian politics. Jensen is a senior research fellow at the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, a government-funded think tank with close ties to the state apparatus and intelligence organisations.

Jensen declared that Russian “foreign interference operations” could be carried out by “influential agents,” who “would indirectly act upon a target population by trying to shape their attitudes and eventually their behaviours to act in a way that’s favourable to the foreign country.”

Jensen’s claims dovetailed with a campaign being spearheaded by the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies in the United States. Their unsubstantiated allegations blame “Russian interference” for the Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US presidential election.

This McCarthyite campaign has been broadened to present all manner of social discontent as the product of a nefarious plot hatched in the Kremlin. The aim is to criminalise mounting oppositional sentiment.

Likewise, the Australian media and political establishment, is alleging, also without evidence, that China is conducting widespread “interference” in Australian politics, economics and virtually every area of social life.

The Liberal-National Coalition government and the Labor Party opposition used these claims to pass sweeping “foreign interference” legislation last June, directed at outlawing growing opposition to Australian involvement in the aggressive US confrontation with Beijing. The latest draconian legislation, including to fast-track the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme and crack open encryption codes for mobile phones and social media are being pushed through parliament at present.

The real target of online censorship is not “foreign interference” but domestic hostility to war and authoritarianism. Jensen declared that Russian “interference” would “likely” aim to weaken “the Five Eyes alliance”—the international surveillance network led by the United States, which monitors the communications of millions of ordinary people and is integral to the preparations for war.

Jensen further claimed that “Russia” and its operatives had “advocated strongly on behalf of Julian Assange, asking for Australia’s intercession regarding his cause to help free him.” He said this would “become more salient in the near future, as reporting last week has indicated that he is currently under sealed indictment in the United States.”

These comments were an attempt to blackguard widespread opposition to the persecution of the WikiLeaks publisher because of its exposures of US-led war crimes and illegal diplomatic intrigues.

The Socialist Equality Party has spearheaded demands that the Australian government act immediately to secure Assange’s safe passage to Australia, with a guarantee against extradition to the US. This included a powerful rally in June addressed by well-known investigative journalist John Pilger.

The target of online censorship is not “fake news,” i.e., false information, but true news that cuts across the lies of the corporate and political establishment. “The truth or falsity of a statement is often incidental to its utility in influence operations,” Jensen declared.

Chris Zappone, foreign news editor of the Fairfax-owned Age newspaper, took up this theme. Over the past two years he has written a stream of articles, claiming that “foreign interference” is a major threat, and that social media imperils “social cohesion.”

Zappone warned the hearing that people “continually asking questions but not with the end goal of reform, but, rather, simply to ask questions … can feed into the growing distrust between the population—the citizens—and the leaders of that country.”

The Fairfax Media journalist declared that it was necessary to determine whether a news article was “helping to clarify a matter for the public” or “actually helping to just break down trust between the public and the leaders in the society.”

Zappone openly invoked the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s, declaring: “They were having this issue then with the communist infiltration and communist propaganda at the time.” His comments pointed to fears within the political and media establishment over the attraction of workers and young people to socialism amid a deepening crisis of world capitalism.

The journalist suggested greater repression. Where “you find that a certain party or group of politicians are relying on a consistent pattern of misinformation, and if it costs money and it takes coordination … That might be a place where the state comes in and there’s some sort of sanction or penalty.”

Tom Sears, a PhD candidate at the Australian Defence Force Academy’s cyber centre, called for a “whole-of-government arrangement” to target “influence operations.” This, he said, could involve the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—the domestic spy agency—the Australian Signals Directorate, which intercepts online and phone communications, the Home Affairs Department and the military.

Sears also called for the online dissemination of World War I Anzac mythology, which is aimed at promoting the military, and intimidating widespread anti-war sentiment. “Anzac is an example of a tradition which has easily transferred into the digital and by which Australians are able to understand what a civic culture is,” he said.

Labor and Greens representatives at the inquiry asked the assembled experts how “influence operations” and “fake news” could be combated. The entire political establishment is committed to the suppression of socialist and left-wing views and websites, as it pursues an agenda of militarism, austerity and authoritarianism opposed by the vast majority of people.

Greek workers protest social attacks by Syriza government

John Vassilopoulos

Strikes and protests have taken place this month in Greece against the austerity policies being imposed by the Syriza-led government of Alexis Tsipras in accordance with the demands of the European Union.

A general strike in the public sector was called by ADEDY (Civil Servants’ Confederation) on November 14. The strike was the first major action by workers since Syriza exited the EU’s “bailout” programme in August, under an agreement that enforces austerity in the country for decades to come. Public-sector workers have seen their pay slashed by 40 percent since 2010 and are demanding an end to a pay freeze and restoration of what are called the 13th and 14th salaries. Despite the huge cuts inflicted on workers, ADEDY demanded only a 2-3 percent pay increase.

A general strike called by the General Confederation of Greek Labour (GSEE) private-sector union federation is set for November 28. The GSEE is calling for the restoration of collective agreements, pay and pensions and making the paltry demand that the minimum wage return to its previous level of €751 a month.

Transport is expected to be hit by the strike, with the Athens metro, the electric railway and the tram network halted. Employees of the ILPAP trolley-bus service will strike, as will workers on OASA buses for part of the day. Ferry workers are backing the strike, with all passenger ferries to be docked nationwide.

So despised is the ruling party that at a November 16 commemoration of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic student uprising against the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974, members of a Syriza delegation, including two government ministers, were forced to leave amid angry protests at their presence.

On November 20, dozens of members of the POE-OTA municipal workers union occupied the Labour Ministry in protest at the death of a refuse worker killed after losing control of the truck he was driving in the early hours of November 16. The accident took place near Athens’ main landfill in Fyli on a busy highway located northwest of the city centre.

According to figures released by POE-OTA, since the summer of 2014, 43 municipal workers in Greece have lost their lives in workplace accidents, while 58 have been seriously injured. These deaths and injuries are directly linked to the austerity and anti-labour legislation imposed over the last eight years by successive governments.

The week prior to the November 16 incident, a worker lost his life, and another was badly injured when they were hit by a car while cleaning the sidewalk on the same stretch of road. According to reports, the worker was deaf and dumb and unable to hear the traffic. That a disabled person was compelled to work on such a busy stretch of road for €495 (the net monthly minimum wage), with a complete disregard for his safety, is a testament to the social crisis produced by an eight-year-long assault on living standards and working conditions.

In the last three years, Syriza has implemented brutal attacks on pensions, shifted more of the tax burden onto the working class, attacked the right to strike and overseen the privatisation of state-owned assets such as the Piraeus Port Authority to the Chinese-owned company Cosco. Two years ago, it completed the privatisation and sale of 14 major Greek airports to the German-led consortium Fraport.

In addition, 23 regional airports have been earmarked for privatisation, as well as over 10,000 archaeological sites and museums, many in Crete, in and around the town of Chania. The Keep Talking Greece website reported that in Chania alone, the government is selling off the “new Archaeological Museum, the archaeological museum located inside the St Francis Church, the National Museum Eleftherios Venizelos, the Historical Archive of Crete, several Venetian and Byzantine moats, fortifications and bastions, as well as properties where important Minoan architectural remains have been discovered.”

On October 11, workers at Greece’s archaeological sites and museums nationwide struck for 24 hours to protest the transfer of public museums and sites to the Privatization Fund. Strikers at the Acropolis in Athens held up a banner reading, “NOT FOR SALE.”

Dozens of token, mainly 24-hour general strikes called by GSEE and ADEDY have been held over the last eight years as a means of letting off steam, while successive governments imposed EU/IMF austerity diktats. These trade union organisations are largely discredited and their inability to maintain control over workers has caused a crisis within the labour bureaucracy. This is especially the case with the All Workers Militant Front (PAME), the trade union allied to the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE). As the second largest faction within both GSEE and ADEDY, PAME has historically played the role of a “militant” loyal opposition within the bureaucracy.

The public-sector strike and proposed strike in the private sector were endorsed by PAME, which campaigned for a 24-hour general strike involving both GSEE and ADEDY for November 8, which failed to materialise.

On November 1, workers in a group of eight unions struck in what was dubbed an “inter-sector strike from below.” The unions involved included the SEFK, which covers teachers working in frontistiria-- evening cramming schools that prepare high school students for exams, the union of waiters and catering workers (SSM) and the union that represents employees of Nokia. Demands included the reestablishment of collective bargaining and repeal of a recent law allowing the government to adjust the minimum wage by decree, based on the demands of big business for increased “competitiveness.”

The action was presented as an alternative to PAME’s strike proposal and supposedly independent of the discredited GSEE and ADEDY federations and accountable to the rank-and-file memberships of union locals.

In an interview with the EfSyn newspaper, Giorgos Christoforou, the head of the union of Nokia Greece employees, declared: “The motivation behind this initiative was the stance of GSEE for the so-called ‘National Day of Action of the Social Alliance’” on May 30. [The Social Alliance includes the Employers’ Federation]. “We then said that this can’t go on. We got sick of waiting for GSEE when they were going to strike together with the employers.”

The strike was endorsed by the Front for Class Overthrow (META), which, while presenting itself as a nonpartisan left-wing trade union faction, was historically aligned to Syriza. Most of its members are now part of a Syriza splinter group, Popular Unity, which advocates a programme of national autarky.

The November 1 action was also endorsed by the pseudo-left Antarsya, in which the Socialist Workers’ Party (SEK) plays a leading role. Antarsya holds most of the seats on the SEFK union’s governing committee. META is headed by Giorgos Charisis, a longstanding senior trade union bureaucrat who was also formerly with Syriza and is now with Popular Unity. In the past, Charisis has served on ADEDY’s governing committee and is currently on the executive council of POE-OTA, the municipal workers’ union.

German grand coalition government passes war budget

Johannes Stern

On November 14, Germany’s grand coalition government—consisting of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD)—passed a bill that will increase the country’s military budget by a massive 12 percent. German defence spending will increase by €4.71 billion to total €43.23 billion next year.

The budget marks a turning point in Germany’s post-war history and is part of a comprehensive drive to rearm.

During its deliberations, the parliamentary budget committee, which includes all of the parties represented in the Bundestag (parliament) and is chaired by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), added a further €327 million to the government’s proposed military budget. The committee also significantly increased so-called commitment appropriations, which pave the way for accelerated rearmament in the coming years. Military spending is to increase by 32 percent to €35.49 billion next year. That is €5.68 billion more than originally planned in the draft budget of Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, a member of the SPD.

In her speech to the Bundestag, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU) made clear that this is only the beginning. She said that “medium-term financial planning” does not reflect “what the future will actually bring.” Future commitments, she explained, should be measured “on the budget of 2020.”

The military budget would need to “continue to rise in order to reach the ambitious goal of 1.5 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) for the military and defence in 2024.” The “Union parties” (CDU and CSU) and the SPD agreed in their coalition mandate to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2024, an annual increase of more than €75 billion.

Von der Leyen explained in detail what the huge sums are for: namely, rearmament and preparations for war. The additional “billions of euros for military procurement” would allow the Bundeswehr (army) to “continue ongoing projects,” she said. She stressed that “everything continues for many, many years” and added that it was now possible “to initiate additional projects, such as the Puma armoured infantry vehicle for the VJTF 2023.” The Very High Readiness Joint Task Force is NATO’s High Commitment Task Force against Russia, which will be led by Germany next year.

In addition, “other major projects” could now be brought forward, von der Leyen boasted, singling out the “tactical air defence system, the MKS 180 and submarine cooperation with Norway.” There was also “more money for the Cyber squad—15,000 men and women—more money for education on cyber issues and innovational initiatives such as the Cyber Innovation Hub and the Cyber agency.”

She pointedly added, “We are doing all this to be ready for action… he foundation has also been laid for a heavy transport helicopter. … A good day for the Luftwaffe (Air Force)!”

Also planned is the further development of independent European military structures. “A year ago,” she said, the “Sleeping Beauty” had been “awakened from the slumber of the Lisbon Treaty.” She was referring to the European Defence Union, which, she noted, “has lain dormant for ten years.”

This signified “an end to fragmentation and a powerful incentive to develop in unison.” She continued: “We want joint armed forces with national responsibilities, but so closely linked, armed and equipped that they can carry out actions together for missions such as the German-French brigade in Mali” or what “the German-Dutch corps has done for many years.”

Von der Leyen added, “In this way the army of Europeans develops slowly from below. That’s our goal.”

Last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) pleaded before the European Parliament for “a real European army” able to enforce the economic and geo-strategic interests of Germany and Europe worldwide.

The establishment of a European military union under German leadership is supported by the Left Party and the Greens. On Monday, Dietmar Bartsch, leader of the Left Party parliamentary group, called on the German government to “not just talk about it,” but “make it happen.” And the leader of the Green Party, Annalena Baerbock, demanded in an interview: “The EU must be able to conduct world politics in a dramatically changed situation.”

Von der Leyen’s speech makes clear that all parties represented in the Bundestag—from the Left Party and the Greens to the far-right AfD—are working closely together to ensure the revival of German militarism in the face of growing popular opposition.

At the beginning of her speech, the defence minister thanked “on behalf of our Bundeswehr” the representatives of all political groups “for good and constructive cooperation” in the parliamentary committees. In particular, she thanked AfD representative Martin Hohmann, who was expelled from the CDU 15 years ago after giving an anti-Semitic speech.

The only criticism of the new war budget in the subsequent Bundestag debate came from the right. “I think the money we have budgeted for the defence sector should not be spent on unnecessary consultations, but rather should land where it is needed: in the armament and equipment of the Bundeswehr,” warned Social Democrat Siemtje Möller.

On behalf of the AfD, Hohmann demanded the further “inclusion of projects that are urgently necessary to maintain effectivity.” Examples included the STH heavy transport helicopter and a new assault rifle. In the case of the heavy transport helicopter, “the government had taken up this necessity at the last moment,” for which the AfD was “grateful.”

The deputy chair of the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, said: “We are increasing spending. We are continuing to pursue the new path set. We are focusing on procurement for large projects, but despite all this, the operational readiness of the main weapon systems remains unreliable.”

Similar loyal criticism came from representatives of the Greens and the Left Party. Tobias Lindner, chairman of the Greens in the Defence Committee, stated: “The Bundeswehr faces great challenges; it has problems. But we Greens are convinced it does not help to pour more and more money into these dilapidated structures without altering them.” It is “dishonest” toward “our soldiers...to just put down some money in small quantities.”

“The armament projects take much longer and are becoming increasingly expensive,” complained Tobias Pflüger, who sits for the Left Party in the Bundestag Defence Committee. As part of a motion for a resolution, the Left Party faction tabled its own proposals for a more effective defence budget. Its role is to disguise the revival of German militarism by employing phrases about “humanity” and “development.”

Thus, the Left Party proposed to “reduce total expenditure in the current plan by 6 billion euros” and “redirect these funds to increase development assistance…humanitarian aid and civilian crisis prevention measures.”