Empire Unravelling: Will Huawei Become Washington’s Suez?

Thomas Hon Wing Polin

America’s full-spectrum campaign against Chinese tech leader Huawei is coming spectacularly undone. Curtains are imminent for Washington’s tawdriest global offensive in recent memory – featuring open extortion, kidnapping, demonization and intimidation of both friends and foes.

The signs were apparent as early as two months ago, when many governments worldwide lukewarmly greeted US calls for a boycott of Huawei’s products and services. But explicit refusals in the past week by staunch American allies Germany, Britain and New Zealand, as well as NATO member Turkey, have all but sealed the deal. After all, hardly any country outside the US-dominated Empire is signing on.

Even 61% of CNN viewers thought the crackdown was motivated by politics, against 24% who believe Washington’s line on “protecting national security.” All that apparently persuaded POTUS Trump to tweet about winning the tech race with China “through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies.”

Washington’s stunning defeat stems from US leaders’ hidebound hubris, their utter inability to conceive of a world in which their country was no longer No. 1 in everything significant. Such navel-gazing put them to sleep, oblivious that history has marched past them in the form of China’s Huawei Technologies. The simple fact is – as Huawei boss Ren Zhengfei has been saying – the Chinese firm is far ahead of everyone else in the development of 5G. Any nation that doesn’t want to be left behind rolling out the game-changing, next-generation communications technology has little choice but to do business with Huawei. Moreover, without fanfare the company has taken a leading role in shaping the very rules of 5G, on a global basis. Like China itself, Huawei simply cannot be contained.

There’s a bigger question underlying the Battle Over Huawei: Will it turn out to be the Suez Crisis of the American Empire? That 1956 watershed in the Middle East clearly signaled the end of the British Empire’s century-long domination of world affairs. America’s President Eisenhower stopped cold a UK-led invasion of Egypt by threatening to dump Washington’s huge holdings of pound-sterling bonds and cripple the British financial system. China may not have hinted at selling its hoard of US Treasurys, but such a move has long been implicit. After Suez, the world knew for certain there was a new No. 1 power: the United States. The battleground in 1956 was oil; in 2019, it is technology.

On other fronts, the signs are grim for Imperial Washington as well. Besides the revolt of the Europeans over Huawei, the German government is at odds with the Trump regime over a growing number of issues. They include Germany refusing to buy America’s F-35 jetfighter; spearheading the creation of a European Army, together with France; cementing Berlin’s (and the EU’s) ties to Russia through energy pipelines; forging a more independent European foreign policy; and, it’s whispered, eventually getting the US “army of occupation” out of Germany. If she proceeds, Chancellor Angela Merkel will have solid public backing. A recent poll found that 85% of Germans considered Berlin’s relationship with the US “negative.” Some 42% said China made a more reliable partner for Germany than the US, while only 23% said the opposite. Italy has announced its intention to participate officially in the China-led Belt & Road Initiative to develop EurAsia, becoming the first Western nation to do so.

In Asia too, Washington has been losing ground. Behind the scenes, the leaders of North and South Korea — not the grandstanding Trump — are spearheading the accelerating moves towards peace and perhaps eventual reunification. They are being discreetly supported and guided by China, especially President Xi Jinping. Trump took his country further out of the picture last week by blowing a much-anticipated summit with the DPRK’s Kim Jong Un with his hardline obstinacy. Even faithful US ally Japan has been engaging its Chinese archrivals in détente, even as it distances itself from an increasingly erratic Washington.

In the Middle East, America’s headaches are intensifying with a bedrock associate, Saudi Arabia. Last week, Riyadh’s volatile, headstrong Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited India and China in a clear bid to diversify his country’s reliance on the US for economic development as well as security.

In the American homeland, meanwhile, bitter political divisions make daily headlines, exacerbated by the pugnacious style of the Trump regime. Nativism and racism have raised their ugly heads to new highs for recent times.

Abroad, allies are talking back and breaking ranks, while rivals gain ground and influence at US expense. At home, the nation chases its own tail incessantly, even as national institutions decay.

How much longer can the American imperium hold?

Improving Health in Africa

Cesar Chelala

One of the lessons of the Ebola epidemic is the need to improve the African countries’ public health services, which have suffered the consequences of decades of neglect. Africa needs to rapidly upgrade those services as well as to improve the capacity of its medical and paramedical workforce.

Although Africa bears one-quarter of the global burden of disease, it only has two percent of the world’s doctors. Progress has been hindered, particularly in rural areas, because the infrastructure and the health services are inadequate, and there is a widespread lack of trained medical personnel.

Effects of HIV/AIDS

The African continent has been greatly afflicted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Talking to a patient at a hospital in Mozambique at the height of the AIDS epidemic he told me, “My choice is to die from AIDS or from hunger.” In a few words, he was highlighting two of the African continent most pressing problems: disease and poverty.

East and Southern Africa is the region most affected by HIV in the world and is also home to the largest number of people living with HIV (19.6 million in 2017.) This pandemic has reversed decades of improvement in life expectancy, educational progress, and economic growth. For example, in Lesotho, where life expectancy was 60 years in 1995, life expectancy had plummeted to around 50 years in 2017 due, to a large extent, to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country.

Although the number of deaths of AIDS-related illnesses has fallen significantly in the last decade, the high cost of treating HIV/AIDS, when coupled with the indirect costs resulting from loss of workers’ productivity, has had a serious negative effect on African economies. HIV/AIDS is estimated to have decreased agricultural output by as much as 20 percent in several African countries.

In addition, public health officials still have to deal with the stigma of AIDS that persists in most African countries, and that is a huge barrier to gathering people tested for the infection. Fortunately, self-testing kits have improved the proportion of people being tested and this has allowed more people to be treated for the infection.

Other diseases

In addition to HIV/AIDS, South Africa has the highest tuberculosis death rate per capita worldwide, followed by Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This is due to a large extent to the increasing number of cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR) as well as drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis. TB is the leading cause of death for people living with HIV.

In addition, there has been a sharp increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancer, and heart and lung diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that NCDs will rise in the region by 27 percent over the next 10 years, resulting in 28 million additional deaths.

Mental health problems have traditionally been neglected by African governments. As a result, most mental health patients remain untreated. This “treatment gap” ranges from 75 percent in South Africa to more than 90 percent in Ethiopia and Nigeria. As Dr. Crick Lund, a Professor of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town has remarked, “By neglecting mental health, it will be difficult to attain many of the Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty, malaria, gender empowerment, and education.”

Many diseases affecting both children and adults could be addressed with minimum resources if they are adequately employed. This is the case of diarrhea and respiratory infections, measles, malaria, and malnutrition, which represent the greatest threats to children’s health. Malaria is the leading cause of death among African children under five years old. African women are approximately 175 times more likely to die during childbirth and pregnancy than women in industrialized countries.

Health problems are worsened by the lack of health professionals, due in part to the continuing exodus of doctors and nurses to industrialized nations. If health care systems are to be effective, resources must be redirected from curative care in urban settings with high tech equipment to primary and preventive health care.

Consequences of corruption

In addition to problems directly related to the health sector, corruption and illicit financial flows (money that is illegally earned, transferred or utilized) drain critical resources needed to improve people’s health and education. According to Kar and Cartwright-Smith, Africa is estimated to have lost in excess of $1 trillion in illicit financial flows. This amount is roughly equivalent to all of the official development assistance received by Africa during the same timeframe.

The widespread practice of bribing government officials by foreign companies must be curtailed through the enforcement of national and international laws dealing with this issue.

Importance of reliable statistics

Lack of reliable statistics is a hindrance to improving health systems in Africa. They range from defective systems for civil registration to poor data on maternal and child health indicators, including immunization rates for the most common diseases. A World Bank study showed that half the population of African countries had not been included in a census.

Reliable statistics are critical for assessing the magnitude and kind of health problems affecting the population, for determining access to health services, particularly in rural areas, for allocating resources for different programs, for assessing the effectiveness of the interventions, and for monitoring different projects.

Economic aid

In the last few years, the emphasis has been placed on economic aid to Africa. African countries, however, need a different kind of aid. They need their human resources to be trained in their own countries. They need more help in preventing major diseases. They need more education for all age levels, and they need better conditions of trade for their products. African countries do not need more monetary aid given irresponsibly, which ends up in the hands of government officials and members of the countries’ elites.

Moving forward

To improve people’s health in Africa more efforts are needed to increase primary health care, especially in rural areas, accompanied by health promotion, disease prevention, and improved education for all ages. For too long, Africa has been a photo-op for movie and music stars, whose patronizing attitudes disregarded the Africans’ capacity for solving their own problems. As writer Paul Theroux wrote about Bono, “There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.”

Africa has a tremendous human potential that, well directed, will help overcome the countries’ difficulties. According to current population trends, Africa is set to have the largest youth population in the world. It is estimated that by 2050, the median age for Africa will be 25 years, compared to 36 for the rest of the world. The role of Africa’s youth in guiding the continent’s progress can be considerable if we appeal to its own capacity, creativity, and resilience.

USA Continues Economic Sabotage of Eritrea

Thomas C. Mountain

On February 28, 2019 the last financial wire transactions between the small socialist country of Eritrea and all the western countries were stopped with no further wire transfers in USD$ or Euros to or from Eritrea being allowed .

UN just and illegal UN sanctions against Eritrea were lifted recently but the damage being done continues. During the 9 year long UN sanctions period the US shut down all Eritrean government bank accounts and cut off all access to USD$ international transfers. The USA and its European lackeys even tried to prevent Eritreans in the diaspora from paying their national 2% income tax (something all US citizens outside the country must do), critical to the creation and survival of the country.

After being kicked out of the dollar market Eritrea’s next turn was to the EU to no avail. The EU would not allow Eritrea access to international euro transfers so Eritrea was forced to fall back on her only international friend, Russia, as a conduit for international banking transactions in euros.

US sanctions against Russia enforced against the EU are now officially the cause for shutting down Eritrea’s last western foreign exchange access completely cutting off Africa’s only socialist country from western capital transfers.

While diplomatic ties between Eritrea and the USA have improved dramatically under Trump the economic sabotage of our country’s economy continues. As with all sanctions by the USA, the target is always the people of the sanctioned country, bringing untold misery in the name of “Defending Freedom and Democracy”.

Sanctions have almost never achieved the political aims of the USA with Iraq a prime example during Saddam Hussein’ rule. Half a million dead Iraq’s “was worth it” as Hillary Clinton’s mentor Lady Albright so infamously proclaimed.

In the case of us living here in Eritrea and our family and friends in the diaspora, its cash and carry, the only way to get part of the country’s hard currency lifeline in and out of our homeland.

When this economic sabotage will end is a question that must be asked in light of the recognition Eritrea has recieved in being a critical player in the peace that has broken out in the Horn of Africa, never mind the peaceful revolution that took place in Ethiopia in 2018.

It goes without saying that small socialist countries have never been treated fairly, with Cuba and North Korea paying a brutal price in human suffering. Eritrea is the latest victim of Pax Americana and it failing grip on the worlds economic lifelines via the USD$. The shameful thing is how spineless the Europeans are, bowing down to the US Empire in the most craven manner. How this story will end remains unknown, but for Eritreans at home and abroad, its just another
challenge to overcome.

The Post-Truth India

Ashraf Lone

We entered the age of fake news long time ago and some intellectuals and scholars have started to call it an important branch of post truth. When did it started and when will it end, nobody has the accurate answers. There are different views about  the beginning of the Post-Truth Age. Some say that it started with the invasion of Afghanistan by US on fake excuses and grounds by spreading misinformation before the invasion, some drag it to the Iraq war, while some take it to the Fatwa which was issued on Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini on the publication of his novel Satanic Verses in 1989, and Muslims were made to go after Rushdie’s life and in return Islamophobia started in the West.  Some view its roots even in the 2nd World War in which Nazi propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels allegedly had said, “ A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told thousand times becomes truth.”

One thing is clear that we are living in the post truth society with half baked knowledge,  misinformation and the result is chaos in society and in our surroundings. Here everything is presumed right and true, presented on screen within few flashes and images. With the coming of Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms everything is taken for granted, and we believe in everything without verifying it. Be it some doctored video or photo, we take everything so seriously that we don’t hesitate in taking another person’s life, be it neighbor or a friend.

In this post truth society facts matter less and emotions are exploited to gain advantage, political, social or any other later to be exploited more, and this cycle continues unabated. Public opinion are formed on fake and untruth news and views to gain immediate access to power, be it through knowledge or political or social. The interesting part of the story is that people don’t know that they are falling victim to propanganda and fake news and all the fake things they are engulfed in.

India has attained a unique distinction of having more fake news than any other country in the world. This fake news has taken lives of many, mostly muslims and other marginalized communities and not even spared intellectuals, writers and journalists. Mostly this fake news has increased during the BJP rule, which boasts of nationalism and has questioned and questioning every Indian’s nationalism who oppose its policies and politics of hate.

Whatsapp has become very dangerous  thing in India. Its easy to use and you don’t have to stand in que to register for it or to create a group. What you need is an android phone and an internet connection which is easily available now through various mobile phone networks and many companies offer now very cheap internet packs. Internet is a good thing but with fake and hate filled Facebook pages, Whatsapp groups and Twitter, it has become very dangerous. There are thousands of Whatsapp groups now created simply for spreading fake news and to spread hatred in the society. Most of these Hate groups or pages are created by those people who don’t believe in democratic norms and with political backing of ruling party spread misinformation through these pages which subsequently leads to hatred in society and then killings. The worst victims of these hate groups have been muslims. Hindutva affialiated groups through various social media means first spread wrong information intentionally about the beef eating or beef storing or smuggling by muslims and within few minutes this spreads in the whole area and we see people marching to the muslims localities and homes, burning muslim localities and killing innocent muslims. We have seen how muslims have felt the brunt of this fake news, thrashed, stabbed and lynched in every part of India.

Other victims of this hate have been those hindus who support progressive values and by some means stand against this hatred spread in society.  Activists, writers and journalists, like Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh, Pansare  and others have fell to this hate. Ravish Kumar, a journalist is receiving constant threats for his fair and uncompromising reporting and writings. Fake Whatsapp groups have been made to spread hate against him.

Now coming to the recent events, it seems now the perpetraters and propagators of hate are feeling exhausted after threatening and killing Indian muslims in the name of nationalism and Cow and beef and other useless stuff. The tide of hate has now been turned towards the Kashmiris, studying and doing business in various cities of India, particularly the north Indian cities. This came after the Pulwama blasts which was blamed on Pakistan. Many Kashmiris were beaten on roads and fake posts attributing to them were circulated on facebook and whatsapp and thus creating an atmosphere of fear for them in mainland India. Most of the Kashmiri students have left their studies midway  and many businessmen have shut down their businesses and left for Kashmir. A professor was recently beaten and made to apologize publicly for the post which the Hindutva goons in the first place didn’t understand. The post was simply against war and in favour of peace.

The tussle or “ Short War” between India also became the victim of this fake propaganda and misinformation. Most of the facebook pages and Whatsapp groups uploaded  cuttings of movies, Russian and American   military drills and of video games to display India’s might to the opponent and wrongly claimed the damage of “Surgical Strike”. This didn’t even spared some  24/7  jingoistic TV news channels who displayed some movie and game clips for their propaganda for stoking extreme nationalistic feelings, to downplay the opponent’s military might and thus craving for war. This jingoism, war mongering and hatred towards muslims and Kashmiris remind us of Joseph Gobbels.

Indeed times are very tough for muslims and other minorties to live peacefully and safely in today’s India but easy to become the target of hate spread by fake news and other misinformation spread through various media plateforms. The lies over the years, especially from last four years have spread enough poison in the society to get washed in weeks or in months. It will take many decades to get rid this society of the fear and hatred created in the name of fake nationalism and fake patriotism. Till then who knows where would India be standing and what will happen to its minorities and marginalized.

India: Modi government suppresses disastrous unemployment report

Kranti Kumara

India’s unemployment rate was the highest it has been in 45 years in 2017-18 reveals a government survey recently leaked to the Business Standard, an influential Indian daily.

Conducted by the government’s National Sample Survey Organization or NSSO, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) found that India’s unemployment rate averaged 6.1 percent in the last fiscal year.

This figure grossly underestimates the unemployment crisis wracking India—as a closer reading of the PLFS itself reveals—and gives only a faint inkling of the social misery confronting working people in a country with no social safety to speak of.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Modi are suppressing the survey, refusing to release it to the public although it was completed in early December, that is three months ago.

This is because the survey’s findings put the lie to the government’s claims of having delivered “development” and shed light on the human costs of its ruthless pro-big business policies.

With national elections to be held in multiple regional phases this April and May, the government is acutely sensitive to anything that undercuts its claims to have presided over a “world beating” annual growth rate of 7 percent.

The data in the leaked survey shows India has faced a growing employment crisis since the 2008-9 global financial meltdown and economic slump; that this crisis worsened in the years immediately preceding the 2014 election, when the BJP swept to power on a promise of jobs and development, and grew still more dire during the first four years of BJP rule.

Less than half of those of working-age are “employed”

One of the most striking findings of the PLFS is the steep decline in the Labour Force Participation Rate (LPFR), that is in the percentage of Indians aged 15 to 24 who are economically active, whether as wage-laborers, farmers, hawkers, shop-owners, artisans or other self-employed.

According to the most recent PLFS, the Labour Force Participation Rate fell from 63.7 percent in 2004-5 to 55.9 percent in 2011-12, and in the following six years fell a further 6.1 percentage points to just 49.8 percent in 2017-18.

This means that out of a total working-age population of 860 million, only 428 million were economically active in 2017-18.

While the PLFS shows the jobless rate to have increased to its highest in 45 years, the LPFR figures indicate that there are tens of millions of “hidden unemployed,” that is of people who have given up looking for work and are now entirely dependent on their relatives and or scrounging and begging for their survival.

This has explosive implications and has already led to the eruption of large-scale protests by jobless youth and impoverished peasants and landless rural labourers.

Soaring youth unemployment

The BJP government-suppressed PLFS shows that youth unemployment has risen steeply since 2011-12 and is “much higher” than “in the overall population.” For instance, the unemployment rate among rural males aged 15-29 years jumped more than three-fold, from 5 percent in 2011-12 to 17.4 per cent in 2017-18, and for young women it almost doubled from 7.8 percent to 13.6 percent.

In the same period, urban youth joblessness more than doubled, with female urban youth unemployment reaching 27.2 percent.

Overall the urban unemployment rate was 7.8 percent in 2017-18, far higher than the 5.3 percent rate that reportedly prevails in rural India.

However, these figures are deceptive. Many of those considered as “rural employed” are trying to eke out a living by tilling tiny plots of land and by hiring themselves out as day-labourers to better-off farmers. So miserable are the conditions in rural India, millions leave for the cities each year.

Another striking aspect of unemployment in India is the increasing number of female workers who are dropping out—or more correctly being expelled—from the workforce. In 2005-06, 49 percent of females between the ages of 15 and 49 reported that they had engaged in work in the previous 12 months. Ten years later only 31 percent did.

Over 90 percent employed in the informal sector

According to the last NSSO survey on employment, which dates from 2011-12, 92 percent of Indians who were employed were either self-employed—a category that includes tens of millions of hawkers and small traders—or employed in small-scale retail outlets and production facilities.

What this means is that less than 35 million persons are employed in the so-called formal economy, comprised of larger private and state-owned companies. Only the formal sector is subject to minimal government labour standards, and only workers employed in the formal sector receive a modicum of benefits and have any assurance of regular pay. The rest work in the informal economy, receiving poverty wages and working up to 7 days a week, in haphazard and often hazardous conditions.

In rural India, where some 900 million people reside, the vast majority live in abject poverty. The suicide of small impoverished peasants by the thousands each year is an entrenched and “normal” phenomenon for the past two decades.

The government’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which promises 100 days of unskilled manual labor annually to one member of every rural household, has been starved of funds by Modi and his BJP since they came to power in 2014. This is because the BJP and its big business backers view this threadbare attempt at poverty alleviation—daily wages are between 160 and 260 Rupees ($2.20- $3.60)—as a waste of funds, and decry it for “distorting” the rural labor market, that is artificially inflating rural wages!

For the past several years, the NREGS has been running out of funds in the middle of the financial year. This has resulted in delays in the payment of wages for weeks and even months. Last year as many as two-thirds of NREGS workers were not paid on time. As a result, increasing numbers are dropping out of this program.

According to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a private business information company, that in some ways collects better statistics than the government, the jobless crisis is far worse than depicted in the most recent PLFS. The CMIE estimates India’s current unemployment rate to be 8.6 percent and says the Indian economy lost 11 million jobs last year.

In December, the All India Manufacturers’ Organisation (AIMO) reported that India’s manufacturing sector had lost 3.5 million jobs since 2016. It placed the blame for these losses on the twin shocks of the late 2016 demonetisation of 86 percent of India’s currency and the introduction in 2017 of the regressive national Goods and Services Tax (GST).

The Modi government’s response to such reports has either been silence or vituperation. It responded to the Business Standard article outlining the findings of the most recent PLFS by denouncing it as a politically-motivated smear campaign.

Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, rubbished the findings of the government’s own NSSO with these words: “There is no authenticity to this information. If some people have cooked up some report and they put their imagination, I do not have any answer.”

NITI Aayog, another government agency deployed to counter the bleak picture painted by the PLFS, pointed to the 3 million new cab drivers for Uber and Ola since 2014 as proof of stellar job creation.

No matter how Modi and the Hindu supremacist BJP try to sugarcoat the stark reality of mass unemployment, it is clear that India’s economic growth both under their tenure and that of the Congress Party-led government that held office from 2004-2014 has occurred at the expense of jobs both in numbers and in quality.

Meanwhile, the wealth of India’s capitalist elite, including its freshly-minted crop of 140 billionaires, has swelled. In 2015, India’s top 1 percent owned 53 percent of the country’s total wealth. By 2017 this had shot up to 73 percent, meaning the other 99 percent unequally shared the remaining 27 percent.

Whatever party or combination of parties forms India’s government after the coming election, the immiseration of the vast majority of Indian’s workers and toilers will continue for all of them, from the BJP and Congress Party to the Stalinist CPM, are committed to perpetuating “pro-investor” policies.

UK: May’s Brexit deal rejected by parliament again

Robert Stevens

UK Prime Minister Theresa May lost another vote Tuesday evening on her proposed European Union (EU) Withdrawal Agreement, with MPs voting against it by 391 votes to 242—a majority of 149.

With just 16 days to go before the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, no deal has been agreed on trading relations after Brexit.

This was the second crushing defeat for May in what has been termed a “meaningful vote” by MPs. In January, her deal was thrown out by a majority of 230, with 432 MPs against in the biggest vote against a sitting prime minister in history.

Tuesday’s vote was the fourth worst defeat ever suffered by a sitting government. Voting against May this time were 75 “hard-Brexit” Tory MPs and the 10 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs upon which the Tories depend for a majority.

May promised MPs after January’s defeat she would seek to win concessions from the EU. A sizable section of the Tory party, up to a third of its MPs, organised in the European Research Group (ERG), are opposed to the section of May’s agreement that includes a “backstop” for Northern Ireland to ensure tariff-free trade with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state. The “backstop” keeps the UK aligned to EU customs rules, with a minimum of regulatory differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

In the intervening weeks, May secured no significant concessions from the EU. On Monday, hours ahead of the vote, she announced a breakthrough in last minute talks in Strasbourg with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. The pro-May, pro-soft Brexit (keeping access to the Single European Market) Daily Mail ran a front-page photo of EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier kissing May as proof of “a breakthrough Brexit deal… sealed with a kiss.”

However, the Withdrawal Agreement text remained unaltered. All that was agreed was a unilateral statement from the UK government which defined the backstop in tortured language as a “joint interpretative instrument”. The backstop was not intended on the part of the UK or EU to be permanent, it said. May also brought back a joint political statement asserting that the UK and EU would work to implement a new trading relationship by 2020, hopefully making the backstop unnecessary.

Prior to the vote, May’s Attorney General Geoffrey Cox told parliament that, though May’s assurances reduced “the risk that the United Kingdom could be indefinitely and involuntarily detained,” the legal risk of being tied to the EU after Brexit “remains unchanged.” If a post-Brexit trade agreement could not be reached between the UK and EU, the UK would have “no internationally lawful means” of leaving the backstop without EU agreement.

Lawyers employed by the ERG declared that the new assurances, “do not materially change the position the UK would find itself in if it were to ratify the withdrawal agreement.” The DUP said it still rejected the deal as “sufficient progress has not been achieved at this time.”

Parliament’s main chamber was only half full as MPs showed their contempt for the prime minister as she opened yesterday’s debate. The verdict of the Financial Times was that May had “lost control of Brexit after her revamped exit deal was overwhelmingly rejected by 149 votes… leaving her authority in shreds.”

Following her defeat, May confirmed that further votes will be held on Brexit today and tomorrow. There is to be a non-whipped “free vote” this evening on whether or not the UK should exit the EU in a “no deal” Brexit. May had to concede this, given that a large section of anti-EU Tories would have rebelled against her anyway. Leading Brexiteer Boris Johnson said in the debate that May’s “deal has now reached the end of the road.” No deal was the “the only safe route out” of the EU, he added.

MPs across all parties are expected to heavily reject a “no deal” Brexit. Therefore, another vote will be held on Thursday to allow MPs to seek an extension to the formal Article 50 exit process from the EU.

The dominant Remain wing of the ruling elite views such a delay as a step towards its overall goal of a second EU membership referendum aimed at reversing the 2016 Leave result. However, there is at present no majority in Parliament in favour of a second referendum, with many Labour MPs in seats that heavily supported Brexit likely to defy the party whip if party leader Jeremy Corbyn imposes one.

The eight pro-Remain Labour MPs who recently left the party to form the Independent Group in Parliament see their main function as preventing the Brexit crisis ending in a Labour election victory under Corbyn, and instead are working across the political divide to ensure that the UK stays in the EU.

Corbyn has done everything possible to police the political crisis facing British imperialism and to enable a solution in the “national interest”. May’s “deal is clearly dead” and “no-deal must be taken off the table,” he insisted after the vote. He called on the “house to come together” to prevent May from “threatening us all with the danger of no-deal, knowing full well the damage this will do to the British economy.”

Corbyn said Labour would again put forward proposals for a “negotiated customs union, access to the markets and the protection of rights.”

Making no mention of a second referendum, he timidly suggested that “maybe it’s time for a general election” so “the people can choose who their government should be.”

The stalemate in parliament gives expression to the extraordinarily weakened position of British imperialism on the global stage. Speaking to Sky News, pro-EU Tory Dominic Grieve warned that the crisis facing the British ruling class would only deepen for years to come. Opposing a no-deal Brexit he said, “What is going to happen is that the moment we are out is the debate is going to resume in an equally debilitating form but with the UK really weakened in its international standing, no longer in the EU, a supplicant in terms of negotiation for the future [EU] relationship, and with a deeply divided parliament, and in my case the Conservatives deeply divided, but the Labour Party is equally divided, and unable to come to an agreement and we should avoid that.”

The failure of the EU to offer May anything significant represents a tightening of the thumbscrews by European powers. This was confirmed in a letter from Juncker to European Council President Donald Tusk, clarifying that if the UK was still in the EU in late May, it would be obliged to take part in the EU elections scheduled for May 23. Spokesmen for Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker issued a statement declaring, “On the EU side we have done all that is possible to reach an agreement… Given the additional assurances provided by the EU in December, January and yesterday, it is difficult to see what more we can do. If there is a solution to the current impasse it can only be found in London.”

Brexit is a manifestation of the ongoing breakup of the EU under conditions of a growing trade war and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts. There is no outcome that can rescue British imperialism from its further descent into a global maelstrom.

US refuses to ground Boeing jet despite second crash in five months

Barry Grey

Two days after the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 commercial jet in Ethiopia that took the lives of all 157 passengers and crew members, the US government and American carriers that use the plane have refused to ground the recently introduced plane.

Boeing 737 MAX 8

This is despite the fact that another 737 Max 8 crashed in Indonesia just five months earlier under what appear to be similar circumstances, killing all 189 people on board, and that virtually every other major country around the world has decided to ground the aircraft and/or ban it from its airspace pending the results of investigations into the cause of the disaster. Only Canada has to this point joined with the US in refusing to ground the plane.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis Ababa, bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed at high speed about six minutes after takeoff early Sunday morning, in clear weather with good visibility, after ascending, then descending, then ascending sharply again while accelerating to speeds in excess of what is standard during a takeoff. The CEO of the airline reported that the pilot, an experienced senior pilot with the company, radioed air traffic control that he was having “flight control problems” and asked permission to return to the airport before losing control of the plane.

The investigation is in only its initial stage and no definitive answer can be given at this time to the question of the cause or causes of the crash. The data recorder and cockpit voice recorder have both been recovered, but have not yet been read. However, the circumstances are ominously similar to the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 last October, which plunged into the Java Sea only minutes after taking off from the airport in Jakarta.

Investigators have blamed that crash on a faulty sensor and automatic feature in the 737 Max models that points the nose down to avoid a stall, but about which the pilots had not been informed and which they were unable to override. As a result, the plane alternated between sharp descents and ascents until it dove into the water at 450 miles an hour. After the crash, pilots in both Indonesia and the US said they had no knowledge of the new autopilot program that Boeing had installed in the updated 737 model, and had not been trained in its use.

Boeing evidently installed the new automated program to compensate for problems connected to the new and much larger engine in the revamped 737. Boeing built the more fuel efficient model in order to compete with its archrival for control of global markets and profits, European-based Airbus, which had introduced its own A320neo to capture a bigger share of the lucrative medium-range commercial flight market. One of Boeing’s major selling points against the A320neo was the claim that the 737 Max 8 required virtually no additional training for pilots who had flown a previous version of the 737, and was therefore cheaper to bring into service.

The context for the introduction of the 737 Max 8 and Max 9 (a longer version) was a ruthless war for control of markets against Airbus, particularly the soon-to-reach $1 trillion Chinese air travel market, combined with a brutal cost-cutting drive within the United States. Since becoming CEO and chairman in 2015, Dennis Muilenburg (2017 compensation of more than $18,450,000) cut the workforce by nearly 7 percent in 2016 and another 6 percent in 2017. Airbus, for its part, announced 3,700 job cuts in 2018.

Muilenburg has also been squeezing Boeing suppliers, demanding price cuts of 10 percent or more, which has led them to intensify attacks on their own workers.

Given the circumstances of the two crashes of 737 Max 8 jets, it is clear that concern for the safety of passengers and staff and the general public, not just in the US but internationally, would dictate at least a temporary suspension of flights until mechanical flaws or other design defects could be ruled out. But Boeing and the US carriers that fly the 737 Max 8 and Max 9—Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United—have all refused to pull the planes, insisting that they are perfectly safe.

Late Monday, after China and a number of international carriers had grounded the plane, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a “continued airworthiness notification” to Boeing 737 Max operators. At the same time, Boeing announced that it would implement a software update on the 737 Max 8 in the coming weeks to “make an already safe aircraft even safer,” by making changes to “flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training.”

The US government is maintaining this position in the face of growing calls for a ban on 737 Max flights in the United States. The flight attendants’ union at American Airlines, which flies 24 of the Max 8 jets, took the token step Tuesday, undoubtedly under massive pressure from below, of calling on American CEO Doug Parker to ground the plane. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants also told its members they would not be forced to fly on 737 Max 8s if they felt unsafe. The pilots’ union at American, the Allied Pilots Association, told its members as well they did not have to work on these aircraft.

Among those individuals who have demanded that the FAA ground the plane are Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, who said in an interview, “Because this is a new model and there are similarities with the two accidents, Boeing should put safety first and ground the aircraft.”

Also calling for a ban are Ray LaHood, transportation secretary under Obama; Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein, Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Mitt Romney; and consumer advocacy groups such as Consumer Reports and FlyersRights.org.

However, the priorities of the capitalist system have nothing to do with the safety and preservation of human life. There are immense financial interests bound up with the profitability and stock price of Boeing that far outweigh the danger of more destruction of human life and suffering for the victims’ friends and family. Further shifting the scale in the direction of cover-up and deception are the geo-political and economic imperatives of defending US national industry against foreign challengers.

Boeing stock accounts for a huge portion of the run-up in share prices since the election of Trump in November of 2016. This makes the protection of the company a matter of the greatest concern for the entire US financial elite. Shares of Boeing have tripled since the election, making it the highest priced stock in the Dow Jones index. From November 2016 through last Friday, when Boeing stock surpassed $422 a share, the Dow added 7,000 points, and Boeing’s rise accounted for more than 30 percent of the increase.

In the aftermath of the Ethiopian crash, Boeing stock fell 5.3 percent on Monday and another 6.1 percent on Tuesday. Even so, it is up 25 percent year-to-date. It has doubled since the beginning of last year. Under the cost-cutting drive and aggressive marketing overseen by CEO Muilenburg, Boeing set company records for earnings, cash flow and commercial deliveries in 2017 and pledged to do better.

It is the United States’ biggest single exporter, which makes it a central player in Trump’s trade war policy. Trump has repeatedly hailed Muilenburg, who has returned the praise.

During his recent trip to Hanoi, Trump posed for a photo with the Boeing CEO to celebrate a new order from a Vietnamese airline that included 100 737 Max jets.

And if Boeing is central to US imperialism’s global ambitions as well as the fortunes of the country’s banks, hedge funds and speculators, the 737 Max 8 is critical to the success of Boeing. It is the century-old company’s best-selling plane ever. It accounts for almost a third of Boeing’s operating profit. It is estimated that a full halt to deliveries could cost the company $5.1 billion, or 5 percent of annual revenue, within two months.

As of January, Boeing had more than 5,000 orders for the various versions of the 737 Max. According to the Wall Street Journal, analysts estimate that the Max 8 represents two-thirds of Boeing’s future deliveries and 40 percent of its profits. As far as the American ruling elite is concerned, it must be protected at all costs!

These facts point to the fundamental irrationality of capitalist private ownership of the airline industry and the division of the world market into hostile and competing national camps. It is a system that is incompatible with the provision of safe, affordable and comfortable air travel for the entire population.

The latest tragic and preventable air crash is further proof of the urgent need to expropriate the corporate ruling elite and transform the major corporations into public utilities operated under the democratic control of the working class so as to satisfy human need, not private profit.

Amid rising protests, Moreno government lays off thousands in Ecuador

Cesar Uco

The government of President Lenin Moreno, besieged by corruption charges, has embarked on an IMF-dictated austerity program entailing mass layoffs that is bringing it into increasingly open confrontation with the Ecuadorian working class.

The first round of layoffs, targeting 10,000 part-time and hourly workers, took effect on March 1. The most affected areas are education and healthcare. Agustín Lindao, leader of the National Union of Public Health Ministry Workers (Osumtramsa), reported layoffs of “2,500 to 3,500 between casual and temporary contractors, doctors, EMTs, nurses, pharmacy assistants, social workers and operation personnel.”

At least 1,000 workers saw their jobs terminated at the Ministry of Education, 200 of them in Guayas. At the Institute of Social Security (IESS), 500 employees were fired.

The layoffs are the first step by the Moreno government in meeting the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for sweeping austerity measures in return for a $4.5 billion deal signed with the financial agency on February 20.

The total cuts demanded under the agreement amount to 10 percent of the public workforce, or 50,000 jobs.

Last month, thousands of workers marched in the capital of Quito to denounce the threat of massive layoffs bound up with the IMF deal, as well as privatizations and a punishing rise in fuel prices.

The march was followed by a national strike called by the Ecuadorian trade unions on February 13 in the face of mounting anger among the workers.

Thousands of workers and peasants blocked traffic at several main arteries, burning tires, in Quito, Manabí, El Oro and Zamora, where they managed to partially stop commercial activities. Hispantv said the protest was “against Moreno for violating his government plan ... [which does not contemplate privatization of strategic areas] ... and supporting interventionism in Venezuela.”

Moreno became president in May 2017 and has seen his popularity plummet, from 77 percent when he first took office to 30 percent today, according to Reuters.

Moreno was the vice president and hand-picked successor of his predecessor Rafael Correa, who was first elected in 2007 after running as a self-proclaimed socialist on a populist program. The government’s reformist promises, made during the commodities boom, ran into the realities of falling oil prices and the deceleration of the Chinese economy.

The turn towards austerity measures directed against the working class begun under Correa has been rapidly accelerated under Moreno, who has broken with and turned against the former president.

The evolution of the Ecuadorian government, formerly included in Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Alliance,” is part of the general receding of Latin America’s so-called “Pink Tide” of nationalist-populist bourgeois governments and the rise of right-wing administrations, including those of the fascistic former army captain Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the extreme right wing multimillionaire Mauricio Macri in Argentina.

Conditions for the working class in Ecuador are steadily deteriorating. A report issued this week revealed that the share of the country’s workforce employed in the so-called informal sector—without regular work, wages or benefits—rose to 46 percent last year.

Moreno’s turn to the right has been accompanied by a shift in policy towards Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has lived as a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. The increasingly onerous conditions imposed upon Assange, which began under Correa, have accompanied a bid by the Moreno government to achieve a rapprochement with US imperialism, including through support for the regime change operation in Venezuela. The threat is that Assange will become a bargaining chip in in this process, under conditions in which he faces espionage and/or conspiracy charges in the US that could result in his execution.

In the midst of carrying out the attacks demanded by the IMF on the working class, Moreno has been accused by the opposition, his formal allies in the bourgeois populist Revolución Ciudadana (Citizens Revolution) party, of embezzlement and corruption. Since he took office in May 2017, he has had three prime ministers. The first two resigned to face corruption charges; the current one is Jorge Glass, also out of the ranks of Revolución Ciudadana.

Representative Ronny Aleaga of Revolución Ciudadana House has filed a complaint against the president before the Ecuadorian prosecutor’s office over the purchase of a holiday property in Alicante, Spain.

Aleaga accuses Moreno of having established in March 2012 INA Investments, an offshore company based in the tax haven of Belize that was owned by his brother Edwin Moreno Garcé until it was dissolved in 2016. INA bought real estate, fancy cars, crocodile leather wallets and other luxury items.

However, what is significant about the investigation is that INA Investment did not limit itself to moving money so that Moreno’s family and its associates could live in wealth. The corruption case takes on a greater dimension in that INA was used to facilitate contracts with the state. The complaint filed by Representative Aleaga estimates that this was an operation involving about US$65 million.

Meanwhile, investigative reporters Christian Zurita Ron and Fernando Villavicencio revealed a transfer of US$18 million from Sinohydro, a Chinese state company, to the company Recorsa – managed by Lenin Moreno’s close friend, Conti Patiño, together with the president’s wife, Rocio Gonzalez – and Sinohydro received a contract from the Ecuadorian government for the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair dam, east of Quito, the largest public infrastructure project in the country’s history, cost estimated at US $ 2.8 billion.

“We are seeing how the presidential family of Ecuador has given itself a great life with money coming from Sinohydro bribes, while the people suffer mass layoffs, fuel hikes, insecurity, ineptitude and indifference from the authorities,” Aleaga said in a recent radio interview.

Meanwhile, Moreno has accused his predecessor Correa of corruption, denouncing him for having paid close to US$5 billion for four projects whose real dollar value should have been about half that. Correa is also charged in Ecuador with responsibility for the botched kidnapping of an opposition lawmaker in Colombia. He has denied the charges, insisting that they are part of a political witch-hunt mounted by the Moreno government.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “Privacy Manifesto”: A brief for intensifying Internet and social media censorship

Kevin Reed

On March 6, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a statement entitled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking” on the Notes tab of his personal page. Widely described as a “manifesto,” the document is a brief for ending the mass public exchange of ideas on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as across the Internet as a whole, under the guise of “protecting privacy.”

The manifesto begins with Zuckerberg emphasizing that he is “taking positions on important issues concerning the future of the Internet,” not just social media. He says that he is “working openly and consulting with experts across society as we develop this.” In other words, Facebook—which has grown to 2.7 billion users across the globe and has a Wall Street value of nearly $500 billion—is working with consultants at the highest levels of the tech industry and US intelligence establishments to develop its plan.

The core of the new strategy is the idea that an open and public social media environment—where all users can freely communicate with one another and share each other’s posts—must be replaced by a structure of one-on-one private communication between individuals. As Zuckerberg wrote, “Over the last 15 years, Facebook and Instagram have helped people connect with friends, communities, and interests in the digital equivalent of a town square. But people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room.”

A second aspect of replacing the “town square” with the “living room” is dispensing with the Facebook timeline feature of stored posts. He writes, “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever.”

In sum, Zuckerberg’s proposal amounts to a gigantic about-face for Facebook. The company that was founded in the 2004 with the mission “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” will now be replaced by “a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever.”

Zuckerberg then elaborates on six technical and policy principles for putting the social media genie back in the bottle: private interactions, encryption, reducing permanence, safety, interoperability and secure data storage.

He makes clear that the new plan is being implemented on all of Facebook’s services and writes, “We understand there are a lot of tradeoffs to get right, and we’re committed to consulting with experts and discussing the best way forward.” He never gets around to explaining precisely what the “trade-offs” are that need so much attention.

After three years of continuous battering by the corporate media and Washington political establishment over “fake news,” unsubstantiated claims of Russian interference in the 2016 elections and numerous data privacy violations, Zuckerberg has dutifully drafted a plan intended to mollify his critics. However, from the standpoint of the ruling class, the real problem with Facebook is none of the above-mentioned transgressions.

The advisors that Zuckerberg is collaborating with—such as The Atlantic Council—are responsible for decades of false news, political meddling and mayhem in countries around the world and covering up public privacy violations. Meanwhile, the Wall Street valuation of Facebook is predicated upon the company’s ability to scrape social media profile information and tidbits of user behavior for sales and marketing purposes. Something much bigger and more threatening to the interests of imperialism and the stock market is behind Zuckerberg’s manifesto.

Under conditions where workers and young people around the world are using social media to communicate and organize their strikes and struggles—especially coordinating across industries and national borders—the ruling class has concluded that these open platforms are a significant menace and must be shut down as soon as possible. Thus Zuckerberg’s “trade-offs” involve a direct attack on online freedom of speech that he and his advisors must now repackage in the form of privacy protection.

Since Zuckerberg’s March 6 post, some in the corporate media have focused on skepticism that the plan can deliver on its ostensible goals. Others, such as Facebook critic Roger McNamee, have argued that the manifesto is a public-relations stunt designed to shore up investor confidence and push back calls for government regulation that would break-up big tech companies like Facebook, Google and Apple.

Nowhere in the official media response is there any connection drawn between Zuckerberg’s new vision and the blatant political censorship that Facebook has been engaged in for over two years. Under the guise of fighting “fake” accounts and implementing “harm prevention,” Facebook’s army of 30,000 censors and artificial intelligence bots have removed millions of user accounts and posts arbitrarily identified as inauthentic or misinformation.

As explained by the World Socialist Web Site in its Perspective of December 29, Facebook is today the global censor that decides what information is to be seen and read by billions of people all over the world. In particular, Facebook has specifically targeted accounts, pages and posts of a left-wing character, including those of writers of the World Socialist Web Site and members of the Socialist Equality Party.

The latest proposals from Zuckerberg are of a piece with these past practices. They represent a deepening of the collaboration between the tech industry—references to encrypted communications notwithstanding—and the military-intelligence establishment. Workers and young people should not accept the claims by Zuckerberg, the media or the political establishment that they will protect the privacy rights of the public. The new Facebook vision is part of ongoing efforts to track what people are talking about on social media and, at the same time, to prevent them from using the platform to organize and coordinate their struggles.

Boeing jetliner crashes in Ethiopia, killing all 157 passengers and crew

Eddie Haywood

On Sunday, a commercial aircraft carrying 157 passengers from Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa bound for Nairobi, Kenya crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all on board. The aircraft, a 737 MAX 8, was an upgraded 737 model manufactured by Boeing. The Ethiopian air disaster is the second such catastrophe for the Boeing model. Five months ago, last October, an Indonesian Lion Air jetliner, also a Boeing 737 MAX 8, went down, killing all 189 on board.

Informing the public of the crash, Ethiopian Airlines posted to its Twitter account: “The group CEO who is at the scene right now deeply regrets to confirm there are no survivors.” The message was posted next to a photo of Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam at the site of the crashed aircraft holding a piece of the jet’s debris.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was bound for Nairobi, taking off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa at around 5:30 a.m. Flight conditions were reported as good with clear visibility. Almost immediately after takeoff the aircraft struggled to ascend at an adequate and stable speed, and according to FlightRadar24, the aircraft fluctuated wildly in vertical speed, going from zero feet to 1,472 feet per minute to dropping down to minus 1,920 feet, an extremely unusual pattern for takeoff.

The pilot of the aircraft sent out a distress call to air traffic controllers, who then cleared the jetliner for a return descent to the airport, before losing contact with air traffic control six minutes later and plummeting to the ground near Bishoftu, a town 47.9 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa. As it slammed into the ground, the aircraft shattered into pieces, leaving a large, smoking crater.

What should have been a two-hour flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi carried passengers from four continents, including a contingent of United Nations delegates who were traveling to a week-long United Nations Environment Assembly scheduled for today.

Among the passengers killed were 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians, eight passengers each from the United States, China, and Italy, seven from Britain, nine from France, and a small number from Egypt, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft involved in the disastrous crash was recently added to the Ethiopian Airlines fleet as part of the company’s expansion of its flights and updated aircraft.

Ethiopian Airlines is the largest airline in Africa, and has enjoyed a reputation for its low accident record compared to other competitor airlines across the continent. Up to 2014, Ethiopian Airlines had experienced only 322 fatalities due to various incidents since 1965.

Speaking to the media regarding the cause of the crash, Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Tewolde GebreMariam said, “At this stage, we cannot rule out anything.”

Personnel from the US Federal Aviation Administration, accompanied by staff from the National Transportation Safety Board were at the crash site on Monday, aiding the Ethiopian-led investigation of the disaster. The FAA told media representatives that Boeing would be part of the investigation, and the agency promised it would issue an update to operators of the 737 MAX 8.

On Monday, Ethiopian Airlines reported that the aircraft’s digital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered. An airline official stated that one of the recorders was partially damaged.

While investigators have not determined the cause of the disaster, according to the Associated Press , a witness to the crash reported that he saw smoke billowing from the aircraft before it hit the ground.

The witness, Tamrat Abera, told the Associated Press, “Before falling down, the plane rotated two times in the air, and it had some smoke coming from the back, then it hit the ground and exploded. When the villagers and I arrived at the site, there was nothing except some burning and flesh.”

Under similar circumstances, in October, a Lion Air flight departing Jakarta, Indonesia, Flight JT610, also a Boeing 737 MAX 8, went down minutes after takeoff. Before JT610 went down into the Java Sea, its crew sent a distress call to air traffic control reporting a malfunctioning of the aircraft’s data system, which caused the plane to suddenly descend. Moments after the distress call, air traffic control lost contact with its crew.

Amid fears of a widespread equipment defect peculiar to the 737 MAX 8 sparked by the two air disasters in quick succession, airlines in Ethiopia, China and Indonesia grounded all such aircraft pending further investigation. Late Monday, an official with Royal Maroc Air said that Morocco grounded its sole 737 MAX 8 aircraft.

On Monday, Boeing’s stock dropped 12 per cent on the news of the air disaster, recovering slightly by the end of the trading day to minus 7 per cent.

Attempting to assuage fears, Boeing stated that it saw no reason for the company to recall any of its 737 MAX 8 aircraft and declared the model was among its most popular aircraft and used around the world.

Boeing is one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers, and the biggest US exporter, posting $10.5 billion in profits in 2018.

While the direct cause for the air disaster in Ethiopia remains under investigation, the World Socialist Web Site in reporting last year’s Lion Air crash documented several equipment issues peculiar to the 737 MAX 8, particularly its automated mechanism Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, equipment aimed at preventing the aircraft from stalling. If the flight’s data system indicates that there is a risk of stalling, the mechanism can automatically force the plane’s nose down independent of any action on the part of the pilots of the aircraft.

Along with the largest airlines carrying out a coordinated attack to slash wages and benefits of airline staff, the upgrade of obsolete and aging equipment is being put off in the effort to increase profits, contributing to numerous air disasters over the last several years.

What can be stated for certain is the Ethiopian crash is part of a broader crisis plaguing the transportation industry, as airlines slash operating costs to the bone, risking the lives of airline workers and passengers in order to increase corporate profits.