Texas church shooting caps record year for mass killings in America

Trévon Austin

A gunman and two other people were killed during services at a church in White Settlement, Texas on Sunday. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, two of the deceased were church-goers: Anton Wallace, 64, from Fort Worth, and Richard White, 67, from River Oaks.

The shooter, identified as Keith Thomas Kinnunen, was killed after members of the church’s security team responded to his opening fire on the congregation. According to the police, Jack Wilson, a former reserve deputy sheriff, was the only person to return fire at Kinnunen. Wilson fired a single shot, from which Kinnunen would later die after being taken to a hospital.

Livestream footage from the church shows a grisly scene. Kinnunen, wearing dark clothing, is seen sitting towards the back of the church. He gets up and holds a short conversation with one of the members, who points towards the right. Kinnunen then walks to the middle of the church before pulling out a shotgun and shooting two people before being shot himself. The incident lasted six seconds.

Amy Kinnunen, the gunman’s sister, told reporters her brother had a troubled past and was homeless for a time. Keith Kinnunen was charged with misdemeanor deadly conduct in 2009 and misdemeanor theft in 2013. He and his brother Joel lived on the streets. The latter died by suicide in 2009. Sunday was his birthday. Amy said she did not think her brother’s actions were politically motivated or an act of revenge.

Sunday’s tragic incident has been seized on to praise a Texas law passed in 2017 making it legal to carry arms in places of worship. The law was passed in response to a deadly shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. The Texas lieutenant governor referred to the law at a press conference where he said the church security team saved “an untold number of lives.”

On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Fox News that had that law not been passed, “I fear that we could have lost, you know, hundreds.”

The hailing of lax gun laws as a supposed deterrent to gun violence contrasts with reports that 2019 will set a new record for mass killings in the US. A database compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University shows that there were more mass killings, identified as incidents where four or more people are killed, in 2019 than in any year dating back to 2006, when the team first began tracking such events. Other research going back to the 1970s shows that no previous year had as many mass killings.

Overall, there were 41 mass killings that resulted in more than 210 deaths. Only eight of the killings did not involve guns.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 400 mass shootings in 2019. The website defines mass shootings as incidents involving firearms where four or more people are injured. Texas alone saw some 30 attacks this year, including the tragic shooting in El Paso that left 22 dead.

Although the number of incidents set a record, the 210 people killed this year is still overshadowed by 224 victims in 2017, when the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history took place in Las Vegas, claiming 58 lives.

According to the database, most mass killings fail to make national news because they do not occur in public spaces. The majority of the killings involve people who know each other, such as family members, gang members and distraught individuals who open fire on their coworkers. Nine mass shootings occurred in a public place. Other mass killings occurred in a home, a workplace or a bar. Often, the motives behind the killings are never discovered.

Nearly half of all states experienced mass shootings this year. Mass slayings occurred in various parts of the nation, from large cities such as New York to small communities like Elkmont, Alabama, with a population of just under 475 people. California, a state with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, had eight mass killings, the most of any state.

The prevalence of mass violence in the United States is indicative of a malignant social crisis. The regularity of mass violence is bound up with a systematic assault by the ruling class on the conditions of the working class. The American ruling elite diverts billions to fund its imperialist strivings and enrich the upper echelons of society, but tells Americans there is “no money” for basic social programs.

Politicians and the media inevitably respond to the latest mass killing with empty platitudes. The Democrats call for restricting access to guns as the solution, while most Republicans promote the opposite. Both of these responses are disingenuous and serve to cover up the rotten state of American capitalism.

Along with the spread of poverty and toxic levels of social inequality, the militarization of American society plays a key role in the social crisis. Each year, state and local governments spend over $100 billion to fund police departments. The Democrats and Republicans recently passed, with bipartisan support, the largest military budget in US history, giving the Trump administration a green light to wage wars abroad and against migrants crossing the US-Mexico border.

The impeachment crisis and US war plans against Russia

Andre Damon

With each passing day of the impeachment crisis, the distance between the official reasons for the conflict in Washington and the real reasons grows wider.

It has become increasingly clear that the central issue is not Trump’s attempt to “solicit interference from a foreign country” by “pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals,” as alleged in the whistleblower complaint that triggered the impeachment inquiry.

A Ukrainian soldier, donning U.S. made equipment, takes his front line position at destroyed Butovka coal mine in the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Vitali Komar)

Rather, the conflict raging within the state centers on Trump’s decision to temporarily delay a massive weapons shipment to Ukraine.

The ferocity with which the entire US national security apparatus responded to the delay raises the question: Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat to fight a war against Russia?

A New York Times front-page exposé published Monday, coming in at 80,000 words and bearing six bylines, makes it clear that Trump’s decision to withhold military aid—over a month before his phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky—triggered the conflict that led to the president’s impeachment.

As the Times reports, “Mr. Trump’s order to hold $391 million worth of sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night vision goggles, medical aid and other equipment the Ukrainian military needed to fight a grinding war against Russian-backed separatists would help pave a path to the president’s impeachment.”

The newspaper states that Trump decided to hold up the distribution of military aid to Ukraine on June 19 after he read a news article saying that the “Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.”

Trump’s action sparked a “fiery internal debate,” according to the Times, leading to an intervention by the “national security team” arrayed in a “united front” around National Security Advisor John Bolton, an architect of the Iraq war.

After Trump rejected the officials’ calls for the aid to be released, saying, “We are pissing away our money,” details of the hold on the military assistance were leaked to the press and a high-ranking CIA official submitted a “whistleblower” complaint accusing Trump of soliciting “dirt” on his political rival.

The CIA spun up its “Mighty Wurlitzer.” The intelligence agencies and the media began promoting the narrative that Trump held up the military aid to hurt his political rival, even though Trump made his decision on the aid package a month before he asked Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

These actions would ultimately lead to only the third impeachment of a president in the history of the United States, throwing the country into a constitutional crisis with an unknown outcome.

All of this begs the question: Given the enormous political cost of impeachment to those who initiated it, what could possibly explain the urgency and ferocity with which the entire national security establishment responded to a delay in the distribution of weapons to Ukraine?

Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat? Is the United States planning a provocation that would thrust Ukraine into a major new military offensive?

The Russian military is certainly drawing such conclusions. In a statement earlier in December, the chief of the Russian General Staff, Valery Gerasinov, said the increased tempo of US exercises in Eastern Europe indicates that indicates the US is making plans for “using their forces in a large-scale military conflict.”

“Military activities are increasing in the Baltic States and Poland, in the Black and Baltic Seas,” Gerasimov said. “The intensity of the [NATO] bloc’s military exercises is growing. Their scenarios point to NATO’s deliberate preparation to use their forces in a large-scale military conflict.”

In February, the United States will ship some 20,000 soldiers to Europe to participate in a military exercise that will be the largest deployment of forces to the European continent in a quarter-century. The exercise, dubbed Defender 2020, will include 17,000 European troops and, according to Breaking Defense, see NATO forces “extend their logistics trains and communications lines from the Baltic to the Black Seas.” The exercise will cost $340 million.

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support within days of the House vote to impeach Trump, includes an additional $300 million in military aid to Ukraine as part of a record-shattering increase in US military spending.

Overall, the United States and its NATO allies have provided over $18 billion in military and other aid to Ukraine since the 2014 US-backed coup that overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and installed the current pro-US regime. This was on top of what Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland bragged in 2013 was “over $5 billion” in aid to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”

The bags of money handed out by the CIA via various “civil society” pass-throughs in Ukraine helped overthrow its elected government and bring to power a US proxy regime supported by the extreme right.

In 2013, the US supported a measure that would integrate Ukraine into a political association and trade pact with the EU. This was intended to pave the way for Ukraine joining NATO. When the Yanukovych government opposed the agreement, the US launched the 2014 coup, installing a puppet regime viciously hostile to Russia.

The 2014 coup was a pivotal point in the efforts of the United States to militarily encircle and ultimately carve up Russia. Since the dissolution of the USSR, the United States has led a systematic drive to expand NATO right up to and beyond the borders of the former USSR.

As Foreign Affairs notes:

In March 2004, NATO accepted into its ranks the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which were once part of the Soviet Union, and four other states. The accession of the Baltics signaled that NATO enlargement would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The EU followed suit in May 2004, extending its border eastward to include a number of former Soviet republics and allies, including the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

But the US was taken aback by Russia’s determined response to the Ukraine coup. Russia annexed Crimea following a referendum in which the overwhelming majority of the population of the enclave supported leaving Ukraine. Moscow at the same time backed a secessionist movement in the country’s east.

Given these circumstances, Foreign Affairs writes:

In fact, that Ukraine is at the center of this storm [the impeachment crisis] should not be surprising at all. Over the past quarter-century, nearly all major efforts at establishing a durable post–Cold War order on the Eurasian continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For it is in Ukraine that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history delusions and the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be seen in its starkest form.

Despite the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine, the United States is determined to continue its efforts to militarily encircle Russia, which it sees as a major obstacle to its central geopolitical aim—control of the Eurasian landmass, which would give it a staging ground for a conflict with China.

The relentless drive for military escalation has brought the Democrats into an alliance with the fascistic right in Ukraine, which has held street demonstrations to pressure President Zelensky to continue and escalate the US-backed proxy war against Russia.

One thing is clear. If there is indeed a timetable to use the hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons being transferred to Ukraine, such a war risks a nuclear escalation. In 2018, Elbridge A. Colby, one of the principal authors of the National Defense Strategy issued by the Pentagon in January of that year, published an article titled, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.”

He wrote:

The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.

Any future confrontation with Russia or China could go nuclear… In a harder-fought, more uncertain struggle, each combatant may be tempted to reach for the nuclear saber to up the ante and test the other side’s resolve, or even just to keep fighting.

Amid a growing upsurge of the class struggle all over the world, the Trump administration, representing a despised and isolated capitalist class, can see in war a means to tamp down, as one comment in the Financial Times recently put it, the “class war” at home, and “make domestic antagonism seem beside the point, if not unconscionable.”

But it is the international growth of the class struggle that provides the means to oppose the war drive of the ruling elite. As mankind enters the third decade of the 21st century, the advanced stage of war preparations on the part of the ruling class makes it all the more urgent, in the immortal words of Leon Trotsky, to counter-pose to the “war map” of the capitalists the “map of the class struggle.”

This means unifying the growing struggles and forging a common movement against war and attacks on democratic rights, as an essential part of the struggle for socialism.

UK Muslims demand investigation of Conservative Party’s Islamophobia

Jean Shaoul

The Muslim Engagement and Development NGO (MEND) is the latest group to formally request that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigate Islamophobia within the Conservative Party. It cited a report detailing more than 120 incidents of Islamophobia in the last five years emanating from over 60 Conservative Members of Parliament, councillors and party candidates.

This follows a series of formal complaints by groups, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), over Islamophobia in the Tory Party that have been met with a muted response in the media. This contrasts starkly with the fraudulent campaign launched by right-wing Labourites, the Tories, the corporate-controlled media and the BBC, orchestrated by the US, Israel and Britain’s military and intelligence apparatus, against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the left over anti-Semitism.

Leading the disgusting racist attacks on Muslims has been Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has singled out and attacked Muslim women and readily readmitted people to the party who have actively endorsed Islamophobic tropes. MEND’s report, From ‘Letterboxes’ to ‘Ragheads,’ cites multiple examples emanating from Johnson, including that:

• “Islam is the problem” and “fear of Islam—seems a natural reaction” and Islam was “the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers,” in a piece in the Conservative magazine Spectator after the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005.

• Tony Blair “is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”

• The Queen loves touring the Commonwealth because of the “cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”

• “[F]or 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”

• Veiled Muslim women looked like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes.”

• “We should forbid the imams from preaching sermons in anything but English” and that British Muslims were part of a “multicultural apartheid,” in a piece in the Telegraph.

Johnson put racism and Islamophobia at the heart of his election campaign, pitting Indian Hindu voters against Pakistani Muslim voters, over the fate of Kashmir in particular, to the extent that his populist right-wing rhetoric saw even former colleagues accusing him of “inciting violence.”

Last May, the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella organization of more than 500 member associations, filed a complaint with the EHRC over Islamophobia within the Conservative Party. It noted that the party’s debating forums were riddled with racist comments, with many members and officials engaging in Islamophobia.

One of the most notorious incidents involved Zac Goldsmith, a former MP and a member of Johnson’s inner circle, who during his campaign to be mayor of London, viciously attacked Sadiq Khan as a Muslim extremist, for which he never apologized.

The party took no action against Goldsmith or MPs, councillors or candidates running for election who whipped up Islamophobia. To cite a few examples:

Bob Blackman, the Tory MP for Harrow East, was not sanctioned for sharing anti-Muslim social media posts by former leader of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson. Neither was Nadine Dorries, a Tory minister who has endorsed Robinson.

The Tory Party only suspended 15 councillors pending an investigation after they (and 10 others) were shown to have posted the Islamophobic and racist material on social media. One had called Muslims the “enemy within,” while another wanted to ban mosques and a third called London’s mayor Sadiq Khan a “vile creature.”

According to a YouGov poll published earlier this year, two-thirds of Tory members believe that parts of Britain operate under sharia law, while almost half of Tories believe in the myth of no-go zones where “non-Muslims are not able to enter” and that Islam is a threat to “the British way of life.” Another 39 percent think Islamist terror attacks “reflected widespread hostility to Britain among the Muslim community.”

All the evidence suggests that Islamophobia is entrenched and widespread among the Tories, whose rampant racism extends to anti-Semitism as well, with three Tory candidates in last month’s election being investigated for their views.

The Muslim Council of Britain notes that the party’s complaints procedures are anything but transparent and those in charge of the process have handled complaints in a callous manner.

Former Tory chairman Brandon Lewis denied that Islamophobia was an issue, while Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council, and Tom Tugendhat, an MP and lieutenant Colonel in the Territorial Army, both claim the party has handled the issue well.

Others have gone even further, with Rod Liddle writing in the Spectator, “My own view is that there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party,” and adding, “Phobia implies these misgivings are irrational, when they are anything but.”

Following the Tories’ election victory, the Muslim Council of Britain urged Johnson to reassure the Muslim community, which was now fearful for its future, and “heal the country and bring communities together.” Harun Khan, the MCB’s secretary-general, said, “Mr. Johnson commands a majority, but there is a palpable sense of fear amongst Muslim communities around the country.” He added, “We entered the election campaign period with longstanding concerns about bigotry in our politics and our governing party. Now we worry that Islamophobia is ‘oven-ready’ for government.”

British Muslim journalist Mehdi Hassan echoed this, tweeting that it was a “dark day” for minorities in Britain.

So deeply entrenched is Islamophobia that even former Tory Party chairperson and cabinet minister Baroness Sayeeda Warsi declared that it had “passed the dinner-table test,” meaning it had become widely tolerated and acceptable. She said that the party “must start healing its relationship with British Muslims.”

Warsi called Johnson’s endorsement from far-right figures Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins and the Tories’ retweeting of the statements “deeply disturbing.” She said, “The battle to root out racism must now intensify” and called for an independent inquiry into Islamophobia.

Health Secretary Matthew Hancock dismissed her remarks, saying, “There are others who take a more balanced view.”

Despite having promised an independent investigation into Islamophobia during his leadership campaign, Johnson abandoned his pledge once he became prime minister. During the election campaign, cabinet minister and key Johnson ally Michael Gove told the BBC’s “Today” programme that the party would mount an independent inquiry before the end of the year. But once again Johnson backtracked, promising an internal investigation that would look at all discrimination, not specifically Islamophobia.

The MCB expressed its concern, saying that broadening the investigation’s remit was designed to bury the real problem and was part of the party’s “denial, dismissal and deceit” regarding Islamophobia.

About half of all hate crimes against religious groups were committed against Muslims between 2018 and 2019, while in-person hate crimes against Muslims from 2016 to 2017 increased by 30 percent. “Punish a Muslim Day” letters were sent to Muslim MPs and families around London, while mosques have been attacked, including when a van ploughed into a group of pedestrians who had been worshiping at a London mosque in June 2017.

These hate crimes, and their tacit support from the top echelons of the political establishment, have a definite logic. Britain’s security services have already warned the public that the far-right has attempted—and failed—to carry out attacks similar to that in New Zealand, even amassing and stockpiling equipment to bomb a mosque, with one-third of terrorist plots in Britain since March 2017 coming from the far-right, arguably more energized by anti-Muslim bigotry than anything else.

Poverty in Germany remains high, 2019 report finds

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Almost one in six people in Germany lives in poverty. This is the headline finding in the Poverty Report 2019 prepared by the organisation Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband (Joint Welfare Association). According to the report, 15.5 percent of the population are poor.

Although the poverty rate experienced a slight decline of 0.3 percentage points between 2017 and 2018, it remains at a high level and has even increased in some regions. The Ruhr region, an urban area with 5.8 million inhabitants, is described as “problem area number 1” with a poverty rate of 21.1 percent, which equates to more than one in five.

Berlin underpass where homeless seek shelter (Credit: Spielvogel/Wikimedia Commons)

The new report, published by Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband in mid-December, contains detailed figures on the development of poverty in Germany, including within states and regions. It also shows comparative figures from a 10-year period between 2008 and 2018.

The authors of the study divide Germany into four segments when it comes to measuring poverty. The south, which includes Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, has a poverty rate of 11.8 percent. The states in eastern Germany have an average poverty rate of 17.5 percent, although the states of Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt have poverty rates of 20.9 and 19.5 percent respectively.

With a population of 18 million, North Rhine-Westphalia has a poverty rate of 18.1 percent, making it the area with the highest poverty rate among the four large regions. It also shows the fastest increase in poverty over a ten-year period. The main responsibility for this is the long-standing, widespread poverty in the Ruhr region. Poverty has increased four times faster there over the past 10 years than the national average. The Cologne and Düsseldorf regions have also seen an increase in poverty.

In Brandenburg, Hamburg, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, poverty also increased between 2017 and 2018.

The fourth area considered in the study are the remaining parts of western Germany, which have an average poverty rate of 15.9 percent. Significant regional differences exist within this area, such as in the state of Bremen, which stands out with a poverty rate of 22.7 percent. The city of Bremerhaven’s poverty rate is even higher at 28 percent.

Over the past 10 years, poverty has risen particularly sharply in Hesse, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. In Hesse, poverty rose by 25 percent, from 12.7 percent in 2008 to 15.8 percent in 2018. At the end of 2018, poverty had also risen significantly in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein to 15.3 percent.

Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband bases its calculation of poverty on European Union guidelines. According to this, all persons are counted as poor who live in households with an income less than 60 percent of the median income. However, this only includes the entire net income of the household. This results in the upper limit for poverty being an income of €1,035 for a single person or €2,070 for a single parent with two children aged between 14 and 18.

The report does not reflect the true scale of poverty. People living in poverty in multi-resident accommodation, such as care homes or refugee centres, are not included in the study. In reality, one in three of the 800,000 people living in care homes depends on social welfare support. The poverty rate also excludes the many refugees forced to reside in camps, and the hundreds of thousands of homeless people. It is thus clear that the real rate of poverty is much higher than the official figures suggest.

The rates of child poverty are particularly shocking and are typically higher than the average in every state. To mention a few examples: in Berlin, the poverty rate is 18.2 percent, while child poverty is 23.8 percent. The corresponding figures for Bremen are 22.7 and 35.8 percent, 15.3 and 21.7 percent in Hamburg, 15.8 and 21.1 percent in Hesse, 20.9 and 27.7 percent in Mecklenburg-Pomerania, 18.1 and 24.7 percent in North Rhine-Westphalia, and 19.5 and 27.3 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. Some cities in the Ruhr region and other areas have even higher rates of child poverty.

In addition, the Ruhr region has seen a steady increase in poverty over a 10-year period of 28 percent. Poverty has increased four times faster there over the past ten years than the national average. One area that stands out is Duisburg-Essen, where poverty rose from 14.8 to 20.9 percent over the past 10 years. This corresponds to an increase of 41.2 percent, amounting in the words of the report to a “poverty landslide.”

The rate of Hartz IV welfare claimants in the Ruhr region has also risen more rapidly than the national average. Although the claimant rate declined nationwide from 10.3 to 8.9 percent between 2008 and 2018, it rose to 15.3 percent in the Ruhr region in 2018, 1.4 percentage points higher than in 2008. Almost every district in the Ruhr has a high rate of Hartz IV claimants. One in four residents in Gelsenkirchen and one in five in Essen are now dependent on Hartz IV.

While millions of working people and their families either live in or are at risk of poverty—and have to fear for loss of their homes due to rising rent and electricity prices—the wealth at the top of society continues to grow. The richest 400 families in Germany own more wealth than the poorest half of the population, some 40 million people.

Central political responsibility for the rise of poverty in Germany must be borne by the Social Democrats and Greens. It was the Social Democrat (SPD)-Green coalition government under Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer that between 1998 and 2005 created a huge low-wage sector with their Agenda 2010 reforms and the introduction of Hartz IV. This policy of wealth distribution from the bottom to the top occurred on an international scale and is supported by all the established parties.

The SPD’s responsibility for the rampant poverty rates in the Ruhr region and North Rhine-Westphalia is particularly striking. Apart from a few exceptions, the SPD has governed continuously in North Rhine-Westphalia for decades. Together with the trade unions, they organised the shuttering of the mining industry and the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs in the steel industry.

These relatively well-paid jobs have been lost for good. In 2014, the Opel plant in Bochum, which was built on the grounds of the shuttered Dannenberg mine in 1960, was closed down. Prior to the plant shutdown, the IG Metall forced the workers to accept wage cuts and other concessions to benefit the company, supposedly to save jobs.

The Opel plant is just one example of thousands of similar cases. The vast majority of the jobs created over recent years are low-wage jobs. This, together with the associated rise of precarious working conditions, have resulted in a rapid increase in the so-called working poor.

At the same time, workers confronted a savage assault on social services and the enforcement of austerity. The municipalities in the Ruhr region, which were almost all governed by the SPD until a few years ago, imposed these measures with particular ruthlessness.

Due to the austerity policies, there are hardly any public swimming pools or youth centres left in the cities in the Ruhr region. District libraries often no longer exist or are opened on a part-time basis and staffed by personnel lacking qualifications. Schools and cultural institutions are also in a sorry state due to the decades-long austerity drive.

Roads, public transport, and infrastructure are falling apart. Conditions are also miserable at social welfare offices. Wait times are often intolerably long, due to the fact that increased workloads for those workers who have survived the job cuts have led to a rise in sickness-related absences. The job cuts thus trigger a vicious circle.

The most recent state governments led by the SPD in North Rhine-Westphalia have all committed to abide by the debt brake, which prohibits the government from taking on any new debt. Between 2010 and 2012, the SPD governed under the leadership of Hannelore Kraft in an SPD-Green minority coalition tolerated by the Left Party.

Between 2012 and 2017, the SPD governed in a coalition with the Greens. Norbert Walter-Borjans, one of the two new federal SPD leaders, was finance minister at the state level during this period. He ruthlessly imposed austerity policies on the working class. He threatened to impose sanctions on the highly indebted cities in the Ruhr region that failed to impose austerity rigorously enough.

Video shows Greek authorities performing illegal “push backs” at refugee crossing

George Gallanis

In an exposure of the nightmare confronting refugees seeking passage into Europe, footage published by the German newspaper Der Spiegel shows Greek authorities performing illegal “push backs” at the Greek-Turkish border in northeastern Greece. The footage confirms what refugees and non-government groups have described as taking place for years.

Push backs stand in violation of international law and violate both the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Geneva Convention. International law states that refugees have the right to asylum processing and cannot be forced to return to a country that does guarantee their safety. In this case, the many fleeing to Greece are escaping violence and possible death from imperialist-instigated war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The push backs flow from the anti-refugee policies of the right-wing New Democracy (ND) government, inherited and built upon from policies and attacks on refugees by the previous pseudo-left Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) government. The pretensions of Syriza as being left were used as cover to ram through austerity measures and increase attacks on desperate refugees. Such a bitter experience makes clear that the defense of refugees must be waged by the international working class not only against right-wing parties such as ND but also against pseudo-left groups like Syriza, which represent the interests of the upper middle class and the financial elite, not the working class.

Footage from a total of eleven videos shows masked men, some donning military garb, transporting groups of migrants and refugees from the Greek side of the Evros River to the Turkish side. The footage is from a security camera on the Turkish side and a cell phone camera, possibly from a Turkish border official. Of the latter, the man is holding a cell phone as he walks along the Turkish side of the Evros. People, likely refugees, appear. On the opposite side of the river, masked men can be seen pulling an inflatable boat from the water into the Greek side. The man filming is heard yelling “no deport” in English.

According to researchers at Goldsmiths University who analyzed the videos for Der Spiegel, the footage’s metadata places the date of the video recordings on September 17, 2019, between 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.

For years, refugees have spoken out against the Greek government for performing push backs. Moreover, six current and former security authorities informed Der Spiegel the Greek military had previously been carrying out the illegal deportations which are now being performed by Greek police—or Greek citizens. The push backs seen in the videos were likely carried out by Greek police. The nearest police station is only a few kilometers away.

Meanwhile, documents from the Turkish Interior Ministry estimate from October 2018 to October of this year that approximately 60,000 refugees were illegally deported from Greece.

A United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention visited 20 detention facilities, some housing refugees, in Greece between December 2 and December 13. The group confirmed with lawyers representing migrants and non-governmental groups that push backs are taking place, stating some migrants attempting to apply for asylum in Greece from Turkey “are arrested, detained in very poor conditions, and summarily returned across the Greece-Turkey land border.” “We understand that it’s not occasional. In fact, we understand that it’s a long-standing practice dating back several years now,” said Leigh Toomey, vice chair of the group.

But for those who make their way into Greece, a possible new nightmare awaits them. While the UN group will be releasing a final full report in the coming year, its preliminary findings point to severe overcrowding at refugee camps, continuous pretrial detainment in which refugees are not given a fair trial and are instead placed in detention based on the testimony of a police officer, and children being tried as adults and placed in overcrowded detention centers. “We are also seriously concerned that unaccompanied minors and other children are being detained and treated as adults. Detention of children in the context of migration is prohibited under international law and should be discontinued,” the report said.

The barbaric mistreatment of refugees did not appear overnight. Greece’s ND party is only intensifying the brutal anti-refugee policies of the previous Syriza government.

Under Syriza, the Moria detention camp on Lesbos was described by the BBC as “the worst refugee camp in the world.” Seven thousand refugees, many of them children, are forced to live in a camp designed to hold 2,000. Refugees and migrants in Greece have faced attacks by riot police, forced evacuations from their homes and severe overcrowding.

In March 2016, Syriza brokered a deal with the EU and Turkey establishing Greece as a prison for refugees. The agreement declared all refugees entering Greece through “irregular” routes, such as traveling across the sea by boat from Turkey to Greece, will be deported back to Turkey, unless a refugee can prove he or she will be persecuted if returned to Turkey.

Political responsibility for the conditions facing refugees in Greece lies with Syriza and the ND government, which is continuing the brutality against refugees. According to the UN, since the start of the year, over 55,000 asylum-seekers have arrived from Turkey. Monthly arrivals increased from 1,486 in February to 10,551 in September.

The growing influx of refugees is being met with more repression. ND is in the process of establishing the Unified Border Surveillance Agency, a new arm of the Greek state that will further expand the surveillance, attacks and deportation of refugees coming into Greece.

Last month, Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the hiring of 400 new guards to be stationed along Greece’s land border with Turkey and another 800 new guards for the Greek islands.

In November, ND announced plans to construct new detention centers on mainland Greece by July 2020. The ND government plans to move 20,000 refugees from the Greek islands to the new centers. While promoting the centers as more humane and cleaner refugee centers, in reality the centers will function as new jails, in which the ND will have more control over the refugee population. The detention centers will be completely closed off and will operate like the closed detention centers in the United States. Hidden behind walls, detention guards will operate with limited scrutiny. Guards will be allowed to carry out attacks on refugees with impunity.

The move has been condemned by humanitarian groups. Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Christos Christou told reporters, “The detention centres, the closed centres...may become prisons at the end of the day, and will not treat people as humans. They will treat them as problems.”

Martha Roussou, senior advocacy officer for the International Rescue Committee in Greece, said, “The government’s announcements represent a blatant disregard for human rights. The creation of closed facilities will simply mean that extremely vulnerable people, including children, will be kept in prison-like conditions, without having committed any crime.”

And the Greek branch of Amnesty International said, “In reality, we are talking about the creation of contemporary jails with inhumane consequences for asylum seekers, and more widely, negative consequences for the Aegean islands and their inhabitants.”

The growing attacks on refugees are being coupled by the whipping up of anti-immigrant xenophobia by ND. While Greece’s working class confronts increased austerity measures and some 33 percent of Greek youth face unemployment, the ND government seeks to blame the woes confronting the Greek working class and youth on refugees, a process increasingly echoed across the rest of Europe and the United States.

Japan to deploy military forces to aid US operations against Iran

Ben McGrath

On Friday, the Japanese cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzō Abe approved plans to dispatch naval personnel to the Middle East, ostensibly to protect oil vessels in the region. The deployment consists of a destroyer with helicopters, as well as one of two P-3C patrol aircraft from its base at Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, Japan’s only overseas military base. The deployment could begin as soon as January and will last for at least one year, according to government sources.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga meets with former United States Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel in September 2013 (State Department photo by William Ng/Public Domain)

Tokyo claims the mission will be limited to intelligence gathering to ensure “peace and stability” in the Gulf of Oman, the Gulf of Aden and the northern Arabian Sea. It also claims that this will be done independently of other nations. However, speaking at a news conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said these operations could be conducted in “coordination with relevant countries”—i.e., the United States.

Since Washington ratcheted up its pressure on Iran by abandoning the 2015 nuclear agreement in May 2018 and then accusing Iran of carrying out attacks in the region this past summer, the Trump administration has pushed allies like Japan to contribute forces in preparation for a military conflict.

Japan has been reluctant to join this operation as nearly 90 percent of its oil comes from the Middle East and, unlike Washington, Tokyo maintains friendly relations with Tehran. The previous week, Abe met Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Tokyo, where the prime minister reportedly briefed his counterpart on the deployment.

Tokyo is attempting to show the deployment as a compromise between the demands of Washington and relations with Tehran, stating that the Japanese military will not join US patrols through the Strait of Hormuz, although this has not been ruled out in the future. “We cannot abandon Japan-related vessels,” a government source stated in relation to the possibility of more aggressive actions in the region.

The Abe administration is using the deployment as another opportunity to further its militarist agenda. While Article 9 of Japan’s post-World War II constitution, known as the pacifist clause, legally bars Japanese governments from maintaining a standing military or deploying it overseas, Tokyo has for decades used “reinterpretations” to allow Japan to operate the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), the formal name of Japan’s military.

The Abe administration passed highly unpopular military legislation in 2015 to justify its own “reinterpretation” of the constitution the previous year to allow the SDF to take part in military actions overseas alongside allies in the name of “collective self-defense.” These moves were part of Abe’s goal of revising the constitution by next year.

The latest naval deployment to the Middle East goes far beyond its stated purpose. First, it is meant to put into practice the 2015 legislation that allows the SDF to be dispatched anywhere overseas and enter a conflict in the aid of an ally. While the forces in the region will be barred from using their weapons, this could change with an order from Defense Minister Tarō Kōno.

Second, the deployment is another incremental move toward full remilitarization, which continues to remain deeply unpopular in Japan. A July poll found that 56 percent of people oppose revising Article 9, while only 32 percent supported it. The new mission to the Middle East, the Abe administration hopes, will help normalize overseas military actions in people’s minds and wear away opposition to constitutional changes, which require a national referendum to pass.

The government is sending Japan’s navy into a potential war zone under entirely false pretences. In June, Washington came within 10 minutes of launching an attack on Iran in supposed retaliation for attacks on oil tankers, one of which was Japanese-operated, as well as Saudi oil facilities and other targets. Tokyo at the time questioned whether Tehran was involved.

The credibility of US claims that Iran is responsible for acts of aggression fails to stand up to scrutiny. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres issued a report on December 10 stating that the UN was “unable to independently corroborate” that Iran carried out strikes this year on facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Given the impeachment conflict and wider political discontent in the US, it is entirely possible Trump could decide to launch an attack on Iran in order to deflect those tensions outward. Such an attack could draw in major powers like China and Russia. This is the context of Japan’s decision to deploy military forces.

The new deployment will be supported by another record-high annual military budget, approved by Abe’s cabinet on December 20. The budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1, of 5.31 trillion yen ($US48.56 billion), increased by 1.1 percent. This is the sixth year in a row that military spending has reached a record high and the eighth straight year of increased spending. Since Abe came to office in December 2012, the military budget has grown by 13 percent.

That figure in the budget does not take into consideration future supplementary military spending. For 2019, Abe’s government allocated 428.7 billion yen ($US3.9 billion) in additional funds, a practice that has become common in recent years and can be expected to continue in 2020.

The increased spending will continue to intensify tensions with China and North Korea, as an arms race develops. Next year alone, Tokyo intends to purchase six F-35B and three F-35A stealth fighter jets from US arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin, with a price tag of 79.3 billion yen ($US725 million). In total, Japan plans to buy a total of 147 variants of the jet, including 42 F-35Bs, capable of short take-offs and vertical landings.

The F-35Bs will be deployed on Japan’s de facto aircraft carriers, which are the first offensive vessels in its navy since World War II. Tokyo will spend 3.1 billion yen ($US28.3 million) to reconfigure the Izumo helicopter carrier next year to accommodate the fighter jets. Its sister ship, the Kaga, will be refitted in the future.

Tokyo will also use funds to scout locations and begin building two Aegis Ashore missile batteries, purchased from the US. The batteries will further integrate Japan into Washington’s ballistic missile system throughout the region, which is being developed in preparation for war with China.

Share market boom masks another financial crisis in the making

Nick Beams

Wall Street stock market indexes are set to finish the year at or near record highs in marked contrast to the end of 2018 when they experienced their worst December since 1931 in the midst of the Great Depression.

The rise and rise of stock prices over the course of the year—the S&P 500 is up by more than 29 percent—has been the principal factor in the further escalation of the wealth of the ultra-rich with Bloomberg reporting that their net worth has risen by $1.25 trillion, or 25 percent.

Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

The escalation of the financial markets, however, is not an expression of economic health. Rather, the social disease of ever-rising inequality, coupled with worsening wages and living standards for millions, is the contradictory expression of a gathering crisis located at the very heart of the financial system itself.

The year 2019 will go down in economic history as the great turnaround when the world’s major central banks gave up on their attempt to return to “normal” monetary policy after pumping trillions of dollars into the global financial system in response to the crisis of 2008–9.

These extraordinary actions, rewarding the very banks and financial institutions whose speculative and in some cases outright criminal activities had sparked the crisis, were justified on the basis that they were necessary to save the entire system. When the crisis passed, it was maintained, such “unconventional” monetary policies would cease and there would be a return to “normal.”

But it has become clear over the course of the past decade that this day will never come because, like a drug addict, the entire global financial system has become completely dependent on the supply of ultra-cheap money for the accumulation of profit.

To give the US Federal Reserve its due it did make an attempt to at least restrict the supply. It carried out four interest rates rises in 2018, on the back of a slight upturn in the US and global economy and foreshadowed more of the same in 2019. It even committed itself to start winding down its massive holdings of financial assets which, as a result of quantitative easing, had expanded to more than $4 trillion from $800 billion in 2007.

The violent reaction of Wall Street to these measures at the end of 2018, amid denunciations of the Fed by President Trump, meant that even these limited measures were shelved. The underlying weakness of the US economy and the fragility of the financial system, where corporate debt has risen close to a record $10 trillion (equivalent to 47 percent of the total economy) and some 50 percent of corporate bonds are rated at BBB (just above junk status), meant it could not sustain a base interest rate above the historically low rate of 2.5 percent.

Fed chairman Powell started the year by making clear there would be no rates rises and in July made the first of what were to be three interest rate cuts for the year. The winding down of asset holdings was halted. These actions have been duplicated by the European Central Bank which has further cut its base interest this year and resumed its asset purchases, adding to the €2.6 trillion stock it already holds, while the Bank of Japan continues its quantitative easing program.

The Fed has not officially resumed quantitative easing but it has intervened aggressively in the short-term financial market following a spike in the overnight repo rate last September. The repo market is crucial to the day-to-day functioning of the financial system as financial institutions borrow money overnight to close their books at the end of the trading day. Under normal conditions, the repo interest rate tracks the Fed’s base rate. But in mid-September it spiked to as high as 10 percent.

Since then the Fed has intervened to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and reversed more than half the previous reduction of its asset portfolio.

One of the most significant effects of central bank policy has been in the market for government bonds. It has been said that 2019 was the year when bond market logic was turned on its head. Bond markets have traditionally functioned as an arena for virtually risk-free investment at a relatively low rate of return. Their operations have formed the basis for investments by pension funds and insurance companies that have to balance their long-term liabilities with secure assets.

But in the middle of this year the mass of bonds yielding negative yields reached $17 trillion. Since then the amount of bonds with negative yields has fallen to $12 trillion, but this is still far beyond anything that has occurred in the past.

A negative yield occurs when the price of a bond in the market has gone so high that if an investor purchased it and held it to maturity they would make a loss. Of course, under those conditions investors do not buy bonds in order to hold them to maturity. They do so in anticipation that prices will rise even further and they will be able to sell them and make a capital gain. And the converse applies. If interest rates rise and the price of the bond falls (the two move in the opposite direction) the investors will make a loss.

The emergence of negative yields in bond markets as a result of central bank monetary policies is the expression of a financial bubble in an area of the market that had previously provided some stability.

In a recent comment on Bloomberg entitled “When the ultimate refuge turns risky,” financial analyst Satyaijit Das noted: “Until the financial crisis of 2008, government bonds were the traditional haven for investors. More than a decade on, their nature has fundamentally changed. In any future crisis, sovereign debt will be a propagator of risk rather than a refuge.”

He warned that despite record low interest rates and low inflation the risk on these supposedly safe assets was increasing. Once they provided risk-free returns. Now, with yields at record lows, they provide only return-free risks.

The danger is that problems in the credit worthiness of government bonds of any country can rapidly be transmitted throughout the financial system as losses on bond holdings create selling pressure leading to rising debt costs. In a recent report, the World Bank pointed to a “global debt wave” that had led to the growth of debt in emerging market economies to a “towering” $55 trillion—the largest in history. Emerging markets are not the only source of potential instability. In the advanced economies government debt has risen to more than 100 percent of gross domestic product compared to 70 percent in 2007.

The significance of the debt bubble in government bonds emerges in clearer focus when it is viewed in the context of the financial crises of the past three decades. The stock market crash of October 1987, when Wall Street experienced its largest one day fall in history, was the result of a share price bubble. Then came the Asian crisis of 1997–98, set off by an emerging market bubble. It was followed by the collapse of the tech bubble in the early 2000s and then the financial crash of 2008–9, sparked by a bubble in the housing market which resulted in a crisis with the onset of recessionary trends at the end of 2007.

Now there is a bubble in the market for government bonds, which in previous periods has functioned as the bedrock of the financial system. Moreover, the world’s major central banks are directly involved because of their purchases of government bonds over the past decade. As Das noted: “It is ironic that actions taken to preserve the system and a key instrument—government bonds—now pose a key threat to financial stability.”

The financial oligarchy go into the New Year celebrating their massive accumulation of wealth and the so-called mainstream media will continue to maintain the fiction that the US and, by extension, the global economy, remain sound. But the reality is that the seeds of another financial catastrophe have not only been planted but are rapidly germinating.

Iran, Russia and China hold joint naval drills in Indian Ocean amid US war threats

Alex Lantier

Iranian, Russian and Chinese warships are finishing today a four-day naval exercise in the Gulf of Oman, near the Iranian coast and the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The exercise marked the first time that Moscow and Beijing sent warships for joint maneuvers with Iranian forces in the Indian Ocean.

A warship sails while approaching Iran's southeastern port city of Chahbahar, in the Gulf of Oman. Iran's navy on Friday kicked off the first joint naval drill with Russia and China in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. (Iranian Army via AP)

The chief of the Iranian fleet participating in the exercise, Rear Admiral Gholamreza Tahani, said that its purpose was to demonstrate the close relations between Iran, Russia and China. “The message of this exercise is peace, friendship and lasting security through cooperation and unity, and its effect will be to show that Iran cannot be isolated,” Tahani said. He added, “Us hosting these powers shows that our relations have reached a meaningful point and may have an international impact.”

The exercises were in fact a signal sent to ruling circles in Washington and in the imperialist capitals in Europe that a US-led war with Iran could rapidly escalate into a direct, all-out conflict involving the world’s major nuclear powers.

In June, after Iran shot down a US drone over its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, Trump tweeted that he had aborted US missile strikes ten minutes before they were to begin. With Iran, Russia and China all facing stepped-up military threats and pressure from Washington, Beijing and Moscow decided to send warships to strategic waters off Iran’s coast to signal that a US or NATO war with Iran would not remain confined to the Middle East.

The exercise itself unfolded under the shadow of growing US and Israeli war threats against Iran, which have escalated since Washington unilaterally scrapped a six-party nuclear treaty with Iran last year and re-imposed devastating sanctions on Iran’s economy.

As Russian warships arrived in Iran on Wednesday, Israel’s Army Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi called for military action against Iran. “It would be better if we weren’t the only ones responding to them,” Kohavi said, in what the Times of Israel called a rebuke to Washington, the Saudi monarchy and other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms for not attacking Iran earlier. Kohavi added that Israeli forces would operate openly as well as clandestinely across the area, “even at the risk of war.”

Iranian Deputy Army Commander for Coordination Affairs Habibollah Sayyari warned in turn that the ships involved in the exercise would fire on any vessel trying to spy on them. “Many countries are definitely seeking to know what the matter is. Spies have also taken action,” he said. “We will hit whatever spying craft are in the war game zone.”

Russian and Chinese officials guardedly expressed concern over possible war and their support for Iran. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “We are dealing with the issues of maintaining stability in the region, security and the fight against terrorism. This co-operation and interaction are built on both a bilateral and multilateral basis but exclusively on a legal basis.”

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said, “The drill will deepen exchange and cooperation between the navies of the three countries.” Wu called the exercises “normal military-to-military co-operation,” adding that they were “not necessarily connected with the regional situation,” an apparent reference to the risk of a US war of aggression against Iran.

The identity of ships involved in the exercise belied official claims that it only aimed to practice antipiracy and rescue operations, however. Russia’s Baltic Fleet guard ship Yaroslav Mudry, the tanker Yelnya and the tug Viktor Konetsky, and the Chinese guided missile destroyer Xining are involved. The Xining is nicknamed the “carrier killer,” as it carries many anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles designed to sink large hostile warships, like US aircraft carriers, in long-range strikes.

US State Department officials contacted by the Financial Times denounced the drill, warning Iran that it should “think twice” about joint military exercises. Referring to the fact that roughly a third of the world’s internationally traded oil passes through the Gulf of Oman, the US officials hypocritically added that these war games “should concern all nations with an interest in safeguarding freedom of navigation in the region.”

The main danger to the region, however, has been the wars launched by US imperialism and its European allies since the Stalinist regime dissolved the Soviet Union and restored capitalism in 1991. Decades of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria claimed millions of lives, forced tens of millions to flee their homes, and spawned bitter proxy conflicts across the region. Trump’s sanctions and war threats against Iran continue this policy of trying to forcibly dominate the region.

Iran, Russia and China moved to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against the proxy war NATO launched in Syria in 2011, committing military or intelligence forces to support Assad even as NATO’s war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Now, facing a NATO military build-up in Eastern Europe and the intensifying US “pivot to Asia” and trade war threats against China, Moscow and Beijing are signaling that they would offer similar support to Iran.

The threats of US military action against Iran and trade war tariffs have also intensified tensions between Washington and its ostensible allies in Asia and Europe, and an imperialist military escalation in the Persian Gulf is now underway. The same inter-imperialist rivalries over control of resources, markets and profits that twice exploded into world war in the 20th century again threaten to erupt into war in the 21st.

Amid growing tensions in the Persian Gulf after Washington scrapped the Iranian nuclear treaty, the Japanese oil tanker Kokuta Courageous was hit by a missile strike. Iranian officials strongly denied US accusations that they had launched the missile and, significantly, Japanese officials declined to endorse these US accusations. Last week, Tokyo announced that it would dispatch warships to the Persian Gulf to guard Japanese merchant shipping in the area.

On December 19, French military officials confirmed that the frigate Courbet would join Danish and Dutch vessels in a European force patrolling Persian Gulf oil waterways. Amid the Brexit crisis, Britain has not joined the European mission but has instead committed its ships to a US-led force in the region, together with Australia.

While Iran, Russia and China are targeted by imperialist aggression, this does not make the military maneuvers of Tehran or the post-Stalinist capitalist regimes in Russia or China progressive. Oscillating between attempts to cut deals with Washington and threatening to launch a catastrophic conflict that could escalate into all-out nuclear war, they neither can nor want to appeal to growing anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiment in the international working class. They are terrified of the growing threat they feel from below.

The year 2019 has seen a historic upsurge of strikes and mass social protests from US auto factories and mines, to the French “yellow vest” and public sector strikes, the national teachers strike in Poland, and mass protests from Algeria and Lebanon to Iraq and Hong Kong. Explosive anger against social inequality goes hand-in-hand with growing opposition to imperialist wars. Within these developing struggles, it is critical to build an international anti-war movement in the working class.

Harvard University Middle East Initiative (MEI) Research Fellowships 2020

Application Deadline: 15th January, 2020

To be taken at (country): USA

Field of Study: Priority will be given to applications pursuing one of these four primary areas of focus:

1. Democratizing Politics: Establishing durable, accountable democracies not only by focusing on political institutions, but also by empowering the region’s citizens.
2. Building Peace: Addressing the sources of domestic and interstate conflict and generating durable political settlements.
3. Revitalizing the State: Reforming the Middle East’s social service delivery systems with a special emphasis on health, education and social protection.
4. Democratizing Financial and Labor Markets: Working to ensure that the financial and labor markets in the Middle East benefit the entire population, not merely the elite.

About the Award: The Middle East Initiative (MEI) engages public policy issues in the Middle East by convening academic and policy experts, collaborating with regional partners, and developing the next generation of leaders.

Fellows are expected to be physically present at Harvard for the duration of the two-semester fellowship. Pre-doctoral research fellows are encouraged to work on, and ideally complete, their doctoral dissertations. Postdoctoral or faculty fellows may use this fellowship to complete a book or develop other works-in-progress.

Fellows are generally expected to:

• Complete a 25-30 page Working Paper to be published by the Middle East Initiative
• Present their research at seminars open to the public
• Attend seminars of other Middle East Initiative research fellows
• Participate in Middle East Initiative activities as appropriate

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility:  

• Eligible candidates include advanced doctoral candidates, recent recipients of a Ph.D. or equivalent degree, and untenured faculty members.
• Applicants for pre-doctoral fellowships must have passed general examinations and should be in or near the final year of their program.
• Applications are welcome from political scientists, historians, economists, sociologists, and other social scientists.
• Applications are also encourage applications from women, minorities, and citizens of all countries.

Value of Fellowship:

• The Middle East Initiative offers ten-month stipends of $40,000 to pre-doctoral fellows and $58,000 to postdoctoral fellows. Pre-doctoral fellows are not benefits eligible. Interested candidates are encouraged to apply for other sources of funding. All applicants should clearly indicate on their application form whether they are seeking full or partial funding, and indicate other potential funding sources. Non-stipendiary appointments are also offered, but the application process remains the same.
• Fellows who expect to complete their Ph.D. program prior to the fellowship can apply for a postdoctoral appointment. Confirmation of Ph.D. completion is required to receive the postdoctoral stipend rate and benefits. The fellow will be paid at the pre-doctoral rate and will not be benefits eligible until the Middle East Initiative receives confirmation of Ph.D. completion.

Duration of Fellowship: 10 months

How to Apply: 

• CV/Resume
• Unofficial transcript (pre-doctoral fellow applicants only)
• Research Proposal (3-5 double-spaced pages)
• Writing sample (less than 50 double-spaced pages)
• Contact information for three recommenders submitting letters on your behalf

To apply, please complete the online application form.

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details