The mass protests in Iraq and the US drive to recolonize the Middle East

Bill Van Auken

Hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Baghdad Friday in a mass demonstration demanding the immediate withdrawal of US troops from the country.

Waving Iraqi flags and chanting “Get out, get out occupier,” and “Death to America,” the crowds expressed the immense popular anger that has built up over decades against the murderous role played by Washington in Iraq. Some carried signs threatening armed resistance, while others wore white capes, symbolizing burial shrouds, indicating their willingness to die in such a struggle.

Demonstrators protest US actions in iraq [Credit: AP Photo]

Miriam, an 18-year-old high school student participating in the demonstration, told Al Jazeera: “I’m here today to protest against the United States occupying our lands. We want to liberate our country from these chains of oppression.”

The demonstration was called as a “million-man-march” by the populist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, undoubtedly in an attempt to provide a controlled release for rising popular anger. Sadr, who leads one of the most powerful blocs within Iraq's corrupt bourgeois government, is trying to balance between Washington and Tehran and finds his position increasingly challenged by a revolt from below.

Among the hundreds of thousands who marched were countless workers and youth whose entire lives have been shaped by US imperialism’s crimes, from the first Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, through a subsequent regime of draconian sanctions, which US officials themselves acknowledge claimed the lives of half a million Iraqi children, to the war of aggression launched in 2003 based on lies about weapons of mass destruction.

The World Socialist Web Site described the impact of that war as “sociocide,” i.e., the murder of an entire society. The death toll from the US intervention was estimated at one million, while millions more were driven from their homes. One of the most advanced societies in the Middle East in terms of health care, education and other basic social indices was reduced to rubble. The conditions of life in Iraq are still shaped by the “shock and awe” inflicted upon the country by the US military.

The bitter resentments over this long and bloody history have been reignited in the wake of the US drone missile assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Suleimani, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a prominent member of the Iraqi government and leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the predominantly Shia militias that are part of Iraq’s armed forces.

The killing of Suleimani and al-Muhandis, along with eight other Iraqis and Iranians, at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3 constituted both an unprovoked act of war against Iran and a war crime.

While bringing the world to the brink of a catastrophic new war in the Persian Gulf, the assassinations were a brazen violation of Iraqi sovereignty. Trump administration officials have repeated baseless and until now wholly unsubstantiated charges that they carried out the murders to preempt a supposed “imminent attack” on US forces or interests in the Middle East. The reality is that Suleimani was in Baghdad at the invitation of Iraq’s interim prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, to discuss attempts to ease regional tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi parliament convened two days after the assassination and passed legislation demanding the expulsion of all US military forces from the country. Abdul Mahdi on January 9 formally requested that Washington send a delegation to Baghdad to negotiate the terms a US withdrawal.

The response was one of anger and imperialist arrogance. Trump declared that the US had built a “very expensive air base” in Iraq and that “We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”

He threatened punishing sanctions, which the Treasury Department and other agencies have already drawn up. Washington also told Baghdad that it would close off access to Iraq’s $35 billion account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York—a lasting legacy of the US military conquest of the country—imposing a financial blockade that could collapse its economy and impose even greater suffering upon its population.

The State Department said it would send a delegation to Iraq only to discuss “how best to recommit to our strategic partnership—not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East.”

Trump reiterated this standpoint after meeting with Iraqi President Barham Salih at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. Asked about the threatened US sanctions, Trump replied, “We’ll see what happens, because we do have to do things on our terms.” Salih, an opportunist political creature of every regime since the start of the US occupation in 2003, came under intense fire for agreeing to meet with Trump, with many warning him not to return to Iraq.

These events have laid bare the essential neo-colonial character of Washington’s intervention in the Middle East over the past three decades, carried out under the shifting banners of a “war on terrorism,” “human rights,” “weapons of mass destruction” and defense of “democracy.”

The roughly 6,000 US troops now in Iraq were brought in on the pretext of defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Washington’s own Frankenstein monster, a jihadist militia that grew out of the Al Qaeda-linked forces the US and its allies unleashed in their regime-change war in Syria, which then turned eastward, overrunning roughly a third of Iraq in 2014. The “war against ISIS” resulted in the devastation of Mosul, previously Iraq’s second city, along with cities and towns throughout Anbar Province, leaving tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Now US military commanders are saying ISIS is no longer a serious threat, and that Iran and Iranian-influenced Iraqi Shia militias, which carried out much of the fighting against ISIS, are the principal enemies in Iraq. There have been reports of discussions between US officials and Iraqi Sunni politicians aimed at fostering a separate Sunni Iraqi state that could host US bases.

What is involved is a new imperialist carve-up of the Middle East. Trump has expressed the criminal character of this operation most openly in Syria, where he has ordered US troops to “take the oil,” occupying the oil and gas fields of northeastern Deir Ezzor province, while suggesting bringing in a major US energy conglomerate to loot the country’s resources.

Underlying this turn to unabashed imperialist banditry lies the failure of the multiple US military interventions and regime-change operations in the Middle East to achieve Washington’s strategic aims. It is now turning toward a region-wide war against Iran as part of its buildup for “great power” confrontation with China, attempting to use military force to establish a chokehold over the energy resources upon which the Chinese economy depends.

The uprising of the Iraq masses has been expressed not only in the mass demonstration against the US occupation, but in the continuous protests against social inequality, unemployment and regime corruption that have shaken the country since last October, leaving some 600 dead.

These struggles are unfolding as the country approaches the centenary of the Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920, when the Sunni and Shia populations of Iraq united in a heroic struggle against occupying British forces that had carved out a colonial possession from the carcass of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

British imperialism retaliated with unrestrained brutality, employing poison gas and terror bombings against an impoverished population, costing the lives of close to 10,000 Iraqis. “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes [to] spread a lively terror,” Winston Churchill, then minister of war, declared.

Formal independence and more than a half of a century of bourgeois nationalist rule in Iraq and throughout the Middle East have failed to either free the region from imperialist oppression or meet the fundamental social and democratic demands of the masses of working people. Now, the methods touted by Churchill are returning with a vengeance.

The mass protests in Iraq, together with the struggles of workers and youth in neighboring Lebanon as well as Iran, which are unfolding amid a global eruption of class struggle, point the way forward.

It is now seventeen years since the mass demonstrations against the 2003 Iraq war, involving millions of people in the US, Europe, and internationally. There is enormous opposition to war among workers and youth throughout the world. This opposition must be connected to the expanding wave of class struggle and protests against social inequality.

It is the struggle of the working class against capitalism, in Iraq, the broader Middle East and internationally, that provides the only answer to the reimposition of colonialism and a new imperialist world war. This emerging mass movement must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify workers across the globe in the common struggle to put an end to the source of war and social inequality, the capitalist system.

Media Legal Defence Initiative (MLDI) Digital Rights Advancement Grants 2020 for Sub-Saharan African Countries

Application Deadline: 9th February 2020 at 23h59 (GMT+1).

Eligible Countries: Sub-Saharan African Countries

About the Award: MLDI would like to partner with NGOs, law centres and/or independent media outlets in East, West, and Southern Africa to advance digital rights and freedom of expression online. A limited number of one-year grants are available to such organisations, for projects aimed at providing better local level access to legal assistance and support to online independent media.
As part of this project, we are offering 12-month grants of up to USD 20,000 to organisations with backgrounds in defending and supporting the right to freedom of expression. The objective of the grants is to improve local access to legal assistance for online media and bloggers in order to advance digital rights and standards in online freedom of expression and to maximise the number of digital rights cases reaching the courts. The grants can be used to set up a media legal defence unit which provides pro bono legal support to journalists, citizen journalists and independent media and/or coordinates networks of lawyers to do the same.
If required, MLDI can provide legal mentoring, capacity building, and other forms of non-financial organisational support.
The grants can be used for the following types of projects in East, West or Southern Africa:

• provide legal advice or support services;
• undertake advocacy activities on laws and/or policies that limit freedom of expression online, advocate for the implementation of court rulings that promote digital rights, or publicise new legal standards on digital rights;
• develop or advance an advocacy and/or strategic litigation coalition to reform laws and/or policies which limit freedom of expression online;
• build or strengthen regional relationships with digital rights advocacy groups;
• analyse laws, policies, and practices that infringe on journalists’ right to freedom of expression online and/or provide training in online freedom of expression and digital rights to journalists, bloggers, and independent media;
• research on, or monitoring of, violations of the right to freedom of expression online;
• other projects and activities may be considered but should be discussed with the Project Coordinator before application (see contact details below).

Type: Grants

Eligibility: To be considered, organisations must meet the following criteria:

• The grant is open to NGOs, law centres and independent media outlets registered in East Africa, West Africa, or Southern Africa;
• The organisation must have a background or demonstrable interest in advocacy, litigation, and/or provision of legal support;
• The organisation should have previous experience in the advancement and protection of freedom of expression in the country or region where it operates; and
• The organisation must have sufficient administrative and financial capacity to comply with MLDI’s reporting requirements.

Number of Awards: Limited

Value of Award: 12-month grants of up to USD 20,000

Duration of Programme: one-off 12-month grants. Grants will start in Summer 2020.

How to Apply: Interested organisations are encouraged to submit a concept note though MLDI’s grant application portal. 
Applicants will be asked to provide the following information:

• Organisation’s name and address;
• The names of the head of the organisation, board chair, and treasurer;
• The total amount of money requested from MLDI;
• The organisation’s annual budget;
• A summary of expected outcomes; and
• A summary of proposed activities and outputs.

Shortlisted organisations will be invited to submit a full proposal.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

India’s Failed Democracy

Mel Gurtov

Citizenship Denied

India is often billed as the world’s biggest democracy. But that title has worn thin: Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is becoming a nationalist state home to Hindus and closed to Muslims. A new citizenship law is exclusionist: It provides a path to citizenship for every religion save Islam, which is practiced by roughly 16 percent of India’s population, or nearly 200 million people. Modi proclaims the law part of the “New India.”

Besides being inhumane, the new law is clearly unconstitutional. According to India’s constitution, any “person who has his domicile in the territory of India and—(a) who was born in the territory of India; or (b) either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or (c) who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years immediately preceding such commencement, shall be a citizen of India.” Among the “fundamental rights” granted under the constitution are: (1) “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.” (2) “The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them. No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition . . . ”

Those citizenship and human rights are now being actively undermined. In Modi we have India’s Trump, a man engaged in the pretense of making India great while suborning its democratic institutions. Under Modi’s ruling party, the BJP, which won a second term in May 2019, secularism is out and Muslims, to quote the novelist Arundhati Roy (writing in The Nation, January 13/20, 2020), “are cast as permanent, treacherous outsiders . . . [that] finds utterance in chilling slogans by rampaging mobs.” The BJP’s origins lie in the RSS, founded in 1925 and today claiming a following of hundreds of thousands organized in numerous interest groups (students, trade unionists, farmers, etc.) and movement branches. The RSS claims Modi as a member since childhood, and its enormous political power makes it the main far-right force in India.

Unlike Kashmir, where millions of people are fighting for the right not to be Indian citizens, in the east India state of Assam, about 2 million Muslims now find themselves effectively made into non-citizens by virtue of the National Register of Citizens. Other religious groups—such as Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians—are considered “persecuted minorities,” having emigrated from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. By act of parliament those groups are entitled to asylum. But Muslims in Assam, and by extension Muslims everywhere else in India if Modi has his way, must produce “legacy” papers that prove their uninterrupted presence in India for the last 50 years in order to be allowed to remain. Otherwise, as Modi’s home minister said last December, the national register will be used to “flush out the infiltrators from our country.”

Worrisome Messages from Kashmir and Xinjiang

The citizenship trap may be only the beginning of the Muslims’ ordeal. Kashmir, whose autonomy was suspended by Modi last summer as Indian troops moved in and an Internet blackout was imposed, provides a mirror to the future for Muslims. So may India’s defense minister, who has spoken about setting up “deradicalization camps” for Kashmiris—an idea that may well have emerged out of watching China’s massive reeducation camps for Muslims in Xinjiang province. Arundhati Roy reports that three Indian state governments have already begun work on establishing Foreigners Tribunals and detention centers, which would be the insidious follow-up to dealing with de-citizenized Muslims. Modi denies there are detention centers in India, but the Washington Post report cited above notes that in Assam a huge one is under construction.

Modi has joined the list of major autocrats, showing anew that the trappings of a democratic government are no barrier to authoritarianism. As we found in eastern and central Europe after the downfall of the Soviet Union, one form of dictatorship can give way to another. Now, under new international conditions—the reassertion of illiberal nationalism, the influence of Trumpism, the global immigration crisis, and financial hardships—autocratic leadership is in vogue in several countries where democratic hopes once ran high, often with popular support. Modi’s BJP is popular despite its corruption, media censorship aggressive assertion of Hindu nationalism, and defiance of constitutional norms. But protests are now occurring in response to his citizenship law, which is so contrary to the Nehru’s dream of a secular state. The more Modi presses his far-right agenda, the more sectarian violence his regime is likely to face.

Sri Lankan president announces major tax concessions for foreign investors

W.A. Sunil

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse has announced large tax concessions for international investors following his government’s reactivation of the Strategic Development Projects Act (SDPA) of 2008.

Last week’s decision, which had been put on hold for three years by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government, was taken after the cabinet approved a paper presented by Rajapakse. The government is desperate to boost foreign direct investments (FDI).

Under the SDPA, tax exemptions are granted for up to 25 years for “identified strategic development projects.” Other concessions for foreign investors include the non-payment of the value added tax (VAT) and the removal of various legal barriers related to obtaining land and infrastructure facilities.

The SDPA was first initiated by the President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government in February 2008 amid the escalating war against separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. It was revised twice in 2011 and 2013 to broaden its concessions.

The paper approved by cabinet last week blamed the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government’s restrictions on the SDPA for “hampering international investor sentiment,” along with what it claimed was the adverse impact of Sri Lanka’s complex tax system.

While there was widespread criticism of long-term tax cuts and easy access to land for foreign investors, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government was not opposed to the SDPA concessions. It granted tax holidays for foreign investors until they made profits from their projects and promised other more comprehensive concessions to foreign capital.

The deeply-divided government was unable to implement its promised concessions and began to fall apart after Sirisena distanced himself from Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and then attempted to remove him and his government in the face of workers’ strikes and protests against International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity measures.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse, backed by his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, came to power by exploiting the widespread popular hostility and making populist promises to reduce the price of essentials and improve social conditions. The past two months, however, have exposed the Rajapakse government as a ruthless tool of big business and international capital.

Rajapakse’s cabinet paper boasted that the new government has taken various measures to improve “business confidence.”

On Monday, the big-business Daily FT claimed that the Business Confidence index had recorded an increase of 75 percent basis points in December. It commented: “The tax reforms, reduction of VAT to 8 percent from 15 percent, and lowering of the government expenditure as well as other changes, seem to have endeared the government, both business and consumers.”

While VAT has been reduced, there has been no fall in the price of essentials, with big business gaining the full benefit of the tax cut. In December, the official inflation rate climbed to 6.2 percent, with food prices rising 4 percent.

The Daily FT editorial hailed Rajapakse’s reactivation of the SDPA as a “positive” step, declaring that Sri Lanka “is in dire need of more investment and exports to drive growth and put the economy on a better footing.”

The newspaper declared that “wider reforms are also crucial to this process.” In other words, the restructuring and privatisation of state enterprises must be intensified, jobs destroyed and working conditions slashed to provide even cheaper labour for investors to exploit.

The IMF has long insisted on these “reforms” in line with its demand for Sri Lanka to reduce it fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Last year the fiscal deficit rose to 7 percent of GDP. The Rajapakse government, which confronts rising debt levels and declining export income, has said that it will hold discussions with the IMF and attempt to reduce its fiscal debt to 4 percent of GDP this year.

According to Central Bank reports, Sri Lanka has to pay $6 billion on external loans over the next 12 months. Early this month Central Bank Governor W.D. Lakshman warned the government that the country was “at a crossroad” with “many challenges” to overcome.

“As far as financial flows are concerned, Sri Lanka continued to experience low levels of foreign direct investment [FDI]. Outflows from the market for rupee denominated government securities and the stock market continued, albeit at a much slower pace than in the previous year,” Lakshman said.

Sri Lanka has been unable to reach an expected $3 billion in annual FDI over the past three years. Inflows, in fact, were only around $1 billion a year.

The outflow of rupee-denominated government securities is a direct impact of international fluctuations. The prime investors in Sri Lankan government securities are from the US, but they are withdrawing funds and shifting investments to more lucrative markets.

Desperate to attract international capital, so-called less developed countries are offering even cheaper labor and more attractive concessions. The Rajapakse government’s latest tax announcements are an attempt to undercut its economic rivals and stop the foreign capital outflow from Sri Lanka.

On Monday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse met with Colombo stockbrokers, assuring them that he would boost the local stock market and give “priority” to “attracting investment.”

The brokers want larger amounts from pension funds, such as the Employees Provident Fund and the Employees Trust Fund, released onto the stock market. They claim pension fund exposure to listed equities markets in East Asian countries is between 17 and 40 percent whereas in Sri Lanka it is only 5 percent. Brokers also want selected state-owned enterprises, or part of them, listed on the stock market to “boost liquidity and market capitalisation.”

The new prime minister, who is expected to face a general election in April and is anxious to prevent mass opposition by workers and the poor, did not immediately agree to the brokers’ demands.

Rajapakse has declared that he needs a two-thirds majority to establish strong government and impose the class war measures being demanded by global finance and the corporate elite. This means massive attacks on the living and social conditions of workers and the poor and will provoke the eruption of strikes and protests, in line with the unfolding international working-class upsurge.

Major Chinese city in lockdown as novel coronavirus spreads internationally

Benjamin Mateus

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is providing health officials around the world with situational updates and guidance on the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan on New Year’s Eve.

Coronaviruses were first described in the 1960s and derive their name for their characteristic appearance under electron microscopes, where they resemble a royal crown or solar corona. Coronaviruses cause diseases in mammals and birds, with symptoms of diarrhea in farm animals such as pigs and cows and respiratory symptoms in birds. The lethal infection of humans has been rare historically.

Since the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) first emerged at the end of December, there have been 570 cases of people developing a pneumonia-like respiratory illness. There have been 553 confirmed illnesses and 17 fatalities reported in mainland China—a three percent fatality rate. Cases have now been confirmed in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Possible cases are being investigated in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Though scientists had thought that the virus could spread only from animal to person, evidence has emerged that person-to-person infection is occurring, though authorities still surmise that such infections are limited. The World Health Organization (WHO) has delayed declaring an international emergency, though it is reconsidering the matter again today.

Dr. Didier Houssin, the chair of an emergency committee convened by WHO, told a press conference yesterday that it was “too early to consider that this event is a public health emergency of international concern.” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva: “Our team is on the ground in China as we speak, working with local experts and officials to investigate the outbreak and get more information.”

Chinese authorities moved this week to effectively lock down and isolate Wuhan, a city of more than 11 million people and the seventh most populous Chinese city. They have canceled planes and trains leaving the city and suspended local transportations such as buses and subways. The news of these measures has inundated Chinese social media.

The virus has emerged on the eve of the Chinese New Year, which falls on January 25. Hundreds of millions of people travel to visit families across China and abroad. According to Xinhuanet, “there will be three billion trips during the travel rush from January 10 to February 18 for family reunions and travel.” Such a mass movement could make the outbreak an international pandemic.

Concerns about the virus’s potential to mutate and become more infective and virulent have senior Chinese health officials extremely uneasy, leading to the drastic measures before the holiday commences. The experiences of 2003 remain fresh, when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, also known as the Asian Avian Flu, spread across 32 countries, with over 8,000 cases and 800 deaths reported. SARS was the first occurrence of a coronavirus where human-to-human transmission was documented.

Additionally, in September 2012, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic germinated in Saudi Arabia and spread to 27 countries. The epidemiologic investigation led to two slaughterhouses where camels were slaughtered. Saudi Arabia imports thousands of camels from African nations, which were found infected with MERS. The virus was found on meat destined for supermarkets.

Human-to-human transmission of MERS was first reported in May 2013 in France. However, researchers noted that the virus spread slowly among humans, suggesting a regression in its virulence. By the end of October of 2013, Saudi Arabia had reported 124 cases, with a high fatality rate of 52 deaths. The disease itself has since entrenched itself in human communities. As of December 2019, WHO has confirmed 2,468 cases of MERS infection, with 851 fatalities.

According to WHO China, the outbreak of the new SARS-related 2019-nCoV virus was first recognized on December 31, 2019, when it was informed of cases of pneumonia-like illness of an unknown vector in Wuhan. By January 3, 44 cases had been identified. On January 11, the National Health Commission China confirmed that the epicenter of the disease had been traced to a seafood market in the city. In less than three weeks, the virus has spread across China and internationally.

The first confirmed fatality was a 61-year-old man, a regular shopper at the seafood market where vendors sold processed meats and live animals such as donkeys, sheep, camels, fox, badgers, hedgehogs and snakes. Authorities believe that the narrow corridors of the market and tight stalls provided the ideal opportunity for this outbreak. Incidentally, researchers had discovered that SARS came from a population of bats endemic in China’s Yunnan province. However, experts have yet to identify the animal species that enabled the Wuhan coronavirus to spread.

Wuhan is a major travel hub in China, with more than 30,000 people flying out on an average day. Nearly 6,000 foreign-invested enterprises from at least 80 countries are operating in city. Its major industries include optoelectronic, automobile manufacturing, iron and steel manufacturing, pharmaceutical and biologic engineering. With the suspension of transportation and the ban on gathering, tens of thousands of workers could be laid off.

The epidemic crisis has exacerbated existing social tensions. Many residents of Wuhan had heard of the outbreaks in Hong Kong before they were informed of the developments in their city. Through social media, people are asking family living abroad of news of events. On the Chinese microblogging website, one user wrote: “If the government wants us to trust them, they should be trustworthy, first. If we have lost confidence in them, the government needs to reflect on itself instead of shutting people up.”

Chinese authorities have extended the lockdown in Wuhan to several nearby cities. In Beijing, major Chinese New Year festivities that attract large crowds have been cancelled. Such a level of containment is unprecedented in modern history and questions have been raised as to the real effectiveness of such draconian measures.

James G. Hodge Jr., the director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, told the New York Times yesterday that quarantines are effective when they isolate those infected or suspected of infection. Instead, he commented, “the Chinese authorities have drawn a line around the city and said, ‘No-one in and no-one out.’ That type of thing is obviously an excessive response.”

The Chinese government, however, is taking such extreme measures primarily to calm corporate investors, as concerns are being raised in financial markets about the implications of the epidemic for China’s economic growth.

The Myth of China’s Population Crisis

Dean Baker

I ridiculed the NYT and Washington Post last week for telling us that China, the world’s most populous country, is in danger of running out of people. Using a tool that seems relatively scarce in Washington policy discussions, arithmetic, I showed that China’s gains in productivity will dwarf the effects of a falling ratio of workers to retirees. To put it simply, with each worker being far more productive, China will be able to enjoy a society in which both workers and retirees enjoy much higher living standards 20 years out than they do today.

I was hoping that we would not see another of these China population crisis stories for a while. I was wrong. A few days later, Ross Douthat used his NYT column to tell us how “Communist cruelty and western folly built an underpopulation bomb.” Douthat tells us:

“Like the United States and most developed countries, China has a birthrate that is well below replacement level. Unlike most developed countries, China is growing old without first having grown rich.”

This is a master statement of illogic. Yes, China is poorer than the U.S. and other wealthy countries, but there are two simple points that make Douthat complaint look incredibly silly.

First, we would want to look at rates of growth, not just levels. If we look at I.M.F. projections, China’s per capita income is projected to grow at rate of just under 5.5 percent annually for the next four years. If it continues this pace of growth for the next twenty years, when today’s too small birth cohort is entering the workforce, its per capita GDP will have nearly tripled. That would make it $64,200 per person, about 7.0 percent higher than the U.S. is today. In other words, China would be rich.

But maybe the 5.5 percent growth rate is too much to assume will be sustained for twenty years. Let’s cut it in half to 2.8 percent annually. In that case, China’s per capita income would grow by a bit more than 73 percent over the next two decades, making it $38,400 in twenty years. That is more than one-third less than the current per capita GDP in the U.S., but it’s only slightly below where Japan and Korea are today, two countries who Douthat apparently feels comfortable in saying have grown rich. It’s also roughly where the U.S. economy was in 1994, a year when most of us would have thought we were relatively rich by world standards.

But this is actually the less important problem with Douthat’s complaint. In 2020, China is considerably poorer than the United States. This means that its people on average have fewer cars, smaller housing units, and in other ways have lower material living standards than people in the United States.

Is this a crisis? Most people in China probably would not call it a crisis, since they are doing hugely better than they did twenty years ago and kids enjoy much higher living standards than their parents.

Now suppose that over the next two decades living standards increase somewhat less rapidly than they would otherwise because there is a falling ratio of workers to retirees. Is there any reason to think this would mean some sort of crisis in China because both its workers and retirees have lower living standards than people in the United States?

It’s very hard to see that story. In other words, this crisis of growing old before it grows rich is an absurdity on its face. There is no reason for anyone to take it seriously.

It is also worth mentioning in this context that we do face this problem called “global warming.” In that context, we should be very happy that China’s population is not 50 percent larger today. That might make people like Ross Douthat very happy, but it would make it hugely more difficult to limit the damage caused by global warming.

SARS-Like Disease Could Become a Pandemic

Martha Rosenberg

Do you remember SARS? Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was so contagious; a SARS-afflicted man on an Air China flight in 2003 infected 20 passengers sitting at a distance away from him and two crew members. The simple act of flushing the toilet spread the deadly lung disease and health care workers had to wear HazMat suits to treat patients. Eight hundred people died including Pekka Aro, a senior official with the United Nations.

Where did the disease come from? This is what the Journal of Virology wrote.

“Exotic animals from a Guangdong marketplace are likely to have been the immediate origin of the SARS that infected humans in the winters of both 2002-2003 and 2003-2004. Marketplace Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs harbored viruses highly similar to SARS…the sporadic infections observed in 2003-2004 were associated with restaurants in which palm civet meat was prepared and consumed.”

China’s response to SARS was to drown, incinerate and electrocute 10,000 civets. The slaughter was depicted in heart breaking photos. Later, reported the Wall Street Journal, the virus was found to be only hosted by civets and actually originated in bats.

Now, a similar disease caused by the same coronavirus as SARS is back in China. “Because some of the patients worked at a seafood market where birds, snakes, and organs of rabbits and other game were also reportedly sold,” there is concern that the pathogen comes from animals like SARS reported Bloomberg this month.

The “new SARS” disease has now spread to Japan and Thailand and is causing deaths. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Those infected in Wuhan included seafood merchants, buyers for restaurants and spice vendors from the market, known as Huanan, said shoppers and vendors in the area. Among those quarantined was the husband of Ms. Huang, who asked to be identified by only her surname. She said her 41-year-old husband frequented the now-closed market to purchase ingredients for a restaurant…

On Dec. 31, he was hospitalized at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital… That night, the mostly empty ward filled up with 40 other patients who had been in contact with the seafood and meat market had been diagnosed with the same viral pneumonia…

A week after the closure, one man who sold live fish there had reopened shop in another market about 12 miles away while waiting for authorities to clear the Huanan market for reopening.”

Exotic, Hunted and Diseased Animals Cause Other Diseases

Eating exotic, hunted and diseased animals can cause diseases to “jump species” and spark huge, merciless epidemics. According to WHO, 32 million people have died of HIV since the beginning of the epidemic and the origin is attributed to animals. Avert, a web site offering global information and education on HIV and AIDS traces HIV to the almost identical disease SIVcpz.

“The most commonly accepted theory is that of the ‘hunter’. In this scenario, SIVcpz was transferred to humans as a result of chimps being killed and eaten, or their blood getting into cuts or wounds on people in the course of hunting. Normally, the hunter’s body would have fought off SIV, but on a few occasions the virus adapted itself within its new human host and became HIV-1.”

Eating cows with mad cow disease (BSE) and deer with chronic wasting disease (CWD) can cause the always fatal human brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). According to the CDC of two patients who died from the animal-transmitted disease

“One of the patients was a 61-year-old woman who grew up in an area where this disease is known to be endemic, and she ate venison harvested locally. She died in 2000, and analysis of autopsy brain specimens confirmed that the patient’s CJD phenotype fit the MM1 subtype, with no atypical neuropathologic features. The second patient was a 66-year-old man who was reported to have eaten venison from two deer harvested in a CWD-endemic area.”

In some areas two-thirds of the deer herd are now infected. Recently, a man contracted CJD from eating squirrel brains.

African Swine Fever Is Spreading

Finally, there is African swine fever (ASF) which has has killed one-fourth of the world’s pigs and half of all China’s factory farm pigs. It has spread to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, the Philippines and the EU.

Even though the disease does not kill people, ASF lives in the meat. “The agriculture ministry has even contacted the German army and nurses to alert them about the risks of crossing into Germany from Eastern Europe with bacon sandwiches,” reports POLITICO as local German governments are building fences along the Polish border to try to stop the disease which wild boar may spread.

Most US ag experts expect the arrival of African swine fever on our shores dashing, hopes of capitalizing on China’s pig scourge with exports.

From SARS to CJD to bird flu and porcine epidemic diarrhea (which killed scores of US animals in the last decade) it is clear meat purveyors have learned nothing from deadly outbreaks.

Bangladesh prepares to send 100,000 Rohingya refugees to isolated island

Rohantha De Silva

On January 16, Bangladesh Refugee, Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mahbub Alam Talukder declared that Bhasan Char, a small island in the Bay of Bengal, was “ready for habitation,” and had “everything in place” to accommodate 100,000 Rohingya refugees.

Around 700,000 Rohingyas fled Burma, or Myanmar, following genocidal repression by the Burmese army in August 2017. Together with those who previously fled Burma, there are more than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, most living in makeshift dwellings in overcrowded camps without clean water and proper sanitation.

Mother and child in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp [Credit: John Hulme]

While Commissioner Talukder claimed the island was “ready for habitation,” the isolated and previously uninhabited island, which emerged from the Bay of Bengal’s muddy waters about two decades ago, is physically unstable and prone to cyclones. Domestic and international human rights organisations have questioned the suitability of the government plan.

Irrespective of the truth of the government’s claims, any accommodation and infrastructure facilities that may exist on the island will be grossly inadequate and prison-like.

Prime Minister Sheik Hasina’s Awami League-led government has banned foreign journalists from visiting the island, and not announced when the Rohingya refugees will be sent there. So far, only 3,500 have agreed to move.

Children outside their home [Credit: John Hulme]

More than 610,000 refugees are currently living in grossly congested camps, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, on Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh, about 350 kilometres from Dhaka. Refugees are banned from leaving the camps and the government has installed checkpoints on nearby roads. Dhaka has launched a crackdown inside the camps, shutting down shops run by refugees, blocking internet services, confiscating mobile phones and imposing a daily 8 p.m. curfew.

In addition, government authorities have warned employers not to hire Rohingya refugees, many of whom attempt to earn a living as casual porters, night guards and construction labourers. Over 40 non-government organisations, which do most of the refugee relief work for the poverty-stricken refugees, have been suspended by the government on various pretexts.

These brutal measures, which are designed to force the Rohingyas onto Bashan Char or leave Bangladesh, were stepped up after government’s attempts to repatriate Rohingya refugees—that is force them back into Burma—failed again last August.

Communal water supplies in camp [Credit: John Hulme]

The Bangladeshi government does not recognise the Rohingyas as refugees, the vast majority of whom are women and children. It defines them as “forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals.” Facing this worsening situation and in fear of forcible relocation, some Rohingyas have attempted to flee Bangladesh. Last month, the Burmese navy seized some 200 refugees, including 69 women and 22 children, as they were trying to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.

Over 500,000 Rohingya children in the Bangladeshi camps cannot attended public schools and are barred any access to formal education. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and its partners teach Burmese, English, mathematics and life-skills to about 145,000 Rohingya children, aged 4 to 14, for two hours daily at some 1,600 learning centres inside the refugee camps.

There are no educational facilities in the camps, however, for young people aged 15 to 18. Some children, mostly boys, receive religious education from Islamic religious institutions or madrasas.

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report in December stated that only ad hoc classes were allowed for refugee children and warned about a “lost generation” of young men, who were vulnerable to criminal gangs.

HRW said the situation was worse for girls outside the camps, who were being preyed upon by human traffickers who falsely promise jobs and forcing some into prostitution. Even in the camps, the girls faced the prospect of sexual abuse and child marriages. “Rohingya refugee children have been watching their chance for an education and a better future evaporate, and two years on there is still not even a plan to enroll them in schools,” HRW’s associate children’s rights director Bill Van Esveld told the media on December 3.

“Rohingya people have said this to me: If the kids have no access to a better future if they have no access to education, what are the alternatives? Despair, which leads to being prey to human trafficking … criminality, and being prey to radicalisation,” Van Esveld added.

Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, in line with her government’s anti-Rohingya refugee rhetoric, told the Dhaka Global Dialogue 2019 last November that the Rohingyas are not “only a threat to Bangladesh but also to regional security.”

Rohingyas are not the only Muslim refugees in Bangladesh living in appalling conditions in violation of their basic democratic rights. There are also the “Bihar Muslims” or the “stranded Pakistanis” who fled the eastern Indian state of Bihar during the 1947 partition of the former British-ruled Indian sub-continent.

Confronted with rising anti-Muslim pogroms in Hindu India, they escaped into East Pakistan, later to become Bangladesh. The poverty-stricken “Bihar Muslims,” who speak Urdu instead of Bengali, are poorer and less educated, working as mill workers and small shopkeepers.

The Bangladeshi government’s persecution of refugees is part of a global phenomenon. Under conditions of an intensifying world crisis of capitalism, the ruling elites in every country attempt to divide the working class by vilifying oppressed minorities and whipping up communalism to divert attention from the failure of the profit system.

Whilst these repressive measures are directed against refugees, they are aimed against all working people and can be stopped only by a unified international and socialist movement of the working class to overthrow capitalism.

Banks to give $10 billion bailout to Boeing, nothing to the families of the dead

Bryan Dyne

Airplane manufacturer Boeing has secured at least $6 billion in loans from major banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, and is seeking a further $4 billion, according a report citing internal sources by the financial news channel CNBC.

The company is looking to offset losses estimated at $1 billion a month from two crashes and the resulting grounding of its flagship 737 Max 8 aircraft. The combined death toll from the October 2018 crash of Lion Air Flight 610 and the March 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was 346.

Boeing logo [Credit: Flickr.com, sota]

Boeing, which posted revenues of $100 billion in 2018, has suffered a sharp fall in income and share value since the grounding of the Max 8 last March. Its stock price has fallen from $440.62 per share on March 1, 2019 to a closing price of $307.15 on Tuesday, wiping out more than $64 billion of the company’s value. The aerospace giant’s sales plummeted from 893 airplanes in 2018 to just 54 in 2019. Its final earnings report for 2019 is expected to be posted on January 29.

It is unclear when or even if the Max 8 will ever fly again. In the 10 months since its grounding, a steady stream of internal leaks, news reports, interviews with former employees and congressional hearings have provided a mountain of evidence pointing to criminal negligence, deadly safety short cuts and concealment of known dangers on the part of Boeing management, facilitated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and top government officials. Yet not a single company executive or regulatory head has been criminally charged, let alone prosecuted and convicted.

These figures have instead been richly rewarded. Ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was forced from his position in December, walked away from the company with $80.7 million in compensation for overseeing the final development, production and certification of one of the deadliest commercial aircraft ever to fly. Michael Luttig, who until recently was Boeing’s chief legal counsel, last year sold shares worth $6.5 million and was gifted shares currently worth $3.6 million.

Even the loan that is being extended to Boeing is constructed to maximize the company’s profits. It will likely be what is known as a delayed-draw loan, designed to have no immediate impact on the company’s credit rating, unlike loans provided to workers. This will provide Boeing extra capital to pay its investors, including firms such as Vanguard and T. Rowe Price, which have continued to receive dividends on their shares throughout the Max 8 grounding.

Investors are also expecting Boeing to use the funds to help complete its $4 billion acquisition of Embraer, which has plans to develop new propeller planes for shorter, regional flights.

In contrast, a pittance has been provided to the 346 families that lost loved ones in the two crashes. The total allocated for them is $50 million, amounting to $144,500 per crash victim. This is less than what Muilenburg averaged in a month. At the same time, Boeing has agreed to pay airline corporations $5.6 billion in compensation for lost profits, more than 10 times its compensation to grieving families.

Nor has any relief been provided to the thousands of workers whose livelihoods are being destroyed as a result of the grounding and production halt of the Max 8. Earlier this month, Boeing subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems, based in Witchita, Kansas, indefinitely laid off 2,800 employees. The parts manufacturer generates nearly 50 percent of its income from producing the fuselage for the 737 Max.

General Electric has announced it is laying off 70 temporary employees at its jet engine factory in Quebec as a result of the grounding. While the company was planning these layoffs, it paid its chairman and CEO Larry Culp more than $15 million to oversee job cuts.

Boeing has been further hit by an expose published Monday in the New York Times concerning a crash of a Boeing 737-NG that occurred in February of 2009. A fresh review of the evidence in that crash, which occurred outside of Amsterdam and killed nine people, shows that a faulty sensor triggered a computer command that could not be overridden by the pilots, causing the Turkish Airlines flight to plummet to the ground. This is essentially the same malfunction that caused both Max 8 crashes.

While the findings from that time by the Dutch Safety Board primarily blamed the pilots, it has come to light that a contemporaneous study by Dr. Sidney Dekker, an aviation safety expert, was suppressed at the behest of Boeing because it made clear that the crash was primarily Boeing’s fault. The airplane manufacturer used only a single sensor to trigger the computer command, rather than following normal safety protocol and requiring a second sensor to set off the command.

In the aftermath, it was revealed that Boeing had upgraded its software to take inputs from two sensors in order to avoid this very problem, but had made the second sensor an optional feature on its NG aircraft, installed at an additional cost to the airline. This upgrade, moreover, was incompatible with many older models of the plane, including the one that crashed.

In the case of both the Max 8 and the earlier 737 model, Boeing knew that its software had potentially deadly consequences but kept hidden from airlines, pilots and the flying public knowledge of the problem and the fact that it was working on a fix.