Indian budget inflicts more austerity amid job crisis, deepening economic slowdown

Kranti Kumara

India’s Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has presented a 30.4 trillion rupee (US $425 billion) budget for the 2020–21 fiscal year that provides modest sops for big business and the well-to-do, and increased austerity for working people.

Presented to parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1, the budget was unveiled five months after the government announced a slew of impromptu pro-big business measures, including a massive corporate tax cut and accelerated privatization drive, in the name of boosting flagging economic growth.

However, in the interim, India’s economy continued to falter, due to steep declines in consumer demand and business investment, and the reluctance of banks, weighed down by unpaid corporate loans, to extend credit.

In the third quarter of 2019, economic growth fell to a more than six-year low of 4.5 percent, even as inflation rose sharply.

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in Houston. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

Citing an economic slowdown in India that “has surprised everyone,” the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently cut its global growth projection for 2020. The IMF now anticipates India will record 4.8 percent real GDP growth in 2019, as compared with the 6.1 percent it projected as recently as October. It has also slashed its projection for 2020 to 5.8 percent, down almost a full percentage point from its previous forecast.

With both big and small businesses slashing jobs, India’s unemployment rate has soared, reaching almost ten percent in urban areas. Whereas some economists had spoken in recent years of India experiencing “jobless growth,” a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly argued India has now transitioned from “jobless to job-loss [economic] growth.”

In ruling class circles there is growing apprehension that the ongoing nationwide protests against the BJP’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act will intersect with mounting popular anger over the jobs crisis, endemic poverty and ever-deepening social inequality, and trigger a social explosion.

In the run up to the second budget of their second term, Modi and the BJP faced conflicting demands from domestic big business and the mouthpieces of international finance capital such as the IMF.

Indian business was pressing for the government to kick-start the economy by providing “fiscal stimulus,” i.e., by boosting government spending on infrastructure projects useful to business, such as building or improving roads, ports and electricity supply and by implementing further tax cuts. The IMF, on the other hand, sternly warned the Indian government that it needed to maintain “fiscal discipline” and resume its stalled effort to reduce the annual budget deficit.

In a recent report the IMF complained that India’s state debt, at 68.5 percent of GDP, is “among the highest” in “emerging markets.” It urged the Modi government to eschew new infrastructure projects, saying that to “generate the revenue needed to get them off the ground” India’s debt “must be reduced,” and to instead focus on “structural reforms.” That is, according to the IMF, it should concentrate on eliminating all remaining restrictions on the layoff of workers, further accelerate the privatization of state-owned enterprises, make it easier for enterprises to assemble large parcels of land, and otherwise “ease” the regulatory “burden” on business.

In the end, Modi and Sitharaman resisted the calls for large-scale “fiscal stimulus” and pressed forward with social-spending austerity.

The finance minister subsequently defended this, claiming India’s economy will soon be on the mend and avowing the BJP would “not repeat the mistakes of the splurging,” an apparent reference to the tens of billions of dollars the previous Congress Party-led government spent to stimulate demand during the post-2008 slump.

But the reality is the Indian capitalist elite and its government have little room for maneuver. In preparing the budget, the BJP found itself caught between the anvil of a $42 billion shortfall in projected tax revenue and the hammer of increased debt financing costs.

The budget has projected a deficit equivalent to 3.8 percent of India’s GDP for fiscal year 2019–20, up 0.5 percentage points from what the government promised in last July’s budget, and a 3.5 percent deficit in 2020–21. However, many analysts believe these figures are based on rosy projections of growth, tax revenue and privatization receipts.

At US $425 billion, India’s total budget is less than 40 percent of that of the United Kingdom, although the latter’s population of 67 million is only a tiny fraction of India’s (1.37 billion). Out of this, interest payments on the government debt represent Rs. 7.1 trillion ($100 billion) or about 23.5 percent of all state expenditure. When combined with India’s $66 billion military budget—the world’s third largest—some 40 percent of the budget is already accounted for, leaving just 18.2 trillion rupees ($257 billion) for all other spending.

Attacking the most vulnerable

The BJP budget inflicts its cruelest cuts on the most vulnerable sections of the rural poor, with $1.3 billion being slashed from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (MGNREGP), a program that literally determines whether tens of millions of rural poor eat or not.

MGNREGP statutorily guarantees 100 days per year of menial, minimum-wage work, such as digging ditches. Although the program has repeatedly been oversubscribed, with many more seeking MCNREGP work than available jobs, the BJP has slashed the program’s budget from an already meager Rs. 710 billion ($10 billion) to a mere Rs. 615 billion ($8.66 billion). To discourage impoverished rural workers from availing themselves of even this skimpy benefit, the Modi government has repeatedly held up the release of the funds that pay their wages.

The budget provides a minuscule Rs. 675 billion ($9.5 billion) for health care, which translates to $7.30 (Rs. 519) per person over the course of the entire year. Education spending is just Rs. 993 billion ($14 billion), or some $10 billion less than the education budget of the City of New York!

To boost consumption and also no doubt placate its middle-class supporters, the BJP announced a $5.6 billion per year tax cut that targets the 98 million or so Indians who earn regular wages or salaries in the “formal” or organized sector of the economy. The Finance Minister loudly proclaimed a decrease of income tax rates of between 5 and 10 percent for persons earning less than Rs. 1.5 million ($21,000) per year. However, to benefit from the cuts people must forego their current exemptions and deductions. Given that 72 percent of regular workers earn less than Rs. 216,000 ($3,040) per year to begin with, this will hardly provide a major boost to consumer demand.

The Finance Minister handed corporations one of their main demands. She announced the elimination of the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) which corporations used to pay directly to the government when they distributed dividends to stockholders. These taxes are now to be paid by the people who receive the dividend, meaning in many, if not most cases, the taxation rate will be lower.

Last September Sitharaman announced a major reduction in corporate tax rates that according to the recently released Economic Survey (ES) 2019–20 has mostly benefited India’s largest corporations. Despite the cash windfall from the reduction in their taxes, estimated by the ES as a gain of between 18.5 to 27.3 percent of existing tax liability, corporations have used the funds to shore up their balance sheets, not re-invest.

In this month’s budget, Sitharaman also announced a gargantuan privatization drive for the coming fiscal year to the tune of Rs. 2.1 trillion ($30 billion), double the 2019–20 goal. This includes selling off a portion of the giant, wholly government-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India and the national airline, Air India. This adds to last November’s announcement that the government is selling off its entire 53.3 percent stake in the highly profitable Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), its 64 percent share of the Shipping Corporation of India, which owns India’s biggest ocean fleet, and its 31.8 percent share of the Container Corporation of India.

On January 8, tens of millions of workers across India joined a one-day general strike to protest the Modi government’s five-and-a-half year assault on Indian workers, of which the handing over of public assets to big business is a key component.

Even while the Modi government proclaims one of its major goals is to transform India into a production-chain hub for world capital rivaling China, India has increasingly resorted to protectionist measures, as have the US and other major capitalist powers. The budget sharply increased tariffs on many goods, including footwear, refrigerators, furniture, toys and mobile phone parts. Not coincidentally, China is a major exporter to India of many of the affected goods.

The Modi government has garnered a justifiably notorious reputation for fudging and inflating budget numbers. Despite the economy being mired in a long-term crisis, it has based many of its budget calculations on an exaggerated growth-rate projection of 6 to 6.5 percent for 2020–21. This is so it can inflate revenue figures and produce, as a result, a smaller and entirely fictitious fiscal deficit estimate.

From Sitharaman’s rambling, close to three-hour budget speech, one would hardly get any sense that the Modi government is presiding over a socioeconomic disaster that has pushed hundreds of millions to the brink of hunger and starvation. According to the finance minister, “[The] fundamentals of the economy are strong and that has ensured macroeconomic stability. Inflation has been well contained.”

India’s stock market, reflecting the sentiments of foreign and domestic speculators, gave a decided thumbs-down, with the two major stock market indices falling by about 2.5 percent in the hours following the budget speech.

This was due both to apprehensions about the prospects for the Indian economy, and concerns that the markets may not be “liquid enough” to support the government’s massive privatization drive. In other words, there are fears private businesses may not be able to raise sufficient capital from financial markets, as the government sucks up funds with its selloffs of LIC, Air India, and other assets.

UNESCO/ISEDC Co-Sponsored Fellowship Program 2020 for Developing Countries – Russia

Application Deadline: 3rd April 2020

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: See list below

To be Taken at (Country): Russia

About the Award: The aim of this fellowships programme is to enhance the capacity-building and human resources development in the area of sustainable and renewable energy sources in developing countries and countries in transition. The training activities in the framework of these fellowships are tenable in specialized institutions in the Russian Federation. The medium of instruction will be English. UNESCO will solicit applications from the developing countries and countries in transition.

Fields of Study: The candidates may choose to study in the following fields of study, which are aligned with UNESCO’s objectives and programme priorities, as per approved 35 C/5 and in accordance with the decisions made by the Executive Board (161 EX/Decision 3.6.3 and 165 EX/Decision 8.6) :
(a) Energy and sustainable development;
(b) Ecological management of energy resources;
(c) Renewable energy;
(d) Sustainable and renewable energy power generation.

Type: fellowship

Eligibility: Candidates must meet the following criteria:
(a) Holder of at least a BSc degree or BA in Economics;
(b) Proficient in English language;
(c) Not more than 35 years of age;

Number of Awards: Twenty (20)

Duration of Award: One month duration: from 30 September to 25 October 2019.

AFRICA (46 Member States): Angola*, Benin*, Botswana, Burkina Faso*, Burundi*, Cameroon, Cape Verde*, Central African Republic*, Chad*, Comoros*, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo*, Djibouti*, Equatorial Guinea*, Eritrea*, Ethiopia*, Gabon, Gambia*, Ghana, Guinea*, Guinea-Bissau*, Kenya, Lesotho*, Liberia*, Madagascar*, Malawi*, Mali*, Mauritius, Mozambique*, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda*, Sao Tome and Principe*, Senegal*, Seychelles, Sierra Leone*, Somalia*, South Africa, Swaziland, Togo*, Uganda*, United Republic of Tanzania*, Zambia*, and Zimbabwe

ARAB STATES (15 Member States): Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania*, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan*, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Yemen*

ASIA and THE PACIFIC (39 Member States): Afghanistan*, Bangladesh*, Bhutan*, Cambodia*, China, Cook Islands, Federal States of Micronesia, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Kazakhstan, Kiribati*, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic*, Malaysia, Maldives*, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Myanmar*, Nauru, Nepal*, Niue, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa*, Solomon Islands*, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor – Leste, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu*, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu*, Viet Nam

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (32 Member States): Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia (plurinacional State of), Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti*, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela

EUROPE (22 Member States): Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Montenegro, Republic of Moldova, Republic of Serbia, Romania, Slovak Republic, The former Yugolsav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, and Ukraine

ASSOCIATE MEMBER STATE (1): Tokelau

How to Apply:

(a) All applications should be endorsed by the National Commission for UNESCO and must be duly completed in English or French with the following attachments in DUPLICATE:

• • The prescribed UNESCO fellowship application form;

• • Six photographs;

• • Certified photocopies of Diplomas;

• • Certificate of English Language proficiency;

• Subsequently, for those who have been selected, the UNESCO medical examination form duly completed by a recognized physician (not more than four months before the actual date of studies). The prescribed form of which will be sent along with the letter of award. Expenses incurred in the constitution of the medical dossiers will not be reimbursed.

(b) Files which are incomplete or received after the deadline for the submission of applications and candidatures, and do not fulfil the requirements mentioned above, will not be considered.
(c) Each invited Member State is requested to nominate not more than two (2) candidates.

Visit the Scholarship Webpage for Details

Important Notes: Selected fellows from countries where there are Russian Federation Embassies or Consulates must obtain their entry visa in their country prior to their departure. Fellows from countries where no such embassy/consulate exists must secure their visa through the nearest country where the Embassy or Consulate of the Russian Federation can be found.

The Earth is Dying, But Not Fast Enough

Thomas Nail

We hear all the time that we are at the tipping point of a long history of increasing energy consumption. Unfettered energy use is eating up finite fuels, increasing planetary temperatures, releasing stored methane and other emissions into the atmosphere, and raising ocean temperatures to levels that threaten the world’s fisheries. Carbon emissions are now heating up the planet at a rate equivalent to the detonation of six atomic bombs per second. At this rate, we are told, the Earth may become uninhabitable for humans by the end of the century.

This is more or less the prevailing environmental wisdom of our times, but we have got the cause of our current dilemma upside down. Big issues like this, however, have a habit of being much stranger than they first appear. The problem, in fact, is not that our planet cannot handle too much energy consumption but that it cannot handle too little. This is an extremely counter-intuitive idea but one that needs examining.

This history of runaway energy consumption began slowly with the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, increasing only slightly with the rise of civilization around three thousand years ago, and then picking up sharply after industrialization in the late 19^th century. The really big spike in energy use, however, began relatively recently. In just the last thirty years humans (some more than others) have come to consume vastly more energy than at any other point in history—twenty-four times as much as our hunter-gatherer ancestors to be precise. The lesson seems clear: we are consuming far too much energy for our planet to keep supporting human life. We must renounce our impulse to consume and instead live more simply and conserve our resources more wisely.

The difficulty lies in the starting assumptions about the nature of energy. The first assumption is that it is only the impact of human energy use that has an effect on the planet and is worth calculating. The standard critique about the effects of increasing human energy consumption over time is not untrue. It represents, however, only a tiny fraction of the total planetary energy use. Trying to understand planetary energetics by looking only at human energy use is like trying to understand the world economy by looking only at the economy of Maine.

For starters, all matter is made of, or rather is, energy. This is the brilliant insight of Albert Einstein’s famous equation: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (E=Mc²). When matter moves (as it all does) it releases some amount of energy, which in turn releases more energy and so on until, theoretically, all matter has been converted into energy and is dispersed. Energy itself is neither created nor destroyed, only dispersed faster or slower. Energy dispersal is energy consumption.

Humans naturally tend to focus on themselves, but if we take a step back from human history to consider planetary energy usage more broadly a very different picture emerges. The rate of energy consumption by the entire web of organisms and processes on Earth has been increasing, in fits and starts, over the entire course of its history. Each new development in the evolution of our planet (the emergence of the lithosphere, then atmosphere, then biosphere) has increased the rate of energy dispersal. If we take an even bigger step back we can see that the entire cosmos has also been increasing its rate of energy consumption/dispersal through fast-moving dissipative systems like galaxies and black holes. Throughout it’s 13.7 billion year-long history, our universe has evolved to increase its rate of energy use not to conserve or reduce it. This is the bigger picture we are failing to consider. In fact, the history of human energy use is absolutely dwarfed, by several orders of magnitude, by total planetary energy usage. Super volcanos, lightning strikes, animal migration, and plant processes all increase the rate of energy dissipation on earth with an ever-accelerating motion. For example, the average tree consumes several times more energy, through the transpiration of hundreds of tons of water per year, than most people do by burning fossil fuels over the same period. Thanks to recent light imaging technologies (LIDAR) we now know there are over three trillion trees on Earth. That adds up to a lot of energy consumption.

More astonishing still is that trees only conserve a mere 1% of all that energy in their own cells. Mature and diverse forest ecosystems around the world consume virtually all the solar energy that they are exposed to yet the vast majority of it is radiated back out as water and heat. But even the mere 1% that trees conserve as biomass dwarfs any level of energy use that humans could ever possibly produce. Specifically, the total amount of all current human energy consumption today is less than 1/1000th of the energy consumed by trees alone. What is more, every time something eats something else in the food chain, it only uses about 1/10 of its available energy to survive. The rest is burned off as heat and waste. All living things live by destroying energy bonds, using a tiny portion of them, wasting the rest, and eventually dying. In short, excess consumption, waste, death, and decay are built-in features of nature not bugs or inefficiencies. The Earth (and Cosmos) evolved to increase dissipation and death not decrease it.

The second assumption of current environmental wisdom is that increased energy consumption is necessarily linked to ecological destruction. It is true that our methods of energy extraction and consumption have historically come at the cost of human lives and environmental blight, but it did not have to be this way, nor does all energy usage require this kind of ecocide. All of our planetary systems thrive on massive energy use, “waste,” and dissipation but do not result in environmental devastation. The fittest for survival are those who maximize planetary dissipation. For example, organisms like lichens and trees are still around because they help increase the rate of planetary energy consumption by dissipating or breaking down 99% of the energy they take in, not conserving it. Evolution favors efficient energy dissipators not conservers.

Our problem today is not that the Earth’s systems and inhabitants are consuming too much energy, but rather not using enough. From this perspective, it is not energy consumption as such; but that certain groups of people on this planet, over the course of human history, have destroyed a large portion of the Earth’s energy-consuming or dissipative processes. In particular, increased CO2 and methane are main reasons why net planetary energy use is down. Fossil fuel-based energy and industrial agricultural practices need to be changed so that the planetary energy can increase and we can all survive. Humans are currently .01% of global biomass and yet since the rise of civilization certain humans have killed off 85% of wild land animals, 80% of marine mammals, 14% of fish, and 41% of all insect species. At the start of the most recent post-glacial period (the Holocene) there were six trillion trees on the planet. Some humans groups are responsible for destroying half the Earth’s forests, which make up 80% of total planetary biomass.

Contrarian as it sounds, humans have actually decreased total planetary energy use by more than half. They have literally conserved the Earth’s energy, resulting in a planet that is hotter and less diverse. When the Earth’s capacity to expend energy, to move into the cool, is damaged, the whole process goes haywire.

We tend to think of the world in terms of stasis and not process. And in our zeal to halt our runaway energy consumption, we act as if the goal was to conserve, accumulate, and stabilize energy use when in fact humans, as part of nature, evolved and exist alongside other life forms in a way that is designed to maximize collective energy use, flow, and movement. It has got to the point now that we won’t even let our trash degrade. We make things from plastics that last for tens of thousands of years and then bury them underground where nothing can break them down. Vast islands of plastic are floating in our oceans, nearly immortal. The net effect of all this is that planetary energy consumption is actually slowing down, with disastrous consequences.

How we respond depends a great deal on how we frame the problem. First, we need to change the way we understand natural processes. Nature is in a state of constant flux—always looking for new ways to use more energy and dissipate it faster. If we want to survive as a species, our best chance is to go with the flow: to contribute to this grand project of collective planetary energy use, and not sabotage it with fossil fuels. The conservationist logic of reducing carbon emissions and consumption alone will not save us. We need to increase the activity of the largest consumers of energy on the planet; not humans, but biodiverse forest ecosystems. Planting and preserving more trees will not only reverse the effects of climate change and increase biodiversity it will also increase planetary energy use.

We also need to find new and creative ways of consuming excess planetary energy, for example by composting everything. Think of how much more energy would be dissipated if even our waste was consumed by armies of insects, fungus, animals, and bacteria, and broken down into raw materials, energy, that fueled the growth of more plants and animals, in a literal “feedback loop” of rapid dissipation. If the more ways energy is consumed the better, then maximizing human and ecological diversity is also key to increasing planetary dissipation.

Even as our planet gets ever hotter, less stable, and less diverse, energy consumption is not the problem, it is the solution.

U.S. Uneasy as Iraq Gets New Prime Minister

M. K. Bhadrakumar

In happier times, Washington and Tehran might well have zeroed in on Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi as their consensus candidate for the post of Iraq’s prime minister.

Why not? He was opposed to Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship—although, unlike most Shia politicians who fled from Saddam’s tyranny, he never lived in Iran but chose the United Kingdom.

However, unlike his famous (notorious) cousin Iyad Allawi who also lived in exile in the UK and whom the U.S. handpicked to head the first government during its occupation (2004-2005), Mohammed Allawi didn’t work for the Western intelligence.

Even detractors dare not say that he ever was on Tehran’s payroll. In fact, he wasn’t—unlike another famous relative of his, Ahmed Chalabi, who is an Iraqi politician.

Although part of the Iraqi Shia aristocracy, he was sensible enough as an aspiring Iraqi politician to have a good rapport with Iran.

Mohammed Allawi is said to be deeply religious and yet is secular-minded. He twice resigned from former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s cabinet protesting against the latter’s “sectarian agenda and political interference.”

There is no conceivable reason why the U.S. cannot be happy that Iran has failed at this crucial juncture in regional politics to insert a ‘yes man’ as the head of the new government in Baghdad.

But prioritizing Iraq’s stability more than anything else, Tehran welcomed Mohammed Allawi’s appointment. On the contrary, even after President Barham Salih gave him the appointment letter on February 1, Washington is still holding back.

American think-tankers wired into the U.S. establishment have run down Mohammed Allawi as a mere frontman of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Sairoon Alliance and its rival, the Fatah Alliance led by Hadi al-Amiri. They anticipate that he is doomed to fail.

The heart of the matter is that there is much angst in the American mind that Mohammed Allawi, once confirmed as prime minister by the Iraqi parliament, may not only restructure U.S.-Iraqi relations, but eventually take the wind out of the sails of the so-called protests that Washington and its regional allies have inserted since October 2019, into the Iraqi body polity as an extra-constitutional center.

Today, the United States’ capacity to influence the Iraqi political elite—a vast unwieldy network of politicians, Shia political parties, security forces, militias, and religious figures that make up Iraq’s muhasasa (sectarian power-sharing) political system—stands much diminished. Clawing its way back up the greasy pole is difficult.

Thus, the protest movement in Iraq, which is now entering its fourth month, has come to be the principal instrument for Washington (and its Saudi and Emirati allies) to surreptitiously advance the broader geopolitical confrontation with Iran that is being played out within the country.

The Iraqi protest movement bears striking similarity with Hong Kong’s, which too had brought the local government down on its knees. In Iraq too, it is a remarkably young movement made up almost entirely of adolescents or youth below the age of 25 and has also seen significant female participation.

The movement in Hong Kong has an inchoate program that keeps mutating—ranging from electoral reforms to eradication of corruption—amidst the artistic graffiti, rap videos, and citizen journalism as modes of political activism and civic engagement.

The Iraqi protest movement too has no unified leadership and yet through its abstract calls for the removal of the current political elite it has worked to insert itself as a factor in the decision-making over the prime minister’s nomination. Some hidden forces are evidently pulling the strings from behind, as seen in Hong Kong.

The outgoing Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi bitterly complained in the Iraqi parliament on January 5 that in two telephone conversations, U.S. President Donald Trump had threatened him with precisely such protests to overthrow him if he didn’t comply with U.S. demands.

POTUS allegedly threatened to position U.S. Marine snipers “atop the highest buildings” to target and kill protesters and security forces alike in an attempt to pressure the prime minister.

Therefore, it is hugely significant that the Iraqi protesters have rejected Mohammed Allawi’s appointment. Iraq is now at a political impasse. In essence, Washington will do everything in its power to prevent the new government from settling in.

In Hong Kong, the turmoil began subsiding once the U.S.-China trade deal was signed. In Iraq, everything depends on the re-negotiation of the terms of engagement with the U.S. The amorphous nature of the protest movement means that it may meet with sudden death as well.

The Trump administration hopes to salvage relations with Baghdad and smother the Iraqi demand for American troop withdrawal. The top U.S. commander in the Middle East General Frank McKenzie visited Baghdad on Tuesday to get the ball rolling.

In a longer perspective, the U.S. hopes that the Sadrists (a movement led by Moqtada al-Sadr) could be exploited as a powerful driver of placing the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) structure under real controls of the government.

But there’s a caveat. As senior fellow at the Washington Institute Michael Knights puts it, “Moqtada also believes he has a role to play as a ‘guide’ focused on ‘social justice’… While unlikely to be a ruler in the mold of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Moqtada is also unlikely to be a ‘quietist’ cleric in the style of Sistani. Something in-between is more likely, raising parallels with Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. This is not a comparison that should reassure [Washington].”

In fact, on February 4, al-Sadr supporters took control of the iconic Tahir Square building in Baghdad and evicted the protesters ensconced there.

The bottom line is that although the level of emotion in the Sadrist discourse about American forces in Iraq is no more acute than it used to be a decade ago, it still remains a deeply held conviction of the movement, from Moqtada himself to the militant cadres, that the presence of foreign military forces should not become a proforma reality of Iraqi life.

2020 Academy Awards: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite from South Korea wins major awards

David Walsh

The South Korean film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, won four major awards at the 2020 Academy Awards Sunday night in Los Angeles. It earned both the best picture and best international feature film awards, an unprecedented event, and Bong won the prizes for best director and best original screenplay.

Parasite

Sam Mendes’ 1917 earned three awards (including veteran Roger Deakins for best cinematography), while Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari and Todd Phillips’ Joker each won two. Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) and Renee Zellweger (Rupert Goold’s Judy) collected the best actor and best actress awards, with Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood) and Laura Dern (Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story) winning in the best supporting actor and actress categories.

As we noted in January, when the award nominations were announced: “Films that took a sharper look at American and global life, including Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters, Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets, Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw and Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy, received no nominations.”

Moreover, Roman Polanski’s J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy), a dramatized account of the Dreyfus affair in France in the 1890s, one of the best films of the year, did not receive an award or a nomination because the #MeToo campaign has intimidated prospective distributors and prevented its distribution in the US. For that matter, Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York has not been able to find a distributor either. This new blacklisting goes virtually unreported in the American media.

Parasite deserved to win the most serious awards. It was markedly superior to every other film up for consideration. Bong’s effort is a complex, troubling work about the social, economic and psychological disaster represented by the vast gap between rich and poor. Two families, the Kims and the Parks, who ordinarily live at the opposite ends of society, are suddenly brought into close proximity, with terrible consequences. The climactic scene culminates in an eruption of class anger.

As we noted in our original review, South Korea is one of the most socially unequal societies on the planet. Bong’s film spells out, in a thoughtful and logical manner, the inevitable results of such a division: the impoverished will do almost anything to emerge from their nightmarish conditions, subsisting literally in the underworld. The pampered rich, living in a cocoon, are utterly unprepared for the envy, anger and violence their dominance and arrogance provokes.

Bong told the Guardian recently that “Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology … but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite

The director, in the film’s production notes, pointed to the fact that “in this sad world humane relationships … cannot hold.” Parasite, he explains, depicts “ordinary people” who descend into an “unavoidable” collision. The film is “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.”

Bong told an interviewer last year, “I think all creators, all artists, and even just everyone, we are always interested in class, 24/7, I think it would actually be strange if we’re not. … I think we all have very sensitive antennae to class, in general.” Unfortunately, as the vast majority of films nominated for Academy Awards this year indicates, this is not the case. The attention certainly of most American filmmakers is firmly on themselves and their ethnic, gender and sexual identities.

It is not clear that Bong, who describes his background and present circumstances as thoroughly middle class, is particularly left-wing in his thinking. He may merely be more observant and honest than most in the film world. (His lack of clarity found expression Sunday night in his friendly comments—to the extent they were not merely polite or diplomatic—directed toward fellow best director nominees Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, by whom he claimed to have been inspired. In fact, Parasite is opposed in every significant way to the murky, misanthropic efforts of Scorsese and Tarantino.) Bong has been paying attention in his films to developments in South Korean society for two decades, with such works as Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017).

The sweeping triumph of a South Korean film about class resentment and conflict at the Academy Awards has a certain objective significance, no matter what the rest of the Awards program may have been like and no matter how the voters may slip back and delude themselves, as they are wont to do, in subsequent years. Despite all the efforts by the media, the Academy hierarchy and the political establishment generally to drown culture in race and gender, the social questions emerge.

And those efforts Sunday night were considerable. The organizers of the Awards ceremony were stung and disappointed by the outcome of the nominating process, which resulted in only one black performer nominated for an acting award (Cynthia Erivo in Harriet) and no female directors. The last weeks have been dominated by the subsequent media “furor.”

1917

The New York Times, inevitably, played a leading role. The Times, for example, referred in one recent article to “the Oscars’ most noted offscreen controversy—the glaring whiteness and maleness of many of the major categories and movies.” And another piece observed: “Going into the 92nd Academy Awards, the headlines were about what we wouldn’t see: no J. Lo [Jennifer Lopez for Hustlers], no female filmmakers of top films, almost no people of color in the acting categories.” And the relentless Times commented further: “Old Hollywood—and the way it is represented by the academy and its nominations—has been under the microscope for awhile now, whether because of #OscarsSoWhite or #MeToo or the lack of recognition of female directors.”

In our view, American filmmaking is truly deficient at this point in an objectively rooted social and moral compass, oriented to the problem of social inequality and class, as well as the great threats confronting the population, authoritarian rule and war. The filmmaker who is oblivious to these questions, whatever his or her gender, race or orientation, will have little of value to say to an audience.

After all, the first female director on whom the Academy bestowed—with great fanfare and much self-congratulation—its best director prize, in 2012, was Kathryn Bigelow, for the thoroughly falsified, CIA-sponsored account of the death of Osama bin-Laden, Zero Dark Thirty.

Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

This year, in response to the angry response to the nominations and the resulting pressures, the organizers of the Awards event did everything within their power to inject race and gender politics into their program Sunday night, to an obvious extent. Desperately over-compensating for their failure to nominate the “proper” number of “nonwhite” and “nonmale” personalities, the Academy made certain that there would be no such complaints when it came to the presenters, singers, comics and musicians, and their various comments about female or black “representation.”

This sort of campaign does not address the legitimate, democratic question of the cultural education and involvement of vast numbers of young people, of all colors and genders, who are excluded from participating in the film, television and music industry because of their social background and economic conditions. What’s involved in the Academy’s “diversity” program is the conformist acceptance of the cultural status quo and the mere redistribution of a portion of the existing positions and wealth to African American, female and gay individuals, already affluent in many cases.

This appeals only to a relatively thin layer of the population. No doubt various factors account for the continuing decline of the Academy Awards’ television audience, which reached its lowest level in history Sunday night, 23.6 million people, but the self-involved, often self-pitying emphasis on race and gender is not widely and popularly appealing.

For example, this moment, described by ABC News, was simply grating: “[Actresses] Sigourney Weaver, Gal Gadot and Brie Larson joined together on stage to introduce a groundbreaking performance of this year’s nominated best original scores.

“‘We want to celebrate the first time in the 92-[year] history of the Academy Awards—a female conductor will be leading the orchestra for this performance,’ Weaver said.

“With Gadot and Larson by her side, Weaver said, ‘all women are superheroes.’”

Renée Zellweger in Judy

The New York Times took the unusual step of running an advertisement for their racialist and discredited “The 1619 Project” during the Awards ceremony. The spot featured actress-singer Janelle Monáe (who actually opened the program with a musical number), as one publication described it, “standing alone on the Virginia shore. The water swirls behind her and the camera pulls in closer as she recites the following words: ‘In August 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon near Point Comfort, Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country we know today has been untouched by the slavery that followed. America was not America, but this was the moment it began.’”

Cynically, the Times ad concluded with this title: “The truth can change how we see the world. The truth is worth it."

Democratic Party politics dominate the Hollywood film world. In a reference to the recently concluded impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Brad Pitt, accepting his award for best supporting actor (for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), quipped, “They told me I only had 45 seconds, and that's 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week.” Bolton, of course, is the extreme reactionary and warmonger with whom the Democrats formed a de facto alliance after his claims about Trump and Ukraine in an upcoming book were leaked to the media.

The success of Parasite at the Academy Awards was generally praised by the American media. But not everyone was happy. Of course, an avowedly right-wing columnist last week headlined his comment, “Bong Joon-ho's 'Parasite' Is Overrated, Implausible, Class-Struggle Nonsense.”

Aside from such reactionaries, however, a few other nervous voices were raised. Critic Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post , in particular, has made it known that the prominence of Parasite was not pleasing to her. Hornaday’s tack was to treat Parasite as though it were simply a variation on the Tarantino-style cinema of gratuitous violence and avoid its social content. “The techniques and tropes Bong repurposes so adroitly in Parasite ,” she wrote, resorting to feminist jargon, “make the film feel both original and oddly familiar, the product of the male gaze that still holds sway in Hollywood.”

Speaking of the Awards ceremony, Hornaday asserted that “clips from the best picture nominees played out like so many boys-with-their-toys wish-fulfillment fantasies, complete with swagger, cars that go vroom and women who are either silenced or virtually absent.” How could Greta Gerwig’s Little Women compete “against so many films that mythologized Big Men?” Lumping in Parasite with the confused and even disoriented Joker, the Post critic described the two films as “derivative and insular, a self-referential grab bag of ‘cool’ visual style—often involving bloody violence—in service to narratives that were either flimsy or just plain shallow.”

The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, who was in the Academy Awards audience in Los Angeles the other night. He too might well agree that the unsettling ideas propelling Parasite are “either flimsy or just plain shallow.”

Ford shakes up management, prepares for more cuts after 99 percent profit decline

Marcus Day

Ford Motor Co. revealed Friday that it was shaking up its senior management team, following its announcement earlier last week of a disastrous fall in profits for 2019 and lowered earnings expectations for 2020.

Ford reported on Tuesday that it had made just $47 million the previous year, down from a profit of $3.68 billion in 2018, a decline of nearly 99 percent. Ford’s stock price was battered in trading the following day, plunging 9.5 percent, its biggest drop in nine years.

On Friday, the company announced that it was appointing Jim Farley to the role of chief operating officer, and that 53-year-old Joe Hinrichs, who had served in the role of president of the automotive unit, was retiring. While the executive shuffling was intended to placate investors, it found a sour response, with Ford’s share price falling a further 1 percent after the announcement Friday.

Ford Motor Company Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. (Photo credit: Dave Parker)

Ford’s falling profits and management shake-up herald an acceleration of its years-long restructuring efforts and corresponding attacks on workers globally. The company, along with General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, VW, Nissan and other global automakers, is seeking to make workers pay for stagnating sales and a looming economic downturn, and major investments to develop electric and autonomous vehicles.

In its calculations, Ford fully expects to rely upon the cooperation of the bribed United Auto Workers union executives, who have spent decades facilitating the company’s attacks on workers.

Despite Ford’s multi-year restructuring and cost-cutting efforts, it has been relentlessly punished by Wall Street and finance capital for not implementing its jobs bloodletting with what they view as the necessary speed and ruthlessness. The company’s share price has been steadily driven downward since mid-2014, despite years of record profits, and last September, the rating agency Moody’s downgraded Ford’s credit rating to junk status.

Farley, formerly president of new business, technology and strategy, is now positioned as the most likely successor to current CEO Jim Hackett, whose fate is viewed as increasingly precarious by industry analysts. “Perhaps it could be nine months from now, or it could be 18 months from now, but they will make an announcement that Hackett is retiring and Farley takes over as CEO,” David Whiston, an auto analyst with financial services firm Morningstar, told Yahoo Finance.

Michelle Krebs, analyst at Autotrader, told the Detroit Free Press, “It is no surprise that after the dismal quarterly earnings report came out that something had to give…The launch of the new Explorer was disastrous, and Joe Hinrichs, who was in charge of manufacturing, among other things, took the fall for it. Meantime, Jim Farley won the credit for turning around Europe, so he was rewarded and looks as if he is set up to replace Jim Hackett, whenever he steps down.”

Farley’s turnaround of Ford Europe under his leadership from 2015 to 2017 entailed a wave of cost-cutting, including buying out salaried workers and ending production of less profitable models. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal in 2016, he summed up the company’s relentless drive for profit at all costs, saying, “The goal is very simple. It is vibrant and sustainable profitability, that we make a return in good times and bad.”

The now-departed Hinrichs was also viewed by industry analysts as playing a key role in cultivating the company’s particularly close relationship with the UAW. Wall Street had pressed Hinrichs to accelerate the company’s job and cost-cutting plan even if this threatened a revolt by autoworkers against the UAW. Farley is likely to be a more cutthroat taskmaster, but he will encounter no more resistance from the corporatist trade union apparatus than Hinrichs did.

Ford experienced the worst financial performance of the Detroit Three last year, which all saw year-over-year declines, with GM’s profits down 17 percent, to $6.58 billion, and Fiat Chrysler’s down 9 percent, to $4.8 billion. All are engaged in a race to shed costs and jobs, as they seek to offset the effects of shrinking markets and the significant capital investments needed to dominate emerging technologies and business models.

Over the last year, while General Motors has shuttered plants and slashed thousands of hourly and salaried jobs in the US, Ford concentrated the bulk of its job cuts outside the country, hammering Europe and Brazil with mass layoffs and plant closures. In Canada, Ford has slashed hundreds of jobs from its Oakville, Ontario, assembly plant, with 400 laid off just last week following the end of the production of the Flex SUV, in a warning shot aimed at the upcoming contract negotiations with Canada’s Unifor union.

In the 2019 labor agreement, the UAW gave Ford the greenlight to close the Romeo Engine plant, 42 miles north of Detroit, cutting 600 jobs, and the removal of higher-paid workers through so-called voluntary buyouts. The deadline to accept these packages expires in late February and early March. If Ford is not able to cull the number of “legacy” workers it wants, it will impose involuntary layoffs.

Ford began the year by quietly rolling out layoffs at its stamping plant in Chicago Heights and has recently reduced the length of shifts at its assembly plant in Chicago. The company has been pushing for layoffs at the Chicago plant and may seek to carry them out in March, according to a recent Facebook post by UAW Local 551 Chairman Coby Millender.

Much has been made in the press of the company’s bungled release of the new Explorer SUV model in 2019 and its impact on profits in the latter half of the year. There have been numerous reports of the Explorer being plagued with defects, with many vehicles being shipped from Chicago Assembly, where they are produced, to Flat Rock Assembly near Detroit for repairs.

A worker at Chicago Assembly described management’s disorganized and chaotic implementation of production for the new model, with workers being blamed for not being able to produce a greater volume of the more complex models. “They didn’t distribute the work area correctly,” he said. “We can’t keep up. I don’t think management ever took that into account. I don’t think they planned it out that they needed more people.

“The line was completely new, and so it’s like you had to start over again but with more complicated vehicles, and you have to push, push, push, and you’re just pushing them down the line. And management doesn’t want to admit they were wrong.”

Workers confront impossible demands for greater productivity, enforced through video cameras and other technologies sanctioned by the UAW, and a new round of mass layoffs. The news contract also allows Ford to expand the number of low-paid temps to replace higher paid “legacy” workers.

Autoworkers can and must fight back, but it is impossible to do so through the UAW, which has long served as an arm of the companies. New organizations, rank-and-file factory committees, are required in order to defend jobs, advance workers’ interests and reverse the decades of concessions and givebacks.

Salvadoran soldiers invade Congress as president warns of imminent “social explosion”

Andrea Lobo

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, carried out a military occupation of the Legislative Assembly on Sunday to demand at gunpoint that legislators allow his administration to negotiate a $109 million loan to buy helicopters, a warship, surveillance and other military expenditures.

Seven months into his first term, Bukele is doing away with the “democratic” trappings of an oligarchic and semi-colonial regime whose political institutions were established by a US-sponsored military junta.

The thinness of bourgeois “democracy” in El Salvador was made apparent by the heavily armed soldiers lined up behind the legislative benches as the president sat at the front podium to give legislators “one week” to approve the negotiations. Anti-riot police stood along the exits.

Bukele then walked outside, where about 5,000 supporters were gathered, with many demanding to flog the legislators. Inciting a fascistic atmosphere, with soldiers still behind him, he proclaimed: “I have asked God, and God told me: patience, patience, patience.”

While appealing to his supporters to wait until the 2021 elections to settle accounts, he declared that “if we wanted to press the button, we would only need to press it” to have the soldiers drag the legislators out. “Blood is on their shameless hands. This loan was due last year; the funds were due to be applied to our police and soldiers.”

Bukele had unilaterally convoked an extraordinary session for Sunday, tweeting last week: “If the legislators don’t attend, they would be breaking the constitutional order and the people will have the power to invoke Article 87 of the Constitution,” which refers to the right to “insurrection with the sole task of reestablishing the constitutional order.”

Most legislators were not present, and many reported harassment by state forces. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) said that the military “sieged” the homes of at least 12 of their deputies, while several deputies of the far-right National Alliance (ARENA) told reporters that police and soldiers knocked on their doors to deliver a “verbal order” to attend the session.

The FMLN and ARENA together hold a majority in Congress and oppose Bukele’s loan request on the basis of immediate political calculations. Representing different factions of the Salvadoran ruling class, both parties have strongly backed the build-up of the state forces. For instance, the FMLN and ARENA continue to collaborate on a bill to hand amnesty for war criminals during the country’s civil war (1980-1992), which would set the stage for new state crimes.

The response of the White House and the Salvadoran military, which operates in daily communication with the Pentagon, suggest that Sunday’s stunt was carried out with the approval of the Trump administration.

On Saturday evening, Minister of Defense René Merino, who is close to the US embassy and was trained by the US Naval War College, released the following statement: “We reiterate to our good citizens that we will honor the oath to obey the president of the Republic and commander in chief of the armed forces in all occasions and risks, even at the cost of our lives.”

US Ambassador Ronald Johnson only tweeted a call “for all parties of the state and all Salvadorans to work and talk in search of consensus and to keep calm.” However, the head of the Organization of the American States, Luis Almagro, who upholds US policy in the region, tweeted late on Saturday: “I held a phone conversation with the Salvadoran foreign minister [Alexandra Hill]. She voiced the respect of her country’s government for the Constitution and institutions and reaffirmed the commitment of the government of president Nayib Bukele with the policies of security that have produced positive results.”

The Bukele administration is a US puppet regime, with the president vowing repeatedly that the US is their “most important partner.” The requested loan is meant to finance the third stage of the “Territorial Control Plan,” which is ostensibly aimed at reducing violence and crime in close coordination with Washington. Amid scarce information on the plan, Bukele told media last year: “It has seven stages. The last one is an emergency stage. We can’t describe every stage or give details since it’s a security process.”

Even though a timeline has not been announced, Sunday’s events are a sign of urgency. In an interview Monday with El País, Bukele said, “El Salvador is one of the few countries in Latin America where people are not protesting in the streets, because there is social tranquility, but not tranquility regarding crime.” He added: “In El Salvador all the conditions are there for a social explosion, but if it doesn’t happen it’s because I asked the people to be calm.

When pressed about the events Sunday, he added: “If I were a dictator or someone who doesn’t respect democracy, I would have already taken control over everything.”

These statements constitute an acknowledgement that his government, at the behest of US capital and its Salvadoran partners, are preparing for a fully-fledged dictatorship in anticipation of an imminent uprising. Sunday’s show of force constituted a coercive warning to the different factions of the Salvadoran ruling elite to fall into line in prioritizing these preparations.

Gang violence is a major source of unrest among Salvadoran workers and impoverished youth who can’t afford hiring private guards. But far from protecting workers’ lives, Bukele’s plan is aimed at preparing to violently crush opposition against the poverty and inequality that give rise to gangs.

Bukele’s use of the 1983 constitution is significant. Separate provisions allow the executive to declare a “regime of exception” and suspend constitutional warrantees, while the articles cited by Bukele allow for “insurrections” to restore them. It effectively provides arguments for the ruling class to reimpose a dictatorship under different scenarios.

The constitution was created by a US-backed military junta, which set up a Constituent Assembly led by Roberto D’Aubuisson, the founder of ARENA and a death-squad leader trained by the US School of the Americas. While this military leadership continued to rule de facto and killed over 30,000 people in the following decade, the façade of a “civilian” government was used by US imperialism as a cover to continue its collaboration. After the 1992 peace accords with the FMLN guerrillas, this “democratic” veneer also facilitated the implementation of brutal IMF-dictated privatizations and social austerity, including under two FMLN administrations.

All over the world, the ruling class is responding to growing social unrest against austerity, inequality and war by invoking the fascist and authoritarian forms of rule of the 20th century. Facing the threat of deadly military repression like that used against the protests mentioned by Bukele in Chile, Ecuador and Honduras, workers and youth in El Salvador need to mobilize independently of all factions of the national bourgeoisie as part of an international political movement against capitalist exploitation.