Japanese government pushes to revise US history text

Ben McGrath

The Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has extended its campaign to whitewash the crimes of the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s to the international level. Last week, Abe took issue with an American history textbook and its treatment of so-called “comfort women.”
“Comfort women” is a euphemism coined by the Japanese military for its practice of forcing women to act as sex slaves for soldiers prior to and during World War II. Approximately 200,000 women in Asian countries occupied by Japan were herded into “comfort stations” where the brutal conditions led many to commit suicide. Women were often lured with phony promises of work in factories.
Abe criticized history textbooks printed by McGraw-Hill Education dealing with the issue. “I just looked at a document, McGraw-Hill’s textbook, and I was shocked,” the prime minister said. “This kind of textbook is being used in the United States, as we did not protest the things we should have, or we failed to correct the things we should have.”
The Japanese government has demanded that McGraw Hill revise the books. Officials from Japan’s Consulate General in New York met with the publishing company in December to voice their complaints. The company rejected Tokyo’s objections saying, “Scholars are aligned behind the historical fact of ‘comfort women’ and we unequivocally stand behind the writing, research and presentation of our authors.”
A large number of the women forced to serve as sex slaves came from Korea, but others were from China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries. Many were too ashamed to speak about their horrific experiences and only began coming forward in the early 1990s. In 1993, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a formal but limited apology—known as the Kono Statement—to the victims.
Abe, who came to office in 2012, has been pressing for a revision of the Kono Statement. His government established a panel of so-called experts to examine the testimonies of former comfort women that formed the basis of the Kono Statement. Last June, the panel claimed that there was a lack of evidence that the women had been “forced” to serve as sex slaves. While not formally calling for the repeal of the Kono Statement, the purpose was clearly to cast doubt on the crimes of imperial Japan.
Right-wing apologists for the Japanese military have long claimed that the comfort women were not sex slaves, but were prostitutes. As a result, they conclude, the Japanese army was no different from other armed forces. In reality, the Japanese military organised and ran the “comfort stations.” Whether or not women were tricked or coerced into these hell-holes, they were not free to leave or to refuse to have sex with the soldiers.
Within Japan, extreme nationalists have targeted the liberal Asahi Shimbun over the issue. The newspaper last year retracted 18 articles published in the 1980s and 1990s dealing with comfort women. The articles were based on the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a soldier who claimed to have rounded up women on Jeju Island in South Korea for the military brothels. Before his death in 2000, Yoshida admitted to changing certain aspects of his story.
The Abe government and its right-wing ideological allies have seized on the Asahi Shimbun’s retractions to claim all evidence of the crimes against comfort women is false. Led by Shoichi Watanabe, a professor at Sofia University, more than 10,000 have joined a lawsuit against the paper. Watanabe not only denies that women were forced into sexual slavery but also that the 1937 Rape of Nanking occurred, during which 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were massacred by the Japanese army.
These attempts to justify the past crimes of Japanese imperialism are in order to prepare for future wars. Last summer, Abe’s cabinet approved the “reinterpretation” of the constitution to allow for “collective self-defense.” This would enable Japan to take part in US wars of aggression particularly aimed against China. The United States is pushing Japan to play a larger role in Asia as part of the US “pivot to Asia” which is aimed at subordinating China to Washington’s economic and strategic interests.
Abe’s cabinet is stacked with ultra-right wing officials with connections to Nippon Kaigi, or Japan Conference, which promotes the lie that Japan went to war in the 1930s to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. It intends to revise textbooks in Japan to promote “patriotic values,” opposes gender equality, and erase war crimes such as the Rape of Nanking.
To serve this agenda, Abe also stated last week that a new, litigation bureau in the Justice Ministry would be created to handle lawsuits against Japan, claiming that they “seriously affected the nation’s honor.” While former comfort women have filed lawsuits against Japan, people forced to work as unpaid laborers in factories have also filed suits against Japanese companies. In May 2013, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that a 1965 treaty between Seoul and Tokyo did not bar individuals from filing compensation claims.
A study released in January by the South Korean government found that 7.82 million Koreans were forced to work in Japanese factories between 1931 and 1945 at companies like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toyota, Nikon, and Nissan. In November 2013, the Gwangju Local Court in South Korea ruled against Mitsubishi Heavy Industries after several women filed compensation claims. Nippon Steel Corporation lost a similar case that year in Seoul and Busan high courts. Both companies have appealed.
South Korean governments regularly exploit Japanese war crimes to engage in its own historical revisionism to cover up the role of Korean leaders in collaborating with Imperial Japan. Many within the South Korean elite enjoy their positions today thanks to their families’ willingness to serve Japanese colonial rule, which lasted from 1910–1945. This includes President Park Geun-hye whose father, the military dictator Park Chung-hee, was an officer in Japan’s Kwantung Army.
South Korean politicians often attempt to paint their anti-Japanese denunciations in progressive terms, by claiming to be seeking justice for victims. In reality, there is nothing progressive about this campaign. Its purpose is to whip up anti-Japanese chauvinism to distract from declining economic conditions like growing unemployment, particularly amongst youth. It drives a wedge between Korean and Japanese workers who suffered and continue to suffer from the same assaults on their rights and working conditions.

Top US diplomat heaps praise on new Sri Lankan government

Deepal Jayasekera

The visit by US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Nisha Desai Biswal early to Sri Lanka this week has clearly demonstrated Washington’s changed attitude towards the Colombo government following the January 8 election that led to the ousting of Mahinda Rajapakse and the installation of Maithripala Sirisena as president.
The Obama administration had been deeply hostile to Rajapakse as a result of his government’s relations with China and supported Sirisena’s campaign. Former President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who has connections with the Obama administration via the Clinton Foundation, engineered Sirisena’s defection from the government and the support of opposition parties, including the pro-US United National Party (UNP), for his candidacy.
In the wake of the election, Sirisena has rapidly reoriented foreign policy away from Beijing and towards Washington and New Delhi. This is fully in line with Obama’s “pivot to Asia” which is aimed at undermining Chinese influence throughout the region and encircling it militarily.
During her visit, US Assistant Secretary of State Biswal met with President Sirisena, Prime Minister and UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, Urban Development Minister Rauff Hakeem and representatives of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the island’s main Tamil bourgeois party.
Biswal was effusive in her praise for the new government, declaring: “It was a privilege to visit Colombo to witness for myself the sense of excitement and optimism that the Sri Lankan people have ushered in through the historic January 8 election.” She had come to inspect the results of the Washington-sponsored regime-change operation and to harness Colombo into the US war drive in Asia.
Biswal continued: “I am indeed excited to be in Sri Lanka and see for myself the energy that has the world talking about Sri Lanka and about Sri Lanka’s democracy and for all the right reasons.” The remarks about Sri Lankan democracy are entirely cynical. Washington’s opposition to Rajapakse was not because of his autocratic methods, but because of his orientation to China. In Sirisena, the US is embracing someone who was, until several months ago, a senior minister in the Rajapakse government and, as such, responsible for all its crimes and abuses.
Speaking alongside Foreign Minister Samaraweera, Biswal pledged full support for the new government. “Sri Lanka can count on the United States to be a partner and a friend in the way forward,” she declared. This is a complete about-face in the US attitude. Having fully backed his war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Washington seized on the Sri Lankan military’s war crimes to put pressure on Rajapakse to break his ties with Beijing following the LTTE’s defeat in 2009.
The US pushed a series of resolutions through the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) calling for an investigation of human rights abuses during the civil war—a move that threatened war crimes charges against Sri Lankan political and military leaders. Now that Rajapakse has been removed, one can predict that the issue of “war crimes” will recede as the US embraces its new “partner and friend.” The US will maintain its “human rights” campaign only insofar as it is useful to prevent Rajapakse and his cronies from destabilising the new government and keeping Sirisena in line.
A US-sponsored resolution adopted by the UNHRC last March established an international inquiry into Sri Lankan war crimes that is due to report in March. The Sirisena government has called on the US and UNHRC to drop the international inquiry promising a “domestic inquiry” instead. In all this manoeuvring about “human rights,” none of those involved—the US, its various allies the European Union and Sri Lanka—has the slightest interest in the justice for the tens of thousands of civilians killed or the many other victims of the Sri Lankan security forces.
Biswal lauded the “many positive steps” already taken the Sirisena government while warning that “there is a lot of hard work ahead and some difficult challenges.” The “positive steps” she had in mind were above all in the arena of foreign policy. Sirisena appointed the pro-US UNP leader Wickremesinghe as prime minister and has already moved to mend strained relations with India, Washington’s key strategic partner in South Asia.
Foreign Minister Samaraweera visited India two weeks ago and Sirisena is due to visit New Delhi on February 16. Samaraweera will visit the US on February 12 to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry. The new government has already signaled its readiness to review Rajapakse’s policies of giving substantial economic and strategic concessions to Beijing.
Britain has also hailed the new Sri Lankan government. Junior foreign minister Hugo Swire concluded a two-day visit to Colombo on January 31 and met with Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and several other senior ministers. He praised the government’s policies, declaring: “It is also heartening to see such a renewed desire to reconcile communities and seek a long-term peace for Sri Lanka.”
The change of attitude towards Sri Lanka in the foreign policy establishment in Washington has been marked. In a “counseling article” to the Brookings Institute, former US ambassador to Colombo Teresita Schaffer called on the US State Department to “lower its voice” on human rights in Sri Lanka.
Schaffer declared: “His [Sirisena's] election presents an opportunity to reset Sri Lanka’s relations with India and the United States. To do this, he and his foreign friends will need tact and creativity, and he will need all his political skills to keep the coalition together. A good place to start would be to suspend action on the annual UN Human Rights Commission resolution on Sri Lanka while the new team gets its balance.”
Former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage co-authored a comment in the Wall Street Journal with Kara Bue, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs, and Lisa Curtis, from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, that bluntly set out US motivations behind its support for Sirisena.
The article declared: “Now is the time for the U.S. to develop a roadmap for reviving ties with Sri Lanka that reflects the broad array of US interests, including respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law, as well as enhancing trade and regional economic integration and securing the Indo-Pacific…
“Without plans for restoring US-Sri Lankan relations, Washington risks losing an opportunity to deepen ties with a strategically located island nation of 21 million people. Sri Lankans have taken a major step forward in re-establishing democracy. Under Mr. Sirisena, the country stands to remove itself from China’s Indian Ocean ‘string of pearls.’”
Biswal’s trip was precisely to restore US relations with Sri Lanka in order to secure the strategically located island. China has financed the construction of a new harbour in southern Sri Lanka as part of its “string of pearls”—port facilities designed to protect its crucial shipping routes across the Indian Ocean.
Under Sirisena, Sri Lanka is now being more closely integrated into the Pentagon’s war planning—which includes a US economic blockade of China by cutting off its essential supplies of energy and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East. This poses grave dangers to the working class and oppressed masses throughout South Asia and the world as a whole.

Mexican government announces budget cuts in response to economic turmoil

Don Knowland

Mexico’s finance minister, Luis Videgaray, announced at a press conference on January 30 that the Mexican government will reduce spending for 2015 by $8.3 billion below the budget approved last year—a reduction of about 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
Videgaray said the cut was due largely to expectations that the slump in oil prices will continue for years. The price of Mexican crude has tumbled 47 percent over the last year. The drop has cast in doubt Mexico’s plans to raise $250 billion by 2018 through selling off national oil assets to giant foreign oil companies.
Mexico normally relies on revenue from the state-owned oil company Pemex for a third of its revenue. While the government purchased hedges against falling oil prices, that protection will expire at the end of the year.
Videgaray also cited a downturn and deflation risks in the world economy, as well as the likelihood that the US Federal Reserve will tighten monetary policy this year, as further reasons for the cuts. Videragay said Mexico needed to take preventive measures to be in a position to convince international financial markets that it can withstand financial contagion.
Despite imposing these cuts, Videgaray declined to lower his November forecast of 3.2 to 4.2 percent growth in GDP, up from estimated growth of 2.1 to 2.6 percent in 2014.
These are fairy tale figures. With these cuts, the Mexican economy will likely grow no more than 2.5 percent in 2015, according to the director of Moody’s Analytics for Latin America, who pointed out that the reduced federal spending necessarily would have a negative impact on growth. Videgaray’s assertions also contradict the January 8 statement of Bank of Mexico governor Agustin Carstens that Mexico is likely to grow slowly for all of 2015 and for a “good part” of 2016.
The spending cuts announced include substantially lower expenditures by Pemex and by the national electricity company. A plan to build a high-speed train from Mexico City to the state of Querétero has also been suspended. The plan for the train was plagued by corruption in the initial award of the project to a consortium that included a Mexican company that sold or financed the sale of mansions to the wife of President Enrique Peña Nieto and to Videgaray himself. Other major infrastructure projects were also canceled.
Videgaray specified a reduction in the goal of incorporating new adult beneficiaries into the federal pension system as another important cut. He also mentioned unspecified cuts to “subsidies” and other “structural reforms” and “austerity” measures.
The budget cuts will fall heavily on the Mexican working class. They are part and parcel of the government’s privatization of the mineral sector of the economy, along with cuts imposed on educational and other workers, under Peña Nieto’s so-called Pact for Mexico.
Videgaray also announced that the government would work with the World Bank this year to completely reorganize the Mexican federal budget in line with these restructuring plans.
The downside risks to Mexico’s economy are in fact very substantial, especially given the pronounced instability in the global economy.
Consumer prices fell 0.19 percent in the first half of January, cutting the annual rate to a four-year low of 3.08 percent. This was the first January decline in over 27 years.
In January, the value of the peso also dropped to more than 15 to the dollar for the first time since the 2009 economic crisis. The drop occurred after lower GDP numbers for the US in the fourth quarter of 2014, and in the immediate wake of the Russian Central Bank’s move to cut its interest rate 2 percent to combat recession and a slide in the ruble. The drop in January was the biggest among 16 major counterparts after Brazil’s real, according to Bloomberg data.
Mexico’s central bank announced in late December that it was reviving an intervention program aimed at reducing foreign-exchange volatility, following a 12 percent decline in the peso over the prior six months.
According to some analysts, cutting back government expenditures provides more room for looser monetary policy. Last week, the bank said it would keep rates at a record low 3 percent in an effort to provide economic stimulus.
Carstens, the central bank head, said during the first week of January that there is a high probability that Mexico will need to lift rates if the US tightens later this year. But the resolve of Federal Reserve officials to raise rates is being tested by lower US growth estimates arising from the global economic slowdown.
Mexico’s economic turmoil will only deepen the intense social tensions that are present throughout the country, erupting in recent months in the mass protests over the 43 disappeared students in Iquala, Guerrero.

US federal court hearing highlights widespread misconduct by prosecutors

Ed Hightower

In a revealing episode, three federal judges of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals chastised a California prosecutor last month in a videotaped hearing about the validity of a murder conviction where prosecutors had offered perjured testimony from witnesses, one of whom was a Riverside County deputy district attorney at the time.
The case, Baca v. Adams, involves the 1995 killing of John Adair and his housemate and partner, John Mix. Defendant Johnny Baca was a friend of Adair’s son and worked as Adair and Mix’s housekeeper. Baca allegedly conspired with Adair’s son to kill the couple and split the financial proceeds with him. The Riverside District Attorney’s office brought no charges against Adair’s son, the alleged co-conspirator.
At trial, one convicted felon and prison inmate named Melendez testified against Baca, saying that the latter confessed his involvement in the crime to him while the two were incarcerated together. Deputy District Attorney Robert Spira also testified at Baca’s trial. Spira had previously prosecuted Melendez, and he testified at Baca’s trial that Melendez was not offered any reduction in sentencing or other consideration in exchange for his testimony against Baca.
Baca was ultimately convicted and granted a new trial, where he was convicted again. His petitions at the state court level, including at the California Supreme Court, were ultimately defeated.
In 2013, the US District Court for the Central District of California considered Baca’s habeas corpus petition. (Habeas corpus— Latin for “you may have the body”—is a centuries-old democratic right, allowing a prisoner to challenge the basis of his incarceration on a number of grounds, such as newly discovered evidence or the ineffective assistance of counsel.)
The District Court had assigned Magistrate Judge Patrick Walsh to evaluate various aspects of the case, including the testimony by Melendez and Spira. Judge Walsh unequivocally found that Spira, then a licensed attorney and prosecutor, lied under oath when he testified that he had offered nothing to Melendez in exchange for the latter’s testimony against Baca. Of course, lying under oath is the basis for the crime of perjury, and it is a violation of an attorney’s ethical obligations to knowingly present false evidence.
The District Court still denied Baca’s habeas petition, and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reviewed this decision.
Under new court rules, the January 8th oral arguments were videotaped and posted to the court’s web site. All three judges at the hearing chastised the Riverside County District Attorney’s office for the blatant misconduct.
In the video, Judge William Flectcher notes that Melendez did receive a benefit for his testimony. “That’s why he got his 16 down to 14 [years].… He did very well by his jailhouse snitching.”
That Melendez did receive a benefit for his false testimony was confirmed in a transcript of his sentencing hearing, a document that, as the judges noted, the Riverside District Attorney’s office “fought tooth and nail” to conceal from Baca’s defense attorney.
Judge Kim Wardlaw underscored the sham character of Baca’s trials:
“The thing that’s so troubling about this case is it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel that the trial was fundamentally unfair. When you have a prosecutor get up, vouch for a witness, lying, the [California state] courts have said he lied…it just seems so fundamentally unfair,” she said.
Judge Alex Kozinski pointedly asked Deputy Attorney General Kevin Vienna if former deputy district attorney Robert Spira had been charged with perjury, to which he received a reply in the negative. Kozinski also asked if there had been any consequences for Baca’s prosecutor, former deputy attorney general Paul Vinegrad, to which Vienna replied that there had been no disciplinary action.
“What kind of encouragement does that give to young prosecutors about dealing with fabricated evidence like this?”
About the lack of disciplinary action against Vinegrad and Spira, he added, “the total silence on this suggests that this is the way it’s done. I mean they got caught this time but they’re going to keep doing it because they have state judges who are willing to look the other way.”
Over the course of several minutes, Kozinski criticized the District Attorney’s office, to the point of urging Vienna to immediately talk to his boss about dropping the Baca case altogether. Otherwise, the court would be forced to enter an order in Baca’s favor that would contain details embarrassing to the District Attorney’s office.
A 2010 report by the Northern California Innocence Project found 707 instances of prosecutorial misconduct in the state in the preceding 11 years. California state courts nonetheless upheld the convictions in these cases 80 percent of the time. Out of the 707 instances of misconduct, only six prosecutors were disciplined, less than 1 percent.
Statistics at the national level are similar. A 2013 study by the Center for Prosecutorial Integrity estimates that misconduct is publicly sanctioned less than 2 percent of the time.
At the same time, the consequences for criminal defendants are disastrous. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, prosecutorial misconduct contributes to 43 percent of all false convictions.
While careerism and zeal play a role in the ubiquity of prosecutorial misconduct, broader processes are at work. The most critical of these is the explosion of social inequality, which makes a massive police state apparatus necessary to defend the interests of a narrow financial elite. Like the police, prosecutors operate as a law unto themselves.

The GM-UAW profit-sharing fraud

Jerry White

In recent days executives from General Motors and the United Auto Workers union have hailed the $9,000 “profit-sharing” check GM is sending to each of its 48,000 hourly workers as proof of success of labor-management collaboration, and that the subordination of workers to the profit drive of big business can indeed lead to “rewards.”
“That really is recognizing the hard work that the entire team did in 2014 to support our core underlying performance,” said GM Chief Financial Officer Chuck Stevens. Not to be outdone, UAW President Dennis Williams gushed, “General Motors’ announcement today leaves no doubt about the strong, stable environment the GM/UAW collective bargaining agreement created. GM has demonstrated that the company can profit, shareholders can have value and our members can be rewarded for their hard work.”
Several things need to be said about these comments. First, the “stable environment the GM/UAW collective bargaining agreement created” included the abandonment of annual wage improvements, cost of living adjustments, paid holidays, the eight-hour day, current and future health and pension benefits and countless other hard-won gains. Compared to the tens of thousands of dollars each worker lost through these concessions, the $9,000 check at GM—or the $6,900 Ford or $2,700 Fiat-Chrysler Automotive checks—are a mere pittance.
This has allowed some “team members” to do a hell of a lot better than others. The company’s $6.6 billion in North American profits, for example, will allow Stevens and GM CEO Mary Barra to pocket at least $18 million in compensation for 2014. This is 303 times the annual earnings of older GM workers; 543 times the yearly wage of a new second-tier worker and 972 times more then contract workers earning as little as $9 an hour.
Then there are the Wall Street speculators who control GM and the rest of the auto industry. Billionaire hedge fund managers like Warren Buffett certainly saw the value of their shares sharply rise since the auto restructuring. Even after this week’s rally following GM’s announcement of record fourth-quarter profits, analysts estimate GM shares will rise 18 percent this year.
The company’s board of directors is increasing its dividend payments by 20 percent—raising its annual outlay by about $400 million to $2.4 billion, or six times what was paid out in “profit-sharing” checks. GM’s estimated cash hoard of $25 billion will not be spent on real wage increases in the coming UAW-GM contract, but on more dividend payments and stock buybacks to benefit financial speculators and corporate executives.
UAW President Williams neglected to mention the other “team members” who have done spectacularly well from the miserable wages and conditions paid to auto workers. These are the aspiring capitalists like Williams who run the UAW, the multi-billion-dollar business that falsely claims to represent auto workers.
With control of billions of dollars in GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler stock, VEBA health care retiree funds and joint real estate, investment and employee training ventures, the army of international, regional and local UAW businessmen have prospered from the greater exploitation of workers. They also managed to increase union dues by 25 percent.
Starting in the early 1980s, the UAW abandoned any struggle to improve the wages and living standards of the workers. On the contrary, in the name of defending corporate profits and improving the Detroit carmakers’ “competitiveness” against international rivals, the UAW collaborated in the shutdown of hundreds of factories, the layoff of more than a million auto workers and one wage and benefit cut after another.
Today, lump-sum payments and profit-sharing schemes account for between 20 percent and 25 percent of a worker’s annual pay. By contrast, 30 years ago the UAW regularly negotiated three-year contracts with a 3 percent annual improvement each year, plus cost-of-living adjustments to counter the effect of inflation.
The whole idea of “profit-sharing” has always been a fraud aimed at concealing the fundamental conflict between workers and the capitalist owners and, to preach class “unity.” Far from workers having the same interests as the capitalists, the enrichment of the capitalist class depends on the ever-greater exploitation and impoverishment of the working class. This social reality has been confirmed in the experiences of workers in every part of the globe.
American workers are living through the most prolonged stagnation of wages since the Great Depression, while the super-rich have accumulated levels of wealth that would put the Egyptian pharaohs to shame. Today, wages have been reduced to the smallest portion of yearly economic output since the end of World War II, while corporate profits have soared.
This state of affairs has begun to cause alarm for a section of the corporate and political establishment. Increasingly various think tanks are warning about a major “wage-push” by workers. Any successful fight to improve wages threatens to open up a floodgate of struggle.
This is the meaning of President Obama’s empty rhetoric about “middle class economics” and “more inclusive prosperity.” At the same time, UAW President Dennis Williams has declared that “general wage increases are important to our members, and it is important to us as a nation, to bring our standard of living up.”
In reality, Obama and the UAW used the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler as the model for turning America into a cheap labor haven, to the point where they boast that corporations are shifting production from China and Mexico back to the US.
The larger-than-expected checks are a calculated ploy to dampen expectations for a genuine wage increase in the 2015 contract negotiations. Workers know they are not responsible for the criminal mismanagement of GM executives who covered up deadly defects and if they were forced to pay for them—in the form of lower profit-sharing checks—this could blow up UAW-GM plans to use performance-based schemes in the new contract to replace real wage increases.
Williams’ rhetoric about raising wages and ending the two-tier system is merely for mass consumption. The fact is, the UAW is just as opposed to any genuine increase in wages as the company and Wall Street. Any increase in “fixed costs” is seen as damaging to the flow of profits—to the company, Wall Street and the UAW—that has been assured by a staggering 35 percent reduction in labor costs since 2007.
Fiat-Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne has recently said he is “hostile” to the idea that workers are “entitled” to regular raises. As he previously said, “We do need to provide real (financial) upside to our workers as long as organization continues to perform. (But) our people also have to share in the downside of this business, particularly the cyclical nature.”
In other words, as long as the automakers profit from the temporary boom in auto sales—fueled largely by lower gas prices, cheap credit and pent-up demand from the recession—workers might get a few crumbs. But if profits decline, as they inevitably will, due to the global economic crisis, a sudden collapse in consumer demand or the criminal and shortsighted decisions of corporate management over which workers have no control, it is the working class that must pay.
The slavish outlook promoted by the UAW should be rejected. The livelihoods of workers cannot depend on the anarchy of the capitalist market. Rather than “profit sharing” the struggles of the working class must be guided by a socialist strategy: the reorganization of economic life so the wealth created by workers can be used for the betterment of society, not the enrichment of the few.
Auto workers must begin now to build new organizations of struggle, controlled by the rank-and-file and independent of the UAW and both big business parties, to prepare a real fight to recoup the devastating losses they have incurred. We urge workers to contact the Socialist Equality Party to take up this fight.

US electronics retailer RadioShack files for bankruptcy

Evan Blake

Electronics retailer RadioShack filed for US bankruptcy protection Thursday, placing the future of its 27,000 employees in jeopardy. The retailer plans to sell 1,500 to 2,400 stores to its largest shareholder, Standard General, and has filed a motion to proceed with closing the remainder of its 4,000 U.S. stores.
Mobile phone company Sprint Corp plans to operate as many as 1,750 of the stores owned by Standard General. The deals made between RadioShack, Sprint and Standard General still require approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.
The announcement of its formal filing for bankruptcy came after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) suspended trading of RadioShack shares on Monday, as the company did not meet the minimum market value of $50 million required to be listed on the exchange. The same day, the company’s key lender, Salus Capital Partners, accused RadioShack of being in default on its loan and said it was considering legal action against the company.
The bankruptcy comes after 11 consecutive unprofitable quarters. The company has been squeezed by competition from Walmart and Amazon in particular, as well as Best Buy and other traditional electronics retailers.
Amazon has suggested that it is considering purchasing some of the RadioShack stores, as part of a move to supplement its online business with traditional retail stores.
RadioShack shares had lost ninety percent of their value in the last twelve months, and in its filing for bankruptcy the company listed $1.2 billion in assets and $1.39 billion of debt. The company said it has reached an agreement with a lender group led by DW Partners for a $285 million loan to operate while in bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy process will be utilized by the corporate owners and hedge fund directors to leach as much money as possible from what remains of the company while upending the lives of RadioShack employees. They have hired auction company Hilco Industrial to shutter under-performing stores. Hilco played a leading role in the recent auction of assets of the city of Detroit and is a major international player in the liquidation business.
Sprint and General Wireless are planning to establish co-branded stores that will exclusively sell mobile devices operated by Sprint, along with RadioShack products, services and accessories. Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure lavished praise on the deal, saying “We’ve proven that our products and new offers drive traffic to stores, and this agreement would allow Sprint to grow branded distribution quickly and cost-effectively in prime locations. Sprint and RadioShack expect to benefit from operational efficiencies and by cross-marketing to each other’s customers.”
If RadioShack does not end a large number of its leases soon, it is faced with the threat of liquidation, following in the wake of Loehmann’s Inc and Borders Group. RadioShack, which is being advised by law firm Jones Day, investment bank Lazard, and financial advisers at Maeva and FTI, is likely to rush through its remaining store closures as soon as possible to avoid this fate.
RadioShack has not provided its thousands of employees with a list of stores slated for closure, but in many locations the impending bankruptcy was felt well in advance. Last March, the company sought to close roughly 1,100 of its stores nationally, as part of an effort to stave off bankruptcy for at least another year. Their creditors, chiefly GE Capital, rejected this plan, limiting closures to 200 stores for each fiscal year.
Over the past year, under instruction from corporate headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, managers at hundreds of “targeted store locations” have gradually cut their payrolls by firing workers, while stripping the stores of merchandise, essentially hollowing out hundreds of their store locations and closing roughly 200 throughout 2014.
This past Sunday, the first day of fiscal year 2016, RadioShack abruptly closed over 200 such nearly-empty stores. CNNMoney reports that “staff at several of those stores say they were given only hours notice last week before rental trucks arrived to haul away remaining inventory.”
An anonymous store manager, whose store shuttered on Sunday, told CNNMoney, “When they converted me to a clearance store, I knew that was a death knell. I feel the company has been mismanaged for at least the last decade.”
Also this week, IBM sought to dismiss rumors that it intends to slash roughly 100,000 jobs, or 26 percent of its workforce, the largest mass layoff of any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. The IBM employees’ union says that is has collected reports of 5,000 jobs eliminated, and that this year could see as many as 10,000.
On Jan. 22, eBay Inc. announced its plan to cut 2,400 jobs in the first quarter of 2015, which amounts to roughly seven percent of the company’s 34,600-person workforce. The company justified this move by citing “weak holiday sales, revenues lower than expected, and restructuring ahead of its PayPal spin-off.”
American Express Co. reported Jan. 22 that it plans to fire 4,000 employees, or six percent of its 63,000-person workforce in the coming year.
The retailer JC Penney announced plans to lay off 2,250 workers by April, as part of its shuttering of 40 underperforming stores. Macy’s, another major retailer, is cutting 1,660 to 2,500 workers, with fourteen stores slated for closure.

European Central Bank tightens its grip on Greece in response to Syriza “debt swap” proposal

Nick Beams

The “debt swap” menu proposed by Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis during his tour of European capitals this week has two central objectives.
It is aimed at ensuring that there is a continuous flow of money out of Greece, stretching into the indefinite future, in repayment of its €315 billion foreign debt, while at the same time giving some breathing space for the new government and creating the illusion that it has won some genuine concessions from the European banks.
Vourafakis’s plan followed the repudiation of the central plank of the program on which it was elected to government just two weeks ago—the writing off of the greater part of the public debt. Recognising that such a “hair cut” would not be accepted, Vourafakis crafted his proposals accordingly.
He proposed that Greek bonds owned by the European Central Bank be converted into perpetual bonds. Normally a bond stipulates that the issuer will redeem its face value at the end of its term. If the existing bonds were made perpetual they would never be redeemed and the Greek government would continue to pay interest on them indefinitely. This would have the effect of writing down the value of the debt owed by the Greek government, though in practice it would make little difference because the existing bonds are long term, extending over more than 30 years.
The other proposal was that interest payments on bonds held by European governments would be indexed to nominal economic growth. That is, if Greek growth increased, the payments would increase, and they would decline as growth fell.
Vourafakis also proposed that the stipulation that Greece should run a budget surplus, after interest payments, should be reduced from 4 percent of gross domestic product to between 1 and 1.5 percent. He insisted this requirement would be met even if it meant the Syriza government would not meet many of the public spending promises on which it was elected.
The proposals won initial support, with the Financial Times commenting in an editorial that as Vourafakis sought support for the new deal he deserved “a full and even sympathetic hearing.”
The Financial Times also indicated that, as most of the Greek debt is owed to other European governments, Vourafakis’s insistence that he talk directly to those governments, rather than to the troika—compromising the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—may have some merit. It seems the Financial Times is of the belief that a Syriza government may be the best instrument for breaking up the power of the Greek oligarchs and opening up lucrative sections of its economy to access by international financial institutions.
But after winning some initial expressions of support, Vourafakis’s mission suffered a significant setback on Wednesday when the European Central Bank intervened.
Having, at least nominally, repudiated the existing bailout terms, the Syriza-led government is seeking €10 billion in “bridging” finance while a new agreement is worked out over the next three months.
However, the ECB put a spoke in its wheel when it withdrew the waiver on the use of Greek government bonds held by Greek banks as collateral for loans it provides.
Under its rules, the ECB should not accept Greek bonds as collateral as they are of sub-investment grade, essentially junk-rated. But the ECB had agreed to waive that stipulation, provided the Greek government remained compliant with the terms put in place by the troika. With the decision of the government to withdraw from that agreement, the ECB announced that it was ending the waiver.
The issue would have come up anyway at the end of the month, when the present agreement was due to run out. This would have required agreement for an extension which the Greek government has said it will not seek. Wednesday’s ECB decision has served to speed up the confrontation.
In its statement, the ECB said it had taken the decision “in line with existing Eurosystem rules since it is currently not possible to assume a successful conclusion of the program review.” However, it said that Greek banks would still be able to obtain funds from the country’s central bank “by means of emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) within the existing Eurosystem rules.”
The decision, while not completely undermining the Greek banks, has, nevertheless, dealt them a major blow because it has reduced the collateral they have available when seeking loans from the ECB. Consequently, shares fell sharply after the decision was announced.
The Greek banks are facing growing liquidity problems because of significant cash withdrawals in the recent period. According to a report in the Economist magazine, some €4.4 billion was withdrawn in December and more than double that amount in January.
Much of this money consists of funds being taken offshore by financial oligarchs seeking a “safe haven” in case capital controls or other government restrictions are imposed. Some of them will also have made the calculation that if the crisis deepens and Greece withdraws from the euro zone, they will be able to use offshore funds to pick up lucrative assets. These would be at rock-bottom prices as a result of the severe devaluation of a reinstated drachma as the national currency.
While the Greek banks will still have access to liquidity through the country’s central bank under the terms of the ELA, the ECB move is a significant tightening of its grip both on the Syriza-led government and the national banking system.
The ECB has the power both to determine the amount of ELA and can decide to withdraw it completely.
As the Economist noted, the “Greek banks’ growing dependence on ELA leaves the government at the ECB’s mercy as it tries to renegotiate the bailout.”
It also pointed out that the ECB has taken action previously. In 2013, the ECB announced that it would stop the authorisation of ELA to Cypriot banks within days unless the government agreed to its bailout terms, forcing it to accept. A similar threat was used to get agreement from the Irish government in 2010.

Saudi Arabia, 9/11 and the “war on terror”

Patrick Martin

More than 13 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, evidence in a federal lawsuit brought by relatives of the victims is a devastating exposure of events and relations long covered up and obscured by the media and political establishment: that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers were financed by the Saudi monarchy, a top US ally with extensive ties to US intelligence agencies.
Affidavits filed with Federal District Judge George P. Daniels substantiate claims that leading figures in the Saudi monarchy, including its longtime ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a nephew of the current Saudi monarch, King Salman, financially supported Al Qaeda.
The documents include a deposition from Zacarias Moussaoui, the only individual convicted of direct participation in the plot to hijack airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center and other US targets on September 11, 2001.
Moussaoui testified that while working for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1990s he prepared a digital database of the group’s financial backers that included Prince Bandar and two other high-ranking Saudi princes: Prince Turki al-Faisal, the longtime head of Saudi intelligence, and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the wealthiest member of the royal family.
He also described working as a courier for bin Laden, bringing messages to members of the Saudi royal family, including Prince Salman, then the governor of Riyadh, who today is King Salman after succeeding to the throne last month.
The New York Times published lead articles Wednesday and Thursday highlighting the new allegations of Saudi backing for the 9/11 attacks. These had less the character of an exposé, however, than of a semi-official attempt to contain the impact of the material being released as a consequence of the 9/11 families’ lawsuit.
This is the apparent reason for the articles’ near-exclusive focus on Moussaoui, a witness whose testimony can be more easily dismissed by the political establishment. The legal papers filed with the federal district court included Moussaoui’s deposition, but much more, including allegations of Saudi complicity in 9/11 from such pillars of the Washington establishment as former senator Robert Graham of Florida. He wrote, “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia.”
Graham is in a position to know. He chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002 when it produced a lengthy report on the 9/11 attacks. This included a 28-page section on Saudi support to the 9/11 hijackers that was classified and suppressed by the Bush administration, an act of censorship that was endorsed and continued by the Obama administration. Senator Graham, who favors the release of this material, wrote, “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.”
The evidence of Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks is a devastating exposure of the fraudulent nature of the “war on terror,” the axis of US national security policy for more than 13 years.
The Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks as the pretext for wars against Afghanistan, whose government had provided shelter to Osama bin Laden, but had no involvement in 9/11, and against Iraq, which had no connection to either 9/11 or Al Qaeda. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, the country that supplied Al Qaeda’s funds, its principal leader, and 15 of the 19 hijackers, was deemed a key US ally.
Every official investigation into the 9/11 attacks had to whitewash the Saudi connection—or be censored, like the Senate Intelligence Committee report. The issue was not just the reactionary role of the Saudi monarchy in financing and supporting Al Qaeda, but the close ties between US intelligence agencies and the supposedly anti-American terrorist group—connections on which the latest Times articles are completely silent.
There is every reason to believe that nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11, 2001 with the tacit or active complicity of sections of the US military-intelligence apparatus. The CIA, FBI and other agencies took no action to disrupt the operations of the terrorists, even though many of the individuals involved were known to US security agencies and several were under active surveillance as they planned and executed the simultaneous hijacking of four US jetliners.
Many questions about the complicity of US agencies with the 9/11 attacks were raised within weeks of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Some were detailed in a series of articles on the World Socialist Web Site just over 13 years ago: see “Was the US government alerted to September 11 attack?”
Thirteen years later, these questions are still unanswered:
* Why were the 9/11 hijackers allowed to travel in and out of the United States freely, even those like Mohammed Atta, who were under surveillance for Al Qaeda connections?
* Why did the CIA fail to inform the FBI of the entry of two Al Qaeda associates into the United States in early 2001? These two lived in San Diego at the home of an FBI informant, sought pilot training, and received funds from Saudi sponsors in Washington. One was listed in the phone book. On September 11, 2001, they were 2 of the 19 hijackers.
* Why were the future hijackers allowed to take flight training, including Moussaoui, who asked to learn how to steer a jumbo jet but not how to take off and land? When Minnesota FBI agents sought to probe Moussaoui’s actions and motives, a month before the 9/11 attacks, FBI headquarters denied requests to search his computer.
* Why was no effort made to respond to repeated warnings from foreign intelligence services, including Russia, Israel, and Germany, about terrorist plans to hijack US airliners and fly them into buildings?
The crimes committed on 9/11 took nearly 3,000 lives. The crimes committed using 9/11 as a justification have taken hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya and a dozen other countries. And 9/11 has served as the all-purpose justification for the wholesale destruction of democratic rights in the United States and other imperialist countries, which have created the framework for police states in the name of preventing “another 9/11.”
Covering up the Saudi connection is critical not only in concealing the role of US intelligence agencies in the events of September 11, 2001, but also to ongoing operations of US imperialism throughout the Middle East, where Washington relies on the reactionary Saudi monarchy as one of its main agencies. This was signaled last month in Obama’s trip to Riyadh to pay homage to the new king, Salman—one of those named as a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden.
The Saudi connection has been critical to the continuing relations of American imperialism with Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups. These forces were first mobilized in the 1980s as part of the campaign by the Carter and Reagan administrations to subvert the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan and foster the disintegration of the USSR. The mujahedddin —including Osama bin Laden—were armed and trained by the CIA and financed by Saudi Arabia. They have more recently been used to overthrow the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi and to undermine the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.
ISIS itself is a product of this insidious relationship. It originates in the Sunni fundamentalist backlash to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003—prior to the US invasion, there was no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq reemerged as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, one of the strongest Islamist groups fighting against the Assad government in Syria, with the aid and training of the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It was only when ISIS fighters crossed back over into Iraq and began attacking the US-backed puppet regime in Baghdad that the group became the target of US bombs and propaganda.
Yet at the center of the entire “war on terror” is a monumental and brazen lie, the claim that 19 hijackers plotted and carried out a major attack on New York City and Washington, D.C., without anyone in the vast US military-intelligence apparatus being aware of what they were preparing. The latest revelations about the Saudi role in 9/11 are another blow against this web of fabrication and cover-up.

NATO doubles combat forces in Eastern Europe

Johannes Stern

The defence ministers of the NATO military alliance decided at a meeting Thursday at NATO headquarters in Brussels to double their combat forces in eastern Europe. The imperialist powers are massing their troops to compel Russia to make concessions and subordinate itself to their interests in Eastern Europe and Asia.
NATO’s rapid reaction force (NRF), composed of ground, sea, air and special forces, is to comprise 30,000 soldiers in future. The number of the troops, previously set at 13,000, is to be more than doubled. Of these, 5,000 soldiers will be trained within a year for a special emergency rapid reaction force. This spearhead will be ready to deploy in a crisis situation within 48 hours, and the entire NRF force within a week.
In addition, NATO agreed to station six so-called command and control units in the three Baltic states, as well as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the command units are “important units” because they “will plan, they will organise exercises. And they will be key for connecting national forces with NATO reinforcements.”
At the same time, NATO’s northeast corps in Stettin, Poland, which serves as NATO’s headquarters in Eastern Europe, is to be further expanded. Similar centres are to be established in southeast Europe.
Stoltenberg left no doubt that these measures were directly aimed at Russia. He described them as “the biggest reinforcement of NATO since the end of the Cold War.”
At a press conference, he said, “Everything we do, when it comes to increasing our own collective defence, by establishing an enhanced NATO Response Force and establishing the very high readiness force, the Spearhead Force... is a response to what we are seeing from Russia over a period of time, and it is in full accordance with our international obligations. So this is something we do as a response to the aggressive actions of Russia violating international law and annexing Crimea.”
Germany, which overran the USSR in the World War II and conducted a brutal war of extermination in Eastern Europe, is playing a central role in the NATO offensive. An article in the online edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), provocatively titled “Germans to the front!” documented how Berlin is pushing forward with rearmament in Eastern Europe behind the backs of the population.
The German-Dutch commando in Münster, which has been leading NATO’s land-based forces since the middle of January, will now also take over leadership of the rapid reaction force. The centre of the spearhead will thus be composed of an airborne brigade of the Dutch army with 3,000 men. The German army is contributing a battalion of tank grenadiers from Marienburg, Saxony with 900 soldiers. Norway will also send artillery which can be rapidly deployed. In addition, there will be 450 soldiers from the multi-national force at the corps’ headquarters.
Furthermore, Germany will double its contingent of troops at Stettin, from which 60,000 soldiers would be commanded in the event of war between Russia and a NATO member. With this additional personnel, the troops already stationed there are to be given the capacity to respond more quickly in a serious situation.
In April, a German paratroop company will reinforce American units which have been stationed in Eastern Europe since last year. They are to be deployed in Poland, then in Lithuania and Latvia. From September, the German air force will once again participate in air reconnaissance in the Baltic Sea. Germany already sent Eurofighters to the Baltic last year. However, at the beginning of this year they were temporarily removed.
The article’s author, Thomas Gutschker, is well connected to the military due to his previous work as a journalist with the German army, and he gives an idea of how far advanced NATO’s plans for war against Russia are. He described the military concept plan for leading the NATO rapid reaction force, which was agreed by NATO defence ministers in Brussels.
“The NATO supreme commander gives the alarm to the rapid response force. The parts of the force then meet at a joint location. From there, they will be brought to the deployment zone. This makes voting easier, and political consultation, both in the North Atlantic Council as well as in capital cities. In Germany, the parliament would have to meet. In the case of imminent danger, the German government can unilaterally decide to send troops. Parliament would then have a retrospective right,” he wrote.
The article describes the logistical difficulties confronted by the German army. Although it had since its Afghanistan mission “experience in the deploying of troops and heavy weaponry,” now “everything is to be done very quickly and new questions are posed: does the railway company have enough flat carriages to transport tanks? Or is it easier to charter a ship that can be loaded and unloaded at the same time? For the extremely rapid reaction force aircraft will be required that only the Americans have. In the summer, a major deployment exercise is planned, the second NATO test.”
German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) called the NATO decisions a “sign of unity and decisiveness” and “important for NATO’s internal strength.” In an interview with the S ü ddeutsche Zeitung, she was full of praise for the German-led rapid response force, which “is capable of deploying within a few days,” and she hailed Germany’s return to an aggressive foreign policy.
Over the past year, Germany has “appropriately assumed responsibility in all of the major crisis situations: in the Ukraine-Russia conflict as well as in the struggle against the so-called Islamic State, in Africa, in Afghanistan. The same goes for our major contribution to the internal security of NATO. We have influenced the West’s actions, diplomatically and militarily. That is responsibility.”
In reality, the foreign policy of the German government and the west is not only not “responsible,” but ruthless and dangerous. At the beginning of 2014 President Gauck, foreign minister Steinmeier and von der Leyen announced the end of Germany’s restraint in foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference.
Only a few weeks later, Berlin and Washington organised a coup in Ukraine, backed by extreme right-wing and fascist forces, to install a pro-Western government and encircle Russia. One year later, the conflict in Ukraine provoked by the West threatens to escalate into an open war with Russia, a nuclear power.
Parallel to NATO’s meeting, US secretary of state John Kerry arrived in Kiev to reassure the regime--which is conducting a brutal civil war against the population in eastern Ukraine--of his support. The US will not close its eyes while Russian tanks and fighters are crossing the border, Kerry told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Russia issued a warning to the US about arming the Ukrainian government’s forces against the pro-Russian separatists in the east. The announcement at the beginning of the week that the US would supply lethal weapons to Kiev could “colossally damage US-Russian relations,” said Alexander Lukashevich, the spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry.

German, French leaders fly to Russia amidst warnings of “total war” over Ukraine

Alex Lantier

As fighting between pro-Russian separatists and the NATO-backed Kiev regime escalates in east Ukraine, and as NATO foreign ministers announced a massive troop deployment throughout Eastern Europe, France and Germany have suddenly announced plans to travel to Russia to propose a new “peace plan.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande traveled to Kiev yesterday to meet with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who also met US Secretary of State John Kerry for talks originally scheduled to discuss US plans to directly arm the Kiev regime. Merkel and Hollande are scheduled to travel today for talks in Moscow, which has supported the separatists in the civil war in east Ukraine unleashed by the NATO-backed coup in Kiev a year ago.
The diplomatic maneuvers take place as the efforts of the US and the European powers to force Russia to back down in Ukraine threaten to unleash a war of incalculable consequences. Russian officials have also stated that if Washington arms Kiev for a large-scale offensive in east Ukraine, the Russian army will intervene to prevent Kiev from massacring the separatists, which could lead to a major land war in Europe and possibly a world war involving nuclear-armed powers.
French President François Hollande announced his trip with Merkel to Kiev at a press conference at the Elysée presidential palace yesterday. “We have gone in the space of a few months from having differences, to conflict, to war ... We are in a state of war, and a war that could be total,” he warned.
Echoing statements by Merkel earlier this week, Hollande said he opposed plans for NATO to arm the Kiev regime, apparently referring to reports Monday that the Obama administration is considering providing Kiev with billions of dollars worth of “defensive” weapons. “I am sure I will be told there is a difference between defensive and offensive weapons, but that is a matter of semantics,” Hollande said. He added that France did not support Ukraine joining NATO.
Claiming that France was a “friend” of Russia, Hollande said: “Time is short, and it will not be said that France and Germany together did not try everything, attempt everything to preserve peace.”
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is holding talks in Poland and Latvia, said Berlin and Paris hope to avoid a “total loss of control” over the escalation of the fighting.
Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov replied that Russia was “ready for a constructive conversation” to establish dialog and economic relations between Kiev and the eastern separatists.
Nonetheless, few details emerged on what Berlin and Paris are proposing. Yesterday evening, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung posted an article on the plan, titled “New Peace Plan in Ukraine: More Territory for Separatists.” Describing the plan as based on last year’s Minsk accords, it declared, “The essence of the proposal is to arrange an immediate ceasefire and grant separatists in east Ukraine broad autonomy in an area larger than previously agreed.”
German government spokesmen denied the report, however. The Süddeutsche Zeitung changed the article and posted a note explaining: “Territorial questions are not to be negotiated between Merkel, Hollande, and Poroshenko. However, political observers think it unlikely that demarcation lines set last September in the Minsk Agreement can be maintained, in light of separatists’ recent territorial gains.”
The British Guardian newspaper posted an editorial arguing that the Franco-German initiative was instead an opportunity to threaten to totally cut Russia off from the world financial system.
It wrote, “EU sanctions thus far have had a virtually symbolic impact. Cutting Russian banks and companies from the Belgium-based Swift international transaction system would, by contrast, impose a serious jolt. It could be done quickly, but then also rolled back rapidly. It has worked before, against Iran, which entered nuclear negotiations soon after being banned from Swift in 2012. ... When Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Hollande head for Moscow, they should put Swift on the table.”
Kerry, who was slated to discuss US arms deliveries to Kiev with Poroshenko, said President Obama is reviewing all options, including “providing defensive [weapon] systems to Ukraine.” He proposed, however, that Russia fall in line with US policy and adopt “a diplomatic solution that is staring everybody in the face.”
He demanded that Russia abandon the east Ukraine separatists: “Russia needs to demonstrate its commitment to ending the bloodshed once and for all. And we would ask that it does so by honoring the agreement that it signed, the Minsk agreement ... There must be an immediate commitment now to a real ceasefire which is not just a piece of paper and words, but which is followed up by specific actions.”
Kerry hailed “unity” between the United States, Germany, and France as ensuring that conflict could be overcome.
Amid the flurry of vague and contradictory proposals, however, it is unclear to what extent Washington and the European powers are coordinating their initiatives, or whether they have well-defined policies. French officials told Le Nouvel Observateur that Merkel’s and Hollande’s trip had not previously been discussed with Washington; however, it is not yet clear whether the Franco-German initiative is in fact in conflict with whatever policy the US government will ultimately pursue.
There are also conflicts within the United States itself. Republican Senator John McCain gathered a bipartisan group of 12 US senators yesterday on Capitol Hill and announced that if the White House does not arm Kiev, they would draft legislation requiring the US government to do so.
Kerry indicated that the Obama administration would make this decision sometime next week, following a visit from Merkel to Washington. The EU is also set to consider new sanctions against Russia next week.
What is clear is that the civil war in Ukraine has placed the world on the verge of catastrophe. According to the French president and his warnings about “total war,” Europe is closer to world war than it has been at any time since the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Responsibility for the immense dangers facing the world population lies primarily with the United States, Germany, and all the NATO powers. The current crisis was provoked by the decision of Washington and Berlin to organize the coup last year, installing a right-wing government lacking any popular support, through a putsch led by pro-Nazi, anti-Russian forces such as the Right Sector militia.
Nothing that Washington or its European allies say can be taken at face value. While Hollande pledged himself as a “friend” of Russia, Kerry declared in Kiev, “We don’t view this as a zero-sum game. We have never viewed it that way. This is not meant to be nor should it be a divide between East and West.”
In fact, as Hollande and Kerry spoke these words, preparations for a far broader military confrontation between the NATO powers and Russia continued apace. A summit of NATO defense ministers in Brussels was setting up the infrastructure for NATO rapid reaction forces to number in the tens of thousands of troops, to be deployed in Eastern European countries all along Russia’s western border. (See: “NATO doubles combat forces in Eastern Europe”)
A major factor behind the calculations of Paris and Berlin, as they suddenly propose a truce, is the rapidly deteriorating situation of the Kiev regime. While they pursue military escalation elsewhere, Paris and Berlin have tactical objections that arming the Kiev regime is not a viable policy. As French diplomatic sources told the daily Le Monde, “The Ukrainians will not militarily retake the Donbass [region of east Ukraine], this strategy is doomed to failure.”
Having lost control of its position at the Donetsk airport, pro-Kiev militias in east Ukraine are surrounded and under heavy fire at the strategic transport hub of Debaltseve.
At the same time, Ukraine’s economy is collapsing due to the fighting in the key industrial regions in the east, and the cutting off of key Ukrainian export markets in Russia. Yesterday, as Kiev sought to negotiate the next tranche of Ukraine’s $17 billion IMF loan, it raised interest rates by fully 5 percent, to 19.5 percent, in an attempt to halt the hryvnia’s 46 percent slide against the US dollar.

US measles outbreak spreads to fourteen states

Kelvin Martinez

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday confirmed 18 new cases of measles in the US, bringing the total number of people infected with the disease to 102, in 14 states.
Measles cases have now been reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Washington, according to the CDC. On January 26, when the CDC issued an advisory, the virus had only spread to six states besides California.
“ This is not a problem with the measles vaccine not working. This is a problem of the measles vaccine not being used,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, assistant surgeon general and director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, during a news conference Thursday.
Of the 34 people infected with measles for whom the California Department of Public Health had vaccination records, only five had vaccines, while one received just the first dose. National trends have confirmed this pattern, according to Dr. Schuchat.
On Monday, a daycare center at Santa Monica High School in Southern California was closed and more than a dozen infants were place on 21-day quarantine after a baby was found to have measles. The child was under a year old and too young to be vaccinated. Los Angeles County health officials ordered the “infant room” at the daycare center to be closed indefinitely. Among students at the high school, 7 percent have waivers exempting them from the measles vaccine, while district-wide, 11.5 percent have waivers citing personal or religious beliefs.
Last year, the United States saw the highest number of reported measles cases in 20 years, with 644 cases as part of 20 separate outbreaks. The spread of the virus was related to a massive measles outbreak in the Philippines.
Measles is a highly contagious and airborne disease that can linger in the air long after an infected person has left a room. According to the CDC, one infected person will spread the disease on average to 18 other people. About one to two people out of every 1,000 infected will die.
In the decade leading up to the 1963 licensure of the measles vaccine, the US suffered an average of 549,000 cases of measles and 495 deaths every year, with the number of unreported cases estimated to be 3 to 4 million, according to the CDC.
In 2000, the disease was proclaimed to be nearly eradicated in the US, but has since made a comeback. From 2001 to 2011, a total of 911 cases were reported, averaging 62 cases a year.
Over the years, the number of cases has risen. In 2014, the CDC reported 644 cases of the measles, and more than 100 cases have been reported this year alone.
“ Outbreaks of measles most commonly occur in communities with pockets of persons who were unvaccinated because of philosophic or religious beliefs,” the CDC said in a statement. “Pockets of unvaccinated persons also occur in states with high vaccination coverage, highlighting the importance of state health departments assessing measles susceptibility at the local level.”
In 2000, the world rate of children who had received at least one vaccination before their first birthday was estimated to be 73 percent, according to the World Health Organization. By 2013 the rate grew to 84 percent, leading measles deaths to drop by 75 percent from an estimated 544,200 in 2000 to 145,700 in 2013. On average, 400 people die every day from measles.
Between 2000 and 2013, the WHO estimated that 15.6 million measles deaths were avoided because of the vaccine, a number roughly equal to the combined populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
Dr. Anne Schuchat told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee this week that “measles are literally a plane ride away” and when people are not vaccinated, the disease “has the chance to spread.” She added, “Vaccines save lives and are the best way for parents to protect their children from vaccine preventable diseases.”

Canada’s Conservatives launch sweeping assault on democratic rights with new anti-terror bill

Roger Jordan

The anti-terrorism bill Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled last Friday contains measures signifying a vast intensification of the drive to abrogate democratic rights and establish the scaffolding for a police state.
Making the announcement in front of Conservative Party supporters rather than in parliament, Harper presented plans that will see Canada’s premier spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), freed from virtually any legal restraint in its day-to-day work.
Bill C-51 provides for CSIS to act in violation of domestic and foreign laws in its intelligence gathering practices and surveillance of suspects.
This is combined with a vast strengthening of the authority of CSIS to take action against terrorist suspects, including measures to disrupt alleged terrorist activity. According to information released by the government, it is no longer acceptable that “CSIS does not have a legal mandate to take action concerning threats. Instead, CSIS is limited to collecting and analyzing information and intelligence, and advising the Government of Canada.”
Under the new bill, CSIS operatives will be empowered to break the law and violate the Canadian constitution’s Charter of Rights, if they have “reasonable grounds” for believing that a threat is posed to Canada’s national security and have obtained court authorization. This is a lower level of legal evidence than would be expected in an investigation by law enforcement officials with the power of arrest.
If a court gives its assent, CSIS agents will be able to perform numerous illegal acts, including breaking into suspects’ homes, seizing and copying documents, and installing or removing “anything.” The only limitations are that CSIS cannot kill or physically harm someone or “violate” their “sexual integrity.”
The government is presenting these powers as a response to the threat of terrorist attacks.
But the legislation is worded in such a way that it empowers CSIS agents to disrupt not only terrorist activity and plots but rather all “threats to the security of Canada.” These include “espionage, sabotage, foreign influenced activities, terrorism and domestic subversion (activities against the constitutionally established system of government in Canada).”
The court oversight proposed by the Harper government would be limited to a judge signing off on these activities in advance. Thus, in effect, the courts would be providing CSIS with a blank cheque to act as it saw fit, with no further review after the fact.
With Bill C-51, the government has abandoned even the limited separation of intelligence work from law enforcement operations adopted by the Canadian ruling elite in the 1980s following damaging revelations about the activities of its security agencies. CSIS was founded in 1984, after a public inquiry uncovered systematic law-breaking and intimidation on the part of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) Security Service, CSIS’s predecessor. The Security Service employed violence, break-ins and arson, among other illegal techniques, against political parties and leftists, especially socialists and trade unionists.
The reformed framework did nothing to prevent CSIS from obtaining vast surveillance powers, such as spying on the population’s telephone and online communications, and systematically violating legal restrictions, illustrated most notably by the revelation that CSIS deliberately lied to the courts over several years about its spying practices.
The bill also broadens the definition of terrorist offences by criminalizing the act of “advocating” or “promoting” terrorism in general. Currently, the promotion of a specific act is required for an offence to be committed.
The new provision is patently aimed at targeting political opponents of the government’s embrace of militarism in Canadian foreign policy. Just last week, Harper implied that the leader of the opposition New Democrats, Thomas Mulcair, was a supporter of Islamic State in a parliamentary exchange in which Mulcair raised questions about the government’s deployment of special forces in Iraq. Harper told parliament, “I know that the opposition thinks it is a terrible thing that we are standing up to the jihadists. I know they think it is a terrible thing that some of these jihadists got killed when they fired on the Canadian military.”
If this is the response to those, like the NDP, who merely differ with the government over the tactics to be pursued in upholding Canadian imperialism’s interests, it is not hard to imagine what the reaction would be to the emergence of a genuine anti-war movement in the working class.
Provisions are also to be strengthened for facilitating the seizure and removal of material from the Internet considered to be encouraging terrorism. A court will be able to order the removal of articles, pictures or videos from websites that it deems to be “terrorist propaganda.” Information published on Harper’s website confirmed that this law was directly inspired by Britain’s example, where authorities are able to block “extremist” material online.
Bill C-51 will, in addition, expand the power of the RCMP to detain individuals without charge. It would allow suspects to be detained for up to seven days and expands the “peace bond” scheme, whereby suspects who have neither been convicted nor charged with an offence are compelled to give up their passports and banned from travelling abroad. The maximum period is currently two years. Bill C-51 would lengthen it to five years.
Judges would also have the authority to impose other conditions on suspects, such as reporting regularly to police officers or electronic tagging. Indicating the vague character of suspicion that would be necessary before adopting such measures, the government declared that they would be aimed at those “who may in some way be connected to carrying out a terrorist activity.”
The level of suspicion necessary to make an arrest will also be reduced from the current requirement that a “terror act will be carried out” to the much more vague belief that a terrorist attack “may be” in preparation. In the course of their investigations, government agencies will be permitted to share data on any individual.
Harper justified these draconian measures as necessary in the face of the grave threat posed by Islamist terrorism. In keeping with his repeated portrayal of Canada as a nation under siege from terrorists, he declared last Friday, “Our government understands that extreme Jihadists have declared war on us, on all free people, and on Canada specifically. Our government will continue to protect the rights and safety of all Canadians.”
In reality, the government is pursuing a very different agenda with this latest legislative package. Firstly, it is seeking to exploit the climate of fear whipped up by the claim that Canada is under attack to win support for Ottawa’s growing involvement in the predatory war in the Middle East led by US imperialism.
Domestically, the terrorist legislation is aimed at suppressing all opposition among workers to the government’s unpopular policies of war abroad and attacks on social and democratic rights at home. Bill C-51 is only the latest in a raft of repressive measures instituted by successive governments led by the Conservatives and opposition Liberals since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These include an all-embracing definition of terrorism, which could cover protests and strikes by workers, mass surveillance of the population by CSIS and the RCMP, and powers to compel witnesses to testify in terrorism trials. In December, parliament adopted Bill C-44, granting blanket legal anonymity in court to CSIS informants, and sanctioning CSIS’s spying on Canadians outside the country.
This reactionary drive also feeds in to the Conservatives’ strategy for the upcoming federal election, which it intends to fight on an overtly right-wing basis by casting the opposition as soft on terrorism and incapable of carrying out the ruling elite’s demands for deeper attacks on the working class.
The opposition Liberals and New Democrats will offer no principled opposition to this programme. Liberal public safety spokesman Wayne Easter remarked, prior to the presentation of the new law, that the Liberals were “very open to what the government will propose.” Noting that his party’s only real complaint was a lack of parliamentary oversight, he left no doubt of his fundamental agreement with expanded state powers, asking, “One key question is: why have current laws not been utilized to the full extent we think they should be?

Mistreatment of detainees and asylum seekers widespread in Europe

Jean Shaoul

A report by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) details the shocking abuse and mistreatment of detainees, particularly asylum seekers and juveniles, in some of Europe’s detention centres. It warns that prison guards had carried out reprisals against detainees who had spoken about their ill treatment to the CPT.
The CPT visited detention centres in 25 of the 47 members of Council of Europe to examine conditions relating to the treatment of detainees. These included prisons, police stations, holding centres for immigration detainees, psychiatric hospitals, and social care homes.
Its findings are contained in 24th General Report of the CPT: European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1 August 2013-31 December 2014).
The CPT drew attention to the mistreatment of asylum seekers, saying that they were being held in conditions that were both inhumane and degrading, particularly in Spain, Italy and Greece, which take in the largest number.
In Greece, migrants were being held in police stations all over the country for long periods. The report cited the example of Perama Police Station in Piraeus, where two or more women were held for months in a dark, mouldy and dilapidated basement cell measuring just 5 square metres, with no access to outdoor exercise or hygiene products.
Greece’s austerity measures had affected the most vulnerable members of society. There was an extreme shortage of staff, and overcrowding at prisons was widespread. Prisons were operating at two or three times their capacity, prisoners were sharing beds or sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and there was a serious lack of hygiene and access to health care. At Korydallos Men’s Prison, a wing of some 400 inmates was staffed by only two prison officers during the day, leading to mistreatment, bullying and intimidation by police officers.
The detention and mistreatment of asylum seekers is becoming a growing issue throughout Europe.
In Britain, for example, around 30,000 asylum seekers—nearly one third of them women and children—are detained every year, and the number is growing. They are isolated from the outside world, allowed only one visitor, and confined, without time limit, until their asylum cases are heard. It is not uncommon for asylum seekers to be held for as long as a year until their cases are heard. If their appeal is rejected, they are deported immediately without regard for their safety. They have no right to health care or legal aid.
A report into Britain’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, which holds more than 400 female asylum seekers, found that nearly three quarters of the 46 women interviewed had been raped, while 41 percent had been tortured. More than half said they had been persecuted for being a woman, while 18 percent had been persecuted for their sexuality.
Such treatment is bound up with the policy of “Fortress Europe” pursued by the European Union’s member states: the sealing off of the continent from the flood of refugees, the result in large part of Europe’s support for the US wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and covert operations in Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
The CPT also expressed its concern about the situation confronting those under 18 years of age. It said that the deliberate ill treatment of juveniles by law enforcement officials remained a real concern in a number of countries.
There were credible allegations of detained juveniles being ill treated, including being kicked, slapped, punched or beaten with batons at the time of apprehension (even after the juvenile concerned has been brought under control), during transportation or subsequent questioning in law enforcement establishments. It was not uncommon for juveniles to become victims of threats or verbal abuse (including of a racist nature) while in the hands of law enforcement agencies.
It recommended that juveniles should not be subject to police questioning without a lawyer or trusted adult, held in law enforcement establishments for more than 24 hours, housed in large dormitories or placed in solitary confinement as a disciplinary measure. That the CPT should make such recommendations speaks volumes for the conditions its investigators observed.
Of great concern to the CPT was that their previous reports had been ignored, some of their previous recommendations had not been implemented, and prisoners or detainees who spoke with their investigators faced reprisals from guards.
Reprisals took the form of undue restrictions on basic entitlements, solitary confinement for fabricated disciplinary or security reasons, placement in worse conditions of detention, withdrawal of support for early release, assault and other kinds of ill treatment. This had occurred in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Moldova, Russia, Spain, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Ukraine.
One prisoner in Ukraine had allegedly been subjected to severe beatings after the CPT’s previous visit to the establishment and been made to shout to other inmates—while he was being beaten—that he would never again complain to the CPT. The CPT, which has no powers of sanction, called on the authorities to prevent the risk of further intimidation and to protect witnesses and “whistle-blowers.”
CPT President Letif Hüseynov said, “Intimidation or retaliation against persons the CPT has interviewed may not only violate their human rights but also strikes a blow to the preventive mechanism established by the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture.”
The CPT report has attracted little media attention—only Deutsche Welle reported it—and no public response at all from the political authorities responsible for this terrible state of affairs.

Australian central bank cuts rates as economic downturn accelerates

Nick Beams

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) yesterday cut its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points in a move that reflects both the intensifying global currency war and the rapidly worsening state of the Australian economy.
The RBA’s cash rate is now at an historic low—even below the level recorded in the depths of the 2008–2009 financial crisis. The Australian dollar fell to just above 76 US cents, its lowest point for more than five years, on the back of the news, amid predictions that further interest rate cuts will be made in coming months.
The RBA decision points to the deepening global downturn. In little more than a month since the start of the year, some 12 countries have now taken action, whether by cutting rates or other measures, to try to lower the value of their currencies as the struggle for markets intensifies and global growth declines.
Australia has been heavily impacted because of precipitous falls in commodity prices, most notably the halving of the price of iron ore, its leading export earner. The terms of trade, a measure of the relative value of exports compared to imports, have fallen by 25 percent over the past three years, leading to a contraction in real gross domestic income over the past half year. Real wages have contracted for the first time since 1991–92.
Having not experienced an official recession—defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth—for almost a quarter of a century, Australia is now being sucked into the vortex created by the ongoing breakdown of the global economy that began in 2008.
Announcing the decision, RBA governor Glenn Stevens, who has advocated a lower Australian dollar in order to try to boost growth, pointed to two key motivating factors.
He said that while the Australian dollar had declined “noticeably against a rising US dollar in recent months,” its fall against a basket of major currencies was much less marked and it remained “above its fundamental value.” This is particularly significant because other central bankers have insisted that their rate cuts have not been aimed at reducing the value of their currency—such a policy being condemned as an expression of the beggar-thy-neighbour measures that characterised the 1930s.
Bank officials have generally tried to cover their tracks by citing the need to prevent the emergence of deflation. But with the inflation at or near 2 percent in Australia no such obfuscation was available to Stevens. He had to admit that the rate cut was specifically aimed at reducing the value of the Australian currency.
Stevens’ statement pointed to the rapidly worsening position of the Australian economy. Growth remained at “below trend pace, with domestic demand growth overall quite weak.” The major component of the weakness is the downturn in domestic investment as businesses anticipate stagnant or contracting markets.
Stevens said output growth would remain below trend and unemployment, now at 6.3 percent, would continue to rise.
This is in marked contrast to RBA forecasts made as recently as last November. Then it said that 2015 was likely to bring a recovery with growth rising from its level of 2.3 percent to 3.5 percent and possibly reaching 4.25 percent by the end of 2016.
As Business Spectator columnist Alan Kohler noted: “Taken at face value, the RBA has made a total reassessment of its view of the economy and concluded that things are not going that well—worse apparently than the statistics are telling us.”
He said the RBA had decided to “don the camouflage suit and tin hat and race out into the currency war battlefield, guns blazing.”
The RBA’s “total reassessment” is an expression of the ongoing downward assessment of the state of the global economy. According to Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey, the International Monetary Fund is about to release fresh forecasts on global growth expressing “further concern about some of the headwinds we are facing.” Just two weeks ago the IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth from 3.8 to 3.5 percent, but it now appears that even that was too optimistic.
Hockey’s warnings about IMF growth revisions made total nonsense of his claim that the RBA cut was “good news for families and small businesses” and “good news for the economy and … good news for jobs.”
In fact, the only beneficiaries will be the financial speculators—share prices rose to their highest levels since the financial crisis of 2008 following the RBA announcement—and real estate and property investors. In other words, the major economic outcome of the decision will not be real growth but ever-increasing financial parasitism and the further enrichment of the super-rich, together with widening social inequality.
Contrary to Hockey, the decision was made because RBA considers that, having held interest rates steady for the past 18 months, the economic outlook is now rapidly worsening, a downturn which has firmly taken hold since its assessment barely two months ago.
Hockey’s bizarre remarks are an indication of the underlying economic forces driving the growing political crisis which has gripped the Abbott Liberal government. On the one hand, it is faced with demands from the corporate elites, articulated in numerous editorial comments, especially in the Murdoch press, that, under worsening economic conditions, it press ahead with an austerity program aimed at lowering the living standards of the working class.
On the other hand, these attacks have produced a growing wave of opposition which last weekend led to the ousting of the Queensland state Liberal National Party government. Premier Campbell Newman, who lost his own seat in the debacle, had exhibited exactly the kind of “strong” leadership advocated in the editorial columns, casting a pall of doubt over the future of the federal government.
In an attempt to deflect growing criticism of his leadership, Abbott used his National Press Club address on Monday to assure the corporate elites that he was remaining firm, while warning his opponents within the party that any attempts to remove him would make the position of the government even worse. His stand, however, has so far failed to end the leadership turmoil.
A measure of the mounting frustration in ruling circles over the worsening economic position and the increasing difficulty of securing their agenda through parliamentary forms of rule was the editorial published in today’s Financial Review criticising the RBA decision.
“Fiscal policy is off the rails,” it declared. “Politics is a mess, with the instability of the Rudd-Gillard years infecting the Abbott government. There has been no major productivity-enhancing policy reform since the GST [the regressive goods and services tax] a decade and a half ago. Our national prosperity is receding as iron ore and coal prices slump. And now, the one upright institution—and the one credible and coherent policy lever—monetary policy—are bending under the pressure of policy failure elsewhere.”
The response of the working class to this deepening economic and political crisis must be to begin to advance its own independent program, based on socialist internationalism, and the building of a new leadership to fight for it.

Washington moves toward arming Ukrainian regime

Niles Williamson

On Monday, the New York Times announced that the Obama administration is moving to directly arm the Ukrainian army and the fascistic militias supporting the NATO-backed regime in Kiev, after its recent setbacks in the offensive against pro-Russian separatist forces in east Ukraine.
The article cites a joint report issued Monday by the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and delivered to President Obama, advising the White House and NATO on the best way to escalate the war in Ukraine.
The think-tank report calls for the US to distribute at least $3 billion in military equipment to the Kiev regime over the next three years. Among the equipment proposed for delivery are light anti-armor missiles, counter-battery radars to target artillery and rocket launchers, medium range drones and armored Humvees. They also call on NATO member states in Eastern Europe with former Soviet equipment to provide weapons and equipment to Kiev.
According to the Times, US officials are rapidly shifting to support the report’s proposals. NATO military commander in Europe General Philip M. Breedlove, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey all supported discussions on directly arming Kiev. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is reconsidering her opposition to arming Kiev, paving the way for Obama’s approval.
Behind the backs of the American people, Washington is recklessly escalating a conflict that threatens to provoke war with Russia. Offensives by Ukrainian fascist militias such as the Right Sector or the Azov Battalion have already led to the deaths of more than 5,000 people and forced over a million to flee their homes. Russian officials have repeatedly stated that they will intervene militarily to halt a bloodbath by Kiev regime forces in east Ukraine—a move that could trigger a global war between Russia and Ukraine’s NATO allies.
The way the report was assembled testifies to the utterly anti-democratic fashion in which US foreign policy is determined. The think-tank report, which the Times ludicrously described as “independent,” was authored by a cabal of former high-ranking Pentagon, NATO and State Department officials. Behind the backs of the American people, a policy is being set into motion that could trigger war between nuclear-armed countries including the United States and Russia.
In fact, the institutions and individuals that issued the report have close ties to the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. First Lady Michelle Obama sits on the board of directors of the Chicago Council.
Among those who signed off on the report, one finds:
Strobe Talbott, current President of the Brookings Institution, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and Ambassador-at-Large to the former Soviet Union. He oversaw the development of US policy toward Russia amid the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR, and early efforts to draw former pro-Soviet states in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics in the Caucasus away from Russia. As President Bill Clinton’s closest advisor on Russia, Talbott supported Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of the Russian parliament in 1993, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.
Ivo Daalder, current President of the Chicago Council, was a foreign policy adviser to Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and the US representative to NATO during the war on Libya in 2011. The bombing campaign led by the United States, France and Britain devastated Libya, killed tens of thousands and resulted in the lynch mob murder of Moammar Gaddafi.
Michele Flournoy currently chairs the Center for a New American Security think-tank and was the Under Secretary of Defense under Robert Gates and Leon Panetta from 2009 to 2012. She also served in the Defense Department in the Clinton Administration, formulating US policy on Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. She was considered a potential candidate to replace current Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who announced his resignation in November.
Two former US ambassadors to Ukraine, John Herbst and Steven Pifer, signed their names to the report. Significantly, Herbst was ambassador during the US-backed 2004-2005 Orange Revolution that brought to power a pro-Western government. In 2006, he secured $2.3 million in funding through USAID, a long-standing conduit for CIA funding and operations, to promote the development of pro-Western media in Ukraine.
In calling for such an escalation in Ukraine, the signatories are all following in the footsteps of former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Last year, Brzezinski delivered a speech at the Wilson Center laying out the policies now being advocated in the Brookings Institution report and discussed by the New York Times.
He called on Washington to provide Kiev with, “weapons designed particularly to permit the Ukrainians to engage in effective urban warfare of resistance. There’s no point trying to arm the Ukrainians to take on the Russian army in the open field, thousands of tanks, an army organized for the application of overwhelming force.” Instead, he proposed a policy of intimidating Russia and, if it decided to intervene in Ukraine anyway, bogging it down in urban ethnic warfare.
He explained, “There is a history to be learned from urban resistance in World War II and most recently in Chechnya, whose capital persisted for three months in house-to-house fighting. The point is, if the [Russian] effort to invade was to be successful politically, it would have to incorporate taking the major cities. If the major cities, say Kharkiv, say Kiev, were to resist and street fighting became a necessity, it would be prolonged and costly. And the fact of the matter is, and this is where the timing of this whole crisis is important, Russia is not yet ready to undertake that kind of effort. It will be too costly in blood, paralyzingly costly in finances.”
The strategy outlined by Brzezinski is sinister and reactionary. If US operations fail to intimidate Russia into ceding all influence in Ukraine and letting NATO proxies crush the Donbass, US weapons and equipment would be used to bleed Russia white in a war fought inside cities that are home to millions of people, and that might escalate into full-scale nuclear war.