Confronting Racism: Homework for the Next Generation

Barbara Nimri Aziz

My friend Amer Zahr’s testimony about racism in the USA points to parallels between what Arab kids experience today and what he faced a quarter century ago when he was 13. On the surface it seems there’s been scant progress for us, as for African Americans, especially Black men for example in how they’re treated by police.

Remarkably, we hapless citizens on the receiving side of prejudice and ignorance continue to believe it’s possible to educate our foes and our rude friends. How many times have we heard how they “honestly never spoke to a real Muslim” or “never sat with a Black family”, how they “never knew”….until they viewed ONE of our prize-winning films, watched Muslims comedians or read a mind-blowing novel by an Arab woman?

Today, recharged by a battery of immense talent—comedians, authors, actors, musicians and TV hosts– we forge ahead with the dream of overturning the shortcomings of our purported democracy, a distracted free press, our abused free speech and our trivia-laden social media.

The latest talent to come to my attention in the search for justice through powerful story-telling is Rafia Zakaria. She’s author of a newmemoir The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan, published by Beacon Press in Boston. I read it and swiftly arranged to interview Zakaria.

The book is a portrait of the author’s Karachi family woven into Pakistan’s history since independence, with the aim of illustrating how divisions and fragilities inside a household can mirror the vulnerability of a whole nation, manifest through women’s lives– from Zakaria’s own hapless Aunt Amina, to protesting college girls, to the ambitious leader Benazir Bhutto. These lives intersect with ONE another and within the promise and pain of nationhood.

The Upstairs Wife joins a growing body of literature that reinvents how history is made more accessible and more realistic. But my phone interview with Rafia revealed something more personal and significant for me. CHOOSING journalism as a career, we share a commitment to erase misconceptions implanted and perpetuated about us by a patronizing and biased western press.

Both Zakaria and I (along with Amer Zahr, Nermin Al-Mufti) declare an unwillingness to accept imperialist characterizations of our existence, and a determination to establish a new discourse. I set out a generation ago to portray multi-dimensional Arab lives (not ‘victims’ who liberals so eagerly embrace), bringing years of anthropology research to my journalism. Today’s generation is fighting the same stereotypes and professional battles we were certain we could obliterate. We didn’t fail; we simply need our children with their energy and their own rationale to maintain the momentum.

Zakaria explains: “You have to PRESENT stories of ordinary families: how they endure history, the mistakes they make, their victories and joys. Those are universal experiences; they bring people of the world together. If you know someone’s story, it’s more difficult to hate them.”

It seems uncomplicated, doesn’t it? Zakaria exactly repeats my assertions when I took up journalism in 1989. I’m heartened, not dismayed by her statements. She too understands the process: “If you call a country a failed state over and over, that BECOMES the country’s identity not only for people applying those terms, but for the people of that country itself.” She concludes my admitting how hard it is for her and other citizens to deal with the reality of Pakistan, not because of its flaws, but because the idea of promise and potential, whether within a nation or in personal relationships, is something very fragile.

Keeping “Hidden History” Hidden

Alison Weir

The American Historical Association (AHA) has refused to publish a paid advertisement for my book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.

This type of action demonstrates how the history discussed in my book has, in fact, so often remained hidden. It follows an incident a few years ago in which the largest chain of history magazines in the U.S. refused any advertisement by the Council for the National Interest, based on the accusation that CNI is “anti-Israel.”* CNI is a 20-year-old organization that works for policies that represent American interests and principles.

The AHA was founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889 “to serve the interests of the entire discipline of history,” according to its website. It is the largest professional history organization in the U.S. and publishes TWO journals, American Historical Review and Perspectives on History. The organization says the latter is “the principal source for news and information about the historical discipline.”

According to AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman in a phone conversation with me, AHA would not publish the ad for several reasons: The book “does not fall within the scope of the mission of the AHA, the book is “advocacy not scholarship,” it “has not been peer reviewed,” and it “has not been reviewed by the mainstream press.”

None of these objections – even if they were accurate – seem relevant to a paid advertisement, and none violate AHA’s published advertising guidelines in any way. In fact, AHA guidelines particularly make clear that advertising in an AHA publication “does not necessarily constitute endorsement or approval of any product or service advertised.”

On top of the irrelevance of Dr. Grossman’s objections to our paid advertisement, his claims contain several fallacies. These may be related to the fact that he has never read the book.

For example, it’s difficult to understand how he could evaluate whether or not the book fits into the scope of the AHA mission to further knowledge of history without reading the book. By the way, my book is thoroughly cited, containing over 300 footnotes and an extensive bibliography.

Dr. Grossman complains the book has not been reviewed by the mainstream press, but it received a long and positive review in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The Washington Report, founded by U.S. ambassadors and Foreign Service officers, has been publishing excellent journalism for over thirty years and is considered by many to be ONE of the top publications on the region.

Against Our Better Judgment has received positive reviews from several distinguished reviewers.

For example, Ambassador Killgore, a career foreign service officer who served throughout the Middle East for many years, wrote that the book was “prodigiously documented” and said, “Alison Weir must be highly commended for throwing such a brilliantly hard light on the relationship between the United States and Israel. I hope this marvelous book GETS all the attention it deserves.”

1. Michael Haber, co-founder of the International Development Law Organization in Rome who has been published in the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Hill, International Herald Tribune, and the LONDON Independent, called the book “revelatory and articulate.”

Senator James Abourezk, who has long focused on the region, stated: “This provocative book documents a history that is essential in understanding today’s world. Scholarly, yet readable, it is a must for all Americans.”

Dr. Grossman also claimed that the book was “advocacy, not scholarship.” When I asked how he had arrived at this conclusion without reading the book, he backtracked and said it was not the book itself that was the problem, it was the advertisement. Yet our advertisement contains no advocacy, other than to advocate for the book itself, presumably the function of any book advertisement.

Perhaps ONE underlying reason for Dr. Grossman’s unsubstantiated claims is that the book was independently produced, rather than the product of the academic and mainstream publishers who normally advertise in AHA, in a belief that such publishers (and such publishers alone) guarantee accuracy. There is much evidence to the contrary, including prize-winning books by major publishers that turned out to be fraudulent.

AHA seems to have had no problem publishing an advertisement by Cambridge University Press for its book Antisemitism and the American Far Left, for example, despite the book’s substantial bias and numerous inaccuracies, including the strange assertion that “university courses on European, American, and Middle Eastern history have rarely addressed the issue of anti-Semitism, or even the Jewish experience.”

Similarly, some of AHA’s articles on Israel-Palestine have contained problematic statements, such as Barry Rubin’s claim that “pro-Israel lobbying efforts… were minimal even into the 1980s,” despite the fact that the pro-Israel lobby had been significant for decades. (Extensive information on this is available in my book and others.)

Troubled by Dr. Grossman’s lack of logic and evidentiary support, I phoned and emailed the MEMBERS of AHA’s Executive Committee, the body that Dr. Grossman said had made this decision. I asked them why they had decided to ban the ad, and requested that they reconsider this decision. I also asked if they had read the book. (Dr. Grossman had said he didn’t know whether any of them had read it.)

Except for one professor who replied that she believed AHA president Vicki Ruiz had already responded to my concerns (Dr. Ruiz had not), none of the committee MEMBERS responded to my emails and phone calls. I suspect that none have read the book.

These are all professors at reputable American universities. I hope they would not be pleased with students who made decisions about a book without reading it. Moreover, my book is quite short and takes little time to read.

In my email to the committee MEMBERS, I pointed out that we were not requesting that AHA review my book:

“We simply asked to put in a paid advertisement telling readers about a new history book that contains clearly cited, highly significant information that would quite likely be of interest to them. This information could then be studied, considered, and debated. To me,” I wrote, “this falls within the AHA mission.”

It’s sad that apparently these professors don’t share this view – or don’t find such a principle sufficiently compelling to overrule a recommendation made by their executive director.

Such negligence is particularly unfortunate in those charged with overseeing AHA operations, given that Israel-Palestine, the subject of my book, is an exceedingly timely issue and ONE that is particularly relevant to AHA – not to mention to millions of people in the Middle East and beyond.

The AHA and Israel-Palestine 

The AHA, like several other scholarly organizations, has recently been embroiled in heated controversies involving Israel-Palestine. Such a situation should make AHA even more sensitive to the need for its MEMBERS to have full, uncensored information on this topic.

In 2014 an AHA MEMBER submitted a resolution calling for a boycott of Israel, because of its violations of academic freedom, to be placed on the agenda for the upcoming AHA national meeting.

AHA President Jan Goldstein, however, decided not to add the resolution to the agenda because, according to an announcement by Dr. Grossman, an “insufficient number of AHA MEMBERS in good standing had signed the petition, and the resolution as written went beyond matters ‘of concern to the Association, to the profession of history, or to the academic profession.’”

While Dr. Grossman ascribed President Goldstein’s decision to consultation with the AHA parliamentarian, the Weekly Standard reported that she had also been heavily lobbied by pro-Israel professors.

A number of other academic organizations have passed such boycott resolutions, including the American Studies Association, Association for Asian American Studies , African Literature Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. The American Anthropological Association is expected to endorse a boycott NEXT year, having resoundingly rejected an anti-boycott resolution in 2014. (The Modern Language Association voted on a resolution on Israel’s violations, but although the majority of those voting favored the resolution, the number required to ratify it was not attained.)

After AHA leadership rejected the boycott resolution, a group called Historians Against the War introduced new resolutions that called for ending Israeli violations but stopped short of calling for a boycott.

At this point, the deadline for new resolutions had passed, so the group went to the AHA business meeting and asked for a suspension of the rules so that the resolutions could be sent to the full membership for an “open and full debate.” This failed for a variety of reasons and the resolutions were not debated at that time, but it is clear that discussion of Israel-Palestine will be part of NEXT year’s convention.

The New York Times reported that AHA president Goldstein announced that her successor, Dr. Ruiz, “had already committed to holding several academic sessions on the issue at the 2016 meeting,” and quoted Executive Director Grossman, who endorsed this action: “Our role is to provide a forum for historians to discuss historical context.”

Given such admirable and publicly expressed stances, and the importance of this topic in the AHA, it is disappointing that Dr. Grossman and Professor Ruiz are blocking a paid advertisement for my book from appearing in AHA publications – thus working to prevent the historical context it contains from being part of this extremely important discussion.

The Irish Brigadista

Lily Murphy

In Ireland there is a place called Morley’s Bridge and it is located on the border between County Cork and Kerry. At this remote spot there is a plaque in memory of a local man.

The plaque reads:

In memory of Michael Lehane, a member of the International Spanish Brigade, who gave his young life at seas that the underprivileged of all nations would enjoy a happy and prosperous existence.

Michael Lehane from Morley’s Bridge died tragically too young but he had lived an action packed life dedicated to fighting fascism and promoting socialist ideals.

Michael Lehane was born on September 27^th 1908 and at the age of 19 he left Morley’s Bridge for the agricultural college in Clonakilty. Lehane had to drop out due to financial strains and he then went to Dublin where he found employment as a labourer.

During this time, an economic depression was sweeping the world while across Europe fascism was on the rise. In Dublin, Lehane became a member of the United Builders Labourers Trade Union. He was politically aware of what was brewing across Europe and what was happening in Spain where fascist army generals led a coup against the democratically elected republican government. Appalled by the actions of right wing rebels in Spain, Lehane joined the International Brigade in December 1936 to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

Lehane’s first taste of war came on Christmas Eve when he saw action on the Cordoba front where nine of his fellow Irishmen fell.

Lehane survived the bloodshed at Cordoba and a month later went on to fight in the Battle of Los Rozas de Madrid. Shortly afterwards he travelled back to Ireland.

Lehane picked up where he left off in Dublin and went back working on building sites around the city. In April 1937 a builders strike was called and all tools were downed. This gave Lehane the chance to re-volunteer for the International Brigade.

By willingly returning to take part in what was unfolding in Spain as an utterly vicious civil war, is testament to Lehane’s steadfast character. He was determined to fight the good fight and so he left to join up with the International Brigade once again.

Lehane made his route back to Spain by undertaking an arduous trek over the Pyrenees mountains in order to evade authorities. Lehane then took part in the Battle of Brunette which lasted throughout the sweltering month of July. During this battle, Lehane and his comrades found themselves under heavy fire from a machine gun that was manned from a church tower in the town. Lehane managed to rescue many of his injured comrades from a hail of bullets before being struck down himself.

Lehane recovered from his injuries and by the Spring of 1938 he was back in Dublin again and working as a labourer. The call to arms was too much for Lehane to resist and by July he was back in Spain fighting Franco’s Fascists.

On July 25^th the International Brigade crossed the Ebro River to advance on the town of Gandesa but a hill, known as Hill 481, stood in their way and it was heavily controlled by Franco’s troops.

The International Brigade suffered heavy losses against the might of Franco’s army on Hill 481 and Lehane was one of a number injured there.

By mid December Lehane and his comrades left Spain for the last time as the war was coming to a close and Franco was proclaiming victory.

Lehane arrived back in Dublin on December 21^st 1938 but his stay would not last long before he left in the new year to go live with his brother in Birmingham England.

Lehane’s political convictions did not wane while in England and authorities viewed this Irish man, who was involved with The Daily Workers newspaper, as nothing more than a subversive, so his brothers house became the scene of police raids during his few years lodging there.

When the war against fascism took on a whole new form in World War II, Lehane made the decision to continue his fight against it. He would not join the British army and wear the uniform of what he saw as an imperialist force so instead he enlisted in the Norwegian Merchant Navy.

Lehane was registered as a fireman aboard the Norwegian steamer ‘Brant County’ on October 2^nd 1941. In March 1943 he went down with the ship when it was attacked in the mid Atlantic by a Nazi submarine. Along with Lehane, 24 crew lost their lives.

Lehane was just 35 years old when he met his end but in his short life, the man from a wildly remote part of the Cork and Kerry border fought non stop against fascism, so that the underprivileged of all nations would enjoy a happy and prosperous existence.

India bans BBC documentary on 2012 Delhi gang rape

Wasantha Rupasinghe

In a blatant act of censorship, India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has banned India’s Daughter, a documentary about the notorious December 2012 gang rape of a Delhi physiotherapy student, Jyoti Singh, and the widespread protests it provoked.

Made for BBC’s “Storyville” series, the 58-minute-long documentary was to be released on March 8 by the BBC and India’s NDTV to coincide with International Women’s Day.

But, acting on a complaint made by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, the Delhi police obtained an order from the courts on March 3 barring media from broadcasting the film and publishing interviews contained in it.

The government also subsequently took steps to prevent India’s Daughterbeing disseminated on the Internet in India. On March 6, a senior government official boasted to the press that Google had bowed to a government order to remove India’s Daughter from its video sharing site You Tube. “As and when the police tell us of other sites who are carrying it,” added the official, “we are directing them to remove these.”

“We can ban the film in India,” BJP Minister Venkaiah Naidu told India’s parliament, “But this is an international conspiracy to defame India. We will see how the film can be stopped abroad.”

The BBC did show the documentary in the UK on March 4 and again on International Women’s Day. It has also been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and screened in the US, and several other countries including Switzerland and Norway. The documentary was gaining a global audience via You Tube, till BBC asked Google to remove it, citing copyright reasons.

Made by British-Israeli filmmaker Leslee Udwin, India’s Daughter is disturbing, but not sensationalist.

It sheds light, albeit only in a limited way, on the social reality behind the infamous “Delhi rape” in which six Delhi slum dwellers, most of them young adults, brutally raped a 23-year-old woman before throwing her and her male companion from a running bus. After a painful, days-long ordeal, Jyoti Singh succumbed to her injuries.

The documentary, which was shot in 2012 and 2013, includes interviews with Mukesh Singh, the driver of the private bus and ONE of Jyoti’s assailants, and TWO lawyers who participated in the legal defense of the six assailants.

The views of Jyoti Singh’s parents, who supported Udwin’s project to make a documentary about their daughter’s fate, as well as those of relatives of the assailants, doctors, and leaders of the protest movement that erupted in the aftermath of the Delhi rape are also PRESENTED.

In the documentary Mukesh Singh, who now languishes on India’s death row, seeks to excuse his actions by saying “a decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night” and claiming “a girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.”

Defense lawyers Manohar Lal Sharma and A.P. Singh also in effective justify the horrific attack on Jyoti Singh. A.P. Singh says that were his daughter or sister to engage in premarital sexual activities, “I would put petrol on her and set her alight.”

The police and the BJP government have cited these abhorrent comments to justify their banning of India’s Daughter. In their request for a court order to suppress the film, the police stated that it shows one of Jyoti Singh’s assailants making “offensive and derogatory remarks against women.” The police then go on to argue that if these remarks were broadcast it would create “an atmosphere of fear and tension with the possibility of public outcry and law and order situation” similar to that in December 2012.

This is a reference to the mass protests that erupted in Delhi in response to the gang rape of Jyoti Singh—protests to which the Indian authorities responded, as they invariably do when confronted with social unrest, with violence and repression.

The claim of India’s Hindu supremacist BJP government to be opposing the denigration of women by banning India’s Daughter is a transparent fraud.

Its real objection to the documentary is that it points to some of the harrowing social issues that surround the Delhi rape case and, in so doing, cuts across the government’s drive to whip up an aggressive “Hinduized” Indian nationalism, based on veneration of a mythologized Hindu tradition and culture, and to market India to foreign INVESTORS as an ideal place to do business.

The government’s swift action against India’s Daughter stands in marked contrast to its repeated failure to stem communal outrages against India’s Muslims, Christians and other minorities.

Moreover, it is part of a widening attack on the right to free speech in India, with governments at both the national and state levels conniving in the campaigns of the BJP, the RSS and other of its Hindu nationalist allies to censor and intimidate writers and artists.

In February last year, Penguin Books India withdrew a book titled The Hindus : An Alternative History by academic Wendy Doniger in the face of opposition and legal threats by Hindu supremacists. World-renowned Indian painter M.F. Hussain was forced to live in self-imposed exile in Doha from 2006 until his death in 2011 due to a series of legal and physical threats by Hindu extremists who charged that his paintings “hurt Hindu sentiments.” In January 2015 Tamil writer Perumal asked publishers to withdraw all his books and announced that he was giving up writing after Hindu supremacists, including the BJP and RSS, demanded his arrest and the banning of his latest book, Madhorubhagan .

India’s Daughter rejects the view that those who carried out the Delhi rape were aberrant monsters or psychopaths, pointing to some of the social circumstances out of which their crime arose.

It provides graphic evidence of the extreme deprivation in which all six of the assailants grew up at Ravidas Camp in R. K. Puram, a Delhi slum.

The home of the 17-year-old boy who participated in the rape is shown to resemble more an animal hut than a house. The boy’s mother, a farm laborer, sleeps in the same room as goats. She explains that their lives have been marked by hunger. Whenever it rains they have no work and hence no food. Her son left home at 11 and cleaned dishes in a HOTEL FOR 300-400 rupees (US $6 to $10) a month.

Mukesh Singh’s mother says, “We are by birth poor and helpless.” Mukesh himself says that “beating and violence” was “the story of every house” in the neighborhood.

Dr. Sandeep Gopal, a psychiatrist who treated some of the assailants, says: “They all actually came from very deprived conditions, where surroundings are not good…and they (lived in) overcrowding. And it is a very common scene that women have been tortured and beaten, or sexually abused by their male partners or husbands.”

Police arrested all six in the days immediately following the attack. With the exception of the juvenile, all were sentenced to death after expedited trials. Authorities claim that ONE of the five adult assailants, Ram Singh, took his own life in March 2013, but his family and lawyer contest that claim, arguing that he was killed.

Udwin says she was inspired to make India’s Daughter by the mass protests that erupted in response to Jyoti Singh’s rape and murder. She has likened the protests to the Arab Spring.

In fact, they were socially and politically very different phenomena. In Tunisia and then Egypt, the working class erupted onto the scene, defying police-military violence to sweep away decades-old US-backed dictatorships.

The Delhi anti-rape protests, which were echoed in other urban Indian centers, were, by contrast, overwhelmingly middle-class. They did express genuine widespread anger over patriarchal attitudes toward, and abuse of, women, but viewed them in isolation from the social reality of contemporary India—a society marked by immense and ever-growing social inequality, where the remnants of pre-capitalist forms of oppression, like the caste system, are intertwined with the horrors of 21st century capitalism, producing a toxic social environment in which an elite of fabulously wealthy businessmen, landowners and corrupt politicians presides over mass suffering and deprivation. This venal elite enjoys veritable impunity for daily crimes of omission and commission, while employing the state’s repressive apparatus—police, courts, etc.—to suppress and brutalize the masses.

Many of the anti-Delhi protesters, including prominent protest organizers, sided with the BJP, then in opposition, in promoting more repressive laws and bigger police budgets as the answer to rape.

It was within this climate that the Congress-led government carried out in Feb. 2013 only the second execution in India in nine years, hanging Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri Muslim who had been tortured and framed up for the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament. 

Udwin herself does not advocate a reactionary “law and order” agenda. Her sympathies lie rather with those anti-rape campaigners who stress education to overcome “socially-learned” behavior.

Given Udwin’s liberal feminist views it is not surprising that in the US and other western countries all sorts of reactionary figures, including the Clintons, have sprung to her defense, condemning the BJP government’s ban on India’s Daughter. These elements’ cynical posturing as defenders of free speech should in no way cause working people to lessen their opposition to the BJP government’s brazen act of censorship, tied as it is to the Indian elite’s widening attack on democratic rights and promotion of Hindu supremacism.

White House announces pro-corporate fracking rules

Philip Guelpa

The Obama administration announced new regulations Friday regarding the use of hydraulic fracturing, also known simply as “fracking,” to extract oil and natural gas from federal lands. In recent years, the use of fracking has grown at a rapid rate in various parts of the country. There is currently no up-to-date oversight of fracking at the federal level, and regulation of the industry at the state level has been weak to nonexistent.

If the practice of fracking continues to expand as it has, the U.S. will soon become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. However, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that this method has very serious negative consequences for human health and the environment, due to the toxic chemicals employed and the huge amount of contaminated waste water which requires disposal.

The oil and gas industry has fought hard to suppress this evidence and to prevent any government intervention that would impinge on its ability to maximize profits, whatever the consequences. For example, in 2005 the oil lobby obtained the so-called Halliburton loophole, which prevents the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating most fracking activity under the Safe Drinking Water Act. In another act of pro-corporate intimidation, a federal court in Pennsylvania recently ruled against a doctor who had sued to overturn the state’s gag order preventing physicians from sharing information about illnesses possibly caused by groundwater pollution emanating from fracking wells.

The move to create federal regulations by the Obama administration is entirely cosmetic, representing little or no improvement over existing, ineffective state regulations. Indeed, it represents a green light for the expansion of fracking on federal lands, where 100,000 wells have already been drilled, with approximately 3,400 new ones added each year. The proposed rules contain no restrictions regarding the placement of wells near historically or environmentally sensitive sites. Furthermore, they have not been reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for their possible impacts on the environment.

The rules, drafted by the Interior Department, which has jurisdiction over federal lands, were arrived at after a four-year process of consultation with the industry. Environmental groups have already denounced them as toothless and containing major concessions to the energy companies. Furthermore, the rules have no effect on private and state-owned land, where fracking is taking place on a massive scale. Only approximately 11 percent of fracking currently takes place on federal land.

Provisions of the regulations include examination of concrete barriers around wells, disclosure of the chemicals employed, but only after the process has been completed (i.e., after the damage has already been done), rules regarding the storage of hazardous chemicals at the well sites, and a review of the geology of the area being fracked. Variations on the rules are permitted to accommodate state regulations, which may be weaker.

Information regarding the chemicals employed in drilling will be recorded on an existing web site controlled by the industry. This site has previously been criticized for a lack of transparency. In addition, loop holes are included that would permit companies to withhold information on fracking chemicals as “trade secrets.”

Industry groups immediately announced their opposition to even these minimal regulations, complaining that they would raise their costs. The Interior Department estimates that the increase will add less than one quarter of one percent to the cost of production. A proposal has already been put forward by 27 Senate Republicans that would restrict jurisdiction over fracking to the states, thus eliminating Obama’s proposed regulations.

In addition to the tremendous wealth and political influence of the energy industry, there are powerful geostrategic interests driving the expansion of fracking, despite the current over-supply of oil on the world market and the consequent plummeting of prices.

It is widely reported that Saudi Arabia, currently the world’s largest producer of oil, has deliberately refused to decrease its production in the face of falling prices, as it has done in the past, in an attempt to drive higher-cost producers out of business, including those in the United States. Fracking is more expensive than conventional methods of extraction. Saudi Arabia, has among the lowest production costs in the world, allowing it to sustain a prolonged reduction in prices, even to ones below the current depressed levels.

Production of natural gas in the U.S. is also under pressure. It currently exceeds the ability of the existing infrastructure to bring it to market. Consequently, there is a determined push to construct major pipelines, including Constitution and Northeast Energy Direct (NED), to take fracked gas from the production areas in Pennsylvania to the northeastern states. In addition, a number of proposals have been made to develop facilities that would permit the export of liquefied natural gas, thus opening the world market to U.S. producers.

The drive to expand fracking in the U.S. is, in part, motivated by the ruling class’s goal of attaining “energy independence.” Elimination of reliance on foreign producers would give U.S. imperialism greater freedom of action in its quest for global domination.

Labor plays anti-Chinese race card in NSW election

Mike Head

Throughout the final week of the campaign for tomorrow’s New South Wales (NSW) state election, the Labor Party and the trade unions have sought to whip up xenophobic and racist opposition to the possible sale of the state’s electricity grid to a Chinese-government owned company.

Labor and union leaders, both federal and state, have claimed that China’s State Grid Corp could gain control of the high voltage transmission business Transgrid, which delivers power to NSW and Canberra, the national capital, if the state Liberal-National government wins the election and privatises the electricity network.

This scare campaign combines anti-Chinese chauvinism with fear-mongering about “national security.” Its purpose is to divert the hostility of workers to the corporate agenda of privatisation and austerity in a reactionary nationalist direction, and feed into the Washington-led drive to confront, and prepare for war against, China. It also serves to bolster Australia’s intelligence apparatus, with Labor leaders calling for the spy agencies to veto any sale to State Grid Corp.

The NSW government is seeking to sell off what remains of the formerly state-owned electricity industry to meet the demands of the financial markets for the slashing of government debt and social spending, and for lucrative new investment opportunities. Premier Mike Baird’s government is hoping to raise $20 billion by leasing 100 percent of Transgrid and 50.4 percent of the distribution networks Ausgrid and Endeavour Energy for 99 years.

Regardless of whether Australian or foreign conglomerates buy the businesses, thousands more public sector jobs will be destroyed and household electricity prices will continue to soar. The government has promised not to sell the rural-based Essential Energy network to try to win votes in country areas, where Essential Energy employs hundreds of people, and to claim that it is only leasing off “49 percent” of the overall grid.

Because of widespread popular antagonism toward the sale plan, Labor has cynically feigned opposition to it, hoping to use the issue to claw its way back into office four years after being ousted in a landslide after 16 years of servicing the needs of big business.

Labor’s posturing, however, has been discredited by the fact that the previous state Labor governments of premiers Bob Carr and Morris Iemma tried to privatise the entire network, a task that was partially achieved under the last Labor government of Premier Kristina Keneally. Moreover, the federal Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating launched the privatisation offensive nationally in the 1990s by selling off the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas as part of their wholesale free-market restructuring of the economy.

The turn to anti-Chinese witch-hunting was launched on Tuesday night in federal parliament by Senator Sam Dastyari, a former NSW Labor general secretary, who is a key figure in the party’s national machine. Dastyari alleged that Premier Baird and state Treasurer Andrew Constance had “secretly” met representatives from State Grid Corp in recent months to discuss the sale of Transgrid.

Dastyari sought to stoke alarm about the supposed prospect of the Chinese government seizing control of the power supply to the country’s capital and its security services. He demanded that the “national security agencies, namely ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation]” disclose their “security concerns” about the sale before Saturday’s election. “This is an electricity company supplying the whole of Canberra, including this place, and including all of the buildings that our federal departments and security agencies are housed in,” he said

Recently-installed state Labor leader Luke Foley, another graduate of the NSW party machine, went further the next day. He told journalists that the Chinese government could spy on Australian army and air force bases and federal parliament and cut power to them if the electricity network was sold to State Grid Corp.

“The [electricity] distribution network goes to Holsworthy Army base, to the Richmond RAAF base, to our defence installations,” he said. “Of course the security agencies will have some views on these matters … Transgrid sends power into Parliament House in Canberra ... And the thing about high voltage transmission lines is that you can transport data on high voltage lines.”

Asked by a journalist if his remarks played on “fears of Chinese expansion” in Australia, including in purchases of rural and urban property, Foley said: “I don’t want any foreign government, friend or foe, to buy our electricity network.” Foley would not elaborate on what he meant by “foe,” but the clear implication was that China was an enemy of Australia.

On Thursday, Foley backed anti-China radio advertisements run by the main building industry union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). The ads accuse the state government of “secretly” negotiating with Chinese officials and declare: “Selling the electricity network is wrong. Selling it to another country is just not on.”

Underscoring the anti-Chinese axis of the campaign, CFMEU national secretary Tony Maher insisted: “The public deserves to know before Saturday about whether or not there is a good chance of the grid corporation of China owning the poles and wires.”

In this foul campaign, there is no mention of the fact that State Grid Corp, China’s largest electricity supplier, employs about 1.5 million workers, who are also facing ongoing attacks on their jobs and conditions as the Chinese capitalist elite tries to compete with transnational corporations on a global scale.

Labor’s campaign has a significance that goes well beyond the state election. Labor and the unions are again reaching back into the political sewer of White Australia racism, on which the Labor Party was founded by the trade unions in the 1890s. It is of a piece with their escalating agitation against “foreign workers” being employed in Australia.

Then, as now, this jingoism serves to split workers in Australia from their Asian and other international brothers and sisters, and divert them from the common source of the assault on their jobs, conditions and basic democratic rights—the bankrupt and crisis-riddled capitalist profit system itself.

Labor and the unions are attempting to channel mounting discontent into the most divisive and poisonous channels. The reactionary campaign also dovetails with the increasing integration, by Labor and Liberal-National governments alike, of Australia’s military and intelligence operations into Washington’s “pivot” to Asia. The nationalist condemnations of China line up completely with the preparations being made by the US and its allies, behind the backs of the population, for war.

Merger between Heinz and Kraft likely to destroy thousands of jobs

Gabriel Black

H.J. Heinz and Kraft Foods announced Wednesday that they would merge to form the world’s fifth-largest food company. The $49 billion deal, which is aimed at vastly enriching predatory INVESTORS on the basis of mass layoffs and ruthless cost-cutting, belies claims of any genuine economic recovery underway in the global economy.

The merger is partly the result of declining sales and profit margins at Kraft Foods. The company was reportedly under pressure from its shareholders to transform the $18.2 billion corporation after its gross profit slipped by 17 percent in 2014. Seeing an opportunity, billionaire Warren Buffett and Brazilian INVESTMENT firm 3G Capital, co-owners of Heinz, swooped in to execute their “rigorous… Cost-Cutting Recipe,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal .

3G Capital’s so-called “zero-based budgeting” strategy has been imposed on Heinz, Burger King, Budweiser, and several other companies it has recently purchased. At Heinz, 6,650 jobs have been cut in the past few years—about half of the company’s workforce. At Burger King, the number of employees was reduced from 38,884 to 2,425 in the year 2013 as the company eliminated corporate positions and offloaded restaurants it owned to franchisees.

While no job cuts have been publicly announced, there is no doubt among industry analysts that thousands are coming. In a recent article entitled “Kraft-Heinz Synergy: How Many Job Cuts Equal $1.5B?” Bloomberg’s merger and acquisition analyst concluded that the majority of the projected SAVINGS from the merger would come from “a lot of job losses.”

Heinz currently has about 6,800 employees in North America and Kraft has 22,000. According to Business Insider, the “synergies” of the deal are likely to result in 5,000 people losing their jobs.

“Zero-based budgeting” does not stop at dramatic job elimination. According to the Wall Street Journal, ONE chicken processing company that adopted the system “scrutinized... how much soap employees used to wash their hands, and how much Gatorade hourly employees at one processing facility drank during breaks.”

Each year, managers are forced to justify every expenditure their division makes as absolutely necessary, as opposed to relying on previous budgets as a guideline. This has led some companies to challenge employees if they asked for simple things like flashlights or color copies for business purposes.Bloomberg Business, speaking about Burger King, could not help but describe the system as “creating an oppressive cheapness.”

The prospect that Kraft could apply the same regime of layoffs, closures and austerity elicited an ecstatic response from speculators on Wednesday. Kraft’s stock jumped 32 percent in early trading. The massive stock surge is a sign of the policies favored by Wall Street: job elimination, mergers, and austerity.

Though THE STOCK MARKET has boomed, fed by cheap cash from central banks, the real world economy has grown at an anemic rate in the past few years. Because companies have such difficulty finding new areas of production and expansion, they have oriented their efforts towards financial speculation, cost cutting, job elimination and mergers. The Kraft-Heinz merger is just the most recent expression of this trend towards monopoly and austerity.

Kraft and Heinz follow a whole host of massive mergers in last year, a record year for mergers and acquisitions. These included Comcast and Time Warner Cable ($69.8 billion), AT&T and DirecTV ($67.1 billion), Covidien and Medtronic ($46.8 billion), Holcim and Lafarge ($46.8 billion), Actavis and Forest Laboratories ($25.3 billion), Facebook and WhatsApp ($19.4 billion), General Electric and Alstrom ($17.2 billion), and Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline ($16 billion).

Many newspapers speculated Wednesday that several other food brands could be up NEXT for acquisition, including Campbell Soup, Kelloggs, and General Mills. These smaller companies, analysts warned, would not be able to compete if they did not also pursue these job elimination measures or merge into larger companies.

Asked by CNBC if Berkshire Hathaway was planning on BUYING more companies, CEO Warren Buffett said, “We look at everything, there is no finish line in 3G and Berkshire.” The Financial Times noted that “times are a-changing” as Buffett’s INVESTMENT strategy has shifted from growth to “acquisitions… job cuts and factory closures.”

While thousands of workers will have their families’ livelihoods put into dire jeopardy, Buffett is expected to pocket $2.2 billion personally by June 2016 as a result of the deal.

US armored convoy: A military provocation in Eastern Europe

Stefan Steinberg

US military forces are staging a deliberate provocation in Eastern Europe as part of NATO preparations for possible war with Russia.

Last Saturday a long convoy of US armored Stryker vehicles set off from Estonia on a 1,100-mile trip transversing Eastern Europe via Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. Additional groups of US soldiers left from bases in Lithuania and Poland. The three groups of troops are due to converge on the Rose military barracks in Vilseck, Germany on April 1.

US troops have been conducting months of exercises in the Baltic together with other East European forces as part of the NATO Atlantic Resolve manoeuvre. Normally US troops and hardware involved in exercises in Europe are shipped back to their bases by train. This time the troops are demonstrably travelling on main roads in order to assess military reaction times for a confrontation with Russia and accustom the populations of Eastern Europe to the presence of US soldiers and tanks on their streets.

In in an interview with Defense News and Army Times, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the commanding general of US Army Europe, linked the convoy named “Dragoon Ride” with military operations against Russia. “It’s helped us further develop our understanding of freedom of movement in Eastern Europe… This is what the US Army does, we can move a lot of capability a long distance,” Hodges said. “I’ve been watching the Russian exercises ... what I cared about is they can get 30,000 people and 1,000 tanks in a place really fast.”

Hodges described the US convoy as a “tremendous opportunity” to practice its capabilities. Along the way the US army is assessing the infrastructure of its Eastern European allies.

The convoy is one element of a massive build-up of US and NATO forces inside Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Last month Washington announced its so-called European Reassurance Initiative, which involves an increase in troop rotations and multilateral exercises, a build-up of military stocks of equipment in selected Eastern European countries and increased military aid to NATO and non-NATO allies.

Planned for transfer and installation in Europe by January 2016 are around 220 Abrams and Bradley tanks, and 18 Howitzers.

Hodges has proposed to NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove that the equipment be either stationed in Germany or distributed around the region in “clusters.” One such cluster would be shared across the Baltics, another by Poland and Hungary, a third by Romania and Bulgaria, and the last, Germany.

In addition, the current US Army Europe-led training mission, Operation Atlantic Resolve, is to be expanded at the end of April from Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, to Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia.

For the Georgian exercises, Hodges said, the US is mobilising Bradleys that will travel across the Black Sea and into Georgia.

The massive show of force in Eastern Europe coincides with increased US pressure for the direct arming of the Ukrainian army in its confrontation with Russia. On Monday, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted in favour of a resolution urging the administration in Washington to send weapons to Ukraine.

The Obama administration has already approved the dispatch of drones, Humvees and other military equipment to Kiev, plus US military personnel. Troops from the US 173rd Airborne Brigade are due to commence training three battalions of Ukrainian national guard troops to support front-line Ukrainian soldiers currently confronting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The battalions are due to undergo training in or near the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine. In the Western-led coup that ousted former president Viktor Yanukovych last year, Lviv was a stronghold for anti-Russian fascist militias.

The US is also sending counter-mortar radar to enable the Ukrainian artillery to detect Russian-backed forces. One military source praised the move, noting that the US could learn from Ukraine’s experience, “as US troops had not been shelled by Russian-made artillery since the Vietnam War.”

The US convoy through Eastern Europe has been welcomed by the adviser to the Polish defense minister, General Boguslaw Pacek, who declared that the convoy was a signal to “those in the East,” i.e., Russia, that NATO is strong and united.

On Monday, Canadian and Polish troops held joint exercises in Drawsko Pomorskie, in the northeast of Poland, and the country is stepping up its own defenses by mobilising around 12,000 reservists for military training. Poland, one of America’s closest allies in Europe, will also host major NATO and international exercises this year.

The political and military establishment in most Eastern European states have largely greeted the show of aggression by US forces. At the same time they have undertaken measures to repress any opposition. According to a statement aired on Czech TV, Czech civilians have been warned against throwing tomatoes and eggs at the US military convoy. Anyone disobeying the legislation is liable to imprisonment for up to 3 years.

French prosecutor says copilot deliberately crashed Germanwings flight

Stefan Steinberg

At a press conference yesterday in Marseille, the French public prosecutor charged with investigating Tuesday’s crash of a Germanwings Airbus A320 said that the German copilot, Andreas Lubitz, had deliberately flown the plane into a mountain in the Alps.

Based on the recordings from a cockpit voice recorder, prosecutor Brice Robin described the final horrific minutes inside the plane just prior to its collision with a mountain, killing all 150 passengers and crew.

According to Robin, the initial 20 minutes of the flight after its takeoff from Barcelona were normal, with friendly exchanges recorded between the pilot and his first officer. Then, after the pilot left the cockpit, presumably to go to the restroom, Lubitz put the plane into a steep dive and refused to allow the senior pilot back into the cockpit.

Transponder data indicates that Lubitz programmed the plane to descend from 38,000 feet to 96 feet, the lowest level. Audio recordings reportedly show that he was breathing normally throughout the period prior to the crash, though he did not say anything or respond to requests from air traffic controllers.

The evening before Robin’s statements, a source close to investigators working on the voice recorder told the New York Times, “The guy outside [the cockpit] is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer. And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer.” At the end, the source said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

Following the terror attacks of 9/11, the cockpits of all of the planes flown by major international carriers were reinforced and equipped with locking devices to prevent any non-crewmembers from entering the cabin.

Crewmembers have a special code with which they can gain access to the cockpit in the event of an emergency. However, the pilot and copilot also have a manual override, with which they can block all entry into the cabin. There is also a means to bypass this override, but it is unclear whether the pilot attempted to do so.

It appears that Lubitz prevented the pilot from regaining entry to the cockpit and then set the plane on its downward plunge. The Airbus A320 has fly-by-wire technology, meaning that the controls are largely computer-driven, but the drastic change of flight course by the Airbus was only possible by manual means, Robin said.

The French prosecutor accused the copilot of “wanting to destroy the plane.” At the same time, he said, there was no evidence of any terrorist motivation.

At a press conference in Germany at 14:30 Carsten Spohr, the CEO of Lufthansa, the parent airline of Germanwings, reiterated the statements made by the French prosecutor and also declared that there was no evidence of a terrorist motive for the copilot’s behavior. Spohr also gave a few details into the background of Lubitz.

The investigation is still ongoing, and more information will no doubt emerge in the coming days. Searchers are still trying to locate the memory card of the flight’s second black box that could throw additional light on the crash, and a thorough investigation of the flight’s voice recorder will still take some time.

Lubitz, aged 27, had been flying for Germanwings since September 2013 and had clocked up a total of 630 hours in the air. He had carried out normal training to be a pilot, although he broke off his training briefly 6 years ago. Some newspapers have speculated that he may have suffered from some form of “burnout” during this period.

According to acquaintances interviewed by the press, however, Lubitz appeared to be a stable man who was carrying a job he had long dreamed of doing.

At this point, there are few indications of what would have driven Lubitz to such a horrific act. However, presuming that the account indicated by the available evidence is correct, the act of homicidal suicide/murder can only be understood as the product of a pathological level of social alienation. Such actions do not occur in a healthy society.

US warplanes attack targets in center of Tikrit

Patrick Martin

US warplanes began air strikes on Islamic State positions in the center of Tikrit Wednesday night, the first involvement of US forces in the bloody fighting in that Iraqi city, the hometown of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Military sources said at least 180 targets were struck in one of the most ferocious bombardments since the US resumed military operations in Iraq last August. Local Iraqi officials said dozens of ISIS fighters were killed Wednesday night, a significant proportion of those who are now surrounded and staging a last-ditch defense in Tikrit.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi formally requested the US intervention Wednesday morning, overriding objections from other Iraqi officials, including the leaders of Shiite militia forces allied with Iran, who have borne the brunt of the ground fighting around Tikrit.

US President Barack Obama agreed to the request, and the air strikes began within hours. The speed of the response indicates that the Pentagon had been planning attacks on Tikrit for some time, since the Iraqi forces became bogged down there earlier this month.

The political preparation for the air strikes also began days earlier, with a steady drumbeat of US pressure on the Iraqi government to distance itself from Iran, which played the major role in organizing and leading the attack on Tikrit. A “senior Obama administration official” told the Washington Post that Iraq was the scene of a “struggle between the United States and Iran for strategic influence and lasting influence.”

Qassem Suleiman, head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s chief of operations in the Iraq-Syria region, left Tikrit Tuesday. This was the day when US air reconnaissance flights began over the city and one day before the beginning of actual air strikes.

Military operations against Tikrit, under control by ISIS for the past nine months, began March 1, when more than 25,000 troops, the vast majority of them Shiite militia fighters, converged on the city from the north, east and south.

In only ten days, the flanking columns had completely surrounded the city and captured all its suburbs, trapping what was believed to be a few hundred ISIS fighters dug in at Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace and a few other locations in the center of the city.

There, however, the offensive stalled, in the face of suicidal resistance and tens of thousands of mines and improvised explosive devices. Casualties among the Iraqi forces mounted, and there was open conflict between Shiite militia leaders and the Abadi government over whether to seek American air strikes to incinerate the last remnants of ISIS.

Jassem Atiya, vice president of the governing council of Salahuddin province, which includes Tikrit, said that Prime Minister Abadi had notified the Shiite militias in writing that he was approving the US air strikes despite their objections. Atiya told the Post that Abadi gave the order, “because the Tikrit battle needed to be completed so that security forces could move on to Anbar and Mosul,” the main centers of ISIS in Iraq.

US military spokesmen presented the air strikes as “direct support to Iraqi Security Forces conducting operations to expel ISIL from the city.” However, press accounts of the fighting gave the breakdown of the pro-Baghdad forces as 20,000 Shiite militiamen, 1,000 Sunni tribal fighters, and only 4,000 Iraqi Army troops.

Lt. Gen. James L. Terry, commander of US military operations against ISIS, said the attacks “will further enable Iraqi forces under Iraqi command to maneuver and defeat [ISIS] in the vicinity of Tikrit” and were coordinated with “renewed efforts on the ground.”

The US attacks on Wednesday night were followed by far more limited Iraqi air strikes during the day Thursday, in what was expected to be a series of alternating day-night raids. At least five Russian-built Iraqi Sukhoi-25 fighter-bombers carried out four strikes each on targets in Tikrit, according to Gen. Anwer Hamid, commander of the Iraqi Air Force.

Abadi went on national television Wednesday night to announce that the ground offensive in Tikrit would resume, saying the city’s “hour of salvation” had come. He did not mention the US air strikes, but thanked both the US and Iran indirectly, saying Iraq had “support from friendly countries and the international coalition.”

There is considerable evidence that US officials welcomed the transformation of the Tikrit offensive into a bloody morass, since a speedy victory would have redounded to the credit of Iran, which supplied weapons, intelligence and military advice to the Iraqi forces.

The Washington Post expressed this view openly, in an editorial March 22, headlined, “The militia menace in Iraq,” which described the stalemate in Tikrit as “half-bad news,” because it was a setback for Iran’s allies in Iraq. The editorial continued, “the checking of the Shiite militias in their attempt to overrun a Sunni territory might ultimately have some positive results.”