Stock markets continue to plunge amidst growing signs of economic crisis

Andre Damon

World stock markets continued to plunge on Thursday. The sell-off began in China, where trading was suspended for the second time in four days when stocks fell by more than seven percent in 30 minutes, resulting in the shortest trading day of the Chinese stock market.

Losses extended to Europe, where major indices fell between one and two percent. In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell by 392 points, or 2.3 percent. The S&P 500 fell by 2.37 percent, while the NASDAQ Composite Index fell by 3.03 percent.

Both the S&P 500 and the DJIA are off to their worst annual starts in history, with the DJIA down by 5.2 percent in the first four trading days of the year, and the S&P 500 down by 4.9 percent.

The NASDAQ has now officially entered a “correction,” defined as a decline of 10 percent or more from the recent peak, while the DJIA and S&P 500 are down by 9.8 percent and 8.8 percent, respectively.

The continued sell-off points to growing fears of a divergence between global stock market values, which have been rising for nearly six years, and the ongoing slowdown of the world economy.

Economic growth in 2015 is expected to have been the lowest of any year since 2009, and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde has hinted that 2016 could be even worse.

The fall in economic output has contributed to a steep drop in demand and prices for commodities. The price of Brent crude oil fell by another 2.1 percent Thursday, hitting $33.27 a barrel, down from nearly $65 in May and its lowest level since February 2004.

The global sell-off centered on fears of a further deterioration of China’s economy, amid concerns that the country’s slowing growth could lead to a significant destabilization of its exchange rate regime. The country’s annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of last year is expected to have been less than 7 percent, down from 14.2 percent in 2007.

China’s central bank reported Thursday morning that it would set the target value for the renminbi at 6.56 to the dollar, the lowest valuation in nearly six years. While Chinese monetary officials have allowed the country’s currency to depreciate in an attempt to boost exports, they have been forced to burn through foreign exchange reserves in an effort to defend the currency’s value and prevent it from falling even faster.

The country’s foreign exchange reserves fell by $108 billion last month, hitting $3.33 trillion, after a fall of $87 billion in November.

The New York Times reported that a “quarterly survey of 2,000 Chinese manufacturers and other industrial companies shows that almost none are currently investing in new equipment and factories.” The newspaper quotes Gan Jie, the director of the Center on Finance and Economic Growth at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, who said, “In the past four quarters, it’s only 2 to 3 percent that are making expansionary investments.”

The latest stock market falls follow the panicked sell-off in the Chinese market over last summer, which led the country’s benchmark index to fall by up to 45 percent from earlier highs. The Chinese government was able to halt the sell-off with massive injections of cash into the financial markets totaling some $234 billion, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.

Fears that the current sell-off in China could be the start of a much broader correction were intensified when billionaire investor George Soros drew a parallel between the current economic conjuncture and the 2008 financial crisis. Speaking at an economic forum in Sri Lanka, Soros pointed to the uncertainty related to China’s slowing economy and unstable currency regime.

“China has a major adjustment problem,” Soros said. “I would say it amounts to a crisis. When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.”

Whether or not the current market moves are the beginning of a significant unraveling remains to be seen. Most of the markets are still significantly higher than lows from last year. Regardless, there is a growing nervousness in the ruling class about the state of the world economy seven years after the 2008 crash, and the markets function as something of a barometer for this sentiment.

Among the concerns are not only the slowdown in China and the general stagnation of the world economy, but also the signs of a significant growth of opposition in the working class. The entire financial system is a house of cards, built on a foundation of free money from the central banks, and premised on the assumption that there will be an unending transfer of wealth from the international working class into corporate coffers and the speculators on Wall Street.

Survey finds a majority of Americans unable to pay for major unexpected expenses

Nick Barrickman

A new survey put out by the personal finance management site Bankrate.com on Wednesday found that more than half of Americans could not weather a sudden financial crisis without having to borrow money from friends and family or being forced to reduce the amount spent on other items such as dining out, paying cable or cell phone bills, or other basic features of a “middle class” lifestyle.

The survey, conducted last month among a pool of 1,000 Americans in conjunction with Princeton Survey Research Associates International, found that only 37 percent of those surveyed would be able to pay an emergency expense of $1,000, such as an emergency room visit or the cost of repairing a broken down vehicle, out of pocket.

Sixty-three percent of those surveyed would not be able to cover such a sudden expense without either cutting down on expenses elsewhere, borrowing or resorting to credit. The survey found that nearly four in 10 Americans had suffered such a financial setback in 2015.

“Without an adequate rainy-day fund, we are all living on a very slippery financial slope,” Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling told Bankrate.com. “The unexpected, unplanned expense is going to rear its ugly head and usually at the most inopportune time…Things as small as a flat tire or one trip to the emergency room can wreck the budgets of those who do not have an adequate amount in their savings account,” she said.

For Americans making less than $30,000 per year, only 23 percent would be able to cover such a sudden expense on their own. This was contrasted by nearly 60 percent of those making over $75,000 annually who could say the same. Nine percent making $30,000 or below stated that they did not know how they would cover such expenses, meaning that they were one expensive setback away from personal financial ruin.

The poll comes amid a slew of other reports detailing an immense drop in the living standards of a significant section of the US population, a component of the growth of social inequality more broadly.

Since the 2008 financial collapse and the subsequent economic “recovery” in 2009, 95 percent of all wealth gains have gone to the top 1 percent in society. A report released in November by the St. Louis Federal Reserve showed that Americans’ personal savings in 2015 were half of what the average was in the early 1980s.

A US Federal Reserve report released in 2014 found that nearly six in 10 Americans had lost all or part of their savings due to the financial impact of the 2008 economic crisis, while a 2015 study by GOBankingrates.com revealed that the majority of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings to their name. A report released the Pew Research firm last month revealed that the number of middle-income homes as a portion of the population had largely vanished in the span of a few decades.

The figures come as the US Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates for banks and other financial institutions, which will likely lead to further difficulty for individuals who rely upon credit in order to finance their costs of living.

The expenses eating away at the typical individual’s savings read like essential items for living in modern society. According to Bankrate.com, the largest expense for one-third of all Americans outside of food and shelter consisted of utilities such as water, electricity or phone service. For those over the age of 50, one in five cited medical bills as their largest concerns outside of food and shelter.

US jobs report: Employment numbers obscure deeper social crisis

Tom Hall

Friday’s job figures for December from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was an occasion for praise by business commentators and self-congratulatory statements by Obama administration officials. The economy unexpectedly added 292,000 jobs last month, considerably above analysts’ projections of 211,000 according to a poll of economists by CNNMoney. The official unemployment rate remained at 5.0 percent.

Jason Furman, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, bragged that the report “[marked] the strongest two years of job creation since 1998-2000.” Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez declared in a written statement that “the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record continues… the worst economic crisis in generations is behind us. Despite unprecedented obstruction from Republicans in Congress, the nation is enjoying an historic recovery.”

Notwithstanding its decent headline payroll figure, the report, upon closer examination, reveals a continuation of economic stagnation and low wage growth that are wreaking havoc with tens of millions of American workers, for whom there has been no “recovery” from the 2008 financial crisis. Even on the jobs front, overall payroll growth for 2015 declined roughly 13 percent relative to 2014, from 3.1 million added jobs to 2.7 million.

This stagnation is borne out by the breakdown of employment figures in the report. The service industry, a traditionally low-wage sector, was the biggest driver of last month’s growth, with 231,000 additional jobs. In the professional and business services subcategory, which showed the biggest growth in the service sector, nearly half of the new jobs, 34,000 out of 73,000, were part-time.

Mining and manufacturing jobs continue to stagnate or decline, driven by a deepening slump in demand and fall in commodity prices. While manufacturing showed a modest increase of 8,000 jobs, employment in the durable goods subcategory, which includes heavy machinery and computer products, declined by 6,000 over the month. The mining and logging sector continued its long decline, shedding 8,000 jobs for a total of 129,000 over the entire year.

“Involuntary part-time workers,” or people working part-time because they are unable to find full-time work, remained unchanged at 6 million people. While this represents a decline of 764,000 over the course of 2015, it is still nearly 50 percent higher than 10 years ago.

The low-wage, casualized labor market, the result of a systematic restructuring of the American economy to place the burden of the financial crisis on working people, continues unabated.

Erik Holm, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’ s MoneyBeat blog, noted in a post that for non-management employees, overall year-on-year wage growth was a meager 2 percent, before factoring in inflation. “So for the vast majority of Americans,” Holm wrote, “there’s virtually no appreciable or noticeable wage growth.” He continued: “That shows two things clearly: employers still by and large do not have to pay up to find workers--even with an ostensibly ‘full employment’ landscape--and the big picture for employees still by and large has not changed.”

“That is not the picture of a robust, healthy, growing economy,” Holm concluded. “The headline numbers may look like ‘jobs market full speed ahead,’ but the reality of the wage numbers shows where things actually stand.”

Average hourly earnings actually fell one cent in December.

The 5 percent official unemployment rate, while formally considered close to full unemployment, is widely acknowledged to significantly undercount the real state of joblessness, with the head of the Gallup polling agency going so far as to call it a “Big Lie.” The fall in unemployment numbers is largely driven by a collapsing labor force participation rate, as millions of people, discouraged by the weak job market, have given up looking for work altogether. While this figure rose in December 0.1 percentage points to 62.6 percent, it remains near the lowest levels in almost 40 years.

Because they are not counted as part of the labor force, people discouraged from looking for work are not considered in the official unemployment figures. The Economic Policy Institute, which analyzes the government’s monthly employment figures, estimates that there were 2.9 million such “missing workers” in December 2015. The official unemployment rate would rise to 6.7 percent if these workers were counted as part of the labor force, the think tank noted.

An alternative measure of unemployment tabulated by the BLS, which includes marginally attached workers and involuntary part-time workers, and which is informally dubbed the “real unemployment rate” in the press, stayed constant last month at 9.9 percent, nearly twice the official level.

The end of 2015 and the first week of 2016 saw several high-profile announcements of layoffs by American corporations. Only days after the Christmas holiday, chemical giant DuPont announced it would lay off 1,700 of its 6,100 workers in the state of Delaware, where the company is based. The layoffs are part of a plan to trim the company’s global workforce by 10 percent in advance of an announced $130 billion merger with Dow Chemicals.

The Macy’s department store chain announced plans on Wednesday to slash 4,800 jobs and close 40 US stores in the aftermath of a dismal holiday season for the retail giant. A story by Business Insider, also released on Wednesday, reported that Yahoo plans to lay off 1,000 workers, or 10 percent of its workforce, beginning as early as this month.

Overall figures on the American economy continue to sour amid growing signs of a new global financial downturn. On Monday, JP Morgan Chase halved its forecast for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2015 from 2 percent to 1 percent, citing weak manufacturing and construction figures.

Global markets continue to fall

Nick Beams

Global stock markets have experienced their worst opening week in a new year in two decades as concerns over the Chinese economy, the value of the renminbi and the policies of Chinese financial authorities sent out a series of shock waves. More than $2.3 trillion was wiped off the value of global stocks for the week.

Markets in the US had their worst opening week ever. Shares closed down about 1 percent on Friday, after falls in Japan and Europe, with the German Dax index posting its biggest loss since 2011.

The Dow lost 6.19 percent in value for the week, and the S&P 500 was down by almost 6 percent, with falls across all ten sectors of the index. The high-tech-based Nasdaq composite index fell by more than 7 percent.

The continued decline came despite a stronger-than-expected jobs report in the US, which indicated that an additional 292,000 jobs were created last month. There was also an upturn in the Chinese market, after trading was suspended for two days last week when falls in share prices exceeded 7 percent, triggering circuit-breaker mechanisms.

Following criticisms that these mechanisms were contributing to, rather than alleviating, market instability, financial authorities lifted them on Friday, leading to the uptick in share prices. In another move aimed at stabilising the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, the foreign exchange regulator issued guidelines to banks limiting the purchase of US dollars by corporations and individuals.

The renminbi was down 0.8 percent for the week, its biggest decline since the People’s Bank of China made a surprise move last August to reduce its value. In a sign of the extent of capital outflow, China’s foreign currency reserves fell by $108 billion in December.

Summing up the events of the week, the Financial Times commented that if any lesson was to be learned from the past six months it was that any bump in the Chinese economy could not be ignored by the rest of the world. “The question is whether the rest of the world feels a gentle ripple or a tidal wave.”

The article noted that the fall in China’s growth rate from more than 10 percent in 2010 to the estimate of just 6.3 percent for this year could be expected, on the basis of China’s weight in global gross domestic product, to reduce world growth by about 0.75 percentage points.

According to International Monetary Fund chief economist Maurice Obstfeld, however, the effects are much greater than is indicated by a direct consideration the 18 percent of the global economy that China comprises. “The global spillovers from China’s reduced rate of growth … have been much larger than we would have anticipated,” he said.

This is because China is at the head of a series of integrated supply chains that involve the countries of South East Asia, Japan and Korea.

An indication of the impact of falling growth is seen in the decline in Chinese imports. They fell by 15 percent in the first 11 months of last year, with purchases from all its major trading partners, except Vietnam and Canada, in decline.

Furthermore, there are increasing concerns that the real level of Chinese growth is considerably less than official figures, with some estimates putting it closer to 4 percent.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday pointed to the gloom that has descended in one of China’s most important industrial areas.

“Executives at businesses in the manufacturing heartland of south-eastern and eastern China, which churn out everything from electronic gadgets from textiles to furniture, talk of slack orders and late payments,” it reported. “China’s traditional heavy industrial engines of steel, cement and glass remain saddled with excess capacity built up in the boom years.” According to one executive cited in the article “no numbers point to a rosy picture.”

While there is no question that slowing Chinese growth rates, fears of a fall in the renminbi, doubts over reliability of government statistics and the destabilising effects of the seemingly ad hoc decisions of Chinese authorities are having their impact, more is involved than simply the state of the Chinese economy.

Financial Times columnist John Authers noted that “Chinese markets are shaking the world,” but, as in the past, “this says more about the frayed nerves in the rest of the world than it does about China.”

Authers pointed to the “greatest fear prevailing in the west: deflation” which impacts on the ability of companies to maintain, let alone increase, their profits. With central banks desperately trying to escape this situation “anything that threatens to intensify the problem is very serious.”

According to Authers, the “stark reaction to this week’s Chinese events reveals a deep lack of confidence in the health of the western corporate sector.”

He drew a parallel with events in February 2007, when a 9 percent fall in the Shanghai index triggered a major fall on Wall Street which, amid growing concerns about the state of the subprime mortgage market, signified the end of the “Great Moderation” when market volatility had remained relatively low.

Multi-billionaire investor George Soros also drew comparisons between the present situation and the events that led to the global financial crisis. In a speech delivered in Sri Lanka this week, he said there was a “serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.”

It is not clear where the present course of events will lead. However, the rise in corporate debt in the US, where the trillions of dollar pumped into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have been used to finance a speculative bubble in stocks, as well as in emerging markets, where corporate debt has increased rapidly over the past four years, have created the conditions for another major financial crisis.

US, China tensions sharpen after North Korean nuclear test

Peter Symonds

In the wake of North Korea’s nuclear test this week, China yesterday rejected comments by US Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting that Beijing had failed to rein in its ally, Pyongyang, and should take tougher measures to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

After speaking to his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Thursday, Kerry told the media that China’s “particular approach” to North Korea had “not worked” and warned that “we cannot continue business as usual.” The United States and South Korea are reportedly holding top-level discussions on stationing “strategic weapons”—that is, nuclear bombs and associated delivery systems—on the Korean Peninsula.

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded, saying: “China is not the cause and crux of the Korean nuclear issue, nor is it the key to resolving the problem.” She declared “all other parties should keep a cool head, stay on the path toward a peaceful solution, and avoid taking actions that sharpen disputes and raise tensions.”

Hua reiterated China’s call for the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and a return to stalled six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia. An international agreement on North Korea’s nuclear programs broke down in 2008 after the Bush administration unilaterally and provocatively demanded a tougher inspection regime. Obama has stymied any resumption of talks by insisting that North Korea accede to US demands in advance.

Hua’s reference to denuclearisation is implicitly directed against the US stationing nuclear weapons in South Korea. Following North Korea’s previous nuclear test in 2013, the Pentagon flew nuclear capable B-2 and B-52 bombers to South Korea during joint military exercises. Standard US military protocol neither confirms nor denies that warships and strategic bombers are carrying nuclear weapons.

A commentary in China’s hawkish, state-run Global Times cited academic Lu Chao, who warned that “the US was overreacting as military deployment would only aggravate tensions in the region and the situation may spiral out of control.” He nevertheless declared that the deployment of military assets was “possible as the US will not dismiss the chance to expand its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, neither will its ally Japan.”

The US threat to base nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula is not aimed primarily at North Korea and its rudimentary nuclear arsenal. Rather Washington is engaged in a military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region as part of its “pivot to Asia” directed against China and seeking to ensure continued American hegemony. The stationing of nuclear capable bombers and ships in South Korea, directly adjacent to the Chinese mainland, would represent a major escalation and fuel tensions with Beijing.

China is caught in a bind. It has been pressuring its ally North Korea to wind back its nuclear programs, including by agreeing to new UN sanctions in 2013. At the same time, drastic economic sanctions could precipitate the collapse of the unstable regime in Pyongyang and open up the possibility of a US-aligned state on China’s northern borders. North Korea depends heavily on trade with China, as well as Chinese aid.

The threatened US military build-up in South Korea underscores the reckless and reactionary character of North Korea’s decision to detonate another nuclear weapon. The Stalinist leadership’s response to the deepening social and economic crisis at home is to ramp up its nationalist and militaristic rhetoric, which serves only to divide workers in North Korea from those in South Korea, Japan and internationally.

Pyongyang’s prime motivation is to exploit its nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip in refashioning relations with imperialism. No peace treaty was ever reached with the US or South Korea in 1953 to end the Korean War and since then the country has been subject to an economic blockade by the US and its allies.

The North Korean regime is desperate to open up the country as a cheap labour platform for foreign investors and is expanding its network of free trade zones throughout the country. However, without an end to the decades-long confrontation with the US and North Korea’s integration into the global capitalist market, foreign investment in the country has remained a tiny trickle.

Reuters reported yesterday that North Korea had sent a message to China declaring that it was seeking a peace treaty with the US, China and South Korea, and warning that it would not stop its nuclear testing until it had one. “North Korea will do it to the end until China and the United States want to sign a peace treaty,” a high-level North Korean source told the news agency.

The source said he had relayed the message to Beijing immediately after the nuclear test, urging China to support the push for a treaty. China had not been informed of the test in advance. Referring to the US demand that North Korea give up its nuclear programs prior to any negotiations, he urged Beijing “not to follow the United States.”

Washington has a long history of reaching deals with the North Korea over its nuclear programs and not keeping its promises. Under the 1994 Agreed Framework reached with the Clinton administration, North Korea froze its nuclear activity and shut down its only reactor at Yongbyon in exchange for supplies of fuel oil and the construction of two light water reactors (LWR). By the time Clinton’s term ended in 2000, virtually no progress had been made on the LWRs.

On taking office, President George Bush ordered a lengthy review of US policy toward North Korea, effectively sabotaged the Agreed Framework and ratcheted up the confrontation with Pyongyang. In 2002, he branded North Korea as part of an “axis of evil,” along with Iran and Iraq. Bush only agreed to China’s proposal for six-party talks under conditions where the US occupation forces in Iraq were hard-pressed, then scuttled the resulting agreement in 2008.

US imperialism has repeatedly used North Korea as a convenient pretext to justify its large military presence in North East Asia and to put pressure on China. President Obama, who has deliberately inflamed flashpoints throughout the Asia-Pacific as part of his “pivot to Asia,” is not about to make any concessions over North Korea and will undoubtedly exploit its nuclear test to accelerate Washington’s war drive against China.

Obama seeks Silicon Valley aid to spy on social media

Thomas Gaist

White House officials met with Silicon Valley executives Friday to discuss the US government’s expanding efforts to monitor and intervene in online social media and other forms of internet communication.

The meeting, held in San Jose, California, featured high-level figures from Silicon Valley, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, and a government delegation led by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA Director Michael Rogers and FBI Director James Comey.

According to an official statement issued by the White House, the purpose of the meetings was to “work together to combat terrorism and counter violent extremism online.”

During the tech summit, the White House delegation circulated proposals calling for tech firms to develop tools to “measure radicalization” levels among different populations, and to enable more effective dissemination of government-produced anti-terrorist media, documents acquired and published by The Intercept on Friday show.

Also on Friday, with the closed-door discussions still in progress, the White House announced new programs against “violent extremism” in the United States, including the establishment of a new Countering Violent Extremism task force, to be formed jointly by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

The new CVE task force, based out of DHS facilities, will seek to “integrate and harmonize” the operations of “dozens of federal and local agencies,” according to unnamed US officials cited by the Washington Post. The newly formed DHS-led task force will “coordinate all of the government’s domestic counter-radicalization efforts,” according to the US officials who spoke to the Post.

The State Department will also create a new Global Engagement Center to coordinate US government social media work internationally, a White House statement said.

Friday’s high-profile Silicon Valley summit and the announcement of the new counterterror programs have confirmed that the Obama administration will make use of its final year in power to further entrench and expand the surveillance apparatus.

The Obama administration aims to spend 2016 “overhauling its propaganda war against the Islamic State,” the Washington Post reported Thursday, in an article based on leaks from unnamed, high-level US government sources.

New spy programs launched by the administration will seek to collect and analyze data from social media networks and develop covert operations that allow the government to use the networks for its own counter-radicalization schemes, the US officials said.

The Obama White House has already overseen the development of a raft of police-state measures in the name of fighting “violent extremism,” hosting two major international conferences last year as part of efforts to coordinate surveillance projects among the various imperialist powers.

As early as 2012, the US government began seeking private contractors to conduct surveillance and analysis of social media data on behalf of the agency, through which the bureau could “develop pattern of life matrices” to enable law enforcement agencies to automatically identify likely “radicals.”

Recent months have seen growing clamor by the American state against encryption technology, as FBI Director James Comey has staged numerous public appearances to demand that the US government be given unlimited “back door” access to all encryption systems used by US communications firms.

The US political and media establishments have sought to justify this agenda by lamenting the limitations of previous social media surveillance efforts, endlessly repeating claims—without any factual basis—that the attacks in San Bernardino and elsewhere could have been stopped through preemptive screening of social media profiles for signs of extremism.

A growing stream of reports from elite universities and US government agencies warn—again without any evidence—that the Internet is enabling mass conversions of US residents into violent terrorists. Media reports this week highlighted one recent contribution, ludicrously titled “ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa,” published in December 2015 by George Washington University’s “Program on Extremism.”

In the period since the exposure by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of massive US government spying on the Internet, many Silicon Valley firms have sought to pose as defenders of privacy against government overreach, although they have cooperated extensively with the government’s surveillance operations for years.

The communications firms are mainly concerned to protect the illusion of independence from the government, rather than to actually protect the privacy of their users, as comments by an unnamed Silicon Valley official reported by the Washington Post on Friday made clear. “Being seen as having the US government force our hands makes others around the world lose confidence in us,” an unnamed Silicon Valley official told the newspaper.

Friday’s meeting, with its lineup of virtually every top US official overseeing counterterrorism and surveillance, demonstrates that the US ruling elite is seeking nothing less than to subject the entire world communications system to unlimited scrutiny by US security and intelligence agencies.

Whether or not the leading tech companies will sign on to the specific initiatives being put forward by the White House Friday remains unclear. Nonetheless, as revelations from Snowden have conclusively shown, all the major communications providers have collaborated to varying degrees with the illegal mass spying operations erected by the US government since 9/11.

The events of the past decade-and-a-half have made clear that the entire corporate and political establishment favors an agenda of police-state spying on the American population.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, AT&T allowed the CIA and NSA continuous direct access to the company’s servers via special rooms installed inside the corporation’s headquarters.

The NSA has enjoyed virtually unfettered access to the servers of major Internet and telephone providers for years as part of secret deals negotiated in connection with the agency’s PRISM program. Since 2007, the US government has successfully recruited Microsoft, Google, Facebook, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple as participants in PRISM, giving the NSA complete access to all live communications hosted on the corporate servers, including email, video and voice calls, chats and file exchanges, along with unlimited access to their data archives.

Terrified by the Snowden exposures, the US government has increasingly turned these methods on its own employees, who are now among the most heavily surveilled groups on the planet. As part of the Pentagon-led “Insider Threat Program,” at least 100,000 US government employees have been targeted by highly intrusive electronic surveillance, a 2015 Congressional report secured in December by a Freedom of Information Act request revealed.

The lottery and social despair in America

Andre Damon

This mania, so generally condemned, has never been properly studied. No one has realized that it is the opium of the poor. Did not the lottery, the mightiest fairy in the world, work up magical hopes? The roll of the roulette wheel that made the gamblers glimpse masses of gold and delights did not last longer than a lightning flash; whereas the lottery spread the magnificent blaze of lightning over five whole days. Where is the social force today that, for forty sous, can make you happy for five days and bestow on you—at least in fancy—all the delights that civilization holds?

Balzac, La Rabouilleuse, 1842

The jackpot in the US Powerball lottery has hit $800 million, since there were no winners in Wednesday’s drawing. In the current round, which began on December 2, over 431 million tickets have been sold, a figure substantially larger than America’s population.

Go into any corner store in America and you will see workers of every age and race waiting in line to buy lottery tickets. With the current round, the lines are longer than ever. Americans spend over $70 billion on lottery tickets each year. In West Virginia, America’s second-poorest state, the average person spent $658.46 on lottery tickets last year.

Powerball players pick six random numbers when they purchase their tickets, with a certain percentage of sales going to the jackpot. If no winning ticket is sold, the jackpot rolls over to the next round.

The totals for the Mega Millions and Powerball national lotteries have been growing every year. This year’s jackpot has eclipsed 2012’s record of $656.5 million, the $390 million payout in 2007 and the $363 million prize in 2000. The jackpots have grown in direct proportion to ticket sales.

State-run gambling programs such as Powerball have been promoted by Democrats and Republicans alike as a solution to state budget shortfalls, even as the politicians slash taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals and gut social programs. From the standpoint of government revenue, lotteries and casinos are nothing more than a back-door regressive tax, soaking up money from the poor in proportion to the growth of social misery.

The boom in lotteries is global. Lottery sales grew 9.9 percent worldwide in 2014, after growing 4.9 percent in 2013.

Psychology Professor Kate Sweeny has noted that lottery sales grow when people feel a lack of control over their lives, particularly over their economic condition. “That feeling of self-control is very important to psychological well-being,” Sweeny says.

There is ample reason for American workers to feel they have no control over their lives. According a recent survey by Bankrate.com, more than half of Americans do not have enough cash to cover an unexpected expense of $500 or more—roughly the price of four name-brand tires.

Some 62 percent of Americans have savings of less than $1,000, and 21 percent do not have any savings at all. Most Americans are one medical emergency or one spell of unemployment from financial ruin.

For all the talk about “economic recovery” by the White House, the real financial state of most American households is far worse than before the 2008 financial crisis and recession. As of 2013, Americans were almost 40 percent poorer than they were in 2007, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. While a large portion of the decline in household wealth is attributable to the collapse of the housing bubble, falling wages and chronic mass unemployment have played major roles.

The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest survey of consumer finances. A large share of this decline has taken place during the so-called recovery presided over by the Obama administration.

In addition to becoming poorer, America has become much more economically polarized. According to a separate Pew survey, for the first time in more than four decades “middle-income households” no longer constitute the majority of American society. Instead, the majority of households are either low- or high-income. Pew called its findings “a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point” in American society.

“Is the lottery the new American dream?” asked USA Today, commenting on this month’s Powerball jackpot. The observation is truer than the authors intended. For American workers, achieving the “American Dream” of a stable job and one’s own home is becoming increasingly unrealizable.

Following more than 10 million foreclosures during the financial crisis, America’s home ownership rate has hit the lowest level in two decades, and for young households, the rate of home ownership is the lowest it has been since the 1960s.

For the tens of millions of America’s poor, and the more than 100 million on the threshold of poverty, the dream of winning the lottery has replaced the “American Dream” of living a decent life. A lottery ticket is a chance to escape to a fantasy world where money is not a constant, nagging worry, where one is not insulted and bullied at a low-wage job by bosses whose pay is matched only by their incompetence. The lottery is, as Balzac aptly described it, the “opium of the poor.”

Using the same phrase to describe religion, Marx noted that the “illusory happiness of the people” provided by the solace of religion is, in fact, a silent protest and distorted “demand for their real happiness.” It is the intolerable social conditions that compel masses of people to seek consolation in a lottery ticket that will propel them into revolutionary struggles.

Endless Racism In The Iranian Model Of The Nation-State

Ali Badri

The world has lived under the shadow of discrimination for a long time before the liberation movements appeared to realize the demands of equality for the oppressed peoples. What happened during the racist massacres remains a disgraceful stain on the face of humanitarianism. Many of nations have freed themselves from this ghost, but still some of them are living under racist murderers.

The most prominent nations that face racism in all aspects of their lives are non-Persian people in the political geography of Iran. The Islamic Republic is one of the countries that is seeking to impose its own version of nation-state on all the ethnic groups that live within its borders by force. A nation-state is a state whose primary loyalty is to a cultural self-identity, which we call a nation or nationality, and is now the predominant form of state organization. (The Nation State by Anthony C. Pick).

On this basis, Iran established the political system based on the exclusion of other peoples for sake of the people of Fars background after Reza shah took power in Iran with support of England. Reza Shah took over the non-Persian people's states and the founded a nation-state based on the idea of the so-called Aryan race in Iran.

The racism and oppression in Iran must be viewed through the lens of the nation-state and ideas of its theoreticians and founders, and also must be evaluated by looking at how the new Iranian state had been established. The modern state was founded in Iran on the basis of theories by senior Aryan racists ideologues including like Kermani and Kasravi, and all the constants were on the basis of the melting of the other ethnic groups into one “Persian” nation.

Five large ethnic groups live in Iran under the discriminatory policy and denial of all their basic rights of the Persian state, which uses occupation to suppress their rights and voices. Arab (Ahwaz territory), Kurds (Kurdistan territory), Baluch (Baluchistan territory), Turks (Azerbaijan territory), Turkmen (Turkmen Sahra territory) are living under the conditions mentioned above. This article could not cover f all the rights which are restricted or taken away from these peoples. From the right of choosing ethnic names for their children to the right of learning in the mother tongue, Iran did not only deprive these peoples of their rights but also has taken steps to make the populations Fars-centric. The most important racist steps which are taken by Iran to change the demographic ratio in non-Persian regions are as follows:

1. Building settlements in the depth of the non-Persian regions to resettle migrants from the rest of the peoples.
2. Preventing indigenous population from employment in order to force them to emigrate into Persian areas.
3. Sabotaging environment.
4. Drying rivers.
5. Depriving peoples from practice of their religious and nationalist rights.
6. Arrests and executions of political and social activists in the non-Persian areas.
7. Spreading and facilitatingdrug abuse in the non-Persian areas.

The goal of each of these acts is the melting of non-Persian peoples into Aryan/Fars culture in order to build a single Persian nation-state. The worst of the racist attempts are taking place in Iran with the silent acquiescence of the rest of the world. Iran is teaching its children hatred and malice towards non-Persians people and we can see this racism in school curricula and books and government media. Eradication of racism in Iran cannot be done by demands or even statements of condemnation or even changing the government but by drying of roots of the current model of nation-state in Iran.

Pharming

John Avery

A major global public health crisis may soon be produced by the wholesale use of antibiotics in the food of healthy farm animals. The resistance factors produced by shoveling antibiotics into animal food produces resistance factors (plasmids) which can easily be transferred to human pathogens. A related problem is the excessive use of pesticides and artificial fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers in agriculture. Pharming is not a joke. It is a serious threat.

http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/06/misuse-antibiotics-fatal-superbug-crisis/

http://ecowatch.com/2013/12/06/8-scary-facts-about-antibiotic-resistance/

http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/27/obama-fight-superbug-crisis/

http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/12/fda-regulation-antibiotics-factory-farms/

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35153795

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-21702647

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34857015

http://sustainableagriculture.net/about-us/

https://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/

Plasmids

Bacteria belong to a class of organisms (prokaryotes) whose cells do not have a nucleus. Instead, the DNA of the bacterial chromosome is arranged in a large loop. In the early 1950's, Joshua Lederberg had discovered that bacteria can exchange genetic information. He found that a frequently-exchanged gene, the F-factor (which conferred fertility), was not linked to other bacterial genes; and he deduced that the DNA of the F-factor was not physically a part of the main bacterial chromosome. In 1952, Lederberg coined the word ``plasmid" to denote any extrachromosomal genetic system.

In 1959, it was discovered in Japan that genes for resistance to antibiotics can be exchanged between bacteria; and the name “R-factors”was given to these genes. Like the F-factors, the R-factors did not seem to be part of the main loop of bacterial DNA.

Because of the medical implications of this discovery, much attention was focused on the R-factors. It was found that they were plasmids, small loops of DNA existing inside the bacterial cell, but not attached to the bacterial chromosome. Further study showed that, in general, between one percent and three percent of bacterial genetic information is carried by plasmids, which can be exchanged freely even between different species of bacteria.

In the words of the microbiologist, Richard Novick, “Appreciation of the role of plasmids has produced a rather dramatic shift in biologists' thinking about genetics. The traditional view was that the genetic makeup of a species was about the same from one cell to another, and was constant over long periods of time. Now a significant proportion of genetic traits are known to be variable (present in some individual cells or strains, absent in others), labile (subject to frequent loss or gain) and mobile, all because those traits are associated with plasmids or other atypical genetic systems.”

Pesticides, artificial fertilizers and topsoil

A very serious problem with Green Revolution plant varieties is that they require heavy inputs of pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation. Because of this, the use of high-yield varieties contributes to social inequality, since only rich farmers can afford the necessary inputs. Monocultures, such as the Green Revolution varieties may also prove to be vulnerable to future plant diseases, such as the epidemic that caused the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. Even more importantly, pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation all depend on then use of fossil fuels. One must ask, therefore, whether high-yield agriculture can be maintained in the post-fossil-fuel era.

Topsoil is degraded by excessive use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers. Natural topsoil is rich in organic material, which contains sequestered carbon that would otherwise be present in our atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases. In addition, natural topsoil contains an extraordinarily rich diversity of bacteria and worms that act to convert agricultural wastes from one year's harvest into nutrients for the growth of next year's crop. Pesticides kill these vital organisms, and make the use of artificial fertilizers necessary.

Finally, many small individual farmers, whose methods are sustainable, are being eliminated by secret land-grabs or put out of business because they cannot compete with unsustainable high-yield agriculture. Traditional agriculture contains a wealth of knowledge, which it would be wise for the world to preserve.

Progress Can Kill: Survival Report Reveals World’s Highest Suicide Rate

A new report published by Survival International reveals that the appalling suicide rate among the indigenous Guarani Kaiowá people of southern Brazil is the highest in the world.

The rate of self-inflicted deaths within the tribe is 34 times the Brazilian national average, and statistically the highest among any society anywhere on earth. Suicide rates among many other indigenous peoples such as Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans in Alaska also remain exceptionally high. This can be viewed as the inevitable result of the historical and continuing theft of their land and of "development” being forced upon them.

The report, “Progress can Kill”, exposes the devastating consequences of loss of land and autonomy on tribal peoples. As well as the shockingly high suicide rates among tribes, it also reveals high rates of alcoholism, obesity, depression and other health problems.

Particularly striking statistics include the sky-rocketing rates of HIV infection in West Papua, which increased from almost no cases in 2000 to over 10,000 by 2015, and the rate of infant mortality among Aboriginal Australians – twice that in wider Australian society. In large parts of the world, poor nutrition continues to cause further problems, such as malnutrition for Guarani children, who are forced to live on roadsides, and obesity for many Native Americans, for whom junk food is the only viable option.

Roy Sesana of the Botswana Bushmen, forcibly evicted from their land in 2002, said: “What kind of development is this when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won’t go. Some become prostitutes. We are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw this before. Is this “development”?”

Olimpio, of the Guajajara tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, said: “We are against the type of development the government is proposing. I think some non-Indians’ idea of “progress” is crazy! They come with these aggressive ideas of progress and impose them on us, human beings, especially on indigenous peoples who are the most oppressed of all. For us, this is not progress at all.”

All of these statistics demonstrate the fatal consequences of forcing change on tribal societies in the name of “progress” and “development”. In many cases, tribes have been forced to move away from abundant and sustainable food sources and a sure source of identity in favour of poverty and marginalization on the fringes of mainstream society. Tragic repercussions of such forced change can continue even several generations down the line.

Around the world, tribes continue to fight for the recognition of their right to live on their lands in peace. Where this right has been respected or restored, tribes flourish. For example after the creation of an indigenous reserve in the northern Amazon in 1992, medical teams worked with tribal shamans and together they halved the mortality rate among the Yanomami Indians. Likewise, the Jarawa In India live on their ancestral lands and enjoy what has been called a “life of opulence”. Nutrionists rate their diet as “optimum”.

Muslim Women: Breaking The Glass Ceiling Of Patriarchy

Moin Qazi

Muslim women across South Asia are slowly getting empowered to stand up to patriarchal practices that undermine their dignity. In literate societies, Muslim women, like their counterparts in other creeds, are an empowered community. First, they challenge cultural norms within their communities that deny Muslim women rights and visible roles. They believe that rights have been accorded to them in foundational Islamic texts, but that cultural interpretations of these same texts disallow what is rightfully theirs. They do not call this a feminist struggle, but describe this as a reclamation of their faith.

Muslim women’s activism around education and equal opportunities are often underpinned by their emancipatory readings of foundational Islamic texts. Muslim women are also challenging patriarchy that all women experience around unequal power hierarchies in society and the objectification of women’s bodies in some sections of the media. In this regard they stand with their sisters of all backgrounds.

Muslim women’s traditional importance in Islamic society has always been and continues to be the foundation of the Islamic family. Social values strongly reinforce orientation towards marriage and children as the normative pattern based on Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) own example. Child rearing, early education, and socialization of children are among women’s most important tasks in Islamic societies worldwide. Although traditionally excluded from the public male domain, Muslim women have been privately involved in study and oral transmission of Islamic source texts (Qur’an and Hadith). In modern times, they have entered into both secular and religious forms of education with enthusiasm supporting their long standing role as family educators and moral exemplars as well as training for professional careers in the workplace outside the home.

The Qur’an recognizes the childbearing and childrearing roles of women, but does not present women as inferior to or unequal to men. On the contrary, central to Islamic belief is the importance and high value placed on education. From the true Islamic point of view, education should be freely and equally available to women as much as men.

Islam anticipates the demands of Western feminists by more than a thousand years. A stay-at-home wife can specify that she expects to receive a regular stipend, which is not that far from the goals of the Wages for Housework campaign of the nineteen-seventies. Elsewhere, the fully empowered Muslim woman sounds like a self-assured, post-feminist type—a woman who draws her inspiration from the example of Sukayna, the brilliant, beautiful great-granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). She was married several times, and, at least once, stipulated in writing that her husband was forbidden to disagree with her about anything. All these conditions are based on the canons of Islam and on early Muslim practice. A Muslim woman, cannot be forced to enter into marriage without her agreement; indeed she has the right to revoke a marriage to which she did not agree in the first place.

We now have an inquisitive and empowered generation that will not easily accept rules and codes without reasoning them out and arguing on every strand before embracing it. A very heartening development is that unlike earlier times when only those who had finally retired from all worldly responsibilities would make the hajj pilgrimage, the youth is very actively participating in this most potent Islamic exercise. A hajj is a revolutionary experience which radically transforms one’s mindset and provides a correct perspective of Islam. An exposure to a composite global culture gives an invigorating perspective to the pilgrim.

Few Muslim women outside the urban areas may want to behave like Western women. The sexually exploitative element remains high in the West, however strident the rhetoric of sexual equality. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the well-known cigarette ad depicting a woman smoking: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’. The message is clear: you too may now die of cancer through smoking. The high rate of divorce and sexual disease are common consequences of the reckless drive to equate the sexes and ‘free’ sexual relationships. Comparison may mean little outside the cultural context, but it is important to point out that until a hundred years ago Western women had virtually no rights in law or practice. Over a thousand years before the first European suffragette, Islam gave far reaching rights and a defined status to women. But these Western attitudes have undoubtedly helped to stimulate discussions of the problem in Muslim urban society thereby revealing the gap between the talk of the Islamic ideal and the actual situation of women.

Women emerged as the centerpiece of the Western narrative of Islam in the nineteenth century, and in particular in the later nineteenth century, as Europeans established themselves as colonial powers in Muslim countries. Their narratives simultaneously and hypocritically perpetuated the Victorian English narrative that European men were superior to women while also denigrating Muslim culture for being oppressive to women. The veil, to Western eyes, then became the most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies. The Muslim resistance to this colonialism, then, supported veiling, not necessarily as a symbol of female subordination, but as a reaction against colonization and assumptions of European supremacy.

Muslim women certainly do not share the western notion of femisnism. These women do not accept that being feminist means being Western and believe that Western women should be respectful of other paths to social change. First, there are multiple causes of discrimination against women, and religion is but one. Second, gender relations structure women’s options in all societies. Third, it is futile to focus on misery elsewhere as an escape from the realities of our own lives. And fourth, the issue of power remains crucial for understanding gender inequality in any society.

Western thinkers and practitioners must reconsider their assumptions about the role of Islam in women’s rights, and approach this topic with a more nuanced lens. They must understand the necessity of recognizing and consciously accepting the broad cultural differences between Western and non-Western conceptions of autonomy, as well as respecting social standards that reflect non-Western values. They should pay heed to what First Lady Michelle Obama expressed to hijab wearing students: “You wonder if anyone ever sees beyond your headscarf to see who you really are, instead of being blinded by the fears and misperceptions in their own minds. And I know how painful and how frustrating all of that can be.”

It is clear that Muslim women’s empowerment, like many things, cannot be imposed on a country or a culture from the outside. Men and women within these conservative communities must first find their own reasons and their own justifications to allow women a fuller role in society. Increasingly, they are finding those reasons within Islam. Like men, women deserve to be free. It is only a matter of time until the day comes when they [women] test their chains and break free. As Rumi says in the Mathnawi, “Woman is a ray of God. She is not just the earthly beloved; she is a creatior , not the created.”

The New Year stock sell-off

Barry Grey

The first trading day of 2016 quickly turned into a global financial debacle, with stock markets all over the world plummeting after the Chinese government shut down its major exchanges to prevent a full-scale crash.

The sell-off confirmed the year-end expressions of foreboding by bourgeois commentators over the prospects for world capitalism in the new year. Whether Monday’s market rout is the beginning of an implosion of unsustainable financial bubbles or an anticipatory financial heart attack remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however. It is a symptom of profound and insoluble contradictions that have only intensified since the Wall Street crash more than seven years ago.

The collapse on Chinese markets, with the Shanghai Composite Index closing with a loss of 6.9 percent, was triggered by new data showing that Chinese manufacturing activity fell in December from the already depressed level of the previous month. The December decline marked the tenth consecutive monthly contraction.

The report confirmed that the slowdown in China to its lowest growth rate in a quarter century was likely to worsen in 2016. Given the immense role of the world’s second-largest economy and central manufacturing hub as a magnet for imports, including oil and other industrial commodities as well as manufactured goods, the indication of stagnation spread fears of a further fall in commodity prices and a deepening crisis of commodity-exporting nations from Brazil and Russia to Australia and Canada.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell by more than 3 percent. Germany, a major exporter to China, suffered a 4.3 percent decline on its DAX stock index. The other major European indexes fell by more than 2 percent, and the EURO STOXX 50 index declined by 3.14 percent.

The global market sell-off was compounded by negative economic data from the US. The Institute for Supply Management reported that its index of factory activity fell to 48.2 in December from 48.6 in November. Any reading below 50 denotes contraction. The figure for December was the weakest since June 2009 and marked the first time since the 2008 crash that the US manufacturing sector had suffered two consecutive monthly contractions.

At the same time, the Commerce Department reported that US construction spending fell 0.4 percent in November. The dismal data prompted economists to lower their fourth-quarter 2015 projections for US economic growth to as low as a 1.1 percent annual rate. The figures confirmed that the US, previously cited as the “bright spot” in a world economy dominated by stagnation and slump, is itself in an industrial recession.

The US indexes fell sharply, with the Dow ending the day down nearly 1.6 percent, the S&P 500 down 1.53 percent, and the Nasdaq 2 percent lower.

The indicators of a deepening crisis in production sent shock waves through the financial markets because they portend the looming collapse of a vast speculative house of cards built up since the 2008 Wall Street crash, which sits atop a real economy that has never recovered from the Great Recession. The dirty secret of the so-called “recovery” is that it has been dominated by an expansion of the types of parasitic and quasi-criminal activities that triggered the financial crisis and depression in the first place.

The US and world central banks and all of the major governments responded to the breakdown of capitalism in 2008 by transferring trillions of dollars in public assets to the bankers and hedge fund billionaires, no strings attached. They were free to do with the blood money as they saw fit. Even the feeble and token proposals to rein in CEO pay at bailed-out corporations were blocked by the financial moguls and their bribed politicians.

Untold trillions were pumped into the financial markets to engineer a record rise in stock prices for the benefit of the rich and the super-rich, whose fortunes doubled in the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

At the same time, governments launched brutal attacks on the working class to make it pay for the bankrupting of the state. These attacks—austerity, wage cutting, mass layoffs—bolstered the profit margins of the corporations and further enriched the top 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent.

The corporations used their massive cash hoards not to expand production or create decent-paying jobs, but to find new avenues for speculation, plowing money into the so-called emerging market economies, the booming energy sector, and high-yield, high-risk junk bonds. While 2015 was a year of rising poverty and desperation for the masses, it was a record year for job-destroying and socially destructive activities such as mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks and dividend increases.

The McKinsey Global Institute last year published a report that gives some idea of the colossal growth of debt in the world economy—a measure of the increase in financial speculation and swindling. It noted that global debt has grown by $57 trillion since 2007, raising the ratio of debt to the world’s gross domestic product by 17 percentage points. China’s total debt has quadrupled, rising from $7 trillion to $28 trillion by mid-2014.

In an article published on January 1, the Wall Street Journal noted that in 2015 “the American corporate landscape was dominated by activist investors, buybacks, currencies and deals”—in other words, by speculation. Meanwhile, the real economy is being starved of productive investment. Capital spending by members of the S&P 500 index fell in the second and third quarters of last year compared to 2014, the first time there have been two consecutive quarterly declines since 2010.

The final weeks of 2015 saw mounting signs that the underlying stagnation and slump in the real economy—marked by plummeting oil and commodity prices, declining global trade and dismal or negative growth rates—is beginning to undermine the mountain of speculative debt. The prices of energy-related junk bonds began to fall sharply, and mutual funds that speculate in them suffered a rush of redemption orders, prompting two such funds to refuse to honor redemption requests from investors.

The social and class significance of the further explosion of financial parasitism is indicated in statistics that document the massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the bourgeoisie that has taken place.

The chief economist of the World Bank published an article on January 1 pointing to a “remarkable statistical trend” in high and middle-income countries. The article noted: “Total labour income as a percentage of GDP is declining across the board and at rates rarely witnessed. From 1995 to 2015, labour income dropped from 61 percent to 57 percent of GDP in the US; from 66 percent to 54 percent in Australia; from 61 percent to 55 percent in Canada; from 77 percent to 60 percent in Japan; and from 43 percent to 34 percent in Turkey.”

Under conditions of widening wars in the Middle East and military buildups in Europe and Asia, accompanied by police-state measures imposed internally in country after country on the pretext of fighting terrorism, the underlying economic uncertainty as the new year begins intensifies great power tensions and drives the ruling elites further along the road to war and dictatorship.

At the same time, a major contributor to the sense of foreboding and fear of shocks that predominates in ruling class circles as the new year begins, reflected in the volatility on financial markets, is the sense that the coming year will see a growth of working-class opposition and struggle. The year just ended was marked by the initial signs of a new period of class struggle, with strikes and protests multiplying from Europe to China to Latin America and the United States.

In the US, the resistance of autoworkers to the imposition of new pro-company contracts by the auto bosses and the United Auto Workers union, and the turn of thousands of autoworkers to the World Socialist Web Site and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter for information and political leadership, herald the reemergence of the most powerful detachment of the international working class into mass struggle.