The detection of gravitational waves: A scientific milestone

Bryan Dyne

The first direct detection of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein almost exactly one hundred years ago, marks a significant advance in the scientific cognition and technical mastery of the natural world.

The most precise scientific instruments ever built, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, have measured subtle ripples in space and time caused by the merger of two black holes into a larger one more than a billion light-years from Earth. This marks the beginning of the era of gravitational wave astronomy.

Groundbreaking research in lasers, vacuum technology, sensing and seismology over four decades contributed to the success announced Thursday. New mathematics was developed to pierce the background noise of the detector and extract a signal. Thousands of engineers and scientists solved innumerable technical challenges and reviewed the initial detection and its implications for months prior to the first release of scientific results.

The detection does more than simply verify the existence of gravitational waves. Computer modeling only possible in the last decade has predicted the shape of these waves from a variety of astrophysical sources as well as from a variety of theoretical models beyond the equations of general relativity as developed by Einstein in 1915-16. The particular shape of the waves in the detected “chirp,” however, correspond precisely to Einsteinian models of a merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, with masses of 29 times and 36 times that of the Sun. Moreover, this is the first detection of black holes in this “intermediate” mass, heavier than most stars but lighter than the supermassive ones found in the center of galaxies.

Similar to the discovery a century and a half ago that various types of light are part of a broader spectrum of radiation, the study of gravitational waves will allow for a fundamentally new way of observing the universe. Objects such as black holes, invisible when studied with light, are detectable with gravitational waves. The early universe, hidden from direct electromagnetic view, could be unveiled by finding primordial vibrations of spacetime caused by the Big Bang. Dark matter, which emits no light but is five times more common than normal matter, may be detectable by faint gravitational interactions. The initial findings are only a hint of what is to come.

The stunning confirmation of phenomena theoretically predicted 100 years ago stands starkly at odds with the incessant contemporary glorification of irrationalism, whether through the cultivation of backwardness and religious prejudice or the promotion of postmodernism and its rejection of objective truth. It is a powerful vindication of the materialist understanding of the world, that there are objective laws of nature and that humans can comprehend them.

The breakthrough announced Thursday is being celebrated and shared amongst millions of people around the world. The servers of Physical Review Letters, the journal in which the findings were published, crashed in the first few moments after the announcement as people from all walks of life rushed to learn about LIGO’s discovery. It is a moment of optimism—especially for a younger generation which has only known unending wars, inequality, poverty, austerity, domestic spying and police brutality—about the prospects for human progress.

There is also an instinctive understanding that the methods employed to find gravitational waves and make other scientific and technical advances could be used to solve social and economic problems. People ask, and rightly so, how is it that society can detect a signal that has an amplitude one thousandth the width of a proton and yet cannot provide sufficient food, shelter, education or health care for the population of the planet?

This is a stark contrast between the way the LIGO project was organized and the everyday operations of world capitalism, a social system based on the ever-greater accumulation of private profit by increasingly catastrophic and parasitic methods. Thousands of scientists collaborated on a common project whose driving force was the pursuit of knowledge, not the amassing of insane amounts of personal wealth. Decisions were made based on objective criteria, with elaborate feedback mechanisms to insure against inadvertent errors, or any attempts to manipulate the results.

Then there is the irrationality of the capitalist nation-state system, with its wars, invasions, bombing, and mass flight of refugees, for whom the world has become a gigantic set of prison cages. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration includes contributors from Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, Russia and the United States. In doing this work, every one of these scientists has to some degree rejected the constant mantra espoused by the ruling elites in every country of national chauvinism and reaction.

Such scientific advances as that announced this past week are rarer than they would be if the immense resources squandered on war and parasitism were directed instead to the conquest of knowledge of the material world, whether this relates to the movements of black holes a billion years ago or to the causes of cancer, a solution to global warming and the development of agricultural production.

Achieving this potential is possible only by resolving the basic social problem: the subordination of human activity to private profit. For this the international working class must become conscious of the objective laws of capitalist development —which are leading inexorably to world war and social revolution—and orient its activity accordingly.

More Unemployment and Less Security

Pete Dolack

The bad news is that the world’s number of unemployed workers and those with precarious employment is expected to rise during 2016 and 2017. The worse news is that the true number of those in these categories are probably significantly undercounted.

The International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that just issued its “World Employment Social Outlook,” predicts that 200 million people will be unemployed in 2016, three million more than last year. This will be most acute in middle-income and poor countries, where unemployment is forecast by the ILO to increase by 2.4 million with a slight decrease in unemployment in the most developed countries. Brazil and China alone are expected to add 1.5 million to the unemployment rolls in the next two years.

Not that having employment is necessarily a marker of stability. The ILO report says that nearly half of the world’s workers — 1.5 billion people — hold “vulnerable employment.” This total includes subsistence and informal workers, and unpaid family workers. This vast cohort (the “reserve army of labor” although the ILO never uses such direct terminology) will not be getting smaller in the foreseeable future. All these factors add up to more inequality. Nor is it limited to any one part of the world, the ILO report says:

“The improvement in the labour market situation in developed economies is limited and uneven, and in some countries the middle class has been shrinking, according to various measures. Income inequality, as measured by the Gini index, has risen significantly in most advanced G20 countries. Since the start of the global crisis, top incomes have continued to increase while the poorest 40 per cent of households have tended to fall behind.” [page 4]

In one-third of the world’s countries, the “precariat” constitutes at least two-thirds of the total workforce. The percentages of those with precarious employment is much higher in developing countries than in the advanced capitalist countries, but in all parts of the world the labor force participation rate — that is, the percentage of those of working age who are employed — is slowly shrinking and is forecast by the ILO to continue to do so through the rest of the decade. Here it is the developed countries that have the lowest participation rate (60.5 percent in 2015), more than two percentage points lower than the global average.

The massive size of the precariat

A gloomy picture, indeed. A picture, however, that does not fully capture the bleakness of stagnation. The number of precarious workers is likely higher than what the ILO calculates. In their book The Endless Crisis, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney estimate that the true size of the precariat is actually significantly larger than those with regular employment. They write:

“If we take the categories of the unemployed, the vulnerably employed, and the economically inactive population in prime working ages (25-54) and add them together, we come up with what might be called the maximum size of the global reserve army in 2011: some 2.4 billion people, compared to 1.4 billion in the active labor army. It is the existence of a reserve army that in its maximum extent is more than 70 percent larger than the active labor army that serves to restrain wages globally, and particularly in the poorer countries.” 

Capitalism is unable to create sufficient employment, and thus considers such people to be “excess population.” Mass migrations from Latin America to the United States, or from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, are consequences. In the 19th century, industrializing European countries had a safety valve in massive emigration (not so good for Indigenous peoples in the target countries of course), but there are no longer large areas into which capitalism can expand. Professors Foster and McChesney put this in stark terms:

“While such mass emigration was a possibility for the early capitalist powers, which moved out to seize large parts of the planet, it is not possible for countries of the global South today. Consequently, the kind of reduction in peasant population currently pushed by the system points, if it were effected fully, to mass genocide. An unimaginable 7 percent annual rate of growth for fifty years across the entire global South, [economist Samir] Amin points out, could not absorb even a third of this vast surplus agricultural population. …

“Aside from the direct benefits of enormously high rates of exploitation, which feed the economic surplus flowing into the advanced capitalist counties, the introduction of low-cost imports from ‘feeder economies’ in Asia and other parts of the global South by multinational corporations has a deflationary effect. This protects the value of money, particularly the dollar as the hegemonic currency, and thus the financial assets of the capitalist class. The existence of an enormous global reserve army of labor thus forces income deflation on the world’s workers, beginning in the global South, but also affecting the workers of the global North, who are increasingly subject to neoliberal ‘labour market flexibility.’ ”

These trends become more acute as high unemployment persists. The true level of unemployment is approximately double official numbers across North America, Europe and Australia. The reason for this is that all those countries do not include discouraged workers, those employed part time but not able to secure full-time work nor all persons marginally attached to the labor force (those who wish to work but have given up).

Less pay to go with less security

With all these factors working against them, wages for working people are stagnant while productivity continues to increase — the one percent is grabbing all the wealth created. This is a global phenomenon. Employees in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Japan have seen their pay lag behind productivity gains and income inequality widen.

Thus it comes as no surprise that labor rights are under attack everywhere. How bad? In a 2014 study, the International Trade Union Confederation determined the degree to which five basic rights — fundamental civil liberties; the right to establish or join unions; trade union activities; the right to collective bargaining; and the right to strike — are upheld, and then assigned a numerical grade. Every country in the world had a ranking of below 50 percent. In other words, every country flunked when graded on respect for labor rights.

What to do about all this? The ILO offers these conclusions as part of its call for a “shift in economic and employment policies”:

“It is particularly important to strengthen labour market institutions and ensure that social protection systems are well designed, in order to prevent further increases in long-term unemployment, underemployment and working poverty. A rebalancing in reform efforts is also needed. In particular, financial reforms need to ensure that banks perform their role of channelling resources into the real economy and into investment for sustainable enterprise expansion and job creation.” 

We should be long past the time when it was possible to believe we could wag our fingers at bad policy-makers and expect they will see the light of day. The unceasing competition of capitalism, its relentless drive to enclose ever more human activity within its logic of profit at any cost, mandates the world we now live in. Drastic imbalances in power are inherent in capitalism; these can’t be legislated away. Thus the ILO’s prescriptions are meaningless. Reforms are possible with enough movement organization, but reforms are eventually taken back, as the past four decades has amply demonstrated.

Desires by industrialists and financiers to press their offensive against working people are behind “free trade” agreements that eliminate barriers to the movement of capital, encourage shifting of production to places with ever lower wages, and impose restrictions on the ability of governments to implement, or even maintain, laws safeguarding health, safety, labor rights and the environment. These are simply the expected outcomes under the logic of capitalism. No regulation can change that. Only a change of economic system can achieve that.

A Comedy of Terrors

Jeffrey St. Clair

Poor ISIS. Try as they might, the men in black still can’t out-terrorize their enemies or, more pointedly, even their patrons. For the past three years, decapitations have served as the money shots for ISIS’s theater of cruelty. Then on New Year’s Day the Saudis upstaged ISIS by audaciously chopping off the heads of 47 men, including a prominent Shia cleric.

This act of brazen butchery is made all the more horrific by virtue of the fact that the Saudi head-slicers recently landed a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, largely at the insistence of British Prime Minister David Cameron, who personally vouched for the petro-autocracy’s acute sensitivity to matters of civil liberties and the humane treatment of prisoners. Then again the drone-troika of Britain, France and the U.S. also enjoy seats on the council, so perhaps the Saudis have earned their slot after all.

With his peculiar fondness for porcine heads, Cameron is probably the Kingdom’s most un-kosher ally, but he is far from Saudi Arabia’s only political cheerleader. Showing a stunning lack of judgment, Comandante Bernie Sanders says his Syrian strategy relies on the Saudis taking the lead in the fight against ISIS. “They’ve got to get their hands dirty,” Sanders inveighed to Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “They’ve got to get their troops on the ground. They’ve got to win that war with our support. We cannot be leading the effort.”

Apparently Sanders skipped the briefing on how ISIS’s apocalyptic ideology has been fueled by fire-breathing Wahhabi preachers financed by the Saudi royal family. The red senator also seems ignorant of the fact that ISIS functions as shock troops for the House of Saud in its proxy war against Iran, now raging in Yemen and Iraq, as well as Syria. You’d think that Bernie would be getting better advice from his friends in Israeli intelligence.

Sanders’ policy on Syria is naïve to the point of doltishness. But Hillary’s Syrian war plan—shared by most of her Republican rivals—borders on the pathological. Having not missed a minute of sleep haunted by the corpses of Libya, Mrs. Clinton is now stumping for the dismantling of Syria, using the carefully cultivated domestic anxiety over ISIS as the pretext. The cornerstone of Hillary’s rogue scheme is the imposition of a no fly zone over that embattled country.

Sounds like a relatively benign plan, right? But wait. ISIS doesn’t have an air force. They don’t even a have drone. Russia, of course, is flying daily sorties in Syrian air space, at the invitation of the Syrian government, such as it is, and some kind of confrontation would be inevitable. Still, Hillary doesn’t flinch. She has zealously vowed to shoot down any Russian plane that violated her unilateral ban.

Yet NATO’s latest recruit, Turkey, jumped the gun. Erdogan’s trigger-happy generals didn’t wait for any such fanciful legalisms and downed a Russian jet for momentarily breaching (perhaps) Turkish airspace. Then Turkamen fighters gleefully trained their machine-guns on the plane’s pilots as they slowly parachuted toward the desert. Vladimir Putin fulminated boisterously to his domestic audience, but prudently declined to retaliate against the Turks, perhaps intuiting that it would snap a tripwire for a full-frontal confrontation with NATO.

Everyone has been consulted about the future of Syria, except the Syrians themselves. Why? Because simply, Syrians don’t matter. They are quite beside the point. Thanks to fresh reporting by Seymour Hersh, we now know that the subtext for Obama administration’s Syrian strategy, dating back to Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, has been largely geared toward ensnaring Russian in the Levantine quagmire. This is chaos theory marketed as foreign policy.

The rubble of modern Syria has become a multi-national bombing range, a kill zone of neo-Cold War contention. Each new act of domestic terrorism, from Paris to San Bernardino, has been used to rationalize more airstrikes on Syria, even though the killers in both slaughters seemed mainly to be attempting to impress the terror network, which is like blaming Jodie Foster for inspiring John Hinkley’s wild fusillade at Reagan and his entourage.

Even Putin, that prickly hero to some precincts of the anti-imperialist Left, has upped the ante by threatening to launch a nuclear strike against ISIS in response to the bombing of a Russian passenger plane over the Sinai, even though there’s no direct evidence that the bomb was planted by the mad men of Daesh. Not to be outdone, Ted Cruz, the natural-born Canadian, has vowed to make the sands of Raqqa glow, despite the fact that few Americans could point to Raqqa on a map or explain why this city of a quarter-million people should be incinerated in retribution for the murderous rampage by the Bonnie and Clyde of San Berdoo.

The war on terror has exploded in the face of the West, with spreading mayhem across the Middle East and unraveling conditions on the home front. One chilling measure of the savage toll from 14 years of war is the rate of military suicides in the US, which now total more than 4000 since the first cruise missiles struck Afghanistan. There is a desperate motive to externalize the blame for this bleak situation, to target a scapegoat. The rancid resumes of ISIS and the despotic Assad regime make Syria a convenient landscape for more imperial bloodletting. There’s not even the faintest flicker of an anti-war movement left to impede their shameful enterprise.

In this comedy of terrors, the apex predators are the familiar ones circling overhead, waiting to blow Syria apart and plunder its bones.

New wave of job cuts in Australia as global slump deepens

John Harris

Since the beginning of 2016, a further barrage of job losses has begun to hit workers in Australia, amid a worsening rout on the financial markets. Growing numbers of workers are being made to pay for the deepening global slump and the collapse of mining commodity prices, as major employers axe jobs in a bid to cut losses and shore up profits.

The mining and resources sector, which temporarily kept Australian capitalism afloat after the 2008 world financial crash, is now in headlong decline, and the fallout is spreading throughout the economy, including the retail sector. Hardly a day goes by without announcements of layoffs or projected job cuts.

This job destruction is yet to show up in the vastly-understated official Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, which reported that the unemployment rate fell by 0.1 percent to 5.8 percent in December. Even by that figure, 727,000 jobless workers were actively seeking employment, just before this year’s financial turmoil wiped tens of billions of dollars off Australian share values, especially the mining and banking stocks.

Some idea of the emerging scale of the job cuts can be gleaned from the Roy Morgan survey figures for January, which showed the unemployment rate jumping to 10.3 percent, from 9.7 percent in December. Altogether, 2.575 million people (19.7 percent of the workforce) were unemployed or under-employed in January—up by 309,000 (1.7 percentage points) since January 2015.

The year began with two major retail collapses. Electronics retailer Dick Smith went into voluntary administration, placing in jeopardy the jobs of 3,300 workers employed at the company’s 393 outlets across Australia and New Zealand. Woolworths announced it will either sell or wind up its home improvement business, which includes the Masters Home Timber and Hardware chain, after sustaining heavy losses. Masters has 63 stores, employing over 7,000 people.

With the prices of Australia’s main exports—iron ore, coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG)—still falling, and with predictions of worse to come, the unemployment toll will only rise. Because the price of LNG is linked to oil, gas producers in Australia are implementing large layoffs.

Chevron shed 1,200 jobs in its Australian operations at end of last year as part of a global restructuring to cut up to 7,000 positions. The end of the construction phase at its $US54 billion Gorgon project on Barrow Island in Western Australia (WA) will result in thousands more layoffs. Gorgon is one of seven gas projects under construction, employing a total workforce of around 35,000. As the projects reach the operational stage, that number is expected to fall to 7,000.

Falling nickel, manganese and copper prices are triggering a wave of lay-offs and closures. In January, 237 workers were laid off at mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel Yabulu refinery after the company was placed into administration with a debt of around $100 million.

CBH Resources announced this month the elimination of 116 jobs at its Endeavour zinc and lead mine at Cobar in New South Wales (NSW), delivering a devastating blow to the town.

Last month, Panoramic Resources cut 50 jobs at its nickel mine in Savannah in WA and a “significant portion” of the workforce at its Perth headquarters. Mincor Resources said it will cease mining at its Mariner and Miitel mines in Kambalda, WA, shedding 90 jobs immediately with more to go as the operations wind down. Independence Group said it will slash 28 jobs from its Long nickel mine in Kambalda.

In January, Consolidated Minerals said it will cease operations at its Woodie Woodie manganese mine near Perth. OM Holdings went into voluntary administration placing its Bootu Creek manganese mine in the Northern Territory in care and maintenance. The company laid off 45 production workers last year and now a further 200 jobs are a risk. Shaw River Manganese in WA was also placed in administration.

Newcrest Mining announced in January that it will axe 100 jobs at its Ridgeway gold mine near Orange in NSW by March. Oz Minerals confirmed last month it will slash around 100 jobs at its Prominent Hill copper-gold mining operation in northwest South Australia, on top of the 70 it axed earlier.

Coal and iron ore job cuts are continuing. Resources giant ANGLO American confirmed this week that more than 100 jobs will be axed at its Drayton coal mine in the NSW Hunter Valley, as a step toward laying off the entire production workforce of 245 by December.

Mount Gibson Iron Ore will cut around 20 jobs at its iron ore loading facilities in WA. Grange Resources flagged job cuts at its Savage River mine in northwest Tasmania that employs around 550 workers.

BHP Billton spin-off South32 warned it will make a “substantial reduction in employee numbers during the remainder of full-year 2016” at its Worsley alumina operation in WA.

Job cuts across other sectors include:

Freight carrier Pacific National will slash 46 coal train drivers’ jobs from its operations in the NSW Hunter Valley.

Ship builder BAE will shed 50 more jobs from the remaining 150-strong workforce at its Williamstown shipyard in Melbourne, Victoria. The company has cut 325 jobs at the yard since August last year. Ship repairer Forgacs will close its two yards in Newcastle, NSW at the cost of 150 jobs.

Auto parts manufacturer SMR Automotive (SMRA) in South Australia will axe 140 jobs by March.

Banking giant Barclays will cut around 80 jobs at its Australian operations, and at least 230 jobs across the Asia-Pacific region . The Bank of Queensland will cut around 50 jobs from its workforce of 2,220.

Lion Beer, Spirits and Wine Australia will slash 39 jobs from its Boag’s Brewery in Launceston, Tasmania—one third of the brewery’s workforce.The University of Western Australia announced a plan to cut 300 academic and professional staff.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the federal government’s science agency, announced this month it will slash 120 positions, mostly from its atmosphere and oceans division.

The federal government plans to cut 700 public servants’ jobs, including in the immigration department.

The WA state government will shed the equivalent of 1,163 jobs from the South Metropolitan Health Service, almost half of them at the Royal Perth Hospital (RPH).

Stock market panic risks new financial crisis

Andre Damon

Global stock markets formally entered a bear market Wednesday, as the MSCI All-Country World Index fell by 1.3 percent, with the index down 20 percent from its high last May. Yesterday, after further losses in Asia, European markets closed down, with the German DAX falling by nearly 5 percent, the Spanish IBEX down by nearly 5 percent, and the US DOW off by 250 points.

The selloff accelerated in early trading Friday, with the Japanese Nikkei falling by more than 5 percent at the opening bell.

The stock sell-off both reflected and helped catalyze a broader crisis of confidence in financial markets, amid a rapid deceleration of the global economy, a sell-off in emerging market debt, a downward spiral in commodities prices, and the seeming perplexity of central banks as to how to deal with a renewed outbreak of panic eight years after the 2008 financial crisis.

The global selloff continued in the US after congressional testimony by Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen, who made no explicit statement that the Federal Reserve would change its plans to continue raising the benchmark federal funds rate over the next year.

Yellen did, however, say that the Federal Reserve would not rule out cutting interest rates below zero if economic conditions continued to deteriorate. If this were to happen, the Fed would follow the Bank of Japan, which late last month announced a surprise interest rate cut, and Sweden, which Thursday cut its benchmark interest rate further into negative territory.

These moves, coupled with a generalized flight to safety, have led to a massive jump in the proportion of bonds with a negative yield. According to figures from JPMorgan, the share of government bonds with a negative yield, once only considered a theoretical possibility, have reached 25 percent. All told, negatively-yielding assets have hit $5.5 trillion worldwide.

The deepening sell-off, and the seeming inability of central banks to formulate any coherent response to the panic, have triggered a general crisis of confidence, not only in the health of the financial system, but in the ability of central banks and governments to offset the crisis through radically expansionary monetary policy: their panacea for every economic ill since 2008.

A Citigroup executive summed up the sentiment in a comment to Reuters: “One of the new themes in markets is that (quantitative easing) has damaged the banks and that therefore it exacerbates the risk-off environment.”

In other words, the panicked sell-off expresses growing fears in financial markets that the vast quantities of cash pumped into the financial system since 2008 have done nothing to improve its underlying health, and may have sown the seeds for a crash on an even greater scale.

This time, however, with central banks having expended so much of their “ammunition” on seeking to keep financial assets afloat for years, there are increasing fears that they will be powerless to respond to a new financial panic.

In particular, the explosive growth in negative-yielding financial assets means that banks, whose core business involves borrowing long-term and lending short-term, will be put under even further financial stress if central banks continue to lower interest rates.

These fears have hammered the banking sector. The S&P 500 financials index has dropped by 18 percent since the start of the year, making banking by far the worst-affected sector, facing an even more rapid selloff rate than that of the beleaguered energy and transport industries.

And that is saying something. The energy and materials sectors have seen share value declines of over 31 percent over the past year, with “companies going Chapter 11 or trading at 50 cents on the dollar,” one portfolio manager told Bloomberg.

Meanwhile the global shipping and transport sector is facing business conditions that, in the words of Nils Andersen, the CEO of Maersk, the largest transportation company in the world, are “worse than in 2008.” The company’s share value, which was down by more than 50 percent in the past year, fell a further 8 percent Wednesday.

Meanwhile the prospects that US economic growth would somehow offset the slump in global output receded further this week, as US corporations posted sharply reduced earnings and outlooks. Earnings for S&P 500 companies fell 4.5 percent in the fourth quarter, and are expected to fall 6.3 percent this quarter. “The general feeling is that the U.S. economy is nearing a peak and there is not much left as far as trends to be talked about,” one hedge fund manager told Reuters.

The fall-off in real economic activity can be expected to further dampen oil prices, which have hit 13-year lows of $27 per barrel, and has triggered a further round of sell-offs in commodity related stocks, with “investors ... liquidating because they need the cash,” as one chief investment officer told Reuters.

Eight years since the 2008 financial crash, it is clear that the capitalist governments and central banks have been unable to address any of its underlying causes. Instead, they have poured cash into financial markets, triggering a feedback loop of speculation and parasitism in the form of mergers and consolidations, which have sharply cut back production and led to mass layoffs.

The end result has been only a further acceleration of the growth of social inequality, with the fantastic enrichment of the parasitic financial oligarchy financed by the wholesale destruction of productive activity and the vast impoverishment of the working class.

In other words, the conditions that gave rise to the 2008 financial crisis have been reproduced once again in even sharper form, and risk a similar outcome.

Global Terrorism Destroying The Humanity: How To Change The Future?

Mahboob A Khawaja

“Nobody can predict which way the ‘Arab Awakening’ will turn this year… Over the decades of unchallenging aggressive adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and now in Syria, West and North Africa and soon in Saudi Arab, America has earned the distinction of being a leader in intrinsic and endless corrupted wars to dismantle, humiliate, kill and destroy the Arab people and maintain the surge for more bloodsheds anytime – anywhere…. Iraq? Its own latent civil war will go on grinding up the bones of civil society while we largely ignore its agony; there are days now when more Iraqis are killed than Syrians, though you wouldn’t know it from the nightly news. And the Gulf? Arabia, where the first Arab awakening began? Where, indeed, the first Arab revolution – the advent of Islam – burst forth upon the world. There are those who say that the Gulf kingdoms will remain secure for years to come. Don’t count on it. Watch Saudi Arabia. Remember what that British diplomat wrote 130 years ago. “Even in Mecca...” (Robert Fisk “Could Saudi Arabia be Next?” The Independent).

Superpowers are Complacent in the Destruction of the Arab world?

For centuries, the Europeans (British, French, Italian and Dutch) built empires by colonizing the Islamic world. They used millions of subjugated people to fight the First and 2nd World Wars. They viewed the subjects as unworthy creature at the ballot box and imposed Whiteman’s superior thinking, culture, language and laws on the colonized Muslim people. Out of favors, loyal tribal agents were transformed into kings, royals, presidents and dictatorship role. This is how Britain stole Palestine from its people. Now the people are awakened to pursue democratic change and the absolute rulers are a liability. The US led few West Europeans want to replace the historical dummies to articulate a different future of their own. All the superpowers are collaborating military operations to destroy the entire Arab region under the pretext of “war on terrorism.” This planned scheme of things will sideline the core issue of the Arab Middle East - freedom of Palestine and normalization of relations with the State of Israel. After the US planned destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria is virtually a collapsed country. It’s economic, civic and political infrastructures are in ruins. Millions of Iraqi and Syrian civilians are victims of insanity because of the authoritarian regime of Bashar-al-Assad, Al-Abidi or the coalition of the US-Russia and Europeans. Most West Europeans except Germany, used the Arabs as soldiers during the Two World Wars are now treating the refugees as animal herd to be barricaded under razor wires. Is there a responsible global governance to safeguard the mankind?

The UNO is fast becoming a wait and see institution - just to make declarations, the same chronic sickness that caused the downfall of the League of Nations and brought about the catastrophic curse of the 2nd WW. Complacency joined by wickedness, authoritarian Arab leaders are engaged in wars that make no sense to rationality of intent and purpose. Yemen, Libya, Egypt are targeted to be politically destabilized and torn apart by sectarian conflicts. Iran and Saudi Arabia’s reactionary policies are flaring up more disastrous sectarian killings. Many Iranian-backed extreme groups including Hezbollah are fighting in Iraq and Syria to maintain the cruelty of sectarian warfare. Their support to Al-Assad dynasty and fighting against fellow Muslims are a shame to the unity and teachings of Islam. Nothing looks optimistic if these countries could ever recover what is destroyed and was built since the ancient time. Unpredictable but paranoid and vengeful political monsters have incapacitated the human faculties of rational thinking across the Arab-Muslim world to be morally and intellectually crippled nations in global affairs. The Western coalition and Russia are collaborating, it is planned and aimed at large scale deaths and annihilation of the entire Arab world. After the WW2, it was Palestine, now the entire Arab Peninsula will be occupied by the superpowers. Russian-American bombing are destroying the masses and habitats. If few millions – just the numbers are abstracted from the population data, it is statistic and nothing about human casualties. Arabs are vanishing somewhere, not the Americans or Russians. The police apparatus planned and managed by the Western nations have dehumanized the Arab population with fear and hatred of the authoritarianism. The Arab citizens are just helpless statistic. They could be easily broken and slaughtered. The civilians are escaping the insanity of foreign bombing and tyranny of authoritarianism.

The wars against the oil enriched Middle East are a distraction from the home-based political and economic issues, be it the US or Russia. “U.S. Spy Chiefs Think The World Is Pretty Much Going To Hell” reads the headlines of the Foreign Policy (February 9,2016)…..from the Islamic State gaining strength in Libya to Kim Jong Un shopping some of the world’s most dangerous weapons, here are the top takeaways from a grim day with the nation’s top spooks. The magazine wonders, “Why are Russian Engineers Working at an Islamic State-Controlled Gas Plant in Syria?” The world knows Russia and the US are collaborating the Middle East warfare for their own interests. Secretary Kerry alleges that Russia is not helping in peace talks. One wonders, who has the focused mind and rational agenda for peacemaking in the Arab world? The need is urgent for the informed global community to intervene and to stop the daily carnage happening across the Middle East. Pepe Escobar (“Empire of Chaos Preparing For More Fireworks in 2016” Global Research: 12/24/2016), an independent geopolitical analysts and author of Empire in Chaos (2014), explains that “The Empire of Chaos, today, is not about complacency. It’s about hubris – and fear. Ever since the start of the Cold War the crucial question has been who would control the great trading networks of Eurasia - or the “heartland”….. Whatever happens in the so-called Syrian peace process the proxy war between Washington and Moscow will continue.”

“Terrorism” is a Political Myth of Action vs. Reaction

What is more alarming in the 21st century when the corporate world’s hired big affluent minds and news-making intellect offer fabricated facts of history to keep the masses under constant fear and red-alerts that American and other Western societies face outrageous trends of “extremism” and “terrorism” coming from the Islamic societies. In a rational perspective “terrorism” does not grow out of any particular land or culture but it is a global historical phenomenon of action vs. reaction game. It was best explained by British author and producer Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear: BBC documentary challenging the American version of the “War on Terrorism”), spells out the myth with clarity: “international terrorism is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media.”

Let us be absolutely clear that the US-led forces including the Europeans were not sent to Afghanistan or Iraq to defend democracy, freedom, human rights and liberty but to occupy those nations and exploit their natural resources and in some instances to test new and invisible weapons on easily available civilian targets. The mankind all over the planet is the net casualty of this horrible crime. Who gained most out of the planned miseries, bloodbaths and cruelty to fellow human beings? The Western oil companies, Washington-based military-industrial complex and the weapon manufacturers in the US and Western Europe.

Across the globe, “terrorism” whether it originates in the Western political culture or reactionary “terrorism” fast growing in the Muslim societies, the problem is critical and consuming too much time and energies which should be used for the good of the mankind living in peace not in adversity and continuing warfare. Do the Americans or other allied with warrior cliché know or have the ability to opt out of the degenerating warfare and its consequential ripple effects for the future of the mankind?

We Need New Vision and Proactive Thinking for Change and Adaptability to the Future

Aggressiveness, police raids and irrational harsh legal judgments do not articulate cooperation and respect for human dignity or social harmony and peace in human society but divide people in hatred, fear and more conflicts. You cannot change a society with law and order dictum. When a problem is misunderstood, its diagnostic approach will be wrong. An out of the official box approach to understand the problem is urgently needed. The major news media corporations in North America and Western Europe are aligned to the establishments and tainted with biased coverage as they get paid via ads and secret dealings. None of this is helpful to foster change and societal advancement for a peaceful future. The mankind looks for change in strategic thinking and actions. “In the name of “System Change, Not Climate Change”, points out Paul Street (“For Intelligent Civilizations on Earth”) “we can rescue and preserve humanity and livable ecology through mass resistance and a revolutionary transformation that takes us beyond the world’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money, profit, empire, and eco-cide.”

Most egoistic leaders once triumphed into political powerhouses; they ignore primary human values of peace, co-existence, freedom and liberty? If Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were alive, their moral and intellectual souls must have been painfully disturbed - how George W. Bush, Blair and Obama tortured the innocent people at Guantanomo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The future generations must not be entrapped by the vengeful reactionary politics of the post 9/11 decade. Human decency and futuristic priorities would deserve rethinking and change in global policies and behaviors. Time and emerging opportunities warrant new societal thinking and approaches, and new visions for change and the future-making. But change and creativity and new visions will not emerge out of the obsolete, redundant and failed individualistic absolutism of the few insane leaders. Intelligent and effective leaders offer hope and optimism in situations of adversity and share proactive vision, and demonstrate flexibility for navigational change when facts of life warrant a change; and eagerness to learn the art of good communication and to do the best for the mankind.

The informed global community wishes to see meaningful dialogue, reconciliation and opportunities for peaceful settlement of the merging conflicts in the Arab world. Have the Two World Wars resolved any problems facing the humanity? What is the cure to raging indifference and cruelty to the interests of the whole of the mankind? The 21st century new-age complex political, economic, social and strategic challenges and the encompassing opportunities warrant new thinking, new leaders and new visions for change, conflict management and participatory peaceful future-making. Is the 21st century political genius more redundant, backward and unable to speak against the political drudgery and wickedness of the few sadistic warlords to destroy the humanity? Perhaps, Robert Burns - the poet (“Man’s inhumanity to Man”, from his poem Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge, 1785), knew better and had unraveling and passionate moral and intellectual understanding of the human nature and interests of the global mankind to clarify:

'Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

ABC’s Of The US Empire

Gary Corseri

“A” Is for “Asininity”

That’s a particular kind of stupidity.

All of us can be stupid at times. (Ever see that picture of Einstein with his tongue hanging out like an aardvark’s, clowning—one supposes—for the camera?)

It’s in our genes to be stupid at times. Looking back on the Vietnam War—which ultimately took his own son’s life—Secretary of Defense McNamara attributed his own stupidity to the “fog of war.”

I would rather call it “asininity.”

Asininity is stupidity that is stubborn as a jackass; stupidity hat insists on itself in spite of all contrary evidence.

The US has been guilty of asininity for a couple of centuries now. We insist on telling ourselves and the world that we are a democracy, that “We the People” are running the show. (It’s in our sacred document—our Constitution, consulted about as often as Donald Trump consults his Bible. We pick out phrases like “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the way Mr. Trump picks out a phrase from “2 Cornthians,” and we insist that we’ve gleaned the whole—all 1291 pages of my Gideon Bible, with all its contradictions, amassed over centuries by men (and probably some women who snuck into the writers’ den) of varying capabilities with often divergent viewpoints.

But, our “leaders” assure us that they know Truth--with all the asinine surety of George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble after 9/11, proclaiming that “we know who did this,” and Big Sheriff is coming after them!

(But how could that fool know anything, when all that rubble and “forensic evidence” was about to be shipped to China for burial (talk about “outsourcing”!).

With murderous fools like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Madeleine Allbright we went after our former ally, Saddam Hussein, and destroyed what was probably the most progressive country in the Middle East—certainly, in terms of the way women lived and worked there, far better than Saudi Arabia!

A few years down the bombed-out road, and we’re destroying Libya—probably the most progressive nation in Africa—no real threat to us except that Quadaffi wants to institute a new kind of currency throughout Africa, pay for goods with gold, not dollars, and besides that, he has rather outlandish tastes in men’s clothing! Caught between rehearsed speeches during a TV interview, informed that the former leader has just been sodomized with a bayonet, asinine Hillary Clinton chortles, “We came, we saw, he died.”

“B” Is for “Belligerence”

For most of my “school years”—from 1st grade through Grad School, I heard that the US was a “peaceful” nation whose “God-fearing” citizens only fought when attacked.

Somehow, Jefferson’s epithet of “savages” for the Original Peoples of this land sailed over my highschool boy’s head. There it is in our Declaration of Independence, a few paragraphs after “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It seems befuddled King George had supported the “savages” when the Colonists tried to expand into their land!

In fact, our Revolution had much to do with our not-so-peaceful “pilgrims” and the newcomers wanting to “migrate” beyond our borders. Our little cities had become fairly crowded with newcomers/immigrants. Between the end of our “French and Indian War” and the beginning our our Revolution, a scant 13 years or so, the population of the colonies pretty much doubled. There has never been so great a period of growth in North American history! This was pre-Industrial Revolution, of course, so there wasn’t much for all these farmhand-“migrants” to do except look Westward lustfully to the lands of the undeserving “red-skin” savages. The migrants couldn’t subsist on already subsisting farms, increasingly crowded with post-war kids and babies. (Our first “baby boomers!) One way the Revolutionists convinced the “excess feeders” (as asinine Kissinger might have it) to enlist was to promise new land in the West. The fact that this “new land” was already occupied by old tribes really did not matter.

“Four-score and seven years” later, we’re still lusting Westward—especially after the discovery of gold in California and our annexation of Texas from recently independent Mexico! Our Civil War is mostly fought over who would control the new territories gained from Mexico—about 1/2 of their country becoming about 1/3 of our continental land mass! Who would master our expansionism? Would it be the slave-holding plantation barons of the South or the Corporate barons of the Industrialized North?

During the Vietnam War, I heard news anchor David Brinkley wonder that we seemed to have a major war every 20 years. It has actually been much more often than that, and if one considers our racist wars on non-whites, our drug wars, Nixon’s “War on Cancer,” etc. our hotheads have been at war perennially.

“C” is for “Cupidity”

Cupidity rhymes with “stupidity,” but like asininity, it’s special—a special kind of greed!

You’ll find the word “Cupid” there—the Roman god of Love!

But, this is not soul-love, or hearts-and-flowers-Valentine love.

This is love of things; materialism; love of luchre--billions and billions of dollars.

Donald Trump epitomizes such love, and he has convinced a fair number of the asinine among us (which is a pretty fair number anyway) that more and more will make us “great again.”

It doesn’t matter that we are poisoning our once pristine skies and we’ll all soon be drinking Flint water!

“C” is also for Corporatism—that system of government that replaced our shaky “Republic” about 200 years ago when our less-than-Supreme Court declared that corporations were “persons.” (Okay, they didn’t say that outright. Crimes, especially corporate and government, crimes are seldom committed in an outright manner. The culprits and plotters hate “conspiracy theories,” but love to conspire! They fashion laws and “amendments” that are “open to interpretation.” “You have a Republic,” wily Ben Franklin told the charwoman—“if you can keep it.”

“C” is also for all-embrasive Culture… and ours is sinking rapidly.

Last weekend, I watched “Saturday Night Live” because I heard Bernie Sanders might appear. I like Sanders almost as much as I liked Rand Paul—Paul for his anti-war/”fiscal responsibility” stance and Sanders for his egalitarianism. (I wish he had called it that from the beginning!) At this point in this belligerent nation’s history, it is probably too much to expect a candidate to be both anti-war and a “democratic Socialist.”

I turned the TV off soon after Larry David’s opening monologue. David said that he used to be a “poor schmuck,” but now he was a “rich prick.” It seemed he liked that vocabulary because he kept repeating himself like a bad can of beans.

No subtlety, no wit, no greater connections. (Oh George Carlin of the “Big Electron”—so sorely missed!)

I thought”: Whatever happened to “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “The Waltons” or even “Saturday Night Live” of the days of Gilda Radner or John Belushi? I thought of the time decades ago, when I was in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and a park-ranger was talking about the bison and some pre-teen kids were climbing trees dangerously and the adults were chattering among themselves until the ranger called loudly: “Who’s watching the kids?” And attention was paid!

What about the kids? Surely there are prepubescent and young kids gorging on this TV junk-food and concluding: anything goes now; you can say anything—it’s on TV and the adults are saying it!

You can say that we can now torture our enemies in IS—never mind “due process,” of course—just as long as you really-really suspect them!

You can be Bill Clinton who accoutered his young and foolish aide with “Presidential knee-pads” in the Oval Office, and now declares that voters who shun his wife must be “sexist”!

You can be a repetitive Rubio-robot or an earnest “Bridgegate” critic like Christie because nobody’s checking the facts, “history” is “an agreed-upon myth” (as Napoleon had it), and “truth” and “beauty” (which Keats equated) are disappearing in our chem-trailed skies.

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice! Reader, if you seek our monuments—look around!

Zionist And Nazi Moral Disengagement

Vacy Vlazna

To be an effective activist it is important for me to understand the nature of human evil. In that endeavour, I was drawn to read Hannah Arendt’s own discoveries about what she coined, ‘the banality of evil’ in her book, ’Eichmann in Jerusalem’ , reporting on the zionist trial of Adolph Eichmann who oversaw the deportation of Jews to ghettoes and concentration camps.

Arendt concluded that unspeakable evil is not committed by human monsters but by normal people in a systematic unthinking manner devoid of moral qualms and codes.

‘The banality of evil’ i.e. bureaucratic psychopathy is rendered acceptable through what Albert Bandura terms, moral disengagement achieved by perverse moral justification, minimising/ hiding cruelty and dehumanising and blaming the victims.

The concentration and repetition of this faux information on the masses leads to the normalisation of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, torture, extrajudicial killings and genocide.

Today, moral disengagement is the corrupted norm of most governments, whether democratic or totalitarian, and the zionist government has, ironically, out-mastered the Nazi mechanisms of moral disengagement or in a word, Hasbara.

Here’s a small insight into how it works; take MK Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party that is in coalition with Netanyahu’s Likud party. Lapid recently spruiked to 30 EU ambassadors,

“We will never be like them [Palestinians], because Israel’s power comes first of all from its morality. The difference between us and our enemies is our values. That is why we can ask the world: Why are you continuing to embrace those who support vile murderers?”

Of course any intelligent person knows that in the laying waste of the rights of indigenous people of Palestine, zionist ‘values’ are void of morality: the zionist values of imprisoning and torturing children, of unjustified mass incarcerations, the zionist value of apartheid, of demolishing homes, of stealing Palestinian land, of testing high-tech weaponry on Palestinian families trapped in the zionist siege of Gaza.

Then there are the zionist values of immolating a teenager and a sleeping Palestinian family, of destroying Palestinian agriculture and livelihoods, of the extrajudicial killings of youth throwing stones and carrying invisible knives, of deliberately blocking ambulances and paramedics to treat the wounded, of calculatedly bringing hunger striking Palestinian prisoners, such as Mohammed Al-Qiq, to the brink of death before granting, if at all, a release from imprisonment for crimes never committed.

According to non-practising Israeli, Dr Marcelo Svirsky, moral disengagement is rife among the occupiers,

“The majority of Jewish-Israelis do not critically reflect on their lasting commitment to their collective beliefs, ideas and practices and hence they do not take notice that these are vehicles of privilege and oppression. In other words, most Jewish-Israelis choose, unconsciously or not, to live in peace with the misery they cause.” After Israel:Towards Cultural Transformation

And when Palestinians show true values of sumoud - steadfast and courageous resistance to zionist ‘values’ and violence, they are falsely labelled ‘terrorists’ or ‘vile murderers’.

On reading Arendt, I wonder if the zionist deprecation of Palestinian resistance is rooted in deep shame. Arendt points out that the Eichmann trial revealed the shocking extent of the collaboration of Jewish leaders (Judenräte) with Eichmann and the Nazis and their knowingly withholding from fellow Jews the horrific consequences of deportation to the concentration camps.

“What was new and especially provocative in Arendt’s account was the insistence on challenging Jewish communal leadership. What might they have done differently? Her answers, offered only tentatively, derived from her view of the function of truth in politics. Should the Judenräte have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being deported to? How many might have been able to save themselves somehow had they known the truth? Why were the Judenräe notables so disciplined and servile to authority?”

“Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn’t they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did.”

“If the Judenräte had not been so “Germanically” disciplined, if they hadn’t compiled detailed lists of potential deportees, if they hadn’t supplied the Nazis with these lists, if they had refrained from collecting the keys and detailed inventories of vacated apartments for the Nazis to hand over to “Aryans,” if they hadn’t summoned the deportees to show up on a certain day, at a certain hour, at a certain railway station with provisions for a three- or four-day journey, would fewer people have died? Others had asked such questions before. But Arendt went further, implying that Jewish leaders had inadvertently allowed themselves to fall into a fiendish trap and become part of the system of victimization.”

In effect, the Judenräte’s, i.e. mainly zionist Jews, collaboration with the Nazis contributed to Jewish dearths and crushed resistance like the undermining the Jewish boycott in the USA of Nazi products which was undermined by,

“There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a Ha’avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.””

Nevertheless Jews resisted the Nazi scourge by way of armed Jewish partisan groups, uprisings in the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, rebellions in ghettoes including the famous Warsaw Ghetto ( wherein, shock-horror, food was smuggled through underground tunnels! ),

“The glory of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the heroism of the few others who fought back lay precisely in their having refused the comparatively easy death the Nazis offered them—before the firing squad or in the gas chamber. And the witnesses in Jerusalem who testified to resistance and rebellion, to “the small place [it had] in the history of the holocaust,” confirmed once more the fact that only the very young had been capable of taking “the decision that we cannot go and be slaughtered like sheep. “

The glorious resistance of the young calls to mind the present Palestinian youth Intifada against 68 years of zionist brutality at the hands of holocaust survivors and worshippers and against the 21 years of Palestinian Authority/PLO collaboration ( like the Judenräte) with the zionists that has facilitated the growth of zionist colonial expansion and the crushing of Palestinian resistance.

Undaunted, Palestinian resistance is in the breath of daily life under the zionist jackboot; going to school is an act of resistance where children are harassed by the savagery of the deviant zionist colonists who prey on them like wild jackals. These deviants reflect the pathological sickness that is zionism.

Resistance illuminates the dignified ultimatum of Palestinian hunger-striking prisoners, al-Issawi, Adnan and Al-Qiq, for freedom or death, resistance is heard in the dangerous digging of life-blood tunnels, resistance raises money by impoverished Palestinians to rebuild the demolished homes of martyrs, it is smelt in the baking of bread and felt in the shaking of olives from ancient trees, in the indefatigable care and courage by doctors, paramedics and rescuers during the 51 day zionist onslaught of Gaza and in the soothing of terrified children traumatised by drones, bombs and ubiquitous death.

There was a tremendous uplift of pride for the young Gazan men who valiantly resisted the military might of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. That spirit is being acted on by Palestinian youth today while the leaders squander Palestinian dignity and the crucial strategy of unity by either collaborating with the zionists or crawling on their knees to Arab states that don't give a damn about Palestine.

So how can we resist the banality of evil to protect the rights of Palestinians and further peace in Palestine for all?

Zionist values and the hasbara machine dread empathy. Empathy engages with suffering and survivors of Nazi atrocities and their descendants have the privileged capacity to realise there is no difference between suffering under the Nazi or the zionist jackboot - both of which made and make strides because the machinations of moral disengagement duped the German people back then, just as the Jewish people are duped today along with British, Canadian, American, European, Australian citizens whose governments grant impunity to the zionist scourge in Palestine.

Empathy is power. Empathy’s identification and connection with the Other evokes profound understanding of the interdependence of humanity which transforms moral concern into actions, like BDS, that, individually and communally, can defeat moral disengagement and the banality of evil.