Junior doctors in England mount 48-hour strike

Robert Stevens

Junior doctors throughout England ended a 48-hour strike Thursday. The strike was the latest in the doctors’ ongoing dispute with the government, which last month imposed an inferior contract on them. Thousands of doctors participated in picket lines in many towns and cities, despite continuous heavy rain and wind.

The picket line at North Manchester General Hospital

The contract is set to be enforced in August and means cuts in premium rate pay for out-of-hours work, evenings and weekends. The already notoriously long working hours of doctors could be increased in a move detrimental to their health and the wellbeing of patients.

The strike, called by the British Medical Association (BMA), the registered trade union for doctors, began Wednesday at 8 a.m. and over the two days resulted in more than 5,000 operations and procedures across England being cancelled. The stoppage was organised to allow emergency coverage only. Since the dispute began, 19,000 operations have been cancelled due to industrial action that began in January.

Pickets at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital

The struggle by the doctors is widely supported and seen as a stand against the systematic destruction of the National Health Service (NHS) being carried out by the Conservative government. A BBC poll issued this week revealed that 65 percent of those polled support the doctors’ strike. This is an almost identical percentage in support as a poll taken during their last strike held in February.

Another indication of growing support is that the percentage of those opposing the strike fell from 22 percent to 17 percent over the last month.

An Ipsos Mori poll published Thursday for the Health Service Journal found 64 percent of respondents blamed the government for the strike, and just 13 percent blamed the doctors.

Following the decision February 11 by the Tories to unilaterally impose the contract, with the backing of National Health Service England chief executive Simon Stevens, the BMA was forced to call the latest strikes in the face of growing anger from junior doctors. However, opposed to an offensive against the government onslaught, and a call for support from the more than 1 million health workers employed in the NHS, the BMA has restricted action among its own members to three 48-hour strikes to be held over a period of more than six weeks. This week’s strikes are to be followed by others on April 6 and April 26.

Central to its continued isolation of the doctors is the BMA’s launching of a judicial review against the government’s contract. It initiated the review as it called the latest strikes, claiming that the government did not, as required by law, carry out an Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) when it imposed the contract. A judge will now decide on whether Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt acted legally over the contract.

On the part of the BMA, the holding of a judicial review can, depending on the ruling passed, lay the basis for acceptance of the contract. According to aDaily Telegraph report, “The British Medical Association ignored the legal advice of its own lawyers” before launching the review. The lawyers, in advice dated February 19, told the BMA the government’s actions were not “inherently unlawful” and “are likely to pose a considerable drain of the BMA’s internal resources.”

The lawyers, said the Telegraph, “concluded that the judicial review should instead be seen as a ‘last throw of the dice’—with its main potential benefit being a new window of opportunity for the junior doctors’ committee to secure further improvements to the contract about to be imposed. To do this, they suggested, the committee should consider keeping the judicial review secret for one to two weeks, to make it easier for health secretary Jeremy Hunt to reopen negotiations.”

Despite the government directly intervening last month to impose the contract and smash up doctors’ terms and conditions, the BMA has insisted that doctors are not involved in a political struggle. Dr. Bea Bakshi, a member of the BMA’s junior doctor committee, told GP Magazine this week, “I think all options are on the table right now and we have to consider all options to get the government to come back to the table for a negotiated settlement. We need to exert as much pressure as possible on the government to get them to come back and negotiate with us.” She added, “We’re doctors, we don’t play politics. The reason we haven’t escalated to a full walkout right now is because we genuinely don’t want to strike.”

Prior to calling the latest strike and judicial review, Johann Malawana, the BMA junior doctor committee chair, said, “The government must put patients before politics, get back around the table and find a negotiated solution to this dispute.”

As the latest strike began, Malawana appealed to a government hell-bent on defeating the doctors at all costs. “We are facing a Department of Health … driven by politics rather than patients,” he said. “We ask the prime minister [David Cameron] to step in … when we ask to reconsider the imposition of this contact.” World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to junior doctors on picket lines in a number of towns and cities. The role of the BMA in sowing political confusion was evident in a number of interviews opposing any politicisation of the dispute.

At Hallam University Hospital in Sheffield, Lucy, a junior doctor, said, “It’s a strike for the NHS for our livelihood and our profession. It is not politically motivated. Nobody talks about politics here. … For me it would be great if Hunt resigned and we had someone in power who would listen to us.”

Fiona

Frances said, “I suppose it is a political struggle up to a point. It is not a struggle against any particular party. We had problems under a Labour government as well. They were very, very unhelpful towards the NHS. To put it mildly, yes, it is politics but not party politics.”

Tom said, “We don’t want to play politics; our priority is the patients. The government might want to play politics.”

At Royal Bournemouth Hospital, Fiona, who works in a GP practice, said, “I work in lots of hospitals in the area. We are quite often short of staff and have gaps on rotas. We often have to cross cover and do the work of two or three doctors. … There are not enough nurses, health care assistants and other staff. We see how the budget cuts take their toll. The government wants to further privatise the NHS. We all have to fight if we want to defend the NHS for future generations.”

Amy

Amy, a trainee at Poole General Hospital, said, “A 98 percent vote for strike action speaks volumes about how we feel about this substandard contract and defending the NHS. What we really worry about is having a seven-day service provided by five days-worth of doctors.”

At North Manchester General Hospital, Peter, a first year junior doctor, said, “This is an NHS-wide issue. We are the first to be attacked, then they’re coming for the nurses and consultants, it will be a domino effect.

“Doctors are generally from a very conservative background, but we have been forced into this. We are overworked, chronically understaffed and work under tremendous stress. Last week I worked for 59 hours and some days I dread going in. An F1 [first year] like myself recently killed herself in Cornwall, leaving a suicide note that directly implicated Jeremy Hunt. The constant fear of cuts creates terrible anxiety.”

Pickets at Poole General Hospital

Alan, who is training to be an Accident and Emergency consultant, said, “My concern is that if this contract goes through, there will be fundamental changes in the way health care is provided. When I was in medical school tuition fees were £1,500 a year and I left with a debt of £25,000. Today’s students start out with debts of £45,000 upwards, £80,000 to £90,000 if you include loans for living expenses.”

“The government have redefined what anti-social hours means, to include Saturdays. We spend less time with our families now. In fact, there is a 50 percent dropout rate of trainee consultants because of this.

“Capitalism is not compatible with people’s lives. Lots of doctors do locum work [agency] just to get their lives back. The government are hoping to defeat us by dividing NHS workers up.”

Petra, a second year student in general surgery, said, “As a student from the United States, I can compare medical care in the NHS, where everybody is treated, rather than being in a community where you have to fend for yourself. If the NHS is privatised and run for profit only the wealthy who can afford to pay will benefit.”

Turkish government intensifies crackdown on media, opposition parties

Halil Celik

This week, an Istanbul court appointed a trustees’ board to take over management of the Feza Media Group, the owner of Turkey’s biggest-selling daily, Zaman, as well as Today’s Zaman and the Cihan news agency. Riot police forcibly broke down the gate and stormed the building, without bothering to deliver the court decision.

The ruling was issued by the government-controlled İstanbul 6th Criminal Court of Peace, at the request of the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which claimed that the media group acted on orders from the “Fethullahist Terrorist Organisation/Parallel State Structure (FETÖ/PDY),” helping it achieve its goals in its publications.

The prosecutor also claimed that the alleged terrorist group is cooperating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to topple the Turkish government.

The seizure of Zaman, which is affiliated with the Gulen movement, one of the few opposition media outlets in the country, is another unconstitutional move of the AKP government. The Turkish Constitution forbids seizure of printing houses and press equipment.

The term “parallel state” or “structure” is generally used by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP to refer to the Gulen movement, inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan started to use the term after the corruption scandal involving his family members and inner circle within the AK Party went public on December 17, 2013. He claims a “parallel structure” inside the state organised the graft probe in order to overthrow his government. Corruption charges were dropped after prosecutors of the case were replaced, dismissed or arrested, however.

The takeover of the Feza Media Group is only the most flagrant measure in a broad offensive against press freedom in Turkey. Last week, satellite provider Turksat halted the broadcast of the independent IMC TV station on terrorism charges, allegedly for its support to the PKK, while the trustee board assigned by a government-controlled court closed down two newspapers and two television stations owned by Koza İpek Holding.

On Friday, March 4, four members of the board of Boydak Holding have also been detained as part of a government-led operation on charges of supporting the so-called “parallel state.” Boydak Holding is one of the Turkey’s largest conglomerates with an annual turnover of more than $3 billion and 38 subsidiary companies. It has operations in a number of sectors in Turkey, including energy, furniture and banking.

Baris Ince, a former editor of the Birgün daily was also sentenced to 21 months in prison for “insulting” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son.

Seeking to justify his crackdown, the Turkish president bluntly declared on Sunday, “The media cannot have unlimited freedom. These reports are an attack on the current president of this country,” adding, “This has nothing to do with freedom of expression at all. This is an espionage case.”

He openly called for prosecutors to defy the Constitutional Court’s February 26 decision releasing Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, two opposition journalists, after 92 days in jail.

Brazenly trampling democratic rights, Erdogan declared, “Turkey is ready to pay compensation for the re-arrest of two journalists if appealed in ECTHR [the European Court of Human Rights]. … Those prosecutors and gendarmes who stopped the MIT [Turkish National Intelligence Service] trucks are now in jail. Therefore, the precaution [the detention of journalists] is not a violation of freedom of press and expression. Members of the press don’t have the right to do anything they wish.”

The two journalists were arrested last November on charges of espionage and aiding a terrorist organisation, after the publication of video footage on the Cumhuriyet web site in June 2015 showing Turkish intelligence service trucks transporting weapons to Islamist groups in Syria as they were intercepted in 2014 by the gendarmerie .

Four former prosecutors and seven military staff, including high-ranking officers, were imprisoned after a court ordered their arrest in May 2015 for ordering searches of trucks carrying weapons to Ankara’s proxies in Syria.

At the centre of Erdogan’s calculations is that the major European powers will give him a green light to attack the media, so long as he makes an agreement with them to prevent refugees fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan from traveling on to Europe.

The tone in this regard was set by German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. In the run-up to the Turkey-EU summit on refugees, de Maizière bluntly declared, “We should not be the referee on the issue of human rights for the entire world.”

He praised the AKP government for holding Syrian refugees in camps in Turkey, thus preventing them from traveling on to Europe: “Ankara has most recently worked in a remarkable humanitarian perspective. Turkey has taken in 2.5 million refugees from the crisis region in Syria. That deserves recognition, not criticism.”

With this support from Berlin and the European Union, Ankara has proceeded to carry out attacks not only on the media, but also on opposition parties. On Erdogan’s orders, the Justice Ministry has submitted to the Prime Ministry a request for Parliament to remove the immunity of leaders of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third-largest political party in the Turkish parliament.

The lifting of immunity targets HDP co-chairpersons Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, as well as three other deputies. According to a last statement of the Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag in a TV interview last week, there are 347 such proceedings against HDP members. Hundreds of HDP mayors, provincial administrators and members have been arrested on charges of being members of, or aiding and abetting “terrorist organisations” since the June 7 elections.

The opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) had already applied to the Turkish Parliamentary Speaker’s Office to establish a joint commission to discuss launching proceedings against pro-Kurdish lawmakers to lift their immunity. The MHP has accused HDP deputies of being linked to the “terrorist PKK” and insists that the war on terrorism should include legal actions against deputies who supposedly aid and abet terrorism.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, chairperson of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has called for lifting the parliamentary immunity of all deputies.

In December, Turkish president Erdogan declared Demirtas’ and Yuksekdag’s statements calling for autonomy in the predominantly Kurdish Southeast region as a “constitutional crime”, and suggested that they should be stripped of their parliamentary immunity. “Motions [to remove the immunity of HDP deputies] should not be left to rot on the shelves of Parliament. The necessary action must be taken,” he said on February 24.

Teachers take strike action against Palestinian Authority

Jean Shaoul

On Tuesday, thousands of striking Palestinian teachers took to the streets of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, defying checkpoints erected across the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) security forces.

The PA was seeking to prevent the demonstration from taking place and the strike from getting out of control. Workers have been joined by parents, students and supporters. The strike by 35,000 teachers has left more than one million children out of school.

The four-week long teachers’ strike has provoked a political crisis for the corrupt business clique around Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, his Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) that has long dominated Palestinian political life.

Teachers’ basic starting salary is NIS 1,700 ($434) a month plus additional payments that bring the total to NIS 2,400 each month ($615). The figure is so low for a teacher that many of those with a family to support have to take on a second job to make ends meet. Paid less than other public sector workers, teachers also have limited annual increments and fewer avenues to promotion and higher salaries.

Their strike began with a two-day walkout, organised reluctantly by the teachers’ union, to demand an expected backdated pay rise, part of a settlement agreed in 2013 and far less than the rate of inflation. It has developed into one of the largest mass strikes ever seen in the West Bank, with three thousand more teachers joining the strike following the PA’s use of the security forces.

In February, the PA used armed security forces to set up roadblocks at the entrance to towns and cities to prevent people joining demonstrations, seizing and questioning many of the teachers. Al-Haq, the rights organization, said that at least 20 teachers had been arrested. A number had been detained or mistreated and their homes searched without a warrant by PA forces.

Teachers forced trade union officials to resign following talks with the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), accusing the union of working against their interests and boosting the government position. Nabil Samara, principal at the Beitunya boys' high school resigned from the union, which is part of the PLO and whose leader Ahmed Suhweil is close to Fatah, the PLO’s dominant faction.

He told Al Jazeera, “The government and the union wanted to get the teachers to accept a smaller raise now and increase it over a longer period of time to try to limit the teachers’ demands.”

The teachers followed this up by demanding the immediate and full implementation of the pay increase, included backdated pay, as agreed in 2013, and insisting on the right to elect a new organisation to negotiate with the government. Teachers elected representatives in each district, but PA officials have refused to recognise them as a union or to negotiate with them.

The PA has responded with threats, intimidation, and smear tactics, calling on mosques to urge the teachers to return to work and saying that it will organise “administrative measures,” that is, mass sackings, of strikers. The PA is the largest employer in the West Bank, and the loss of a job is a grave threat in this area, where thanks to Israel’s crippling occupation, 23 percent of Palestinian men and 36 percent of women are unemployed. Nearly half of youth between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed and 25 percent of Palestinians live in poverty.

The Palestinian Legislative Council has sought to intervene as a mediator, while the Ministry of Education has offered to pay part of the salary increases due since 2013 and to negotiate over their other demands by September—provided the teachers return to work immediately.

The teachers rejected this, saying that they have no guarantee the government will keep its promises given that it has repeatedly claimed that it does not have the money to meet their demands. Indeed, the PA and United Nations made a joint appeal for $571 million in food aid, so desperate is the situation in Palestine. Last October, a US official said the economic aid to Palestine would be cut due to “unhelpful actions,” meaning the spate of lone attacks on Israelis by desperate Palestinians. At the same time, an Israeli official said that US defence aid to Israel would be stepped up.

The teachers point out that the biggest single item of government expenditure is for the security forces. More than half of all public employees are in the security forces, which for decades have acted as subcontractors for Israel in suppressing all dissent to Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation.

Even the US State Department’s latest annual report on human rights reported that under the PA, there are “restrictions on freedom of speech, press, and assembly” and “limits on freedom of association and movement.”

The PA’s intransigence has antagonised parents, students and the working class, whose anger at its craven capitulation to every one of Washington’s dictates, collaboration with Israel and refusal to lift a finger to defend Palestinians from Israel’s shoot to kill policy, has reached boiling point. Calls for the prime minister to resign have surfaced on social media.

Since the current unrest began last October, Israeli security forces have killed around 187 Palestinians. These were in response to lone attacks on Israelis that have killed around 30 people.

The oppression of the Palestinian people is not just the result of Israel’s military strength but of the failure of the perspective of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, articulated by the PLO, of establishing a Palestinian nation state via an agreement with imperialism. The Oslo Accords, signed with much fanfare in 1993 after decades of struggle, instead brought to power a corrupt clique of Palestinian businessmen. Hostile to the interests of the workers, they sought an accommodation with the major imperialist powers and the Zionist regime.

The teachers’ strike has brought the class issues to the fore. Under conditions of a globally integrated economy, only the perspective of socialist internationalism can provide a way forward. That requires a determined struggle to unite Palestinian workers with their class brothers and sisters, both Jewish and Arab, across the entire Middle East, as part of a common struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.

Violence, racism and the Trump campaign

Patrick Martin

The series of violent incidents at rallies for billionaire Donald Trump is a warning of the increasingly fascistic character of the Republican front-runner’s campaign.

On Wednesday, at a rally near Fayetteville, North Carolina, a supporter of Trump attacked a 26-year-old black man, Rakeem Jones, as he was being escorted out of the Crown Coliseum by Cumberland County sheriff’s deputies. Jones was one of a small group of anti-Trump protesters at the event.

The attacker, 78-year-old John McGraw, punched Jones in the face, knocking him down. Afterwards, McGraw boasted of the attack. He told a television interviewer, “You bet I liked it,” adding, “He deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him… He might be with a terrorist organization.” McGraw was subsequently arrested and charged with battery.

At a press conference Friday morning in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump defended the attack, blaming it on the victim. “It was a guy who was swinging—was very loud—and then started swinging at the audience,” the billionaire real estate mogul said. “And you know what? It swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate.”

The attack in North Carolina was followed up later in the day by physical confrontations between Trump supporters and some of the thousands of protesters who attended a planned Trump rally in Chicago Friday evening, which was called off at the last minute. In interviews later in the evening, Trump said that if the rally had gone forward, “someone might have been killed.”

Earlier this week, when Michelle Fields, a reporter for the right-wing Breitbart.com web site, tried to approach Trump after a Florida rally, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski grabbed her by the arm and shoved her away, an assault witnessed by several journalists.

These incidents follow a pattern in which protesters at or outside Trump rallies have been physically attacked by Trump supporters, including members of white supremacist groups, and Trump security guards, or forcibly ejected by police. Last week a young black woman who brought an anti-Trump sign to a rally was attacked physically and cursed with racist and sexist epithets. Her sign was ripped up and she was frog-marched out of the rally.

Trump has repeatedly incited violence against protesters, beginning last fall but with increasing frequency once the primaries and caucuses began:

• On February 1, he told a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”

• On February 22, at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump denounced a protester, saying, “I’d like to punch him in the face, I tell ya.” He added, “You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher.”

• On March 9, in Fayetteville, he said of interruptions by protesters, “See, in the good old days this didn’t used to happen, because they used to treat them very rough. We’ve become very weak.” Shortly thereafter, the assault on Rakeem Jones occurred.

In the course of Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate in Florida, CNN moderator Jake Tapper quoted these statements and asked Trump whether he had done anything to “create a tone” that encouraged violence.

Trump blandly denied the obvious. Blaming the victims, he said the protesters had provoked his supporters. “People come with tremendous passion and love for the country, and when they see protest, in some cases… They have anger,” he declared.

None of Trump’s three remaining rivals, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, or Ohio Governor John Kasich, pursued the issue. On the contrary, Cruz expressed sympathy with “the frustration that is boiling over.” Rubio declared that police officers “deserve our respect,” although the question was about right-wing thug attacks.

This evasion characterized the approach of Cruz, Rubio and Kasich to the debate as a whole, in which they did little to challenge Trump’s status as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. There was no repetition of previous declarations that the billionaire demagogue was unfit to hold office or represented a threat to democracy.

The Trump campaign represents something new and dangerous in American political life. After decades of basing its political operations on appeals to racism, national chauvinism, militarism and Christian fundamentalism, the Republican Party is giving birth to a movement of a fascistic character.

The instances in which Trump breaks with the traditional program of the ultra-right—on trade, for example, or in opposing cuts in Social Security—do not contradict this assessment. Fascist movements, as opposed to the traditional right, claim to defend the social interests of working people, but on the basis of extreme nationalism.

Trump’s social demagogy and appeals to sections of white workers are given credibility by the fact that what passes for “left” in the political establishment, the Democratic Party and its periphery, has nothing but contempt for the working class. The Obama administration spearheaded the slashing of wages throughout industry when it backed a 50 percent cut in starting pay for auto workers as an essential component of its bailout of the industry. And Obama has proposed a series of cuts in Social Security and Medicare, either as part of budget deals with congressional Republicans or to finance his health care counterreform.

The “left” Democratic presidential contender, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, now centers his appeals to workers on denunciations of NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, blaming foreign countries, not US corporations, for the collapse of jobs and wages. This helps legitimize the reactionary economic nationalism that is Trump’s stock-in-trade. In the wake of Sanders’ upset victory in Michigan, where anti-trade demagogy played a significant role, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has embraced similar anti-trade rhetoric.

American politics is taking on an ever more openly violent character—the product of nearly four decades of political reaction and war. Trump did not come out of nowhere. All the crimes, at home and abroad—torture, illegal invasions and occupations, drone assassination, police violence and domestic repression—have political consequences. In the 15 years of the so-called “war on terror,” permanent war has become a basic feature of American life. Militarism abroad and social reaction at home, marked above all by unprecedented levels of economic inequality, have generated increasing state violence.

This has been presided over by both parties of big business. The Republican Party has specialized in promoting every form of ideological backwardness. The Democratic Party, while carrying out the same basic policies as the Republicans, has promoted identity politics based on race, gender and sexual orientation to obscure the fundamental class divide in society, sow divisions within the working class and block the emergence of an independent political movement of working people.

Now, the entire political system is beset by a deep crisis of legitimacy. Masses of people are alienated and disgusted with both parties. This takes an initial, though distorted left-wing form in the broad support for the campaign of Sanders, who calls himself a socialist, and a right-wing form in the support for Trump.

Whatever the outcome of the primary process, which remains uncertain in both big-business parties, the official US two-party system is headed for unprecedented political upheavals. There is a powerful class dynamic at work. Both corporate-controlled parties are moving to the right, while broad masses of working people and youth are moving to the left.

The racism and fascistic tendencies of the Trump campaign must be seen as a serious warning. They can be countered only through the development of a unified movement of the working class, breaking free of the entire two-party system and taking the road of the independent political and revolutionary struggle for socialism. 

Pentagon deploying drone aircraft within the US

Joseph Kishore

A report released by the Department of Defense inspector general reveals that for nearly ten years, the US military has been coordinating the domestic use of drones with local officials and the National Guard. It has done so without any public accountability or reporting by the media.

The Pentagon report, prepared last month, was made public last week only after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Federation of American Scientists.

The inspector general report provides only a glimpse into the extensive use of the military within the borders of the United States. It refers to “less than 20” instances since 2006 when drones were requested by US agencies for use outside of military bases. It does not include a complete list of cases where drones were used, but instead provides nine examples occurring between 2011 and 2016.

While the report is accompanied by the usual reference to “protecting the American public’s civil liberties and privacy rights,” the use of drones (or unmanned aircraft systems, UAS) within the country is a serious warning. It is part of a broader expansion of domestic military activity over the past fifteen years and complements the much more extensive deployment of drone aircraft by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Several of the examples listed include large-scale training exercises that involve a simulated natural disaster. Such exercises provide an opportunity for the military to practice the coordination of its assets with local, state and federal civilian agencies.

The cases listed include Exercise Guardian Shield 2015. In this exercise, carried out last summer in Ohio, the Ohio Air National Guard, the FBI and state and local agencies simulated incidents throughout the state. Exercise Ardent Sentry 2011, another example listed in the report, was a nationwide exercise simulating an earthquake along the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which includes parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee. The exercise was overseen by the US Northern Command, set up in 2002 under the Bush administration as the first-ever command in charge of military activity within the United States.

Military drones were also reportedly deployed during several natural disasters, including flooding in the Mississippi River Valley at the beginning of this year and in South Carolina last October. Of the nine cases listed, six took place in the last 10 months, indicating a significant expansion of military drone use.

The use of drone aircraft is part of the integration of the military with domestic agencies (through a program known as Defense Support of Civil Authorities, or DSCA), under the authority of the US Northern Command. In 2006, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an interim order that, according to the inspector general report, “encourages the use of DoD [Department of Defense] UAS to support appropriate domestic mission sets.”

The current DSCA policy guidelines (adopted in 2012 under the Obama administration) contain extremely broad language calling for the military to respond to requests “from civil authorities for domestic emergencies, law enforcement support, and other domestic activities, or from qualifying entities for ‘special events.’”

The ground is being laid for a much broader use of military drones. A 2012 Department of Defense report to Congress identified 110 potential drone bases within the US and called for expanded military access to domestic airspace, ostensibly for the purpose of training individuals to meet the vast growth in “operational demand” abroad, i.e., the assassination program of the Obama administration in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries.

The potential drone bases cited in the 2012 report were located in 39 different states throughout the country.

Since the US Northern Command was first established, the Pentagon, under the Bush and Obama administrations, has pushed for a reinterpretation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for domestic purposes. In 2008, the Pentagon established an “anti-terror” unit within the framework of the Northern Command composed of 20,000 regular Army troops that could be used within the US.

A Department of Justice “white paper” on drone assassination, leaked to the press in February 2013, outlined the Obama administration’s position that the White House has the authority to kill anyone, including US citizens, anywhere in the world without judicial process. In the spring of that year, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to rule out the possibility that the president could, under “extraordinary circumstances…authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States,” including by means of drone strikes.

Over the past several years, the Pentagon has carried out a series of domestic exercises simulating large-scale military operations. These include most significantly Operation Jade Helm, begun in July 2015 and involving drills in parts of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

The expanded use or simulated use of military forces within the country has coincided with the militarization of local police and the use of the National Guard to impose effective martial law in response to terrorist attacks or social protests, including the lockdown of Boston following the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and the states of emergency in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland during protests against police violence in 2014 and 2015.

Last June, FBI Director James Comey acknowledged that his agency had used drone surveillance aircraft to monitor the protests in both Ferguson and Baltimore. An Associated Press report prior to Comey’s testimony revealed that the FBI had conducted more than 100 flights in 11 states during a single month that year, employing shell companies to operate the aircraft.

The events in Ferguson and Baltimore revealed the essential purpose behind all of these measures. Utilizing the “war on terror” as a pretext, the White House and the Pentagon have worked systematically to expand the apparatus of surveillance and repression—military and police—to utilize the instruments of war ever more directly against social opposition within the United States.

Palm Oil And GM Mustard: A Marriage Made In Hell

Colin Todhunter

The current drive to get genetically modified (GM) food crops into India is being spearheaded by GM mustard. However, the decision to sanction the commercialisation of this crop has been delayed due to accusations of “unremitting fraud” and “regulatory delinquency.”

These accusations are being strengthened with each passing day, as further evidence comes to light about the underhand, deceptive and corrupt tactics that have been used to fudge and manipulate data under a veil of secrecy. It is becoming increasingly clear that GM will not increase yields or have any benefits, especially when compared to current non-GM and traditional, high-yielding varieties. In fact, it would do more harm than good (see this also and this slide show too) and GM mustard would serve only one purpose: it would act as a Trojan horse to open the floodgate to GM food crops being grown in India.

One of the main (bogus) arguments put forward in favour of GM mustard is that India needs to reduce its imports of edible oils and that GM will give an underproductive indigenous edible oils sector a much-needed boost. While it is clear that India’s imports of edible oils have indeed increased, this is not as a result of an underperforming home-grown sector.

In terms of volumes, palm oil, soybean oil and mustard oil are the three largest consumed edible oils in India, with respective shares of 46%, 16% and 14% in total oil consumption (2010 figures). Over the past 20 years, India's indigenous edible oil output has risen only about a third whereas imports have surged twelve fold, making it the world's top buyer of cooking oils.

The argument to reduce imports certainly carries weight: overseas purchases of edible oils exceed $10 billion per year, India's third-highest after oil and gold.

However, Davish Jain, chairman of the Soybean Processors Association of India, targets the heart of the issue when he says:

"India has become the dumping ground for palm oil. Our oil seed and edible oil production will not rise unless we restrict cheaper imports."

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Then import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector.

Aside from one previous occasion (1987), 1996 saw imports of palm oil reach over 1,000 MT (metric ton) and have increased more than nine fold since then. Back in September, with Malaysian palm oil prices near six-year lows, the fear was imports could rise even more.

Supporters of GM mustard now twist this situation to call for the introduction of GM mustard to increase productivity. This is of course erroneous on two counts: first, it was not poor productivity that led to the massive increase in imports; second, GM mustard is even lower yielding that varieties that already exist – no amount of manipulated data can hide this, as we can now see.

However, there has been a big winner in all of this: the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia. India is now the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-­thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.

Indonesia leads global production, but the cheap price is often offset by the destruction of large tracts of tropical forest. Oil palm plantations often replace tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of climate-changing gases (see this analysis). Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the US and that’s largely due to the production of palm oil.

From 2000 to 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Planned expansion could wipe out the remaining natural habitat of several endangered species. This is a ludicrous situation considering that Brazil and Indonesia spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it. The two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rainforests.

If there were ever a case study of how to rundown your own edible oils sector, then India is it. At the same time, in doing so, it has been a main contributor to the growth of Indonesia's palm oil sector and in the process has fuelled massive environmental damage that is impacting the whole planet.

And now, under pressure from the feed and poultry sector, India could be on the verge of encouraging the flow of soy imports into the country, which would further undermine the indigenous sector. If you can’t fool the nation into growing GM, then at least you can get it to import it from the likes of South America or the US - which could be in the pipeline (see this, page 1).

Just as in Indonesia, this would also fuel massive environmental catastrophe as well as further widespread social devastation and damage to human health (outlined here).

Growing concerns about Australia’s housing bubble

Mike Head

Recent weeks have demonstrated the increasing precariousness of Australian capitalism’s reliance on soaring property prices, particularly over the past two years, to offset the implosion of the two-decade mining boom and the worsening fallout from the 2008–09 global economic breakdown.

Investment in the mining sector is still plummeting because of collapsing demand for raw materials in China and globally. Australia’s economy has so far avoided a recession, unlike other export commodity-dependent countries. But that is largely because of debt-fuelled household spending, undertaken on the basis of record low interest rates and steep rises in housing values.

Last week’s national accounts illustrated this unstable situation. As a headline figure, gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 0.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, in the December quarter of 2015. That was a marked slowing of growth to an annualised 2.4 percent, down from the annualised 3.6 percent recorded during the first quarter of 2015.

Treasurer Scott Morrison seized on the headline result of 3 percent growth during 2015 as a whole, falsely claiming it as evidence the economy was successfully shifting from dependence on resources to broader sources for growth. “We are now growing faster than every economy in the G7 and well above the OECD average,” he said.

In reality, most of the growth in the last three months of 2015 came from household consumption expenditure, which contributed 0.4 percentage points to GDP, and public fixed capital formation (government spending), which added 0.2 percentage points.

Without those two factors, the economy would have registered nil growth. Business investment, which has been falling for two years, continued to plummet—an indicator of the underlying economic deterioration. Private business investment fell 3.3 percent during the quarter, driven by a 12.3 percent drop in engineering construction.

Falling wages are making the housing bubble all the more unsustainable, and socially explosive. Homes are being priced further and further out of the reach of millions of young and working-class people. Since 2008, average house prices in the two most populous cities, Sydney and Melbourne, have risen 80 and 50 percent, but real wages have now been declining for three years.

The consumer price index (excluding volatile items) increased by 7.2 percent over the three years from December 2012, while the wage price index—a measure of wages per hour excluding bonuses—rose by only 7 percent.

Average wage income per person continued to fall, by 0.6 percent, in the December quarter, reflecting the ongoing attack on wage levels by employers and the elimination of thousands of full-time jobs in the mining industry, car and steel plants, retail stores and other basic industries.

Revealing the growing disarray in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton directly undercut Treasurer Morrison’s effort to shore up business and consumer confidence. Trying to discredit a Labor Party pledge to confine “negative gearing” tax incentives to new houses, Dutton said the policy would be a “disaster” because it would lower house prices and lessen the capacity of property investors to take out margin loans to buy shares. “I think the economy will come to a shuddering halt and I think the stock market will crash,” he declared.

Dutton’s remarks underscored the extent to which the economy now depends on this speculative activity. Former Victorian Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett added to the sense of crisis, denouncing Turnbull as a self-interested and cowardly leader who was raising the possibility of calling an early federal election “simply to cover up [the government’s] own failings.”

The government’s in-fighting and mounting criticisms by the corporate elite of its failure to impose pro-business austerity measures are compounding nervousness about the danger of a property crash. Westpac bank’s consumer confidence index dipped below 100 for January, indicating that pessimists outnumber optimists. The share of survey respondents who believed real estate to be the wisest place for their savings plunged to 14.7 percent, from 23 percent in December.

Concerns that Australia’s housing market resembles that of the United States on the eve of the 2007–08 “sub-prime” loan crash were aired in the Australian Financial Review last month. Hedge fund Variant Perceptions released a report comparing the dubious lending practices and sky-rocketing house prices in western Sydney to those documented in the film The Big Short. The report described meetings with 20 mortgage brokers where prospective borrowers “were coached on how to get things through banks” and told that banks did not check pay slips in assessing loan applications.

There are signs that the bubble is due to burst. In the past two years, Australia’s housing stock has surged $900 billion in value to $5.6 trillion, or 3.6 times Australia’s GDP—a larger ratio than either Japan or Ireland exhibited before their housing markets crashed in 1989 and 2006.

Australian household debt as a share of GDP has surged to 120 percent, the highest ratio in the industrialised world. Almost half of new loans are being written by third parties, mostly mortgage brokers, who are paid on commission with little incentive to ensure the loan is ultimately repaid.

More than 40 percent of loans (about 70 percent for investor loans) being issued are “interest only”—that is, the lenders are not required to pay the loan amount for decades to come—all on the expectation of endlessly rising house prices.

Between 2011 and 2015, housing investment more than doubled, temporarily offsetting the mining crash, but it began to drop last April, with the biggest fall-off in apartments. Corporate economic forecaster BIS Shrapnel has warned of a “very messy end” to the apartment boom, with all cities, except Sydney, expected to be in over-supply by 2017.

The acceleration of mortgage debt appears to have reached its limit. Both the value and number of new housing loan approvals fell in January from December, by 3.4 percent and 3.9 percent respectively. Investors continued to withdraw, with the value of their loans falling by 14.8 percent to $11.4 billion, compared with averages of about $14 billion a month last year. Building approvals also dropped 7.5 percent in January—twice the fall economists had expected.

Average rents are already falling in mining-dependent states—down by 8.4 percent in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, over the past year—and are predicted to start dropping in Sydney and Melbourne in coming months. Average weekly Sydney rents stand at $598, up just 1.5 percent over the past 12 months.

Australia’s big four banks have grown fat on the back of home lending. They are in the top 25 banks globally by market capitalisation. They are also among the most leveraged. From 1880 to 1940, Australia’s major banks had equity and retained earnings of 15 to 25 percent of their assets, but today they have little more than 5 percent.

This week, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) deputy governor Philip Lowe sought to hose down fears of a housing bubble but admitted that the rapid surge in house prices was starting to slow. In a speech to the Urban Development Institute, Lowe insisted that the central bank had “a high degree of confidence that the Australian banking system is resilient to house price fluctuations.”

An RBA report last year argued that wealthiest 40 percent of households hold 80 percent of the mortgage debt and most could survive a 25 percent fall in house prices. This only proves that it is the richest layers of society that have benefited from the housing boom, at the expense of working class people unable to buy homes. In any crash, however, as in the US, it would be the poorest and most vulnerable households that would lose their jobs and homes.

Sri Lankan government to convert Western province into investment hub

Minusha Fernando

The Sri Lankan government has announced that it will commence work this month on its so-called Western Region Megapolis Project (WRMP). Touting it as a “flagship project,” the government aims to merge the Colombo, Gampaha and Kaluthara districts and create a cluster of towns and cities with new infrastructure to attract foreign investment.

The project involves clearing land for the development of financial districts, shopping complexes, hotels, condominiums and leisure parks, as well as improved harbour and airport infrastructure. Thousands of workers and lower income residents will be forced out to make way for the project.

WRMP minister Champika Ranawaka told the media on March 1 that the project will start in parts of Colombo and 23 townships and include minimising road congestion and flooding problems, as well as new parks.

The WRMP is more ambitious than the project initiated by former President Mahinda Rajapakse, who promised to convert Colombo into a major South Asian commercial and tourist hub. The Urban Development Authority (UDA) was brought under the control of the defence ministry secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, the president’s brother, who employed military methods to clear land ear-marked for investors.

The UDA demolished hundreds of shanties, small houses and small businesses and started to evict 60,000 people. Protests against evictions were suppressed using the military and police.

The Rajapakse government’s plan was mainly concentrated on Colombo. The WRMP, which is being unveiled under conditions of a deepening global economic crisis, includes three districts with a combined population of six million, the majority of them poor. According to the latest estimates, the grandiose project, which requires $US40 billion for new infrastructure, will be completed in three phases between 2016 and 2030. Colombo city will function as its epicenter.

The WRMP is a desperate attempt by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to attract international investors to take advantage of Sri Lanka’s cheap labour and low taxes.

Wickremesinghe claims he developed the plan in 2004 on the advice of Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. The Singapore autocrat used police-state methods to convert the small island state into major international commercial, industrial and financial centre. Sirisena and Wickremesinghe are resorting to similar measures to suppress opposition to the WRMP by workers, students and poor peasants.

Officially launching the project on January 29, Wickremesinghe declared: “[T]he world is supporting us today. We have to utilise the foreign aid and attract more investments by grabbing this opportunity.”

Wickremesinghe’s boast of “world support” follows the ousting of Rajapakse in a US-backed regime-change operation in the January 2015 presidential election. Washington was hostile to Rajapakse as a result of his economic and political ties with Beijing. The US, along with India, Japan and the European Union, has provided political backing for the new government.

Sirisena and Wickremesinghe, who was installed as prime minister, rapidly shifted foreign policy away from China and toward the US. Previous multi-billion investment agreements with Beijing for construction of the Colombo Port City Project have been scaled down to satisfy US and India, although the government is still seeking Chinese investment in other ventures.

WRMP minister Champika Ranawaka told the state-run Daily News on January 29 the Megapolis project was “based on economic prosperity, social justice, environmental sustainability and people’s quality of life.” The government, he admitted, had to deal with “the issues concerning slum dwellers.” He said in Colombo alone there were 68,000 families and over 100,000 in the Western Province.

“The country needs to have proper housing and social mobilisation programs to transform the lives of these slum dwellers to live a quality life in dignity,” Ranawaka said.

This is a lie. “Social mobilisation” is simply another name for the eviction and relocation of the poor. Like the former Rajapakse administration, Ranawaka cynically claimed there would be dwellings provided for those evicted. The government, however, has no plans to build the required number of homes.

“The benefits are much greater and have a positive impact on a much larger community than those who are negatively impacted initially,” Ranawaka said, citing the Mahaweli Agricultural Project. This scheme, which displaced thousands of poor farmers, was forcibly imposed by the United National Party government of President J.R. Jayawardene during the 1980s.

Sirisena, Wickremesinghe and their parties previously exploited the anger of shanty dwellers who were evicted under Rajapakse, but the present government’s political agenda and class hostility toward the poor is no different.

Ranawaka told a recent meeting that Sri Lanka’s shanty dwellers were mostly “drug addicts, drug peddlers or alcoholics or underworld thugs.” The Rajapakse government similarly slandered Colombo slum-dwellers as a “social evil.”

In recent weeks, UDA officials have ruthlessly moved against Colombo shanty dwellers in line with the government’s megapolis project.

On February 12, UDA officers demolished small huts in Colombo’s coastline suburbs—from Wellawatta to Galkissa. Four days later, the UDA sent workers with backhoes to demolish about 250 makeshift huts at Thotalanga in Colombo, where hundreds of poor are living.

When residents opposed the UDA’s destructive operations and blocked local highways, the government mobilised special task force police to attack them. The Thotalanga shanty-dwellers refused to leave and are now living in plastic-covered sheds. Last week, they were threatened by a UDA project director—a military brigadier—who declared they had two weeks to vacate the area.

The refugee crisis and the polarization of Europe

Peter Schwarz

Idomeni, Lesbos, Calais … every day one sees pictures that for decades one could not have imagined in Europe: refugees, including families with small children, living in improvised tents and burrows, drowning in rain and mud, lacking medication and food. And again and again: closed borders, barbed wire and heavily armed police who attack desperate refugees with tear gas and batons.

Large sections of the population look on these brutal scenes with horror and disgust, but the official political debate on the refugee crisis takes place within a narrow spectrum ranging from the right to the ultra-right. In politics and in the media, the only voices allowed are those arguing for unrestrained nationalism and the sealing-off of Europe’s internal borders, or those who, in the name of a “European solution,” support the militarization of the EU’s external borders and a dirty deal with the Turkish government.

Compassion for refugees, hospitality, aid, the right to protection and asylum are all banished from the official discourse, which concentrates exclusively on the most efficient way to deter, criminalise and get rid of refugees. The large majority of the European population who, according to every poll conducted, sympathises with refugees and the untold numbers who have donated their savings and their free time to help them go unrepresented in newspaper columns and on talk shows.

In the German federal states holding elections on Sunday, the Greens, the Social Democrats and, indirectly, the Left Party are promoting the policies of Angela Merkel, who advocates hermetically sealing off the EU’s external borders. The only opposition comes from the right wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which want to close off the German borders.

The arguments in Germany resemble those in Great Britain, where voters in the Brexit referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union, are faced with two equally right-wing alternatives: to support the reactionary institutions of the European Union or endorse a British “independence” that removes all obstacles to the intensified exploitation of the working class and more ruthlessly chokes off immigration into the country.

The restriction of the public debate to right-wing positions, adhered to by the entire media and all established parties, serves a political purpose: to prevent the defence of and support for refugees from joining up with the fight against the capitalist system, which has nothing to offer to wide layers of the population but social misery, repression and war. Those incensed by the racist agitation and arson attacks of the ultra-right are to be directed into the political channels of a government policy that is just as reactionary and which has provided fertile ground for the growth of the extreme right.

The brutal mistreatment of refugees is the culmination of a rightward turn in European politics that has developed over a period of years. The actions taken against refugees are the sharpest expression of this shift to the right so far, but not its cause. The real cause is the deepening crisis of international capitalism and the accompanying sharp social polarization. As was the case in 1930s, the ruling elites react to this crisis by stirring up nationalism and xenophobia, building up the state apparatus and pursuing their international economic and political interests through the means of war.

In 2008, when the criminal machinations of speculators brought the world financial system to the brink of collapse, the governments of Europe, like those throughout the world, pumped trillions in public funds into failing banks to rescue the fortunes of the rich. When, as a consequence, some weaker European countries almost collapsed under their debts, threatening the stability of the Euro, the EU and the German government insisted that the working class bear the cost. They made an example of Greece, forcing its population into bitter poverty.

In 2014, Germany and the EU supported the right-wing coup in Kiev and provoked a confrontation with Russia which has continued to intensify. This coincided with the escalation of the war in Syria. After the US and its European allies destroyed first Afghanistan and then Iraq and Libya, the Syrian conflict has now developed into a war involving great and regional powers, threatening to plunge the world into a third world war.

The victims of these wars who attempt to escape certain death by fleeing to Europe are treated worse than animals. One sees what the ruling elites of Europe are capable of. What began with austerity dictates in Greece and other countries finds its continuation in the inhumane treatment of refugees, and is a signal of what workers and youth can expect in the future. Historical experience shows that agitation against foreigners and members of different religions (then it was Jews, today Muslims) serves as the prelude to the oppression of the entire working class.

Under these conditions, the defence of refugees, opposition to war and militarism and the fight against capitalism are inseparable. Only an independent movement of the working class, basing itself on an international socialist program, can prevent Europe’s regression into nationalism, barbarism and war.

This requires not only opposition to the extreme right, but also, and above all, a relentless political fight against the influence of pseudo-left tendencies that lull workers and youth with left phrases to secure and support the social assaults, the build-up of the state, and the war policies of the ruling elite.

The experience with Syriza in Greece has shown what such parties are capable of. The Tsipras government was brought to power at the beginning of 2015 because it promised an end to the brutal austerity measures of the EU. Since that time, Syriza has drastically sharpened austerity policies and taken on the role of the border police and prison guards for the EU.

The Left Party in Germany, Podemos in Spain and numerous other parties that promoted Syriza and support it to this day play no other role. They do not speak for the working class, but for affluent layers of the middle class who do not want to overthrow capitalism, but rather seek to preserve it at any cost.

There is massive opposition in Europe to the devastating effects of austerity measures, to the attacks on refugees and democratic rights and against militarism and war. But this opposition lacks a perspective and a political leadership. The International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections fight for the unification of the European working class based on a socialist program, for the United Socialist States of Europe.

The Financial System is a Larger Threat Than Terrorism

Paul Craig Roberts

In the 21st century Americans have been distracted by the hyper-expensive “war on terror.”  Trillions of dollars have been added to the taxpayers’ burden and many billions of dollars in profits to the military/security complex in order to combat insignificant  foreign “threats,” such as the Taliban, that remain undefeated after 15 years.  All this time the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.

The purpose of the Federal Reserve and US Treasury’s policy of zero interest rates is to support the prices of the over-leveraged and fraudalent financial instruments that unregulated financial systems always create.  If inflation was properly measured, these zero rates would be negative rates, which means not only that retirees have no income from their retirement savings but also that saving is a losing proposition.  Instead of earning interest on your savings, you pay interest that shrinks the real value of your saving.

Central banks, neoliberal economists, and the presstitute financial media advocate negative interest rates in order to force people to spend instead of save.  The notion is that the economy’s poor economic performance is not due to the failure of economic policy but to people hoarding their money. The Federal Reserve and its coterie of economists and presstitutes maintain the fiction of too much savings despite the publication of the Federal Reserve’s own report that 52% of Americans cannot raise $400 without selling personal possessions or borrowing the money.

Negative interest rates, which have been introduced in some countries such as Switzerland and threatened in other countries, have caused people to avoid the tax on bank deposits by withdrawing their savings from banks in large denomination bills.  In Switzerland, for example, demand for the 1,000 franc bill (about $1,000) has increased sharply.  These large denomination bills now account for 60% of the Swiss currency in circulation.

The response of depositors to negative interest rates has resulted in neoliberal economists, such as Larry Summers, calling for the elimination of large denomination bank notes in order to make it difficult for people to keep their cash balances outside of banks.

Other neoliberal economists, such as Kenneth Rogoff want to eliminate cash altogether and have only electronic money.  Electronic money cannot be removed from bank deposits except by spending it. With electronic money as the only money, financial institutions can use negative interest rates in order to steal the savings of their depositors.

People would attempt to resort to gold, silver, and forms of private money, but other methods of payment and saving would be banned, and government would conduct sting operations in order to suppress evasions of electronic money with stiff penalties.

What this picture shows is that government, economists, and presstitutes are allied against citizens achieving any financial independence from personal saving.  Policymakers have a crackpot economic policy and those with control over your life value their scheme more than they value your welfare.

This is the fate of people in the so-called democracies.  Any remaining control that they have over their lives is being taken away. Governments serve a few powerful interest groups whose agendas result in the destruction of the host economies. The offshoring of middle class jobs transfers income and wealth from the middle class to the executives and owners of the corporation, but it also kills the domestic consumer market for the offshored goods and services.  As Michael Hudson writes, it kills the host.  The financialization of the economy also kills the host and the owners of corporations as well.  When corporate executives borrow from banks in order to boost share prices and their performance bonuses by buying back the publicly held stock of the corporations, future profits are converted into interest payments to banks.  The future income streams of the corporations are financialized.  If the future income streams fail, the companies can be foreclosed, like homeowners, and the banks become the owners of the corporations.

Between the offshoring of jobs and the conversion of more and more income streams into  payments to banks, less and less is available to be spent on goods and services.  Thus, the economy fails to grow and falls into long-term decline.  Today many Americans can only pay the minimum payment on their credit card balance.  The result is massive growth in a balance that

can never be paid off.  It is these people who are the least able to service debt who are hit with draconian charges.  The way the credit card companies have it now, if you make one late payment or your payment is returned by your bank, you are hit for the next six months with a Penalty Annual Percentage Rate of 29.49%.

In Europe entire countries are being foreclosed.  Greece and Portugal have been forced into liquidation of national assets and the social security systems.  So many women have been forced into poverty and prostitution that the hourly price of a prostitute has been driven down to $4.12.

Throughout the Western world the financial system has become an exploiter of the people and a deadweight loss on economies.  There are only two possible solutions. One is to break the large banks up into smaller and local entities such as existed prior to the concentration that deregulation fostered.  The other is to nationalize them and operate them solely in the interest of the general welfare of the population.

The banks are too powerful currently for either solution to occur.  But the greed, fraud, and self-serving behavior of Western financial systems, aided and abeted by governments, could be leading to such a breakdown of economic life that the idea of a private financial system will become as abhorent in the future as Nazism is today.