Russian De-Escalation in Syria and the Future Shape of the Middle East

Omar Kassem

Obama’s withdrawal from the Middle-East after the failure of the policy initiated in 2009 of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in order to isolate and destroy Hezbollah, was grasped by the Iranians with both hands. They were quick to reinforce Assad as their guarantee of their link with Hezbollah’s territories in Southern Lebanon. Qasim Suleimani, the supreme commander of Iranian strategy in the Arab world, visited Moscow covertly in August 2015. He studied the possibilities with the Russians of redressing the situation in Syria, and this Vladimir Putin quickly saw as an opportunity to reinforce the Russian navy base in Tartus, as well as acquire a new airbase near Latakia.

The DAESH/ISIL threat was used by Putin as an excuse for the prospective intervention to give to the Americans and Europeans, who were in no position to put up resistance to the idea. Russia decided on its action under the guise of joining the ‘fight against terror’ full-time and the US, facing the contradictions inherent in its policies in the Middle-East, had no choice but to welcome the idea.

The collapse of US foreign policy in the Middle-East

A US plan had been in place for régime change in Syria ever since 2006, in order to break the Iran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis by proxy, with the help of Saudi Arabia and Egypt in fomenting sectarian divisions in the country (Assange 2015: 267). Hezbollah was a central piece of Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare across the region, and a prime example of Iran’s cultivation of ideologically-motivated militias, of which the Houthis in Yemen and the Badr brigades in Iraq would be other examples, to extend its influence. Hezbollah had demonstrated itself to be a formidable opponent against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War, launching thousands of rockets into Israel territory during the conflict and surviving a ferocious air attack by what was supposed to be one of the world’s most powerful air forces.

By the time Barak Obama became President in 2009 and Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State, the policy was formally articulated to topple Assad and install a régime in his place, using jihadi forces. When Hillary Clinton was revealed by WikiLeaks saying that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide (Wikileaks Embassy Cables:30Dec2009), this was not to be a prelude for dismantling these connections, but for gaining control of them to serve the new Obama doctrine of achieving the same imperial aims which had eluded G W Bush II, only this time by proxy (DOD Aug2012).

In 2009, Inderjeet Parmar predicted that Obama’s foreign policy wouldn’t differ much from that of G W Bush, irrespective of his much-vaunted vocal opposition to the Iraq War and his Senate vote against the ‘Petraeus surge’ in 2004. Parmar wrote that the liberal internationalists in the Democratic Party’s Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) – often known as Clinton’s think tank – were at one with neo-conservatives from the Iraq War onwards, and  demanded that America “rally the forces of freedom and democracy around the world to defeat [the] new menace and build a better world” (Parmar 2009:4).

But just as the democracy-promotion myth would be shown up to be the malformed abortion that it was under Bush when Hamas won their elections in Gaza 2006, US policy in Syria would soon have face up to the fact that the Muslim Brothers would become a major player in the Syrian National Congress (SNC), the Syrian opposition group established in Istanbul in 2012. It was Hillary Clinton who killed off any chance of making a success of the SNC because of her outright opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, calling the it a waste of time and a mere ‘talking-shop’. The U.S. State Department’s policy opposition to the freely and fairly elected Egyptian Muslim Brothers would also later become clear (House Foreign Affairs Committee 29 Oct 2013), consistent with Jason Browlee’s assessment of overall US policy against the Muslim Brothers of “keeping critics of their [U.S.] Middle-eastern policies out of power” (Brownlee 2012: 10).

Once again, the Emperor had no clothes. Democracy and freedom was clearly not the principle on which the US could conduct itself abroad in any systematic way. These contradictions would short-circuit spectacularly with the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013, when Obama showed himself unwilling to act even on his own red lines with respect to Assad’s crimes, now that the US had become conflicted over the need for his removal. And there is little doubt that it was Assad who committed this war crime, if one follows UN Chief Weapons Inspector Ake Sellstrom’s arguments. Israeli army sources had reported at the time that Assad’s forces had launched the heinous attack, although the irony always is with Israeli reports that they are rarely believed. Seymour Hersh, however, subsequently reported that the finger of blame should have been pointed at Turkish Intelligence, but Hersh’s single source method of reporting seems to have let him down.

The quick reaction of the Russians, anxious to protect Assad, and offering to defuse the situation by having Assad surrender his arsenal of chemical weapons, should have told us everything we needed to know at the time about the real culprit. Obama was off the hook, thanks to Putin.

The Iran Nuclear Deal

On invading Iraq, G. W. Bush had threatened Iran and Syria that they were next on his list.  Both countries understandably then backed the Sunni insurgency which scuppered the US army’s occupation. This lead to David Petraeus’ call for the 2004 surge (which Obama voted against), which eventually only succeeded through the payment of massive bribes to the Sunni tribes. As Dexter Filkins would later report in the New Yorker Magazine in 2013, Qasim Suleimani actively organised Sunni jihadi groups that became al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Assad régime in Damascus also became a staging post for European jihadis travelling to Iraq. It should hardly have been surprising when Hassan Abboud, the leader of the jihadi group Ahrar el-Sham in Syria, up until he was killed in September 2014, accused the Iranians of having created DEASH/ISIL. Assad himself would militarise the 2011 Arab Spring by releasing incarcerated jihadis from Sednaya prison into the swelling crowds of protesters.

Iran’s strategy for survival against US threats using asymmetric warfare didn’t rely only on the creation of militias around the Arab World with ideological fealty to the Iranian régime, which harked back to the policies of Shah Ismail I Safavi against the Ottomans in the 1500s. It also clearly promoted groups with opposite ideologies, as and when they were needed in order to destabilise the US hegemon’s grip on the region. Iran thus didn’t rely only on its control of the Straights of Hormuz, on developing ballistic technology, and on creating a ‘nuclear problem’, to dissuade the US from military action against it, but actually also posed a serious region-wide threat through its octopus-like presence across the region.

Clearly, Iranian policy succeeded, which is why by March 2013 Obama had begun conducting secret negotiations with Iran in order to unwind the ‘nuclear problem’. The current shape of the Middle-East can be said to have resulted in large measure from Iran’s strategy during the years of siege. Iran in its new phase, on the other hand, faces the entirely new problem of how to deal with the consequences of its actions, in the face of Saudi Arabian reaction.

The Iran deal set a course for US-Russian relations prior to the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, which was difficult if not impossible to change. The Russians were crucial to Obama’s plans to manage Iran’s stockpile of nuclear material and central, therefore, to achieving a deal with Iran. This deal was intended by Obama to be the final legacy of his second term in office. In any event, whatever other problems such as Ukraine there might have arisen in US-Russia relations, both powers always have had the common interest of working to monopolise nuclear power and to control its proliferation. Russia entered Syria confident that the US couldn’t object.

The Russian interest in Syria

The Russian interest in Syria is entirely a matter of energy policy, which required developing a strong military presence in Syria. The Tartus naval base would need to be complemented with the new Latakia airbase whilst, in order to fully reinforce the new air capacity for the long term, the airbase would need to be equipped with its state of the art S-400 air defence system. This would give it unquestioned air superiority in the region.

However, the S-300 and the S-400 have been the subject of much diplomatic manoeuvring by the US and Israel over the years. It would have been difficult to justify transferring this system to Syria in normal circumstances, and some kind of military escalation on the conventional front would be necessary to provide the grounds for such a move. The constant incursions into Turkish airspace by Russian warplanes during October/November 2015, together with ferocious airstrikes against Turcoman tribesmen seem to have been devised to solicit a reaction from the Turks and thus enable Russia to act as it wished. The result sought was forthcoming when the Turks downed a Russian warplane on November 24, during yet another incursion into Turkish airspace.

No other possible explanation exists for Russia engaging in intensive activity military activity in western Syria right on the Turkish border, 350 km away from Raqqa, the Syrian base of DAESH/ISIL, the ostensible target of the Russian campaign if Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was to be believed. Putin thus sacrificed a Russian warplane to achieve his military strategy. Claims that the warplane hadn’t violated airspace were discredited and finally put to rest in the course of Putin’s theatrics over the downed jet’s black box. The withdrawal now of the majority of Russian forces on the basis of ‘mission accomplished’, leaving behind re-equipped naval and air bases in Northern Syria, without a dent having being made in  DAESH/ISIL forces in Northern Syria, presents us with an overwhelming circumstantial confirmation of the narrow Russian objectives in Syria described here.

Although one could call the Tartus/Latakia military objective narrow, an important strategic objective results from it in respect of Russian energy strategy.

Up until the Russian incursion into Syria, Turkey had gained an important strategic position in respect of energy supplies to Europe as a result of the conflict in Ukraine and the cancellation by the EU of the South Stream gas pipeline project to Europe through Bulgaria. Turkey was open to Russia’s idea of diverting South Stream through Turkey. However, Turkey was also building the Trans-Anatolian pipeline  (TANAP) to Azerbaijan through Georgia, which would supply Turkey and Europe with Caspian and Iranian gas. Furthermore, Syria and Southern Turkey provide the main routes for the supply of oil to the refinery hub at the port of Ceyhan, from Iraqi Kurdistan (KRG). These routes would be those that would also be used for any prospective land route for pipelines carrying Qatari gas. This would become a serious competitor for Russian gas to Europe, if supplied more cheaply overland, rather than by sea using the current LNG conversion system.

The recurrent Middle-eastern nightmare thus repeats itself, as Syrian civilians killed and wounded in Russian airstrikes since September 2015 have paid the price for a foreign power’s energy strategy. Russia has sought in the period up to the current disengagement to apply leverage to Turkish decision-making on energy flow to Europe, standing as it does now in the way of the close Turkish Qatari alliance becoming realised in the form of an overland gas pipeline, and even warning Israel over a possible rapprochement with Turkey, which would see yet another source of gas open up for Turkey. The Russian intent so to encircle Turkey was not only evident in its Syria policy, which included support for the Syrian-Kurdish (PYD) branch of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), plainly and actively involved in terrorist action in Turkey at the time, but also in openly reinforcing its Armenian  military base at Gyumri with a squadron of attack helicopters, to shadow the development of TANAP.

It is clear, however, that the energy trading hub that Turkey represents is only half the story. The current price of energy is a major problem and Russia’s economy is in recession as a result of a combination of EU sanctions, and the sharp drop in government revenues resulting from oil and gas prices.

It isn’t enough for Russia to ensure priority for its gas transfers through Turkey through its strong-arm tactics. It is also necessary for it to try to manage the energy markets in order to organise an orderly rise in prices, for which coming to an agreement with Saudi Arabia is an absolute necessity. The current disengagement in Syria was a foregone conclusion ever since energy negotiations began with Saudi Arabia in early February. Leaving Assad now to his own devices, although in a stronger position than had been, is a precursor to an important state visit by King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose policy is unbendingly one of removing Assad from power. Russia’s disengagement was a condition of improving relations with Saudi Arabia.

The current oil and gas markets are clearly problematic for producers. Although downward price movements in these markets are traditionally reinforced by increased production as producers seek to capture more revenue, and although the US shale overhang will remain in place for decades to come to form a price ceiling for these markets, it is clear that Russia and Saudi Arabia see the possibility for collaboration on achieving a middle-of-the-road solution from their perspective within the shadow of the shale overhang somewhere around the $50-$60 p/b range. This is significant, as it would represent almost a doubling of current prices.

It is crucial for these calculations that Iranian energy production policy can now by influenced by Russia and that Iraq in turn can be influenced by Iran, contrary to the judgement of some analysts. Not only does the new regional political set-up permit a scenario where Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq cooperate, it makes eminent commercial sense for them to do so.

The future shape of the Middle-East

The new phase will have crucial implications for political developments in the region, especially in regard to the Kurdish question. The head of steam that the PKK and YPD built up as a result of the possibilities for them to exploit the Syrian chaos to their advantage has not only clearly unsettled Turkey, but also Iran. Just as Turkey seeks to maintain the integrity of the Syrian state in order to avoid increasing secessionist demands by Turkish Kurds, Iran has always sought to maintain the integrity of the Iraqi state to avoid just such a fate with respect to its own Kurds. The Russian rapprochement with Iran culminating in the Syrian intervention is now strained because of Russian backing of the PKK/YPD in the context of its encirclement policy of Turkey, setting off processes which Iran views with horror.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey has in fact formally pursued a policy of democratic pluralism ever since 2009, when the Kurdish language was accepted as an official language in the educational system, and Kurdish culture promoted across schools and universities with the launch of new degree courses. The Turkish political process also became wide open to Kurdish parties, and the Kurdish Democratic Party (HDP) in fact made substantial gains in the first of the two sets of parliamentary elections that took place in 2015 (June). This, however, did not stop the PKK from engaging in a series of violent acts of terror, and the HDP to publicly back these actions, with the aim of achieving an independent state under its rule in South-Eastern Turkey.

The PKK and the HDP are unlikely to succeed in their efforts. With the second set elections in 2015 (October), and after the PKK had aggressively re-launched its terror campaign, two million Kurdish voters instantly switched allegiance from the HDP to the AKP, with the AKP ending up with well over three times the number of Kurdish MPs than the HDP. What, therefore, will defeat extremism in Turkey is an open democratic system and a fast-growing liberal economy that seems to be able to absorb even millions of Syrian refugees into its cities (three-quarters of these refugees are housed in towns and cities and only a quarter in camps). This capacity is not necessarily available in Iran as its polity is currently constituted. Therefore, although Turkey is suffering terribly from the effects of the Syrian civil war, fomented originally by US foreign policy decisions and then exacerbated by US foreign policy indecision, it is a country which is more likely than Iran to return to a state of peaceful growth. Iran, faced now with its new opening, will have to deal with a whole host of problems that this will bring.

In addition, Iran has to deal with the Saudi Arabian reaction to the past policies of regional militia-promotion, no longer appropriate to the new phase. The Rouhani régime is particularly embarrassed by the recent fall from grace of Hezbollah on the Arab street, changing as it has done from Arab hero to regional pariah, as a result of its support of the Assad régime, and it role in the particularly gruesome siege of Madaya and the starving of its people.

Implicit in the Russian disengagement implicitly is an acceptance of the new difficulties that will begin to beset its Iranian ally. Continued intervention in Syria would also damage its own prospects for limiting the spread of DAESH/ISIL through a pro-Kurdish stance, as Sunni rebels began to threaten to make common cause with DAESH/ISIL against a coalition of Assad and Kurdish forces. The fluidity of the jihadi phenomenon means that such a policy will backfire on Russia itself as DAESH/ISIL enters Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Clearly supporting the integrity of all states in the region, especially Syria, and putting its weight behind a political solution, is seen by Russia now as the only way of eradicating the extremism.

Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the three powers that will determine the future of the region east of Suez, and all three are committed to the territorial integrity of both Syria and Iraq. Iran and Saudi Arabia will clearly differ as to the nature of the régime that should rule in each capital, however. The likely result of this is likely a stalemate, with the situation de juro in each country showing a different de facto reality on the ground. This will not be to the disadvantage of those three powers, who will each have their clients and their spheres of influence, more than likely displacing the traditional influence of the US, UK and France, in Syria and Iraq.

In contrast with these prospects for the region east of Suez, great uncertainty will continue to cloud the future of Egypt and Libya. While Egypt was put under the rule of a strongman in order to protect Israeli interests, and democracy scuppered, like everything else in the region that the US has done in this century, the eventual outcome will be the opposite of what is intended. The descent of the country into economic and financial chaos, and the rise of extremism as a result of the persecution of moderates, could have consequences far worse than the experience in Syria so far unless the moderates return to power. There is no other option: all the ageing cadres surrounding the Egyptian régime have become as threadbare are the country itself, and could not possibly redress its economy.

The greatest disservice the US has done to its policy of dictator-promotion is to have completely discredited the military as a political and even as a technocratic actor on the Egyptian stage. It is only the arrogance of US and Israeli élites that makes them unable to see that the descent of Egypt on their watch into what can only be described as a circus, and a bloody one at that, will backfire on them.

What’s Behind the Rise in Income Inequality? Technology or Class Struggle?

Matt Vidal

Over the past three decades, income inequality has risen in most of the 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A recent analysis of 22 OECD countries from 1985 to 2013 found that inequality increased in 17 of them (including the US, UK, Canada and Germany), underwent little change in four (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Greece) and declined in only one (Turkey). Over the same period, in the 17 richest countries GDP growth primarily benefitted the top 10% of the population, with the bottom 40% receiving little from a quarter century of growth.

The prevailing explanation for rising inequality – the mainstream economics explanation – is that technology did it. There are no capitalists making investment decisions, no managers making employment decisions and certainly no class struggle. Only technical change, supply and demand. Here I want to make the case for the centrality of class struggle in driving inequality.

According to Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, “Most economists agree that a leading cause [of rising inequality] is skill-biased technological change — the tendency of new technologies to increase the relative demand for skilled workers.”

A more sophisticated and convincing version of the technology story is the “task approach” of MIT economist David Autor and colleagues, which is about the automation of jobs. Computerization is able to easily replace routine jobs, which happen to be those in the middle of the skill distribution (e.g. clerical work and bookkeeping). Both higher-skill jobs (e.g. professionals, managers and technical workers) and lower-skill jobs (e.g. cooks and cleaners) are nonroutine jobs, hence unable to be replaced by automation.

The task version of the technology story well fits the data showing polarization of the job structure into high-wage and low-wage jobs, and it is an important part of the story. But it’s not the most important part of the story.

If technical change is the main driver of income inequality, then either version of the technology explanation predicts that inequality should trend similarly in countries that are comparable in terms of level of economic development, industrial structure and vocational training and educational systems.

To examine this, I’ve plotted income inequality for Canada, the UK and the USA. In addition to having similar industrial structures, these countries are all conventionally understood to be institutionally similar, highly liberal economies with minimal government intervention and only a residual social safety net. Further, they have comparable vocational training and education systems with similar outcomes on a range of indicators.

As a measure of inequality I used the Gini coefficient, in which perfect equality has a value of zero (0) and complete inequality a value of one (1). Using OECD data, the only measure available for all three countries going back to the early 1970s is the Gini for net income (after taxes and transfers). The Gini for gross income would have been better, because it would display the picture produced before government transfers. However, all three countries have similar levels of government income transfers, so the net income measure will suffice.

Source: OECD (Canada and US) and Institute for Fiscal Studies (UK).

The trends in the chart are not easily squared with the prediction of the technology story. From the early 1970s to the present, income inequality has risen more or less continuously in the US, while in Canada it was stable for two decades until around 1994, rising continuously thereafter. In the UK inequality rose faster than the US until 1990, thereafter remaining comparatively stable while it continue to rise in the US.

In a bit more detail, in Canada the trend in inequality was largely flat for 21 years, fluctuating only 0.019 points between from 1976 to 1997. Over the same period, inequality in the US rose more or less continuously, a full 0.062 points. In the UK, inequality rose even faster than in the US in shorter period of time: shooting up 0.101 points in just 13 years between 1978 and 1991.

Compared with Canada, variation from low point to high point in the Gini coefficient over the 21 years from 1976 to 1997 was three times higher in the US and five times higher in the UK.

A more plausible explanation for the variation in income inequality trends across the OECD would refer to the distinct political economy of each country. Because such an explanation requires an in-depth analysis of each country, I focus the remainder of this short article elaborating a class struggle argument for the US case.

The skill-biased technical change story is an extension of human capital theory. According to the latter, wages are determined by the skill levels of individual workers; according to the former, technology increases the productivity of skilled workers, hence increasing demand for them. Human capital theory suggests the rise in low-wage jobs would be driven by a rise in low-skill jobs. However, in a recent academic paper I found that from 1960 to 2005, there was a 15 percent decrease in the low-skill job share of total employment.

In short, compared with previous decades, the contemporary American economy has a lower proportion of low-skill jobs yet a higher proportion of low-wage jobs. What gives?

The US Case

A high corporate profit rate in the 1950s and ‘60s allowed a class compromise: Capital provided secure jobs, rising real wages and opportunities for training and promotion; labor provided industrial peace and cooperation with management leading to continuous productivity improvements. The class compromise was forged within the corporation.

Sociologists have shown that there is no single version of economic rationality. Rather, people come to understand their interests through particular ideologies or cultural logics. In the 1950s and ‘60s, corporate managers understood their business interests to include not simply maximizing shareholder value but also sales growth and market share. The dominant logic of corporate organization was one of vertical integration.

The logic of vertical integration included internalizing employment: the development of internal labor markets and the protection of workers from market forces. As a result, many low-skill jobs in large manufacturing corporations provided security, opportunities for training and promotion, and decent pay through administratively-determined wages (patterned on union contracts in the auto sector).

Vertical integration led to high levels of industry concentration. It has been demonstrated that industry concentration ratios have a remarkably strong negative correlation within inequality, a full –0.8 in the US from 1950 to 2006. Inequality is reduced by high concentra­tion due to the substitution of administrative policies regarding wages for market determination.

However, the profit rate began dropping due to a combination of increasing capital intensity in the economy (pushing the profit rate down) and increasingly high wages associated with the class compromise (cutting into the profit rate). From a postwar high of 26.8 percent in 1951 the corporate profit rate dropped to a low of 9.4 percent in 1982.

Source: BEA data (corporate profit/corporate net capital stock).

Under intensified international competition and a declining profit rate, capital abandoned the class compromise and began to recover profits out of wages.

One of the most well-known outcomes of capital’s assault on labor was deunionization, which played a central role in rising inequality, the former explaining up to one-fifth of the latter in the US.

Equally important, under the rise of the ideology of shareholder value, the dominant logic of employment became one of externalization. This included outsourcing, downsizing, and lean staffing strategies (which reduced opportunities for training and promotion) along with increased use of part-time and temporary employment.

Most important was a return to the market-determination of wages even for full-time, long-term jobs. This provides an explanation for the increase in low-wage work despite a decrease in low-skill work: under the class compromise, low-skill jobs provided decent wages because they were shielded form market forces. Under the ideology of shareholder value and the logic of employment externalization, market competition now forces the wages of low-skill workers down as far as possible.

A central outcome of these measures has been a steady decline in the wage share of total national GDP (leading to a rise in the profit share) from a high of 59.9 percent in 1970 to just 50.7 percent in 2011. This is behind the partial recovery of the profit rate.

In sum, much of the rise in inequality is the result of class struggle, as capitalists and their managers have attempted to recover profits out of wages. This happens through real people making real decisions – what industries and regions to invest in, how to organize the corporation, how to structure employment contracts – not by the impersonal march of technology.

To be sure, there are structural dynamics driving these decisions – the UK and Canada experienced similar declines and rises in profit rates and employment costs, and engaged in similar responses, though with different timings and magnitudes. Nonetheless, it remains the case the decisions of a small class of capitalists are behind rising inequality and stagnating living standards.

Rains Become A Nightmare!

Mohammad Ashraf

(Once welcome as a boon from the Gods, the rains these days give nightmares to the people!)

Recently Yasir Ashraf did a front page story in the paper titled, “Rains no more welcome in Kashmir”! According to him, people living in the areas where the Jhelum had breached its embankments were living in fear. The breaches had been plugged only with sand bags and no action had been taken for strengthening these with concrete embankments. In fact some people were frantically trying to get inflatable boats as a safety measure. The Government had wasted 18 months and still there was no sight of permanent measures being taken. The dredging of the Jhelum and the flood spill over channel had been recently taken up under the orders of the Governor. However, the pace is abnormally slow and it will take years. What is needed is an accelerated job on a fully mechanised basis round the clock. Reportedly a Kolkata based firm has been engaged for mechanised dredging and they are supposedly employing three machines. The extent of the River would require more than a dozen machines, with an equal number of JCBs and fleets of trucks (dumpers) to remove the mud and silt and deposit it away from the River at safe places.

Equally important are the embankments especially along the banks of the River all along the city of Srinagar. These need to be strengthened with embedded concrete piles or with concrete walls. Apart from dredging the stretches near the source and near the other end in Baramulla, the River embankments have to be made impregnable and its depth increased by at least ten feet or so along its course through the City of Srinagar to contain and channel flood waters safely. The same treatment has to be given to the flood spill over channel. Except for big projects such as the flyover construction, most of these works are allegedly assigned by the concerned engineers to small contractors on political considerations. A road stretch of few kilometres gets divided among four to five contractors. This results in delay as one contractor completes the job earlier while as the other one dithers. Then there is the problem of quality control.
The entire project of flood prevention which includes dredging, strengthening of embankments needs to be allotted to a major resourceful organisation on a turnkey basis with a stipulation of a time frame with huge penalties for default. In fact, the organisation constructing the fly over could be asked to take up the work of concrete embankments as they already have enough equipment and manpower. The flyover completion may get slightly delayed but that is a better choice than getting it totally washed away! This could be done by the Governor directly by exercising the residuary powers vested in him under the constitution. An instant of this nature occurred during late seventies in Gulmarg. The skiing was dependant on a ramshackle rope tow. A French Ski lift company owner Mr. Montaz visited Gulmarg and met Sheikh Sahab. He asked him if he could put some ski lifts on priority in Gulmarg. Mr. Montaz said he could do it within a month. Sheikh Sahab directly assigned him the work and three ski lifts were imported and installed in Gulmarg. Had this not been done, Skiing in Gulmarg would have never attained national and international status which it has at present!

Regarding the flood panic, it is mistimed. Severe floods do not occur in winter as it usually snows in higher reaches. The worst period of floods is late summer and early autumn. At that time it rains all over and the water has only one channel to go and that is the River. All other outlets are closed due to the ripening of the rice crop. Also last time there were other factorssuch as the combination of the western disturbances with the monsoon spill over from the South. The recent climate change has made the occurrence of such freak events a strong possibility. So there is still time to complete the job of protecting the habitations from the flood fury. In fact, to guarantee right to life is the first constitutional duty of a government. Other niceties come later.

This job should have been the priority number one in the so called developmental agenda of the last Government which is now in limbo! They did absolutely nothing and dithered for months on end. They are still bargaining for their existence without bothering about the fate of the people. If the Governor accelerates the pace of development and takes up the flood prevention measures on a war footing within a stipulated time frame people may prefer the Governor’s or even President’s Rule to an elected government of self-serving greedy politicians!

On Burning Ground: The Human Cost Of India’s Push to Produce More Coal

Fred Pearce

India’s state-owned coal company is ramping up production at the nation’s coal mines, such as this open-pit operation in Jharia, to fuel economic development. (Photo: Fred Pearce)

“Come,” says Raju. “Let me show you my house.” His clean white shirt, well-brushed hair, and calm demeanor belie the almost apocalyptic landscape in which he and his family lived.

We are standing on the edge of a 650-foot unfenced drop into an open-pit coal mine that is shrouded in dust. As we gingerly approach his home, a two-room brick hut just 30 feet from the precipice, we have to clamber over the rubble of collapsed houses and avoid deep fissures and spots of hot earth from which smoke is erupting. What remains of the once-rural village of Lantenganj — now deep inside India’s largest coalfield in the mining state of Jharkhand — is being consumed by underground fires that burn the coal beneath. The government-owned company Bharat Coking Coal, whose mines are responsible for the fires, wants the villagers to leave — for their own safety, the company says, and so the mine can be expanded.

But Raju’s family and the 50 others that cling on here say they will not go without proper compensation and new homes near to their jobs in these mines. “We’ve got nothing from the government,” Raju tells me, as we inspect a crack that has opened up in his living room floor. “We want a better deal or we will not move.” Until, presumably, their houses fall into the abyss below.

These are economic boom times in India. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is presiding over 7-percent annual growth, fueled by the coal that generates most of the country’s electricity and powers heavy industries like steel and motor manufacturing that dominate Jharkhand, one of India’s industrial heartlands. To keep the growth going, Modi last year called for the state-owned company Coal India, whose subsidiaries include Bharat Coking Coal, to double its production by 2020.

Many fear the climatic consequences of India’s drive for coal-powered growth. Other major coal mining nations like the United States and China are cutting back on burning the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. But India, the world’s third largest coal producer and fourth largest greenhouse-gas emitter, stood out as a climate bad guy at the United Nations’ climate talks in Paris in December. It has set itself on an energy growth path that will increase emissions by an estimated 60 percent by 2030.

That is bad enough. But there is a local price to pay too — in polluted air and damage to the lungs and living conditions of people, like Raju, whose homes are in such mining areas as the 108-square-mile Jharia coalfield that includes Lantenganj. According to Gurdeep Singh, of the Indian School of Mines University in Dhanbad, the biggest nearby city, Jhaira is probably the most densely populated coal-mining area in the world, with up to half a million inhabitants.

The Jharia coalfield is gigantic. Its nine large open pits and dozens of deep mines and smaller pits are responsible for about a quarter of India’s coal production, including almost all of its highly prized bituminous coal, which is burned in the blast furnaces of the country’s major iron and steel corporations, such as Mittal and Tata.

As I experienced during a trip to the Jharia coalfield early this month, nearby communities are frequently shrouded in a noxious fog of smoke and dust that catches in the throat and dramatically reduces visibility. A study last year by the Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research in Dhanbad found widespread evidence of lung diseases and other health impacts.

The problem is worsened by the fires that lurk underground in about a tenth of the coalfield. Aside from blackening the air, they cause widespread subsidence as they eat away the coal and cause the ground above to fissure and collapse. Over the years, they have consumed an estimated 37 million tons of coal , according to Glenn Stracher of East Georgia State College in Swainsboro, an expert on underground coal fires, who rates the Jharia conflagrations among the worst in the world.

The fires typically ignite spontaneously when minerals in the exposed coal are oxidized and heat up. Some have been burning since the British began deep mining here over a century ago. But the subterranean conflagrations have dramatically worsened since independent India began open-pit mining in the 1970s.

Official reports mention 70 long-standing major fires. But in the plush air-conditioned local offices of the government-run Mines Rescue Station, the people whose main job is to contain and extinguish fires in productive mines by sealing them off told me that the current tally is 84. They are losing the battle.

This sounds as though it would be bad for business. Indeed, the fires have reportedly cut off some 1.5 billion tons of coal from future mining. But Jharia businessman Ashok Agarwal, who campaigns for the rights of those who are losing their homes to the fires, told me he believes the mining company sees the fires more positively – as a means to force out villagers who get in the way of expanding the mines to increase production. “The fires are being used to secure more and more land,” he said. “As they spread, the people are forced to evacuate.”

The company, which did not respond when contacted by Yale Environment 360, reportedly denies this motive. But the Jharia coalfield has a tradition of brutality. It and the neighboring steel city of Dhanbad are notorious in India for being the home of coal mafias. These are criminal gangs that reputedly control trade unions, money lending, a huge clandestine trade in coal — and politics. In 2012, Bollywood made a movie based on the local mafiosi, called Gangs of Wasseypur .

An hour’s rickshaw ride away from Jharia, serried ranks of four-story apartment blocks make up Belgaria, a township under construction by the government’s Jharia Rehabilitation and Development Authority since 2006 to house evacuees from the advancing mines and fires. It currently has 2,300 households, each family having been given a free one- or two-room apartment for life. But it could grow to many times that size if the government’s aim to shift 100,000 people from the coalfield is ever carried out.

The township has a bank and a school, and much cleaner air than on the coalfield — but no jobs. Evacuees have to commute back to the coalfields to find even casual labor. Yet many – like Pandey, who came from the mining village of Bokapahari five years ago – have more or less given up trying to find work. “There are no jobs now,” he said.

Life in the township remains surprisingly rural, with chickens and cattle roaming the streets. In his tiny apartment, Pandey’s daughter was cooking a lunch of leafy green vegetables and rice; I noticed her stove burned dried cattle dung, rather than coal.

An hour later, I was in Pandey’s former home village of Bokapahari, its remaining houses sandwiched between an abandoned mine and one still growing. As I watched smoke billow from a subterranean fire just meters from his home, Mohammed Ansari told me that his family would be happy to move. “But the people in charge of the relocations want bribes, and we won’t pay,” he said, with a dismissive snarl.

The slow progress in moving people away from the hazardous and unhealthy coalfield suggest that government in Jharkhand is characterised less by ruthlessness than by inefficiency and corruption. The state has been condemned by Human Rights Watch as one of India’s most corrupt.

Beyond Jharia, the state is peppered with coal mines: giant open pits descending for hundreds of meters, a few old underground shafts, and many drift mines, which are reached down steep slopes from the surface. Close to the village of Kujju, north of the state capital of Ranchi, I met Bhodo, a member of the Oraon tribal group, whose members originally moved there to work on tea estates, but now labor in the mines.

After washing off the grime from his shift at the Kujju mine in a nearby river, Bhodo was walking home along a road made impassable to our car by subsidence from an underground fire in the mine. Though more than 50 years old, he said he continued to work underground operating machinery — a job he inherited from his father.

He went home, put on a shirt, and got in the car, and we headed to the steep sloping entrance of the drift mine. “The mine isn’t safe with the fires,” he said as we drove. “There are 10 kilometers of tunnels in there, and you can easily get lost in them.”

At the mine, the hard-hatted manager, who did not give his name, said the 150 miners, working in three shifts, brought around seven tons of coal to the surface every hour. It was a relatively small enterprise of Central Coalfields, another subsidiary of Coal India. Even so, I was shocked to see two children playing unattended amid the heavy machinery. Nobody seemed concerned.

India may fancy itself as the new China, driving toward becoming a 21st-century nation. But in a journey of several days across the coalfields of Jharkhand, it more resembled an industrialized caricature of the old India.

Most astonishingly at odds with the new image were the coal cycle-wallahs. I first came across them on the road north out of Ranchi, pushing specially strengthened bicycles loaded with bags of coal. There were dozens of them – some on their own, and some in groups. Each bike carried about a quarter-ton of coal. Uphill was very hard work, though freewheeling downhill looked fun if you could steer the load.

One group of cycle-wallahs, resting halfway up a steep incline, told me they were taking coal more than 40 miles from mines at Urimari to Ranchi, a journey that took two days. Each load cost them around 600 rupees, or $9, to purchase at the mine and would be sold on arrival to brokers for 1,500 rupees, making a profit on the journey of a paltry $13.

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, of the Australian National University in Canberra, who has analyzed Jharkhand’s cycle-wallahs, estimates that most of them are members of tribal minorities and that they transport more than 3 million tons of coal each year. Far from diminishing, the volumes they carry may have doubled since Lahiri-Dutt first started investigating a decade ago, and she says more children are now involved in what are often family businesses.

Cycle-wallahs handle only an estimated 1 or 2 percent of all the traded coal. But their continued role in an industry said to be central to India’s economic progress seems to encapsulate both the sheer human endeavour and resourcefulness of those at the bottom of India’s society and the dysfunctional nature of an economy that would rely on them.

Jharkhand today graphically illustrates the huge disparity between Modi’s growth agenda for India, and the stark reality of the social and environment conditions across this country of more than a billion people. If the prime minister’s modernization project — and the role of coal in it — moves forward, India would seem set to create a mounting tide of victims — from the cycle-wallahs and the refugees of Jharia’s coal fires, to the country’s air quality, to the planet’s climate.

New Burmese president installed amid tensions with the military

John Roberts

Burma’s (Myanmar) parliament, the Assembly of the Union, on Tuesday formally elected the county’s new president and two vice-presidents, who will take up office and lead the new government from April 1.

The new president is Htin Kyaw, a close confidante of National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He will replace Thein Sein, a former general who led the military-backed United Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) government that was routed in last November’s national elections.

Suu Kyi, who has said she will run the government through her presidential nominee, was excluded from the presidency by the country’s constitution because her two children have foreign citizenship. The NLD leader will choose the cabinet ministers, with the exception of the three important posts reserved for the military—defence, border security and the interior.

Htin Kyaw has two key qualifications for the presidency. He is loyal to Suu Kyi and will not unduly upset the military. He has known Suu Kyi from childhood and has longstanding family connections with the NLD. He is not a well-known political figure. Until his selection as the NLD’s presidential candidate, he had not made a public political speech.

A trained economist, Htin Kyaw worked in the junta’s foreign economic relations department, where he served as deputy director before resigning in 1992 to assist Suu Kyi. He played no significant role in the mass protest and strike movement in 1988 that shook the foundations of military rule.

Right up until the last moment, Suu Kyi had been seeking to cut a deal with the military that would allow her to assume the presidency. Following last year’s election, she held three closed-door meetings with military chief Min Aung Hlaing and offered additional cabinet posts to the military, in return for a constitutional fix to remove or temporarily suspend the clause excluding her from the presidency.

Last December, Suu Kyi met with the former military dictator Than Shwe and assured him that she would not focus on the past—that is, she would not pursue the military for its crimes including the brutal suppression of the 1988 uprising. In turn, Than Shwe endorsed her as “Burma’s future leader.”

The military’s stance has since hardened. On March 9, a senior NLD upper house member told the media: “[Suu Kyi] believed that she would be able to work with the military, but after the last meeting with the commander-in-chief [Hlaing], she realised that she cannot negotiate with them.”

The differences between the NLD and the generals are routinely presented in the international media as a conflict between “democracy” and the autocratic military. In reality, the two sides represent competing factions of the country’s ruling elite, each intent on defending their class interests.

Suu Kyi and the NLD speak for layers of the Burmese bourgeoisie whose interests were marginalised by the military’s domination of the economy and advocated a turn to the US and the opening up of the country to Western investment.

As the Obama administration implemented its confrontational “pivot to Asia” against China, the junta tilted its foreign policy away from Beijing and toward Washington. It released Suu Kyi from house arrest in 2011, allowed carefully-managed elections and initiated a raft of pro-market reforms to encourage foreign investment.

Suu Kyi collaborated with the military, serving as its de facto ambassador to present Burma as a “developing democracy” that is open for business. Nevertheless, sharp differences remain. The military is prepared to allow the NLD to formally assume power but is determined to keep it on a tight leash.

The military not only has significant economic interests of its own. It is fearful that the NLD will not be able to contain the popular opposition that will inevitably emerge to the government’s pro-market agenda. The military’s control over the defence and interior ministries ensures that it can intervene directly to suppress any social unrest.

Significantly, the interior ministry has sweeping powers over government at all levels. Its General Administration Department handles coordination and communication for all ministries and controls appointments to all regional and state-level government bodies, as well as for thousands of towns and villages.

The manner in which the president and vice-presidents were chosen also ensured that the army would have its nominee in a key political post. The military’s choice of hardliner Myint Swe, who was elected vice-president on Tuesday, is particularly ominous. He headed Than Shwe’s feared military intelligence and oversaw the violent suppression of the 2007 “Saffron” protests of Buddhist monks. He is still subject to US sanctions.

The NLD’s choice of Henry Van Thio for the second vice-presidential post indicates that Suu Kyi and her party will continue to make concessions to the military. Van Thio is an ex-army major with close ties to one of the junta’s business cronies. As an ethnic Chin, he was also installed to make a pitch for support from the parliamentary representatives of the country’s various ethnic minorities.

Tensions between the NLD and military will continue. The army has a long list of demands, including that its officers be appointed as chief ministers in Arakan, Shan and Kachin states, as well as the city of Rangoon, the centre of the nation’s economic activity.

The generals are also acutely sensitive to any exposure of their corrupt practices and many other crimes. Last month the entire military lower house delegation stood up in protest at allegations by NLD members that the Thein Sein administration had mismanaged contracts.

The gesture was an obvious threat to pull the plug on the limited democratic reforms if the NLD did not drop the issue. One NLD member told the media: “We were scared when the military stood up … my heart just dropped … The situation was very tense.”

Glasgow City Council workers strike against cuts and poverty wages

Steve James & Minnie Watson

Two groups of Glasgow City Council (GCC) workers struck against poverty-level wages this week. The 130 primary school and nursery janitors are holding a three-day strike in pursuit of payments for heavy lifting and removal of dangerous materials from playgrounds. Since January, workers have been refusing to remove the materials.

Eighteen CCTV operators are also holding a 48-hour strike seeking allowances for their 24/7 monitoring shifts. Both groups of workers are employed by GCC’s so- called arms’-length agencies (ALEOs).

The janitors’ action follows years during which these workers have been deprived by Cordia—the ALEO set up by the City Council to run support and caring services in the city—of payments made to other groups of workers employed directly by GCC. The Working Context and Demands payment is worth between £500 and £1,000 annually. Similarly, the shift allowances being demanded by the CCTV operators from Community Safety Glasgow (CSG), another ALEO, are paid to other groups of CSG and GCC workers. Shift allowances can amount to £7,500 annually.

The janitors’ and CCTV workers’ stance expresses the huge tensions building up between the Scottish government, local authorities and their trade union accomplices on the one hand, and hundreds of thousands of local authority workers and the millions dependent on council services on the other.

Another round of spending cuts imposed by the Scottish National Party (SNP) administration on behalf of Tory central government and passed on by both SNP and Labour local authorities is likely to cost as many as 15,000 job losses. They will result in incalculable social misery in towns and cities where services have already suffered years of cuts and restrictions. Over the next two years, up to £1 billion worth of cuts are to be imposed across Scotland’s 32 local authorities, on top of cuts that have slashed 42,000 local authority jobs since 2008.

Glasgow alone intends to cut £133 million from spending through 1,500 job losses, and restrictions to overtime payments, holiday entitlement, and increased demands for “flexibility”. GCC’s financial crisis was further exposed with the publication by the Evening Times of a leaked e-mail earlier this month in which GCC “suggests” that Glasgow charities, which run a host of essential services, could be asked to repay money paid to them by the city’s Integrated Grant Fund.

Scotland’s other 31 local authorities are also planning brutal cuts. Edinburgh City Council has announced around 2,000 job losses, and Falkirk Council is expected to announce in excess of 400 more. In Argyle and Bute, all the council’s secondary school librarians have been made redundant. Dundee City Council is shedding 200 council posts. Cuts will be made to children and family services, domestic waste recycling, roads and street lighting.

Moray Council was considering raising council tax by 18 per cent and ignoring the SNP’s council tax freeze. It backed down after Scottish finance minister John Swinney warned them, and all councils, they would simply lose much of their government funding if they refused to comply. Moray has now set a budget and intends to raise the cost of school dinners and music tuition fees this year, and further cuts are being scheduled. Inverclyde Council delayed setting its budget for a month but in the end agreed to £6 million cuts and 50 job losses.

The trade unions have been a vital component in this sustained, year-on-year assault on council workers and service users. The main unions, Unison (which has 10,000 members in GCC alone), GMB, Unite, the EIS teachers union and builders union UCATT have opposed any struggle. The union executives are solely concerned with maintaining their close relations with local authority management and their Labour or SNP leadership.

Every struggle, which could not be entirely avoided, has been left isolated, with workers left to fight on alone, despite the identical threats and challenges faced by tens and hundreds of thousands of workers employed by the same organisations and in the same unions.

One expression of this is that Glasgow’s striking janitors picketed the City Chambers twice this week, but on different days from the CCTV workers, who are also Unison members.

Most of the city council’s workforce has not even been asked to vote for industrial action of any kind. As late as March 12, Unison’s Glasgow branch secretary announced only, with regard to the assault on workers’ holidays, “We’re now in the process of moving towards a strike ballot”. Unison will undoubtedly attempt to close down the janitors’ and CCTV workers’ disputes before risking any broader dispute.

The GMB union did hold a “consultative ballot” of 1,000 of its members in street cleaning, refuse and parks. Eighty percent of workers voted in a huge turnout, and of these, 95 percent backed industrial action. GMB official Benny Rankin conceded, “There has never been such a level of support for strike action in living memory”. Presented with a massive endorsement of industrial action, Rankin demanded GCC reverse its cuts or “we will move to a formal ballot for strike action”.

The reality is that neither Unison nor the GMB has the slightest intention of prosecuting a serious struggle in defence of its members. Rather, both are seeking a marginally altered funding package that can be sold to their members as a great victory.

Covering for the unions the pseudo-left led Defend Glasgow Services Campaign is calling for GCC to set a “balanced no-cuts budget”. In January, Unison Glasgow and its pseudo-left leaders and supporters called for councils, and indeed the Scottish government, to set budgets in defiance of central government guidelines. This, Unison claimed, “would allow time and space for the building of a national campaign to win the money required to fully fund jobs and services”.

A statement from the pseudo-left Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) seeks to maintain the same illusions in Glasgow’s Labour Party administration and the Scottish government. “It’s long past time that so-called ‘anti-austerity’ politicians from Labour and the SNP stood up and stopped playing pass-the-parcel with Tory cuts”.

In the event, not a single council set a no-cuts budget.

Council workers should reject the bankrupt policies of the trade unions and their pseudo-left apologists. In opposition to them, they should establish independent workplace committees to take up a genuine campaign against the onslaught of cuts, and against the Scottish government and council leaders who are implementing them.

Such a struggle must be based on uniting workers and service users across local authorities throughout the UK and would seek the support and active involvement of the widest sections of the working class against the austerity policies of the government, Labour and the SNP.

Constitutional crisis in Poland continues

Clara Weiss

Poland's conservative-nationalist PiS (Law and Justice Party) government has refused to recognize the decision of the Constitutional Court rejecting the recent judicial reform as unconstitutional.

The EU’s Venice Commission has sided with the Constitutional Court, and US officials have also condemned the PiS government for its attack on the Constitutional Court. On Saturday, there were renewed opposition protests in Warsaw and other Polish cities, with tens of thousands of people taking part.

After its election victory in October, the PiS rapidly carried through a bloodless coup, bringing the intelligence agencies and public media under its control, and blocking the Constitutional Court. Jarosław Kaczyński's party is trying to arm itself against rising social tensions by building an authoritarian state, resorting to rapid militarization and threatening war against Russia.

The rightward shift of the Polish government has exacerbated the crisis in the EU and has escalated tensions with Germany in particular. For the first time in its history, the European Commission has imposed the so-called rule of law mechanism on Poland. It will give the Polish government recommendations for a change in some laws; if Warsaw refuses to comply, Poland could lose its voting and veto rights in the EU.

Now the Court has declared unconstitutional the 22 December 2015 legislative amendments, with which the PiS sought to regulate the operation of the Constitutional Court in summary proceedings. These prescribe that all meetings of the Court must be attended by at least 13 of the 15 judges, deal with all cases in chronological order, and decisions are reached by a two-thirds majority. The Constitutional Court justified its rejection of these changes on the basis they make its regular functioning impossible.

The PiS government has refused to either recognize or publish this ruling. A judgment of the Constitutional Court only becomes legal in Poland when it is published. The PiS argues that the Court’s decision was reached illegally, because it had not followed the 22 December guidelines it has declared illegal.

Shortly after the ruling of the Constitutional Court, the Venice Commission confirmed the EU’s attitude towards it. The assessment of the Venice Commission had been requested by the Polish Foreign Ministry after protests by the EU and especially Germany in December.

The Venice Commission concluded that the changes in the law made “effective” action by the Constitutional Court difficult, if not impossible, threatening “democracy” and “human rights.”

The PiS has already announced it will not recognize the Venice Commission's assessment, and several prominent officials said they would not tolerate “foreign interference” in Polish affairs.

Meanwhile, some US senators have expressed relatively mild criticism of the Polish government. Republican and Democratic senators have sent a letter to Prime Minister Beata Szydło expressing concern about the state of democracy and the rule of law. Szydło rejected the criticism as being an interference in Polish affairs.

The US government has kept noticeably quiet in recent months and expressed no official criticism of the PiS government, which places even more importance than its predecessors on an alliance with the US in the confrontation with Russia. Among others things, a permanent NATO troop presence in Poland is to be agreed at the NATO summit in Warsaw in July. Washington will not put this alliance in jeopardy at any cost.

At the same time, a letter by US senators, including John McCain, who is known for his anti-Russian positions, expresses concern that the political crisis in Poland is spiralling out of control and could undermine US strategy in Eastern Europe.

Both the EU and the US are concerned about the economic orientation of the PiS, which aims to limit the influence of foreign capital in the Polish economy in the interests of Polish small business.

On the other hand, the opposition movement, led by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD) and supported by the neo-liberal parties Civic Platform (PO) and Nowoczesna, speaks for sections of the bourgeoisie and the urban middle class, who profited from EU membership and the opening up of the country for international capital and who see their interests threatened by the policy of PiS.

Encouraged by the position taken by the EU in support of the Polish Constitutional Court and the intervention of some individual US representatives, the opposition in Poland held more protests in Warsaw and other cities on Saturday. The Warsaw protests, among the largest since the beginning of the so-called democracy movement, were attended by some 15,000 people according to the police. The opposition put the figure at 50,000.

As with previous demonstrations, the protest march consisted of a sea of Polish and EU flags. Some US flags were also to be seen. Members of KOD, which organized the protest, were seen selling Polish and EU flags on the fringes of the demonstration.

The demonstrators did not chant slogans, but made noise with vuvuzelas, daubed red and white, the colors of the Polish national flag. Posters mostly attacked President Andrzej Duda and PiS head Kaczyński. Many KOD badges repeated the slogan that had dominated the 1989 demonstrations: “We are the nation.” After protesters passed in front of the presidential palace, the demonstration gradually dissolved after a little over two hours.

It speaks volumes about the political and social orientation of the KOD movement that it holds up the EU and the US as guarantors of “democracy” and “human rights”, in a situation in which they are depriving millions of people of their homes through war and treating those fleeing worse than animals.

UK Budget: Austerity for workers pays for tax breaks for corporations and the rich

Robert Stevens

Conservative Chancellor George Osborne’s annual budget proposal, announced Wednesday in the House of Commons, consists of give-aways for big business and the super-rich and austerity measures on working people.

As well as billions of pounds in additional spending cuts, education provision is to be opened up to the private sector on an unprecedented scale—with all schools forced to become Academies. All primary and secondary schools in England will be “set free from local education bureaucracy” and must become academies by 2020 or have plans to do so by 2022, said Osborne.

The budget was announced under conditions of marked economic decline, with the economy now £18 billion smaller than projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) just three months ago. GDP growth for this year has been revised down to 2 percent from 2.4 percent and will fall to 2.2 percent for 2017.

As a result of slower growth, lower tax receipts and declining real wages, it is estimated that the national debt will increase by £50 billion over the course of the parliament. The Financial Times editorialised Wednesday that Osborne was delivering his budget in an “atmosphere of fiscal claustrophobia.”

Osborne warned, “Financial markets are turbulent,” the “outlook for the global economy is weak” and it makes “for a dangerous cocktail of risks.” He was obliged to cite the warning of the International Monetary Fund this month that the global economy is “at a delicate juncture” and faces a growing “risk of economic derailment.”

While noting these dangers, Osborne proceeded to outline policies that will only lead to a further slump in the UK economy.

A massive decline in public spending and in the incomes of millions of working class people is to be imposed under conditions in which, as Osborne boasted, “Last autumn’s Spending Review” delivered “a reduction in government consumption that is judged by the OBR to be the most sustained undertaken in the last hundred years of British history—barring the periods of demobilisation after the first and second world wars.”

His budgets over the last five years had “reduced the share of national income taken by the state from the unsustainable 45 percent we inherited, to 40 percent today,” he gloated. “My spending plans in this Parliament will see it fall to 36.9 percent by the end of this decade.”

The budget was trailed with predictions that around £4 billion in cuts would be made to disability benefits, but Osborne announced larger cuts still. £1.2 billion is to be cut immediately from the 640,000 disabled recipients of Personal Independence Payments (PIP). This will rise to a total £4.4 billion cut from PIP by 2020. Many people receiving PIP, who need help with dressing themselves or using the toilet, face losing up to £150 per week. These cuts follow on from the £28.3 billion already taken from the disabled over the past five years.

The government will save a further £2 billion in public sector pension costs by raising planned public service pension contributions, in line with a lower discount rate, while not compensating departments for the additional costs they will face. This will hit all “unfunded” pension schemes in the public sector, including those for the National Health Service, teachers and civil servants.

In contrast, the richest are to be handed a £523-a-year tax cut, by raising the threshold for higher rate income tax by more than £2,500.

Even more wealth is to be funnelled to the rich with Osborne declaring, “Our policy is to lower taxes on business.”

Corporation Tax, currently set at 20 percent was set to fall to 18 percent for the financial year April 2020. Osborne announced, “Today I am going further. By April 2020 it will fall to 17 percent.” Corporation Tax will then have been reduced by 9 percent in the space of a decade, with Osborne stating, “Let the rest of the world catch up.”

Capital Gains Tax is being slashed from 28 percent to 20 percent, or from 18 percent to 10 for basic rate payers. This will only benefit those with substantial capital that has appreciated in value.

In response to demands from North Sea oil companies hit by a collapse in the price of crude, Petroleum Revenue Tax, which stood at 35 percent, is to be abolished. The Supplementary Charge—an added tax on the profits of oil companies—will be halved from 20 percent to 10 percent. In response, the share values of the oil conglomerates surged, with BP up 3.5 percent, Shell 3 percent, and the oil services business Wood Group 4 percent higher.

In his one token gesture, Osborne, in response to concern over obesity and widespread ill-health issues, announced that soft drinks companies would pay a levy on drinks with added sugar. But this will only begin in April 2018 and will have a negligible impact on the soft drinks companies, with the price passed on to the consumer.

Osborne attempted to portray the economy as hit by a temporary blip and presented a series of wildly optimist projections leading to a public finance surplus of £10 billion by 2020. What is certain is that any deficit reduction is premised on a continuation of the attacks on the living standards of workers, pensioners and young people. The OBR noted, “£3.5 billion of as-yet unidentified cuts” are to be “generated by an ‘efficiency review’ that will report in 2018.”

In his response, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described Osborne as a “chancellor who has produced a budget for hedge fund managers more than for small businesses.”

Osborne’s was “a budget of failure. He’s failed on the budget deficit, failed on debt, failed on investment, failed on productivity, failed on trade deficit, failed on the welfare cap, failed to tackle inequality in this country.” [emphasis added]

What is the implication of Corbyn including the “welfare cap” in Osborne’s list of failures? His criticism of the Tories for a failure to cut welfare spending was one echoed by Britain’s right-wing media, which insisted on no more retreats in reducing the living standards of millions.

His attack renders null and void the other pro-forma criticisms Corbyn made of the budget. In fact, Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had foreshadowed Osborne’s budget by making clear that Labour are ready to carry out an austerity programme in government.

McDonnell refused to commit to a penny in public spending under a future Labour government, stating his desire “to ensure that the Government’s debt is set on a sustainable path.” Labour “will commit to ensuring that, at the end of every Parliament, government debt as a proportion of trend GDP is lower than it was at the start,” he pledged. “Let me make it absolutely clear. I will be absolutely ruthless about how we manage our spending,” he told the BBC last week.