University of California installs secret spyware system

Norisa Diaz

Over the last few months, reports have revealed that the University of California (UC) Board of Regents, presided over by ex-chief of Homeland Security and former Democratic Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, has sanctioned a secret spyware system capable of monitoring and collecting data from all individuals within the networks of the ten UC campuses and five medical centers throughout California.

As head of the UC Board of Regents, Napolitano is one of 26 members who oversee one of the state’s largest institutions and employers. The University of California is comprised of almost 20,000 faculty members, 200,000 staff, and a student body comprised of nearly 250,000. The spyware system has been installed in complete secrecy, without the knowledge or consent of students, faculty, and staff.

The UC Office of the President (UCOP), has issued statements that the spyware is necessary to prevent “cyber-attacks” and what it terms “Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).” The office cites a July 2015 UCLA cyber-attack that put the personal and medical information of 4.5 million people at risk. The UCOP stated that from “time to time, if a serious cybersecurity threat arises that may potentially impact multiple campuses, the Office of the President may direct campuses to coordinate security monitoring, investigation, and threat remediation activities.”

Though the spyware has been in place since August 2015, information of the spyware was not revealed until December 2015 when Ethan Ligon, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley campus and member of the Academic Senate-Administration Joint Committee on Campus Information Technology, sent an email to faculty members, ignoring orders by the UC administration to keep the project confidential.

“The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus, and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of [all] this data… This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus,” Ligon wrote in the email.

UC Berkeley campus IT staff also showed the device to Associate Professor Greg Niemeyer because they felt “sufficiently uncomfortable” with the system and its lack of transparency. Niemeyer told the DailyCal, “Right now we don’t know, we can’t ask and we can’t find out…The whole operation is covert, and we can only assume from the hardware we see that it’s extremely expansive.”

The UCOP has chosen a data collections system, Fidelis XPS, made by Fidelis Cybersecurity, which has the ability to inspect and intercept all communications, including encrypted emails, and has the ability to analyze the contents of that communication.

Upon revelations of the Fidelis spyware, students, staff, and faculty have justifiably vocalized the threat of such a spyware system to their privacy rights and academic freedom.

“Unfortunately, many have been left with the impression that a secret initiative to snoop on faculty activities is underway,” Napolitano said in a statement Monday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

There is no reason to take Napolitano’s statements for good coin. As the former chief of Homeland Security for the Obama administration, Napolitano possesses an immense familiarity with NSA spyware systems and privacy infringement.

In 2012 while serving in her previous post, she oversaw the “Secure Communities” program to identify and gather fingerprint and other information on immigrants. She also expanded the 287(g) program which cemented partnerships between federal government and local police to enforce immigration law.

Expansion of these programs were deemed necessary to counter “home-grown threats,” Napolitano said, and called for “a culture of collective responsibility” in which all individuals act as government informants.

When asked the question if she was suggesting that US citizens “from school days on” should be trained “to watch more carefully their schoolmates, their coworkers, their families and their neighbors and then more effectively report what they say to some authority,” Napolitano replied to the questioner that they were in fact “getting the gist of what I’m saying.”

Napolitano and the UCOP insist that the aggregated data will not be used for “non-security purposes.” However, it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which student protests and strikes for higher wages are easily categorized as “security purposes” by the UC administration. Additionally the security policy makes an exception to disclose the personal data for those considered to be engaged in “illegal activity.”

The 26 member UC Board of Regents are handpicked by the Governor to serve 12-year terms. Like the majority of the board, Napolitano has no experience in higher education. While governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009, Napolitano oversaw $100 million in cuts from the Arizona State Universities and another $40 million from the state’s community colleges. Such was the extent of her previous experience overseeing higher education.

The Regents and UC administration are overseeing a virtual wrecking operation increasing tuition all while libraries, art centers, classes, and campus services are cut. The Regents are so widely despised by students, faculty and staff that the board has been forced to hold meetings in secret, as all publicly known meetings have been meet with protests.

Currently, students are protesting the chancellor of UC Davis, Linda P.B. Katehi , after the Sacramento Bee reported her ties to private companies, including for-profit universities such as DeVry, and having received $420,000 over three years for serving on the board of textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons, exposing a true conflict of interest.

There is little doubt that such a protest would constitute “illegal activity” in the eyes of the administration, giving license to the administration to spy on student and faculty organizers protesting Chancellor Katehi’s obscene conflicts of interest.

Above all it is Napolitano’s background as Chief of Homeland Security which has made her the most desirable candidate to enforce cuts which will dramatically impact the lives of students, faculty, and workers throughout the system.

Like the other governor-appointed members, Napolitano hails from the highest echelons of the ruling elite. The students, faculty, and staff of the UC system have every reason to believe the Fidelis spyware and other methods will be directed and used against them as social struggles emerge in the coming period.

Canada’s Liberal government tables first budget amid mounting economic turmoil

Roger Jordan

Tabled Tuesday, the first budget of Canada’s Liberal government touted a plan to use deficit spending to stimulate an economy that has experienced slow growth for a decade and been roiled by the collapse in world oil prices and commodity prices since the fall of 2014.

Among OECD countries, only Switzerland, Norway and Greece have experienced slower growth than Canada during the past year.

It is the fallout from this downturn and the resulting decline in government revenues that accounts for the lion’s share of the government’s projected deficit of $29.4 billion or 1.5 percent of GDP in the 2016-17 fiscal year.

Canada’s budget has been in deficit in every year since 2008, although Stephen Harper and his Conservatives pursued a harsh austerity agenda, cutting tens of billions from social spending. The difference is the Liberals are eschewing austerity rhetoric and championing a multi-year deficit-spending plan, including some very modest social spending increases and an enhanced infrastructure-building program, as a means of restoring the economy to high growth.

In last year’s election, the Liberals ran on a pledge to take on $26.5 billion in new debt over the next four years. But due to the deterioration in the economic situation, they are now projecting $113.2 billion in deficits over the coming five years.

In his budget speech, Finance Minister Bill Morneau claimed the Liberals’ deficit-spending plan is aimed at helping “grow the middle class” and compared it with the Keynesian economic policies that were pursued by Canadian governments in the decades immediately following the Second World War. “In the post-war years,” declared Morneau, “Canadians built the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Trans-Canada Highway. They constructed new airports, subways, pipelines and communication networks. They created new colleges and universities—and parents sent their children to those institutions in record numbers.”

Morneau said the additional spending the Liberals plan during their first four-year term will boost economic growth by 0.5 percent annually and could create 100,000 jobs.

His claim that this will help rekindle the high-growth of the post-war years is a pipe-dream. The relatively brief period of rapid post-war capitalist expansion and stability arose on the basis of the three decades of world wars and depression that preceded it and out of which US imperialism emerged as the preeminent world power. Today, global capitalism is in its deepest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the US is at the very heart of the crisis.

Furthermore, Canada has witnessed a vast transfer of wealth into the hands of the wealthiest sections of society over the past three decades, as successive governments have slashed public spending and handed out lavish tax breaks to big business and the rich. All their talk of supporting the “middle class” cannot disguise the fact that the Liberals intend to leave this reactionary fiscal framework almost entirely intact. Even the Liberals’ proposal to implement a modest tax on stock-options over $100,000 turned out to be empty “progressive” election campaign rhetoric. To enthusiastic applause from corporate executives and business lobby groups, Morneau announced in Tuesday’s budget speech that the tax is “not in our plans” for this or future budgets.

Even if the Liberals implement their spending plans in full, government spending as a percentage of GDP is slated to be 15.1 percent in 2021 or very close to its record low-level since 1950.

Rather than the “middle class,” those who will benefit most from many of the Liberals’ new measures are upper-income families. According to economists’ calculations, the households that stand to reap the largest reward from the small tax cut the Liberals made at the end of last year and the new child benefit are families with an annual income of between $90,000 and $130,000.

The budget aims to uphold the interests of the ruling elite through infrastructure investments of $6.8 billion over the next two years targeted at accelerating business activity and boosting corporate profits and by pursuing big business-dictated trade and investment agreements, such as the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Overall, the Liberals’ infrastructure spending program is heavily back-loaded, meaning that just $11.9 billion in new funding will be forthcoming in the first four years, with a further $48 billion promised over the six fiscal years beginning in 2020-21.

The Liberals’ deficit-financed infrastructure plan has won support from broad sections of the ruling class. In line with debates within the bourgeoisie internationally, much of Canada’s business elite has concluded that, under conditions of anaemic economic growth worldwide and the threat of further financial crises, the commitment to a balanced budget and relentless austerity is counterproductive. Both the IMF and OECD have advocated member states take advantage of unprecedentedly low interest rates to finance infrastructure projects in the hopes of kick-starting economic growth.

For his part, Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz, who in January 2015 cut interest rates to 0.5 percent, has repeatedly said Canada’s central bank has all but run out of room to provide further stimulus and that the Bank’s monetary stimulus should now be supplemented by government “fiscal stimulus.”

In elaborating their plans, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Moreau are collaborating closely with leading figures from the global financial elite, as demonstrated by their appointment of Canadian Dominic Barton to head the recently-created council of economic experts that is tasked with formulating the government’s “economic innovation and growth strategy.” Barton is the managing director of McKinsey, a consulting group that advises the world’s largest corporations. A recent McKinsey report concluded that the next decade will see a significant decline in profit rates, and that “[g]overnments all over the world will face new questions about what it means to develop a comparative advantage that can last in this fast-changing environment.”

Morneau’s deficit targets are widely seen as readily achievable, since the government has built in a $6 billion annual contingency fund, twice the norm of recent budgets.

However, for all the talk in the corporate media, from both right-wing Conservative-aligned opponents of the budget and its “left” and liberal proponents, about the budget breaking the austerity mould, the Liberals are in fact committed to continuing to cut social spending.

Under the fiscal plan that Morneau tabled Tuesday, government operating expenses are to flatline after 2017. The Finance Minister also reiterated the Liberals’ commitment to find $6 billion in annual “savings” by their fourth year in office and, so as to underscore the government’s long-term commitment to spending restraint, he went out of his way to praise the Chretien-Martin Liberal government, which in the mid-1990s carried out the greatest social spending cuts in Canadian history, for its “wise management of the nation’s finances.”

Most revealingly, the Liberals’ indicated they intend to implement the Harper government’s health-care funding formula, which calls for tens of billions of dollars’ worth of health care spending cuts over a 10-year period beginning in 2017.

As for the military, the Liberals reiterated their commitment to maintain the 3 percent annual increase in base defense spending slated to begin in 2017 and last for at least nine years. The Trudeau government has already expanded Canada’s role in the US-led war in the Middle East and is currently considering military interventions in multiple countries in Africa, and in Haiti.

With the assistance of a compliant media, the Liberals are promoting their budget as a massive reinvestment in social needs. In fact, many of the budget’s “progressive” measures largely involve a repackaging of existing measures, or are back-loaded, so much of the promised spending will only take place years down the road.

The government’s much-heralded $23 billion “Canada Child Benefit,” which it extravagantly asserted during the election campaign will lift over 300,000 children out of poverty, replaces the previous government’s “Universal Child Benefit” and various child tax benefits. The government made a mere $4.5 billion of new funding available for the program, under conditions where child poverty and daycare costs continue to rise. Moreover, the new benefit will not be indexed to inflation.

Morneau pledged $8.4 billion in new money for services for Canada’s impoverished native people, but this is spread out over five years. Even if the government fulfills its pledges, per capita education spending on Native children will still fall well under the Canadian norm. Since 1996, Liberal and Conservative federal government have restricted increases in social transfers to Native communities to 2 percent—meaning, due to inflation and population growth, 20 years of annual spending cuts in real terms.

Similarly, the $3.5 billion made available to provide a 10 percent increase for single elderly people claiming the Guaranteed Income Supplement and to undo the Conservatives’ move to increase the age of eligibility from 65 to 67 for Old Age Security is much more modest than the headline figures suggest.

As for the unemployed, the majority of whom no longer even qualify for Employment Insurance, the government offered the thinnest of gruel. Workers in the areas of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland worst affected by the collapse of the energy sector will be able to more easily qualify to receive jobless benefits and receive them for longer.

In a sop for the trade union bureaucracy, which strongly backed the Liberals in the name of “Anybody But Harper” in last October’s election and whom the government is now grooming to serve as a means of smothering social opposition, Morneau reinstated the special tax privileges for union-controlled investment funds the Conservatives eliminated in their 2014 budget. The largest of these funds, Quebec Federation of Labour’s Solidarity Fund, has more than $10 billion in assets and serves to cement the tripartite ties between the union apparatuses, big business and government.

US airstrike kills 40 in Yemen

Gabriel Black

Three US airstrikes killed over 40 alleged Al Qaida affiliated militants on Tuesday at a former government military base west of the southern Yemeni city of Mukalla. Local officials estimated that another 25 militants were wounded in the attack.

The Pentagon reported that the site of the attack was a “training camp” containing “more than 70 AQAP [Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula] terrorists.” This was the second mass-casualty US airstrike this month, after a March 5 airstrike killed over 150 people in Somalia, whom the US claimed were linked to al-Shabaab, the major jihadist militia in Somalia.

The US airstrike on AQAP forces comes after a series of significant territorial gains by the jihadist militia. AQAP has come back from a position of considerable weakness, following a devastating military campaign by the Yemeni government in 2012 and repeated drone strikes by the US government.

However, since having their forces crippled four years ago, AQAP has made large advances in the past year due to the chaos fomented by the US-backed Saudi war against Houthi militias.

Both the United States and Saudi Arabia are seeking to prevent the Houthis from coming to power, after they quickly seized control of the capital and much of the country in 2014. The Houthis are a Shiite group politically close to Iran and have been supported by elements in the Yemeni military who are loyal to former US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Since the beginning of the Saudi-led air campaign on March 25, 2015, at least 6,200 civilians have been killed by Saudi bombers, according to the United Nations. Amnesty International estimates that at least 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes. In 2013 the population of Yemen was approximately 25.4 million people–meaning that about 10 percent of the population has been driven from their homes.

Earlier this month, on March 15, Saudi warplanes killed 119 people at a market in the Hajja province of Yemen. The UN estimated that 22 children were killed and another 47 people wounded. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein stated that the Saudi-led coalition may have perpetrated “international crimes” with the bombing and added that all in all the coalition was “responsible for twice as many civilian casualties as all other forces put together.”

It is in this context of bloodshed, aerial bombardment and mass displacement that AQAP has been able to regain significant amounts of territory. Last March it captured the southeastern port city of Mukalla, acquiring an oil terminal, money from the central bank and a weapons depot. In December of last year it took control of the capital of Abyan province, near Aden–Yemen’s major port city. Several other towns were taken shortly after, making AQAP a dominant force throughout southern Yemen.

The most recent strike by the US military was the largest airstrike in Yemen by the US in five years. Because it also follows another mass airstrike earlier this month in Somalia, some analysts have suggested this represents a change in strategy of the US. Typically US airstrikes have focused on taking out leaders of AQAP rather than broadly killing its members at large gatherings.

Adam Baron, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, speculated that the US could be concerned about AQAP’s rapid growth in southern Yemen over the past few months. “These are areas where Al Qaeda has really managed to get unprecedented amounts of control in Yemen,” Baron reported to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Micah Zenko, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies US airstrikes in the Middle East, told the Guardian, “The Somalia and Yemen strikes suggest that the White House has authorized a significant opening of the aperture to target gatherings of suspected terror groups, rather than named individuals who pose imminent threats.”

Both in Syria and Libya the United States has funded and abetted similar Al Qaeda backed forces in order to topple Bashar al Assad and Muammar Gaddhafi, respectively.

Similarly, in Yemen, AQAP was reported to be fighting alongside Saudi-backed forces in order to take back Yemen’s large port city of Aden from Houthi Rebels in 2015. Far from being a one-off event, BBC journalists later filmed Al Qaeda forces fighting alongside Saudi Arabian and UAE forces in late 2015 near the southern city of Taiz.

The fact that the United States is now bombing these same forces is a testament to the recklessness and hypocrisy of the so-called War on Terror. The US and its biggest ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, are comfortable funding, supporting and fighting alongside Al Qaeda, insofar as it suits their aims, and dispensing with them when they are no longer needed or threaten blowback against Western interests. Tuesday’s attack is yet another testament to this rotten policy.

200,000 jobs threatened by Norway oil industry crisis

Ellis Wynne

The plunge in the price of oil since 2014 has exposed the full extent of the Norwegian economy’s dependence on oil and gas. In response, the Norwegian bourgeoisie, like ruling elites worldwide, are seeking to roll back the social position of the working class.

Norwegian capital is seeking to create a “life after oil” by developing existing industries and financial services. However, such a solution to its problems is a pipe dream.

In 2014, 1,904,000 barrels of oil per day (BPD) were extracted from Norwegian oil fields and Karl Eirik Schjoett, director general of Norwegian Oil and Gas Association stressed, “It is impossible to replace oil”. He pointed out that “before the oil industry the GDP per inhabitant of Norway was 40 percent lower than that of Sweden. Now it is 65 percent higher. That is down to oil.”

A recent estimate calculated that GDP per man-year in the oil and gas industry amounts to 10 million kroner. In the fishing industry, GDP is 1.7 million kroner per man-year and in shipping 1.3 million. The GDP in industry as a whole is only 0.9 million kroner per man-year and in agriculture and forestry a mere 0.5 million per man-year.

Schjoett showed one of the sectors considered the “new oil industry”—fishing—recorded a record export of just 75 billion kroner ($8 billion) in 2015. The oil and gas industries exported 450 billion kroner ($49 billion).

The ruling elite of Norway now insists that relatively high wages in the oil industry are slashed as the spearhead of a cut in wages for all workers. As far back as August 2012, at the height of the oil boom, Steinar Stroem, a Norwegian professor of economics at the University of Turin, opined in an interview with Stavanger Aftenblad, “A lower salary level in the oil and gas industry can help other industries outside the oil industry which will be needed when the oil runs out. This means that employees receive a smaller share of the wealth but it will be better for society as a whole.”

Stroem’s call to rob the working class has become the common position of the financial elite and their ideologues following the crash in oil prices. Typical is an article which appeared in Canada’s National Post (October 2014), “World’s best paid oil-workers expose Norway to crude price crash.”

Norway, the article stated, had the oil industry’s highest labour costs with the average offshore worker’s earning $179,000 in 2013: “Norway has already been coping with 13 years of production declines from its ageing North Sea oil fields and reduced revenues will imperil further developments to replace oil.”

Statoil, the state-owned oil company which controls 60 percent of the total production on the Norwegian continental shelf, has lost more than 20 percent of its value in the past year. It has had to borrow and sell assets to cover dividend payments so three new projects it was leading were already deemed to be at risk.

The National Post bemoaned the “ high wage culture” in the offshore industry, which “meant that workers earned almost twice as much as in the neighbouring UK.”

Sten Lier Larsen, head of the Norwegian Federation of Industry, stated, “We’ve incurred a general cost level on the Norwegian shelf that can prove very dangerous. We have extremely higher wages than others.”

A Reuters article earlier that year headlined, “ End of Oil Boom Threatens Norway’s Welfare Model,” baldly stated that the end of the oil boom had “exposed an economy unprepared for life after oil and threatened the viability of the world’s most generous welfare model.”

The article warned, “High spending within the sector has pushed up wages to unsustainable levels not just for oil and gas but for all sectors and that is now acting as a drag on further energy investment. Norwegian firms outside oil have struggled to pick up the slack in what has been for at least a decade almost a single track economy.”

In 2015, the crisis deepened with the price of oil in the winter hovering around $30 a barrel. For the first time the Norwegian government was forced to dip into its Sovereign Wealth Fund, now valued at $860 billion, to balance the state budget.

In November last year, the English language Nordic Page reported that the consulting agencies, Menon Business Economics and DNV, had forecast in a report, commissioned by a cooperative organization for the oil industry, that up to 200,000 full-time jobs may disappear in Norway because of the downturn. By January 2016, according to the investors’ journal Zero Hedge,every Norwegian oil field was operating at a loss. At present, according to the Research Institute at Stavanger, there are 330,000 jobs related to the petroleum industry in Norway. In early 2015, unemployment rose to above 4 percent (high by Norwegian standards) and prospects are bleak.

Continuing losses on the state oil fund are serving to drive cuts to the government’s budget. Earlier this year, the Conservatives/Progress Party coalition set up a productivity commission headed by Joern Rattsoe, professor of economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, to investigate how the Norwegian economy could be “remodeled”. The commission affirmed that the Norwegian mainland economy (excluding oil, gas and shipping) had grown at an annual average of 3 percent between 1996 and 2005, but from 2006 average annual growth was a mere 0.8 percent.

The message delivered was clear, and is one familiar to workers throughout Europe. All growth in the Norwegian economy could be throttled by a steep rise in the number of pensioners, lower oil prices and a “swollen public sector.” What was needed was “creative destruction” in the public sector, it advised.

The government and corporations are working hand in glove with the trade unions to reduce workers’ wages and living standards. Joern Eggum, president of the United Federation of Trade unions (Fellesforbundet), the largest trade union in the private sector, and Stein Lier Larsen, head of the Norwegian Federation of Industry, are agreed that any wage increases to be negotiated between the trade unions and employers should be low.

Larson summed up the aim of the ruling elite, telling Stavanger Aftenblad on January 28, “If jobs are to be saved we must reach a wage settlement of a kind not seen since the 1930s.”

He warned, “There is only one figure that fits in the year’s wage settlement and that is nil.”

The consumer price index rose by 0.6 percent in January and household debt, at more than 200 percent of annual disposable income, is one of the highest in Europe.

The government/employers/trade union alliance is already well underway, with central wage settlements in recent years lower than previously. At last month’s conference of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, its director, Kristin Skogen Lund, broke with tradition and invited Norwegian trade union federation head, Gert Kristiansen, onto the stage. Kristiansen stated, “We agree that we must face the challenges together.”

Speaking to the Dagsavisen newspaper, Kristiansen emphasized, “We have never been part of trying to negotiate our members out of their jobs, and we don’t do that this year either,” adding that she preferred to describe lower wage demands as “collective common sense.”

Obama hails Macri’s attacks on Argentine workers

Rafael Azul

US President Barack Obama arrived in Buenos Aires on Wednesday March 23, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the CIA-backed military coup that installed the fascist military junta of Gen. Jorge Videla.

Amidst a massive police operation, involving helicopters and military surveillance and fighter planes—some 700 security personnel had arrived earlier in Buenos Aires to prepare for the US president’s arrival—Obama moved to Argentina’s Government House, the Casa Rosada, met with the recently installed Argentine president Mauricio Macri and gave a press conference.

An effusive Macri welcomed Obama: “This is your house,” he declared. In a reference to Obama’s visit to Argentina and Cuba, Macri praised the US for trying to establish a “mature” relationship with the nations in the region.

In turn, Obama called for the US and Argentina to become “universal allies” and praised the new president for his measures of economic shock that have so far resulted in the destruction of more than 100,000 public sector jobs, wiped out energy subsidies and devastated living standards.

The US head of state predicted that Macri’s economic reforms would place Argentina on the path of “sustainable” economic growth. He also predicted that US capitalists would launch an investment program in Argentina.

“I can tell you President Macri is a man in hurry,” said Obama; “I’m impressed because he has moved rapidly on so many of the reforms that he promised, to create more sustainable and inclusive economic growth, to reconnect Argentina with the global economy and the world community.” This was a thinly veiled reference to the Macri administration’s decision to pay off the Wall Street vulture funds that acquired billions of dollars worth of Argentina’s pre-2002 debt.

Obama also indicated that the US would collaborate with Argentina on security questions and that the US and Argentina had signed a pact to combat drug trafficking. As he did in Cuba during the previous three days, Obama posed as a defender of civil liberties and open government. He referred to Argentina as one of the “most powerful nations” in Latin America that could become a “key ally” of Washington in the region.

“Argentina is re-assuming its traditional leadership role in the region and around the world,” declared Obama. Those words are ominous, given the content of a US State Department information press release that was issued following Obama’s discussions with Macri on Wednesday. Washington desires a closer military and security relationship between the US and Argentina so that the latter can bear a greater share of the “peace-keeping” burden as a junior partner in US imperialism’s war agenda.

Buried in a list of proposed areas of cooperation, such as nuclear research and clean air, there is a proposal for the beefing up of Argentine military reserves so that the Argentine armed forces can better intervene in so-called peace-keeping operations in Africa and elsewhere.

In addition to military equipment upgrades, cooperation against drug trafficking and supposed terrorism in the “triple border” region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, the discussions with Macri envision close cooperation between the two countries’ intelligence agencies. In May of this year, the US Treasury Department will organize its first-ever working-round-table with the Argentine Armed Forces. Similar agreements were discussed involving the US Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security departments.

Obama said he would visit Memory Park (Parque de la Memoria), a monument on the shore of the La Plata River to the 30,000 victims of the Videla dictatorship to honor the dead and missing. He also confirmed that Washington would declassify US military and intelligence records related to the junta, as a confidence-building measure between both nations.

March 24 is a day of remembrance in Argentina, marking the anniversary of the Videla coup that the US supported in 1976. Following the coup, it helped establish an alliance between the military regimes that ruled in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s and assisted in the blood bath that followed. Under its Plan Condor, the CIA and US military intelligence trained the torturers and executioners and helped hunt down and disappear the workers and youth that Obama now honors in the name of human rights and transparency.

As in Cuba, where he cast over a half century of US aggression as ancient history, Obama is attempting to portray Washington’s support for coups as some long-gone era. But as recently as 2009, his own administration helped orchestrate the overthrow of the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

The timing of Obama’s visit is a source of anger among many Argentines, who see his hypocritical gestures as part of an attempt to wipe out the memory of the crimes committed by US imperialism in the country and broader region.

In an emotive open letter, 20 Argentine and one Uruguayan family members of disappeared individuals repudiated Obama’s trip and particularly his visit to the Parque in the company of the right-wing president Macri:

“His arrival, forty years after the anniversary of the civic and military coup, is a provocation against those of us who have fought during decades against impunity. It is an insult to the memory of our 30,000 arrested and disappeared comrades to welcome to our country the president of the nation that promoted and supported the bloodiest military coup that Argentina ever experienced, as in other nations in this region. Many of us lost our sons, parents, family members and comrades, who were all victims of Plan Condor, operated by the United States, and out of which the activities of the armed forces and intelligence agencies of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay were coordinated, to assassinate thousands of militant workers and students that kept resisting the dictatorships. … Now, forty years after, the US announces that it will open the archives related to the Argentine dictatorship…but we all know that companies such as Ford that had clandestine detention centers in their plants will remain unpunished and no American official will ever be tried in court for participating in the Argentine genocide. … Now more than ever: We do not forget, we do not forgive, we do not reconcile.”

Egypt is Building to Crisis

S. Fitzgerald Johnson

Egyptian society is rapidly building to another eruption of crisis. If Egyptian society is a plane, it is in the process of crashing; the broken plane’s dive angle is steepening, and it is accelerating at the earth. For decades, productive capital in the form of the military has been accumulating capital by devaluing the labor-power commodity of workers in Egyptian society. This contradictory process – accumulation of value at one pole and destruction at the other – erupted in 2011. In superficial responses, productive capital twice replaced its junior partner in governing (in 2011 and 2013). The contradiction is again sharpening. When it erupts this time, productive capital, because of how it has temporally deferred crisis, will react with more extensive and intensive direct violence against workers.

The value of a worker’s labor-power commodity is determined by the value of the means of subsistence necessary to reproduce the worker. Explains Marx: “the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner” (Marx, Capital Volume I (London, Penguin Books, 1976), 274). One way to reduce the value of the labor-power commodity is to reduce the value of the wage goods consumed by the worker; the less value consumed by the worker, the less value the worker’s commodity. It is to this end of devaluation that capital encourages trade liberalization and welcomes lower value retailers such as Walmart and Target into societies. Presuming no commensurate increase in wages, price inflation also devalues the labor-power commodity by reducing workers’ consumption of means of subsistence. As prices rise, workers are able to buy fewer wage goods. The depreciation of a society’s currency devalues the worker’s commodity in the same way as inflation. Currency depreciation demands that a smaller quantity of imported commodities – in the Egyptian case most importantly wheat for bread – be exchanged for the same quantity of the currency. The worker is reproduced with less value, and his/her labor-power commodity is devalued.

January 2011 in Egyptian society saw the eruption of a crisis of value destruction suffered by workers. Since then, productive capital and its junior partner, be it commercial capital in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood or finance capital represented by the state forms of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, the Sultanate of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, have weaponized the Egyptian currency to wage an unrelenting social war on workers. In January 2011, the exchange rate was 5.88 pounds to the US dollar. By July 2015, it was 7.73 pounds to the dollar. And with the Central Bank of Egypt’s (CBE) decision on Monday to move the official exchange rate to 8.85 to the dollar, the value represented by the Egyptian currency has been almost halved in just over five years (Wahish, Levelling with the dollar).

Productive capital has been able to depreciate the Egyptian currency in a relatively controlled fashion, and attack Egyptian workers without major social conflagration, because of deposits made by the GCC state forms into the central bank. The deposits enabled the CBE to purchase Egyptian pounds in the international market and thereby gradually reduce the currency’s price. Money was transferred to the CBE because capital represented by the GCC state forms benefits from this depreciation. For example, it cheapens land for Emerati-owned Emaar Properties and Arabtec Holdings and devalues the labor-power commodity consumed by Kuwaiti-owned Cairo Poultry Company and Saudi-owned Misr Arab Poultry (Hanieh, Lineages of Arab Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 92). The contradictions of this relation are sharpening. The CBE is effectively out of money, having spent the deposits it received from the GCC state forms. Its remaining reserves of USD16 billion are sufficient only for three months of imports. In order to continue to receive deposits into the coffers of the CBE (and it seems increasingly likely that the Egyptian state form will have to apply for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)), productive capital must continue to devalue Egyptian commodities, including the labor-power commodity, by reducing the price of the currency. However, devaluing Egyptian commodities for foreign deposits increasingly antagonizes workers and thereby endangers productive capital’s dominant social position. Also, while the controlled depreciation has allowed capital to intensify the process of transforming Egyptian society into the GCC’s Mexico, the low price of oil and costs of war on Yemeni society mean the GCC state forms cannot continue to transfer billions to the CBE. A Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is raising domestic petrol prices, discussing the privatization of Saudi Aramco through an initial public offering and seeking a USD$10 billion loan cannot continue to transfer money to the CBE (Hazel Sheffield, Saudi Arabia reportedly looking to borrow $10bn in its first international loans in a decade). The gradual repricing of the Egyptian pound with its relative social peace is giving way to sudden, and sizeable, shocks such as Monday’s abrupt 14 percent depreciation and with them more acute social conflict.

The sharpening contradiction means productive capital is increasingly desperate. It is increasingly desperate for US dollars to deficit finance its accumulation in Egyptian society. In a moment in which a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP) is produced in societies with negative interest rates, the Egyptian state form has to pay double digit interest in order to be able to assume debt. The certificates sold to expand the Suez Canal, a materially unnecessary, but ideologically important endeavor, are paying 12.5 percent for five years. The state form’s recently sold three-month bonds have yields of 13 percent. And most spectacularly, the state-owned banks Banque Misr and the National Bank of Egypt just issued dollar denominated Beladi (My Country) investment certificates with an interest rate of 15 percent!

Productive capital is also increasingly desperate in terms of its social relations. All commodity societies are governed by some balance of consent and coercion. The neoliberal form of state headed by Sisi is steadily losing the ideological support it once enjoyed, and with it the consent of the subordinated working class. Recent protests by doctors and cab drivers are expressions of this ongoing erosion. To try to arrest this erosion, the state form will continue to intensify its nationalist rhetoric, including escalating its encouragement of xenophobia, and may even involve itself in a war in Libya which Sisi recently, and curiously, disavowed. Of course, these ideological maneuvers will ultimately prove insufficient in the face of real, material degradation of the lives of workers. Because of the nature of Egyptian social relations, the contestation-repression dialectic is increasingly shifting the balance to state coercion of subordinate workers. This extension and intensification of violence directed at workers was evident last week when Sisi bellicosely promised to “remove from the face of the Earth” anyone subverting the state (“Sisi tells Egyptians: Don’t listen to anyone but me,” ). It was evident in the deployment of increased numbers of the state’s repressive forces when the CBE depreciated the currency. It is evident in the expanding detention, disappearance and torture of tens of thousands of workers.

Productive capital’s devaluation of Egyptian workers’ labor-power commodity through currency depreciation is extending and intensifying state violence. This process will become even more destructive and the relation will become even more violent because the currency depreciation is not yet finished. Finance capital (including the usurer’s house EFG-Hermes that once employed Gamal Mubarak) is calling for a further depreciation of the pound to the range of 9.5-10.45 to the US dollar (Deya Abaza, “Economists welcome Egyptian Pound devaluation, flexible exchange rate” ). The working class will more hotly contest the further destruction of the value of its labor-power commodity and the state form will inevitably use more extensive and intensive violence to try and coerce it into continued subservience. The real threat to the daily reproduction of working class life in Egyptian society is not cadres of workers deluded by religion such as the Islamic State franchise in the Sinai, but rather productive capital in form of the military. Productive capital, with its material truncheons and fetishistic cudgel in the form of the Egyptian currency, is the barbarous social force driving Egyptian workers to the next deadly crisis.

A World War has Begun: Break the Silence

John Pilger

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated.  Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.”  A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious  superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us.  The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.  Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier.  Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union –  has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.

Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”.  According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.

What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.

What does this really mean?  It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China.  Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.

I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.

All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and  hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.

The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or  China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.

The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.

This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and  across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.

In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.

In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist.  He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure.  That alone should arouse our scepticism.

Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.

According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States.Unleashing them?

This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.

No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”.  The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.

Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.

As presidential  election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.

Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia.  He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons.  As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”

One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright  who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.

Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East.  She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.

A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton;  such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.

Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality,  racism and sexism.

Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.

In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.

In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.

In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war.  There was no debate. Silence.

What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?

Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?

Our Socioeconomic System Is Killing Us

Lionel Anet

Civilisations’ driving force is to dominate the maximum number of people and land area, as it’s for capitalism, but with fossil fuels; it attained that through violence and deceit. On the other hand, capitalism uses the socioeconomic power as the new supreme controller of oppression instead of relying solely on the sword and a spiritual belief. However, oppressing a section of peopled will oppress all, including nature; one can’t be free if we deny freedom to others. Today the socioeconomic system is the overlord oppressor. It oppresses our mind by confining our thinking within the present day economic needs to exploit the planet and its life. This to satisfy those of us, who are seduced by the competition for power, through wealth, measured and with created money.

As everyone and nature are now oppressed and at the mercy of an economic system that’s erratic and largely unpredictable, but worst still, is its dependence on population growth as an easy means to maintain a pretence of economic success. This’s coupled with a persistent over exploitation of our forest, top soil, and water from rivers and ground water; they eventually won’t be able to support us as the planet heats up. Military build-up and its use are counteracting economic difficulties for the time been, but exasperating the above difficulties.

We are valued, as nature is, by the part we take in growing of the economy; it’s our reason to live. This’s unique for any life form, it’s one of many forms of insane positions that the latest method of civilisation has adopted to maximise its exploitation of people and the planet for the fewest. This economy is pervasive and ranges from the clear to the nebulose; we work, live and will die for it, soon, if we don’t use the economy as a system to give us the best life possible as other life forms do.

But there’s nothing as insane as changing the chemical composition of the biosphere that’s known to heat the planet until it will have its own momentum, by producing more heating gases from the heat that those gases produced, (positive feedback). Life will gradually become unbearable in multitude of ways until we are doom. We do the insane to satisfy an insane economy, it’s the way our rulers force us to function and it’s the only reason we stayed with it.

We are now so close to an unliveable planet, that it has become in everyone’s interest to have an economy that function for us instead of working for an alien economy, as we are doing now. If we achieve that it will also automatically transform an exploitative economy to a cooperative economy that works within and as a part of nature. That means we will not only have cooperative social economy globally but cooperative with nature, which should save today young ones and give us all something worthwhile to achieve.

That turnaround will be the most difficult thing we ever need to do, therefore, we will need a united world to transform from that competitive ideology to a cooperative one quickly or die out. To survive this century we have no alternative but to fix social interactions and our relationship with the planet and its life. We can only have that if we have unity of purpose regardless of wealth or any other factors, and that’ll generate a feeling of importance for all of us in our endeavour. It will be the most important engagement that people have to do to save themselves and maybe for all life. Survival is the prime drive for all life otherwise there’s no life, so let’s use it.

It’s not possible to deal with that momentous task by fighting for it, but as it’s in everyone’s interest it should be possible to accomplish it. The 1%, have achieved what was on the whole what capitalism logical outcome would be, so it’s no use killing those wealthy ones and leaving the economy that can get out of control again. It’s the economy that’s the enemy not people, although we are to a certain extent what the economy has made us. However, it follows that an economy that centred its function as a part of nature and for our welfare will change the tone of societies and its people.

The situation we are up against has never occurred before, so there’s no precedent, we must come up with a solution. The quality that’s lacking in all civilisations is fairness; conversely, neoliberals have taken unfairness to its limit, which’s what may end life on earth. It’s that competition to have more regardless of consequences that has created the unfairness and the depletion of vital resources that’s may end all life. Therefore, if the purpose of that economy is to take advantage over others, then unfairness will be the outcome, but if due to our survival instinct kicking in, we change our ethos to cooperate and help one another then fairness should be the outcome and the way of life.

The difficulty is getting our wealthy and other controling people to see the dire danger they are facing and can’t avoid with business as usual. Neoliberalism economic in particular encourages and demands growth in a competitive way on a world scale, which is now creating mounting stress for people, the ecosystem, aggravate by depleting resources. People are resilient but the ecosystem that we are a part of and dependant on to sustain ourselves is collapsing. This is due to our new god, a dysfunctional economy, that we are all working and living for. Economic systems that other lives have are to serve that particular life and this’s all we need it’s an economy that serves people. It will be easier to save ourselves and enhance our happiness than to destroy our life, let alone all life.

The only reason the 1% and their economist are demanding perpetual economic growth is due to an ignorance of physic and that is what’s endangering them. It’s a course that’s grossly unsustainable in so many ways. It’s understandable they don’t see that danger as it’s obscured and distracted by pilling more money in front of themselves and protecting it from their competitors, or the demand that a little of it is taken from them. But instead, if we show concern for them and their descendant’s life, some of the 1% might see and understand the dire danger they’re facing. As well, the people who support them and depend on them might come to their senses, but those people may only investigate the state of the planet, if they don’t feel threaten by the people they robbed, as they always been. The way we interact with one another will determent our survival, and it will also be so for the 1%. We all die this century or do our best to save everyone a task that will additionally enhance our self-esteem. We can have a common cause because we must to survive and that means we can change our lifestyle as we have a vital reason to do so. But if we continue to attack the wealthy, they will retaliate to protect their interest and no one will survive.

From bitter experience, we have no hope of overpowering those tycoons, but we never had such an all-encompassing threat to our and their survival, which gives us all a common need and viewpoint. So this opens up opportunity to discard many aspects of civilisation such as the glory of warfare, overfed people amongst starving fellows, palaces for a few and hovels for many. Those outcomes are due to a competitive spirit and it’s that spirit that is poisoning the way we interact with one another and nature.

Therefore, the most important thing we must do is to show our incredibly wealthy people, who are at present in charge of what’s published that we are concerned for their life. So far we’ve tried to replace or kill those wealthy ones and in turn their fear has prevented many who could cooperate to think only of their fears of losing the wealth they took. Survival is our most powerful instinct and many of the wealthiest must have it to be alive, they also can look after themselves well and maintain such power. So if they know the desperate straight they’re in and can see that we are all in the same boat, cooperation will be seen as obvious.

Our gross dishonesty and incredible unfairness will kill us all. We can’t keep taking increasing amount of energy and vital minerals as the effort used to get more energy and stuff will soon not be greater than what’s use to get them. Returns from the diminishing non-renewable resources and also from the renewables are losing their margin of profit to expenditure to acquire those resources. That is people are living well beyond natures ability to sustain that life style. This is unfair as we are taking the lion share of renewable at the expense of other life and to be renewables they must get their energy from the sun and the earth’s spin. Those sources, power all our renewables so they will last as long as the earth spins and the sun produces the energy; it’s that energy that maintains life, which recycles all the substances that it needs. Pre-civilisation, the energy and life sustaining matter was in many ways shared roughly interchanging the use of sun light energy and minerals in unimaginable ways.