From Agriculture to Demonetisation: Not ‘Make in India’ but Made in Washington

Colin Todhunter

Emerging evidence indicates that demonetisation was not done to curb corruption, ‘black money’ or terrorism, the reasons originally given. That was a smokescreen. Modi was acting on behalf of powerful Wall Street financial interests. Demonetisation has caused massive hardship, inconvenience and chaos. It has affected everyone and has impacted the poor and those who reside in rural areas (i.e. most of the population) significantly.

Who does Modi (along with other strategically placed figures) serve primarily: ordinary people and the ‘national interest’ or the interests of the US?

Convenient bedfellows

We don’t have to dig too deep to see where Modi feels at home. Describing itself as a major ‘global communications, stakeholder engagement and business strategy’ company, APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to (part of) the Wall Street/US establishment and functions to serve its global agenda. Modi turned to APCO to help transform his image and turn him into electable pro-corporate PM material. It also helped Modi get the message out that what he achieved in Gujarat as Chief Minister was a miracle of economic neoliberalism, although the actual reality is really quite different.

In APCO’s India brochure, there is the claim that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy. APCO’s publicity blurb about itself claims that it stands “tall as the giant of the lobbying industry.”

The firm, in its own words, offers “professional and rare expertise” to governments, politicians and corporations, and is always ready to help clients to sail through troubled waters in the complex world of both international and domestic affairs.

Mark Halton, former head of Global Marketing and Communications for Monsanto, seemed to agree when he praised APCO for helping the GMO giant to:

“… understand how Monsanto could better engage with societal stakeholders surrounding our business and how best to communicate the social value our company brings to the table.”

If your name is severely tarnished and you need to get your dubious products on the market in countries that you haven’t managed to infiltrate just yet, why not bring in the “giant of the lobbying industry.”

As a former client of APCO, Modi now seems to be the go-to man for Washington. His government is doing the bidding of global biotech companies and is trying to push through herbicide-tolerant GM mustard based on fraudulent tests and ‘regulatory delinquency‘, which will not only open the door to further GM crops but will possibly eventually boost the sales of Monsanto-Bayer’s glufinosate herbicide. In addition, plans have been announced to introduce 100% foreign direct investment in certain sectors of the economy, including food processing.

Neoliberal dogma

This opening up of India to foreign capital is supported by rhetoric about increasing agricultural efficiency, creating jobs and boosting GDP growth. Such rhetoric mirrors that of the pro-business, neoliberal dogma we see in APCO’s brochure for India. From Greece to Spain and from the US to the UK, we are able to see this rhetoric for what it really is: record profits and massive increases in wealth (ie ‘growth) for elite interests and, for the rest, disempowerment, surveillance, austerity, job losses, the erosion of rights, weak unions, cuts to public services, bankrupt governments and opaque, corrupt trade deals.

APCO describes India as a trillion-dollar market. Note that the emphasis is not on redistributing the country’s wealth among its citizens but on exploiting markets. While hundreds of millions live in poverty and hundreds of millions of others hover above it, the combined wealth of India’s richest 296 individuals is $478 billion, some 22% of India’s GDP. According to the ‘World Wealth Report 2015’, there were 198,000 ‘high net worth’ individuals in India in 2014, while in 2013 the figure stood at 156,000.

APCO likes to talk about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. In other words, colonising key sectors, regions and nations to serve the needs of US-dominated international capital.

Paving the way for plunder

Modi recently stated that India is now one of the most business friendly countries in the world. The code for this being lowering labour, environmental, health and consumer protection standards, while reducing taxes and tariffs and facilitating the acquisition of public assets via privatisation and instituting policy frameworks that work to the advantage of foreign (US/Western) corporations.

When the World Bank rates countries on their level of ‘Ease of Doing Business’, it means nation states facilitating policies that force working people to take part in a race to the bottom based on free market fundamentalism. The more ‘compliant’ national governments make their populations and regulations, the more attractive foreign capital is tempted to invest.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ – supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID – entails opening up markets to Western agribusiness and their fertilisers, pesticides, weedicides and patented seeds.

Anyone who is aware of the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the links with the Indo-US Nuclear Treaty will know who will be aware that those two projects form part of an overall plan to subjugate Indian agriculture to the needs of foreign corporations (see this article from 1999). As the biggest recipient of loans from the World Bank in the history of that institution, India is proving to be very compliant.

The destruction of livelihoods under the guise of ‘job creation’

According to the neoliberal ideologues, foreign investment is good for jobs and good for business. Just how many actually get created is another matter. What is overlooked, however, are the jobs that were lost in the first place to ‘open up’ sectors to foreign capital. For example, Cargill may set up a food or seed processing plant that employs a few hundred people, but what about the agricultural jobs that were deliberately eradicated in the first place or the village-level processors who were cynically put out of business so Cargill could gain a financially lucrative foothold?

The Indian economy is being opened-up through the concurrent displacement of a pre-existing (highly) productive system for the benefit of foreign corporations. For farmers, the majority are not to be empowered but displaced from the land. Farming is being made financially non-viable for small farmers, seeds are to be privatised as intellectual property rights are redefined, land is to be acquired and an industrialised, foreign corporate-controlled food production, processing and retail system is to be implemented.

The long-term plan is to continue to starve agriculture of investment and have an urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Wal-Mart-type supermarkets that offer highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food contaminated with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security. This would be disastrous for farmers, public health and local livelihoods.

Low input, sustainable models of food production and notions of independence and local or regional self-reliance do not provide opportunities to global agribusiness or international funds to exploit markets, sell their products and cash in on APCO’s vision of a trillion-dollar corporate hijack; moreover, they have little in common with Bill Gates/USAID’s vision for an Africa dominated by global agribusiness.

And, finally, to demonetisation

Modi rode to power on a nationalist platform and talks about various ‘nation-building’ initiatives, not least the ‘make in India’ campaign. But he is not the only key figure in the story of India’s capitulation to Washington’s agenda for India. There is, for instance, Avrind Subramanian, the chief economic advisor to the government, and Raghuram Rajan who was until recently Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2007 and was a Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 1991 to 2013. He is now back at the University of Chicago.

Aside from Rajan acting as a mouthpiece for Washington’s strategy to recast agriculture in a corporate image and get people out of agriculture in India, in a recent article, economist Norbert Haring implicates Rajan in the demonestisation policy. He indicates that the policy was carried out on behalf of USAID, MasterCard, Visa and the people behind eBay and Citi, among others, with support from the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Haring calls Rajan the Reserve Bank of India’s “IMF-Chicago boy” and based on his employment record, memberships (not least of the elite Group of Thirty which includes heads of central, investment and commercial banks) and links, place him squarely at the centre of Washington’s financial cabal.

Haring says that Raghuram Rajan has good reason to expect to climb further to the highest rungs in international finance and thus play bow to Washington’s game plan:

“He already was a President of the American Finance Association and inaugural recipient of its Fisher-Black-Prize in financial research. He won the handsomely endowed prizes of Infosys for economic research and of Deutsche Bank for financial economics as well as the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Prize for best economics book. He was declared Indian of the year by NASSCOM and Central Banker of the year by Euromoney and by The Banker. He is considered a possible successor of Christine Lagard at the helm of the IMF, but can certainly also expect to be considered for other top jobs in international finance.”

The move towards a cashless society would secure a further degree of control over India by the institutions who are pushing for it. Securing payments that accrue from each digital transaction would of course be very financially lucrative for them. These institutions are therefore pursuing a global ‘war on cash’.

Small, wealthy countries like Denmark and Sweden can bear the impact of a transition to a cashless economy, but for a country such as India, which runs on cash, the outcomes so far have been catastrophic for hundreds of millions of people, especially those who don’t have a bank account (almost half the population) or do not even have easy access to a bank.

But, regardless of the large-scale human suffering imposed as a result of demonetisation, it could kill two birds with one stone: 1) securing the interests of international capital, including the eventual displacement of the informal (i.e. self-organised) economy; and 2) acting as another deliberate nail in the coffin of Indian farmers, driving even more of them out of the sector. The US’s game plan remains well and truly on course.

Not really a case of ‘make in India’. Some 50 years after independence, as a state India remains compromised, weak and hobbled. More a case of made in Washington.

A version of the following piece was originally published in June 2016. However, since then, India’s PM Narendra Modi has embarked on a ‘demonetisation’ policy, which saw around 85 percent of India’s bank notes becoming invalid overnight.

The Dark Side of Obama’s Legacy

Melvin A. Goodman

There is a dark side to President Barack Obama’s legacy on national and international security matters that will enable President-elect Donald Trump to damage America’s political institutions as well as its standing in the global community.  President Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer and an expert in constitutional law, was insufficiently scrupulous in protecting our moral obligations, creating an ironic and unfortunate page in U.S. history.  Instead of making the “world safe for democracy,” the clarion call of President Woodrow Wilson one hundred years ago, President Obama contributed to the furtherance of a national security state and a culture of secrecy.

The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama tilted too far in the direction of the military, which already plays far too large a role in the policy process and the intelligence cycle.  Strategic intelligence has suffered from the Pentagon’s domination of a process that is now geared primarily to support the warfighter in an era of permanent war.  The strategic intelligence failures during the Obama administration include the absence of warning regarding events in Crimea and the Ukraine; the “Arab Spring;” the emergence of the Islamic State; and Russian recklessness in Syria.

The militarization of intelligence presumably will worsen in the Trump administration, which will be dominated by retired general officers and West Point graduates at almost all of the key departments and agencies in the foreign policy community. The CIA has become a para-military organization in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with too much attention given to covert action.

President Obama campaigned on the basis of transparency and openness, but ignored accountability for the CIA’s transgressions and fundamentally weakened the role of oversight throughout the national security community.  A statutory Inspector General was created at the CIA in 1989 due to the crimes of Iran-Contra, but President Obama made sure there was no IG in place at CIA during most of his eight-year presidency and acquiesced in the destruction of the Office of the Inspector General at CIA.

The Senate intelligence committee’s authoritative report on the CIA’s illegal use of torture and abuse could not have been prepared without the work of the Office of the Inspector General, but President Obama tolerated the CIA director’s interference with the committee’s staff and ignored calls for the release of the full report.  As a result, it will be easier for a Trump administration to reinstate the use of torture that violates constitutional and international law, let alone common sense and decency.  With regard to the now-banned practice of waterboarding, Donald Trump stated that “only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work,”

The Obama administration also conducted a campaign against journalists and whistle-blowers that was unprecedented, using the one-hundred-year-old Espionage Act more often than all of his predecessors combined.  In fact, he misused the act, which was designed to prosecute government officials who talked to journalists and not to intimidate legitimate whistleblowers who report crimes and improprieties.  Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of the Washington Post, called Obama’s control of information “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

President Obama, in his high-minded rhetoric, denounced torture and abuse that “ran counter to the rule of law;” warned that our use of drones will “define the type of nation that we leave to our children;” and that “leak investigations may chill investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”  Nevertheless, he sought no accountability for those who broke laws in conducting torture and abuse; expanded the use of drone warfare; and, according to the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, “laid all the groundwork Trump needs for an unprecedented crackdown on the press.”

As long as Congress defers to the president on the conduct of national security; the courts intervene to prevent any challenge to the power of the president in national security policy making; and the media defer to official and authorized sources, the nation will have to rely on whistleblowers for essential information on national and international security.  Their role will be particularly essential in a Trump administration in view of the president-elect’s reckless statements on nuclear forces, nuclear proliferation, the use of force, and U.S. relations with key allies.  The fact that Trump remains hostile to intelligence briefings and that his first three appointments to the National Security Council are conspiracy theorists creates a horrifying scenario for furthering the dark side of the Obama legacy.

Holiness’ “Holy” Act: An Archbishop, Reportedly, Initiates Onslaught On The “Sinful” Venezuela

Farooque Chowdhury

The following news-report by Fox News says:

“On New Year’s Day, priests across Venezuela reportedly were instructed by Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino, the archbishop of Caracas, to read […] a text during the homily encouraging parishioners to take a stand for democracy and not be intimidated by the socialist rule of Nicolas Maduro.”

The January 4, 2017 datelined news-report says:

“Spanish newspaper ABC reported that the Vatican itself is encouraging the Catholic Church’s involvement in Venezuela’s acute financial and humanitarian crisis.

“The text of the homily was sent by the Vatican, according to the paper.”

The news-report headlined “Priests in Venezuela reportedly instructed to give anti-Maduro homily” adds:

“In last Sunday’s homily, priests across the country referred to a ‘real dictatorship situation’ and urged Venezuelans ‘to put all their efforts into stopping the advance of the dictatorship and to eradicate it in a democratic way.’

“The extreme shortage of food and medicines, the text read, is caused by ‘an erroneous economic system, a socialist totalitarianism that gives government a total control of the economy.’”

It says:

“Vatican-sponsored talks between the two sides stalled last month after the opposition said they would not attend any further meetings unless more concessions were made by the government.”

The January 4, 2017 datelined and “La llamada de la Iglesia a rebelarse tensa aún más su relación con Maduro” headlined original ABC-report by its Caracas correspondent Ludmila Vinogradoff says:

“El llamamiento de la Iglesia catolica venezolana para que se celebren elecciones y sean liberados los presos políticos, como salida a la crisis generalizada que atraviesa el país, ha tensado aún más sus ya difíciles relaciones con el Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro. El Arzobispado de Caracas instó a sus feligreses a rebelarse contra la «dictadura» de forma «pacífica y democrática», en las homilías pronunciadas en las misas del pasado domingo.

“Los sacerdotes leyeron la homilía del cardenal Jorge Urosa, «Año nuevo en paz y familia», orientada desde la Santa Sede, en la que se aborda la crítica situación económica, política y social que vive Venezuela. La Iglesia católica venezolana califica de «dictadura» el régimen de Maduro por bloquear la Asamblea Nacional, de mayoría opositora desde las legislativas del 6 de diciembre de 2015.”

The news-report presents serious information if the news-report is factual, if there’s no fabrication in the news-report, if it’s not part of disinformation campaign against the forward march by the people in Venezuela: (1) With the beginning of 2017, at least a part of Holiness has formally begun its war against the people’s effort to build up a secured and dignified life in Venezuela; (2) with this call, onslaught on the people’s initiative has formally been initiated; (3) at least a part of Holiness has formally taken stand in favor of the propertied interests, which feels its better days of appropriation, loot, speculation, squandering and pillaging are facing resistance; (4) at least a part of Holiness has thrown away all shrouds of its original class allegiance, publicly and formally taken political stand, and formally and publicly joined the camp opposite to the people in the class war now going-on in Venezuela.

The reported instruction of Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino, and the report that the Vatican is encouraging the Catholic Church’s involvement, and the text of the homily was sent by the Vatican are nothing but open political move by the part of Holiness. Now, if the report is not false, the part has begun acting openly as a political organization, has openly joined the alliance being fed by imperialist bosses, and has openly become part of the imperialist intervention process in Venezuela.

This role by the part is not new. It’s neither new in Latin America nor new in the world. Readers are aware of the part’s collaboration with Latin American tyrants-murderers-robbers. Readers are aware of the part’s role in Poland. The part’s fuelling of the Gdansk shipyard union led by Walesa is not a forgotten chapter of history.

But has the part ever issued any call to rise up against a system based on exploitation, based on appropriation of surplus labor, based on lies and deception? Has the part ever issued any call to rise up against a system having not an iota of honesty and moral standing? Has the part ever issued any call to resist imperialist intervention? Has the part ever issued any dictum that says: imperialism has no authority to violate people’s right to determine their way of living, their political and economic systems in all parts of the world, has no authority to intervene with, to trample political system in any country? Has the part ever issued any call that exposes corruption, political and financial, of the Brazilian elites, that calls upon the people in Brazil to revolt against the robbing scheme the Brazilian elites are now implementing? Has the part ever, in its total history, issued any call to extend health care system to the neglected, the forgotten, the citizens the rich consider non-existent in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Brazil, in Honduras, in Africa? Was there any call ever issued by the part to provide safe housing to the poor in Venezuela, to dismantle the system that allows the Venezuelan rich to keep their mysteriously gotten land fallow for the sole purpose of speculation in the land market – higher and higher profit? Nay, nay, nay, the only answer facts produce. But were not children dying in these countries? Were not innocent people claiming rightful rights were murdered? Don’t two of the Ten Commandments say: Thou shalt not kill and Thou shall not steal? Doesn’t the rich class steal, don’t the imperialists kill? The system of profit survives by killing toilers, the poor, the laboring people.

Now, with the reported call the part has also begun another process: delegitimizing itself. It’s simple dialectics, the process idealists verbally ignore, but faithfully go by its rules in their material transactions including pocketing profit. The process of delegitimizing self by the part will get stronger and more vibrant the more class struggle sharpens, the more people educate themselves politically, the more mobilizations of people are organized, the more earthly issues of exploitation and class rule are discussed, the more superficial issues are thrown away from tables of discussion, the more class line is followed.

The part issuing the reported call to stand for democracy has not identified the question: Democracy for whom? Is it for the democracy of ravaging capital or for people? Is it the democracy of tyrants, tyranocracy, or of the toilers? No democratic system is class-neutral. But bourgeois academia and media never cite the fact although many prestigious mainstream studies have found the fact. And, sadly, this fact is also not told unequivocally and boldly by a part of scholars sitting in the camp of the people.

The part’s reportedly formal call is not new. It’s ingrained in its laughingly mystic character. Many years ago, it was written in the very first paragraph of the Communist Manifesto: the pope, the tsar, Metternich, Guizot, police have entered into a holy alliance against the toilers’ political fight. This world is still being ruled by these forces. Souls and pall bearers of Metternich and Guizot are very active, and are increasingly taking an offensive position. So, the toilers’ fight is still alive. It’s alive in Venezuela, in Brazil, in lands across oceans. And, the reported call, a provocation, is incapable of wiping out class struggle. So, the people’s fight in Venezuela, in all lands will continue.

More than 100 injured in Brooklyn train derailment

Philip Guelpa

On Wednesday, at the height of the morning rush, a Long Island Railroad (LIRR) commuter train slammed into the bumper block at the end of the line at the Atlantic Avenue Terminal in downtown Brooklyn, New York. The two front cars derailed and crashed into a room beyond the end of the track. Reports indicate that at least 103 people suffered injuries, mostly minor. Eleven people were hospitalized. Luckily, there were no fatalities.

The LIRR train was carrying over 400 passengers, most bound for work in New York City. Commuters can connect with nine subway lines at Atlantic Terminal, next to the Barclays Center, making it one of the city’s busiest transit hubs.

This accident is similar to one that occurred last September at NJ Transit’s Hoboken terminal in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. In that incident, one person was killed and 114 people were injured, many seriously.

The relatively low level of injuries in Brooklyn is likely due to the slow speed of the train, which was reportedly traveling at only between 10 and 15 miles (16 and 24 kilometers) per hour. This is in contrast to the Hoboken train, which approached the terminal at twice the speed limit.

A section of the derailed train

An investigation of the Hoboken incident concluded that the train engineer suffered from undiagnosed sleep apnea, which causes drowsiness, possibly resulting in a loss of control.

However, safety technology known as Positive Train Control (PTC) would have automatically slowed the train’s approach, had it been in operation. In 2008, the federal government mandated that PTC be installed throughout the rail system by 2015, but many railroads, including both NJ Transit and the LIRR, have delayed, claiming a lack of funds.

Before a National Transportation Safety Board investigative team even reached the site of the Brooklyn accident, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Tom Prendergast and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo both immediately blamed “human error” as the likely cause.

The reason why the train did not stop before the bumper is, as yet, unknown. One passenger, Aaron Neufeld, told ABC News, “It didn’t seem like we were going unusually fast... I don’t think it was anything out of the norm.”

The train crew is being interviewed and the train’s event recorder, the so-called black box, is being examined. There are many possible reasons for the accident, including equipment malfunction. No firm conclusions can be drawn as to the cause of the accident until the investigation has been completed.

The Atlantic and Hoboken terminal incidents are by no means isolated events. These are only a few of the many rail transportation incidents that are occurring with remarkable frequency in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area in recent years.

Just last October a LIRR train derailed near New Hyde Park, on Long Island, injuring 33 people, including four seriously.

A Metro North passenger train headed for Manhattan derailed in December 2013 while taking a sharp curve at high speed, killing four and injuring 67, 11 critically. If PTC had been in place, this accident would likely not have happened.

While each incident has specific characteristics, the pattern points to a criminal lack of investment in safety and maintenance. In recent years, audits of both NJ Transit and Metro North found numerous safety violations and a prioritization of on-time performance over safety. In other words, speedup and cost cutting were putting both passengers and workers at risk.

Disability services privatised and targeted for more cuts in Australia’s public schools

Susan Allan

The public education system in Australia is beset by myriad funding cuts, all of which compromise the ability of teachers and schools to provide the best possible education to their students. One of the most egregiously under-funded areas is the provision of services to students with disabilities.

Across the country’s six states there is a patchwork of different funding models for such students. Everywhere, however, the trend is the same—governments are moving to cut funding for disability services, providing more profit-making opportunities to various corporate interests, and placing mounting pressure on under-trained and under-resourced teachers to individually address an array of complex physical, psychological, intellectual and other disabilities.

The situation is most advanced in the state of Victoria. Victoria’s Program for Students with Disabilities (PSD), first established in 1995, provides schools with targeted funding for students who qualify under one of seven categories: physical disability, visual impairment, hearing impairment, severe behaviour disorder, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and severe language disorder.

All students who qualify for the PSD are allocated annual funding of between $6,000 and $51,000 each, depending on the assessed severity of their disability. The largest proportion of eligible students (approximately 40 percent) receives $15,000 a year, while another 25 percent receive $24,000. The majority of this money is usually allocated to Education Support staff, who support the student in the classroom and schoolyard for a part of the school week, though can also be spent on equipment and teacher training.

The government’s own figures make clear the inadequacy of the PSD. Just 4 percent of the public school population qualify, while another 11 percent are estimated to have a disability, yet receive no targeted funding.

School administrators and teachers are nevertheless legally obligated, under disability and equal opportunity legislation, to provide “reasonable adjustments” to allow all those with disabilities to fully participate in school life. According to one government document, “reasonable adjustments” may include, but not be limited to, “infrastructure adjustments, the use of ES [Education Support] staff, or adjustments in teaching approaches or styles to adapt to the strengths and needs of particular students.”

The vagueness of these formulations is undoubtedly deliberate. It has worked to divert parent frustration and anger away from the government, and led to a situation where, in some public schools, parents of disabled children who do not qualify for PSD funding have bitterly clashed with overworked teachers and school administrators over rival assessments of what constitutes a “reasonable adjustment” within the classroom and the school.

Such angry reactions on the part of parents are not confined to those whose children fail to qualify. Many parents of children who do qualify, complain that their funding is inadequate and blame schools and teachers for failing to provide enough services and support.

Parent complaints to regional and higher educational authorities, beyond the local school, including threats of legal action, are becoming more prevalent, and these place immense pressure on under-resourced schools, principals and teachers to meet ever-increasing demands.

Disabled students who qualify, including those in wheelchairs with disabilities, are not always given full-time education support staff for every hour of the school day or week. This means that for several hours in a school day, when classes in art or physical education, for example, are being held, students with disabilities have no additional support. Teachers are expected to carry the burden: to teach their classes, provide continuous one-on-one support to their disabled students, as well as deal with their other students who may have learning, social, emotional or behavioural issues. It is not uncommon for teachers to have several students in their classrooms who have just missed out on disability funding by one percentage point.

The government’s denial of urgently needed funding to 11 percent of public school students is a product of its extraordinarily stringent eligibility criteria.

For example, for students on the autism spectrum to qualify for PSD funding, they require three separate assessments—from a paediatrician, a psychologist, and a speech pathologist—confirming not merely that they have autism, but also that they demonstrate “significant deficits in adaptive behaviour” and “significant deficits in language skills.” This latter criterion is exceptionally difficult to satisfy, because a “significant deficit” effectively means that the child cannot understand simple instructions or verbalise basic needs and demands. Students with autism can therefore display comorbid health issues, severe learning difficulties, violent and other challenging classroom behaviours, and yet be immediately denied funding on the basis that they are able to engage in extremely limited verbal communication.

A report issued by the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission in 2012, “Held Back: The experiences of students with disabilities in Victorian schools,” noted the “perverse incentive” for parents to make their child’s disability seem as bad as possible. One parent told the Commission: “We took our son off all his medication prior to his last assessment to ensure he presented as badly as possible as that was the only way we could easily gain access to a special school for secondary school.”

For two of the designated disability criteria—severe language disorder and intellectual disability—the government contracts out the task of assessing children to a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

In 2007, the former Victorian Labor government of John Brumby imposed the “Outsourced Assessment Service” that remains in operation today. Currently, 63 percent of all students who qualify for the PSD, do so on the basis of the intellectual disability criterion. This means that a large proportion of funding applications for students with disabilities go, not to the state Education Department, but to a private business, Assessments Australia (AA).

AA is owned by MAX Solutions, which is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-based MAXIMUS. MAXIMUS reported $US2.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2016. The company operates outsourced and privatised health, welfare, education, and administrative services in countries including the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

In Australia, MAXIMUS profits from the notorious “work for the dole” scheme, which forces unemployed workers to take on onerous and menial jobs merely to keep receiving unemployment entitlements. A 2015 article in the Saturday Paper reported: “The US company now dominates the ‘welfare business’ in Australia, having picked up 27 employment services contracts across the country, including 14 of the 51 regional Work for the Dole co-ordinator contracts.”

Within the Victorian education system, a teacher can now spend many hours filling out lengthy pre-screen reports on a student’s physical, academic, communicative, social and other abilities as part of an application for intellectual disability funding, only to have MAXIMUS deny the funding after sending one its employees to the school to spend 45 minutes testing the student.

The state Labor government is preparing further regressive measures. In April 2016, it issued a report reviewing the PSD, much of which was focussed on creating additional obligations for classroom teachers, such as further “reasonable adjustments” for those students diagnosed with autism or dyslexia. The review also proposed investigating a new funding model for the PSD, utilising new and “more efficient” disability assessment procedures, which are being introduced with the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Precisely what this will entail remains to be seen, but the report notably promoted New Zealand’s Ongoing Resources Scheme as an alternative funding proposal. The NZ scheme allocates disability funding to just 1 percent of all NZ students, one-quarter the percentage of students being funded in Victoria.

It is clear that new and major funding cuts are in the pipeline. They will exacerbate an already dysfunctional public school system, undermining even further the democratic right of all young people, including those who are disabled, to a high-quality, fully-resourced public education.

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement engulfed in corruption scandal

Marianne Arens

Rarely has a party been so thoroughly exposed as Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5S) in Rome. The election of its member Virginia Raggi as mayor of the Italian capital in summer 2016 was regarded as their greatest success to date. Now Raggi, who had promised a “radical new beginning in the name of honesty and transparency”, is engulfed in a corruption scandal.

On December 16, Raffaele Marra, head of personnel of the Rome City Council, was arrested for corruption. A few days prior, Paola Muraro, responsible for waste disposal as part of the environment brief, resigned because she was being investigated by the state attorney for abuse of office. Earlier, in September, Raggi had to completely reshuffle her cabinet when five leading members of the city government resigned in protest.

Several building contractors have been placed under house arrest, accused of bribing members of the city administration in relation to a school renovation programme. They are suspected of pocketing up to 20 percent of the budget for the renovation as bribes.

Also on December 16, police seized documents belonging to the mayor to examine her hiring practices.

Grillo, the founder and leader of the Five Star Movement, has kept an iron grip on Raggi. On his blog, he wrote on December 17: “Mistakes have been made. Virginia has recognised that she had trusted the wrong people. From today, the line of approach has been changed ... We will fight tooth and nail to change Rome.”

On January 2, Grillo proposed an amendment of the M5S code of ethics, to be voted on via the internet, which would stipulate that a minister from M5S does not automatically have to resign if the judiciary is investigating him or her. This alone is decided by the “guarantor of the movement”, namely Grillo himself. In the Italian press, the change has been nicknamed “decreto salva-Raggi” (Raggi Rescue Decree).

The fight against corruption has long been a central issue in the propaganda of M5S. Grillo has exploited accusations of corruption in order to channel the widespread anger with the ruling elites behind his own movement, which claims to be neither left-wing nor right-wing. In reality, however, the M5S advocates a right-wing, nationalist and pro-capitalist programme. The Five Star Movement has risen to become the second largest party in the country, just behind the ruling Democrats (PD), and won the runoff ballot for Rome mayor with 67 percent of the vote.

Raggi has only needed six months to expose the real character of Grillo’s movement. It represents the interests of petty-bourgeois layers who want to climb the social ladder and enrich themselves, and is linked very closely with the old, corrupt elites. Its tirades against government waste are directed primarily against workers in the public sector, and its demands for stricter immigration controls are aimed at the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

M5S has increasingly gathered right-wing and far-right elements around itself. This is also shown by the recent exposures of the Rome city administration. Raggi enjoys the best relationships with well-known and very right-wing circles in Rome. The 38-year-old lawyer had worked at the law firm of Pieremilio Sammarco, whose brother, the star lawyer Alessandro Sammarco, has defended both ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, as well as his advisers Marcello Dell’Utri and Cesare Previti.

It is reported that Raggi completed an internship 13 years ago at Cesare Previti’s firm. Previti had helped Berlusconi obtain his villa in Arcore and was co-founder and later parliamentary leader of his Forza Italia party. He was defence minister in Berlusconi’s first cabinet in 1994. The long-time adviser and Berlusconi lawyer, a member of the scandal-ridden P2 Lodge, was later convicted for bribing judges (but was only imprisoned for one day).

The Sammarco law firm enjoyed good relations with a predecessor of Raggi, the extreme right-wing mayor Gianni Alemanno (2008-2013). In his era, the so-called “Mafia Capitale” flourished unhindered. The accusations against Marra and Paola Murora go back to the Alemanno era.

Marra, who is also known as “Rasputin from the Capital” because of his influence over Raggi, last worked as the senior employer of 23,000 municipal workers. Under Alemanno, he was chief of the housing policy department, and in this capacity, was embroiled in several cases of real estate corruption.

Arrested at the same time as Marra, Rome real estate mogul Sergio Scarpellini was said to have helped Marra acquire a private property in 2013 for half a million euros below the market price. In return, Marra is said to have granted him lucrative contracts.

Marra is also said to have concluded contracts worth millions with another contractor, the engineer Fabrizio Amore, who is also being investigated in connection with the “Mafia Capitale.”

City councilor Murora, who was supposed to clean out the nepotism in the department responsible for refuse (AMA), was also part of the insider network. For 12 years, also under Alemanno, she worked as a highly-paid consultant for the AMA, and in this capacity was able to pocket over a million euros in fees. Murara is under investigation for environmental crimes related to the garbage disposal service.

Since 2012, the extent of the “Mafia Capitale” has been uncovered by investigative journalist Lirio Abbate, the newspaper L ’ Espresso and the Attorney General Giuseppe Pignatone. Accordingly, known Mafiosi such as Massimo Carminati and Salvatore Buzzi controlled whole sections of the city administration. Carminati came from the neo-fascist terrorist organization Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Revolutionary Armed Cells) and his business entertained the best relations with both political camps.

Under Alemanno, Carminati and Buzzi led a so-called “cooperative” holding, with up to a thousand employees and a turnover of tens of millions of euros, which they used to put former prisoners or immigrants to work. They also managed to take over the management of reception centres for refugees. Here, they pocketed the €30 to €45 a day paid for each refugee by the Italian state—a business worth millions that proved more profitable than drug dealing. Carminati and Buzzi are now in custody.

After Marra’s arrest, and after intensive discussions with Grillo, Raggi severed ties with two other close associates in December: Deputy Mayor Daniele Frongia and the Secretariat Director Salvatore Romeo. As the Espresso has revealed, Raggi has long been known by Marra, Frongia and Romeo. The quartet had forced the top candidate of the Five Star Movement in Rome, Marcello De Vito, out of the race for city government in early 2016 through intrigue.

Raggi’s election victory in June 2016 was mainly due to the fact that she was “a new, fresh face”, while the two large political camps were completely discredited. “Mafia Capitale” had blossomed under the Alemanno regime, but it also subsequently brought the centre-left camp no improvements.

When Ignazio Marino took over the leadership of the capital in 2013, with the support of the Democrats (PD) and various pseudo left organizations, the city faced bankruptcy and Marino pushed the crisis onto the working class with an austerity decree. He quickly lost all support and resigned voluntarily at the end of 2015, although the corruption allegations raised against Marino proved to be unfounded.

Raggi brought Marra, Frongia and Romeo into the municipal administration as a conspiratorial clique, where they occupied highly-paid positions. The so-called “magic circle” (alluding to Raggi’s name “raggio magico”, magical radius) first came to public notice when the cabinet chief, Judge Carla Raineri, resigned in early September in protest against Marra, who apparently pulled all the strings. On the same day, the councillor responsible for financial affairs and three other senior officials left the city administration.

A January 3 survey by the Winnpoll agency showed the Five Star Movement had lost two percentage points in the polls as a result of the revelations. If parliamentary elections were held now, Beppe Grillo’s party would still receive 26.4 percent. However, the winners would be a new coalition of the right-wing, with 34.4 percent (14.1 percent for Lega Nord, 13.2 Forza Italia, 4.4 Fratelli d’Italia), while Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party would win 27.5 percent and the pseudo-left less than 5 percent (Sinistra Italiana 4.4 and Rifondazione Comunista 0.5).

Germany in 2016: Mass deportations and brutality toward refugees

Stefan Steele

The ruthlessness and brutality of Germany’s authorities against refugees now knows almost no bounds. In 2016 alone, some 25,000 desperate people were deported. Again and again, families are torn apart, children repatriated despite serious illness to war-torn homelands and refugees snatched from their beds without warning in the middle of the night.

The number of so-called “voluntary returners” is even higher, reaching some 55,000 in 2016. The “voluntary” nature of the return lies in the fact that following rejection of their asylum claims, refugees are given an ultimatum: either leave the country within a specified time period and receive some minimal support for their departure, or be forcibly deported and often bear the cost of it themselves. Those in this category are then banned from re-entry to Germany.

Not infrequently, part of a family is deported, so the remaining members follow them. This too is recorded as a “voluntary” return.

The Left Party celebrates this particularly insidious form of brutality as a “humane” alternative to deportation. Thuringia, the only German state under Left Party rule, with 1,726 so-called voluntary returns between January and November 2016, ranks second among the states behind Saxony.

In addition to these ruthless deportation practices, Der Spiegel recently published a survey revealing that refugees are treated badly as soon as they arrive in Germany. In nearly 1,500 cases over the past two years, property was confiscated from refugees. The sums involved totalled “at least 863,000 euros [$US 903,000]”, according to the news weekly.

The leader in this practice is the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)-Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition ruling Saxony, which has seized a total of 328,432 euros in 411 cases. This act of mass theft occurred despite the fact that Saxony only accepted five percent of asylum seekers under the Königstein formula, which forms the basis for the distribution of refugees in Germany.

This operation is based on Paragraph 7a of the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act. According to this law, “a surety can be demanded from those entitled to benefits”. An exception is made for “an allowance of 200 euros”. Bavaria and Baden Wurttemberg each permit a higher allowance.

Patrick Irmer, spokesman for the Saxony Refugee Council, told Der Spiegel he knew of at least four cases in which those affected were only allowed to keep a minimal 50 euros, although the relevant regulations on the allowance were already in force.

Under the current legislation, the confiscation of money from refugees can take place forcibly and without warning. In Bavaria, North Rhine Westphalia and Schleswig Holstein this means that asylum seekers are routinely searched if they are suspected of having any items of value on their person.

While most German states only confiscate cash, Rhineland Palatinate and Middle Franconia impound automobiles too. This imposes a massive curtailment of freedom of movement on refugees and increases the pressure on them to “voluntarily” return. The vehicles are only returned upon their leaving the country.

Hamburg, by its own account, is the only state where no such actions are carried out. According to Der Spiegel, Brandenburg, Bremen, Saxony Anhalt and Lower Saxony dispense with the seizure of assets, but in return they provide accommodation and meals on account or pay out lower benefits.

These confiscations bear startling similarities to the Nazi regime’s actions against the Jewish population in the 1930s. Before the construction of the large extermination camps, Jews were forced to sell their property well below its value, or it was simply taken from them. They were excluded from social life, through being denied access to public buildings and events, and their children were not allowed to attend state schools.

Eighty years later, the same politicians who solemnly declare in speeches that the memory of the “rupture of civilization of the Shoah” must be maintained, now rail against asylum seekers.

The list of vile measures taken by the authorities and reactionary media campaigns is growing: it includes the hysteria over alleged mass sexual attacks by asylum seekers in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015-16, for which no serious evidence has yet been produced; the restriction on access to public pools in Bonn; the inhumane accommodation in gyms, former hangars and container villages; the demands for a burqa ban; and the seizure of the already minimal assets of asylum seekers. These actions can only be understood as a fundamental attack on the rights of the entire working class.

This deeply anti-democratic and authoritarian trend has culminated recently in the first mass deportations to Afghanistan. On its website, the German foreign ministry “warns against travel to Afghanistan”. Whoever still travels there, it explains, must be aware of the risk from terrorist or criminal acts of violence. Naturally, the ministry does not mention that for 15 years Germany has been a belligerent power directly responsible for this “violence”. Now German authorities are forcing people fleeing the war and terror to return to Afghanistan, thus again endangering their lives.

New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany: Racist agitation and state repression

Dietmar Henning

The huge police deployment in Cologne on New Year’s Eve has served as the pretext for virulent racism and calls for the strengthening of the state apparatus.

Politicians and media are attempting to outdo each other with racist outbursts. They employ the cliche of “criminal North Africans,” shortened to “Nafris,” who possess “basic aggressiveness” and are all “multiple offenders.”

The vastly exaggerated events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne a year ago served as the pretext for a campaign targeting refugees and foreigners. This time around, it was exploited to justify a vast build-up of police forces in several major cities.

In Cologne alone, 1,500 state police, 300 federal police and 600 state law enforcement officials were mobilized. In the course of the night, Cologne Police President Jürgen Mathies demanded additional forces, resulting in a further 200 police officers being deployed.

The hundreds of police deliberately targeted foreigners or those they took to be foreigners. Thousands of visitors who came to Cologne for New Year’s Eve were for all intents and purposes singled out. The police wrote on Twitter, “Hundreds of Nafris are currently being checked at the main train station. Information to follow.”

The police divided up new arrivals at the train station on the basis of racial criteria. Women were rapidly let through.

According to the Rheinische Post, “those who did not correspond to a ‘North African’ profile were able to use a separate exit to the street. All others were directed through an exit that included personal checkpoints.” A large number of young men were kettled by the police in front of the train station. A police spokesman told journalists that the issue was merely “teething problems.”

On New Year’s Eve, everyone with dark skin, hair or eyes—irrespective of their behavior or nationality—was a target. In total, the police collected personal data from 1,700 people. Around 900 young men—overwhelmingly North Africans—were issued with a ban from the city centre and immediately sent back to the train station, where the federal police directed them onto trains. Others had to wait for up to three hours to get out of the police kettle. Of those stopped and searched, 92 were taken into custody.

The police authorities and politicians defended their racist actions, known as “racial profiling” and the federal government explicitly thanked the police.

Although police president Mathies expressed disappointment at the use of the term “Nafris” for North Africans in the police tweet, because this was merely an “internal working concept” for the police, he vehemently defended carrying out personal checks according to this criterion.

From the experience the police gained from New Year’s Eve 2015, and a series of raids, according to Mathies, “a definite impression has emerged as to which people need to be checked”—i.e. “Nafris.” Wolfgang Wurm from the federal police added, “We spoke to people relevant to investigations and questioned their intent.” He left no doubt about the fact that this practice would be continued.

The media has also based its reporting on the “experience gained” from New Year’s Eve 2015. Even though only 33 people were convicted after an extensive investigation, and just three for sexual crimes, the lies about mass sexual assaults were presented as if they were facts.

When a few dared to mildly criticise the use of the term “Nafri” and racial profiling, a wave of outrage was unleashed. Green Party chairwoman Simone Peter was sharply attacked when on New Year’s Day she described as “utterly unacceptable” the use of “derogatory terms for groups like ‘Nafris’ by organs of the state.”

The co-chair of the Greens, Cem Özdemir, told Spiegel Online that the police had acted “appropriately” and thereby guaranteed security. “Many people with a high potential for aggressiveness” had travelled to Cologne, asserted the Green chair.

The Green Party’s parliamentary group chair, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, told the Dortmund-based Ruhr Nachrichten, “It was correct to act quickly and preventively, to ensure the security of all people in Cologne.” The interior policy spokesperson for the Greens, Irene Mihalic, herself a former police officer, rejected the “general criticism of checkpoints” in an interview with Die Welt .

The Green Party mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, who campaigns for more deportations to Syria, wrote on Facebook on Monday, “Specific answers to specific problems is not racism, but necessary.”

Simone Peter, having been brought to heel, described her criticism as too rapid and ill-considered. “It was right to act quickly and preventively here,” she said in a second statement.

While the Greens defended the strengthening of repressive arm of the state, racism flourished in the media. The studio director at WDR radio in Cologne, Lothar Lenz, commented, “They were there again—the hordes of men prepared for violence—but this time there was luckily enough police waiting.” Lenz argued it was a mistake to defame the operation as racist.“Just because officers identified potential perpetrators at the train station by their appearance and checked them? Yes, but how else should they have done it?”

The Bild newspaper provided a platform for Christian Social Union secretary Andreas Scheuer, who stated, “We cannot allow idealistic multi-cultural dreaming to become a security risk for the population.”

And in his blog on the web site of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ‘Don Alphonso’ railed under the title “Very populist questions for the Nafris, politicians and police after Cologne.” The pseudonym belongs to Rainer Meyer, who describes his pen name as an “artistic figure,” so as not to be bound by journalistic protocol and political correctness.

In a question directed “to the Nafris,” he asked, “Why do you and your friends exhibit ‘basic aggressiveness’?” To the politicians he wrote, “The Nafris were checked on one evening.” What would happen on the other 364 evenings in the year? “Is it not necessary? Are they simply risky groups on New Year’s Eve?” He had the impression that “we now have a kind of temporary internal state of siege.”

The right-wing racist tirades from politicians and the media are a response to the rapidly intensifying capitalist crisis. Social inequality is growing rapidly and ever larger amounts of money are being spent on the military and wars which the majority of the population opposes. In anticipation of major class conflicts, a massive apparatus of state repression is being constructed.

Just two days after New Year, Interior Minister de Maizière declared in a guest contribution for the FAZ that in light of the current challenges from “terrorism, large influxes of asylum seekers and cyberattacks,” it was necessary to give the intelligence agencies more powers.

De Maizière intends to place the domestic intelligence agencies, with their 16 state organisations, fully under the control of the federal state. The federal criminal office (BKA) is to receive the power to enforce custody prior to deportation over other agencies. The powers of the federal police are also to be significantly strengthened in the areas of “random police checks and cyber attacks.”

De Maizière called for a “national pooling of forces” to carry out deportations. Rejected asylum seekers are to be taken into custody more easily. He intends to conduct deportations more rapidly: “I propose that the federal state obtains additional authority over the ending of the period of residence.” In this way, rejected asylum seekers could be “immediately dealt with.” To this end, he proposed the establishment of prisons which he termed “federal departure centres,” remarking, “Departure centres are already legal and could preferably be established close to German airports.”