Goethe-Institut Literary Exchange Program for Cameroon and Nigerian Writers 2017

Application Deadline: 15th February 2017

Eligible Countries: Nigeria and Cameroon

To be taken at (country): Nigeria and Cameroon

About the Award: Though  Cameroon  and  Nigeria  are  neighbors  and  share a  lot  of  similar  cultural values,  this  potential has  not  been  exploited for  the  collaborative knowledge and advancement of  either country.  Consequently,  though   they   share a  border,  they know  little  or nothing  about  each  other and  hardly  engage  in literary collaborations that  could benefit both  countries.

Type: Training

Eligibility: 

• Applications not  following  the  rules  will automatically be  disqualified.
• The working  language of the workshop is English.

Selection: Applicants   will  be   selected  by a  jury   appointed  by Goethe-Institut Lagos  and Yaounde. The jury’s decision  will be final and non-appealable.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Program: The  workshop  will  feature  different  stages  of  exchange  in  both   Cameroon  and Nigeria at no expense to the applicant.

Duration of Program: 10th-16th May 2017

How to Apply: The body of the e-mail should contain following:

1. Your Name
2. A short  bio not  more  than  200  words  with  relevant publishing history stating whether you are applying from Nigeria or Cameroon.
3. An unpublished writing sample  of not more  than  700  words  written in English and submitted twice  in .doc format.  One sample  submitted with your  name  on it and the other without.
4. Your availability to  travel between 10th-16th May 2017  and  other dates after being given prior  notice.

Your  sample  of work  must  be  included  as  an  attachment in your  mail.

To apply  send  an e-mail  to  libo@lagos.goethe.org. Your email  subject  should  read:

“Application for Literary Exchange 2017”.

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: Goethe Institut

Resisting the Lynching of Haitian Liberty!

Malaika H Kambon

It should be obvious by now that the U.S./UN, EU, OAS, and various hired paramilitary police have engineered a second fraudulent election in as many years in Haiti.

This latest attempt to kill Haiti’s freedom by aborting her dreams of democracy via the electoral process was designed to prevent landslide victories by Fanmi Lavalas, reminiscent of the presidential victories of Jean Bertrand Aristide. The U.S. and UN do not want to see this.

But people have turned out in force, as protests continue against the blatant sabotage of the November 20, 2016 elections, where Dr. Maryse Narcisse and Fanmi Lavalas again sought to reclaim Haiti’s freedom, only to be met – again – by a U.S. elite intent upon electoral sabotage.

But the fraudulent elections have ignited the country. Daily protests have been held for over a month. For the 35^th consecutive day, tens of thousands are in the streets, who see in the candidacy of Dr. Narcisse the fruition of their dreams: freedom, dignity and sovereignty via a political party of the people that knows what it wants to achieve.

The international press is busily trying to shore up the fraudulent “win” of PHTK (or bald head party) candidate Jovenel Moise. But even in an electoral process that was blatantly manipulated, Moise, “the banana man,” controls nothing in Haiti but his mouth, and that not very well.

And the U.S. government, reminiscent of the cryptic simplicity of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Christ in Alabama,” taunts and tries to snatch Haitian freedom with its entrenched racism.

But Haiti is rising up, and she is fighting back! With the swiftness of a Muhammad Ali strike, Haiti reminds us that we have not ever been n****rs, and that we always define our tree of liberty, and our “place” as being free.

A Haitian artist’s depiction of the killing of Haiti’s democracy. 

Haitian grassroots people are battling the attempted electoral coup d’etat, and are now into thirty-five consecutive days of peaceful yet forceful demonstrations against the fraud. This has got the resident oligarchies so worried that they have escalated their military and political attacks.

Corrupt judges and the PHTK party of Michel Martelly are trying to force international observers and parties contesting the fraudulent November 20 elections to quit the fraud probe. Attacks by militarized police against peaceful demonstrators are growing in number and strength. The entire electoral process is broken, worse than in the U.S.

On December 24, 2016 at about 2:00 pm Haitian time (5 pm PST) in an escalating show of force, militarized police armed to the teeth, shot indiscriminately into a crowd of thousands. Many demonstrators were wounded on Martin Luther King Avenue, in the city of Port au Prince, in Haiti.

Members of Fanmi Lavalas were especially targeted. A sitting member of parliament had his car shot up by police. According to witnesses a policeman took his automatic weapon and smashed out the back window of the car owned by a Fanmi Lavalas candidate for the Senate. A journalist from Radio Timoun, the people’s radio station, was also injured by police gunfire and was taken to the hospital.  The people announced that demonstrations would continue on December 25, 2016, day 34. They will not stop.

Fascism sends its Seasons Greetings full of repression from UN occupied Haiti.

A critical question people should be asking themselves is why do a bunch of fascist, billionaire whites; their international quislings; and the internal puppet leadership of Haiti; want so badly to maintain an apartheid regime, and the occupation and ownership of a sovereign Afrikan country they describe as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere?”

Recall that Haiti was forced to pay the blood sucking World Bank and its IMF vampire siblings more than a million dollars per week to satisfy debts incurred by the 29 year Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier family regimes, and other Duvalierist tyrants who succeeded them. The most recent example of these is the highway robbery of the treasury by Hillary Clinton’s puppet, Michel Martelly.

Round and round and round they go, with the World Bank lying and saying it is eradicating poverty, while Haitians eat mud cookies in order to repay a debt caused by white theft and to be considered deserving of “help” from blood sucking multilateral financial institutions.

Such thieves include the Clinton Foundation, which claimed magnanimity in their dealings with Haiti, as billions of dollars of earthquake relief money under their control remained unaccounted for.

The people of Haiti are left even more impoverished.

This continual interference in Haiti’s democratic process keeps happening because:

(1) Haiti overthrew chattel enslavement of Afrikan people over 200 years ago by slapping down the combined military might of France, England, and Spain; thus establishing its independence, and turning the myth of white supremacy on its head. ”We are the first Black independent country in the world,” asserts its first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide.

(2) Even though the same “civilized” Euro-American and Canadian regimes instigated two coups d’etat against the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide; the people haven’t ever stopped resisting tyranny;

(3) Haitian resistance keeps getting stronger, despite U.S.-UN occupation of the country. In collusion with the U.S. government, in 2004 the United Nations brought its un-peacekeeping, cholera spreading, brutal force of 10,000 MINUSTAH troops into Haiti. Along with the reconstituted Haitian army headed by drug runners wanted by the DEA, these combined forces exist to “keep the natives in their place.” This is with the full support of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the European Union (EU).

(4) President Jean Bertrand Aristide fought for and continues to fight for Haitian dignity, sovereignty, and independence. When he was in office, he refused to be a sellout president and kept all of the Haitian assets for the Haitian people. In 2003, he demanded that over $22 billion dollars in money extorted from Haiti by 19^th century France be restored. Haiti was originally forced to pay this money starting in 1826, to former slave owning French plantation owners.

(5) Drs. Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Maryse Narcisse both defy the evil of entrenched tyranny. Dr. Maryse Narcisse, the 2016 Fanmi Lavalas presidential candidate is in the streets daily with the people fighting for Haiti’s independence.

(6) President Aristide fought for fair trade for Haiti, in defiance of the Clinton regime policies that collapsed Haiti’s economy.

(7) Haiti’s geographic location boasts huge oil, gold, and other reserves of wealth. She is also strategically located in relationship to Cuba.

(8) President Aristide attacked and threatened the hegemony and corruption of Haiti’s 1% ruling elite by enforcing labor and taxation legislation laws.

The U.S. attitude toward Haiti has always been one of keeping Afrikans “in their place,” as described by white supremacy.

U.S. 19th century government didn’t want a free Afrikan state dismantling its brutal slave economy. So enslaver U.S. president Thomas Jefferson gave Napoleon $40,000.00 to re-enslave Haiti. He also put the word out that an Afrikan person was only worth three fifths of a white person. Napoleon got his butt kicked, Jefferson lost a lot of money but acquired the Louisiana Purchase for a song, and Haiti was free.

Fast-forward to 1915 and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson of Birth of a Nation-reinstitute-the-KKK-filmmaking fame. His Secretary of State, William Byron Jennings “disapproved” of “Niggers, speaking French!” in Haiti. Wilson sent in the Marines to occupy and rob Haiti from 1915-1934.

Fast-forward again to 2004.

Haitians kept deciding that their “place” was to be free, so the IRI, Colin Powell – another lying Sec of State, the CIA, and USAID kidnapped President Aristide and his family by transporting them as “cargo” to the Central Afrikan Republic, in a US plane designed for the program of “extraordinary rendition.”

Well, that didn’t work either because Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Trans-Africa founder Randall Robinson and others snatched them back from the brink of captivity and they went into exile, first in Jamaica then in South Africa until the power of the Haitian people brought them back home to Haiti.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, odious Euro-U.S. debt designed to kill people by the dollar, Duvalier Papa and Baby Doc, the U.S. government and the U.S. puppet’s thefts of Haitian resources, DEA drug runners, entrenched racism, foreign domination, onerous rapes, pre-dawn UN and paramilitary attacks, strip mining, cholera, odious rapacious Secretaries of State from William Byron Jennings to Hillary Rodham Clinton, terrorist Tonton Macoutes, starvation, murders, kidnappings, and disappearances of children, freedom fighters, and pro-democracy activists Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, Father Gérard-Jean Juste, to name but two; mud cookies for food…

In spite of all of these horrible things and more, the Afrikan people of Haiti keep fighting to be free.  Haitian resistance to entrenched U.S. interference in her government has not ceased for over 200 years. It will not stop. It is about to be 2017, right now.

The Haitian Revolution, from 1791-1804…It is happening again. The people of Haiti will be free.

Is Europe Heading for a “Lexit”?

Conn Hallinan

When European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg this past September, he told them the organization was facing an “existential crisis.” In part, he blamed “national governments so weakened by the forces of populism” that they were “paralyzed by the risk of defeat in the next election.”

Indeed, it’s been a bad year for the huge trading group. There was Brexit, or the United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw. And Rome’s referendum to amend Italy’s constitution was trounced, leaving several Italian banks in deep trouble.

Meanwhile, the austerity policies of the EU have kept most of its members’ economies either anemic or dead in the water. Even those showing growth, like Ireland and Spain, have yet to return to where they were before the 2008 economic meltdown. Between 2007 and 2016, purchasing power fell 8 percent in Spain and 11 percent in Italy,

It’s also true that number of national governments — in particular those in Germany and France — are looking nervously over their shoulders at parties to their right.

But the crisis of the EU doesn’t spring from “populism.”

Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

That term often obscures more than it reveals, lumping together neo-fascist parties, like France’s National Front and Germany’s Alternative for Germany, with left parties, like Spain’s Podemos. Populism, as Juncker uses it, has a vaguely atavistic odor to it: ignorant peasants with torches and pitchforks storming the citadels of civilization.

But the barbarians at the EU’s gate didn’t just appear out of Europe’s dark forests, like the Goths and Vandals of old. They were raised up by the profoundly flawed way that the Union was established in the first place, flaws that didn’t reveal themselves until an economic crisis took center stage.

That the crisis is existential, there is little doubt. In fact, the odds are pretty good that the EU will not be here in its current form a decade from now — and possibly considerably sooner.

But Juncker’s solutions include a modest spending program aimed at business, closer military ties among the 28 — soon to be 27 — members of the organization, and the creation of a “European Solidarity Corps” of young volunteers to help out in cases of disasters, like earthquakes. But he offered nothing to address the horrendous unemployment rate among young Europeans.

In short, he’s proposed rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs while the ice looms up to starboard.

But what’s to be done isn’t obvious, nor is how one goes about reforming or dismantling an organization that currently produces a third of the world’s wealth. The complexity of the task has entangled Europe’s left in a sharp debate, the outcome of which will go a long way toward determining whether the EU — now a house divided between wealthy countries and debt-ridden ones — can survive.

It is not that the European left is strong, but it’s the only player with a possible strategy to break the cycle of debt and low growth.

The politics of racism, hatred of immigrants, and reactionary nationalism espoused by the National Front, the Alternative For Germany, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Denmark’s People’s Party, and Austria’s Freedom Party will not generate economic growth — not any more than Donald Trump will bring back jobs for U.S. steelworkers and coal miners and “make America great again.”

Indeed, if the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany Party gets its way, that country will be in deep trouble. German deaths currently outnumber births by 200,000 a year, a figure that’s only accelerating. According to the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, to have a sufficient working-age population that can support a stable pension system, the country will require an influx of 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years.

Many other European countries are in the same boat.

Withdraw or Reform?

There are several currents among the European left, ranging from those who call for a full withdrawal, or “Lexit,” to reforms that would democratize the organization.

There is certainly a democracy deficit in the EU. The elected European Parliament has little power, with most key decisions made by the unelected “troika” — the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. The troika’s rigid debt policies mean members have lost the ability to manage their own economies or challenge the mantra that debt requires austerity, even though that formula has clearly been a failure.

As economists Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau point out in their book The Euro and the Battle of Ideas, growth is impossible when consumers, corporations, and governments all stop spending. The only outcome for that formula is misery and more debt. Even the IMF has begun to question austerity.

But would a little more democracy really resolve this problem?

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a long-time critic of austerity, argues that while the EU does indeed need to be democratized, a major problem is the common currency. The euro is used by 19 of the EU’s 28 members that constitute the Eurozone.

Stiglitz argues that the euro locked everyone into the German economic model of modest wages coupled with a high-power export economy. But one size does not fit all, and when the economic crisis hit in 2008, that became painfully obvious. Those EU members that used a common currency were unable to devalue their currency — a standard economic strategy to deal with debt.

There’s also no way to transfer wealth within the EU, unlike in the United States. Powerful economies like California and New York have long paid the bills for poorer states like Louisiana and Mississippi. As Stiglitz points out, “a lack of shared fiscal policy” in the EU made it “impossible to transfer wealth (via tax receipts) from richer states to poorer ones, ensuring growing inequality between the core and the periphery of Europe.”

Stiglitz proposes a series of reforms, including economic stimulus, creating a “flexible” euro, and removing the rigid requirement that no country can carry a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, however, argues that the Union “is not suffering from a democratic deficit that can be fixed with a ‘little more democracy’ and a few reforms here and there.” The EU, he says, “was constructed intentionally as a democracy-free zone” to keep people out of decision-making process and to put business and finance in charge.

Is the machine so flawed that it ought to be dismantled? That’s the opinion of the British writer and journalist Tariq Ali and King’s College Reader in politics Stathis Kouvelakis, both of whom supported the Brexit and are urging a campaign to hold similar referenda in other EU member countries.

Another Way: Civil Disobedience

But since that that position is already occupied by the xenophobic right, how does the left argue for Lexit without entangling itself with racist neo-Nazis?

Varoufakis, a leading member of the pan-European left formation DiEM25, asks whether “such a campaign is consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles” of internationalism. He also argues that a Lexit would destroy the EU’s common environmental policy and the free movement of members, both of which find strong support among young people.

Is re-establishing borders and fences really what the left stands for? And wouldn’t re-nationalizing the fossil fuel industry simply turn environmental policies over to the multi-national energy giants? “Under the Lexit banner, in my estimation,” says Varoufakis, “the Left is heading for monumental defeats on both fronts.”

DiEM25 proposes a third way to challenge the disastrous policies of the EU, while avoiding a return to borders and “every country for itself” environmental policies. What is needed, according to Varoufakis, is “a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience” to create a “democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels.”

The idea is to avoid the kind of trap that Greece’s left party, Syriza, has found itself in: running against austerity only to find itself instituting the very policies it ran against.

What DiEM25 is proposing is simply to refuse to institute EU austerity rules, a strategy that will only work if the resistance is EU-wide. When Greece tried to resist the troika, the European Central Bank threatened to destroy the country’s economy, and Syriza folded. But if resistance is widespread enough, that will not be so easy to do. In any case, he says, “the debt-deflationary spiral that drives masses of Europeans into hopelessness and places them under the spell of bigotry” is not acceptable.

DiEM25 also calls for a universal basic income, a proposal that’s supported by 68 percent of the EU’s members.

Portugal’s left has had the most success with trying to roll back the austerity measures that caused widespread misery throughout the country. The center-left Socialist Party formed a coalition with the Left Bloc, and the Communist-Green Alliance put aside their differences, and together they restored public sector wages and state pensions to pre-crisis levels. The economy only grew 1.2 percent in 2016 (slightly less than the EU as a whole), but it was enough to drop unemployment from 12.6 percent to 10 percent. The deficit has also declined.

Spain’s Podemos and Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labor Party have hailed the Portuguese left coalition as a model for an anti-austerity alliance across the continent.

Rebel Cities and Continental Solidarity

Debt is the 800-pound gorilla in the living room.

Most of the debt for countries like Spain, Portugal, and Ireland wasn’t the result of spendthrift ways. All three countries had positive balances until the real estate bubble pumped up by private speculators and banks burst in 2008, and taxpayers were forced to pick up the pieces. The “bailouts” from the troika came with onerous austerity measures attached, and most of the money went straight to the banks that had set off the crisis in the first place.

For small or underdeveloped countries, it will be impossible to pay off those debts. When Germany found itself in a similar position after World War II, other countries agreed to cut its debt in half, lower interest rates, and spread out payments. The 1952 London Debt Conference led to an industrial boom that turned Germany into the biggest economy in Europe.

There’s no little irony in the fact that the current Berlin government is insisting on applying economic policies to debt-ridden countries that would have strangled that German post-war recovery had they not been modified.

It’s possible that the EU cannot be reformed, but it seems early in the process to conclude that. In any case, DiEM25’s proposal to practice union-wide civil disobedience hasn’t really been tried, and it certainly has potential as an organizing tool. It’s already being implemented in several “rebel” cities like Barcelona, Naples, Berlin, Bristol, Krakow, Warsaw, and Porto, where local mayors and city councils are digging in their heels and fighting back.

For that to be successful throughout the EU, however, the left will have to sideline some of the disputes that divide it and reach out to new constituencies. If it doesn’t, the right has a dangerous narrative waiting in the wings.

America’s Russian Problem

Melvin A. Goodman

Russian-American relations over the past several years have taken on some of the most familiar aspects of the Cold War.  The conventional wisdom is extremely one-side, concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is entirely responsible for the setback as a result of his actions in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, and that the Russian leadership is not trustworthy on any diplomatic or political level.  This is a simplistic view.

Before there can be any progress in resolving the considerable differences between Moscow and Washington, it is paramount that the U.S. contribution to the imbroglio is recognized.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-five years ago, a brace of American presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) have taken advantage of Russia’s considerable geopolitical weakness.  Clinton was the first to do so with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which marked a betrayal of U.S. commitments not to do so.

In conversations with Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker emphasized that, if the Soviets pulled nearly 400,000 military forces out of East Germany, the United States would not “leapfrog” over East Germany to assert itself in Eastern Europe.  The expansion of NATO was not only strategically flawed, but from the Kremlin’s point of view it was a repudiation of those verbal guarantees.

Clinton expanded NATO by admitting former members of the Warsaw Pact, but George W. Bush went further by bringing in former Soviet republics, the three Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Bush administration was even flirting with membership for Georgia and Ukraine, until German Chancellor Angela Merkel convinced President Bush that such a move would violate a “red line” that Putin had clearly established.  Washington’s manipulation of Georgia had a great deal to do with the short war fought between Russia and Georgia in the summer of 2008.

Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which served as the cornerstone of strategic deterrence and the arms control relationship between Russia and the United States, was another example of the United States taking unnecessary advantage of Moscow’s geostrategic weakness.  The ABM Treaty was abrogated in order to clear the way for a nationwide missile defense in California and Alaska as well as the deployment of a regional missile defense in Eastern Europe, which the Obama administration unwisely strengthened.  The fact that the Bush and Obama administrations explained that the regional missile defense was needed against a possible attack from Iran made no sense, particularly in the wake of the Iranian nuclear accord that Russia fully supported.

Putin’s claims of U.S. interference in the parliamentary elections in Russia in 2011 as well as in the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2013-2014 are too easy dismissed in the United States, particularly in the mainstream media.  Putin supported NATO’s actions in Libya in 2011 because he had “guarantees” that military intervention was needed to prevent a humanitarian nightmare and was not intended to promote regime change.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s self-aggrandizing claim that “we came, we saw, and he died” in referring to Moammar Qaddafi put the lie to U.S. importuning.

The Obama administration promised a “reset” in relations with Russia but there was no effort to institutionalize bilateral relations and, in a visit to Poland in 2011, President Obama announced the first steps in basing U.S. fighter aircraft in Poland, one more “leapfrog” measure.  Obama also unnecessarily personalized the confrontation with Putin, and allowed Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to stop high-level discussions between the Department of Defense and the Russian Defense Ministry.

President-elect Donald Trump now has an opportunity to move Russian-American relations off of dead center.  He cannot ignore areas of controversy, including the unconscionable cyber intrusions in U.S. political websites as well as Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria.  At the same time, there are many issues of mutual interest that require diplomatic and political coordination, including strategic disarmament, nuclear proliferation, and international terrorism.  Russian-American cooperation on the Iran nuclear agreement could be replicated elsewhere.  Any cooperative arrangement dealing with the North Korea nuclear program would be facilitated by having Washington and Moscow on the same page.

There are already indications that Putin is willing to work with the United States on issues dealing with the Middle East, including Syria, as well as in Central Europe, where Russian and American military moves have created tensions in the European theatre.  Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman have even referred to the need for a “reset” with NATO, particularly the need for normal relations.  Any “reset” would require a sophisticated diplomatic intervention, and we will soon learn if a new and inexperienced national security team in Washington is up to the task.

The Three-Way Tug Of War That’s Pulling Syria Apart

Nauman Sadiq

Last month, the Islamic State recaptured Palmyra from where it was evicted by the Syrian army only in March; and this week, the Islamic State has launched a fierce assault in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, near Syria’s border with Iraq, and has successfully managed to surround the military airport, thus cutting off food supplies to the besieged city.

Although the Syria experts of the mainstream media are claiming that the Islamic State’s jihadists from the Anbar province of Iraq have crossed over from the border to reinforce the militants in Palmyra and Deir Ezzor, but we should keep in mind that Ramadi was liberated in December 2015 and Fallujah in June last year. Why did it take the Islamic State’s jihadists several months to recapture Palmyra and mount an assault in Deir Ezzor when the aforementioned cities in eastern Syria are located only a few hours’ drive from Anbar in Iraq across a highly porous border?

The Russian defense ministry, by contrast, has given the explanation that thousands of Islamic State jihadists have crossed over to eastern provinces of Syria from Mosul in Iraq; and several analysts have blamed the US for not doing enough to prevent the reinforcements reaching to eastern Syria from Iraq, because the preference of the US seems to be to drive out jihadists from Iraq but letting them give a hard time to the government troops in Syria.

The Syrian civil war is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a Arab regime and the Syrian Kurds. And the net beneficiaries of this conflict have only been the Syrian Kurds who have expanded their area of control by cleverly aligning themselves first with the Syrian regime against the Sunni Arab militants since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to August 2014 when the US declared a war against one faction of the Sunni Arab militants, i.e. the Islamic State, after the latter overran Mosul in June 2014; and then the Syrian Kurds aligned themselves with the US against the Islamic State, thus further buttressing their position against the Sunni Arab militants as well as the Syrian regime.

Although the Sunni Arab militants have also scored numerous victories in their battle against the Shi’a regime, but their battlefield victories have mostly been ephemeral. They have already been evicted from Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq and their withdrawal from Mosul, against the Iraqi armed forces with American air and logistical support, is only a matter of time.

In Syria, the Sunni Arab militants have already been routed from east Aleppo by the Syrian government troops with Russian air support. Although a faction of Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, is still occupying Raqqa and Palmyra in eastern Syria, but it’s obvious that the Islamic State is going to lose Raqqa to the Syrian Kurds and Palmyra to the Syrian government troops sooner or later.

The only permanent gains of the Sunni Arab militants would be Idlib in western Syria, Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria; and a few areas in northwestern Syria, like al-Bab, which might change hands from the Islamic State to the relatively moderate factions of the Sunni Arab militants through Turkish arbitration.

Notwithstanding, the only difference between the Soviet-Afghan jihad that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad; back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists have been sold as “moderate rebels,” with secular and nationalist ambitions, to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terror, therefore the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in those countries: such as, the red militants of the Islamic State, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide money, training and arms to the Syrian militants to battle the Syrian regime with the support of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact, that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria, the bulk of the so-called “moderate opposition” is comprised of Islamic jihadists, like the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers that goes by the name of the Free Syria Army (FSA.)

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, the various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in their character than secular or nationalist, as such.

Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, had been allied with the Shi’a regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014, as I have already mentioned.

At the behest of the American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States’ policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.

However, the reports of infiltration of the Islamic State’s jihadists from Iraq into eastern Syria by the Russian defense ministry sources lend credence to the suspicion that although the US seems sincere in driving out jihadists from Iraq, but it is still playing the double game of using the Sunni Arab militants to weaken the Syrian regime.

Australian report highlights collapse of union membership

Oscar Grenfell

Figures released last week by research agency Roy Morgan, revealing record low membership rates, have highlighted the gulf that exists between the trade unions and the working class.

Having worked hand in glove with big business and governments to enforce the destruction of jobs, wages and working conditions over the past three decades, the unions have become bureaucratic shells viewed with hostility and suspicion by millions of workers.

Based on a survey of 50,000 workers across occupational, age and wealth brackets, conducted in September 2016, the report estimates that national union membership stands at around 17.4 percent. This is the lowest result since the research firm began collecting union membership data in 1998.

The figure is higher than the 15 percent recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last year, a fact that some analysts have attributed to the smaller sample size of the Morgan survey.

The results provide a glimpse of the class character of the unions. While they are fraudulently touted as “workers’ organisations” by various pseudo-left groups, the unions have virtually no membership base among the most impoverished sections of the working class and young workers.

The highest density of union membership, at 25.8 percent, is the second wealthiest fifth (quintile) of the working population, with an annual income of between $80,000 and $99,000. Individuals in public administration and defence are 65 percent more likely to be union members than the average working population.

The finding tallied with ABS data from last year, which found that just 11 percent of workers employed in the private sector are in a union. Among construction workers, Roy Morgan reported that the unionisation rate is only 11.5 percent. The figure is 9.7 percent for farm, forestry and gardening workers.

Membership was lowest among the poorest workers, with just 12.9 percent in the lowest quintile surveyed—those with an income between $20,000 and $39,000—and 14.2 percent in the quintile with the second lowest income. This indicates that the unions view with disinterest the plight of the most exploited sections of the working class.

Among most young people, union membership is a thing of the past. Just 6.9 percent of workers under the age of 25 belonged to a union, while the ratio was 12.3 percent among those aged 25–34.

Young people have borne the brunt of the destruction of full-time work by the employers. Hundreds of thousands of youth have been consigned to low-paid, insecure work with poverty-level wages, no entitlements and the constant threat of unemployment. These conditions are spreading throughout the entire workforce, with rates of part-time, casual and contract work soaring to more than 40 percent.

The unions have directly enforced the destruction of the pay and conditions of young workers. Last year, for instance, it was revealed that the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association had signed secret deals with major fast food corporations, clearing the way for the underpayment of up to 250,000 workers—as much as $300 million a year collectively—compared to the mandated award rate.

The state with the lowest proportion of union membership was South Australia, with just 14.9 percent of the working population belonging to a union. The figure was substantially down on the 24.6 percent recorded in 2012.

South Australia’s Public Sector Association general secretary Nev Kitchin summed up the union bureaucracy’s contempt for the working class. Responding to the data, he declared: “We’ve been really good at building up the best working conditions anywhere in the world, so you now have a generation of people who are apathetic and don’t recognise the hard work that went on to gain them.”

In reality, South Australia has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The unions have collaborated with the major employers in the destruction of large swathes of industry and manufacturing, leaving working-class areas with joblessness of a depression-era magnitude. Officially, the state’s unemployment rate stands at 6.5 percent. But in Elizabeth, in northern Adelaide, where General Motors is shutting its assembly plant this year, joblessness is already at a staggering 33 percent.

The decline in membership rates is one expression of the complete corporatisation of the unions, which function as an industrial police force. They represent a wealthy, upper middle-class officialdom whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the workers they falsely claim to represent.

The unions derive the bulk of their income, not from membership dues, but various parasitic financial arrangements, including control of massive superannuation funds. The royal commission into union corruption in 2015 documented numerous cases of the unions funnelling workers’ compensation monies into financial investment vehicles, establishing bogus union-controlled charities and health and safety companies which solicit donations from big business, and striking countless backroom deals with employers.

Many of those counted as union members may have little choice. In a number of cases detailed by the royal commission, companies paid the union membership dues of their employees. Some workers were not even aware they were members of the union, but were subjected to union-company deals to slash wages and conditions below award rates. The unions, including the Australian Workers Union, formerly headed by Labor Party leader Bill Shorten, also use their fictitious membership numbers to boost their factional weight in the Labor Party.

The decline in union membership is an historic shift, bound up with their transformation into direct agencies of the corporate and financial elite, amid the unprecedented integration of global production. Unions once sought limited concessions for their members, within the framework of wage exploitation, under conditions of a nationally-protected economy. During the 1950s, around 60 percent of workers were union members.

The sharp decline in membership began during the 1980s, as the unions signed a series of Accords with the Hawke and Keating Labor governments to drive down wages and conditions, and eliminate thousands of jobs, in response to globalisation and the demands of business that Australia be “internationally competitive.”

Summarising the decline in union membership in an entire generation of workers, an ABS report in 2008 noted: “In 1986, almost half (48 percent) of those employees born in the 1950s, and then aged 25–34 years, were union members. Ten years later the unionisation rate of this cohort, then aged 35–44 years, had fallen to 36 percent, and a further decade later it was 28 percent (26 percent in 2007).”

Now, amid a deep-going crisis of Australian and world capitalism, the unions are enforcing the demands of the corporate elite backed by governments for unprecedented cuts to real wages, the destruction of what remains of hard-earned conditions and the axing of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Only through the establishment of new organisations of struggle, including rank-and-file committees completely independent of the unions, and a new political perspective based on the struggle for a workers’ government and socialist policies can workers unify and fight back against this company-union offensive.

Brazil’s Temer government sends military into the prisons

Bill Van Auken 

Following a series of bloody prison riots that have claimed the lives of at least 134 inmates in the first 15 days of this year alone, the right-wing Brazilian government of President Michel Temer has ordered the military to prepare to carry out raids on penitentiaries around the country.

According to the government, the plan will initially see the mobilization of 1,000 troops drawn from the Army, Navy and Air Force, divided into 30 units that will be sent into prisons as requested by state governments. Defense Minister Raul Jungmann indicated that this force could be significantly expanded, drawing from Brazil’s 350,000-strong armed forces.

Jungmann said that the armed force would be contributing to “reducing the possibility [of new rebellions] and also to reducing their lethality.” He acknowledged that this “contribution” went “beyond their principal task, which is the defense of the country.”

Meeting with a group of state governors Wednesday, Temer declared that the armed forces “will be, as well, through their extraordinary operational capacity and even the credibility that they have, a fear factor in relation to those who are in the prisons.”

According to the government, the military will be utilized to conduct “sweeps” of prisons in search of weapons, cellphones and drugs. Supposedly, prison personnel and police will first clear the areas to be searched, precluding direct physical confrontations between the troops and the inmates.

Temer’s turn to the armed forces comes in the wake of prison uprisings that killed 60 inmates on January 1 and 2 in a prison located in the Amazon river city of Manaus, followed by two more bloody upheavals, one in the northern state of Roraima, where 33 prisoners lost their lives, and another in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, where another 26 were killed. Smaller outbreaks at other prisons produced additional deaths.

The government and the corporate media have attributed this bloodletting, which in a number of cases included the beheading of prisoners, to turf wars between rival gangs, principally the PCC (First Command of the Capital), based in Brazil’s southeastern city of Sao Paulo, and crime organizations based in the north of the country.

In reality, however, many of those killed were not linked to any gang, but rather were the victims of a brutal and inhuman system of incarceration that reflects the staggering social polarization that is the overriding feature of Brazil’s capitalist social order.

With over 622,000 inmates, Brazil has the fourth largest prison population in the word, trailing only the US, China and Russia. This population has increased more than six-fold since 1990, resulting in more and more inmates crammed into decaying prisons.

According to the government’s own statistics, the official capacity for prisons nationwide is only 327,000, just over half of the number of inmates who are today being held under abominable conditions in these facilities. The prison complex in Manaus, where the first massacre took place on New Year’s Day, held 1,224 men in a space meant for 454.

A major factor in driving up Brazil’s prison population was the former Workers Party government’s embrace under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the “war on drugs,” with the implementation of a new drug law in 2006, whose repressive weight fell overwhelmingly on the most impoverished sections of the Brazilian population. The law was only made more draconian under Lula’s successor, the recently impeached PT president Dilma Rousseff.

Meanwhile, with the onset of Brazil’s deep-going economic crisis, the Rousseff government and its successor under former vice president Temer slashed funding for the building of new prison facilities by 85 percent over the past two years, according to the daily Folha de S.Paulo, while also cutting appropriations for maintaining existing prisons.

For its part, the Brazilian court system operates at glacial speed and with utter contempt for the democratic rights of the working class and the poor. Fully 40 percent of those in jail have yet to be tried or convicted of any crime.

Temer’s calling out the troops to confront the crisis in the prison system is part of a broader pattern of a turn to repression and militarization by his government, the most right-wing in Brazil since the fall of the 20-year dictatorship brought to power by the US-backed military coup of 1964.

With 12 million unemployed and the government carrying out the most sweeping attacks on education, health care and working class living standards in decades, the increasing reliance upon the military to confront manifestations of social unrest has ominous implications.

Last month, Gen. Rômulo Bini Pereira, the former chief of staff of the Defense Ministry, wrote a column for Folha de S.Paulo stating that under conditions of deepening economic and political crisis, “the country may enter into a situation of ungovernability, which will no longer meet the expectations and desires of society, rendering the existing democratic regime unworkable.” In such a situation, he warned, “the Armed Forces may be called upon to intervene, including in defense of the state and [society’s] institutions.”

UK: Spying powers used more than 55,000 times by local government agencies

Trevor Johnson

Laws introduced in 2000 by the Labour government, under the guise of “fighting terrorism”, were used by UK local councils to carry out more than 55,000 days of covert surveillance of citizens over a period of five years.

Councils were given permission under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to carry out the surveillance, including spying on people walking dogs, feeding pigeons and fly tipping (illegal dumping). Many councils used spying to question the legitimacy of welfare benefit claims.

The councils gathered evidence by planting secret listening devices and cameras and by using private detectives.

Members of the Liberal Democrats obtained this information on the use of spying by issuing a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Every local council was asked if they had used the powers and if so how many times.

The councils’ responses showed they had launched 2,800 separate surveillance operations, lasting up to 90 days each. Of the 283 councils responding, two-thirds had used the powers allowed under the RIPA spying legislation. Lincolnshire County Council alone requested nearly 4,000 days of spying operations.

All the claims made in parliament and elsewhere—that judicial oversight of the newly passed and even more authoritarian Investigatory Powers Act/Snoopers’ Charter would ensure it would not be used beyond its original purposes—have been disproven at one stroke.

If it was so easy for councils to obtain warrants to invade the privacy of ordinary people over transgressions like not cleaning up after their dog, can anyone believe that the Investigatory Powers Act will not be used just as freely by the secret services to spy on people, including their political activities?

Equally, if the powers allowed under RIPA were misused on this scale, how much will the new, more intrusive powers of the Snoopers’ Charter be utilised against the wider population under conditions of growing crisis and escalating inequality?

Among the examples cited in the Guardian were Midlothian Council in Scotland, which used RIPA to obtain data on dog barking and Allerdale Borough Council in Cumbria, England that used the powers to determine who had been feeding pigeons. Lancaster City Council used the powers in 2012 for “targeted dog fouling enforcement” over a period of 11 days.

In another case, Bromley Borough Council in London used RIPA following a complaint about the accumulation of rubbish in a rear garden. The complaint claimed the perpetrator was a “serial fly tipper”. In response Bromley Council, reported the Guardian, “deployed a ‘covert camera’ in the upstairs bedroom window of another property, which gathered evidence of what was happening.”

The attack on democratic rights inherent in the RIPA legislation was criticised from the outset by civil and human rights organisations. A report published in 2010 by Big Brother Watch, a civil liberties and privacy rights group, noted, “most people would imagine that these serious powers—to spy on people, without notice—were meant for law enforcement use against terrorists and crime kingpins. One might also presume, wrongly, that these powers are meant to be used sparingly in serious cases, rather than by council officials on members of the public, not convicted of any offence, in relation to trifling allegations.”

In its report from that year, “The Grim RIPA: Cataloguing the ways in which local authorities have abused their covert surveillance powers,” Big Brother Watch found that “372 local authorities in Great Britain have conducted RIPA surveillance operations in 8,575 cases in the past two years. This means that councils alone have carried out over eleven surveillance operations every day in this country over the past two years.”

The latest report confirms that in the years since that report, use of the RIPA by local councils became more frequent rather than less.

RIPA was introduced even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and was the beginning of the imposition of a battery of legislation which has eviscerated civil liberties and democratic rights in the UK. It permitted the opening of postal correspondence, the review of subscriptions and phone numbers, details of Internet searches and email communication, bugging of buildings and vehicles, pursuing and monitoring of individuals, and the use of informers.

Among the main legislation introduced, each piece more draconian than its predecessor, were the:

• Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)—passed 26 July 2000

• RIPA extensions in December 2003, April 2005, July 2006 and February 2010

• Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA)—passed July, 2014

• Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA/“Snoopers’ Charter”)—passed November, 2016

On July 14, 2014, a new bill was brought forward by the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition strengthening the authorities’ ability to retain large amounts of data on every citizen and to spy on the population at large. The bill that led to the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA) was rushed through parliament on “emergency” grounds.

DRIPA, now replaced by the Snoopers’ Charter, was also widely misused by the state and its auxiliaries. Some half million requests were granted to access DRIPA data each year. Hundreds of public authorities, including the police and every other branch of the state and intelligence agencies, were given access to confidential data—illegally according to the European Court of Justice.

In its December 2016 ruling, the European Court of Justice found that the general surveillance on a mass scale allowed under DRIPA was unlawful.

The vast state spying operation that was carried out illegally for years by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spying operation—before being exposed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden—has now been made legal by the introduction of the Snoopers’ Charter.

While highlighting the disproportionate and absurd use of anti-terror legislation to target dog walkers and pigeon-feeding pensioners, the media organisations that saw fit to publish the latest RIPA figures, including the Guardian and Independent, did not raise the implications of the far more intrusive Snoopers’ Charter.

On the basis of the draconian raft of legislation now in place, the UK has been dubbed the “surveillance state.” Along with its gigantic, legalized spying dragnet, the UK has more closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras per capita than any other country in the world. In 2013, there were already up to 5.9 million CCTV cameras in the UK, approximately 15 percent of the world’s total. The UK has more CCTV cameras than China—even though China more than 20 times as many people.

People in urban areas of the UK are likely to be captured by around 30 CCTV systems every day, with each CCTV system made up of multiple cameras.

Increasingly complex computer software is now being used to pick out and recognise faces from CCTV footage. Following the London riots of August 2011, police trawled through more than 200,000 hours of CCTV footage to identify potential suspects. Around 5,000 individuals were found by such means over a period of more than five months.

Software to record car number plates and identify cars and their owners has been available for nearly a decade and is widely used by UK police. According to a recent estimation, every single vehicle in the UK and its driver is captured on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database around six times every week. Some 30 million motorists are photographed every day, with images of cars and their drivers taken at the rate of 350 every second. A staggering 11 billion reads of number plates are taken annually via a vast network of 7,858 cameras—many of them unmarked. This equates to an almost trebling of reads taken since ANPR was introduced in 2009.