General Motors announces 1,100 job cuts at Lansing, Michigan plant

Shannon Jones & Jerry White

Just three days after phasing out the second shift at its Detroit assembly plant and eliminating 1,300 jobs, General Motors announced Monday it will lay off another 1,100 workers at its Lansing Delta Township plant when it ends third shift production on May 12.

The layoffs at the vast complex just outside of the Michigan state capital bring the total number of job cuts announced by GM since December to 4,600. On January 20, 850 workers lost their jobs at the neighboring Lansing Grand River plant, and another 1,100 were laid off at the Lordstown Assembly plant, near Youngstown, Ohio.

Shift change at GM's Delta Township Assembly Plant

The ongoing job cuts expose the fraudulent character of President Donald Trump’s posturing about protecting American workers. Trump has said nothing about the GM job cuts while appointing GM’s CEO Mary Barra to his corporate advisory board.

Workers at the Delta Township plant, which employs 3,200 hourly and 250 salaried workers, were given a 60-day notice of the layoffs Monday morning. The plant produces the highly profitable Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave and GMC Acadia sports utility vehicle models. The new generation Acadia, however, is being moved to GM’s Spring Hill Assembly Plant in Tennessee.

The plant will shut down from May to June to prepare for the launches of the new Traverse and Enclave. It will resume as a two-shift operation on June 12, according to the Detroit News.

“We have known this was coming for a while, so it is not a shock,” a worker at the Lansing Delta Township plant told the World Socialist Web SiteAutoworker Newsletter. “We had three cars in the plant and now we are down to two. There is not enough demand for those to run three shifts. We hope we will get another product, but it might not be this year but further down the road.”

He said that even if GM decided to move a new vehicle into the plant, it would take time to get the bugs out and ramp up production. “Most of the workers that are being affected are temporary workers. Some workers were given the opportunity to move to Tennessee,” where the production is being shifted. “However, those workers are already gone.” He noted that most of the workers facing layoffs were temporary workers, not eligible for transfer or for supplemental unemployment benefits (SUB).

GM is carrying out a global restructuring of its operations even as it is engaged in funneling approximately $12 billion to its richest investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividend payouts. In a Monday morning meeting with investors Barra said GM’s sale of its European Opel-Vauxhall division to French automaker Peugeot-Citroen—which could lead to the shutdown of several plants and wiping out of at least 6,000 jobs—would free up $2 billion to accelerate its stock repurchase plan to drive up the company’s share value.

The ending of GM’s 80-year presence in Europe is part of the automaker’s efforts to be a smaller, more profitable company with fewer employees, fewer pension and health care obligations. Barra told investors that GM continuously looks at every country and product line to ensure they provide a “great return.” Barra promised investors returns of 20 percent or more.

GM made a record $12 billion in North American profits last year. Analysts have largely attributed the profits to the concessions contained in the 2015 UAW-GM contract, which expanded the number of disposable temporary workers allowing the company to quickly cut back production and their workforce in response to slowing demand without having to pay early retirement or supplemental unemployment benefits. Known as “perma-temps,” these lower-paid workers are repeatedly hired and fired before they reach one year and qualify to become full-time employees.

A call from the World Socialist Web Site seeking a statement on the layoffs from UAW Local 602 was not returned. In comments to the Lansing State Journal, however, local president Bill Reed did not even pretend to oppose the layoffs, which will have a devastating effect on workers and their families. Instead, he repeated the company line, saying the layoffs were due to “a major vehicle change” and would probably be short-lived. “I know (GM) wants to utilize the plant at full capacity,” he said.

A worker who recently retired from the Delta Township plant told the WSWS, “They keep workers in the dark like mushrooms. What they are doing is laying off workers before they get a year in the plant so they don’t have to pay benefits. It is tragic, but that is how they repay people. Another thing I heard they are doing is laying off permanent people in violation of seniority because it is cheaper to work temps.”

“The union doesn’t represent the people,” he continued. “They are policemen for the companies. It is nothing but a pressure cooker in there. Management makes up new rules every day just so they can maximize profits. It is like a dictatorship now. You make a mistake and you get three days off without pay. I was not able to get a grievance written in the last 15 years. It is like an old boys’ network. If there are any rumors on the floor, they will haul you into labor relations.”

A worker at the GM Detroit-Hamtramck plant with five years said that he had just learned of the layoffs in Lansing today, which followed the layoff of 1,300 workers Friday at his plant. “We had heard that there were going to be layoffs, but there was nothing down on paper. From my understanding the temporary workers will be in a pool and may be called back in the future, but I don’t know how they decide who comes back, if it is random or not.”

He said there were still some temporary workers in his plant who were being used to train permanent workers. However, the temporary workers would face layoff as soon as the training period was over.

As far as the future of his plant he said, “There is talk of more weeks of shutdown. You never know. There is no telling what is going to be happening.”

Margaret, a retired GM worker living in Ohio said she had been following the layoffs closely. “According to the UAW contract the temporary workers are supposed to be made full time after one year, so they are laying them off so they can’t get to full time.”

She said she had worked for seven years at the Lordstown Assembly Plant outside of Warren, Ohio. “At Lordstown they had temps working for years. They would lay them off after 90 days and then hire them back so they didn’t have to pay full wages. They are doing the same thing at Delta and Detroit-Hamtramck.”

Asked what she thought about the media blackout of the layoffs in Detroit she said, “I can tell you why there is no media coverage, GM wants to hide its dirty work.”

Margaret spoke about the collaboration of the UAW with management in the destruction of tens of thousands of auto jobs. “Since I started work GM has closed three-quarters of its plants and I have worked at seven different plants starting in Saginaw, Michigan. I finally took my pension and got out. The UAW doesn’t care about the workers.

“GM doesn’t want to give workers anything. They made billions of dollars in profits last year.”

She said she opposed the attempt by the Trump administration with the collaboration of the UAW to scapegoat immigrant workers for the destruction of jobs. “These workers come here to get a job and a better life for their families and now they are being punished. The corporations are our enemies, not immigrant workers. It doesn’t matter if a worker is immigrant or not, there is too much mistreatment of poor people. They are being tossed on the scrap heap. They value money more than humans.”

Trump issues new version of Muslim travel ban

Patrick Martin

US President Donald Trump issued a revised executive order banning travel from six majority-Muslim countries and halting all refugee entry into the United States for the next 120 days. The order revokes and replaces Executive Order 13769, signed by Trump January 27, which was struck down as unconstitutional by several federal courts.

The revised order targets six of the countries named in the previous order—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—but exempts the seventh country, Iraq. This was after objections from the Pentagon, which feared widespread popular anger in the country where 6,000 US troops are deployed alongside tens of thousands of Iraqi army and militia forces in the ongoing conflict with Islamic State guerrillas.

The order omits several of the most flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional provisions of the earlier order, including a specific preference for “minority religious groups,” which in the context of Muslim-majority countries meant overt discrimination against Muslims.

Unlike the first order, the travel ban is prospective only: it freezes new applications for visas for the next 90 days, but has no effect on current visas, or on US legal residents (green card holders) coming back from visits to one of the six targeted countries. There will be no mass cancellation of visas, as was the case under the initial draft of the order.

That said, the reactionary and anti-democratic character of the order remains, with the main immediate effect felt by refugees, who will make up the vast majority of those denied entry to the United States, rather than travelers.

Trump cuts the number of refugees to be admitted from 117,000 for the current fiscal year to only 50,000. Given that there is a 120-day freeze on all refugee admissions, which begins when the new order takes effect March 16 and lasts until July 14, it is highly unlikely that even 50,000 refugees will be able to enter the US during the remainder of the period ending September 30.

The impact on travelers could be much larger going forward, since the executive order commissions the secretary of homeland security, in consultation with the secretary of state and the attorney general, to make recommendation on extending the travel ban, and to draw up additional lists of countries whose citizens should be excluded, based on an assessment of whether these countries have provided information on their own citizens demanded by the US government. In other words, the “temporary” ban on the six countries could well become open-ended, and Washington will bully foreign governments into collaborating with its “anti-terrorism” policies, on penalty of being added to the travel ban.

The language of the new executive order bristles with Trump’s hatred for the judicial review process that resulted in the effective overturning of the earlier order, and his contempt for the issues of democratic rights and constitutional norms that were raised in the numerous legal challenges. It reiterates the claim of near-absolute presidential power to bar the entry of broad classes of foreigners at the discretion of the White House.

Immigrants’ rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the new travel ban as just as anti-democratic and unconstitutional as the first order, even though scaled back to apply to somewhat fewer people. Lawsuits will be filed even before the new order takes effect on March 16.

The supposed “anti-terrorist” rationale for the travel ban is belied even by the agencies responsible for enforcing it. The Department of Homeland Security itself admitted, in a report made public last month, that country of origin was not a meaningful variable in assessing the likelihood of any individual mounting a terrorist attack.

According to an analysis by Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, cited in Monday’s New York Times, of the 36 Muslim extremists who have engaged in terrorist attacks inside the United States since 2001, 18 were born in the US and 14 migrated here as children, and so would have passed any vetting procedure. None came from the six countries targeted by the travel ban.

The Times concluded: “Muslim extremists have accounted for 16 out of 240,000 murders in the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” The newspaper could have added—but chose not to—that during that period far more Americans have been killed by former soldiers traumatized and brutalized by the wars conducted by US imperialism in the Middle East than by any terrorists, Muslim or otherwise.

These facts did not stop Trump from claiming, in his address to Congress last Tuesday, “The vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” That lie was followed by a brazen appeal to fear: “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America.” This was in reference to refugees from Syria, mainly women and children, victims of a brutal civil war instigated by the United States and the oil-based monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

Congressional Democrats for the most part postured as critics of the revised travel ban, but they have focused all their attention on denouncing Trump as insufficiently aggressive towards Russia, effectively downplaying any objections to his attacks on democratic rights.

The issuance of the new order came in the midst of a mounting political crisis of the Trump administration over charges and counter-charges relating to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and alleged contacts between Trump aides and Russian intelligence agencies. No actual evidence of such interference or such contacts has ever been made public—only an endless series of anonymous leaks from officials in the military-intelligence apparatus opposed to Trump’s apparently softer foreign policy towards Russia.

On Saturday, Trump retaliated with a series of tweets claiming President Obama had ordered wiretapping of his Trump Tower offices during the election campaign, claiming that this represented a scandal as serious as Nixon and Watergate. Like his critics in the anti-Russian campaign, Trump did not offer a shred of evidence to back up his extraordinary claims.

Reaction to these charges in the media and official political circles was overwhelmingly hostile, with congressional Republicans distancing themselves from the White House, agreeing only that the question of wiretapping should be looked into by the intelligence committees that are investigating the charges of Russian interference.

White House officials avoided all interaction with the media during the issuance of the executive order establishing the revised travel ban, apparently to avoid further questions on the wiretapping issue. Trump signed the order behind closed doors, rather than welcoming television cameras to the Oval Office as he did when he signed the first order.

The formal issuance of the order came at a joint White House appearance of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at which each official read a short statement. All three then left without taking any questions. A scheduled televised press briefing by Press Secretary Sean Spicer was held off camera and behind closed doors.

India becomes “frontline” state in US war plans against China

Deepal Jayasekera & Keith Jones

India is to become a major service and repair hub for the US Seventh Fleet—the armada that is at the center of US war preparations against China.

Last month the Pentagon awarded a contract, said to be worth up to $1.5 billion over the next five years, to a shipyard in Gujarat to maintain the Seventh Fleet’s warships and patrol and service vessels.

This is a strategic move aimed at giving flesh and blood to last August’s agreement opening India’s military bases and ports to routine use by the US military for the resupply and repair of its warplanes and warships.

The transformation of India into a hub for the Seventh Fleet marks a new stage in India’s integration into US imperialism’s military-strategic offensive against China.

The Seventh Fleet is at the very center of US plans to wage war on China. It has responsibility for the western Pacific and the eastern stretches of the Indian Ocean up to the India-Pakistan border. US strategy calls for the Seventh Fleet to impose an economic blockade on China by seizing control of the Straits of Malacca and other Indian Ocean/South China Sea chokepoints and to spearhead a massive bombardment of Chinese military installations, cities and infrastructure in what the Pentagon calls its “Air-Sea Battle” plan.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Washington has worked assiduously to harness New Delhi to its predatory agenda and to build up India as a counterweight to China. The Pentagon and US military-intelligence think tanks have long coveted India as a geopolitical prize because of its size, its large nuclear-armed military and its strategic location. India, or so the strategists of US imperialism calculate, can serve as China’s “soft southern underbelly.” It also provides the best vantage point from which to dominate the Indian Ocean, China’s and the world’s most important commercial waterway.

Under Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP government, New Delhi has dramatically expanded its already extensive military-strategic cooperation with Washington. In addition to the basing agreement, India has expanded bilateral and trilateral military-strategic ties with America’s principal Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. In January, the head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, revealed that the Pentagon and Indian military are sharing intelligence on Chinese submarine and ship movements in the Indian Ocean.

The grave threat the Indo-US alliance represents to the people of Asia and the world is underscored by the advent of the Trump administration. It has denounced China as a “currency manipulator,” dismissed the Obama administration’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia” as weak and ineffective, and threatened to deny Beijing access to Chinese-controlled islets in the South China Sea—an act that would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

Trump has criticized Obama’s foreign policy on many fronts. But when it comes to India, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has vowed that the Trump administration is determined to “build upon” the recent “tremendous progress” in Indo-US “defense cooperation.”

The Indian government, opposition and corporate media are all complicit in keeping India’s workers and toilers in the dark as to the extent to which India is being transformed into a frontline state in Washington’s drive to thwart China’s rise and assert US hegemony over Eurasia. This drive, if not stopped through the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class, leads inexorably to war between the world’s nuclear-armed great powers.

India’s emergence as a hub for the US Seventh Fleet is so striking a change, however, that even Indian media reports could not avoid mentioning that during the Cold War, the Seventh Fleet was used by Washington to bully and threaten New Delhi on several occasions. The Times of India wrote, “The US Seventh Fleet, which was sent to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 by then-American President Richard Nixon … to pressure India during the Bangladesh liberation war, will now ironically be maintained by an Indian company.”

Because of New Delhi’s strategic and commercial ties with Moscow, Washington treated India as an adversary for most of the Cold War.

Newly independent India had been eager to establish warm relations with Washington. But New Delhi balked at US imperialism’s attempts to bully it into subordinating its foreign policy to Washington’s strategic offensive against the Soviet Union.

Washington responded by recruiting Pakistan, the rival state created through the communal partition of the subcontinent that had accompanied independence, to serve as a linchpin of its Cold War alliance system. With the US arming Pakistan, India turned to the Soviet Union for arms purchases and strategic support. It also became one of the founders and the principal leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Soviet support also helped New Delhi counter the economic pressure the US exerted on India because of its use of import substitution and state ownership to strengthen the Indian bourgeoisie’s position vis a vis international capital. Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party government were also mindful of the assistance the Soviet Stalinist regime’s support could play in integrating the Stalinist Communist Party of India (CPI) into bourgeois politics so as to use it to contain working class opposition.

India’s non-alignment policy had nothing to do with genuine opposition to imperialism. It was a stratagem of the Indian bourgeoisie to strengthen its class rule. When the rug was pulled out from under its state-led capitalist development strategy by globalization and the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it quickly junked its anti-imperialist rhetoric and began to fashion a more direct and slavish relationship with Washington.

This shift was spearheaded by Nehru’s Congress Party heirs. It was a Congress-led government that forged the “global Indo-US strategic partnership” that served as the antechamber for India’s transformation under Modi into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s anti-China offensive.

Yet the CPI, its Stalinist sister party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and their Left Front continue to promote “non-alignment” as “anti-imperialism” and claim that the Indian bourgeoisie can play a progressive role in world politics.

The Stalinists maintain that the imperialist world order can be pacified and the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie best advanced if New Delhi curtails its strategic ties with Washington and opposes US “unilateralism” by advocating “multi-polarity”—i.e., a greater role in regulating world affairs for the other imperialist ruling elites, the Indian bourgeoisie and the oligarchs who now rule Russia and China.

That the Stalinists openly support the great power ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie is underscored by their support for the expansion of India’s military and nuclear arsenal.

And for all their claims to oppose Modi’s embrace of Washington, they have failed to alert the working class to how the Indian bourgeoisie’s alliance with US imperialism is emboldening New Delhi in its drive to impose itself as South Asia’s regional hegemon.

The Stalinists applauded when India carried out illegal, cross-border military raids inside Pakistan last September, plunging South Asia’s nuclear-armed rivals into their most serious war crisis since at least 2003.

Pakistan’s reactionary elite has responded to India’s increasingly menacing posture by threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a larger Indian attack and by deepening its longstanding strategic partnership with Beijing.

US imperialism’s reckless drive to harness India to its offensive against China has transformed South Asia into a geopolitical powder keg. The Indo-Pakistani and Sino-Indian conflicts have become enmeshed with the US-China confrontation, adding to each a massive new explosive charge, with potentially calamitous implications for the people of the region and the world.

South Asia is thus a pivotal front in the development of a working class-led global movement against imperialist war and the capitalist system out of which it arises. Such a movement, uniting workers and toilers in India, Pakistan and across the subcontinent with the Chinese, American and international working class, will emerge only through a merciless exposure of the criminal role being played by the Stalinist CPM and CPI.

Australian government beset by turmoil

Mike Head 

Paralysis wracked the Liberal-National Coalition government last week over the cutting of wage rates for thousands of low-paid workers, underscoring a profound crisis confronting the entire Australian political establishment. Growing social discontent, combined with the immense uncertainty generated by the Trump presidency, has fuelled deep divisions in ruling circles that are increasingly calling into question the future of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

For four days last week, Turnbull refused to defend the previous week’s ruling by the Fair Work Commission industrial tribunal to slash by up to 50 percent the extra amount paid for Sunday and public holiday work—penalty rates that many low-paid retail, hospitality, fast food and pharmaceutical workers depend upon to eke out an existence.

Clearly concerned at the outrage among broad layers of working people over the across-the-board cut in workers’ wages, Turnbull sought to distance the government from the decision, claiming it was a ruling by an independent industrial “umpire.” He did not indicate support for the pay cut—a measure long sought by business—until Friday, after being condemned for not “selling” it by the Murdoch media and Tony Abbott, the man he ousted as prime minister 18 months ago. Turnbull sought to justify the attack on workers’ conditions by claiming it would increase employment by small businesses.

Today, however, the government politically backpedalled again. Treasurer Scott Morrison signalled that in its annual budget in May the government would abandon more than $13 billion in cuts to welfare, family tax benefits, pensions and other social spending that have remained blocked in the Senate since the 2014 budget. Only three weeks ago, Turnbull and Morrison unveiled an “omnibus” bill, containing all the stalled cuts, to try to demonstrate to the financial elite that they could impose the measures that Abbott had failed to deliver.

Last Friday, Turnbull desperately attempted to divert discussion by aligning himself with Trump’s vast expansion of US military spending and rhetoric against Islamic terrorism. Turnbull used the arrival in Australia of the first two $100 million F-35 Joint Strike Fighters being purchased from Lockheed Martin to boast that his government was undertaking “massive” military spending—the “biggest, ever in peace time” and that he had discussed these plans with Trump, who was “very, very impressed.”

Turnbull repeatedly declared that Australia was “killing terrorists” in the Middle East, thanks to his government’s legislation enabling the armed forces to kill “terrorists” well away from any battlefield. This legislation, in fact, cleared the way for civilians to be targeted as part of the latest escalation of the “war on terror,” which is a pretext for US-led operations to secure US control over Syria and the rest of the region, after the catastrophes created by the earlier invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Turnbull’s claim he had been praised by Trump, who had cut short his first phone call with the former, highlights the underlying impasse confronting Australian imperialism. It remains heavily dependent, as it has been since World War II, on the US, militarily and strategically. Yet Trump’s unilateral “America First” drive to assert US global hegemony has thrown a giant question mark over all the calculations that the Australian capitalist class made when it lined up behind the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” to confront China.

Not only has Trump pulled the plug on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the economic thrust of the “pivot,” through which the Australian ruling elite hoped to gain more lucrative access to Asian markets. His threats of trade war and military conflict with China imperil Australia’s largest export market and magnify the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war, with Australia functioning as a key US base.

When Turnbull ousted Abbott in September 2015, he claimed he would provide the “economic leadership” to “transition” Australia away from the collapsing mining boom, largely based on exports to China, by developing “agile” and “innovative” new policies. This claim lies in tatters, with large parts of the country mired in recession, corporate investment plummeting, full-time jobs being decimated and real wages falling.

The resulting discontent has only intensified since last July, when the government barely retained power after it called a double dissolution election of both houses of parliament, in a failed bid to break through the blockage of its legislation in the Senate. Since then, the government has worked closely with an array of right-wing populists in the Senate, particularly Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation, whose senators have voted with the government on nearly 90 percent of its legislation.

Increasingly, Hanson is being promoted in the corporate media, together with Senator Cory Bernardi, a right-wing defector from the government, and lower house MP George Christensen, who has repeatedly threatened to defect. While reflecting the rifts wracking the government, they are being used to channel the mounting disaffection in reactionary nationalist and xenophobic directions, trying to emulate Trump by posturing as anti-establishment figures.

Yesterday, Hanson was afforded a 20-minute interview on Australian Broadcasting Corporation television’s flagship “Insiders” program to peddle her anti-Islam chauvinism, accusing Muslims of trying to impose sharia law on Australia. At the same time, Hanson revealed something of her utter hostility to the working class. She stridently backed the penalty rates cut and emphasised her desire to “stabilise” the government of Turnbull, with whom she had “a good rapport.”

Amid this turmoil, the Labor Party, backed by the trade unions, is seeking to return to office by cynically exploiting hostility toward the penalty rates cut. Union officials met on the weekend to draw up a “WorkChoices” style advertising campaign, hoping to reprise the 2006–07 campaign that diverted opposition to the Howard Coalition government’s workplace laws behind the re-election of a pro-business Labor government under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, which passed similar anti-democratic legislation.

Labor leader Bill Shorten’s feigned outrage at the wage-cutting is doubly hypocritical. As a key minister in the last Labor government, he initiated the Fair Work Commission's review of penalty rates, and, as a longtime union leader, played a central role in scrapping penalty rates for many retail, fast food and service workers via union-imposed enterprise agreements with major companies.

With the Liberal Party government in Western Australia likely to be defeated in next Saturday’s state election, the Turnbull government’s instability could come to a head this month. An editorial in Saturday’s Australian warned that because of his “apparent paralysis” Turnbull was on borrowed time.

“For almost a decade now our nation has been stuck in a period of developmental diapause, where alternating periods of partisan upheaval and political ineffectiveness have stymied both fiscal repair and economic reform,” the editorial declared. “The markets, the public and Mr Turnbull’s own culpable colleagues are running out of patience.”

This message points to the protracted crisis of capitalist rule. This is firstly bound up with the inability of successive Coalition and Labor governments to push through all the austerity and wage-cutting measures demanded by the wealthy elite and the global financial markets. Since Howard’s Coalition government suffered a near-record electoral rout in 2007, every government has unravelled in less than three years.

Washington has also demonstrated its willingness to bring down any government that fails to unconditionally line up behind the US confrontation with China. In mid-2010, Rudd was ousted by US-backed Labor Party figures after he proposed that the US make some accommodation to China’s rapid economic growth.

Court hears final arguments in South Korean president’s trial

Ben McGrath 

The impeachment trial of South Korean President Park Geun-hye concluded last Monday. She is accused of being involved in a corruption scandal that includes her close aides and high-level executives at local conglomerates. The Constitutional Court is now deliberating on whether to uphold Park’s impeachment by the National Assembly on December 9 and remove her from office. A verdict is expected by mid-March.

Park refused to appear before the court or face questioning by the special prosecution counsel set up to investigate the corruption allegations. Her legal team agreed to sit down with investigators on February 9, only to pull back, claiming that the latter had violated good faith by leaking the schedule to the media and insisting that the session be recorded.

One of her defense attorneys conveyed a written statement from Park to the court on Monday, reiterating what she had previously said publicly. “I have never been involved in corruption and graft in my political journey,” Park stated. “Among the numerous things I have done until now, not one was for my personal interest, and I have never exercised or abused my authority as president for myself or those around me.”

The special prosecutors named Park a suspect in the separate corruption case last Tuesday, but she is immune from indictment while in office. They have accused her of colluding with her close friend Choi Soon-sil to accept bribes from major corporations.

If the Constitutional Court upholds the National Assembly’s decision, a new presidential election will be held within 60 days. Leading contenders include Moon Jae-in from the opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).

The prosecution team also formally indicted 18 others, notably Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics and heir to the largest chaebol (family-owned conglomerate) in South Korea. This brought the total number of indictments to 31, the largest since the introduction of the special prosecutor system in 1999.

Among the list of charges, which also include perjury and embezzlement, Lee is charged with handing over 43 billion won ($37 million) to firms controlled by Choi in exchange for the government approving a merger between Samsung affiliates Cheil and Samsung C&T Corporation in 2015. The move, through cross shareholdings, solidified Lee as next in line to take over the conglomerate from his ailing father Lee Kun-hee.

According to the Yonhap News Agency, the merger also led to profits of 854.9 billion won ($754.7 million), while depriving the state-run National Pension Service (NPS) of at least 138.8 billion won ($122.5 million). However, the NPS approved Samsung’s move. Four other senior Samsung executives will face trial as well.

The Seoul Central District Court approved an arrest warrant for Lee Jae-yong on February 17. A warrant was previously sought by the investigation team in January, but the request was denied. After the counsel presented new charges and evidence, the court approved Lee’s detention.

There is little new or shocking about these allegations, in and of themselves. South Korea’s chaebols have long been hotbeds of corruption, with government officials turning a blind eye or benefitting from kickbacks. Seoul, regardless of the party in power, is also no stranger to using extra-legal and outright oppression to enforce its agenda.

Park’s impeachment is a sign of the struggle taking place within the political establishment over how to balance between the US and China amid sharpening tensions between the two powers, exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump.

Park came to office in 2013, seemingly with the intent of developing a closer relationship with Beijing. While the Obama administration publicly supported Park, tensions with Seoul grew over the US deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile battery in South Korea. After dragging out a decision, the Park administration finally agreed to the THAAD deployment in July 2016 but negotiations continued over where and when the battery would be installed.

China opposed the THAAD installation. Far from being a defensive measure against North Korea as the US claims, THAAD and its accompanying radar system are aimed at Beijing. In the event of an attack on China, the battery would be used to knock out any response by the Chinese military.

Significantly, at no point during the mounting political crisis that led to her impeachment in December did Washington express support for Park. Within Park’s right-wing Saenuri Party, since renamed the Liberty Korea Party, a prominent group of lawmakers backed Park’s impeachment. They split and set up the Bareun (Righteous) Party in January.

Acting president Hwang Gyo-an has promised to push forward with the THAAD deployment. Last week, the military and Lotte, another South Korean chaebol, signed a land swap agreement to provide a location for the weapon on a golf course in the southeastern city of Seongju. The battery could be installed as early as May, two months earlier than previous predictions.

The Bareun Party’s Kim Moo-sung (Kim Mu-seong) and Yu Seung-min, a presidential contender, have been highly critical of China. Kim, as chairman of the Saenuri Party in July 2015, stated in Washington: “The US seems to have suspicion that South Korea may be coming too close to China, but it should be kept in mind that none other than the US is the only, irreplaceable, unique ally.”

In September 2015, Yu criticized Defense Minister Han Min-gu over the Park administration’s public position on THAAD and its relations with Washington. He also questioned the president’s appearance at a military parade in Beijing that month, which had raised concerns in the Obama administration. “Seoul must make it clear the US-South Korea military alliance ... is a blood alliance free of problems, and clarify this fact for the citizens of both the United States and South Korea,” Yu stated.

Yu also said in January: “We should hardly have to be conscious about China’s stance. Rather, we should convince China by saying that once the North Korean nuclear issue is solved we will withdraw THAAD from the Korean peninsula.” The Bareun Party denounced a visit by seven opposition DPK lawmakers to China in January as “kowtowing” to Beijing.

The DPK, which has not opposed the THAAD installation in principle, is attempting to capitalise on public opposition to the deployment, which will ensure South Korea is a target in any conflict between the US and China. The DPK delegation, which was an attempt to ease tensions with Beijing, carried a message from its potential presidential candidates, including Moon Jae-in, who are now pushing to put off a final decision on THAAD for the next administration.

China lowers economic growth target

Nick Beams 

The Chinese government has reduced its growth target for this year to “around” 6.5 percent after the economy expanded by 6.7 percent last year—itself the lowest increase in more than a quarter of a century.

The target was announced in the annual “work report” delivered by Premier Li Keqiang to the opening session of the two-week session of the National People’s Congress yesterday. The main reason for the lowered target is concern that increased growth, fuelled by rising debt, could set off a crisis in the financial system, an issue that Li addressed in his remarks.

“At present, overall systematic risks are under control,” Li said. “But we must be fully alert to the build-up of risks, including risks related to non-performing assets, bond defaults, shadow banking and Internet finance.” He also pointed to government concerns about the “high leverage in non-financial Chinese firms.”

The reference to financial problems comes after a warning from the International Monetary Fund in a report on the Chinese economy last August about the high levels of corporate debt.

The IMF’s mission chief in China, James Daniel, said the country’s medium-term outlook was becoming clouded because of “high and rising corporate debt” and authorities had to “urgently address the problem.”

Chinese debt is now estimated by the Bank for International Settlements to be 254 percent of gross domestic product. While that is comparable to the levels of other major indebted countries, the main concern is the speed of the increase. According to one estimate, debt quadrupled between 2007 and 2014.

Another indication of the financial expansion is that the Chinese banking system has now surpassed that of the euro zone to become the largest in world by assets.

In a comment to the Financial Times on Li’s address, Eswar Prasad, a specialist on the Chinese economy at Cornell University, said the lower growth target was “symbolically important” because it signalled “the government’s concerns about rising financial risks and environmental degradation wrought by the earlier emphasis on high growth at all costs and the unbalanced growth model that sustained it.”

A Commerzbank economist echoed this assessment, telling the newspaper that “China’s policy stance has turned to risk control.”

Li said financial supervisors must fix “weak links” in the financial system and action had to be taken to rein in housing prices in major centres, saying “houses are built to be lived in,” not for speculation.

Last year, when faced with the problem of unsold real estate and falling construction, the government eased mortgage conditions, setting off renewed buying that led to a slight fall in unsold apartments.

However, according to the report in the New York Times, “what looked like a bubble before looks ever more so now.” Real estate prices in Beijing and Shanghai are now among the highest in the world in relation to local income, with developers still heavily in debt.

But a lower growth rate brings other problems for the Chinese government. In past years, the official position has been that a growth rate of at least 8 percent was necessary to maintain employment and “social stability.” The official target is now well below that level and could go even lower.

Li sought to address those concerns in his report, which called for the creation of 11 million jobs, up from the level of 10 million in 2016. He acknowledged the government’s difficulties in developing a “new normal” for the economy, with less dependence on debt. “Like the struggle from chrysalis to butterfly, this process of transformation and upgrading is filled with promise but also accompanied by great pain,” he said.

Last year’s NPC took place amid protests by hundreds of coal miners in south-eastern China, who marched through the city of Pingxiang as the government announced that some 1.3 million workers would lose their jobs.

The protests saw some officials pressing for government policies to support economic growth. But according to the Financial Times “that debate has been settled in favour of officials who feel the government should pay more attention to financial and economic risks even if its results in slower economic growth.”

While the issue may be “settled” within ruling circles, it has not gone away. Many regional areas are experiencing far lower levels of growth than the official figures for the economy as a whole, with local authorities covering up the real situation in their regions.

Evidence of this surfaced last month, when Chen Qiufa, the governor of Liaoning, a major industrial region in north-eastern China, revealed that false statistics boosted the province’s economic data from 2011 to 2014. According to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, government officials inflated figures by more than 100 percent. Revenue for one county for 2013 was revised down from 2.4 billion yuan ($350 million) to 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million).

Last year, the province, which has a population of 43 million, larger than the state of California, reported that its economy actually contracted as a result of cuts in major industries.

The government also faces major problems on the financial front. Monetary policy is going to come under pressure because the US Federal Reserve is expected to further raise interest rates, probably as soon as this month, with more rises to follow.

This will tend to increase the outflow of capital from China, putting downward pressure on the yuan under conditions where US President Donald Trump and other members of his administration have denounced China as a “currency manipulator”—allegedly lowering the value of the yuan to gain an advantage in export markets.

In fact, Chinese authorities tried to prop the currency up, spending almost $1 trillion over the past year and imposing restrictions on sending money out of the country. If US interest rates do rise, the government will have to further tighten monetary policy and impose more restrictions, putting it at odds with better-off sections of the middle classes and wealthier layers of society—the main social base of the regime—which have been sending money out of the country.

The government is also under pressure because of the considerable anger in the major urban centres over the increased prevalence of choking smogs. In his report, Li said the government would renew its effort to combat pollution and that “we will make our skies blue again.”

But clearing the clouds from the cities is likely to prove as intractable a problem as clearing those which hang over the economy and the financial system.

US coal miners face loss of retiree health coverage, black lung benefits

Samuel Davidson

Thousands of retired coal miners and surviving widows have been sent letters by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Health and Retirement Fund notifying them that their health benefits will be cut off April 30 when funding for 22,600 recipients runs out.

This is the third letter sent to retirees in five months. The first two were sent in October and November 2016. In December, congressional Democrats agreed to a four-month extension of the health plan, which is set to expire in eight weeks.

The UMWA Health and Retirement Fund administers retirement and health plans for both active and retired miners. Benefits are paid from the 1974 UMWA Pension Plan and the Multiemployer Health Benefit Plan, which are both slated to run out of funds.

A few congressmen from coal mining states have introduced bills to extend funding for the programs, but no votes are presently scheduled. The Trump administration, which has postured as the friends of miners, has said nothing, while pushing for the lifting of occupational health and safety and environmental laws, which it calls “job killing.”

Opposed to any struggle against the energy giants and the government, the UMWA is telling workers to place their fate in the hands of Democrats and Republicans on the federal and state level who have long been the pawns of Big Coal. Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is the former boss of the Sago Mine where 12 West Virginia miners were killed in a 2006 explosion following numerous safety violations.

Changes or the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could also make it more difficult for thousands of coal miners and widows to receive black lung benefits. Black lung, or coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, has been on the rise for the past two decades after years of decline.

Each year about 1,000 miners die from the slow and painful disease caused by coal and rock dust, which scars lung tissue, causing miners to slowly suffocate to death.

In the 1960s and 1970s, rank-and-file miners, retirees and widows in the Appalachia coal fields had to wage wildcat strikes and other struggles just to win recognition of the disease and get compensation. The miners had to fight not just the coal operators and the government but the UMWA bureaucracy, which was allied with the coal bosses.

For years, coal companies vigorously fought paying benefits based on legal requirements that miners prove they were both 100 percent disabled and suffered black lung from their work in the mine. Coal companies would often bring in their own doctors to testify that the miner was not totally disabled and that he contracted black lung from smoking.

One provision of the Affordable Care Act slightly amended this process. If a miner had worked 15 years in a mine and was 100 percent disabled it could be assumed that his black lung was caused by mining unless the company could prove otherwise.

The Obama bill left intact the 100 percent disability requirement, meaning miners who are deemed partially disabled are forced to choose between quitting and losing their income or continuing to breathe coal dust that is slowly killing them.

“One hundred percent disabled with black lung means you don’t have very long to live,” an underground coal miner from Pennsylvania told the World Socialist Web Site. “It’s often that guys work in the mines and then die pretty soon after they leave.

“When black lung sets in you can’t breathe and get any oxygen to the blood. Fifteen years seems like a long time before you can claim black lung benefits. With the new technologies, you are mining so much coal and producing so much dust a miner can get black lung a lot quicker than before. You see people who work six or seven years getting it now.

“If you are working six days a week, nine hours a day, whether you are running a shearing machine, a bolter or a cutter, there is so much dust. They want production so they just keep you running the machines. There is only so much water and so much air you can throw at it to keep down the dust.”

Studies have shown black lung is on the rise, hitting miners at a younger age and assuming a more aggressive form. 

One thousand miners die every year from the disease, and its incidence is now as high as it was in the 1970s when the first provisions to protect miners were enacted. Researchers attribute this to the increased amount of silica produced from grinding into rock, as companies seek to mine thinner and more difficult to reach seams of coal. Like coal dust, silica cuts into lung tissue, causing it to scab over, and preventing the absorption of oxygen.

“There are guys in my mine with black lung who are still working. They are nominally protected by the government but instead of being taken out of the mine, they are shifted to another job where they are not exposed to as much coal dust. Once a quarter an inspector takes a sample to show how much dust the worker is being exposed to. But they are still in the mine and breathing in dust.”

In 1995, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the federal agency tasked with monitoring black lung, issued recommendations that the legal dust limit be lowered from the 2.0 mg to 1.0 mg. The administrations of Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama refused to implement the new standards. In 2014, the Obama administration issued new standards cutting dust levels to 1.5 mg, just a 25 percent cut rather than the 50 percent reduction sought by NIOSH scientists.

“The Feds lowered the dust limit last year. The guys in the mines say with current production levels you can’t meet the standards. You would have to scale back production, but that is not something the coal operators are going to do. If they already have contracts for so many tons they are going to run production to get those tons. They will sell as much coal as they think they can extract from the ground.

“It is framed to us that regulations are killing the coal industry. The operators would like to see zero regulations if they could. I am not saying all operators are bad, but typically speaking, if a miner comes between a coal operator and a dollar, they are always going to take the dollar.

“Another thing we talk about in the mine is the health impact from breathing fumes. A lot of the equipment is run by diesel engines now so they don’t have to run electrical cables through the mines. But nobody really knows what all those fumes are doing to you. It’s almost like they’re doing an experiment on us.

“Workers have to unite together. It will be hard, in many countries, workers would be risking their jobs and being able to support their families if they speak up. All over the world, miners are producing more coal and giving their lives and health away.”

Another provision of the ACA allows widows to continue receiving black lung benefits when their spouses died. Without that provision, spouses will have to reapply for the benefits, often waiting years to get approved.

The increased incidence of black lung and threat to miners’ health and pension benefits is the direct result of the long record of betrayal by the UMWA, which has systematically worked to isolate and betray the coal miners. Former union president Richard Trumka, now the president of the AFL-CIO, played a key role in overturning the militant traditions of the miners and selling out key struggles, including the 1984-85 AT Massey strike and the 1989-90 Pittston strike.

Trumka has recently pledged to “partner” with Trump on trade and immigration issues, underscoring once again the anti-working class character of these pro-company and nationalist organizations.

UK: Up to 250,000 protest attacks on National Health Service

Robert Stevens

Up to 250,000 people demonstrated in London on Saturday in defence of the National Health Service (NHS).

The NHS is being systematically decimated, after nearly a decade of cuts in which more than £40 billion is being slashed from its budget. Such is the scale of the attacks being carried out against public health care, that in January the British Red Cross described the situation facing the NHS as a “humanitarian crisis.”

Protesters listening to the speeches in Trafalgar Square

The demonstration was called by the Health Campaigns Together coalition and the People’s Assembly, with the backing of national trade unions, including Unite, Unison, the GMB and British Medical Association. The People’s Assembly is backed by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Green Party and an assortment of Stalinist and pseudo-left outfits.

The protest was far larger than the organisers anticipated. That the event was so much larger demonstrates that broad layers of working people, youth, students and pensioners are determined to defend the NHS from cuts and privatisation. The Daily Mail, which along with other right-wing newspapers routinely plays down the size of demonstrations, described Saturday’s event as “one of the biggest NHS rallies in history.”

Health workers and members of the public attended from every major town and city in the UK, including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Preston, Nottingham, Southampton, Portsmouth, Norwich, Cambridge, Derby, Brighton, Bristol, Exeter, Stoke, Newcastle, Carlisle, York and the Isle of Wight.

Many of those marching carried official demonstration placards with the slogans, “Our NHS” and “No Cuts, closures, privatisation, pay restraint.” The placards also included a statement from Anuerin Bevan, the Labour MP who inaugurated the NHS in 1948, reading, “The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

Large numbers attended with their own homemade banners with a range of slogans, including many that linked the onslaught on the NHS to other attacks on working people. One read, “My education is under attack, my health is under attack, my future is under attack.” Another read, “No More Austerity—No Cuts.” Other slogans, including “NHS not Trident,” opposed spending the resources of society on war and demanded it be spent on health, education and housing.

Some of the protesters marching in London

A number of demonstrators were supporters of the many local campaigns that have sprung up to oppose the closure of vital health services facilities. Others brought placards denouncing the government’s “Sustainability and Transformation Plans,” which are the means by which tens of billions in cuts are being imposed in 44 areas of England. “Stop STP—Save the NHS,” one proclaimed, and another, “Death by STP—5 year NHS Cuts Plan.”

The rally assembled in London’s Tavistock Square, before marching through the capital and passing Trafalgar Square, with bystanders crowding pavements to show their support. It continued down Whitehall and passed the prime minister’s Number 10 Downing Street residence on its way to the main rally in Parliament Square. Uniformed police officers stood behind barriers as the marchers passed the Department of Health building.

At the head of the march were Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey and Public and Commercial Services union leader Mark Serwotka. They and the speakers on the main stage offered no strategy to fight the onslaught against the NHS.

Keynote speaker and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s speech consisted of a series of truisms about the NHS that not even Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May could openly disagree with. “Whatever you do in the health service, thank you, because every day you contribute to what is the most civilised institution in this country,” he said. Alluding to the biblical tale of the Good Samaritan, he added, “Defending the NHS is defending a basic human value and a basic human right. You don’t walk by on the other side when somebody is in difficulties or needing help.”

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the NHS rally

Citing Bevan’s statement to loud applause and cheering, Corbyn told the rally, “We’ve got the faith, we’ve got the fight and we are up for it!” Yet he offered no basis on which health service workers could conduct any fight against the government’s attacks.

Corbyn said the crisis wracking the NHS “is the fault of a government who have made a political choice.” “The money’s there,” he said.

On this basis, he made no appeal to mobilise the working class against the Tories, but instead appealed to Chancellor Philip Hammond to use next week’s Spring Budget to guarantee funding for the NHS and for social care.

To render Corbyn’s bromides more palatable, Serwotka, McCluskey, Communications Workers Union leader Dave Ward and McDonnell made more demagogic speeches, as they fraudulently claimed that the unions were involved in a determined fight to defend the NHS.

Serwotka stated that NHS workers had suffered seven years of pay cuts with many leaving in search of better jobs as they were unable to pay bills and make ends meet. He then called on the government to offer a pay rise, declaring that it was “long overdue that the trade unions and the TUC [Trades Union Congress] do something about the resolution we agreed unanimously [at the TUC’s Congress] in September, which is to get all public sector workers to campaign against the pay cuts and to take action together.”

Serwotka concluded by urging everyone to support Corbyn.

McCluskey concluded by stating, “Our message to the private health companies … is a simple one, keep out of our NHS, you thieving Tory bastards.”

John McDonnell (left) and Len McCluskey (right) at the head of the march

Ward said, “When we say the NHS is in a crisis, it’s in intensive care and the Tories are getting away with murder.”

In full rhetorical flow, he concluded, “We are going to take back control of the NHS. What about taking back control of the railways? What about taking back control of the postal industry, the telecommunication industries? What about taking back control of workplaces … come on everybody, rise up.”

Many of the speakers referred to last year’s struggle carried by 50,000 junior doctors, who struck repeatedly in unprecedented action against the government insistence that they accept an inferior contract. McDonnell said in his speech, “We owe a debt of honour to the junior doctors who took action last year. They were fighting to save the NHS. ... If industrial action takes place over pay, whether it’s in Parliament or on the picket line, Jeremy and I will be with you. And if we have to take to the streets we will.” Labour had created the NHS and it would be a “Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn that restores the NHS.”

Such statements are lies. Corbyn and McDonnell, despite a token attendance at the picket lines of junior doctors “in a personal capacity,” did nothing to mobilise Labour members and supporters in defence of the doctors, and instead urged a negotiated settlement be reached by Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Neither did the trade union bureaucracy lift a finger in opposition to these attacks, ensuring that the junior doctors suffered a defeat and in so doing once again cleared the path for the attacks that have followed.

US ramps up bombing campaign in Yemen

Niles Niemuth

In a major escalation of operations in Yemen, the US military carried out more than 30 airstrikes and drone strikes on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, hitting multiple targets allegedly linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). As many as 20 people were reported killed in the attacks, which hit the southern governorates of Shabwa, Al Bayda and Abyan.

The multi-day bombardment was the heaviest so far in the undeclared US war in Yemen, which has killed or injured more than 1,700 people, including hundreds of women and children, since 2009. According to a tally maintained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the US has carried out a least 390 attacks in the last eight years.

Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis told reporters on Friday that more airstrikes would be forthcoming: “US forces will continue to target AQAP militants and facilities in order to disrupt the terrorist organization’s plots and ultimately to protect American lives.”

Last week’s offensive was the first major military operation by the US in the country since the raid on January 29 by US Special Forces that killed as many as 30 civilians, including 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki, the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen and Islamist cleric assassinated by the Obama administration in 2011. The raid resulted in the death of Navy SEAL William (Ryan) Owens and left three other soldiers wounded.

President Donald Trump used the presence of Owens’ widow, Carryn Owens, at his address to a joint session of Congress last week to defend the murderous operation and promote American militarism, praising her husband as “a warrior and a hero.”

The string of attacks since January marks a definite intensification by the Trump administration of the US intervention initiated by the Obama administration. Trump’s predecessor pioneered the use of drone-fired missiles to assassinate those declared to be leaders or members of AQAP. Drones have been used to target and kill alleged terrorists in countries, besides Yemen, where the US is waging war without congressional authorization, including Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and much of North Africa.

Obama notoriously claimed the right to assassinate American citizens and anyone else he chose, beginning with the murder of Anwar Al-Awlaki in September 2011. His drone killing program and war in Yemen have now passed into the hands of Trump.

The intensification of US military operations in southern Yemen comes amidst an ongoing aerial onslaught and naval blockade by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia against Houthi rebels in the country’s more populated western region.

The air campaign and subsequent ground invasion aim to push back the Houthi rebels, who took over much of the country in early 2015, and reinstate the US-backed government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies have been funneling weapons and money to Sunni militias, including those affiliated with AQAP, to serve as ground troops in the war against the Zaidi Shiite Houthis.

Since it began in March 2015, the Saudi-led campaign, made possible by continuous support from the US government in the form of intelligence, logistics, military equipment and aerial refueling, has killed more than 10,000 Yemeni civilians and wounded 40,000. Saudi bombs have hit hospitals, schools, marketplaces, factories and residential neighborhoods.

The war has plunged the poorest country in the Middle East into a humanitarian disaster, with the UN estimating that at least 19 million Yemenis, more than two-thirds of the country’s population, are in need of assistance and protection.

UN Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien reported on Friday that 500,000 children under the age of five are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and more than 7 million Yemenis did not know where they would get their next meal. Even though the country risks being pushed into famine without immediate action, O’Brien reported that the UN had received only 3 percent of the estimated $2.1 billion needed to provide humanitarian assistance to 12 million people over the next year.

While Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is of considerable geopolitical significance, forming the eastern side of the Bab El Mandeb Strait, a major shipping lane which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. A significant portion of the world’s oil supply traverses the strait, making it one of the most important strategic choke points on the planet.

The US Navy announced last month that the USS Cole would join three other warships already operating off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea and the Bab El Mandeb, out of “concern for the freedom of navigation.”