EU summit reveals sharp divisions within Europe and tensions with US

Johannes Stern 

The annual Euro Summit meeting of the 28 EU heads of government, which began Thursday, was dominated by sharp transatlantic tensions and a deep crisis of the European Union (EU).

Conflicts between Germany and the United States intensified ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first meeting with President Donald Trump next week. On Monday, Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic adviser, described the US’s trade deficit with Germany as a “serious matter” and as “one of the most difficult issues” for American trade policy.

“I think that it would be useful to have candid discussions with Germany about ways that we could possibly get that deficit reduced outside the boundaries and restrictions that they claim that they are under,” Navarro said in Washington.

Germany has responded to Washington’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric by attempting to bind Europe together under its leadership and prepare “for a trade war with the United States,” as the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper put it.

The European powers are seeking to exploit Trump’s cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to expand economically into Asian markets. In a piece entitled “Europe counters Trump” the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on the draft statement for the summit: “At their meeting in Brussels, the EU heads of government want to stand up to Trump’s ‘America first policy’…and are determined to fill the hole that the United States will leave behind following Trump’s withdrawal from world trade.”

The EU is striving to rapidly conclude a trade agreement with Japan, which is the second-largest Asian economy after China, and is currently negotiating free trade deals around the world with a further 20 countries, among them Singapore and Vietnam.

Before travelling to Brussels, Merkel noted in a statement to the German parliament “that Europe will act together against unfair and protectionist trade practices, and firmly defend its interests, whenever and wherever this is necessary.” In the future, she said, the EU had “to be capable of carrying out independent crisis management.” Germany was “reliant not only on having access to the single market, but also to global markets.”

In order to pursue these global interests militarily, Germany and other European powers are seeking to establish a European army. Ahead of Thursday’s summit, a meeting of European foreign and defence ministers on Monday agreed to the creation of a joint command centre for military interventions. According to diplomats, the headquarters will begin work this month and be fully operational by June.

Germany’s aspirations to rise to the position of Europe’s hegemon, and its mounting conflict with the United States, which as a military protective power and arbitrator has supported European unity since the end of World War II, are intensifying the already sharp divisions within the European Union.

This found expression at the summit in a sharp dispute over the re-election of European Council President Donald Tusk. Although the Polish government vehemently opposed the re-election of Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, the summit extended his term in office. The election of a politician into a senior position within the EU against the will of his own government is an unprecedented event in the history of the EU. Tusk is a member of Poland’s largest opposition party, Civic Platform (PO), which is engaged in a bitter dispute with the governing PiS.

PiS chairman Jaroslaw Kaczyński described Tusk prior to the summit as “Germany’s candidate.” Poland’s foreign Minister, Witold Waszczykowski, spoke in the aftermath of the election of a “diktat from Berlin.” “We now know that it is an EU in which Berlin calls the shots,” he told the Polish media. The Polish delegation announced it would block all further decisions at the summit with its veto.

In an effort to keep the right-wing, anti-Russian Polish government on board, Berlin has adopted a more strident tone against Russia. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) demonstratively stopped off in Warsaw on his way to a visit in Moscow. Along with the three Baltic States, Poland is among the four Eastern European countries where NATO is in the process of deploying 4,000 military personnel, together with tanks and other heavy weapons. Gabriel visited the battalion being led by the German army in Lithuania last week.

Speaking in Moscow, Gabriel vehemently defended the first stationing of German troops in Eastern Europe since the genocidal war launched under the Nazis and blamed “the violation of borders in the centre of Europe” on Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rejected Gabriel’s accusation that his country was threatening NATO’s eastern members. “We have different statistics on that,” he stated. In fact, Russia was being “encircled by NATO weapons, NATO units… NATO ground troops are appearing on our borders, including from the Federal Republic of Germany.”

The intensifying crisis in the Balkans was also on the agenda of the EU summit. The region was being subjected to “challenges and tensions,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned in Brussels, “far more than ever.” She warned that the Balkans were increasingly becoming “a chessboard for great power games.”

Britain accused Russia at the beginning of the week of fomenting tensions in the region. Moscow was involved in the “undermining of countries in the Western Balkans,” which was “completely unacceptable,” British foreign Minister Boris Johnson stated. In truth, it is the Western powers that are fomenting conflict in the Balkans. In the 1990s, they tore Yugoslavia apart and bombed it. Less than a year ago, in spite of Russian warnings, NATO accepted Montenegro as a new member in the military alliance.

The growing tensions over the Balkans are only the most visible manifestation of the parallels in Europe to the run-up to the First World War over a hundred years ago. With world capitalism gripped by an ever-deepening economic and political crisis in every country, divisions within Europe and between the European powers and America increasingly take the form of protectionism, backed by rearmament and the threat of military force.

The WikiLeaks exposures and the CIA’s threat to democratic rights

Patrick Martin

Speaking at a cybersecurity conference at Boston College Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey said, “there is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.” Every activity that Americans engage in, including conversations between spouses and with members of the clergy and attorneys, is within “judicial reach.” He declared, “In appropriate circumstances, a judge can compel any one of us to testify in court about those very private communications.”

The FBI director did not add, although he could well have, that a judicial order is completely irrelevant to the US military-intelligence apparatus. The US government has far more direct methods than court orders to learn what its citizens are thinking and talking about, through the use of sophisticated cyberweapons. These include the thousands of hacking tools whose existence was made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks, in a data release exposing efforts by the CIA to turn millions of ordinary electronic devices, from cellphones and smart TVs to the computer systems running most cars, into spy weapons.

The FBI director’s declaration that there is no right to privacy was greeted with a yawn by the corporate media, which barely reported his comments, and by Democratic and Republican party politicians. This is in keeping with the overall treatment of the WikiLeaks revelations, which has been one of indifference to the threat to democratic rights exposed in the CIA cyberweapons cache.

As far as the media is concerned, anyone who raises concerns about the right to privacy, or other democratic rights, being threatened by the national-security apparatus is an agent of Russia. This position was put most bluntly by the Washington Post, in its lead editorial Thursday, headlined, “WikiLeaks does America’s enemies a big favor.”

The editorial begins with a flat-out, 100 percent defense of the CIA, declaring, “The first thing to say about the archive of cyberhacking tools stolen from the CIA and released by WikiLeaks is that they are not instruments of mass surveillance, but means for spying on individual phones, computers and televisions. There is no evidence they have been used against Americans or otherwise improperly …”

The editorial continues, “It follows that the targets of the hacking methods, and the prime beneficiaries of their release, will be Islamic State terrorists, North Korean bombmakers, Iranian, Chinese and Russian spies, and other U.S. adversaries.” The editorial goes on to smear WikiLeaks as a tool of Russia, and denounces “privacy zealots” who “are, in effect, advocating unilateral U.S. disarmament in cyberspace.”

In response to such a brazen defense of the CIA, one is tempted to ask, why doesn’t the Washington Post simply announce that it is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, tasked with the ideological and political defense of the military-intelligence apparatus? There is not a shred of an independent, critical attitude in this editorial. The newspaper swallows whole the CIA’s assurances that its agents are “legally prohibited” from spying on Americans. And it denounces WikiLeaks for acting as real journalists do, collecting information about government misconduct and making it public.

This from a newspaper that, 46 years ago, in conjunction with the New York Times, published the Pentagon Papers, over the vehement objections of the Nixon White House and the CIA and military leaders of the day, who raised the same cry of “national security.” One can only conclude that if someone brought the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers to the Post (or the Times ) today, the editors would immediately call up the FBI and have the leaker arrested.

The line of the Post has been repeated in innumerable forms in newspapers and on television. Former director of the CIA and the NSA Michael Hayden has been brought forward on nearly every news program to deliver the official government line. None of the major broadcasters adopt a critical line or seek to interview anyone who supports WikiLeaks and its exposure of CIA crimes.

A concrete demonstration of the relationship between the media and the military-intelligence apparatus is provided by a report posted on the web site of the New York Times earlier this week by David Sanger, the newspaper’s principal conduit for information that the CIA and Pentagon wish to make public.

Sanger wrote about how he and another Times reporter, William Broad, prepared last Sunday’s front-page report on US efforts to counter North Korean missile launches, headlined, “Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles,” which suggested that the US military had developed methods for causing North Korean missile launches to fail. The main thrust of this article, splashed across the newspaper’s front page, was that the countermeasures were insufficient, and more drastic actions were required against the supposed threat of a North Korean nuclear strike against US targets.

In a remarkable paragraph, Sanger describes “the sensitive part of these investigations: telling the government what we had, trying to get official comment (there has been none) and assessing whether any of our revelations could affect continuing operations.” He explains, “In the last weeks of the Obama administration, we traveled out to the director of national intelligence’s offices,” where, Sanger says, it was “important to listen to any concerns they might have about the details we are planning to publish so that we can weigh them with our editors.”

In plain English, the New York Times’ front-page “exclusive” was nothing more than a press release from the military-intelligence apparatus, aimed at spreading fear of North Korean nuclear capabilities in the upper-middle-class readership of the Times, and setting the tone for national media coverage of the issue. The political goal was to shape public opinion to support a preemptive US military attack on North Korea, an impoverished country the size of the state of Mississippi.

The main significance of the media response to the WikiLeaks revelations is that it demonstrates the complete erosion of democratic consciousness in all the institutions of the American ruling elite. In any serious accounting of the threats to American democracy, the CIA would be in first place: America’s own Gestapo, what even President Lyndon Johnson described as a “damned Murder Incorporated” for its brutal methods of assassination and provocation across the Caribbean and Latin America.

There is no greater danger to the democratic rights of the American people than the military-intelligence apparatus of the American government itself, the last line of defense for a crisis-stricken and historically doomed ruling elite.

MISF Du Pré Grants for Multiple Sclerosis Researchers from Developing Countries 2017

Application Deadline: 30th June 2017

Eligible Countries: Emerging Countries

About the Award: MISF offers Du Pré Grants to MS researchers from emerging countries to enable them to make short visits to established MS research centres outside their own country, either to learn from each other or to carry out parts of joint research projects. The aim is to encourage cross-fertilisation of skills through collaborative research projects. Two of the annual awards are supported by Stichting MS Research (the Dutch MS Research Foundation).

Type: Research

Eligibility: All candidates must:

• be educated to post graduate level in an area relevant to multiple sclerosis (MS)
• be citizens of an emerging country (all countries with a low, lower middle or upper middle income as defined by the World Bank)
• focus their research in an area relevant to MS

Before nomination, candidates need to have identified a suitable project and discussed their involvement with the project supervisor of the host institution outside their own country. Candidates are encouraged to identify a suitable host institute and supervisor to develop their project proposal before applying.

Candidates are expected to return to their own countries at the end of the study period where they will contribute to advancing care and research in MS.

The grant may also be used as a supplement for work related to MS by a candidate who has been accepted for training in a recognised institute (within the six months prior to nomination) but who doesn’t have enough money to cover the total cost.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Research: Each grant is likely to be between UK £2,000 and £4,000, to a maximum of £5,000. The funds are intended to go towards travel and living costs, or to top up an existing grant to extend a visit.

Duration of Research: Visits generally last between two and six months.

How to Apply: Candidates must provide the following to apply: A letter from the candidate detailing their reasons for nomination and the requested grant amount. His or her curriculum vitae. Signed testimonies (references) from at least two people with whom the candidate has worked. A description of the field of research that the candidate wishes to be trained in or the research that he or she wishes to carry out A lay summary of the research proposal A letter of support from the supervisor of the host institution, indicating that appropriate facilities will be made available.

Click here to apply for a Du Pré Grant

Visit Research Webpage for details

Award Provider: MISF

Attend the Google Launchpad Accelerator for Developers in Sub-Saharan Africa 2017

Application Deadline: 24th April 2017

Event Timeline: Lagos – 22nd September, Nairobi – 26th September, or Cape Town – 29th September

Offered annually? No

Eligible Countries: All African Countries

To be taken at (Continents): The Launchpad Accelerator is currently accepting applications from select countries in

• Africa (Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa)
• Asia (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam)
• Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland)
• Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico)

About the Award: Launchpad Build is an event series aimed at raising awareness, amongst intermediate and expert developers with an existing Web or Android application, on how they can leverage the power of Firebase to improve their productivity. With Firebase, developers are able to quickly develop high-quality applications, grow their user base and earn more money.

Come engage in talks and hands-on codelabs covering Firebase 2.0 with a focus on Analytics, Cloud Messaging, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Pirate Metrics, Serverless with Firebase, Tensor Flow and much more. Through the Launchpad Build event, developers will get skills and resources necessary to start using Firebase in their applications.

Type: Event

Value of Program: 

• Work closely with Google for 6 months
• This includes 2 weeks of all-expense-paid training at Google Headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley
• Equity-free support
• Access to Google engineers, resources, and mentors
• Credits for Google products
• Marketing spotlight opportunities

How to Apply: 

Visit Event Webpage for details

Award Provider: Google

Important Notes: Google will neither provide support nor reimbursements for visas, flights, accommodation and transportation to and from the events. Potential attendees are please advised to apply to attend events for which they can comfortably provide for their own travel and related logistics.

IOE-ISH Centenary Masters Scholarships for Developing Countries 2017/2018 – University College London

Application Deadline: Monday 10th April 2017 (23:59 London time).

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Developing Countries

To be taken at (country): UK

Type: Masters

Eligibility: Candidates should:

• Be citizens and residents of a low or lower-middle income country (as per World Bank website).
• Have an offer to study a full time masters degree in London at the UCL Institute of Education (October 2017 start).
• Not have studied or lived in the UK before.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: ISH will provide accommodation for a year, while the IOE covers tuition fees.

Please note that these scholarships do not cover subsistence in London or travel.

Duration of Scholarship: 1 year

How to Apply: Students who have received an offer to study at the UCL Institute of Education, will receive an email with a copy of the application form.

If you have an offer and haven’t received the application form please contact IOEinternational@ucl.ac.uk (please include your full name and student ID in your email).

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: UCL Institute of Education

Canada’s Russian Aggression

Yves Engler

Why is the Trudeau government escalating its belligerence towards Russia?

Monday it confirmed that 200 Canadian troops would remain in the Ukraine for at least two more years. This “training” mission in the Ukraine is on top of two hundred troops in Poland, a naval frigate in the Mediterranean and Black Sea and a half dozen CF-18 fighter jets on their way to locations near Russia’s border. Alongside Britain, Germany and the US, Canada will soon lead a NATO battlegroup supposed to defend Eastern Europe from Moscow. About 450 Canadian troops are headed to Latvia while the three other NATO countries lead missions in Poland, Lithuania and Estonia.

From the Russian point of view it must certainly look like NATO is massing troops at its border.

Canada’s military buildup in Eastern Europe is the direct outgrowth of a coup in Kiev. In 2014 the right-wing nationalist EuroMaidan movement ousted Viktor Yanukovych who was oscillating between the European Union and Russia. The US-backed coup divided the Ukraine politically, geographically and linguistically (Russian is the mother tongue of 30% of Ukrainians).

While we hear a great deal about Russia’s nefarious influence in the Ukraine, there’s little attention given to Canada’s role in stoking tensions there. In July 2015 the Canadian Press reported that opposition protesters were camped in the Canadian Embassy for a week during the February 2014 rebellion against Yanukovich. “Canada’s embassy in Kyiv was used as a haven for several days by anti-government protesters during the uprising that toppled the regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych,” the story noted.

Since the mid-2000s Ottawa has actively supported opponents of Russia in the Ukraine. Federal government documents from 2007 explain that Ottawa was trying to be “a visible and effective partner of the United States in Russia, Ukraine and zones of instability in Eastern Europe.” During a visit to the Ukraine that year, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay said Canada would help provide a “counterbalance” to Russia. “There are outside pressures [on Ukraine], from Russia most notably. … We want to make sure they feel the support that is there for them in the international community.” As part of Canada’s “counterbalance” to Russia, MacKay announced $16 million in aid to support “democratic reform” in the Ukraine.

Ottawa played a part in Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”. In “Agent Orange: Our secret role in Ukraine” Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon detailed how Canada funded a leading civil society opposition group and promised Ukraine’s lead electoral commissioner Canadian citizenship if he did “the right thing”. Ottawa also paid for 500 Canadians of Ukrainian descent to observe the 2004-05 elections. “[Canadian ambassador to the Ukraine, Andrew Robinson] began to organize secret monthly meetings of western ambassadors, presiding over what he called ‘donor coordination’ sessions among 20 countries interested in seeing Mr. [presidential candidate Viktor] Yushchenko succeed. Eventually, he acted as the group’s spokesman and became a prominent critic of the Kuchma government’s heavy-handed media control. Canada also invested in a controversial exit poll, carried out on election day by Ukraine’s Razumkov Centre and other groups that contradicted the official results showing Mr. Yanukovich [winning].”

For Washington and Ottawa the Ukraine is a proxy to weaken Russia, which blocked western plans to topple the Assad regime in Syria. As part of this campaign, 1,000 Canadian military personnel, a naval vessel and fighter jets will soon be on Russia’s border.

Where will this lead? A new cold war against a capitalist Russia? Or a much hotter war involving direct confrontation between Canadian and Russian troops?

What would the US response be to Russian troops massed on its border? The last time Russian missiles came within 90 miles of American soil, the world came close to nuclear war.
Canada is participating in a “game” of brinksmanship that could end very badly.

The Refugee Crisis Is a Sign of a Planet in Trouble

David Korten

The plight of immigrant families in the United States facing threat of deportation has provoked a massive compassionate response, with cities, churches, and colleges offering sanctuary and legal assistance to those under threat. It is an inspiring expression of our human response to others in need that evokes hope for the human future. At the same time, we need to take a deeper look at the source of the growing refugee crisis.

There is nothing new or exceptional about human migration. The earliest humans ventured out from Africa to populate the Earth. Jews migrated out of Egypt to escape oppression. The Irish migrated to the United States to escape the potato famine. Migrants in our time range from university graduates looking for career advancement in wealthy global corporations to those fleeing for their lives from armed conflicts in the Middle East or drug wars in Mexico and Central America. It is a complex and confusing picture.

There is one piece that stands out: A growing number of desperate people are fleeing violence and starvation.

I recall an apocryphal story of a man standing beside a river. Suddenly he notices a baby struggling in the downstream current. He immediately jumps into the river to rescue it. No sooner has he deposited the baby on the shore, than he sees another. The babies come faster and faster. He is so busy rescuing them that he fails to look upstream to see who is throwing them in.

According to a 2015 UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) report, 65.3 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution in 2015, the most since the aftermath of World War II. It is the highest percentage of the total world population since UNHCR began collecting data on displaced persons in 1951.

Of those currently displaced outside their countries of origin, Syrians make up the largest number, at 4.9 million. According to observers, this results from a combination of war funded by foreign governments and drought brought on by human-induced climate change. The relative importance of conflict and drought is unknown, because there is no official international category for environmental refugees.

The world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees.

Without a category for environmental refugees, we have no official estimate of their numbers, but leading scientists tell us the numbers are large and expected to grow rapidly in coming years. Senior military officers warn that food and water scarcity and extreme weather are accelerating instability in the Middle East and Africa and “could lead to a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.” Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, former military advisor to the president of Bangladesh and now chair of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change, notes that a one-meter sea level rise would flood 20 percent of his country and displace more than 30 million people.

Already, the warming of coastal waters due to accelerating climate change is driving a massive die-off of the world’s coral reefs, a major source of the world’s food supply. The World Wildlife Federation estimates the die-off threatens the livelihoods of a billion people who depend on fish for food and income. These same reefs protect coastal areas from storms and flooding. Their loss will add to the devastation of sea level rise.

All of these trends point to the tragic reality that the world community will be facing an ever-increasing stream of refugees that we must look upstream to resolve.

This all relates back to another ominous statistic. As a species, humans consume at a rate of 1.6 Earths. Yet we have only one Earth. As we poison our water supplies and render our lands infertile, ever larger areas of Earth’s surface become uninhabitable. And as people compete for the remaining resources, the social fabric disintegrates, and people turn against one another in violence.

The basic rules of nature present us with an epic species choice. We can learn to heal our Earth and shift the structures of society to assure that Earth remains healthy and everyone has access to a decent livelihood. Or we can watch the intensifying competition for Earth’s shrinking habitable spaces play out in a paroxysm of violence and suffering.

Australian school principal removed for allegedly resisting “anti-radicalisation” program

Mike Head 

The principal and deputy principal of a high school in Sydney were dismissed from their posts last week, accused of not implementing a government program that instructs teachers to detect and report “anti-social and extremist behaviour” among students. The principal, Chris Griffiths, and deputy principal, Joumana Dennaoui, were replaced without notice.

Mark Scott, the head of the New South Wales (NSW) state education department, confirmed this week that the two were removed because Punchbowl Boys High School, in Sydney’s working-class southwest, resisted participating in the “School Community Working Together” program.

This program was unveiled at the start of 2016. It is part of a national “anti-radicalisation” plan launched simultaneously by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s federal government, especially targetting schools in working class and immigrant areas. The aim, emphasised by federal Justice Minister Michael Keenan, who is also the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Counter-Terrorism, is to make schools “the frontline of defence against radicalisation and threats to social cohesion.”

Speaking to right-wing broadcaster Ray Hadley on 2GB Radio on Monday, Scott said the school, which has a significant population of Muslim students, had been “reluctant” to participate in the program, which “works with the police and other community leaders.”

A determination was then made “at a senior level” to send in a “very senior team” to conduct an “appraisal” of the school, which allegedly found “matters that were a concern,” including “a significant lack of staff unity.”

Scott’s comments reveal the real reasons for the pair’s removal, which was conducted behind a media witch-hunt against Griffiths and students, laced with unsubstantiated claims by unidentified police officers of “verbal attacks” on staff by students and “threats of beheadings.” Griffiths was denounced for reportedly advising students of their democratic right not to be interrogated by police, and even accused of trying to turn the school—a government public school—into a Muslim-only college.

Teachers at the school generally supported Griffiths on not participating in the government program, but the department exploited some grievances among teachers, including complaints that female teachers were sidelined in last year’s school graduation ceremony.

Parents and students have opposed the removals. The local Canterbury-Bankstown Express reported that parents objected at a “tense” and “hostile” Parents & Citizens meeting at the school on Tuesday, where education department officials and new principal Robert Patruno spoke. Students could be seen and heard chanting “we want Griffiths back” while the meeting was underway.

After the meeting, parents told the newspaper they were angry that the department was not more transparent with its reasons for removing the pair. Iman Awad, whose son attends the school, said the decision was “unfair.” She described Griffiths as a “good person” who “used to go to the train station to walk all the kids to school each morning.”

The removals have all the hallmarks of a high-level political intervention. Scott himself is a major figure in ruling circles. He was appointed head of the education department by the state Liberal-National government last year, immediately after 10 years as managing director of the federal government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes told the Australian he had regular briefings from the department on the situation. He said it was “unusual” to remove both a principal and deputy principal, but “decisive action has been taken by the department.”

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham backed the decision and pointed to the wider precedent being set. He said the Turnbull government “expects schools to uphold and promote Australian values and is monitoring the ­ response of states to these issues, including their application of appropriate de-radicalisation programs.”

Birmingham’s reference to “Australian values” indicates the broader thrust of the “anti-extremist” schemes. They initially target vulnerable Muslim students but are directed against any dissent or unrest among students, particularly under conditions of worsening youth unemployment in working-class areas and escalating Australian military involvement in Washington’s predatory operations in the Middle East and other US war preparations.

In February last year, when Birmingham and Keenan jointly announced the national “anti-radicalisation” plan, he said school staff would receive “awareness training” and be encouraged to report “concerning student behaviour” to authorities. The Australian hailed the program under the headline: “Teachers to be trained to spot teens on path to terror.”

In other words, teachers are being required to become informants on their students. The “School Community Working Together” fact sheet circulated to teachers in NSW government, Catholic and private schools notes that “in our modern society, students are more informed about world events than ever before” and “often discuss these passionately.”

The fact sheet instructs teachers: “[I]f support for extremist behaviour is exhibited during these discussions you should advise your Principal or their delegate that these discussions have taken place … If there is any doubt whether someone has engaged in anti-social and extremist behaviour, it should be reported to the School Safety and Response hotline.” If a principal makes a report to the hotline, “information may be shared with relevant police authorities.”

“Anti-social behaviour” includes “offensive” conduct. “Extremist behaviour” occurs “when a person believes fear, terror and violence are justified to achieve ideological, political or social change.” These classifications can cover not just opinions depicted as support for Islamic fundamentalism but views directed against imperialist war and the capitalist profit system itself.

One of the academics who prepared the national program, Professor Greg Barton, who heads Deakin University’s Australian Intervention Support Hub, told the Australian in February last year that the program sought to provide “safe” spaces to channel “angry” questions, such as “why has the war in Syria being going on for five years?” and “why did we invade Iraq?” into politically safe directions.

Throughout the media barrage against Punchbowl Boys High and its principal, there has been no mention of the broad outrage among masses of workers and youth, expressed particularly acutely in migrant communities, over Australia’s role in the criminal US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Yemen and Syria, which have killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to flee their homes.

Nor is there any reference to the economic and social conditions that provide fertile ground for recruitment of marginalised youth by Islamists. In suburbs like Punchbowl and neighbouring Bankstown, young people from Middle Eastern and other immigrant backgrounds face worsening levels of unemployment, poor educational and social facilities and constant police harassment. Youth unemployment in the area officially exceeds 20 percent, and many more young people have been pushed into low-paid casual or “cash-in-hand” jobs, or forced to work in unpaid internships or traineeships.

The purpose of anti-Muslim witch-hunts, such as what is taking place at Punchbowl Boys High, is to ramp up the 16-year-old “war on terror” both as a pretext for escalated military operations and as a means of diverting mounting social and class tensions at home in reactionary and divisive, chauvinist and nationalist directions.

UK household incomes to plummet for years to come, new reports find

Barry Mason

According to a report, “Living Standards, Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2016-17 to 2021-22,” by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), workers in Britain will remain in the grip of a squeeze on incomes, which began with the global financial crisis of 2007/8.

The IFS concludes that cuts will continue until 2021, making it the most prolonged squeeze on income for 60 years. It is estimated that, on average, households will be £5,000 a year worse off than they would have been if the financial crisis had been avoided.

The report, compiled using official government data on household incomes for the year 2014-15; the most recent set of such figures, examine the policy implications of government fiscal measures. The researchers augmented this using other data sources and changes in legislation to produce an up-to-date picture.

In the introduction to the report the IFS noted, “The latest available data show real median incomes in 2014-15 just 2.2 percent above its 2007-08 level. This poor performance is largely due to wages (and ultimately productivity)—the large falls in real wages that characterised the recent recession and the weakness of real pay growth since… it is no surprise that the picture looks even worse if we exclude pensioners: among the rest of the population, average incomes were essentially the same in 2014-15 as back in 2007-08.”

The report notes that the decline in real incomes is due to the austerity policies of successive governments. Their impact will worsen as they are projected through in the coming years. It forecasts that nearly one in three children will be living in poverty, predicting child poverty rates of 30 percent by 2022.

The report predicts inequality will rise by 2021-22, because of the weakening growth of earnings combined with the changes to benefits and taxes, which will hit the poorer hardest. According to the IFS, this will represent the most prolonged, persistent decline in living standards since 1961.

The IFS expects the income of an average household to be 18 percent lower in 2021-22 than it would have been if the 2007-08 financial crisis had not occurred. For a couple with two young children, it would mean a drop in income of over £8,000 a year while a couple with no children would see a drop of nearly £6,000 in the income they could have expected outside of the financial crisis.

The report found that those families in the bottom 15 percent will be on lower incomes in five years’ time compared to today. This is due to the 2013 introduction of Universal Credit—which replaced six means-tested benefits and tax credits—and is paid at a lower level.

Earnings are set to fall even further with last year’s Brexit vote for the UK to leave the European Union. This triggered a steep decline in the value of the pound, with inflation expected to accelerate to 3 percent in a years’ time. Wages are not expected to grow at the same rate.

Andrew Hood, a senior research economist and one of report’s authors said, “Weak earnings growth combined with planned benefit cuts mean that the absolute poverty rate among children is projected to be roughly the same in 2021-22 as it was in 2007-08. In the decade before that, it fell by a third. Tax and benefit changes planned for this parliament explain all of the projected increase in absolute child poverty between 2014-15 and 2012-22.”

Another IFS economist, Tom Waters, expects the financial crisis to have a long-standing effect for years to come, noting, “Even if earnings do much better than expected over the next few years, the long shadow cast by the financial crisis will not have receded.”

The IFS report was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)—the social policy research and development charity. Responding to its findings, JRF chief executive Campbell Robb said, “These troubling forecasts show millions of families across the country are teetering on a precipice, with 400,000 pensioners and over one million more children likely to fall into poverty and suffer the very real and awful consequences that brings if things do not change.”

The staggering decline in income since 2007 was confirmed by other reports published last month. A report commissioned by the Trades Union Congress noted that the UK ranked near the bottom of a list of more than a 100 countries in the terms of growth in pay since the 2007-08 financial crash. In real terms, UK workers saw the value of their wages decline. It warned, “[T]he UK’s poor global ranking is unlikely to improve soon, with the latest monthly figures showing real wage growth at its lowest for almost two years.”

A report from the UK based insurance multinational Aviva highlighted the dire low levels of savings among poor families, and how inequality is increasing in terms of savings accrued by the poorest families compared to the richest.

The report noted that “data shows low income families (earning £1,500 or less a month) now typically have just £95 in savings and investments excluding pensions compared to £136 a year ago, while high income families (earning £5,001 a month or more) have increased typical savings to £62,885.”

According to Aviva, the average savings of high-income families increased by nearly £13,000—a 25 percent increase since last year. They estimate around a quarter of UK families are classed as low-income families, whose savings on average have fallen to less than £100.

Commenting on the report, Paul Brencher of Aviva said, “The gulf between low and high income families is showing signs of widening, in a worrying indication that those less fortunate are finding their finances increasingly stretched. While high-income families have been able to increase their savings pots, those with low incomes have seen theirs fall to less than £100. This reflects the trend of shrinking savings seen across the UK families as a whole. Without a financial back-up, any sudden unexpected expense could put low income families in particular under added pressure.”

In summarising the IFS report, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation made a plea to Conservative Chancellor Philip Hammond to ease the burden on low-income families.

This met with a hostile response from the government, with Hammond making clear this week that the austerity onslaught against the working class, the poorest and most vulnerable will continue. Ahead of today’s budget, the chancellor authored a piece in the Sunday Times, criticising calls for “massive borrowing to fund huge spending sprees…” On Tuesday, Hammond told MPs “the [welfare] reforms that we have already legislated for must be delivered, and parliament’s original intent in legislating for those reforms has to be ensured”.

Likely shift to the right in Dutch elections threatens EU

Dietmar Henning

The significance of the Dutch parliamentary election on 15 March stretches well beyond the borders of this country with 17 million inhabitants. As in the United States, the ruling class throughout Europe is responding to the capitalist crisis and growing social tensions by abandoning democratic forms of rule and returning to nationalism and war.

The election in the Netherlands will serve as the prelude to the French presidential elections. The right-wing candidate Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV), which is currently almost neck-and-neck in the polls with the right-wing liberal People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) of sitting Prime Minister Marc Rutte, is channeling the mounting social anger in a nationalist and Islamophobic direction.

A victory for Wilders would provide a boost to Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National (FN), in France’s presidential elections in April and May. If she wins, this would be the end of the European Union and the framework within which European politics has operated since the end of the Second World War. Le Pen and Wilders both intend to push for an exit from the EU and the European currency union.

On 21 January, Wilders met Le Pen in Koblenz, Germany, with other right-wing extremist parties which compose the “Europe of Nations and Freedom” group in the European Parliament, to celebrate Trump’s entry into the White House. “Make the Netherlands great again,” tweeted Wilders after Trump’s election. Other participants in Koblenz included Frauke Petry, chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). With Trump, Wilders and Le Pen, she hopes to obtain a boost ahead of Germany’s federal election in September.

While opposition to Trump in the working class and among the youth is growing globally, Europe shows that his election as US president was neither an American nor an individual phenomenon. And like Trump, Wilders did not fall from the sky.

Wilders began his political career as an economic liberal in the VVD during the 1980s. In 1998, the admirer of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher won a seat in parliament. He broke with the VVD in 2005 over the question of Turkey’s membership in the EU and founded the PVV, which he runs like a business. Wilders is the only member; he searches for election candidates and parliamentary deputies by means of adverts and personally selects them, without making them party members.

His influence grew following the financial crisis of 2008. As in every European country, the state in the Netherlands propped up the financial market. The then-Christian Democratic (CDA) Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and his social democratic (PvdA) Finance Minister Wouter Bos made available more than €85 billion to Dutch banks. The money was subsequently squeezed out of the population through social spending cuts. Since then, Wilders has portrayed himself as a representative of the “common people” and channeled social anger in a nationalist and Islamophobic direction.

The orgy of cuts and privatisations of social welfare systems was accompanied with agitation against immigrants by all governments, whether led by the social democrats, Christian democrats or right-wing liberals. Immigrants were made scapegoats for the social and economic decline. In the previously tolerant country, the right to asylum and immigrants’ rights were significantly restricted. The social democrats and VVD have also joined in the xenophobia during the current campaign.

The Netherlands has been closely aligned with Germany in the growing national divisions that have emerged in the EU since 2008. The country, which has traditionally relied on trade, is heavily dependent on exports, 70 percent of which go to the EU. More than 60 percent of all imports come from EU member states. Germany has been by far the Netherlands’ most important trading partner for many years. At €167 billion (2015), the volume of trade between the two countries is among the highest in the world. The major seaport in Rotterdam is one of the largest deep-sea ports in Europe. The direct access to the Rhine and Europe’s largest inland port at Duisburg, Germany, has made the Netherlands Europe’s hub for the international exchange of goods.

Germany and the Netherlands have been the two main countries demanding more spending cuts from Greece so as to bleed the Greek population white to rescue the banks.

Germany and the Netherlands also cooperate closely in the military sphere. As a NATO member, the Netherlands has participated since 1998 in the military interventions in Yugoslavia, Africa (Ethiopia/Eritrea), Afghanistan and Iraq. Dutch troops are currently involved in the NATO military build-up in Eastern Europe. Several hundred soldiers are in the process of deploying to Lithuania on the Russian border, where they will be part of NATO’s first battle group led by the German army. Meanwhile, Dutch submarines are patrolling in the Mediterranean.

As in every country, the Dutch ruling class is responding to the mounting political, national and social tensions with militarism, xenophobia and nationalism. The election thus carries with it the potential of being the beginning of the end of the European Union.

While the centrifugal forces have to date been concentrated in Britain, which always occupied a special role, and countries in the south or east like Hungary or Poland, two founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC), the EU’s predecessor, are now affected.

Brexit, Britain’s exit from the European Union, already initiated the breakdown of the European Union. Originally demanded by the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), exit from the EU is now the official policy of the Tory government of Theresa May and a minority section of the opposition Labour Party.

The defeat of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in last December’s constitutional referendum was the next blow for the EU. The banks and EU representatives saw the referendum as the last chance to resolve the banking crisis within the framework of the EU and the euro.

On March 1, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, published the so-called “White paper on the future of Europe.” The scenarios outlined in it all assume that the tensions will intensify and political divisions will deepen. The document proposed a major programme of military rearmament to overcome these problems.

Then last weekend, heads of government from Germany (Angela Merkel), France (François Hollande), Italy (Paolo Gentiloni) and Spain (Mariano Rajoy) appealed for a “Europe of different speeds” in Versailles, i.e., for the larger nations to press ahead alone. The main issue was military cooperation. This was initiated by the EU foreign and defence ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday. They agreed upon a joint headquarters, which is initially to lead EU military missions abroad.

Since Brexit, discussions have been ongoing in Germany about the need to seize on the crisis of the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as a chance to rise to the status of a hegemonic political and military power, based on its economic weight, capable of challenging Russia and the United States.

Austerity and militarism are the policies of the EU’s defenders. But to impose these against the wishes of the population, authoritarian forms of rule are required. This is why the right-wing opponents of the EU are receiving a platform from sections of the political and media establishment to divide the working class with their xenophobia and impose the policies of social cuts and war.

The working class in the Netherlands has no real choice in the elections March 15. The only alternative to the two roads offered by the bourgeoisie, Balkanisation of Europe or a militarised European great power, is the United Socialist States of Europe. Only the establishment of workers governments in every European country and the unification of Europe on a socialist basis can prevent the relapse of the continent into nationalism and war, and create the preconditions for the use and further development of the continent’s vast riches and productive capacities to meet the interests of society as a whole.

Imperialist wars and interventions fuel refugee crisis in Africa

Thomas Gaist 

Large numbers of persons fleeing war and famine in sub-Saharan Africa are transiting through Libya in a desperate effort to reach Europe, UNICEF reported last week.

An estimated 80,000 refugees, including 25,000 children, left Libyan ports in an effort to cross the Mediterranean Sea and enter southern Europe last year, with 4,000 of them dying during the crossing.

Another 320 refugees died attempting the crossing during the first two months of 2017 alone, a 300 percent increase from the same period in 2016. Some 16,000 African refugees have crossed from Libya to Italy so far this year, nearly double last year’s figure for the same period. Twenty-two refugees from sub-Saharan Africa were killed and 100 wounded during clashes between smugglers along Libya’s Mediterranean coastline on Tuesday.

There are 5.5 million Africans currently refugees in other countries, while 11 million Africans are displaced within their home countries, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) reported in January. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says 18 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa are at risk of becoming refugees in the coming year.

The tide of refugees comes predominantly from countries where the United States and its European allies have intervened most heavily. In Africa, just as in the Middle East, decades of imperialist warfare have shattered entire societies and turned large sections of the population into refugees. This is the most important factor underlying the huge exodus of dispossessed people now struggling to reach European shores.

Libya, which was destroyed and plunged into chaos by the 2011 US-NATO war, has become the epicenter of Africa’s refugee crisis. Refugee smuggling routes from across sub-Saharan Africa converge on the country, which has a long Mediterranean coastline and virtually no functionary authorities. A growing number of criminal networks and extremist militias specialize in transporting, and extracting money from, the refugees. While most of Libyan society remains in chaos, a system of detention centers, including for-profit camps run by militia groups, has managed to take hold.

“There are dozens of illegal prisons over which we have no control. There are at least thirteen in Tripoli. They are handled by the powerful armed militias,” a Libyan police official told UNICEF, quoted in the organization’s report, “A Deadly Journey for Children: The Central Mediterranean Migration Route.”

In Uganda, 120,000 South Sudanese refugees have crossed the border fleeing war in the past two months alone. Thousands of South Sudanese are fleeing the country every day, the United Nations refugee agency reported this week.

The South Sudanese civil war (2013-present), fought out between factions of a regime installed by Washington in 2011, is causing an unprecedented social collapse. The violence is fatally disrupting economic life, causing widespread famine and has forced 1.5 million to flee the country.

The South Sudanese war is producing “the destruction of all the social fabric in all parts of the country,” according to a secret report by the United Nations secretary-general, leaked to the Washington Post Monday. The South Sudanese government in Juba is blocking humanitarian aid from reaching areas in need, according to UN humanitarian secretary Stephen O’Brien.

January saw preparations for airstrikes by US F-16 warplanes based in Djibouti, with speculation they could be directed against targets in South Sudan.

The war in northern Nigeria is producing another humanitarian catastrophe that is among the worst in Africa. Five million northern Nigerians are in need of food in the northern provinces of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, and two million Nigerians may starve in the coming year, UN officials reported Monday.

The Nigerian war has involved a steadily growing US role. The Obama administration steadily expanded the US troop presence in neighboring countries. In May 2014, the Obama administration sent 80 US Air Force soldiers to Chad, under the pretext of searching for Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram. In March 2015, a US-backed Chadian army invaded northern Nigeria and seized several towns.

In May 2015, the White House authorized direct US military operations in Nigeria. In October 2015, the US Defense Department sent 300 soldiers to Cameroon, along Nigeria’s eastern border.

Last November, US AFRICOM General Donald Bolduc told the New York Times that the Lake Chad Basin, where Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon share borders, is becoming “ground zero for the fight against militant Islam in Africa.” Of the 30 million residents of the Lake Chad Basin, 2.6 million are already displaced as a result of military violence, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Although presented as the fault of “radical Islam,” Africa’s refugee crisis has, in reality, developed out of the crisis of world capitalism and the worldwide eruption of US militarism. The transformation of millions of Africans into homeless refugees, fleeing for their lives, is above all the responsibility of the American ruling class, and the criminal strategic aggressions it has pursued during the past two and a half decades.

Prior to the 1990s, the existence of the Soviet Union imposed constraints on US imperialism’s efforts to dominate Africa. The end of the USSR removed a political obstacle inhibiting the imperialist powers from pursuing the military conquest of their former colonies. It marked the beginning of a new scramble to redivide and enslave the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

For 25 years, Washington has sought to violently reorder African society and politics in accordance with the interests of American capitalism. Africa’s national elites eagerly adapted to the new situation, and have grown rich amidst the spread of war and famine. They have welcomed ever more US and NATO soldiers into Africa and have thrown open their economies for unrestrained exploitation by foreign capital.

Today, decades after Africa’s “independence” and decolonization, thousands of American troops are permanently stationed in Africa. The United States maintains an elaborate military infrastructure across large areas of the continent, including “forward bases” and “security locations” in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Senegal, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

“AFRICOM, as a new command, is basically a laboratory for a different kind of warfare and a different way of posturing forces,” Oxford Research Group security director Richard Reeve said. “There are a myriad of ‘lily pads’ or small forward operating bases ... so you can spread out even a small number of forces over a very large area and concentrate those forces quite quickly when necessary.”

This week, joint US-African war exercises are taking place along the Nigerian border, involving thousands of US and Africa soldiers, including forces from Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mauritania, Morocco and Chad.