More Than 30 Arrested As Freedom Protests Sweep Across Arab Ahwaz Region In Iran

Rahim Hamid

More than 30 people were brutally arrested in Ahwaz in Iran on Monday, the second day of Eid al-Fitr, after courageous Ahwazi Arabs held peaceful demonstrations in towns, cities, and villages across the region, demanding freedom and human rights and protesting against the systemic oppression and injustice which generations of Ahwazis have now endured under successive regimes for 92 years.

After attending Eid Prayer, dozens of Ahwazi Arab youths staged peaceful rallies in solidarity with Ahwazi families whose sons have been executed and imprisoned by the Iranian regime.

People gathered in front of the Martyrs families’ homes – sending a strong and defiant message to the Iranian regime by reciting poems to praise martyrs’ sacrifices.

At these peaceful rallies which swept through most of Ahwazi areas, protesters held banners and raised their voices together in chants against the Iranian regime’s relentless ethnic cleansing policies.

In spite of regime clamp-downs, each year, the Ahwazi Arab People visit families whose relatives had been executed or imprisoned by the regime. They do this not only to declare their continued solidarity with the mourning families but also to remain defiant in the face of an oppressive regime.

The protesters, boldly wearing their traditional Arab clothes which the regime proscribes them from wearing in public, chanted freedom slogans, recited poetry and participated in traditional dances, defiantly celebrating the Arab heritage which the theocratic regime has done its utmost to quash.

The protesters energetically chanted anti-regime slogans and calls for freedom vowing to continue their struggle for freedom, with the chants including “Yes, yes to liberation!”, “Ahwaz is my dear homeland!”, “The mother of the martyrs calls us”, “By soul, by blood, we sacrifice ourselves for Ahwaz!”, and “We are coming out to face you o occupiers, from every neighbourhood and every street!”

Iranian regime authorities,  already nervous of the unrest roiling Iran as the country’s minorities and dissidents continue to protest against years of injustice,  deployed massive numbers of heavily armed police and security personnel to terrorise the protesters and break up the demonstrations, with many protesters beaten and arrested.  The regime has also banned Ahwazi people from gathering publicly and even from leaving their homes to visit family and friends during the Eid holiday, although this is a central part of the festive celebrations.   It’s believed that the regime’s typical excessive reaction is intended as an effort to intimidate the protesters and activists into silent acquiescence.  The arrests of protesters at demonstrations were also followed by regime personnel across the region storming and ransacking activists’ homes with many activists, arrested,  and harassing, chasing and beating any young people in the streets seen wearing traditional Arab garments or heard speaking negatively about the regime.

Many of the protesters and activists arrested were taken to unknown locations, with family and friends unable to contact them since.

It’s important to note that Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-adha – the most important holidays for the Ahwazi Arab people – are also used as a form of resistance in the face of a regime which has sought to erase the Ahwazi’s Arab identity.

The Iranian regime has for a long time attempted to crush any expression of  Ahwazis’  Arab cultural identity, wishing to both deny the people their own identity and to deny them any of the massive wealth extracted  from the oil and gas resources on their lands;  over 95 percent of the oil and gas resources claimed by Iran are located in the Ahwaz region;  the offer of favourable oil and gas deals is believed to be the reason that the British government of the time facing multiple helped Iran’s then-Shah to occupy the  Arab region in 1925.

As protests continue to grow amongst Iranian minorities whose anger at years of systemic oppression, injustice and bigotry is exacerbated by the current economic crisis plaguing the country and hitting the already oppressed minorities hardest of all, the so-called Islamic Republic is facing multiple crises as younger generations refuse to accept these grotesque injustices for much longer.

Arabs living in the region of Iran-occupied Ahwaz have campaigned for years to achieve rights aimed at preserving their unique cultural identity, which is being eroded due to regime-sanctioned Persianization. Ahwazi Arabs have suffered greatly due to decades of widespread oppressive regime tactics, which have kept the vast majority from obtaining gainful employment, entry into educational institutions, and access to stable living situations.

One of the clearest indications of this oppressive erasure is the Iranian government’s doctoring of demographic statistics. The Iranian regime claims that the Arab population of Iran is only around 2-3% of the total. Were this percentage accurate, only around 2.3 million Arabs would exist in a country that has a population of 80 million.  In reality, however, there are around 12 million Arabs in Al-Ahwaz region, with even more living along Iran’s Gulf coast areas. These statistics mean the percentage of Arabs in Iran is well over 10% of the total population.

Prior to 1925, Ahwaz was semi-independent and even in some historical periods was also whollyindependent country. Following the assassination of its leader Sheikh Khazal and a brutal military invasion that resulted in the massacre of many Ahwaz inhabitants, the territory was forcefully annexed to Iran. Since this time, the continued plight of Arabs in Iran-occupied Ahwaz has been largely ignored by the world at large. Iran does not govern Ahwaz as if it is a region equal in importance to the rest of Iran. Rather, Iran rules Ahwaz as if it is an occupied territory meant to be used for its resources and nothing more.

The Arabs who call Ahwaz home are not valued by the Iranian regime, nor are they seen as equal to their Persian counterparts. As such, the Arabs in Iran are underrepresented by regime statistics in an effort to erase their cultural identity, to bury them beneath the yoke of systematic Persianization.

Deny the Ahwazi Arab identity. By every tool assimilate the Arabs into Persian culture, and if they resist and refuse, humiliate them until they get fed up and sick of being Arab. If they resist more, intimidate them into silence. If they refuse to be silent, just execute them: You will be Persian, or I will destroy you.  This is the despotic logic of Iranian mentality towards Arabs. These are the plight of Ahwazi Arab people under Iran occupation.

Here I want todescribe briefly some of the oppression and injustice still continuing against the Arab Ahwazis in southern and southwestern Iran.

The repression by the regime authorities of the people of Ahwaz is amongst the worst in Iran, with the region suffering the highest rates of execution in the country–no mean feat for a regime which now has one of the highest per capita execution rates globally, according to the UN.

Thousands of Ahwazis have been murdered by the regime and hundreds more injured in daily random shootings by regime military and security personnel. Ahwazis are targeted for such ‘crimes’ as wearing native Arab garments, speaking their native Arabic language,  or holding peaceful protests calling for human rights.  The pretext given for arrest, imprisonment and/or execution of political or human rights activists is usually Moharebeh or ‘crimes against God’.

Despite the region containing over 95 percent of Iran’s oil and gas resources, it is the poorest in Iran.

Amongst the forms of oppression inflicted on Ahwazis are the following:

Linguistic and cultural oppression.  Not only is the policy of enforced poverty used by the Iranian regime to keep Ahwazi Arabs oppressed and impoverished, but efforts to extinguish cultural heritage further exacerbate the oppression.  Ahwazis are forbidden from learning or teaching in our native language, Arabic, or even from naming our children certain Arabic names.  The teaching of Arab history or circulation of Arabic publications is also outlawed.

Religious oppression:  Ahwazi Sunnis are automatically accused of being ‘agents of Saudi Arabia’, with the hardline theocratic regime prohibiting the construction of mosques for Sunnis and banning any religious education in Sunnism or sects other than the fundamentalist  Shiism which is the doctrine of the ruling regime, whose founder, Khomeini, is viewed, quite literally, as being divine. These proscriptions on other faiths and sects are seen as a way to strengthen the control of the ruling regime.

Educational oppression: Most Ahwazis have been very deliberately deprived of education by successive regimes. If knowledge is power, then this is a means of keeping the people powerless, with Ahwazis deprived of the most basic education facilities, available to ethnically Persian Iranians.

Social repression: By denying Ahwazis their cultural identity, and awareness and restricting any form of cultural expression, the regime aims to eradicate this central aspect of the people’s identity.  The regime has also covertly encouraged the spread of addictive drugs as a means of subjugation and control, locking young people into a cycle of addiction that leaves them with no inclination to be involved in civil or political activism.

Economic oppression:  Without education, Ahwazis start at a disadvantage. The Ahwazis are further held back by a lack of access to or benefit from their own natural resources–oil, gas, arable farmland and even access to the waters for fishing, once one of the principal economic activities in the region.  Unemployment levels are among the highest in Iran. In the city of Ahwaz, there is a vast divide between the wealthy and the impoverished. Those responsible for city planning in Ahwaz have restructured the city in such a manner that the nicer neighbourhoods are populated with Persians, whereas the more run-down and deprived neighbourhoods are inhabited predominantly by Arabs. The disparity in access to nicer neighborhoods is exacerbated by restrictions on education and employment access, which are more readily available to Persians than to Arabs. Arabs in Al-Ahwaz live on approximately 1-2 dollars a day, and the average salary of an employee in this oil-rich area is only around 150-200 dollars a month. But revenue garnered from the Iranian oil industry in Al-Ahwaz is not actually being used to reinvest in the local economy and improve living conditions for those living and working there. Instead, profits are funneled into the Iranian military, which is well known as a violator of human rights locally and abroad. This leaves the region impoverished and neglected, while the Iranian regime continues to benefit from the fruits of their labour. Since massive oil reserves were found in Ahwaz, Persians from other parts of Iran have taken the opportunity to secure high-paying jobs in the region while leaving Ahwazi Arabs to work the lowest income jobs.

As a matter of fact, regardless of the process by which Ahwazis seek to attain their rights (whether through decentralized politics, federalism, autonomy, or complete independence), Iran will be left with a multitude of destructive after-effects. The Iranian authorities are well aware of the danger posed by the independence of any of their peoples under occupation – specifically in Ahwaz. Due to this fear, the regime has resorted to a variety of oppressive practices such as systematic persecution, murder, displacement, arbitrary detention, and theft of resources. Iran is a country that relies on oil and gas revenues at an estimated 87-90% of the county’s income. Were oil-rich Ahwaz to attain independence, Iran would lose nearly 90% of their oil revenues – that’s a loss of almost 80% of the total government income. The loss of access to oil reserves in Ahwaz would bankrupt the Iranian government in a very short period of time. Also, were Ahwaz to become independent, Iran would struggle to provide adequate food and water to their people, as 50% of their water comes from Ahwaz. This would result in many agricultural lands not having sufficient irrigation to produce crops, thereby expanding the prevalence of poverty and hunger in the country.

Environmental oppression:   The whole Ahwaz region has the highest levels of environmental pollution in the world, according to the latest UN statistics. With many of the region’s rivers dammed and diverted to ethnically Persian areas, much of the once rich farmland is now desert, bringing other problems such as sandstorms and drought.  Heavy pollution from the oil and gas extraction in the region further add to the devastating environmental problems, which are further exacerbated by summer temperatures of over 50 degrees Celsius.

Political oppression: any involvement in political activism, other than support of the regime, is banned for Ahwazis, with political and human rights activists routinely arrested, systematically tortured, and often exiled to other parts of Iran or executed on the feeblest of excuses.  Ahwazis are prohibited from holding any position in the state, at the local or regional level, except in a limited range of political and religious posts serving the regime.  The Islamic Republic allows the appointment of these individuals in order to both present a facade of Ahwazi support for the regime and to distort and eradicate the people’s struggle for equality and human rights. Any efforts by Ahwazis to organise or assemble are brutally cracked down upon.

The tragedy of the Ahwazi Arabs; is indeed the unaddressed and unknown nature of their suffering; to a UN that remains without actions in order to be helpful in putting the Iranian regime under actual pressure and put an end to its non-stop suppression inflicted upon Ahwazi Arabs for decades.

Bank for International Settlements warns on low interest rate regime

Nick Beams

The main thing to be said about the annual report of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) which was issued on Sunday is that it reflects the uncertainty of policymakers about the future direction of the world economy and whether previous prescriptions are applicable in the post global financial crisis world.

On the key question of monetary policy, the BIS, sometimes referred to as the central bankers’ bank, called into question whether, given low inflation, sticking to inflation rate targeting as the guide for setting interest rates was creating the conditions for more financial problems.

Central banks around the world have kept interest rates at historically low levels in the years since the crisis of 2008 and are looking to return to a more “normal” regime. But inflation and, most significantly wages growth, remain at historic lows and consequently monetary policy has remained loose. However, this may cause problems, according to the BIS.

“Keeping interest rates too low for long could raise financial stability and macroeconomic risks further down the road, as debt continues to pile up and risk-taking in financial markets gathers steam,” the report said.

It noted that raising rates too quickly could cause financial market turbulence, as in the so-called “taper tantrum” of 2013, when the US Federal Reserve indicated it was going to pull back on its quantitative easing program. On the other hand, if rate rises were delayed this would mean that rates would have to rise faster and further in the future.

“Central banks may have to tolerate longer periods where inflation is below target, and tighten monetary policy if demand is strong—even if inflation is weak—so as not to fall behind the curve with respect to the financial cycle,” Claudio Borio, the head of the BIS monetary and economics department said.

The world’s major central banks have inflation targets of around 2 percent but prices remain below that level despite official figures which claim unemployment is falling. According to the previous “models” with which policymakers have worked, prices and wages should now be rising. But this is not taking place.

The report pointed to some of the reasons, noting that global labour markets had seen “profound changes over the past decades with significant implications for wage and price formation. As labour market slack diminishes, wage growth is expected to rise. But wage demands have lagged more than in the past. Rather than a purely cyclical phenomenon, this wage behaviour appears to reflect long-term forces that are reshaping the global economy.”

The main change, though this was not alluded to in the report, is that so-called full-employment is now largely a misnomer because a growing proportion of “new” jobs are not full-time but part-time or casual. In the US, for example, some 94 percent of the 10 million jobs created under the Obama administration took this form.

One expression of this process is the long-term decline of the labour share of national income, some details of which were provided in the report. In the 1970s, for example, the share of wages in manufacturing in G7 economies was well over 60 percent. In the years 2010 to 2016 it had fallen to around 53 percent.

Productivity figures for manufacturing industry showed the same tendency. While productivity increased to 300 from a base of 100 in 1980, real compensation for hours worked lagged by at least 50 points over the same period.

These figures show the impact of the growth of financial parasitism in the major economies over this period in which profits have been accumulated through relentless cost cutting, dictated by financial markets, and the accumulation of profit not through the expansion of productive investment but increasingly via financial operations. This tendency has accelerated in the wake of the financial crisis and the provision of trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money by the world’s major central banks.

In its overall review of the global economy, the BIS pointed to the change in facts and above all sentiment in the past year with clear signs that growth had gathered momentum. But, it continued, “sentiment has swung even more than facts” and “despite the best near-term prospects for a long time, paradoxes and tensions abound.”

Elaborating on whether sentiment had swung too far, Borio said “doubts about the future derive from tensions that will have to be resolved at some point and from long-term developments that may eventually threaten growth.”

Among those tensions was the contrast between financial market volatility, which has plummeted, and increased political uncertainty and that between soaring stock markets and long-term bond yields which “have not risen as much as economic prospects have brightened.”

The report identified four major risks to the sustainability of the present apparent upswing. A significant rise in inflation could choke the expansion by forcing central banks to tighten policy more than expected. Serious financial stress could materialise if financial cycles mature and their contraction phase turns into a “a more serious bust.” Even without financial stress “consumption might weaken under the weight of debt,” and investment might fail to take over as the main growth engine. “Finally, a rise in protectionism could challenge the open global economic order.”

It said what it called the “risk trinity” remained in place: unusually low productivity growth, unusually high debt and unusually narrow room for policy manoeuvre.

Warning of the growth of a housing property bubble in some countries, the BIS said that “leading indicators of financial stress signal risks from high private debt and house prices in economies that were not at the epicentre” of the global financial crisis.

It noted that Australia, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland had experienced a 2-3 percent growth rate in household debt in 2016 with most of the money used to purchase houses. Over the past four years the Australian household debt has climbed almost 15 percentage points.

Taken together with slowing wages—in Australia for example wage growth is at its lowest rate in the post-war period—the rise in debt could spark a crisis.

“Household debt—or debt more generally—outpacing GDP growth over prolonged periods is a robust early warning indictor of financial stress,” the report said.

In the face of what it termed “paradoxes” and “tensions” the BIS concluded that at the global level a “multilateral approach to policy” had to be reinforced as the only way of “addressing the common problems the world is facing.”

But here events are moving in the other direction. Protectionism, as the report acknowledged, is on the rise and the “America First” agenda of the Trump administration is increasing trade and economic tensions between the major powers.

German parliament agrees to massive expansion of digital surveillance

Sven Heymann

Last week, by a large majority, the Bundestag (federal parliament) agreed to a massive expansion of digital surveillance. The state will be given the power to deploy “trojans,” computer code that can bypass a user’s security and implement remote online searches of a person’s devices. The decision effectively eliminates the possibility of secure digital communications in Germany.

The Bundestag passed the necessary amendments to the Criminal Code with the votes of the grand coalition of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), while the Left Party and Greens voted against. At the end of the state interior ministers conference last week, federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) had announced that the government would create the legal basis for these powers during this legislative period, and thus before the parliamentary summer break.

Through the introduction of “state trojans” and remote online searches, a devastating attack on fundamental democratic rights is being carried out under the pretext of fighting terrorism. The Süddeutsche Zeitung described the draft bill as “one of the most far-reaching surveillance laws in the history of the Federal Republic.” And Reporters Without Borders warned that the new law “means that there is no longer any digital means of communication in Germany that protects journalists from being monitored.” In fact, the law prepares the ground for the total monitoring of the population.

The introduction of state trojans (source telecommunication monitoring) is mainly intended to make encrypted communication available to the security authorities in plain text. To this end, a trojan is secretly planted on the target’s device--for example, on the user’s PC, smartphone or tablet. Unnoticed by the user, these trojans can capture all communications on the device, even in real time. This includes communications sent via a messenger app or e-mail with end-to-end encryption, as the trojan reads the message directly on the device before it is encrypted. Supposedly more-secure programmes or apps like Signal, Telegram or Gnu-PGP are not hacked, but are simply bypassed by the trojan.

So-called online remote searches make it possible for the investigating authorities to read the entire hard disk on a target computer via the Internet. In contrast to a physical house search, the persons concerned are unaware that this measure is being used and cannot legally defend themselves accordingly.

The two measures are accompanied by a massive expansion of the offences to which they can be applied. While previously the surveillance of suspects was limited to a few serious crimes, it is now also applicable to numerous other offences, such as corruption, robbery, extortion, fraud, organised gangs, tax evasion and counterfeiting. Even the suspicion of the “misuse of an asylum application” can become the occasion for complete digital monitoring in future.

To prevent open resistance developing in the population before the law was passed, the coalition parties have used a perfidious trick. They did not introduce the law into the normal legislative process as a separate bill, which takes several months and requires readings in the Bundestag and a submission to the Bundesrat (second chamber of parliament). Instead, they steamrolled it through by including the new regulations in a law to amend the criminal code. This approach allows the grand coalition to pass the law before the summer break, without the Bundesrat having to pass it again.

The two opposition parties, the Left Party and the Greens, have also contributed significantly to this fraud. While their parliamentary deputies all opposed the law in the debate, they advocate the same political course of increasing state powers as the CDU/CSU and SPD.

In the debate, Hans-Christian Ströbele (Greens) warned against completely unrestrained surveillance, because a judge who orders the use of a state trojan could not properly check whether a time-limited measure had actually been ended. Ströbele assumes the law will eventually fail at the Supreme Court.

Left Party deputy Jörn Wunderlich said this was one of the “most invasive surveillance laws of the past few years,” going even further than the “big eavesdropping attack.”

If the Greens and the Left Party are now hypocritically expressing criticism of excessive surveillance, they are doing so mainly for two reasons. On the one hand, they are trying to give the impression that there is still an opposition within parliament against unrestrained surveillance. On the other, they are trying to conceal their own role in the increasing powers that have been granted to the state. When they were part of the federal government, the Greens had already passed the most stringent security laws under Interior Minister Otto Schily (SPD).

The complaints by the speakers of both parties, that they had been steamrolled by the legislative procedure and had no real means of preventing the adoption of the law, are simply lies. Unlike the public, which was left completely in the dark, both parties were involved from the start of the proceedings. Representatives of both the Greens and Left Party can be found in the Bundestag legislative committee, which agreed on the introduction of state trojans and remote online searches in the new law.

In contrast to previous tightening-up of security laws, where there were sometimes months and even years of disputes between the parties, as well as public protests and demonstrations, this time, all the Bundestag parties tried until the very last to prevent any public outcry. They all ensured the far-reaching decisions were agreed on without any obstacles at the state interior ministers conference, because they all sit in various state governments where they agree to tightening up the security laws.

For example, the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party had only just adopted a joint security package in January, which includes the expansion of public CCTV surveillance and will devour €27 million this year alone. In preparation for a possible joint coalition at federal level after the Bundestag elections in September, the weeks of silence of the Greens and the Left Party before this week’s debate was to signal, above all, that they are ready to help impose further attacks on democratic rights.

Concentration of poverty in New York City neighborhoods on the rise

Philip Guelpa

Despite being elected on a campaign slogan invoking “Tale of Two Cities,” pledging to fight the extreme economic inequality in New York City, the mayoralty of self-styled progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio has presided over a marked increase in poverty and a continuing rise in the cost of housing. Far from lessening the divide between the two “cities,” which has been growing for decades, the segregation, both economic and geographic, between the city’s wealthy elite and the working class, has only intensified.

The rate of poverty and the concentration of poor people living in impoverished neighborhoods in New York City have both risen dramatically in recent years. These are the findings of a newly released study by the Furman Center at New York University— State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2016. During the period from 2011 to 2015, 1.7 million city residents were classified as living below the official poverty line, set at the absurdly low level of $24,036 annually for a family of four. This represents 20.6 percent of the population, up from 19.1 percent in the 2006-2010 time span. Other, more realistic studies have shown that nearly two thirds of the city’s population suffer from some form of economic distress. Thirty percent of the city’s children are officially poor.

The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. The percentages of New Yorkers at the upper and lower ends of the income range grew, while those in the middle shrank. Between 2000 and 2015, households earning less than $40,000 per year increased by nearly three percentage points; those earning more than $100,000 grew by about one percentage point, but the ones in between shrank from 36 to 33 percent. Clearly, those in the middle are predominantly falling into poverty.

According to the Furman Center study, the geographic concentration of people living in areas of extreme poverty, neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of the residents are officially classified as poor, had fallen somewhat since 2000, when it was 25.4 percent, to 19.4 percent in 2006-2010. This increased markedly, to 23.5 percent, from 2011 through 2015—a period of supposed recovery from the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. These are only the most acute examples. Nearly 45 percent of the city’s population live in areas of either high or extreme poverty (30-40 percent of the residents below the poverty line, respectively). Neighborhoods encompassing 16.5 percent of the city’s population, 1.4 million people, experienced a 10 percent increase in the rate of poverty, the study found.

Living conditions in these poor neighborhoods are appalling. In extreme poverty areas, serious housing code violations were registered at five times the city average and the employment rate was 20 percentage points lower.

Of the five New York City boroughs, the Bronx has the highest percentage of neighborhoods experiencing high or extreme poverty—52.6 percent.

One of the processes driving the increase in poverty is revealed by the report’s finding that the employment rate for the city as a whole increased by 2.4 percentage points between 2005 and 2015. Thus, while a slightly higher percentage of the population is working, the real value of their income is decreasing.

The Furman Center also found that as poverty is increasing, rents are continuing to climb, creating unbearable living conditions for a large portion of the city’s population. These are related phenomena. As the overall cost of housing continues to rise, relatively better off people are forced to move to poorer neighborhoods in search of more affordable rents. This, in turn, prompts landlords to raise rents in those areas, impacting existing low-income residents.

As an example, the study describes the case of East Harlem, a predominantly working class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. In 2000, the poverty rate was 37.1 of the population. It is now 37.5—again based on the absurdly low official poverty line. However, the number of residents with annual incomes of more than $100,000 has risen by more than 4 percent. Thus, while the overall percentage of people living in poverty is increasing, the economic spread between rich and poor is widening.

Simultaneously, rents in East Harlem are increasing at a rapid rate, with the monthly median rising $120 between 2015 and 2016 alone, putting extreme pressure on the already economically stressed residents.

Citywide, between 2005 and 2015, median gross rent increased 18.3 percent, while median household income for renters increased just 6.6 percent.

The acute lack of affordable housing is driving large numbers of people onto the streets. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of city residents spending the night in homeless shelters increased by 87 percent, to about 61,000.

The situation is not new, but is becoming ever more severe. Despite fluctuations, the general trend of increasing poverty and lack of affordable housing has been continuing for decades, but has accelerated in recent years as the global economic crisis intensifies.

The extreme economic inequality that exists in New York City is starkly illustrated by the fact that while nearly two thirds of the population experience some form of economic distress, with over a third living in deep poverty, New York has the second highest GDP of all cities in the world. And yet, despite this huge amount of wealth that could be used to address the crises of poverty and lack of affordable housing, the living conditions for the city’s working class continue to deteriorate.

These statistics and many more presented in the Furman Center report starkly illustrate the utter failure to address the huge economic disparity between the city’s rich and poor by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The two parties, regardless of who lives in Gracie Mansion (the official mayoral residence) or who controls the City Council, are the representatives of the city’s financial and corporate elite.

All of the myriad programs that have over the years been presented allegedly to combat poverty, the lack of affordable housing, and resulting homelessness have been predicated on the need to maximize the wealth of the ruling elite. These programs have utterly failed to improve the former, while definitely facilitating the latter. Indeed, conditions for the mass of the population have only gotten worse.

In just one of many examples, there was a sharp decline in the issuance of permits for construction of new housing units in 2016, following the failure to renew the 421-a tax incentive program. That program, while greatly benefiting developers and large landlords, had done nothing to reduce the critical lack of affordable housing.

The working class of New York is rapidly approaching the breaking point. Mass revolt against increasingly unlivable conditions may erupt at any time. The anger and frustration find no expression within the present political establishment. What is required is the building of a party that fights for a socialist program to expropriate the vast wealth of the city’s elite and employ it to benefit the great majority of the population.

US, UAE operate network of torture chambers in Yemen

Niles Niemuth

The United States and United Arab Emirates (UAE), in coordination with Yemeni proxy forces, are operating a network of torture chambers in the war-torn country into which hundreds of men have been disappeared.

As revealed by an Associated Press (AP) report published last week, the US and UAE have established a network of at least 18 secret prisons in Yemen used for torturing and interrogating men who are suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The brutal torture regime began under the Obama administration and continues under President Donald Trump.

According to the AP report, the US operates with a mostly hands-off approach in which it provides lists of names of men to be detained and then provides the torturers with lists of questions to be asked to detainees. After tormenting and interrogating detainees, the UAE transmits transcripts and videos of confessions to US officials.

However, a Yemeni officer reported to the AP that he witnessed at least two detainees brought to ships off the coast of Yemen where the US Navy regularly patrols. The prisoners were taken below deck to be interrogated by what the officer described as American polygraph and psychological experts.

While US military officials denied that they interrogate Yemenis on boats off the coast, a spokesman for the CIA refused to comment when asked by the AP about the allegations.

Yemen Interior Minister Hussein Arab admitted that detainees have also been flown across the Red Sea to a military base in Eritrea run by the UAE.

US defense officials, speaking to the AP on a condition of anonymity, confirmed that American forces participate in interrogations in Yemen. They also reported that senior US military officials were aware of the allegations of abuse at prisons in Yemen but none of the torture had been carried out when US military personnel were present.

Among the medieval horrors described by former detainees include the “grill,” in which a prisoner is tied to a spit and rotated in a circle of fire like a piece of meat. A former detainee described an incident in which guards lit a fire under the metal shipping container he and others were being kept in as a means of filling it with smoke and tormenting the men inside.

Other former detainees at the main detention facility in the port city of Mukalla report being crammed into shipping containers smeared with human feces and being blindfolded for weeks at a time. The prisoners were subjected to repeated beatings and sexual assault by guards as well as whippings with electrical wires.

A member of the Hadramawt Elite, a proxy force set up by the UAE, reported that at times US forces were only yards away when inmates were being subjected to these abuses.

Whether or not American soldiers or intelligence agents were present during interrogations, receiving intelligence obtained through torture is a violation of the International Convention Against Torture and is considered a war crime.

In conjunction with the AP report, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting the cases of 49 of the nearly 2,000 men who have been swept up by this torture network. At least four of the 49 were children, who had been arbitrarily arrested or forcibly disappeared and kept in prison along with adults.

A former detainee at the Central Prison in the southern city of Aden reported that seven to eight boys between the ages of 15 and 17 had been in the same prison ward when he was detained in 2016. The children described being blindfolded and beaten by guards who threatened to strip off their clothes.

Former president Obama, who infamously quipped that “we tortured some folks,” spearheaded the effort to whitewash the global torture regime established by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Much was made about Obama’s moves in 2009 to shut down the secret black site torture centers that spanned the globe from Thailand and Poland.

Despite Obama’s promises and phony posturing, the notorious prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains open. During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would “load [Guantanamo] up with some bad dudes.”

Obama’s insistence to “look forward, as opposed to looking backwards” in regards to the war crimes committed by the CIA and the military under his predecessor ensured the continuation of the criminal abuses American imperialism relies on in its efforts to assert its dominance over the entire planet, both under his own administration and that of his successor.

The US has been carrying out an undeclared drone war against AQAP in Yemen since late December 2009. In the last eight years there have been at least 253 confirmed drone strikes, killing as many as 1,226 people including 49 children. Obama ordered a number of drone strikes that targeted American citizens for death in Yemen, including Anwar al Awlaki who was assassinated in 2011.

In 2015 Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their other Arab allies, with the full backing of the United States, launched a brutal war in Yemen to push back Houthi militants who took over much of the country, and reinstate the ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The Saudi-led assault has killed more than 12,000 people, pushed 7 million to the brink of starvation and sparked a cholera epidemic which threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands.

Since Trump took office earlier this year, US Special Forces have increased their activity on the ground in Yemen, carrying out raids and providing support to the UAE and its various proxy militias. Dozens of people, including the eight-year-old daughter of al Awlaki, were killed in January by US Special Forces in a raid on a purported AQAP compound in central Yemen.

The efforts under Obama and now Trump to assert control over Yemen, which borders the geostrategic oil transit choke point of the Bab el Mandeb strait, is part of ongoing efforts to neutralize Iran as a regional power capable of blocking or limiting the predations of US imperialism in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.

Flammable cladding rife in Australian construction industry

Paul Bartizan & Richard Phillips

State and federal governments in Australia have reacted to the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London with calls for urgent safety checks into the use of non-fire resistant aluminium composite panel (ACP) cladding on properties across the country.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten have demanded audits. Senators involved in a long-running federal committee investigation into the use of non-compliant building materials declared last week that the inquiry would now examine flammable cladding. The state governments in New South Wales (NSW), South Australia and Queensland have also announced audits.

The expressions of concerns by the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor about combustible ACP cladding are entirely cynical. The risks and dangers of this material were well-known to Australian fire safety and construction authorities and the relevant state and federal ministers long before the Grenfell Tower disaster. Over the past two decades there have major fires in ACP-clad multi-storey properties in Britain, the US, South Korea, France, China, the United Arab Emirates and Australia.

The use of aluminium panels with highly flammable polyethylene cores is banned on the exteriors of high-rise buildings in Australia and many other countries. However, the use of the product is widespread because it is cheaper—$35 per square metre less expensive than their fire-resistant counterparts—20 percent lighter and easily installed. Contrary to the current public posturing about the panels, state and federal governments and regulatory authorities have resisted taking any action to prevent the spread of the dangerous material, let alone conduct a national audit and order its removal.

Two days after the Grenfell Tower disaster, the Age newspaper revealed that the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), the industry regulatory body, had, in fact, been aware of the safety threat posed by ACP material since 2010.

The newspaper reported that a fire-safety consultant had written to the ABCB in June 2010 explaining that most types of aluminium composite panels were “not able to achieve the criteria nominated in [the building code] to be deemed non-combustible.” The letter warned that these materials had been used extensively for about 25 years and that “millions of square metres” of ACP were installed on high rise buildings across Australia.

According to the Age, the board planned to send a national advisory note warning the industry about the cladding but this elementary action was delayed by negotiations in the Building Codes Committee in 2012.

In fact, the ABCB issued no specific warnings until well after a major fire occurred at the ACP-clad Lacrosse building, a 23-storey apartment block in downtown Melbourne, in November 2014. The fire, which started at 2 a.m. from a discarded cigarette on a balcony, spread rapidly, jumping from balcony to balcony, engulfing the upper-13 storeys within 15 minutes. Internal fire sprinklers prevented fire spreading inside the apartments and luckily no-one was hurt or killed.

Notwithstanding official bans on non-fire resistant ACPs on Australian high-rise construction, these rules are not seriously enforced because building safety certification has been deregulated, allowing construction companies to hire private certifiers who in a number of documented cases have authorised dangerous and unsafe structures. Urgent calls by peak fire and building safety bodies for Australian governments to end privatised building safety certification have been ignored.

All levels of Australian government, which are increasingly dependent on millions of dollars in tax revenue from the residential property boom, have no interest in policing construction safety, let alone introducing laws that might impede the industry.

The rallying cry of every government, Liberal-National and Labor, federal, state and municipal alike, is “get rid of business red tape.” In other words, successive governments have created the conditions for the run-down of building safety and inspection standards, deregulation, and other cost-cutting construction methods throughout Australia.

Almost three years since the Lacrosse apartment fire there has been no national audit of the extent of flammable ACP-cladding on high-rise buildings in Australia, despite the fact that building regulatory authorities and the responsible government ministers know there are hundreds of these potential death traps.

The only audit has been by the Victorian Building Authority in the aftermath of the Lacrosse fire. A limited and selective audit of 170 high-rise buildings with ACP cladding in central Melbourne and its immediate surrounding suburbs found that 51 percent of these structures had the non-compliant combustible ACP cladding.

A secret briefing note from NSW’s Department of Planning and Environment leaked to the Australian newspaper in mid-February 2016, estimated that there were between 1,800 and 2,500 high-rise buildings in metropolitan Sydney with ACP cladding. If the proportion with the non-compliant combustible type of panel is similar to Melbourne then there could be over 1,000 buildings in Sydney alone prone to fire risk. If extrapolated nationally, hundreds more high-rise buildings in Brisbane, Gold Coast and other Australian cities are threatened.

While the focus has been on high-rise buildings, the danger of combustible cladding on other buildings is being ignored. Victorian state firefighting authorities estimate that there are at least 800 low-rise buildings just in Melbourne with suspect ACP cladding. Buildings under 25 metres high (about eight storeys) are not required to have sprinkler systems.

Early last year peak fire safety agencies issued an urgent warning about the dangerous and uncontrolled use of combustible ACP cladding. Fire Protection Association Australia chief Scott Williams described the cladding as “a ticking time bomb” and the “dirty secret of the building industry in Australia.”

Williams said that the Gold Coast was one of the worst-affected cities in Australia for high-rise buildings covered in flammable external cladding and said state governments had been lax in regulating the use of the non-compliant material.

A few days after the Grenfell Tower blaze, the Victorian state Labor government’s planning minister, Richard Wynne, declared that the Grenfell Tower disaster was not possible in Melbourne or elsewhere in the country because Australia had “the best building codes of any first-world country.”

This worthless assurance is motivated by concerns that the truth about the extent of ACP cladding in Australian construction will generate a public outcry and demands for its removal. This would drastically impact on property prices and the increasingly fragile construction industry.

While the official investigation into the Lacrosse fire called for the immediate removal of the cladding from the building, the panels remain in place with hundreds of people still living in the apartments. The cladding has not been removed because the 328 apartment owners, who have been ordered to replace the ACP by July 2018, at a cost of at least $8.6 million, are involved in ongoing court action with the builder over who will pay.

Likewise, six other apartment blocks in Melbourne with flammable cladding and on the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s “enhanced response list” are still covered with the dangerous material. According to an Age newspaper report on Saturday, residents in some of the apartments have not even been informed about the cladding and the dangers they confront.

In June 2015, Engineers Australia released a report revealing that 85 percent of strata units in NSW were defective at completion and that the state had Australia’s worst building certification system. While the report did not deal with ACP cladding, commonly reported problems included inadequate fire separation between apartments, faulty installation of fire dampers to stop the spread of smoke and defective electrical installations.

As one of the report’s authors Robert Hart told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I’m waiting for a major fire to happen in one of these buildings … I wish I could say it won’t, but it will … and when it does, it will be the NSW government that has blood on its hands for its total failure to provide a proper system of certification for the building industry.”

Over 150 people die in oil tanker explosion in Pakistan

Wasantha Rupasinghe 

About 157 people including men, women and children were killed when an overturned petrol tanker exploded on a road in the Bahawalpur district of the southern Punjab in Pakistan on June 24. At least 20 children were among the dead.

The death toll could rise as more than a hundred injured, about 40 critically, are being treated in hospitals. The hospitals, including the Bahawalpur’s Victoria Hospital in South Punjab and others in Multan, are poorly equipped.

The tanker was carrying 40,000 litres of fuel when it overturned after bursting a tyre, while travelling to Lahore on a major highway. When news spread of petrol spilling from the tanker, hundreds of residents from the nearby village of Ramzanpur rushed to the scene with buckets and other containers. Motorcyclists and other vehicles also stopped to collect fuel, which is costly in Pakistan.

“After about 10 minutes the tanker exploded in a huge fireball and enveloped people collecting petrol. It was not clear how the fire started,” regional police chief Raja Riffat told the media.

Video footage and photos from the site show charred bodies and the wreckage of motorcycles and cars, along with kitchen utensils, pots, cans and buckets that were brought to the site to collect petrol.

Nahid Ahmed, a doctor at the Nishter hospital in Multan told the Dawn that more than 50 severely-burned victims were being treated. Rizwan Naseer, director of Punjab provincial rescue services, explained that many of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition and required DNA testing to identify the dead.

Abdul Malik, a local police officer who was reportedly among the first to arrive on the scene, told Associated Press that he had “never seen anything like it in my life. Victims trapped in the fireball. They were screaming for help. When the fire finally died down we saw bodies everywhere, so many were just skeletons.”

Khalil Ahmed, a 57-year-old former government employee who lives in the village of Ramzan Joya, told Reuters that he had lost 12 relatives in the fire, saying “one body has been recovered and 11 others are still missing.”

Ahmed explained: “After the spill, people began calling their relatives to come and gather the oil, and some showed up from a nearby village as well. There must have been 500 people gathered when the fire began.”

The New York Times noted: “Fuel is a high-value commodity in Pakistan, so even for those aware of the risks, the prospect of obtaining it free was too powerful a lure to ignore. Ahmedpur East [the small city near the disaster] has long suffered from poverty, illiteracy and a lack of modern facilities, and local residents have blamed the provincial government for spending money on urban areas at the expense of rural regions.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif cut short his private visit to Britain and went to Bahawalpur to meet with the victims of the inferno and the relatives of the deceased. In an exercise in political damage control, Sharif expressed his “sympathy” for the victims and announced compensation of 2 million rupees (about $US19,000) for the families of each of the dead and 1 million rupees for the injured. Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister’s brother and chief minister of Punjab, also took part.

Nawaz Sharif, in an attempt to deflect mounting anger, announced that, “a proper inquiry will be held to determine whether the oil tanker was fit to be on the road and whether all stakeholders did what they were supposed to do. Such incidents should be made an example of so they can be avoided in the future.”

His brother told a press conference that the tragedy was a “result of poverty as locals, with no education and desperate for food, were collecting petrol to feed their stomachs.” He added: “This is the result of the endemic corruption prevalent in the country.”

Such statements are utterly cynical. The prime minister and his brother are political representatives of the Pakistani elite who are responsible for the utter neglect in South Punjab and widespread poverty throughout Pakistan. According to a World Bank survey, more than 60 percent of the population survives on less than $3 a day.

South Punjab is among the areas worst affected by poverty along with Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and Sind. All four districts in South Punjab are poverty stricken—the poverty rate in Muzaffargarh is 64.8 percent and in Rajanpur 64 percent, followed by DG Khan 63.7 percent and Bahawalpur 53 percent.

In its June 26 editorial entitled “Darkened by death,” News International wrote that the Bahawalpur tragedy “speaks to the state of human deprivation in Pakistan today” and “can be seen as a continuation of the precariousness of the lives of the destitute in Pakistan.”

The editorial continued: “This incident is not about blaming one institution or another, but goes much deeper to the socio-economic structure of our society and is a product of decades of collective failure on the part of our leadership.” It noted: “The victims could not receive the specialist treatment they needed because there isn’t a single burn unit in Bahawalpur’s hospitals. Southern Punjab’s only burn unit is located in Multan.”

Similarly, the Dawn’s editorial declared: “How many of the injured could have been saved had better emergency services been available at the site of the incident and in nearby hospitals will perhaps never be known.” It went on to say: “The chain of flaws—from highways with inadequate safety resources to medical services that were quickly overwhelmed—is a failure of government,”

The tragedy certainly represents “a failure of government” and the “socio-economic structure” it defends—namely capitalism. However, the gnashing of teeth by editorial writers along with the perfunctory comments of the prime minister and his brother are part of a well-rehearsed performance which is above all aimed at deflecting public anger. The official inquiry will be a whitewash in which none of the fundamental causes of the disaster will be addressed, let alone rectified.

Congressional Budget Office report: Senate bill will strip 22 million of health insurance

Barry Grey

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported Monday that under the Republicans’ Senate bill to “repeal and replace” Obamacare there would be 15 million fewer Americans with health insurance in 2018 than under current law, a number that would rise to 22 million by 2026. This massive assault on health care for working people would bring the total number of uninsured by 2026 to 49 million, as compared to the already disgraceful figure of 28 million under Obamacare.

As in the House version of the measure passed last month, the central feature of the Senate Republicans’ “Better Care Reconciliation Act” is a devastating cut in funding for Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor, the disabled and millions of elderly people. Both versions of the so-called “reform” would effectively end Medicaid as an “entitlement” program that provides guaranteed benefits, requiring government funding to increase to meet increased need.

Instead, funding for the program would be capped on a per capita basis or by means of block grants to the states. The individual states would have the power to tighten eligibility, reduce benefits, introduce co-pays and deductibles and otherwise gut the program.

Passage of the Senate bill and Trump’s signing into law of a composite version following negotiations between the two chambers would mark a milestone in the destruction of the bedrock social reform measures of the 1930s and 1960s, with Medicare, the government health program for the elderly, and Social Security, the government pension program, next in line for dismantling.

The CBO estimates that the Senate bill would slash Medicaid spending by $772 billion over 10 years. Enrollment in the program would fall by 16 percent, with 15 million fewer beneficiaries than under current law. This would occur mainly through the termination, beginning in 2021, of the expansion of Medicaid under Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA), which added 11 million previously uninsured people to the Medicaid rolls.

Medicaid currently serves some 75 million people, about 20 percent of the US population. This includes 30 percent of all adults with disabilities and 60 percent of children with disabilities, as well as 64 percent of all nursing home residents.

The punitive impact of the bill extends well beyond those on Medicaid, however. According to the CBO, the measure calls for a total cut in spending for health care of $1.02 trillion over 10 years. This includes a reduction of $408 billion in various forms of subsidies for people who purchase insurance from private companies on the Obamacare exchanges.

The CBO concluded that in addition to the Medicaid cuts, “substantially smaller average subsidies” in the individual market than those provided under Obamacare would leave millions more people uninsured. Deductibles and copays, already outrageously high under the ACA, would skyrocket even higher, making insurance unaffordable for many low- and even middle-income people. The biggest impact would be on individuals with incomes about double the official poverty line, roughly $30,000. The share of uninsured in this income group would rise from 15 percent to 40 percent.

The demographic targeted for the most savage attack is low-income elderly people below the Medicare eligibility age of 65. The CBO estimates that insurance premiums for this group would rise by 280 percent over the next decade.

Under Obamacare, insurance companies were allowed to charge older Americans as much as three times what they charge a 21-year-old, itself an obscene concession to the profit greed of the insurance industry. Under the Senate bill, as well as the House version, they can charge five times as much. As a result, a 64-year-old making $26,500 a year on track to pay $1,700 in annual premiums under current law would pay $6,500 under the Senate bill.

The Senate bill is supposedly less “mean” than its House counterpart because it nominally retains the Obamacare ban on insurance firms discriminating against consumers because of preexisting health conditions. This, however, is rendered almost meaningless by the fact that the Senate bill incorporates a House provision allowing individual states to be granted a waiver from enforcing a separate provision of the ACA requiring insurance policies to provide 10 “essential benefits.”

As a result, companies would be able to compensate for charging affordable premiums by denying coverage for such things as doctor’s services, inpatient and outpatient hospital care, ambulance service, prescription drug coverage, pregnancy and childbirth care and mental health and substance abuse services.

The bulk of the money saved by condemning tens of millions of people to sickness and an early death will be handed over to the rich in the form of more than $700 billion in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

The CBO estimates that the Senate bill would reduce the federal deficit by $321 billion over 10 years, a substantially greater savings than the $119 billion in the House bill. It is expected that some of this will be used by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican from Kentucky) to fund marginal increases in funding for such things as the opioid epidemic and rural hospitals, as demanded by some of the approximately 10 Republican senators who have announced either skepticism of the current version of the bill or opposition to it.

McConnell is pushing to bring the measure to a floor vote by the end of this week, before the traditional July 4 holiday recess, when lawmakers will return to their districts to face voter outrage over the massively unpopular attack on health care. He faces opposition from a handful of “moderate” senators whose states are highly dependent on Medicaid, as well as from a group of far-right senators who say the bill does not go far enough in dismantling Obamacare, gutting Medicare and removing all restraints on the health care industry.

The Republicans are using a “budget reconciliation” procedure to bypass the possibility of a Democratic filibuster, which would require 60 votes to break. With a 52-48 majority over the Democrats, who are expected to vote as a block against the bill, the White House and Senate leadership can afford to lose only two Republican votes. (In the event of a 50-50 tie, Vice President Mike Pence will be able to cast the deciding vote for passage of the bill).

On Monday, McConnell released an amended version of the draft bill that had been issued last Thursday. The new version, which will undoubtedly be further tweaked in the coming days, is even more reactionary than the original. Under pressure from the insurance industry, the Republican leadership added a provision designed to prevent people from waiting until they are diagnosed with a disease or become ill to purchase insurance. It allows insurance companies to impose a six-month waiting period on individuals who buy insurance but let their coverage lapse for 63 days in the prior year.

Under this provision, people who are diagnosed with diseases such as cancer, diabetes or multiple sclerosis will be unable to obtain treatment for months, a virtual death sentence for many.

The Democrats, far from offering serious resistance to the Republican attack, are pleading with McConnell and company to negotiate a bipartisan “compromise” that does not replace Obamacare, but “fixes it.” The latter term is a euphemism for making Obamacare even more pro-corporate and anti-working class by adopting provisions being demanded by the insurance companies to further underwrite their profits.

Typical were the remarks of Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal on the MSNBC cable news network on Monday. The Democrats are “ready, willing and hope to sit down with our Republican colleagues,” he declared, adding, “The country is hungry for bipartisanship.”

Unanimous Supreme Court reinstates anti-Muslim travel ban

Tom Carter 

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court voted 9-0 to allow portions of President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban to go into effect. Seventy-two years after the Supreme Court’s infamous 1944 Korematsu decision upholding internment camps, curfews and military exclusion orders targeting people of Japanese ancestry, the court is once again authorizing state discrimination based on nationality.

“Very grateful for the 9-0 decision from the US Supreme Court,” Trump promptly gloated on Twitter. “We must keep America SAFE!”

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump declared that he would impose a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He signed a presidential decree shortly after taking office that temporarily banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. This executive order was later “watered down” to exclude several of its more provocative provisions, such as official discrimination in favor of Christian refugees, and to lift the ban in relation to Iraq.

The announcement of the anti-Muslim ban prompted major demonstrations at airports across the country, with protesters cheering fiercely when each traveler or refugee made it past the immigration authorities. Despite the use of the indistinct phrase “travel ban” in the media, the executive orders are broadly understood—by supporters as well as opponents—to be motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry. According to recent polls, a clear majority of Americans oppose the ban.

Lower federal courts quickly entered various emergency orders blocking parts of the ban from going into effect before its constitutionality could be litigated, with many judges expressing themselves in extraordinary terms. Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that the executive order “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” He questioned whether the Constitution “remains a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.”

Yesterday, the Supreme Court trampled over these lower court decisions, allowing part of the ban to go into effect pending a decision on the merits, which is expected in the upcoming October term.

In its order yesterday, the Supreme Court added the caveat that the travel ban “may not be enforced against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” such as those who have family members or professional or academic connections in the US. However, the Supreme Court ruled, the ban can be enforced with respect to all “other foreign nationals.”

The caveat is a political compromise that does not have any legal significance. Its only purpose is to justify the cowardly capitulation by the court’s so-called liberal wing. The historic significance of yesterday’s decision is that Donald Trump’s presidential decree attacking Muslims, which was drafted by his fascistic advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, will be allowed to go into effect with the approval of all nine justices on the Supreme Court.

The unanimous decision, delivered “per curiam,” i.e., summarily by the court as a whole, bases itself on the “compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security.” As all nine of the Supreme Court justices well know, the idea that the ban is in some way related to national security is a fraud that does not stand up to any kind of rational scrutiny.

Trump campaigned for president on the basis of anti-Muslim hatred, repeatedly shouting about “extreme vetting” of Muslims at his rallies. His anti-Muslim executive orders, the crude handiwork of white nationalists that Trump has ensconced in the West Wing, are an effort to give legal sanction to this sentiment. Former New York City Mayor and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani bragged publicly that Trump consulted with him about how to craft an anti-Muslim executive order that would withstand legal scrutiny.

Moreover, notwithstanding the contortions of Trump’s lawyers, the ban makes no sense as a supposed “national security” measure. According to data gathered by Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, none of the Muslim extremists who have engaged in terrorist attacks inside the United States since 2001 came from the six countries in question. Of the mere 36 extremists Professor Kurzman was able to identify, 18 were born in America and 14 emigrated as children, so the vast majority would not have been subject to any vetting procedure anyway.

The Supreme Court’s caveat about “bona fide relationships” is entirely arbitrary and has no basis in the presidential decree or any other statute or rule. As right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote in a separate opinion, joined by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court does not define what constitutes a “bona fide relationship” or a “credible claim” to such a relationship. Instead, these questions are delegated to Trump administration immigration authorities to apply as they see fit. If the Supreme Court is acknowledging President Trump’s power to issue the decree “to provide for the Nation’s security,” these three justices declared, then it should have allowed the anti-Muslim ban to go into effect in its entirety.

The participation of justices appointed by Democrats in this decision, including Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, explodes the pretenses of the Democratic Party to be interested in defending immigrants or democratic rights. Despite popular protests against the anti-Muslim ban, the Democratic Party has refused to mount any significant public campaign against Trump on this issue over the past six months. Instead, the party has focused all of its attention on denouncing Trump as insufficiently hostile to Russia, concentrating on forging alliances with the military and intelligence agencies as well as arch-reactionaries like John McCain.

The silence of the Democrats while the Trump administration attacks Muslims as part of a ruthless assault on democratic and social rights across the board exposes the party’s election-year posturing as worn-out lies worthy only of contempt. The Democratic Party represents war, inequality, reaction and repression.

Every election year, the American population is told that it must elect Democrats to prevent further shifts to the right on the Supreme Court. Whatever the ultimate fate of the anti-Muslim ban, yesterday’s decision should once and for all put such claims to rest.

Nor is this the only recent Supreme Court case in which the authoritarian and anti-democratic conclusion was reached by a unanimous vote. In 2014, at the request of the Obama administration, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 9-0 to grant immunity to police officers who killed a fleeing motorist and his passenger with a hail of 15 bullets.

As of this writing, no prominent Democrat has breathed a word about yesterday’s decision. The Twitter feeds of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are conspicuously silent about the Supreme Court’s attack on Muslims, as are many of the opinion columns of America’s major newspapers, which remain fixated on the Democratic Party’s anti-Russia campaign and the internecine strife roiling Washington.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision rests on a decade-and-a-half of uninterrupted efforts—through the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations—to dismantle democratic rights and erect the legal infrastructure of a police state. Building on the Bush administration’s assertion of unchecked “wartime” and “emergency” powers wielded by the president, the Obama administration asserted the power to conduct unlimited spying on the American and world population, as well as to assassinate anyone, anywhere in the world, by presidential decree.

President Obama shielded Bush-era torturers and their accomplices from accountability, insisted on immunity for killer cops, flouted international law, invoked “state secrets” to shield his administration’s activities from the public, imposed military-police “lockdowns” of entire urban areas, and vigorously persecuted anyone who dared to expose official criminality. Thanks to the political atmosphere and legal precedents built up through a decade-and-a-half of the “war on terror,” the Supreme Court now sits on its hands while the president persecutes Muslims in the name of “the Nation’s security.”

At the same time that it allowed the anti-Muslim ban to go into effect, the Supreme Court signaled a further intensification of efforts to undermine the separation of church and state.

The court also ruled Monday that a Missouri church had a right to receive recycled tires to resurface its playground through a state assistance program, despite the Missouri constitution’s prohibition on conferring state benefits on religious institutions. While the stakes might appear relatively minor, the decision marks the first time in the Supreme Court’s history that it has decided that the US Constitution positively requires the state to provide public funds directly to a church.

Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, for whom undermining the separation of church and state is a particular area of professional expertise, filed a concurring opinion in the Missouri case declaring that the church was the victim of “discrimination against religious exercise” and criticizing language in the majority opinion that would limit its future application.

Doubtless with the support of Gorsuch, the Supreme Court also announced Monday that it would hear the case of a Colorado cake decorator who refused to prepare a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. Lower courts already ruled that this bigoted gesture violated Colorado’s public accommodations law, which prohibits businesses from discriminating based on factors such as race, gender or sexual orientation. The cake decorator, Jack Phillips, is claiming that his act of discrimination represents “religious expression.”

Gorsuch has no problem with religious discrimination provided Muslims are the target. It is perhaps unfortunate for Gorsuch that the three decisions were all published on the same day. When Christians are denied the “right” to receive state funds or to discriminate against others, Gorsuch vibrates with righteous indignation. But Gorsuch would allow Trump’s measure persecuting Muslims to go into effect in its entirety.

Unpacking Recent Violence against Egypt's Copts

Derek Verbakel

On 26 May, the Islamic State (IS) murdered 29 Coptic Christians on a bus in Minya, the latest targeting of Egypt's largest minority community. Three church bombings since December, also claimed by IS, have killed over 70 Copts. The government of Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi casts itself as the protector of Egyptian Copts, and violence against them appears to result straightforwardly from the ideological-strategic imperatives of IS. Yet such a shallow narrative is inadequate to understand recent outbreaks of violence affecting the Coptic community. Rather, these episodes must be placed in the broader context of violence against Copts in Egypt. Implicated is not only the role of IS, but also that of the Egyptian state and society in producing socio-political conditions amenable to violence. 

Deadly attacks and less visible instances of violence against Copts have long occurred under successive authoritarian regimes in Egypt. An especially salient episode unfolded in October 2011, highlighting the imbricated roles of state and societal actors: 28 Copts were massacred for protesting government passivity toward assaults on churches by Muslim extremists. In discouraging broader civil disobedience, security services knew that targeting a marginalised group would provoke little public outcry. 

El-Sisi has also instrumentalised the Copts’ suffering in the context of escalating violence since mid-2013, itself linked to tightening ties between Coptic Orthodox Church leaders and the state. The July overthrow of Egypt's former President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was supported by Coptic Orthodox Church leaders but not all Copts. Still, many Morsi supporters viewed the wider Coptic community as complicit in the El-Sisi led coup. After military personnel killed nearly 1000 pro-Morsi demonstrators the subsequent month, several Copts were killed, and numerous churches and homes in Upper Egypt were destroyed by angry mobs. Prominent Muslim Brotherhood voices incited violence against Christians – an enduring phenomenon. El-Sisi then chastised foreign governments for their alleged apathy to the attacks while crudely characterising all Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathisers as sectarian terrorists. 

But despite further symbolic posturing, such as attending the Coptic Christmas mass since 2015, El-Sisi has presided over continuous discrimination against Copts through state institutions. This has mutually reinforced societal expressions of intolerance and bigotry, evident, for instance, in the Copts and their properties regularly being attacked by local vigilantes under the pretext of illegal construction or renovation of churches. A long-awaited new law on church construction was passed in August 2016, but its many loopholes risk worsening pre-existing restrictions on establishment of houses of worship for non-Muslims. Where localised violence occurs, government officials oversee customary reconciliation processes led by Muslim leaders unsympathetic to the situation facing Copts. Aggressors are shielded and Copts pressured to settle. 

A sense of impunity has also prevailed where due process is ostensibly followed. For instance, prosecutors recently failed to convict several men who stripped an elderly Coptic woman naked and paraded her in the street following a rumour that her son had a romantic relationship with a Muslim woman. Around the same time, four Coptic teenagers received a five-year prison sentence for blasphemy for recording a video ridiculing IS. When hate speech was then directed at their faith – also illegal under the Penal Code – double standards common in the application of the law were predictably ignored. Resulting widespread perceptions of Copts as lesser citizens with fewer rights lay the groundwork for those seeking to incite violence against them.

Such actors – the IS and likeminded groups – have grown stronger under el-Sisi's rule. Repression of the political opposition, such as through mass imprisonment of Muslim Brotherhood members and other Islamists, has fueled the very radicalisation it seeks to curb. As the prospects of establishing an Islamist system of governance in Egypt have faded, more groups and individuals who would have previously distanced themselves from such ideology appear to be increasingly viewing jihadi violence as politically necessary. 

Through the attacks since December, the IS has sought to present the state as illegitimate and unable to protect its citizens, particularly Copts, who the group wishes to eradicate from Egypt. However, Copts have quietly experienced growing internal displacement and emigration from Egypt since mid-2013. In recent years, many have justifiably condemned Church leaders for further politicising their identity through adopting political stances mirroring the regime’s. In February 2017, the IS vowed to escalate its campaign of deadly violence against Copts, several hundred families of whom fled north Sinai. Statements from the local Coptic Bishop resembled those of the government, downplaying the gravity of the situation. 

After two church bombings took place on 9 April, the Church referred to them as “exported to Egypt from abroad,” aimed at “striking our national unity.” El-Sisi added, “I won’t say those who fell are Christian or Muslim...I will say that they’re Egyptian.” However, such statements deny the unique experiences of violence and discrimination facing Copts and occlude the socio-political conditions in Egypt through which these come about. Similarly obfuscatory logic was exercised after the May attack: El-Sisi sought to demonstrate strength by striking supposed IS fighters in the Libyan's Derna city, who were in fact non-IS adversaries of his Libyan ally, Khalifa Haftar. 

Interplay between state and societal forces in Egypt have produced a political order subjugating Copts and setting the stage for further episodes of violence against them, particularly as flagging IS fortunes elsewhere may energise the group’s activities in Egypt. Regrettably, the current regime’s failure to pursue substantive policies mitigating patterns of violence offers little hope the plight of Egypt’s Copts will abate.