The Attack on Al Jazeera

Stanley L. Cohen

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple, who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free open encounter?

—John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing

The march from fake news to no news is as straight and unbroken as the runway from Washington D.C. to Riyadh.

Tyranny knows no truth… just unbridled power and a drive to extinguish it whether by mob appeal or the slam of a prison gate. Today, we are witness to a unity of drive and purpose, in both West and East, where full scale attacks on debate and dissent have become very much the norm… with news outlets shuttered, journalists jailed and thinkers shamed.

Whether it is the most recent royal family in Washington, the perpetual caste in KSA or the wannabe one in Cairo, diversity of thought, identity and purpose is under siege in ways not seen since Galileo dared to suggest that a central tenet of Christian cosmology… the Earth lies at the center of the universe… was factually untrue. Charged with heresy, Galileo was forced to recount and abjure.

Today, in many places, the channel of peeling truth from cosmetic reality has moved well beyond the mere papal process of 16th century Europe to the full-on embrace of singularity of thought… be it coerced by force, banishment or closure.

Nowhere is this more painfully evident than it is, today, in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) where a coalition of states, along with an assist from the African state of Egypt,  have challenged Qatar’s independence by a subterfuge checklist that, in reality, boils down to their fear of Al-Jazeera and what it represents.

Since its genesis, Al-Jazeera has served as much more than a mere signpost of speech or thought… popular or otherwise. Its existence, alone, stands as a safety valve against those closed societies that embrace repression as so much a check against the light of day of which they fear.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has no autonomous media, nor does it endure political parties, unions or human rights groups.  The government treats online journalists, writing for state approved news outlets, the same as it does print and broadcast journalists… subjecting them to exacting regulation and content based intimidation.

The internet, alone, is the sole means, within KSA, by which a relatively robust exchange of information, from within and without the state, can circulate. However, its closely monitored “citizen-journalists” are subject to strict filtering mechanisms that scrutinize and, often, block their internet content.

Indeed, authorities regularly monitor websites, blogs and chat rooms, as well as the content of e-mail and mobile-phone text messages.

Sites that contain “harmful”, illegal, anti-Islamic, or offensive material are blocked… as are those that carry criticism of Saudi Arabia, the royal family, or the other Gulf States.

So, too, sites that call for political reform or are critical of the current political and social landscape are blocked, as are human rights websites (“Country Profile: Saudi Arabia” August 6, 2009) making the country one of the world’s most repressive with respect to freedom of expression whether online or in print.

For those whose print and internet communications, or blogs, cross the rigid and narrow divide of government criticism, they run the risk of swift state reprisal… often arrest and detainment, without specific charges, for critical or controversial remarks. Others have been accused of blasphemy, inciting chaos and defaming the king and state which can bring punishments that can run into years of imprisonment and, at times, include flogging.

Several cases speak volumes about a Saudi state that, very much the norm, seeks to silence dialogue with ruthless punishment meted out against those who dare to dissent.

For example, Raif Badawi was arrested in 2012 on a charge of “insulting Islam through electronic channels.”  Subsequently he was prosecuted for apostasy and criticizing the regime on his blog… which included material critical of “senior religious figures” and  suggested  that Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University had become “a den for terrorists.”

For pure speech, and nothing else, Badawi was convicted on several charges, in 2013, and sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. In 2014 his sentence was increased to 10 years in prison, 1000 lashes, and a fine. The first 50 lashes were administered on January 9, 2015 with the remainder postponed more than a dozen times since.

Following his arrest, Amnesty International designated Badawi a prisoner of conscience, “detained solely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression.” Human Rights Watch has noted: “The charges against him, based solely to Badawi’s involvement in setting up a website for peaceful discussion about religion and religious figures, violate his right to freedom of expression”.

Meanwhile, Badawi’s attorney, Waleed Abu al-Khair, himself a prominent human rights activist, continues to serve a 15 year sentence on charges imposed on him in 2014 stemming solely from his criticism of human rights abuses in KSA. Among other things, Waleed was found guilty by a security court of:

… Disobeying the ruler and seeking to remove his legitimacy

… Insulting the judiciary and questioning the integrity of judges

… Setting up an unlicensed organization

… Harming the reputation of the state by communicating with international organisations

… Preparing, storing, and sending information that harms public order.

In March of 2016, Saudi Arabia sentenced journalist, Alaa Brinji, to five years in prison plus an eight year travel ban for tweets in which he criticized religious authorities and voiced support for the right of women to drive and for jailed human rights activists.

KSA is ranked 168th out of 180 countries in Reporters without Borders (RSF) 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Bahrain

Bahrain, an island Kingdom located off of the eastern coastline of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, is no more respectful of speech and press freedoms.  It was listed 164th in the most recent RSF world rankings.  It sees independent and vigorous journalism as an ever-present danger to its ability to control the state’s domestic narrative and to maintain political power.

Infamous for jailing large numbers of journalists… in particular photographers and cameramen… Bahrain has a recent history of targeting political dissidents, as well. Their crimes are typically little more than the will to challenge blanket restrictions upon assembly and prohibited speech.

Journalists and dissidents convicted of charges that include unlawful demonstrations and supporting “terrorism” typically receive long sentences. Often mistreated in detention, many have been imprisoned for life. Others have been sentenced to death.

Not long ago, a raid by Bahrain security forces left five people dead and hundreds detained. Recently, a court sentenced two young anti-regime protesters to death; two others were imprisoned for life and eight received sentences of 3 to 10 years. Nine of the pro-democracy activists saw their nationality revoked.

Just this past month, Al-Wasat, the island’s sole independent newspaper, was closed in yet another government effort to control the free flow of information among its population of a bit more than one-million.

Describing it as a temporary suspension “until further notice”, the government accused this highly respected newspaper of “dissemination of information that affects national unity and the kingdom’s relationship with other countries.”

Egypt

When it comes to state repression of media freedom, Egypt stands alone. As we say in the law, it’s “sui generis”… one of a kind.

Since the revolution of 2011, and the subsequent military coup of 2013, more than a dozen journalists have been killed. None have been the subject of proper and thorough investigation. No one has been held accountable.  Countless others have been injured, many tortured, by security officials after having been swept up for little more than covering demonstrations.

Although precise figures are difficult to obtain, it has been estimated by various human rights groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), that, today, hundreds of journalists, bloggers and social media activists are entombed in maximum security prisons throughout Egypt. Many will spend years in detention… uncharged and untried. Others face long jail terms, including life sentences, in political witch hunts   targeting those seen as enemies of the state… often subjected to mass trials, by the hundreds, denied even a modicum of due process. In 2015 alone some 600 activists were sentenced to death in show trials of pro-democracy campaigners.

Under a terrorism law adopted in August 2015, journalists are obliged to report only the official version of “terrorist” attacks. Failure to do so renders the offender subject to punishments ranging from a loss of government license to fines and imprisonment.

In the summer of 2015, three privately owned newspapers were prevented from printing, articles that were critical of the Egyptian President.

Earlier this year, the government banned circulation of an edition of an Egyptian weekly newspaper with an image, on its cover, of famed ex-football player Mohamed Aboutrika and his mother.  Designated a “terrorist” for his support of the presidential bid of the Muslim Brotherhood‘s Mohamed Morsi in 2012, today, Aboutrika lives in Qatar where he works as a sports analyst.

Recently, Egyptian authorities suspended two issues of a privately owned newspaper after it published a front-page editorial blaming the interior ministry for the Palm Sunday church bombings,

In December of 2016, Egypt’s president ratified a new law regulating media outlets which extended his control over them. The law creates three regulatory bodies… two to oversee state-owned press and media organizations and a Higher Council for Media Regulation to “regulate” all of Egypt’s media outlets… whether public or private. It has the authority to fine, or suspend, publications and broadcasters, and to issue or revoke foreign media permits.

To understand the full nature and extent of Egypt’s current effort to control what is reported, and how, one need only consider who has been targeted, and for what, since the military coup that brought al-Sisi to power.

In 2016, the head of Egypt’s Journalists’ Union and two board members stood trial in Cairo… charged largely with spreading “false news.” Described as  an “effort to muzzle the media,” after a seven month trial the three were convicted of harboring two journalists who wrote for a website critical of the government and sentenced to two years in prison and fined $650.00.

Other prominent journalists have been swept up in what has been described as little more than a government effort to create a “state of fear.” According to CPJ, photojournalist Mahmoud Abou-Zeid, known as “Shawkan”, has been imprisoned since 2013, along with 700 others, for covering the dispersal of a pro-Muslim Brotherhood sit-in.  Recipient of the CPJ International Press Freedom Awards in 2016,“Shawkan” remains imprisoned and untried despite deteriorating health.

Others, on a CPJ list of detained Egyptian journalists, include Mahmoud Abdel Naby, a correspondent for Rassd News Network (an alternative media network based in Cairo), who has been imprisoned since 2013. Also arrested, in 2013, were RASSD executive director, Abdullah Al-Fakharany, co-founder, Samhy Mostafa and Amgad TVpresenter Mohamed al-Adly.

According to CPJ, the trio was charged with “spreading chaos” during the government dispersal of the sit-in at Rabaa Al-Adaweya.

CPJ has also adopted as human rights cases the matters of Abdallah Shousha from Amgad TV, Omar Abdel Maqsoud from Misr al-Arabia, Sabry Anwar from El Badil, Mohamed El-Battawy from Akhbar Al-Youm, Abdelrahman Abdelsalam Yaqot  from the Karmoz website and Hisham Gaafar, director of the Mada Foundation for Media Development

Others held include freelance journalists Hassan El-Kabbani and Ismail Alexandrani, detained for several years without trial, and well-known human rights activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah, who is serving a five-year prison term based upon protest charges alone.

Egypt is ranked 161 out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

The GCC Attack on Al-Jazeera

According to the Egyptian human rights group, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, and news reports between May24 and June 12, 2017, state authorities blocked access to at least 64 websites… including dozens of alternative news sources. The number was considerably higher than the 21 sites security officials announced had been censored for “spreading lies” and “supporting terrorism.”

The information blackout came in the wake of similar moves by GCC members, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, which blocked access to websites, in their respective countries, run by the Qatari-funded network Al-Jazeera.

Although the GCC claimed the block was necessitated by an alleged hack of Al-Jazeera and an ensuing fake news report, it proved to be the first information broadside in a coordinated effort to control an independent narrative available to several hundred million viewers in one of the most volatile regions of the world.

In the days to come, what began with a move to control website access quickly escalated to a complete break in diplomatic relations in which the GCC and Egypt demanded of Qatar that it close the international network, Al-Jazeera, and defund  various other news sources including Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed, Middle East Eye, Arabi21 and Egypt’s Rassd News Agency.

Although other demands were made of Qatar, it is clear that a prime focus of GCC and Egypt, in the staged diplomatic crises, is a desire to once again limit access to independent news sources by the region’s restive populations.

Indeed, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Saudi Arabia controlled almost all of the public dialogue through the purchase of most of the popular Arabic newspapers employing  many of the region’s most respected journalists of the day. Although the government permitted some diversity of thought and expanded coverage of Arab and international issues, no critical discussion of Saudi Arabia and its royal family, direct or otherwise, was permitted.

To some degree, this standard was relaxed by virtue of a joint venture between the Saudi controlled Orbit Communications Company and BBC which introduced the Arabic language television station to the region.  It proved, however, to be short-lived… closing less than two years later because of growing censorship demands, by the Saudi Government, which included refusal to permit the station to air prominent dissident viewpoints.

That was to soon change. In 1996 Al-Jazeera opened, staffed largely by those same dissenting voices that lost their jobs with the Saudi closure of the Arabic-language BBC news service. Though funded by the Qatari government, the new network was empowered, like no other, with broad editorial discretion.

From the beginning, Al-Jazeera was controversial… broadcasting dissenting opinions on important issues, including from opposition figures silenced domestically in their own nations, at a level unheard of in the region.

Al-Jazeera’s availability throughout the Middle East changed its information landscape  . . . introducing a level of freedom of speech, on TV, that was previously unheard of in the region.

In just five years, it became the most widely viewed Arab television station for news. Within ten years, three-quarters of Arabs looked to it as their primary source of information.

Al-Jazeera became an instant counter-force to the tailored news of Saudi and Egyptian controlled media in particular. It presented controversial viewpoints regarding the governments of many Arab states on the Persian Gulf… including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and, even, Qatar. It also aired particularly contentious views about Egypt and its judiciary.

From its start there was a backlash against Al-Jazeera which manifested itself in a variety of ways and intensified over time. Thus, in May of 2002, Bahrain banned Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts from within its borders… due to the channel’s comments about Bahrain’s municipal elections… labeling it as “serving Zionism”. Saudi Arabia soon jumped on this row and reportedly pressured advertisers to avoid the channel almost from the day it opened its doors.

Most contentious of all, however, was its coverage of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions during the Arab Spring. Criticized by some for its “pro-democracy” bent, Al-Jazeera was, all at once, greeted with tremendous support by people in the streets yet disparaged by autocratic states in the region which feared the reach of the democratic movement to their own capitals.

Of all the states in the region, none has been more fearful or punitive towards Al-Jazeera than Egypt… which has long targeted it in a transparent drive to maintain government control of information for this nation of ninety million having seen both a revolution and military coup in this decade, alone.

Indeed, Egypt’s recent decision with the GCC to use Al-Jazeera as a handy pretext to divert attention from internal political repression and failure is by no means of recent vintage. Since the military coup of 2013, the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has proven resilient, and arguably desperate, in looking elsewhere to craft convenient foils in its own political and economic missteps.

To look toward Egypt, as a veritable primer in state repression of free speech and information, is a perverse understatement. Thus, not long after the coup, charges were filed against legendary Al-Jazeera television host, Ahmed Mansour, an Egyptian national, who was tried, in absentia, on allegations dating back to Tahrir Square in the final days of the successful 2011 revolution.

Tried in secret, without notice, counsel, or an opportunity to be heard, Mr. Mansour’s persecution, like so many others in Egypt, are routinely rejected by the broader world community as so much a sham… a political vendetta lacking independence and reliability.

Indeed, when Egypt sought Mansour’s extradition from Germany to face a fifteen year sentence, it refused the request taking note that “Egypt’s judicial system is politically motivated.” Not long before, the African Union, of which Egypt is a member, concurred…, holding that the Egyptian judiciary is politically controlled and corrupt.

On other occasions the al-Sisi government has purposely targeted Al-Jazeera journalists.  In 2013, ten of its employees were accused of spreading “false news” while covering public demonstrations against the military coup that removed President Mohammed Morsi. Ultimately, only three… Baher Mohamed, Mohamed Fahmy and Peter Greste… were detained.  Greste was held in prison for over a year, while Mohamed and Fahmy spent 437 days in detention before being released.

This past December, Al-Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein, an Egyptian national, was detained upon arrival at Cairo’s airport. Not long thereafter, Egypt’s interior ministry accused Hussein of “disseminating false news and receiving monetary funds from foreign authorities in order to defame the state’s reputation.” Six months later he remains in custody.

In May, a Cairo court sentenced a former editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera Arabic, Ibrahim Helal, to death, charging him, in absentia, with endangering national security.

Information Control

Make no mistake about it, the demand that Al-Jazeera close its door, as so much the price of regional “peace”, is nothing short of a desperate autocratic drive to strip the human spirit of its thirst for knowledge and its innate right to grow.  It will not happen.

For time immemorial, those in power… whether by force of arms, royal edicts or the shade of a ballot box too small to effect meaningful change… have sought to control the dialogue as a desperate effort to hang on to power that is not theirs to own. It will not happen.

The marketplace of ideas transcends time and place. It is a community that knows no wealth, authority or limits. It is a boundless souk that welcomes all… no matter race, religion or gender.

From the time of Plato to Avicenna to de Beauvoir to Marx, women and men of principle and courage have struggled in pursuit of truth. Many have paid the ultimate price, in their search for it, while others have fled it… sated with the fleeting comfort born of fame or fortune and little else.

Al-Jazeera is one voice of many.  It competes with a crescendo of other information partisans who seek to influence today’s vision and tomorrow’s journey. This competition of ideas demands the freedom that is untempered speech… if it is to work, and work well.

At times, Al-Jazeera is surely right… at others, mistaken. Ultimately, it matters not. Al- Jazeera is a much needed voice… and a welcome space for the freedom of voices in agreement and opposition.

Voices bring thought. Thought brings information. Information is knowledge. Knowledge is power.

Iran, the US and the World

Robert Fantina

Maintaining a straight face, United States Secretary of ‘Defense’ James Mattis calls Iran “the primary state sponsor of terrorism”. This from the man whose country is bombing at least six nations.

A week ago, I had the opportunity of travelling to Iran, to present at the conference ‘United States, Human Rights and Discourse of Domination’ held on July 2 in Tehran. Although only in Iran for four days, and only visiting two cities (Tehran and Mashhad), that is more time than most of the people who listen to Mr. Mattis’s bizarre ramblings have spent there. So perhaps my impressions may be of some value.

Tehran is a bustling city: the business area is noisy, crowded and exciting, not all that different from any major city in the U.S. or Europe which I have visited. I observed women in various modes of dress; yes, all wore headscarves, as is required, but beyond that, they wore jeans, slacks, sneakers, high-heeled shoes, and any other fashion observed anywhere else.  As I rode through both cities, I observed women driving, sometimes alone, sometimes with other women in the car, and sometimes with men in the car. Additionally, women with Ph.D.s presented at the conference, and I met a young woman studying for her Ph.D. in at the University of Tehran. It should be noted that none of these situations would be observed in Saudi Arabia, with which the U.S. has full diplomatic relations.

The hotels at which I stayed in Tehran and Mashhad were both modern, with the one in Mashhad being exceptional in style and amenities. Lights in the hallways turned on when there was motion, so it was available when needed, reducing waste of electricity. It was beautifully appointed throughout.

During my time in Iran, I saw one police officer, who was directing traffic; I could not tell if the officer was armed. I saw one armed soldier on duty at the airport in Mashhad, both when arriving and when leaving. I saw two other soldiers, apparently off-duty, awaiting a flight in Mashhad. Other than that, there was no military presence observed in either city.

I found the people helpful. Although I had guides through all my activities, these guides didn’t accompany me on my flight from Mashhad. Prior to boarding, my guide asked a group of people if anyone would be interested in assisting me on my way back to Tehran, to assure that I found my contact there. As he was making this request, I, of course, didn’t know what he was saying. A gentleman who spoke some English volunteered, my guide explained what was happening, and we proceeded.

Although I could certainly have located my Tehran guide back at the airport (I had previously met him), I appreciated this gesture. There is something a bit intimidating about looking at the ‘Arrivals’ and ‘Departures’ board in the airport, and not understanding a single word that is written.

Additionally, arriving back in Tehran, I realized that I had left my wallet and cell phone at airport security in Mashhad. The gentleman who had volunteered to assist me called my guide in Mashhad, who returned to the airport, retrieved my missing belongings, and is sending them back to me. The gracious volunteer remained with me until my guide and I found each other.

It may be a wonder to some people, but I walked wherever I wanted to in both cities. Restaurants abounded, and the group I was with enjoyed meals and sightseeing, with no restrictions.

What, one might ask, did I not experience in Iran that I might have expected to experience in the U.S. For one, no unarmed people were shot by the police while I was there. There were no mass shootings in schools or places of business. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani did not embarrass himself or his country on the international stage; he did not threaten ‘regime change’ against any country. There was no news about the country’s officials attempting to deprive its citizens of health care.

Returning for a moment to the puzzling statement of Mr. Mattis, let us be reminded that Iran has not invaded another nation in over 200 years. The U.S. has been at war for at least 220 of its 241 year history.

Let us now ask: What country is the primary state sponsor of terrorism? Is it the one who is being threatened with ‘regime change’ by the country which is now bombing six other countries, and that has not invaded another country in over 200 years? Or is it the one doing the bombing?

Since logic and common sense tell us that it must be the one doing the bombing (the U.S.), we need to ask another question: why does the U.S. want to convince the world that Iran is exporting terrorism, when it itself is doing so?

The answer has been stated before, but I will not hesitate to state it again: the U.S. does not want any country in the Middle East to be powerful except apartheid Israel. Iran is a power broker in that part of the world, so the U.S. must reduce it to ruins, if it possibly can, as it did with Iraq. However, Iran is not Iraq: it is far bigger, more heavily populated, and more powerful than Iraq ever was. An invasion of Iran would be a disaster for the U.S., the Middle East and quite possibly, the entire world.

Will any of that matter to U.S. President Donald Trump? Probably not. He only cares about his popularity (his poll numbers are dismal, but he thinks they are just part of media lies; he seems to believe he is beloved around the world), and has only a minimal grasp, if any at all, of history, politics or current events. He is surrounded by the likes of Mr. Mattis, who also seems more than amenable to walking wide-eyed into certain disaster. Will Secretary of State Rex Tillerson be the voice of reason? When pigs fly. Mr. Tillerson has said that U.S. policy is “to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government,” possibly, one might think, in the way the U.S. is supporting elements inside of Syria that are working, at U.S. behest, to overthrow that government. The fact that Iranian president Rouhani was elected in a democratic process is not sufficient for Mr. Tillerson.

Perhaps we can look to the U.S. senate for some restraint: hardly. It recently voted 98 – 2 to increase sanctions on Iran.

The only real hope is that the U.S. will react to pressure from Russia, which will not look kindly on an attack on its ally. Perhaps, just perhaps, Messrs. Trump, Mattis, Tillerson, et. Al will be sufficiently cognizant of the risks of a nuclear world war to prevent it. It is beyond frightening to consider that that is the slim hope upon which civilization relies.

The End of the Social Contract

Vijay Prashad

Disabled Americans came in wheelchairs into the United States Senate to register their protest against the harsh Republican plan to slash health care. ADAPT, a disability rights group, staged a die-in right before the office of the leading Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. About 60 protesters tried to block the entrance to McConnell’s office. Their goal was to show the rest of America what would come out of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which the Republicans sought to push through as an alternative to Obamacare. The police arrested 43 protesters and wheeled out others from McConnell’s hallway. The McConnell plan would slash Medicare, a government plan that provides health-care coverage for low-income Americans and for those with disabilities. One of the elements of the plan envisages cutting funds for in-home assistance that allows disabled Americans to remain in their own homes rather than move to nursing homes. Fourteen million Americans will lose any access to health insurance.

One of the people who got out of her wheelchair to be arrested was Stephanie Woodward, director of advocacy for the Center for Disability Rights. She was arrested by the officers in the Senate, who carried her out. “We have a right to live,” Stephanie Woodward said. “And by live, I don’t mean just breathe. I mean be a part of the American dream, be in the community, raise a family, go to work. These Medicaid cuts will force people into institutions who don’t need to be there.”

Harsh budget

Evidence of a major assault by the Trump administration on the social safety net in the U.S. was already there in Trump’s budget proposal. He sought to cut funds for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Medicaid and the Interagency Council on Homelessness. Cuts to affordable housing and to homeless assistance programmes were a centrepiece. But so too are cuts that would hurt the disabled. Sally Johnston, president of the Disabled in Action of Greater Syracuse, said: “Trump’s proposed budget will cut trillions of dollars in domestic services. How can this make America better?”

Harshness towards the vulnerable defines Trump’s agenda. There was a whisper of this when Trump mocked a disabled reporter for The New York Times, Serge Kovaleski, and when 12-year-old J.J. Holmes, who has cerebral palsy, was ejected from a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. The disregard shown to people with disabilities reveals the kind of agenda that Trump was always going to drive. Generosity towards people is not his metier. His is a harsh project, to push aside the vulnerable in a social Darwinist drive to excellence. Weakness is reviled. Strength is applauded.

In late June, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin married the Scottish actress Louise Linton. They had a lavish wedding, attended by Trump, his Vice President and most of the Cabinet. Mnuchin and Louise Linton live in a $12.6 million home in an exclusive part of Washington, D.C. The money is Mnuchin’s, what he made as a partner in Goldman Sachs. Mnuchin is not the only fabulously wealthy person in Trump’s cabinet. He sits at Cabinet meetings near Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Deputy Commerce Secretary Todd Ricketts. Trump’s Chief Economic Adviser is Gary Cohn, another former Goldman Sachs president. All are worth hundreds of millions of dollars each.

At a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, just after the Mnuchin wedding, Trump mused about the wealth in his Cabinet. “Somebody said—why did you appoint a rich person to be in charge of the economy? No, it’s true. And Wilbur’s a very rich person in charge of commerce. I said—Because that’s the kind of thinking we want’.” What kind of thinking would that be? The thinking of someone who was willing to set aside any social agenda for his individual gain.

Trump’s base is made of a combination of people of great wealth—who are few—and the immense white-collar middle-class sector that has found itself made vulnerable by globalisation. Business process outsourcing struck the white-collar middle class, which formed the base of the Tea Party and then the Trump movement. He promised this base that he would not become wedded to Wall Street but would put Main Street in charge. That has not come to pass. “I love all people, rich or poor,” Trump said, “but in those particular positions I don’t want a poor person.” No poor or middle-class person should direct commercial or budgetary policy. That should be left to the rich. This is an honest assessment of Trump’s project—to appeal to the mass of white-collar vulnerable workers, but to deliver the reins of power to the very wealthy.

In a new book, Duke University professor Nancy MacLean goes into the intellectual roots of the radical Right and the vision of the current agenda, as articulated by Trump. The Right, she shows in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is interested in the destruction of “society” and the creation of pure individualism. Charles Koch, one of the major financiers of the radical Right, relied upon Baldy Harper. Harper argued, decades ago, that support for vulnerable populations would erode liberty. He suggested that liberal policies that helped the poor and the disadvantaged would be like a disease against society. “Once the disease has advanced,” he wrote, “a bitter curative medicine is required to gain already-lost liberty.” These are harsh words. The idea of a “bitter curative medicine” is something that is natural to the Trump team. The vicious knives they wield against any social policy for the poor and the vulnerable are sharp and are used with gusto. One can see the way they cut away at precious social policies in the budget and in their health care plans.

Nancy MacLean describes the agenda of the economist James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Buchanan is a favourite of the radical Right, for whom he acts as an important intellectual standard. A clear sentiment of Buchanan’s vision is available in a 2005 document, where he attacks people who have not been able to save enough for unforeseen circumstances or for retirement. If they fall catastrophically ill or lose their jobs, they should have prepared for this eventuality through prudent savings. If not, Buchanan wrote, they “are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to animals who are dependent”. The language here is ferocious. It is mimicked by Trump and his Cabinet.

Let us return to Trump’s budget. He proposes to cut $2.5 trillion in programmes for the working class and the indigent. Food stamps, the essential means for the poorest Americans to access food, would go. It is important to underline that one in six Americans struggles with hunger—49 million Americans have a hard time putting food on their tables. One in five children is at risk of hunger, with the ratio higher—one in three—for African-American and Latino families. There will be no easy way for Americans who struggle with food insecurity to feed themselves. They will be left to starve, like “subordinate members of the species”.

‘Poverty a state of mind’

In a radio interview, Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said: “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind.” Aid to the poor, says the Trump team, does not work. The poor must be made to “go to work”, said Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. But how to go to work when jobs are simply unavailable, as Trump himself has said on many occasions? In fact, the office that helps the poor find jobs has also been slated to be cut. That means even those few programmes to assist the unemployed to find work will no longer be available. In fact, as New York University Professor Jonathan Morduch and Rachael Schneider say in their new book The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty, even those who have jobs at low pay struggle to make ends meet. Many of them rely on government assistance to get by. If they do not get access to government programmes, they turn to credit card loans and payday loans to cover their bills. There is great fragility in the budgets of the working poor.

There is cruelty in Trump’s vision. It throws the poor to the lions of desperation. The remnants of liberalism are being withdrawn. This is the end of the social contract.

Dangerous Pantomime: Trump And North Korea’s Missile Program

Binoy Kampmark

It’s all fine while it remains on the stage, a matter of contained, almost camp displays of grunting and strutting.  The diplomats can still have some say; the foreign ministries retain some hold over the military instinct. But the longer the Korean Nuclear Dance continues, the more likely it will repel the jaw jaw option in favour of war war.

Starting premises are important.  The refusal by the United States to consider a peace and security solution that has several limbs to it (denuclearisation only after the formal signing of a peace-treaty; the open acknowledgment that Washington will not engage in regime change) remains crippling.

The intercontinental ballistic missile test by Pyongyang on Tuesday of the Hwasong-14 – one that was, on this occasion, successful – was merely the fruit of insecurity and fears that have been the hallmark of the regime for decades.  Its options in terms of defending itself against the might of the US military machine were always limited, leaving the way open for meagre psychological options: to frighten, to threaten, and to repeatedly warn.

A nuclear option has always been one of the most grotesque yet valuable aides in this sense.  It has all the elements of the perfect pantomime, provided its actors worship at the tabernacle of deterrence.  If this be the case, then Kim Jong-un is playing his cards exactly as he should: seeking the means of arming his state, at least sufficiently, to proof it against a US-led attack.

The catch here is that no one knows, perhaps not even the North Korean military establishment itself, how effective their programs would necessarily be if put to the test. (Favourable analysis that such an ICBM can, in fact, reach US soil is exactly what the DPRK regime wants to hear.)

The need for putting up a good show, however illusory, is paramount.  As the announcement on North Korean state television went with inevitable hyperbole, North Korea had become “a full-fledged nuclear power” that had acquired “the most powerful inter-continental ballistic rocket capable of hitting any part of the world.”

The response from the US and its allies, however, takes the rational out of the equation and replaces it with a madman who refuses to take his medication or see the shrink. This has a mutually destabilising effect: the assumption of madness entails a necessarily mad response, one that might even entail the use of force.  The situation escalates, and the calming, if absurd state of deterrence, abates.

Rather than going through the maze of diplomatic options, President Donald Trump’s suggests flustered opinions and frustrated tweets.  He had claimed prior to his inauguration that Pyongyang would simply not acquire an ICBM option that could reach the US.

But in Warsaw, he suggested that he was considering “severe things” by way of retaliation against a state “behaving in a very, very dangerous manner”. He also blamed China for foot dragging on curtailing Pyongyang’s nuclear efforts, a persistent nonsense that Beijing somehow has a magic, coercive hand over the DPRK.  “So much for China working with us – but we had to give it a try.”

A suitably dangerous manner was advocated on Wednesday, when US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, suggested that the “considerable military forces” at the disposal of Washington was an option.  “We will use them if we must, but we prefer not to have to go in that direction.”

Secretary of Defense James Mattis has been more cautious, suggesting that the next stage of North Korean weapons development did not spell the need to duck and cover.  “I do not believe this capability bring us closer to war.”

Any military option – be it the idea of a surgical strike, a limited pre-emptive assault that would attack both the nuclear arsenal and the DPRK leadership – is marred by the inferno that is bound to engulf the peninsula, urged on by the use of North Korean artillery amassed along the border.  This blood-letting, the potential result of 8,000 rocket launchers and artillery pieces, given that half the population of South Korea lives within 50 miles of the Demilitarized Zone, could be astonishing.

Astonishing here is a matter of degree.  Another speculation in this calculus of death was advanced by Roger Cavazos for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Stability in 2012, suggesting “three thousand casualties in the first few minutes” that would drop once the element of surprise was lost.  “If the KPA were to engage Seoul in a primarily counter-value fashion by firing into Seoul instead of primarily aiming at military targets, there would likely be around thirty-thousand casualties in a short amount of time.”

The North Korean supreme leader, whatever hysteria blows his way, is sitting well. The last thing he wants is an easing, a sober brake on proceedings that might cause a halt to his ongoing project.  Crisis breeds monsters of opportunity.  As Yun Sun of the Stimson Centre suggests, “The ICBM test removed the false hope that we might be able to stop North Korean nuclear provocations with either sanctions or the use of military provocations.”

The Importance of Being a Cow: A Mother or a Meal?

Amrita Datta

The more conservative a society, the more is its ritualistic overtone, and vice versa. In other words, by the very definition of conservatism – an ideology built around the idea to conserve – is heavily dependent on various rituals and practices epitomizing that ‘ism’ of conservation. Therefore, conservatism and ritualistic celebration are directly proportional to each other and not at loggerheads with each other. A conservative society is highly ritualistic. It draws its functionality from everyday rituals and practices and also elaborate rituals associated with the life-stages of humans namely birth, community initiation, marriage and death. This way, India, a typical example of conservative South Asian society is largely characterized by its loyalty towards everyday practices, often based on religious identity and often other primordial identities like caste and gender. However, conservative societies like India are facing an interesting crisis. Insofar as these societies remained conservative in all its facets would not be a problem. But the misfit begins when these conservative societies like India adapts a liberal economy.

Even at the risk of being labeled as economic determinist, in a strictly Marxist fashion, it is hard to deny that conservatism of a society in its everyday life can sustain happily at the behest of a ruthlessly liberal economy that invites cultural flows from all possible nooks and corners of the world! Again, India, is a very apt example of this. Conservative mindset of a Brahmanical society is caught between the pull of a neoliberal economy that copies more than it adapts and how! On one hand, the mainstream Indian society is strewn with caste politics and gender injustice – a double-trouble that comes as a combo – there is no end to gender inequality in India till caste is overthrown; while on the other hand, one witnesses the major rush of economic liberalization and now globalization that has made “other cultures” trespass into the overtly patriarchal Brahmanized “Great Tradition” (in a typical Yogendra Singh fashion) in India. These other cultures mostly constitute the countries India has international trade with – the most significant being America. Concomitantly, it is no surprise that the process of McDonaldization can be less be observed in India than in the USA. However, cultural replication is not remotely close to cultural synchronization or cultural adaption. As a result, Indian society is caught in a limbo, a huge crisis. Indian society is a wannabe that wants to be the coy bride at her wedding and also wants to show enough cleavage to the co-travellers during her honeymoon package tour to Malibu. It wants it all! Consequently, it is kind of in a huge mess now as it fits nowhere. Indian society on one side wants to cling onto its rituals including myopic caste practices, sexist arranged marriages, parochial burial rituals and so on. On the other hand, it also wants to dance to Justin Beiber and wants to accept so. The result is a big confusion as to what to belief – whether the people should believe the rituals more or the malls, high rises and the flyovers more; if they should trust the maulvi more or the Louis Vutton ore; whether they should rely more on sacred thread as a process of community (among the Hindu Brahmins) initiation or first visit to Hard Rock Café to find their ‘tribe’. But, these confused participants of the society have to hold onto something – to sustain, if not to evolve. In a situation of societal confusion what Durkheim called anomie, humans need totems to stay connected with each other. Similarly, Indian society has also found its totem – the cow. The cow is a gift of modern day conservative-liberal dichotomy of the Indian society in which some worship the cow while eat the cow; some adore the cow while some negate the cow; some signifies the cow while some undermines the cow. Nevertheless, the cow is indeed the quintessential symbol of conformity, of protest, of resistance and of fury.

So the cow is the only common imagery that a diversified society like India can all find together. Within different religious contexts, cow is definitely there – as a mother or as a meal. There is no escaping the cow in India these days because this is the only tangible collective imagery that the people residing in India can identify with. However, the cow is hardly an imagery with social function since it emerges out of anomie, of confusion. Within the context of series of mob lynching over cow meat in recent times in the country that quite normalizes violence in our everyday life, the collective memory of the cow has invoked more confusion and renders pathological.

The cow epitomizes the pangs of a society caught in a socio-economic imbalance where the Society has lost pace to the Economy. India is a classical example of hedonistic economic ‘reforms’ with little foresight of social adaptability of that reform in which the cow dominates humans as evolution goes back in track!

Backed by Greens, NDP to form British Columbia’s government

Roger Jordan

The trade union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) has been tasked with forming the government in British Columbia, Canada’s third most populous province, after NDP and Green Party legislators combined to vote non-confidence in Christy Clark’s Liberal government last week.

On May 29, some three weeks after a provincial election had resulted in a hung parliament, the NDP and Greens struck a deal to replace BC’s 16-year-old Liberal government with a Green-backed, minority NDP government.

Clark maneuvered for the next month in the hopes of hanging on to power. She delayed the recall of the legislature to late June, presented a Throne Speech which included some NDP and Green campaign promises, and, following the defeat of her government, tried to prevail on Lieutenant-Governor Judy Guichon to call a new election.

Although there is no Canadian precedent for dissolving a legislature so soon after its election, Clark claimed this was called for because the NDP-Green combination will be incapable of providing “stable government.” The NDP took 41 seats in the May 9 provincial election and the Greens 3, meaning that combined they have 44 seats to the Liberals’ 43. However, once a Speaker is supplied, the Green-backed, NDP government will have exactly the same number of seats as the Official Opposition Liberals. The Speaker is mandated to break tie votes, but according to convention is not supposed to change the status quo, which will make it difficult for the NDP to adopt all but money bills without Liberal support.

The Lieutenant Governor heard Clark out at an audience on June 29. But she then promptly called on NDP leader John Horgan to form the government. He is expected to be sworn in as premier in the latter part of July.

There is no doubt Guichon was carrying out the wishes of big business when she handed the reins of power to Horgan and his NDP. To do otherwise would have broken with parliamentary tradition and drawn attention to the sweeping arbitrary powers invested in the monarch and her representatives, the Governor General and provincial Lieutenant Governors. These powers have been retained in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable institution, so as to provide the ruling class with a fail-safe means of imposing its authority in a major crisis, not to save the career of one of its political hirelings.

Moreover, big business in BC and across Canada has long experience with the NDP, which like social-democratic parties the world over has renounced any commitment to social reform and supports austerity and war.

BC’s first minority government in over six decades, the Horgan-led NDP will make at most minimal and mainly cosmetic changes to the austerity agenda of their Liberal predecessors. During the election campaign, Horgan boasted that his platform was based on the budget plan adopted by the Liberals, who for 16 years slashed public services, cut workers’ real wages, and gave big business and the rich massive tax handouts.

The confidence and supply agreement hammered out between the NDP and Greens confirmed this. Many NDP election promises, including to build 114,000 housing units over the next decade and raise corporate taxes by a minuscule 1 percent, were either scaled back or totally abandoned. Horgan’s pledges to do more to tackle the opioid crisis and to combat poverty are simply not credible given his commitment to a balanced budget for at least the first three years of NDP rule and to otherwise work within the reactionary fiscal framework laid down by the Liberals.

No doubt the NDP will point to pressure from the Greens to justify abandoning other of their promises. After Horgan made a speech vowing to make it easier for unions to win certification, Green leader Andrew Weaver said his party would ally with the Liberals to ensure the measure doesn’t pass. During the election campaign, Weaver criticized the NDP’s modest spending proposals as lavish and irresponsible and boasted about his ability to work closely with Clark and her Liberals. Following the election, the Greens signaled they would be willing to keep the Liberals in office under a deal similar to that they ultimately struck with the NDP, but backed down when they realized it would cost them much of their popular support.

Wherever the Greens have held power or propped up governments internationally, they have pursued reactionary pro-business policies. In Germany, the Greens participated in a coalition with the Social Democrats from 1998-2005 which gutted much of the country’s social welfare system through a series of labour law “reforms,” creating one of the largest low-wage sectors in Europe. The SPD-Green government also led Germany’s into its first foreign military intervention since World War II, the NATO war on Yugoslavia. In Australia, the Greens helped prop up a pro-austerity and pro-war Labor government, including giving support to brutal, anti-refugee policies that have confined asylum-seekers to remote islands in the Pacific.

Anyone still harbouring illusions in the character of the incoming government would do well to examine the response of big business, which has been broadly supportive of the NDP’s policy changes. Greg D’Avignon of the British Columbia Business Council has lauded the NDP-Green accord’s call for an “emerging economy” task force, which will develop business strategies including protectionist “made in BC” regulations for government contracts, and for an innovation task force for the technology sector. Opposition, such as there is, from the business community has come from sections of the ruling elite, including in finance and energy, who fear the NDP-Green de facto coalition will make good on its promises to do everything in its power to block the expansion of the Kinder-Morgan oil-bitumen pipeline, fracking, and other environmental destructive resource development projects like the Site C dam.

Whether the NDP-Green opposition to some or all these projects will continue remains to be seen. The Alberta NDP came to power in May 2015 as an avowed opponent of unrestricted pipeline and oil tar-sands development, including the Keystone XL project. Two years later, Premier Rachel Notley regularly argues in favour of pipelines, including during a trip to Washington earlier this year to lobby for the approval of the Keystone XL project. She has pledged to work closely with Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in forcing through the Kinder Morgan expansion over popular opposition. Angered by the BC NDP’s stance, Notley forbade Alberta NDP staffers from campaigning for the party in the BC elections.

Within hours of his being tasked with forming BC’s government, Horgan held a friendly phone chat with Trudeau, the two men having apparently agreed to set aside discussion of the pipeline issue till when they meet later this summer. Following their discussion, Horgan stressed his government will cooperate with Ottawa, including on the softwood lumber dispute with the United States.

Predictably, the trade unions and other so-called “left” organizations are doing their utmost to dress the incoming government in “progressive” colours. Time and again during the 16 year of Liberal rule, the unions’ scuttled militant strikes that had widespread popular support and the potential to spearhead a working-class offensive aimed at driving the Liberals from power.

The BC Federation of Labour, which poured vast sums into the NDP’s election campaign, is hailing the creation of a “fair wage commission” as a great step forward and claiming that this will lead to the adoption of a $15 minimum wage. As a matter of fact, the NDP-Green agreement provides no commitment to adopt such a measure. The commission is merely tasked with examining the possibility of introducing a $15 minimum wage by 2021. Even if this were enacted, it would do little for working people struggling to make ends meet in cities with exorbitant housing, food and other living costs, like Vancouver and Victoria.

In announcing its “critical support” for the NDP ahead of May’s election, the International Socialists, who are aligned with the ISO in the United States, enthused that the BC NDP was “trying to move with the leftward swing in politics around the world.”

In truth, the NDP, like its social democratic counterparts around the world, has moved so far to the right that it is virtually indistinguishable from the big business Liberals and Conservatives.

The enthusiasm of the unions and pseudo-left for the new government is bound up with their own privileged interests, which are separated by a vast social gulf from the concerns of working people. As well as offering BC’s unions the opportunity to broaden their corporatist ties to big business and the state, including through positions on new committees and other consultative bodies, the NDP’s assumption of power opens up career prospects for some of their leading personnel.

Horgan has appointed as his chief of staff Jeff Meggs, who was a prominent member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Canada (CPC) for over a decade. After breaking with the Stalinists in the late 1980s, Meggs became an NDP staffer. Later he helped initiate political cooperation between the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), a “left” Vancouver municipal coalition with heavy CPC influence, and rightwing “modernizing” figures like current Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson as part of the Vision Vancouver alliance.

Court rejects Trump’s delay of methane rules

Daniel de Vries 

A federal appellate court in Washington, D.C. earlier this week blocked the Trump administration from arbitrarily postponing compliance with a rule to limit methane pollution from new oil and gas industry sources. The court’s 2-1 ruling is a modest, temporary hurdle for the administration as it attempts to unravel the regulatory framework put in place decades ago.

The decision grants a request by an environmental group to void a 90-day administrative freeze by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and requires immediate implementation of the rule. However, it does nothing to prevent the agency from moving forward with a formal proposal to delay compliance, provided it follows public review and comment procedures laid out in the Clean Air Act. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced earlier this year that he is pursuing just such a course as he considers rewriting or scrapping the rule altogether, as required by a March executive order.

The methane regulation, finalized in May 2016, was a component of President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan. It places minimal requirements on new hydraulic fracturing and conventional oil and gas wells such as mandating formal schedules or procedures to repair gas leaks. In most cases it requires no additional pollution control equipment to be installed.

Methane is a potent global warming gas 25 times more powerful over the long term than carbon dioxide. The rapid expansion of natural gas production via fracking under the Obama administration has been accompanied by concerns about the impact on climate change, in addition to the harm caused by the poisoning of water resources. While carbon pollution from power plants has declined over the last decade with a shift to cheap natural gas, many scientists have concluded that methane leakage has offset if not worsened the net climate impact of electricity generation in the US when evaluated from the point of extraction through to combustion in the power plant.

Even if strictly complied with, the methane rule would still allow industry to spew large amounts of climate-degrading pollutants into the atmosphere. Yet even these modest restrictions are too much for a section of industry which sees in the Trump administration an opportunity to not only to roll back Obama-era rules, but constraints stretching back decades.

Among the first targets in this effort are climate-related regulations. Prior to Trump’s announcement last month to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, strongly backed by his environmental chief Pruitt, EPA announced the reversal or delay of several climate-related rules affecting power plants, vehicle manufacturers, landfills and fossil fuel producers.

In a move that would give prominence to fellow climate deniers, Pruitt is preparing an official program to critique the science underpinning climate change. The program would recruit “experts” to perform a “red team, blue team” evaluation of supposed scientific controversies. Coal boss Robert Murray, according to Climate Wire, interpreted the step as preparation for an attempt to reverse the EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases pose a danger to health and welfare. Reversing this endangerment finding, if it withstands legal challenges, would facilitate the Trump administration’s wholesale withdrawal of all regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions.

Revoking the endangerment finding or even individual rules is a time-consuming bureaucratic process. However, issuing compliance delays, whether through a formal public review and comment process or via administrative fiat, is a means for the Trump administration to temporarily or in some cases indefinitely exempt industry from regulatory constraints. In less than half a year of the Trump administration, EPA has issued delays for existing programs not only related to climate change, but also national air quality standards for smog, certification and training requirements for workers using pesticides, wastewater discharges from power plants, energy efficiency standards and emergency response planning for chemical exposures, among others.

The methane decision may impact some of these delays. EPA’s justification for a two-year compliance postponement for emergency response plans, for example, relies upon the same statutory provisions at issue in the methane rule. This week the states of California and New Mexico filed suit to block the delay of a companion oil and gas methane rule issued by the Department of the Interior.

Nonetheless, the current and forthcoming legal challenges seeking to force the Trump administration to implement existing rules, let alone complete mandatory new ones, may well amount to little. The courts typically give broad leeway to the Executive Branch to review and postpone rules. Among the EPA regulations currently on hold, most fall under unique authorities, so the methane ruling may not be directly relevant. Furthermore, Trump’s budget proposal, which would slash funding for the EPA by a third and eliminate more than 3,000 jobs, is intended to cripple the agency’s ability to carry out existing regulations.

The broader deregulatory push by the Trump administration, building on decades of bipartisan policy, is moving forward without hesitation. Trump underscored this during his fascistic remarks Thursday in Poland. He decried “The steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people.” “The West became great, not because of paperwork and regulations, but because people were allowed to chase their dreams.” Trump is determined to remove all constraints, environmental or otherwise, on the wealth and privilege of the ruling elite.

Sears announces the closing of 43 more stores in the US and Canada

Anthony del Olmo

On Friday US retailer Sears announced that it was closing 43 more stores in the United States on top of the 265 closings that had been announced earlier in the year. The new announcement includes 35 Kmart stores and eight Sears stores.

Sears Holdings had announced last week that the company would be closing 20 more stores nationwide by mid-September, including 18 Sears stores and two Kmart stores. Earlier this year the company announced that it would be closing 150 stores by April.

The closings will bring Sears’ total store count down to 1,140, from its 2,073 store count five years ago. Just prior to the recent five-year period, nearly 1,500 stores were closed in 2011 alone.

Underscoring the widespread character of the assault on jobs, at the same time as the Sears announcement, computer giant Microsoft said that it would slash thousands of jobs, 3,000 employees by some reports, though management would not confirm that number.

The cuts at Microsoft will largely impact the company’s sales force. The layoffs come as the business plans to reconfigure its sales organizations, focusing more on its cloud computing products. Most of the job losses will be outside the US.

On top of the store closures by Sears, the company plans to eliminate 400 management positions at its corporate offices to reach its goal of $1.25 billion in cost reductions. The cuts are aimed at adding on to the profits the company earned in the first quarter of the year, profits that followed two years of consecutive quarterly losses.

Sears’ reported profits of $244 million at the end of last quarter had little to do with retail sales. Rather, it was largely a product of the asset stripping carried out by Sears Holdings’ CEO, and hedge fund manager, Eddie Lampert, as part of the company’s predatory “cost reduction” measures that have resulted in mass closures, asset sales and layoffs.

These ruthless efforts aside, sales are down nearly 37 percent since early 2013.

Sears, a former giant in the retail industry, is still projected to lose $1 billion in revenue every year and has a debt of $1.6 billion that is still growing. Nevertheless, Sears Holdings shareholders, include Lampert, who has owns 49 percent of shares and has a net worth of $2.2 billion, can expect to profit handsomely from the virtual liquidation of Sears at the expense of its employees.

Meanwhile, Sears workers have also recently been stripped of their employee discount that gave them 10 to 20 percent off Sears and Kmart merchandise. Instead it has been replaced with a system that awards 20 percent back in “points” that can only be used on future purchases within 60 days.

Sears Canada, an independent spin-off of the American company, has also recently announced the closure of 59 of its 225 stores, laying off some 2,900 workers according to the Canadian Global News. Significantly, the company is not required to issue severance pay to the laid off employees and the pensions for retirees are continually underfunded. Despite receiving $450 million in a court-supervised restructuring plan, the money is only to be used to maintain operations, since under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, companies receiving government aid are explicitly protected against paying severance.

The store closures and layoffs at Sears are reflective of the shake-up in the retail industry as a whole, which has seen considerable profit losses in recent years.

Already, retailers have announced more than 3,200 store closures this year, with analysts expecting that to grow to more than 8,600, breaking the record for 6,163 store closures during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2016, Kohls closed 18 stores and laid off over 1,500 workers. Target Canada ceased operations in early 2015 as it was projected to lose $2 billion annually, forcing over 17,000 workers out of a job over the course of the year. In this year alone Target stock values have fallen 28 percent.

As of last May, retail stores had slashed nearly 89,000 jobs since October 2016 according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since 2001, that number is a staggering 500,000.

The crisis in the retail industry is highlighted by its lackluster performance during last year’s holiday season, a historically important sales period. For Kmart and Sears in particular, sales had decreased by up to 13 percent compared to 2015.

A major contributor to the fall in retail sales has been Amazon’s emergence as a provider of cheap products and convenient online shopping. During the same holiday season, Amazon reported shipping a total of 1 billion items worldwide, accounting for 38 percent of all internet sales.

Amazon’s recent bid for the acquisition of Whole Foods adds additional pressure on retail companies, particularly large discount retailers like Walmart and Target, which have also attempted to become major grocers. The application of Amazon’s delivery service to include groceries or expedited drive-thru purchases would likely exacerbate the already falling numbers of walk-in customers and shopping mall visitors.

Workers at Whole Foods will soon face the same brutal regime that Amazon inflicts on its warehouse workers. In order to squeeze the most out of its workers, Amazon imposes high productivity demands and makes workers walk between seven and 15 miles on every shift, all while paying wages of less than $12.00 an hour.

The slow death of brick and mortar retail is also an expression of the stagnant and declining wages in the United States. Consumer spending is at its lowest in three years, increasing by a scant 0.3 percent rate in the first quarter, the slowest pace since 2009 during the depths of the recession.

Currently over 32 million workers in the US are employed in the retail industry, and it is estimated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that these workers are paid on average $10.87 per hour and $9.69 per hour for cashiers. As the retail industry continues to contract, these conditions will only worsen as the companies attempt to offload their crisis onto the backs of their workforce.

Trump escalates US drone war in Somalia

Timotheos Gaist 

The Trump White House escalated American imperialism’s decades-long war in Somalia this week, ordering American military drones to launch repeated airstrikes against insurgent strongholds in southern regions of the impoverished Horn of Africa nation.

On Sunday, a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired Hellfire missiles against an al Shabaab camp near the capital, Mogadishu. On Tuesday, American forces carried out another drone strike, described by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) as a “collective self-defense strike,” against “an al Shabaab troop concentration.” The attacks are openly acknowledged in American ruling class media as marking the onset of a major expansion of the war.

During its first six months in office, the Trump administration has laid the foundations for a wider war in Somalia, extending and building upon the general policy of covert and proxy war against Somalia pursued by the previous two administrations under the banner of the “global war on terrorism.”

In March, Trump granted US commanders open-ended authority to wage war throughout southern Somalia, without approval by civilian authorities. In April, President Trump approved deployment of scores of regular American ground troops to Somalia, the first such deployments since the 1992 “Operation Restore Hope,” which saw some 30,000 imperialist troops dispatched to the outskirts of Mogadishu, under the pretext of providing humanitarian aid.

The Trump White House now favors “even more permissive rules of engagement for drone operations in Yemen and Somalia,” Center for Drone Studies expert Dan Gettinger told Fox News last week.

The drone war in Somalia, waged by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for more than 10 years, is being organized from AFRICOM’s Camp Lemonnier, in neighboring Djibouti.

Local sources report seeing dozens of heavily armed drones and war planes leaving Lemonnier’s airfield every day. American military and intelligence operatives have also established a secret drone and commando training base at Baledogle airport, some 70 miles north of Mogadishu, according to Homeland Security News Wire.

“We continue to work in coordination with our Somali partners and allies to systematically dismantle al Shabaab, and help achieve stability and security throughout the region,” an AFRICOM statement released Tuesday said.

“U.S. forces remain committed to supporting the Federal Government of Somalia [FGS], the Somali National Army and our Amisom partners in defeating al Shabaab and establishing a safe and secure environment in Somalia,” Pentagon spokesperson Major Audricia Harris said.

The stepped up tempo of drone strikes comes in response to increasingly successful offensives by al Shabaab, whose popularity now far surpasses that of the American-backed Federal Government of Somalia (FSG).

The drumbeat of drone strikes, commando raids, and proxy wars by US-backed regional forces and warlords have completely failed to defeat or even stem the al Shabaab insurgency, which has consolidated its hold over large areas of the country, and continues to deal punishing blows against the government.

The Islamist militia, which emerged out of the youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), has achieved a series of tactical successes in recent months, aggressively engaging and defeating government troops across a broad swath of the country, from the oil-rich Puntland region in the north, to the Somali-Kenyan border in the south. On June 8, al Shabaab forces overran a government military base in Puntland, killing dozens of government soldiers, and seizing large quantities of weaponry, munitions and armored vehicles.

Al Shabaab “has cemented its hold on ungoverned territory across southern and central Somalia, even after decades of the United States partnering with some African nations to combat al-Qaida’s third-largest affiliate,” the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported Wednesday.

“In the last eight months, al-Shabaab has overrun three African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) Forward Operating Bases by amassing large numbers of fighters and attacking in overwhelming numbers. Al-Shabaab has also increased its combat capability by seizing heavy weaponry, armored vehicles, explosives, small arms, ammunition, and other miscellaneous supplies during its operations overrunning Burundian National Defense Forces FOB Leego, Ugandan People’s Defense Force FOB Janaale, and Kenyan Defense Force FOB Ceel Ad,” AFRICOM acknowledged in a June 11 statement.

“The terror organization has cemented its control over southern and central Somalia, they have used this area to plot and direct terror attacks, steal humanitarian aid, and to shelter other radical terrorists,” AFRICOM said.

This week saw al Shabaab mount brazen attacks against targets associated with the US-allied Kenyan government to the south, whose Kenyan Defense Forces (KDF) have served as a proxy occupation force on behalf of Washington since 2011.

On July 6, al Shabaab fighters launched attacks against a Kenyan police station near the coastal town of Lamu, and in the Boni forest along the Kenya-Somalia border. The fighting near Lamu, whose port facility sits at the eastern end of the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) strategic infrastructure corridor, lasted throughout the day, leaving three Kenyan police officers dead.

The rise of al Shabaab is powerful measure of the ongoing collapse of the nation-state system. The extremist militia group has exploited the breakdown of Somalia’s central government to establish power bases in large areas of the country, taking on social and economic roles associated with normal sovereign states, such as levying taxes and providing basic services. The group’s internal intelligence service, known as the Amniyat, regularly carries out sophisticated covert operations in the heart of Mogadishu, assassinating top officials and bombing FSG facilities.

“Al-Shabab is becoming a shadow government, positioning itself as Somalia’s champion of disenfranchised and marginalized clans,” American University Professor Tricia Bacon wrote in an analysis for the Washington Post. “This is why al-Shabab won’t be going away anytime soon.

“Al-Shabab has shown an impressive ability to adapt and is positioned to not only survive, but to thrive. It has overrun AMISOM forward operating bases (FOB), killing and injuring scores of troops and seizing arms, military vehicles and heavy weaponry,” Bacon wrote. “Al-Shabab has a remarkably effective taxation system that few dare to defy, even those living, as one person I interviewed put it, ‘a stone’s throw from an AMISOM FOB.’ That brings in a steady stream of revenue. What’s more, al-Shabab is relatively uncorrupt and efficient. You can see that clearly on the roads that it controls, where it operates checkpoints that require set payments, offers a receipt to passengers, and keeps the roads relatively safe.

“Al-Shabab finds ways to exploit the vacuum left by the state, tapping into a deep reservoir of grievances. It has both conventional military strength and terrorist abilities as well as political and ideological influence that goes beyond its territorial holdings,” she wrote.

US ruling class strategists fear a repeat, in Somalia, of the seizure of large areas of northern Iraq by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which took the Pentagon high command completely by surprise, and nearly toppled the US-backed government in Baghdad.

The FSG has proven incapable of securing and holding the vast majority of its own territory, aside from central areas of Mogadishu, small portions of the surrounding Indian Ocean coastline, and narrow corridors linking the capital and the southern port city of Kismayo to the Kenyan and Ethiopia borders. Calls are growing for US forces to assume a much larger role in the FGS’s defense, until now left in the hands of African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops drawn from the militaries of Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda, supported by American commandos, “advisers,” and air power. Such a mission would require thousands of conventional ground forces, along the lines of the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We’ve convinced ourselves that working through our African partners is going to solve the problem. But in many cases, it’s making the problem we’re trying to solve worse,” American Enterprise Institute analyst Katherine Zimmerman argued in an appearance on Fox News.

Whatever the exact form taken by future US war operations, it is clear that American imperialism is determined to employ ever greater levels of military violence against a Somali society that is already reeling from decades of imperialist-orchestrated war, and is wracked by historic levels of famine, drought and disease.

Over 750,000 Somalis have been displaced by drought since November 2016, with more than 20,000 displaced in June alone. More than 50,000 Somalis have been treated for cholera or acute watery diarrhea (AWD) since the beginning of 2017. Some 350,000 Somali children under the age of five are currently acutely malnourished, according to a United Nations Humanitarian Snapshot published July 6.

The spread of famine is accelerating the destabilization of US-backed political arrangements throughout East Africa, and placing mass social struggles against imperialism on the order of the day. AFRICOM is “war-gaming procedures to work in a famine environment,” US Marine Corps General Thomas Waldhauser told Congress in March.

Nearly 27 million people living in the broader East African region, including Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, urgently require food aid, according to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Five million South Sudanese are projected to be “severely food insecure” by the end of July, according to the UN.

Fed stress test results unleash “party time” for US banks

Nick Beams 

Anyone looking for conclusive evidence that the US financial system and more broadly the entire economy is run of, by and for the ultra-wealthy need go no further than the Federal Reserve decision to give all the major banks a pass on its stress tests at the end of June.

In what one financial analyst characterised as “party time,” the major banks responded by handing out billions of dollars to their super-rich shareholders in the form of dividends and other benefits.

The head of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, alone is expected to benefit to the tune of $1.6 billion as a result of bank share purchases he made following the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. With decades of experience in financial circles and knowledge of how government operates, he bet that the authorities would rescue the banks and payoff time would come.

As a result of the Fed decision, the market value of US banks is estimated to have risen by $40 billion, with the six largest banks increasing in value by $25 billion.

Stress tests were introduced in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis. They are supposed to ensure that the banks have sufficient capital to meet adverse circumstances and do not again require a bailout from public funds.

According to the Fed’s calculations, the capital held by the largest American banks was nearly 14 percent of assets, weighted by risk at the end of 2016—deemed sufficient to meet any financial problems. But according to the New York Times, alternative definitions of capital, in line with international, rather than American, accounting standards, the capital ratio is only 6.3 percent.

“The passing grades on the Fed’s stress tests pave the way for banks to pay their largest dividends in almost a decade,” the newspaper reported. “The hands-down winners will be shareholders and bank executives, who could see their stock-based compensation packages advance even further.”

The amounts run into scores of billions of dollars, which are going to be handed out via dividends and stock buybacks to increase share valuations.

According to one estimate, the six largest US banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo—are set to return to shareholders between $95 billion and $97 billion over the next year. This is 50 percent more than they returned last year.

The inclusion of Wells Fargo in the pass list is particularly striking. It was found guilty last year of schemes that set out to defraud customers by collecting fees on two million unauthorised accounts in order to boost its bottom line and balance sheet. Now it has lifted its dividend on shares and announced an $11.5 billion share buyback scheme.

Bank of America said it would increase its dividend by 60 percent on each share and unveiled a $12 billion share repurchase plan.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein offered a measured, but obviously satisfied, response to the Fed decision, saying his bank was “well positioned to continue to return capital to shareholders while expanding our client franchise.” Blankfein once famously remarked that in the finance industry he was doing “God’s work.”

At JPMorgan Chase, the payout to shareholders will be $27 billion over the next year. Citigroup, which almost went belly up in the financial crisis, will return $18.9 billion to shareholders, an 82 percent increase on the year before.

The stress tests, together with supposedly tighter regulations under the Dodd-Frank Act, were introduced to give the impression that the government and financial authorities were taking some action in response to the financial crisis, set off by the dubious and, in some cases, outright criminal activities of the banks.

But no one was charged, let alone jailed and the only penalties have been fines that the banks paid out of their profits as operating expenses. The Dodd-Frank measures have largely proved to be toothless, presenting only a minor inconvenience.

Even these measures are now set to be significantly watered down, if not scrapped outright. Last month, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said stress tests should be performed only every second year and banks that maintained a sufficient level of capital should be exempted altogether.

Capital Alpha Partners analyst Ian Katz expressed the sentiments circulating in bank boardroom and executive offices, but not usually voiced publicly. He said the Fed decision was “payout party time.” Katz forecast more to come, declaring: “The highly positive report card puts more wind at the backs of the Trump administration and others who want to soften Dodd-Frank era regulations.”

One slightly sour, but significant, note in the stress test assessment was the Fed’s decision to give the Capital One Financial Group only conditional approval to make payouts while it fixes “material weaknesses” in planning.

Capital One derives most of its revenue from credit card operations and the Fed referred to a “recent uptick in delinquency rates” in this financial area. This points to deep and growing problems in the US economy as working families and young people increasingly struggle to make ends meet under conditions of falling real wages and the replacement of full-time jobs with low-paying, part-time and casual positions.

Furthermore, there is a causal connection between the cash-rich banks and the deepening economic malaise of the working population.

In banking and finance, it appears as if profit comes almost out of thin air, as money begets still more money. But in the final analysis, all financial profits represent a claim on the surplus value extracted from wage workers.

Consequently, the period since the financial crisis has seen the development of two interconnected processes. While the banks and finance capital have been sustained and expanded by bailouts and the Fed’s provision of ultra-cheap money, workers, and especially young people, have been subjected to ever-lower wages and worsening working conditions.

At the same time, social facilities have been slashed on the grounds that there is no money.

The economy has thus come to resemble a giant vacuum cleaner in which the real wealth produced by millions of workers is siphoned off to the semi-criminal and criminal elements (so clearly established by their activities that led to the financial crisis) who occupy the heights of society.