Uninhabitable Earth?

Robert Hunziker

David Wallace-Wells’ article “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, July 9, 2017 has created a furor of criticism, people bouncing off walls from coast to coast. Consider – the title of the article says it all!

The critics, including prominent climate scientists, claim Wallace-Wells’ conclusions are dangerously exaggerated, but are they really? Additional criticism is leveled by some of the first-rate news sources on climate change, like Grist: “Stop scaring people about climate change. It doesn’t work.”

For sure, Wallace-Welles’ opening in his New York Mag article describes Armageddon. In one paragraph, the reader finds “terrors” beyond anything ever imagined, “even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Drowning cities may be expected, but according to Wallace-Welles, “fleeing the coastline will not be enough.” But to where?

That’s just for openers, moreover: “No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.” Wallace-Welles hits hard, never taking his foot off the accelerator. Full speed ahead, we are doomed, and it happens soon “within the lifetime of a teenager today.”

After years of studying peer-review climate research and writing over 200 articles, it’s easy to agree with David Wallace-Welles’ statement: “What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.”

That schedule includes frightening highlights, to wit: According to most of the scientists he spoke with, Miami and Bangladesh are toast this century, even if fossil fuel burning comes to a sudden halt within 10 years. Dismally, the paleoclimate evidence shows the ocean, when the planet was “even four degrees warmer,” well above the Florida landmass – gulp. Regrettably, “The most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change report projects us to hit four degrees warming by the beginning of the next century.” By the way, that’s probably conservative. That’s how the IPCC works.

Fascinatingly, he delves into the secretive opinions of leading scientists, which is refreshing, as well as deeply disturbing, but seldom, if ever, brought out in public: “But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.”
The operative statement therein: “Scientists… have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too.” It’s one of the world’s best-kept secrets that scientists either low-ball their research or risk job/grant loss! That lamentable fact has been publicly admitted by some of the world’s top climate scientists (mentioned in previous articles as well as captured on tape). It is a scandalous disservice to the public, to life, to the ecosystem.
Another major criticism of the article is that gloom and doom turns people off and turns people away, which may or may not be true. However, polls show it does turn people off. Still, without alarms, fires burn to the ground. In the case of global warming it is so big it requires big clanging alarms.
The danger of downplaying risks is aptly described by Wallace-Welles when he compares today’s climate to the most notorious extinction event of 252 million years ago: “It began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive.”

“We are adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate, by most estimates, at least ten times faster.” Frankly, nothing more needs to be said about the credibility of his underlying thesis if that fact alone is true. Ten times faster today than what caused an extinction event of 97% of life is enough to wake up in the middle of the night screaming!

If 10 times faster is not bad enough, consider this statement in the article: “Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come.” That’s 50xs.

We’ve already experienced a sampling of deadly global warming gone amuck, which provides some insight to Wallace-Welles’ projected four degree increase in temps, assuming no aggression action is taken to stem the tide: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”

If Wallace-Welles’ initial chapter is not chilling enough, headlines of subsequent chapters spell certain doom: (II) Heat Death (III) The End of Food (IV) Climate Plagues (V) Unbreathable Air (VI) Perpetual War (VII) Permanent Economic Collapse (VIII) Poisoned Oceans (IX) The Great Filter. That’s unrelenting doom and gloom of an ecosystem gone astray or, in the final analysis, ecosystem destruction. If a movie theatre previewed a documentary entitled Ecosystem Destruction, nobody’s around to see it.

Wallace-Welles provides insight to the deadly force of The Great Acceleration, without identifying it as such, which under human influence turbo-charges the ecosystem. Already, the Amazon rain forests, a significant source of oxygen for the planet, suffered its 2nd 100-year-drought in the space of only 5 years in 2010. That’s acceleration! Whatever happened to once-in-100-year droughts?

Arctic meltdown/methane hydrates/runaway global warming, Greenland meltdown/23’ water frozen in ice, splintering Antarctica/200’ water frozen in ice, glacial water towers disintegrating, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, accelerating desertification, permafrost methane eruption, 100-year droughts every 5 years, rainforest destruction/oxygen deprivation, and the sudden emergence of eco-migrants for the first time is but a partial list of what’s going wrong from continent to continent and throughout the ocean system, the whole enchilada under severe stress.

Clandestinely hidden in the outskirts, climate change is most pronounced and deadly on the fringes of the ecosystem where the least number of people live. Who notices, other than scientists?

Wallace-Welles mentions Wally Broecker (84) who works at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as one of the scientists who first identified the changing climate. He is of the opinion, at this late stage, “no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster.” He believes the only possible solution may be geoengineering but yet untested and highly controversial; it may cause as many problems as it fixes. Nobody knows for sure. Although, where’s the groundswell to actually do something?

On an upbeat note, according to Wallace-Welles’ final statements: “Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another.”

That’s not nearly as doom and gloom as the critics claim. He ends on an upbeat note. But it’s more likely him throwing a bone to his readership.

David Wallace-Welles’ article is well written, and it serves a good purpose. It brings to surface uproar. How else expose a problem as large as the planet itself? Beyond the doom and gloom, it may be fixable, hopefully. But realistically, it does not look very promising, especially with America so far off course, goosing The Great Acceleration like never before!

Iranian Security Forces Intensify Demolishing Ahwazi Arabs Citizens’ Homes

Rahim Hamid

Members of an Ahwazi Arab family were arrested after Iranian security forces beat them and ransacked their home.

On July 11, 2017, human rights activists in Arab Ahwaz region in the south and south west of Iran  reported that Iranian security forces arrested an Ahwazi Arab woman, Zahra Sawari, and two of her sons, Mohammad Sawari and Ali Sawari, after completely demolishing their house under the pretext that it was built without certification.

According to reports, the Ahwazi woman and her two sons sustained injuries to their faces and heads after being beaten severely by Iranian regime forces.

This heartbreaking footage which has gone viral across  social media shows the injured and despairing Ahwazi woman amid the rubble of the pitiful brick shed that was her and her five sons’ only home after security forces from Iran’s “resistance” regime demolished it, using the pretext that it was an illegal construction on state land unlicensed by the municipality. The blood running down her and her son’s faces comes from cuts inflicted by bricks from the home which were thrown at her by the regime personnel when they protested and attempted to stop the demolition and retrieve their meagre possessions.

Zahra Sawari explains that she and her family once lived in a home in Abadan, also in the Ahwaz region, which was destroyed in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. When they subsequently fled to the regional capital, also named Ahwaz, she says, they lived as refugees in a tent in the shanty town where her one of her sons was bitten by a scorpion. Donations from other Ahwazi people enabled her and her sons to build the pitiful home on empty land in the same area – the home which has now been demolished by the Iranian regime.

Now, under the scorching summer sun in the hottest region of the world, in an area where daytime temperatures regularly rise to over 60 degrees Celsius, the woman and her family have no shelter, with all their possessions destroyed in the regime’s callous demolition. As Ahwazis, the family has no legal rights to complain about the crimes perpetrated against them and will receive no compensation, with the regime using this racist system as carte blanche to carry out such crimes on a daily basis.

Ahwazi eyewitnesses reported  that the regime’s personnel were shouting racist, anti-Arab abuse and threats at the family while the demolition operation took place, telling the victims that they had orders issued by the court prosecutors justifying their inhuman actions, although they produced no warrants or other documents.    Following the demolition, the regime officials shot their guns into the air and subjected the already traumatised dispossessed families to another beating before abandoning the now homeless dispossessed peoples in the street outside the rubble of their homes, and declaring that the land had now been confiscated by the regime.

This regime’s systematic approach to looting and razing Ahwazi’s houses had previously been revealed with the regime’s secret plan, which was leaked by Ahwazi dissidents, with aims to change the demographic composition of   Ahwaz from an Arab majority to non-Arabs.

In fact, these repeated criminal practices in the region pursued by the local regime authorities indicate the security grip and unilateral actions by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Ahwaz. The regime of Iran always was critical towards Israeli policies against Palestinians including land confiscation and house demolition, however, current Iranian regime’s practices against Ahwazi people expose its hypocritical slogans.

“This is not the first time that random houses have been demolished. The municipality of Ahwaz has carried out similar measures against Arab citizens without paying attention to the deliberate deprivation of the people of the region by the Iranian authorities,” said Karim Dohimi, an Ahwazi activist.

Dohimi added, “These policies only serve to continue the Iranian policy of demographic change and oppression of Ahwazi Arab population”.  “The Iranian government has made no efforts to resettle these war-stricken citizens or compensate them for having their homes destroyed during the war. Instead, the property, land, and real estate of those killed, imprisoned, or disabled during the war were given away to the members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.  Many years have passed since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian authorities are building residential neighborhoods and settlements for non-Arab settlers in Ahwaz. There settlers are readily provided with jobs and privileges before those things are granted to the native Arab population”.

According to Ahwazi Arab activists, these houses were built by impoverished Ahwazi Arabs who were unable to buy or rent houses after being displaced as a result of the Iraq-Iran war from 1980 – 1988. During this eight-year war, many Ahwazi Arab had to flee their homes in Howeyzeh, Boston, Khafajiyeh, Abadan, and Muhammarah to migrate in the hopes of finding safer living conditions elsewhere in the region.

Rather than resettling or compensating these citizens left destitute by the destruction of their homes in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and forced to flee with only the clothes they were wearing, the regime allocated the properties, land and real estate to Revolutionary Guard troops and disabled veterans injured in the same war and the families of POWs.

Although almost three decades have passed since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian authorities are building ethnically homogenous, Persians-only residential neighborhoods and settlements for non-Arab settlers   who it has enticed to the region with financial incentives, well-paid jobs and privileges not available to the indigenous Arab people, who instead live in ghettoes deprived of the most basic services.   Many of the Ahwazi people, forced to flee their destroyed towns and villages during the war,   now live in conditions of destitution, with no hope of compensation; all of this is a continuation of the regime’s deliberate policy of demographic change and of subjugation of the region’s indigenous Arab people.

These are the actions of the same Iranian regime which shamelessly and cynically exploits Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people to use as PR and to represent itself as a savior and supporter of Arab freedom. Ahwazi Arabs know the obscenity of that lie all too well.

Islamic Radicalism: A Product of Western Imperialism

Nauman Sadiq

Peaceful, or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other cosmopolitan religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an essentialist approach, which lays emphasis on essences, we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its proper historical context.

For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by nature is an essentialist approach; it overlooks the role played by nurture in grooming human beings. Human beings are only intelligent by nature, but they are neither good nor evil by nature; whatever they are, whether good or evil, is the outcome of their nurture or upbringing.

Similarly, to pronounce that Islam is a retrogressive or violent religion is an essentialist approach; it overlooks how Islam and its scriptures are interpreted by its followers depending on the subject’s socio-cultural context. For example: the Western expat Muslims who are brought up in the West and who have imbibed Western values would interpret a Quranic verse in a liberal fashion; an urban middle class Muslim of the Muslim-majority countries would interpret the same verse rather conservatively; and a rural-tribal Muslim who has been indoctrinated by the radical clerics would find meanings in it which could be extreme. It is all about culture rather than religion or scriptures per se.

Islam is regarded as the fastest growing religion of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are two factors responsible for this atavistic phenomena of Islamic resurgence: firstly, unlike Christianity which is more idealistic, Islam is a practical religion, it does not demands from its followers to give up worldly pleasures but only insists on regulating them; and secondly, Islam as a religion and ideology has the world’s richest financiers.

After the 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West, the price of oil quadrupled; the Arab petro-sheikhs now have so much money that they are needlessly spending it on building skyscrapers, luxury hotels, theme parks and resort cities. This opulence in the oil-rich Gulf Arab States is the reason why we are witnessing an exponential growth in Islamic charities and madrassahs all over the world and especially in the Islamic World.

Moreover, although it is generally assumed that the Arab sheikhs of the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the conservative emirates of UAE sponsor the Wahhabi-Salafi sect of Islam, but the difference between numerous sects of Sunni Islam is more nominal than substantive. The charities and madrassahs belonging to all the Sunni denominations get generous funding from the Gulf States as well as the Gulf-based private donors.

Notwithstanding, all the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Americans and the Wahhabis of the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British stirred up uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his struggle against the Sharifs of Mecca; because the latter were demanding too much of a price for their loyalty: that is, the unification of the whole of Arabia under their suzerainty.

King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the support of the British. However, by then the tide of British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former possessions and the rights and liabilities of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War, on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez canal onboard the USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring American-Saudi alliance which persists to this day; despite many ebbs and flows and some testing times, especially in the wake of 9/11 tragedy when 15 out of 19 hijackers of the 9/11 plot turned out to be Saudi citizens.

During the course of that momentous Great Bitter Lake meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Apart from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used thousands of Vietnam War veterans to train and equip the 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) that does not comes under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and which plays the role of the praetorian guards of the House of Saud.

Moreover, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of Saudi oil reserves are located. Furthermore, the US has set-up numerous air bases and missile defense systems that are currently operating in the Persian Gulf States and also a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

The point that I am trying to make is that left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over the forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and African immigrants of the Gulf Arab states.

One-third of the Saudi Arabian population is comprised of immigrants; similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population also consists of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka; and all the other Gulf Arab States also have a similar proportion of immigrants from the developing countries; moreover, unlike the immigrants in the Western countries who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Notwithstanding, it is generally assumed that political Islam is the precursor of Islamic extremism and terrorism, however, there are two distinct and separate types of political Islam: the despotic political Islam of the Gulf variety and the democratic political Islam of the Turkish and the Muslim Brotherhood variety.

The latter Islamist organization never had a chance to rule over Egypt, except for a brief year long stint; therefore, it would be unwise to draw any conclusions from such a brief period of time in history. The Turkish variety of political Islam, the oft-quoted “Turkish Model” however, is worth emulating all over the Islamic World.

I do understand that political Islam in all of its forms and manifestations is an anathema to liberal sensibilities, but it is the ground reality of the Islamic World. The liberal dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, had never worked in the past, and they will meet the same fate in the future.

The mainspring of Islamic radicalism and militancy isn’t the moderate and democratic political Islam, because why would people turn to violence when they can exercise their right to choose their rulers? The mainspring of Islamic militancy is the despotic and militant political Islam of the Gulf variety.

The Western powers are fully aware of this fact, then why do they choose to support the same Arab autocrats that have nurtured extremism and terrorism when the ostensible and professed goal of the Western policymakers is to curb Islamic radicalism and militancy?

It is because this has been a firm policy principle of the Western powers to promote “stability” in the Middle East rather than representative democracy. They are fully cognizant of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against any Western military presence and interference in the Middle East region.

Additionally, the Western policymakers also prefer to deal with small cliques of Middle Eastern strongmen rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level; it is certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of the so-called “pragmatic” politicians and statesmen.

Fighting The Wrong Enemy: Why Americans Hate Muslims

Ramzy Baroud 

Two officers sought me from within a crowd at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. They seemed to know who I was. They asked me to follow them, and I obliged. Being of Arab background, often renders one’s citizenship almost irrelevant.

In a back room, where other foreigners, mainly Muslims, were holed for ‘added security’, I was asked numerous questions about my politics, ideas, writing, children, friends and my late Palestinian parents.

Meanwhile, an officer took my bag and all of my papers, including receipts, business cards, and more. I did not protest. I am so used to this treatment and endless questioning that I simply go through the motions and answer the questions the best way I know how.

My first questioning commenced soon after September 11, 2001, when all Muslims and Arabs became, and remain, suspect. “Why do you hate our president,” I was asked then, in reference to Bush.

On a different occasion, I was held in a room for hours at JFK International Airport because I had a receipt that revealed my immortal sin of eating at a London restaurant that served Halal meat.

I was also interrogated at an American border facility in Canada and was asked to fill several documents about my trip to Turkey, where I gave a talk at a conference and conducted several media interviews.

A question I am often asked is: “what is the purpose of your visit to this country?”

The fact that I am an American citizen, who acquired high education, bought a home, raised a good family, paid my taxes, obeyed the law and contributed to society in myriad ways are not an adequate answer.

I remain an Arab, a Muslim and a dissident, all unforgivable sins in the new, rapidly changing America.

Truthfully, I never had any illusions regarding the supposed moral superiority of my adopted country. I grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza, and have witnessed, firsthand, the untold harm inflicted upon my people as a result of American military and political support of Israel.

Within the larger Arab context, US foreign policy was felt on larger scale. The invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003 was but the culmination of decades of corrupt, violent American policies in the Arab world.

But when I arrived in the US in 1994, I also found another country, far kinder and more accepting than the one represented – or misrepresented – in US foreign policy. While constantly embracing my Palestinian Arab roots, I have lived and interacted with a fairly wide margin of like-minded people in my new home.

While I was greatly influenced by my Arab heritage, my current political thoughts and the very dialectics through which I understand and communicate with the world – and my understanding of it – are vastly shaped by American scholars, intellectual dissidents and political rebels. It is no exaggeration to say that I became part of the same cultural Zeitgeist that many American intellectuals subscribe to.

Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments in the US have been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades.  Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America’s failed wars and counter-violence.

Terrorist threats have been exaggerated beyond belief to manipulate a frightened, but also a growing impoverished population. The threat level was assigned colors, and each time the color vacillated towards the red, the nation drops all of its grievances, fights for equality, jobs and health care and unites in hating Muslims, people they never met.

It mattered little that, since September 11, the odds of being killed by terrorism are 1 in 110,000,000, an extremely negligible number compared to the millions who die as a result of diabetes, for example, or shark attacks, for that matter.

‘Terrorism’ has morphed from being a violent phenomenon requiring national debate and sensible policies to combat it, into a bogeyman that forces everyone into conformity, and divides people between being docile and obedient on the one hand, and ‘radical’ and suspect, on the other.

But blaming Muslims for the decline of the American empire is as ineffective as it is dishonest.

The Economic Intelligence Unit had recently downgraded the US from a “full democracy’ to a “flawed democracy”. Neither Muslims nor Islam played any role in that.

The size of the Chinese economy is soon to surpass that of the US, and the powerful East Asian country is already roaring, expanding its influence in the Pacific and beyond. Muslims are hardly the culprits there, either.

Nor are Arabs responsible for the death of the ‘American dream’, if one truly existed in the first place; nor the election of Donald Trump; nor the utter corruption and mafia-like practices of America’s ruling elites and political parties.

It was not the Arabs and Muslims who duped the US into invading Iraq, where millions of Arabs and Muslims lost their lives as a result of the unchecked military adventurism.

In fact, Arabs and Muslims are by far the greatest victims of terrorism, whether state-sponsored terror or that of desperate, vile groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Americans, Muslims are not your enemy. They never have been. Conformity is.

“In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service,” wrote John Stuart Mill in ‘On Liberty.’ The English philosopher, had a tremendous impact on American liberalism.

I read his famous book soon after I arrived in the US. It took me a while to realize that what we learn in books often sharply contradicts reality.

Instead, we now live in the ‘age of impunity’, according to Tom Engelhardt. In a 2014 article, published in the Huffington Post, he wrote: “For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.  Nothing it does – torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court.”

Those who are “held accountable” are whistleblowers and political dissidents who dare question the government and educate their fellow men and women on the undemocratic nature of such oppressive practices.

Staying silent is not an option. It is a form of defeatism that should be outed as equally destructive as the muzzling of democracy.

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Barring citizens of Muslim countries from travelling to the US is a great act of immorality and injustice. Sadly, many Americans report that such discriminatory laws already make them feel safe, which itself is an indication of how the government and media manipulate consent in this country to produce the desirable results.

A big fan of hating Edward Bernays’ work, yet appreciating his honesty, I realize the question is not that of Trump alone. Bernays, whose writing on propaganda influenced successive governments and inspired various military coups, was versed on manipulating popular consent of Americans nearly a century ago. He perceived the masses as unruly and a burden on democracy, which he believed could only be conducted by the intelligent a few.

The outcome of his ideas, which influenced generation of conformist intellectuals, is in full display today.

America is changing fast, and is certainly not heading in the right direction. Shelving all pressing problems and putting the focus on chasing after, demonizing and humiliating brown skinned men and women is certainly not the way out of the economic, political and foreign policy quagmires which American ruling elites have invited upon their country.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear,” wrote George Orwell.

No matter the cost, we must adhere to this Orwellian wisdom, even if the number of people who refuse to hear has grown exponentially, and the margins for dissent have shrunk like never before.

German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp slashes 2,500 jobs as it prepares to sell off steel division

Dietmar Henning

At the start of the week the ThyssenKrupp Group announced that it would cut 2,500 of the company’s 18,000 administrative jobs over the next three years. Half of the jobs are to be shed in Germany by the end of 2019-20.

A spokeswoman for the concern said that the job cuts were “part of measures already decided.” This, however, contradicts the company’s previous argument that its current savings program was insufficient “to ensure a sustained positive inflow of funds from current business levels”.

The spokeswoman declared that the company, with over 159,000 employees worldwide, had reviewed its administrative costs and compared them with those of its competitors. As a result the company was “convinced that our current administrative costs of 2.4 billion euros are clearly too high."

ThyssenKrupp plans to cut its annual budget of €400 million per year in order to “achieve our EBIT targets [earnings before interest and taxes]”. The company is aiming to generate a profit of at least €2 billion per year, and at least €1.8 billion this year. It came as no surprise when the stock market immediately responded to the announced cuts with a leap in ThyssenKrupp shares.

The 2,500 who are to lose their jobs in the interests of the shareholders are only the beginning. The cuts are part of the preparations for the company’s shedding of its steel business. The job cuts affect employees in the company’s headquarters in Essen as well as administrative offices in other sectors—lifts, plant construction, auto components, trade in recyclables and steel production.

A week ago the Handelsblatt business newspaper reported that ThyssenKrupp would shed its steel group with currently 27,000 employees—even in the event of no successful deal with Tata Steel. The British-Indian steel firm has been negotiating a deal with ThyssenKrupp for almost two years.

In addition to a €500 million savings program, which was first announced in April and involves the loss of around 4,000 jobs, the shedding of the steel sector will endanger thousands of other jobs and entire factories.

According to Handelsblatt, the ThyssenKrupp Group wants to detach itself from its steel business by September.

ThyssenKrupp CEO Heinrich Hiesinger favours a merger with Tata Steel. In any new joint venture, however, Hiesinger has made clear that the concern does not want to retain the majority of shares, and thus the leadership and responsibility necessary for “ThyssenKrupp to recover its weakening position,” one company manager told Handelsblatt .

The right wing daily financial newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, noted cheerily: “If Hiesinger agrees a deal with the new Tata CEO, Natarajan Chandrasekaran, about 3 billion euros of pension charges, and financial liabilities attributable to the steel division, would disappear from the Group’s books.” New leeway would be created to concentrate on other sectors and increase dividends.

Hiesinger plans to fly to India this month to seal the joint venture with Tata. The subsequent loss of up to 10,000 jobs at the British and Dutch plants of Tata Steel and the German ThyssenKrupp plants could raise an estimated €500 million through the “synergies” freed up by the merger of both companies.

Should the “deal” fail, however, other alternatives are conceivable, according to Handelsblatt. “One possibility is the realization of previous plans: a partial sale to prospective customers from Asia and Eastern Europe or a launch on the stock market.” In this respect the paper names as interested party the Russian steel producer NLMK headed by oligarch Wladimir Lissin, who, with a fortune of over €15 billion, is listed as Russia’s third richest man.

Whatever deal is struck, ThyssenKrupp-Stahl Group, with its 27,000 employees, will be broken up. Over 200 years ago, steel production was behind Thyssen’s growth into one of the largest industrial corporations in Germany, Europe and the world. This will soon be history.

The impact goes far beyond Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands. The Austrian daily newspaper Kurier commented last week that the planned merger of Tata Steel and ThyssenKrupp “sets in motion the long sought withdrawal of steel overcapacity in Europe.”

In addition to rising steel imports from China and punitive tolls on European steel by the US, “the third major problem of the European steel industry is the European steel industry itself,” which has production capacities of around 210 million tonnes, but only needs around 170 million tonnes.

“These over-capacities must be dismantled as quickly as possible,” declared Wolfgang Eder, former President of the World Steel Federation, and one-time head of the European steel association Eurofer. In the medium term, one in five of the roughly 350,000 steel workers’ jobs is at risk.

ThyssenKrupp has announced it intends to implement its job cuts in a “socially acceptable” manner. According to the company’s leading trade unionist, Wilhelm Segerath, this means full support for the job cuts in order to cut costs, but where possible without “job-related redundancies.”

This is the theme tune of the German trade unions and the invariable starting point for job cuts. The “prevention of company-induced redundancies” by IG Metall and its works councils has paved the way for major plant closures in recent years, including GM-Opel, Outokumpu and many more.

The leader of the IG Metall in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Knut Giesler, criticised the constant talk about restructuring and mergers which had led to “considerable uncertainty among the employees.”

“We want concepts and solutions that can be used to secure jobs at the factories—through innovation and growth,” Giesler stated.

Regardless, the ThyssenKrupp Management Board is highly interested in working closely with IG Metall and its works councils to carry out the sell-off and job cuts. “Whether and how the board can build a bridge to the works council and IG Metall is still unclear,” according to Handelsblatt last week. “There is still so much unexplained,” the paper quotes a manager.

However, it is not only the company executive which is unclear. Workers remain in the dark, although the trade unions have representatives on all of the important committees of the supervisory board.

On Wednesday IG Metall’s deputy head in Duisburg, Thomas Kennel, expressed his concern that “tomorrow the works councils will confront questions to which they have no answer.” He assumes that “existing contracts will be respected and therefore redundancies excluded”.

It is clear that IG Metall and the trade union are under enormous pressure from the workforce and are seeking to find a way to implement ThyssenKrupp’s plans without serious opposition from workers. Anger with the IGM and works council is widespread. “The next works council elections will be held as early as the spring of 2018” Handelsblatt notes, and cites one source who declared: “If the IG Metall capitulates beforehand, then it will blow up in its face.”

British Columbia wildfires force 14,000 to evacuate their homes

Janet Browning & Roger Jordan

More than 14,000 people in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) have been forced from their homes as hundreds of wildfires rage in the province’s central and southern interior. Provincial authorities declared a state of emergency last Friday and military units have been placed on stand-by to intervene.

The fires have been fueled by several weeks of hot and dry weather. As of Thursday evening, the province reported 183 wildfires were burning, down from 220 earlier in the week. BC Wildfire Services has 1,000 firefighters tackling the wildfires, along with private contractors and several hundred firefighters from other provinces.

Darren Campbell, head of the emergency response centre for the Cariboo Regional District, said that strong winds forecast for the weekend could lead to the threatened areas expanding significantly, especially in Chilcotin and north Cariboo. “We might be dealing with some new situations in some new areas,” he said Thursday.

Bob Turner of Emergency Management BC said that plans are being developed for mass evacuations, most likely from Williams Lake, with a population of over 10,000.

Those who were forced from their homes were given virtually no warning of the approaching blaze and some fear they have lost everything. “We’re going back to nothing,” one resident staying at an emergency centre in Kamloops told CBC. “All the trailers and everything are just laying flat. We probably won’t even be able to save a picture.”

Many people went to Kamloops in the south to escape the fire, but the city has become overwhelmed, so evacuees are now being told to drive to Prince George, several hours to the north. Most have left everything behind, including their animals.

BC Bus Service has stopped running into Williams Lake as an evacuation order was issued by Cariboo Regional District for Wildwood, Soda Creek and Fox Mountain, the Lakeside Area of Williams Lake, White Road, Ross Road, Glen Road, South Lakeside, Miocene, Wildwood and Lexington, and 150 Mile House. Ashcroft, Cash Creek, and Princeton have also been evacuated.

At least 60 homes have been destroyed in the village of Cache Creek.

Harrowing stories have emerged of families driving through fires to escape. Sally Aitken uploaded a video to Twitter showing the vehicle she was travelling in with her husband surrounded by fire.

Since April, 78,000 hectares have been burned by over 600 wildfires, according to BC Wildfire Services. The fires currently burning cover a total area of between 2,000 and 12,000 hectares.

The chaotic response to the wildfires, with many families being left to sleep in parking lots, is a damning indictment of governments at the provincial and federal level. Wildfires are not an unusual occurrence in BC, which has witnessed hot and dry summers over recent years. The last time a state of emergency was declared was in 2003, when the Okanagan Mountain and Barriere wildfires wrought substantial damage. 200 homes in Kelowna were destroyed.

Despite this, successive BC Liberal governments have restricted wildfire management budgets. Including 2015, the province overspent its wildfire budget in nine out of the 10 previous years.

In 2015, the BC government allocated a paltry $63 million for fighting wildfires and had used up the budget in a matter of weeks. By mid-August the total bill for fighting wildfires had risen to over $180 million.

Although wildfires are natural phenomena, measures could have been taken to mitigate the damage and disruption they have caused. Scientists were well aware that the Cariboo region represented a high risk and have been warning governments more generally across Canada about the increased danger of large-scale fires due to climate change.

Daniel Perrakis, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told CBC in an interview that a multi-year drought in BC’s central and southern interior contributed to the blaze. “[T]he rain and snow that fell over the winter, was insufficient to saturate the soil and the wood fuels in the forest. And the other issue there is that the most heavily impacted area by the recent mountain pine beetle outbreak and so the forests in that area are dominated by Douglas Fir and Lodgepole Pine trees. And the Lodgepole Pine, the majority of the trees there, are dead, and they were killed probably between 10 years ago and five years ago, and so they are just like standing firewood in the forest and they are very, very dry and very susceptible to starting fires and spreading fires.”

In a society capable of rational, scientific planning, such a state of affairs would be the occasion for vast resources to be made available to mitigate the dangers posed by fires. But under capitalism, virtually nothing was done to combat such risks. Forest fire specialists have repeatedly criticized provincial governments for spending too little on preventive measures and relying instead on emergency budgets to fight fires when they break out.

Lori Daniels, a fire expert at the University of British Columbia, told CBC in 2015 that while the government spent $200 million on combating fires that summer, less than $1 million was spent to take preventive measures in the high-risk southern interior.

In neighbouring Alberta, inadequate wildfire budgets and a lack of preventative measures played a significant role in the exacerbation of the catastrophic fire that engulfed Fort McMurray in May 2016, forcing some 90,000 people from their homes.

FortMcMurray, at the heart of the province’s multi-billion dollar tar sands operations, only had one exit road and was surrounded on all sides by forest. Despite repeated warnings about the need to establish fire breaks, the only facilities accorded this protection were the oil companies’ installations, which survived the blaze largely intact. Over 2,000 buildings were destroyed in the city.

As in last year’s disaster, stories coming out of the affected areas tell of many residents being largely left to fend for themselves.

Tl’etinqox First Nation Chief Joe Alphonse said Sunday his community made up of five bands near Williams Lake is preparing to protect itself, refusing to leave although under a provincial evacuation order. “We are bringing in machinery to build a fire guard. We have three firefighting unit crews registered with the province and we are going to set up our own internal firefighting crew that’s not registered and starting fighting it on our own.” The community has no power and is surrounded by wildfires, yet the residents refuse to leave except for those sick and elderly with respiratory problems who have been evacuated.

Historic Lee’s Corner has been burned to the ground and homes and businesses have been lost in the village of Boston Flats, where 30 homes in the trailer park were burned to the ground. Fortunately everyone survived.

The loss to the town has been devastating. CBC carried an interview with dairy farmer Rob Donaldson of Bradner Farms who lost his 300 milk cow barn, a multi-million dollar operation, in a matter of 20 minutes. As the barn burned, 30 family, friends and strangers tried to save the trapped animals. Donaldson blew through the barn wall with a bobcat skid-steer loader and drove through flames to get most of his cows out to where they could make a run for it. “They are like my family,” he said.

Farmers forced to evacuate have left behind an estimated 10,000-20,000 cattle. Ranchers could also face heavy financial losses because grazing areas are threatened by the fires, raising the likelihood that feed will have to be purchased for their animals at considerable cost.

Mounting tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbors, China and Pakistan

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

As India integrates itself ever more fully into Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China, relations between New Delhi and Beijing and between India and its other nuclear-armed neighbor, Pakistan, continue to deteriorate.

For the past month, Indian and Chinese troops have been arrayed against each other on a Himalayan ridge, the Doklam or Donglang Plateau, that is claimed by both China and Bhutan.

The confrontation is being widely described as the most serious since India and China fought a month-long border war in 1962. Both Indian and Chinese officials have repeatedly made thinly veiled threats of an impending military clash.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continue to regularly exchange artillery barrages across the Line of Control (LoC) in disputed Kashmir. In the past week, New Delhi and Islamabad have both condemned one another for killing poor villagers with indiscriminate shelling across the LoC, while boasting about killing enemy soldiers.

Further enflaming the situation, Islamist anti-Indian Kashmiri insurgents reputedly attacked a busload of Hindu pilgrims returning from the remote Amarnath cave shrine Monday night. The attack left seven people dead and 19 injured.

India’s government immediately seized on Monday night’s atrocity to intensify repression of the mass protests that have convulsed Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only Muslim-majority state, for the past year.

Kashmir has been at the center of the reactionary strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan from its very outset—the bloody 1947 communal partition of South Asia into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. Over the course of the subsequent seven decades, the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisie have both shamelessly abused and manipulated the Kashmiri people. Today India is led by the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while Pakistan’s rulers seek to advance their own mercenary interests by using Islamist organizations to channel the opposition to the Indian state in a reactionary, communalist direction.

Emboldened by the strategic support and new weapons it has received from the US, India’s BJP government has pursued an increasingly hardline policy against Pakistan. For most of the past three years it has been insisting that it will keep even the most rudimentary ties with Pakistan in the deep freeze until Islamabad demonstrably halts all logistical support from Pakistani territory for the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir.

Last September Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered Indian Special Forces to mount illegal cross-border raids inside Pakistan, and then proclaimed that India would no longer adhere to “strategic restraint” in its relations with Pakistan.

During the ensuing months-long war crisis, China came to Pakistan’s support.

Beijing and Islamabad have a decades-long “all weather” military-strategic partnership. But as the Indo-US “global strategic partnership” has become stronger over the past decade and especially since 2015, China and Pakistan have responded by forging still closer ties.

Whilst Indian military strategy has long envisaged the possibility of having to fight Pakistan and China simultaneously, India’s new Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, has himself repeatedly portrayed this as a live threat by boasting that India is ready to fight a “two-front war.”

Tensions between China and India over their long, disputed border are nothing new. India’s corporate media regularly publishes inflammatory articles alleging Chinese incursions across the Line of Actual Control that delimits current Indian- and Chinese-controlled territory.

What is different in the current dispute is the aggressive stance being taken by Beijing, the attention it is being given by China’s state-run newspapers, and New Delhi’s insistence that control over the Doklam Plateau affects its core strategic interests.

On Wednesday Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang dismissed the claim of Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar that just as the two countries have managed their border differences in the past, so the current standoff can be “handled” even if it persists for months, even years.

Geng took issue with Jaishankar’s description of the border standoff as a “difference,” saying that it is an outright “dispute.” Moreover, he emphasized that Beijing does not consider this to be similar to previous border spats. “China,” he said, “has explicitly pointed out that the illegal trespass of Indian border troops into China’s territory this time took place at the defined Sikkim section of the China-India boundary, which is utterly different in nature from the previous frictions between the two sides at the undefined sections of the China-India boundary.”

The Foreign Ministry spokesman went on to reiterate Beijing’s demand that India unilaterally withdraw its troops from the disputed Doklam Plateau area as the precondition for any talks.

India, however, is adamant; it and the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, which does not even have diplomatic relations with China, will not permit Beijing to gain the upper hand in the Doklam. To do so, India claims, would place China in a position where, in the event of a war, it could seize the strategic Siliguri Corridor. A narrow slice of territory some 50 kilometers from the Doklam Plateau, the Siliguri Corridor connects India’s seven northeastern provinces with the rest of the country.

Until very recently, Beijing generally “turned the other cheek” in the face of Indian actions it considered hostile or threatening. This was because it was painfully aware that a key US strategic aim is to harness India to its anti-China offensive and feared an aggressive response would only drive New Delhi into Washington’s welcoming embrace.

However, China is now quite prepared to push back forcefully, including by threatening India with military action.

Beijing has clearly concluded that its previous policy failed. Under Modi, India has been transformed into a veritable frontline state in the US drive to thwart China’s rise and force it to forgo any challenge to US hegemony in Asia. India has opened its military bases and ports to routine use by US warplanes and battleships; forged bilateral and trilateral military-strategic ties with American imperialism’s principal military-strategic allies in the Asia-Pacific, Japan and Australia; and routinely parrots Washington’s provocative stance on the South China Sea dispute.

Moreover, India is openly challenging China on multiple fronts. To Beijing’s dismay, it recently tested a ballistic missile, the Agni V, that is said to be capable of raining multiple nuclear warheads on any major Chinese population center from anywhere in India. New Delhi has intensified its support for the Tibetan government-in-exile and recently organized for the Dali Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh, a northeastern Indian state that Beijing calls southern Tibet and says rightfully belongs to China.

The Indian press is full of alarmist articles about the military-strategic threat from China, including claims that large numbers of Chinese submarines are plying the Indian Ocean and that Beijing is plotting to transform various Indian Ocean ports whose construction it sponsored into Chinese naval bases.

Pointing to the massive joint Indo-US-Japanese naval exercise that is now being held in the Bay of Bengal and the recent US deal to sell India naval surveillance drones, the Chinese media counters that it is China that is threatened with encirclement. “Given the importance of the Indian Ocean for its trade and oil imports,” declared an editorial in Monday’s China Daily, it is “China that should feel ‘security concerns’.”

Amid the current Indo-China border dispute, there are increasing calls from the Indian media and various military-security think tanks for New Delhi to further expand and formalize its military-security alliance with Washington.

Yesterday, the Indian Express published an op-ed column by former Indian Navy Chief Arun Prakash that calls for the “India-Japan-US triad” on display during the current Bay of Bengal war games to “be elevated to strategic status.” Pointing to China’s “hostility and aggressive posturing … both on our land borders and sea,” Prakash says, “realpolitik demands India” ensure “a favourable regional balance-of-power through cooperation and partnerships; striking short-term alliances if necessary.”

Thus far, Washington has said nothing about the Doklam Plateau standoff. But when Modi visited the White House last month, Trump touted the “strategic convergence” between the US and India and vowed to “expand and deepen” the Indo-US military-strategic alliance.

Recent events underscore the extent to which US imperialism’s reckless drive to employ India as a satrap in its confrontation with China has transformed all of South Asia into a geopolitical powder keg—one that threatens to plunge the region and even the world into catastrophic conflict.

Tenfold increase in cholera cases in Yemen since April

Thomas Gaist 

The war waged against Yemen by the Saudi monarchy, launched in March 2015 and supported extensively by the United States government, has produced a social catastrophe that easily ranks among the worst war crimes in history. The virtually complete destruction of Yemen’s social infrastructure, through deliberate and relentless bombing, has fueled an explosion of hunger and disease that continues to intensify with each passing day.

The past three months have witnessed a meteoric growth of cholera cases throughout the impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation, with outbreaks reported in over 95 percent of Yemen’s internal subdivisions, resulting in 1,600 confirmed deaths thus far.

More than 300,000 cases were registered by the Red Cross this month, up from only 35,000 in April. Some 100,000 new cases were recorded during the past two weeks alone. Many of the victims are stranded in the countryside and unable to reach medical facilities.

So systematic and deliberate has been the Saudi assault against Yemen’s medical infrastructure that public health experts are describing the Saudi war policies as involving “the weaponization of disease.”

The Saudi-led bombing campaign has destroyed or damaged as many as 160 medical centers across Yemen, and fewer than half of Yemen’s health facilities remain functional. Saudi forces have actively blocked medical supplies from reaching affected areas. The World Health Organization (WHO) cancelled the delivery of half a million cholera vaccines this week, citing concerns that the scale of the outbreak and the intensity of the violence will make delivery of the medications impossible.

“This cholera scandal is entirely manmade by the conflicting parties and those beyond Yemen’s borders who are leading, supplying, fighting and perpetuating the fear and fighting,” UN official Stephen O’Brien noted in a statement to the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

“Yemen is facing critical stoppages of hospitals and a lack of doctors and nurses. The health system has essentially collapsed,” O’Brien said.

“All of this is entirely man-made—this is a result of the conflict,” UN aid coordinator for Yemen Jamie McGoldrick reiterated.

Two years of bombing and naval blockade have brought normal economic activity to a grinding halt, resulting in the non-payment of salaries and wages, and the widespread breakdown of basic services. In addition to hospitals, Saudi air strikes have regularly targeted markets, residential areas, and education centers.

As a result, more than two-thirds of Yemen’s population requires humanitarian assistance, with some 16 million going without reliable sources of clean water. More than 2 million children under five years old are in imminent danger of starvation.

“The humanitarian situation in Yemen is appalling. The people are suffering from war, hunger and cholera, which has spread further during the last few weeks. The country is not suffering from a single emergency but a number of complex emergencies, which have affected more than 20 million people and whose scale and effect will be felt long after the end of the war,” UN envoy to Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in prepared remarks Wednesday.

Although clothed in the usual rhetoric about “human rights” and “international law,” the Saudi war, supported by American imperialism and a coalition of regional allies, including UAE, Morocco, Qatar, Bahrain, Sudan, Kuwait, and Egypt, is motivated by geopolitical considerations, foremost among which is the struggle to control the highly strategic Bab el Mandeb waterway, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.

“Most of the world’s crude oil supply from Gulf States passes through the Yemeni port (Bab el Mandeb) to Suez Canal. The route further stretches to the Red Sea and from there all the way to Europe, USA and North Africa. Approximately 3.3 Million barrels of world crude oil passes through Bab al Mandeb of Yemen to Suez Canal which makes Yemen a strategic trade route,” the Pakistan Alternative Policy Institute noted in a July 9 report.

For the Saudis, the war has also served as the occasion for the establishment of a coalition of Arab nations, the so-called Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism (IMA), which Riyadh aims to employ as an instrument of its power struggle against the government of Iran. With its recent war ultimatums against Qatar, the Saudi government has made clear that the Yemen war represents only the opening phase of its larger regional agenda.

The evident failure of the war in military terms has not deterred Riyadh, which is sponsoring new offensives by Yemeni government troops in Saada and Jawf provinces, and tightening its blockade of Yemen’s coastline.

“Their [Saudis’] plan was to bomb Houthis to submission and that clearly didn’t work. The two-year campaign is a failure. Houthis were not defeated and they are stronger, the country is disintegrating, and Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster,” Yemen expert Nadwa al-Dawsari recently told Middle East Eye .

The Saudi leadership is now reportedly considering the reinstatement of longtime Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saleh, who earned the hatred of ordinary Yemenis over many years of oppressive rule, was removed from power in 2011, as part of a US and Saudi-backed transition process.

Under conditions in which the outbreak of mass struggles associated with the “Arab Spring” threatened to divide the Yemeni national military and destroy the regime entirely, Saleh’s removal represented an attempt to salvage a Yemeni state apparatus whose close ties to the Pentagon had been cultivated over decades.

The failure of this policy become clear in early 2015, when Saleh’s successor, Abd Rabbuh Hadi, was forced to flee into exile in Saudi Arabia, after Houthi rebel militias captured the capital city and seized control of his personal residence at gunpoint. The possibility of Saleh’s return to power, after more than two years of bloody warfare waged in the name of returning the “democratically elected” Hadi to power, starkly demonstrates the lying nature of the official justifications put forth for the war.

Despite the formal leadership of the war by Saudi Arabia, final responsibility for the historic crimes unfolding in Yemen lies squarely with the American ruling class and state.

Last month, the US Senate approved the sale of $500 million worth of advanced weaponry to Riyadh. During the past eight years alone, the Obama administration authorized the transfer of more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training to Saudi Arabia.

Throughout the Yemen war, American warplanes and intelligence and logistics personnel have aided the Saudi war effort on a daily basis. During its first months in power, the Trump administration approved a renewal of direct ground operations in Yemen by American ground forces.

The trajectory of Yemeni society during the past two and a half decades is a microcosm of the evolution of world history, and in particular of the fate of the ex-colonial countries, during the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The unification of Yemen in May 1990, carried out through the absorption of the Soviet-aligned South Yemen into a political framework dominated by the imperialist-backed northern elites, was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era of democracy and stability. Instead, the intervening period has seen a steady escalation of American military violence against the country, with US drones and commando teams carrying out regular missions from 2001 onward, under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism.”

Fifteen years of unending war, waged and sponsored in various forms by the United States, have left Yemen utterly shattered, politically, socially, and economically. The “unity” of the nation established amid the breakup of the USSR is today mocked by the ever greater breakup of the country into smaller fragments, controlled by various armed factions. The admonition of UN official Stephen O’Brien, that “we should all feel deeply guilty” for what is happening in Yemen, could just as well read, “we should all feel deeply afraid.” The fate of Yemen only shows, in far advanced form, the future which imperialism is preparing for humanity as a whole.

Ex-Workers Party President Lula sentenced to jail amid Brazil’s spiraling political crisis

Bill Van Auken

Brazil’s former Workers Party (PT) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was convicted on corruption charges Wednesday and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison. He will not be jailed until his appeal is heard, and, theoretically, he could still run for president in the 2018 election.

The court action against Lula comes amidst a crisis of bourgeois rule in Brazil that is rapidly spiraling out of control.

It is less than a year after the removal of Lula’s hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, through her impeachment on trumped-up charges of budgetary manipulations. Her former vice president and now head of state, Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), is also facing criminal charges and a mounting rebellion from his right-wing base in the Brazilian congress that could spell his ouster.

Temer’s approval rating has fallen to 7 percent, while every major political party and institution of the Brazilian state has been thoroughly discredited by the unending revelations of corruption emerging from the three-year-old Operation Car Wash ( Lava Jato ) investigation. This political crisis is unfolding as the ruling class prosecutes a full-scale assault on the basic rights and social conditions of the working class, which has taken its initial form in sweeping labor and pension “reforms.”

The conviction of Lula came in the first in a series of pending corruption cases against the former president. It involved the so-called triplex scandal, in which prosecutors charged that he accepted $1.2 million worth of bribes in the form of a three-story, beach-front apartment and renovations to the structure provided by the engineering firm OAS. It was alleged that the company provided the favors in return for aid in securing lucrative contracts with Brazil’s energy giant Petrobras.

The scandal was a small part of an estimated $2 billion in assets drained out of the state-run company in a scheme of wholesale bribes and kickbacks that involve every major political party and every significant political figure in the country.

Lula’s defense attorney, Cristiano Zanin Martins, declared that the judge leading the Car Wash investigation, Sergio Moro, had “disregarded evidence of innocence” and had “used the process for the purpose of political persecution.”

The reality, however, is that the entire Workers Party is saturated with corruption. The PT was founded in 1980 in the wake of a wave of strikes and mass student protests that fatally undermined the 20-year, US-backed military dictatorship. The party, along with the trade union federation with which it is affiliated, the CUT, served from its origins as a political instrument for diverting the revolutionary strivings of the Brazilian working class back under the domination of the bourgeois state.

During its dozen years in power, the PT emerged as the principal party of Brazilian capitalism, defending the interests of a ruling financial and corporate oligarchy both at home and abroad. It used the power of the state to promote the growth and profits of a layer of Brazilian transnational corporations headed by billionaires, such as Odebrecht, OAS and JBS. These firms, in turn, funneled money back into the coffers of the PT and other parties, as well as into the personal pockets of leading politicians.

The PT and Lula were able to survive earlier exposures of this corrupt operation (which included the so-called mensalao scandal of a decade ago, in which the PT was paying monthly stipends to congressional deputies to secure their votes in favor of government-backed legislation). This was under conditions in which the economy was continuing to grow, fueled by the commodities boom and rising demand from China that underlay all the political projects of the so-called left governments of Latin America.

Today, Brazil remains in the grip of the country’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Predictions earlier this year of renewed growth have fallen flat, and unemployment continues to rise, hitting 13.3 percent in May. The real jobless rate, counting so-called discouraged workers who have ceased looking for non-existent jobs, is probably closer to a quarter of the workforce.

With no prospects for a growth in foreign investment or a renewal of the rising exports that predominated during Lula’s presidency, the turn by the Brazilian bourgeoisie and all its parties, including the PT, is toward a redoubled assault upon the working class.

On Tuesday, the Brazilian Senate approved a labor “reform” that strips workers of unemployment benefits, slashes break times and reduces vacation rights, while facilitating the full transformation of the workforce into casualized, contract labor at the mercy of employers.

While the legislation is wildly unpopular and has provoked popular protests and strikes, the major union federations deliberately sabotaged a general strike that had been planned for June 30 in opposition to the “reform.”

Rather than mobilize the working class against the right-wing government, the unions sought to reach a deal to amend the legislation in the area that mattered to them most—a proposal to eliminate the automatic deduction of union dues from workers’ wages. Temer has reportedly agreed to propose an amendment to the bill passed by the Senate to secure the unions’ income stream. The deal underscores the character of these organizations, which represent the interests not of the working class, but those of privileged upper middle-class layers of officials and bureaucrats tied to the capitalist state.

Temer’s presidency, however, is hanging by a thread after he was named in a plea bargain agreement reached with executives of the JBS conglomerate who directly implicated him in bribe-taking. He has been formally charged on one count of corruption and faces further accusations.

For the charges to go to trial, the congress must vote to send the matter to Brazil’s Supreme Court. While it initially appeared that Temer would prevail in such a vote, there are now reports that the group of right-wing parties that make up the government’s base are prepared to ditch him in favor of the speaker of the lower house of congress, Rodrigo Maia of the DEM. The DEM is the right-wing party that emerged as the political successor to Arena, the official party of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Maia would assume the post of interim presidency during the 180-day period given for the Supreme Court to try Temer. If Temer is convicted, an indirect vote by the congress would choose the next president, with the favored candidate apparently being Maia, who is himself implicated in soliciting campaign donations in return for political favors to OAS, the same firm involved in the case in which Lula was convicted.

In the midst of this rapidly escalating political crisis, Temer delivered a speech Wednesday in which he portrayed Brazil’s CIA-backed military coup of 1964 as a manifestation of the “vision” of the Brazilian people being “incompatible” with the “democratic system.”

“1964 arrived and it was the centralizing inclination of the Brazilian people,” said Temer. “The people like to have an organism that is in charge of everything, especially what is based upon an absolute obedience to the judicial order.”

He went on to lament the “tumultuous currents” engulfing his government, adding that “an absolute contempt for institutions is again reborn from a stupendous force and everyone starts saying that we have to change. This is very bad for our country.”

The remarks of the embattled president read like a plea for the imposition of a dictatorship under conditions in which the Brazilian bourgeoisie cannot impose the policies it requires by peaceful means.