As Class Conflict Sharpens in Iran

Reza Fiyouzat

Some have already forgotten it. Some are relieved to be able to forget it. What was it? CIA plot that got snuffed, as the Supreme Leader put it supremely deceptively? Was it an aberration? A blip?

It was a reminder that time is short, and life is precious: A one-week flash flood of protests by Iranian poor-and-fed-up people across the country, in 80 cities, towns and even some very small towns; these protests voiced grievances that have only one way of being heard: in the streets.

Western ‘anti-imperialist’ and conspiracy-oriented left, European powers with lucrative deals either lined-up or ongoing, international financial centers, and President Rouhani and the whole herd of the so-called reformist and pragmatist factions of the regime, along with their expat mouthpieces, whose collective complicity was exposed unequivocally by this latest uprising of the people – they all can relax. The security forces and the hardliners did what they do best, so everybody can relax.

This latest wave of people’s movement is in fact the continuation of a century-long struggle, though it may have burst onto the scene seemingly out of nowhere. This last episode of people’s resistance to dictatorship that started on Dec. 28 of last year, auspiciously ringing in the new year, lasted a mere week or so, yet we see how this flash movement came as an earthquake that shook the Iranian state out of its self-assured slumber, and opened up more deeply a crack, that deep-seated contradiction, that has been at the foundation of this theocracy.

As short as it was in its lifespan, this latest social upheaval has compelled everybody to get busy providing summations: analysis and evaluation of ‘what happened’, views on the current situation, and how to proceed forward.

International financial institutions had been issuing their recommendations and approvals to the Iranian regime for a long time. The World Bank has approved of the current regime of neoliberalism and austerity that the Iranian government has been instituting in systematic and progressive steps since the 1990s. The IMF has issued its recommendations for reforms of the banking system, and it has warned about the troublesome ramifications of the totally unregulated banking sector that has been operating at an industrial scale in Iran stealing precious little or not-so-little savings people might have put away. The proportion of the bank holdings that stole people’s savings and are insolvent is estimated at 40%.

The so-called Reformist faction of the ruling class in Iran, our equivalent of the Democratic Party in the U.S., had already reached its conclusions years before this latest uprising, and is now in overdrive pushing thread-bare advice, telling people not to be in a rush, be calm and, most importantly, do not resort to any defensive violence, don’t destroy any property, but do depend on the Reformists to look out for the people and protect them from those nasty fundamentalist extremist conservatives who won’t let the Reformists do anything for the people.

But, their game was exposed. They had up to now pretended to have been the protectors of the people, but people saw that their leaked budgets, like the good neoliberals that they are, protected the already-privileged, the state-run foundations, the religious foundations, and the security forces, while the budget decreased the miserly little help that was previously provided for the neediest.

Further, as we witnessed especially in 2016, people have seen Rouhani’s government executing thousands for drug dealing charges, yet god knows how many were simply addicts, or worse, how many journalists, bloggers and political prisoners were thrown into the mix. People are certainly aware of the dire situation of the political prisoner and their mass hunger strike.

People have, on top of all the regular misery they are condemned to suffer, seen that, since the lifting of the sanctions, most of the benefits of the economic growth have gone mostly to the rich and the connected. And it doesn’t help that the rich in Iran, just like the rich in the U.S., really like to throw it in your face about how sweet they got it. These are the people who’ve got it good in Iran, not the majority. So, if you’re supporting the Islamic Republic, these rich kids are the people you’re supporting.

In terms of political actions to be taken by the people, Reformists’ advice to the people was mostly this: Of course, you have a right to protest and voice your grievances. But, If the regime’s thugs and security forces kill you with impunity, arrest thousands of you with no due process, harass and torment the families of those they killed and force them to read out prepared statements written by security forces on national TV to the effect that their son was not killed by the security forces, if they torture you in jail to get a ‘confession’ for crimes you never committed, if they kill you in detention and say you committed suicide … turn the other cheek.

Our Reformists are true disciples of Jesus.

As for the foreign ‘interveners’, the western powers displayed a clear division in their tactical responses to the Iranian people’s uprising. While the detestable Trump administration’s lackeys were full of hollow and hypocritical pronouncements in support of the Iranian people’s protests (despite having classified Iranian people as potential terrorists through their travel and immigration bans), the European powers were swift in their ‘level-headedness’. Macron sounded just like our own ‘Reformists’, advising all sides to refrain from rash acts (and this, while the regime was busy killing people with impunity, and arresting peaceful protesters by the thousands with no due process), pushing the viewpoint that the best way to protect human rights in Iran is to support and dialogue with the very state that has been denying us any rights and condemning the Iranian people to ruination and political and social abject misery for forty years.

It is of course natural for the French president, a natural-born neoliberal, to come to the aid of fellow neoliberals in Iran. After all, Renault’s production levels in Iran just hit a record high in 2017 (see here.). The French car company Peugeot also produces cars in Iran.

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Then there is the summation by the people in the streets.

From its head to the smallest bones in its toes, this regime is steeped in violence, thievery and deception. And the working classes know it. To comply with global neo-liberal demands for intensified capital accumulation, an effort that took a giant leap with Ahmadinejad’s second term (2009-2013), state subsidies for basic goods and fuel saw a steep drop, and concurrent ‘privatization’ of state assets transferred increasingly larger portions of the economy to … institutions run by the regime institutions, or their cronies.

One enterprise that has been gobbling up all that was to be privatized is the Revolution Guards, to the tune of now owning a third of the Iranian economy. Besides having complete control over all military-industrial network of production, the ‘privatized’ telecommunication industry was also ‘bought’ by the Revolution Guards; the same with the radio and television broadcasting system; the same with considerable shares in the auto industry, which are run as joint ventures (with France’s Peugeot or Renault, for example); import/export licenses almost exclusively go to the Revolution Guards or “Khodi” people (those who actively support the theocracy); cronies, basically. The Revolution Guards also run and operate financial institutions. And just like all other governments that need a secret budget, aside from the traditional smuggling communities local to the border regions of Iran (especially in Baluchistan, in the southeast corner of Iran), the state also has a monopoly on smuggled goods (both into and out of Iran), including cigarettes, drugs and alcoholic beverages, all of which can literally be delivered to your house if you have the means.

One effect of the recent uprising of the destitute and the super-exploited was the signal it sent to all the layers of the theocracy. The movement shook the regime to such an extent that even the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has issued statements advising the Revolution Guards to relinquish some of their vast economic holdings so that a few other local capitalists can breathe and expand the regime’s positive hegemony by that much. Back only a couple of years ago, the Revolution Guards were eyeing to gobble up even more of the economy, but now they have to realize that there is such a thing as ‘too greedy’ even for an organization playing body guard for a clerical class that is the definition of ‘leech-like’, as we call them in Persian (zaloo-sefat).

The economic and trade sanctions that were imposed by western powers in fact strengthened the regime’s hold on power, while at the same time impoverishing the working classes. As a result, holding two to three jobs to make ends meet has become an increasingly widespread necessity; as has sales of body organs and blood as ways of making ends meet; as has prostitution. Social misery also registers itself in the number of addicts to hard drugs, such as heroin, crack cocaine and opium. As reported in The Guardian back in 2014, the interior minister, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, announced the number of those afflicted with drug addiction to be six million. Today, we most likely have close to seven to eight million addicts in a country of 80 million.

Poverty in Iran is suffered by almost half the population; the youth comprise half of the population, and youth unemployment is estimated at 40%; the numbers of homeless have tripled in the past decade, and the homeless crisis has become so severe that some homeless people in Tehran have taken to sleeping in pre-dug graves in some cemeteries. The images of these grave-dwellers caused a huge outcry in Iran last year.

Iran is a society rich in resources and with incomes from oil, gas and petrochemical sales worth tens upon tens of billions of dollars in the past two years (since the nuclear deal was struck). The state has enough wealth to recruit, train, send and support a constant supply of mercenaries serving in foreign lands dying in thousands, killing in tens of thousands for the past six years, just so a dictator and his family can maintain absolute control over Syria; yet so little is done to help out the most desperate of the people in Iran.

The very “mostaz’afaan”, the wretched of the earth, the downtrodden, in regime’s own language, the very people regime’s ideologues claim to be the intended beneficiaries of the revolution — these wretched of the earth are the ones who just rose up to shout their hatred and disgust at the entire regime.

And that is the qualitative difference between this latest unrest and that of the 2009. The social contradictions that have sent Iranian people onto the streets on a regular basis, in different sizes, and initiated by different segments of the population, are deepening and finding a sharper class character.

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Those hopeful that this monstrous theocracy suffocating our people is going to last forever may be catching their breaths right now, happy that the people’s upheaval was crushed.

But we have happy (for us) news for them. It was not crushed. I cannot be crushed. Not for long; in any given decade, or two or three, we have risen up again and again since 1905; all of those major upheavals were also marked by smaller upheavals and recurrent unrest dispersed in between. Those in charge claim fantasies of having crushed the ‘sedition’, but that’s just hopeful thinking made into statements that history shreds on a regular basis.

Since the Constitutional Revolution of more than a century ago in Iran (1905-1911), the people of Iran have not stopped attacking our equivalent of the French Bastille – our traditional ruling classes. For thousands of years, the traditional ruling classes in Iran, just like in Europe, had been a joint venture of what in Persian we call “Shah-o-Sheikh” (monarchy and clergy). Now the ruling class is comprised solely of the clergy and their assortment of security forces and paramilitary support systems. Their economic structure is, like the Shah’s regime, capitalist; only, this one is of the extremist neoliberal type with a theocratic superstructure: The worst of the worst kind of capitalism you can get forced into.

Those who consider themselves to be of the leftist tradition of the Enlightenment and the left wing of the French Revolution and supporters of the Russian Revolution, and at the same time support this medieval theocratic regime, must simply have left all reason and rationality behind.

The western left must take account of the fact that the Iranian regime is the victory of the counterrevolution in Iran in the wake of the revolutionary movement that swept the Shah and monarchy out of power in 1979.

Some in the western left, as well as the Reformist wing of the regime, claim that a revolutionary movement in Iran is something to be afraid of since it can only end Iran up like Iraq or Syria. This line of thinking does not take into account the fact that the Islamic Republic, just as much as the U.S. is responsible for spreading violence and instability across the greater Middle East, from Afghanistan to Lebanon.

This is not just State Department propaganda. This is the reality of the power status in the Middle East. The State Department would naturally have a say about this reality. But it is a reality. It is a reality experienced and hated by the Arab masses who are being slaughtered by Iranian-organized militias ravaging their communities; just as Vietnamese peasants and fighters hated the ravaging and violence brought onto their communities, villages, towns and cities by the U.S. forces.

If we look at the actual demands raised in the 1979 revolution in Iran, we realize that all those demands are still not realized and have repeatedly been brought to the streets: economic justice, freedom and independence from imperialist powers (including Russia and China). The same social conflicts and contradictions are still present, and have in fact intensified ten-fold under the suffocating social conditions this theocracy has imposed on society for almost forty years.

The social demands of the next revolutionary movement in Iran are not something that can be ignored by resorting to political-strategic calculations to do with power moves by outside players. The people of Iran have a natural right to demand what’s justly their basic rights as humans, and they will fight for those rights regardless of what outside powers may or may not wish to do. Did the Cuban people in late 19th century give up their fight to gain independence from Spain just because the American government at the time got involved in that fight?

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The latest protests in Iran were many things. They were ‘street intelligence’ throwing a wrench in the wheels of the ruling theocracy and challenging its neoliberalism at home and its regional imperialism; a loud rejection of a sham ‘legitimacy’ being forced down people’s throats, a shout of people’s disgust transmitted to the world; it was a social oppositional awareness expressing itself spontaneously on a mass scale; and it was an exhibit of formerly repressed social grievances voiced out loud. Those who didn’t take to the streets in the last wave of protests back in 2009 have been thinking and dreaming about this moment. This time they came out, and they came out more articulately.

Many observers have contrasted this latest upheaval with the much more protracted Green Movement of the 2009, which lasted in effect for just over seven months. A significant factor in the shaping of the 2009 movement was that the movement found its initial impetus from challenging the results of the rigged June 2009 elections. So, its most vociferous demand was to challenge the official results of an election. This meant that, fundamentally, it was submitting to the legitimacy of one faction of the regime, the ‘Reformists’.

During these latest protests, however, the most prominent slogan was, “Bread, Jobs, Liberty!” while all other slogans pointed either to the looting of the national wealth by the clerical classes and their cronies, or else they focused on negating Iranian regime’s expansionist policies in the region. Here we can see a clear and unambiguous deepening of the publicly-mass-expressed awareness of the working classes confronting the whole regime.

Historically, people make their moves one step at a time, and as they can, but in the case of this latest step the Iranian people took, we can see a deepening of the demands they bring to the battle in each successive stage of their long struggle for achieving social justice for all. So, we can see the collective political subjectivity of the masses taking a significant and conscious step on the path to becoming a “class for itself”.

Iranians are no exception to the general rules of human social developmental laws that govern other nations. We have our own circumstances, our own historical rhythms, but we have the same universal problems as the rest of humanity. And as we go through our cycles of struggle against deep structural injustices woven into our economic and political structures, we learn and proceed forward. Any fundamental social transformation is the work of generations, not a one-time-event.

Consider this historical fact: the three pillars of the French Revolution’s (1789) main slogan were, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. Liberty from an absolutist monarchy was achieved, of course. An actual legal end to the privileges of a monarchial type of governance, however, was not achieved until the Third Republic (1870); that’s 81 years. Equality of genders in terms of political rights — voting rights — took until 1945 to be achieved; that is, 156 years for legal gender equality to become a reality in a country we consider ‘progressive’, First World, currently imperialist, formerly colonialist power with colonies across the globe, bringing them their special sauce of ‘mission civilisatrice’. And that’s just one aspect of equality. Eradication of classes has obviously not been achieved in France, and in fact class inequalities are deepening more than ever; so, no fraternity either.

Iranian socialists rejoice in the people’s efforts to take the struggle one step further, giving the class conflict in Iran a sharper definition; we salute our people’s fighting spirit!

Ending Pollution Requires a Change in Attitudes

Graham Peebles

Pollution has become an everyday affair; a murderous way of life which, according to a report published in The Lancet, is responsible for the deaths of at least nine million people every year. The air we breathe is poisoned, the streams, rivers, lakes and oceans are filthy, — some more, some less — the land littered with waste, the soil toxic. Neglect, complacency and exploitation characterize the attitude of governments, corporations and far too many individuals towards the life of the planet, and its rich interwoven ecological systems.

The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, which is yet another cry for urgent collective action, found that pollution is responsible for a range of diseases that “kill one in every six people around the world”. This figure, while shocking, is probably a good deal higher because “the impact of many pollutants is poorly understood.” The landmark study establishes that we have reached the point when “deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.”

Our selfish materialistic way of life is having a devastating impact on all forms of life; unless there is a major shift in attitudes the numbers of people dying of pollution will increase; contamination of the oceans will increase, deforestation and desertification will continue, and the steady destruction of all that is beautiful and naturally given will intensify. Until one day it will be too late.

Plastic oceans, poisoned air

Even climate change deniers cannot blame the natural environment for the plastic islands that litter the oceans, or the poisoned water and contaminated air. Pollution results from human activity, it “endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies.” A sense of intense, life-threatening urgency needs to be engendered, particularly amongst the governments and populations of those countries that are, and have historically been, the major polluters — the industrialized nations of the World.

Although China has now overtaken the USA in producing the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions, as the New York Times reports, America (which has 5% of the world’s population but produces 30% of the world’s waste), “with its love of big cars, big houses and blasting air-conditioners, has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet….In cumulative terms, we [the US] certainly own this problem more than anybody else does,” said David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California.

Russia and India follow the USA as emitters of the most greenhouse gases; then comes Japan, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, which the World Economic Forum relates, has “on a per-country average, the most toxic air in the world.” Australia, Canada and Brazil should also be included amongst the principle polluters; as Brazil’s economy has grown so have the quantities of poisonous gas emissions, their effect made worse by deforestation of vast areas of the Amazon rain forests.

Indonesia, too, warrants our attention. This small country (3% of the global population) in the middle of the South Seas is a major polluter: It has the third largest expanse of tropical forest after the Amazon and Congo, and is cutting down trees at the highest rate on the planet; it produces approximately 5% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, is the second-largest contributor to marine plastic pollution after China and has some of the dirtiest water in south east Asia, – only a third of the population having access to clean drinking water.

China also has a problem with polluted water; IBT report that “Government analysis found that more than 80% of the water from its wells was not safe to drink…while about 60% of its groundwater overall was of poor or extremely poor quality.” Water pollution has reached serious levels in America as well: according to the Water Quality Project 32% of bays, 40% of the country’s rivers and 46% of its lakes are “too polluted for fishing, swimming or aquatic life.” The Mississippi River, which is amongst the most polluted rivers in the world, “carries an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of nitrogen pollution into the Gulf of Mexico every year. The resulting pollution is the cause of a coastal dead zone the size of Massachusetts every summer.”

Polluted rivers result in contaminated oceans; chemical fertilizers, detergents, oil, sewage, pesticides and plastic waste flow into the sea from inland waterways. Some pollutants sit on the surface of the ocean, many collect on the seabed where they are ingested by small marine organisms and introduced into the global food chain. The shocking condition of the seas was highlighted recently in the BBC production Blue Planet II. In a sequence that moved many to tears, an Albatross, having been at sea for weeks looking for food, was filmed feeding its chicks with bits of plastic collected from the surface of the ocean.

Recent research has identified 10 rivers as the source of 90% of the plastics in the oceans. Deutsche Welle reports that all of them run through densely populated areas where waste collection or recycling infrastructure is inadequate. Three of these filthy tributaries are in China, four more run through China, two — the Nile and the Niger (regularly the scene of oil spills) — are in Africa. The list is completed by the Holy Ganges in India, which serves as rubbish dump (almost 80% of urban waste is thrown into the river), utility room, bathroom, burial chamber and sacred temple.

Plastic waste is produced everywhere, but five Asian countries produce 60% of the global total, currently 300 million tons (only 10% is recycled): China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. If nothing changes it’s predicted that by 2025, plastic consumption in Asia alone could increase by 80 percent to over 200 million tons, and global consumption could reach 400 million tons. Greenpeace estimates that roughly 10% of all plastic ends up in the Oceans where it is thought to kill over a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals.

The statistics around pollution are numerous, shocking and all too depressing. Here’s a taste:

*5,000 people die every day through drinking unclean water.

*About 80% of landfill items could be recycled.

*65% of deaths in Asia and 25% of deaths in India are due to air pollution.

*Chronic obstructive respiratory disease (caused by burning fossil fuels indoors) is responsible for the death of more than 1 million people annually.

*Over 3 million children under five die annually from environmental factors.

*Worldwide, 13,000-15,000 pieces of plastic are dumped into the ocean every day.

*At least two-thirds of the world’s fish stocks suffer from plastic ingestion

*For every 1 million tons of oil shipped, approximately 1 ton is wasted through spillage.

*A million plastic bottles are sold worldwide every minute; forecast to increase by 20% by 2021.

*Around 1,000 children die in India annually due to diseases caused by polluted water.

*There are more than 500 million cars in the world; there could be 1 billion by 2030.

*Shoppers worldwide use approximately 500 billion single-use plastic bags annually. This translates to about a million bags every minute and the number is rising.

Criminal neglect

Pollution and the environmental catastrophe more broadly is the result of insatiable consumerism, selfishness and individual and collective irresponsibility. It flows from a materialistic approach to living, rooted in desire and an unjust economic system that demands unbridled consumerism for its survival. Ideologically rooted Corporate Governments imprisoned in nationalism, and obsessed with short-term economic growth feed the system and the most important issue of the time is relegated to an afterthought, rarely spoken about by politicians who seem to believe that limitless development and mass consumerism is of greater importance than the health of the planet.

Designing policies that will clean up the air, the seas and rivers, and will preserve forests and farmland, should be the priority for all governments around the world, particularly the industrialized nations, who have been responsible for producing the majority of the filth and for cultivating the consumer culture that is perpetuating the crisis. But whilst governments need to take a leading role to stop pollution, individuals, all of us, need to change the way we think and how we live. It is imperative we consume less and that decisions regarding purchases should be made firstly with environmental considerations in mind. Sufficiency and simplicity of living need to replace abundance, complacency and indulgence.

This demands a major shift in attitudes, not in 25 years, not in a year, but now. As Pope Francis rightly states in his groundbreaking papal letter ‘Care for Our Common Home’, “Our efforts at [environmental] education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature. Otherwise, the paradigm of consumerism will continue to advance, with the help of the media and the highly effective workings of the market.”

The ‘market’ aided by the media, is not concerned by such liberal considerations as the welfare of the planet and the health of human beings; it is a blind monster with a compulsion for profit, and if the ecological networks within which we live are to be purified and healing is to take place it needs to be rejected totally. A new way of thinking is required that moves away from divisive selfish ways to inclusive, socially/environmentally responsible behavior based on a recognition that the environment we live in is not separate from us and that we all have a duty to care for it. This requires a fundamental change of attitudes.

“If we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behaviour.” And, whilst there are many exceptions to this, the prevailing, carefully cultivated ‘mindset’ is a materialistic, self-centered one in which responsibility is passed to someone else, usually a government. It is a mindset that has been conditioned virtually from birth by the motivating mechanism of reward and punishment. This crude tool encourages deceit, undermines humanity’s essential goodness and relies on the stimulation of materialistic, hedonistic desire – the very thing that is fueling the environmental crisis – for its success. It is a method that may well work with corporations and to a limited degree with individuals, but a more potent and cleaner way to change the behavior of the population at large is the Way of Awareness: Awareness that we are brothers and sisters of one humanity, that cooperation, not competition is an inherent aspect of our nature and that that we are all responsible for the world in which we live. Its up to us, each and every one of us to consciously live in an environmentally responsible manner – no matter the cost or inconvenience, and to begin to repair the terrible damage we have done and continue to do to the natural world.

Washington Widens the War in Syria by Provoking Turkey

MIKE WHITNEY

The Trump administration has drawn Turkey deeper into the Syrian conflict by announcing a policy that threatens Turkey’s national security. Washington’s gaffe has pitted one NATO ally against the other while undermining hopes for a speedy end to the seven year-long war.

Here’s what’s going on: On January 18, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced the creation of a 30,000-man Border Security Force (BSF) to occupy East Syria. Two days later, January 20, the Turkish Army launched a ground and air offensive against Kurdish troops in the Afrin canton in Northwest Syria.

The media has tried to downplay the connection between the two events, but the cause-and-effect relationship is pretty clear.  Tillerson’s  provocation triggered the Turkish invasion and another bloody phase to the needlessly-protracted conflict.  Washington’s screwup has made a bad situation even worse.

A five-year-old child could have figured out that Turkey wasn’t going to sit-back and let the US establish a Kurdish state on its border without putting up a fight. Keep in mind, the US plans to defend this new protectorate with  a 30,000-man proxy-army comprised of mostly Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units or YPG.  The Turks, however, believe the YPG is connected to the terror-listed PKK which  has prosecuted a scorched earth campaign against the Turkish state for decades. That’s why Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will not allow these groups to dig in along Turkey’s southern border, they constitute a serious threat to Turkey’s security. Just imagine if Hezbollah decided to set up military encampments along the Mexican border. How long do you think it would take before Trump blew those camps to kingdom come? Not long, I’d wager.

So why did Tillerson think Erdogan would respond differently?

There’s only one explanation: Tillerson must be so blinded by hubris that he couldn’t figure out what Erdogan’s reaction would be.  He must have thought that,  “Whatever Uncle Sam says, goes.” Only it doesn’t work like that anymore. The US has lost its ability to shape events in the Middle East, particularly in Syria where its jihadist proxies have been rolled back on nearly every front. The US simply doesn’t have sufficient forces on the ground to determine the outcome, nor is it respected as an honest broker, a dependable ally or a reliable steward of regional security.  The US is just one of many armed-factions struggling to gain the upper hand in an increasingly fractious and combustible battlespace.  Simply put,  Washington is losing the war quite dramatically due in large part to the emergence of a new coalition  (Russia-Syria-Iran-Hezbollah) that has made great strides in Syria and that is committed to preserve the Old World Order, a system that is built on the principles of national sovereignty, self determination and non intervention. Washington opposes this system and is doing everything in its power dismantle it by redrawing borders, toppling elected leaders, and installing its own stooges to execute its diktats. Tillerson’s blunder will only make Washington’s task all the more difficult by drawing Turkey into the fray in an effort to quash Uncle Sam’s Kurdish proxies.

In an effort to add insult to injury,  Tillerson didn’t even have the decency to discuss the matter with Erdogan– his NATO ally– before making the announcement! Can you imagine how furious Erdogan must have been?   Shouldn’t the president of Turkey expect better treatment from his so-called friends in Washington who use Turkish air fields to  supply their ground troops and to carry out their bombing raids in Syria? But instead of gratitude, he gets a big kick in the teeth with the announcement that the US is hopping into bed with his mortal enemies, the Kurds. Check out this excerpt from Wednesday’s Turkish daily, The Hurriyet ,which  provides a bit of background on the story:

“It is beyond any doubt that the U.S. military and administration knew that the People’s Protection Units (YPG)…had organic ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Washington officially recognizes as a terrorist group….The YPG is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the political wing of the PKK in Syria. They share the same leadership…the same budget, the same arsenal, the same chain of command from the Kandil Mountains in Iraq, and the same pool of militants. So the PYD/YPG is actually not a “PKK-affiliated” group, it is a sub-geographical unit of the same organization….

Knowing that the YPG and the PKK are effectively equal, and legally not wanting to appear to be giving arms to a terrorist organization, the U.S. military already asked the YPG to “change the brand” back in 2015. U.S.

Special Forces Commander General Raymond Thomas said during an Aspen Security Forum presentation on July 22, 2017 that he had personally proposed the name change to the YPG.

“With about a day’s notice [the YPG] declared that it was now the Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF],” Thomas said to laughter from the audience. “I thought it was a stroke of brilliance to put ‘democracy’ in there somewhere. It gave them a little bit of credibility.” (Hurriyet)

Ha, ha, ha. Isn’t that funny? One day you’re a terrorist, and the next day you’re not depending on whether Washington can use you or not. Is it any wonder why Erdogan is so pissed off?

So now a messy situation gets even messier. Now the US has to choose between its own proxy army (The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces) and a NATO ally that occupies the critical crossroads between Asia and Europe. Washington’s plan to pivot to Asia by controlling vital resources and capital flowing between the continents depends largely on its ability to keep regional leaders within its orbit. That means Washington needs Erdogan in their camp which, for the time being, he is not.

Apparently, there have been phone calls between Presidents Trump and Erdogan, but early accounts saying that Trump scolded Erdogan have already been disproven. In fact, Trump and his fellows have been bending-over-backwards to make amends for Tillerson’s foolish slip-up. According to the Hurriyet:

“The readout issued by the White House does not accurately reflect the content of President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan’s phone call with President [Donald] Trump,”…“President Trump did not share any ‘concerns [about] escalating violence’ with regard to the ongoing military operation in Afrin.”…The Turkish sources also stressed that Trump did not use the words “destructive and false rhetoric coming from Turkey.”…

Erdoğan reiterated that the People’s Protection Units (YPG) must withdraw to the East of the Euphrates River and pledged the protection of Manbij by the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA)…

“In response to President Erdoğan’s call on the United States to end the delivery of weapons to the [Democratic Union Party] PYD-YPG, President Trump said that his country no longer supplied the group with weapons and pledged not to resume the weapons delivery in the future,” the sources added.” (Hurriyet)

If this report can be trusted, (Turkish media is no more reliable than US media) then it is Erdogan who is issuing the demands not Trump.  Erdogan insists that all YPG units be redeployed east of the Euphrates and that all US weapons shipments to Washington’s Kurdish proxies stop immediately. We should know soon enough whether Washington is following Erdogan’s orders or not.

So far, the only clear winner in this latest conflagration has been Vladimir Putin, the levelheaded pragmatist who hews to Napoleon’s directive to “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”

Putin gave Erdogan the green light to conduct “Operation Olive Branch” in order to pave the way for an eventual Syrian takeover of the Northwestern portion of the country up to the Turkish border.  Moscow removed its troops from the Afrin quarter (where the current fighting is taking place) but not before it presented the Kurds with the option of conceding control of the area to the central government in Damascus. The Kurds rejected that offer and elected to fight instead. Here’s an account of what happened:

Nearly a week ago, [a] meeting between Russian officials and Kurdish leaders took place. Moscow suggested Syrian State becomes only entity in charge of the northern border. The Kurds refused. It was immediately after that that the Turkish Generals were invited to Moscow. Having the Syrian State in control of its Northern Border wasn’t the only Russian demand. The other was that the Kurds hand back the oil fields in Deir al Zor. The Kurds refused suggesting that the US won’t allow that anyway.

Putin has repeatedly expressed concern about US supplies of advanced weapons that had been given to the Kurdish SDF. According to the military website South Front:

“Uncontrolled deliveries of modern weapons, including reportedly the deliveries of the man-portable air defense systems, by the Pentagon to the pro-US forces in northern Syria, have contributed to the rapid escalation of tensions in the region and resulted in the launch of a special operation by the Turkish troops.” (SouthFront)

Erdogan’s demand that Trump stop the flow of weapons to the SDF will benefit Russia and its allies on the ground even more than they will benefit Turkey. It’s another win-win situation for Putin.

The split between the NATO allies seems to work in Putin’s favor as well, although, to his credit, he has not tried to exploit the situation. Putin ascribes to the notion that relations between nations are not that different than relations between people, they must be built on a solid foundation of trust which gradually grows as each party proves they are steady, reliable partners who can be counted on to honor their commitments and keep their word. Putin’s honesty, even-handedness and reliability have greatly enhanced Russia’s power in the region and his influence in settling global disputes.  That is particularly evident in Syria where Moscow is at the center of all decision-making.

As we noted earlier, Washington has made every effort to patch up relations with Turkey and put the current foofaraw behind them. The White House has issued a number of servile statements acknowledging Turkey’s “legitimate security concerns” and their “commitment to work with Turkey as a NATO ally.” And there’s no doubt that the administration’s charm offensive will probably succeed in bringing the narcissistic and mercurial Erdogan back into the fold. But for how long?

At present, Erdogan is still entertains illusions of cobbling together a second Ottoman empire overseen by the Grand Sultan Tayyip himself, but when he finally comes to his senses and realizes the threat that Washington poses to Turkish independence and sovereignty,  he may reconsider and throw his lot with Putin.

In any event, Washington has clearly tipped its hand revealing its amended strategy for Syria, a plan that abandons the pretext of a “war on terror” and focuses almost-exclusively on military remedies to the “great power” confrontation outlined in Trump’s new National Defense Strategy. Washington is fully committed to building an opposition proxy-army in its east Syria enclave that can fend off loyalist troops, launch destabilizing attacks on the regime, and eventually, effect the political changes that help to achieve its imperial ambitions.

Tillerson’s announcement may have prompted some unexpected apologies and back-tracking, but the policy remains the same. Washington will persist in its effort to divide the country and remove Assad until an opposing force prevents it from doing so.  And, that day could be sooner than many people imagine.

Australia: Lack of safety system contributed to injuries in rail crash

Eric Ludlow

Sixteen people were injured last Monday when a suburban train crashed into a barrier in Sydney’s northwest. While the incident is still under investigation, the failure of successive governments in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) to install proper safety systems was a contributing factor.

Rail Safety Consulting Australia director Phillip Barker told the Daily Telegraph last week that, had an Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system been installed in the Waratah-class train, the injuries caused by the accident at the end-of-the-line Richmond Station might have been prevented.

Barker, who previously worked for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) as a rail safety investigator, said: “It’s likely an ATP would have been able to reduce the seriousness of the impact. There still would have been contact [with the barrier], but it’s more likely people would have just lost their footing rather than being slammed into the walls.”

Despite this, Gladys Berejiklian, the premier in the NSW Liberal-National coalition government, dismissed concerns about the safety of passenger trains in the state, saying: “If we thought there was any threat to any other service we would have taken action.”

Sydney Rail head Howard Collins also waved away unease over the safety of the trains. “There’s no indication there’s anything wrong in terms of the Waratah fleet,” he said. “Let me make that clear. We’re now working with the safety investigators.”

Investigations are being conducted by the government-run ATSB, Office of Transport Safety and an independent body corporate, the Office of National Rail Safety Regulator.

While ongoing inquiries have yielded no conclusions, the government and corporate media immediately suggested that the train driver was to blame for the crash. Without offering any evidence, media reports stated that “initial investigations” into the crash suggested “no mechanical fault” and “likely driver error.”

Barker later spoke to the WSWS. He commented that the results of inquiries “depend on who is doing the investigation. The ATSB won’t be saying that, but the owner of the train system might.” Certainly, “after one or two days of investigations, it is not possible to rule it [mechanical failure] out or rule it in.”

Asked to explain the ATP system, Barker said it is used in sections of track where the train is required to “meet a speed target,” such as on curves and at platforms. If a driver, for whatever reason, is “unable to maintain the correct speed,” the ATP will first alert the driver and, if no action is taken, initiate an emergency brake to meet the required speed. “They are good systems used all around the world,” he said.

The last major incident on NSW railways was the 2003 disaster at Waterfall, 40 kilometres south of Sydney, that resulted in the death of the driver, 53-year-old Herman Zeides, and six passengers.

Despite testimonies from other drivers and evidence pointing to mechanical issues, the then NSW Labor government and the media declared that Zeides was at fault and that rail drivers in general engaged in unsafe practices.

A Special Commission of Inquiry (SCOI) investigation report into the accident, released in 2005, blamed the railways management for the disaster. It absolved Zeides, concluding that he had “not contributed to the accident through recklessness or carelessness.”

The report made 177 recommendations to the state government and rail operators. Two recommendations remain open, including Recommendation No. 32 which stated: “RailCorp [the NSW rail network owner] should progressively implement, within a reasonable time, level 2 automatic train protection.” The report pointed out that the technology was already in use in Western Australia.

Level 2 ATP, according to Phillip Barker, uses radio signals rather than track-side signals to activate the ATP system. He added that such systems were installed in the state of Queensland in 1998.

The NSW government only began implementing ATP systems almost a decade after the SCOI report on the Waterfall disaster and is not due to complete the roll-out in the Waratah fleet until December 2019.

Barker also told the WSWS that, while it was difficult to determine early in the investigation, the issue of driver fatigue “was certainly something which should be looked at.” Train drivers in the Sydney rail network are frequently asked to work long shifts in order to cope with the lack of staff.

Barker pointed out: “You have to remember: The driver’s just part of the system. Driver error is a result, not a cause. There are a lot of things further up the line which have to be put into place. The driver is just the last link in the chain.”

Asked if other measures should be taken to prevent crashes, Barker said: “There are two phases: prevent the likelihood of it occurring, and reduce the impact.” He said ATP devices would lower the chances of crashes, but “other systems such as the buffer could be looked at to reduce the consequences of such incidents.”

There existed “good [buffer] designs these days,” he said. “It’s not a concrete block [as at Richmond Station], but a sort of sliding system.” This system works as a “friction buffer [which] uses a length of rail to slow the train [to a stop].” Such a system might be difficult to implement at Richmond Station because there is not much track between the platform and the buffer. “A concrete block,” he said, “is a pretty absolute method of stopping trains … [and is] not designed for slowing down a runaway train, as in this incident.”

Last week’s crash is a warning that government failures to invest in safety systems, overworked drivers and mounting chaos in the Sydney rail network are setting the stage for new disasters.

Accelerating concentration of wealth in Australia

Mike Head 

Social inequality in Australia, which is already higher than in many other developed countries, worsened markedly in 2016–17, according to data presented by the charity Oxfam last week.

In particular, the statistics compiled by Oxfam in its latest Australian factsheet, titled “Growing gulf between work and wealth,” show an accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires at the expense of workers.

The number of Australian billionaires more than doubled over the past decade, from 14 in 2008 to 33 in 2017, with a corresponding rise in their total fortunes of almost 140 percent to $115.4 billion.

This vast transfer of wealth has intensified since the global financial crisis of 2008. Of the 19 new billionaires created over the decade, eight were added in the past year alone.

Based on the Forbes global billionaires list, Oxfam reported: “Last year saw the largest annual increase in the number of Australian billionaires and billionaire wealth since the start of this century—with an extra eight Australian billionaires and an increase in total billionaire wealth in Australia of about $38 billion.”

Oxfam calculated that this single year’s increase in wealth was enough to pay for more than half of Australia’s annual federal public health spending of $71 billion in 2016-17. This comparison provides only a limited picture of the ongoing underlying redistribution of wealth, gouged out of the destruction of the jobs, wages, conditions and basic services of the working class.

The growth of social polarisation is a global phenomenon. Oxfam’s latest annual world report on inequality showed the largest increase in the number of billionaire’s internationally in history. The number of dollar billionaires rose to 2,043, with a new billionaire created every two days. Nearly all global wealth growth in 2017—82 percent—went to the top 1 percent, while the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, saw nothing at all.

According to Credit Suisse data cited by Oxfam, the share of wealth concentrated in the hands of Australia’s top 1 percent grew to 22.9 percent in 2017—up from 22 percent in 2016. As was the case in 2016, the richest 1 percent continued to own more wealth than the poorest 70 percent of Australian residents combined.

Oxfam stated: “Wealth inequality in Australia has been on the rise over the past two decades, with the gulf between the amount of wealth held by the top 1 percent and the bottom 50 percent now the greatest at any time over this period.” The wealth proportion held by the top 1 percent rose from around 20 percent in 2000 to near 23 percent in 2017, while the share held by the poorest 50 percent fell from almost 12 percent to 8.5 percent.

The poorest 40 percent of society—nearly 10 million people—now has only 4.4 percent of the wealth. They confront daily battles to make ends meet, with levels of personal debt soaring to unprecedented heights. The ratio of household debt to income more than doubled between 1995 and 2015, going from 104 percent to 212 percent, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) statistics released in 2015. Most of this is mortgage and credit card debt.

At the top, the wealth figures are almost certainly an underestimate because of the many difficulties in tracking the true scale of the fortunes assembled by the financial elite. Not least is the camouflaging of assets for tax evasion purposes, highlighted by the “Panama” and “Paradise” papers of 2016 and 2017, which located thousands of billions of dollars secreted away in tax havens.

Oxfam reported that income inequality in Australia had also climbed, to be higher than at any time before the 2008 breakdown. Australia’s income inequality compared poorly to other OECD member countries. The latest OECD data showed that Australia’s Gini coefficient was 0.33 in 2014, ranking the 13th most unequal out of the 35 OECD countries. (The Gini coefficient is an internationally recognised measure of income inequality, where zero indicates perfect equality and 1 indicates total inequality in which one person acquires all the income.)

Over the past six years, under successive Labor and Liberal-National governments, Australian wage levels and average living standards have fallen in real terms, compared to inflation. In effect, the billionaires have profited from the systemic suppression of working class struggles.

Oxfam’s Australian wealth distribution data also points to another social fracture—a growing divide between the richest 1 percent and the rest of the top 10 percent. Of the 52.3 percent of total wealth held by the most affluent 10 percent, 22.9 percent was owned by the 1 percent, leaving 29.4 percent for the remaining 9 percent.

This divergence exceeds that noted in a groundbreaking 2016 report, which found that the wealthiest 1 percent had amassed 20 percent, leaving 33 percent for the following 9 percent. On average, those in the top 1 percent enjoyed wealth nearly 6 times than those in the next 9 percent. That differential has now blown out to 9 times.

So, while the top 10 percent has access to wealth, property, privilege and political power that place them in a totally different realm to the vast majority of the Australian population, the highest 1 percent have fortunes and lifestyles that most of the rest of the top 10 percent can only dream of and aspire to.

The data assembled by Oxfam reveals a third social fault line. The redistribution of wealth up the social ladder has squeezed the “middle” strata between the top 10 percent and bottom 40 percent. Many in those layers, which generally were better-off during the post-World War II period, are also living in financial stress, as reflected in the rising household debts levels.

In its report, Oxfam noted that the social polarisation is part of global divide. It said a CEO in a top fashion company in Australia could earn up to $2,500 per hour, while a garment worker in Bangladesh, where many fashion items are made, earned as little as $0.39 per hour. Garment workers earning the minimum wage in Bangladesh would have to work more than 10,000 years to make the same amount as the CEO took home in one year.

Oxfam’s fact sheet concluded that “a broken economic system” was “concentrating ever more wealth into the hands of the rich and powerful, while ordinary working people are not always able to scrape by.” However, it appealed to governments and corporations—the very same ones that have driven the process—to “tackle the key drivers of inequality.”

In reality, the ever-increasing transfer of wealth into so few hands to the detriment of the billions who toil every day to generate that wealth demonstrates the need to abolish capitalism, not to issue futile appeals to fix the “broken economic system.”

UK Labour: Corbyn seeks accommodation with Blairites and big business

Chris Marsden

The first vote on Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) after the consolidation of a pro-Jeremy Corbyn majority was unanimous.

The NEC urged Haringey Council in London to abandon plans to privatise a vast swathe of public assets, including housing estates, under the multimillion-pound Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV). The scheme has met with massive local opposition and the deselection of numerous councillors associated with the project.

The unanimous NEC vote is an appeal to the Blairite leadership of the local council, led by Clare Kober, to bow to political realities. It is a call for a truce so that they and other Labour councillors and MPs do not face deselection battles that might reignite a civil war in the party that the Corbynites are seeking to quell.

This month three new NEC posts, created to reflect a trebling of the party’s membership to almost 600,000, were all won by pro-Corbyn candidates including Jon Lansman, who heads Momentum, the campaign group that backed Corbyn’s leadership bid.

Last year, Lansman prepared for his accession to office by expelling members of various pseudo-left groups from Momentum, leaving it under the control of forces grouped around Corbyn, including many Stalinists from the former Straight Left faction of the Communist Party.

The NEC “Lanslide” spurred apocalyptic warnings from right-wing forces in the party, churned out by the Murdoch press, of a cull of Corbyn’s opponents and the party’s transformation along Bolshevik lines.

“Jeremy Corbyn allies plot to oust 50 Labour MPs,” declared the Sunday Times. “Corbyn’s nationalisation plan is ‘£176bn gamble’,” added the Times.“Jeremy Corbyn would rip our foreign policy to shreds,” warned Daniel Finkelstein, asserting Corbyn’s support for Lenin’s definition that “imperialism is the highest form of capitalism.”

Others pointed to the underlying danger that gave rise to Corbyn’s leadership and now near-control of the party. The Financial Times warned, “Labour is gaining increasing favour for its public-sector-dominated prescription for many of Britain’s ills,” especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the construction firm Carillion. It cautioned that “until others can rally a suitable defence … Labour’s message will continue to receive a hearing. Especially with disgruntled voters who are ready to be seduced by stirring anti-capitalist rhetoric.”

With the minority Conservative government of Theresa May embroiled in factional warfare over Brexit so severe that there is talk of an imminent leadership challenge, the ongoing shift to the left among workers and young people raises fears in ruling circles of a Labour government elected on pledges to end austerity and curb business excesses.

In response, Corbyn and his allies are again seeking to reassure big business that they can be trusted to safely channel political and social opposition in a way that does not imperil the fundamental interests of British capitalism.

Replying directly to suggestions of a purge of right-wingers, Lansman gave an extensive interview to the Independent. Noting the witch-hunt of the left in the Labour Party in the 1980s, he reassured all concerned, “I don’t want that to happen to anyone else, ever again … I want an inclusive pluralist Labour Party that remains a coalition.”

Regarding Momentum, he continued, “We have made it clear that we are not going to campaign to reselect anyone, at all, anywhere.”

For the most part, the Blairites are minded to take Lansman at his word. Without the numbers to mount a successful challenge, their focus for the moment is on extracting maximum concessions from Corbyn—especially regarding Labour’s stance on Brexit.

This is set out as the price for an accommodation between the Blairites and others within the Parliamentary Labour Party and local councils and the Corbyn leadership. Writing December 28 in the Guardian, Martin Kettle urged Corbyn to “create a Labour [Party] of all the talents.” Given the danger of a hard-Brexit under the Tories, “all those who reject the doctrinaire extremes” must recognise that the “national interest of preventing or softening Brexit should override any partisan anxiety about what a Jeremy Corbyn government might mean.”

He praised what he called a “ceasefire” in the Labour Party and urged that this be “the shape of things to come.” Not all “Momentum members are machine-obsessed sectarians,” he added, while “so far, there is little evidence of a systematic attempt to purge the centrists and social democrats.”

Writing again on January 11, Kettle acknowledged that “Jeremy Corbyn’s dilemma is real”: the party is pro-Remain, but it cannot afford to lose anti-Brexit voters and still win an election. He urges Remainers to focus on ensuring “Britain’s trading relationship with the EU after Brexit” and its relationship with Ireland. “To obsess about a second referendum is to put the cart before the horse,” he added. “The central issue for the next eight or nine months is what they [terms of agreement with the EU] should be. The referendum’s time will come.”

Tony Blair himself this week rowed back on his overt hostility to Corbyn, citing similar calculations.

Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit Secretary, has warned against thinking of ways to “rub out” the Leave vote, insisting, “I don’t think we’re going to know what ‘out’ looks like at 2021 at the earliest” and stressing the need to defend UK access to the European Single Market in negotiations

Speaking at the Davos summit in Switzerland, to Bloomberg TV, Blair stated his belief that Corbyn is a “pro-European” politician and that he expects Labour to eventually shift its policy to staying in the EU.

“The Labour party, for reasons I understand, by the way, it’s got to say ‘well, we’re still in favour of Brexit’—but if you see how the Labour party is moving, it’s moving it’s very much towards a ‘let’s keep the single market’ position. There’s nuance in what it says but I think at the end there is a majority in the Labour party for keeping a close relationship with Europe.”

Arguing for access without membership, as Labour does, is “a very short leap” to maintaining EU membership if that is not offered.

Addressing the presence of Labour Chancellor John McDonnell at Davos, Blair cited this as “an indication that the Labour Party has changed in a fairly fundamental way.”

McDonnell’s ostensible mission at Davos was to explain to the super-rich and the leaders of the major powers that Labour intends to implement a “Robin Hood tax” on financial transactions. But this sole concrete policy measure was framed around reassurances that he and Corbyn seek to rescue capitalism, not bury it.

He warned “well intentioned” business figures of the need to head off an “an avalanche out there of discontent, resentment and alienation … there’s an anger building out there they need to recognise.”

There was a “moral duty” for “those who earn more and on corporations to reject tax avoidance… I think in that way there might be a potential for changing the attitude of millions of and billions of people who think they’ve not been treated fairly by the system.”

McDonnell’s appeal was heard by an audience of just 20 people.

US involvement in enslavement and rape of Afghan children

Kayla Costa

A report released Monday revealed the United States’ long-term complicity in widespread sexual violence against Afghan boys. Between 2010 and 2016 alone, there were nearly 6,000 accusations of child sexual abuse reported by American military personnel, with no actions taken in response.

In a practice known as bacha bazi, or “boy play,” high-ranking Afghan elites use boys between the ages of 10 and 18 to entertain them as dancers, dressed in make-up and girls’ clothing. They then hold the boys hostage, raping them and forcing them to engage in other sexual acts over extended periods of time. Once these boys escape their enslavement, they are left with deep psychological, emotional, and social trauma.

The US military has been aware of these abusive practices for years, but has worked to hide them from the public eye in order to proceed with its cooperative relationship with the Afghan police and military.

Completed in June 2017, the report was to remain classified as “Secret//Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals” until 2042. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was well aware that the incidents were in violation of domestic and international human rights law, but the Pentagon continued to funnel billions into their operations through a loophole called the “notwithstanding clause.”

The decision by the Obama administration to commission the report in 2015 only arrived after an article by the New York Times recounted reports from soldiers and commanders in the US military, some of whom had been dismissed for their attempts to intervene in the crimes. Captain Dan Quinn was one of those who left the Special Forces, telling interviewers, “ We were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did.”

Despite the number of reports of military personnel being told to ignore the incidents for the sake of privacy or cultural differences, the SIGAR report reiterates that they found “no evidence that U.S. forces were told to ignore human rights abuses.” Instead, it primarily blames the lack of clearly defined procedures in reporting incidents, and the apathy of the Afghanistan government.

While the promises of Afghan leaders to crack down on these child rapists have gone unfulfilled, they do not carry sole responsibility. Gul Agha Shirzai, an Afghan politician who was backed by the CIA, is deeply involved in bacha bazi, and currently works as the minister of border and tribal affairs. In another case, contractors who worked for DynCorp—an aviation, weapons, and law enforcement company that conducts nearly all of its business with the US government—were found to have bought drugs and “dancing boys” with their Afghan policemen in 2010.

Since 2001, the United States has funneled over $70 billion straight into Afghan military and police forces and easily over $1 trillion more broadly. The country has faced great destruction, with at least 175,000 Afghan casualties and millions displaced as refugees. Poppy production and the drug trade now have a huge influence over the national economy, elevating the same government officials, warlords, and elites that participate in child enslavement and rape.

The American military machine also has its own history of sexual violence, against its own forces and civilians. Rape has been used as an act of war against women, children, and prisoners of war throughout every major conflict in the past century. This is no exception for the United States interventions in the Middle East. In one striking example, a Preliminary Examination Report from 2016 documented 82 individual detainees of the CIA who were tortured, abused or raped in Afghanistan and the “black sites” of Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

After a brief hiatus at the start of 2016, the Pentagon has intensified operations in the Afghanistan. Civilian casualties are higher today than at any point since the first invasion, caused in part by a 300 percent increase in air strikes and artillery barrages. At least 16,000 US troops are now on the ground, just a fraction of the total forces throughout the Middle East.

Countless photos, videos, and stories of the killing and suffering of children and women have been circulated by the media to justify the wars in the Middle East. Accompanied by crocodile tears, these alleged violations of human rights by those targeted by the US military are seized upon as justification of wars of aggression.

This SIGAR report is just one more confirmation that the “human rights” politics of the US ruling establishment are shot through with hypocrisy and deceit.

German industrial workers poised to launch massive strikes

Dietmar Henning

Germany’s most important industrial sector, the metal and electronics industry, is on the brink of a major expansion of strike action. With 960,000 workers having participated in brief warning strikes and protests over the past two weeks, the IG Metall trade union has announced one-day strikes at 250 plants between Wednesday and Friday this week.

Despite its best efforts, IG Metall has failed to smother the movement surrounding the contract talks. The fifth round of bargaining collapsed because the union felt it could not, due to pressure from the workers, agree to a contract for the Baden-Württemberg region that would have served as a template for nearly 4 million workers nationwide.

The union and the employers’ organisations blamed each other for the failure of the talks. The latter proposed a wage hike of 6.8 percent in two stages as part of a 27-month contract, which would equate to just 3 percent per year. The union proposed a 4.5 percent increase in wages in the first stage and a total increase of 8 percent over 27 months. This would amount to 3.6 percent per year, far below the original demand for a 6 percent annual increase.

IG Metall has also largely abandoned its demand for a temporary reduction in weekly working hours in exchange for a partial offsetting of wages. Stefan Wolf, head of the Sudwest Metall employer association, indicated that the union was prepared to agree as part of its proposal to increased working time in the plants. This would enable the companies to achieve their most important goal—the abandonment of the 35-hour workweek and its extension to 40 or even 42 hours.

The demand for a partial offsetting of wages for certain groups of workers, such as shift workers and workers who look after children or relatives in need of care, has been entirely cast aside by IG Metall. Instead, workers would have the option of exchanging the second stage of the pay hike for additional holidays.

Despite the union’s backpedalling, the talks collapsed because the pressure from rank-and-file workers was so great that the unions could make no further concessions to the employers without running the risk of losing control of the workers. However, IG Metall continues to do all it can to sell out the contract struggle.

To this end, the union did not declare that the talks had failed and it avoided calling a strike vote to authorise unlimited strikes. The 24-hour strikes, which were initially meant to take place immediately, were postponed until Wednesday so as to create another window of opportunity to reach a rotten deal.

The union also handed the employers an opportunity to go to court to block the strikes. Rainer Dulger, head of the industrial employers’ association, has already announced his intention to file for an injunction against the strikes on Monday.

Even if the 24-hour strikes take place, IG Metall will strive to implement a rotten compromise immediately thereafter. Union head Jörg Hofmann explained the purpose of the strikes by saying that they should “increase the pressure on the employers to reach an acceptable compromise in the contract conflict.” Manager Magazin reported, “The contract parties had long considered making a final attempt to reach an agreement after another week of strikes in early February.”

The main factor behind IG Metall’s determination to seal a sell-out agreement as quickly as possible, without obtaining even half of its original wage demand, is the ongoing talks over the establishment of a new federal government. The unions want at all costs to avoid risking a collapse of talks between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the conservative parties due to the pressure of a massive strike wave.

The German Trade Union Federation and IG Metall are fervent advocates of a new installment of the grand coalition, even though the SPD and the conservative parties bear responsibility for major attacks on the working class over the past 20 years, beginning with a massive tax cut that benefited the rich and followed by the Hartz labour laws, the Agenda 2010 social welfare reform, the lifting of the retirement age from 67 to 70 and a drastic deterioration of the health care system.

Germany has, as a result, become one of Europe’s most unequal countries. More than 40 percent of the population earn less than they did 20 years ago. Some 3.2 million people have more than one job. The gulf between rich and poor has reached levels not seen since 1913. The 45 richest households own more wealth than the poorest half of the population.

German companies have also made huge strides in productivity. Workloads in the plants have risen continuously over recent years at the expense of workers’ health and well-being. For many, stress levels have become unbearable. According to the industrial employers association, productivity per worker rose by 2.5 percent during the period January to November 2017 alone.

This increased productivity goes exclusively to fatten the profits raked in by executives and shareholders. By contrast, workers’ wages have barely increased. The minimal pay hikes over the last decade have been eaten up by rising rent prices. A growing number of full-time positions are being replaced by low-paid temporary and contract labour. This is why the demands for a 6 percent pay increase and a temporary reduction in the workweek to be partially compensated secured strong support.

A new installment of the grand coalition would not only continue, but intensify the anti-worker policies of its predecessor. As has already been agreed in a paper published following the conclusion of exploratory talks, the new government’s main task will be to strengthen the European Union and expand it into a military fortress capable of enforcing the global interests of German and European capital. The SPD and the conservative parties plan to cooperate with French President Emmanuel Macron, who governs under a de facto state of emergency and has initiated the greatest social counterrevolution since the founding of the Fifth Republic.

The grand coalition’s real goals—a massive military build-up and strengthening of the domestic state apparatus, and a corresponding hike in military spending—are being discussed only behind closed doors or in specialist publications. However, even the lead article in the latest edition of Der Spiegel made clear that the mad drive to war is not unique to US President Donald Trump.

In a piece titled “World Power Against Its Will,” Ullricht Fichtner fantasised how, “In Manchester and Rome, in Warsaw and Lyon the window panes” will shake when Germany, which he compared to an “800-pound gorilla,” moves. “Every child should know,” according to Fichtner, “that a colossus like Germany has no choice whether or not to exercise power.”

IG Metall, which fully supports the plans for a new grand coalition, will do everything to smother the contract struggle and sell it out. Workers who want to fight to retain their jobs and gain improvements in wages and working conditions must break with the trade unions and form independent action committees. The action committees must take control of the organization of the strikes and make contact with workers in other countries who want to fight against the global corporations and their respective governments.

Get in contact with the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) and the World Socialist Web Site, which will support you in this struggle. The SGP calls for an expansion of the strike movement and for it to be made the prelude to a political mobilisation for new elections. The SPD and the conservative parties, in league with the trade unions, cannot be permitted to put their reactionary plans into practice.

The SGP is the only party calling for new elections and fighting in the working class for a programme that combines the fight against war and exploitation with the fight for a socialist society.

2018 begins with US police reign of terror

Niles Niemuth

While largely ignored by the mass media, the reign of terror by police officers continues to rage across the United States. The entire state apparatus, from local cops to immigration agents, has been unleashed by the Trump administration to beat, maim and kill with impunity.

During a speech to hundreds of uniformed officers last July, Trump urged the police to not be “too nice” and to treat detainees “rough.” The Justice Department has at the same time ended the toothless pretense of federal oversight over a handful of police departments put in place by the Obama administration.

In the year since Trump was sworn in as president, at least 1,223 people have been killed by police. Since the beginning of 2018, according to killedbypolice.net, 3.5 people have been killed on average every day.

A Washington Post database reports 78 fatal police shootings so far this year. As in previous years, the figures show that police killings impact every race and ethnicity, with whites comprising the largest share of victims, while African Americans are killed at a rate higher than their overall percentage of the population. In those cases where race or ethnicity has been identified by the Post, 54 percent of victims were white, 25 percent African American, 15 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 2 percent Native American.

Among the most recent victims is Donte Shannon, a 26-year-old African American man who was killed by police in Racine, Wisconsin on January 17 after fleeing a traffic stop. According to the police account, Shannon’s initial crime was not having a front license plate on his vehicle. Officials claim the police were forced to unleash a hail of bullets after Shannon pointed a gun at them, though investigators have not reported finding a weapon at the scene.

On the same day, a deputy in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed 16-year-old Joseph Haynes, a white youth, during an altercation after a court hearing. Haynes, who was unarmed, was thrown to the ground and shot once in the abdomen after he confronted a deputy for pushing his mother up against a wall.

In addition to those killed, workers and youth are subjected to police harassment and brutality on a daily basis.

Earlier this month, Louisiana teacher Deyshia Hargrave was removed from a school board meeting and handcuffed by a deputy marshal after she raised questions about school officials awarding themselves raises while denying them to teachers and staff. Former coal miner Gary Michael Hunt was choked by a police officer and removed from a public meeting after demanding clean water for the residents of Martin County, Kentucky.

Not even children are spared, as shown by a report Sunday that a 7-year-old child in Miami, Florida was led away from his school in handcuffs after an altercation with a teacher last week.

The issue of police killings and brutality erupted into national and international prominence with the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014 and the militarized police response to protests. Popular anger over police violence has not gone away. However, over the past three and a half years there has been a systematic effort to smother opposition and channel it behind the Democratic Party.

A critical role has been played by Black Lives Matter (BLM), which was developed and promoted to push the false claim that police violence is a racial rather than a class issue. Along with the various other organizations that promote and support the Democratic Party, BLM sought to cover up the relationship between police violence and the nature of the capitalist state as an instrument of class repression. BLM pushed for various reforms, including body cameras, oversight boards and more minority police officers, as the supposed solution to police violence.

In 2016, the main leaders of BLM threw their support behind Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. During the election season, the Ford Foundation announced that it would funnel $100 million to a panoply of organizations associated with the BLM movement. This was followed by the announcement of an initiative by BLM to promote “black capitalism,” including the introduction of a Black Lives Matter debit card.

The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the epidemic of police violence. The Obama administration presided over the continued militarization of police forces while ensuring that nothing was done to prosecute officers who perpetrated violence.

Since the election of Trump, the Democrats have entirely ignored the ongoing wave of police killings. They have worked to suppress and divert all manifestations of social opposition to the Trump administration behind a reactionary and militarist agenda of aggression against Russia, a further redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the destruction of democratic rights.

A significant factor in the efforts to censor the Internet, spearheaded by the Democratic Party, is concern that police killings and abuse videotaped on smartphones have become national and international issues through distribution on social media platforms. Facebook is now changing its newsfeed to limit the reach of content from news sources outside the so-called “mainstream,” with the aim of preventing the expression and propagation of opposition to police violence and social inequality.

Opposition to police violence within the United States cannot be separated from opposition to war, social inequality and the capitalist system. With wealth concentration rising to levels without historic precedent, the ruling elite relies on the police to enforce inequality.

And as the Pentagon prepares to wage war abroad on an unprecedented scale, the ruling class is preparing for war at home. The concept of “Total Army” has been coined to embrace the innumerable and growing connections between the police, border patrol, immigration agents and the military—a single apparatus of war and repression.

The ruling class is well aware that it faces its greatest danger within the United States, in the form of the growth of working-class struggle and the development of a mass movement against capitalism. It is only through the building of such a political movement that the reign of police violence can be ended.