Is This Class Warfare?

Mike Whitney

Is there a conspiracy to keep wages from rising or is it just plain-old class warfare?

Check out these charts from a recent report by Deutsche Bank and see what you think:

(Feeling Underpaid, Zero Hedge)

Well, what do you know? Everywhere the global bank cartel has its tentacles, wages are either flatlining or drifting lower.

“Coincidence”, you say?

Not bloody likely, I say. There’s either policy coordination between the various heads of state and their central banks or wealthy elites have secretly seized the levers of power and imposed their neoliberal dogma when no one was looking. Either way, it’s pretty easy to see the effects of “extraordinary monetary accommodation” on wages. It’s done absolutely nothing, which is why inflation has stayed in check. Because if wages aren’t rising, then inflation remains subdued which gives central bankers an excuse for launching another one of their trillion dollar QE programs that further enriches their crooked friends on Wall Street.

Yipee! More free money for Wall Street and the investor class!

See how it works?

And what about productivity? Why are wages no longer rising along with productivity?

(What Killed the Middle Class, Zero Hedge)

It seems fairly obvious that if wages don’t rise with productivity, then personal consumption is going to flag and the economy’s going to tank. If that’s the case, then boosting wages should be a top priority among policymakers, right?

But it’s not. The top priority for most politicians is kowtowing to their private sector bosses who fund their campaigns and make sure they have a nice-comfy job when they finally call it quits after years of groveling service. Isn’t that the way it usually works for these so-called “public servants”; they craft legislation that serves their fatcat constituents and then count the days until their next big payoff?

The point is that economic policy is not designed to improve conditions for ordinary working people. It’s not even designed to strengthen the economy. If that was the case, then there’d be some effort to hire more public workers to increase activity, boost business investment and strengthen growth. That would be the obvious remedy for today’s sluggish economy, wouldn’t it? Instead, Obama has done the exact opposite. He’s slashed the deficits by a full trillion dollars and allowed more than 500,000 government employees to get their pink slips. As a result, the economy has been chugging along at half-speed for nearly a decade. Thanks for nothing, Barry. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Now check out this “Government Job Destruction” chart at the Streetlight blog:

(Government Job Destruction, Streetlight blog)

And it doesn’t stop there either, because all this wretched belt-tightening has reduced consumer demand which has forced corporations to decrease the amount capital they reinvest in their businesses. So, just as wages have been suppressed in developed countries around the world, so too, business investment has been sharply curtailed just about everywhere eliminating another critical source of stimulus. Check out this clip from the Daily Reckoning:

“Yesterday’s release of domestic capital expenditure (capex) figures were a sorry sight. In the three months to September, business investment fell a barely believable 9.2%. …

In light of plunging domestic spending, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on what’s happening to global capex. (Capital Expenditures) Like Australia, the world as a whole has something of an investment problem. And there’s no sign that things are likely to improve anytime soon…

Outside of the US, it appears as if the world has decided to forego investing altogether. Business spending is down by 6% in the US; over 20% in Europe; 15% in China and Japan. As for the rest of the world, Australia included, capex is down a whopping 28%.” (Australia’s Capex Collapse is Part of a Global Disease, Daily Reckoning)

Okay, so corporations aren’t investing in their businesses because wages are flat and demand is weak. Is that really a big deal?

It IS a big deal, because there are only so many sources of spending in the economy, and when businesses, governments and consumers all reduce their spending at the same time, the economy slows to a crawl and stays like that until something changes. Unfortunately, nothing has changed which is why GDP is still hovering around 2 percent a full eight years after Lehman Brothers blew up.

But, why? Have policymakers suddenly forgotten how the economy works or what fiscal levers to pull to kick-start growth?

Of course not. They simply refuse to do what’s needed. Instead, Congress has used the crisis to hand over control of the system to the central banks and their deep-state powerbrokers. Now, wherever you look, the politicians are on the sidelines sitting on their hands while the CBs dictate policy. It’s crazy. It’s like regime change without all the blood.

And how has this bloodless coup effected working people?

It’s been terrible. While stock prices have nearly tripled and speculators have raked in trillions, median household income has dropped by more than 7.2 percent, incomes are falling, wages are flatlining and more and more people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

Did you know that 85 percent of Americans say that it’s harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago? (Pew Research Center) Or that “77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time”, or that “one of every four workers in the US brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level”, or that “47 million Americans are on food stamps, or that “40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers,” mainly temps, contract workers and part-time labor?

Anyway, you get the picture. Making ends meet is getting harder all the time. But why would wealthy elites support policies that are so obviously destructive to working people and the overall economy?

For money, that’s why. Lots of money. Check it out:

“Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez …The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income…

Wage income continues to be flat. Wages grew just 1.7 percent last year, the slowest rate since at least the 1960s. That’s not because American workers are slacking off, though. While they have seen an entire decade of stagnant or falling wages, they’ve increased their productivity by nearly 25 percent.

At the same time, the stock market has been reaching record highs, which mostly helps the wealthy who are much more likely to own stocks, thus exacerbating income inequality. Corporate profits have also hit records and boosted executive pay without trickling down to workers.” (The 1 Percent Have Gotten All The Income Gains From The Recovery, Think Progress)

But it could just be a big mistake, couldn’t it? I mean, maybe the central banks really didn’t know that their policies would work the way they have.

Be serious. Do you really think that this relentless upward waterfall of money to uber-rich tycoons (“95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population”) is a mistake, that it’s merely the unintended consequence of well-meaning monetary policies that were designed to spur lending and strengthen growth but, by pure happenstance, backfired and triggered the biggest redistribution of wealth to voracious, do-nothing plutocrats in history?

Is that what you think?

You don’t need to be Leon Trotsky to figure out what’s really going on here. Heck, even Warren Buffett nailed it when he said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s…winning.”

You got that right, Warren.

What Do Terrorists Want?

Sheldon Richman

After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama, said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems that something important is left out of the story. In the classical model of terrorism, instilling fear (along with causing death and injury) is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.

Terrorists don’t necessarily get a kick out creating carnage and fear (though it is possible). Primarily they want the survivors’ fear converted into action aimed at changing their government’s policy. Thus terrorism, if it to have any meaning, is a political, not a sadistic, act. In the paradigm case a weak nonstate group, unable to resist a state’s military or to change its policy directly, terrorizes the civilian population of that state in the hope it will demand a change in foreign or domestic policy. (Let’s leave aside for this discussion that terrorism has been strategically (re)defined by the United States and its allies such that it can apply only to their adversaries, even when they attack military targets instead of civilians.)

It’s not hard to fathom why the full story of terrorism is not acknowledged by officials and pundits: it would draw attention to what the U.S. government and allied states have long been doing to people in the Muslim world. Nearly all Americans seem to think it’s a sheer coincidence that terrorism is most likely to be committed by people who profess some form of Islam and that the U.S. military has for decades been bombing, droning, occupying, torturing, etc. in multiple Islamic countries.

Or perhaps they think U.S.-inflicted violence is just a defensive response to earlier terrorism. (I might be giving people too much credit by assuming they even know the U.S. government is doing any of this.) When the U.S. military isn’t wreaking havoc directly, the U.S. government is underwriting and arming tyrants like those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. And just to complete the picture, the U.S. government fully backs the Israeli state, which has oppressed Palestinians and occupied their land for many decades.

All this is what Islamist terrorists say they seek revenge for (more here), and the U.S. government acknowledges this. (That does not excuse violence against noncombatants, of course.)

But telling the full story about the terrorists’ objectives might inadvertently prompt a fresh look — maybe even a reevaluation — of America’s atrocious foreign policy. The ruling elite and the military-industrial complex would not want that.

Since questioning and changing U.S. foreign  policy are out of the question, the pundits and “terrorism experts” look for other ways to prevent terrorism. Unsurprisingly, everything they come up with entails violations of our civil liberties. Discussions about “profiling” are featured on cable news channels almost regularly. Should we or should we not profile? Those few who say no are accused of “political correctness,” the handy put-down for anyone who is leery about violating privacy or gratuitously insulting whole classes of people.

But let’s think about profiling for a moment. As acknowledged, when one hears about public, indiscriminate suicidal violence, such as occurred in Brussels, it is reasonable to wonder if the perpetrators professed some “extreme” variant of Islam. (That doesn’t mean another group, say, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, couldn’t be the perps, as in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.)

But since Islamists come to mind first, that might give us a clue to how to profile. As part of the profiling, why not look for links to countries the U.S. government and its allies bomb, occupy, or otherwise abuse? The media inform us that many of the terrorists in Europe first went to Syria to try to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. government wants overthrown), but then came home angry after NATO countries started bombing the Islamic State there and in Iraq, with the inevitable civilian casualties. In some cases Syrian nationals sneaked into Europe through Turkey.

So the perpetrators of the next terrorist act are likely to be Islamists with links to or sympathy for people terrorized by the United States and its allies — namely, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. But if that kind of profiling makes sense, wouldn’t it make even more sense simply to stop inflicting violence on the Muslim world?

Islamic Extremism is a Product of Western Imperialism

Garry Leech

As we struggle to come to terms with the latest terrorist attacks in Brussels, it is important that we understand the causes of such extremism. After all, Islamic extremism was virtually unknown fifty years ago and suicide bombings were inconceivable. And yet today it seems that we are confronted with both on a daily basis. So what happened to bring Islamic fundamentalism to the forefront of global politics? While there are many factors involved, undoubtedly one of the primary causes is Western imperialism. Western intervention in the Middle East over the past century to secure access to the region’s oil reserves established a perfect environment in which Islamic fundamentalists could exploit growing anti-Western sentiment throughout the Islamic world with some establishing violent extremist groups. The most recent consequence of this process is the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, which emerged out of the chaos caused by the US invasion of Iraq.

In order to understand the rise of the Islamic State we must first briefly review the history of Western intervention in not only the Middle East but throughout the world to reveal that Islamic extremism in not a unique phenomenon. For the past 500 years, peoples throughout the world have resorted to acts of violence that today would be classified as terrorism in efforts to resist Western imperialism. Indigenous peoples in the Americas often used violent tactics to defend themselves against the brutal European colonizers. There were also many violent slave revolts by Blacks who had been shipped from Africa to the Americas in the service of Western imperialism.

In Southeast Asia, the Filipino people first violently resisted the Spanish and then rose up again when the United States became the new colonial ruler of the Philippines in 1898. Apparently, Washington’s newest colonial subjects didn’t appreciate President William McKinley’s concern for their well-being when he arrogantly declared that since Filipinos “were unfit for self-

government, … there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Zulu people were resorting to violence in an effort to resist British attempts to “civilize” them in the late 1800s. Back then, those who violently resisted Western imperialism weren’t labelled “terrorists,” we just called them “savages.” These are just a few examples of the countless attempts throughout the global South to resist the violent and often brutal expansion of Western imperialism, which included not only the imposition of Western values and culture on people, but also Christianity.

One of the reasons that Islamic extremism has only come to the fore in recent decades is the fact that Western imperialism in the Middle East is a relatively recent occurrence. Western imperialism didn’t begin to make serious headway in the Middle East until the early 20th century. Consequently, we haven’t yet succeeded in our quest to violently subjugate the peoples of that region to the degree that we have peoples throughout most of the rest of the world. Insome Middle Eastern nations, Western imperialism initially took the form of traditional colonialism, which involved direct rule. In other countries, it has constituted a neo-colonial approach utilizing international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as direct US and European intervention in the forms of military coups and outright war.

While European nations, particularly Britain, had made some inroads into the Middle East in the late 1800s, it was the discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 that marked the arrival of Western imperialism. The London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) gained the rights to Iran’s oil and, because its major shareholder was the British government, Britain effectively controlled Iran’s oil sector. During the ensuing decades there were major protests by the Iranian people who were unhappy with foreign ownership of the country’s oil and the fact that Iran was receiving only 16 percent of its own oil wealth. In 1950, the Iranian parliament finally responded to popular demands and voted to nationalize the country’s oil sector. The following year, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh established the National Iranian Oil Company.

Unhappy with Iran’s decision to claim ownership of its own oil resources and to use them for the benefit of the Iranian people, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to oust the moderate, secular and democratically-elected Mosaddegh government. Shah Reza Pahlavi was installed in power and the new pro-Western dictator immediately re-opened the door for Western companies to return to Iran. And to ensure that the Shah maintained iron-clad control over the population, the United States provided him with military aid as well as training for his secret police force, which would brutalize the Iranian people for the next 26 years.

Under the Shah, Western oil workers flooded into Iran and the country’s capital Tehran became a decadent playground for high-paid foreign oil workers who engaged openly in un-Islamic activities including alcohol consumption, casino gambling and prostitution. And while the country’s oil wealth was flowing into the pockets of foreigners and the Shah and his cronies, most Iranians were struggling to survive in poverty. Not surprisingly, Islamic fundamentalists began pointing to Western imperialism and Western decadence as an affront both to Islam and to the Iranian people. It was a narrative that began to resonate with many impoverished Iranians who had traditionally been moderates. In 1979, under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a popular revolution overthrew the Shah’s repressive regime and established an Islamic state.

Reflecting on the US role in Iran, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated, “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

The first significant success for Islamic fundamentalism directly resulted from the United States and Britain overthrowing a democratically-elected and secular government and their subsequent support for a brutal dictatorship, all in the name of securing access to oil. Today, we are not only still dealing with the consequences of this Western imperialism in our relations with Iran, but also with Iran’s support for other fundamentalist groups in the region such as Hezbollah.

The same year that Iran became an Islamic state, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to defend that country’s unpopular Soviet-backed regime from a growing insurgency. The mujahideen rebels, like the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, were fighting against a Western-backed dictatorship. This time it was the atheist communists of the Soviet Union that were the imperialists. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan only boosted the strength of the mujahideen as recruits flocked from throughout the Islamic world to help liberate the country from the foreign infidels. Many of the tens of thousands of recruits came from Saudi Arabia, which contributed to the fundamentalist movement known as Wahhabism expanding from being a fringe sect of Islam that primarily existed in Saudi Arabia to a major religious force throughout the Sunni Islamic world.

The United States viewed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan through a Cold War lens and began providing weapons and training to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen rebels. During the 1980s, Washington supplied the mujahideen with $4 billion in arms that significantly strengthened the fundamentalists and President Ronald Reagan publicly referred to them as “freedom fighters.” One of the mujihadeen beneficiaries of US aid was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. The primary objective of the war for this particular “freedom fighter” was the removal of a Western military from Islamic lands. The mujahideen succeeded in their holy war in 1989 when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. And then, in 1996, following a civil war between various factions of the mujahideen, the recently-formed Taliban emerged victorious and established a fundamentalist government.

As a 1993 article in the British daily Independent made clear, Osama bin Laden was viewed by the West as a warrior, not a terrorist, for his role in the mujahideen. The article, titled “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace,” described bin Laden’s work building roads in the impoverished nation of Sudan in the early 1990s. But bin Laden was not only building roads, he was also establishing a new organization with his mujahideen fighters that would eventually be called al-Qaeda. The mission of al-Qaeda essentially remained the same as that of the mujahideen in Afghanistan: to drive Western military forces out of Islamic lands. This time the target was US troops based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait following the first Gulf War. Consequently, bin Laden went from being a “freedom fighter” to a “terrorist” virtually overnight even though his mission hadn’t changed, only the target.

From the perspective of Washington, bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he was fighting against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan but was a “terrorist” when he fought against the presence of US military forces in the Islamic world. From the perspective of bin Laden and his Islamic extremist followers, however, nothing had really changed. Whether it was Soviet soldiers or US troops, both constituted Western military forces that had to be removed from Islamic soil.

Ultimately, Western intervention in the Islamic world gave birth to al-Qaeda. First, Soviet military support for a puppet regime in Afghanistan, then US backing of the Islamic fundamentalists who constituted the mujahideen rebels, and, finally, the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the first Gulf War. As a consequence of these imperialist actions, Islamic extremists in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged as powerful forces with the latter feeding off the growing disenchantment among Muslims angry at Western militarism in the Islamic world, Western backing for corrupt governments in the Middle East, and US support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

Following al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, the United States launched its war on terror and targeted the Islamic extremist group in Afghanistan. However, the Bush administration also sought to exploit the 9/11 attacks to justify ousting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Top Bush administration officials launched a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign to convince the American people that Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and linked to al-Qaeda, both of which were untrue. They also portrayed Hussein as a terrorist threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was another lie.

As the reports by UN weapons inspectors had made clear, Iraq no longer possessed any chemical or biological weapons; they had been destroyed in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions following the first Gulf War in 1991. Furthermore, the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign conveniently ignored the fact that the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had possessed and used during the 1980s were supplied to it by the United States when Hussein was an ally against the fundamentalist regime that had come to power in Iran.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Iraq without authorization from the UN Security Council and in direct violation of international law. Four days before the invasion, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared, “From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” But one year later an extensive nationwide poll in Iraq showed that 71 percent of Iraqis saw the US troops as “occupiers” rather than “liberators.” Such a response should not have been surprising given that some 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation.

The military occupation gave rise to an insurgency that sought to oust the foreign occupying troops. Prior to the US invasion there had been no Islamic extremist groups operating in the country. But the emergence of the broad-based insurgency and the post-invasion chaos opened the door for al-Qaeda to enter Iraq. And it was out of both the insurgency and al-Qaeda that the fundamentalist Islamic State (originally known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) emerged in 2006.

Following the invasion, the United States dismantled Saddam Hussein’s military and many of the unemployed former officers ended up joining the insurgency. Some of these military officers conspired with a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq to form the Islamic State. The new extremist group sought to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. The Syrian civil war in 2011 allowed the Islamic State to cross into Syria where it grew dramatically stronger and began to consolidate control over territory. It then re-focused its efforts on Iraq and easily defeated the new US-trained Iraqi army and consolidated its control over northern parts of that country in 2014. Meanwhile, the West’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a failed state and opened the door for the Islamic State to establish a foothold in that part of North Africa.

The Islamic State has had significant success recruiting disenchanted Muslims from around the world to join its ranks and to carry out terrorist attacks in Western nations such as France and Belgium. Last year, even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged “there are elements of truth” in claims that the invasion of Iraq led to the creation of the Islamic State. As Blair admitted, “Of course, you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

Once again, Western imperialist actions in the Middle East had given rise to Islamic extremism. But the rise of the Islamic State should not have come as a surprise to anyone. That the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq laid the foundation for the emergence of the Islamic State was entirely predictable. After all, the West’s ouster of the moderate and secular Mosaddegh and its backing of the Shah’s ruthless regime in Iran had given birth to that country’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution. And Washington’s military support of fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan and its establishment of military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ensured the emergence of al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Western imperialism in other parts of the Middle East over the past century has also contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. While most of the Arab states in the region gained independence following World War Two, the United States and Britain essentially handed over most of Palestine to European Jews so they could create the Jewish state of Israel. And, ever since, Israel has received unconditional US support to brutally repress the Palestinian people and to repeatedly violate international law, which has generated widespread anti-Western sentiment throughout the Middle East. It wasn’t until after almost 40 years of Israeli rule over Palestinian lands that Islamic fundamentalism and the tactic of suicide bombing finally made inroads among the traditionally moderate Palestinian population. This occurred when Hamas was formed in the Occupied Territories in the mid-1980s. Similarly, it was Israel’s US-supported invasion of Lebanon that gave birth to the fundamentalist group Hezbollah during the same decade.

Over the past one hundred years, the Middle East has been targeted by Western imperialism in the violent manner that the rest of the world has endured for centuries. Nowadays we use politically correct terms such as “democracy promotion” and “human rights” instead of “civilize” and “Christianize,” but they essentially mean the same thing because they are simply the latest justifications for stealing resources and imposing Western values on other cultures. Not surprisingly, as has been the case throughout the rest of the world over the past 500 years, there is widespread resentment and anger towards the West for its imperialist policies in the Middle East. And, also not surprisingly, some fundamentalist Muslim resisters to Western imperialism have resorted to extreme tactics.

Finally, perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Western imperialism in the Islamic world is the fact that each consequence has been more extreme than the previous one. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were far more extremist than the Islamic government that came to power in Iran. And the Islamic State is even more extremist than al-Qaeda. Which begs the question: What new and even more extremist monstrosity are we currently creating with our ongoing military interventions and imperialist policies in the Islamic world?

How Israel Makes Money From Blockading Gaza

Ryan Rodrick Beiler

A Palestinian farmer harvests strawberries from a field in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 10 December 2015.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)

Palestinians whose livelihoods are forcibly enmeshed in Israel’s economic system are often used as human shields against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The frequent accusation made by critics is that boycotts of Israeli businesses, especially settlement businesses, will hurt the very Palestinians that BDS activists say they support.

At times, settlement advocates even deploy Palestinian spokespersons to speak positively about the higher wages they receive working for settlement businesses.

A new report released by UK-based Corporate Watch brings the voices of the Palestinian farmers and agricultural workers to the debate over how the BDS movement can best resist Israeli exploitation of their land and labor.

Corporate Watch’s report, titled, “Apartheid in the Fields: From Occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets,” focuses on two of the most vulnerable segments of Palestinian society: residents of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.

Farming under siege

Anyone entering Gaza through the Erez checkpoint on the northern boundary with present-day Israel, traverses a long, fenced corridor running through the so-called “buffer zone” enforced by the Israeli military.

This poorly defined area ranges from 300 to 500 meters along the inside perimeter of Gaza.

Since 2008, the report states, more than 50 Palestinians have been killed in this zone. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed and more than 60 injured so far this year.

According to the UN monitoring group OCHA, this zone also takes up 17 percent of Gaza’s total area, making up to one third of its farmland unsafe for cultivation. Areas that once held olive and citrus trees have now been bulldozed by Israeli forces.

Corporate Watch says that even though Palestinians are routinely shot at from distances greater than 300 meters, farmers whose land lies near the border have no choice but to cultivate these areas despite the danger.

Economic warfare

In addition to the lethal violence routinely inflicted on Gaza, Israeli authorities enforce what they have called “economic warfare” – a de facto boycott of almost all agriculture originating in Gaza.

Virtually no produce from the enclave is allowed into Israeli or West Bank markets, traditionally Gaza’s biggest customers.

From the time Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in 2007 up until November 2014, a monthly average of 13.5 trucks left Gaza carrying exports – just one percent of the monthly average of goods shipped out just prior to the closure.

By contrast, already this year more than 22,000 trucks have entered Gaza, many carrying Israeli produce considered unsuitable for international export.

Dumping it on the captive market in Gaza further undermines local farmers.

The trickle of exports that Israel permits from Gaza go primarily to European markets, but this is only allowed through Israeli export companies that profit from the situation by taking commissions and selling Gaza products for far higher prices than they pay the producers.

“The Israelis export Palestinian produce and export it with an Israeli label,” Taghrid Jooma of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees told Corporate Watch. “For example, they export roses from Gaza for nickels and dimes and sell them for a lot of money.”

Muhammad Zwaid of Gaza’s only export company, Palestine Crops, told Corporate Watch that part of the problem is that Palestine lacks its own bar code and so any produce exported through Israel carries an Israeli one.

“We have our own stickers,” said Zwaid, “but [Israeli export company] Arava has asked for them to be smaller and often Arava stickers are put on top of ours. Our produce is taken inside Israel by the Israeli company and then taken to a packing station where it is repackaged.”

Supporting BDS

Corporate Watch reports that while many of the farmers they interviewed support BDS, they also want the opportunity to export their produce and make a living.

This presents a quandary because a boycott of Israeli export companies like Arava will include Palestinian products as well.

Even so, the farmers interviewed maintained their support for BDS as a long-term strategy that outweighs the limited benefits of current export levels.

“What we need is people to stand with us against the occupation,” said one farmer from al-Zaytoun. “By supporting BDS you support the farmers, both directly and indirectly and this is a good thing for people here in Gaza.”

“Farmers all over the Gaza Strip were particularly keen on getting the right to label their produce as Palestinian, ideally with its own country code, even if they have to export through Israel,” the report states. “Country of origin labels for Gaza goods is something the solidarity movement could lobby for.”

Mohsen Abu Ramadan, from the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, suggested to Corporate Watch that one strategy could be to engage farming unions around the world to urge them to endorse BDS in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

Bulldozing the Jordan Valley

While Israel’s siege and deadly assaults have rightly focused international attention on Gaza, Israel’s actions in the Jordan Valley have generated far less outrage.

Yet well before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing government made clear its opposition to a viable Palestinian state, he had pledged to never give up control of this agriculturally rich region under any two-state configuration.

Occupation authorities refuse virtually all Palestinian requests to build or improve infrastructure in the region. Residents face severe restrictions on access to electricity and water as well as other basic infrastructure.

Demolitions of Palestinian homes have increased in recent months, and in February, Israel carried out the largest demolition in a decade.

Routine violations

In the Jordan Valley, settlement agriculture often relies on Palestinian labor – including child labor – to do hazardous jobs for a fraction of what would be paid to Israeli citizens.

Though entitled to the Israeli minimum wage according to a high court ruling, many workers are routinely paid as little as half that.

Palestinians Zaid and Rashid are employed in Beqa’ot, a settlement built on land seized from Palestinians. They receive wages of $20 per day, about a quarter of which goes for daily transport.

They receive no paid holidays despite the fact that the Israeli government advises that workers are entitled to 14 days paid holiday and must receive a written contract and payslips from their employer.

Although they are members of a Palestinian trade union, their settler employers do not recognize any collective bargaining rights.

Workers are moreover frequently pressured into signing documents in Hebrew — which they cannot read — stating that they are being treated according to law. Workers fear being fired if they do not sign.

While Palestinians working in settlements are also required to obtain work permits from the military occupation authorities, several of those interviewed for the report had no such permits, leading to suspicions that employers may be attempting to further circumvent Israeli labor laws by using undocumented workers.

Both Zaid and Rashid told Corporate Watch they back the call for a boycott of Israeli agricultural companies.

“We support the boycott even if we lose our work,” Zaid said. “We might lose our jobs but we will get back our land. We will be able to work without being treated as slaves.”

Label games

Corporate Watch profiles the five main Israeli export companies: Arava, Mehadrin, Hadiklaim, Edom and the now defunct Carmel Agrexco.

A common practice by these companies is mislabeling goods as “Produce of Israel” even when they are grown and packed in West Bank settlements that are illegal under international law.

Corporate Watch also documents the varying degrees of success that BDS activists have had in targeting these companies.

Since 2009, following pressure from activists, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued guidelines stating it is an “offense” to mislabel settlement goods as “Produce of Israel.”

Similar guidelines approved by the European Union late last year outraged Israeli politicians, despite the fact that the same practice has been United States policy since the mid-1990s.

Despite the guidelines, however, UK stores continue to stock Israeli products with misleading labels.

As recently as 2013, Corporate Watch found labels from the Israeli settlement of Tomer for the Morrisons store brand of Medjoul dates.

In another example, the Aldi chain was caught selling grapefruits from Carmel Agrexco labeled as products of Cyprus.

Beyond settlement boycotts

Of the supermarket chains targeted by BDS campaigns, only one, The Co-operative, has pledged to “no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements.”

This means that not only would the Co-op not stock settlement produce, but that it would not buy produce grown in present-day Israel from companies that also have settlement operations.

This made it the first major European chain to take such a step.

Corporate Watch points out that while not directly supporting the settlement economy, those Israeli companies without settlement operations still pay taxes to the Israeli government, which supports its ongoing occupation, colonization and oppression of Palestinians.

It notes that the Co-op took a much stronger stance regarding apartheid-era South Africa, when it boycotted all South African products.

In accordance with the 2005 BDS call from Palestinian civil society, Corporate Watch advocates a full boycott of all Israeli goods

China-Iran: Common Grounds for Cooperation

Tapan Bharadwaj


Given the recent 'mainstreaming' of Iran, it is important to consider its foreign relations, and especially relevant in this context is its relationship with China and the future prospects of this bilateral, with particular focus on its economic aspect. 

What are therefore the major areas for cooperation between the two countries?

Setting the Stage
The China-Iran bilateral relationship is unique primarily due to the level of trust both parties share. This kind of trust is absent between Iran and other partner countries. There are several instances where both have weighed favourably towards the other at regional and global platforms - this includes the period of international economic sanctions against Iran. Here, both the willingness and capability of states to act a certain way count. 

China issued its first ever white paper on its Arab policy on 13 January 2016, just before President Xi Jinping's visit to the region. The white paper coincided with the declaration of  the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action's (JCPOA) 'Implementation Day', 16 January 2016. The JCPOA was an agreement negotiated and signed between Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, UK, US and Germany). The Chinese government played an important role in these international negotiations, aimed at lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for limitations on their nuclear weapons programme.

Xi Jinping and Hassan Rouhani promised to increase bilateral trade to US$600 billion  in 10 years, during the former's visit to Iran on 23 January 2016. Trade between two stood at around US$52 billion in 2014, before the plunge in oil prices. Rouhani’s promise to revive Iran's national economy was a priority of his election agenda, which contributed significantly to his victory in the 2013 election. The results of the twin elections for parliament and clerical assembly experts, held in February 2016, have also shown support for these promises.

Common Grounds for Cooperation
China, in its white paper, talks about a "1+2+3" cooperation pattern with Arab countries. This has energy cooperation at its core, with infrastructure construction, trade, and investment facilitation as secondary, and cooperation in the fields of nuclear energy, space satellites and new energy as tertiary.

China’s cross-continental 'one belt one road' (OBOR) initiative, Iran’s quest for integration with the world, China’s potential to invest, and Iran’s great reserves of hydrocarbons provide an excellent, mutually beneficial scenario for cooperation between Beijing and Tehran.

Iran has the fourth-largest proved crude oil reserves in the world. It is the third-largest producer in the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the largest oil producing cartel in the world. Iran therefore plays an influential role in deciding the international price of oil from the supply side of the market. China is the world’s second largest oil consumer and the world’s largest net importer of petroleum and other liquids. This makes it a very important country with the ability to influence international oil prices from the demand side. The extent of Beijing and Tehran's cooperation would be a very important element of the oil demand/supply dynamics. 

Chinese Gains
China’s presence in West Asia has never been more important than it is today. Although China's economic growth rate is on the decline, it is still significantly high. Its economic growth runs on the wheels of its energy and trade policies, and oil import is an important element of its energy policy. China’s interest in Iran thus will be dominated by its focus on oil imports. Moreover, Iran’s geographical location is significant to China’s ambitious OBOR initiative. Iran today provides attractive opportunities for Chinese investment. Better relations with Iran will likely enhance China’s energy security policy and provide a market to sell its ‘cheap-workable-technologically-upgraded’ products. 

Iranian Gains
Iran has not been able to use its oil and natural gas resources to fully realise the potential of its economy. In the current circumstances, Iran has been provided with an opening to use its natural resources in the support of its economic growth, and China has shown a positive interest in this. The space and time is perfect for both to come together in an advantageous way. Iran is primarily looking for investments from China in its infrastructure sector. The arrival of the first cargo train from China and China’s interest in financing the Masjed Soleyman petrochemical project are some indicators of the growing cooperation between both. China's ability to successfully distance itself from domestic politicking in the countries in which it invests is an important determinant of Iran's keenness to cooperate with China.

Future Prospects
The US, a regional and global power, is unlikely to exit West Asia. Concomitantly, China's presence in the region is also growing. This could lead to a ‘cold-hot-conflict’ type situation. Iran might look to draw closer to China as this engagement, unlike its relationships with the West, does not come with clauses of good governance and human rights concerns attached. 
Oil and gas imports would be the top priorities for China in its engagement with Iran, while Iran would consider Chinese investments to enhance its domestic oil production capacity on the top of its agenda. The future appears bright for this relationship - better relations will be rewarding for both, in which Iran is likely to benefit immediately while China in the near and distant future.

Dramatic fall in Employment Tribunal cases in UK

Dennis Moore

In November 2015, Dick Palmer, the father of three sisters, Lucy, Bethany and Esme Palmer, had to pay the Employment Tribunal (ET) a fee to be able to bring a claim of sexual harassment and unfair dismissal against award-winning chef Ben Cox, co-owner of the Star Inn, in Sancton, North Yorkshire.

Palmer said that the case only went ahead after he agreed to pay a £250 fee. He commented, “The costs just keep going on up and up and, when you think of it all, it would be enough to put most people off, but my daughters were convinced something had to be done and we had to bring this case forward.”

The tribunal found Bethany, 24, and Lucy, 21, were unfairly dismissed and Lucy and Esme, 17, were sexually harassed by Cox. The restaurant was found to have breached working time regulations by denying Lucy and Bethany a rest break.

It is now three years since the introduction of tribunal fees by the Employment Appeal Tribunal Fees Order 2013 under powers conferred by the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcements Act 2007. Fees start at around £160 to issue a “type A” claim (e.g., unlawful deduction of wages or breach of contract). It costs £250 for a “type B” claim (e.g., unfair dismissal, discrimination claims), with a further hearing fee of £230 for Type A claims and £950 for Type B claims.

Since their inception in 1964, Employment Tribunals had been free, with costs met by the government.

At the time of the changes, there were many criticisms of the fees system on the basis that they would restrict the number of people able to afford to take cases forward to tribunal. These warnings have been vindicated.

In the first year following the introduction of fees, the numbers of cases accepted to go to tribunal dropped dramatically, by 77 percent. Cases fell from 187,441 during the period October 2012 to September 2013, to just 43,961 from October 2013 to September 2014.

Employers and government ministers asserted at the time that fees were necessary to prevent vexatious and unfounded claims. Yet there is no evidence to show that the drop in people taking claims forward can be attributed to such claims. Evidence from the Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) Scotland and England, the Law Society of Scotland and the universities of Bristol and Strathclyde shows that it is workers with genuine cases who are being prevented from pursuing their claim.

The August 2015 study “Employment Tribunal Fees—effect on clients of the Citizens Advice Bureaux” revealed that the introduction of the fees has been a major determining factor in cases not going forward to tribunal.

Workers who have lost their jobs are often not in any financial position to take cases forward. This is particularly the case for workers moving from one low paid job to another. The CAB study notes that workers who have been advised that their case is strong often will not take it forward for fear of losing the case and then losing the fees they have paid out.

The levels of compensation awarded in most tribunal cases in relation to the fees themselves are also a factor in many cases not being taken out. In disability discrimination, the average award is £7,536, with 18 percent of those awarded compensation receiving less than £3,000 and 29 percent less than £5,000.

In cases of race discrimination, the average award is £4,831 with 28 percent of those awarded compensation receiving less than £3,000 and 46 percent receiving less than £5,000. In the case of sex discrimination, the average award is £5,900, with 22 percent of those awarded receiving less than £3,000 and 39 percent less than £5,000.

The Funding Code, published by the Legal Aid Agency, an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice, advises that a “reasonable person” would not litigate a claim with 50-60 percent prospects, unless the likely damages award was at least four times the likely cost of pursuing the case.

Prior to these changes in legislation, a major problem was that tribunal compensation awards were often not being paid. A 2013 study by the department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) found that only 49 percent of tribunal awards were paid in full, with 16 percent paid in part. Thirty-five percent of those winning their case against an employer received no money at all.

Many have found that since the introduction of fees, there has been difficulty in obtaining legal advice from those working on a “no win—no fee” basis. This has led to people pursuing cases that win and then being no better off financially once legal costs were deducted.

In the case of the Palmers, it was clear that without the financial support of their father it is likely they would not have been able to take their case forward to tribunal.

The CAB-led study highlights the fact that many workers feel powerless to do anything to remedy a wrongdoing. Comments like this cited in the report are common: “Well as far as I'm concerned, for me, there is no law or legal system ... as far [sic] it is me getting justice, you know. You’ve got to pay for justice. What sort of justice is that you’ve got to buy it?”

The fact that workers are not able to access justice is leading to a growing number of unlawful employment practices being normalised, and is just one expression of the ferocious attack on working conditions and democratic rights since the financial crash of 2008.

The Unison trade union failed in August last year to challenge the changes to employment tribunals in the Court of Appeal. The court ruled that it could not be inferred that a drop in the number of employment claims was entirely down to potential claimants being unable to afford fees.

Unison is currently challenging the ruling in the Supreme Court.

Unison is opposed to tribunal fees primarily on the basis that they are harmful to its efforts to deepen collaboration with employers and the state. Last September, Mike Kirby, Unison’s Scottish Secretary, said of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) plan to end tribunal fees in Scotland, “This announcement goes a long way towards building more sensible industrial relations in Scotland and we welcome it” (emphasis added).

The content of these “sensible relations” is outlined in the programme of the devolved SNP administration’s programme for 2015-16, “A Stronger Scotland,” which Unison lauded. It states, “The Scottish Government’s partnership with the Scottish Trades Union Congress and strong belief in the contribution of the Trade Union movement to fairness and equity at work is also important. We will continue to oppose the legislation being brought forward by the UK Government which threatens to undermine the Unions’ ability to act as partners in economic development” (emphasis added).

The Labour Party, even prior to Jeremy Corbyn being elected leader, said it would abolish the ET fee-paying system. Yet it is they and the trade unions that are responsible for these and many other attacks being imposed.

Labour under Tony Blair came to power in 1997, after successive Conservative governments had introduced a battery of anti-trade union laws. Over the next 13 years Labour maintained this legislation while in office, with the unions not lifting a finger in opposition. If workers are to fight back against ruthless employers, they cannot depend on the courts for legal redress, or the Labour Party and trade unions that are proven defenders of the capitalist class.

Australia: Pacific Islanders suffer slave-like conditions in fruit industry

Paul Bartizan

Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition government has brushed aside recent exposures of the highly exploitative conditions facing Pacific Islander “seasonal workers” involved in fruit and vegetable harvesting and threatened to deport those who refuse to accept the harsh conditions.

Late last month ABC television’s “7.30 Report” revealed that a group of Fijian and Tongan workers hired under the government’s Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) were being paid as little as $A10 per week to harvest tomatoes.

The Pacific Island workers were hired by AFS Contracting, a “government-approved” SWP employer in Victoria’s Shepparton region, but sought permission to find other work. Those hired under the SWP scheme, however, can only work in Australia for a maximum of seven months per year and are tied to the farms contracted by their “Approved Employer.”

Isikeli Fifita from Tonga told the program that he earned $A201.96 for a week harvesting nearly three bins of tomatoes at the rate of $68 per bin. A bin typically holds 500 kilograms of fruit. AFS Contracting deducted $80 from his pay for accommodation, $50 for health insurance, $32 for transport and $30 tax, leaving him with only $9.96 in his pay packet.

Sia Davis said $120 was deducted from her pay each week for the privilege of sharing a caravan with two other women. Two of the women had to share a bed. For two consecutive weeks, her pay was reduced to zero, after deductions imposed by the labour contractor.

The workers secretly recorded AFS Contracting owner Tony Yamankol who threatened to sack the workers in response to their complaints. “If I terminate you, [then] you won’t come back to Australia [with] any other employer on this program,” he said.

While the workers quit AFS and sought permission to find another employer, their appeals have been ignored by the government. Minister for Employment Michaelia Cash has refused repeated requests by the ABC and other media outlets to be interviewed about the case. The Labor Party, which initiated the scheme when it was in government in 2008, and the unions, fully endorse the SWP scheme.

Australian immigration and employment officials who met with the workers in recent weeks said that they would be deported if did not return to AFS Contracting.

Merewairita Sovasiga told the ABC that government officials were “pushing us to go back home. Every one of us is not happy. And we are going back with nothing.” Another worker, Manueli Taione, said, “If you don’t want to go back to Fiji, they [the government] are trying to send us to our employer Tony [Yamankol] … But I don’t like the way they treat us, they treat us like slaves.”

The “7.30 Report” is just the latest in a series of exposures of the exploitation in the agriculture and food-processing sectors under Australia’s SWP scheme.

In late December, the Weekly Times newspaper reported on the deportation of six Fijian workers by PlantGrowPick, a Queensland based labour hire company. The workers said they were only paid $1.20 an hour when the horticultural award rate is $21.61 an hour, had been verbally abused by supervisors, denied medical access, refused work breaks and prohibited from attending church. After complaining about their treatment they were sent back to Fiji by the labour contractor.

This month Maroochy Sunshine, another Queensland labour-hire company, was found guilty of violating labour laws by the Fair Work Ombudsman. More than half of the 22 Vanuatu workers hired to pick fruit and vegetables in the Lockyer Valley, the Sunshine Coast and Bundaberg were not paid any wages at all.

The Seasonal Workers Program was introduced by the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008, following a similar Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme in New Zealand in 2007. In 2011, Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard touted the benefits of the scheme to Pacific Island leaders falsely claiming that their countries and the workers’ families and communities would benefit.

The SWP is a contemporary version of the system of “blackbirding” whereby nearly one million workers were used as cheap indentured labour in Australia and other Pacific countries from the 1860s to the 1940s. Many Pacific Islanders were kidnapped and sold to Australian landowners who treated them as virtual slaves with no security or citizenship rights.

The Fijian workers highlighted on the “7.30 Report” were told before signing up to the season workers program that they could earn $657 per week on hourly award rates, excluding taxes and expenses, or an average of $595 if they worked piece rates. The reality was nothing like this. According to recent Australian government statistics, the average residual income for workers in the SWP pilot program (after tax, travel, accommodation and living costs deductions) was only $4,500 for a 16-week contract and $7,500 for a 26-week contract.

Since its introduction, over 8,500 workers have been granted SWP visas and there are 70 “government-approved” employers. The program targets workers from the impoverished island states of the South Pacific—Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Nauru, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji and East Timor—who are being forced by worsening economic circumstances to seek work in Australia or New Zealand.

The average annual after tax-wage in Tonga is around $A6,000 and in Fiji $A8,000. Tonga, which has a population of just over 100,000, relies on remittances from the estimated 200,000 expatriates for 39 percent of its GDP.

The National Farmers Federation (NFF) has responded to the recent reports on the real wages and conditions facing those hired under the SWP by stating that “bad publicity” could reduce the number of Pacific Islanders joining the program.

The NFF’s concerns have nothing do with ending the harsh and repressive conditions facing Pacific Islanders workers but maintaining the flow of cheap labour to the industry and maximising profits.

Early last month, the Liberal-National coalition announced that it was extending the SWP to other sectors of Australia’s agricultural industry to include cattle, sheep, grains and mixed farming enterprises. This, the government cynically declared, was “good news for citizens from our SWP partner countries … who will now have more opportunities to benefit from a wider variety of work experiences while also earning a decent wage.”

The slave-like conditions created by the SWP scheme is not an aberration but the labour-hire business model that the ruling elite seeks to impose not just in the agricultural industry but on all sections of the working class.