In new cost-cutting move, PSA subcontracts Opel operation in Germany

Marianne Arens

In accordance with the announcement by the Opel Executive Board earlier this month, the automaker will subcontract its ITEZ research and development centre in Rüsselsheim, Germany to French engineering firm Segula Technologies, which will take over the majority of the facilities and “up to 2,000 employees”.

With this move, the systematic dismantling of the Opel Group—which was sold by US carmaker General Motors to French auto company PSA last year—has taken another significant step forward.

The ITEZ Adam-Opel-Haus and Design Centre and the Dudenhofen test track still employ almost 8,000 engineers, developers, designers and others. Opel and GM previously used the location for research and development, including for the development of the Ampera electric car.

Opel CEO Michael Lohscheller announced September 5 that the sale to Segula was the best solution for the development centre, which he said has suffered from a “drastic reduction in orders”. The centre, company officials say, has only been working at 40 percent capacity for some time.

This will leave the fate of the developers and researchers at Rüsselsheim in limbo. Segula has 11,000 employees worldwide and already works for PSA, the maker of Citroën, Peugeot and other brands, in France. The company intends to build up its Northern Europe headquarters in Rüsselsheim, Germany, by acquiring plants from Opel’s vehicle and drive train development facilities.

Segula, according to the deal negotiated with Opel, is supposed to take on up to 2,000 engineers and developers and guarantee them protection against dismissal up to 2023. This cannot hide the fact that conditions for these employees will worsen. Since the main customer will continue to be the PSA/Opel Group, the employees shifted to Segula will likely work for significantly less pay and under worse conditions in order to guarantee Segula a profit.

The deal follows a familiar pattern. Increasingly, the auto industry outsources parts of its research and development to subcontracting firms to lower costs and hedge against changes in market conditions. The large automakers face increasing risks from the immense costs associated with electric car technology and mounting global competition, which is increasingly taking the form of a trade war. Brexit and the recent lira crisis in Turkey (where Opel exports) has significantly increased these risks. Under such conditions, wage reductions and temporary work are on the rise in the engineering profession, and the pressure on permanent workers and their former gains is increasing.

In July, the French daily Le Monde announced that intensive talks about the sale of the Opel development centre would be held with Segula and three other car service providers (Altran, Akka, Bertrandt). These moves are part of the restructuring program called PACE!, which the Opel works council and the IG Metall union signed off on last year, shortly before the takeover of Opel and Vauxhall by the PSA group.

Following a slice-and-dice tactic, the cuts agreed to by the unions so far have been implemented step by step. As car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer told broadcaster ZDF in July, the board and the unions had “deliberately not announced everything all at once”, because otherwise “one would have been afraid of triggering a revolution or a strike”.

Acknowledging the value of the unions, management at the Rüsselsheim Development Centre announced in early September, “We want to discuss with our social partners exactly how the selection of employees [who would switch to Segula] will take place.”

At the end of July, PSA and Opel management announced that the company had generated a profit of more than €500 million in the first half of 2018, making money for the first time after nearly twenty years of losses. The reason for this was not an expansion of sales, however. On the contrary, Opel’s European market share continues to shrink and is only about half what it was in 2010. At that time, Opel had a market share of 10.2 percent, now it is only 5.6 percent.

Profits have increased, company officials boasted, due to a reduction of fixed costs by 28 percent over the last twelve months. This “success” has been achieved through the collusion of IG Metall and other unions in the increased exploitation of the Opel workforce and attacks on contract workers and subcontractors.

In Opel plants outside Germany, around 17,000 workers are being blackmailed into giving up past gains and their jobs are being systematically decimated. With the help of the respective national trade unions, PSA and Opel/Vauxhall in the United Kingdom, Poland, Spain, Hungary and Austria have reduced wages by threatening to close factories. But all the concessions accepted by the unions have not saved jobs. The workforce is still threatened with job losses, such as in the Opel plant in Vienna-Aspern, where 600 of 1,400 jobs will be cut by the end of next year.

A worker familiar with the conditions at a PSA Citroën plant in Spain told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “The union does nothing to protect workers. If you don’t vote for one union or another you get in trouble. Management will hire a person in the morning and they will quit by lunchtime because of the pressure to meet production quotas. They’re always looking for new people. The new hires will get paid €800 and will have to do the same work as senior workers making €1,500 a month.”

The contracts for hundreds of temporary workers have been terminated at Opel plants in Germany since the turn of the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, short-time working has been introduced on the assembly lines, and the IG Metall is supporting gradual job cuts and wage reductions.

In May 2018, the union approved a management plan for the destruction of twenty percent of permanent jobs. By 2019, 3,700 of today’s approximately 18,500 employees will be pushed out “voluntarily” by means of partial retirement, early retirement and severance payments. This means the permanent loss of better-paid and more secure positions for the next generation.

Union representatives have also agreed to other labour cost reductions. Opel workers are being forced to give up the wage increases agreed to in February in the metalworking and electronics industries. The concessions were sold to the workforce by the IG Metall officials as the cost for supposed job guarantees until 2023. The worthlessness of this promise can be seen in the recent sell-off of the Rüsselsheim development centre, where Opel workers will be handed over to lower paying subcontractors.

The pledges by PSA to “further invest in all locations” are always linked to the statement “if these plants remain competitive”. The viability of the production plant in Eisenach is particularly uncertain. Some 450 out of 1,300 posts are to be slashed, which is one in three jobs. The long-term continuation of two-shift operations in Eisenach is also uncertain.

In addition to the decline in sales the impending conversion to electric cars could lead to the destruction of 100,000 jobs in the German auto industry over the next few years, according to a study conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute in June 2018. In drive train technology, almost half of jobs could be wiped out.

This has aggravated the situation not only at Opel, but also in other car companies. Ford is already speculating about the fate of its production plant in Saarlouis, near the French border, and its development centre in Cologne.

In the face of this attack autoworkers take the initiative by building rank-and-file factory committees independently of the IG Metall. These committees must fight to unite workers throughout Europe, North America and around the world in a common struggle to defend the right of all workers to good-paying and secure jobs. This must be combined with a political struggle for a socialist policy, including the transformation of PSA and the auto giants into public enterprises, collectively owned and democratically run by workers themselves.

China and Russia strengthen ties to counter US threats

Peter Symonds

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin met in Vladivostok on Tuesday and pledged greater strategic and economic cooperation aimed at countering the US.

The Trump administration is accelerating its trade war measures against China, with preparations to impose another $200 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods, while imposing further sanctions on Russia.

Moreover, the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy, unveiled at the beginning of this year, declared that great power competition, not terrorism, is the primary focus of US military strategy. It branded China and Russia as “revisionist powers”—that is, countries that pose a threat to the existing “international rules-based order” dominated by the US imperialism.

Neither Xi nor Putin named the United States or Trump but they left no doubt that stronger ties between China and Russia were a reaction to punitive US measures. In an obvious reference to Washington, Xi declared that the two countries would cooperate “to oppose the policy of unilateral actions and trade protectionism.”

The Chinese president noted that he had met Putin three times this year and the two countries held “similar or identical positions on international matters.” China-Russia cooperation, he declared, is “gaining ever more importance against a backdrop of growing instability and unpredictability on a global scale.”

Putin declared that his talks with Xi had paved the way to enhance “the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation between Russia and China.” He noted that the two leaders had discussed “military-technical co-operation.” Putin referred, in particular, to their identical views on the need for a “political and diplomatic settlement of the situation on the Korean peninsula” and urged Washington to normalise relations with North Korea.

Significantly, Xi and Putin met as more than 3,000 Chinese troops, along with 30 fixed-wing aircraft, joined huge Russian military exercises known as Vostok in Siberia. China and Russia have held joint war games regularly, but foreign participation in these annual drills have been limited previously to Russia’s closest allies from the former Soviet Union. In the past, these specific drills were used to prepare for war against China.

The Russian military billed this year’s week-long Vostok exercises as the biggest since 1981, with around 300,000 Russian personnel and more than 1,000 aircraft, 36,000 tanks and scores of ships.

Vasily Kashin, an analyst from the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics, told the Wall Street Journal that China’s exercises with Russia provided “much-needed foreign experience that is crucial if Beijing wants to establish an internationally-capable fighting force.”

Xi was in Vladivostok to participate in the Eastern Asian Forum, established by Putin in 2015 to attract foreign investment to the Russian Far East. The fact that Xi attended for the first time, along with a delegation of nearly 1,000 Chinese businesspeople and officials, was aimed at underscoring the growing ties between the two countries.

Facing pressure and threats from Washington, Beijing and Moscow have enhanced their cooperation despite conflicting interests. In 2014, the two countries signed a landmark agreement on oil and gas sales to China that had been long delayed due to haggling over prices.

Russia also has been reluctant to sell hi-tech weaponry to China, fearing there was still the potential for it to become an adversary. However, in recent years, Moscow has begun selling some of its most advanced weapons to Beijing, including the S-400 surface-to-air missile system and Su-35 fourth-generation fighter jet.

Putin was clearly seeking to expand economic ties with China as a means of circumventing sanctions imposed by the US and its allies. The Russian president told the media that he and Xi had paid “special attention to trade and economic cooperation.”

“We noted with satisfaction that bilateral trade increased by almost one third in the first six months of the year, reaching $50 billion,” Putin said. “We have every reason to believe that by the end of the year, trade will reach a record high of $100 billion.”

On the sidelines of the Eastern Asian Forum, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba signed a deal with the state-owned Russian Direct Investment Fund, Russian internet group Mail.ru and telecom company MegaFon to establish a Russian online shopping portal.

China and Russia signed agreements aimed at “consolidating Russian-Chinese regional, production and investment cooperation in the Far East.” They outlined a program for developing bilateral “trade, economic, and investment cooperation” in Russia’s Far East for the next six years. The two countries also “reaffirmed their interest in broadening the use of national currencies in mutual payments,” thus avoiding the use of US dollars as the means of trade.

Xi told the media: “Our trade is making progress. Both sides are actively working on the rapprochement of the projects One Belt, One Road and the EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union], promoting large strategic projects in the energy sector, aviation, space and transport links, and also developing our cooperation in new spheres, such as finance, agriculture, and e-commerce.”

The reference to China’s massive One Belt, One Road infrastructure plan for linking Eurasia, and the EAEU, proposed by Russia for economic and political cooperation between former Soviet republics, is significant. Potentially these are rival plans to bring the vast Eurasian landmass under the domination of Moscow or Beijing. That Xi is offering a “rapprochement” on this key issue signals that the two countries are putting aside their differences, for the time being at least.

Russia and China are not formal military allies and both sides are well aware that significant strategy and economic differences remain. While looking to consolidate ties to counter the threat posed by the United States, Moscow and Beijing are each willing to cut a deal with Washington at the expense of the other, should the opportunity arise.

The intransigence of the Trump administration, however, is driving the two countries into each other’s arms, just as it is destabilising long-established alliances of the US with European powers and Japan.

This instability is not simply a product of the erratic and reckless policies of the Trump administration. The volatility reflects the drive by US imperialism to arrest its historic decline through economic and military means. Once again, as in the 20th century, rival economic and political blocs are forming, as the precursor to world war.

One in every nine human beings goes hungry

Patrick Martin

The number of hungry people in the world continues to grow, reaching 821 million in 2017, or one in every nine people, according to the report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018,” released Tuesday in Rome by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other groups.

The figures are horrific: 151 million children under five years old, 22 percent of the world’s total, are “stunted” by malnutrition; one in every ten children in Asia is described as “wasting,” with weights well below what they should be given their heights; a staggering one in three women of child-bearing age suffers from anemia, in large measure from poor diet.

The report’s authors warn of “alarming signs of increasing food insecurity and high levels of different forms of malnutrition,” but offer no prescription to resolve the deepening crisis except the pious wish that more should be done to bring an end to the military conflicts, including civil wars, which are the primary cause of food insecurity, and to counteract climate change, the second most important cause.

The 821 million hungry people in the world include an estimated 515 million in Asia, 256.5 million in Africa, 39 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, and perhaps 20 million in the rest of the world.

The last figure is undoubtedly a gross underestimate, since it largely accepts the claims of governments in the advanced capitalist countries that hunger and malnutrition are non-existent. If accurate figures could be obtained for the number living on the brink of starvation in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the European Union, the total for the world would likely top 1 billion people.

Credit: World Food Program

These figures demonstrate the utter failure of capitalist system. The productive forces—land, machinery, agricultural technique—are more than adequate to feed the human race. There is a super-abundance of food on the planet. But the profit drive of giant agribusiness corporations, and the reactionary nation-state system, dividing humanity with its artificial and completely outmoded boundaries, keep a billion human beings from obtaining the food they need as a minimum condition of a decent existence.

The UN report found that 2017 was the third year in a row in which the number of people who aren’t getting enough to eat has risen. This figure has risen from 783.7 million in 2014, for a total rise of more than 38 million. In 2017, severe food insecurity, defined as a family running out of food and going at least a day without eating, was up in every region of the world except Europe and North America.

The sharpest increases in malnutrition were in Africa and South America, as well as in the country of Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula across the Red Sea from East Africa, which has been ravaged by war and a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with US backing. High levels of malnutrition were found in South Asia as well, but these were largely unchanged from 2016 to 2017.

Over a longer time frame, since 2005, the FAO found that the number of malnourished people in Africa had increased by 60 million, while the number in Asia declined significantly.

Particularly striking was the change in North Africa, once a comparatively prosperous area, where the number facing malnutrition fell from 9.7 million in 2000 to 8.5 million in 2010, before soaring to 20 million last year. Similarly, the number facing malnutrition in Western Asia—the Middle East—rose from 20.1 million in 2010 to 30.2 million in 2017.

The combined increase across this vast region, extending from Morocco to Iran, is more than 20 million people added to the rolls of those on the brink of starvation, during the period that coincides with the US-NATO attack on Libya, the revolutionary uprising and its bloody suppression in Egypt, the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and the aftermath of the war in Iraq.

The FAO’s 2017 report on food security focused largely on the impact of these wars, as well as similar conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Somalia in driving up the number facing hunger. The agency’s 2018 report focuses mainly on the impact of the second most important cause of hunger in the twenty-first century, climate change.

According to the report, “climate variability—extreme droughts and floods—are already undermining production of wheat, rice and maize in tropical and temperate regions, and that the trend is expected to worsen as temperatures increase and become more extreme.”

It continued, “Hunger is significantly worse in countries with agricultural systems that are highly sensitive to rainfall and temperature variability and severe drought, and where the livelihood of a high proportion of the population depends on agriculture.”

Drought, linked to the long-term changes in weather patterns associated with climate change, has devastated four different population centers: southern Africa, including South Africa, the enclaves of Lesotho and Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe Malawi and Madagascar; the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda; West Africa, from Mali to Senegal; and parts of the Indian subcontinent, especially southern Sindh province in Pakistan and neighboring regions in India, which are densely populated.

Wasting is a syndrome that has the most pernicious effect on children’s health, both short-term and long-term. Children affected by wasting accounted for 875,000 deaths in 2013, the last year when studies are available, 12.6 percent of all deaths of children under five years of age. Of these, 516,000 were related to severe wasting, essentially deaths by starvation and related diseases.

Half of all the children afflicted by wasting live in South Asia, and the countries with a prevalence of 15 percent or more include India and Sri Lanka. Also in this category are Papua New Guinea, Yemen, and four countries in East Africa: Eritrea, Djibouti, South Sudan, and Sudan.

What all these countries have in common—although there is not a word of this in the UN report—is that they are former colonies of the world’s imperialist powers, which continue to dominate the world economy and exploit the resources of the “less developed countries,” whether through direct investment, loans, or austerity demands enforced by the International Monetary Fund.

Among the worst-off countries are those like Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia, subjected to imperialist wars and imperialist-instigated civil wars, which in some cases have extended for more than a generation.

Nutrition is an increasing concern, not just for the billions in Asia, Africa and Latin America, who constitute the majority of the world’s population, but for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, where living standards have been driven down for more than three decades.

According to the UN report, the second-largest nutritional crisis involves the spread of obesity, particularly in North America. This too is a disease of poverty. “Food insecurity contributes to overweight and obesity, as well as undernutrition, and high rates of these forms of malnutrition coexist in many countries,” the report explains. “The link between food insecurity and overweight and obesity passes through diet, which is affected by the cost of food. Nutritious, fresh foods often tend to be expensive. Thus, when household resources for food become scarce, people choose less expensive foods that are often high in caloric density and low in nutrients, particularly in urban settings and upper-middle- and high-income countries.”

Some 13 percent of the world’s adults, or 672 million, are medically obese, about one person in eight, with the highest rates by far in the United States. The lowest rates of obesity are in Africa and Asia, although rates are rapidly increasing.

United Nations Regional Course in International Law Programme for African Scholars 2019

Application Deadline: 22nd October 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: African countries (see list below) 

To be taken at (country): Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Fields of Study: The Regional Courses may include seminars on the following topics: Introduction to international law, Treaty law, State responsibility, International peace and security, Peaceful settlement of international disputes, Diplomatic and consular law, International organizations, United Nations institutions and law making, The Work of the International Law Commission, African Union law and institutions, Organization of American States law and institutions, International human rights law, Movements of persons, International humanitarian law, International criminal law, International environmental law, International watercourses, Law of the sea, International trade law, International investment law, Legal research, Legal drafting

About the Award: The 2018 United Nations Regional Course in International Law for Africa will be organized by the Codification Division of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs in cooperation with Ethiopia, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the African Union. The Regional Course will be conducted in English.
The Regional Courses provide high-quality training by leading scholars and practitioners on a broad range of core subjects of international law, as well as specific subjects of particular interest to the countries in a given region. In addition, the interactive nature of the training allows the participants to share experiences and exchange ideas, which promotes greater understanding and cooperation on legal matters in the region.
The Regional Courses are intended to enable qualified professionals, in particular government officials and teachers of international law from developing countries and countries with emerging economies, to deepen their knowledge of international law and of the legal work of the United Nations and its associated bodies.

Type: Short course, Fellowship

Eligibility: To qualify for the Regional Course, candidates

• must have a legal background with professional experience in the field of international law.
• are required to submit a medical certificate of good health and to certify that they are able to attend the entire course period.
• Fluency in spoken and written English is also required.

Selection Criteria: When selecting participants for the Regional Courses:

• due consideration is given to the candidates’ qualifications, to the scope of their professional duties, to the relevance of the training to their professional duties and to gender balance.
• Applications from female candidates are strongly encouraged.
• Due consideration is also given to those candidates who are already present in Addis Ababa.

Number of Awardees: The course will accommodate up to 30 participants.

Value of Programme: The fellowships cover the fellowship recipient’s travel in economy class, accommodation, meals, medical insurance, participation in the Regional Course and the training materials. In accordance with the policies and procedures governing the administration of United Nations fellowships, participants will also receive a stipend to cover other living expenses.
Qualified candidates may also apply for self-funded positions. Self-funded participants bear all costs associated with their participation (travel, accommodation and living expenses). Training materials and lunches during the weekdays are provided to all participants.

Duration of Programme: The Regional Course will be held at the facilities of the ECA in Addis Ababa, from11 February to 8 March 2019.

Eligible countries: The Regional Course is open to candidates from the following countries: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

How to Apply: Download and fill the Application Form at the right hand corner

Visit Programme Webpage for details

Award Provider: United Nations

Nokia Foundation Scholarships for International Students to Study in Finland 2018/2019

Application Deadline: 1st October 2018

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): Finland

About the Award: Nokia Scholarships are granted to individuals pursuing a doctoral degree in information or telecommunications technology or in clearly related supporting scientific disciplines. Scholarship can be granted for doctoral studies in a Finnish university or to a Finnish applicant for doctoral studies abroad.

Type: PhD

Eligibility: The applicant must receive a commitment statement from his/her principal supervisor, who must be a professor, docent, or senior scientist at the university at which the student is pursuing their degree. The statement must be submitted to the application database by the supervisor. The scholarship can be granted no more than two times to the same individual.

Number of scholarships: Not specified

Duration of Scholarship: The scholarship can be granted no more than two times to the same individual.

How to Apply: Nokia Scholarship Application

Visit scholarship webpage for details to apply

The U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel (vs. Iran and the World)

Gary Leupp

The increasingly embattled and reviled, soon to fall Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the “Iran nuclear deal”) in May.

He did so in order to fulfill a campaign promise, and express his pathological resentment for his predecessor by undoing an Obama achievement. That’s how the whole world understands it—especially as his idiocy becomes widely acknowledged— even by his inner circle of frustrated leakers in an unfolding drama of White House chaos.

Trump is a very unusual U.S. president, pursuing peace with North Korea, for example, while seeking regime change in Iran. Where’s the consistency, ask foreign leaders?  They understand that the U.S. leader is not guided by any coherent ideology and is hence unpredictable and often irrational. They also know that the conditions Mike Pompeo set for the U.S. to return to the agreement were outrageous, humiliating and designed for rejection.

Trump has not only withdrawn the U.S. from the agreement but sought to block its implementation by imposing secondary sanctions on countries trading with Iran. These infuriate European officials and have produced strong protest. It’s preposterous to demand that Daimler AG cancel plans for Mercedez-Benz manufacture in Iran until Tehran ceases support for Hizbollah or the Syrian army.  Europeans vow to find ways to escape U.S. efforts to sabotage trade. The Chinese will surely continue to purchase Iranian oil; so will the Indians, South Koreans, Turks, Italians, and Japanese. These are Iran’s top petroleum customers.

Who in the world supports the U.S. in its efforts to sabotage of the JCPOA? Who supports it in its drive to inflict economic pain, and then, according to the plan, the overthrow of the regime making use of MEK and other proxies? There are two countries whose leaders do, emphatically: Saudi Arabia and Israel. Unlikely bedfellows, would they not seem, even though united in hostility to Tehran?

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy governed by harsh Sharia law. It is the land of two of Islam’s holiest sites,  the homeland of Sunni Islam. Its royals view the Islamic Republic of Iran as a bastion of (Shiite) heresy and rival for regional influence. They see it as operating through any other Shiite forces in the region: various political parties and militias in (primarily Shiite) Iraq; the Alawite-led but secular government of Syria, commanding as it does the continuing loyalty of the Syrian Arab Army; the (Shiite-based) Hizbollah political party and militia in Lebanon; the mass movement of the Shiite majority in Sunni-ruled Bahrain; the Houthis of Yemen, etc.

The Saudi government does not publicly target Shiism; there is a significant (rather oppressed) Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia itself. It does not represent itself as defender of the truth faith, at war with the heretical Shiites, but as a U.S. and British ally (and huge arms customer) concerned with “maintaining stability” in the region—stability of the status quo constantly threatened by Persian trouble-making.

Israel is of course a unique sort of parliamentary republic, a democracy of sorts (it being understood that Palestinians are second-class citizens). Religious law does not pertain as it does in many Islamic countries (although Jewish rabbinical courts are part of the justice system). Israeli leaders don’t care about Sunni-Shiite differences as they care about Iran’s support for numerous Arab enemies of Israel. And of course, they’ve said for years that Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map. (The Iranian president had quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that “the occupation of Jerusalem will vanish from the page of time” but this was distorted and the misquote used to this day endlessly to justify the baseless charge that Iran plans to nuke Jerusalem.)

Iran, they keep saying, is an “existential threat” to Israel. It supports Assad, Hizbollah, at times Hamas. The Shah overthrown in 1979 had been a friend, but his successors call for “Death to Israel!” Binyamin Netanyahu has for decades shrieked about the immanent likelihood of an Iranian nuclear test; but it was all a ploy to get the U.S. to bomb Iran. Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama took the bait. (Dick Cheney probably would have. Or John McCain.)

Their joint efforts to urge U.S. action against Iran have brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into what is now an openly admitted relationship, a de facto anti-Iranian alliance. It is also an alliance against the Syrian regime that is aligned with Iran, Hizbollah, (sometimes) Hamas, and contests Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. With the U.S., these two countries constitute what we can call an axis—an axis opposed to the rest of the world’s right to deal with and trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In Syria, the Syrian Arab Army with its international allies (including of course Russia) has largely won the conflict initiated in 2011, fueled by foreign jihadis. Al-Qaeda (Tahrir al-Sham) forces are concentrated now in Idlib Province—perhaps 10,000 according to Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy on Syria. There are tens of thousands of others in aligned groups. They’ve been corralled there and now the Army is closing in. The pacification of that province could mark the end of the war and perhaps the end of the neocon project of region-wide regime change. (But again, Trump is unpredictable.)

It’s not clear that U.S. efforts to sabotage of the Iran Deal will work (and bring down the mullahs). But in the meantime, the U.S. may try to sabotage the reconquest of Idlib. When someone like Pompeo depicts this final chapter to a tragic conflict as a humanitarian catastrophe, it raises the prospect of U.S. force to prevent that humanitarian capacity. (Remember Libya?)

Now Trump warns Russia (in a tweet) against “recklessly” attacking Idlib. And the Israeli press reports that the U.S. is identifying Syrian government chemical weapons centers to strike, if necessary (as though there are such centers). RT reports a false-flag operation is probably being planned. There may be some release of sarin that the U.S. will use as a pretext for strikes—to protect the civilians of Idlib, of course.

The Saudis have been big supporters of some of the groups in Idlib; the Israelis continue to bomb Syrian army forces; the U.S. insists on its right to intervene and has thousands of troops in the country. They’re all there, probably coordinating strategy with Washington, towards both Syria and Iran.

The Exceptional Nation (that elected an idiot); the Nation-State of the Jewish People (that named a square and a high-speed train station after Trump); the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia headed by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (who awarded Trump a gold medal). Such a fine Axis of Evil! But the axis pivots on Trump,  who may not be long on his throne.

Of course the evil that men do lives after their impeachments or whatever ignominious end. Pence who never dines with women other than his wife might have a fine time with the Saudis, and since he believes God gave Israel to the Jews (Gen. 12:3 etc.) he’ll have a fine time with the Israelis. But he may be perceived just as Trump is perceived by the world now: as an idiot incapable of providing positive leadership to anything, an abject bootlicker so outclassed by the likes of Merckel, Putin, Xi, Macron, Abe, etc. that he will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back again.

May the Axis shatter on the rocks of defeat in Syria, Iranian resistance, world powers’ rejection of U.S. hegemony, Israeli isolation and a crippling U.S. political crisis.

The Struggle of Small Farmers in Argentina’s Crisis

Vijay Prashad

Thirty years ago, in my economics text book, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better – said the author – for Argentina to concentrate on production and export of beef, while Germany should put its resources towards electronic products. This was the essence of the comparative advantage theory – do more of what you do best, rather than diversify your economy. It seemed churlish. It condemned Argentina to produce raw materials, while Germany went ahead with technological development.

Argentina, at that time, was still a major producer and exporter of beef. We had no access to José Hernández’s epic poem Martín Fierro, about the gauchos of the pampas, the cowboys of the plains of Argentina, but we knew of the ferocious compadritos (hoodlums) and cuchilleros (knife fighters) from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. There were cowboys mixed in here, loners who sat on their horses on Argentina’s flat-lands and gathered their cattle for the market.

No longer do these horsemen define the Argentine economy. It is more accurate to portray the soybean farmer as the protagonist of the country’s fortunes. Much of this has to do with the growth of the Chinese market, where rising living standards have shifted dietary habits – including more meat consumption. The soybeans go to feed the pigs of China. It is remarkable that from 1960 to 2013 the world soybean harvested area increased from 20 million hectares to 120 million hectares. Argentina became one of the major suppliers to the Chinese market. Four problems confound Argentina’s soybean trade:

+ The price of soybean has declined, with Argentina selling more volume but its farmers receiving less profit on their sale. In 2012, soybean sold at US$17.5/bushel, but now sells at US$8.4/bushel.

+ China buys more raw soybeans rather than soybean oil, which means that it retains the value-added parts of soybean production for its own industries.

+ Argentina’s right-wing government cut back on taxes for soybean export, which hurt its public revenues. Now, with the currency crisis, the government is going to reinstate the taxes.

+ A drought hurt Argentina’s soybean crop, to make up for which the industry purchased 120,000 tonnes from farmers in the United States. Environmental problems will continue to pose problems for Argentina’s soybean sector. Soybeans leach the soil.

Who Remembers Us?

Soybean production takes up about half of Argentina’s arable land. It is no longer cattle that run through the pampas; it is now the soybean flowers that tilt in the breeze.

WILDO WALKS ME THROUGH THE FIELDS

Wildo Eizaguirre likes to talk about farming. He farms only one hectare of land, which he rents from a real estate company. On this farm, Wildo is forced to be creative. The farm is near the town of La Plata, whose markets survive on the fresh produce grown by Bolivian migrant farmers such as Wildo. In greenhouses made of found wood and plastic sheeting, the farmers grow tomatoes and peppers, chard and lettuce. Barrels of home-made fertilizer line the edges of the farmland. Some of these fields are worked in an organic method, but others – such as those that grow tomatoes – have to be treated with chemicals. Wildo’s farm is clean. He works hard at that. He smiles proudly when I mention it.

Small farmers like Wildo find it difficult to survive. Half of their costs go to rent, while a third more goes to electricity. Farmers like Antonio García as well as Elsa and Mabel Yanaje suggest – as well – that the rent is a dead weight for them. The cost of land is prohibitive and their tenure on the land is uncertain. It prevents the farmers from making capital improvements to the farm or even from buying equipment (such as tractors) to make their labour more productive. Neither do these farmers own the fields nor do they control the pathways to the market. Brokers buy their produce at the lowest prices and then take them to be processed or sold directly to supermarkets. The money is made elsewhere than on the fields.

Wildo and the farmers around him belong to the Movement of the Excluded Workers (MTE), which is a part of the Confederation of Workers in the Popular Economy (CTEP). The concept of ‘popular economy’ (la economía popular) refers to activities inside the informal sector that are designed to benefit the workers in the sector and not the chain of accumulation that otherwise takes maximum advantage of them. In February this year, 40,000 workers of the CTEP and MTE marched to the headquarters of their provincial government demanding the declaration of a food emergency. These are people who work the land and who work to keep the city clean, but they have very little food to show for it. Hunger stalks their world. It is hunger, the sharp downturn of the economy and the lack of dignity shown to them that lead these workers to groups like CTEP and MTE.

In the CTEP office (Buenos Aires) I meet Juan Grabois, one of the leaders of CTEP. Most of the leaders of the Argentinian left are deceptively young – Juan is only 35 years old. It has to be remembered that the military Junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 killed the entire fruit of the left’s leadership. Young men and women like Juan Grabois came to politics when their country almost literally dissolved in the crucible of IMF policy making in 2001-02. Argentina exploded in a million directions, ordinary people blockading the streets and banging pots and pans – these were the piqueteros. Young people like Juan Grabois and Milagro Sala (now in prison) as well as Manuel Bertoldi and Itai Hagman of the political formation Patria Grande came of age in this period. They organised the Movement of the Unemployed Workers and the Movement of the Excluded Workers, student groups and feminist groups, platforms for the indigenous and platforms for the disillusioned. These young people are today the backbone of Argentina’s rapid regrowth of a genuine left.

Grabois pushes back his long hair as we talk about Argentina’s economic troubles, its currency slipping into oblivion against the US dollar. He has interesting ideas about the social wages that are needed to create a new Argentinian project – one in which, as he says, ‘no member of society suffers deprivation’ and every person is able to find a way to live. If such a new basis is not created, he feels, Argentina – like other parts of the world– will slip into permanent chaos. The crisis cannot be handled with military force. No new dictatorship is on the horizon. No police can fire enough tear gas to end the misery.

The people of CTEP and MTE are serious. In the countryside, I visit a processing shed set up by the MTE. Here, the organisation intends to store produce and process it to provide the farmers with a better deal. Maria Eugenia Ambort, a militant with MTE, tells me about MTE’s range of work. A few years ago, the MTE along with the Barrios de Pie (a militant group based in the neighbourhoods of Argentina) created community kitchens on the streets as a way to focus on the hunger crisis. Nothing that is meaningful to the workers is alien to the work of the MTE.

Wildo is a philosopher of the small farmers. ‘The land’, he says, is ‘predictable’. He knows when to plant his tomatoes and he knows when to harvest them. What is not predictable, he says, is the market. Wildo would like to live in a world where he is not defined by the power of capital. That is the world he is fighting to build.

Can the Ethiopian/Eritrean Alliance Bring Peace To South Sudan?

Thomas C. Mountain

All roads to peace in the Horn of Africa seem to run through the Eritrean capital of Asmara these days, with the latest peace initiative allying Ethiopia and Eritrea looking like it will be bringing peace to South Sudan.

To understand the South Sudan civil war you must look no further then the Chinese oil fields, the only such owned and operated in Africa, and one of the first targets of the rebellion/coup attempt over 5 years ago. The only beneficiary from the South Sudan civil war has been the USA, for China has seen all of its ambitious plans for further development of its one and only energy field shut down.

No one, outside of the Eritrean President Issias Aferworki, has pointed the finger of blame for this conflaguration where it belongs, at “foreign powers” aka the Central Intelligence Agency without whose $10 million a month for the past 60 months there would have been no functioning rebel army. Soldiers got to get paid, at least $300 a month and with some 20,000 rebel military (all former South Sudan regular army) the monthly nut to keep a war going is big enough to
have to be a deep pocket operation, $600 million and counting so far. No one else has access to this kind of cash but The Man aka the Central Intelligence Agency.

One of the main demands of the rebels has been to shut down Chinese oil operations in the country. Gee, whose national interest is this in? Certainly not South Sudans, whose very survival depends on these oil wells.

Fast forward to the soft coup and “peaceful revolution” in Ethiopia, whose former gangster government did the CIA’s bidding in funneling the dirty money to pay for the rebellion in South Sudan. With the Tigrayan ethnic minority regime no longer in power, as in “game over”, the handwriting is on the wall, it looks like the jig is up, for who can the CIA count on now to launder its filthy, bloodstained lucre? Not the usual client regimes like Uganda or Kenya, both of whose economies were damaged by the civil war in South Sudan. The CIA is certainly not going to trust hard currency strapped President Bashir of Sudan to pass the cash, not with hundreds of millions being involved. So maybe, just maybe, this evil spawn of Babylon, the CIA’s Dirty War in South Sudan, USA vs. China, might soon come to an end.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir was here in Asmara to finalize the peace deal, looking almost stunned that peace had finally come to pass. As Eritrean President Issias Aferwerki laid out the future peace for all to see, Dr. Abiy in Ethiopia made sure no more cash or weapons is funneled by the CIA to the rebellion. With families to feed the rebels need to collect a salary and have little choice but to accept reintegration into the South Sudanese regular army.

Once this critical step is complete a real peace can take hold, though one should not underestimate the deviousness of the CIA who may yet find a way to fund rebellion amongst disgruntled elements in the newly reunited South Sudanese Army.

Still, it seems Pax Americana has come to terms with the new reality on the ground out here in the Horn of Africa, what with China making its move into the energy industry in Ethiopia, building a multi billion$ natural gas pipeline to extract and export the estimated 4 trillion cubic meters lying beneath the Ethiopian Ogaden.

Now that a ceasefire has been reached between the Ogadeni fighters and Ethiopian P.M. Abiy’s government, again, signed here in Asmara, Ethiopia can start to use its massive energy reserves and begin to ween itself from bankrupting foreign currency drains for energy purchases.

The leaders of Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea have all gathered in where else but Asmara, and signed, sealed and started to deliver on peace and economic cooperation. Even the Godfather in Djibouti, who cried foul when the Somali President visited Asmara has had to sign the normalization of relations agreement with Eritrea.

And all of this absent anyone from any of the major imperial powers, strictly an African accomplishment though China has pledged many billion$ to keep Ethiopia afloat in its sea of debt, mainly to the western banks.

Real Pan Africanism has been a dream since the end of WW2, where African countries work together for their mutual peoples benefit and not allow the imperial bloodsuckers to continue their predations. With a wave of peace sweeping across the Horn of Africa what is left is on the ground economic development that will begin to lift some of the most war and famine blighted people on the planet out of their destitution. Will an Ethiopian/Eritrean Alliance really be able to bring the change so desperately needed?

Washington bullies Central American countries for adopting “One China” policy

Andrea Lobo

This weekend, Washington temporarily recalled its ambassadors from the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, and its charges d’affaires from Panama over “recent decisions to no longer recognize Taiwan.” This referred to the decisions to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese government in Beijing by El Salvador in August, the Dominican Republic in May and Panama last year.

The Trump administration also canceled a meeting scheduled for this week with foreign ministers and top military officials of the Northern Triangle of Central America—El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Having based its relations with China since 1979 on the “One China” policy, recognizing Beijing as the sole legitimate government of all of China, Washington’s measures against countries adopting the same policy constitute a remarkable level of imperialist bullying and rank political hypocrisy.

The spokesperson of the Salvadoran government, Roberto Lorenzana, declared Monday that “We have no objections to this meeting [the recalling of the ambassadors], the only thing we ask is that our decisions are respected.” Far from protesting and sharply exposing the predatory character of Washington’s response, officials of the countries affected have only made meek appeals and otherwise insisted that relations with the US remain unchanged.

The previous Monday, Republican Senators Cory Gardner and Marco Rubio, and Democrats Ed Markey and Bob Menendez, introduced a bill authorizing the State Department to suspend US aid and break diplomatic relations with any other countries that decide to establish ties with Beijing. With unbelievable cynicism, the press release announcing this proposed intimidation of impoverished and historically-oppressed countries denounces “Chinese pressure and bullying tactics.”

The White House said in a statement in late August that it would “re-evaluate” its relations with El Salvador and condemned “China’s apparent interference in the domestic policies of a Western Hemisphere country.” China’s Foreign Ministry responded: “We hope that the relevant country [the US] can respect other sovereign states’ right to choose and formulate their foreign policies and stop interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs.”

Significantly, Beijing sent its business charge d’affaires to Sunday’s conference of the FMLN, the ruling bourgeois party in El Salvador, after leaders of the far-right opposition party, ARENA, declared that if elected in 2019 it would switch the country’s diplomatic ties back to Taiwan. The opposition’s obsequious appeal to the US led to widespread condemnations citing the theft of $15 million in Taiwanese aid intended for families affected by the devastating 2001 earthquakes by the ARENA administration of the late President Francisco Flores.

The diplomatic decision by the FMLN, however, in no way reflects a defense of “national sovereignty” against US imperialism, as some leaders claimed Sunday. It is, above all, a desperate quest for new sources of loans after two years of persistent public debt defaults—particularly at a time when the US central bank is raising its interest rates—while continuing to impose Wall Street’s diktats of social austerity.

Washington had previously stopped denouncing the Dominican Republic’s switch to China after the Dominican government adopted a tougher stance against the Maduro government in Venezuela. However, the political alliance of FMLN and the Venezuelan government and now its shift to Beijing could result in efforts of the Trump administration to forcibly undermine the FMLN government. The FMLN has ruled the country since 2009, but has never gained the support of the dominant and fascistic sections of the military, which fought against the FMLN guerrillas during the 1980s, with the backing of the US, terrorizing and killing tens of thousands of peasants and workers.

Relations between Taiwan and El Salvador were cemented by outright bribes and Taipei’s extensive support for the Salvadoran military, supplying weapons and training its officers during this horrific slaughter.

These factors, as underlined by comments to CNN Tuesday by former senior adviser at the US State Department, Daniel Erikson, “made El Salvador a particularly attractive target for a White House ready to draw a line in the sand regarding the deepening ties of the Asian rival in Latin America.” He added: “El Salvador, in part, has become a battle axis in the new strategic context between the US and China in Latin America.”

At the same time, China has invested heavily in the Panama Canal and become the second top user after the US. Chinese companies have also become the main supplier for Panama’s Colon free-trade zone, the second largest in the world, and manage the main port terminals on both entrances of the Canal. This growing presence provoked warnings to Congress last year by Adm. Kurt Tidd, chief of the US Southern Command, which considers the “defense” of the Panama Canal one of its main tasks.

The Taiwanese government of Tsai Ing-wen has used the affair to further reassure Washington of its interest in having a greater role in the US confrontation with China. Taipei’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that resources previously allocated to its missions in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador will be transferred to lobbying efforts in the US Congress and expanding the Global Cooperation and Training Framework with the US. The Ministry of Defense announced last weekend that it will increase its budget to upgrade air-to-air capabilities of its US-provided F-16 fighters to “maintain parity” with Chinese fighters, according to Taipei Times. This is on top of the 5.6 percent increase in Taipei’s military budget to $11 billion between 2018 and 2019.

The historical context of the US response highlights its hypocrisy, but also the grave danger posed to workers in Taiwan, Latin America and the entire world by the rapid escalation of the confrontation between the US and China.

The United States had a close alliance with Taiwan during the Cold War under the US-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty, signed after the Korean War. However, the treaty was annulled in 1980 as the Carter administration renewed relations with Beijing and adopted the One-China policy in January 1979.

However, despite criticisms by Beijing, the US continued military sales and cooperation unofficially with Taiwan. This military partnership has strengthened and become increasingly open, particularly since the implementation of Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” against China.

The growing US challenge to Chinese influence in the Asia-Pacific region and globally has also severely undermined diplomatic relations between Beijing and Taipei. Now, the Trump administration threatens to openly turn Taiwan and its 24 million people into a US frontline state against China. In December 2016, Trump complained about “being bound by a One China policy” and, once he assumed office, accepted a call from the Taiwanese president as the first direct contact since 1979 between leaders of the two countries.

The 2018 US military spending bill, approved last month with overwhelming bipartisan support, takes Washington-Taipei relations to a new stage, indicating that the “Six Assurances” of military cooperation are a cornerstone of US-Taiwan relations, and calling for stronger defense and security ties, including joint exercises and training. Earlier this year, in a highly provocative step, two US warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait.

The recall of diplomatic personnel from El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Panama last week constitutes a new step in the use of Taiwan by US imperialism to counter growing Chinese economic influence across the world. This is in the context of the most recent US National Defense Strategy document describing China and Russia as Washington’s main geopolitical rivals. “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security,” announced Defense Secretary James Mattis in January.

As Chinese economic presence in Latin America was growing exponentially at the beginning of this century, Washington agreed to a US-China sub-dialogue on Latin America in April 2006. The minutes made available on WikiLeaks report that the Chinese Latin American Affairs director, Zeng Gang, exhorted; “Taiwan’s authorities use relations with these countries as tools to further their secessionist activities and damage China’s core national interests,” but “some of the leaders of these countries have told the PRC (People’s Republic of China) that they must take US concerns into account” demanding “clarification of US views.”

At the time, the chief US diplomat for Latin America, Thomas A. Shannon—most recently Trump’s acting Secretary of State and Deputy Secretary of State—claimed that “The United States does not encourage or discourage” ties with the PRC and cannot “dictate” other countries’ position on this issue.”

As its economic position internationally deteriorates and global capitalism sits on the verge of major economic and political shocks, US imperialism is abandoning the pretense of respecting the internal politics of other countries as it seeks to defend its hegemony over Latin America.

Brazil’s Workers Party drops Lula as candidate for president

Miguel Andrade

On Tuesday, September 11, Brazil’s Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) formally withdrew the presidential candidacy of jailed former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known universally as Lula—substituting in his place the former right-wing mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad.

The move was a recognition by the PT that it would be impossible to place Lula’s name on the ballot in next month’s presidential election, given his conviction on money laundering and passive corruption charges stemming from the Lava Jato investigation into the vast bribery and kickback operation centered on the state-run energy conglomerate Petrobras. Lula is now serving a 12-year sentence.

On August 31, Brazil’s Electoral Court (TSE) ruled that the former president, who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2010, was ineligible to run under the so-called “Ficha Limpa” (clean slate) law that Lula himself signed while in power and the PT supported. The statute prohibits politicians with criminal convictions upheld by an appeals court to run in elections. The TSE had set Tuesday as the deadline for the PT selecting another candidate.

The replacement of Lula—who had been placed first in the polls when listed as a potential candidate—by Haddad, who until this week registered just 4 percent support, is the latest shakeup in a crisis-ridden run-up to the October 7 vote in the country of over 207 million people.

The replacement of the PT candidate follows on the heels of the assassination attempt against the current front-runner, the fascistic army reserve captain and federal legislator Jair Bolsonaro who was stabbed during a campaign rally in Minas Gerais last Thursday by a man who told police he had been told by God to carry out the attack. Bolsonaro, who remains in intensive care after the attack, has seen a slight sympathy bump in the polls, with one showing his support increasing from 26 to 30 percent.

While the barring of Lula’s candidacy had been viewed as a foregone conclusion in Brazilian ruling circles, a brief controversy erupted over an August 17 statement by the United Nations Human Rights Committee calling upon Brazil “to take all necessary measures to ensure that Lula can enjoy and exercise his political rights while in prison, as candidate in the 2018 presidential elections.”

Although the note clearly stated that “this request does not mean that the Committee has found a violation yet” in his trial, it generated anxiety for suggesting that the Ficha Limpa law could be in violation of international law.

Predominant factions within the ruling elite had already been incensed by the highly ambiguous case of the rosary brought to Lula in prison in early June by Vatican official Juan Grabois, which the PT praised as a gesture of political support from Pope Francis, and the support for Lula’s candidacy, as well as his claim of being a political prisoner, by various imperialist officials. Since his arrest order in April, these have included, most prominently, former French President François Hollande, former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and, most recently, the former leader of German Social Democracy, Martin Schulz, who declared to Deutsche Welle in Curitiba, where Lula is serving his sentence, that he had come “at request of the Party leader Andreas Nahles” after having discussed the matter with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.

The right-wing reaction to these events highlights the sharp turn to the right take by Brazil’s entire political system. Newspaper editorials and opinion pages have become increasingly reminiscent of the rants against “international interference” made by Brazil’s 1964-1985 military junta and similar regimes across Latin America over human rights reports. The country’s oldest newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, charged the New York Times with “inexplicably aiding” Lula’s “international campaign to defame Brazilian institutions” by publishing his open letter of August 14, while the UN human rights panel’s statement prompted Bolsonaro to deliver a Trump-like rant vowing that he would “withdraw” Brazil from the United Nations.

On September 3, in an interview with the financial daily Valor Econômico, Brazilian Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes charged “the main media of the US and Europe” with spreading “PT propaganda.” And an O Estado de S. Pauloeditorial from September 4 furiously called the PT’s decision to renew its appeal of the TSE ruling to the UN “an assault on Brazilian sovereignty.”

Most ominous of all, however, was O Estado de S. Paulo’s interview with the chief of the Brazilian armed forces, Gen. Eduardo Villas Boas, who declared that Lula’s candidacy would be unacceptable to the military and denounced the UN Human Rights Committee statement as “an attempted invasion of Brazilian sovereignty.”

General Villas Boas told the newspaper that Lula’s succeeding in overcoming the Ficha Limpa law and winning the election could threaten the “stability and governability” of Brazil, increasing the division of Brazilian society, and “directly implying our action, as in the case of the truckers strike.”

Under these conditions, the PT’s “Free Lula” campaign has been the main vehicle for the party’s overtures to business circles the world over to recognize the usefulness of Lula in maintaining class peace in Brazil. It has appealed to the reactionary forces of “democratic imperialism,” such as the Democratic Party in the United States, the Socialist Party in France and the German Social Democracy, which are engaged in relentless militarism abroad and censorship and the normalization of the far-right at home, in order to violently confront increasing working class militancy.

Recent developments have only accelerated this drive, raising the most serious issues are for the working class. What is required is a conscious and relentless exposure of the fraudulent “Free Lula” campaign by the PT and the pseudo-left organizations surrounding it.

The Ficha Limpa law itself was the opening shot of a sharp turn to the right by the PT that alienated decisive sections of the working class in major PT power bases in the industrial regions of the country. This prompted the ruling class to desert the PT and bring down President Dilma Rousseff in the 2016 impeachment, which was met with indifference by workers after her government had conceded to the right wing on every major issue, from austerity measures to the privatization of the state-run oil giant Petrobras.

The PT reacted to the 2016 impeachment of Rousseff by blocking, through the collaboration of the CUT trade union federation, any attempt by workers to fight against the acceleration of austerity measures, as this would send the ruling class the “wrong signal” about the PT’s willingness to return to power and continue the war on workers’ living standards.

Despite its populist phraseology, the “Free Lula” campaign is saturated with contempt toward and, in the case of its most sycophantic leaders, hatred for, the working class, which they see as responsible for the rise of the far right.

A bourgeois party, the PT looks not to the masses of Brazilian workers, but rather to the imperialist powers as a base of support for its return to power. Thus, the party’s sycophantic mouthpiece, Brasil247, carried a leading article titled “German association warns multinational corporations: don’t invest in a fascist Brazil”—a reference to a possible victory by Bolsonaro.

On August 22, 2017, Brasil247 celebrated the nervousness within Brazilian ruling circles over the exclusion of Brazil from US Vice President Mike Pence’s first Latin American tour with the headline “[financial daily] Valor: With Temer Brazil has become a global pariah.” From the impeachment on, the party has seized upon pieces in Le Monde, the Financial Times and the New York Timeswarning the Brazilian ruling class that Lula is a precious political asset as a vindication of its policies.

On September 1, after the barring of Lula’s candidacy, Brasil247 interviewed Gilberto Maringoni, a former PT member and leader of the PSOL (the Socialism and Liberty Party, within which the Morenoites and Pabloites operate). He put the issues at stake for the PT in the clearest class terms, saying that the foreign policy of the current government of Michel Temer represented “a 100-year regression” from the “successful” plan envisioned by the monarchist founder of Brazilian diplomacy in the early twentieth century in which US dictates to Latin America “would have to be mediated by Brazil as the leading regional power.”

In face of these right-wing professions of faith by innumerable self-proclaimed socialists, one must ask: What would be the reaction of a new PT government to an explosion of working class struggle that challenged the interests of imperialism? Only one answer is conceivable: the most ferocious repression.

These forces, whose social base is the bourgeoisie and the upper middle classes, blame the working class for the loss of an international position “never before reached” by Brazil, in Maringoni’s words. They are abandoning their “left-opposition” pretensions adopted in relation to the Lula administration after the founding of PSOL in July 2004.

Their frustration with the working class is giving way to the most naked class hatred, as expressed in the writings of El País’s Eliane Brum on the last major eruption of working class struggle in Brazil, the May truckers’ strike. Brum had written that Lula was intolerable for the ruling class because “the social programs and affirmative action of the PT ended up threatening” class conciliation in Brazil (“Lula, the irreconcilable,” April 11).

On May 4, she wrote that right-wing demands for a military intervention seen among some of the truckers had “predictably channeled” resentments over “masculinity threatened by growing LGBT and women protagonism.” She concluded that “there was nothing more symbolic” of these supposed sentiments “than the aggressive image of trucks in a world that needs to reduce carbon emissions” and that the most underestimated effect of the strike was the decrease in pollution in the city of São Paulo.

This neo-Malthusian rhetoric is the language of class hatred of the promoters of the “free Lula” campaign, for whom the biggest threat is posed not by the far right, but by the working class.