VLIR Training Scholarships for Sustainable Development and Human Rights Law (SUSTLAW) Postgraduate Programme 2019

Application Deadline: 30th September 2018

Eligible Countries: Developing countries

To be taken at (country): University of Antwerp, Belgium

About the Award: SUSTLAW offers a comprehensive teaching programme based on the research lines of the Law and Development Research Group. The postgraduate programme runs in conjunction with the Faculty’s Master of Laws (LL.M).

Type: Training

Eligibility: You can only apply for an ITP scholarship if you meet the following requirements:

• Nationality and country of residence:  A candidate should be both a national and a resident of one of the 31 eligible countries (not necessarily the same country) at the time of the application.
• Relevant professional experience and a support letter: Priority is given to candidates who are employed in academic institutions, research institutes, governments, the social economy or NGOs, or to those who aim to have a career in one of these sectors. The training candidate should have relevant professional experience and a support letter confirming (re)integration in a professional context where the acquired knowledge and skills will be immediately applicable.
• Fungibility with other VLIR-UOS funding: Candidates who are working at a university where we already fund IUC, TEAM or SI projects, can receive an ITP-ICP scholarship if they clearly motivate the reason for their application and if they clarify why the participation at the ICP or ITP programme cannot be funded as part of the IUC, TEAM or SI programme or project funds that already exist.
•  Other VLIR-UOS scholarship applications and previously awarded scholarships: A potential candidate can only submit one scholarship application with us per year – irrespective of the scholarship type – and can, therefore, only be selected for one VLIR-UOS scholarship every year. Candidates who already received one of our scholarships to participate in another ITP, will not be eligible. Candidates who already received one of our scholarship to participate in an ICP (or vice versa) can only be selected if the previously attended course is thematically linked to the ITP.

Candidate must also meet the course’s admission requirements.

Number of Awards: 12

Value of Award: The scholarships cover the programme fees, accommodation, travel expenses, visa costs, insurance and an allowance.

Duration of Programme: 11 February to 3 May 2019.

How to Apply: To apply for an ITP scholarship, you first need to apply for the training programmes at this link. Follow the guidelines for application on the programme´s website. Mention as part of your training application that you wish to apply for the ITP scholarship.
It is important to visit the Programme Webpage (See Link below) to access the application form and for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

The Afghan Morass

Cesar Chelala

On learning that he was from Afghanistan, I asked my Afghan taxi driver in New York his opinion about the situation in his country. “Americans don’t get it,” he said. “They are not going to succeed in Afghanistan. My father was a warlord who fought the Russians, and I grew up in Afghanistan, so I know the situation there. I have a lot of respect for the Russian soldiers, who fought us fiercely. But I don’t have the same respect for the coalition soldiers who always overprotect themselves. They don’t seem to understand that we have fought for centuries against foreign occupation in my country, and we have always succeeded.”

The taxi driver’s assessment confirmed the strength of the Afghan soldier, able to fight with the most primitive weapons against the greatest empires on earth. When these soldiers feel their land usurped by foreign forces, their strength is multiplied. And this is just one of the obstacles confronting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Matthew Hoh, a former Foreign Service officer and former Marine Corps captain who became the first U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war, had declared, “Upon arriving in Afghanistan and serving in both the East and South (and particularly speaking with local Afghans) I found that the majority of those who were fighting us and the Afghan central government were fighting us because they felt occupied.”

More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan, and the U.S. has spent more than $840 billion fighting the Taliban and paying for relief and reconstruction. The amount of money the U.S. has so far spent in Afghanistan is higher than what it spent, in current dollars, on the Marshall Plan, which help rebuild Europe after World War II.

Despite all these financial resources spent in Afghanistan, and even though the American military says that the Afghan government “controls or influences” 56 percent of the country, this control is limited to district and military quarters while the Taliban controls the rest.

According to Afghan official statistics, the Afghan security forces outnumber the Taliban by 10 to 1. However, as recently as the second week in September, dozens of police officers, soldiers and civilians were killed by Taliban insurgents in four well-coordinated attacks which even included one in Kabul.

In the deadliest attack, the insurgents killed over 30 members of the government security forces in Baghlan Province, located in the north of the country. The casualties among the Afghan security forces have been significant. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, a U.S. government agency, 6,785 Afghan police and soldiers have died in the first 10 months of 2016.

As there are increasing calls for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the real dilemma for the U.S. is if it is worth to persist in what increasingly seems like an unwinnable war on this natural resources-plentiful country. The Taliban have indicated that they are ready for a second round of talks with the U.S.

It is now time for both parties in this cruel war to put and end to what has been like a hemorrhage in the body of the Afghan people. Those who have failed in the past should be a sobering reminder to the troops now fighting in that country. Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires. It should more properly be called the end of an illusion.

Yemen’s Descent into Hell: A Saudi-American War of Terror

Rajan Menon

It’s the war from hell, the savage one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with seven other Middle Eastern and North African states, have been waging in Yemen since March 2015, with fulsome support from the Pentagon and American weapons galore. It’s got everything. Dead children in the dozens, a never-ending air campaign that pays scant heed to civilians, famine, cholera, you name it. No wonder it’s facing mounting criticism in Congress and from human rights groups. Still, ever since President Donald Trump (like Barack Obama before him) embraced the Saudi-led coalition as this country’s righteous knight errant in the Middle East, the fight against impoverished Yemen’s Houthi rebels — who have, in turn, been typecast as Iran’s cats-paw — has only grown fiercer. Meanwhile, the al-Qaeda affiliate there continues to expand.

For years now, a relentless Saudi air campaign (quite literally fueled by the U.S. military) has hit endless civilian targets, using American smart bombs and missiles, without a peep of protest or complaint from Washington. Only a highly publicized, completely over-the-top slaughter recently forced the Pentagon to finally do a little mild finger wagging. On August 7th, an airstrike hit a school bus — with a laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin — in northern Yemen, killing 51 people, 40 of them schoolchildren. Seventy-nine others were wounded, including 56 children. Soon after, a U.N. Security Council-appointed group of experts issued a report detailing numerous other egregious attacks on Yemeni civilians, including people attending weddings and funerals. Perhaps the worst among them killed 137 people and wounded 695 others at a funeral in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, this April.

The attack on those schoolchildren and the U.N. report amplified a growing global outcry against the carnage in Yemen. In response, on August 28th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis let it be known that the Trump administration’s support for the Persian Gulf potentates’ military campaign should not be considered unreserved, that the Saudis and their allies must do “everything humanly possible to avoid any innocent loss of life.” Considering that they haven’t come close to meeting such a standard since the war started nearly five years ago and that the Trump administration clearly has no intention of reducing its support for the Saudis or their war, Mattis’s new yardstick amounted to a cruel joke — at the expense of Yemeni civilians.

The Statistics of Suffering

Some appalling numbers document the anguish Yemenis have endured. Saudi and Emirati warplanes officially have killed — and it’s considered a conservative estimate — 6,475 civilians and wounded more than 10,000 others since 2015. Targets struck have included farms, homes, marketplaces, hospitals, schools, and mosques, as well as ancient historic sites in Sana’a. And such incidents haven’t been one-off attacks. They have happened repeatedly.

By April 2018, the Saudi-led coalition had conducted 17,243 airstrikes across Yemen, hitting 386 farms, 212 schools, 183 markets, and 44 mosques. Such statistics make laughable the repeated claims of the Saudis and their allies that such “incidents” should be chalked up to understandable errors and that they take every reasonable precaution to protect innocents. Statistics compiled by the independent Yemen Data Project make it clear that the Gulf monarchs don’t lie awake at night lamenting the deaths of Yemeni civilians.

Saudi Arabia and its partners have accused the Houthis, the rebels with whom they have been in such a deadly struggle, of also attacking Yemeni civilians, a charge Human Rights Watch has validated. Yet such a they-do-it-too defense hardly excuses the relentless bombing of non-military sites by a coalition that has overwhelming superiority in firepower. Houthi crimes pale by comparison.

And when it comes to the destruction of civilian lives and livelihoods, believe it or not, that may be the least of it. Take the naval blockade of the country by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that cut the number of ships docking in the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeida from 129 between January and August 2014 to 21 in the same months of 2017. The result: far less food and medicine entered the country, creating a disaster for Yemenis.

That country, the Arab world’s poorest, has long relied on imports for a staggering 85% of its food, fuel, and medicine, so when prices soared, famine spread, while hunger and malnutrition skyrocketed. Nearly 18 million Yemenis now rely on emergency food aid to survive: that’s an unbelievable 80% of the population. According to the World Bank, “8.4 million more are on the brink of famine.” In December 2017, following a barrage of bad publicity, the Saudi-Emirati blockade was eased marginally, but it had already set in motion a spiral of death.

The blockade also contributed to a cholera epidemic, which the shortage of medicines only exacerbated. According to a World Health Organization report, between April 2017 and July 2018, there were more than 1.1 million cholera cases there. At least 2,310 people died from the disease, most of them children. It is believed to be the worst cholera outbreak since statistics began to be compiled in 1949. At 800,000 cases between 2010 and 2017, Haiti held the previous record, one that the Yemenis surpassed within half a year of the first cases appearing. The prime contributors to the epidemic: drinking water contaminated by rotting garbage (uncollected because of the war), devastated sewage systems, and water filtration plants that stopped running due to lack of fuel — all the result of the horrendous bombing campaign.

Wartime economic blockades starve and sicken civilians and soldiers alike and so amount to a war crime. The Saudi-Emirati claim that the blockade’s sole purpose is to stanch the flow of Iranian arms to the Houthis is nonsense, nor can it be considered a legitimate act of self-defense, even though it was instituted after the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at the airport in the Saudi capital and the residence of that country’s monarch. (Both were shot down by Saudi air defenses and were clear responses to coalition airstrikes on Houthi-held territory that killed 136 civilians.) By the standards of international humanitarian law or simply common sense, choking off Yemen’s imports was a disproportionate response, and clairvoyance wasn’t required to foresee the calamitous consequences to follow.

True to form, President Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, echoed Saudi charges that the Houthi missiles were Iranian-supplied Qiam-1s and condemned that country’s interference in Yemen. Given the scale of destruction by a foreign coalition using armaments and technical assistance provided by the United States (and Britain), her comments, in less grim circumstances, would have been laughable.

Those American-supplied weapons have included cluster munitions, which pose a particular hazard to civilians because, when dropped from a plane, their devastating bomblets often disperse over enormous areas. (Such bombs are banned under a 2008 treaty signed by 120 countries that neither Riyadh nor Washington has joined.) In May 2016, the Obama White House confirmed that it had stopped sending such weapons to Saudi Arabia, which then continued to use Brazilian-made variants. However, other American arms have continued to flow to Saudi Arabia, while its warplanes rely on U.S. Air Force tankers for mid-air refueling (88 million pounds of fuel as of this January according to a Central Command spokeswoman), while the Saudi military has received regular intelligence information and targeting advice from the Pentagon since the war began. And with the advent of Donald Trump, such military involvement has only deepened: U.S. Special Operations forces are now on the Saudi-Yemen border, helping to find and attack Houthi redoubts.

In June 2018, ignoring U.S. opposition, the Saudi coalition heightened the risk to Yemeni civilians yet more by launching an offensive (“Golden Victory”) to capture the port of Hodeida. (So much for the Pentagon’s standard claim that supporting the war gives the U.S. influence over how it is waged and so limits civilian casualties.) Saudi and Emirati airpower and warships supported Emirati and Sudanese troops on the ground joined by allied Yemeni militias. The advance, however, quickly stalled in the face of Houthi resistance, though only after at least 50,000 families had fled Hodeida and basic services for the remaining 350,000 were disrupted, creating fears of a new outbreak of cholera.

The Roots of War

Yemen’s progression to its present state of perdition began as the Arab Spring’s gales swept through the Middle East in 2011, uprooting or shaking regimes from Tunisia to Syria. Street demonstrations grew against Yemen’s strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and only gathered strength as he attempted to quell them. In response, he allied ever more strongly with Saudi Arabia and the United States, alienating the Houthis, whose main bastion, the governate of Saada, abuts the Saudi border. Adherents of Zaydi Islam, the Houthis played a pivotal role in creating a political movement, Ansar Allah, in 1992 to assert the interests of their community against the country’s Sunni majority. In an effort to undercut them, the Saudis have long promoted radical Sunni religious leaders in Yemen’s north, while intermittently raiding Houthi territories.

As a Houthi rebellion began, Saleh tried to make himself an even more indispensable ally of Washington in its post-9/11 anti-terrorist campaigns, notably against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a growing local franchise of al-Qaeda. For good measure, he joined the Saudis in painting the Houthis little more than tools of an Iran that Washington and Riyadh both loathed. When those powers nonetheless came to see the Yemeni autocrat as a political liability, they helped oust him and transfer power to his deputy, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Such moves failed to calm the waters, as the country started to disintegrate and Saudi-U.S. efforts to consolidate the transition from Saleh to Hadi unraveled.

Meanwhile, regular American drone strikes against AQAP angered many Yemenis. In their eyes, not only did the attacks violate Yemen’s sovereignty, they intermittently killed civilians. Hadi’s praise for the drone campaign only discredited him further. AQAP’s power continued to grow, resentment in southern Yemen rose, and criminal gangs and warlords began to operate with impunity in its cities, highlighting the Hadi government’s ineffectuality. Neoliberal economic reforms only further enriched a clutch of families that had long controlled much of Yemen’s wealth, while the economic plight of most Yemenis worsened radically. The unemployment rate was nearly 14% in 2017 (and exceeded 25% for young people), while the poverty rate rose precipitously, as did inflation.

It was a formula for disaster and when Hadi proposed a plan to create a federal system for Yemen, the Houthis were infuriated. New boundaries would, among other things, have cut their homeland off from the Red Sea coast. So they gave up on his government and girded for battle. Soon, their forces were advancing southward. In September 2014, they captured the capital, Sana’a, and proclaimed a new national government. The following March, they occupied Aden in southern Yemen and Hadi, whose government had moved there, promptly fled across the border to Riyadh. The first Saudi airstrikes against Sana’a were launched in March 2015 and Yemen’s descent to hell began.

The American Role

The commonplace rendition of the war in Yemen pits a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition against the Houthis, cast as agents of Iran and evidence of its increasing influence in the Middle East. Combatting terrorism and countering Iran became the basis for Washington’s support of the Saudi-led war. Predictably, as this cartoonish portrayal of a complicated civil war gained ground in the mainstream American media and among Beltway pundits (as well, of course, as in the Pentagon and White House), inconvenient facts were shunted aside.

Still, all these years and all those dead later, it’s worth considering some of those facts. There are, for instance, significant differences between the Houthis’ Zaydi variant of Shia Islam and the Twelver Shiism dominant in Iran — and some similarities between Zaydis and Sunnis — which makes the ubiquitous claims about a Iran-Houthi faith-based pact shaky. Moreover, Iran did not jump into the fray during the violent 2004-2010 clashes between Saleh and the Houthis and did not have longstanding ties to them either. In addition, contrary to the prevailing view in Washington, Iran is unlikely to be their main source of weaponry and support. Sheer distance and the Saudi coalition’s naval blockade have made it next to impossible for Iran to supply arms to the Houthis in the volume alleged. Besides, having pillaged various military bases during their march toward Aden, the Houthis do not lack for weaponry. Iran’s influence in Yemen has undoubtedly increased since 2015, but reducing the intricacies of that country’s internal crisis to Iranian meddling and a Tehran-led Shiite bloc expanding from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula amounts to, at best, a massive oversimplification.

The obsession of Trump and his key advisers with Iran (a remarkable number of them are Iranophobes) and The Donald’s obsession with plugging American arms makers and hawking their wares helps explain their embrace of the House of Saud and continuing support for its never-ending assault on Yemen. (Jared Kushner’s bromance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman undoubtedly played a part as well.) None of that, however, explains the full-scale American backing for the Saudi-led intervention there in the Obama years. Even as his administration denounced Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter of Syrian civilians, his officials seemed unmoved by the suffering war was inflicting on Yemenis. In fact, the Obama administration offered $115 billion worth of weaponry to Riyadh, including a $1.15 billion package finalized in August 2016, when the scale of Yemen’s catastrophe was already all too obvious.

In recent years, opposition to the war in Congress has been on the rise, with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna playing prominent roles in mobilizing it. But such congressional critics had no effect on Obama’s war policy and are unlikely to sway Trump’s. They face formidable barriers. The mainstream narrative on the war remains powerful, while the Gulf monarchies continue to buy vast quantities of American weaponry. And don’t forget the impressive, money-is-no-object Saudi-Emirati lobbying operation in Washington.

That, then, is the context for the Pentagon’s gentle warning about the limits of U.S. support for the bombing campaign in Yemen and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s subsequent certification, as required by Congress, that the Saudis and Emiratis were taking perfectly credible action to lower civilian casualties — without which the U.S. military could not continue refueling their planes. (Mattis “endorsed and fully supported” Pompeo’s statement.)  As the fifth anniversary of this appalling war approaches, American-made arms and logistical aid remain essential to it.  Consider President Trump’s much-ballyhooed arms sales to the Saudis, even if they don’t total $100 billion (as he claimed): Why then would the Saudi and Emirati monarchs worry that the White House might actually do something like cutting off those lucrative sales or terminating the back-end support for their bombing campaign?

One thing is obvious: U.S. policy in Yemen won’t achieve its declared goals of defeating terrorism and rolling back Iran. After all, its drone strikes began there in 2002 under George W. Bush. Under Obama, as in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, drones became Washington’s anti-terrorist weapon of choice. There were 154 drone strikes in Yemen during the Obama years according to the most reliable high-end estimates, and civilian casualties ranged between 83 and 101. Under Trump they soared quickly, from 21 in 2016 to 131 in 2017.

The reliance on drone attacks has bolstered al-Qaeda’s narrative that the American war on terror amounts to a war on Muslims, whose lives are deemed expendable. And so many years later, in the chaos of Yemen, the group’s power and reach is only growing. The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led intervention is also likely to prove not just self-defeating but self-prophetic. It seems to be cementing an alliance between Iran and the Houthis who, though they have been pushed out of Aden, still control a big chunk of Yemen. Meanwhile, in a move that could make the war even deadlier, the Emiratis appear to be striking out on their own, supporting secession in southern Yemen. There’s not much to show on the anti-terrorism front either. Indeed, the Saudi coalition’s airstrikes and U.S. drone attacks may be moving Yemenis, enraged by the destruction of their homes and livelihoods and the deaths of loved ones, toward AQAP. In short, a war on terror has turned into a war of and for terror.

In Yemen, the United States backs a grim military intervention for which — unless you are a weapons company — it is hard to find any justification, practical or moral. Unfortunately, it is even harder to imagine President Trump or the Pentagon reaching such a conclusion and changing course.

Iran Hawks in Washington

Peter Koenig

No doubt, anti-Iran propaganda out of Washington abounds. There are numerous Zionist-run think-tanks (sic) that make US Foreign Policy – and are ratcheting up anti-Iran anger in the US, but targeting especially the Iranian population at home, in Iran. The notorious chief-villain of these agencies, by the way, highly subsidized by the US State Department, and perhaps even more important, by the powerful US military-security complex, is the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD). More than fifty years ago, then President Dwight Eisenhower already warned the world about the invasive, abusive and greed-driven powers of this ever-growing war industry.

Nobody really heeded his advice, least the United States with her world hegemonic aspirations. Today we have to live with it – and recognize the dangers emanating from this war complex, that controls more than 50% of the US GDP – all associated industries and services included. If peace was to break out tomorrow – the US economy would collapse. It is, therefore, the new normal that aggressions are flying out from Washington to all those proud countries that refuse to submit themselves to the dictate of the hegemon – like Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Russia, China, Pakistan, Cuba —- and many more. The assaults on free and independent thinking nations come in the form of verbal insults, economic sanctions, tariffs, broken international and bilateral agreements – and foremost war threats and provocations. Beware from falling into the trap.

Iran is not alone. It means – moving on and living with this western imposed system – or else…

And else, means getting out of it. Unfortunately, it does little good accusing the devil overseas, like the FDD, NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and whatever else they are called. They will not go away; they just enjoy the anger they generate. And yes, there is a clear and present danger that through Netanyahu and Trump war provocations on Iran are being launched. And yes, as long as Iran is still linked to the western monetary system, and tries hard to stay linked to it, more sanctions will follow, disastrous sanctions – but disastrous only as long as Iran is tied to the western dollar-based economy. If you, Iran, move away from this massive western monetary fraud – and this will not happen over-night – you, Iran, will gradually regain your economic autonomy and political sovereignty. This is crucial.

Fighting and arguing against senseless and totally illegal sanctions and aggressions – or even begging the west to stick to the Nuclear Deal, against Washington’s reneging on the Nuclear Deal, is a waste of time. It will achieve nothing. They, the US of A, will not give in. The Israel and war industrial complex lobbies are too strong. Counting on Europe to stick to the “Deal” is not a good strategy. Even if – for their own selfish interests – the Europeans would want to maintain the 5+1 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), first, you never know whether and when they may cave in to Washington and Israel’s pressure, and second, even if they don’t, you are still linked to the western ponzy-economy through the euro and, thus vulnerable for sanctions.

Most important, however, rather than looking outside for a culprit – i.e. in Washington or Brussels, find the solution from within. There are two major obstacles to keep in mind. The first one Iran is in the process of overcoming, it’s called embarking on an “Economy of Resistance”; the second one is more complicated but not impossible – neutralizing the Fifth Column in Iran.

Economy of Resistance – is a path to self-sufficiency, economic autonomy and political sovereignty. Iran, under the guidance of the Ayatollah, has already embarked on this de-globalizing route. President Putin said already several years ago, the sanctions were the best thing that happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It forced Russia to rehabilitate an rebuild her agricultural sector and modernize her industrial park. Today Russia is by far the largest wheat exporter in the world and has a cutting-edge industrial arsenal. This message, Mr. Putin, transmitted during his visit to Tehran last November face-to-face to the Ayatollah.

Following the principles of a Resistance Economy implies a gradual, but eventually radical separation from the western monetary system – and adherence to the eastern alliances, like the SCO – Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS and the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU). Iran is poised to become a member of the SCO within short. These alliances are no longer trading in UDS dollars, have their own international transfer systems – separated from the western, privately run SWIFT which is totally controlled by the US banking moguls – and therefore, SWIFT is a prime instrument to impose financial and economic sanctions, by withholding or blocking international payment transfers and blocking or confiscating assets abroad.

These eastern alliances are trading in their local currencies and in the case of China and hydrocarbons, even in gold-convertible yuans. One or several new eastern monetary systems are under consideration, including by the BRICS. An important part of the eastern alliances is President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – or the new Silk Road, a massive multi-trillion yuan infrastructure and transport investments plan – spanning the world from east to west with several connecting “roads”, including maritime routes. This BRI plan, recently incorporated in China’s constitution – is the vanguard for a new economic system, based on equality and benefitting all partners – a clear departure from the western “carrot and stick” approach, i.e. ‘do as I say – or else’ – sanctions will follow.

Second, and this is the real challenge – countries like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China – and all those nations that resist the west’s attempts to conquer, command and subdue them – have a strong so-called “Fifth Column”, open and covert infiltrated western or local and western-trained and funded ‘assets’. These people are usually embedded in the financial sector, especially the central banks and in trade related activities. They are the ‘recipients’ of the messages from the Hawks from Washington – they propagate them in Iran, bring people to the streets often by paying them – to make believe that there is a strong opposition to the government.

They control the local media, publish false economic information – unemployment, inflation – and seek tightening investment links with the west. The Fifth Columnists, or Atlantists, are helping manipulating currency exchange rates, devaluations of their country’s – Iran’s – money; they are exaggerating the impact of sanctions at home to create fear and hostility against the government – in brief, they are weaponizing public opinion against their own government. They are collaborators with Iran’s enemies.

The Fifth Columnists are a dangerous, criminal and non-transparent alliance of opponents working for foreign interests, in Iran, as well as in Russia, Venezuela, China – and where ever the Washington hegemon and its dark deep masters want to bring about regime change. Neutralizing them is a huge challenge, as their activities are deeply rooted in their countries financial system, private banking and international trade.

The best way of annihilating their nefarious impact is by applying the rules of Resistance Economy – breaking loose from the western dollar system, de-globalizing the economy, finding back to political and economic sovereignty – local production for local markets with local money and local public banking for the development of the local economy; and by trading with friendly, culturally and ideologically aligned countries. If the link to the globalized west is broken, their power is gone. Iran is on the right path – the future is in the East. The greed-driven aggressive west is committing economic and moral suicide – the west has become a sinking ship.

The United States of America – the Real Reason Why They Are Never Winning Their Wars

Peter Koenig

This essay is inspired by Professor James Petras’ article, describing that the US never wins wars despite trillions of investments in her war budget and obvious military superiority https://www.globalresearch.ca

Professor Petras is of course right, the United States is currently engaged in seven bloody wars around the globe (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) and has not been winning one, including WWII. The question is: Why is that?

To these wars, you may want to add the totally destructive and human rights adverse war that literally slaughters unarmed civilians, including thousands of children, in an open-air prison, Gaza, the US proxy war on Palestine, carried out by Israel; plus, warmongering on Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. Let alone the new style wars – the trade wars with China, Europe, and to some extent, Mexico and Canada, as well as the war of sanctions, starting with Russia and reaching around the world – the fiefdom of economic wars also illegal by any book of international economics.

Other wars and conflicts, that were never intended to be won, include the dismantlement of Yugoslavia by the Clinton / NATO wars of the 1990s, the so-called Balkanization of Yugoslavia, ‘Balkanization’, a term now used for other empire-led partitions in the world, à la “divide to conquer”. Many of the former Yugoslav Republics are still not at peace internally and among each other. President Tito, a Maoist socialist leader was able to keep the country peacefully together and make out of Yugoslavia one of the most prosperous countries in Europe in the seventies and 1980s. How could this be allowed, socioeconomic wellbeing in a socialist country? – Never. It had to be destroyed. At the same time NATO forces advanced their bases closer to Moscow. But no war was won. Conflicts are still ongoing, “justifying” the presence of NATO, for European and US “national security”.

Then, let’s not forget the various Central American conflicts, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, the 8-year Iraq – Iran war – and many more, have created havoc and disorder, and foremost killed millions of people and weakened the countries affected. They put the population into misery and constant fear – and they keep requiring weapons to maintain internal hostilities, warfare and terror to this day.

All of these wars are totally unlawful and prohibited by any international standards of law. But the special and exceptional nation doesn’t observe them. President Trump’s bully National security Advisor, John Bolton, recently threatened the ICC and its judges with ‘sanctions’ in case the dare prosecution of Israeli and American war criminals. And the world doesn’t seem to care, and, instead, accepts the bully’s rule, afraid of the constant saber-rattling and threats being thrown out at the resisters of this world. Even the United Nations, including the 15-member Security Council, is afraid to stand up to the bully – 191 countries against 2 (US and Israel) is a no go?

None of these wars, hot wars or cold wars, has ever been won. Nor were they intended to be won. And there are no signs that future US-led wars will ever be won; irrespective of the trillions of dollars spent on them, and irrespective of the trillions to come in the future to maintain these wars and to start new ones. If we, the 191 UN member nations allow these wars to continue, that is. – Again, why is that?

The answer is simple. It is not in the interest of the United States to win any wars. The reasons are several. A won war theoretically brings peace, meaning no more weapons, no more fighting, no more destruction, no more terror and fear, no more insane profits for the war industry – but foremost, a country at peace is more difficult to manipulate and starve into submission than a country maintained at a level of constant conflict – conflict that not even a regime change will end, as we are seeing in so many cases around the world. Case in point, one of the latest ones being the Ukraine, after the US-NATO-EU instigated February 2014 Maidan coup, prepared with a long hand, in Victoria Nuland’s word, then Assistant Secretary of State, we spent more than 5 years and 5 billion dollars to bring about a regime change and democracy to the Ukraine.

Today, there is a “civil war” waging in eastern Ukraine, the Russian leaning Donbass area (about 90% Russian speaking and 75% Russian nationals), fueled by the ‘new’ Washington installed Poroshenko Nazi government. Thousands were killed, literally in cold blood by the US military-advised and assisted Kiev army, and an estimated more than 2 million fled to Russia. The total Ukraine population is about 44 million (2018 est.), with a landmass of about 604,000 km2, of which the Donbass area (Donetsk Province) is the most densely populated, counting for about 10% of population and about 27,000 km2.

Could this Kiev war of aggression end? – Yes, if the West would let go of the Donbass area which in any case will never submit to the Kiev regime and which has already requested to be incorporated into Russia. It would instantly stop the killing, the misery and destruction by western powers driven Nazi Kiev. But that’s not in the interest of the west, NATO, EU and especially not Washington – chaos and despair make for easy manipulation of people, for exploitation of this immensely rich country, both in agricultural potential – Ukraine used to be called the bread basket of Russia – and in natural resources in the ground; and for steadily advancing closer to the doorsteps of Moscow. That’s the intention.

In fact, Washington and its western EU vassal allies are relentlessly accusing Russia for meddling in the Ukraine, in not adhering to the Minsk accords. They are ‘sanctioning’ Russia for not respecting the Minsk Protocol (Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed on 11 February 2015 to a package of measures to alleviate the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine), when in fact, the complete opposite is true. The west disregards the key points of the accord – no interference. But western propaganda and deceit-media brainwash western populations into believing in the Russian evil. The only ones meddling and supplying Kiev’s Nazi Regime with weapons and “military advisors” is the west.

The going strategy is lie-propaganda, so the western public, totally embalmed with western falsehoods, believes it is always Russia. Russians, led by President Putin, are the bad guys. The media war is part of the west’s war on Russia. The idea is, never let go of an ongoing conflict – no matter the cost in lives and in money. It’s so easy. Why isn’t that addressed in many analyses that still pretend the US is losing wars instead of winning them? – Its 101 of western geopolitics.

For those who don’t know, the US State Department has clearly exposed it’s plans to guarantee world primacy to the Senate’s Foreign Relations Commission. Assistant Secretary of State, Wess Mitchell, has declared that the United States is punishing Russia, because Moscow is impeding Washington from establishing supremacy over the world. It gets as blunt as that. The US openly recognizes the reason for their fight against Russia, and that Washington would not accept anything less than a full capitulation. See French version in ZE Journal: file:///C:/Users/Peter/Downloads/ZEjournal.mobi%20-%20Non%252C%20ce%20n%E2%80%99est%20pas%20un%20complot%E2%80%A6%20juste%20une%20pathologie.pdf

The full supremacy over the world is not possible without controlling the entire landmass of Eurasia – which for now they, the US, does not dominate. Mitchell added, contrary to optimistic hypothesis of earlier administrations, Russia and China are the most serious contenders to impede materially and ideologically the supremacy of the United States in the 21st Century, in a reference to the PNAC, Plan for a New American Century.

Then Mitchell launched a bomb, “It is always of primordial interest for the United States’ national security to impede the domination of the Eurasian landmass by hostile powers.” – This clearly means that the United States will shy away from nothing in the pursuit of this goal – meaning an outright war – nuclear or other – massive killing and total destruction – to reach that goal. This explains the myriad false accusations, ranging from outright insults at the UN by a lunatic Nikki Haley, the never-ending saga of the Skripal poisoning, to Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections – and whatever else suits the political circumstances to bash Russia. And these fabricated lies come mostly from Washington and London – and the rest of the western vassals just follows.

“War is hugely profitable. It creates so much money because it’s so easy to spend money very fast. There are huge fortunes to be made. So, there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are ‘others’ whom we can legitimately make war upon.” Roger Waters, Co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd

Russia today is attacked by economic and trade “sanctions”, by travel bans, by confiscated assets they have in the west. The Cold War which propagated the Soviet Union as an invasive threat to the world, was a flagrant and absolute lie from A to Z. It forced the Soviet Union, thrown into abject poverty by saving the west from Hitler during WWII – yes, it was the Soviet Union, not the US of A and her western ‘allies’ that defeated Hitler’s army – losing between 25 and 30 million people! – Imagine! – by saving Europe, the Soviet Union became unimaginably devastated and poor.

The US propaganda created the concept of the Iron Curtain which basically forbade the west to see behind this imaginary shield to find out what the USSR really was after WWII – made destitute to the bones by the second World War. Yet this Cold War and Iron Curtain propaganda managed to make the western world believe that it is under a vital threat of a USSR invasion day-in-day-out, and that Europe with NATO must be ready to fend off any imaginary attack from the Soviet Union. It forced the Soviet Union to using all her workers’ accumulated capital to arm themselves, to be able to defend themselves from any possible western aggression, instead of using these economic resources to rebuild their country, their economy, their social systems. That’s the west – the lying, utterly and constantly deceiving west. Wake up, people!!!

Here you have it, confirmed by Wess Mitchell. The US would rather pull the rest of the world with it into a bottomless and an apocalyptic abyss with its sheer military power, than to lose and not reaching her goal. That’s the unforgiving ruling of the deep state, those that have been pulling the strings behind every US president for the last 200 years. – Unless the new alliances of the East – i.e. the SCO, BRICS, Eurasian Economic Union – half the world’s population and a third of the globes economic output – are able to subdue the United States economically, we may as well we doomed.

As the seven present ongoing wars speak for themselves, chaos – no end in sight and intended – allow me to go back to a few other wars that were not won, on purpose, of course. Let’s look again at WWII and its sister wars, economic wars and conflicts. Planning of WWII started soon after the Great Depression of 1928 to 1933 – and beyond. Hitler was a ‘convenient’ stooge. War is not only hugely profitable, but it boosts and sustains the economy of just about every sector. And the major objective for the US then was eliminating the Bolshevik communist threat, the Soviet Union. Today its demonizing President Putin and, if possible, bring about regime change in Russia. That’s on top of Washington’s wish list.

In the midst of the Great Depression, in 1931, the US created the Bank for International Settlement in Basel, Switzerland, conveniently located at the border to Germany. The BIS, totally privately owned and controlled by the Rothchild clan, was officially intended for settling war compensation payments by Germany. Though, unknown to most people, Germany has paid almost no compensation for either WWI and WWII. Most of the debt was simply forgiven. Germany was an important player in Washington’s attempt to eliminating the “communist curse” of the USSR. The BIS was used by the FED via Wall Street banks to finance Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union.

As usual, the US was dancing on two weddings: Pretending to fight Hitler’s Germany, but really supporting Hitler against Moscow. Sounds familiar? – Pretending to fight ISIS and other terrorists in the Middle East and around the world, but in reality, having been instrumental in creating, training, funding and arming the terror jihadists. When WWII was won by the Soviet army at a huge human sacrifice, the US, her allies and NATO marched in – shouting victory. And to this day these are the lessons taught in western schools, by western history books, largely ignoring the tremendous credit attributable to the Soviet Union, to the Russian people.

And since the USSR was not defeated, the Cold War had to be invented – and eventually with the help of Washington stooges, Michael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, the west brought down the Soviet Union – preparing the way for a unipolar world. This grandiose goal of the exceptional nation was however – and very fortunately – stopped in its slippery tracks by the ascent of Russian President Putin.

But that’s not all. For dominating Russia, Europe had to be ‘colonized’ – made into a “European Union” (EU) that was never meant to be a real union, as in the United States of America. The idea of a European Union was first planted shortly after WWII by the CIA, then taken over by the Club of Rome – and promoted through numerous conventions all the way to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. The next logical step was to give the EU a Constitution, to make the EU into a consolidated Federation of European States, with common economic, defense and foreign relations strategies. But this was never to be.

The former French President, Giscard d’Estaing (1974 – 1981), was given the task to lead the drafting of an EU Constitution. He had strict instructions, though unknown to most, to prepare a document that would not be ratified by member states, as it would have bluntly transferred most of the EU nations sovereignty to Brussels. And so, the constitution was rejected, starting by France. Most countries didn’t even vote on the Constitution. And so, a federation of a United Europe didn’t happen. That would have been an unbeatable competition to the US, economically and militarily. NATO was eventually to take the role of unifying Europe – under the control of Washington. Today, the EU is ever more integrated into NATO.

What happened in parallel to the construct of a (non) European Union, was the European financial and economic colonization or enslavement, through the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1944. They created the World Bank, to manage the Marshall Plan, the US-sponsored European reconstruction fund, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to monitor and regulate the gold standard (US$ 35 / Troy Ounce), vis-à-vis the so-called convertible mostly European currencies. In fact, the Marshall Plan, denominated in US-dollars, was the first step towards a common European currency, prompted by the Nixon Administration’s exiting the gold standard in 1971, eventually leading to the Euro, a fiat currency created according to the image of the US dollar. The Euro, the little brother of the US fiat dollar, thus, became a currency, with which the European economic, financial and monetary policies are being manipulated by outside forces, i.e. the FED and Wall Street. The current President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is a former Goldman Sachs executive.

These are wars, albeit the latter ones, economic wars, being constantly waged, but not won. They create chaos, illusions, believes in lies, manipulating and mobilizing people into the direction the masters of and behind Washington want them to move. These are the same masters that have been in control of the west for the last 200 years; and unknown to the vast majority of the western population, these masters are a small group of banking and financial clans that control the western monetary system, as we know it today. It was brought into existence in 1913, by the Federal Reserve Act. These masters control the FED, Wall Street and the BIS – also called the central banks of central banks, as it – the BIS – controls all but a handful of the world’s central banks.

This fiat financial system is debt-funding wars, conflicts and proxy hostilities around the world. Debt that is largely carried in the form of US treasury bills as other countries’ reserves. The continuation of wars is crucial for the system’s survival. It’s hugely profitable. If a war was won, peace would break out – no war industry profit there, no debt-rent for banks from peace. Wars must go on – and the exceptional nation may prevail, with the world’s largest military-security budget, the deadliest weapons and a national debt, called ‘unmet obligations’ by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) – of about 150 trillion dollars – about seven and a half times the US GDP. We are living in the west in a pyramid monetary fraud – that only wars can sustain, until – yes, until, a different, honest system, based on real economic and peaceful output, will gradually replace the dollar’s hegemony and its role as a world reserve currency. It’s happening as these lines go to print. Eastern economies, like the Chinese, with China’s gold-convertible Yuan, and a national debt of only about 40% of GDP, is gradually taking over the international reserve role of the US dollar.

The US of A, therefore, will do whatever she can to continue, demonizing Russia and China, provoke them into a hot war, because dominating, and outright ‘owning’ the Eurasian landmass is the ultimate objective of the killer Empire.

Peru’s supreme court sentences Shining Path leaders to new life prison terms

Cesar Uco

After five hours of deliberations, the Peruvian Supreme Court voted last week to sentence Abimael Guzman, his wife Elena Yparraguirre, Osmán Morote and seven other members of the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) to life in prison for ordering the bombing in July 1992 of Tarata Street, a densely populated commercial area of the Miraflores district in Lima.

According to the daily Correo, “The Shining Path leadership is charged with crimes against public tranquility, terrorism in the form of aggravated terrorism and crimes against public health.”

The life sentences for the bombing of Tarata Street come on top of previous life prison terms for “terrorism” and “treason” dictated against the Shining Path leaders in 1992 by a secret military court, after they were captured by Peruvian intelligence forces. Several appeals followed, but all ended up in courts upholding the original sentences.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office, reports El Comercio, will appeal the acquittal of the defendants in the Tarata Case in relation to drug-trafficking charges.

The timing of the new terror trial serves a definite political function under conditions in which the entire Peruvian state apparatus, and in particular the judicial system, is enveloped in a wave of corruption scandals.

The former Wall Street banker, Pedro Pablo Kuczynki, was forced to resign as president in March over charges relating to the sprawling corruption scandal involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrechet.

His successor, President Martín Vizcarra, confronts a spreading crisis involving audiotapes of high-ranking judges, prosecutors and attorneys bargaining over verdicts, sentences and positions.

Under these conditions, the re-prosecution of Shining Path serves to divert public opinion by reviving the widespread resentments among the Peruvian people over the crimes committed during the 20-year war fought between the guerrilla group and the Peruvian Army.

In its final report, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that 69,280 people had been killed or disappeared between 1980 and 2000; 54 percent at the hands of Shining Path and most of the rest by the Peruvian Army. The overwhelming majority of the victims were drawn from the country’s 6 million citizens of indigenous origin, who make up about 20 percent of the population.

On the evening of July 16, 1992, two vehicles parked on Tarata Street, each loaded with 250 kilograms of explosives, were detonated, killing 25 people and wounding more than 200. The explosion was so powerful that it damaged 183 homes, 400 businesses and 63 parked cars.

The attack on a busy commercial center of Miraflores marked a turning point in public perception of the fight against Shining Path. For the first time, the bloody struggle had exacted victims in a neighborhood frequented by Lima’s upper classes, who had remained largely indifferent to the death and suffering experienced by the indigenous population in the Andes.

Adhering to the Maoist doctrine of peasant-based guerrilla warfare in the countryside, Shining Path began violent operations in the early 1980s. Its main source of recruitment was from among college students from Huamanga University in Ayacucho, where Abimael Guzman taught philosophy, the Huancayo University, also located in the central Andes, and the La Cantuta teachers’ university, along with two major national universities in Lima—National University of San Marcos and the National University of Engineering.

It began operations in Lima in 1983. In addition to blowing up electricity pylons, creating blackouts in large parts of the capital, Shining Path members set fire to factories and attacked bourgeois party offices. Eventually it would expand its operations, blowing up car bombs in the streets.

Initially, Shining Path gained popularity among the most oppressed peasant youth who were attending university in the highlands. It was able to capitalize on centuries of oppression and neglect by the central government toward the poorest Andean regions of the country—Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurimac.

By 1991, Shining Path controlled most of Peru’s central and southern Andean region. The war cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent peasants with mass casualties inflicted by both the Peruvian Army and Shining Path.

Shining Path soon lost its façade of a guerrilla movement fighting to liberate the Andean people from the oppression of the state. It began holding summary trials in the villages of poor peasants, accusing them of passing information to the Peruvian Army. Trials turned into mass executions.

Losing popularity among the peasants, who found themselves in the crossfire between the Peruvian Army and the guerrillas, by 1985 Shining Path turned increasingly toward acts of terrorism, including the assassination of leaders of leftist groups, local political parties, trade unions and peasant organizations.

Meanwhile, the killing of students suspected of being sympathizers of Shining Path was directed from the highest level of the government. Former president Alberto Fujimori, who claimed victory in the 1990s for capturing Abimael Guzman, was found guilty, together with his sinister adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, of crimes against humanity for having ordered the “La Cantuta” and “Barrios Altos” massacres carried out by the Colina death squad. Fujimori and Montesinos were condemned to 25 years incarceration for these crimes, along with separate sentences for acts of corruption.

In contrast to the re-prosecution of the Shining Path leadership, in December 2017, former president Kuczynski pardoned Alberto Fujimori, who remains free to this day.

There are still more Shining Path-related trials yet to come. According to El Comercio, “This ruling does not end the judicial processes of the terrorist leaders. They have to face two other trials. … One of them is the process for the killing of 117 peasants from the Ayacucho town of Soras in 1984.”

The other case involves a different set of defendants, who have not been implicated in any acts of violence or terrorism. These are the leaders of the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef), founded in November 2009, and led by Alfredo Crespo, Abimael Guzman’s defense lawyer. They are facing charges of being members of Shining Path and having received money from drug trafficking to finance their activities.

The group has focused on demanding a general amnesty for all those jailed in connection with Peru’s 20-year dirty war, from the Shining Path prisoners to Fujimori and members of the security forces. In 2011, the group sought recognition as a political party in order to run in elections, but its petition was denied by federal election officials.

Australia’s financial newspaper warns of another global crash

Mike Head

“It will happen again.” That was the headline on last weekend’s Australian Financial Review marking the tenth anniversary of the liquidation of the US investment bank, Lehman Brothers, which began the global financial breakdown of 2008–09.

The newspaper published multiple articles warning that another crash is inevitable and that it would likely be even worse for international and Australian capitalism, because of the escalation of financial and household debt, the intensifying US-China economic war and the collapse of cooperation between the major economic and military powers.

Significantly, the edition’s accompanying editorial also sounded an alarm on the state of Australia’s political system, describing it as “shaken and fraying on the extremes” and “dysfunctional, producing five prime ministers in as many years.” Moreover, “declining loyalty has drained the political parties of meaning.”

Behind the backs of the working class, the corporate and financial ruling class is discussing the likelihood of a catastrophic economic failure that will unleash social suffering and class conflicts that the existing political system will not be able to contain.

This provides a further insight into the factional warfare that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last month and which is tearing apart the Liberal-National Coalition, one of the two pillars—with the Labor Party—of capitalist rule since World War II.

The prospect of a financial meltdown and an all-out trade war is propelling a drive to refashion the Liberal Party and the political establishment as a whole along extreme right-wing authoritarian, nationalist and xenophobic lines to divert and suppress the anticipated eruption of working class and political unrest.

Writing from Washington, the financial newspaper’s economics correspondent Jacob Greber gave a sense of the discussions underway about the fragile state of the world economy. “While the next crisis is unlikely to be a repeat of the GFC [global financial crisis], it will almost certainly echo,” he wrote. “The triggers will be different, and are by definition unknowable. But it will be just as scary and just as sudden when it finally bites.”

Despite Greber’s remarkable admission that the source of the next crisis would be “unknowable” as far as corporate analysts are concerned, he listed factors that were likely to make the coming meltdown even more “scary” and “sudden” than the GFC.

“[M]any of the things that came together in 2008 to prevent another Great Depression may not be available next time,” Greber noted. These included the “unprecedented cooperation between the world’s central banks” and China’s willingness to help bail out the US financial system. Today, President Donald Trump’s “America first” approach had thrown that into “serious doubt.”

Greber also referred to the bipartisan agreement of the US Congress in 2008 to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets to stabilise the banks, followed by other “unconventional” measures. These featured record low interest rates and the pumping of billions more dollars into the hands of the financial oligarchs via “quantitative easing.”

Greber cited a warning by Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip that “polarisation, populism and protectionism” would mean “far less political will” in a now “dysfunctional” Washington to deal with the crisis. These references primarily related to the instability triggered by the Trump administration, but it was the preceding eight years of the Obama White House that saw the burden of the collapse imposed on the working class, via the destruction of jobs and cuts to wages.

Making a parallel warning, the Australian Financial Review editorial voiced concern about the “deepening distrust” in “politics, business and even media.” In Australia, as in the US, the political elite displayed complete unity in propping up the banks and finance houses at the expense of workers’ jobs and conditions.

Among the voices warning of the potential consequences of the next crisis are Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan, the prime minister and treasurer in the last Labor government, who boast of “saving the banks” in 2008–09 by guaranteeing their borrowings and deposits and providing $42 billion in economic stimulus packages to spur retail spending.

Together with the much larger stimulus provided by the Chinese regime, which boosted Australian mining exports for several years, these measures averted a crash. However, the record profits of the banks and corporations went hand in hand with an intensified offensive against workers’ jobs and living standards.

Moreover, the bonanza handed to the finance houses by the Labor government, combined with record low official interest rates, fuelled a speculative property bubble that sent house prices soaring.

Prices are now declining, under conditions in which Australian households are now saddled with some of the highest mortgage debts in the world—exceeding 200 percent of disposable income. Falling house values, stagnant wages and rising interest rates threaten to cause immense financial stress that could see many lose their homes.

On average, house prices in Sydney, the most expensive city, have dropped 6 percent since last September and forecasts of future falls range up to 40 percent. One forward indicator, housing finance, is 8.3 percent below last year’s peak. Investor loans, which rose to 40 percent of the total and fuelled the bubble, have decreased by 28 percent since 2015.

Overshadowing these indicators are escalating measures by Washington, including punitive tariffs on Chinese imports, to prevent China from challenging US supremacy. Any major economic crisis in China, Australian capitalism’s largest export market, will have vast implications.

According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s typically downplayed September board minutes, “members observed that there were still significant tensions around global trade policy and that this represented a material risk to the outlook.”

In recent weeks already, the leading Australian share market index has fallen from near 6,400 to below 6,200, and the Australian dollar has dropped and wavered around 71 to 72 US cents, a far cry from its peak above the US dollar in 2012.

Given the uncertainty, the central bank left its official cash rate unchanged at 1.5 percent, where it has sat for more than two years, but warned that the next move is likely to be up. Any such move, even by 0.5 points, would see millions of households trapped in debt, unable to pay their mortgages as house values fall.

Increasingly, corporate media commentators are calling into question the ability of the Liberal-National government, currently headed by Scott Morrison, to deal with the mounting social tensions and political disaffection. In the same edition of the Australian Financial Review, Australian Broadcasting Corporation political correspondent Laura Tingle said the Morrison government offered only the prospect of a “depressing circus for some time to come.”

With the Coalition wracked by political rifts, the Labor Party could lead the next government. But its role would be to try to shore up the profit system by handouts to the financial oligarchy and deepening the assault on the jobs and conditions of the working class, as the last Labor government did from 2007 to 2013.