French government seeks delay in order to impose unpopular labour reform

Kumaran Ira

In the face of youth protests and strikes, after millions signed an online petition against the El Khomri law, the French government is seeking to delay the imposition of the unpopular labour law reform. It was initially due to be presented on March 9, but Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri only presented the law to the National Assembly yesterday. Parliamentary debate has been pushed back to May 3.

The aim of the Socialist Party (PS) government’s manoeuvres is to work with the trade and student union bureaucracies to delay implementation of the reform and, using both police violence and the impact of upcoming school holidays, outlast protests against it.

Amid mounting anger, the government is moving to crack down on protests and blockades of high schools by students. At the March 24 protest, riot police in major cities attacked students and arrested some 40 protesters. Fifteen students were arrested in Paris and another nine students were detained in the western city of Nantes. During the past week, the police attacked and detained some students. Some students were fined and received a six-month suspended sentence.

Near the Henri Bergson school in Paris, a video shows a police officer hitting a student. According to witness statements to BFM-TV, “police attacked a 15-year-old high-school student as he was trying to move away from a cloud of tear gas when the police wanted to detain him.”

The delay imposed by the PS government is a cynical manoeuvre: nothing fundamental has been changed in the bill. The core measures in the El Khomri law include allowing unions and management to negotiate contracts violating France’s Labour Code at the level of individual firms; lengthening the work week; facilitating mass sackings; and undermining job security for young workers who are new hires.

While the PS is indicating that it will compromise on not fixing upper limits on penalties for illegal mass sackings, the central elements of the bill remain. Above all, it still retains the ability for the unions to negotiate contracts violating the Labour Code—a measure which, amid a growing global economic slump, paves the way for vast attacks on the working class.

According to the Odoxa poll for Le Parisien and France Info, published on March 24, 71 percent of the population are still opposed to the draft reform of the Labour Code, the same proportion as for the first version of the bill.

The critical question for youth opposing the bill is to orient to the only force that can halt the drive to austerity and attacks on democratic rights currently sweeping Europe: the working class. The struggle must be taken out of the hands of the trade unions and their student union allies, and develop into a broader struggle of the working class against austerity, war, and the state of emergency, politically and organizationally independent of the union bureaucracies and the PS.

The unions, the Left Front and other political satellites of the PS like the New Anti-capitalist Party, support the wars and the state of emergency imposed by the French state, however, and have repeatedly helped negotiate PS reforms.

Since Hollande came to power, they have isolated and suppressed struggles, including the Aulnay plant closure of French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën, and the Air France pilots’ strikes. They have organised protests against the El Khomri law because they fear that the rising anger among workers and youth could escape their control and trigger a mass movement against the hated PS government. They are, however, petty-bourgeois tools of the ruling class, which funds them to the tune of 95 percent of their €4 billion yearly budget.

Youth must be warned: to the extent that the struggle remains under the control of these organisations, which have no base of support in the working class, the struggle against the El Khomri law will be sold out. Indeed, the media and state officials have already started a cynical press campaign trying to demoralise protesters by speculating that opposition to the bill has been fatally weakened.

Following March 24 student protests across France, Le Monde reported, “the number of blockaded high schools seems to be trending downwards. The education ministry reports that 57 public establishments are affected of 2,500 in France, that is half of the number during the previous mobilisation on Thursday March 17.”

RTL Radio wrote, “For François Hollande, the storm has passed after numerous protests have been taken into account, and different demonstrations by the unions.” It quoted a government source as saying, “We have put out the fires.”

It concluded, “At the government, no one believes anymore in a massive mobilisation of the youth,” citing ministers who said, “Everything suggests things are running out of steam.”

This is echoed by the demoralised propaganda of the unions. While continuing to pose as opponents of the bill, they have not condemned police violence or sought to mobilise opposition to the state of emergency. They simply sought to maintain political control over protests that they called because they feared that if they had not done so, protests would have erupted against the reform anyway.

The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and other unions met and released a common strike call for March 31. It paves the way for them to wind down the movement. The statement reads, “After the March 31 day of action, the government must respond. If this is not the case, the signatories will invite the workers and youth to debate whether to continue action in the coming days and to reinforce mobilisations, including through strikes and protests.”

This is a reactionary fraud. With whatever minor modifications it feels compelled to introduce, the PS will press ahead with the El Khomri law. The unions’ invitation to “debate” whether or not to capitulate to the PS is a cynical dodge, to hide their alignment on the PS and the media campaign pushing for the winding down of the protests. Youth and workers must reject such attempts to present the PS’ illegitimate and reactionary reforms as part of a “democratic” debate.

President François Hollande’s popularity is plunging to a new record low, becoming France’s most hated president since World War II. Last week, the Labour Ministry reported that the number of job seekers rose by 38,400, pushing jobless numbers to a record 3.59 million people.

German interior minister seeks to further restrict rights of immigrants

Marianne Arens

The German coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) is seeking to further restrict the rights of immigrants. Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière announced on Saturday that he and Minister of Employment Andrea Nahles (SPD) will present the draft of a new integration law to the cabinet in May. It will include “harsh measures” against refugees who do not comply with regulations.

Among other things, the law will oblige refugees with residence permits to “learn the language, learn a trade” and “behave themselves.” If a refugee fails to meet these demands, his or her social benefits could be withdrawn. De Maizière told German broadcaster ARD on Saturday, “If the integration capacity of the concerned parties is inadequate, there will be cuts to social assistance.”

In addition to this, the interior minister wants to couple the right to residence for refugees, which is already protected under the Geneva conventions, with “integrative capacity,” by which is meant the ability to assimilate into German society. De Maizière says he wants to establish “a relationship between the successful completion of integration and the length of time one is permitted to remain in Germany.” There is already a strictly regulated settlement permit in existence in Germany. De Maizière evidently wants to further tighten these regulations.

He bluntly declared that he wishes to align the status of refugees with that of “legal immigrants,” thereby suggesting that refugees were otherwise essentially illegal. They should only be permitted to stay long-term, said de Maizière, “if they can secure their livelihoods, if they learn to speak the German language, and if they recognised the free and democratic basis of society.”

De Maizière’s rhetoric is no different from the right-wing agitation of Alternative for Germany (AfD). In reality, it is the asylum policy of the German government that has impeded the integration of refugees. Those at the mercy of this policy are first sent to barracks in large numbers, divided according to ethnicity and religion, and isolated from the population. They live in miserable and unhygienic social conditions. Educational opportunities and language courses are for the most part only organised by volunteer initiatives.

Under these conditions, for which the German government is responsible, de Maizière paints a portrait of refugees unwilling to assimilate, whom one must force to “behave themselves” with penalties and deportations. The interior minister has for years attacked refugees in this way. De Maizière is stoking a climate of hostility toward foreigners to push through an extreme right-wing agenda directed against all workers in Germany.

That is made especially clear in his call for residence obligations for refugees with permission to stay in Germany. In the ARD interview, the interior minister declares that “even recognised refugees, at least as long as they don’t have jobs which can secure their livelihoods, must remain where the state sees fit and not where refugees think fit.” He added: “Yes, it is an infringement on the right to freedom of movement,” but such measures served to “prevent the formation of ghettos.”

De Maizière is taking up plans already proposed by SPD chairman and minister of economic affairs Sigmar Gabriel in January. Gabriel told ARD at that time: “I believe we need a condition for place of residence. Otherwise, everyone—including recognised asylum applicants—will move to the big cities. That intensifies the problem and we can get real ghetto problems.” Such conditions, requiring certain groups of people to settle in a precisely defined place of residence, have existed for recognised refugees in Germany since the tightening of asylum laws in the 1990s. They were only abolished under pressure from the European Union in 2008. They constitute a clear violation of the Geneva conventions, which ruled that recognised refugees could freely choose their residence and move freely.

Only under the so-called subsidiary protection does a three-month residency requirement still exist. “Subsidiary protection” is granted to those who are not recognised refugees but who cannot yet be sent back to their home countries due to an acutely dangerous situation. This provision is applicable to almost all Syrian refugees. The argument that one must restrict freedom of movement to prevent the formation of ghettos is cynical in several respects. In reality, such measures work directly against integration.

The human rights organisation Pro Asyl writes: “Free choice of residence enables refugees to settle in a place where, for example, relatives can help facilitate their integration. Even new arrivals are dependent on networks that assist them in finding a job or a place to live.” The organisation points out that the initial period after arrival is crucial to a successful integration.

Ghettos are not created because refugees move close to their friends and relatives, but because of the policies of the federal and state governments. So-called social flashpoints, such as Berlin, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and the Ruhr area, are a product of the shutting down of mines, steel works and other industrial facilities as well as a systematic policy of social cuts through programmes like the Hartz IV welfare reforms and the neglect of municipal infrastructure.

A few weeks ago, a report by a leading welfare organisation detailed the profound gulf between the upper classes of society and the poor, unemployed, single parents, retirees and disabled. These are the real reasons for ghettoisation.

In the classic right-wing populist manner, the German coalition government is attempting to scapegoat refugees for this situation. In reality, the restrictions on freedom of movement are being put into place to better control and monitor refugees. The authorities want to know at all times where people reside so they can immediately detain and deport them the moment the political opportunity presents itself.

That they resort to noxious xenophobic rhetoric to achieve these aims and suppress the fundamental democratic right to freedom of movement serves as a serious warning to the entire working class of Germany. With the residence obligations, a police-state regime will be created that can be easily expanded. What is used against refugees today will be directed against all workers tomorrow.

FBI claims successful hack of Apple iPhone security systems

Thomas Gaist

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced Monday that it successfully hacked security features embedded in the iPhone’s iOS 9 operating system, and will therefore end its legal case against the tech giant Apple. In a short court filing, the FBI informed the court that it “no longer requires the assistance of Apple, Inc” in its efforts to compromise the phone’s data protection mechanisms.

The government refused to reveal the means by which FBI investigators gained access to San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook’s iPhone. While dropping this specific legal challenge, the FBI will continue efforts to employ “the creativity of the public and private sector” toward overcoming any obstacles to its investigation posed by iPhone security software, the government brief stated.

“It remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security and public safety,” government attorneys wrote.

The FBI’s case, launched with the backing of the Obama administration in February, had sought to force Apple to design and install software that would give investigators access to security systems embedded in an iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Farook.

The agency claimed that its latest efforts to compromise iPhone security were strictly related to the necessities of its investigation of the December 2015 incident.

“The San Bernardino case was not about trying to send a message or set a precedent; it was and is about fully investigating a terrorist attack,’’ top FBI official James Comey argued in an op-ed piece published by Lawfare last week.

In reality, the case represents the latest manifestation of the Obama administration’s drive to seize on the high-profile terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, and now Brussels to renew its push for unfettered access to encrypted communications.

Comey practically acknowledged as much in his commentary, arguing in the most general terms for Americans to revise their understanding of “liberty” in accordance with the needs of the security agencies.

“We have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety,” he said. “Finding the right place, the right balance, will matter to every American for a very long time.”

What exactly Comey means by “the right balance” was already clear from his relentless efforts, waged on behalf of the Obama White House, to promote new legislation requiring companies to install “backdoor” access to their encryption systems.

Beginning with his July 2015 report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and the Challenges of Going Dark,” Comey staged a series of public appearances in which he issued dire warnings about the horrific terror attacks and crimes that would result from the continued use of unbreakable encryption.

Comey’s protestations over the supposed security threat arising from the FBI’s lack of access to electronic data are preposterous. In light of everything that has been revealed since the 2013 exposures by Edward Snowden, it is impossible to believe that the FBI’s decision to provoke a highly public conflict with Apple over a single iPhone was motivated by purely forensic considerations. The FBI and numerous other federal and state police agencies enjoy sweeping access to vast amounts of electronic data captured by the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs.

Monday’s decision to suddenly call off the case has only underscored that the suit against Apple was little more than a cynical ploy in service of these efforts to roll back basic democratic rights.

More than simply gaining access to the data on Farook’s phone, which apparently was not far beyond the bureau’s capabilities, the FBI suit has served to ratchet up pressure on Apple and the US tech industry generally.

For its part, Apple resisted the FBI demands only because they were leveled in an intentionally public manner. Apple’s long record of collaboration with US government spying makes clear that the company has no scruples about enabling illegal government surveillance, and the tech companies have been involved in close negotiations with the state for months aimed at working out new forms of cooperation.

“We will continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have done all along,” Apple noted in its statement Monday.

Supreme Court ruling favors unions in agency shop dues case

Tom Carter

The United States Supreme Court issued a one-sentence ruling yesterday in a major case concerning the constitutionality of so-called “agency shop” agreements for public employees.

Also known as “agency fee” or “fair share” agreements, these contracts give a single union the exclusive right to represent a particular category of workers, as well as the power to compel all of those workers to pay the equivalent of union dues. These agreements have been upheld for decades, including in the 1977 Supreme Court case of Abood vs. Detroit Board of Education. However, the agreements were challenged in yesterday’s case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association as infringing on the constitutional free speech rights of workers who do not wish to join or support the union.

At the time of oral arguments in the case in January, the Supreme Court was expected to declare agency shop fees for public employees unconstitutional by a vote of 5-4. However, the unexpected death of Antonin Scalia last month left the Supreme Court with a 4-4 split vote. In cases of a tie vote, the decision of the last appeals court to hear the case is upheld. In the Friedrichs case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in favor of the unions in November 2014, citing the Abood decision.

Accordingly, the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday simply reads, in its entirety, “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.”

This decision leaves the status quo ante in place. For the time being, unions can continue to compel payment of “fair share” fees from non-union workers. At the same time, the Supreme Court left the merits of the constitutional question undecided. Yesterday’s decision kicks the can down the road, with the issue likely to be revisited once a newly appointed Supreme Court justice can break the tie.

The hard-fought Friedrichs case reflects ongoing divisions within the American ruling class over the best means of exploiting workers and suppressing their struggles.

On the one hand, the attack on agency shop fees is identified with the so-called “right to work” campaign and roughly corresponds to the Republican Party position. This position reflects the interests of those sections within the ruling establishment that would prefer to dispense with the services of the trade unions in suppressing the class struggle and facilitating layoffs, wage-cuts and speedups. Instead, these sections would resurrect the laissez fairelegal framework and doctrines that prevailed at the beginning of the last century.

The case was brought on behalf of a number of California teachers by the Center for Individual Rights, a law firm with a history of right-wing religious and libertarian legal campaigns. A consortium of right-wing entities supported the case in the Supreme Court, including the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund and the Pacific Legal Foundation, which was founded by former members of Ronald Reagan’s welfare “reform” team while he was governor of California.

The challenge to agency shop fees is based on the legal theory that they infringe on the First Amendment free speech rights of workers because they force workers to subsidize the activities of unions with which they do not agree. This theory, which the Supreme Court would likely have endorsed were it not for Scalia’s death, would have precluded public employee unions from collecting any funds from non-union members, which in turn would have jeopardized the unions’ revenue streams.

On the other hand, the defenders of agency shop fees, roughly corresponding to the Democratic Party position, believe that the state should continue to grant legal protection to what have long since become right-wing, pro-management organizations, such as the California Teachers’ Association, its parent organization the National Education Association, and the official unions more generally. This faction within the ruling elite considers the role of these organizations to be critical in undermining the opposition of workers to the destruction of living standards, working conditions and social services such as public education.

If “right to work” is the slogan of the Republican position, then the Democratic position can be identified with the slogan “labor peace.” Neither side in this legal dispute in any way represents the interests of the working class.

The Democratic position is that compelling workers to support pro-management unions, and deeming those unions to be the “sole legal representatives” of the workers, is a more effective, efficient and reliable way to attack workers’ rights than abolishing these organizations, a risky proposition that poses the danger of genuine, militant and even revolutionary workers’ organizations replacing them.

The Democratic Party also has a direct pecuniary interest in protecting unions, which have become completely integrated into the Democratic Party apparatus and provide it with campaign cash and election workers.

The 1977 Supreme Court decision in the Abood case emphasized the “governmental interests advanced by the agency-shop provision,” and specifically cited the governmental interest in “labor peace.” The Supreme Court indicated that it would be undesirable if “rival teachers’ unions, holding quite different views as to the proper class hours, class sizes, holidays, tenure provisions, and grievance procedures, each sought to obtain the employer’s agreement.” It was therefore better from the standpoint of the state for a specific union to be designated the “sole legal representative” of the workers, with authority to negotiate on behalf of those workers and collect money from each of them.

A friend of the court brief by the American Federation of Teachers union in the current case emphasizes “states’ interests in promoting collaborative working relationships with their unions.” The brief goes on to praise “what can be achieved through labor-management collaboration.” Variations on the word “collaborate” appear at least ten times in the brief. This encapsulates the unions’ position that they should continue to enjoy legal privileges based on their usefulness to management and the state.

In oral arguments in January, the attorney for the California Teachers Association expressly argued that agency shop fees promote “labor peace.” He said, “In New York City, for example, there were strikes that were occurring all of the time until an agency fee system was put into place, and that enabled the city to better deliver transit services, school services, and the like.” In other words, an agency fee system is a tool for reducing strike activity.

Workers should reject the entire framework of the alternatives as they are defined in the Supreme Court case. They can effectively fight the attacks of the employers and the government only by breaking the grip of the corporatist unions and building new organizations—factory and work place committees of struggle, democratically controlled by the workers themselves and completely independent of the official unions and all of the politicians and parties of big business.

The Socialist Equality Party supports all efforts to build such organizations and fights to link this struggle to the development of an independent political movement of the working class based on a socialist program.

Intelligence accounts raise more questions on origins of Brussels, Paris attacks

Alex Lantier

Accounts of US and European intelligence’s monitoring of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) make ever clearer that the key ingredient in ISIS terror attacks in Brussels and last year in Paris was the support of factions of the NATO countries’ intelligence apparatus for ISIS in the war in Syria.

As NATO officials sought to use ISIS militias and terror attacks to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and to discredit Assad’s accusations that they was supporting terrorists in Syria, they ignored mounting signs that ISIS was developing a broad terror network in Europe. This reckless policy led to substantial infighting inside the intelligence services, which was however hidden from the public.

On March 22 in Brussels, ISIS operatives identified as terrorists to state authorities, the El Bakraoui brothers, were able to prepare and carry out attacks, even though Belgian officials had been warned of the timing and targets of the attacks. Now, as NATO powers debate a shift towards pro-Russian forces and away from ISIS in Syria, factional infighting in the intelligence apparatus is erupting into the open. This is the content of yesterday’s lengthy New York Times feature article, titled “How ISIS built the machinery of terror under Europe’s gaze.”

The article is based on internal documents and testimony of US and French intelligence operatives of how they monitored ISIS operatives returning to Europe from Syria and apprehended several preparing attacks in Europe. It presents extended accounts of the travel plans, social media postings, and political views of several European recruits to ISIS who were preparing attacks in Europe, making clear that ISIS is thoroughly penetrated and monitored by NATO intelligence agencies. This makes it all the remarkable that ISIS was allowed to repeatedly carry out large-scale attacks in Europe.

The Times notes, “Officials now say the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down.”

In fact, sections of the intelligence establishment were aware and concerned from shortly after the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011 that the Islamist militias they were mobilizing against Assad would organize terror attacks not only in Syria, but also in Europe.

The Times cites retired US General Michael T. Flynn, the leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2012 to 2014. Flynn was a key source in a report by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books in January, detailing contacts of US military intelligence with Russian and Syrian officials, which the DIA hoped to use in a war against ISIS.

Flynn tells the Times, “This didn’t all of a sudden pop up in the last six months. They have been contemplating external attacks ever since the group moved into Syria in 2012.”

These signals included the May 24, 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels carried out by Mehdi Nemmouche, an ISIS fighter from nearby Roubaix, in France. The Times notes, “Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,’ Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection. ‘He probably acted alone,’ she told reporters at the time.”

In fact, a review of Nemmouche’s phone records by the intelligence agencies showed that he was in close touch with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the public face of ISIS’ social media recruiting operations, who subsequently led the November 13 ISIS attack in Paris.

The Times writes, “In the months before the Jewish museum attack, Mr. Nemmouche’s phone records reveal that he made a 24-minute call to Mr. Abaaoud, according to a 55-page report by the French National Police’s anti-terror unit in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.”

The article follows in detail the movements of ISIS operative Reda Hame, a 29-year-old computer technician from Paris who traveled to Syria in 2014 and volunteered, apparently after some initial reluctance, to return and carry out terror attacks in Europe. Despite attempts to hide and encrypt his communications with Abaaoud, Hame was apprehended in August of last year before he could carry out any attacks.

He is apparently one of 21 such ISIS operatives who were arrested before carrying out their attacks. “It’s a factory over there,” Hame told French intelligence officials after his arrest, according to the Times. “They are doing everything possible to strike France, or else Europe.”

As sections of the intelligence establishment were well aware, a mass of information pointed to the fact that ISIS was preparing terror attacks in Europe. “All the signals were there. For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014,” adds Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst with private firm Kronos Advisory.

The main question that emerges from the Times ’ account, which it does not even bother to pose, is why intelligence agencies did not pay attention to the “deafening” signs that ISIS was preparing attacks in Europe. This also raises what role state agencies’ decision to downplay these reports played in ISIS’ ability to carry out the Paris and Brussels attacks—against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, again in Paris in November, and now in Brussels—killing and wounding hundreds in Europe.

The central factor is that in the initial years of the war, there was broad support in the ruling classes of Europe and the United States for a proxy war for regime change against Assad relying on Islamist terror groups. In Europe, protocols were put in place so that thousands of Islamist fighters could travel to the Middle East, to train for war against Assad, with impunity.

Initial reports that NATO proxies were carrying out hundreds of terror bombings, like the report by the Arab League in early 2012, were denounced in the Western media. In the ruling class and reactionary layers of the affluent middle class, there was broad support for an imperialist war against Syria waged via terrorist methods. Middle class pseudo-left groups such as the International Socialist Organization in the United States, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France and the Left Party in Germany enthusiastically promoted war with Syria.

War fever swept the New York Times, which published extensive, favorable portrayals of terror attacks in Syria by leading journalists. C.J. Chivers’ August 2012 video report “The Lions of Tawhid” detailed his stay with an Islamist militia, the Lions of Tawhid, that carried out truck bombings and killings near the Syrian city of Aleppo.

After criticisms emerged that the video showed the Lions of Tawhid carrying out a war crime by trying to use a prisoner as an unwitting suicide bomber, Chivers dismissed his critics as supporters of Assad on his blog, The Gun: “Where you stand on this probably depends on who you are. You might support this if you support the rebels and their cause. You won’t much like it if you are a member of a Syrian Mi-8 helicopter crew, or depend upon those aircraft and those crews for medevac and ammunition resupply.”

As these moods and views dominated in ruling circles, intelligence agencies ignored the mounting evidence that ISIS and similar groups linked to Al Qaeda were developing terror networks internationally. This underscores the fact that the main goal of the so-called “war on terror” is regime change and imperialist domination of the Middle East, not fighting terrorism. The Times report makes clear that the wars and the division of labor between the intelligence agencies and Islamist fighters have emerged as the main danger of terrorism in Europe today.

A number of questions remain, however, on how it was possible for the Charlie Hebdo, November 13, and Brussels attacks to proceed. In all cases, the attackers were high-ranking ISIS or Al Qaeda fighters well known to intelligence services: The Kouachi brothers were under state surveillance and spoke directly to Al Qaeda’s top leadership in the Arabian Peninsula. Abaaoud was known internationally and publicly as a leading ISIS official. And the El Bakraoui brothers in Brussels were violent felons known as terrorists to the intelligence services.

Given that the intelligence services were able to identify and stop more obscure figures such as Reda Hame, it remains inexplicable how such top Islamist fighters were allowed to travel freely across Europe to prepare mass terror attacks.

Warnings of global arms race ahead of Nuclear Security Summit

Andre Damon

On Thursday, the leaders of the US, China, Britain, France, Italy, India and over fifty other countries will gather for a biennial Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. The summit will be dedicated to making largely meaningless declarations of unity and international collaboration in the face of a recent wave of terrorist attacks in Europe.

Behind the scenes, briefing papers published by intelligence agencies and think tanks, whose reports are rarely if ever mentioned in the national press or on the evening news, tell a different story, one hinted at by the decision of Russia not to send representatives to the summit.

One study, published earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, is entitled “Rethinking Armageddon: Scenario Planning in the Second Nuclear Age.”

The private intelligence think tank Stratfor declares that the world is in the midst of a “new arms race,” with major global powers, led by the United States, working aggressively to modernize, upgrade and expand both their conventional and nuclear arms.

In 2010, US President Barack Obama vowed that the US would “not develop new nuclear warheads or pursue new military missions or new capabilities.” Like most of his other promises, this pledge was broken. The White House has initiated a $1 trillion program to modernize the US nuclear stockpile. The program will upgrade existing nuclear warheads by wedding them to precision-guided missiles, and will provide mechanisms to adjust their yield so as to make them easier to use on the battlefield in tandem with conventional weapons.

Two former high-level Defense Department officials penned a recent report for the Union of Concerned Scientists warning that the move by the White House “would be viewed by many as violating the administration’s pledge not to develop or deploy new nuclear weapons.”

In January, the Defense Department announced it was moving forward with plans to replace its Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines with a completely new design beginning in 2021. Each one of the US Navy’s 14 Ohio-class ballistic submarines constitute the fifth most powerful military force in the world. Every submarine carries 24 Trident II missiles. Each missile carries eight warheads with a yield up to 36 times greater than the “Little Boy” bomb that killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima in 1945.

Yet the Navy views this as inadequate. Each new submarine, of which there will be 12, will cost $6 billion to $8 billion, up from $2 billion for the Ohio class. This estimate excludes research and development, the price of each submarine’s nearly 200 nuclear warheads, and associated operating costs.

Each of these submarines is estimated to cost 5–10 times more than the construction of a major teaching hospital, which would provide care for thousands of people.

The dramatic development of the US nuclear arsenal is part of a radical modernization of its armed forces, including the expansion of the F-35 fighter program, the estimated cost of which has ballooned, according to the latest figures, to $1.12 trillion.

The US Air Force has complained that that it does not possess a next-generation stealth aircraft capable of delivering high-yield nuclear weapons. The result is the announcement of the procurement of the latest US bomber, the Northrop Grumman B-21, of which the Air Force plans to purchase 100 at half a billion dollars apiece.

The next generation of weapons, including directed-energy beams, rail guns and hypersonic missiles, is already being field-tested and is likely to come into production over the next decade. Stratfor wrote that “as competition heats up among Russia, China and the United States to be the first to deploy” next-generation weapons, “each will become more vulnerable to attack by the others. If tensions rise, so will the risk of pre-emptive strikes among the longtime rivals.”

Numerous reports have warned that the development of precision guided, hypersonic and other next-generation non-nuclear weapons, together with the miniaturization of nuclear warheads and the development of precision-guided nuclear delivery systems, is breaking down the so-called “firewall” between conventional and nuclear war. As a result, US strategists, in particular, are increasingly pondering whether a nuclear war is “winnable.”

Along with shifts in the geopolitical situation and changes in technological capabilities, the US military and its accompanying think tanks are changing their doctrines and terminology.

The world has entered the “second nuclear age,” in the words of author Paul Bracken. The US must be ready to “fight tonight,” as Admiral Harry B. Harris put it when he became head of the Pacific Fleet. Researcher Michael Carl Haas has written on the “Second Pacific War,” involving the US and China, in which “painful losses—in ships and aircraft, sailors and aviators—would have to be expected as a matter of course, and they would probably accumulate quickly, on both sides.”

It is a well-known fact that the outbreak of the First World War was preceded by a race between Germany, Britain and other imperialist powers to build the latest and largest battleships, known as dreadnoughts, together with the expansion of their traditional military forces. Between 1908 and 1913, military spending by the European powers increased by 50 percent.

No one should believe that today’s arms race will have different consequences. These weapons, soaking up a substantial share of the world’s wealth, are meant to be used. For the first time, a world war is on the horizon between combatants possessing nuclear weapons, under conditions where the rules of engagement are being revised to make their use more likely.

Mankind finds itself in a perilous situation. Imperialism is leading society to a catastrophe that can be averted only through revolutionary means.

In A Pornified Culture, Even 'Smashing Patriarchy' Is A Fetish

Mickey Z.

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

I’ve always appreciated this quote from Assata Shakur and felt it to be ironclad radical truth. Then I woke up to the insidious reality of patriarchy. After too many years dick-footing around, I finally recognized male pattern violence for what it is: the worst problem in the world.

Of course, there’s no shortage of fierce and wise women relentlessly fighting back against sex-based oppression, exploitation, and violence. But, thanks to pornography -- the propaganda wing of male supremacy -- everything women do is fetishized, eroticized and commodified. When gonzo porn passes for sex education, anything can and will be perceived (often by both sexes) as “hot.” Even smashing patriarchy.

Let’s say a woman decides to subvert imposed gender norms by not shaving her body hair. Well, legions of men dig that “fetish,” too. Google a certain mix of related words and you’ll get about 27,500,000 results (in 0.59 seconds). After all, in a porncentric patriarchy, the only logical reason a woman would ever grow her underarm, leg, and pubic hair would be to seduce, arouse, and please every single man she encounters.

What if other women opted to reject the frailty myth by working out, developing their muscles, or excelling at a tough sport like Mixed Martial Arts? *deep sigh* Yeah, there are porn categories for all those, too. Just like there’s an abundance of porn videos exploiting other versions of the “powerful woman” trope (soldiers, CEOs, cops, prison guards, wealthy widows, the boss’s daughter, etc.) and these videos typically involve such women being brutally “put back in their place.” Why else would any woman “fight the power” if she wasn’t seeking male attention?

Let’s face it, even if a woman feels ZERO sexual attraction to the entire male sex or consciously opts to avoid any intimate contact with any men, well, “lesbians” is the most popular porn genre of all. Again, within a phallocentric culture, a depiction of two women making love is always designed for the viewing “pleasure” of the male population of Planet Earth.

I could go on but since I’m already concerned this article will be considered “hot” by some creeps, please allow me to introduce perhaps the cruelest patriarchal reversal of all: Feminism has been fetishized, as pornographers offer their predatory audiences the big prize of getting the revenge they're all taught to dream of. Scan Tumblr, if you can stomach it, and you’ll find endless mock feminist “re-education” or “reclamation” posts, designed to give the impression that the men in these particularly extreme and violent clips are “freeing” or “curing” women from their feminist tendencies. Cue the dude-bro voice: “She’s a feminist? That’s hot.”

Question: Unless women were to unexpectedly seize control of all military and economic power in the world, how can feminism (as currently defined) lead to systemic liberation?

Which brings me back to Assata and her infamous quotation.

If males as a class oppressing females as a class is the foundational cause of all violence, oppression, and hierarchy -- and EVERYTHING females do has been weaponized and used against them, how can women address this situation if not by “appealing to the moral sense” of “the people who were oppressing them”? If all forms of rebellion are rapidly corrupted into masturbatory fodder for each new generation of porn-addicted boys and men, what chance does this culture have for drastic and sustainable social change if men themselves don’t step up?

Come to think of it, perhaps this is the cruelest irony of all: Must the frontline soldiers in the struggle for women’s liberation be men?

Abolish Gender

In 99.9 percent of activist realms, personal choices do nothing to provoke institutional change. But male supremacy -- the big problem, the one at the root of it all -- can and will be challenged every single time an individual male rejects his patriarchal programming. With that in mind, I’d like to re-visit my list of 10 radically simple ways men can appeal to their own moral sense and get started right now:

1.Don’t rape and don’t be a rape apologist (99.8 percent of those in prison for rape in the United States are men and 0 percent of these rapists committed their atrocity because the victim was “asking for it”).

2.Don’t murder women (or men or children or, basically, everyone).

3.Don’t be a pedophile.

4.Don’t physically or emotionally assault your domestic partner.

5.Don’t jerk off to pornography; don’t let boys have access to pornography.

6.Don’t be a john; don’t accept the postmodern mantras about prostituted women/girls and “choice,” and don’t eroticize pain, fear, and shame via BDSM and “kink.”

7.Don’t tell misogynist jokes or use misogynist language or allow other men to do so in your presence.

8.Don’t harass, cat call, stare (“male gaze”), mansplain, or manspread.

9.Don’t ever say “not all men” and don’t engage in patriarchal reversals.

10.Don’t penetrate female-only safe spaces.

Bonus entry: Don’t be too proud of yourself for adhering to these basic guidelines, because they are the very least any man can do to challenge prescribed gender roles.

I repeat: This. Is. The. Absolute. Least. We. Can. Do.

Since we now have some don’ts to follow, here are a few things we can do:

•Listen to, validate, respect, appreciate, trust, defend, and learn from females.

•Discover how to be silent, how to relinquish the spotlight, the stage, the microphone, the platform.

•Do the work to educate ourselves and learn to recognize the deeper connections, the roots.

•Commit to addressing and surrendering all the socialization and privilege that automatically comes along with being born male.

•Reject the masculinity paradigm and stop conforming to macho ideals and conditioning.

•Identify. Unlearn. Evolve. (Each day, every day.)

•Share what you learn with boys and young men to give them a real chance to be better.

Most of all, we must openly and relentlessly name the problem: US. We are the problem. Men are the problem. Patriarchy, male supremacy, male pattern violence, misogyny -- and all the institutional structures created to maintain and obscure this necrophilic system.

If we men want to live up to self-anointed labels like activist, revolutionary, radical, ally, and comrade, the path is clear. We are required to do almost all of the initial work and make (by far) the biggest changes and commitments. If we care about justice and liberation as much as we claim we do, now is the time to look in the mirror, to call ourselves out, to check our egos and our masculinity programming at the door, and to make what appear to be major sacrifices (pro tip: they’re not).

One more time: We men must name the problem, over and over again, until we stop being the problem and stop passing on the problem to the next generation.

Contrary to Assata’s otherwise inspiring quote, the first step towards challenging patriarchy (without it becoming yet another profitable avenue for male gratification) just may be for the oppressors to make a moral choice and smash it from within.

The Climate Wars: Trench Warfare or Blitzkrieg?

Ugo Bardi

In a previous post, I examined more than 25 years of Gallup polls in the US and I came to the conclusion the climate debate is stuck in a trench warfare condition. Apparently, the percentage of Americans who say they are "worried" about climate change is today nearly the same as it was in 1989.

After the publication of that post, I received a comment that cited the results of a recent study of the social media sponsored by "The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate" that seem to be indicating a different trend. Here is the main result of that study;

Clearly, something has changed in 2014 that has led to a remarkable change in the discourse on the relation of climate and economic growth, with a very large growth (around 700%) of people having an attitude defined as "positive" toward climate change. At first sight, it looks good: this is not trench warfare, it is a true blitzkrieg.

However, it is also something that has to be taken with great caution. Note that the question that was examined in the analysis was very narrow; strictly limited to whether one believes that climate change and economic growth are compatible. The analysis didn't examine whether the messages indicated that people were worried or not about climate change, or even whether they believed it existed and was caused by human actions. And the "negative" opinion expressed in a fraction of the messages might well have been expressed by people who were very worried about climate change; so much that they thought (reasonably, in my opinion) that economic growth can only worsen things.

Indeed, the goals and the approach of the group of people who call themselves "The New Climate Economy Commission"seems to be very limited. In one of their reports, they state.

The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is a major international initiative to analyze and communicate the economic benefits and costs of acting on climate change. Chaired by former President of Mexico Felipe Calderón, the Commission comprises 28 former heads of government and finance ministers and leaders in the fields of economics and business. The goal of the New Climate Economy is to shift public discourse away from the costs of climate action to one focused on how economic growth and climate action can be achieved together

This group is said to be "commissioned by seven countries – Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom," but there are few details on what were the terms of the financing were and which agencies provided it. The page where they could provide more details on these questions is not accessible to the public. Apparently, anyway, the idea is that, since economic growth is good by definition, then it will also solve the climate change problem. Which is debatable, to say the least.

Nevertheless, we have here an interesting result that indicates that the debate on climate is not necessarily stuck forever and that, at least, there is a growing interest in the issue. It also shows that we have remarkable capabilities of studying trends in the debate not just on the basis of the old style opinion polls, but by analyzing complex trend on a vast network of social media. So far, I haven't been able to find an equivalent study that would ask questions such as, for instance, what is the percentage of people believing that it is urgent to act against global warming. That may come in the near future and then we'll be able to see if trench warfare in the climate wars is really transforming itself into a blitzkrieg.

Cuba’s Sustainable Agriculture At Risk In U.S. Thaw

Miguel Altieri

Havana market. Julia Dorofeeva/Shutterstock

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens.But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

For the past 35 years I have studied agroecology in most countries in Central and South America. Agroecology is an approach to farming that developed in the late 1970s in Latin America as a reaction against the top-down, technology-intensive and environmentally destructive strategy that characterizes modern industrial agriculture. It encourages local production by small-scale farmers, using sustainable strategies and combining Western knowledge with traditional expertise.

Cuba took this approach out of necessity when its economic partner, the Soviet bloc, dissolved in the early 1990s. As a result, Cuban farming has become a leading example of ecological agriculture.

But if relations with U.S. agribusiness companies are not managed carefully, Cuba could revert to an industrial approach that relies on mechanization, transgenic crops and agrochemicals, rolling back the revolutionary gains that its campesinos have achieved.

The shift to peasant agroecology

For several decades after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, socialist bloc countries accounted for nearly all of its foreign trade.

The government devoted 30 percent of agricultural land to sugarcane for export, while importing 57 percent of Cuba’s food supply. Farmers relied on tractors, massive amounts of pesticide and fertilizer inputs, all supplied by Soviet bloc countries. By the 1980s agricultural pests were increasing, soil quality was degrading and yields of some key crops like rice had begun to decline.

When Cuban trade with the Soviet bloc ended in the early 1990s, food production collapsed due to the loss of imported fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and petroleum. The situation was so bad that Cuba posted the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.

But then farmers started adopting agroecological techniques, with support from Cuban scientists.

Thousands of oxen replaced tractors that could not function due to lack of petroleum and spare parts. Farmers substituted green manures for chemical fertilizers and artisanally produced biopesticides for insecticides. At the same time, Cuban policymakers adopted a range of agrarian reform and decentralization policies that encouraged forms of production where groups of farmers grow and market their produce collectively.

As Cuba reoriented its agriculture to depend less on imported chemical inputs and imported equipment, food production rebounded. From 1996 though 2005, per capita food production in Cuba increased by 4.2 percent yearly during a period when production was stagnant across Latin America and the Caribbean.

In the mid-2000s, the Ministry of Agriculture dismantled all “inefficient state companies” and government-owned farms, endorsed the creation of 2,600 new small urban and suburban farms, and allowed farming on some three million hectares of unused state lands.

Urban gardens, which first sprang up during the economic crisis of the early 1990s, have developed into an important food source.

Today Cuba has 383,000 urban farms, covering 50,000 hectares of otherwise unused land and producing more than 1.5 million tons of vegetables. The most productive urban farms yield up to 20 kg of food per square meter, the highest rate in the world, using no synthetic chemicals. Urban farms supply 50 to 70 percent or more of all the fresh vegetables consumed in cities such as Havana and Villa Clara.

The risks of opening up

Now Cuba’s agriculture system is under increasing pressure to deliver harvests for export and for Cuba’s burgeoning tourist markets. Part of the production is shifting away from feeding local and regional markets, and increasingly focusing on feeding tourists and producing organic tropical products for export.

President Obama hopes to open the door for U.S. businesses to sell goods to Cuba. In Havana last Monday during Obama’s visit, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack signed an agreement with his Cuban counterpart, Agriculture Minister Gustavo Rodriguez Rollero, to promote sharing of ideas and research.

“U.S. producers are eager to help meet Cuba’s need for healthy, safe, nutritious food,” Vilsack said. The U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba, which was launched in 2014 to lobby for an end to the U.S.-Cuba trade embargo, includes more than 100 agricultural companies and trade groups. Analysts estimate that U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba could reach US$1.2 billion if remaining regulations are relaxed and trade barriers are lifted, a market that U.S. agribusiness wants to capture.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell tour a Havana farmers' market, November 2015.US Department of Agriculture/Flickr, CC

When agribusinesses invest in developing countries, they seek economies of scale. This encourages concentration of land in the hands of a few corporations and standardization of small-scale production systems. In turn, these changes force small farmers off of their lands and lead to the abandonment of local crops and traditional farming ways. The expansion of transgenic crops and agrofuels in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia since the 1990s are examples of this process.

If U.S. industrial agriculture expands into Cuba, there is a risk that it could destroy the complex social network of agroecological small farms that more than 300,000 campesinos have built up over the past several decades through farmer-to-farmer horizontal exchanges of knowledge.

This would reduce the diversity of crops that Cuba produces and harm local economies and food security. If large businesses displace small-scale farmers, agriculture will move toward export crops, increasing the ranks of unemployed. There is nothing wrong with small farmers capturing a share of export markets, as long as it does not mean neglecting their roles as local food producers. The Cuban government thus will have to protect campesinos by not importing food products that peasants produce.

Cuba still imports some of its food, including U.S. products such as poultry and soybean meal. Since agricultural sales to Cuba were legalized in 2000, U.S. agricultural exports have totaled about $5 billion. However, yearly sales have fallen from a high of $658 million in 2008 to $300 million in 2014.

U.S. companies would like to regain some of the market share that they have lost to the European Union and Brazil.

There is broad debate over how heavily Cuba relies on imports to feed its population: the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that imports make up 60 to 80 percent of Cubans' caloric intake, but other assessments are much lower.

In fact, Cuba has the potential to produce enough food with agroecological methods to feed its 11 million inhabitants. Cuba has about six million hectares of fairly level land and another million gently sloping hectares that can be used for cropping. More than half of this land remains uncultivated, and the productivity of both land and labor, as well as the efficiency of resource use, in the rest of this farm area are still low.

We have calculated that if all peasant farms and cooperatives adopted diversified agroecological designs, Cuba would be able to produce enough to feed its population, supply food to the tourist industry and even export some food to help generate foreign currency.

President Raul Castro has stated that while opening relations with the U.S. has some benefits,

We will not renounce our ideals of independence and social justice, or surrender even a single one of our principles, or concede a millimeter in the defense of our national sovereignty. We have won this sovereign right with great sacrifices and at the cost of great risks.

Cuba’s small farmers control only 25 percent of the nation’s agricultural land but produce over 65 percent of the country’s food, contributing significantly to the island’s sovereignity. Their agroecological achievements represent a true legacy of Cuba’s revolution.