Alcoa workers strike in Western Australia

Terry Cook

Around 1,500 workers employed by US-based aluminium company Alcoa in Western Australia (WA) are continuing indefinite strike action in a protracted dispute over a new enterprise agreement (EBA). The current deal covers employees at the company’s refineries in Kwinana, Pinjarra and Wagerup and its Huntly and Willowdale bauxite mines south of Perth.

The walkout on August 8 was sparked when EBA negotiations that have been ongoing for around 20 months stalled. Alcoa applied to the federal government’s pro-business tribunal, the Fair Work Commission, to allow it to terminate the current work agreement.

If Alcoa’s application is granted, the workers could be forced back onto the base industrial award, leading to massive pay reductions and sweeping cuts to working conditions. The company is demanding that the workers vote on its EA proposal before the end of this month.

The same tactic, of seeking to force workers onto the base award, has been used by companies in numerous disputes over the last three years, including at Glencore’s Oaky North mine in Queensland and Griffin Coal in WA. In each case, it has been used by the companies, assisted by the unions, to pressure workers into accepting regressive agreements that slash wages and conditions.

Companies can apply for the termination of agreements under Fair Work industrial laws introduced by the former Labor government, with the support of the unions. The legislation also contains draconian anti-strike provisions which have been used to suppress workers’ opposition in dispute after dispute.

The strike at Alcoa erupted despite the efforts of the Australian Workers Union (AWU) to contain all opposition to sporadic limited stoppages while it attempted to broker a sell-out deal with the company.

In the wake of last week’s walkout, AWU Western Australian state secretary Mike Zoetbrood told the media that while the union’s members were “sensible, and only want what is fair and reasonable,” they “won’t accept the company using threats of termination as a means of pressuring the workforce into accepting sub-par working conditions.

Zoetbrood admitted that the union had offered “concessions” during negotiations.

The union has not made public the details of the concessions or what “sub-par working conditions” Alcoa is seeking to impose. But it is clear that the company wants to increase workplace flexibility and management prerogatives so that it can restructure to take advantage of market opportunities.

A statement by Alcoa’s corporate affairs director Jodie Read last week pointed to the agenda to be enshrined in the new EBA. Read declared that Alcoa wants “to establish a modern EBA” to allow it “to manage our operations efficiently and productively, and gives us the ability to respond to changing market and operating conditions.” She further stated that the company is determined to remain “internationally competitive throughout the business cycle through the implementation of the EBA.”

The demand for “international competitiveness” has been the banner under which companies, aided at every point by the unions, have destroyed thousands of jobs and eliminated working conditions to slash costs and get an edge over their rivals in the struggle for market share.

Remaining “internationally competitive” will mean escalating the drive to increase productivity while forcing down labour costs.

Last year, Alcoa gained regulatory approval from the WA state government to ship 2.5-million tonnes of bauxite from its WA mines to third-party customers, mainly to China. This tonnage is on top of the bauxite that is mined to feed Alcoa’s own WA alumina refineries that have a capacity of around 9.3 million tonnes or some 8 percent of the world’s alumina supply.

Alongside expanding operations, the company has carried out a cost-cutting operation in Australia, as part of a worldwide restructure announced in 2009 that included a 13 percent cut to its global workforce to offset falling aluminium prices.

This has seen sweeping attacks on the rights of Alcoa workers around the world. Around 1,000 Canadian workers at an ABI smelter in Quebec, Canada, majority-owned by Alcoa, have been locked out since January, as the company demands cuts to jobs and conditions.

Similar measures have already been carried out in Australia.

In 2014, the AWU worked with Alcoa to carry out an “orderly closure” of its Point Henry smelter in Geelong, Victoria and preventing any struggle against the shutdown. The closure cost 1,000 jobs. The company also shuttered its Yennora aluminium rolling plant in Western Sydney destroying another 250. The next year Alcoa closed its mine and power station at Anglesea, which used to supply the Port Henry smelter, axing nearly 90 jobs.

In 2017, Alcoa, with the connivance of the AWU, used the threat to close its smelter at Portland, in south-western Victoria, to secure a $230 million government subsidy. The reprieve for the 600 workers at the plant could be withdrawn at any time and the facility shutdown. Significantly, the closure threat came just one year after the AWU agreed to a one-year wage freeze for the Portland workforce, saving the company $1.5 million. It followed successive rounds of job cuts since 2009.

The strike is part of a growing wave of opposition, in the working class, and among Alcoa employees around the world, to the offensive against jobs, wages and conditions spearheaded by the major corporations since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The historical record demonstrates that these struggles can only go forward through a complete break with the corporatised unions. New organisations of struggle, including independent rank-and-file-committees, must be established to resist the AWU’s attempts to suppress the strike and turn to other sections of workers in Australia, Canada and internationally to spearhead a counter-offensive involving the entire working class.

Such organisation require a new political perspective, aimed at establishing a workers’ government that would place essential industries, including mining and resources, along with the banks and corporations, under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.

Amidst Turkish crisis Indian rupee falls to all-time low

Deepal Jayasekera

With the ongoing crisis involving Turkish lira, the Indian rupee fell to an all-time low on Tuesday. The Indian currency dropped to the level of 70.1 to the US dollar and ended at 69.93 at the end of the day, recording its largest one-day fall in five years.

Indian officials have attempted to downplay the severity of the crisis confronting the Indian economy and its currency. Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chander Garg told the media on Tuesday that there was “nothing at this stage to worry” about the fall of the rupee as it was due to “external factors.” He claimed that India had sufficient foreign exchange reserves to withstand the decline.

At the same time, Garg admitted that the country’s central bank, known as the Reserve Bank of India, was limited in what it could do to contain the fall. He said: “As currencies of other economies are also depreciating, intervention by the Reserve Bank of India, by selling dollars in the country, will not help much at this stage for stabilising the rupee.”

Indian officials have been forced to admit their inability to control “external factors” on the country’s economy. According to Garg, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has spent about $US23 billion so far in this year in its attempt to stabilise the rupee.

The fall of the Indian rupee has been unfolding over several months, in response to moves by the US Federal Reserve to lift interest rates and end its “quantitative easing,” thus reversing the flow of relatively cheap dollar-denominated loans. The Indian currency has declined about 8 percent so far this year. Now, amidst the sharp fall of the Turkish lira, which underscores the far-reaching implications of an upward movement of the dollar as a result of the US Fed’s moves on so-called emerging markets, the decline of the Indian rupee is accelerating.

Pointing to the role of foreign investors in the fall of the rupee, B. Prasanna, group executive and head of ICICI Bank, said: “The swift move [of the rupee] past 69 happened due to foreign portfolio investor (FPI) outflows and the need to hedge existing short dollar positions in the market, driven by global market sentiment rather than actual importer demand.”

The decline of Indian rupee is a part of global rush by investors away from so-called emerging markets. Radhika Rao, an economist at DBS Bank in Singapore, said: “The fall in rupee was not in isolation, rather a part of the broader sell-down in emerging markets currencies.”

As a further indication of the growing economic crisis confronting the Indian elite, the country’s trade deficit rose to $18 billion last month, from $16.6 billion in June. The major factor was the increase in oil prices. India imports more than 80 percent of its crude-oil needs.

Some sections of Indian big business welcome a weaker rupee as a favourable factor for exports, arguing that it will make the country’s products competitively cheaper in the world market. Anand Mahindra, the executive chairman of the Mahindra Group, which has interests ranging from cars to construction equipment to insurance, tweeted: “With this boost to India’s export competitiveness could we now convince global companies that it’s time to switch to India for world-scale, export-focused manufacturing?”

However, a weaker rupee will not favour all sections of Indian industries as argued by Mahindra. Those which rely on imported raw materials, component parts and machinery will face increases in their manufacturing costs in rupee terms.

Moreover, a weaker rupee could lead to higher inflation under conditions of increases in import bills of crude-oil, commodities, electronic items and engineering equipment. According to the Indian oil ministry, every rupee change in the exchange rate against the US dollar makes a change of 108.8 billion rupees ($1.58 billion) in the country’s crude-oil import bill, which reached $12.4 billion in July, 57.4 percent higher than a year ago.

While Indian officials boast the country’s foreign reserves are sufficient to push back against the downward pressures on the rupee, the current level of about $402 billion would not cover import costs for a year.

The global economic shocks will intensify the political crisis confronting the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) will face national elections next year. Its ability to allocate spending toward some cosmetic social policies, in an effort to retain support, is increasingly limited.

The higher inflation resulting from the depreciation of the rupee will intensify the already immense burden on the working people and rural poor in the form of increasing prices for fuel, food and other essential goods and services. It will lead to a further escalation of class struggle.

This year, significant sections of workers and the oppressed have engaged in strikes and mass protests over the attacks on their wages, jobs and working conditions, by both the national BJP government and administrations at state level. Bank employees throughout the country, public-sector bus workers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, cab drivers attached to major taxi companies Uber and Ola, and farmers in western, eastern and northern India were among them.

Immense class antagonisms exist due to the poverty and widening social inequality caused by the pro-investor economic reforms carried out by successive governments since 1991. The top 1 percent of country’s population enjoys nearly a quarter of all income and owns 60 percent of the country’s total wealth, under conditions where about 70 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Only a tiny minority of big bourgeoisie and privileged section of upper middle class has benefited from more than a quarter century of economic reforms in the expense of vast majority of workers and oppressed masses.

India’s social powder keg is on the verge of explosion under conditions where the main opposition Congress Party and the Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI)—are discredited among the workers and oppressed masses due to their role in imposing pro-investor economic policies and associated austerity measures. These organisations will not be able to contain working-class resistance as they have in the past.

UK: Westminster “terror incident” remains unclear

Paul Bond

Police have been granted additional time to question Salih Khater, a 29-year-old British national of Sudanese origin, held on suspicion of terror offences after he drove into three cyclists outside Parliament Tuesday morning. Details around the incident remain unclear.

Even though Khater was arrested for attempted murder, the authorities are not yet able to c onfirm that the incident was a terrorist attack. As of Friday, Khater has not yet been charged with any offence.

This did not stop the media printing lurid headlines the following morning, like the Times: “Terror returns to Westminster.”

From what has been made public, Khater drove from his home in Birmingham to London on Monday night in a silver Ford Fiesta. He drove around the Tottenham Court Road area between 1:25 a.m. and 5: 55 a.m., before moving down to Whitehall and Westminster. Police say he drove around this area for the next 90 minutes.

CCTV footage from just after 7:30 a.m. shows Khater driving around Parliament Square. He slowed down as an ambulance passed him closely on the right, employing sirens and flashing lights. Immediately afterwards Khater took a sudden left turn, across a central reservation, striking several cyclists and pedestrians. Three people were injured, none seriously.

Khater drove down an access route to the Houses of Parliament and crashed into a security barrier. Armed police descended on the car and arrested Khater, who said nothing. No weapons or explosives were found.

Detained initially on suspicion of preparing an act of terrorism, he was then arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Police were granted a warrant of further detention for questioning, with Khater said to be not cooperating with their enquiries.

Police say Khater was not known to UK intelligence agencies. However, everything said by the authorities around the case should be approached with the necessary caution—given that in every case of terrorism carried out so far in the UK, as in other countries, the perpetrators have been well known to the state.

Questions remain about the incident itself. CCTV footage reveals an unmarked white van in the close vicinity which was apparently following Khater. The van changed direction to follow his car when he crossed the central reservation, raising the possibility that Khater was already under surveillance.

The security services denied any connection, but a retired police officer told the Daily Mail that the “consensus” among former officers was that this was “likely an unmarked police vehicle.”

Scotland Yard have said there was an unmarked vehicle in the area on “unrelated matters.”

Khater and his family are Zaghawa Muslims, who fled from Darfur to eastern Sudan following the 2007 humanitarian catastrophe. Abubakr Ibrahim, a Sudanese community leader in Birmingham who knows the family, explained that Khater “wanted to leave Sudan because of the country’s economic problems.”

In 2008, he walked across the desert to Libya, where he worked on a farm for two years before going to Italy and France, then coming to Britain around eight years ago with his younger brother, Mohammed.

In Birmingham, Salih Khater studied English and took a college science diploma. He had started an accountancy degree at Coventry University last September but was asked to leave after failing his first year.

Eight years after he first claimed asylum, Khater was finally issued his British passport just two weeks ago. He has not seen his family in the Sudan. His father and sister died there last year.

Sections of the press have speculated that the incident was a reconnaissance exercise for a future attack. Friends and acquaintances in Birmingham, however, say Khater went to London to obtain a visa so he could visit relatives in Sudan.

Anwar Mukhtar runs a football team for Sudanese migrants in Birmingham, which Khater joined when he arrived. Mukhtar pointed out that having a passport “allow[ed] him to travel in and out of the country for the first time since he arrived as a refugee.” Friends say he was driving overnight to arrive early at the embassy and find a parking space.

Dismissing the idea that Khater would have staged a terrorist attack, Mukhtar told press that he “missed his family and was looking forward to seeing them, so … it makes no sense.”

Mukhtar and other friends have suggested that Khater panicked at the proximity of the ambulance and lost control of his car. Tiredness after driving all night has also been suggested as a possible contributing factor.

Khater was widely described as a quiet and sociable man, who spent his time in cafés and playing football. He did not attend mosque. A trustee of Birmingham Central Mosque says Khater was not known as “a fervent worshipper,” noting that “He’s not the kind of person we usually see committing these kinds of crimes. They’re usually loners and keep themselves to themselves.”

This has not prevented the press drawing connections with Khalid Masood’s attack on Westminster Bridge last year, although the incidents were different.

Masood, who was known to the security services, was armed, and had driven deliberately at pedestrians before he was shot by police. The Daily Mail wrote that Salih Khater had moved in April to a council block “just ten minutes” from Masood’s former home.

The incident will be used to intensify policing powers and surveillance across the capital. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said that security in the area, including both “armed officers … and physical barriers” had been increased lately, “and there is more to come on that in further months.” Decisions on pedestrianisation will be discussed “between parliamentary authorities, [the police], the intelligence agencies and indeed the local authorities,” including Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The Sun demanded in an editorial that increasing state surveillance, including monitoring of social media, were necessitated by the events. “The Government must not let terrorism slip to the back of the queue, no matter how thorny other political issues are. It remains a clear and present danger.”

Press coverage of the incident is already being used to justify further Islamophobia. Windows were smashed with catapults at two Birmingham mosques on Wednesday evening. Earlier that day, responding to coverage of Khater’s case, Birmingham Central Mosque trustee Nassar Mahmood warned that such incidents led people to “speculate and… apportion blame very quickly,” making Muslims “the bogeyman in society.”

Taliban attack on Afghan city deepens crisis of US puppet regime in Kabul

Jordan Shilton

The battle between the Taliban and Afghan government forces for control of the city of Ghazni, located some 150 kilometres southeast of the Afghan capital, underscores the deepening crisis confronting the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul. After 1,000 Taliban fighters stormed the strategically important centre on 10 August, it took government forces five days to restore their control over the city, following a series of US air strikes.

At least 100 Afghan security forces were reportedly killed in the fighting, along with a further 30 civilians. Hundreds more were injured or forced to flee their homes. The Afghan government claimed that there were 400 Taliban deaths.

Coming almost a year to the day after US President Donald Trump bombastically unveiled his new strategy for Afghanistan, including the deployment of thousands more troops and the boast that he was untying the hands of the American military, the battle for Ghazni testifies to US imperialism’s disastrous position in Afghanistan. After almost 17 years of bloody colonial warfare, which has claimed the lives of untold thousands of civilians and driven millions more from their homes, Washington is struggling to maintain in power a corrupt government that is despised by the vast majority of the impoverished Afghan population. Although some 15,000 US troops remain in the country, Afghan government control in many regions is non-existent.

The loss of Ghazni would have essentially cut the government in Kabul off from Afghanistan’s southern provinces. But even with the Taliban’s retreat, Kabul’s control over the area remains tenuous. Reports indicate that many of the Taliban fighters retreated to well-established positions in the countryside near Ghazni. While the Afghan government claims that the Taliban controls only 14 percent of Afghan territory, an estimate by the BBC earlier this year suggested that the radical Islamist group is contesting government control of 70 percent of the country.

As if to underline the besieged character of the regime in Kabul, Taliban fighters launched a series of attacks on Afghan army bases in the northern province of Baghlan and overran a military base in the northwestern province of Fariab on Tuesday and Wednesday. The attacks claimed the lives of around 100 Afghan security forces.

The security situation in the capital is also dangerous. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber attacked an education centre in a Shia district of western Kabul, killing at least 25 and injuring 35 more. The attack came just three weeks after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 23 at Kabul’s international airport. Since January, 16 attacks claiming the lives of at least 240 civilians have occurred in the capital.

According to figures released by the United Nations in July, more than 1,600 civilians lost their lives in fighting across the country between January and June this year. 160,000 were forced to flee their homes due to clashes between government forces and the Taliban.

The Afghan government has stepped up its denunciations of Pakistan for its alleged support for the expansion of Taliban violence. Emboldened by Trump’s decision in January to cut off all military aid to Islamabad as part of Washington’s efforts to cement its strategic partnership with India, Pakistan’s nuclear arch-rival in the region, Kabul accused Pakistan of being behind a string of deadly attacks in the capital.

Following the fighting in Ghazni, Afghan government officials claimed that of the 400 Taliban fighters allegedly killed, 70 came from Pakistan. They cited social media reports alleging that large numbers of body bags have arrived in Pakistan and that funerals were being held to mourn the victims.

Islamabad rebuffed the charges, declaring that there was no evidence to back them up. Pakistani intelligence has long maintained ties to the Taliban so as to retain a degree of influence in the affairs of its war-torn neighbour. The Pakistani ruling elite has also grown increasingly concerned at Washington’s moves to sideline Islamabad in Afghan affairs in favour of India.

Observers anticipate a spike of violence in the coming weeks ahead of parliamentary elections planned for October. Six months later, in April 2019, presidential elections will be held.

Under these conditions, there are fears within the American military and political elite that the tottering Afghan regime could be torn apart or collapse entirely. Following the last presidential election in 2014, armed conflict nearly broke out between competing factions led by the current president, Ashraf Ghani, and Abdullah Abdullah, who abandoned his opposition to the election result only after months of behind-the-scenes wrangling culminated in a power-sharing agreement that saw Abdullah appointed to the new post of Afghan chief executive.

This time around, Ghani’s main challenger could be Atta Mohammad Nur, the governor of the western Balkh province and a warlord who is building a coalition for a presidential bid. He is relying on opposition to Ghani’s rule among ethnic Tajik politicians who allege that the president has failed to abide by the national unity government agreement.

In a bid to help stabilise the situation somewhat, US imperialism has ditched its opposition to talks with the Taliban. According to a report late last month in the New York Times, American officials have met with Taliban representatives on several occasions since mid-July in the Qatari capital of Doha, where the Islamists maintain a political office. The US delegation to the talks, which excluded Afghan government representatives, was reportedly headed by Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs Alice Wells. As late as February, Trump was insisting that peace talks involving the Taliban would take place only with the Afghan government, not directly with US representatives.

Washington’s decision to meet with the Taliban is being driven above all by broader geopolitical considerations. In mid-July, the Russian government announced that it would invite Taliban representatives to Moscow to participate in Russian-led peace talks on Afghanistan that would also involve the Afghan government and Chinese representatives. The move appears to have emerged from a June meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the security alliance led by China and Russia. At that meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping presented a peace plan for Afghanistan that called for the establishment of an SCO Afghanistan Contact Group to lead a peace process.

Xi spoke of the need for a “foundation for shared peace and security” by combating the “three evil forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism.” He went on to appeal for enhanced cooperation with Afghanistan on “defence security, law enforcement security, and information security.”

Afghanistan, which currently has observer status at the SCO, was represented at the meeting by Ghani and Abdullah.

In another meeting reported by the Diplomat magazine, Russian, Chinese, Pakistani, and Iranian intelligence officials gathered to discuss ways to deal with the security situation in Afghanistan. All four countries are targets of US imperialist aggression.

Significantly, the Moscow talks on Afghanistan, which Russia says will go ahead before the end of the summer, will not include the United States.

Washington has no intention of allowing its regional competitors to challenge its influence over Kabul by means of a peace deal that excludes the United States. To this end, it has decided not only to sit down with the Taliban, but also to collaborate with the Afghan branch of ISIS, whose fighters were recently rescued from a Taliban attack in northern Afghanistan by Afghan government helicopters.

The Bush administration, with the full support of the American ruling elite, launched the Afghanistan war in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks for definite geopolitical reasons. The attacks served as a welcome pretext for US imperialism to establish a foothold in Central Asia, putting its military forces within striking distance of Russia and on China’s western border. Control over Central Asia was seen as critical for Washington’s determination to consolidate its hegemony over the Eurasian landmass, and in particular over the Middle East, the world’s most important oil-exporting region.

Geopolitical rivalries have only intensified in the intervening years. With the global capitalist crisis having deepened markedly since 2001, as shown by the rapid escalation of tensions between the major powers, Washington is all the more determined to enforce its economic and geopolitical interests against its rivals in Afghanistan and beyond.

For this reason, the current efforts by various parties to bring about a peace agreement notwithstanding, the growing interconnection between the Afghan conflict and broader geopolitical and strategic rivalries is increasing the danger of the eruption of a region-wide war that would quickly draw in the major powers.

Google employees protest plans to build censored search engine in China

Andre Damon 

Hundreds of Google employees have protested the company’s moves to build a censored search engine in China, the New York Times reported Friday.

The Times article follows an August 1 article by the Intercept reporting that the company has secretly devoted a team of engineers and developers to constructing a search engine that would comply with China’s strict regime of Internet censorship.

Google famously ended its search operations in China in 2010, protesting the country’s strict demands that users be prevented from accessing critical websites and topics. But it has dropped all such scruples in the more recent period.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the existence of the operation, known internally as Project Dragonfly, at an all-hands meeting with employees on Thursday. At the same time, he sought to downplay the revelation, saying the company was not “close” to rolling out the product and that Google’s expansion in China was “slow-going and complicated.”

The letter by employees does not address the substance of the “moral and ethical issues” raised by Project Dragonfly, but demands that the company provide employees with more information about the tools it is developing. “We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building,” the letter concludes.

The letter and Thursday’s meeting follow the publication of an open letter in April, signed by over 1,000 employees, demanding that the company end its collaboration with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence systems designed to power the US military’s drone warfare program.

Google was forced to backtrack, nominally canceling the “Project Maven” program and adopting a set of ethical guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence. Its collaboration with the US military, however, has intensified, and the company is in the running for a massive Pentagon contract, known as “Project Jedi,” to host a large portion of the military’s technical infrastructure.

The news of Google’s efforts to create a censored search engine for the Chinese has elicited denunciations from sections the of US press, which have scolded the company for collaborating with a “totalitarian” government. In fact, Google’s proposed censored search engine in China represents a development of, not a departure from, its overall trajectory.

In April 2017, Google responded to intensifying pressure from the US political establishment and intelligence agencies by implementing a censorship system in the United States targeting principally left-wing, anti-war and socialist organizations.

At that time, Google Engineering Vice President Ben Gomes announced changes to the company’s search algorithm aimed at promoting “authoritative” news sources over “alternative viewpoints.” By using search evaluators to train the company’s artificial intelligence system, the company has down-ranked domains presenting an “alternative viewpoint… unless the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”

The effect of these measures has been a massive down-ranking of left-wing sites, particularly the World Socialist Web Site, whose search traffic from Google plunged by 75 percent.

Google gave no explanation as to which sites were being targeted and why, and told reporters that its rating system was free of political bias. In the ensuing year, this approach has been embraced by other technology giants, including Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said earlier this year that the company would reduce the propagation of what it called “fake news” instead of simply removing it, because such censorship was a “sensitive issue.”

Google’s claim of being free of political bias in its downgrading of websites is a lie that has been fully exposed by its increasingly aggressive efforts to decrease or block readers’ access to sites that promote oppositional information and viewpoints.

The development of a search engine that completely blocks a set of terms and domains at the request of a government is simply the next step for Google’s censorship regime. Pichai has made clear that the project will go ahead despite political pressure not only from employees, but also from sections of the political establishment that fear it may cut across their anti-China policies.

The United States is locked in a bitter dispute with China over its technology sector, with Washington seeking to block the growth of smart phone makers Huawei and ZTE, while promoting the expansion of US technology firms such as Google in the Chinese market.

The determination of Google to proceed with its China project indicates that the censorship methods Google is developing nominally for China are seen as having utility elsewhere, including within the United States itself.

With sales of smart phones expected to plateau, growth declining in other sectors, and record-breaking fines being imposed by the European Union amid deepening trade and economic tensions with the United States, Google, like other technology giants, is seeking closer collaboration with the American government and other governments to bolster its revenue stream. And with the United States, China and other countries increasingly focused on domestic repression and military expansion, this collaboration inevitably takes the form of partnering in police and military operations.

The ultimate outcome of Google’s efforts to create a censored search engine in China may well rest on high-level state negotiations. As the New York Timeswrote: “The Chinese government could nonetheless use Google as a chip in its negotiations with the American government, which has been critical of the way China limits market access for United States technology companies. By letting Google’s search engine back into China, the Chinese government could give President Trump a political victory, earning some good will.”

Regardless of the outcome of the talks, it is clear that Google has no objection to state censorship and is willing to collaborate with any government, whether Trump’s America or Xi’s China, to implement it.

In the midst of a deepening crisis of the world capitalist system, every ruling class internationally, fearful of growing left-wing and socialist opposition within the working class, is seeking to implement and expand state censorship of the Internet.

CEO pay up 17 percent while US workers’ wages stagnate

Matthew Taylor & Barry Grey

Average compensation for CEOs at the 350 largest companies in the US increased by 17.6 percent in 2017 over the previous year, soaring to $18.9 million. Workers’ wages, meanwhile, continued to stagnate, rising a paltry 0.3 percent.

These indices of the relentless growth of economic inequality are reported in a new study published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based think tank.

The increase in US chief executive compensation brought the ratio of CEO to workers’ pay to 312-to-1. This means that the typical CEO of a large firm makes in a single day almost as much as the typical worker earns in an entire year. By contrast, the ratio in 1965 was 20-to-1.

The surge in CEO pay is largely driven by the record rise in stock prices, with corporate bosses benefiting from massive stock buybacks, increased dividend payouts and other forms of financial parasitism. The policy of the Federal Reserve and Democratic as well as Republican administrations over the past four decades has been calculated to drive up stock prices, enabling the stock market to serve as the primary mechanism for redistributing wealth from the working class to the corporate-financial elite—the top 5 percent income earners, and, particularly, the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent.

This redistribution of wealth was greatly accelerated under the Obama administration, which responded to the financial crash of 2008 by instituting a series of policies whose net result was the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom layers of society to the top in history. These policies included the multitrillion-dollar bank bailout, near-zero percent interest rates, and the money-printing operation known as “quantitative easing.” These measures pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets and provided the banks and hedge funds with virtually free credit, enabling them to mount new speculative operations similar to those that triggered the financial meltdown and Great Recession in 2008.

The vast inflation of stocks and other financial assets was made possible by the continuing suppression of the class struggle and workers’ wages by the trade unions, which all but banned strikes in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. Wage cutting and the growth of low-paying part-time and temporary jobs in the place of decent-paying jobs wiped out in the Great Recession dramatically lowered the social position of the working class. This was combined with cuts in health care, pensions, education, housing, food stamps and other vital social programs.

The orgy of self-enrichment of the financial oligarchy has continued and accelerated under Trump with the enactment last December of a multitrillion-dollar package of tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Trump’s tax cuts have triggered a new round of mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks and dividend payments that will increase the wealth of CEOs and investors by an estimated $2.5 trillion by the end of 2018.

According to the EPI, the average compensation of American CEOs has grown by 71.7 percent since 2009, while compensation for the average worker has grown only 2.1 percent in the same period.

The CEO compensation documented by the EPI report is 586 times the annual pay of a UPS warehouse worker under the sellout contract the Teamsters union is seeking to ram through over rank-and-file opposition. That agreement caps the pay of warehouse workers at $15.50 an hour.

The total 2017 compensation of CEOs at the country’s 350 largest firms was $6,615,000,000. This is enough to grant every one of UPS’s 230,000 workers in the US a bonus of $28,760.

Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent. The typical worker’s compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent. This points to the most important factor in the colossal growth of social inequality over this period—the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions.

The span of 1978 to 2917 roughly corresponds to the period when the trade unions began collaborating in wage cuts and other concessions to the corporations and, after betraying a series of bitter strikes against wage cutting and union busting in the 1980s, all but ended strike activity in the US.

The suppression of class struggle by the unions has been particularly pervasive in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2017, major work stoppages in the US fell to seven, the second-lowest level since records began in 1947. This has enabled the ruling class to carry out a fundamental restructuring of class relations, with labor’s share of nonfarm national income in the US falling from 66.4 percent in 2000 to 58.9 percent in 2018—a transfer of wealth that will equal $1.4 trillion in 2018 alone.

A second factor in the suppression of wages is the immense consolidation and concentration of corporate power, particularly in the US. In an article published Friday on next week’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming conference of central bankers, the Financial Times reported that a major topic will be the role of accelerated corporate monopolization in wage stagnation as well as low productivity and slowing capital investment.

The article cites a measure of corporate concentration—the Herfindahl-Hirschman index—which is up 48 percent since 1996. It notes that there has been greater concentration in some 75 percent of US industries over the past two decades.

Although not part of the official agenda, one can be certain that foremost on the minds of the bankers who gather at Jackson Hole will be the resurgence of strike activity this year in the US and internationally. In the first six months of 2018 there were 12 major work stoppages in the US, involving 444,000 workers, more than the total number of strikers over the last six years combined.

The surge in strike activity, and the fact that teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona initiated their statewide strikes independently of the unions, have struck fear in the American and international ruling class.

In all of these struggles workers have confronted not only the intransigence of the capitalist class, but also the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy, which seeks to suppress, contain and derail any action by workers that imperils the privileged position the union executives enjoy as the policemen of the working class.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the current contract negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters union. In June, 93 percent of UPS workers voted in favor of a nationwide strike when their contract expired on July 31. Rather than prepare for a strike and appeal to other sections of workers to join them, the Teamsters extended the contract indefinitely so as to wear down opposition to the new contract.

The new five-year contract “negotiated” by the union maintains poverty-level wages for warehouse workers, 70 percent of whom are part-time. It also creates a new “hybrid” class of drivers who will both deliver packages and work in the warehouses, earning $6 less per hour than regular drivers.

The conditions are rapidly developing for a massive eruption of working-class resistance in the US. In addition to the contract covering 230,000 UPS workers, labor agreements will expire in the coming days for hundreds of thousands of workers at the US Postal Service and in the steel, telecom and entertainment industries. At the same time, teachers will be returning to their classrooms under conditions where none of the issues that sparked strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and other states have been resolved.

The growth of militancy is combined with increased disgust with capitalism and interest in socialism. What is required is a struggle to break the grip of the pro-corporate, nationalist trade unions and mobilize the working class against the entire political establishment and the corporate oligarchs it represents.

The Socialist Equality Party urges UPS workers, postal workers, teachers and all other workers to establish new organizations of struggle independent of the unions—factory, workplace and neighborhood committees—to organize strike action and expand the fight for decent wages and conditions nationally and internationally.

This industrial offensive must be combined with a new political strategy to unite all of the various struggles—for jobs, wages, schools, health care, housing, against war—in a single unified political movement directed against the capitalist profit system and all of its political representatives.

Agbami Medical and Engineering Professionals Scholarships for Undergraduate Nigerian Students 2018

Application Deadline: 28th August, 2018

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All Nigeria States

To be taken at (country): Nigerian Universities

Accepted Subject Areas?

• Medicine/Surgery
• Dentistry
• Pharmacy
• Engineering

About Scholarship: Star Deep Water Petroleum Limited, a Chevron company and operator of the Agbami Field, in its continuous support for capacity building in the health and engineering sectors as a strategic feed into the national manpower pool, is offering a number of University Scholarship Awards to qualified Nigerian students from ALL states of the Federation.
The scholarship program, funded by Star and its Agbami co-venturers, is a major component of their Social Investment in the strategic development of health and education in Nigeria.

Offered Since: 2012

Type: Undergraduate

Requirement & Eligibility: Applications are invited from FULL-TIME, 100 and 200 level undergraduates from any state of the Federation, studying any of the under listed courses in universities within Nigeria:

Medicine & Surgery
Dentistry
Pharmacy
Engineering
Selected students will be invited for computer-administered qualifying tests in selected examination centers nationwide. Short-listed candidates for the qualifying test will be invited by email and SMS text messages. All applicants are therefore advised to ensure that valid GSM telephone numbers and personal email addresses are properly entered into the e-forms on the web site.

Number Scholarship: Several

Scholarship Benefit: Tuition fees and stipend 

How to Apply: Application is open to full-time 100 or 200 level students admitted during 2017/2018 or 2016/2017 academic session only.

1. Before you start this application, ensure you have clear scanned copies of the following documents

1. • Passport photograph with white background not more than 3 months old (450px by 450px not more than 200kb)
   • School ID card
   • Admission Letter
   • O’ Level Result
   • JAMB Result
   • Local Government Area Letter of Identification

2. Ensure the documents are named according to what they represent to avoid mixing up documents during upload

3. Ensure you attach the appropriate documents when asked to upload

To apply, follow the steps in the Scholarship Webpage (see Link below)

Visit scholarship webpage to apply

Sponsors: Chevron Nigeria oil and gas company

Important Notes: Please note that applicants for the Agbami scholarship are ineligible to apply for any other scholarship program sponsored by “STAR” or any of its Co-venturers, including the NNPC/CNL JV scholarship program published simultaneously with the Agbami scholarship program

The Nordic Countries Aren’t Socialist

Matthew Funke

If the Nordic countries represent the horizon of possibility for world unfettered by capitalist exploitation, please end me now. Those who claim that Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland, have a socialist economy, also have a misunderstanding of socialism. This misconception must be dispelled, in order to better comprehend our present international political climate and specifically the world we must strive to achieve. The Nordic countries don’t represent the better world that is possible, because they aren’t socialist.

A common misconception is that adequate social welfare programs is the equivalent of socialism. Though these are very good things that would exist under socialism, (and have existed under socialism, as shown in Chapter 7 of the 1936 USSR Constitution) a society can still have these things and be capitalist. Canada, Hong Kong, Chile, Australia, and many other countries, have universal or free healthcare. Germany, Fiji, Egypt, and Turkey all offer free education, along with some others, though sometimes conditional in relation to academic achievement or lack thereof. If those countries were socialist or aiming for socialism, like Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia, then the US would be bullying them right now, as the US harasses Nicaragua and slams sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Socialism is not our present organization of life, with the same unequal power structures, but with a “big government.” Socialism is not social democracy, in which somehow we will establish socialism through reform and displace the bourgeoisie through institutional means in a bourgeois state. No matter how much corporate power is limited, as long as corporate powers still exist and still exploit the majority and still have the upper hand in society, it is not socialism. To put it simply, socialism is an economic system in which private property is abolished and the means of production (tools, technology, machinery, raw materials) are not privately owned but are owned by all the workers. Private property is inherently violent, as the capitalist class withholds the money you need to sustain yourself and buy commodities necessary for the maintenance of your life, and only give it to you on an hourly basis if you use your labor-power to produce commodities for them on their private property. They then extract the money they garnered from the sale of the commodity you made, which they sold at a higher cost than what it cost to produce, then put a large portion of it into their pocket, spend a bit on capital, and give even less to their workers. In a socialist society, workers would receive the full value of their labor, rather than bosses and investors taking the surplus value from the worker’s labor.

In the Nords, society isn’t organized to abolish wage-slavery or overcome proletarian alienation, but is fundamentally organized in the same way as the rest of the capitalist world. This capitalist organization is an inherently flawed and exploitive system that is devouring itself alive, as the clash of its internal contradictions will bring it to its knees, and raise the fists of the working class. The nordic states are infested with these contradictions.

Nightmares in the Nordic Countries

If we examine the nordic countries present life and history more closely, the fact that they are poisoned with capitalist hegemony becomes quite apparent.

Imperialism and monopolization is an inevitable conclusion of capitalism, as it ensures accumulation of more profit. For starters, four of the seven Nordic countries are a member of NATO, the union formed to fight against the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact. With the help of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, NATO destroyed semi-socialist Yugoslavia and sent Libya into a slave trade. Other unions that some Nordic countries are a part of include the European Free Trade Association, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the European Union. Because socialist countries love unquestionable economic co-operation with capitalist states and free trade, apparently.

Colonialism is also a product of capitalism, and the Nords aren’t free from these human rights abuses either. Norway colonized the indigenous Sámi people, and has been further plundering against their humanity for centuries. The country has been greatly criticised by the international community for their politics of Norwegianization of and discrimination against the indigenous population of the country. Finland treats them similarly, as they deny funding daycare and Sámi language instruction for Sámi children, yet provide these rights to Finnish children. Finland denies many land rights and aboriginal rights to the Sámi, and Sweden isn’t innocent of this either. Had the Sámi not been colonized and their lives not been trampled, the Nordic model wouldn’t be thriving as it is today, at the expense of the Sámi homeland.

Malcolm X was right when he said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.”, though liberalism masquerades behind “colorblindedness” and truisms like “all men are created equal.” Racism (not xenophobia or ethnocentrism) truly emerged from the birth of capitalism and the Atlantic Slave trade to justify the European colonialists horrendous atrocities committed abroad to secure immense profits. It has evolved today to provide a rationale for the horrible oppression of people of color throughout the entire world, justifying the horrible inequalities that non-white people face, while justifying the decadence that the rich enjoy. Sweden is no different: the country has consistently had race attacks, according to a United Nations report that shows an epidemic of racist violence, amidst a country that perceives itself as progressive and tolerant. Asylum centers are burned, Mosques are vandalized, and these crimes occur more often than usual during election seasons, especially by Nazi parties. Tobias Hübinette, associate professor in intercultural studies at Karlstad University, says: “The welfare state takes care of you if you are inside the system, but access to the system is largely through work and partly through the residential market, which are highly segregated.” Institutional racism is so deeply tangled within capitalist society, that the only solution is an entirely new system, because it can’t function without it.

Denmark is even designating “ghettos”, urban neighborhoods where immigrants (mostly from countries the West is bombing) typically live, which are plagued by gang violence and unemployment. The Danish government, even the “pro-immigrant” Social Democrat party, are all supportive of these measures. Measures include pretty much forcing children from the “ghettos” at the age of 1 to enroll in daycare that teaches “danish values”, Christianity, and the Danish language; though parents aren’t obligated to do so, if they don’t, the municipalities would end their child benefit payments. These immigration laws even include gentrification, demolition of ghetto neighborhoods, and deliberate lowering of social welfare benefits for those that live in the ghettos. Punishments for crimes are doubled if they are committed within the ghettos, crimes that normally result in fines would inevitably result in imprisonment for the suspect, and the deployment of police is increased in these neighborhoods.

Along with racism, xenophobia, colonialism, and imperialism, another huge issue in the Nords is violent misogyny. The Nordic countries, despite their gender equality, have the highest rate of domestic violence against women in the EU, with nearly 40% of women murdered were killed by their male partner. Online violence against women, including gendered hate speech, leaks of nude images of the victim, coercion of sexual communication, and threats of sexual assault, are all increasingly prevalent in Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. Doctors forcing teenage girls to take “virginity tests” against their will, often damaging the patients ovaries, is an all too common crime in Sweden. Perhaps this is all a product of the commodification of the traditionally female body as a sex object to be used, perhaps this is a product of a neglected hyper-masculine culture, perhaps this a product of a history of the “traditional family”, division of labor, and further gendered segregation. Misogyny, even if combatted institutionally, will always be an issue under capitalism, that leads to the destruction and loss of women’s lives.

Conclusion

Sweden, a country dominated by corporations, and has above-average crime rates compared to other EU countries, especially with above-average levels of consumer fraud, is not socialist. Nor is Denmark, the country ranked 112 in economic “freedom” by the Heritage 2018 Index of Economic Freedom with an economy that stands out as the “most free” economy in the world. Norway, who wins second place in the world for the most deaths by drug overdoses, and whose oil workers are currently on strike over pensions and pays, is not a socialist country. Iceland, the country that regularly slaughters whales and has a tourism industry destroying the environment isn’t socialist either. All of the Nordic countries are in the top 20 of the Heritage 2018 Index of Economic Freedom, and if you think the Nordic model is socialist because they have good social welfare plans, please re-evaluate your idea about what words mean.

You may think, “Okay, the Nords aren’t socialist. But the socialism you’re describing didn’t work out.” And to that I reply, you’re wrong. The Washington Post reported that Struggling Romanians yearn for communism, Gallup reported that Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup, and The Christian Science Monitor reported that Tajikistan pines for old Soviet Union strength. The Pew Research Center would begger to differ that Hungarians don’t miss the Hungarian People’s Republic. Will Stewart writes for Express: “Life was better in the Soviet Union than afterwards, according to a majority of people who had a clear memory and experience of living under communism in the USSR.” in his article titled, Back in the USSR: 64 per cent of Russians say life was better in the Soviet Union than now. The Balkan Insight reports: “A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia – ‘during the time of socialism’ ”. These successes aren’t just in the past, examples are with us now.

Socialism isn’t dead, and countries actively pursuing socialism are doing pretty well. Venezuela, though struggling due to a US-led economic war of lowering Saudi oil prices and intensifying sanctions, along with government mismanagement, not because of socialism, has built over 1,600 communes in which thousands of people live in and love. Even past US president Jimmy Carter praised their voting system, saying, “Of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” The Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC says since Hugo Chavez took office in Venezuela, and since Evo Morales did in Bolivia, poverty rates, extreme poverty rates, and unemployment rates, have all dropped significantly, while enrollment in education and minimum wages have increased significantly. Dr. Margaret Chan of the World Health Organization describes the DPRK’s healthcare system, saying, “…I can tell you they have something which most other developing countries would envy.” Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, has pretty much ended racism on their island, and the World Wildlife Fund said that Cuba is the only country in the world that has achieved sustainable development. The tiny island, even though blockaded, provides healthcare, education, and housing for all, free of charge. All of this is a gross simplification of some of the achievements of socialist nations, but the message is clear: socialism works.

No, present socialist nations aren’t perfect, nor are the Nordic countries complete hellholes, but the former doesn’t suffer from the common contradictions of capitalism that the latter does: the contradiction between public welfare and private appropriation, between various disparities of income and uneven geographical development, between technological advancements and human disposability, between overproduction and starvation, between ecological sustainability and expansion of industry. So I am tired of “socialists” pointing towards the Nords as a pillar of socialism, because it is not only wrong, but does a great disservice to the legacy of achievements of the socialist nations that bourgeois media demonizes; a legacy that we can, and must, seek to replicate, exclusive to the material conditions of our present world.