The Iraq war – the eleventh anniversary is ignored

March 30, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized

Historical anniversaries are important events to commemorate; they allow us to evaluate the importance of the event and understand its impact upon contemporary life. Celebrating particular war anniversaries indicates what priorities the political order of our society has, and drives the current political debate surrounding our foreign and domestic policies. 2014 will witness the centenary anniversaries of various battles of World War One. Whether those commemorative events are right or wrong can be debated, and their contemporary relevance can be disputed. However, the fact that we choose to remember these events tells us about our character and the current state of politics.

Ignoring the anniversaries of historical events is also a striking indicator about what we stand for in today’s world. Dismissing historical occasions as unworthy of remembrance demeans their importance, and we risk forgetting those things that constitute decisive turning points in contemporary history.

March 20 this year was the eleventh anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. This anniversary passed largely ignored in the mainstream corporate media. Ignoring this event promotes the deception that the Iraq war can now be relegated to the back-burner; a conflict that was savage but now over. We can assuage our collective conscience that the horrors of this war can be consigned to distant memory.

This collective amnesia was challenged by various anti-war and labour groups. did hold events in their own way to remember this terrible invasion. The online magazine Common Dreams pointed out that the current Obama administration looks quite hypocritical in its hysterical condemnations of the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, because it was the United States that violated international law and launched an illegal invasion of Iraq back in 2003, and the lethal consequences of that war are still being felt by Iraqis today. The US set the precedent for breaking international law and occupying smaller nations, a principle invoked by Washington only when official ‘enemy’ countries are culpable.

The Truth-Out magazine carried an article by Hugh Gusterson entitled “The Iraq War: Forgotten in Plain Sight”. The author highlights the almost-complete omission of any reference to the Iraq war, avoiding any mention of a country still suffering from war and occupation. The media studiously ignored the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq invasion. By ignoring that, they can also ignore the ongoing disastrously lethal consequences of that invasion. The refusal to acknowledge the anniversary of the 2003 invasion is in line with the Obama-driven narrative since 2010 that the Iraq war is over, and that US combat troops have withdrawn. This narrative is false, misleading, and only feeds into a false sense of security.

The article by Gusterson cited above details the wilful omission of the corporate media in reporting the Iraq war. With the reduction of US casualties, and since the 2010 fake ‘withdrawal’, the media narrative has sought to portray Iraq as a largely peaceful society slowly but steadily making good since the US invasion. Not only has the number and frequency of news stories about Iraq dramatically dropped, the little reporting that we do obtain is bereft of any historical and political context. The violence in Iraq, the suicide bombings, the killings, are all decontextualized and reported as unrelated to the harmful consequence of the US invasion and occupation. As Gusterson explains:

US media coverage of the Iraq War shifted in other ways, too. The celebrity war correspondents came home with best-selling books and were replaced by second-tier writers or wire service reports. The newspaper articles grew shorter and disappeared into the interior regions of the newspaper of less interest to readers. The stories were less investigative reports or attempts to make vivid narrative sense of the war, and more pedestrian factual reporting of how many people were killed where and by whom.

The weekly reports of violence in Iraq are explained away as the result of centuries-long hatred between the Sunni and Shia communities – in other words, the barbaric natives just hate each other and that is the way it has been for years. With this normalisation of violence in Iraq, the culpability of the US in generating and inciting this sectarian conflict can be ignored and whitewashed.

Make no mistake – the fratricidal sectarian conflict in Iraq is the direct result of the US invasion, and the communalisation of Iraq politics since 2003. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, presides over a US-supported political structure that rewards sectarian affiliation over and above cross-ethnic Iraqi national unity. A state of near-civil war, punctuated by recurring bouts of sectarian killings, was created and maintained by the US invasion. As Ashley Smith of the Socialist Worker online newspaper explains, the US used the oldest imperial tactic in the book to maintain its dominance in Iraq – divide and rule.

Political office and power in Baghdad is currently awarded along the lines of sectarian affiliation – and this breaks down a sense of Iraqi Arab nationalism. The Kurds in the north of Iraq have their own statelet, economically dependent on the more powerful neighbour of Turkey to the north. The Iraqi Arab population can be divided into Sunni and Shia component, and the remaining Iraqi Assyrian and Christian minorities find themselves adrift in this new post-invasion setup.

Throughout the history of modern Iraq, the state was never perfectly harmonious to be sure. But it has never been fractured more seriously along sectarian lines than it is today – and that is the direct consequence of the US invasion.

A conference organised by various Iraqi civil rights, workers and trade unions groups heard testimony of the sectarian malignancy that has gripped Iraq since 2003. Called the Right to Heal, conference organisers that while the Obama administration continues to peddle the myth that Iraq now enjoys ‘sovereignty’, the reality on the ground is very different. Eleven years after the American invasion, the society in Iraq remains plagued by sectarian conflict, a lack of basic services and a traumatised population. The Right to Heal conference proceeded as follows:

In two hours of emotionally-charged testimony — curated by the Right to Heal campaign, a joint effort of Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, Federation of Workers Councils and Unions of Iraq, and Iraq Veterans Against the War — the hearing traced the ongoing impacts of the U.S.-led war and occupation. This legacy includes environmental poisoning, Iraqi government repression, sectarian conflict, poverty, trauma, displacement, and death.

The environmental destruction wreaked by nearly two decades of US attacks on the country is becoming more widely known. In 1991, during the first US assault on the country, US forces used weapons contained depleted uranium, and in 2004 during the US attack on Fallujah, white phosphorus was used to decimate the population. A toxicologist who addressed the conference explained:

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist, testified that U.S. burn pits in Iraq are exposing the Iraqi public to a litany of dangerous compounds, including lead and mercury. Research teams sent to Iraqi hospitals in Basra and Falluja found abnormally high rates of cancer, birth defects, and heart defects, she stated.

The toxic environment of Iraq is another direct outcome of the US invasion.

Speakers from the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions, and Iraq Veterans Against the War all made stirring contributions about the devastating impact of the US invasion and ongoing occupation. One major theme emerged from the Right To Heal conference; the US must make amends in Iraq by cleaning up its toxic legacy and stopping carrying out imperial wars of conquest overseas.

While the main architects of the Iraq war are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the US Republican leadership, they are not the only culpable parties. The Iraq war is also Obama’s war, a project that he has continued, and defended vigorously in a speech only a few weeks ago. In 2010, amid much fanfare about the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq, a number of major changes got lost. It is true that a number of combat divisions and brigades have withdrawn – at least to their heavily fortified barracks. But the US occupation has not ended, indeed, it has continued since 2010. As Seumas Milne stated in an article back in August 2010;

The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all – it’s rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush’s war on terror was retitled “overseas contingency operations” when Obama became president, US “combat operations” will be rebadged from next month as “stability operations”.

The tactics have changed, but the end goal of occupation, dominating the political and economic process in Iraq continues. It is interesting to note that the post-2010 US presence in Iraq increasingly resembles the British-sponsored Kingdom of Iraq in the 1930s. The British, having occupied Mesopotamia, as Iraq was known, faced a stubborn indigenous and nationalist rebellion in 1920. The English were compelled to change tactics, and set up a semi-colonial administration in Baghdad, having nominal authority over the country. The major economic and political decisions were made by the English ruling class, and Iraq became an economic vassal of the British empire.

The US maintains thousands of private security contractors, intelligence agents and associated military personnel in the country. In fact, as Seumas Milne stated, the occupation has been privatised and outsourced; “There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals”, typically from the developing world. “

When an occupation is outsourced, the public relations exercise can begin; the direct military engagement has ended, ‘withdrawal’ has taken place, and now somebody else can do the hard work of fighting and dying in order to maintain the occupation. As Ghali Hassan wrote back in September 2010, the occupation of Iraq has been redesigned and repackaged to make it more palatable to domestic public opinion. As Hassan went on to explain:

We all know there is no Iraqi government; it doesn’t exist. The U.S.-installed and U.S.-protected collection of criminals, religious extremists and Kurdish warlords is not a “government” per se. It is a puppet government of self-serving stooges who are incapable of to have an agreement between themselves, let alone govern the country. Since March 2010, they have been squabbling, fighting and battling over their posts and privileges.

Hassan explained that the contrast in US policy could not be more starker; the US embassy in Baghdad is the size of Vatican city, and there are towns and villages that remained ruined and desolate. While billions of dollars have ‘disappeared’ from Iraq’s oil revenues, basic services like electricity, clean water and health care remain underserviced and unavailable to most Iraqis. The lack of expertise, an impoverished workforce and economic laws that favour privatisation have seen Iraq’s agricultural sector decline, and the number of farmers steadily decrease. In the wake of the 2003 invasion, Iraqi agricultural productivity declined by 90 percent, this in a country as fertile as land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a cradle of ancient civilisation. Large agribusiness now dominates the Iraqi market, with Iraq becoming a dumping ground for cheap imports.

After eleven years of war, it is time to not only remember the Iraq conflict, but to reject the false narrative that this war has ended. It is time to end the notion that the Obama administration is an “anti-war” government. It is time to reject the poison of sectarianism that is tearing the country apart and revive a vision of pan-Arab nationalism. The International Criminal Court, presuming it is dedicated to the principles of fairness and justice, must ensure that those American political and military officials who designed and carried out this Iraq war be prosecuted for their crimes. The European Union, the United States and the international community should serious listen to the grievance of the Iraqi people, and stop pretending that the Iraq war is resolved. Obama’s deceptions and distortions about the Iraq invasion must be countered; the anti-war president has presided over a criminal occupation that continues to carry out sociocide, the destruction of a society. Eleven years after the American invasion, the modern-day Mongols of Baghdad, the American imperialist power, must be made to pay reparations and heal the wounds of Iraqi society.

Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

March 16, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized Europe, Israel, Labour Zionism, Palestine, Revisionist Zionism, Theodor Herzl

In 2005, Palestinian human rights groups and civil rights organisations launched a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel. This campaign has multiple aims, one of them being to pressure the Israeli government to comply with United Nations resolutions, and ensure that its policies conform with international law and the Universal principles of human rights. Specifically, the BDS campaign intends to achieve the full recognition of Palestinians as equal citizens within the state of Israel, to achieve the right of return of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel since 1948, as demanded by Article 11 of the United Nations general assembly resolution 194, and to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab land, cease the building of settlements and dismantle the ongoing Israeli West Bank barrier (also known as The Wall).

This campaign has attracted its supporters around the world, including Palestine solidarity activists in Australia. Various socialist and Left groups have strongly supported the BDS campaign. But the campaign has received strident criticism from Zionist organisations, political parties supportive of Israel and the ever-hostile Murdoch media establishment. Professor Irwin Cotler, former Justice Minister in the Canadian government, warned of what he called the ‘de-legitimisation’ of Israel, being promoted by campaigns like BDS. This de-legitimisation is nothing new, he argued, being based in anti-Semitism. Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, long known for his support of Israel, went further and attacked the BDS campaign for ‘abetting terrorism’, and for being an obstacle to peace. The BDS campaign has faced charges of anti-Semitism by Australian politicians and trade union leaders as well. Indeed, criticism of the state of Israel, its policies and founding ideology of Zionism is routinely met with the charge of anti-Semitism.

This charge usually serves to silence any debate about Israel’s policies, slander the critic with a tag that is dripping with historic vitriol, and delegitimise any measures by Palestinian and Palestine solidarity activists to achieve full human rights for the Palestinians and the associated Palestinian refugees. If a critic of Israel is motivated by good old ethnic-racial hatred, then their claims for equal rights and statehood recognition are discredited. The supporters of the Palestinian cause can then be ignored, and their claims of Palestinian statehood rejected as the outpourings of the irrationally obsessed, mindlessly hateful partisans of anti-Semitism, motivated by revulsion of the Jewish people and their culture.

Let us examine more closely the issue of anti-Semitism, the claims of Zionism and its realisation in the state of Israel, and the tactic of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Anti-Semitism is an irrational, xenophobic hatred of Jews as a people; regarding the Jewish people around the world as constituting one indivisible, biologically unchanging entity that comprise one nation.

Anti-Semitism is nothing new, being based in the traditional religious, namely Christian hostility to the Jewish culture and people. After the lifetime of Jesus, early Christian attitudes towards the Jews began to harden. Anti-Jewish attitudes and doctrines were part of Christian teaching and popular art from the earliest times of the established Christian church. The gospel of John, written much later than the three other gospel books, contains the most decisive comments indicating a break with Judaism, though this book is less historical than the others. This kind of religious anti-Semitism was partly based on theological differences, competition for followers, and misapprehension of Talmudic beliefs and practices.

The religious-based anti-Semitism of centuries past has been largely superseded by the more modern-sounding, pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice, which singles out Jews as incapable of assimilating into their host nation, and motivated by a tribalist-racial hostility to non-Jews, and unwilling to adapt to the secular, ‘modern’ values of the West. Modern day, nationalistic anti-Semitism adopted a particular political dimension – to exclude the Jews as a people from the political and economic life of their resident nations. Forcing Jews out of employment, business, suppressing their language and schools; these became part of the political programme of anti-Semitic parties across Europe.

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of secularism and nationalism, the religious ideologies were pushed aside and the traditional prejudice of anti-Semitism was adapted to the changing political and economic conditions of capitalism. Oppressed nations, particularly those in the Ottoman Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and Imperial Tsarist Russian empires, were demanding their independence and fighting for it. The Jewish populations of Europe, hitherto assimilated into their respective nations, were now articulating their religiously-based teachings of a return to Zion in a more nationalistic form. The Jewish people had been taught that a divinely inspired Messiah would restore them to the allegedly historical homeland of the Jews in Palestine. Never matter that Palestine was home to thousands of Arab Muslims and Christians. This yearning was always a vague aspiration; in the context of nineteenth century nationalism and secularisation, aspirations for a homeland were to take a different turn.

Throughout Europe, nationalist groups were agitating for independence; the Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians and other nationalities long suppressed were rising. The authorities in Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey and other European states needed a convenient scapegoat to blame the rising nationalistic tensions. The growth of industrial capitalism broke the bonds of feudalism, and undermined the position that many Jewish communities held in the feudal order. The capitalist system created its own inequalities and imposed suffering on the working class. Workers in various countries, among them the Jewish workers, made common cause to fight against the social and economic oppression of capitalism.

Anti-semitism was the usual outlet to divert growing anger at the economic and political injustices of the time. Immiseration could be blamed on the ‘Jewish usurer’, the stereotype of the shifty, scheming Shylock, extorting the ‘average’ (meaning non-Jewish) worker, gained traction in times of economic distress. Pogroms against Jewish communities were a frequent occurrence in Europe, particularly in Imperial Russia under the Tsar. In this charged context, the Jewish people of Europe began to join revolutionary, nationalist and socialist groups, joining the fight for social and economic justice.

But a new response began to be articulated by a number of Jewish commentators and intellectuals in Europe. They regarded anti-semitism as the inevitable and immutable consequences of living among non-Jewish nations, and that assimilation was impossible. They began to elaborate a new nationalistically motivated yearning for a homeland – Zionism. Lance Selfa, writing in the International Socialist Review magazine in the article ‘Zionism: False Messiah’, explains that political Zionism defined itself the project of establishing an exclusively Jewish state, as a nationalist, colonialist project. Zionism maintains that Jews around the world are a single nation and thus need to establish a separate homeland. Zionism holds that anti-Semitism is an inevitable consequence of the Jewish presence in their host societies.

Moses Hess, a German Jewish contemporary of Karl Marx, was the earliest exponent of this abnormal nationalism. He wrote a book, ’Rome and Jerusalem: The last national question’ (1862), in which he expounded that German anti-Semitism was a fact of life and could not be changed. The Jews of Europe would always be regarded as the outsiders, and that assimilation had failed. He argued that Jewish emancipation by joining the revolutionary struggles of the time was impossible, and that there was only one solution – a separate homeland for the Jewish people.

However, it is with Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jewish journalist and author fo the book ‘The Jewish State’ (1896) and modern political Zionism finds its most articulate exponent. Herzl argued that anti-Semitism was not only an inevitable product of Jews living as minorities amidst a non-Jewish population, but was also a necessary political ally, compelling Jewish communities in Europe and elsewhere to be driven out and thus further the goal of building a separatist homeland. Zionism is a particular form of Jewish communalism, very similar in goals to the Hindu supremacist and communalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that seeks to establish a Hindu-exclusive state in India by expelling Muslims and other minority communities.

Zionism shares with anti-Semitism the basic foundational premise that Jews around the world are a fixed entity, and must be separated from non-Jewish populations in order to be emancipated. This kind of abnormal nationalism, not only required that Jews dissociate themselves from the struggle for equality and economic justice in their home countries, but also find a place to call their homeland. Palestine was not the first destination chosen by the nascent Zionist movement as a homeland; Herzl and the leaders of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) appealed to the major imperial states of the day for a territory to call their own. At various stages, Uganda, Argentina, Madagascar were all seriously considered as possible homelands for a new Jewish state.

They approached the Ottoman Turkish Sultan, the German Kaiser, and the Russian Tsar, whose regime was responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms, in the vain hope of acquiring recognition for their cause, helping to divert Jewish workers from the revolutionary struggle, and demobilise Jews in the fight against the poison of anti-Semitism. Herzl even shook hands with the Russian minister von Plehve, in 1903. Plehve was the minister of interior and director of the police who oversaw the massive pogroms against the Jews of Kiev and other cities in the early 1900s. The Zionist leaders approached all the imperial powers for favours, no matter how criminal and murderous they were in relations to the Jewish populations in Europe. Zionism, from its very inception, was always an ally of imperialism.

It is interesting to note that Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann and other Zionist politicians wrote about the Jews of Europe in the most disparaging, obscene terms, reflecting their acceptance of the basic ideas of anti-Semitism. Anne Zirin, in her article documenting the ‘Hidden history of Zionism’ notes that the writings of Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann and other leading Zionists are replete with descriptions of Jews as aliens, parasites, bacteria, poisonous elements that cause harm to their hosts. These views stem from the basic premise of Zionism – and anti-Semitism – that humans can be most logically and fundamentally divided into races, and it is useless to struggle against such genetically based racial differences. Herzl himself regarded the anti-Semite as a necessary and dependable ally; he wrote in his diaries that the anti-Semitic countries would be the most interested in expelling the Jews from Europe and assisting their emigration to a Jewish homeland. Herzl surmised that ‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’. Not only were Jews considered a separate race, but also had to be defined as one of the ‘superior’ races, able to build their own state.

With the end of World War One, the imperial patrons that Herzl approached had all been defeated – Ottoman Turkey collapsed and its territories divided among Britain and France; the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist Russian regimes had been toppled, and newly independent states had taken their place. The one empire that Zionist leaders had approached during the war, and which had committed to building a Jewish national home, was Britain. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed the British government to the Zionist project of building the Jewish population in Palestine. The British ruling class, and Balfour the then Foreign secretary, were anti-Semitic; they had their own reasons for encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine. The British military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, bluntly declared that the Zionist movement was a useful ally of Britain, dedicated to building a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.

Balfour’s anti-Semitism was not out of place in the English aristocracy and ruling class. Winston Churchill, a rising star of British politics and the secretary of state for air and war, wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’. In this article, Churchill argued that Bolshevism was a devious product of the Jewish mentality, a perverted aspiration for equality that can never be fulfilled. Jewish people in Europe were gravitating towards this subversive philosophy. After all, were not leading Bolshevik figures in the Russian revolution of Jewish origin? So that is conclusive evidence; the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy is afoot to overturn the existing social order. But there is a solution; winning Jews over to Zionism. The best antidote to the virus of Bolshevism and its misguided ideas of racial and economic equality is the doctrine of Zionism; the British government has the responsibility to build a Zionist home for the Jews in Palestine.

The goal of the Zionist project was spelled out quite clearly by its leaders – Palestine must be colonised. The migration of Jewish settlers into Palestine was conducted from the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries not just for creating a new market and acquiring natural resources, important as those goals were. The Zionist movement wanted to create a new type of society, one that demolished the indigenous people – namely the Palestinians – and create a settler-colonial society that was exclusively Jewish. The Palestinian economy had to be undermined and replaced by a new, settler project. This effort undermines the myth, peddled by Zionist groups, that Palestine was a ‘land without a people’ and the Jews being ‘a people without a land’.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leading figure of early Zionism and the political father of the hardline right-wing ideological tradition within the Jewish state, explained quite clearly that the Zionist movement had come to Palestine to colonise it and defeat the local population. In a 1923 article entitled ‘We and the Arabs’, Jabotinsky elaborated exactly what the Zionist movement intended to achieve in Palestine: colonisation. He explained that the indigenous population would fiercely resist any attempts at colonisation, and so it was necessary to construct an ‘iron wall’ of separation, until the Palestinians either submitted, were expelled, or were simply liquidated. Jabotinsky expressed the racially biased colonial view of the Palestinians that settler advocates have had of indigenous populations.

Any native people – its all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He went on to expound on how exactly he wished the Zionist movement to treat the indigenous people of Palestine:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Jabotinsky founded a school of thought within Zionism that was sympathetic to the fascist powers of the time. He admired Mussolini’s Italy, and his organisation had cordial relations with leading fascist political leaders in Rome. In 1935, when Mussolini authorised a division of Zionist activists to take on military training in Italy, he described Jabotinsky to the Zionist emissaries of the time as ‘your fascist, Jabotinsky’.

Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and precursor of the Likud party in Israel, was not the only Zionist activist that sought the collaboration of the imperial powers. The mainstream of the Zionist movement, Labour Zionism, led by figures like David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, were also applying to the various imperialist powers for their patronage. The Zionist leaders offered to make Palestine an outpost of ‘civilisation’ amidst the ocean of native ‘savages’, the Arabic-speaking peoples. Annie Zirin, in her article about the history of Zionism for the International Socialist Review, quotes the writings of Theodor Herzl, who explained that the new Jewish state in Palestine would form an outpost of European cultivated civilisation against a tide of pan-Arab barbarism. This point is important, and we will return to it later.

Britain remained the imperial patron of the Zionist project, assisting the passage of Jewish emigrants to Palestine throughout the 1920s and 30s. With the revolt of the Palestinians in 1936, Britain changed its tactics and recommended partitioning the country along ethnic lines, allocating portions of Palestine to Arabs and Jews. What is important to note that during all this time, the Zionist movements in Europe regarded the imperial states as allies, and made decisive efforts to place themselves at their disposal. Lenni Brenner documented the efforts of the Zionist leaders to ingratiate themselves with the fascist powers of the 1930s, in his book ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’. Brenner examines the attempts by the German Zionist federation to undermine the campaign against anti-Semitism in Germany, find ways to cooperate with the Nazi regime, and appease anti-Semitic sentiments in Germany in order to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine. The visit of a top Nazi SS official to Palestine for six months, as a guest of the Zionist federation, was commemorated with the issuance of a gold medal: on one side, the Nazi swastika with the words ‘A Nazi travels to Palestine’; on the other, the Star of David. The Nazi official in question wrote several article about his sojourn in Palestine, and was enthusiastic about the Zionist project, describing “how Jewish soil under a Jew’s feet “reformed him and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.”

Brenner’s book is available online, and makes for a fascinating expose on the willingness of the Zionist leaders to approach any imperialist regime, no matter how murderously anti-Semitic, in order to achieve their goals of colonising all of Palestine.

It is not the purpose of this article to go into a detailed examination of the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israeli forces, establishing the Jewish state. The reader can refer to the excellent book by Israeli historian Illan Pappe, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, which documents the plans of the Zionist movement to attain ethnic supremacy in Palestine by expelling the indigenous population. What is important to note is that after its official foundation in 1948, the Zionist state was not only dependent on imperial patronage for its survival, but also became a bulwark of reaction, establishing working alliances with other repressive regimes around the world. Zionism is an essential prop within the larger imperialist system. Nowhere is this aspect of the Zionist state more in evidence than in its extensive military, political, economic and ideological cooperation with the former apartheid state of South Africa.

In 2010, a book detailing this unspoken yet solid alliance was published, called ‘The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with South Africa.’ The ultra-racist regime of apartheid South Africa was subjected to sanctions and international condemnation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. United Nations resolutions called on states to terminate relations with the white supremacist state. But one state continued and even increased is economic and military cooperation with the white racist regime – Israel. The Afrikaner outpost in South Africa was not just anti-Black, but also had a history of anti-Semitism. The National Party, the South African party that implemented and extended apartheid, had sympathetic ties to anti-Semitic groups, and even supported the fascist regimes in the 1930s. Many of its leaders were themselves members of pro-Nazi groups in South Africa. Yet this was no obstacle for ties between Pretoria and Tel Aviv to flourish.

The Israel-South Africa connection was driven by pragmatic considerations – sharing nuclear technology, military training of their respective armed forces, the development of business ties, and the growth of cultural exchanges. But what is significant to note is that this axis was not just opportunistic; there was a deep ideological affinity between Zionism and white supremacist apartheid. The South African prime minister in the 1970s, John Vorster, described the common goals that both Israel and his regime had – confronting the enemies of western civilisation. Just as Israel was an outpost of white European civilisation up against an ocean of Arab-Muslim barbarism, white South Africa was engaged in a struggle against the onslaught of black African Communism. Tel Aviv and Pretoria were ‘brothers in arms’, forming a mutually beneficial and ideologically driven axis that reinforced repressive practices with regard to their respective indigenous populations.

Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African politician primarily responsible for the extension of apartheid and the creation of black African bantustans, commented in 1961 that: “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” John Dugard, professor of law and former UN special rapporteur to the Human Rights Council on the Human Rights situation in the occupied territories, wrote an introduction to a book published in 2009 called ‘Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s guide’, where he examines the similarities and differences between the two societies. He should know what apartheid looks like – he is white South African. In 2009, Dugard wrote an article published in the Huffington Post that it is high time to treat the Israeli regime with the same exclusion as was apartheid South Africa. In its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel is implementing its own version of apartheid.

Understanding the history of Zionism, its regard for anti-Semitism as a cement with which to build a new state, and its role as an ally of racist and oppressive regimes, helps us to understand the importance of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, the starting point of this article. So is boycotting Israel motivated by anti-Semitism? Absolutely not says Sherry Wolf, an activist with the Socialist Worker magazine and an advocate of BDS. Zionism’s supporters use the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect debate, shut down meaningful dialogue, and downgrade the struggle by Palestinians for their rights. The BDS movement has condemned anti-Semitism and racism in all its forms. As Sherry Wolf explains it, the BDS movement is about achieving economic, political and social equality for the Palestinians. Wolf herself is of Jewish background, and she recognises the historic injustice perpetrated by the Zionist regime against the Palestinians. Brian Klug, senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University and a founder of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, explains that anti-Zionism has nothing in common with anti-Semitism. Do not poison the debate on Palestine with false accusations. This does not mean that charges of anti-Semitism can be dismissed lightly – far from it. As Tony Greenstein, anti-Zionist activist in Britain elaborates;

Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of “anti-semitism” has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article…..One of the consequences of this abuse of the term “anti-semitism” is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.

Let us leave the last word to Omar Barghouti, one of the leaders of the BDS movement, who elaborated on why we should support the BDS movement:

A Jewish state in Palestine (“a state of the Jewish nation”), no matter what shape it takes, is by definition exclusionary; it cannot but contravene the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population and perpetuate a system of racial discrimination that ought to be opposed categorically. Any other exclusionary regime in Palestine that denies citizens some of their rights based on their identity — ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, etc. — must be rejected just as strongly.

Accepting modern-day Jewish Israelis as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model, is the most magnanimous — rational — offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors. Only by shedding their colonial privileges, dismantling their structures of oppression, and accepting the restoration of the rights of the indigenous people of the land, especially the right of Palestinian refugees to return and to reparations and the right of all Palestinians to unmitigated equality, can settlers be indigenized and integrated into the emerging nation and therefore become entitled to participating in determining the future of the common state.

It is time to advocate a secular, unitary and democratic state in Palestine, because this is the equitable, humane solution for all its people.

The Revenge of History by Seumas Milne – essential reading for understanding global politics

February 23, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized capitalist economy, corporate power, Richard Dawkins, Seumas Milne

Seumas Milne is a regular political writer for The Guardian newspaper in Britain. He is also an associate editor of the paper. He writes weekly columns about political and economic subjects, ranging from the capitalist economy, to British politics, to the ‘war on terror’, and to the fightback by the victims of the imperialist states. His columns are incisive, eloquent expositions of the deceptions, misinformation, and distortions promoted by the corporate-controlled media, and he returns dignity to the profession of journalism. He is a forensic reporter, forever dissecting the messages of the rich and powerful in order to empower readers with the realisation that we need not buy the corporatised messages sold to us.

His writings from 1999 through to 2012 have been collected and printed in the book The Revenge of History: the battle for the 21^st century. This volume contains the articles that Milne has written over the decade, expounding on the twists and turns of neoliberal globalisation, the growth of unrestrained corporate power, the anti-globalisation protests, the eruption of US militarism and imperial wars, and the resistance of ordinary people to the impositions of capitalist corporate power. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the workings of the new global disorder since the end of the Cold war in 1991.

The title of the book is an obvious riposte to the widely disseminated yet anaemic thesis of the ‘end of history’ promoted by Professor Francis Fukuyama, a RAND corporation acolyte and spokesperson for US financial capital, in the early 1990s. The contention was the as the Eastern bloc adopted capitalist policies and structures, there was no remaining serious ideological and political challenge to the capitalist prescription. The Eastern European countries, and the world generally, could look forward to a period of prosperity and peace based upon the abundance created by the capitalist institutions. These illusions soon evaporated into nothing, and by the end of the 1990s, the unfettered application of privatisation, unregulated markets and corporate power had run into serious trouble.

Milne examines the progress of the 1990s, and takes their measure. His columns demonstrate that the Anti-1989 era has well and truly erupted. In a chapter of the book entitled ‘In Thrall to Corporate Power’, Milne documents that not only has unrestrained corporate power penetrated Europe, but has also made its way into the political platforms and ideologies of the traditional social-democratic parties of Europe. In powerful articles, Milne lacerates the adoption of neoliberal policies by the ‘New Labour’ administration of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The decades-old established goals of public funding, nationalisation of key industries and a social safety net, enshrined in Labour party policy, were gradually eroded by ‘New Labour’ politicians like Blair and his allies, Mandelson, Brown, Byers and Prescott. Blairite protégés were promoted, and his government, showing its true colours, included former corporate executives. Never before had the leaders of multinational corporations been included in a Labour Party cabinet, until the rise of Blairism. Milne ably demonstrates the corrupting influence that this free-market fundamentalism has had on the British political system, with democratic functioning being hollowed out and replaced by the operations of corporate power. As Milne elaborates in the book (page 81) “The New Labour disposition of social priorities has already made itself felt in the government’s deference to boardroom barons.”

Back in 2001, Milne noted the ‘Return of Anti-Capitalism’ in Britain, examining the surge of anti-globalisation protests, grassroots movements and campaigning organisations that loudly proclaimed their opposition to the wave of mass privatisations and the resultant increase in inequality. The protests were organised for May Day, the traditional Labour day holiday that has symbolised solidarity with workers everywhere. As Milne explains (page 20) “ten years after the end of the cold war and the supposed global triumph of liberal capitalist ideas, the international workers’ day has again become a focus of international protest…” The May Day holiday has provided a common platform of opposition, involving the rejection of capitalist policies in favour of pro-social programmes.

There is one other political feature of Blairism, one that has made an enormous impact around the world. This is in the area of foreign policy. Blairism tied its mast to US imperialism early on, and participated in wars overseas. In 1999, British military forces were involved in the attack on Yugoslavia and Kosovo. Why is this significant? As Milne states in his article from 1999 – this was a war, launched by European powers against another European country on the pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention’ (pages 4-5). Liberal interventionism has become an almost permanent fixture since then, with the US and Britain disguising their predatory interests in the cloak of ‘humanitarianism’. Feigned concern for human rights, in countries designated as ‘enemy states’, has become the favoured propaganda tool to stampede public opinion into accepting imperial wars.

Global justice was to be dispensed by the imperialist powers, in a manner of their choosing and on their own pre-defined terms of justice and human rights. The US attack on Iraq in 2003, the occupation of Afghanistan, the drone strikes on Pakistan and Yemen, are all expressions of deep commitment to human rights, not measures designed to bring recalcitrant peoples into line with imperial interests. Never forgetting his native Britain, Milne is a strident critic of the English capitalist state. Back in 2000, Milne noted Blair’s renewed enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian wars’ in his article ‘Sierra Leone: Raising the crusader’s flag in Africa’ (pages 5 – 7). The deployment of British troops to its former colony was the largest military operation involving English soldiers since the end of the 1982 Falklands War.

In fact, Britain’s humanitarian wars first took off in Africa, shedding any remaining concerns about the savage record of English colonialism in that continent. Milne accurately describes the ‘blanket of cultural amnesia’ (page 6) about the crimes of British and Western colonialism that enables the promotion of new colonial adventures. Never matter that British troops, back in the day of good old-fashioned colonialism, killed Sierra Leonean workers, nailed the severed limbs of Kenyans to signposts to intimidate the population, and posed in pictures with the heads of Malayan guerrillas. All this is irrelevant in the new era of the ‘wars of values’. Milne has a firm grasp of modern history, especially the history of Western colonialism. A sense of outrage at the atrocities committed by the English ruling class permeates Milne’s writings. Milne turns his journalistic fire on the ruling bodies that govern the country of his origin.

Milne regularly denounces the history of Western colonialism, a necessary historical lesson in today’s culturally amnesiac world, to use Milne’s turn of phrase. However, criticising the crimes of the imperialist powers colonial history is not merely an academic exercise, but an essential part of a political and cultural battle for the future. The wilful ignorance and blind dismissal of the appalling savagery and massive scale of the crimes of Western colonial imperialism is part of a wider battle for history.

In his 2002 article “The battle for history: Stalin, Hitler and colonial crimes”, Milne makes the point that while the Nazi holocaust and Stalinist purges were horrific and the numbers monstrous, a whitewashing of Western history makes these atrocities emblematic of the twentieth century. The equally barbaric crimes of French, British, American and other Western imperialisms are portrayed as tame and carried out only in the service of ‘humanitarian’ motives. In this distorted prism of history, as Milne writes, the monstrous atrocities of Euro-Atlantic imperialism are buried beneath an avalanche of manufactured outrage over the crimes of official enemies. The false equation of Nazism with the USSR further serves to bury the other, emblematic horrors of the twentieth century, and distorts our perspective for the future. As Milne writes (page 42):

Consider a few examples. Up to 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early 1900s. Up to a million Algerians are estimated to have died in the war for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the 20th-century British empire, the authorities gassed, bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Sierra Leone to Palestine, India to Malaya. And while Martin Amis worries that few remember the names of Soviet labour camps, who now commemorates the name of the Andaman islands penal colony, where 80,000 Indian political prisoners were routinely tortured and experimented on by British army doctors, or the huge Hola internment camp in Kenya where prisoners were beaten to death in the 1950s?

If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 – and earlier British governments are even more guilty of the still larger famines in late 19th and early 20th-century India, which claimed as many as 30 million victims under a punitive free market regime. And of course, in the post-colonial era, millions have been killed by US and other western forces or their surrogates in wars, interventions and coups from Vietnam to central America, Indonesia to southern Africa.

Milne is not dismissing the horrors of the Stalinist purges, neither is he minimising the culpability of the German ruling class for the crimes of Nazism, or ignoring the suffering of their victims. On the contrary, Milne is encouraging us in the West to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that we have no place for claiming the moral superiority of the capitalist project, while we demonise attempts at social change with the usual conservative objection that radical social movements only led to even larger abominations. This suppression of the colonial West’s savage imperial project only serves to legitimise today’s imperialist adventures, disguised as they are with ‘humanitarian’ clothing. Liberal imperialism is essentially a continuation of the imperialist mission, albeit with different, more covert tactics and newer technologies. However, Milne also points out that this new liberal interventionism, while more cunning in its tactics, will be forcefully resisted by those at the receiving end of its strikes. Milne wrote in 2008 that the defeats of the imperial project in Iraq and Afghanistan have dealt a powerful, if not mortal, blow to the notion that intervention is motivated by concerns for human rights (page 174-175).

Milne’s ability to handle complex social and political issues is demonstrated by his December 2004 article on the role of, and struggle inside, religion. Milne’s sympathies are with the secular political Left, and he makes no secret of the ongoing philosophical conflict between the secular, naturalistic underpinnings of the political Left and the primacy of the supernatural in religion. He correctly notes that the Left has struggled against clericalism, meaning those institutions of organised religion that were or are pillars of the established conservative order. The issues of how the secular Left relates to religion resonate with us until today. However, Milne also correctly observes that many secular parties, particularly in the Arab and Islamic worlds, have failed to attract broad masses of support. Into this breach, the Islamist political currents have stepped in. Added to this is the fact that Western, particularly American imperialism, aims its lethal forces at Muslim-majority countries, and one can see that resurgent Islamism is a force with social and political resilience.

Milne examines how the Left should relate to this conjuncture of politicised religion in the Arab and Islamic-majority countries in his article “The struggle is no longer against religion, but within it.” (December 2004, pages 122 – 125). The wars conducted by the United States in the Middle East, and its proxy the state of Israel, would not be possible without a domestic political climate of intense hostility to Islam as a monolithic block. Indeed, Islamophobia has become the acceptable hatred, demonising the entirety of the Islamic world as uniquely irrational and hostile to the ‘good guys’ of the West. This political agenda is resisted by the insurgent actions of various Islamist groups. The Left, while not abandoning or compromising its basic philosophical platform, should stand in solidarity with the victims of US imperial power, denounce the wars conducted in order to expand access to markets and natural resources for transnational corporations.

In fact, many of the political groups and forces that routinely denounce Islam for its supposedly rigid and uncompromising character, are the very forces that welcome imperial aggression overseas – namely the xenophobic, anti-immigrant Right, the evangelical Christians and some secular libertarians. As Milne elaborates in his 2004 article (pages 124 – 125):

Outright opposition to religion was important in its time. But to fetishise traditional secularism in our time is to fail to understand its changing social meaning. Like nationalism, religion can face either way, playing a progressive or reactionary role.

Milne avoids the sweeping condemnations of religion and religious people – a la Richard Dawkins – and seeks to understand the role of religion in today’s political and social order.

Many of the liberal secularists, who have traditionally opposed religion, have singled out Islam as a unique threat and thus have joined the cheerleading chorus for US expansionary wars and predatory economic practices in Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, many of today’s avowedly secular political leaders, like the Egyptian military dictator al-Sisi, are guilty of perpetrating crimes against their own people with the full backing of the patron, the United States.

There is so much more that Milne has covered in his writings, and it is beyond the scope of the current article to examine each in great detail. The war on terror and the gradual erosion of civil liberties; the 2008 economic crash and its consequences; the end of the unipolar world and the eruption of uprisings; the Arab Awakenings and their impact on the status quo of the Arab world – all these issues are examined at length by Milne. The book contains the eloquent expositions of a political journalist who has studied each topic, become a well-versed expert, and can write an academically sound article but also relate to the general audience. He is not writing for the benefit of other academics and professionals, but for us, the people that are most affected by the crisis of the corporatised imperialist system.

Let us make a number of concluding observations. Milne is an expert at dissecting the lies, distortions and deceptions sold to us by the mainstream media. He is articulating an alternative vision, a vision of a non-corporate world, where decisions about the future of humanity are not made in secret corporate boardroom meetings. He regards the reader as fully capable of becoming cognisant of the class politics, economic inequities and social injustice that has led us to the current unstable global disorder. He also has no doubt that people can organise, and have the capacity and strength to collectively fight back.

Unemployment is capitalism’s revolving door

February 16, 2014June 17, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized unemployment, unemployment rate

The online political magazine Counterpunch published an article by Geoffrey McDonald entitled “The Revolving Door of Unemployment”. McDonald examined the concerns expressed by American business magnates, along with US president Barack Obama, about the plight of the unemployed. They all agreed that unemployment currently exists, and that something must be done about it. Many of the corporate leaders that are feigning concern about the high level of unemployment are responsible for policies that create and worsen it. The Obama administration, driven by the ideological imperative to increase corporate profits, has certainly succeeded in driving up private profits, but has also created the conditions for mass and long-term unemployment. Not only has long-term structural unemployment become a major feature of capitalist society, but also job insecurity and low pay for those that find work.

McDonald uses the metaphor of a revolving door in describing unemployment – it is an accurate characterisation. While millions of unemployed have the capacity to work, they are separated from the means and resources to utilise that capacity. Every person has the theoretically legal right of equal opportunity to search and apply for work. Every person can enhance or improve their education, skill set, and job-seeking techniques to land a job. That is all well and good in an abstract sense, but in the real world of the capitalist market, there is one problem – equal opportunity will not reduce the unemployment rate and will not produce a reduction of poverty.

The decisions taken by the financial oligarchy, the tiny minority that owns the productive facilities, natural resources and economic levers that operate the economy, make decisions that affect the lives of the overwhelming majority of the population, the ninety-nine percent of us. For the majority of the world’s people, unemployment is a revolving door, an experience that will happen at some point in our lives. The days of job security are finished. Employment is now temporary, casualised to the point where most of us are temporary economic citizens.

Back in July 2013, the Huffington Post published a story that explained just how widespread the unemployment epidemic really is; four out of five American adults will struggle with unemployment at some point in their working lives, become reliant on welfare payments, and find their economic circumstances deteriorating. The United States now has 46.2 million people unemployed, a record statistic. That means fifteen percent of the population is out of work, idle labour power capacity that remains underutilised. The economic data gathered by the authors of the Huffington Post article also elaborate that the risk of poverty is increasing, and in 2011, 12.6 percent of working age adults (between the ages of 25 and 60) lived in poverty.

This feature of the capitalist system – mass, structural unemployment – is not only an indication that the numbers of full time, secure positions are decreasing. It also indicates, as McDonald points out in his Counterpunch article, that less people are doing more of the work. The increase in production and creation of more products means that the currently employed, shrunken workforce is remarkably efficient at keeping up the production process, so that output has barely slackened. As McDonald explains:

More and more products are generated with fewer and fewer people. Millions are not needed because the workers who are still needed are so productive that everything the employers want to have produced at a profit has already been produced. In other words: people are unemployed, made “redundant,” because of abundance. The means to produce wealth have become so highly developed that society needs less and less workers. In any other social system, this would be a reason to rejoice. This would mean less toil, effort, and unfree time, and more leisure and fun. Not in the market economy, the “best of all economic systems.” Productivity advances throw millions of people into destitution.

The human face of the unemployment crisis was brought home by an article in the New York Slimes, the lapdog of the US financial-military elite. In a rare display of concern for those who are underprivileged, the New York Slimes examined the downward slide of a previously employed professional in an article entitled “Caught in a Revolving Door of Unemployment”. The news report detailed the life of Jenner Barrington-Ward, an urban professional who has undergone a personal crisis brought on by long-term unemployment:

A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward’s middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.

Ms. Barrington-Ward describes it as “my journey through hell.” She was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

She applied herself to the new circumstances, retrained herself, took courses, expanded her skill set and applied for hundreds of jobs- all to no avail. She has been refused work for various reasons, being told by potential employers that she cannot work at fast food outlets because she was ‘too articulate’, could not clean toilets because she did not speak Spanish, and was refused work at a laundromat because she was ‘too pretty.’ At one point, she was told by a prospective employer ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’

With longer-term joblessness comes the concomitant problems of poorer health, increased likelihood and incidence of depression, higher risk of suicide, and strained family relations. Chronically occurring unemployment is also undermining another long-lasting myth about capitalist society, especially its American variant – that hard work and dedication will earn a working class person a seat in the ‘middle class’. Upward social mobility has been promoted, particularly among migrants, to attract and maintain labour for all sorts of industries by the ruling class. Well, that myth is now experiencing a serious decline. Gary Lapon, writing in the Socialist Worker magazine in August 2013, states that the vast majority of working people in the United States will experience unemployment and its associated impoverishment at some point in their working lives.

Long terms of unemployment have deleterious consequences on a person’s mental health, increasing the chances of depression, anxiety and stress-related disorders. Overcoming and managing these harmful impacts can take months, even years. Lapon references a study done by researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who examined the impact of unemployment duration on health care services and mental health. The study was published in the International Scholarly Research Network in 2012. The researchers looked at the consequences for mental health of participants who had been involuntarily unemployed for more than twelve months. They found the long-term unemployed have higher levels of impaired mental health, are less likely to access health services because of prohibitive costs, and experienced higher levels of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease and musculoskeletal disorders.

What should be noted is that while greater numbers of working people are experiencing poverty, and more people are likely to be impacted by periods of unemployment, the financial elite has continued to amass huge fortunes, with an enormous transfer of wealth from the working class to the ultra-rich one percent. According to Business Insider Australia, corporate profits have reached an all-time high, and wages have descended to a record low, in terms of the share of each of the gross domestic product (GDP). Companies are actually paying less to their employees as a share of GDP. Combine that with the fact that fewer people are working today than at any time during the last three decades, one can see that the Business Insider article provides a snapshot of just exactly who is benefiting from the current crisis of the capitalist system. It is not just in the United States that the unemployment situation is worsening; figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (February 2014) demonstrated that unemployment has hit a record high in ten years. An economist with Moody’s Analytics stated that “There’s no spinning it, Australia’s labour market is weak…. Businesses are not confident in future economic conditions so are trimming jobs and working their existing staff harder.” There is a breakdown of the current unemployment rate state-by-state provided by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation here: let us look forward to more intelligent criticism of the ABC from current Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, in light of these worsening economic conditions.

Moving across to Europe, the economic crisis is going from bad to worse, with austerity measures only adding to the pauperisation and immiseration of millions of people across the continent. Russia Today published a summary of the findings of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in October 2013. The report, entitled “Think Differently: Humanitarian impacts of the economic crisis in Europe” details the social and humanitarian disaster that has overtaken huge areas of European countries, with snowballing poverty and unemployment. While greater numbers of people are requesting aid from charities, the poor are getting poorer, unemployment has risen sharply, and there is an increase in xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics in Europe. Grown-up children are increasingly reliant on their parents and families for income support, and generations are living together just to pay the bills.

The study drew economic data from the European Union countries, as well as countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Balkans. Take note of the Balkans, because we shall return to a particular country that area later in the article.

The full report can be downloaded from the web site of the Red Cross here.

It is not just the economic impact of unemployment that is taking its toll; the deleterious psychological consequences are manifesting themselves as well. It is not just that lack of procuring the basic necessities and energy that undermines physical and mental health, but also:

National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies report an increased need for psychosocial support to people suffering from depression and other mental health problems, according to the report. A prime example of the ongoing mental anguish suffered by those thrown into poverty has been apparent in Greece over the past three years.

“Suicide rates in Greece have grown drastically by as much as 40 percent between January and May 2011, compared to the same period in 2010, a 50-year high,” the report notes.

Earlier in the article, the current author made reference to the Balkans, a region suffering heavily from the scourge of unemployment and poverty. It is important to return to this area, because over the month of February 2014, we can see the reaction of people that are frustrated and exasperated at the ongoing chronic crisis. They have taken action to redress the imbalance of an economic system that condemns them to live in poverty and despair. The people of Bosnia, living in a state of economic and ethnic apartheid since 1995 with the Dayton accords, have risen up in protest against the mass unemployment, privatisation of industries, the job insecurity and lack of accountability in the political institutions. The uprising has taken place in the main industrial centres of the country, led by ordinary working class people, in an attempt to wrest back control of their lives.

In an extensive analysis of the Bosnian uprising, Michael Karadjis, socialist activist and academic with Green Left Weekly, published an article in the Links online magazine detailing the historical background and context of the Bosnian situation. Since early February 2014, Bosnian workers – yes, the ‘Muslims’ of Yugoslavia, frequently derided in the corporate press – have risen to take back control of the factories, resources and political direction of their statelet. Bosnia was reduced to a statelet status back in 1995 with the signing of the US-brokered Dayton accords, which basically solidified the nationalist-driven ethnic division of Bosnia in cantons, with the Serbs carving out one portion, the Croats gaining control of another, and the Bosnians left to live in squalor in their own, reduced rump statelet at the mercy of the European Union-appointed governors. The nationalist poison had taken its toll, and the US and European powers simply entrenched an apartheid-style system, rewarding the ethnically cleansing activities of the protagonists – with the Bosnian Muslims the ultimate losers.

The uprising is driven mainly by the Bosnian working class, because they have been the ones severely impacted by mass privatisation, unemployment and poverty. With Yugoslavia fragmented by competing national chauvinisms in the 1990s, the Bosnian Muslims have studiously avoided the nationalist contagion, articulating demands such as the following, quoted by Karadjis in his article:

Recognise the seniority and secure health insurance of the workers.
Process instances of economic crimes and all those involved in it
Confiscate illegally obtained property
Annul the privatisation agreements
Prepare a revision of the privatisation
Return the factories to the workers and put everything under the control of the public government in order to protect the public interest, and to start production in those factories where it is possible

It is not the purpose of this article to go into a detailed analysis of the Bosnian context, but suffice it to say that Central and South Eastern Europe experienced the worst rates of unemployment in Europe since the onset of the economic crisis. Detaching Bosnia, and the other former Yugoslav republics, from the Eastern bloc has involved turning them into captive labour markets for the European Union. Integration for Bosnia has meant becoming a semi-colonial appendage of the richer European powers, its resources pillaged in the course of mass privatisation, while the Bosnians were left unemployed. Michael Karadjis notes that Bosnia’s unemployment stands at an overall 40 percent, with youth unemployment reaching 57 percent. Breaking with this program of capitalist austerity is absolutely necessary to resolve the ongoing problem of unemployment and social inequity.

To understand the issue of unemployment, it is necessary to understand the role it plays in the functioning of the capitalist system. Graham Matthews, writer and activist for Green Left Weekly, elaborated on the connection between capitalism and unemployment in an article published in 2009. He referred to the work of a nineteenth century German philosopher and political economist, whose work is making a comeback given the current capitalist downturn. As the capitalist corporations, driven by the imperative to make profits, drive down production costs and increase labour productivity, routinely replace their variable capital – workers and their active labour – with fixed capital, in the form of greater mechanisation and technology. While it is true that new technologies help to drive new industries, workers are displaced from one industry, downsized from their occupations, and labour costs are driven down. Generating a greater amount of labour productivity from fewer and fewer workers is the general goal of corporate power. Workers are continually used and then discarded on an ‘as-needs’ basis. As Matthews explained in his article:

Although it may rise or fall, unemployment itself is a permanent feature of capitalism.

“The greater the social wealth … and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army [i.e. the unemployed]”, Marx said. “The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth.”

The unemployed are more than just a permanent “reserve army of labour” on which capital may call, however. They also serve capital by placing a permanent pressure on the wages of those who are employed, encouraging them to work harder for less, at pain of losing their job to someone else.

Viewing the unemployed as a reserve army of labour, temporary citizens if you will, provides an insightful platform for comprehending unemployment as a permanent, structural feature of the capitalist system. While politicians make decisions and implement specific policies that are conducive to creating unemployment, and should be held responsible for the staggering numbers of unemployed that we see today, it should be noted that unemployment is here to stay regardless of specific policy decisions by the political class. Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, professor emeritus of economics at Drake University, Iowa, makes the important point in his 2011 article in Counterpunch that only by mass mobilisations from below, with workers joining together and rising as one, can the nation-wide program of misery and unemployment be reversed. Obscene levels of corporate profits have been made at the expense of ordinary working people, transferring the burden of the economic crisis onto the shoulders of those who are not responsible for creating this economic mess. Only by combining their efforts, rather than begging at the table, can workers achieve an equitable system where the permanent revolving door of unemployment can finally be closed.

Drone warfare – now going international

January 31, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized drone strike, United States, US President Barack Obama

US President Barack Obama gave the State of the Union address in January 2014, where he outlined how the United States is performing economically, the achievements of his administration, and the plans for the future. His speech contained the usual nationalistic clichés, militaristic sloganeering, vacuous rhetoric regarding economic inequality and posturing as the champion of the poor while advocating policies friendly to large corporations.

There is one area of policy that Obama has continued from the Bush-Cheney era. The one policy sphere that Obama has expanded upon during his administration only rated one mention in the entirety of his speech. This is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, (UAV), popularly known as drones, to carry out wars of aggression overseas, targeting alleged political opponents and spread US imperial power throughout the world.

Drone warfare is the undisputed weapon of choice of the Obama administration. While Bush-Cheney-Rice clique began the process, Obama has expanded the operation and use of drones throughout various countries and continents. In fact, just three days after he was inaugurated in 2009, Obama authorised his first drone strike, in Pakistan, supposedly targeting a Taliban safe house. Actually, the main victims were a Pakistani tribal leader allied to the Pakistani government, and his family.

As Eric Ruder, writer for the Socialist Worker online magazine explained in January 2013, Obama’s drone wars involve black-ops, high-level secrecy, and death and destruction delivered by computer-assisted remote control. To quote Ruder, the United States “can dispatch lethal force half a world away by means that would look familiar to any teenage gamer: the joystick and the video screen.”

Back when drone warfare began in 2001, the United States held a virtual monopoly on the technology of drones and their usage. Well, just as the capitalist economic crisis has gone global, so too has drone warfare. Conn Hallinan, foreign policy expert and writer for the blog Foreign Policy in Focus, wrote an article published in Common Dreams online magazine, in which he explains that now 70 countries have acquired and built, or are in the process of building, their own version of the lethal weapon. As Hallinan explains;

For a sure-fire killer you want a Made-in-the-USA-by-General-Atomics Predator or Reaper, but there are other dangerous drones out there and they are expanding at a geometric pace.

While the rest of us, the 99 percent, struggle with the cost of living and cope with rising levels of inequality, drone warfare is not only expanding in reach and scope, but it is a growing business. Hallinan elaborates that:

Drones have become a multi-billion dollar industry, and countries across the planet are building and buying them. Many are used for surveillance, but the U.S., Britain, Sweden, Iran, Russia, China, Lebanon, Taiwan, Italy, Israel, France, Germany, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all own the more lethal varieties. The world’s biggest drone maker is Israel.

The Russian weapons manufacturer, Sukhoi, is developing its own version of predator drone, a 20-tonne attack vehicle that may be used to strike at stationary and moving targets on land and at sea. Israel has been an active participant in the drone warfare drama, producing its own drones and selling the military technology to various customers, mainly the United States. The activist group Drone War UK published an extensive report on the production, proliferation and usage of drones by the Israeli state.

The market for drones is rapidly expanding, and aviation experts contend that sales of UAVs will compose the largest market share of all aircraft sales, and it is businesses in Israel that will reap the rewards. Drone manufacture and proliferation is booming. Confirmation that Israel is using drones itself has arrived in a rather unexpected way; earlier in January 2014, an Israeli drone crashed in the southern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave currently blockaded by Israeli forces.

In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran launched its Fotros drone, capable of flying for 30 hours, according to its manufacturers. Brazil is the leading commercial drone power in Latin America, having purchased the Hermes 450 drone from the Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems. Brazil has the highest number of drones in the Latin American region, both by purchasing them internationally and manufacturing them domestically.

The European Union’s first armed assault drone, the nEUROn, was unveiled in January 2012, produced by a consortium of European nations. While media attention has focused, quite rightly, on the drone strikes by the United States in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other countries, the military forces of European states are quietly and confidently building their own fleet of drones.

The United Kingdom, a long-term (satellite) ally of the United States, has built and used drones itself, and in mainland Europe, growing pressure from military lobbies and armaments manufacturers is having the intended effect of pushing more countries to buy and manufacture drones. Chris Cole, the director of Drone Wars UK, quoted the French Defence Minister, Thomas de Maiziere justifying the creation and use of drones by saying that “We cannot keep the stagecoach while others are developing the railway”. Interesting choice of words in 2014 – the development of the stagecoach was surpassed by the railway prior to 1914, exactly one hundred years ago when a little something called World War One exploded on the scene, the result of many factors including an arms race between the European imperialist states.

The main targets of all these drones are not each other, but the people living beneath them. The armaments manufacturers never admit that the principal victims of drone strikes are the civilians in targeted areas. Militarily, they are vulnerable to anti-aircraft systems, demonstrated by the downing of a US drone by the Iranians in late 2011. However, drones are deployed to surveil conflict zones, and strike targets in those areas with impunity, avoiding the deployment of American troops into the war zones. With the failure of the US to win ‘hearts and minds’ in the battle areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and so on, the turn to drones by the US ruling class is an attempt to avoid domestic criticism that foreign troop deployments – and casualties – that are the inevitable result. Removing US casualties as a factor in overseas wars, the US ruling elite was hoping to make foreign wars more palatable to the domestic population. Warfare by remote-control seems like a victimless, ‘smart’ kind of war.

The victims of the drone strikes are speaking up about the atrocities they have witnessed. In an article for AlterNet online magazine called ‘The Constant Presence of US drones in the Sky Traumatize and Ruin Lives on the Ground’, the journalist H. H. Bhojani summarised the experiences of Pakistani children that have gone through the horrific experience of a drone strike. The families that live in North West Pakistan, a constant target of US drone strikes, have experienced firsthand the slaughter, mayhem and bloodshed of these computer-guided weapons systems. Bhojani looks at the story of Nabila, one of many children in the village of Tapi, in the Pakistani northwest. In October 2012, she witnessed her grandmother being blasted to smithereens by a drone strike. She, her brothers and sisters were injured, and while the physical wounds may have healed, the psychological scars still remain. As the article in AlterNet elaborates:

Nabila’s drawings are like any other nine-year-old’s. A house rests besides a winding path, a winding path on which wander two stick figures. Tall trees, rising against the back drop of majestic hills. Clouds sprinkled over a clear sky.

Nabila’s drawings are like any other nine-year-old’s. With one disturbing exception.

Hovering over the house, amidst the clouds, above the people, are two drone aircraft.

Perhaps this is the scene she saw moments before the drone strike, a mental photograph captured with crayons.

The capricious nature of drone warfare makes it all the more frightening for its intended victims. The AlterNet article elaborates further that;

Like terrorism, drones generate disproportionate fear because they can happen anytime. “I’m afraid to go outside. I don’t even see my friends anymore,” Nabila says.

There is increasing attention given to the psychological trauma caused by drone strikes. Psychiatrist Peter Schaapveld spoke of a ‘psychological emergency’ in towns that are the routine targets of drones. He described the children living in drone-stricken areas as being ‘traumatized and re-traumatized’ by the lethal weapons constantly hovering overhead. And what is ironic is that the more that people on the ground are intimidated by drone warfare, the more that resentful and angry young men are being driven into the arms of extremist and fundamentalist anti-American groups, such as al Qaeda. As Schaapveld explained:

[I]nstead of keeping us safe, they breed animosity and tear apart the fabric of some of the poorest and disenfranchised communities in the world,” said Schaapveld. “A hellfire missile costs over $60,000, which could be spent building schools and wells. Yemen needs aid and our support, not drones.”

The full article is available on Truth Out online magazine here.

There are encouraging signs that the horrors of drone warfare are spurring people into action. In November 2013, there was an anti-drone summit in Washington DC, organised by various activist and human rights groups. Gathering people from around the world, the summit heard the stories and shared experiences of people whose lives have been impacted by drones. The political leaders in the imperialist states must be held to account for the criminal actions of drone warfare.

It is only fitting to conclude with the words that the current author used in an earlier article about this subject; that drone warfare is just the latest technological incarnation of strategic aerial bombing, a campaign of raining terror from the skies that has bedevilled the twentieth century:

The Obama administration’s policy of drone strikes is only the latest technological application of the old, discredited, nightmarish and criminal practice of strategic aerial bombing. Its enthusiasts have proposed its supposed ‘surgical’ feature, ignoring the mass civilian deaths and casualties that accompany such bombing. This doctrine is an essential tool of the imperialist states in their quest to build and expand economic empires, and has nothing to do with minimising the loss of lives or damage to property.

……

What kind of political and economic system is it, which fails to acknowledge the people that have died as a result of all the aerial bombing campaigns, and then applies the central doctrine of their killers?

Fifty years of the war on poverty – inequality is still the issue

January 21, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized Democrat Party, Johnson administration, Vietnam war, War on Poverty

January 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the speech – the State of the Union address – by former US president Lyndon Johnson announcing the War on Poverty. This war involved a series of legislative reforms intended to resolve a rising national poverty rate in the United States. In 1964, the United States Congress passed an initiative of the Johnson administration, the Economic Opportunity Act. This established local Community Action Agencies, administered by the Federal government, to implement poverty reduction strategies in their local communities. Eliminating poverty, expanding educational opportunities, and tending to the needs of the elderly, disadvantaged and unemployed were objectives of these community action agencies.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid, two agencies that provided health insurance for the underprivileged, helping millions of elderly people and the disabled. The most well-known reforms that the Johnson administration enacted are the civil rights measures, granting the right to vote to millions of previously disenfranchised African Americans in the deeply segregated Southern states.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the seminal measure of federal legislation that prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race. This act outlawed any measures that specifically discriminated against ethnic minorities from voting, and ensured that mass enfranchisement of the racially-excluded African American communities was enacted in the Southern states of the US. Federal authority thus overrode the segregationist local authorities in the southern states. Interestingly, in 2013, the United States Supreme Court struck down the main provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section 4 of the legislation that mandates Federal supervision of all electoral laws in individual states, thus eviscerating a significant piece of legislation that guaranteed the democratic right to vote for racial and ethnic minority groups.

There were many other socially redistributive policies adopted by the Johnson administration as part of the Great Society, implementing the war on poverty. Nutritional assistance programs for those in dire poverty, educational programs such as Head Start which provided comprehensive educational, nutritional and parent-guardian involvement in the early childhood education of children from low-income backgrounds, food stamp programs for those in dire need – these encompass just some of the major changes that Johnson introduced as part of the War on Poverty. While Kennedy initiated many of the policies that became known collectively as the Great Society, Johnson carried them through over conservative opposition.

The collective legislative reforms enacted as part of the War on Poverty have undoubtedly had enormous social benefits for millions of Americans. Without programs like food stamps, nutritional and educational assistance, the Job Corps, poverty would be immeasurably worse. Does this mean that the war on poverty is a resounding success after 50 years? No it is not.

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, representing Florida’s 24^th District, wrote in the Huffington Post that while the positive impacts of the social programs under the War on Poverty are still with us today, the Republican Party, the political representatives of the financial and industrial elite, have defunded many of these programs and have waged an unrelenting assault on all the socially redistributive measures of the 1960s. In fact, there is a war against the poverty-stricken, and an economic assault on the wages and conditions of the working class in order to transfer even more wealth to the highest echelons of the financial oligarchy.

In July 2013, CBS News reported that according to economic data made available to The Associated Press revealed that four out of five American adults will rely on welfare at some point in their lives, because they face poverty, unemployment and loss of income in deteriorating economic conditions. More people are pessimistic about job prospects for the future, and increasing job insecurity, along with the massive loss in secure, well-paying manufacturing jobs is contributing to this sense of heightened pessimism. Economic insecurity includes periodic bouts of unemployment, and the corresponding rise in levels of anxiety and stress that accompany such periods.

Let us not forget that Johnson’s war on poverty measures also included tax cuts for the wealthy. He advocated the ‘trickle down’ theory of economic rationalism, that is, by decreasing marginal and capital gains taxes on the large corporations, the latter will invest that money into productive activities, create jobs and thus wealth will ‘trickle down’ to the poorer segments of society. In 1964, at the urging of the Johnson administration, the US Congress passed the Revenue Act, also known as the Tax Reduction Act, which cut marginal and capital gains taxes. It had the support of both sides of American politics. So the Johnson administration was not anti-business, as the conservative side of politics would have us believe, but actually did its utmost to cater for the needs of big business.

The trickle down theorists omitted to mention that wealth, rather than being dispersed by the corporate class, tends to coagulate at the very top. Johnson was no friend of the working class – his policies, derived from the platform of the Democrat Party, never sought to challenge the fundamental structural inequalities of the American capitalist system. Johnson witnessed the increasing level of poverty in the US, reaching 22.4 percent in the late 1950s, the idle capacity of closed factories and the unemployed members of the workforce, and the great strides made by the USSR during the 1950s and early 1960s in developing their economy and educational resources, launching the first artificial satellite into space in the late 1950s, and the first person into outer space in 1961. In 1957, the American economy entered a recession, and while the economy recovered by 1961, the US was still growing more slowly than West Germany and Japan. The US economy began the 1960s with high unemployment, millions of idle workers, unused industrial capacity and a flow of gold and dollars out of the country. The Johnson administration launched measures to revive American capitalism domestically, while also escalating and intensifying American militarism abroad, namely in Vietnam.

The war on poverty and all its associated measures, tax cuts and social programs, were not only advocated by the Democrat Party, but were fully supported by the Republicans at the time. Bipartisan support for the war on poverty is an important point that is often overlooked in today’s more right-wing political climate of attacks on social security. Ferocious anti-socialist and extreme right-wing successor to Lyndon Johnson as president, Richard Nixon, not only embraced the war on poverty, but actually extended its application. Nixon advocated an increase in welfare payment, plus an automatic cost-of-living adjustment to social security payments to cater for inflation. Both these measures became law in 1972.

Nixon expanded the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps upon which millions of American families depend; provided supplemental security income (SSI) to the elderly and people with disabilities, and initiated a tax break for moderate income earners so they could keep a greater proportion of their earnings. All these measures were adopted by a Republican president who escalated the Vietnam war, expanded the US bombing campaign into neighbouring Cambodia, suppressed and spied upon anti-war protests domestically, and authorised covert assassinations and death squad operations in the south of Vietnam to stamp out the anti-colonial liberation movement there.

It is true that since the late 1970s, with the advent of the Thatcher-Reagan consensus on the primacy of ‘free market’ economics, there has been a sustained assault by the ruling class on social security by the conservative side of politics. The era of deregulation of financial markets, and the privatisation of public assets had begun. Government programs were viewed as bloated and wasteful. The economic campaign to widen the operation of the private sector was accompanied by an ideological campaign to demonise government-run services as inefficient hotbeds of nepotism, and people living on welfare as ‘scroungers’ avoiding personal responsibility to find work. There was no comparable denunciation of the real benefit claimant abusers, the corporations that rely on state subsidies, and who receive payouts on a massive scale until today.

Jobs and working conditions were under sustained attack by the financial oligarchy, and one of the targets of the American Republican political offensive was the war on poverty. However, the Republican effort at derailing the social security measures of the war on poverty have been enabled, and extended, by the Democrat Party. We have gone from a war on poverty, to a war on the poor. While more American politicians are discussing the issue of inequality, the debate is framed as a singular attack on the public purse as the allegedly worst offender for waste and inefficiency.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, discusses the effects of the war on the poor and the demonisation of the unemployed in her article. She correctly notes that the Republicans have led the attack on the working poor, and that unemployment is not the result of personal failings, but the result of an ever-shrinking number of jobs that pay a liveable wage.

However, she puts her political faith in the Democrats, a party that is ostensibly an opposition force, but which has done its utmost to implement policies that are not far removed from the right-wing neoliberal economic agenda. The Democrat party has also encouraged a climate of economic insecurity, which sees not just the unemployed struggling, but a significant section of the employed not earning nearly enough, finding themselves sinking into poverty. It is not just the manufacturing workers that are descending into penurious circumstances; adjunct professors are also facing temporary employment, with no health benefits, declining hours of work, and compose a new and growing proportion of the working poor.

Former US President, Democrat Bill Clinton fulfilled his 1992 campaign promise to ‘end welfare as we know it’ by passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996. This legislation reformed the entire basis of welfare in the United States, and introduced a workfare component to the disbursement of payments. Open-ended unemployment benefits were ended, and time limits introduced. The unemployed were now required to work for their payments, and this exerted downward pressure on the wages of the full-time employed. This kind of scheme was a centrepiece of the Republican party’s efforts to transform welfare – it took a Democrat president to do it.

In the words of the late Professor Tony Judt, who wrote the following observation in an article for the New York Review of Books:

Consider the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” (a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive), the Clinton-era legislation that sought to gut welfare provision here in the US. The terms of this act should put us in mind of another act, passed in England nearly two centuries ago: the New Poor Law of 1834. The provisions of the New Poor Law are familiar to us, thanks to Charles Dickens’s depiction of its workings in Oliver Twist. When Noah Claypole famously sneers at little Oliver, calling him “Work’us” (“Workhouse”), he is implying, for 1838, precisely what we convey today when we speak disparagingly of “welfare queens.”

When a Democrat president enacts a law that was a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s platform in dealing with the poor, there is hardly a murmur of protest.

To quote Tony Judt further;

In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens.

The implementation of the reasonable-sounding Personal Responsibility Act was the first step in undermining the conditions of stable employment and liveable wages for the majority of the working class. Poverty has become a permanent and expanding feature of the American capitalist system. More people are being pauperised, pushed down into the ranks of the working poor.

For the vast majority of people in the US, poverty will be an experience to endure for at least a portion of their lives. The myth of upward social mobility is being eroded, as increasing numbers of Americans rely on food stamps, welfare payments and charitable organisations to make ends meet. Working people, especially those on minimum wage, are unable to cope with an ever-increasing cost of living. No longer can a working person achieve the much-vaunted ‘American dream’ of a ‘middle class’ lifestyle. However, some people are doing very well out of this most recent economic crisis; as the Socialist Worker’s writer Gary Lapon explained:

The 400 richest Americans, with a total net worth of $1.7 trillion as of last year, were worth an average of $4.2 billion each, enough to support over 89,000 families of four at 200 percent of the poverty level for an entire year.

In the meantime, in major American cities, the numbers of homeless are increasing. In Chicago, where Obama’s close political adviser and friend Rahm Emanuel is mayor, the homeless shelters can barely cope with the demand, and those turned away were forced to stay riding on public transportation in order to keep warm. The public school system is breaking down, with dilapidated buildings housing ever-growing classes, the electricity and lighting systems are stretched to the limit, but Mayor Emanuel still found the time to do the important things, like go holidaying in Indonesia while the city’s residents shuddered in the freezing conditions.

The Obama administration is continuing the pro-business policies of his Democratic predecessors, announcing a new anti-poverty initiative – promise zones. Five impoverished communities are selected to be the targets of deregulatory measures, tax breaks for the corporations to invest in, and these communities will serve as cheap labour pools for capital investment. This deregulation and encouragement of business investment has its origins in the failed ‘trickle down’ theory of economic investment. Once again, rather than implement socially redistributive policies, a Democrat President is relying on the goodwill of the private sector with inducements that have failed to attract investment in the past. Writing in Jacobin online magazine, Sam Wetherell states that deregulatory-driven solutions to poverty reduction are more accurately called ‘Enterprise Solutions’. These areas are friendly to big capital, exempt from state oversight and regulation – including state taxation – this solution supposedly encourages private investment and jobs growth. The workforce is corresponding impoverished.

Benefiting already powerful market forces, Obama’s initiative of promise zones sounds very similar to the most extreme right-wing Republican economic freedom zones, allowing business to run rampant at the expense of health and safety standards, environmental concerns and working conditions. In November 2013, the Obama administration made the largest cuts to the food stamp programme it was first introduced in the 1960s. Long-term stagnation and recurring joblessness are the order of the day – so let us not expect the Obama regime to end this recession any time soon.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the American investigative journalist, democratic socialist and activist, raises an interesting point in her article about poverty and the minimum wage published in The Atlantic. One of the main charges by the financial oligarchy against welfare expenditure is that poverty is the fault of the poor; the irresponsible habits and spending of the poor is the reason for their penurious circumstances. Government intervention, it is argued, does nothing to alleviate poverty because the poor have made thoughtless and feckless lifestyle choices. Single mothers seem to attract the most criticism, being singled out as particularly wasteful and overly-dependent on welfare, scrounging off the system while the rest of us hard-working taxpayers foot the bill.

Ehrenreich addresses these charges in her article ‘It is Expensive to be Poor’. For people in poverty, it is not capricious lifestyle choices that are responsible, but the lack of decent paying, secure jobs. Low-paying and minimum wage jobs are a kind financial trap – they pay too little and are too insecure to help a person build up savings and move to a more secure area of employment. In fact, being on a minimum wage is a big incentive for a worker to be extremely frugal with their money, carefully monitoring their spending, making sure the essentials are paid and working according to a budget. As Ehrenreich explains;

I was also dismayed to find that in some ways, it is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times more than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

Being poor in today’s America is an expensive proposition. Ehrenreich concludes her article by stating that we need to revive a sense of collective responsibility to assist the poor, and not view them as irredeemable miscreants. Since the 2008 economic crisis, it is not just the manufacturing workers that have been downsized, but middle managers, technical workers, information technology specialists, lawyers and legal professionals – people that were once doing well but now face difficult circumstances. It is difficult to maintain the narrative of failing personal responsibility, blaming the victims for their poverty when the one percent is accumulating massive amounts of wealth at the expense of the ninety-nine percent.

Inequality is the major issue of our times, highlighted by the ongoing capitalist economic crisis. The Obama administration, while pay lip service to the issue of wealth redistribution, has actually presided over a transfer of income from the nation’s working class to the top one percent. Mike Treen, in a wide-ranging article on inequality published in Links online magazine, reports that in September 2013 95 percent of America’s income gains over the 2008-2013-period have accrued to the nation’s wealthiest one percent. Obama acknowledged that greater numbers of Americans are feeling frustrated with Washington in a speech he gave in December 2013. A few weeks later, 1.3 million unemployed people were cut off from receiving any benefits as part of a budget deal approved by both sides of the US Congress.

Inequality is not just an issue for the United States, but a global affliction.

For poverty to be reduced, we must go beyond redistributive measures, important as they are, and address the structural inequities of the capitalist system itself. There is one politician who has done just that, but he was not an American. He became president of a country that is dwarfed by the United States economically and militarily. It has nothing like the mineral and labour power resources of the US, and has suffered horrendous levels of poverty for decades. He took power in a democratic election in 1999, and by the end of his presidency in early 2013, he not only consistently maintained and expanded his popularity, regularly winning elections, he set an example for other countries to follow in poverty reduction.

That politician was the socialist President of Venezuela, the late Hugo Chavez.

In an article published in Counterpunch in 2012 entitled ‘The Achievements of Hugo Chavez’, the writers explain how Chavez maintained his popularity with the electorate:

One of the main factors for the popularity of the Chávez Government and its landslide victory in this re-election results of October 2012, is the reduction of poverty, made possible because the government took back control of the national petroleum company PDVSA, and has used the abundant oil revenues, not for benefit of a small class of renters as previous governments had done, but to build needed infrastructure and invest in the social services that Venezuelans so sorely needed. During the last ten years, the government has increased social spending by 60.6%, a total of $772 billion.

Which other political leader of recent times can demonstrate the following achievement;

Before the Chavez government in 1998, 21% of the population was malnourished. Venezuela now has established a network of subsidized food distribution including grocery stores and supermarkets. While 90% of the food was imported in 1980, today this is less than 30%. Misión Agro-Venezuela has given out 454,238 credits to rural producers and 39,000 rural producers have received credit in 2012 alone. Five million Venezuelan receive free food, four million of them are children in schools and 6,000 food kitchens feed 900,000 people. The agrarian reform and policies to help agricultural producers have increased domestic food supply. The results of all these food security measures is that today malnourishment is only 5%, and child malnutrition which was 7.7% in 1990 today is at 2.9%. This is an impressive health achievement by any standards.

Venezuela now boasts the lowest inequality level in the South American region; reducing poverty from 70.8 percent in 1996 to 21 percent in 2010. Extreme poverty was 40 percent in 1996; it was 7.3 percent in 2010.

Spearheading massive social and political change, the Bolivarian Revolution achieved an enormous reduction in severe poverty that had afflicted millions for decades, blighting the lives and prospects of families and children in that country.

War on Poverty – Chavez showed the world how it is done. The Venezuelan revolution continues.

When it comes to humanitarian intervention, the French are the quiet achievers

January 8, 2014 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized France, Francois Hollande, Mali, Northern Mali

For most of 2013, the attention of the international media, at least the corporate-controlled media, has been focused on the ongoing crisis in Syria, the continued American interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the increasing tensions with China. All these issues are vitally important, and deserve the attention of the international community. The US has continued to use ‘humanitarian’ reasoning as a pretext to intervene either directly or indirectly in various countries in the Arabic-speaking and African worlds. The invocation of ‘humanitarian’ reasons, however flimsy or laughable, is convenient for disguising the predatory, plundering, imperialist interests that motivate these military invasions. For the moment, direct military intervention in Syria has been avoided, and American-supported efforts to cobble together international support for a military strike against Iran have so far been derailed. But one country has taken to humanitarian interventions with quiet enthusiasm; interventions that are motivated by economic and political interests that intend to shift the balance of power in Africa: France.

French President Francois Hollande made a lightning visit to the impoverished African nation the Central African Republic. French paratroopers were deployed to the former French colony in December 2013, ostensibly to restore law and order in an increasingly chaotic situation resulting from clashes between rival Muslim and Christian groups. Hollande, stopping over in the nation’s capital Bangui after attending the funeral for the late Nelson Mandela, made a speech thanking the services of French soldiers and commemorated the lives of those military personnel that had been killed. He justified the speedy intervention in the Central African Republic as dangerous but necessary to protect human life. In fact, he made the following remark;

France is not here in the Central African Republic out of any self-interest,” Mr Hollande said. “France has come to defend human dignity.

The notion that French ruling class policymakers are motivated by purely humanitarian considerations is preposterous in the extreme. France has maintained extensive economic and political interests in its former African colonies since the granting of formal independence in the 1960s. The ambitious programme of neo-colonialism, given the name ‘Francafrique’ by the French establishment, was quiescent in recent times but has witnessed a resurgence since 2008.

Francafrique refers to the network of political, economic and military relations that the French ruling class has maintained with the political authorities in the former African colonies. This ‘opaque conglomerate’ maintains friendly relations with African political clients that are amenable to French interests. While France formally withdrew from its African colonies, such as the Ivory Coast, it still exerts heavy political and economic influence in its former sphere of influence. The natural resources and exports of its African dependencies are funnelled into the coffers of the French bourgeoisie. France is the main customer of the Ivory Coast’s primary produce exports. Most of the citizens of the Ivory Coast, 70 percent in fact, work in or are dependent upon agricultural sector. If French interests are undermined or threatened in any way, France has the resources to intervene decisively and impose a political outcome suitable to its agenda – as it did in the Ivory Coast back in 2011.

In the 1990s, European integration became the main preoccupation of the French bourgeoisie, the latter rushing to penetrate the former Eastern Bloc countries, making investments, exploiting the cheap labour and focusing on absorbing the previously closed-off countries into the European capitalist network. As the much-vaunted European Union falls to pieces and is kept barely alive by massive transfusions of public money, the French ruling class looked to its former African possessions as an area where they could escalate their exploitative practices. Also throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Chinese have invested heavily in African countries, financing and carrying out projects, building infrastructure and increasing their influence. This ‘soft power’ has rattled the cages of the French imperialist bourgeoisie.

At the beginning of 2013, the French government of the ostensibly ‘socialist’ Francois Hollande took decisive military action in its former African colony of Mali. Roger Annis, a long-term Canadian activist and writer, has written extensive articles about the situation in Mali. In January 2013, Annis wrote that:

France, the former slave power of west Africa, has poured into Mali with a vengeance in a military attack launched on January 11. French warplanes are bombing towns and cities across the vast swath of northern Mali, a territory measuring some one thousand kilometres from south to north and east to west. French soldiers in armoured columns have launched a ground offensive, beginning with towns in the south of the northern territory, some 300 kilometres north and east of the Malian capital of Bamako.

The motivations of the French to commit to Mali, coming after the 2011 French intervention in the Ivory Coast, are not hard to discern. While the usual, tired and well-worn clichés of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘defending human rights’ were trotted out to drum up public support for the Mali intervention, one can discover the calculations of the French imperialists by digging a little deeper. Maintaining access to and domination over the natural resources and riches of Africa for the transnational corporations is the important calculation motivating military interventions. As Roger Annis explains in his article regarding Mali:

West Africa is a region of great resource wealth, including gold, oil and uranium.

The uranium mines in neighbouring Niger and the uranium deposits in Mali are of particular interest to France, which generates 78 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy. Niger’s uranium mines are highly polluting and deeply resented by the population, including among the semi-nomadic Touareg people who reside in the mining regions. The French company Areva is presently constructing in Imouraren, Niger, what will become the second-largest uranium mine in the world.

Notwithstanding the fabulous wealth created by uranium mining, Niger is one of the poorest countries on Earth. As one European researcher puts it, “Uranium mining in Niger sustains light in France and darkness in Niger.”

Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, where displaced Malians are subject to food insecurity and crippling poverty. Malnutrition in Mali has reached endemic proportions in some parts of the country. All the military fighting has disrupted farming and agricultural activity, and schoolchildren are reliant on food programs run by international aid agencies to guarantee their daily caloric intake. Still, 1.3 million people are in desperate need of food, and 200,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition, according to the aid agency CARE, the Cooperate for Assistance and Relief Everywhere.

Despite this pervasive poverty, the imperialist states have included Mali in their most important plans – the war on terror and militarisation of the African continent. As Roger Annis explained in his essay, back in 2005 the United States established the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Initiative group, roping in eleven African states including Mali. The aim of this agency was to combine the military efforts of participating states in combating terrorism; but as the foreign policy experts Conn Hallinan and John Gershman explained in their examination of this issue back in 2006, the Sahara contains many mirages, one of them being ‘terrorism’, a pretext for military aid to governments that will use that military power to suppress domestic political opponents. In 2008, the work of the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Initiative was absorbed into the United States Africa Command, Africom.

In December 2013, just under a year after the French intervention in Mali, turmoil and political instability returned to the country. Two French journalists, working for Radio France Internationale, (RFI), were killed after being abducted by unidentified assailants. They were kidnapped in an area of Northern Mali where French troops have maintained a heavy presence. France has responded by moving even more troops from the relative safety of southern Mali into the regions of the north where the instability has flared.

No-one takes any solace or pleasure in the kidnapping and murder of journalists. Such abductions only provide grist to the mill for imperialist propaganda outlets to tarnish their opponents as remorseless killers, and further whip up national chauvinist support for overseas wars. However, the main politically criminal behaviour in the Mali war has been performed by the French political and military establishment.

This latest upsurge of French military activity, disguised as another episode in the never-ending ‘war on terror’, is motivated by French imperial designs in Africa, protecting and extending access to raw materials, strategic resources and increasing markets at a time of deepening economic crisis in Europe itself. The worn-out cliché of fighting ‘Islamist extremism’ is trotted out at every turn to justify further resource wars in Africa. The plight of Mali is not the responsibility of Islamist guerrillas; the culpability of the criminal war in Mali rests squarely on the shoulders of the French ruling class. The latter has intensified its scramble for resources and markets, and its push to project its military and economic power is reframed as a part of the global ‘war on terrorism.’ The humanitarian pretext serves to neutralise anti-war sentiment and mobilise public opinion in favour of resource wars.

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The Tuareg people, a semi-nomadic Berber group, have staged a number of nationalist uprisings throughout the 20^th century. Their homeland extends across northern Mali and West Africa. The Tuareg are the main, Muslim-majority group in the north of Mali, and they inhabit parts of Algeria, Libya, Niger and Burkina Faso.

The French conquered large swathes of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including what is today Mali. The Tuareg were brutally suppressed, and after the formal declaration of independence of Mali in 1960, the Tuareg’s grievances remained unresolved. As Patrick Cockburn states in his article on the Mali crisis, the struggle of the Tuareg people for self-determination is at the heart of the political and economic instability in Mali. Tuareg nationalism, remaining unfulfilled, continues to simmer beneath the surface and has erupted into open rebellion a number of times since 1960.

The Tuareg Area (courtesy of en.wikipedia)

Through forced sedenterisation, and the repressive policies of the Malian state backed by the French, the Tuareg have become part of the urban workforce, migrating to other parts of Africa in search of work. Some still practice pastoralism, and the Tuareg have maintained their dominant presence in northern Mali. The Tuareg organised the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) to fight for autonomy and independence. This political and military movement has been a thorn in the side of the Malian state. The Malian military forces have severely repressed all attempts by the Tuareg to establish an independent state. The MNLA fights until today for a thorough reform of the corrupt and dictatorial Malian state, an end to military brutality, and greater powers of self-governance.

In early 2012, the MNLA, reinforced by Tuaregs fleeing from the Libyan imbroglio, launched a series of offensives against the Malian military. The Tuaregs from Libya, having fought in the ranks of the Libyan army of Qadhafi, brought their military training, expertise and weapons into northern Mali. The Malian government, stung by a string of losses, began to totter. A group of Malian military officers, led by Captain Amadou Sanogo, ousted the president and established an open military dictatorship. The coup plotters justified their actions on the basis that they could deal effectively with the growing Tuareg insurgency. It is worthwhile to note that Sanogo, the coup leader, was trained in the United States.

From March 2012, the MNLA posed a serious threat to the fragile Malian state. The Malian government forces were expelled from large portions of northern Mali. At this point, the hardline Islamist guerrilla groups enter the fray; the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and Ansar Dine. These militias added the more orthodox Salafist objectives to the northern Mali conflict, implementing their version of strict Sharia in the areas they conquered. The MNLA was ousted as the Islamist guerrillas quickly reoriented the uprising from purely political, economic and social goals into a religiously-dominated project. Stories about cultural repression, the demolition of Sufi mosques deemed unacceptable by the Salafist-oriented groups, the imposition of social controls and the attacks on architectural monuments and shrines by Ansar Dine militants provided a public relations bonanza for the French ruling class to obtain public support for another military intervention.

It should be noted that during the entire mini-civil-war between the MNLA and the Islamist guerrillas throughout the second half of 2012, the French government and military did nothing. As the Islamist surge began to tighten its grip on the capital city, Bamako, and the Malian government was on the brink of total collapse, only then did the French decide to militarily intervene. Operation Serval, the name of the French operation in Mali, began in January 2013 and continues until today. It appears that defending human dignity does not factor into political calculations until French interests are directly threatened.

The standard clichés were deployed by French President Hollande to portray the French invasion in humanitarian terms. Only a few days after the initial incursion in January 2013, Hollande stated that;

France is a liberating force, living up to its ethics, its values. It has no material interests in Mali. There are no economic or political calculations involved (in explaining its military intervention). It is acting uniquely in the service of peace.

Rob Prince, in an extensive article about the Mali intervention published in Foreign Policy in Focus noted:

Brings a tear to my eyes to know that its military intervention in Mali is purely humanitarian, in solidarity with the Malian people with no ulterior motive! Perhaps in the next world, but not in this one!

He later elaborates the true nature of France’s role in Africa:

Indeed quite the contrary to Hollande’s assertion can be argued: that in Africa, France has been an oppressive force, one that in this case and always puts its self-interests (in the case of Africa for raw materials, strategic minerals, uranium, oil, natural gas) before any humanitarian consideration and will stop at nothing – and has stopped at nothing – to achieve its goals.

Roger Annis, the Canadian writer, socialist and expert on Mali, wrote in his article in relation to the public relations campaign regarding the Mali invasion;

It is true that Islamic fundamentalists have ruled northern Mali with an iron hand since taking over in 2012. But the reasons for this latest intervention lie in the determination of the world’s imperial powers to keep the human and natural resources of poor regions of the world as preserves for capitalist profits. West Africa is a region of great resource wealth, including gold, oil and uranium.

In fact, the Sahara region, and West Africa, represent a vast untapped cornucopia of natural resources. The French bourgeoisie are angling to acquire the riches of the north African region as Europe sinks further into economic crisis and disarray. As Rob Prince explained in his article:

For France, the Sahara as a whole is nothing short of a strategic gold mine, both in terms of the known wealth the region possesses (uranium, oil, gold for starters) and what might yet to be discovered. Mali’s strategic potential today lays more in future resources wealth, although gold is mined in the country’s northern regions. If the mineral/strategic resource wealth of its neighbors is any indication, northern Mali is rich in similar potential. Neighboring Niger (to Mali’s east) is one of France’s main sources of uranium for its powerful nuclear industries.

The first step in disentangling ourselves from overseas imperialist adventures is recognising the false pretence of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and its misrepresentation of reality. The mirage of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ is used to disguise the predatory ambitions of imperialist powers to reassert their control and domination of strategic markets and resources. To portray an imperialist conquest as a war of liberation is nothing but a grotesque deception. On Bastille Day 2013, the military led the annual parade of celebration and commemoration for the French revolution. The current French republic maintains the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ which encapsulates the motivating spirit of the original French revolution.

In 2013, on Bastille Day, the troops from 13 African countries that participated alongside the French military in the Mali invasion, marched down the Champs Elysees Avenue in Paris, accompanied by flyovers by military aircraft and giant military vehicles loaded with land-to-air defence systems. The traditional celebration of liberty and equality was turned into a triumphal display of French imperial might, saying to the world “we won in Mali”.

This grotesque perversion was challenged by at least one French voice – the non-government group Survie, whose representatives stated that France has adopted a self-proclaimed role of gendarme in Africa, and in particular in Mali. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in France also denounced the military intervention in Mali.

The French invasion of Mali is turning out to be trap; a quagmire from which the French military cannot quickly extricate itself. The Mali war lingers on, and the natural resources of that country will be exploited by the French ruling elite, while the Malian people continue to live in poverty. Horace Campbell, professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University stated in his article on France, the US and the Mali intervention that the Tuaregs have genuine grievances against the corrupt Malian state. Until this question of self-determination and economic justice is resolved, Mali will continue to be unstable and any foreign intervention will have precarious and fragile results. Imperialist invasion only worsens Mali’s problems.

Israel and Saudi Arabia – when rogue states combine

December 8, 2013 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized Iran, Israel, Robert Parry, Saudi Arabia

A quietly emerging correspondence of interests has resulted in an alliance of seemingly unlikely partners, Israel and Saudi Arabia. This combination, while powerful, has suffered a stinging defeat.

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Rove McManus, the talented Australian comedian and TV personality, used to host a comedy segment on his TV program called “What The….?”. He would select rather bizarre, unusual or freakish episodes of behaviour of celebrities, or ludicrous examples of eccentric conduct by actors, and invite the audience to express its incredulity and disbelief with the expression “What The…?”. We can all think of examples of outlandish or peculiar behaviour by TV and film actors which invite us to express our shock and disbelief at their eccentricity, behaviour far removed from the usual social norms that govern the conduct of the 99 percent. However, it is not only in the world of film and television where we can experience “What The….?” moments. In the area of global politics, seemingly opposite entities can engage in conduct that while initially appearing extraordinary, is actually motivated by basic economic and political interests.

Consortiumnews is an online magazine dedicated to independent investigative journalism, exposing the hypocrisies and crimes of US imperial power. On December 4, 2013, the magazine published a story about the Middle East with the following headline; “Saudi-Israeli Alliance Boosts Al-Qaeda”. Wait a minute….”Saudi-Israeli alliance?”…..’boosts Al-Qaeda?”…..What The….?? It beggars belief that two states that are diametric opposites would be cooperating on major international issues. A fundamentalist and exclusively Jewish state, cooperating with the hard-line Wahhabi Islamic state of Saudi Arabia? Surely this cannot be right.

After getting over the shock from the apparently unbelievable content of the headline, and digging deeper, one can find that such an alliance does indeed exist, and has been very active over the last few years. The entire article, written by Robert Parry, examines the strategic geopolitical interests that have converged to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together, if not in open embrace, then at least through channels of secretive cooperation. In August 2013, Robert Parry, the founder and senior editor of Consortiumnews published the interesting article ‘The Saudi-Israeli Superpower’ which elaborated on the growing interconnection between the two historically different states now seeking an alliance of convenience based on mutually agreed political interests. The ongoing Syrian civil war and the military coup d’etat of July 2013 in Egypt have brought to light a burgeoning, not-so-unusual alliance in the Arab world; the strategic cooperation of the Israeli state and Saudi Arabia. An alliance consisting of military clout, political power and financial backup, this cooperation has witnessed an intersection of interests. While the Israeli and Saudi states are the pillars of this alliance, the other Persian Gulf petro-sheikhdoms, and Jordan, all play a supportive role in this drama.

As Robert Parry explains in his article;

The potential impact of this new coalition can barely be overstated, with Israel bringing to the table its remarkable propaganda skills and its unparalleled influence over U.S. foreign policy and Saudi Arabia tapping into its vast reservoir of petrodollars and exploiting its global financial networks.

Implacable hostility to Iran

What immediate concerns have brought together this apparently odd couple? Both view Shia Islamic Republic of Iran as the main enemy, and have been busy lobbying American, European and other governments to take a tough line against Tehran. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia have whipped up fears of the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons programme to mobilise political and economic support for a military strike against that country. While the European states, the US and Iran were negotiating the now-established Geneva accords on curbing aspects of the Iranian nuclear programme, Saudi and Israeli officials were busy making plans for a military attack on Iran, should a deal have failed to materialise. Both have been agitating for harsher sanctions against Iran, and were disappointed with moves by the United States and new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for rapprochement.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia worked overtime to try and scuttle any possible agreement between the P5 + 1 states – the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – and the Iranian regime regarding the latter’s nuclear capabilities. The deal reached between the relevant parties represents a serious defeat for the Israel-Saudi alliance. The latter deployed increasingly hysterical rhetoric, and used their widespread ‘soft power’ connections inside the US and other governments to attempt to sabotage any kind of agreement. As Robert Parry explained in one of his many articles on the emerging Israel-Saudi alliance, both powers bring their complementary strengths to the table;

Saudi oil billionaires can reach into both Wall Street boardrooms and the corporate offices of Texas energy giants, while Israel has unparalleled lobbying power with Congress and can deploy its network of neoconservative propagandists to shape any American foreign policy debate.

However, this time, their wishes were not fulfilled. While the Saudi regime had a temper tantrum over the failure of the US to be swayed, the interim agreement with Iran represents a severe rebuff to the Zionist lobby in the US, and the concessions that Iran offered, albeit under economic duress, do represent a lessening of tensions and the threat of immediate war has receded. The fact that the deal was reached does not mean that it is fair or equitable to the Iranians. The latter have been suffering under a regime of punitive sanctions and were forced to give up a great deal just to secure some minimal relief from a crippling economic embargo. There was very little reciprocity in the terms of this deal. As Professor Ismael Hossein-Zadeh explained in his Counterpunch article;

Deprived of more than half of its oil exports/revenue, and largely locked out of the international banking and/or trade system, the Iranian economy and its people are already gravely suffering from the ravages of economic sanctions.

Under such pressing conditions, sections of the Iranian elite were looking to compromise and reach an interim deal. But the fact that the Israel-Saudi Arabia connection was working to sabotage even such an unjust arrangement represents how far they will push tensions to the point of even threatening a wider regional war. High level political figures in the Israeli establishment were even considering launching a bombing campaign against Iran should an agreement be reached between the P5 +1 and Iranian states. There were some voices in the Israeli establishment opposed to a unilateral strike against Iran – Gabi Ashkenazi, former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff for one; Shimon Peres, the Israeli President for another. However influential, they could not drown out the shrill rhetoric of the war hawks in Tel Aviv. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, motivated by implacable hostility and hatred for any regional challenger, were pushing for a violent outcome with Iran – that outcome has been averted for the time being. This confederation of rogue bedfellows had hoped that spreading around the limitless Saudi and Arab-monarchy petrodollars, plus louder and more shrill neoconservative and Zionist voices in the US Congress would undermine any US-Iranian reconciliation – it did not work.

Aversion to the Arab Uprisings

Another area where both states find that they converge is their combined wariness of the political forces and social movements unleashed by the Arab Awakening, normally understood by the misnomer ‘Arab Spring’. Jordan is the principal contact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, being heavily dependent on the financial generosity of the petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf, particularly the regime in Riyadh. Jordan has maintained close military contacts with Israel since signing a peace agreement in 1994.

The emerging nexus between Tel Aviv and Riyadh was further in evidence during the recent upheaval caused by the Egyptian military’s coup d’etat against the former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi. Saudi Arabia is providing lavish finances for the militarist regime, and Israel deployed its considerable political resources in Washington to lobby the Obama administration not to oppose the coup; in fact, the US steadfastly refused to describe the ousting of former President Morsi as a coup. Israel’s position has improved significantly with the removal of Morsi, and the consequent isolation of the Israeli-blockaded Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian government of Hamas in the Gaza Strip has suffered a reversal of fortune with the ousting of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

It is interesting to note that the royalist, theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, along with its Persian Gulf partners, is solid allies of the violently secular dictatorship of the current Egyptian President General al-Sisi.

The Syrian imbroglio

Cooperation between the two rogue states also extends to the Syrian civil war. The Syrian regime, a long-term benefactor of the Hezbollah party in Lebanon and the only Arab ally of Iran, faces an insurrection increasingly dominated by Saudi-funded Islamist militants. Israel and Saudi Arabia view the Syrian regime as part of a ‘Shia Crescent’ blocking the onward advance of the pro-American Sunni monarchies. The toppling of Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite from the Shia denomination of Islam, and the growing sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict, does not unnecessarily perturb the Tel Aviv regime. In fact, the Syrian government’s long-standing support for the Hezbollah party, the latter having defeated Israeli forces in 2006 and driving them out of Lebanon, would be cancelled by the victory of Saudi-backed Sunni insurgents.

Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States until September 2013, stated that the Saudi Arabian plan to destabilise and eventually overthrow the Syrian regime is something the Israeli leaders can agree with. The removal of the Iranian-backed Assad regime would be welcomed by Tel Aviv, and its replacement with Saudi-supported militant regime, while not the best outcome, is the preferred option. To quote Oren from Consortiumnews;

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

It is true that the Ba’athist regime in Damascus maintained an armed truce with the state of Israel for more than forty years. Syrian troops did not actually do battle with Israeli forces at any time since the 1967 war, when Israel seized (and still occupies) the Golan Heights from Syria. While both sides intervened in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, neither side directly engaged in combat against each other. As late as May 2013, Israeli officials were publicly declaring that they preferred Assad to remain in power, with the fear of an Islamist takeover dominating concerns in Tel Aviv. However, now with the Israeli-Saudi tag team in action, Israel is utilising its considerable political propaganda networks to encourage the United States (and other imperialist countries) to directly intervene in Syria on the side of the Saudi-backed insurgents.

One of the key players in enabling this new alliance to function is the Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, a mysterious figure involved in all sorts of murky affairs, currently head of Saudi intelligence and an intimate fellow traveler of the Bush family. His connections with the United States are legion and extensive, ranging from business interests to high-level political connections. He has been instrumental in cultivating the axis of cooperation between his regime and the state of Israel. The Likudnik-House of Saud axis of terror, according to veteran journalist Pepe Escobar, is sponsoring Sunni fundamentalist insurgents and providing political support for those groups, exacerbating the Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab and Islamic countries. Bandar is a cunning, long-term and wily political operator who knows how to use petrodollar-bribery and threats in turn to persuade his counterparts to adapt to Saudi strategy.

In July 2013, Bandar met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the situation in Syria. Bandar and his Saudi colleagues were pushing for full-scale and direct American military intervention in Syria, and he was trying to shore up support for another American-led imperialist regime change war. The Israeli-Saudi axis had been agitating for direct American and European military intervention in Syria, and Bandar was hopeful that the Iranian-allied Syrian regime would soon fall. Bandar met Putin to convince the latter to drop support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad. What transpired in the meeting reveals the character of the Israel-Saudi network.

According to Robert Parry in his article “Israeli-Saudi Alliance Slips into View”, Bandar made a not-so-subtle threat that should Putin adhere to the Saudi position on Syria, the upcoming 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics would not be targeted by Chechen militants controlled by Riyadh;

Amid Bandar’s calls for Russian cooperation with the Saudi position on Syria, Bandar reportedly offered guarantees of protection from Chechen terror attacks on next year’s Winter Olympic Games hosted by Russia in the city of Sochi. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year,” Bandar reportedly said. “The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”

Putin refused to be intimidated, rejected the bribes offered by Bandar, and worked towards rejecting a joint American-British military intervention in Syria. Russian diplomacy, combined with public opposition to another imperial war after Iraq and Afghanistan, stymied moves by the American and British administrations for war in Syria. It is interesting to note that, quoting from Robert Parry again;

“Bandar’s Mafia-like threat toward the Sochi games – a version of “nice Olympics you got here, it’d be a shame if something terrible happened to it” – failed to intimidate Putin. Indeed, I was told that Putin’s anger fueled his decision to intervene in the Syrian crisis to head off a threatened U.S. military strike designed to “degrade” the Syrian military.”

The rejection of another American military intervention, this time in Syria, by the international community represents another serious defeat for the Israel-Saudi Arabia alliance. Prominent members of the Saudi royal family were fuming that their latest drive to war in Syria was rebuffed by the Obama administration. However, influence-peddling is the main characteristic of the Saudi-Israeli network, its soft power reaching into corporate boardrooms and political offices. Buying and selling political influence, lobbying and public relations are what the proponents of this dark alliance do best.

Rogue states operate by using underhanded means, and flout international law. They subvert the democratic process, and exploit divisions for advantage. The Sunni-Shia split is being used judiciously to create a sectarian reordering of the Middle East. As Stephen Lendman explains, Israel and Saudi Arabia seek to install controllable vassals, Arab proxies that can be bent to their will. If we fail to heed the lessons of history, we are bound to repeat the tragedies that occurred.

The House of Saud, with the backing of the Reagan administration of the 1980s, bankrolled a number of Sunni fundamentalist groups to fight against a Communist, secular state in Afghanistan. Hailed as freedom fighters by the Reagan government, the various groupings of Afghan mujahedeen formed the bases of what later spawned fanatical outfits like Al Qaeda. In the 1990s, the Islamist groups began targeting the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia, the best of “frenemies” to use an internet meme, are doing their best to fund, train and politically support armed Sunni fundamentalist groups that will one day become roving guerrillas.

The first step in a long-term solution would be for America to actually leave the Middle East. After a decades-long ‘war on terror’, American policy in the Arab and Islamic worlds lies in ruins. It has brought nothing but misery and suffering to the people of those countries. Israel and Saudi Arabia have consistently partnered with the US in enabling, aiding and abetting American crimes. Criminal alliances need to be broken.

The NSA spying scandal, unintended consequences and remembering the 1953 Iranian coup

November 10, 2013 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, NSA, United States

The cascading repercussions of the expanding US National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal are extending throughout the world. The Socialist Worker online newspaper has been covering this growing issue, publishing a series of articles documenting the extent of the American (and British) spying network. The amount of data collected, the targets for spying, the duration of the surveillance and the lack of transparency on the part of the US and British intelligence-gathering agencies demonstrates the sordid and ruthless character of the associated ruling classes and the lengths to which they will go to maintain their rule. As the Socialist Worker explained in a recent article;

“The long arm of the U.S. security state reaches across oceans and stretches into the presidential palaces of America’s closest allies. Last month, the National Security Agency (NSA) was exposed for tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone–for over a decade.”

The expansion of spying capabilities and national cooperation on surveillance indicates the underlying deceptions and barbarity of the capitalist powers. All kinds of communication technologies, social media, emails, mobile phone records – all are considered fair game. Glenn Greenwald, the perceptive American journalist and social commentator, has been following this issue closely. He has worked with the whistle-blower Edward Snowden to bring the details of the spying network to light. The efforts of Greenwald and Snowden in meticulously documenting the scope and mass of NSA data collection is truly a public service, throwing light on an otherwise dark corner of corporate-political power structures. For instance, in one month alone, the NSA collected 70 million digital communications in France. That was over the period December 2012 to January 2013. The NSA also collected the data from 60 million phone calls in Spain.

Interestingly, the US government maintains a hierarchy of cooperation with its allies, and collaborates with differing levels of intimacy and knowledge-sharing with its different imperialist partners. The Socialist Worker article elaborates that the American establishment categorises its allies into four different classes for the purpose of spying cooperation;

“Comprehensive Cooperation,” which includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand; “Focused Cooperation,” which includes 19 countries, most of them in Europe, plus Japan and South Korea; “Limited cooperation,” which includes France, Israel, India and Pakistan, among plenty of others; and “Exceptional Cooperation,” which includes countries the U.S. considers to be hostile.

So Australia maintains comprehensive cooperation with the United States in matters of spying, and is more valued in terms of its surveillance importance than Israel – makes one proud to be an Australian.

The reverberations of these revelations are truly staggering, and warrant serious consideration. However, there is one consequence that the US and Britain did not foresee, but one that has far-reaching importance. It is a consequence that has strong implications for the countries of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries.

Every year, on November 4, the Iranian government commemorates the 1979 seizure of the US embassy. The American embassy is today a museum, hosting exhibits that celebrate the Iranian revolution and the dramatic hostage-taking carried out by young Iranian revolutionaries at the time. The storming of the US embassy was part of the ongoing revolutionary process, and is until today a sore point in US-Iranian relations. The embassy seizure, referred to in Iran as “Conquest of the American Spy Den”, has been justified by the Iranian government on the grounds that the US embassy was a centre of espionage activity.

This year, on November 4, the Iranian regime stated that yes, we have been vindicated – the American embassies around the world are nests of spies. In an article for The Diplomat online magazine, which covers foreign affairs, officials from the Iranian government stated that the takeover of the US embassy and hostage-taking was fully justified, and the current NSA revelations about the extent of US-British spying activity provide the corroborative evidence for the regime’s claim – that the US embassy was a nest of spies. November 4, celebrated in Iran as the ‘National Day of Campaign against Global Arrogance’, provided the perfect opportunity for the Iranian government to express its vindication. The Tehran regime is now feeling fully justified that it did the right thing in 1979, seizing the US embassy and smashing what turned out to be den of spies.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameinei, remarked that the university students who seized the US embassy back in 1979;

“discovered the truth and real identity of this embassy, which was in fact a spy nest, and put it out there for the people of the world to see…. On that day, our youth named the American embassy the spy nest, and today, after the passing of more than three decades, American embassies in European countries that are America’s partners have been named spy nests. This matter demonstrates that our youth were more than thirty years ahead of the world’s calendar.”

Iranians mark the November 4 commemoration with big, nationalistic rallies, denouncing the United States, chanting ‘Death to America’, and rallying support for the regime. This year, these rallies had added significance because of the restarted negotiations between the newly-elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over the nuclear weapons issue. The new Iranian administration has indicated its willingness to talk, which has always been the position of Tehran. But the November 4 rallies were meant to bolster support for the regime, and appear to give it domestic strength and popularity. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated that the negotiators who talk to the United States are by no means compromisers. He elaborated that speaking with the official enemy is difficult, and so they deserve the full support of the population.

Most of the corporate media’s coverage of Iranian politics simplistically divides the population into ‘hardliners’ and ‘moderates’. Usually an Iranian is designated ‘moderate’ because they are willing to accommodate US interests, particularly US business interests. Pro-western candidates are described as ‘moderate’, and therefore reasonable; opposition to US policies in the region is taken as an indication of a ‘hardliner’ and therefore someone irrational and closed to negotiation.

This oversimplified characterisation is misleading, because the Iranian government has always signalled its willingness to cooperate, but not compromise on its most basic demands for security and safety. Iranian politics is more complex, and not conductive to being categorised into neat, labelled packages. In fact, Saeed Jalili, a former Presidential candidate and and Iran’s one-time nuclear negotiator, stated in his speech to the November 4 rally that;

“the “Death to America” chant was for the most “thoughtful” and “honest” individuals, adding that “These individuals have the most understanding about [the US’] opposition to us. The logic of Imam [Khomeini] was that ‘Death to America’ was death to the grandiosity and humiliation of nations. It was death to the violence that gives permission to occupy countries. Death to the control room that in one instant gives the command to kill thousands of individuals. ‘Death to America’ is a symbol. ‘Death to America’ is not against the American people; it is against the 1%, a defense of the oppressed in the world, and even America.”

Exactly.

Make no mistake – the Iranian regime is a bourgeois-clerical dictatorship, where the imposition of religion is carried out harshly, where labour activists and dissidents are imprisoned and tortured, where the government still executes its opponents. Iranian trade unionist Reza Shahabi, imprisoned in the notorious Evin complex since June 2010, and now requires urgent medical attention. He was an organiser for the bus workers in the city of Tehran, and has been convicted of political offences. The Iranian government is definitely no friend of the workers. However, we must recognise that the United States and Britain, using their considerable resources, intend to return the nation of Iran to a semi-colonial, dependent status where the country’s resources are open to exploitation by foreign multinational capital. Indeed, the imperialist countries wish to restore Iran to the economic and political situation that obtained before the 1979 revolution, when Iran was ruled by the despotic Shah and the small, ultra-wealthy clique of bankers, financiers, military generals and police chiefs that ran the country as a personal fiefdom, allowing the major multinational corporations to plunder the nation’s main resource, oil and natural gas. Indeed, earlier in 2013, the Iranians celebrated another political anniversary, one that casts a long shadow over American-Iranian relations. It was an event that shaped Iranian politics for decades, and influenced the politics of the entire Arab and Islamic worlds.

August 2013 was the sixtieth anniversary of the American and British sponsored coup d’etat against the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. The latter, representing a coalition of nationalist, secular, religious and bourgeois forces, attempted to nationalise the main Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum. The coup, orchestrated by the Americans and British, toppled the nationalist Mossadegh and installed the pro-western Shah of Iran. Under the royalist dictatorship, the oil and natural gas resources were opened up to private corporations, the regime launched a massive crackdown on dissent, and the monarchy ruled with an iron fist. The Iranian secret police, trained by the Americans and British, tortured and repressed all opposition to the Shah’s rule. The anti-American resentment generated by this coup reverberates until today in Iranian politics. Ten years ago, the independent media channel Democracy Now examined the 1953 coup on its fiftieth anniversary. US involvement was not officially acknowledged until August 2013, when declassified documents from the CIA archives, maintained by the George Washington University, conclusively demonstrated that the US with the connivance of Britain, organised the overthrow, sponsoring pro-monarchist and anti-Mossadegh forces inside Iran, and eventually supported a general as the preferred leader of the country. Interestingly, the general considered acceptable as the new leader of Iran, Fazlollah Zahedi, was once arrested and imprisoned by the British authorities in Iran during the World War Two because of his pro-Nazi sympathies.

Mossadegh was a nationalist, who united various political forces behind him. While anti-Communist, he allowed the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, to organise openly and conduct their political activities free from state harassment. He believed that the economy was being milked by Britain, and subsequently the United States, for which there was one remedy – Iranian control of the massive oil and natural gas resources. By controlling their main national resource, Mossadegh argued that Iran could manage its own affairs free from foreign interference. The US and Britain responded by interfering in the domestic affairs of Iran, paying sympathetic generals and police officers, organising disturbances and riots by pro-monarchist thugs and criminals, arranging for hostile anti-Mossadegh articles to appear in media outlets, implementing an oil embargo to cripple the economy and impoverish the population, and creating a political climate of tension and instability conducive to a coup d’etat. The overthrow of Mossadegh, organised by Britain initially but then taken over by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), brought to power a royalist dictatorship that was fully compliant with US and British business interests. The 1953 Iranian regime change formed the template for subsequent American covert interventions in the Arab and Islamic countries.

Once the Shah was in place, the oil embargo was lifted, the economy returned to a semblance of normality, and the plans for oil nationalisation were cancelled. The Shah clamped down on all dissent, banning Mossadegh’s formation, the National Front, arresting and killing members of the Iranian Communist Tudeh party, and turning the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, into a largely compliant instrument of the absolutist monarchy. The Iranian secret police formed by the Shah, SAVAK, earned a reputation for brutality and savage torture. The royalist regime established close and enduring relations with Israel, and the two states formed friendly ties for the duration of the Shah’s reign. It is hard to imagine today, but Israel and Iran were once on very cordial terms, which was part of the Shah’s pro-western orientation. The Iran-Israel alliance consisted of trade, intelligence-gathering and sharing, armaments development, and with Turkey involved, a trilateral arrangement on military and intelligence cooperation. Before the Shah’s royalist regime was overthrown in 1979, thousands of Israeli businesspeople and diplomats travelled to Iran to find fortune and hospitality.

The Shah of Iran on the left with his good friend, former US President Jimmy Carter

Interestingly, the Shah’s regime aggressively pursued the development of nuclear power, a policy fully supported by the United States at the time. In the 1970s, the Shah declared that Iran would develop an extensive network of nuclear power plants, and that ‘all options were on the table’, including the eventual development of nuclear weapons. In documents that are also available from the George Washington University archives, the Shah’s government argued for the development of nuclear technology on the basis of national rights. The Shah contended that Iran was a regional power, and that Iran should be able to pursue all technologies that would make it stronger, including nuclear capability. These arguments are being heard again from the governing mullahs and politicians in Tehran today.

Well, Iran is still developing new military technology; the Iranian defence ministry announced the successful test launch of a new surface-to-air missile, capable of striking down cruise missiles, drones and bombers. With the Obama administration’s escalation of Predator drone strikes across the world, it is no wonder that the Tehran regime has responded with new technology designed to counter the drone threat. Unlike the positive reaction to the former Shah’s embrace of nuclear technology, the US has received the news of the latest Iranian military developments with icy hostility.

The expansion of NSA surveillance, its application on such a wide scale, and the amount of information collected represents not just a massive assault on democratic rights. The NSA spying activities are also creating a culture of fear and intimidation, where people are becoming reluctant to speak out. Far from enhancing freedoms, the nexus between corporate and political power is actually creating a powerful police state. We are witnessing the creation of a tyrannical dispensation, where one global power, the United States, has arrogated to itself the right to lecture other nations about human rights and international law, when it is itself the worst rogue state, violating the very laws it demands everyone else maintain. This is the global arrogance to which the Iranians are referring. The last word belongs to Edward Snowden, whose comments were summarised in the Socialist Worker:

The U.S. government can’t be entrusted our freedoms–we have to win them and defend them ourselves. That’s the message Edward Snowden is telling the world–as he wrote in Der Spiegel: “Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.”

Five years after the economic meltdown: Riches for some, poverty for the rest, and the Last Man Standing

October 5, 2013 Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized economic collapse, United States

Five years ago, in September 2008, the giant investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, filing for bankruptcy. This was the largest, but not the only, banking and investment firm to go under in that year, signalling the beginning of the ongoing capitalist economic crisis. Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, IndyMac, and a host of financial institutions went bust, were taken over by the federal government (yes, in the United States where private corporations are venerated, banks were nationalised) and returned to private ownership or continued in different forms.

The beginning of this economic meltdown compelled the national bourgeoisies of the worst hit economies – namely the United States and Britain – to take steps to alleviate the crisis and rescue the capitalist system. Austerity packages were applied in the nations that experienced severe economic downturn, measures that forced the working class to accept lowered pay levels, an erosion of working conditions, removal of pensions and job security, while the top one-percent of the social pyramid preserved their wealth. In the United States, the Obama administration passed a series of stimulus packages, designed to hand over public money to the ailing investment banks and financial institutions. Corporations such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other privately-owned hedge funds so that they could continue their predatory financial practices.

The economic crisis has meant a huge drop in employment. Back in 2009, the CNN Money outlet reported that millions of jobs were lost as a result of the economic meltdown. The normally corporate-friendly mouthpiece Sky News reported in February 2013 that in the United Kingdom, 3.7 million jobs were lost since the start of the great recession. Less employment opportunities has meant a staggering rise in unemployment, less secure jobs and more temporary work for employees. Being unemployed or underemployed is becoming a more common feature of working life in the crisis-wracked capitalist states.

The Wall Street Journal, the lapdog of the US financial elite, reported earlier in September 2013 about the upcoming ‘Lost Generation’ – the high schoolers from 2008 who lived through the economic downturn and are now struggling to find work. The article entitled “Wanted jobs for new ‘lost’ generation”, details the plight of young people, their diminishing prospects for secure employment, their resultant financial difficulties, and increasing student debt that is now part of the life of new college graduates. The economic and social stagnation of an entire generation puts paid to the myth of upward social mobility in a capitalist system. As Gary Lapon explained in article published in the Socialist Worker online magazine;

“ONE OF the biggest myths about the United States is that it’s a mostly “middle class” society, with poverty confined to a minority of the population.

The reality is exactly the opposite: The vast majority of people in the United States will experience poverty and economic insecurity for a significant portion of their lives.”

Lapon summarises the findings of various economic surveys and statistical analyses that accurately portray the life of the majority of people in the United States that experience economic immiseration. As Lapon explains;

“Around four out of every five people in the U.S. will endure unemployment, receive food stamps and other forms of government aid, and/or have an income below 150 percent of the official poverty line for at least one year of their lives before age 60.”

Long periods of unemployment are not just economically devastating, but also have a deleterious impact on mental health, contributing to bouts of depression and anxiety, higher levels of admissions to mental hospitals, and also a rise in chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Lapon cites a study by researchers at the University of Queensland who examined the harmful effects of family unemployment on child cognitive development. Children from unemployed families and living in poverty experience diminished levels of cognitive development, according to the researchers.

However, the wealthiest one percent of the American population has amassed enormous amounts of wealth, enough to feed millions of hungry and impoverished people. The combined wealth of the richest American oligarchs is more than enough to fund education programs, food kitchens, and social welfare for the poorest families. As Lapon explains in his article;

“The 400 richest Americans, with a total net worth of $1.7 trillion as of last year, were worth an average of $4.2 billion each, enough to support over 89,000 families of four at 200 percent of the poverty level for an entire year.”

However, the wealthiest and largest corporations are doing well during this crisis. In fact, the Obama administration has done everything in its power to ensure that the richest elite retained and even increased their share of profits as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Concomitantly, the share of the GDP dedicated to workers’ wages has decreased. As Forbes magazine documented in April 2012, under Obama’s watch, corporate profits have hit an all-time high, while wages have stagnated and reached an all-time low. In the third quarter of 2012, corporate earnings increased to $1.75 trillion, while workers’ wages have plummeted as a percentage share of GDP. In 2013, the picture was even starker, with Business Insider Australia reporting that corporate profit margins have hit another all-time high in the United States. One of the reasons for this surge in corporate profitability is given by the Business Insider article;

“Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. The other reason corporations are so profitable is that they don’t employ as many Americans as they used to. As a result, the employment-to-population ratio has collapsed. We’re back at 1980s levels now.”

“In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords and 300+ million serfs.”

The Huffington Post, the mouthpiece of the liberal wing of the American ruling class, published an article that detailed how corporate profits are soaring, but workers are not getting any richer. Income inequality is skyrocketing, with an average CEO from one of the largest corporations in the US earning 273 times more than his or her co-workers. It is touching to see that the author of the Huffington Post article still believes that wealth will somehow trickle down to the rest of the population, rather than tending to coagulate at the very top. The Wall Street financiers and speculators, those responsible for the current capitalist malaise, are hardly expected to be socially responsible and reform their criminal ways. In fact, in a sign that the speculator-parasites are continuing their predatory practices, pensions and public money is being looted by the big banks and financial firms in order to prop up a failing economic system.

Behind the statistics and figures are the human stories of suffering and struggle that the 99 percent are going through to make ends meet. Job insecurity and the threat of poverty are basic instruments that the capitalist class uses to keep working people down. In an article published in the Socialist Worker called “She gave 25 years and her life”, author Leighton Christiansen documents the life and passing of adjunct Professor Margaret Mary Vojtko, who taught French at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. As the article states:

“On September 1, she passed away at the age of 83, still an adjunct. She was buried in a cardboard coffin.

Margaret Mary was, in the words of Prof. Gary Rhodes, part of a new segment of America’s working poor: adjunct professors at colleges and universities. When she was hired 25 years ago, Vojtko may as well have taken a vow of poverty–and this poverty undoubtedly hastened her death.

Like the rest of the working poor, adjuncts work part-time or full-time for low pay, are routinely denied access to health care and/or affordable health insurance, and have little or no money left after paying the bills to invest in a retirement plan, if one is even available.”

Her story is becoming increasingly widespread, as education is privatised and universities become corporatised ‘knowledge factories’. A professorship is normally associated with job security and decent pay – not anymore. Impoverishment, the lack of a decent wage, and the erosion of health benefits all contribute to stresses and strains of the life of people like the late Margaret Mary Vojtko, and hasten their demise.

As the criminal parasitism and social decay of the capitalist system become the norm, more people are realising that all the social gains of the past – the minimum wage, set working hours, paid overtime, health benefits – are being rolled back. Obama used the fifth anniversary of the 2008 financial meltdown to make the case for an economic recovery. He argued that while problems remain, the financial situation is stabilised. There is a grain of truth in this characterisation; the economy has partly stabilised, but not for the 99 percent of us. Richard Eskow, in an article published in Common Dreams, states it plainly;

“Five years after the financial crisis, it’s become increasingly apparent that the government didn’t rescue “the economy.” It rescued the wealthy, while doing far too little for everyone else.”

Obama is correct in one respect – the banking and financial system has been stabilised, in order to continue plundering the public purse and reallocate a greater proportion of the national economy to corporate profits. The economic recovery was intended to secure the privileges and position of the super-wealthy, while the rest of us, the 99 percent, bear the burden of the costs and are economically pauperised. The vaunted recovery has been a bonanza for the financial elite, while the working class have to work longer hours, for stagnant wages, increasing cost of living and lower expectations for the future.

One of the ways in which corporate profits are maximised at the expense of workers is an increase in unpaid overtime. Unpaid overtime contributed by workers to employers increased from an estimated $72 billion in 2009 to $110 billion – or almost eight hours a week for full-time workers in Australia. This comes from a report examining the issue of overwork, and its contribution to levels of stress, depression and anxiety among the workforce. As unpaid overtime increases, the levels of stress, anxiety and poor sleep patterns increase. This has a deleterious effect on health, family life and relationships.

Emmanuel Saez, professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley and the Director of the Centre for Equitable Growth, authored an extensive study into the growth of income inequality in the United States over the last five years. The study by Saez, entitled “Striking it Rich; The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States”, elaborates how the economic recovery has benefited the already-wealthy, with a massive transfer of money from the working class to the financial elite. To quote from Saez’s study;

“Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. Hence, the top 1% captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery. From 2009 to 2010, top 1% grew fast and then stagnated from 2010 to 2011. Bottom 99% stagnated both from 2009 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2011.”

Richard Eskow, writing in Common Dreams, states that while there has been an economic recovery of sorts, it is a recovery tailored to the needs of the financial oligarchy. What we are witnessing is a rich person’s recovery, made possible by the policies of the Obama administration. Political decisions were taken to enable the recovery to be skewed in favour of maintaining current levels of inequality, and even increasing the rates of corporate profitability. As Eskow states;

“A Rich Person’s Economy doesn’t just happen. It took government action to decimate the thriving middle class of the 1960s and 1970s while directing an ever-increasing stream of wealth to the already wealthy.”

And further in his article:

“Government efforts were largely targeted toward banks, whose earnings are primarily pocketed by the wealthy. The lack of accountability for Wall Street misconduct was interpreted (probably correctly) as license to continue their risky, wealth-accumulating behavior.”

The recovery has been implemented by the political representatives of the ruling financial oligarchy to continue the criminal parasitism that resulted in the economic malaise in the first place, and take money from the public sphere, leaving the 99 percent to struggle with diminishing resources. The defenders of the economic status quo, such as the Obama administration, are insisting on hyping up a recovery enriches a minority at the expense of the vast majority of working people. The danger resides in the fact that all of us in the 99 percent will swallow this propaganda and believe that we will share in this recovery, and that wealth will filter down from the very-top.

Richard D Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst recently wrote an article republished in Common Dreams online magazine exposing the fallacy of the recovery hyperbole, and disabusing the readers of any notion that the capitalist economy is serving the interests of the 99 percent. As Wolff states in the introduction to the essay,

“You don’t have to be a Marxist to see how the 1% tries to fool us that we too are sharing in their renewed wealth. But it helps.”

Professor Wolff explains that hyping the recovery serves a specific political function; lulling the 99 percent into a false sense of security while our wages decline and our working conditions are eroded. It also reassures the partisans of ‘free-market’ capitalism that their dogma is sound and that the system is working. Many academically trained economists have built their careers hailing the merits and alleged superiority of the capitalist system. Critics of the capitalist, ‘free-market’ fundamentalist dogma have long been derided as extremists and fringe-dwellers, unable to grasp economic reality. The academic celebrants of capitalism, as Wolff calls them, are now reeling from the obvious breakdown of the economic system and the inadequacy of the dogma they were schooled in and defending all these years.

Paul Krugman, Nobel-Prize winning economist and regular contributor to the New York Times, penned a column in December 2012 expressing his dismay that big capital is acquiring an ever-greater share of the national pie at the expense of labour. After observing that the American economy is still in deep trouble, he asks in astonishment;

“Wait — are we really back to talking about capital versus labor? Isn’t that an old-fashioned, almost Marxist sort of discussion, out of date in our modern information economy?”

Actually, the ‘old’ Marxist categories of capital versus labour, surplus value, and the alienation of the worker from the productive process and its results are all quite relevant to today. Marx elaborated on the operating mechanisms of capital, analysed the laws of motion of capital, the primacy of profit maximisation, and elucidated on the intractable contradiction of capitalism; the private ownership of the means of production, but the socialised and collective nature of the productive process. Bourgeois economists, like Professor Krugman, are slowly rediscovering Marx and the critical importance of his analysis in understanding modern capitalism. Of course, Lenin came along an elaborated a theory of capitalist imperialism, the division of the world into rival spheres of influence controlled by the imperialist states, growing militarism and inter-imperialist rivalry, the super-exploitation of the economically-colonised countries for the benefit of a handful of imperialist powers, and the domination of the world by finance capital, but it is too much to expect the celebrants of big capital to absorb all this in the one sitting, so let’s stick to Marx.

Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business in New York University, the economist widely credited with foreseeing the economic collapse of 2008, stated in an interview back in 2011 what the servants of corporate capital dare not say out loud;

‘Karl Marx was right, at some point capitalism can destroy itself.”

His comments, stated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal and summarised in The Australian newspaper, were part of a long and extensive interview where Roubini surmised that all the major capitalist economies were falling into a deep recession, and that austerity programs were precisely the wrong instrument to use to recover. Professor Roubini’s warnings turned out to be prescient and perceptive, unlike the chairperson of the Federal Reserve, Ben ‘I did not see it coming’ Bernanke. In an article dated October 1 2013, Professor Roubini examines the return of the other great manifestation of the capitalist malaise, the Eurozone crisis. Stimulus packages have been passed, and the immediate storm has been weathered, but beneath the surface, says Roubini, the eurozone’s fundamental problems remain unresolved. The ‘periphery’ countries of the Eurozone, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria – are all at the epicentre of the crisis, but it is still seething beneath the surface. Roubini identifies what he calls ‘austerity fatigue’ as the larger European economies, such as Germany and France, tire of pumping money into the coffers of the failing states.

After an enormous campaign of calumnies and defamation against him, his theories derided as obsolete and outdated, there is one philosopher and political economist who has withstood the test of time. His analysis is worthy of serious consideration. He examined how the capitalist system accumulates enormous wealth at the top end of the social pyramid, and imposes increasing pauperisation on the 99 percent at the bottom. Knocking out the other major bourgeois-economist contenders, the last man standing, and the ultimate fighting champion is:

Antipodean Atheist

Writing at the intersection of politics, culture and life

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