Alternatives International

Israel Aims New Nakba-Style Weapon At Arab Citizens

Myssana Morany — 2017-06-01T13:44:03Z

The new so-called Kaminitz Law allows the Israeli government to carry out mass home demolitions in Arab villages and towns already hard hit by housing shortages and discriminatory state policies.

What Jewish Israelis call their War of Independence, Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic. During the 1948 war and its aftermath, Israel depopulated and destroyed 600 Palestinian villages and expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians from the newly-established state in order to open up their land for Jewish settlement.

But the Israeli campaign to control land has never stopped. As Israel celebrates the 69th anniversary of its establishment — Palestinians commemorate the Nakba annually on May 15 — it is also brandishing its latest weapon against its remaining Arab citizens, designed to corral them into an ever-shrinking living space.

According to Israel, the new so-called Kaminitz Law, which was enacted in April 2017, is intended to consolidate and streamline state powers in enforcing planning and building regulations. But in practice, this law allows the Israeli government to carry out a new wave of mass home demolitions in hemmed-in Arab villages and towns already hard hit by severe housing shortages and a history of discriminatory state policies. According to official state statistics, 97 percent of the demolition orders issued between 2012 and 2014 were against homes in Arab communities in Israel.

Israeli policy is driven by the rationale that the implementation of planning and building regulations in Arab towns can and should be achieved only through a harsh policy of mass home demolitions and other punitive measures against home and land owners. Those punished under the new law can be imprisoned for up to three years, and could accumulate fines reaching hundreds of thousands of Israeli shekels.

The Kaminitz Law intends to make “building violations” simply disappear, while completely ignoring the conditions that created the phenomenon of unauthorized construction in Arab towns and villages in the first place, and absolving the state of all responsibility for this phenomenon.

It also ignores the harrowing human cost of the new law: hundreds of families will be left homeless and without alternative housing solutions.

The Kaminitz Law hides behind a cloak of neutrality and the guise of equal and universal implementation of the law across all sectors of the population. However, it will have a disproportionate impact on Arab citizens of Israel, because it intentionally ignores the decades of systematic discrimination that generated the housing crisis in Arab towns and villages across the country, and which resulted in extensive “unauthorized construction.”

It is therefore disingenuous to portray “unauthorized construction” in Arab towns simply as a deviation from the desired social norm, as one might any other legal transgression. One cannot view the state's intent to increase enforcement of planning and building regulations without considering the wider context of Israel's suppressive historic relationship with the Palestinian Arab minority, and its longstanding efforts to restrict and control the living space available to them.

From 1948 to the present day

The most violent and dramatic period of Israel's land grab was during the Nakba in 1948. Armed Zionist militias, and subsequently the Israeli military, forcefully seized and reconfigured the land. Israel expelled the residents of some 600 Arab towns and confiscated their land, later demolishing these towns entirely. Those Arabs who remained were concentrated in restricted areas of the country — 139 surviving Arab villages and the Siyagh zone in the Naqab (Negev) desert — where they lived for the ensuing 20 years under Israeli military rule.

Persisting in its efforts to exert control over the land, Israel adopted a cleaner but no less violent weapon: the law. Behind the façade of legal neutrality, Israel continued to confiscate Arab land. Property belonging to Palestinian refugees (even the internally displaced who remained within the new state's boundaries and became citizens) was transferred to a designated state authority, and as much as 50 percent of property owned by Palestinian Arabs who became Israeli citizens was expropriated and, in most cases, used for the “public purpose” of Jewish settlement.

Even today, Israel continues to use land and expropriation laws to wrest control of Arab-owned land, particularly in the Naqab and Jerusalem areas.

Following the military and legal stages of land takeover, Israel then turned to zoning and planning regulations to limit Arab use of land. For generations, Israel neglected to draw up any building or land development plans for Arab towns and villages. However, it did take care to map out the municipal boundaries of Arab communities in the early days of the state, very deliberately wrapping them tightly around the outermost homes in each town.

As the decades passed, the boundaries of most of these towns were never expanded. Most Arab-owned agricultural land was reallocated to surrounding Jewish regional councils. Deliberately-placed military bases and firing zones, state-managed forests, national parks, nature reserves, and highways today serve as barriers that encircle and confine Arab villages in Israel.

Rather than making up for the decades of discriminatory policies that have resulted in today's phenomenon of unauthorized construction, the Kaminitz Law threatens Palestinian citizens of Israel with heavy fines and prison time — criminalizing their right to shelter and their struggle to survive in the face of discriminatory policies.

If the 1948 Nakba was the opening shot in Israel's land grab campaign, this new law is its latest weapon in the arsenal designed to control and restrict Arab citizens, while reinforcing the state's Jewish character and giving clear preference to Jewish citizens.

Myssana Morany is an attorney in the Land and Planning Rights Unit at Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Source : http://alternativenews.org/index.php/comment/417-israel-aims-new-nakba-style-weapon-at-arab-citizens

Yemen - a Nation in Resistance Against Wahhabi Imperialism

Catherine Shakdam — 2017-06-01T13:41:30Z

Yemen was earmarked for a brutal military takeover the minute its people began to assert their sovereign rights against the diktat of Saudi Arabia.

Here we are again discussing the human tragedy that has become Yemen - this bleeding scar of a nation that was unilaterally declared war to by Saudi Arabia back in late March 2015. For two long years, two incredibly trying years Yemen's sovereignty, Yemen's right to self-defend its borders and its people, Yemen's right to religious freedom, and more importantly Yemen's right to political self-determination have been trampled over by an elite that calls itself democratic while arguing despotism.

Yemen has suffered so many injustices it would be now impossible to list them all, nevermind calling for reparation … There are however crimes so grave and so flamboyantly despicable in their nature that we must speak them - never to waver in our calls for vindication.

Beyond the bloodshed, the inhumane humanitarian blockade and the disappearing of a people‘s cultural heritage lies a betrayal far more biting and vile … Yemen you see was denied the truth of its Resistance Movement so that it could be reduced to an illegitimate rebellion against the so-called legitimacy of the former presidency.

Western capitals, those wannabe beacons of democracy and human rights, have systematically defiled, vilified and otherwise criminalized Yemen's Resistance Movement so that the world would not wake up to the reality of its main regional partner: Saudi Arabia.

A violent theocracy raised on the ideology of Takfir, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been instrumental over the past decade in the spread of radicalism - as expressed by groups such as al-Qaida, the Taliban, Boko Haram and of course Daesh (aka ISIS). A profoundly reactionary regime that rejects the notion of religious freedom, al-Saud's monarchy has nevertheless been hailed a model of stability and steadfastness against Terror by western powers.

Takfiri is frequently used in reference to Daesh (also known as ISIL or ISIS) but the term has a hidden universal applicability that surpasses our era while exposing the dark ideology languishing in the core of the phenomenon.

Since they started calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in June 2014, the gun-wielding occupiers of Iraq and Syria have been referred to as Takfiris by many Islamic scholars.

Derived from the word kafir, meaning infidel, the Arabic word could refer to any ideology that is based on declaring the dissent apostate, and therefore eligible to be killed by the members of the group. Takfirism is mostly rooted in Wahhabism, the official religion of the absolute autocratic regime of Saudi Arabia.

How could any democracy worth the ink on its constitution ever align itself with the kingdom you ask? The answer I'm afraid is only too predictable: money. Actually, it is more complicated than just money … capitalism rather lies at the heart of this crass alliance in between Wahhabist Saudi Arabia and western capitals.

Defined by Lenin at the turn of the 20th century as the most perverted expression of capitalism, imperialism has been the agenda behind most fought wars since World War II. The force behind nations' implacable will to enslave others to their will, unfettered capitalism or globalist corporatism has hidden behind many faces to justify its ambitions. Might it be under the flag of counter-terrorism, national security or even democracy-building, how many sovereign nations over the decades have fallen prey to western interventionism or that of its allies?

Too many would the beginning of an answer …

Yemen here sits a cautionary tale.

Yemen I would personally argue - and argued I have indeed, is THE cautionary tale par excellence, the one catastrophe we cannot possibly turn away from without risking to condemn the entire region to the folly of Wahhabism.

Yemen was earmarked for a brutal military takeover the minute its people began to assert their sovereign rights against the diktat of Saudi Arabia - that tyrant who since the 18th century has sat in ownership of the Hijaz through bloodshed and oppression.

But Yemen was never meant to resist as it did … Little could the western world expect that impoverished Yemen to rise such a tide against the House of Saud when capitulation would have been easier.

Yemenis do not look kindly on foreign invaders. The kingdom there might have done better should its officials had bothered reading up on their neighbors' history since never once was the Yemeni nation tamed.

Two years into this genocidal war Yemen has already taught the world a lesson in resistance and bravery, History will unlikely forget. For all the many dances Riyadh will hold to entertain its foreign host as to boast of its foreign friendships, Yemen will need only the arms of its sons and daughters to cry its freedom alive.

Maybe now western media could learn to speak Yemen's Resistance as it is, and not as it would like the public to perceive it.

Too many times have I read Reuters, AP, AFP and others sell Yemen down the proverbial river by labeling its freedom fighters under a great many misapprehensions: Iran-backed Shiite rebels they all have written ad nauseam so that Resistance could be tainted both by sectarianism and ethnopolitical-centrism.

Yemen's Resistance is no one's movement but its own. Yemen's Resistance is as pluralist and multicolored as the people that move it … Yemen is many schools of thoughts and traditions. Yemen is more than a sectarian punchline … if only you could climb down from your high horse and recognize a people in the throes of a brutal war, maybe you would see the dignity of a people in righteous resistance.

It requires more than just courage to stand alone before a system that sole purpose is to disappear life.

It takes faith and the depth of a tradition born in allegiance to stand firm on its truth before the fury of many world nations.

Source: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Yemen---a-Nation-in-Resistance-Against-Wahhabi-Imperialism-20170529-0016.html?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=34

‘Naxalbari': Fifty Years Later

Pritam Singh — 2017-06-01T13:38:23Z

Today, May 25, will commemorate 50 years of the Maoist uprising of Naxalbari in West Bengal. In March, 1967, a decision was taken in Naxalbari to carry out an armed rebellion for the rights of peasants and workers. This isolated revolt led to a movement that has lasted half a century.

ON May 25, 1967, in a village called Prasadujot in the Naxalbari block in West Bengal, a group of peasants forcibly tried to seize land from the landlords who controlled it. The peasants had legal entitlement to the land. They were led by two left-wing activists Kanu Sanyal (1929-2010) and Jangal Santhal (?-1981), and supported by a communist ideologue, Charu Mazumdar (1918-1972). This resulted in a violent confrontation between the peasants and the police, who were supporting the landlords. This seemingly isolated revolt in a far-flung village eventually gave birth to a movement that attracted the attention of the world. An English-language journalist or commentator gave it the name “Naxalite”, and this name has stuck. It has even been adopted by the supporters of the movement.

Fallout on Indian politics

Almost 50 years on from what seemed at first to be an isolated revolt, the fallout for Indian politics may be judged by a remark in 2010 by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He had said that the movement was the single biggest internal security threat to India.

There were three armed communist rebellions in India right after Independence in 1947. All three rebellions revolved around control over and ownership of land and produce from the land. One was in the Telangana region of the erstwhile southern state of Hyderabad in 1947; the second one was in the Tebhaga region in West Bengal in 1948, and the third one was a Lal Communist Party-led revolt in the erstwhile PEPSU region of the present state of Punjab in 1948. All three rebellions were militarily crushed by the Indian state, with large-scale human rights violations in all the three regions.

Paradoxical as it may sound, the military suppression of these three armed rebellions spread the mass influence of the communist movement in these three states. This can be attributed primarily to the land reforms introduced by the Indian state to take the heat out of the communist movement. This ended up increasing the popularity of the communists.

The land reforms boosted communist influence because immediately after the Indian state had suppressed the armed rebellions in the three states, it initiated land reforms. These were mainly in the form of granting better propriety rights to the peasantry in order to deal with the perceived socio-economic causes of the rebellions. In the mass consciousness of the peasantry, it was not the Indian state which was seen as their main benefactor — it was the communists, whose multiple sacrifices were seen as having forced the Indian state to grant concession to the peasants and tenants. In all three states — Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Punjab — the electoral performance of the CPI was impressive in the 1950s. This suggests that the two distinct paths in communist politics — that of armed struggle and that of parliamentary work — could be complementary. This has not been recognised either in the political perspectives of both — the armed struggle tendency and the parliamentary tendency — in the Indian communist movement, or in the academic literature on the subject. The failure to recognise this complementarity and an over-emphasis on the competitiveness between the two streams have contributed to sectarianism in the Indian communist movement.

The Naxalite movement emerged from the conflict between two tendencies in the global and Indian communist movement — the parliamentary constitutionalist path and the path of armed struggle. Its timing and political approach was also shaped by global political movements such as the 1968 radical youth upsurge. In its first phase (1967-69), the support base of the Naxalite movement was mainly among the peasants and tribal communities. In the second phase (1969-72), its main support base shifted to urban students and youth. During this second phase, it represented some of the radicalism and the iconoclasms of the wider global student and youth movements of 1968.

After suffering a decline from mid-1970s to late 1970s, over the past three decades the Naxalite movement has re-emerged, especially since 2004. It is a powerful challenger to the hegemony of the centralist Indian state. After its revival, the movement has taken a leading role in developing social welfare, human development and educational activities in the tribal areas where it has operated for decades and where it has de facto administrative control. The Maoists-run schools, health centres, rural credit and seed bank, water-management projects and social reforms are aimed at gender equity in families and the wider adivasi society. It is an unusual insurgent movement that has a strong social welfare and egalitarian management components to it. What began in the early 1980s as a campaign against forest, revenue and police departments and money-lenders, has added social reform as a significant aspect to its political arsenal. The social base and even the leadership profile of the movement has significantly changed from urban middle class students and intelligentsia to young tribal young men and, even more significantly, to tribal women.

Influence on art & literature

Regarding the impact of the movement on literary and artistic productions, it is most well known in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Bengal and Kerala. In Punjab, the poets Paash, Sant Ram Udasi and Lal Singh Dil and the theatre artiste Gursharan Singh clearly represent the impact of the movement. In Andhra Pradesh, Naxalite folk songs have become part of the mainstream and Gaddar, a celebrated Telugu poet, openly supports the movement. In Bengal, Satyajit Ray's 1971 film Seemabaddha was based on the life of an upper-class family during the Naxalite movement. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas made a critically acclaimed film, The Naxalites in 1980. In 2005, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi was set against the backdrop of the movement. From Kerala, K. Satchidanandan, an internationally recognised poet, has been inspired by the movement.

Politically, the single-most importantthreat to the left and democratic movement in India is the rise of Hindu nationalism incorporating fascist/semi-fascist tendencies. The leadership of the Naxalite movement seems aware of this threat, how this awareness results in building wider alliances outside its restricted area of influence remains to be seen.

The writer is Professor of Economics at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/-naxalbari-fifty-years-later/412218.html

Two Different Daughters of India

Rajdeep Sardesai — 2017-06-01T13:35:49Z

Both Jyoti Singh and Bilkis Bano were brutalised and gangraped. What happened to them holds a mirror to the darker side of our society and yet their narratives do diverge, a separation that deserves serious introspection.

This is the story of two daughters of India, both victims of horrific sexual crimes. Jyoti Singh was a bright 23-year-old, dreaming of a career in medicine that would lift her family out of poverty when she was brutally gangraped and murdered in the heart of the national capital in December 2012. Bilkis Bano was just 19 and five months pregnant when she was gangraped while trying to escape the mob in her village in Gujarat's Dahod district during the 2002 communal riots. Bilkis's three-year-old child was killed in front of her while 13 members of her family were also murdered. Jyoti and Bilkis hold a mirror to the darker side of our society and yet their narratives do diverge, a separation that deserves serious introspection.

Last week, Jyoti Singh's killers were given the death sentence by the Supreme Court. It meant that within four-and-a-half-years of the date of the original crime, justice had been delivered. Just a day earlier, the Bombay High Court affirmed the life sentences of 11 accused in the Bilkis case, while sentencing the six police officers and a government doctor who tried to cover up the case to three years jail. While Jyoti Singh's verdict was the top headline and received 24 x 7 carpet coverage across television channels, the Bilkis ruling did not attract screaming banner headlines or prime time debates.

The difference is not surprising. Jyoti Singh's sickening death occurred in the national capital where most television channels and newspapers are headquartered and barely a few kilometres away from parliament where our law-makers reside. Within hours of her death, thousands of people had converged on Rajpath, with constant live coverage magnifying the surge of protests. The anger echoed in parliament, the country mourned her death, leaders went and met her family members and eventually a high level committee was set up to examine the troubling issue of sexual violence.

Bilkis Bano, by contrast, was languishing in a refugee camp for riot victims in Dahod, a tribal-dominated district of southern Gujarat, about 200km from Ahmedabad. Bilkis had attempted to register a case with the local police station who chose to ignore her pleas and threatened her instead to drop the charges. It was only with the support of highly committed NGOs, the National Human Rights Commission and a strong legal team that Bilkis managed to get the Supreme Court to direct the CBI to take over the investigation and transfer the case out of Gujarat. For over a decade, Bilkis fought her case bravely even as she had to move home repeatedly and couldn't return to her village out of sheer fear that her attackers were still around.

Bilkis's case slowly became just another Gujarat riots case even as the Jyoti Singh case became a cause celebre, a symbol of the fight for gender justice. Those who supported and fought for Bilkis were accused of being pseudo-secular “jholawallah” liberals only seeking to malign the government in Gujarat. Those who took up the Jyoti Singh case were seen as being at the vanguard of redefining rape laws. Global documentaries were planned in memory of Jyoti Singh's courage, hardly anyone wanted to visit Bilkis and her family.

While the accused were punished in both the cases, the judges final orders reflected the contrasting public mood. Describing the Delhi gangrape case as ‘demonic', the judges saw it as a “crime against humanity” and ruled that it was a “rarest of rare” case that deserved the death penalty. In the Bilkis case, the judges rejected the conspiracy charge, claiming that the crime had occurred on “the spur of the moment” even while admitting that the accused were “hunting for Muslims”. While rejecting the death penalty for the rapists, the judges said, the “accused were boiling with revenge” after the Godhra train burning.

Ironically, when I asked Bilkis if she was satisfied with the verdict, she softly replied: “I always wanted justice, never revenge!” My counter-question to the world at large is simply this: is ‘justice' then for a gangrape victim in a communal riot different from ‘justice' for a gangrape in a bus in Delhi?

Post-script: Bilkis is now 34. The child she was pregnant with when she was gangraped is now 15. “He wants to be a lawyer”, she tells me with a smile. Maybe, he will one day be able to tell ‘new India' the true meaning of justice.

Rajdeep Sardesai is senior journalist and author. The views expressed are personal

Source : http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/jyoti-singh-and-bilkis-bano-two-different-daughters-of-india/story-7olpgSe53ot1H8TAKTA3GJ.html#disqus_thread

The Nixonization of Donald Trump

John Feffer — 2017-06-01T13:32:55Z

In the aftermath of Watergate, the country turned to the left. Are progressives positioned to capitalize on Trump's stumbles today?

The comparisons are multiplying. There was Trump's appeal to the “silent majority” during the presidential election, his later adoption of the “mad man” theory in his foreign policy, his possible taping of conversations, his arm-twisting of top officials, and his all-around involvement in the scandals enveloping his administration.

In a late night monologue last week, Jimmy Kimmel delivered a particularly apt zinger: “When we said Trump should act more presidential, we probably should have specified — we didn't mean Nixon.”

But it's worse than that. I knew Richard Nixon (well, not directly), and Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. For all of his manifest flaws, Nixon at least had an idea of what he was doing in the White House. Despite being a pro-business racist who detested environmentalists, Nixon supported new environmental laws, championed economic policies that would have placed him on the left side of the Democratic Party, and even expanded affirmative action.

But it was foreign policy that ultimately defined Nixon's non-Watergate legacy, for better or worse. Even as he was becoming entangled in domestic scandal, Nixon was executing the foreign policy equivalent of a Simone Biles balance-beam routine. In the early 1970s, along with his national security advisor Henry Kissinger, Nixon was opening up China, negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, trying to extricate U.S. troops from the quagmire of Vietnam, and attempting to prevent tensions in the Middle East from escalating into all-out war.

Indeed, it was these deviations from the hardline anti-Communism of the militarist wing of the Republican Party that ultimately caused Nixon's downfall, according to a detailed account by Len Colodny and Tom Schactman in their book The Forty Years War.

The steady drip of resentment over his radical alterations to U.S. foreign policy, particularly with regard to his overtures to the Soviet Union and China, accumulated until it leached away many former supporters on the right. As he weakened, his foreign policy opponents' attacks grew bolder, taking away more support. Attacks from within the executive branch added to the erosion. Eventually, with no conservative friends left, Nixon opted to resign.

In other words, Nixon went up against his era's version of the Blob, and the Blob struck back. In so doing, Nixon's right-wing enemies redefined themselves. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Fred Ikle, Albert Wohlstetter: Aghast at Nixon's apostasies, these figures became the core of what would become the neoconservative movement.

There are some parallels between the problems that have dogged Trump and Nixon. The ur-scandal of the Trump administration involves its closeness to Russia at a time when the foreign policy establishment has preferred a more hardline stance. Trump, as candidate, seemed to want to extricate U.S. troops from quagmires overseas. And the neocons were so upset with his foreign policy utterances that they again crossed party lines — just as many neocon Dems did back in the 1970s — to back Hillary Clinton for president.

But Trump is not Nixon, and these parallels are superficial. The focus on impeachment, while satisfying as an example of delicious comeuppance, is a distraction. The truly important question remains: What kind of backlash will Trump's apostasies create and who will take advantage of the political opportunity?

Trump and Russia

Maybe Trump was making nice with Russia, some speculated early on, because he hoped to better contain China. Or perhaps he simply wanted Moscow's help in bombing the Islamic State into smithereens.

But Trump doesn't have a Kissinger in his pocket. The president's recent sit-down with the grey eminence cum war criminal was just a quick refresher before Trump takes his standup routine overseas. His foreign policy “brain trust” is paralyzed by inexperience, ideological incompatibilities, and just plain incompetence. Let's be clear: Trump had no particular geopolitical aims in mind when he urged closer relations with the Kremlin.

The dealings with Russia that may ultimate deep-six Trump have had an entirely different character.

First, Trump is drawn to autocrats with high popularity ratings. Second, Putin is a favorite figure among the far right in the United States — white supremacists protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville last Saturday, for instance, chanted “Russia is our friend” — and Trump wanted this constituency on his side during the campaign. Third, Putin is putting together a hard-right coalition of leaders in Europe (the National Front in France, the UKIP in England, the Alternative for Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria) who promise to undermine the European Union and support Russian aims in Ukraine. Trump is competing for the affections of the same group.

Then there are the economic benefits that will accrue to Trump and his pals in the extraction industries from better relations with Russia. Lift the sanctions imposed against Russia in the wake of its interventions in Ukraine and U.S. oil and gas companies can resume their deal-making with the oligarchs.

These cultural sympathies and economic interests combine to form the circumstantial evidence behind possible political collusion. Unfortunately, there isn't much else to go on. Yes, during the transition, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had some discussions with Russia ambassador to the United States and lied about them. Attorney General Jeff Sessions misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about his contacts with Sergei Kislyak. Two other national security aides, Carter Page and J.D. Gordon, also had conversations with Kislyak.

Somebody hacked into the Democratic National Committee's server as well as John Podesta's email account and passed on the information to WikiLeaks, which released it to maximum effect during the campaign. It's more than likely that the hackers were connected to the Russian government — and even Trump himself seemed to accept this allegation in his tweets last July and remarks to the press a week before his inauguration — but definitive proof has not materialized. A dossier compiled by a former British intelligence operative suggests that Russia has compromising material about Trump that it can use to blackmail him. But this, too, remains speculative.

So, Trump advisers met with Russians, and the Russians probably interfered in the U.S. election (as they likely did recently in the French elections as well). He even shared classified material with the Russians. This is stupid, with profound ramifications for U.S. standing among its allies, but it's not illegal. The smoking gun remains elusive.

With its attempts to cover up its Russian connections, however, the Trump administration has been blowing a lot of smoke. Why did Flynn and Session lie? Why did Trump try to prevent former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying on Russia before a Senate committee? Why, most recently, did Trump fire FBI chief James Comey after he'd asked for more money for the Russiagate investigation? Did the president ask Comey to back off from the Russiagate investigations, which would amount to an obstruction of justice?

Where there's smoke, there's likely to be a smoking gun. Nixon, too, was undone by the cover-up.

The first project of his covert band of “plumbers” was a break-in of the office of a psychiatrist to gather information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who'd leaked the Pentagon Papers to the news media. Oddly, the papers covered U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War only up to 1967, before Nixon was elected to his first term as president. He'd have been better served to ignore the revelations.

In June 1972, the “plumbers” attempted to plant bugs in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment building. Even though the police caught the operatives, the scandal didn't immediately gather force. That fall, Nixon went on to win the presidential election by the largest margin ever. His foreign policy initiatives, meanwhile, continued to reshape global politics.

But the “plumbers” weren't the only thing rotten about the Nixon crowd. Misconduct was rampant in the GOP, the Nixon campaign, and his administration — corruption, abuse of power, even a spy ring run by the members of the military to keep tabs on the administration's foreign policy initiatives. Infighting and dissatisfaction at the highest levels was producing leak after leak that not even the best plumbers could plug.

So far, it would appear that the Trump people are simply too incompetent to run the kind of covert ops that the Nixon and company attempted. But the pure avarice of Trump and his family, their ignorance of the law they don't know and their flouting of the law they do know, and their general contempt for democratic procedure all make misconduct a certainty. Trump's refusal to release his tax returns, the obvious subversion of the emoluments clause, and the rewards that the Trump empire will reap from executive orders and pending legislation all add up to the same kind of environment of misconduct that surrounded Nixon as well.

Impeachment would remove the rotten head, but we'd still be stuck with the rest of the stinking fish.

The Backlash

Nixon, as Colodny and Shachtman point out, was undone by forces to his right, not his left. Today, the left is even weaker than it was in the early 1970s. Republicans control Congress, have a majority of state legislatures, and now, with Neil Gorsuch installed in the Supreme Court, have an edge in the judicial branch as well.

Today, some Republicans are beginning to edge away from their party's standard-bearer — but not for the same reasons that they let Nixon twist in the wind.

Trump has backed away from his most Russia-friendly proposals, even refusing to issue a waiver that would have allowed Exxon to bypass sanctions and drill for oil in Russia. The president no longer threatens to pull out of NATO. He bombed the Syrian army. He is even considering a surge in Afghanistan of several thousand U.S. troops. This assertion of American power should appease both the hawks in the Republican Party and the neocons who were skeptical of Trump's “America First” policies.

Rather, it's Trump's handling of crises, his mercurial policy shifts, his constant gaffes, and his half-baked proposals on banning Muslims from entering the country, replacing the Affordable Care Act, and overhauling the tax system that have alienated some of the party's rank-and-file from the president.

The Republican Party is in a quandary. They tried to get rid of Trump during the presidential primary last year and failed miserably. They made their accommodation to their new leader, but he has galvanized the opposition, which has been so evident at town meetings throughout the country. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin ponders the future of the Republican Party:

Perhaps the tribal instinct and abject fear of Trump's wrath will keep elected Republicans tethered to the failing president through next year. At that point, the potential for a wave election for Democrats looms large. If Trump is still around by November 2018, a thrashing at the polls may be the only thing to persuade Republicans to walk away from Trump.

The key question is: Who will take advantage of this opportunity?

In the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's resignation, the country turned to the left. Détente with Russia and China continued, the U.S. finally pulled out of Vietnam, and various congressional committees exposed U.S. wrongdoing around the world and sought to rein in the abuses of power. George McGovern, despite his trouncing in the 1972 election, had renewed energy and authority, and the Democratic Party surged leftward.

This time around, the Republican Party will be reeling even if Trump isn't impeached. Perhaps the Sanders wing will take over the Democratic Party. Perhaps a new progressive party will emerge to channel the widespread discontent with the political elite and the status quo. Or perhaps a Macron-like figure will come along to revitalize the “vital center” and appeal to voters tired of polarization.

Trump is a forest fire raging out of control, destroying everything in his path. The sooner we put out the flames, the sooner we can expect new growth.

Let's just hope that, as in the immediate post-Nixon era, what doesn't kill us will ultimately make us stronger.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Source: http://fpif.org/the-nixonization-of-donald-trump/

En Marche to Uncertainty

Sukumar Muralidharan — 2017-06-01T13:30:09Z

The French election was fought within a narrow spectrum of nationalist anxiety

For embattled western liberals, it was like emerging into a new dawn of hope. On May 7, Emmanuel Macron, deftly deploying the image of an unsullied outsider, won the French presidential election by a decisive two to one advantage over his Right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen of the National Front (NF). Key to Macron's success was the distance he managed to establish from the discredited political establishment, through the artifice of launching his own party hardly a year before the presidential race. With the rousing, but ultimately rather vacant title of En Marche! (or “Forward!”) , the party revealed no deeper political doctrine, except an intent to efface older distinctions in a new synthesis.

With national assembly elections in June being the first test of the new politics, the former Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, has already pronounced the demise of his party and vowed to line up behind the newly-elected President. A bloc of Right-wing politicians and voters too could presumably rally to Macron's flag by then.

Macron comes to the powerful French presidency with the briefest of résumés in public service: four years as minister for the economy under his deeply unpopular predecessor, François Hollande. His effort then to shed older political orthodoxies, was seen to undermine key premises of the compact which kept France's labour unions active and involved. Despite widespread scepticism within the ruling Socialist Party, the Macron reforms were pushed through parliament using a rarely invoked procedural manoeuvre.

Shortly afterwards, Macron announced his parting of ways with the Socialists, embracing an ideological neutrality and a posture of pragmatism that placed the “nation” at its core. The French party system has always been more fungible than elsewhere. Socialists and communists, with nominal identities that have remained stable over the years, are now in a state of electoral irrelevance. Parties that have survived have had to reinvent and rebrand themselves.

In the first round of the presidential election this year, three of the top six performers chose to contest under newly-fashioned names that were exhortatory rather than ideological. Macron's En Marche! led the field with its urgent call to resume the historical forward march of the French nation. Then there was the Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon under the banner of La France Insoumise, or “Unbowed France”, who finished fourth in a tightly contested first round, where the first four candidates were clustered around the 20 per cent vote share mark. Mélenchon, also a former Socialist, broke to the Left, essentially charting his own course and winning the late and rather reluctant endorsement of mainstream communists.

The mainstream party of the Right, with the scandal-plagued François Fillon as its standard bearer, had rebranded itself the “Republicans” in 2015, and finished narrowly ahead of Mélenchon. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who swept up the Right-wing fragments that stayed away from the Republicans, fought under the banner of Debout la France, or “Arise France” and came in sixth.

In the deep political and economic malaise that prevails in France, ideology has been replaced by inchoate appeals to national loyalty, largely indistinguishable in formal terms across the political spectrum. This genuflection before an abstract ideal of French national glory pays unwitting homage to the xenophobia that has been the NF's unique appeal. The NF seeks to turn the perceived erosion of national glory on a vulnerable immigrant population and France's partners in the European project. Others seek routes towards national aggrandisement that preserve newly-acquired embellishments of civility and liberalism.

Those embellishments are clearly of less value when economic anxieties are becoming the main determinant of voting behaviour, and this shows in Le Pen's electoral performance. In a very crowded field in the 2002 presidential election, her father Jean Marie won through to the second round by what was a statistical fluke. The top three candidates all had vote shares clustered around the 17 per cent mark, and Jean-Marie narrowly beat a popular Socialist candidate to qualify. His luck ran out by the second round: he barely managed to increase his vote share and was out-voted nearly five times by Jacques Chirac.

The daughter has done considerably better, increasing her vote share by a substantial 12 per cent between the first and second rounds. In the ideological flux and turmoil of France today, substantial numbers of voters are breaking for the far-Right. That could become a stampede if the Macron formula for restoration of French glory fails to gel.

Macron sees France's economic future tied to a reinvigoration of the faltering European project, an enterprise in which German endorsement is essential. Modesty is out of place here. High European Union officials are hinting at an autonomous course in world affairs, stepping into the void caused by the regime of clownish ineptitude in the US and rescinding the privileges enjoyed by the British financial services industry in the continent.

Other plans that Macron brings to the table include a common budget for the Euro currency area and a mutualisation of debt that would enable the lesser economies to overcome sovereign debt issues by leveraging the credit-worthiness of the more solid performers. Germany is sceptical but has to sustain a strong partnership with France to prevent the fragmentation of Europe. The road ahead is uncertain, but the European project will continue to flounder if it stays within the halfway house of monetary union devoid of fiscal coordination. “Fortress Europe” may well be the continental response to the gathering Brexit momentum across the channel and cries of “America first” across the ocean.

Sukumar Muralidharan teaches at the school of journalism, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat

Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/en-marche-to-uncertainty/article9693438.ece
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Terror of the Witches' Prophecy

Jawed Naqvi — 2017-06-01T13:27:35Z

In a phenomenally wired world like ours we should ideally be more enlightened and connected. The reality is the opposite, bordering on the occult. There seems to be more focus on the witches' prophecy to divine the truth, in a manner of speaking, than on Macbeth's lurking ambitions.

As revealed with damning proof by Messrs Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, people are being steadily shepherded towards the opaque, to become more bereft of rational reasoning than was their lot earlier.

Consider the readily advocated logic of more pervasive security — as opposed to an honest appraisal of the malaise, say, in the aftermath of the Manchester slaughter. Take any other devastating moment in any other part of the world — the attack on Christians in a bus in Egypt, on the heels of the Manchester carnage. It is not difficult for our frayed minds to grasp the link between the two tragedies.

Stretch the logic further though, and one feels a stubborn lack of comprehension, an inability to see the connection between the drowning of three-year old Alan Kurdi in the Mediterranean Sea on a bad day and the death of Saffie-Rose Roussos, the angelic eight-year-old who died in a Manchester music hall with 21 other mostly young beautiful people.

Jeremy Corbyn saw the link but Theresa May shouted him down. It's useful to recall what he said just three days after the attack on one of Britain's most cosmopolitan cities: “Many experts including professionals in our intelligence and security services have pointed out the connections between wars that we have been involved in, or supported or fought in other countries such as Libya, and terrorism here at home.”

That's exactly what Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky have been saying too. Corbyn added, to be sure, that his “assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those that attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and implacably held to account for their actions”.

Traditionally, jumbling fair with foul is associated with witchcraft. There are no witches, of course, only humans playing their roles while blaming it on the supernatural. Professor Bradley likened the witches' prophecy in Macbeth to “equivocation of the fiend”, which is a reasonably familiar human trait, is it not? It's commonly called double-speak.

Three apparitions on the heath brought happy tidings to Macbeth, which are said to have contained the seeds of the hero's doom, never mind his own lurking ambitions. Shakespeare's use of the occult (or Bimal Roy's for that matter) did not preclude rational thinking.

Cassius (like Corbyn in Manchester), we can recall, was quick to identify the material explanation for Brutus's quandary. It was not the stars up there but human frailties within that nursed many of the world's failures. The words from Julius Caesar were cushioned in dialectical reasoning, a rare commodity today.

It is difficult to see the Manchester tragedy without reference to Tony Blair and David Cameron who both took turns in stirring the witches' brew. Ms May was a member of the Conservative establishment that hunted down Muammar Qadhafi, reportedly with the help of those that struck Manchester the other day. Both the former prime ministers equivocated through their teeth to adverse outcomes for their country and the wider world.

The Chilcot inquiry report hasn't left a fig leaf for Blair to hide his complicity in the destruction of a secular Iraq, a country that could have saved many tragedies, possibly including the cold-hearted attack on the music halls in Manchester and Paris. And no inquiry is needed to determine Britain's complicity in the ongoing dismantling of a secular Syria. The problem it seems is that all three — Syria, Libya and Iraq — were Cold War allies of Moscow.

History is replete with a range of compelling explanations for Manchester-like calamities. One could go back to Colonel T.E. Lawrence without disturbing the logic of cause and effect to explain the unending terror attacks stalking men, women and children. Without Lawrence setting up a kingdom of the most puritan sect of Muslims the story would be quite different.

My personal starting point to explain Manchester would be in Fez 1981. Often known for witchcraft and sorcery, the Moroccan resort was the venue of an Arab summit — two summits in fact, one failed and the other had to be revived.

When Salman Abedi blew himself up at the concert hall the president of the United States had just won billions of dollars of arms contract in Riyadh, which he followed up by a round of frolicking and sword dance with the Saudi royalty. Moments later, he was meeting his friend Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel when the Manchester terrorists struck. He called the attackers “losers” without saying who the winners were, if any.

Israel and Saudi Arabia were the topic at the Fez summit, but Saddam Hussein, Qadhafi and Hafez al-Assad boycotted it. Representing them instead were their deputies, Tariq Aziz, Abdusselam Jalloud, who later defected against his Libyan boss, and Abdul Halim Khaddam, Assad's vice president.

The Saudi proposal was carried by crown prince Fahd. He sought a hurried Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist in return for a Palestinian state. Because of the Cold War or out of stubbornness by the big three, Fahd's plan was thrown into the dustbin. The Shia-Sunni, Iran-Saudi narrative promoted by Riyadh was an afterthought. Remember that Riyadh's first quarries, in collusion with Britain, were the Sunni PLO, the Sunni-ruled Iraq and the Sunni-ruled Libya.

An alternative way to understand the pain and suffering set off by mindless killers could require us to accept the witches' mumbo jumbo: “Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn and caldron bubble./ Cool it with a baboon's blood, / Then the charm is firm and good.”

Taking the witches' war dance in Macbeth seriously, as some of us can be lulled into doing, would require us to be looking for a baboon, a fall guy, but where? In Iran? China? Or perhaps in Moscow?

The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi.

Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1336249/terror-of-the-witches-prophecy

Migration and Capitalism, in the Age of Trump

Mostafa Henaway — 2017-06-01T13:25:17Z

“We are people! We are not illegal!”— Kiwi Ilafonte

This past May 1st, across the United States and here in Quebec, the spirit of May Day was alive and well. Immigrant workers have given International Workers' Day a new breath of fresh air since the historic mobilizations of a “day without an immigrant” in the United States in 2006. This year in the U.S., broad coalitions of migrant communities and trade unions took to the streets in solidarity with immigrant workers to resist Donal Trump's racist and xenophobic policies. In Montreal the Immigrant Workers Centre, community organizations, and trade unions marched in solidarity with precarious immigrant workers and the “Fight for $15” campaign. The struggles of immigrant workers for migrant justice, against racism and broad workplace struggles that impact heavily immigrant workers for decent work and wages are critical for any renewal of working class politics in North America and beyond.

The world is still reeling as Donald Trump is turning his anti-immigrant rhetoric into reality, with a second attempt at implementing the ban on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, pushing forward the expansion of the wall between Mexico and the United States, and increased deportations. Migration has become one of the most profound issues of our time, shaping contemporary politics in the advanced capitalist states in Europe and North America. Not only in the United States, but in the first two months of 2017, 1,134 migrants crossed from the U.S. into Canada in harsh conditions in order to claim refugee status as a result of the crackdown on migrants in the USA. It is critical for the Left to put forward a clear position of solidarity with migrants and open borders at this juncture, not only in order to pose a challenge to the far right's xenophobic agenda but also for building a working class movement for more radical social transformation.

Analyzing Migration

Across the advanced capitalist states, a few sections of the broad left have currently taken positions on migration based on a game of catch-up to the right. These policies have unfortunately begun to have a significant impact on how the Left is analyzing the question of migration, as well more broadly for how it relates to the questions of class and to whom we should begin to re-orient our discourse in this current moment of disorientation.

Some sections of the Left seek to rebuild a lost connection to the “rust belt” working class, in particular states in the U.S., and de-industrialized regions in Canada, abandoned by the Left, thus rebuilding the weakening power of trade unions. As a result, the strategy of this section of the Left has been to present a more tame position of regulated migration, in order to reorient their demands toward such sections of the working class. Similarly, elements of the trade union movement seek a tightening of the labour market through restricting migration rather than organizing migrants and immigrant workers, due to their own inability to adapt their organizing strategies and forms to the current historical juncture. This only reinforces a false vision that pits migrants and immigrants against a narrow vision of the working class.

Such a view of the working class distorts our perception of how work has transformed, and of who is performing that work. To simply speak of a national working class is impossible; we need to think of the class in a true internationalist and local way, understanding the role migration plays. It is precisely at this moment that we need to be organizing more with immigrant and migrant workers, not simply to rebuild the labour movement, but more profoundly to create working class politics that can lead to radical transformation. To engage in organizing that can bring about solidarity in local communities to defend their neighbors; coworkers who face exploitation and deportation as a manner to frame how work has shifted. Why is there such profound migration, and how can they challenge their employers and racist policies by finding the local commonalities.

Interventions and Migrations

The massive wave of migration over recent years has its roots in the dispossession of people by the devastating impacts caused by global capitalism, and U.S. imperialism, which have their roots here in the Global North. A testament to this is the recent ban of migrants from seven states that the U.S. has actively attempted to destabilize, force regime change, or has occupied directly. Canada's role as an imperialist state has also fueled the destabilization of the Middle East, has contributed immensely to the creation of 60 million refugees by 2015 – mainly displaced in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia. The U.S. is also pursuing the same strategy to shut the borders to Latin America, in particular to those devastated by NAFTA and displaced from their lands as a result of U.S. intervention in Central America.

A similar pattern has taken root with the role of Canadian capital in Central America. In Guatemala, for example, entire communities have been displaced violently from their lands and livelihoods with destructive mining projects on their territory. This displacement has fueled labour migration by over 5,000 Guatemalans in the agricultural program in Canada as a mechanism of development for rural indigenous communities in Guatemala who were originally displaced by Canadian capital. As journalist Juan Gonzalez describes Latino migration to the U.S., “you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States unless you understand America's role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire.”

Those that have become en masse displaced by U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism will have no refuge from its carnage. From the dangerous journey to “El Norte” to the death boats on the Mediterranean, migration has become the last desperate scream of humanity searching for a better future, making our solidarity and the opening of borders a must for the global working class.

Global migration has reached historic proportions, reaching 244 million people in 2015, according to the United Nations. The massive wave of migration by 2015 was a signal in terms of both the desperation of a global working class and the increasing inequalities produced by the expansion of global capital, as those whose collective wealth and resources have continued to be drained, accumulated and concentrated. A recent study has shown that from 1980 up to the present, the developing world has lost $16.3-trillion in capital flight to the Global North. Developing countries have paid $4.2-trillion in interest payments on international debt. This has resulted in those populations without state social services, decent work, as a result of structural adjustment, and the integration into global capitalism. The integration of the developing world into U.S.-led global capitalism did not lead to a trickle-down effect of wealth and prosperity on a global level, but has in reverse led to a profound trickle-up effect – and concentration of capital in particular states and regions across the globe. As capital becomes more mobile and seeks competitive advantage, this has had a great impact on local populations.

As capital flight generates unemployment and forces workers to migrate to seek work, at the same time generates the needs for workers in other regions. One of the largest flow of migration globally has been internal migration in China from rural regions into industrial hubs. Asia has also now become the second largest destination of migrants globally outside of Europe. As production chains become more global as a result of the compression of time to be able to move goods across the globe, has resulted in the need for greater low wage disposable workers in other regions. Shifting the nature of migration globally, already coupled with historical imbalances as a result of imperialism and uneven development maintaining particular migration corridors. The crisis of 2007/08 in the core countries resulted in push factors of new corridors such as African migration toward Brazil, and Asia. Thus as the power of capital globally strengthens and becomes more mobile it makes migration one of the major forms that workers have individually to cope with such capital flight, and uneven development under capitalism.

Is Global Migration Necessary for Global Capitalism?

One faulty assumption is that capitalists and conservative politicians are outright anti-migration. Trump had actually declared that his aim was to transform the U.S. immigration system into one modeled on Canada's immigration system, which is based on meeting the needs of capital and ensures that those who come through regulated means remain temporary, vulnerable and deportable at any given moment. Global elites, and states in the Global North have in fact been immensely supportive of global migration that suits the needs of capital. Migration has not only provided mass pools of cheap exploitable labour across the globe but has also shored up entire economies in the Global South. In essence it has become the last escape valve that has prolonged the crisis in the Global South, through large financial flows from migrants in the form of remittances. Labour migration is the largest percentage of migration globally. According to the ILO, there are an estimated 150 million migrant workers in 2015 worldwide. The overwhelming majority of labour migration takes place in the form of migrant worker programs, either under trade agreements, through the International Organization of Migration, or Guest Worker programs. These migration regimes allow for mass, temporary migration that suits the need of capital rather than workers.

States have increasingly opted for such models, based on temporary labour migration where workers are tied to a single employer without the freedom of movement. This can be seen as a globalization of the Kafala system. The Kafala system is a sponsor-based system of migration where the employer sponsors the migrant worker for the visa. This creates in essence a privatized form of migration where the employer has the power over the migrant to determine if they are allowed to remain in the host country. The kafala system is associated with temporary migrant workers in the Gulf Cooperation Countries, forcing workers into situations with single employer visas, without fundamental worker rights, and with deportation being the consequence of challenging their work conditions. This model is not simply a phenomenon in the Gulf, but has been expanded as a model of regulated migration globally.

Canada has become an example of this system for other states to replicate – migration has become regulated and stratified in two forms: one for wealthier migrants, and skilled workers, who have access to citizenship and permanent residence under the point system; and the other form, extreme exploitation without the ability to become permanent residents under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program in Canada. The program has brought over 300,000 workers on temporary work visas without the right of permanent residency, tied to a single employer and thus constrained in their capacity to defend their basic rights for fear of facing deportation. This form of stratified migration is now upheld by the World Bank as an effective model to ensure continuing flow of remittances from the Global North to the South, while guaranteeing a supply of cheap labour that can be quickly accessed and disposed of. Ensuring that workers remain temporary in the countries to which they migrate ensures that they remit more to their countries of origin. This has become a central aspect of capitalist development in the Global South.

The failure of neoliberal policies (free trade, privatization, and freedom of movement for capital) in the Global South has led to a new discourse by the World Bank – promoting ideas of sustainable development aid; not eliminating debt and allowing countries to pursue sovereign forms of economic development, but repackaging neoliberal policies through aid. To no one's surprise, the mantra of sustainable development also became an epic failure.

The World Bank has since promoted what it sees as the only safety valve left to governments and capitalists in some zones of the Global South to release mounting pressure over unemployment, low value and low-paid work in global supply chains, and lack of state services as a result of economic restructuring – exporting, not commodities, but populations!

Multi-lateral coordination between the UN, the EU, and the IMF through the Forum of Global Migration and Development, the World Bank has moved to promote and expand regulated migration as a mechanism for development, further locking certain zones in the Global South into exploitative neoliberal capitalism. By 2015, the remittances of migrants to developing countries had reached an estimated $601-billion. Without such remittances back to the Global South countries permitting them to purchase commodities from the Global North, they would not meet their international debt obligations, and people's ability to survive would be in peril. Further, remittances and migration become the only means left for Global South populations to secure services, such as health and education, that were previously provided for publically but have now become privatized. Entire economies (such as that of the Philippines and Egypt) are now built around providing export labour.

The Philippines, considered one of the great hopefuls of American-led globalization, although moving labour intensive industries to the Philippines has not improved conditions of poverty for workers there. This led to an increase of its labour export policy, which has led to sending 20 per cent of its workforce abroad. The Philippines has become dependent on remittances which account for 10 per cent of its GDP. Other states such as Egypt have pursued similar strategies, to shore up their economies. Egyptian migrants fill the fisheries of Greece, the agricultural sector in Cyprus, and construction in the Arab world. Egypt too was considered a darling of the World Bank with growth rates at 5 to 6 per cent during the early 2000s. Remittances from Egyptian migrants alone were equivalent to the revenue of the Suez canal, or 5 per cent of the GDP. Not only are the immediate remittances crucial for foreign currency reserves, but also for replacing state services such as welfare, and education, as those in poverty rely on remittances of family members who are sent as workers abroad.

Remittances have become an increasingly important lifeline for developing countries. According to the World Bank, developing countries need to leverage remittances in order to gain access to international capital markets due to the counter cyclical nature of remittance flows. This has been the particular strategy proposed by World Bank economist Dilip Ratha. According to Ratha, “[r]emittances can improve a country's creditworthiness and thereby enhance its access to international capital markets. Hard currency remittances, properly accounted, can significantly improve country risk rating.” This has only reinforced countries in the Global South to pursue labour export programs in order to have steady access to capital markets. This only benefits corporations in the Global North and South, instead of eliminating international debt, countries in the Global South can seek new loans to continue to pay their unjust debt obligations to international lenders. Labour migration has become a win-win for global capitalism – it has allowed countries in the Global South a mechanism to continue to integrate into global markets, avoid crisis, and maintain imports, but at the same time giving countries in the Global North unprecedented amounts of cheap exploitable labour.

Migration and Class in the Global North

Immigrants and migrant workers have been at the fault lines of global capitalism – they are at the heart of the global economy as expressed with such clarity by journalist Michael Grabell around migrant workers in the U.S. and the rise of the logistics industry. “The people here are not day labourers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America's largest companies – Walmart, Macy's, Nike, Frito-Lay... They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.”

Beyond this, immigrant workers are concentrated in industries that cannot be off shored, such as: agriculture, food-processing, services, and logistics, where these workers face the same conditions as they would in the Global South. As conditions facing all workers become more precarious, immigrant and migrant workers become increasingly vulnerable facing lower-wages, precarious conditions, as temporary agency workers, as day labourers, and as a result of being undocumented and without having trade union representation. Despite this, they have organized against the odds, self-organizing against unjust laws, and employers. Organizing not only to defend their own labour rights, but for the working class as a whole.

In the United States immigrant workers brought back to life a militant tradition to May Day as witnessed by the historic mass mobilizations, in 2006 on the “day without an immigrant” where a million people mobilized in the streets of Los Angeles and mobilizations across the United States. In France the sans papier actions in the Paris region in 2008 under the banner “we work here, we live here, we stay here” migrant workers organized wild cat strikes, and occupations of restaurants to demand regularization. In Canada immigrants have been central to broad based working class movements such as the fight for $15 in Canada.

Migrant and immigrant workers have been forming new models of worker organizations along class lines, which has opened up the possibilities of going beyond business unionism. From the creation of hundreds of workers' centres across the U.S. and in Canada, despite the contradictions and limits, migrant and immigrant workers continue to self-organize. Immigrants have formed their own unions on industrial lines, such as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, taxi workers have organized in Toronto to build new types of organization, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain which has organized migrant workers who are cleaners in London, and large networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in the USA. These examples of worker self-organization and a renewed labour movement by immigrant workers have been central to giving hope for a renewal of working-class politics.

The industrial action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to refuse to go to JFK airport on the eve of the implementation of Trump's first immigration ban ... was the very first political industrial action by workers against Trump and his policies.”

The industrial action by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to refuse to go to JFK airport on the eve of the implementation of Trump's first immigration ban despite the action being limited was the very first political industrial action by workers against Trump and his policies. This is the kind of struggle and organization that will rebuild the Left and where we need to concentrate our forces, if we truly want to move from protest to power. But that means a Left that takes a serious effort to relate to such struggles.

Under Trump, as capital becomes more mobile and more power is given to finance through deregulation, and borders become increasingly tightened – the call for open borders is not simply a humanitarian demand or one that may seem simply an impossible one, it is very much a necessary one in our moment, and at its heart a working-class demand. That is if our conception of working class is a truly international one, and we aim to root our struggles with all of those who are dispossessed by global capital from their land, and their livelihoods. Where we can be the most effective now is not to call for regulated migration but to actually call for open borders, and to be vigorous in our support for migrant workers in their organizing, not just against employers but their struggles for immigration status, and freedom of movement. As a Left, we also need to find the commonalities in terms of their struggles with those having their livelihoods displaced, whether it be in the rust belts in the U.S., or those having their livelihoods displaced in Mexico, the Philippines, or Syria. They all have had their livelihoods and dignity displaced by the same common enemy – global capitalism and imperialism. This is where we can build the common struggle against the tensions, and build working-class struggles based on solidarity and internationalism. We must, as the Left, call for freedom of movement for people, not for capital.

Mostafa Henaway is a long time organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and was a member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and the Toronto Coalition of Concerned Taxi Drivers.

Brazil's Political Rupture and the Left's Opportunity

Alfredo Saad-Filho — 2017-06-01T13:22:08Z

Fora Temer – eleições diretas já!

“Out with Temer – direct elections now!” Amid meltdown in Brazil, the left calls for democracy, while the right must find ways to deny the people a voice.

The Brazilian Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) won the country's presidential elections four times in a row; first with Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-06, 2007-10), then with his hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011-14, 2015-16). During its 13 years in office, the PT changed Brazil in many ways; four are principally worth mentioning, as they would come to play key roles in the elite conspiracy to impeach Dilma Rousseff and destroy her party.

First, the PT democratized the state. It implemented the social and civic rights included in the 1988 ‘Citizen's Constitution', and advanced Brazil's emerging welfare state across several fields of social provision.

Second, the PT changed the social composition of the state through the appointment of thousands of leaders of mass organizations to positions of power. For the first time in Brazilian history, millions of poor citizens could recognise themselves in the bureaucracy and relate to close friends and comrades who had become ‘important' in Brasília.

Third, PT policies contributed to a significant improvement in the distribution of income, through the creation of millions of unskilled jobs, a rising minimum wage, and higher transfers and benefits.

Fourth, although the government never abandoned the neoliberal macroeconomic policy framework imposed in the 1990s, it gradually introduced, in parallel, neodevelopmental (that is, expansionary Keynesian) policies that helped to secure faster growth, higher profits and wages, and distributional gains.

Successes and Failures

Yet the PT failed to reform media ownership, which secured the space for a virulent opposition aligned with the country's neoliberal elites. The party also endorsed a model of distribution based on financialization, consumption, low-paid jobs, and transfers: essentially, both the rich and the poorest gained, while millions of skilled jobs were lost through the ‘globalization' of production, privatizations, the simplification of managerial structures and new information technologies. They sliced not only the number of ‘good jobs' in manufacturing, but also middle management posts, and increased precarity even for relatively senior jobs.

The Workers' Party elicited mounting opposition by the neoliberal elite and the upper middle class both because of what it did do, and because of what it failed to do. PT economic policies irked finance and most of the bourgeoisie; they suffered losses because of greater state intervention, the reduction of interest rates and the economic downturn since 2011; they also resented the perceived loss of their control over state policy under Rousseff.

The upper middle classes were alienated from the PT because of their ideological commitment to neoliberalism, and because the party supported the economic and social ascent of the working class. The upper middle classes were also tormented by losses in their income and their dislocation from the outer circle of state power.

Rousseff repelled most professional politicians because of her unwillingness to conform to the established principles of pork-barrel politics. The government lost the support of large segments of informal workers, notably the flocks of Pentecostal churches that opposed the expansion of civic rights and progressive values, with flashpoints around Dilma's opening toward the liberalization of abortion and citizenship rights for homosexuals.

Finally, the expansion of the courts, the Attorney General's Office and the federal police – in terms of size, resources and powers – enabled them to launch a devastating attack on the PT.

These elite groups converged around an aggressive ‘alliance of privilege' that was cemented ideologically by the mainstream media. The weakness of the political parties of the right enabled the media to take up the mantle of the opposition, hunting down the PT systematically, drawing upon a discourse which incorporated right-wing values, neoliberal economics, and strident allegations of corruption.

The Revolt of the Elite

The revolt of the elite was triggered by Dilma Rousseff's re-election in 2014. Her victory came as a surprise to the alliance of privilege, who underestimated the capacity of the PT and the left to mobilise a progressive coalition drawing upon the working class and the poor.

However, Rousseff's triumph was fragile, and coincided with the continuing deterioration of the economy, which has plunged the Brazilian economy into the worst crisis in its recorded history. The distributional improvements that had legitimised the PT administrations stagnated. Repeated policy failures, the media onslaught, and the disorganization of the government's base within the most right-wing congress in decades, combined to create a generalised dissatisfaction that focused on the state.

Since 2005, the mainstream media and the judiciary launched successive waves of attack against the PT, with corruption emerging as the ideal tool to fell the Rousseff administration. The lava jato (carwash) operation, pioneered by the federal police since 2014, revealed that a cartel of engineering and construction companies had bribed a group of politically-appointed directors of the state-owned oil conglomerate Petrobras, in order to secure a virtual monopoly over oil and other contracts. Those bribes allegedly channelled funds to several political parties, among them the PT.

The federal police and public prosecutors made overt political use of these investigations. They disregarded evidence that right-wing parties were involved in similar cases, selectively leaked compromising information to the media, and sought to implicate the PT wherever this was possible. Prominent politicians and the managers of several large firms were routinely arrested in order to extract plea bargains. Those refusing to co-operate were imprisoned indefinitely. When they finally surrendered, the aspersions cast on the PT were blatantly used to fuel the scandal mill. Accusations against the other parties were normally ignored.

The unfolding scandal catalysed the emergence of a mass right-wing movement populated by the upper middle classes, whose grievances included a laundry list of deeply felt but unfocused dissatisfactions articulated as demands for the ‘end of corruption' and Dilma's impeachment. Their excitement was misguided, for three reasons.

First, the anti-corruption discourse of the alliance of privilege was selective. It targeted the institutions and parties aligned with neodevelopmentalism, suggesting that their most important goal was to change government policy, rather than eliminate corruption.

Second, chatter about corruption provided a convenient figleaf, obscuring meaningful debate on economic policy. For example, the neoliberal bourgeoisie would find it difficult to campaign to curtail labour rights, cut pensions, weaken domestic industry and cripple Petrobras. However, if these goals were disguised as a ‘struggle against corruption', policy changes could be smuggled in later, regardless of the interests of the vast majority.

Third, the coordinated attack by the judiciary and the media disconnected the PT from its sources of funding and its mass support. The loss of millions of jobs and billions of dollars in output and investment were merely collateral damage.

Lava jato was remarkable for another reason, unrelated to corruption: it was indicative of a severe distortion of Brazil's constitution, by which guarantees of the independence of the judiciary supported the emergence of a self-appointed group of ‘pure' investigators, in fact aligned with the political right, who called upon themselves to clean up the political system.

Their mission was fortuitously supported by elites' mounting animosity toward the PT, the sensitivities of the middle classes, the deepening economic crisis, and the paralysis of the Rousseff administration. In the mêlée, the economic crisis, rising unemployment, gargantuan corruption and a torrent of scandals became thoroughly enmeshed.

The mainstream media began trumpeting a message that the PT was at the centre of a web of thievery without precedent: Lula and Dilma were robbing the republic by day and at night, they conspired to turn Brazil into a satellite of Venezuela. Rousseff lost a voter on her impeachment in the Chamber of Deputies by 367-137, on 17 April 2016, and by 61-20 in the Senate, on 31 August.

Dilma Rousseff's impeachment was a grotesque spectacle. Her trial was overtly political, all legal niceties having been abandoned long ago, and it was transparently orchestrated by a cabal of thieving politicians. They claimed the right to impose an unconstitutional vote of no confidence on a President who had made mistakes, but committed no crime.

The impeachment process was driven by an unholy coalition between the leadership of the opposition, bitterly regretting their four consecutive defeats in Presidential elections, leading figures in the judiciary, Rousseff's traitorous Vice-President, Michel Temer, and the Machiavellian speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, who was struggling with heavy corruption charges in Brazil and in Switzerland (he would end up in prison soon afterwards, his usefulness to the coup overwhelmed by the heavy political cost of the allegations being made against him). They were trailed by a motley crew of minor characters, many of whom were accused of egregious crimes – not least corruption – and by a parade of business leaders whom the media fêted as if they were the nation's saviours.

After the Impeachment

In the following months, the administration led by Michel Temer engaged in a fully-fledged attempt to restore orthodox neoliberalism, undermine employment rights and internationalize the economy. The government's attack was impeded only by its own venality, incompetence and endless tribulations, as Temer stumbled against the law, emerging mass resistance and the ongoing threat that his parliamentary base of support would disintegrate.

This was expected. What came as a surprise was the recent split in the alliance of privilege. The main interest of capital as a whole was the restoration of orthodox neoliberalism, relying on the judiciary to continue dismantling the PT.

But by now the judicial attack had already gained its own momentum, and it has been strongly backed by the upper middle classes, which treat the judges and public prosecutors as major celebrities. In the country of football megastars, soap operas and Carmen Miranda, this is important. And indeed the media has harnessed huge revenues from popular interest in the investigations.

On 18 May, the owners of JBS, the world's largest meat processing conglomerate, agreed a plea bargain. They revealed JBS funding to 28 parties and almost 2,000 politicians, and produced evidence of large cash payments to the leader of the right wing PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party) and runner-up in the 2014 presidential elections, Aécio Neves, against whom multiple accusations had already emerged but were never investigated seriously. Finally, JBS produced the recording of a conversation between one of its owners and President Temer, suggesting that JBS would pay Eduardo Cunha for his continuing silence while in jail, in order to avoid incriminating his old friend Temer.

The reaction in Brazil was explosive. Temer, already tainted by multiple allegations of corruption and other misdemeanours, and facing difficulties pushing his neoliberal agenda in congress, was abandoned by parts of the mainstream media, who spotted a lame duck and called for his resignation or, failing that, impeachment. His political allies are jumping ship. Temer is probably doomed.

The problem for the remnants of the alliance of privilege is what to do next: the constitution suggests that congress should elect an interim president to steer the ship until the 2018 elections. The left is calling for direct elections now. Elections are unacceptable for the alliance of privilege, because the political right is divided and has no readily viable candidate.

In contrast, the left could field Lula, who is leading in the polls in spite of the attacks he has been enduring for several years, and despite the fact he is facing investigations that are certain to find him guilty of something: in a few months, he is likely to be unable to run for public office.

Despite the political chaos, the Brazilian left finds itself in a good position for the first time in several years. The genie has not only escaped from its bottle; it has gone berserk. Temer is damaged goods rather than a statesman; it has become incontrovertible that Dilma Rousseff was overthrown by a criminal gang; the alliance of privilege is split, and the left is calling for elections while the right must find ways to deny the people a voice.

The left can win this battle, and upend the conspiracy of the elites. Now is the time to fight, on the streets, in the offices, factories, and neighbourhoods: Fora Temer – eleições diretas já! •

Alfredo Saad-Filho is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London. This article first published on the openDemocracy website.

Source: https://socialistproject.ca/bullet/1419.php

Hunger Strike Ends, Palestinian Prisoners Declare Victory

Ali Abunimah — 2017-06-01T13:19:24Z

GAZA: After 40 days without food, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have suspended their hunger strike in Israeli jails.

The end of the strike came after 20 hours of intense negotiations between the strike's leaders, including imprisoned Fatah figure Marwan Barghouti, and the Israel Prison Service, according to a statement issued Saturday morning by the prisoners solidarity committee.

The committee hailed the agreement as a “victory for the Palestinian people and the prisoners in their epic defense of freedom and dignity.”

It added that Israel was forced to negotiate after realizing that the prisoners “were ready to continue until victory or martyrdom and that the use of oppression, violence and other violations failed to weaken them, but rather strengthened their resolve.”

The statement says Israeli authorities accepted some of the demands of the prisoners, but does not provide details.

However Israel Prison Service sources told the Ma'an News Agency that the agreement, reached between Israel, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the Palestinian Authority, would grant prisoners a second monthly family visit to be funded by the PA.

“The move effectively reinstated the number of family visits that were traditionally provided to Palestinian prisoners, before the ICRC reduced the number of visits they facilitated last year from two to one visit a month, sparking protests across the Palestinian territory,” according to Ma'an.

But the Israeli prison spokesperson reportedly “declined to comment on whether any of the other demands were met.”

Some 1,500 prisoners began their hunger strike on 17 April to demand improvements in conditions and an end to solitary confinement, heavy restrictions on family visits and administrative detention – prolonged imprisonment without charge.

They also called for Israel to ease restrictions on the entry of books, clothing, food and other items from family members.

Israel quickly resorted to harsh punitive measures in its effort to break the strike, including transferring prisoners between prisons, subjecting leaders to solitary confinement, blocking visits by lawyers and confiscating personal belongings.

As the strike continued and the health of many prisoners sharply deteriorated, Israel increased psychological pressure: media reports suggested Israel would resort to the dangerous and medically unethical practice of force-feeding and Israeli ministers publicly smeared Marwan Barghouti in an apparent effort to discredit him and break the strike's unity.

By Friday night, 834 prisoners remained on hunger strike, according to the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz, and 18 remained hospitalized.

Activists in Palestine and around the world have organized solidarity actions with the hunger strikers. Many posted on social media about taking the “salt water challenge” – symbolically drinking only salty water, as the hunger strikers do, to raise awareness about their struggle.

The last mass hunger strike occurred in 2014, when hundreds of prisoners protested the use of administrative detention. Before and since, individuals have waged individual hunger strikes, in some cases reaching three months.

The end of this strike coincides with the beginning of Ramadan. Some prisoners had announced the intention to fast by refusing even salt and water during the hours of sunrise to sunset. This could have placed their already weakened bodies in even graver danger, and sharply increased pressure on Israel.

(Cover Photograph: Palestinians in Gaza City celebrate after hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails suspended a 40-day hunger strike on 27 May. The end of the strike, which coincides with the start of Ramadan, came after marathon negotiations between Israeli prison authorities and strike leaders. Ashraf AmraAPA images)

Wednesday, May 31,2017

Source: http://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/NewsDetail/index/6/10830/Hunger-Strike-Ends-Palestinian-Prisoners-Declare-Victory