Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Lula da Silva: “Brazil is Undergoing a Right-Wing Coup”
https://therealnews.com/stories/lula-da-silva-brazil-is-undergoing-a-right-wing-coup
Australian university union leaders quit amid escalating sellouts
By Mike Head
22 August 2018
After presiding over a series
of betrayals of university workers, the two top officials of the National
Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) are standing aside and backing the installation
of a more openly pro-management leadership.
Both the national secretary,
Grahame McCulloch, who has held the post at either the NTEU or its predecessor
union for 35 years, and national president Jeannie Rea, there for eight years,
have resigned. According to McCulloch, their aim was to “encourage leadership
renewal of the union at all levels.”
The simultaneous departure
points to a significant crisis within the university trade union. Disaffection
among university staff is growing as the union assists managements to impose
government funding cuts via real wage reductions, greater casualisation and
heavier workloads.
Since the NTEU was formed in
1993 to enforce the regressive “enterprise bargaining” system, introduced by
the Keating Labor government, the union has participated in transforming the
country’s public universities into corporatised institutions, serving the
narrow profit interests of employers and the corporate elite.
Like all the other trade
unions in Australia, the NTEU has used enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs)
to split university employees according to their individual workplaces,
suppress industrial action and subordinate them to the profit demands of
university administrations.
Over the past decade this
process has only accelerated, since the NTEU backed the last Greens-backed Labor
government’s “education revolution.” This so-called “revolution” has forced
under-funded universities to compete with each other to enrol high-fee paying
students, attract corporate sponsorships and drive down costs, at the expense
of the educational interests of both staff and students.
Between 2009 and 2015, only
6.4 out of every 100 new positions created at Australian universities were
tenured teaching or research jobs. At the same time, the universities and
related companies have generated more than $22 billion a year in revenue for
the wealthy elites, mainly by charging exorbitant fees to international
students.
Around the world, parallel
processes have already triggered strikes this year by university workers and
school teachers, including in Britain, Canada, the US, New Zealand and Sri
Lanka, often in defiance of their own unions. Similar rebellions are already
brewing in Australia.
Over the past year, opposition
among university workers has grown to the NTEU’s sellout deals in the seventh
round of enterprise bargaining since 1993. These have included a betrayal at
the University
of Sydney so blatant that the union’s own branch committee recommended
a “no” vote; a similar sellout at Western Sydney
University, and an agreement at Western Australia’s Murdoch
University that cut wages, increased workloads, facilitated
retrenchments and overturned hard-won conditions.
To replace McCulloch and Rea,
the leadership’s “NTEU Future Team” backed the unopposed nominations of Alison
Barnes, from Sydney’s Macquarie University, as president and Matthew McGowan,
McCulloch’s long-serving assistant, as secretary.
The election of these two
marks a further pro-corporate shift. At Macquarie University, Barnes has
pioneered “interest-based bargaining” (IBB), which consists of months of
backroom talks, based on defining “common interests” between the union and
management.
In reality, IBB means devising
schemes to overcome rank-and-file opposition to management demands for further
cost-cutting and pro-business restructuring. Over the past six years, prominent
trade unions have used IBB to inflict mass retrenchments, wage reductions and
the overturning of hard-won conditions on their members.
At Macquarie, a centrepiece of
the IBB drive has been a misleadingly titled “jobs families” proposal, endorsed
by Barnes. It will permit management to coerce up to a quarter of academics to
allocate 70 or 80 percent of their workload to teaching, with no time for
research, overturning the traditional academic workload of 40 percent research,
40 percent teaching and 20 percent administration.
In April, a joint email circulated
by Barnes and the university’s human resources director announced “significant
progress on the major strategic topic of academic job families” and declared
“in principle” agreement on a 2 percent annual pay rise—well below the increase
in average household expenses.
At a Macquarie University NTEU
branch meeting on June 19, opposition to these joint proposals led to a
majority vote for resolutions moved by Socialist Equality Party supporters,
calling for a unified national struggle by university workers to overturn
budget cuts and for vastly increased education funding, at all levels, to
guarantee the basic social right to free, first-class education for all
students.
These resolutions were passed
in the presence of Barnes and NTEU officials. They advanced a perspective
completely opposed to that of the NTEU, which is why Barnes and the union have
suppressed them. Unlike other union resolutions, those advanced by the SEP and
passed by the union membership have not been circulated to all Macquarie staff
or to their colleagues elsewhere. This underscores the anti-democratic
character of the union itself, notwithstanding McCulloch’s claim that he led a
“highly democratic structure.”
In reality, the NTEU
specialises in cajoling university workers into accepting the erosion of their
conditions and basic rights, invariably keeping them in the dark about the real
content of the agreements that the union signs behind their backs.
The Barnes-McGowan “NTEU
Future Team” has nominated Western Australian state secretary Gabe Gooding as
assistant national secretary. She was at the centre of this year’s sellout at
Murdoch University. According to the Future Team’s election brochure, she “led
the campaign against the aggressive management tactic at Murdoch University.”
In fact, the NTEU cynically
exploited an application by Murdoch management last year to terminate an
existing EBA, initially threatening to unilaterally slash salaries and
conditions. The union ultimately pushed through a deal, despite immense
hostility among its members, that gave the management practically everything it
wanted.
Nationally, the NTEU insisted
that its members could support their Murdoch colleagues by rushing to sign EBAs
everywhere else. The NTEU’s sole concern was to preserve its role as the
enforcer of management demands.
Because of growing hostility to
these betrayals, a rival leadership faction is supporting a pseudo-left
candidate against Gooding. University of Technology Sydney branch president
Vince Caughley, once a public member of the International Socialist
Organisation (ISO), is canvassing votes in the name of “grassroots leadership
renewal” to “make union strength a priority.”
The perspective of the
pseudo-left organisations is to divert outrage on the part of union members to
ever-deepening cuts behind the election of yet another pro-business Labor
government.
Whatever the tactical
differences between the two factions, Caughley’s position echoes that of the
“Future Team” in calling for support for the Australian Council of Trade
Unions’ “Change the Rules” campaign.
Also revealing is the fact that
Caughley is backed by another ex-ISO leader, Michael Thomson, the union’s New
South Wales state secretary, who was instrumental in pushing through last
year’s NTEU sellout at the University of Sydney.
To fight for their basic
rights, students and university employees must decisively break from the NTEU,
and begin to form workplace rank and file committees that are completely
independent from the union and from Labor and the Greens. Such committees must
turn out to other university workers across the country and to workers
everywhere in a unified struggle against wage cuts, the deepening social
crisis, and the escalating drive towards authoritarianism and war. This
requires a socialist perspective, aimed at the complete reorganisation of
society in the interests of the vast majority, not the profits of the wealthy
few. We urge all those who want to take forward this fight to contact the
Committee For Public Education (CFPE), established by the Socialist Equality
Party.
Canadian ruling elite whips up anti-refugee hysteria to shift politics sharply right
By Laurent Lafrance and Roger
Jordan
22 August 2018
Canada’s ruling elite is
whipping up anti-refugee xenophobia with the twin aims of turning politics
sharply to the right and diverting attention away from its agenda of austerity
and war.
While the Conservatives are
leading the way with appeals to far-right and outright racist forces, Justin
Trudeau’s federal Liberal government is presiding over the deportation of
desperate asylum-seekers and working closely with the Trump administration to
strengthen security at the Canada-US border.
The most right-wing section of
the Canadian elite, emboldened by the coming to power of Donald Trump in the
US, is portraying Canada as under siege by “illegal aliens.” This chauvinist
campaign has escalated in recent weeks with Ontario’s new provincial
government, led by the right-wing populist Doug Ford, ending cooperation with
the federal government on a program that provides minimal support to
asylum-seekers who have fled the United States for Canada out of fear of
persecution and deportation.
In a thoroughly cynical
manner, Ford and his spokesmen, who lead a government hell bent on eviscerating
what little remains of Ontario’s public and social services, claim that
refugees are a drain on social spending. Employing the language of Trump or the
far-right in Europe, Ford has argued that the influx of refugees is causing a
“housing crisis” and jeopardizes Ontarians’ access to public services.
Ford’s anti-refugee xenophobia
must be taken as a serious warning by working people across Canada. His goal is
to mobilize the most backward sections of the middle class and sow divisions
among working people as he imposes a hard-right agenda of social spending cuts,
tax cuts for big business and the rich, and law-and-order measures.
Ford’s rise parallels the
strengthening of far-right political forces internationally, including Trump in
the US, the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Rally and Italy’s Lega —all
of which scapegoat immigrants for the social crisis produced by capitalism.
These reactionary forces are being cultivated and systematically promoted by
important sections of the ruling elite which view them as a battering ram to be
used against the working class.
Workers disgusted by Ford’s
program of vicious attacks on the working class and anti-immigrant xenophobia
must recognize that their ostensible establishment opponents, the Liberals and
social-democratic NDP, represent no alternative. Like their counterparts
internationally, the so-called “progressive” parties and the pro-capitalist
trade unions have created the conditions for the rise of far-right figures like
Ford and Trump, by their decades-long imposition of capitalist austerity and
embrace of war and reaction.
While posturing as a friend of
refugees, the Trudeau government has deported thousands of desperate
asylum-seekers trying to flee Trump’s vicious crackdown on immigrants. In fact,
as Trump has been carrying out his anti-immigrant witch hunt, the Liberal government
has expanded its border-military cooperation with the US Department of Homeland
Security and the US Customs and Border Protection Agency—the very same bodies
overseeing the mass round-up of immigrants south of the border.
The Liberals’ “pro-refugee”
posturing, which is abetted by the media, serves to obscure the fact that this
big business party maintains a hard line against refugees and is eager to
expand military-security cooperation with a Trump-led US.
According to data provided to
Reuters by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board, the Trudeau government
granted refugee status to just 53 percent of all claimants in 2017. For
so-called “irregular entrants,” i.e. those entering Canada from the US, the
rejection rate is far higher. Of the thousands of Haitians who came to Canada
last year when Trump ended their “Temporary Protected” status, only 9 percent
received the right to remain.
Moreover, Trudeau’s Liberals
defend the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States to the
hilt. It is this reactionary deal that forces significant numbers of refugees
to cross the US-Canada border outside official entry points, often in
life-threatening conditions.
The Safe Third Country
Agreement deprives asylum-seekers who enter Canada from the US at a land-crossing
of the right to make a claim for refugee status in Canada and sanctions their
immediate return to the US. However, under international law, Canada is obliged
to hear the claims of those who arrive outside official entry points.
The Conservatives are urging
the Trudeau government to declare the entire Canada-US border an official entry
point, so as to dramatically expand the application of the Safe Third Country
Agreement and ensure the immediate arrest and deportation of all those fleeing
the anti-immigrant witch hunt south of the border. Thus far the Liberals have
insisted that this is not necessary, because under Canada’s reactionary
immigration laws the vast majority of asylum-seekers will soon be expelled
anyway.
The Liberals reject the claims
promoted by the Conservatives, the Toronto Sun, the Journal de
Montreal, and other right wing media that the spike in refugee claimants
constitutes a “crisis.” But this is entirely hypocritical.
Because they want to
discourage refugee claims, the federal Liberals are doing everything to ensure
that those who cross into Canada face difficult, crisis-type, conditions,
including at one point housing large numbers in tents just inside the border.
In their 2018 budget, the
Liberals set aside $173.2 million over two years to strengthen border security.
The government boasted that part of this money is to be earmarked for
“expediting” the removal of those whose claims for asylum have been rejected on
the spurious grounds they are “economic,” not political, refugees.
To manage an enhanced
crackdown on asylum-seekers, Trudeau announced last month the appointment of
former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair to a newly-created post of Minister of
Border Security and Organized Crime.
The Liberals’ pro-refugee
posturing is all the more hypocritical given that the Trudeau government and
Canadian imperialism bear responsibility for creating the conditions that have
led tens of millions worldwide to flee their homes. Like its Liberal and
Conservative predecessors, the Trudeau Liberals have ruthlessly pursued
Canadian imperialist interests in US-led wars around the world that have
destroyed entire societies.
This has included deploying
troops to the war in Syria and Iraq, dispatching military forces to Mali, and
supplying weapons to the Saudi regime to wage its near-genocidal war in Yemen.
As tensions between the US and
Canada have flared up over trade, which is but one expression of a broader
breakdown of the global capitalist order, the Liberals have rushed to bang the
drum of Canadian nationalism and impose multi-billion counter-tariffs on
Washington. The nationalist narrative underpinning such policies plays directly
into the hands of the extreme right.
The trade union bureaucracy
plays a critical role in sustaining this foul political atmosphere with its
promotion of virulent Canadian nationalism, including by means of its support
for the Canadian government’s protectionist tariffs and its denunciations of
foreign workers, particularly in Mexico and Asia, as competitors of Canadian
workers. Similarly, the New Democratic Party, which recently raised the demand
for the formation of a corporatist national tariff task force to defend
“Canadian jobs,” is fully on board with peddling this nationalist filth.
The Parti Québécois and the
pro-sovereignty movement in Quebec have long stoked xenophobic sentiments,
presenting immigrants as a threat to “Quebec values,” and seeking to divide
workers along ethnic and linguistic lines. Like Ford, PQ leader Jean-François
Lisée has suggested that refugees are responsible for deteriorating public
services, and he has called for a Trump-style fence to block the principal road
whereby refuge claimants are crossing over from the US into Quebec. For its
part, the right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) is demanding a
reduction in immigrants and advocates that future immigrants to Quebec who fail
a French-language and “Quebec values” test be expelled.
The promotion of such
reactionary nostrums by the ruling elite is laying the groundwork for a
deepening of the assault on the democratic and social rights of the working
class—an assault which can be enforced only by a resort to openly authoritarian
forms of rule. In this context, it is no accident that as in Europe and the
United States, ultra-right groups such as La Meute in Quebec or Storm
Alliance, active across Canada, feel emboldened. Over the past two years, they
have organized protests and other provocations in major cities, often with
direct police support.
Workers cannot oppose these
dangerous developments by allying themselves with any section of the ruling
elite. All are complicit in the attacks on jobs and living standards of working
people and the criminalization of strikes and social opposition. The defence of
refugees and immigrants must be a rallying point for a broader counteroffensive
against the ruling-class agenda of war abroad, and attacks on democratic and
social rights at home that is shared by the entire political establishment,
from the NDP to the Conservatives. To prosecute such a struggle, workers
require their own independent political party opposed to the capitalist profit
system on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
Right-wing populist Imran Khan sworn in as Pakistan prime minister
By Sampath Perera
22 August 2018
The right-wing, Islamic populist
Imran Khan was sworn-in as Pakistan’s prime minister last Saturday, amid
protests from opposition parties that Pakistan’s “deep state” had muzzled them
during the campaign for last month’s national and provincial assembly elections
and rigged the results.
A onetime cricket star whose
Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (or Movement for Justice) was long an also-ran in
Pakistani politics, Khan is assuming the reins of government of a country whose
economy is teetering on the verge of collapse. Moreover, Islamabad’s relations
with the United States, for decades its most important ally, have become so
estranged that Washington is threatening to nix an emergency loan from the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Khan devoted much of his first
televised address as prime minister to blaming the parties that respectively
led the country’s last two governments and have dominated its politics for the
last three decades—the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan
People’s Party (PPP)—for the economic crisis. “Never in Pakistan’s history have
we faced such difficult economic circumstances,” said Khan. “In our entire
history,” he continued, “we haven’t been as indebted” as “we have become in the
last ten years.”
Khan, who has vowed to slash
expenditures across the board, announced the formation of a committee to mount
a nationwide drive to “cut expenses.” In an attempt to lend legitimacy to an
austerity and privatization drive that will further impoverish Pakistan’s
workers and toilers, Khan pledged to fight corruption, increase tax collections
from the rich, and eschew the perks of office, including by reducing the prime
minister’s personal staff from over five hundred to just two.
In the July 25 election,
Khan’s PTI captured 151 of the 342 National Assembly seats. Its parliamentary
majority is dependent on the support of smaller parties, including the
Karachi-based MQM-P and the Balochistan National Party-Mengal, and
independents.
In last Friday’s National
Assembly election for prime minister, Khan polled 176 votes as against 96 for
Shehbaz Sharif—the current PML (N) president and brother of the former prime
minister, Nawaz Sharif. The latter was stripped by the Supreme Court of the
prime ministership in July 2017, after being found guilty of corruption
charges, and was jailed in the run-up to this year’s election in what was
widely perceived as a politically-motivated and manipulated prosecution.
The PPP had initially
indicated that it would vote for Shehbaz Sharif as a show of protest against
the military, judiciary and bureaucracy’s machinations in favour of Khan and
his PTI. But in the end, the PPP abstained in the prime ministerial election.
A similar spectacle occurred
in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and the traditional PML-N
stronghold. Although the PML-N had won narrowly more Punjab Assembly seats, the
PTI, using the leverage gained from its victory at the Centre, was able to
rally independents and smaller groupings, including the Pakistan Muslim
League-Quaid (PML-Q), the party set up by General Musharraf to support his
US-backed dictatorship.
For four years beginning in
June 2013, Nawaz Sharif headed a right-wing government that imposed IMF
austerity, collaborated with the US in waging war in Afghanistan, and bowed to
the military’s demands for greater powers, including the reinstitution of
military courts and the death penalty, and the expansion of “anti-terrorism”
operations to large parts of the country.
Nevertheless, Sharif and the
military crossed swords over his attempt to pursue closer relations with India,
and over whether the civilian government or military would wield supervisory
authority over the $60 billion, geo-strategically significant China Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC).
That the July 25 election was
far from free or fair is incontrovertible. But it is also true that there has
been a huge erosion of popular support for both the PML-N and PPP, because of
their imposition of IMF austerity, connivance in the US occupation of
Afghanistan, and flagrant corruption.
For the time being, both Pakistan’s
ruling elite and international capital, as attested by commentary in the likes
of the Economist and Financial Times, view Khan, given his image
as a political outsider and populist appeal, as the best frontman for a
government that will be tasked with imposing socially incendiary spending cuts
and pushing through a fire-sale of state-owned enterprises.
The records of those Khan has
chosen for his cabinet underscore the incoming government’s pro-austerity
orientation and its eagerness to work hand-in-glove with the military, which
has directly ruled Pakistan for almost half of its seven decades as an
independent state and continues to effectively control its foreign and security
policies.
Twelve of the 21 top
appointees—16 minister and 5 advisers—served in Musharraf’s dictatorial regime
and five were ministers in former PPP governments.
Khan’s appointments to the
Finance and Foreign Affairs portfolios exemplify the unbroken link between the
PTI and the anti-working class and pro-imperialist policies of its
predecessors.
Finance Minister Asad Umar was
until recently reputedly Pakistan’s highest paid CEO. In recent weeks, he has
been boasting of an IMF-backed plan to swiftly reorganize the management and
corporate structure of 200 public sector enterprises, so as to ensure they make
profits and can be rapidly sold off to investors.
As his foreign minister, Khan
has named Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who served in the same capacity in the PPP-led
government from 2008 to 2013. Qureshi is known to be well liked in Washington.
During his previous tenure as foreign minister, the Obama administration
dramatically escalated the illegal US drone war in Pakistan’s the tribal areas
with the tacit support of the Pakistan government and military, killing
thousands of innocent men, women and children.
Khan first gained significant
popular support by demanding an end to drone war and denouncing the PPP
government’s relations with Washington as “slavery.” However, he has long
scaled back such rhetoric. Under conditions where the Trump administration has
threatened to punish Pakistan, including by stripping it of its status as a
“Major non-NATO ally,” if it does not more slavishly implement the US Afghan
war strategy, he has limited himself to calls for a more equitable relationship
between Islamabad and Washington.
Khan’s appointment of Qureshi
is clearly meant to signal that his government is anxious to mend fences with
Washington.
Khan’s vapid promises of an
“Islamic welfare state” will quickly prove to be a cruel hoax.
A self-avowed rightist, who
promotes himself as a “born-again Muslim” promoting “Islamic values,” Khan has
long cultivated close ties with the military and the religious right, including
through his support for the country’s draconian “blasphemy laws” and the state
persecution of the Ahmadiyya Muslim minority.
The author also recommends:
US threatens
to nix IMF bailout of Pakistan
[10 August 2018]
[10 August 2018]
Fascists stage pogromist march against Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica
By Andrea Lobo
22 August 2018
On Saturday, August 18,
far-right and outright fascist groups carried out pogromist attacks against
Nicaraguan migrants in downtown San José, Costa Rica.
Hundred of thugs in groups of
dozens marched in several major parks and avenues armed with knives, bats and
Molotov cocktails. The actual number of those participating at any one place
was difficult to determine, given the hundreds of pedestrians and onlookers.
Some of the participants were threatening to “kill” and “burn” Nicaraguans. The
main target was Merced Park, known as a meeting place used by Nicaraguan
immigrants.
The Ministry of Security
reported that 44 people were arrested, 38 Costa Ricans and 6 Nicaraguans, while
16 knives, a baseball bat, and 8 Molotov cocktails were confiscated. The latter
were found in a suitcase left behind at Merced Park.
Some of those present were
wearing Nazi insignias, with the security minister describing the participants
as “soccer hooligans, Nazis and anarchists.” The Costa Rican detainees were
immediately freed after being booked at the police station, with a majority of
them reportedly having criminal records, while the Nicaraguans were held longer
to check their immigration status.
The police chief, Randall
Picado, described the scene at Merced Park: “People arrived, sang the national
anthem and waved a flag. But suddenly, a group of them began running around the
park, chanting xenophobic slogans against Nicaraguans. … Any Nicaraguan who
would look at them was assaulted.” The police intervention, however, was fully
planned and sought at most to mediate the violence against Nicaraguans, with
some of the cops participating in it.
“Since I have lived here [for
19 years], I’ve never had to live through such a humiliation. … They would tell
us, ‘Nicas, sons of this. Leave, murderers, thieves,’ and would then attack
us,” María Andrea García told La Nación. She added: “The police didn’t do
anything. On the contrary, they would hit the Nicaraguans and tell us: ‘You are
not in your country. Leave, dogs.’”
During the last few weeks, the
police have joined immigration officials in rounding up hundreds of undocumented
immigrants in these same parks for deportation procedures.
The government’s spokesperson,
Juan Carlos Mendoza, called the attacks “unprecedented in Costa Rican history.”
President Carlos Alvarado gave a national address on Sunday warning against “provocations
and calls of hatred.” However, he immediately boasted about new police-state
capabilities to “expedite deportation of people with unwanted profiles,”
claiming to “understand the worries of many Costa Ricans” about the threat to
“national security” supposedly presented by migrants.
Far from seeking to counter
the pogromist atmosphere, Alvarado has fomented “patriotic” chauvinism since
the electoral campaign, exploiting it to justify the ongoing build-up of the
police, immigration units and intelligence services, which in turn will be
aimed against all forms of social opposition. The next morning, Alvarado
announced the incorporation of 98 new officers to the migration police.
Thousands have shown interest
online in participating in an “anti-xenophobia” march on Saturday organized by
pro-refugee groups. The generalized opposition to anti-immigrant policies and
attacks among workers and youth—a 2016 poll show that only 10.6 percent
believed Nicaraguans “should not come; they generate problems”—needs to be
mobilized to actively defend immigrants from attacks and deportations at
workplaces and in communities.
On January 13, heavily armed
police and immigration officials broke up a peaceful picket of more than 100
workers protesting the arbitrary firing of 60 co-workers at a pineapple
plantation in Los Chiles. Several picketing Nicaraguan workers were arrested
for deportation proceedings.
Constituting about 8 percent
of the Costa Rican population, Nicaraguans are an integral part of the working
class in Costa Rica, which is bound to Nicaragua by innumerable family,
economic and cultural ties.
All attacks against Nicaraguan
workers by the Costa Rican and Nicaraguan states—both at the behest of the main
investor in the region, US imperialism—will be ultimately used to undermine
workers’ struggles in both countries. This raises the urgent need to
consciously unite workers entering into struggle across the national borders
under a socialist and internationalist program, which calls for tearing down
the dead weights of the nation-state system and capitalism.
The fascist attackers on
Saturday frequently chanted “Free Costa Rica,” which corresponds, along with
the social-media accounts promoting the march, with the Free Costa Rica
Movement, a notorious fascist organization in Costa Rica. It formed as a
paramilitary group that carried out violent attacks against an upsurge of
worker and student demonstrations within Costa Rica throughout the 1970s and
1980s, along with xenophobic assaults against Nicaraguans within Costa Rica and
military support for the US-backed terrorist Contra forces.
After more than three decades
of anti-worker policies aimed at creating the most profitable conditions for
foreign and domestic capital, social inequality in Costa Rica has reached new
heights, with poverty levels above 20 percent and unemployment at 10.3 percent,
according to the Central Bank.
Social anger is growing
rapidly against the high unemployment; devastated state of public education,
health care, housing, and other social infrastructure; rampant corruption; and
record-levels of homicides and other indices of crime. In response, every
sector of the Costa Rican ruling establishment is scapegoating the ongoing wave
of immigrants seeking to escape the brutal repression and economic crisis in
Nicaragua.
The government has already
rejected more than 1,000 Nicaraguan refugee applications this year, citing
“criminal records.” This is part of a pernicious tendency. Costa Rica deported
549 Nicaraguans in 2017—before the current wave of migration—compared to 262 in
2016. Last year, 14,330 Nicaraguans were turned back at the border, compared to
6,754 in 2016.
As part of the deadly
crackdown carried out by the Daniel Ortega administration in Nicaragua against
demonstrations that began in mid-April protesting pension cuts, more than 2,000
Nicaraguans have been arrested “arbitrarily,” 480 of whom remain detained,
according to rights groups. The UN has denounced “collective detentions,” while
estimates of those killed vary between 317 and 448.
Several Facebook accounts are
calling for more anti-Nicaraguan “demonstrations” for the rest of August and
September. The largest of these right-wing groups, “Costa Rica Unida,” which
has more than 158,000 members, is managed by David Segura, a current legislator
of the evangelical National Restoration Party (PRN). Another key figure of this
far-right movement is Marvin Rojas Ramírez. On Friday, he posted a video
watched more than 100,000 times in which he describes receiving support and
feedback from high officials in state institutions. “We are a large group and
are getting organized,” he says, “we’ll be announcing dates and places to
meet.”
La Nación reported that a
“wave” of false stories were shared tens of thousands of times on social media
to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of Saturday’s march. However, the
efforts of La Nación and several media commentators to portray
the attacks as a result of “fake news” are aimed at channeling the
widespread revulsion felt by workers and youth against these xenophobic attacks
behind an equally ominous and authoritarian agenda.
On August 10, Facebook
suspended for 48 hours the page “For a new Costa Rican army,” which advocates
for building a paramilitary force to be deployed against Nicaraguan citizens.
It has more than 27,000 “likes” and expresses political support for the “Free
Costa Rica” fascists. Facebook’s actions constitute an outright attack against
freedom of expression and will be used by the government and the technology
corporations as a precedent to expand censorship against socialist and
left-wing outlets.
The growth in support for the
far right is chiefly the political responsibility of pseudo-left parties like
Frente Amplio and the trade unions, which have suppressed the class struggle
for decades and have now largely aligned themselves behind the Alvarado
administration. Consequently, in the February general elections, the
evangelical far right led by the PRN, which is adopting an increasingly open
anti-immigrant stance, became the main opposition in Congress and the only
significant political force that claims to battle the austerity and fiscal
packages being imposed.
Anti-immigrant sentiments are
similarly being fueled across Latin America as social catastrophes worldwide
continue to force millions to flee. For instance, about 1,200 Venezuelans were
forced to evacuate the Brazilian town of Pacaraima after hundreds attacked them
and burned their belongings and tents.
Argentina on the brink of financial meltdown
By Cesar Uco
22 August 2018
The crisis of the Turkish
lira, driven by the strengthening of the US dollar, combined with the increase
in US interest rates in recent months and sharply exacerbated by the Trump
administration’s imposition of punishing trade tariffs, has spread to a number
of “emerging markets” economies, which borrowed heavily during the years of low
interest rates. Argentina has now joined Turkey in imposing currency
mega-devaluations, threatening a national economic collapse.
Last week, in a desperate
attempt to keep the national currency, the peso, from going into freefall, the
Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA) increased the short-term interest
rate to 45 percent, the highest in the world, in a bid to attract profit hungry
investors. The Argentine peso closed last Friday at 30.62 pesos to the US
dollar, losing 22 percent of its value against the dollar in just the last
three months, equivalent to an annualized devaluation of 124 percent.
Above all, the Argentine
ruling establishment fears a bank run, which, given the intensification of the
class struggle in the country, could detonate mass popular upheavals against
the bourgeois state led by right-wing President Mauricio Macri.
The decision to hike the
interest rate to 45 percent followed the Central Bank’s inability last Thursday
to sell sufficient amounts of its reserves to support the peso. Last Thursday,
the bank “bid US$500 million, of which it sold only US$55 million,” according
to the Argentine daily El Clarin. The day before, the bank had
successfully sold US$781 million. But on Tuesday the BCRA conducted an auction
of US$500 million, managing to sell only US$200 million, according to Reuters.
Argentina has a credit rating
of B, according to Standard & Poor’s—equivalent to the rating of subprime
mortgages prior to the collapse of the housing bubble that led to the world
financial meltdown of 2008. Argentine country risk remains high at 667 basis
points.
With massive outstanding
short-term debt, Argentina is facing a potential calamity in the financial sector
that provides industry, including transnational corporations, with the
necessary credit to function. Access to short-term funds is vital for companies
to pay workers’ salaries.
In past years, this funding
was made available by the Central Bank issuing Letras del Banco Central, Lebac,
the Argentine equivalent of US Treasury bills. At this point, there are about 1
trillion pesos or US$33.5 billion of outstanding Lebac.
Since the Fed put an end to
its quantitative easing policy, emerging markets are having difficulties in
servicing their debt in US dollars, as well as in national currencies that
maintain a high correlation to US interest rates.
By May 2018, as the financial
crisis became apparent, Argentina secured a loan from the IMF for US$30 billion
in a desperate effort to slow inflation and to prevent a bank run.
But the IMF loan was not
enough to contain the devaluation of the peso. Over the past month it reached
an annualized rate of 199 percent, comparable only to the Turkish lira.
The Central Bank and the
Ministry of the Treasury are coordinating efforts to move away from short-term
debt, the Lebac—usually with maturities of around 1 month—the Argentine
equivalent to one-month US Treasury bills. As long as world interest rates
remained low, the Lebac program became a major source of short-term funding.
BCRA President Luis Caputo has
declared that the Lebac program needs to be completely dismantled by the end of
the year. The notes are a major source of funding for Argentine banks, which
hold about 50 percent of the Lebac, with the other 50 percent in the hands of
common investment funds, public corporations, enterprises and individuals.
The Lebac will gradually be
replaced by one-year maturity notes issued by the BCRA (Nobac) and letters of
liquidity (Leliq). The latter is destined to become the main source of funding
in the future. The cost of closing down the Lebac program is estimated at US$7
billion, which will come out of the Treasury reserves in US dollars.
In an effort to stabilize the
economy, the Argentine government last week placed longer term debt—US$1.64
billion worth of government bonds maturing in 2020 (BODEN 2020) and US$514
million treasury notes (LETES)—with maturities of between 210 and 378 days.
As the US dollar strengthens
against all major currencies, Argentina is looking to China to negotiate a
currency swap—Chinese yuan vs. Argentine pesos—for US$4 billion, to be used in
reinforcing falling reserves. This represents a move away from economic
dependence on the US, despite the right-wing Macri’s affinity for Donald Trump.
Argentina’s inflation reached
its peak in 2016 with an annual rate of 40.3 percent, the highest in the world,
and in 2017 the Consumer Price Index rose 24.8 percent. It is expected that
2018 will close with an inflation rate of between 30 to 40 percent, more than
double the BCRA target.
In remarks delivered Friday in
northwestern Jujuy, one of Argentina’s poorest provinces, Macri publicly
acknowledged the obvious, that both Argentina’s financial crisis and the
measures his government is taking in response are resulting in the erosion of
working class living standards and a steady growth in poverty. “This
devaluation brought a rebound in inflation, and inflation is the largest driver
of poverty, and regrettably, we are going to lose some of the gains we have
made in poverty reduction,” Macri told a news conference.
Last year, Argentina’s
official statistics agency, Indec, claimed that the poverty rate fell to 25.7
percent from 30.3 percent in 2016.
The Argentine economy is
projected to contract 0.3 percent this year. In his remarks Friday, Macri
offered cold comfort to the Argentine population. “Next year the economy will
grow,” he said. “Not much, but it will grow.”
In the face of inevitable
social unrest, the government will have to increasingly resort to repressive
measures, including the use of the military. Last month, Maci signed a decree
allowing the use of the armed forces in domestic policing for the first time
since the savage military dictatorship that ruled the country in the 1970s and
1980s.
The second prop upon which the
Macri government depends to suppress the resistance of the working class is the
trade union bureaucracy.
Throughout the first half of
this year, hundreds of thousands of workers—among them teachers, steelworkers,
teamsters and other sectors—have held demonstrations expressing their anger
over the loss of real wages to inflation.
This led to a 24-hour general
strike on June 24 that paralyzed Buenos Aires and most major Argentine cities.
The main trade union, Confederacion General de Trabajadores (CGT), has called a
total of three general strikes against the Macri-IMF attacks on workers’ living
standards. In April and December 2017, workers also staged one-day general
strikes.
The CGT’s role is to contain
the rising movement of the Argentine working class within the confines of
capitalism, limiting the general strikes to 24 hours and preventing popular
upheavals from challenging capitalist rule.
Meanwhile, the bureaucracy’s
ostensible “left” opponents, particularly the pseudo-left groups that comprise
the opportunistic parliamentary bloc known as the Workers Left Front (Frente de
Izquierda y de los Trabajadores, FIT)—the Workers Party (PO), Workers Socialist
Party (PTS) and Socialist Left (IS)—seek to channel the working class behind
the right-wing unions and the bourgeois state by advancing the call for putting
pressure on the CGT’s Peronist bureaucrats to fight.
The decisive question posed by
the deepening of the economic crisis is the building of a new revolutionary
leadership in the working class, based upon the perspective of socialist
internationalism fought for by the International Committee of the Fourth
International.
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Venezuela’s Maduro government imposes capitalist shock therapy
By Bill Van Auken
22 August 2018
Venezuela remained in a state
of chaos Tuesday, four days after President Nicolas Maduro announced a series
of economic measures, including a 95 percent currency devaluation and a
conversion of the country’s old currency “the strong bolivar” to a new one, the
“sovereign bolivar,” by lopping off five zeros from the new banknotes.
The country’s fractured
right-wing opposition claimed credit for reduced economic activity after an end
to a long holiday weekend, but the closure of businesses and reduced public
transportation appeared to have more to do with confusion over the new currency
regime than the “general strike” called by the collection of discredited
US-backed right-wing parties that make up the so-called Broad Front (Frente
Amplio) previously known as the MUD (United Democratic Roundtable).
While the Venezuelan right
cast its call for a general strike as an action in defense of the country’s
impoverished and exploited working class, one of the principal objections of
the Fedecamaras, the business association that is a pillar of the right-wing
opposition, was to Maduros’ inclusion of a 3,000 percent increase in the
country’s minimum wage, which it claimed would bankrupt Venezuelan businesses.
The increase, which raises the
Venezuelan minimum wage from $1 a month to $30 a month, is an accommodation by
the government to the wave of strikes involving nurses, electrical workers,
textile workers, public school teachers, university lecturers and various other
sectors of the workforce.
The new $30 is still a
starvation wage amounting to less than half the amount needed to meet essential
monthly necessities. It less than a third of the official monthly wage of
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, and less than a tenth of the prevailing
minimum wage in most of Latin America’s major economies.
In a statement issued on
Monday, Maduro claimed that his new plan would usher in an “economic miracle”
and represented a “revolutionary formula ... unique in the world.”
The derisory minimum wage hike
aside, the plan introduced by Maduro has all the earmarks of capitalist shock
therapy, in which the full weight of Venezuela’s profound economic crisis is to
be placed on the backs of the country’s working class.
In addition to the massive
devaluation, the plan includes an increase in the country’s value-added tax
(VAT) from 12 percent to 16 percent, which will be translated into
across-the-board consumer price hikes. Subsidies on gasoline prices are also
being lifted in a bid to raise them from what had been among the lowest in the
world to prevailing international rates. Previous attempts to impose such
increases had led to riots in Venezuela.
This has been accompanied by
tax exemptions for capitalist corporations, including energy transnationals
seeking to exploit the country’s oil wealth, as well as the lifting of currency
exchange controls introduced in 2003 in an attempt to control capital flight.
The Maduro government has
promoted its measures as the path to a “zero deficit,” the same goal enunciated
by right-wing capitalist governments throughout Latin America.
While the government and its
supporters claimed that the roll-out of the new currency regime was a success,
average Venezuelans saw it as just a further aggravation of the protracted
crisis. Withdrawals of the new “sovereign bolivar” were limited to 10
(1,000,000 of the old “strong bolivar”) at ATMs — the equivalent of 17 US
cents. Bank tellers were allowed to give out only 50 of the new bolivars.
The government has affirmed
that it will pay the increased costs of the new minimum wage for small and
medium-sized capitalist enterprises for the first 90 days, but no clear
provisions have been introduced for it to do so.
The immediate effect of the
new measures was a sharp rise in prices following Maduro’s announcement on
Friday, further intensifying the hyperinflation that the IMF has projected will
reach 1,000,000 percent for the whole of 2018. Rising prices have been
accompanied by severe shortages in basic food and medical supplies.
The increasingly intolerable
conditions for Venezuelan working people have led to a wave of economic
migrants fleeing the country in seek of work elsewhere in Latin America or
farther abroad. The flow of Venezuelan migrants has led to a violent reaction
in northern Brazil, where mobs attacked a migrant camp, as well as official
restriction being placed upon their entry by both Ecuador and Peru, which are
now demanding passports from Venezuelans passing south through Colombia.
US Vice President Mike Pence
issued a denunciation of the Maduro government’s new economic measures,
declaring that they “will only worsen the lives of the Venezuelans.”
Washington has imposed a
series of increasingly punishing sanctions aimed at creating the maximum
economic turmoil in the country, with the aim of preparing conditions for
regime change. These have included a ban on Venezuela’s borrowing or selling
assets in the US financial system, making it impossible to restructure its $60
billion debt. There are increasing threats that the Trump administration may
escalate these measures with a ban on the import of Venezuela oil.
US government strategists are
banking on the increasingly intolerable economic and social conditions
triggering a coup by the Venezuelan military bringing to power a more pliant
regime.
The military has been a
central pillar of the Venezuelan government since the coming to power of
Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, a former career army officer and
coup leader, in 1999. His “Bolivarian socialism” rested heavily on the military
command, which filled many of the top posts in the government and profited
immensely off of its control of government contracts, key economic sectors and
illicit activities.
The arrests of two senior
military officers in the wake of the August 4 attempted drone assassination of
Maduro during a speech before troops in Caracas indicates the potential for
fissures within the military command under the combined pressure of US
imperialism and the growth of extreme class tensions within Venezuela itself.
Venezuela’s workers and
oppressed masses confront immense dangers under conditions of a growing threat
of violent conflict between two reactionary and repressive factions of the
country’s ruling class, as well as that of a military intervention by US
imperialism. These threats can be answered only by means of the mobilization of
the working class independently of both the government and the right-wing
opposition, as well as their respective trade union affiliates, in a political
struggle to put an end to capitalism as part of a socialist revolution
throughout the Americas and internationally.
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