Editorial Comment

This week we include articles that cover key issues confronting us in South Africa and internationally and that WE NEED TO RESPOND TO.

Must read articles include the Traditional Leadership Bill, the reality of the mining industry’s destructive impact on the environment and communities and an appeal from Trevor Ngwane of the United Front in Gauteng to stand up and resist re-merging xenophobia.

The international section has a special selection of articles under, The US in the Era of Trump – What’s all the fuss about?

The mainstream liberal media and celebrities have drummed up lots of fear and loathing of the newly elected US president Donald Trump. This unexpected right-wing president has a reputation of being a racist, homophobe and misogynist, correctly criticised by all and sundry. The fear and concern with the Trump presidency is warranted since it is likely to impact severely on working class Americans and smaller nations, especially those who make up the right-wing’s “Axis of Evil”. But there is much continuity between the new US government and Trump’s predecessors. Trump is merely a more outspoken and vulgar head of state of the great imperial power. The reign of the democrat and first black president, Obama, has seen more deportations of “illegal” immigrants than his conservative Republican predecessors and more countries attacked by US invasions and incursions than during the Bush era. Under Obama, the US was behind instigating and supporting the right-wing coup in the Ukraine and has surrounded Russia and China with military bases and missile launchers. Together with Britain, Obama’s government has provided arms for the Saudi regime to attack Yemen, deliberately killing thousands of civilians and essential infrastructure – hospitals, water and electricity supply, education facilities. This has led to the poorest country in the region now facing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis with over 18 million people out of a population of 27 million facing starvation and of these, 3.3million already affected by severe malnutrition and death that is seeing one child under 5 years of age dying every 10 minutes as you are reading.

It is Obama who presented that colonial power in the Middle East, Israel, with its biggest military aid package of over US$30bn – more than that received by all US allies combined. Donald Trump’s government represents continuity of rightward anti-working class political shifts all over the world over the past few decades and aggravated by the deepening of the global capital crisis since 2008. As the systemic crisis intensifies, the system will throw up more repressive and populist right-wing leadership figures, such as Trump and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines along with many others in Europe and elsewhere. Their role is to win over and dazzle the desperate masses with promises and lies while demonstrating Rambo like tendencies as “men of action”.

This tendency has been the case here in South Africa with the ANC Zuma regime too, which is increasingly losing popular support and resorting to repressive measures to protect its hold on power. Strong mass organisation and resistance based on a clear working class programme is the only antidote to this situation, that the previous week saw 94 deaths of psychiatric patients as a consequence of the government’s anti-working, class cost cutting measures while at the same time, terrible anti-foreigner violent xenophobic attacks have re-emerged in some of our townships that saw three Somali spaza shop-owners assassinated separately on the same night in Site C, Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

WE MUST ACT

SOUTH AFRICA

Amadiba Crisis Committee: “Only fraud can pass the criminal traditional leadership bill through parliament”

The public speaks: One says “You want to take the land from the people”. Next one says “This bill will lead to war”. Next one says “You want the chiefs to make secret deals with capitalists”. It goes on like this. Mr Mgakane then finally wraps it up. He is pleased that everybody supports TLKB. He put that on record. He is in complete contempt of the will of the people. He is conducting a fraud. He likes it… aidc.org.za/

Bill reinforces apartheid tribal system

The Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill is dangerous. The Inyanda National Land Movement is campaigning to stop it before it is passed into law. If Parliament does pass this Bill, the struggle for rural democracy will continue in the courts, in Parliament and in thousands of rural villages across our country. The Bill, which is undergoing public hearings, is against the democratic spirit, letter and intent of our Constitution. It will benefit elites, such as those hovering over the Wild Coast seeking yet more mining profits at the expense of our people and ecology… mg.co.za/article/

INTERNATIONAL

The certainties that turned neoliberalism into the “common sense” of our age are melting into the air. Tried and tested policies such as privatisation, marketisation, financialisation and trade liberalisation have lost traction, and established political systems haemorrhage legitimacy. Mass protests spring in unexpected places and take new forms. Even the steadiest political hands have lost their grip on the levers of power, which, themselves, increasingly lack effectiveness. The economic turmoil in global neoliberalism is morphing into a wholesale political crisis… column.global-labour-university.org/

Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%

While some of the world’s leaders are obsessed with keeping people out of their country, an unspoken entity is slowly but certainly taking our jobs: robots… zmescience.com/

Gig economy threatens government finances, says May adviser

Theresa May’s adviser on the future of work says the boom in the gig economy could have a significant impact on government finances, with self-employed workers and contractors paying more than £2,000 less a year on average in tax than employees doing equivalent jobs… theguardian.com/

Facebook Server Farm Powered by “Clean Energy” Will Increase Denmark’s Greenhouse Emissions

Last month, the social-media giant Facebook announced plans to build a new data center near Odense, Denmark. The expansion of server capacity was needed, the company said, to support “richer content” such as live-streaming and virtual reality… counterpunch.org/

Russia, China sign deal to bypass US dollar

In a symbolic blow to U.S. global financial hegemony, Russia and China took a small step toward undercutting the domination of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency on Tuesday when Russia’s second biggest financial institution, VTB, signed a deal with the Bank of China to bypass the dollar and pay each other in domestic currencies… america.aljazeera.com/