Why the European Dream of Integration Won’t Die

John Wight

Though the EU is currently embroiled in an enveloping crisis, with centrifugal political parties growing in strength across its member states, and despite Brexit delivering the EU’s permanence an ontological blow, the concept of a united Europe will continue to be an attractive one on both historical and philosophical grounds.

The idea of uniting Europe, or forging a united Europe, has tantalized philosophers, emperors, dictators, revolutionaries, and figures on both the left and right of the political spectrum for centuries. With so many different nation states occupying a relatively small part of the world, each with their own unique culture, language, history, and story, Europe has been at the centre of historical events since the Renaissance of the 15^th century triggered the continent’s emergence from the Dark Ages, which ensued following the collapse of the western Roman Empire around 500 CE.

The first serious proponent of a European continent bound by common laws and a uniform economic system was Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and military genius, whose attempt to spread the ideas and values of the French Revolution at the end of bayonets was finally crushed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Napoleon with his Grande Armee was committed to sweeping the detritus of European feudalism – autocracy, aristocracy, and monarchy – into the dustbin of history. He intended to replace them with revolutionary France’s Code Civil (Napoleonic Code), a uniform legal code established with the objective of replacing the divine right of kings and feudal privileges, both of which were still very much in in place across Europe at the time. As he lamented after his attempt to conquer Europe failed, “I wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary: there would be but one people in Europe.”

Holding to a similar objective half a century after the end of Napoleonic Wars, and after the industrialization of Western Europe had given birth to the modern age of capitalism, the great philosopher, economist, social critic, and revolutionar, Karl Marx, outlined his vision of a Europe and world in which the nation state would give way to the international brotherhood of the workers of the world. Marx held economic and social class rather than nation as the defining separation under capitalism.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, led by Lenin and his Bolsheviks, was committed to bringing Marx’s vision to pass. The ultimate goal of the Bolsheviks was to spread the revolution over Russia’s border to the rest of Europe, where economic and social conditions were more advanced and propitious when it came to communism taking root. They failed in that endeavor, just as Napoleon had failed, providing further evidence of the enduring strength of national consciousness even among a given nation’s most impoverished and marginalized.

After a First World War that was so brutal and destructive of human life it was considered to be ‘the war to end all wars’, a chorus of voices across Europe began making the case for a united Europe in order to prevent the possibility of such a calamity occurring again. None was more vocal in this cause than the Austrian writer and novelist Stefan Zweig. In 1934, amid the Great Depression and, with it, the alarming rise of extreme nationalism and fascism across Europe, Zweig wrote, “The European idea is not a primary emotion like patriotism or ethnicity; it is not born of primitive instinct, but rather of perception; it is not the product of spontaneous fervor, but the slow-ripened fruit of a more elevated way of thinking.”

History records that the primitive instincts driving nationalism and patriotism proved stronger than Zweig’s “elevated way of thinking” during the 1930s. Hitler’s vision of a united Europe, however, was of an entirely different order from that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, or for that matter Stefan Zweig’s.

The fascist dictator rose to power in Germany obsessed with gaining vengeance for a German people that had been “stabbed in the back” during the First World War. He blamed a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” that was intent on destroying the nation state and taking over Europe and the world. Combined with his belief in the need for lebensraum (living space) for Germanic race that was superior to every other, he embarked on a campaign to colonize Eastern Europe in a war of annihilation against Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, and others – peoples and groups considered Untermenschen (subhuman) in his perverse worldview.

Interestingly, Hitler was an admirer of the British Empire, specifically its success in controlling such a large swathe of the world, and harbored dreams of emulating it in Europe. The Nazi dictator’s conception of a united Europe was in truth a Europe enslaved and ruled by a new Germanic/Aryan order, a Third Reich that would last for 1000 years. It lasted just eleven before it was destroyed.

After the war Winston Churchill, Britain’s legendary wartime Prime Minister, also mooted the possibility of a united Europe – a United States of Europe, which together with the British Commonwealth and the United States would forge a world underpinned by peace and security. He outlined his idea in a speech in Zurich in September 1946. “The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause.”

This brings us to the forerunner of today’s European Union, which as with Churchill’s vision was born out of the devastation of the Second World War. French diplomat and businessman Jean Monnet is credited with being the father of what became the EU. It started life with the Treaty of Rome in 1951, which gave birth to the establishment of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSE) made up of Belgium, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

As Monnet had it, “There will be no peace in Europe if the States rebuild themselves on the basis of national sovereignty, with its implications of prestige politics and economic protection (…). The countries of Europe are not strong enough individually to be able to guarantee prosperity and social development for their peoples. The States of Europe must therefore form a federation or a European entity that would make them into a common economic unit.”

The idea of sacrificing some sovereignty in the interests of peace and security, with the objective of avoiding anything like the 20^th century conflagrations of the First and Second World Wars occurring again, is the philosophical cornerstone of European unity in our time. However the this current model of European unity has developed within the strictures of a cold war paradigm, ideologically committed to isolating Russiam the largest country in Europe.

The result, in recent years, has been an increase rather than lessening of tension across Europe. Combined with the economic and financial crash of 2008, and the EU’s introduction of harsh austerity measures in response, it has turned the very concept of European unity into something ugly and unwelcome. The recrudescence of nationalism and emergence of centrifugal political parties committed to breaking up the EU has given us a Europe more divided than at any time since the 1930s.

A divided Europe, as the last century has shown, is in the last analysis a Europe at war. However if European unity is to succeed, it has to be on the basis of equality between states, respect for cultural differences, and underpinned by an economic system that serves the masses of the people instead of a small elite. It must also, by necessity, include rather than exclude Russia.

It is why the EU in its current form is not fit for purpose.

The Beneficiaries of Conflict With Russia

Brian Cloughley

On  January 30 NBC News reported that “On a snowy Polish plain dominated by Russian forces for decades, American tanks and troops sent a message to Moscow and demonstrated the firepower of the NATO alliance. Amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO is wavering, the tanks fired salvos that declared the 28-nation alliance a vital deterrent in a dangerous new world.”

One intriguing aspect of this slanted account are the phrases “dominated by Russian forces for decades” and “vital deterrent” which are used by NBC to imply that Russia yearns, for some unspecified reason, to invade Poland. As is common in the Western media there is no justification or evidence to substantiate the suggestion that Russia is hell-bent on domination, and the fact that US troops are far from home, operating along the Russian border, is regarded as normal behaviour on the part of the world’s “indispensable nation.”

Then Reuters recorded that “Beginning in February, US military units will spread out across Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Germany for training, exercises and maintenance. The Army is also sending its 10th Combat Aviation Brigade with about 50 Black Hawk and 10 CH-47 Chinook helicopters and 1,800 personnel, as well as a separate aviation battalion with 400 troops and 24 Apache helicopters.”

As the US-NATO military alliance continues its deployments along Russia’s borders, including the US-UK supported Joint Viking 2017 exercise in Norway that began on March 1 and the deployment of  more US troops in Poland “from the start of April, as the alliance sets up a new force in response to Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea,” the campaign by the US and British governments against alleged “Russian Aggression” continues to increase in volume and intensity, aided by an ever-compliant media.

During his visit to Washington on March 6-7 Ukraine’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Senator Marco Rubio of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and received assurances of US support in “confronting Russian aggression” while in Britain it was announced that its foreign minister, Boris Johnson, the “mop-haired buffoon” was about to visit Russia in to tell it to “keep its nose” out of western affairs. Mr Johnson declared that Russia “was up to all sorts of no good” and “engaged in cyber-warfare.”

The splendid irony of the Johnson allegation about cyber warfare is that it came just before the revelation that Britain’s intelligence agencies were deeply involved with those of the United States in cyber-chicanery on a massive scale. WikiLeaks once again showed the depths of deceit and humbug to which the West’s great democracies submerge themselves, and revealed that leaked files “describe CIA plans and descriptions of malware and other tools that could be used to hack into some of the world’s most popular technology platforms. The documents showed that the developers aimed to be able to inject these tools into targeted computers without the owners’ awareness . . . the documents show broad exchanges of tools and information between the CIA, the National Security Agency and other US federal intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence services of close allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.”

ABC News then announced, without a shred of proof, that “Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, appears to have a strong relationship with Russia” but could not disguise the report by CNN that the documents disclosed that “to hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were Russian.”

There has been no comment on the WikiLeaks revelations by such as US Senator Amy Klobuchar who declared in January that “Russia used cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine our democracy. We are not alone. Russia has a pattern of waging cyberattacks and military invasions against democracies across the world.”  She was echoed by Senator Ben Sasse who declared that increased US sanctions would “upend Putin’s calculus and defend America from Russian cyberattacks and political meddling.”

Of course it would be impossible for the Senators to revise their rabid hatred of Russia and overcome their dismal pride to acknowledge that on March 1 the US National Reconnaissance Office launched a spy satellite carried by an Atlas V rocket that was powered by a Russian RD-180 engine. In an astonishing example of petty-minded obfuscation, the 1,500-word official report on the launching mentioned RD-180 three times — but failed to state its country of manufacture. The mainstream media followed suit.

There was to be another Atlas V launch in March, carrying supplies to the International Space Station, but it was delayed by “a hydraulic issue that was uncovered on ground support equipment required for launch.” Had it been deferred because of malfunction of the Russian engine that powers it, there would have been gloating headlines.

Reaction by the US government to the WikiLeaks disclosures has been to denounce them because they supposedly “not only jeopardise US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.”  Predictably, Senator Sasse tweeted that “Julian Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin.”

There should be no surprise about the activities of US and British intelligence agencies, because they already have a proven record of spying on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, French Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, to name but a few world leaders subjected to the indignity of greasy little eavesdroppers sniggering at their private conversations.

In June 2013 it was revealed that the United States of America had been spying on European Union computer networks in the EU offices in Washington and New York. According to Germany’s Der Spiegel a document of September 2010 “explicitly named the Union’s representation at the UN as a ‘location target’.” Der Spiegel discovered  that “the NSA had also conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.”  Together with their British colleagues, the techno-dweebs of Government Communications Headquarters, the US agencies have been having a ball — but have been unable to prove that Russia “used cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine our democracy.”

The faithful CIA mouthpiece, the New York Times, stated in December that “American spy and law enforcement agencies were united in the belief, in the weeks before the presidential election, that the Russian government had deployed computer hackers to sow chaos during the campaign.”  Not only this, but “CIA officials presented lawmakers with a stunning new judgment that upended the debate: Russia, they said, had intervened with the primary aim of helping make Donald J Trump president.”

But there is no evidence whatever that there was election-time hacking by Russia, and now there is proof that “to hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were Russian.”

Although none of the assertions that Russia has been conducting a cyber war against America can be substantiated, Washington’s anti-Russia propaganda campaign will continue for the foreseeable future, while President Trump’s initial intentions to enter into dialogue with his counterpart in Moscow wither away to nothing. Even if he does resurrect the sensible policy he seemed to endorse, his acolytes in Washington will do their best to maintain confrontation by spreading more allegations of Russian “aggression” and “cyberattacks.”  The anti-Russia campaign is gathering force, and it is not difficult to put a finger on why such a counter-productive crusade appeals to so many in the West.

The US arms and intelligence industries are the main beneficiaries of confrontation with Russia, closely followed by the hierarchy of the defunct US-NATO military alliance who have been desperately seeking justification for its existence for many years.  For so long as the military-industrial complex holds sway in Washington, there will continue to be sabre-rattling and mindless military posturing.

But the International Space Station will continue to be resupplied by rockets powered by Russian engines.

Philippine administration steps up police-state measures

Dante Pastrana

At the instigation of the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, steps have been taken this month to intensify the so-called war on drugs which is being used to prepare police state measures against the working class.

The lower Congressional house has now restored the death penalty for drug-related crimes. The military formally joined Duterte’s anti-drug war. The police have re-started their operations against drugs. And Duterte, after visiting the military junta in Thailand, has once again publicly threatened to impose martial law on the pretext of eliminating drugs.

Early this month, the Lower House approved House Bill No. 4727, re-imposing the penalty of Reclusion Perpetua and the death penalty for drug-related crimes. Reclusion Perpetua, a far more stringent version of life imprisonment, fixes the minimum sentence at 30 years without parole and includes a life-long ban on holding political office. The bill has now gone to the Senate where political allies of Duterte are also in majority.

Underscoring the disarray of the political party of former President Benigno Aquino III, half of the Liberal party congressmen voted for the bill. Party leaders had previously made strenuous public avowals to vote against the death penalty.

The Maoist Makabayan bloc voted against the bill. In a statement to the Sun Star Daily, Makabayan bloc member, Carlos Isagani Zarate said, “The Makabayan bloc is vehemently against the measure even with its supposedly watered down version, as the death penalty bill is deliberately anti-poor.” He added that “this will be no different from the current spare of extra-judicial killings wherein 99 percent of the victims were poor.”

Zarate’s opposition is entirely hypocritical. Four Makabayan members hold key positions in Duterte’s cabinet and bear political responsibility for his policies, including the brutal anti-drug war.

Initially bill covered 21 crimes, including plunder of public funds, bribery and murder, but the lower house whittled the list down to just drug-related crimes, for which the maximum penalty is death and the minimum penalty is Reclusion Perpetua.

Other draconian legislative measures are also being prepared. Next in the agenda is the expansion of Duterte’s war on crime to include children as young as nine years of age.

Backed by the Speaker of the House, Pantaleon Alvarez, a bill to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility to nine years is now under deliberation. The bill declares as state policy, “that the Filipino youth shall be taught to accept responsibility for their words and deeds as early as possible, and not to unduly pamper them with impunity from criminal responsibility upon reaching the age of nine years.”

Also this month, the Philippine National Police has re-launched its campaign against drugs. “This time,” Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa claimed, “we will make sure that this will become less bloody if not bloodless campaign.”

Within 24 hours, the police announced eight crime suspects have been killed in separate gun battles and another 21 have been arrested in the province of Bulacan, just north of Manila. Within a week, the police reported an additional nine crime suspects had been killed and 446 arrested nationwide.

The official numbers are now 60 killed from police operations, over 4,000 alleged drug suspects arrested, over 23,000 drug users surrendering to the police and more than 205,000 houses visited by police in the house-to-house campaign of intimidation.

The previous campaign from July 2016 to January 2017 resulted in over 2,500 drug suspects killed in police operations with a 97-percent kill rate, that, according to the Reuters news agency, was “the strongest proof yet that the police were summarily shooting drug suspects.”

The police also went to over 6,800,000 houses threatening and bullying residents, resulting in more than 1,175,000 million declaring themselves either drug addicts or drug suspects or both.

Another 4,525 were killed and attributed to death squads which, according to Amnesty International, have closed links to, and paid off by, the police.

The police campaign was brought to a halt following the exposure of police involvement in the kidnapping for extortion and murder of South Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo in December 2016. The ensuing public controversy forced Duterte to pull the police off his war on drugs and to make a show of “cleaning up” the force. Some 40 percent were accused of corruption and a score of officers were sent off to war-ridden posts in the southern Philippines.

While the police no longer reports the number of alleged drug suspects killed by death squads, the summary or extrajudicial killings continue albeit at a slower rate of about five per day, down from 30 murders a day.

Duterte has also moved to militarize and centralize the war on drugs. He has formed the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs composed representatives from 21 government entities, including the defense department, the armed forces, the national police, agriculture department, and even the education department.

Significantly, the social welfare department headed by the Maoist Judy Taguiwalo has also been included in the committee, underscoring the political complicity of the Maoists in Duterte’s war on drugs.

Nominally headed by the civilian Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), the military has assigned a 500-man task force to provide the “muscle” to the committee’s operations.

The real purpose of the war on drugs is to establish a vast police-state apparatus that will be used to suppress social opposition from workers and the poor. It is no accident that the vast majority of the victims of the war on drugs come from the poorest layers of society.

Social tensions are already erupting. In the same week that the police re-launched their war on drugs, hundreds of urban poor took over 5,000 units of unoccupied government housing at five sites in the province of Bulacan, near Manila.

More have followed suit. As of March 17, an estimated 15,000 homeless have reported to have occupied a total 8,500 units of empty government housing despite Duterte accusing them of “anarchy” and warning of brutal eviction.

Duterte is openly preparing for dictatorship. In 25 speeches and interviews since August 2016, he has either threatened to impose martial law or insisted he already had the power to impose draconian measures anyway. The president has repeatedly outlined how he could end the limits to martial law set by the 1987 constitution.

In March 24, speaking to the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce of the advantages of martial law, Duterte chillingly stated: “There is no more court. I do not have to go to the court to apply for a search warrant. I do not have to go the courts to secure a warrant of arrest. Martial law, just like [the dictator] Mr. Marcos, he used the aso (Arrest, Search, Seizure Order). It’s a cruel process and it is taken care of by the military.”

These preparations for dictatorial rule are being advanced as opposition grows to the brutal methods of the anti-drug war. Opinion surveys, while reported by the media as revealing strong support for Duterte himself, nevertheless indicate deep hostility to his police state measures and the danger of dictatorship.

A Social Weather Station survey conducted in December, revealed that an overwhelming 80 percent of the population feared that they or a loved one would be killed as part of Duterte's war on drugs. Some 94 percent wanted illegal drug trade suspects be arrested and kept alive. Over 60 percent declared that extrajudicial killing was not a solution but a serious problem of the current administration.

Even more revealing, another survey, conducted by Pulse Asia in January 2017, showed that 74 percent of the public disagreed with imposing martial law for any reason. Significantly, among the working class and the poor, it found that opposition to martial law skyrocketed from 12 percent in September 2016 to 76 percent in December 2016.

The ruling elites are acutely aware, that amid the growing danger of US imperialist war against China and Russia and the deepening crisis of the global capitalism, a social explosion of the working class and poor, internationally and in the Philippines, will sooner rather than later occur and are preparing accordingly.

Thousands of Australian asylum seekers face deportation

Max Newman 

The Australian government is threatening to cut as many as 30,000 asylum seekers, currently living in the country on insecure bridging visas, off their limited work and welfare rights unless they complete a 60-page complex legal application for a new visa within 60 days.

This could the first step toward mass deportations. The Liberal-National Coalition’s decision to send out “fast track assessment” letters to the refugees marks a further escalation of the violation of the basic democratic and legal rights of asylum seekers by one government after another.

As a result of the anti-refugee measures of the previous Labor government, some 24,000 asylum seekers who reached Australia by boat between August 2012 and January 2014 have been living ever since on temporary bridging visas, with no right to family reunion.

They are part of what the federal government’s para-military Border Force agency this month referred to as a “legacy of 30,000 IMAs [illegal maritime arrivals] whose claims for protection had not been progressed.” This reference to “illegal” flies in the face of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which enshrines the right to flee persecution, and not be punished or discriminated against for doing so.

Under legislation introduced by the current government in late 2014, some of these refugees can apply for two types of short-term visas: Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) or Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEV). However, as one of the restrictive conditions on these visas, they have been forced to wait for government invitations to even apply for them.

Now, many have been issued letters by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, given them 60 days, or in succeeding letters 30 or 14 days, to complete application forms that require detailed answers to over 100 questions, including specifying each address they lived at in the past 30 years.

If asylum seekers do not complete their applications in time they could be cut off their bridging visas, making them liable to indefinite detention or removal back to their countries of origin to face possible mistreatment, torture or death.

The Fast Track Assessment program was established by the 2014 legislation, which also expanded ministerial powers and stripped asylum seekers of the right to challenge visa refusals via tribunal hearings. Instead, appeals are conducted “on the papers” by an Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) panel, without the applicants having the right to produce new evidence or appear in person.

Since the IAA commenced operation, the asylum application success rate has dropped from 90 percent to 70 percent. The 2014 legislation effectively cut all funding to the Immigration Advice and Application Scheme, a legal service for asylum seekers. This forced many refugees, who struggle to read and write in English, to rely on non-government legal services, often staffed by volunteers, which have long waiting lists.

Kon Karapanagiotidis, CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, which has 1,150 people on its waiting list, told the Huffington Post that the government was “trying to create such terror and panic in people that they lodge without legal assistance” to “make it easier to reject and remove people.”

The visas for which asylum seekers can apply also violate basic right and international refugee law. They deny permanent protection from persecution, instead leaving refugees in legal limbo.

TPVs must be reviewed every three years, so that refugees are in constant fear of deportation and find it difficult to secure work and accommodation. Many are living in dire conditions, relying on charities, welfare payments set at 89 percent of poverty line unemployment benefits, and minuscule rental assistance payments.

TPV holders are legally barred from ever applying for any kind of permanent visa to live in Australia. Also, they cannot bring families to Australia, or leave the country without permission. The only purpose of these restrictions is to coerce them into leaving Australia.

SHEVs are even more oppressive. They were conceived as a means of turning asylum seekers into cheap labour, forced to seek work in rural or regional areas without any guarantee of minimum wage or conditions. If refugees work or study in designated zones in “regional Australia” for three and a half years without seeking welfare support, they will be eligible to apply for other visas, including permanent ones, “where they satisfy the relevant criteria.” That is, they must have nominated skills, employer-sponsorship or close family ties.

The plight of the 30,000 “legacy” refugees is the direct responsibility of the previous Labor government, which was kept in office by the Greens from 2010 to 2013, as well as of the current Coalition government.

These asylum seekers were the last to land in Australia before the Labor government reopened the refugee prison camps on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea in 2012, and declared that all future arrivals would be sent there. In July 2013, the Labor government then shut the border permanently, saying no refugees who arrived by boat would ever to be permitted to settle in Australia.

The levels of stress on asylum seekers forced to live on bridging visas, constantly watched and hounded by immigration officials, have driven a number to suicide, including a 21-year-old Rohingya man who had fled Burma as an unaccompanied teenager and set himself on fire on the floor of a bank in Melbourne.

The Turnbull Coalition government is now preparing to take that inhumane policy to its ultimate conclusion of removing tens of thousands of refugees from the country. Like the governments in the US, across Europe and around the world, Australia is victimising some of the world’s most desperate and vulnerable people often driven to seek asylum as a result of criminal US-led interventions and wars.

One in eight community college students in the United States are homeless

Bryan Dyne

A new study by the Wisconsin HOPE Lab has revealed that about half of community college students in the United States, which make up 46 percent college students in the country, do not have consistent housing and that 13 percent are homeless. In absolute terms, this means at least one million people trying to receive postsecondary education do not have a roof over their heads.

These results confirm and expand upon previous studies that have looked at college student homelessness, including earlier work by the HOPE Lab and studies done by the College and University Food Bank Alliance.

This estimate is an order of magnitude higher than the official homeless statistic of the US, which is 0.5 percent of the population, and more than twice the rate of youth aged 10-19 which face homelessness at least once during a year, which is just under five percent. It is also more than 29 times the official student homelessness rate recorded by the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), which is the only federal body that collects data on homeless students.

In order to clarify the disparity between the official statistics and the HOPE Lab survey, the World Socialist Web Site spoke to the Wisconsin HOPE Lab founder, Sara Goldrick-Rab. She noted that “The FAFSA is notorious for undercounting homeless students. First, students have to fill out the FAFSA, which many do not. Furthermore, since a homeless student counts as being financially independent, and thus is eligible for more money, FAFSA requires that they fill out a large amount of paperwork, essentially to prove that they are homeless. Since we just asked the students themselves, we captured a much better picture of the problem.

“Even our results, however, are undercounting the problem. Since it’s a voluntary survey, we are going to miss some people. We also do not count things like couch surfing as being homeless because that’s often considered something which college students just ‘do’. As a result, we include that in our housing insecurity statistics, which includes about half of all community college students.”

The latest HOPE Lab survey is the most widespread study of homelessness amongst college students and, according to the research done by the authors, is likely the only study that looks specifically at the plight of community college students.

One of the few comparable studies was done by the California State University (CSU) system, which included more students but only looked at California schools and achieved its estimates based on interviews with CSU staff, faculty and administrators rather than asking the students directly.

In contrast, the Wisconsin HOPE Lab sent a survey to more than 750,000 students across the country with a monetary incentive to garner participation. The final survey response was 33,934 students, making it the largest national study which focuses on food and housing insecurity among college students to date. While the nature of the study does not immediately lend itself to broad generalizations, the agreement between this study and all other studies looking at hunger and homelessness on US campuses suggests that the data collected do represent trends throughout all 50 states.

One thread which supports this hypothesis is that housing insecurity, which includes the inability to regularly pay utilities or rent or the need to move frequently as well as those without a permanent place to live, is not a problem isolated to urban or high-poverty community colleges but a largely uniform problem across the areas studied. Rural and urban community college students are equally likely to be housing insecure, but homelessness is actually higher for those students living in cities (15 percent) than those living in suburbs (14 percent), rural areas (11 percent) and small towns (9 percent).

Moreover, the data collected show that housing insecurity is unrelated to things like eligibility for Pell Grants or immigration status.

Of students ineligible for Pell Grants, 12 percent were homeless, compared to 16 percent for those who did receive a Pell Grant. The difference in homeless rates between US citizens and permanent residents was less than one percent. And while students who are African American or Hispanic both were overrepresented among homeless undergraduates in the study, the largest single racial category among homeless community college students in the study is non-Hispanic white.

Even the cost of attendance, which includes tuition as well as food, room and board, books, supplies and transportation, does not greatly affect the rates of housing insecurity. The community colleges studied with the lowest cost of attendance ($11,934 per year) had a housing insecurity rate of 50 percent while the most expensive colleges ($26,563 per year) had a housing insecurity rate of 46 percent.

The one factor that the study did find that impacts the homelessness rate is whether or not a given student was a former foster youth. Almost 30 percent of community college students among this demographic who were surveyed are homeless.

Similar to the previous studies, which looked primarily at the levels of hunger amongst college students, the current research shows that working or receiving financial aid does not alleviate the stress of finding adequate housing.

More than 40 percent of homeless students have a job, and more than half of those work between 20 and 40 hours per week. One-third of homeless students are receiving student loans. And, in another indicator of the financial distress among these students, one-sixth of homeless students are getting through college through credit card loans.

There is also little federal assistance for homeless students. To quote the report, “among students experiencing housing insecurity or even homelessness, less than 13 percent received any form of assistance with housing costs, and only about six percent got assistance with utilities. Even though 28 percent of students in this study have children, and of those 63 percent were food insecure and almost 13 percent were homeless, barely five percent received any child care assistance. Instead, the most common forms of support these students received were tax refunds (likely from the Earned Income Tax Credit) and Medicaid or public health insurance (e.g., via the Affordable Care Act).”

Venezuelan Supreme Court strips legislature of lawmaking powers

Eric London

Late Wednesday night, the Venezuelan Supreme Court issued a ruling stripping the country’s legislative branch of its lawmaking powers, ostensibly over the opposition-controlled National Assembly’s insistence on installing three legislators whose election was overturned over alleged voting irregularities.

The international corporate media has called the move a “coup d’etat,” claiming that the government of Nicolas Maduro has established a dictatorship. In a leading editorial posted online yesterday, Spain’s El Pais said the decision is “extremely serious, without parallel since Venezuela’s institutional crisis began” and marks a step toward the establishment of dictatorships akin to the US-backed juntas that plagued South and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. The US State Department issued a strong public condemnation of the court’s decision.

There is nothing progressive in Maduro’s maneuver, aimed at shoring up institutional support for a government that is deeply unpopular among the Venezuelan working class.

Despite its pretensions of promoting “Bolivarian socialism,” Maduro heads a capitalist state whose nationalist program has produced a social crisis leading to the impoverishment of the vast majority of the Venezuelan working class. Under Chavez and Maduro, the government brutally repressed social opposition in the working class, which has thus far taken the form of food riots and isolated strikes.

But the primary danger to the Venezuelan working class comes from those very forces denouncing the move as a “coup.” Beneath the surface of the intensifying crisis, US imperialism is gathering the forces of the extreme right in an attempt to open up the country to unfettered exploitation by the American oil companies.

The Venezuelan opposition, a right-wing mix of opportunist plotters and CIA assets, has responded to the maneuver by threatening military dictatorship. Proving their democratic pretenses to be a fraud, the president of the National Assembly, Julio Borges, told El Nacional, “We have to call on the National Armed Forces, they cannot remain silent, they cannot remain silent in the face of the violation of the Constitution.”

Another opposition lawmaker told the New York Times, “The people chose us through a popular vote.” But the popular vote did not stop the opposition from attempting to orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected Chavez government in 2002, leading to the deaths of dozens of demonstrators.

In recent weeks, the US has heightened pressure on Venezuela in an indication that the Trump administration is seeking to force Maduro’s hand and provoke a crisis that brings about the fall of the government.

Speaking in advance of an extraordinary session of the Organization of American States (OAS) on Tuesday, Senator Marco Rubio said the government would suspend aid to Haiti, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic unless the countries voted to suspend Venezuela from the OAS.

The Democratic Party-aligned press has led the way in calling for a more aggressive stance toward Venezuela.

As if anticipating heightened tensions, a New York Times editorial on March 29 said Venezuela must implement “macroeconomic reforms” aimed at opening up the country to Wall Street’s exploitation. “These proposals could become harder to reject if a large international coalition presents them to the Venezuelan people as assistance that should not be interpreted as an affront to their country’s sovereignty.”

On March 19, the Washington Post published an editorial titled, “Trump has an opportunity to correct Obama’s mistake on Venezuela,” which argued that Obama’s strategy of mediation with the Venezuelan government was “a feckless failure and that collective action is imperative to restore Venezuelan society.” The Post editorial encouraged the Trump administration to take a harder line against the Maduro government.

In February, the Trump administration launched a new round of sanctions against Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami, accusing him of drug trafficking and money laundering. Michael Fitzpatrick, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, said: “We need to act with urgency and clarity of purpose for indeed, as the saying goes, the whole world is watching, [The sanctions are] important for the OAS, which is fulfilling its responsibility to safeguard democracy.”

The move followed a letter signed by a bipartisan group of 34 US senators and congresspersons addressed to Trump, which read: “We urge you to exercise [your] authorities and send a strong signal to the Maduro regime and other bad actors in the region that human rights abusers will be held accountable for the misery and suffering it has needlessly brought to the people of Venezuela.”

When it comes to inflicting “misery and suffering” on the people of Latin America, nobody comes close to the United States government. Over the course of the 20th century, the United States has invaded the region dozens of times, overseen many coups, supported military dictators and right-wing death squads. Millions of Latin American workers and peasants have been killed to secure the profits of American corporations.

One US corporation, ExxonMobil, has a particular interest in Venezuela. The increased pressure is undoubtedly related to the fact that Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was ExxonMobil’s CEO.

In January, the nonprofit publication the Conversation wrote an article titled “Rex Tillerson’s long, troubled history in Venezuela . ”

The article notes that ExxonMobil and its predecessor Standard Oil have been exploiting Venezuela’s oil since 1921. Access was cut from 1976 until the 1990s and again in 2007 due to government nationalization efforts. In 2007, ExxonMobil refused the government’s offer to pay fair value for the company’s assets in the country.

The corporation has provocatively begun drilling for oil off the coast of Guyana in territory claimed by Venezuela for over a century. An ExxonMobil subsidiary recently signed a $200 million, 10-year contract to further develop its extraction methods in the region. The corporation has long set its sights on regaining unrestricted access to the country’s oil.

The intensified imperialist pressure against Venezuela marks a continuation and an escalation of the policies of the Obama administration, which included sanctions and heavy diplomatic and economic pressure. However the crisis plays out in the coming days, it remains within the realm of possibility that the corporate CEOs and military generals who conduct the day-to-day operation of government may eschew “soft power” diplomacy and opt for military invasion.

German foreign minister outlines European strategy

Johannes Stern

Anyone seeking clarification about the reactionary program behind the so-called “election campaign” of Social Democratic Party chancellor candidate Martin Schulz and a possible “red-red-green” (SPD-Left Party-Green Party) federal government in Germany should read Sigmar Gabriel's contribution on the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in the Rheinische Post .

Under the title “Fighting for a Stronger Europe,” the Social Democratic foreign minister and former SPD chief pleads for the rearmament of the continent both at home and abroad, for a strengthening of “Fortress Europe” and a continuation of austerity policies.

In the area of foreign and security policy, it is time “to say goodbye to the idea that we are not responsible for our own security in Europe. The sentence is correct: Europe finally has to grow up,” Gabriel writes. The partnership with the US and NATO are “cornerstones of the transatlantic community,” he says, but the European Union must be “able to cope with crises and conflicts in its own neighbourhood. The first steps have been taken, others have to follow.”

Gabriel is well aware that a more independent and aggressive European military policy under German leadership also requires the internal militarization of the continent. Europe needs to “improve its internal security,” he says. In order to justify the setting up of a pan-European police force he cynically raises the alleged “struggle against terrorism”: “Here, we can and must be better, through better cooperation and more exchange. The people of Europe should not be afraid. Whether it is in Brussels, Paris, Berlin or elsewhere—freedom and security go hand in hand.”

The fact that Gabriel’s priority has nothing really to do with “freedom” or “security” is underlined by his plea for an expansion of Fortress Europe. He seeks a “protection of Europe’s external borders, which really lives up to the name.” Within Europe, “borders have lost much of their importance,” and that is “a great achievement. But strong external borders are also a great achievement.” The foreign minister then made clear against whom the strong borders are directed: “We see, in the midst of the crises in our neighbourhood and the refugee flows, how important an effective protection of our borders is.”

Gabriel would be a poor Social Democrat if he did not combine the brutal repulsion of desperate people fleeing war zones in the Middle East and North Africa and the death by drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean, with vicious attacks on the European working class. All EU members must be prepared to “undertake the necessary reforms to maintain their competitiveness,” he wrote.

Gabriel justified his call for “European unity” as follows: “In this crisis-stricken world, where so many certainties have been lost, European states can only successfully defend their interests and values when they speak with one voice. No country in Europe, even Germany, can do it alone. Together we are so much stronger than the sum of our individual states. To this end we need to close ranks.”

To put it in a nutshell: only when Germany holds the continent together as “hegemon” and “taskmaster” (Herfried Münkler) can it play a role in world politics.

Gabriel is thereby pursuing Germany’s traditional world-power strategy, which had already been adopted in the Foreign Ministry under his predecessor Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD). Germany’s imperial empire (Kaiserreich) and the Third Reich had also tried to unite Europe under German hegemony in order to further its geopolitical interests.

At the start of the First World War, Walter Rathenau, the head of the German office for war supplies, had declared: “The ultimate leadership of Europe is indispensable because an emerging central power like Germany will always suffer from the jealousy of its neighbours to the extent they lack the strength to incorporate these neighbours organically…It is the German task to manage and strengthen the old European body.”

And Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop wrote in the guidelines for a “Europe Committee” established in April 1943: “It is already clear today that the future of Europe can only survive based on the full implementation of the pre-eminence of the Great German Reich. The safeguarding of this pre-eminence must, therefore, be seen as the core of the future re-organization.”

Shortly afterwards Joseph Goebbels stated in his diary: “It must remain the goal of our struggle to create a united Europe. But Europe can only undergo clear organization under the Germans. There is practically no other leadership.”

In order to once again bring the continent under German domination, the ruling class is preparing to sweep aside all of the democratic limitations it was forced to accept after two lost world wars, albeit through clenched teeth. According to a report by the Rheinische Post, Gabriel pleaded at a defence policy conference of the SPD parliamentary group for a weakening of parliament’s constitutional right to decide on the Bundeswehr’s foreign operations. For example, the EU’s participation in military deployment should not be made dependent on the Bundestag “because it may be just before an election.” This is an issue that “will challenge the politics of our country,” the foreign minister added.

A document from the German Society for Foreign Affairs (DGAP), notably titled “Europe—where are your Legions?” calls for a “Europe Division” of 20,000 soldiers set up by Germany, as the starting point for a European army controlled from Berlin. After all, “in the sphere of defence the main thing is the actual available military capabilities. Mere words about strength and responsibility impress neither Moscow nor Washington.”

Triggering of Brexit intensifies national tensions in Europe

Robert Stevens

The European Union (EU) and representatives of the continent’s major powers reacted with undisguised hostility to Prime Minister Theresa May’s triggering the Article 50 process for the UK to exit the EU.

The most significant expression of tensions came from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who responded--within hours of Brexit being triggered--by rejecting one of the main demands outlined by May in her Article 50 letter to European Council head, Donald Tusk.

May’s six-page letter stated that the Conservative government believed it was “necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the European Union.”

Merkel is considered one of the more conciliatory voices regarding Brexit among Europe’s ruling elite, given Germany’s shared desire for austerity and free market liberalism from which both major imperialist powers have long benefited. But shared support for economic liberalism was trumped by the need to maintain a united front of the EU powers to prevent Brexit being a source of political contagion spurring on nationalist sentiment across the continent. Merkel warned, “The negotiations [on the UK’s EU exit] must first clarify how we will disentangle our interlinked relationship. We must deal with many rights and obligations that have been linked to membership. Only then, later, can we talk about our future relationship.”

Outgoing French President Francois Hollande issued a statement in agreement with Merkel. His office said, “The President indicated that the talks must at first be about the terms of withdrawal, dealing especially with citizens’ rights and obligations resulting from the commitments made by the United Kingdom.”

Speaking later Hollande said his assessment was that a final deal would be “economically painful” for Britain.

The Thursday editions of several newspapers, which supported Britain remaining in the EU, summed up the crisis enveloping Britain’s ruling circles. Philip Stephens of the Financial Times, in a piece titled, “Brussels takes back control of Brexit: All the power lies with Europe and Britain holds no cards in the coming negotiations,” wrote:

“Until this week Brexit was about Britain. Now it is about Europe. A conversation largely focused on what sort of deal Britain would pitch for on its departure has become one about what the EU27 are willing to offer. To borrow a phrase [from the referendum campaign of the leave the EU wing], Brussels has taken back control.”

Stephens added, “Those in Theresa May’s government who have blithely imagined they can have the best of all worlds face a cold shower of reality.”

Outlining Britain’s “negotiating stance,” May’s letter warned that Europe’s security would be jeopardised if a trade deal favourable to the UK was not agreed. She wrote, “Europe’s security is more fragile today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Weakening our cooperation for the prosperity and protection of our citizens would be a costly mistake.”

The word security was referred to in the six-page letter no less than 12 times. The implied threat was that the UK would withdraw its substantial security and intelligence assets, as May followed the playbook written by US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to withdraw support for NATO if the EU powers did not increase their military spending.

The Brexit-supporting Sun celebrated May’s stance, with the headline, “PM’s Brexit threat to EU: Your money or your lives.” Its editorial stated, “[T]he Prime Minister would be crazy not to use our peerless anti-terror security services as a bargaining chip.”

This hostile opening gambit was made under conditions in which the US-led NATO continues to encircle Russia with heavy UK involvement, threatening war with another nuclear power.

The European Parliament’s Brexit chief, Guy Verhofstadt, was asked if May’s letter constituted blackmail. He replied, “I think the security of our citizens is far too important to start a trade-off of one and the other.”

On Thursday, he told Sky News that he opposed the “threat” in May’s letter, adding, “You cannot use, or abuse, I should say, the security of citizens to have then a good deal on something else.”

May and the Brexit faction of the ruling elite trumpeted last year’s referendum vote to leave as the springboard for the UK to “get out of Europe and into the world.” A newly liberated “global Britain” would be free to sign unlimited trade deals with countries and trading blocs internationally.

Verhofstadt was blunt in warning that the EU would prevent this while the scheduled two years of EU/UK talks were in progress. “We make very clear that we will never accept that behind our back the UK is starting trade negotiations with other countries before the withdrawal. The same goes for all member states of the EU who could be tempted to negotiate separate agreements with the UK,” he warned.

Not a single placatory statement on Brexit has been made by any senior EU figure. On every issue, the EU is taking the hardest line possible. The EU insists that no talks over trade will even be broached until the rights of EU citizens living in Britain and those of British citizens living in EU countries have been resolved. Verhofstadt also aligned himself with the Irish nationalist parties Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, insisting, “We will never accept a hard border again between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic [which remains an EU member].”

On Wednesday evening, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani told BBC’s Newsnight that nothing would be discussed in the EU/UK negotiations before the issue of how much the UK must pay in a “divorce settlement” was agreed. Figures of anything up to £60 billion have been estimated as a payment for the UK’s share of EU liabilities, minus the UK’s share of EU assets. Tanjani said he did not know how much the bill would be, “but I think billions and billions of euros.”

On the BBC’s Today radio programme, Manfred Weber, the chair of the largest grouping in the European Parliament--the right-wing European Peoples Party--referred to the UK as a non-European power to be treated in a hostile manner. “I have not the Russians’ interests in mind. I have not the Americans’ interests in mind. I have only these in mind who elected me.” He added, “I can give you a clear example for this--I don’t care anymore about the City of London’s interests. I will care about the interests of Amsterdam, Dublin and Frankfurt and Paris. That is what I have to do. These negotiations will be very tough.”

On the day May’s letter was delivered to Tusk, the EU competition commission blocked a long-planned £21 billion merger of the London Stock exchange with the Deutsche Börse. EU competition regulator Margrethe Vestager declared that the deal would create a “de facto monopoly” in “fixed income instruments.”

On April 5, the European Parliament--which has veto powers over any final Brexit deal--is expected to vote in favour of a resolution stating that a trade deal with the UK cannot be finalised until after its withdrawal from the EU. The resolution stipulates that a three-year time limit is applied as a transitional period to reach an agreement following Britain’s expected withdrawal in 2019.

Pentagon exercises free rein in global military escalation

Bill Van Auken

Two months into the administration of Donald Trump, the US military is involved in a relentless military escalation from the Baltic Sea in Eastern Europe to Central Asia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. The “war on terror” launched by the Bush administration more than fifteen years ago, having already turned much of the region into a slaughterhouse, is taking an even deadlier turn.

In extraordinary testimony to a US Congressional panel, the top military commander of US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia essentially laid out a proposal for the buildup to war against Iran, even as the Pentagon is steadily escalating a murderous bombing campaign that has killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria.

Gen. Joseph Votel, the chief of the US Central Command, told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that Iran “poses the greatest long-term threat to security in this part of the world” and demanded that Washington act to “disrupt [Iran] through military means or other means.” He added, “We need to look at opportunities where we can expose and hold them accountable for the things that they are doing,” while calling into question the 2015 nuclear agreement signed by Iran, the US and the other major powers.

Votel went on to present the case for an expanded US military intervention in Yemen, declaring that “there are vital US interests at stake” in this, the most impoverished Arab country, where Saudi Arabia and its allies have waged a near-genocidal war against the population using American weapons along with indispensable US intelligence and logistical support. The remark came as the Pentagon is preparing to back an offensive by the Emirati military aimed at capturing a Red Sea port that constitutes Yemen’s last link between the outside world and its starving population.

Finally, Votel told the US congressman that the Pentagon is preparing to substantially increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan—the US commander there has suggested that as many as 5,000 more soldiers be sent into the more than 15-year-old war.

In the same breath, Votel asserted that it is “fair to assume” that Russia is “providing some sort of support to [the Taliban], in terms of weapons or other things that may be there.” That no one has presented any evidence to validate such an assumption did nothing to mask the significance of the US commander’s remarks. The US intervention in Afghanistan is part of a military strategy aimed at confronting Washington’s key rivals for regional and global hegemony: Russia, China and Iran.

Votel’s testimony came just a day after the chief of the US European Command, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, told the same Congressional panel that he wants another full US armored division—as many as 20,000 US troops equipped with Abrams main battle tanks, infantry combat vehicles as well as missile systems and Apache and Black Hawk helicopters—permanently deployed on Russia’s western borders. In addition, he called for an increased presence of US warships near the country’s shores—“It would be wonderful to have a carrier support group with amphibious forces”—as well as the provision of “lethal” weapons to the right-wing nationalist regime in Ukraine.

Denouncing Russia for its “aggression” and “malign activities,” he described Moscow as “a very lethal, tough enemy.” Never mind that the $54 billion increase that President Donald Trump has proposed for the Pentagon budget is the equivalent of 80 percent of Russia’s military spending.

A week earlier, the head of the US Africa Command, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, called for the Trump administration to lift the controls restricting US military operations in Somalia to pave the way for a full-scale American intervention in that impoverished African nation. The AP reported yesterday that the Trump administration has granted this request.

Functioning as 21st century proconsuls, these US regional commanders are increasingly dictating the key elements of US foreign policy. This is not an innovation introduced under the Trump administration, but rather has built up steadily over the course of a quarter century of unending US wars under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

Nonetheless, there are increasing indications that the Trump White House, which has installed an active-duty Army general as its national security advisor and two recently retired Marine generals as secretaries of defense and homeland security, has given a free rein to the military in conducting lethal operations abroad.

This has found its starkest expression in the murderous offensive being conducted by the Pentagon in Syria and Iraq, with US bombs reducing entire residential neighborhoods in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, to rubble, and killing innocent civilians in attacks on mosques and schools in Syria.

Allowing new “rules of engagement” that make mass civilian casualties inevitable, Washington is unceremoniously dispensing with whatever “human rights” window dressing was attached to the US interventions under the Obama administration, even as it pursued the same essential policy.

As much was acknowledged by a former senior Pentagon official under Obama, Andrew Exum, who commented recently, “Potentially, by giving field commanders more leeway to exploit opportunities on the battlefield, the Trump administration can execute the Obama administration’s strategy more efficiently.”

While cynically lamenting the “tragedy” of this efficient slaughter of civilians in Mosul, US commanders have made it clear that new and even worse atrocities are still to come. “As we move into the urban environment, it is going to become more and more difficult to apply extraordinarily high standards for things we are doing, although we will try,” Votel told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday.

Earlier, the chief of US operations in Iraq and Syria, Gen. Stephen Townsend, described the Mosul operation as “the most significant urban combat to take place since World War II”, characterizing it as “tough and brutal.”

The bulk of the brutality is now coming from the more than 500 bombs that US warplanes have dropped on the city every single week this month.

Urban combat, it should be noted, has been a key focus of US military planners in recent years. Quoting remarks by Gen. Mark Milley, the US Army’s chief of staff, at a “Future of War” conference held last week, Military.com reported, “If war is about politics, it is going to be fought where people live, and ‘it will be fought, in my opinion, in urban areas,’ Milley said. ‘That has huge implications for the United States Army.’”

The terrorized population of Mosul—including an estimated 600,000 children—is being used as guinea pigs by the US military in preparing its forces for such operations, which it sees as inevitable given the vast social polarization created by the profit system. Such future urban battles, it is well aware, will be waged not only in war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East, but in America’s own cities.

What is most extraordinary is the absence of any organized opposition to the military bloodbath that is being systematically implemented, and that contains within it the seeds of world war. Within the political establishment, the parade of generals testifying before Congress meets nothing but fawning praise from Democrats and Republicans alike. The organizations that orbit the Democratic Party, and once professed opposition to war, remain silent or, more often, do what they can to provide the humanitarian or “left” justifications for imperialist slaughter.

In the final analysis, the immense power and influence of the US military and its senior commanders notwithstanding, the drive to world war is rooted not in the unleashing of the generals by Trump, but in the crisis of global capitalism and the irresolvable contradiction between world economy and the division of the globe into rival nation-states that is driving every capitalist power to rearmament and militarism, with Washington leading the pack.