UK General Election: Green Party offers no real alternative to austerity and militarism

Chris Marsden

The Green Party has achieved a new level of public prominence in the UK, held up by the media as a left alternative to Labour.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) praise it as the English arm of a potential “progressive alliance,” which, together with Plaid Cymru (the Party of Wales), can form an anti-Conservative bloc with Labour that will push Ed Miliband’s party to the left. The party itself speaks of a “Green surge” of new members, while its leader Natalie Bennett has been included in all the official televised debates as a measure of its growing influence.

This is designed to cause confusion as to what the party truly represents.

Its claims to a “left” agenda, even when taken on their face, are thin. The key measures advocated touch on the concerns of broad layers of working people, but they offer very little of substance.

Its manifesto “for the common good” promises an end to austerity, to “close the gap between the rich and the poor” and bring about a more equal, democratic and humane society. It contains a pledge to protect the National Health Service from “creeping privatisation,” initially increasing the NHS budget by £12 billion a year to overcome its funding crisis and then by 1.2 percent in real terms. It promises to renationalise the railways, decommission Trident nuclear weapons, abolish the “bedroom tax,” increase the minimum wage to £10 an hour, build 500,000 social housing units, cap rents, de-stigmatise benefits by introducing a “citizen’s income” payable to everyone, crackdown on tax evasion and avoidance and create 1 million public sector jobs, etc.

However, having made its electoral pitch to the millions of people suffering from increasing hardship, the party stresses that everything is “fully costed.” This guarantee is designed to fend off attacks from the right, but unintentionally exposes how limited the Green’s measures are in the face of the assault waged on the working class.

A £10 an hour minimum wage will only be achieved by 2020 and is offset by cuts to tax credits (state-funded subsidises to low paid workers). The “citizen’s income,” available to all and supposedly “enough to meet the basic needs of everyone,” is set at £72 a week—nice as a top-up, but not so great if you are unemployed and reliant on such a paltry sum.

In similar fashion, measures to be taken against the rich are exceedingly modest—a top rate of income tax of 60 pence on the pound above £150,000 and a wealth tax of “up to 2 percent” on the assets of the country’s richest 1 percent—300,000 people who are worth more than £3 million. There is in addition a promise to “curb boardroom excesses” by limiting salaries at the top of companies to 10 times those at the bottom.

No solution under capitalism

The problem for the Greens is that this measure, under capitalism, is just as much pie in the sky as its ludicrous proposal to reduce electricity consumption by a third by 2020, by half by 2030 and two-thirds by 2050!

It knows this, hence the manifesto’s final chapter makes clear that the Greens’ limited additional fundraising measures must be accompanied by multi-billion-pound cuts. An appendix entitled “It does all add up” admits to £16.7 billion in government spending “efficiency savings,” as well as a massive and unrealisable £15 billion cut on spending on major roads. The two figures are equivalent to the £30 billion cuts agreed by the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour before the general election.

The Greens in reality are a pro-capitalist party which, on all fundamental questions and with a few verbal caveats, defends the existing system based on brutal class exploitation, militarism and violence.

The party pledges a “policy of ‘defensive defence’, which threatens no one”, before adding that this policy “makes it clear that threats and attacks will be resisted.”

Significantly, the manifesto omits any mention of NATO. The Greens have previously said they were in favour of withdrawal from the nuclear bloc. It commits to maintaining existing levels of military spending at 2 percent of GDP, a central demand of the US-led NATO alliance. The manifesto even speaks of “enhancing the UK’s well-respected role in genuine peacekeeping and the protection of non-combatant communities”—the type of “human rights” jargon that has been used again and again to sanction predatory wars of imperial conquest.

The Green Party is also a firm defender of the European Union, which, together with the International Monetary Fund, is imposing savage cuts that have had a devastating impact on the working class in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere. The manifesto “recognises that the UK is part of Europe and that we cannot cut ourselves off from our geography or its political realities. … Much EU action has been progressive: safeguarding basic rights, peace and security achieved through mutual understanding, environmental protection, the spread of culture and ideas, and regulation of the financial system ” (emphasis added).

The picture can be extended to any progressive pose adopted by the Green Party. Naturally it does not oppose immigration per se, but what it describes as “involuntary migration”—by which it means the millions dispossessed by war and colonial-style economic subjugation. But after a lot of high-sounding phrases about ending such scourges, the manifesto reassures its readers, “We accept that these policies will take time to work and that we must address immigration as it is here and now. Some controls on immigration will be needed for the foreseeable future …”

The class basis of the Greens

The Green Party’s “left” turn is of recent vintage. It has its origins in a group called PEOPLE, before becoming the Ecology Party. Its founders in 1973 were Conservatives, who adopted the Malthusian outlook blaming overpopulation for the world’s ills that still exist to this day, without dressing this up in left phrases. It advocated slower economic growth “or better still no growth at all,” anticipating the end of civilisation within 20 years.

The presentation of its underlying ideology has undergone various changes since then, but it has remained at all times a party of an upper-middle-class layer. These are sometimes horrified at the worst excesses of the profit system and the impact this has on their own lives, but from the standpoint of blaming “people,” “consumerism,” technology and economic growth for society’s failing—and always from a position of bitter hostility to the working class and socialism, which are seen as a threat to their privileged existence under the existing social order.

Not once do the Greens oppose the right of the bourgeoisie and its corporations and banks to control society and misuse and plunder its assets. Indeed their philistinism and prostration before the unchallengeable edifice of the profit system is exemplified in the manifesto statement, “So it’s not the economy, stupid. Or at least not one that grows forever. The Green Party believes that equality is much more important than growth. And growth doesn’t bring equality; in fact it helps to justify inequality.”

The party first began to grow in size in the 1980s at the same time as other formations such as the Greens in Germany, finally taking the name Green Party in 1985.

From the late 1990s, the Green Party sought to emulate its more successful German counterpart by becoming more professional—epitomised by the ascendancy of the media-savvy Caroline Lucas to head the party. However, it did so just at the time when the ability of Greens everywhere to pose as an alternative was being undermined by the experience of millions with such parties when they took office. This was especially the case in Ireland and Germany, where Greens have imposed austerity and signed up to military interventionism.

With the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, and the collapse of the Liberal Democrats in the UK due to their joining with the Conservatives in coalition, the Green Party is trying to tack to the left. It now routinely stresses how “different” it is to other Green organisations and even boasts of being the most left-wing of all European Green formations.

However, in the one place where they have run a council in the UK, Brighton, they have acted exactly as their Irish and German counterparts. Lucas was elected MP for Brighton Pavillion in 2010 and Jason Kitcat was the Green Party leader of the council. The Greens presided over cuts of £25 million in their second Brighton budget and imposed wage cuts of up to £4,000 for refuse workers and street cleaners, provoking a bitter strike. Millions were cut from adult social care and children’s services.

As to how the Green Party would perform on the national stage, it is instructive that the one party in Europe they have been anxious to solidarise themselves with is Syriza in Greece. They praised its election victory as proof of the need for similar movements to stand against the “discredited economic model and failing Governments across Europe.”

Within a matter of weeks, Syriza has been revealed as a pliant tool of the EU and the IMF—ready to betray every one of its election promises as it prepares to implement a fresh round of savage austerity measures to funnel yet more billions of euros into the coffers of the banks. Should the Green Party ever be in a position of power, it would have no qualms in doing the same.

Bennett launched her party’s manifesto by urging voters to “create a peaceful political revolution” by voting Green. But this feeble rhetoric is framed solely as an argument against the actual social revolution that is required in order to end the domination of society by a ruthless financial oligarchy. That requires the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a socialist and internationalist programme to take power and form its own government—the programme advanced by the Socialist Equality Party and our sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Australian government to share intelligence with Iranian regime

Peter Symonds

The visit by Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop to Iran last weekend, the first in more than a decade, again highlights the role of Australia as a diplomatic point man for the United States in international affairs.

Having marched in lockstep with Washington in its diplomatic confrontation, crippling sanctions and war threats against Tehran over the past decade, Bishop’s mission was to feel out the possibilities for greater collaboration with Iran in securing US economic and strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond.

Bishop’s trip took place as Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarifn published an op-ed comment in Monday’s New York Times effectively offering Iran’s services as a junior partner to US imperialism in the Middle East—the role that it played prior to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the dictatorial rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. The comment comes in the wake of an international framework agreement to end the decade-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear programs.

Bishop’s main achievement was to secure an unprecedented “informal” intelligence-sharing arrangement with Iran that would include information gathered in Iraq in the war against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The US and its allies are already in a de facto alliance with Iran in propping up the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad against the Sunni extremist militias that seized large parts of the north and west of the country last year.

Justifying the intelligence arrangement with Tehran, Bishop declared the ISIS was the “most significant global threat at present” and had changed the geostrategic and political landscape in the Middle East in a way that no one envisaged. “And now the conversation we are having about how to cooperate to defeat this common enemy is not a conversation I thought we would be having,” she said.

The abrupt about-face by the Australian government simply echoes moves in the same direction by Washington. Having branded Iran as part of an “axis of evil” in 2002, the US is now seeking to finalise a nuclear deal as a step towards a possible wider rapprochement. Far from being a step towards peace, the US moves are in preparation for wider wars not only in the Middle East but Russia and China.

While providing few details of the intelligence-sharing arrangement, Bishop was optimistic that it would have major benefits, including to track down Australian citizens fighting with ISIS. “They [Iranians] are very present in Iraq. The Revolutionary Guard is on the ground, they are working with security forces. They are carrying out operations in Tikrit and elsewhere, they are all over the place,” she enthused.

These remarks highlight the utter cynicism with which the US and allies such as Australia exploit “human rights” issues. Just a year ago, Washington and Canberra were denouncing Iran, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp in particular, for propping up the Syrian “dictator,” President Bashar al Assad, while ISIS was part of the US-backed “democratic revolution” to overthrow Assad.

The new attitude was summed up by Peter Jennings, head of the government-backed Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who is well connected in military and intelligence circles. He explained in the Australian that it would be absurd to refuse to take intelligence from Iran just because it commits human rights violations.

“The only sensible response is to say we will do it and start a process of cooperation, and we will know in good time if anything useful for us or for them comes out of it,” Jennings declared. He also made clear that “highly classified Australian [intelligence] product” was not going “to be shoved over to the Iranians.”

The Australian government’s contempt for democratic rights was underscored by Bishop’s efforts to secure a deal to return Iranian refugees in Australia to Iran where they will face possible persecution and jail.

Former intelligence analyst and “independent” parliamentarian Andrew Wilkie was more strident in his criticism. He branded the Iranian regime as the “most ruthless and untrustworthy in the world” and declared that Australia was “dancing with the devil” by concluding an agreement with a country that used torture to extract information.

Wilkie’s comments reflect the continued opposition of sections of the US Congress, as well as Israel and other US allies in the Middle East, to any deal with Iran over its nuclear programs and other issues. That is likely why the Obama administration was content to allow Australia to proceed and absorb any public criticism.

The response in Washington to Bishop’s announcement has been notably low-key. US State Department spokeswoman Marie Darf simply repeated that the US was not coordinating with Iran on the ISIS threat and was “trying to get a little more information” on the intelligence-sharing arrangement.

The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson noted yesterday that Bishop would keep “the Americans fully apprised of what is happening.” He pointed out: “It is likely that the Americans will look favourably on additional sources of information which they, like Australia, can weigh and accept or reject.”

In reality, the US intelligence apparatus undoubtedly knew about the intelligence sharing deal well in advance and gave it the green light. The proposal was first mooted last year and discussed in October when Bishop met Iranian foreign minister Zarif. American spy agencies will gain access to any Iranian intelligence data handed to their Australian counterparts through the so-called Five Eyes sky network.

While she has been touting the benefits of the new arrangement for Australian intelligence, Bishop has been silent on what Tehran is expecting in return. When asked if Australian citizens fighting with ISIS could be placed at risk, she said she would not comment on “a matter of deep intelligence operational issues.” In reality, the Australian government has already given the green light to the US military to assassinate its citizens through drone strikes.

Bishop did refer to the deranged hostage-taker in the Sydney siege, Iranian refugee Man Haron Monis—a hint that information could be exchanged on the activities of other Iranian refugees in Australia. Such actions could have severe consequences for Iranian political exiles and their families from a regime that is notorious for brutally suppressing its opponents especially leftists and socialists.

With the proviso that an international nuclear agreement is finalised, Bishop made clear that her visit was just the first step in opening up closer economic and political relations with Iran. Australia would “very much value further dialogue,” she told Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Most US states saw jobs losses in March

Ed Hightower

The US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report on state and regional unemployment for March 2015 shows a deteriorating economic situation. Despite modest job growth nationally, non-farm payroll employment declined in 31 states and the District of Columbia last month. Only 18 states saw an increase in employment.

In particular, states and regions that once benefited from a boom in domestic oil production are now hemorrhaging jobs as a result of the oil price decline. States with the largest over-the-month job losses were Texas (25,000), Oklahoma (12,900) and Pennsylvania (12,700).

In percentage terms, the largest over-the-month declines in employment occurred in Oklahoma (0.8 percent), followed by Arkansas, North Dakota, and West Virginia (0.6 percent each).

The rapid job losses in Texas—America’s second most populous state with 27 million residents, with an economic output equivalent to Spain—has generated concerns in major economic and political circles. March 2015 is the first time in 53 months that the state of has showed a net loss of jobs.

JP Morgan Chase economist Michael Feroli was among many analysts who predicted a severe loss of oil-related jobs in the state in late 2014, earning him the ire of then-President of the Dallas Federal Reserve who last month, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, publicly dismissed such predictions with contempt.

Referring to the March jobs report, Feroli said if the national economy had lost jobs in the same proportion as Texas did, the US would have lost 304,000 jobs last month, an amount associated with a full-blown recession.

The slump in oil prices threatens jobs in other industries, including steel and automobile manufacturing. The steel sector closely followed the boom in shale oil and natural gas production over the past several years when higher oil prices prevailed. Globally, the industry has undergone a restructuring over the last quarter century that is almost without parallel, forcing prices down and destroying jobs and productive infrastructure.

On Friday, United States Steel Corporation sent layoff notices to 1,404 workers involved in producing pipe and tube products used in the oil and gas sector. The layoffs could come as early as June for 579 employees at a plant in Lone Star, Texas, 166 at a factory in Houston, 255 at a mill in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and 404 managers in the company’s tubular operations.

Since March, US Steel has announced plans to idle its Granite City, Illinois, factory that employs 2,000 workers, a tubular steel facility in Ohio employing 614 workers, as well as layoffs and closures in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

Ford Motor Company announced Thursday that it will idle 700 workers at the Michigan Assembly Plant in the Detroit suburb of Wayne starting June 22, citing decreased demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. The facility produces a number of vehicles in this category, including the Ford Focus, Focus ST, Focus Electric, C-Max hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid.

Sales of the Ford Focus fell 14.5 percent in March, and sales of the C-Max Hybrid were down 22 percent during the same period and by 31 percent during the first quarter. General Motors has announced similar plans for facilities making its more fuel-efficient models.

The United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers unions accept without question the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs by the corporate giants, with the USW predictably blaming foreign steelmakers for “dumping” steel.

The report on state unemployment further exposes the Obama administration’s lies about the supposed economic “recovery.” It dovetails with poor economic figures in recent months, including retail sales, industrial production and home building, all of which point to a deepening economic downturn.

Flush with more than $1.3 trillion in cash—and benefiting from virtually free credit poured into the financial markets by the Federal Reserve—major corporations are not investing in expanding production. Instead they are pouring billions into stock buybacks and dividends to benefit wealthy investors, and to fuel a wave of mergers and acquisitions that will destroy even more jobs. Meanwhile the workers who remain are subjected to unrelenting demands for lower wages and benefits and higher levels of exploitation.

Financial news outlets are now referring to “mega-mergers.” A case in point is this month’s takeover by energy giant Shell of the smaller firm BG in a $70 billion deal. ExxonMobil is also widely expected to make a bid for BP. Both the Shell-BG mega-merger, as well as any acquisitions by rival ExxonMobil, will serve to boost profits not through new investment in infrastructure, but through layoffs, closures and the lowering of labor costs.

While better-paying jobs in the US manufacturing sector are evaporating, what little job growth there is consists largely of low wage service sector work. In one sign of the deteriorating conditions for workers in these industries, a study by the University of California’s Center for Labor Research and Education released April 13 found that a majority of spending on public assistance programs goes to households headed by someone who is working.

“When companies pay too little for workers to provide for their families, workers rely on public assistance programs to meet their basic needs,” Ken Jacobs, chair of the labor center and co-author of the new report said in a press release.

Thus, at the state and federal level, the US government subsidizes companies that pay poverty wages, to the tune of $153 billion per year.

According to the report, workers in a diverse range of occupations systematically rely on public assistance, and in staggering proportions, including frontline fast-food workers (52 percent), childcare workers (46 percent), home care workers (48 percent) and even part-time college faculty (25 percent).

While Wall Street executives are making record bonuses, four out of 10 bank tellers in New York City are forced to rely on some form of public assistance because their wages are too low to survive.

French police arrest student on charges of plotting Paris terror attack

Kumaran Ira

A 24-year-old Franco-Algerian IT student, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, has been in police custody since Sunday on charges of preparing a terrorist attack. Ghlam, who was already known to French intelligence services due to alleged ties with Islamist groups, is charged with plotting terrorist attack on two churches in the Paris area. He is also being questioned about the killing of a fitness teacher on Sunday.

On Sunday, ambulance staff reportedly notified police that they had received an 8 a.m. call from a man with a gunshot wound to the thigh. Police tracked the trail of blood to a vehicle and said they found an assault rifle, a bulletproof vest, and ammunition there. Ghlam stated that he was the owner of the vehicle, and he was then placed under medical arrest.

Reports of the alleged “imminent” terrorist attack broke only four days after Ghlam’s arrest, however, when they were trumpeted to the mass media. On Wednesday, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve told the media, “A terrorist attack was foiled on Sunday morning.”

“Documents were also found and they prove, without any ambiguity, that the individual was preparing an imminent attack, in all probability, against one or two churches,” said Cazeneuve.

Cazeneuve also charged Ghlam with the murder of a 33-year-old fitness teacher, Aurélie Châtelain, who was found dead in the passenger seat of her car in Villejuif, just south of Paris. DNA at the scene links Ghlam with Aurélie’s murder, according to Cazeneuve.

Ghlam’s sister was also arrested in Saint-Dizier; French media claimed that she was a “known radical.” His girlfriend has also been held for questioning.

According to press reports, Ghlam had traveled to Turkey for a week earlier this year and was detained upon his return to France. Le Monde noted, “The technical environment (Internet browsing data, telephone, etc.) of this student had been drawn up and he was the subject of a ‘S file’ for State security, which means he was under police surveillance ‘that does not attract attention.’ ” After studying these details, however, police let him go, according to Cazeneuve, concluding they had nothing “to justify launching an investigation.”

Turkey is a frequent destination for the hundreds of European Muslims who are seeking to join reactionary Al Qaeda-linked Sunni Islamist militias in Syria, fighting in the French- and US-backed proxy war to topple Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Ghlam was reported to have posted notes on Facebook stating that he wanted to travel to Syria to fight.

On Wednesday, Cazeneuve dismissed concerns over French intelligence’s failure to foresee Ghlam’s plot though he was being watched. He told TF1 television: “The DGSI [General Directorate of Interior Security] did everything it had to do and proceeded to all the investigations that were required.”

People who knew Ghlam in France said he did not appear particularly unusual. He arrived for the first time in France with his mother in 2001 to join his father in Saint-Dizier. He had to return to Algeria in 2003 for lack of papers allowing him to remain in France, however. He received his high school diploma in Algeria in 2010, before returning to France the same year.

He was a student from November 2011 to June 2013 at the SUPINFO school of computer science, in Montparnasse. Students are selected to participate in the school based on good marks.

“He did not attract attention to himself, he was a normal student with decent results. We are very surprised to see his name in the press today,” one school official told Le Figaro. While the curriculum is five years, he left at the end of its second year, however. “He was around much less in his second year. He finally told us that he wanted to switch career tracks and go to another school,” the same official added.

Until his arrest Sunday, he lived in a room of a student hostel in Paris. A spokesman for the students’ representative body (CROUS) told AFP: “It’s the first time we’ve heard about him since he took that apartment, there were no complaints about him, he paid his rent normally, around 200 euros a month.”

Given Ghlam’s history and the peculiar timing of the government’s decision to highlight his arrest, his detention raises more questions than it answers about the political forces behind the affair. As with Mohamed Merah’s shooting spree in Toulouse in 2012 and the Kouachi brothers’ shooting at Charlie Hebdo in January, the suspect was under close police surveillance and apparently had links to Islamist operations in Syria that are supported by sections of the state.

Now, before his case has been publicly investigated, his detention is being seized upon to justify attacks on democratic rights and handing over even greater powers to the intelligence agencies.

The Socialist Party (PS) is seizing on the arrest to push for rapid passage of its controversial surveillance bill, currently being debated in parliament, that legalises mass electronic spying and intelligence-gathering methods under the guise of fighting terrorism.

“We must always improve our intelligence capabilities,” French president François Hollande said in response to Ghlam’s arrest, stressing that this was the purpose of the surveillance bill.

The new spy measures give intelligence agencies sweeping powers to collect phone and Internet data from phone companies and Internet service providers. It allows authorities to spy on the digital and mobile communications of anyone linked to a terrorism investigation, without authorisation from a judge.

Though the bill has attracted criticism from human rights groups and even from sections of the political establishment, according to Les Echos, these are now “winds that the Elysée presidential palace and the Matignon prime minister’s office hope will die down on May 5, during the formal vote.”

Dark Is Not Ugly

Sibtain Hyder

Laxmi Chandra, a dentist based in Jammu recalls how her classmates in college used to ridicule her because of her dark complexion.

“They never allowed me to sit next to them. Being dark in complexion doesn’t mean I am a lesser human. I am perplexed. People still continue to stress on this myth that white people are superior,” she said.

‘My relatives barraged me with words of contempt. My uncle even bought me a fairness cream and persuaded me to use it every day. For a woman, looking fair is a must in this country,” she added.

Subash, a 25-year old pass-out from National Institute of Technology Srinagar, has a similar deplorable experience to share.

The questions he faced from his fellows like “don’t you take bath? Look at your skin, you pollute this college,” he recollected.

Media strengthens the stereotypes. It plays a significant role in shaping our outlook. And it is dead on target. In promoting a brand or in highlighting social causes, objectivity is crucial. But in the contrary we see adverts and films promoting discrimination on the basis of skin colour.

Media tries to persuade us to believe that our natural skin colour is not good enough. Low grade workers or beggars shown in films are mostly dark-skinned. Advertisements of fairness products openly express that dark in ugly.

We have to examine culture in general. Fairness has always been considered superior. The films, advertisements are made for a commercial outcome. For a successful commercial outcome, filmmakers or advertisers will make a media product that is targeted to a certain audience. One could blame filmmakers or advertisers for their stance, but it’s all society’s fault. The questions are, Can society be changed? And what role should the media play? Media has become a money-making machine. We can’t get away from that fact.

I believe the only way to change views is to take education to the grassroots level. The government must utilise media to project a healthier viewpoint. Since the society we live in doesn’t have direction or motivation for the good, the short term prognosis will be poor.

You cannot promote something without comparing it with its inferior, like they do in advertisements. They promote a certain brand of fairness cream by comparing a dark-skinned person with an energetic white skinned one. Researches show that India’s fairness cream market is worth $450m and growing rapidly at the rate of 18 per cent a year. So far this year, people have used over 100 tons of skin whitening products.

People suffer from low self-esteem. Colour bias is still lodged in the society. It not only involves home or family but educational institutes and workplaces too. It has affected our relations. Discrimination lives in those who have continuously stressed on this concept. Education plays an important role in bridging the gap.

In the corporate world of today, every value, every great human virtue is trashed. Evil phenomenon like racial discrimination are being promoted as common brains already stand brainwashed to anti-human tendencies by today’s corporate culture.

Media, parenting, friend circles or lack of conscience, whatever may be the reason, dark is not ugly. What is ugly is the fact that consciously or sub-consciously our society is contributing to this hurtful social evil.

Net Neutrality Is Essential

Syed Ali Mujtaba

The internet’s privatization debate has intensified in India. It is hogging limelight because government is kite flying the idea to privatize the internet and allow the telecom companies to make money on customized services.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi has leveled the charge that Modi government that has come to power with the help of corporate money is now trying to pay them back their money by privatizing the internet.

The move is to allow telecom companies providing Internet services to create a VIP culture online by breaking the web into fast and slow lanes. They want to offer faster download speeds to rich companies who pay them and choke those who can’t.

The second thing is to allow telecom companies to have pay service for access to websites like WhatsApp, Youtube and Skype etc. This revenue model kills net neutrality, where all websites are treated equal.

Without net neutrality the richest 1% will control what we see online. Download speeds for sites that don’t pay the telecom companies will become so slow that it will be given up in frustration and any dynamic start-ups will be killed off trying to compete with giants with deep pockets.

Some argue that telecom companies are after all profit-making businesses so they should be allowed to charge what they like. But a free and open Internet is a public utility and a global consensus is emerging to keep it that way.

Remember, in the year 2000 it was contemplated to make the e mails a paid service. A huge public pressure was but that allowed this service remain unchanged.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has strongly aired his views in the Parliament. He has accused the government being anti-youth and trying to give away Internet space to corporates.

Rahul questioned, if the government favors net neutrality why it is holding consultation with Telecom Regularity Authority of India (TRAI). He linked the issue of net neutrality to the land acquisition law and accused the government of trying to hand over another resource to corporates.

Rahul Gandi demanded that the government should work out a law for net neutrality as over one million people are fighting for net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a principle that says Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should treat all traffic and content on their networks equally.

The internet is now a level-playing field. Anybody can start up a website, stream music or use social media with the same amount of data that they have purchased with a particular ISP.

But in the absence of neutrality, the particular ISP might favour certain websites over others for which extra payment is not made.

For example; Website A might load at a faster speed than Website B because the ISP has a deal with Website A that Website B cannot afford.

It’s like Electricity Company charging you extra for using the washing machine, television and microwave oven above and beyond what is already being paid.

The controversy erupted when in March 2015; TRI released a draft consultation paper seeking views from the industry and the general public on the need for regulations for over-the-top (OTT) players such as Whatsapp, Skype, Viber etc, security concerns and net neutrality.

The objective of this consultation paper, the regulator said, was to analyze the implications of the growth of OTTs and consider whether or not changes were required in the current regulatory framework.

OTT or over-the-top refers to applications and services which are accessible over the internet and ride on operators' networks offering internet access services.

The best known examples of OTT are Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, e-commerce sites, Ola, Facebook messenger etc. The OTTs are not bound by any regulations.

The TRAI is of the view that the lack of regulations poses a threat to security and there’s a need for government’s intervention to ensure a level playing field in terms of regulatory compliance.

The sort of closed Internet that TRAI is proposing, in defiance of the principle of net neutrality, is no longer on the discussion agenda in any country. They all have dumped such ideas in the garbage bin.

It’s the apocalypse of the Internet that offers democratic promise of the information highway to everyone. So there should be no discrimination in terms of speed, access, cost or any such criteria.

Net is basic requirement for human survival like food water and shelter. It can be used to build powerful global vision, it can be used to fight corruption, save lives, and bring people-powered aid to countries in crisis. Any demand that goes against the grain of net neutrality should be outlawed.

The Secret Country Again Wages War on Its Own People

John Pilger

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa.  Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide”.

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home, which revealed that thousands of Indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused, a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around the then prime minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The First Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

The government of the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programmes, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalised for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as eleven. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatised and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring (at a G20 breakfast for David Cameron) that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered, “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices.”

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want”. In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Both conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs programme, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century “chief protector of Aborigines”, such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media.  “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago.  The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its “normal” mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the blackfella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of “economic hub towns” satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

The last frontal attack was in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, said his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers”.

Known as “the intervention”, the media played a vital role. In 2006, the national TV current affairs programme, the ABC’s Lateline, broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 “intervention” allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 per cent lower mortality rate.

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness — aside from natural disaster and civil strife — is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”

In March, Barnett changed his story.  There was “emerging evidence”, he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands.  What evidence? Barnett claimed that   gonorrhoea had been found in children younger than 14, then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands.  His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife”. He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10 per cent.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “Fatal Burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by Indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death”. This “fatal burden” is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80 per cent of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International, “It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights — up to a point. On 12 April, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on Indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust told me, “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials — power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching “celebrations” of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops — the Anzacs — were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

In bookshops, “Australian non-fiction” shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defence of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

This is part of the “great Australian silence”, as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale”. He was referring to the Indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of Indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by he state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronised by politicians.  More Indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained “in care”; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

Last year, the West Australian Police Minister, Liza Harvey, attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which docmented the racism and thuggery of police towards black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an Indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children.  The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country”. They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention” , Abbott told him to, “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade”.

The planned closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources”. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An international  momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned”. It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.

A Psychedelic History of the CIA

Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

On June 17, 1999 the state of Texas put to death by lethal injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977 of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder’s case received more press attention than most executions these days, mainly because the Canadian government tried to intervene on his behalf and urged Texas governor George W. Bush to spare his life. Unmoved by arguments that after his arrest Faulder had been denied his right to consult with officials from the Canadian embassy, Bush sent him to the death chamber.

What went entirely unmentioned by the American press was that 37 years ago Stanley Faulder had been the unwitting victim of medical experiments partially funded by the CIA. According to Faulder’s sister, Pat Nicholl, who lives in Jaspar, Alberta, “At 15 Stanley was arrested for stealing a watch and sent to a boys’ home for six months. At 17, another theft got him six months in jail. At 22 he was caught in a stolen car and sent to jail in New Westminster, B.C. for two years. There, he asked for psychiatric help and was put in an experimental drug program which involved doses of LSD”.

Faulder was one of hundreds of Canadian prisoners who were experimented upon by psychiatrists in the 1960s and 1970s. The prison LSD program was run by Dr. George Scott, a staff psychiatrist for the Canadian Federal Corrections, who had served as director of the Canadian Army’s psychological rehabilitation department during World War II. After the war, Scott teamed up with shrinks from Allan Memorial Institute, including the notorious Ewen Cameron, to launch a variety of drug, electroshock, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance experiments, using prisoners and patients at mental hospitals as guinea pigs. The LSD for some of the experiments as well as funding for the research was provided by the CIA and the Canadian Defense Department.

Scott was stripped of his license to practice medicine. The sanction was not for dosing prisoners with psychotropic drugs, but for emulating Sandor Ferenczi by making passes at female patients. Even here Scott used drugs and electroshock to aid his seductions. According to court records, Scott used a technique called “narco-analysis” to manipulate one of the women into having sex with him. Narcoanalysis involves heavy doses of sodium pentothal and Ritalin. Scott used the pentothal, in combination with electroshock, to take his victim into a near comatose state, implanted erotic suggestions, and then roused her to consciousness with shots of Ritalin. This continued for a period of five years. Scott even prescribed birth control pills for the woman.

* * *

In 1969, Robert Renaud, an inmate at the Kingston Penitentiary, claimed that Scott had given him ferocious jolts of electroshock as a punishment for not cooperating with the doctor. Like Faulder, Renaud was in jail for theft and was not considered violent. Scott dismissed Renaud’s allegation, though films of the psychiatrist shocking prisoners from that time have recently surfaced. In response, Scott said he only performed electroshock once a week on prisoners who “were sick enough”.

Scott was sued by 24 women inmates who say they were subjected to his LSD experiments. One of the women who brought the suit is Dorothy Proctor. She was given LSD at the Kingston women’s prison in 1961–the same year Faulder was drugged. Proctor was a 17-year-old black woman, serving a three-year sentence for robbery, when Scott diagnosed her as a sociopath and put her in his experimental program, which included sensory deprivation (a 52-day stint in the Hole), electroshock and mega-doses of LSD. [The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2002.]

In a 1998 interview with the CBC program “This Morning” Proctor vividly described the first time she was offered LSD as she was in the middle of a long stint in solitary:

“The prison psychiatrist comes down to the Hole, and he has a student with him, a lady psych student from Queen’s University and she’s to take notes. He pulls up a chair for her and him, and they are outside in the hallway section of the cell, talking through the bars. I am on the floor, no mattress just a blanket. Then I am taken out of the cell that has a commode. I am now in a cell with a hole in the floor for my toilet. It had backed up so I am also in my own waste and stench. So he comes out and presents me with this, you know, we want to help you so much. We want you to correct yourself and we want you to rehabilitate yourself. And I am your friend, and you are worth saving. So just cooperate with me. And I have a pill that just might help you. I am going to rescue you. That was the LSD. I don’t think it was 15 or 20 minutes before Dante’s Inferno. It was obvious. I am locked in. I can’t get away. And the walls start to move in on me. And they melt. The bars turned to snakes and there was an awful vibration in my body. Just awful. And I just thought I had gone mad.”

Scott shrugged off the claims, telling the Ottawa Citizen in an interview in 1997 that he had no regrets about his activities. “I am happy with myself. I don’t give a shit.”

“Worse Than Benedict Arnold”

On July 1, 199 the Smoking Gun website put up 14 pages from more than 500 FBI transcripts and memoranda, showing that LSD guru Timothy Leary was volunteering to snitch, then snitching to the feds about his knowledge of the Weather Underground and almost anyone else Leary thought the feds might be interested in, including his former wife Rosemary, his attorneys and the wife of one of his attorneys. This was in 1974 when Leary was in Folsom prison in northeastern California, after convictions for a number of marijuana busts plus time for his jail break.

It’s not entirely fresh news that the late Timothy Leary was a squealer and a snitch to the FBI. The snitching was well known at the time. The FBI was eager to leak the fact that Leary, high priest of LSD and potentate of the counterculture, was singing about his former associates.

The news, the Bureau seemed to have reasoned, would spread fear and despondency and foster rifts. On April 4, 1974, the Chicago Tribune ran an FBI-inspired leak, headlined “Leary Will Sing”; and in the letters that Abbie Hoffman wrote in the mid-1970s, edited by wife Anita, To America With Love: Letters From the Underground, vitriol was poured on Leary the Snitch. Himself on the run after his cocaine bust, Hoffman wrote,

“I’m digesting news of Herr Doktor Leary, the swine. It’s obvious to me he talked his fucking, demented head off to the Gestapo… God, Leary is disgusting. It’s not just a question of being a squealer, but a question of squealing on people who helped you. The curses crowd my mouth. Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold.”

Leary’s awfulness was somewhat forgotten by the time he’d become a staple of the Hollywood gossip columns and before his ashes were fired off into the space that he roamed so freely in his acid-sodden years. Leary began his career as a research psychologist at the Kaiser Foundation in Oakland, where he developed a personality test to help the authorities classify prisoners, allocating them to various levels ofincarceration. (When Leary himself was convicted, he was handed the very test that he had devised years earlier, and thus was able to frame answers that put him in a minimum security facility in San Luis Obispo, from which he was sprung by the people he later ratted on.)

From Kaiser, Leary went on to become a lecturer at Harvard. It seems likely that the “Leary Test,” as it was known, had attracted the attention of the chairman of the Dept. of Social Relations, Dr. Henry Murray, whose experiments on Ted Kaczynski are noted below. Murray’s
“Thematic Aptitude Test” was being used by the CIA, which then took up the “Leary Test,” no doubt with handsome fees to both Kaiser and to Leary. By the time Leary got to Harvard Murray already had contracts with the Pentagon and CIA to test student volunteers (including Kaczynski).

Leary took the drugs to be tested and sallied forth to the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord, a maximum-security prison, where he embarked on experiments designed, so he said, to see if LSD and psilocybin could be successful agents in behavior modification. As with all research on prisoners, there were certainly other aspects Leary didn’t publicly own up to, such as investigation into the properties of these psychotropic drugs in interrogation.

The CIA helped spring Leary from his prison in Algeria, where he’d been consigned by Eldridge Cleaver, who had instantly seen Leary for the miscreant he was. At the time Cleaver put him in jail, the exiled information minister of the Black Panthers said, “There’s something wrong with Leary’s brain. We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire. To all those of you who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration and leadership, we want to say to you that your God is dead, because his mind has been blown by acid.” Leary’s wife Rosemary didn’t want to deal with the CIA agent who sprang them from prison in Algeria. For once Leary was on the mark. “He’s liberal CIA,” Leary told Rosemary. “And that’s the best mafia you can deal with in the 20th century.”

Kaczynski: Guinea Pig

It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Michael Mello, author of The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski notes that at some point in his Harvard years–1958 to 1962–Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of “a psychological experiment”. Mello identifies the chief researcher for these only as a former lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.

Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it through a fascination with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a father figure. After spending the 1930s developing personality theory, Murray was recruited to the OSS at the start of the war, applying his theories to the selection of agents and also presumably to interrogation.

As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously prosecuted the CIA’s efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the control of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s technical services division. Just as Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs.

Sometimes the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes, which culminated in Olson’s fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson’s children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after being unwittingly slipped a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.

What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment’s long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber’s homicidal rampages?

The CIA’s mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipitating agent never identified?

Bye Bye Labour

Richard Seymour

In David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning’. They do what ‘everyone agrees’ is necessary in order to win, but to no effect. Unable to work out why, they face the oncoming election much as they might a whirring propeller, and are left in shreds.

There is no tragic note to be sounded about any senior Labour figure today. Ed Miliband sacks his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, for conveying a ‘sense of disrespect’ towards the owner of a white van. Ed Balls, having given up his brief attempt at an attack on the coalition’s austerity policy, courts respectability by pledging to honour all the coalition government’s spending cuts. Rachel Reeves gratuitously alienates the unemployed and welfare recipients – groups she treats as identical, although the majority of people who receive benefits are in work – by insisting that Labour ‘is not the party to represent those who are out of work’. All of this is evidence of Labour’s clumsy move rightwards in the hope of expanding its base. What has happened instead is that chunks of that base have seceded to the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, the Greens or even Ukip. Labour does not lack popular policy initiatives, from repealing the Health and Social Care Act or the bedroom tax to freezing fuel prices and introducing rent controls. What it lacks is a purpose.

Labour claims that addressing the ‘cost of living crisis’ is what really matters. But having accepted the straitjacket of austerity, what can Labour really do about it? The longest decline in living standards in fifty years can hardly be uncoupled from austerity policies that have retarded growth and removed vital support from working-class incomes. Ed Balls’s promise to continue cutting means that Labour can at best tinker at the margins of the crisis. In some instances, as with its de facto agreement with the Tories that unemployment benefit for the under-25s must be scrapped, Labour apes Tory policy. Even if this achieved its stated aim, by forcing unemployed young people to find work for poverty pay, how would that improve living standards?

Worse, Labour has accepted Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public participation in it. And the British state, and its military commitments, are sacrosanct. In the months leading up to the Scottish independence referendum – the sole recent instance of mass, enthusiastic democratic participation in the UK – Labour found itself campaigning alongside the Conservatives, with the result that in May’s election it will be all but wiped out north of the border. The logic of its position has compelled Labour to attack the SNP far more vehemently than it has the Conservatives. Miliband has been forced, under Tory pressure, to rule out a post-election coalition with the SNP, which may be enough to end any prospect of a viable Labour government.

By degrees, Labour has come to accept most of the Conservative ‘vision’, not least because it lacks one of its own. The Tory Weltanschauung is complex, its racist and authoritarian flavours tempered by business-friendly cosmopolitanism and ‘free market’ libertarianism. It has taken only thirty years for Labour to metabolise the right’s ‘common sense’ about the market and spending, its repressive attitude to security and criminal justice (the prison population and police numbers expanded at a much higher rate under Labour than they have under the Conservatives; ‘anti-terror’ legislation and Asbos proliferated), and now its immigration policy. Shortly after William Hague became Tory leader in 1997, Labour took up the Tories’ rhetoric about asylum seekers and gypsies. Its response to the riots in the north of England in 2001, which pitted young Asian men against the far right and the police, was to blame local tensions on the Asian propensity for self-segregation. There were years of authoritarian exhortations to embrace ‘Britishness’. But, as the Blairite columnist Dan Hodges has argued, ‘trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.’ It also gave Cameron the opportunity in opposition to belittle the ‘Alf Garnett’ race politics of the Labour front bench and to pledge to ‘reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government’.

Judging from Labour’s painstaking recapitulation of Tory ideas, one would think that its main problem is the overweening strength of the Conservatives. Yet the Tory share of the vote is stuck in the range 30 to 35 per cent, exactly where it has been since Black Wednesday in 1992. The question of Europe has fatally divided its base, as a swelling coalition of small businessmen, lone traders and hyper-Atlanticist cowboy capitalists have shifted their loyalties to challengers such as Ukip. Big business, which traditionally dominates the Conservative leadership, may enjoy the fruits of Europe’s free-trade rules, but many small businesses demand the right to use cheap and precarious labour with as little regulation from Brussels as possible.

The roots of Miliband’s dilemma lie instead in a crisis of representative democracy that is not peculiar to the UK but is afflicting all the rich democracies. The context for this crisis is a rise in public indebtedness across the industrialised world whose proximate cause is the collapse of revenues resulting from the global recession and the subsequent need for unprecedented bailouts to rescue banks and prop up economic activity. But the problem is chronic; it was first detected in the 1970s. Among the root causes of increasing public debt are the slowing of growth rates compared to the postwar era, a demographic shift that has increased the size of the dependent population relative to the working-age population, and a displacement of manufacturing by service industries that are less profitable and thus generate lower tax revenues. But in the period of Thatcher and Reagan, it was argued that the postwar Keynesian consensus was the main culprit: it had distorted the market and driven up inflation, and state expenditure had outrun the productive base of the economy. Successive governments – Thatcher in the 1980s, Clinton in the 1990s, Schroeder and Blair in the 2000s – sought to reform the state to control costs. There were cutbacks in discretionary spending, and the public sector was restructured by the creation of internal markets.

The result was not a smaller state, or even a more efficient one (the introduction of internal markets in the NHS, for instance, has increased overheads from 3 per cent to 15 per cent of total costs), but a state that is more business-friendly and less democratic. And deficits have not significantly decreased in most cases. In the US, Clinton’s blitz on welfare and pro-Wall Street policies produced a short-lived budget surplus by the close of his administration. In the UK, governments have run deficits in all but six years since 1979, and even before 2008, the trend was that they were gradually increasing. Indeed, the surge in structural unemployment, used to control inflation and bust unions, has tended to exacerbate the public debt problem.

Wolfgang Streeck and Armin Schäfer argue in Politics in the Age of Austerity (2013) that one result of cost controls is to emaciate the budget for discretionary programmes, as more of the budget is consumed by debt repayments and other mandatory expenditures. Given the success of the rich in lobbying against tax increases, and in avoiding paying tax in the first place, it is increasingly difficult to raise the revenues needed for existing services. Taxes on consumption – which hit the poor hardest – have been implemented, but there is limited political tolerance for these. States are increasingly left with very little room to manoeuvre, while the growing domination of government discourse by neoliberal doctrine tends to suppress policy choices which are not ‘market-friendly’. In this situation, mild market interventions such as temporary energy price freezes might be possible, but nationalising energy companies will not be seriously considered. This narrowing of democratic choice renders Westminster politics increasingly irrelevant to the lives of citizens, except in so far as it panders to spite: the punishment of the obese, the disabled, Scots, single mothers, immigrants and so on.

Now that we’re expected to fend for ourselves, the expectations invested in parliamentary democracy have tended to dwindle, as has participation in it. Voter turnout has fallen across the rich democracies, most sharply among the poorer and less educated. The tendency is particularly advanced in Britain: turnout in general elections between 2000 and 2010 varied between 60 and 65 per cent, well below the 72.5 per cent average recorded by Streeck and Schäfer for the core economies in the same period. In the 2010 general election, turnout ranged from 44 to 72 per cent, with the lowest turnouts in the areas with the highest unemployment. The collapse in participation rates is much steeper in local and regional elections, perhaps partly in response to the centralisation of political power and the decreasing scope of local government to effect real change.

In Labour’s case, the collapse of its representative link with its base also has specific causes. The social basis of Labourism is the labour movement, and it is in retreat. Union membership has halved since 1980. The co-operative movement has shrivelled and the Methodist halls are no longer filled; the broader labour movement no longer produces a steady stream of orators and organisers. Even so, the accelerated rot of recent years is a product of New Labour’s period in office. The Blairites had argued that mass recruitment of new members would anchor the party to the mainstream, while a centrist governing strategy would help bind middle-class voters to progressive ideas. In fact, membership fell to the lowest levels in the party’s history after 13 years of Labour government, and the loss of five million working-class votes between 1997 and 2010 resulted in Labour’s lowest share of the vote since 1918.

Ed Miliband’s leadership bid was based partly on the need to reclaim the working-class vote. The first year of his leadership saw a brief revival in party membership. Yet he has struggled to reconcile his objective with Labour’s continued acceptance of the post-Thatcherite consensus – and of austerity politics – as the condition of gaining middle-class votes and the co-operation of business. The essential fallacy of British politics is that there is a large centre ground, and that this is where elections are decided. As Nick Clegg has discovered to his cost, in a period of economic depression this area has a tendency to shrink. Yet as the political situation polarises and the establishment parties feel the earth fall away beneath them, they cling ever more tightly to their belief in this centre ground. Labour is doing just this, as a matter of both principle and strategy. It is doing it because it thinks it’s the right thing to do, because it’s what the party is used to doing, and because it can’t do anything else.

Ironically, Labour’s electoral weakness may stave off the worst for it. The party is trapped in a spiral of self-destruction, which James Doran, a Labour activist, has called ‘Pasokification’. Greece’s dominant centre-left party implemented austerity and its vote collapsed from 43.9 per cent in 2009 to 4.7 per cent in 2015 – but Pasok’s fate is only an extreme form of the implosion threatening most European social democratic parties, from the German Social Democrats to the French Socialists. The Labour Party faces a dilemma in May. Defeat will be demoralising and will increase the possibility that the party will ultimately collapse. There is little evidence that any significant force, other than the Blairites, would be in a position to take advantage of Miliband’s loss, and certainly none that a Labour left with any influence would emerge from the ruins. Yet if it wins, Labour will be forced to implement an austerity agenda which, while not enough to satisfy Conservative voters, will turn its own remaining voters off in droves. That would be a defeat of a different order. For a vision of that future, one need only look across the Channel, at François Hollande sinking and sinking in the polls, and the Front National on the rise.