Austrian Chancellor Faymann resigns

Markus Salzmann

On Monday afternoon, Austrian government leader Werner Faymann announced his immediate resignation from all offices at a press conference in Vienna. As well as resigning as chancellor, he is also standing down as chairman of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ).

Faymann’s resignation is the result of a long rightward development of the SPÖ, which has led to a dramatic loss of votes. The highpoint of this development was the presidential election in late April. The SPÖ candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer, a longtime union bureaucrat, won just over 10 percent of the vote and failed to reach the second round.

Although the SPÖ has been almost completely ruined under Faymann’s leadership, he said in his resignation statement that he was proud of his “work for the country.” In a display of smugness that is hard to beat, he said that despite “structural deficits” the “social force of the country” had been strengthened. He said that wherever he went in Europe he was asked, “How did you manage that?”

Faymann took over as SPÖ chairman in the crisis year of 2008, and was elected chancellor shortly after. In coalition with the conservative Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP), he has pursued a strict austerity course at the cost of the working class. Under his government, the retirement age was raised, public jobs massively cut and wages curbed. Over the last five years, the number of unemployed rose from 300,000 to 475,000, meaning more than 10 percent are unemployed. At the same time, the wealth of those at the top of society has grown enormously.

Resistance to this policy has been expressed in one election defeat after another for the SPÖ. The Wiener Standard has shown that under Faymann, the SPÖ lost votes in 18 of 20 state, federal and European elections. A few days ago, Faymann was booed at the May Day rally outside Vienna’s City Hall. He only completed his speech with difficulty.

The right-wing policies that the SPÖ has pushed through with the ÖVP against all opposition have opened the way for the far-right FPÖ. This was particularly the case in immigration policy. After an initially liberal course, the Faymann government made an abrupt U-turn, sealed the borders to Hungary and Italy, imposed an upper limit for refugees, and eliminated the right to asylum, working closely with the right-wing government in Hungary and other Balkan states.

It was not only in terms of content that the Social Democrats have moved towards the right-wing extremists. In Burgenland, the SPÖ formed a joint state legislature with the Freedom Party last year.

Under these circumstances, the FPÖ candidate Norbert Hofer won 35 percent of the vote in the first round of the recent presidential election, and has a good chance of winning the runoff on May 22. For the first time since the founding of the second Austrian republic 71 years ago, an extreme right-wing ideologue could enter the presidential palace at Hofburg who advocates Islamophobic and xenophobic views, sympathises with the far-right Pegida movement and rejects the EU.

Faymann and the Social Democrats have responded to the electoral success of the far-right with a further shift to the right. In the meantime, for all intents they have abolished the right to asylum. The government can now impose a state of emergency if “public order and the protection of domestic security” can no longer be guaranteed due to high numbers of refugees. In practice, this means this takes effect when the ceiling of 37,500 immigrants per year set by the government is reached.

Faymann explicitly defended the right-wing course of the party when he resigned. It was right, he said, to end the “welcoming culture” and enforce a restrictive refugee policy.” It would have been irresponsible “not to implement our own actions,” he said.

With Faymann’s resignation, the SPÖ is moving even closer to the FPÖ. The main topic at yesterday’s meeting of the Federal Executive was the so-called realignment of the party. This outlines closer collaboration with the right-wing extremists.

At the end of April, Faymann had announced the creation of a “strategy group” regarding further dealings with the FPÖ. This is directed towards overturning a previously binding party decision from 2014 banning any coalition with the FPÖ. In practice, it has had no relevance for a long time. But ending the official ban on forming a coalition with the FPÖ would be a sign that the Social Democratic Party leadership is moving even further to the right.

Chancellery Minister Josef Ostermayer had already indicated the lifting of the ban at the weekend. “It could go in the direction that the various levels—municipalities, federal states—decide themselves whether cooperation makes sense,” Ostermayer told the Österreich newspaper.

The Burgenland Social Democrats, who already govern together with the Freedom Party, had spoken out before becoming aware of Faymann’s resignation, saying it made sense to end the “exclusion” of the FPÖ at the federal level. Faction leader Robert Hergovich said on Monday in Eisenstadt: “We do not believe in leaving a strategic advantage to the ÖVP, by saying that we will work with no one but the ÖVP.” He said the time was “now ripe to formulate these pragmatic positions.”

Governor Hans Niessl (SPÖ), who has governed together with the FPÖ since last year, told the broadcaster Ö1 that it concerned the future of social democracy. Not everything was sorted out by changing one person, he said. It also concerned the future attitude of the SPÖ towards the FPÖ. Something had to change there, he said. The Social Democratic mayor of Steyr, Gerald Hackl, also stressed the “points of intersection” with the FPÖ, and called for cooperation.

Those calling most vehemently for a further sharp shift to the right are the trade unions. Erich Foglar, head of the Austrian Trade Union Federation (ÖGB), pleaded expressly for collaboration with the ultra-right. He told news magazine profil that a “government coalition with the FPÖ could not be ruled out.” According to Foglar, there was “nothing objectionable” in an alliance with a party that advocates an openly xenophobic and nationalist programme.

In a guest commentary for profil, Josef Muchitsch (chairman of the construction workers union) railed against “left-wing dreamers” in the SPÖ and demanded Faymann’s resignation in order to facilitate moves towards the FPÖ. “The policy of exclusion towards the FPÖ is a mistake,” he wrote. “Demarcation where it is understandable, but general exclusion, no. If there are reasonable people at the municipal and state level in the FPÖ who support us in implementing our policies, that should not be prevented.”

The resignation of Faymann and the closer collaboration of the SPÖ and FPÖ heralds the final stage in the decline of the Austrian Social Democrats.

Fascistic candidate Rodrigo Duterte wins Philippine presidential election

Joseph Santolan

Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of the southern Philippine city of Davao and long-time head of the city’s death squads that have executed over 1,400 people in the past 20 years, was elected president of the Philippines yesterday.

With over 75 percent of the votes tabulated last night, Duterte had received more than 15 million votes. His nearest contender, Mar Roxas, had obtained just over nine million; Grace Poe, 8.5 million; and Jejomar Binay, five million.

Poe has already conceded Duterte’s victory, staging a televised press conference after midnight to announce her concession.

While neither Binay nor Roxas had conceded as of press time, Duterte’s victory is being acknowledged universally in the Philippine media as a foregone conclusion. Duterte will thus become president having received approximately 38 percent of the vote.

The vice-presidential race is the tightest in Philippine history. Leni Robredo, closely associated with the outgoing Aquino administration, and Ferdinand Marcos Junior, son of the late dictator, are polling within a percentage point of each other. It is likely to be some time before this race is finally resolved.

Elections in the Philippines are violent and corrupt affairs. The 2016 election was no exception. An estimated 50 people were killed in election-related violence from January 10. The reports vary, but an additional 13 to 18 people are estimated to have been killed in poll violence on election day.

The past six years of outgoing President Benigno Aquino’s administration have been shaped above all by Washington’s drive to war with China. Under its so-called “pivot to Asia,” the Obama administration has escalated tensions in the region to the brink of war.

Under Aquino, Manila has functioned as a leading proxy of Washington in this confrontation. Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), the Aquino government arranged for the restoration of US military bases in the country. Manila filed a legal case in The Hague, which was drawn up by Washington, against China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. With the full support of Washington, Aquino has staged repeated military provocations in the disputed waters.

In the face of explosive social tensions and the threat of global war, elections around the world have become exceedingly volatile affairs. The political representatives of the bourgeoisie are moving sharply to the right.

Duterte is the embodiment of this trend in the Philippines. War and dictatorship are on the agenda of the entire bourgeoisie. Not a single candidate presented any alternative to this. Duterte, however, gave this drive within the ruling class its most openly fascistic expression.

Duterte repeatedly pledged that he would launch a campaign to kill alleged criminals throughout the country upon his election. He declared he would “dump” 100,000 corpses in Manila Bay. If workers in an export-processing zone attempted to form a union, he asserted he would kill them.

Washington has no objections to Duterte’s fascistic politics, but Duterte is also an unstable and volatile figure. He has alternated between calling for bilateral negotiations with Beijing to solicit massive investment from China, to calling for mandatory military service for all youth in preparation for war with China.

Of the rival candidates, Washington would have preferred either Roxas, the former investment banker from a long-standing political dynasty, or Poe, whose husband was recently revealed to have been a contractor for a private intelligence firm based in the United States working for the CIA.

Binay represented sections of the Philippine bourgeoisie who are concerned that Washington’s drive against China is bad for business. Binay was not opposed to the basing of US forces in the country, but did seek a more conciliatory approach to Beijing and looked to scaling back Aquino’s confrontational moves. He was polling well ahead of his political rivals until a series of corruption scandals undermined his campaign.

Washington sees Manila’s legal case against China as a bellwether for the political allegiance of the new administration. The elected president will assume office on June 30. The International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) is expected to hand down a decision before that date. Washington intends to use the ITLOS verdict as a legal pretext to dramatically escalate pressure on China in the South China Sea. The US government will expect its proxy in Manila to lead the charge in this matter.

Duterte will toe Washington’s line or his presidency will not last long. In an early indication that Duterte intends to follow Washington’s dictates, he announced today that problems in the South China Sea should be resolved through multilateral negotiations, which should include Japan, Australia and the United States. China has long insisted that problems should be resolved through bilateral negotiations, while Washington has demanded multilateral negotiations to which it would be a party.

Washington is already carefully eying Duterte’s intended cabinet. Ernie Bower, senior adviser for the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Reuters on May 9: “If he selects technocrats with experience, good track records and strong networks, it may not be as bad as the campaign rhetoric suggested.” Drawing a parallel between Duterte and US Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump, Bower stated: “The fear and anxiety come from the fact that we just don’t know—and neither Duterte nor Trump seem to know—who they would include in their cabinet teams if elected.”

Duterte gave an initial sense of his intended administration in an interview on election day. He told the press he would staff his cabinet with “military men.” He also said he intended to revise the constitution to ease rules limiting foreign ownership in the country. “I will open investments. If possible, in every region, I’ll have economic zones. And the foreigners can come, and they’ll have the same protection. I guarantee them profits that will be swiftly returned to them.”

Responsibility for Duterte’s successful political career, which has now culminated in his election as president, rests with the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), a nationalist and anti-working class organization.

From his early days as mayor of Davao and the head of the Davao Death Squads, the CPP’s New People’s Army (NPA) consistently provided Duterte with support. Duterte’s campaign manager was a former high-ranking member of the CPP.

Duterte has repeatedly styled his fascistic politics as “leftism.” The CPP has endorsed these phrases. In the weeks leading up to the election, the NPA on two occasions staged ceremonies, turning over captured police officers to the Philippine government in the person of Duterte, providing him the chance to pose with the NPA in front of a hammer and sickle flag.

Jose Ma. Sison, founder and head of the CPP, staged a meeting over Skype with Duterte, which was then published on the Internet. Sison stated how excited he was at the prospect of peace talks between the NPA and a Duterte administration. He announced that if Duterte were elected, he would return to the Philippines after 30 years of exile in the Netherlands.

Sison was the first public figure to hail Duterte’s election. He issued a statement within an hour of the closing of the polls, which was published in the Inquirer, the leading Philippine daily paper. Sison extended his “warmest congratulations” to Duterte. Sison said he “now looked forward to further conversations with President Duterte to arrange an immediate ceasefire, release of all the political prisoners, my return home and acceleration of the peace negotiations. Let us have as goal a government of national unity, peace and development.”

Carlos Zarate, representative of the CPP’s front organization Bayan Muna, likewise endorsed Duterte’s victory, hailing it as “phenomenal” and stating that it “changes radically the politics in the Philippines.”

UK prime minister invokes militarism and war to argue for EU membership

Julie Hyland

In a speech pledging to ensure “peace”, Prime Minister David Cameron’s argument for Britain remaining in the European Union (EU) was all about preparing for war.

Speaking at the British Museum Monday, the Conservative Party leader set out what he described as a “big, bold patriotic case” for voters supporting continued UK membership of the EU in the June 23 referendum. While claiming to “respect” their views, he made a bellicose attack on supporters of a Brexit (British exit)—especially those within his own party—for endangering not only Britain’s “national interest” but the future of NATO and the security of the West.

Cameron made clear that he was speaking not only on behalf of the UK, but for all the major imperialist powers. Referencing President Barack Obama’s public intervention in favour of a Remain vote during his visit to London on April 22, Cameron said the US leader had made “plain” the standpoint of “our principal and indispensable ally, the guarantor of our security…as only the oldest and best friends can.”

Support for a Remain vote was the “clear view” of all the UK’s “allies”, he warned, from Australia, New Zealand and Japan to Britain’s “major new trading and strategic relationships—China and India. …”

The secretary-general of NATO had said that a weakened and divided Europe would be “bad for security and bad for NATO,” he continued. Over the weekend, former UK intelligence chiefs Sir John Sawers, (MI6) and Lord Jonathan Evans (MI5) had added their voices to the calls by Britain’s former military chiefs for a Remain vote. UK membership of the EU was “not just about the day-to-day cooperation, it’s about the wider stability of our continent,” Sawers said.

These military considerations dominated the prime minister’s remarks. The economic arguments made by his opponents in favour of a Leave vote were dealt with more briefly, with Cameron accusing them of taking a “leap in the dark” by failing to answer what would replace UK trade relations with the EU.

Despite arguing against the risk of turning the clock “back to an age of competing nationalisms in Europe” by a British exit (Brexit), Cameron’s presentation of UK-European relations centred entirely on glorifying past national conflicts.

The UK had shaped European history for 2,000 years, entirely—according to his account—through war. “From Caesar’s legions to the wars of the Spanish Succession, from the Napoleonic Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Britain had helped write the history of Europe, he said, before listing military battles against France and Germany from 1704 through to the Second World War.

Evoking Churchill, Cameron spoke of the “character of the British people”, this “island nation”, “our island story”, as being “special, different, unique” especially for not having “been invaded for almost a thousand years.”

“[M]y heart swells with pride”, he continued, “whenever I hear the tell-tale roar of a Spitfire engine” that had done battle with the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War.

Cameron’s extolling of British patriotism and militarism was not purely for domestic consumption. It was intended to reassure Washington that the British bourgeoisie remains its most valuable asset in ensuring that the EU continues to toe the US line—especially regarding militarism and war.

The years before the UK joined the then-European Economic Community in 1973 had seen British governments preside over “a steady retrenchment of our world role, borne of our economic weakness,” he said. In 1956, the Suez crisis—an attempted British/French intervention into Egypt—saw Britain forced to beat a humiliating retreat under US instruction while it also abandoned “our aircraft carriers”.

“[Starting] with the transformation of our economy by Margaret Thatcher” in 1979, “we have turned around our fortunes”, he said. As a result, the UK had waged wars in Iraq, the Malvinas, Afghanistan, and Syria, was “building permanent military bases in the Gulf”, “flying policing missions over the Baltic states”, renewing its independent nuclear deterrent, and building two new aircraft carriers—”the biggest warships the Royal Navy has ever put to sea.”

It was UK membership of the EU, alongside NATO, the Commonwealth and the Five Power Defence Agreement with Australia and New Zealand that enabled the “amplification” of British power, Cameron said.

This was the preamble to his warning of a fresh existential threat to the European continent. He asked rhetorically, is “peace and stability on our continent” assured “beyond any shadow of doubt?”

Although he cited the terror threat posed by Islamic State to justify a further European-wide assault on democratic rights, he made clear that the main danger was what he described as a “newly belligerent Russia.”

It was barely 20 years since war in the Balkans, he said, and, more recently, “we have seen tanks rolling into Georgia and Ukraine.” Such threats require a “shared approach by the European democracies,” he continued, evoking the Cold War and NATO’s formation, under US auspices, against the Soviet Union in 1949.

British exit from the EU would mean abandoning “the Poles, the Czechs, the Baltic States and the other countries of central and eastern Europe which languished for so long behind the Iron Curtain.” These nations “view the prospect of Britain leaving the EU with utter dismay. They watch what is happening in Moscow with alarm and trepidation.

“Now is a time for strength in numbers. Now is the worst possible time for Britain to put that at risk. Only our adversaries will benefit.”

Cameron’s presentation turns reality on its head. The liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 by the Stalinist bureaucracy was the signal for a scramble by the major powers—led by the US—to regain access to territory, raw materials, labour and markets that had been lost to them due to the October 1917 revolution.

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars of the 1990s were precipitated by the NATO powers—foremost the US and Germany. Under the banner of “humanitarian intervention” and “national self-determination”, they encouraged intercommunal conflict and carried out the bombing of Serbia—aimed at transforming the Balkans into a de facto NATO protectorate.

Likewise, in Ukraine, it was the US and the EU that instigated the 2014 right-wing putsch in Kiev to install a virulently anti-Russian regime.

This drive to encircle, weaken and ultimately dismember Russia is resulting in the greatest remilitarisation of Europe since the Second World War. Only last week, Washington used the change of command at its European Command HQ in Germany to step up its provocations against Moscow—including plans to deploy a third US armoured brigade combat team near the Russian border and more funds for “war fighting equipment.”

Describing a “resurgent Russia” as a greater threat to American interests than terrorism, newly installed Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said the 60,000 or so US troops deployed in Europe must be prepared “to fight tonight if the deterrence fails.”

Cameron has solidarised fully with these threats against Russia. In doing so, he warned that without Britain’s membership of the EU, there was no guarantee that Washington and NATO would be able to count on future European backing for its provocations. There had been a “real risk of a feeble European response, and of a split between the United States and Europe” in response to the Ukraine crisis, he said. But Britain had injected “steel into Europe’s action,” ensuring effective sanctions against Russia through the EU and thus ensuring “crucial unity between Europe and the US in the face of Russian aggression.”

The UK had played the same role in pushing “hardest” for the implementation of an EU oil embargo against Iran.

Although he did not state so explicitly, Cameron’s claims were directed against France and Germany.

Without UK membership there would be no one to prevent Europe from “becoming a protectionist bloc” or “pushing for political union,” Cameron said.

If the Leave vote went through, the UK would be left “outside the room” while the leaders of Germany, France, Italy, “the Maltese, the Slovak, the Czech, the Polish, the Slovene” took the decisions that would “have a direct bearing on Britain”—the implication being that none of them could be trusted.

EU plans decades of austerity for Greece

Alex Lantier

After the unanimous vote by Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) parliamentarians Sunday to impose a new package of €7.2 billion in pension cuts and tax increases, the euro group of euro zone finance ministers met yesterday in Brussels to discuss plans for restructuring Greek debt.

The meeting came after a three-day strike by broad sections of the working class in Greece against the austerity measures imposed by Syriza and the European Union. Anger is growing against Syriza, which has time and again betrayed its election promises to end EU austerity. After the latest cuts, which boost regressive value-added taxes as well as income taxes for low-paid workers and small businesses, the minimum state pension will fall from €450 to an even more miserable €382 per month.

Initial reports of the plans being discussed in Brussels show that what Syriza is trying to negotiate with the EU is a framework for imposing decades of harsh austerity on Greece. In exchange for extending Greece’s debt maturities and capping interest rates and yearly debt payments, the euro group is demanding that Syriza adopt “contingent measures” to automatically impose more austerity if it has any problem meeting its debt repayment schedule. Moreover, the euro group will not fully engage the debt restructuring process until the end of the current bailout scheme in 2018.

These austerity measures are apparently intended to continue for decades in order to bring Greek debt from over 170 percent to 74 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2060.

EU officials made clear that there would be no final deal reached Monday on restructuring Greece’s unsustainable debt. “Today we will only have a first discussion on what, when, if and how the debt sustainability or debt relief measures could take place,” Dutch finance minister and euro group president Jeroen Dijsselbloem said as he arrived at the meeting.

Nonetheless, EU officials indicated that Syriza had largely agreed to “contingent measures” prescribing new austerity to ensure that Greece continues to service its debt. European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici said, “A deal needs to address three issues: reforms, we are there; the contingency mechanism, we are almost there; and the debt issue, we are starting the discussion.”

Syriza also reportedly abandoned its objections to EU demands that it run a massive budget surplus to raise funds equivalent to 3.5 percent of Greek GDP to service its debt. Though this measure is so harsh that even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) objected that it was unrealistic, Syriza plans to abide by it.

Syriza officials tried to present this deal as a victory for Greece. “We have an important opportunity before us for the country to break this vicious cycle and enter a virtuous cycle,” said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos declared, “This was a very good euro group for Greece, and I think a very good euro group for Europe.”

In fact, under cover of restructuring Greece’s debt, Syriza is preparing for the imposition of lasting and drastic austerity to further impoverish the working class.

The French business magazine La Tribune wrote: “The vicious circle of unreachable objectives and endless austerity is not broken but reinforced by the ‘contingent measures.’ Behind Alexis Tsipras’ cries of victory, this worrying fact should not be forgotten… It is not certain that exchanging debt restructuring for intensified austerity and surveillance is a good deal, and the Greek government may prove to have obtained only a Pyrrhic victory.”

The close collaboration between the EU and Syriza to impose more austerity on the working class has once again vindicated the warnings made by theWorld Socialist Web Site about Syriza even before it came to power in the January 2015 elections. It is obvious to ever-broader sections of workers in Greece and internationally that Syriza is a reactionary bourgeois party, an instrument of the Greek ruling establishment committed to defend the EU and Greek capitalism. Workers can defend their basic social rights only in revolutionary struggle against Syriza and all its political allies and defenders.

A recent report in the German financial daily Handelsblatt underscores that the EU bailout of Greece was never a program to help the Greek working masses, who lost far more from austerity measures than any benefit they received, but rather a subsidy to the major European banks stolen from European taxpayers. The hundreds of billions that have been spent since 2009 went overwhelmingly to repaying Greek sovereign debt held by European—and primarily French and German—banks.

Of the €215.9 billion spent on the Greek bailout by the European institutions, only €9.7 billion (less than 5 percent) went to the coffers of the Greek government, Handelsblatt reported. Of the rest, €86.9 billion went to service debt, €52.3 billion to interest payments, and €37.3 billion to rescue Greek banks.

“The aid packages were first and foremost used to rescue European banks,” European School of Management and Technology President Jörg Rocholl told Handelsblatt. “The European taxpayers have bailed out the private investors,” he added.

Syriza’s unanimous vote to impose more austerity on Greek workers as part of this bailout scheme testifies to the utterly reactionary role of its brand of pseudo-left politics.

At a meeting of the Syriza parliamentary fraction on Friday, Tsipras unabashedly came out in favour of the austerity measures he came to power claiming to oppose, cynically arguing that this was the only way to discharge Syriza’s duty to save Greece’s welfare system from collapse. Calling the cuts “progressive changes,” he said, “Our goal is not simply to complete the review by the lenders—that could be, as in earlier years, easily achieved—but to stick to our own obligations in full.”

The so-called “Group of the 53” inside Syriza, which includes Tsakalotos, proposed that the Syriza government step down in a deceitful manoeuvre to pin the blame for its austerity measures on the next government. They are aware that one of the main dangers facing Syriza is its exposure to the explosive social anger in the working class. In a statement it issued, the “Group of the 53” proposed that Syriza “fall heroically resisting the internal or external troika, rather than humiliatingly at the hands of [Greek] society itself.”

A further eruption of US militarism in the Middle East

Bill Van Auken

This week’s admission by the Pentagon that dozens of American troops are now on the ground in Yemen, ostensibly to assist troops of the United Arab Emirates in combating Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has laid bare the escalating eruption of US imperialist violence across the greater Middle East.

Nearly 15 years after the launching of the so-called “war on terror” and 25 years after the first US Gulf War against Iraq, American forces are carrying out lethal operations over a vast region ranging from Pakistan in the east to Libya in the west, and from the Turkish border in the north all the way to Somalia in the south.

In the name of fighting terror, US imperialism has terrorized a sizable portion of humanity. The net results are casualties now totaling in the millions, a refugee crisis that surpasses that of the Second World War, and a catastrophic deepening of human misery in every land where the US has placed its “boots on the ground.”

In Yemen, as elsewhere, US troops are engaged in a fight against forces that emerged directly out of Washington’s own interventions. As a direct by-product of the criminal war being waged by the Saudi monarchy and its Gulf oil sheikdom allies against Yemen, the poorest nation of the Arab world, AQAP has wrested control of a 340-square-mile area of the country’s southern coast and amassed a war chest of over $100 million in captured bank deposits.

This was not some unforeseeable side effect, but rather a direct result of Saudi Arabia’s—and Washington’s—reliance on Al Qaeda-linked forces to do their dirty work in a sectarian war that has killed at least 6,000 Yemenis, including 1,000 children, displaced 1.2 million people, and left half the population in danger of starvation.

The same essential story is unfolding in Iraq and Syria, only with far bloodier consequences. A US intervention that has seen some 5,000 US troops sent back into Iraq and hundreds more operating in flagrant violation of international law inside Syria is supposedly aimed at wiping out the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

ISIS, another Al Qaeda offshoot, had its origins in Iraq, the product of the war of sociocide waged by US imperialism between 2003 and 2010. It crossed the border into Syria, becoming one of the principal ground forces in the US-orchestrated war for regime change against the Assad government and the beneficiary of vast stocks of arms and supplies funneled in by the CIA and Washington’s regional allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Immensely strengthened, ISIS crossed back into Iraq. Taking advantage of the deep sectarian divisions created by Washington’s policy of divide and rule, it overran much of the country in 2014, including Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and routed US-trained and equipped Iraqi security forces.

In Afghanistan, 10,000 US troops remain, carrying out, as the massacre of at least 42 patients and medical staff at the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz reveals, combat operations that continue to claim civilian lives.

Finally, a meeting has been set for next week in Vienna to discuss another intervention by the US and the NATO powers in Libya, a country whose society was shattered by the US-NATO war of 2011, leading to ISIS forces seizing control of strategic areas on the Mediterranean coast.

This broad wave of US military violence is unfolding a century after the agreement reached during World War I that determined the imperialist carve-up and much of the subsequent history of the region. One hundred years ago, on May 9, 1916, British Middle East envoy Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot reached the infamous secret deal that bore their names. The Sykes-Picot agreement set the terms for the cynical post-World War I carve-up between Britain, France and, as a lesser power, Russia of the lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

Lines were drawn in the sands of the Middle East in utter disregard for the aspirations of the peoples of the region. This conspiracy became publicly known as a result of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, with then-Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Leon Trotsky publishing the secret agreement in order to expose the crimes of the imperialist powers against the oppressed peoples of the region.

The war, Trotsky said, and been fought “for the ‘repartition’ of the Turkish lands between the banks, industrialists and merchants of the strongest capitalist powers.” Promises by the imperialists of Arab independence, he warned, would create territories “‘independent’ only of the Arabs and wholly dependent upon the bosses of international capital.”

The partition agreed to by Britain and France was imposed only through the bloody suppression of popular Arab insurgencies in territories that

are now divided between Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. With the decline of British and French imperialism in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent decolonization, Washington became the principal guarantor of the nation-state system erected on the foundations of Sykes-Picot.

Despite the pretensions of Pan-Arab nationalism on the part of the Nasserites in Egypt, the Baathists in Iraq and Syria and other Arab regimes, the Arab bourgeoisie was never willing or able to supersede the boundaries drawn by the old colonialists, which marked out the lands ruled by the colonial states that they inherited. In the end, despite their conflicts with imperialism, they functioned as junior partners in the exploitation of the peoples they ruled.

The nation-state system erected on the basis of Sykes-Picot has been largely wrecked by a quarter century of unending military violence carried out by US imperialism to assert its own unfettered hegemony over the oil-rich region. In the course of Washington’s multiple wars, the Pentagon and the CIA have recklessly fomented sectarian conflicts to further their aims, tearing nations apart and creating conditions for a region-wide war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

While in an earlier epoch British and French imperialists attempted to impose a system of colonial rule, their American successors have specialized in smashing up existing states with the aim of denying the region’s energy resources to US imperialism’s rivals and assuring that no power emerges capable of challenging Washington’s regional hegemony.

The Obama administration, which is carrying out this reckless and destructive war policy, is riven with divisions. Military commanders are increasingly chafing at the administration’s pretense that US forces are not involved in combat, but merely acting as “advisors” in the multiple conflicts in which they are engaged. While the White House wants to limit the engagements in the Middle East in order to turn greater military force against US imperialism’s great power rivals, China and Russia in the first instance, the logic of military intervention is pushing the Pentagon to demand continuing escalation in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and beyond.

The bitter debates within the ruling establishment over how best to employ militarism to offset the economic decline of US capitalism are being carried out behind the backs of the American people. Both parties are rigorously excluding from the 2016 election campaign the preparations for a vast escalation of war in the Middle East and beyond. But one thing is certain: once the ballots are cast in November, there will be a dramatic expansion of global US military aggression, no matter who wins the White House.

The immense dangers that the war conspiracies of the ruling elite pose to people in the US and around the globe can be answered only through the building of an independent and international political movement of the working class against war and the capitalist system that produces it. This is what is being fought for by the Socialist Equality Party and its candidates in the 2016 election, Jerry White for US president and Niles Niemuth for vice president.

Mining a Heart of Gold? Slave Wages and Humanitarianism in Africa

Yves Engler

What do you call people who try to make people believe what they say but ignore the results of what they do? How about spin-sploiters?

After a few years of research I have come to realize that there is a long and ignoble history of Westerners exploiting Africans while touting humanitarian objectives. Unfortunately, this practice is not confined to the distant past.

A leading Canadian NGO official, who then founded Québec’s largest mining company, provides a recent example.

In a 2012 Gold Report interview titled “First, Do Good When Mining for Gold: Benoit La Salle” the President of the Société d’Exploitation Minière d’Afrique de l’Ouest (SEMAFO) boasted about the company’s social responsibility. La Salle said: “SEMAFO is not a company that mines gold, ships it out and, once that is done, breaks down camp and leaves. People see SEMAFO as being a very good corporate citizen. Today, many people believe that the CSR report is more important than our annual report.”  This is a startling claim for an individual obligated to maximize investors’ returns but a cursory look at the company’s record suggests it has little basis in reality.

Those living near SEMAFO’s Kiniero mine, reported Guinée News in 2014, felt “the Canadian company brought more misfortune than benefits.” In 2008 the military killed three in a bid to drive away small-scale miners from its mine in southeast Guinea. BBC Monitoring Africa reported “the soldiers shot a woman at close range, burned a baby and in the panic another woman and her baby fell into a gold mining pit and a man fell fatally from his motor while running away from the rangers.”  Blaming the Montréal-based company for the killings, locals damaged its equipment.”

In September 2011 protests flared again over the company’s failure to hire local young people and the dissolution of a committee that spent community development monies. Demonstrators attacked SEMAFO’s facilities, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.  Some also targeted a bus carrying company employees, prompting the authorities to evacuate all expatriate staff to Bamako in neighbouring Mali.

In 2014 the Guinean government’s Comité Technique de Revue des Titres et Conventions Miniers concluded that the Montréal firm evaded $9.6 million in tax.  The Comité Technique also found that the company failed “to produce detailed feasibility studies” and was not “in compliance with new measures in the 2011 mining code.”  The Comité Technique recommended that SEMAFO be fined and stripped of its mining rights in the country.

To the east, SEMAFO opened the first industrial scale gold mine in Niger. A 2007 Montreal Gazette business article headlined “Local Miner a Major Force in Niger: It’s not every day we receive a press release from a gold mining company that includes a warm personal message from the prime minister”, reported on the close ties between SEMAFO and Hama Amadou, then Prime Minister of Niger. “We work very closely with him,” said La Salle. “We’re part of his budget every year.”

La Salle described how the prime minister helped his company break a strike at its Samira Hill mine in the west of the country. “He gave us all the right direction to solve this legally,” La Salle said. ‘We went to court, we had the strike declared illegal and that allowed us to let go of some of the employees and rehire some of them based upon a new work contract. It allowed us to let go of some undesirable employees because they had been on strike a few times.” (In mid-2008 SEMAFO’s preferred prime minister was arrested on corruption charges stemming from two unrelated incidents.)

The bitter strike led to a parliamentary inquiry regarding environmental damage caused by the mine, lack of benefits for local communities and treatment of miners. Opposition politicians accused SEMAFO of paying “slave wages”.  “The wages are very low,” explained Mohammed Bazoum, deputy chairman of Niger’s main opposition party in 2009.

SEMAFO was also accused of failing to pay both taxes and dividends to the government. Despite owning a 20% share in the Samira Hill mine, the government received no direct payments from the Montréal-based majority owner between 2004 and 2010. “Since this company started its activities, Niger has not seen a single franc despite its being a shareholder,” noted Abdoulkarim Mossi, head of a government committee set up to tackle economic and financial irregularities in the country.

Next-door, the company was close to President Blaise Compaoré who seized power in 1987 by killing Thomas Ankara, “Africa’s Che Guevara”, who oversaw important social and political gains during four years in office. La Salle worked closely with Compaoré for nearly 2 decades, traveling the globe singing the Burkina Faso government’s praise. After leaving office the Prime Minister between 2007–2011, Tertius Zongo, was appointed to SEMAFO’s Board of Directors and at a September 2014 Gold Forum in Australia SEMAFO officials lauded the government as “democratic and stable”.  The next month Compaoré was ousted by popular protest after he attempted to amend the constitution to extend term limits.

After ending Compaoré’s 27-year rule community groups and mine workers launched a wave of protests against foreign, mostly Canadian, owned mining companies. In a Bloomberg article titled “Revolt Rocks Burkina Faso’s Mines After President Flees”, SEMAFO’s director of corporate affairs, Laurent Michel Dabire, said the company was looking to fund a new police unit that would focus on protecting mining interests in the country.

SEMAFO is an outgrowth La Salle’s work for Plan Canada, part of a $1 billion a year global NGO. La Salle said that SEMAFO “was created in 1995 during my first visit to Burkina Faso as part of a mission with the NGO-Plan. I am the president of the administration council of Plan Canada and a director of Plan International. So, after the Plan organized visit to Burkina Faso provided me an opportunity to get close with national authorities, I decided to create SEMAFO to participate in the development of Burkina Faso’s mining industry.” As Plan Canada’s designated Francophone spokesperson, La Salle got to know Compaoré. “The president turned to me,” La Salle told another reporter, “and said that I should come back to his country with Canadian expertise to help his country develop its mining sector.”

La Salle procured mining expertise while Compaoré granted the Canadian a massive stretch of land to prospect. “The land package we have is way beyond what you’d see anywhere else in the world,” La Salle boasted.

Compaoré was good to La Salle. The Canadian ‘humanitarian” made millions of dollars from Burkina Faso’s (and Niger and Guinea’s) minerals. When he resigned after 17 years as president of SEMAFO in 2012, La Salle received a $3 million departure bonus, which was on top of his $1 million salary.

La Salle is just one in a long line of Westerners who’ve asked the world to believe what they say but ignore the actual results of what they do — a “spin-sploiter” — publicly professing humanitarian ideals all the while exploiting Africa.

The Distortion of American Politics

Lawrence Wittner

Ever since the foundation of the American Republic, there has been both praise for and suspicion of the role the press plays in U.S. political life.  Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that, if it were left to him “to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”  And yet, Jefferson was also profoundly disturbed by the politically biased and inaccurate articles that he saw published in the press.  As he told James Monroe:  “My skepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one.”

Jefferson’s ambivalence about the press becomes understandable when one considers the distorted reporting that has characterized the current campaign for the U.S. Presidency.

Take the case of the Times Union, the largest newspaper in New York State’s heavily populated capital region.  With a circulation of 66,835 on weekdays and 128,565 on Sundays, the Times Union focuses on the city of Albany and its suburbs, but also covers the rest of the capital region, including the cities of Schenectady, Troy, and Saratoga Springs.  Although owned by the Hearst Corporation, the paper has a somewhat more centrist tone.  With the New York Presidential primaries looming, it endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and John Kasich for the Republican.  This “moderate” stance meshes well with the politics of Albany, a city that, though overwhelmingly Democratic, has long been controlled by a rather conservative Democratic political “machine.”

Consequently, it must have come as an unpleasant shock to the Times Union’s editors when, in the April 19 New York State Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders emerged victorious not only in the city of Albany, but in the entire capital region.  Indeed, Sanders garnered 53.3 percent of the Democratic vote in New York’s 20th Congressional district (an area comprising all of Albany and Schenectady Counties, as well as portions of Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Montgomery Counties).  Having defeated Hillary Clinton by a healthy margin of almost seven percent, Sanders won four out of the seven delegates allocated to the district by the New York State Democratic Party.  The outcome of the race was a reversal of the results in the 2008 Democratic primary, when Clinton handily defeated Barack Obama in the capital region.

This could have provided quite a dramatic feature item for a local newspaper, especially given the fact that a ragtag, volunteer campaign had defeated the Clinton juggernaut–a juggernaut reinforced by Clinton’s eight years of representing New York State in the U.S. Senate, the backing of Clinton by every major Democratic politician in the state, and the loyal campaigning for Clinton by the Albany Democratic “machine.” The David versus Goliath aspects of this story were also strengthened by the contrasting delegate slates for the two rival candidates that appeared on the 20th Congressional district election ballot:  the top local elected public officials and Democratic Party leaders for Clinton and a group of obscure community members for Sanders.  Here, it seemed, was a newspaper’s dream story.

But it wasn’t printed.  In fact, the Times Union even failed to report that Sanders had won the race in the capital district.

The Times Union article posted on the night of the primary didn’t mention Sanders’s victory at all.  Instead, the article, headlined “Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton win in New York,” gave the impression of a Clinton and Trump sweep.  “New York,” it proclaimed, “turned out to be the state where the presidential front-runners regained their mojo.”  Although the article devoted a good deal of attention to the activities of primary voters in the capital district, it somehow omitted reporting on whom they had voted for.

An updated version of the article appeared the following day in the Times Union, after the five counties’ boards of election had posted the election results online. By this time it was clear that Sanders, though losing heavily to Clinton in the New York City metropolitan region, had defeated Clinton in most other areas of the state.  This included not only the 20th Congressional district, but the neighboring 19th and 21st which, all together, provided Sanders with 11 delegates to Clinton’s seven.  Even then, however, the writers of the article could not quite bring themselves to say that, in the capital region, where almost all the Times Union’s readers lived and voted, Sanders had won.  Instead, they confined themselves to declaring that “Sanders performed well in the more rural regions of upstate–and in the Capital Region.”  With a headline this time proclaiming “Big home-state wins boost front-runners,” the article once again left readers with the impression that Clinton had been victorious in the newspaper’s locale while, in reality, the clear victor was Sanders.

On the night of April 22, three days after the presidential primary, seven words buried at the very end of a Times Union blog finally let slip the fact that Sanders had won in the 20th Congressional district.

The reluctance of the Times Union to report on how residents in its own region had voted, like the negligible coverage the newspaper gave to the vibrant local Sanders campaign in the months leading up to the Presidential primary, is really quite remarkable.

But should it surprise us?  Probably not.  One wonders to what degree this treatment of Sanders’s campaign is a national phenomenon.

All Angles Covered: Is The EU Completely In The Pocket Of The Biotech Industry?

Colin Todhunter

“In less than a fortnight, EU Member States will take a decision on the re-approval of glyphosate. Genius [lobby firm] is working to get this toxic herbicide re-approved by communicating the industry's mantra that glyphosate is scientifically proven safe, sponsored by Monsanto, Dow and Syngenta. At the same time, they are being paid by German authorities and EU-funded projects to work on issues that are closely related to glyphosate, and that are key to the interests of the same corporations. Public authorities using the same lobby consultancies as the corporations they are supposed to regulate is highly problematic…” - Corporate Europe Observatory

Much of the following text is an edited version of key extracts taken from the article referred to below from Corporate European Observatory.

On 9 May, Corporate Europe Observatory posted an article on its website that described how Genius, a lobby consultancy firm based in Germany, has been employed to distort the debate on glyphosate in favour the biotech industry.

Research linking the use of glyphosate to various diseases is well documented, and the World Health Organisation has declared the substance as “probably causing cancer to humans.” Despite this, the European Commission is seeking to grant glyphosate re-approval for another ten years. The re-authorisation is being sought by the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), an industry platform uniting producers of glyphosate-based herbicides, whose members include Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Barclay Chemicals. Genius was used to run its website.

In addition to the Glyphosate Task Force (GTF), Genius has been hired by biotech lobby group EuropaBio, its German member organisation DIB and individual corporations including Bayer, BASF, and Syngenta. It also works for the Brussels-based corporate food think tank EUFIC (European Food Information Council).

Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow (all members of the GTF), as well as BASF and Bayer coordinate a lot of their lobbying efforts via lobby associations like EuropaBio. All of them share a deep commercial interest in the re-approval of glyphosate and in the continued production of glyphosate-tolerant GM crops, also via the sales of other brands of pesticides used for the same crops.

In the case of glyphosate, Genius ‘translates’ the science on its toxicity for its clients from the pesticide industry by writing on the Glyphosate Task Force website that it does not cause cancer, and saying that the IARC “should withdraw the decision” to classify glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen.

However, Genius also lists public institutions as its clients, who are in charge of regulating the industry’s products, including the European Commission, the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) and 10 German federal and regional authorities, including the German risk assessment agency Bfr. This is important because Germany is the Rapporteur Member State for the re-approval of glyphosate, and Bfr is the agency in charge of the renewal assessment report.

Genius takes part in several EU-funded research projects that generally aim to help shape EU risk assessment requirements or increase communication activities on the supposed benefits of the biotech industry's products.

An important example is GRACE (GMO Risk Assessment and Communication of Evidence). Kristina Sinemus, Genius' Managing Director, and its co-founder Klaus Minol take part in this project. In fact, about half of the experts participating in GRACE have close ties to industry lobby groups like ILSI (International Life Sciences Institute), PRRI (Public Research and Regulation Initiative) and/or to industry-funded organisation ISBR (International Society for Biosafety Research). Genius is not the only lobby consultancy participating in GRACE; Belgium-based Perseus also works with companies aiming to get deregulation for new techniques of genetic engineering.

The GRACE project is important, since it feeds directly into the process by which the European Commission in 2016 will decide on further standards of risk assessment for GM crops.

Testbiotech warns that “there is a substantial risk that the EU Commission will come to false conclusions, and could fail to set sufficiently robust standards to maintain the precautionary approach as required by EU regulations.”

Between 2006 and 2009, Genius worked for EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority responsible for risk assessing the products of Genius' pesticides/biotech clients. Its role was to “support the European Food Safety Authority through editorial work and public relations tasks.” Tasks included the 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 annual reports, background texts for the website, and a newsletter, as well as doing communication work for a conference on GMO risk assessment for human and animal health and the environment that was held in Brussels in 2009.

Genius has been involved in numerous other EU funded projects in the same field, as detailed in the article by CEO. That article (containing all relevant links) should be read in full all links because it highlights how a failure and the complete lack of willingness by the EU to properly regulate lobbying in Brussels as well as conflicts of interest within public bodies have all but corrupted decision-making processes and have placed the health of 500 million Europeans at serious risk, while continuing to fuel an unsustainable model of corporate-controlled agriculture.

If the decision-making and propaganda surrounding glyphosate were made into a Shakespearean play, it would be based on tragedy. In the absence of Shakespeare, here's a short but excellent video by Pesticide Action Network Europe:

Drastic increase in far-right crimes in Germany

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The official report from Germany’s Federal Police Agency (BKA) for the first quarter of 2016 confirms a drastic increase in far-right motivated attacks on asylum seekers, refugees and their supporters.

According to the report, in the first three months of the year, there were 347 such attacks on asylum accommodation, including three attempted homicides, 37 arson attacks and 23 bodily injuries. Of the 347 attacks on refugee shelters, the BKA regards 319 as acts of right-wing violence.

In its report, the BKA warns for the first time that as well as physical attacks on refugees, “In addition to injury, homicides must be reckoned with in individual cases.” The BKA lists other potential targets of right-wing violence as refugee volunteers, politicians and journalists.

In addition to the attacks on refugee homes, the report lists a further 73 violent right-wing crimes against refugees. There were also 386 right-wing offences (propaganda offences, criminal damage and incitement) against refugees, 88 against politicians and 33 against volunteers, including two personal injuries.

The BKA report also warns about terrorist and criminal groups in the far-right spectrum. As evidence for this, it cites the build-up of offences in certain regions, the availability of explosives as well as the number of those the security authorities deem to be potential offenders on the far right.

Overall, the number of crimes with a right-wing extremist background rose from 10,541 (2014) to 13,846 (2015). This represents an increase of more than 30 percent.

Throughout 2015, there were 1,031 officially registered attacks on asylum seeker accommodation. Adding in the attacks that have occurred over the first three months of this year to the rest of 2015, there has been an increase of 25 percent.

In particular, there were many right-wing attacks on refugees and their accommodation in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There were 92 since the beginning of this year, and 214 last year.

These high numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As the WSWS has reported in previous articles on this subject, the official statistics only record crimes that are classified as being motivated by right-wing extremist sentiments. Countless attacks on refugee shelters or on political opponents are not registered because the police authorities conceal the extreme-right motivation.

In addition, only a fraction of these crimes are investigated and even fewer offenders are prosecuted and convicted. Investigations of the far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU) have revealed that extreme-right offenders who work as undercover informants for the intelligence services or police have often had their crimes covered. The boundaries between the obstruction of justice and the immediate financial and logistical support of such right-wing groups are very fluid. The police and intelligence services are closely linked to the right-wing extremist scene via this network of undercover informants and agents.

The rise of extreme-right and xenophobic violence is a direct result of the brutal refugee policy of the German government, which aims only at sealing off borders and deterrence. This is supported by all the state governments and established parties in Germany.

The government has repeatedly tightened up the asylum laws in the past few months. With the support of the Green Party, the Bundesrat (second chamber of parliament) has declared all the Balkan states to be safe countries of origin, resulting in the deportation of thousands of people who have lived in Germany for many years. A hideous competition between the various state administrations can be witnessed as to who can be the “most effective” and most ruthless when it comes to deportations .

As a result of the European Union’s dirty deal with Turkey, which the German government largely negotiated, and the closure of the Balkan route, only a few refugees now manage to travel to Germany, where their treatment and accommodation breaches fundamental democratic rights. Hundreds of thousands of people are denied decent housing and proper treatment. This is meant to discourage others from coming to Germany, and at the same time is grist to the mill of the far-right parties and fanatics.

Trump’s rise causes disquiet in Australian ruling circles

Mike Head

Donald Trump’s emergence as the presumptive US Republican presidential candidate has been met with a mixture of consternation and nervousness in Australia’s media and political establishment, both for foreign and domestic policy reasons. Alarm over the implications of a Trump presidency for the Australian ruling elite’s long reliance on the US military alliance has been accompanied by anxiety over the popular discontent that Trump has exploited.

In his comments on foreign policy, Trump has combined “America First” isolationism, demanding that US allies ramp up their own military spending, with provocative denunciations of China and aggressive assertions of American might. Trump has declared he will stop China “raping” America, back the use of torture by US forces and encourage Japan and South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons.

Domestically, he has employed fascistic demagogy, seeking to divert the seething social discontent among working people by scapegoating immigrants and other minorities, and promoting extreme nationalism in economic and foreign policy. His rise marks the advanced decomposition of American democracy. As the WSWS has warned:

The impending nomination of Trump means that a substantial section of the American ruling class has concluded that the defense of its interests requires massive political repression within the United States and war against competitors and enemies beyond its borders.

During a radio interview last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sought to downplay the potential fallout. He insisted that he had “absolutely no doubt” Australia would “always have a very, very strong friend and ally in Washington,” regardless of who was elected president. “Our relationship with the United States is so deep—it’s based on thousands if not millions of individual relationships, it’s been built up over generations,” he said.

Turnbull’s remarks underscore the integration of Australia’s political, military and security elite into that of Washington since World War II, in order to secure the predatory interests of Australian imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region. Since taking office last September, Turnbull has been at pains to publicly maintain the commitment made by the previous Labor government to the Obama administration’s “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia to counter the rise of China and prepare for war against Beijing if necessary, despite China becoming Australian capitalism’s largest export market over the past decade.

At the same time, Turnbull voiced concern about Trump’s capacity to tap into the social “tension” produced by mounting inequality in the US, while trying to deny any such disaffection in Australia. “Income inequality is a big issue in the United States,” Turnbull said. “We have much more equality in incomes in Australia because we have a much better targeted social welfare system. But there are a lot of tensions there and I think support for Trump is clearly evidence of that.”

In reality, widening inequality—a global phenomenon—is also producing growing political unrest and volatility in Australia, as demonstrated by the inability of any prime minister to survive a full parliamentary term since 2007. Turnbull’s recourse to an unpredictable “double dissolution” election of all members of both houses of parliament on July 2, in an attempt to break through a Senate blockage of deeply unpopular key austerity measures, is further evidence of a similar underlying political crisis to that convulsing America.

Figures within the Australian security establishment, where there are close ties to Washington, have expressed alarm that a Trump presidency might signal a waning US commitment to Australia’s interests. Former Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general David Irvine told an Australian Strategic Policy Institute conference in Canberra last month that a Trump victory would “totally overturn the Asia-Pacific applecart, with a nuclear Japan or a nuclear South Korea.” The foundation of Asia-Pacific security would be “turned on its head” and Australia would have to significantly increase its own military capability.

Reflecting these concerns, former Labor Party leader Kim Beazley, who recently completed a six-year appointment as Australia’s ambassador to Washington, has warned that a Trump White House would have “devastating” consequences for relations with China and for US trade commitments, notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed US-led economic bloc across the region.

“Were Trump to be elected, the impact on American positioning on global trade would be disastrous,” Beazley told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on May 5. “Visceral hostility to the American free trade position—that has been a lifetime Trump commitment.” In a lecture last month, Beazley declared that Trump had “no regard for alliances at all.” If Trump won the presidency, “it is certain the TPP would not go through” and “the effect would be potentially quite devastating.”

Beazley also represents the pro-Washington leadership that has long been entrenched inside the Labor Party. He strongly backed Hillary Clinton, a proven ruthless prosecutor of the military and economic interests of the US and its allies. Her victory would be “reassuring” because “she would be most likely to replicate in minds of friends and opponents of America what it has stood for traditionally,” including the “rebalance” toward Asia.

Similar anxieties have been voiced by another figure with close connections in Washington, the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan. “On the basis of declared policy, Clinton would be an infinitely better president for Australia than Trump,” he wrote on May 5. “Clinton values alliances, is widely experienced and works for stability.” But Sheridan noted that she was “by no means inspiring, to anybody,” giving Trump “burgeoning electoral plausibility.”

This posed an acute dilemma. “All my national security Republican friends in Washington detest Trump and many plan to vote for Clinton or not vote at all.” Perhaps, Sheridan suggested, they should “get close to his campaign to try to draw it into strategic reality and responsibility.” Sheridan gave voice to the perplexity in ruling circles. “Anything at all is possible now,” he concluded.

Mark Latham, another former Labor Party leader, has welcomed the Trump ascendancy, openly extolling his fascistic demagogy as a means of channeling social unrest, while promoting the illusion that Trump would be less of a “dangerous warmonger” than George Bush, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. In a March 29 column in Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Telegraph tabloid, Latham hailed Trump for advocating “bold solutions to longstanding problems, such as illegal immigration and deficit budgeting, backed by his personal story in building a lucrative business career.”

Clearly, Latham, who led Labor from 2003 to 2005, would relish playing a similar role to Trump. Revealing an abiding contempt for the working class, he declared that Trump appealed to voters not only because the billionaire was ostensibly anti-establishment, but shared their views. “Why shouldn’t they support a successful, down-to-earth candidate who talks their language and shares their values?”

Furthermore, Latham argued, Trump’s “foreign policy is in our national interest.” Trump, Latham claimed, “has been highly critical of Bush and the neo-con invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the death of 4,500 American servicemen and the rise of Islamic State—a truly vulgar outcome.” A Trump presidency “would mean no more fiascos like Vietnam and Iraq, sparing young Australian lives from the futile killing fields of US-led invasions.”

Far from opposing imperialist war, this view reflects essentially tactical divisions within both the American and Australian ruling classes provoked by the catastrophic outcomes of the interventions in Vietnam and the Middle East. Above all, Latham, like Trump, is looking to whip up nationalism as means of diverting the rising social discontent in a reactionary and violent direction that would inevitably entail war against foreign rivals as well as domestic repression.