Sadiq Khan and the End of Islamophobia in the UK?

John Feffer

Even his own sister was mortified.

In the recent mayoral race in London, the Conservative Party’s Zac Goldsmith was in many ways the perfect candidate: a young, handsome fellow who possessed full-spectrum appeal.

To win the election, Goldsmith could have focused on all the work he’d done on the environment, as a journalist and former editor of the magazine The Ecologist. To further woo liberals, he could have highlighted his considerable international experience and his support of the rights of indigenous peoples. Conversely, he could have cemented his popularity among conservative populists by emphasizing his skeptical attitude toward the European Union. If he’d played it safe, Goldsmith could have translated an early lead in the polls into a victory at the ballot box.

Instead, the Goldsmith team prompted a huge backlash by suggesting that his opponent, the Labor Party’s Sadiq Khan, was a Muslim extremist because of his associations and his political bedfellows. The rhetoric from the Conservative camp was nothing so blatant or ugly as some of the proposals in the Republican presidential primary, such as prohibiting Muslims candidates from entering the Oval Office (Ben Carson) or prohibiting Muslims immigrant from entering the country (Donald Trump).

Still, the insinuations prompted Goldsmith’s sister Jemima, a prominent journalist and convert to Islam, to write on Twitter: “Sad that Zac’s campaign did not reflect who I know him to be.” Even fellow Conservatives distanced themselves from the candidate. Former Conservative cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi, for instance, decried the “appalling dog whistle racism,” and the Conservative leader in the London Assembly, Andrew Boff, called the tactics “outrageous.”

Last week, when Londoners went to the polls to elect their mayor, the billionaire conservative suffered a humiliating landslide defeat. Sadiq Khan will be the new face of multicultural London.

What’s most interesting about the handling of Goldsmith’s campaign is the perception, among his advisors, that the instrumental use of Islamophobia would be politically helpful. It wasn’t such a reach, perhaps. On the continent at least, the tactic seemed to work in boosting the fortunes of what should otherwise be fringe parties like the National Front in France, the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, and the Sweden Democrats. And the blatantly anti-Muslim UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been steadily gaining support, nearly doubling its representation in the same local elections.

London, of course, is a city, and a very diverse one at that. What might work in Britain as a whole clearly failed with the more cosmopolitan voters in its capital. Polling at 20 percent across most of the country in the 2014 elections, UKIP managed only 7 percent in London. One UKIP candidate attributed the difference to the “more media-savvy and educated” population of the capital city.

It would be reassuring to believe that Sadiq Khan’s victory will banish Islamophobia from the electoral toolbox, particularly here in the United States. But America is not London. And our billionaire conservative is no tree-hugging friend of indigenous peoples. He doesn’t care about offending liberal sensibilities.

Moreover, anti-Islamic sentiment has been steadily rising in the United States, thanks to a relatively small group of well-funded organizations and individuals. Even if Donald Trump loses in November, as he most assuredly will, Islamophobia will not slink into the shadows along with its mouthpiece, the disgraced reality star.

Astounding Misinformation

Since 2001, the United States has resettled about 800,000 refugees inside its borders. Of that number, five have been arrested on terrorism charges. Two were arrested this January, another in 2013, and the other two in 2011. Five out of 800,000 equals .000625 percent. That’s practically the definition of statistically insignificant.

Yet, as the Brooking Institution’s Robert McKenzie pointed out at a recent panel in Washington, DC sponsored by Brookings and Duke University, 31 out of 50 governors have announced that they want to bar Syrian refugees from entering their states. All but one of these governors is a Republican. It’s an important reminder that the scaremongering of Trump, Carson, and the other erstwhile presidential candidates poisons the party as a whole.

The problem extends beyond individual Islamophobes. Equally troubling is the overall climate of bigotry and fear. Christopher Bail, a Duke University researcher who also participated in the panel, has been documenting the spread of Islamophobia. He presented a series of graphs that revealed that:

Over the past decade, 32 states proposed shariah law bans, controversies about the construction of mosques have increased by more than 800 percent, and the number of Americans with negative opinions of Islam has more than doubled.

To understand how astonishing these results are, imagine if I wrote that 32 states had proposed anti-UFO laws, that controversies over the construction of playgrounds had increased by 800 percent, and that the number of Americans with negative opinions of Judaism had more than doubled. You’d think that the country had been taken over by delusional, child-hating Nazis.

After all, there is zero evidence of a campaign to impose shariah law anywhere in the United States — the only case ever cited is one in which a domestic court judge based his judgment on shariah law, which the appellate court sensibly overturned — just as there’s no evidence of an alien plot to take over the world. Mosque attendance has been definitively demonstrated to reduce extremism, not encourage it. And although anti-Semitism is universally reviled, anti-Islamic sentiment flourishes because many Americans associate the religion with the tiny number of extremists who call themselves Muslims rather than with the 99.9 percent who are not followers of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.

For information on the negative correlation between mosque attendance and extremism, you can turn to an important 2010 study, also from Duke University. Or you can look at recent polling from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), which Dalia Mogahed also presented at the Duke-Brookings panel.

Muslim Americans who regularly attend mosques are more likely than those who do not frequent mosques to work with their neighbors to solve community problems (49 vs. 30 percent), be registered to vote (74 vs. 49 percent), and are more likely to plan to vote (92 vs. 81 percent).

ISPU also found that Muslims in America are just as likely as members of other religious groups to “oppose the targeting and killing of civilians by individuals or small groups” and far more likely to “oppose the targeting and killing of civilians by the military” (65 percent, versus 45 percent of Jews and slightly less for Catholics and Protestants, say such practices are never justified).

The fact that Americans are so ignorant of the basic facts about Muslims in America isn’t simply the result of a lack of contact (most Americans don’t personally know any Muslims) or the absence of information in school curricula. Much of the ignorance around Muslims, particularly as it relates to security issues, is manufactured.

A relatively small industry of pundits and activists — Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Walid Phares, Robert Spencer, and their associated donors — have managed to inject their views into mainstream organizations (if you consider the Heritage Foundation mainstream) and into the news media (if you consider Fox to be “news”). And from there, these calculated distortions have entered the political discourse (if you consider what Donald Trump says to be “discourse”).

But it’s not just The Donald.

From the Margins to the Center

In her victory speech after the Pennsylvania primary last month, Hillary Clinton gave a shout out to all the various constituencies that make up her voting bloc: women, workers, LGBT, people with disabilities. She also warned of what would happen should candidates “from the other side” prevail:

They would make it harder to vote, not easier. They would deny women the right to make our own reproductive health care decisions. They would round up millions of hardworking immigrants and deport them. They would demonize and discriminate against hardworking, terror-hating Muslim Americans who we need in the fight against radicalization. And both of the top candidates in the Republican Party deny climate change even exists.

At first glance, Hillary is hitting all the right notes. But as Omid Safi, the head of the Duke Islamic Center, pointed out at the above-mentioned panel, only Muslim Americans merited an ominous qualifier: “terror-hating.”

Hillary is implying that, without such a qualifier, Muslim Americans are somehow guilty by association. They are connected in the public mind with the San Bernardino couple who killed 14 people at the end of last year — unless they explicitly say otherwise — in a way that white Christians are not expected to disavow their connection to Dylann Roof, who likewise killed nine people last year.

For most Americans, Muslims are the “other,” a group of people who have to constantly prove the negative: that they’re not terror-loving. Good luck proving the negative. In such an environment, Muslims will never be above suspicion. Muslim organizations have repeatedly decried every terrorist act linked to Muslims, but the mainstream media has just as repeatedly ignored them. And so continues the myth that Muslims secretly approve of what al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are doing.

To defeat Islamophobia, or at least to stigmatize it to the same degree as racism and anti-Semitism, political victories over candidates who use both dog whistles and megaphones to trumpet anti-Islamic sentiment are, of course, essential. But the challenge is greater.

First, as Omid Safi pointed out, you shouldn’t fight intolerance with tolerance. A concept emerging from ancient pharmacology, “tolerance” meant the degree to which a body could put up with a toxin. Muslims are not toxins. They are part of the fabric of American society. Like all other Americans, they deserve to be respected for how they are the same as everyone else — and different.

On the side of difference, they practice a religion that has features in common with other monotheisms as well as quite a few unique features. But whether it’s praying toward Mecca, making annual charitable contributions, or undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage), the essential features of Islam have been part of the American landscape since before even the birth of the country. Difference is what makes America great. Those who prefer cultural uniformity should relocate to, well, Saudi Arabia, for instance.

On the side of similarity, it’s time to stop securitizing Muslims — thinking of them only in terms of terrorism, national security, and “threat.” As the ISPU polling indicates, American Muslims have the same preoccupations as the rest of America: the economy. They identify strongly as patriotic, and the more religiously observant they are, the more being American is important to their identity. They are far more satisfied than any other religious group with the direction the country is currently heading. And they are far more diverse a group than any other religious community. With large numbers of African American, Latino, and Asian adherents, the American Muslim community looks more like America than Protestants, Jews, or even Catholics.

The victory of Sadiq Khan has “normalized” Muslims in UK politics in much the same way that JFK normalized Catholics in American politics. American Muslims are still waiting for their JFK moment. True, for the last seven years, large numbers of Americans have thought that their president is a Muslim, which in Islamophobic America has been just another way of saying that these conspiracy theorists don’t like Obama. So, obviously, that doesn’t count.

The presidential victory of Obama was not the end of racism. But it did serve as a watershed moment in the evolving status of the African American community and represented a significant nail in bigotry’s coffin. Some day in the future, when the grotesqueries of Donald Trump are a fading memory and even the Islamophobia-lite of mainstream politicians will seem as archaic as the anti-Semitic insinuations of polite 1950s America, the occupant of the Oval Office will state that she is proud to be both American and Muslim.

There will be cheers. There will be boos. But we’ll know that the era of Islamophobia has passed when the most common reaction is a shrug and a yawn.

Kashmir: Finalising The Physical Integration!

Mohammad Ashraf

(After having failed in theirovert attempts to integrate Kashmir by wooing Kashmiris, the physical integration of the state which was ensured through subtle and covert means is now being given final touches!)

The extremist Hindutva elements in India with their collaborators in Jammu, tried to effect total merger and integration of the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir right from the day of the signing of the instrument of accession by the then Dogra Maharaja of Kashmir, late Hari Singh. The accession itself was limited to three aspects and was conditional subject to ratification by the people of the state through the exercise of their free will. In fact, allegedly, Maharaja himself was not very keen for the merger of the state with the Indian Union and wanted to maintain an autonomous status. His hand is supposed to have been forced by the Tribesmen entering the state with tacit Pakistani approval. The story of those turbulent times has been recorded in umpteen numbers of books written by a galaxy of historians, the connected officials, politicians and others. While on one hand Pandit Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and others were trying to woo Kashmiris to a so called secular India of Tagore, on the other hand Patel with the help of RSS and others was trying to force complete integration of the State into the Golwalkar’s India!

In the beginning, Sheikh Abdullah, the tallest Kashmiri leader was taken in by the bonhomie of Pandit Nehru and others but the subsequent agitation of Parija Parishad in Jammu for total integration which was sternly put down by him causing a tremendous media furor in entire Indiamade him doubt the correctness of his decision, the expression of which landed him in prison for eleven years! The major official integration was effected in the time of G M Sadiq. The “tunnel” of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was utilized to effect integration in various spheres including the political, financial and other aspects. The so called Article supposed to be safeguarding the State’s Autonomy was extensively used to integrate the state into the Indian Union and it is now only a hollow shell! While on one hand hue and cry is raised about the removal of this article generating upheaval among the local people, on the other hand very subtly measures are taken to integrate the state fully in a very surreptitious manner. The apparent aim seems not only to merge the territory into the mainland but also to make the local people totally dependent on outside aid.

The most important resource, the water has already been mortgaged by the so called leaders. The state could not only live but be very prosperous without any outside dole had Kashmiris been able to exploit the potential of hydro-electric power on their own. The campaign for outside dependence was started from the very day of the deposing and imprisonment of the Kashmiri leader who had been used to gain the peoples’ support for the accession of the state. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad started the culture of subsidy which has finally reduced the state to an economic wretch!

Some of the recent moves appear as the final touches to the full geographical, economic and political integration of the State. The conversion of REC into NIT which changed its composition of 50% State and 50% Central to 80% Central and 20% State; the recent trouble at NIT; the move regarding the identification and process for acquiring land for setting up Sainik colonies and composite townships for Pandits; the proposal for setting up shelters for outside labour almost a million of whom are already here, have been alleged by local leaders to be moves to change the demography of the State. The continuous presence of Army and Para-military along with outside labour has already changed the demography. However, physical integration of any territory in the world by turning the locals as inmates of a big prison does not last long. This is a historical fact which the authors of the present move for integration need to keep in mind. The British had to leave India in spite of having held it for two centuries. The French had to leave Algeria; the Italians had to leave Libya and in recent times the Americans had to leave Vietnam and the Russians Afghanistan! The Americans are right now in the process of leaving Afghanistan!

The only integration which lasts is the integration of the mind and the soul. Both the Indian Government and the Indian people in general have so far utterly failed in integrating the mind and the soul of Kashmiris into the Indian mainstream. The stark evidence of that is the extreme alienation especially among the new generation of Kashmiri youth. One and all have admitted this alienation caused by the suppression faced by the people during the last two decades at the hands of the security forces operating with total immunity. The extent of alienation is evident from the increasing new wave of militancy and the total outright open support of the people to these new militants.

There are two possibilities. Either the neo-nationalists in India realise that by forced physical integration of the land they cannot win over Kashmiris and take practical measures to end the oppressive regime. This would involve repealing AFSPA and all other black laws, releasing all imprisoned youth and leaders, and starting a realistic political dialogue both with the local leaders and across the border for the final resolution of the problem. In the alternative, the continued oppression even if ensuring total physical integration of the land will result in a massive outburst which no one will be able to control and may ultimately result in a South Asian Armageddon ! 

Russia creates National Guard to protect capitalist oligarchy

Vladmir Volkov

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of a National Guard. The aim of the force, which will report directly to the president, is to defend the capitalist oligarchy over which the Kremlin presides against growing external and internal threats.

Along with the danger of Islamic terrorist activity on Russian territory, the country’s ruling elite confronts ongoing conflicts along the perimeters of the nation’s borders, and the possibility of ethnic-regional separatism stoked by the imperialist powers in the multi-ethnic state. At the same time, discontent is rising in Russia over collapsing living standards.

The newly proposed armed force has no precedent in the history of post-Soviet Russia in its composition, size or prerogatives. It will absorb all the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (about 170,000 men), and all the special detachments of this Ministry, namely the Special Rapid Response Unit (SOBR) and the special mobile militia units (OMON). These last two together amount to about 50,000 men.

According to press reports, in total the National Guard will consists of at least 300,000 troops. Considering that the Russian Defense Ministry has about 1 million troops, the new force will effectively function as a separate, Praetorian Guard of the president. A little known Putin loyalist, the former head of presidential security, Viktor Zolotov, will head the new agency. Prior to this appointment, he directed the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).

The National Guard will inherit all the equipment belonging to the MVD. This includes about 1,600 troop carriers, 35 artillery pieces, armored cars, Il-76 and An-72 transport planes, the Mi-8 and Mi-24 attack helicopters and a few tanks.

The first reading of the new law establishing the National Guard by the Russian Parliament (Duma) is planned for May 18. It is expected to win the approval of all parliamentary factions, including the Communist Party (CPRF) of Gennady Zyuganov, which competes with other parties of the “loyal opposition” in the promotion of repressive and antidemocratic legislation.

On April 14, Putin sought to justify the creation of the new force by claiming that its main purpose is to “control the distribution of weapons inside the country.” The real aim of the National Guard, however, finds expression in the mandates and rights it has been granted.

The National Guard will have the ability “to arrest and bring in for an identity check” individuals without providing any reason for their detention and without proving that they are wanted by the police. The draft law establishing the Guard allows unrestricted “access to dwellings and other properties, to grounds and territories.” Restrictions on using various special measures of crowd control, such as water pumps and sonic cannons, are to be drastically reduced for the National Guard, as compared to existing police forces. It will have the virtually unrestricted right to employ such means against protesters during mass demonstrations, with the exception of “visibly pregnant women, obvious invalids and children.”

In an April 28 comment about the establishment of the National Guard,Gazeta.ru noted that according to polls, “many people understand that the new armed force is aimed at suppressing possible disorders within the country… Not even political disturbances, but rather economic and social ones. More and more often mass street rallies attract not the white collars, but the “Uralvagonzavod” (the Ural railcar works, i.e. the blue collar proletariat),” remarked the online newspaper.

The growing economic crisis in Russia, which has pushed tens of millions of citizens to the edge, is breeding diffuse but ever stronger popular discontent.

According to official statistics, in March 2016 retail sales dropped by 5.8 percent compared to the year before, real wages fell by 3 percent and real disposable income shrank by 1.8 percent. In mid-April, the Ministry of Finance announced that it will cut the “unprotected”—i.e., social spending—portion of the federal budget by 10 percent.

With the average monthly income of a Russian family in 2015 amounting to just 43,800 rubles (about $665), households are facing severe financial distress. “Exhaustion of resources—that is how we may summarize the state of the Russian consumer today,” observed Marina Lapenkova, director for work with global clients of the Nielsen Russia Center in an interview with Kommersant. The Nielsen index of consumer trust has dropped to its lowest point in 11 years.

The rapid decline of incomes, the halving of the value of the ruble and the freezing of wages of many state employees and pensioners have led most of the country’s inhabitants to devote more than 50 percent of their budgets just to the purchase of food.

Plans for the creation of the new force come amidst news reports of preparations on the part of state authorities for the use of violence against the population. In April, there was an exercise in the Smolensk region on how to disperse an unsanctioned mass rally. According to the hypothetical scenario used for the exercise, local inhabitants had received exaggerated utility bills and came out to an unsanctioned demonstration.

Earlier, there were internet reports of a training exercise in Liubertsy (a suburb of Moscow), where the troops were training to disperse an unsanctioned meeting held under the slogan, “No to corruption!”

In April, the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a public request for proposals to design a non-lethal acoustic means to disperse large rallies. As public commentary noted at the time, similar measures were utilized by the American police to disperse street disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri.

The decision to establish the National Guard is fully in line with Kremlin’s overall policy for decades—the strengthening of the state and its apparatus of repression, the encroachment and limitation of democratic rights, the criminalization of that deemed to be “nonconformist” and the fostering of militarism and Russian nationalism. These tendencies have grown stronger during the past two years, as tensions between Moscow and Washington have escalated, the Kremlin threatened by US support for regime change in Russia and the regional break-up of the multi-ethnic state.

Anxiety over the situation in the country is driving renewed efforts to limit any means available to the population for the expression of political opposition. On April 18, the chairman of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, published a comment in a leading press outlet entitled, “It is time to put a stop to the information war”. Denouncing the “hybrid warfare unleashed by the US and its allies” during “the past decade,” he declared, “We should stop playing at fake democracy, stop following these fake liberal values.”

He demanded the tightening of censorship of the internet, the “bypassing of the courts”, the compilation of blacklists of extremist materials and the blocking of web sites that “spread extremist and radical-nationalist information.” Dispensing with the concept of the presumption of innocence, he wrote, “if those possessing such information do not consider it extremist, then let them argue about it through the courts and prove their innocence.”

Bastrykin also suggested using the criminal code to “decisively interrupt the targeted falsification of the nation’s history”. He declared statements that the government deems to be “connected to falsification of facts about historical issues and events” to be the equivalent of extremism.

While maintaining that the main target of such measures is the propaganda of the imperialist powers, the Kremlin is fundamentally concerned with blocking the emergence of a movement of working people against both Russia’s capitalist oligarchy and the rapacious appetites of global finance.

Tens of thousands demonstrate against Polish government

Clara Weiss

On Saturday, under the slogan “We are and will remain in Europe,” tens of thousands demonstrated in the Polish capital Warsaw against the Law and Justice Party (PiS) government and in favour of a stronger orientation to the European Union. According to opposition sources, around 200,000 people participated in the march through the city centre, which would make it the largest demonstration in Poland since 1989. With the support of the Catholic Church, the government organised counter-demonstrations, but could only draw between 3,000-4,000 people.

Campaigns using large placards took place in the Polish capital for several weeks in the lead-up to the demonstration. Warsaw’s mayor, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, from the opposition Citizens’ Platform (PO), was among the most prominent figures in the opposition movement. Backing also came from figures like Adam Michnik, the former editor of the influential dailyGazeta Wyborzca. As an opposition intellectual during the Stalinist era, he helped prepare the way for capitalist restoration.

Compared to earlier protests, more young people participated, above all students and some entire families. Academics and members of the Warsaw middle class were clearly visible.

The opposition noted at the demonstration that the issue was defending democracy and the constitutional court against the PiS. But at the heart of the protest was the issue of the EU. In the sea of Polish and EU flags which dominated the protest, there were significantly more EU flags than at previous protests.

Ryszard Petru, chairman of the Nowoczesna (Modern Party), stated, “We are not in agreement with describing the EU flag as dirt and that Jarosław Kaczyński is leading us out of the EU.” Other opposition figures said the issue was defending democracy and “European values” like “freedom” and “solidarity.”

Nowoczesna is involved in the committee for the defence of democracy (KOD) and played a central role in organising the protest. In the last election, the party managed to secure many votes from disappointed PO supporters. In recent polls, Nowoczesna, with 20.4 percent support, was in second place, behind the PiS (30.8 percent). Only 12.8 percent still support PO.

Nowoczesna represents the interests of large and small businesses whose operations are closely tied to EU membership. Petru, the party’s chairman, worked for the World Bank between 2001 and 2004, where he was involved in drafting austerity measures for Poland and Hungary to allegedly improve the climate for investment. He was thereafter active in management and as an economist for a number of important Polish banks. He has close ties to economist Leszek Balczerowicz, who heavily influenced the shock therapy for Poland in the 1990s, making him among those chiefly responsible for the social catastrophe produced by capitalist restoration.

The protests came in the wake of an intensifying constitutional crisis and growing conflicts over Poland’s EU policy. The PiS government has largely blocked the constitutional court and refused to publish its ruling against a new law which significantly limits the court’s powers. As long as the ruling remains unpublished, it does not come into force.

The EU has intervened in the conflict, and following proposals from the Venice Commission, it sided with the constitutional court. In response, Zdzisław Krasnodębski, who is responsible for EU affairs in the PiS government, proposed via Twitter a referendum over Poland’s continued EU membership.

However, this was met with opposition from among the PiS leadership. Kaczyński, the party’s chair, condemned those in favour of a referendum at the beginning of May as a “political plague.” He emphasised that Poland would remain in the EU, even if it withdrew the freedom to oppose policies which contradicted national security. In January, President Andrzej Duda issued an urgent warning over the potential break-up of the EU resulting from a Brexit.

According to figures from the Polish economy ministry, Britain is the country’s second largest export market. For British concerns like Tesco and Shell, Poland is the most important sales market in Central Europe. In addition, Britain is, after the United States, home to the second largest community of Polish immigrants. Around 850,000 Polish workers live in Britain. Many came to find better jobs, and support their families in Poland with remittances.

From the standpoint of the working class, the protests represent no principled opposition to the PiS’ right-wing policies, which aim to construct an authoritarian state and are playing a central role in US imperialism’s war drive against Russia. Instead, the opposition parties are attempting to divert the opposition to these right-wing policies behind the reactionary project of the EU.

The lack of interest among the opposition parties in defending democratic rights is shown by their fundamental acceptance of the government’s new anti-terror law.

The EU, which the Polish opposition parties feel part of, is implementing ruthless attacks on the working class across the continent. The current government’s predecessor, a coalition between PO and PSL (Polish People’s Party), was responsible for social attacks backed by the EU.

The opposition speak on behalf of sections of the Polish bourgeoisie and urban middle class, who see their privileges threatened by the policies adopted by PiS. EU membership after the restoration of capitalism in Poland provided the basis for the emergence of a small but, in cities like Warsaw and Krakow, relatively substantial middle class.

While Polish heavy industry was largely dismantled and the country transformed into a low-wage platform for foreign, and in particular German, investment, the banks, non-governmental organisations and service companies which flourished in parallel to this offered well-paid positions for sections of the urban middle class. At the same time, many Polish corporations have benefited from the European sales market.

The threatened break-up of the EU and the policies of PiS have thrown these layers into crisis. The latest edition of the liberal magazine Polityka, which is closely associated with the opposition parties, warned in its lead article of the danger of a break-up of the EU in the event of a “Brexit” or “Polexit.” Despite the repeated assertions of Kaczynski and Duda, the opposition fears that Poland could leave the EU.

The magazine issued a dire warning over the impact on business of a break-up of the EU or a Polexit, writing: “Poland is still a poor country and does not have large amounts of capital of its own, the level of the standard of living is among the lowest in Europe. We need foreign investment and capital. Since joining the EU, Poland has received investments totalling €125 billion. Direct investment from EU states is around €110 billion. Polish exports have increased by 200 percent.”

The article concluded: “We are in a situation which we wanted to avoid and should always fear like fire: neither aligned with the west nor Russia, we are in a grey zone. The Polexit has begun.”

Thousands lose their homes in Alberta wildfire

Roger Jordan

In the wake of the first tour by media representatives through Fort McMurray Monday, it is clear that many thousands of residents have been left homeless by the catastrophic wildfire which forced close to 90,000 to evacuate the city May 3.

The Alberta government confirmed that 2,400 structures, between 10 and 15 percent of the city, were destroyed outright by the fire, close to five times more than the 2011 blaze in Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada’s worst wildfire disaster prior to this month. An additional 12 homes were burned down in the small community of Anzac, south of Fort McMurray.

This only gives an indication of the worst of the damage, since many of the buildings left standing will have suffered partial fire damage, and/or severe water and smoke damage. Officials confirmed that large areas of the city are without water, gas and power.

Reports suggest that at least 12 of the houses that burned to the ground belonged to firefighters involved in fighting the blaze. Around 700 firefighters from across the country continue to work on containing the fire.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has said that it will be two weeks before an announcement is made on when residents can return to Fort McMurray. It is likely to be many months, if ever, before the thousands whose homes have been destroyed have a place to return to in the city.

The fire has grown to over 230,000 hectares in size, but is now largely removed from residential areas. It did not reach the Saskatchewan border, 90 kilometers (56 miles) to Fort McMurray’s east, as earlier expected.

Insurers estimate that total damage caused by the fire could top $9 billion, making it the most expensive disaster in Canadian history. Indications are that insurers will respond by increasing premiums for homeowners in areas close to forests or at high risk of wildfires. “It’s quite possible we could see some rate increases, possibly regionally,” Jason Mercer of Moody’s Canada said Wednesday.

As well as residential properties, many businesses were destroyed in the flames, leaving hundreds, and possibly thousands, of workers without jobs. Economist Herb Emery told the Globe and Mail that the fire would likely cause the provincial jobless rate to spike in the short term from 7.2 to 10 percent.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to visit the region tomorrow. He has explicitly refused linking the wildfire to climate change or any other “political” explanation, describing such approaches as “not helpful.” The Trudeau government is anxious to push ahead with its support for further expansion of Alberta tar-sands oil production, above all through the construction of pipelines to transport oil to tidal water.

Notley met with oil executives in Edmonton Tuesday to discuss restarting production at facilities around the devastated city. Some operations have already started pumping oil at lower than normal rates, and Suncor Chief Executive Steve Williams confirmed that others could be ready to operate at full capacity within 24 to 48 hours of a decision to resume production. Others located south of the city could take a week or two to restart.

Oil facilities have suffered only minor damage, including to some electrical infrastructure. But Williams maintained, “We don’t believe at the moment that the electrical infrastructure issues are going to be big enough to stop the industry ramping up.”

This underlines the basic fact that the wildfire that destroyed much of Fort McMurray was no natural disaster, but the product of the capitalist system’s reckless drive for profit at all costs. Fort McMurray was expanded exponentially over recent decades to serve the needs of the oil giants exploiting the Alberta tar sands, but unlike the large fire breaks and specially trained fire crews in place to guard oil production facilities, few precautionary measures were taken to protect the people of Fort McMurray and their homes. Only one road out of the city existed for a population that surpassed 100,000 at the peak of the oil price boom, and fire breaks to deprive flames of fuel close to residential areas were lacking.

The official indifference to the fate of the population is made even more outrageous by the repeated warnings issued by scientists about the increased risks of wildfires in Canada’s boreal forest. Experts have long warned that the combination of climate change, a larger human presence in the boreal forests due to the oil, mining and logging industries, and a lack of precautionary measures were creating the conditions for a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Over two decades ago, scientists predicted the lengthening of the fire season, and more recent studies estimated the area burned in Canada by fires will continue to increase in coming decades.

Just months prior to last week’s fire, the incoming federal Liberal Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr was warned in his briefing papers that governments at all levels have insufficiently funded programs to combat wildfires. In 2005, the provincial, territorial and federal governments agreed on a Canadian Wildlands Fire Strategy urging the improvement of community resilience, better fire management and the implementation of modern business practices. “Governments remain supportive of the strategy,” said Carr’s briefing notes, “but progress towards implementation over the past decade has been limited, primarily due to fiscal constraints.”

Even as signs grew of the mounting threat, with 2015 witnessing a record fire season, successive provincial governments in Alberta cut the firefighting budget. The result of the latest cuts imposed by Notley’s NDP government is that the province will be without air tankers to fight blazes from mid-August, even though the fire season, which began a month early this year due to warmer temperatures, runs through October.

Those displaced by the fire have largely relied on the generosity of the local population for support, with many residing with friends and family. The Red Cross has received at least $67 million in donations from across the country and is preparing to disperse $50 million of this to the evacuees, $600 for every adult and $300 for dependents.

The Alberta government began handing out financial assistance to evacuees yesterday in the form of pre-loaded debit cards, with $1,250 for every adult and $500 per dependent.

Thousands lined up for hours at four distribution sites in Edmonton. Residents at the Northlands evacuee camp started lining up at 6 a.m., eight hours before the card distribution was slated to begin, only to be told they were in the wrong place. Due to the length of the lines, some ultimately left empty-handed.

The evacuation centres where several thousand are being housed are showing signs of strain. At least 50 people were taken sick at Northlands in Edmonton Monday and had to be segregated from the rest of the camp’s residents.

The camps are dependent on volunteers, but this is proving insufficient. “We need more volunteers to help, we need every hand,” Dalia Abdellatif of Edmonton Emergency Relief Services told CBC. “Without volunteers, we would not be able to run this place.” She added that a centre set up at a former Target store in the city required more resources.

Distress Centre Calgary, which provides support to people with trauma and other mental health problems, reported that it received over 180 calls to its emergency line related to the wildfire between May 4 and 8. Many of those evacuating the city were already suffering the effects of the economic downturn, which by April had driven the official unemployment rate in Fort McMurray to almost 10 percent.

On top of this, Fort McMurray was home to refugees from around the world, including Syrians who recently fled the civil war. “To me when I do go back I will probably have to go see a counsellor, because … just seeing all those homes burn down brings back a lot of my past,” Godelive Ohelo, who fled the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo after losing relatives, told CBC.

Growing bankruptcy crisis in global oil and gas industry

Gabriel Black

Lower oil prices have bankrupted dozens of major oil and gas companies since 2015. Moreover, a sharp increase in bankruptcies in the month of April suggests that the worse is yet to come.

A total of 69 major oil and gas companies, with $34.3 billion in debts, have gone bankrupt since 2015, according to a report released earlier this month by Haynes and Boone law firm. In April 2016 alone, 11 significant companies went under. These companies cumulatively held $14.9 billion worth of debt, making April 2016 account for 43 percent of the total bankruptcy debt since the beginning of 2015.

Charles Gibbs, a company-restructuring lawyer, told Reuters that the second quarter of 2016 would have even more bankruptcies than the first. The global consulting and professional service firm Deloitte, meanwhile, predicts that a third of global oil and gas companies, 175 corporations, are at risk of bankruptcy.

Forbes cites a Bernstein Research prediction that before 2019 there will be $70 billion in defaults in the global gas and oil industry and $400 billion worth of risky debt. So far, there has been $34.3 billion in defaults, much of that centered in “unconventional” oil and gas producers. For example, the largest failure so far has been the Canadian-listed company Pacific Exploration and Production, which mines Venezuela’s Orinoco bitumen, also known as tar or oil sands. The company had $5.3 billion in debt.

“Unconventional” fields, such as shale formations, which require hydraulic fracturing, tar sands, and deep-sea offshore reserves, have costs of production far higher than “conventional” oil. While Ghawar, the largest Saudi Arabian field, has a cost of production close to $1 a barrel, an average shale well in the Bakken field in North Dakota only begins to break even at $69 a barrel, according to a recent Scotia Bank estimate.

In 2014, Brent Crude Oil (the international standard for oil price), was a little over $110 per barrel. Since then its price has declined rapidly, descending to nearly $35 per barrel at the start of this year. The rout has devalued US energy company stocks by more than $1 trillion . The spot price, which has risen to about $47.50 at the time of writing, remains highly volatile.

At the beginning of December 2015, the downturn had already led to 250,000 workers being laid off around the world. Tens of thousands more workers have been laid off this year, with more to come.

The crisis in the oil industry is of immense significance and could spark a broader meltdown of the fragile global financial system.

Reuters writes, “U.S. oil and gas companies sold about $350.7 billion in debt between 2010 and 2014, the peak years of the oil-and-gas boom, with junk bonds making up more than 50 percent of all issuance.” By comparison, $177.1 billion in US telecommunication bonds were sold between 1998 and 2002 before the implosion of that industry. However, only 10 percent of those were junk bonds.

A larger sell-off of these bonds could cause a larger panic in US financial markets, where many institutions rely on unprecedented low interest rates to remain afloat.

The downturn in oil prices has also been accompanied by a general downturn in commodity prices, particularly for iron ore. This downturn has hurt many resource-extracting or primary manufacturing countries, such as Brazil, Australia and China, which rely on exporting natural resources and producing steel and other foundational industrial goods. This has exacerbated concerns that there could be an exodus of investment from developing countries, ultimately causing an economic crisis. In China alone, there are expected to be more than 1 million layoffs of steel and coal workers in the next two years.

The past nine years have been a state of near-permanent volatility in the oil market. Between 2004 and 2007, Brent Crude went from $20 a barrel to $147 a barrel. With the financial crisis, it then dropped to around $30 in 2009 before going back up again to about $114 in the summer of 2014 and then plummeting again to $30 in less than a year. This year, the International Energy Association is predicting the price will rise again.

The massive and historically unprecedented volatility in the oil market is an expression of the irrationality of the capitalist economic system. During times of rising oil prices, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested into new, expensive, unconventional oil techniques, such as fracking. But whenever there is a downturn in the price, this unconventional section of the oil market becomes unprofitable and investment leaves.

Rather than create a supply-demand equilibrium as neoclassical economics would predict, there is in fact a chronic imbalance between the two. One day, producers struggle to come up with new oil for an ever-expanding market, and the next day, there is too much of it and pressure is exerted to rein in production. This boom-bust cycle makes any rational planning for a sustainable energy future impossible, so long as the oil industry and the world economy as a whole run on a capitalist basis.

Australian state government imposes draconian “public safety” laws

Mike Head

For the second time in two months, extraordinary laws that can be used to shut down political protests and punish dissent have been pushed through the parliament of Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), giving the police far-reaching repressive powers.

Brought forward amid a deteriorating economic situation, along with political instability caused by rising social discontent, the legislation can only be described as police-state in character. The two latest bills allow police officers to issue sweeping “crime prevention” and “public safety” orders—including forms of house arrest for up to five years—without a charge, trial, or conviction.

Last week, the Serious Crime Prevention Orders Bill and the Organised Crime and Public Safety Bill were simultaneously rammed through both houses of parliament by the state’s Liberal-National government in just 24 hours. The laws override fundamental legal and democratic rights, going beyond the anti-protest legislation adopted in March.

The law enacted in March imposes extraordinary punishments—such as jail terms of up to seven years for hindering a mining project—that can be used to suppress opposition, including industrial action by workers, to the deepening assault on jobs, living standards and social conditions. But those punishments still require convictions recorded by courts. Last week’s bills give police officers themselves virtually unchallengeable powers to impose orders that can strip individuals of their freedom of movement, employment and right to communicate.

Such laws are only possible because the Australian constitution contains no bill of rights or any other guarantee of basic democratic rights—not even a mention of the word “democracy.” Moreover, the High Court, Australia’s supreme court, has in recent years eviscerated the limited so-called freedom of political communication that its judges previously found to be implied by the 1901 colonial-era constitution.

In France, where President François Hollande’s Socialist Party administration used last November’s terror attacks in Paris as a pretext to hand open-ended powers to the police, the parliament endorsed a three-month state of emergency under the country’s constitution. There is no such requirement in Australia.

Politically, such laws could only be enacted due to the complicity of the entire political establishment, and the virtual silence of the mass media. Unprecedented measures, adopted by Liberal-National and Labor governments alike in the “war on terrorism,” such as detention without trial, are being extended throughout the legal system as a whole. Although the Labor Party and the Greens formally voted against the two latest bills—warning their government colleagues that the provisions were so extreme they could fuel political disenchantment—they have issued no public statements in opposition to the legislation or warned the population about its significance.

Under the guise of combatting “organised crime,” police officers can now “make public safety orders” where a person, or class of person, at a public event or in any other area, “might” pose a serious risk to “public safety or security.” Such orders can essentially abolish the freedom of assembly, association, expression and movement, all on the assessment of a senior police officer or, where the orders are supposedly required “urgently,” any police officer, even a probationary constable. The penalty for disobeying an order is up to five years’ imprisonment.

There is no right of appeal, unless the order extends beyond 72 hours. Then an appeal can be made to the state’s Supreme Court, but the police do not have to disclose any “criminal intelligence evidence.” The hearing is conducted without the presence of either applicants or their lawyers.

Alternatively, the police, or the NSW Crime Commission or the Director of Public Prosecutions, can apply to a court for “serious crime prevention orders,” lasting up to five years. These can effectively punish people for alleged involvement in, or “facilitation” of, offences, even those for which they were acquitted in a criminal trial.

Orders may restrict a person’s movements, activities, employment, residence, expression, assembly, association or anything else “if there are reasonable grounds to believe that the making of the order would protect the public.” An order “may contain such prohibitions, restrictions, requirements and other provisions as the court considers appropriate.”

A serious crime is defined as one punishable by imprisonment for five years, which includes most offences in the state’s Crimes Act, and could extend from “seditious conspiracy” (anti-government activity) to possession of a cannabis plant. In crime prevention order hearings, the normal rules of evidence do not apply. Hearsay is admissible, the standard of proof is “the balance of probabilities,” not the criminal law standard of “beyond reasonable doubt,” and police can provide untested criminal intelligence.

Conditions may be imposed on any reporting of the existence of the order. Because of the broad discretions given to the police, court appeals are unlikely to succeed. Breaches of orders can also result in imprisonment for five years.

The bills were rushed through despite condemnations by civil liberties groups and the legal profession. In its submission to parliament, the NSW Bar Association declared: “The bill effectively sets up a rival to the criminal trial system and interferes unacceptably in the fundamental human rights and freedoms of citizens of NSW.” The legislation was “contradictory to long-settled principles concerning the adjudication of criminal guilt by a fair trial.”

In parliament’s upper house, Labor and the Greens combined to propose a series of amendments that would have referred the bills to a parliamentary committee inquiry or put a cosmetic gloss on the police powers, such as by requiring more senior police officers, or courts, to issue the “prevention” or “safety” orders.

Greens MP David Shoebridge said the amendments were proposed in “good faith” because they “simply civilise what we say is fundamentally inappropriate and liberty-thieving legislation.”

Labor’s Adam Searle said his party had done its best to improve the legislation, “to make it properly fit for purpose and to render it in a form where everyone in the community can have confidence in the probity and the integrity of the regime of orders to be created.”

Another Labor MP, Ernest Wong, said he was offended by government suggestions that his party did not support the police. He insisted: “It was the Labor Party that, for 16 years, oversaw the building of the most professional, best funded, best equipped and most contemporary police force in the nation.”

No reliance can be placed on any of the establishment parties, the courts or the media, which has barely reported the passage of the bills, to defend essential democratic rights.

With Labor’s support, Premier Mike Baird’s state government is about to unveil another package of “anti-terrorism” laws, which will provide a model for matching legislation by all states and territories. These measures, agreed upon at a summit of federal and state leaders, both Labor and Liberal-National, last month, will feature detaining and interrogating suspects, as young as 14, for up to 14 days without charge.

These developments highlight an escalating pattern. As the WSWS has repeatedly warned, the ever-expanding terrorism legislation introduced since 2001 is being used to establish an authoritarian framework, aimed at targeting not just a relative handful of alleged Islamic extremists, but at suppressing the inevitable social struggles that will emerge against the drive to war and austerity.

Protests erupt in France against regressive labor law

Alex Lantier

After the Socialist Party (PS) government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced Tuesday that he would impose the unpopular labour law reform without a vote in the National Assembly, protests and riots erupted in cities across France against the PS’s blatantly anti-democratic procedure.

Valls and President François Hollande invoked article 49-3 of the French constitution, which allows them to impose a law if the Assembly does not vote to censure the government, forcing new elections, in 48 hours—that is, by the end of today. Three-quarters of the population opposes the draft law, which lengthens working times, undermines job security and allows bosses and unions to negotiate contracts violating the Labour Code.

Hundreds of protesters gathered Tuesday night in Paris in front of the National Assembly, whose staff barricaded the shutters, fearing a riot. Protesters denounced Valls’ decision as an “insult to the people,” shouting slogans such as, “Real democracy is here” and “National Assembly, assembly of capital.”

One thousand people marched across Toulouse shouting, “Toulouse, rise up,” and, “We don't want this society,” but were blocked by a police cordon before they could arrive at the departmental PS headquarters. Protests of several hundred people also took place in Lille, Tours, Marseille, Grenoble and Nantes, where protesters clashed violently with police.

In Lyon, protesters shouted slogans against the PS in front of city hall, and later attacked a police station and ransacked a PS local section building. Another PS headquarters was violently ransacked by a few dozen protesters in Caen.

The PS government and the French bourgeoisie are hoping, however, that while these protests reflect anger felt by tens of millions of workers, they will not immediately provoke the eruption of a general strike by the working class, as in 1936 or 1968.

The daily newspaper Le Monde wrote, “Even though using article 49-3 immediately provoked a protest before the National Assembly, the government is betting that its parliamentary coup will not inflame the social climate. ‘The social movement and protests exist, but they are not currently growing,’ commented an associate of the head of state.’”

The events in France starkly highlight the significance of the deep crisis of political leadership in the working class. Workers and youth mounted mass protests against the law for over two months, it is overwhelmingly opposed by the population, and the general mood among workers in France and internationally is moving to the left, amid rising social anger with the entire political establishment. Yet a desperately weak and unpopular PS government, which is widely seen as a factotum for the banks, is on the verge of imposing a widely hated law by legislative fiat.

Central responsibility for this lies with the union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left parties close to the PS, like the New Anticapitalist Party, that mounted the #UpAllNight movement, which directed youth away from struggle against the PS and towards impotent meetings on various city squares. This demobilised the protests, blocked a campaign to mobilise broader layers of the working class against the Valls government, and handed the initiative for a time back to the PS. The PS then wasted no time in moving to ram the bill through the Assembly.

There will be powerful anger and opposition in the working class to attempts to use the labour law to undermine its wages and conditions, particularly given the antidemocratic methods the PS used to impose the law. The struggle of the working class against the PS and against similar governments across Europe is only beginning.

Yet it must be stated clearly that the PS is on the verge of succeeding in forcing the bill through the parliament. Unlike the #UpAllNight movement—whose media figurehead, nationalist economist Frédéric Lordon, has insisted that it does not matter whether or not the labour reform passes—the WSWS frankly warns that the labour law would be used to mount bitter attacks on working people.

Its passage would mark a significant setback for the workers and youth who have been fighting the bill, and constitute irrefutable proof of the necessity of a break with the existing organisations, which are tied to the PS and have proven completely bankrupt.

This includes the attempts by sections of the trade union bureaucracy and of the Left Front of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to promote illusions in impotent appeals to deputies of the National Assembly to halt or partially rewrite the labour reform.

Thus Mélenchon posted a Tweet on the labour law apparently calling for joint protests with right-wing forces and a motion of censure to bring down the PS government. He wrote, “To stop it, vote to censure. No reticence on disgusting measures faced with disgusting people. Yes, we need protests by a common front of those who refuse the bill. And now.”

A motion of censure presented by the Left Front and its allies failed last night, receiving less than 60 votes. Today, a motion of censure is being prepared by the right-wing opposition The Republicans (LR) party, though it appears unlikely to carry under conditions where fewer than 60 deputies from the Left Front and PS were willing to vote to censure the government.

Every indication is that the so-called rebel factions of the PS that have voiced mild and hypocritical objections to the labour reform are preparing to fall in line with the law and will not vote to censure the PS government.

Benoît Hamon, one of the leaders of the faction, said yesterday, “The right-wing censure motion, well, you have to understand that you may be in disagreement with Manuel Valls, but preferring [right-wing former President] Nicolas Sarkozy to Manuel Valls ... it's a bit hard to prefer that type of politics to the current government.”

The Valls government is reportedly threatening any PS deputy who votes the LR censure motion in the Assembly with expulsion from the PS.

Brazil Senate vote ousts Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff

Bill Van Auken

After a twenty-hour debate that ended only at 5:45 AM in Brasilia, the Brazilian Senate voted to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, suspending her from office. While only a simple majority was needed to start a trial of the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores--PT) president, her opponents mustered 55 votes in favor, one more than a two-thirds majroity, with only 22 against.

The move effectively ends more than 13 years of Workers Party rule in Brazil and ushers in an extremely right-wing government that will redouble the attacks on the living standards and basic rights of Brazilian workers that had already begun under the Rousseff administration.

Scattered demonstrations broke out both for and against impeachment in Brasilia and across the country as the Senate debate unfolded.

In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest affirmed the Obama administration’s “confidence in the mature, durable, democratic institutions in Brazil to withstand the challenge.”

In legal terms, the Senate vote only initiates a trial process that must conclude within 180 days with a decision on whether or not to impeach Rousseff, removing her permanently from office, which requires a two-thirds majority. Her suspension in the meantime, however, has cleared the way for her successor, Vice President Michel Temer, to carry out a wholesale purge of government officials.

A last-ditch attempt Tuesday by the country’s attorney general to win a Supreme Court order halting the impeachment proceedings was rebuffed. Another appeal on Wednesday for the court to bar Temer from sacking government ministers and naming his own cabinet was also rejected by the court.

While the entire political establishment in Brazil, along with some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, are implicated in a massive bribes and kickbacks scandal involving contracts with the state-run energy giant Petrobras, Rousseff is to be tried on charges of improperly transferring funds from public banks to sustain government programs and, allegedly, to conceal fiscal realities in during her 2014 reelection bid. The president and her supporters point out that such budgetary practices were nothing new, having been employed by each of her recent predecessors.

Sixty percent of the members of the Senate that voted for an impeachment trial are themselves facing charges of one character or another, the great majority involving money laundering and corruption. Thirteen are facing trial before the Supreme Court in connection with the Petrobras scandal, while others are implicated in charges ranging from murder to rape and even the exploitation of slave labor.

While both Rousseff—who chaired the Petrobras board when the kickback scheme siphoned off some $2 billion in assets—and her predecessor as president, Workers Party founder Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, are also facing investigations, there has been no evidence directly linking her to criminal activity.

Rather, the impeachment process is being carried out on the basis of a transparent pretext with the objective of effecting a radical change in government policy demanded by the financial markets.

Brazil faces its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the economy expected to contract for the second year in a row by at least 4 percent. Layoffs have taken place at the rate of 100,000 a month, while inflation has eaten into the living standards of the population.

The Workers Party government had already begun implementing harsh austerity measures. Rousseff and other PT leaders had argued that they alone could claim “legitimacy” in carrying through such attacks, while counting on the collaboration of the CUT union federation. Decisive sections of the Brazilian ruling class as well as foreign investors, however, made it clear that they wanted regime change.

During the protracted Senate debate, some of those backing impeachment made it clear that this was the real reason for ousting Rousseff, not alleged fiscal misdeeds. Senator Raimundo Lira of the PMDB, who led the special commission on impeachment, told the body, “We are living through a moment of crisis that will only begin to be resolved” with Rousseff’s ouster.

While Rousseff and her supporters have denounced her impeachment as a “coup,” the inconvenient truth is that the collection of right-wing parties and corrupt politicians who have pushed her out of the presidency are in most cases the erstwhile running mates, allies and partners of the PT and its government.

The 13 years of Workers Party rule served to further the growth of the right wing, which was awarded with government positions and payoffs for political support. Meanwhile, the corruption and pro-capitalist policies of the PT in power served to erode whatever base the party once had in the Brazilian working class.

Vice President Temer is to assume his new position as provisional president at 11 a.m. on Thursday. Folha de S.Paulo reported Wednesday that he had already prepared a speech in which he will tell the Brazilian people that the country’s economic situation is critical and that the population must unite in support of sweeping emergency measures.

Temer’s party, the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), has cast the program of the incoming administration as a “bridge to the future.” In reality, it is a bridge to the past, an attempt to wipe out social rights that were written into the 1988 constitution adopted three years after the end of Brazil’s more than 20-year-long military dictatorship.

Temer is to announce a new cabinet which will also be sworn in Thursday, making virtually a clean sweep of the ministers who had served under Rousseff. Most of their replacements have already been named. A PMDB legislator explained that it was necessary to avoid a “vacuum of power.”

Among the most significant appointments involve economic portfolios. Named as the new head of the Central Bank is Ilan Goldfajn, chief economist and partner at Itaú Unibanco, Brazil’s largest private bank. Goldfajn, who served in the same post under the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), has called for the scrapping of Brazil’s constitutional requirements to fund health care, retirement programs and aid to the poor, suggested that wages are too high and that the growth of unemployment is required to bring down inflation. Former Bank of Boston CEO and central bank President Henrique Meirelles has been tapped as minister of economy, entrusted with defending the interest of Brazilian and international capital.

To head the Ministry of Defense, Temer has apparently chosen Newton Cardoso, Jr., a 36-year-old PMDB deputy from the state of Minas Gerais. According to Folha, the choice has prompted protests within the military’s uniformed command, which sees him as too young and politically inexperienced to oversee the armed forces under conditions of intense political crisis. Not helping matters, he and his father, the former governor of Minas Gerais, were named in the Panama Papers as having opened an offshore account to purchase a $1.9 million helicopter and a flat in London valued at 1.2 million pounds.

And as justice minister, Temer has named Alexandre de Moraes, the right-wing Sao Paulo public safety secretary, who has presided over a Military Police force that kills more people each year than all of the US police departments combined.

While recent polls have put Rousseff’s approval rating at roughly 10 percent and indicated 60 percent support for impeachment, Temer’s popularity is if anything lower and a similar majority has called for his removal.

The assumption of power by Temer, who himself faces potential impeachment as well an investigation in connection with the Petrobras scandal, will hardly stem the political crisis. Rather, it signals a sharp intensification of the class struggle in Brazil under the rule of an illegitimate government.