Brexit financial fallout widens

Nick Beams

Problems in the global financial system are mounting following the June 23 British referendum vote to quit the European Union. One of the clearest manifestations is the spike in the volume of government bonds trading at negative yields.

Over the past month, the total has surged by $1.3 trillion to $11.7 trillion, reflecting a massive “flight to safety” by investors and institutions that have lost all confidence in the prospect of normal growth in the world economy. Last week, German ten-year bonds traded in negative territory, while in Japan all government bonds of less than 15 years duration have yields below zero.

A negative yield means the price of the bond is so high and the consequent yield so low (prices and yields move in inverse relationship to one another) that investors would lose money if they held a bond to its maturity date.

The shift in the bond market indicates that the outlook for the global economy is worsening following the Brexit vote, prompting central banks around the world to prepare to pour still more money into the financial markets.

Longer-term British rates remained marginally positive after the British ten-year bond dropped to a record low of 0.78 percent last week. But yields on a two-year bond went negative for the first time ever amid predictions by economists of a UK recession in the coming months and a downbeat assessment by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

He said the decision to quit the EU marked a “major regime shift.” He added that “uncertainty over the pace, breadth and scale of these changes could weigh on our economic prospects for some time,” while he foreshadowed “some monetary policy easing” over the next few months.

Besides uncertainty over Brexit, there were longer-term shifts at work, Carney indicated. “These challenges have been compounded by deeper forces that have radically altered the balance of saving and investment in the global economy,” he said. “Whether called ‘secular stagnation’ or a ‘global liquidity trap,’ the drag on jobs, wages and growth is real.”

“Secular stagnation” or “liquidity trap” refers to the situation, first identified in the 1930s, where investment prospects are so low that cuts in interest rates provide no boost to economic activity in the real economy, and economic stagnation becomes a permanent condition.

Carney pointed to a number of interrelated factors leading to a worsening economic outlook both in the short and longer term. Globalisation and automation had reorientated the location of jobs, and the growth of bigger, more global markets had been accompanied by “winner-takes-all” patterns of compensation.

In the short term, indices of policy uncertainty in the US and Japan were about one-and-a-quarter times their averages before the financial crisis, and three times greater in China. In the UK, “progress since the financial crisis has been more than totally unwound this year with the measure having risen to five times the pre-crisis average by the start of the referendum campaign.”

Households, businesses and financial markets were suffering a form of “economic post-traumatic stress disorder.” There was an inchoate sense of economic insecurity for many people.

On the business side, there were “serial disappointments” in corporate earnings. “The failure of past relationships, especially rates of productivity growth, has embedded a sense of uncertainty in markets about the fundamentals upon which future prosperity will be built.”

Carney said uncertainty over global growth was holding back spending by corporations in the advanced economies. Global investment remained “weak” and investment in the UK was “tracking below past cycles.”

On the stability of the British financial system, Carney offered the reassurance that, as a result of “reforms,” the capital requirements of major banks were now ten times larger than before the crisis. But as Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf noted, ten times near-zero was still close to zero, and the way capital measurements were carried out was “dicey.”

Another round of European economic and political turmoil is looming, with indications that the Italian government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi could defy an EU ruling and pump billions of euros into the debt-ridden Italian banking system. After the Brexit vote, the share values of Italian banks, which have around €360 billion of non-performing loans, dropped by 30 percent.

The Financial Times has reported that Renzi is determined to intervene with public funds if necessary, despite opposition from Berlin and Brussels to such bailouts. According to the report, the threat of direct government intervention has “raised alarm” among EU regulators that it would “devastate the credibility of the union’s newly implemented banking rule book during its first real test.”

Last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the thumbs down on Italy’s request for a suspension of rules on state aid to recapitalise the country’s banks, and senior European Central Bank official Benoit Coeure said any suspension would spell the end of the banking union “as we know it.”

Renzi has responded to suggestions of rule-breaking by saying he will not be “lectured by the school teacher.”

Renzi has staked his political future on a constitutional referendum in October designed to lessen the powers of the upper house of parliament and promote government stability. But he faces opposition from the populist and nationalist Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord, which say the proposed amendment concentrates too much power in the hands of the government. The financial group Citi has described the referendum as “probably the single biggest risk on the European landscape this year outside the UK.”

While share markets have been boosted by the prospect of still more cheap money, like a heroin addict getting another shot, there is a growing sense among the financial elites that the measures taken since 2008 are leading to disaster.

Speaking in a panel discussion of central bankers convened by the Bank for International Settlements at the end of last month, the retiring governor of the Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, warned that it was wrong to assume that central banks always had a “big bazooka” up their sleeves. The major industrial nations insisted that emerging markets had to be “orthodox” in their policies, but they had themselves “thrown the orthodoxy out of the window.”

Rajan, who as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund was one of the few to warn prior to 2008 of the problems being created by cheap-money policies, said trust in the financial elites and financial institutions had collapsed, there was no common economic paradigm, and the crisis had brought the major economies “back to the conditions we experienced in emerging markets.”

In a Bloomberg article published July 2, Mohamed El-Erian, a senior economic adviser to the Allianz finance group, pointed to the structural uncertainties created by the Brexit vote as well as worsening underlying economic conditions reflected in low productivity growth and investment. “This state of affairs has made it enormously difficult for central banks (and others) to come up with a vision that commands sufficient conviction and foundation, leaving their policy approach without a solid secular foundation,” he wrote.

Repeatedly, he wrote, central banks had gone deeper into unchartered territory. That journey has led to a situation where the balance sheets of the world’s central banks have tripled in size since 2008. In contrast to the situation in 2008, when central banks stood on the sidelines of the financial markets, they are now major players. This means that when what global bond trader Bill Gross calls the bond market “supernova” explodes, the central banks will be massively compromised and sucked into the maelstrom.

Uncertainty in Japan following Brexit vote

Ben McGrath

The British vote to leave the European Union (EU) has raised uncertainty within Japan’s political establishment over its economic and political relationship with Europe and the United Kingdom (UK), as well as concerns that China could benefit from the fracturing of the EU.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government is now trying to consolidate relations between Japan and the United States, UK and the EU. Last week, Tokyo dispatched Vice Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama to Washington, London and Brussels for high-level discussions.

Sugiyama held talks with US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 27. The Japanese vice minister told reporters after the meeting that the two countries would “coordinate and make maximum efforts so that this issue will not have an unnecessary impact on the international community.” He referred to shared “basic values” in “the political, economic and security fields.”

Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida made similar comments in relation to the UK on June 24, saying: “Both Japan and Britain share fundamental values and have a cooperative relationship in the political, economic and national security spheres. We will continue with our efforts to maintain and strengthen that relationship.”

References to shared values—painted as commitments to democracy and peace—are in fact the opposite. Under the false banner of defending democracy and “human rights,” the US and its allies have waged one war of aggression after another in the Middle East to ensure America’s continued global hegemony. The US, backed by Japan, is now ramping up its “pivot to Asia” to undermine Chinese influence and prepare for war against China.

In an article on June 25, the Asahi Shimbun cited government and military officials who were clearly worried the Brexit would affect the Abe government’s remilitarization of Japan. General Yoshiyuki Sugiyama, chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Forces, declared: “I have no idea how it [Brexit] will influence the [security] policy.” An unnamed government official stated: “It will be difficult to push forward on various national security issues at a time when Britain is unstable.”

Reflecting fears in Japan’s ruling circles that Britain could draw closer to Beijing, the article suggested that London might lift the weapons export ban on China, which was imposed by the European Community, the EU’s predecessor, following the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters.

Tokyo and Washington may use claims that China will benefit from Brexit to intensify the pressure on Beijing. China, however, is just as concerned not only about the economic impact of Britain’s exit from the EU, but also that the US will be strengthened by the fracturing of Europe.

While in Washington, Sugiyama referred to next week’s scheduled ruling by a UN tribunal on China’s claims to islands in the South China Sea. “We discussed in general terms that after closely studying the results, it would be appropriate to raise our voices in the international community individually, jointly, together with the Group of Seven industrialized nations and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,” he said.

A Japanese government source cited in a Mainichi Shimbun comment on June 27 on Brexit, stated: “The British have recently come to see the South China Sea problem in the same way as Japan and the United States. However, with Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, economic issues will take precedence, and Britain may forget about the South China Sea.”

British officials attempted to allay Japanese fears when Sugiyama was in London last Wednesday. However, the two sides only agreed in general terms to work together to prevent any fallout in bilateral security relations.

The potential economic consequences of Brexit are also generating fears in Japanese ruling circles. The Japanese yen has strengthened as investors seeking safe havens have bought up the currency, thus impacting on exporting companies that rely on a weaker yen for profits.

Abe held separate conversations by phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel last Thursday. “Prime Minister Abe asked that Britain and the EU work together and send a clear message that would remove market concerns and strengthen predictability in a speedy manner,” a government statement declared.

One of the three “arrows” of Abe’s economic policy, or Abenomics, was stimulus measures designed to raise inflation to 2 percent. The government is planning another stimulus package for this autumn. While it is still in the works, it has been suggested the package could be at least 10 trillion yen ($US98 billion).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) called for additional stimulus measures, or a “reloading” of Abenomics, only a few days before the Brexit vote. “The three arrows remain the right arrows. We’d prefer to relaunch them with a little more force,” the IMF’s David Lipton said.

The third arrow, in particular, contains structural changes that include tax breaks for corporations and ending the country’s lifelong employment system so as to create cheap, temporary labor. The economic fallout from Brexit could lead to the acceleration of attacks on the working class.

Abe is using the Brexit vote to boost the government’s chances in the July 10 upper house election. He is campaigning on a platform promising stability, saying: “We cannot lose now. We cannot entrust Japan to the Democratic Party and the Japanese Communist Party (JCP).” The two opposition parties have joined to form an electoral alliance.

The prime minister hopes to obtain a two-thirds majority in the Diet to pass revisions to the current constitution, which would then be submitted to a national referendum. At the top of the government’s list is to change the constitution so as to allow further remilitarization and the use of its armed forces to aggressively prosecute Japan’s economic and strategic interests.

Terror attacks shake US-backed Baghdad regime

Thomas Gaist

Multiple car-bomb explosions killed some 125 and injured 150 in Baghdad Saturday. Online media sites linked to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed responsibility for the attacks, claiming they were directed against Shi’ites, regarded as apostates by the reactionary Sunni fundamentalist group.

The bombing, the latest in a string of major terror attacks, struck in the middle class neighborhood of Karrada, home to Shi’ites, Sunnis and many others. The bombs detonated just after midnight local time, when the streets were crowded with families breaking their daytime Ramadan fast. At least 25 of the dead were children.

The horrific atrocity comes on the heels of similar terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Bangladesh and Kabul, and an earlier attack in Baghdad by a knife-wielding assailant.

In a statement Sunday, the Obama administration vowed that the attacks “will only strengthen US resolve to support Iraqi security forces.”

“The United States strongly condemns ISIS’s heinous terrorist attacks in Baghdad,” a US National Security Council statement said. The NSC said that the administration would “intensify our efforts to root out ISIS’s terrorist network and leaders.”

The attack comes amid a general escalation of military operations against ISIS in Iraq, encompassing both Iraqi forces and the renewed American military intervention, launched by the Obama administration in the summer of 2014. Obama sent in US forces, three years after they were withdrawn, in response to the threatened destabilization of the US-backed government in Baghdad by the seizure of large areas of western and northern Iraq by Sunni insurgents.

Fresh from proclamations of victory over ISIS and “liberation” in Fallujah, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi is preparing for another offensive, against the northern city of Mosul, which is projected to last for months and displace at least 500,000 people. The bombing of Baghdad neighborhoods, just days after Abadi’s victory tour through Fallujah, is a humiliating blow to a government already in political turmoil.

Abadi visited the Karrada neighborhood on Sunday morning in a public display of sympathy that aroused anger from the bereaved population. Crowds gathered to denounce the prime minister as a “thief” and a “dog,” and security forces had to escort him from the area.

Sunday’s bombing is only the latest manifestation of the growing breakdown of the neocolonial government installed in power in Baghdad by the 2003 US invasion. The centralized nation-state structure of Iraq is a hollow shell, with most of the country controlled by ethnically-rooted factions. The sectarian tensions inflamed and manipulated by Washington for years are engulfing Iraq in a deepening civil war that threatens the very existence of the US-backed regime.

The intensification of the sectarian conflicts are fueling regional power struggles and threatening wider war in the Middle East. Shia militiamen with ties to the Iranian government have come into conflict with Iraqi security forces during the Fallujah campaign, prompting demands from Sunni leaders that all Shia formations be excluded from the Mosul offensive. Saudi representatives denounced Iran last week for “destabilizing the Middle East,” citing Tehran’s backing for Shi’ite militias accused of atrocities, prompting denunciations from Baghdad, which claimed interference by Riyadh in Iraqi affairs.

Since 2014, two years of renewed US war in Iraq, waged under the fraudulent banner of the “war on terrorism” and “war against ISIS,” have only deepened the sectarian chaos. Baghdad itself is currently under military-police lockdown, a measure taken as much out of fear of the population as of terror attacks.

The Abadi government faces a spiraling political crisis. The government’s assault on Fallujah has inflamed Sunni-Shia tensions amid reports of massacres by sectarian militias on both sides, and Abadi’s political reforms, aimed at tamping down sectarian divisions within the Baghdad government, have been blocked by political opponents in Iraq’s judiciary. The Iraqi prime minister was met with jeers and stone throwing during a visit to the bombing site on Sunday.

Washington is preparing to prop up its client in Baghdad and reassert its dominance over the country with further deployments of US troops. American General Sean MacFarland said last week that he will deploy at least 400 additional troops in Iraq this fall, with or without presidential approval. The Pentagon is pressuring the Obama administration to authorize still more deployments before the end of 2016.

US military forces are being committed to an open-ended and continuously growing war in Iraq. American troop levels in Iraq are already well over the official “cap” avowed by the White House, with the officially acknowledged total at well over 5,000. Thousands of American soldiers and Marines, armed with heavy weaponry including artillery, tanks and Apache helicopters, are laying the framework for large-scale ground war in Iraq.

The Obama administration and Democratic Party establishment are, for political reasons, inclined to delay and downplay the escalation in Iraq until after the November elections, in an effort to disassociate themselves from wars that are hated by broad sections of the US population. At the same time, they are authorizing the Pentagon to create conditions in which further escalations in Iraq, Syria, and globally can be carried out next year, once the political hurdle of the election has passed.

Dhaka hostage crisis ends in a violent military assault

Deepal Jayasekera

A hostage crisis that started last Friday night in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka ended in a bloodbath. On Saturday morning, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina’s government ordered a full-scale military assault, involving commandos, into the restaurant, the Holey Artisan Bakery, where several gunmen had taken about three dozen people hostage.

Security forces claimed to have rescued 14 hostages. Twenty hostages, mainly foreigners, were reportedly killed by gunmen. Among them were nine Italians, seven Japanese, two Indians, one Bangladeshi and one US citizen. Six assailants were killed and one was captured in the raid, according to security officials.

The Awami League government launched this operation to bolster the power of the state apparatus and send clear signals to the US and other imperialist forces that it is firm on suppressing Islamist terror groups. In a televised statement, Hasina said: “My government is determined to root out terrorism and militancy from Bangladesh.” Her government’s action demonstrated that it had no concern about the lives of the hostages.

Whoever the perpetrators of Dhaka hostage-taking were, their action is a heinous crime. As some survivors told the media, gunmen began killing hostages on Friday night. They were asked to recite verses from the Koran, the Islamic holy book. Those who could do so were spared. Others were killed in cold blood, mostly hacked to death.

The terrorist attack has played into the hands of Hasina’s government and its security forces, which is strengthening its repressive measures against her political opponents and the working class and poor amid a growing radicalisation, particularly among garment workers.

Exploiting earlier terrorist attacks, the government already has conducted a countrywide crackdown, mobilising thousands of police and paramilitary officers, and arresting more than 14,000 people. Contrary to the government’s claims to be targeting Islamic extremists, many of those arrested are alleged ordinary criminals, as well as members and supporters of opposition parties, including the Bangladesh National Party (BNP).

The restaurant attacked last Friday is less than 1.5 kilometres from many foreign diplomatic missions, including the US Embassy. Gulshan, where the café is located, is an exclusive enclave, home to diplomats and some of the Bangladeshi elite. James Moriarty, former US ambassador to Bangladesh, characterised the area as “the epicentre of the entire country.”

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack through Amaq, an ISIS media branch. But Bangladeshi and American officials have expressed doubts. The US State Department initially said the claim could not be confirmed and it was assessing information. US officials said the attack was more likely to have from Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).

However, the Amaq site later published photographs apparently showing the inside of the café and some dead hostages while the siege was still going on. Although the authenticity of the photos has not been established, US officials shifted their focus to ISIS as the group behind the attack.

Bangladesh officials said all the perpetrators were from Bangladesh and part of a local Islamic group. National Police Chief Shahidul Hoque told the media: “Five of them were listed as militants and law enforcers made several drives to arrest them.”

ISIS and Al Qaeda have claimed a number of earlier attacks, mostly targeting secular bloggers and academics and religious minorities, such as Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Sufi Muslims. But Hasina’s government has repeatedly denied the presence of any groups with international connections. Instead, she has blamed the official opposition BNP and fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI). The police have blamed Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) for such attacks.

Bangladesh has been convulsed by a deep political and social crisis as a result of the worsening global economic breakdown and the intensification of geo-political tensions. Faced with repeated struggles of workers in the garment sector, which accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports, the government has brutally suppressed their strikes and protests.

The US State Department said President Barack Obama was briefed about the hostage crisis in Dhaka and was closely observing the developments. It said the US “supports Prime Minister Hasina in her commitment to combat violent extremism in Bangladesh.” Washington has concerns that any destabilisation of South Asia, including Bangladesh, would upset its strategic agenda in Asia, directed against China.

Because of the country’s strategic location, at the “armpit” of India, which is Washington’s main strategic partner in South Asia, and also its close proximity to China, Bangladesh is vital for the US in its “pivot to Asia” against Beijing. The US has been working to integrate Bangladesh closely into its preparations for war against China.

As a part of that agenda, the US has been pushing Hasina’s government for closer collaboration in its “war on terror” by cracking down on Islamic extremist groups and allowing a greater US presence in Bangladesh. US will undoubtedly use Friday’s attack to further its moves in that direction.

Islamist terrorism is the product of US-led wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The ISIS was nurtured by the US proxy war in Syria, which is seeking to oust the Assad government, and benefit from the flow of arms and money to various Islamic fundamentalist groups from the US and its Middle Eastern allies.

US military attacks in the Middle East and Afghanistan, including its drone attacks on civilians, including women and children, killing thousands of people, have provided fertile ground for Islamic extremists such as ISIS to recruit Muslim youth throughout the world, including in South Asia, and also for local Islamic extremist groups.

The Dhaka hostage incident underscores the fact that Bangladesh, like the rest of South Asia, has been increasingly embroiled in the global geo-political tensions, intensified in Asia by the US efforts to militarily encircle China and isolate it diplomatically.

Other world and regional powers have seized on the Dhaka hostage-taking to strengthen their ties with Bangladesh, pursuing their own strategic interests. Japan, the European Union, Britain, France, Germany and India all condemned the terrorist attack and pledged their support to the Hasina government’s efforts to “combat terrorism.” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent Vice Foreign Minister Seiji Kihara, along with a team of “terrorism experts,” to Dhaka.

No party able to claim victory in Australian election

James Cogan

Official politics is in disarray in Australia, with neither the governing Liberal-National Party Coalition nor the opposition Labor Party yet able to claim victory in the July 2 “double dissolution” election for all seats in both houses of parliament. When vote counting stopped on Saturday night, at least 13 of the 150 seats in the lower house were too close to call.

The Australian Electoral Commission is indicating that the Coalition has so far secured just 64 seats and Labor 69, with 76 needed to form government. One Green, two so-called independents and up to three right-wing populists appear likely to hold as many as six “crossbench” seats and be the kingmakers in a possible hung parliament.

With millions of postal and pre-poll votes still to be counted, a result may not be known for two weeks. The result for the upper house, the Senate, could take a month to be finalised. It is clear, however, that neither of the major parties will control the Senate, with the balance of power to be held by the Greens and other parties.

The outcome is an unmitigated disaster for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who became Liberal leader last September through the factional ousting of Tony Abbott. Turnbull called the double dissolution election with the objective of securing a majority in both houses. Instead, he faces the prospect of trying to form a minority government, or losing office altogether.

The 2016 election marks a definite turning point in the crisis that has wracked the Australian political establishment over the past nine years. Masses of people, after decades of falling living standards under both Labor and Coalition governments, are deeply alienated from, and hostile toward, the longstanding two-party system.

In 2007, the Coalition lost government in a landslide to Labor. John Howard became the first prime minister since 1929 to lose his seat. The 2010 election, which was called by Julia Gillard following an unprecedented political coup inside the Labor Party to oust Kevin Rudd as prime minister, resulted in a debacle for Labor and the first minority government since 1941. In 2013, the Greens-backed Labor government was thrown from office, with Labor recording its lowest vote in 110 years.

Now, not even three years later, the Coalition has suffered a shipwreck. If Turnbull does lose power, the position of Australian prime minister will change six times in just six years and the Coalition government will be the first not to win a second term since 1931.

The historic dimensions of the breakdown of the two-party system are expressed sharply in the underlying slump in Labor’s primary vote—its share of the national vote slightly increased from its 2013 low but is still the second lowest on record.

Voters turned in unprecedented numbers to so-called “minor parties” and independents, which polled 13 percent of the national vote in the lower house and 26 percent in the Senate. Deputy Labor leader Tania Plibersek bluntly admitted this morning: “We don’t have two parties anymore; we’ve got a plethora of choices out there.”

Virtually the entire Australian establishment, most prominently the Murdoch-owned newspapers, the financial press and business associations, advocated and confidently predicted the election of a majority Coalition government. Instead, large numbers of people who are enduring stagnant or falling incomes, insecure work or unemployment, uncertain retirements and deteriorating social services, cast a protest vote in despair against the entire political setup.

The parallels with the presidential primaries in the United States and the recent Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom are striking. A massive disconnect exists between the ruling class and masses of ordinary working people, fuelled by a widening social gulf between rich and poor.

As with the support won by Donald Trump in the US and the Leave campaign in the UK, the primary beneficiaries, at this stage, have been reactionary, anti-immigrant nationalist forces. The chief political responsibility for the emergence of these dangerous right-wing formations lies with the Labor Party and trade unions, which also whip up xenophobia against foreign workers and investment, and have created the social crisis to which various demagogues are appealing.

In South Australia, the state-based populist Nick Xenophon Team won over 20 percent of the vote, at least three Senate seats and possibly two lower house seats. In Queensland, the anti-immigrant One Nation won over 9 percent of the Senate vote, propelling its leader, Pauline Hanson, into the upper house. One Nation appears likely to win Senate seats in other states as well. In Victoria, media shock-jock Derryn Hinch has been elected into the Senate. In Tasmania, former intelligence official and whistle-blower Andrew Wilkie was re-elected into the lower house and the right-wing populist Jacqui Lambie held her Senate seat.

The Coalition was repudiated most strongly in the outer working-class suburbs of the major cities and regional towns, which have been devastated by decades of economic restructuring and now face worse conditions as Australia slides toward its first recession in 25 years. The Labor Party’s populist campaign of accusing the Coalition of planning to privatise the public health insurance scheme, Medicare, had a definite impact on sections of workers and retirees, even though Labor governments have also systematically eroded the public health system. On this dishonest basis, Labor was able to claw back a number of lower house working-class and regional seats.

The election is a major blow to the Greens and their new leader Richard Di Natale. The Greens did not win any additional seats in either the lower or upper houses, and polled less than 10 percent nationally. The result serves to consolidate the Greens as the party of privileged layers of the middle class in the inner suburbs of the major cities, with little support in the working class.

Bitter recriminations against Turnbull are now tearing through the Liberal Party. Leading right-wing commentators are calling for his resignation and there is rampant speculation that he will face a leadership challenge from Abbott. A split in the Liberals cannot be ruled out. There growing numbers of calls in the media for a new election to be held.

With the conservative parties in turmoil, Labor leader Bill Shorten has insisted that a new election should not be called. Instead, Labor will “do everything we can to make this parliament work.” Labor powerbrokers have gone public with demands that no challenge to Shorten’s leadership be launched within the party.

Both Turnbull and Shorten have made approaches to the crossbench members with a view to forming a minority government. The possibility of such a government, however, with one of the major parties beholden to the parochial whims of independents or Xenophon Team candidates, is viewed with horror in financial and business circles. In the face of the deteriorating economic situation internationally and the collapse of Australia’s mining export boom, incessant demands are being made for savage cutbacks to public spending in order to finance corporate tax cuts and reduce the budget deficit, and for sweeping cuts to wages and working conditions.

While it has not found overt expression, the American ruling class, which relies on Australia as a key ally in its ever-more bellicose drive toward a military confrontation with China, particularly in the South China Sea, will be no less dismayed by the outcome. Behind-the-scenes, Washington will undoubtedly try to use its influence to engineer an outcome to ensure Canberra remains a reliable military partner.

A sense of bewilderment and rage pervades the corporate media over the election outcome.

Today’s Australian Financial Review editorial stated: “The 2016 election confirms the Australian political system’s failure to reach a workable consensus on how to deal with the end of Australia’s China mining boom…. this will impose significant costs such as through the likely loss of the nation’s AAA sovereign credit rating.” The editorial concluded: “Without change, it will likely take an imposed crisis to force the system to deal with the national challenges Australia cannot ultimately avoid” [emphasis added].

An “imposed crisis” could range from a financial crisis triggered by an exodus of international capital, or the fabrication of a national security “emergency,” to a sharp escalation of US and Australian military tensions with China.

Pointing in the direction to which the establishment parties may well be pressured by economic or political shocks, the Australian editorial today asserted: “At a time when we could well do with a government of national unity we are confronted by a fractious and palpable inability to govern.”

The Labor Party would have to play the primary role in any such “national unity” regime, repudiating all its populist promises and working with the conservatives to ride roughshod over the opposition of masses of people to the agenda of austerity, economic restructuring and militarism being demanded by the financial and corporate elite.

However the political impasse is worked out over the coming days and weeks, Australian capitalism has descended into a historic crisis that will lead to unprecedented social and class conflict. The election campaign conducted by the Socialist Equality Party, in laying down the socialist and international perspective and program that the working class needs in order to fight for its independent interests, will prove crucial in the period ahead.

Two hundred forty years since the Declaration of Independence

Andre Damon

Two hundred and forty years ago today, representatives of the thirteen colonies that would form the United States of America signed the Declaration of Independence proclaiming their separation from the British Empire and monarchy. This action was, as the Declaration’s principal author, Thomas Jefferson, would write fifty years later, the “signal of arousing men to burst [their] chains... [T]he mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Before the American Revolution, society for nearly 2,000 years had been based on the principles of the “great chain of being,” rule by an aristocracy, and the divine right of kings. The Revolution created a society in which hereditary titles of nobility were banned, monarchy outlawed and the separation of church and state established.

Explaining the transformation ushered in by the Revolution, the great historian Gordon Wood wrote:

One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships—the way people were connected one to another—were changed, and decisively so. By the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the eighteenth century. It was in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world.

As Wood pointed out, the Revolution was “the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.” It “not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia.”

The fact that in the American colonies, a provincial backwater, conceptions of an extremely radical and advanced character, rooted in the Enlightenment, were not only embraced but for the first time put into practice was a remarkable achievement.

The American Revolution did not fall from the sky. The revolutionaries saw themselves as defending the social gains of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. But the impact of the American Revolution went far beyond anything that had been achieved on the European continent.

The victory of the American Revolution provided the ideological and political impetus for the French Revolution and all subsequent democratic, egalitarian and socialist movements. Karl Marx hailed the American Revolution as having “given… the first impulse… to the European revolution of the eighteenth century” and the subsequent development of the working class socialist movement.

As with all great events in history, the Revolution was torn by contradictions. It was a bourgeois revolution and those who led it could not escape the social relations that prevailed at the time. Among the greatest of the contradictions was the fact that a substantial portion of the delegates to the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration proclaiming all men to be created equal came from states whose economies were based on slavery. Many of the greatest leaders of the Revolution were themselves slave-owners and were well aware of the conflict between the institution of slavery and the principles they professed. However, as Wood points out:

To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.

The greatness of a revolution is expressed not merely in the problems it solves, but also in the new questions it raises. Anyone who would doubt the progressive and revolutionary implications of July 4, 1776 would do well to heed the words of one of its most eloquent defenders, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who, as an escaped slave, had no shortage of personal experience with oppression.

In a speech delivered on July 5, 1852 titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass told his audience that the “signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age... The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.”

Douglass added, “Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”

Slavery, Douglass argued, was an affront to the principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, and the genuine application of these principles required the abolition of slavery. That contradiction would be resolved, at the cost of some 750,000 lives, in the Civil War, the “Second American Revolution.”

Douglass’ biting comment that the legacy of the American Revolution “stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times” applies with equal force to the state of American society and politics today. The principles that animated the American revolutionaries are in contradiction to the subsequent social and political development of the United States, which has become the most unequal society in the developed world—an aristocracy in all but name.

This all-pervasive reaction has been accompanied by a growing and ever more brazen ideological assault on the legacy of 1776. The fad of denigrating the Revolution, championed by those whose lack of experience with any genuine social struggle is rivaled only by their total disregard for historical fact, is exemplified by an article published Friday by Vox.com columnist Dylan Matthews.

Matthews writes, “This July 4, let’s not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it.” He declares that in comparison to the form of government that emerged from the Revolution, “Monarchy is, perhaps paradoxically, the more democratic option.”

He presents his apology for monarchy from the standpoint of identity politics, with its obsessive and false insistence that race, not class, is the fundamental category in history and politics, declaring, “[t]he main benefit of the revolution to colonists was that it gave more political power to America’s white male minority.”

Matthews argues, taking up the line of academics such as Simon Schama, that the British monarchy, not the American revolutionaries, was the true proponent of the liberation of the oppressed. In his Rough Crossings, Schama, an exponent of the efforts of reactionary historians to denigrate the American Revolution, declares that the revolution was “first and foremost mobilized to protect slavery.”

Both Schama and Matthews hail the efforts of the British Empire to recruit slaves to its cause, as if this tactic changed the counterrevolutionary aims of the British monarchy. (Schama, it should be noted, devoted another book to a venomous attack on the French Revolution.)

In his piece on Vox.com, Matthews claims that “anger” at the British efforts to mobilize slaves against the revolution “ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence.” This is an example of the intellectual dishonesty that pervades such arguments. The quotation Matthew invokes, subsequently excised at the insistence of pro-slavery elements in the Continental Congress, is part of a scathing denunciation of chattel slavery. Jefferson wrote that King George:

... has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither…

He is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase their Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People upon whom he also obtruded them.

The reactionary denunciation of 1776 published in Vox is, predictably, endorsed with virtually identical arguments in an Op-Ed piece published today in The New York Times, titled “Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence?” Its author, Robert F. Parkinson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Binghamton, writes:

For more than two centuries, we have been reading the Declaration of Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the Declaration as people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more, about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights.

According to Parkinson, a mood of demonic racism prevailed among the revolutionary colonialists, with Jefferson, Adams and Franklin doing everything in their power to whip up anti-Indian and anti-Black mobs. The assistant professor writes:

We like to excuse the founders from this, to give them a pass. After all,there is that bit about everyone being “created equal” in this, the most important text of American history and identity. [Italics added]

For Parkinson, the words that comprise what is arguably the most famous and politically significant phrase ever written in the English language – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” – is merely “that bit.” 

The efforts to discredit and denigrate the first American Revolution are, in essence, ideological justifications for ever-widening social inequality based on class exploitation.

The socialist movement has always embraced the American Revolution and its declaration of human equality. Changing what has to be changed, the principles that are elaborated in the Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation of the rights of man, form the ideological, political and moral bedrock of the conceptions that animate the socialist movement.

Two hundred and forty years later in the United States, an immense and complex land of 320 million people, the egalitarian principles of the American Revolution continue to resonate powerfully in the consciousness of broad masses of people.

Six-Party Talks 2.0: Not for Denuclearisation but for Peace

Sandip Kumar Mishra

North Korea seems to be adamant to seek further sophistication in its nuclear weaponisation programme, despite international pressure and sanctions to the contrary. Through its fourth nuclear test in January 2016, it wanted to demonstrate to the international community that its nuclear programme was non-negotiable. The UNSC Resolution 2270 and all other previous resolutions and sanctions appear to be ineffective.

 

On 22-23 June 2016 North Korea’s participation in the Annual Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD) in Beijing, a platform for nuclear envoys from the six countries of the Six-Party Talks, is indicative of North Korea softening its stand. Although the platform is an informal gathering, since the formal Six-Party Talks have not been held after 2008, it is the only mechanism that brings nuclear envoys from these countries to one table. North Korean participation in the dialogue happened after a two-year gap as it did not send its envoys for the dialogues in 2014 and 2015. In the June 2016 dialogue, Choe Son-hui, Deputy Director for North American Affairs at North Korea's Foreign Ministry and the Deputy Chief Envoy for the Six-Party talks participated in the deliberations. 

However, on the very first day of the dialogue, it became clear that none of the parties had any creative plan to move forward. While North Korea refused any compromise on its nuclear programme, the five other countries repeated their commitment to denuclearising North Korea. It was reported that the North Korean envoy very forcefully stated, “The Six-Party talks are dead.” This means that North Korea is quite firm in maintaining that it will not give up its nuclear programme.

 

The deadlock on the North Korean nuclear issue has been one of the destabilising factors in regional politics. There are, broadly, three positions represented by the six parties involved in the negotiations. First, South Korea, US and Japan stress that North Korea must first give up its nuclear weapons to have any other discussions and exchanges with the outside world. These countries have been, bilaterally and multilaterally, trying to further isolate North Korea and arm-twist it into abandoning its nuclear programme. Second, China and Russia are also in favour of North Korean denuclearisation but they do not support South Korea, US and Japan’s isolationist methods. Third, North Korea itself is stubborn to retain its nuclear programme and further enhance it. According to the subjective perception of North Korea, abandoning its nuclear and missile programmes would mean an end to the North Korean regime. 

It is interesting to note that all the other five countries seek a denuclearised North Korea. The US and China, who otherwise contest each other on several issues in the Asia-Pacific, seem to be in agreement on the final goal of a non-nuclear North Korea. Consequently, if these countries take a more accommodative approach it would be easy to reach a common understanding to achieve this objective. Since, arm-twisting and sanctions have not been very effective in stopping North Korean nuclearisation, South Korea, US and Japan may need to go along with China and Russia. This means that they need to have a common engagement policy towards Pyongyang. It must be underlined that this common engagement policy should be based on transparency and mutual trust. More so because after the third nuclear test by North Korea in early 2013, China was cooperating with the international community in putting pressure on North Korea. However, after the fourth nuclear test, in January 2016, the US and South Korea squarely blamed China for being unable to stop it. As per China’s perspective, they were doing enough to discourage North Korea and the test was not because of China but in spite of China. This blame-game has distanced the five countries on the North Korean nuclear issue and it must be avoided for any future common engagement process to be effective.

 

In recent years, through several pronouncements and diplomatic moves by North Korea, it is clear that Pyongyang is also willing to interact with the international community. It would be better to have a 2.0 version of the Six-Party Talks among these countries in which broader peace and confidence-building measures would be discussed. The North Korean nuclear issue should not be part of its agenda at least in the first few rounds. It is impractical to follow a ‘nuclear issue first and peace and all other issues later’ approach when it is not moving forward. The sequencing should be reversed as ‘peace and other issues first and nuclear issue later’. Rather than blaming North Korea for being adamant on its position, it would be wise for the other five countries to move beyond their diplomatic stubbornness. This change in stance might lead to the positive outcome that is being sought.

Another Fed Fiasco: U.S. Bond Yields Fall to Record Lows

Mike Whitney

The US economy has never been as mismanaged as it is today. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the bond market.

On Thursday,  the yield on 30-year US Treasuries dropped to a record-low 2.18 percent while the benchmark 10-year Treasury slid to 1.37 percent. (less than 1 basis point above its all-time low!)

In plain English, what this means is that the US economy stinks. Unfortunately, “stinks” does not adequately express how badly the economy is actually doing, so let’s break it down a little bit.

Credit is the life’s blood of the modern economy. When credit demand is weak, the economy struggles and growth falters. Falling yields on long-term bonds (like the 30-year Treasuries) indicates that the demand for credit is weak, therefore the price of money falls. It’s just supply and demand.

So let’s cut to the chase: At present, investors are willing to lend the government their money for 30 years expecting a miserable 2 percent return on their investment. What sort of fool would do that? There have to be better outlets for profitable investment than that, right?

Wrong. There are no other “safe” profitable outlets, because the economy is still in the doldrums 8 years after the Crash of  ’08. And the reason the economy is in the doldrums is because that is where policymakers want the economy to be. Because as long as the economy is in the doldrums the Central Bank can continue to keep interest rates locked at zero so its crooked crony buddies on Wall Street can make beaucoup profits off stock buybacks and dividends.

Get the picture? The Fed is not “experimenting” with a policy which, it believes, ‘may or may not’ put the economy back on a strong growth-path sometime in the future. No. That’s not it at all.  It is continuing to implement a policy that works “just fine” for the people who count, that is, the chiseling bankers and corporatists who own the government and who dictate policy behind the curtain of our political charade.

Now, typically, you might think that stocks would fall when bond prices rise or vice-versa, but that’s not how things work anymore. Now when the bond market rallies, stocks rally too on the prospect of more “extraordinary monetary accommodation”, which is a fancy term for more free money.   This is precisely what’s happening at present. Stocks have shaken off their massive 2-day losses following the Brexit earthquake, and climbed to near-record highs again due to promises from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to boost their stimulus.

More free money means higher stock prices and a comforting return to the new centrally-planned market where stocks stay perennially bubbly while the economy staggers along at an anemic 2 percent GDP.

This is why investors are willing to lend the government their money for next-to-nothing for 30 years. It’s because they anticipate that this low rate, low inflation, low growth environment will continue for the foreseeable future. And they’re probably right, too. The Fed and its cronies have an absolute lock on power and investors in the “world’s biggest and most liquid market” (USTs are a $13 trillion market) don’t see that changing anytime soon.

It would be impossible to overstate how pessimistic this view really is. Basically, bond yields are telling us all that there is no hope for the future, that what you see is what you get. There won’t be an economic recovery because an economic recovery is not in the interests of the people who are getting rich off the current policy. So just suck it up and get used to it.

So, how low are long-term bond yields?

They’re lower than they were after Lehman Brothers defaulted. They’re lower than they were after the dotcom crash. They’re even lower than they were during the Great Depression! How do you like them apples?

The 30-year is lower than anytime on record and its bound to go lower still because the people who are conducting the policy are determined to suck every drop of blood out of the economy before moving on to their next host. That’s just how parasites work.

Long-term yields are lower because the economy is worse not better.  Can you see that?

The bond market is saying in simple, straightforward language that the Fed is doing a shitty job.

After 8 years, I don’t know how anyone could disagree with that.

How Tobacco Became the Opium War of the 21st Century

Cesar Chelala

When Christopher Columbus explored the New World in 1492, he found the natives smoking a native plant, tobacco, which they did both for medicinal and ceremonial purposes, and was the first to introduce it in Europe.

From 1617 to 1793, tobacco was the most widely used and valuable staple export from the English American mainland colonies and the United States. Columbus would have never imagined that shortly after its introduction in Europe tobacco would become one of the main threats to health in several Latin American and Asian countries, as opium did in the XIX century, particularly in China.

Tobacco, one of the most addictive substances in the world, was introduced to China via Japan or the Philippines in the 1600s. In 1643, Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, was one of the first to alert on the dangers of tobacco when he wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. Chongzhen, the emperor at the time, outlawed growing tobacco and smoking its leaves.

In 1858, the Treaty of Tianjin (Tientsin) which ended the first part of the Second Opium War (1856-1860) not only legalized the import of opium but allowed cigarettes to be imported to China duty-free. By 1900, China was almost entirely permeated by foreign companies.

In 1929, Fritz Lickint, a German scientist from Dresden, published the first statistical evidence linking tobacco use and lung cancer, a finding that was confirmed in 1950 in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Only in 1999 the Philipp Morris tobacco company acknowledged that, “There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers.”

Today, while its use has diminished considerably in industrialized countries, it is having a devastating effect on the health of the Chinese population. As Dr. Bernard Lown, a famous cardiologist, already indicated in 2007, “The struggle against tobacco is not being won, it is being relocated.” He also denounced that cigarettes are becoming more addictive and more lethal because of the higher tar and nicotine content.

The state-owned China National Tobacco Corporation (CNTC), trading as China Tobacco, founded in 1982, accounts for roughly 30 percent of the world’s total production of cigarettes, and it is the largest manufacturer of tobacco products. China National Tobacco Corporation falls under the jurisdiction of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, or STMA.

The STMA has been under constant pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to loosen its monopoly. Since 2001, increased access has been granted to foreign companies. Today, although CNTC dominates China’s market, foreign brands can still be found in large cities in China. In 2007, it was estimated that CNTC had 32 percent of the world tobacco market.

Tobacco smoking still continues to place a heavy toll on the Chinese people’s health. It is estimated that every day roughly two thousand Chinese die due to smoking. China has now approximately 360 million smokers – a number greater than the U.S. population- who consume 37 percent of the world’s cigarettes. In addition, almost 800 million people suffer the consequences of second-hand smoke. According to the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, smoking will be responsible for approximately 3.2 million deaths annually by 2030.

Tobacco is also costly to the country’s economy. Although tobacco firms paid 864.9 billion yuan in taxes in 2012, when the combined health care costs of those made sick by tobacco plus the loss of productivity they represent the cost is probably much higher. The increased health costs as a result of smoking are part of the tragic legacy of tobacco.

Paradoxically, while the US government has been extremely successful in discouraging smoking at home, it has successfully put pressure on Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand to break their domestic tobacco monopolies, at the same time flooding them with American cigarettes. This led former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop to state, “People will look on this era of the health of the world, as imperialistic as anything since the British Empire – but worse.”

Through its issuing of the China Tobacco Control Plan (2012-2015) the Chinese government has indicated its intention to lower the negative impact of smoking on the Chinese people. The plan, however, has been widely criticized by its lack of concrete proposals.

To effectively combat smoking it is necessary to mobilize communities, educate the people about the health risks and high costs of smoking, impose punitive fines in class action suits and increase tax on cigarettes. Unless these measures are implemented, tobacco will end up causing more damage to the Chinese people than the Opium Wars did in the XIX century.

Democracy Is Dead

Gilbert Mercier

From the west to the east, and the south to the north of our global horizon, it is the same tableau: the horrendous killing fields of disaster capitalism where its cohorts of 18-wheelers, heavy road machinery and police patrol cars roam the landscape continuously and are turning us and the better principles of our humanity into countless road kills. Hell on Earth is to be our common fate, and we might have already reached a point of no return. The corporate hyenas and political vultures that generally constitute the global elite are joyfully feeding on the carcasses of justice and morality; rationality and empathy; common sense and the notion of public good; sound governance without corruption and equality before the law; and last but not least, freedom and fair governance through democracy.

Comparing this small group of depraved elite sociopaths, with not a trace of compassion or even consciousness to the scavengers of the natural world, is actually unfair to vultures and hyenas. Scavengers in nature have an important function in the ecosystem for their role of recycling waste. On the other hand, the few thousand rulers of global corporate imperialism are parasites weakening our common life force. If vultures are the useful garbage collectors of the natural world, the corrupt rulers of globalization are tics and leeches gorging on our blood. The British exit vote from the European Union, known as Brexit, has to be understood in the context of rejection of globalization. The global corporate world order has only worked for its masters but certainly not for the vast majority of the people, who are becoming the serfs of a new feudalism.

Calling the vote in favor of Brexit xenophobic doesn’t address the issues at stake. Cheap labor coming from Eastern Europe has served the interests of corporations and the rich very well, but it has had a negative impact on the welfare of British-born workers. This problem is general across the EU. The purpose of the EU was never to be a capitalist paradise where a free circulation of people, money, goods, and services would cater to the needs of multinational corporations, and where people ultimately would be uprooted to become the slaves of the so-called free market. The EU project was not centered on economic considerations but instead on cultural and social-value notions. It was a way out of the nightmare eras of World War I and World War II for founding members France and Germany. The formation of the EU was about a resolute rejection of war to embrace lasting peace. Other countries might follow the British people in their intention of leaving supra-national entities such as the EU. Paradoxically, the United Kingdom itself might disintegrate with the independence of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Globalists of all stripes are calling this nationalist revival narrow-minded and obscurantist. Their leading argument is that global problems such as climate change, overpopulation, and poverty require institutions with global authority. But what they should keep in mind is that those various supra-national institutions or entities, which started with stated good intentions, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), not only have failed to solve any global problems but have, by their corrupt nature made them worse. In the case of the supra-national North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), there is no pretense of being a do-gooder. The armed fist of the Orwellian empire is in the business of globalization of war with decisions made in Washington, DC.  In Orwellian times, many supra-national organizations behave like corporations under humanitarian pretenses, when they are in fact parasitic organisms depleting our strength. Meanwhile, no one represents We The People at all. In the world of humanitarianism for profit, public servants have vanished and been replaced by corrupt incompetent groups operating like crime families.

All members of the fake left advocate that the system must be changed progressively from within and that a collapse would be mainly a disaster for the poor and weak. This notion is as valid as to claim that a building destroyed by an earthquake is in need of some fresh window dressing. Regardless of the global elite’s arrogance, a systemic collapse is on its way and will exponentially take hold of the planet within two or three decades. The super-rich will eventually have nowhere to run or hide, and no private armies to protect them from the wrath of nature. Forcefully resisting the brand of globalization imposed on us by the thugs and slave drivers of disaster capitalism is a moral obligation all world citizens should embrace. When people in power live in the castle of their own lies, it is time to dismantle the fortress. When governance has lost all moral ground and reason, it is time to call for a revolution.

If, as human beings, we could understand that We The People should be all of us, regardless of geographic location, then perhaps the concept of globalization would serve a purpose and be beneficial. No workers in Europe and the United States should tolerate that people in places like Haiti, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Honduras be paid slave wages; otherwise, down the line they will either lose their jobs or be exploited by the same corporations. Under the globalization of the plantation owners, the people are living in chains. Once upon a time, words like freedom, liberty, and democracy had meaning. They have largely been gutted out and are just empty shells, ghosts in a play of smoke and mirrors animated by the sinister masters of ceremony of the universal rat race. A first necessary step to take would be for all people still able to exercise free will and critical thinking to understand that what government and political representation has become is precisely the opposite of democracy. Voting under these kinds of circumstances is as delusional as giving substance to the figments of our own imaginations. When democracy is dead, it is time to boycott elections.