Ghostbusters, GMOs and the Feigned Expertise of Nobel Laureates

Devon G. Pena

Last week a controversy erupted just as the Roberts-Stabinow Digital Divide GMO labeling law was being discussed in the Senate. It involves a letter signed by 100+ Nobel laureates attacking Greenpeace for being “anti-scientific” in its stance against the proliferation and continued use of genetically engineered organisms.

The letter is a defense of “Golden Rice”, a GMO said to address vitamin deficiencies associated with blindness in the Global South and perhaps one of the worst of the frequent scientific frauds perpetrated by biotechnology interests. The Nobel Prize recipients fell for a zombie rice story that refuses to die and persists as a central legitimizing narrative in the pseudo-humanitarian rhetoric that regularly spews from the pro-GMO propaganda machine. I have written about this in the past to show how Monsanto and the other Gene Giants are spending hundreds of millions on a deceptive campaign to misinform the public about the fake scientific consensus they spin based on inadequately designed industry-led studies of risk, toxicology, and food safety (see the post of May 2, 2014).

It should be further noted that scientists and activists in the food and seed sovereignty movements, including Vandana Shiva, have shown two things about this so-called miracle rice crop: (1) Advances in eliminating blindness among children in the Global South, where they have been possible, worked by addressing access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods and diets; getting rid of hunger and poverty greatly reduces the prevalence of nutritionally triggered blindness, and many other maladies for that matter. (2) The scientific claims about Golden Rice are fabricated exaggerations. Researchers with Vandana Shiva’s Seed Freedom project explain the gist of the problem:

Since the daily average requirement of vitamin A is 750 micrograms of vitamin A and 1 serving contains 30g of rice according to dry weight basis, ‘Vitamin A rice’ would only provide 9.9 micrograms which is 1.32% of the required allowance.  Even taking the 100g figure of daily consumption of rice used in the technology transfer paper would only provide 4.4% of the RDA. In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg (272g) of rice per day.  This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10kg. (See the research on this question at Seed Freedom, here).

Moreover, it has been noted by numerous scientific experts and other observers that none of the signers of the letter have any substantive research experience in the fields of environmental risk science, toxicology, or food safety. The group of Nobel Laureates includes: 1 peace prize, 8 economists, 24 physicists, 33 chemists, 41 doctors. One critic of the letter, Claire Robinson of GM Watch, adds the observation, quoting Phillip Stark, Associate Dean, Division of Mathematical snd Physical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at University of California-Berkeley, that science is “about evidence not authority. What do they know of agriculture? Have they done relevant research? Science is supposed to be ‘show me’ not ‘trust me’…Nobel Prize or not.”

This leads me to make another observation about the unethical nature of this letter which is an example of the deception of scientific authority masquerading as expertise. The only expert in agriculture on the list of signers is the ghostly Norman Borlaug, who is of course the “Father of the Green Revolution”. And herein lies the basic problem: Borlaug was no friend of Indigenous farmers, seed savers, and plant breeders. He was guilty of imposing high-input hybrid seeds developed by technicians in lab-white who never consulted or developed relations of solidarity with farmers. This was arrogant top-down agricultural managerialism and did a lot to damage the prospects for food sovereignty. As one recent study of the failure of Golden Rice notes:

The Green Revolution spread generic, disembedded high-input seeds to replace locally adapted landraces as well as peasant attitudes and practices associated with them. The disembeddedness of Golden Rice that boosts its value as a public relations vehicle has also been the main impediment in it reaching farmers’ fields, as it has proved difficult to breed into varieties that grow well specifically in the Philippines.

The disembeddedness of GMO crops is the heart of this problem and the Nobel laureates have failed to understand how culture intersects with agriculture in ways most physicists and neoliberal economists cannot fully comprehend unless they open their minds to other ways of knowing and being in the world. Anyone with the intelligence to become a Nobel laureate surely has a moral obligation to understand this cultural context before participating in an act of epistemic violence designed to justify continued corporate domination of our food systems and dismiss our scientific counter-claims and evidence as ideological puffery.

We may also need to recruit the Ghostbusters since at least two of the signers are dead. Alfred G Gilman died on Dec 23 2015 and Norman Borlaug died on Sept 12, 2009.

How the Media Constructs False Narratives

Nauman Sadiq

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of “Jihad in the way of God” might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists’ cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

This emotional outrage, in my opinion, is a far more potent factor than the sterile rational argument of God’s supposed command to fight holy wars against the infidels. If we take all the other contributing factors, that I have mentioned in the second paragraph out of the equation, I don’t think that Muslims are some “exceptional” variety of human beings who are hell-bent on killing the heretics all over the world.

Notwithstanding, it’s very easy to distinguish between the victims of structural injustices and the beneficiaries of the existing neocolonial economic order all over the world. But instead of using words that can be interpreted subjectively I’ll let the figures do the talking. Pakistan’s total GDP is only $270 billion and with a population of 200 million it amounts to a per capita income of only $1400. While the US’ GDP is $18 trillion and per capita income is in excess of $50,000. Similarly the per capita income of most countries in the Western Europe is also around $40,000. That’s a difference of 40 to 50 TIMES between the incomes of Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, i.e. the Western powers.

Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $600 billion, which is three times the size of Pakistan’s total GDP. A single multi-national corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world owns assets in excess of $200 billion which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such business conglomerates are: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC, BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, RDS, Total, Vitol; Manufacturers – Apple, Microsoft and Google.

On top of that, semi-legit wealth from all over the world flows into the Western commercial and investment banks: last year there was a report that the Russian oligarchs have deposited $800 billion in the Western banks, while the Chinese entrepreneurs have deposited $1.5 trillion in the Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add up Saudi investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.

The first and foremost priority of the Western powers is to save their Corporate Empire, and especially their financial institutions, from collapsing; everything else like eliminating terrorism, promoting democracy and “responsibility to protect” are merely arranged side shows to justify their interventionist foreign policy, especially in the energy-rich Middle East.

Additionally, the irony is that the neoliberal dupes of the mainstream media justify and validate the unfair practices of the neocolonial powers and hold the victims of structural injustices responsible for their misfortunes. If a Third World’s laborer has been forced to live on less than $5 a day and a corporate executive sits in the Wall Street on top of $18 trillion business empire, neoliberals are okay with this travesty.

However, we need to understand that how does a neoliberal mindset is structured? As we know that mass education programs and mass media engender mass ideologies. We like to believe that we are free to think, but we aren’t. Our narratives aren’t really “our” narratives. These narratives of injustice and inequality have been constructed for the public consumption by the corporate media, which is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments and the business interests.

Media is our eyes and ears through which we get all the inputs and it is also our brain through which we interpret raw data. If media keeps mum over some vital structural injustices and blows out of proportion some isolated incidents of injustice and violence, we are likely to forget all about the former and focus all of our energies on the tangential issues which the media portrays as the “real” ones.

Monopoly capitalism and the global neocolonial economic order are the real issues while Islamic radicalism and terrorism are the secondary issues and itself an adverse reaction to the former. That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

Genetically Engineered Crops: the Grand and Failed Promise

Jim Goodman

The endless miles of dead brown fields are finally gone. Spring in the Midwest should be announced by endless miles of green, but at best, a haphazard patchwork of winter wheat, rye, hayfields and the occasional bit of pasture are the only green that show up after snow-melt.

Most of the winter grains planted last fall have been sprayed and killed to make way for endless miles of corn and soybeans.

Corn, soy and alfalfa cover the Midwest, a mono-culture of Genetically Engineered crops (GE) that have mostly displaced the small dairy farms and their pastures, the fields of small grain and diverse mixes of clover and grass hay.

We are at least, partially, through the herbicide season. The first wave was last fall’s “burn-down”, the non-selective spray application (most notably Roundup®) that kills everything and gives the fields that lovely dead brown look in the spring.

The spring “pre-emergence” spray (killing weeds before the corn and soy emerge) is over and the third wave of “post-emergence” spraying is in progress and of course the forth and even fifth spray applications can come anytime during the summer to hopefully kill any weeds that escaped the first three attempts.

Then of course, wheat will need the pre-harvest application of, again, Roundup®, to kill any surviving perennials, but mostly to enhance the dry down of the grain. This is done a few days prior to harvest, and while it is quite effective as a desiccant, it also puts a good amount of herbicide directly on grain that will move into our food chain.

So, if nothing else GE crops have clearly changed the appearance of our landscape, the crops farmers grow and the way they manage weeds and pests. But they have changed the economy as well. The small diversified farms, the cheese factories and the small town businesses are mostly gone.

Some would argue, mostly agricultural economists, corporate agribusiness executives and those farmers who decided to get big rather than get out, that modern agriculture is the economic engine that drives rural America.

And it does, but those of us who still farm on a relatively small scale, those who value the environment, who try and keep our rural schools running, our rural roads passable our hospitals open, to us, it appears modern agriculture has mostly driven the money out of rural America.

Industrialized agriculture still needs people to do the work, but that work must be done at very low wages. When the profit is gone, when small farms are gone, when farm inputs are no longer purchased locally, when the tax base erodes,— rural communities die.

The profit seems to have instead, gone into the pockets of seed, chemical and equipment companies, Wall Street banks and through the hands of corporate lobbyists into the hands of elected officials who will, at all costs, support corporate profit and the wishes of agribusiness. Small towns, people and the environment have become secondary to the growth of modern agriculture.

Just as blue collar workers have seen their jobs and financial stability outsourced, so we have seen the wealth of our rural communities, the local farm income that had once been recirculated in our small towns, sent into the profit margins of corporate agribusiness.

So, do I blame this on GE crops? No, not directly, but the system of farming, the large scale mono-culture grain and livestock production for the world market could not exist without them.

Before the introduction of GE soy in 1996 the trend to larger and fewer farms was clearly happening, but the GE “promise” of effective weed control and higher yields certainly hastened that trend. But that “promise” was just that, a promise— one that was false and quickly broken.

The National Academy of Science in a recent report seemed to find no clear evidence supporting the grand promise of GE crops— they worked in some instances, but failed in others. There was some indication of increased yield but weeds were developing herbicide resistance as well– in short hardly a ringing endorsement. And, GE crops actually increased herbicide usage, not a positive change for our health, or the environment.

Despite the high cost and progressive failure of the GE technology, farmers continue (out of desperation to make a profit?) to embrace it and cover the Midwest with GE corn and soy. More grain used to fatten livestock (despite the demand for grass fed dairy and meat) and further the growth of dairy, hog and poultry production into giant Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s).

The integral part GE crops have played in the growth of industrial agriculture, the global food economy, obscene corporate profits and the decline of rural communities will be their real legacy and success,— if you can call it that.

And don’t be surprised, as American consumers increasingly reject GE technology, forcing GE crops on the rest of the world is the plan of corporate agribusiness and our government— That, it seems, is one more aspect of American Exceptionalism.

Why Arabs Are A Divided People?

Mahboob A. Khawaja

The contemporary Arab world is fraught with formidable forces of diverse enemies – the self, the authoritarian rulers and foreign interventionists – the ex-colonial masters. Common sense stops at various levels to reflect on the real problems. Greed of power, sectarian hatred and missing sense of moral and intellectual visionary leadership to deal with the real problems of political transformation. Once the Arab people were a model of progressive culture of Islamic unity respecting the human freedom of thoughts and actions, ethnic diversity, equality, social justice and emancipation of sustainable future. It was all destroyed by affluent agents of foreign influence-the tribal leaders and continuous warfare for greed of political hegemony over people, natural resources and tribalism. Today’s bloodstained tyranny of the Arab authoritarianism overrides the facts of Arab culture, history and a progressive civilization that lasted for eight hundred years in Al-Andalusia- Spain. Could any one factor be reason for the Arab world’s continuous downfall and moral and intellectual disintegration?

When you call the authoritarian leaders to planned political transformation into the 21st century of knowledge-based dialogue, reasoning and systematic political change, they will reject it and mock at your rationality. Authoritarianism is not the exclusive outgrowth of the Arab culture and intellectual norms but an imported by-product of the European colonial legacy. When the British, French, Italian, Dutch and now Americans moved into the Arab Middle East, they dismantled the Arab traditional lifelines and replaced it with their own values of thinking, laws and order, system of governance and perpetuated animosities to divide and rule the Arab people. Nobody termed it “terrorism” against the helpless Arab masses whose planned disconnect with their own values and aspirations for future was to ensure the grand scheme of empire-building. Palestinians are not the only victims but the entire Arab political embodiment speaks for itself.

The Arab Masses in Search of Intelligent Leaders

Of more importance is the spectator role of all the Arab rulers of the Middle East. How come after more than sixty years of freedom from the European imperialism, the Arab societies do not have any educated, responsible and intelligent leaders to offer sense of moral and political security to the people in crisis?  Why should President Obama and President Putin intervene to resolve the Arab leader’s adversity and intransigence against their own masses? Are the Arab rulers a dead-ended entity flourishing in the midst of daily civilian bloodsheds?  Where is the Arab leader’s moral and intellectual consciousness of the gravity of the crises and accountability to the people? Where is the so called economic prosperity that the Arabs were supposed to enjoin in the contemporary world? How could Obama or Putin bring change, sigh of relief and halt in daily massacres carried out by the Arab armies against their own people?  Does the Arab authoritarianism or the cruelty of systematic killings make any sense to a rational thinker?  The voices of reason and human conscience must speak loud and clearly.  There are no Arab leaders having legitimacy in political governance or having chosen by the Islamic principles of “Shura” (consultation) of the people. President Morsy represented the will of the people in Egypt but he was abruptly ousted by the military dictatorship. All the Arab states are in a state of political chaos, shattered dreams and extreme uncertainty lacking any proactive plan how to come out of the prevalent political ruthlessness and viciousness ordained by the rulers. The Arab people need no new enemies; the rulers are doing the job. The contemporary Arab rulers are the new age political monsters – facilitating a favorite perversion from the facts of life – the real issue of Palestine and peace with Israel is sidelined and being marginalized. There are no responsible Arab leaders to stand for facts of the Arabian political landscape and be productive. The focus should have been on Palestine and to pursue progressive negotiated resolution for the establishment of an independent State of Palestine and co-existing in peace with Israel. Throughout the oil exporting Arab world, the contemporary rulers have turned out to be complacent in the US –Israeli strategic plans for the future of the Middle East. Ironically, it is hard to imagine if the prosperous Arab rules occupying dusted palaces have any consciousness of the interest of the masses or the real world affairs in their own backyards.

Would the Arab People Undermine Their own Future?

With unstoppable cycle of political killings and daily bloodbaths in so many Arab states  – Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Yemen, and spill-over impacts to other oil producing Arab nations – and reactionary militancy against the authoritarian rule and dismantling of the socio-economic infrastructures –  is the Arab world coming to its own end because of the sadistic authoritarian rulers?  The Arab leaders and the masses live and breathe in conflicting time zones being unable to see the rationality of people-oriented Islamic governance, the worst is yet to come, surrender to foreign forces as there are no leaders to think of the future or the Arab armies to defend the people. There are no educated, conscientious or publicly elected legitimate leaders in the Arab- Muslim world. There are no independent public institutions in the Arab world to provide critical and impartial analyses on the global political affairs or reflect on possible remedies in war and peace. Throughout the Arab-Muslim world, there is not a single established university teaching global peace, security and conflict management – the institutions dealing with the present and envisioning the future that the Western nations are built upon for change and development. Leaderless Muslim masses appear desperate to look for a visionary and intelligent leader to offer some sense of moral and intellectual security. Across the Arab – Muslim countries, leaders live in palaces, not with people. If there were educated and intelligent leaders in the Arab world, one could reason the unreason. But the oil exporting Arab leaders operate from a position of political weakness, not of strength to play any useful role at the global political theatre. The vision if there is one, is clearly a blind vision of the present and future, always expecting from others to do things for the oil enriched and useless figure heads. Professor John Esposito, (Unholy War and What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, 2nd ed. 2011), a reputable scholar of Western-Islamic culture and history at the Georgetown University, offers a lesson in contemporary political affairs:

“An important lesson of history is that rulers and nations do rise and fall. Unforeseen circumstances can bring up unanticipated change. Few expected the breakup of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe to occur when they did ……now is the time for those in all walks of life (political, economic, military, media and academic) who wish to see a new order not to be silenced but to speak out, organize, vote and be willing when necessary to make sacrifices in promoting a new global order.”

Islam professed reason, unity and tolerance as vital components of the public governance. Many ego-centric Arab rulers have a smug sense of self-righteousness as they continue to enforce wrong thinking, wrong ideas and wrong priorities to extend much hated political dictatorships. None of them took counseling what happened to Saddam Hussain, Qadafi, Abdullah Saleh and Hosni Mubarak and now fast coming to Bashar al-Assad. The Arab police states flourish because of the false motives, political deception, taunting malice, lack of understanding of the phenomenon of political change and disorientation to the real problems of social – political life. The masses and the rulers need to look at themselves in the mirror. How should the global community view the contemporary Arab societies living under obsessed conspiracies of power and corruption of tribal authoritarianism for over half a century? They are a failure on all the major frontlines of global affairs. If Palestine is not resolved because the Arab states are weak and indifferent to the focal issue of the Middle East political lifelines. What happened to their Islamic culture, values and glorious civilization? Was the petrodollar a conspiracy (“fitna”) to disconnect the Arab people from the Islamic civilization?  Ironically, how the few tribal leaders could have managed the time and history on their own unless large segments of the masses were complacent in making the tragedy of deaths and destruction?

Time and History Demand New Thinking fort Political Change

The compelling realities across the beleaguered Arab world demand new thinking, new proactive visionary leadership, men of new ideas and plans to deal with unwarranted bombing of the civilian population, wholesale foreign deaths and deliberate destruction of the Arab people and culture and millions of displaced refugees-nowhere to go. These are highly urgent and sensitive issues of the 21st century politics, individual absolutism, human freedom and justice involved in cross-cultural conflicts. There are countless issues to be addressed across the socially, economically and political broken, dysfunctional and sometimes badly ruptured Arab societal landscape.

Time and history are not on the side of the besieged rulers doomed to be replaced by those friendly to the Western powers and new political imagination of the people seeking societal change. As it stands now, Arab leaders have no other thought and priority except to check the depleted oil prices, and count the dead bodies – soon they could be part of abstract statistic debated and defined by the American and Europeans warriors as to how the Arabs lost their national freedom, human dignity and oil pumping economic hollowness. To reverse the naïve blunders for accidental change, taunting malice and missing understanding of transformational leadership and to strike a rational outlook for the future, this author (“Arab Leaders Count Dead Bodies but Peacemaking is not the Aim.” Uncommon Thought Journal, 2/19/2015), offered the following insight and reminder to all concerned across the Arab world:

Once the Arabs were leaders in knowledge, creativity, science and human manifestation, progress and future-making – the Islamic civilization lasting for eight hundred years in Al-Andulsia- Spain. But when they replaced Islam – the power and core value of their advancements with petro-dollars transitory economic prosperity, they failed to think intelligently and fell in disgrace and lost what was gained over the centuries. They relied on Western mythologies of change and materialistic development which resulted in their self- geared anarchy, corruption, military defeats and disconnected authoritarianism. The Western strategists ran planned scams of economic prosperity to destroy the Arab culture with their own oil and their own money turning them redundant for the 21st century world. Today, the Arab leaders are so irrational and cruel that they reject all voices of reason for change and human development only to bring more deaths and destruction to their societies.

Carnage In Istanbul, Dhaka And Baghdad

Chandra Muzaffar

The month of Ramadan witnessed unspeakable carnage in three Muslim cities in three different countries. On 28 June 2016, 41 people, both locals and foreigners were killed in shootings and suicide bombings at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. On 2nd July, 20 people taken hostage by militants in an upmarket restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh were shot andmurdered. On the 3rd of July in Baghdad, 165 were massacred in massive bomb blasts.

The killers in all three episodes were Muslims, specifically Sunni Muslims. The majority of the 226 victims were also Muslims. In all three instances, ISIS or Daesh was alleged to be the perpetrator. In the case of Istanbul, the Turkish government made this allegation in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. In the case of Dhaka, Daesh claimed responsibility though the Bangladeshi government has maintained that the savagery was committed by a home grown militant outfit known as the Jamatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh. In the case of Baghdad, Daesh was quick to claim “credit.” It made it a point to emphasise that its target were Shias.

A number of Muslim governments have condemned the Istanbul-Dhaka- Baghdad (IDB) carnage. Both Sunni and Shia religious elites have also denounced in strong language the IDB atrocities. They have demanded that the masterminds behind these perpetrators of terror be severely punished.

Most analysts are agreed that the spurt in Daesh terrorism during Ramadan is to demonstrate to Muslims and the world at large that it is still a formidable force, in spite of major setbacks on the battlefield in recent months. It was defeated in the strategic city of Fallujah, close to Baghdad, just a few days before it embarked upon its 2nd July act of terror. Daesh has been pushed out of other areas in Iraq as well. The Syrian army, with Russian air support re-captured the ancient world renowned heritage city of Palmyra at the end of March this year. The Syrian government has also regained control over large swathes of land that Daesh and other terrorist groups had captured in the last two years.

Because Daesh and its allies and rivals in terror are in decline, governments in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) and other powers should step up their efforts to defeat and destroy the scourge they represent. They should enhance their cooperation and work resolutely towards a single goal. It is important to emphasise this because governments within and without WANA have been known to facilitate the flow of funds, firearms and fighters to Daesh while professing opposition to terrorism. It is this hypocrisy on their part which has helped Daesh to grow so rapidly. Even if some of these governments and the clandestine channels they have created are no longer colluding with Daesh, they remain linked directly or obliquely to other terrorist organisations such as Al-Qaeda and its affiliate, the Jabhat al-Nusra.

Why are they doing this? The reason is obvious. They are pursuing their own individual or collective political or economic agendas. These agendas maybe related to natural resources in WANA or its strategic routes or the security and ideological concerns of certain actors in the region. Often they correspond to the hegemonic ambitions of a superpower that has sought to dominate and control WANA for the last 50 years at least.

It is these ambitions sometimes complicated by the goals of national and regional actors that have resulted in occupation, intervention and the politics of regime change. Occupation and regime change have given rise to mayhem and chaos that havein turn spawned terrorist outfits and activities. Iraq is an outstanding example of this. The humiliation and the anger generated by occupation — whether it is Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan — often shared by tens of thousands of others who are not its direct victims explains to a great extent the contemporary terrorist and why he acts the way he does.

This is why combating terrorism on the battlefield important as it is, can never be the real solution. One must have the honesty and the integrity to address the underlying causes. It requires those who prescribe remedies for terrorism from the lofty heights of global politics to hold a mirror to their own souls. They must be willing to admit that their unrestrained drive for hegemonic power and for control over wealth may be the root problem. Or, as the 19th century Russian thinker, Alexander Herzen, put it in another context, “The doctor is the disease.”

US attempt to hustle India into Nuclear Suppliers Group stalls

Wasantha Rupasinghe

The failure of India’s high-profile, US-backed diplomatic offensive to secure membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the world body that regulates nuclear trade, is a further indicator of heightening global geopolitical tensions.

In the run-up to the annual plenary meeting of the NSG, which was held in Seoul on June 24, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi toured world capitals to drum up support for India’s NSG membership. When Modi visited Washington in early June, US President Barack Obama reiterated the US’s strong support for India’s speedy entry into the 48-member NSG.

But to New Delhi’s and Washington’s chagrin, the NSG plenary did not even formally discuss India’s application. Instead it held a general discussion on the rules governing the adherence of new states and issued a statement at its conclusion that said “full, complete and effective” implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should remain the basis of NSG membership.

This would appear to bar India—which formally declared itself a nuclear weapons state in 1998—from entering the NSG, since the NPT only recognizes the legal right of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the US, Russia, Britain, France and China, to possess nuclear weapons.

However, the US, which is encouraging India’s great power ambitions as part of a concerted and increasingly successful drive to harness New Delhi to its military-strategic offensive against China, has signaled it will continue to push for an exception to be made for India.

“We are confident that we have got a path forward …that India (will) be a full member of the (NSG) regime by the end of the year,” a senior Obama administration official told the Press Trust of India only hours after the NSG plenary concluded.

US officials have since repeatedly vowed to work with India to secure its entry into the NSG, while joining India’s government and media in suggesting that Beijing was responsible for the rebuff India suffered at the Seoul meeting. Speaking in New Delhi last Thursday, US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Tom Shannon accused “one country” of “break(ing) consensus” at the NSG, lauded India as an “anchor of stability” in the Asia-Pacific region, and denounced “what China is doing in the South China Sea” as “madness.”

Beijing immediately responded to Shannon’s remarks, characterizing them as “irresponsible” and charging Washington with seeking to drive “wedges” between countries.

In respect to what had happened at the NSG, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that Shannon had “shown no regard to facts.” "In the plenary meeting in Seoul,” Hong continued, “India' accession was not on the agenda … the meeting discussed the technical, legal and political questions concerning the accession of relevant countries.

According to press reports, two-thirds or more of NSG members supported India’s NSG application. These included the US’s principal Asian-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, the major NATO powers, and Russia, which has a decades-old military-strategic partnership with India as well as multiple contracts to sell it nuclear power plants,.

However, China was far from alone in insisting that the rules that have hitherto governed NSG membership continue to apply. Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, New Zealand, Turkey, and Brazil are all said to have raised questions about the admission of non-NPT members.

In the run-up to the plenary, Beijing questioned why Washington is rushing to admit India, while vehemently opposing any suggestion that Pakistan, which like India developed nuclear weapons in defiance of the NPT, be considered for NSG membership.

With the US vigorously promoting India, including declaring it a “Major Defense Partner” and giving it access to advanced weaponry, Islamabad and Beijing have increasingly been pushed into each other’s strategic embrace.

Pakistan lost little time in boasting about the rebuff India suffered in Seoul. “Pakistan’s intensive diplomatic lobbying, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif personally writing to 17 prime ministers, prevented India from gaining into the NSG,” claimed Sharif’s Foreign Affairs Advisor, Sartaj Aziz.

The Indian media has responded to the diplomatic reversal in Seoul with a China-bashing campaign. Most reports on the NSG meeting had screaming headlines castigating China for blocking India’s advance and entirely omitted the fact at least nine other countries had voiced opposition to junking the NSG’s rules of membership to accommodate India.

Typical was a June 27 Indian Express article titled “Obstructionist China will find it difficult to foil India’s NSG bid: Defence Expert.” It cited Major General (Retired) P.K. Sehgal railing against China and Pakistan. “Both know fully well” said Seghal, “that the entire world was unitedly standing behind India and China was on the wrong foot forward.”

There have been a few discordant voices. A Deccan Herald editorial questioned the wisdom of New Delhi seeking to railroad China into allowing it into the NSG: “While some risk is necessary to further India’s rise, it is calculated risks that India should be taking.”

Indian geo-political analyst Raja Mohan, a strong supporter of India’s burgeoning alliance with US imperialism, on the other hand had nothing but praise for Modi’s diplomatic offensive. Articulating the great power ambitions of the Indian elite, Mohan said the NSG issue is about making India a “rule maker” and “shaper of the global order.”

In 2008, albeit reluctantly and under a US diplomatic full-court press, China agreed to give India a “permanent” NSG “waiver” allowing it to purchase civilian nuclear technology and fuel despite not having signed the NPT.

The “waiver” was a key element in ending the international nuclear embargo on India and actualizing the Indo-US nuclear accord. While touted by Washington as an agreement limited to the civilian nuclear field, the accord has huge military-strategic implications as it enables New Delhi to concentrate the resources of its indigenous nuclear program on developing its nuclear arsenal. No less significantly, the 2008 accord was fashioned by the Bush administration and Pentagon war-planners as a means of cementing an Indo-US “global strategic partnership” and building up India as a counterweight to China.

Eight years on, Beijing is acutely aware of the extent to which India has been integrated into Washington’s war plans. Under Modi’s two-old government, New Delhi has intensified bilateral and trilateral collaboration with the US’s main regional allies, Japan and Australia; parroted the US line on the South China Sea dispute; and agreed to allow US warships and planes to use Indian military bases for refueling and resupply.

Fearing encirclement, Beijing, nonetheless, continues to favor wooing New Delhi in the hopes of loosening its embrace of Washington over confrontation. Even as it was impeding India’s quick entry into the NSG, Beijing was agreeing to accept India along with Pakistan as full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at the SCO’s annual summit, held in Tashkent, June 24-25.

The official Chinese position in respect to the NSG is that it is not against India’s admission per se, only that it wants one rule for all, preferably within the framework of the NPT.

However, editorials and op-eds in the state-run Global Times are giving voice to growing anger within the Chinese regime over New Delhi’s burgeoning alliance with Washington and are no doubt meant as a warning that Beijing’s “tolerance” has limits.

In a June 28 editorial titled “Delhi’s NSG bid upset by rules, not Beijing,” the Global Times attacked a “few Indian media outlets” for “vilify(ing) China's position” at the NSG. It warned them, and by implication New Delhi, not to think Washington’s “endorsement … means India has won the backing of the world.”

The editorial went on to charge that India is being “spoiled” by a West intent on using it for “the purpose of containing China.” “Recent years have seen the Western world giving too many thumbs up to India, but thumbs down to China.” After noting that China’s economy is five times bigger than that of India, the Global Times said that “the international ‘adulation’ of India” is making it a “bit smug in international affairs.”

“India's nationalists,” it concluded, “should learn how to behave themselves. Now that they wish their country could be a major power, they should know how major powers play their games.”

New Zealand pseudo-lefts silent on Maoist alliance with Philippine president

Tom Peters

Rodrigo Duterte, who took office as president of the Philippines on 30 June, is a fascistic figure. In the name of an “all out war” against drugs and crime, he intends to restore the death penalty by public hanging, and lower the age of criminal liability from 15 to 12. He has instructed police to kill alleged criminals and drug addicts. He has promised to fill Manila Bay with 100,000 corpses in his first six months as president.

The rise of Duterte is a warning that the Philippine ruling class is preparing to use violent and dictatorial methods to suppress the working class, which will be propelled into struggle against soaring social inequality and US-led preparations for war with China.

Political responsibility for Duterte’s victory rests with the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The party’s front organisations campaigned vigorously on his behalf, fraudulently promoting him as a progressive candidate. Celebrating Duterte’s inauguration, CPP leader and founder José Maria Sison hailed the CPP’s peace talks with the new government as the foundation for an “independent, democratic, developed, prosperous and peaceful” Philippines. The CPP has accepted three cabinet positions in Duterte’s administration.

These developments have profound international significance: they are a damning exposure of the nationalist, pro-capitalist program advanced not just by the CPP but by its co-thinkers throughout the world. These include the New Zealand pseudo-left groups Fightback and Redline, which emerged from the break-up of the Maoist Workers Party in 2011. Fightback and Redline have remained silent on the CPP’s support for Duterte, thereby tacitly endorsing its actions.

For years, the Workers Party hailed the CPP and Maoist parties in India and Nepal as model “revolutionary” organisations. A typical statement on 23 December 2008, still available on the Fightback web site, declared that the CPP and its founder Sison had “led the struggle against feudalism, capitalism and imperialism” and its “commitment to internationalism has given confidence to many organisations and individuals in the struggle for world revolution.”

In October 2010, the Workers Party and the now-defunct Socialist Worker (whose leading members joined Fightback) promoted a speaking tour of New Zealand by Luis Jalandoni and his wife Coni Ledesma, leading members of the National Democratic Front, a CPP front organisation. A statement published by the Workers Party and Socialist Worker hailed the couple as “veteran leading figures in the Philippine revolutionary Left.”

Jalandoni is now a principal negotiator of the political alliance between the CPP and President Duterte. On 19 May, after Duterte offered cabinet positions to the CPP, the Philippine Inquirer quoted Jalandoni saying they were “very happy for this gesture ... It shows his trust and confidence in the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front.”

The Redline blog has published numerous articles glorifying the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, as a “revolutionary movement” which “insist[s] on fighting for nothing less than socialism.” Most recently, on 20 June 2015, Redline reposted a statement by Sison criticising the Greek Syriza government’s anti-democratic move to impose drastic austerity measures dictated by the European Union and the banks. Yet Redline has said nothing about Sison’s embrace of Duterte, who aims to encourage greater private investment in the Philippines and violently suppress any opposition from the working class.

In fact, Sison has never led a genuinely revolutionary party. The Philippine Stalinists repeatedly supported bourgeois governments. Sison, on the executive committee of the PKP (Communist Party of the Philippines), led the newly formed Workers’ Party (Lapiang Manggagawa) to enter a coalition with President Diosdado Macapagal from 1963-65. In 1965 Sison switched to supporting Ferdinand Marcos and his Nacionalista Party for the presidency, leading the PKP youth wing, Kabataang Makabayan, to back his presidency. In 1967 Sison split from the pro-Moscow PKP and founded the pro-Beijing CPP, which denounced Marcos as a “fascist” and allied with his bourgeois rivals.

Far from advancing an internationalist program of world revolution, the CPP based itself on Stalin’s so-called “two-stage theory” of revolution, and his nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country.” Stalin attacked Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, which had guided the Russian Revolution, and which held that in countries of a belated capitalist development, such as Russia, China and the Philippines, only the working class was capable of fulfilling the national democratic tasks.

In 1970, Sison echoed Stalin’s theories in Philippine Society and Revolution, stating that the aim of revolution was national democracy, not socialism, under a “united front dictatorship of the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie and all other patriots.”

The CPP’s integration into the Duterte government is the logical outcome of its anti-Marxist perspective of forging an alliance with the national bourgeoisie.

The New Zealand Maoists have followed an equally right-wing political trajectory. The NZ Communist Party (NZCP) was the first Stalinist party in a developed capitalist country to align with Beijing in the early 1960s, following the Sino-Soviet split. In 1966, a pro-Moscow splinter formed the rival Socialist Unity Party. While continuing to glorify Stalin, the NZCP covered up all Mao’s crimes, including the disastrous “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” and Beijing’s betrayal of the Vietnamese struggle against imperialism.

The NZCP and its off-shoot, the Workers Communist League (WCL), founded in 1980, also supported the CPP. The WCL played a key role in the New Zealand Philippines Solidarity Network, which sent a delegation to visit the Philippines in the late 1980s after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.

Following the collapse of the NZCP and WCL in the early 1990s, several former Maoists pursued careers in bourgeois politics and the trade unions, while others helped to establish the predecessors of Fightback and Redline. Former WCL member Robert Reid now leads FIRST Union, one of the largest in the country. Another, Graeme Clarke, is general secretary of the Manufacturing and Construction Workers Union. Both unions have scapegoated foreign workers for unemployment and attacks on wages and conditions following the 2008 financial crash.

Prominent ex-WCL member, Sue Bradford, was a Green Party parliamentarian from 1999 to 2009. The Greens supported the then-Labour Party government, including its decision to send troops to Afghanistan.

In 2011, Bradford helped launch the Maori nationalist Mana Party, which was promptly joined by the pseudo-left groups Fightback, the International Socialist Organisation and Socialist Aotearoa. Mana’s founding platform called for larger government payments to Maori-run businesses, and discrimination against foreign workers, along with minor reforms such as an increased minimum wage. Mana contested the 2014 election in an alliance with billionaire Kim Dotcom’s openly right-wing Internet Party and failed to win any seats in parliament.

Mana has supported anti-immigrant campaigns led by the opposition Labour Party and the right-wing populist New Zealand First. These parties have scapegoated Chinese people, in particular, for the country’s housing crisis.

Redline criticised Fightback’s decision to join the Mana Party, which it denounced as reformist, and criticised Labour’s anti-Chinese statements. Neither group, however, has opposed the CPP’s furious attempts, over the past two years, to whip up anti-Chinese chauvinism, at the same time as the Philippines has been integrated into US preparations for war against China. In 2014, Mong Palatino, a leader of the CPP front organisation Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), stated: “Hate China? Then join the people’s army, strengthen the people’s movement, and be prepared to fight for the motherland.”

Fightback and Redline are silent about the CPP’s embrace of US imperialism and anti-Chinese warmongering because they have no fundamental political differences. They have not said a word about the New Zealand political establishment’s support for the US military build-up against China, including the government’s announcement that it will spend $20 billion on new military hardware to support “interoperability” with US and Australian forces.

The New Zealand pseudo-lefts’ support for the CPP must be taken as a warning: these groups do not represent the interests of the working class, but sections of the upper middle class, who orbit around the trade unions, the Mana Party and Labour. As the drive to war intensifies and the social crisis deepens, these organisations are lurching to the right. Like their counterparts in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia, the pseudo-lefts are seeking to integrate themselves into the political establishment to advance their own interests under capitalism.

Volkswagen: 700 workers lose their jobs in Germany

Dietmar Henning

Contract workers and temporary employees are invariably the first ones to lose their jobs when it comes to redundancies. This applies fully to the Volkswagen Group in the wake of the company’s diesel exhaust fraud scandal. Last week nearly 700 contract and short-term workers were dismissed at the VW plant in Zwickau, Saxony.

The VW board is using the company’s current crisis to make long-planned cuts in its workforce. In so doing it relies heavily on the IG Metall trade union and its related works councils. Even prior to the revelations of the diesel scandal in September 2015, shareholders were demanding increased dividends and profits, particularly in the core VW auto sector where profits stood at just 2 percent.

The latest job cuts in Zwickau were in fact first announced in December 2015. The local council member Jens Rothe declared resignedly last week that it was “Not a good day for Zwickau,” while Stefan Kademann from the IG Metall spoke of an “unfortunate” development.

In reality, IG Metall and the works council continue to play off contract workers against the company’s permanent staff. Rothe stated there was no possibility of continued employment for temporary workers and workers with short-term contracts, because the company had to cut costs due to general pressure, and in particular because the production of the Phaeton model in nearby Dresden was one of the first casualties of the exhaust fraud.

“First, we had to make room for our colleagues in Dresden,” Rothe said. Around 400 of them have been transferred to the VW plants in Zwickau and Chemnitz.

Overall, VW employs approximately 10,000 full-time workers in the state—the majority of them at the plant in Zwickau. A spokesman for VW Saxony declared that 160 workers had been offered work at the Porsche factory in Leipzig, where production is due to start on the new Porsche Panamera.

Nine hundred thirty temporary workers at the VW transmission plant in Kassel also fear for their jobs. The local VW works council head Carsten Baetzold said in late April that 526 temporary contracts due to end in September would initially be extended by six months. He also called for a renewal of the contracts for 404 additional temporary workers, which are due to expire at the end of the year.

Whether this will happen is far from certain. The director of the local plant, Thorsten Jablonski, has said that the plant had enough orders (in April) but the situation remained unclear for the coming years.

“It is impossible to specify at the present time what effect the transformation from fuel driven autos to electric-mobility will have on the number of factories by 2020 or 2022,” Jablonski said. Should it be concluded that there were too many jobs remaining, then cuts would have to be made in the near 16,000-strong core workforce.

Last week, VW CEO Matthias Müller presented the company’s “Strategy 2025” with the backing of Bernd Osterloh, the central works chairman. It is clear that the new policy will provide the framework for massive attacks against the VW workforce worldwide. The company’s goal of making the group the leading mobility service provider and manufacturer of electrical and self-driving cars by 2025 will inevitably mean the destruction of jobs, wages and benefits.

This also means attacks on the company’s core workforce, whose social entitlements and relatively high wages are regarded as an obstacle to increased competitiveness by management. The contract workers and temporary workers who are losing their jobs in Zwickau are the first to suffer from the criminal activities of the VW group.

Washington plans escalation of war for regime-change in Syria

Thomas Gaist

Even as it increases its troop presence and prepares a further escalation of US military violence in Syria—a move that could well trigger a war between the United States and Russia—Washington is publicly proposing to increase its military coordination with Moscow in Syria.

Last week, the Obama administration acknowledged having submitted a proposal to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin for stepped-up collaboration in air attacks on the forces of the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, in return for a Russian agreement to end attacks by Russian jets and Syrian government forces on anti-regime “rebels” openly backed by the US and its NATO and Gulf allies.

The five-year-old war for regime-change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the only Arab ally in the Middle East of both Russia and Iran, has already taken the lives of more than 250,000 Syrians and turned more than half of the country’s people into homeless refugees.

There has as of yet been no public response from Moscow. Putin, for his part, has made clear that he is prepared in principle to accept a government without Assad as part of an overall settlement with the US and its allies, but only in return for guarantees for Russian military and naval bases by a new Syrian government acceptable to Russia—demands that cut across Washington’s basic war aims.

Al Nusra, whose fighters operate alongside Washington-backed jihadist militias, is the major force defending the “rebel” position in the key city of Aleppo, which is increasingly surrounded and besieged by Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian government forces. The main purpose of the US initiative to Russia is to prevent the fall of Aleppo and buy time while the Obama administration prepares a major expansion of the war, which will most likely be delayed until after the November elections.

According to press reports, the White House is proposing “a number of measures” for US-Russian military cooperation in Syria, including joint air strikes and intelligence sharing. To the extent that the offer is more than a cover for US preparations to step up its aggression in Syria and its confrontation with Russia in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe, it is motivated primarily by the severely weakened position of US proxy forces on the ground in Syria. They have suffered major setbacks since Moscow launched its military intervention in support of the Assad regime in September of last year.

The partial ceasefire negotiated by the US and Russia and initiated last February has been used by US proxy forces to shore up their positions in Syria, with, however, only limited effect.

In the intervening period, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have announced the deployment of hundreds more Special Forces troops to the battlefields of the country and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has made numerous statements pointing to a more direct role for the American military in the fighting.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has pledged to implement a “Plan B” for increased US military aid to the “rebels” and other moves to escalate the war should the already compromised ceasefire collapse. These measures could include supplying the “rebels” with hand-held ground-to-air missiles, capable of bringing down Russian military jets operating in Syria.

Within the US political, security and media establishment, there are growing criticisms of Obama’s policy and demands that Washington move more decisively against both Assad and Putin. There are reportedly sharp divisions within the administration itself.

Earlier this month, US State Department sources leaked a “dissent memo” authored by 51 mid-level department operatives calling for US air strikes against the Syrian government. Secretary of State Kerry, who headed up the campaign in 2013 for a full-scale US air war against Assad on the basis of false allegations of government chemical weapons attacks against civilians—a plan Obama cancelled at the last minute in favor of a Russian-proposed plan to dismantle the regime’s chemical weapons stock—called the memo an “important statement” and held a cordial meeting with several of its drafters.

The reports of the administration’s proposal for stepped-up military cooperation with Russia have evoked heated denunciations from sections of the media. The Washington Post published a lead editorial on Saturday headlined “Obama retreats from Russia in Syria—again.” The newspaper complained, “Obama appears fiercely determined to learn nothing from his tragic mistakes in Syria.” It warned that the “only tangible result” of the plan “would likely be the reinforcement of the Assad regime.”

A Newsweek analysis, “Why is Obama Getting Into Bed with Putin in Syria?” similarly denounced the White House proposal, lamenting that the deal would block further US offensives aimed at weakening Assad and that “from now until January 2017, US objectives in Syria will be limited to lowering the level of violence as much as possible.”

In the US election campaign, the danger of a wider war in the Middle East as well as war with nuclear powers Russia and China has been deliberately buried, so that there will be no opportunity for the broad anti-war sentiment in the population to find expression in the election.

Whichever party wins, however, the incoming administration will carry out a reckless escalation of militarism. Both the Democratic and Republican presumptive presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have declared their support for intensified bombing and the imposition of a no-fly zone directed against the Syrian regime and its Russian backers.

Australia: Deepening social discontent produces post-election turmoil

Mike Head

Anger over job losses and declining living conditions, combined with years of bitter political experiences with both Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments, were the primary factors in the further collapse of support for the major parties in last Saturday’s Australian election.

With 1.5 million postal votes still to be counted, some of which will not arrive until July 15, it may be another 10 days before the outcome of the election is known. At least 13 seats in the 150-member lower house remain in doubt, leaving both parties well short of the required majority of 76 seats.

The most likely result is a hung parliament, only the third in Australia’s history, with the formation of a government dependent on deals struck with other parties and “independents.” Before the election, the Coalition government held 90 seats, due to its sweeping defeat of the Greens-backed Labor government in the 2013 election.

The deepening impact of the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 has intensified the protracted breakup of the two-party system over the past three decades. Since 2007, in particular, voters have experienced six years of Labor government, supported by the Greens, and three years of Coalition government; both seeking to slash social spending to impose the burden of the global breakdown.

The most pronounced expression of the continuing haemorrhaging of support for the political establishment, including the Greens, came in the upper house, the Senate, where a record 26 percent of the valid votes went to other groups, mostly right-wing populists who postured as opponents of the major parties.

There was a 2-percentage point swing against the ruling Coalition, taking its vote down to around 35 percent, but Labor picked up only a 1-point swing to about 30 percent, and the Greens’ vote fell 0.35 points, losing at least one of their nine Senate seats as a result. Today’s 26 percent vote for “others” stands as another marker in the historic decline in support for the major parties. It stands in sharp contrast to the 4.25 percent recorded in 1990.

For now, the main beneficiaries were predominantly nationalist formations trying to channel the social and political discontent in protectionist and xenophobic directions, pitting Australian workers against their fellow workers internationally. Despite the disintegration of mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party (PUP), which secured 5.5 percent of the vote at the last federal election in 2013 with similar anti-establishment rhetoric, the vote for such parties grew.

Most prominently, Pauline Hanson’s right-wing, anti-immigrant One Nation obtained 4 percent, including nearly 10 percent in the mining state of Queensland. The Nick Xenophon Team, which pushes for protectionism and military spending, is based in South Australia, where the closure of the car industry is compounding the mining bust, secured 3.4 percent. Hanson and Xenophon could hold up to three seats each in the 76-member Senate.

In the House of Representatives, the largest shifts against Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government came in areas of the country most devastated by the collapse of the country’s mining boom, the closure of auto and other manufacturing industries and soaring housing prices, which have taken home ownership out of the reach of many young working class people.

On average, the Coalition vote fell 3.68 percentage points to 41.8 percent, but its losses were considerably greater in the regions where the social reality was most starkly divorced from Turnbull’s constant refrain that Australians live in “exciting” times of “transition” to a new economy.

In northern and central Queensland, where thousands of jobs have been eliminated in coal mines and the Townsville nickel refinery, the anti-government swings exceeded 6 points. In electorates around the north and south of Brisbane, the state capital, where official unemployment rates are as high as 20 percent, the government’s vote fell by up to 8.5 points.

Across the western and southwestern suburbs of Sydney, where exorbitant house prices are hitting families facing high unemployment and under-employment rates, the anti-government swing reached as high as 9.3 percent, allowing Labor to regain several seats it lost in 2013.

In Tasmania, which has the second highest unemployment rate in the country, the government’s vote dropped by up to 10.8 percent, and it lost all three seats it held in the island state to Labor. Ex-PUP Senator Jacqui Lambie kept her Senate seat with a vote of 8.5 percent.

Across South Australia, where workers have been hit by closures of mines and auto-related plants, anti-government swings of around 8 percent opened the way for Xenophon’s group to pick up one or possibly two seats, as well as two or three Senate seats.

In Western Australia, where iron ore and other mine closures have eliminated thousands of jobs, the government lost more than 5 percentage points, with the largest swings in outer Perth suburbs.

While Labor has gained a number of seats, these were mainly ones it lost in the 2013 landslide, taking it back to near the total it obtained in the 2010 election, after which it formed a minority government with the Greens.

To gain votes, Labor conducted a desperate last-minute “save Medicare” campaign, falsely claiming it would defend the public health system, even as it repudiated previous promises to oppose social spending cuts worth $40 billion over four years, plus a $57 billion cut to public hospitals over the next decade.

Despite the cynical Medicare claims, Labor won only about a half of the lower house votes lost by the government, leaving it with Labor’s second lowest primary vote in a century.

In the lower house, the Greens’ vote increased marginally by just over 1 percent to 9.9 percent, but that remained well down from their peak of 11.8 percent in 2010, before they entered into a formal agreement to prop up the minority Labor government. That government, led by Julia Gillard, not only committed Australia to the US military “pivot” to Asia against China, including the basing of US marines in Darwin, but cut public spending by the greatest amount in history in 2012–13.

During this election, the Greens wanted to further cement their position in the political establishment, seeking ministerial posts in a Labor-led government and pledging to help stabilise the parliamentary set-up. Reflecting their upper-middle class and pro-business constituency, they concentrated their campaigns on largely gentrified and wealthy electorates.

For example, the Greens obtained 43 percent of the vote in inner Melbourne, 25 percent in Higgins, a well-to-do electorate held by the Coalition, and 19 percent in Kooyong, based on Melbourne’s richest neighbourhoods. In the now largely better-off electorates of Batman and Wills, they picked up 37 and 30.5 percent respectively. Likewise, the Greens polled 22 percent in Grayndler in inner Sydney, and nearly 20 percent in inner Brisbane, as well as 20 percent in the northern New South Wales rural electorate of Richmond, which includes the wealthy enclave of Byron Bay. By contrast, their vote in working class areas was generally less than 5 percent.

Hanson’s One Nation consciously targeted some of the most economically and socially devastated regions. Its vote exceeded 15 percent in central Queensland and outlying areas of Brisbane, where mining-related job losses have created virtual ghost towns and areas of deep poverty. It also picked up 8 percent in the western Brisbane electorate of Oxley, which has high levels of unemployment.

Hanson last won such levels of support during the late 1990s, when she gained from the landslide defeat of the Hawke and Keating-led Labor government of 1983-1996 that ruthlessly enforced the restructuring of the economy to satisfy the needs of global capital.

Hanson’s ability to make a political comeback, preying upon the social distress being suffered by broad layers of working people, is entirely bound up with the fact that the working class has been politically suppressed and straitjacketed for decades by the Labor Party and trade union apparatuses. They have enforced the ongoing destruction of jobs and conditions under the demand of making Australian-based employers competitive on the world market, peddling a nationalist line that dovetails with Hanson’s.

The re-emergence of Hanson, along with Xenophon, Lambie and similar “other” parties, who all defend the profit system, which is the ultimate cause of war, exploitation and social inequality, is a warning sign. It reinforces the need for workers and young people to turn to the genuine socialist perspective advanced by the Socialist Equality Party, to completely reorganise economic life to meet human need, not the insatiable profit appetites of the wealthy elite.