France’s permanent state of emergency

Alex Lantier

At 4:53 AM Wednesday, the French National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to extend for a fourth time the state of emergency imposed by the Socialist Party (PS) government after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris. By 489 to 26, it prolonged what has become the longest state of emergency in France since the collapse of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime at the end of World War II.

Official claims that this is a temporary response to the latest horrific attack in France—in which an apparently deranged, indebted Franco-Tunisian truck driver plowed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 and wounding over 100—do not hold water. Amid a deep crisis of bourgeois democracy across Europe, the ruling elite, facing seething social tensions, is moving to impose a permanent state of emergency and transition from democratic to dictatorial forms of rule.

On Wednesday, in a lengthy interview with Le Monde, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve tried to reassure the public that the state of emergency is a temporary, lawful policy to fight terrorism. “The state of emergency cannot be a permanent state of affairs,” he said, adding: “It is not a state of exception, it is part of the rule of law. The Nice attack shows there can be counterattacks and calls for stepped-up vigilance. It is the imminent character of the danger that justifies prolonging the state of emergency.”

Cazeneuve’s reassurances are absurd on their face. All his arguments are intended to justify a permanent elimination of democratic rights. As Prime Minister Manuel Valls stated in the Assembly, the PS insists that France will live in imminent danger of events like the November 13 and Nice attacks into the indefinite future. “Even if these words are hard to say, it is my duty to do so,” Valls said. “There will be attacks and there will be other people killed. We must not become accustomed, we must never become accustomed to the horror, but we must learn to live with this menace.”

If the PS claims the terror threat is eternal, the inescapable conclusion is that the PS supports an eternal state of emergency. Indeed, various press commentators have written that it will be impossible to lift the state of emergency next winter, when the six months expire. They claim it will have to be prolonged for at least another six months to protect candidates in the presidential election of April-May 2017.

More fundamentally, Cazeneuve's claims are a political fraud because stopping terror attacks is not the purpose of the government’s actions. The state of emergency law was drafted in 1955 to crush an armed insurrection against French colonial rule by the Algerian people that began in 1954, and to limit opposition to the colonial war against the Algerians in the French working class—something it failed to do.

Today, over 60 years later, the main target of the state of emergency is not terrorism, but social and political opposition in the working class.

After the Nice attack, even Valls had to confess that the state’s draconian powers under the state of emergency—which allows police to ban social protests, carry out unlimited searches and seizures, censor the press, impose house arrest without trial and set up military tribunals—cannot stop the attacks. These police state measures do nothing to address the root causes of these attacks—NATO’s use of Islamist terror networks as tools in the war for regime-change in Syria and the deep social crisis in France.

Rather, as European capitalism sinks deeper into the greatest economic and political crisis since World War II, the ruling classes in countries across Europe are moving to dispense with democratic rights. As workers discover that democracy can be overturned by an arbitrarily imposed state of emergency, the fragile and ultimately unviable character of capitalist democracy is being exposed before millions.

The same day the French National Assembly voted to prolong the state of emergency, the Turkish government imposed a three-month state of emergency amid a broad purge of the military and state apparatus following last week's failed military coup.

In Britain, the referendum vote to leave the European Union has unleashed a massive political crisis. Various sections of the ruling elite are calling for a repudiation of the Brexit vote and trying to purge the base of the Labour Party so as to anti-democratically oust its elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and shift Labour's social and foreign policy even further to the right.

The German government, which is remilitarizing its foreign policy in the face of overwhelming popular opposition, is making plans to deploy the army within Germany itself.

The PS government in France has already used the state of emergency to try to crush explosive social opposition to its austerity measures, notably this spring's mass protests by workers and youth against its regressive labor law. It threatened to ban demonstrations outright, trampling constitutionally protected rights to strike and protest. It violently attacked protests with hordes of riot police and helped organize a counter-demonstration by the police union.

The reaction of the French state, especially compared to the previous national states of emergency of the 1950s and 1960s, seems all out of proportion to the terror threat it cites as justification for upending the constitution and suppressing democratic rights.

The longest of the three states of emergency imposed during the Algerian war lasted eight months. These emergencies—as the war began in 1955, after the 1958 coup d'état, and after the failed putsch of the Algiers generals in 1961—came amid a war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and involved the mobilization of millions of soldiers. And while they served to repress working class opposition to the war, the 1958 and 1961 emergencies were also aimed against insurrections by powerful sections of the French armed forces that had international support, notably in the fascist Franco regime in Spain, and felt the government was capitulating to anti-war sentiment in the working class.

Attacks like the Charlie Hebdo killings, the November 13 attacks and last week’s atrocity in Nice were carried out under unclear circumstances by handfuls of terrorists, most often known to French intelligence. While they claimed a horrific toll of over 200 lives, this pales in comparison to the mass slaughter of the Algerian war. Yet today’s state of emergency has already lasted longer, and the PS clearly intends to maintain it into the indefinite future.

What is driving this hysterical, anti-democratic reaction is, in the final analysis, the escalating social and political opposition in the working class. A central task facing workers, as this opposition develops and takes ever more politically conscious form, is the defense of democratic rights against the drive to dictatorship by a ruling class presiding over a bankrupt capitalist order.

UnitedHealth cuts Obamacare options for tens of thousands

Kate Randall

UnitedHealth, the largest US health insurer, has indicated it is drastically cutting its Affordable Health Care (ACA) public exchange offerings to only three states. This could affect some tens of thousands in the 31 states to be eliminated from the health insurer’s currently served markets. The drastic reduction in its covered health exchange markets comes despite revenues rising by 28 percent in the second quarter of 2016, to $46.5 billion, and profits jumping 13 percent, to nearly $3.4 billion. This is due mainly to profits in the company’s Optum division.

UnitedHealth reports that it has lost more than $1 billion over the last two years on the exchanges run by what is commonly known as Obamacare. This includes an estimated $200 million in losses in “ACA-compliant individual products” in 2016, Forbes reports.

In a telephone call with analysts Tuesday, UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley said the company now expects to operate “three or fewer exchange markets” in 2017, down from 34 this year. UnitedHealth plans to maintain public exchange offerings only in New York, Nevada and Virginia, pending approvals, Hemsley said.

UnitedHealth cited higher-than-expected enrollment in Obamacare insurance products as the main cause of its projected $200 million losses for 2016. According to Investor’s Business Daily, the insurer had 820,000 exchange customers at the end of June, up by about 25,000 from the end of March. These figures were surprising, as enrollment typically declines for most companies as the year progresses.

UnitedHealth ACA enrollees since March have tended to be sicker, including customers with chronic conditions such as HIV, diabetes and hepatitis C. Under Obamacare, insurers are prohibited from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions. The moves by UnitedHealth to dump the vast majority of their ACA products demonstrate, however, that insurers are free to exit the market if they determine their profits are threatened.

Under the ACA’s “individual mandate,” individuals and families without health insurance from their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid must purchase coverage from a private insurer on the exchanges or pay a substantial tax penalty. But the insurer companies are under no such obligation to actually provide such coverage.

For UnitedHealth, the real driver of profits and revenue has been the company’s Optum division, which saw revenues soar by 52 percent in the second-quarter, to $20.6 billion. The Optum unit includes OptumRx, a pharmacy benefit management company, which saw a 69 percent growth in revenue in the second quarter, to $15.1 billion, due to growth and acquisitions, according to Forbes .

Through urgent care centers and doctor’s practices it owns, Optum also provides technology services to doctors and hospitals as well as a business providing outpatient care.

The giant insurers can pick and choose where to do business, letting profits and revenue be their guide, as Obamacare is based on the for-profit model. The insurance companies make no pretense that their involvement in the ACA marketplace is driven by altruistic motives.

When insurers do choose to participate in the ACA marketplace there is little meaningful oversight on the prices they charge for premiums. While premiums and the scope of plan networks vary from state to state, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report showed that the average cost of the second-lowest-cost “silver” plan on the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 10 percent in 2016, double last year’s rate.

The most affordable ACA plans also come with large deductibles, which must be paid in full before any coverage, except that deemed “essential,” kicks in. Many of the lowest-cost “bronze” plans come with deductibles as high as $5,000 and more.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Obamacare premiums in California will rise by an average of 13.2 percent in 2017, according to state officials. This follows increases of 4.2 percent in 2015 and 4 percent in 2016. Officials had previously boasted that the state’s Covered California program had insured hundreds of thousands of people while keeping costs relatively low.

Three quarters of Labour MPs back renewal of UK nuclear missile system

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Parliament voted by a massive majority Monday evening to support the renewal of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system.

The 472 to 117 vote in favour of the Conservative government motion approves the manufacture of four replacement submarines at a current estimated cost of £31 billion. However, this is just the initial cost. The final cost, including the maintenance of the system, could reach £205 billion, according to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). To put this into perspective, the entire annual cost of the National Health Service budget for 2015/16 is £116 billion.

The vote on Trident was originally put in place by former Prime Minister David Cameron, prior to June’s referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU). Cameron supported remaining in the EU and wanted the vote held after an expected victory for the Remain camp in the referendum. This was seen by Cameron as a way to tackle divisions in a Tory party split down the middle over EU membership and as a means of avoiding any controversy with Labour, which supported Remain, during the referendum. With the vote to leave the EU, Cameron was forced to step down, to be replaced by Theresa May after an aborted leadership contest.

Just one Conservative, Crispin Blunt, voted against renewal, with 322 of his party’s MP’s backing renewal. Blunt, the chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, stated that he could not back renewal as the cost was “colossal,” “when factoring in 32-year in-service life.”

The government’s figures estimated a total renewal cost of £179 billion, he said, adding, “We have capped defence expenditure at 2 percent of GDP. The cost of this programme comes at the expense of the rest of the defence programme.”

Tory and opposition Labour MPs took it in turns to support the use of nuclear weapons, with many stating Trident had to be retained in order to confront Russia.

Prime Minister Theresa May declared, “In the past two years, there has been a disturbing increase in both Russian rhetoric about the use of nuclear weapons and the frequency of snap nuclear exercises.”

Asked by an MP of the Scottish National Party if she was “personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children,” May replied. “Yes ... the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour Party frontbench.”

May was referring to the position of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has said he would not authorise a nuclear strike.

Corbyn told MPs, to heckling from Labour’s backbenches, “I make it clear today, I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people.”

May did not have to rely on Tory MPs to oppose Corbyn. Pro-war Labourites actively plotting his removal queued up to denounce him.

Corbyn refused to whip the vote on Trident, meaning that they had a “free vote.” This allowed fully three-quarters of the parliamentary party to back the government, as 140 Labour MPs supported the motion with just 47 against. Also, de facto siding with the government were the 40 Labourites who stayed away from the Commons or who abstained in the vote. Among these were Emily Thornberry, Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary, who is conducting a review into Labour defence policy. Also abstaining was Clive Lewis, Labour’s shadow defence secretary.

Supporting Trident were Owen Smith and Angela Eagle, the two Labour MPs challenging Corbyn for Labour leadership. Smith and Eagle stood down from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet in a failed attempt to force him to resign. Even among those who remained, three, Andy Burnham, Rosie Winterton and Deputy Leader Tom Watson, voted with the government.

Labour MP John Woodcock said he hoped May would “be reassured that whatever she is about to hear from our front benchers, it remains steadfastly Labour party policy to renew the deterrent while other countries have the capacity to threaten the United Kingdom and that many of my colleagues will do the right thing for the long-term security of our nation and vote to complete the programme that we ourselves started in government.”

Referring to the coup against Corbyn, he stated that workers in the defence industry “are now being ignored by the party leader, who clings to an idea of Labour party democracy to save his own skin, and that is not right.”

Toby Perkins, who resigned as shadow armed forces minister, ridiculed Corbyn, stating, “As a 13-year-old I certainly made some of the arguments we heard from our front bench a few moments ago.”

Underscoring Labour’s intimate links to the defence and intelligence operations of the British state and its role in the ongoing US-led preparations for war against Russia, he told Parliament, “In the past nine months, I have visited NATO with two previous shadow secretaries of state for defence. We met representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Poland and several other NATO allies.”

Ruth Smeeth, who resigned from the shadow cabinet and is playing a leading role in the coup targeting Corbyn, gave a succinct statement about Labour’s historic role in defence of the British capitalist state:

“From Major Attlee’s support for Churchill in our country’s darkest hour to the founding of NATO under Ernest Bevin, our party has always stood up first and foremost for the security of our nation—we do now, and we always will.”

Jamie Reed, who resigned from the shadow cabinet last September before Corbyn had even finished his leadership victory speech, said in the debate he supported “every word of the motion before us in the name of the prime minister, because the truth is that the preservation of our national security does not wear the colours of any political party.”

Prior to the 2015 general election, a poll conducted by CND found that 75 percent of Labour’s parliamentary candidates opposed renewing Trident. This underscores the extent of the move to the right by the party, which, according to the dictates of the ruling class, has abandoned any such pose of pacifism.

Once again, the view of the Parliamentary Labour Party is in blatant opposition to that of most rank-and-file Labour members, who overwhelmingly support Corbyn. A poll of members earlier this year found that 40 percent opposed Trident renewal, with just 29 in favour.

Concluding his speech, Reed said of Corbyn, “A policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament is a bar to being elected.”

May referred to the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas and “some Labour Members” who “seem to be the first to defend the country’s enemies and the last to accept these [nuclear weapons] capabilities when we need them.”

Workers should recall how these politically loaded and ominous statements, essentially a charge of treason, align with those of senior figures in the UK’s military who have already threatened a mutiny against Corbyn if he ever takes office.

Washington and Brussels step up pressure on Turkey

Halil Celik

Washington and Europe have stepped up their pressure on the Erdogan government following the failed July 15 coup in Turkey. To this end they are using the wave of arrests of army personnel and judges by the Turkish government in the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt.

US Secretary of State John Kerry indirectly warned Turkey of losing its NATO membership. “NATO also has a requirement with respect to democracy and NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening,” Kerry told journalists in Brussels on Monday.

Previously, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini had warned Turkey against reinstating the death penalty for those alleged to be responsible for the coup, insisting countries that applied the death penalty could not be EU members.

The German government also warned Turkey not to take “disproportionate measures” after the failed coup. “Germany and the EU have a clear position: we categorically oppose the death penalty,” declared government spokesman Steffen Seibert in Berlin. “The introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of EU accession negotiations.”

Prior to a meeting with their EU counterparts, the foreign ministers of Austria and Luxembourg, Sebastian Kurz and Jean Asselborn, also warned Turkey against authoritarian measures and the reintroduction of the death penalty. “There must be no arbitrary purges, no criminal sanctions outside the constitutional framework and the judiciary,” Kurz said in an interview with the newspaper Kurier.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeated his call for the extradition of Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen. Gülen lives in the US and has been accused by Erdogan of being behind the coup. Erdogan said he would formally request the extradition of Gülen and submit evidence on his role in the coup attempt.

At the same time, the wave of purges launched in Turkey has aggravated social and political tensions. On Monday, the Turkish Interior Ministry suspended 8,777 persons, including 7,899 police officers and 614 gendarmerie officers, along with 30 provincial and 47 district governors. The move came a day after the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office issued arrest warrants for some 2,750 judges accused of links to the “Fethullah Terrorist Organization” (FETO), named after Gülen.

Speaking to the state-run broadcaster TRT on Sunday, Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said that more than 6,000 people, including some 3,000 military personnel and dozens of high-ranking generals, had been arrested for alleged links to the failed coup.

Within the last two days, 103 generals and admirals have been detained across Turkey, while investigations at various military headquarters, including the Incirlik airbase, continue. The ongoing purge and prosecution of thousands of military, security and judiciary officials will be, in the words of the Turkish justice minister, “the most extensive case ever seen in Turkey’s history.”

Speaking Sunday at a funeral for people killed in the coup attempt, Erdogan vowed that his government would “continue to cleanse the state institutions of all these viruses [i.e., FETO members].” He said, “Since yesterday, the judiciary has been cleansed of these elements. They have been put in custody—dismissed and imprisoned. This was necessary, but that is not enough.”

By Tuesday, an estimated 50,000 public servants were estimated to have been either arrested or sacked, including over 15,000 teachers.

The ongoing purge and arrests have failed, however, to calm the tense situation. Rather, they have served to intensify conflicts within the state apparatus. Thus, the Turkish president instructed military combat planes to conduct patrols across Turkey, and the Istanbul Security General Directorate ordered its forces to shoot down any unidentified helicopters without warning.

The scale of ongoing operations, the number of suspended and arrested people, and the elevated positions of many of those arrested, especially in the military, belie the claims that the failed coup was a desperate “kamikaze” action organised by a small minority within the military.

Erdogan has not limited himself to government agencies in his purge of political opponents from the state apparatus. His government has mobilised tens of thousands of Islamist militants, mainly members of the pro-AKP Ottoman Societies, within the larger mass of AKP voters who took to the streets against the attempted coup following Erdogan’s call early Saturday morning.

After preventing large sections of the population from taking part in anti-coup demonstrations, these Islamist mobs are increasingly directing their attacks against AKP opponents. Hundreds of Islamist demonstrators in Istanbul vandalised the central office of a local newspaper and blocked the main entrance of a barracks while shouting jihadist and religious slogans.

Similar reactionary forces are active in other cities. In an attempt to provoke sectarian conflicts, Sunni Islamist mobs have gathered in largely Alawite-populated neighbourhoods in the eastern province of Malatya, shouting pro-AKP and Sunni Islamist slogans.

It was this angry religious mob that provided Erdogan and his government the opportunity to initiate a debate on reinstating capital punishment. Their demands for reinstating the death penalty to punish coup plotters were positively answered by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım on July 15. Yildirim declared that his government could not remain indifferent to such demands.

Three days later, he repeated this view, saying, “People on the streets are chanting for ‘capital punishment’… Our citizens’ demand is an order for us... Our parliament will consider the issue. We will act in line with public opinion.”

Yıldırım’s remarks came after Erdogan vowed on July 17 that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty. “In democracies, decisions are made based on what the people say. I think our government will speak with the opposition and come to a decision,” he said.

Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 as part of reforms aimed at obtaining European Union membership.

The Republicans plumb the depths

Joseph Kishore & David North

As one follows the Republican National Convention, one cannot avoid the conclusion that some fundamental political boundary is being crossed.

There is little reason to idealize the political history of the United States. The conventions of the two capitalist parties—attended by several thousand delegates representing a cross section of corrupt politicos and operatives in the pay of Big Business—have usually been sordid affairs. Over the past half-century they have resulted in the nominations of people such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. And yet this Republican Party convention in Cleveland, which has just officially chosen Donald Trump as its candidate for president, represents something new, ugly and sick.

Even as socialists, who have carefully followed, analyzed and explained the protracted crisis of American democracy, it is difficult to suppress a feeling of disgust, akin to nausea, as one watches the proceedings. One cannot help but ask oneself, “Has it really come to this?” The convention is a display of the grotesque and the absurd, in which all that is seedy, stupid, backward, cruel and reactionary in American politics and culture is on display.

An air of demoralized paranoia dominates the convention. Under the slogan “Make America Great Again,” the speakers describe a country in irreversible breakdown, beset by enemies inside and out. In the speeches, filled with appeals to the military and the police, one senses, beneath all the braggadocio, a ruling class extremely nervous about its future.

Donald Trump emerged from a silhouetted stage on Monday night to introduce his wife, who was about to read her plagiarized tribute to her hero. Unfortunately, there is not to be found among the ranks of present-day journalists the equal of an H.L Mencken, who certainly would have drawn attention to the absurd irony of hysterical evangelical delegates choosing as their prophet a thrice-wed man who publicly extols the size of his private parts and has entertained the New York tabloids with descriptions of his most memorable sexual encounters.

Another great American satirist, Sinclair Lewis, the author of Elmer Gantry and It Can’t Happen Here, would probably have seen in the excitement of the delegates proof that the United States is a country where puritanical hysteria commingles with a fascination for the pornographic, and where pious moral virtue never stops the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

There is very little that is original in the person of Trump, except, perhaps, that his limitless self-obsession and narcissism have allowed him to become a vessel into which the greed and criminality of the American ruling class can be poured. In his personal history, he stands out only for his ability to combine the phenomenon of the crooked CEO with the celebrity culture of American television.

As the World Socialist Web Site has pointed out before, Trump’s particular fascistic personality was forged not in the beer halls of Munich and the trenches of World War I, but in the real estate market of New York City. With his casinos, his fictional universities and his endless stream of failed businesses, this personification of corporate fraud could hardly be a more fitting symbol for the state of American capitalism.

That Trump emerges from a broader political degradation is evident in the convention, the events that surround it and the line-up of speakers, each more reactionary than the last. On Monday, there was Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, who, in his screaming for vengeance and blood, appeared to be doing his best impression of Benito Mussolini. Giuliani came after Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who recently declared that the country was in the midst of a civil war, pitting defenders of law and order against revolutionary Marxist forces, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, which he lumped together with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The Republican Party Platform was passed quickly on Monday. Officially dedicated to the military and the police, it outlines a program for eliminating every legal, financial and government restraint on the accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class. It calls for repealing the 16th amendment, which established the federal income tax; lowering the corporate tax rate; eliminating government regulations; cutting Medicaid and transitioning Medicare into a program for subsidizing the purchase of private insurance; cutting Social Security; replacing remaining welfare programs with “the dynamic compassion of work requirements” and abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency. The platform also adopts Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

It enshrines a form of clerical authoritarianism, with government based on religious principles. Aside from the ubiquitous references to God, the platform would ban abortion under all conditions, protect corporations and other entities that discriminate on the basis of religious prejudice, and overturn court rulings legalizing gay marriage.

The most significant element of the Republican Party platform, however, is what it says about foreign policy—asserting that the United States must subordinate the entire world to the interests of American corporations. “We cannot allow foreign governments to limit American access to their markets while stealing our designs, patents, brands, know-how, and technology,” it proclaims. “We cannot allow China to continue its currency manipulation, exclusion of US products from government purchases, and subsidization of Chinese companies to thwart American imports.”

In the Middle East, it calls for forcing out Assad in Syria, going to war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, repudiating the Obama administration’s deal with Iran, expanding the war in Iraq and unconditionally supporting Israel. The platform backs the arming of Ukraine against Russia and pledges to “meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Summing up the drive of American imperialism to dominate the entire globe, the platform asserts that the United States must “retake its natural position as leader of the free world” by “rebuilding the US military into the strongest on earth, with vast superiority over any other nation or group of nations in the world.”

This is a program for a Fortress America, armed to the teeth. It is an agenda that cannot be realized without the implementation of a police state, the reduction of the working class to absolute poverty, and the launching of world war.

With the Democratic Party convention coming up next week, we will have the opportunity to analyze the other side of the US political system. However, it must be said that the characteristics revealed in the Republican convention and the persona of Trump are an expression of the decay of not just one party, let alone one individual, but of the political and social system as a whole. What is to some extent concealed in the Democratic Party is revealed more fully in the Republican Party. The nomination of Trump is a nodal point in the terminal crisis of American capitalism.

The Superpowers Are Violent Powers

Lawrence S. Wittner

If asked to identify the world’s superpowers today, most people would name the United States, Russia, and China.  Although many citizens of these countries maintain that this status is based on the superiority of their national way of life, the reality is that it rests upon their nations’ enormous capacity for violence.

Certainly none has a peaceful past.  The United States, Russia, and China have a long history of expansion at the expense of neighboring countries and territories, often through military conquest.  Those nations on their borders today, including some that have wrenched themselves free from their imperial control, continue to fear and distrust them.  Just ask Latin Americans, East Europeans, or Asians what they think of their powerful neighbors.

Nor has there been any significant reduction of their military might in recent years.  Despite their professions of peaceful intentions, all three nations maintain vast armed forces and a clear willingness to use them when it suits their rulers.  According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, in 2014 the United States had 2.3 million active duty military, reserve military, and paramilitary personnel, Russia had 3.4 million, and China 3.5 million.  These figures do not include many other people they kept fully armed, such as China’s 3 million-strong People’s Liberation Army militia.  In 2015, the combined military expenditures of the three superpowers constituted more than half the world total, with 36 percent ($596 billion) spent by the United States, 13 percent ($215 billion) by China, and 4 percent ($64 billion) by Russia.

Lest anyone think that Russia’s low military expenditures―at least compared to those of the United States and China―indicate a collapse of its capacity for mass violence, it should be kept in mind that Russia continues to possess more nuclear weapons than any other nation.   With an estimated 7,290 nuclear weapons in its arsenals, Russia is a formidable military power, indeed.  The United States, a close runner-up, has some 7,000, giving these two superpowers possession of roughly 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons―more than enough to annihilate life on earth.  China, by contrast, lags far behind as a nuclear power, with a mere 260.  Even so, these Chinese weapons, if carefully directed, could kill about 52 million people and cause nuclear winter climate catastrophe, killing millions more.

As might be expected of countries that view themselves as the light of the world, each is dissatisfied with the nuclear status quo and is busy ramping up its nuclear arsenal at enormous cost.  In the United States, a program is underway to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to build new nuclear weapons factories, new nuclear warheads, and upgraded delivery systems for the warheads via land-based missiles, submarines, and planes.  Meanwhile, both Russia and China are building their own new generations of nuclear weapons.  According to a recent New York Times report, Russia is developing “big missiles topped by miniaturized warheads,” while “the Russian Navy is developing an undersea drone meant to loft a cloud of radioactive contamination from an underwater explosion that would make target cities uninhabitable.”  For its part, the Chinese military is flight testing a “hypersonic glide vehicle” that is fired into space “on a traditional long-range missile but then maneuvers through the atmosphere, twisting and careening at more than a mile a second,” thus rendering missile defenses “all but useless.”  Americans can take heart, though, for the Obama administration “is flight-testing its own hypersonic weapon.”

Nuclear weapons, of course, have not been used except as threat since 1945.  But there is nothing to prevent their employment in the future, particularly as the superpowers continue to use their military power recklessly.  China, though not currently at war, is alarming its neighbors by building islands in disputed offshore waters and establishing military facilities on them.  Russia is absorbing the Ukrainian territory it recently seized by military force and heavily bombing portions of Syria.  And the United States is continuing its lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while launching covert military operations in numerous other countries from its 662 military bases around the globe.

Not surprisingly, these are also violent societies at home.  Although most nations of the world have abolished capital punishment, both the United States and China still put large numbers of people to death.  Indeed, China is the world’s most active executioner.

This state-organized violence is often accompanied by citizen violence.  In 2015, the use of firearms in the United States resulted in the deaths of 13,286 people and the wounding of another 26,819.  These figures include 372 mass shootings, but not the many suicides (21,175 in 2011, says CDC data).  In 2012―the latest year with comparative statistics―the number of gun murders per capita in the United States was nearly 30 times that in Britain.

Murder rates are also high in the three superpowers―though considerably lower in China than in the United States and Russia.  When ranked by the lowest murder rates among the nations of the world, China was #28, the United States #96, and Russia #128.

Overall, then, the three superpowers are unusually violent powers.  An extensive study by the Institute for Economics & Peace, released recently, ranked 163 independent nations and territories according to their level of peacefulness.  Examining 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators linked to domestic or international conflict, the degree of militarization, and the level of safety and security in society, the study concluded that, when it came to peacefulness, the United States ranked #103, China #120, and Russia #151.

Is this really the best that these large, economically productive, educationally advanced, and technologically sophisticated nations can do?  If so, the world is in big trouble.

Banning And Banishing: The Nonsense About Muslims

Binoy Kampmark

He was the kingpin of the whole affair by suggesting it. In December 2015, the US Republican presumptive nominee for President, Donald Trump, came up with that daft suggestion which seems so utterly devoid of informed meaning.  Ban Muslims from entering the United States and the phenomenon of terrorism would somehow be abated.

His prepared statement was characteristically dramatic in the manner of reality television, envisaging a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

The recent shootings of US police officers, inflicted by disgruntled former black American soldiers, may inspire Trump to think about another form of banning and banishment, though where, exactly, are we to put such aggrieved patriots? It was the policy of British American settlers to happily make use of slaves and remove them, with the assistance of various trading middlemen, from their African homes.  Such difficulty!

The latest terrorist attack in Nice generated a good deal of activity on the idiocy meter, with other representatives of immigrant societies suggesting that Muslim immigration should stop altogether. Australia’s resident demagogic squawker, Andrew Bolt, did his usual tin-pot surmising with the idea that there were links between immigration, Islam and terrorism in France.

Bolt’s reasoning in the Herald Sun is proudly myopic, a breezy speculative excursion that confuses correlation, causation and everything else.  Jihadists have run amok in France to make “Europe’s bloodiest battlefield” because “France lets in the most Muslims.”

The fact that French foreign policy has an inglorious record of destabilising regimes such as that of Gaddafi’s Libya and further stirring the pot of Islamic fury in Syria, never makes an appearance in the analysis. Western states, goes this line of thinking, engage in foreign theatres without domestic consequences.

Bolt’s hold on evaluation, accuracy and statistics is sketchy. But the life of a fanatic is untroubled by the intrusion of facts, a point that he shares with those terrorists he struggles to understand. “No European country has a higher proportion of Muslims than France – up to 10 per cent of its population, or six million, though statistics are vague, and vary.”

This permits Bolt to engage in a false statistical analysis.  He scours the globe to identify places where the Muslim populations are fewer.  Naturally, he picks a country from his fantasy where immigrants of all types are few and far between: Japan. “Japan has strict controls on immigration and its 127 million people include just 100,000 Muslims.  Result: zero Islamist attacks.”  Genius.

Air head Sonia Kruger, a host of a breakfast show host, Today Extra, decided that Bolt had a point, suggesting the intellectual muscle he can muster for his scribbles.  “There is a correlation between the number of people in a country who are Muslim and the number of terrorist attacks.”

Naturally, Kruger feels that being a mother somehow provides her the magic of omniscient insight, a deep feeling for the sociology of life.  “Following the atrocities of last week in Nice where 10 children lost their lives, as a mother, I believe it’s vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled a racist.”

Such views are never far from the psyche of the immigrant society.  Built by immigrants, forged by immigrants, such a society is bound to also have some self-loathing at a certain point. Bad apples found in the cart suggest that it might tip over. Best, therefore, to make sure that particular orchard is never harvested.

In doing so, the argument tends to be made that free speech is being asserted.  Kruger’s shallow understanding here is palpable. “I want to feel safe and I want to see freedom of speech.”  Obviously, banning the followers of a particular faith from entering a country would be a stunning affirmation of how speech is distinctly not free.

While Today Extra is hardly the front line of weighty Enlightenment thinking, co-host David Campbell did provide a tincture of balance. “I’d like to see freedom of religion as well, as well as freedom of speech. They go hand in hand.”

The issue of banning immigrants of a particular disposition coming into Australia has never been far from Australia’s political pulse.  The first act of the fledging Australian parliament in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act which inaugurated the White Australia policy.

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard has similarly been excited by notions of banning entrants, be they Asians or individuals of a certain disposition.  While opposition leader in the 1980s, Howard gambled on the idea that Australia was simply accepting too many Asians, thereby diluting its cultural and racial stock.

On August 1, 1988, Howard suggested that, “If it is in the eyes of some in the community too great, it would be in our immediate term interests and supportive of social cohesion if [Asian immigration] were slowed down a little so that the capacity of the community to absorb were greater.”

It was political stupidity, and suicide on his part, though he would learn his lesson during the 1990s.  In that decade, he transformed the Australian approach to refugees by developing a trans-pacific prison system euphemistically called processing, using poorer Pacific countries to do Canberra’s dirty work.  During these years, he would launch a series of blows against those arriving to Australia on often dangerous rafts and vessels, claiming that he did not “want people of that type in Australia”.

Those who favour bans on immigrants of a specific religion tend to ignore the obvious point about what resident, and Australian-born followers of that faith would do.  What better statement of deprivation and estrangement could there be than one of state-sanctioned exclusion. What next?  Concentration camps?  Perhaps the logic here is one of internment and ultimate banishment.  Trump would be proud.

Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull: The Failure Of Success

Binoy Kampmark

The term “mandate” has been sluicing through the Australian electoral system in its predictable wash-up. In that particular country, it never matters whether one wins by one vote or a hundred thousand: everyone has a “clear mandate” to do what they damn well wish they think they were encouraged to do.

It is worth remembering that the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, took his government, and the country, to an election, and tediously long eight-week campaign, after seeking a double dissolution (that is, of both chambers of Parliament).

That effort was meant to improve his numbers and obtain the proverbial mandate against those in the Senate considered all too obstructionist for his governing – democracy, in other words, is not a matter of all parties but only the majority.

What happened on election night was considerable bloodletting, a brutal display of voter vengeance that could only have been taken one way. It might have been deemed a massacre, and others with a mild acquaintance of their ancient history would have used the term Pyrrhic victory.

In 279 BC, the battle of Asculum in Apulia got that fateful tag with the help of King Pyrrhus of Epicurus.  The Empiriotic forces did endeavour to win the day, but at considerable cost at the hands of the Roman forces commanded by Consul Publius Decius Mus.

As Plutarch noted in Pyrrhus (75 AD), “he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward.”  Far from actually being given any sort of mandate, the election result for the prime minister was a hectoring punishment, a deliverance of sheer disgust.

The government came within a whisker of terribly calculated defeat.  It staved off swings in several crucial seats, and even now, the final seat of Herbert is being mulled over with an eight vote margin. (Labor having won the seat, but pending a recount.)

Even then, Turnbull could say that the Coalition was heading to what might be termed a “solid” majority of a flimsy 77 seats. (Not so, if Herbert is lost.)  “We’ve won the election, that’s the mandate.  All of our policies that we took to the election we will deliver.”

The assessment coming from the machine men – party director Tony Nutt and pollster Mark Textor, both of whom sound like the sorts of implements you would find in an obsolete writing bureau – could only speak in the dry terms of electoral concerns about the economy, and the fact that they should have been more “attack” advertisements.

The point with Nutt is significant. Here he was, the strategist of the Liberal Party, running what was termed an eight-week “dictatorship” of micromanaging constipation.  Liberal party state branches across the country were studiously ignored, while ammunition against the Labor opposition remained unused, if, indeed, it was ever stored up.

An unnamed (of course) source from the Liberal party claimed that Nutt’s time as chief of staff for former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu entailed “doing nothing more than complaining if his tea didn’t come in a cup and saucer and making orders for the stationary cupboard.  He can hardly use an email.”

The result should not have necessarily emboldened the opposition Labor Party either.  Its leaders had already set the tribal trend in motion with the respective acts of internal political assassinations, first against Kevin Rudd, then against Julia Gillard.  Labor deserved to win seats, but not government.

Turnbull has done his cosmetic best with the thinned team he has to work with.  With fewer sitting members, his decision has been to overcompensate: inflate the ministry, bulk it and bulge it in the hope that no one will notice the fewer chairs and voices.

Australia’s government now has the largest cabinet since 1975, with an assortment of positions split like a meal amongst a parsimonious family. Victorian Kelly O’Dwyer found her position on small business removed, with assistant treasurer responsibilities renamed.

The defence portfolio was split, with Christopher Pyne essentially taking over the meaty aspects of shipbuilding and the defence industry more broadly, while the erstwhile Defence Minister Marise Payne finds that a somewhat lesser portion of the pie left. With Pyne busying himself, she won’t have much to play with.

The division is significant in pushing the Turnbull government into a more military frame of mind.  Think defence, think business. This is hardly endearing in a peaceful context, but it certainly will tickle parts of the electorate intoxicated by the link between armaments and money.  Pyne certainly thinks so, seen defence as “an economic and innovation driver as we shift from the post mining construction boom period into a new age of innovation.”

The gesture of creating a grander front bench was not fooling certain Coalition government members.  The faces were bright enough for the swearing in ceremony, but the ceremony could only go so far.  The ever dyed-in-the-wool conservative Eric Abetz noted that the lack of any frontbencher from Tasmania. The opposition leader noted the prevailing issues of female representation and the lack of a tourism portfolio.  Turnbull remains one tainted by the sweet smell of failing success.

Cuba shuffles heads of ministries in response to economic slowdown

Alexander Fangmann

The economic stagnation and turmoil that have battered countries throughout Latin America in the recent period have begun to severely impact the Cuban economy. Just days after outlining a series of austerity measures, most notably cutbacks in energy consumption, imports and state investment, Economy Minister Marino Murillo was sacked and reassigned to concentrate on speeding up the reintroduction of market relations and other “reforms” throughout the economy.

According to a report on an official note from the Cuban Council of State published by the Cuban News Agency, the council and Cuban President Raúl Castro “agreed to free” Murillo to “concentrate his efforts on tasks related to the updating of the Cuban economic and social model.” He will be replaced as minister of planning and the economy by Ricardo Cabrisas, a long-time functionary and vice president. Though demoted from his ministerial position, Murillo will retain his own position as a vice president.

The reassignment of Murillo is one of several recent changes in ministerial posts. The same note that announced Murillo’s removal as economy minister also included the news that Higher Education Minister Rodolfo A. Alarcon was being replaced by Loidi Jose R. Sabol. During the previous week, Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), published a notice that Culture Minister Julian Gonzalez had been replaced by Abel Prieto, who had previously held the post until 2012, but had been subsequently named a special advisor to the president and Council of State.

Murillo had announced the cutbacks at a closed-door speech to the National Assembly on July 8, after outlining the impact of the slowdown on the economy. After registering 4 percent economic growth in 2015, the government had expected growth this year to decline to 2 percent. However, it appears that the government now expects growth to fall well below this level for the rest of the year, even though the economy grew 1 percent in the first half.

In his speech, Murillo stated, “We planned to import $14.416 billion to support 2 percent growth this year, but with the adjustments we will spend $11.973 billion.” In other words, imports will be slashed by almost $2.5 billion, around 15 percent. Imports that do not contribute to tourism and other export industries will be among those targeted for cuts.

Those industries are being spared because Cuba requires the hard currency they bring in. The country imports 60 percent of its food and more than 50 percent of its oil, requiring that state importers have currency on hand. But earnings have been hit hard by low prices for nickel, oil and sugar. The price of nickel, one of Cuba’s major commodity exports, has been cut in half since 2014, threatening the industry’s profitability.

Murillo also said that 17 percent of planned investments would be suspended. Since such a measure would impact the growth of the economy, it is likely a reflection of Cuban officials’ desperation to cut imports while continuing to maintain the country’s position with its creditors, many of whom have already been asked to extend payment terms.

Other measures include a 28 percent reduction in fuel consumption through the end of the year, fanning fears of blackouts and a return to the “special period” of the 1990s, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union ended subsidies to the Cuban economy. According to reports, public lighting is to be decreased by half, public bus service will see cuts and workers will see workdays cut. A New York Times article reported that bank employees have been ordered to run air conditioners for only two hours each day and to work only half a day in order to save energy. Fuel consumption for government and state-run company vehicles will be cut in half, and some workers have been told to work from home.

The fall in oil prices, which has driven the political and economic crisis in Venezuela, has now also begun to affect Cuba directly. In the National Assembly session, Castro noted, “There has been a contraction in the fuel supplies agreed to with Venezuela despite the strong will of President Nicolas Maduro and his government to fulfill them.” Venezuela had previously cut shipments of subsidized oil through its Petrocaribe program to other countries, including the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.

Despite protests by Luis Morillo, the general manager of Cuba operations at PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, that the problem is not a reduction in oil shipments, but merely a “technical and engineering difficulty at the Cienfuegos refinery,” Reuters has reported that internal trade data from PDVSA indicates that it has shipped 40 percent less crude oil to the island this year than in 2015. Although to some extent Venezuela has substituted refined petroleum products for crude oil, nonetheless, overall shipments are down 19.5 percent.

Venezuela has itself struggled with refinery output recently as its own import-driven shortages have exacerbated a long-standing neglect of maintenance and investment in its plants. It has also been unable to import sufficient quantities of the lighter crude needed for blending purposes in its refinery operations. Oil production in June fell to a 13-year low. While output had been on a slow decline, the drop in price for Venezuelan oil from over $100 per barrel in June 2014 to under $40 has led to a huge currency shortage affecting supplies of all kinds of goods.

The Reuters report suggests that Venezuela is sending Cuba a heavier grade crude oil than in the past, in order to keep lighter crudes within Venezuela for its own use. This heavier crude that Cuba is now receiving requires more special refining and blending, and could be the “technical” reason why parts of the joint Cuban-Venezuelan refinery in Cienfuegos have been temporarily shut down.

Aside from the direct effect on oil supplies resulting from the drop in Venezuelan shipments, the Cuban government will also be unable to count on earnings from the resale of the subsidized oil, which were already hurt by the fall in oil prices. According to Jorge Pinon, director of the Latin America and Caribbean Program at the University of Texas at Austin, “Cuba has been able to produce a surplus of gasoline and jet fuel, which it can export to the international market to generate hard currency.”

The demotion of Murillo, highly associated with the Castro government’s recent efforts to reintegrate itself into world financial markets, reestablish market relations and reduce the size of Cuba’s public sector, appears to be mostly a cosmetic change. It does, however, acknowledge the continued problems facing the economy and the worries of Cuban officials that any substantial downturn might provoke widespread protests and social unrest.

On June 28, in a speech given to journalists attending a meeting of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), Karina Marrón González, a deputy director of Granma, warned, “we are creating a perfect storm,” and that “this country cannot take another ’93, another ’94,” particularly since “there is not a Fidel to go out to the Malecón.” Marrón González is referring to the Maleconazo, protests that erupted in the summer of 1994 in response to pervasive blackouts following the end of Soviet subsidies.

It is these worries that are behind the feverish efforts of the Cuban government to reestablish diplomatic and economic relations with the United States, before its Venezuelan support collapses. Hoping to stay in power by providing US capitalism a cheap offshore labor platform on the Chinese model, the petty-bourgeois nationalist Castro government is worried that an independent movement of the working class might upset its timetable.

Child poverty soars in Britain

Joe Mount

The number of children living in poverty in the UK has surged by 200,000 in recent years, as austerity measures and economic crises have driven down the living standards of millions of working class families.

On Tuesday, the Department for Work and Pensions published the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics for 2014/15. They reveal that 3.9 million children now live in families that struggle to make ends meet—29 percent of all children. An individual is considered to live in relative poverty if their income is below 60 percent of the median household income. The poverty threshold for a family with two children is a miserly £435 per week.

As with official figures generally, the number of children living in poverty is most certainly an underestimation.

A separate analysis of the new data was performed by the Resolution Foundation. It reported a 9 percent jump in a single year. This is the greatest annual rise in child poverty in two decades, with 2.5 million children living in poverty in 2015 compared to 2.3 million in 2014.

Poverty afflicts growing numbers of working families, not just the unemployed, due to deteriorating rates of pay and benefit cuts. Two-thirds of poor children live in households with at least one working adult. Sam Royston, chair of the End Child Poverty Coalition, called the figures “simply unacceptable” and added, “The government promised to ‘make work pay’ but this is not happening for the 66 percent of children in poverty who are in working families.”

This figure was 45 percent in 1997 and has risen consistently since then, due to social attacks carried out by the successive Labour and Conservative/Liberal Democrat governments.

Millions of children’s lives are being scarred by a lack of necessities. Responding to the report, Gareth Jenkins from Save the Children said, “It’s unacceptable that nearly one in three children in the UK today are growing up in poverty. Today’s figures remain stubbornly high, resulting in a life time of reduced opportunity for millions of children across the UK.”

“The situation is even more worrying for children under five who are far less likely to do well at school if they spend this crucial period of their childhoods trapped in poverty; and are most at risk—with half of all children in poverty coming from this age group. We know the early years are the ‘golden years’ for changing these odds.”

He called on politicians to “focus on early investment in children’s futures with good quality early years teaching, which we know reduces the devastating blow poverty delivers to future life chances.”

The rise in child poverty is part of a broader impoverishment of the working class. The number of people living in relative poverty increased to 13.5 million in 2015 from 13.2 million a year earlier, in terms of disposable income when housing costs are deducted. Incomes have barely recovered from the effect of the 2008 global financial crash, reaching an average of £473 a week in 2014–15 compared to £469 in the 2009–10 financial year.

Children are bearing the brunt of spending cuts to essential social services. Matthew Reed from the Children’s Society said, “Austerity has bitten hard, with an additional 200,000 children living below the poverty line. More children face missing out on hot meals, sleeping in cold bedrooms and being bullied at school.”

Planned cuts to benefits for working parents, implemented via the Universal Credit counter-reform and the welfare cap, will further impact the poorest families. Reed warned, “The four-year freeze to tax credits already in the pipeline will only make things worse.”

This was confirmed by a United Nations study published earlier this month which located the source of rising social misery in spending cuts imposed by the Tory government.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child voiced fears about the spending cuts’ effect on children and young people from deprived backgrounds in particular, stating, “The committee is seriously concerned at the effects that recent fiscal policies and allocation of resources have had in contributing to inequality in children’s enjoyment of their rights, disproportionately affecting children in disadvantaged situations.”

These cuts will cause the number of children living in hardship to soar to a predicted 5 million by 2020. Alison Garnham of the Child Poverty Action Group stated, “These grim figures reinforce projections from experts like the Institute for Fiscal Studies that UK child poverty is set to rise by 50 percent or more by 2020.”

Relative poverty statistics are also a measure of social inequality. Their sharp rise is another sign that the rich are getting richer due to the economic stimulus policies designed to benefit only the financial oligarchy.

In response to the hike in poverty figures, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Stephen Crabb shed crocodile tears: “A decade ago, when David Cameron became party leader, he promised that under his leadership his party would measure and act on child poverty. It’s a tragedy that we are now talking about rises in child poverty, not falls.”

He added, “It’s also hugely depressing that at a time when we’re seeing rising child poverty the government has passed legislation that eliminates its target to reduce child poverty, or even to report on the progress it is making. Child poverty isn’t inevitable—the government needs to invest in our children so we can all share the rewards of a stronger economy and a fairer society.”

Crabb’s hypocrisy is staggering. An MP for 11 years, he voted for every attack carried out on workers’ living standards by the 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat government and the current Tory government.

Many anti-poverty charities issued similar futile appeals to the Tory government to adjust their policies to reduce the harm done to poor children.

Frances O’Grady, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary, said: “We can tell how strong the economy is, and how fair it is, from how well working families are doing. But since the Conservative-led government took office in 2010, there has not been any progress reducing working age poverty. Working families were unfairly made to pay the price of a financial crisis they did not cause. With the economy now facing trouble again from Brexit, working people should not be made to pay the price a second time.”

Between 1997 and 2010, child poverty fell slightly due to limited redistributive measures implemented by the TUC-backed New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The tide decisively turned in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, which sparked a global economic crisis and the led to the imposition of a social counter-revolution to pay for bailout of the banks and financial institutions.

Ever since successive Labour and Tory governments have waged a systematic offensive against the working class. The rise in poverty is the result of the British ruling elites’ aim to destroy the welfare state and implement vicious pro-business policies, stepping up the exploitation of the working class to compete with their international rivals.

With political and economic crisis resulting from last month’s Brexit referendum vote to quit the European Union, it is inevitable that austerity will be stepped up. David Finch, an Economic Analyst at the Resolution Foundation, warned, “The outlook of weaker pay growth, significant welfare cuts and now higher inflation stemming from the Brexit sterling plunge means the living standards of many families may come under strain in the coming years.”