The Scourge Of Youth Detention: The Northern Territory, Torture, And Australia’s Detention Disease

Binoy Kampmark

“What we’re changing is a culture in an organisation within the youth detention system and I think we’ve come a long way in that time.”

Adam Giles, NT Chief Minister, ABC News, Jul 26, 2016

It was an image that would not have been out of place in the sickly procession of pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay during the ill-fated and misnamed war on terror.  Here was a young man, seated, strapped in and euphemistically “restrained,” verging on catatonic; on his head, a suffocating bag.

Within hours of the Australian investigative news program Four Corners covering that incident on Monday, and various other incidents of violence at the Don Dale facility outside Darwin in the Northern Territory, the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced a royal commission.

Context is everything, and a mere description about the abuse of youths in detention facilities tends to fall on a public deaf and immune to state sanctioned cruelty. Australia’s two-track morality here is evident in its tolerance of pacific gulags that house intrepid asylum seekers, and on land for others similarly deemed undesirable.

In the Northern Territory, where frontier law making meets frontier violence, such devices as the restraint chair which kept Dylan Voller shackled, were approved under the legislation of the state.  Carceral politics, in other words, is big in the north, and becomes particularly piquant when dealing with youths.

The Don Dale facility is but one manifestation of this state-sanctioned enthusiasm, characterised by periods of prolonged solitary confinement, strip searching and excessive force.  It is designed to be punitive, a form of retribution against youths who have defied the social order.  As with any other system of torture, it is the foot of power visibly applied to the backs and bodies of children.

The policy of the Territory has also seen a growing young prison population of which 96 per cent are Indigenous.  It is also the Australian territory with the highest percentage of indigenous citizens – 30 per cent in all.

The NT Chief Minister, Adam Giles, gives an insight into how distinctly indifferent he has been to such revelations. On the one hand, an appearance of immediate action has been required: sacking, for instance, the minister overseeing young detainees, John Elferink.  “I sat and watched the footage [from Four Corners] and recognised the horror through my eyes.”

What has followed since has been a cultivated obliviousness, despite knowledge about such footage as the tear gassing of youths at Don Dale being available for at least a year.  Giles claimed to have had no sense that this had been happening.  As a head disembodied from the rest of the detention structure, the chief minister suggested that “over time there has most certainly been a culture of cover-up within the Corrections system.”

Ditto the police commissioner, Reece Kershaw, and ministers at the federal level.  “This is not Australia,” declared deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who went on to suggest that Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, would have stirred had he gotten an inkling something was wrong.

Such surprises become even less plausible given the operating assumptions of the entire detention system.  Giles paints a picture of necessary incarceration in a world of violent children, street menaces who risk the security of everybody else.  At a press conference on Wednesday, Giles observed that, “Nobody wants to see a kid in jail, but nobody wants to see their own kids assaulted by other kids.”

Members of the NT community, the minister noted on Tuesday, were “sick of youth crime… they have had a gutful.”  The children, not a sick frontier mentality, constituted the ghoulish problem, these demons keen to smash cars, initiate house break-ins and assaulting citizens.

Each press conference has given has been typified by this spirit of disingenuousness. All of it is marked by one overwhelming acceptance: youth detention, with all its maximums security frills, is necessary.  Besides, he retorts, there were “improvements” in youth detention; but it was “not perfect”.

This begged the question as to whether a royal commission was even necessary, an overegging of an already improved pudding.  “I want to make sure we have a safe community to live in, where kids aren’t breaking into homes.”

On Tuesday, Giles revealed another tactic suggesting that any investigation into the youth detention system is not going to have legs. Note, claimed the chief minister, the way some of the youths in the footage were actually behaving.  The blaming of inmates remains the default position.

“There are kids who are trying to deliberately cause cranial issues by bashing their head against the wall.”  Such naughtiness, though quiet, meditative reflection is hardly the sort of thing encouraged in the NT detention system for desperate youths.

Officers themselves need “to be able to de-escalate issues when children are not in… a calm environment within themselves and at all times those kids’ wellbeing is being put at the best possible place.”

To add to this furore, Giles has been accompanied at stages by indigenous politician Bess Price, the Territory’s Minister for Community Services,  claiming that various families were happy to see their children in prison.  This eye-brow raising comment was perfectly tailored to a system of necessary teaching and retribution: bad boys needed to be taught a lesson, to be made better.

Whatever it is deemed, be it a culture, a form of thinking, or an attitude, any revelation to its practitioners via the medium of a television program is bound to sting.  That a royal commission has been the borne fruit in this endeavour may not mean very much.  Political figures such as Giles suggest that mentalities can be immoveable.  The prison alternative remains all powerful.

Homeland Terror

Linh Dinh

Justifying the War on Terror, George Bush huffed, “We’re fighting them there, so we don’t have to fight them here.” Broke, gullible or crazed Americans must be sent overseas to combat Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the Taliban and ISIS. Otherwise, endless terror would devastate the homeland.

Periodically, terror plots must be orchestrated by the FBI to keep domestic fear from flagging, however. Flags at half mast stiffen limp fighting spirit.

Though Washington makes a show of denying it, the War on Terror is understood by the media-drugged as a war against Muslims, Israel’s eternal enemy.

As this open-ended assault on Muslims generated millions of Muslim refugees, Benjamin Netanyahu declared in March of 2016, “A strong Israel prevents the passage of masses of refugees to Europe. The world would be different if we were not here.”

Bibi got the second part right. Israel is the prime reason why there are so many Muslim refugees, and this world would be much more peaceful if your terror state disappeared. As long as Israel exists, there will be Muslims massacred or fleeing in terror from their wrecked homes.

Neoconservatism birthed the War on Terror. Founded by Jews, this movement’s main aim is to conserve Israel, even if they have to wreck the entire Middle East, disfigure Europe and ruin the United States. Jacob Heilbrunn explains in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons:

Neoconservatism was forged into an actual movement by [Irving] Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Even today, the neoconservative movement is best described as an extended family based largely on the informal social networks patiently forged by these two patriarchs […] Not all of them were Jews—a fact that has been frequently pointed out by the neoconservatives themselves to refute the canard that neoconservatism is a Jewish movement. Fair enough. Yet the movement’s non-Jewish members were largely bound to the group by a shared commitment to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.

Concocted by two rogue, undemocratic states, this War on Terror could be called off this very second, and the much ballyhooed terror threat would be instantly over. Many American lives would be saved, not just foreign Muslim ones.

Since the US and Israel need the War on Terror to terrorize, rape and degrade vast swaths of this earth, this farce must go on.

Like any growth industry, the US and Israel-backed Muslim Menace must conquer new markets. After skyscrapers, airports, train stations, stadia, government buildings, gay bars, marathons, flying shoes, sky high milk bottles and even airborne underwear, it was time to infiltrate European swimming pools, music festivals, shopping malls and fast food restaurants.

What better way to do this than to import millions of young Muslim men into Europe? Even if their homes haven’t been bombed by the US, Israel and NATO over the years, they might have other reasons to resent or despise the West.

Perfect. On top of all the individual shootings, knifings, gropings and rapes, the more spectacular terror events can be directed by the CIA and Mossad, those unmatched experts at exporting terror.

The Western public already know about mass sexual assaults in Egypt. These “circles of hell” have become increasingly common since 2005, with its most famous victim a 60 Minutes journalist, Lara Logan. Many Westerners also know about Pakistanis raping about 1,400 English girls, over 16 years, in Rotherham, England.

When I taught in Leipzig last year, two of my students, an Indian who had grown up in Qatar and a blonde, told me they were followed by Muslim men. The Indian student could speak Arabic, so she shouted at her stalkers. To shake off her stalker, the blonde went into a store and stayed there. Since these incidents happened after the Cologne mass sexual assault story, these young women were already leery of seeing Muslim men in public.

The architects of the War on Terror generate refugees, then expect Europe to absorb them. Speaking in Hanover on April 25th, 2016, Obama praised Merkel, “What’s happening with respect to her position on refugees here, in Europe, she’s on the right side of history on this […] She is giving a voice to the kinds of principles that bring people together rather than divide them.”

Hungary’s Viktor Orban has a different take, “This invasion is driven, on the one hand, by people smugglers, and on the other by those activists who support everything that weakens the nation-state. This Western mindset and this activist network is perhaps best represented by George Soros.”

Soros, “The benefits brought by migration far outweigh the costs of integrating immigrants. Skilled economic immigrants improve productivity, generate growth, and raise the absorptive capacity of the recipient country.”

Many progressive Jews support massive immigration in the West, but not Israel. They criticize nationalism in the West, but not Israel. Though Jews may not be the Chosen People, Israel is certainly the Exempt Nation.

Soros is proud of his geopolitical flexing. To CNN, the man said, “Well, I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now.”

The world has become habituated to hearing about Islamic barbarity in Europe. Yesterday, an 84-year-old French priest was forced to kneel, then had his throat slit by two men shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” Three days ago, a 27-year-old Syrian wounded twelve innocent people, three seriously, when he blew himself up in Germany. Sometimes the details surrounding these crimes are bizarre or inexplicable.

The same man, Richard Gutjahr, just happened to film the beginnings of the Nice truck attack (84 people killed, 303 injured) and Munich shooting (nine killed, with four others shot). He’s married to Israeli Einat Wilf, a former member of Knesset. Why did Gutjahr aim his camera at a McDonald’s entrance before anything happened? And how did the shooter appear out of nowhere, literally, for he didn’t walk out of any door? Study the footage.

Another video of the alleged shooter has him standing on top of a parking garage. Arguing with two Turks on a balcony across the street, Ali David Sonboly accused, “Because of you, I was ganged on for seven years,” and as they called him an asshole and a jerkoff, Sonboly explained, “I was born here. In a Hartz IV [welfare] area. Here in the Turkish section of Hasenbergl. I was in treatment. How is it my fault? I haven’t done anything.”

You are to conclude that Muslims can’t even stand each other, you see, so they’ll kill just about anybody.

A key aim of the War on Terror is to spread terror everywhere, so that the state, that master of terror, can be everywhere.

Nepal’s prime minister steps down

W.A Sunil

Nepal’s prime minister, K.P. Oli, resigned last Sunday, as he faced certain defeat in a no-confidence motion filed by the pro-India Nepali Congress (NC) and the Maoist United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M).

India undoubtedly had a significant hand in toppling the Oli government. New Delhi is determined to undercut Beijing’s growing influence on Nepal, which is wedged between India and China. The Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is working closely with the US in support of Washington’s “pivot to Asia” policy directed against China.

In a deal with the NC, the Maoists withdrew from Oli’s ruling Communist Party of Nepal UML (CPNUML)-led coalition on July 12 and filed the no-confidence motion. The United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) backed the move. It is an alliance of Madhesi parties, which are demanding greater autonomy in Nepal’s southern Terai region, bordering India. The UDMF said it would support the formation of a new government only if it receives a written promise to address their demands.

Oli’s administration was the eighth government since 2006 when the Maoist party abandoned its rural guerrilla movement and joined the NC and the UPNUML to scuttle mass struggles against Nepal’s monarchy. India supported that manoeuvre as part of its efforts to keep the country under its sway.

Announcing his resignation after a three-day parliamentary debate, Oli said he had maintained “international relationships with India and China based on national independence and sealing some trade agreements with China, thereby ending dependence on a single nation [India] for trade and commerce.” He spoke of thereby transforming the nation from “land-locked” to “land-linked.”

In his resignation speech, Oli described the “game” to change the government as “mysterious,” but did not elaborate. Earlier, however, on July 14, addressing a National Security conference in Kathmandu, Oli directly accused India of engineering the operation. After declaring that he “never compromised on the national interest,” Oli said: “India used the Nepali Congress and Maoists against my government and is trying to topple it.”

India has denied any responsibility. On July 10, speaking to visiting Nepali parliamentarians, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj asked them not to “drag” India into Nepal’s internal affairs. However, she went on to accuse Oli of not keeping promises made to the Indian prime minister.

The Maoist party’s deal with the NC stipulated that its leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda) would become prime minister for nine months and then hand over to Congress leader Sher Bahdur Deuba. Addressing the parliament, Dahal made a thinly-veiled reference to the tensions between India and China, saying: “Given our geopolitical realities, we have to make fair and balanced relations with our neighbors. So we have to strengthen our internal national unity.”

The Hindu and the Times of India reported that after withdrawing support from the Oli government, Dahal sent a party leader, Matrika Yadev, to New Delhi to secure its support. According to the Times, Yadev “did not just meet MEA [ministry of external affairs] officials, but also Janatha Dal MP Sarad Yadev and National Congress Party MP D.P. Tripathi.” They met to “allay” Indian concerns about Dahal’s past pro-China policies, the Times reported.

Oli accused India of making a similar regime-change attempt in May. New Delhi officials and Deuba reportedly persuaded Dahal to quit the government but he changed his mind at the last moment. In return, Oli promised to withdraw criminal charges against Maoist party members allegedly involved in the decade-long insurgency from 1996 to 2006 and expedite reconstruction work in the country, which was devastated by a deadly earthquake early last year.

In retaliation for India’s intervention, Oli recalled Nepal’s envoy to New Delhi, saying the ambassador was part of the conspiracy, and cancelled a visit to India by Nepal’s president.

During the past year, India has increasingly pressed Nepal to distance itself from China. Sections of Nepal’s elite had sought to lessen the country’s dependence on India, seeing it as limiting the pursuit of their own interests.

As part of India’s response, last September New Delhi backed the Madhesi parties’ agitation for greater regional powers in Nepal’s new constitution. India effectively supported the Madhesi parties’ disruption of supplies from India to Nepal. The blockade, which dragged for five months, resulted in serious shortages of fuel, medicine and other essentials, compounding the impoverished conditions facing the masses.

Oli ultimately made constitutional amendments to give limited concessions to the Madhesis, but Modi pressed for further concessions. The Indian government had no concern for the democratic rights of the Madhesi people but exploited the issue as a lever to influence Kathmandu.

In March, Oli made a five-day visit to China and signed several trade and investment agreements, including for China to open more transit points for Nepal. China also agreed to build an oil pipeline from China to Nepal, an international airport for the city of Pokhara and a new bridge at the border town of Hilsa. China surpassed India as the top donor to Nepal.

Oli’s government was toppled just as the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping was planning to visit Nepal in October. The newspaper said the visit was “widely seen as a key to China’s outreach in South Asia as it battles for influence in the region.” Since the Oli government’s collapse, Beijing has yet to make a statement on Xi’s visit.

In another sign of the intensifying geopolitical tensions, Oli’s communication minister, Sherdhan Rai, accused the Maoists of making their move “at the behest of external forces, who are interested in stalling the Chinese president’s visit.”

The collapse of the Oli government has only deepened the political instability in Nepal. None of the parties in the political establishment has the slightest concern for the interests of the workers and poor. The population is being dragged into a dangerous maelstrom, driven by the moves against China by India and the US.

Gap between rich and poor in Germany larger than previously thought

Elisabeth Zimmermann

On July 14, the German news programme “Monitor” reported new numbers on top income earners in Germany. The report based itself on data from top earners at more than 1,300 businesses collected by the Kienbaum consultancy firm.

According to the study, from 1997 to 2014 the income of CEOs increased by an average of 42 percent, the income of managers by 59 percent and the income of company board members with DAX companies by 186 percent. During the same period, the income for average earners increased by just 15 percent.

The Kienbaum study estimates the average gross income of company management in 2013 at approximately €500,000. That is more than double the amount arrived at for this year by the socioeconomic panel SOEP. They estimated that the average gross income of the top percent of top earners in 2013 at only €200,000.

The numbers of the SEOP are used in several other investigations into wealth and poverty in Germany. They constitute an important basis for the German government’s report on wealth and poverty and represent an extreme misrepresentation of the gap between rich and poor.

That the numbers on the income of top earners were inaccurate was already understood. For the most part, they consisted of appraisals arrived at through the surveys and extrapolations of the SOEP. What is new is the size of the gap between high and average incomes.

In a press release, “Monitor” writes that the new data on the richest Germans reveals, “The gap between poor and rich is clearly much larger than official statistics have shown.”

The “Monitor” piece itself points out from the beginning that there is a large amount of data on the poorer part of the population: “The rich, however—statistically speaking—are somewhat unknown creatures.” What the top earners actually make and what they pay in taxes, even in the official statistics, is often only vague speculation.

Professor Wolfgang Lauterbach, a wealth researcher who contributed to the “Monitor” piece, says of the top percentage point of income recipients: “This 1 percent is actually a group about whom we are feeling around in the fog. … Who are they? What, ultimately, do we know about the amount of taxes paid by each person? What do we know about their assets? What we know, to be frank, is nothing. That is a little like a black box.”

The report uses two examples to demonstrate how income levels have grown apart. A shop owner must earn a gross annual income of €30,000 to make ends meet. While the shop owner’s work in recent years has grown, his or her income, however, has not. With €150,000 in annual income, the CEO of a company belongs statistically to the top 1 percent of income earners in Germany.

According to the relevant statistics, says the report, “since the end of the 1990s, the average income has increased demonstrably slower than the income of the top 1 percent. The average has only increased by 8.4 percent, the highest incomes by 31.5 percent. Inequality has also increased.”

One must say, however, that the cited example of a shop owner with €30,000 and a CEO with €150,000 in annual income presents only a small section of income inequality. Many company directors, at DAX companies in particular, receive annual incomes of several million euros and earn far more than shown in the example.

The World Wealth Report 2016, recently published by the consultancy firm Capgemini, has already documented the increase in millionaires worldwide and provides a sense of the enormous concentration of wealth at the top of society. Last year, the number of millionaires worldwide (calculated in US dollars) grew to 15.4 million and in Germany to almost 1.2 million. In the last year alone, 58,000 people became millionaires in Germany.

A striking redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top has been taking place for a long time. This process intensified with the outbreak of the international financial and economic crisis of 2008. According to the World Wealth Report 2016, the assets of the world’s super-rich have quadrupled in the last 20 years despite the financial crisis.

In Germany, especially since the SPD-Green government of Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer from 1998 to 2005 and the governments that followed, austerity measures against the working and poor population have greatly intensified. The wealth tax was abolished in 1997, followed by the lowering of the peak tax rate from 53 to 42 percent and additional benefits for the wealthy and top earners.

With the Hartz IV welfare laws, an immense low-wage sector was created and the conditions placed on social assistance in case of unemployment and other emergency situations were tightened and severely restricted. Millions of people forced to work in this low-wage sector cannot make ends meet even though they are employed and must rely on Hartz IV supplements, a time-consuming and stressful affair.

While wealth is concentrated at the top of society, poverty and social hardship is on the rise in large sections of the population. According to the latest government report on wealth and poverty, the top 10 percent possess more than half (51.9 percent) of all wealth. The poorer half possesses just 1 percent. And even these figures will have grown farther apart in recent months in light of new statistics on income trends among the wealthy.

Poverty in a rich country like Germany has already reached devastating proportions. Since 2014, 15.4 percent of the population, or one in six people, are considered poor, as reported by the Parity Association. One in seven children under the age of 15 is considered poor and dependent on Hartz IV, as shown in statistics of the Federal Labour Office for 2015. In cities like Bremen and Berlin and several cities in the Ruhr, almost one in three children grow up in poverty.

UK steel industry jobs threatened following Brexit vote

Danny Richardson

In an attempt to avert meltdown in the UK steel industry ahead of last month’s referendum vote to leave the European Union (EU), then Prime Minister David Cameron’s government offered to buy up to a quarter stake in Tata Steels’ UK operations or any successful buyers of the firm.

The government said it would also provide debt financing for hundreds of millions of pounds. Other concessions included a substantial reform of the British Steel Pension Scheme, which has a membership of 130,000, a deficit of £700 million, and overall liabilities of £15 billion. Tata has waged a battle to shed responsibility for the pension scheme since it bought the Corus Steel business in 2007.

The expected sell-off of Tata Steel’s remaining British operations took a new turn after a board meeting in Mumbai, India on July 8. Instead of an updated progress report on the ongoing sale of Tata UK, Koushik Chatterjee, the executive director of Tata Steel Europe, announced a proposal that would involve Tata UK becoming part of a joint venture project with European conglomerate ThyssenKrupp. Tata said it was also talking to other unnamed industry players.

Chatterjee was careful not to commit to anything concrete, stating that the discussions could lead to the creation of a “premium, world-class strip steel business” before warning, “It is too early to give any assurances about the success of these talks.”

The same day Business Secretary Sajid Javid met Cyrus Misty the global chairman of Tata and responded to the news of the joint venture saying it was encouraging. The UK government “will continue to work closely with Tata to find a long-term solution for sustainable blast furnace steel manufacturing in Port Talbot,” Javid said.

The Port Talbot plant in south Wales, employing more than 4,000 workers, is the largest of Tata’s UK steel plants.

The Financial Times wrote, “The proposal offers a glimmer of hope to the 11,000 workers at the collection of British factories, which was put up for sale in March following years of losses that had ballooned to as much as £1m a day.”

However it struck a note of caution, adding, “But the announcement does not dispel the cloud of uncertainty that has been hanging over the business for the last three months. Tata… had been expected to either sell the business or close it down by the summer: instead, its talks with ThyssenKrupp signal the start of another period of uncertainty for steelworkers.”

This was borne out with the July 21 announcement by Fairwood Fabrications, one of the metal engineering firms supplying the Port Talbot plant, that it was entering liquidation. The remaining 66 workers were laid off, taking the total to 250 since January. In January, Mark Coia, chief executive of Fairwood Fabrications, told the Financial Times, “We are part of the family with Tata—when they bleed, we bleed.”

The Wales Online news site reported that the uncertainty over the fate of Port Talbot could lead to many more plant closures and job losses locally as, “There are around 50 companies in Wales whose primary business involves steel, and which are affected by the fate of Port Talbot.”

It did not take long for the fleeting talk of a bright future for the UK steel industry, with thousands of jobs saved, to come apart at the seams. Three days after the Mumbai meeting, Chatterjee warned that the global steel industry faced immense challenges and the outcome of talks with the British government regarding the British Steel Pension scheme was paramount to any deal.

The Guardian reported that the UK government had drawn up a plan with pension trustees and the trade unions for the present scheme to be “spun off” into a new shell company. The inflation-linked annual increase would be benchmarked against the consumer price index rather than the retail price index, potentially saving billions of pounds in future liabilities. For such changes to take place in the British Steel Pension scheme, the government would need to change pension laws.

Quantum Advisory, a firm of pension expert contacted by BBC Wales, found that current British Steel pensioners will lose an average of 25 percent entitlement whichever option is offered to them. Members who are at present employed and paying into the scheme will fair even worse, losing on average 40 percent of their expected benefits under the proposals offered by the government.

The scheme could reach £4.9 billion (around 10 times its current deficit) in the worse-case scenario given in the BBC report.

The steel trade unions were in direct contact with senior Tata executives during the Mumbai board meeting and with UK government ministers the day before. Roy Rickhuss, the leader of the main union, Community, responded to the new proposals saying, “The current status of the sales process is unclear and this will be frustrating for our members and perhaps even for the bidders.”

After admitting he was aware that there had been talks between the Tata and ThyssenKrupp for some time, Rickhuss offered the services of the union in finalising any deal. He stressed, “Tata must recognise the level of frustration, even anger amongst the workforce over these delays and uncertainties… It’s vital that they work with Community to reassure and protect the greatest assets to the business, its people.”

The main issue for the unions is how to sell further cuts in wages and conditions to steel workers and push through further attacks on their pension rights. The record of the steel unions indicates they will be on hand to ensure a rapid transition in any merger.

The media responded to the Tata board meeting by reporting its possible impact on Port Talbot, but the other Tata UK plants would also be affected.

The Guardian stated on July 8 that Tata UK’s “speciality steel division faces a Serious Fraud Office investigation. Ten staff including two executives have been suspended after an internal audit uncovered allegedly falsified quality certificates, prompting criminal inquiry.”

The vote for Brexit is central to Tata’s calculations. Its board statement declared it looked at the business in the light of the uncertainties caused by the UK referendum. It also stated the outcome of talks with the UK government regarding the pension scheme had a bearing on its decisions. “Taking the above issues into account, the Board of Tata Steel has decided to also look at alternative and more sustainable portfolio solutions for the European business,” it stated.

The possible Tata/ThyssenKrupp merger is just one of several being put together across Europe. The most recent concerns the June announcement that Luxembourg-based steel company ArcelorMittal SA was teaming up with Italy’s privately owned Marcegaglia SpA to take over the ailing Ilva steel plant in Taranto, Italy. Marcegaglia SpA also has a UK production facility located in Dudley in England, where it manufactures electro-welded carbon steel tubes and employs 100 people.

Deadly heat wave hits central and eastern US

Catherine Long

The severe heat wave that swept the Midwestern United States this weekend caused 11 deaths. Power outages related to the heat wave left over 98,000 households in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois without power, with several thousand still without power as of Monday.

Powerful storms followed the heat wave and flooded portions of the city of Chicago, northwest Illinois, northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. Floods have trapped motorists, closed freeways, and injured several.

The heat dome spread to the Eastern United States just in time for the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The dome is a zone of high-pressure warm air that inhibits cooler Arctic air from reaching the northern US.

Intense thunderstorms have followed the heat dome east, causing flooding in Philadelphia, record-setting high temperatures in Baltimore and Washington DC, and power outages from storms in New York City. The sporadic power outages in NYC sent the real-time price of electricity skyrocketing over $1,000 per megawatt, from $50 earlier in the day.

Five of the heat-related deaths in the Midwest were in Roseville, Michigan, near the city of Detroit. The deaths in Roseville were attributed to heart and lung problems exacerbated by the heat. Age and poverty-related health conditions, such as diabetes and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), make people especially susceptible to heat-related mortality. Dehydration and respiratory distress from humidity lead to death within hours. Several in Roseville died of heart attacks.

The city of Detroit is the poorest large city in the United States, with overall poverty levels of 39.3 percent and a child poverty rate of 57 percent. From the financial and housing crash in 2008 to the city bankruptcy in 2014, the living standards of the people of Detroit have been under relentless attack. Both autoworkers and city employees have had their pensions gutted to subsidize bailouts of the parasitic auto and finance industries. Foreclosures and evictions have displaced many residents into substandard public housing.

Hikes in utility rates and cuts to local transit have driven up the cost of living and reduced ease of travel for the urban poor. Many in Detroit have to rely on public transit, with 24 percent of city residents having no car. Detroit area utility costs have been up to 24 percent higher than the national average for the past four years.

The city of Detroit offers “cooling centers” for those without air conditioning, but access is not adequate. A 2012 study by the University of Michigan concluded that only 30 percent of the most vulnerable populations could reach a cooling center on foot without risking heat stroke. The researchers declared that the city must “improve the effectiveness of emergency response measures during future extreme heat events.”

Previous heat waves in the Midwest have strongly impacted the urban poor. Heat island effects have killed hundreds in the US and thousands in Asia in the last few years. The city of Chicago experienced a heat wave in 1995 that claimed over 500 lives in three days. More recently, both India and Pakistan experienced heat waves that claimed thousands.

These deaths are preventable. The energy corporations and Republican and Democratic administrations, including the Obama White House, have intentionally neglected upgrades to infrastructure such as roads, utilities and housing for decades. Subpar housing, crumbling roads, and ancient electrical infrastructure are all indicators of the disdain the ruling class has for even the most basic needs for the masses of people.

Climate change is tied to the rise in severe weather episodes and extreme temperatures. So far, every month in 2016 has set yet another all-time temperature record. Detroit is identified by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) as an urban area of concern under climate change.

NRDC writes: “By 2099, Detroit is estimated to experience 36 excessive heat event days per summer, up from nine days on average between 1975-1995.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts an extra 100 to 250 heat-related deaths every summer in the city of Detroit due to climate change.

Children systematically abused in Australian juvenile prison

Terry Cook

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation “Four Corners” program on Monday night broadcast footage and interviews exposing some of the brutal and violent methods against boys, some as young as 10, held in juvenile detention centres in the Northern Territory (NT). The sickening abuses inside the Don Dale facility, south of Darwin, committed mostly against indigenous children, can only be described as torture.

In an attempt to head off widespread public outrage over the revelations, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday announced a royal commission of inquiry, designed to bury the exposures as much as possible and cover up the political responsibility for them.

The abuses did not begin under the current Country-Liberal Party government in the NT. They date back at least to 2010, during the period that the Labor Party held office in the territory from 2001 to 2012.

The “Four Corners” catalogue of evidence includes CCTV vision and video recordings made by guards showing repeated assaults on boys being kept illegally in solitary confinement for up to 17 days at a time—far beyond the legal limit of 72 hours—in hot, tiny and filthy cells without access to running water and little natural light.

One recording shows a boy, just 14, being pinned face down on the floor and stripped naked by three guards, leaving him visibly distraught and traumatised. The supposed reason for this assault, in October 2011, was that the child had threatened self-harm.

In another video taken in 2015 the same boy, Dylan Voller, then 17, is seen strapped, hand and foot, in a “mechanical restraint chair” with a cloth bag over his head, where he is left for two hours after allegedly threatening self-harm.

Commentators have justifiably described the footage as akin to the images of hooding and torture that emerged from the US-run Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq. After seeing the video, a former guard has revealed that the device was used on Voller several times.  

CCTV footage showed the tear-gassing of six boys inside the Don Dale centre’s so-called Behavioural Management Unit (BMU) in August 2014. One of the boys, Jake Roper, 17, had left his cell and smashed fittings in a frustrated protest against his prolonged solitary confinement.

Prison officers, accompanied by a savage dog, rushed in from a nearby adult prison to spray 10 bursts of tear gas at the boys, who were seen desperately attempting to escape the fumes by climbing beneath bed sheets in their locked cells, while gasping for air and crying out. Then the boys were hogtied, dragged out and hosed.

It is clear that such mistreatment was approved at the highest levels of government. The then NT Corrections Commissioner Ken Middlebrook, who was present during the 2014 incident, authorised the use of tear gas. He issued a media statement falsely claiming it was necessary to subdue a riot by six detainees who had broken out of their cells and armed themselves with broken glass and light fittings. 

NT Corrections Minister John Elferink applauded the action, declaring: “I again congratulate and place my support behind, the staff who made this decision.”

After “Four Corners” went to air, Turnbull joined NT Chief Minister Adam Giles in a damage-control operation. Giles yesterday sacked Elferink as corrections minister, while leaving him as the territory’s attorney-general and children’s protection minister. Giles claimed not to have known of the evidence of abuse.

Such claims do not hold water. A report on the 2014 incident by the former NT Children’s Commissioner Dr Howard Bath was presented to the NT government in September 2015. The report rejected the official claim of a riot at the facility and confirmed that boys had been tear-gassed. Bath’s report was accurately reported by the World Socialist Web Site last year and received coverage in other media.

Bath’s report also made clear that the horrific conditions at the centre had long been known. Bath noted that in August 2012, information came to light that staff were using restraints, but nothing was done to prevent further abuses. The government dismissed Bath’s report as inaccurate, “shallow” and “one-sided.”

Even as Giles tried to cover his government’s tracks, describing the “Four Corners” footage as “horrific,” he provided a glimpse of the underlying “law and order” regime and culture that is driving such conditions, not just in the NT but nationally.

Giles, who is an indigenous politician, sought to justify the barbaric treatment by claiming that people in NT were “sick of youth crime” and “the majority of the (NT) community is saying let’s lock these kids up.” He added: “The Northern Territory government does not resile from its tough approach to those who don’t want to respect other people’s property or safety.”

The reality is that these boys are being punished for petty crimes, such as car thefts and breaking and entering, that have their roots in worsening poverty and disadvantage, and not just in indigenous communities. Despite years of lip service, initiated by the last federal Labor government, to “closing the gap” between indigenous and non-indigenous health, education, housing and social conditions, Aboriginal people remain among the most oppressed layers of the working class.

Over the past decade, the NT’s rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people have increased sharply. Almost 90 percent of adult inmates are indigenous, up from 69 percent in 1991. Between 2002 and 2012, the rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal women rose by 72 percent.

While indigenous people are being particularly victimised, however, similar police and state violence is increasingly being deployed against working class people more generally. Governments, both federal and state, have conducted relentless “law and order” campaigns for decades as social conditions have deteriorated as a result of the austerity and pro-market measures demanded by the financial and corporate elite.

The shock expressed by Turnbull and federal Labor leader Bill Shorten over the “Four Corners” exposure is doubly hypocritical because Coalition and Labor governments alike have enforced the equally brutal detention and abuse of refugees, including vulnerable young children. Both parties also oversaw the NT Intervention, a repressive operation from 2007 onward that imposed police-military and bureaucratic control over indigenous communities.

Turnbull claimed that a joint federal-territory royal commission “will get to the bottom of this swiftly and we will identify the lessons that need to be learnt.” Such inquiries are a long-standing means of defusing contentious issues, whitewashing the political responsibility and strengthening the powers of the state apparatus itself.

Such was the outcome of the Hawke Labor government’s 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which resulted in no prosecutions and handed down 330 recommendations that only served to ensure that the killings of indigenous people continued with impunity.

Knife attack in Japan leaves 19 disabled people dead

Peter Symonds

A terrible attack in Japan by a disturbed individual on disabled people early Tuesday morning has left 19 people dead and a further 26 injured, half of them critically. Satoshi Uematsu, 26, broke into a centre for people with disabilities around 2 am, tied up the staff and then methodically stabbed the residents, before leaving and handing himself in to police.

The deadly attack has produced widespread shock in Japan where the homicide rate is low and multiple murders rare. No serious attempt, however, has been made in the Japanese or international media to probe any of the underlying social and political causes of the killing spree.

Uematsu was a former employee of the disabilities centre, known as Tsukui Yamayuri-en. He was forced to resign in February after he sent a letter to the speaker of the lower house of parliament advocating euthanasia for the disabled. According to the national broadcaster, NHK, he threatened to kill hundreds of people with disabilities “for the sake of Japan” and called for legislation to allow the lives of the severely disabled to be ended.

“I will carry out a massacre without harming staff,” Uematsu reportedly wrote. “I can kill 470 disabled people. My goal is a world where people with multiple disabilities who have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society can be euthanised with the consent of their guardians.”

Uematsu made clear that Tsukui Yamayuri-en would be his first target, and that he would carry out the attack at night, when fewer staff were on duty.

After hearing about the letter, the welfare centre’s director told Uematsu that he was not an appropriate person to work at the facility and obtained his agreement to resign. The young man was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with a marijuana-induced psychosis and delusional disorder, but allowed to leave just 12 days later.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday issued a perfunctory statement offering “condolences from the bottom of my heart” to the families of the victims and said his government would “do everything to get to the bottom of the truth.” Other politicians at the national and prefectural level followed suit.

While nothing suggests that yesterday’s attack was in any way connected to terrorism, the multiple murders will undoubtedly be used, as has been the case in recent incidents in France and Germany, to justify a further bolstering of the state apparatus in Japan.

Already, various commentators are calling for tough law-and-order measures. Nobuo Komiya, a Rissho University criminology professor, told Associated Press: “Japan has put an emphasis on not creating criminals, but it is reaching breaking point. Like in foreign countries, I think institutions need to develop a plan in operational management and prepare for a worst-case scenario, given that criminals are inevitably born.”

What Komiya is dismissing is the very notion that crimes, including murder, are the product of a diseased society rather than being innate to “evil individuals.”

A report on global homicide issued by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in 2013 noted: “With no notable fluctuations, the homicide rate in Japan has decreased steadily since 1955 to reach one of the lowest levels in the world. The country’s homicide rate is associated with a stable and prosperous society with low inequality and high levels of development.”

In 2014, there were 11 times more homicides in the United States than in Japan, even though the American population is less than three times that of Japan.

Two decades of economic slump, however, combined with a deepening assault on living standards by successive governments have led to rising levels of social inequality, unemployment and poverty that are exacerbating social tensions. Young people in particular face an uncertain future as permanent jobs have been replaced by casual, low-paid employment.

According to the Yomuiri Shimbun, Uematsu obtained work as a part-time employee at the Tsukui Yamayuri-en centre in December 2012 after quitting a job with a transportation-related company. He became a full-time worker in April 2013. The New York Times reported that he told the police yesterday: “I held some grudges after being forced to resign.”

The Financial Times explained that “care facilities in Japan have come under growing strain as the number of elderly people has risen, creating the need for a large number of carers. Wages in the sector are low and a widespread shortage of trained carers and nurses had been blamed for a rise in incidents of elderly abuse.”

A study published in 2010 by researcher Yuuka Ooka into the working conditions of staff at welfare facilities for people with disabilities found that “62 percent of workers were in the condition of high-risk mental health.”

The study noted that government “reforms” had resulted in funding cutbacks, which resulted in increased workloads. “In recent years, problems in mental health among welfare staff have been increasing in every facility, resulting in their leaving or early retirement. It is clear that the reform efforts made the staff exhausted and sometimes sick. This trend in Japan has been a serious issue among facilities for people with disabilities.”

What drove Uematsu to murder disabled people remains unclear. He was clearly a deeply disturbed individual whose mental instability may well have been compounded by poor working conditions and the lack of assistance for staff members. There are some hints that he might have been attracted to extreme right-wing groups. The New York Times, for instance, noted that he had been following “several right-wing accounts” on Twitter.

The Abe government, in particular, has given succour to right-wing and fascistic organisations in Japan through its efforts to remilitarise Japan, integrate the country into US-led wars and promote virulent Japanese nationalism. This agenda only encourages a climate in which violence is seen as normal and that finds its most reactionary expression in the extreme right.

Three French soldiers killed during secret military operations in Libya

Anthony Torres

Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian reported the deaths of three agents of the General Directorate of Exterior Security's (DGSE) Action Service, which is carrying out black ops on Libyan soil. The incident underscores the illegal character of the French government's ongoing military operations in Libya, which are being carried out behind the backs of the French people.

The Brigade for the Defense of Benghazi, an Islamist militia, claimed responsibility for the destruction of the helicopter carrying the soldiers earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, militants fired a surface-to-air missile and shot heavy weapons at the aircraft, bringing it down and killing the soldiers.

President François Hollande praised “the courage and devotion of the soldiers” active in fighting terrorism, whereas Le Drian simply referred to a “helicopter accident” in an attempt to obscure France's military intervention in Libya, which has never officially been approved.

The revelation of the presence of clandestine French forces provoked an angry reaction from the Libyan puppet regime, installed after NATO's bloody war in Libya in 2011 and backed by the UN, which claimed to not be aware of the French operations.

In a communiqué published a week ago, the national unity government led by Fayez el-Serraj described its “profound unhappiness concerning the French presence in the east of Libya, organized without coordination with us.” Serraj claimed that his government had contacted the French government to demand an explanation.

The French presence on the ground is officially an intelligence and support mission. From the Sahel countries to the south of Libya, where it has maintained a military presence even since formal decolonization in the 1960s, France is engaged in surveillance operations and military interventions.

Hasni Adibi, a political scientist and analyst of Arab countries at the Study and Research Center for the Arab and Mediterranean World (CERMAM) in Geneva, explained France’s intervention in Libya to the Atlantico web site: “Hollande has chosen an intermediate option, a targeted but discreet presence. But France's presence in Libya is not new. Immediately after the fall of Gaddafi and the spread of the jihadists across the Sahel, the French reinforced their presence in Chad, that is to say very close to the border, and since then they have been monitoring Libyan skies. France fears a movement of men and weapons from Libya towards its positions in the Sahel countries. The reinforcement of the Islamic State [IS] in Derna, in the east of the country, in 2015 and it sudden growth in Syrte forced a turn in French policy in Libya.”

Adibi added, “The third element that motivated France's involvement is the intensification of coalition air strikes in Syria and Iraq, IS might decide to look for a place to retreat and take refuge. Libya, which has collapsed into instability, is well situated to become this place. France cannot allow a return of the jihadists to the Mediterranean's southern flank.”

This is a damning admission of the responsibility of French imperialism, together with the other NATO powers, for the bloody chaos in Libya, the Middle East, and across northern Africa. In 2011, the imperialist powers responded to revolutionary struggles of the working class in Egypt and Tunisia by launching a violent military offensive seeking to recolonize the entire region.

During the war in Libya five years ago, waged under the pretext of defending a revolution that would bring down Muammar Gaddafi's regime, NATO provided massive air support to Islamist militias tied to Al Qaeda. These Islamist groups were the main proxy forces on the ground in the war organized by NATO to install a puppet regime and seize the strategically-located, oil-rich country.

Libya subsequently served as a base for Islamist fighters and weapons which US, French and other European intelligence agencies funneled into Syria in order to fuel a sectarian civil war there aimed at overthrowing the government of President Bashar al Assad.

In Libya, the chaos created by the NATO war and the conflicts that broke out between the different Islamist factions sank the country into an entrenched civil war and provoked a vast migrant crisis. Thousands of refugees have died in the Mediterranean on boats which they boarded in Libya.

Libya's UN-backed national unity government has proven incapable of controlling these conflicts and consequently is not considered reliable by the imperialist powers, including France.

The French special forces' clandestine operations have exposed the double game France is playing.

Paris officially supports the Serraj regime, but at the same time backs General Khalifa Haftar, the self-proclaimed military chief of the east, where the French military presence is deployed.

The French-backed general reportedly aims to imitate Egypt's dictator, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Sisi installed a military dictatorship in Egypt after a coup against the Islamist government of President Mohamed Morsi, who repressed social opposition based in the working class through assassinations and mass torture. France sees Haftar as the best option to set up a bloody regime that can ensure the stability of Libya and thus French imperialism's interests in the country.

Haftar is seeking to build and deploy his own army in the region, but due to his close ties with the US and French governments, the Misrata militias and the military forces in Tripoli have refused to officially recognize him.

Ultimately, France's military intervention in Libya exposes the anti-democratic character of Hollande's Socialist Party (PS) government, which covertly sends soldiers to fight in Libya without informing the public, which is largely hostile to France's external military operations.

Two ISIS supporters shot dead after slaying a priest in France

Kumaran Ira

Two ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) supporters murdered an 86-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel, on Tuesday, cutting his throat while shouting “Allah Akbar” in the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in northern France. Another victim was critically wounded. Police special force units summarily executed the two as they left the building.

The attackers entered into the church as Mass was ending, at around 9:30 a.m. They held several worshippers and at least one nun hostage, while another nun escaped. One nun, Sister Danielle, said: “Everyone was shouting ‘stop, stop, you don’t know what you’re doing!’ They forced him to his knees and obviously he wanted to defend himself and that’s when the drama began.” She said she had fled the church as the terrorists murdered Hamel.

Sister Danielle said the two men filmed their attack. “They didn’t see me leave,” she told the French channel BFMTV. “They were busy with their knives. They were filming themselves preaching in Arabic in front of the altar. It was a horror. Jacques was an extraordinary priest.”

ISIS reportedly claimed responsibility for the slaying via its Amaq news agency. This was the fourth attack claimed by ISIS in less than two weeks, after a man ploughed a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding more than 300; a knife attack on a train in Würzburg, Germany, injuring 5 people; and a suicide bombing at a wine bar in the southern German town of Ansbach last Sunday, wounding 15 people.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said that one of the attackers was identified as 19-year-old Adel Kermiche, who lived in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray. According to Molins, Kermiche “had tried to go to Syria in 2015, had been under judicial control since March 18, under house arrest and under electronic surveillance.” Under the terms of his house arrest, he was only allowed to go out between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.

French intelligence had issued Kermiche an “S file,” which classified him as a threat to French national security, after he was condemned for associating with terrorists and trying to travel to Syria. As of this writing, the second attacker is still being identified.

The incident occurred amid a massive deployment of police and armed forces across France in the wake of recent attacks. Since the foiled terrorist attack on two churches near Paris in April 2015, which was being prepared by a 24-year-old Franco-Algerian IT student, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, churches and other houses of worship, including mosques and synagogues, have been placed on high alert.

The church attack is horrific and reactionary. Its main beneficiary will be the French political establishment, which has exploited such attacks to escalate its military interventions in the Middle East and to tighten the draconian, anti-democratic measures of France’s ongoing state of emergency.

Imposed after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris last year, the state of emergency has been extended for another six months, following the July 14 Nice attack. It gives police extra powers to carry out arbitrary searches and seizures, launch mass arrests and place people under house arrest. After yesterday’s church attack, the Socialist Party (PS) government vowed to further boost law-and-order measures and give even more extraordinary powers to the police and military.

The PS has also intensified the war in the Middle East, supposedly to fight ISIS. Just before the Nice attack, it had already announced that the aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle would travel to the Middle East. After the events in Nice, President François Hollande announced that France would send heavy artillery to Iraq from next month, to support the fight against ISIS.

Following the killing in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Hollande described it as “an ignoble terrorist attack.” He declared, “Daesh has declared war on us. We have to win that war. ... Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them. It is our will. The French must know that they are threatened, that we are not the only country—Germany is, as well as others—and that their strength lies in their unity.”

Other heads of state internationally also used the attack to terrorise the public and call for stronger law-and-order measures.

Speaking from Downing Street, British Prime Minister Theresa May said: “We all face a terror threat. If you look at the national threat level here in the United Kingdom, it is at severe. That means that a terrorist attack is highly likely. What is necessary is for us all to work together, and stand shoulder to shoulder with France. We offer them every support we have in dealing with this issue and this threat that they, and the rest of us, are facing.”

In France, Prime Minister Manuel Valls insisted, “We have today all the tools we need to fight terror. ... The French people must understand that we are at war, [and] must change our relationship to security.”

“There may be new attacks. We will do everything we can to avoid them, with the weapons allowed under the rule of law, without placing our democracy in question,” Valls declared.

In fact, the PS has abrogated democratic rights by imposing the state of emergency, and there are escalating calls from within the political establishment for even more drastic law-and-order measures. In June, right-wing French lawmakers called for “retention centres” for radical Islamists after the brutal murder of a policeman and his partner at their home.

After yesterday’s attack, far-right National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen called for police state measures. In a statement, she advocated “closing Salafist mosques, expelling imams who spread hate, controlling our national borders, stopping immigration, vetoing the German policy of greeting migrants, expelling immigrants with criminal records, dealing with people with ‘S files’ so they do no harm, reinforcing our security, military, and intelligence forces, reforming the nationality code, reinforcing judicial punishments and effectively applying penalties, and building more prisons.”

There have been repeated calls from right-wing politicians to allow the state to indefinitely detain individuals targeted for “S files.” Between 10,000 and 11,000 individuals in France have had S files opened on them, but they do not all have jihadist sympathies. Insofar as the intelligence services can open S files on individuals at will, this proposal would amount to giving the state a blank check to indefinitely imprison anyone whose political opinions it dislikes.

Super Majority in Japan: Implications for the Constitution

Shamshad A Khan

Post-war Japan has been mostly ruled by the polity that believes that the current Constitution was drafted during the Allied Powers’ occupation and is therefore an imposition. They have argued to change the Constitution, especially the clauses that ban it from keeping a full-fledged army to make the country at par with other sovereign nations. However, they could not gain the required numbers in the National Diet (Japanese Legislature) to initiate an amendment. Article 96 of Japan’s post-war Constitution stipulates stringent measures for constitutional revision: a concurrent vote by two-thirds majority in both the houses and a majority approval by Japanese voters in a public referendum.

For the first time in Japan’s post-war history, pro-revision parties have gained two-thirds majority in both the houses of the Diet. Japan’s upper house elections, held on 10 July 2016, have given two-thirds majority to the ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The ruling coalition already had two-thirds majority in the lower house since the December 2014 snap elections. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), headed by Abe considers Japan’s Constitution – especially the war-renouncing charter – a relic of the post-war period and result of the US-led occupation after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Abe has remained passionate about amending the Constitution and has made various attempts in the past to specifically amend the peace clause to allow more power to the country’s defence forces. Abe had argued for the tweaking of Article 9 when he became Prime Minister for the second time in December 2012, but he gave up this plan upon facing a multi-corner attack from domestic constituencies that blamed him for gutting the Constitution. On gaining super majority in both the houses of the Diet with the help of other pro-revision parties, the ruling coalition has now crossed the threshold to undertake a Constitutional revision.

The “ultra revisionists,” both inside and outside the Diet have been urging the Abe administration to seize this opportunity to fulfill one of the founding goals of the LDP. When the LDP was formed in 1955 with the merger of two conservative parties, one of the objectives was to change the Constitution by gaining the required strength in both the houses. If the numbers of other pro-revision smaller parties; Kokoro and Initiatives from Osaka are counted, undoubtedly, the ruling LDP has the number to initiate a Constitutional revision. But convincing the New Komeito, its own coalition partner supported by the Buddhist organisation the Soka Gakkai, would be the biggest hurdle for Abe. Soka Gakkai members did not like the party’s decision when it supported the Abe government last year in passing key legislations allowing Japanese defence forces to undertake “collective self-defence.” The Japanese media had reported that many members were deserting the party because of Komeito’s decision, which had weakened Japan’s pacifist security policy. Apparently, this was the reason that the New Komeito did not mention constitutional revision in its campaign pledge.

Convincing the public about the goals and objectives of constitutional revision is the second biggest hurdle for Abe. The constitutional revision passed by the Diet has to be approved by a referendum with a majority vote. Various opinion polls, both by pro and anti-revision media groups suggest that the Japanese people favour a constitutional revision. But when it comes to revising Article 9 that opposes war and use of force overseas, a majority remains opposed. Apparently, the Japanese want constitutional revision to include provisions such as human rights, privacy and environmental protection, which they believe have not been adequately mentioned in the present Constitution. The thrust of the LDP, however, has been to amend Article 9. Before the upper house elections Abe had said, on several platforms, that debates should be deepened to realise constitutional revision and that he wants to achieve this goal during his prime ministership. However it seems unlikely that he would be able to achieve it. The anti-amendment groups are reminding the Abe administration that it should not push for constitutional amendment as it was not among its key poll planks; rather it should focus on the revival of the economy on which it sought a mandate from the people.

Abe  faces many daunting tasks: reviving the economy, getting the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement approved from the Diet, acquiring the repatriation of its citizens believed to be abducted by North Korea, and a resolution of the Northern Territory dispute with Russia. These issues have also been highlighted by Abe as he wants to finalise them before passing on the leadership baton in the LDP. By September 2018, a few months before the term of the current lower house expires, Abe’s third consecutive term of LDP’s presidency will also end. As per the LDP’s constitution, an incumbent president cannot assume more than three consecutive terms and as per Japan’s existing norm, the president of the party with a majority in the Diet assumes the Prime Minister’s office. The LDP has not indicated that it is willing to change its own Constitution to pave the way for Abe’s extension in office. It is likely that during the few years left, Abe will prioritise issues that are more important than constitutional revision and Article 9; and it seems that the pacifist clause of the Japanese Constitution will live to see another day.