UK National Health Service forced to the brink of financial collapse

Margot Miller

The National Health Service (NHS) in England is facing a “colossal financial challenge” and “cannot deliver the required services to patients and maintain standards of care within the current budget.”

This is the damning conclusion of “Impact of the Spending Review on health and social care,” a report released July 23 by the House of Commons Health Select Committee. It underlines the parlous state of NHS finances due to endless cuts and indicates that the health service is facing an existential crisis.

The report examines the effect of the Conservative government’s spending review last autumn on health and social care and its impact on the NHS England’s Five Year Forward View strategy document. The strategy document was published by NHS chief executive Simon Stephens in 2014 and identified a projected £30 billion funding gap by 2020-2021. Stephens is a former Labour Party councillor, who later became an adviser to former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. The strategy was promoted as a panacea for eradicating inequality in health outcomes between the rich and poor. The most deprived people, for example, can expect to live in good health nearly 17 years less than their least deprived counterparts do.

In last year’s Spending Review, great play was made of then Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s announcement that the NHS would receive an additional £8.4 billion to plug the funding gap. That figure was a lie as even Health Select Committee chair and Tory MP, Dr. Sarah Wollaston, acknowledged. Wollaston said the “increase in health funding is less than was promised by the usual definitions.”

Total NHS spending will in fact rise by just £4.5 billion—half the amount Osborne announced. The rest includes money diverted to NHS England from the Public Health grant to Local Authorities and Health Education England.

However, to even talk about an increase in spending on the NHS is misleading. To plug the funding gap, the NHS has been instructed to make savings of £22 billion by 2021, on pain of fines and takeovers by regulators.

Accepting the overarching strategy of the ruling elite that “efficiency savings” are required, the Five Year Forward View advocated Preventative Medicine as the key to realising these savings. However, the Public Health budget, which finances preventative health, is set to shrink from £3.47 billion this year to £3 billion by 2020/21.

The Select Committee concludes that neither the government nor NHS managers can provide “sustainable” ways of meeting the rising deficits.

The Select Committee findings are no less bleak when it comes to the training of new staff. Its assessment that Spending Review cuts on Health Education England come at a time when the “workforce shortfall is already placing a strain on services and driving higher agency costs” is an indictment of the criminal operation now underway to wreck the NHS.

The report describes how cuts in training for new doctors and nurses have led to staff shortages and reliance on more expensive, agency staff and that “We are deeply concerned about the effect of the cuts on the training budgets,” which takes effect next year. Nurses instead will have to fund their own training and living expenses by taking out loans, leading to debts of up to £52,000.

With one in three nurses due to retire in the next five years, and one in 10 nursing posts unfilled, ending bursaries will inevitably make worse the huge crisis in the supply of NHS staff.

The Select Committee report also expresses what is obvious to all—that the NHS cannot implement the seven-day service in hospitals and GP (General Practitioner) surgeries demanded by the government, “given the constraints on NHS resources.”

The imposition of seven-day working without the necessary extra funding has met with huge opposition from health workers and the public. Junior hospital doctors have taken days of strike action, for the first time ever, against an inferior contract that increases their hours without remuneration and compromises patient safety. They recently rejected the British Medical Association’s (doctors’ trade union) recommendation to accept the government’s final offer before they imposed the new contract.

In Reviewing Social Care, the Select Committee writes that “historical cuts to social care funding have now exhausted opportunities for significant further efficiencies in this area.” In other words, and like most other sectors in the NHS, Social Care has been cut to the bone. In what the report refers to as “delayed transfers of care,” the discharge of old people from hospital after treatment is often delayed, because there are not enough places in recuperative care homes.

The report’s final verdict on Social Care is that “increasing numbers of people with genuine social care needs are no longer receiving the care they need because of a lack of resource.”

In relation to provision for Mental Health Services, the Select Committee warns that promised extra money to achieve parity for this poor relation “could get sucked into deficits in the acute sector.”

Not only are services being cut now, but funds earmarked for facilitating the changes outlined in the Five Year Forward View are being used to cover current account deficits. The budget for capital projects is also being raided.

Hospitals have been told by NHS England that they need to take whatever action is necessary to tackle the £2.5 billion deficit this year, the largest aggregate deficit in the history of the NHS. An example of the destruction this is leading to is at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, northwest England, which due to a £40 million deficit is preparing to shed 350 jobs out of total staff of 5,000. In Scotland, Tayside health chiefs are planning cuts in jobs and services over the next five years to tackle a deficit of £175 million.

Such is the determination of the government to impose austerity that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, one of the few Tory senior cabinet members to retain his post after Prime Minister Theresa May took up office last month, has instructed NHS England to abandon long-established NHS treatment targets. Waiting times for Accident and Emergency treatment and cancer referrals will be relaxed and hospitals have been told to ignore previous safety guidelines regarding staffing levels. One nurse per eight patients now no longer constitutes the absolute minimum safety level, but is the maximum ratio allowed.

A picture emerges of an NHS near collapse. For the ruling elite, its answer is more of the same. The House of Commons Select Committee concludes, “If the funding is not increased, there needs to be an honest explanation of what that will mean for patient care and how that will be managed.”

Department of Health Director Pat Mills is more forthright—that patients may have to pay to use the NHS by 2025.

Though making a hard-hitting assessment of the crisis overwhelming the NHS, the parliamentary report was a fraudulent exercise. It is a part of a softening up process to prepare the population for the break-up and destruction of the NHS. The report does not and cannot offer any progressive solution to the funding crisis, because the Select Committee that wrote it comprises MPs from the very parties, including Labour, whose policies have led the way in attacking the NHS.

Obama’s drone-missile machinery of murder

Patrick Martin

Late Friday evening, the Obama administration released a previously secret policy document that gives general instructions to those engaged in preparing, approving and carrying out the drone-missile assassinations that have become the hallmark of Obama’s eight years in the White House.

The document, a President Policy Guidance, or PPG, was made public, albeit with extensive redactions, as the result of a protracted legal battle by the American Civil Liberties Union. Federal Judge Colleen McMahon ordered the Justice Department to release the document no later than Friday, August 5. The ACLU posted the PPG on its web site the next morning.

The 18-page document makes clear that what has taken place since Obama entered the White House is the routinization and bureaucratization of state killings. Literally any individual on the planet could be targeted for assassination by a Hellfire missile fired from a US Reaper drone.

Derek Chollet, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 2012 to 2015, described the atmosphere inside the Obama administration in an interview last month with the Washington Post. “[T]he use of military power—the United States killing people overseas—occurs so frequently now that it just kind of washes over the debate,” he said. “It has become almost too easy. No one even notices it any more. It’s just a constant.”

While US citizens and resident aliens (“US persons” in the language of the PPG) require specific approval by the president—unlike citizens of foreign countries, where only notice to the president is required, but not his approval in advance—there is no geographical restriction whatsoever. Nothing stops the CIA from proposing, and the president from approving, the drone missile assassination of someone within the borders of the United States.

And even the restrictions that are supposedly imposed by the document are subject to waiver at the president’s discretion. The document declares, in one of its most important passages:

“Nothing in this PPG shall be construed to prevent the President from exercising his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, as well as his statutory authority, to consider a lawful proposal from operating agencies that he authorize direct action that would fall outside of the policy guidance contained herein, including a proposal that he authorize lethal force against an individual who poses a continuing, imminent threat to another country’s persons.”

In other words, the document spells out what the president requires his subordinates to do in order to receive his approval, while reserving the right of the “Commander in Chief” to do anything he wants.

The document is filled with bureaucratic jargon reassuring the officials involved that their actions are in compliance with the law, that lawyers for the “nominating agencies”—the agencies drawing up the death lists—will review each candidate and provide assurances that their targeting is “lawful.” Moreover, assassination strikes will be authorized only if there is “near certainty” that there will not be civilian casualties.

The only “certainty,” however, is that the guidance document has been drawn up to create a paper trail exonerating the decision-makers against future prosecution at a war crimes tribunal. These officials will argue that they were assured no civilians would be killed. In turn, lower-level officials have been told what type of assurances they must provide in order to have their “nominations” to the death lists approved.

A footnote on the second page explains, “This PPG does not address otherwise lawful and properly authorized activities that may have lethal effects, which are incidental to the primary purpose of the operation.” In other words, unintended deaths, what was termed “collateral damage” during the Vietnam War, are simply not an issue. This is nothing but a blank check for killing civilians on a mass scale, as long as the deaths are explained as “incidental” to the main operation.

The PPG spells out a complex approval process. It starts with the “nominating agency,” usually the CIA or Pentagon, with recommendations approved by the CIA director or secretary of defense, then reviewed by the staff of the National Security Council, which works at the direction of the president, and finally signed off on by the “deputies committee,” a group consisting of the No. 2 officials of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department and other national security agencies, and then the “principals committee,” which brings together the senior officials of the same agencies. In the event of inter-agency disputes, or if the target is a “US person,” the final decision is reserved to the president.

The role of the NSC in this process is particularly important. This body has quadrupled in size under the Bush and Obama administrations, as day-to-day direction of national security policy has been concentrated in the White House. Besides giving the president and his closest aides a direct line to the military-intelligence apparatus, the NSC insulates the drone assassination program from outside scrutiny.

Considered part of the White House, the NSC is exempt from any congressional scrutiny as well as the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, under the interpretation of “executive privilege” embraced by Bush and Obama and accepted by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. NSC officials, up to and including current National Security Adviser Susan Rice, cannot be subpoenaed by a congressional committee or otherwise held accountable for their actions.

According to former Obama administration officials, there are currently seven countries where drone missile killings are taking place: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, as active war zones, do not require advance approval. They are essentially “free-fire zones” for the drone missile operators. It is unclear whether Libya was given the same status when Obama last week signed an order authorizing US bombing of supposed ISIS bases in the country.

Last month, the White House released data for the first time on civilian deaths caused by drone missile strikes, but its figures were widely dismissed as a gross underestimation by journalists and human rights groups that have investigated the program. The “official” figure of 116 civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya is only one-tenth the estimate of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, for example.

Like the redacted text of the President Policy Guidance document, the civilian death estimate was released late on a Friday, in a signal to the corporate-controlled media that this was information the US government preferred to downplay.

The media obediently followed orders. A few perfunctory articles appeared in newspapers on Saturday and Sunday, but there was no outcry, there were no editorials denouncing the assertion of a presidential “right to kill” without judicial process, and the Sunday television interview programs did not so much as mention the word “drone.”

Rio 2016: The “Olympic ideal” and the reality of capitalism

Bill Van Auken

“The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” These words, which appear in the Olympic Charter’s “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” are supposed to sum up what is referred to with sanctimonious reverence as the “Olympic ideal.”

There has never been a golden age of the Olympic games, which have for over a century served as an arena for the promotion of nationalism. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was candid in acknowledging that he valued sport not only for its potential for advancing mankind’s development, but also for its use in preparing French men to become better soldiers in war.

With the opening of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, however, the contrast could hardly be more stark between the supposed Olympic ideal and the reality of a capitalist system mired in economic crisis and social inequality and hurtling toward another world war.

The opening ceremony of the Rio games, held in the city’s iconic Maracana Stadium, was widely covered by the international news media. Less reported was a brutal attack by the Brazilian police against a demonstration organized a half mile away, called against what the protesters termed “the exclusion games.” Police used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades to drive the demonstrators off the streets, injuring several.

Earlier clashes were seen along the route taken by the Olympic Torch, which in one case was extinguished by a crowd of workers and youth in the coastal town of Angra dos Reis. They had turned out to protest the expenditures on the Olympics under conditions where public employees and teachers are not being paid and transit service and health care are being cut because of the deepening fiscal crisis.

In 2009, when the Brazilian government secured the 2016 games for Rio, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proclaimed, “Our time has arrived.” During the same period, Lula was boasting that Brazil, whose growth rate had rebounded to 5 percent, was immune from the effects of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Since then, the world capitalist crisis has devastated Brazil’s economy, driving the official unemployment rate to over 11 percent and sending real wages falling. Millions are threatened with being thrown back into extreme poverty in what is already one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Even as the games unfold, the Brazilian Senate is moving ahead with the impeachment of ousted President Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budgetary irregularities. Those moving against the Workers Party (PT) president are, like the PT itself, implicated up to their necks in the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras bribery scandal. Nonetheless, they are backed by both Brazilian and foreign capital, which wants a full change of regime in order to proceed with sweeping austerity policies under interim President Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president and political ally.

In the run-up to the opening of the games, the Brazilian government heavily publicized alleged terror plots that appeared to have little if any substance. In fact, the massive security operation accompanying the Rio games is aimed not at terrorists, but at the Brazilian population itself. An occupation army of some 100,000 troops and police—twice the number mobilized for the already militarized 2012 London games—has been deployed across Rio, many dressed in combat gear, carrying assault rifles and backed by armored cars and even tanks.

This operation has been supplemented by the United States military and intelligence apparatus, which, according to NBC, has “assigned more than 1,000 spies to Olympic security,” hundreds of whom have been sent to Brazil. In addition to the CIA, FBI and NSA spooks, detachments of Marine and Navy commandos from the US Special Operations Command have been deployed on the ground.

This is the culmination of a campaign of repression that has unfolded over the past few years in tandem with preparations first for the 2014 World Cup football tournament and now for the Olympics. Violent police measures have been used to drive tens of thousands from their homes in impoverished districts targeted for development, while thousands more homeless have been swept from the streets in what amounts to an exercise in “social cleansing.” Police have killed between 40 and 50 people a month in the city over the recent period, while extra-official death squads have murdered many more. So much for the Olympics and “human dignity.”

Against this backdrop, the vast wealth expended on the Olympics, all in pursuit of enrichment and private profit, is obscene. Corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonalds and others, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights and are spending hundreds of millions more to exploit them. TV companies have shelled out $4 billion to broadcast the 19-day event, while marketing revenues are expected to total $9.3 billion.

A relative handful of individual professional athletes will make tens of millions more from product endorsements. The days when the Olympics were a celebration of amateur sports are a distant memory.

Within the games themselves, the overriding atmosphere of social inequality is ever present. While poorer teams are dealing with substandard conditions in hastily constructed Olympic villages, the US basketball “dream team” is residing on the luxury cruise ship Silver Cloud, moored in Rio’s harbor and surrounded by police and navy patrol boats.

Meanwhile, the use of the Olympics to promote nationalism and prepare for war is as virulent in the Rio games as at any time since Adolph Hitler convened the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

On Monday, it was announced that Russian athletes will be banned entirely from the Paralympics to be held next month in Rio in connection with charges of state-sponsored doping of athletes. Earlier, 118 members of the country’s track and field team were banned under a system relegating the decision to the federations of each individual sport.

Washington, the World Anti-Doping Agency, various NGOs and the Western media have waged a virulent campaign to exclude every Russian athlete from the Rio Olympics and prevent the country’s flag from even appearing there, as part of a broader effort to paint Russia as a “rogue” nation that must be stopped by force.

The campaign to bar Russia from the games is inseparably bound up with the growing US-NATO siege of the country’s Western borders, which has been steadily escalated since the US- and German-orchestrated coup that installed an ultra-right, anti-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014.

The sanctimonious denunciations of Russia for having corrupted an otherwise pristine sporting event reek with bad faith and hypocrisy. The anti-Russian campaign intentionally obscures the wholesale corruption surrounding the entire organization of the games as well as the rampant doping practiced by nearly every country.

The controversy, which has run in tandem with the Democratic Party’s neo-McCarthyite campaign denouncing Vladimir Putin for interfering in the US election, has been pumped up as part of the attempt to prepare public opinion for a military conflict with Russia that could quickly lead to nuclear war.

While this year’s Olympic Games will once again provide a display of astounding athletic ability by participants from across the planet, the entire event is overshadowed by a social system that is founded on inequality and exploitation, and threatens the very survival of humanity.

Need the World Worry over Trump Foreign Policy?

Chintamani Mahapatra


Never before did the American foreign policy draw so much limelight during an election year in the US as it has now. Likewise, the global anxiety over the outcome of a presidential election in the US has become more palpable today than ever in the past. Similarly, rarely have allied and rival countries of the US expressed their disquiet and angst over the foreign policy statements of an American presidential nominee as it is being witnessed during the 2016 election campaign. Yet, another new history in the ongoing US presidential election campaign is the vigorous opposition to their nominee’s positions on foreign policy issues by senior officials of his own party.

All these because of unconventional foreign policy views by Republican nominee Donald Trump that have unsettled both allies and enemies of the US to varying degrees. Trump’s prickly tongue has invited bitter invectives against him as well. Incumbent US President Barack Obama declared Trump “unfit” to serve as the Commander-in Chief of the US army. Incumbent US Vice President Joe Biden  said, “threats are too great, and times are too uncertain” to elect Trump as the next US President, since he “has no clue about what makes America great”, even though he vows to make America “great again.” Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have accused Trump of making “disgraceful statements that betray” the “long standing values and national interests” of the US.

When Trump questioned the usefulness of the nuclear weapons by asking, “if we have them, why can’t we use them,” his “mental stability” came under suspicion. Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate Bill Weld said “He’s a showman…a pied piper…a music man” and more seriously “the noun that comes to my mind is a “screw loose.”

Significantly, the Republican Party’s senior officials and leaders too are miffed with Trump’s foreign policy statements. More particularly, a group of former cabinet officers, senior officials and career military officials, in an open letter in the Washington Post challenged Trump’s position on Europe, NATO and Russia, saying “We find Trump’s comments to be reckless, dangerous and extremely unwise” that go against “core, bipartisan principle found in every U.S. administration….” This is where both the Democrats as well as the Republicans seem to be united against Trump.

So are some American allies. For instance, French President Francois Hollande reportedly thinks that Donald Trump’s comments are “vomit-inducing.” America’s trade partners are apprehensive about Trump’s opposition to free trade. American allies are concerned about his position that unless they pay adequately for it, they should fend for themselves in defence and security matters. The US’ neighbours appear concerned about his ideas to build walls to prevent illegal movement of people.

There is little doubt that shallow remarks and use of obnoxious language have earned Trump several enemies within his country and abroad. But will Trump, if he wins the election, build a wall along the Mexican border? Will he disband NATO? Will he ask Japan and South Korea to make nuclear weapons to defend themselves? Will he endorse the spread of Russian influence? Will he flex muscles against China? Will he walk away from trade deals his predecessors have concluded? Will he wage a unilateral war against the Islamic State?

The answer is perhaps in the negative. It is important to separate rhetoric from reality to assess the US’ role under a possible Trump administration. In the heat of the campaign, all the candidates make promises, issue statements and indulge in strong criticisms, and once a nominee wins the election and assumes office, the whole world suddenly looks strikingly different. In this complex dynamics of domestic politics and intricate web of international relations, a single American president simply cannot do what he desires or dreams or promises. This will be more applicable to Trump than to his rival, Hillary Clinton, since the former is completely raw on foreign policy/national security issues and later is a proven diplomat.

However, Trump and his campaigns have already begun to change course. He has begun to find faults with the foreign policy weaknesses of the Obama Administration, build his own vision of a world order where the US would have restored its prestige, power and economic weight in the global. He harps on making “America great again” in the backdrop of declining US influence in the world order; he wants to make common cause with Russia and give an option to China to productively cooperate or risk having its own separate path; manage the huge trade deficit and restore the manufacturing primacy to keep jobs at home; confront radical Islam and stabilise regional orders than export the Western version of democracy; concentrate on domestic developments and not on nation-building abroad. All these ideas are expected to win votes and not please allies or displease rivals abroad.

Hiroshima And Nuclear Power: The Truth Of The Matter

S.G. Vombatkere

On my grandfather’s sixtieth birthday on July 16th, 1945, the atomic bomb was tested in USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twenty-one days later, on August 6th, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima. The same day, the experiment was hailed in The New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US president Truman said: “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history”. A second live-test was conducted three days later by dropping a 21-kiloton Plutonium-core bomb on Nagasaki. In the same issue of NYT, the hitherto secret July 16th test was also reported thus: “… a group of eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world”.

The Frankenstein monster released on the “Day of Atomic Energy” lives and prospers in the intimate relationship between bombs and nuclear power, because weapon-grade Uranium-235 and Plutonium are products or by-products of the nuclear cycle vital for the operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs). The NYT report provides justification to shift the discussion from experiments with bombs on people to NPPs, which are essentially controlled nuclear experiments, though the nuclear industry has self-certified it as proven technology.

In experiments, things can and do go wrong. Whatever the triggering factor for accidents in NPPs, the real effects on public health and safety are hidden from the public by the secretive, government-protected nuclear industry. The Frankenstein monster bared its fearsome visage when the world witnessed accidents that could not be hidden from the public, at Windscale (UK), Three Mile Island (USA), Chernobyl (USSR) and Fukushima (Japan). When nuclear accidents cannot be hidden, the nuclear industry downplays their effects with outright falsehoods, equivocating statements and technical-political verbiage. All this even while nuclear power continues to be promoted as the best combination of safe-clean-cheap-reliable (SCCR) energy, with the additional advantage of carbon-emission reduction to mitigate global warming.

Nations with nuclear capability have enacted laws to provide a secrecy-screen to the nuclear industry, because of legislators’ blind trust in esoteric science and technology. The secrecy-screen is required precisely because of the intimate link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It makes the plans, projects and expenditures of the nuclear industry opaque to the public and law-makers alike. Thus the legislative body which legitimizes nuclear secrecy effectively scores a self-goal. However, the nuclear industry selectively puts out information for public consumption, spends phenomenal funds on propaganda to advertise its SCCR-energy operations and, being part of the military-industrial complex, secretly builds nuclear weapons.

The truth of the matter

In 1948, US General Omar Bradley warned:“We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”

But opposition to nuclear bombs and nuclear power has been expressed right from 1946 onwards, and the arguments have become more comprehensive, cogent and forceful with the passing years. This has developed into a school of thought and peaceful action which the ruling political class, under thrall of the nuclear industry, pejoratively dubs “anti-nuclear”. However, those who oppose nuclear bombs and nuclear power are primarily concerned with problems of life, livelihood, health and safety of present and future generations of human and non-human life, and thus are pro-life rather than anti-nuclear.

The impossibility of keeping present and future generations safe from nuclear pollution (contamination) created in the past and continuing with increased vigour in the present, is a truth which the nuclear industry has consistently denied and ridiculed. The denial and ridicule is changing especially in recent times, into violent opposition by the nuclear industry to those who articulate these truths and call for shutdown of NPPs. This is happening worldwide and exemplified in India by violence in support of the nuclear industry, by Tamil Nadu police against peaceful opponents of the Koodankulam NPP by lathi-force, bullet-force, jailing protestors, and charging protestors with sedition and waging-war-against-the-state.

This brings to mind Arthur Schopenhauer’s words: “Any truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident”. Clearly, the truth about the undesirability of nuclear power is in its second stage. Transition of the nuclear industry into the third stage of this truth may happen when the questionable economic viability of nuclear power and the hollowness of the SCCR claim become apparent to the next generation of proponents of nuclear power. Sooner rather than later, the public is sure to recognize the awful reality of the nuclear Frankenstein. As the world touches the 71st anniversary of the nuclear bomb and protests against the nuclear industry multiply, Nicholas Walter’s words are apt: “No one can tell when protest might become effective, and the present might suddenly turn into the future”.

The Olympic Gold Obsession: An Australian Condition

Binoy Kampmark

Obsessions of any sort, notably of a consuming nature, are never healthy matters.  The drive to win gold, laced with a desperation often reflected in steroid consumption and psychological battering, has made the Olympic Games the least of savoury spectacles.

Even worse than the physical reduction of the athlete to mechanism and medal winning machine is the complicity towards it from the coaching establishment and hungry spectators.  Nothing is quite as terrifying as triumph – or failure – by association, the vicarious delight, or woe, the groupies feel when their chosen champion falls.  “We,” they claim, were also in the pool that day.

Australia is particularly bad on this score.  Its failure to net a monstrous swag of medals at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 was seen as a catastrophe to morale, a national disgrace. Only one silver and four bronze medals were brought home.

The characteristic approach to gold madness was typified by the near hysterical antics of Australian swimming coach, Laurie Lawrence, at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.  After Duncan Armstrong won gold in the 200m freestyle event in record time, Lawrence exclaimed effusively how,  “He did it again. Lucky lane six.”

The interviewer proceeded to ask him whether Lawrence was ready to respond to a question about how he felt.  “Mate, we just beat three record-holders.  How do you feel?”  In conclusion, Lawrence lands the fundamental blow to those who believe that the competition, not the victory, is what counts.  “Why do you think we come here?  For the silver?  Stuff the silver!”

The Lawrence philosophy was much evident during the London 2012 Olympics.  Australian swimmer Emily Seebohm had won silver in her 100m backstroke final.  Instead of congratulatory embraces, there was commiseration and grief. She had only won silver.  Apologies to parents, the coach and the Australian public followed.  To be second was to be humiliated.

With such conditions at play, it was little wonder that a 2010 survey of ethical and integrity issues in Australian sport conducted by the Australian Sports Commission and Colmar Brunton Social Research found a host of concerns: “Athletes being pushed too hard by coaches or parents”; “Negative coaching behaviours and practices” and negative administration.

A quick glance at Australia’s performance at the London Games should have punctured the gloom of the medal cravers.  The country’s athletes won eight gold, 15 silver, and 12 bronze, a highly credible 35 medals leading to an eighth placing on the table.

Broadcaster, television presenter and author Waleed Aly, writing in The Monthly, encouraged a celebration of the achievement, while regarding any gold lust as a “puerile” fascination. Those treating the performance as below par were to be treated with derision.

In the wake of that performance, deemed poor by the lucre-craving establishment, veteran Fairfax journalist Paul Sheehan would express concern at that voracious hunger for the medal count:

“Hundreds of millions of tax dollars and thousands of hours of grinding, invisible sacrifice by athletes have been compromised by an obsession with gold.  This obsession has clouded the reality that Australia has just had a brilliant Olympics.  An unambiguous success” (Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 13, 2012).

The other fallacy in boosting medal counts is the notion that high rankings actually lead to increased sports participation and a tongue wagging interest in following Olympic heroes.  The statistics regarding sport participation in England showed a decline of interest in sport leading up to the 2012 games. Nor has a figure like Michael Phelps, who dominated his swimming meets in 2008, inspired a generation of enthused swimmers.

As the Games commence at Rio, Australian journalists and the sporting establishment, led by the steely Kitty Chiller, is running the pre-emptive remarks about gold again.  Predictions are being made, the loot being divvied out.  In July, Chiller suggested that the 410-strong team would bag “15 maybe even 16” gold medals of a projected medal tally of 45, a feat that would land Australia in the top five.

Medals are being awarded even before the first events have taken place.  Even Chiller admits that, “For any country to double the number of gold in [four-year period] is a huge ask. I genuinely believe we can do it.”

The erroneous assumption made is that record holders will perform on the day and win gold.  On swimmer Cate Campbell, the ABC observed that breaking a world record a mere month before Rio made her “the favourite to win the gold in the 100 metres freestyle.”

The same network ran with the jarring headline that Australia’s swimming team were “aiming to erase memories of London.”  Readers were introduced to “the stars of the Australian swimming team hoping to rebound from the poor showing at the 2012 Olympics in London.”

Again, the grand hope will be in the pool, where Australians are always expected to excel with automatic superhuman achievement.  In Chiller’s cool words, “Yes, we’re going to rely on swimming, we always do.”  Again, they will not be prepared for the disappointment should those medals not eventuate.  The gold disease tends to be a particularly aggressive one.

Farm Hack: A Commons For Agricultural Innovation

Dorn Cox


In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange. They were convinced that transforming agricultural technology into a commons would result in a more adaptive, open and resilient food system, one that would reflect the values not just of the grower but of the larger community as well. The path toward a more distributed and just agricultural and economic system, this gathering of people concluded, would come into being through the collective development of new working prototypes and universal access to a constantly improving repository of best ideas and practices.

Thus began Farm Hack, an ambitious volunteer project that brought together the seemingly disparate cultures of technologists and agrarians. The start of Farm Hack came with an offer from M.I.T. to host a teaching event that could connect engineers with farmers’ needs. The National Young Farmers Coalition had just started a blog called “Farm Hack” and launched the first program, followed closely by more events held in partnership with GreenStart and Greenhorns agrarian networks and maker/hacker networks.

The Farm Hack community quickly expanded through online and in-person social networks across the east and west coasts of North America. Within three years, it became a user-driven, collaborative community of ideas and tools with many thousands of active participants. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from every continent were soon contributing tens of thousands of hours to the platform. Farm Hack has become a rapidly growing repository of agricultural knowledge, containing scores of open source designs and documentation for farming technologies and practices. In effect, Farm Hack is an emergent, networked culture of collaborative problem-solving.

Hacking has been defined as the art of coming up with clever solutions to tricky problems by modifying something in extraordinary ways to make it more useful. Hacking also means rejecting the norms of consumer culture, and imagining ways to modify, improvise, and create new, accessible, custom solutions for particular problems. Not surprisingly, both hacker and maker culture are a natural fit for the sustainable agricultural movement. Both cultures formed in response to ongoing, hegemonic attempts to control users’ access to basic technologies and other resources. Both arose from a realization that open access to knowledge is the best strategy to counter dominant industry interests. This has long been an inherent part of agriculture in general, and a critical part of sustainable agriculture in particular. On most farms, identifying a problem, thinking of a solution, testing that solution and assessing its efficacy while thinking of the next iteration is a daily practice.

Within its first year, the Farm Hack website featured documentation for over 100 innovative agricultural tools. They ranged from manufacturing instructions for newly created farm-built hardware such as garlic planters, to the remanufacturing of an “extinct” farm-scale oat huller. The community contributed designs for greenhouse automation and sensor networks and business models for organic egg enterprises.

The power of open source exchange is illustrated by the quick pace and diversity of modifications and improvements made to tools on Farm Hack. One of the first greenhouse monitoring projects was turned into an electric-fence alert system, which quickly evolved into an automation and data logging system, which then spun into businesses selling kits. An organic no-till roller made open source by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania was quickly modified in New Hampshire, then Quebec, and then France and Germany; the latest versions being built in New York are based on German and French improvements made six months earlier. In this production model, inventors increasingly may not be able to predict the ultimate use of their tools, as the ultimate use will be collaborative and emergent.

Despite being an all-volunteer organization, operating without a budget until 2014, Farm Hack partnered with dozens of organizations, universities, open source and maker communities in the US and Europe to expand the network. In addition to providing an online forum and repository for the community’s knowledge and tools, Farm Hack has hosted in-person and online events to document and improve tools, foster sharing and build skills. In these events, the group carries on the agrarian club tradition of mixing participatory education with lots of good eating, drinking and socializing.

With growth of the community came greater financial burdens of hosting and guiding the conversations and idea exchanges. The community also needed to evolve in its role from organizing and planning, to facilitating, guiding and recruiting new contributors. Initial funding to support these needs came indirectly through the founding partner organization budgets supplemented by contributions from community volunteers. It was three years before the first general grant support was secured. A university extension program wrote a grant on behalf of Farm Hack to document, measure and extend the reach of USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) funded projects.

To manage the challenges of growth and expansion in its third year, the Farm Hack network adopted a set of ten principles; participants wanted to maintain the representative open agrarian values of the network as they interacted with established power structures. The collaborative and flexible structure of the organization, and rapidly evolving tools for remote collaboration, became important ways for the organization to evolve while remaining representative and emergent. For example, a collaborative tool currently in development, by the community and for the community, is a best practices template for open source project contracting to help navigate the tension of having paid and volunteer efforts working side by side. The template is exploring the awarding of bounties and other rewards for commercial contracts, special recognition to volunteer efforts, and pooled payments or retainers on a project-by-project basis for participants.

Open Source Software Converges with Agrarianism

Farm Hack has blended a rich set of old and new traditions – the Enlightenment salon ideals of the eighteenth century and those of the open source software movement. Both believe that the natural state of knowledge is to be free. Farm Hack also looks to the Physiocratic worldview of nature-governance articulated by Quesnay, Jefferson, Locke and Franklin, who regarded the productivity of the soil, and the education of the populace to provide for their own livelihood, as necessary for liberty and the health of a culture. From this perspective, agricultural production is the root of sustainable civilization. It is not just an occupation, but a foundation for the shared cultural values of a healthy society.

Well before the Internet, Enlightenment thinkers pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing with their community-created Encyclopedie: A Systematic Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, first published in 1751 and written with over 2,250 contributors. More than 250 years later, the contemporary open source software community is pioneering the development of networked tools, such as wikis, forums and collaborative documents, all of which facilitate social cooperation and trust. Building on these models of voluntary reciprocity, Farm Hack implicitly challenges the prevailing norms of conventional agricultural economics and research. It challenges not only what types of questions are asked in agricultural research and development, but also who asks the questions, the types of tools that are produced, and how they are financed.

The Farm Hack community believes that the tools, seeds, and techniques used in agriculture should both reflect and benefit those who intend to use them, not just those intent on selling them. Through an ongoing amateur inquiry that connects farmers with other farmers, designers, engineers, and thinkers, Farm Hack has embraced, woven together, and expanded upon preindustrial and modern hacker/maker ideals. Its open, social collaboration creates the potential for every farm to become a research farm, and every neighbor to be a manufacturer, drawing upon a global library of skills and designs.

An Alternative Template for Agriculture

From Encyclopedia of Practical Farm Knowledge, published by Sears and Roebuck, 1918. Available at archive.org.

By documenting, sharing, and improving farm tools and associated know­ledge, Farm Hack is not just framing agriculture as a shared foundational economic activity. It illustrates an alternative template for local manufacturing and provides greater citizen choice, control and local self-determination. The primary limiting factor in agriculture shifts from the (negative) extraction of scarce natural resources to the (positive) expansion of skills and systems understanding of all participants. Farmers are able to learn better ways of harnessing the complex biogeochemical flows of atmospheric carbon, water, and nitrogen into productive and resilient agroecosystems. The emphasis shifts from efficient extraction of resources to skilled regeneration of resources using all available knowledge.1See essay by Eryka Styger on the System for Rice Intensification (SRI). The focus becomes improving rather than diminishing the natural resource base.

Another contribution to the rapid expansion of Farm Hack’s community has been its reliance on the network structures and administrative tools pioneered by other open source communities, including Drupal (blogging software), Wikipedia (wiki collaboration), Open Layers (Java script software), and Apache (server software). It has been able to build trust, grow, and adapt while making its own unique contributions back to the commons. Another important tool used by Farm Hack is the Collective Impact Framework, a structured approach that allows organizations to use collaborative tools to form common agendas and adopt shared measurement tools, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication among diverse sorts of participants.2John Kania and Mark Kramer, Collective Impact, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Issue 73 (Winter 2011), available at http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact. This Framework has been adopted in order to enable the community to identify and reduce overlapping, duplicative efforts, and to build upon the cumulative achievements of the broader open source community.

Farm Hack’s online platform is a prototype for implementing this framework in the context of open source agriculture practices. Just as symbiosis is as powerful an influence as competition in nature, Farm Hack believes that it can help turn the conventional agricultural research and development system on its head. By creating tools and social norms that reward, refine, test and evaluate collaborative production, it is possible to stimulate rapid, reliable community knowledge and innovation.

In 1726, Jonathan Swift famously wrote, “Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” The quote embodies Farm Hack’s partial but expanding achievement: By creating open source repositories of knowledge and technologies, it is bypassing the dominant political and economic power structures behind industrial agriculture. Farm Hack is shifting the balance from those who derive their power through the control of scarce resources and knowledge to those who mix their creative skills with nature in order to create abundance.

Is Globalization Responsible For ANC Decline In South Africa Local Elections

Vivek Kumar Srivastava

African National Congress (ANC) the symbol of South African apartheid movement and widely recognized as the face of African people is all set to lose its control in the South African political landscape. The local municipal elections results have shown that its voting share has declined to 53.83% and the total seats obtained stand at 5,020 (last announcement). This is its lowest performance since the 1994 when Mandela used to be the key leader of the party. This dismal performance   is going to impact the whole political system and dynamics in significant manner. Several factors are responsible for this decline of the Party; among which the corruption and the role of elites in the political system of the country are noteworthy besides the policies of the government are also to be blamed.  It appears that adoption of the globalization by the government increased corruption, poverty, inequality and unemployment; which in accumulated way led to the loss of the political power by the ANC. In April 1994 national lections were organized and Nelson Mandela thereafter attempted to integrate the socialism with capitalism but impact of globalization was there for all the developing countries. The establishment of WTO on 1 January 1995 and collapse of USSR on 25 December 1991 had heralded that globalization and free market economy was here to stay. South Africa was no exception like India; as Kidane Mengisteab, a respected author in his writing ‘Globalization and South Africa’s Transition through a Consociational Arrangement’ has stated that –

‘There are a number of measures that the South African government has already undertaken that show it has embraced economic liberalization in line with globalization. One such measure is its agreement with the WTO to liberalize its trade. The country concluded an agreement with the WTO in 1994 committing itself to the reduction and restructuring of import tariffs, the removal of import surcharges and phasing out of the country’s General Export Incentive Scheme. The import surcharges were abolished as early as October 1995 and the General Export Incentive Schemes were repealed in July 1997. Tariff rates have been slashed from 15 per cent in 1994 to 10 per cent in 1996, and are expected to come down to 8 per cent in 1999. The government also agreed to deregulate financial markets and to gradually relax exchange controls.” The rand depreciated by about 21.9 per cent between the end of 1995 and the end of 1996. Although from December 1996 to the end of July 1997 it appreciated by 4.9 per cent. These measures were aimed at strengthening the competitiveness of the country’s economy and facilitating the integration of the South African economy into the global economy. The ANC’s agreement to privatize state-owned assets is another indicator. By the end of 1995, the ANC, under pressure from international finance capital, released a document (‘The State and Social Transformation’) in which it proposed a dramatic reversal of the state’s role in the public sector through partial privatization and a range of deregulatory measures. At the beginning of 1996, government and labour accepted the National Framework Agreement (NFA) which laid down guidelines for restructuring state assets. Other indicators include the adoption in June 1996 of a new macro-economic strategy, the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme which essentially conforms to the logic of globalization with its rather tight fiscal policy. Supply-side measures to support industrial restructuring have also been adopted by the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) as a result of South Africa’s entry into the global market. Lack of notable progress in reducing poverty among the victims of apartheid is another critical indicator that the government has not been able to aggressively pursue its original redistributive policies. The most important mechanism for reducing absolute poverty is employment creation and in this regard the performance of the South African government has been disappointing. There has been some progress in expanding the participation of black South Africans in the public sector. By the end of 1996, the proportion of black South Africans in the public service has risen to about 65 per cent. However, there has not been a corresponding progress in the private sector.’ President Jacob Zuma on 31 August 2014 reemphasized his policy of integration with the world, saying that ‘We want more markets for our goods and services and want more investments to come to South Africa in the next five years.’

This all though diverted government attention from the common people and their problems which led to disaster in the national economy. According the Statistics South Africa ‘Community Survey 2016 results’ approximately 13,3% (2,2 million) of households in South Africa indicated that they had skipped a meal in the 12 months before the survey. The province with the largest proportion of households that skipped a meal was Eastern Cape at 17,6%, followed by Northern Cape (17,5%), North West (17,4%), Free State (15,7%), KwaZulu-Natal (14,8%), Mpumalanga (14,8%), Limpopo (12,9%), and Gauteng (10,8%).

Moreover the South Africa’s unemployment rate increased to 26.7 percent of the labour force in the first quarter of 2016, which means 5.714 million individuals in the country were having no jobs in the first quarter of 2016 in comparison to the 5.2 million unemployed in the last quarter.

EPWP (Expanded Public Works Programme) like policy initiatives were undertaken but these could not provide the necessary ingredients to deal such overpowering problems.

The government policies increased not only the corruption but also the unemployment and the poverty. Loss of ANC is therefore the loss of the new models of economic development. Developing countries are unaware but the truth is that neoliberal policies have led to the greater increase in the inequality. The policies of globalizing the economy need to be tempered with the policies of generating the equality, no democracy can sustain if people are unemployed and the poverty spreads without control. This will lead to destabilization of the democratic order and finally the violence will follow. The burden of all this will fall on the globalization and privatization. This requires prudence about the globalization-privatization related policies. ANC may learn a lesson from it after such debacle.

India and US deepen strategic collaboration in Africa

Wasantha Rupasinghe

The Indian and US militaries are partnering in the training of African officers to lead and train troops deployed on UN, and potentially African Union-sponsored, “peacekeeping” missions.

Late last month, Indian and US government and military officials inaugurated the first “United Nations Peacekeeping Course for African Partners”—a three week Indo-US initiative that is being hosted by the Indian government at its Centre for UN Peacekeeping in New Delhi.

Indian and US army officers are jointly training what a US State Department blog post described as “38 of the most skilled military officers” in Africa. The trainees are drawn from at least eight countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierre Leone in West Africa, Tanzania and Uganda in East Africa, Zambia and Malawi in southern Africa and Rwanda in Central Africa.

India has long helped staff UN peacekeeping operations with soldiers and police, while using them to gain leverage on the world stage. It currently has thousands of troops deployed in Africa, including in the Congo, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sudan and South Sudan.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj announced the Indo-US UN training initiative last September at the conclusion of the first annual “India-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue.” US President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized the initiative's importance to plans to bolster Indo-US collaboration in Africa in the joint statement that they issued after Modi visited the White House on June 7.

For well-over a decade, the US has been working assiduously to harness India to its predatory strategic agenda, especially against China. This has included supporting New Delhi in its efforts to expand economic and military-strategic ties in South-East Asia and working to implicate India in the US-fomented South China Sea dispute.

Similarly, Washington has offered to partner with India in a host of economic, diplomatic, social, cultural and military-strategic initiatives in Africa, where both countries are competing for influence, markets, and resources with China.

Under Modi's two year-old Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, New Delhi has integrated itself ever-more completely into Washington's drive to strategically isolate, encircle, and prepare for war with China. In their June 7 statement, Obama and Modi announced plans to bolster military cooperation in all areas—land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace—and the finalizing of an agreement to enable US war planes and ships to use Indian military bases for rest, refueling and resupply.

In a speech to the July 25 ceremony inaugurating the first Indo-US “Peacekeeping Course for African Partners,” US Ambassador to India Richard Verma made clear that Washington's aim is to draw India into joint combat operations with US forces.

Verma emphasized the “global” character of the Indo-US partnership, then cited approvingly Modi's claim in his June 8 address to the US Congress that “a strong India-U.S. partnership can anchor peace, prosperity and stability from Asia to Africa and from (the) Indian Ocean to the Pacific.” He went on to stress that the character of UN peacekeeping operations has changed, with so-called UN Blue Berets increasingly waging counter-insurgency wars. Whereas they once routinely policed truces between states,“Today, two-thirds of peacekeepers,” said Verma, “operate in active conflicts; the highest percentage ever.”

“State failure around the globe,” continued the ambassador, “and the extremist elements that often fill the vacuum created by instability … requires the international community to revamp its support for peacekeeping operations and to build local capacity.”

To make his meaning crystal clear, Verma dredged up a long forgotten incident from the Korean War, when an Indian army team of medical paratroopers had supported US troops, waging war under the cover of a UN resolution, in a “daring” operation “behind enemy lines.” He of course neglected to mention that the US-led, UN-authorized forces laid waste to much of the Korean Peninsula in a war aimed at laying the groundwork for military action against China and the USSR; or that at the war's height the head of the US forces in Korea, General MacArthur, pressed for the use of nuclear weapons.

With the Indo-US UN Peacekeeping Training program, the Obama administration and Pentagon are pursuing two key objectives.

First, they are further promoting military-to-military ties and with the aim of making India a junior partner in providing “international security,” that is in policing and shoring up a US-led global capitalist order. Their transparent aim is to move from the joint-training of personnel from third countries to lead military interventions aimed at securing Washington's interests to joint Indo-US military action. In March, Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., the head of the US Pacific Command, told a Delhi conference that he looked forward to the day in the near future when US and Indian warships would jointly patrol the Indian and Pacific Oceans, including the South China Sea.

The second objective is to draw India into closer military-strategic cooperation with the US in Africa, which because of its vast resource wealth and proximity to pivotal Indian Ocean shipping lanes has increasingly become a focus of US strategy. In 2008, the US established Africom as a separate military command tasked with intensifying US military operations across Africa and ensuring US strategic hegemony over the continent.

For the Indian bourgeoisie, Africa has also become a heightened priority. It looks to expand exports, but above all covets Africa's oil and other natural resources to feed its expanding economy. New Delhi is also anxious to establish its strategic presence in East and South Africa so as to bolster its status as a “security provider” for the Indian Ocean and as a great power.

Last October, Modi hosted an India-Africa Forum Summit in New Delhi that was attended by 41 African heads of state. In addition to a number of bilateral agreements with different African countries, India announced that it was establishing a $US10 billion concessional line of credit to support African infrastructure and other economic development projects over the next five years.

However, this pales in comparison with the $60 billion in aid and investments Chinese President Xi Jinping announced last December when he attended the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In a bid to bolster India's economy and counter growing Chinese influence in the continent, Prime Minister Modi paid a five-day visit to four South and East African countries—Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya—at the beginning of last month.

Modi began his African tour in Mozambique, a country that is particularly important to India. It is reportedly the site of a quarter of all Indian investment in Africa as well as an India military monitoring station that allows it to surveille the southwestern Indian Ocean.

To further strengthen security ties, Modi promised India will assist Mozambique in building its military capacities through training and the supply of equipment. To underscore, the latter point he gifted Mozambique a fleet of armored personnel carriers.

Modi and Tanzanian President John Pombe Joseph Maguful agreed, a press release reported, to a “deeper overall defence and security partnership, especially in the maritime domain.” To Kenya, India's prime minister provided a line of credit to buy military equipment.

Senate result underscores Australian government’s instability

Mike Head

More than a month after the July 2 election, the Australian Electoral Commission this week released the final results of the voting for the Senate. The outcome highlights how far the election backfired for the Liberal-National Coalition government and the entire parliamentary establishment.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called the double dissolution election of all members of both houses of parliament to try to break through a protracted political deadlock, in which consecutive governments, Coalition and Labor alike, have lacked an upper house majority and been unable fully impose the severe spending cuts demanded by the corporate elite.

Instead, the election saw millions of people express their hostility towards this agenda by voting for other candidates who posed as opponents of the political establishment, which includes the Greens, which propped up the previous Labor government. For the Senate, the upper house, more than 26 percent of people, a record, voted for parties other than Labor, the Coalition and the Greens.

Not only was the government reduced to a razor-thin majority of one seat in the 150-member House of Representatives. It lost three seats in the 75-member Senate, cutting its numbers to 30. Labor gained just one, taking its tally to 26, while the Greens lost a seat, reducing its members to nine.

The number of “crossbench” senators, mostly right-wing populists, increased by three to 11. If Labor and the Greens oppose a bill, the government will have to secure the votes of nine of these senators. In the previous Senate, the government needed deals with six of the eight “crossbenchers” to pass legislation where it could not come to an arrangement with Labor or the Greens.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Political Party, an anti-immigrant formation, will have four Senate seats—two in Hanson’s home state of Queensland and one each in New South Wales (NSW) and Western Australia. The Nick Xenophon Team, a South Australian-based protectionist group, will have three. The remaining four crossbenchers are free market libertarian David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party, who retained his NSW seat, Family First’s Bob Day from South Australia, Victorian independent Derryn Hinch and ex-Palmer United Party representative Jacqui Lambie in Tasmania.

These figures exploited the seething discontent among broad layers of the population with mounting job losses, growing inequality and deteriorating social conditions, by seeking to channel it in nationalist and xenophobic directions.

Hanson, in particular, consciously targeted some of Australia’s most economically and socially destitute regions, combining populist pitches, such as advocating higher aged pensions, denouncing the predatory practices of the banks and calling for higher taxes on foreign companies, with agitation against “Islamic terrorism,” Chinese land purchases and immigration.

Years of suppression of working class struggles by the Labor and trade union bureaucrats, assisted in recent decades by the Greens, have opened the door for these reactionary elements to take advantage of the worsening social distress.

While their emergence underscores the instability and breakup of the parliamentary order, the government and the media establishment will seek to use these formations to shift the political agenda further to the right, as a means of imposing deep cuts to working conditions, and health, education, welfare and other social programs.

Turnbull has already held talks with Hanson, saying: “I respect her, I respect her election, 500,000 Australians voted for her.” He noted that she spoke “warmly” about their meeting, which discussed “a wide range of policy interests which she wants to pursue.” Turnbull said there would be “no freeze on Muslim migration”—one of Hanson’s policies—but ruled out nothing else.

At the same time, the unpredictability of trying to cobble together votes from an array of ostensibly anti-elite senators has fuelled calls in the media for the government to forge deals with Labor and/or the Greens to push through the austerity agenda. In today’s Australian Financial Review, chief political correspondent Phillip Coorey reiterated that the government could pass much of its agenda “without relying on the crossbench.”

Because the Greens clung onto nine seats, their votes will be sufficient to pass legislation with the Coalition’s 30 votes. In the last parliament, the Greens teamed up with the government to back several key measures to slash pension entitlements and other spending. Labor also partnered with the government to achieve similar outcomes, and pledged during the election campaign to reverse its opposition to billions of dollars worth of “zombie” measures that remain blocked from the 2013, 2014 and 2015 federal budgets.

Turnbull’s shaky government faces two escalating pressures—from Washington and the financial markets. The first was highlighted by US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Australia last month. He held talks with Turnbull to underscore the US insistence that Australia’s military forces take part in provocative operations inside Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea.

The second pressure was underlined by post-election threats by the three main global ratings agencies to cut Australia’s AAA credit rating unless the government moves swiftly to slash spending.

This week the dire economic situation was accentuated by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) decision to reduce the cash rate for its loans to the banks by another 0.25 points to 1.5 percent—a historic low. This rate is now half the “emergency level” of 3 percent set in 2009 during the global financial crisis.

The RBA referred to slowing growth in China and the global economy, continuing low prices for Australia’s commodities exports and “a very large decline in business investment.” As with other central banks around the world, the RBA is cutting interest rates in desperate battles to attract investment, drive down the value of their currencies and pump cash into the finance houses.

There is mounting consternation in ruling circles with the Turnbull government’s failure to aggressively prosecute the austerity offensive since the election. These concerns were intensified by a string of political debacles, notably the open rifts in the government over its rejection of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s bid for nomination as UN secretary general, and the rapid resignation of the judge originally appointed to head the government’s royal commission into the horrific abuses of boys in Northern Territory juvenile prisons.

In editorials this week, the Australian declared that Turnbull’s inaction on “tough decisions” had produced “an extraordinary and worrisome state of affairs” nearly a year after Turnbull ousted his predecessor Tony Abbott, citing Abbott’s lack of economic leadership. “Budget repair must be Mr Turnbull’s central cause,” today’s editorial declared. “There is much to do and no time to lose.”

These marching orders mean that explosive social and political battles lie ahead for the working class. As the Socialist Equality Party warned throughout the election campaign, whichever government was formed, the real agenda of austerity and militarism would soon be brought forward. Those predictions are being confirmed, underlining the necessity for workers and youth to turn to the socialist and internationalist perspective fought for by the SEP.