The TPP is Dead

Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

We have worked to stop the TPP and other Obama trade agreements for more than five years. We were part of the ‘movement of movements’, the largest coalition ever opposing a corporate trade agreement, which stopped it. It included all sorts of activists who work on human rights, worker rights, the environment, climate change, Internet freedom, health care, food safety and more.

People told us stopping the TPP was impossible. Even after the election of Trump, people still told us we could not win, the corporations wanted this and they would get it. But, after years of work, the impossible became the inevitable and the TPP is dead.

Even before the election the TPP was near death. Years of people working to stop it made TPP stand for Toxic Political Poison. First, the movement exposed the TPP which the Obama administration had sought to keep secret while it negotiated a global corporate coup with the aid of hundreds of corporate lawyers, executives and lobbyists.

The movement organized spectacle protests that drew attention to an agreement being secretly negotiated. People across the country organized leafletting, teach-ins and visibility actions. There were national and global days of action, and there were Twitter storms and memes on Facebook. It became impossible to hide the TPP. The secret was exposed. Once exposed, the movement educated people about what it contained. Wikileaks and others leaked portions of the document. As more was exposed, it became less popular.

The movement conducted national call-in days that garnered hundreds of thousands of calls to Congress. When we went to Congressional offices, phone calls coming in on the TPP were constant. When fast track was being considered in 2015, we built an encampment on Capitol Hill for three weeks. We worked across the political divide with Tea Party and conservative Republicans who shared our concerns about the trade deficit, lost jobs and loss of sovereignty.

The battle over fast track trade promotion authority slowed the progress of the TPP. It took years longer to get fast track than the administration had hoped. One compromise that the administration made to get fast track was to publish the TPP text after it was completed so the public and members of Congress could read it. Again, the more people read about it, the less popular it became.

These political battles also showed the risk associated with the TPP. John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, lost his job because of how he twisted arms to get votes for fast track and how he punished Republicans who exposed fast track. Members fought back against these tactics and Boehner’s career was quickly ended. He may have won fast track for Obama, but lost his place in Washington, DC. A message was sent to all elected officials – be careful with the TPP, it is politically toxic.

By delaying fast track the TPP was pushed into an election year and that was a key to our victory. In the campaign, those running for office were forced to answer to the people. Do you support the TPP? Do you support giving up US sovereignty? Allowing unsafe foods into the country? Forcing GMO’s into global agriculture? Increasing the prices of pharmaceuticals? Making corporations more powerful than governments? The questions kept coming because the TPP affects everything.

Every candidate for president had to come out against the TPP. The only one who didn’t was Gary Johnson who did not seem to understand the agreement. He believed the slogan “free” trade when in fact it was corporate trade, crony capitalism on an international scale. Senators who supported TPP changed their positions in order to keep their jobs. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan continually warned the President that the votes were not there to ratify the agreement, even in a lame duck session.

Popular Resistance has been planning all year for an action camp and series of protests next week to kick off the lame duck and stop ratification. This will now turn into a celebration — the people stopped a global corporate coup. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) also died as a result of people powered pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. We will ensure that the final agreement, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), perhaps the most dangerous of Obama’s three agreements, is also dead. TiSA is also in trouble as member nations experience difficulty completing its negotiations.

All these Obama agreements failed because the corporations demanded too much. They wanted to force the US big finance capital system on countries all over the world. They wanted to institutionalize pushing public services into private profit centers. They wanted the power to sue corporations if their profits were impacted by laws written to protect the public interest. Leaks showed the US was the most aggressive on behalf of corporate interests out of all the countries involved in these negotiations. This almost made it impossible to reach agreement on the TPP and has stopped agreement on TTIP and TiSA. If Trump attempts to negotiate a “better deal” for US corporations it will be almost impossible to get other countries to agree. The TPP and Obama trade agenda may end up like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has made little progress since the Seattle protests of 1999. They are likely to flounder and go nowhere.

Now, we need to put forward a new approach to trade, an approach that protects the people and planet and that is negotiated in a transparent and participatory way. Trade must make the Paris climate agreement goals a reality, lift up international labor standards and protect the environment as well as the food supply, Internet, access to healthcare and more. We need agreements that allow communities to protect themselves from corporate abuses. The death of the TPP is a step toward ending neo-liberalism that has privatized public goods, enriched corporations and created a global wealth divide. Future trade agreements should work toward making the International Declaration of Human Rights and related agreements reality. Trade can uplift the world but it must be clear that is one of the goals of trade.

The defeat of the TPP is a tremendous victory that should propel us forward. It shows organized people have power even in the US oligarchy. We need to build on this power, continue our unity as a movement of movements and demand that the people’s agenda becomes the political agenda, not the agenda of big business and the wealthy oligarchs. It is time for people power to rule. We still have a lot of work to do, but we should celebrate this great victory and move to set a people’s agenda for the United States.

Panic in America: People in Revolt

Luciana Bohne

A “grab them by the pussy,” racist, sexist white man has grabbed the White House, and the polite class is twirling in outrage like dervishes approaching oblivion. 

This insult to the “dignity of the office” and the “nation” is more shocking than the action of the black man who took the Nobel Peace Prize and then proceeded to bomb seven countries.

Hillary Clinton’s victory was projected as the sole possible outcome of a reasonable, civilized, and progressive society, as the elite see it, which only eight years earlier had voted for the first African American president in its history. Instead—vanity, vanity, all is vanity—the troglodytes won.

Not so simple. Liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics are unwilling to recognize in the politically incorrect catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory the blowback to the ferocious economic plunder by the neoliberal order, backed by decades of wanton and unchecked military aggressions.

The neoliberals’ vaunted “internationalism” (more realistically, American neocolonialism) has created a weak domestic economy which to a degree justifies the nationalist call to look homeward and entrench behind the borders of sovereignty—one of Trump’s rallying cries.

A Chinese observer, Qiao Liang, author of Unrestricted Warfare(1999), abused in English translation with the inaccurate subtitle,  “China’s Master Plan to Destroy America,” recently identified the germ of the country’s general economic disease in the neoliberal shift from productive to financial investment:

“This financial economy (using money to make money) is much easier than the real (industry-based) economy. Why will it bother with manufacturing industries that have only low value-adding capabilities? Since August 15, 1971, the U.S. has gradually stopped its real economy and moved into a virtual economy. It has become an ‘empty’ economy state. Today’s U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has reached US$18 trillion, but only $5 trillion is from the real economy.”

People in revolt against the neoliberal order

For forty-five years, the neoliberal elite ruled the US by the “free hand of the market.” In plain terms, among other abuses of the social contract, they have launched a class war to maximize profits by depressing wages.”  The mystical “hand” has been slapping around American workers by moving industry to places where labor is cheaper and unions weak. In turn, the exploited foreign workers have sought relief from desperate wage conditions in their countries by immigrating to the US, embittering the native workforce.

Nearly 50 million Americans, nearly twenty percent out of 325 million, are poor. The unemployment rate, officially around five percent, is closer to ten percent.

Twenty years ago Patrick Buchanan’s “pitchfork populism” appealed to only twenty percent of Republicans. After the crash of 2008 and the recession, which rescued the “banksters” and immiserated masses of Americans, public attitudes against the neoliberal global order (“internationalism” in the Establishment’s lingo) solidified and hardened, crossing party lines.

Buchanan’s political heir, Trump gathered the motley disaffected masses into a surge of revolt against the neoliberal status quo, winning the White House. As a tiny minority of sober voters had predicted in 2008, Obama’s presidency disappointed and enraged the masses of people whose material conditions his administration worsened by continuing and even accelerating the policies that his voters had expected him to reverse. In this sense, Obama’s blithe indifference to domestic poverty is responsible for Trump’s victory. The liberals have no one to blame but themselves.

Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Corbyn, Sanders, and even Syriza and Podemos, in a discordant, confused, and unfocused cacophony of warning bells, are ringing the changes of public revolt. With any luck, the deafness of the international elite may in good time force a global social revolution. This is why the left should keep an open mind both about the limitations of these disgruntled popular forces and their potential for radicalization as a result of repeated frustration to effect change.

The elite are shaken

As the one percent of ruling elite well understands, Trump’s victory signals the rejection of their policies. This week’s issue of The Economist is devoted to Trump’s “stunning victory” and to what it means for the world economy and corporate America, “now that the old certainties are gone” (emphasis mine).

Trump’s election reveals, in the first place, the extent of the public’s animosity toward globalization. Though they may not yet understand it as the re-colonization of the world, the people certainly feel its material effects and resent being its losers. The trade pacts, which Trump so cleverly and justifiably denounced, have benefitted no one but the corporations and the [indebted] consumers.

In the second place, Trump’s election has tapped into the public weariness of the endless wars, though not in the spirit of international solidarity or appeals to pacifism. He is definitely not a socialist.  His appeal is nationalist, in the “isolationist” tradition—not an innovative perspective.

Instead of denouncing militarism (he expressed support for the galactic size of the defense budget), Trump has fueled resentment of allies in military alliances (NATO, specifically) as “free-loaders,” ignoring the fact that these military alliances do not serve any other interests than the interests of the US.

Nevertheless, to the elite this change of course from intervention to retrenchment presents an unwelcome shake-up, especially since it bodes a foreign policy of detachment, including relinquishing the aggressive face-off with Russia and China.

In the third place, Trump’s invidious stance on immigration—not different de facto from Obama’s—drives Trump to emphasize “sovereignty” (“got to have a country, people”), a most unwelcome word to the architects of invasions and regime change. It is understood by them that there is only one sovereignty, the sovereignty of international capital in a borderless world. That Trump advocates pulling back from wars and regime change and making the US an isolated national fortress goes against everything they have sought to achieve.

In sum, Trump’s presidency bodes a return to tariffs and protectionism, a more restrained military posture, and a curb on the movement of labor. Less a political “revolution” than a change of course back to the 1840s’ populism of the unpleasant Andrew Jackson, who was hardly a man of peace or of social justice. Not much in it for left hopefuls except for the significant factor that popular rage has driven the change. Undeniably, Trump’s election is the working class’ payback for the elite’s betrayal and damage during over four decades of undeclared but effective class war.

It is doubtful that Trump will achieve much of his isolationist agenda, though he will have to make some concessions to the popular expectations of attenuating and even reversing neoliberal choices, as the conservative government of Theresa May is having to do in Britain.

In the US, as in Europe, the social structure has come under pressure, and the neoliberal regime feels threatened and insecure.

Regime change and its terrors

In the first hours and days after Trump’s election, the Western media—just as it did with Brexit—was disguising the elites’ terror at the looming regime change and their horror at the prospect of seeing the “free hand” in handcuffs as a moral revulsion at the arrival in the White House of a tribe of primitive white-trash rude-necks, straight out of the racist “populism” of the 1920s’ Ku Klux Klan, fueling public hysteria with hyperbole and sensationalism.

The headlines in The Guardian on Thursday morning after the US election read like tabloids from the gutter press.

“Mourning in America: Will Trump Destroy the Country?’

“I think he’s a damaged person”

“A night of shattered dreams”

“Transgender Americans fear for safety after Trump win: ‘We are traumatized.’”

“The first black American president will now be succeeded by a man endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. This, according to Trump and his supporters, male and female, is what the American dream actually looks like.”

“Misogyny won the US election – let’s stop indulging angry white men.”

“Forget angry white men – white women pushed Trump to victory”

Gloria Steinem’s article in the same Guardian blames it all on “white-lash and man-lash,” even though fifty-three percent of white women voted for Trump, but some of these women have no college degree, so they probably don’t count.

For Steinem, it was the exceptional quality of Clinton’s character that lost her her chance. She was too good, too full of integrity, too devoted to women’s rights, too un-conniving to break through the highest of the glass ceilings.

She hoped but never expected her to win:

“If a first female president were someone like, say, Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, or another woman who knew how to play the game and win, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But Hillary Clinton didn’t just play the game; she changed the rules. She insisted that women’s rights are human rights, that women can decide the fate of our own bodies, that workers of all races should get paid the same as white men for the same work.”

Steinem’s plaintive hagiographic obituary of Clinton’s defeat omits mentioning that Clinton opposed raising the minimum wage of Haitian workers to 62 cents per hour because it would have lowered the profits of American corporations, exploiting the poorest of the poor there.

It must be difficult for a feminist Democrat to mention Haiti and Clinton Foundation in the same breath, for the racist and sexist profiteering of Bill and Hillary is most nakedly documented there. Its account can be read here.

As to evaluating character, it’s been a long time apparently since Steinem read Virginia Woolf’s idea of a feminist: “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.” (A Room of One’s Own).

These are not the virtues usually associated with the bellicose, corrupt, and ruthlessly ambitious Clinton, even if one refrains from calling her the Butcher of Libya and the Wrath of Honduras, her legacy as Secretary of State.

Clinton incarnates the most ferocious interests of international financial capital and of the high-tech industries that feed the military-industrial complex and the global surveillance system.

So, Gloria, yours is stupid stuff. If feminism is not about the pursuit of peace, it is simply the female version of patriarchal exploitation and opportunism. Weep not that she lost; weep that feminism has sunk so low as to celebrate in her person anti-feminist qualities such as ambition, careerism, competition, imperialism, and warmongering.

Such feminism has lost the moral ground to accuse anyone of sexism, let alone the people who voted for Trump.

It is now evident that identity politics, the mantra of race and gender, has been cultivated by the neoliberal order to obscure the category of class, while actually waging class war, and to relegate the working poor to the realm of the unmentionable.

Under worsening economic conditions, masses of the alienated have perceived their alienation. This is happening all over the neoliberally ravaged world.  To side with the elite against the rage of the people is madness. Worse, it is to alienate the people further to the right in a classic social dynamic that, under severe conditions, delivers full-blown fascism.

So This Is How The US ‘Revolution’ Will Unfold

Dan Glazebrook

In late 2012, Peter Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut made a startling claim. Based on an analysis of revolutionary upheavals across history, he found that there were 3 social conditions in place shortly before all major outbreaks of social violence: an increase in the elite population; a decrease in the living standards of the masses; and huge levels of government indebtedness. The statistical model his team developed suggested that, on this basis, a major wave of social upheaval and revolutionary violence is set to take place in the US in 2020. His model had no way to predict who would lead the charge; but this week’s election gives an indication of how it is likely to unfold.

Let’s take the first condition, which Turchin calls “elite overproduction”, defined as “an increased number of aspirants for the limited supply of elite positions”. The US has clearly been heading in this direction for some time, with the number of billionairres increasing more than tenfold from 1987 (41 billionairres) to 2012 (425 billionairres). But the ruling class split between, for example, industrialists and financiers, has apparently reached fever pitch with Trump vs Clinton. As Turchin explains, “increased intra-elite competition leads to the formation of rival patronage networks vying for state rewards. As a result, elites become riven by increasing rivalry and factionalism.” Indeed, based on analysis of thousands of incidents of civil violence across world history, Turchin concluded that “the most reliable predictor of state collapse and high political instability was elite overproduction”.

The second condition, popular immiseration, is also well advanced. 46 million US citizens live in poverty (defined as receiving an income less than is required to cover their basic needs), whilst over 12 million US households are now considered food insecure. Whilst this figure has been coming down consistently since 2011 (when it reached over 15 million), it remains above its pre-recession (per-2007) levels. Trump’s policies are likely to sharply reverse this decrease. Trump’s second promise in his ‘contract with voters’ is a “hiring freeze on all federal employees”, amounting to a new onslaught on public sector jobs. This is in addition to what seems to be a promise to end the direct funding of state education (to, in his words, “redirect education dollars to…parents”), and to end all federal funding to so-called ‘sanctuary cities’, that is cities which do not order the state harassment of immigrants or force employers to reveal the nationalities of their workers. These cities are some of the most populated in the country, including NYC, LA, Dallas, Minneapolis and over two dozen others.

In concert with his avowed intention to lower taxes on the wealthy, including slashing business tax from 35 to 15%; to smash hard fought workers’ rights (under the mantra of ‘deregulation’); and to scrap what little access to healthcare was made available to the poor throgh Obamacare – not to mention his threat to start a trade war with China – poverty looks set to skyrocket. It is not hard to see how social unrest will follow.

As for the third condition – government indebtedness – it is hard to see how the massive tax breaks Trump has proposed can lead to anything else.

Turchin writes that “As all these trends intensify, the end result is state fiscal crisis and bankruptcy and consequent loss of the military control; elite movements of regional and national rebellion; and a combination of elite-mobilized and popular uprisings that manifest the breakdown of central authority.”

But Trump is also preparing for that. Exempt from his public spending cuts, of course, are police and military budgets, both of which he promises to increase. And when questioned on the issue of police brutality last year, Trump said he wanted to see the police be given more powers. In other words, the tacit impunity which currently exists for police violence looks set to be legalised. And history shows that there is nothing like police impunity to spark a riot.

Meanwhile, as his policies fail to deliver the land of milk and honey he has promised, the demonisation of scapegoats will continue. Having already vowed to round up and deport two million immigrants, and to ban Muslims from entering the US, it is already clear who these scapegoats will be. However, as well as migrants, popular anger will also be directed towards whatever namby-pamby liberals have blocked him from waging his promised war against them: be it Congressmen, judges, trade unions, pressure groups, or whoever. A combination of increased executive powers plus the use of his newly mobilised mass constituency will be directed towards purging these ‘enemies within’.

“My model suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970” says Turhcin, “because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time”. All that remains to be seen is – who will win.

Australian government mounts attack on Human Rights Commission

Peter Symonds

Over the past week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National Coalition have used the outcome of a case under the Racial Discrimination Act to mount a vicious attack on the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and its president Gillian Triggs. In a cynical attempt to divert attention from the ongoing crisis within the government’s ranks, they have launched a phony “freedom of speech” crusade against the Act.

Under section 18C of the Act, it is unlawful to do anything that is reasonably likely “to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or group of people” because of their “race, colour or national or ethnic origin.” On Friday last week, the Federal Circuit Court threw out a long-running case against the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and three ex-students who had allegedly contravened that section.

The QUT case underscored the anti-democratic character of the Act’s provisions that were being used to sue the three students. Their allegedly “offensive” behaviour consisted in posting Facebook posts expressing their objection to being asked to leave a computer lab reserved for indigenous students. The staff member in charge at the time, Cindy Prior, initiated a formal complaint with the HRC over the Facebook posts, one of which declared: “QUT stopping segregation with segregation?” When no resolution of the complaint was reached within the HRC, Prior took it to the court, seeking $250,000 in damages from the university and the students.

Turnbull, backed to the hilt by the Murdoch media, is now engaged in a frontal assault on the HRC, accusing it of “bringing” the legal case to court. In an extraordinary attack, he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Monday: “What the judge was saying to the Human Rights Commission is, ‘You’ve been wasting the court’s time. You’ve been wasting government money.”

Triggs replied on the ABC’s “7.30” program last Monday, explaining that her commission did not bring the case to court, but rather carried out its remit, which was to attempt to conciliate the complaint in an effort to prevent it from becoming a legal battle. She said the Act set a “low threshold” on accepting a complaint and, if that threshold were met, the commission was obligated to investigate and seek to conciliate the parties. In the event that no agreement was reached, either party could take it to court.

Undeterred, the Coalition government ramped up the pressure, announcing on Tuesday a joint parliamentary inquiry into the HRC that would examine its procedures and consider amendments to the Act.

Amending or removing section 18C has been a hobby horse of the Coalition’s right wing ever since 2011, when Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt was found guilty of racial vilification for having accused “fair-skinned” Aborigines of taking advantage of indigenous programs.

Last month, before the QUT judgment, the Murdoch media found another martyr for the cause, after complaints were lodged under 18C against cartoonist Bill Leak, who had depicted an Aboriginal father, holding a beer and unable to remember his son’s name when told by police to control him. The cartoon was clearly a political dog whistle to racist sentiment that Aborigines are drunks who cannot care for their children.

In waging their campaign against the HRC and 18C, the government and its media allies are posturing as defenders of free speech. This is a sham, and no one should be taken in by it. In the first place, their aim is not to uphold the democratic right to freedom of speech for all, but to selectively remove any legal obstacle to the inflammatory rants of commentators like Bolt and their open whipping up of racism and xenophobia.

Successive governments, Coalition and Labor alike, have made deep inroads into basic democratic rights under the reactionary banners of the “war on terror” and “border protection.” The government ministers and media hacks now parading as defenders of the right to “free speech,” have themselves backed legislation that severely curtails that basic right.

* In May 2015, the Coalition government passed the Border Force Act, with Labor’s support, that made it a crime, punishable by two years in prison, for doctors, nurses and other professionals working inside Australia’s offshore detention camps in Nauru and Manus Island to divulge information about the horrendous conditions facing refugees in these far-flung hell-holes.

* In late 2014, the Coalition, with Labor’s backing, enacted a new power to jail whistle-blowers for up to 10 years for revealing information concerning anything that the attorney-general had unilaterally deemed a “special intelligence operation.”

* Under the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) passed in November 2014 with bipartisan backing, anyone can be jailed for five years, or groups can be outlawed, for advocating “terrorism,” even if no terrorist act actually occurs. “Terrorism” is so vaguely defined that it potentially allows for the prosecution of opponents and critics of the illegal US-led wars in the Middle East.

Such laws are only possible because Australia has no bill of rights or constitutional guarantee of free speech or of other fundamental democratic rights. Moreover, the High Court, Australia’s supreme court, has, in recent years, eviscerated the limited right to freedom of political communication that the court’s judges had previously found to be implied by the country’s 1901 colonial-era constitution.

Moreover, successive Coalition and Labor governments have joined the US-led persecution of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for the “crime” of exposing the diplomatic intrigues, provocations, human rights abuses and war crimes of American imperialism and its allies, including Australia. In the case of Assange, Canberra refused to take the most elementary steps to protect the rights of an Australian citizen.

The current witch hunt against the HRC is particularly aimed at Triggs, who has already come under intense pressure to resign after criticising the government over its flouting of international refugee law. It was launched just weeks after Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson resigned in protest against the government’s attempt to muzzle him. These attacks underscore the increasingly lawless character of the government and its determination to free itself from the formal strictures of official departments and bodies.

The broad scope of the campaign against the HRC was highlighted in a comment in Murdoch’s Australian last Monday by right-wing commentator Jennifer Oriel. Taking her cue from US presidential candidate Donald Trump, she declared it was time to drain the “swamp” of the “human rights industry.” Oriel not only called for the repeal of section 18C and the dismantling of the HRC, but also of the state Discrimination and Equal Opportunity Commission, arguing that “the Australian people cannot afford the vast system of activism swamping taxpayer-funded minority groups, media, academe and the law.”

Like Trump, Oriel and the Murdoch media are making a pitch to wide layers of the population whose lives are dominated by the insecurities and distress caused by unemployment, low wages, casual jobs, poverty and the lack of decent health and education services, and seeking to divert their hostility to official politics into a reactionary direction. At the same time, those who defend section 18C and the Racial Discrimination Act—the Labor Party, the Greens, ethnic and legal organisations, and the various pseudo-left organisations—promote the divisive politics of identity based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference in order to weaken and divide the working class, and suppress the class nature of the ever-widening social divide.

The social base for identity politics lies in layers of the upper middle class for whom the mechanisms of “positive discrimination,” based on gender and race, have been a useful lever for advancing their careers in academia, the media, the state apparatus and party politics. As the social crisis facing working people has intensified following the 2008-09 global economic breakdown, identity politics has been increasingly promoted to block a unified movement of the working class to defend its common interests against the profit system.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) opposes the Racial Discrimination Act.  In unequivocally defending the basic democratic right to free speech for all, the SEP opposes the Act from the left, not from the right. We have nothing in common with the fraudulent posturing of the Turnbull government and its media allies as proponents of free speech, even as they enact laws to muzzle their critics and opponents.

Freedom of speech is not something that can be applied selectively, according to whether one agrees or disagrees with the views being advanced.

That is why, in 2011, the SEP opposed all those—Labor, the Greens and the pseudo-lefts—who cheered the conviction of the right-winger Bolt as a “victory” in the struggle against racism. We insisted that the working class could not cede the fight against racism and xenophobia to the capitalist state—its courts, laws and police—which was itself established on the basis of the genocide of Aborigines and has played the central role in promoting racism ever since, including through the “White Australia Policy,” which operated for more than 60 years.

The SEP warns that while Section 18C is being invoked today against right wingers such as Bolt and Leek, their cases will be utilised in the future as precedents to silence socialist opponents of the political establishment. Under conditions of mounting political economic and social crisis, the ruling elites will not hesitate to exploit the entire battery of anti-democratic laws, developed as part of the “war on terror,” to suppress the emerging opposition and political radicalisation of millions of ordinary workers and youth.

Australian government unveils brutal refugee deal with the US

Max Newman

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday announced a one-off “resettlement” deal with the United States that will forcibly remove to the US some of the 2,200 refugees who have rotted since 2013 in Australia’s prison camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

At a media conference in the government’s Maritime Border Command headquarters, Turnbull declared that Australia’s naval “Operation Sovereign Borders,” which organises the interception and turn back of refugee boats, would be boosted to its highest-ever level.

In return for taking a limited number of heavily-vetted asylum seekers, the Obama administration will deport to Australia some Central American refugees currently languishing in camps in Costa Rica, having been denied entry to the US. On both sides of the Pacific, some of the world’s most vulnerable people will be denied the basic right to seek protection, while many will face permanent separation from their families.

Far from alleviating the horrors produced by Australia’s “offshore” detention regime, the new deal will see hundreds of families split up forever, with many detainees, especially single men, unable to reunite with their spouses and children in Australia. It represents an escalation of the anti-asylum seeker policies being enforced worldwide in the face of the greatest refugee crisis since World War II, and further undermines the 1951 Refugee Convention, which recognised a right to seek asylum without being punished, or deported, for doing so.

Globally, more than 60 million refugees have fled their countries, mostly because of the criminal wars launched by the US and its allies, including Australia, in the Middle East.

At the media conference, where Turnbull and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton were flanked by four military, naval, “border protection” and police chiefs, the prime minister boasted that his Liberal-National Coalition government had “put in place the largest and most capable maritime surveillance and response fleet Australia has ever deployed.”

No details of the US agreement were disclosed, but Turnbull emphasised that it would apply only to detainees who were classified as refugees under the narrow official test, and to those currently held in the camps. All those excluded—either arbitrarily denied refugee status or already “resettled” in Nauru or Papua New Guinea—will remain indefinitely in limbo.

On Manus Island there have been 675 “positive refugee determinations” out of 1,015 single male detainees; on Nauru there have been 941 out of 1,195 men, women and children. More than 800 of the officially-designated refugees have been supposedly “resettled” in Nauru or PNG. Most of them are from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iraq, while others are stateless.

Not one extra asylum seeker will receive protection as a result of the swap deal. Turnbull stressed that the arrangement would result in no increase in the annual US refugee quota. Nor will there be any increase in Australia’s intake as a result of the Costa Rica plan, which Turnbull initially revealed in September.

No timeframe has been placed on when the transfers will occur. Turnbull declared they would be conducted in an “orderly” fashion. This could last many months. US Homeland Security officials will screen the refugees, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) providing a fig leaf of legitimacy to the process by selecting those to be “considered” by the US.

Some of the media commentary has focussed on whether the incoming Trump administration will honour the pact. The forced removal of refugees from Costa Rica to Australia, however, is in line with Washington’s own anti-refugee policy, under which the Obama administration has deported more than 800,000 people, including more than 40,000 children.

“Australia’s border protection policy has not changed,” Turnbull emphasised. “It is resolute, it is unequivocal.” He insisted that an essential component of the arrangement was the proposed lifetime ban on all refugees who attempted to come to Australia by boat. The government is intent on pushing that legislation through parliament by making it a precondition for the refugee swap.

To underscore the coercive nature of the plan, Dutton insisted that the Nauru detention camp would remain open “forever” and that detainees who refused to go to the US, or return to the countries they fled, would instead be handed a 20-year Nauruan visa, leaving them stranded on the tiny Pacific island without any support or aid whatsoever.

These comments come after multiple revelations of extreme abuse inflicted on those inside Australia’s refugee camps. In the past four months alone, there has been a leaked cache of over 2,000 incident reports from Nauru revealing the abuses inside; an Amnesty International report indicting the Australian government for torture of refugees; and a United Nations committee report detailing the profound mental health effects on those inside the camps, particularly children.

Despite the reactionary precedent set by the deal, numbers of refugee organisations have applauded it, claiming it will end offshore detention. Likewise, Labor Party opposition leader Bill Shorten embraced the agreement and reiterated that Labor was on a “unity ticket” with the government in relation to refugee policy. Shorten even chided the Coalition for blocking a similar plan, concocted by the Gillard Labor government in 2011, to dump asylum seekers in Malaysia.

The Greens, who posture as defenders of refugees, also welcomed the swap deal, only complaining of the lack of details. The party’s immigration spokesman, Senator Nick McKim, said: “After three years, the government has finally admitted that offshore detention is a dead-end.” This is totally false. In the course of their press conference Turnbull and Dutton made unambiguously clear that their Liberal-National government would maintain the detention regime, which was reinstituted by the former Greens-backed minority Labor government in 2013.

The plan will conveniently elevate Australia’s military presence in the region, just as Washington pushes for a more frontline role by Canberra in the US “pivot” to Asia and its confrontation with China.

No information was provided at the media conference about the scale of the “border protection” military escalation, only that Australia would have more “assets” at sea and aerial surveillance than during any “peacetime” in history. The military and police chiefs warned of the “large threat” to Australia that would be caused by small leaky boats filled with people fleeing for their lives, and said the armed forces were ready for “any contingency.”

Turnbull repeated the hypocritical claim, echoed by Labor, that permanently shutting the borders to refugees was aimed at preventing asylum seekers from dying on perilous journeys at sea. The truth is that thousands of desperate refugees are dying around the world, precisely because of the refusal of Western governments to provide them with safe passage. No doubt, this toll is continuing in the waters to Australia’s north, but being shrouded by a government-mandated blanket of military secrecy.

Successive Australia governments have used fraudulent “concerns” about “deaths at sea” as a central plank in their criminal policies aimed at deterring refugees. The most notorious example was the October 2001 SIEV X tragedy in which 353 refugees drowned in Australian-surveilled waters. Both the Howard Coalition government and the Labor opposition of the day cynically seized upon their deaths to warn other intending asylum seekers of a similar fate.

Irish ruling elite in deep crisis over Brexit

Steve James

The British decision, June 23, to leave the European Union (EU), simultaneous with damaging tax rulings, has raised broad concerns for the future of Ireland’s low-tax investment strategy and the entire basis of the Irish economy.

Brexit also raises the possible imposition of a “hard” border or passport controls between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It threatens the Common Travel Area, first agreed in 1923, under which there are 30,000 border crossings a day.

Ireland joined the European Economic Community (EEC), forerunner to the EU, on the same day as Britain in 1973, following an 83 percent majority vote the previous year. Membership allowed the Irish bourgeoisie to exploit the republic’s endemic poverty to provide a low-wage, English-speaking workforce to primarily US-owned transnational corporations seeking access to the European market. On this basis Ireland became known, prior to the 2008 meltdown of its banking sector, as the “Celtic Tiger,” with annual growth rates above 10 percent.

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial collapse, the Irish government imposed billions of euros of austerity measures on the working class, at the behest of the EU-led “troika.” Over the same period, British and Irish membership of the European trading bloc allowed tariff free export of a large volume of Irish agricultural products to Britain. Overall trade between Ireland and Britain amounts to more than €1 billion a week.

Large European subsidies also provided a steady funding stream towards infrastructure projects, to cross border bodies and agriculture.

Both these pillars of the Irish economy are collapsing. Earlier this year, the European Commission demanded that the Irish government collect some €11 billion due in back taxes and up to a further €6 billion in interest from the US tech giant Apple. The ruling followed similar European moves against Starbucks and Amazon and expressed sharply deepening transatlantic tensions. These are likely to escalate following the election of Donald Trump as US president.

In response, last week Ireland’s Fine Gael Finance Minister Michael Noonan formally launched an appeal in defence of the right not to tax the world’s richest corporations. Noonan said he intended “to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.”

The immediate consequence of the Brexit decision, however, is the fall in the value of the British pound against the euro. This has already caused a sharp crisis for Irish agriculture, long before the British government has taken any formal step to trigger the Article 50 EU exit process. Sterling has declined against the euro by nearly 15 percent since June 23, from €1.31 to €1.15 with a comparable increase in the price of Irish exports to Britain. Of €11 billion in food exports from the republic, some €4.4 billion is directed towards Britain; 230,000 workers are employed in the industry.

In October, two former holders of the office of Taoiseach (Irish premier), John Bruton and Bertie Ahern, gave evidence at a House of Lords select committee in Westminster. Bruton, once leader of Fine Gael, warned that Brexit threatened to disrupt the food processing industry that operates across the Northern Ireland border. Thirty percent of milk produced in the North is processed in the South, while 40 percent of chicken produced in the North is consumed in the South. Brexit will require some form of tariff reckoning on all such transactions.

According to Ahern, a senior figure in Fianna Fail, the British-based supermarket chain Tesco obtains 60 percent of its cheese and 84 percent of its chicken produce from Ireland. The Guardian reported that one in 10 of Ireland’s mushroom farmers had gone into bankruptcy post-Brexit. Representatives of the Irish meat industry warned that a post-Brexit Britain might strike a trade deal with rivals such as Brazil, which would further undercut the Irish position. A recent survey by the Dublin-based Economic and Social Research Institute reckoned that over 10 years, the impact of Brexit would cause a drop in Irish output of between 2.3 and 3.8 percent.

Around 300 attended a conference of an All-island Civic Dialogue in early November. The conference, initiated by current Taoiseach Enda Kenny to discuss the implications of the Brexit crisis, brought together employers, trade unions, non-governmental organisations and most of the major parties on both sides of the border.

The conference followed the rejection of a legal challenge against Brexit by the High Court in Belfast. Two challenges were made in separate proceedings. One was by a cross-party group of Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and another was by a citizen, Raymond McCord, whose son was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries. The basis of the challenge was a position that Northern Ireland should be able to veto any change to its constitutional position as a devolved government and the arrangements in the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement.

On October 28, a High Court judge ruled there was nothing in the Good Friday Agreement to prevent the government triggering Article 50. McCord said he would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

Kenny opened the all-island conference, stating that Brexit “presents the most significant economic and social challenge of the past 50 years.” He reiterated his aspiration to avoid a “hard” border, but warned the problems this might face because “there are those around the European table that take a very poor view of the fact that Britain has decided to leave.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams called for some form of special status for Northern Ireland that would avoid border controls. According to Adams, the Irish government “as a continuing member of the EU, has the right, and in our view the obligation to bring forward such a proposal.”

The conference was boycotted by Northern Ireland’s Ulster Unionists, which was in favour of Remain, and the pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Northern Ireland First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster denounced the conference as full of “grandstanding remoaners.” A majority of the population of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU by a margin of 56 to 44. Foster complained the Irish government was exaggerating the uncertainty around Brexit to “poach” investors from the North.

Contradicting Foster, the head of the Northern Ireland Confederation of British Industry complained that Northern Ireland was particularly vulnerable because its businesses were generally quite small, and traded heavily with the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland is annually in receipt of around £260 million in EU farm subsidies.

On Friday Fine Gael’s Joe McHugh, the republic’s minister for the diaspora and international development, stated his opposition to moves by Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to thwart Brexit. Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party government is opposed to Brexit on the basis that it threatens access to the EU Single Market. To this end, Sturgeon has held talks with representatives from Germany, France and other EU nations.

McHugh said talks over Brexit involving the devolved governments of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland had to take place under the auspices of Westminster. Speaking to Scottish daily the Herald, he said, “It’s a UK Government position and what I like about their approach is they’re looking to involve the devolved assemblies. I think that’s important. They’re already doing it, it’s already happening.”

Last week Sturgeon confirmed that the Scottish government is joining legal action on the side of those opposing May’s plan to trigger Article 50 by the end of March. On December 5, a Supreme Court panel of 11 senior judges will hear an appeal by May’s government to this month’s ruling by the High Court that she did not have the legal right to bypass Parliament.

French government creates illegal database on over 60 million citizens

Anthony Torres

By setting up a single database centralizing information on the entire French population behind their backs, France’s Socialist Party (PS) government is giving the state vast repressive powers. Coming amid the state of emergency, it constitutes a fundamental threat to democratic rights, in particular to opposition within the working class to austerity and war.

The database, named “Secure Electronic Titles” (TES), was decreed into existence on October 30. It centralizes the personal and bio-metric data of all holders of passports or national identity cards. It concerns over 60 million people, that is, virtually the entire French population. The official launch of the database took place last Tuesday in the Yvelines area and will be extended across France at the beginning of 2017.

The database was prepared in violation of the law, behind the backs of the population. It was first proposed in 2011 at the National Assembly, during a debate on a secure national ID card, and sharply criticized by the National Commission on Information-Processing and Liberties (CNIL). While recognizing as “legitimate the use of bio-metric information to identify a person,” the CNIL ruled that “bio-metric data must be conserved in an individualized data system.”

The new TES replaces and combines a former TES, which contained passport data, and the National Management Database (FNG), which contained ID card data. It also adds data, including a digital photo of the face, fingerprints, eye data, and physical and electronic addresses. These data are conserved for 15 years (for passports) and 20 years (for ID cards).

The TES database violates legal limits on the use of bio-metric data, moreover, since fingerprints and retina scans are indelible and can be used to remotely identify individuals, and not simply authenticate that an individual presenting himself to the state indeed is who he purports to be. In 2012, the Constitutional Council invalidated an attempt to set up a similar database, ruling that such a database would serve not only to authenticate but also to identify individuals.

Thus, by creating the TES database, the PS government of President François Hollande trampled the recommendations of the CNIL and the Constitutional Council’s veto in 2012.

Having created the TES by decree, the government will find it easy to modify its functioning to increase its powers, as was the case for the national DNA database. According to Guillaume Desgens-Pasanau, a magistrate and lecturer and the National Conservatory of Arts and Professions (CNAM), “once the database of 60 million people is there, one can easily add a search function, for instance. It is quite easy, as it is regulated via a decree and therefore does not require new legislation.”

Beyond the risk that TES data could be pirated, the police, gendarmerie, customs and the intelligence services, as well as Interpol, will have access to tools that reinforce pre-existing surveillance infrastructure.

Speaking to Agence France-Presse (AFP), CNIL President Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin described her concerns regarding the TES: “It is very clear that we are not dealing with a database whose ultimate goal is to struggle against identity theft … This large-scale mechanism raises fears that it can be used for other purposes, not today, but in the coming period.”

The attacks on democratic rights, the police-state measures, and the pervasive domestic spying set up by the Hollande administration constitute an immense danger for the working class. A government even further to the right than the PS, armed with such powerful surveillance tools, could easily go even further than Hollande in repressing workers’ opposition to austerity and war.

The creation of the TES database is part of a far broader installation of a police state by Hollande after the November 13 terror attacks, committed by Islamist networks mobilized by the NATO powers in their war for regime change in Syria.

Police repression of protests against the PS’ deeply regressive labor law, a few months after the imposition of the state of emergency, exposed the more fundamental objectives of the police state crackdown. Hollande used a vast police deployment to detain hundreds of youth, intimidate high school and university student protesters, and physically crush strikes against his anti-worker policies.

The state of emergency went hand in hand with stepped-up attacks by the PS against Muslims and immigrants, with raids on hundreds of predominantly Muslim families in working class areas.

The collection of physical information as well as data on people’s political opinions is aimed at allowing police and intelligence agencies to identify and track existing and potential opponents of state policy. The AGDREF-2 database, which contains bio-metric data, including all ten fingerprints for 7 million non-citizens residing legally or illegally in France, can also be used to identify individuals.

Given the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim statements from both official and far-right circles, such a database could serve to identify and deport via detention camps immigrants and Muslims—a possibility mooted by far-right journalist Eric Zemmour after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

These are all indications that the TES database is part of a broad construction of a police state in France, aiming to crush working class opposition to the austerity and war policies advanced by the PS. This has been broadly discussed in the ruling class and state circles in the European Union (EU).

Writing for the EU Institute for Security Studies, Thomas Ries, the leader of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, called for the growing recourse to military means in dealing with social problems: “…the percentage of the population who were poor and frustrated would continue to be very high, the tensions between this world and the world of the rich would continue to increase, with corresponding consequences. Since we will hardly be able to overcome the origin of this problem by 2020, i.e., the functional defects of society, we will have to protect ourselves more strongly.”

This points to the deep crisis of capitalist rule, as the ruling class attacks fundamental democratic rights to confront rising social tensions and working class anger against war and social inequality.

German parliament backs extension of military operations in Iraq and Syria

Justus Leicht

With the votes of the governing coalition of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), the German parliament last week approved an extension of the country’s military missions in Iraq and Syria. This involves the continuing participation of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) in combat missions as part of the so-called Anti-IS Coalition with other Western countries and regional governments in the Middle East.

The motion introduced by the government permits the dispatch of up to 1,200 soldiers, reconnaissance Tornados, tanker aircraft and a naval vessel until December 31, 2017. The “mission-related additional costs” alone for the German military forces will amount to about €133.6 million.

The list of tasks is long: it includes “logistics support through aerial refuelling”; “escort and security of the naval force”; “sea and air surveillance”; “the exchange and comparison of situational information with other actors in the international anti-IS coalition”; “the carrying out of liaison, advisory and support tasks for the HQs of the multinational partners” and “ensuring the management, linking, protection and support tasks for implementing the deployment of German forces”.

German soldiers will be deployed on NATO AWACS reconnaissance missions, which fly from Turkey into international airspace over the Mediterranean to gather intelligence on the situation in the region. The planes start out from the Konya base in south Turkey. The Bundeswehr is providing about one-third of the AWACS personnel for NATO.

In total, there are currently about 500 German soldiers deployed in the anti-IS operations. Most of them are stationed at the Incirlik base in Turkey, from where they launch Tornado fighter aircraft on reconnaissance flights over Syria and Iraq, providing target data for the bombing missions carried out by the coalition. In addition, a German air tanker is used to supply Bundeswehr and allied planes. German soldiers serving aboard the frigate Augsburg are tasked with accompanying and protecting the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean.

The size of the mission area is worth noting. “The deployment of German armed forces takes place primarily in and over the area of operations of the terrorist organization IS in Syria, on the territorial area of neighbouring countries, whose respective governments have granted permission, as well as in the Eastern Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, Red Sea and adjacent sea areas”, according to the draft parliamentary motion.

In other words, German troops are involved in a comprehensive combat and war mission in the Middle East, which is escalating the attacks on the metropolis of Mosul in Iraq and the so-called “IS-capital” Raqqa in Syria. The forces deployed have been expressly granted the right to “use military force”.

Civilians have been repeatedly killed since the beginning of the German mission. This week, the US Army admitted that at least 64 civilians had been killed in 24 coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, between November 2015 and September 2016. The real number is far higher. At the end of October, Amnesty International published a report on 11 different attacks by the US-led coalition, in which a total of about 300 civilians were killed. Other observer groups calculate that well over a thousand deaths are due to Western bombing in Syria.

Last Thursday, Amnesty International accused the Iraqi security forces of having abused and killed civilians during their offensive in Mosul. According to information from the human rights group, the incidents occurred south of Mosul. Several residents of the liberated area were tied up or beaten with cables and rifle butts before some were shot. Some bodies were found mutilated or blindfolded.

The Bundeswehr is playing an important role in the battle for Mosul. In close proximity to the front, up to 150 German soldiers are training and arming Kurdish Peshmerga units, which are advancing from the north of the city. Germany has admitted to delivering more than 2,200 tonnes of arms, ammunition and other military equipment to the Iraqi Kurds since 2014. As early as last April, Amnesty International accused the Kurdish militias of having “looted, set on fire, blown up or destroyed by bulldozers … thousands of homes”.

Niels Annen, foreign policy spokesman of the SPD parliamentary group, who campaigned for the mandate on behalf of the government in parliament, nevertheless had the chutzpah to call the German war effort a “humanitarian contribution”.

He knew “no other European country, which had acted in such a way over the recent weeks and months so that the support for the already visible consequences of this offensive ... succeeded”, he added cynically. “Even in the preparation of this operation”, Germany had “helped, [so] that refugee facilities were built and that the means were there so that liberated areas had water, that there were health care provisions and that the infrastructure was restored”.

In reality, the Bundeswehr is not building up the “infrastructure” let alone “health care provisions”, but is spreading terror and chaos. This can be seen most clearly in Afghanistan, where the Bundeswehr has been active for 15 years. On Friday, a bomb was detonated in front of the German Consulate General in Mazar-i-Sharif, killing at least six people and injuring more than a hundred. The Taliban described the attack as retaliation for an airstrike by the Western occupation forces on November 3 in Kunduz, which cost the lives of at least 30 civilians, including many women and children.

The German forces are responding with brutal counter-violence. After the attack, the Quick Reaction Force was deployed, the NATO Response Force from the Resolute Support mission, which is run from the German field camp at Marmal outside the consulate. Shortly afterwards, German soldiers shot two Afghan motorcyclists who had approached the scene of the attack and who had allegedly not stopped when warned.

Instead of pausing and halting the madness of its missions abroad, Berlin is now using the election of the new American President Donald Trump as an excuse to push forward German militarism.

In his speech to parliament, Annen appealed, “I hope that the Bundestag will make it clear that our country, the Federal Republic of Germany, with the soldiers that we have sent, and with the skills that we want to provide [ ...] is regarded as part of the coalition, that we take responsibility and—particularly in view of the election in the United States and the uncertainty that this election result has caused—that we want to be seen as a reliable partner. This is more important than ever”.

For tactical reasons, the Greens and Left Party voted against the motion, but agree with the call for a more independent German foreign and military policy. For example, on election night, the Left Party representative in the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, Stefan Liebich, cheered the prospect of a more aggressive German great power politics.

Germany and Europe must “act more strongly, more independently, more self-assuredly in future foreign policy”, said Liebich. The times in which we oriented ourselves to the US were now over. “The task now is to strengthen European foreign and security policy. ... We will in future say a louder and clearer No to what Washington wants. It’s now time to end the pussyfooting”.

This does not prevent the Left Party, when necessary, from working closely with the United States to enforce the economic and geo-strategic interests of Germany in the Middle East. On Friday, the pro-Left Party newspaper Neues Deutschland published a propaganda interview with the Peshmerga Brigadier General Hazhar Omar Ismail, “the first US-trained Kurdish military cadre”. In 2013, he “graduated from the Pennsylvania Military College”, notes the paper. Now he is closely coordinating the offensive against Mosul with the Western powers.

Trump victory batters emerging markets

Nick Beams

Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election lifted American stock markets on the back of the belief that financial deregulation and possible increased infrastructure and military spending could provide a profit boost. But it was a different story in “emerging” markets, where currency values have fallen and funds have been withdrawn.

According to the Institute for International Finance, emerging market stocks and bonds experienced a $2.4 billion outflow in the past week, most of it after the election.

Last Thursday, the iShares Emerging Markets’ exchanges traded fund suffered its worst single day of outflow since 2011, with more than $1.5 billion in withdrawals.

Latin America was particularly hard hit. Currencies fell sharply, led by a 12 percent decline in the value of the Mexican peso since the election, hitting a record low on Friday. The Brazilian real fell by 5.2 percent against the dollar on Thursday—its biggest single-day drop in five years.

The declines were not confined to that continent. The South African rand was down about 6 percent for the week. Indonesian stock markets fell 4 percent on Friday and the rupiah dropped by 2.7 percent, prompting an intervention by the country’s central bank.

Emerging market bond funds suffered their first outflow in four months and JPMorgan’s emerging market currency index experienced its worst week in three years. According to one financial analyst quoted by the Financial Times: “In just two days, half of the last six months’ gains have been given back.”

Asian bond markets were hit by a sell-off. Yields on 10-year government debt rose sharply in South Korea and Thailand. As with all fixed income debt, yields rise as the price of bonds falls. The yield on 10-year South African bonds rose to 9 percent, its highest level since September.

Several factors are driving the emerging market downturn. There is concern that Trump’s protectionist “America first” policies will have a significant impact on global supply chains. These fears are also reflected in US stock markets. The stocks of tech-based companies, which depend on cheap-labour countries for their business models, did not join last week’s rise on Wall Street.

Another major factor is the sharp rise in US bond yields which followed the Trump victory on the expectation that any infrastructure spending program, coupled with major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, will increase US government debt. The yield on 10 year-treasury bonds, considered to be a global benchmark, rose by 37 basis points (0.37 percentage points) last week to finish at 2.15 percent, the first time it has gone over 2 percent since the beginning of the year.

The prospect of higher yields in the US is attracting funds from emerging markets. According to Ashely Perrott, head of pan-Asia fixed income at UBS Asset Management in Singapore: “If [US] treasury yields continue to march higher, that will put pressure on emerging markets. What you think is an opportunity initially might turn into a regret.”

Rapid movements of funds out of emerging market debt back to the US could have major global ramifications. The Japanese financial firm Nomura noted that a move “meaningfully above” 2.25 percent in US 10-year treasuries in the short run “could result in a significant redemption flow… potentially triggering a broader risk-off event.” In other words, major outflows could bring about a rush for the exits, leading to global financial turbulence.

The International Monetary Fund has reported that world debt now stands at a record $152 trillion and warned that high debt levels in emerging markets could make them vulnerable to a reversal of capital flows.

No one has any clear idea of what specific measures a Trump administration will implement and whether they will get through the US Congress. But any policies that increase fiscal spending, at least in the short term, are likely to bring about higher inflation and will increase pressure on the US Federal Reserve to lift interest rates.

Whatever the medium-term outlook, there is a growing expectation that the US Fed will raise its base rate by 0.25 percent when it next meets in December.

That prospect appears to have strengthened on the back of remarks by Fed vice-chairman Stanley Fischer. Addressing a conference convened by the central bank of Chile, he said the Fed appeared to be reasonably close to achieving its objectives on inflation and employment and “the case for removing accommodation gradually is quite strong.”

Rising interest rates in the US will in turn bring about a stronger US dollar and a further fall in emerging market currency values, with consequences for emerging market dollar-denominated debt because the real value of that debt rises with every increase in the dollar. There was significant financial turbulence in January and February when the Fed raised rates by 0.25 percent last December, with global equity markets experiencing one of their worst starts to the year on record.

In the longer term, as the Financial Times noted, there is considerable scope for further rises in yield because outstanding US debts are twice what they were relative to gross domestic product when Reagan came to power in 1980s. Much of that increase has occurred in the recent period, with US debt almost doubling to $14 trillion since the global financial crisis of 2008.

The other longer-term factor that will impact not only on emerging markets but the world economy as a whole is the “America first” nationalism that forms the core of the Trump economic agenda.

In a research note on the impact of Trump’s policies, the US bank Citigroup said that while they might provide a short-term boost for the US economy, they could set off a disastrous global trade war.

“A US-led trade war is a material downside risk for the global economy, which could easily trigger a global recession. In our view, the election outcome significantly increases the risks around the global macroeconomic outlook, including for inflation, and future Fed policy,” it said.