Foreign Intervention in Venezuela is a Bad Idea

Camilo Gómez

Once the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela is suffering its worst ever economic crisis. Inflation is sky high, products of necessity like food aren’t available, and there are shortages of most medicines and medical supplies. Poverty is crushing large parts of the population, there is high malnutrition, and infant mortality is rising at dangerous rates. Given these conditions, it is not a surprise that Venezuela has become a common feature in international news.

Venezuela presence in the media started after the massive protests in different cities around the country that began in March of this year, since the Supreme Court of Venezuela released a decree to take the functions of the National Assembly of opposition majority which was considered a coup d’etat by the opposition. The death toll of the protests is 61 and, while there have deaths of protesters and security forces, the majority of the deaths come from those who’ve been victimized by state oppression. Many wonder how they can help Venezuelans: the crisis in Venezuela has created an immigration wave, with many people considering moving to other countries in Latin America, as well as the United States. There are a lot of Venezuelans from previous immigration waves who are helping their compatriots settle, but a large number of them don’t think they can return to their native country for a while. However, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times there is an offer of a strange kind of help: regime change. The article argues that the Venezuelan crisis is so severe the international community must take action first with humanitarian aid and, if needed, with action by the UN Security Council.

Since the Times is a liberal publication, unlike conservative and libertarian publications the author doesn’t mention the left-wing ideology of the Venezuelan government––perhaps to not explicitly label their critique as an anti-communist attack or to alienate progressive support. When the author starts talking about humanitarian aid it progresses to a confrontational take––the real goals of the author seems to be a foreign military intervention in Venezuela under the guise of humanitarian intervention. The author, Jared Genser, is a member of several human rights NGOs around the world. He may have good intentions, but when he mentions the UN Security Council he is not being honest. It is unlikely, given his background which includes law degree from Harvard, that he would be naive enough to think Russia and China are going to support crushing an ally like Venezuela. In reality, Genser is calling for an American military intervention.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, given the fact that neoconservatives and liberal interventionists often talk about the benefits of humanitarian intervention despite its inhumane consequences. There are three ideological groups in the US that have been against humanitarian intervention: libertarians argue against it, justifying their beliefs with the non-aggression principle. Paleoconservatives signal that true limited government should also include foreign policy, and radical leftists often ascribe to the idea that humanitarian interventions is just an excuse for American imperialism.

But not all the arguments are theoretical. In the 2008 book The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, a journalist and humanitarian aid worker, make the case against humanitarian intervention from his perspective as someone on the ground during several crises. In his experience, when humanitarian interventions take place, the consequences are very rarely anticipated––and in some cases, the problems become even worst. Plus he mentions that humanitarian interventions make more the labor of aid workers because a large part of the population identifies them as part of the occupying force. The worst thing about humanitarian intervention is that it invariably causes mass civilians casualties and harms the most vulnerable populations, such as women and children.

Even if a military intervention were successful in removing Maduro from office, that wouldn’t change the fact that now even civilians are armed in what are called Bolivarian militias. Maduro and Chávez warned Venezuelans for years that American imperialism wanted to plot a coup against them––if this became true, and the US invaded, the Bolivarian militias who are loyalists to Maduro would start a civil war.

Many people don’t see an end to Venezuela’s problems, but there are still some hope for change. The protests are  having an effect in the Venezuelan government. Luisa Ortega, the chief prosecutor of Venezuela, has becoming increasingly critical of the government to the point of speaking out against state repression at the protests. The convocation of Maduro for a National Constituent Assembly is a show of weakness and an attempt of legitimize his government. Even back in March, before the protests, the security firm Stratfor warned about a possible rebellion inside the military––and now, under public pressure, the same security firm points to a likely split between the military’s allegiances and Maduro.

If Maduro knows that he has lost the support of the military, he is going to end up calling for an election, which he would probably be unable to win––finally there would be a change. But this possibility would disappear if the US attempts to cause a military coup. In the short term, Maduro would be able to appeal to the patriotism among both the Venezuelan army and the population at large against a foreign enemy. Venezuela can have a transition if we trust the Venezuelan people. If America decides to intervene, though, the situation would become much worse.

The Truth About US Involvement in Syria

Robert Fisk

Somewhere over the Atlantic, I’ve always suspected, there’s a giant glass curtain through which Americans view the Middle East – through a glass darkly, perhaps – and which utterly distorts their vision.

Even when they arrive in the region to chat to their “moderate” friends, the Sunni Muslim head-choppers, dictators and torturers who are now enlisting a mad American President in their alliance against Shia Muslims, the Western visitors do no more than mouth their propaganda and agree with Sunni Gulf plans to annihilate Iran.

It’s not just the Washington crackpot himself. Take General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who is beginning to earn his sobriquet in his grasp of contemporary history, as well as the obscene comments which earned him his nickname during the illegal 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Emerging from his meeting with the Saudis, whose Wahhabi faith arguably inspires the horrific Isis cult, the US defence secretary told American journalists that “everywhere you look, if there’s trouble in the region, you find Iran”.

Incredibly, no American reporter took Mattis up on this gobbledygook – which is odd, because we all thought Isis was the problem.

Isn’t Mattis aware that his men are helping the Iraqi army and pro-Iranian Shia militia destroy Isis in Mosul? Isn’t he aware that Isis – not Iran – have threatened to destroy the entire Western world? Does he not realise that Iran is the sworn enemy of Isis?

Nope? Well, there’s the “Mad Dog” for you. Iran is Shia Muslim; Isis is Sunni Muslim; Saudi Arabia is Sunni Muslim. Ring any bells?

But I guess that’s just too complicated for Trump’s warrior chief. So let’s take a long, hard, gritty look at the reality, which eludes the whole Trump menagerie.

Let’s kick off with Syria, where (according to Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel and most of the pseudo-experts on Western television) Iran is in the process of taking control.

A reality check: most of the Syrians I meet in Assad regime-controlled territory: in Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, and a lot of the Syrian army, were grateful for Russia’s intervention – not just because it reversed the grave defeats of the government military forces, but because it counterbalanced Iran’s influence in their country.

Officially, the ruthless Syrian army counts Russia, Iran and the Hezbollah as its allies, which is why their flags fly together outside military headquarters in some Syrian cities.

But Syrian soldiers were not impressed by the few thousand Iranian forces – not 30,000, as the New York television mountebanks claim – who arrived to help them. Relations became even more fraught when Iran claimed that its forces had participated in the capture of eastern Aleppo last winter.

It was a lie. The Iranians invented this fact as surely as Trump invents facts in the Middle East. And the Syrians bitterly resented this dishonesty.

No Iranian forces took part in the December east Aleppo battles – despite what Tehran boasted – that almost at once led to allegations of rape carried out by Syria’s allies.

The rape claims were then directed at Iraqi Shia militias – which also, according to civilians in Aleppo (from both east and west), were not present in the battle.

In fact, Syrian troops whose families and homes were in eastern Aleppo were deliberately included in the attacking forces because they knew the roads and buildings. It’s unlikely they would have permitted Iranian or Iraqi or any other militias to have raped or mistreated their families.

There may well have been executions during the fighting (a war crime, make no mistake about it), but the “rape” of eastern Aleppo was a gross exaggeration, despite Iran’s lie which helped to spawn such stories in the first place.

Then there is the story, put about by Washington, that the Syrians and their Russian allies and the Iranians only fight the American-paid “moderate” – and largely mythical – opposition forces, and do not go into combat against al-Qaeda, Jabhat al Nusrah or Isis. This is nonsense.

I’ve been on the front lines when the Syrians were fighting Nusrah and al-Qaeda south of the Turkish frontier and north of Lattakia.

In a later struggle at the very same positions, all but one of the Syrian soldiers I interviewed (almost all of them Sunni Muslims, although we are supposed to believe that they are, like their president, Shia Alawites) were killed in a massive suicide bombing by Nusrah.

South of Qamishleh and in Palmyra and, most recently, east of Aleppo, I have seen Syrian troops in direct combat with Isis. When they recaptured Deir Hafer, 20 miles east of Aleppo, in April, I entered the town with the first Syrian soldiers. Isis had just fled for their lives under shellfire and air attack, leaving their infamous black flags, crucifixion posts, arms factories and black-painted Islamic courtrooms still intact.

And yet Washington still maintains that the Syrians don’t fight Isis.

The Paranoid Style of Counter-Terrorism

Ben Debney

One of the more notable characteristics of recent events in the United Kingdom has been a concerted refusal by those affected to give into the temptation to adopt a victim mentality. Mourners for the victims of the Manchester bombing stood around afterward singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ by Oasis; London mayor Sadiq Khan described recent terror attacks as “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

That this latter comment in particular precipitated a feud with Donald Trump, who interpreted it to mean that there was no reason for people to be alarmed, tells us much. Not only does it tell us much about the responses available to us in the wake of actual and perceived acts of terror, but also about the assumptions guiding the choices we make one way or the other.

For the last decade and a half, western leaders have been defiant in the face of the same kind of summary violence that the west has habitually visited on the Oriental other throughout history, insisting that terrorism ‘will not change us’ even as the world changes radically. Fear of outsiders and external threats precipitate hate crimes that spike with each violent incident, exploding into the occasional race riot such as at Cronulla. Such incidents are typically relegated to the memory hole by leaders preoccupied being defiant, in favour of talk about ‘our values.’

Militant ignorance of this kind refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of what Tony Abbott referred to as the ‘home team,’ or even the possibility that it is actually capable of doing anything wrong at all. This narcissistic mentality reaches its zenith in the person of Donald Trump, who in refusing to draw any distinction between being criticised and being attacked degenerates into what political scientist Richard Hofstadter referred to as the ‘Paranoid Style.’

The Paranoid Style, Hofstadter wrote, evoked ‘qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,’ and gave rise to ‘systematic delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness.’ This was, in large measure, what it was designed to do, acting as a kind of confirmation bias that that allowed those invoking it to dodge the entire issue of their own conduct and policies, and what role these might play in the emergence of undesirable consequences.

Insofar as this was the case then, the Paranoid Style was characteristically selfish, sacrificing any possibility of constructive resolution to social tensions to what was in essence a temper tantrum at the suggestion that one’s conduct might be anything less than saintly. Rather than ensuring public safety in the face of summary politically-motivated violence by addressing their root causes, such responses guaranteed that they would continue — the next victims to come martyrs to the recalcitrance of political leaders displaying less capacity to resolve differences peacefully than toddlers disputing ownership of a plastic spade in the kindergarten sandpit.

Indeed, as this metaphor suggests, it is a sandpit logic informing traditional responses to non-state terrorism. Two small children in a sandpit with one spade between them; the one without the spade hits the one with, and snatches the spade as the other recoils. When the teacher comes to investigate at the sound of wailing, the child who now has the spade protests that it was his spade to begin with, and the other child took it from him, and that in reality he is the offended party. The teacher immediately identifies him as the aggressive party, removes him from the sandpit and calls the parents.

When he grows up, he is elected to high office. He’s still used to hitting people and taking things of theirs that he wants, maybe the land they used to occupy prior to white invasion, maybe the money earmarked for their social security net, which he gives to his wealthy friends instead. Maybe he hits the wrong person one day in the process of invading someone else’s country, and they decide to hit back.

This would seem to go some way towards explaining the news this week that ‘British Intelligence warned Tony Blair of Manchester-like terrorism if the West invaded Iraq’ (Jon Schwarz, The Intercept, 24 May 2017). The connection between western intervention and terrorist events in western countries has not generally been hard to understand, except in the case of those whose salaries, after Upton Sinclair, depends on their not understanding them.

As Jeremy Corbyn pointed out in the aftermath of the Manchester attacks, “Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” This appears to account for the fact that, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombing of 2004, Spain suffered no more terrorist attacks after withdrawing its troops from the Middle East. The UK, on the other hand, refuses to learn from its mistakes, remaining a vocal and active supporter of western military aggression and ever shriller exponent of the Paranoid Style.

Its continuing reliance on such as a means of exonerating itself from criticism helps to account for the attacks levelled at Corbyn by government figures. Sir Michael Fallon, the defense secretary, accused him of “very muddled and dangerous thinking,” while foreign secretary Boris Johnson also relied on incredulity to substitute for a counter-argument, denouncing criticism of mainstream counterterrorist narratives as “absolutely monstrous,” and alleging that it was “absolutely extraordinary and inexplicable in this week of all weeks that there should be any attempt to justify or to legitimate the actions of terrorists in this way” (Rowena Mason and Heather Stewart, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: the war on terror is simply not working,’ The Guardian 26 May 2017).

It is a notable facet of this changed state of affairs that ideas suddenly become fearful; it has long been noted of stereotypes of the demonised other that they tend to embody contradictory traits, both morally weak in their lack of regard for the much-vaunted values our side claims to uphold, but also threatening to our way of life in the appeal they are able to garner nevertheless. Such was the witchcraft of the Jews, so too is it today of the Muslims — and, by extension, of anyone who goes against the self-appointed defenders of western values, who deserve our respect whether they observe the values they purport to uphold in their actions or not.

Just as ideas are frightening then, so too is debate — especially when it comes to challenging received wisdom about the more challenging issues of the day. If it is absolutely monstrous to suggest we practice what we preach, and in so doing stop stirring the hornest nest while feeding the hornets (or their Wahhabist Saudi sponsors, at least), then it is equally so to point out that most of the victims of non-state terror have been Muslim, and that most of the terrorist attacks carried out in the West have been perpetrated by white supremacists.

Just after the Manchester attacks, two anti-racists were murdered in Portland, Oregon, by one in the process of defending two young Muslim girls from his attacks on them. Last week a terrorist attack in Kabul killed 90. Such events do not fit the dominant counterterrorist narrative, and therefore pass largely without the slightest bit of concern or care on the part of the political class. Perhaps a normalization of violent death such that it is not considered newsworthy might be considered a change for the worse.

Here at home, a violent incident in Brighton is denounced by the Prime Minister as terrorism, providing him with an opportunity to reposition himself as a defender of the nation while stirring the hornet’s nest in his support for western military aggression in such a way as to guarantee that they will continue.

In this case as in many others, the preponderance of terror panic gives every criminal an opportunity to give vicious, brutal thuggery the air of a higher purpose by declaring their allegiance to Islamic State, who for their part are more than willing to claim them purely out of disinterested motives and not for the PR value — or so we are lead to believe by the PM, who is otherwise a paragon of mainstream counterterrorism and the Paranoid style. As Michael Brull has pointed out, this has become more pronounced as his opinion polling numbers have started to slide (Michael Brull, ‘Into The Abyss: Right On Cue, Desperate Malcolm Turnbull Turns On Minorities,’ New Matilda, 31 October 2016).

Australians face “a growing threat from Islamist terrorism,” Turnbull, still plagued by troublesome approval ratings, alleges today. Being part of the political class that habitually kicks the hornet’s nest, he would know, making sure at the same time to ensure that Australians are afraid of non-state retail terrorism, even if they don’t really understand where it come from. There are no calls for calm in this instance, no appeals for self-restraint in not being provoked into lowering ourselves to the level of everything we claim to oppose and in so doing handing victory to our enemies. The specter of evil Is far too valuable, the Paranoid Style far too effective a drawcard in the absence of policy

The continuing currency of paranoia as a political narrative suggests that, to be sure, we are changed, though the indigenous people of this country might have something to say about how far the white majority had to travel from the values it invokes in protesting its innocence and victimhood. As a friend of mine on Facebook suggested, the Brighton terrorist ‘sounds like a bogan from Cranbourne who was knocked back on his Southern Cross Soldiers application on a technicality regarding the color or his skin, so he justified his violent tendencies with the next best thing,’ an ‘an ice addict with a drinking problem and a history of domestic violence.’ ‘By that logic,’ he adds, ‘Wagga is full of Muslims.’

It is, however, always easier to point the finger than to reflect, and on that count at least, nothing ever changes.

The Facts Proving Corbyn’s Election Triumph

Jonathan Cook

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the election, you could be excused for taking away two main impressions of last night’s results. First, that Theresa May had a terrible, self-sabotaging campaign; and second that, while Jeremy Corbyn may be celebrating, he decisively lost the election.

Those are the conclusions we would expect a pundit class to draw that has spent two years slandering Corbyn, calling him “unelectable”, warning that he appealed to little more than a niche group of radical leftists, and claiming that Labour was about to face the worst electoral defeat in living memory – if not ever. Corbyn’s social justice message was supposedly alienating the heartlands of the UK.

So let’s stand back, look at the voting figures and see how a Corbyn-led Labour party actually did.

Corbyn received 41 per cent of the vote, against May’s 44 per cent. Given the UK’s inherently flawed, first-past-the-post electoral system, he won some 50 fewer seats than the Conservatives, but that was still a big improvement on Labour’s share of seats in the last election, under Ed Miliband. There is now a hung parliament, and to survive May will need to depend on the votes of a small group of Northern Irish Ulster unionists, creating a deeply unstable government.

But how did Corbyn do in terms of the Labour vote compared to his recent predecessors? He won many more votes than Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock, who were among those that, sometimes noisily, opposed his leadership of the party.

They lost their elections. But what about Corbyn’s share of the vote compared to Tony Blair, his most high-profile critic, whose many allies in the parliamentary Labour party sought relentlessly to subvert Corbyn’s leadership over the past two years and tried to bring him down, including by staging a leadership challenge last year.

Here are the figures for Blair’s three wins. He got a 36 per cent share of the vote in 2005 – much less than Corbyn. He received a 41 per cent of the vote – about the same as Corbyn – in 2001. And Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 was secured on 43 per cent of the vote, just two percentage points ahead of Corbyn last night.

In short, Corbyn has proved himself the most popular Labour leader with the electorate in more than 40 years, apart from Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. But let’s recall the price Blair paid for that very small margin of improvement over Corbyn’s vote. Behind the scenes, he sold Labour’s soul to the City, the corporations and their lobbyists. That Faustian pact secured Blair the backing of most of the British media, including Rupert Murdoch’s stable of papers and TV channel. The corporations mobilised their entire propaganda machine to get Blair into power. And yet he managed it with only 2 percentage points more than Corbyn, who had that same propaganda machine railing against him.

Also, unlike Corbyn, Blair did not have to endure a large section of his own party trying to destroy him from within.

And in addition, Blair was able to rely on a strong Scottish vote for the party that no longer existed by the time Corbyn became leader. Most of that vote now goes to the Scottish National Party (SNP) over the issue of independence for Scotland.

All of this indicates the extent of Corbyn’s achievement.

Another point. Blair’s 1997 landslide was the peak of his success. As Labour members realised what he had done to achieve victory, support ebbed away relentlessly until he was forced to step down and hand over a profoundly damaged party to Gordon Brown.

With Corbyn, the election campaign proved that there is a huge appetite for his honesty, his passion, his commitment to social justice – at least when audiences got a chance to hear from him directly, rather than having his policies and personality mediated and distorted by a biased and self-serving corporate media. Unlike Blair, who destroyed Labour to turn it into a Thatcher-lite party, Corbyn is rebuilding Labour into a social movement for progressive politics.

Here is a graph that offers another measure of the extent of Corbyn’s achievement last night.

It shows that he has just won the largest increase in the share of the Labour vote over the party’s previous general election performance since Clement Attlee in 1945. In short, he’s turned around the electoral fortunes of the Labour party more than any other party leader in 70 years.

And unlike Blair, he’s done it without making back-room deals with big business to eviscerate his party’s economic and social programmes.

India’s Healthcare System Needs An Overhaul

Ashish Singh

A report published by Forbes on 11 September 2014 still stands true as not much has changed in the access to healthcare in India. According to World Health Organization’s 2000 World Health Report ranking India’s healthcare system at 112 out of 190 countries. The below paragraph is based on a friend’s recent experience when he was spending time and energy for the treatment of his aunt.

Diagnosis and Treatment are two sides of the same coin when it comes to Healthcare Industry. In India, Healthcare system needs revival in the current scenario as Doctors these days focus too much on Diagnosis rather than treatment which was not the case before 90’s. Every time you visit a new doctor or seek advice for a patient’s well-being, you’d be referred to some pathological lab or the other for new series of tests. It’s been more than two weeks and I haven’t come across a single doctor who’d refer to old reports and will ask for fresh reports every time you seek an opinion from the diagnostic center which he/she deemed fit. We are left with no choice but to keep running from pillar to post. Conducting such tests frequently may add to the earnings of the pathological labs as well as of the doctors. However, it also adds to financial and psychological burden of the patient and their relatives. It is observed that even an extra day of medication can alter vital parameters which the doctors are looking for and thus be making pathological tests a redundant excercise as raw reports are received within 3 hours and it takes almost a day to receive the final test report. I wonder what if someone couldn’t afford treatment as their money is spent majorly on diagnosis?

Coming back to the Forbes report, there are five main points one should keep in mind while thinking of healthcare sector in India:

1. Rural Versus Urban Divide: India still spends nearly 4% of its national GDP towards healthcare goods and services (compared to 18% by the US). In India, there are wider gaps between the rural and urban populations in its healthcare system which worsen the problem. A staggering 70% of the population still lives in rural areas and has no or limited access to hospitals and clinics.
2. Need for Effective Payment Mechanisms: Besides the rural-urban divide, another key driver of India’s healthcare landscape is the high out-of-pocket expenditure (roughly 70%). This means that most Indian patients pay for their hospital visits and doctors’ appointments with straight up cash aftercare with no payment arrangements.  According to the World Bank and National Commission’s report on Macroeconomics, only 5% of Indians are covered by health insurance policies.
3. Demand for Basic Primary Healthcare and Infrastructure: India faces a growing need to fix its basic health concerns in the areas of HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea. Additionally, children under five are born underweight and roughly 7% (compared to 0.8% in the US) of them die before their fifth birthday.
4. Growing Pharmaceutical Sector: According to the Indian Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), India is the third-largest exporter of pharmaceutical products in terms of volume. Around 80% of the market is composed of generic low-cost drugs which seem to be the major driver of this industry.
5. Underdeveloped Medical Devices Sector: The medical devices sector is the smallest piece of India’s healthcare pie. However, it is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the country like the health insurance marketplace.

Access to affordable and quality healthcare services is a basic right and the government/state should put efforts in ensuring it. As it is said that one person’s sickness is good enough to take down the happiness and prosperity of that family in India, it becomes the utmost important factor to ensure that falling ill and getting better has lesser or no correlation between family’s overall socio-economic conditions.

Police “terror” raids in Australia mask unanswered questions about hostage incident

Mike Head

In a show of force, more than 150 Victorian state and federal counter-terrorism police raided homes in Melbourne’s northern suburbs before dawn yesterday, and Victoria’s deputy police commissioner Shane Patton foreshadowed more raids in coming days.

The operation was said to relate to the supply of firearms used by Yacqub Khayre, a mentally-ill and drug-addicted young man, when he killed a man and took a hostage in the bayside suburb of Brighton on Monday.

Victoria Police’s para-military Special Operations Group and Australian Federal Police (AFP) counter-terrorism officers searched homes and detained occupants, reportedly seeking evidence for potential charges of aiding and abetting a terrorist offence, a crime that carries life imprisonment.

As intended, the raids generated fresh media headlines about the “terrorist threat,” seeking to drown out an examination of all the unanswered questions about Monday’s event, particularly the revelations that the police had targeted Khayre to become an undercover agent.

As with nearly every terrorist-linked attack internationally, including the latest atrocities in Manchester and London, the perpetrator was well known to the police and intelligence agencies, yet inexplicably “fell through the cracks” of their massive surveillance networks.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews rushed to take credit for yesterday’s police raids. “They are in connection with the terrible, tragic events of Monday in Brighton,” he told Sky News as the operation began.

Andrews also stepped up the bipartisan exploitation of the hostage-taking incident. Both his state Labor government and the federal Liberal-National Coalition government have falsely depicted Khayre’s actions as a terrorist attack in order to call for even greater police-state powers.

Andrews advocated more draconian laws, including the expansion of “control orders” and “preventative detention orders”—two forms of detention without trial that were introduced in 2005 on the pretext of responding to an imminent terrorist emergency that never materialised.

These powers were on top of arbitrary detention and interrogation powers handed to the political spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), in 2002, in the first sweeping batch of measures under the banner of the “war on terror.”

Andrews and other state and territory leaders met Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday for a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) gathering to further bolster the powers and resources of the security forces.

Turnbull announced a special “terrorism summit” to be convened “as soon as possible” to discuss the proposals of Andrews and others. In the meantime, the COAG leaders agreed to a presumption against parole and bail for people with “terror links.” They also decided that parole and prison officials would be briefed by ASIO on “terror suspects.”

It is not for want of such sweeping powers that Khayre supposedly “slipped through the net.” Among the unanswered questions about Monday’s hostage incident the following are the most critical:

* Why did senior commanders of the AFP and Victoria Police set out to recruit Khayre as an informant?

A secret US diplomatic cable previously published by WikiLeaks demonstrates that in August 2009, AFP counter-terrorism coordinator Damien Appleby and Victoria Police detective inspector Andrew Gutske proposed grooming Khayre, who was in prison, as an undercover agent.

In an assessment provided to Michael Thurston, the US consul-general in Melbourne, Appleby and Gutske stated: “The AFP believes that Khayre may be turned while in prison to serve as an informant in related cases.”

Such vulnerable recruits are employed to infiltrate groups, often acting as agent provocateurs to entrap others into making statements or taking steps that can then be cited as evidence of plans for “a terrorist act.”

That kind of frame-up is known to have taken place in 2009, when Khayre was charged with involvement in an alleged plot to make a far-fetched suicide attack on the Holsworthy army base in Sydney. According to the evidence at the trial, the “plot” was proposed by a police undercover plant.

As a result, three young men were convicted and sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment, but Khayre was found not guilty by the jury. Meanwhile, he had been held in a “super-maximum” security prison between August 2009 and December 2010.

* Why was this briefing given to the US consulate?

The US consul-general relayed the assessment, via a classified cable, to a high-level list of US addresses, including the US embassy in Canberra, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Council, Secretary of State and Department of Justice.

Consul-general Thurston further stated: “Our contacts within the AFP and the Victoria Police praise intelligence collaboration between Australia and the United States, but request that more cooperation be carried out between countries with large Somali populations such as Sweden, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. Specifically, these contacts appreciate roving witness programs with the FBI and would like to see their application expanded. Positive public relations could be an added benefit of this increased collaboration.”

This cable points to the intensive collaboration between the US, Australian and allied intelligence agencies, including the use of witness protection programs for undercover agents. It also indicates the key role of “public relations”—that is, media deception—in the operations conducted by the globally coordinated network.

* Did Khayre’s police recruitment proceed?

There has been no statement from the AFP or Victoria Police denying that Khayre became an informant. It is entirely possible that he provided information about the supposed Holsworthy conspiracy and may have remained in the grip of the authorities right up to Monday’s violent events, in which the police gunned him down, ensuring his silence.

Khayre may have been a participant in a police “de-radicalisation” program—another vehicle for cajoling young men into working with the security agencies, under threat of being returned to jail, prosecuted on new charges or being deported if they fail to cooperate.

Fairfax Media reported that in 2011 the AFP rejected a recommendation for Khayre to participate in such a program. But Victoria Police this week said 22 people were currently enrolled in its “Community Integration Support Program,” and Khayre was a participant.

Many other questions remain. They include why Khayre, then 19, was initially released on probation in 2007, with a three-year jail sentence suspended, after being convicted of more than 40 violent offences? Did his probation require collaboration with the police?

Khayre had a traumatic background. He arrived in Australia as a child in 1991, fleeing the conflict in Somalia. All the evidence points to a deeply troubled young man with a long history of “ice” addiction and alcohol abuse, being preyed upon by both Islamic fundamentalists and police-intelligence agencies.

Islamists and Western security agencies internationally have exploited unstable and vulnerable young men. Enraged by the US-led wars that have devastated the Middle East, killing and displacing millions of people, in pursuit of Washington’s hegemony over the strategic and resource-rich region, such teenagers and men have become the dispensable cannon fodder of intensifying geo-political conflicts.

European Central Bank still failing to meet inflation objective

Nick Beams

The European Central Bank (ECB) left its monetary policies basically unchanged following a meeting of the governing council in Tallinn, Estonia, on Thursday, except for a small change in wording indicating that it would not reduce interest rates any further.

In its forward guidance statement, the ECB omitted a reference in earlier statements about cutting interest rates to lower levels if warranted. The change was made in response to data showing that the euro zone experienced an uptick in growth in the recent period.

Explaining the change, ECB president Mario Draghi said deflation—the risk of falling prices—had “gone away.”

However, Draghi did not hold out any prospect for price levels to rise on a sustained basis to the ECB’s target of below, but close to, 2 percent in the near future. The latest data show inflation in the euro zone running at 1.4 percent in May, after 1.9 percent in April and 1.5 percent in March.

At the press conference following the meeting, Draghi said the ECB expected interest rates to remain at their present levels for an extended period and well past the horizon of net asset purchases.

While there was a “stronger momentum” for growth in the euro area and the economy was expanding at a “somewhat faster pace than previously expected,” this expansion had yet to translate into “stronger inflation dynamics.”

Draghi continued: “Therefore, a very substantial degree of monetary accommodation is still needed for underlying inflation pressures to build up and support headline inflation in the medium term.”

In addition to keeping the ECB base interest rate at minus 0.4 percent, the governing council maintained its financial asset purchases—mainly government bonds but some corporate bonds as well—at the present level of €60 billion a month at least to the end of the year and possibly beyond. By the end of 2017, the ECB will have some €2 trillion on its books.

In view of the higher growth rate in the euro area and the opposition from Germany to the asset-purchasing program, questions were raised at the press conference about whether the ECB was set to announce a “tapering” of its asset purchases, possibly at its September meeting. But Draghi said it was not discussed.

While the official explanation is that inflation has not yet reached the target of 2 percent, the more fundamental reason is the fear that a lift in interest rates would impact on countries, such as Italy, that have significant debt problems. This could cause turmoil in the European financial system, which increasingly depends on the flow of cheap money from the central bank.

In the lead-up to the Tallinn meeting, Draghi said there were risks in a premature tightening of monetary conditions.

Some of those risks were underscored in the days before the ECB meeting. The Spanish bank Banco Popular was taken over by its rival Banco Santander for a symbolic payment of €1 after it ran through €3.6 billion in the first two days of this week.

The burn-through of emergency funding provided to the bank was the result of the first major run on a large-scale euro zone bank. After the Banco Popular failed to find a buyer, a steady trickle of customers turned into a flood, creating a liquidity crisis.

The bank, which did not require a bailout in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, was weighed down by €37 billion of property loans, many toxic. It was forced to tell authorities on Tuesday it could not open its doors the next day without an intervention.

Questions were raised at Draghi’s press conference about the takeover operation, conducted by the euro area bank resolution authority, the Single Resolution Board. But the questions were deflected on the grounds that it was not within the province of the ECB and could not be dealt with for legal reasons.

While the specifics of the takeover, and the losses imposed on shareholders and junior bondholders, were not discussed, the overall direction of ECB monetary policy has clear implications for the viability of other euro zone banks.

Numbers of banks in Portugal and Italy face funding problems and that list would be extended were there to be significant tightening of overall monetary policy.

One of the most significant parts of the press conference came during an explanation by Draghi in response to a question about whether there was any prospect of the ECB reaching its inflation target.

Draghi said there was a “flat and low profile for underlying inflation.” This is despite the official data showing a reduction of unemployment levels and an upturn in economic growth.

“That has mostly to do with subdued nominal wage growth,” Draghi said, indicating that the main reason for this was “structural changes” in the economy.

“All this recovery is happening with very strong creation of new jobs, so there is definitely a very significant increase in labour force, labour participation. At the same time we have evidence that many … of these new jobs are so-called ‘low-quality’ jobs, where we’re talking about temporary employment, we’re talking about part-time employment.”

This phenomenon is so prevalent that the ECB is seeking to develop new measures of the “concept of unemployment,” broader than that provided by the official rate.

One of the recurring themes of Draghi’s press conferences over the years has been his emphasis on the need for “structural reforms.” While claiming that such reforms were “good for growth,” he said those that made labour markets “more flexible do tend to produce a lower growth in nominal wages.”

However, in the long-established tradition of capitalist politicians and policy-makers, he promised “jam tomorrow”—calling for patience and claiming that, in the end, the “structural reforms” effects would “fade away” and “job quality will improve.”

In fact, the stagnation and outright lowering of wages, through the creation of part-time and casual employment under conditions of increasing exploitation, is not a temporary affliction. It is the “new normal” in all the major capitalist economies, such as the US, Britain, Europe and Australia. It might be called the Amazonisation of the workforce.

Dispute erupts in Trump administration over Gulf conflict

Jordan Shilton

Five days after Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in a move that stopped just short of war, significant divisions have emerged within the Trump administration over the US position on the dispute.

Speaking in the Rose Garden yesterday, President Donald Trump declared that the action taken by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain was “hard but necessary.” He denounced Qatar for having been a “funder of terrorism at a very high level” and boasted that the Gulf countries and Egypt had consulted with him prior to their diplomatic offensive about “confronting Qatar.”

Trump’s belligerent comments came just an hour after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued a statement calling for the blockade on Qatar to be lifted and stressing that “these countries will immediately take steps to deescalate the situation.”

Trump’s remarks make clear that following Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia last month, during which he sought to form a Sunni bloc to confront Iran, Riyadh felt emboldened to strengthen its regional position under the pretext of combating terrorism. Qatar has long attempted to maintain a somewhat more independent foreign policy, including through economic ties and joint exploration of energy resources with Iran and through its support for groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. This stance has infuriated Riyadh.

At the same time, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar has backed Islamist “rebel” forces in Syria, notably the al-Nusra Front, although it also maintains ties with the Assad regime. Until Riyadh broke diplomatic ties, Qatar was also part of the coalition conducting the brutal war in Yemen that has killed tens of thousands of civilians over the past two years.

The differences between Trump and Tillerson are bound up with competing US interests in the Gulf and the surrounding region. Qatar is home to the largest US military base in the Middle East and the operational center of the US Central Command, which directs the US-led wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Tillerson noted in his statement that the diplomatic blockade was “hindering” US military operations, although he did not detail what these were.

Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis later commented that contingency measures were being prepared in the event the Saudi-led isolation of Qatar creates difficulties for the US military.

In Washington, comments from a White House official to the Washington Post aimed at papering over the disagreement between Trump and Tillerson only underscored it. Speaking about the blockade, the official said that Trump felt Qatar “deserves it,” before adding, “Tillerson may initially have had a view, then the president has his view, and obviously the president’s view prevails.”

Such disputes only add fuel to the fire of a deepening conflict that could rapidly escalate into a regional war. On Wednesday, UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash threatened to impose an economic embargo on Qatar, while Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told the Saudi newspaper Mecca, “We will not hesitate to protect our interests and the road is open to any options to protect ourselves from Qatar.”

Saudi Arabia and its allies stepped up the pressure Friday by placing 59 individuals and 12 Qatari-funded charities on a “terror finance watch list.” Others named on the list included a leading Muslim Brotherhood cleric residing in Qatar, individuals in Libya, and Shia groups based in Bahrain that Riyadh accuses of having links with Iran.

Qatar continues to deny the allegations of supporting extremism. Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said in an interview with Al-Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatari regime and based on Doha, “We are not ready to surrender, and we will never be ready to surrender the independence of our foreign policy.”

Late Thursday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan approved a parliamentary decision to speed up the deployment of Turkish troops to back the regime in Qatar. A military assessment team is expected to arrive in Doha in the coming days to prepare the groundwork for a larger deployment. Ankara has also pledged to step in and provide Doha with food supplies if the Gulf states move to cut economic ties.

Turkey has the tacit backing of the European imperialist powers, above all Germany. In an expression of the deepening transatlantic rift, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel attacked what he called the “Trumpification” of relations in the Middle East in an interview with German daily Handelsblatt earlier this week. On Friday, he met with al-Thani in Germany and urged that the blockade of Qatar to be lifted and a negotiated settlement reached.

Under these conditions, the most destabilizing factor is US imperialism, which is in the midst of an escalation of its military drive to secure geo-strategic hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East. In Syria, Washington has intervened under the pretext of combating ISIS terrorism to wage a war for regime-change so as to weaken its two main rivals in the region, Iran and Russia.

During his trip to Saudi Arabia, Trump denounced Iran as one of the main regional sources of terorrism, raising the prospect of war with Tehran. Apparently returning to this theme Friday, Trump demanded that more be done throughout the region to clamp down on “terrorism,” declaring ominously, “I won’t name other countries, but we are not done solving the problem.”

In Syria, the US has begun over recent weeks effectively to begin the partitioning of the country. An air strike on military vehicles and the shooting down of a Syrian government drone Thursday near the al-Tanf base in the southeast of the country marked the third time in as many weeks that the US military has attacked forces loyal to the Assad regime in Damascus. On May 18, Washington bombed a pro-government militia some 20 miles from al-Tanf and a similar strike was launched against Assad’s forces on Tuesday.

The US has justified these attacks on the grounds that the pro-government forces have allegedly violated a “deconfliction zone” proclaimed unilaterally by Washington in Syria’s south near the borders with Jordan and Iraq. The al-Tanf base, where Special Forces have been training local militias for many months, is a key part of a strategy to prevent Assad’s forces and Iranian-backed militias from gaining control of territory in eastern Syria currently held by ISIS and thus opening up a ground supply route from Tehran through Syria to the Mediterranean coast and Lebanon. These US-led efforts are assuming increased urgency as Kurdish-dominated fighters organized in the Syrian Democratic Forces advance into Raqqa in Syria’s northeast.

US imperialism’s aggressive moves to form a Sunni alliance to push back Iranian and Russian influence in Syria and the broader region is creating the conditions for a much larger military clash that could rapidly draw in the major powers.

Indicating the deepening tensions over the al-Tanf area, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov labeled Tuesday’s attack on pro-government forces as “an aggressive act that violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and—deliberately or not—targeted the forces which are most effective in fighting terrorists on the ground.” According to Iranian TV, Lavrov described the “deconfliction zone” as illegitimate and said Moscow would refuse to recognize it.

Lavrov pointed out that the Syrian troops that came under attack were defending a route connecting Syria and Iraq that ISIS fighters were trying to destroy. The foreign minister went on to allege that the attack had resulted in ISIS gaining its objective.

Moscow, which intervened in the Syrian conflict in 2015 to prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad, continues to fly aircraft close to the “deconfliction zone” in support of pro-government forces fighting ISIS. This raises the immediate danger that future US strikes on Assad’s forces like those carried out this week could trigger a direct clash between the two nuclear-armed powers.

Drug crisis pushes up mortality rate for Americans in their prime

Shelley Connor

A recent analysis of Centers for Disease Control (CDC) records by the Washington Post points to a growing mortality rate for 25- to 45-year-olds across nationalities and ethnicities. For the first time, mortality rates are increasing without respect to geographic or racial boundaries, a harsh reflection of the widespread economic decline of America’s workers.

According to the Post ’s analysis, alcohol-related deaths increased among white, black, and Hispanic Americans. Homicide, the leading cause of death for young African-Americans, has risen steadily since 2010. However, among all these factors, the juggernaut of the opioid epidemic appears to be driving most of the increasing mortality rates among 25- to 44-year-olds.

Well in advance of Barack Obama’s 2016 pronouncement that “things have never been better” for America, opioid-related deaths were skyrocketing. According to the CDC, the number of opioid overdoses has quadrupled since 1999. The rate of deaths from drug overdoses has steadily increased, jumping from 14.1 percent in the second quarter of 2014 to 15.2 percent in 2015. By the CDC’s most recent estimates, there was a 19 percent increase between 2015 and 2016. The agency estimates more than 59,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016. This is greater than the number of American casualties for the duration of the Vietnam War.

From 2012 to 2013, Jefferson County, Alabama’s most populous region, saw heroin overdoses increase by over 200 percent. Heroin-related deaths have since decreased in Jefferson County, but overdoses have increased, with Fentanyl—a synthetic opioid that is estimated to be 50 times more powerful than morphine—now claiming twice the victims that heroin does.

In the neighboring state of Georgia, a spate of overdoses claimed four lives within 48 hours this past week. The drug in question was sold to users as the pain-pill Percocet. The yellow pills they purchased, however, were more likely to have contained Fentanyl. Both Fentanyl and carfentinil—which is used to tranquilize elephants—have played an increasing role in overdoses and deaths, with dealers either cutting other opioids with these more powerful synthetics, or substituting them altogether.

In Ohio, fatal overdoses have quadrupled since 2010. Cuyahoga County coroner Thomas Stilton, whose jurisdiction includes the city of Cleveland, testified to the Senate last month that deaths among African-Americans in his area have doubled within the past year because of Fentanyl. In Dayton, the number of confirmed overdose deaths within the first 33 days of 2017 amounted to more than half the yearly totals from the previous two years.

Individually, all of these individual areas of crisis confirm the Washington Post ’s analysis; Americans in the prime of their lives are being cut down by economic distress and despair. These symptoms of social breakdown have marched steadily across the map, from depressed rural outposts in the Southwest and Appalachia, to the Rust Belt, to metropolitan areas and into previously comfortable suburbs. They defy boundaries of race and ethnicity, with death rates beginning to flatten out between black, white and Hispanic workers and youth.

This analysis comes on the heels of a report released by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in March, which revealed a rise in so-called “deaths of despair” among middle-aged white Americans. The pair’s analysis, which they reported to the Brookings Institute, revealed that deaths due to alcoholism, overdose and suicide increased by half a percentage annually between 1999 and 2013, a trend they characterized as “extraordinary and unanticipated.”

Life expectancy rose consistently throughout the second half of the 20th century, due to the struggle of workers for safer working conditions, retirement pensions and health care. In addition, American capitalism, at its zenith, could afford to provide a high standard of sanitation throughout the country. Public health initiatives for safe drinking water, advanced sewage systems, and vaccination programs seemed to put an end to many of the diseases that had claimed so many lives in years past.

The Post points to an “inflection point” around the year 2010, as working class Americans reeled from the effects of the Great Recession. Yet even prior to the Great Recession, mortality data for some portions of the 25- 45-year-old cohort signaled grave distress. The CDC noted that the suicide rate, which had fallen steadily between 1986 and 1999, began rising gradually in 2000. Between 1999 and 2015, an estimated 600,000 people died of suicide in the United States. This is comparable to the 500,000 people who have died in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003.

There are other factors that figure into these astonishing and sobering numbers. As the WSWS has reported, the US maternal mortality rate—which predominantly affects women in the Washington Post ’s cohort—increased by 27 percent between 2004 and 2014.

The United States leads the industrialized nations in health care inequality, which accounts significantly for this increase in mortality rates. This is borne out by the Pos t’s analysis, although their analysts attribute it to education level—people with a four-year degree die at a lower rate than do their peers with a high school diploma or less.

Other studies, however, point out that the largest disparities are not accounted for by education level, but by income; the wealthy live, on average, 15 years longer than their working class peers. Workers have seen their life expectancy grow shorter and shorter in the face of deindustrialization, attacks on their wages and increased health care costs.

Josh Sharfstein, director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at Johns Hopkins, stated that the rising mortality rates reflect “an out-of-control epidemic” and “an absolute call to public health.” However, as Sharfstein pointed out to the Post, there is limited access to effective treatments in many places in the United States.

This situation can only worsen under current conditions. The American Health Care Act, passed by the US House in May, calls for cuts that would gut Medicaid. Donald Trump’s budget proposals take that gutting as a mere jumping-off point, calling for $1.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid in addition to severe cuts to other social programs.

In the meantime, pharmaceutical companies are allowed or even encouraged to raise the price of life-saving medicines. Naloxone, a narcotic antagonist that has saved countless lives, has increased in the midst of the opioid epidemic. Kaleo, the company that markets naloxone injection Evzio, increased the price of their injector by 1000 percent last year. Even the generic naloxone injection costs double what it cost prior to the nationwide rash of overdose deaths.

The fact that Kaleo and other companies can profit from the same realities that have caused American mortality rates to soar gives lie to the common myth that the stock market is an accurate gauge of Americans’ financial health. It also shows the free-market ideology peddled by bourgeois politicians for the insidious fiction that it is.

As American capitalism plunges towards its nadir, workers cannot afford to put their trust in either the two big business parties. The analysis of the Washington Post, as well as that of Case and Deaton, highlight the fact that class, more than race or gender, determines life expectancy and access to health care.