UK Conservative government in meltdown as plotting intensifies to remove Sunak

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Conservative government has been wracked by leadership plots, scandals and the defection of one of its MPs, Lee Anderson, to the far-right-Reform UK party.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been in office for less than 18 months. He entered Downing Street on the say so of a few hundred Tory MPs during a party leadership contest. At that time he was the third Tory prime minister in the space of seven weeks, following the resignation of Boris Johnson over the COVID “Partygate” scandal and then Liz Truss, elected by a few tens of thousands of Tory Party members, who remained in power for just 44 days.

Sunak’s Tories trail the Labour Party by around 20 points, with forecasts regularly made of a wipeout in the general election to be held later this year.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosts his weekly Cabinet meeting in 10 Downing Street on March 12, 2024. [Photo by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Talk of another leadership election, previously described by most Tory MPs as political “suicide”, has been growing. Sky News reported Sunday, “As misery and despair stalk the Tory party, talk of changing leader is getting louder”; the BBC on Monday, “Mood among Tory MPs darkens as Rishi Sunak faces leadership questions”.

Sunak’s allies were forced to brief The Times Monday morning that “he would be prepared to call a general election if rebels force a leadership contest… People should be careful what they wish for.”

Shadow cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt is the first named potential challenger, as a front for a further shift to the right. On Sunday, the Daily Telegraph Tory house newspaper recalled, “In 1990, a ‘stalking horse’ challenge by Sir Anthony Meyer led to the leadership election of 1990 that brought about Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. Since then, the rules have changed so that such a candidate cannot simply trigger a contest themselves with a handful of backers.”

It added, “In this case, it is being claimed that some MPs on the Right of the party are pledging support for Ms Mordaunt so that she effectively becomes a ‘stalking horse’ candidate behind whom MPs across the party felt they could unite, on the basis that many centrist MPs may not wish to back potential candidates such as [Business Secretary] Mrs [Kemi] Badenoch and Suella Braverman.”

Former defence secretary Ben Wallace, one of 60 Tory MPs stepping down at the next election, responded by declaring with a despairing statement that it was too late to replace Sunak. He told Times Radio, “There comes a moment in time in the electoral cycle where you effectively put on your best suit, you stand up and you march towards the sound of the guns and you get on with it.”

Sunak’s crisis intensified last week when it emerged that the Tories’ leading-donor Frank Hester—a businessman who has given the party £10 million in total and was reportedly set to hand over another £5 million, or may have already done so, for this year’s election campaign—had made a series of violently racist comments. In 2019, he said of black Labour MP Diane Abbott “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there” and that she “should be shot”.

With several senior Tories making excuses for Hester’s vile comments, it took Downing Street an entire day to finally issue an apology through clenched teeth, with Sunak’s spokesperson saying they were “racist and wrong” but that Hester “has now rightly apologized for the offence caused, and where remorse is shown it should be accepted.”

Sunak had every reason for wanting to move on quickly. The Guardian reported Saturday that Hester is understood to have attended two Tory fundraisers in the last year, including in June when he was photographed with the prime minister. The newspaper added, “The prime minister is also believed to have met Hester in Leeds, the day after the autumn statement in November, when the donor paid £16,000 for Sunak to take a helicopter to the city for a political visit.”

Hester has also had close dealings with current foreign secretary and former prime minister David Cameron, and current chancellor and former health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Sunak was also minded to be cautious in responding to Hester’s comments as he is still in the middle of a backlash from the extreme right-wing of his party for suspending its deputy chairman Lee Anderson, who then defected to the Reform Party. Anderson had said on a live broadcast that “Islamists” had “got control of [Labour Mayor of London Sadiq] Khan [himself Muslim]… He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”

The MP was highly popular with the group of Brexiteer Tories who won a swathe of previously Labour-voting “Red Wall” seats in Boris Johnson’s 2019 election victory over Jeremy Corbyn. Reform, formerly Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, campaigns as a more stalwartly anti-immigration, anti-“woke” alternative to the Tory Party and is polling between 10-14 percent, presenting a lethal threat to the Tories’ election chances.

Significantly, Johnson, who was forced out after Sunak stood down as his chancellor and has harboured a massive grudge since, is already out campaigning in these Red Wall seats. He is primed to do so in a general election with the demand that “the party should remind Red Wall voters of the key elements of the manifesto that won him a landslide five years ago, including his flagship [Brexit] policy,” according to the i newspaper.

Under conditions of seemingly irresolvable Tory meltdown, the ruling class is working closely with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to prepare a politically like-for-like replacement to rescue British capitalism, with less of the overt racism spewing forth from the government.

However, it should be noted that Anderson’s journey into the far-right political sewer started in the Labour Party. He was a longtime Labour member and councillor for the party. Formerly a miner in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, including during the 1984-85 strike, he was elected for Labour onto Ashfield District Council in 2015. He quit to join the Tories in 2018, complaining that it had “been taken over by the hard left” under Corbyn’s leadership.

The Tories and Labour are entirely aligned on the fundamental issues of military spending—backing both NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza—and continued austerity to make the working class pay for it. They are agreed on a further onslaught against democratic rights to enforce this agenda, with anti-war protest and opposition to genocide branded as “extremism”.

Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chancellor, has been pledging for years that she will demonstrate “ironclad discipline” in restricting social spending. Last week, as Birmingham’s bankrupt Labour council imposed £300 million in spending cuts, and amid warnings that half of all councils face bankruptcy, Reeves refused to say that a Labour government would bail them out to protect vital services.

Speaking to Sky News’s Trevor Phillips she said, “I’m not going to be able to fix all the problems straightaway… I’m under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that I will inherit if I become chancellor later this year and I need to be honest with people.”

Australian government to unveil new anti-democratic electoral laws

Mike Head

On the pretext of limiting the power of corporate and wealthy interests to influence election outcomes, the Albanese Labor government is about to announce further legislation designed to shore up the fragile two-party parliamentary order in the face of growing social unrest and political disaffection.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. [Photo: Twitter/@AlboMP]

The legislation, which has been drafted behind closed doors for months, has yet to be released or tabled in parliament. According to media reports, however, the government has begun briefing members of parliament on its contents.

Under the guise of placing limits on political donations and election spending, the legislation will erect onerous fund-raising and bureaucratic hurdles for smaller parties, while boosting the multi-million dollar taxpayer funding of the main parties of the capitalist political establishment.

Yet-to-be specified caps will be placed on political donations by individuals, companies and non-party groups. They are likely to be high enough to permit large donations nationally, while expenditure limits will be imposed on campaigns in each individual electorate. That will undermine the ability of smaller parties and non-party groups to raise substantial funds to focus on contesting particular seats.

Extensive new financial reporting and compliance requirements will also make it more difficult for smaller parties and non-profit entities, including charities, to organise the resources, advanced technology, full-time staff and administrative capacities needed to stand or support candidates.

By contrast, the legislation will increase the public funding handed to incumbent parties, including to meet these “compliance burdens,” based on how many votes they secured in the previous election. Presently, that funding is calculated at $2.78 per vote, but it is higher in most Australian states, ranging up to $8.85 a vote in the Australian Capital Territory, which has a Labor-Greens coalition government.

This money, worth more than $200 million for the 2022 federal election, flows to party headquarters to spend wherever they choose across the country. The amount by which this funding will increase has not been released.

At the same time, the rationale for the legislation is a charade. It will do nothing to curb the real power of the corporate conglomerates. They dominate and dictate the programs of all capitalist governments, regardless of their stripe, behind the fig-leaf of the increasingly discredited parliamentary set-up.

The Albanese government is cynically portraying the latest legislation as a move to block large donations from billionaires, such as iron ore magnate Clive Palmer, who officially gave $117 million to his far-right United Australia Party during the 2022 election campaign. Palmer’s party conducted an advertising blitz that helped it pick up one Senate seat.

Another target is said to be the $2.5 million donated by Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, and the $1.85 million given by Rob Keldoulis, a share market trader, to the Climate 200 organisation, which champions the interests of “Green energy” companies. That money helped financed the campaigns of six “Teal independent” candidates who secured traditional Liberal Party seats in the House of Representatives in 2022.

These big money campaigns essentially represent conflicts between different factions of the corporate ruling class, while also seeking to channel disaffection back into the parliamentary order through the creation of “third parties” or groups of “independents.”

However, there are deep concerns in the ruling class that a fracturing of the political system could open the door for the broader discontent to find left-wing and socialist expression.

Most recently, an editorial in the Murdoch media’s Australian newspaper on the government’s narrow win in the March 2 Dunkley by-election pointed to this anxiety. “Extrapolating an anti-Labor swing of this size across the board at a general election would force the Prime Minister into minority government with the Greens, the teals or other independents. The potential for chaos would be profound.”

Similar fears in the corridors of power were voiced in the June 2023 report by the joint standing parliamentary committee on electoral matters, which conducted an inquiry into the May 2022 election. That report’s recommendations laid the basis for Labor’s new legislation.

From its opening words, the report was preoccupied with propping up the parliamentary order in the face of “rising levels of public distrust [that] can serve to further alienate citizens.” It added that a divorce between “truth and trust” explained “why voters feel so disheartened and frustrated.”

The truth is that the entire parliamentary setup is distrusted because of decades of pro-business attacks by successive governments, both Labor and Coalition, on the working and social conditions of workers, producing ever-greater levels of social inequality, as well as the rising military spending and danger of war.

The Albanese government may try to push its legislation through in time for the next election, which must be called before May 2025. Special Minister of State Don Farrell is reportedly seeking support from the Coalition and the Greens to ensure a quick passage through the Senate.

These latest measures add a new dimension to the anti-democratic electoral laws that Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition jointly rushed through in 2021, just months before the last federal election. This is another desperate bid to bolster the two main parties of capitalist rule as they impose a deeply unpopular program of intensifying austerity and war preparations.

Like the 2021 legislation, the central purpose of the new measures is to stifle challenges to the existing parliamentary set-up, and particularly to prevent the mounting working-class discontent from developing a political voice.

In August 2021, for parties not then represented in parliament, the number of electoral members required to be officially registered and have their party names on election ballot papers was suddenly trebled from 500 to 1,500. This was in the middle of COVID-19 lockdowns that made physical political campaigning illegal, as well as unsafe.

Although the parliamentary report avoided saying so, the gap between “truth and trust” has widened enormously since the May 2022 election, when the Labor Party clawed its way back into office despite its primary vote falling to a near-record low of 32.5 percent. Labor only obtained a slim two-seat majority in the lower house because the Liberal Party’s vote fell even further.

Since then, Labor’s campaign slogan of “a better future” has proved a lie. Working-class living standards have fallen by the most in half a century, driven by soaring rents, home mortgage interest rates and prices. Labor has ramped-up its commitment to the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the US war preparations against China via the AUKUS military pact, and remained in lockstep behind the Biden administration’s backing for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“Stakeknife” murders report a cover-up of Britain’s dirty war in Northern Ireland

Steve James

The interim report published this month from Operation Kenova, the police investigation into the British spy “Stakeknife”, confirmed that British agents within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) committed multiple murders.

The Stakeknife operation is among the foulest episodes of British imperialism's decades long dirty war in Northern Ireland. Infiltration of the IRA and other republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, by British and Northern Ireland security and intelligence forces, was a central component of the 30-year conflict.

Kenova report, March 2024 [Photo: PSNI]

In line with the “Low Intensity Operations” doctrine codified by the British Army's late General Sir Frank Kitson, infiltration of republican groups provided information allowing arrests, operations to be sabotaged and executions and bloody ambushes set up. Infiltration of, and collusion with, the loyalist, pro-British groups provided them with weaponry and targeting information, allowing them to function as state sanctioned assassination squads.

For several years up to 1991, for motives that remain uncertain, although money played a role, Freddie Scappaticci, a republican from Belfast, in the leadership of the IRA's Internal Security Unit (ISU) intimidated, tortured, manipulated and murdered IRA members accused or suspected of being British agents. But, from sometime around 1978, Scappaticci was a British agent, feeding information on IRA discussions, operations and members to his British Army paymasters and controllers.

Scappaticci was handled by the British Army's spy operating Force Research Unit (FRU), while maintaining the image of a tough and violent operator respected by the republican leadership. Scappaticci, whose ISU also vetted new recruits to the Provisionals and maintained a brutal dictatorship in working class areas against youth accused of petty crimes, was outed in 2003 after years of suspicion, following failed operations, regarding the existence of top level British spies in the IRA.

In his readable 2023 work, “Stakeknife's Dirty War” former IRA prisoner and press officer, Richard O'Rawe noted “the road to peace was strewn with dead bodies—many of them ASU [Active Service Unit] members, who were cut down in carefully constructed SAS [Special Air Services] ambushes.”

O'Rawe notes that the late Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, former head of the IRA's Northern Command, Martin McGuinness, was central to Scappaticci's rise to head the ISU in 1986.

Scappaticci's treachery ran parallel with efforts of the Sinn Fein leadership to end their guerrilla war and find terms on which they could integrate themselves into the British government in the North and serve as partners in the exploitation of the working class. Remarkably, although sidelined and widely distrusted in republican circles from 1991 on, Scappaticci continued to live in Belfast, unhindered and unharmed.

When he was first publicly named in 2003, then Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams said he initially accepted Scappaticci's protestations of innocence “at face value.” Stakeknife came to be identified, not because of republican efforts, but primarily through the work of disgruntled ex-FRU member Ian Hurst, incensed at the brutal treatment and murder of other British agents, sacrificed to maintain Stakeknife in place.

Scappaticci eventually fled, later in 2003, to unknown locations in the UK, after abandoning efforts to deny his role. He died in April last year.

He only surfaced in public once, at Westminster Magistrates Court, where he was found guilty of possessing extreme animal pornography. His case was heard by Chief Magistrate and Senior District Judge for England and Wales, Emma Arbuthnot, the same judge who spearheaded the legal torture of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

Unlike her treatment of the principled journalist and publisher targeted for exposing imperialist war crimes, Arbuthnot thought well of the brutal torturer and murderer Scappaticci. She told him “You have not been before the court for 50 years—and that’s good character in my book,” handing him a suspended sentence.

In 2003, the Stakeknife revelations threatened not only further damaging documentary and legal exposure of the British state's murderous and cynical methods, and a large number of murder trials, but also to discredit the Sinn Fein leadership with grave political consequences for the Good Friday Agreement. Therefore Operation Kenova was not commissioned until 2015, 13 years after Scappaticci's exposure and tasked with investigating 24 murders. Scappaticci was not interviewed until 2018.

It has taken another nine years for Kenova to deliver an interim report which does not even formally confirm that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. Instead, Kenova led by led then Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Jon Boutcher, names Scappaticci as “inextricably bound up with and a critical person of interest at the heart of Operation Kenova”. Beyond that, the report rests on generalisations.

For example, Kenova identified three types of murders:

• murders committed by agents, including cases in which one agent murdered another.
• murders of alleged or suspected agents, carried out as punishment or deterrence, including cases when the victim was not in fact an agent.
• murders of both categories which could have been prevented but were not.

Kenova came to its conclusions after following up 12,000 lines of enquiry, taking 2,000 statements and interviewing 300 people, including 40 under caution. Eventually 35 files were submitted to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland (PPSNI). These referred to over 50,000 pages of evidence acquired from official sources including previously undisclosed files. Newly available forensic techniques were deployed.

More detailed and specific reports on individual murders are going to be handed to families at a later date along with a final report which, Boutcher claims, “will confirm the truth and set out the full facts”.

Much of Boutcher's interim report is devoted to problems setting up and managing the investigation and his frustrations in dealing with multiple security and legal agencies. These are bound up with the need to draw a line under the dirty war, present all the issues arising out of it as “legacy” while offering a pretence of legal restitution for families whose relatives were killed.

The Shankill road, Belfast during the troubles, circa 1970 [Photo by Fribbler / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

This has given rise to considerable tensions between police and legal authorities—tasked with formally investigating large numbers of unsolved murders—and the huge intelligence, police and military apparatus and their political leadership in Britain and Northern Ireland. The British government and military have no more interest in investigating their crimes in Northern Ireland than in later and current atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide.

Boutcher, despite repeatedly insisting on his support for the intelligence services work, writes of:

“The lack of any legal or policy framework to guide FRU and [Royal Ulster Constabulary] agent handlers in particular and of any associated oversight or supervisory mechanisms were very serious failings: they put lives at risk, left those on the frontline exposed and fostered a maverick culture where agent handling was sometimes seen as a high-stakes ‘dark art’ practised ‘off the books’.”

He admits:

“Whether a result of cultural obstruction, documents being over-classified or difficulty identifying and locating relevant material held by the authorities, access to records has been a persistent problem and a legitimate concern to families.”

Despite having negotiated agreements and single points of contact with the Security Service, MI5, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), data was still difficult to extract.

The Kenova team, for example, was given logins to intelligence database, MACER, used by the British Army. It became apparent that the MoD had a different set of logins with access to more records. Kenova was duly given more access, but Boutcher noted that the logins with greater rights had not been available to the series of previous investigations into intelligence activity and collusion in the “Troubles”.

Jon Boutcher [Photo: kenova/kenova.co.uk]

Boutcher complained that MI5 was holding historical material from the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch and the FRU which remained marked as Top Secret.

Boutcher notes that on the very day Kenova intended to submit its first set of files regarding members of both the Provisional IRA and the security forces, MI5 informed his team that their security credentials on their London building had expired.

He placed his difficulties in the context of a series of investigations into intelligence handling and collusion between loyalist killers and the British state, many remain Secret or Top Secret.

These include the Stalker report of 1984 into “shoot to kill” allegations against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), predecessor to the PSNI. A follow up report, Sampson 1986, also remains Secret while a further review into both the Stalker and Sampson reports, the 1988 McLachlan report, is labeled Top Secret.

Sir John Stevens' three reports into the leaking of targeting information from the security forces to loyalist killers found that almost all loyalist intelligence came from the British security forces. They were only partly released. A central focus of Stevens' first report, Stevens 1, was the former soldier Brian Nelson's role as both intelligence officer for the loyalist Ulster Defence Association and an agent for the FRU. Nelson had a role in as many as 30 murders. He was eventually charged and found guilty of 20 crimes, including conspiracy to murder.

Remarkably, Stevens was entirely unaware of Stakeknife despite Scappaticci being handled by the same FRU that he investigated regarding Nelson. Stevens 1 remains Top Secret. A follow up Blelloch report on agent handling was, until Boutcher requested a change, marked as Top Secret, now downgraded to Secret. Boutcher noted, “Lord Stevens said it was apparent that discussions at the highest level in the Army had resulted in the decision to withhold vital information from his inquiry team.” Stevens 2 remains Top Secret. Stevens 3, released in 2003, found that members of the security forces had colluded with the UDA in loyalist murders including that of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989.

Pat Finucane mural on the Falls Road, west Belfast [Photo by Zubro © 2003 / CC BY-SA 3.0]

In his outcomes and findings, Boutcher insists that files handed to the PPSNI “contain significant evidence implicating Stakeknife and others in very serious criminality and that this needs to be ventilated publicly.” But no-one in senior government or military positions claimed to have had any knowledge of Stakeknife. Boutcher points to what he euphemistically describes as “conscious lack of professional curiosity from the very senior leadership of the Army” regarding recruitment and running of agents.

Nevertheless, “Our Kenova investigations have established that agents were regularly involved in inciting and committing serious criminal acts” and “It is undoubtedly the case that some FRU and RUC Special Branch agents disclosed their involvement in criminality to their handlers (both before and after the event) and were assured that their anonymity and status would always be protected and they would never stand trial or spend time in jail.”

Shortly before Boutcher's report was published, the PPSNI announced it would not be taking action against seven people alleged to have been Provisional IRA members and five retired members of the British Army's Force Research Unit, said to be agent handlers, and more senior army figures. This follows decisions, stretching back to 2020 to avoid prosecuting former Security Service members and a PPSNI prosecutor.

Late 2023, the PPSNI said it would not be proceeding against “civilian suspects” in connection with murders, conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment, one police officer and six military personnel over allegations of perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office. Earlier last month the PPSNI decided not to proceed against a further two former soldiers and two alleged Provisional IRA members.

Not one of the files submitted to the PPSNI by Kenova have resulted in a single prosecution.

The suspicious “suicide” of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett

Bryan Dyne

The death of Boeing whistleblower John “Mitch” Barnett, the 62-year-old former employee of the aerospace corporation, was declared a suicide two days after he was found dead in a truck parked in a hotel lobby. There are ample reasons to question this narrative.

At the time, Barnett was in the middle of a deposition in Charleston, South Carolina, in which he was providing testimony for a civil case he was pursuing against Boeing. Barnett worked for Boeing as a quality manager for most of his 32-year career, during which he raised many serious questions about the safety of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner commercial aircraft. The suit charges Boeing with harassing him on the job, stalling any promotions and ultimately forcing him to leave the company 10 years before he planned to retire.

John Barnett in the 2022 Netflix documentary "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing." [Photo: Netflix]

Barnett completed two days of his deposition on March 7 and March 8, and, according to his lawyers Rob Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, he was tired but committed to giving his third and final day of testimony. When he did not arrive in court on March 9 and did not answer their phone calls, Barnett’s lawyers called the hotel where he was staying to check on him. Hotel employees found Barnett dead with a gunshot wound to his head.

The Charleston County coroner ruled that the cause of death was “a self-inflicted wound,” and a police report stated that officers had found “a white piece of paper resembling a note” near Barnett’s body. However, Barnett’s lawyers immediately challenged the claim that their client’s death was a suicide. They released a statement saying:

We didn’t see any indication that he would take his own life. No one can believe it. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public. No detail can be left unturned.

A more revealing comment came from one of Barnett’s family friends, Jennifer, who told an ABC affiliate on March 15 that Barnett had warned her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

Jennifer’s stunning revelation would, in a world based on reason, justice and the protection of the public, be the starting point for investigations into other causes of Barnett’s death. Instead, the corporate media has for the most part failed to report her statement, even as it continues to report on various near-disasters involving Boeing planes over the past several months.

It is worth contrasting Barnett’s death and its aftermath to that of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was found dead in his jail cell in February. The news outlets, along with President Joe Biden, wasted no time declaring, with no evidence, that Navalny’s death was the work of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yet when there is more than enough evidence to suggest foul play in regard to a whistleblower against Boeing, the evidence is ignored.

Barnett had a history of speaking out about Boeing’s dangerous and negligent practices after he left the company in 2017. In a variety of interviews, he described how Boeing compromised quality control in a manner that was “catastrophic” for passengers on Boeing planes. The overriding goal, according to Barnett, was to “make the cash register ring.”

In an interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter, Barnett exposed the role of Boeing’s military connections, inherited from its merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. “The entire team came down… from the military side,” he said. “Their motto was, we’re in Charleston and we can do anything we want. They started pressuring us not to document defects, to work outside procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected.”

The most infamous disasters of Boeing aircraft remain the deadly crashes of 737 Max 8 planes in October 2018 and March 2019 which killed all 346 passengers and crew aboard the two planes. Both crashes were caused by a relatively unknown piece of software, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS).

Leaked documents and congressional hearings revealed that Boeing’s leadership knew that MCAS could cause crashes by forcing a plane into a nosedive, overriding pilot control. The corporate giant nevertheless went ahead with the installation of the software on all of its new planes. Top management also went out of its way to conceal the existence of the system from pilots, airlines and regulators until it was forced to after the first crash. But even then, Boeing insisted that the Max 8 planes were safe—until the second crash, which triggered the global grounding of the aircraft.

No executives were ever tried for the crime of developing and deploying a defective, deadly aircraft. Federal investigations let then CEO Dennis Muilenburg and current CEO David Calhoun off the hook. Muilenburg made more than $80 million during his time as CEO, and Calhoun made $22.5 million in 2022 alone.

Boeing plays a massive role in the American economy and the US military-industrial complex. It is one of the country’s largest manufacturers and exporters, and is a key supplier of the vast sums of war materiel purchased by the US government. Nobody should doubt that it is capable of defending its profits and the interests of American imperialism by any means necessary, including the silencing of a troublemaker.

Barnett is not the first to come to a suspicious end just before providing potentially damning evidence against a critical force in American capitalism.

Journalist Michael Hastings was found dead after crashing into a tree at 100 miles per hour while investigating then CIA Director John Brennan. His last story, “Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans,” was published by BuzzFeed on June 7, 2013, 11 days before he died.

Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich, thought to be behind the leak of 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee showing extraordinary corruption in favor of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was shot in an apparent mugging in June 2016.

Financier and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019 after investigations into his business threatened to reveal sordid connections to high level executives and politicians in the US and around the world.

In every case, a story is worked out by the corporate media that is politically palatable for the bourgeoisie: car crash, robbery gone wrong, suicide by hanging. There is no serious investigation or follow-up, whether by the police or those purporting to call themselves “journalists.”

There can be no doubt that Barnett had more to say that would have further exposed the criminality of Boeing’s leadership and of American capitalism as a whole. The commercial and military aircraft giant remains in business only because it is protected at every level by federal regulators, whose penalties for deadly practices amount to less than a wrist-slap, and politicians who design laws allowing the production of machines as complex as aircraft with essentially no oversight.

These forces themselves serve Wall Street bankers and corporate executives who comprise the oligarchy in the US and internationally. For them, the waging of war and extraction of profit towers above questions of safety and the protection of human life.

Amid mass layoffs across the US, Dollar Tree announces nearly 1,000 Family Dollar store closures

Eddie Haywood

Discount retail giant Dollar Tree announced Wednesday that it will shutter nearly 970 of its Family Dollar stores across the United States and Canada, as well as 30 Dollar Tree locations, leaving thousands out of work, following what the company calls “years of mismanagement” and “declining profitability” of its stores. 

A Family Dollar store in Ridgeland, Mississippi [AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis]

Many of the stores to be closed are located in rural areas and impoverished towns and cities. The Family Dollar chain has 8,000 stores in the US and Canada and is owned by Dollar Tree, one of the largest discount chains of its kind. In many areas of the country, a Family Dollar store represents the only option for groceries and other goods, with larger supermarkets several hours’ driving away.

Announcing the closures in a press release, Dollar Tree stated, “As a result of this review, we plan on closing approximately 600 Family Dollar stores in the first half of fiscal 2024. Additionally, approximately 370 Family Dollar and 30 Dollar Tree stores will close over the next several years at the end of each store’s current lease term.”

Family Dollar has lost ground to rival retailer Dollar General, whose prices are 10 to 15 percent lower. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many youth and workers that form the majority of Family Dollar’s shoppers have been impacted by record-high inflation, which has seen prices for housing, food, gasoline, and other living costs skyrocket, resulting in a decline in spending. 

Higher prices, taken together with jobs paying lower wages that have not kept pace with inflation, have left many youth and workers struggling to survive, leaving many to choose between forgoing payment of one necessary bill to pay another. Workers’ livelihoods have been further stressed by the Federal Reserve’s high interest rate policy which is aimed at fueling job cuts and suppressing wage growth.

Dollar Tree acquired Family Dollar in 2015, in what then CEO Bob Sasser called a “transformational opportunity,” referring to the potential profits to be amassed by investors.

At the time of the acquisition, Dollar Tree’s executives saw an opportunity to edge out rival discount chain Dollar General, which in 2015 operated more than 12,000 stores, compared to Dollar Tree’s over 13,000 stores. 

The expansion for both retailers over the intervening years has exploded. In 2022, Dollar General operated over 19,000 stores compared to Dollar Tree’s more than 16,000 locations, including its Family Dollar locations.

The acquisition, brokered by Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase and investment firm Morgan Stanley, saw Dollar Tree’s profits soar from $2.7 billion in 2014 to $5.4 billion in 2015. In 2023, Dollar Tree opened 641 new stores and saw its profits balloon to more than $9.3 billion.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the news of the mass store closings come after Family Dollar was ordered February 27 to pay a $41.6 million fine by US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, for storing food, cosmetics, medicine, and other products in a rat-infested warehouse, leading to scores of temporary closures of stores around the country.

Pleading guilty to one misdemeanor count of debasing FDA-regulated products by holding them in unsanitary conditions, the retail giant confirmed that for a number of years preceding January 2022, the company shipped products to more than 400 stores in the Southeastern US from its filthy Arkansas warehouse. 

Federal investigators found the warehouse contained both live and dead and decaying rodents, as well as rodent feces and urine. The investigators additionally documented several instances of gnawing and nesting across the warehouse.

In spite of this corporate malfeasance, Dollar Tree CEO Rick Dreiling boasted to the media, “While we are still in the early stages of our transformation journey, I am proud of what our team accomplished in 2023 and see a long runway of growth ahead of us. As we look forward in 2024, we are accelerating our multi-price rollout at Dollar Tree and taking decisive action to improve profitability and unlock value at Family Dollar.”

This week’s announced closures represent the beginning of the end that Dollar Tree intends for Family Dollar, to slowly grind down its troubled subsidiary for as much profit as possible. In this, Dollar Tree is functioning much like a vulture capital firm that preys on a troubled company to bleed it dry of funds, then discarding the carcass.

The mass closures of stores follow a wave of layoffs and closures of other companies across the United States.

UK-based beauty products retailer The Body Shop closed all of its US stores on March 1, as well as 33 of its locations in Canada, after the distressed company collapsed and necessitated administration proceedings in London. The collapse of the company has led to hundreds of workers losing their jobs.

Additionally, Outdoor Voices, an Austin Texas-based athletic apparel retailer, announced the closure of all 16 of its stores located across the US on Sunday, declaring the company was moving its retail business entirely online.  

After expressing shock, workers told media the company suddenly fired them via an internal Slack message. Speaking to USA Today, workers said they were offered no compensation or severance. After the company relented, store managers were offered a $500 bonus to work through the weekend, with one stating, “It’s like a slap in the face.”

Amid the growing wave of store closures are the ongoing mass layoffs across all economic sectors in the US and internationally, constituting nothing less than a jobs massacre conducted by the corporate oligarchy.

In the first weeks of 2024, 25,000 workers in the tech sector were summarily laid off, including workers at Google, Meta, and Amazon. The job cuts followed the devastating loss of 260,000 tech jobs in 2023, the worst mass layoffs since the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s.

Political instability continues as Pakistan cobbles together a pro-austerity minority government

Sampath Perera

Pakistan’s ruling elite has now cobbled together a minority government led by the Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) with Shehbaz Sharif as its prime minister. This follows weeks of political instability after elections in February, which were manipulated and rigged on the orders of the military high command to prevent the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan from emerging victorious.

The new government of the world’s fifth-most populous country will be called upon to enforce vicious austerity on the orders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is dominated by US imperialism and global capital.

With reason, it is widely described as “weak,” “unstable” and “unpopular.”   

In this photo released by the Pakistan's President Office, President Arif Alvi, right, administers the oath of office to newly elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif during a ceremony at the Presidential Palace, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Monday, March 4, 2024. [AP Photo/Pakistan's President Office ]

Sharif’s 19-member cabinet was sworn in last Monday, but his government’s primary agenda is predetermined. It will continue and expand IMF-dictated austerity policies and capitalist restructuring (privatization, deregulation etc.). This program is the same one as that the previous coalition government headed by Shehbaz Sharif implemented during its 16 months in office from April 2022-August 2023 and which was intensified under the caretaker administration appointed to “oversee” the general elections.

The entire establishment is committed to the IMF diktats. However, deep divisions exist over how best to implement the politically explosive reforms. The government is also expected to maintain a servile relationship with the US-backed military, especially in relation to the country’s foreign and security policies. Pakistan has been ruled for nearly half of its existence by the military and in recent years, with Pakistan facing an intersecting cascade of economic, political and geopolitical crises, it has increasingly bullied and dominated the civilian government.

Under pressure from Washington, the military deemed Imran Khan and his Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party unsuitable for holding office as early as 2022 and organized the downfall of their government via a parliamentary non-confidence vote.

However, blatant widespread interference by government agencies and the military in the Feb. 8 vote aimed at preventing the PTI from returning to office. including denying it the right to stand candidates in its own name, badly backfired. The PML-N and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)—the two traditional parties of the Pakistani establishment and the principal components of the coalition that succeeded Imran Kahn’s government—won 73 and 54 seats respectively. Meanwhile, PTI-backed “independent” candidates emerged as the strongest group, winning 93 out of the 266 National Assembly constituencies.

Despite this rebuke, the military persisted in demanding a government that excludes the PTI. Army Chief Gen Syed Asim Munir rejected the popular vote and communicated the military’s own demand to the Islamabad political elite. “The nation needs stable hands and a healing touch to move on from the politics of anarchy and polarisation,” Munir said in a statement, essentially declaring any form of participation by the PTI in the government as unacceptable to the military.

In his statement, Munir referred to nationwide protests by PTI supporters against the seizing of Khan by paramilitary forces during a court appearance last year. The protests included the storming of a handful of military installations and the residence of at least one senior officer.

The generals played a crucial role in Khan’s own ascendency to government office in 2018. However, they had a falling out over his backtracking on some IMF-dictated energy subsidy cuts in the face of widespread popular protests and, most importantly, his defiance of Washington at the outset of the Ukraine War.

Underscoring Washington’s involvement in the behind-the-scenes wrangling to form a new government, PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari was summoned to Islamabad to meet with US Ambassador to Pakistan, Donald Blome. As the Islamabad elite was struggling to stomach the “shock election,” the emissary from Washington was discussing “federal government’s formation” with the former foreign minister in the previous Shebhaz Sharif-led government, according to a Feb. 12 Dawn report.

However, those most involved in stitching the new government together were eager to keep their distance from it in the end. Nawaz Sharif, the three-time prime minister and dynastic leader of the big-business PML-N, arrived in Pakistan in October ending four years of self-imposed exile in London and ran as his party’s much-touted prime ministerial candidate. The top judges in Pakistan set aside all previous convictions in various corruption cases so as to make him eligible for the office even as they were delivering one verdict after another against Khan and the PTI. Post-election, however, the elder Sharif anointed his younger brother Shehbaz as prime minister of what may prove to be a short-lived government.

The PPP, without whose support the government could not survive, has refused to join Shehbaz Sharif’s cabinet. It has also reserved the right to support the government only on a case-by-case basis. This is an obvious attempt to detach its name from the socially devastating and politically disastrous policies the government will inevitably implement. In exchange for supporting the coalition, however, the PPP’s boss, Asif Ali Zardari, a notoriously corrupt political conspirator, was installed as the country’s president.

Powerful sections of the Islamabad elite recognize that the new army-installed government is viewed by huge swathes of the population as illegitimate. The thoroughly anti-democratic measures deployed against the PTI provoked widespread public outrage and mass protests.

The latest of these measures was the Election Commission’s refusal to award any of some 70 National Assembly seats “reserved” for women and “religious minorities” and distributed on the basis of the respective parties’ seat-share to the PTI, thereby weakening its position in opposition. The PTI-elected independents had joined another party, the Islamist Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), which according to precedent should have allowed for PTI supporters to be nominated under the SIC’s banner. But the Election Commission ruled 4-1 to disallow this on the grounds the SIC had not submitted a list of candidates for the reserved seats prior to the election.     

The ruling elite is worried by the fact that the PTI, which has cultivated an image as a party of “outsiders,” will posture as an opponent of IMF austerity. No matter that when in office it served as a pliant instrument of the IMF and the frontbenches of the Imran Khan-led government were filled with leading lights of General Pervez Musharraf’s US-backed dictatorial regime.

There is no question that Khan and his the PTI were the electoral beneficiaries of widespread popular sympathy due to their arbitrary persecution by the military and the courts.  

However, the Feb. 8 vote was above all an expression of anger and opposition to the military’s vast power and reach and to the traditional ruling establishment as a whole. It was this that allowed Khan, a former cricket star, to rally support far beyond his traditional base in the urban professional middle class.

Using an eclectic mixture of messages, Khan has demagogically presented himself as an opponent of austerity and US imperialism and its wars, which have ravaged neighbouring Afghanistan and subjected millions in Pakistan’s tribal regions to years of drone surveillance and strikes. Yet, he has indicated time and again his willingness to patch up relations with Washington and above all to accept the military’s dominant role in Pakistan’s politics and government. His government implemented two rounds of some of the harshest IMF austerity in the country’s history, leading to a substantial erosion of his popular support prior to his ouster from office.

The new government assumes office amid an unprecedented and protracted social crisis produced by years of austerity policies, privatization and economic reforms leading to a horrendous economic situation. The crisis is compounded by climate-change-induced natural disasters and the ruinous mishandling of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Conservative World Bank estimates place 40 percent of Pakistan’s population below the poverty line. The cost of basic necessities has skyrocketed as a result of protracted high inflation in the last two years. Prices are continuing to rise at an annual rate of 34 percent.

Sharif appointed political outsider Muhammad Aurangzeb as finance minister. He resigned as CEO from Pakistan’s largest private bank, the Habib Bank, to assume the position. Aurangzeb, also the former CEO of JP Morgan’s Asia Corp, is leading a 4-day review with the IMF that began on Thursday to secure the release of the last tranche of a $3 billion emergency loan program.

Although he was selected for the finance post because of his close ties to global capital, Aurangzeb was given a dressing down by IMF officials for presenting it with a document that claimed, Pakistan “has met all structural benchmarks, qualitative performance criteria and indicative targets for successful completion of the IMF review.”

Aurangzeb announced on Tuesday that Pakistan will use the review to start negotiations for another loan of $6 billion or more from the IMF. In a statement communicating the IMF board decision to release the previous tranche of the loan, it indicated the type of conditions that will be attached. It asked for “broad-based reforms to improve the fiscal framework,” that is reduce social spending and drive up tax revenue, and “cost-side power sector reforms.” The latter is a euphemism for the gutting of subsidies and other steps to make the sector “profitable.”

It is also insisting on a “market-determined exchange rate” so as to ensure the full cost of the Pakistan rupee’s erosion is immediately borne by the poverty-stricken masses. Pakistan’s currency was the worst performing in Asia last year. A new loan will inevitably involve draconian reforms connected with these measures leading to a further impoverishment of the people.

In response to a question from Dawn, the US State Department urged “Pakistan to continue working with the IMF and other international financial institutions to implement long-overdue macroeconomic reforms,” it reported on March 8. Given Washington’s dominant position in the IMF, its endorsement is critical for Pakistan to secure another loan facility.

The revival of the badly frayed Pakistani-US relationship after Imran Khan’s ouster in 2022 was almost certainly bound up with Islamabad supplying weapons to Ukraine via a back channel. But as Washington prepares for war with Iran to consolidate its dominance in the Middle East, Islamabad will also come under pressure to take an increasingly confrontational stance towards Tehran, on issues ranging from trade to cross-border security.

Islamabad’s capitalist elite is well aware that there is overwhelming opposition among the population to the imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza and widespread recognition that this crime is only possible due to US imperialism’s active role in it. This is adding fuel to the fire of the longstanding anti-imperialist sentiments of the population. There is no sign of a let up in the compounded crises Pakistan is facing. Rather, the fragile government is on a collision course with the masses, whose genuine democratic and egalitarian aspirations place them in irreconcilable opposition to the coalition’s subservience to the IMF. The government will embrace ever-more authoritarian forms of rule as it seeks to ram through another austerity program, while conceding more say and power to the military to secure its continued support.