The Death of a Life That Mattered

Walter Brasch

Michael Blake died last week.

You probably don’t know the name.

You probably don’t know about his life.

You probably don’t know most of what he wrote. That’s probably because he didn’t write diet and exercise books. Or cookbooks. Or “feel good” books. Or books about celebrities. Or books that advanced junk science or conspiracy theories.

Michael Blake fused history and social issues, writing about social justice. Writing books that mattered. Writing screenplays that were never produced and then discarded.

He was born in Fort Bragg, N.C.; his father was in the Army, and later became a telephone executive. But it was his mother, Sally, who dominated his life. It was her last name, “Blake,” that he adopted as his own, pushing aside his father’s name, “Webb.”

Michael Blake studied journalism at the University of New Mexico, dropping out in his senior year; he would later study film at the Berkeley Film Institute.

His semi-autobiographical novel, Airman Mortensen, talked about life in the Air Force. His autobiography, Like a Running Dog, revealed his life in the 1970s, sometimes homeless and hungry, living in cars, living on friends’ and acquaintances’ sofas, hanging out with musicians, writers, actors, and others in the creative arts, working at odd jobs, sometimes selling features and investigative stories to the alternative press, which were publishing stories of importance in the 1960s, stories the mainstream media would never touch. Eventually, he would be hired full-time at the L.A. Free Press, one of the most important alternative newspapers of the era. Even with a steady paycheck, albeit it not a large one, he usually ate only one meal a day, often a sandwich from a Jewish deli near the newspaper’s office.

His screenplay, Stacy’s Knights, written while he was in his late ’30s, starred his friend, a little-known actor, Kevin Costner. It gave both of them temporary financial security.

Blake would continue to write about social issues, many of the stories and books not bringing in significant income. But he wrote and spoke out about issues that mattered—the slaughter of wild horses and burros, the problems that developed from racial conflict, the lack of social justice. He was honored with the Environmental Media award, the Animal Protection Institute’s humanitarian of the year honor, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for work with minorities and the ministry.

On the day he died, two men shared $300 million by appearing at a Las Vegas casino and tried to beat the life out of each other. Michael Blake, in his lifetime, never earned what the loser earned in that fight. The royalties from all of his writings never even equaled the salary for one year for a major league pitcher or a celebrity with a paid entourage.

With one exception, his writing brought him a modest lifestyle.

That one exception began as a screenplay, but Kevin Costner wanted him to rewrite it as a novel, believing that a book would have moreimpact. About three dozen publishers rejected it, most of them concerned more about marketability and profits than editorial quality and social issues, before Fawcett published it but gave it little promotion. The novel, published only in paperback, sold a few thousand copies.

An so, Blake took the basis of the novel, and rewrote the original screenplay—but studios didn’t want to take a chance on the project. Costner, fresh from a starring roles in Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, along with his friends producer Jim Wilson and Blake, produced the film themselves, staying true to the writer’s intent, something rare in the film industry.

Dances With Wolves, starring Kevin Costner, is the story of race hatred and the attempts to destroy a culture that had existed thousands of years before the pilgrims came to the place that became known as the United States of America. The film earned seven Oscars, including Best Film; one of those Oscars went to Michael Blake for best screen adaptation.

It was only after the film became a mega-hit, eventually earning more than $400 million, more than 20 times the production costs, did the book become popular. That book, now published in two dozen languages and in hardcover, has sold about 3.5 million copies since 1988. It helped give Michael Blake financial stability; it helped assure that he could write what he wanted, now from Tucson where he bought a ranch and devoted much of the last quarter-century of his life to the environment, to protecting animals, to fighting for social justice.

It was in Tucson where he and his wife, Marianne Mortensen, an artist who, like her husband, became an advocate for the preservation of wild horses and burros, settled. It was in Tucson where they raised three children—each with a Native American first name and a middle name in honor of Marianne’s Danish heritage.

In those last decades of his life, his health deteriorated. He had multiple sclerosis. He needed a heart bypass. Cancer spread through his body. Once robust, he was now gaunt. But, he would summon what strength he had left to write and to travel the country, speaking out about issues that mattered. He died as he had lived much of his life—without much money and with a conscience to bring truth and justice to the people and animals whose own voices weren’t heard by those who should have been there to help them.

Michael Blake and I were born in the same year and shared some of the same experiences in the ’60s and ’70s in southern California. He was my friend and an inspiration of what it means to be a writer, to use words and imagery to try to help people better understand their lives and their cultures.

You may know only his one now-famous work. You need to read the rest.

The Brothers Agwu

Charles R. Larson

A river runs through Chigozie Obioma’s haunting debut novel, The Fisherman, the powerful story of an Igbo family, living in a Yoruba area of southern Nigeria, mostly during the troubled years of the country’s military unrest. It’s the story of four brothers (Ikenna, 15; Boja, 14; Obemba, 11; and Ben, the narrator, 9, at the beginning of the story). They have two much younger siblings, and most of the time their father works for the Central Bank of Nigeria a thousand miles away from them, in Yola, in northern Nigeria. He’s a fairly tyrannical father when he’s around, but the major problem is his absence from the family and his high expectations for his son’s careers.

In his absence, the four teenage and preteen siblings get into something that becomes much more than mischief, something that will eventually destroy their family. That’s where the river becomes important in Obioma’s mythic story: “Omi-Ala was a dreadful river: Long forsaken by the inhabitants of Akure town like a mother abandoned by her children. But it was once a pure river that supplied the earliest settlers with fish and clean drinking water. It surrounded Akure and snaked through its length and breadth. Like many such rivers in Africa, Omi-Ala was once believed to be a god; people worshipped it.” All this changed when the Europeans arrived with their religion and the river was transformed into an evil place. It is worth noting that Akure is where Obioma himself grew up, though Google Maps shows no river with that name.

Though the river has long been off bounds for the four brothers, one day when their father is away they get the idea that they should try fishing and—if they are successful—perhaps they can sell the fish for a modest profit. But “the Omi-Ala [has become] a dreadful river,” totally polluted. Worse, the town’s madman, named Abula, haunts its environs, and some weeks after the brothers four have begun fishing, there’s an altercation between them and the madman. Abula singles out Ikenna, the eldest, and spews out a string of predictions, including “Ikena, you will swim in a river of red but never rise from it again…. Ikena, you shall die like a cock dies.”

Abula’s earlier predictions about other people in Akura have largely come true—something that Ikenna fully understands. It isn’t too longbefore the elder brother begins believing the predictions, as his body wastes away. His mother warns him that he has “chosen to believe the visions of a madman,” i.e., it takes two to make the predictions come true. Ignore them. But it’s already too late. When Ikenna isolates himself from his brothers, they try to talk him out of his fears but with little success. For the first time the harmony of the four Agwu brothers begins to weaken. Though Ben, the narrator, speaks fondly of his older brother—romanticizing him in a highly lyrical passage in the novel—he, also, is not able to talk Ikenna out of his fears.

Then the absolute worst happens and brother turns against brother and tragedy results. All of these events are set to the background of political unrest in Nigeria, with violent schisms fighting one another, which is to say that what happens to the brothers becomes a metaphor for the disastrous late years of Nigeria’s military dictatorships, especially when Sani Abacha raped the country. The fisherman metaphor also pulls on interesting Biblical parallels. But it’s too late. The family unity is destroyed. And the parents are equally subsumed by events involving their four sons.

The Fisherman is an impressive novel, especially Obioma’s storytelling skills but it is badly flawed by one major element: the writing itself, the use of language. Purple prose abounds, as do strange sentences and phrases such as the following: “He subpoenaed tranquil spirits” or “temporal lobotomy.” Numerous others could be sited but this one wins the prize:

“I observed that he [Abulu] carried on his body a variety of odours, the most noticeable of which was a faecal smell that wafted at me like a drone of flies when I drew closer to him. This smell, I thought, might have been a result of his going for long without cleaning his anus after excretion. He reeked of sweat accumulated inside the dense growth of hair around his pubic regions and armpits. He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and wastes. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself. He had the smell of banana trees and guava trees, of the Harmattan dust, of trashed clothes in the large bin behind the tailor’s shop, of leftover meat at the open abattoir in the town, of leftover things devoured by vultures, of used condoms from the La Room motel, of sewage water and filth, of semen from the ejaculations he’d spilled on himself every time he’d masturbated, of vaginal fluids, of dried mucus.”

I doubt if a dog’s nose could pick up so many smells, and that isn’t even the entire paragraph.

Are their no editors around any longer, no one to take a pencil to such passages and cross them out?

Such a pity to undermine such talent.

Chigozie Obioma: The Fishermen

Little, Brown, 297 pp., $26.

Bred to Kill

DAVID YEARSLEY

Though the singing of the American national anthem at sporting events retains vestigial trappings of patriotism, the real point of the exercise is entertainment, the more violent the better. If the anthem is a ritual, it is no longer one of faith in the fatherland but of mortal sacrifice. The thousands in the stadium—and in cases of televised blockbuster events like the Super Bowl, the billions worldwide—watch, listen, and pray that the national hymn will fell the singer like an angry bull goring a grandstanding toreador. Botched or forgotten words, cracked high notes, wandering intonation, suicidal ornamentation: all these draw blood and gleeful jeers. And once this enraged bull of a one-time English drinking song reclad in bombast by a racist Maryland lawyer and amateur poet called Francis Scott Key has the combatant down it stamps and snorts and slashes without mercy. The anthem was bred to kill and kill it does. There is no ear to be cut off the beast and given to the vocalist should he or she survive the ordeal: until a few days ago, the only victory to be had was merely the avoidance of public humiliation.

Thus when movie star Jamie Foxx stepped into the ring last Saturday before the latest “Fight of the Century” pitting Floyd Mayweather against Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas all were eager for the first slugfest of the night: Foxx versus Key. It proved to be far and away the best of all the bouts.

But first came the undercard of this slugfest of song: a stocky tenor with the everyman name of Julio Lopez and a neck like a Virginia ham faced off against the Mexican national anthem. The scheduling of this matchup spawned puzzlement and wisecracks from the newsrooms of London to the bars of Mexico City. Though he speaks Spanish, the boxer Pacquiao is from the Philippines, where, by the way, the language is in decline. The silver-haired ring announcer described this seemingly random insertion of the Mexican hymn as a prelude to the “upcoming Cinco de Mayo celebrations” then still three days hence. This was a tenuous pretext at best. There were unconfirmed reports that Tecate beer, one of the sponsors of the event, insisted on the singing of the Mexican anthem as a subliminal advertisement for their product. In his 2007 Cinco de Mayo matchup against Oscar de la Hoya in Las Vegas,Mayweather had donned Mexican colors and an outsized sombrero. At least Saturday night’s Mexican anthem brought back fond memories of that outlandish get-up.

All this theorizing about the reasons for the inclusion of the Mexican hymn was quickly forgot once the bout got under way. Lopez has gone toe-to-toe with his country’s anthem many times in Las Vegas, and had moved up at last one weight class for the latest rematch against this always-daunting opponent.

The Mexican anthem was contrived in the 1850s in the aftermath of Mexico’s defeat in the war with the United States after which the American Southwest—including all of Nevada—was deeded over to the Anglos. Only a few will enjoy the irony of such macho posturing about Mexican military swagger hymned in the very region lost more than one-hundred-and-fifty years—never mind that its singing comes in the context of continued political resistance to immigration reform. What better way to kick-off a boxing duel than with a paean to the glories of combat? The English translation of the opening stanza runs:

Mexicans, at the cry of war
Make ready the steel and the bridle
And let the earth shake to the core
At the roar of the cannon
And let the earth shake to the core
At the roar of the cannon.

The Mexican hymn assumes the brawling stance of so many anthems born of the nineteenth-century nationalism that repurposed the melodic contours of the church for the unifying imperatives of the state.

Lopez took the microphone and the pair went at it with vicious zeal. The opening uppercut of an arpeggio—ascending rather than descending like its American counterpart, the Star-Spangled Banner—shook the tentative Lopez. He wobbled in the knees and the vocal cords went slack and he nearly collapsed at the descending chromatic scale on the second line: “Y retiemble en sus centros la Tierra” (and let the earth shake to the core), a musical low blow that conjures not only the tremors of battle but also the shudderings of the seismically volatile country itself. For a long moment it looked as if Lopez wouldn’t even last the full two-minutes.

But then he gathered his wits and voice and fought his way from the corner, landing several combinations as the hymn lurched towards flat-side harmonies. A whirr of Lopez punches ushered in rapturous crescendo up to a glancing high B that shook the anthem but did not bring it down. The Himno can take a punch and had staying power to land a series of body blows in a toe-to-toe exchange that continued past the final bell. All the singer could manage was an exhausted descent to the barely audible reprise of the “roar of the cannon.” The resulting draw left the future of both Lopez and the Himno México in doubt. Most hope that retirement beckons for the fighters, and well-deserved decades of poolside relaxation, Tecate in hand.

Then came the main event. The actor turned vocal pugilist, Foxx looked resplendent in his cream tuxedo, black shirt, and abundant gold necklace. Gleaming in the spotlights’ blue glare, his face was thick with lubricant meant to lessen the blows to be inflicted by the iron-fisted anthem.

But for all his bravura, Foxx looked uncharacteristically nervous. He later claimed that his earpiece had fallen out just prior to entering the ring. Foxx therefore had to try and find his pitch and bearings directly from the florid Hammond B-3 organ accompaniment emanating from distant speakers in the cavernous MGM-Grand arena. The look of panic on his face would seem to confirm that claim. The anthem stunned him at the opening bell and the auditorium hushed in euphoric anticipation of the spectacle of an A-list Hollywood titlist about ready to crash to the canvas in the first moments of the fight. This grandstander had wanted to rock out, but was instead being rocked by non-stop blows from his unflappable and merciless opponent. Foxx would later concede, “That it was a little off.”

He may have been hurt but he did not drop.

Instead, he did what all smart fighters must: he kept his feet moving, dodging knock-out punches with melodic feints and bobs, weaving around the original melody with deft, if dazed, slides and turns. From his distant corner the organ urged its man on like Angelo Dundee spurring on Ali.

Indeed, Foxx’s dismal start revealed itself to be pure musical rope-a-dope, as he stung the anthem with jabs and flurries of ornament. The Banner was sagging under the jubilant assault as Foxx got stronger and stronger. Now it was the Founding Father of American song that was on the ropes, and Foxx toyed with him, keeping him upright for more melismatic combinations and the knockout falsetto right cross on the final “Brave.” With a black church Hallelujah coda, Foxx did a boastful dance above the fallen champion, the strutting menace that had knocked out so many great heavyweights of song.

Francis Scott Key’s worst nightmare was, as he put it, “to associate and amalgamate with the Negro.” Now his greatest work was out for the count as an ecstatic Foxx glared defiantly into the blinding lights, the fans unsure whether to cheer or riot.

Pulling itself up from the mat, with broken nose and bruised ribs the body politic tried to spin the defeat instead as a debacle for Foxx. The movie star’s performance was subjugated to a savage smear campaign. That’s all just so much hype. Promoters are already trying to convince Foxx to climb into the ring with the Mexican Mauler next time out.

Australian Greens execute abrupt leadership change

Mike Head

On Wednesday, the Australian Greens’ 11 members of federal parliament suddenly replaced their leader of three years, Senator Christine Milne—less than a week before the Abbott Liberal-National government hands down next Tuesday’s federal budget.

The timing of the backroom ballot points, in the first instance, to preparations by the Greens to assist the government to push through major cuts to social spending, including on pensions, in this budget. Key provisions in last year’s budget were blocked in the Senate by Labor, the Greens and cross-bench senators, after the government’s austerity offensive provoked popular outrage.

In what was reportedly a unanimous vote, Senator Richard Di Natale, 44, who has been in the Senate since 2010, was installed as party leader in a snap ballot conducted less than two hours after Milne, 61, announced her resignation.

Di Natale immediately announced his readiness to negotiate with Prime Minister Tony Abbott on the budget and other measures. He declared that he was not an “ideologue,” but entered politics to “get stuff done.” With 10 votes in the Senate, the Greens can ensure the passage of any piece of government legislation they support.

While paying tribute to Milne’s “commitment and patriotism to offer to serve in the parliament,” Abbott welcomed the leadership change. “Maybe the Greens will become the constructive negotiating partners that the public want the parliamentary cross bench to be,” he said yesterday.

Likewise, today’s Australian Financial Review editorial greeted Di Natale’s comments as “a welcome sign that this key party on the Senate crossbenches has discovered a practical streak.” Yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald editorial stated: “The elevation of Richard Di Natale to replace Christine Milne as Australian Greens leader is a potential plus for federal politics.”

Having become the “third party” of the Australian political establishment over the past two decades, the Greens are making a bid to play a more pivotal role in shoring up the parliamentary framework in the face of rising popular discontent. The new leader emphasised his wider determination to make the parliamentary system work better to produce “outcomes,” because “people are sick of the sort of the nonsense that goes on in this place.”

Di Natale stressed that he and Milne were “different people.” Milne and her long-time predecessor Bob Brown, who founded the Greens in 1992, had a history of environmental protest politics, designed to attract younger voters disaffected with the two main ruling parties, Labor and Liberal.

By contrast, Di Natale, a former doctor, hardly mentioned the environment at his initial media conference. The new leader much more clearly represents the upper-middle class and business layers on which the Greens increasingly rest. He declared that the Greens were “the natural home of progressive, mainstream Australian voters” and “not just on the Labor side.”

Di Natale’s orientation reflects the Greens’ membership, now the wealthiest of all the parliamentary parties, and their developing social constituency. In recent elections, such as the March 28 New South Wales (NSW) state poll, the vote for the Greens was generally highest in affluent electorates.

The Australian reported on April 11 that, based on census data, the Greens won an average of just 4.8 percent of the vote in electorates with the highest proportion of labourers. By contrast, the article noted, that in the “top 10 electorates in NSW ranked by the proportion of households with income of $3,000 a week or more, the Greens’ primary vote averaged 17 percent.” It reached 46.4 percent in inner-city middle-class Newtown and 37.2 percent in Balmain—the two Sydney seats where Green candidates were elected.

These better-off layers are entrenched in the upper echelons of the public service, the multi-billion dollar “green” business sector and the various government-funded institutions that promote identity politics agendas, such as feminism and multiculturalism. Di Natale, the son of Italian immigrants, focused on these issues in his media conference.

There has been a concentrated turn to this milieu by the Greens since the drubbing they received at the last federal election in 2013. After serving for six years as de facto coalition partners in the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the Greens’ overall vote dropped by about a third. In the Senate, it dropped by 4.4 percent, to 8.6 percent—the party’s worst result in almost a decade.

Under Labor, the Greens lined up fully behind Canberra’s commitment to the Obama administration’s military and strategic “pivot” to Asia to encircle and confront China. They also backed the US-led military interventions into Libya and Syria, and have since called for a more aggressive confrontation with Russia.

In a bid to head off the emergence of public opposition to the new war in Iraq and Syria, Milne last year called for a parliamentary debate on Australian’s involvement. She did not oppose the war itself, but canvassed concerns about its likely success and the need for Australian troops to be retained in the Asia-Pacific region.

Significantly, Di Natale made no mention of the Middle East war, or rising US militarism, at his media conference—itself an indication of the Greens’ continued alignment behind Washington and its allies.

In an effort to appeal to voters alienated by the ongoing attacks, by Labor and Liberal governments alike, on welfare and social services, Di Natale claimed that he would give voice to issues such as “decent health care, decent education, affordable housing, public transport.”

The Greens’ record demonstrates the fraud of this claim. Last year, they joined Labor in voting for the bulk of the cuts in the Abbott government’s budget, including $80 billion worth of cuts to education and health funding to the states over 10 years. They opposed calls to block the budget, precisely because they feared a political crisis that could have triggered a mass working-class movement against the entire austerity program.

The Greens’ deputy leader, Adam Bandt, was also ousted in Wednesday’s ballot, to be replaced by two co-deputies, Senators Larissa Waters, 38, a lawyer, and Scott Ludlam, 45, a former graphic designer.

Media reports indicated that Bandt and other Green MPs, notably former Moscow-line Socialist Party member Senator Lee Rhiannon, were kept in the dark about Milne’s planned departure, and the ballot was called swiftly in order to prevent any challenge to the new line-up. Rhiannon publicly called for membership ballots on the party’s leadership. In response, Di Natale bluntly rejected criticisms of the abrupt ballot, saying “that’s politics.”

Conscious of the deep disaffection among workers and youth toward the parliamentary elite, Rhiannon recently proposed that the Greens could help form a Syriza-style coalition of the “radical left,” as has taken office in Greece. Such a formation, backed by pseudo-left groups and possibly some trade unions, would seek to cobble together new political mechanisms to enforce the requirements of the corporate elite amid a rapid downturn in the Australian economy.

Milne is now expected to quit her senate seat before next year’s scheduled federal election. Among the frontrunners to fill the resulting casual vacancy is former Tasmanian state Greens leader Nick McKim. Like Di Natale, McKim epitomises the social milieu on which the Greens are based. As a senior minister in the 2010–14 Labor-Greens power-sharing state government, he spearheaded that government’s austerity measures by trying to shut 20 public schools, provoking widespread public resistance.

China’s Xi meets head of Taiwan’s Kuomintang

Ben McGrath

The leaders of China’s and Taiwan’s ruling parties met in Beijing on May 4. Xi Jinping and Eric Chu held an approximately one-hour discussion, during which the two expressed support for continued economic cooperation as well as for the 1992 agreement that established the “One China” policy.

Chu was in the Chinese capital as part of a three-day trip, which included a cross-strait cooperation event in Shanghai and a meeting with other high-ranking officials in the Chinese government on the weekend. Chu became head of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT) in January following disastrous results for his party in November’s local elections. Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou stepped down from the post. Chu is now viewed as a potential candidate in next year’s presidential election.

The meeting between took place in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People and was the first between Xi, acting in his capacity as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Chu. It was also the first meeting between CCP and KMT party leaders in six years.

Both Xi and Chu expressed their support for the “One China” policy, in which both sides recognise that the island of Taiwan is Chinese territory, but agree to disagree on which is the legitimate government of China. Chu stated: “Hopefully the two sides can promote cooperation based on the 1992 consensus and work together on issues such as regional peace, environmental protection, and economic cooperation.”

In this regard, Chu discussed with Xi several economic issues, including the possibility of Taiwan joining the Chinese-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China’s “One Belt, One Road” trade initiative, and its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

Taiwan has been blocked from taking part in each of these by Beijing which is seeking to ensure that Taipei’s involvement in the international agreements corresponds to its interpretation of the “One China” policy. In order to deal with China, countries must acknowledge that the mainland People’s Republic represents the sole Chinese nation. Only a handful of nations now officially recognise the Republic of China on Taiwan as a state.

The AIIB is slated to open later this year, with 57 founding members. Taiwan was excluded from becoming one of those founders after Beijing demanded that it join under an “appropriate name.” Chu’s delegation suggested on Monday that Taiwan could apply as Chinese Taipei. Xi indicated that Beijing would “welcome” Taiwan’s participation in the AIIB on these terms.

The “One Belt, One Road” trade initiative is a Chinese plan to organize economic development throughout Eurasia through the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road, while the RCEP is a proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the six countries with which it holds other FTAs—China, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.

Taiwan is interested in joining these projects but is wary of the political preconditions that Beijing may set in order to do so. In an effort to assuage these concerns, Xi stated during the meeting: “The two sides can consult with each other on an equal basis under the principle of ‘One China,’ and reach a reasonable arrangement.”

Xi promised Chu that Taiwan would be given preferential treatment: “We are willing to give priority to Taiwan in opening-up. Our efforts to open up to Taiwan compatriots will be bigger.” He continued, “We will continue to protect the legitimate interests and rights of Taiwan businesses on the mainland and create a better environment for their development.”

A day before his meeting with Xi, Chu attended the tenth Cross-Strait Economic, Trade and Culture Forum in Shanghai and held a meeting on Saturday with Yu Zhengsheng, a top political advisor and member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee.

The forum is a vehicle for CCP-KMT dialogue and began a year after the 2005 meeting between Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, and then-KMT chief Lien Chan. That meeting marked an important thawing in relations between Taipei and Beijing.

Relations between Taiwan and mainland China had been tense for years. The KMT fled to Taiwan in 1949 in the wake of the Chinese Revolution. Initially considered by the United States and its allies as the legitimate China, they began withdrawing their recognition of Taiwan in the 1970s, as Mao Zedong’s regime sought a rapprochement with the imperialist powers.

Since 2005, the KMT has drawn closer to Beijing, with Ma Ying-jeou winning the presidency in Taiwan in 2008 with promises to ease tensions and boost economic cooperation with China. Closer ties with the mainland, however, have not staved off the impact of the global economic slump. The Taiwanese economy has stagnated and youth unemployment hovers around 14 percent.

The KMT represents the wing of the ruling class on Taiwan that views even greater economic integration with China as their best option. It is opposed by the Taiwanese nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Tsai Ing-wen, the head of the DPP, chastised Chu’s meeting with Xi, accusing the KMT of accepting Beijing’s interpretation of the “One China” policy. She declared that only big business would benefit from cross-strait cooperation and called on Chu to consider Taiwan’s “national interest.”

The DPP, however, fully embraces capitalism and offers no genuine alternative to the Taiwanese masses. Its cautious advocacy of Taiwanese independence reflects the standpoint of layers of the ruling class whose interests are bound up with global exports and investment, and who feel threatened by Chinese competition.

In next year’s presidential election, the DPP hopes to exploit dissatisfaction with the economy and repeat the sweeping victory it registered in last November’s local elections.

Italian parliament adopts new election law

Marianne Arens

Italy’s parliament adopted an electoral reform in its fourth reading on Monday that will give the government more freedom to act independently of the will of the electorate. The Senate, Italy’s second chamber, had already backed the law in January.

As with the previous electoral reform, which was declared to be in breach of the constitution by the Supreme Court in 2013, the new law guarantees the largest party a parliamentary majority in the lower house, even if its result is well below 50 percent of the vote. The Senate, where the distribution of seats corresponds more directly to the election result, and which has to date formed a check on power, will be practically abolished.

The election law is among the most important projects of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (Democratic Party, DP). It is aimed at giving his government and future administrations a stable majority so as to force through strict austerity measures, deregulate the labour market and strengthen the military. It is clearly a step towards dictatorial forms of rule.

All four votes in parliament were declared to be votes of confidence in Renzi in order to keep the number of dissenters in his own ranks low. In the fourth vote, 334 voted in favour and 61 against. The opposition parties had earlier left parliament in protest.

The new election law will come into force on July 1, 2016. It contains a 3 percent hurdle for smaller parties and is a distorted form of proportional representation. If a party achieves 40 percent of the vote, it obtains a government bonus of 15 percent, thereby establishing an absolute majority of 340 seats in the 630-seat parliament. The remaining seats will be distributed in line with the votes obtained.

If no party reaches 40 percent, a second round of voting between the two strongest parties takes place. The victor then receives 340 seats, even if they did not obtain 30 percent of the vote in the first round.

The previous election law contained a similar regulation. The strongest coalition of parties, not a single party as in the new law, obtained a government bonus to secure a majority. Silvio Berlusconi introduced this to consolidate his majority. It was termed porcellum, or “pigs law”.

As Berlusconi’s power waned, the DP benefited from porcellum. Renzi, who took over from Enrico Letta in February 2014 without a vote by the electorate, can rely on a stable majority in parliament, even though his party won only 25.4 percent of the vote at the last election.

At the end of 2013, Italy’s highest court declared porcellum to be in violation of the constitution because it distorted the will of the electorate too much. The court also raised concerns over the rigidity of the order on party lists, thanks to which the parties and not the voters were able to determine who entered parliament.

On this second question, the new Italicum election law makes concessions to the constitution. The parties are only permitted to determine the top position on their lists, while the voters have the opportunity to cast two votes in order to determine the order of candidates on the list.

Alongside Italicum the Renzi government is reforming the Senate, which is being eliminated as an upper house with equal powers to act as a check of parliament. In future, it will only exist as a regional representative body with consultative powers. The number of senators will be reduced from 315 to 100. They will no longer be directly elected, but appointed by regional governments. In addition, there are senators appointed for life and those named by the president.

Since Renzi has no majority in the existing Senate, he was only able to pass the electoral reform and the Senate reform with the support of Berlusconi’s right-wing opposition. This was the point of the so-called Nazereno pact concluded last year by Renzi and Berlusconi. The latter is hoping to make a political comeback and therefore assisted Renzi to pass both reforms in the Senate.

The Nazereno pact subsequently broke down because Renzi had Sergio Matarella elected as Italian president against the wishes of Berlusconi. Since then, deputies of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia have expressed strong vocal opposition to Renzi. Forza Italia parliamentary fraction leader Renato Brunetta denounced Italicum last week as “Renziist fascism.”

Tensions are also mounting within Renzi’s party, after he threw 10 critical deputies out of the constitutional committee in parliament. Prominent party members from the former Communist Party such Guglielmo Epifani, Pier Luigi Bersani and Gianni Cuperlo, along with Renzi’s predecessor Enrico Letta, remained absent from part of the vote in protest. Renzi obtained the necessary majority through the support of several smaller parties, including Mario Monti’s Scelta Civica (Citizens’ Vote) and the Aerea Popolare group.

The SEL Party (Left, ecology, freedom), which initially backed Renzi, the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo and Berlusconi’s party are pressing for a referendum against the electoral reform.

SEL leader Nichi Vendola stated that the “servile subordination of the legislative power to the executive” was simply unacceptable. During Berlusconi’s time, they had been “up in arms when much less was involved.”

The theatrical posturing of the opposition on the left and right involves nothing principled. They are merely concerned with defending their privileges, which they see as threatened by the new election law. The shifting alliances and power struggles recall the intrigues and conspiracies at the time of the Borgias. They are miles away from the real daily lives of the population.

The extreme right-wing Lega Nord has been the main beneficiary from the controversy surrounding the law thus far. In two new polls by Ipsos and IX, the party has obtained between 13 and 14 percent support. This represents a trebling of their vote since the 2013 parliamentary election. Originally campaigning for the separation of the wealthier northern regions, the Lega Nord is seeking to profit from the crisis under its new leader Matteo Salvini and build a national party on the basis of racism, hostility to the EU and support for authoritarian forms of rule.

Netanyahu forms far-right coalition government in Israel

Jean Shaoul

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu formed a government Wednesday, just hours before a deadline for announcing a coalition.

Six weeks after winning the largest number of seats in the 120-member Knesset, he now has a coalition commanding just 61 votes.

Its membership and size makes it the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history and also the most unstable. Its agenda will be determined by Israel’s grasping oligarchs who, like their counterparts elsewhere, have no solution to the problems besetting the country other than more militarism and austerity.

Last December, Netanyahu precipitated elections two years ahead of schedule by sacking Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni—leaders of two of the parties in his previous dysfunctional coalition, in the belief that the disarray of the opposition parties would enable him to win a large majority and form a more pliant coalition based on Israel’s ultra-right-wing parties. This would allow him to push through an austerity budget, while pursuing an aggressive policy towards the Palestinians and preparing for a possible attack on Iran.

Instead, Netanyahu encountered opposition to his constant Iran-baiting, which ran counter to Washington’s plans to draw Tehran into a broader anti-Russia and China alliance. He made a speech to a joint session of the US Congress, organised by the Republican Party leadership behind the back of the Obama administration, where he opposed any US-Tehran deal. But this was widely opposed by the opposition parties, the media and business circles as transparent electioneering that jeopardised Washington’s support for Israel.

Opinion polls predicted that the Labour Party’s Zionist Union coalition would win the most seats. Netanyahu and other Likud leaders went so far as to insinuate that Washington was behind the rise in support for the Zionist Union.

In the end, Netanyahu was only able to secure 30 seats for the Likud Party and win the election on March 17 after making a last ditch appeal to right-wing voters, particularly in Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu (Israel is Our home) and Naftali Bennett’s Beit Yehudi (Jewish Home). He disavowed his 2009 agreement to support a “two state solution” and launched an ultra-nationalist and anti-Palestinian tirade. He called for right-wing voters to go to the polls to counter Israeli Palestinians who were turning out “in droves.”

Despite these efforts, he was unable to secure a stable and viable coalition—forcing him to ask Israel’s president for a two week extension to form a government. Then last week, his former ally and foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman and his Israel Beiteinu Party pulled out amid bitter recriminations and complaints that Netanyahu was not “nationalistic” enough. Netanyahu was forced to make significant concessions to secure a deal with Naftali Bennett and his Beit Yehudi party, which has eight seats and with whom relations had been both fractious and venomous.

Bennett supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is opposed to any Palestinian statelet, however circumscribed, and advocates the annexation of Area C—the majority of the West Bank. While not substantially different from Netanyahu’s, such policies when so publicly declared run counter to the Obama administration’s calls for “talks with the Palestinians.”

The “peace process” is a sop to legitimise the ongoing US military operations, both open and covert, in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, to secure hegemony over the Middle East and whose ultimate target is Iran. These operations depend upon Arab bases and military participation.

In return for saving Netanyahu’s premiership, Bennett demanded and got the Justice Ministry for Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home party. Shaked is virulently hostile to both the Palestinians and African migrants, whom she has said pose a threat to Israel’s Jewish character. She has pressed for the “Jewish Nationality Bill,” which would further jeopardise the citizenship of Israel’s own Palestinians who form 20 percent of the population.

Shaked will also head the powerful Ministerial Committee for Legislation and the Judicial Appointments. She has been at the forefront of the right-wing push to curb the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court to strike down government legislation. Netanyahu himself proposes to expand the judicial appointments committee that selects Israel’s judges with a minister and an additional legislator, giving politicians a majority on the committee and thus paving the way for the government to pack the court.

Uri Ariel, also from Jewish Home, will take the agriculture portfolio, giving Jewish Home control over the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, which funds infrastructure for West Bank settlements. He will also be responsible for Bedouin affairs, against a background of bitter disputes over plans to deprive the Bedouins of their ancestral homes.

Bennett himself will head the education ministry, whose budget is to be increased by $163 million. The pay of conscript soldiers in their third year is set to rise at a cost of $250 million, while Ariel University, Israel’s newest university located in the West Bank, will have its budget increased.

Other members of the Netanyahu’s new coalition include Kulanu (All of Us), a Likud splinter group (ten seats), the ultra-Orthodox Shas (seven seats) and United Torah Judaism (six seats).

Kulanu’s chief, Moshe Kahlan, who favours an economic shakeup of Israel’s monopolies, will get the finance ministry, while the housing and environment ministries will go to other members of Kulanu. Shas will get the economy and religious affairs ministries. Moshe Ya’alon of Likud is expected to retain the defence portfolio.

The coalition has agreed to repeal a law that expands the military draft to include the ultra-Orthodox and another law easing the conversion process to Judaism. While Likud plans to introduce a Jewish Nationality Bill and a law to circumscribe the Supreme Court’s power, the coalition parties will have a free vote on these issues.

Netanyahu’s wheeling and dealing, to secure a majority of one, leaves him in charge of a fractious cabinet and subject to blackmailing by his partners in pursuit of their own interests and social bases.

The opposition includes the Zionist Union with 24 seats, TV presenter Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (11 seats), the middle class liberal and former “peace” party Meretz (four seats), and the Arab United List with 14 seats.

Netanyahu has conspicuously not replaced his former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, instead reserving the post for himself in addition to the premiership. This leaves the door open for a possible deal with Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union and a key cabinet role for Herzog or one of his allies. This would, as well as securing his government, help to mend fences with Washington, which is anxious to see a more malleable figure in charge of foreign relations.

Herzog, who ran his campaign on the slogan “Anyone but Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname],” said that the party’s natural place is in opposition to Likud. But true to form, he did not explicitly rule out joining a Netanyahu-led government.

Canada’s parliament adopts bill to greatly expand intelligence agencies’ powers

Roger Jordan

Canada’s House of Commons voted late Wednesday to adopt the Conservative government’s Bill C-51, which, in the name of combating terrorism, overturns core democratic rights and legal principles

In its third reading, the House voted by 183 to 96 in favour of the legislation. It will now be sent to the Senate for final approval, with the government pressing for Bill C-51 to be proclaimed law before the month’s end.

Bill C-51 authorizes the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to break the law and violate the Canadian constitution’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” in disrupting groups or individuals the state deems to pose a threat to the country’s national security.

While the government has presented CSIS’s new “disruption” powers as directed at terrorist plots, the legislation defines national security in sweeping terms so as to include purported threats to the country’s economic security, territorial integrity, diplomatic interests or constitutional order. The activities CSIS will be permitted to undertake could include everything from breaking into homes and offices to steal computers and seizing bank accounts, to pressing employers to fire national security suspects or mounting smear campaigns against them.

The legislation’s sweeping definition of national-security threats means that CSIS can and will target dissident political groups and protesting workers. Both CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have a notorious record of targeting leftwing and working-class organizations stretching back decades.

Not insignificantly, some of the language Bill C-51 uses in describing national security threats echoes that which the Harper government has employed in justifying illegalizing strikes, including by Canada Post, Air Canada and CP Rail workers.

Bill C-51 would also create a new “speech-crime” under which persons could be jailed for up to five years for the promotion of terrorism “in general.” The speech in question need not have been tied to any actual or planned terrorist attack, nor made in public. As legal experts and even sections of the corporate media have observed, this new criminal offense is so vaguely and broadly defined that it could readily be used to target those who express sympathy with groups like Hamas (officially designated a terrorist organization under Canada’s Anti-Terroism Law) or the pro-Russian insurgents in Ukraine, or who oppose Canada’s participation in imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Bill C-51 will also expand the police’s power to detain terrorist suspects without charge and empower the courts to remove “terrorist propaganda” from the internet. The state’s ability to impose travel bans and other restrictions on individuals who have never been charged let alone convicted of a crime is also being greatly expanded.

Bill C-51 guts Canadians’ privacy rights, giving the various national security agencies virtually unfettered access to all government information about individuals who become the subject of a national security investigation. Such investigations, as the Conservative government-appointed Privacy Commissioner noted, can be triggered by simply visiting a country like Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iran.

Harper’s Conservative government is ramming Bill C-51through parliament at breakneck speed, while whipping up a climate of fear so as to intimidate all opposition to its draconian measures. Since last October’s killings of two Canadian Armed Forces personnel by two disturbed individuals, Harper and his government have systematically portrayed Canada as a country under siege by terrorists, so as to provide justification for the shredding of democratic rights at home and a policy of aggressive war abroad. Just last weekend, Harper seized on his visit to Canadian military personnel in Kuwait involved in the US-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria to promote Bill C-51.

In parliament, the government ensured that the bill was subjected to only the most perfunctory scrutiny. The time allowed for consideration of its provisions at the committee stage was extremely curtailed. Only a small number of witnesses were permitted to make brief appearances and those who questioned the bill’s provisions—the vast majority—were routinely derided by government MPs as enablers of terrorism.

The handful of amendments the Conservatives subsequently made to the bill will have virtually no impact on its scope. The attempt to reassure critics that those engaging in civil disobedience and other “unlawful” protests will be exempt from CSIS disruption campaigns is worthless given the ease with which the state can designate such protests as national security threats, if not acts of terrorism.

Despite expressing concerns with certain aspects of the bill, the Liberals voted in favour of it Wednesday evening as they did in the bill’s first and second reading. Party leader Justin Trudeau has claimed that if the Liberals form the government after the upcoming federal election, they will make amendments, but they have conspicuously joined with the government in asserting that the powers of the national-security apparatus must be massively expanded.

Responding to NDP MP Wayne Marsden’s criticism of the Liberals’ stand on Bill C-51, Liberal defence critic Joyce Murray stated, “I would ask the member whether he would want it on his conscience should there be an attack that leads to deaths of Canadians because of the loopholes that the bill is attempting to fix?”

Like the Official Opposition NDP, the Liberals’ main objection to the bill has been the lack of oversight of the intelligence agencies by vetted representatives of the ruling elite.

While the NDP did vote against Bill C-51, its opposition is of a thoroughly unprincipled character. For nearly three weeks after Harper’s late January unveiling of the legislation, the NDP remained almost completely silent, issuing no substantive critique of the bill’s numerous anti-democratic measures. Only after a significant section of Canada’s ruling elite, led by theGlobe and Mail, had sharply criticized the bill, warning that so blatant a break with democratic forms of rule could undermine the legitimacy of the government and state, did NDP leaders Thomas Mulcair belatedly announce that his party would oppose Bill C-51.

The NDP never sought to mobilize Canadians in opposition to Bill C-51 and draw the connection between it and the broader assault on democratic rights, whether in the form of the criminalizing of strikes or the Communications Security Establishment’s (CSE) systematic spying on the metadata of Canadian electronic communications

Instead, the social-democrats did everything to reassure the ruling class that they have no fundamental disagreement over maintaining in place the vast array of anti-democratic, police-state measures implemented since 2001. Mulcair even went so far as to say that if the NDP forms the government after the election, it will not seek to repeal Bill C-51, only, like the Liberals, amend it.

The complicity of the opposition parties has exposed the bankruptcy of the perspective advanced by various protest groups like Openmedia and Protest Canada that have organized “Stop Bill C-51” rallies in recent weeks. While providing an indication of the growing popular hostility to the attack on democratic rights being mounted in the name of combating terrorism, the rallies have been orientated toward pressuring the big business political establishment through a “non-partisan” protest campaign.

This is spelled out on the “StopBillC-51” website. “The silver lining,” it declares, “is that this is an election year and public opposition and support are particularly important to MPs this year. The Bill can be shut down in one of two ways: 1. By having it voted down. If the Liberal MPs can be pressured to change their stance on the bill and every other MP voted against the bill, it would only take seven Tory MPs to break ranks to vote the bill down… 2. By delaying the third vote until parliament breaks for election.”

Nothing could be more bankrupt than seeking to rely on the Liberals and the other parties of the establishment to stand up for democratic rights. It was a Liberal government that began the onslaught on basic rights in the aftermath of 9/11, enshrining a catch-all definition of terrorism in the Criminal Code and vastly expanding the powers of the police and intelligence agencies, including sanctioning CSE’s spying on Canadians’ electronic communications.

The Chretien Liberal government’s break with long-standing democratic and legal norms, together with the construction of a mass surveillance apparatus, was part of an international process which saw the ruling class around the globe turn decisively towards authoritarian forms of rule. In all of the major imperialist powers, the purported threat of terrorism has been used to develop and enforce a vast array of repressive measures that have as their ultimate target the broad masses of working people.

The backdrop to this turn toward authoritarian forms of rule in Canada, as around the world, is an unprecedented growth in social inequality and the ruling elite’s pursuit of an agenda of austerity and war that is inimical to the interests of the vast majority. These processes have intensified since the 2008 global economic meltdown, as the bourgeoisie steps up its class war assault on public services and worker rights. Growing working class opposition has been met with increasing state violence, including the illegalization of virtually all strikes in the federally-regulated sector, the suppression of the 2010 anti-G-20 protests in Toronto, and the Quebec Liberal government’s use of police violence and emergency legislation against the 2012 Quebec students strike.

The imminent adoption of Bill C-51 has illustrated once again that no section of the political establishment can be relied upon to conduct a genuine struggle against the assault on democratic rights. All of the parliamentary parties are complicit in the building up of a vast national security apparatus whose foremost and true target is the growing popular opposition to big business and it agenda of austerity and war.

To stop the authoritarian Bill C-51 and dismantle the reactionary police-state apparatus built up over the past decade and more requires the mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist programme as fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.

US Court of Appeals finds NSA phone data collection is illegal

Ed Hightower

On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a key provision of the USA Patriot Act does not provide a legal justification of the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, making that program unlawful. The court overturned a 2013 ruling in the government’s favor.

The Court of Appeals has remanded the case, American Civil Liberties Union v . Clapper, for further proceedings at the district court level. Thursday’s ruling denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction that would have halted the spying program until the case was decided on the merits. Thus, the practical significance of the ruling is essentially nil.

At the same time there are profound political implications for Thursday’s court opinion. It is not every day that the second highest court in the United States issues a 97-page legal memorandum calling the NSA’s flagship domestic spying program what it is: blatant illegality on a monumental scale.

Officially, the court declined to review the constitutional claims that the warrantless data collection violated the plaintiffs’ rights of free association and rights against unwarranted searches and seizures. Instead, the court only considered whether the NSA program had a legitimate statutory basis in the Patriot Act and its legal predecessors.

The court’s findings about the telephone metadata program speak volumes about the criminality that prevails at the highest levels of state.

The opinion notes that the public first learned about the NSA’s telephone metadata program on June 5, 2013, when the Guardian published a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden, which directed telecom giant Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. to give the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis. .. all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The NSA has been collecting telephone metadata information in bulk under § 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, since at least May 2006, when the FISC issued its “Primary Order” requiring production of “all call‐detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by [redacted]. .. , includ[ing] comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number[s], communications device identifier[s], etc.), trunk identifier, and time and duration of call.”

The program, and the FISC order authorizing it, have been renewed 41 times since May 2006 (FISC orders must be reissued every 90 days). The current authorization was issued on February 26, 2015 and expires on June 1, 2015. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will also expire on June 1.

American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper concerns a FISC order that requires Verizon “to produce call detail records, every day, on all telephone calls made through its systems or using its services where one or both ends of the call are located in the United States.”

The government’s arguments were riddled with internal inconsistencies. To cite one, government attorneys disputed any characterization of the telephone metadata program as collecting “virtually all telephony metadata” associated with calls made or received in the United States, but the same attorneys never argued that Verizon is the only telephone service provider subject to such a FISC order.

The key issue in Thursday’s opinion was the specific language in § 215 which limits the issuance of FISC orders to instances where there exist “reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation … to obtain intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism …”

Government lawyers supporting the NSA telephone metadata program made the absurd and chilling argument that all of the seized information from essentially all persons in the US, all of the time, are relevant if they merely lead to improvements in databases or collection techniques that eventually aid in later, as yet unanticipated terror investigations. By the same logic, governmental placement of video cameras inside of every US household would be relevant to any number of criminal investigations.

The Court of Appeals took the government to task on this point, if only verbally:

“Thus, the government takes the position that the metadata collected—a vast amount of which does not contain directly ‘relevant’ information, as the government concedes—are nevertheless ‘relevant’ because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant.”

And later:

“The overwhelming bulk of the metadata collected by the telephone metadata program, as the government itself concedes, concerns … individuals who are not targets of an investigation or suspected of engaging in any crime whatsoever, and who are not even suspected of having any contacts with any such targets or suspects. Their records are sought solely to build a repository for the future application of the investigative techniques upon which the program relies.”

For all its sneering at the government’s farcical, if Orwellian, lines of argument in favor of omnipresent surveillance, the Court of Appeals took as a given the legitimacy of the “war on terror” and the overarching concern for “national security.” It suggested that balancing the inalienable rights enshrined in the US Constitution with the requirements of a police state is a task best undertaken by Congress and the president, who are at least nominally accountable to the population by way of the ballot box.

As the court put it:

“Congress is better positioned than the courts to understand and balance the intricacies and competing concerns involved in protecting our national security, and to pass judgment on the value of the telephone metadata program as a counterterrorism tool.”

This is nothing more than a call for a more robust pseudo-legal foundation for dictatorial forms of rule.

For its part, three weeks before the expiration of Section 215, Congress has yet to arrive at a bill that would extend or modify the warrantless telephone metadata collection program. Whatever form such legislation may take, it will pose no threat to the military-intelligence apparatus.

Bond market sell-off signals mounting financial crisis

Nick Beams

The instability of the global financial system and the potential for another crash have been underscored by a major sell-off of government bonds this week. Yesterday saw European markets display levels of volatility not seen since the euro zone debt crisis turmoil of three years ago.

In the course of the day, the yield on the German 10-year government bond, which moves inversely to its price, jumped by 21 basis points (a 0.21 percentage point rise) to 0.80 percent, before falling back to its opening level of 0.59 percent.

In the middle of last month, the yield was just 0.05 percent, with predictions that it was on its way to zero.

Other markets in Asia and the United States have also showed considerable volatility. The US bond market this week suffered its longest losing streak since 2011, with the yield on the 10-year bond treasury note rising at one point to its highest level for the year.

It has been estimated that in the last two weeks alone some $2 trillion has been wiped off global share and bond markets.

The rapid rise in European yields indicates that there has been a massive exit from the bond market after investors and speculators had shovelled billions of dollars into purchases following the initiation of the European Central Bank’s asset purchasing program, which pumps €60 billion per month into financial markets.

Money poured in because of the belief that, as a result of the ECB’s actions, bond prices would continue to rise and, despite falling yields, there were big profits to be made via capital gains. Markets operated according to the theory that while it may be foolish to buy at an elevated price there was a bigger fool who would pay even more in the near future.

The scale of the swing can be gauged from the fact that in normal times the yield on bonds only moves by a few hundredths of a percentage point in the course of a day.

But normal calculations have been thrown awry by the near-zero interest rate regime of the world’s major central banks and the associated asset-purchasing programs, so-called quantitative easing.

Consequently, market analysts were at something of a loss to find an explanation for this week’s events, as evidenced by a range of comments cited in today’s Financial Times.

“The movements of recent days have been extremely unusual and the magnitude doesn’t reflect the economic data we’re seeing,” said James Athey, investment manager at Aberdeen Asset Management.

Michael Riddell, bond fund manager at M&G investments, told the newspaper: “It is difficult to understand exactly what is driving this. But that’s in part because central bank action has blunted the relationship between the feedback from the economy and prices in markets.”

Ralf Presser, the rates strategist as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said there was a “lot of soul searching at the moment” because it was thought that the yield on German 10-year bonds was heading for minus 20 basis points. In other words, the price of bonds was going to continue to rise.

In addition to the gyrations on the bond market, another indication of mounting financial instability is contained in a report issued today which claims that emerging markets—a target for speculators in search of higher profits—have suffered a bigger exit of capital over the last three quarters than that experienced in the financial crisis of 2008–2009. The total outflow from the 15 largest such markets in the nine months the end of March was just over $600 billion, compared to an outflow of $545 billion in the same period to March 2009.

A spokesman for the firm publishing the results said the selloff could continue into the second quarter of the year. An even bigger contraction has been recorded in the foreign currency reserves of emerging markets; these have plummeted by more than $374 billion from December last March, amid falling growth rates—down to 3.9 percent in February from 4.1 percent the previous month.

While it is not clear yet where the losses in European financial markets have been sustained—and they could run into many billions of dollars—the potential for another financial catastrophe was made clear in a report issued by the Joint Committee of European Supervisory Authorities earlier this week.

It covered conditions in financial markets from September 2014 to March this year in the lead-up to this week’s sell-off. The report began by noting that since the last report in August “financial system risks” had “intensified further.”

Persistent low interest rates had sustained the demand for riskier investments and provided investors with incentives for enhancing their returns. “This is frequently achieved by renewed build-up of leverage [that is, increased debt]” with such increases “mainly limited to financial institutions outside the banking system.”

But it also indicated that “fundamental questions” remain about the “sustainability of some banks’ business models in search for sustained and solid profitability” in an environment of low interest rates.

In a warning of the possible consequences, it concluded: “A fragile market equilibrium, could be disrupted by some large or several unexpected negative events.” This could lead to a reassessment of risk which “would have a substantial impact on the financial system via decreasing asset values.”

This week’s events certainly fit the description of an “unexpected negative event.”

The report also gave the lie to the claim, advanced by financial authorities in support of the program of quantitative easing, that in the long run it will provide a boost to the real economy.

Describing investment levels as “anaemic” and remaining below the pre-2008 trend, it said that with low growth rates, savers turn to bubbles to reach their targets and “over time, productive investments are crowded out, as real resources are misdirected.”

That is to say, far from leading to an improvement in the real economy via increased investment, the policies of the central banks, which have fuelled bubbles and enabled the accumulation of vast profits via financial speculation, make an already dire situation even worse.

The worsening state of the global economy has also been highlighted by figures on the American economy, which show that it all but stagnated in the first quarter this year, recording an expansion of just 0.2 percent. It would have been negative but for a build-up of inventories, often an indicator of recession.

But these figures could be revised down in the coming weeks amid further evidence of economic weakening.

The US trade deficit for March rose by 43 percent to $51.4 billion, the worst figure since October 2008 and the largest percentage increase since 1996. These figures indicate that US export performance in the first quarter may have been worse than initially estimated, prompting a report by BNP Paribas that the American economy could have contracted at an annual rate of 0.4 percent in the first quarter.

The turbulence in financial markets and the worsening outlook in the real economy are an indictment of capitalist governments and financial authorities around the world.

Not only have their policies provided no economic “recovery,” their handing out of virtually free money to the finance houses and speculators has created the conditions for another financial catastrophe which will result in further far-reaching attacks on the social conditions of the working class.