UK Election Aftermath: Cameron To Continue Waging War On Working People

Colin Todhunter

Today in the UK, people are waking up to their first week of a five-year rule under a Conservative majority government. It’s been the first time the Tories have managed to form such a government since 1992. Only 37 percent of those who bothered to vote actually voted Conservative. In fact, the current administration is in government with 24 percent of support from all those who were eligible to vote.

Under the UK’s ‘first past the post system’, the Scottish Nationalist party gained 56 seats with 4.8 percent of votes cast. The Greens gained one seat with a share of 3.8 percent. Under a system of proportional representation, the Greens would now have 25 seats in the new parliament. With the current system, a party could theoretically gain the most number of seats nationally but fail to gain a single seat. This is the nature of the ‘democratic’ voting system in the UK.

What the UK now has in store is five years of an ideologically driven administration that will push through its welfare-cutting, pro-privatisation policies wrapped up in talk of a need for austerity and presided over by a millionaire-dominated cabinet which represents the interests of the richest echelons of global capital.

Out of those who voted Tory, a good deal comprised people of relatively modest means: people who will have been led to believe that ordinary people’s interests equate with the ‘national interest’ as defined by Tory politicians. These are people who for some strange reason believe that more privatisation, more deregulation, more austerity, more inequality, more concentration of wealth and more attacks on the public sector will be good for them as individuals and good for the economy.

The acceptance of this ideology is not just down to Tory methods of persuasion but is also due to its perpetuation by the corporate mainstream media and the other main political parties, which have fully embraced neoliberalism. However, many people feel that the Tories can be best trusted to see through such things, unlike Labour (Tory-lite) or the Liberal Democrats who might mismanage, waver or may not be quite as committed to the neoliberal cause. As a party by the rich, for the rich of and of the rich, they may have a point.

What we can now expect to see is the attempted completion of a project that had begun under Thatcher in the eighties: the complete subservience of ordinary working people to the needs of powerful corporations, the tax-evading corporate dole-scrounging super rich and the neoliberal agenda they have imposed on people. And key to securing this is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The European Commission tries to sell TTIP by claiming that the agreement will increase GDP by one percent and will entail massive job creation. These claims are not supported even by its own studies, which predict a growth rate of just 0.01 percent GDP over the next ten years and the potential loss of jobs in several sectors. Corporations are lobbying EU-US trade negotiators to use the deal to weaken food safety and restrictions on GM food and agriculture as well as labour, health and environmental standards, among other things. Through certain regulatory and investor trade dispute stipulations, the outcome would entail the by passing of any existing democratic processes in order to push through the ultimate corporate power grab.

This proposed trade agreement (and others like it being negotiated across the world) is based on a firm belief in ‘the market’ (a euphemism for subsidies for the rich, cronyism, rigged markets and cartels) and the intense ideological dislike of state intervention and state provision of goods and services. The economic doctrine that underpins this belief attempts to convince people that they can prosper by having austerity imposed on them and by submitting to neo-liberalism and ‘free’ trade: a smokescreen the financial-corporate elites hide behind while continuing to enrich themselves.

Current negotiations over ‘free’ trade agreements have little to do with free trade. They are more concerned with loosening regulatory barriers and bypassing any current democratic processes that hinder their profits. These deals could allow large corporations to destroy competition, enforce privatisations and secure lucrative government procurement markets and siphon off wealth to the detriment of smaller, locally based firms and producers. We see this from TTIP, to the US-India Knowledge Agreement on Agriculture, CETA, TPP and beyond.

Cameron: handmaiden to the rich

Whether based in New York, London, Berlin or Delhi, the planet’s super rich and their corporations comprise a global elite whose members have to varying extents been incorporated into the Anglo-US system of trade and finance. For them, the ability to ‘do business’ (exploit labour - or automate - and make profits) is what matters, not national identity or the capacity to empathise with an ordinary working person that was born on the same land mass and who will lose their livelihood.

Notions of the ‘national interest’ that governments churn out are merely rhetorical devices to be used to rally the masses. And notions of being ‘against the national interest’ are used to curtail of destroy dissent, as we currently see happening with Greenpeace in India.

In order ‘to do business’, government machinery has been corrupted and bent to serve their ends. In turn, organisations that were intended to be ‘by’ and ‘for’ ordinary working people to challenge capital have been successfully infiltrated and dealt with.

The global takeover of agriculture by powerful agribusiness, the selling off and privatisation of assets built with public toil and money and secretive corporate-driven trade agreements represent a massive corporate heist of wealth and power across the world.

Whether it concerns rich oligarchs in the US or India’s billionaire business men, corporate profits and personal gain trump any notion of the ‘national interest’. 300,000 dead farmers in India who killed themselves or the ranks of the unemployed in Spain or Greece are regarded as mere 'collateral damage' in what is ultimately a war on working people and the environment itself.

Looting economies for personal gain is disguised as ‘free trade’. Austerity is sold as ‘growth’. Massive profits is ‘wealth creation’. Ecological degradation is ‘progress’. From Obama in the US to Cameron in the UK or Modi in India, their neoliberal agenda betrays them as handmaidens to the rich.

In Britain expect to see militarism, brutality and imperialism continuing to be sold under the banner of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘democracy’. Expect more cronyism, an increasingly wider revolving door to facilitate the flow between private interests and government, more insidious lobbying by big business and a continued free for all in the corrupt City of London.

Some 11,334,000 voted Conservative in the UK last Thursday. The other 53 million in the country now face having deal with the outcome for the next five years.

Economic Disinformation Keeps Financial Markets Up

Paul Craig Roberts

The latest payroll jobs report is more of the same.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that 223,000 new jobs were created in April.  Let’s accept the claim and see where the jobs are.

Specialty trade contractors are credited with 41,000 jobs equally split between residential and nonresidential.  I believe these are home and building repairs and remodeling.

The rest of the jobs, 182,000, are in domestic services.

Despite store closings and weak retail sales, 12,000 people were hired in retail trade.

Despite negative first quarter GDP growth, 62,000 people were hired in professional and business services, 67% of which are in administrative and waste services.

Health care and social assistance accounted for 55,600 jobs of which ambulatory health care services, hospitals, and social assistance accounted for 85% of the jobs.

Waitresses and bartenders account for 26,000 jobs, and government employed 10,000 new workers.

There are no jobs in manufacturing.

Mining, timber, oil and gas extraction lost jobs.

Temporary help services (16,100 jobs) offered 3.7 times more jobs than law, accounting architecture, and engineering combined (4,500 jobs).

As I have pointed out for a number of years, according to the payroll jobs reports, the complexion of the US labor force is that of a Third World country. Most of the jobs created are lowly paid domestic services.

The well paying high productivity, high value-added jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners who work for less.  This fact, more than the reduction in marginal income tax rates, is the reason for the rising inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.

Offshoring middle class jobs raises corporate profits and, thereby, the incomes of corporate owners (shareholders) and executives.  But it reduces the incomes of the majority of the population who are forced into either lowly paid and part time jobs or unemployment.

The extraordinary decline in the labor force participation rate indicates shrinking opportunities for the American labor force. No economist should ever have accepted the claim that the economy was in recovery while participation in the labor force was declining.

The officially documented decline in the labor force participation rate casts additional doubt on the claimed increases in payroll jobs. If jobs are growing, the labor force participation rate should not be declining.

Having looked at the actual details of the payroll jobs report, which are seldom if ever reported in the financial media, let’s look at what else goes unreported in the media.

The government’s economic statistical agencies are under pressure not to roil the financial markets.  Consequently, initial reports, which are always the headline reports, are as close as possible to the “consensus forecast” prepared by economists in the financial sector, whose jobs are to maintain a good atmosphere for financial instruments.

This practice results in optimistic advanced estimates and first estimates.  The real reporting comes later in revisions.  For example, today the headline was 223,000 new jobs, recovery on track, stock market up.  What was not reported by the media is that the prior month’s (March) payroll jobs growth was cut to 85,000 jobs, substantially below population growth.

The same thing happens with the reporting of GDP growth. The first quarter GDP advanced estimate was kept in positive territory with a 0.2%–two-tenths of one percent–growth.  When the revisions arrive, which we already know will be negative GDP growth due to the trade figure, they will not receive the same attention.

There are many additional problems with the economic reporting.  I have written about a number of them in past reports.  Here I will provide one more example.  According to the payroll jobs report oil and gas extraction lost 3,300 jobs in April.  This low number is inconsistent with what we know about layoffs from fracking operations. According to Challenger Gray, a private firm that tracks job cuts announced by corporations, in April 20,675 jobs were lost as a result of falling oil prices. That is more than six times the loss reported by the payroll jobs report.

Challenger Gray reports that during the first four months of this year, corporations have announced 201,796 job cuts. Obviously, corporations are not creating new jobs.  That is why the BLS looks to waitresses, bartenders, remodeling contractors, government, and social services for employment growth.

Jobs offshoring has shriveled the employment opportunities for Americans. These shriveled opportunities are largely responsible for stagnation and decline in real median family incomes, for the falling labor force participation rate, for the rising inequality in the income and wealth distribution, and for student loans that cannot be repaid from the lowly paid jobs available.  Corporations and Wall Street in pursuit of short-term profits have given the economy away.  Much of the former US economy now belongs to China and India.  Corporate executives and shareholders got rich off of this give-away.

A Little Love for a Disintegrating Country

Lee Ballinger

My mother immigrated to the United States from Brazil by ship when she was sixteen years old. Her mother was from the small town of Gravata in the northeast, not far from where Lula, the autoworker who would become president of Brazil, was born. My father’s Dutch/English ancestors also came by sea, but in 1642. One of their descendants was a laborer in the small party of men who founded the city of Newark, New Jersey.

Growing up, I never felt like the son of immigrants. Maybe because the word “immigrant” didn’t carry the weight it does today. Maybe because all I was interested in was sports, girls, and getting drunk. Where we lived in southern Indiana the Klan was very active. The dry cleaners we used while I was growing up was run by a Klansman who was later sent to prison for burning down an African-American bookstore.

It was not cool to be foreign there. My mother spoke three languages but I only heard her use English at home, except when her sisters would visit. My mother was a beautiful woman, very smart and beloved by almost everyone. She might have invented the concept of “get in where you fit in.” I was forty-two years old when she died. We never discussed any of this.

I am well aware of the crimes of America. America has killed many of my friends and it has almost killed me. But there are many reasons to love America. Almost every day, I find new reasons to give my passion to this place. People I meet, songs I hear, moments on the street.

America is disintegrating and much of the ugliness of our history is being revealed again. We have to deal with this. The future of humanity is at stake. But I also know this: You cannot transform something you do not love. You can throw rocks at it but you cannot change it. I was born here. I will die here. I am in it to win it.

I love my country.

The new global arms race

Thomas Gaist

Since the 1980s, in an effort to maintain the position of unchallenged global primacy it achieved during and immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US ruling elite has spearheaded a global arms race and militarization drive that now threatens to produce a third imperialist world war.

After a superficial and short-lived drawdown during the “peace dividend” years of the 1990s, the US military’s expenditures have grown fantastically since the beginning of the 21st century, under the fraudulent banner of the “global war on terrorism.”

Between 2000 and 2006 alone, the US Department of Defense budget rose from $300 billion to over $530 billion. As of 2014, official US military expenditures totaled $610 billion, or nearly 35 percent of total military spending globally.

Taking into account the US military’s secret “black budget” and the various “contingency” funding packages for wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the real amount consumed every year by US militarism is closer to $1 trillion.

These expenditures are necessary to fulfill the US government’s openly stated commitment to endless and total war. As reaffirmed in the Obama administration’s 2014 National Security Strategy document, the Pentagon is committed to safeguarding America’s status as “the world’s leading global power.” The NSS 2014 calls for the US to intervene “in every part of an increasingly interconnected planet,” including the Arctic Circle.

Washington’s military ambitions are not confined to the territories of Earth, but encompass outer space and cyberspace as well.

The Pentagon’s new cyberwar strategy includes a “far more muscular role for the US military’s cyber warriors,” calling for new cyber-weapons capable of delivering “blunt force trauma” against enemy information networks and preparing for preemptive cyber-offensives against Russia, China and Iran.

On 60 Minutes this week, US Air Force Space Command General John Hyten announced that the Pentagon is launching a new space program—with an initial budget of $25 billion—in an effort to establish unconditional US military dominance over outer space.

Washington is also at the forefront of a renewed nuclear buildup. The Obama administration has announced US government plans to spend $355 billion on modernization of nuclear arsenals over the next decade.

At a conference of 800 nuclear specialists in Washington this March, a senior US Air Force commander boasted to a conference of nuclear experts in Washington that its nuclear capabilities give the US “an ability to allow no adversary to have sanctuary anywhere in the world.”

US imperialism is the exemplar and leading enabler of international war preparations of a mind-blowing scale. In 2014, global military expenditure consumed nearly 2.5 percent of global production, reaching almost $1.8 trillion, according to estimates cited by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institution (SIPRI). World expenditures on weapons remained “significantly above the [previous] peak levels of the late 1980s,” according to the SIPRI.

Governments in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe and Africa are outfitting themselves with vast quantities of light and heavy weapons. Total military spending worldwide has grown by 1.7 percent so far in 2015, a rise driven largely by increased purchasing from states in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, according to statistics published Wednesday by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Though far surpassed by the US behemoth, foreign military budgets continue to grow at an accelerating rate.

Spending by other non-US powers in 2014 included: China ($215 billion); Russia ($85 billion); Saudi Arabia ($80 billion), the United Kingdom and France ($60 billion each); Japan and India ($50 billion each); Germany ($45 billion); South Korea ($35 billion); Brazil, Italy and Israel ($30 billion each); and Australia, Turkey and the UAE ($25 billion each).

While the other major imperialist powers, including Germany and Japan, are moving rapidly to remilitarize, the international cockpit of war planning and rearmament is the United States.

Overwhelmingly purchased from American corporations, which control some 75 percent of the world arms trade, the most advanced weapons systems are being deployed to flashpoints around the world. In the South China Sea, Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, the steady escalation of war simulations and regional conflicts make clear that the vast arsenals being accumulated by the major powers are not intended merely for show.

Asia

During a speech from Singapore in 2012, then US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made clear Washington’s intention to target the Chinese mainland with the most destructive firepower at its disposal.

Panetta proclaimed that the US would “rapidly project military power” across the Pacific through the deployment of America’s most advanced military hardware, including “an advanced fifth-generation fighter, an enhanced Virginia-class submarine, new electronic warfare and communications capabilities and improved precision weapons.”

The Pentagon’s most lethal resources will be “forward stationed and forward deployed” to strategic areas of the Eastern Pacific, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel assured regional allies during the 2014 Shangri La Dialogue.

In line with the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” the US Navy and Marine Corps have extensively pre-positioned forces along the outskirts of the South China Sea, where, in collaboration with the navies of South Korea, Japan, Philippines and Vietnam, the US war plan aims to rapidly strangle the flow of oil and other essential commodities from the Indian Ocean to Chinese ports.

The US buildup has driven a corresponding expansion of regional military assets. In 2014, fully 48 percent of US weapons sales went to the Asia-Pacific. Militaries in the region increased spending by 62 per cent between 2005 and 2014, reaching $450 billion in 2014. Vietnam’s military budget has surged by some 130 percent since 2005.

The Pentagon launched a new round of joint “Operation Balikatan” war-games with Philippine forces involving some 12,000 soldiers this month. During the exercises, Philippine commanders issued provocative anti-China rhetoric and threats cited in media reports on the exercises. Maneuvers focused on tactics for assaulting fortifications perched on reefs and small islands, intended to simulate Chinese facilities in the Spratly Island chain.

A top Philippine military officer warned last week of “the adverse effects of China’s aggressiveness,” and announced that the US will assist the Philippine army with new equipment and training specifically tailored to counter China’s island-based defenses. Philippine President Benigno Aquino, who utilized this week’s ASEAN conference as an opportunity to stoke conflict with Beijing, warned during the US-led exercises that the Chinese advances should “engender fear for the rest of the world.”

Europe

Beginning in early 2014, US imperialism fomented a coup and civil war in Ukraine as the means to create conditions for the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe into a vast staging ground for war preparations against Russia.

In the wake of the US-orchestrated February 2014 operation in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the US and German-led NATO alliance has rapidly developed its network of bases and intelligence and logistical facilities in Poland, Romania and the Baltic states. Last year, the US-led alliance established new battle groups in Europe for the specific purpose of initiating combat operations against Russia on extremely short notice, including the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, also known as the “Spearhead Force.”

Since the beginning of 2015, the US has deployed thousands of tanks and other combat vehicles to Europe, including 800 new battle tanks in March alone. This month, as part of the “Noble Jump” war games, the US and 11 other NATO militaries simulated a dry run for the opening stages of mobilization for a full-scale ground war against Russia. NATO officers told press that the exercises showed that NATO’s spearhead forces can be mobilized and forward deployed for combat along NATO’s “eastern flank” within 48 hours. Also this month, more than 2,000 US and NATO troops simulated large-scale tank and infantry battles in the rolling hills of eastern Romania, as part of ongoing war games codenamed Wind Spring. (See video footage here).

With enthusiastic support from the US, NATO-aligned governments along the Russian border are implementing large increases in military spending this year. According to statistics compiled by SIPRI, military expenditures in Central and Eastern Europe have increased more rapidly than any other region in the world during the period since the February 2014 coup in Kiev.

The largest increases are planned by the US puppet regime in Kiev, which will double its military spending in 2015, after increasing its budget by more than 20 percent in 2014. Lithuania plans to increase military spending by 50 percent in 2015, Poland by 20 percent and Latvia by 15 percent.

The US Army transferred large numbers of Patriot missiles to the outskirts of Warsaw in mid-April, as part of $2 billion deal with the Polish government.

East European militaries are preparing to use their new hardware in coordination with a growing presence of US military personnel, trainers and “advisors.” As part of Operation “Fearless Guardian,” hundreds of US Army paratroopers deployed to Ukraine this month to train Ukrainian militants, including members of the neo-fascist Azov Battalion.

In addition to an overall $1 billion military aid package to the Kiev regime, now led by President Petro Poroshenko, Washington has offered to cover the $20 million expense of the six-month long training program.

Already in 2014, Ukrainian fascistic groups gained official approval as purchasers of weapons from US armament firms, having privileged status as the only non-state groups on a list of “green-lighted” weapons purchasers that includes 56 national governments, according to SIPRI.

Middle East

The decades-long US military buildup in the Middle East has been accompanied by a surge of weapons purchases by America’s regional gendarmes in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.

Major US weapons firms informed Congress this month that they are preparing huge new weapons packages, including thousands of high-tech missiles and other munitions, to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan. The sales are necessary to replenish the depleted arsenals of the Gulf States, which have run low in the past year as regional conflicts have escalated.

Saudi Arabia has been the most aggressive purchaser in recent years, spending more than $80 billion on weapons in 2014, nearly as much as Russia and more than France and Britain. The kingdom’s ongoing bombing campaign against Yemen has been carried out with fresh supplies of brand new US hardware.

The UAE spent $23 billion, has tripled its total military spending over the past decade and appears poised to win the honor of being the first non-NATO government authorized to purchase US Predator drones. Saudi and the UAE have now become the second and fourth largest buyers of US arms, respectively, according to SIPRI research.

Qatar ordered weapons systems worth nearly $24 billion in 2014, including $11 billion worth of Apache helicopters and advanced missile systems. The purchases evidently whetted the appetites of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which have opened new offices in Doha in recent years.

The US tripled weapons sales to Iraq in 2014, selling the Baghdad government some $15 billion worth of “big-ticket equipment, including fighter jets, attack helicopters and laser-guided missiles,” according to the Wall Street Journal .

The vast weapons transfers to Middle Eastern regimes serve a definite strategic function, aside from their enormous profitability for US manufacturers. The occupation and militarization of the Middle East and large portions of Africa is now seen in US ruling circles as a necessary component of preparations for strategic confrontation with Beijing.

Faced with a massive buildup of US forces concentrated in the Pacific, East Asian powers, primarily China and but also Japan, have turned to their “geographic back door”—Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa—in an effort to circumvent US predominance in the Pacific and secure access to natural resources and commercial partners. As the US Defense Department argued in its 2014 US Quadrennial Review, “a continued American presence in the Gulf is a key stratagem to check expanding Chinese power.”

Latin America

In addition to the main cauldrons of brewing geopolitical conflict in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, US government is also continuing to promote militarization throughout Latin America.

US regional policy is anchored by “security cooperation” programs with the national bourgeois elites in the Western Hemisphere, such as Merida Initiative and Plan Colombia, which funnel US weapons and military expertise to US imperialism’s client regimes in Mexico and Colombia respectively.

In the past few years, Mexico has made “a 100-fold increase from prior years” in weapons purchases from the US, according to an official NORCOM statement. US arms sales to Mexico rose from nearly $400 million in 2011 to more than $1.2 billion in 2013.

Mexico’s arms purchases have included some 3,000 Humvees for more than $550 million, and some $800 million on a fleet of Black Hawk helicopters. This includes five choppers equipped with M134 machine guns, capable of firing some 5,000 rounds per minute, for an elite urban police unit stationed in Mexico City known as the Condores.

                                                            ***

There is no mystery behind the build-up to yet another global bloodbath, so clearly foreshadowed in the terrifying war preparations of the US and its rivals. As Leon Trotsky, founder of the Fourth International, wrote in his 1934 analysis, “War and the Fourth International,” the capitalist mode of production and the dynamics that it fosters, primarily that of implacable struggle between rival states, lead inevitably to world war.

“The same causes, inseparable from modern capitalism, that brought about the last imperialist war have now reached infinitely greater tension than in the middle of 1914. The fear of the consequences of a new war is the only factor that fetters the will of imperialism. But the efficacy of this brake is limited. The stress of inner contradictions pushes one country after another on the road to fascism, which, in its turn, cannot maintain power except by preparing international explosions. All governments fear war. But none of the governments has any freedom of choice. Without a proletarian revolution, a new world war is inevitable,” Trotsky wrote.

Now as in Trotsky’s time, the only alternative to the slaughterhouse being prepared by imperialism lies in building the Fourth International as the World Party of Socialist Revolution.

The cost of military domination

Jeff Lusanne

Every passing year in America brings news of cutbacks to essential social programs, from food stamps and home heating assistance to research and infrastructure. The public is told there is no choice because “there is no money” for such programs. What is never questioned in the political establishment is how a country with crumbling bridges and mass poverty can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the military.

An F-22 Raptor. Each fighter costs around $339 million.

The officially budgeted military spending of the United States in 2014 was $610 billion, nearly 35 percent of global military spending and greater than the combined spending of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, India and Germany.

Real annual military spending by the United States is even higher, once nuclear weapons funding, interest payments on foreign wars, and the cost of veteran care is included. With these items, the annual amount is closer to $1 trillion.

Between 2000 and 2006, the US Department of Defense budget rose from $300 billion to over $530 billion, and it continues at those levels, despite the sequester federal budget cuts. For 2016, the President has proposed a total spending amount of $613 billion that would put Pentagon spending higher than any point during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

The proposed $613 billion in funding is more than eight times larger than the federal education budget. It is over 22 times the amount proposed in the discretionary budget for transportation, $27.4 billion, even as the American Society of Civil Engineers rates the state of US infrastructure as a “D,” requiring trillions of dollars in repairs. At current rates, military and intelligence spending between 2015-2020 will exceed $4 trillion.

The largest portion of the defense budget goes towards operations and maintenance of the military’s vast inventory of weapons and equipment. The category of Military Personnel received $142.9 billion, while procurement—new equipment—received $99.5 billion. Research, Development, Test & Engineering (RDT&E) received $62 billion, while construction and other assorted items took up the rest of the budget.

Between the branches of the armed forces, 2014 funding was relatively equal: the Army received $167.4 billion, the Navy (including the Marines), $162.1 billion and the Air Force, $144.3 billion. The Army’s costs have the largest connection to personnel, operations, and construction, and as US troop levels have been drawn down in Iraq and Afghanistan the Army’s share of funding has dropped significantly. Despite this, the overall military budget has not mirrored the drop as more money has been plowed into the incredibly expensive, high-tech weapons systems of the Navy and Air Force.

Within the president’s proposed Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2016 there is a proposed 12 percent increase in procurement and RDT&E spending to $177 billion, and much of it goes towards big-budget weapons programs designed to maintain total global military dominance.

The US military, across all its branches, has 13,900 planes. The entire commercial aircraft fleet in America—including all the major airlines and freight carriers like FedEx and UPS—is less than half that amount, at 6,788 aircraft.

Compared to other militaries worldwide, the US operates more planes in every type of category (combat, transport, helicopter, training, etc.) than any other nation. This includes a whopping 78 percent share of the global aerial refueling tanker fleet, the means by which combat aircraft can extend their flight range, allowing the US to more easily bomb anywhere in the world.

This vast fleet of aircraft includes some of the most expensive weapons ever created, and current weapons programs that will cost even more. The most recent cost estimate of the notoriously failure-prone F-35 fighter-bomber is $400 billion for procurement of 2,400 planes, while the lifetime operational cost will be $1 trillion.

In 2001, the per-plane estimated cost was $81 million, and the costs continue to rise as the plane is now seven years past its anticipated service date. In 2016, the White House is requesting $11 billion in funding for another year of research, development, and procurement. Including all of these costs, each of the 57 planes requested will cost $193 million.

The deficit of the City of Detroit, which was the nominal cause for the city’s bankruptcy and the gutting of city workers’ pensions, was $327 million in 2013—less than the cost of one Navy F-35C. The city has announced plans to shut off water service to more than 20,000 households to collect a debt that amounts to about one-eighth the cost of one such aircraft.

Yet the F-35 is just one of many programs with equally staggering costs. In the 2016 procurement budget, over twelve separate drone, plane, and helicopter programs each have budgets of $1-3 billion dollars. Five E2-D Hawkeye command and control aircraft are requested for fiscal year 2016 at a cost of $263 million each. Adding the 2014 and 2015 budgets, nearly $4 billion has been spent for just 15 of these aircraft.

The White House is requesting $1.7 billion in 2016 for research and development on what is likely the next aircraft boondoggle, the Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B.) This new, undisclosed “high tech, long range” bomber will replace the B-52, which has rained down death across the world for over 60 years; the B-1; and the B-2, the most expensive aircraft in history at $2 billion per plane. Northrup Grumman made the B-2 and is in fierce competition for the lucrative LRS-B contract.

The purchase cost of military systems is really just a fraction of their ultimate cost. The F-22 Raptor, the military’s latest air superiority fighter, is consuming upwards of $500 million per year just for upgrades and modifications. The B-2 has an ongoing annual cost of $300-$400 million for the last five years. Dozens of other planes require tens or hundreds of millions annually.

Yet nothing costs more money than an aircraft carrier, and the Navy has 10 of them in operation. Russia, China and France each field just one. The US Navy is constructing replacements of their fleet; the first Gerald R. Ford-class carrier was launched in 2015 and cost $12.8 billion.

When planes, bombs, missiles, crew, fuel, and supplies are added, the cost becomes unimaginably high. The Ford-class carrier is meant to feature the F-35C, which is the most expensive variant of the plane, at an estimated $337 million each. The carrier can hold up to 90 aircraft, but even just 40 F-35Cs would represent $13.4 billion dollars, more than the already gargantuan cost of the carrier itself. Each aircraft would carry millions of dollars worth of bombs and missiles. The total cost of all the items on the ship is therefore only comparable to entire federal budget items like science, which has a proposed budget of $31 billion for 2016.

Operating a carrier strike group has an estimated daily cost of $6.5 million, which is the cost of a new high-speed passenger rail locomotive. Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, only has a total of 355 locomotives to haul passengers across the entire country, nearly all of which are over 20 years old and in need of rebuilding or replacement. Replacing every single locomotive of Amtrak would cost less than operating one aircraft carrier for one year.

Aircraft carriers are just one aspect of several multi-billion-dollar ship programs. In the FY2016 proposal, another $22 billion would go towards the construction of submarines, destroyers, littoral combat ships, and a fuel tanker. Tomahawk cruise missiles, the notorious weapon of choice for the “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraq in 2003, now cost $2.1 million each. In the first three days of the 2011 assault on Libya, at least 161 such missiles were fired; in present-day prices that would cost $338 million, the same cost as the 2,800-foot long six-lane Stan Musial Veteran’s Memorial Bridge across the Mississippi River that recently opened.

A largely hidden, yet massive, military cost is the operation, maintenance and replacement of the so-called “Nuclear Triad.” This is the system of nuclear warheads ready for deployment on long range bombers, submarines, and land-based installations, and each of the three elements are up for replacement during the 2020s. Already in 2015, research on these replacements is consuming billions per year, before designs have even been finalized and contracts secured. A January 2014 report from the James R. Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies is simply titled “The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad,” pointing to its estimate that $1 trillion will be spent on nuclear systems by the US in the next 30 years. It also notes that Congress has no accurate measure of the actual current spending on nuclear programs.

The destructive power of these nuclear forces is almost incomprehensible and greater than anything the world has ever known. The 14 current Ohio-class submarines in the Navy’s fleet each contain up to 24 nuclear-armed Trident II ballistic missiles. Each missile has a range of over 5,000 nautical miles and upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere can release eight W88 “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.” Each W88 can travel to a separate target and yield a blast more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thus, each Ohio class submarine carries nearly 200 nuclear warheads that can simultaneously attack every major city of an entire region of the world—from just one submarine. Given the provocative nature of the US’s activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, the possibility of any escalation is an absolutely harrowing prospect.

The terrifying destructive potential of the US military, whether conventional or nuclear weapons, is a very profitable business. In September, when the US began bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the stocks of four of the five largest weapons makers—Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon—soared to all time highs.

Australian “Rental Affordability” report highlights housing crisis

Oliver Campbell

Anglicare Australia’s “2015 Rental Affordability Snapshot,” released late last month, provided a glimpse of a mounting housing disaster confronting millions of workers, young people and pensioners, along with those forced to subsist on poverty-level government welfare and other benefits.

Based on a survey of over 65,000 properties listed on the private rental market over one weekend in April, the report highlighted the devastating impact of worsening unemployment and an unprecedented housing bubble that has pushed prices and rents to record levels. According to the charity organisation, some 1.6 million people across the country struggled to pay their rent in 2014.

The report noted that for a household with two parents and two children living on the government’s Newstart unemployment benefits, just 0.9 percent of listed homes would be “affordable” and “appropriate.” A dwelling was deemed unaffordable if it would cost more than 30 percent of an income for those in the bottom 40 percent of the national income distribution.

Official statistics, which grossly understate unemployment, show the highest levels of joblessness in 12 years, with about 800,000 people looking for work in January. During last year, more than 520,000 people had received Newstart payments for 12 months or more. The maximum payment for a couple without dependents is just over $900 per fortnight.

For single adults on Newstart benefits, or the even lower Youth Allowance, less than 0.1 percent of homes were affordable. Just 8 properties out of the more than 65,000 listed were suitable for a young person on Youth Allowance seeking to share with others.

For a single parent living on welfare payments with two children, only 0.3 percent of homes were affordable, and only 3.4 percent of homes surveyed were affordable for a couple without dependents living on the marginally higher aged pension.

The inadequacy of social security payments compared to rents was underscored by the comments of Chad Porter, a 52-year-old single parent who lost his job as a machine operator after an injury. He told the Sydney Morning Herald he spent some $590 of his $1,034 fortnightly Newstart payment on rent for a house near Mount Druitt in Sydney’s far western suburbs. “After I pay my rent I have hardly any money left, even for food,” he said. “I have to buy my daughter medicine, the things she needs for school. It’s very rare that I buy meat and usually it might be sausages or maybe a bit of ham. I get food vouchers just so we can eat.”

For workers on low wages, the situation was also acute. For a single parent on the minimum wage with two children, just 3.3 percent of homes were affordable. Only 2.3 percent of homes were appropriate and affordable for a single adult on the minimum wage. A couple living on the minimum wage with two children and receiving family tax benefits had access to 23.8 percent of listed properties.

The crisis is worst in the major urban centres. Of the 14,036 properties listed in Sydney, only 58 were affordable and appropriate for those on government benefits. None of the properties were accessible to single people on the youth allowance, the disability pension or Newstart, and just over 2,200 properties were within the range of a family with both parents on the minimum wage.

The report documented the case of Monica, a 55-year-old university graduate forced out of the small dwelling she shared with a housemate, after a $60 rental increase. Facing deepening health problems, she was unable to work, subsisting on Newstart, while her housemate was on insecure, contract work.

The report also revealed serious rental affordability in regional and rural areas. Of the over 1,200 properties surveyed in Gladstone, Rockhampton and Emerald in central Queensland, none were suitable for a single person living on Newstart or Youth Allowance, while just eight were suitable for those on the aged pension.

In another case study, a 64-year-old woman living on a widow’s pension in Western Australia was forced out of her home by a rent increase. She moved into her elderly mother’s garage, and placed her belongings in costly storage. She was told that the waiting period for public housing was over five years. A small rural cottage that she applied to rent would have cost $200 a week, some 75 percent of her pension, and came with the proviso of performing menial farm labour.

Homelessness is rising. The report noted figures from 2013-14 indicating that 254,000 people attempted to access homelessness services in that year. Over 44,000 of them were young.

Underlying the affordability crisis is a decades-long assault on affordable public housing by successive Labor and Liberal governments, and the promotion of a speculative property boom that has seen median home prices in Sydney approach $1 million. In the major cities, public housing waiting lists often extend over ten years, with properties continuing to be sold off to real estate developers.

In Sydney, house prices grew by 57 percent between January 2009 and January 2015, while Melbourne witnessed a 50 percent growth over the same period. According to Moody’s rating agency, the nationwide average for mortgage repayments is around 27 percent of income. In Sydney, it is over 35 percent of income. With house prices growing five times faster than stagnating wages, mortgages are beyond the reach of broad sections of the working class.

The staggering growth in home prices has been driven by a massive expansion of debt, encouraged by record low interest rates. Australian private sector debt reached over 200 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, while household debt stood at around 130 percent of GDP. According to figures published last year, while banks were making multi-billion dollar profits, some 95 percent of their lending was channeled into property, the bulk of it residential.

The flood of hot money into the housing sector, which is part of a global phenomenon, has been promoted by government policies, including “negative gearing” that allows investors to claim rental property costs as tax deductions. The policy, reintroduced under the Hawke Labor government, was complemented by a capital gains tax discount by the Howard Liberal-National government, aimed at promoting speculative investment in housing. According to the Australia Institute think tank, 55 percent of the benefits of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount is reaped by households in the top 10 percent of income distribution.

The housing disaster confronting masses of people is an indictment of capitalism. Amid an orgy of financial speculation centring on the housing market, the profit system is unable and unwilling to provide the fundamental social right of decent, affordable housing.

Venezuelan economy continues to deteriorate

Alexander Fangmann

Made worse by the ongoing decline in oil prices, Venezuela’s economic situation continues to worsen. With wages deteriorating and basic necessities in short supply, conditions for the working class are more grim by the day, while the government of Nicolás Maduro prepares crackdowns on protests and strikes.

Among the more recent indications of the severe problems facing the working class are announcements that the workday for public sector workers would be reduced to six hours from eight in order to save electricity, while the minimum wage will be increased by 30 percent. Inflation is expected to be well over 150 percent for the year, and the economy is expected to shrink by 7 percent in 2015. Further, it is estimated that the country’s fiscal deficit will amount to 20 percent of GDP.

Extremely high inflation and other economic problems were already developing in Venezuela well before the OPEC decision keep oil production at high levels relative to world demand, but that decision has had a drastic effect on a country that relies on oil for 96 percent of its export earnings. It has been estimated that barrels of oil must fetch approximately $120 in order for the country to balance its budget, and Venezuelan heavy crude has only averaged about $47 per barrel this year compared to $88 per barrel last year.

The fall in oil export earnings has led to a sharp decline in Venezuela’s foreign exchange reserves, the money used to purchase imports, on which the country is heavily reliant. Already at their lowest level since 2003, foreign reserves fell an additional $507 million on May 7. Reserves now stand at $18.2 billion, among the lowest of major economies in the region, and have fallen by $4.1 billion since the beginning of the year alone, as Venezuela burns through its reserves in order to fund the import of needed goods.

The fall in oil exports, and thus of foreign exchange, is one of the primary drivers of the endemic shortages witnessed throughout the economy. Imports for last year were estimated to have decreased by 22 percent and are expected fall a further 31 percent in 2015. This has led to widespread problems beyond the lack of certain foodstuffs and basic consumer goods. On May Day, the Maduro administration announced it would move toward nationalization of the food distribution system through the creation of a closed transport system intended to prevent hoarding or rerouting of goods outside the country, where they can be sold for higher prices.

Among the more horrifying of the shortages are those affecting medical care. Imported medicines and medical equipment are now in short supply. In response, the government has announced a scheme to ration pharmaceuticals, known as SIAMED, with patients required to submit fingerprints at the pharmacist, and given only limited amounts at a time.

Aside from drugs, medical equipment including X-ray machines, defibrillators, and ultrasound machines have now become scarce, as replacements parts and supplies have dried up. There have been reports of increased mortality in Venezuelan hospitals, and the Associated Press reported that doctors are resorting to decades-old treatments for fairly routine procedures. At one clinic, radical mastectomies are now used to treat 70 percent of breast cancer cases because radiotherapy machines are unavailable.

Foreign corporations are also abandoning the country, citing the volatile currency or the inability to ensure a steady stream of imports for production. GM has announced it will cease production in the country by July, firing its 446 workers. Ford has already ceased production due to lack of parts and will likely let go of its workers soon as well. Other factories assembling vehicles for Toyota, Chrysler and other manufacturers are also operating at minimum capacities, according to a report published by Reuters.

The lack of currency for imports is exacerbated by the existence of several exchange rates, a source of widespread distortions in the economy. There are currently three official exchange rates. Under the first two exchange rate mechanisms, which are available for the most economically necessary categories of imports, the rate is 6.3 and 12 bolivars to the dollar, while under the third, it is over 190 bolivars to the dollar. Even so, the black market rate is even higher, with a dollar bringing in around 275 bolivars.

This has opened up opportunities for massive fraud and corruption throughout the economy, not least of all in the import sector. Edmeé Betancourt, a former president of the Central Bank of Venezuela, was reported by the New York Times to have said that $20 billion out of the $59 billion allocated for imports in 2012 disappeared through fraud. With the increasing divergence of exchange rates, the opportunity for arbitrage has only increased. Datanálisis, a Venezuelan polling firm, estimates that 70 percent of customers at state stores are selling goods on the black market because it is possible to make a substantial profit on the difference in exchange rates.

Among the biggest beneficiaries are the boliburguesía, those with close ties to the regime and the military. According to a report in the Financial Times, the former Finance Minister and chief economic advisor to Hugo Chavez, Jorge Giordani, estimated that insider access to hard currency cost the country 15 percent of GDP. Giordani stated that the “regime does not favour the needy, but rather the powerful and corrupt,” and compared it to a “mafia cartel.”

On the other hand, the working class is seeing its purchasing power evaporate in the face of high inflation. Even though the government announced a 30 percent minimum wage increase, following a 15 percent increase in January, the newly announced minimum wage of 7,421 bolivars per month is worth only around $37 at the weakest of the three official exchange rates, and less than $30 on the black market. This led to a 24-hour strike by faculty at the Central University of Venezuela on May 4 in protest over low pay.

Meanwhile, the Maduro government has increasingly put its trust in the military to clamp down on worker unrest and anger. The Venezuelan armed forces are to receive salary increases of 75 percent for the year, even after increases of 45 percent announced in October. At the end of January the government published new regulations explicitly allowing the use of deadly force to maintain public order at public protests and demonstrations.

The continued crisis has seriously eroded support for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which is facing legislative elections this year. A poll in February indicated that 48 percent of those polled would vote for any opposition candidate, but only 24 percent would vote for a PSUV candidate.

Intending to get ahead of the crisis and perpetuate the fraud that Venezuela is undergoing some kind of socialist revolution, a dissident group within the PSUV known as Socialist Tide (Marea Socialista) has left the party and plans to stand its own candidates in the election. A spokesman for the group, Nicmer Evans, offered excuses for Maduro, blaming the OPEC decision for the country’s problems saying, “No system in the world, capitalist or socialist, could cope with such an oil price drop.”

Nonetheless, the main goal of Socialist Tide is to provide a “left” cover for the PSUV under conditions in which the ruling party is preparing to send the military out against protesting workers. Evans alluded to this, noting that the government’s “biggest challenge is what happens if people come down from the slums.”

Italy: Expo 2015, May Day reveal deep class antagonisms

Marc Wells

On May 1, 2015 the Universal Exhibition, also known as Expo 2015, opened in Milan, Italy. Under the misleading and falsely humanitarian slogan “Feeding the planet, energy for life,” the world’s fair is a corporate orgy with participation from 145 countries around the world.

“Expo Milano 2015 offers a unique business opportunity,” its web site describes. “Leading businesses in innovation, technology, energy, mobility, security and banking have decided to become partners of the event.” Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella, proclaimed: “Expo is a turning point. Today a new cycle begins. I never had doubts.”

A false picture is being painted of the Expo as a unique opportunity for Italy as a whole.

In reality, companies like Coca-Cola, automaker Fiat Chrysler, defense giant Finmeccanica, oil multinational ENI and bank Intesa San Paolo are some of the Expo’s powerful sponsors. Major world corporations, in addition to pro-imperialist international institutions like the European Union and the United Nations, are set to participate.

The opening day created a glaring dichotomy of two Italies—Expo’s big business on one side, and the working population on the other—as it coincided with May Day, the heritage of which is based on the bloody struggles of workers who, inspired by socialist ideas, won fundamental social gains, such as the 8-hour day.

This year, in addition to the traditional May Day march, led and controlled by the trade union federation CGIL-CISL-UIL, which have reduced the event to a series of bureaucratic perfunctory events such as music concerts and empty rallies, an organization called No-Expo added its presence to the streets in the afternoon with the declared intent of “celebrating Expo 2015’s epic flop.”

The social crisis in Italy is intense: between 2007 and 2014, unemployment in Italy has doubled, and the percentage of youth between 15 and 24 not in education or in employment training (NEET) has jumped from 16.2 to 22.2 percent. The labor force participation rate has decreased from 62.8 to 55.7 percent, nearly 15 points below the European Union’s 70 percent safety target.

Workers are increasingly frustrated by the unions’ collusion with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s government. His Jobs Act facilitates dismissals and the introduction of a new contract form according to which new hires receive virtually no benefits, while the state-run wages guarantee fund Cassa Integrazione is progressively eroded.

The unions signed an agreement in July 2013 with Expo 2015 that, according to the ex-Stalinist CGIL, “responds to the contingency needs derived from this opportunity of development through [collective] bargaining, not through the derogatory legislative establishment.”

In addition to the creation of a measly 640 positions and 195 internships, the agreement pledges to “generate 475 volunteering opportunities. This number, multiplied by… a minimum of 5 hours and for an average engagement of 2 weeks… allows the deployment of about 18,500 volunteers.”

Moreover, there are no provisions for employment beyond the six-month duration of the Expo, while training is set in most cases at 12 months, twice as long as the actual fair.

These mechanisms are typical of how the unions facilitate the restructuring and fragmentation of labor: by rotating volunteering jobs, the agreement ensures the deployment of gratis labor and creates more precarious jobs with no benefits or security.

CGIL called this “a balanced response to the needs of flexibility related to the event.” In other words, the unions fully complied with the demands of capital to demolish workers’ rights and establish a new normal based on free labor and hyper-exploitation.

This is being upheld as the model to fight world food shortage and malnourishment by the major trade unions as well as Prime Minister Renzi, who cynically called Expo “a great opportunity for life quality and to declare war against poverty in a world where a billion people die from obesity and another billion from lack of food.”

The purpose of the No-Expo organizers is to fill the immense gap created by the trade unions’ treacherous policy of collaboration with the employers. No-Expo is a conglomerate of bourgeois, pseudo-left tendencies whose program supports capitalism, while they demand only the opportunity to play a more prominent role in future exploitation.

As CGIL-CISL-UIL stand exposed and discredited, social centers, base unions (“sindacati di base”), CGIL dissidents and the so-called “radical left” (more accurately pseudo-left) join forces to contain and smother the workers’ malcontent.

A prominent role in that effort is played by Sinistra Anticapitalista (SA), the successor of the dissolved and thoroughly discredited Sinistra Critica. It proclaims that its purpose is to develop “a revolutionary and libertarian project for socialism.”

SA’s political trajectory follows the logic of its history. After the dissolution of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI), the continuity of bourgeois rule was ensured by the creation of two new parties: a bourgeois organization which is today the Democratic Party (PD) and an alternate one, Rifondazione Comunista, aimed at maintaining control of the vacuum created on the left.

Throughout the two decades following the split, Rifondazione consistently provided the “left” cover for all the policies of social reaction implemented by the center-left, from sweeping privatizations, to massive cuts in social programs and pensions, to imperialist interventions.

Until 2006, Rifondazione incorporated many opportunist tendencies that served a vital role in providing support for anti-worker policies. Once workers’ opposition to such policies and a decline in its membership indicated that an imminent collapse of Rifondazione was on the horizon, the various factions sought to ensure the maintenance of a “left” cover.

Hence, leaders of these factions created new vehicles to contain the working class politically: Marco Ferrando, a veteran member of Rifondazione and with a long history in the Pabloite United Secretariat, formed the Workers’ Communist Party (PCdL), while former Rifondazione senator Franco Turigliatto, after providing decisive support to the center-left imperialist Prodi government, created Sinistra Critica, now dissolved into SA.

These parties share one common strategy: opposition to the working class as the only social force capable of overthrowing capitalism and replace it with petty-bourgeois demands in line with capitalist rule.

They view an independent mobilization of workers on a socialist basis with hostility, not as a viable strategy. Instead, they are concerned with “being able to converse with a section of the city [of Milan] that’s uncertain on the judgment [of the Expo],” as PCdL states while it praises the myriad of groups that joined the No-Expo demonstration with which this party is politically aligned.

Or they congratulate themselves for having “participated, without ifs or buts, in the great and beautiful [May Day] demonstration… along with ‘L’Altra Europa con Tsipras’ [The Other Europe with Tsipras, another sympathetic group that supports Syriza’s pro-bank orientation] and the trade unions.” Nothing reeks more of petty-bourgeois opportunism than their position.

The No-Expo demonstration mobilized 30,000 people, according to its organizers. Some 300 “black bloc” demonstrators vandalized windows (some were marked by No-Expo protesters with a blue X), set cars on fire and engaged in physical confrontations with the police.

While there is no reason to rule out the possibility of state agents provocateurs behind these actions, it is also true that the anarchist elements are at home in a demonstration led by Pabloites, given their common political target: to sabotage any possibility of an independent mass working class movement and to divert attention from the social contradictions underlying capitalism, while the state is given a free pass to implement reactionary police state measures.

The Expo will proceed undisturbed for the sake of corporate interests. The next six months will see an escalation of precariousness and hyper-exploitation of labor. For the working class, broader questions of political strategy need to be raised.

Workers must become conscious of and fight against their enemies in the pseudo-left, who shout radical slogans while they despise and fear the working class and make deals with sections of the bourgeoisie. This struggle requires the unity of workers internationally on the basis of a genuinely socialist program.

Historians condemn Japan’s whitewashing of war crimes

Ben McGrath

Last Tuesday, 187 prominent historians from universities in the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries published an open letter criticizing the Japanese government of Shinzo Abe for continuing to whitewash past war crimes.

The statement entitled, “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan,” takes aim at the Abe government’s stance on “comfort women,”—a euphemism for women coerced into becoming sex slaves for the Japanese army during the 1930s and 1940s. It calls for the defense of the “freedom of historical inquiry” in Japan and all countries against nationalistic distortions.

Among the signatories were notable historians such as Herbert Bix, professor emeritus at Binghamton University/State University of New York (SUNY), Ezra Vogel, professor emeritus at Harvard University, and Bruce Cumings from the University of Chicago. An earlier letter, released by 19 American historians in February, criticized Abe’s efforts to have references on comfort women altered in American university text books.

The comfort women system was established in the early 1930s. While the first women to be involved were Japanese, as the war spread throughout the Pacific, the military turned to its colonies, coercing poor women with phony promises of good jobs in factories. An estimated 200,000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines, and other Asian nations were then taken to brothels and prevented from leaving. Many committed suicide to escape their barbaric treatment.

The open letter stated: “The undersigned scholars of Japanese studies express our unity with the many courageous historians in Japan seeking an accurate and just history of World War II in Asia.” Historians, as well as journalists in Japan, who have published information on war crimes, have been criticized and in some cases threatened with violence by right-wing nationalists, who claim that comfort women were willing prostitutes and that stating otherwise is an affront to Japanese honor.

Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a leading Japanese historian on comfort women, received phone calls and letters threatening his life after he began publishing his research on comfort women in the 1990s. One such note read, “You must die.” In 1992, Yoshimi discovered extensive documents from the 1930s in the Japanese Ministry of Defense’s library (then called the Defense Agency), showing the military’s role in establishing “comfort stations” (military brothels) throughout Asia.

In January of this year, former Asahi Shimbun journalist Takashi Uemura filed a defamation lawsuit against Bungei Shunju, a publisher, and Tsutomu Nishioka, a right-wing professor at Tokyo Christian University and denier of the crimes against comfort women. Nishioka has accused Uemura of faking the information in his articles.

Uemura stated when he filed his lawsuit: “There is a movement in Japan to stop people who want to shine a light on the dark side of history, on the parts of the war that people don’t want to mention.”

Uemura first became the target of Japanese nationalists in 1991, following two articles he wrote on Kim Hak-sun, who is considered to be the first comfort woman to come forward. Uemura was accused of faking his stories and was attacked as the journalist who “fabricated the comfort woman issue.”

Condemnation of Uemura increased last August, following the Asahi Shimbun’s retraction of a series of articles on comfort women published in the 1980s and 1990s that referenced the accounts of Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier who claimed he had rounded up women during World War II in Korea. Historians had dismissed Yoshida’s story by the early 1990s, while emphasizing the clear evidence of the military’s role in establishing comfort stations.

Neither of Uemura’s articles relied on Yoshida’s story, but the retractions further opened the door for attacks on journalists and academics by right-wing nationalists like Nishioka. Not only was Uemura’s life threatened, but Hokusei University, where he is now employed, received bomb threats. Photos of Uemura’s teenage daughter also appeared online with calls to force the girl to commit suicide.

The Abe government strengthened the nationalists’ claims by calling into doubt the 1993 Kono Statement, a formal yet limited apology for the abuse of comfort women during the war in the Pacific, released by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono. In June 2014, Abe’s government released a report by five “experts” questioning whether women and young girls were coerced or forced into the military brothels.

Tuesday’s letter goes on to say, “[…] historians have unearthed numerous documents demonstrating the military’s involvement in the transfer of women and oversight of brothels. Important evidence also comes from the testimony of victims. Although their stories are diverse and affected by the inconsistencies of memory, the aggregate record they offer is compelling and supported by the official documents as well as by the accounts of soldiers and others.”

The letter also makes clear the fundamental difference between the comfort women system and justifications by Japanese nationalists that prostitution was common in other theaters of war: “Among the many instances of wartime sexual violence and military prostitution in the twentieth century, the ‘comfort women’ system was distinguished by its large scale and systematic management under the military, and by its exploitation of young, poor, and vulnerable women in areas colonized or occupied by Japan.” [emphasis added]

The open letter comes less than a week after Abe, the most right-wing Japanese prime minister in the postwar period, was warmly welcomed by Obama on a trip to the United States where the prime minister also made a speech to a joint session of Congress, the first Japanese premier to do so. The two sides agreed to new security guidelines to allow Japan to take part in the United States’ imperialist wars.

All of this is bound up with the United States’ “pivot to Asia,” designed to economically subordinate and militarily surround China. Japan has been encouraged by Washington to remilitarize and discard its postwar pacifist constitution, as well as to enflame territorial conflicts in the region. During Abe’s recent trip to the US, Obama once again promised to back Japan in a war with China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

While the historians’ letter fails to directly tie historical revisionism to preparations for war, that is the purpose of Abe’s campaign: to whip up Japanese nationalism to condition public opinion, particularly young people, for future conflicts.