Peabody Energy declares bankruptcy

Clement Daly

The bankruptcy filing of Peabody Energy is another in a string of Chapter 11 filings by major coal producers and has serious implications for workers, retirees and mining communities.

In a highly anticipated move, Peabody Energy—the world’s largest coal producer—filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in St. Louis, Missouri on April 13. It was the most prominent to date of a series of bankruptcies in the coal mining industry spurred by the deepening global economic crisis and the recent plunge in commodity prices.

According to Bloomberg, the bankruptcy of the 133-year-old Peabody is the biggest this year and “the most powerful convulsion yet in an industry still waiting for the coal market to bottom out.”

Peabody’s filing came at the end of a 30-day grace period it utilized last month in relation to a $71.1 million interest payment owed on its debt. In its 2015 annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Peabody claimed to have lost nearly $2 billion last year on top of losses of $787 million in 2014. In bankruptcy, the company claims $11 billion in assets and $10.1 billion in liabilities.

In an indication of the threat the bankruptcy poses to Peabody’s 7,100 employees globally, the company has hired the notorious Jones Day law firm, which is currently helping the bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources scrap its collective bargaining agreements with the United Mine workers of America (UMWA). Over the past five years, Jones Day has also had a hand in the bankruptcies of American Apparel in October 2015, Radio Shack in February 2015, the city of Detroit in 2013, and Hostess in 2011.

In addition to its 26 coal mines in the United States and Australia, the energy giant owns a five percent stake in Illinois’ Prairie State coal-fired power plant and a 37.5 percent share of the Dominion Terminal Associates coal export terminal at Newport News, Virginia. Its US mines in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, New Mexico, and Wyoming mine thermal coal primarily for domestic electricity generation.

The company’s North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (PRB) is the world’s largest and most productive coal mine. Operating on two 12-hour shifts, 365 days per year, the mine’s 1,150 workers produced approximately 110 million tons of coal in 2015—more than the entire state of West Virginia.

In Australia, the company mines thermal and metallurgical coal for steelmaking, primarily for the global market; however, these operations are not part of the US bankruptcy restructuring.

In its filing Peabody complained, “Over the past several years, American coal producers have encountered reduced demand and lower coal prices created by sluggish economic growth, an abundance of extremely low priced natural gas and increased regulatory hurdles. This convergence—of marked reductions in volume and pricing—substantially impacts the company’s revenues and cash flows.”

Buoyed briefly in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis by slowing, but still strong growth in the emerging economies, particularly China, global coal prices peaked in 2011. Since then, China’s growth has slowed to lowest level in 25 years and coal’s share domestic energy production has continued to erode.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, US coal production in 2015 reached its lowest level since 1986. The administration also forecast last month that, “2016 will be the first year that natural gas-fired generation exceeds coal generation in the United States on an annual basis.”

The first expressions of the downturn in the US coal industry occurred in the Central Appalachian coal basin—southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Virginia—where the coal seams are thin, having been depleted by nearly a century of mining activity, and consequently productivity is half that of the Illinois basin and one-fifteenth that of the more recently opened massive strip mines of the PRB.

The Appalachian coalfields are also the historic stronghold of the UMWA where decades of militant struggles waged by miners in the early and mid-20th century resulted in limited gains in living standards and working conditions. While decades of anticommunism, nationalism, and corporatist collaboration on the part of the UMWA bureaucracy, coupled with the impacts of globalization, have reduced the union to a hollow shell of its former self, operators remaining in the region have been forced to reckon with the legacy liabilities of those previous gains, largely absent in the strip mines of the west.

Recognizing the mounting problems of the Appalachian basin, over the last decade the largest coal companies began to divest themselves of their holdings in the region. In 2006, Arch Coal spun off its union operations in Appalachia into Magnum Coal, a move which allowed Arch to write off approximately $530 million in liabilities, including retiree health care, workers’ compensation, and environmental reclamation.

In a similar move, Peabody created Patriot Coal in 2007 as a spin-off of its union operations in Appalachia. At the time, then-Peabody CEO Rick Navarre boasted of the move, “In total, our legacy liabilities, expenses and cash flows will be nearly cut in half.” The criminal character of the scheme could be seen in the new company’s first quarterly report claiming $1.2 billion in assets and $1.1 billion in liabilities. In 2008, Patriot acquired Magnum Coal, increasing its debt burden and leaving the company responsible for benefits to retirees, which outnumbered active miners by three to one.

It came as no surprise then when Patriot was the first of the major coal companies to file for bankruptcy in July 2012 as coal prices began their historic slide. As the World Socialist Web Site explained at the time, the Patriot bankruptcy “is not merely the product of blind economic forces, but also the result of deliberate policies in the coal industry, first to increase profits margins at the expense of workers, and second, to shift the weight of the economic crisis onto their backs.”

As the WSWS also warned during the Patriot bankruptcy, “The outcome of the case will serve as a precedent for the gutting of wages and working conditions in the mining industry and is no doubt being followed closely by the other operators.”

Since that time, Patriot has been followed into the bankruptcy courts by Edison Mission Energy in 2012, James River Coal in 2014; Alpha Natural Resources, Walter Energy, Xinergy, and Patriot for a second time in 2015; and Arch Coal in January 2016. Bankruptcies at beleaguered coal producers Foresight Energy and Cloud Peak Energy are expected soon with similar indications also coming from Murray Energy.

Peabody’s Patriot Coal scheme was part of more than a decade of acquisitions, restructuring, and cost cutting. In 2011, at the height of the coal boom, Peabody acquired the Australian metallurgical mines of Macarthur Coal Limited for $4 billion. A year later, the company spent $1.2 billion on coal leases from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in the PRB. Meanwhile, as Peabody notes in its bankruptcy filing, the company has created over the past few years “a leaner organizational structure by reducing hundreds of positions and reducing selling, and general and administrative expenses to the lowest levels in nearly a decade.”

The inevitable logic is that Peabody has followed these companies into bankruptcy restructuring despite having shed its costly Appalachian operations and operating some of the most productive mines in the US.

As analyst Jeremy Sussman explained to Bloomberg, Peabody’s bankruptcy is “much more of a balance sheet restructuring than anything else.” He claimed that unlike many of the other bankrupt coal companies, most of Peabody’s mines still make money. Peabody admitted as much in its filing claiming that “the relief provided by chapter 11 will enable [the company] to continue to restructure [its] debt and operations while riding out the storm that has beset the coal industry.”

Insurers set to sharply increase Obamacare premiums

Kate Randall

US health insurance companies are preparing to seek substantial increases in Obamacare premiums, the Hill reported Monday. Citing big losses on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, many insurers will ask state insurance commissioners to approve double-digit hikes in ACA premiums and some may pull out of the market if they are not approved.

The planned premium hikes are a further exposure of the pro-corporate character of Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation. Both candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have embraced the ACA as a supposedly progressive health care reform.

In reality, the ACA is designed to funnel increased profits to the private insurance companies. Under the law’s “individual mandate,” those without insurance through a government program or employer must obtain coverage offered by private insurers or pay a penalty. The insurers are demanding a hefty profit as the condition for their participation in the ACA marketplaces.

Many insurers say they have been losing money on Obamacare plans, in part due to setting their premiums too low when they started in 2014. “There are absolutely some carriers that are going to have to come in with some pretty significant price hikes to make up for the underpricing that they did before,” Sabrina Corlette of Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms told the Hill.

Qualified Health Plans (QHPs) under Obamacare must offer coverage regardless of any person’s preexisting health conditions, but are restricted from charging higher premiums based on health status and age. As a result, QHPs are more attractive to older, less healthy people and less attractive to younger, healthier people. With fewer young and healthy people enrolling in the ACA plans, the pool of clients is more costly to insure.

A study released Friday by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University found that insurance company losses from QHPs on the individual market were in excess of $2.2 billion. These losses came despite insurers receiving net reinsurance payments of $6.7 billion from the ACA’s reinsurance program, a program set up under the law to compensate insurers for large claims incurred by “high-risk individuals in the individual market.” That program is set to expire at the end of 2016.

A report from McKinsey & Company found that in the individual insurance market, which includes the ACA marketplaces, insurers were profitable in only nine states and lost money in 41. Larry Levitt, an expert on the ACA at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Hill, “Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”

Insurance analysts have warned that if more young, healthy people do not sign up for Obamacare coverage, the individual marketplace may collapse, with insurers pulling out in droves and sending the market into what is known in the insurance industry as a “death spiral.”

UnitedHealthcare, the largest single health carrier in the US, said in November that it was considering leaving Obamacare by 2017 due to financial losses. UnitedHealthcare’s definition of “losses” was the possibility of not seeing the same $1.6 billion in profits that it pocketed in the third quarter of 2015. Last week, the company announced it was dropping its ACA plans in Arkansas and Georgia and that more states could follow.

Blue Cross Blue Shield dropped its ACA plans in New Mexico last year after it lost money and state regulators rejected a proposed 51.6 percent premium increase. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina now says it may drop out of the ACA marketplace in that state due to losses.

News of the planned premium hikes follows a poll earlier this year showing widespread public dissatisfaction with the Affordable Care Act. Polling by National Public Radio and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that more than a quarter of US adults say they have been personally harmed by the health care law since its passage.

Twenty-six percent of the poll’s 1,002 respondents said that the cost of health care has been a serious strain on their finances over the last two years. About 40 percent of those facing these financial struggles said they have spent all or most of their savings accounts on large bills, while 20 percent said they hadn’t filled prescriptions because they could not afford them.

Insurers seeking the premium hikes claim that the blow will be softened by the tax credit available to some low-income individuals and families who qualify under Obamacare. However, about 15 percent of Obamacare enrollees do not receive these subsidies, so they would bear the full burden of any premium increases.

Even with the subsidies, the overwhelming majority of the least expensive “bronze” Obamacare plans come with deductibles in excess of $5,000. This means that payment for all but certain “essential” services must be made out of pocket before any coverage kicks in. These costs are forcing many people to self-ration and go without needed medical care for themselves and family members.

Many of the bronze plans also offer extremely narrow networks, restricting access to doctors, hospitals and other providers. In an effort to boost their profits, insurers are expected to further restrict their provider networks in addition to raising premiums. The Mercatus Center study cited above found that QHPs in 2014 with narrow provider networks performed better financially than those with broader networks.

More than 50,000 junior doctors begin two-day strike in UK

Robert Stevens

The unprecedented decision by 55,000 junior doctors to not provide emergency cover during the 48-hour strike that begins today is a measure of their determination to beat the attack being mounted against them and the National Health Service by the Conservative government.

The strike will have a major impact, with at least 12,711 non-urgent operations and 112,856 outpatient appointments cancelled ahead. In their four previous strikes since January, the British Medical Association (BMA) ensured emergency cover was in place, as has been the case since the NHS was founded in 1948.

The BMA has repeatedly sought a face-saving compromise in order to allow them to call off the dispute. BMA leader Dr Mark Porter said to the government yesterday, “If you agree to lift imposition while talks resume, we will immediately call off the industrial action.”

But the Tories have rebuffed all offers made to them. They are not only determined to impose contracts that endanger patient safety, their aim is to inflict a decisive defeat on the junior doctors in order to intimidate anyone seeking to oppose the reorganisation of the National Health Service in line with full privatisation.

The profession’s regulator, the General Medical Council, has warned that medics who go on strike could face disciplinary action or even be struck off if their actions “caused patients serious harm.” For its part, the right-wing media is seeking to whip up hostility to the strike.

Junior doctors have refused to back down in the face of all these threats and workers overwhelmingly continue to support the action. But the danger of a defeat grows with each day that the BMA, other health unions and the Labour Party are allowed to isolate the strike.

From the very beginning, the BMA has insisted that this is not a political dispute, while unions such as Unison, with nearly half a million members, have not organised a single action in support of the junior doctors.

Last week, BMA junior doctors committee chairman Johann Malawana wrote to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt offering to call off the strike if the government agreed to halt its plans to impose the new contract. Malawana said, “With a week to go to the start of the first full walkout of doctors in this country, I am writing to make a clear offer in a bid to avert industrial action. Simply put, if the Government will lift the imposition, junior doctors will call off next week’s strike action. ...” He called on the government to “get back around the table” for talks “at any time between now and the start of next week’s industrial action.”

Hunt replied curtly that it was not possible to “change or delay” the introduction of the contract.

While new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell make vaguely supportive noises, the Labour Party acts as an implacable enemy of the junior doctors. Earlier this month, Shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander told a meeting in parliament that she had not been on a junior doctors’ picket line and had no intention of ever doing so. She is now playing a leading role in seeking to get the dispute called off.

On Sunday, a cross-party group of MPs, led by Alexander, wrote to Hunt proposing that if he piloted the new junior doctors’ contract before introducing it across England, the BMA would call off its strikes. The letter stated, “If it remains your intention to introduce this new contract, we believe it should be piloted in a number of trusts/across a number of deaneries and for its impact on patients, staff and the ‘weekend effect’ to be independently evaluated.”

This proposal would bring opposition to the contract to an end and only delay its implementation nationally. It was presented by Alexander alongside Conservative MP Dr Dan Poulter, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb and the Scottish National Party’s Dr Philippa Whitford. The letter assured Hunt that a pilot scheme could not only end the strike, but “would allow genuine progress towards your manifesto commitment of high quality emergency care across seven days a week.”

Doctors and nurses will be justifiably sickened by such a statement being made about a government that has imposed tens of billions of pounds in cuts and “efficiency savings,” leading to the loss or reduction of many emergency services over the past six years. No wonder that one of Britain’s most right-wing newspapers, the Daily Mail, said the government should consider accepting it.

The offer was once again rejected, with Hunt tweeting, “Any further delay just means we will take longer to eliminate weekend effect.”

According to the Guardian, Prime Minister David Cameron “told Hunt to maintain his firm stance in the bitter dispute in two separate conversations late last week. The prime minister was adamant that there should be no climb-down from the tough rhetoric and combative tactics Hunt has employed since the row first flared in September.”

On Monday, a government source told the BBC that the two all-out strikes this week “were aimed at toppling the government and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt.” He said there could be no compromise as BMA leaders had radicalised a “generation of junior doctors” and any retreat would mean the government facing similar industrial action by other unions, which were watching this dispute “like a hawk.”

In reality, the other unions are watching the junior doctors only in the hope of seeing them brought to heel. The junior doctors can only win by waging an implacable political struggle to bring down the government. And to do that requires a completely different strategy and orientation.

Junior doctors must build their own rank-and-file committees to take the strike out of the hands of the BMA. They must call for a rebellion against the other health unions by the more than 1.3 million workers employed in the NHS and for united industrial and political action against the government. Above all they must appeal for solidarity action to be taken by the millions of workers and young people throughout the UK who want to see the NHS defended and who face similar attacks on their jobs, wages and conditions.

The Socialist Equality Party’s NHS Fightback provides junior doctors and other health workers with the means through which to organise such a counteroffensive and the socialist programme and leadership required to lead it.

China debt levels reach record high

Nick Beams

Chinese debt levels have risen to a record 237 percent of gross domestic product, according to a report published in the Financial Times over the weekend, prompting warnings that the country could be heading for a Lehman-style financial crisis or a protracted period of low growth like that which has afflicted Japan over the past two decades.

The report said that total debt in China, including both foreign and domestic borrowing, had climbed to $25 trillion as a result of a rapid expansion of borrowing since the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. In 2008, Chinese debt stood at 148 percent of GDP.

When the crisis erupted, leading to a contraction of world trade in the first months of 2009 at a faster rate than in the initial period of the 1930s Depression, the Chinese export model of economic growth collapsed, leading to the loss of 23 million jobs. The government responded with a stimulus package of half a trillion dollars and a massive expansion of credit to state-owned corporations and local government authorities. The credit expansion has been estimated to be the equivalent of the entire US financial system.

The expectation of the Chinese authorities was that the world economy would experience a recovery after the crisis and exports would resume their previous path. But nearly eight years after the financial crisis, the world economy continues to stagnate. Most significantly, world trade, which prior to the crisis grew at a faster rate than global GDP, is now running at a level below growth.

Since 2013, Chinese government and financial authorities, recognising that the expansion of infrastructure investment—especially in property—is inherently unsustainable, have been trying to effect a “rebalancing” of the economy away from capital intensive development and towards consumption and the expansion of services.

Growth rates have fallen from their previous levels of around 10 percent, lowering the government’s official target for economic expansion to between 6.5 percent and 7.0 percent. But even this lower level is proving difficult to sustain.

Economic turbulence in the last half of 2015, flowing from the stock market crisis in August and slowing growth, prompted fears of a “hard landing,” leading the government to reopen the credit spigots to sustain the economy. The first quarter 2016 estimate of growth was 6.7 percent, in line with government projections but nevertheless the lowest rate since the depths of the financial crisis. That result was achieved only through a major expansion of credit.

The Financial Times reported that according to central bank data and its own calculations, new borrowing increased by 6.2 trillion renminbi in the first quarter of this year, the biggest-ever increase over a three-month period, and more than 50 percent higher than the same period last year. The China chief economist at BNP Paribas, Chen Xingdong, said the first quarter GDP result was achieved only through the expansion of industrial production, fixed-asset investment, and what he called an “astonishing” increase in construction start-ups. At the same time, growth in the service sector, which is supposed to provide the basis for a “rebalanced” Chinese economy, slowed.

There is a divergence of opinion among economists and financial analysts as to how the Chinese debt problems will play out. Some warn that it will end in a “Lehman-style” crisis, with bank failures and a collapse in credit. According to Jonathan Anderson of the Emerging Advisors Group, whose remarks were cited in another Financial Times article over the weekend, the banks are relying on the sale of high-yielding products rather than deposits to finance credit—a formula that led to the 2008 collapse of the US banks Bear Stearns and, later in the year, Lehman Brothers.

“At the current rate of expansion” he wrote recently, “it is only a matter of time before some banks find themselves unable to fund all their assets safely. At that point, a financial crisis is likely.”

Global hedge fund investor George Soros has compared the Chinese economy to the situation that prevailed in the US before the collapse of 2008. Others maintain that China’s central bank will keep pumping money into the financial system in order to ward off a collapse, but this will lead only to Japanese-style stagnation.

Whatever the immediate outcome, the mounting debt crisis has far-reaching implications for the global economy as a whole, with a large number of economies, ranging from Australia and Brazil to the economies in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, highly dependent on continued Chinese economic growth.

In a report issued earlier this year, Ha Jiming, an investment strategist with Goldman Sachs, noted: “Every major country with a rapid increase in debt has experienced either a financial crisis or a prolonged slowdown in GDP growth.”

In its recent Global Financial Stability Report, the International Monetary Fund drew attention to the rising debt problems. It estimated that more than 15 percent of total commercial lending in China was “potentially at risk,” meaning that banks faced a loss of 4.9 trillion renminbi, an amount equivalent to 7 percent of GDP. Others estimate that the stock of non-performing loans may be even higher.

The organisation’s World Economic Outlook report, prepared for its spring round of meetings earlier this month, pointed to substantial and rising “spillover” effects on advanced economies from the Chinese financial system.

It is not clear what impact the growing concerns over Chinese debt levels will have in the short-term. But other short-term potential sources of instability are looming.

The Bank of Japan will meet on Thursday amid growing pressure for a further easing of its monetary policy, after it initiated negative interest rates at the end of January. While the central bank insisted that the lowering of the value of yen was not an official aim of the new regime—governments and central banks maintain an official fiction that they do not target the value of their own currency, lest they be accused of engaging in a currency war—the Bank of Japan and the government had hoped that the yen would fall.

Instead, in the three months since negative rates were introduced, the value of the yen has been rising, increasing the deflationary pressures on the Japanese economy and making it harder for Japanese companies to compete in global markets.

The official position of Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is that the monetary policy is working. However, he put forward a similar position in the lead-up to the surprise introduction of negative interest rates at the end of January.

Much will depend on what the US Federal Reserve decides to do at its meeting on Wednesday. If it points to an interest rate rise in June, this will likely lead to a rise in the US dollar and a fall in the yen. However, if it pushes future interest rate rises further out, the dollar will tend to fall, putting more upward pressure on the yen—an outcome that could produce another surprise announcement from the Bank of Japan.

Obama’s war summit in Europe

Bill Van Auken

President Barack Obama ended his six-day trip through Saudi Arabia, Britain and Germany Monday with what amounted to a mini-war summit in the northern German city of Hannover. The meeting was attended by himself, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Obama used the occasion to announce a significant escalation of the US intervention in the Middle East—the dispatch of 250 more special operations troops, a six-fold increase over the current deployment of 50. This follows on the heels of an escalation of troop numbers in Iraq and an authorization of the use of US Apache attack helicopters in combat there.

The Syrian escalation has been ordered under conditions where the White House has reportedly fashioned a “Plan B” to be put into effect once the shaky cessation of hostilities in the country is deemed to have failed. The plan calls for the CIA, operating in conjunction with Washington’s reactionary allies in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil monarchies, to funnel massive quantities of new arms, including surface-to-air missiles, to the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias that serve as Western proxies in the war for regime-change.

The American president’s message to his European counterparts was that they must stop being “complacent” and work to build up their own military forces for interventions in the Middle East, North Africa and against Russia to the east.

This appeal appeared to be in line with the policies already being pursued by Washington’s NATO allies. Britain, France and Italy are in the advanced stages of preparing another imperialist incursion into oil-rich Libya, having cobbled together a puppet regime that can formally request foreign intervention in a country already shattered by the US-NATO war begun five years ago.

Obama’s host, Chancellor Merkel, proudly declared, “We are ready and willing to be militarily engaged,” citing the German military’s participation in ongoing interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali.

“We have to put in more equipment, more personnel,” Merkel said at a joint press conference with Obama. “We know the targets NATO has submitted to us. We think that the whole positioning of our federal armed forces reflects fully our sense that we need to shoulder this international responsibility.”

Seven decades after the fall of the Third Reich, German militarism, recklessly promoted by Washington, is back in business.

There was a certain valedictory quality to Obama’s public statements in Germany, with his administration coming to an end in barely nine months. He pretentiously titled a 49-minute speech he delivered Monday “An Address to the People of Europe.”

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, described the Hannover speech to a group of businessmen as a “bookend” to a speech he delivered in Berlin in the summer of 2008 during his run for presidency. At that time, some 200,000 people poured into Berlin’s Tiergarten to cheer the Democratic candidate in the naive hope that he would put an end to the eight years of aggressive war, torture and criminality that characterized the Bush presidency.

This represented what was probably the high water mark of the phenomenon known as “Obamamania,” in which large numbers of people on both sides of the Atlantic were swept up in the cynical marketing of Obama, a junior senator and unknown political quantity, as the champion of “hope and change,” whose supposed sympathy for the oppressed and hostility to war would be assured by the color of his skin.

Playing a prominent role in this campaign were various elements of the pseudo-left both in the US and Europe, including the International Socialist Organization in the US, which described his election as a “transformative event,” and Germany’s Left Party, which praised his 2008 speech in the Tiergarten. These forces worked to channel antiwar sentiment behind the Democratic candidate, whose election served as a vehicle for their own move to open support for imperialist war.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site described the speech as “a reactionary affirmation of Cold War anti-communism and an attempt to promote the new framework for US imperialist militarism and aggression, the so-called ‘global war on terror.’”

The speech, the WSWS continued, promised a more collaborative relationship with Europe’s capitalist powers and offered the prospect that “in return for their assistance in salvaging America’s neocolonial ventures in Afghanistan and elsewhere, they could anticipate a larger slice of the spoils.” To the American ruling elite, the speech signaled Obama’s “determination as president to prosecute US imperialism’s global hegemonic aims...”

Nearly eight years later, Obama addressed the “people of Europe” as a commander-in-chief who has overseen the continuation of the war in Afghanistan along with new military interventions in both Iraq and Syria. As president, he threw the US military into the war for regime-change that devastated Libya. He has provided military support to the Saudi assault that has driven the people of Yemen to the brink of starvation and personally directed a global campaign of drone murders and massacres that has killed thousands of innocent civilians.

The danger is growing of these various conflicts igniting a new world war, as the Pentagon executes its “pivot to Asia” with increasingly provocative military challenges to China, and the US and NATO carry out an aggressive buildup on Russia’s borders.

The election to choose Obama’s successor is notable for the virtual blackout by the two major parties, their candidates and the corporate media of the rising danger of world war.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, is the favored candidate of the US military and intelligence complex, described glowingly by the New York Times last week as the “last true hawk left in the race.” The Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has called for a major increase in military spending and the return of torture.

The “democratic socialism” and “political revolution” of Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders include no challenge to American militarism, and he has pledged to back Clinton should she win the nomination.

The Socialist Equality Party has launched its 2016 election campaign. Our candidates, Jerry White for US president and Niles Niemuth for vice president, are breaking through the conspiracy of silence of the capitalist parties and candidates and raising as the most critical issue confronting American working people the danger of war. Their campaign is focused centrally on the building of an international antiwar movement based on the working class and directed against the capitalist system, the source of militarism and war.

The lessons of Obama’s presidency are vital. Workers and young people can wage an effective struggle against war only to the extent that they organize their strength independently of and in opposition to the Democratic Party and the capitalist two-party system.

At the same time, this struggle must be international, uniting the working class across national boundaries in a common struggle against imperialism and for socialism.

To that vital end, the International Committee of the Fourth International is holding an International May Day Online Rally this coming Sunday, May 1, at 1:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time.

New Zealand’s healthcare crisis worsens

Tom Peters

Recent reports highlight the increasingly severe problems in New Zealand’s public health system, caused by chronic underfunding.

Research commissioned by the Health Funds Association, released on April 11, found that 110,000 people are on the official waiting list for elective surgery and an additional 170,000 who need operations are not on the list. The survey also found that average wait times for surgery had increased by 80 days to 304 days since 2013.

The National Party government plans to spend an extra $11 billion on military hardware over the next decade, including new frigates and planes, to assist New Zealand’s integration into the US-led military encirclement of China. By contrast, the health sector is being starved of funds and tens of thousands of people are suffering as a result.

The government’s 2015 budget allocated an extra $425 million per year to healthcare over the next four years. An analysis by the Council of Trade Unions, however, found that inflation, ageing and population growth meant at least $549 million was needed just to maintain the existing—already grossly inadequate—levels of service. Similar funding shortfalls have occurred in previous years, as the government has sought to impose the cost of the economic crisis on working people.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman dismissed the waiting list survey, declaring in a statement: “There’s a difference between surgery people actually need, and surgery people think they need.” His remarks suggest that patients should be arbitrarily denied treatment. In fact, other research points to a vast unmet need, including a 2014 study published in the New Zealand Medical Journal showing that one in three people in need of surgery were not being placed on waiting lists.

Canterbury Charity Hospital founder Dr Phil Bagshaw told Fairfax Media the government’s method of measuring unmet need by contacting general practitioners was “a complete waste of time.” He said a “large proportion of the population now don’t go to their GP because they can’t afford it. It’s no longer just my opinion because we have figures to support it.” Bagshaw’s own study of the unmet need will be released later this year.

The most common elective surgical procedures are gynaecological, gastrointestinal, knee and shoulder surgeries. Those who cannot get a doctor’s referral for an operation, or who face lengthy delays, are often forced to live with crippling disabilities and pain.

A Fairfax report on April 15 quoted Sharon Cooper, a 35-year-old Canterbury resident suffering complications from surgery for an injury received while working on a dairy farm. After a specialist told her she needed a partial knee replacement, she was refused an assessment by Burwood Hospital “due to the number of people waiting with a greater level of need.”

Cooper “now has a pronounced limp, and is in constant pain,” the report stated. “I’m pretty much at a loss,” she said, adding: “It’s like being in a hole you can’t get out of. I know I’ll get to the point where I can’t work and I just think it’s so unfair.”

Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB) chief executive David Meates told reporters: “Could more people benefit from operations? Certainly yes. It does come down to funding.”

On the same day, Fairfax reported that doctors at the region’s Christchurch Hospital emergency department were “pleading for more staff” to deal with a surge in admissions. There has been an increase in work-related accidents linked to the rebuilding of Christchurch following the 2011 earthquake.

In late 2015, CDHB chief medical officer Dr Nigel Millar wrote to a Ministry of Health official saying the ministry had “not responded appropriately” to the disaster. He accused it of being “blind to the real issues and determined to drive the business-as-usual model.” Almost all the country’s district health boards (DHBs) are running deficits and under pressure to cut costs.

Graham Roper, a member of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ Community Committee, told Radio NZ on April 11 that several DHBs had diverted funding for mental health services to make up shortfalls elsewhere, with disastrous consequences. Non-government counselling and support services have also had their funding slashed.

The cuts come amid a surge in mental health problems bound up with worsening social and economic problems. According to the Ministry of Health, demand for child and adolescent mental health services has soared by 30 percent in the past five years. At Rotorua Lakes DHB, which covers one of the country’s poorest regions, the number of young people seeking help has doubled. There were 564 suicides nationwide last year, the highest toll on record, with many linked to poverty and unemployment.

With patients being turned away from over-stretched services, desperate family members are often forced to call the police when a relative experiences a mental health crisis. According to Radio NZ, police received 25,500 calls for mental health-related incidents last year—more than double the figure from 2013, when they received 12,000 calls.

Roper explained: “Two thirds of people who take their own lives have no contact with a health provider in the six years prior to their death in relation to mental health problems... It’s a systematic nationwide problem and tragedies will continue to occur. The police aren’t the body to manage [this].” Police fatally shot two suicidal young men last year during call outs—Pera Smiler in Lower Hutt and David Cerven in Auckland.

The opposition Labour Party’s health spokesperson Annette King has criticised the government for what she says is a shortfall of $1.7 billion in health spending over the past five years. Labour and the Greens have called for an inquiry into the state of the country’s mental health services.

The present crisis, however, is the result of policies pursued by successive governments, led by Labour and National. The Lange Labour government began the process of funding cuts in the 1980s, including the introduction of patient fees for prescription medications. The Clark Labour government, which was supported by the Greens, removed more than 35,000 people from the surgery waiting list in 2005–2006.

Labour’s Health Minister Peter Hodgson defended the slashing of the waiting list, telling the New Zealand Herald in January 2007: “There will never be enough taxpayer money to fund all types of elective surgery.”

Dr Bagshaw opened his charity hospital in Christchurch that year for “people who have been dropped off the waiting list,” he told the Sunday Star-Times in 2007.

The Star-Times reported a vast expansion in private hospitals under the Labour government. Southern Cross, the biggest private hospital chain, grew by 20 percent in four years, while Wakefield Health Group increased its number of operating theatres by 25 percent in 18 months.

Labour openly encouraged the growth of the private sector at the expense of public hospitals. This right-wing agenda, supported by the entire political establishment, has produced a catastrophe for ordinary working people, while the rich can access the best care money can buy.

UK: Millions of low income families will be poorer under welfare reforms

Thomas Scripps

This month, cuts to Universal Credit—the Tory government’s cover scheme for slashing welfare—were implemented for some 80,000 households. By 2020, the cuts will be extended to 1 million households across the UK, saving the government £3 billion a year.

Universal Credit will cost 2.1 million in-work families £1,600 a year and 1.1 million out-of-work families £2,300 a year when fully implemented, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The changes were first outlined in Chancellor George Osborne’s summer budget last year, where he outlined a plan to make £12 billion of welfare cuts, mainly targeting the working poor.

The Universal Credit cuts involve lowering the amount people can earn before low-wage subsidies, in the form of Universal Credit benefits, are reduced. The new earnings level at which benefits will begin to be withdrawn is now set at a flat £192 a month, down from previous levels of £222 a month for a couple and £263 a month for a single parent. In other words, the changes cut the amount of money working people can expect to be paid by the government when their employers provide only a pittance in wages.

For working families, this amounts to the loss of up to £200 a month. The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) estimates that families with a single earner working full-time on the “national living wage” of £7.20 will have to work the equivalent of an extra month a year to make up the shortfall. Single parent households, moreover, already suffering disproportionate hardship and generally among the poorer sections of society, will be the hardest hit. A single parent working full-time for the “living wage” will have to work the equivalent of an additional two months.

Responding to criticisms of the cut, a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spokesman said, “We are simplifying the work allowances under UC [Universal Credit] and giving people extra help to progress in work. This is alongside the increase in the national living wage and personal tax allowances which are helping us move to a higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare society.” He said households affected could get help from Jobcentres to increase their hours.

Various organisations have already shown how the increases in the minimum (rebranded “living”) wage and in personal tax allowance have either done nothing significant to help working people or else have been outweighed by the staggering impact of welfare cuts.

In December 2014, Julia Unwin, from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation charity, said, “Raising the personal tax allowance is an expensive way of helping the working poor—most of the additional money will actually go to better-off families, while poorer families only keep a third of the tax cut. Raising the work allowance would have been a much more effective way of making work pay for those in poverty.”

In September last year, Adam Corlett, from the Resolution Foundation, commented on the national living wage, “While the chancellor’s new wage floor will give a welcome boost to millions of Britain’s lowest-paid staff, it cannot guarantee a basic standard of living or compensate for the £12 billion of welfare cuts that were announced alongside it.”

As for the suggestion that families can simply turn up at the Jobcentre and find more work, even under the government’s own heavily manipulated unemployment figures, 1.7 million people are out of work. Stable employment is in short supply, with part-time work, self-employment and zero-hours contracts becoming the norm for low income families. Single parents are being trapped between the need to work longer hours and the rising cost of childcare—£6,003 a year on average for 25 hours a week for a child under two as of last year, a 5.1 percent increase on 2014.

The fact is these cuts will drive yet more working people and their children into poverty.

Moreover, “transitional protection” (money which the government claimed it had set aside to help families as they moved from the old tax credit system to lower Universal Credit payments), is revealed by the Office for Budget Responsibility to be almost nonexistent. The total set aside for 2018-19, by which time around 2 million people are supposed to have made the switch, was just £34 million, barely more than 1 percent of the £3 billion the Tories will gain by cutting Universal Credit.

Such is the character of the first major operation to be carried out by the DWP under its new head, Stephen Crabb, following the resignation of Iain Duncan-Smith. Crabb used his first speech as an opportunity to affirm that he is “absolutely committed” to Universal Credit reform, which he described as “the spine that runs through the welfare system.”

Upon Crabb’s appointment, the media promoted the fact that he hailed from a less-privileged background than the usual Tory minister and grew up on a council estate in Wales under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This was supposed to lend a veneer of credibility to the most savage attacks being imposed on working people in generations. A recent interview Crabb did with the Spectator, the house organ of the Tories, is enough to show that his origins do not matter a jot. He referred in glowing terms to Thatcher’s “right-to-buy” scheme, which set the tone for the destruction of affordable and social housing that continues to this day.

In response to Crabb’s speech, Labour’s Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions Owen Smith called Universal Credit a “great idea” before adding, “Unless he [Crabb] reverses the cuts in the work allowances and restores the work incentives it’s going to leave millions of people worse off.” Smith’s proposed solution, however, was only that Crabb conduct a “thorough review” of Conservative policy.

This was demanded of the Conservatives, who, along with their previous coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have imposed more than £100 billion in spending cuts over the past six years and is committed to a programme of austerity for the foreseeable future.

Smith cannot demand the government abandon their programme because Labour themselves, despite uttering a few fragments of left rhetoric, are committed to a “more fiscally restrictive policy than [Tony Blair’s] new Labour”, according to John Rentoul in the Independent. This was said in response to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s comments this March that Labour would “be absolutely ruthless about how we manage our spending” and “ensure that the government’s debt is set on a sustainable path.”

Within months of being elected Labour leader on a mandate to end austerity, Jeremy Corbyn has ditched all opposition to the government’s cuts. They fear that any mobilization of workers and youth against unending cuts will unleash a popular movement against the capitalist order they are determined to uphold.

Nigerian Literary Renaissance?

Charles R. Larson

For more than fifty years, I have closely followed Nigerian writing—especially fiction—beginning with the pioneers of the continent’s writing: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others. Nigeria has dominated the writing of the continent because of its large population and, especially in the early years, its high literacy. I suspect this domination will continue in the future. In the past decade, especially, there has been an explosion of Nigerian literature; many writers have achieved international fame. And the younger ones keep publishing exciting new books, often critical of their country, often tackling new issues and themes. No other country on the continent today has such a rich tradition and high literary productivity as Nigeria. Think of it this way: the country is the continent’s leader, not just in its economy.

Add to the list of emerging new Nigerian novelists A. Igoni Barrett, who—according to the information about him—has published an earlier book, Love Is Power, or Something Like That—a collection of short stories that I have not read. Now he’s published a novel, called Blackass, an often-disturbing satire with cutting-edge humor of contemporary life in Lagos, the country’s largest city. I’ll say right up front that the book is uneven, with a number of slow sections, but nevertheless worthy of our attention because of a malaise, which if correct, might be called the Nigerian disease. And that sickness is the continued assumption that white is better than black, a carry-over from colonial days when the idea was droned into the colony’s subjects. I hope that Barrett is wrong—that this is no more than a big joke, an obsession, for many people.

The plot is fairly simple. A young Nigerian, Furo Wariboko, who has been unemployed for a long time, wakes up one morning and discovers that he is white. Although he’s 33 years old (is that supposed to be revealing?), he still lives with his family because of his lack of a job. But this is the morning when he has a serious job interview. His mother has already left for work; his sister is still asleep, so Furo can leave the house without their awareness of his altered appearance. The country, according to Furo—who narrates much of the story—has a youth unemployment rate of fifty percent, not that atypical for African countries today. And although Furo has some advanced education, the lack of job prospects has made it impossible for him to move away from his family.

At the job interview because he arrives late, Furo should be at the back of the line of many people, but his whiteness results in his being considered before most of the other applicants and immediately offered the job at a rather enormous salary. That position is the Marketing Executive for a book-publishing company. Never mind that he knows zilch about marketing; never mind that he himself rarely reads. Barrett can’t resist poking fun at Nigerian book-reading patterns, mostly limited to self-help books. Titles like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, and Are You Ready to Succeed? are included in the company’s publications. If you spend much time in Lagos and other major African cities, you will encounter street-hawkers selling books of such ilk.

Not only does Furo get a job because of his white skin, but Nigerian women are also immediately attracted to him. One of them lets him move in with her and she discovers—after they have made love the first time—that although his skin is white, his buttocks are black. Figure that one out. All of the people he encounters are immediately attracted to him because he has a Nigerian accent, speaks Pidgin English, and has his country’s mannerisms—plus the supposed bonus of being white.

Intentionally, Furo has not returned home after he gets the job and the girl; he tries to sever all relationships with his family, including taking on a new persona and a new name (Frank Whyte). For a time he is fearful of visiting some of the dicer places in Lagos where he’s always been comfortable in the past. Then one of the people he meets tells him, “No white man has ever been lynched in Lagos.” Soon, other companies attempt to poach him, to hire him at an even larger salary—all because they love the idea of a white man who can speak the local dialect and act like a Nigerian. Finally, he’s offered still another job at an obscene salary, a fancy car, and such an expensive flat that he can’t resist the temptation. All of these shenanigans are a little like those of Jerzy Kosinksi’s Chauncey Gardiner, moving up, up, up in society because of an assumption the people around him have made of him that is not true.

Best of all—and this is why Blackass is worth reading and not tossing aside in spite of some of the slower passages—the novel has more than enough believable surprises in the last fourth of it that shift the narrative in a fascinating direction that the reader does not foresee at the beginning (in spite of adequate clues along the way). The ending is delicious, quite an accomplishment on Barrett’s part, demonstrating the writer’s skills at plotting and moving his satire into a more serious dimension. Thus, Blackass becomes a revealing commentary on the veneer that one typically regards as Nigerian society, without recognizing the bulwark that holds it all together.

Extremism is the Bane of Our Existence

Nyla Ali Khan

Are the ideals of secularism and humanism being upheld by mainstream and separatist politicians in our pluralistic state? How constructive a role is the civil society playing? The growth of nationalism or an autonomous Kashmiri identity certainly doesn’t involve supporting obscurantism or deliberately preventing the growth of knowledge and information. The identity of a state or a nation cannot be built on unquenchable hate and certainly not on cashing in on the pain and grief of other people, some of whom will not have the luxury of closure. It is or, at least, should be inconceivable, in the day and age of a global economy, to spurn the concepts of reason, rationality, and political and moral ethics.

The perpetuation of a politics that emphasizes, reinforces, or creates cultural myopia and monocultural identities, in a society as diverse as ours, would be the bane of our existence. This damaging short-sightedness results in intolerance, arbitrary justice, tyranny, and ignorance. The contemporary political discourse in the state, particularly the Kashmir Valley, doesn’t have to be limited to the framework of the two-nation theory. Nor should dissatisfaction with the policies of the Governments of India and Pakistan vis-à-vis Kashmir encourage the glorification of reactionary politics. The last thing that Jammu and Kashmir needs is Taliban ideologues in any guise, either civil, or political, or military. Such an extremist ideology or even a mild form of it confuses local, national, and international observers, and ends up encouraging reductive interpretations of the politics of Kashmir.

It is interesting to me that a lot of Kashmir observers in the Indian subcontinent as well as in the West reduce the Kashmir conundrum to the dispute between India and Pakistan over sharing the waters of the Indus basin, which originates in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Disappointingly, in the discussion that followed my presentation at Salisbury University, Maryland, in May 2012, some very well-read academics and career diplomats reduced the entire issue to the water dispute between India and Pakistan. My editor and colleague at Oxford Islamic Studies lamented that most Americans couldn’t find J & K on the map. There are some other observers who circuitously see the issue in terms of the religious versus secular binary. Interestingly, there is a new breed of writers and columnists in the subcontinent, particularly in Kashmir, who, erroneously, labor under the delusion that pre-and post-1947 Jammu and Kashmir was a haven for pan-Islamism, which is completely anachronistic.

Such interpretations, willy-nilly, obliterate the legitimacy of regional political aspirations across party, religious, cultural, and linguistic lines. Much to my amusement, in response to an article of mine on the autonomous status of J & K, a British-Indian academic labeled me an “Islamist,” probably because he thought about autonomy only in religious terms, not political ones. But that didn’t deter me from emphasizing my world view. I cannot emphasize enough how foolish it would be to smirk at the religious, provincial, and sectarian violence or growing obscurantism in either India or Pakistan, because that simply doesn’t bode well for a peaceful resolution and developmental politics in our neck of the woods. Sanctioned extremist political and religious ideologies in either of the two countries wouldn’t enable J & K to move forward.

Sloganeering, rabble rousing, demanding the incorporation of articles in constitutions, and other theoretical issues are all very well, but the real test is whether these theories have a real impact in institutions, instead of being just hollow words. So, belittling the importance of institution building and stoking a state of disorder would be highly irresponsible. After reading a recent essay of mine on the issue, my editor pointed out that, “the recent victories in the Egyptian and Tunisian constitutions brought the same issues to mind.”

The public disappointments that Kashmiris have had to face over the years shouldn’t dilute democratic aspirations, and extremist ideology, perpetuated either by civil society, or politicians, or the military must, at all costs, be kept at bay.

In 2008, probably traumatized at the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, claimed to be agonized by the strained relations between the two nuclear powers in the Indian subcontinent. While emphasizing the importance of creating bonhomie between India and Pakistan, Zardari had said that the Kashmir conflict could be placed in a state of temporary suspension, for future generations to resolve. The current Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, has mastered the art of public and political volte face.

As I’ve pointed out before, subsequent to the initiation of the composite peace process by then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, no substantive measure was taken to hold a substantive dialogue and negotiations with Pakistan. Efforts at the “Quiet Diplomacy” heralded by one time Indian Minister for Home Affairs, P. Chidambaram, were intermittent and interspersed with pugnacious responses to regional demands for greater autonomy. A resolution to the Kashmir imbroglio, which promises peace, prosperity, and progress, requires unprecedented strong political will from leaders, policy makers, and civil society members on both sides of the Line of Control.

Despite the several letdowns, we need to remember that the process of democratization is an evolutionary one and does not provide instant solutions. To further this process, it is just as important to maintain the pluralistic regional, religious, cultural, and linguistic ethos of J & K.

If the institutions of state do not function transparently or are unable to deliver, it is important to hold state actors accountable, particularly elected representatives who, ideally, are answerable to their constituents. But it is just as important to hold those non-state actors accountable who thrive and build their careers on the agony of the less fortunate. State and non-state actors who want Kashmiri masses to wallow in grief for eternity, while they climb their way to the echelons of power and a new-found elitism should be called to account. Although the sufferings of the people of Jammu and Kashmir cannot be brushed off, the bitter truth is that it is time to summon up the courage to initiate a politics of construction. Can we begin the process of developing a cohesive society with coherent state policies? A fragmented society cannot accomplish anything, either politically or socioeconomically. As Abraham Lincoln said in 1858, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Core Beliefs and the Popular Tide

Joseph Natoli

Both politics and religion are taking on, in different ways, the popular tide against core beliefs that tide amounting to the triumph of personal opinion and belief. That the only core belief is in a personal autonomy and will threaten both religious dogma, predominantly in the West, and political Neoliberal ideology, whose core dogma is the righteousness and correctness of “The Invisible Hand of the Market.”

While Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) appears to be an attempt to ease the tension between church teachings and personal views on these matters, he has not moved Catholicism’s core beliefs in regard gender roles, extra-marital sex, birth control and same-sex marriage. While it seems unregulated markets and their distribution of income is a liberty on a macro-level of a similar emancipation from restraint sought on the personal level, the former actually throws everything personal on the layout of a roulette wheel. So both the ancient core beliefs of Catholicism and our present Neoliberal core beliefs have different maneuvers of countering the popular tide.

What history records is a never ending interplay of one set of core beliefs running into another set of core beliefs, each side doing all it can to hide any attachments to the personal. The pretense grounding any core belief is that it is objectively determined, or celestial in origin, or simply “in the nature of things.”To argue for universal applicability, the personal, subjective, idiosyncratic, anecdotal is kept out of sight. The idea that reality was what you willed it to be or what you designed it to be and that any truth posted outside your own interests just did not affect you is represented not in philosophy or history but in psychopathology, or, the not quite formed mentality and psyche of the very young.

Nevertheless, part of our millennial clime is this clash of personal and core beliefs, of the world is my oyster and the world is what some sacred text says it is, either religious or scientific. Foucault’s “structures of domination” are now observed in all narratives that impose themselves upon your own self-designed narrative. The illusion that what you will is in some way accommodated by a world outside yourself is nurtured in what Bifo Berardi calls the infosphere, the universe of transmitters. Here you find a niche that does accommodate your opinions. It is here in cyberspace that the popular tide rushes, not toward any societal ocean of shared views but cascading in tributaries that fracture yet into more tributaries.

That the mental traveler can by a Google search somehow liberate himself or herself from a prison house of already existing knowing is yet another illusion. We choose within the boundaries of the chooser, the infinitude of cyberspace choices offered somehow leading us to think that such infinitude is within us.

We do see, however, sudden viral surges of common reaction, of a joining beyond the boundaries of self. The only way to explain a surge of widely shared notions, a faddish tidal wave, among those who neither respect nor seek shared understanding or have shared core beliefs is to say that powerful magnetizing forces are at work. In other words, in spite of the sovereignty of one’s own views, outside forces bring people together in shared views. And it is here that we see the way a Neoliberal politics manages to bend the anarchy of personal rule within the domain of market rule.

Political authority and the power it wields is the authority that now emerges from a plutocratic order that has been the result of an unregulated market rule. The “personal opinion” crowd is being heavily lobbied by plutocracy to maintain its core market beliefs while also maintaining the illusions of a proper representative, electoral democracy. The popular tide of personal opinion has run alongside the powerful tide of plutocracy. And the latter infiltrates the former in such a way that everyone so recruited to accept market rule is able to hold onto the illusion of personal autonomy.

Division and distraction are the sand bags stacked to defend plutocracy against the popular tide of personal opinion. Rather than directly oppose deviations from market rule directly or finesse opposition as seems to be Pope Francis’s approach in regard to deviations from Catholic core beliefs, the Neoliberal/plutocratic order welcomes the chaos of personal opinion in the same way Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse welcomed Custer’s dividing of his troops at the Little Bighorn in 1876. “Divide and rule the politician cries” were words of Goethe that sum up the Neoliberal strategy here. Entanglement within distractions is another way of defending plutocracy from a turning of the popular tide against it. One way to get those who have been scrunched by Neoliberal corporate politics to vote for the scrunchers is to not only encourage a wandering off into one’s own personal interests but to elevate relatively inconsequential issues, which do not threaten market rule.

We can observe these Neoliberal strategies at work in the current presidential primaries where the popular tide of personal opinion has actually coalesced in the form of an angry solidarity.

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters are reacting to a diminishment of everything for the Many and an expanse of everything for the Few. Hard times stun but a slow and growing experiential awareness and representation of such angers and mobilizes. However, the anger of Trump’s followers has been led down the path of easy distractions, the low road of the primordial visceral. Neoliberals exploit a politics of narcissism by converting societal problems, such as a Grand Canyon of a wealth divide, to the personal realm, specifically personal biases and hatreds.

Neoliberals can demonize and scapegoat ethnic minorities because in the voting calculus more votes will be won than lost with such a strategy. That may change as ethnic minorities rise out of a bottom 40% no voting group to voters with leverage. A poor man who could benefit from increased taxes on the wealthy will vote for the party of wealthy because it will protect his gun ownership. Those out of work can easily be persuaded to see that immigrants have taken their jobs.

Bernie Sanders has taken the path of explanation and understanding, seeking to overcome a politics of narcissism with a politics of shared wealth. What Sanders has been taking on head to head is the populist tide of personal opinion, forcing it into the one channel where plutocracy can be demolished.

Both the media and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, have mocked the single focused, one message campaign of Sanders. The media does so because its entertainment approach to politics cannot abide a repetitive, one message transmission. It needs the theatrics and antics of a Trump in order to attract fifteen second attentiveness.

Hillary plays to the politics of personal identity and liberation by preferring to avoid the issue creating a coalescence of anger — the wealth divide. She has clearly found a distracting issue campaign to offer a greater accommodation to a plutocracy with which she has only minor issues. Returning Sanders’ critique of plutocracy with critiques on his civil rights and gun control credentials assists the Neoliberals in dismissing Sanders and his critique.

However, Sanders’ one message and its unexpected power to draw the angered and thoughtful has forced Hillary off her preferred focus on cultural issues, such as race, guns, abortion, marriage, gender identity, ethnic identity, immigration, all significant to a wide variety of the electorate. They remain, however, both distracting and divisive because the most correct settlement of these issues would not staunch the bleeding of the Many in which a plutocratic order engages.

While Sanders is fighting both the plutocratic order and a popular tide of personal autonomy, both Hillary and Trump are playing into that popular tide but facing the plutocratic order quite differently. Hillary is non-threatening to that order while Trump, ever the wild card, is at play with it. It is this seigniorial erratic disdain for the core beliefs of plutocracy that attracts those who also assert their own seigniorial will against all order outside themselves.

When we turn to the core beliefs of religion and the popular tide of personal opinion, we find different strategies at work.

Religion is the other force bringing the fractured and dispersed into a common net but, unlike the power of plutocracy, which is expanding, religion’s assertion of core beliefs is on the wane in the Christian West, though not on the wane in the Islamic world.

The coalescing affinities of a radical Islamism are not being challenged by any greater affinities in Islam, although the West is hoping that such will occur. Christianity, however, is being pushed by a rising millennial preference for personal determination into clashes that are marking it as out of date, out of touch, old school analog, and so as irrelevant as everything now being discarded in our cybertech world is. Islam’s authority is not diminished by the West’s view of women’s headscarves or the Muslim failure to get behind LGBT rights. There is no Islamic “popular tide” of personal will superior to the will of Allah.

It seems clear that Islamic core beliefs have not been perforated by a zeitgeist of personal will and autonomy that has filled the post-truth world of the West. Christianity’s core beliefs then find themselves in the kind of war Islam is not fighting.

Pope Francis’s Joy of Love recognizes a need to create a rapprochement with a millennial world with very little appetite for any kind of authority beyond the authority of personal choice. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church’s long survival has much to do with its persisting core belief and its refusal to adapt those to the winds of societal and cultural change. Their center will hold even though the idea of a center has withdrawn into a personal space where final authority rests there and not on any outside authority.

Americans cohabit outside of marriage, abort and divorce at will, expand marriage beyond a man and a woman, see LGBT rights as the new civil rights. The mood is not “Do What the Church Commands You to Do” but rather a slogan from Rabelais, “Do What Thou Wilt.”

The Pope’s hope for a kind of détente relationship therefore is a dilemma for the analog nurtured but for the digital nurtured a “whatever” matter. Pope Francis by the sheer force of a growing celebrity personality hopes to finesse a tolerance for the ancient institution and its analog ways, surviving, as it has countless times in the past, the predilections of the present. What he refrains from bringing into play in his upholding core beliefs against the popular tide is all the fear that Dante’s Inferno, for instance, instilled in the mind of medieval Catholic.

The Pope does not play to the dark side of our natures and, in this, he stands far above the man who seems set to become the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States.