Time for the Brits to Ditch the United Kingdom and Its Monarchy?

Kenneth Surin

The announcement last week that the UK taxpayer is going to have to fork out for an extensive remodelling of Buckingham Palace, whose occupant is one of the richest people in the world, was met with more hostility than one would expect from a country that has been immersed fully in the royal psychodrama, and mesmerized by its attendant fantasies, for centuries.

The renovation of the palace, projected to cost £370/$450 million, comes at a time when, thanks to the policies of a callous Conservative government, levels of poverty and homelessness are approaching heights not seen since the 1930s.  In the face of such misery and destitution, the Treasury announced that funding of the royal family is to increase by 10% to meet the cost of repairs to the palace.

The opposition Labour party, led by an avowed anti-royalist, immediately fudged the issue by saying it would not oppose the use of the public purse to fund the renovation, since Buckingham Palace is “a national monument”.  Which only begs the question why someone is entitled by an accident of birth to have a national monument (or two or three or more), with ample subventions from the taxpayer, as their place to call “home”.

The Brexit vote has generated a constitutional conundrum.  London voted Remain, the north of England was for Leave, Scotland voted Remain, Wales was for Leave, the North of Ireland voted Remain.   A jumble of motives underlay this variability of outcomes.

London’s prominent globalized service sector (which is hugely reliant on migrant labour) serves the interests of workers and consumers rather than citizens.  It conduces to an inclusivity and cosmopolitanism of a certain sort, evinced by the large Remain vote, but catering to the cosmopolitan dispositions of an international bourgeoisie puts London at odds with most of the rest of England, and, moreover, does little to advance democracy and greater equality in the UK.

Scotland is deeply hostile to the UK’s reigning neoliberal dispensation and tired of playing a bit-part in an English-dominated Westminster system.  Scots have fashioned, piecemeal, their version of a modern constitutionalism capable of expressing their national identity.  Given that the EU is a congeries of national identities, continued EU membership is seen by many Scots as the best way for their country to entrench these initiatives.

The key to the political situation in Northern Ireland is the agreement between two sovereign states (Eire and the UK) designed to overcome civil conflict.  This two-state agreement is premised on power-sharing between the two communities—unionist and nationalist—while upholding the principles of equality, toleration, and acceptance of difference.  The Northern Irish vote to remain in the EU was motivated in large part by the perception that an EU framework, as opposed to a Westminster dominated by England and decoupled from the EU, is more likely to safeguard the cross-border cooperation vital for continued peace in the north of Ireland.

The north of England and Wales have suffered more from postindustrial blight than other parts of the UK, and their Leave vote has affinities with the vote for Trump in similarly blighted American regions.  That is, this was a “backlash” vote born of anguished desperation, and an expression of the collapse of the Hobbesian compact– subjects obey in return for protection from the sovereign– that has prevailed up to now.   People living in these devastated regions have come to realize that governments since Reagan and Thatcher care more about corporations and banks than supposedly ordinary citizens.

The referendum on the EU, then, was in no way a conclusively collective expression of the “will of the people”.  What it expressed more than anything else, and with a jumble of underlying motivations and desires, was the uneasy but growing realization on the part of the electorate that the UK’s ruling elite has since the 1970s been less concerned with the interests of “the people” and much more invested in its own self-servingly avaricious ends.  Hence the weakening of the hitherto dominant Hobbesian compact.

The implementation of Brexit has been chaotic.  Theresa May, who voted Remain but held her finger up to the prevailing wind and caved-in to her party’s Eurosceptic wing by opting for a hard Brexit, contradicts herself on the implementation from one day to the next, and members of her cabinet contradict her Brexit positions on an hourly basis.  It is impossible to tell how this will pan out, but whatever happens “Ukania” could be on its last legs.  (“Ukania” being Tom Nairn’s term, who in turn used Robert Musil’s “Kakania”, a fictional central European nation in deep dysfunction, as his model.)

The Scots, and to a lesser extent the northern Irish, are likely to make their own accommodations with the EU regardless of what transpires in Westminster.  The Scots are going to want a second independence referendum, and with EU membership on the line, the vote of the first referendum, which was against independence, is likely to be overturned.

The northern Irish may do something deemed wildly improbable even a few years ago, and see that they may have more in common with the country south of the border, which is solidly ensconced in the EU, as opposed to belonging to an increasingly alien UK without Scotland and hamstrung by a pervasive Little Englanderism, with its customary loathing of all things Irish.

All the above is conjecture at this point, but if any of it comes about, the monarchy will almost certainly be jeopardized, or at least profoundly transformed.

The nonagenarian queen is generally respected, at least for her perceived decorousness, but the erratic Prince Charles is not (the social trauma over Diana still disquiets the British soul).

Australian friends assure me that once the queen has had her state funeral, Australia is almost certain to declare itself a republic– after all, how many countries have a foreign monarch as their head of state?

With Scotland gone as well, it will be more difficult for Brits to sustain the psychodrama underpinning the principle of monarchy.  The disintegration of the politically backward Ukania and the decaying remnants of Empire (marked decisively by Australia’s soon-to-happen dumping of the English monarch) will make it easier, in principle, for Brits to remove the collective blindfold wrapped round their heads.

The foreignness of its monarchy has always been difficult to square with the ethno-nationalist and nativist impulses driving the Little Englanderism that was one of the main propellants behind the Brexit vote. It has always been puzzling to some of us how Brits can be oblivious to the history of their monarchy, which in the last millennium has seen three foreign houses constitute its royal dynasties.

First there was William I, the conquerer from Normandy, in 1066.  When the Tudor blood-line could no longer be maintained due to a conflict over a rivalrous Protestant or Catholic succession, William III and his wife Mary, from the House of Orange in the Netherlands, were invited by the aristocracy to take over in 1689.  When the blood-line of the House of Orange came to a halt, the House of Hanover, from the minor German principality of that name, was invited to take over in 1714.

Moreover, the queen’s great-great-great grandfather was the Belgian Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria.  Prince Phillip, aka Phil the Greek, is the father of the next in line to the throne, Prince Charles.

And yet there are royalist Brits who typically undergo a sharp blood-pressure spike when they hear the accents of a Polish plumber or Romanian hotel maid.

Will Brits see that submission to the monarchy is integral to Ukania’s political backwardness, and that overcoming the latter will require the abandonment of its royalist psychodrama?

Ukania’s political backwardness (its lack of a proper constitution, the retaining of a wholly unelected second chamber, the absence of proportional representation in elections, a hideously corrupt honours system abused by all the mainstream political parties, the deliberate production and maintenance of its Celtic periphery), of which the royalist psychodrama is simultaneously a prime cause and manifestation, ensures that the monarch’s subjects are incapable of seeing their true relation to the country’s social surplus.

Billionaire tax-dodgers who run virtual Ponzi schemes and raid pension funds are overlooked by a rigged legal system, while the right-wing tabloids run melodramatic features on those who chisel the benefits system for gains that are minuscule in comparison to what’s snagged by the pension-fund raiders and tax-dodgers (the recent prime minister David Cameron and his finance minister George Osborne amongst the latter).

Eradicating this royalist psychodrama will therefore be an important first step in a radical reshaping of institutions, enabling in this way a less distorted view of the UK’s unfair and unbalanced division of the social surplus, and hopefully making possible its truly equitable division as a potential next step.

For another thing, it would save a lot of taxpayer-money spent, now and in the future, on the refurbishment of those presumed “national monuments”!

The Reality Of Fake News

Binoy Kampmark

Fake news as reality; the inability to navigate the waters in which it swims; a weakness in succumbing to material best treated with a huge pinch of salt. That, we are told, is the new condition of the global information environment.

Laura Sydell of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered furnished readers with one such example: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” Shared over half a million times, it ran on a site “that had had the look and feel of a local newspaper” (not that you can feel the website Denverguardian.com).

There was not much to the site. It was the only story running, spawned on WordPress. Eventually, a triumphant Sydell, with the assistance of a head engineer at MasterMcNeil Inc., John Jansen, based in Berkeley, identified the individual in question behind the story.  Justin Coler of Disinformedia, “got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.”

This ushered in a life of information fakery, an attempt to “publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out that they were fiction.”

A dangerous dance is thereby initiated, one that assumes a false balance. The “meat,” as Coler calls it, is consumed more enthusiastically by some than others. Naturally, his target audience was always going to be the more indignant and loudly cheering one.  Conjuring up the fiction to then condemn it only goes so far.  The beast eventually develops legs, scurrying away from the truth.

This was very much the case in the reactions to supposed fake news stories.  Some supporters would accept the product wholesale, ignoring the rebuttal.  The Trump followers, claimed Coler, were “just waiting to eat up this red meat they they’re about to get served.”

This led to something of a perversion: to prove a point, Coler, as a registered Democrat, was effectively cultivating a market and exploiting it. He was even making money out of the credulous, even if they were backing another candidate.

Again, the wheel on this score is being re-invented.  The jump to conclusions that fake news sites are somehow new is only matched by the ignorance about what came before – the carefully doctored text to defame a minority, the false narrative about a race, idea or culture (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion come to mind), and the airbrushing of history.

Traditionally, the misinformation business was reserved for the higher end of the news production cycle: a William Randolph Hearst, a Rupert Murdoch, or a director of propaganda operations in a government (totalitarian or otherwise) ever enthusiastic about spinning the story.  The difference now is that the arm of dissimulation has been extended – to the ordinary citizen who has a huge array of sharing functions and social media platforms to spread a word.

Information in this era, being treated as some magic gold dust, is being packaged and fed to the public via various mediums.  The only thing interesting about this aspect is the democratisation of production and dissemination.  We are all potential directors of the fake news industry.

In that sense, fake news has seen a seamless incorporation into the commons – the dissemination of fictions, suppositions and fantasies, made available like domestic crockery to the everyday citizen.  The effects of mass democracy can be, in parts, hideous.

Technology, seen in conventional utopian circles as emancipative, has become the handmaiden for acts, conscious or otherwise, of orchestrated mendacity.  Rather than freeing the mind and adding a corrective to standard media accounts, it can supplant them, becoming their own form of tyranny.  Cheap, available, easy to use, the creation of a myth, spun with rapid ease via the blogosphere that mimics the newspaper, spreads like a violent brushfire through social media, burning down rival narratives with inexorable force.

Before you know it, clumsy Hillary Clinton is sharing the same fate with dotty Kim Kardashian, locking horns on fictional terrain about who died and which one did not, and what crime was committed or, as it often can be, not.  Celebrity vacuity and political lies occupy the same terrain, and the muddle assumes total form via social media.

The digital giants of information, such as Google, claim that this phenomenon can be arrested by limiting advertising tools to websites in the service of fake news.

“Moving forward,” said Google in a statement to Reuters, “we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property.”

This limited appraisal assumes that people engage in the fake news business do so purely for purely business motivations.  Only the money matters; but what, of ideological motivation and basic malice?

Perhaps it is far more fitting that we accept one logical consequence of this information revolution: that we are here on this planet to also misinform and spread the fleeting lie, which is always easier than the lumbering truth. The danger here is the speed that lie rushes into the digital sphere, and eventually, print: rapid, it takes hold of the narrative, and eventually supplants the truth.

Demonetisation And Terrorism

Jayashubha

An argument which has been put forward in the recent ‘Demonetisation’ issue is its relationship with Terrorism. It has been pointed out that ‘funds’ either from outside or otherwise find their way into the terrorist groups. Fake currency or notes in denominations of Rs. 500 and 1,000 sustain and fund the terrorist activities. Hence the belief expressed is that Demonetisation will hit the backbone of terrorism.

Though it has not defined terrorism, it can be assumed that it refers to Kashmiri militancy, Maoist insurgency in tribal belts and ethnic unrest in North-east apart from rise of Islamic radical groups.  Establishing a relationship between Demonetisation and Terrorism is too simplistic an argument by the Government. It tends to deny the root causes for emergence of militant activities and unrest among certain sections.

On Kashmir issue, such a relationship tends to deny the political nature of the Kashmiri militancy. It tends to ignore the fact that the Kashmiri militancy continues because of indigenous factors but not because of external factors. It continues due to unrest among Kashmiri with the larger Indian approach of handling Kashmir issue. News that is being circulated in Social media is that incidents of stone pelting have stopped since the announcement of Demonetisation. It assumes that stone pelters involved in such acts after accepting cash worth Rs. 500 funded from Pakistan. However, as reported by Safwat Jargar, the incidents of stone pelting only saw a natural decline starting from 820 in July to 179 in October. This further declined to about 49 incidents till 14h November (15 between 9th and 14th November). As stated by him that such a claim is ‘laughable, stupid and hollow’ for Kashmiri.

On Maoist insurgency, the linkage tends to be ignorant of the fact that it is not the cash in denominations of Rs. 500/1000 but the cashlesness and impoverishment of the poor which sustains the movement. Conditions of mass poverty and inequity create conditions for sustenance of the movement. In the simplistic relationship that is getting established in the name of demonetisation, issues of social and economic inequity, injustice to the tribal groups in the name of industrialisation and takeover of forest lands, large scale displacement of the tribal groups, human rights violations are being denied.

On ethnic unrest in North-east, establishing relationship between Demonetisation and Militancy tends to simplify the complex nature of issues in North-east. The issues in North-east is largely due to a) failure of Indian state to accommodate the ethnic / nationalist aspirations within the framework of Índian Union’; b) continuation of a discriminatory attitude towards North-east; c) failure in creating a fair system which create conditions among ethnic groups not to compete but to share the limited natural resources; d) failure in creating a system for ethnic minorities to feel safer in their geographies with provisions of protecting their cultural identity. These factors seem to be ignored.

The signs of Islamic radicalism may be a worrying sign. However, it cannot be denied that majoritarian extremism in the name of Hindutva may only create more conditions for rise of Islamic radicalism. Moreover, the issue that needs to be addressed is the large scale alienation of Minorities. Protecting and strengthening the secular fabric rather than moving away from it will create this sense of security.

Overall the demonetisation and terrorism argument put forward by the Government is completely unconvincing. Politically, it is reduced to a role played by an external hand. Economically, it is reduced to the contribution of fake currency in sustaining the movement. Socially, it tends to deny the deprivation and social alienation among various sections. Culturally, it tends to ignore the need for religious and ethnic minorities to feel safer.  A simplistic relationship between demonetisation and terrorism only shows the narrow solutions to complex issues.

India’s Agrarian Crisis

Moin Qazi

More than a billion people in the world are employed in agriculture, and in India, one out of four people are farmers or agricultural workers. Farm output contributes $325 billion. ( about 15 per cent) to India’s $2-trillion economy. Small farmers—who constitute 85 percent of farmers globally—make up one of the largest constituencies among the world’s poor .Small and marginal farmers constitute 80 per cent of total farm households, 50 per cent of rural households and 36 per cent of total households in India.

These farmers and their families are among the victims of India’s longstanding agrarian crisis. Economic reforms and the opening of Indian agriculture to the global market over the past two decades have made small farmers vulnerable to unusual changes and fluctuations. The small farmers have now to compete with the larger ones who are well endowed with capital, irrigation and supplementary businesses to buffer them against any adverse shocks. As fallout the farmers are facing what has been called a “scissors crisis”, which is driven by the rising cost of inputs without a commensurate increase in output price. A crop failure, an unexpected health expense or the marriage of a daughter are perilous to the livelihood of these farmers. An adverse weather change, for example, can lead to a drastic decline in output, and the farmer may not be able to recoup input costs, leave alone the ability to repay loans. Sometimes farmers have to plant several batches of seeds because they may go waste by delayed rains or even excess rains. The problem has dragged down yields and rural consumption nationwide — a heavy economic drag on a nation where two-thirds of people live in the countryside.

Small and marginal farmers also do not have access to institutional credit. Most of them depend on village traders, who are also moneylenders, giving them crop loans and pre-harvest consumption loans. The superior bargaining power of village traders and the middlemen means that the prices received by farmers are low. On account of the small size of the farms, they can rarely apply technological solutions that work best on the large scale. Since the extension workers of the government are not properly trained small farmers do not have access to knowledge of best practices .It involves crop rotation techniques by which crops are rotated such that no single family (botanical family) has a predominance in the rotation; this ensures that pests do not build up, since pests are family specific also. Higher farm labour and input prices and depleting ground water resources add to their woes.

The current crisis in Indian agriculture is a consequence of many factors – low rise in farm productivity, non remunerative prices for cultivators, price fluctuations. erratic weather conditions affecting harvests, small landholdings, overdependence on subsidies for power and fertilizer, unfavourable trade policies, , constrained markets for their products, restricted access to capital and farm inputs such as fertilizers or seeds ,insecure land ownership limiting farmers’ propensity to invest ,poor food storage facilities resulting in high levels of wastage.. Fragmentation of land holdings and a fall in public investments in rural areas, especially in irrigation facilities have further compounded his woes.

We have opened Indian farmers to global competition and given them access to expensive and promising biotechnology, but not necessarily provided a mechanism that can equip him with higher prices, bank loans, irrigation or insurance against pests and rain. Indeed, one or two crop failures, an unexpected health expense or the marriage of a daughter have become perilous particularly when farming is both risky and unprotected by ay official safety window. which are resistant to bollworm infestation, the cotton farmer’s prime enemy. It says the seeds can reduce the use of pesticides by 25 percent .Bt cotton was touted as an answer to bollworm infestation, the cotton farmer’s prime enemy. But genetic modification has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.

Once known as white gold because it was such a profitable crop, cotton is no longer a money-making venture in India. The growing sophistication of agricultural methods has made cotton farming more and more expensive over the decades, and the Indian government has gradually moved away from subsidizing farmers’ production. Cotton is more vulnerable to pests than wheat or rice, and farmers are forced to invest heavily in pesticides and fertilizer.

The promotion of Bt cotton since 2006 has increased the capital cost incurred on cotton production exponentially. Though the yield from planting Bt cotton was high initially, it has been declining continuously for the last four to five years It has gone down from up to 300 kg of cotton from less than half a hectare of land to 100 kg.

There is greater value for farmers in forming groups for mutual self help where those growing the same crops come together in organized groups to receive joint training, buy inputs in bulk and start to sell as a single body .Smallholder farmer producer groups are a key component of creating true scale because of the confidence, support and buyer/seller power they provide. This also enables a greater scale of transformation in terms of individuals and communities
The Indian farm community is at a crossroads. .Eccentric weather patterns and a dearth of government aid have seen the agrarian crisis swell since the 1990s, forcing farmers to search for other modes of income. While the rural areas are being emptied, moving the population into the urban areas is leading to the collapse of the cities. It is expected that by 2035, roughly 50 percent of India’s population will be urban based. The population shift from rural areas along with prime farmland being diverted for non-agriculture purposes will create a food deficit thereby leading to an unforeseen crisis on the food security front While farmers, particularly those with small parcels of land ,continue to work out strategies to keep their age old bond with their land alive the new generation finds farming unsustainable for their new living style .This is the key reason of their influx to cities despite the hard truth that the hopes for a new utopia in their new word is just a mirage

We need to arrest this influx and inject the rural economy with new skill development programmes to generate local employment .That is the right way of saving both the cities and villages –in a way the civilization itself.

Australia: Mounting evidence of black lung cover-up

Oscar Grenfell 

Over the past months, information has emerged indicating the extent of the pneumoconiosis health crisis among coal miners in Queensland, Australia, and a decades-long cover-up by successive governments, the major mining companies and the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).

Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung, is caused by the build-up of dust particles in the lung. There is no cure for the condition. In its advanced stages, it can lead to scleroderma, lung problems, chronic bronchitis and heart failure. The disease results in an excruciatingly painful and prolonged death.

This month, BHP Billiton, the transnational mining company, confirmed to a Queensland state parliamentary committee that three of its current miners and two former employees are affected by the disease.

The official acknowledgement follows confirmation in October that a former miner who worked at the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance Goonyella Riverside mine had been diagnosed with black lung. He had only ever worked in open-cut mines.

The case exposed the claims by the mining companies and government regulators that only a relatively small number of miners who worked on below-ground sites were potentially affected. Forty of the 53 coal mines in Queensland are open-cut.

Paul Head, the diagnosed miner, said he was “shocked.” He told the Daily Mercury: “I just thought it was underground, from what I’d heard about it, that’s what everyone thought.”

Head noted the ubiquity of coal dust, stating: “Everything you touch, you get black stuff on you... Even walking from the car into the mine, all you got to do is look at the cars in the car park and it tells you how much dust is around.”

Testimony to a current Queensland parliamentary inquiry into the disease corroborated Head’s comments. This week, Nathan Leotta, a former miner told the inquiry: “In 2009 and 2008, they were telling us at inductions to go underground … and that it was eradicated because they haven’t had any cases in 15, 20 years.”

Speaking on the evasive safety practices of the major mining companies, Leotta said: “Let’s say that the inspectors were coming on a Wednesday. It’s our last shift on a Tuesday night, we’d down tools for four hours and hose down.”

Last year, several suspected cases were reported in Queensland. They contradicted claims by the mining industry, government regulators and the unions that the disease was eradicated in the 1980s. The official number of confirmed cases has since risen to 16. The CFMEU claims it knows of at least 30 miners hit by the condition who will not speak out for fear of losing their job.

It rapidly emerged that incidents of the disease had been suppressed by government authorities. In 1984, just before the declarations that “black lung” was eradicated, a Queensland health department study found 75 suspected cases of the disease among former and then-employed miners. The information was apparently never acted upon.

Testimony to a federal inquiry earlier this year revealed that eight of ten coal mines in Queensland operated above the 3 milligram limit for daily exposure to coal dust, between 2012 and 2015, with one registering 6.5 milligrams. No company was ever prosecuted, and the mandated level was not enforced by consecutive Labor and Liberal-National governments or the trade unions, which play a central role in overseeing health and safety practices.

In July, a Monash University study into the disease found “a major system failure at virtually all levels” of the Queensland Coal Mine Workers Health Scheme. It said the system was designed to find “fitness for work rather than the detection and management of early CMDLD (black lung).” Spirometry tests were generally carried out by unqualified practitioners unable to detect black lung.

The damning report followed earlier revelations that as many as 100,000 chest x-rays of miners conducted under the health scheme had not been examined by any medical personnel.

The CFMEU, mining companies, state Labor government and Liberal National opposition have all scrambled to cover-up their culpability. The union has demagogically denounced the companies for failing to enforce safety standards, while remaining silent on its own knowledge of the breaches, which went on for years.

Queensland CMFEU official Stephen Smythe recently declared: “Black Lung sufferers are victims of a deadly disease inflicted on them by employers who failed to ensure a safe workplace for them and by successive state governments that failed them.” The union called for a compensation fund to be established. But it has collaborated with the major mining companies for decades in enforcing the destruction of jobs, wages and conditions and the erosion of basic safety standards.

Material uncovered by the ABC’s “7:30” program in August revealed four compensation claims for black lung between 2007 and 2012, making clear that successive governments and the unions were aware of the disease.

Last month, at the Queensland parliamentary committee hearing, Paul Goldsbrough, the executive head of the state’s Office of Industrial Relations, admitted that his department confirmed a case of black lung in 2006.

The Liberal-Nationals have sought to capitalise on the obvious complicity of former Labor governments, which were in office from 1998 to 2012, and the CFMEU. Liberal-National opposition leader Tim Nichols denounced “a failure in the detection of black lung by the department, government, unions and health professionals.”

Yet, the conservatives were themselves in office from 1957 to 1989, 1996 to 1998 and 2012 to 2015. Equally hypocritically, some Labor MPs have called for a royal commission and postured as defenders of the victims of the disease.

The plight of coal miners struck by the illness is an indictment of the capitalist profit system and the entire political establishment. The official cover-up of the disease coincided with the mining boom, which was invoked as proof that Australia had escaped the global financial crisis of 2008, and delivered the major mining companies billions of dollars in profits.

Now that the boom has imploded, with thousands of jobs slashed across the sector nationally, the re-emergence of black lung underscores the reality that the super-profits came at the direct expense of the coal miners themselves.

Scientists have called into question the existing safety standards within the industry. Professor Lou Irving, clinical director of the University of Melbourne’s Lung Health Research Centre, stated in September: “There are regulations limiting the amount of dust that coal miners can be exposed to, but they have no basis in science.” He commented: “We simply do not know at what point exposure to dust triggers lung stiffening, or fibrosis and we urgently need to address this so we can catch it before it becomes incurable.”

Irving said black lung rates in Australia may be comparable to those in the United States. Incidences of the disease in West Virginia, Kentucky and other impoverished mining states have soared in recent years. Following the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia in 2010, autopsies showed 71 of the miners who perished had signs of the disease.

In 2008, at the height of the mining boom, some 36,700 workers were employed in the Australian coal industry. In addition to coal dust, underground miners come into contact with high concentrations of diesel fumes. A study last month found that, resulting from the fumes, they face 38 times the accepted occupational risk for lung cancer.

French right’s presidential primary highlights shift far to the right

Alex Lantier & Alice Laurençon

François Fillon and Alain Juppé, who are running Sunday in the second round of the French right's primary for the 2017 presidential elections, held one last debate on Thursday night.

After the surprise victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential elections, the sudden victory of Fillon in the first round underscored that bourgeois politics is currently undergoing a major historic turn, far to the right. Alain Juppé, the former front-runner who tried to hide his program of drastic austerity, war, and police-state measures by pledging to “bring people together,” suffered a humiliating defeat. Currently, Fillon is set to receive 65 percent of the vote in the second round, according to an Odoxa poll.

Given the ruling Socialist Party's (PS) profound unpopularity, Fillon would become the most likely candidate to run against the neo-fascist National Front's (FN) Marine Pen in the presidential run off next year. Fillon bases himself on Juppé's program, but pushes certain policies much further. Above all, he is justifying them with numerous positions echoing those of the far right—hostile to abortion, towards homosexual marriage, or stirring up anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic prejudices.

The campaign points to an intensification of the broad attacks on the working class and an escalation of French participation in various wars led by NATO, as well as the eruption of very sharp class conflicts, after next year's presidential elections. The programs of Fillon and Juppé already face broad popular opposition among 56 and 52 percent of the French people, respectively.

Tuesday, Juppé provoked criticisms from other members of his The Republicans (LR) party when he called Fillon's program “retrograde” and “based on great social brutality.” The two candidates' decision to mute their differences and hold a cordial debate, in order to make a public show of LR party unity, had the effect of underlining the close resemblances between the policies proposed by the two candidates.

Neither one mentioned the state of emergency that has now been in effect for over a year in France, or the danger of war with Russia or other major powers opposing the imperialist wars led by NATO in Syria and across the Middle East. Support for these policies is in fact unanimous among all the candidates of government parties.

The debate concentrated on budget cuts and attacks on social services being prepared against the population, Fillon's reactionary positions on lifestyle issues, as well as on France's foreign policy alignment.

Fillon and Juppé both propose public sector job cuts (500,000 and 200,000, respectively), pushing the retirement age back to 65, cutting taxes on profits from capital, cutting the ISF tax on the wealthy, and deep budget cuts (€100 billion and over €85 billion, respectively).

Fillon denounced a question from journalists on his attitude to fundamental social rights granted after the end of World War II in France. He replied, “This French social model does not exist anymore today. We are not in 1945 anymore, we are in an open world, we must profoundly change this model so it is more fair.”

Fillon also defended his proposals to transfer responsibility for reinbursements of numerous health care treatments from Social Security to private insurance—thus paving the way for the privatization of health care, supposedly to carry out the “debureaucratization” and “revival” of France.

Fillon and Juppé then arrogantly defended the bailout plans for the banks organized by the French right, when it was in power at the time of the 2008 financial crash. While defending this granting of enormous sums to the financial aristocracy, they shamelessly proposed massive job cuts, unprecedented austerity measures, and the destruction of social gains won by the working class over decades of struggle in the 20th century.

Juppé and Fillon also sparred over Fillon's reactionary comments on abortion, which Fillon has stated he does not believe is a “fundamental right,” as well as his declaration that France “does not have multiculturalism as its calling.”

The two candidates reaffirmed their preference for a supposedly independent policy vis-a-vis both the United States and Russia, as well as their support for NATO and the Atlantic alliance. In a gesture that can have no other significance than a declaration of hostility to Germany, the European Union's dominant power, Fillon predicted that thanks to his austerity policies, France could soon become Europe's principal power.

In fact, the reactionary positions of Fillon and Juppé show that the ruling class is preparing for a sharp confrontation with the working class, under conditions of explosive war crises abroad and police-state rule at home in France.

The rightward lurch in official politics evidenced in the election of a demagogic and fascistic billionaire as US president is also coming to France.

A deep economic and geo-strategic crisis of world capitalism is staggering the political elites and resuscitating the most retrograde political tendencies. In France, the primary responsibility lies with the PS of President François Hollande, and the pseudo left parties like the New Anticapitalist Party that called for an Hollande vote in 2012. The PS’ state of emergency, the war drive in Syria, and Hollande's austerity policy have all produced a deep destabilization of class relations and of the political establishment in France.

The PS’ sharp turn to the right and its appeals to the far right, such as its attempt to inscribe the state of emergency and the deprivation of nationality policy in the constitution, has left the French right trapped. As it desperately tries to stay to the right of the PS—while it is in fact in agreement with it on the issues of war, austerity, and attacks on democratic rights—it is taking far-right positions on lifestyle issues that the PS and the pseudo left parties have placed at the center of their activity.

On Europe1 on Wednesday, Fillon attacked the Muslim and Jewish communities: “Muslim extremists are taking the Muslim community hostage,” he said. “We must fight this fundamentalism, we must fight it as we did in the past, I recall, we fought forms of Catholic fundamentalism and also the willingness of the Jews to live in a community which did not respect all the rules of the French Republic.”

France's Grand Rabbi Haïm Korsia telephoned Fillon to recall that the consigning of Jews to ghettos in France was due to French anti-Semitism, not to a freely-taken decision. He “underlined that the Jewish tendency to live apart that could exist in an earlier period was neither due to nor chosen by the citizens of Jewish faith, but the consequence of French society's refusal at the time to accept its fellows,” Korsia's staff reported.

Fascist Thomas Mair convicted of murdering Labour MP Jo Cox

Robert Stevens

On Wednesday, the fascist Thomas Mair was convicted of the June 16 murder of Labour Party MP Jo Cox.

Cox represented the Batley and Spen constituency in West Yorkshire. She was shot three times and stabbed 15 times by Mair in broad daylight on the way to her surgery at the local library in Birstall, near Leeds.

Cox was killed just one week prior to the referendum vote on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.

At the conclusion of an eight-day trial, a jury at the Old Bailey in London found Mair guilty. He was sentenced to a whole life prison term by Justice Wilkie.

At the beginning of the trial Mair refused to enter a plea and the court recorded a “not guilty” plea, as is legally required. The trial was due to last longer but at the conclusion of the prosecution’s case, Mair’s lawyer Simon Russell Flint QC, told the jury that Mair would not be going into the witness box. Mair said nothing during the trial. It was revealed after the trial that Mair refused to answer all questions relating to Cox’s killing.

After the jury returned their verdict, Mair requested to make a statement to the court. This request was refused by Justice Wilkie.

Some troubling questions emerge from the trial. Cox’s killing was a high-profile political assassination—the first murder of a sitting MP since Ian Gow in 1990, who was killed in an Irish Republican Army bombing. Yet, months later, and after the conclusion of the trial, we know little more of the circumstances surrounding her death than we did a few hours after the murder took place.

There appears to have been little effort made to explore Mair’s political connections. When he was apprehended shortly after the killing, he declared to the arresting police officers that he was a “political activist”. Moreover, at an earlier hearing before the trial, when asked to confirm his name, Mair told the court, “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

When they searched his home following his arrest, police found extensive evidence of indirect links to fascist and far-right groups. Mair had purchased books from the US-based neo-Nazi group National Alliance, founded by William Pierce, author of the notorious racist tract The Turner Diaries. These included guides on how to build homemade explosives, guns and a copy of Ich Kampfe, a handbook for members of Hitler’s Nazi Party. He also subscribed to the South African white supremacist S.A. Patriot. A note in a 2006 newsletter of the London-based far-right Springbok Club read, “Thomas Mair, from Batley in Yorkshire was one of the earliest subscribers and supporters of ‘S.A. Patriot.’”

Cox had arrived at the library with her constituency manager Fazila Aswat, and caseworker Sandra Major. According to Aswat, Mair approached Cox from behind, stabbing and then shooting her. He also stabbed Bernard Carter-Kenny before shooting Cox again. Aswat said she could hear Mair shouting, “Britain first, this is for Britain, Britain will always come first.” Another witness, Jack Foster, also says he shouted, “Britain first.”

Britain First is the name of a UK fascist group.

Mair has almost always been portrayed in the media as being a disturbed “loner”—which he may or may not be. He had a history of mental illness and had sought help regarding his mental health state the day before he killed Cox. But given his extensive connections to far-right forces, going back to at least 1991, what investigations have been undertaken to establish whether he did indeed act alone, whether he was acting in concert and, if so, with whom?

It was only revealed after the trial that police are still investigating who supplied Mair with the gun used to kill Cox. During the trial it emerged that Mair used a German-made .22 calibre bolt-action rifle, which had been sawn down to just 12 inches in length so it could be used with one hand. The licensed gun was supposedly stolen, along with ammunition, from a car in Keighley, West Yorkshire in August last year.

No evidence emerged in a search of Mair’s home, or in the trial that he had modified the weapon, which points to the fact that he acquired it in its sawn-off state. Detective Superintendent Nick Wallen, who led the investigation into the killing said, “My suggestion is that Thomas Mair has not been responsible for cutting the weapon down. But how he—an antisocial loner with no previous history, no criminal ring or individuals around him—how he came to be in possession of that gun is very much an active line of inquiry and I would like any assistance I can get.”

Citing police sources, the Daily Mail reported that the gun “was not thought to have fallen into the hands of Thomas Mair, 53, until about two weeks before he struck in Batley, West Yorkshire.” The Telegraph and ITV also report that Mair acquired the gun around two weeks before he killed Cox—months after it was stolen. Yet in its report on the trial the Financial Times commented of the police investigation, once again without citing supportive evidence, “They have found no indication that Mair was part of a criminal or far-right network that could have supplied him with the gun.”

Politically the trial was a cover-up.

Cox was killed at the height of the Brexit referendum campaign during which she was an active and outspoken advocate of a Remain vote. Among the items found in the search of Mair’s home was a ring binder containing a press cutting of an article published on May 26 in a local newspaper calling for a Remain vote in the referendum. Cox wrote, “I believe that the patriotic choice is to vote for Britain to remain inside the EU where we are stronger, safer and better off than we would be on our own.” Near the ring binder were press cuttings about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian fascist who killed 77 members of the youth movement of the Norwegian Labour Party in 2011.

Despite this, there was a decision by the prosecution not to make the Brexit referendum a factor in their case. The Guardian reported Wednesday, “Prosecutors acknowledge privately that the febrile atmosphere in which the EU referendum campaign was waged appears certain to have contributed to Mair’s decision to murder his MP, but this played no part in their case. There was no need to refer to the referendum in order to establish his guilt.”

Not to raise Mair’s political motives in this way is extraordinary. But politically, to do so would cut across efforts by all sides to sanitise their own xenophobic stance. During the referendum, the Leave and Remain Campaigns competed over how best to clamp down on immigration—in or out of the EU. And following the Leave victory, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has committed her government to carrying out Brexit negotiations including a pledge to end the freedom of movement of EU citizens into Britain—a pledge also held up by Labour

Instead, the official narrative is that Cox must be held up as an example of a supposedly “inclusive” patriotism, whose maiden parliamentary speech declaring that “we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us” can be cited by anyone to excuse their own rotten politics. To this end, sentencing Mair, Justice Wilkie said to him, “You affect to be a patriot... In the true meaning of the word she [Cox] was a patriot.”

Anxiety in Australian elite over Trump’s policies

Mike Head

There is nervousness in Australian ruling circles that Donald Trump’s “America first” protectionism will trigger trade wars that could have disastrous consequences for the country’s fragile, debt-laden and commodity export-dependent economy.

In the name of restoring “Americans jobs,” Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of up to 45 percent on China and possibly Japan and South Korea. Between them, these three countries account for 60 percent of exports from Australia—some $158 billion out of $266 billion in 2014.

Any such tariffs could provoke retaliation, leading to all-out trade wars that are likely to crash the global economy, further devastating Australian capitalism, which also relies heavily on inflows of foreign investment and borrowings.

For public consumption, the Turnbull government and the corporate media are playing down the implications of Trump’s threats. They are trying to create illusions that Trump will modify his policies once he takes office.

Deloitte Access Economics spokesman Chris Richardson said Trump could hurt Australia’s economy via trade. But he said people should not panic. “The chances are that policies will change, but what will change will be slower and smaller than you’ve heard in the campaign,” he said.

Other commentators, usually cited in media business columns, were more frank. University of New South Wales economics fellow Tim Harcourt said: “Trump could be the most isolationist, protectionist president since Herbert Hoover in the ‘20s, so it’s actually quite alarming for the world.”

AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said investors are particularly worried about Trump’s protectionist trade policies triggering “a global trade war.” In a report, he wrote: “Australian shares would be particularly vulnerable to this given our high trade exposure.”

Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr said any tension with China would have a knock-on affect. “I think the economic shock to Australia would be big. The damage he [Trump] would do by a trade war with China would be immeasurable.”

One attempt to measure the impact was made by Australian National University economist Professor Warwick McKibbin, a former board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia. In order to try to model the fallout from a 40 percent increase in tariffs between the US and China and other major economies, he based himself on a working paper he had co-written for the World Bank.

McKibbin estimated that Australia would suffer a 5.6 percent reversal in economic growth in the first year alone—more than enough to inflict a recession. “We’d get hit by more than the US because we’re a lot more exposed to trade,” he told the Australian.

He said his forecasts assumed a trade war on all fronts and a more realistic scenario was a trade war on manufacturing, but Australia was also exposed to a Trump administration’s impact on rising interest rates. Australia’s banks depend on borrowing on world financial markets for almost half their funds.

Fairfax Media economics editor Peter Martin said even small cuts in Chinese demand for Australian commodities would send the federal budget—already in deep deficit—“into conniptions” (fits of hysterical excitement or anger). He pointed out that the US is China’s biggest market, taking 18 percent of everything it sells.

If a Trump government imposed tariffs on China, Martin warned, Beijing “would have to retaliate (somehow), raising the prospect of a trade war that would damage both China and the US. War gaming by the respected Peterson Institute says it could push the US into recession by 2019. The last time that happened, during the global financial crisis, Australia avoided recession with help from China. We mightn’t get it a second time.”

Following the 2008 breakdown, the Australian economy did not crash only because the Chinese regime produced massive debt-driven stimulus packages that temporarily drove up demand for Australian-exported coal and iron ore, igniting a mining boom. That made the Australian economy more acutely dependent on China’s growth.

Such is the concern in Australia’s establishment that Philip Lowe, the recently-appointed governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, last month cast aside the central bank’s traditionally cautious language.

Responding to questions from journalists after his first public speech as governor, Lowe described the prospect of a Trump presidency as less than “benign.” He added: “We don’t have a Trump plan. What we do is have a generic response plan to a whole range of shocks.”

Answering another question, Lowe said: “If I go through the list of things that make me worried about the global economy … right at the top of that list is the shift towards protectionism.”

The Australian economy’s vulnerability was underscored this week. Global credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s reiterated its warning, first issued after the Turnbull government’s near-defeat in the July 2 election, that Australia would lose its AAA rating within months unless the government proved it could push spending and revenue measures through both houses of parliament.

Craig Michaels, S&P’s head of sovereign ratings, said the government had to demonstrate it could deliver its pledge to eliminate the annual deficit, currently around $40 billion, by 2020–21. He said this date would be more than a decade since the federal government first went into deficit after the 2008 crisis, and eight years after the previous Labor government first vowed to produce a balanced budget for 2012–13.

Michaels said combined consumer, bank and government debt reached around 250 percent of gross domestic product by mid-2014. “What it means is that Australia’s economic prospects are beholden to the ongoing willingness of foreign investors to roll over that debt and to continue to fund what is a structural current account deficit.”

That was fine “provided foreign investors remain comfortable and confident in the Australian growth story.” A sudden collapse or withdrawal of foreign lending was a “low probability scenario” but “that fiscal story” was “starting to break down a little bit now.”

Yesterday’s Australian Financial Review editorial warned: “The credit rating agencies are running out of patience.” It insisted that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National government had to both inflict austerity measures and “induce” growth, supposedly by cutting the country’s 30 percent company tax rate.

The financial newspaper claimed that this would “encourage companies to invest now.” In reality, company tax rates would only fatten profits, and the dividends paid to the wealthy elite, while the resulting revenue loss would further gut social spending, especially on health, education and welfare.

Statistics on foreign investment released this week highlighted the fragility. They showed a 25 percent fall to $117.9 billion in 2015, down from $156.6 billion in 2014.

There were also more signs of an end to a debt-fuelled residential apartment boom that has partly offset the implosion of the mining sector since 2011. A 3 percent fall in the value of residential construction to $17.6 billion in the September quarter was accompanied by a 10.9 percent slump in non-residential work to $8.3 billion—the biggest quarter-on-quarter fall in 16 years. Engineering construction also slipped, taking total construction down to $46.1 billion, 11 percent less than a year ago.

Incoming Trump administration prepares assault on federal workers

Nick Barrickman

The incoming Trump administration has singled out civilian federal employees for attacks on jobs, employment security and pensions. According to the Washington Post, “President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are drawing up plans to take on the government bureaucracy they have long railed against, by eroding job protections and grinding down benefits that federal workers have received for a generation.”

The federal civil service, which consists of over 2.75 million workers, excluding members of the armed forces, the judiciary and elected officials, has come under relentless attack from the political right for decades. Right-wing propaganda depicts federal workers as overpaid and privileged drones in an attempt to divide the working class and divert anger over declining living standards and growing inequality against a section of the working class itself. The aim is to dismantle whatever remains of job protections and benefits that are based on civil service laws and contracts with federal employee unions. This is despite the best efforts of the unions over many years to help impose job cuts and wage and benefit concessions.

In 2012, House Republicans proposed a 10 percent federal workforce reduction as part of their fiscal budget for that year.

According to the Post, the incoming administration will implement “[h]iring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions.” In addition, the Trump White House will seek “guidance” from the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who in 2011 provoked mass protests at the state capital by shredding public employee rights and imposing sweeping concessions on public workers.

The new administration will also follow the example of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who, as governor of Indiana, tied state worker pay to performance ratings.

According to Jason Chaffetz, Republican congressman from Utah and chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, the plan to slash federal employee pensions will be modeled on his home state, which recently replaced defined benefit pensions with market-based defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. The switch from traditional pensions will initially affect newly hired workers, according to press reports.

The assault on federal workers is based on the ten-point “Contract with the American Voter” released by Donald Trump in late October. The statement declared that within its first 100 days in office, the Trump administration would enact “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health).”

The Post quotes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of Trump’s transition team, as saying that Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist, will lead the attack on federal workers. Until signing on as the head of Trump’s presidential campaign last August, Bannon headed the Breitbart News web site, a platform for the fascistic alt-right that regularly rails against the so-called “privileged class” of government workers in Washington.

Contrary to the myth of a ballooning “big government” promoted by the right wing, the US civil service has undergone numerous cutbacks in its workforce under both Republican and Democratic presidents. As a result, the number of federal employees today is consistent with the number employed in the 1960s, despite a near-doubling of the US population since then.

A likely precedent for Trump’s plan to slash workers’ pay and job protections is the 2014 Veterans’ Choice Act, signed into law by President Obama. Passed during the scandal at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) that year, the law facilitates the firing of VA workers while giving employees less than a week to appeal their dismissal.

Prior to the Veterans’ Choice Act, workers had the option of appealing their dismissal to the Merit Systems Protection Board, established as part of the civil service system to prevent politically motivated firings.

Under a Trump administration, such firings are likely to become the rule. During the presidential campaign, Trump regularly declared that if elected he would shut down government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. At the same time, Trump is pledging a massive increase in military spending and packing his administration-in-waiting with military figures.

The planned assault on federal workers exposes the cynicism behind repeated statements by Democratic Party leaders—from Obama and incoming Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—suggesting that Trump may enact measures to improve the lot of workers and pledging their readiness to collaborate with him.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union, has remained silent on Trump’s agenda. On November 9, the day after the election, AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. released a brief press statement declaring, “We ‎will work with the Trump administration on areas of common ground, as we have with every administration for generations.”

Syrian war threatens to escalate as Turkey accuses Damascus of attacking its troops

Jordan Shilton

Turkey’s Prime Minister and armed forces both accused the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad Thursday of conducting an airstrike on Turkish troops in the vicinity of al-Bab in the country’s north, resulting in three casualties.

The incident threatens to escalate already sharp tensions between Ankara and Damascus into all-out war, posing the very real risk of direct clashes between the major powers.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim warned in comments to Hurriyet that the attack would “not be left unanswered.” Turkish warplanes at the Gaziantep air base were placed on emergency standby.

A direct Turkish attack on Syrian government forces would quickly draw Russia, a key ally of the Assad regime, even more deeply into the conflict and Turkey, as a member of NATO, could call on the alliance for support under Article 5, which obliges alliance members to come to the defense of a NATO state under attack. Such a move would mean war between NATO and Russia.

Turkish troops launched Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria in late August, in alliance with opposition militias organized in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) with the aim of preventing the establishment of a Kurdish enclave on the Turkish border by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighters, which are aligned with the Kurdish Democratic Unity Party (PYD). The Syrian government condemned the intervention as a violation of its territorial sovereignty.

Ankara alleged the attack occurred as its troops sought to push into al-Bab, an Islamic State-held town it is determined to capture before Kurdish forces. Gaining control of al-Bab would enable Turkey to have a major say in the offensive to retake the ISIS capital of Raqqa and represent an important step in blocking attempts by YPG fighters to link two Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria.

The Syrian government also recently indicated that it might be preparing to launch an offensive on al-Bab, raising the prospect of a multi-front battle over the town. Reports said pro-government forces had been seen gathering to the south.

Speaking to Voice of America, an anonymous Western diplomat stated that the alleged Syrian government attack runs the risk of causing a “potentially catastrophic escalation of the war.”

While it is entirely possible that Syrian aircraft did launch the attack, there is strong evidence to suggest that Turkey is seeking to pin the blame on Damascus to legitimize its ongoing incursion. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-aligned organization that can hardly be accused of having a brief for the Assad government, reported that the Turkish casualties were in fact caused by an ISIS suicide bombing on Wednesday. For its part, the Turkish government imposed a gag order on media reporting of the attack. The Syrian government has not commented on the incident and there has been no independent verification of Ankara’s claims.

The US response to the incident was also muted, indicating the ongoing tensions between Washington and Ankara over policy in Syria. Last week, the Pentagon announced it was withdrawing its Special Forces that had been embedded in the Euphrates Shield mission since its launch in August. A Pentagon spokesman told a Turkish newspaper on Monday that the Turkish and FSA offensive on al-Bab was not being conducted as part of the international coalition’s efforts to retake Raqqa.

The United States, which fomented the Syrian war in 2011 with the aim of toppling Assad, bears chief responsibility for the more than 300,000 deaths that have occurred since and the deepening rivalries in the region. While initially endorsing Turkey’s Euphrates Shield mission, it continues to depend heavily on the YPG, which it has armed and supported with up to 500 US Special Forces. Indicating the major combat role assumed by these troops in the push against Raqqa, the first US casualty in the fighting was announced yesterday after a US Special Forces soldier was killed by an improvised explosive device planted by ISIS.

The YPG, which together with a number of smaller militias is organized in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), announced earlier this month the launch of operations to retake Raqqa. But it has been engaged in intensified clashes over the past week with Turkish-backed FSA forces. Turkey has launched a series of airstrikes against YPG fighters trying to reach al-Bab from nearby Manbij. Turkish troops have also taken the lead in the attack on al-Bab, rather than relying on their FSA allies as in previous battles. Turkey views the YPG and PYD as an extension of the banned Kurdish separatist PKK, and has vowed to press on and retake Manbij from the SDF after capturing al-Bab from ISIS.

A report on the Stratfor website, which has close ties to US intelligence, noted earlier this week that Washington was becoming concerned that Turkish clashes with the YPG could “undermine the Raqqa effort altogether.” It went on to raise the prospect of clashes breaking out between the Turkish-backed FSA and Syrian government troops, which are backed by Iranian forces and Russia, if Turkey’s advance into Aleppo province proceeds.

As the World Socialist Web Site previously noted, it is clear that the US is seeking to create new “facts on the ground” by escalating the conflict prior to the assumption of power by President-elect Donald Trump, who is yet to make his intentions clear in Syria but has indicated the possibility of improving ties with Russia. Earlier this week, it emerged that portable antiaircraft missiles, so-called manpads, had been supplied to the US-backed Ansar al-Islam Front, an extremist Islamist militia with ties to Syria’s al-Qaida affiliate.

These developments underscore the reckless character of US imperialism’s drive to establish its unchallenged domination over the energy-rich Middle East. Over the course of more than two decades of virtually uninterrupted war, it has brought the region to a point where any number of flashpoints in the Syrian civil war, not to mention in Iraq where sectarian conflicts over control of Mosul are deepening, could trigger a wider war with catastrophic consequences for the population of the region and beyond.

On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner urged Washington’s European allies to block Russian oil tankers from using their ports on their way to Syria to supply fuel for Russian airstrikes. The same day, the European Union unveiled a plan to investigate Russia for an alleged breach of EU sanctions against Syria because of its use of a Cypriot port in October while transporting jet fuel to the Assad regime.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov retaliated angrily Thursday, accusing the US of inciting other states to block Russian counterterrorist operations in Syria. Konashenkov stated that the US had been hindering Russian operations for months “through dragging out any talks, failures to meet obligations to separate the opposition from terrorists and constant promises to some day provide information on the militants. Now the State Department “has openly called on other countries to obstruct our Air Force in fighting international terrorism in Syria.”

In intervening militarily to support the Assad regime, its only Arab ally in the Middle East, Russia is only increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic military clash between the major powers.

Moscow has continued its support for the offensive by the Syrian army against civilian areas of eastern Aleppo to dislodge Jihadi rebels, dominated by the al-Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front. Since recommencing direct attacks on the city on November 15, Syrian and Russian airstrikes, including missile attacks launched from Russian aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, have killed over 140 civilians. Dozens have also been killed and wounded in government-held areas by indiscriminate shelling by the Islamists.

Australian state government imprisons teenagers in adult jail

Eric Ludlow

The state Labor government in Victoria has seized on recent clashes at a juvenile detention facility in Melbourne to imprison children in a maximum-security adult prison. This repressive response to a so-called riot in the juvenile facility is the latest example of the brutality being inflicted on teenage prisoners, following revelations of sickening abuses in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

Up to 40 teenagers, accused of “rioting” on November 12 at the “Youth Justice Centre” in the suburb of Parkville, have been moved to the top-security Barwon Prison. The Parkville facility holds 15–18-year-old males who have been either sentenced to imprisonment or are awaiting trial, denied bail.

There have been repeated protests by teenage prisoners over the past two years, sparking clashes between detainees and staff at the overcrowded and dilapidated Parkville facility, and other Victorian juvenile jails. In the latest incident, according to unsubstantiated media reports, inmates set off fire alarms, barricaded themselves in inaccessible areas, and climbed onto rooftops.

Premier Daniel Andrews said he would make “no apology” for shifting boys to Barwon. He demonised the teenagers, declaring: “Violent, repeat offenders who have been involved in completely unacceptable conduct are going to adult prison.”

The detention of dozens of boys in an adult jail is supposedly a temporary measure, while “fortification works” are undertaken at the Parkville institution. The Andrews government, however, attempted to send seven alleged “ring leaders”—five 16-year-olds and two 17-year-olds—to the adult prison permanently.

The state’s Youth Parole Board blocked that permanent move as a violation of human rights legislation. Nevertheless, Families and Justice Minister Jenny Mikakos said the government was determined to “send a very clear message that this disgraceful behaviour won’t be tolerated.”

Such statements indicate that the Labor government is preparing for further punitive measures against juvenile prisoners, a high proportion of whom have complex trauma, post-traumatic stress, and other psychological issues caused by unemployment, social dislocation, family breakdown, and alcohol and drug addiction.

More broadly, behind the tensions in the juvenile jails is the fact that working-class youth face deteriorating economic and social conditions. According to a recent report, young people in Australia are the first generation since World War II to face lower living standards than their parents.

Working-class youth confront high unemployment and under-employment, insecure part-time and casual work, heavy housing costs, huge debts and soaring tuition fees. Even on understated official figures, unemployment is around 28.7 percent for those 15–19 years old. In some areas, joblessness has reached depression-era levels of over 40 percent.

The only answer of the Labor government, and the ruling class as a whole, is police-state violence. Past pretences of tackling the underlying social problems, or even of providing treatment and rehabilitation programs for detainees, have been largely dispensed with.

The government’s vicious response was backed by the trade unions. Community and Public Sector Union state secretary Karen Batt said the provisional detention of young people in adult prisons was a “strong” and “smart” response.

The entire political and media establishment in Victoria has waged a sustained and reactionary “law and order” campaign around the Parkville unrest. The commentary has tried to bury evidence of the appalling conditions inside the Parkville centre that likely sparked the supposed rioting.

In 2010, an Ombudsman’s report documented serious overcrowding, with the number of detainees in some wings of the facility being nearly twice the number of beds. Electrical hazards were also detailed, with at least two instances of staff members experiencing an electric shock. The report also exposed unhygienic facilities, unguarded potential suicide by hanging points, unsafe grounds and poor maintenance, among many other issues.

State Liberal Party opposition leader Matthew Guy declared that the government was not doing enough to curb a “violent crime wave” sweeping Victoria. In reality, Victorian Crime Statistics Agency data for the year ending June 30, 2016 showed a 4 percent decrease in the number of people aged under 25 convicted of committing a crime.

Lurid claims of a youth crime “tsunami” have been promoted by the media, especially the Murdoch outlets, such as the tabloid Herald Sun. The newspaper has spearheaded a racist campaign to link the unrest to immigrant and refugee youth, especially from Sudan. Without providing any evidence, it declared that leading “rioters” of Sudanese and other African backgrounds in the Parkville facility were connected with the so-called Apex gang.

A hysterical campaign against this alleged gang has been conducted since March, when a group of young people reportedly engaged in some petty thefts and vandalism in central Melbourne during an annual festival. It remains unclear whether the “Apex gang” actually exists.

The dispatch of teenagers to adult jails in Victoria is part of a wider pattern of violence directed against working-class youth across Australia, at the behest of Labor and Liberal-National governments alike. In both the Northern Territory and Queensland, governments have convened official inquiries to seek to whitewash, and quell public outcries over, exposure of abuses such as assaults, imposition of solitary confinement and use of hooded restraints (“spit hoods”) in juvenile jails.

The purpose of the “law and order” campaign is to create the climate for even more repressive laws, targeting the legal and democratic rights of young people and the working class as a whole. The phenomenon is an international one, with governments moving toward authoritarian forms of rule in order to push through corporate austerity agendas.