Australia’s ABCC Bill: A far-reaching assault on workers’ rights

Mike Head

After trying for three years, the Liberal-National Coalition government this week finally secured the passage of the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) Bill, following a complex series of last-minute deals with various Senate “crossbenchers.”

The ABCC legislation is the second of the two industrial relations bills that the government used as a trigger for the July 2 double dissolution election of all members of both houses of parliament.

The central purpose of the ABCC bill is to outlaw and suppress all strikes, stoppages and work bans by workers throughout the construction, transport and offshore oil and gas industries, as well as solidarity action via picket lines involving other workers and supporters.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared the bill “a vital element in our national economic plan.” The peak employer body, the Master Builders Association, claimed its passage was a victory against “bullying” on construction sites. Media commentators spoke of ending “union thuggery” in the building industry.

In reality, the target is not the trade unions, which have secured mutually-beneficial enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) with many major companies to enforce their requirements for ever-higher rates of productivity and profit, but workers in a wide range of construction-related industries.

Formally titled the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013, the ABCC Bill was first introduced by Turnbull’s ousted predecessor Tony Abbott after the 2013 federal election. As far as the corporate elite was concerned, it was supposed to be the first instalment of a stepped-up offensive against workers’ jobs, wages and conditions, starting with building workers.

The bill reinstates and expands the coverage and powers of the ABCC, which was first established by the previous Howard Coalition in 2005, with extraordinary coercive powers and punitive measures, including heavy fines on construction workers for taking “unlawful” industrial action.

The Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, which took office in 2007, retained the ABCC until 2012, and used it to attack workers taking industrial action on major construction projects, including Woodside Petroleum’s liquefied natural gas plants in Western Australia and the West Gate Bridge upgrade in Melbourne. In each case, the trade unions isolated the disputes and sought to prevent any political and industrial movement against the Labor government.

Labor then replaced the ABCC with a Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate, with similar but slightly modified powers. It was intended to work more closely with the unions, particularly the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), which covers most construction-related workers, to curtail resistance by workers.

For the past three years, the Coalition government has employed Labor’s inspectorate to harass, intimidate and prosecute building workers. The agency’s 2015–16 annual report boasts of a 30 percent increase to $1.8 million in penalties imposed on unions and workers, 34 legal proceedings and 17 compulsory interrogations—a 21 percent rise.

With the passage of the ABCC Bill, this punitive assault on construction workers will be ramped up. First, penalties for unlawful industrial action or supposed coercion have tripled to $36,000 for individual workers and $180,000 for trade unions.

What is “unlawful” will remain determined by the Fair Work Act, first introduced by the previous Labor government with the support of the unions. It prohibits all industrial action outside narrow “enterprise bargaining periods”—usually only once in three or four years—policed by the unions.

Second, these penalties have been extended to any other workers, or family members or supporters, who join pickets or blockades seeking to support any struggle to defend construction workers’ conditions.

Third, the agency’s powers have been expanded beyond building sites to also cover workers involved in off-site prefabrication of building parts, the transporting or supplying of goods for building work, and offshore oil and gas platforms. This scope also can be extended by ministerial regulations.

Fourth, the ABCC has a range of new powers, including to prosecute workers and unions even after they have settled or abandoned a dispute with an employer, and to pursue legal costs and uncapped compensation—potentially millions of dollars—for damage allegedly suffered by a company. Employers can also now apply for court injunctions to stop industrial action or picketing.

These provisions all provide greater scope for the use of the ABCC’s police state-style coercive powers. It can compel workers or other witnesses to answer questions, hand over documents, provide information or testify in secret hearings. Anyone who refuses to comply can be jailed for up to six months. These powers overturn fundamental rights, such as to remain silent and not to self-incriminate.

To gain the vote of one “crossbench” senator, the government agreed to retain the current fig leaf of scrutiny, introduced by Labor, of requiring an Administrative Appeals Tribunal member to approve the use of these powers. This deal also reversed the bill’s onus of proof on workers to prove that any industrial action was taken lawfully. However, workers still bear an “evidential burden”—they must produce evidence of their “justification” for taking action.

Finally, the industry code issued by the government under the bill will ban a host of clauses in enterprise agreements, including any that limit casualisation, excessive overtime or retrenchments, thus opening the way for unfettered sackings and replacement of workers by casual or body-hire labour. Companies that agree to such clauses also will be barred from tendering for federal government-funded infrastructure projects

As a result of a split among the employers, this code will not commence for two years. Two major companies, Lendlease and ProBuild, joined the CFMEU in a lobbying push for this delay. Together with an estimated 1,500 other companies, they have signed agreements with the CFMEU since 2014 that contain such clauses, in return for the union suppressing workers’ discontent. Some agreements provide for employer-paid union delegates, whose essential function is to police the deals.

The final horse-trading on the ABCC Bill this week highlighted the promotion of reactionary nationalism and protectionism, under the guise of defending jobs and conditions.

In return for voting for the bill, Senator Nick Xenophon secured an agreement from the government on new procurement rules to require suppliers bidding for government projects worth more than $4 million to use Australian-produced materials and hire local workers.

Above all, these measures are directed against imports of Chinese-made steel, in line with campaigns by the trade unions and the Labor Party to blame Chinese workers—tens of thousands of whom are also losing their jobs—for the corporate destruction of steelworkers’ jobs in Australia. The Labor Party immediately congratulated Xenophon and the government for striking the deal.

Likewise, Labor Senator Doug Cameron, an ex-union leader, successfully moved an amendment to the bill’s industry code, requiring employers to employ Australian residents wherever possible, not overseas workers. This is part of a reactionary campaign by Labor and the unions to bar or expel foreign workers who entered the country on temporary work visas.

UK Independence Party selects new leader as post-Brexit crisis deepens

Julie Hyland 

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) finally elected a new leader this week, after two ballots in as many months.

Paul Nuttall, a former history lecturer and Member of the European Parliament, won 62.6 percent of the vote. Despite having been deputy party leader for six years, he is a virtual unknown as the UKIP brand has been synonymous with former City trader, Nigel Farage.

Parodying US President-elect Donald Trump, Nuttall pledged to “put the great back into Britain” and to turn UKIP into an “electoral force”—largely at the expense of the Labour Party.

In reality, Farage’s departure as party leader after the successful campaign for Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) in the June referendum has left UKIP rudderless. Nuttall’s own victory was largely due to his being the last one standing.

Diane James, MEP for South East England, had been elected as UKIP leader on September 19. Her landslide victory came after she won the backing of Farage and Arron Banks, UKIP’s multimillionaire donor. They backed James as a safe pair of hands after their preferred candidate, Steven Woolfe, was barred from standing in the contest on a technicality.

Woolfe’s barring was indicative of deep tensions and factional rivalry within the organisation. James stood down after just 18 days in the job, on October 5, saying that she could not exert her authority over the party. The following day, Woolfe was hospitalised after a reported altercation with a fellow UKIP MEP, after a party meeting in the European parliament in Strasbourg.

Woolfe collapsed during a vote in the meeting, hours after he had allegedly been involved in a confrontation with Mike Hookem. The altercation came after Woolfe reportedly said he had considered defecting to the Conservative Party, before deciding to run in the UKIP leadership contest. Woolfe subsequently resigned from UKIP, as did James. Both now sit as Independents in the European Parliament.

James’ resignation meant that Farage had to act as interim leader while the second leadership race that ended with Nuttall’s victory took place.

Like many of UKIP’s leading spokesperson, Nuttall hails originally from the Conservative Party. His opposition to Brussels is combined with eulogies to unrestrained capitalism, and calls for a war against “cultural Marxists.” A staunch Catholic, he is anti-abortion and supports a referendum on the return of the death penalty. Nuttall has praised moves to privatise the National Health Service, telling Sky News that it “is a monolithic hangover from days gone by and unfortunately or fortunately shall I say, we are becoming an older population and quite frankly I would like to see more free market introduced into the health service.”

Nuttall, who is from Liverpool, claims that UKIP will champion “working class people.” Douglas Carswell, another Tory defector and UKIP’s only Westminster MP, claimed UKIP would lead an “anti-oligarch insurgency” as “heirs to the Levellers” in the English civil war.

But neither Nuttall nor his party offer any social policies that will alleviate the massive decline in living standards among working people after eight years of austerity, and nothing whatsoever for the youth. Nuttall’s promotion of anti-immigrant and law and order rhetoric is a right-wing populist veneer for the defence of the interests of British capital against the working class.

Carswell claims that the key feature of the 21st century is the degree to which technology has fundamentally transformed “the relationship between the governed and the governing.”

The “coming of broadband and digital communication” has led to the “emergence of a new class of citizen-consumer,” he claims. Just as Netflix and Amazon have made “self-selection a cultural norm,” so public services must be re-ordered accordingly.

Such a policy translates into the final dismantling of universal social provision and handover to the private sector and cannot mobilise significant support. That is why Nuttall made clear that the central plank of UKIP’s campaign over the immediate period would be the demand for Britain’s immediate exit from the EU, combined with anti-Muslim propaganda and the whipping up of “English patriotism.”

Gerard Batten MEP has been appointed UKIP spokesman on Brexit (British Exit from the EU). He attacked Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May as someone who had supported a Remain vote in the referendum and who “cannot be trusted to deliver our withdrawal from the EU.” UKIP was opposed to triggering Article 50, which begins the two-year process of negotiations with the EU over Britain’s terms of exit, he said. Instead, Parliament should repeal the European Communities Act (1972) in order to “restore law-making supremacy to the UK Parliament and put the British Government in the driving seat of negotiations not the EU.”

Behind the demagogy, UKIP is in deep crisis. In addition to divisions within the organisation, party donations have crashed. Between July and September, UKIP raised just £43,000, less than the extreme-right British National Party, which has no parliamentary representation. UKIP claims that this is because many donors concentrated on funding the Leave campaign in the EU referendum. But the party has reportedly lost 14,000 members in the past year and a half, as the Tories have adopted its political agenda wholesale.

In addition, the UKIP-controlled Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe—a group in the European Parliament—has been accused of misspending more than half a million euros (£427,000) of taxpayers’ money by financing Farage’s attempt to win a Westminster seat in the 2015 General Election and the anti-EU referendum campaign. The Alliance has been asked to return €172,655, and will miss out on €248,345 in grants as a result, deepening UKIP’s financial crisis.

Most importantly, Arron Banks has threatened to walk away from UKIP. He was part of the welcoming party, led by Farage, which travelled to New York to congratulate Trump immediately on his becoming president-elect. The insurance tycoon subsequently said he was planning to fund 200 candidates to “drain the swamp” of careerists and corruption in Parliament. He told the Times that the plan was to draw up an “undesirability” rating to target sitting MPs. “It would be highly amusing to tease career politicians with a hot poker,” he said.

UKIP’s crisis is in sharp contrast to Farage’s personal fortunes. Trump’s suggestion that he would make the “ideal” UK ambassador to Washington drew outrage from the government. It was regarded as an unprecedented intrusion into British political life and a barely disguised demand for the sacking of the current ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch.

Farage continues to insist that he would be able to negotiate a better UK-US trade deal under a Trump presidency, with his backers accusing the May government of “arrogance” and mendacity in blocking him for the job.

Last week, Farage was afforded a champagne-fuelled party in his honour at the luxurious Ritz hotel in London. Those attending included Banks and the billionaire Barclay brothers, Sir David and Sir Fredrick, owners of the Ritz and the Telegraph newspaper. Lord Ashcroft—former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and billionaire tax exile—helped bankroll the event, along with property entrepreneur and co-founder of Leave EU, Richard Tice, and Lord Pearson, former Tory turned one-time UKIP leader.

Farage told the gathering that he suspected “the Conservative party is not fit for the legacy of Brexit. I suspect there is going to be a genuine realignment of British politics over the course of the next three or four years. ... There are great battles to be fought and I’m going to go on fighting those battles.”

The former UKIP leader is planning another visit to Washington next month to meet with the “transition team” who are preparing for Trump’s move to the White House in January. The Express reported that he has also lined up 20 speaking events in the US for the next year, “which could see him rake in a fortune.” A friend of Farage was cited by the newspaper, stating, “It is churlish to say he isn’t rich because compared to other people he would consider himself well off, but this is his new life, this is what he is going to do going forward.”

US Navy punishes family that revealed Flint water poisoning

Zac Corrigan

Since the time her four children started losing their hair and breaking out in rashes in late 2014, LeeAnne Walters has played a central role in exposing the systematic poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Michigan. This week, Walters has publicly revealed for the first time that her husband, a 17-year veteran in the US Navy, has endured months of daily humiliation, threats, and punishment at work in an effort to silence her.

“It has been heart wrenching to watch them try to destroy my husband on a daily basis,” LeeAnne told the WSWS. “Never in a million years did I think we’d be fighting the Navy for our livelihoods after fighting for our lives in Flint.”

Citing the Whistleblower Protection Act, Dennis Walters requested permission, on November 22, to apply for a transfer from his workplace at Naval Base Norfolk, in Virginia, where the continuous mistreatment has been meted out.

In April 2014, as part of a complex and far-reaching plan to monetize the assets of both Detroit and Flint, Democratic and Republican party officials and regulatory bodies—at the city, and state and federal levels—conspired to switch Flint’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the notoriously polluted Flint River.

After decades of flaunting regulations by General Motors (GM) and other corporations, the river water is so corrosive that after the switch, it damaged parts produced in GM’s Flint Engine Plant. The untreated corrosive water piped through the entire city’s water infrastructure for another year after GM returned to the Detroit-supplied source of treated water caused toxic amounts of lead to be leeched into the homes of 100,000 Flint residents, resulting in a massive public health crisis that continues to this day.

LeeAnne and Dennis Walters played a pivotal role in revealing to the world the scale and scope of the poisoning by initiating independent testing of the city’s water. Even though the Walters family had to move from Flint to Virginia after Dennis was stationed there in late 2015, LeeAnne continued to travel to her home in Flint each month. She often drives with a team of volunteers to oversee the testing of hundreds of homes in Flint for lead and chlorine levels in residents’ tap water.

She also monitors the efforts of both state and federal officials to bring the water supply into legal compliance. Close to three years after the switch to the Flint River, and 14 months after the order to return to Flint’s original source, the water is still too toxic for drinking, cooking, brushing one’s teeth, and many residents still complain of hair, skin and lung ailments when bathing in it.

LeeAnne testified, with Dennis at her side, at a hearing before Michigan state legislators in March, 2016, presenting a detailed chronology of events in Flint leading to the uncovering of the toxic nature of the water. “That’s when things took a turn for the worse,” LeeAnne recalls. The Navy, she said, “basically put a gag order on Dennis. The Master Chief told him he couldn’t be involved in Flint or talk to the media, because it was ‘too political.’ We have it in writing—they said it had the potential to demean and discredit the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], even though the EPA was funding our testing!”

“Dennis adhered to this,” says LeeAnne, but the Navy wanted to silence her, as well. “They told him that he needed to ‘get me under control,’” she said, explaining that Dennis’ superiors began to demean and humiliate him on a daily basis. “Because I live in Flint for two weeks out of each month, to do the testing, they were saying to him, ‘What kind of mother would leave her family like that? Her role as a military wife is to support you, not to be a crusader.’ They even told him that it wouldn’t be long before I left him for some celebrity or millionaire,” that she would supposedly meet through her work in Flint.

LeeAnne said Dennis endured this while being made to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, in unusual shifts which required him to sleep on his office floor. “They told him that [my own work in] Flint seemed to be a problem, that it was keeping him from focusing on work. They even ordered my husband to do ‘voluntary’ therapy for seven sessions, otherwise they would involuntarily lock him up in a psych ward at a mental hospital for eight days. That would ruin his career,” she said. “They told him they would force him into a ‘hardship discharge,’ which would make him lose his retirement benefits.”

She added, “Eventually, I called the ombudsman, but that only made things worse.” Dennis was repeatedly denied leave, denied opportunities to receive training which could advance his career, and stripped of qualifications that allowed him to perform job duties like teaching classes or being a line coach on the gun range, she said.

In May, Dr. Marc Edwards, the scientist from Virginia Tech who tested the Walters water in Flint, tested the water in the family’s military housing in Virginia. The results showed that its lead level was at 16.6 parts per billion. Like the water in Flint, this was above “action level” set by the EPA. LeeAnne says that when she reported the results to the Navy, instead of addressing the problem, the punitive conditions against Dennis were once again escalated. He was charged with “failure to report” for duty, a serious offense that can result in jail time. “But when he asked for time off to find a lawyer in July, the charge was magically dropped,” LeeAnne said.

These revelations underscore the conspiratorial nature of the Flint water poisoning and its coverup. Involved are not only private financial interests, but the City of Flint, the State of Michigan, the Federal government, and, as has now been revealed, even the US military, which has a long history of using such intimidation—and much worse—against whistleblowers.

There are of course the contemporary cases of Manning, Assange, and Snowden.

It isn’t just military and intelligence whistleblowers that are attacked by government bodies. The 2001–2005 lead-in-water crisis in Washington DC was prolonged for years because high-placed health officials fired several whistleblowers in the department who tried to make the danger public. It was the independent intervention of Edwards that eventually revealed the source of the lead contamination and forced local and federal agencies to finally address the problem.

Regarding the campaign against her family, LeeAnne said: “I want to help people in Flint. That’s my passion. It’s my community. But there’s only so much of me, and in a way [the Navy] has diverted some of my attention from what I’m trying to accomplish in Flint. But as far as getting me to stop, I’m not going to bow down to bullies.

“This is why people don’t whistleblow, because this is what happens. My biggest fear is that others will have to go through what we’ve gone through.”

Moscow in secret talks with Syrian “rebels”

Bill Van Auken

Syrian “rebel” groups backed by the US, Turkey and other Western powers have entered into talks with Russia on brokering an end to the fighting in Aleppo, which was Syria’s largest city and commercial capital before being devastated in the US-orchestrated war for regime change against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The talks in Ankara, first reported by the Financial Times of London, were reportedly brokered by the Turkish government and convened in the context of the increasingly decisive rout of the Islamist militias that have controlled parts of eastern Aleppo for the past four years and threatened to overrun the entire city as recently as last year.

Since last weekend, Syrian government troops, backed by Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and Shia militias from Iraq, have retaken some 40 percent of the territory previously occupied by the Islamists, whose strongest contingent is the group known as the Al Nusra Front, which served as Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate.

Tens of thousands of civilians have poured out of the eastern section of the city, seeking refuge from both intense bombardment by Syrian government warplanes and the terror exercised by Al Nusra and similar jihadist groups. While the Western powers claimed that there were 250,000 civilians trapped in the “rebel”-held area, based on the inflated claims made in relation to other areas retaken from the Islamists, many believe that only a fraction of this number had resided in the eastern zone.

According to the Financial Times, “While the secret talks are not the first time a rebel representative has met with the Russians, those familiar with the talks said it was the first time such a large number of opposition groups were involved.”

The FT article highlighted the implications of the talks in terms of the sidelining of Washington and the increasingly evident debacle confronting the more than five-year-old US operation directed at arming, training and paying militias for the purpose of overthrowing Assad.

“The Russians and Turks are talking without the US now. It [Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara,” one unnamed opposition figure told the British daily.

Another opposition representative, asked why Moscow was attempting to reach a deal with the so-called rebels at this juncture, said that the Russian government was “essentially saying: ‘Screw you Americans.’”

The more likely motivation is the desire of the government of President Vladimir Putin to use ties with the armed opposition as a bargaining chip in its dealings with both Washington and the Assad government itself under conditions in which Russia’s intervention on the side of Damascus, which began 14 months ago, has apparently produced a decisive turning of the tide in the Syrian war.

The talks are indicative of closer relations between Ankara and Moscow, even as conflicting agendas in Syria and the wider region have led to intermittent frictions. Turkey sought a rapprochement with Russia earlier this year to break the tension caused by a November 2015 Turkish ambush and shooting down of a Russian warplane operating against Islamist militias in Syria near the Turkish border. Relations grew closer in the aftermath of the abortive July 15 military coup, which was widely blamed on the US.

Turkey’s own intervention into Syria, Operation Euphrates Shield, has been carried out with the tacit complicity of Russia, which controls much of Syrian airspace, even as the Assad government has denounced the Turkish incursion.

Tensions boiled to the surface after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a statement Tuesday declaring that Turkey had sent its military into Syria “to bring justice.” It added, “We are there to end the rule of the cruel Assad, who has been spreading state terror.”

The statement prompted demands from Moscow for an “explanation.”

“The announcement really came as news to us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “It is a very serious statement and one which differs from previous ones and with our understanding of the situation. We hope that our Turkish partners will provide us with some kind of explanation about this.”

This was followed by a phone conversation Wednesday between Erdogan and Putin. On Thursday, Erdogan offered the “clarification” demanded by Moscow. “The aim of the Euphrates Shield Operation is no country or person but only terror organizations. No one should doubt this issue that we have uttered over and over, and no one should comment on it in another fashion or try to [misrepresent its meaning],” the Turkish president told a meeting of village chiefs assembled at the presidential palace in Ankara.

By “terror organizations,” Erdogan and his government have consistently made clear they mean not only the Islamic State (ISIS), but also the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, which the US has funded, trained and armed, utilizing it as its principal proxy force against ISIS. The Pentagon has declined to provide Turkish troops with air cover because of Ankara’s determination to attack Washington’s Kurdish proxies.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, meanwhile, met in Turkey’s Mediterranean resort city of Alanya Thursday, announcing that both countries are seeking to broker a truce in Aleppo and assure the provision of humanitarian assistance to its battered population.

Russia has proposed opening up four “humanitarian corridors” into eastern Aleppo to permit civilians to escape the besieged zone and allow food and medical aid in. Previous attempts to open up such corridors have broken down, however, as a result of the US-backed Islamist militias shelling them and firing upon civilians attempting to escape.

The US and its allies have denounced the Russian-backed offensive by the Syrian government, highlighting the humanitarian crisis in order to demand an end to the attack on the Al Qaeda-linked militias that form the backbone of the Syrian “rebels.” The increasing hysteria of these denunciations reflects the fact that the fall of eastern Aleppo will deprive these militias of their last urban stronghold and consolidate Syrian government control over all of the country’s major population centers.

European Union Commission plans multi-billion weapons fund

Christoph Vandreier

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as US president, the European powers are pushing ahead rapidly with plans for military rearmament. On Wednesday, the European Union (EU) Commission presented proposals for increased military spending and closer Europe-wide coordination on the research and development of weaponry.

The main change will involve the restructuring of relevant EU mechanisms and funding sources to direct them towards arms production. Following the use of the EU’s institutions to implement attacks on social and democratic rights in recent years, the bureaucratic apparatus is now to be deployed to enforce a deeply unpopular policy of war and the build-up of the military.

The Commission proposed the creation of a European defence fund. The goal of the plan is “that member states jointly purchase, develop and retain the full spectrum of land, air, space travel and naval capabilities,” a paper from the Commission states.

The main areas of focus will be expanding the capacities for surveillance, the development of armed drones, unmanned access to outer space, and cybersecurity. It is precisely in these areas that the European powers remain heavily dependent upon the United States.

The Commission acknowledged, “Taken as a whole, Europe has the second-highest level of military spending. Yet Europe trails behind the US and suffers due to an inefficient use of means, which can be linked to overlapping structures, a lack of interoperability and technological gaps.”

Therefore, major investments are necessary, and defence cooperation needs to be achieved, the EU Commission states. Only in this way can the necessary expertise be obtained and its resources used effectively to secure the “strategic autonomy of the union.”

In practice, the “defence fund” will comprise two parts. The first will be financed by EU funds and support research in weaponry. From the year 2020, €500 million is planned for this annually, which will most likely be raised through cuts to EU civilian programmes. Currently, all EU members spend just €2 billion on arms research. The EU fund would therefore amount to an increase in funding of 25 percent.

The much larger second part would cover the development and purchase of military equipment. Member states will coordinate their purchases through this according to demand. If France, Germany and Italy all intend to buy armoured personnel carriers, for example, they should not order these individually in the future, but coordinate purchases through the defence fund. The Commission estimates a gross total of €5 billion per year. But no limits on the fund have been established.

A central feature of the plan is that the investments undertaken through the defence fund will not be calculated when figuring out each state’s budget deficit. The Commission’s paper states that such investments will be “viewed as ‘one-off measures’ in the spirit of the Stability and Growth Pact and will therefore not burden the efforts towards structural consolidation expected from the member states.”

In practice, this means that EU states which breach the deficit criteria will be punished if they use funds for civilian jobs, hospitals, infrastructure projects or schools, but not when they invest the same loans for tanks, submarines and fighter jets.

In Greece, the EU’s insistence on debt reduction resulted in people dying from treatable diseases, youth unemployment increasing to almost 50 percent and the decimation of wages. By contrast, the floodgates are to be opened for loans to expand the military.

The military build-up is being undertaken in close collaboration with the companies which will profit from it. The defence fund is to be managed by a coordinating committee, which, along with representatives from the member states and the EU, will also include lobbyists from the arms industry.

In addition, the EU Commission will inject large amounts of resources actually intended for civilian and economic projects into the arms industry. For example, the European Investment Bank (EIB) will “make available loans, guarantees and its own capital for the expansion of ongoing activities in the area of goods with a double purpose,” according to the paper. In this way, the regulation prohibiting the funding of arms companies will be evaded.

Other EU funding sources, such as Erasmus+ and the funding of regional clusters of excellence, in which universities also participate, will be directed increasingly towards military research and production.

The Commission noted that its proposals were not about creating a European army, but that the jointly developed and purchased equipment would remain in the possession of the individual member states.

But the proposals correspond with the plan for a “security and defence union” to be discussed at the EU summit on December 15-16. The German government is the main driving force behind calls for a European army and the integration of European foreign policy. Berlin hopes in this way to dominate the EU’s structures and rise to the position of a world power.

On Tuesday, the European minister in the Foreign Office, Michael Roth, underscored this position at the Berlin Security Conference. Especially after Brexit and the election of Trump, Germany needed “a responsible European foreign policy. In foreign and security policy, the EU cannot afford to stand on the sidelines and take no action.”

Roth continued, “The EU must therefore now really assume responsibility for peace and security in the world–-as crisis manager and negotiator, and, yes if necessary, militarily.” This policy of wars and interventions is to be ramped up with the release of the EU Commission paper.

Tensions mount over US presidential election recounts

Patrick Martin

The first major statewide recount of a presidential election since the Florida standoff that determined the outcome of the 2000 election began Thursday in the state of Wisconsin, where Republican Donald Trump won by a narrow margin of 22,177 votes, less than one percent, over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In Michigan, the state where Trump won his narrowest victory on November 8, with an initial margin of 10,704 votes, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed Wednesday with the State Board of Canvassers for a recount. On Thursday, lawyers acting for the Trump campaign filed an objection to block the recount, with a hearing set in Lansing on Friday morning to determine the outcome.

Stein has also filed for a recount in Pennsylvania, where Trump’s margin was more substantial, nearly 70,000 votes, but still well below the 1 percent mark. A full recount in Pennsylvania remains unlikely, since the procedure is prohibitively complex, requiring three voters in each of the thousands of precincts to seek a recount in that precinct. Stein has gone to court seeking a full statewide count.

The recounts are being conducted—or debated—under conditions where Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Trump has passed the 2.5 million mark, and her percentage lead in the popular vote is approaching 2 percent, larger than those won by 10 of the country’s 44 presidents.

Clinton’s popular-vote lead is five times that of Al Gore over George W. Bush in 2000, when the Republican became the first candidate in 112 years to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, thanks to the political intervention of the pro-Republican majority in the Supreme Court.

The historical precedent of the 2000 election was clearly on the minds of officials as they began the recount in the Wisconsin state capital, Madison. State elections administrator Mike Haas declared, “This is certainly not Bush v. Gore,” referring to the infamous Supreme Court decision that halted the Florida recount and awarded the White House to the Republican.

Bush lost the popular vote to Gore by a margin of 540,000 but edged him narrowly in the Electoral College, 271 to 267. Trump has a wider margin than Bush in the Electoral College, leading Clinton by 306 to 232, because of his narrow victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the three states being recounted, with a combined 46 electoral votes. The initial results in all three states would have to be reversed to change the outcome in the Electoral College.

The three recounts were initiated by Stein after she was approached by a group of academics specializing in election cybersecurity. Stein has denied that she initiated the recounts in an effort to shift the result of the election and install Clinton in the White House, claiming that she is merely seeking to verify the results of the election against any possibility of tampering by cyberattack from Russian-based hackers.

But in taking up the claims by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party of a massive effort by Moscow to disrupt the 2016 election, Stein has solidarized herself politically with an effort closely akin to McCarthyite witch-hunting. No evidence of Russian government intervention in the US elections has been presented, either by the US government or the corporate media outlets, most notably the New York Times and Washington Post, which have promoted the “Russian hacking” story so assiduously.

Despite the dubious political motivations of those who initiated the recount, there is no doubt that the widespread response to it reflects both popular hostility to Trump and anger over the prospect that he will become president despite such a massive loss in the popular vote.

When Stein made an online appeal for money to pay for the legal and processing costs, more than $7 million was raised in a few days, almost entirely from small donors. This is twice the amount Stein raised for her own presidential campaign, which the Greens largely downplayed once it became clear that the contest between the two main capitalist candidates was tightening.

The recounts sparked a typically “big lie” response from Trump himself, who claimed in a tweet that he won the Electoral College in a “landslide” and would have won the popular vote in a similar fashion but for “millions” of illegal votes cast for Clinton. He also claimed that there was ballot-rigging for Clinton in New Hampshire and Virginia, which she won narrowly, and in California, where her margin was in the millions.

The Trump campaign has been equally hostile in its legal tactics, intervening in each state to oppose a recount, restrict its scope, and, if possible, prevent hand recounting of individual ballots in favor of machine recounts.

In Wisconsin, press reports indicate that most of its 72 counties will recount ballots manually, with a goal of completing the process by the deadline of 8 pm on December 12. Milwaukee County, the state’s largest, is one of a handful that will not recount by hand, but simply feed the ballots through the same machines that counted them initially. Stein went to court seeking to compel a hand recount in every county, but lost the case.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign argued that Stein was not entitled to a recount because she finished in fourth-place and therefore could not be “aggrieved” by any alleged fraud, as well as claiming that the recount could not be completed in time to ensure the state’s electoral votes are properly cast when the Electoral College meets December 19. “There is no reason to rewrite Michigan election law to accommodate the conspiracy-minded requests of an acknowledged loser,” the Trump petition argues.

Stein’s lawyers in Michigan pointed to the large number of ballots where no presidential vote at all was recorded—at least 60,000, far more than the 10,000-vote margin separating Trump and Clinton. Some optical scanners may fail to read faint pencil marks, they said.

The Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign have taken a largely hands-off approach to the recounts, sending legal observers to participate in hearings, but not giving any material or political support. Clinton’s legal counsel, Marc Elias, said that the recount effort was within Stein’s legal rights, but would not change the outcome of the election.

The Obama administration has been openly hostile, with an unnamed “senior official” telling the press last week, “We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people.” This remarkable statement echoes the language used by Trump and his spokesmen, although the “will of the people,” at least as expressed in the popular vote, went clearly against Trump.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest was pressed on the subject at a briefing November 28, when he declined several times to go beyond the statement that Obama was fulfilling his “institutional responsibilities” in preparing the hand-over of power to Trump, and that “election administrators at the state and local level in states like Wisconsin and Michigan have a very clear set of rules and responsibilities that they should follow. And the President’s expectation is that’s what they should do.”

Mosul and imperialist “human rights”

James Cogan

Once again, the United Nations Security Council convened in emergency session on Wednesday to denounce Syria and Russia over the plight of civilians in the war-torn city of Aleppo.

An offensive begun last weekend by pro-Syrian government forces, backed by Russia, has recaptured 40 percent of the city’s sectors that were held by various Al Qaeda-linked and other Islamist militias since they launched a civil war against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Thousands of people are fleeing from the US-backed Islamist militias. Syrian government officials have asserted they will retake all of Aleppo by the end of the year.

US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power was among those who addressed the Security Council. Power spoke as the representative of the Obama administration, which actively intrigued with the Islamist militias to initiate the war against Assad. Washington has worked with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf State monarchies, as well as the European powers, to recruit, fund and arm the “rebels.” It has used the Islamists as its proxies in a pro-imperialist regime-change operation. The result has been over 400,000 deaths, the displacement of over 10 million people and the destruction of much of Syria.

Power spoke as Washington contemplates the prospect that large sections of its militia proxies could be destroyed over the coming weeks, signalling the general failure of its efforts to overthrow the Assad regime. She demanded an immediate ceasefire and “compliance with international humanitarian laws.”

In emotive language, Power declared: “I would ask Council members and all citizens of the world to just force yourself to a take a break from your day and watch the images from eastern Aleppo. Parents cradling their children in agony, civilians on foot mowed down literally carrying their suitcases, which then lay beside their lifeless bodies…”

The Russian-backed Syrian government offensive in Aleppo is, without question, brutal and merciless. Professions of concern by US imperialism, however, which has ravaged much of the Middle East over the past 25 years, carry no political or moral weight. Power’s rhetoric and similar statements in the Security Council by US allies, such as France, Britain, Spain and New Zealand, were even more grotesque given the character of the US-directed assault underway on the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Six hundred kilometres to the east of Aleppo, the US and its allies are assisting an Iraqi government offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which, bolstered through Washington’s intrigues in Syria, crossed into Iraq and took control of Mosul in 2014. The US-backed regime in Baghdad claims the city is now fully surrounded by tens of thousands of Iraqi Army troops, Kurdish forces and various Shiite militia members.

A claim, repeated in an Associated Press report, that the US-led forces are “avoiding the use of overwhelming power to protect civilians,” is crass propaganda. The Iraqi military has asserted that the ISIS fighters intend to “fight to the death,” effectively ruling out any prospect of negotiations. Leaflets have been dropped instructing the up to 1.6 million civilians trapped in the city to remain in their homes, while a “coalition” of American, British, French, Australian, Canadian and Jordanian aircraft bomb suspected ISIS positions. A November 24 humanitarian overview by aid organisation REACH reported that families are crowding into the lower floors of housing complexes out of fear of the airstrikes.

Iraqi special forces units, accompanied in most cases by American personnel, are pushing through the eastern suburbs, clearing them block by block. The tactics they employ are simple, crude and, given the instructions to civilians to remain in their homes, murderous. They call in air attacks, artillery or tanks to destroy any building that is suspected of being occupied by ISIS or booby-trapped with explosives. Civilian casualties have been justified in advance by claiming that ISIS is using people as “human shields.”

The Iraqi military boasted this week it has killed 1,000 ISIS fighters, while ISIS has claimed to have killed over 3,700 pro-government and Kurdish troops. No credible figures are being provided by either side on the toll inflicted on civilians, but reports suggest it is high. West Erbil Hospital, located some 80 kilometres away from Mosul, is admitting 150 military and civilian casualties every day. The only wounded civilians who could reach the hospital are those found in areas captured by government forces. Thus far, barely 70,000 people have managed to escape.

Mosul—a city with a history stretching back over 4,000 years—is literally being destroyed in order to “save it.” Bombing this week destroyed a major water pipeline in the eastern suburbs, cutting off water to some 650,000 people. Electricity is already largely cut. Food prices have reportedly doubled as supplies dwindle. The city’s health system is dysfunctional. The university and numerous other public buildings have been reduced to rubble. On Wednesday, coalition aircraft bombed and “disabled” four major bridges over the Tigris River that link the western and eastern sectors of Mosul, further isolating the population in the east from potential resupplies of food and other essentials.

The siege of Mosul is predicted to continue for weeks, if not months. As winter and freezing temperatures set in, exposure, starvation and disease will likely take more lives than the bombing, particularly among children, the infirm and the elderly.

The Obama administration did not this week demand ceasefires or “compliance with international humanitarian laws” in Mosul. The attitude of the imperialist powers to war crimes is determined by whether they benefit from them. In Aleppo, the interests of the US and European powers are being set back, so there is condemnation and calls for action. In Mosul, US interests are being asserted, so civilian deaths are downplayed or outright denied.

Whenever representatives of imperialism and the capitalist ruling elite speak of “human rights,” the independent standpoint of the working class must be contempt and hostility. The only way to end the criminality of imperialist war and neo-colonial intrigue is to end capitalism itself.

Australia: CIMIC Group’s takeover of UGL foreshadows more job cuts

Oscar Grenfell 

A takeover of UGL, an Australian-based mining and engineering contractor, by the Spanish-owned construction company CIMIC Group foreshadows further restructuring of UGL and a stepped-up assault on its workers’ jobs, wages and working conditions.

UGL shareholders are set to vote on the $526 million hostile takeover bid in the next week and a half, after UGL’s board of directors approved the offer last week. The announcement followed CIMIC Group’s acquisition of more than 50 percent of UGL’s shares. In a symptom of UGL’s decline since the end of the mining boom, the takeover offer values the business at $3.16 per share, down from $22 in 2007.

The UGL board issued a statement declaring that the company’s acquisition meant “UGL may not be able to execute its current strategy, business plan or turnaround” and its “business mix may change” if CIMIC Group “determine that some assets should be divested.”

CIMIC Group will conduct a review into UGL’s business model in order to “drive operational efficiencies.” It has flagged a potential sell-off of assets, along with an overhaul of management and other cost-cutting measures, raising the prospect of layoffs and closures of UGL-operated workshops and sites.

The takeover underscores the deepening crisis of a host of mining and engineering contractors as a result of the collapse of commodity prices, the implosion of the mining boom and a marked slowdown in the construction sector.

CIMIC Group’s bid for UGL, unveiled in June, coincided with a 28 percent fall in UGL’s share price, driven by a worsening dispute over Japanese company Inpex’s Ichthys liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Darwin. A joint venture between UGL and Inpex contractor JKC, the construction of the project has reportedly been marked by repeated delays and disruptions, resulting in major cost blowouts.

In August, UGL announced a $200 million write-down on contracts for the Ichthys project, amid disputes with JKC. Workers involved in the LNG plant’s construction have been forced to foot the bill for its ongoing crisis. In June, JKC announced 130 redundancies. In November, another 460-480 jobs were cut. Among them were 380 boilermakers, electricians and other tradesmen employed by UGL, and up to 100 staff employed by JKC.

Law firm Slater and Gordon has foreshadowed a shareholders’ class action against UGL, alleging that the company did not disclose delays at the Ichthys project. In August, UGL posted a full-year loss of $106.3 million, largely on the back of the Ichthys project. Earnings for the construction and engineering divisions of the firm fell by 67 percent to $13.9 million, with fewer contracts in the resources and utilities sectors.

Last year, UGL registered a $236 million loss. The company responded by deepening a restructuring that it began following the global financial crisis. In September last year, it axed 200 jobs. The sackings followed a spate of workshop closures and major job cuts, including at Ballarat in 2012, Taree and Broadmeadow in 2013 and Chullora in Sydney in 2015.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), which covers a number of UGL’s sites, played the central role in enforcing the sackings. At UGL’s Auburn rail workshop in Sydney, the union defied a vote of workers in September 2015 demanding a halt to retrenchments, and blocked a motion put by workers to hold a sit-in until the company agreed to reinstate all employees who were contesting their retrenchments. 

In every instance, the union worked with management to suppress opposition from the workforce, clearing the way for job cuts and an ongoing assault on working conditions.

The most recent sackings followed years of restructuring that have seen UGL’s workforce decline from a peak of around 80,000, to less than 8,000. The company sold off its UK-based retail division, and scaled back its operations in the US and China, in the wake of the 2008 crash.

For his role in imposing the restructures demanded by UGL’s corporate shareholders, Ross Taylor, the company’s CEO, is set to receive a payout of at least $7.6 million. Almost $7 million of that is tied to his “performance,” i.e., pushing through the attacks on UGL’s workforce.

CIMIC Group’s history makes clear that further restructurings are on the agenda. Formerly Leighton Holdings, the business changed its name in early 2015 following a series of allegations of corruption, bribery and other malpractices. The ultimate owner of CIMIC Group is now Grupo ASC, a Spanish-based company with construction, telecommunications and engineering operations around the world. It has total assets valued at over €34 billion in 2016.

In 2013, the Financial Times reported: “Long considered one of Spain’s most secretive companies, ACS acquired a fearsome reputation for launching bold takeovers, using debt to buy up assets and then selling them on for a profit in a manner some analysts quipped was more akin to a private equity group than a construction company.”

Since its acquisition by ASC in 2014, CIMIC Group has launched a series of takeover bids, taking advantage of the financial woes of companies in the engineering and mining contracting sectors. At the beginning of this year, CIMIC Group acquired Sedgman, a mining contractor, and earlier took over Devine, a construction company.

The Australian Financial Review last month noted the growing number of takeover bids in the contracting sector. Danny Younis, senior analyst at investment group Shaw and Partners, told the newspaper: “The contracting game is currently more depressing than a Dostoyevsky novel, and it is no wonder in the past year or so we have seen companies like ALS, Bradken, Emeco Group, Downer EDI, Ausenco, Sedgman, Broadspectrum, Coffey and now UGL all either be an acquirer, acquired or subject to takeover offers.”

The newspaper listed a host of other contractors that have gone into administration, including ADG Global Supply, SubZero Group, Hughes Drilling, THO Services, WDS, Viento Group and Titan Energy Services.

Construction activity in Australia last month was at its lowest level since 2010, with the September quarter down by almost 5 percent on June. Non-residential building fell by close to 11 percent—the steepest drop since 2000. At the same time, mining companies have laid off thousands of workers and demand for coal, iron ore and other commodities remains low.

Speculating on what CIMIC Group will do with UGL, the Australian last month suggested that it may “tip” part of UGL into Ventia, CIMIC’s infrastructure, utilities and telecommunications firm, before selling off the new entity. Such a move would inevitably entail further job cuts.

The AMWU has issued no public statement on the takeover of UGL. This is a signal that, as in the past, the union will work with management to impose the demands of the corporate shareholders for ever-greater “efficiency” and profits.

Violent clashes follow announcement of businessman Jovenel Moïse as election winner in Haiti

John Marion

Protests and clashes with police broke out in Haiti Tuesday amid charges of electoral fraud in the country’s November 20 presidential election. Losing candidates have vowed to challenge the victory of banana exporter Jovenel Moïse, the candidate of former president Michel Martelly’s PHTK (Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale).

The largest demonstration erupted in Port-au-Prince’s sprawling shantytown of La Saline, a stronghold of Fanmi Lavalas, the party of former president Bertrand Aristide, which has described the official vote results as an “electoral coup.” Police used tear gas in an attempt to disperse protesters.

Meanwhile, the US Embassy issued a report Tuesday that it had “received reports of gunfire and burning tires at a protest in downtown Port-au-Prince,” advising American citizens to stay out of the area.

Preliminary results of the November 20 election have awarded the presidency to Moïse. If challenges to the vote count do not result in a change, the country’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) will publish the confirmed results on December 29 and Moïse will take office on February 7. Because he won more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be no runoff election.

Nonetheless, only slightly more than 20 percent of eligible voters participated. The election was originally scheduled for October 9, but postponed because of Hurricane Matthew. A month and a half after the storm tens of thousands of people in the south of Haiti still have no homes, and some polling places were being used as shelters as election preparations took place. An accurate count of how many thousands of people lost their voter identification cards in the storm is not possible, but according to the Miami Herald only 6,000 people had reapplied for cards before November 20.

The Sud, Grand’Anse, and Nippes departments, hit hardest by the storm, also lost most of their fruit trees and other crops, leading to what Le Nouvelliste has called “a food catastrophe.” According to United Nations figures, nearly 600,000 people in these areas are in urgent need of food assistance.

Haitian workers and peasants have good reason to be wary of elections organized by the country’s ruling elites. The vote to replace Martelly was originally scheduled for October 25, 2015 but was so blatantly fraudulent that the runoff scheduled for January 2016 was postponed and then cancelled. Jocelerme Privert, the president of Haiti’s Senate, was named provisional president when Martelly stepped down.

Political parties in Haiti are allowed to send observers, or mandataires, to voting centers; the mandataires receive credentials allowing them to vote where they are stationed, rather than at their normal polling place. More than 900,000 of these passes were issued for the October 25 election, and were so uncontrolled that they were openly being sold for as low as $3 each on election day. Nonetheless, European Union and Organization of American States observers called the vote “a breath of hope for Haitian democracy.”

Legislative elections held on August 9, 2015 were also so corrupted that, according to a National Lawyers Guild report, “fraud, violence and voter intimidation were widespread, affecting 67.8 percent of voting centers.” The NLG report noted that the police at polling centers did not stop “acts of violence and other disruptions, raising questions about whether officers had received an order from above directing them to stand down.”

Moïse, a businessman and former Secretary General of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Haiti, was given first place in the results of the October 2015 election, but did not receive enough votes to avoid a runoff. Jude Célestin of the Alternative League for Progress and Haitian Emancipation (LAPEH) came in second but boycotted the scheduled runoff, leaving Moïse as the only candidate holding campaign events. Célestin won second place again in the voting just concluded, but with slightly less than 20 percent of the vote.

The number of mandataire credentials issued for November 20 was significantly less (125,800) than in 2015, and controls were supposedly put in place requiring that each badge correspond to the voter ID number of the person wearing it. Nonetheless, a US lawyer from the National Human Rights Network told the Miami Herald that incidents of fraud had been observed.

With or without fraud, Moïse benefited from the votes of those who are not struggling just to survive. There were reports of dancing and celebrations in Petionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince. One of Martelly’s last acts in office was an attempt to establish an off-shore banking haven on the island of Gonâve; it does not require a stretch of the imagination to predict that his protégé will work to benefit international finance.

The elections were held under extraordinary restrictions, ostensibly to prevent violence, but also suppressing basic rights. On November 18, the Haitian National Police (PNH) announced the prohibition throughout the country, from the evening of November 19 through midnight on the 21st, of selling or drinking alcohol; driving a car or motorbike within 100 meters of a polling place; and carrying guns, knives, and blunt weapons. The forced closing of all nightclubs was included in the decree which, however, made no mention of prohibiting bribery.

The PNH mobilized 9,400 police across Haiti, and approximately 3,600 of the UN’s hated MINUSTAH force were also used to police the elections. Five hundred MINUSTAH vehicles were made available for the crackdown. In an intimidating statement released November 16, the US embassy in Port-au-Prince said “the United States is taking note of parties involved in electoral violence.”

The CEP, obviously afraid of public opposition to the election results, made its announcement under heavy guard in Petionville. It also waited until late Monday night, even though the results were supposed to be announced Sunday.

Dr. Marysse Narcisse, the Fanmi Lavalas presidential candidate, won slightly less than 9 percent of the vote, despite campaign support from former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. A lawyer for Fanmi Lavalas has sent a letter to the CEP questioning the vote tally, which was rebuffed by CEP president Léopold Berlanger even before the official count was announced. Opposition parties will be allowed a short window to challenge the results, from December 3 to the 5.

War tensions between India and Pakistan intensify

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones 

Relations between India and Pakistan remain extremely taut, with South Asia’s rival nuclear powers the closest to all-out war since a 10-month period in 2001-2002 when India mobilized nearly a million troops on Pakistan’s eastern border.

The truce along the Line of Control (LoC) between Indian- and Pakistan-held Kashmir that was put in place in the aftermath of the 2001-2002 war crisis has manifestly broken down. Virtually every day for the past two months, Indian and Pakistani troops have unleashed intense barrages of artillery and gun fire across the LoC. And while continuing to disclaim wanting war, military and government leaders of both countries routinely make bloodcurdling threats.

To cite just one bellicose exchange from last week: On November 25, Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the country’s parliament that Pakistan’s military “will kill three Indian soldiers for every Pakistani soldier they neutralize,” adding India would face “dire consequences … if it went to war against Pakistan.” The next day Asif’s Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, told a rally in Goa: “We don’t itch for a fight, but if someone looks at the country with evil eye, we will gouge his eyes out and put them back in his hand. We have that much power.”

Parrikar, who has repeatedly boasted that New Delhi has the military might and daring to force Islamabad to bend to its will, recently called for India to renounce its “no-first strike” nuclear pledge so as to increase its strategic leverage and spook its enemies.

On Tuesday, tensions heightened still further after Islamist, anti-Indian, Kashmiri secessionists attacked an Army post, killing seven Indian Army personnel, including two officers. The Nagrota Army post is near Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state and the site of a quarter-century old, Pakistani-supported insurgency.

According to the Hindu, Tuesday’s deaths raised to 27 the number of Indian security personnel killed in Kashmir, either by Pakistani cross-border firing or in encounters with insurgents, since Indian Special Forces carried out “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan in late September, ostensibly in retaliation for an earlier insurgent attack on the Indian military base at Uri.

India claims to have killed a like number of Pakistani troops and at least 40 civilians on both sides of divided Kashmir have perished in cross-border firing.

Unnamed Indian military sources have told the media that evidence points to Pakistani involvement in Tuesday’s attack. But thus far, India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has not accused Islamabad of responsibility for the Nagrota attack, in marked contrast from its reaction to the September 18 Uri incident.

This could all change rapidly, however.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government are heavily invested, both strategically and politically, in securing a demonstrable advantage from the current confrontation with Pakistan.

Big business has vigorously applauded the BJP’s much-trumpeted claims to have freed India from the shackles of the “strategic restraint” policy that previous governments reputedly pursued in regards to Pakistan.

Moreover, the BJP has shamelessly exploited the war crisis with Pakistan to deride its opponents as weak, even disloyal, and served notice that it intends to make its aggressive stand against Pakistan a key issue in the coming elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Rattled by the world economic crisis, the Indian bourgeoisie brought Modi and his BJP to power two-and-a-half years ago to accelerate the pace of pro-investor socioeconomic “reform” and to more aggressively pursue its great power ambitions on the world stage.

In line with this, Modi has transformed India into a veritable “frontline state” in Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China, calculating that the strategic favours the US is lavishing on India in return will enable it to change the “rules of the game” with Pakistan and impose itself as South Asia’s regional hegemon.

In August, Modi unveiled a new hardline strategy against Pakistan, announcing New Delhi would mount a diplomatic campaign to have it labelled a “state sponsor of terrorism” and signaling India’s support for the nationalist separatist insurgency in Balochistan—that is for Pakistan’s dismemberment.

Then in late September the BJP government repudiated India’s longstanding policy of not publicly revealing its military operations inside Pakistan, which was adopted out of fear that to do so could ignite a dynamic of strikes and counter-strikes that could quickly escalate to all-out war.

In the ensuing two months, New Delhi has insisted that it will resume regular high-level contacts with Islamabad only if it agrees that “cross-border terrorism” is the core problem in Indo-Pakistani relations and acts to prevent the Kashmir insurgency receiving any logistical support from Pakistani territory.

In pursuing this hardline stance, Modi and his BJP have been buoyed by Washington’s endorsement of India’s illegal and highly provocative Sept. 28-29 attack inside Pakistan. While the Obama administration has counseled caution, it is anxious to show New Delhi that it recognizes there will be quid pro quos for India’s integration into Washington’s anti-China “Pivot to Asia” and in that vein is prepared to cede India more latitude in dealing with Pakistan.

India is also mindful that US president-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly lauded India as among Washington’s most valued strategic partners while attacking Pakistan for not acting like a US ally. It eagerly anticipates gaining even greater leverage over Islamabad when Trump takes office.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has been shaken by its strategic isolation. After the Uri attack, India was able to enlist most of the region’s other states in a boycott of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting that was to be held in Pakistan last month. Islamabad’s calls for international condemnation of India’s illegal “surgical strikes” were met by a thunderous silence.

In an attempt to defuse the war crisis, Islamabad has announced that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s top foreign policy advisor, Sartaj Aziz, will travel to India for the Dec. 3-4 Heart of Asia (HoA) conference on Afghanistan and that he will be available for “comprehensive and unconditional dialogue” with Indian officials on its sidelines.

India, however, has not shown any enthusiasm for Aziz’s participation in the HoA meeting in Amritsar, just 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the Pakistani border, let alone Islamabad’s offer of talks. Yesterday the Times of India cited unnamed Indian officials as saying Pakistan’s offer of dialogue “was meaningless in the light of continuing terror strikes from across the border.”

The protracted violent cross-border standoff and the Modi government’s bellicose rhetoric, including Defence Minister Parrikar’s calls for India to abandon its no-first strike nuclear pledge are, however, giving pause to some sections of the corporate media.

On November 24, the Chennai-based Hindu published an editorial titled “Restore the ceasefire” in which it said both India and Pakistan must be “alert … to the danger of the retaliatory cycle spinning out of control” and “must guard against adventurism.” It went on to call on New Delhi to take immediate steps to reopen dialogue with Pakistan. “Given India’s regional status and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unchallenged hold over political power,” declared the Hindu, “it is incumbent on him to initiate steps to restore the ceasefire that worked well for over a decade.”

The Economic Times in a November 25 editorial titled “Do not slide into a war no one wants” explicitly raised the prospect of the “high risk strategy” of “limited confrontation” aimed at whipping up “jingoistic fervor” for political gain ending in war between the “two nuclear powers in South Asia.”

“Even,” continued the Economic Times, “if that does not entail use of nuclear weapons—an eventuality no longer to be ruled out as absurd, given the line of thinking favoured by the political leadership both in India and in Pakistan—a war would be very costly in terms of both life and treasure.”

While in striking contrast with the bellicose mood being whipped up by much of the India, the two editorials grossly understated the extent to which South Asia is now enveloped in war clouds. Coincident with the Indo-Pakistan war crisis there has been a major escalation of Indo-China tensions.

Beijing is disconcerted by the extent of India’s strategic realignment with Washington, as exemplified by New Delhi’s ratification in late August of an agreement allowing US warplanes and battleships to make routine use of Indian military bases and ports. India is incensed that Beijing, while urging Islamabad to show restraint, has stood by its longstanding ally in the current crisis, and, in response to the burgeoning Indo-US alliance, has strengthened its partnership with Pakistan.

These developments underscore that the intractable Indo-Pakistani conflict has now become enmeshed with the growing confrontation between US imperialism and China adding to each a massive new explosive charge and raising the prospect that a war between India and Pakistan could rapidly involve the world’s great powers.