An anti-democratic witch-hunt in Australia over dual citizenship

Mike Head

Over the past month, an unprecedented media and political campaign has been launched against members of the federal parliament who allegedly hold, or are entitled to hold, citizenship of another country as well as Australian citizenship.

The witch-hunt involves a provision in Australia’s British colonial-era 1901 founding Constitution, declaring ineligible anyone owing allegiance to a “foreign power.” This anti-democratic clause today potentially disqualifies millions of people—about half the population—who were born overseas or had a parent born overseas, even if they are Australian citizens.

Two Australian Greens senators—party co-leaders Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters—have resigned their seats already. Ludlam was born in New Zealand and Waters in Canada, and both were unaware they automatically remained citizens of those countries. They had lived in Australia since they were infants.

However, as soon as the issue was raised in the media—in circumstances that remain murky—Ludlam and Waters each quit without any fight, not even a legal challenge. Instead, they both abjectly apologised for their supposed negligence in not checking their status.

After parliament resumed this week from its six-week winter recess, the Senate referred their cases to the High Court, the country’s supreme court, along with those of two other senators—a National Party government minister and a One Nation representative. Other MPs could face challenges. Media outlets have drawn up lists of more than 20 declared to be suspect because of their migrant heritage.

Every parliamentary party—the ruling Liberal-National Coalition, the Labor Party, the Greens and the various “third parties”—has joined the crusade against so-called dual citizens sitting in parliament or even standing for election. None has called for the scrapping of the anti-democratic provision.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull quickly endorsed the witch-hunt, deriding the “incredible sloppiness” of the Greens. Labor leaders demanded that the Coalition “come clean” on any of its MPs “at risk” of dual citizenship. Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale was the most fervent of all, demanding an official investigation of all 226 members of parliament to “immediately establish” their eligibility.

This hue and cry is anti-democratic to the core. Australia has an estimated six million dual citizens, who are potentially barred from standing for or sitting in the parliament.

Section 44(i) of the Constitution disqualifies anyone who “is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power.”

The clause excludes not just dual citizens. It covers any Australian resident “entitled” to foreign citizenship. For some countries, children and even grandchildren of citizens may be entitled to citizenship. In other countries, like Canada and New Zealand, citizenship is acquired by birth and sometimes may be virtually impossible to renounce.

The words “adherence to a foreign power” could extend even further, particularly in wartime conditions, to anyone with an overseas family heritage, or who opposed a war or wartime measures such as conscription. It should be recalled that during both world wars, thousands of residents of “enemy” descent—German, Italian and Japanese—were arbitrarily rounded up and interned in camps for the duration of the war.

The anti-democratic character of this provision is highlighted by the fact that when it was adopted, there was no concept of Australian citizenship. Instead the continent’s inhabitants were classified as “subjects” of the British monarch, as were people throughout the British Empire.

The colonial politicians and businessmen who drafted the Constitution opposed using the word “citizen” because it smacked of republicanism. While they had their own imperialist ambitions, they were tied to the apron-strings of the empire, which remained their economic backstop and great power guarantor.

The only reservation of the “founding fathers” was that the term “subject of the Queen” would open the door for “Asiatic” royal subjects from Hong Kong and elsewhere. The constitutional convention debates are full of references to barring the Chinese and other “coloured races.”

In the end, this fear was addressed by the first parliament adopting legislation to expel Pacific Island labourers and impose English-language “dictation” tests to exclude immigrants not of the “British race.”

However, British subjects from elsewhere in the Empire such as New Zealand, Canada or Britain could stand for and sit in parliament, as long as they met basic residency and age requirements.

Australian citizenship was only introduced in the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948. By then the ruling class had shifted its alignment behind the US following World War II. Even so, it was not until 1987 that “British subjects” were no longer entitled to Australian citizenship.

Today, section 44(i) stands as a barrier to essential legal and democratic rights. With the exception of the Aborigines, the entire population is composed of people who are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who have arrived since 1788. Moreover, Australia, like many other countries, is increasingly diversifying because of the globalisation of economic and social life.

Full civil political rights, including to stand for elected office, should be available to all, regardless of birthplace, skin colour or ethnic background. More broadly, people should be free to live and work where they choose, with full democratic participation, not straitjacketed by the anachronistic capitalist nation-state system.

More than a century after it was imposed, section 44(i) is being brought to centre stage now for definite political purposes.

One immediate motive is to create a potential vehicle to remove politicians, and possibly governments, via legal challenges and court rulings, effectively overturning election results. Over the past decade, the Australian political establishment has become increasingly unstable, with one government falling after another, amid rising popular discontent with glaring inequality, falling living conditions, attacks on basic democratic rights, and mounting militarism.

If any Liberal or National lower house MP is disqualified, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government could lose its one-seat majority, triggering a new election or the formation of a highly unstable minority government, led by the Coalition or Labor.

The other, underlying, purpose is to whip up nationalist sentiment. This is designed to divide Australian workers along ethnic and communal lines, as well as split them from their fellow workers across Asia and internationally. Such agitation seeks to create the ideological climate for war. Around the world, with the Trump administration in the lead, ruling elites are inciting protectionism, jingoism and bigotry as a means of diverting the deepening social tensions outward and justifying war-mongering threats.

“True-blue Australian MPs only,” was the headline of an Australian editorial on July 20, highlighting the nationalist character of the outcry. The Murdoch publication insisted that patriotism, loyalty and national pride are essential pre-requisites for sitting in parliament.

The disqualification of “foreign” MPs is just one manifestation of this promotion of nationalism. The government is proposing legislation to restrict Australian citizenship to “patriots.” Applicants will have to formally “pledge allegiance” to Australia and pass tests of “Australian values” and university-level English—reminiscent of the “White Australia” dictation tests.

In late 2015, the Coalition government also pushed through legislation, with Labor’s backing, enabling it to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals by decree. The immigration minister can now unilaterally declare, on the basis of secret intelligence reports, that someone has “renounced” Australian citizenship. These provisions could be used to terminate the basic rights of many people, including those opposing the predatory and criminal wars being conducted by the US and its allies, such as Australia.

For now, these powers have been confined to dual citizens, but there have been calls within the government to extend the measures to all citizens. Citizenship is an essential democratic right, without which members of society can be stripped of all political and civil rights, including to vote, stand for office and obtain health, education, welfare and other social services.

These developments are a warning sign. The clouds of war are gathering, and the media and political establishment is trying to foment a xenophobic atmosphere, with far-reaching implications for fundamental democratic rights.

German automaker VW collaborated with Brazilian dictatorship

Ludwig Weller 

The criminal machinations of Volkswagen are not exhausted by the diesel emissions scandal and the formation of an auto cartel. The history of Germany’s largest automaker, which began under Hitler’s Nazi regime, has once again caught up with VW. Research conducted by broadcasters NDR and SWR, as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, confirm that during the period of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, VW participated in the persecution of regime opponents.

The firm’s own plant security service at its facility in Sao Paulo operated like an intelligence service, according to the research. It spied on VW employees, prepared lists of political opponents which ended up in the hands of the authorities, arrested militant workers and transferred them to the political police and enabled the arrest of workers by the military police on the grounds of the plant, thereby handed them over to be tortured. The company’s chief executive was informed of the arrests as early as 1979.

Public Broadcaster ARD screened a documentary entitled “Collaborators? VW and the Brazilian military dictatorship” on July 24. The film showed how VW do Brasil, Volkswagen’s subsidiary in Brazil, used plant security to spy upon workers opposed to the regime in the plant and in their private lives. The mere suspicion that they could be involved in trade union or communist activities was sufficient to justify VW handing workers over to the military junta. Hundreds of oppositional workers were tortured in prisons and killed as a result.

VW workers in Sao Paulo who survived have been targeting the VW company in Germany for years and demanding compensation. Two years ago, they filed a class action lawsuit and the state prosecutor in Sao Paulo has since been investigating VW.

An interview with the now 91-year-old former VW chief Carl Hahn, who was a member of the supervisory board of the company’s subsidiary in Brazil at the time, exposes the ongoing and persistent callousness of the company. Hahn denied outright having known anything about the collaboration. Asked about the latest investigations, he responded cynically, “They should just do it; we have more important things to get on with here.”

Hahn added that the company had the desire to move forward before noting with a smug smile, “However, I can tell you that we weren’t communists.”

The VW spokesman in Wolfsburg, Germany said as little as possible. Asked about the investigations, he blandly noted, “There are different interpretations, accusations must of course be proven. We should wait a little and not jump to premature conclusions.”

A central figure in the 45-minute documentary is the former toolmaker Lúcio Bellentani, who tells his life story. Shortly after the military coup in 1964, the 19-year-old began his career at VW do Brasil. He soon became active on the periphery of the Brazilian Communist Party.

In the summer of 1972, secret police held a pistol to his back, arrested him and led him away in handcuffs during the night shift in the pressing plant. The armed VW plant security force and VW staff were on the scene. The first interrogation occurred in the human resources department. He was beaten, and ordered to give the names of other trade union and party activists. Since he remained silent, they brought him to the notorious prison of the political police (DOPS).

Bellentani’s only “crime” was the distribution of leaflets and organisation of discussion circles. He encountered other VW colleagues in prison and still cannot forget their desperate cries. His wife was only allowed to visit him with their two small children after 47 days of imprisonment and torture. He was released after two years.

Although Lúcio Bellentani has retained his humor, he is marked by this period to the present day. He and a number of former colleagues have been meeting up for years and have absolutely no intention of letting VW off the hook. They therefore have placed a lot of hope in the class action lawsuit, which is based on their testimony.

But VW continues to play for time. Former VW chief historian Manfred Krieger, who visited Brazil in 2014 and called for a memorial for the workers, was laid off in the autumn of 2016. He was forbidden from giving interviews for the documentary.

VW subsequently hired the Bielefeld-based historian Christopher Kopper, son of the long-serving spokesman for the board of Deutsche Bank, Helmar Kopper, in hopes that he would place the company’s interests first in the investigation of the brutal methods of suppression employed by VW do Brasil.

But contrary to expectations, the historian, who is to present his final report in the autumn, came to similar conclusions to the research conducted by NDR, SWR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which evaluated investigation files, internal VW papers from the period in question, documents of the VW supervisory board, reports from the Foreign Ministry and classified papers from the DOPS torture chambers under the military dictatorship.

The key finding is clear: “The picture emerging from all of this is that VW did not only collaborate and assist the regime, but was an independent actor in the repression. A good collaborator.”

While VW do Brasil persecuted militant workers and handed them over to the goons of the military dictatorship, it was simultaneously employing and protecting high-ranking Nazi collaborators.

Following the opening of VW’s new plant in Sao Paulo in 1959, one of the first to be employed there was Franz Stangl. The SS captain was a participant in the Nazis’ T4 euthanasia program and obtained “the class I and II War Merit Cross with distinction,” according to a subsequent court ruling. In 1942, he received a promotion to commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps.

After the war, he fled to Brazil, like many other high-ranking Nazis. There, he worked for eight years undisturbed under his own name in VW do Brasil’s “plant maintenance.” It remains unclear whether he was involved in the plant security service. He built a house close by, where the war criminal being sought around the globe was able to live unmolested.

Asked whether he was aware that Stangl had been employed by VW do Brasil under his own name for years, former VW chief Hahn answered, “We certainly didn’t know every concentration camp commandant’s name… and that those who came from Germany would be employed there is, I think, a matter of course.”

Without the research of Simon Wiesenthal, who tracked down Nazi war criminals around the globe, Stangl would probably never have been identified or arrested. In March 1967, Wiesenthal complained in a letter to North Rhein-Westphalia’s Justice Minister Josef Neuberger that “the Volkswagen plant in Sao Paulo made available to Stangl its lawyer, Dr. Garcia, who is of course seeking to resist the extradition.” Basileu Garcia was considered one of Brazil’s top prosecutors at the time. In addition, according to Wiesenthal, German industrial circles were applying considerable pressure to Brazilian business circles to hinder the extradition.

Stangl was arrested in Sao Paulo on 28 February, 1967, and despite the efforts at resistance extradited to Germany. It would take another four years before he was sentenced by a court in Düsseldorf to life imprisonment. The ruling was “accessory to murder in 400,000 cases.”

Shortly after Stangl’s arrest, then VW chief executive Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz-Wink justified the employment of Stangl by saying, “In addition, Brazilian law forbids asking any questions of or collecting information on workers or employees.” In light of the collaboration with the Brazilian military and persecution of oppositional workers, it would be hard to make a more cynical statement. Incidentally, Schultz-Wink was himself a member of the Nazi Party.

The VW concern, together with the Social Democrat-Green government in Lower Saxony, has yet to comment on VW’s collaboration with the military dictatorship or the Stangl case.

What has been the response of the IG Metall trade union and the works councilors imbedded in VW? The answer is a stony silence. Neither the IG Metall nor the works council in Wolfsburg has taken a position on the matter. Not a single word of protest, no call to the VW board that it may wish to at least apologize for the criminal acts against Brazilian workers.

This feckless and subservient behavior of the trade union and works council can only surprise those who have a completely uncritical relationship with them or defend the union’s nationalist policies.

During a massive general strike in Brazil in 1979, which also included VW workers, a small delegation of VW workers from Sao Paulo visited Wolfsburg to confront the VW board of directors with the criminal machinations at VW do Brasil. One of them openly challenged then VW chief executive Toni Schmücker during a trade union conference in Wolfsburg city hall and reported on the collaboration between VW’s plant security force and the military dictatorship.

The VW board downplayed the situation and maintained a low profile, but IG Metall did not lift a finger. There is no indication of any solidarity rallies, and there is not even a record of notes of protest to the board of management. The current evasion by the trade union is a clear sign that IG Metall not only displayed a complete lack of solidarity with their Brazilian colleagues at the time, but also bore joint responsibility for their persecution.

Even now, when VW’s own company historian has been forced to confirm this grim episode, IG Metall and the works council stand behind company management to a man. Workers must draw far-reaching conclusions from this, and not only at VW. The huge crisis in the auto industry will spare no-one, and this will above all require a bitter struggle for jobs and wages, which can only be waged with a socialist orientation.

The example of the struggle by former VW do Brasil workers illustrates how workers confront a united front of company management, trade unions and the political establishment. The lawsuits filed by the former VW workers risk grinding to a halt without the workers having obtained justice or compensation. Without a global alliance of VW workers, which first and foremost demands a break with the pro-capitalist trade unions, the workers’ rights cannot be defended.

Danger of India-China border war grows

K. Ratnayake 

The standoff between Indian and Chinese troops on the Doklam Plateau, a remote ridge in the Himalayan foothills, is continuing, amid growing warnings and threats of an impending military clash.

Indian Defence Minister Arun Jaitley told the country’s parliament Wednesday that its military is ready to meet any challenge and has already demonstrated with its victories over Pakistan in wars in 1965 and 1971 that it has learned the “lessons” of 1962. This was a reference to the month-long 1962 Sino-Indian border in which Beijing gave New Delhi a bloody nose, then ordered its troops to withdraw.

In an even more significant and troubling sign of the escalation of tensions, the Indian Ministry of Defense (MOD) has urgently requested additional funds of Rs. 200 billion ($3.1 billion) from the finance ministry to speed up the procurement of munitions, armaments and other war materiel. This follows on last month’s announcement that the MOD had given Vice Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Sarath Chand special powers to speed up emergency purchases of the ammunition and spare parts needed to wage war.

New Delhi has repeatedly suggested that the Doklam border crisis could be defused by both sides withdrawing their troops from the disputed ridge.

But China is adamant that it is up to India to take the first step, by recalling its forces unilaterally.

Beijing has repeatedly termed India’s actions unprecedentedly provocative. Unlike previous border disputes, the Indian Army is confronting Chinese troops on territory to which New Delhi itself has no claim, but is rather the subject of a dispute between China and the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

Moreover, Beijing disputes India’s claim that it interceded at the bequest of Bhutan to stop Chinese construction workers from expanding a road on the disputed plateau. Beijing contends that New Delhi acted unilaterally, then leaned on Bhutan, which India has long treated like a protectorate, to join it in protesting the alleged Chinese incursion on its territory. To date, Bhutan’s government has issued only one statement on the almost two month-old Doklam standoff, and did so close to two weeks after the alleged Chinese incursion began.

Beijing has repeatedly served notice that its patience is wearing thin and that it will not allow the standoff to continue indefinitely.

On Tuesday, a Chinese diplomat Wang Wenli told a delegation of Indian journalists, “If India continues going down the wrong path, we have the right to use any action under international law to protect the lives of our troops. New Delhi should stop sending signals that everything is under control.’’

The previous day the delegation had visited a People’s Liberation Army garrison on the outskirts of Beijing where they were treated to a demonstration of Chinese marksmanship. Addressing the journalists, PLA Senior Colonel Li declared, “What the Indian troops have done is an invasion of Chinese territory.” He added, “You can report about what the Chinese soldiers are thinking about. I am a soldier, I will try my best to protect (China’s) territorial integrity. We have the resolve and determination.”

Yesterday, an editorial in the government-owned China Daily, titled “New Delhi should come to its senses while it has time,” warned that the “window for a peaceful solution” of the border dispute is “closing.” “The countdown to a clash between the two forces has begun,” affirmed China’s largest English-language newspaper, “and the clock is ticking away the time to what seems to be an inevitable conclusion.”

The principal cause of the rapid deterioration in Sino-Indian relations, of which the current border confrontation is only the latest and most explosive example, is India’s ever deeper integration into Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, India has opened its military bases and ports to routine use by the Pentagon; greatly expanded bilateral and trilateral military-strategic ties with Japan and Australia, US imperialism’s principal Asia-Pacific allies; and parroted Washington’s aggressive stances on both the South China Sea dispute and North Korea.

The Chinese Communist Party regime, which speaks for the capitalist oligarchy that has arisen from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism, has no progressive answer to the US drive to encircle and subjugate China. Organically incapable of making any appeal to the antiwar sentiment of working people around the world, it oscillates between seeking an accommodation with Washington and pursuing its own increasingly aggressive militarist policy, while whipping up bellicose nationalism.

In a further sign of the mounting war danger, the Indian media has given prominence to an interview in which the Indian-born economist and British Labour Peer Meghnad Desai warned of the imminence of a Sino-Indian war, while voicing his hope and expectation that American imperialism would come to India’s support.

“I think at this time it is very likely that we will be in a state of full-scale war with China very soon, Desai told the India Asia News Agency (IANS).”

Willfully ignoring India’s emergence as a “frontline state” in the US offensive against China, Desai sought to paint China as an aggressor in both the Himalayas and the South China Sea.

Desai, who has long traveled in Indian government and ruling class circles, said that a war would not be restricted to the Doklam Plateau, but “will start from all places, across the northern Himalayas.” Such a war, he warned, “will not be controllable,” but India’s “defence co-operation” with the US and its allies “will bear fruit.”

“India,” he continued, “cannot stand up to China without American help and support. America cannot stand up to China without Indian help. That is the symmetry in this relationship.”

On June 18, the very day Indian troops interceded on the Doklam and forced the Chinese construction workers to cease their road-building, Modi was meeting with Trump at the White House. At the conclusion of that meeting they pledged to further expand the Indo-US “global strategic partnership.”

As Desai’s remarks underscore, even a war that begins as a border skirmish could rapidly escalate and quickly draw in the US and other powers. Indeed, the BJP government and the Indian elite are banking on drawing on US support, raising the prospect of a conflict that quickly escalates into a global conflict among nuclear powers.

Even if such a catastrophe were averted and a war between India and China limited to a border war, it would have calamitous consequences for working people around the world.

Such a war, whatever its outcome, would only strengthen imperialism.

A Chinese “victory” would only cause the Indian bourgeoisie to cement its place in a US-led NATO-type alliance against China. Moreover, Germany, Japan and the other imperialist wars would use the events in the Himalayas as a pretext to accelerate their plans for rearmament and war.

In the event China suffered a defeat, US imperialism would seize on the opportunity to intensify its reckless military-strategic offensive against China. Meanwhile, the Modi government, flush from reversing the “humiliation” of 1962, would step up its efforts to bully India’s neighbours into recognizing it as the hegemon of South Asia and whip up a climate of bellicose nationalist euphoria to intensify the assault on the working class and drive Indian politics still further right.

US to launch drone bombing campaign in the Philippines

Joseph Santolan 

The Pentagon is planning to launch drone air strikes on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, NBC News revealed Monday citing two unnamed US defense officials. The story was published as US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila in the wake of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum held there over the weekend.

The island of Mindanao, with a population of over 22 million, has been under martial law for nearly three months as the Philippine military has carried out a bombing campaign, with the direct support and guidance of US military forces, on alleged Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) elements in the city of Marawi.

What has been done to the people of Marawi is a war crime. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and over 400,000 driven from their homes, turned into internally displaced refugees. They are scattered across Mindanao and the Visayas in search of shelter in the midst of the typhoon season, often malnourished and some even starving.

Martial law serves the interests of US imperialism. The US military was involved in the initial attack by Philippine forces that led to the declaration of martial law, special forces operatives have participated in assaults carried out throughout the city, and US surveillance planes have directed the daily bombing barrages.

Since his election a year ago, Duterte sought to rebalance Philippine diplomatic and economic ties toward Beijing and, to a certain extent, Moscow, and proved intractable to Washington’s interests. Over the course of his predecessor’s term in office, US imperialism had through legal and military means sharply escalated its war drive against China, using Manila as it leading proxy in the region.

When the volatile and fascistic Duterte took office, Washington funded his murderous “war on drugs,” but, when he began to distance himself from US dictates, the US State Department found that they were concerned with “human rights.” The pressure of this campaign only opened up a far wider gulf between Manila and Washington, as Duterte lashed back denouncing US crimes during the Philippine American War. Clearly, alternative and more drastic means to either control or eliminate Duterte were needed.

Washington built the military of its former colony, and the top brass were all trained in and loyal to the US. As Duterte flew to Moscow to meet with Putin to negotiate a potential military agreement, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, working with Washington and behind the back of the Philippine president, launched an attack on the private army of a ruling class family in Marawi which they claimed had pledged loyalty to ISIS. The attack allowed Lorenzana to declare martial law and compel the president to return to the Philippines.

Washington began calling the shots in Marawi and effectively throughout the country. Duterte disappeared from public life for two weeks. Lorenzana, using the authority of martial law, restored joint maritime exercises with US forces which Duterte had scrapped as they clearly targeted against China. The US Embassy in Manila began directly interacting with the military brass, circumventing the presidential palace of Malacanang entirely.

Duterte reemerged to the limelight as a man disciplined by Washington. The message was clear, if he wished to remain in power he had to toe the US line. Washington had no problems with his war on drugs, which has killed over 12,000 people in the past year, provided he served US interests. Tillerson declared that he would not be raising issues of human rights in his meeting with Duterte.

In a press conference with Tillerson, Duterte groveled. “We are friends. We are allies,” he declared. “I am your humble friend in Southeast Asia.”

Washington is not content with securing Duterte’s loyalty, however. In essence they are looking to effectively re-colonize the Philippines, establishing military bases throughout the country, and directly dictating the course of its politics.

Already Washington has begun operating with the hubris of the colonial master. The plan for the US to launch a campaign of drone bombing in Mindanao is in an advanced stage of readiness, yet by their own admission, neither the civilian government, nor the Philippine military brass have been informed of the plan.

In July, General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Washington intended to give a name to its mission in the Philippines, a move which would secure greater funding for the US operations in the country.

Selva stated, “Particularly in the fragile areas of the southern Philippines, I think it’s worth considering whether or not we reinstate a named operation, not only to provide for the resources that are required, but to give the Pacific Command commander and the field commanders in the Philippines the kinds of authorities they need to work with indigenous Philippine forces to actually help them be successful in that battle space.”

Washington already has “boots on the ground”—special forces participating in the battles in Marawi, and its surveillance planes determining targets in the bombing campaigns. An escalation beyond this to additional “kinds of authorities” would involve the direct US bombing of the city.

The Duterte administration attempted weakly to fend off the US encroachment on Philippine sovereignty, responding to the reports that US would begin a bombing campaign in the country by declaring that the combatants in Marawi were “ISIS inspired.”

The US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951 only allows US combat operations in the country if it is directly attacked by a foreign power. Herein lies the significance of the labeling of what is essentially the private army of a ruling class family as ISIS. Under the terms of the MDT, Washington can argue that the forces in Marawi are a foreign invasion force.

The fiery anti-imperialist posturing of Duterte is gone, and his press secretary is weakly attempting to preserve national sovereignty by claiming that the enemy combatants—largely children and young men recruited and armed by a section of the Mindanao elite—are only “inspired” by ISIS.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines meanwhile put out a press statement, saying, “we appreciate Pentagon’s reported desire to help the Philippines,” but added that “we have not yet received formal notice” of the offer.

The ultimate target of Washington’s drive to re-colonize the Philippines is China. On August 4, U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Michael Klecheski opened a Joint Maritime Law Enforcement Training Center (JMLETC) on the island of Palawan, which is the closest to the disputed South China Sea. At the facility US forces will be working with and training the Philippine military in order to enhance the country’s “maritime domain awareness capabilities” and to “stop large-scale weapons from transiting through or near Philippine territorial waters,” including by means of the “use of force.”

“Large-scale weapons” “near Philippine territorial waters” is a clear reference to the stationing by the Chinese of materiel on the disputed Spratly Islands.

The events of the past three months in the Philippines reveal yet again that US imperialism will go to any lengths to achieve its ends. US forces manufactured the threat of ISIS out of a private army largely comprised of child soldiers, oversaw the bombing of a beautiful city killing hundreds of civilians and turning four hundred thousand more into poverty-stricken refugees—all to orchestrate the declaration of martial law and set the stage for military dictatorship.

British government backs US war drive against North Korea, China

Simon Whelan & Robert Stevens 

A UK Foreign Office spokesman yesterday said the UK would “continue to work with the US and our international partners to maintain pressure on North Korea.”

The statement continued, “We have been consistently clear and forthright in our condemnation of North Korea’s destabilising and illegal behaviour, including through support for UN Security Council resolutions to bring in sanctions that will limit North Korea’s ability to pursue its nuclear weapons programme.”

Downing Street’s declaration was made in the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump threatening Pyongyang with “fire and fury” in response to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. It is designed to contrast with the European Union and Germany’s expressed concern at what Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government called a “rhetorical escalation” between the US and North Korea.

A German Foreign Ministry spokesman, Martin Schaefer, said further “saber rattling” was unhelpful and called on “all parties to show restraint.” Schaefer added that Germany backs a proposal by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for talks with North Korea, while the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s spokeswoman, Catherine Ray, said “a lasting peace and denuclearization of the Korean peninsula must be achieved through peaceful means.” For Mogherini, “that excludes military action.”

Whatever the differences between the positions of Tillerson and Trump, the UK Conservative government has staked its post-Brexit future on being the most loyal ally of the US in all its military actions.

While in Australia on July 27, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told an audience of Australian business heads and politicians at the Lowy Institute that the UK would commit UK aircraft carriers to secure “freedom of navigation” exercises in the waters of the South China Sea.

“One of the first things we will do with the two new colossal aircraft carriers that we have just built is send them on a freedom of navigation operation to this area,” he said. They would patrol just a few miles off China’s coast, to “vindicate our belief in the rules-based international system and in the freedom of navigation through those waterways which are absolutely vital for world trade.”

British Defence Minister Michael Fallon, who accompanied the foreign secretary on the trip, added, “We have the right of freedom of navigation and we will exercise it.”

Last year Britain’s Royal Air Force sent four military aircraft to Japan for joint exercises in the same region. While in Australia, Fallon reminded his hosts, “We flew RAF Typhoons through the South China Sea last October and we will exercise that right whenever we next have the opportunity to do so, whenever we have ships or planes in the region.”

Tensions in the South China Sea have escalated due to the belligerent statements and actions of the Trump administration, which is challenging China’s control over the Spratly Islands—constructed or expanded in the South China Sea by Beijing.

Under the Obama administration, the US Navy sent guided missile destroyers on three earlier occasions within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit around Chinese islets. Earlier this year, the US sent two bombers over the region, just a week after a US guided-missile destroyer deliberately intruded within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit claimed by China around Triton Island in the Paracel Islands.

During a visit designed to secure post-Brexit trade agreements, the two Tory government ministers agreed with their Australian counterparts that the two countries would strengthen arrangements to share classified information on defence, security and counter-terrorism operations and conduct cooperative military activities in the Asia-Pacific region. They also discussed the deployment of soldiers in domestic counter-terrorism operations based on the UK’s Operation Temperer—under which troops were deployed on the streets of Britain in May after the Manchester bombing—and legislation proposed recently in Australia.

After meeting with Johnson, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the two had discussed the issue of the South China Sea as one of the pressing “challenges” of the Asia-Pacific region. The South China Sea is one of the busiest commercial sea routes in the world, carrying $5 trillion worth of trade a year.

Just two days after his Australian speech, Johnson warned in response to a long-range missile test by Pyongyang, “The UK will stand alongside our allies and partners as we confront the growing threat North Korea poses to regional and international security.”

During the campaign for the June 8 British General Election Johnson said that North Korea must be disarmed. Speaking at the UN Security Council, he said, “Britain stands alongside our allies in making clear that North Korea must obey the UN and halt its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes—disarming in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner.”

Today US, British and Norwegian armed forces are concluding a 10-day North Sea war games exercise that began almost immediately after Johnson’s declarations in Sydney.

Taking place off the northwest coast of Scotland, Britain’s Carrier Strike Group linked up with the US aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush in a naval exercise codenamed Exercise Saxon Warrior.

The operation included 15 warships from various NATO countries, more than 100 aircraft and nearly 10,000 armed forces personnel. Among other ships deployed were two Type 23 frigates--HMS Westminster and HMS Iron Duke—the destroyer USS Donald Cook, missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the Norwegian frigate HNoMS Helge Ingstad.

The exercise paused briefly as the UK’s just launched £3 billion aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth--currently undergoing sea trials before entering service—sailed alongside it. Measuring 280 metres and weighing 65,000 tonnes, the HMS Queen Elizabeth is the largest ship ever built for the Royal Navy. Britain’s second new carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, is being fitted out ahead of its expected launch in 2020.

The USS George H. W. Bush took part following its deployment in the Middle East, where its jet fighters “conducted more than 30 strikes against ISIS targets,” according to the Daily Mail .

The US Navy said the exercise was carried out to develop “theatre-specific combat skills” and enhance cooperation between multi-national forces. It would offer a “myriad of challenges to the multi-national and multi-platform force by creating a diverse and unpredictable war environment based on fictional geo-political and military scenarios.”

The UK Defence Journal cited Commander Eric Retz, US Navy Carrier Strike Group 2’s operations officer, who said, “Saxon Warrior will test every aspect of our war-fighting capabilities-from air wing strikes to the self-defence of the carrier.”

Ahead of HMS Queen’s Elizabeth’s launch, British armed forces personnel have been embedded with the USS George H. W. Bush, to “learn and build their individual and ultimately collective skill set,” said Commodore Andrew Bretton, the commander of the Royal Navy’s carrier strike group.

Britain has not been able to deploy its own aircraft carrier since the Ark Royal was decommissioned in 2011.

Bretton told the Press Association, “We have been out of carrier strike operations for several years, so the opportunity to learn from our American cousins is extremely welcome, and has been really important in enabling us to accelerate that programme.”

Captain Jerry Kyd, HMS Queen Elizabeth Commanding Officer, described the US-led fleet as an “awesome embodiment of maritime power projection. And given that the United Kingdom’s Carrier Strike Group Commander and his staff are embedded on board the US carrier for Saxon Warrior shows the closeness of our relationship with the US Navy and the importance that both nations place on the delivery of the UK’s Carrier Strike programme.”

Kyd emphasised, “HMS Queen Elizabeth is at the start of her journey to generate to full warfighting capability, but we are working hard to ready ourselves to take our place in operations and the line of battle alongside our closest allies.”

US health catastrophe: Drug overdose deaths approach 60,000 a year

E.P. Milligan 

Drug overdose deaths in the United States are rising sharply, the National Center for Health Statistics reported Tuesday. For the year-long period ending January 2017, total US drug overdose deaths totaled 64,070, up 21 percent from 52,898 for the previous year. This is equivalent to 175 people dying every day from drug overdoses.

Based on more comprehensive data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, whose figures lag behind the social reality by about a year, more than 500,000 Americans have died of drug overdoses in the period between 2000 and 2015—roughly equivalent to the population of Sacramento, California.

More Americans have died of drug overdoses in the 21st century than in all the US wars of the 20th and 21st century combined: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The horrific scale of loss does not stem from an unexpected or unstoppable epidemic, like the medieval Black Death or the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919. It is not a natural but a social plague, the byproduct of the collapse of living standards and the destruction of jobs for tens of millions of working people.

The focal point of the drug overdose epidemic is deindustrialized America: factory towns, centers of coal mining or timber harvesting, areas targeted for devastation by the profit system.

Broad swathes of the United States are barren shells of what once used to be. Factories and mills have closed, towns have withered, schools and hospitals have shuttered. Unemployment and underemployment run rampant, while the vast majority of jobs available to workers come with pay so miserable most have to take on a second or even third job just to survive. A decade after the financial meltdown of 2008, social inequality has reached intolerable proportions. It is within this context that one must understand the drug epidemic.

In previous decades, overdose deaths mainly afflicted the young and a subculture of the drug-addicted, many of them socially isolated or aging. This is no longer the case. There has been an 8 percent spike in overdose death rates for individuals between the ages of 25 to 44 in every racial and ethnic group in the US during the period of 2010 to 2015. Over the span of a mere five years, a substantial section of the American workforce—individuals in the prime of their lives—has been killed off.

Drug overdoses now account for more deaths than guns or car accidents. The overall death rate in 2015 was significantly higher than during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, the last time that US life expectancy actually decreased. The driving force is opioid overdoses, which now account for around six in 10 drug deaths. This is in large part due to the influx of cheap and accessible opioid prescription medicines over the past decade, substances produced, distributed and heavily marketed by American pharmaceutical companies, at enormous profit.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported that overdose deaths reached a record 19.9 per 100,000 people in the third quarter of 2016—a sharp spike from the previously recorded 16.7 over the same three-month period a year earlier. The first two quarters of 2016 now show death rates of 18.9 and 19.3, also far larger than previous data suggested.

Even the current report remains contested by some experts, who think real numbers are higher still. In a separate study released Monday, Professor Christopher Ruhm, a public policy and economics professor at University of Virginia, argues that opioid death rates may be as much as 24 percent greater than the official totals.

The American ruling class has no solution to this health crisis except its usual prescription for every social problem: more police repression. At a press briefing Tuesday, President Trump pledged a law and order rampage. At the very same press conference he issued recklessly bellicose threats against North Korea, Trump pledged to “beat this horrible situation” of overdose deaths by beefing up the police force and escalating the war on drugs.

Trump criticized the Obama administration for being too lenient on prosecuting drug addicts and small-scale peddlers, pledging to crack down harder on the victims of the overdose epidemic. “We’re not going to let it go,” he said. “The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place. If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem.”

Trump’s authoritarian response will not result in the arrest of those truly responsible for the crisis: the CEOs of the major pharmaceutical companies. For years, corporations and investors alike have generated immense profits by flooding the medical market with highly-addictive prescription opioids like oxycontin, oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl.

The press briefing was held to highlight Trump’s refusal to adopt the recommendations of his own special commission, headed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, which called for the declaration of a national emergency in the opioid crisis, to speed the flow of resources, in both money and medical manpower, to the worst-hit areas.

Instead, Trump insisted he will end the crisis through the building of a wall between Mexico and the United States, which he claimed would stop the flow of heroin into the country. To make matters worse, his budget proposal for fiscal 2018 aims to reduce funding for addiction treatment, research and prevention efforts.

Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Secretary Tom Price echoed Trump’s decision not to declare a national emergency in a statement to reporters yesterday, putting forth the contemptible lie that the epidemic was neither “an infectious disease” nor “a specific threat to public health.” The DHHS declared a state of emergency in Puerto Rico last year following the report of more than 10,000 Zika cases. Another was declared during the 2009-2010 flu season amid fears of a potential pandemic.

The impact of the opioid crisis is far greater.

Proposed cuts in Medicaid and other federal health programs will only magnify the scope of the drug crisis. A study issued on July 31 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found that uninsured people were twice as likely as those with health insurance to report prescription opioid misuse and also had higher rates of use disorders. It also revealed a correlation between mental health issues and opioid use. For many at-risk individuals, the threat of jail rather than drug counseling and treatment is essentially a death sentence.

Macron to eliminate housing benefits for 50,000 people in France

Kumaran Ira

While French President Emmanuel Macron announced only a €5 cut to monthly Personal Housing Aid (APL) for low-income people, the state is in fact threatening to totally cut off tens of thousands of people from housing benefits.

Due to a benefit cut-off set up in January 2007, anyone receiving less than €15 monthly in housing aid is thrown off the APL rolls. According to BFM-Business, “With the across-the-board cut now announced, all those receiving €15-19 monthly will simply be thrown out of the system.”

According to data of the National Fund for Family Benefits (CNAF), nearly 50,000 people will be totally cut off from housing aid. This includes 20,224 recipients of APL, 8,415 recipients of Family Housing Aid (ALF), and 19,757 recipients of Social Housing Aid (ALS).

The French state spends approximately €18 billion yearly on housing aid. Thanks to this €5 monthly cut, it plans to cut spending €32 million per month, or €360 million per year. Thus, with its €5 monthly cut, the state is not just slashing yearly benefits by €60 per recipient; it is cutting up to €228 per year, given the many thousands of recipients who are receiving between €15 and €19 per month.

This cut symbolises the class character of the Macron administration, which arrogantly slashes benefits for students and working families while handing over untold billions to the super-rich.

The APL cut is simply an initial taste of tens of billions of euros in social cuts and attacks on the working class that Macron has been preparing to unveil since his election in May, while he simultaneously hands billions of euros in gifts to the wealthy. These gifts, including cuts to taxes on large fortunes (ISF) and on financial securities income, would cost some €7 billion, according to the French Observatory of Economic Situations (OFCE).

It is not hard to see which social benefits are set to benefit under Macron. According to the news magazine Marianne, “The judgment is devastating: for the top 0.01 percent in this country, the two key measures of Macron would mean tax cuts on the order of €1 million per year and per household.”

According to an OFCE research note, Macron’s tax cuts will net on average €4,225 for the top 1 percent of Frenchmen, that is, a 3.1 percent increase in purchasing power. However, for the bottom 90 percent of the French population, the average reduction in taxes will be €55, or 0.3 percent on average. This minute gain will be compensated, however, by deep cuts to key social services on which masses of people rely in France.

According to Marianne’s calculations based on OFCE data, “in fact it is even more interesting to ask who benefits among the wealthiest of the wealthy, at the top of the income ladder, that is to say for the wealthiest 0.01 percent. In this income layer, a couple with two children has income from financial securities of €3.4 million of the overall annual income of €6.3 million. For them, the tax cut arising from the unitary tax withholding system [replacing the ISF] would be considerable, nearly €450,000.”

This measure exposes the illusions in Macron promoted by all the major French media, that he was a young entrepreneur who would by sheer dynamism alone revitalise France’s economy. In fact, he plans to make France more attractive to investors by massively expanding social inequality. He aims to intensify austerity by carrying out social reforms, including the labour law, aiming to eliminate all the social rights obtained by workers in the struggles of the twentieth century, while also spending billions of euros on wars and the army.

On August 2, the French parliament definitively adopted the enabling act authorising the Macron administration to rewrite the labour law by decree. The reform, which is deeply unpopular, includes measures such as imposing a maximum on fines for unfair dismissal in the labour courts; allowing enterprises to negotiate contracts violating national labour laws and industry-level accords; and facilitating sackings.

Macron also plans to cut pensions and unemployment benefits by decree. The introduction of a pay-in system for pensions is intended to allow the state to move towards the abolition of the social right to a fully publicly financed pension. With unemployment benefit “reform,” oversight and harassment of job seekers will be reinforced, while the duration of unemployment benefits will be cut.

The announcements of cuts by the Macron administration are provoking broad opposition among workers. Though he was inaugurated only three months ago, Macron and his government are already unpopular. According to recent polls, his approval rating has fallen rapidly, to 40 percent, the fastest fall for a newly elected president since the creation of the office of the presidency in 1958.

This collapse in popularity is the population’s initial judgment on Macron’s attempt to set up a naked dictatorship of the financial aristocracy. The housing benefit cuts, a wage freeze in the public sector, and a planned tax hike on retirees are all provoking growing anger.

Ifop pollster Jérôme Fourquet commented that Macron’s fallen popularity is due to the government’s “austerity policy…[and] various discontents and complaints coming from very diverse layers of the population,” including working women, public sector workers, and retirees.

Death of Hollywood stuntman highlights dangerous working conditions

Glenn Mulwray 

John Bernecker, a 33-year-old stuntman on AMC’s popular show The Walking Dead, died July 13 from injuries suffered from a 22-foot fall on the show’s set in Georgia.

Bernecker fell from a balcony onto a concrete floor, suffering a head injury, and was transported by helicopter to Atlanta Medical Center, where he was pronounced brain-dead and taken off life support later that afternoon. According to an assistant director on the show, Bernecker missed a safety cushion “just by inches.”

His death is only the latest in a long history of deaths and devastating injuries suffered on film sets since the very earliest days of film production.

Over the more than a century of film production worldwide, precise records of on-set deaths and injuries have not been kept, attesting to the callousness of the studio system’s mad rush for profits. But estimates are that stunt work alone accounts for more than half of all film-related injuries, with five deaths occurring for every 2,000 injuries, a rate that is higher than in law enforcement, road construction or mining and puts the number of dead throughout the history of film production well into the hundreds.

According to a 2016 Associated Press (AP) report, at least 43 people have died on sets in the US since 1990, and more than 150 left with life-altering injuries. Despite the significant numbers, the dangers of working in the film industry have been systematically obscured from public view.

“I think it’s always been something that’s been swept under the rug,” journalist Stephen Farber told the AP. Farber has written extensively of the aftermath of the deadly 1982 Twilight Zone: The Movie helicopter crash that killed actor Vic Morrow and two children.

Deaths and injuries on film sets often go under-reported and improperly investigated. More often than not, witnesses are reluctant to come forward in an industry where the vast majority of workers have no way to protect themselves from retribution for blowing the whistle on unsafe conditions. In an industry with a history of political blacklisting, being a whistleblower carries the risk of seeing one’s career destroyed overnight.

Fatalities related to film and television productions declined steadily through the 1990s as digital effects increasingly came to replace risky stunts. Since 2010 that trend has reversed as producers have demanded more spectacular and dramatic footage on ever decreasing budgets and particularly with the proliferation of reality shows competing for the attention of viewers in an increasingly crowded field.

In 2014, basic safety rules were discarded when a bed and film crew were brought on to active train tracks on a bridge crossing the Altamaha River in Wayne County, Georgia during the filming of the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider. A train arrived on the bridge and collided with the bed, instantly killing first assistant camera person Sarah Jones and injuring seven others.

The film’s producers had previously been denied permission to film on the tracks but decided to continue shooting illegally without informing the rail company that owned the bridge. Not even a minimum level of precaution was taken, such as stationing a lookout further down the tracks. The crew was informed they would have 60 seconds to vacate the bridge in the event a train appeared.

David Michaels, then Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), told the L.A. Times in 2015, “Often when we investigate fatalities, we find that they were predictable and preventable. They often involved cutting corners, hurrying things up to save money or both and the result is tragedy.”

In March of 2015 the trend came to a head when two helicopters collided during filming in Argentina for French reality TV show Dropped. All 10 people on both helicopters perished in the horrific accident. In December of that year another helicopter crash in Argentina, this time for an MTV reality show, killed the two people on board.

“It’s truly remarkable to me that production companies can use ultra-advanced technology to make spectacular films but too often they won’t spend the modest resources necessary to make sure their workers are not injured or killed on the job,” Michaels remarked.

Despite such protestations from Michaels, a leading work safety official in the Obama administration, the federal government has made only token efforts to punish the egregious negligence and callousness of the major studios toward their production workers that has taken place during the bloody uptick in accidents that have occurred under the Obama’s presidency.

The 2016 AP study revealed that in response to 15 fatal on-set accidents the OSHA has levied $404,000 in fines. As the agency’s fines are often contested, that figure has been reduced to $236,000 on appeals.

Just as with fines it levies on other large corporations, OSHA’s penalties for the major studios and production companies do not even amount to a footnote in the financial reports of an industry that made a record $11.4 billion last year.

Picking up right where Obama left off, the policies of the Trump administration have been entirely geared toward protecting the profits of major corporations from government regulation. Under Trump’s proposed 2018 budget that would see defense and security spending increase by $54 billion to $603 billion, the budget of the Department of Labor, which OSHA is a part of, would be reduced by $2.5 billion. Indeed, since Michaels left his post at the conclusion of Obama’s term, it has become another in a long list of federal appointments Trump has left unfilled.

Safety issues on set have become a major point of contention in discussions surrounding the tentative contract the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) agreed to on July 4 with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers regulating pay and working conditions of actors and performers on television and movie sets.

SAG-AFTRA’s lack of regard for safety was revealed in a 2015 incident on the Georgia set of the Lionsgate Films sci-fi film Allegiant. During a chaotic fighting scene involving more than 130 untrained extras—including 30 children, some as young as four years old—steel and aluminum weapons, some with sharpened edges, were distributed as props.

When a whistleblower on set called the SAG-AFTRA safety hotline to report the dangerous environment for the child actors, the person got only a recording. The whistleblower proceeded to call SAG-AFTRA’s stunt and safety office in Los Angeles, SAG-AFTRA’s rep in Georgia and the union’s Southern regional office in Miami, receiving no answer or recordings.

SAG-AFTRA’s unwillingness, and one might add, inability, to fight for improved safety on sets, particularly over the past decade that has seen an increase in death and injury as the competition for viewers has intensified, is a reaction to the same pressures that have led unions in all industries to collude with corporations in eroding safety and workplace conditions.

US police killings on track to reach all-time high in 2017

George Gallanis 

As of this writing, the number of people killed by the police in the United States has likely increased. The count as of August 7, 2017 stands at 746 for the 2017 calendar year according to killedbypolice.net. Such an amount is unprecedented for the same time in previous years. If police killings stay consistent, 2017 will have the highest number of police killings on record.

While data from killedbypolice.net and the Washington Post is limited to recent years, both place 2015 as having the highest recorded number of people killed by police. Both, moreover, have recorded more killings than the official Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics (FBI), which has routinely undercounted killings.

As the Post has noted, “The FBI gathers information on fatal police shootings, but that program is based on voluntary reporting by police agencies and covers only cases in which police fatally shoot people who are committing felonies. The Post ’s data has revealed a dramatic undercount by the FBI.”

According to killedbypolice.net:

● In 2014, police killed 663 people by August 7, with 1,114 killed by the year’s end.

● In 2015, police killed 725 by August 7, with 1,216 killed by the year’s end.

● In 2016, police killed 714 by August 7, with 1,162 by the year’s end. The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, recorded significantly lower deaths. Its data, nonetheless, also reveals a similar trend.

● In 2015, police killed 592 people by August 7, 2015, totaling 991 killed for the year.

● In 2016, police killed 589 people by August 7, 2016, totaling 963 killed for the year.

● Presently, the Post puts the count at 594 killed as of August 7 in 2017.

Both show that 2015 was the previous peak year for police killings, with a slight decline in 2016. Comparatively, the current count of police killings taken on August 7, 2017 is higher than any year at the same point in time from both killedbypolice.net and the Post. For 2017, the total number of killings averages to 3.5 a day. In just the first seven days of this month, from Tuesday, August 1 to Monday, August 7, US police killed at least 28 people, or four people every day.

Included amongst the dead is 32-year-old Kyle Andrew Lankford from Dickson County, Tennessee, shot by police on August 6. Police hounded Lanford in a police chase after he allegedly stole a car. Lanford was subsequently shot dead after he allegedly pulled out a knife after the pursuit ended. Last year, Lankford was arrested in Dickson County for the petty crimes of stealing, driving while drunk and on a revoked license, evading arrest and vandalism.

Then there is 15-year-old Kemonte Cobbs killed by Gary, Indiana police on August 2. Cobbs and four other individuals robbed a Verizon Wireless store in Munster, Indiana, 45 minutes southeast from Chicago, Illinois. The five individuals, including Cobbs, drove away from the store and were pursued by the police. Eventually, all five fled the vehicle, at which point Cobbs was shot dead for allegedly pointing a gun at a cop.

For the many thousands killed in an encounter with the police, most have had the misfortune of being born poor or becoming poor and destitute, forced into a life of desperation, violence, drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and suicide.

In Tennessee, where Andrew Lankford lived, a festering opioid epidemic took the lives of 1,451 people in 2015, up from 342 in 1999. Moreover, many of the state’s residents live in poverty. In 2014, 18.4 percent of Tennessee’s population scraped by below the official poverty line; many more live near poverty.

Gary, Indiana, where 15-year-old Kemonte Cobbs was killed, was a once major industrial hub which produced massive quantities of steel. Gary’s massive steel plants employed many of the city’s residents, providing them with relatively decent paying jobs.

Through decades of deindustrialization, much of Gary now sits as a boneyard of the steel industry. In 1970, the US Steel Gary Works employed over 30,000. In 1990 it declined to just 6,000. Presently US Steel Gary Works employs 5,100 workers. According to city-data.com, in 2015 38.6 percent of Gary residents lived below the poverty line. In 2013, the Gary Department of Redevelopment estimated that one third of all homes in the city are unoccupied or abandoned. The city’s population has collapsed by more than 50 percent since its peak in 1960.

Police violence is inextricably bound up to with the astronomical growth of social inequality and intensification of class tensions. Today, eight people own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. In America, the wealthy live 15 years longer than the poor.

The enormous social chasm which exists in the United States is increasingly untenable and the American ruling class is taking note. With massive social upheavals on the horizon, it is seeking to defend its wealth, power and privileges by laying the framework for police-state rule.

The number of police officers working in the US has risen by a quarter of a million from three decades ago, according to the FBI. In 1975, there were 400,000 police officers throughout the US. Today, that number is more than 700,000.

According to a study entitled “OpenTheBooks Snapshot Report – The Militarization of Local Police Departments,” 1.5 million military weapons, equipment and related items have been transferred from the Department of Defense (DoD) to federal, state and local law enforcement units since 2006.

The report found that “thousands of units of government across America received military equipment” including “park districts, forest preserves, hometown police departments, junior colleges, universities, county sheriffs, natural resource and public safety departments, state police – and Homeland Security, Interior and the Justice Department.”

The items amount to $2.2 billion worth of gear and include “helicopters and airplanes, armored trucks and cars, tens of thousands of M16 and M14 rifles, thousands of bayonets, mine detectors and many other types of weaponry.”