The Flawed Institution: Australian Marriage And The Same-Sex Debate

Binoy Kampmark

It’s a pretty curious thing to see: marriage being defended at all.  Like slavery, and not necessarily inconsistent with it, marriage is an institution. It embraces codes. It imparts obligations, duties, and rights.  And it creeps up on you.

In Australia, flawed campaigns are being waged in its name.  This has been occasioned by an absence of parliamentary will.  Abdicating a responsibility that was clearly given to them by the High Court of Australia in the 2013 case between the Commonwealth and the Australian Capital Territory, parliamentarians will be waiting for the results of a postal plebiscite that should not be taken for granted by anybody.  The farce will then continue on what form of bill will be voted upon, if, indeed, there will be a bill put forth at all.

Taking this survey into account (the wording by the Turnbull government on this is intentional) is, however, hard to take seriously.  Lacking the austere gravitas and purpose of a referendum, it only promises to take the temperature of the Australian populace, a reading of that confused patient known as the public.

Then there is the nagging question of whether the plebiscite will even go ahead.  A sword of Damocles hangs over its very legality, and the holder of that weapon – the High Court of Australia – may yet find against it.  Advocates against it have argued that such a measure cannot bypass parliamentary will.

As for the arguments for marriage, these have been variant and even idiosyncratic.  Conservatives groups for gay marriage argue that you strengthen it by virtue of expanding it.  The more, it seems, the merrier.  The stance is outlined by Nick Greiner, former New South Wakes premier.

Those in favour of not enlarging the tent – such as Senator Matt Canavan – embrace the erroneous notion that an ancient institution should not be changed in terms of gender.  What has been done for millennia must be right. (He forgets that the same arguments could be used in apologias for genocide, slavery and domestic violence.)

The good senator is somewhat confused in insisting that the institution needs more than love.  It would be far more accurate to say that property and securing it against challengers has been the traditional role of marriage.  Love tended to be found outside it.

The issue of marrying for love is a charmingly recent phenomenon.  It was very much the understanding in European aristocratic circles that marriage would only ever be to keep the line of succession safe. If you so happened to be a Hapsburg operating the levers of power five hundred years ago, you would also see marriage as a means of acquiring other properties (states, possessions, colonies).

The issue of children raises other fascinating points.  For Canavan, the bond between males and females called for “a special word and a special institution” because of its link to breeding. A strict reading of marriage as a breeding machine puts those heterosexual couples who don’t wish to add to their global carbon footprint at odds with the religiously minded.  Marriage entails issue, and blessed are the breeders, despite adding to population bomb.  Even on that score, same-sex couples can have children, even if a heterosexual element is still required to supply the, to put it indelicately, raw matter.

As for the issue of miracles, nothing could be less so.  Offspring tend to be an automatic affair that only promises to disappear when the process of reproduction becomes sexless, a dry, mess free laboratory matter sketched in such dystopian delights as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

The campaign has also given a foretaste of the nastiness to come. The pro-marriage conservatives insist that children who are raised in any environment that is not hetero-normative are bound to have a few screws loose.

Again, we have a problem of false attribution of value: since the conventional marriage produces children, it follows that it is good.  This is hardly a good argument when stacked up against those dysfunctional children who come from that euphemised context of a “broken home”. Broken homes also produce broken children, and heterosexual couples can be damn good at it.

Advocates for the status quo have also brought the issue of freedom of religion into play.  But this is a deceptive and disingenuous way of introducing discrimination via the backdoor.  Traditional anti-discrimination statutes would thereby be circumvented by the bigoted notion that you could refuse to hold a service or bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The novelty of this debate is seeing how advocates from the Left perspective have marched in favour of same-sex marriage when marriage itself has lost its appeal to many progressives.  The only argument left, then, is the equality of choice: same-sex couples should be perfectly entitled to enter into a flawed, anachronistic institution should they wish to. We should all be entitled to make our own mistakes.

Cuba Has A Higher Life Expectancy Than The U.S- Why?

Arshad M Khan

So frequently is the word ‘freedom’ employed in the political vernacular, it has come to mean whatever the listener desires. For Mr. Trump, it is one word in the volcanic plume countering a society’s rhythm, designed to attract attention. That he has garnered in spades, enough to win him the highest office in the land.

To many freedom is an absence of worry. The desire and need for a social fabric knit well to support the basic prerequisites: food, shelter, health and education. None of them charity, because they are an investment in the fundamental source of a society’s well-being: human capital.

The selfishness of the haves has contributed to loss of competitiveness. The old GM was paying $100-$200 per car in health insurance costs, and manufacturers were also forced to provide remedial education for high school graduates to enter the world of complex modern manufacturing. Neither was a similar burden on competitors from Japan and Germany. Suffice to say though that this was not the only reason for problems.

But selfishness is not all with regard to healthcare, the focus of this piece. The biggest culprit by far is general complacency. Added to a Republican majority in Congress and Donald Trump, there is little hope in the near future.

Reading about healthcare recently, I came across an article in a prestigious magazine offering a solution. Affiliated to Stanford, the authors were a MD/MBA candidate and a venture capitalist adjunct. It says it all. Why would a doctor want an MBA? It is not an uncommon program, by the way. The answer is simple and obvious: the medical profession is big business. Did the authors have a prescription? Indeed they did. Force everyone to have insurance and force insurers to insist on primary care.

As a percent of GDP, the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. Yet it lags far behind in measures like child and maternal mortality, life expectancy an chronic illness.

A survey last November by the New York based Commonwealth Fund compared the U.S. with 10 other advanced countries. The Netherlands came out on top; the U.S. dead last. By coincidence, the Dutch are the tallest people on earth. “U.S. adults are sicker and have the highest rates of material hardship,” observed Robin Osborn who led the survey.

Of note, despite dilapidated facilities in Cuba, universal healthcare has paid off. Life expectancy is higher than the U.S. by about a year.

The slogan ‘Medicare for all’ is catchy, and, were it to happen, would transform healthcare. All the same, Medicare has gaps throwing people back into the arms of insurers, and into the morass of bills from hospitals, accounting by insurers as to what is covered, and arguments back and forth; not to mention overcharges by hospitals, which have their own litany of unbelievable tales.

In the British system — under attack by the Conservatives for some time and being gradually dismantled — no one ever sees a bill. It allowed post Second World War generations of poor and disadvantaged to bring up healthy, educated children who contributed to the growth of the country.

If there is an answer to the problems in the U.S. system, it will have to come from independent experts. Profit oriented hospital corporations buying up community hospitals and headed by multi-million salaried CEOs is not the answer. Neither are for-profit insurers. Who has the guts to pour ‘liquid plumber’ down this clogged-up drain? That is the real question. The Canadian politician who fought for their healthcare system is a national hero. Any takers here?

Climate Breakdown

Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

Climate breakdown, as George Monbiot calls it, is happening before our eyes at the same time the science on climate change grows stronger and has wider acceptance. Hurricane Harvey, which struck at the center of the petroleum industry – the heart of climate denialism – provided a glimpse of the new normal of climate crisis-induced events. In Asia, this week the climate message was even stronger where at least 1,200 people died and 41 million were impacted. By 2050, one billion people could be displaced by climate crises.

Climate disasters demonstrate the immense failure of government at all levels. The world has known about the likely disastrous impacts of climate change for decades. Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which  operates under the auspices of the United Nations and was founded in 1988. The IPCC published the first of five reports in 1990. Thousands of scientists and other experts write and review the reports and 120 countries participate in the process. The most common surprises in successive reports are more rapid temperature increases and greater impacts than scientists had predicted.

We can No Longer Ignore the Science and the Evidence Before Us

The science on climate change has become extremely strong as the final draft of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Climate Science Special Report showed. The document was leaked last month because scientists feared the Trump administration would amend, suppress or destroy it. The report describes overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change impacting us right now and the urgent need to get to zero net carbon emissions.

It is not just science that confirms the climate crisis, it is also people’s experience with extreme weather, constant record breaking temperatures, and deadly heat waves as well as collapsing mountains in Alaska, the shrinking Colorado River and an ice free Arctic as a few examples. People have experienced a series of extreme storms – Hurricanes Harvey, Katrina and Sandy being the most notable this century –droughts, fires and other physical evidence that make it hard to deny climate catastrophe. Climate denialism requires shutting one’s eyes to obvious realities when the truth is the Earth is warmer than it has been in 120,000 years.

There is no doubt that these storms are made more deadly by climate change. Harvey was a tropical storm until it went over the warm Gulf of Mexico and grew into a hurricane with record rainfall. Climate expert Michael Mann explains that warmer water resulted in greater moisture being absorbed, more rain and more flooding. Sea level rise added to the greater flooding. The stalling of the storm over Houston was also predicted by climate forecasters because the jet stream pattern has changed. Climate change had the same effects on Hurricane Sandy in New York City.

Science is denied because many profit from the dirty energy status quo and denying or even hiding the existence of climate change. There is litigation against oil and gas companies and an SEC investgation because records show they knew their products were causing climate change going back to the 70s but funded research to hide reality.  ExxonMobil is being sued by shareholders for misleading investors and faces shareholder challenges. Coastal communities are suing dozens of oil and gas companies for continuing to pollute after they knew the damage they were doing. Former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, now the Secretary of State, used a fake email account to discuss climate change and many of those emails are now missing. Youth suing over the destruction of their environment and climate change are seeking Tillerson’s testimony and emails. There are many climate criminals to point to with the dirty energy companies at the top of the list. There are 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of green house gas emissions. Good government would hold them responsible.

Climate protesters outside of White House. Photo by Susan Walsh for AP.

Historic Failure of Government

The three decade life of the IPCC has coincided with deep corruption of government by the energy industry, sprawl developers and other dirty energy profiteers. The anti-science movement in the United States, which includes government officials, industry and others who deny climate change exists, provides cover for elected officials to do nothing or act inadequately on the urgent reality of climate chaos so that corporations continue to threaten the planet.

The United States elected a climate denier, Donald Trump, who describes climate change as a hoax and has appointed officials who are complicit in denying climate change, closely tied to polluting industries and favor policies that result in climate breakdown, and many of whom were part of the misinformation network on climate. Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, putting the US out of step with the world on the issue. The Trump administration has sought to hide evidence of climate change, but people have been sharing climate documents with other governments and scientific groups before he hid them. Thirteen cities joined together to publish Trump-deleted climate data. Trump has conducted a witch hunt against believers in climate change. These actions have resulted in the unusual step of climate scientists protesting the Trump administration.

But, even presidents who recognize climate change reality have not taken action to confront it.  Unlike Trump, President Obama played a more hidden hand in his undermining of climate policy. His energy strategy favored “all of the above” energy including oil and gas and his office approved carbon infrastructure and off-shore drilling. Obama showed dirty energy extraction is a bi-partisan concern, as Alison Rose Levy clearly reminds us. Obama undermined the 2009 Copenhagen climate accord and weakened the Paris agreement. He was preceded by the marinated in oil Bush-Cheney administration. Those two administrations wasted 16 years of critical time to respond to climate change.

Federal decisions had local impacts as can be seen in Houston, the fourth largest city. The federal government inadequately regulated superfund sites, pollution from oil refineries and chemical plants in the area. These were all part of “Cancer Alley” or the “Chemical Coast” – names used to describe the petrochemical capital of the United States. When flooding came, so did disaster in these areas. A  1.5 mile radius around one chemical plant had to be evacuated and toxic waste sites flooded.  Of course, the environmental racism that led to these dangerous polluters being put in poor neighborhoods, usually communities of color, is now resulting in massive pollution in those areas and will cause health problems.

But inadequate response to climate change often includes state and local governments (some states and cities are taking positive steps). Texas is an example of decades of failed government as it has taken no action to adapt to climate change over the last three decades. Bills were introduced to do so but the legislature failed to act. Why? Because the laws included the words “climate change,” e.g. calling for a “climate change vulnerability assessment” and were perceived as a threat to the oil and gas industry.

The metropolitan area of Houston contains 6.5 million people over urban sprawl the size of New Jersey. Zoning regulations allowed for unregulated growth, even in areas prone to flooding, creating a large population on a flood plain. The area has had a long relationship with the petrochemical industry which has been able to get its way, but being business friendly to the industry is going to become very costly. The city is sinking at 2.2 inches a year in large part because of oil and water being pumped from under it.

The failure to act on climate for the last three decades also means that government will spend more as each crisis has multi-hundred million or even multi-billion dollar costs. In addition, people today are leaving a bill of hundreds of trillions of dollars to future generations. It would be much less expensive if government acted responsibly and put in place infrastructure and technology to adapt to climate change as well as to ameliorate it now. The disaster in Houston is an opportunity to make those changes.

The historic failure of government action on climate change shows a fatal flaw in a representative democracy that is based on the corruption of big business money and serves the corporate interests who profit from the flawed status quo.

People Rise to the Challenge

Throughout much of this history, particularly in the 21st Century, people have been challenging the dominance of the oil, gas and coal industries and pushing government to confront climate change.

Even before Trump came into office, there were massive protests during the Obama administration against the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline and other carbon infrastructure throughout the country.  People protested the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is an arm of the oil and gas industry disguised as a federal agency. Obama’s FERC commissioners were a rubber stamp for the industry, now, Trump’s FERC continues the practice.

People were escalating actions during the Obama era saying the time for direct action on climate change is now. Protests were on an upswing before Trump was elected. Last September, Bill McKibben recalculated the climate math showing how time was running out.

From the first day of the Trump administration people were taking action. Climate activists blockaded Trump’s inauguration making it more difficult for people to attend. In addition to protests against specific carbon energy products, people mobilized for #DayAgainstDenial Protests across U.S. to call attention to climate change.

People pushed businesses and local governments to pledge to reduce carbon emissions resulting in over 1,400 U.S. cities, states and businesses vowing to meet Paris climate commitments.  Last week, nine eastern states jointly agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent more than their previous target.

There is widespread climate change action, which is ‘unstoppable’ despite Trump’s policies. In fact, Trump’s presidency may be leading to an escalation in movement action as people know we can no longer hope to win by simply voting or speaking out. People are showing they are willing to risk going to jail for a livable future. And, we have begun to see cases where juries are not willing to convict people for climate change protests.

Climate change affects each of us and is an issue that unites us. When crisis hits, we need to act as a community in mutual aid of each other. Those community relationships can be built now so we are ready in times of crisis.

The only way we can mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown is by working together toward the common goals of reducing our carbon footprint, moving to a net zero carbon energy economy as soon as possible and putting in place the infrastructure needed to adapt to the climate crisis.

Australian government strips asylum seekers of all housing and welfare payments

Max Newman

On Monday, the Turnbull government suddenly stripped around 100 asylum seekers currently living in Australia of their pitiful income support of $100 a week and demanded they leave their public housing within three weeks, effectively leaving them destitute and homelessness.

The asylum seekers had been transferred to Australia for medical treatment from the country’s offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. While the initial targets are single people, who may include pregnant women, around 400 other men, women and children, including more than 37 infants, could be next.

This is a premeditated and calculated attack on the basic legal and democratic rights of refugees, designed to give them no choice but to go back into indefinite detention on Nauru or Manus, or be deported to the countries they fled. It is part of a new turn by the increasingly unstable Liberal-National Coalition government to try to whip up a nationalistic and xenophobic constituency.

Defending the move on talkback radio, Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton, one of the government’s key figures, branded lawyers who represent asylum seekers as “un-Australian.” In other words, it is treasonous for lawyers to perform their obligations to defend the legal rights of their clients.

Dutton demonised both the lawyers and the refugees, saying lawyers were “playing the game with these people,” who were taking Australia “for a ride.”

The government is using a new form of visa—the “final departure Bridging E Visa”—which is the first step to deportation. Immigration Department letters, leaked to the media, told the asylum seekers: “You will be expected to support yourself in the community until departing Australia. From Monday 28 August you will need to find money each week for your own accommodation costs.”

The letters added: “From this date, you will also be responsible for all your other living costs like food, clothing and transport. You are expected to sign the Code of Behaviour when you are released into the Australian community. The Code of Behaviour outlines how you are to behave in the community.”

Anyone who violates the repressive code can be deported. Under the code, visa holders must adhere to “Australian values,” not withhold information from officials, and not engage in any “anti-social” or “disruptive” activities.

According to the department, “anti-social” means “an action that is against the order of society. This may include damaging property, spitting or swearing in public or other actions that other people might find offensive. “Disruptive” means “to cause disorder or to disturb someone or something.”

Under previous visas, the refugees were not permitted to work and had to depend on charities. Now, they will be permitted to work, but many cannot due to medical conditions and employers are unlikely to hire people who are living under constant threat of removal.

Having endured great suffering, fled persecution and then been incarcerated in hellhole conditions on Nauru or Manus Island, these innocent people are now being reduced to penury to try to force them back to harm. They are being cruelly punished in order to deter any refugees from attempting to seek asylum in Australia.

For months, the government has also threatened thousands of other asylum seekers, currently living in Australia, with forced removal to their countries of origin if they do not complete complex refugee visa applications by October 1.

The government’s latest actions have provoked widespread outrage and thousands of people across the country have offered sanctuary to the asylum seekers. On social media, people have offered rooms in their homes, food and clothing. Numbers of churches have offered protection and financial support.

This is not the first time that the government has sought to evict the refugees. Protests erupted around Australia in March last year when the government announced plans to remove 267 people back to the offshore camps.

At the time, the Turnbull government claimed to have backed down from its assault, but as the WSWS pointed out, this was only a temporary reprieve. Various online protest groups, the Greens and pseudo-left groups heralded this as a great victory, and proof that the government and the rest of the political establishment could be pressured into changing course.

This “Let Them Stay” campaign was also designed to funnel popular opposition back behind the political parties that threw the refugees into detention in the first place—namely the Greens-backed Labor government that reopened Manus Island and Nauru in 2012.

A similar line up is occurring again. Because of groundswell opposition, Labor politicians are attempting to distance themselves from the government’s move, while reiterating their bipartisan commitment that no refugee who tries to enter Australia by boat will ever be permitted to settle in the country.

Labor leader Bill Shorten described the government’s policy as “cowardly and cruel” and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s “weakest move yet.”

At the same time, he claimed that it had “nothing to do with strong borders or stopping people-smugglers.” These are the code words that both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition have used to package their anti-refugee regime. Shorten restated his agreement with the government that “we don’t want to see the people smugglers back in business.”

Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale said he was seeking advice on whether the creation of the new bridging visa could be disallowed in the Senate. “We do call on members of the crossbench and the Labor party to support us in doing everything we can to stop this unspeakable cruel act getting through the Senate,” Di Natale said.

This posturing is just as hypocritical as Labor’s. The Greens propped up the minority Labor government of Julia Gillard when it reopened the prison camps on Manus and Nauru. The government’s latest move underscores how far it will go to enforce the brutal regime that Labor put in place.

With the US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria escalating, the world refugee crisis, the greatest since World War II, will worsen. In response, governments across the globe have vilified refugees and fomented xenophobia, with Australian governments pioneering the inhuman drive to “stop the boats.”

Kenyan Supreme Court voids presidential election, ordering new poll

Eddie Haywood 

The Kenyan Supreme Court on Friday invalidated the August 8 presidential poll which named incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta the winner over his rival, Raila Odinga. In an unprecedented decision, the court, led by Chief Justice David Maraga, overturned the poll citing that “balloting had been tainted by irregularities.” The court ordered a new poll to be conducted within 60 days.

The ruling contradicts claims made by Western election observers that no misconduct occurred during the poll, including the findings of the Carter Center’s team led by former US Secretary of State John Kerry, which certified the election to be “free and fair.”

The unprecedented ruling was the first instance in which a high court anywhere in Africa overturned a presidential election result.

The court, in declaring last month’s poll “invalid, null, and void,” stated that the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), the body charged with counting the vote in Kenya, “failed, neglected, or refused to conduct the presidential election in a manner consistent with the dictates of the Constitution.”

The six-judge panel, after absolving the Kenyatta government of any criminality or misconduct, stated the IEBC “committed irregularities and illegalities in the transmission of results,” speaking to the widely held suspicion that ballot rigging occurred in the electronic tallying of the vote.

Speaking to the media after the court decision, Odinga remarked that “it is a precedent-setting ruling” and the first time in Africa’s history “a ruling has been made by a court nullifying irregular presidential elections.”

After the court’s decision, American and European investors went into panic mode, anticipating a bloody crackdown by the Kenyatta government. The Kenyan stock exchange, NSE 20, dropped 3.5 percent Friday and trading was halted briefly on the news of the court’s ruling. Kenya’s sovereign bonds took a dive, before recovering somewhat at the end of the trading day.

President Kenyatta, attempting to reassure international capitalists, stated that he accepted the court’s decision. At the same time Kenyatta proceeded to call the six judges “crooks and thugs,” and said ominously, “the judges should know they are dealing with an incumbent president.”

From a president who has demonstrated his willingness to silence opponents, including by the use of murder, Kenyatta’s words are nothing less than a threat.

The Carter Center, the organization known for its election observer teams sent around the globe to monitor polls, released a statement after the court’s ruling reaffirming its conclusion that the Kenyan election was conducted in a free and fair manner, and asserted that the “irregularities” which the court cited in its ruling occurred in the electronic tallying by the IEBC, data which the organization was waiting for the IEBC to compile in order to provide an analysis.

Speaking to the New York Times, Walter Mebane, a professor of statistics and political science at the University of Michigan who studies elections worldwide, conducted an in-depth computer analysis of the Kenyan election with software he developed to detect fraud. Based on his team’s statistical analysis, Mebane found massive patterns of fraud and manipulation.

“It was unlike any data set I had ever seen. Every single indicator came up signaling anomalies. It’s a huge red flag that something weird is going on,” the professor concluded.

Virtually none of the election observers have spoken a word regarding the extremely suspicious events which occurred before and after the poll, or given any indication that these figured into their analysis. The remarkable circumstances prior to the election raise further serious questions about the integrity of the poll.

In the week preceding the poll, Christopher Musando, a senior official with the IEBC, was found dead, his body bearing the marks of severe beating and torture before he was killed.

The offices of National Super Alliance (NASA), the political party to which Odinga belongs, were burgled the month before the poll. Several items were taken, including computers, lists of party members and other documents related to party strategy. NASA has accused the Kenyan National Police Service of the break-in, an accusation the police have denied.

Reports of intimidation and arrest of journalists also were made in the lead up to the election, including the detention of journalists employed by media outlets known to be critical of the Kenyatta government.

Two foreign consultants employed by the Odinga campaign were kidnapped in early July by unidentified Kenyan police and held for several hours before being forced onto a plane and out of the country.

Regarding the alleged tampering of the poll, the IEBC has admitted that an attempted hack of their computer servers took place, but claimed that it was not successful and resulted in no disruption to the tally.

An official with the IEBC, Orenge Nyabicha, committed suicide the day after the election, leaving a note behind which indicated he was distraught with the IEBC’s conduct during the vote tally.

Further exposing the Western claims that the Kenyatta government had acted in a free and fair manner during the election as fraudulent is the Kenyatta government’s shutting down of two human rights organizations, Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHCR) and African Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG), on bogus charges of tax avoidance after the two organizations announced their intention to pursue legal action in the courts over the irregularities of the election.

The unanimous declaration by Western observers that the election was free and fair is the clearest indication of American and European imperialism’s support for the Kenyatta regime. The quick denial of any election irregularities exposes their fear of economic and military operations in Kenya coming to an abrupt halt in the event a disputed election was followed by a bloody crackdown similar to what occurred after the 2007 election, in which 1,200 people were killed.

A strong fear haunts the Kenyan ruling elite and its Western capitalist patrons that any further investigation into election fraud will provoke a massive social explosion. The Kenyan ruling class is keenly aware that it presides over a social powder keg already riven by widening social inequality and deep social misery.

For nearly a decade, first as deputy prime minister then as president, Kenyatta has carried out the dictates of Western capitalism, bleeding Kenya’s vast economic resources and its working class for massive profits.

Regardless of the outcome of a new poll, the new government will preside over the apparatus of capitalist exploitation set up by Western corporations and banks which tolerate no obstacles to their bottom line.

Kenyatta and Odinga are multimillionaires who represent competing factions within the Kenyan ruling elite. They are both ruthless defenders of the capitalist system responsible for their own enrichment and the social catastrophe experienced by the majority of Kenyans.

Britain’s pseudo-left promote Labour councils enforcing savage cuts

Laura Tiernan 

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Counterfire, the Socialist Party (SP) and the Peoples’ Assembly have joined forces to promote a September 12 “anti-austerity” delegation to parliament, called by Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees.

Rees heads the city’s Labour-controlled council, which voted in February to slash £104 million from public spending by 2022, including £33 million over the next financial year. A “hit list” targets 112 services, including meals-on-wheels, school “lollipop” patrols and dementia support. Half of the city’s libraries face closure and all of its public toilets.

During February’s council meeting, protesters were ejected from the public gallery after they heckled Rees. He has since presided over a “community consultation,” asking residents to decide where the cuts should fall. On July 10, Rees told a consultation at Bristol City Hall that the council’s budget would mean “internal sacrifice.” Outside, protestors held placards that read, “Marvin, you cut we bleed” and “Bristol City Council cuts will kill.”

According to the SWP, Rees is now spearheading a major struggle by Labour councils against austerity. In a July 31 article, “Taking up the fight against the local authority cuts,” Sadie Robinson wrote, “Pressure is growing on Labour councils to fight cuts. All have imposed attacks on workers and services then blamed Tory cuts, sparking angry protests and some strikes. Now Bristol’s Labour mayor has unveiled a plan to lead a delegation to Whitehall and demand an end to council funding cuts. And he wants other councils to join him.”

Robinson continues, “Marvin Rees has written an open letter to council leaders in Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. Together with Bristol these ten make up the ‘core cities’—and nine are run by Labour councils. Rees called on them to ‘harness’ the mood against austerity and lobby a ‘weakened’ government on 12 September.”

Rees’ open letter was a transparent act of political damage control. It was aimed at deflecting public outrage against Labour’s slash-and-burn measures by shifting the blame once more onto the Tories. In reality, Theresa May’s government, like the Cameron government before it, has relied on local Labour councils to enforce its cuts on the ground.

The September 12 “lobby” called by Rees commits Labour councils to precisely nothing. It is timed to coincide with their presentation of a green paper to the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, outside parliament.

Titled “Invest, Reform, Trust,” the paper is described by Rees and his fellow council leaders as advancing “alternatives to austerity.” It does nothing of the sort. It was released on July 18 at an industry roundtable in Manchester, co-sponsored by accounting giant PwC and “featuring business leaders and industry bodies from across the UK.”

It’s pro-business proposals include private finance initiatives, localised business tax rates, and increased devolution, ushering in a “place-based industrial strategy” to boost competitiveness and “let cities and their people ‘get on with the job’ of raising productivity.” Case studies cited in the paper include Sheffield’s Skills Made Easy, described as “a truly employer-led training scheme,” which pays apprentices just £3.50 an hour.

Another proposal, the Labour councillors explain, “is to broaden the programme of Enterprise Zones to cover specific industrial sectors” that “would seek to create tax and other incentives to build clusters and strengthen agglomeration effects in cities.” In other words, devolved councils would preside over a bidding war to attract investment based on tax handouts and the most brutal levels of exploitation.

The SWP’s support for the green paper and their willingness to corral protests behind such a ruthless pro-market agenda is not accidental. Members of the SWP and other pseudo-left groups are employed throughout the public sector, as union officials and local reps, and as middle managers and executives in local authorities and NGOs. With Corbyn being groomed for office, the pseudo-left is positioning itself as a key power broker—offering its services to enforce Labour’s agenda against the working class.

If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, consider the following quotations taken from the SWP, Counterfire and the Socialist Party.

The same edition of Socialist Worker cited above quotes People’s Assembly member Huw Williams, who openly solidarises himself with Rees: “There is anger towards the mayor, but there’s also a sense that he’s ‘one of us’. If Rees leads protests that has the potential to mobilise a large number of Labour Party people.”

“Now the mayor has said he will challenge the cuts, people see this as a march not against him but the Tories. There’s a good chance it will be on a serious scale.”

This open defence of the Labour Party at the very point when Rees and dozens of Labour-run councils are implementing austerity is made more explicit still by Counterfire, an SWP splinter group led by Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German. A July 20 article titled “Mayor of Bristol to lead protest against austerity” describes his call for a protest as “very welcome news,” providing “a significant opportunity for the anti-austerity movement.”

The nature of this “opportunity” is made clear in the course of their extraordinary article.

“At a recent march in solidarity with Grenfell organised by Bristol People’s Assembly and the tenants’ union ACORN, there were calls for Labour councillors to take a much more active stance in opposition to the cuts. Clearly, there is considerable disquiet over this issue amongst the thousands of Labour party members in Bristol, who can see that these cuts risk undermining Labour’s recent increased support.

“In these circumstances, Bristol People’s Assembly decided that we would lobby the council to urge them to call both a mass lobby of Westminster and a Bristol based protest rally against the cuts. An open letter which we sent to the Mayor and Labour councillors outlining our position was published in the Bristol Post.”

The problem with the cuts, according to Counterfire, is not that they will devastate the working class. The fear that preoccupies this social layer, especially after the Grenfell Tower fire that crystallised such deep popular anger, is that the cuts will undermine and threaten the Labour Party’s grip over the working class. Hence, the friendly advice they offered Rees and his fellow Labour councillors: organise a public protest against the Tories.

The purpose of this protest is not to oppose the cuts, as Counterfire freely admits: “Following discussion, we chose not to foreground the demand for the council to not implement any cuts, (although we assured them of widespread support were they to take this course of action). Instead, we focused on the call for a mass lobby and a public demonstration.

“This was largely out of recognition that people want to mainly protest at the Tories who they rightly consider the main enemy, rather than at a Labour mayor and council who they, again rightly believe, should be on their side.”

The granting of a political amnesty to Bristol’s mayor exposes political relations of central importance for the British ruling class: the daily collaboration by the pseudo-left with the Labour Party. A post on the People’s Assembly Facebook page boasts of this relationship: “A coalition of 14 organisations [including the Greens, Bristol Labour, ACORN, the GMB and Unite] led by Bristol PA [People’s Assembly] has been meeting with the Mayor and his team in the last week to plan arrangements.”

While Rees and his fellow councillors have faced public anger over their enforcement of austerity, the People’s Assembly, SWP, Counterfire, et al. have moved in like a team of consultants. They function as Labour’s political protection racket, with all protests being channelled into a planned ToriesOut national protest and week of action outside the Conservative Party conference in Manchester in October.

The People’s Assembly has continued to work with Rees despite his explicit statement—in a letter to them on July 12—that he would not retreat from enforcing an austerity budget: “I have been explicitly clear that I do not agree with refusing or failing to set a budget… It is important to remember what Jeremy Corbyn wrote about legal budgets.”

Rees quotes from Corbyn’s December 2015 directive to Labour council leaders that was co-signed by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Shadow Secretary of State for Local Communities John Trickett, instructing them to impose cuts:

“If this does not happen, i.e. if a council fails to set a legal budget, then the council’s section 151 officer is required to issue the council with a notice under section 114 of the Local Government Act 1998. Councillors are then required to take all actions necessary to bring the budget back into balance. It would mean either council officers or, worse still, Tory ministers deciding council spending priorities. Their priorities would certainly not meet the needs of the communities which elected us."

One week later, the People’s Assembly replied to Rees, welcoming his July 12 letter and congratulating him for his “bold political stance” and “initiative in opposing austerity”!

The actions of Labour councils throughout the country, which have helped implement more than £100 billion in spending cuts since 2008, points to the duplicity of the ToriesOut campaign. If Labour comes to power under Corbyn, it will continue and deepen the Tories’ measures.

None of this will restrain the Socialist Party, which continues to serve up absurd vistas of a socialist paradise under the new Labour leader. The August 9 edition of The Socialist hailed a report produced by the SP’s Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), “How much reserves have councils got?”

TUSC’s report tabulates the resources and borrowing facilities controlled by 124 Labour-led councils. The SP’s writer enthusiastically explains, “It argues that ‘the substantial resources of the local state under the control of the Labour Party’ could be used to fight austerity now, ‘without waiting for a change of government’… It shows what a counter-power to Theresa May's 'weak and wobbly' government they could be—if they were prepared to turn Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity message into action.”

The article continues: “Jeremy Corbyn should instruct the councillors to withdraw their attacks on the workers now or face not being able to stand as Labour candidates in next year's elections,” before concluding with a quote from TUSC national chairperson and SP leader Dave Nellist, who declares: “There is a chance to show in the months ahead what Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity policies could mean in practice if Labour councillors refused to vote for cuts in the council chambers.”

Refusing any struggle against rightwing MPs and councillors, Corbyn’s “anti-austerity message” is a fiction. While publicly condemning homelessness and decrying the resort to food banks, he has held the line in his insistence that all Labour councils adhere to the Tories budget lock. He does all of this safe in the knowledge that his pseudo-left backers in the unions and throughout the public sector will continue to promote his “anti-austerity” bona fides.

A genuine struggle against austerity must unite every section of the working class in direct opposition to Labour’s pro-capitalist programme. This means repudiating the Tories’ austerity budgets and fighting for a socialist programme, aimed at confiscating the wealth of the financial oligarchy and placing society’s resources under the democratic control of the working class.

German federal police illegally collect data to blacklist journalists and activists

Martin Kreickenbaum 

Germany’s Federal Criminal Police (BKA) are illegally storing masses of data regarding supposed “politically motivated crimes.” As broadcaster ARD reported, data on more than 100,000 people accused of such offenses is being held in a database called “Internal Security,” even though in the vast majority of cases, there has never been a charge, let alone a court proceeding. The ARD report suggests that the BKA is operating a “blacklist” of journalists and political activists classified as “left-wing extremists.”

Both the extent of the surveillance and the arbitrary and unconstitutional storage of such data are typical characteristics of an authoritarian police state. The BKA is combining the records of the secret service and various police bodies. Its enthusiasm for data hoarding goes beyond that of the Stasi (State Security Police) of the former East Germany.

The scandalous activity has come to light by chance. In the course of the G20 summit in Hamburg, a total of 32 journalists had their previously-issued accreditation withdrawn. The reason for this was said to be “security concerns.” Several journalists subsequently lodged a freedom of information request with the BKA. This showed that in most cases, the “concerns” were completely unfounded.

According to the BKA information, photojournalist Frank Bründel “strongly supported or belongs to a violent movement.” In fact, the Hamburg police had only checked the identity of the journalist, who was there to pursue his profession at a demonstration on May 1. But this was already enough to place him on the BKA’s blacklist of “left-wing and violent” persons.

The file on journalist Björn Kietzmann is even more drastic. The photographer has a spotless police record, but the BKA file contains 18 completely groundless allegations against him, including “causing an explosion,” in the “politically motivated violence” category.

In fact, Kietzmann had only filmed a demonstration where a firework had exploded nearby. Kietzmann was initially arrested, but the trial was later stopped because of his evident innocence. The entries in Kietzmann’s BKA file go back to 2002 and have still not been erased even after 15 years, although he was only fined in a single case.

Other journalists were accused of having photographed police officers on protests or of violating the law of assembly. They often found themselves classified as “activists of a left-wing extremist scene” in the files. And although in almost all cases, the journalists concerned were found not guilty by the judiciary, the BKA did not see any reason to remove them from their database of “violent left-wingers.”

But these journalists are just the tip of the iceberg. According to the Federal Interior Ministry, records on some 109,625 persons and 1,153,351 criminal offences are currently stored, 27 times more than the 41,549 politically motivated offences recorded in the official criminal statistics for 2016.

This completely arbitrary and unconstitutional storage of data was apparently made possible by a deliberate legal vagueness in the BKA Act, which allows data collection even if the persons concerned have not been convicted in court. However, in each individual case, the BKA must justify why the subjects are expected to continue to commit politically motivated crimes.

But this does not happen in most cases, making nonsense of the presumption of innocence. The practices of the BKA were reprimanded in the 2017 Data Protection Report, which found that the long-term gathering of data “turns the presumption of innocence on its head and contradicts the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and the [German] Supreme Court.”

As early as 2012, Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar criticised the many conspicuously legal violations in the BKA database for “politically motivated left-wing criminality.” The BKA subsequently deleted 90 percent of the 3,819 people listed in the database, but only then to continue gathering information even more excessively in other databases.

The Interior Ministry is playing down the extent of the surveillance. There were “mistakes” in four cases, according to Tobias Plate, spokesman for Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. But there was no “uniform pattern”; first and foremost it was the fault of a lack of data quality, as well as the judiciary, which did not inform the BKA of acquittals, according to Plate.

Stephan Mayer, domestic affairs spokesman for the Christian Democrat faction in the German parliament, also defended the BKA’s surveillance practices. Mayer stated that no one should “engage in any kind of speculation that there are hundreds of thousands or millions of misused data entries by the BKA or other security agencies”—although that is precisely the case.

Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary chair Thomas Oppermann, on the other hand, spoke of a “data storage scandal at the BKA” and said, “Apparently, the BKA indiscriminately stores information about innocent citizens.” But this is just as hypocritical as the pronouncements of leading politicians of the Greens and the Left Party.

All the parties represented in the Bundestag are competing in the election campaign over who will stand for the most extensive state build-up. All agree that the police force should be increased by at least 15,000.

The SPD is also calling for the use of video surveillance technology, the expansion of the BKA into a coordination centre for all police authorities and the equipping of the investigating authorities with modern information technology. Under the pretext of “counteracting terrorism,” the SPD is advocating a further intensification of the relevant laws, the centralisation of the federal and state security authorities, and closer “cooperation between police and the secret service.” It thus calls for precisely the police-state surveillance that Oppermann now criticises.

The Social Democratic Federal Justice Minister Heiko Maas has also welcomed the ban on the website linksunten.indymedia.org as an “important blow against violent extremists.” After the grossly exaggerated events surrounding the G20 summit in Hamburg, Maas has even expressly demanded the establishment of a European “database of extremist left-wing radicals.” Exactly what the BKA has been doing for years!

The government and opposition parties justify the increasingly comprehensive surveillance of the population on the pretext of the fight against terrorism. Actually, nearly all terrorist attacks have taken place under the very eyes of the security authorities. The attacks at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, in Paris, Brussels or Barcelona were not the result of a lack of surveillance. On the contrary, the attackers were all well known to the security authorities, some so well known that it gives rise to the suspicion of state complicity.

The BKA’s practice of storing millions of files makes clear the actual purpose of the monitoring measures. It is about acting against left-wing and progressive organisations. Facing growing opposition to social inequality and militarism, critical voices are to be pursued through legal channels and silenced.

Hurricane Harvey to be costliest US natural disaster

Patrick Martin

With estimates of the total damage ranging from $180 billion on up, Hurricane Harvey may be the costliest disaster, in terms of economic damage, in US history.

Damage estimates are still preliminary, with large areas still inaccessible. The death toll stands at 50, but it is expected to rise considerably as homes in lower-elevation neighborhoods of Houston—mostly poor and working-class—and in the swamped cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur are reached by rescue and recovery teams.

The American Red Cross reported Sunday its highest total for storm refugees, 37,000 in emergency shelters across the Texas Gulf Coast and 2,000 more in Louisiana. Some 85,000 homes are still without electrical power, mainly in the southeast Texas region between Corpus Christi and Galveston, where Harvey first came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane.

The Texas Department of Public Safety raised its estimate of the total number of homes damaged by flooding and wind to over 200,000 Sunday, with much of Houston and all of Beaumont and Port Arthur still unaccounted for. Nearly 15,000 homes were classified as destroyed.

A staggering one million vehicles were destroyed or damaged, mainly by flooding, which destroys the complex electronic workings of most modern cars and trucks.

Only a small fraction of homeowners and businesses in Harris County, which includes Houston, have federal flood insurance policies, about 250,000 for 1.7 million homes or apartments and 100,000 business premises. For the region as a whole, it is estimated that at least 70 percent of the flood damage is uninsured.

The Houston Independent School District, seventh largest in the US, reported that at least 202 of its 284 schools had water inside, and only 115 had been deemed safe to reopen by September 11, when the school year is now scheduled to start. At least 75 schools had “major” or “extensive” damage, and 39 were still inaccessible due to flooding and had not been checked.

The damage from Harvey is likely to be more than the combined total of Hurricane Katrina ($110 billion) and Superstorm Sandy ($60 billion).

In the face of this catastrophe, the response from the institutions of the American ruling class is a combination of criminal negligence and indifference. The federal and state governments have left the bulk of the population to shift for itself, local governments across the region have virtually collapsed, and the giant corporations and other institutions of the ruling elite—universities, churches, foundations, etc.—have offered only token assistance.

President Trump traveled to the Gulf Coast for the second time in a week, in a choreographed show of “sympathy” for the victims of Harvey in Houston and Lake Charles, Louisiana. As usual with Trump, every appearance was a display of sickening self-love and hollow and obviously phony populism.

After speaking with a small, vetted group of storm refugees at the NRG Center, one of several convention centers in downtown Houston housing victims of Harvey, Trump told reporters, “They’re really happy with what’s going on.” He added, referring to the government response to Harvey, “It’s something that’s been very well received. Even by you guys, it’s been very well received.”

This comment, a mixture of self-promotion and self-delusion, only underscores the unbridgeable social gulf between the billionaire president (along with the media) and the vast majority of the storm’s victims, working people who have lost nearly everything, and in some cases saw loved ones swept away by rushing waters.

The White House is requesting an initial $7.8 billion appropriation from Congress in emergency assistance to the storm-ravaged area, with a second request for $6.7 billion to follow shortly. The combined total, $14.5 billion, is less than 10 percent of the published estimates of damage, and less than a quarter of the recovery and relief funds approved after Superstorm Sandy in 2012-2013.

The Trump administration appears to be seizing on Hurricane Harvey to solve an immediate political dispute with Congress, following the cynical maxim of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now mayor of Chicago) to “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan sent Friday, called for the initial emergency funds for Hurricane Harvey to be packaged in a bill to raise the federal debt ceiling, which Treasury officials have said must be enacted by September 29 to avoid dislocating Wall Street and global financial markets.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared on Fox News Sunday to reiterate this demand, which is aimed mainly at the Freedom Caucus, a grouping of 40 ultra-right Republicans in the House of Representatives who have threatened to block any increase in the debt ceiling unless it is combined with major cuts in social spending.

Besides the impact on Wall Street, the Trump administration is concerned that a federal debt default could disrupt the overseas operations of the US military, which are dependent on foreign countries receiving US payment for supplies, refueling and other costs, as well as direct financial subsidies to client regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

The real attitude of the Trump administration towards the victims of natural disasters like Harvey is shown in the draft budget plan prepared by the White House, which cut nearly a billion dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as abolishing the Chemical Safety Board, which investigates disasters like the series of explosions at the Arkema plant in Crosby, Texas, northeast of Houston.

Trump has gloried in his executive actions dismantling what little remains of regulatory restrictions on the operations of the giant oil and chemical companies that dominate the Gulf Coast. According to one tabulation, there are 33 plants in the greater Houston area whose corporate owners have filed formal notices with the federal government that in “worst-case” scenarios, a disaster at the plant would endanger a nearby population of more than one million people. Arkema was only one of the 33.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported Sunday that more than 800 wastewater treatment plants are not fully operational in the wake of Harvey, while 166 water systems are operating under “boil-water” instructions to their customers. Another 50 have shut down entirely, including the water system for the entire city of Beaumont, with a population of 118,000.

Rather than redoubled monitoring of the dangers of toxic chemical leaks, the EPA was engaged Sunday in a bitter war of words with the Associated Press, after the AP reported that there were 13 toxic waste sites in southeast Texas, managed under the EPA’s “superfund” program, that had been inundated, raising the prospect of dioxin and other toxic chemicals leaking into the floodwaters.

The EPA denounced claims that it had not yet bothered to check on these sites, a full week after Harvey struck the region, claiming the AP “is cherry-picking facts.” However, these facts were unanswerably true, as the AP and other sources documented that 13 of the 41 superfund sites in the region were underwater.

The EPA admitted that it had not been able to physically visit the sites near Houston, because of floodwaters, and was relying on aerial monitoring to “confirm possible damage,” a completely inadequate method of determining whether there were breaches in the containment around any of the sites.

The EPA maintained that it was working with state authorities, but the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has suspended pollution reporting requirements for the duration of the hurricane disaster, and the TCEQ office in Houston is closed. The Trump administration budget would cut the superfund program by 30 percent.

Once the immediate danger of drowning is past, the main threat from floodwaters is the combination of chemicals and waste products they have accumulated. The federal Department of Health and Human Services reported that it had treated 420 of the 7,500 people housed at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, some of them for diarrhea or vomiting following contact with contaminated floodwater.