Two Minutes to Doomsday

Robert Hunziker

Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!

Only recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward 30 seconds. It now registers two minutes to midnight. Verily, it’s lights out when the clock strikes 12:00 midnight. Ka-boom, it’s over!

What’s going on?

Hitherto, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the clock was set all the way back to 17 minutes to midnight. Thereafter, it wasn’t until 1998, when India and Pakistan staged back-to-back nuclear weapon testing, that the famous timepiece moved forward into single digits once again. It’s important to note that resetting the clock is not a frivolous undertaking. A group of distinguished scientists make that decision.

Here’s the rationale for the move closer to the dreaded midnight hour: Upon the election of Trump, the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 2 ½ minutes to midnight. That was based upon extraordinarily provocative nasty destabilizing verbiage from the president himself. Indeed, he is commander in chief, ahem.

Thereafter, following the self-crowning glory of Trump’s inauguration, which was an absolute bust, especially as worldwide protests in the streets vastly outnumbered the inauguration, global risks have measurably increased with leaders Trump & Kim exchanging simplistic infantile barbs at every opportunity.

Not only, it’s also a fact that global risks have compounded via U.S.-Russian relations, featuring more conflict than cooperation, as the two Super Powers crank up tensions: (1) continuing NATO military exercises along borders, (2) undermining the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, (3) upgrading nuclear arsenals, and (4) eschewing arms-control negotiations. Truly, America is in conflict within all categories that ricochet into holocaust.

On a Global basis, tensions have increased over the South China Sea. Pakistan and India continue building larger nuclear weapon arsenals. And, in the Middle East, the U.S. is driving a stake into the heart of the Iranian nuclear deal. Meanwhile, and increasingly so, cyber threats risk outages of infrastructure power grids and water sources.

Exasperating this perilous world scenario, there is the real threat of fundamental breakdown in the international order because of U.S. behavior, torpedoing trustworthiness amongst nations whilst also undermining, and in fact ridiculing, a very sober Paris 2015 climate accord. In point of fact, U. S. leadership has turned deceptive and unreliable to predict or discern between sincerity and mere rhetoric, intermeshed within goofy twitter messages. Confusion and conflicting policy statements confront allies with despair.

Further endangering the world community, it is all too evident that the Trump administration is true grit for neoliberal spirits. In fact, it is speculated that if the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists computed risks of holocaust based upon the tenets behind rampant neoliberal capitalism, the clock would be reset to one minute before midnight. Indeed, especially under Trump, and especially with a big tax cut combined with rejection of any effort whatsoever to tame global warming. The biosphere is at a heighten level of risk under Trump.

The case can be made that the planet is at peak risk because of neoliberal socio-politico-economic policies that are equal in weight to the threat of nuclear holocaust. Neoliberal capitalism runs roughshod over the social contract and ignores ecological responsibility. For certain, there is no profit to be found in social contracts or ecological caretaking.

As a result, after 35 years of hardcore neoliberalism, the ecosystem is exhausted, frayed, and starting to collapse. Indeed, neoliberal principles of privatization of public assets, rugged individualism, and free-market dicta scrunch every class below the one percent whilst tossing aside ecological concerns into the gutter. Similar to a hefty steamroller, neoliberal ascendency literally flattens the social contract and tosses aside care for the biosphere.

The brand spanking new tax cut leveled at propping up corporations and the super rich exposes $1.5T in new governmental debt. Ipso facto, government must be cut to the bone to satisfy Republican dogma. Hence, the middling classes will be screwed, as the poor get decimated. Socially conscious and ecologically beneficial government will be, and is already, ripped apart. The checks and balances that keep the ecosystem humming, like the EPA, are systematically ravaged via executive order whilst giving the finger to the Paris 2015 climate accord.

This ongoing massive unraveling of guardianship for the ecosystem is smack dab in the crosshairs of a mean-spirited Ayn Rand-type conspiracy, taking full control over America. Rule via decadence is taking America back to late 19th century socio-politico-economic principles, “when men will be men.” As it happens, Trump is turning loose the most boorish elements of the transnational elite.

Meanwhile, the planet simmers with overheating symptoms, and emits an orangish glow because of massive chemical saturation, threatening civilization down to its core. The biosphere can ill afford the world’s largest economy rejecting remedial efforts. If the Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists gave equal weight to ecosystem debasement as it does nuclear threats, the Atomic Clock would bust a spring.

Alas, because of excessive levels of CO2 emitted by humans with resultant global warming, which the Trump group exacerbates, the planet is weak in the knees, especially where people don’t see it, as for example,  (1) The all-important Atlantic ocean conveyor belt circulation pattern, aka: Thermohaline, has already started to slow down way ahead of schedule because of global warming, (2) Oceans have lost 40% of plankton production over the past 50 years, threatening loss of one of the major sources of oxygen for the planet, (3) In 2017, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone, where oxygen is so weak that fish die, is the largest ever at 8,800 square miles, (4) Kelp Forests in the ocean, the equivalent of terrestrial Rain Forest, are being wiped out from Tasmania to California, (5) Greenland experienced total surface melt for the first time in scientific history, (6) The massive Arctic meltdown threatens runaway global warming (“RGW”) as methane hydrates are exposed, bringing in its wake burn-out agriculture, (7) Irreversible Antarctica ice sheet collapse has commenced.

But still, overshadowing all threats to civilization, positive climate feedbacks are starting to influence the global warming process, meaning the planet itself is on autopilot, emitting one molecule of CO2 via hands-free positive feedbacks for every two molecules of CO2 emitted by human activity. (Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography) This one fact alone is reason enough to move the Doomsday Clock much, much, much closer to midnight.

Postscript:  “There are growing signs that the Pentagon and the CIA are pressing ahead with preparations for a preemptive war against North Korea, including the use of nuclear weapons. There have been multiple reports in the American corporate media of behind-the-scenes discussions between the US military and intelligence apparatus and the Trump administration of the feasibility of a so-called “bloody nose” attack, involving US air strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities, with the expectation—however ill-founded—that they would not provoke a full-scale war. (Source: Alex Lockie, news editor, Business Insider: “US Stealth Bombers in Guam Appear to be Readying for a Tactical Nuclear Strike on North Korea,” Defend Democracy Press, Jan. 28, 2018)

Another rapid rise in Australia’s prison population

John Harris

New statistics show that Australia’s total prison population has risen by almost 40 percent over the past five years. The increase is the product of punitive “law and order” programs implemented by Labor and Liberal-National governments across the country, in response to a deepening social crisis.

Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) last month revealed that, on any given day, an average of 41,262 people are in full-time incarceration. This represents an increase of 5.8 percent, or 2,257 people compared to the previous year, and a rise of close to 40 percent, or around 11,877 people, since 2012.

The incarceration rate grew from 187.2 prisoners for every 100,000 Australian adults in 2014 to 216.2 in the third quarter of 2017—a rise of more than 15 percent. The most oppressed section of the working class, the Aboriginal population, has been hit hardest, with indigenous incarceration rates at an all-time high of 2,346 people per 100,000—more than 10 times the national average.

These results continue a stark trend. Between 1945 and 1982, the national rate of imprisonment was relatively stable, averaging 65 prisoners per 100,000 adults. In 2000, the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government-funded research organisation, reported that the number of inmates rose by 102 percent in the 17 years from 1982 to 1998. The incarceration rate in 1982 was 89.9 per 100,000; by 1998 this had climbed to 139.2 per 100,000—a 55 percent increase.

This extraordinary rise points to far-reaching social problems and repressive political reactions. For decades, the major political parties have outbid each other in boosting police numbers, enhancing police powers and requiring the judiciary to deliver harsher sentences.

As well as strengthening the powers of the police-judicial apparatus, these campaigns serve to distract attention from the relentless cuts to education, health and public services that increasingly have left working class people with little or no forms of social support. The resulting despair and destitution is blamed on the individuals who suffer the consequences of official policy.

There is no doubt that the introduction of tougher sentencing laws, and restrictions on bail, have contributed to the overall spike.

According to the ABS data, 32 percent of Australian prisoners last year had not been sentenced, up 85 percent from 2012. The statistics indicate that half the increase in the prison population over the past five years is a result of more people being held on remand.

On remand, defendants who have not been convicted of any crime are held in full-time custody, usually after being denied bail. They can wait months, and sometimes over a year, for their trials. According to the Law Reform Commission, 55 percent of those on remand are either found not guilty, given a community service order or are deemed to have served their time.

In the state of New South Wales (NSW), the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reported in 2016 that the average time taken to finalise a trial for those on remand increased from 209 days in 2007 to 300 days in 2015. This was a direct result of reactionary legislation aimed at limiting access to bail.

In 2014, the state’s Liberal-National government, with the full support of the Labor Party opposition, amended bail laws. The change effectively overturned the bedrock legal presumption of innocence, declaring that the prime responsibility of judges in considering bail applications was to “ensure the safety of victims, individuals and the community.” For designated serious offenses, “the bail authority must refuse bail unless the accused person shows cause, why his or her detention is not justified.”

Previously, the onus was on the prosecution to prove that the accused was a flight risk, or a risk to the community. Now, defendants must establish why they should be granted bail. Similar measures have been being introduced by state governments across the country, amid a clamour of “law and order” hysteria, promoted by the corporate media.

Attacks on the right to bail have been accompanied by tougher sentencing requirements, including longer and mandatory jail terms. This further punishes the victims of mounting inequality, poverty and social distress. Prisoners are overwhelmingly drawn from the most impoverished and oppressed layers of the working class, including those suffering mental health problems or drug addiction.

People affected by psychosis or other conditions that can lead to violent or destructive acts can often find no adequate treatment or support as a result of slashed healthcare budgets. Instead, they are targeted by the authorities for imprisonment.

Many prisoners have been convicted of illicit drug offenses and assaults. The latest ABS figures show that these offences accounted for 81 percent of the increase in the prison population over the past year.

Earlier reports also pointed to this pattern. A States of Justice report published in December 2016 indicated that from 2008-09 to 2014-15, illicit drug offences rose by 40 percent nationally, increasing in every state and territory. Figures from February 2017 indicate that the trend has continued, showing a 48 percent increase in illicit drug offences since 2008-09.

A report published in March 2014 by the Australian Institute of Criminology raised concerns about the lowering of the threshold of trafficable quantities for illicit drugs, warning that drug users faced convictions for trafficking offenses with significant penalties.

The report stated that in all “jurisdictions except Queensland, Australian drug trafficking thresholds are attached to ‘deemed supply’ laws, which reverse the traditional burden of proof from prosecutors onto defendants. Such laws mean that possession of the trafficable threshold amount will constitute a presumption of trafficking, placing the onus on the alleged offender to prove that the possessed amount was not for the purposes of trafficking.”

The publication indicated that in every state, people can be charged with the maximum penalties for possession of a base-level quantity of drugs. According to legal experts, drug users increasingly are being charged with serious offenses for exceeding these thresholds.

According to the 2015-16 Illicit Drug Data Report released by Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, there were 47,625 arrests over amphetamine-type stimulants in 2015-16, a 213 percent increase from the 2006-07 figure of 15,216. Arrests for all categories of illicit drugs increased by 87.6 percent over a decade, from 82,389 in 2006-07 to a record 154,538 in 2015-16.

The targeting of drug users by the authorities underscores the fact that governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, have no other response to the worsening conditions of life that propel some individuals to substance abuse. It is part of a broader build-up of the powers of the police, the courts and the entire apparatus of the state, directed against the working class as a whole.

Bangladesh government opens apparel factory in prison

Rohantha De Silva & Wimal Perera

Late last month Bangladesh’s Awami League-led government opened a knitwear factory in one of its prisons. The state-owned Resilience Garment Industry plant is located inside the Narayanganj District Jail, near Dhaka.

The factory will employ over 300 of the jail’s 2,150 inmates. It has two units—one for ready-made garments (RMG) and the other to produce Jamdani, a traditional Bangladeshi fabric. The goods will be exported and carry the tag “Made by Prisoners.”

Bangladesh Knitwear Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BKMEA) president Selim Osman told the media the new facility had the potential to earn up $US1.5 million per annum. The BKMEA provided prison authorities with financial assistance and advice for the project, which Bangladesh big business has enthusiastically endorsed.

Addressing the opening ceremony on December 27, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said the government planned to expand the new system, declaring: “All the prisoners at different prisons of the country are provided with training for their reform and are given all kinds of facilities. Gradually, they will be provided with more facilities.”

Bangladesh government authorities claim the initiative is a “benevolent move.” It is, in fact, a new kind of slave labour system and one that will be used to put pressure on other garment workers to keep wages low. Bangladesh has almost 80,000 prisoners, held in overcrowded and inhuman facilities designed for 27,000 people.

As prisoners, these garment workers have no democratic rights and will be forced to do everything demanded of them by jail authorities. While the media has reported that the plant will have two shifts, no details have been released about what they will be paid or their working conditions.

According to reports, only a portion of factory’s income will be given to prisoners employed in the factory, with the rest divided between the jail itself and the state coffers. Narayanganj Jail superintendent Subhas Kumar Ghosh said the pittance earned by the inmates will be put in their respective bank accounts and could be sent to their families or taken when prisoners are released.

Bangladesh’s garment industry, which has some of the lowest wages in the world, is the country’s principal export earner—accounting for 80 percent of total export income. About 4.5 million workers, the overwhelming majority being young girls from rural areas, are employed in 4,500 factories. With one in every eight Bangladeshis, directly or indirectly, dependent upon the textile industry, the ruling elite is seriously concerned about the stability of this sector.

Bangladesh apparel industry chiefs plan to almost double garment export earnings, from $28 billion per year to $50 billion by 2021. The sector, however, is facing intense global competition. A Daily Star comment on December 14 warned that the “current competitive advantage of Bangladesh is already being challenged by countries that depend on low-cost production—like Ethiopia. Many European and US retailers and brands will follow these countries if better margins are offered.”

Bangladesh garment manufacturers and the government are also acutely nervous about the increasing militancy of garment workers and other sections of the industrial workforce.

In December 2016, tens of thousands of garment workers in Ashulia, a major industrial area just outside Dhaka, took strike action for an increase in the minimum monthly pay—from $68 to $200 (16,000 taka). Fearful that the walkout would spill over into other parts of the country areas, owners locked out about 85 factories and sacked over 2,000 workers.

The government and factory employers were only able to suppress this unrest because of the assistance provided by the trade unions.

Three years earlier, in September 2013, about 50,000 garment workers from more than 300 factories walked out, demanding that their monthly pay be increased from $38 to $103 (8,000 taka).

While the government eventually raised the minimum wage to 5,300 taka there have been no other pay increases, despite its promise of a salary hike every three years.

In January 2017, Forbes reported that while Bangladesh garment workers received only 13 US cents per hour, the hourly income of Bangladesh CEOs was 16,000 times that amount.

According to a November survey published by New Age, 64 percent of readymade garment workers are unable to pay for their daily essentials. The newspaper reported that “99.6 percent [of] workers have no savings and 100 percent of them are indebted” and that 77.2 percent have to work overtime to meet family needs.

Worried about the eruption of a new wave of strikes, the government is promoting the development of trade unions in the garment sector in order to control the workforce.

On November 21, four senior government ministers met with Siddiqur Rahman, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association. Rahman told the meeting the garment industry could “benefit from the practice of healthy trade unionism”—i.e., unions that dissipate or suppress workers’ demands.

As a result, the government has decided to amend the labour law and reduce the number of workers needed to form a union. The percentage of workers from a plant needed to legally establish a union will be reduced from 30 percent to 15–20 percent.

The appalling conditions in factories in Bangladesh were underscored five years ago when more than 1,130 people were killed in the Rana Plaza building collapse. The government declared that garment workers’ wages and working conditions would be improved, but virtually nothing has been done.

Now the government has moved to intensify the exploitation in the garment industry by establishing the first prison factory in the country’s history.

UK NHS faces further attacks with introduction of “accountable care organisations”

Jean Shaoul

As the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service (NHS) approaches, Theresa May’s Conservative government is starving the NHS of cash, while its plans for the dismantling and wholesale looting of the NHS are gathering speed.

The government has accepted the recommendations of the Naylor Review, published in March last year, calling for the sale of NHS land and property to property developers to fund “reforms.” The Review claims that this would release billions of pounds to fund investment in the NHS.

It calls for hospitals to be “incentivized” to sell their property by receiving extra government funding—that would not be forthcoming if they refused—in what would be a “fire sale” of NHS land.

This is in addition to the transfer of much of the NHS estate (except that owned by the NHS Foundation Trusts) in 2013 to NHS Property Services, a company wholly owned by the Department of Health (DoH). The company charges market rents and inflated property management charges to NHS trusts and some general practitioners (GP) practices for the buildings bought and paid for by generations of taxpayers. Between 2013 and March 2017, NHS Property Services sold 295 properties worth more than £203 million.

With the DoH free to sell NHS Property Services, now it too is being prepared for the market.

NHS England has announced that it is to set up an accountable care system (ACS) whereby several healthcare organisations agree to provide all health and social care for a given population. This in turn means creating accountable care organisations (ACOs) to manage the contract to establish such a system, and purchase and deliver health care in a particular area on long-term contracts. The eight pilot ACOs will function as locally integrated health systems with greater autonomy over commissioning and funding decisions and be given additional funds as a carrot.

While ACOs could be an existing NHS trust or, a GP-owned organisation, this is only a sop to public opinion, which is almost universally hostile to the proposals.

The government’s clear preference is for the private sector, including consortia made up of insurance, property and healthcare companies, to bid to become ACOs and manage the combined budgets. They will be free to subcontract services to private companies such as Virgin, UnitedHealth and Circle, bypassing tendering and competition rules.

The financial advisors, lawyers, accountants and all the additional bureaucracy needed to manage the contracts and billing—as well as their hefty profit margins—will further erode the NHS’ already limited budget.

But crucially, while healthcare is free at the point of use, social care is means-tested and thus subject to user charges. This paves the way for the blurring of the boundaries between health and social care, and the extension of user charges to healthcare.

It means that non-NHS bodies will manage billions of pounds of health and social care funding via large contracts, exempt from any oversight, accountability to public bodies and disclosure under Freedom of Information legislation.

These latest proposals follow on from the government’s plans to introduce 44 Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships for commissioning healthcare aimed at making it easier to drive through £26 billion savings and associated cuts and closures. The ACOs signify a further level of integration and even greater autonomy over commissioning and funding decisions.

The government’s proposals have been introduced at the behest of the private sector and are an import from the US’ public-private healthcare system, a byword for restricted access to limited treatments at exorbitant cost.

Simon Stevens, the NHS England CEO who has held various senior executive positions with UnitedHealthcare Group and Global Health, was appointed by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013 to bring a similar system to England.

The outcomes are all too clear. It means workers will have to pay for their own healthcare costs if they are to get prompt, accessible treatment and/or pay for health insurance. Those who cannot pay face long waits, healthcare denial, pain and suffering. Those with the greatest need, the long-term sick, the elderly and those with complex needs—thanks to increasing poverty, stress and pollution—face exclusion from healthcare: a return to the pre-NHS days.

The creation of ACOs will entail creating a new Standard Contract, which NHS England would like to be in place by next month. While this was subject to a public consultation that has now closed, the proposal to radically change the management of healthcare in England is being introduced without any public debate or legislation—despite the requirement under the Labour government’s 2006 National Health Service Act that expanded the system of contracting for healthcare—for consultation prior to implementation and the results taken into account.

These attacks should be seen against the desperate financial crisis facing the NHS and rationing-through-waiting as a means of managing demand. Following the austerity measures set in place after the Labour government’s bailout of the banks in 2008, and further measures taken by successive governments to prop up the financial sector, real NHS spending per capita was flat between 2010/11 and 2016/17, and is due to fall by 2 percent by 2020/21. This, together with an aging population with complex needs, implies a level of cost cutting without historical precedent or international parallel, at least among the advanced economies.

All this has prompted two separate legal challenges to the government’s plans. Last October, the patient campaign group, 999 Call for the NHS, filed papers seeking a judicial review, arguing the ACO contract published by NHS England was “unlawful” and breached the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

That reactionary Act gave free rein to the hiving off of NHS assets to the big corporations and the construction of a healthcare “market” on the back of taxpayers’ money, while removing the Secretary of State for Health’s core duty to provide or secure comprehensive and universal healthcare. While the Act states that the prices paid for NHS services must reflect the number of patients receiving care for that specific service, the new proposals go even further, allowing commissioners to give providers a fixed budget for an area’s population.

Another group, #JR4NHS, backed by prominent doctors, lawyers, academics and cultural figures as well as the renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, has successfully crowd-funded its bid to seek a judicial review to stop NHS England from introducing ACOs without proper public consultation and without full Parliamentary scrutiny.

Campaign spokesperson Allyson Pollock, Professor of Public Health at Newcastle University and author of NHS Plc, warned that Accountable Care Systems were an import from the US. Furthermore, ACOs were non-NHS bodies not recognised in any Act of Parliament yet they would be able to decide “on the boundary of what care is free and what has to be paid for and will be paid more if they save money.”

Such has been the opposition to the plans that last week NHS chiefs agreed to run a full consultation on ACOs over a period of almost three months.

Professor Pollock told the World Socialist Web Site, “I am delighted that the government and NHS England have now accepted that there must be a national public consultation on ACOs, and that no ACO contract will be signed until that’s happened. It should not have needed expensive legal action to make this happen.

“It’s essential now that Jeremy Hunt [Secretary of State for Health and Social Care] holds off on the ACO regulations, as Sarah Wollaston [Chair of the House of Commons Liaison Committee and the Health Select Committee] has asked him to do, otherwise it will make a mockery of the consultation.

“I remain concerned about the lack of transparency and the need for primary legislation for such a radical shake-up of the NHS, which has always been the case in the past.”

In a separate development, #JR4NHS has also been granted permission to go to a hearing for a judicial review on the issue.

Polish government seeks to criminalize mention of Polish crimes during the Holocaust

Clara Weiss

The lower house of the Polish Parliament (Sejm) approved a bill January 26 which provides for severe penalties for both Polish and foreign citizens who use the term “Polish concentration camps” and who refer to the participation of Poles in the crimes of the Holocaust. The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate and the president, but is expected to pass these hurdles.

This far-reaching assault on free speech is part of the systematic effort of the right-wing Polish government of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) to strengthen fascist forces and, along with that, falsify the history of Poland.

Coming a little over three months after the Polish government has helped stage the biggest fascist demonstration in Europe since the end of the Second World War, this bill marks another milestone in the shift to the right of not just the Polish but the European bourgeoisie. In an obvious and despicable effort to provoke and insult victims of the Holocaust, the bill was debated and passed one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The bill provides for up to three years in prison for people and organizations, both Polish and foreign, who use the term “Polish concentration camp” or attribute participation in the Holocaust to the “Polish nation.” Those who are deemed to “deliberately reduce the responsibility of the ‘true culprits’ of these crimes” may also be punished.

The terms “Polish concentration camp” or “Polish death camp” are indeed factually incorrect, since the Nazi extermination camps were located in occupied Poland and run by German military and SS units. But the campaign against the use of these terms has for years served as a means for the far-right to deny any participation of Polish nationalists in the Nazi murder of the Jews.

The most aggressive organization in this campaign has been the Polish League Against Defamation. Founded in 2013 by the former vice-president of the Polish Press Agency, it has been going after historians and other figures for years. The bill backed by the PiS now gives right-wing organizations like the League the right to stand as accusers in civil suits against people and organizations.

The passing of the bill by the lower house has provoked a diplomatic crisis with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned the Polish ambassador for a discussion and bitterly denounced the new law. The Israeli press as a whole has reacted to the new bill with outrage.

The diplomatic fallout in Israeli has come as something of a surprise to the Polish government, which has maintained close relations with Israel since the 1990s. However, right-wing commentators in Poland insist that the bill was worth a deterioration in relations with Israel and the PiS government has signaled it has no intention of backing down.

The reasons for the aggressive posture of the Polish government on this question, at the expense of relations with one of its closest foreign allies, can only be explained by its deep crisis and fear of social unrest. Historically, the whipping up of anti-Semitism has served as a key tool for both the Polish bourgeoisie and the Polish Stalinist bureaucracy, to promote nationalism, divide the working class and crack down on the workers’ movement.

In the Poland of the 1930s, anti-Semitic legislation and assaults, including pogroms and bombings, were the order of the day. A right-wing student movement resulted in the institution of “ghetto benches” at major universities, and numerous murders of Jewish students. In 1936, the elimination of the Jews from Polish economic life and the “Polandisation” of major cities were proclaimed state policy. Several professional associations, above all doctors, lawyers and traders, banned Jews from their professions.

There is no question that the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis were welcomed by the Polish state. In 1937, Polish justice minister Witold Grabowski travelled to Germany to discuss with senior Nazis the adoption of the Nuremberg race laws in Poland. In 1938, there were several high-level Polish-German meetings which included discussions of a “Gesamtlösung” (total solution) of various issues, including the so called Jewish question.

The historical roots of modern Polish and Nazi anti-Semitism were, in fact, quite similar. Both constituted a reaction to the rise of the Marxist working class movement. The Nazi bogeyman of the jüdischer Bolschewismus (Jewish bolshevism) had its Polish equivalent in the Żydokomuna (Jewish commune). The social democratic and then the communist movement in Poland had a powerful constituency within the Jewish proletariat and intelligentsia. It produced figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, and, in a later generation, Emanuel Ringelblum, Isaac Deutscher, and the Trotskyists Abraham Leon and Solomon Ehrlich. After Polish, Yiddish was the second language of the socialist movement. Socialist parties also stood at the forefront of the struggle against anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

That the Polish working class was unable to overthrow the reactionary Sanacja regime and found itself disarmed in the face of the Nazi invasion was largely a result of the rise of Stalinism. It threw the Polish communist movement into a deep crisis from the mid 1920s on and virtually paralyzed it in the 1930s. In 1938, shortly before the criminal Hitler-Stalin-pact, Stalin dissolved the Polish Communist Party. Almost its entire leadership and thousands of its members were murdered in the Stalinist purges.

These developments created the conditions for the Nazis to invade the country, and turn occupied Poland into the main stage of the murder of European Jewry. All six major death camps were built in Nazi-occupied Poland. Within three to four years, 3 million out of 3.5 million Polish Jews were annihilated, along with another 1.5 million Soviet Jews and some 1.5 million Jews from other parts of Europe.

Polish nationalist and fascist forces, much like the far-right throughout Eastern Europe, participated in this historical crime.

The so called Blue Police, created by the Nazi occupiers in the General Government in late 1939, numbered thousands of Polish policemen who helped round up Jews for their deportations to the death camps. Many others helped denounce Jews to the Nazis, often after blackmailing them for weeks and months and thus robbing them of all they had. Partisan groups of the far-right would hand out Jewish partisans and refugees to the Germans for murder, even while they themselves were being persecuted by the Nazis.

Pogroms against Jews by Poles occurred both during and after the Nazi occupation. The most notorious of these were the pogrom in Jedwabne in July 1941, which took the lives of some 350 Jews, and the pogrom in Kielce in June 1946, which killed over 40. Both have been historically documented and publicly discussed only over the past three decades.

The denunciation of Polish anti-Semitism, and of the support for or indifference to the murder of Polish Jewry, have long been a hallmark of left-leaning and democratic tendencies in Polish society. In his poem Campo dei Fiori, the later Nobel prize laureate Czesław Miłosz, who participated in the Polish underground movement against the Nazis, bitterly denounced the indifference of many Poles as the Nazis burned down the Warsaw Ghetto. Drawing an analogy to the burning of Giordano Bruno on Campo dei Fiori by the Catholic inquisition in 1600, Miłosz wrote in 1943:

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

The Holocaust was not only a major blow to the Polish workers’ movement, it also destroyed or buried a good portion of its history. The Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland, which had a substantial anti-Semitic wing, and bore a substantial share of guilt for this disaster, was engaged in an ongoing campaign of historical falsification about the Russian Revolution and the socialist workers’ movement as a whole. Far from fostering a closer examination of the Holocaust, the Stalinists in fact opposed and stifled such a study.

Tragically, this has led to a situation where the Holocaust and many aspects of Polish-Jewish history could be discussed and researched only after 1989. The recent effort to publish the entire underground archive that was assembled in the Warsaw Ghetto under the leadership of the socialist Zionist Emanuel Ringelblum is a major contribution to resurrecting the historical knowledge and truth about the Holocaust and the workers movement in Poland. One particularly important volume came out in 2016 and documents the heroic struggle of the Trotskyists in the Warsaw Ghetto for revolutionary internationalism.

There is little question that large sections of the Polish bourgeoisie are bitterly opposed to this development. What they fear in the historical truth about the Holocaust and the crimes of fascism, German or Polish, is the historical truth about the Russian revolution and the socialist movement. The next step might well be a ban on books addressing Polish anti-Semitism and the crimes of the Polish far-right, and the firing of people who nevertheless speak and write about them.

The return of the Polish bourgeoisie to its right-wing strategy of the Intermarium, an anti-Russian and anti-German alliance of far-right forces throughout Eastern Europe, the war preparations, and the massive social inequality in Poland, all these require a suppression of democratic rights, and the rewriting of history. Last summer, the Trump administration assured the PiS government of its full support in this reactionary endeavor. US imperialism bears full responsibility for what is happening in Poland right now.

With its policies, the PiS government has placed itself at the forefront of ideological and political reaction in Europe. However, it is ultimately only the most blatant expression of an international tendency. In Germany, the rise of the far-right AfD has been aided by the entire political establishment and historical revisionists, and a Nazi apologist like Jörg Baberowski teaches “history’ at one of the country’s post prestigious universities. The only way to stem the tide of political reaction and historical revisionism is to educate and mobilize the working class on a socialist basis to fight against capitalism.

Renewed push for Australia to build nuclear weapons

Peter Symonds

A discussion has begun over the past month in Australian strategic and military circles about the necessity of building nuclear weapons, or developing the capacity to do so, against the alleged threat posed by nuclear-armed powers, above all China.

The debate, in public at least, is quite cautious, given the widespread popular hostility to war and thus the potential for protests to erupt against any move to create a nuclear arsenal. However, the very fact that the issue is actively being discussed is another sign of rapidly sharpening geo-political tensions and the accelerating arms race by major powers around the world.

The renewed push for nuclear arms is connected to a wider strategic debate about the growing danger of conflict between the US and China. For the most part, the Turnbull government and opposition parties, as well as the media and think tanks, have lined up behind the Trump administration’s bellicose stance toward China, along with North Korea. The government has backed the new US defence strategy that identifies China and Russia, not terrorism, as the over-riding threat.

Under conditions of the mounting danger of war, however, doubts have been expressed about the willingness and capacity of the United States to come to the aid of Australia, including in the event of a nuclear attack.

Hugh White, who previously advocated encouraging the US to cut a deal with China to ease tensions, wrote an extensive article in the Quarterly Essayentitled “Without America: Australia in the New Asia.” He argued that in the not too distant future the US will not be able to match China militarily and Australia will have to go it alone.

White, a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University (ANU), bluntly declared: “The chilling logic of strategy therefore suggests that only a nuclear force of our own, able credibly to threaten an adversary with major damage, would ensure that we could deter such a threat [from China] ourselves.” Having raised the issue, however, he qualified the remark, writing that he was neither “predicting nor advocating that Australia should acquire nuclear weapons.”

Paul Dibb, an emeritus professor of strategic studies at the ANU, made a similar suggestion obliquely in an article in the Australian last October, entitled “Our nuclear armament position is worth reviewing.” Dibb said Australia did not require nuclear weapons at present, but times were changing and “it would be prudent to revisit reducing the technological lead time.”

Australian currently has no commercial power reactors and only one research establishment, at Lucas Heights in Sydney run by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). On paper, this facility is devoted to the peaceful use of nuclear technology. As a result, the infrastructure to obtain the basic ingredient for a nuclear weapon—enriched uranium or plutonium—is lacking and would take years to build.

What Dibb suggested is that Australia, under the guise of generating nuclear power or on another pretext, acquire the essential technology to produce the fissile material needed to build a nuclear weapon. The hypocrisy involved is staggering. Analysts making such proposals accuse countries like Iran and North Korea of putting such plans into practice, and support a US pre-emptive attack to eliminate the supposed threat.

Dibb is well aware that Australia is a signatory to Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). He noted that it would be difficult to argue under its “supreme interests” clause that Australia is facing an existential threat. Any move by Australia to “reduce the lead time” also could “seriously concern the US and other countries … and might stimulate further nuclear proliferation.”

In fact, before signing the NPT in 1970 and ratifying it in 1973, the Australian government drew up plans for a commercial nuclear power plant at Jervis Bay, south of Sydney, that would covertly supply the enriched uranium needed to manufacture nuclear weapons. The Jervis Bay project, which was promoted by Prime Minister John Gorton, was mothballed after he was ousted in 1971 by Billy McMahon.

Associate Professor Wayne Reynolds, author of the Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb, told the Australian last year in that period “Germany, Italy, the Netherlands—all wanted nuclear weapons but Australia was top of the list because of our uranium resources, our scientists and our enrichment program.”

While White and Dibb, who both held senior positions in the Australian defence and intelligence establishment, are chary about openly pushing for nuclear weapons, others are calling for the matter to be discussed and for steps to be taken.

In an article entitled “Wrestling a nuclear-armed 800-pound gorilla” on December 9, Andrew Davies, director of the defence and strategy program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), chided White and Dibb for their “coyness and willingness to defer grappling with the logical conclusion of their arguments.”

Davies wrote: “The key question, which we shouldn’t dance around, is whether we judge the risk of an attack from China to be high enough and serious enough to warrant developing an independent nuclear deterrent.” While not answering the question, he declared that “there is a serious strategy discussion to be had.” ASPI receives funds from the government and armaments companies.

Fellow ASPI analyst Malcolm Davis, in an article “Going nuclear?” on January 9, added a note of urgency: “To deter nuclear threats requires nuclear weapons, and having such a capability would reinforce any future non-nuclear deterrent … Australia would not consider such a step lightly, but don’t expect much time for deep consideration if our policy makers are forced to confront this option.”

Lowy Institute analyst Peter Layton proposed in an article on January 17 that Australia consider “sharing nuclear weapons” rather than developing an independent arsenal. He suggested the placement of US nuclear weapons on Australian soil on the same basis as in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Turkey, or alternatively, cost-sharing with Britain to build its fleet of Dreadnought-class nuclear submarines, armed with Trident nuclear missiles.

This discussion is tied to a broader push to boost military spending in preparation for war. Retired Major-General Jim Molan, soon to be confirmed as a Liberal Party senator, argued in the Australian on January 4 that US military capacity had declined markedly. Australia must “address our critical vulnerabilities on fuel security and high-end weapons holdings. Without doing so, we could be reduced to impotence in less than a week. In the medium to longer term, we need more stable security guarantees.”

In its 2016 defence white paper the government already foreshadowed a multi-billion dollar military expansion, lifting the defence budget to at least 2 percent of gross domestic product and purchasing advanced weapons systems. In a related move, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday announced a vast expansion of military industries in the name of a drive to export arms and become one of the world’s top ten weapons exporters.

None of these steps has anything to do with “defence” or preserving peace. Rather in a world where geo-political tensions are accelerating, Australia is seeking the military means to pursue its own imperialist interests, either in league with the US, as it has done since World War II, or independently if need be. The military and political establishment is coming to the conclusion that in order to do this it needs the ultimate in “high-end weapons”—a nuclear arsenal.

The Economist: Humanity teeters on the brink of world war

James Cogan

The Economist magazine, the influential London weekly described by Karl Marx over 150 years ago as the “European organ” of the “aristocracy of finance,” has devoted its latest issue to discussing “The Next War” and “The Growing Threat of Great Power Conflict.” Its lead editorial opens with a chilling warning:

In the past 25 years war has claimed too many lives. Yet even as civil and religious strife have raged in Syria, central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating clash between the world’s great powers has remained almost unimaginable.

No longer … powerful, long-term shifts in geopolitics and the proliferation of new technologies are eroding the extraordinary military dominance that America and its allies have enjoyed. Conflict on a scale and intensity not seen since the second world war is once again plausible. The world is not prepared.

The Economist envisages a dystopian, violent future, with the American military deploying to intimidate or destroy purported challenges to its dominance everywhere.

In the next 20 years, the Economist predicts that “climate change, population growth and sectarian or ethnic conflict” are likely to ensure that much of the world descends into “intrastate or civil wars.” Such conflicts will increasingly be fought in cities, ringed by “slums” and populated by millions of people, at “close quarters, block by block.” The future for large sections of humanity is the carnage that was witnessed during last year’s murderous battles over the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Syrian city of Aleppo.

But more chilling are the series of scenarios it outlines for a major escalation in tensions between the United States and Russia and China, presented as its strategic adversaries, which at any moment threaten to spiral into nuclear holocaust.

In July of 2016, Mehring Books published David North’s A Quarter Century of War, which noted:

Beginning with the first Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91, the United States has been at war continuously for a quarter century. While using propaganda catchphrases, such as defense of human rights and War on Terror, to conceal the real aims of its interventions in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as its confrontation with Russia and China, the United States has been engaged in a struggle for global hegemony. As the US seeks to counteract its economic weakness and worsening domestic social tensions, its relentless escalation of military operations threatens to erupt into a full-scale world war, between nuclear-armed states.

Less than two years later, much of this assessment has been echoed by one of the most significant political organs of Anglo-American capitalism. But the conclusions drawn by the Economist, speaking as the unalloyed representative of financial and corporate oligarchs whose wealth is bound up with American imperialist global dominance, is the exact opposite of North’s stated aim of helping build a “new antiwar movement.”

Rather, the Economist urges the United States to develop the “hard power” to defend itself against “determined and able challengers,” presenting the sociopathic argument that peace is best safeguarded by America’s ability to utterly destroy its adversaries.

The premise of the special report is that urgent action must be taken by the United States to stem the decline of its hegemony. It asserts that if the Chinese and Russian ruling class are permitted to realise their ambition of dominant influence in their own regions, then the “plausible” consequence will be a “devastating clash between the world’s great powers”—a world war fought with nuclear weapons.

China and Russia, its editorial in the January 27 edition declares, “are now revisionist states that want to challenge the status quo and look at their regions as spheres of influence to be dominated. For China, that means East Asia; for Russia, eastern Europe and Central Asia.”

The conclusion advanced by the Economist is that America must end “20 years of strategic drift” under successive administrations, which has allegedly “played into the hands of Russia and China.” In a series of articles, its special report advocates that the US spends staggering sums on new nuclear weapons and conventional weapons systems, including robotic, artificial intelligence (AI) technology, to ensure that it retains the military superiority that has, until now, inspired “fear in its foes.”

It warns: “The pressing danger is of war on the Korean peninsula, perhaps this year.… Tens of thousands of people would perish, many more if nukes were used.”

The US military is ready to launch such a war. It has B-2 and B-52 nuclear-capable bombers forward deployed at Guam, and hundreds of jet fighters and an armada of warships in other Pacific bases. There is ample reason to believe that the confrontation Washington has provoked with North Korea, through its demand that Pyongyang give up its nuclear weapons’ program, is a massive rehearsal for a future nuclear stand-off with China.

The Economist opines that “a war to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons seems a more speculative prospect for now, but could become more likely a few years hence.”

It asserts that the US is threatened by the so-called “grey zone” in which China, Russia, Iran, and other countries are seeking to “exploit” American “vulnerabilities” in parts of the world without provoking an open conflict. It gives as examples Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and Iran’s political influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

US imperialist meddling, however, is considered entirely legitimate by the Economist. In Syria, the US has waged seven years of intrigue for regime-change to overthrow the Russian and Iranian-backed government. Washington’s announcement this month that it intends to effectively occupy one third of the country and assemble a 30,000-strong proxy army from Kurdish and Islamist militias has created conditions for not only direct clashes with Iran or Russia, but also with its nominal NATO ally Turkey.

Predictably, amid the frenzied moves in the US and internationally to impose state control and censorship over the Internet, the journal accuses Russia of seeking to “undermine faith in Western institutions and encourage populist movements by meddling in elections and using bots and trolls on social media to fan grievances and prejudice.”

Technology companies, it insists, must be even more integrated with the military, while Internet corporations must work with the state apparatus to suppress access to oppositional views, on the fraudulent pretext of combatting “influence operations” and the “mass manipulation of public opinion.”

It notes in passing that for the American government, which already runs annual budget deficits approaching $700 billion, “finding the money will be another problem.”

The truth is that the subordination of every aspect of society to war preparations will be paid for by the ongoing destruction of the living standards and conditions of the American working class, combined with the elimination of its democratic rights and repression of opposition.

In an unintended echo of George Orwell’s “Newspeak,” the Economistconcludes that “a strong America”—armed to the teeth and permanently threatening its rivals with obliteration—is the “best guarantor of world peace.”

The most chilling aspect of the report, however, is that it is pessimistic of its own prognosis that US imperialism can intimidate its rivals into submission. The very development of an ever more aggressive military stance toward China and Russia raises, not lessens, the likelihood of war.

“The greatest danger,” it states, “lies in miscalculation through a failure to understand an adversary’s intentions, leading to an unplanned escalation that runs out of control.”

What is being referred to is escalation into a nuclear holocaust. The article quotes Tom Plant, an analyst at the RUSI thinktank: “For both Russia and the US, nukes have retained their primacy. You only have to look at how they are spending their money.”

The US is upgrading its entire nuclear arsenal over the coming decades at a cost of $1.2 trillion. Russia is upgrading its nuclear capable missiles, bombers and submarines. China is rapidly expanding the size and capability of its far smaller nuclear forces, as is Britain and France. Discussions are underway in ruling circles in Germany, Japan and even Australia on acquiring nuclear weapons so they can “resist” the nuclear-armed states.

The madness of a nuclear arms race in the 21st century arises inexorably from the contradictions of the capitalist system. The struggle among rival nation-states for global geostrategic and economic dominance is the inevitable outcome of its intractable crisis and the ferocious conflict for control over markets and resources.

The epoch of world war, wrote the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, is the epoch of world revolution. The overthrow of the capitalist system that gives rise to the war danger is an urgent necessity for the survival of human civilization.

The International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections are fighting to build an international, anti-war socialist workers’ movement. The open discussion on the prospect of nuclear war in the pages of journals like the Economist should motivate all serious workers and young people to join our struggle.

European Commission STARTS Prize (€20,000 plus funded to Award programs in Brussels and Amsterdam) 2018

Application Deadline: 2nd March 2018

Eligible Countries: All

To Be Taken At (Country): The winning projects will be presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 2018 in Linz, Austria, at the BOZAR Electronic Arts Festival in September/October 2018 in Brussels, Belgium, at Waag Society in Amsterdam, Netherlands and at various partners worldwide.

About the Award: Science, Technology and Arts (=STARTS) form a nexus with an extraordinarily high potential for creative innovation. And such innovation is considered to be precisely what’s called for if we’re to master the social, ecological and economic challenges that Europe will be facing in the near future. The role of artists thus is no longer seen to be just about propagating scientific and technological knowledge and skills among the general public but much more as a kind of catalyst that can inspire and trigger innovative processes. The artistic practice of creative exploration and experimental appropriation of new technologies has a wide reaching potential to contribute to the development of new products and new economic, social and business models. Accordingly, the STARTS Prize focuses on artistic works that influence or change the way we look at technology, and on innovative forms of collaboration between the ICT sector and the world of art and culture.

Considering the novelty of this award competition and the interdisciplinary approach, Ars Electronica is launching the STARTS Prize 2018 with a dual approach for submissions:

• Submission via open call: The STARTS Prize aims to showcase and celebrate visions and achievements at the interface between innovation and creation—driven by both science/technology and the Arts. The submission is open to all forms of artistic work and all types of technological and scientific research and development. Submission deadline is March 2nd, 2018.

• Recommendations through international advisors: 15 international advisors who have reputation and credibility in the field will recommend projects and help to encourage wider ranges of participants as well as a geographical and gender balance. These recommended projects will be contacted by the organizers and asked to submit their project via the submission platform. So the same process and deadlines will be applied as for the open submissions. The international advisors serve as facilitators to identify relevant works and projects during the submission process. However, they will not be part of the jury meeting and therefore will not have voting rights.

Type: Contest

Eligibility:

Who can enter?

• Artists / creative professionals or the researchers / companies involved from throughout the world; STARTS is not limited to citizens of EU-member states.

What can be submitted?

• groundbreaking collaborations and projects driven by both technology and the arts. Purely artistic or technologically driven projects are not the focus of this competition.
• all forms of artistic works and practices with a strong link to innovation in technology, business and/or society; furthermore, STARTS is not restricted to a particular genre such as media art and digital art.
• all types of technological and scientific research and development that has been inspired by art or involves artists as catalysts of novel thinking.

Selection Criteria: 

• Quality of the artistic research and its potential influence on technology
• Quality and success of the collaboration between art and technology
• Quality and intensity of the connection to innovation, education, social inclusion or sustainability
• General criteria such as aesthetics, originality, convincing concept, innovation and the technique and quality of the presentation

Number of Awards: 2

Value of Award: 

• Two prizes, each with €20,000 prize money, are offered to honor innovative projects at the intersection of science, technology and the arts: one for artistic exploration, and thus projects with the potential to influence or change the way technology is deployed, developed or perceived, and one for innovative collaboration between industry/technology and art/culture in ways that open up new paths for innovation.
• Grand Prize—Artistic Exploration
  Awarded for artistic exploration and art works where appropriation by the arts has a strong potential to influence or alter the use, deployment or perception of technology.
• Grand Prize—Innovative Collaboration
  Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts that opens new pathways for innovation.

Duration of Program: The jury convenes on April 23th, 2018. All STARTS Prize 2018 winners will be notified by beginning of June 2018 at the latest.

How to Apply:

• A video documentary (approximately 3 minutes in length)
• Images (JPG, TIF, BMP, PNG) at the highest possible resolution; compressed files (such as .zip or .lzh files) are unacceptable.
• A clear, detailed description of the artistic concept, the form of interaction and technical implementation; since specific prerequisites have to be fulfilled for an onsite presentation to take place (e.g. in conjunction with the Ars Electronica Festival), the project’s specifications as to hardware & software and spatial requirements should be as detailed as possible. Moreover, the entrant must specify what he/she can provide on his/her own in order to stage such an onsite presentation, and what must necessarily be furnished by Ars Electronica Linz.
• A printable portrait photo and a biography of the artist
• At the entrant’s option, additional material such as images, documents and drawings (as PNG or PDF) can also be submitted.

 SUBMIT NOW!

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: European Commission