The Afghan War is Killing More People Than Ever

Edward Hunt

Seventeen years into the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, violence has never been worse. In 2017, more than 20,000 Afghans died, a new record.

The dead include an estimated 10,000 Afghan security forces, 10,000 Taliban forces, and 3,438 civilians. Although there is no reliable data on Afghan casualties available to the public, reports published by the Costs of War Project at Brown University indicate that the annual death toll for the Afghan population has never been higher than it was in 2017.

For civilians, the last four years of the war have been the deadliest, with more than 3,400 civilians killed each year from 2014-2017, according to data from the United Nations and the Costs of War Project.

“We are concerned that we will see greater harm this year unless necessary steps are taken by all parties to prevent civilian casualties,” said Tadamichi Yamamoto, the UN Secretary General’s special representative for Afghanistan.

The record violence comes as the Trump administration has intensified the war against the Taliban. Although President Trump repeatedly indicated before he was president that he opposed the war and wanted to end it, he has instructed U.S. military forces to take more aggressive action.

“In Afghanistan, I’ve lifted restrictions and expanded authorities for commanders in the field,” Trump acknowledged last year. The new approach, according to Brigadier General Lance Bunch, means that “the gloves are off.” U.S. military forces are now looking for “any opportunity to target the enemies of Afghanistan wherever we find them in the theater.”

With the new authorities, the U.S.-led coalition has been waging a more aggressive war. In 2017, U.S. forces tripled the number of airstrikes against enemy forces. They also helped Afghan security forces intensify offensive operations against the Taliban.

“In the last year, we’ve seen offensive operations, kind of unprecedented over the last few years, by the Afghan security forces,” U.S. General John Nicholson, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, has commented.

Administration officials acknowledge that they expected the Taliban to respond to the increase in military pressure with more violence. “And so we anticipated this,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said. In March, State Department official Alice Wells remarked that “it will not come as a surprise if we see more terrorist tactics addressed at urban audiences.”

The increase in violence has been devastating for the Afghan people. According to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, which tracks civilian casualties, more than 3,400 Afghan civilians have died and more than 6,800 Afghan civilians have been injured in each of the past four years of the war.

Afghan officials quietly acknowledge that about 10,000 Afghan security forces died last year, a significant increase from previous years. Fearing that the publication of the numbers could undermine morale and hinder ongoing recruitment efforts in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has begun censoring the records.

Although U.S. and Afghan officials estimate that about 10,000 Taliban forces were killed in 2017, Gen. Nicholson has said that “enemy casualty rates have been much higher.” Either way, last year’s combined death toll for Afghan combatants is about 20,000 people.

Despite the record death toll, the Trump administration remains committed to its strategy. “Progress and violence coexist in Afghanistan,” Secretary Mattis recently commented.

The U.S. military’s primary objective is to bring at least 80 percent of the Afghan population under the control of the Afghan government. According to a classified study, the Afghan government might prevail in the war if it achieves this goal. “The focus of our military operations is on increasing and expanding population control by the government of Afghanistan,” General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command, told Congress earlier this year.

The Trump administration’s approach is failing. Not only are record numbers of Afghans dying, but the Afghan government has been losing control of the population. In its latest report to Congress, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction confirmed that the Afghan government’s control has dropped from 69 percent in August 2016 to 65 percent in January 2018.

Last year, the U.S. intelligence community largely predicted the failures. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the political and security situation in Afghanistan will almost certainly deteriorate through 2018 even with a modest increase in military assistance by the United States and its partners.”

Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said that the war has reached a new low. “After 17 years in Afghanistan the situation is worse than it’s ever been,” Hagel commented earlier this year.

Perhaps the best hope for Afghanistan now lies with a growing Afghan peace movement, which has been calling for an immediate ceasefire and talks to end the war. Not only has it succeeded in getting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to announce a temporary ceasefire, but the Taliban announced its own ceasefire, leading to a few days of peace and celebrations throughout the country.

“I think President Ghani is responding to and indeed reflecting the desire of a wide cross-section of Afghans… in desiring to see a reduction in violence and a way forward to an end to the conflict,” a senior State Department official said.

The Afghan government plans to maintain the ceasefire for the immediate future, despite the recent decision by Taliban officials to resume fighting.

Australian Senate votes for huge tax cuts for wealthy

Mike Head

Backed by nearly all the right-wing populists in the Senate, the Turnbull government yesterday succeeded in pushing through parliament legislation that promises to hand massive income tax cuts to rich households.

While the government claimed to be assisting low-income families, their tiny tax cuts will be dwarfed by those for the wealthiest layers of society. Workers paid less than $37,000 a year will get up to $200 in a tax offset—just enough for a cup of coffee a week—to be paid in a lump sum after July 1, 2019.

By contrast, high-income households, on combined incomes of up to $300,000, will benefit by up to $764 a year from this July 1, rising up to $8,350 a year from 2024–25. In general, the higher the income, the greater the tax cut. Someone on $200,000 a year, for example, will gain a 16 times greater benefit than a nurse on $55,000.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull hailed the passage of the three-stage, seven-year package as the “most comprehensive reform of personal income tax in a generation.” An historic shift is certainly involved, in favour of the wealthy elite. The centrepiece of the tax package is a virtual flat tax plan, whereby tax rates will not rise for incomes from $41,000 through to $200,000.

“It is fair, it rewards and encourages enterprise, it encourages and enables aspiration,” Turnbull said. Earlier in the week, Turnbull had told parliament what he meant by “aspiration.” In a display of ruling class contempt for working people, he said the tax package would encourage a low-paid 60-year-old aged care worker to “aspire” to a higher-paid job—an “aspiration” virtually impossible to achieve.

The tax bill passed by 37 votes to 33 in the Senate, where the Liberal-National Coalition government holds just 31 seats. Significantly, the extra votes were provided by an unstable assortment of “crossbenchers.” They had won seats at the 2016 double dissolution election by posing as anti-establishment candidates, exploiting the deepening discontent with the main pro-business parties, the Coalition, Labor and the Greens.

Among them were Senator Pauline Hanson and her sole remaining One Nation colleague, plus the two surviving senators from Centre Alliance, formerly called the Nick Xenophon Team. Fearing an electoral backlash, they each initially voted against the third stage of the tax package, the one most blatantly rewarding the rich. They reversed their votes yesterday, however, when the government refused to split the bill to separate off the third stage.

Buoyed by the vote, and urged on by the corporate media, the government vowed to seek a similar vote next week on its full plan to slash the company tax rate from 30 to 25 percent, which would deliver an $80 billion handout to the big banks and large companies over the next decade.

At present, Hanson and the Centre Alliance are vowing to vote against the company tax bill. They are aware of intense popular opposition to it and worried about an electoral disaster in by-elections scheduled for July 28 and the next general election, which is due within nine months.

Various media commentators have called into question the reality of the promised tax bonanza over the next 10 years, given the global economic turmoil and danger of another financial crash. The looming trade wars, particularly between the US and China, could have devastating consequences for Australian capitalism, which depends heavily on exports to China and investment from the US.

The tax plans are actually both designed to boost corporate profits and investors’ incomes under these conditions. They seek to match the tax cuts being offered by the Trump administration and capitalist governments around the world as they fight each other for investment and markets.

The tax bills, key parts of the government’s May budget, go hand-in-hand with vicious cuts to welfare and other social spending, intended to force jobless or low-paid workers into even lower-paid and less secure employment, and further multi-billion dollar increases in military spending in preparation for war.

Labor and the Greens voted against the government’s tax package, posturing as advocates of “fairness.” Labor leader Bill Shorten, a long-time trade union bureaucrat and former senior Labor government minister, again spoke of “working families doing it tough” and against “big banks and big business.”

This populist stance shows the acute concerns in the Labor and affiliated trade union leadership of the social and political discontent that is threatening to erupt outside the control of the political establishment. Disaffection is growing because of soaring inequality and decades of attacks on working class conditions by Labor and Coalition governments alike.

Even as he claimed to speak for working people, Shorten emphasised Labor’s aim to head off any eruption of working class hostility. He insisted in parliament that it was “not class war” to demand bigger tax cuts for the majority of workers and more funding for school and hospitals.

In reality, Labor’s alternative tax package is a modified version of the government’s. Its purpose is to satisfy the requirements of the corporate elite while trying to channel the disaffection back behind the election of another pro-business Labor government.

Labor has promised to double the tiny income tax offsets for people on low to middle incomes. This still would not pay for transport fares or petrol costs. Labor also supported the government’s increase in the $87,000 tax threshold to $90,000 from July 1, a move that will hand higher-income households up to $764 in 2018-19, and much more over future years.

The fraud of Labor’s posturing was underscored by this week’s election of former Treasurer Wayne Swan as the next Labor Party national president. Swan ran a campaign that insisted Labor had to make “fairness” the centre of its electoral pitch.

After his victory, Swan told Sky News: “There’s a very clear choice—a prosperous, fair Australia, with a fair tax system under Labor, and under the Liberals what you get is the rich are getting richer.”

Swan explained: “To get new members coming through our door, and a new generation campaigning and voting for us, we have to show them we mean business about creating a better, more democratic and more equal society.”

This is from the man who handed down one budget after another under the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments of 2007 to 2013. After propping up the major banks with borrowing guarantees after the 2008 global financial crisis, the Labor governments inflicted the burden on the working class via cuts to welfare, including for sole parents, and to education and healthcare.

The voting figures in the Labor Party poll provided another glimpse of the ongoing collapse in the party’s membership and support, precisely because of its record. Only 19,504 people voted, about 40 percent of the party’s claimed membership, which is dominated by parliamentary careerists, union bureaucrats and staff members.

Far from representing “working families doing it tough,” the Labor Party is a thoroughly corporate entity. It was the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s, working very closely with the trade unions, that began the restructuring of Australian capitalism to make it “internationally competitive” at the direct expense of the working class.

Peruvian teachers strike in defiance of government ban

Cesar Uco

Peruvian teachers have continued an indefinite strike in defiance of a government decree Wednesday declaring their action illegal and threatening mass firings in retaliation.

The decree was imposed in the 19 out of 24 of the country’s regions where the action has shut down public schools. According to business daily Gestión, 70 percent of public schools remain closed, affecting 3.5 million students.

Prime Minister César Villanueva warned that teachers who fail to heed the strike ban will face administrative measures, including the loss of pay for every day not worked.

Minister of Education Daniel Alfaro was more menacing, telling the daily Expreso that “teachers who do not come to work for three consecutive days will be definitively replaced,” having been deemed to have abandoned their jobs. The government will also freeze the accounts of any regional government that pays strikers for days not worked, he said.

The government has attempted to vilify the teachers movement, with the minister of the interior, Carlos Basombrio, linking it to the former Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, based on the fact that a few of the strike’s leaders belong to Movadef (Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights), a group that has called for the release of imprisoned Sendero members.

Hundreds of teachers have come into Lima from the provinces to participate in daily demonstrations against the government. They are being fed by soup kitchens and sleeping on cardboard on the floor of the union headquarters.

According to Gestión: “The government has practically agreed to all salary demands, although it will be gradual, but refuses to yield on the evaluation of teachers’ performance,” a measure supposedly aimed at removing those found incompetent.

The claim that demands dealing with wages and benefits have been resolved has been rejected by the teachers themselves, who continue to press for both salary increases and an increase in the education budget in daily mass marches.

The conditions facing teachers in a country that lacks proper roads are extremely harsh. A considerable number of teachers have to travel hours on foot every day to get to schools to teach, with a salary of just 1,200 soles (US$ 370) a month.

Thus far, there have been no violent confrontations between the police and teachers. During the last 50-day walkout by teachers last year, however, demonstrations by teachers were brutally attacked by the police on several occasions.

The present strike is based on the government’s failure to fulfill the agreements reached to settle the 2017 teachers strike. The teachers’ union president, Pedro Castillo, has declared that teachers are preparing larger mobilizations in the coming days. He said that one of the main demands was an increase in the education budget to 6 percent of GDP; it currently stands at 3.67 percent.

The teachers’ strike is part of growing wave of workers’ struggles throughout Peru. Railroad workers in Cusco walked out, while in Lima and its neighboring port city of Callao, transit workers launched a strike Wednesday.

It was estimated that half of public transport was paralyzed in Lima at rush hour Wednesday morning. The attitude of the government was to accept the demands of the transport workers, approving 280 new licenses, which extend transport companies’ rights to continue operating until 2019.

In spite of the agreement, Lima municipal officials issued a warning asking the police to intervene if there were incidents involving people trying to take the bus to work.

The highly visible “tourist” train to Machu Picchu was partially paralyzed by the strike of railroad workers. They are demanding wage increases and also an increase in the education budget. They are in the third day of an indefinite strike.

In addition, there are 198 unresolved social conflicts—146 of which are active—that are threatening to erupt once again because of the intransigence of the administration of Peru’s new President Martin Vizcarra in denying their basic demands.

The Peruvian ruling class has been taken aback by the mass movement of workers and peasants all over the country, which is disrupting their attempts to destabilize a crisis-ridden state apparatus. Expressing fear and concern, the daily Expreso led Wednesday’s edition with “Strike season begun in Peru.” It warned that a “new strike wave and protests threaten the country,” and that many more workers could be expected to “join the indefinite teachers’ general strike that started Monday.”

The Peruvian economy has been in decline for the past two years. The economic crisis has been combined with a crisis of governability, with former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) forced to resign over his involvement in the multibillion-dollar bribery and concessions scandal involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Recently, it was revealed that the bribes in Peru could amount to a sum much higher than the previously reported US$29 million.

The approval ratings of politicians in the executive and legislative branch are below 20 percent. The right-wing fujimorista Fuerza Popular, which dominates the legislature, is divided between the followers of Keiko Fujimori and her younger brother Kenji. In December, Kenji struck a deal with president PPK to free his jailed father, Alberto Fujimori, who had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity, in exchange for avoiding impeachment. According to the polling firm Ipsos, as of April 2018, Keiko’s approval rating was a meager 19 percent, her brother Kenji’s, 15 percent. The left bourgeois parties fare no better, with their most visible leader, Veronika Mendoza from Nuevo Peru, reaching an approval rate of only 18 percent. Meanwhile, the governing party has seen its representation in Congress cut almost in half.

Given the discrediting of all the major parties and institutions in Peru, a renewal of the class struggle threatens to destabilize the entire existing capitalist political setup.

UK Conservative government proposes tax increases on workers to fund National Health Service

Ajanta Silva 

This week, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the National Health Service (NHS) will receive a further £20 billion in funding. While the funding sources remains vague, with an unspecified “Brexit dividend” being cited as one source, any such increase is not set to be implemented until 2023-2024.

What is clear is that millions of workers will face large tax increases to pay for any increase. The NHS is relied on by more than 60 million men women and children and paid for through taxation.

May announced that in order to fund the NHS, “we will all need to make a greater contribution through the tax system in a way that is fair and balanced.” The Financial Times reported that Chancellor Philip Hammond is to oversee the proposal and that “nothing is off the table” for him.

The announcement follows months of propaganda that only on the basis of a huge increase in the taxing of working people can the NHS’s long-term funding crisis be resolved.

“Solutions” mooted include introducing charges to use NHS services as standard, replacing publicly run services with an insurance-based system, and introducing a dedicated tax to fund the NHS.

The common theme of these solutions is that any necessary funding increase should fall on to the shoulders of the working class, not the wealthy elite. This, as the British super-rich have tripled their wealth in the 10 years since the global financial crash, while workers on average earn £24 less per week than they did before the 2007-2008 global financial crash and the onset of mass austerity.

More than a trillion pounds—enough to run the NHS for almost a decade—was spent to bail out the banks during the financial meltdown by the then-Labour Party government.

The richest 1,000 individuals now possess wealth, not including bank balances, of £724 billion and have increased their riches by a massive 10 percent on average in the last year alone. These hundreds of billions would pay for the NHS’s current annual budget of £116 billion more than six times over.

The demand that workers pay more tax to fund the NHS is in sharp contrast to the tax breaks for the rich, including the slashing of Corporation Tax by successive Tory governments since 2014. By 2020, it will have fallen from 20 percent to 17 percent, with the aim of reducing it to a level such as that in Ireland of 12.5 percent.

But there are no demands that the super-rich hand over any of their ill-gotten gains to fund the NHS.

Instead, a report, “Securing the future: funding health and social care to the 2030s,” authored by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the Health Foundation charity—in association with the NHS Confederation, representing 240 trusts in England—demanded increasing workers’ taxes. The report proposes a massive tax increase to the tune of £1,200-£2,000 per household over the next 15 years.

The IFS/Health Foundation point to the growing demand on services and the financial crisis engulfing in the NHS. They note that “with the older population growing rapidly, along with the numbers suffering chronic health problems, and a growing pay and drugs bill, demands on the health service will only continue to grow.”

They predict that in order “to secure some modest improvements in NHS services, funding increases of nearer 4% a year would be required over the medium term, with 5% annual increases in the short run. This would allow some immediate catch-up, enable waiting time targets to be met, and tackle some of the underfunding in mental health services.”

Even to continue with something like the current funding arrangements, the report says that “adult social care spending is likely to have to rise by 3.9% a year over the next 15 years taking an extra 0.4% of national income, relative to today.”

They conclude that overall, “[H]ealth and social care spending is likely to have to rise by 2–3% of national income over the next 15 years.”

What this means is clear: If people want to retain the NHS and care system, be prepared to pay more for it. Otherwise, services will continue to be slashed to the bone.

The report was effusively welcomed by representatives of all the main parties and the corporate media and hailed as the only possible way to fund the NHS.

A number of right-wing Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs demanded May commit to increasing tax on workers to fund the NHS, claiming that there is public support for this measure.

MP Dr. Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative chair of the health and social care select committee, Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrats’ former care minister, and Liz Kendall, the Blairite former shadow care minister, said, “As a cross-party group of MPs who have come together to campaign for a new settlement for the NHS and the care system, we wholeheartedly endorse this analysis.

“We call for the government to accept the case for meeting the ambitious scenario which would deliver a modernised NHS. It sets a benchmark against which to judge any announcements from the government about extra funding for the NHS and social care as we approach the 70th anniversary of this great institution.”

Writing for the Financial Times, Martin Wolf said, “Public spending on health (and grossly underfunded social care) must rise in the years ahead. Politicians must discuss higher taxation. Anything else is an evasion,” He asserted that “to help the discussion, we have the benefit of a superb new report.”

Wolf warned, “[T]he decision to fund health though taxation was a perfectly reasonable one. Political cowardice is no reason for refusing to live up to the evident consequences.”

The Guardian editorialised, “Politicians of all stripes have for too long avoided confronting hard truths about rising demand for health services and how to meet the cost”. It praised May for earlier starting a necessary conversation with her plan to reform social care financing—then dubbed as dementia tax.

Increasing the taxes of workers, many already pauperised, to fund the NHS is to continue as more avenues are opened for the big private health care, pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies to make far greater profits from the NHS—of which a substantial chunk has already been privatised.

In 2016-2017 alone, 70 percent of the £7.1 billion worth of NHS clinical contracts awarded through the market tendering process in England were scooped up by private firms. This brings the total value of contracts awarded through the market to around £25 billion, since the Health and Social Care Act (2012) came into force.

The central responsibility for the financial crisis tearing apart the NHS is its massive underfunding over the last decade. The IFS documents: “Health spending has risen by an average 3.7% a year in real terms since the NHS was founded 70 years ago. At 1.4% a year, spending growth over the last eight years has been slower than at any time in the NHS’s history.”

Since May’s predecessor David Cameron ushered in the “age of austerity” in 2009, the Tories have imposed record low levels of funding for public health care. Since 2010, tens of billions of pounds have been slashed from the NHS budget in efficiency savings as part of plans to save nearly £50 billion between 2010 and 2020. The first £20 billion in savings was drawn up at the behest of the last Labour government of Gordon Brown. These have crippled front-line services and put patient safety and care in jeopardy.

May’s proposal will see these cuts continue, with her pledge for a “plan that tackles wastes, reduces bureaucracy, and eliminates unacceptable variation, with all these efficiency savings reinvested back into patient care.”

In recent years, social care spending has fallen by 10 percent as a result of deliberate starving of funds by Tory-led governments, despite the growing demand for these services and the most vulnerable people in society not receiving the appropriate level of support and care.

Key waiting-time targets for elective surgery, cancer treatment, investigation and Accident and Emergency performance have not only been missed but gone from bad to worse. Many patients who are medically fit for discharge are compelled to languish in hospitals due to lack of social care and support in the community. Hospital bed occupancy rates have reached dangerous levels. A year earlier, the crisis engulfing the NHS was aptly described by the Red Cross as a “humanitarian crisis.”

Staff shortages are becoming more acute and dangerous for patient safety despite bogus government claims that they have increased staffing levels. In England alone, there is a shortage of 40,000 nurses. The UK has fewer practising doctors per 1,000 people than many other European Union countries.

Trump administration plans sweeping government restructure to cut social programs

Matthew Taylor

The Trump administration announced on Thursday its intention to restructure the federal government as part of a reactionary initiative to eliminate food stamps, housing aid and other forms of social assistance that millions of Americans rely upon.

The proposed reorganization of federal agencies and cabinet departments includes the merger of the Department of Labor and the Department of Education (ED) into a single entity to be called the Department of Education and the Workforce. This would allow the administration to reduce or eliminate many job training programs, workplace protections and student aid programs.

Established in 1980 at the end of the Carter administration, the ED has long been a target of conservative politicians. President Ronald Reagan attempted to eliminate the agency in the 1980s but was blocked by Congress. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry famously called for the elimination of the department during the 2012 presidential campaign along with the Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy, which he now leads.

With only 4,000 employees and a budget of some $70 billion dollars, ED is one of the smallest cabinet-level agencies in the federal government. Upon taking office Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to head the agency. The billionaire DeVos, whose husband is heir to the Amway fortune and whose brother, Eric Prince, is the founder of the notorious Blackwater mercenary group, has made a career of attacking public education.

Before taking office, DeVos, along with her family, spearheaded the attack on public education in the state of Michigan, where she hails from, and nationwide. They have spent tens of millions sponsoring legislation which would enable the privatization of public schools, eliminate protections for teachers—including the right to strike—and enable religious organizations to play a prominent role in public education.

Trump’s appointment of DeVos to head the agency at the outset of his administration was a clear signal to the various billionaire-funded think tanks and political action committees that he endorses their agenda of privatization. Now with his attempt to merge the Departments of Labor and Education, he is indicating to those same forces his intent to eliminate public assistance altogether.

The Department of Labor, with a budget of $12.2 billion and 14,400 employees, currently oversees a host of programs, including federal Unemployment Insurance, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, as well as programs covering workers’ compensation, veterans’ employment, workplace protections for the disabled, and other worker protection agencies.

All of these programs, however ineffective they may be, represent an obstacle to the more efficient exploitation of workers by big business.

Also set to be shifted from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the Department of Commerce is the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant Program, which funds various housing programs for low-income people. The rationale behind this move, according to an anonymous Republican advisor quoted by the New York Times, is that career bureaucrats within HUD may be too sympathetic to the recipients of this funding and that Department of Commerce officials would be more likely to effect its elimination.

Most significantly, the administration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, would be moved from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health and Human Services, which would be renamed the Department of Health and Public Welfare, paving the way for the elimination of SNAP benefits.

The elimination or reduction of SNAP benefits is a long-held ambition of Republican lawmakers, who have been foiled in past attempts to destroy the program due to the fact that its funding is provided through the Food Bill, legislation passed by Congress every five years which in addition to providing SNAP benefits to low income citizens also authorizes the vast subsidies upon which the US agricultural sector relies upon to remain competitive in the global market.

Because many Republican lawmakers have traditionally relied upon the vote of farmworkers in so-called “red states” it has been necessary to preserve the SNAP program in order to maintain the provision of subsidies to farmers. Trump’s proposed change would eliminate that obstacle.

Food assistance benefits have already been heavily eroded by various state legislatures which administer the federal program—especially over the past decade. This typically includes setting income thresholds so low that only the poorest workers are eligible, placing a time limit on how long an individual can collect benefits, and most recently instituting work requirements on beneficiaries of the program.

The branding of the new agency as the Department of Health and Public Welfare is in itself an attempt to make the programs the agency administers more vulnerable to elimination. For decades politicians from both capitalist parties have used the term “welfare,” which refers to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, as an epithet. Insofar as they have been successful in attacking welfare, it is due to the fact that TANF, like SNAP and other social assistance programs, is only available to the very poorest citizens. This deprives millions of struggling workers of benefiting from these programs and creates a political wedge upon which the ruling class can divide workers who share a common class interest.

Just as with Trump’s moves last year to render Medicaid ineffective by allowing the states to institute work requirements, charge premiums for coverage,and institute other measures to prevent Americans from benefiting from the social programs that were conceded to them through decades of struggle, his latest attempt at social regression is of a similar character.

Where social programs can be eliminated, they will be. Where they cannot, onerous work requirements will be attached to them to make them inaccessible to the majority of the population and ineffective for the few who do qualify. All of these actions are a prelude to the ultimate goal, the liquidation of Social Security and Medicare and the transfer of the assets of these programs into the hands of the Wall Street parasites in whose interests the US political system operates.

Trump’s proposed restructuring would require the approval of Congress, a tall order in an election year. Though Trump’s plan is in keeping with the long-held aims of both the Democratic and Republican parties, the political blowback may prevent enough Republican legislators from supporting it to prevent its passage. Just as with Bill Clinton’s destruction of “welfare as we know it” and Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—perhaps the two most reactionary pieces of domestic legislation passed in recent decades—Trump’s plan may ultimately require a Democratic politician to push it through.

Trade war and the eruption of economic nationalism

Nick Beams

One year ago, there was a conflict in major international economic bodies over the refusal of the United States to include a commitment to “resist protectionism” in communiqués and statements.

The phrase had been regularly invoked by international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the G20 in response to the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008. Indeed, the leaders of the major capitalist powers regularly congratulated themselves over the following years that, in response to the most significant economic breakdown since the Great Depression, they were not going down the path of the 1930s.

The lessons of history had been learned, they claimed, and there would be no repeat of the trade war and other protectionist measures that played a key role both in deepening the Depression and creating the conditions for the eruption of World War II.

Twelve months after the outbreak of the war of words, what is the situation?

The United States, invoking “national security,” has imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent on steel and aluminium imports from the European Union, Canada, and Japan. The EU will today impose retaliatory tariffs, and Canada is likewise preparing to impose tariffs on the United States.

Next month the US will start to impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, directed at high-tech products, with threats to impose imposts on a further $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, and the possibility of tariffs on an additional $200 billion after that if China goes ahead with its threat to retaliate.

The key issue in the conflict with China is not primarily the US trade deficit—the US has rejected moves by China to increase its imports from America—but the moves by Beijing to enhance its industrial and technological capacities under its Made in China 2025 plan. The US regards this perspective as a threat to both its economic and military supremacy.

In a comment published in the Wall Street Journal this week, Peter Navarro, Trump’s White House economic adviser, made clear that what he called “Beijing’s audacious plan to dominate emerging technology industries” would not be tolerated, that China’s investment in “strategic technologies” posed “the gravest risk to “America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base” and that “economic security is national security.”

In other words, the economic warfare being conducted by the United States is bound up with the drive to reduce China to the status of an economic semi-colony and this agenda will be imposed by military means if necessary.

The trade war measures being imposed by the US against both its “strategic allies” and what it calls its “strategic competitor,” China, are, from the standpoint of the development of man’s productive forces, totally irrational.

In the more than eight decades since the disastrous tariff and currency wars of the 1930s, the global economy has become a far more profoundly integrated organism with virtually every commodity the product of a vast and complex international division of labour in which many components of products cross international border several times before emerging in their final form.

But the very irrationality of the US measures, imposed under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” does not mean there will be some pull back.

On the contrary, as Trotsky observed some 80 years ago, while the prospect of harmonious economic development on a nationalist foundation was completely impossible, the economic nationalism of an authoritarian or fascist state was a “menacing reality insofar as it is a question of concentration all the economic forces of the nation for the preparation of a new war.” These measures signified that a new world war was “knocking at the gates.”

Trotsky’s warnings resonate in the current international political situation. In every country, the precepts of liberal democracy are being torn apart amid the re-emergence of the authoritarian and fascist forms of rule that characterised the 1930s. Today, as in that period, “Everyone defends himself against everybody else, protecting himself by a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets.”

As the WSWS outlined in yesterday’s perspective, there is now a global war against immigrants. In the United States, Gestapo-like raids are being launched with the use of language against immigrants that recalls that of the Nazi regime in Germany. European politics is being dominated by the rise of increasingly right-wing and fascistic movements—in Germany, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere—speaking with the voice of those who carried out the worst crimes of the 20th century.

The fact that the breakdown of the entire economic order and its attendant political consequences is being spearheaded by the United States—the supposed guarantor of international stability—is of the most profound historical significance.

The launching of trade war and the return to economic nationalism is the outcome of deep and irresolvable contradictions within the global capitalist system above all that between the global character of the economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states and great powers, struggling against each other for markets and profits.

In the final years of the 1930s and into the war years, key sections of the US political establishment drew the conclusion that any return to the nationalist policies of that decade would bring about an economic disaster and create the conditions for socialist revolution. This understanding was the basis for the construction of the post-war order based on the promotion of free trade and the renunciation of protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbour economic measures.

Rather than seeking to crush its former economic and strategic rivals, the US sought to promote their economic growth through measures such as the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, the Marshall Plan and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These policies were not carried out on the basis of any US benevolence but were grounded in calculated self-interest—the recognition that the economic advance of the US depended on the expansion of the world economy as a whole.

These conceptions formed the basis of the post-war economic order. But the very growth of the world economy steadily undermined the dominant position of the US within the world economy. In the past 30 years, the globalisation of production has accelerated this tendency. Now the US is confronted not only with the increasing economic power of its old rivals, Europe and Japan, but the emergence of a new “strategic competitor” in the form of China.

Sections of the US ruling elite came to conclude that rather than enhancing the position of the United States, the very post-war system it had constructed was now undermining it. This assessment did not begin with the Trump administration but formed the centre of the international economic policies of the Obama administration. It insisted that a new system had to be constructed, based not on multilateralism, but on the establishment of a new regime which placed the US at the centre of a network of global economic relations.

This was the nationalist core of the Obama administration’s proposal for a Trans-Pacific Partnership, excluding China and Obama’s corresponding plans for Europe.

While Trump scrapped both these plans, the economic nationalism which formed their essential content, has now been developed and expanded in even more virulent form. The aim is to re-establish the economic dominance of the US by any means necessary: the prosecution of trade war, economic nationalism, accompanied necessarily by increasingly authoritarian measures, and the assertion of American military might in every corner of the world.

Even as they criticise Trump’s imposition of tariffs on the United States’ NATO allies, the Democrats have loudly praised the US president’s trade war measures against China, and even demanded their expansion. The bipartisan support for these policies makes clear that trade war and protectionism is not merely a product of Trump, but of American capitalism.

There are those who vainly hope that somehow, in some way, in the face of the madness of trade war and economic nationalism the US can be made to see reason and at least undertake a course correction, if not a reversal. This is an illusion. There can be no return to the past because the economic foundations on which it was based have been shattered.

The only way out of the breakdown of the global capitalist system and all the attendant horrors it is producing, is the unified struggle of the international working class for political power and the socialist transformation of the world.

Living by One’s Own Truth: Capitalism equals Corruption

Anandi Sharan

Small and marginal farmers, sharecroppers, landless labourers and other farm and forest workers in India are the single largest natural resource being exploited for capitalist accumulation in India.

The market pays the manual work of those who produce their own food and that of others at below social reproduction cost.

This is a fundamental market failure in relation to the majority of human beings in India. The manual labourer in India is given rations in the form of Public Distribution Service food by the State in order that capital is free to take everything from the land and people and grow at the cost of everything else.

The growth of capital is at the cost of the humans who work with their hands, as well as at the cost of animals and plant biodiversity.

100% of biota today is appropriated by capital. There is no wilderness. The number of mammals has reduced by 70% in the last 50 years. What remains are workers, the last bio-mass of any mass other than ants on earth, to be exploited for capital in its latest avatar of globally networked electronic-financial-exploitation-machines run on algorithms to maximise the financial income of the capitalists sitting at the centre of the web.

An association of independent producers generally has a vision of a market that serves the producer, allowing her to retain at least enough from her surplus production of food, wood, etc to earn money and save wood enough build an own home within five years of starting work. She rightly should be able to expect to contribute to a network of such producers in her region to allow her to buy the services of transport systems that allows her to visit relatives and friends within India and abroad from the income earned from her productive work at least a few times a year. Other basic needs can be added to the list of minimum expectations any producer should be able to work towards in her life and work. This matriarchal vision is that all human beings should, according to the paradigm of the unilateral drawing from the world that a mother does when she nurtures her children, be able to draw what she needs from the world to create the world anew everyday in full harmony with others and her surroundings. But the vision is the opposite of the reality.

The exploitative nature of the Indian State is illustrated by the plethora of laws passed by the Indian Parliament that protect banks rather than agriculturists. Instead of protecting the market for the work product of Indian agricultural and forest workers, the State protects the profit of banks. To avoid mass starvation deaths as a consequence of this capitalist legal framework, the majority of Indians are given food rations by the State in order to keep us as a reserve army of labour for global capital. Indian capital itself is created by commercial banks owned majorly but not exclusively by the State for the benefit of global capital. Indian capitalists must pay 12% to borrow money to hire workers. Indian agriculturists must pay the same interest rate for working capital, or more in case they are not “bankable”. And the solution to this totally anti-worker money system of high interest and debt in India according to the United Nations, the Group of Seven, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, and all the other institutions of the Washington consensus, including the Indian Finance Ministry, Niti Aayog, and the Reserve Bank of India, is for India to borrow part of the 76 trillion US dollars swirling around in the global economy at interests rates lower than Indian ones. And this is what is going on. The Modi Government like the Manmohan Singh Government before it has an economic policy based on the import of capital into India, with the attendant outflow of repayments and interest and loss of monetary sovereignty of India. Fascist Governments such as these are in the ascendant across the world.

To conclude: the struggle for justice by agricultural workers and unemployed labourers in India in our demands for economic and political arrangements that meets our needs within the framework of the Indian constitution, is the sine qua non of the survival of the human species and most other higher living organisms on earth.

Trees will survive and thrive when capitalism ends no matter what. But unless we humans overthrow capitalism and put the peace, happiness and harmony of each and everyone of us at the heart of our economic and political actions, most of us will die very unhappy, and ill, and malnourished in the coming decades.

The Catholic Church in Resistance: Priests, Child Abuse, and Breaking the Seal of the Confessional

Binoy Kampmark

The tradition is represented as noble, the confiding link between confessor and penitent, a bridge never to be broken, even under pain of death.  Taken that way, the confessional is brandished as the Catholic Church’s great weapon against the wiles and predations of secular power.  The State shall have no say where the priest’s confidence is concerned, for all may go to him to seek amends.  “The sacramental seal,” goes the relevant code of canon law, “is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for the confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason.”

Those points certainly have merits, even if these seem a touch faded after the sex abuse imbroglio the Church has found itself in.   Confession, which functions as a barometric reading of Catholic guilt, has developed its own succour and relish, an ecosystem of ritual and understanding resistant to the prying of the criminal law.  Not merely does its ironclad protection provide a dispensation from the laws of the land in certain troubling cases; the confession, in effect, serves as an economy of ordered guilt, reassurance for the next binge of sin. To remove it, or at the very least heavily qualify it, would be an unsettling challenge to a distinct Weltanschauung.

The process effectively permits all – including erring priests – to engage the process from either side of the grille. Historically, the process also imperilled children.  Pope Pius X, in decreeing in 1910 that confession should commence at the tender age of seven, permitted an army of celibates access to vulnerable, an in certain instances titillating flesh.

Legislators troubled by the enduring force and fascination with the seal of the confessional have gotten busy, most notably in Australia.  This was prompted, in no small part, by the findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. “We are satisfied,” went the Australian report, “that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt.”

One recommendation specifies that institutions “which have a religious confession for children should implement a policy that requires the rite only to be conducted in an open space within the clear line of sight of another adult.” But the members of the Royal Commission went beyond the spatial logistics of the confessional.  Institutional jolting was required.

Each state and territory government, argued Commission members, should pass legislation creating “a criminal offence of failure to report targeted at child sexual abuse in an institutional context”.  This, it was suggested, would extend to “knowledge gained or suspicions that are or should have been formed, in whole or in part, on the basis of information disclosed in or in connection with a religious confession.”  The law would also exclude existing excuses, protections or privileges.

Despite treading delicately, such recommendations were not merely matters for demurral by the Church, but considerations to be sneered at from the summit of spiritual snobbery.  President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart reduced the matter to one of neat sophistry veiled by religious freedom.  “Confession in the Catholic Church,” he reasoned in August last year, “is a spiritual encounter with God through the priest” being “a fundamental part of the freedom of religion”.

Hart’s protestations did not go heeded in the South Australian legislature, making it the first in Australia to legally oblige priests to report confessions of child abuse from October 1.  Omitting to do so will result in a fine of $10,000.  Bishop of Port Pirie and acting Adelaide Archbishop Greg O’Kelly, much in Hart’s vein, saw the move as having “much wider implications for the Catholic Church and the practice of the faith.” Such comments could only come across as archaic and insensitive, given the conviction of his predecessor, Archbishop Philip Wilson, for concealing child sex abuse.

More to the point, the remarks by Bishop O’Kelly are brazenly selfish, permitting the priest an all-exclusive gold card for reasons of amendment, “that the penitent actually is sincere about wanting forgiveness, is sincere about anting reparation”.  The conspicuous absentee here is the victim, always abstracted, if not totally hidden, by matters of the spirit.

While accounts such as John Cornwell’s, whose stingingly personal The Dark Box makes the sensible point that abolishing the confession and its lusty pull would essentially address the problem, the Church is already finding fewer penitents.  In a sense, it is already losing the appeal, the allure, and even the danger, of the confessional.  Musty physical convention has given way to digital releases and outpouring.  Social media, crowned by the confessional fetish that is Facebook, takes the disturbed soul and expresses it to the globe.

From the vacuity of the Kardashian phenomenon to the newly enlisted grandparent keen to reflect on banal deeds, these platforms have stolen an irresistible march on those in the land of Catholicity.  Such confessions of sin or achievement – the distinctions are not always clear – have become the preserve of Mark Zuckerberg and his technicians, rather than a local priest desperate to remain relevant. But that age old resistance against the laws of the civic secular domain remains the Church of Rome’s stubborn, practised specialty. The elusive spirit, in dialogue with an unverified Sky God, continues to be its invaluable alibi for crimes of the flesh.

Outrage in Russia over pension reform

Clara Weiss

Last Thursday, the Russian Labor Ministry submitted a bill to the Duma (parliament) that raises the retirement age for men to 65 from 60 and women to 63 from 55. The bill was intentionally submitted the first day of the FIFA World Cup, when Russia played against Saudi Arabia at the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow. The law, which still has several legislative processes to go through, is widely expected to be adopted in the fall. Ninety-two percent of the population oppose the measure, according to polls.

Because of low life expectancy for substantial segments of the population, the increase in the retirement age will mean that large numbers of Russia’s workers will not live long enough to see a pension. Although life expectancy, which dropped dramatically during capitalist restoration in the 1990s, has been rising over the past 18 years and now stands at 72.5 years, only 57 percent of Russian men live until the age of 65.

In 62 out of 85 regions of the Russian Federation, the average life expectancy for men is below 65 years. In 3 of them it is below 60. It is particularly low in many industrial jobs, including coal mining and the metallurgical and chemical industries. Women in Russia, whose life expectancy stands at 77.06 years, outlive their male counterparts by more than 10 years.

The pension reform bill will jack up the retirement age for a number of special-category workers who have hitherto been able to stop working sooner. This includes those employed in the far north, for whom the retirement age will increase from 50 for women and 55 for men to 58 and 60 years, respectively.

The average pension in Russia, 13,300 rubles ($210), is so low that 17 million out of the 47 million pensioners in Russia at this point are still working, the majority of them in low-paying jobs. However, in many professions it is close to impossible to find employment after one’s mid-50s. The pension reform will mean that many older people, unable to find work and ineligible to receive a pension, will become unemployed and entirely dependent on their family and friends helping them financially. The unemployed receive virtually no state support in Russia.

The average salary in Russia is currently around 35,900 rubles ($567), with real incomes having declined some 11 percent over the past 4 years. To support an additional family member on such poverty wages will push already poor families into destitution. According to official statistics, some 19.6 million Russians, about 13.4 percent of the population, now live in extreme poverty. They have to survive on 9,828 rubles (less than $174) a month. Millions more are living on the brink of extreme poverty, cannot afford to travel for vacation, or buy new clothes.

The raising of the retirement age, discussed for years within the ruling elites, is the most far-reaching assault on the living standards of the population since the restoration of capitalism in the 1990s. Part of the ongoing reshuffling of wealth from the population to the country’s super-rich oligarchy, the move is also part of the Kremlin’s overtures to international finance capital, which has long demanded that the government ax social expenditures.

The Russian government has remained markedly vague about its precise plans. However, it is widely believed that the measure is based on the proposal of the Center for Strategic Research, headed by former finance minister Alexei Kudrin. Kudrin is a close confidant of President Putin. He is an important link between the Presidential administration and more openly pro-imperialist forces actively working for a negotiated settlement between imperialism and Russian big business.

It remains unclear whether the retirement age will be raised gradually over the next 15 years, or all at once, as one deputy of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation recently argued.

Experts have called the increase in the retirement age a blatant act of “confiscation” of the population’s wealth. According to calculations by Maksim Krivelevich, who teaches at the School of Economics and Management of the Far-Eastern Federal State University, the state will effectively steal 1 million rubles ($16,000) from every working woman and 1.5 million rubles ($24,000) from every working man. The money, earned by workers over decades and paid into the government-run pension system, is being re-directed into the state budget, which is regularly used to bailout oligarchs and banks hit by the recent Western sanctions and economic crisis.

As of this writing, over 2.15 million people have signed a petition initiated by the Confederation of Labor of Russia (KRT) at the end of last week and addressed to the President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, and the Federal Assembly demanding that the pension “reform” not be enacted.

In comments on the petition, many workers expressed their outrage and hatred of the ruling oligarchy and the government. To quote just a few comments:

•  “I was robbed by this country in 1991, in 1997, in 2008, I will not bear it any longer.”
  
•  “There is money for war, soccer, and “Mercedes” cars for officials, but not for pensions?”
  
•  “People will go on the barricades.”
  
•  “This is a genocide of the population. Let’s first introduce an average pension of 13,000 rubles for the government and State Duma, let them live on it for just half a year…Where will this army of 60-year olds work? People will just drop out of life without any help…”
  
•  “10 years remain before I retire. After this reform I won’t see my pension at all. And this after all the defaults, denominations, restructuring, liberalization of prices and other experiments that were done on us?”
  
•  “I would like to see who any of you and the president would survive just one year on our miserable salaries, at age 65!!!!!”
  
•  “We need a law on the complete confiscation [of wealth] from the nouveau riches.”
  
•  “We are already giving the state too much of our salaries, we’re paying taxes, heat is getting more expensive and so on and so forth, and now they also want to raise the retirement age, that is after you retire there will be even less time to manage to experience some joy and satisfaction…We have natural resources after all, and receive billions by selling them!!! But everything is going into the hands of a few dozen oligarchs, Putin’s “friends”!!! Let’s oppose this outrage!!!!”

The petition sponsored by the KRT is an attempt to control popular anger, as the Russian ruling elite fears a social explosion over the effects of the pension reform. For similar reasons, the right-wing leader of the so called liberal opposition, Alexei Navalny, announced that he would organize rallies against the reform starting July 1. In reality, Navalny’s program is entirely hostile to the working class. He speaks for political and social forces that are responsible for capitalist restoration and are now seeking closer collaboration with US imperialism.