Syria and the S-300s: Re-Centering the People in the Global Struggles for Power

Ajamu Baraka

“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world [….] No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.”

– Gore Vidal

One of the most amusing elements of the current anti-Russian hysteria produced by U.S. state/corporate propagandists is the notion that Russia is this bold, aggressive challenger to “U.S. and Western interests” when the reality has always been the opposite. In the tumultuous period after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Russian Federation emerged as the dominate power under the leadership of the clownish BorisYeltsin.

The Russian capitalist oligarchy that developed during that period and expanded under the leadership of Vladimir Putin has always just wanted to be part of the global capitalist game. They had demonstrated on more than one occasion their willingness to cooperate with the agenda of Western powers.  However, they wanted to be respected with their regional interests recognized.

But as result of greed, hubris and just plain incompetence, U.S. policy-makers, especially the amateurs running foreign policy during the Obama years, pushed the Russians out of their preferred zone of caution in international affairs, with Syria being exhibit A. Forcing the Russians hand in Syria was followed by the Ukraine when the U.S. sparked a coup in that nation as the second front against Russian “intervention” in Syria.

So it was quite comical to see how the announcement that Russia will deliver the S-300 air defense system to the Syrian government was met with feigned horror by U.S. and NATO forces. This decision was taken after the U.S. allowed or didn’t stop the Israeli Air Force from playing games that resulted in a Russia cargo plane being shot out of the air by Syrian ground defenses who mistook the Russia plane for an Israeli aircraft.

Without an adequate air defense system capable of covering the entire nation and strategic territories within Syria, the Israeli Air Force has had almost unimpeded access to Syria air space during the Syrian war to attack military forces associated with the Syrian government, Hezbollah and the Iranian state.

Yet in their zeal to push out anti-Russian propaganda, the state/corporate propagandists in the U.S.  exposed once again Russia’s conservatism and acquience to the global colonial U.S./EU/NATO agenda. While the headlines screamed traitor at Turkish President Erdogan for concluding a deal for the Russian S-400, the most advanced system the Russians are selling on the open market, very few seemed to have noticed that those wily, evil Russians that were propping up their partner in Syria hadn’t even delivered on the S-300 sale to the Syrian state that had been concluded five years ago!

The Russians said that they failed to deliver the system that the Syrians purchased due to a request from the Israeli government in 2013. This decision took place a year after the debacle of Geneva I, the United Nations sponsored conference to resolve the Syrian War, where the Russians appeared ready to abandon Assad as long as the Syrian state was maintained, and their interests protected.  Getting rid of Assad but maintaining the Syrian state was also U.S. policy at the time.

However, instead of a negotiated settlement in which the Russians would play a role, the Obama administration rejected Geneva I believing that it could topple the government in Syria through its jihadist proxies. The U.S. knew that those elements were never going to be allowed to govern the entire nation but that was the point. The Syrian state was slated to be balkanized with its territory divided and a permanent presence by the U.S. directly on the ground. Those forces in Syria would be bolstered by the thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq that had been reintroduced as a result of the U.S. reinvasion supposedly to fight ISIS – that it helped to create.

Although the Russian position on Assad came out just a year after the Chinese and Russians gave the green light to the U.S. and NATO to launch a vicious war on Libya is old news, it points out how in the global game of power relations the peoples of the former colonial world continue to lose. The Russians, like the Chinese, have demonstrated repeatedly their willingness to collaborate with the U.S. and the “Western colonialist alliance,” even as successive U.S. administrations have singled them out, along with Iran and Venezuela, as geostrategic threats to U.S. global hegemony.

This observation is not meant to be another Russia and China bashing that plays into the hands of the reactionaries driving U.S. policies who see military conflict with those two nations as inevitable. Instead what is being argued here is the absolute necessity for African/Black people and oppressed peoples and nations to be clear about the international correlation and balance of forces and competing interests at play so that “we” the people are not confused regarding our objective interests.

Russian intervention in Syria was not as cynical as the U.S. and Western European powers, which knew from the beginning that “progressive” forces in Syria could not win a military conflict. Nevertheless, they encouraged those forces to engage in military opposition while the U.S. and its allies decided to back various Islamist forces – not for democratic change – but to destroy the Syrian state.

Maintaining an independent, critical perspective on the national and global dispensation of social forces means not having any illusions about the world and the national, class and racial politics in play. We need to be clear that supporting Syria’s attempt to assert full sovereignty over its territory was only a secondary concern for the Russians. The back seat given to the Syrian government in the negotiations between Russia, Iran, and Turkey regarding Idlib confirms that. Protecting Russian interests in Syria and the Mid-East was and is the driving force for Russian military and diplomatic activity, nothing else!

The delivery of the S-300 anti-aircraft system to Syria resembles the Russia cooperation with the U.S., Israel and Turkey on the Turkish Afrin operation,which was basically an invasion of Syria by Turkey in order to establish a “buffer zone”. These are all decisions based on the objective interests of Russia and secondarily the interests of the Syrian government.

It remains to be seen how the deployment of the S-300’s will alter the situation on the ground in Syria. It would not be surprising if the deployment was limited and only covered the territory around Latakia, the site of the Russian air base and close to its warm-water port. It may not be in Russia’s interests to allow the Syria government the means to block Israeli intrusions into Syrian air space. If the Syrian government had the ability to really ensure the security of its national territory from Israeli intrusions, it could mean that Russia would have less leverage over the Syrian government to force a withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria. Additionally, the land corridor and security of the “Islamic pipeline” between Iran, Iraq and Syria could be secured that may not be necessarily conducive for maintaining Russia’s share of the energy market in Europe.

The U.S. and Israel overplayed their cards and made a strategic blunder by precipitating the shooting down of the Russian cargo plane. Although National Security Adviser John Bolton claims that the decision to supply Syrian forces with the S-300 is a “significant escalation,” the escalation really took place in 2012 when the Obama administration decided to allow U.S. vassal states to significantly increase military support for radical Islamic forces. Michael Flynn revealed this as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency– something the Obama forces never forgot.

Syria has been a difficult object lesson for the left that has had a devastating consequence for the people of that embattled nation. Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions have been displaced primarily because left and progressive forces lacked the organizational, but more importantly, the ideological, political, and moral clarity to mount an opposition to the machinations of their national bourgeoisie in Europe and the U.S.  The very idea that the bourgeois leadership of their respective states might have some benevolent justifications for military intervention in Syria revealed a dangerous nationalist sentimentality that is driving the left version of white supremacist national chauvinism.

Before the dramatic rightist turn of the left in the U.S. and Europe over the last two decades, the left – at least much of the Marxist-Leninist left – opposed Western imperialist intervention out of a theoretical and principled commitment to the national-colonial question in the global South. As citizens in “oppressor nations,” opposing their own bourgeoisie’s interventions into oppressed nations was seen as a responsibility for the left and indeed was a measurement of what was actually an authentic left position.

That stance has virtually disappeared.

The first response by the Western left to plans or actual interventions by their nation’s ruling class is a strange conversation regarding rather or not the intervention is justified or not based on the nature of the government being toppled by the intervention.

For those of us who are members of oppressed peoples and nations, it is quite obvious that without independent organizations and global solidarity structures buttressed by the few progressive states that exist on the planet, we cannot depend on any bourgeois state to really care about our humanity or on the radical or left forces in Northern nations to put a brake on repression and intervention against non-Europe states and peoples.

The bloodletting will continue in Syria. Candidate Trump raised some serious questions about the wisdom of U.S. policies in Syria and indicated that he might be willing to reverse U.S. involvement. But President Trump surrendered to the pressure from the foreign policy establishment and the warmongering corporate press. Instead of extricating the U.S., the administration announced a few weeks ago that the U.S. will essentially engage in an illegal and indefinite occupation in Syria.

There is reasonable doubt that Israel and the U.S. will allow the deployment of the S-300s even if the Russians followed through with the delivery. Which means the possibility of another dangerous escalation in the conflict at any moment. It also means why despite one’s opinion about the nature of any government’s internal situation, it is important to reaffirm and defend the principles of national sovereignty and international law in opposition to the arbitrary and illegal interventions to effect a change in government by any outside forces.

The people’s movements for social justice and human rights around the world must not allow the people to be drawn into the machinations and contradictory struggles and conflicts between essentially capitalist blocs, which include the Russians and the state-capitalism of China. This is not to suggest a moral or political equalization between the emergence of capitalist Russia and China and the systematic degradation unleashed on the world by the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project that emerged in 1492 with the invasion of the “Americas.” That would be a perversion of history and divert us from the primary global contradiction and target: The Western capitalist alliance and the corporate and finance oligarchy at its center.

In the competition between blocs and the real possibility of global conflict, we must be vigilant not to repeat the tragic mistake made before the first world war when workers enthusiastically signed up as cannon fodder in the clash of capitalist empires. Imperialist war really is a class issue!

Totalitarian capitalist domination is not a figment of our imaginations, it is real. Penetrating the ideological mystifications that divert us away from the matrix of power that distorts consciousness and renders the people as collaborators in their own subjection is the task of the moment.

The global order is changing, the only question is what will emerge. Will the new order be a multipolar one dominated by emerging capitalist states or will a new transitional order develop that is oriented toward an association of states and people’s movements moving toward authentic de-colonization, ecological rationality, and socialist construction?

There is still time for the people to choose.

Food, Justice, Violence and Capitalism

Colin Todhunter

In 2015, India’s internal intelligence agency wrote a report that depicted various campaigners and groups as working against the national interest. The report singled out environmental activists and NGOs that had been protesting against state-corporate policies. Those largely undemocratic and unconstitutional policies were endangering rivers, forests and local ecologies, destroying and oppressing marginalised communities, entrenching the corporatisation of agriculture and usurping land rights.

These issues are not unique to India. Resistance against similar practices and injustices is happening across the world. And for their efforts, campaigners are being abused, incarcerated and murdered. Whether people are campaigning for the land rights of tribal communities in India or for the rights of peasant farmers in Latin America or are campaigning against the fracking industry in the UK or against pipelines in the US, there is a common thread: non-violent protest to help bring about a more just and environmentally sustainable world.

What is ultimately fuelling the push towards the relentless plunder of land, peoples and the environment is a strident globalised capitalism, euphemistically termed ‘globalisation’, which is underpinned by increasing state surveillance, paramilitary-type law enforcement and a US-backed push towards militarism.

The deregulation of international capital movement (financial liberalisation) effectively turned the world into a free-for-all for global capital. The ramping up of this militarism comes at the back end of a deregulating/pro-privatising neoliberal agenda that has sacked public budgets, depressed wages, expanded credit to consumers and to governments (to sustain spending and consumption) and unbridled financial speculation. In effect, spending on war is in part a desperate attempt to boost a stagnant US economy.

We may read the writings of the likes of John Perkins (economic hitmen), Michel Chossudovsky (the globalisation of poverty), Michael Hudson (treasury bond super-imperialism) or Paul Craig Roberts (the US’s descent into militarism and mass surveillance) to understand the machinations of billionaire capitalists and the economic system and massive levels of exploitation and suffering they preside over.

Food activists are very much part of the global pushback and the struggle for peace, equality and justice and in one form or another are campaigning against violence, corruption and cronyism. There is a determination to question and to hold to account those with wealth and power, namely transnational agribusiness corporations and their cronies who hold political office.

There is sufficient evidence for us to know that these companies lie and cover up truth. And we also know that their bought politicians, academics, journalists and right-wing neoliberal backers and front groups smear critics and attempt to marginalise alternative visions of food and agriculture.

They are first to man the barricades when their interests are threatened. Those interests are tied to corporate power, neoliberal capitalism and the roll out of food for profit. These companies and their cheerleaders would be the last to speak up about the human rights abuses faced by environmentalists in various places across the world. They have little to say about the injustices of a global food regime that creates and perpetuates food surpluses in rich countries and food deficits elsewhere, resulting in a billion people with insufficient food for their daily needs. Instead all they have to offer are clichés about the need for more corporate freedom and deregulation if we are to ‘feed the world’.

And they attempt to gloss over or just plain ignore the land grabs and the marginalisation of peasant farmers across the world, the agrarian crisis in India or the harm done by agrochemicals because it is all tied to the neoliberal globalisation agenda which fuels corporate profit, lavish salaries or research grants.

It is the type of globalisation that has in the UK led to deindustrialisation, massive inequalities, the erosion of the welfare state and an increasing reliance on food banks. In South America, there has been the colonisation of lands and farmers to feed richer countries’ unsustainable, environment-destroying appetite for meat. In effect what Helena Paul once described in The Ecologist as genocide and ecocide.  From India to Argentina, we have witnessed (are witnessing) the destruction of indigenous practices and cultures under the guise of ‘development’.

And from various bilateral trade agreements and WTO policies to IMF and World Bank directives, we have seen the influence of transnational agricapital shaping and benefitting from ‘ease of doing business’ and ‘structural adjustment’ type strategies.

We also see the globalisation of bad food and illness and the deleterious impacts of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture on health, rivers, soils and oceans. The global food regime thrives on the degradation of health, environment, labour and communities and the narrowing of the range of crops grown resulting in increasingly monolithic, nutrient-deficient diets.

Whether it includes any or all of the above or the hollowing out of regulatory agencies and the range of human rights abuses we saw documented during The Monsanto Tribunal, what we see is the tacit acceptance of neoliberal policies and the perpetuation of structural (economic, social and political) violence by mainstream politicians and agricapital and its cheerleaders.

At the same time, however, what we are also witnessing is a loosely defined food movement becoming increasingly aware of the connection between these issues.

Of course, to insinuate that those campaigning for the labelling of GM food, the right to healthy food or access to farmers markets in the West and peasant movements involved with wider issues pertaining to food sovereignty, corporate imperialism and development in the Global South form part of a unified ‘movement’ in terms of material conditions or ideological outlook would be stretching a point.

After all, if you campaign for, say, healthy organic food in your supermarket, while overlooking the fact that the food in question derives from a cash crop which displaced traditional cropping systems and its introduction effectively destroyed largely food self-sufficient communities and turned them into food importing basket cases three thousand miles away, where is the unity?

However, despite the provisos, among an increasing number of food activists the struggle for healthy food in the West, wider issues related to the impact of geopolitical IMF-World Bank lending strategies and WTO policies and the securing of local community ownership of ‘the commons’ (land, water, seeds, research, technology, etc) are understood as being interconnected.

There is an emerging unity of purpose within the food movement and the embracing of a vision for a better, more just food system that can only deliver genuine solutions by challenging and replacing capitalism and its international relations of production and consumption.

Pakistani poker: Playing Saudi Arabia against China

James M. Dorsey 

Desperate for funding to fend off a financial crisis fuelled in part by mounting debt to China, Pakistan is playing a complicated game of poker that could hand Saudi Arabia a strategic victory in its bitter feud with Iran at the People’s Republic’s expense.

The Pakistani moves threaten a key leg of the USD60 billion plus Chinese investment in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative.

They also could jeopardize Chinese hopes to create a second overland route to Iran, a key node in China’s transportation links to Europe. Finally, they grant Saudi Arabia a prominent place in the Chinese-funded port of Gwadar that would significantly weaken Iran’s ability to compete with its Indian-backed seaport of Chabahar.

Taken together, the moves risk dragging not only Pakistan but also China into the all but open war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Pakistan’s first move became evident in early September with the government’s failure to authorise disbursements for road projects, already hit by delays in Chinese approvals, that are part of CPEC’s Western route, linking the province of Balochistan with the troubled region of Xinjiang in north-western China.

In doing so, Pakistan implicitly targeted a key Chinese driver for CPEC: the pacification of Xinjiang’s Turkic Muslim population through a combination of economic development enhanced by trade and economic activity flowing through CPEC as well as brutal repression and mass re-education.

The combination of Pakistani and Chinese delays “has virtually brought progress work on the Western route to a standstill,” a Western diplomat in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad said.

Pakistani Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid, in a further bid to bring Pakistani government expenditure under control that at current rates could force the country to seek a $US 12 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has cut $2 billion dollars from the US$8.2 billion budget to upgrade and expand Pakistan’s railway network, a key pillar of CPEC. Mr. Rashid plans to slash a further two billion dollars.

“Pakistan is a poor country that cannot afford (the) huge burden of the loans…. CPEC is like the backbone for Pakistan, but our eyes and ears are open,” Mr. Rashid said.

The budget cuts came on the back of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party projecting CPEC prior to the July 25 election that swept him to power to as a modern-day equivalent of the British East India Company, which dominated the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century.

PTI criticism included denouncing Chinese-funded mass transit projects in three cities in Punjab as a squandering of funds that could have better been invested in social spending. PTI activists suggested that the projects had involved corrupt practices.

Pakistan’s final move was to invite Saudi Arabia to build a refinery in Gwadar and invest in Balochistan mining. Chinese questioning of Pakistan’s move was evident when the Pakistani government backed off suggestions that Saudi Arabia would become part of CPEC.

Senior Saudi officials this week visited Islamabad and Gwadar to discuss the deal that would also involve deferred payments on Saudi oil supplies to Pakistan and create a strategic oil reserve close to Iran’s border.

“The incumbent government is bringing Saudi Arabia closer to Gwadar. In other words, the hardline Sunni-Wahhabi state would be closer than ever to the Iranian border. This is likely to infuriate Tehran,” said Baloch politician and former Pakistani ports and shipping minister Mir Hasil Khan Bizenjo.

Pakistan’s game of poker amounts to a risky gamble that serves Pakistani and Saudi purposes, puts China whose prestige and treasure are on the line in a difficult spot, could perilously spark tension along the Pakistan-Iran border, and is likely to provoke Iranian counter moves. It also risks putting Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, who depend on China economically in different ways, in an awkward position.

The Saudi engagement promises up to US$10 billion in investments as well as balance of payments relief. It potentially could ease US concerns that a possible IMF bailout would help Pakistan service debt to China.

A refinery and strategic oil reserve in Gwadar would serve Saudi Arabia’s goal of preventing Chabahar, the Indian-backed Iranian port, from emerging as a powerful Arabian Sea hub at a time that the United States is imposing sanctions designed to choke off Iranian oil exports.

A Saudi think tank, the International Institute for Iranian Studies, previously known as the Arabian Gulf Centre for Iranian Studies (AGCIS) that is believed to be backed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, argued last year in a study that Chabahar posed “a direct threat to the Arab Gulf states” that called for “immediate counter measures.”

Written by Mohammed Hassan Husseinbor, an Iranian political researcher of Baloch origin, the study warned that Chabahar would enable Iran to increase its oil market share in India at the expense of Saudi Arabia, raise foreign investment in the Islamic republic, increase government revenues, and allow Iran to project power in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

Mr. Husseinbor suggested that Saudi support for a low-level Baloch insurgency in Iran could serve as a countermeasure. “Saudis could persuade Pakistan to soften its opposition to any potential Saudi support for the Iranian Baluch… The Arab-Baluch alliance is deeply rooted in the history of the Gulf region and their opposition to Persian domination,” Mr. Husseinbor said.

Noting the vast expanses of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Mr. Husseinbor went on to say that “it would be a formidable challenge, if not impossible, for the Iranian government to protect such long distances and secure Chabahar in the face of widespread Baluch opposition, particularly if this opposition is supported by Iran’s regional adversaries and world powers.”

Saudi militants reported at the time the study was published that funds from the kingdom were flowing into anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian Sunni Muslim ultra-conservative madrassas or religious seminaries in Balochistan.

US President Donald J. Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, last year before assuming office, drafted at the request of Mr. Trump’s then strategic advisor, Steve Bannon, a plan that envisioned US support “for the democratic Iranian opposition,” including in Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan and Balochistan province.

All of this does not bode well for CPEC. China may be able to accommodate Pakistan by improving commercial terms for CPEC-related projects and Pakistani debt as well as easing Pakistani access to the Chinese market. China, however, is likely to find it far more difficult to prevent the Saudi-Iranian rivalry from spinning out of control in its backyard.

Sharp rise in child protection interventions in Australia

Michelle Stevens

A report released this year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare revealed a 25 percent rise over the past five years in the number of child protection interventions—that is, children who were the subject of an official investigation, care and protection order, or out-of-home care.

The statistics in the Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report point to a deepening social crisis, particularly in working class and rural areas, with the worst impact on indigenous families, who are among the most vulnerable layers of the working class.

A total of 168,352 children, a rate of 30.8 per 1,000 children aged 0–17, received child protection involvement throughout Australia in 2016–2017, with 74 percent of these children being repeat referrals. This included 47,915 children, with a median age of nine, who had been removed from their families and placed in out-of-home care as at June 30, 2017. That was an 18 percent increase over four years.

These figures partially mask the disproportionately high rate of state intervention among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, which was 164.3 per 1,000, seven times higher than non-indigenous children.

Indigenous children were placed in out-of-home care at 10 times the rate for non-Indigenous children. For indigenous children aged 5 to 9, the rate of out-of-home care rose to 12 times their non-indigenous counterparts.

Out-of-home care means children are taken from their birth families and placed in the homes of relative or foster carers, or residential facilities or family group homes run by governments or non-government organisations (NGOs).

Many of the carers in these programs are volunteers, paid only rent and board or out-of-pocket expenses. They are not required to be qualified to deal with these children’s complex needs, including past trauma.

Teenagers can be placed in “lead tenant households,” where an adult lives and supervises them in rented premises. Alternatively, they may be housed in hotels or motels.

The high proportion of children remaining in out-of-home care for five years or more—41 percent of the total—contributed to the overall increased rate.

About 1 in 20 children in out-of-home care were living in residential care, ostensibly used for children with complex needs. Some were very young—3 percent of those in residential care were aged under five years.

Residential care facilities can be described as mini-institutions where children are denied the consistency of care and opportunity for a loving bond provided by a parent, permanent carer or guardian.

Moreover, in 2017–2018, according to a Productivity Commission report, almost 6 percent of children in out-of-home care across the country were victims of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. That was only among the reported cases, so the true level of abuse is likely to be higher.

Bernie Geary, the Children’s Commissioner in the state of Victoria for 10 years, until 2015, provided a damning condemnation of residential homes in that state in a report he released as he left his position. After visiting 21 residential care homes, he reported 189 incidents of the alleged sexual abuse of 166 children. That was 1 in 3 of the 500 children in residential care at the time.

The Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report did not ask or seek to explain what accounts for the increase in state intervention, which leads, in many cases, to the forced and traumatic removal of children from their families, for years on end.

The Productivity Commission report showed that police, not doctors, schools or social workers, initiated the greatest number of cases. It also showed that the highest rate of substantiations—notifications found to be true—came from poorer families. This indicates the impact of falling wages, soaring living costs, poverty, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues, especially on low-income households.

However, another factor has also contributed to the rise in interventions. Governments have slashed budgets and staffing to government-run child welfare departments, and transferred the residential care of children to NGOs and corporate residential care providers, creating a profitable industry. There is now a clear economic incentive to remove children from their families and place them in out-of-home care.

In 2016, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program revealed aspects of this process. It reported that one company, Premier Youthworks, with a revenue of around $20 million in 2015, was paid between $550 and $1,700 per child per day to house and “care” for approximately 80 children. As a proprietary limited company, it was under no obligation to report its profits.

Nationally, there have been over 40 official inquiries into child protection and care provision over the past two decades. Yet the crisis has only worsened. The brutal conditions exposed in state-run institutions have been replaced with a model where similar conditions exist behind the doors of smaller facilities, run by private providers. A multi-billion-dollar government-funded industry profits from placing children into residential care, with little or no transparency to assess the quality of the services provided.

In 2015, the New South Wales state government commissioned an “Independent Review Of Out Of Home Care,” which was not made public until this year. It said the number of children in out-of-home care in that state had doubled between 2006 and 2016, a rate far greater than the population growth of children and young people.

The previously-buried report concluded that the system was “ineffective and unsustainable, not client centred.” Expenditure was “crisis driven and not aligned to an evidence base” and “failing to improve long-term outcomes for children and families with complex needs.” Almost three quarters of cases of suspected abuse or neglect reported to Family and Community Services (FACs) were closed without investigation, even where the risk of serious harm was “high” or “extremely high.”

The review also reported that the average cost per child of out-of-home care had more than doubled since 2012, when the state government began to shift programs to NGOs. It said 60 percent of children in out-of-home care were placed with NGOs and they were staying there longer because the bulk of funding was paid to NGOs “instead of addressing family needs earlier.” Despite this, the state government is seeking to transfer all children’s out-of-home care services to the private sector by 2022.

Child protection departments across the country remain understaffed and unable to cope with the number of cases reported to them. Lack of resources has increasingly led to the ditching of any pretence of addressing the underlying family crises that lead to state intervention. Instead, children are simply removed and offloaded to private “care providers.”

Ten years ago, the last federal Labor government offered a phony apology to the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous children who were taken from their families, shattering their lives. Today new “Stolen Generations” are being created of both Aboriginal and non-indigenous children.

Governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal-National alike, are divesting themselves of any responsibility for community and family support. At the same time, vulnerable children have been reduced to an economic commodity, worth thousands of dollars a day to NGOs and business operators.

Labour Party-run councils escalate austerity in UK

Alice Summers 

Councils in England are facing the biggest cuts to local government funding since 2010.

Figures from the Local Government Association (LGA) indicate that the revenue support grant, which is the main source of government funding for local authorities, will be cut by 36 percent next year—the largest annual reduction in nearly 10 years. This equals a loss of £1.3 billion of central government funding for local services in the 2019/20 financial year.

In total, councils across England will see the funding they receive from central government slashed by as much as 77 percent by 2020. Almost half of local authorities (168) will no longer receive any central government funding by this year, with councils facing a funding gap of £5.8 billion.

The decades-long onslaught on the public provision of services by the British ruling elite, exacerbated since the 2008 global financial crash, has led to a crisis within local councils across the country. Reports appear on a daily basis detailing the savage effects of budget cuts on local communities, with virtually every municipality witnessing an increase in food-bank usage, homelessness and poverty, and seeing the closure of valuable public resources such as libraries and leisure centres.

According to Labour councillor Richard Watts, Chair of the LGA’s Resources Board, the loss of £1.3 billion of central government funding “is going to tip many councils over the edge. Many local authorities will reach the point where they only have the funds to provide statutory responsibilities and it will be our local communities and economies who will suffer the consequences.”

Against this backdrop, Labour councillors from across the UK wrote an open letter to the Conservative government criticising the cuts to councils. The letter, which announced a campaign launched by Councils Against Austerity at the Labour Party Annual Conference, was signed by 24 Labour council leaders and 12 local Labour group leaders. It called on the Tory government to “recognise the catastrophic impact which eight years of uninterrupted austerity has had on local government.”

Appealing to the government to reverse the “disastrous policy of austerity that has dominated thinking in the Treasury since 2010 and has been disproportionately weighted against local authorities,” the open letter called for a “needs-led approach” to funding and for more local control over council tax rates.

Labour council leaders who signed the open letter include Joseph Ejiofor from Haringey, Susan Hinchcliffe of Bradford, and Barking and Dagenham leader Darren Rodwell.

In fact, one of the focuses of last month’s Labour Party annual conference was ostensibly the party’s opposition to, and fight against austerity measures and their impact on local councils.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn delivered a speech in which a significant section was dedicated to criticising Tory austerity measures and praising Labour councils for standing up against them:

“Eight years of destructive austerity and obsessive outsourcing have left… councils teetering on the precipice…,” he proclaimed, “[A]nd this Government must be held to account for their social vandalism. It is Labour councils and only Labour councils that are taking every step to protect people and services and we must thank them for it.”

This could not be further from the truth.

Claims that the knock-on effects of these austerity measures are merely the result of central government Tory malignancy, and that Labour is the defender of working people against cuts to vital public services, are utterly disingenuous.

Far from standing up to Tory-led austerity measures, Labour councils have loyally imposed every cutback demanded of them, and in many cases are blazing the trail when it comes to attacks on public services and facilities. Local authorities have in effect become property speculators, in moves pioneered by Labour councils. Selling off social assets to private developers, they have earned themselves windfalls in the process.

According to property market data, local authorities in England and Wales spent £758 million buying up commercial property in the first eight months of 2017.

Labour-run Haringey for example, whose new council leader, Joseph Ejiofor, signed the open letter to the government, planned a £2 billion transfer of local authority assets to private developer Lendlease through a 50:50 partnership—the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV).This would have seen huge swathes of public housing demolished to make way for 6,500 expensive private homes, forcing thousands of working-class families out of London.

Massive public opposition put a halt to the HDV. Haringey Labour members successfully fought for the deselection of Blairite councillors who had given HDV their backing. Having built up intimate connections with property developers, Blairite Claire Kober departed as council leader to take up a lucrative position as director of housing at the housing management group, Pinnacle. The council, however, is still pursuing a social cleansing agenda, with working class areas remaining under the threat of demolition.

In Bradford, whose leader Susan Hinchcliffe was another signatory to the open letter, £30 million of cuts were agreed by the Labour-council earlier this year, primarily targeting adult social care and school nursing and health visiting.

Liverpool, the city which hosted Labour’s conference, has seen some of the worst cuts to public services in the country. Last year the Labour-dominated council slashed £90.3 million from local spending, to be enacted before 2020. In total, between 2010 and 2020, the council will have cut a staggering £600 million from its budget. When adjusted for inflation, the spending reduction equates to a cut of at least 64 percent of the council’s overall budget over the last decade.

A report from the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University showed that in Liverpool, cuts to social welfare programmes will reach £920 a year per working-age person, well above the national average of £690 a year.

Over a quarter of Liverpool’s population of roughly half a million residents are officially poor, making the impact of these cuts doubly painful.

Another flagship Labour council, Birmingham, will have imposed more than £650 million worth of cuts by 2020. As part of its savings programme in preparation for the 2022 Commonwealth Games to be held in the city, the council plans to cut £5 million for Birmingham Children’s Trust, an organisation which supports disadvantaged children. Another organisation, which assists adults who have suffered life-changing events, will lose £2.4 million and 21 children’s centres will also be shut.

Following the example of Conservative-run Northamptonshire County Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt in February this year, there are fears that Birmingham City Council may also become insolvent before 2022.

Despite the claims by Councils Against Austerity that they are waging a struggle against austerity, its signatories do little more than issue toothless criticisms from the side-lines while reliably imposing every spending cut demanded, at a massive human cost.

The duplicity of Corbyn’s claims to be standing up to Tory austerity was clear from the moment he became party leader. He and shadow chancellor John McDonnell issued a letter instructing local Labour councils to abide by the law and set legal budgets, i.e., impose austerity cuts demanded by the Conservative government.

Ever since, Labour councils have continued to enforce the spending cuts first demanded by the 2007-2010 Brown Labour government, and then by the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the decimation of vital services.

French government staggered by Interior Minister Collomb’s resignation

Francis Dubois

The resignation on October 2 of Gérard Collomb, the second-ranking minister in the government, under conditions without precedent in France’s Fifth Republic, has laid bare the extreme weakness and deep crisis of President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

After Macron initially refused Collomb’s resignation on October 1, Collomb submitted it again and forced Macron to accept it a day after having refused it. Macron, apparently taken by surprise, was forced to give the job to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, while he looked for a replacement. Philippe was then forced to cancel a scheduled official visit to South Africa.

Collomb had already announced last month that he intended to leave the government after the May 2019 European elections, supposedly to run in the municipal elections in Lyon in 2020. This announcement had effectively left France’s powerful interior ministry leaderless.

The departure of one of the Macron presidential campaign’s first supporters and the sudden collapse of the Macron-Collomb alliance, a pillar of the executive since Macron’s election last year, has directly undermined the president. While it was expected, it has also staggered the entire French ruling elite. It underscores the instability of the government as it sets out to make many fundamental attacks on democratic rights and cuts to basic social programs, including pensions, health care and unemployment insurance created by workers’ struggles over several generations.

The press was alarmed at the circumstances of Collomb’s resignation. “In the second year of his term, the late Interior Minister defied the president of the Republic and made him back down. It is a first in the Fifth Republic whose 60th birthday we are celebrating on October 4,” wrote Le Monde, adding: “With his departure, the former ally of Emmanuel Macron has indeed unleashed a crisis of authority at the summit of the state.”

The newspaper also warned about the visible impotence of the “head of government, Edouard Philippe, who will look like a fool in front of the deputies as he seems totally taken by surprise,” although the constitution makes him responsible for nominating and firing ministers.

Echoing broader media accusations that Collomb deserted his post, the paper adds that after Macron and Philippe, “The third victim is Collomb himself, as one wonders if he understood very well the implications of his actions for what is known as the authority of the state.”

After his departure, Collomb immediately distanced himself from the president. He announced his intention to run in the Lyon municipal elections as an unaffiliated candidate, thus abandoning Macron’s Republic on the March (LRM) party. And over the last several days, Collomb and his associates have made multiple biting or alarmist comments in the press about the viability of Macron’s presidency.

Collomb’s associates told La Dépêche du Midi that shortly before his resignation, Collomb told them: “Those who are still able to speak frankly to Macron are those who were there from the beginning: Ferrand, Castaner, Griveaux and me … He will end up hating me. But if everyone bows down before him, he will end up being isolated, because occupying the Elysée presidential palace by nature isolates people.”

Collomb himself declared on LCI that his relationship with Macron exploded because “I tried to bring him news of what is happening on the ground.” He added on BFM-TV that Macron will be a victim of “hubris ... the curse of the gods. When at a certain time, you become overly sure of yourself, you conclude that you will clear out everything in your path. There is a phrase that says that those whom the gods would destroy, they first strike blind.”

Above all, Collomb’s departure takes place amid persistent and broad-based protests and complaints among the police and domestic security forces.

This already erupted into public police protests at the end of 2016 and in 2017, to which Collomb alluded in his resignation speech at the interior ministry on October 3, mentioning the ongoing “revolt” of the police. Thousands of policemen had marched multiple times in cities across France, demanding more funding and recognition for the repression of mass protests against the labor law that they were carrying out under the state of emergency and the so-called “war on terror.”

This opposition also emerged in the Benalla affair this summer, which thoroughly destabilized the government. When it emerged that Alexandre Benalla, a close Macron aide, had beaten up peaceful protesters on May Day while posing as a policeman, much of France’s parliamentary opposition applauded the police against Macron.

At the head of this operation stood Unsubmissive France (LFI) leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who declared an open alliance with the right-wing The Republicans (LR) party on the issue and also worked in concert with the neo-fascist National Rally (formerly National Front) of Marine Le Pen. All of them took the opportunity to support the police repression on May Day.

This episode has confirmed that Macron has indeed lost the support of significant sections of what has long been a key social base of the French government: the police forces.

While the ongoing police protests are fertile grounds for various far-right provocations, Mélenchon is trying to pass them off them off as progressive, and to pass off the police as democratic supporters of the Republic.

In fact, faced with the unpopularity of the executive, the police are preparing stepped-up repression of workers’ struggles and working class neighborhoods. In his resignation speech last week, Collomb insisted on the need for greater police intervention in working class suburbs, saying the police had to “ensure security” and carry out a “Republican reconquest” of these districts.

With Collomb’s departure, it is not simply one of Macron’s longest-standing supporters that is leaving the sinking ship. It is the second top-ranked minister to resign in a month, after Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot. After the rail strike and the privatization of the National Railways (SNCF), Macron’s popularity ratings have evaporated. An Elabe poll found that only 6 percent of French people believe that his policies will improve their well-being.

Collomb’s departure confirms the enormous weakness of the Macron government, which is fundamentally due to the enormous and growing social inequality in France, and the deep opposition in the working class to Macron’s program.

The rallying of LFI officials close to the union bureaucracy to the side of the police underscores the urgent need for the working class to make a new development in their struggle against Macron and the European Union. As the Socialist Equality Party has explained, to stop the drive to austerity and military-police rule, workers cannot fight within the straitjacket imposed by the unions, which they have already largely abandoned. The task is to build their own committees of action and prepare a movement that will raise the necessity of the transfer of power to the working class.

Israeli mass murder of Gazans targets children

Jean Shaoul 

The Israeli army opened fire on Palestinian protestors in the Gaza Strip Friday, killing three people, including a 12-year-old boy.

Fares Hafez al-Sersawi died along with Mahmud Akram Mohammed Abu Samane, aged 24, after being shot in the chest during demonstrations east of Gaza City, while Hussein al-Rakab, aged 28, died after being shot in the head near the southern city of Khan Yunis. A further 376 people were wounded, seven of whom remain in a critical condition.

The previous Friday, following a relatively quiet period as Israel and Hamas discussed a now-stalled agreement brokered by Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escalated its slaughter of unarmed civilians, shooting and killing seven Palestinians demonstrating near Gaza’s border with Israel, and injuring 500.

The seven murdered included 12-year-old Naser Azmi Musbeh and 14-year-old Mohammed Naif al-Houm, while 90 children, four medics and four journalists were among those wounded by live fire. Not a single Israeli was hurt during this bloodbath.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Friday’s toll brings the total number of Palestinians killed to 197 and the number injured to at least 21,600 since the March of Return protests began on March 30. According to the United Nations, 77 Palestinians have required amputation, including 14 children and one woman, while 12 people have been left paralysed due to spinal injuries.

The most powerful military force in the Middle East faces an impoverished and essentially unarmed population. It is brutal and cowardly slaughtering civilians who have faced an economic siege, the destruction of their livelihoods, repeated bombardments, and military assaults over the last 11 years.

Originally scheduled to finish on May 15, the date of the establishment of the State of Israel Palestinians mark as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day, weekly rallies demanded the right of Palestinians to return to the homes from which their families were driven in 1948. Demonstrations have continued, with mid-week beach protests in northern Gaza and the launching of incendiary kites and balloons into Israel, sparking fires that have destroyed forests, burned crops, and killed livestock.

Tensions in the occupied territories have risen following Israel’s introduction of the “Nation-State Law” and Washington’s ending of its financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency—the Palestinian refugee aid body. The law institutionalises discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, sanctions state-supported segregation and the exclusion of Arabs from exclusively Jewish communities and removes Arabic as an official state language.

Of the 197 killed by Israeli forces, a staggering number of children—some 44 or one quarter of the total—have been slain since the protests began, according to the group Defense for Children International, indicating that the murder of young children has become Israel’s new weapon of terror against the Palestinians.

Human rights groups have told the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is carrying out an investigation into Israel’s use of lethal fire against the protestors, that there is no evidence that a single protester in Gaza killed during the march was armed. This gives the lie to the government’s claims that it faces armed terrorists that plan to rush the border with Israel.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Fatou Bensouda, has warned Israel that its leaders may face trial for the killings of unarmed demonstrators. But this slaughter of men, women and above all children has largely been treated as a non-event by the major imperialist powers and the corporate media.

Secure in Washington’s support, mass murder has been used repeatedly by the Zionist state since its foundation to terrorise the Palestinians and drive them from their villages, farms and homes. Israel’s criminal political elite are now braying for more blood. A bitter battle of words has broken out between two of Israel’s extreme right-wing parties, Israel is our Home and Jewish Home, as they position themselves for what is expected to be an early general election in the New Year, over whether Israel’s deadly crackdown on the protests in Gaza has been harsh enough.

On September 29, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the far right religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, excoriated Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Gaza policy, calling it insufficiently aggressive. Lieberman, whose Israel is our Home party is in sharp decline, replied on Israel Radio, “Bennett is brazenly lying… What softness is he talking about? Just last Friday seven rioters were killed and over 500 injured and not a single Israeli was hurt.”

Later, Lieberman told Army Radio, “There is a real dispute here—that will remain with us as we enter the election process—between a bizarre, sleepwalking, messianic right, and a responsible right.”

Bennett responded in his own interview on Army Radio by urging the IDF to shoot any Palestinians flying incendiary kites and balloons over the Gaza-Israel border, saying that Lieberman’s policies were only encouraging Hamas, the Islamist party that controls Gaza: “The policy toward Gaza is a leftist policy that will ultimately lead to a full-on flare-up. The situation will be unbearable.”

On Thursday, the IDF announced that it would ramp up its forces in the south and deploy Iron Dome air defence batteries in the Gaza area, claiming that its aim was to “thwart terrorism and prevent penetration into Israel along the Gaza border fence.”

On Friday, Lieberman declared that Israel had in fact pulled back from responding harshly to the Palestinian protests to avoid a major conflict during the Jewish Holy Days season (September 9 to October 1), and tweeted, “The holidays are over, and I say to the heads of Hamas: ‘Take that into account’.”

He followed this up the next day with an announcement that Israel was reducing Gaza’s fishing zone from nine nautical miles to six nautical miles, in further breach of the 20 nautical miles agreed under the Oslo Accords, citing Friday’s “riots” as justification for this collective punishment.

In another move calculated to intensify the divisions between Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian faction for control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, Tel Aviv approved Qatar’s purchase of fuel for Gaza from Israel, overriding the PA’s objections. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a further crackdown against the Palestinians in Gaza. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a press conference on Thursday, he warned that Israel’s response to an attack by Hamas would be “very harsh.”

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, called for a ceasefire with Israel, telling an Israeli newspaper that he did not want another war. He said, “It’s in no one’s interest. We cannot prevail in a confrontation against a nuclear power. And certainly [another conflict] is not in our interest. War gains nothing.”

Far from seeking to rein in its chief ally in the Middle East, the Trump administration believes that Tel Aviv can be used to further Washington’s own imperialist designs for global domination. Green lighting the murderous offensive against Gaza by its Israeli attack dog is only a means to an end: the removal of the Syrian and Iranian regimes, by means of an economic and diplomatic blockade, subversion, and war as part of the broader aim of transforming the resource-rich region into a de facto colony of US imperialism.

Limo crash in upstate New York kills 20

Josh Varlin

A limousine crash on October 6 in Schoharie, New York, killed 20 people, making it the deadliest transportation accident in the US since 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in Buffalo, killing 50 people. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the crash, with initial reports indicating that a dangerous intersection contributed to the accident.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters Sunday: “The fact that the NTSB is here indicates we’re very concerned about this. I’ve been on the board for 12 years and this is one of the biggest losses of life we have seen in a very long time.”

The crash is the worst in the Albany-area Capital Region since the 2005 sinking of a tour boat on Lake George, which killed 20 people, many of whom were vacationers from Michigan.

Family members of some of the victims have told the press that the limo passengers were traveling to a birthday party and came from multiple families. While the names of the victims have not been officially released as of this writing, some information has become public through relatives’ statements and GoFundMe pages.

Among the deceased are two newlywed couples: Erin Vertucci and Shane McGowan, as well as Axel and Amy Steenburg. Vertucci worked at St. Mary’s Healthcare in Amsterdam, New York, as an administrative assistant. Employees of a local superconductor manufacturing company, GlobalFoundries, were also among those killed.

Saturday’s crash happened just before 2 p.m., when the limo driver failed to stop at an intersection at the bottom of a hill, continued into the parking lot of Apple Barrel Country Store, hitting two people and an unoccupied SUV, then collided with an earthen embankment. All 18 people in the limo, as well as the two struck in the parking lot, were killed.

As deadly as the crash was, it could have been even worse. Apple Barrel Country Store is a popular tourist destination during the fall, when tourists travel to upstate New York to see the foliage change colors. Jessica Kirby, the store manager, told the New York Times that the store was packed for Columbus Day weekend, which is usually its busiest. Most of her customers had arrived from New York City, the state capitol Albany or New Jersey, she told the Times.

The intersection, where State Route 30 and State Route 30A meet in a T, is notoriously dangerous. The two roads meet after descending “steeply downhill,” according to the Times. There is only a stop sign at the intersection, rather than a more visible traffic light. The speed limit leading into the intersection is 50 mph, according to a Google Maps Street View capture from August 2016.

Kirby told the Times, “We’ve had three tractor-trailer type vehicles—they come down that hill too fast, they go through our parking lot and they end up in a field behind our business.”

Schoharie Town Supervisor Alan Tavenner said that the state Department of Transportation worked on the intersection about seven years ago, although to no apparent effect. The Albany-based Times-Union quotes Tavenner saying, “There have been tractor trailers that have come barreling down that hill and it was a miracle they didn’t kill somebody.”

Tavenner told the Times, “I honestly think it was a more dangerous intersection than it was before.”

Accidents are so frequent that Kirby immediately recognized the sound and called 911. “We’ve heard accidents before. You know that sound when it happens.”

The tragedy underscores the dangerous state of roads in the United States. Despite the intersection’s hazards being known for years, adequate measures were not taken, apparently contributing to the avoidable deaths of 20 people.

It also underscores the semi-regulated nature of stretch limos. After a 2015 limo accident on Long Island that killed four people, a grand jury found serious safety issues with limos with aftermarket modifications.

Aftermarket limousines are not subject to the same safety regulations as factory-made limos. According to the Associated Press, “A grand jury found that vehicles converted into stretch limousines often don't have safety measures including side-impact air bags, reinforced rollover protection bars and accessible emergency exits.”

The main outcome of the 2015 crash was that the NTSB would investigate limousine crashes on a case-by-case basis.

It is not clear as of this writing if the 2001 Ford Excursion in the crash had aftermarket modifications, although it did have 17 passengers in addition to the driver.

Fascistic candidate Jair Bolsonaro places first in Brazilian presidential election

Miguel Andrade 

The Brazilian general elections held on Sunday resulted in the most right-wing Congress since the end of the 1964-1985 US-backed military dictatorship and gave the fascistic former Army reserve captain Jair Bolsonaro a wide lead in the presidential contest.

Failing to win an outright majority of the ballots, Bolsonaro faces a run-off on October 28 against Workers Party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro won 46 percent of the vote, barely 4 percent short of a first-round victory. Haddad, a former mayor of Sao Paulo, came in a distant second, with 29 percent, corresponding to roughly 30 million votes. Abstention and spoiled ballots were at a record high, at 40 million votes, a significant figure considering that voting is mandatory in Brazil and repeated abstention is punished by fines, withholding of passports and, most importantly, exclusion from civil service.

Twelve percent voted for Ciro Gomes, of the Democratic Labor Party, the oldest functioning bourgeois party in Brazil, which is the heir of the 1937-1945 corporatist politics of dictator Getúlio Vargas and is associated with bourgeois opposition to the 1964-1985 military regime.

Geraldo Alckmin, of Brazil’s former traditional right-wing party, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), saw his party’s electoral obliteration, dropping from 48 percent of the vote in the 2014 run-off against the PT to only 5 percent in Sunday’s balloting. Marina Silva, a former PT environmental minister who since 2010 commanded the support of sections of big business such as the powerful heir to Brazil’s largest private bank, Neca Setúbal, saw her vote collapse from 21 percent in 2014 to only one percent.

The PT’s main self-declared “left” opposition, the pseudo-left Morenoite-Pabloite alliance, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), won just 0.6 percent of the vote, down from 1.6 percent in 2014 and a far cry from its first election in 2006, in which it won 7 percent of the vote based on its criticism of the PT’s neoliberal policies.

The elections were overshadowed by the worst economic crisis in Brazil’s history, with the GDP drop between 2015 and 2016 the largest since the 1929 crash, and the slowest recovery in history, with employment and median income projected by bourgeois economists to return to their 2013 levels only by 2027.

The entire political system has been thoroughly discredited by the massive corruption scandal surrounding the state-run energy giant Petrobras, exposed in the so-called “Lava Jato” (Car Wash) probe, which has so far uncovered 12 billion reais (US$4 billion) siphoned from public funds into bribes and kickbacks. The scheme was further shown to be an integral part of the so-called “national champions” policy of favoring nationally owned industrial, infrastructure and agribusiness monopolies in the national and international markets, whose expansion was made possible by the late 2000s commodity boom.

Having overseen the massive corruption scheme and the beginning of the economic crisis, the PT saw a wholesale desertion of working-class voters in regions it had historically dominated, mainly in the country’s industrial south, winning there by the smallest margin since it first came to power in 2002 with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula.

The collapse of support for the PT, combined with major youth and working-class protests against the brutal austerity and privatization program imposed by Lula’s successor, PT President Dilma Rousseff, beginning on the first day of her second term with the nomination of “Chicago Boy” Joaquim Levy as her finance minister, emboldened the far right to push for Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016. While her ouster was initially opposed by bankers, agribusiness bosses and industrialists as “disruptive,” it finally gained their support in order to accelerate the austerity program she herself had implemented.

As the Car Wash probe developed, endless accounts by jailed businessmen of their corrupt relations with PT officials, including first and foremost Lula, provided further means for the weakening of the PT and finally, for the jailing of Lula himself. Lula’s conviction on the charge of receiving a beachfront penthouse in exchange for rigging Petrobras contracts further eroded the PT’s position, taking Lula out of the electoral race. While he initially was the front-running candidate for president, with 30 percent support, he also faced a 50 percent rejection by those polled, while a clear majority has indicated its opposition to his release from prison.

Anti-corruption rhetoric, together with ultra-nationalist agitation against the “sale” of Brazilian assets to China and Chinese investments in African and Latin American countries (condemned as “handouts”), combined with tough-on-crime and anti-immigrant demagogy has served as the stock-in-trade of the far-right crusade against the PT. This has been consciously directed at the neglected working class, especially in declining or struggling industrial regions.

The Car Wash probe became a major tool for a violent turn to the right. After Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment, her vice president and successor, Michel Temer, imposed a labor reform allowing unhindered contract work in companies while decimating health and safety regulations. His government later imposed a 20-year spending freeze through a constitutional amendment. In the face of every attack, the PT was unwilling and unable to mobilize the working class. Together with its affiliated trade union confederation, the CUT, it called off at the last minute a series of general strikes, even in face of immense working-class militancy, thereby strengthening the ultra-nationalist, far-right appeals to workers.

With Brazil’s ruling class determined to wage a class war on workers, Bolsonaro has garnered decisive support from business circles, which used to swing between the PSDB and the PT, most prominently the so-called “Bible, Beef and Bullets” caucus which grew to comprise a third of Congress during the 13-year rule of the PT and provided its governments with decisive support for right-wing policies on many occasions.

Most importantly, the caucus was the breeding ground for the fascistic Bolsonaro, who has held a seat as Rio de Janeiro state’s representative in the lower house for seven straight terms since 1991.

In 1999, he stated his desire for “an audience” with then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, declaring him “a hope for Latin America,” and stating that neither he nor Chávez were “anti-communist.” For these supposedly “nationalist” positions, Bolsonaro was not only tolerated in the PT-led congressional alliance, but considered an important vote against neoliberal measures that the PT government itself rammed through over more than a decade, such as the 2003 pensions reform, allowing him to fashion a fraudulent right-wing populist and nationalist appeal.

Coming from Rio de Janeiro, a city the PT transformed into a virtual federal protectorate in order to build the infrastructure to host the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics in the face of massive opposition to evictions, the under-funding of health and education and military operations in working-class neighborhoods, Bolsonaro was able to exploit a widespread perception of the PT’s betrayal of workers in favor of big business. He also appealed to fear of crime with extreme pro-gun, pro-military rhetoric—the signature gesture used by the candidate and his supporters has been pointing their fingers as if they were firing guns. Bolsonaro has called for making it easier for police to kill criminals, this in a country where cops killed over 5,000 people last year.

Bolsonaro faces a 45 percent rejection rate in the polls, compared to 40 percent for his PT adversary, Haddad. If this widespread rejection proves enough for Haddad to defeat him on October 28, the result will be a return to power by the PT at the head of the most right-wing government since the end of the military dictatorship.

Bolsonaro has indicated that his defeat at the polls would be illegitimate and has openly appealed to the military—which has recently intervened in politics in a manner unprecedented since the end of the dictatorship—for support.

While appealing to big business for support and seeking to cobble together an “anti-fascist alliance” embracing demoralized right-wing “democratic” politicians in the PSDB and even discredited media conglomerates that have carried anti-Bolsonaro reports, such as the right-wing O Globo network and Veja magazine, the PT, a thoroughly bourgeois party, is neither able nor willing to make any class appeal to the working class.

The PT’s policies will only strengthen the far right and heighten the threat of a return to an even bloodier dictatorship than the one that ruled the country for two decades beginning in 1964.

The only answer to these dangers is the building of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class through the construction of a Brazilian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.