Toward a Counterculture of Rebellion

Bernard Marszalek

Living In A World That Can’t Be Fixed is not a guidebook to terminal melancholy. Curtis White, the author of this book, also wrote The Spirit of Disobedience along with other social criticism, hardly advocates that course of inaction. On the contrary, White’s provocative title poses a challenge. He’s saying political reformism offers modest remedies, at best, to mitigate the catastrophe upon us. And he says it with a range of insights—from Wordsworth to Adorno by way of Agnes Varda. Curtis writes with assurance of his sources, but far removed from a pedantic style.

Let’s begin where White does in the year 1969—a pivotal year for him. A recent high school graduate, living in an East Bay suburb outside San Francisco, he encountered both the political left and hippies—the counterculture. He absorbed both milieux. That year, forever in the shadow of ’68, was noteworthy for several historic countercultural events: Woodstock, People’s Park, the Alcatraz Island occupation, and, ending in December, with the fateful Rolling Stone’s Altamont concert where one person was killed.

The political aspects of the Sixties counterculture have been relegated to limbo by the manipulative media to emphasize instead the hairy, bell-bottomed, dope-smoking, denizens of the music scene as epitomizing the counterculture. White corrects this. The counterculture had extreme poles: uptight politicos at one end and psychedelic mystics at the other. White, however, was in the majority who combined, to varying degrees, political awareness along with hedonistic and revelatory pursuits of mind and body. The rebellious nature of the counterculture, we need to recall, had antecedents. The Beats immediately preceded the hippies and in some instances merged with that culture. Before the Beats, the Dadaists and Surrealists combined revolutionary politics with literary and artistic disruptions, and they in turn drew upon a host of nineteen-century poets and artists who assaulted the bourgeois philistinism of their era. It is this rich vein of oppositional culture that White mines for his sharp analysis of our current predicament.

And what precisely is our predicament? Let’s be clear here that the world in turmoil affects us intimately by way of mass
media saturation. The 24/7 bullshit that comes our way precludes an informed and critical analysis. Cutting through the media—its “if–it-bleeds-it-leads” stories—is essential. In short, the neoliberal order, unable to remedy the shambles it has created, putters along like a jalopy chucked full of armed thugs. All the media shows us in its wake is the carnage.

In response to mass media the political left promotes a moral crusade, not a vision of a convivial future. White maintains that left politics lacks an appreciation of culture, specifically a “culture-as-politics.” As he says:

Properly understood, culture is concerned with the process of becoming. Culture is about movement more fundamental than this year’s political movements. As Sigmund Freud wrote, culture is the act of “replacing what is unconscious with what is conscious.” A cult is unconscious. It simply does what it has always done. It follows instructions. Culture, on the other hand, is the bringing to awareness of the damage—repression, irrationality, violence, ugliness, injustice, and tragedy—imposed by the cult. In this sense, culture is enlightenment. And in this sense the United States is a cult.

An investigation into the meaning of culture leads White to explore the significance of place and the thinking of Christopher Alexander, a British-American architect and theorist who should be better known. Influenced by, among others, the anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin and British “plotlanders” who built their own homes, Alexander imagines communities as “mosaics of subcultures”—a radical social decentralization not for political ends as much as for relational needs. Applied to cities, these mosaics are similar to the diverse neighborhoods in Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach’s Seventies speculative novel of a future US where the Pacific Northwest secedes.

The unofficial capital of Ecotopia was San Francisco, where the hilly topography invited distinct and diverse neighborhoods. Today gentrification and homogenization has transformed San Francisco into a playground for salary-bloated software engineers. When Callenbach wrote the city was still a haven for cultural creation. Communes and collectives thrived. The picturesque large Victorians in the Haight that accommodated communal households of hundreds of freaks were splashed across front pages to perpetuate, at best, novelty and at worst, depravity. Ignored were the thousands who inhabited other neighborhoods throughout the city. In this way the media deliberately misconstrued the extensive culture creation for superficialities.

Artists, musicians, and actors appropriated more space by transforming abandoned warehouses into live/work studios. Soon the communes spawned economic collectives: food stores, bicycle and head shops, resale clothing stores, and even car repair garages and print shops. These ventures did business in a neighborly way—like a village. In the mid-Seventies many of them were networked through a group called The InterCollective. During its heyday their Directory listed 150 collectives in the San Francisco Bay Area and 350 on the West Coast.

The Sixties countercultural institutions, rooted in place, provided the space for collective pursuits that the traditional economy foreclosed. To disparage these collectives as failed projects, because many of them didn’t survive, is to forget that youth, not too distant from their childhood, hobbled them together. Notwithstanding their precarious origins, the legacy of that period continues today with up to 2,000 worker cooperative members and further thousands living in cooperative housing in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area.

To incubate institutions that incorporate the elements of a good life, White asserts, requires grounding in place as a site to cultivate our better selves. This notion may seem foreign to most people, so White successfully unwraps it with references to a broad range of cultural artifacts: films, books, plays, and music. From pop culture to more obscure literary references, he manages to convey complex ideas effortlessly.

If the Sixties was noted for communes, fifty years later we have our commons.

Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, methodically studied commons all over the world. Her book Governing the Commons, however, didn’t appear until 1990. The commons, as resource sharing and as an alternative to private property, didn’t gain popular recognition until the beginning of the current century.

An argument could be made that the notion of the commons eclipses the communes of the counterculture. If the hippies and fellow travelers had explicitly recognized that their various collectives had an historic commonality, maybe a stronger political force of solidarity would have taken shape. A force, that is, to sustain a concerted fight to keep rents low and funding high for countercultural subversions.

There was one struggle in White’s pivotal year of 1969, the year of People’s Park, which is exemplary as a reclamation of the commons. The commons-to-be was a parcel four times the size of People’s Park and two miles away in a working class neighborhood of Berkeley. It was a dirt field several hundred feet wide and one-half mile long that remained after Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) submerged tracks underground for its transit system.

Much of the energy from the People’s Park struggle got directed to creating a park on the barren land. They called it People’s Park Annex. This was the impetus that propelled the neighbors to develop the land. For ten years the community near the park overcame police harassment to plant trees and shrubs, create a vegetable garden, build children’s play structures, and party with huge potlucks. They resisted all attempts to divert the land for one stupid project after another until finally, with some clever legal tactics, the community wrenched the land from BART so that the City of Berkeley could acquire it. In 1979, Ohlone Park, named after the tribe that historically inhabited the SF Bay area, was officially proclaimed as a city park. The residents of Berkeley removed a significant piece of real estate from the market and created a commons—one of the largest reclaimed urban commons in America.

The continuing struggle with the campus-owned land, that is the original People’s Park, took on the tone of militant resistance—the park as a battlefield. The PPA participation, however, looked more like a carnival. There’s a lesson here. It’s the nature of a commons to facilitate democratic practices and cultivate a pragmatic egalitarianism—to live differently, as White asserts. Or as one guerilla gardener said of the PPA, “This is an adult adventure playground.

Obviously not all commons are carnivals. Historically the commons was a survival resource. It was the village grazing field, the wood supply, and a space for garden plots. In the nineteenth century, cooperatives were considered the urban form of the commons, as they remain today, though few refer to them as such. The commons was a work site, but we wouldn’t recognize the nature of the work done there. Sure, the specific tasks would be recognizable as those undertaken to provide sustenance for a family, but the context would not. Commoners practiced cooperation and reciprocity; the commons was maintained and improved collectively. Over decades, if not centuries, rules and regulations were established that provided guidance for managing the commons and governance was based on the egalitarian premise that decisions were decided to avoid divisiveness. It was the site for solidarity, which is why it had to be destroyed, enclosed.

White proposes that a new culture needs to arise from a solid foundation, a place to initiate significant revolt. One premised on “sustainable happiness.” He defines happiness with this quote from Tolstoy’s novella Family Happiness:

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness.

This idyll resembles the vision Marx had of life in a post-capitalist (communist) society where one would garden in the morning, have a leisurely lunch with one’s friends, play games afterwards and read or play music in the evening (or a similar mix of activities).

These nineteenth century musings may seem quaint to us. Seemingly, they depict individual refuges, though in context they were meant to be collective ventures. But we could ask what relevance do they have for a world where rural residents everywhere are draining away to urban slums?

Place without solidarity is a shrine. Nineteen century workers had Labor Temples.

The oppositional culture that White seeks must involve a strategy to build solidarity. Decades ago, solidarity streamed out of factories all over the land. Its attire was the work shirt and sturdy denim slacks. Its accouterment was the lunch pail. And strikes fortified it. Solidarity like that may appear in specific cases today, but it is no longer universal. It no longer terrorizes the bosses.

So where to find that solidarity today? If it can’t be found on the assembly line can it be found with jobs at all? By the way, working in an Amazon warehouse doesn’t approach the sense of dignity that was integral to manufacturing jobs; even though they may have been grueling and hazardous, those jobs supplied the psychological basis for resistance to the demands of the bosses.

There can be no oppositional culture if we are tethered to a meaningless job all day. What made the Sixties counterculture viable was, relatively speaking, an abundant economy compared to the austerity we suffer today. It was possible then to have a part-time job, live communally, and spend most of the day doing “what we will” as the old Eight Hour Movement slogan proclaimed.

To counter the austerity imposed on us by the bankers and their henchmen we might consider the obvious hidden in plain sight. The wealth of our society accumulated because of the efforts of previous generations. All the historic accomplishments along with all the natural resources are the commons and our inheritance. Each of us should be entitled to a portion of that inheritance. Guy Standing, the British economist, calls it a Commons Dividend. That’s just another name for a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

A UBI coupled with the implementation of basic human rights as outlined in the UN Charter on Human Rights could be the foundation for a life that is our wealth, to paraphrase John Rustin who White admires. But this is just the beginning. “Everything begins with the individual, but nothing ends there,” to quote Raoul Vaneigem, who I admire.

A guaranteed income in the context of the climate catastrophe we are enduring will hardly lead to the idyllic life Tolstoy or Marx imagined, at least not all the time. There is work to be done. Consider for example: to create a sustainable agricultural economy will entail droves of people moving to farms, to the new farms created to restore the soil, grow organic crops, and sequester carbon. This means thousands of smaller plots with millions of people working them maybe part-time and seasonally. With a UBI, jobs that force individuals to harm the planet to survive could be abandoned for socially useful tasks and absolutely necessary ones given the climate emergency. The possibility of solidarity arising amongst those reversing the damage to our planet cannot be dismissed. In fact, these are the tasks, collectively organized from the grassroots that can only function well with solidarity.

White calls for re-balancing our priorities. We can too easily get addicted to quotidian outrages—the media is a gateway drug—and waste too much time, as White maintains, trying to reform a world that can’t be fixed. Time spent creating a life with others should be the goal. This isn’t an abstraction. It means developing a playful and determined opposition—a counterculture of rebellion. We have antecedents. But instead of collectively reclaiming our lives, we work at jobs that suck our cooperative energies for stupid, if not destructive, ends. By developing solidarity with others for good ends, we will heal our abused selves while healing the abused world.

Why is there so Much Wrong in Our Society?

Graham Peebles

As old certainties crumble and systems crystallize, social divisions grow and extremes harden, a friend asks: “Why is there so much wrong in our society?” It’s a good question. He was referring specifically to Britain where we both live, but, although the specific problems may vary, the question could be applied to any country, and by extension, to world society.

Politicians, lost in a fog of their own ambition and blinded by ideologies, argue and deceive; they have no answers to the pressing issues or my friend’s question and, addicted to the privilege, status and motorcades, are concerned only with gaining and retaining office. Corporations and undemocratic institutions exert increasing political power and sociological influence; religion, essential to some, is irrelevant to many, ‘the church’ east and west groans under the weight of its inhibiting doctrine, fails to provide guidance and succor, and ‘the people’ – most of whom live under a blanket of economic insecurity – feel increasingly anxious, angry and depressed.

We had been discussing the justice system and specifically prisons, retribution and the total absence of rehabilitation in the UK system, when my friend posed his rhetorical question. The areas of chaos and dysfunction are many and varied, from environmental carnage to armed conflict, slavery, economic injustice and homelessness. All, however, flow from the same polluted source, us – mankind; motive, often short-term ideologically rooted, conditions and corrupts action and the construction of socio-economic forms.

Society is not an abstraction, it is a reflection of the consciousness of the people who live within it, the seed of ‘what is wrong in our society’ lies within this consciousness, not simply in the forms and systems themselves. There will never be peace in the world, for example, until we ourselves are free of conflict: that we constitute society and that societal problems flow from us is clearly true, but, as with most things in life, the issue is more complex and nuanced.

Firstly, the relationship between the forces of society and the individual is a symbiotic one, and this is well known to those that most powerfully control the systems under which we all live; secondly, the vast majority of people have little or no influence over the mechanics of society. Depending on the nature of the society in which we live, we are all to a greater or lesser degree, structural victims, with little or no voice and even less influence – something that in recent years in particular, millions have been marching to change. Billions of people throughout the world, the overwhelming majority, feel themselves to be subjects within a Giant Game of Aggrandizement and Profit played by governments and powerful organizations, including the media in its many strands.

These interconnected and interdependent groups, which are of course made up of men and women, design and shape the way society functions, and do all they can to manipulate how the masses think and act. The ideology of choice for those functioning within the corporate political sphere is founded on and promotes the dogma of greed and profit. Selfishness, ambition, competition, nationalism all are found within its tenets and are promoted as natural human tendencies that are beneficial for an individual and so should be developed. Such ‘qualities’ they claim, bring success, usually understood as material comfort, career achievement or social position, and with success, the story goes, comes happiness. Within the Corrupt Construct happiness, which is rightly recognized as something that everyone longs for, has been replaced by pleasure, which is sought after day and night. Likewise, desire and the satiation of desire, itself an impossibility – this too is well known by the architects – has been substituted for love, which has been assimilated, commodified and neatly packaged.

The tendency towards greed and selfishness, hate and violence, no doubt exist within the human being, the negative lies within us all, so does the good. The Good is our inherent nature, hidden within the detritus of conditioning and fear. The negative, aggravated, rises, and, within the Corrupt Construct it is relentlessly prodded and stirred up. Desire is demanded, facilitating its bedmate fear, which manifests as anxiety/stress, to which an antidote is offered by the deeply concerned, eternally grateful, trillion dollar pharmaceutical companies, recreational drugs/alcohol and the world of entertainment. Common sense, restraint and The Wisdom of The Wise is trivialized, discarded; conflict and suffering, within and without goes on. Discontent leading to the pursuit of pleasure is the aim, desire, agitated, the means.

The two most pervasive and effective tools employed to condition the minds of all are education and the media. Conditioning into competition and nationalism, pleasure and individualism – not individuality, which is dangerous to the status quo and is therefore actively discouraged; conformity is insisted upon and forms a cornerstone of education and the stereotypes churned out by the media.

This is a transitional time, a time of collapse and expansion, of disintegration and rebuilding; underlying the present tensions and discord is the energy of change and the emergence of the new.

A battle is taking place, between those forces in the world that are wedded to the old ways, and a dynamic, global movement for social justice, environmental action, peace and freedom. Sapped of energy, the existing forms and modes of living are in a state of decay; propelled solely by the impetus of the past they persist in form only, hollow carcasses without vitality. Growing numbers of people around the world know this to be true, and while some react with fear and look for certainty behind a flag or ideology, the majority call for a fundamental shift, for justice and the inculcation of systems that allow unifying harmonious ways of living to evolve. As always, resistance is fierce, but change and the spirit of the time cannot be held at bay indefinitely.

Impeachment: What Is At Risk

David Sparenberg

Today, as the public phase of impeachment hearings are underway, I am watching while reading from the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Sadly, I admit to not trusting the American people as much as I might to see clearly, think honestly, and do what is right.  I would welcome being mistaken in my skepticism.

However, I am certain not to trust the systems and structures of the American way of life not to corrupt the principled values and decision making of the American people.  The socio-political and economic system of big money and world power is both ingeniously and insidiously corruptible and Americans may prove to be fatally susceptible to confusion, convenient misguidance, compromise and corruption.  Operating under misnomers, these are powerful channels of American life and the very fundamentals of democracy, much weakened by narcissism and indulgence instead of being schooled in freedom of conscience and moral character will be needed not to remain numbed into accepting the status quo of limited perception, disconnection, and the indifference that accompanies disempowerment.

This thinking poses a painful dilemma for me.  My experience is of a lifetime. That experience is that no matter how much I disagree with policies, or opinions or attitudes, I cannot deny finding most Americans to be good natured and well intentioned. Yet this by itself may not be enough in the democratic crisis the United States now struggles with and is deeply immersed in.  When ordinary goodness is divorced from truthfulness and justice, a crisis becomes problematic on the level of ordinary identity, behavior and cohesion.

Perhaps, as the impeachment of Donald J. Trump moves forward, we, to one another but also before the rest of the watchful world, will see if there is honesty akin to Abraham Lincoln and integrity of the statue of Frederick Douglass still alive within us to recall the exiled American soul and reaffirm the constitutionality of the American republic? Long since we ceased to be a nation of naïve innocence, of robust farmers and tenacious pioneers.  Are we yet capable of responsible citizenship, of standing up, resisting what is wrong and doing what is right?  Events in motion will provide an answer.

Was the Founder of White Helmets Killed by Islamic State?

Nauman Sadiq

The founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, was found dead on November 11 in suspicious circumstances after falling off a two-story apartment building in downtown Istanbul. He was a former British army veteran and a private security contractor from 2008 to 2012 working for Good Harbor, run by Richard Clarke, the former Bush administration counter-terrorism czar.

Much like Erik Prince of the Blackwater fame, Le Mesurier’s work included training several thousand mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) oil and gas field protection force, and designing security infrastructure for the police state of Abu Dhabi.

Although the police in Istanbul are treating the incident as suicide, it’s obvious that a person of his background and training would never attempt suicide by jumping off a two-story building. Because such a fall might have fractured a few bones but it was highly unlikely to cause death.

The assassination of James Le Mesurier should be viewed in the backdrop of the killing of the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on October 27 in a US special-ops raid. It’s important to note in the news coverage of the killing of al-Baghdadi that although the mainstream media has been trumpeting for the last several years that the Islamic State’s fugitive leader was hiding somewhere on the Iraq-Syria border in the east, he was found hiding in the northwestern Idlib governorate, under the control of Turkey’s militant proxies and al-Nusra Front, and was killed while trying to flee to Turkey in Barisha village five kilometers from the border.

The reason why the mainstream media scrupulously avoided mentioning Idlib as al-Baghdadi’s most likely hideout in Syria was to cover up the collusion between the militant proxies of Turkey and the jihadists of al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, the White Helmets area of operations is also Idlib governorate in Syria where they are allowed to conduct purported “rescue operations” and “humanitarian work” under the tutelage of al-Nusra Front.

In fact, the corporate media takes the issue of Islamic jihadists “commingling” with Turkey-backed “moderate rebels” in Idlib so seriously – which could give the Syrian government the pretext to mount an offensive in northwest Syria – that the New York Times cooked up an exclusive report a couple of days after the special-ops night raid, on October 30, that the Islamic State paid money to al-Nusra Front for hosting al-Baghdadi in Idlib.

The morning after the night raid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Sunday, October 27, that a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by warplanes belonging to the international coalition had attacked positions of Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in Idlib province where the Islamic State chief was believed to be hiding.

Despite detailing the operational minutiae of the special-ops raid, the mainstream news coverage of the raid deliberately elided over the crucial piece of information that the compound in Barisha village five kilometers from Turkish border where al-Baghdadi was killed belonged to Hurras al-Din, an elusive terrorist outfit which has previously been targeted several times in the US airstrikes.

Although Hurras al-Din is generally assumed to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, it is in fact the regrouping of the Islamic State jihadists under a different name in northwestern Idlib governorate after the latter terrorist organization was routed from Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria and was hard pressed by the US-led coalition’s airstrikes in eastern Syria.

According to “official version” of Washington’s story regarding the killing of al-Baghdadi, the choppers took off from an American airbase in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, flew hundreds of miles over the enemy territory in the airspace controlled by the Syrian and Russian air forces, killed the self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State in a Hollywood-style special-ops raid, and took the same route back to Erbil along with the dead body of the “caliph” and his belongings.

Although Washington has conducted several airstrikes in Syria’s Idlib in the past, those were carried out by fixed-wing aircraft that fly at high altitudes, and the aircraft took off from American airbases in Turkey, which is just across the border from Syria’s northwestern Idlib province. Why would Washington take the risk of flying its troops at low altitudes in helicopters over the hostile territory controlled by myriads of Syria’s heavily armed militant outfits?

In fact, several Turkish journalists, including Rajip Soylu, the Turkey correspondent for the Middle East Eye, tweeted on the night of the special-ops raid that the choppers took off from the American airbase in Turkey’s Incirlik.

As for al-Baghdadi, who was “hiding” with the blessing of Turkey, it now appears that he was the bargaining chip in the negotiations between Trump and Erdogan, and the quid for the US president’s agreeing to pull out of Syria was the pro quo that Erdogan would hand Baghdadi to him on a silver platter.

It’s worth noting that although Idlib governorate in Syria’s northwest has firmly been under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led by al-Nusra Front since 2015, its territory was equally divided between Turkey-backed rebels and al-Nusra Front.

In a brazen offensive in January, however, al-Nusra Front’s jihadists completely routed Turkey-backed militants, even though the latter were supported by a professionally trained and highly organized military of a NATO member, Turkey. And al-Nusra Front now reportedly controls more than 70% territory in the Idlib governorate.

The reason why al-Nusra Front has been easily able to defeat Turkey-backed militants appears to be that the ranks of al-Nusra Front have now been swelled by highly motivated and battle-hardened jihadist deserters from the Islamic State after the fall of the latter’s “caliphate” in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

In all likelihood, some of the Islamic State’s jihadists who joined the battle in Idlib in January were part of the same contingent of thousands of Islamic State militants that fled Raqqa in October 2017 under a deal brokered by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The merger of al-Nusra Front and Islamic State in Idlib doesn’t come as a surprise, though, since the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front used to be a single organization before a split occurred between the two militant groups in April 2013 over a leadership dispute. In fact, al-Nusra Front’s chief Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was reportedly appointed the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, in January 2012.

Finally, regarding the assassination of the founder of the White Helmets, James Le Mesurier, in downtown Istanbul, it’s worth pointing out that Turkey has been hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees and myriad factions of Ankara-backed militant proxies. It’s quite easy for the jihadists of al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State to intermingle with Syrian refugees and militants in the Turkish refugee camps.

Evidently, one of the members of the White Helmets operating in al-Nusra’s territory in Syria’s Idlib betrayed his patrons for the sake of getting a reward, and conveyed crucial piece of information to Le Mesurier who then transmitted it to the British and American intelligence leading to the October 27 special-ops raid killing al-Baghdadi. In all likelihood, the assassination of the founder of the White Helmets was the Islamic State’s revenge for betraying its slain chief.

New Zealand police introduce new armed units

Tom Peters

Late last month, the New Zealand Police launched Armed Response Teams (ARTs) in three districts: the Canterbury region including Christchurch; the Waikato; and Counties Manukau in working class South Auckland. Following a six-month trial, the ARTs will be “evaluated” before most likely being rolled out across the entire country—a major step towards arming all police officers.

The ARTs are the latest in a series of moves by the Labour Party-NZ First-Greens government to exploit the far-right terrorist attack in Christchurch in March to strengthen the state’s anti-democratic powers.

So-called “anti-terrorism” legislation introduced last month will allow courts to drastically restrict the freedom of individuals suspected, but not convicted, of involvement in overseas terrorist or “extremist” groups. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has also played a leading role advocating internet censorship in the name of combating “extremism.”

Now, the Ardern government is joining others internationally in militarising the police to defend ever-widening levels of social inequality against working class opposition. New Zealand’s ruling elite is undoubtedly watching the mass protests in Puerto Rico, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Lebanon, Hong Kong and elsewhere with growing anxiety. The country has been shaken by nationwide strikes by teachers, nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers, opposing austerity and the decay of public services.

New Zealand is one of a small handful of countries where frontline police do not routinely carry guns, although patrol vehicles are equipped with them. In 2008, the previous Labour Party government armed police with tasers. An elite Armed Offenders Squad (AOS), with 352 members, was called out 1,058 times in 2017 to deal with allegedly armed suspects.

In response to widespread opposition to the ARTs, Ardern told TVNZ she was “totally opposed to the routine arming of the police.” She claimed the ARTs were “specialised” units that would be “called out” in cases where suspects were known to be armed.

This is thoroughly misleading. The ARTs, unlike the AOS, are deployed seven days a week to carry out standard tasks including so-called “preventive patrolling” in “high-risk areas.” Police Association president Chris Cahill told Radio NZ the ARTs would also be involved in “lower risk” activities, saying: “I don’t think anyone would expect that they should just sit around and do nothing all day.”

To justify the armed units, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said “our operating environment has changed” since fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people and injured 50 more in Christchurch using a military-style semi-automatic rifle. Ardern claimed that there was “a prevalence of guns in New Zealand” and police had to be better prepared for incidents involving firearms.

In fact, gun ownership has fallen considerably since the March 15 attack. The government banned possession of weapons like Tarrant’s and more than 36,000 guns have been turned in during a buyback.

There are many unanswered questions about why police did not prevent the Christchurch atrocity. Police issued Tarrant a firearms license, which required officers to visit his flat and take statements from referees. This was after Tarrant had made numerous threats against “communists” and immigrants on social media, including a death threat that was dismissed by Australian police. New Zealand police ignored a warning from a member of the Bruce Rifle Club, where Tarrant was a member, about violent and racist talk among club members.

Tarrant’s fascist manifesto, which expressed sympathy for the police and military, was banned in an anti-democratic decision by New Zealand’s censor. A royal commission of inquiry into how Tarrant’s attack was planned and carried out is being held in secret.

The Christchurch attack is being used to make changes that have been planned for years. The Labour Party and its coalition partner NZ First ran a law-and-order campaign in the 2017 election, promising to increase police numbers by 1,800, or about 20 percent. Labour recruited former police union leader Greg O’Connor as a member of parliament. O’Connor had long advocated for police to be armed and has defended every shooting by police.

Shootings have already increased dramatically. In 2017, Stuff reported that 35 people were shot by police, 16 of them fatally, in the previous 10 years. This compared to 42 people shot in the 100 years prior to 2007. No officers have been charged, including in recent cases in 2015 and 2016 where witnesses described the shootings as unnecessary.

A petition against armed patrols on the ActionStation website gained more than 8,000 signatures in three weeks. One signatory, Tama’a, commented: “I don’t want NZ to turn into America, where there’s going to be higher chance of Maori/Pacific Islanders getting killed.”

Sol Marco wrote: “Increased militarisation of the police and these patrols will only increase violence. The police are already biased against Maori, against poor people and against those who may have problems with mental illness… This is frightening.”

About 60 people protested in Manukau Square on November 2 against the ARTs. Counties Manukau is one of the poorest areas of the country, with a large proportion of Maori and Pacific Islanders, who are disproportionately affected by police violence. From 2009 to 2019, 66 percent of those shot by police were Maori or Pacific, who make up just 22 percent of the population.

Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson told Radio NZ “more armed officers will result in more deaths and injuries for people experiencing mental health crises.” He noted that the similar warnings when tasers were introduced were ignored and that weapons are used disproportionately against mentally ill people.

The ARTs will not be the last move to strengthen police powers. The Ardern government has proposed new “Firearms Prohibition Orders,” which Police Minister Stuart Nash admitted would infringe on human rights. Anyone with a criminal conviction deemed “high risk” could be barred from “being around others who have firearms, using them under supervision, or being at a location that enables access to guns.” To enforce the orders, police would get much greater powers to carry out warrantless searches.

Political and economic turmoil escalates in Lebanon

Jean Shaoul

Lebanon’s political and economic crisis has intensified as protests and strikes continue into their fifth week, encompassing wide layers of workers and poor farmers throughout the country, across the sectarian and national divide.

On Tuesday, the National Federation of Employees’ and Workers’ Trade Unions in Lebanon, called a general strike over the government’s economic mismanagement and its failure to implement the protesters’ demands, including the formation of a new government.

Demonstrators poured onto the street, setting up roadblocks and chanting “all of them means all of them”, the rallying call of the protest movement against all the political parties, to demand the end of the entire sectarian political system.

Universities and schools, after briefly reopening last week, are again closed until further notice as students protest against government corruption, the lack of jobs and essential public services and the soaring cost of living.

Workers at Alfa and Touch, the state-owned mobile network providers, have gone on strike, demanding salary guarantees.

Bank workers have remained on strike over fears for their safety following the imposition of controls on transfers abroad and dollar withdrawals, credit restrictions that have led to some private sector employers cutting salaries. The falling value of the Lebanon pound on the black market has caused the price of imported goods to rise, leading to the stockpiling of food.

Gas stations have started to ration fuel or have closed, saying they will run out of fuel within a week.

According to data from Lebanon’s central bank, cited in Al-Akhbar, consumer debt has risen to $21 billion, in addition to mortgage debt of $13 billion, meaning that householders are paying a massive $1.5 billion in interest. But these loans have in turn fueled an escalation in housing prices with the result that housing costs eat up a vast proportion of wages. Now, many of the borrowers are unable to keep up with their payments or repay their loans.

According to one World Bank scenario, any further devaluation would lead to up to half Lebanon’s six million population falling below the official poverty line. It says that the crisis may have already pushed Lebanon into recession.

The Syndicate of Private Hospitals announced that medical workers would go on strike from November 15 if no action was taken to remedy the government’s failure to make payments to hospitals. The banking crisis is also making it impossible to buy the dialysis filters, heart stents and other medical equipment that had to be paid for in dollars.

On Tuesday, President Michel Aoun’s remarks in a televised speech, characterized by insensitivity, only added to the anger. He said that Lebanon would descend into a “catastrophe” if protesters do not return home and allow Lebanon to work normally again. He added that if those demonstrating “see no decent people in this state, let them emigrate. They won’t get into power.”

Soon afterwards, protesters marched towards the Presidential Palace in Baabda, in a suburb outside Beirut, until they were blocked by soldiers with jeeps, barbed wire and riot police, three-men-deep, in full body armour. They daubed graffiti along the route. One slogan said, “How do you sleep at night, Mr. President?” Incensed by Aoun’s remarks, they called for the politicians and their cronies to leave the country. Elsewhere across Lebanon, demonstrators burned tyres, hurled stones at soldiers and blocked roads.

Alaa Abou Fakher, a member of the Druze Progressive Socialist Party, was killed after being shot in the head by a soldier in front of his wife and child while they were protesting in Khaldeh, south of Beirut. An army spokesman said that it was an accident, the result of a stray bullet amid firing to disperse protestors at a roadblock, and the soldier who fired the shot was under investigation. Fakher is the second person to be killed in protests that have generally been peaceful.

The protest movement had abated somewhat following the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Saudi puppet, on October 29. He remains the head of a caretaker government until Aoun secures parliament’s support for a new prime minister, which under the constitution must be a Sunni politician. He has refused to accept the premiership again unless he can form a “technocratic” or independent government. By this he means one with little or no members from Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, and the President’s Free Patriotic Movement, led by Aoun’s son-in-law and foreign minister Gebran Bassil.

Hariri’s resignation, while an apparent concession to the protesters, allows him and his cronies to bolster their positions by adopting some of the popular demands, such as a non-sectarian based government, as their own.

Hariri, who was summoned to Saudi Arabia in September shortly before the protests erupted, ostensibly to discuss Lebanon’s economic crisis and a possible loan, is under pressure from Riyadh to eliminate Hezbollah’s—and Iran’s —political influence in the country. This is an anathema to Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement, the largest single party in the parliament, and Hezbollah itself, which—with its Shia ally Amal—has by far the largest coalition bloc, having won the largest share of the popular vote.

Hezbollah, Amal and Hariri’s Future Movement have nominated the 75-year-old Mohammad Safadi, a billionaire businessman from Tripoli, who made his fortune in Saudi Arabia, and a former finance minister, to become prime minister. If this is accepted, his government would be tasked with pushing through an economic “reform” package that would impose further austerity on Lebanon’s already impoverished working class in return for $11 billion in loans pledged at an international conference last year.

Safadi was involved in a controversial real estate development along the coast that sparked protests against the illegal privatisation of public property. Last month, he denied allegations that he had taken advantage of his government position to obtain the land at a bargain basement price. His wife, Violette, is a minister in Hariri’s caretaker cabinet.

That Lebanon’s political elite can even suggest such a man for the premiership testifies to the complete bankruptcy and isolation of the political elite. It flies in the face of the protests’ key demand of a clean sweep of the entire existing corrupt political setup. Indeed, the indications are that his name has been put forward to test the waters and provide some support for Hariri’s “technocratic” government. The announcement prompted protests in Safadi’s home city of Tripoli, a Sunni stronghold.

Hezbollah and its ally Amal, for their part, have sought to shore up the existing setup, put in place in 2016 with their support for Aoun’s presidency and Hariri’s premiership, which has brought them political power and influence. Their promises to root out corruption and economic mismanagement came to nothing.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, warned his supporters that any change in government would only worsen the situation, since it could take a long time to form a new government and solve the crisis. Echoing his ally, Iran, he accused the United States and Israel of supporting the protests from behind the scenes, demonized the demonstrators, sent in Hezbollah operatives to clear roadblocks set up by protestors and attacked those opposing the government, provoking a number of violent incidents. But this provoked a backlash, with some journalists at the pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar reportedly resigning in protest against its blackguarding of the protestors.

More recently, Nasrallah has sought to adapt to the protesters’ demands, praising them and calling on the judiciary to be “brave” in its pursuit of corrupt officials and even urging judges to begin with those affiliated to his party. He said, “If there is a case related to any person in Hezbollah, go ahead. Start with us, start with us.”

The protest movement in Lebanon is made up of diverse social and political layers and lacks a clear political agenda. The various bourgeois, professional workers associations and petty-bourgeois ad-hoc groups within the movement, regardless of their opposition to the existing political setup, offer no way forward for the workers and poor in Lebanon.

Indeed, the political vacuum poses enormous political dangers with the very real threat of an intervention by the regional powers or their local proxies. It is significant that Washington, Tel Aviv, Paris and Riyadh have said very little about the protests other than empty calls to “heed the protesters’ legitimate demands to end corruption and mismanagement” and “preserve democracy.” In reality, they are determined to use the political crisis to eradicate Hezbollah as a significant political force in both Lebanon and Syria and thereby roll back Iran’s influence in the region. Iran, for its part, is determined to prevent such an outcome, including by encouraging state repression.

Lebanon’s struggle takes place amid a growing wave of working class militancy throughout the Middle East and North Africa, exemplified by the strikes and demonstrations in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and most recently, Iraq. It is to these forces and workers internationally that Lebanese workers must turn in a struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism.

The Trump impeachment and US policy in Ukraine

Patrick Martin

The first two days of televised hearings in the impeachment of Donald Trump have made clear the character of the conflict gripping Washington. While the Democrats frame their accusations against the president around accusations of “bribery” and “obstruction,” the testimony makes clear that they are using the instrument of impeachment to fight out differences over foreign policy.

The first three witnesses, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, Ambassador William Taylor, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, have all played major operational roles in the efforts by American imperialism, over the past 15 years, to install a pliant stooge regime in Ukraine, formerly the second-largest component, after Russia, of the Soviet Union.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (right) and her attorney, Lawrence Robbins, arrive to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

The initial US intervention in Ukraine took the form of the 2004 “Orange Revolution,” which led to the ouster of a pro-Russian regime headed by Viktor Yanukovych and his replacement by the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. But Yushchenko and his corrupt Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, dubbed the “gas princess” for her role in stealing a fortune from that industry, soon lost the support of the population. In 2010, Yanukovych made a political comeback, won the presidential election, and reestablished closer ties with Moscow.

In 2013-2014, Washington tried again, this time with a campaign dubbed the “revolution of the Maidan,” named for the central square in Kiev occupied by anti-government protesters. A notorious leaked phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt documented Washington’s direct role in directing the right-wing campaign that ultimately drove Yanukovych into exile. Nuland boasted that the United States had expended $5 billion in Ukraine to promote its interests.

Kent, Taylor and Yovanovitch, hailed as paragons of virtue and professionalism by the media and members of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic and Republican alike, are the heirs and continuators of this longstanding criminal imperialist enterprise. It has two principal purposes: to open up Ukraine, a country of more than 40 million people with vast natural resources, to exploitation by US multinational corporations; and to undermine Russia strategically by creating a pro-American bastion on its southern flank, as part of the broader effort by Washington to confront Russia throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and cement a dominant American position on the Eurasian land mass.

This utterly reactionary, pro-imperialist role was demonstrated Friday in the tribute that Yovanovitch paid, in the course of her testimony, to Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian interior minister (head of the domestic police) under both the current president Volodymyr Zelensky, and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Avakov is a principal sponsor of fascist militias like the Azov Battalion, which glorify the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II against the Soviet Union. In other words, the State Department officials being celebrated in the media for defending American democracy are actually working with the fascists in Ukraine.

While Yovanovitch hailed Avakov, Kent cited as his heroes among immigrants who have rallied to the defense of the United States, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, two of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the twentieth century.

In the opinion of these front-line operatives for American imperialism, together with the intelligence agencies in whose interests the Democrats speak, Trump is endangering the already very shaky position of the United States in Ukraine. This applies not merely to his bullying shakedown of Zelensky to obtain political ammunition against Biden and the Democrats, but to Trump’s overall policy in the region. He has said that Putin should be invited to the next G7 summit (where the US is host), essentially reconstituting the G8 from which Russia was expelled in 2014, and suggested he might visit Moscow next May for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Even more dangerous, in the eyes of the military-intelligence apparatus, was his praise for Russian cooperation in the US special operations assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, immediately following Trump’s order for a US pullout from northeast Syria, allowing Turkey, Russia and the Assad regime to move into positions formerly occupied by American special operations troops.

At her press briefing Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi emphasized the foreign policy focus of the impeachment drive. She said that Trump’s actions were far worse than the Watergate scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, effectively committing the Democrats to bring articles of impeachment to a vote in the House and force a Senate trial.

Pelosi repeated the phrase, “All roads lead to Putin,” meaning that Trump’s foreign policy decisions—including withholding military aid from Ukraine—have a common thread of being favorable to the Russian president. In other words, she was reviving, under a new guise, the anti-Russia campaign that was based on bogus claims of a massive intervention by Moscow in the 2016 presidential election.

The Democratic leadership is determined to exclude from the purview of the impeachment inquiry any of Trump’s real crimes, limiting it entirely to his conflict with the national-security establishment over foreign policy differences related to Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. Pelosi herself has repeatedly declared that any differences with Trump over his persecution of immigrants, his attacks on democratic rights, his tax cuts for the wealthy, and his efforts to build up a racist and fascistic movement can wait until the 2020 election. Only his break with the anti-Russian foreign policy consensus in Washington requires the more drastic remedy of impeachment—whose purpose is not so much to remove Trump, as to force a change in policy on this critical issue.

The connection between the impeachment drive and differences on foreign policy was spelled out Friday on the front page of the New York Times, in an analysis by the newspaper’s senior foreign policy specialist, David Sanger, a frequent mouthpiece for the concerns of the CIA, State Department and Pentagon, under the headline, “For President, Case of Policy vs. Obsession”

Sanger contrasted the current impeachment drive to those carried out against Nixon and Bill Clinton, presenting it as involving far more serious issues, because neither Watergate nor the Clinton sex scandal “touched on America’s national interests in the weightiest geopolitical confrontations of their eras.”

This assessment is nonsense in relation to Nixon and Watergate, which arose directly out of the defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam, and Nixon’s frantic efforts to suppress antiwar sentiments, through massive political spying, the attempt to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, and finally the burglarizing of the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

But Sanger goes on to spell out, in remarkably blunt terms, the real foreign policy issues at stake in the Trump impeachment. He writes, “In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years …”

Trump, according to Sanger, has betrayed the anti-Russia policy outlined by his own administration, in a Pentagon strategic assessment which declared that the “war on terror” had been superseded as the top US priority by “great-power competition,” particularly directed at China and Russia. He sacrificed this policy to his own personal, electoral interests, as expressed in the comment by the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, “President Trump cares more about the investigation of Biden” than about the military conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

There is not the slightest democratic content to the impeachment campaign against Trump. This is not an effort to overturn a single one of Trump’s reactionary attacks on working people and democratic rights. It is a conflict between two reactionary factions of the American ruling elite, the fascistic Trump and the CIA-backed Democrats, over the direction of imperialist foreign policy.

American workers cannot line up behind either of these factions but must advance their own alternative to the foreign policy of imperialist domination, subversion and plunder, based on the fight for the international unity of the working class on the basis of a socialist program.

Mass protests after police shoot and kill Aboriginal teenager in remote Australian town

Eric Ludlow

Angry demonstrations have erupted across Australia following the death of 19-year-old indigenous man Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot and killed by police on Saturday night in Yuendumu in the Northern Territory (NT). The poverty-stricken community of about 1,000 people is about 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs.

Part of the November 14 protest in Alice Springs

Walker was shot about 15 minutes after two police officers entered the home of the young man’s relative without a warrant at 7 p.m. over alleged breaches of a suspended sentence. They claim that Walker was “armed with a weapon” and “lunged” at an officer. This is disputed by witnesses and the young man’s family. Police fired three times at Walker, who died two hours later in the police station without receiving critical emergency care.

The police officers were wearing body cameras but authorities have yet to release any information about the alleged “weapon,” other than to say that it was “edged.” No other details about the incident, which has been officially declared a death in custody, have been made public.

According to reports, around 200 people—including Walker’s family—quickly gathered outside the police station after the shooting. Protestors asked for two family members to be allowed in the station. The police refused this request.

Community elder Eddie Robertson told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “When we heard what happened, the police were already on their way to the police station and they locked themselves in there.… They wouldn’t come out, they just looked at us from the window.”

On Sunday, Kumanjayi Walker’s cousin, Samara Fernandez Brown, told the media that the family “went to sleep on Saturday night thinking that he might still be alive because that’s what they [the police] told us. They said he was getting medical assistance… The whole time he was dead, just sitting there at the police station.”

Walker was not given any emergency treatment because the seriously under-funded local health clinic was shut on Saturday night. Authorities claim that medical staff had been withdrawn from Yuendumu because of a “series of break-ins.”

The health workers, who were staying about an hours’ drive away, were not directed to return until 7:30 p.m., and only arrived at the Yuendumu police station at about 8:30. Initial plans to despatch the Royal Flying Doctor Service, at around 7:42 p.m., were abandoned at 9:00 p.m. because Walker had already died.

The police did not issue a press release confirming Walker’s death until 6:53 a.m. the next morning—after police reinforcements had arrived in Yuendumu and almost 10 hours after he died.

On Wednesday, 28-year-old Constable Zachary Rolfe, a former member of the Army who had served in Afghanistan, was charged with one count of murder, after protests and solidarity rallies across Australia during the past four days.

Up to 1,000 people held a protest march and rallied in Alice Springs yesterday, demanding justice for Walker and his family. It followed demonstrations earlier this week in Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Tennant Creek, Pukatja, Alice Springs and in Darwin, the NT capital. Solidarity rallies were also held in major Australian cities, including Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and the national capital Canberra.

Rolfe, who is suspended on full pay, was granted bail in an out-of-session court hearing and will reappear in an Alice Springs court on December 19.

Along with a coroner’s inquest into Walker’s death, there will be an Independent Commission Against Corruption inquiry, an internal police investigation and a police professional standards investigation. Previous investigations into deaths in police custody have ended as whitewashes and done nothing to end the ongoing police harassment of Aboriginal communities, and young people in particular.

The Northern Territory Labor government and federal government officials have attempted to dissipate the mass anger over the murder. They have feigned concern and offered empty platitudes to the Walker family, whilst publicly backing the police.

NT Labor government Chief Minister Michael Gunner declared on Wednesday that the police “who serve us day in, night out, keeping us safe… will be hurting and will need our support.”

Ken Wyatt, the Morrison government’s federal minister for indigenous Australians, flew into Alice Springs yesterday and told the media that “now was not the time for blame.” He met with several Yuendumu residents and brushed aside their calls for police not to be armed in remote indigenous communities, declaring that policing methods were determined by the NT government.

Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Price, a member of the Country Liberal Party, which is part the federal government Liberal-National Coalition, defended the police and said that the Walker family would be “working” with them.

In a live video posted on social media, Price, who is indigenous, denounced non-indigenous protesters, claiming that they were “interfering,” “hijacking” and “causing division” in the community.

“You are kardiya [white], this is not your family, and you need to go away.… I’m sick of protesters in my community. Sick of protesters using Aboriginal people and our circumstances for their own political means,” she declared.

Several indigenous leaders have hailed the murder charge against police officer Rolfe and embraced the official attempts to quell the mounting anger. Others are attempting to present the killing as a purely racial question, ignoring the widespread police brutality against workers of all backgrounds, and fostering illusions in the official investigations.

Irrespective of the outcome of these investigations, or the police trial, nothing will change for the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people, the most oppressed section of the Australian working class and the victims of decades of state repression and government neglect and vicious social spending cuts.

The endemic unemployment and lack of the most basic social facilities, including access to proper health, education and proper drinking water, which blights Yuendumu, are typical of remote indigenous communities across Australia.

Indigenous Australians are the most incarcerated people in the world, accounting for only 3.3 percent of Australia’s population, but 27 percent of the total number of prison inmates, 22 percent of deaths in prison and 19 percent of those killed in police custody.

The legal right of Northern Territory police to raid Walkers’ home without a warrant was established through the reviled Northern Territory Intervention. Under these draconian powers, officers can enter Aborigines’ homes without a warrant and arrest them if they believe they are drinking alcohol or have drugs or pornography in their property.

These repressive measures were first introduced by the Howard Liberal-National Coalition government in 2007, and rebadged as “Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory” by the Gillard Labor government in 2012. They have been maintained by subsequent governments.

While the Hawke Labor government’s 1987–91 “Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody” was supposed to end the killings, the fatalities continue. There have been over 420 recorded Aboriginal deaths in custody in the past 18 years. Not a single police officer has been successfully prosecuted over these deaths.

In 2002, senior constable Robert Whittington shot and killed Robert Jongmin in Wadeye, Northern Territory. Whittington was charged with murder but never found guilty or convicted of any criminal wrongdoing. He remains a sergeant in the NT police.

Less than eight weeks ago, on September 16, Joyce Clarke, a 29-year-old Yamatji woman, died after being shot at a home in Geraldton by Western Australian (WA) police. Local indigenous leaders attending her funeral, which was to be held today, told ABC media this morning that armed police were constantly patrolling the community and harassing youth.

Clarkes’ death was the third fatal police shooting in WA in the past 12 months. In September 2018 two Aboriginal teenage boys drowned following a police pursuit in Perth.

The violent police attacks are not confined to the Aboriginal population. All sections of the working class, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds or mental health, are being targeted by police. The police killing of 40-year-old schizophrenic Todd McKenzie in August, despite desperate pleas from his family, is just one recent example of the escalating brutal police assaults on working-class communities.

The German government’s “basic pension” bluff

Marianne Arens

The German government has patted itself on the back. According to Christian Democratic Party (CDU) leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the basic pension model agreed upon by the CDU, Christian Social Union (CSU), and Social Democratic Party (SPD) party leaders on Sunday will “make an important contribution in the fight against poverty among the elderly.” Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) added that it was “social and fair.”

Really? In truth, the measure is far from providing a real basic pension deserving the name. The grand coalition is trying to have its cake and eat it too, since the social project must not cost anything.

As provisional SPD chairman Malu Dreyer calculated, up to 1.5 million people could receive the new “basic pension” beginning January 1, 2021. The government calculates additional costs of 1 to 1.5 billion euros will be required from tax revenues. Mathematically, this amounts to around one thousand euros per person per year. As a monthly figure, it is just 80 euros more—the proverbial drop in the ocean.

While the supposed “project of the century” of the basic pension might cost 1.5 billion euros in tax funds, the government wants to increase expenditures substantially for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) with a focus on upgrading their armaments. The annual military budget will increase first to 50 billion euros and then shortly to an astounding 73 billion euros, or two per cent of gross domestic product.

Furthermore, business-friendly measures were adopted at the same time as the basic pension. The government wants to provide 10 billion euros for employers who invest in “future technology” in the field of digitisation and air conditioning.

Who will benefit from the basic pension?

The condition for receiving it is that a person has worked for at least 35 years and contributed into the pension fund. Disastrously, Labour Minister Heil's concept is oriented towards “lifetime contributions” and not towards the needs of the recipients. From the outset, this would exclude those employed in low-paid jobs throughout their working lives who have therefore paid too little or no contributions. Those who are poor in old age, but have less than 35 years of contributions, cannot benefit from the basic pension.

The “up to 1.5 million people” who, according to Malu Dreyer, could benefit from the basic pension are only a fraction of poor senior citizens, who in fact number at least three to four million. In Germany, pensioners are officially the third largest group affected by poverty, after the unemployed and single parents.

This is the result of decades of austerity by governments of all political persuasions carried out on the back of the working class. Pension levels have been falling steadily since the late 1970s, a process that has accelerated rapidly since the SPD-Green Party coalition under Schröder and Fischer (1999-2005). With its policies of liberalization, privatization and the Hartz laws introducing labour and benefit “reforms,” this government opened the floodgates to low-wage labour and insecure, precarious working conditions, which contributed significantly to the destruction of pension levels.

As a result, pensions in Germany today amount to only half of net income (50.5 percent), well below the OECD average (70.6 percent). The Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund (German Pension Insurance Association, DR) assumes even lower values: According to DR, pensioners today only have 45.0 percent of their previous earnings to live on. In absolute figures, almost 35 percent of all men in West Germany receive 900 euros or less in monthly pensions according to DR. In the case of women, the figure is almost 77 percent, i.e. more than three quarters of all women pensioners have to rely on 900 euros or less in retirement.

While governments have abolished wealth tax and are constantly lowering taxes for the super-rich, they are increasingly taxing pensioners. All these measures have made Germany one of the most unequal countries in the world, especially in the area of poverty among the elderly. And the trend continues. Due to various recent “reforms,” the level of benefits provided by statutory pension insurance will fall by a further 20 percent by 2030.

The current basic pension project of the grand coalition will not change this scandalous inequality.

In fact, the government is pursuing quite different goals with this project. It is intended to ensure its survival and enable the grand coalition to achieve the goals it really cares about. First and foremost, this includes the return to a policy of great power politics, which will be accompanied by war missions of the Bundeswehr, as Bundestag (parliament) President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) and Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer have formulated in recent programmatic speeches.

Two days after the agreement on the basic pension was reached, public swearing in ceremonies for army recruits took place in front of the Reichstag in Berlin and in six other cities. The oath taken was intended to “anchor the Bundeswehr in the heart of society,” i.e. to accustom society to the omnipresence of soldiers.

The government is rapidly moving to the right in response to the growing opposition to its anti-social and militaristic policies. Recently, the governing parties—the CDU/CSU and SPD—have scarcely received forty percent of the votes in the polls.

In its refugee policy and stepping up of state powers, the grand coalition has largely adopted the policies of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and is preparing a further shift to the right at the upcoming CDU and SPD party congresses.

Right-wing CDU politicians, business associations, and representatives of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the AfD are raising a hue and cry about the latest basic pension model because it does not provide for strict means testing. Income is examined, so that a well earning spouse means there is no entitlement to the basic pension, but not property, as for instance a dwelling used by oneself.

The federal chairman of the conservative youth association Junge Union, Tilman Kuban, disparaged the basic pension on November 7 on the Maybrit Illner show as a ticker-tape parade. The FDP parliamentary deputy Johannes Vogel complained, “They want to disperse money with a watering can!” Carsten Linnemann, chairman of the CDU’s organisation for small- and medium-sized business, insisted on the implementation of a complete means test. Otherwise, he warned, “a breach in the dam for other social payments” threatened.

These representatives of the rich, who like to spend 80 euros on a bottle of wine when they enjoy a good meal, insist that every pensioner undergo the humiliation of bearing themselves financially in order to obtain the same sum in an additional monthly pension. Their great power politics can only be financed through imposing new austerity measures on workers and the elderly. That is the reason why they promote the AfD and rely on authoritarian forms of rule.