Boris Johnson scrapes through no-confidence vote and survives as UK Prime Minister—for now

Thomas Scripps

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has narrowly survived a bruising vote of no confidence by his own MPs in the Conservative Party. The vote was triggered after the 54thMP (15 percent of the Conservative group in parliament) submitted a letter of no confidence to the backbench chair Sir Graham Brady.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left) leaves the Houses of Parliament, in London, Monday, June 6, 2022. Johnson faced a no-confidence vote Monday night which he won with a small majority. (AP Photo/David Cliff)

In the ballot held Monday evening, 148 Tory MPs out of 359 (41 percent) voted no confidence in Johnson. This is seriously damaging, at the very upper end of what the rebels were expecting. Previous ballots in which a significant section of the party voted against the leader—37 percent against Theresa May in December 2018 and 41 percent against Margaret Thatcher in 1990—have forced their resignations within months.

But Johnson gave no sign of doing the same, telling the BBC afterwards it was an “extremely good, positive, conclusive result” and an opportunity for the Tory Party to “unite and deliver”. By the rules, the prime minister now has a grace period in which no further votes can be called in his leadership for a year, though Brady commented on the day, “it’s possible for rules to be changed.”

A likely prolonged period of guerrilla warfare has begun in Britain’s governing party, with internal skirmishes over upcoming by-elections, the crisis over the Northern Ireland Protocol and an ongoing investigation into whether Johnson knowingly misled parliament. Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi summed up the atmosphere by lamenting that the Tories had organised “a circular firing squad”.

Johnson scraped through after the failure of his opponents to mount a coherent challenge. The no confidence vote was prompted by growing but unorganised concern that Johnson is now inflaming an explosive political situation while alienating key sections of the party’s support base.

The “partygate” scandal surrounding Johnson’s participation in government drinks parties during pandemic lockdowns, which has now dragged on for half a year, is at the centre of Johnson’s fate—epitomising for millions the Tory Party’s cruel indifference to mass deaths and illness, summed up by Johnson’s declaration, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

This has in turn become the focus of Tory fears that Johnson’s widespread unpopularity is now an obstacle to the government’s ability to push through savage austerity measures and escalating involvement in NATO’s proxy war against Russia without provoking popular opposition.

Steve Brine, Sir Bob Neil and Jeremy Wright’s statements announcing their intention to vote against Johnson were typical, warning “Rule makers cannot be law-breakers”, “events have undermined trust in not just the office of the Prime Minister, but in the political process itself,” and that the prime minister must go “both to safeguard future public compliance with Government instructions when it counts, and to allow the present Government to deliver the important legislation it has introduced”.

Recent polls predict damaging Tory losses in by-elections in Tiverton and Honiton to the Liberal Democrats and Wakefield to Labour. At a Service of Thanksgiving for the Queen at St Paul’s Cathedral on Friday, Johnson was loudly booed by a crowd of the Tories’ die-hard supporters waving Union Flags.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson accompanied by his wife Carrie arrives at St Paul's Cathedral for the Platinum Jubilee Service of thanksgiving for the Queen. Johnson was booed by the crowd as he entered St Paul’s. 03/06/2022. (Credit: Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

But such is the political crisis gripping the ruling class that the Tory rebellion has been unable to solve the problem of who would replace Johnson. Had a viable contender come forward, the vote might well have been swung. Of the candidates likely to run in a leadership election, only Jeremy Hunt, health secretary under David Cameron and a non-starter for right-wing Tory MPs, announced he would be voting against the prime minister.

The most organised opposition to Johnson comes from the Tory right, who have used the partygate crisis to push the full-speed implementation of a raft of reactionary legislation and who see Johnson as an impediment to a Brexit-enabled low-to-no tax, zero-regulation free market paradise. Their preferred candidate is Foreign Secretary Liz (the human hand grenade) Truss. She has proved her anti-Russian credentials and is considered more of an economic hawk than Johnson. David Gauke, a former Tory MP and cabinet minister, wrote in the New Statesman that Truss is “A leadership candidate who can articulate authentically an agenda of lower taxes and deregulation”.

The foreign secretary has not openly come out against Johnson, however, so far positioning herself as the inheritor of his support group if he does fall. She tweeted early Monday, “The Prime Minister has my 100% backing in today’s vote and I strongly encourage colleagues to support him.” Other potential leadership challengers, including Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid, did similarly.

Whether or when Johnson is replaced, the party is setting an ever-more determined course of war, austerity, authoritarianism and mass infection. Johnson’s letter defending his position to Tory MPs highlighted his government’s “reopen[ing] the economy speedily” during the COVID pandemic, “becom[ing] the first European country to help the Ukrainians” in the NATO war on Russia, and “striking an economic and migration partnership with Rwanda” tearing up the right to asylum as his major successes.

At a private meeting of Tory MPs, he said, “We all know you can’t spend your way out of inflation, and tax your way to create growth” and that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had told him on the phone that morning that he wanted a “strong UK”. He announced during the day, “The UK will gift the Ukrainian Armed Forces multiple-launch rocket systems so they can effectively repel the continuing Russian onslaught.”

Johnson’s wartime prime minister pitch was not enough to prevent a no confidence motion because its appeal is muted by the universal support for war among his potential challengersand because someone widely known as a liar is badly placed to combat the absence of any popular pro-war sentiment in the population.

For this reason, the whole rotten show is being kept on the road by the efforts of the Labour Party to place the question of the hated Johnson government’s survival entirely in the hands of Tory MPs. Starmer told LBC radio Monday morning, “it’s in the national interest that he goes now.” Admitting having Johnson at the head of the Tory Party was widely considered an electoral boon for Labour, he went on, “But looking at the national interest, I think Tory MPs have got to step up, show leadership and get rid of him.”

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Boris Johnson walk to the House of Lords to hear the Queen's Speech in May 2022. (Credit: UK Parliament Jessica Taylor)

Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting appealed to Tory MPs on Radio 4’s Today programme: “Get on with the job of government. Give the country the prime minister it deserves.”

As far as Labour makes any independent pitch, it is to portray itself as the genuine party of the national interest. On Sunday, the party’s culture secretary Lucy Powell published an article in the Observer using the Jubilee as an occasion to proclaim Labour the party of “patriotic principles” which “puts Britain first.” To prove Labour’s credentials, Powell explains, “If 10 years ago we had invested in our own capacity for 5G technology, say, we would not find ourselves at the mercy of Huawei and the Chinese Communist party today. If the Tories hadn’t effectively banned onshore wind in the UK, we would produce more additional energy than we import from Russia.”

To push this agenda, Labour as much as the Tories depends on the trade unions to suppress the class struggle and keep the working class out of the political arena. But the potential for changing this situation is emerging, as key sections of workers on the rail network, BT and elsewhere look to mount strikes against efforts to hold down wages amid a worsening cost-of-living crisis. This creates the basis for a movement that will get rid of the Tory government, whichever political criminal leads it.

Biden White House discusses how many daily COVID deaths would be acceptable to declare the pandemic over

Benjamin Mateus

A report in Politico Monday sheds light on the ruthless and cynical effort by the Biden White House to convince Americans that the COVID pandemic has officially ended. Citing three sources, the website reports internal conversations among Biden aides as to what would be a “general metric” for daily COVID death figures that would be acceptable to the public and provide the basis to declare the pandemic over.

This would come from the president who declared last summer that America had entered a period of “freedom” from COVID, to be followed by a deluge of infections and deaths that stunned the population and pushed the health care system once more to the brink of collapse. COVID vaccines were being hailed as decisive in lifting the country out of the pandemic, but while effective, they provided only limited relief.

Medical personnel wearing personal protective equipment out of concern for the coronavirus remove a person from an ambulance near an entrance to Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, Monday, April 20, 2020. [AP Photo/Steven Senne]

Due to the sensitive nature of the issue, the three individuals who spoke to Politico did so on conditions of anonymity, knowing the explosive nature of making these calculations public. Politico reported that “the discussions, which took place across the administration, and have not been previously disclosed, involved a scenario in which 200 or fewer Americans die per day, a target kicked around before officials ultimately decided not to incorporate it into pandemic planning.”

Politico remarked, “the discussions represented at least a nascent effort to create a framework for a post-COVID world. One of the three people involved in the conversations last year said it was an effort to gauge what the American public would ‘tolerate.’ ‘Five hundred a day is a lot. You still have 9/11 numbers in a week,’ the person said. ‘People generally felt like 100 [a day] or less, or maybe 200, would be ok.’”

What is such talk?

These cold-blooded calculations show representatives of the White House, supposedly sworn to protect and defend the population, speaking like insurance executives who are determining the cost of their payouts versus income from premiums. It is clear from the casual character of these discussions that such barbaric mathematics are part of everyday life in the top circles of the Biden administration.

And while the death toll from COVID is calculated in the tens and hundreds of thousands, the death toll from an all-out war with nuclear-armed Russia or China will be tallied in the millions, if not billions.

The White House conversation sounds like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s macabre Dr. Strangelove. When General “Buck” Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, advocates a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, he tells the president, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is seeking to extricate itself from the COVID pandemic by relegating it to just another seasonal virus and diverting attention from the continued threat posed by SARS-CoV-2, which currently continues to infect close to 110,000 people each day and kill more than 300 daily. 

At no point in the entire period of the pandemic has the US ever dropped below 200 deaths per day. Even the lowest daily deaths recorded thus far would equate to 100,000 annual fatalities. Even 200 COVID deaths per day would mean more than 73,000 COVID deaths annually, 12,000 deaths above even the worst flu season in the last decade, in 2016-2017. During the Omicron wave, 40 percent of the 170,000 deaths were among the vaccinated.

One must ask how these flunkeys who are trying to ascertain what an acceptable threshold for declaring COVID is over can square their calculations with the dreadful forecast from the same White House that this fall and winter could see 100 million COVID infections, including a significant wave of deaths among the elderly and most vulnerable.

As for children, who remain the least vaccinated for COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is far deadlier than the flu, which killed a handful of children in the last two years, versus more than 1,500 dead of coronavirus. Even Dr. Ashish Jha, who has been a staunch advocate of school reopening, has recently acknowledged this, admitting that COVID has been “a far greater threat to kids than the flu is.”

However, few have remarked that the limited measures to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus nearly eliminated flu for the last two years. Yet, without efforts to build the necessary infrastructure to ventilate and filter air in public spaces and ensure mask wearing to prevent respiratory infections altogether, the population will be subjected to multiple pathogens, including the persistence of the immune-evading SARS-CoV-2. 

In a manner of speaking, the COVID pandemic has demonstrated the woeful state of the entire public health infrastructure, which has subjected people to unnecessary illnesses for years, not to speak of the impact of poor air quality to the cognition of school children from high CO2 levels and the impact on their pulmonary health.

More urgent for the Biden administration and the entire bourgeois political apparatus are the growing economic crisis and the constant outbreak of struggles by workers, the social crisis erupting in its most pathological form in what seems like daily mass murders, and the growing threat of nuclear war with the US-led NATO war with Russia. All these are being exacerbated by the constant reminder that the pandemic is far from finished taking its toll on the health and well-being of the population. 

Indeed, the WSWS’s characterization of the pandemic as a trigger event in world history is being continually affirmed by the intensifying crisis of capitalism, with the US the epicenter. The deaths of more than 1 million people, with close to 60 percent of its population infected and millions debilitated by Long COVID, are a stark reminder of the criminal policies based on the mantra that the cure cannot be worse than the disease. 

To officially declare the pandemic over is to declare SARS-CoV-2 a permanent fixture of daily life and the official abandonment of public health as a social institution for the betterment of the health of the population. The impact of repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2 will mean a drastic decline in the health of the population. The CDC has already acknowledged that one in five working age adults will develop Long COVID after their infection. 

What remains undetermined is how this will impact their mortality long after they have been declared infection free, but this is expected to be considerable. These figures are being pored over by financial statisticians for the banks and insurance companies, but their focus is not to provide any meaningful response to the dangers posed by COVID but to inform the markets and their CEOs on the future of their labor force and direct and indirect costs to their financial holdings.

The grotesque comments by the Biden officials on what level of death is tolerable should not come as a surprise to the working class. This is what is meant by the attempt to normalize death and force the population to acquiesce to these supposed realities. However, there is an alternative to this bankrupt nihilistic perspective. COVID can be eliminated. It has been scientifically proven, and demonstrated in practice in China. But the end of the pandemic on an international scale is a political question requiring a socialist perspective for which the working class must fight.

The growing global movement of nurses and health care workers

Jerry White

Throughout the world, nurses and other health care workers are engaging in a growing wave of strikes and protests against understaffing, exhausting workloads and the erosion of the living standards by the sharp rise in inflation.

In Germany, more than 2,500 nurses at North Rhine-Westphalia university hospitals have been on strike for more than a month over staffing levels and pay. “We simply can't take any more,” a striking nurse in Essen said. “We come home physically and psychologically broken—this must finally come to an end.”

Striking nurses and health care workers around the world [Photo: WSWS]

In the United Kingdom, 40,000 Scottish nurses at public and private facilities are planning to walk out if their demands for a 10 percent raise are not met. Hundreds of thousands of National Health Service (NHS) workers in the UK also want to join the “summer of discontent” work stoppages by railway workers, teachers and other public sector workers.

In France, health care workers are walking out across the country after being denied bonuses. This follows last month’s strike by 11,000 Spanish doctors and nurses in Madrid and a nationwide strike by 20,000 doctors in Turkey demanding better wages and benefits.

In India, 20,000 nurses are striking government hospitals in Nagpur in the western state of Maharashtra. In nearby Sri Lanka, health care workers have been at the forefront of the strikes and mass protests demanding the resignation of the Rajapakse government and an end to rising prices and IMF austerity demands.   

Last month, 10,000 nurses in New Zealand conducted strikes and slowdowns to demand higher pay and safe staffing levels. This followed the first stoppages by Australian public hospital nurses in New South Wales in more than a decade. They struck twice, in February and March, in defiance of government bans and remain locked in a dispute.

In the United States, 350 nurses, respiratory therapists and radiology technicians at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, have been on strike for more than two weeks. Another 1,300 resident physicians at Los Angeles public hospitals—who regularly work 12-hour shifts and are paid the equivalent of barely the minimum wage—just voted overwhelmingly to strike. Last week, 15,000 nurses in Minnesota conducted a one-day strike, and tens of thousands of nurses in Michigan, New York, California, Washington and other states face contract struggles in the coming weeks and months.

On May 27, dozens of nurses walked off the job at Orlando Regional Medical Center (ORMC) in Florida to protest inhuman workloads, which led to a tragic suicide by a patient going unnoticed for hours. This followed the mass protests by nurses and other health care workers in Washington D.C. and Nashville, Tennessee, demanding the dropping of criminal charges against former nurse RaDonda Vaught for a medical error caused by chronic staff shortages and other safety violations by Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The scapegoating of Vaught has led to a virtual boycott of Vanderbilt by nurses and health care workers, and medical center officials have resorted to training shuttle drivers and other university workers to perform clinical duties.

All over the world, health care workers confront the same intolerable conditions, which have been enormously exacerbated by the response of the ruling classes to the pandemic. The prioritizing of profits over human lives by capitalist governments led to the virtual breakdown of health care systems, which had already been undermined by decades of cost-cutting and understaffing.

Burnout, stress and health concerns have led to an exodus of nurses, further deepening the crisis. Conditions have gotten so bad that 90 percent of US nurses are considering leaving the profession, according to a March 24 report in Healthcare IT News, and medical school students are switching their majors.

Far from mobilizing health care workers to oppose these conditions, the trade unions have worked to suppress and block the opposition of nurses and health care workers. At the same time, the unions have promoted all sorts of quarter and half measures—from legislation to cap nurse-to-patient ratios and the setting up of more labor-management committees for “safe staffing,” to Bernie Sanders’ deadend “Medicare for All” proposal in the US—which have and can do nothing to solve the crisis.

The same giant hospital chains in the US—Tenet, UnitedHealthcare, Allina, Prime Healthcare—that received billions in government pandemic relief are now crying broke and telling workers they have no money to hire more staff and provide living wages to those who have risked their lives and health.

The fight of health care workers raises directly the subordination of health care to private profit. The domination of the global health care system by giant hospital monopolies, pharmaceutical, medical equipment and insurance companies makes it impossible to provide high quality health care to everyone regardless of income.

The major capitalist governments, led by the United States, are diverting society’s resources to war, that is, to the instruments of death not the preservation of life. Biden can find $40 billion to ramp up the US-NATO proxy war against Russia on top of the nearly $1 trillion the US Defense Department eats up every year.

At the same time, the US government’s trustees for Social Security and Medicare reported last week that the two critical federal programs—which 47 million retired workers rely on to supplement their income and health care expenses—would not be able to fully fund benefits by 2028 to 2034.

What flows from this?

First, the struggles of health care workers must be organized and unified through the development of rank-and-file committees, independent of the corporatist trade unions.

Nurses in the US have already taken a critical first step by forming a national steering committee to build rank-and-file committees in every hospital and health care facility to fight the victimization of medical workers. This is part of the fight to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to unite the the struggles of health care workers across all national borders and develop it as a globally coordinated movement of the working class.

Second, the fight to prioritize life over profit requires a political mobilization against the capitalist system.

The consequences of the subordination of social needs to private profit is clearly expressed in the catastrophic state of the health care system. Nurses and health care workers see this every day. The for-profit system is based on the exploitation of health care workers and the sacrifice of patient health to the bottom line of the medical corporations and their investors. The private insurance industry exists for the sole purpose of denying proper care to patients that need it.

But this must be understood as a particular expression of the character of the capitalist system as a whole. Over the past two-and-a-half years, 20 million people died from COVID-19, including more than 1 million in the US, because the ruling class rejected the most basic public health measures to stop the transmission and elimination of COVID-19. The stock markets soared, and the world’s billionaires gorged themselves.

Sexual Assault and the American Way

Robert Koehler

And another sex scandal pops into the news. This time it’s the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, cringing in shame upon the recent release of a “bombshell” report detailing two decades of sexual abuse by pastors and other church officials, along with ongoing official coverup of the crimes and denigration of any victims who had the courage to speak up.

“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” one former church official said.

Yet another American apocalypse, you might say — linking the SBC with institutions as diverse as the military, the Catholic Church, Hollywood, and of course, politicians. Whatever such institutions stand for, whatever their values, what is suddenly on public display is the fact that these values don’t apply to the institutions themselves. Hierarchical power rules and officially espoused values morph, essentially, into public-relations clichés.

And I don’t even mean these words in a condemnatory way. The issue transcends individual social structures. As the diversity of the above organizations indicates, sexuality — and its taboo nature — permeates American culture as a whole, and although things have loosened up in the last couple generations, the phenomenon of sexuality remains mostly private, hidden behind a wall of shame.

As I wrote some years ago: “This a world in which young people ‘come of age’ — come into their sexuality — in utter isolation. While violence is lovingly spread across the entertainment and news media, sex remains sealed in cringing aversion.

“We live in a world in which powerful men are trapped in their own adolescence.”

And, as the Associated Press informs us, the result can look like this:

“Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention . . .  stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday.

“These survivors, and other concerned Southern Baptists, repeatedly shared allegations with the SBC’s Executive Committee, ‘only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.’”

The independent firm that conducted the investigation spoke with survivors of varying ages, including children, and reported that the trauma they experienced went beyond the initial abuse and included “the debilitating effects that come from the response of the churches and institutions like the SBC that did not believe them, ignored them, mistreated them, and failed to help them.”

Remind you of anything?

In 2012, the Pentagon released a report estimating that 26,000 cases of sexual assault had occurred in the U.S. military — up from 19,000 the previous year — of which some 3,000 had actually been reported . . . because, you know, same deal. The victims mostly didn’t want to bring even more trouble into their lives.

Rapes are reported to military commanders, who, as with religious leaders, have an institutional image to protect. A sexual assault allegation quickly becomes an infuriating inconvenience — something way too easy to ignore. While Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has been introducing legislation every year since 2013 that would put investigation of such accusations into the hands of independent prosecutors, it has been continually blocked from coming to a vote.

The consequences of this double crime — sexual assault followed by official indifference — is deeply pernicious to the victims themselves. Last year, the New York Times told the detailed story of a female Marine who went through that process, winding up (no surprise) in a state of deep depression.

“Soon, her fear gave way to self-loathing. She woke up every morning angry that she’d woken up at all. She began to believe that she deserved the attack and that the world would be better off without her.

“Over the next four years, (she) tried to kill herself six times. She can still feel the scars on her wrists, but they are now mostly hidden by tattoos. Somehow, she always stopped just short of cutting deeply enough to die.”

Eventually, she left the Marines and began reclaiming her life. The Times, noting that nearly a quarter of U.S. servicewomen have reported being sexually assaulted while in the military, called the phenomenon “a poison in the system.” And it ended the story in a way I’ve never seen before: “If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at . . .” and it lists the phone number.

Something large is fomenting here. It goes beyond crime and punishment. I think it involves understanding who we are, or maybe more to the point, understanding the nature of the world we have created for ourselves, sometimes referred to as “dominator culture.” Mixed with sexual desire and confusion, it can turn into a mess.

“In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most,” writes bell hooks. “When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”

Curbing sexual assault — ending it — is not a power struggle. It’s far more complex than that, a process that can only begin with honoring and valuing the victims, setting aside what we think we know, and listening to them.

Who needs a hegemon?

Ron Forthofer

uncle sam

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the US has been able to exert tremendous influence on other nations through its military and economic power. The world no longer was bipolar with the US and the Soviet Union competing for leadership. Instead, it has been a unipolar world under US hegemonic leadership.

In 1997, US neoconservatives created a think tank, Project for the New American Century, to promote and extend American global leadership. In 2000, PNAC issued a report, ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ that called for extending the US global leadership through maintaining the preeminence of US military forces. It was also considered important to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor.

War crimes

During the period since 1991, the US has misrepresented itself as a benign hegemon. The US mainstream media has worked hard to convince the US public and the world that US actions are for good causes. The US corporate media tout this era as a continuation of Pax Americana. However, many nations around the world view things very differently. They see, for example, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on lies as a major war crime that devastated Iraq and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. There were no sanctions imposed on the US or its allies for this shocking crime and no call for reparations to help rebuild Iraq. Moreover, this attack, along with the US involvement in the attack on Libya and its military support for terrorists in Syria, created instability and devastation throughout much of the Middle East.

Illegal use of sanctions

Many countries also question the US use of unilateral sanctions. Currently the US has imposed sanctions on 39 nations including about 1/3 of the globe’s population. Many of the sanctioned countries haven’t complied with US political positions and their people have paid a horrible price for these nations attempting to maintain their sovereignty. Although the US corporate media seldom if ever reports it, sanctions not approved by the UN Security Council are a violation of the UN Charter. So much for the US touted idea of a rules-based order. Moreover, perhaps even worse, the US uses secondary sanctions to prevent other nations from trading with the targeted nations.

In general, sanctions most severely affect the vulnerable and represent a most cruel form of economic warfare, similar to the idea of the siege warfare in the past. Moreover, history shows that the great majority of these illegal sanctions don’t work in bringing about the changes the US wants. For example, the US has had sanctions on Cuba for about six decades without bringing down the Cuban government. Among the sanctioned nations, the people of Venezuela have suffered particularly incredible hardships.

Coups overthrowing democracies

These nations also see the US support for coups and attempted coups in many nations, e.g., in Haiti in 2004, in Honduras in 2009, in Ukraine in 2014, and in Bolivia in 2019. In addition, during the past two years, there have been coups and coup attempts in Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Gambia and Mauritania led by US trained military officers.

Protecting war criminals

Nations around the world also see how the US prevents actions to be taken against its allies for their appalling violations of international law. Israel is a prime example, escaping any sanctions for its many war crimes, for its continuing occupation and theft of Palestinian land, and for its violations of human rights in the West Bank and Gaza. In addition, Israel has escaped sanctions for its criminal attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria and for its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.

These US actions are hardly those of a benign force. For many of the poorer nations, the last three decades of this unipolar world, the so-called Pax Americana, have brought violence, insecurity, poverty and hunger. China is the exceptional nation that has experienced impressive improvement in the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people during this period.

US hypocrisy

Moreover, given the US attacks on Iraq and other countries, people around the world are angry about US hypocrisy over imposing sanctions on Russia for its criminal invasion of Ukraine. For example, most nations strongly condemned the Russian attack, but countries, including much of Asia, Africa and South America with the majority of the world’s population, do not support the US sanctions on Russia.

Deterring a competitor

The Russian attack on Ukraine follows eight years of ongoing fighting between Ukrainian nationalist forces and Ukrainians who rejected the 2014 US-supported coup. This coup overthrew a democratically-elected government and, unsurprisingly, the new coup government looked westward, away from Russia.

Insanely, the US knowingly provoked this 2022 Russian attack. Making matters worse, the US has not encouraged Ukraine to find a diplomatic solution to end the destruction and killing in Ukraine. Instead, the US seems willing to sacrifice Ukraine in order to weaken Russia.

A weakened Russia also harms the Russian and Chinese effort to move from a unipolar to a bipolar world. However, a bipolar world is not necessarily an answer to illegal actions by powerful nations. For example, both the US and the Soviet Union violated the sovereignty of other nations during the period that these two powers coexisted. As long as the UN Security Council allows a single permanent member to veto resolutions with no override possible, the Security Council can’t function when the interest of a powerful nation is challenged.

Regardless, the last three decades show that the US doesn’t follow or respect international law and strongly suggest there must be a force to counter the US hegemon that has done so much damage to the world. In particular, nations of the world needs to work together if there is to be any chance of lessening the disastrous impact of climate chaos. The world can’t allow this malign hegemon to continue to push corporate greed over the interests of life on the planet.

Rents in Britain unaffordable for majority of workers

Allison Smith

UK rents are rising at their fastest rate in 14 years. According to property website Zoopla, they rose 11 percent nationwide over the past year to an average of nearly £1,000 per month (£995), forcing the average tenant to spend more than one third of their household income on rent.

In London, single workers are forced to spend a staggering 52 percent of their income, with payments increasing by 15.7 percent in the capital city.

Zoopla reports demand for rental properties was up 76 percent this year compared to the past four years, citing students and young workers returning to work as the government ends all COVID restrictions.

Heygate Estate, London (Credit: Flickr / Axel Drainville)

But workers being forced back to the office under the government’s “live with the virus” agenda is only part of the reason rents are up this year. The main cause is that successive Labour and Tory governments have for decades implemented policies removing all limits on private wealth accumulation, starving local councils of the necessary funding. They have allowed the sell-off of council estates and privatisation of social housing and their conversion into luxury apartments, causing a massive shortage of affordable housing.

According to government statistics, “the long-term historic trend has been a decrease in the size of the social sector” in housing. Between 2020 and 2021 alone, there was a 12 percent decrease in available social housing, with more than one million households on the waiting list, according to the Shelter housing charity.

In 2016, London’s Barking and Dagenham borough had 50 times more people on the waiting list than available properties, causing a 50-year waiting list for council housing. Since 1980, the borough has lost 50 percent of its council housing stock, mainly due to the right-to-buy scheme introduced under the Thatcher government under which tenants could buy their council property at a reduced rate.

More than 40 percent of council houses sold to their tenants under right-to-buy terms are now privately rented out to local authorities paying millions annually to private landlords to house homeless families in properties they once owned.

The spiraling cost of living has pushed thousands into debt, leading to a 63 percent rise in “no fault” renter evictions, with more than 3,700 evictions between January and March this year—up 38 percent over the previous quarter.

Margaret Perry, a renter who earns £30,000 a year, told the Guardian that her landlord put up her rent by 22 percent to £825 per month for her room in Haringey. “That’s just not an option. It’s hard enough as it is,” she said.

In Salford shopping centre, in the north west of England, a 29-year-old shopworker told the World Socialist Web Site, “Since COVID, prices have risen and people like myself have to work extra hours, sometimes 70 hours a week, to pay bills and provide for the family. People like me, under 30, can get depression. Mental health problems are linked to livelihood. People who can’t provide for the family get depressed. Even if wages go up, everything else you buy goes up. It’s killing young people. It’s not easy to survive in the 21st century. It feels like World War Two when our grandparents were struggling.”

House prices have increased by £55,000, with the purchase cost of the average home now roughly £368,000. At this price it is nearly impossible for workers to get on the home ownership ladder. Most are unable to save for the down payment and fees required to buy a home because nearly all of their monthly income is spent on food, fuel and rent.

Last year, Guardian analysis of the housing crisis showed that “low-paid ‘key’ workers on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic would not be able to afford to buy the average priced home in 98% of Great Britain.”

Nurses on a median annual wage of £33,920 are unable to buy a “median priced property in almost three-quarters of local authorities nationwide.” Secondary school teachers on £40,881 per year are unable to buy in nearly one fifth of council areas.

According to Bloomberg Economics, the cost-of-living crisis will likely add an average of £2,370 per year to UK consumers’ household bills, making home ownership even more elusive.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research expects “that disposable incomes will fall in 2022 by 4.8% with a further fall of 1.4% in 2023. The forecast fall in living standards this year is an estimated £71bn—which amounts to £2,553 per household… the largest since records started in 1955.”

The crisis is being worsened by NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, which is causing global food and fuel shortages. A survey by Rightmove, an online real estate portal and property website, reports that the shocking rise of energy bills has led to a 36 percent rise in the number of inquiries for all energy bills to be included in rental agreements.

In the face of mounting anger as more people are pushed into destitution, the government’s legislative agenda outlined in May included proposals to scrap the Victorian-era Vagrancy Act, introduce a Renters Reform Bill and regulate social housing.

With a staggering 22 percent of the 4.4 million renters in England living in what the government describes as “homes of an unacceptable standard”, it vaguely stated that the Bill will improve the “lives of millions of renters by driving up standards in the private and socially rented sector, delivering on the government’s mission to level up the country.”

A main impulse for what is trumpeted as a “New Deal for renters” is saving on welfare spending, with the government declaring that the “reforms will prevent private landlords from benefiting from tax payer money for renting out low quality homes, slashing the £3 billion a year in housing benefit that is estimated to go to landlords renting out non-decent homes.”

The Crisis homeless charity points out how the proposals give “with one hand while taking with the other. The plan to introduce legislation that has the potential to criminalise anyone forced to sleep rough is nothing short of shameful and flies in the face of any effort to tackle rough sleeping for good.”

The government’s Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is seeking “views on proposals to respond effectively to begging, potential penalties for harmful begging and how to encourage vulnerable people to engage with rehabilitative support.” It warns, “We must balance our role in providing essential support for vulnerable people with ensuring that we do not weaken the ability of police to protect communities.”

Aside from the Vagrancy Act, the police have an arsenal of modern weapons they use against society’s most vulnerable, including Community Protection Notices (carrying a maximum £20,000 penalty), Public Space Protection Orders (involving £100 fines, escalating to prosecutions) and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that are available for use under civil rather than criminal law. Police have gone as far as using anti-terrorism legislation to justify searching rough sleepers.

According to Crisis, core homelessness in England alone has been rising year-on-year, jumping from 207,600 in 2018 to 227,000 in 2021.

Elaine, a worker in Sheffield, recently shared with the WSWS that she “saw a homeless girl in her twenties laid asleep outside the Meadowhall shopping centre because she couldn’t get anywhere to live. That’s the result of what all these governments have done. This reality doesn’t affect people in the government because they’ve got money, and they don’t realise how it affects everyone else. They’re all looking out for each other.”

Initial official story on police response to Uvalde shooting crumbles

Chase Lawrence

More evidence and new witnesses continue to undermine the accounts given by Uvalde police and Texas state officials about the course of events and the actions taken during the horrific massacre of 19 school children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School on May 24.

A funeral home worker whose workplace is across the street from the school told Telemundo and NBC News Sunday that after he had seen the gunman enter the school with an assault rifle, he had armed himself and was prepared to charge into the school after him but was stopped by police who had cordoned off the building.

Cody Briseno saw the shooter, Salvador Ramos, crash his pickup truck outside the school, and he and a co-worker went to help him. They retreated after seeing the youth was loading his AR-15 assault rifle, and went back inside their workplace.

Briseno called his wife and asked her to bring his gun from home. Once armed, he marched toward the school. He told NBC that a police officer asked him what he was doing, and he responded, “I’m going to go in and try to stop them,” telling the policeman the gunman was already inside the school. The cop told him to stay back and shut up.

The funeral home worker has since given a statement to the Texas Rangers, the agency that is investigating the police response to the Uvalde massacre.

Other accounts confirm that the main concern of the police officials on the scene appeared to be controlling the crowd of parents outside the school and pushing them back, along with the press, not rushing the school to stop the gunman’s rampage. Ramos was not confronted by police and shot dead until 77 minutes after the first police unit arrived outside Robb Elementary.

This policy contradicts standard police doctrine for an active shooter, where the usual tactic is to rush in immediately with whatever officers and equipment are on hand so as to disrupt the attack before it can claim more lives.

This is what is taught in active shooter classes in most police departments including in Texas, where the manual on shootings, released in 2020, declares: “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”

This was certainly the attitude of many parents, who were prevented by police from running into the school to save their children with some even being tackled, but apparently not that of the 19 officers, all of whom were required to take the course, or of the men giving them their orders.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, the FBI was given jurisdiction over mass shootings and developed a series of FBI initiatives to train police agencies on how to respond including the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (Alerrt) program, which was developed in Texas.

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo took the most recent shooter training courses in December 2021. According to the district police’s Facebook page, the department hosted active shooter training at Uvalde High School in March as well, with the post reading, “Our overall goal is to train every Uvalde area law enforcement officer so that we can prepare as best as possible for any situation that may arise.”

The current official explanation for why the police waited is hard to believe. According to the new official story, police were ordered by Arredondo, the incident commander, not to go in because he was treating the situation as a hostage situation. Believing there was “no risk to other children,” he was waiting for more officers to show up and until they could get a key to the classroom and body armor.

A memorial at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas Monday, May 30, 2022, to honor the victims killed in last week's school shooting. Photographs of the victims, from left, show Layla Salazar, McKenna Lee Elrod, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos and Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The first call from the child trapped in the classroom came in just after noon. But the 19 officers on scene waited for 47 minutes in the hallway outside the classroom in question until 12:50, at which point federal and local officers finally confronted Ramos and shot him. Additional calls were received from children inside the classroom with some pleading for intervention from the police. All the victims fatally shot were in the classroom in question.

This explanation is only the latest in a series of shifting and contradictory stories emerging from local and state police authorities.

Initially, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said that following an armed confrontation between a school police officer and soon-to-be mass shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a teacher left a back door propped open allowing access to the school building. Ramos then proceeded to go on a shooting rampage until stopped by a team of Uvalde police officers who “immediately breached, because we know as officers, every second’s a life.”

Every element of this has proven untrue. There was no school police officer, and Ramos did not confront one before entering the building. The police did not “immediately” breach but waited more than an hour.

The shooter was not let in by a careless teacher. The Texas Department of Public Safety stated the teacher did close the door and that they had video evidence from inside the school proving this. The teacher herself had made this information public via her attorney, following the accusation she didn’t close the door. The door did not lock, a defect that the TDPS is now investigating.

The police story later shifted to there being a delay of 40 minutes to an hour before Ramos was killed by a Border Patrol tactical unit, but still claiming they intervened immediately and that this “saved other kids,” claiming they kept Ramos “pinned down.”

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott repeated the same claims, claiming officers showed “amazing courage by running towards gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”

There are now claims that Arredondo was not informed about calls that the Uvalde Police Department, separate from his small six-man school unit, was receiving, apparently because of a “system failure” to relay information from one unit to the other.

Abbott has promised an investigation into the shooting to find “exactly who knew what, when, who was in charge” and what they did, claiming, “The bottom line would be: why did they not choose the strategy that would have been best to get in there and to eliminate the killer and to rescue the children?”

TDPS investigators have claimed that the Uvalde School District police chief isn’t cooperating. The Justice Department is conducting a Critical Incident Review of the shooting as well. These investigations will like others of their type seek to exonerate the police force as a whole, and perhaps scapegoat one or another individual actors. 

While the official story on what happened is still murky, if anything has been made clear it is that the actions of the police have severely undermined the claims by the political establishment and the corporate media that the answer to school shootings is deploying more police and militarizing the schools even more.

What is consistently ignored in the massive media reporting of the Uvalde massacre, and similar horrors, are the social roots of the violence. The US is a sick society, a country led by a ruling class that has been at war constantly for over 30 years, routinely summarily executes 1,000 people a year in police killings, has sacrificed more than 1 million people’s lives in the pandemic just to keep Wall Street profiting, and is now recklessly escalating the war with Russia, threatening a nuclear holocaust.

It is in this context that these shootings take place, and any real attempt to address them must address the underlying causes of this crisis in the capitalist system itself.

Australian Rich List reveals accelerating wealth

Max Boddy

The latest Australian Financial Review (AFR) annual Rich List has boasted that the fortunes of Australia’s wealthiest 200 individuals and families soared in the past 12 months, even as workers faced skyrocketing living costs.

From April 2021 to April 2022, the combined total of the top 200 shot up to $554.9 billion, a $75.3 billion increase. The AFR proudly declared that their wealth “soars past half a trillion dollars.”

Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest

The wealth accumulated by this tiny elite in just four years is staggering. The 2018 Rich List had the combined total at $282.7 billion, so their fortunes have nearly doubled.

The largest increases have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, with $213.1 billion accumulated from 2020 to 2022. The Australian ruling elite, like its counterparts globally, has exploited this disaster to slash jobs and real wages, assisted by the trade unions, which stifled workers’ opposition.

Over the same period, the now ousted Liberal-National Coalition government, backed by the Labor Party, and its state and territory counterparts, gave bailout packages and other handouts to big business exceeding $400 billion.

The share of wealth is most concentrated at the apex of the list, with the top ten richest claiming 40 percent of the combined total, or $219.37 billion. There are 26 new billionaires added to the list, which reached a record total of 137.

The record cut-off point for entry to the list was $629 million, a $39 million increase from last year and almost double the $342 million needed to make it only five years ago.

Topping the list are two mining magnates: Gina Rinehart, with an estimated fortune of $34.02 billion, up from $31.06 billion last year, and Andrew “Twiggy” Forest, with $30.72 billion, up from $27.25 billion.

Increased global demand for raw resources saw another mining magnate, United Australia Party head Clive Palmer, rank seventh with $19.55 billion and Glencore shareholder Ivan Glasenburg rank ninth with $12.2 billion.

The continued speculative property bubble, which has forced the median Australian house price in major capital cities to $1 million, causing a rise in homelessness and housing insecurity, increased the fortunes of property moguls. Apartment developer Harry Triguboff ranked sixth with $21.25 billion.

“Tech entrepreneurs” featured. Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar took spots three and four with $27.83 billion and $26.41 billion respectively. Canva founders Melanie Perkins & Cliff Obrecht took the eighth spot with $13.82 billion.

The cardboard manufacturing Pratt family numbered fifth with $24.30 billion, while former shopping mall king Frank Lowy ranked tenth on $9.27 billion.

An article on one of the rich listers provided a glimpse into the world of luxury inhabited by the wealthy few. It reported that “online social gaming juggernaut” Virtual Gaming Worlds paid “another healthy dividend to holders of its unlisted shares, and founder Laurence Escalante spent his on a long-range jet.”

Bombardier Global 7500

Escalante became “one of the handful of Australians to own a Bombardier Global 7500 jet… When the $120 million jet touches down in Perth before the end of the year, Escalante will join fellow Financial Review Rich Listers John Gandel, Kerry Stokes and Andrew Forrest in being able to privately travel from Australia’s east coast to America’s west coast non-stop.”

Nevertheless, despite such displays of opulence, and whilst previous Rich Lists glorified the elite’s fortunes, there was an evidently nervous attempt this year to downplay the massive wealth disparity in Australia and claim that everybody has the chance to be a billionaire.

According to one of the Rich List articles, “Australia doesn’t have a superclass of inherited wealth at the top.” It featured billionaire Sam Arnaout, a property mogul worth $1.89 billion, who emerged from being a “panel beater” and is the son of refugees fleeing Lebanon’s civil war.

“The Rich List is porous in both directions,” the article claimed. “Six Australians might be in the ‘1 percent’ global 200 wealth club, but middle Australia is near the top of median wealth per head for developed countries… The more Australians become billionaires, the more new and often global businesses are likely to be created, in the end benefiting the whole nation.”

Nothing is further from the truth. The vast majority of the richest 200 came from wealthy families. Moreover, all their wealth is extracted from the labour power of the working class. The massive increase in the holdings at the top end of the scale is due to the accelerated funneling of money from workers, millions of whom face poverty, housing insecurity, casual or insecure jobs, intolerable working conditions and the daily threat of infection and death due to the unchecked spread of COVID-19.

Real wages are going backward, while the share of national income going to profits is at a record high, intensifying a four decades-long trend. Official inflation exceeds 5 percent, but is much higher for essentials such as food, fuel and housing. The cost of living has soared due to the ultra-cheap money handed to large corporations, the supply crisis produced by COVID and the proxy war waged by the US and its NATO allies against Russia in Ukraine.

This is fueling an increase in the class struggle internationally, including in Australia, with strikes by teachers, nurses, healthcare workers, university workers and bus drivers, to name a few.

In the lead-up to the May 21 Australian election, Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese made a pitch to big business, insisting that a Labor government, in combination with the unions, would be able to restructure the economy to drive up productivity—output per worker—even further.

Now prime minister, Albanese is planning a government-employer-union summit to deliver on that pledge. His model is that of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, which imposed a vast redistribution of wealth from the working class to the top, including the largest ever tax cut to high income recipients, from 60 to 36 percent by 1993.

The unions played the crucial role in that historic pro-business shift, suppressing workers’ resistance via a series of corporatist Accords, breaking up shop-floor committees and then straitjacketing workers in enterprise bargaining that outlawed most strikes.

Significantly, the Rich List was first released in 1984, the first full year of the Hawke government. At that time, the combined wealth for Australia’s richest was $6.4 billion, around 2.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) that year. Now the fortunes have increased by more than 85-fold and equal 23 percent of GDP.

This is part of a global process of accelerating social inequality. As a recent Oxfam report revealed, food insecurity doubled in the past two years, while a new billionaire was minted on average every 30 hours.