America’s Five Sex Panics

David Rosen

Donald Trump is a once-upon-a-time upmarket hedonist who, like a recovering alcoholic, has morphed into a super-moralist.  Upon taking office as president, he relaunched the culture wars with VP Mike Pence as the officer-in-charge and implemented by the Cabinet, the new Supreme Court justice and the Republican-controlled Congress.  The U.S. is living through the fifth sex panic and the religious right’s efforts may signal the death-play of the postmodern culture wars.

The current sex panic was launched in 1972 by Phyllis Schafly, a lawyer and conservative activist, and successfully blocked the adoption of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  Until Trump’s election, it appeared that this sex panic was contained.  A series of key Supreme Court decisions — along with changes in popular attitudes (especially among younger people) and aggressive corporate promotion of sexuality to sell nearly everything – restricted the religious right to local and state battlefields.

Trump’s renewed culture wars target teen birth control and abortion, gay and transgender rights, access to pornography, sex-toy sales and the treatment of sex offenders, among other concerns.  Most troubling, the anti-sex right has more federal power than since the anti-Communist and anti-homosexual purges of the 1950s.

Today’s culture wars are, broadly speaking, the fifth sexual panic in U.S. history.  These panics are social battlegrounds on which Americans fought, over the last four centuries, to determine the country’s moral order.  These struggles fashioned the nation’s sexual culture, the boundaries of personal sexual experience, the meaning of pleasure.  Today’s panic follows four earlier panics: (i) during the colonial and post-Revolutionary era; (ii) during the premodern, post-Civil-War era; (iii) during the early-modern, WW-I era; and (iv) during the modern, post-WW-II era.  Today’s panic embodies the crisis of postmodern globalization.

Sex panics are terrains of social struggle, an area of contestation as the nation modernized — and capitalism came to increasingly dominate both public and private life.  Each panic embodied the country’s socio-economic, demographic and legal maturation, from a small-town and rural society, to an urban and industrial nation and to the center of a globalized, financialized system with an ever-expanding militarized state.

During the first two panics, the America colonies — and then as the U.S. — slowly matured from an agricultural society with pockets of port-city development along the Atlantic coast.  In the wake of the Civil War, industrialization and westward expansion remade the nation, increasingly distinguished by an ever-growing marketplace.  In the 20^th century, consumer revolutions in the 1920s and 1960s transformed sexuality from a private indulgence into a commodity.  Today’s fifth panic pits those seeking to impose greater repression, returning American morals back to the 1950s when the U.S. was “great,” and those seeking to promote, however incoherently, sexual emancipation by ending the role of sex as a commodity.

During each panic period, then-traditional notions of moral order were promoted by those with religious and political authority.  They sought to impose a conservative check on the excesses of the marketplace – and were often successful.  They secured the passage of regressive laws and implemented repressive police actions to maintain what they considered acceptable standards of decency.  However, during each panic subversive forces emerged and the boundaries of the acceptable were continually challenged and changed, often culminating in major social crises.  We are currently living through such a period.

America’s 1^st Sex Panic

Americans have never been comfortable with sex and the first panic started in the earliest days of the nation’s settlement.  On April 5, 1614, Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman and reputed daughter of Chief Powhatan, married the Englishman John Rolfe near Jamestown, Virginia. The marriage took place just eight years after this first-permanent English settlement was established in what would become America, the United States.  It is the first recorded interracial marriage in the newly-colonized territory, but to marry Rolfe, Pocahontas converted to Christianity, was renamed Lady Rebecca and radically changed her appearance, adopting British formal dress.

During the half-century of 1647–1693, New England colonists were subject to a nearly-inexhaustible list of sins that fell into two broad categories, sins of character and sins of the flesh. Among the former were pride, anger, envy, malice, lying, discontent, dissatisfaction and self-assertion. Among the latter were adultery, bestiality, fornication, incest, interracial relations, lust, masturbation, polygamy, seduction and sodomy as well as temptations like carnality, drunkenness and licentiousness.  Almost anything could be a punishable sin.

But the gravest sin was being accused of witchcraft and over 200 people were so charged.  But the most shameful sin was being accused of engaging in the truly unholy deed of having sex with the Devil.  The worst sex offenders were the 30 or so people, mostly elder women, who were convicted of sexual congress with Satan — and executed.

During the first sex panic, the religious and political leaders of the white European colonies – those considered “Americans” – railed against difference, seeking to contain sexual desire from those not like themselves.  And in the wild, still untamed new world, difference was everywhere and people, both men and women, indulged their desires for difference.  Illicit sexual “congress” was initially between British males and Native females, but as the immigration of both free and indentured European women and men, and the forced importation of African slaves increased, both male and female, the complexity of illicit interracial relations multiplied.

During the early days of the nation’s settlement, voluntary and noncommercial sexual relations between whites and people of a different color were not yet illegal.

The first recorded legal marriage between an African man and a European woman is reported to have taken place on William Boarmans’ plantation on the western shore of Maryland in 1681.  The couple — Eleanor Butler, a white servant girl called Irish Nell, and Negro Charles, a black slave — was married by a local Catholic priest.

Colonial male leaders were deeply troubled by such relations.

America’s 2^nd Sex Panic

During the first-half of the 19^th century, the definition of what, in fact, was America profoundly changed.  Between 1790 and 1860, the nation’s total landmass tripled to 3,021,000 square miles from 891,000 square miles.  The country grew through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Spain’s cession of Florida in 1845, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the establishment of the Oregon territory in 1846 and the seizure of California and much of the Southwest from Mexico in 1848.

The 1820-1860 period witnessed the emergence of a powerful evangelical movement – often called the Second Awakening – that sought spiritual revival and to renew American morality.  It sought to renew the eroding sense of exuberance that characterized the post-Revolutionary era.  The revival movement emerged in upstate New York’s “burned over” district and spread rapidly throughout the country, especially in the rural West.  It replaced the deism of the Founding Fathers as America’s religious ethos.   It’s evangelical spirit of renewal contributed to the rise of the temperance movement in the 1820s, the abolitionist movement of the 1830s, the feminist movement of the 1840s and – to the shock and chagrin of its proponents – the communitarian and free-love movements (e.g., Shakers and Oneida) that flared up throughout the era.

On June 16, 1827, James Richardson and Josephine Lolotte began living together as husband and wife at the utopian community of Nashoba, a Chickasaw word that means Wolf River.  Richardson was an immigrant Scotsman who was Nashoba’s storekeeper and doctor as well as the community’s operational overseer; Lolotte was the daughter of Mam’selle Lolotte (Larieu), a free woman of color from New Orleans who oversaw the raising of the children.  Francis Wright, the radical utopian, founded the community — with the help of Andrew Jackson — in the wilderness of eastern Tennessee, a full day’s coach ride from Memphis.  Surviving for only three years, it was the most radical of the dozens of experiments in utopian communitarianism that flourished in the U.S. during the tumultuous, uprooting decades of the mid-19^th century.

The Richardson-Lolotte marriage was not the only interracial sexual relationship in America, let alone in the South, during this period.  Surely the most scandalous affair of the era — and perhaps in all American history — involved Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  Their affair, as much about an adulterous liaison as an interracial one, has gotten more controversial with time.  Back then, among Jefferson’s set of plantation gentry, a slave master was understood to have had certain “property rights” that legitimized sexual rape of female slaves.

During this antebellum era, intimate relations could also take place between a white woman and a black man as evident in the experiences of the noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  While only recently escaped from slavery, he married Anna Murray, a free black woman, in 1838, and they remained together for the next four decades.  In the 1850s, Douglass is rumored to have had several affairs with white women, including the daughter of a leading British abolitionist and with the journalists, Ottilie Assing, a half-Jewish, German immigrant and – like Marx – a “’48er.”  Anna Douglass died in 1882 and, after observing the traditional period of mourning, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white woman twenty years his junior, in 1884.  They remind together until his death in 1895.

Slavery was the defining issue of American life in the 80-odd years between the Revolution to the Civil War; interracial sexual relations was surely the most explosive.  It truly was – and still is — America’s most peculiar institution.

America’s 3^rd Sex Panic

The Civil War significantly transformed the nation.  New technologies like the railroad and the telegraphy were setting the stage for the forthcoming age of electricity.  Many of the new developments inflamed the forces of moral rectitude, those who battled to preserve what they believed to be the nation’s true Christian virtue.  Led by Anthony Comstock, a new generation of Puritans fought against prostitution (i.e., “white slavery”), obscene literature, (i.e., pornography), birth control (e.g., abortion), race mixing (i.e., “miscegenation”), homosexuality (i.e., perversion) and alcohol consumption (i.e., abstinence).

A powerful white conservative Christian social movement railed against the emerging new social order, assailing vice in every form, be it alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, birth control or obscenity in publishing and the arts.  Champions of the “social purity” movement included the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Women’s Christian Temperance Alliance (WCTA), the American Purity Alliance (formed in 1895), the American Vigilance Committee (the two later consolidated into the American Vigilance Association). In addition, local groups included Chicago’s Committee of Fourteen, New York’s Committee of Fifteen, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society in Boston. These groups drew upon many social notables, from Jane Addams and Grace Dodge to J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for both political influence and financial support.

Nearly a century after Francis Wright called for a utopian sexual revolution, a modern generation of feminists, exemplified by Victoria Woodhull, Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, fought to redefine social and sexual relations.  However, the Comstock laws banning obscene materials and the Mann Act barring interstate sexual commerce set the limits of sexual expression.  As the U.S.’s entry into WW-I approached, about 125 red-light districts in cities throughout the country (most notably New Orleans’ Storyville) were closed-down under the requirements of “war discipline.”  More troubling, the government launched a campaign that led to the arrest, forceful medical testing and/or imprisonment of some 30,000 women for allegedly being carriers of venereal disease and, thus, “domestic enemies” undermining the war effort. Two key postwar Amendments were the crowning achievements of the 3^rd sex panic: (i) the 19^th Amendment prohibiting the manufacturer, distribution, sale and consumption of alcohol; and (ii) the 20^th Amendment granting women the right to vote.  Women of the Christian right actively backed both efforts as ways to ensure abstinence.

America’s 4^th Sex Panic

During the post-WW-II era, the U.S. was wracked by a war against communists and a wide-ranging war on sex, the nation’s 4^th sexual panic.  Targets in these culture wars were homosexuals, pornographers and others who posed a special threat that needed to be suppressed.

Homosexuals were singled out from special persecution.  In 1950, the year Sen. Joe MacCarthy claimed he had a list of 205 subversives working for the State Department, he served on the Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments.  It held hearings investigating “homosexuals and other sex perverts” working for the government, thus directly linking subversion and sexuality.  It found that the mental health of gay federal employees affected national security:

In the opinion of this subcommittee homosexuals and other sex perverts are not proper persons to be employed in Government for two reasons: first, they are generally unsuitable, and second, they constitute a security risk. [emphasis in original]

In the wake of this and other hearings, in 1950, Congress passed – over Pres. Harry Truman’s veto — the Internal Security Act, aka the Subversive Activities Control Act of the McCarran Act.  A series of Washington, D.C., witch-hunts purged thousands of so-called perverts from government jobs.

For McCarthy and others, communism and homosexuality were but two sides of the same corruption undermining the nation’s moral order.  The panic led Truman, in 1951, to issue Executive Order 10241; it barred prostitutes, paupers, the insane as well as ideological undesirables and homosexuals from government employment.

On January 20, 1953, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower took office as the 34^th President formally ending two decades of Democratic rule.  He also ended the New Deal and the Fair Deal, replacing them with an era of Cold War prosperity and peace that transformed American life.  During the period from 1945 to 1960, the nation’s population increased by 28 percent, to 181 million from 140 million, and the gross national product (GNP) more than doubled, to $503 billion from $212 billion.  This was a new America.

On June 13, 1953, Pres. Eisenhower gave a seminal address on free speech and censorship at the Dartmouth commencement ceremony, second in importance to his legendary 1960 Farewell Address warning about the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.”  Faced with a rise in book – and comic-book – burnings, Ike tried to square the circle.  “Don’t join the book-burners,” he declaired.  “Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book,” he declared, “as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency.  That should be the only censorship.”

The panic that took place during the late-‘40s to the mid-’50s was fueled by numerous reports of sex crimes.  In 1947, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warned, “the most rapidly increasing type of crime is that perpetuated by degenerate sex offenders. … [It] is taking its toll at the rate of a criminal assault every 43 minutes, day and night, in the United States.”  Teenager boys were singled out as the new sex offender.

In ‘53, Congress passed and Ike signed the now-infamous Executive Order 10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment,” legalizing the firing of federal employees for committing “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion.”  As a result, between May 1953 and June 1955, 837 investigations of alleged sex perverts took place.

Pornographers posed a special threat to the nation, challenging established notions of what was acceptable, what Ike called “decency.”  A growing sexual aesthetic or culture was in formation, being expressed in all forms of “obscene” representation, whether images, books, magazines, comics or movies, both poplar and scholarly. Against the powerful forces of religious, legal and psychological repression, an underground, counterculture, of sexual deviants survived and thrived.

Radical sexual representations, images that suggested the pleasures of something considered deviant, were increasingly popular at the margins of indulgence, best symbolized by the ‘50s icon, Bettie Page.  Old fashioned and more religious terms like “sin” and “immorality” gave way to a new vocabulary of the illicit, including more medical, scientific and secular concepts like perversion, deviant, sexual psychopath and sex criminal.

During this period, bars and other party spaces fermented illicit desires.  Private hook-ups were easily arranged, facilitating the voluntary, consensual association of self-selected individuals, men – and some women – seeking to fulfill idiosyncratic sexual indulgences.  Many were into simply homoerotic pleasures.  Others sought to fulfill leather, bondage, sadomasochism (s&m) or other fetishes.  Remarkably, they discreetly sought out – and found — like-minded individuals, whether heterosexual or homosexual, who shared their special fantasy.

America’s 5^th Sex Panic

In the early-1970s, Schafly and other Christian conservatives were infuriated by ‘60s political and cultural radicalism, of calls for Black Power, mounting anti-Vietnam War protests, a nascent feminist movement and a counterculture celebrating sex, drugs and rock-&-roll.  They were deeply distressed by two landmark 1973 decisions.  First, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that a woman has a right to her body and can terminate an unwanted pregnancy; second, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), in the revised The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-3), the mental-health bible, reclassified homosexuality, freeing it from the stigma of a mental disorder.

Since the 1970s, Christian conservatives have vehemently fought to limit the innumerable forms sexuality, of sex for pleasure.  It lost key battles over a person’s right to contraceptives, a woman’s right to an abortion, access to pornography, purchase of sex toys and gay marriage.  Blocked at the federal level, conservatives have successfully waged campaigns in states across the country to limit a woman’s – or underage girl’s – access to a medically-approved abortion and other sex-related products.  Until Trump’s inauguration, the culture wars seemed at a standoff, but they are now back with a vengeance not seen in a century.

Over the intervening four decades, conservative moralists have focused on four critical issues: (i) abortion and birth control, (ii) homosexuality and gay marriage, (iii) teen sex education and premarital sex, and, most recently, (iv) transsexuality and gender identity.  Other, secondary, issues concerned sex trafficking of young girls, child pornography, local sex-toy shops and sex-offender registries.

In the 21^st century what was once considered a sin or a perversion has become the new normal.  The adult consensual sex industry is estimated to a $50 billion enterprise.  These developments may prove ultimate undoing of Trump’s relaunched culture wars.

Killing Civilians in Iraq and Syria

Edward Hunt

The ongoing effort of the United States to eradicate the Islamic State by aggressively launching airstrikes against targets that include non-combatants is causing significant harm to civilians in Iraq and Syria.

Estimates of civilian deaths from airstrikes range from the hundreds to the tens of thousands. Although the U.S. government says that it has killed 603 civilians in airstrikes since the start of military operations in 2014, the monitoring group Airwars estimates that airstrikes have killed at least 4,500 civilians, including nearly 1,000 children.

Some of the strikes have been horrific. One attack in Mosul last March killed at least 100 civilians and injured countless more. “Dozens of Iraqi civilians, some of them still alive and calling out for help, were buried for days under the rubble of their homes in western Mosul after American-led airstrikes flattened almost an entire city block,” The New York Times reported.

Officials in Washington deny any wrongdoing. They insist that they are taking every precaution to protect civilians. They also argue that they are not intentionally killing civilians, despite the fact that President Trump promised during his presidential campaign to go after civilians. When it comes to terrorists, “you have to take out their families,” Trump said.

Others argue that civilian deaths cannot be avoided. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of coalition forces, said during a press conference last March that civilian deaths result from the fog of war. “And this is why it’s not a war crime to accidentally kill civilians,” Townsend said, in a misinterpretation of the law.

Still, U.S. officials know that they are responsible for killing civilians in Iraq and Syria. For over the past year, at least, they have been deliberately striking targets that they know will result in civilian casualties.

Clear evidence emerged in January 2016 after U.S. forces bombed a site in a civilian area of Mosul that the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) had been using to store money. “U.S. commanders had been willing to consider up to 50 civilian casualties from the airstrike due to the importance of the target,” CNN reported.

Around the same time, officials in the Obama administration loosened restrictions designed to limit civilian casualties. According to a report by USA Today, administration officials granted military officials permission to strike targets that came with higher probabilities of civilian deaths. “Before the change,” USA Today reported, “there were some limited cases in which civilian casualties were allowed.” With the change, “there are several targeting areas in which the probability of 10 civilian casualties are permitted.”

For others, U.S. military forces were still dealing with too many restrictions. Upon entering office, President Trump moved to implement a more aggressive military campaign. “We have not used the real abilities that we have,” Trump said. “We’ve been restrained.” Expanding the Obama administration’s program of exterminatory warfare, which by that point had already killed about 60,000 IS fighters, Trump decided to implement what administration officials call “annihilation tactics.” According to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Trump “directed a tactical shift from shoving ISIS out of safe locations in an attrition fight to surrounding the enemy in their strongholds so we can annihilate ISIS.”

The Trump administration’s tactical shift has had significant consequences for civilians. By surrounding targets to annihilate them, coalition forces have been killing far more civilians in Iraq and Syria. It “appears that the number of civilian casualties has risen in recent months,” The Los Angeles Times reported in April. The New York Times agreed, reporting in May that the “number of civilians killed in American-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria spiked this year.” Earlier this week, The Daily Beast provided additional confirmation, reporting that “all parties agree that casualty numbers are steeply up.”

Military officials recognize the consequences of their actions. “We’re not perfect,” Lieutenant General Jeffrey Harrigian, the commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, commented during a press briefing last May, when asked about civilian casualties from airstrikes. Commander Townsend has even suggested that civilian casualties are inevitable. Undoubtedly, “civilians will get caught in the crossfire,” Townsend said earlier this month. “Civilians will get hurt. Civilians will get killed.”

Still, U.S. officials continue to insist that they are not to blame. They characterize civilian deaths as accidents or mistakes. In other words, they keep shifting the blame elsewhere, just as Townsend did when he once again blamed the fog of war. The entire situation is “sad and it’s an unavoidable part of war,” he said.

But civilian casualties are not unavoidable. They are not mistakes. For the past year, civilian casualties have been a direct result of U.S. policy. By embracing policies that allow for civilian casualties, officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations have permitted U.S. forces to kill civilians. Indeed, U.S. officials are ensuring through their actions and policies that civilians in Iraq and Syria will continue to die.

The Politics of Textbook Jihad

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The final version of Turkey’s national school curriculum has left evolution out and added the concept of jihad as part of Islamic law in books.

Announcing the new school curriculum, Turkish Education Minister İsmet Yılmaz told a press conference in Ankara on Monday, “Jihad is an element in our religion; it is in our religion… The duty of the Education Ministry is to teach every concept deservedly, in a correct way. It is also our job to correct things that are wrongly perceived, seen or taught.”

“In this manner, in the lessons on Islamic law and basic religion sciences, there will be [the concept of] jihad. But what is this jihad? What our Prophet [Muhammad] says is that while returning from a war, we are going from a small jihad to a big jihad. What is this big jihad? It is to serve our society, to increase welfare, to ensure peace in society, to serve the society’s needs. The easiest thing is to wage war, to fight. The skill is the difficult one, which is to ensure peace and tranquility,” he said.

Speaking about the controversial decision to exclude evolution, Yılmaz said it was not included in the national curriculum “because it is above the students’ level and not directly relevant.”

Yılmaz said the new curriculum will also include topics on the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ), the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The Saudi Textbooks

The Turkish inclusion of Jihad in school textbooks is juxtaposition to the Saudi Arabia’s move in recent years to eliminate from the ‘controversial’ definitions of Jihad in kingdom’s school text books. After the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks Saudi Arabia, accused of fostering the intolerance and animosity through its educational system, was under pressure to revise school text books which allegedly teach hate and extremism.

The American government called on Saudi Arabia to reform its educational curriculum, including textbooks in Saudi schools and distributed worldwide, by reviewing and revising educational materials and eliminating any that spread “intolerance and hatred” towards Christians and Jews and promoted holy war against “unbelievers.”

The Saudi government has repeatedly said that it has undertaken extensive educational reform. One Saudi official announced in 2006 that 36 of the 66 major textbooks had been revised. Another official said that Saudi Arabia had removed 31 controversial items from its curriculum.

Dr. Abdulilah Al-Mosarraf, director of planning and evaluation at the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has said that almost all Gulf countries have made major changes in their school curriculums. Saudi Arabia, for example, has removed 31 controversial items from its curriculum. Referring to the educational reforms carried out in Saudi Arabia, he said, Riyadh has removed the offensive books and passages from the curriculum. The GCC includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Tellingly, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its annual report of 2017 recommended that Saudi Arabia should make public an annual assessment of the relevant Ministry of Education religious textbooks to determine if passages that teach religious intolerance have been removed.

The Commission also recommended that the US administration should press the Saudi government to denounce publicly the continued use around the world of older versions of Saudi textbooks and other materials that promote hatred and intolerance, and to make every attempt to retrieve, or buy back, previously distributed materials that contain intolerance.

How extremism and intolerance crept into the school text books?

Let us pause here to refresh our memories how the so-called extremism, hatred and intolerance crept into the school text books.

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation, according to the Washington Post.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum.

Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, the Washington Post said adding:

“As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.”

The text books were published in the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu. They were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.

During that time of Soviet occupation, the so-called Afghan Mujahideen leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country, the Washington Post report of March 2002 said. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders.

“AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996,” the Washington Post report concluded.

This is how extremism, hatred and intolerance entered into Afghan, Pakistan, Saudi and many other Muslim countries.

Suicides Continue To Ravage Farmlands

Moin Qazi

At least 217 farmers have ended their life in the month following Maharashtra Government’s farm loan waiver announcement on June 2 this year.This numbers for the month of June equal the average monthly figures in the past six months.

The number of suicides has now shot up to 1,327 this year. The number is only marginally lower for the same time period last year. In June 2016, the total number of cases had reached 1,541 in the first six months.

Farmer suicides are a wrenching and contentious issue and are surging upward even as the number of farmers in states is going down. It is a  two decades-old national affliction that is as tragic as it is complex and is a serious threat to India’s most critical economic sector.

The roots of despair of the Indian farmer have been well researched and documented.They are a toxic blend of: livelihoods drained away by spiralling debt; soil tired on heavy doses of chemicals-fertilisers, crops and livestock destroyed by drought or unseasonable monsoon rains associated with climate change; plummeting water tables from relentless water mining; the loss of agricultural land to development; a collapse in cotton prices and dependence on expensive genetic-engineered hybrid seeds; penury and debt on account of dependence on predatory moneylenders, and near absence of rural mental health services and public awareness of mental health disease. . The sector has been the slowest-growing in India, with growth averaging around 2 per cent a year, exacerbating the crisis.

Farmer suicides are simply a reflection or a symptom of how fragile the farm economy is. Even a small aberration in the weather – unseasonal rains, high winds, dry weather and drought – multiplies the risk factor for farmers, taking it to unmanageable levels. Livelihood security for any farming family, therefore, hangs by a slender thread.

Small landholdings ,large loans,  failure to boost productivity, poor irrigation infrastructure and overuse of groundwater dependence on rain for water, have added to farmers’ woes. Perversely, bumper crops arising from a good monsoon can also lead to a surplus of produce, pushing down prices and hurting farmers’ ability to pay off their loans. According to an economic survey carried out last year for 17 Indian states, a farming family earns 20,000 rupees a year on average, or 1,700 rupees a month.The suicide rate for farmers is 48 per cent higher than any other profession. In the 20 years since the Indian government first started keeping track of farmer suicides, about 3,00,000 farmers have ended their lives. Farmer suicides are a red stain of shame on the democratic pretentions of the Indian government as it continues to bungle the handling of its agricultural policies and programmes.

Nothing is simple about the farmer suicide phenomenon. In the farmers’ plight, all strands of an economy in transition intersect. To a degree, the suicides reflect the farmers’ bafflement at the gradual, and erratic, withdrawal of the state. They have felt the cost of reforms – but have yet to see the benefits.

The high rate of farmer suicides is often first traced to the trauma of the early 1990s – when India, devastated by financial crisis, embraced a raft of free market reforms, kickstarting the current era of economic liberalisation.

There are two triggers for the suicides. The first at the time of sowing, when the cash strapped farmer is pushed to buy seeds he can ill afford, so he takes credit. The next is at the time of harvest, when he arrives in the market and realises that he will not get the price that will enable him to repay the loan. That’s when the desolate fellow has no option but to consume pesticide.

A closer look would suggest that there is a broad pattern to farmer suicides. Most of these farmers had little appetite for risk earlier. They were happy with the modest yield that kept their home and hearths running. Lured by the promises of new foreign seeds, the farmers started availing big ticket loans to invest in expensive seeds, tagged with high yields, in what they saw a fair commercial risk.

If the math was right it was certainly worth it. But unfortunately we don’t have sophisticated financial risk-hedging instruments at the lower segment of farmers. Nor do we have super-efficient supply chains that should support this type of savvy ventures. Any adverse

While farmers, particularly those with small parcels of land, continue to work out strategies to keep their age-old bond with their land alive the new generation finds farming unsustainable  . This is the key reason behind their influx to cities despite the hard truth that the new utopian world the migrants hope to discover is a vain chimera and  is in reality just a another hard toil. This painful discovery will further add to the social stressThe worsening woes of Indian farmers can hardly be neglected by the leaders of a country where two-thirds of people live in the countryside and many are being forced to head to cities to escape the wrath at their farms. Gandhi’s declaration that agriculture is the soul of Indian economy is as relevant as the man himself.

When India became independent, the contribution of agriculture to the economy was 50 per cent; it is now 15 per cent. Employment in the agro sector was to the extent of 88 per cent; now it is 66 per cent. Rural wages have fallen to their lowest.

For every Indian farmer who takes his own life, a family is hounded by the debt he leaves behind, typically resulting in children dropping out of school to become farmhands, and surviving family members themselves frequently committing suicide out of hopelessness and despair.

The Indian government’s response to the crisis – largely in the form of limited debt relief and compensation programmes – has failed to address the magnitude and scope of the problem or its underlying causes.

There are too many questions that seek quick answers. Some groundbreaking reforms are needed as the first steps in breaking the cycle of desperation and misery that so many Indian farming communities face. We must respect the ominous signs in the country’s farmlands which are claiming their debt in the form of lives of farmers who own them.

If the government is serious about reviving agriculture, it ought to act fast. We have the tools, but we need to summon the political will. This is the only way we can save thousands of farmers from the deadly noose.

Disqualification threats hang over Australian MPs

Mike Head

Extraordinary events over the past week point to a concerted campaign to use the reactionary provisions in the Australian Constitution to remove “third party” members of the Senate elected at last July’s double dissolution election.

A witch hunt has been launched, led by the Murdoch media, to identify every member of parliament who was born overseas or might have acquired foreign citizenship from their parents, and demand they provide proof of having renounced their dual citizenship.

Two Greens senators—party co-leaders Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters—abruptly quit their seats, without a fight, after being accused of breaching section 44 of the Constitution by failing to realise that they held dual citizenships.

Both were born overseas—Ludlam in New Zealand and Waters in Canada—but arrived in Australia as infants. It appears that they automatically became, and remained, citizens of those countries.

The two Greens became the third and fourth senators disqualified this year under various provisions in section 44—an unprecedented figure.

Now, question marks have been raised about Greens leader, Senator Richard Di Natale, who has an Italian family background, and two other Greens senators—Nick McKimm, who was born in Britain, and Peter Whish-Wilson, born in Singapore.

Also in the firing line is Malcolm Roberts, elected to the Senate for Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigrant One Nation, because he was born in India.

Earlier in the year, the Labor Party applied to the High Court, the country’s supreme court, to disqualify independent Senator Lucy Gichuhi because of her previous Kenyan citizenship, but the court rejected the application for lack of evidence.

Prominent overseas-born MPs, including former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, have scrambled to issue media statements asserting they had formally renounced their dual citizenships before standing for parliament. More than 20 other MPs, including some from Labor and the Coalition, have been reportedly investigating whether they remain dual citizens.

“True-blue Australian MPs only,” was the headline of an Australian editorial on July 20, highlighting the nationalist character of this crusade. It insisted that patriotism, loyalty and national pride are essential pre-requisites for sitting in parliament. The editorial claimed that the requirement of sole Australian citizenship was both elementary and easy to fulfil.

In reality, this campaign is anti-democratic to the core. In effect, it is seeking to nullify the ballots of the tens of thousands of people who voted for these candidates. It also disqualifies millions of citizens from standing for parliament.

No reliable figures exist for the number of dual citizens in Australia but the 2016 Census reported that 6.9 million residents—28.5 percent of the population—were born overseas. Australia has always been an immigrant country but this is a growing trend, with the overseas-born numbers increasing from 5 million over the past decade.

Section 44 (i) of the Constitution, like the document as a whole, is a colonial-era provision, imposed when Australia was still part of the British Empire and all residents of the continent (except for the indigenous population) were classified as British subjects.

The clause is a sweeping one, disqualifying any person from standing for election who “is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power.”

These words could be used against anyone accused of “adherence to a foreign power.” This could extend, particularly in wartime conditions, to someone with an overseas family heritage or to anyone who opposed a war.

In several tenuous and divided rulings over the past 25 years, Australia’s supreme court, the High Court, has interpreted section 44 (i) as requiring all candidates to “take reasonable steps” to renounce their “foreign nationality.” What is “reasonable” remains undefined.

The threat of disqualification has now spread to the Greens candidate who may be in line to replace Waters, former Australian Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett. He could fall foul of another part of section 44—clause (iv)—which declares ineligible anyone who “holds any office of profit under the Crown.”

Bartlett had a part-time research job at the Australian National University while he was number 2 on the Greens’ 2016 Senate ticket in Queensland, behind Waters. Constitutional experts have said that whether employment by a university constitutes an “office under the Crown” is a “grey area” not yet tested in the High Court.

There is an anti-democratic precedent however. In 1992, independent Phil Cleary won former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s seat but the High Court disqualified ­him because he was a Victorian state government schoolteacher—despite Cleary being on leave without pay.

Earlier this year, the High Court disqualified two other “crossbench” senators on the basis of far-reaching interpretations of further provisions in section 44. One Nation’s Rod Culleton had been convicted of larceny, an offence punishable by more than 12 month’s jail. The court ruled this meant he was in breach of Section 44 (ii), even though the conviction was later set aside.

In the case of Family First’s Bob Day, the court radically widened its previous interpretation of Section 44 (v), which prohibits anyone with an “indirect pecuniary interest” in an agreement with the Commonwealth. Day’s electorate office was leased from his family trust, even though the federal government actually paid no rent to the trust.

Increasingly, what appears to be unfolding is a purge aimed at ousting or undermining smaller parties that won seats at the 2016 “double dissolution” election, which backfired spectacularly for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National government and produced a highly unstable parliament.

Turnbull called the election to try to breakthrough a parliamentary impasse produced by the blocking of key budget-cutting measures in the Senate. Opposition members feared the popular backlash they would trigger if they voted for the most blatant moves to gut public health, education and welfare.

Such was the deep public hostility, however, that the election saw the Coalition reduced to a fragile one-seat majority in the House of Representatives, making its survival constantly precarious.

The result was even worse in the Senate, where a record 35 percent of the electorate voted for the Greens or “crossbench” candidates—mostly right-wing populists who claimed to oppose the political establishment. Following the subsequent defection of Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, who formed the Australian Conservatives, the Coalition holds only 29 seats in the 76-member Senate.

Over the past year, this result and the continuing political crisis has produced numerous media and corporate commentaries bemoaning Australia’s “ungovernability” and the “failure” of parliament.

One of the first to voice these sentiments was billionaire businessman Gerry Harvey. Straight after the election, he suggested the installation of a dictator “or something like that” in order to impose anti-working class austerity measures. Harvey declared that “our democracy at the moment is not working.”

There are indications that this hostility within ruling circles toward the election outcome, and democratic forms of rule, is now taking the form of a drive to subvert the 2016 result by using anti-democratic constitutional provisions to remove a number of senators.

US-China trade talks conclude in acrimony

Nick Beams

Two days of trade talks between the US and China this week have produced nothing in the way of concrete results, only a commitment by both sides to continue the discussions on specific items amid growing tensions.

The talks, which were agreed upon at the meeting between US president Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in April, got off to a somewhat acrimonious start when at the end of the first day both sides cancelled scheduled press conferences.

At the opening of the discussions, US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross struck a belligerent tone as he demanded action by China to reduce its $309 billion trade surplus with the US.

Standing beside Chinese vice-premier Wang Yang, he said: “China now accounts for nearly 50 percent of the US goods trade deficit. If this were just a natural product of free market forces we could understand. But it’s not and so it is time to rebalance our trade and investment in a more fair, equitable manner.”

Ross did not elaborate further but the implication of his remarks is that the Chinese state plays a central role in “unfair” trade practices detrimental to the US. But this kind of accusation goes beyond China. The core of Trump’s “America First” trade agenda is that the global trading system as it is currently established is detrimental to the interests of the US and must be changed in the interests of “fair” trade.

Following the blast from Ross, Wang tried to strike a conciliatory tone. He acknowledged that discussions had become more difficult and that the talks were an “even more daunting task” and then added:

“We can think like a champion but we don’t need to defeat each other in [tackling] our differences. Pursuing co-operation is the best way forward.”

The US maintained its aggressive stand as the talks concluded. US treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Financial Times the US had taken a “very big step” toward reducing its deficit with China and that Beijing had “heard … the marching orders.”

Once again Wang tried to put the best face on a bad situation saying in a statement issued after the meeting that both sides had agreed to “work constructively” to reduce the deficit and that they had reached “a broad consensus on a wide range of issues.” They shared the view that the most important outcome of “this round of dialogue is that it has charted the course of China-US economic co-operation.”

But these remarks cannot cover up the fact that the two sides are deeply divided. As Evan Medeiros, a former Asia adviser under the Obama administration noted, in a comment reported by the Financial T imes, the meeting “had all the signs—no joint statement, or press conference, no outcomes—of serious and sustained tensions rapidly emerging due to deep differences.”

Under the agreement reached between Trump and Xi in April, there was to be a 100-day plan to address the trade issues. The process appeared to have got off to a good start when China lifted restrictions on US beef imports due to an earlier cattle disease scare. But since then nothing has emerged.

Reports of the discussions said they had been “quite tough” and the US was not prepared to “settle for the crumbs the Chinese were offering.”

Mnuchin said very specific targets would be discussed sector by sector in coming discussions. Ross elaborated further saying those targets would have to be defined along with a “reasonable period of delivery,” citing opening financial services, the placing of tech companies “on a level playing field” with the objective of “substantially” increasing US exports to China.

One of the key issues hanging over the talks was the question of steel. At the direction of Trump, the US commerce department is working on, or has already prepared, a report to the president on whether to use a section of a 1962 piece of legislation giving him the power to impose tariff or other restrictions on steel imports on “national security” grounds.

It had been thought that Trump may have announced a decision around the time of the G20 meeting earlier this month. Questioned by a reporter on Wednesday on whether tariffs would be imposed on steel, Trump responded that it “could happen.”

Pressure is mounting on Trump from the US steel and aluminium firms. On Tuesday a group of these companies delivered an open letter to Ross calling for “remedial action” on national security.

Commenting on the letter, Michael Stumo, chief executive of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, one of the signatories, said: “For too long, America has tolerated China’s massive and strategic subsidising of its state-controlled industries, including steel and aluminium. Other countries take action on national security grounds to preserve industries but the US has not, as yet, done so.”

And the push goes beyond steel. It was time for the US to “assert its rights more forcefully in manufacturing and agriculture,” Stumo said.

While the issue on steel is largely being couched in terms of action being necessary against China, any tariff or other restrictions will have a much broader impact. The countries which could be hit include Brazil, Canada, South Korea and the European Union. They may be even more adversely affected than China, because Chinese exports are concentrated in low-grade products which US steel companies are reluctant to manufacture.

If the US does invoke bans on national security grounds—a measure which has been described as the “nuclear option” on trade—it could rapidly lead to an all-out trade war with retaliatory action directed against American firms in other areas.

At the time of the G20, when it was expected that the US could order steel bans, it was reported that EU officials had drawn up a list of US goods, including whiskey, orange juice and dairy products as possible targets for retaliation.

Speaking on the eve of the G20 summit, which subsequently revealed the widening divisions between the US and Europe, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker did not spell out details but said the EU would respond to any US steel sanctions.

“Our mood is increasingly combative he said, warning that any response would come in “days,” not months.

That is, if Trump does go ahead with steel restrictions it could bring about an all-out trade war. The tensions surrounding the two days of US-China talks indicate that this prospect has moved closer.

Australia: Anger grows over fire at Melbourne recycling plant

Will Morrrow

Anger has continued to grow among workers over the conditions that led to the fire at the Coolaroo recycling plant in Melbourne’s north, which broke out on July 13 and blanketed large areas of the city in toxic smoke and ash.

At least 115 households were forced to evacuate their homes for 24 hours due to smoke from the fire. Five people, including one child, were hospitalised with smoke-related conditions, and many others have been treated for asthma or developed other breathing difficulties. Up to 100 firefighters managed to bring the massive blaze under control only by last Saturday, and it has continued to smoulder among the compacted recycling materials in the factory ever since.

Workers complain of their homes and cars being covered in dirt and ash, smelling of burnt plastic. The state Environmental Protection Agency was forced to issue a notice to residents on July 20, warning them to stay away from local waterways, which have been poisoned by the runoff water used to fight the blaze.

On Thursday evening, around 100 people attended a meeting at the Coolaroo Hotel, called by the legal firm Madden Lawyers, to discuss a class action against SKM, the plant’s private operator. The suit was filed yesterday in the Victorian Supreme Court and has already been joined by more than 100 people.

While the meeting was called to discuss the legal aspects of a suit against SKM, many workers in attendance expressed outrage at the failure of government authorities to take any action against the company over the past years. When a speaker noted that there had already been three fires at the plant in 2017, residents shouted back the correction: “four!” Many residents demanded to know what could be done to force the plant to close.

The fire has revealed the contempt of the entire political establishment, from local council authorities and environmental agencies to both major parties at the state and federal level, for the lives of the working class population, and the impact of the subordination of every sphere of social life—including trash collection—to the profiteering of private corporations.

The same indifference of the ruling elites to the lives of the working class all over the world was expressed in the recent catastrophic Grenfell Tower fire in London, in which an untold number of people were killed because the building had no sprinklers or fire alarms, and had been fitted with cheap and combustible external cladding.

The fire at the SKM plant was no isolated accident. Firefighting services have been called to the plant nine times in the last five years, including four times this year alone, three times in 2015 and once in both 2012 and 2013. A large blaze in February sent plumes of acrid smoke over nearby suburbs. Just a day before the latest fire, another small fire had occurred inside the plant. Yet SKM has been allowed to continue its operations, providing an ongoing source of revenue to local governments.

The Coolaroo plant was opened in 2005, after SKM won a contract to supply recycling services to nine local councils. While previously, companies had charged councils for recycling collection, SKM offered to pay to collect the recyclables, which it processes and sells on the world market. The plant now services 14 local government areas and processes up to 500 tonnes of materials every day, collected from up to 1.2 million residents.

That the plant was able to open and operate in a residential area in the first place, expresses the indifference of authorities for the lives of ordinary working people. Coolaroo is part of Broadmeadows, a former industrial area that has been devastated by decades of layoffs and restructurings overseen by the trade unions. Almost one in four people are officially unemployed in the area.

On July 15, the state Labor government of Daniel Andrews, in an effort to divert attention from its own failure to ensure basic safety standards, announced a “joint task force” to conduct safety audits of recycling plants. These will involve the Environmental Protection Agency, Emergency Management Victoria and fire-fighting services.

The EPA likewise made a publicised visit to SKM’s plant at Laverton, in Melbourne’s west, and found numerous safety violations. The Sunday Herald Sun reported that it had “received multiple complaints over the storage of excess waste at the Laverton site. Photographs taken yesterday show mountains of recycling bales stored beside vehicles in an employee carpark.”

World Socialist Web Site reporters attended the Thursday meeting and spoke to residents, who described how their complaints had been ignored over years by the EPA and local government.

Julie, who lives in a housing commission flat one-and-a-half kilometres from the plant, caring for her 88-year-old mother, said she had been complaining for years about the noise levels caused by its operations. “I didn’t know where the noise was coming from and I couldn’t get any answers from the EPA or council, so I eventually did my own research, following the railway line until I found the source of the noise,” she said.

Julie

“Every time the EPA agreed to come out, there was always another excuse. It dragged on for years. I gave up in the end. It’s the sound and the smells, of wet, damp newspaper. We’ve got trucks going in and out throughout the night. My bedroom faces the factory. I have to sleep with silicone [plugs] in my ears,” she said.

“The EPA did a sound test, finally, in 2013 at my house, 1.5 km away from the plant. It was 6 dB over. It’s more than that now.”

Julie’s efforts were ignored by authorities. “The council didn’t want to know. I rang them many times. It got to a point where you’re given a reference number and they close it off before anything is done. It’s because they’re involved. There are over a dozen councils involved in recycling at that plant. Nobody wanted to listen to me. The Health Department of the Hume Council is a joke. They sent me a ‘noise diary.’”

“Because of the area I live in, they think, ‘oh, it’s only Broadmeadows, let it go.’ How can we have industrial and residential cohabiting with no problems? This would never happen in a wealthy suburb.”

Julie noted that those families affected by the Tullamarine toxic dump had complained for more than two decades about the effect of toxic chemical waste leakage and pollution in nearby residential areas. It only closed down in 2008.

When a World Socialist Web Site reporter noted the international implications of the Grenfell Tower fire, which had revealed the consequence of the class gulf between rich and poor in every country, Julie noted: “It’s the same thing. It’s wrong. It’s an attitude everywhere: ‘I don’t care. I’m making a lot of money.’”

“I’m a Labor voter and they’ve been sitting comfortably for too long. They know how we’re gonna vote, so they coast along. It used to be a Labor Party. It’s not anymore. It’s all changed. Even the unions are not about what they used to be. It used to be about the people. An eight-hour working day. Well that doesn’t apply now, does it? It’s all gone.”

Jackie, who was one of the residents evacuated last Friday, told WSWS reporters: “On Thursday night, at 10.50 p.m., I received an SMS from the fire services that we should evacuate. How could I do that with my mum at that time of the night? Then we received another evacuation message in the morning. I have a car so I was able to take my mum to an aunt’s in Reservoir.”

Jackie

“As a result of the smoke, my mum has an upper respiratory infection. She also suffers heart palpitations—she rarely gets them, but she has got them again. On Saturday I ended up going to the Northern hospital. I was getting really red in the face and sweating all the time.”

Jackie contemptuously referred to the “cleaning items” she had been provided by the council. Showing WSWS reporters the items she had been given, she noted: “On Monday the council came around and gave us a pair of rubber gloves, and a mask and some instructions about how to clean the house. I was so angry, what a joke. There was smoke and dust everywhere.”

Brexit crisis tearing apart UK’s Conservative Party

Chris Marsden

This week’s talks on the terms of Britain leaving the European Union largely proceeded in the absence of one of the key negotiators.

Brexit Minister David Davis met for one hour with the EU negotiator Michael Barnier Monday, before flying back to the UK and then returning for a brief discussion and joint press conference Thursday.

At the conference, Barnier condemned Davis for a “lack of clarity” on the UK position on key issues—above all the so-called “divorce settlement” and the future status of EU nationals. Clarification is “indispensable,” Barnier declared, while Davis spoke of “robust” discussions and compromise on both sides. Barnier replied that the EU is not in a game of making concessions.

Davis could do little but stall, because he represents a government that is in the middle of bitter factional infighting over Brexit. Indeed, the leading Brexiteer went back to the UK to hear Prime Minister Theresa May warn against briefing and leaks against cabinet colleagues by their factional opponents.

Since her disastrous political miscalculation in calling June’s snap general election, the vultures have been circling over May—who is almost certain to face a leadership challenge in the autumn. The delay in deposing her is in large part due to concern that a precipitous move might hasten a fresh general election, amid warnings that Labour might win it. However, it is Brexit that underpins the political paralysis of the government.

The days leading up to the latest round of negotiations saw leaks against Chancellor Philip Hammond—that he had called public sector workers “overpaid” and made sexist comments at a function. The feigned outrage was motivated by Hammond’s advocacy of a “soft Brexit”—including maintaining access to the Single Market and urging a two-year disengagement process.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson—who said the EU can “go whistle” for a settlement—and Michael Gove, the leading pro-Brexit Tories along with Davis, are accused of authoring the leaks. A senior Tory said, “Everyone knows it’s them behind the briefing against Philip and it’s all to do with Brexit. They are so obsessed with a hard Brexit that they are prepared to run the economy off a cliff. In addition, they do not like the fact that Philip is pointing out that we will deservedly lose the next election if we do that. They are dangerous and deranged.”

The “Brexiteers” are no more diplomatic, with one telling the Daily Telegraph, “What’s really going on is that the establishment, the Treasury, is trying to f--- it up. They want to frustrate Brexit.”

There is no honour among thieves. Michael Gove’s former aide, Dominic Cummings, who now backs Johnson, said that Davis was “thick as mince, lazy as a toad, and vain as Narcissus.”

Preventing an implosion is now the main argument in the party for keeping May in office. As the same MP stated, “That’s why we have to keep Theresa there. Otherwise the whole thing will fall apart.”

With reports of a letter of no confidence in May circulating among MPs and 30 reported to be backing Davis, three senior members of the influential 1922 Committee of backbench MPs said they would support May in taking disciplinary action.

May duly issued her warnings, while Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the Policy Exchange think-tank, “I think we in the cabinet would also do well to reflect on those military virtues—loyalty, discipline, cohesion—that might better enable us first to concentrate our fire on a dangerous enemy in reach of Downing Street, somebody who would lower our defences, scrap our deterrent, weaken our response to terrorism.”

In reality, May’s threats are toothless, with former Deputy Prime Minister and leading Europhile Michael Heseltine stating that “she can’t sack leading Brexiteers because she has no authority. So you have an enfeebled government. Everybody knows this... The Europeans have worked it all out. This is a government without authority.”

Hammond is in tune with the concerns of leading sections of big business, who recognise the UK’s weakened position against its imperialist rivals.

According to PwC's UK Economic Outlook, GDP is expected to drop from 1.8 percent growth last year to 1.5 percent in 2017 and to 1.4 percent in 2018. Pay levels continue to fall, even as inflation continues to rise to near 3 percent with house prices rising even faster—threatening an end to the consumer spending-driven growth. Deloitte, the Institute of Directors, and the Confederation of British Industry have all recently warned of the damaging impact of Brexit or Brexit “uncertainty”. A CBI survey suggested that 42 percent of UK firms believe Brexit has hurt their investment plans. Rain Newton-Smith, chief economist at the CBI business lobby group, said, “That's why the CBI has suggested staying in the single market and a customs union until a final deal comes.”

One report after another complains of delegations from Germany, France, Switzerland and Ireland seeking to poach business from the City of London.

Hammond has even reached out to the Labour Party. Blairite Labour MP Chris Leslie said that his pushing for a longer transitional period maintaining close economic ties with the EU was “welcome news” and “might be able to secure a lot of support on all sides of the House.” In reply, Hammond welcomed “any opportunity to build consensus across the House and across the nation.”

Such overtures point to a possible political realignment to rescue the bourgeoisie from the crisis it faces.

In the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman suggested that, in the end, “revelatory moments in the next two years” would “create a clear demand for a second vote” because the “vision of a pain-free Brexit was an illusion.”

“The sheer incompetence and infighting of the current May government can also be relied upon to undermine the case for Brexit on a weekly basis,” he added.

Brexit was advanced by the Tory right as a way of liberating the City of London from the restraints placed on it by its rivals Germany and France. Instead, it has exposed the underlying economic and political decline of British imperialism.

Those in ruling circles who opposed Brexit—and saw preserving Britain’s place in Europe’s trade block as vital—want to reverse the disastrous outcome of last year’s referendum. However, the inter-imperialist tensions that gave rise to Brexit have only deepened.

It is not merely that Berlin and Paris will now only accept London back on the most humiliating terms. The stepped up pursuit of economic, political and military integration led by Berlin to strengthen Europe’s hand against the United States risks closing the door to even this possibility. Moreover, Europe itself only appears strong in contrast to the UK. It is rent by deepening political and social tensions that would blow up in the event of any serious downturn in the global economy.

Politically, the Tory Party appears broken. Labour’s pro-business, “soft Brexit agenda should be an attractive alternative. A Corbyn-led government, however, remains anathema to those who fear that his anti-austerity rhetoric will spark genuine opposition in the working class. This is why Labour is still in the midst of a civil war that many in ruling circles hope will produce a new, pro-EU party or coalition.

Political turmoil and economic dislocation has dramatically undermined the authority of Britain’s rulers, not only in Brussels but also in the eyes of millions of workers, offered only further austerity from the pro and anti-EU wings of the bourgeoisie alike. As indicated by the reaction to the Grenfell Fire, the situation is becoming ever more politically and socially explosive.

White House in turmoil as special counsel expands Russia probe

Barry Grey

Amid reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expanding his investigation into alleged Russian interference in the US elections and collusion by the Trump campaign, the intensifying conflict within the American ruling class and state is bringing long-simmering conflicts within the Trump administration to the boiling point.

The internal crisis erupted Friday with the resignation of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. This followed by one day the resignation of the chief spokesman for President Donald Trump’s outside legal team, Mark Corallo, and the demotion of the lead attorney, Marc Kasowitz.

These developments came after Trump’s extraordinary interview with the New York Times, in which the president denounced his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself in the Russia probe, and criticized the deputy attorney general and acting head of the FBI. Trump went on to accuse Mueller of conflicts of interest and attack his decision to investigate his business dealings as well as those of family members and close associates as a “violation” of the special counsel’s mandate.

Washington insiders suggested that Trump was seeking to create a justification for firing Mueller, prompting the Los Angeles Times to editorialize in favor of impeachment should that occur.

Spicer’s resignation was triggered by Trump’s appointment of Anthony Scaramucci, a multimillionaire Wall Street hedge fund operator, former Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers banker and Fox News commentator, as White House communications director. Spicer, who had been filling that role since the resignation last May of Mike Dubke, vehemently opposed Scaramucci’s appointment, according to multiple media reports. In this he was joined by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief White House political adviser Stephen Bannon.

Aligned against them and pushing for Scaramucci’s appointment were Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, generally regarded as Trump’s top White House aide.

Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a long association with Spicer, who served as the RNC’s spokesman. He brought Spicer into the White House. While Priebus declared his support for Scaramucci following the announcement of his appointment, Priebus’s own position is increasingly problematic and his departure is widely considered only a matter of time.

With the elevation by Trump of a fellow member of the Wall Street kleptocracy to head White House communications, the billionaire president is increasingly narrowing his circle to fellow oligarchs and close family and distancing himself from the Republican Party establishment.

This appears to coincide with a decision to adopt a more aggressive posture toward Mueller. Mark Corralo, the legal spokesman who resigned on Thursday, was known to have opposed public criticism of the special counsel.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times escalated the factional warfare against the White House on Friday with front-page reports, citing anonymous administration sources, of efforts by Trump lawyers to document conflicts of interest within Mueller’s team of prosecutors. The Post reported that Trump is making inquiries about his powers to pardon potential targets of the investigation, including himself.

These actions are in response to aggressive moves by Mueller to expand his probe. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that Mueller’s team is looking into Trump business operations going back a number of years and has subpoenaed banks for Trump’s financial records. Media reports say Trump is particularly agitated over the likelihood that Mueller will obtain his tax returns, which the president has refused to release to the public.

Parallel investigations by congressional committees are also expanding. On Monday, Kushner is scheduled to be interviewed in private by the Senate Intelligence Committee on the meeting held in June of 2016 involving him, Donald Trump Jr., then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin as well as other prominent Russians. The Senate Judiciary Committee has summoned Trump Jr. and Manafort to testify in a public session next Wednesday to discuss the meeting, and the Republican chairman, Charles Grassley, has said he will subpoena them if they balk at appearing.

It was also reported Friday that Mueller instructed the White House and the Trump campaign members who attended the June 2016 meeting to preserve all records relating to it.

It is increasingly unlikely that the factional battle within the ruling class will end in a peaceful compromise. There are powerful sections of the corporate-financial elite who would like to see Trump removed, but are not sure how to do it and fearful of the implications. At the same time, the longer the impasse drags on, the greater the dangers.

At some point, the political crisis will trigger an implosion of the massively inflated financial markets, plunging US and world capitalism into an even deeper crisis than that of September 2008. And the longer the political warfare in Washington continues, the greater the danger that it will provide an opening for the pent-up anger and frustration of the working class to explode into mass struggle.

This is a crisis of class rule without historical precedent. It unfolds against the backdrop, and is fueled by, intensifying economic, social and geopolitical crises. American and world capitalism remains mired in economic stagnation, intensifying the descent into trade war and, ultimately, military conflict among the major powers. Militarism and war are on rise in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and the American military is operating without any civilian restraint. Class tensions are rising in parallel with relentless austerity and growing social inequality.

American global hegemony is breaking down. Large sections of the ruling elite are appalled and frightened by the growing isolation of the United States in the affairs of world imperialism, as demonstrated at the recent G20 summit in Germany.

And at the summit of the state, the White House is occupied by an outright gangster, the product and embodiment of the degraded and criminal state of American bourgeois political culture. In Trump, the ruling class confronts a nightmare of its own making—a Frankenstein’s monster—a would-be Bonaparte who has brought into the White House the mafia methods he employs in his business operations.

Scaramucci summed up the outlook of the oligarchy both he and Trump represent when on Friday, at his first White House press briefing, he wished Spicer well and said, “I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.”

Nor is there the slightest progressive or democratic content to the anti-Trump opposition of the Democratic Party and major media outlets, in alliance with the intelligence agencies. The Democrats are not conducting a struggle against Trump’s brutal social attacks or his onslaught on immigrants and democratic rights. They are entirely focused on their hysterical campaign against Russia, attacking Trump for refusing to prioritize and intensify the warmongering drive against Moscow initiated by the Obama administration. They demand an escalation of the war for regime change in Syria and the military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia in Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Trump’s ruling-class opponents are concerned over the new administration’s open and unabashed corruption, fearing that Trump is subordinating the basic geopolitical interests of American imperialism to his own business interests and those of his family.

It is imperative that the working class take advantage of the political crisis to intervene independently in defense of its own interests—for jobs, health care, education, immigrant and democratic rights, and peace—against both factions of the ruling elite. It must not allow its opposition to Trump to be channeled behind the Democratic Party.

There is a real danger that Trump will respond to the isolation of his administration by escalating the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan or initiating new ones to channel political and social opposition against a foreign “enemy” and undercut his ruling-class opponents.

Without a revival of working-class struggle on the basis of a socialist program in opposition to the entire economic and political system, the outcome of the crisis, whoever is president, will be a further shift to dictatorial methods of rule and an expansion of militarism and war.

The conditions for such a struggle are rapidly maturing. The urgent task of the day is to consciously prepare that movement by building the Socialist Equality Party as the new political leadership of the working class.