Hypersonic Putin and Gonzo Weaponry

Binoy Kampmark

Weapons of dazzling murderousness have always thrilled military industrial establishments.  They make money; they add to the accounts; and they tickle the pride of States who manufacture them.  From time to time, showy displays of restraint through arms limitation agreements are made.  These can apply to either the offensive element of such weapons, or their defensive counters.

The calculus of death is often premised on ensuring that, for every destructive advance made, some retarding force accompanies it.  By way of example, nuclear warheads spraying a country can be countered by anti-defence missiles.  However, the nature of such a defence should never be impregnable.  The balance of terror must be maintained in these acts of amoral accounting.

Of late, treaties restraining the deployment of weapons that gallop ahead of such a balancing act have been confined to shredders and dustbins.  There was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a reminder of a thawing period between the Soviet Union and the United States from 1987.  It prohibited the fielding of land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.  But President Donald J. Trump has never been a man for history, treating it as an encumbrance on the United States.  Violations by Russia were cited, with the 9M729 missile singled out as a stand out culprit.  Russia duly countered; the United States’ Aegis Ashore facility based in Romania could technically be used to launch missiles in breach of the treaty.  Both countries have now confined the document to oblivion.

The last nuclear arms control treaty existing between Russia and US is the lonely 2010 New START treaty, dealing with the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers.  Expiring in February 2021, the sense that it will go the way of others is genuine.

Withdrawing from such arms control treaties has led to a widening in the field of experimentation, and few are as exciting for the merchants of death than the hypersonic missile, best described as a form of gonzo weaponry.  Hypersonic weaponry emphasises unstoppable speed, travelling, at the minimum five times the speed of sound, but are noted for their infuriating agility in the face of defences.  The military accountants are smacking their lips; sales for such weapons are predicted to reach $5 billion in the next decade.  Such armaments inclined outfits as JP Morgan see money-making opportunities or, in the sanitised words of one of its analysts Seth Seifman, “substantial growth potential by the mid-2020s.”

Russia, China and the United States have active programs in the field, but it is Russia that claims to have stolen a march on everybody else.  As Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced as hospital staff announce the delivery of a prized newborn, the “Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle entered service at 10:00 Moscow time on 27 December”.  Strategic missile forces chief Gen. Sergei Karakaev has revealed that the Avangard has been deployed in the Orenburg region in the southern Urals.

In contrast, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper claimed in August that “its probably a matter of a couple of years” before the US could obtain such a system.  Reaction from Washington to the announcement was one of quiet acceptance.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is enthusiastic, and confident enough, to proclaim the Avangard system as singular. “Not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons.”  This is the true chest-thumping bravado of the old Cold War days, when the Soviet Union could claim to be streets ahead of others in the field of missile technology. “The Avangard is invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defence means of the potential adversary.”

The Avangard system is a toy of some joy for those who admire the attributes of deliverability, flexibility and manoeuvrability.  It is nuclear capable, able to carry a nuclear weapon with a yield of two megatons.  And it is blisteringly fast, coming in at 27 times the speed of sound.  As Putin said in March 2018 during his state-of-the-nation address, “It heads to target like a meteorite, like a fireball.”

A new race has opened up and the field is looking increasingly crowded.  Lockheed Martin is being commissioned “to design and build a hypersonic vehicle”.  It notes the “complex engineering and physics challenges” involved in reaching speeds of Mach 5.  “As one of the Department of Defense’s highest technical priorities, our scientists and engineers are developing game-changing hypersonic solutions.”

Reading the inventory of the company’s dizzying array of systems is candy to the militarist baby.  There is the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW), a “hypersonic boost glide vehicle” designed to be launched from the B52.  Then comes the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), leveraging “the common hypersonic glide body” which will include “a new class of ultrafast and manoeuvrable long-range missiles with the ability to launch from ground mobile platforms.”

Boeing is intent on adding to the run, keen to invest in a British company specialising in “advanced propulsion systems that could power a hypersonic vehicle.”  A slew of other outfits are also sinking their teeth into the market.  Raytheon and Northrop Grumman announced in June that a joint team was “quickly developing air-breathing hypersonic weapons to keep our nation ahead of the threat.”

For all the bravado one tends to see in the defence industry across countries, worries are discernible in the Pentagon.  The hypersonic system supposedly mocks and scorns current defences; the fear that they will be fully operational before credible deterrents are put in place is the sort of thing analysts lose sleep over.  As US Air Force General John Hyten explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 20, “We don’t have any defence that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us.”

Michael Griffin, undersecretary for research and engineering, is intent on making his mark.  “I did not take this job to reach parity with adversaries.  I want to make them worry about catching up with us again.”  But he finds himself, and the United States, short in the field.  “The United States is not yet doing all that we need to do to respond to hypersonic missile threats.”  A few ideas are being floated, including the placement of detecting sensors in space.

Whatever the merits of Putin’s expansive claims on the Avangard system – and these remain hard to test – they furnish the military establishments across the globe a boon to seek further funding and experimentation.  The balance of terror, the ledger of doom, is set for a shake-up.

Best films and television of 2019 and the decade

David Walsh & Joanne Laurier

Remarkably, one-fifth of the new century is already behind us.

We asked a number of writers for the WSWS, Richard Phillips, Fred Mazelis, Clara Weiss, Stefan Steinberg and Verena Nees, for suggestions about the most valuable films from 2019 and the rest of the past decade.

We post various lists below. There may well be glaring omissions, either because we were unable to see a particular movie or program or because we undervalued it, perhaps along with over-estimations in some cases, but among the works mentioned, we trust there are worthy and rewarding ones. We urge readers to offer their own recommendations.

Stefan Konarske and August Diehl in The Young Karl Marx (2017)

A number of objective processes are at work in the film and television industry, particular reflections of broader tendencies in social and cultural life. On the one hand, there is a staggering accumulation of wealth at the top. Those in charge of visual production have the most remarkable technologies at their disposal and the capacity to create virtually any image. However, film and television studio executives and producers demonstrate a terrible paucity of imagination and originality, in part the result of relentless shareholder pressure encouraging the blandest and least offensive products, in part an expression of the demoralized absence of any great interest in contemporary life or confidence in the future of their social system.

Worse still, in some cases, the “philosophy” of the stock market swindler, dismissive of any long-term concerns in the interests of the feverish accumulation of personal wealth, finds a reflection today in the selfish, chilly outlook of certain industry types. More than a century ago, on the subject of artistic life in pre-World War I Vienna, Leon Trotsky described this “moralising turned on its head” as “a never-ending and boring sermon: do not fear, do not harbour any doubt, do not feel ashamed, do not have any scruples, grab what you can.”

Peterloo (2018)

In the US, the concentration of control over the media (including broadcast and cable television, film, radio, newspaper, magazine, book publishing, music, video games and online operations) by a handful of conglomerates has reached an advanced stage. In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90 percent of the media. By 2012, six companies owned 90 percent, and by 2019, that number had fallen to four: Comcast (through NBCUniversal), Disney, ViacomCBS (controlled by National Amusements) and AT&T (through WarnerMedia).

Disney, which purchased 21st Century Fox earlier this year for $71.3 billion, increased its revenue in 2019 to an estimated nearly $70 billion. The giant firm was responsible for eight of the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2019. Its movies, none of which has any enduring value, earned $10 billion in global revenue this year.

Jean Dujardin and Louis Garrel in J'accuse (2019)

Such levels of financial success inevitably breed fawning and sycophancy in the miserable American media. Time magazine recently named Robert Iger, Disney’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, its “Businessperson of the Year.” Forbes magazine estimates Iger’s wealth to be $690 million. His annual salary is $65.5 million, 1,424 times what the median Disney worker earns, a ratio that Disney heir Abigail Disney has termed “insane.”

Time’s gushing article touched on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+ (pronounced Disney Plus), which signed up 10 million people on the first day of its launch in mid-November, before noting that the service was “not yet a threat to the big tech companies that dominate the stream: Netflix has 158.3 million subscribers, Amazon Prime has 101 million, and Google’s YouTube has about 2 billion users a month.”

Sealed Lips (2018)

Again, the possibilities are enormous, but the contradictions are equally stark. A commentator at MediaU recently wrote that Amazon and Netflix, which a few years ago seemed to be the saviors of independent filmmaking, “have retrenched; they have announced that they are looking for less independent and ‘more commercial’ fare. And while Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Facebook will spend more than $16 billion on content this year, in aggregate, only a tiny fraction” will go to independent films. “The big platforms are looking for marquee series and big names that will attract viewers, and they are spending for it—Facebook is spending up to $2 million per episode, with Amazon and Netflix spending up to $10 million per episode, for series.”

As far as the American corporate elite is concerned, the production of a handful of empty, bombastic “blockbusters,” exported to every corner of the planet, is the ideal business model.

Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln (2012)

However, this is not by any means the whole picture. A growing number of writers and directors are looking critically and angrily, and at times with considerable acuity, at contemporary society. The financial collapse in 2008 and the subsequent impoverishment of millions, the vast social inequality, the global rise of neo-fascistic parties, the endless wars and the systematic assault on democratic rights have had an inescapable influence on artistic circles. Efforts at censorship and repression, including the infamous imprisoning of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, in the name of “national security,” religious fundamentalism or other reactionary pretexts, have also incensed and disturbed many.

The emergence of broad popular opposition to the existing social and political order, initially reflected in the eruption of strikes and mass protests in dozens of countries this year, must contribute to breaking up the cultural stagnation.

The difficulties and obstacles confronting the sensitive and thoughtful artist in our day should not be underestimated or regarded unsympathetically. Trotsky’s proposition in 1938, on the eve of World War II and amid the horrors of fascist barbarism, that art, “the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society,” holds truer today than ever.

Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

In the US, Britain and increasingly elsewhere, the artist is thrown on the mercy of the “free market,” as state support for the arts is slashed or eliminated. Corporations and governments alike—directly and indirectly—demand films and television programs that suit their brutal purposes, defense of profit, war and the “national interest.”

Filmmaking is an expensive, labor-intensive and socially cooperative undertaking. It requires the mobilization of considerable artistic-technical resources. Raising funds for and seeing through to the end the production of a truly “independent” or oppositional film is an exhausting process at present. Many barriers, deliberately placed or otherwise, stand between the filmmaker and his or her intended audience.

The accumulated intellectual atmosphere in “cultivated” settings, bohemian or academic, is not a healthy one either. Every artist there is expected, before anything else, to pay tribute to racial or sexual identity as the life-and-death question in contemporary existence. Disgrace and exclusion are the price for opposition to this rotten program.

Free State of Jones (2016)

When South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) argued that “all artists … are always interested in class, 24/7, I think it would actually be strange if we’re not” and that “we all have very sensitive antennae to class, in general,” he was expressing, sadly, a distinctly minority view.

Every work of art, even the most banal, reflects the time and society in which it was created. What else could it reflect? The decisive issue is whether it does this in a rich, challenging and critical manner. That is the artist’s central responsibility, even though, as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy pointed out, “It is very difficult to tell the truth.”

In recent decades, the artists, due to unfavorable intellectual and political conditions, have been largely content to passively and uncritically reflect the immediate conditions in which they found themselves, not seriously probe or dispute them. Worse still, all too often, as in the movies of Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier, the French “cinema of the body,” Japanese horror and gangster films, etc., they have wallowed in the confusion and disorientation prevailing in many petty-bourgeois quarters.

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book (2018)

Without minimizing the immense problems, the past decade unquestionably witnessed more interesting work in the movies than the previous one. The threatening or unjust state of contemporary society obliged a number of filmmakers, first of all, to look more searchingly at history. Our lists below include, for example, Mike Leigh’s Peterloo (2018), Bernd Böhlich’s Sealed Lips (2018), Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx (2017), Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones (2016), Antonio Chavarrías’ The Chosen (2016), Lars Kraume’s The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015), Giulio Ricciarelli’s Labyrinth of Lies (2014) and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

In the US, we have been unable so far to see one of the most important historical films of the past decade, Roman Polanski’s version of the Dreyfus affair, J’accuse ( An Officer and a Spy, 2019). The anti-democratic, repressive #MeToo crusaders have intimidated prospective distributors and prevented the film’s being shown in North America.

Clergy (2018)

When Polanski’s film was screened for select film buyers at the Cannes film festival last May, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “domestic buyers largely gave the film the cold shoulder. One executive at a prestige distributor in the U.S. skipped the presentation. ‘No interest,’ the buyer said. Another U.S. buyer also ignored the invite. ‘It’s just not possible to release that film in the U.S. right now,’ the executive explained.”

The Playlist website openly refers to the fact that Polanski and Woody Allen (the release of whose film A Rainy Day in New York was halted by Amazon Studios, its producer), whom it describes as “critically-acclaimed and legends in the industry,” spent “the last year blacklisted from Hollywood, as their sexual misconduct allegations from decades previous have resurfaced in light of the #MeToo movement.” This new blacklisting, if anything, arouses less protest in the conformist and cowardly media and film industry establishment than the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s.

So Long, My Son (2019)

These extraordinary acts of censorship (to which one could add the excising of actor Kevin Spacey from Ridley Scott’s completed movie All the Money in the World and the suppression of Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy) raise questions as to the significant obstacle that upper-middle class identity politics represents to artistic representation.

Fascistic attacks on art and artists are not an innovation, but the stock market, real estate and media boom of the past several decades, combined with the malignant impact of postmodern and identity-centered ideologies, has created within erstwhile “cosmopolitan” and “sophisticated” liberal and left layers a new constituency for censorship, authoritarianism and, more generally, imperialist politics. Self-aggrandizing and self-pitying, indifferent to historical truth and facts (as the New York Times’ “1619 Project” has graphically demonstrated), virulently hostile to egalitarianism and the demands of the working class, this “New Right” element regards art that goes below the social or historical surface, and raises “unsettling” questions about the whole set-up, with unmistakable and implacable hostility.

An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker (2013)

As long ago as 1994, in a review of Jane Campion’s The Piano (in the International Workers Bulletin), we asserted that movements dedicated to gender and racial politics had not “helped anyone to see the world and its most fundamental social relationships more clearly; they have had precisely the opposite, narrowing effect. They have objectively damaged artistic and intellectual work.”

Inevitably, in the face of ever more open class conflict, identity politics in art and society has moved from a generally defensive posture to an aggressive one. The attacks on Polanski, Allen, Spacey, C.K. and others represents a stepping up of the campaign against democratic rights and artistic freedom.

Of the films we admired most over the past 10 years, a number were ignored in large measure (The Young Karl Marx, Peterloo, etc.), while others, especially those that challenged racialism, the viewpoint now officially upheld by the pseudo-left and the Democratic Party, were assailed, sometimes ferociously. It is not possible to tell the story of American filmmaking in the 2010s in particular without some reference to these controversies.

Nebraska (2013)

We should recall that Spielberg’s Lincoln, which contains powerful sequences shedding light on some of the most tense and turbulent moments in American history, was unfavorably compared by a number of critics, especially the “liberal-minded” and “left” ones, with Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) in particular, as well as with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

According to Django Unchained ’s “misanthropic, racialist view of the world,” we noted in February 2013, “slavery was demolished or should have been demolished through acts of bloody individual vengeance. The film does not let the fact that the institution was not demolished in this manner stand in its way.”

Little need be added at this point about Bigelow’s deplorable Zero Dark Thirty, which was not only a dull, murky and psychologically unconvincing journey to the “dark side” and a defense of CIA torture, but, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in 2015, “based” on events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden that never took place.

Court (2014)

Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post was one of those who claimed that Django Unchained came closer to the truth about slavery than Spielberg’s Lincoln did. Hornaday wrote that “even at its most lurid, preposterous and ahistorical, ‘Django Unchained’ communicates truths that more solemn, self-serious treatises [i.e., Lincoln] might miss.” Former New York Times drama critic and columnist Frank Rich, writing in New York magazine, asserted that Django Unchained’s “reverie on the Civil War era, a crazy amalgam of the nightmarish and the comically surreal, dredges up the racial conflicts left unresolved by both Lincoln and Lincoln.”

In the Nation, Jon Wiener contrasted Lincoln and Django Unchained, and came down on the side of Tarantino’s effort, writing, for example: “In Spielberg’s film, old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom.”

Meanwhile, filmmaker and liberal icon Michael Moore rushed to the defense of Zero Dark Thirty, arguing offensively and ludicrously that Bigelow’s film with its central character, a female CIA operative, represented a triumph for feminism. The work, Moore wrote, “is really about how an agency of mostly men are dismissive of a woman who is on the right path to finding bin Laden. Yes, guys, this is a movie about how we don’t listen to women.”

Ilo Ilo (2013)

Another work that aroused the ire of the identity politics industry was the highly valuable and moving Free State of Jones, significantly inspired by research carried out by historian Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, one of the professors who has expressed serious criticism of the Times’ 1619 Project. Gary Ross’ film chronicles the struggles of a white farmer in Mississippi, Newton Knight, to organize an insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Charles Blow of the Times launched one of the most venomous assaults, “White Savior, Rape and Romance?,” in June 2016 (to which column Bynum replied). Blow wrote that Ross’s film tried “desperately to cast the Civil War, and specifically dissent within the Confederacy, as more a populism-versus-elitism class struggle in which poor white men were forced to fight a rich white man’s war and protect the cotton trade, rather than equally a conflict about the moral abhorrence of black slavery. Throughout, there is the white liberal insistence that race is merely a subordinate construction of class.”

Vann Newkirk II authored an equally repugnant piece, “The Faux-Enlightened Free State of Jones,” in the Atlantic, while one of the most telling commentaries came from Erin Whitney at ScreenCrush who lamented that Free State of Jones “tells its story with ignorance and colorblindness.” Whitney went on to complain: “This is not a Civil War movie about race; it’s one about class disputes and sympathizes with white people.”

I Am Not a Witch (2017)

Peter Farrelly’s Green Book came under sustained attack by race-obsessed circles even before its release in November 2018 through its receiving the Academy Award for Best Picture in February 2019. In the film, acclaimed pianist Don Shirley employs a working class Italian-American, Tony Vallelonga, as his driver and bodyguard in a musical tour through the South. Shirley sees the tour as part of the struggle against segregation.

For its elemental, humane view that racial prejudice is a social problem solvable through education and example, reason and empathy, and that racial hatred is not an essential component of the human condition, Green Book earned the instinctive and unrelenting enmity of critics and media commentators mesmerized by race.

Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times declared the film to be “insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch.” Remarkably, the critic denounced the film for peddling “a shopworn ideal of racial reconciliation.” Brooks Barnes in the New York Times termed the film “woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.” Instead, Barnes extolled the virtues of Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018) a superhero movie glorifying a fictional African ethno-state called Wakanda.

One of the fouler pieces, by Wesley Morris, appeared in the New York Times prior to the Academy Awards. Its theme was summed up in its headline, “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” Indiewire noted that the victory of Green Book at the Academy Awards “was immediately met with outrage from movie journalists and critics on social media.”

Succession (2018)

The “outrage” of a definite portion of the critics and the media establishment generally extends to those filmmakers who have the audacity to step outside their “comfort zones” and take up social questions. Thus, writer-director Steven Soderbergh was greeted with some of the worst reviews of his career earlier this year when he released The Laundromat, a sharp-eyed film based on revelations about the Panama Papers and treating corporate criminality and money laundering. Various critics, a number of them in the pay of plutocrat Rupert Murdoch, found the exposé of ruling elite malfeasance unpalatable.

“I’ve just watched a 96-minute op-ed,” grumbled Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, while Tom Shone in the Sunday Times (UK) commented that The Laundromat “wanders into aimless sketches vaguely concerned with the Panama Papers and rich people behaving badly.” “Overly preachy” (Aaron Peterson in the Hollywood Outsider ) and “an indignant lecture” (David Sexton in the London Evening Standard ) were additional comments.

The venturing of director Todd Haynes—identified as a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema—into socially critical territory in Dark Waters (2019), focused on DuPont’s toxic chemical contamination in Parkersburg, West Virginia, prompted one irate commentator to headline his review, “What the hell is Todd Haynes doing behind the camera of generic docudrama Dark Waters ?,” and to label the remarkable film “a crushing disappointment.”

In the end, the development of the world determines the development of art, even in the unusual circumstances of film and television production. The big movement of the working class coming into increasingly direct and conscious conflict with the various ruling elites around the world remains the critical question. Such developments will show the artists that a force exists capable of leading society out of its present state to a higher form of organization. The best artists, the most honest and sincere, will respond with ground-breaking work. We have every confidence in that.

Australian Labor and Liberal ministers agree on further regressive education measures

Patrick Kelly

A meeting of Australian state, territory, and federal education ministers earlier this month agreed to a series of measures that will accelerate the pro-corporate “Gonski 2.0” agenda, unveiled last year.

On December 12, after two days of discussion, the Labor and Liberal politicians signed off on the so-called Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration. The pretentiously titled document subordinates federal and state education policy even more explicitly to the demands of the largest corporations for a trained and readily exploited workforce. Related agreements involve the further narrowing of the curriculum, imposition of regressive phonics programs for early years’ literacy teaching, and the extension of standardised testing regimes in schools.

The lead-up to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Education Council meeting featured big business representatives issuing a series of blunt demands that a new generation of productive workers be prepared within the school system, saving corporate Australia money by obviating any need for workplace training.

A December 4 article published in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper, “PISA results: Business tells schools to ‘lift your game’,” featured demands from every major corporate lobby group. Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox declared, “… we risk finding it very difficult to develop the skills needed to succeed in the emerging world of work.” Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry director of employment, education and training, Jenny Lambert, added that businesses complain that it is “taking a long time for school leavers to become productive in the workforce, in part because they require significant training in these basic skills.”

Tony Shepherd, chairman of global infrastructure fund MSAM Limited, and of Infrastructure South Australia, denounced “educationalists [for] saying ‘a dog ate my homework’ and [making] the inevitable plea for more funding.”

The article, like numerous others recently published in the Australian press, seized on purported declines in Australian 15-year-old students’ international ranking in literacy, maths and science standardised test results, as reported by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The attempt to generate a moral panic about “declining standards” necessarily involved suppressing any mention of the numerous challenges to PISA’s testing veracity and international methodology made by education experts. Alan Reid, Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of South Australia, recently noted, for example, that “concerns come from educational statisticians and researchers, who argue the validity and reliability of the tests themselves are at best dubious and at worst render the league tables ‘useless’.”

Dan Tehan, education minister in the federal Liberal-National government, nevertheless declared that the PISA results demonstrated the need for further regressive curricular “reforms,” not for additional investments in public education. In a statement issued before the education ministers’ meeting, he declared that “money is not the issue,” and that instead “school systems need to de-clutter their curricula and get back to basics.”

There was no reported conflict whatsoever during the two-day meeting, involving Labor Party education ministers for the states of Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia, as well as for the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory and their Liberal counterparts from Tasmania, New South Wales, and South Australia. Victoria’s Labor education chief James Merlino described the meeting as “the most productive” he had experienced in his five years as minister.

There was no discussion about addressing the inequities within the Australian education system—which, with 40 percent of secondary students in private schools, is among the world’s most unequal—nor about how to resolve the crisis confronting countless working-class public schools, with inadequate student support resources, deteriorating infrastructure, and overloaded teaching staff.

The silence on all these issues reflects the bipartisan unity within the political establishment for a continued offensive against the public education system.

The collectively signed, 24-page Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration mostly featured, as with other government documents on education, motherhood statements about the importance of schooling for children and for society. Tehan boasted, however, that corporate demands had been heeded. “The declaration also acknowledges,” he explained, “the need for workforce skills, including communication, teamwork, languages and problem solving.”

Other parts of the document referred to the “fast-changing labour market” and the need for “effective partnerships with education and training providers, employers, industry.”

The education ministers agreed to several measures that will soon be rolled out in schools nationally.

New literacy and numeracy “progressions” will be established, along with more intensive standardised and centrally monitored student assessments. This was a key recommendation of the “Gonski 2.0” report, authored by the former stock exchange chairman, David Gonski. The “progressions” are based on breaking literacy and numeracy sub-skills down to their narrowest component parts, with the aim of having students master each step in the chain of “progressions” before being taught the next.

The entire framework rests on mechanical and reactionary pedagogical assumptions. Student learning is assumed to proceed in an orderly, individual, and uniform manner, quantifiable in monthly increments. In reality, children’s learning is developmental, periodically taking qualitative leaps forward as students develop, together with their peers, an integrated experience and knowledge of society and the world.

The imposed “progressions” pave the way for the punitive targeting of teachers and schools deemed to be “failing” if assessed student progress does not advance by a 12-month or greater increment each school year. Tehan explained: “The literacy and numeracy progressions will help teachers ensure that every student gets at least a year of learning from every year of school.”

The federal education minister also pledged to take a “chainsaw” to the curriculum in order to “get back to basics” and focus on literacy and numeracy. This is a long standing right-wing hobby horse. Precisely what it means remains to be seen, with a review into the Australian Curriculum now brought forward to begin next year.

Whatever specific “back to basics” measures are introduced, they will be targeted at working-class and other public schools. For the wealthiest families, who send their children to the most exclusive private schools, education will continue to be anything but basic. Thanks to the continued funneling of enormous public funds into these institutions, there has been a construction boom in drama centres, music theatres, science and IT hubs, Olympic-class athletic facilities, and “aquatic and well-being centres”.

Ahead of the curriculum review, one measure the government has announced involves the further promotion of regressive synthetic phonics literacy programs. This is via new accreditation standards for teacher education programs, which will now have to demonstrate “explicit reference to reading instruction, including phonics.”

In response to the federal and state education ministers’ acceleration of the pro-corporate agenda, the central complaint of the Australian Education Union (AEU) is that it was not more centrally involved. The union has repeatedly collaborated with government attacks on public education in the last period—the only precondition being proper government acknowledgement of the bureaucracy’s services—as was most clearly demonstrated with its betrayal of a threatened teachers’ boycott of NAPLAN tests in 2010.

In a statement sure to leave the Morrison government shaking in its boots, AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe warned, after the education ministers’ meeting: “We acknowledge that in the communique the Education Council has committed to improving its consultation processes; however if that fails to address our concerns, then we will reserve our right to take further action.”

Collapse of UK National Health Service threatened as Johnson government readies further onslaught

Robert Stevens

The National Health Service (NHS) faces collapse after decades of underfunding, staffing cuts and privatisation.

Even before the onset of the NHS’s now-annual “winter crisis,” a heightened expression of a year-round crisis, senior doctors’ representatives warned that the health service was “on its knees.”

National Health Service (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Figures compiled by NHS England found that in November the health service missed all targets for Accident and Emergency (A&E) care, operations and cancer treatment.

A record low 71 percent of patients who attended a hospital-based A&E unit were seen and discharged, admitted or transferred within the four hours waiting-time target. Not a single major A&E department in England met the four-hour target, with 88,923 patients waiting more than four hours from a decision to admit to hospital admission—64 percent higher than last November. Compared with 258 in November 2018, 1,112 patients were forced to wait more than 12 hours, a 331 percent increase.

There were 2.14 million attendances in November 2019, 5.2 percent more than in November 2018. Hospitals are running at near total capacity, with bed occupancy at 95 percent. This is well above the 85 percent considered safe by doctors.

Winter brings more people into hospital, meaning the NHS running at levels that cannot be safe. Nuffield Trust chief executive Nigel Edwards stated his concern that bed occupancy was at “a level which will make it near impossible to admit many patients in need on to the right ward.”

Cases of flu are being reported earlier than last year, while norovirus cases are already double what they were in 2018, according to Miriam Deakin, the director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, representing NHS trusts. Earlier this month, a spate of norovirus cases resulted in the NHS having to close more than 1,100 beds. The Guardian noted that Southampton general hospital had to shut 32 beds in five wards, and closed an entire ward to new admissions, while Reading’s Royal Berkshire hospital shut four wards to contain the virus.

Figures on people requesting to be seen as emergencies and being admitted as an emergency case in A&E were both at record highs last month, while those waiting for a non-urgent operation (such as knee and hip replacements) rose to 4.45 million—another record high.

David Maguire, the senior analyst of the Kings Fund, told the Daily Express, “We are looking at any performance at its worst since records began. … Hospitals are constantly operating in the red zone, with NHS trusts struggling to cope with more than 100,000 [staff] vacancies.”

In Scotland, NHS figures were the worst for almost two years. By the first week of December, just 81.2 percent of A&E patients were either admitted, transferred or discharged within 4 hours, as 336 patients spent more than 12 hours waiting in A&E.

The statistics came out on December 13, the day after Conservative leader Boris Johnson was elected in a landslide due to a collapse in Labour’s vote. Dr. Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, commented, “Day one of the new government and another set of stark NHS performance figures. They are not inheriting a problem, they created this problem. …”

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said, “These figures show an NHS on its knees and it is no wonder that most leaders predict that this winter will be the worst on record. … More and more patients are turning up at emergency departments and there is a limit as to how many they can cope with.”

The extent of the NHS crisis is highlighted by at least three hospitals being forced to declare a black alert this month—an admission that they have run out of beds and cannot cope with any new admissions. Last January, 23 out of 145 NHS acute hospital trusts and ambulance trusts declared black alerts.

Cuts, under-funding and under-staffing are reaping a terrible human cost, with many needlessly dying or suffering life-threatening diseases and illnesses that could have been contained if acted upon earlier.

There are eight NHS-wide targets for cancer treatment, but overwhelmed hospitals only managed to meet three of these last month.

Last month, the Health Service Journal reported the findings of a review of ophthalmology at 120 NHS trusts in England. Carried out by Alison Davis, from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, and Professor Carrie MacEwen, from Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, it found that 27 trusts admitted having delayed appointments for more than 1,000 glaucoma patients in the past 12 months. Sixteen trusts delayed appointments for more than 500 patients. Almost half a million people in England have the most common form of glaucoma and timely follow-up appointments are necessary to avoid the risk of blindness. According to a 2017 survey by the British Ophthalmological Surveillance Unit, up to 22 people a month were suffering permanent and severe sight loss due to NHS delays.

Other surveys point to the detrimental impact of NHS staff being chronically overworked. Last week, the British Medical Association in Scotland published findings that three quarters of its members believed their workload had a negative impact on their health and well-being in the past year. Eighty-three percent of those who responded saw their workload increase, and 80 percent reported that they “often or always” worked beyond their designated hours.

The previous month, a Royal College of Nursing study found 6 in 10 nurses felt they were not able to provide the level of care they wanted to. With 43,000 unfilled vacancies, the NHS is being forced to operate with one of the lowest proportion of nurses per patients in the Western world. According to the British Medical Journal, among the richest nations, there were 9.3 nurses, on average, for every 1,000 people. In the UK, there are just 7.8, compared to 12.9 in Germany.

District nursing, without which the NHS cannot function, is at the point of collapse. The number of NHS district nurses has fallen from more than 7,000 to just over 4,000 in a decade. One in five staff are working an extra day of unpaid overtime every week to try to meet growing demand.

Even the Tories’ reactionary policy to cut hospital stays by having more patients treated at home cannot work due to the systematic undermining of district nursing. Patient safety is being constantly threatened. The Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) found that 48 percent of district nursing teams were delaying either visits or care on a daily basis, with 75 percent reporting their teams have vacancies and frozen posts. Just 500 district nurses were being trained annually over the last three years.

QNI chief executive Crystal Oldman said, “[T]he pressures we are under mean that without a coherent workforce plan for district nursing the NHS long-term plan will be undeliverable…hospitals already under pressure would be under even greater pressure if people can’t be cared for in their own homes and communities.”

During the election campaign, both the Labour Party and the Tories claimed that the NHS was “safe” in their hands, despite both offering spending “increases” that would barely keep the NHS operating at its present chronic level. Both parties offered spending at a level below the average 4.1 percent a year spent by governments throughout most of the 71 years of the NHS’s existence. Under the 2010-­­­­2015 Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, NHS spending growth was slashed to an average of just 1.3 percent a year.

Despite electioneering pledges from Johnson that the NHS will never be sold off to the private sector, including to US corporations who want their slice of the £144 billion NHS budget, and bogus claims that he will recruit another 50,000 nurses, austerity cuts will continue to rain down unabated. The impact on the NHS will be catastrophic.

A new website, NHScuts, run by Keep Our NHS Public and Outlandish—a co-op group specialising in creating data tools—provides national figures estimating the reduction in NHS funding compared to historical levels. Projecting each clinical commissioning group’s 2015 budget to 2023 and taking account of allocated NHS spending made in the Tory’s election manifesto, NHScuts found, “On average, local health services (by area clinical commissioning group) will be £176m worse off.

“Worst affected is Birmingham [the UK’s second largest city] and Solihull, where the local NHS will have lost £846m, which is equivalent to 26,000 nurses, 7,700 GPs, 500 GP surgeries or 820 MRI machines.” In the county of Derbyshire, the NHS will lose £592 million in annual funding by 2023, “which is equivalent to 18,200 nurses or 5,400 GP or annual costs for 350 GP surgeries or 580 new MRI machines.”

Fires create hellish conditions across Australia

Mike Head

Samuel McPaul, a 28-year-old volunteer firefighter whose wife is expecting their first child in May, lost his life yesterday fighting the fires that are raging across much of Australia. He was killed when the truck from which he was working was flipped over by what officials described as “cyclonic winds” generated by a “fire tornado” to the east of the regional city of Albury-Wodonga, on the border between the states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. A 39-year-old member of his crew was severely injured and burnt, while the vehicle driver suffered minor injuries.

Residents sheltering from fire on Mallacoota wharf (Photo credit Twitter @bluesfestblues)

Samuel McPaul was the third volunteer firefighter to lose their life in the months-long Australian fire disaster, which is reaching a new level of intensity this week due to searing heat, intense winds and electrical storms. Official fire maps show blazes threatening lives and homes in every state and territory.

A mass evacuation order on Monday affecting an entire eastern region of Victoria underscored the severity of the bushfire and heat wave conditions. The state’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) broadcast the order on Sunday: “Everyone in East Gippsland must leave the area today due to the fire danger forecast for tomorrow. Do not travel to this area. It is not possible to provide support and aid to all the visitors currently in the East Gippsland region.”

The unprecedented order covered an area half the size of Belgium, including national parks, villages and towns whose population at this time of the year is swelled by more than 30,000 holidaymakers. People had just hours to pack up and leave.

More than 10 bushfires are burning in East Gippsland, with emergency warnings issued yesterday for dozens of small communities where residents are in danger. “Multiple properties” have been destroyed, according to Victorian authorities. Between 4,000 and 5,000 people in the coastal town of Mallacoota have sought safety on the beach as fire threatened homes and visibility was less than 50 metres.

On Monday, 40-plus degree heat was registered throughout Victoria, along with wind change gusts of up to 80 kilometres per hour and dry lightning strikes. Fires damaged homes in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, the state capital, forcing evacuations.

Fears that the Gippsland fires could close the Princes Highway, the only major road left open in the region, prompted Victoria’s Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp to issue the order to leave East Gippsland.

Crisp said 550 state forest firefighters and 300 CFA volunteers were standing by, as well as 70 helicopters and water-bombing aircraft, but “there isn’t enough trucks to go around.” He warned residents: “So don’t count on a fire truck protecting your particular house. You need to get out of there.”

Crisp’s order, issued with the backing of the state’s Labor Party government, also highlighted the inadequacy of the fire-fighting resources provided by the state and federal governments, which continue to largely rely on exhausted volunteers to deal with one emergency after another.

It was considered too dangerous to send firefighters into the burning forests, so they were confined to protecting key assets and communities. Even then, Gippsland fires incident controller Ben Rankin said not all the properties and small towns were “fully defendable.” If the fire behaved in a particularly aggressive way, even tourist towns could be at risk.

People in Victoria were the most endangered yesterday because of high temperatures, high winds, low humidity and tinder-dry forests, but the crisis has spread throughout the continent since September.

Australia’s record for average maximum temperatures across the country has been broken twice already this month—by more than a degree—adding to the scientific evidence of the complex but undeniable connection between climate change and extreme weather and catastrophes such as fire.

Hellish conditions are being experienced by millions of people, both the residents of areas directly threatened by walls of fire and those in the major cities, including Sydney, where smoke has produced dangerously poor air quality, exceeding official “hazardous” levels, often for days on end.

More than five million hectares have burnt out this “fire season,” with months still to go. More than 1,000 homes have been lost and 10 people have died, including three volunteer firefighters. New South Wales (NSW) has been the worst-affected state so far, with 911 homes destroyed, along with 72 facilities and more than 2,000 outbuildings.

At least 100 fires are burning around the state, with more than 40 uncontained. “Mega-fires” have burnt for weeks to the northwest, west and southwest of the state capital, Sydney, Australia’s largest city with a population of five million. A map published by the Rural Fire Service graphically shows the vast area that has already burnt out and how fire is encroaching ever closer to major towns and the suburban outskirts of Sydney itself. [See map]

The worst fire danger in NSW is expected to come today, as a severe wind change was due to move north up the coast. Conditions in the entire coastal stretch of NSW from the Victorian border up to the greater Sydney region, then moving inland to the Hunter Valley, are rated as extreme.

Yesterday, the temperature in parts of every state and territory soared past 40 degrees Celsius (104F). That included Tasmania, the southern island state closest to Antarctica, where the gauges recorded maximums of 40.2C by midday, breaking century-old heat records.

Tasmanian Fire Service chief officer Chris Arnol warned on Monday that even homes built to the most modern standards could be indefensible as the fire danger reached “extreme” in parts of the state.

In South Australia, firefighters are battling catastrophic fire conditions in the Adelaide Hills, Kangaroo Island, the state’s mid-north and Yorke Peninsula.

Despite recent patches of rain, dozens of fires are still burning in Queensland, where areas of rainforest, previously thought to be immune to fire, have been destroyed in recent months.

Fires are also threatening lives and homes in Western Australia, thousands of kilometres away. Blazes broke containment lines north of the port city of Albany, after blackening more than 16,600 hectares since being sparked by lightning on December 26. Another fire is posing a threat to people south of the Western Australian goldfields, after already burning through 148,000 hectares since mid-December.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison caused outrage earlier this month when he rejected calls for greater resources and for financial assistance for volunteer firefighters. He insisted that volunteers “want to be out there defending their communities.”

Yesterday, however, it was revealed that the number of volunteer firefighters has fallen by about 18,000 over the past decade. Volunteer groups blamed dissatisfaction with an atmosphere of bullying, as well as an ageing cohort, rural population decline and changes to operations.

In NSW, only one in 10 Rural Fire Service (RFS) volunteers is aged 25 or younger, and the median age of volunteers is more than 50. The destruction of full-time jobs and the reliance of millions of people on on-call contract, casual and temporary employment has made volunteering for fire service untenable for many younger workers.

For weeks, volunteer brigades have complained of poor equipment, especially smoke masks, to cope with such fierce and protracted fires. Some have defied the fire authorities by conducting fund-raising activities to buy better gear.

In an attempt at political damage control, Morrison announced on Sunday the federal government would compensate some NSW volunteer firefighters up to $6,000 each. The backflip came after weeks of demands on the Liberal-National Coalition government to ease the strain on volunteers, some of whom have been fighting fires continuously for months with no financial assistance.

NSW RFS firefighters who are self-employed or work for small or medium-sized businesses can apply for $300 a day, but only after 10 days on the front lines, up to a maximum of $6,000, representing the equivalent of just 20 days’ emergency leave.

Victoria’s Labor government opposed even paying those meagre amounts. Victorian Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville said: “This is against the spirit of volunteerism. This is not their second job. This is something they contribute their time, their energy, their commitment to and it’s not about payment.”

Neville echoed Morrison’s initial indifference toward the volunteers, reflecting the longstanding bipartisan policy of imposing the burden of rural and semi-rural firefighting on volunteers.

In another sign of popular disgust, more than 260,000 people have signed a petition to call off tonight’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display on Sydney Harbour, with the funding redirected to drought and bushfire relief. However, both the federal, NSW and local governments declared the need to proceed with the display, which generates some $130 million in revenue for the tourism industry.

Morrison stated: “I think it is important to send a message to the world … We will keep doing what we do normally.” City of Sydney spokeswoman Tanya Goldberg told the media: “Cancelling would seriously hurt Sydney businesses, particularly in the wake of reports of a weaker retail season.”

Millions of people in Australia and internationally, however, are increasingly aware that corporate profit interests is the primary factor blocking any serious action to address climate change and its consequences, including the fire crisis.

Texas church shooting caps record year for mass killings in America

Trévon Austin

A gunman and two other people were killed during services at a church in White Settlement, Texas on Sunday. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, two of the deceased were church-goers: Anton Wallace, 64, from Fort Worth, and Richard White, 67, from River Oaks.

The shooter, identified as Keith Thomas Kinnunen, was killed after members of the church’s security team responded to his opening fire on the congregation. According to the police, Jack Wilson, a former reserve deputy sheriff, was the only person to return fire at Kinnunen. Wilson fired a single shot, from which Kinnunen would later die after being taken to a hospital.

Livestream footage from the church shows a grisly scene. Kinnunen, wearing dark clothing, is seen sitting towards the back of the church. He gets up and holds a short conversation with one of the members, who points towards the right. Kinnunen then walks to the middle of the church before pulling out a shotgun and shooting two people before being shot himself. The incident lasted six seconds.

Amy Kinnunen, the gunman’s sister, told reporters her brother had a troubled past and was homeless for a time. Keith Kinnunen was charged with misdemeanor deadly conduct in 2009 and misdemeanor theft in 2013. He and his brother Joel lived on the streets. The latter died by suicide in 2009. Sunday was his birthday. Amy said she did not think her brother’s actions were politically motivated or an act of revenge.

Sunday’s tragic incident has been seized on to praise a Texas law passed in 2017 making it legal to carry arms in places of worship. The law was passed in response to a deadly shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. The Texas lieutenant governor referred to the law at a press conference where he said the church security team saved “an untold number of lives.”

On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Fox News that had that law not been passed, “I fear that we could have lost, you know, hundreds.”

The hailing of lax gun laws as a supposed deterrent to gun violence contrasts with reports that 2019 will set a new record for mass killings in the US. A database compiled by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Northeastern University shows that there were more mass killings, identified as incidents where four or more people are killed, in 2019 than in any year dating back to 2006, when the team first began tracking such events. Other research going back to the 1970s shows that no previous year had as many mass killings.

Overall, there were 41 mass killings that resulted in more than 210 deaths. Only eight of the killings did not involve guns.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 400 mass shootings in 2019. The website defines mass shootings as incidents involving firearms where four or more people are injured. Texas alone saw some 30 attacks this year, including the tragic shooting in El Paso that left 22 dead.

Although the number of incidents set a record, the 210 people killed this year is still overshadowed by 224 victims in 2017, when the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history took place in Las Vegas, claiming 58 lives.

According to the database, most mass killings fail to make national news because they do not occur in public spaces. The majority of the killings involve people who know each other, such as family members, gang members and distraught individuals who open fire on their coworkers. Nine mass shootings occurred in a public place. Other mass killings occurred in a home, a workplace or a bar. Often, the motives behind the killings are never discovered.

Nearly half of all states experienced mass shootings this year. Mass slayings occurred in various parts of the nation, from large cities such as New York to small communities like Elkmont, Alabama, with a population of just under 475 people. California, a state with some of the most stringent gun laws in the country, had eight mass killings, the most of any state.

The prevalence of mass violence in the United States is indicative of a malignant social crisis. The regularity of mass violence is bound up with a systematic assault by the ruling class on the conditions of the working class. The American ruling elite diverts billions to fund its imperialist strivings and enrich the upper echelons of society, but tells Americans there is “no money” for basic social programs.

Politicians and the media inevitably respond to the latest mass killing with empty platitudes. The Democrats call for restricting access to guns as the solution, while most Republicans promote the opposite. Both of these responses are disingenuous and serve to cover up the rotten state of American capitalism.

Along with the spread of poverty and toxic levels of social inequality, the militarization of American society plays a key role in the social crisis. Each year, state and local governments spend over $100 billion to fund police departments. The Democrats and Republicans recently passed, with bipartisan support, the largest military budget in US history, giving the Trump administration a green light to wage wars abroad and against migrants crossing the US-Mexico border.