Australian state election dominated by alienation and discontent

Mike Head 

Such is the level of disgust and disaffection with the Australian political establishment, that this Saturday’s election in New South Wales (NSW), the country’s most populous state, could produce a “hung” parliament, with no party able to form a majority government.

Years of widening social inequality and worsening living conditions under successive Liberal-National and Labor governments have created deep discontent within broad layers of the working class, which finds no voice within the official political setup. Real wages are in serious decline and youth unemployment is at endemic levels, including in Sydney, the state capital and the country’s financial industry hub. Rural poverty is widespread.

The state’s official unemployment rate is 3.7 percent, largely as a result of a six-year property boom, which is now crashing. But the rate is more than three times higher in working-class suburbs, such as Liverpool, Fairfield, South Granville and Mount Druitt, and in regional centres like Albury, Tamworth and Nowra.

These statistics are just one indicator of the yawning gulf between the corporate elite, whose wealth has soared since the 2008 global financial meltdown, and the workers and youth who have paid the price via casualised employment, record levels of household debt and deteriorating social services and infrastructure.

Billions of dollars have been poured into corporate pockets for long-delayed and mostly privatised road and rail projects, while the state has more than 1,000 dysfunctional demountable school classrooms and the median waiting time for “elective surgery” in public hospitals has risen to 234 days. More than 37,700 people experience homelessness on any night—up by 40 percent in eight years—and falling house prices mean that many households now owe more on their mortgages than the market value of their homes.

Another indication of mass discontent was expressed last Friday, when tens of thousands of school students, in towns and cities throughout the country, joined their international counterparts by walking out of their classrooms to take a political stand against the escalating threat of climate change and the governments and corporations responsible for it. Notably, they did so in defiance of disciplinary threats from the state government and school principals.

State Labor Party leader, Michael Daley, used the strike to criticise the current Liberal-National Coalition government for denouncing the students, but both major parties have failed to come anywhere near a commitment to the students’ demand for 100 percent renewables by 2030—let alone any broad, scientifically-worked out plan to halt climate change and prevent the planet’s destruction.

The lack of any fundamental differences between the major establishment parties has seen the state’s voters deluged by negative attack ads and mud-slinging, accompanied by phony promises to suddenly make available billions of dollars to tackle the longstanding decline in public health and education, enforced by both Labor and Coalition-led governments for decades.

The agenda of whichever party leads the next government has been determined in advance: to impose the burden of the intensifying capitalist breakdown onto the backs of the working class.

Buried by the corporate media, an official pre-election budget update warned that global factors, including “rising political tensions, policy uncertainty, financial market volatility and hikes in trade tariffs” were clouding the state’s economic outlook. In particular, “deteriorating conditions in the housing market are having a stronger than expected negative impact on consumer spending and dwelling approvals.”

According to market analysts, Sydney’s median house price has fallen more than 10 percent from its peak in mid-2017 and worse is yet to come. As well as throwing over-stretched working-class families deeper into financial stress, this is stripping billions of dollars from state government revenues.

The election is also being held amid a deepening political crisis.

After 16 years in office, the last pro-business and notoriously corrupt Labor government was thrown out in 2011, reducing Labor’s vote to an historic low of 25.5 percent. At the last state election in 2015, Labor’s vote rose to just 34.4 percent, despite its hypocritical efforts to exploit the hostility to the federal Coalition government.

Opinion polls indicate little pickup in Labor’s support since then, leaving it short of winning the 13 seats in the 93-seat lower house needed to form a majority government. But the Coalition is also languishing at less than 40 percent.

A defeat for the eight-year-old Coalition state government is likely to intensify the factional war inside the unstable federal Coalition government, which must go to an election by the end of May.

Last year, NSW Liberal MPs urged Prime Minister Scott Morrison to call an early federal poll, in order to get “smashed” and improve the chances of the Coalition clinging onto office in NSW. Instead, Morrison has delayed the federal election for as long as possible, and certainly until after the NSW vote.

State Premier Gladys Berejikilian is a member of the Liberal Party’s “moderate” wing, as was Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, whom the party’s “hard right” faction removed last year. There is nothing remotely progressive, however, about either faction, with both supporting deeper attacks on living conditions and democratic rights, and stirring up nationalism and anti-immigrant xenophobia.

Berejikilian’s defeat, however, would intensify the federal inner-party crisis. The “hard right,” led by Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, would exploit the loss to intensify its push to transform the Coalition into an anti-immigrant, populist and fascistic movement, along the lines of Trump in the US and far-right parties in Europe.

Both Berejikilian and Labor’s Daley have contributed to the demonisation of immigrants, blaming them for the lack of infrastructure, loss of full-time jobs and other social problems. Berejikilian has agitated for months for the halving of immigration into NSW. Following last Friday’s fascist attack on Muslims in New Zealand, a speech by Daley surfaced on social media showing him accusing Asian immigrants and other “foreigners” of “moving in and taking” the jobs of “our kids.”

“White Australia” nationalism and racism, upon which the trade unions established the Labor Party in the 1890s, remains at the core of their political DNA. This has been underscored by the fact that Mark Latham, who led the Labor Party nationally less than 15 years ago, is standing in the NSW election as the lead candidate for the virulent anti-immigrant Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, one of a plethora of far-right parties seeking to divert growing working class unrest into reactionary racist and nationalist directions.

Daley, who was installed as Labor leader last November, is being presented in the corporate media as new and relatively unknown. Given the level of popular hostility, this is regarded as an electoral advantage. In reality, he was a roads, police and finance minister in the last Labor government, which boosted the police force to deal with social unrest, sold off the state’s electricity retail assets, axed jobs and sent household power prices soaring, in order to accelerate the privatisation of public services and utilities.

The union bureaucrats, who policed the last Labor government’s policies, in tandem with the pseudo-left groups, such as Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, are campaigning, yet again, for the return of another big business Labor government, perhaps in alliance with the Greens, as a supposed “lesser evil.”

This claim has been peddled at virtually every Australian state and federal election for decades, and millions of ordinary people now know it to be a lie. Both major parties unashamedly represent the financial and corporate interests of the country’s “power elites,” and both are utterly impervious to the crisis facing the vast bulk of the population. Moreover, Labor and the Liberal-National coalition, along with the Greens, fully support the country’s military alliance with the US, and are deeply implicated in Washington’s drive to war against China, in order to reinforce its global hegemony.

Workers and youth need to take firm stand against the new round of lies being promoted in the 2019 NSW state election, and turn to the socialist and internationalist perspective that alone represents the interests of the working class. That is the perspective advanced by the Socialist Equality Party, for social equality, for democratic rights, including freedom for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, and for the international unity of the working class in the struggle against austerity and war.

Officials, media call for school militarization, censorship after mass shooting in Brazilian school

Miguel Andrade

Brazil, one of the most unequal and violent countries in the world, was left stunned a week ago on Wednesday by the brutality of a school shooting in the city of Suzano, in the industrial belt surrounding São Paulo. Two former students of the Raul Brasil State School, one aged 17 and the other 25, opened fire during a class break, killing five students and two school officials and wounding 17 others, before the 17-year-old shot his older accomplice and killed himself as the police arrived.

It soon emerged that another murder in the city minutes earlier, of the 17-year-old’s uncle, was the beginning of the rampage. This week, police announced the provisional detention of another 17-year-old youth, charged with helping to organize the massacre.

As the police and media investigation into the reasons for the massacre and the profiles of the shooters began, it immediately became clear that deep social alienation had been a major factor in their lives for a long time. Despite the age difference, the two had been friends from an early age and shared a considerable portion of their lives together playing video games at a local LAN gaming center, where workers told investigators they mostly played so-called shooting games, as do most of those who go there.

While the older shooter, Luiz Henrique de Castro, had graduated from the school, the younger one, Guilherme Taucci de Monteiro, had dropped out a year ago, telling his parents and grandparents, with whom he lived, that he couldn’t bear the feeling of social awkwardness and exclusion. His family, itself in considerable social distress as a result of the mother being unemployed for two years and also suffering from severe drug addiction, was unable to help. The conditions affecting his family are widespread in the city, at the center of a growing “rust belt” in São Paulo’s far east, in which no less than 25 percent of families are recipients of poverty relief benefits, and industry and trade are facing a slow recovery from a 43 percent collapse.

According to family members, despite the long build-up of Monteiro’s distress, the death of his grandmother three months ago plunged him into what appeared to be severe depression.

Much evidence, including social media posts, has also shown that the shooters had grown increasingly close to the far-right milieu, including to the online defenders of unabashed police violence in Brazil and promoters of violent threats against public figures associated with the left, and, not least, those targeted by Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro himself.

At some point, Monteiro started adopting American neo-Nazi symbols, including the skull balaclava that he wore when he invaded the Raul Brasil school, and which is worn by members of the neo-Nazi “Atomwaffen Division” in the US. An active line of investigation is being pursued into what extent the shooters had been involved with dark web “chans”—like those used by the fascist terrorist of Christchurch, where, in the wake of the massacre, monitors have detected not only messages of celebration, but also the emergence of messages being attributed to the shooters in Brazil.

In the official reactions from authorities and media, broader social issues remained the great unmentionable. For the know-nothings in the government and media, no word was warranted about the Brazilian social apartheid that is fueling civil-war levels of youth deaths in “drug wars,” countless state-sponsored police murders and the locking-up of 700,000 people, who live in constant terror of being decapitated in another riot in the veritable dungeons that constitute the country’s prison system.

While city and state authorities immediately issued perfunctory condolence statements. The fascistic president Jair Bolsonaro took six hours to post a statement on social media, predictably calling the massacre an act of “incomparable monstrosity and cowardice.” The Supreme Court president issued a dismissive statement in which he absurdly claimed that “this kind of violence is not part of our culture.”

Meanwhile, in Congress, politicians reduced the massacre to the questions of either gun control or the arming of teachers. Leaders and members of Congress from the Workers Party (PT) and Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), acting with the minds of petty state bureaucrats, issued mealy-mouthed statements, peppered with cheap psychoanalysis, about it being “necessary to end the culture of violence, which presents guns as a ‘purveyor of power.’”

Much more significant, however, was the bankrupt and reactionary response of what passes for the “progressive” press, as expressed in Folha de S. Paulo’sopinion pages, where the consensus was that reporting on the issue only encouraged future tragedies, and that attempting to reflect on wider underlying issues such as inequality, unemployment and the generally violent relations under capitalism was a distraction from the problems of “patriarchy” and “entitlement,” as well as the “suffering of the victims.”

Such opinions were expressed against the ominous backdrop of a statement by São Paulo’s Public Attorney’s office announcing that it is seeking to bring terrorism charges against anyone involved in the attack, unleashing the draconian 2016 anti-terror law approved by the PT. The measure would set a precedent for the witch-hunt of hundreds of thousands of people sharing, in one way or another, gun-related material the Attorney General’s office considers akin to that shared by the assailants.

Expressing the lurch to the right by the upper middle class, cultural critic Nelson de Sá quickly reacted to the tragedy with unmistakable “#MeToo” language, writing: “contrary to American journalism, we in Brazil still haven’t learned that the protagonists in this kind of story are the victims, not the assassins.” In other words, any attempt to understand what motivated two youth to kill others and then take their own lives is forbidden, and the public must accept that such tragedies just happen.

Another reactionary piece was written by the paper’s Ombundsman, who gained notoriety during the election for criticizing Folha’s editorial board for not classifying Bolsonaro as a far-right politician. Defending Sá’s line of reasoning, she related the Suzano tragedy with the Christchurch attack, asking rhetorically about the Australian fascist’s manifesto: “what is the point of reporting someone’s amateurish evaluation of the effect of race mixing on a nation’s development?” In other words, the Brazilian public must not be warned of the international fascist danger.

Another high-profile piece posted by Folha was a 2018 New York Times article by Frank Bruni that blames all such tragedies—as well as Bolsonaro’s election—on the internet, and concludes with a call for censorship: “I don’t know exactly how we square free speech and free expression—which are paramount—with a better policing of the internet, but I’m certain that we need to approach that challenge with more urgency than we have mustered so far. Democracy is at stake. So are lives.”

Such privileged layers, with nothing by contempt for the public in general and the working class in particular, are shifting ever further rightward. They are terrified that such supposedly incomprehensible tragedies are pushing broad layers of the population to see and react against the whole of capitalist irrationality, as shown by the outpouring of solidarity for the slain children.

Fifteen thousand people attended their collective funeral. As for the reaction of the parents, one of them told the press: “It never crossed my mind not to forgive the assailants. They are kids. They too are victims.” He added: “Dealing with them was first their family’s responsibility. But if the family can’t help, what is to be done?”

The army of petty-bourgeois identity politics pseudo-leftists are determined to suppress such questions. Their thoroughly reactionary response includes the assertion by Vice News that the attack was typical of someone “feeling wronged for not having what was promised to him [as a “man”]: a fancy job, high salary and sex with beautiful women.” Similarly, Marcelo Hailer in Revista Fórum stated that “toxic masculinity killed the Suzano students,” adding that “this masculinity promises a world of conquest for heterosexual men.”

It never occurs to these misanthropes that far more than “a world of conquests” is missing for millions of youth—particularly in deindustrialized towns like Suzano. More and more, the logical conclusion of this pseudo-left interpretation of the tragedy coincides with that of the far right—the youth who carried out the shootings were “monsters.”

A break with such reactionary views and the pseudo-left organizations which promote them is ever more urgent, as the far-right is openly targeting youth in Brazil and internationally in anticipation of major class struggles, and the Bolsonaro government is seeking to rally a far-right base by constantly appealing for parents, and even students, to denounce “Marxist indoctrination” by teachers and professors.

This campaign is being closely coordinated with the international far right. This was shown in Bolsonaro’s US visit, which included meetings with both Steve Bannon and the Virginia-based fascistic charlatan Olavo de Carvalho.

Supported by powerful corporate backers, right-wingers supporting the campaign have already pushed the PT and the pseudo-left out of two major student unions, in Rio Grande do Sul in the far south and in the capital Brasília, while Bolsonaro supporters have just finished their first “Conservative Students Congress,” hailing Brazil’s military dictatorship’s murderers and promising to escalate the witch hunt against socialism.

There is no doubt that such a fascistic campaign had its role in the channeling of the two shooters’ social alienation into such extreme anti-social behavior.

The Suzano tragedy has exposed the dismissive attitude of the PT and its satellites towards broader issues, which has in itself facilitated the official red-baiting. Despite their claims to be an “anti-fascist” opposition to Bolsonaro, these organizations have never missed an opportunity to answer far-right rants and threats by Bolsonaro and his supporters by completely dissociating themselves from socialism.

Historic flooding across US Midwest leaves thousands homeless, four dead

Jacob Crosse 

Thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes as communities throughout the US Midwest experience historic flooding events. States of emergency have been declared in four states, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin and South Dakota. As of this writing, four people have died, while thousands remain in emergency shelters or trapped in their homes, surrounded by water.

Seventy out of 99 counties in Nebraska are under state-issued emergency declarations, as are 41 of Iowa’s 99 counties. In both states, melting snow, ice jams, and falling rain have engorged river systems with rushing water that has overwhelmed insufficient levee systems and destroyed outdated dams.

The flooding, which began last week, but was predicted weeks in advance, will continue throughout the week and into spring, as snow and ice melts while rain continues to fall. According to the National Weather Service, flooding has impacted approximately 9 million people in 14 states.

A record-setting winter snowfall season followed by last week's “bomb cyclone,” which brought high winds and heavy snow across the Midwest, in conjunction with warming temperatures, proved to be a deadly combination that has overwhelmed neglected infrastructure and transportation systems.

The latest environmental and social crisis, exacerbated by climate change, will have devastating effects on local farming economies. Meteorologists have documented  a 15 and 20 percent increase in rainfall  in the Upper Midwest in recent decades. The frequency of high impact rainfall has nearly doubled in the same timeframe. The message is clear: just as hurricanes and tropical storms have increased in intensity, flooding events in the Midwest are expected to increase as well.

Flooding events in the United States will increase food prices on a global scale. The Midwest and Great Plains states, including Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and Minnesota, contain some of the most productive and valuable agricultural land in the country. In Nebraska early estimates place the economic losses to farmers from the current flooding, primarily centered on corn and livestock, at over $1 billion, with that number expected to rise.

The flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi flood plains has compromised approximately 210 miles of the federal levee system in four states, making travel arduous or impossible for residents seeking to find shelter or return home and assess damages. In addition to overflowing levees, at least two dams have been compromised. The Spencer Dam, located on the Niobrara River in Nebraska, was destroyed last week, leading to at least one fatality.

Vice President Mike Pence conducted a flyby of the submerged Nebraska plains and briefly stopped in Omaha for photo opportunities with local government officials on Tuesday. Pence assured those in attendance that once he returned to Washington, D.C. federal disaster declarations would be “expedited.”

Despite Pence’s rehearsed remarks workers can be assured that whatever funds are made available after the fact will be severely lacking and difficult to access, while lucrative rebuilding contracts will be made available to campaign contributors and connected business interests.

The flooding has been particularly devastating to rural farmers in the affected area, many of whom were already teetering on financial ruin. Bankruptcy among farmers rose by 19 percent across the region in 2018, including in Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. Dairy farmers, already in a precarious financial situation as milk prices continue drop due to escalating trade war tariffs between the United States and China, have been forced to dump thousands of gallons of milk, with some farmers forced to quit the industry all together.

Farms that haven’t been inundated with floods aren’t safe from the effects of the deluge. Vital rail and road infrastructure used to transport feed, grain and livestock has been washed away, isolating the farmers from local and global markets. In Nebraska, over 40 state and federal highways remain closed due to flooding. In some cases National Guard troops have been airlifting in hay and feed to prevent a mass culling of livestock. Even so, farmers are reporting massive losses as thousands of animals have either been trapped in overflowing barns or swept away by rushing water.

The Army of Corps of Engineers has warned that flooding will continue and that a “majority of the federal levee systems” are “compromised ... along the Missouri River from the confluence of the Platte River to Rulo, Nebraska.”

In 2011, following a major flood that breached a two-mile-long levee in Hamburg, Iowa, residents took matters into their own hands and raised the height of the levee to prevent future flooding. Federal officials however, intervened against this act of self-preservation and ordered the locals to reduce the size of the levee to pre-flood levels unless they were willing to make an additional $5.5 million in improvements. This proved to be too costly for the small town so the levee was lowered.

Hamburg residents such as Lana Brandt, 70, are flummoxed as to the government's intentions, now that Hamburg, eight years later, is once again under water.

“The government made us tear the top off of the levee and bring it down to stump size...and so the water’s rushing over the levee now,” Brandt told The Daily Nonpareil. “Whereas, if we had been able to keep that levee, we might have been able to keep our community dry, and we wouldn’t lose businesses and property and crops. This is huge.”

While workers and farmers are forced to pack sandbags and erect dirt berms in order to protect their lives and homes, the federal government is flying in hundreds of feet of retaining walls to protect military assets located at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. A 740 foot-long, four-foot-tall system of barriers was flown in from Louisiana to the base overnight on Sunday to protect flight simulators from being flooded.

The long-term effects of the massive cleanup that will be required will include innumerable environmental impacts on farmers and communities. Waterlogged fields will need to be dried before spring planting can begin, lest fields rot, mold over or fail entirely. The flooding has produced a dangerous concoction of industrial chemicals and pesticides that has covered hundreds of miles of farmland and seeped into the walls of homes, schools and businesses.

“The water is chock-full of stuff. This is a toxic brew that is going down the river—the water took out gas stations and farm shops and fuel barrels,” John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, told the Washington Post.

Once the waters begin to recede, workers and farmers will be left to pick up the pieces on their own. Thousands of people who couldn’t afford flood insurance will continue the American tradition of appealing to their fellow workers on websites such as GoFundMe.com for the funds and supplies necessary to survive once Red Cross shelters close and token government assistance shrivels up.

With each successive natural disaster American capitalism reveals itself incapable of and unwilling to mitigate the impact on the working class. The systematic negligence of vital infrastructure is another expression of class exploitation in the United States. Only through the reorganization of society on a scientific socialist perspective, organized for human need rather than private profit, will future climate disasters be mitigated and unnecessary loss of life be stopped.

Click here for graphs detailing increase in water precipitation in Midwest.

Amid deepening economic and political crisis, Turkey holds local elections

Ulas Atesci

Amid a mounting economic and political crisis, voters across Turkey will go to the polls March 31 in local elections.

Facing bitter tensions with Washington and Turkey’s other NATO allies over the decades-long wars in Iraq and Syria and an economic crisis triggered by the Trump administration’s trade war measures, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces possible defeat in the country’s principal cities. This raises the prospect that the government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his right-wing populist AKP, which has ruled the country since late 2002, could unravel and fall.

Whatever the elections’ outcome, they will solve nothing. The main rival of the “People’s Alliance” of the AKP and the fascistic Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) is the so-called “Nation Alliance.” It unites the Republican People’s Party or CHP—the party of the capitalist-military-bureaucratic Kemalist elite that dominated the institutions of the Turkish Republic in the 20th century—with the Good Party, a split-off from the MHP. The Nation Alliance is backed by the Kurdish nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and a wide swathe of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations.

The CHP-Good Party-Kurdish bourgeois alliance is no less hostile to the interests of the working class than the AKP-MHP alliance, from which it is distinguished mainly by its more pronounced orientation to, and closer relations with, the imperialist powers. Amid growing class struggles internationally, including the emergence of a revolutionary movement among workers and youth against Algeria’s military regime, the Nation Alliance-HDP partnership serves to chain growing working class anger against Erdogan to the capitalist system and to imperialist war.

The AKP-MHP alliance emerged after the MHP backed the AKP against an abortive US- and German-backed coup attempt, launched from NATO’s Incirlik air base on July 15, 2016, that aimed to kill Erdogan and topple his government. This alliance, which has controlled the national government since then, now faces a deepening economic slump, growing popular anger over social inequality, and mounting pressure and threats from Turkey’s traditional imperialist allies.

Increasing tensions between Turkey and the US came to a head when Washington made the Syrian offshoot of the PKK—the Kurdish nationalist group against which Ankara has been waging a bloody war for the past 35 years—its principal proxy army in the fight to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Incensed, Ankara refocused its intervention in Syria from regime change in Damascus to blocking the emergence of a PKK proto-state there. In pursuit of this goal, it has entered into a shaky alliance of convenience with Russia and Iran, who share the objective of rolling back US influence in Syria.

Since the 2016 aborted coup, Erdogan has attempted to straddle the fault lines of world geopolitics, insisting Turkey wants to maintain close relations with the US and pursue membership of the European Union. But Washington has responded with bullying and ever more strident threats.

Deepening economic crisis

US efforts to punish Turkey economically have had a significant impact on an economy that was already facing turbulence.

After Trump imposed tariffs on Turkish exports to the United States last year, Turkey’s economy entered its first recession in a decade, falling 2.4 percent in the last three months of 2018. Turkey last fell into recession in 2009 amid the global economic crisis triggered by the 2008 Wall Street crash. Unemployment has surged to 13.5 percent, and 24.5 percent among the youth. In the last six months, almost 1 million people have applied for unemployment pay.

At the beginning of 2018, the minimum wage, paid to almost half of Turkish workers, was 1,603 TL (US$424). As Turkey’s currency collapses and prices soar, particularly for food, the purchasing power of the minimum wage—despite a 26 percent rise to 2,020 TL—has fallen to US$370.

As the AKP falls in the polls and faces possible defeat in Istanbul, Ankara and other cities, there are signs that the AKP could disintegrate. Ex-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, ex-President Abdullah Gul and other ex-AKP officials are reportedly considering launching a new party. Some sources claim they have more than 50 parliamentary deputies from both the AKP and CHP—enough to potentially bring down the AKP-MHP alliance in the national parliament.

Erdogan has responded by running a bellicose nationalist campaign, claiming an AKP victory is crucial to the Turkish people’s survival against its “external and internal enemies.” At an AKP rally, he also attacked AKP turncoats, denouncing those who “have gotten off the [AKP] train and boarded another. … Those who betray us today will betray the place they go in the future.”

Erdogan and MHP leader Devlet Bahceli are branding the CHP, the Good Party and the HDP as “terrorist” groups, saying they are aligned with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) and what they call the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETO) of Fethullah Gulen—the US-based preacher Ankara blames for the 2016 coup attempt.

In the run-up to the elections, the Erdogan government has intensified its political repression, targeting opposition leaders and candidates for legal attack. CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has been accused of insulting the interior minister in a TV speech 10 months ago, and prosecutors have begun proceedings to remove his parliamentary immunity so he can be charged and tried. HDP co-leader Sezai Temelli and the CHP’s Ankara candidate Mansur Yavas have also been hit with legal charges.

Erdogan is seeking to appeal to popular opposition to US imperialism and NATO, talking up plans to buy the S-400 air defense system from Russia, and denouncing as “terrorists” the Kurdish forces that the US and its other nominal NATO allies have used to wage their ruinous regime-change war in Syria.

The opposition Nation Alliance tries to put itself forward as the only alternative to “AKP-MHP fascism.” CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has pledged to fight for a “strong democracy” and a “strong social state” with “sustainability.” At the same time, the CHP and its allies are generally silent on relations with Turkey’s NATO allies—trying to signal to the imperialist powers that they would be more reliable allies than Erdogan.

The pledges of the Nation Alliance to fight for democracy, jobs and social spending are empty rhetoric. In fact, it is just as hostile to the struggles and social aspirations of the working class as the AKP—a point that the CHP made very clear by joining the AKP in denouncing the Izmir metro strike. Moreover, as the party of the traditional Kemalist elite, the CHP is directly implicated in all its crimes, including repeated coups and the brutal anti-Kurdish war.

Subordinating the working class to pro-imperialist parties in the name of fighting “fascism”

To present itself as to the “left” of Erdogan, the Nation Alliance relies on the services of the Kurdish nationalist HDP and the pseudo-left parties.

The HDP is endorsing the Nation Alliance even though it supports Erdogan’s cross-border military operations in Syria and Iraq, and Erdogan’s decision to jail thousands of HDP members, including former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş and other HDP parliamentary deputies.

The HDP has refrained from nominating candidates in the major cities of western Turkey and is instead endorsing those of the Nation Alliance. The HDP is issuing empty promises to its voters that if they elect Nation Alliance candidates, these candidates will be obliged to listen to them. HDP co-chair Sezai Temelli recently said, “Mansur Yavas will know” if he becomes Ankara’s mayor “it is with HDP votes. He can’t run his politics ignoring HDP voters.”

The HDP is running its own candidates mainly in the Kurdish-majority areas of southeastern Turkey. It is also cooperating with the Felicity Party (SP, a smaller Islamist party) in some places.

From prison, where Erdogan has placed him for calling for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey in alliance with US-backed Kurdish militias across the border in Syria, Demirtas has endorsed a Nation Alliance vote as an “anti-fascist” vote against Erdogan. He calls on HDP voters “to cast your vote for a strategic purpose to limit and retract the fascist bloc. HDP voters should never consider other parties or party members as enemies. The defeat of the AKP and the MHP depends on an effective outcome of votes you cast.”

The pseudo-left parties are claiming opposition to the AKP-MHP bloc is justification for supporting the bourgeois CHP and HDP, and even the far-right Good Party or the Islamist Felicity Party.

As the World Socialist Web Site stated before last June’s parliamentary and presidential elections, “The Turkish pseudo-left parties and organisations are lining up behind the pro-NATO and pro-EU bourgeois opposition parties. ... They are all in agreement on the rejection of an independent perspective for the working class—independent of all the discredited bourgeois camps.”

Alper Tas, the leader of the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP), has accepted the CHP’s nomination as a candidate for the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, with HDP and Good Party support.

On March 19, Labor Party (EMEP) leader Selma Gurkan also endorsed CHP candidates in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, telling the daily Evrensel that “the forces of labor and democracy, which includes us, have agreed to support CHP candidates” in Turkey’s major cities.

Turkey’s Socialist Equality Group endorses none of the bourgeois candidates in these elections, which will resolve nothing, regardless of which camp wins. It seeks to intervene in these elections to lay out the basis of an independent policy of the Turkish and international working class, oppose the wars and bankrupt political pretensions of the capitalist parties, and develop its struggle to build a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in Turkey.

Ukrainian far right mobilized in inter-oligarchic infighting

Jason Melanovski & Clara Weiss 

With less than two weeks left in the presidential campaign, the Ukrainian Interior Minister has mobilized against incumbent president Petro Poroshenko the very same far-right forces that were instrumental in the imperialist-backed 2014 coup that brought Poroshenko to power.

Last week, Poroshenko, who currently sits in third place in Ukraine’s Presidential election polls, behind comedian and leading candidate Volodmyr Zelenskiy and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was accosted by members of the far-right Azov Battalion-affiliated National Militia in the city of Zhytomyr during a campaign stop. In a photo that was widely shared on social media, Poroshenko was seen fleeing reporters and the far-right thugs while jumping through puddles in the street.

Earlier that week, on March 9, members of the National Militia and other far-right groups attacked Poroshenko’s office in Kiev, leading to the deployment of 700 officers with tear gas to prevent a potential coup against Poroshenko prior to the March 31 presidential elections.

The attacks by the far right on Poroshenko come weeks after the release of an explosive Youtube video reporting that the son of one of Poroshenko’s close political allies, Ihor Hladkovskyy, had begun smuggling military parts from Russia in 2015 and then used private companies linked to Hladkovskyy and Poroshenko to sell the smuggled parts to the military at highly inflated prices. According to the report, the government knew that the items were smuggled into Ukraine from Russia and that the prices were inflated, but continued to purchase the parts in order to enrich companies linked to Hladkovskyy and Poroshenko. Poroshenko later removed Hladovskyy from his position as deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

In the wake of this report, figures such as far-right Azov Battalion leader Andrey Biletsky and his ally Interior Minister Arsen Avakov have come out publicly in opposition to another presidential term for Poroshenko. Despite being a member of Poroshenko’s government and parliamentary bloc, Avakov stated in an interview with Ukraine’s ICTV, “We are at the end of the political cycle. One way or another, when this political cycle ends, we will have a new president and a new government. And here I am absolutely calm.”

Biletsky and the Azov Battalion have demanded the resignation of Poroshenko prior to the elections, and promised to break up all Poroshenko campaign events prior to March 31.

Interior Minister Avakov, who is the only minister who has been part of changing administrations in Kiev ever since the coup in 2014, is rumored to be allied with Poroshenko’s rival in the election, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Both Biletsky and Avakov are regarded as political friends of the exiled oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Kolomoyskyi is said to be bankrolling both Tymoshenko and leading candidate Volodmyr Zelenskyi against Poroshenko in the upcoming elections.

Avakov, who as Interior Minister controls the country’s police force, National Guard, and successor militias to the Azov Battalion which have been incorporated into the government, has immense power to control and threaten voting sites in the upcoming elections. He could also easily order police to stand by in the event of a far-right insurrection against the Poroshenko government.

In addition, the Biletsky-affiliated National Militia have been named official election observers by the country’s Central Election Commission. The group has promised to violently threaten anyone it perceives as committing “fraud,” stating, “If we need to punch someone in the face in the name of justice, we will do this without hesitation.”

The comments by Biletsky and Avakov and the threats by the far right point to potentially violent clashes on March 31, with each side crying foul. Poroshenko, who still enjoys the support of the regular military and his Western imperialist backers, has begun making statements promising that the upcoming elections will be “honest” and “would fully meet European standards of the election campaign.” He is using these declarations to set the stage to condemn the results due to election “fraud,” and to seek Western support if he fails to make it out of the first round of the voting.

Poroshenko, whose campaign has relied chiefly on the whipping up of nationalism, religious separatism and Russophobia, has responded to the attacks from the far right by stepping up militaristic threats against Russia. He has tried to portray his far-right opponents as playing into the hands of the Kremlin, stating in one interview, “Putin hopes that anyone but Poroshenko will be elected, so that the new Ukrainian leaders crawl on their knees and grant him Crimea. My position—don’t count on it! We will liberate Crimea.”

Poroshenko is well aware that both Tymoshenko and Zelenskyi are seen as less reliable allies of the United States and NATO in their ongoing confrontation with Russia. Zelenskyi, a native Russian speaker who enjoys widespread popularity both in Russia and Ukraine, previously appealed to Putin to avoid a military confrontation between the two countries. Tymoshenko likewise has had previous business contacts with Russia, and has made vague promises to end the conflict “peacefully.”

The mobilization of the far right, which is drenched in the blood of thousands of Ukrainian civilians who were killed in the past five years of civil war and has rampaged through numerous villages of the Sinti and Roma ethnic minorities, is a direct result of the imperialist-backed coup in 2014, fraudulently portrayed as a “democratic revolution” by the bourgeois media. In reality, exploiting the factional warfare within the oligarchy, the imperialist powers, above all the US and Germany, mobilized far-right forces to bring to power a regime directly subservient to their interests and complicit in their open war preparations against Russia.

Whatever the outcome of the upcoming elections, US imperialism, which views Ukraine as a country of strategic significance in the encirclement of and war preparations against Russia, will not tolerate any deviation from the confrontational stance taken toward Russia by Poroshenko.

The fascistic forces mobilized openly in 2013-2014 have now become the trump card in the internecine factional battles of the oligarchy. Fueling the explosive conflicts within the oligarchy and the government are the enormous social tensions in the country.

The months leading up to the election campaign have seen a growing wave of protests and strikes by the impoverished working class. The Poroshenko regime responded to these class tensions with an imperialist-backed provocation against Russia in the Azov Sea in late October, and the declaration of martial law in several Ukrainian regions before the election campaign.

Recent polls and media reports show that the overwhelming sentiment in the Ukrainian population is one of opposition both to the ongoing war in the east and to the staggering levels of poverty prevailing in the country. With Poroshenko and Tymoshenko widely hated, the comedian Zelenskyi has been able to capitalize on popular discontent by portraying himself as a pro-peace candidate who would de-escalate tensions with Russia and fight the endemic corruption in the country.

The current situation harbors serious dangers for the working class. The same shock troops that have been targeting Poroshenko and that have been employed against the East Ukrainian civilian population since 2014, will be employed in any major social confrontation between the country’s working class and the oligarchy. They will also be utilized in the case of an escalation of the war, both domestically and against Russia, which continues to be the policy direction of substantial sections of Ukrainian ruling circles, and of the US foreign policy establishment.

Far right attacks on UK Muslims following New Zealand massacre

Paul Mitchell

Several right-wing assaults have taken place in Britain since the horrific killing of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand March 15,

Within hours, a 27-year-old man was attacked with a “hammer” and a “batten,” causing injuries to his head, outside a mosque in Whitechapel, East London. The victim had to be taken to hospital for checks before being discharged. The attack started when a gang of white men in their 20s shouted Islamophobic abuse and called the Friday worshippers “terrorists,” according to witnesses. “The suspects returned to their car and left the scene before police arrived,” a spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said.

Despite the incident being filmed by several onlookers, no arrests have been made by the police.

While describing the attack as a “horrible hate crime”, Detective Chief Inspector Sean Channing was desperate to play down its significance. “Whilst there were initial Islamophobic comments made by this group towards the individual which are being treated seriously, I would like to make clear that at no point did the group approach any mosque or congregation in the area… There is no evidence to suggest that the mosque near the area was the intended target.”

On Saturday in Stanwell, near London’s Heathrow Airport, a 50-year-old man went on the rampage with a knife and baseball bat while shouting “All Muslims must die!”

Local residents described him also screaming, “White supremacists rule!” and “Do you wanna die? Well you’re gonna die!’’ before knifing a young Muslim teenager.

The suspect had previously been arrested for sending threats online.

A 24-year-old Syrian neighbour, Nemer Salem, said he had heard a man shouting racist abuse earlier on Saturday including “some crazy things about Muslims… I’m a Muslim and I got a little bit worried.” Another neighbour explained, “He never used to be like this, but over the last couple of months it’s like someone’s flipped a switch and he’s a completely different person.”

The alleged assailant was arrested near the scene on suspicion of attempted murder and racially aggravated public order. The victim of the stabbing was taken to hospital with his injuries described as not life-threatening.

On Sunday, Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, head of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing declared, “Whilst this investigation is still in its infancy, it has hallmarks of a terror event, inspired by the far-right, and therefore it has been declared a terrorism incident.”

The confirmation of a right-wing terror attack by Basu makes a mockery of his claims in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch attack, echoed by the press and politicians, that what happened there was unconnected to the UK. Basu made the ludicrous claim that “there is no intelligence linking these appalling events in Christchurch to the UK.”

But as Socialist Equality Party (UK) national secretary Chris Marsden explained at the launch of the English-language edition of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany in London Sunday, the Christchurch killer, Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant, was “part of an international network of far-right organisations.” He had been radicalised in Europe including the UK.

In his 73-page “manifesto,” Tarrant made hero-worshipping reference to British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley and Darren Osborne, imprisoned in 2017 after driving a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park mosque in north London. Osborne had planned to assassinate London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been physically assaulted only last month at the same mosque. In his manifesto, Tarrant stated that Sadiq Khan is among three politicians who should be targeted for assassination.

Marsden explained, “In Britain, the Brexit referendum had been accompanied by a deluge of nationalism. In June 2016, on the eve of the referendum, fascist Thomas Mair had shot and stabbed Labour MP Jo Cox to death. Tarrant had himself written in support of Brexit, that “it was the British people firing back at mass immigration, cultural displacement and globalism, and that’s a great and wonderful thing.”

In February, the trial began regarding a neo-Nazi plot to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper on behalf of the banned far right group, National Action. Jack Renshaw, 23, bought a machete and carried out research online planning how to kill Cooper for National Action and “white Jihad.” Renshaw has admitted preparing an act of terrorism but has denied being a member of National Action. He is on trial at the Old Bailey alongside Andrew Clarke, 34, and Michal Trubini, 36, from Warrington, who also deny membership of the proscribed organisation—which was banned over its support for the murder of Jo Cox.

This week Harun Khan, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK’s largest Muslim umbrella body with over 500 affiliated organisations, mosques, charities and schools, said that Britain’s Muslim communities were “living under a palpable sense of fear.”

The Christchurch massacre, Khan continued, “makes the risk of copy-cat attacks here in the UK a real possibility, especially in a climate where we are now fully appreciating the growth in the far-right.”

Khan contrasted the government’s commitment of £14 million to support the security of around 400 synagogues and 150 Jewish schools (equivalent to £25,000 per institution) to counter “religiously based hate crime” (12 percent of total recorded hate crimes) with the £2.4 million handed out over three years to all other faith institutions. That is equivalent to less than £500 for each Muslim institution, even though 52 percent of hate crimes are directed at Muslims. Religious hate crimes rose by 40 percent, from 5,949 in 2016-17 to 8,336 in 2017-18, according to the Home Office.

More than 350 leading Islamic figures from countries including the UK, US and South Africa have signed a letter to the Guardian, which links Tarrant’s actions to an atmosphere of “systemic and institutionalised Islamophobia.”

The letter says: “This bigotry has been fuelled by certain callous academics, reckless politicians as well as media outlets who regularly feature those who demonise Islam and Muslims with impunity, disguising their vile mantra behind a veneer of objectivity.

“The massacre of Muslims did not just begin with bullets fired from the barrel of Tarrant’s gun. Rather it was decades in the making: inspired by Islamophobic media reports, hundreds and thousands of column inches of hatred printed in the press, many Muslim-hating politicians and unchecked social media bigotry.”

Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi, a Muslim, felt obliged to call on the government to counter Islamophobia, saying it was the party’s “bigotry blind spot.” Last July, she called for a “full independent inquiry,” saying, “I’ve been warning my party of its ‘Muslim problem’ for far too long.” She had repeatedly raised the issue over the past three years—including writing to Theresa May—but “absolutely nothing tangible has happened”.

“I don’t really believe we have that big a problem,” one former minister told the Guardian. Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis accused Warsi of “missing out on key facts” about the party’s “clear process” and “swift action.”

His comments are shown up for the lies they are by the fact that this month saw 25 Conservative members suspended pending investigations that they made Islamophobic statements on social media. One made the comment, “I was going through a few magazines the other day down at the local Mosque. I was really enjoying myself. Then the rifle jammed.”

Last month, 14 Conservative members of the Facebook group, "Jacob Rees-Mogg: Supporters' Group," were suspended for Islamophobic and racist comments, including demands to “send them home now.”

Macron to deploy French army against “yellow vest” protests

Anthony Torres

After Wednesday’s meeting of the council of ministers, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux announced that President Emmanuel Macron would activate army units during this weekend’s “yellow vest” protests. This is the first time since the 1954–1962 war in Algeria that the army is to be mobilized in police operations on French soil against the population.

Griveaux announced that the operation would have the task of “securing fixed and static points in conformity with their mission, that is to say principally the protection of official buildings.” He justified his recourse to the armed forces by claiming this was necessary to allow the police forces to “concentrate on protest movements and on the maintenance and re-establishment of public order.”

Today, Defense Minister Florence Parly is slated to meet representatives of the police forces in the late afternoon to discuss operational details on the upcoming deployment this Saturday.

The mobilization of army units comes on top of a series of repressive measures the government announced on Tuesday. These include allowing the state to ban protests if “radicals” attend them, increasing fines for participating in a banned protest from 38 to 135 euros, the setting up of “anti-hooligan brigades” of police, the use of drones, the firing of chemical agents allowing police to trace demonstrators, and the use of police checkpoints to stop and identify demonstrators.

The resort to the French army to threaten protests against social inequality marks a historical turning point of international significance. A wave of strikes and protests is spreading across the world, driven by mounting political anger at decades of austerity and militarism. These range from protests by the “yellow vests” to strikes against decade-long wage freezes across Europe, to the mass protests against the Algerian military dictatorship, to the strikes of US teachers and Mexican maquiladora workers and mass strikes in Sri Lanka and India.

Macron’s decision to deploy the army against the “yellow vests” is part of the increasingly desperate attempts of the ruling class internationally to intimidate the rising political opposition among workers and, failing that, to create conditions to try to repress it through force of arms.

The government is deploying the army amid the media frenzy that followed the looting of the Champs- Élysées avenue in Paris during last Saturday’s “yellow vest” protests. But there is no hard evidence that “yellow vest” protesters carried out this looting. Top officials, including Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, have said these actions were committed by far-right groups who exploited a breakdown in the chain of command of the police forces, some of whom were filmed joining in the looting of shops on the Champs- Élysées.

Despite the murkiness of Saturday’s events, the government is responding by rapidly stepping up threats against protesters. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner brazenly declared that on Saturday, police were facing “10,000 hooligans,” implying that the vast majority of peaceful “yellow vest” protesters were violent criminals whom police could treat as such. Speaking about the violence on Saturday, Macron for his part provocatively declared that supporters of the “yellow vest” movement “have made themselves complicit in it.”

The looting Saturday is only a pretext for the implementation of plans that have been long prepared. A possible resort to the army inside France has been publicly discussed for several years, since the then-ruling Socialist Party (PS) began calling for dispatching the army to working class districts of Marseille and other cities under President François Hollande.

The use of troops to crack down on domestic political opposition underscores the correctness of the WSWS’s long-standing opposition to fraudulent claims that the “war on terror” launched by Washington and its European allies aims to protect the people. The PS began Operation Sentinel under the state of emergency it declared after the Nov. 13, 2015, terror attacks in Paris, perpetrated by Islamist networks the NATO powers were using in the Syrian war. Now Macron, a former minister in the PS government, is using these supposedly “anti-terror” troops to reinforce the mobile police squads he is throwing against the “yellow vests.”

Sensing itself to be deeply isolated and despised by workers internationally, and terrified by rising protests in both France and Algeria, the financial aristocracy intends to wage ruthless class war. A February article in the Monde diplomatique titled “Class struggles in France” pointed to the panic seizing broad sections of the ruling class amid the growing political opposition that is for now largely peaceful but also very deep in the French and international working class.

The monthly wrote, “Fear, not of losing an election, or failing to ‘reform’, or to take stock market losses. But of insurrection, of revolt, of destitution. For a half century, the French elites had not experienced such a feeling. … The director of a polling institute mentioned for his part ‘big CEOs who were indeed very worried,’ and an atmosphere ‘that resembles what I have read about 1936 or 1968’ (the two French general strikes). There is a moment where they tell themselves, we have to be able to spend a lot of money to avoid losing what is essential.”

And so the financial aristocracy is pouring resources into repression and breaking with longstanding guarantees that the army would not be sent to fire on the population. After former PS presidential candidate Ségolène Royal called for sending the army to Marseille in 2013, history professor Jean-Marc Berlière reviewed the history of the French army’s use for police operations in an interview in Le Monde.

In the 19th century, Berlière explained, the army’s repeated murder of workers, including women and children, during strikes and May Day rallies provoked enormous class anger: “Massacres like those that periodically took place—at Fourmies, Narbonne, and so on—seriously hurt its image, which was already badly damaged by suspicion of social and political collusion due to its engagement during strikes on the side of the employers.”

After the October 1917 Revolution in Russia during World War I, which saw mass mutinies in the French army, the government decided it could no longer trust the army for domestic policing. “After the victory and the sacrifices of the 1914–1918 war, it was no longer possible to use the victorious army for internal operations,” Berlière said. Asked whether the French army was active after World War I in domestic policing inside the borders of current-day France, he added: “Basically, no. The political risk was too great: what would be the attitude of the conscripts?”

After the army’s infamous resort to mass torture and murder in a failed attempt to keep Algeria under French rule during the 1954–1962 independence war, Macron is again turning to the army. His hailing last year of Nazi-collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as well as Georges Clemenceau—who as interior minister before World War I oversaw army operations leading to the murder of 18 workers—reflect continuous official attempts to legitimize repression.

This underscores the reactionary character of continuous proclamations from within the political establishment that left-wing, socialist and working-class politics are irrelevant and dead. They create conditions where a deployment of the army against working people, lacking any shred of legitimacy, proceeds without meaningful opposition in official French life. The central task, in which the “yellow vest” protests mark an initial step, is to independently mobilize the growing political opposition in the working class against this drive to military-police dictatorship.

The Boeing disasters: 346 more victims of capitalism

Bryan Dyne

In the wake of two deadly airplane crashes that have killed 346 people, it has become clear that executives at aerospace giant Boeing repeatedly subordinated basic considerations of safety to profit, aided and abetted by the federal government.

The first disaster occurred on October 29, when a Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air crashed thirteen minutes after leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. That same plane only narrowly averted disaster a day earlier, Bloomberg reported this week, when a third, off-duty pilot who happened to be on the flight, intervened under similar conditions that ultimately caused the crash.

Less than five months later, on March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed about six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing a further 157 men, women and children.

Beginning on March 11, every country in the world grounded the 737 Max 8, citing overwhelming safety concerns. The United States was the final holdout, but it grounded the aircraft on March 13.

“Boeing, in developing the 737 Max 8, obviously felt intense competitive pressure to get the new aircraft to market as quickly as possible,” wrote Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger in a column in MarketWatch this week. Sullenberger is the pilot who safely landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River in 2009 and a leading air safety expert.

“When flight testing revealed an issue with meeting the certification standards, the company developed a fix… but did not tell airline pilots about it. In mitigating one risk, Boeing seems to have created another, greater risk,” he wrote.

Sullenberger added, “After the crash of Lion Air 610 last October, it was apparent that this new risk needed to be effectively addressed.” But instead of grounding the aircraft and immediately fixing the problem, Boeing did everything it could to conceal the deadly defect and keep the aircraft flying.

In other words, Boeing executives evidently acted in a reckless, negligent manner, contributing to the deaths of 346 people.

Sullenberger concluded, “It has been reported that Boeing pushed back in discussions with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] about the extent of changes that would be required, and after the second crash, of Ethiopian 302, the Boeing CEO reached out to the US President to try to keep the 737 Max 8 from being grounded in the US.”

Both the FAA and the Trump administration, for their part, were more than willing to run interference for the company.

The close integration between the airline industry and the agency nominally tasked with regulating it is well documented. In 2005, the FAA introduced a new program whereby aircraft manufacturers could choose their own employees to serve as FAA “designees,” charged with certifying the safety of their commercial planes. Since then, there has been virtually no independent oversight of the safety of any new civilian planes, those produced at Boeing or elsewhere.

During the 737 Max 8 rollout, Boeing told its pilots that they could learn all they needed to know about flying a new type of airplane from a 56-minute presentation on an iPad and a 13-page manual. Both were approved by the FAA and the pilots’ union, and neither included any information about the system likely responsible for the crashes, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmenting System, or MCAS.

US officials, moreover, have deep connections to the airline industry. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell was an American Airlines executive. US President Donald Trump’s new nominee to head the administration, Stephen Dickson, is a former Delta head.

Boeing is a top defense contractor with extensive ties to the military-intelligence apparatus. Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense, has worked for Boeing for three decades. Moreover, the current secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, is the wife of Mitch McConnell, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign financing from Boeing.

Moreover, Boeing is a key part of the US financial elite’s war for control of markets. Since the 737 Max 8 series was released in 2017, the sales of just 350 of the 5,011 orders Boeing has received have accounted for 50 percent of the company’s profits. Boeing itself has maintained its status as the world’s fifth-largest defense contractor and is currently the largest US exporter.

Shares of Boeing have more than tripled since the election of Donald Trump and his promises of further deregulation, making it the highest- priced stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company has accounted for more than 30 percent of the increase of the Dow since November 2016.

The tragic and preventable deaths of nearly 350 people demonstrate certain realities of contemporary social and political life. The capitalist system is based on the maximization of shareholder profit, not the satisfaction of the needs of society. If endangering the lives of hundreds of people will lead to higher profits, such a risk is justified.

Governments, in their turn, serve to protect the interests of the corporations, a reality demonstrated by the Trump White House’s efforts to protect the largest US exporter, and the repeated actions of the FAA to cover up the series of disastrous shortcuts taken by Boeing.

These disasters highlight the need to take the airline industry out of the hands of Wall Street so that air travel can be brought into harmony with human and social needs.

The technological advances that have been made in air travel over the past decades are indisputable. For the first time in world history, travelers can move from any two points in the world within a single day. This technology must be freed from the restraints of giant corporations and of the capitalist system as a whole. This requires the nationalization of the major airlines and aerospace companies, their transformation into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities to provide for social need, not private profit.