Slump deepens in Australian residential construction industry

Paul Bartizan & Richard Phillips

Australia’s construction industry, plagued by revelations about faulty and unsafe apartment blocks, confronts an escalating crisis.

The Ralan Group, a large property developer, this week went into voluntary administration, owing creditors up to $500 million and jeopardising the future of at least 3,000 apartments. The administrators declared “it is uncertain how much, if any, of your deposit [on a planned apartment] you may receive back.”

On the same day, Adelaide Brighton, a cement manufacturer, announced a major fall in profits. The company’s shares fell over 18 percent, pulling down the share prices of other cement-making companies.

Both announcements came a day after the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that new dwelling approvals dropped 25.6 percent over the last financial year, with 14.8 percent fall in new houses and a 39.3 percent drop for apartments. Apartment blocks over four storeys suffered the largest decline.

The Housing Industry Association reported that there had been just 56,357 new homes sold nationwide during the year, the lowest figure since the 1991 recession, despite record low interest rates.

A JP Morgan property analyst described the drop in approvals as “ugly.” A UBS senior economist predicted that construction investment could fall by 10 percent, with up to 100,000 jobs axed in the industry.

The inflated cost of houses and apartments has put them out of reach of many working-class families. Another key factor in the slump is reports that thousands of apartments erected during a debt-fueled property bubble are faulty, unsafe and require expensive repairs.

A July 27 report in the New Daily revealed that 97 percent of all new buildings in the state of New South Wales (NSW) have at least one defect, 71 percent in Queensland and 74 percent in Victoria. The average number of defect types per building is 16 in NSW, 12 in Queensland and 11 in Victoria.

The tip of an iceberg of poorly constructed apartments emerged in 2014 when the external covering of the high-rise Lacrosse apartment block caught fire in Melbourne. It was covered with the same highly flammable cladding as London’s Grenfell Tower.

Investigations by Australian authorities following the Grenfell Tower disaster, which claimed the lives of 72 people in 2017, revealed that the use of flammable cladding was rampant. Hundreds of buildings are covered with the dangerous material.

Promises by state governments to rectify the problem came to nothing. The flammable cladding issue, however, was just one of many problems blighting the industry.

Opal Tower

On Christmas Eve last year, hundreds of residents were evacuated from western Sydney’s 26-storey Opal Tower, following structural movement and damage to the recently completed $165 million building.

In June this year, residents from 120 apartments in Sydney’s Mascot Tower were ordered out of their homes because of foundation problems.

Last month, the media reported that the 109 owners of the Sugarcube apartment complex in Sydney’s Erskineville had been banned from entering the building since its completion in May 2018. The developer had not remediated the former industrial site, which had dangerous levels of heavy metals, hydrocarbons and asbestos.

Residents of nearby Garland Lofts, a nine-year-old set of inner-city apartments, in Zetland, were evacuated last November because of chronic water leaks and fire safety problems.

And the list goes on. Regular reports have appeared of badly built and unsafe properties in Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities.

Apartment owners in faulty buildings are struggling with their mortgages, legal costs, skyrocketing insurance premiums and temporary accommodation costs.

Seven months after being evacuated, many Opal Tower residents remain in rental properties and face a twenty-fold increase, to $2 million, in the annual insurance bill for the entire building, or more than $5,000 per apartment due this month. If the bill is not paid, the building will need to be evacuated again.

This week, Opal Tower owners launched legal action against the NSW government, and the Sydney Olympic Park Authority, which owns the land on which the complex was built, for repair costs and other compensation.

Fearing the impact on profits, stamp duties and property taxes, the state and federal governments, insurance companies and construction lobby groups are desperately attempting to contain the cascading crisis.

This led to a July 18 state and federal Building Ministers Forum (BMF), which promised to introduce regulatory measures recommended in last year’s Shergold-Weir “Building Confidence” report.

A day after the meeting, an Australian Financial Review editorial demanded the BMF and the construction industry “come to grips—quickly—with the scale of problems in the sector, before uncertainty cripples both public confidence and the industry.”

The BMF pledges and other government posturing will change little in the multi-billion dollar industry. Nothing will be introduced that undermines the deregulatory processes introduced by all governments over the past three decades to boost profits by eliminating “red tape.”

Even if adopted, the proposed measures would apply only to future construction, without alleviating the plight of current victims. Those who purchased houses or apartments built on contaminated or unstable land, or with cracking foundations, flooding, faulty plumbing or electrical wiring, or covered in flammable cladding will have to pay.

There is virtually no building insurance safety net for owners. No Australian government—state or federal—has taken responsibility for funding the repair costs facing existing home owners, a disaster that they have helped create.

Before the BMF meeting, the Victorian state Labor government said it would fund $600 million worth of flammable cladding replacement—half through increased levies on new high-rise residential developments. In other words, the financial burden will be passed onto purchasers, while the developers who installed the cladding retain their windfall profits.

Last week, the Owners Corporation Network, a peak body for apartment strata groups, representing thousands of people, denounced the BMF proposals, describing them as an attempt by governments to “buy time.”

Referring to the 2008–09 global financial crisis (GFC), the organisation warned: “This is a GFC-style situation, where credit ratings and the risk for financial products came into question. In that case loss of confidence in the financial system became a contagion.”

UK: Over 1,300 homeless people penalised last year under the 1824 Vagrancy Act

Joe Mount

Thousands of people are being prosecuted every year in the UK under the draconian Georgian-era Vagrancy Act 1824. This outlaws begging and rough sleeping “in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence.”

Although sections of it were modified or repealed in some parts of the UK, much of the Act remains in force today in England and Wales and can see rough sleepers moved on, fined up to £1,000 or arrested.

The law was enacted when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 and many destitute discharged soldiers returned home, compounding the overcrowding problem in the booming industrial cities that attracted toilers from the countryside, Ireland and Scotland. It allowed punishments such as whipping and hard labour to be used to clear the streets. A 1906 government committee characterised it as a “measure simply of repression.”

The Act was used to prosecute 1,320 people during 2018 and is most commonly employed by police as a threat to force rough sleepers to relocate. Fines levied under the Act are often deducted from weekly benefit payments.

A homeless man from Blackpool named Pudsey, who grew up in care, told homelessness charity Crisis: “The [Business Improvement District] team and the police were on me straight away when I got here. It was them who first served me the Vagrancy Act papers…”

“Since coming to Blackpool I’ve now had thirteen charges under the Vagrancy Act, and I’ve also been taken to court twice for it. Getting the papers just made me angry. They just come up and tell you to move, but I don’t know where they expect you to go? Five of those warnings I was even asleep when they gave them to me, so how could that have been for begging? I just woke up to find it on my sleeping bag. ‘Sitting in a public place gathering money for alms,’ they called it.”

“Half the homeless in town have been given Vagrancy Act papers now, and most of them have been fined about £100 and then given a banning order from the town centre. If they get caught coming back, they get done again and could go to jail, but that means all those people can’t get into town to use the few local services there are for rough sleepers.”

A 24-year-old man was fined £150 after being found outside a supermarket in the bitter cold last December, according to Middlesbrough based Teesside Live. The news site also reported cases of men, after being found in tips and scrapyards, charged under the act for “being in enclosed premises for an unlawful purpose.”

This shocking social reality has prompted a campaign—with the social media hashtag #ScrapTheAct—for its repeal backed by charities, some cross-party Members of Parliament and the Labour Party.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn promises to repeal the Act and provide extensive support to eliminate homelessness within five years of coming to power. These pledges are belied by instructions from Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, for local councils to continue enforcing “legal budgets.” Labour authorities run most of the urban working class areas and work hand-in-glove with the Tory governments to implement austerity, while their affluent, well-connected local leaderships regularly make a killing in privatization and property development deals associated with gentrification.

The Green Party also supports the campaign, with former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas and their sole MP tweeting: “Criminalising homeless people for begging or sleeping rough is Dickensian.” This is a party that speaks for a section of the ruling elite and is amongst the most vocal supporters of the European Union, which has imposed devastating budget cuts across the continent that have impoverished millions, driving many into homelessness. Closer to home, the Greens have worked with Tory and Labour councillors in Brighton and Hove and in coalition government with Fianna Fail in Ireland to push through spending cuts.

In response to the campaign, Tory Housing Minister Heather Wheeler declared: “No one in this day and age should be criminalised for having nowhere to live. I’m committed to ending rough sleeping for good and our rough sleeping initiative is providing an estimated 2,600 additional beds and 750 more support staff this year.”

This from a representative of a government that has slashed the annual homeless services budget by one quarter, approximately £590 million per year, since 2008, or a total of £5 billion since 2009, according to homelessness charities.

Their real attitude is shown by Wheeler’s earlier remarks, revealed this month, describing the homeless in her Derbyshire constituency as “the traditional type, old tinkers, knife-cutters wandering through,” a pejorative reference to Irish, Gypsy, Roma and other traveller communities.

Due to opposition from the wider public, who see growing numbers of homeless in every town and city centre, the government has made token gestures in recent years including a promise to “end rough sleeping by 2027” and funding that is dwarfed by austerity measures imposed in recent years.

Labour, as much as the Tories, are complicit in creating the social conditions that give rise to rampant homelessness and the encouraging of state repression of its casualties, rather than providing the support required to rebuild their lives.

Demands for the Vagrancy Act to be repealed are not new. Last year, a petition received 20,549 signatures, prompting a mealy-mouthed response from the government asserting that “enforcement can form part of moving someone away from the streets but it should also come with an offer of meaningful support.”

The routine use of such anti-social legislation was escalated under the class-war policies of the 1980s Tory government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This began the period of social counter-revolution that continues today, including the wholesale destruction of social housing provision.

This anachronistic legislation is a symbol of the repressive character of the British ruling class, which upholds the failed capitalist system by using the most brutal means to maintain its centuries-long rule. It is naïve to believe that its repeal would alleviate the problem, let alone strike at its root causes.

While many people are still prosecuted under the Vagrancy Act, its use since 2010 has fallen overall as the police have other, more modern, weapons in their arsenal. These include the so-called Community Protection Notices (carrying a maximum £20,000 penalty), Public Space Protection Orders (involving £100 fines, escalating to prosecutions) and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that are available for use under civil, rather than criminal, law. Some rough sleepers have even been searched under anti-Terrorism legislation, underscoring how all such laws are ultimately targeted against the working class.

The persecution of homeless people across the country is being stepped up in myriad ways. The clearing of encampments, otherwise known as “tent cities,” by local councils has steadily risen from 72 in 2014 to 254 in 2018, with some authorities seizing tents and charging for their return.

Beyond policing, this punitive approach characterises the welfare and justice systems, which criminalise the victims of societal problems, by stigmatising the poor and shifting the blame onto the supposed moral failings of the individual.

The plight of the homeless is now a tragically familiar sight on the streets of Britain. There are approximately 320,000 people homeless in the UK, with the numbers shooting up over the last decade due to rising rents, cuts to housing benefits and the scarcity of social housing. In the capital rough sleeping soared by 18 percent to 8,855 people between April 2018 and March 2019.

The homelessness crisis is not a temporary problem but a permanent part of life in capitalist society. The existence of thousands who cannot find work or meet their other basic social needs, amid an advanced technological society approaching the third decade of the twenty-first century is a profound indictment of the social and political order dominated by a narrow, parasitic oligarchy.

Senate Democrats approve Trump war budget

Patrick Martin 

The US Senate passed a budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1 that includes a record $738 billion for the military. The budget was the product of an agreement between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Trump White House, reflecting bipartisan support for the American war machine.

Senate Democrats gave far more support to the Trump-Pelosi budget than Republicans, voting for it by 38-5, with four absent. Republicans divided much more closely, 30 for, 23 against, and one absent. Republicans were not opposed to the record spending on the military but objected to the level of spending for domestic social programs and the overall deficit.

If the Democrats had voted against the budget by any significant margin, it would have been defeated.

Of the seven Democratic senators running for president, four were absent from the vote, including Bernie Sanders, who declared during the Tuesday Democratic debate in Detroit that he would vote against the record military budget, but did not bother to return to Washington to cast his vote on Thursday. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker were also absent.

Among the three Democratic presidential candidates who did return to the capital to vote, Kirsten Gillibrand backed the war budget, while Michael Bennet and Amy Klobuchar voted against.

The Senate result mirrored that in the House, where Democrats provided a huge majority for the budget deal, 219-16, while most Republicans actually voted against the budget backed by Trump, 132-65. Among the House Democrats voting for the record war budget were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The bipartisan legislation now goes to the White House for Trump’s signature. In a series of tweets over the past week, Trump has hailed the budget deal with Pelosi, singling out the record funding for the military as the principal gain made by the administration negotiating team, which was headed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

In their final statements before the vote, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed the budget, but the Democrat was far more enthusiastic, while McConnell off-loaded responsibility for the deal onto the White House.

“In recent weeks, key officials on President Trump's team engaged in extensive negotiations with Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic House,” McConnell said. “Given the exigencies of divided government, we knew that any bipartisan agreement on funding levels would not appear perfect to either side. But the administration negotiated a strong deal.”

Schumer hailed the budget deal, saying, “It will strengthen our national security and provide our troops with the resources they need to do a very difficult and often dangerous job,” adding, “For too long the arbitrary, draconian limits of sequester have prevented us [from maintaining] military readiness. This deal ends the threat of sequester permanently.”

Speaking for the Trump administration, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, a professed “deficit hawk” or opponent of higher spending, said on Fox News Sunday, “When the Democrats won the House, everybody knew that we would end up spending more money. So what did we get in exchange? We got more money for defense, which we think that we need. We got more money for the V.A., which we think that we needed.”

The budget deal sets a top-line spending number of $1.37 trillion for fiscal year 2020, which begins in two months, and $1.375 trillion for the following year. This refers only to discretionary spending, the sums authorized by Congress each year. Interest payments on the federal debt and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are legal obligations of the Treasury and do not require specific year-by-year authorization.

Despite Schumer’s claim that the budget provides $10 billion more in budget authority for domestic social spending than for the military, reestablishing parity between defense and nondefense items, the figures for fiscal year 2020 are $738 billion for the military and only $632 billion for everything else, a gap of more than $100 billion.

The budget legislation also extends the federal debt ceiling until July 1, 2021, removing any possibility of a “fiscal cliff” in which federal debt payments are placed into question, potentially disrupting financial markets. This was Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s principal concern in the talks with Pelosi, given that the Treasury was projected to reach the current debt ceiling sometime in August, during the congressional recess.

The Democratic leadership made one more huge concession to the White House. Pelosi and Schumer agreed that for the next two years there will be no attempt to use “must pass” legislation, such as appropriations bills for the various federal agencies, to push for Democratic policy preferences like ending the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, or forbidding the use of federal funds to build Trump’s wall along the US-Mexico border.

The result of this capitulation, combined with the Supreme Court ruling last week allowing Trump to divert funds appropriated for the Pentagon to the wall construction program, is that the White House can proceed with the building of the wall as fast as contracts can be approved for construction companies that enlist in the highly profitable effort. White House officials boasted that at least 100 miles of new wall would be in place in the coming year.

The final passage of a two-year budget for the federal government, with more Democrats than Republicans supporting the deal in both the Senate and the House, demonstrates in the starkest terms the political reality confronting the working class. Workers face, not a “divided government,” as the corporate media endlessly claims, but a unity government of two right-wing capitalist parties, equally opposed to the social and economic interests of working people.

The budget deal exposes the utter fakery of the Democratic presidential debates, in which right-wing candidates posture as friends of working people and opponents of Trump, while in their day jobs as senators, members of the House, governors and mayors, they empower the Trump White House and collaborate with its vicious attacks on the working class.

This de facto coalition government, with a fascistic president enabled by his Democratic partners, offers working people no prospect but military aggression overseas, attacks on jobs, living standards and social benefits at home, and a frontal assault on democratic rights, with immigrants playing the role of guinea pigs for the treatment of the entire population.

Mass protests erupt after Sudan’s military junta guns down school children

Jean Shaoul

Tens of thousands of students and youth took to the streets this week after Sudan’s armed forces opened fire on a youth rally Monday over bread and fuel shortages in El-Obeid, the regional capital of North Kordofan. Six people were killed, including four school children, and more than 60 injured. The military junta has now closed down all the nation’s schools.

Videos on social media show security forces in El-Obeid firing a truck-mounted machine gun against protesters from close range. The truck is marked with a skull and crossed swords insignia and a windscreen sticker reading, “Playing with the big guys is tough.” It has rocket-propelled grenades hanging on the side. According to the Sudanese Doctors Committee, some of the protesters were shot by snipers.

Demonstrators accused the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group led by one of the leading members of Sudan’s military junta, Mohammed Hamdan Dagolo, also known as Hemeti, of the killings.

The governor of Northern Kordofan ordered a statewide closure of schools and a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in four towns and cities in a bid to quell the unrest. But outrage provoked by the killings could not be contained. One of the main protest groups, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), called for nationwide demonstrations “to denounce the El-Obeid massacre and demand the perpetrators be brought to justice.”

Tens of thousands of students and youth responded in the capital Khartoum on Tuesday and in El-Obeid on Wednesday in a rising tide of opposition to the Transitional Military Council (TMC), which ousted long-term dictator President Omar al-Bashir in April to prevent the overthrow of the entire regime. Some protesters in Khartoum wore school uniforms and chanted, “Killing a student is killing a nation.” Security forces used tear gas and live ammunition to disperse the crowds. As the unrest continued, the nationwide shutdown of schools was ordered.

The Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), an umbrella opposition front including the Sudanese Communist Party, once the strongest in the Middle East, and armed rebel groups from the conflicts in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile, said they would not be taking part in the planned talks with the TMC on Tuesday.

These layers are hostile to the workers' and rural poor’s basic demands: social equality, better living standards and political freedom. The FFC agreed on July 17 to a “Political Declaration” that would establish a joint civilian-military transitional ruling body to supposedly oversee the formation of a civilian administration and prepare for elections after three years. The power-sharing agreement gave free rein to the military and is an attempt to sell out the months-long protest movement that brought cities across the country to a virtual standstill.

A civilian-led transitional government in alliance with the military, while giving the social layers represented by the FFC a greater share in Sudan’s national cake, would continue to represent the interests of the country’s capitalist elite and its enforcers. This venal clique presides over a country where at least 80 percent of the 40 million population live on less than US$1 per day, with some 5.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance in 2018, an increase of 700,000 compared to 2017, and where some 2.47 million children suffer from acute malnutrition.

The power-sharing agreement was met with widespread scepticism and smaller protests continued. The very next day, security forces fired tear gas on demonstrators in Khartoum, who were commemorating those killed since the start of the demonstrations in December last year, calling for “Civilian rule, civilian rule!” and “Freedom, peace, justice!”

According to the Sudanese Doctors Committee, at least 250 people have been killed by the security forces and 400 wounded since the start of the protests in December, with at least half killed on June 3 as the military and paramilitary forces cleared the sit-in outside the military’s headquarters in the capital.

On July 20, angry protesters again took to the streets of Khartoum after an official investigation into the June 3 crackdown cleared the TMC of all responsibility for the bloodshed. Fath al-Rahman Saeed, who headed the investigation, claimed that just 87 had died and 148 had been wounded and that those officers responsible did so without authorisation from the TMC. He said eight army officers had been charged and could face the death penalty, but did not name them. Saeed denied that there was any evidence of rape, despite widespread reporting by local medics of rape, a means of war and repression widely used by Diagalo’s RSF in Darfur.

According to protest organisers, at least 11 people have been killed in the biggest demonstrations since June 3.

The murderous assault on the school children in El-Obeid took place as Dagalo, the deputy leader of the TMC, was meeting with the Egyptian butcher President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo. El-Sisi, along with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has backed the TMC since it ousted Omar al-Bashir in April.

It was el-Sisi, the chair of the African Union (AU), who brokered the deal between the TMC and opposition leaders at the behest of US imperialism, which is determined to ensure that the uprising does not spread to its regional allies: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. These dictatorial regimes, fearing their own working class and poor peasants, backed the junta, ordered the crackdown on protesters and dictated the terms of the “deal” with the opposition forces that would provide a civilian cover for the continued rule of the Sudanese elite.

The last thing the US—and Europe—wants is instability in Sudan, strategically located in the Horn of Africa alongside the Red Sea and the entrance to the Suez Canal, through which much of the region’s oil passes. Imperialism also fears a new wave of refugees heading for Europe.

The AU, in its former guise as the Organisation for African Unity, once espoused Pan-African Socialism, whose origins lie in the efforts by the Stalinist bureaucracy to subordinate the workers and poor peasants to an emerging bourgeoisie based on advocacy of “two-stage revolution”—first a unified movement for national liberation and only much later a struggle for socialism.

Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution explained that the emerging bourgeoisie in countries with a belated capitalist development could not carry out national revolutions against imperialist domination because it feared any challenge by the working class to efforts to establish its own rule.

In the immediate post-war period, Soviet backing initially gave such movements room to manoeuvre and advance limited reforms and economic policies of “import substitution.” But following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism, nationalist regimes throughout Africa embraced the free market and established themselves as local enforcers of the exploitation of the region by the major powers and transnational corporations.

It is the working class, in alliance with the rural poor, that must now play the decisive role in the struggle for democratic rights, jobs and all of life’s essentials in a struggle against the national bourgeoisie and the imperialist powers. This struggle cannot succeed if confined to the national soil.

Sudan’s struggle takes place amid a growing wave of working class militancy, as evidenced by the strikes and demonstrations by workers in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Workers in Sudan must seek consciously to unify their fight with their brothers and sisters throughout Africa and with workers in the imperialist centres, based upon the programme of world socialist revolution.

Early peak in Australia influenza season causes concern

John Mackay

With the Australian winter influenza season striking earlier this year, indications are that it will be severe. To date, at least 306 predominately elderly people have died nationally. Two children as young as two and a 13-year-old also died of the disease.

There were over 138,322 laboratory-confirmed cases from January 1 to July 10, with the highest numbers in the most populous states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. This is almost eight times the five-year average of 17,349 cases at this point of the year. Last month saw at least 40,000 confirmed cases in NSW, the highest ever recorded for June.

There have been 35,000 notified cases of influenza in Victoria this year, but clinicians said the true number was likely many times that. This time last year, there were fewer than 3,000 reported cases and 5,000 at the same point in 2017.

The 2017 season, the worst on record, resulted in 1,165 deaths nationwide according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with approximately 250,000 laboratory-confirmed cases. In the milder 2018 season, 486 deaths occurred.

The influenza virus develops rapidly, with fever, chills, muscle aches, fatigue and coughs worsening during the initial few days. Most sufferers will improve without medical care, but some are at higher risk of severe complications, such as pneumonia or sepsis. Sepsis occurs when the body’s response to an infection injures its own tissues and organs, leading to shock, multi-organ failure and death.

Influenza can affect anyone, but the most at risk groups, where the notification rates are higher, and severe complications more prevalent, are children and those aged over 65 years. Pregnant women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are at higher risk also.

Influenza is a global problem. The virus strains are internationally monitored by scientists to predict the strains for the winter seasons in both the northern and southern hemispheres. In Australia, flu incidences typically peak in August, with the season running from May to September, so a full assessment cannot be made until the flu season ends. Health experts are still urging people to be vaccinated, in order to minimise the severity of the outbreak.

Nursing homes and aged care facilities are particularly vulnerable. As of early July, there had been more than 360 influenza outbreaks at residential aged care facilities across Australia. In NSW, there had been 112 outbreaks at aged care facilities, a mental health facility and hospital, resulting in 66 confirmed deaths.

Early this month, five residents were hospitalised and three died in a single nursing home, south of Wollongong, near Sydney. Twenty staff also contracted the flu, requiring the nursing home to be quarantined.

South Australia is experiencing a very bad early season, with 82 deaths and the number of reported cases surpassing 20,000. This compares to the whole 2017 flu season, which saw 124 deaths and 28,486 cases.

Doctors in South Australia have raised concerns over the lack of uniform and evidence-based standards for vaccination and containment of virus outbreaks in aged care. There are about 250 aged care facilities in the state.

Dr Rod Pearce, a member of the Immunisation Coalition, told newsGP, a website of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners: “At the moment there’s no predictable response from [residential aged care facilities] that satisfies GPs that their patients are being looked after properly.”

The flu vaccine, while not affording complete protection, is the best-known defence against the virus. The vaccine is only provided free of charge to children, people over 65 years of age and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Other people must pay a GP or a chemist to be vaccinated.

There is ongoing scientific research into a universal vaccine that could target a part of the virus that is not susceptible to mutation. Mutations of the virus mean that yearly vaccines, targeting specific strains, can be ineffective or have reduced protection.

A universal vaccination would permit a one-off vaccination against the flu. However the development of such a vaccine by the giant pharmaceutical companies would require profitable returns. Fears have been expressed on financial markets that universal vaccinations would not be profitable enough, and would disrupt the existing vaccine market.

A recent National Australia Bank report on the stock price of Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, which produced vaccines, stated: “If a universal vaccine was developed, the seasonal vaccine would be obsolete. Switching a yearly shot to a once or twice in a lifetime vaccine would cause a huge decline in sales.”

The report warned that the company developing a universal vaccine would not see a return on its investment unless the price of the vaccine was raised substantially above the existing levels.

This year’s outbreak is putting increased pressure on a healthcare system suffering from years of funding cuts. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a government-funded body, published a report in May showing that the number of people presenting to hospital emergency departments increased by 11 percent between 2013–14 and 2017–18, to more than 8 million patients, or an average of 22,000 per day. The report said this was greater than expected, considering the average population growth over the same period.

Earlier this year, the Australian Medical Association (AMA)’s pre-federal budget assessment stated the allocated healthcare funding over the next four years was inadequate and would provoke a healthcare crisis. The submission stated: “Despite their importance and despite our reliance on our hospitals to save lives, and improve quality of life, they have been chronically underfunded for too long.”

AMA president Dr Tony Bartone stated: “Wait times in emergency departments, as well as elective surgery wait times, especially for non-urgent categories, have remained significantly under target.”

The flu season is an annual and predictable event whose severity could be minimised with global free access to vaccination, and the development of a universal vaccine. Instead, chronically-underfunded public health systems strain under the weight of influenza outbreaks.

Millions displaced and hundreds killed by monsoonal floods in South Asia

Rohantha De Silva

Heavy monsoonal rains that began in early July have battered the lives of millions of people in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Though the weather situation has improved, social conditions will worsen in the coming period, with livelihoods and dwellings devastated and increased risks of disease outbreaks.

While current reports indicate that around 600 people have been killed across these countries, the real figure may well be higher because many casualties go unreported. UN estimates show that over 25 million people have been displaced, with the majority being poor people living a hand-to-mouth daily existence.

India is the worst affected. According to an NDTV report on Monday, 170 people were killed and nearly 11 million impacted by flooding in the Indian states of Assam and Bihar. More than 100 of these deaths occurred in Bihar, India’s poorest state.

In the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 32 people were killed by lightning strikes on Sunday, while 2,283 villages in 18 of the 33 flood-hit districts of the state remain under water. Food production has been shattered and thousands of villagers rendered homeless.

Last Thursday an express train near Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra state, was stranded for more than 12 hours when a river burst its banks and submerged rail lines. Indian navy helicopters and emergency boats rescued around 1,000 passengers.

In Assam, over 180 animals, including 16 rhinos, died in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park.

At least 113 deaths have been reported in Nepal, with 38 people still missing due to serious flooding and landslides in the mountainous state.

Massive destruction has occurred in the eastern parts of the country. Many bridges and roads have collapsed or been washed away. The repair bill is estimated to be more than 300 million Nepal rupees ($US2.7 million).

In Bangladesh, over 75 people were killed and more than six million displaced in 28 districts, but with many still reported missing, the death toll will be higher. The Jamuna River embankment was breached on July 17, flooding at least 40 villages and inundating the dwellings of over 200,000 people.

Rohingya refugees from Burma or Myanmar have been badly affected because most of their settlements are located in the flood-prone areas, such as the Cox’s Bazar area near Dhaka. At least 6,000 refugees are now homeless following the destruction of their makeshift huts.

Parts of Pakistan are also flooded, with 23 reported dead, and in Sri Lanka, nine people have been killed and over 540 badly impacted.

South Asian governments have responded with a combination of apathy and indifference toward the millions of poverty-stricken people affected by the floods and now desperately attempting to survive the aftermath. In some areas there has been no government aid or assistance whatsoever.

According to the Indian media, Prime Minister Narendra Modi telephoned the chief ministers of Assam and Bihar states and instructed them to initiate relief measures. Likewise in Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina issued ritual instructions.

On Monday, Reuters reported that Foyez Ahmed, the deputy commissioner of Bogra district in Bangladesh, declared that although the district had relief supplies, “we don’t have adequate transport facilities to move to the areas that are deep underwater.”

Some media reports indicate that anger is mounting among flood victims over ongoing government failures to prepare for the annual flooding.

In the northern Indian state of Bihar, residents chased away a circuit officer on July 19 for failing to distribute relief material. Residents in the state’s Motihari district, near the Nepal border, told journalists that no health officer had visited the area, no community kitchen had been organised, and children had been suffering from hunger for five to six days.

The BBC reported that protesting villagers chanted slogans denouncing the government and said they were “abandoned every monsoon season.”

Heavy monsoonal rains, which trigger devastating floods and landslides, are an annual occurrence in South Asia. In 2017, 1,300 people were killed and 45 million people impacted by floods in South Asia. According to UNICEF, 16 million children were among the victims.

Though the monsoons are a natural phenomenon, responsibility for the social devastation lies with the regional ruling classes and their governments. Climate change, driven by global warming, deforestation and unplanned mining, worsens the situation.

Enriching themselves at the expense of the masses, no section of South Asia’s capitalist elites has taken any serious flood mitigation measures, let alone provided safe dwellings and adequate disaster relief. The International Disaster Database in Belgium noted in 2017 that around 2,000 people die every year in South Asian floods.

Two weeks ago, Xavier Castellanos, the Asia Pacific regional director of the International Federation of Red Cross and Crescent Societies, warned: “We are seeing growing numbers of displaced and increasing loss of life with each day of rain. Entire communities have been cut off by rising waters, increasing the risk of people going hungry and getting sick.”

While that international charity has mobilised over 1,000 volunteers in Bangladesh, Nepal and India to provide emergency supplies, including food, temporary shelters and hygiene kits, these efforts are grossly inadequate.

On July 18, a Hindustan Times editorial called on the Indian government to develop “a long-term strategy on floods.” Similar perfunctory calls have been issued after every major flood in the past ten years—in 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017—but nothing has been done.

A “long-term strategy on floods” is impossible within the framework of the capitalist nation-state system. All the major rivers originate in the Himalayas, and pass through Nepal and India to Bangladesh and Pakistan. The 1,800-kilometre border between India and Nepal has over 6,000 rivers and rivulets, which provide 70 percent of the river water during the dry season.

This year’s monsoonal floods occur as wide areas of India face drought. The Asia Times recently reported that water levels in 85 of India’s 91 reservoirs are below 40 percent and 65 are below 20 percent. Chennai, the Tamil Nadu state capital and the country’s fourth-largest metro area, faces severe water shortages, with the working class and the poor hardest hit.

Monsoonal flood mitigation measures must be developed as part of a sub-continent plan that cuts across national boundaries and the conflicting profit interests and ambitions of the competing corporate elites. This perspective is rejected by all South Asian governments, underscoring the reactionary character of the 1947 division of the sub-continent into competing capitalist nation-states by British imperialism, India's Congress Party and the Hindu and Muslim elites.

UK: Penniless father of three commits suicide while waiting for welfare payment

Margot Miller

Phillip Herron, a single parent from Durham, England, is another victim of the UK’s punitive benefits system and the decades-long onslaught against the working class.

The 34-year-old father of three children was driven to suicide while waiting a month for his Universal Credit (UC) welfare payment to come through. At the time of his death he had just £4.61 in the bank. One can only imagine his desperation.

On March 18, he drove to a quiet country lane where he took his own life, after posting a photo of himself in tears on social media with a suicide note. Phillip left his job at a factory shortly before becoming the full-time care giver for his children.

His grieving mother, Sheena Derbyshire, 54, told the Daily Mirror, Phillip wrote that “his family would be better off if he wasn’t there anymore.” His family had been unaware of his financial difficulties, and his death came as “a complete shock.”

Sheena later discovered that Phillip owed £20,000 to the banks, utility firms and the modern-day loan-sharks, pay day lenders who were charging him 1,000 percent interest. Phillip was in danger of losing his home. Among his paperwork, Sheena found an eviction notice received from his social landlord, the Bernicia housing association.

Phillip Herron

Sheena was able to form a picture of the last six months of her son’s life by trawling through his computer and mobile phone. It revealed Phillip’s life unravelling through no fault of his own. Listening to the last few months of voice messages revealing the deterioration of Phillip’s mental health was “the most heart-wrenching thing I’ve ever done,” said Sheena.

Phillip’s death has had a devastating effect on the family. Sheena explained that his youngest daughter “is totally lost. She misses her dad so much. She had a dream the other night that he came to her. She said, ‘I asked him not to leave again. But when I woke up, he wasn’t there.’ [The children] haven’t even been offered counselling.”

Sheena will present the evidence she uncovered among Phillip’s belongings at the upcoming inquest into his death to be held in Sacriston, County Durham—to expose how he was failed by the UC system.

UC was introduced in 2010 and rolled out nationally between 2013 and 2018. It is a single benefit payment replacing six existing previous entitlements for the unemployed and those with low incomes. Advanced by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition as simplifying the benefits system, it is designed to drive people into low paid jobs and cut benefits as part of slashing £12 billion from the welfare budget.

As UC is paid a month in arrears, an initial claim is followed by at least five weeks before the first payment. This causes untold hardship. “When people turn to the government for help, they’re already desperate,” Sheena explained to the Daily Mirror. “To make them wait so long for payments is dangerous. There is no reason it should take so long. Phillip already had problems, but I think this was the final straw.”

Phillip’s death triggered an outpouring of sadness, outrage and anger on social media. Among the 260 comments on the Manchester Evening News Facebook page reporting the story are “This is barbaric,” “those poor kids,” and for “[t]he poorest debts should be written off like the banks were.”

Singling out Amber Rudd, Secretary for the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] who has been retained in Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new class war cabinet, another tweeted: “You should hang your head in shame.”

A DWP spokesperson had stated in relation to the tragedy, “Suicide is a very complex issue, so it would be wrong to link it to someone’s benefit claim.” In response one person stated on social media, “[N]ow another death on their blood-soaked hands.”

Someone from Leeds posted, “So [former Tory Prime Minister] Theresa May cried when she lost her job. She didn’t get upset for the working-class people who died in the Grenfell Tower. She never cried for the people who suffered due to cuts in Universal Credit and even committed suicide when all hope had gone.”

Phillip joins a growing list of victims, whose deaths have been hastened by sadistic government cuts to benefit entitlement for hundreds of thousands of people.

Joy Worrall, an 81-year-old pensioner, threw herself into a quarry in North Wales in May after the DWP froze her pension benefits, leaving her destitute with just £5 to her name.

Martin John Counter, a 60-year-old from Bromley, took an overdose in September after being wrongly accused of benefit fraud. He suffered from myriad health problems making him unfit for work. He had forgotten to inform the DWP of some bank savings when he lodged a claim for Employment Support Allowance (ESA)—an essential benefit to assist people with disabilities.

On April 15, Stephen Smith, 64, died in Liverpool weighing just six stone after terrible suffering. The DWP had cut off his ESA and declared a chronically ill man “fit for work.”

Stephen Smith’s advice worker, Terry Craven, told the WSWS he found the news of Herron’s suicide “extremely upsetting. I cried when I saw Phillip’s case.

Stephen Smith in hospital shortly before his death__Credit_Liverpool Echo

“He died needlessly. Phillip is the product of this evil government’s aims and objectives. [Former Tory leader and DWP minister] Iain Duncan Smith is back in government and will be wringing his hands in glee.

“Anyone reading about Phillip’s suicide will think, ‘Is that what it does to you, applying for Universal Credit?’ and will end up taking poorly paid work.”

Last year, the food bank Trussell Trust distributed 1.6 million food parcels to destitute households. A fifth of recipients needed help because of social security delays, half of which were UC claimants.

Terry Craven (left) with Stephen Smith (centre) and Terry Nelson (right) who manages CASA

Because of the delay in the initial payment, renters can easily slip into rent arrears and face eviction. An Inside Housing investigation found that people on UC were twice as likely to present as homeless to their local councils as households under the previous benefits system.

Phillip’s death came just months after an academic study commissioned by Gateshead council found that claimants in the UC system had considered suicide over a number of issues. Alice Wiseman, the director of public health at Gateshead council, said of the study’s findings, “I consider Universal Credit, in the context of wider austerity, as a threat to the public’s health.”

An All-Party Parliamentary Group on Universal Credit report published July 18, “What needs to change about Universal Credit?” confirms the intention behind the UC welfare reforms is to intensify the impoverishment of the working class. It notes that under UC, tenants are left with a rent shortfall of between £100 and £300 a month. Families with three children lose an average £2,600 a year, while larger families an average £7,800.

Families cannot qualify for free school meals above an income of £7,400 a year, leaving many households caught in a poverty trap. More than 100,000 families with disabled children will be worse off by £1,750 plus per year.

Parents under the age of 25 lose £66.05 a month under UC compared to the previous tax credit system. Parents who are students cannot claim childcare support. People with additional care needs stand to lose about £64 a week, while the most disabled adults in the support group for ESA will lose £42 a week.

Under UC far more people suffer welfare sanctions (with the first sanction being deprived of benefits for 91 days). Eleven percent of claimants have been sanctioned, around a fifth of them more than once.

Labour Party leaders routinely denounce the UC system. Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Margaret Greenwood said, “The Coalition Government claimed Universal Credit would lift people out of poverty… [B]ut instead it is ruining lives.” This demagogy conceals the fact that Labour refuses to even call for UC’s abolition. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn only calls for it to be “redesigned. ” A party spokesman declared recently, “Universal Credit isn’t working and cannot continue in its current form.”

Preparing for great-power war, France creates space command

Will Morrow

French President Emmanuel Macron’s administration announced this month the creation of a military space command and detailed plans to place anti-satellite weapons systems in orbit. The announcement is the latest step in a military build-up by France and the EU imperialist powers, and part of preparations to wage “great power” wars, including between nuclear-armed states.

The new military branch, whose creation was signaled by Macron on July 13, will be merged into the Air Force, which will henceforth be called the Air and Space Force. Defense Minister Florence Parly outlined the details of the new division in a speech to over 100 air force military brass at the Air Base 942 in Lyon on July 25.

“Space is a new front to defend, and we must be ready,” Parly declared. “Seeking to one day become a space general will no longer be a fantasy, it will be a credible ambition.”

Florence Parly at the Air Base 942 in Lyon on July 25 [credit Florence Parly]

This first stage of the command’s operations will involve the deployment of a new generation of Syracuse satellites equipped with visual cameras to identify other nearby satellites. In the second stage, so-called nano-satellites that are more difficult to shoot down, and satellites equipped with submachine guns and lasers capable of destroying or incapacitating rival satellites, will be deployed.

The obvious implication of these announcements, ignored and covered up by the media, is that the ruling class is preparing to wage wars not only against impoverished and former colonial countries in the Middle East and Africa, targeted under the fraudulent banner of the “War on Terror”—which have no capacity to launch attacks using satellite technology or destroy French satellites—but against militarily-advanced nuclear-armed powers, like Russia, China and the United States, which rely heavily on satellite technology for their operations.

This insane perspective is being worked out with no public discussion and entirely behind the backs of the working class. Summing up the discussions in the French state, Le Point quoted an unnamed official from Parly’s cabinet stating that “we do not want to launch into a space arms race,” but were engaged in “reasoned arsenalization.”

In fact, the French announcement will accelerate a growing turn by the major powers to the development of outer-space weapons. Every area of the world, from the Arctic, to cyberspace and outer space, is being transformed into an arena of battle amidst a historic breakdown of the capitalist nation-state system that is driving the ruling elite towards war and accelerated attacks on the social and democratic rights of the working class at home.

In June 2018, US President Donald Trump announced the creation of a new “Space Force,” to oversee and expand the more than 20,000 personnel already under the direction of the Air Force’s Space Command. Last March, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a blood-curdling address to the nation to announce that India had become the third nation after the US and China to shoot down a satellite, and proclaim that “We are now a space power.” China and Russia, the two principal targets of US military aggression to offset its relative economic decline through military force, are building up their own anti-satellite missile systems as well.

The feverish and Dr. Strangelove-esque militarism gripping the French ruling class was indicated by an announcement earlier this month that Macron’s newly created Defense Innovation Agency has just created a “Red Team” of five to six science fiction authors, whose task is to imagine and advise the military on futuristic weapons systems.

The development of a French space force is part of Macron’s bid to take the leadership of a European army being spearheaded by Paris and Berlin. Their aim is to transform the European Union into a military power capable of waging war, including independently of and in opposition to the United States. Germany, in addition to having no nuclear weapons, does not have an active space program of its own, while the exit of Britain from the EU leaves France as the only EU nuclear power, in addition to possessing—for now—Europe’s largest blue-water navy.

The EU’s “Strategic Agenda for 2019–2024,” adopted at its Brussels summit last month, asserts that Europe must “reinforce its global influence,” “influence the course of world events,” and “move forward towards a genuine European Defence Union.”

Last month, a week after the US Defense Department reached the biggest ever trade deal for the purchase of nearly 500 fighter jets, France, Spain and Germany responded in kind with the signing of agreements for the creation of an integrated European air combat system. The cost of the project—which will include not only a new fighter plane, but an integrated network of fighter jets and unmanned drones linked to naval and land forces—will exceed €100 billion. Some estimate it at over €500 billion by 2050.

Speaking last Thursday, Parly made clear that France expects other European powers to contribute to the program. “France has its independence,” but would “not be isolated in this new space of conflict,” she said. “We will thus build, with our European partners, a future common capacity of knowledge in the spatial context.” Germany and Italy would contribute to radar technology for detecting and identifying satellites, she said, and €700 million is to be reallocated to the Air and Space Command to give a total budget of €4.3 billion.

The Macron administration has boosted military spending and announced a series of major arms projects since coming to office. Last September, France raised total military spending by 5 percent to €35.9 billion, excluding pensions, as part of the EU target of 2 percent of GDP.

Last month, Macron unveiled the first of six Suffren-class nuclear-powered submarines, each of which is to cost approximately €9 billion. As opposed to its predecessors, the Suffren will be able to remain underwater for 70 instead of 45 days and carry 50 percent more arms. It will be tasked with escorting France’s nuclear-armed ballistic-missile submarines and aircraft carriers, as well as conducting espionage operations.

The feverish rearmament of the French and European ruling class for war exposes the fraud of all claims that European capitalism stands in relation to its US counterpart as a kinder and more benevolent version. Under conditions of the deepest economic crisis of the capitalist system since the 1930s, all the imperialist powers are once again preparing for war. The billions of euros necessary to fund these destructive weapons systems are to be extracted from the exploitation of the working class and the relentless imposition of social austerity.

The fascist attack in Gilroy and the US epidemic of mass shootings

Patrick Martin

The killing of three people at the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California captured headlines across America, but the corporate media has sought to suppress or downplay its most important aspect: its politically motivated character.

Nineteen-year-old Santino William Legan opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle inside the festival late Sunday afternoon. He killed three people—a six-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl, and a 25-year-old man—and wounded at least 15 others before being shot to death by local police.

The three people he killed were Hispanic or African-American. This was apparently not an accident. Legan’s internet postings indicate he was motivated by racist and white-supremacist views. The most important indication was a piece of text urging, “Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard,” followed by a complaint about “hordes of mestizos” (mixed-race people) allegedly crowding into towns in the Gilroy area.

The book Legan praises is Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest, a social Darwinist, white supremacist screed first published in 1890, inspired by, among others, the reactionary German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One passage in the book denounces the Declaration of Independence for the “degrading, self-evident lie” that “all men are created equal.” This is followed by imprecations against blacks, Asians, Jews and the poor, as well as those who live in “noxious” urban centers like London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago and New Orleans—language whose modern equivalent is Donald Trump’s denunciations of “rat-infested,” crime-plagued Baltimore.

Despite this clear evidence of Legan’s political sympathies, local police and the national media claimed that the motive for his attack was a mystery, and that it was just one more “senseless killing” of the type which has become commonplace in the United States over the past three decades.

Not a single prominent media pundit or newspaper columnist made the obvious connection between Legan’s mentality and the fascistic hatred of immigrants and minorities promoted by the president of the United States, using mass rallies, comments to the media and tweets directed to a Twitter audience of more than 50 million.

The media cover-up only gained a certain plausibility because the Gilroy attack was one of ten instances of mass shooting across the United States over the past weekend. The casualty toll showed 15 deaths and 52 wounded.

The slaughter continued after the beginning of the work week. Tuesday morning at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi, a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, a gunman shot two Walmart workers to death and wounded a policeman before he was himself shot and arrested.

The media response to these tragedies has been twofold: using them to disguise the specifically political aspects of the Gilroy, California attacks; and holding them up as proof of the need for stepped up repressive measures, including not only the usual liberal calls to restrict gun ownership, but stepped-up police powers as well.

Particularly noteworthy was an editorial in the Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, which made no mention of the fascistic beliefs of the gunman and declared that the Gilroy shootings were “an indictment of our gun laws.” The editorial went on to note the heavy security presence of police during the Gilroy attack, and their quick response, shooting Legan to death one minute after he opened fire. The implication was clear: quicker and more massive police repression was in order.

In the two decades since the Columbine massacre made “mass shootings” a recognized category of events in the United States, the World Socialist Web Site has sought to develop a critical understanding of what is typically dismissed as “senseless violence” in America.

As we noted in a recent commentary, the two decades since Columbine coincide with the decomposition of American society under the impact of mounting social inequality and endless imperialist war:

It has also been two decades, more or less, since the declaration of the “war on terror” and the invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq, two decades since the hijacking of a national election and the repudiation of any concern by the American bourgeoisie for democratic norms, two decades of mounting social inequality and two decades of unrelenting attacks on workers’ conditions of life…

American capitalist society is disintegrating. Mad, individual anti-social acts such as the one that occurred at Columbine will not be halted by the pious wishes, much less the indifference, of the powers that be.

There has been a change in the general category of “mass shootings,” which have increasingly acquired a political character.

Of course, the event that to a certain extent triggered the wave of mass killings, the Columbine murders, had an element of this. It was planned for Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombings. Now, however, such politically-motivated massacres happen with regularity, including the attack by a fascist gunman against a synagogue in Poway, California in April of this year and the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in October 2018.

And as the example of the Gilroy, California attack demonstrates, far from “pious wishes” about an end to such violence, the current American government is deliberately inciting such atrocities. President Trump is pursuing a definite political strategy, politically facilitated by the Democrats, of stoking violence and creating the conditions for ever more authoritarian measures.

The capitalist system as a whole is responsible. The bitter disappointment in Obama, the fascist incitement of Trump, in combination with the economic hardships and endless war, have encouraged or produced a new phenomenon, the openly right-wing mass shooter.