Corbyn - A Leader In Thrall To The Right Wing

From WSWS

Corbyn’s capitulation to the right wing and the lessons of the UK Labour leadership contest

On Saturday, September 4, Jeremy Corbyn secured a massive popular victory in his re-election as UK Labour Party leader. His triumph was secured in the face of a vicious witch-hunt by Labour’s right wing, which included denying a vote to more than 180,000 registered members and supporters. He won thanks to the political mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of workers and young people seeking to take on the political heirs of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and support Corbyn’s declared aim of committing Labour to oppose austerity, militarism and war.

Yet just four days later, Corbyn’s victory might well have never happened. He gave the closing speech Wednesday to a Labour Party conference at which his opponents carried the day on every single issue of substance.

Most telling of all, Corbyn’s shadow defence secretary, Clive Lewis, not only publicly endorsed the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system, but pledged that a Labour government would “fulfil our international commitments, including those under Article 5” of NATO’s constitution. This commits the UK to come to the aid of any NATO member facing attack. Given the escalating US-led provocations against Russia, involving Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, this is a commitment to wage nuclear war against a nuclear power.

This left Deputy Leader Tom Watson to crow that Labour was “reaffirming our commitment to NATO—a socialist construct, as our defence spokesman, Clive Lewis, reminded us yesterday—and trying to persuade our EU colleagues to do the same.”

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell outlined an economic policy based on protectionist measures to ensure that British industry is globally competitive. Watson praised him for “deftly” explaining that “Labour is a market socialist party.”

He added, “I don’t know why we’ve been focusing on what was wrong with the Blair and Brown governments for the last six years... Capitalism, comrades, is not the enemy.”

The hours leading up to Corbyn’s final appearance were monopolised by a former leadership challenger, Andy Burnham, demanding that the party oppose the free movement of labour in Europe and recognise that working people “have a problem” with “unlimited, unfunded, unskilled migration which damages their own living standards.”

After such a display, any further protest by Corbyn, any refusal to endorse this or that measure, only proves him to be a left-talking figurehead for a right-wing party of militarism and war.

Corbyn made clear how consciously he seeks to utilise left rhetoric to conceal the real character of the Labour Party and prevent the working class breaking from it. His speech was once again peppered with calls for unity with the right wing in a rebuilt “Labour family.”

But more revealing still was how he detailed the political concerns that animate him. The support he has won, he explained, was not “unique to Britain.” He stressed that “across Europe, North America and elsewhere, people are fed up with a so-called free market system that has produced grotesque inequality, stagnating living standards for the many, calamitous foreign wars without end, and a political stitch-up which leaves the vast majority of people shut out of power.”

He continued: “Since the crash of 2008, the demand for an alternative and an end to counter-productive austerity has led to the rise of new movements and parties in one country after another.”

What he had accomplished was to make sure that “In Britain, it’s happened in the heart of traditional politics, in the Labour party, which is something we should be extremely proud of.”

By preventing a break from Labour at a time of such acute crisis for British and world capitalism, Corbyn could boast that “We meet this year as the largest political party in Western Europe, with over half a million members.”

Making a direct appeal to his opponents, he said, “Some may see that as a threat. But I see it as a vast democratic resource.”

There is nothing democratic in any of this. Corbyn is steering the aspirations to genuine democracy and an end to austerity and war felt by millions of workers behind a party that he admits views its new members as a “threat,” and does so because it is a party of the state and the financial oligarchy.

Moreover, Corbyn wants to channel this desire for change behind policies that are wholly geared to the interests of British capitalism. His appeal was framed around calls for state investment to end the situation where “Britain lags behind France, Germany, the US and China” in research and development and productivity. “A Labour government will never accept second-best for Britain,” he declared. “We will also be pressing our own Brexit agenda,” he added “including the freedom to intervene in our own industries...”

Corbyn’s defence of the Labour Party’s grip on the working class and his continued opposition to any struggle against the right wing is a vindication of the political stand taken by the Socialist Equality Party.

From the very beginning of his first leadership bid last year and throughout the attempts to remove him, the SEP opposed all efforts by groups such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party to portray support for Corbyn as a means of transforming the Labour Party. To cite just three examples, we wrote:

“However, those looking to a Corbyn victory to provide an alternative to austerity will be cruelly disappointed. The real measure of his campaign must be judged not on stated intentions, but on the essential criterion of the class interests served by the party and the programme he defends. Labour is a right-wing bourgeois party. It is complicit in all the crimes of British imperialism and has functioned as the principal political opponent of socialism for more than a century...”

“No one can seriously propose that this party—which, in its politics and organisation and the social composition of its apparatus, is Tory in all but name—can be transformed into an instrument of working class struggle. The British Labour Party did not begin with Blair. It is a bourgeois party of more than a century’s standing and a tried and tested instrument of British imperialism and its state machine. Whether led by Clement Attlee, James Callaghan or Jeremy Corbyn, its essence remains unaltered.” The political issues posed by Corbyn’s election as UK Labour Party leader.

“Those workers and young people who have rallied behind Corbyn in the hope that they could ‘recapture’ Labour from the Blairites have been misled. It is the upper-middle class clique that constitutes the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]—and which is accountable only to the military-intelligence state apparatus—that determines Labour’s class character, not its members.” Lessons of Labour’s leadership contest.

Our appraisal was not rooted in an estimation of Corbyn’s subjective intentions. We based ourselves on an historically-derived understanding of the nature of the Labour Party and of a contemporary world situation in which the demands of the ruling elite for ever greater exploitation of the working class and the pursuit of a military offensive to secure control of the world’s resources mean there can be no return to a reformist past.

The crucial task placed before workers and young people is to secure their political independence from all those who seek to subordinate them to the profit system, which is the root cause of austerity and war. We urge all readers of the World Socialist Web Site to study the record of the SEP and take the decision to join us in building the new and genuinely socialist and internationalist leadership that is urgently required.

Britain's Fascist Police In Action

Rabid US Military Connives With ISIS

62 dead, 100 wounded as US bombs Syrian army near Deir ez-Zor

From WSWS

At least sixty-two Syrian troops died and 100 were wounded on Saturday when US jets bombed a Syrian government base on Al-Tharda mountain near Deir ez-Zor. Remarkably, the US Central Command has still not apologized for the attack, even though its bombing allowed the Islamic State (IS) militia to storm and capture the base shortly afterwards.

This massacre is a flagrant act of war that threatens to escalate the Syrian conflict into an all-out war pitting the US-led NATO alliance against Syria and its allies, including Russia. Everything suggests that the attack, coming in the initial days of a US-Russian ceasefire in Syria openly criticized last week by the US army brass, was deliberately committed by forces inside the US government hostile to the ceasefire.

The US military’s refusal to formally apologize for the massacre is staggeringly reckless. Syrian troops fighting US-backed Islamist opposition militias are being aided on the ground by units from Iran, China, and Russia. The Pentagon is signaling to these countries—which not only have powerful forces in Syria but, in the case of China and Russia, nuclear weapons—that their own troops may end up as targets of US military action, as they operate alongside Syrian forces.

Syrian and Russian officials denounced the bombing as US aid to IS, while Russian officials called an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to demand explanations from Washington. The Syrian Foreign Ministry declared, “At 05:00 pm, on September 17th, 2016, five US aircraft launched a fierce airstrike on Syrian Army positions on al-Tharda Mountain in the surroundings of Deir ez-Zor Airport. The attack lasted for an hour.”

It accused Washington of complicity with IS: “The attack launched by the ISIS terrorists on the same site, taking control over it...highlights the coordination between this terrorist organization and the US.”

What emerged from the contradictory accounts of the bombing provided by the feuding factions of the US military-intelligence machine is a picture of a massacre prepared and executed in cold blood.

The Obama administration relayed regrets via Moscow to Damascus for the “unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces,” anonymous senior US officials told the press. However, the US Central Command (Centcom), responsible for the Pentagon’s operations in the Middle East, issued a perfunctory statement making no apology to the Syrian military for its losses.

“The coalition air strike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military,” it declared, blandly adding: “Syria is a complex situation with various military forces and militias in close proximity, but coalition forces would not intentionally strike a known Syrian military unit, officials said. The coalition will review this strike and the circumstances surrounding it to see if any lessons can be learned.”

Such claims that US fighters were unaware of who they were bombing are simply not credible, and are flatly contradicted by other accounts in the media.

An anonymous Centcom official told the New York Times that US surveillance aircraft tracked the Syrian army units “for several days” before US fighters attacked them. “The attack went on for about 20 minutes, with the planes destroying the vehicles and gunning down dozens of people in the open desert, the official said. Shortly after this, an urgent call came into the American military command center in Qatar… The call was from a Russian official who said that the American planes were bombing Syrian troops and that the strike should be immediately called off.”

Nevertheless, the US jets continued to bomb the Syrian base for several minutes before ending the attack, according to the Centcom official’s account.

The attack at Deir ez-Zor shows that Washington and its allies are not seeking a cease-fire and de-escalation, let alone peace. They are pursuing the same strategy adopted by the NATO powers in Syria ever since 2011: pursuing regime change by backing Islamist militias like IS or the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The latest attack has shown that, even after IS mounted repeated terror attacks in Europe and the United States, a definite collaboration still exists between US and IS forces to escalate the war.

After Saturday’s attack, US think tank operatives quickly came forward in the media to do political damage control. Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Center warned the Times that the air strikes would “feed conspiracy theories that Washington is in league with IS” and allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to “blast the US on the eve of the UN General Assembly.”

This is cynical propaganda. As they backed Syrian opposition militias, top US officials and journalists were fully aware of their terrorist character. Times journalist C. J. Chivers dedicated a friendly 2012 video to the Lions of Tawhid militia, which set off truck bombs in Syrian cities. This was only one of dozens of US-backed opposition militias that carried out atrocities across Syria, including IS, whose operations in Syria only began to be targeted last year after it carried out repeated terror attacks in Europe.

The dominant factions of the US government want war, and Moscow’s strategy—negotiating truces with Washington, and backing Assad while accommodating US military operations in Syria—is totally bankrupt. Hostile to and afraid of appealing to antiwar sentiment in the working class, particularly in the United States, the Kremlin has sought to deal with the US war drive through talks with the US government. This strategy has failed, as Russian officials were all but forced to admit, in the face of US military opposition to the cease-fire.

After the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council called by Moscow, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin charged that the US attack was a deliberate attempt to derail the joint US-Russian-brokered ceasefire, pointing to the “highly suspicious” timing of the attack.

“It was quite significant and not accidental that it happened just two days before the Russian-American arrangements were supposed to come into full force,” he said. “The beginning of work of the Joint Implementation Group was supposed to be September 19. So if the US wanted to conduct an effective strike on Al Nusra or ISIS, in Deir ez-Zor or anywhere else, they could wait two more days and coordinate with our military and be sure that they are striking the right people… Instead they chose to conduct this reckless operation.”

“One has to conclude that the airstrike has been conducted in order to derail the operation of the Joint Implementation Group and actually prevent it from being set in motion,” Churkin added.

This assessment was echoed by the DEBKA File publication, which has close ties to Israeli intelligence. “The Pentagon and US army are not following the orders of their Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama in the execution of the military cooperation accord in Syria concluded by US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva on Sept. 12,” it wrote.

It cited concerns by top US defense officials that the terms of the cease-fire give Russia too much of an “opportunity to study the combat methods and tactics practiced by the US Navy and Air force in real battlefield conditions.” For this reason, the Pentagon is opposing it even after it was agreed to by Kerry: “Washington sources report that Defense Secretary Carter maintains that he can’t act against a law enacted by Congress. He was referring to the law that prohibits all military-to-military relations with Russia as a result of Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.”

Pie Trumps Trump

US Hypocrisy

The US authorities were the main antagonists against Russian athletes participating in the Olympic games because of so called drug taking irregularities.

But are these two women shown below, the biggest drug takers on the planet? And shouldn't the Wimbledon authorities investigate? Otherwise the game of tennis is likely to lose all credibility.

Serena and Venus Williams

Blairites Escalate Purge Of The Labour Party

Any vestige of Labour party democracy is being destroyed by the fanatical Blairite wing of the party in its attempt to stop Jeremy Corbyn from winning the leadership election.

Behind the scenes there has been a purge of as many members as possible who support Corbyn, their voting rights curtailed often on spurious grounds, whilst those supporters of Owen Smith are allowed to get away with all sorts of misconduct.

As the World Socialist Web Site observed today "the witch-hunt and its intensity is the major lesson that must be drawn from the events of the past weeks. It demonstrates just how far the bureaucracy and its supporters will go in order to preserve the Labour Party as a trusted instrument of imperialist rule––and gives the lie to Corbyn’s claim that an influx of members and the advocacy of a few reforms can transform it into a means of defending the interests of the working class."

The Hilarious Jonathan Pie Contemplating God

The most unpopular candidates in American history

From WSWS

There is mounting evidence that the avalanche of political filth from the two main capitalist parties, which enjoy an effective political monopoly in the United States, has alienated record numbers of people. Opinion polls taken over the past week have shown support for both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump declining, with her numbers falling somewhat more rapidly than his, leading to headlines about Trump beginning to “close the gap.”

Clinton and Trump are, it is now widely conceded, the two most unpopular presidential candidates in modern US history. Trump is viewed unfavorably by nearly two-thirds of voters polled, with 44 percent describing him as a racist and 59 percent saying his campaign appeals to bigotry. Yet Trump is only narrowly behind Clinton, whose unfavorability number hit 60 percent in polls last week. Nearly two-thirds of those polled—including many of those planning to vote for her—say that the former Secretary of State is corrupt, a liar and not to be trusted.

What the corporate-controlled media cannot say, but which is undeniably true, is that the two candidates are so widely hated because they represent the increasingly right-wing policies of the US ruling elite, under conditions where American workers and youth are moving to the left.

The actions of the two candidates last week only underscored the vast decay of the American political system. Trump gave a speech in Arizona on immigration which was an hour-long diatribe against undocumented immigrants, whom he blamed for unemployment, crime, budget deficits and terrorism. His fascistic rant concluded with a 10-point plan for the establishment of a police state in America, complete with detention camps for the millions whom Trump pledged to order rounded up in his first action as president.

For her part, Clinton gave a speech on US military policy to the convention of the American Legion—a bulwark of right-wing anti-communism and militarism—in which she presented herself as a more aggressive and reliable commander-in-chief than Trump, whom she suggested was a Russian puppet. She threatened to use force in response to unsubstantiated charges of cyberattacks on the United States by Russia and China, and she hailed the growing list of Republican national security officials, including nearly all the architects of the Iraq War, who have endorsed her campaign.

Train Pie

Music to soothe the savage breast

Fed up with all those EU fanatics who can't accept defeat?  Fed up with those two rich and out of touch Americans vying to be president? Forget them and go into the WW3 with a bit of culture.

I proudly present John Dowland's "Come Again". He was an Elizabethan genius.