Corbyn addresses Trades Union Congress in a display of cynicism and hypocrisy - World Socialist Web Site

Corbyn addresses Trades Union Congress in a display of cynicism and hypocrisy - World Socialist Web Site

For all her bleating about being a working class woman, you can't get away from the fact that O'Grady is living the life of Riley. Together with all the other union delegates at Brighton she has commandeered a first class compartment on Britain's salubrious gravy train.

And now, to add insult to injury, Corbyn has promised to reserve a seat at the Cabinet table for one of these reprehensible labour fixers to better ensure that the working class is more effectively managed.

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.

Definition Of An American

One of an unexceptional group of people known collectively as Americans who scour the planet blowing up shit.

Unlike Hitler who only sort to impose his will on Europe an American seeks to impose his will on the world.

The Red Flag

The ruling class and the spectre of Leon Trotsky

From WSWS

Seventy-six years ago today, the assassin Ramon Mercader plunged an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his home in Coyoacan, Mexico City. Gravely wounded, Trotsky valiantly fought back against his killer. He died of his injuries the following day.

The aim of the assassin’s paymaster, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was to silence the voice of his principal foe and so deprive the Russian and international working class of its greatest revolutionary leader.

Stalin failed. Today, the dictator’s name and that of his followers is reviled. He was, as Trotsky warned, “The grave digger of the revolution,” whereas Trotsky is forever associated with the incorruptible struggle against Stalinism and for international socialism.

Trotsky remains not only a towering historical personality, but also a figure of acute contemporary political relevance for workers the world over. This finds confirmation in the way that his name has been invoked repeatedly in the deepening crisis of the British Labour Party.

The right wing of the Labour Party, beginning on August 9 with an article in the Guardian by its deputy leader Tom Watson, is bitterly denouncing “Trotskyist entryists” and portraying all supporters of Labour’s current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as unwitting dupes of these shadowy forces.

In the Corbyn camp, the response has been to express outrage and incredulity that such an accusation has been made—with Corbyn reassuring the Observer, “At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour Party [emphasis added].”

None of this has prevented Britain’s major newspapers from being inundated with articles on Trotsky, seeking to denigrate him and warn against any association with his ideas. Repeated references have been made to “Trotsky’s ghost” haunting the Labour Party and portraying the political struggle within it as one between reform and revolution.

Whatever the factional intentions of the Labour right, the emergence of Trotsky’s name to the centre stage has enormous objective significance. Indeed, whenever capitalism is gripped by crisis and an eruption of social and political conflict involving the working class, Trotsky’s presence is always felt.

Why is this?

Despite the declarations of his supposed “irrelevance”, the ruling elite and its media is acutely aware of the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism under conditions of bitter social divisions, the political turmoil produced by the Brexit referendum and, above all, the threatened breakup of the Labour Party that has policed the struggles of the working class for more than a century.

Millions of workers and young people are looking for a means of fighting back against austerity and militarism. Corbyn’s pretence of being such an alternative, while opposing any break with the Labour Party, cannot last. The question of building a new and genuinely socialist party will inevitably arise.

The situation in Britain only expresses that which is developing the world over. The working class is moving to the left, but it has yet to build the socialist leadership it requires.

Next year is the 100th anniversary of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Alongside Lenin, Trotsky’s name is synonymous with that epochal event that established the first workers state in the world. Today, world capitalism is once again in the grip of an escalating economic, political and social crisis that raises anew the question of whether humanity will be dragged into an era of dictatorship, barbarism and war, or whether the working class will succeed in establishing world socialism, ending class exploitation and national divisions.

Trotsky led the political fight against the degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalin. His struggle and that of the Left Opposition, which culminated in the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, refutes the central claim of anti-communist propagandists that Lenin led to Stalin, and that socialism produced bureaucratic tyranny.

Trotsky is the author of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and of such epoch-defining phrases as “The death agony of capitalism.” He is the personal embodiment of the perspective of world socialist revolution. And as far as Britain’s ruling class and its counterparts internationally are concerned, this makes Trotsky the most toxic and dangerous figure in history.

Even after the passage of decades, Trotsky’s writings have immediate relevance. Not only did he pay close attention to the class struggle in Britain, he offered the most trenchant and scathing appraisal of the Labour Party and of its role as a defender of capitalist rule. His classic work, “Where is Britain Going?” was published in 1925, just one year before the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress betrayed the General Strike. His writings on the Fabian left and its impotence, cant and hypocrisy, provide a salutary warning against placing any trust in Corbyn and his backers in the union bureaucracy:

They are the main prop of British imperialism and of the European, if not the world bourgeoisie. Workers must at all costs be shown these self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie in their true colours. To show them up for what they are means to discredit them beyond repair. To discredit them means rendering a supreme service to historical progress.

In the next period, the burning issue that must be clarified among advanced workers and youth internationally is that of Trotsky and his political legacy. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the world Trotskyist movement that is represented in Britain by the Socialist Equality Party, has dedicated itself to refuting what we have termed the “post-Stalinist school of historical falsification” regarding Trotsky and his life and work.

In the first decade of this century, and on the eve of the 2008 financial crash, British historians Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service all published biographies of Trotsky. World Socialist Web Site Chairman David North conducted systematic work to expose the lies and falsifications they contained. Published in 2010 under the title In Defense of Leon Trotsky, North described their tendentious works as “pre-emptive biographies” seeking to “completely discredit Trotsky as a historical figure” on the eve of renewed revolutionary struggles.

In his introduction, North made the following observation of the motivations for all present efforts to denigrate Trotsky:

Leon Trotsky was, above all else, the great tribune and theoretician of world socialist revolution. The passions evoked by his name testify to the enduring significance of Trotsky’s ideas. Arguments about Trotsky are never simply about what happened in the past. They are just as much about what is happening in the world today, and what is likely to happen in the future.

Since these words were written, much additional ink and paper has been wasted on seeking to diminish and slander Trotsky. Yet despite these slanders and those that will follow, it has never been possible to erase his enduring presence. This is because Trotskyism is not only a spectre but a political movement. The organization that he founded, the Fourth International, is the conscious expression of deep objective tendencies that are once again bringing the working class all over the world into revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.

The Big Fake

American and British media propaganda knows no bounds. Consider the video of the child supposedly caught up in a bombing raid by Russia in Aleppo. Forget for a moment that the US has inspired and funded the whole Syrian catastrophe and continues to do so by supplying ISIS with all the means they need to topple the Assad government - forget that and just look at the photo.

A boy has supposedly been plucked from the rubble of a bombed building and instead of being rushed to hospital where his wounds can be treated he is instead plonked in a chair for the world to gawk at. Does it make sense to you. 

Hooray I got it removed. So much egg on the BBC's face.

The Olympic Flame Should Be Extinguished

Rio 2016: The “Olympic ideal” and the reality of capitalism

From WSWS

“The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” These words, which appear in the Olympic Charter’s “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” are supposed to sum up what is referred to with sanctimonious reverence as the “Olympic ideal.”

There has never been a golden age of the Olympic games, which have for over a century served as an arena for the promotion of nationalism. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was candid in acknowledging that he valued sport not only for its potential for advancing mankind’s development, but also for its use in preparing French men to become better soldiers in war.

With the opening of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, however, the contrast could hardly be more stark between the supposed Olympic ideal and the reality of a capitalist system mired in economic crisis and social inequality and hurtling toward another world war.

The opening ceremony of the Rio games, held in the city’s iconic Maracana Stadium, was widely covered by the international news media. Less reported was a brutal attack by the Brazilian police against a demonstration organized a half mile away, called against what the protesters termed “the exclusion games.” Police used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades to drive the demonstrators off the streets, injuring several.

Earlier clashes were seen along the route taken by the Olympic Torch, which in one case was extinguished by a crowd of workers and youth in the coastal town of Angra dos Reis. They had turned out to protest the expenditures on the Olympics under conditions where public employees and teachers are not being paid and transit service and health care are being cut because of the deepening fiscal crisis.

In 2009, when the Brazilian government secured the 2016 games for Rio, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proclaimed, “Our time has arrived.” During the same period, Lula was boasting that Brazil, whose growth rate had rebounded to 5 percent, was immune from the effects of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Since then, the world capitalist crisis has devastated Brazil’s economy, driving the official unemployment rate to over 11 percent and sending real wages falling. Millions are threatened with being thrown back into extreme poverty in what is already one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Even as the games unfold, the Brazilian Senate is moving ahead with the impeachment of ousted President Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budgetary irregularities. Those moving against the Workers Party (PT) president are, like the PT itself, implicated up to their necks in the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras bribery scandal. Nonetheless, they are backed by both Brazilian and foreign capital, which wants a full change of regime in order to proceed with sweeping austerity policies under interim President Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president and political ally.

In the run-up to the opening of the games, the Brazilian government heavily publicized alleged terror plots that appeared to have little if any substance. In fact, the massive security operation accompanying the Rio games is aimed not at terrorists, but at the Brazilian population itself. An occupation army of some 100,000 troops and police—twice the number mobilized for the already militarized 2012 London games—has been deployed across Rio, many dressed in combat gear, carrying assault rifles and backed by armored cars and even tanks.

This operation has been supplemented by the United States military and intelligence apparatus, which, according to NBC, has “assigned more than 1,000 spies to Olympic security,” hundreds of whom have been sent to Brazil. In addition to the CIA, FBI and NSA spooks, detachments of Marine and Navy commandos from the US Special Operations Command have been deployed on the ground.

This is the culmination of a campaign of repression that has unfolded over the past few years in tandem with preparations first for the 2013 World Cup football tournament and now for the Olympics. Violent police measures have been used to drive tens of thousands from their homes in impoverished districts targeted for development, while thousands more homeless have been swept from the streets in what amounts to an exercise in “social cleansing.” Police have killed between 40 and 50 people a month in the city over the recent period, while extra-official death squads have murdered many more. So much for the Olympics and “human dignity.”

Against this backdrop, the vast wealth expended on the Olympics, all in pursuit of enrichment and private profit, is obscene. Corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonalds and others, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights and are spending hundreds of millions more to exploit them. TV companies have shelled out $4 billion to broadcast the 19-day event, while marketing revenues are expected to total $9.3 billion.

A relative handful of individual professional athletes will make tens of millions more from product endorsements. The days when the Olympics were a celebration of amateur sports are a distant memory.

Within the games themselves, the overriding atmosphere of social inequality is ever present. While poorer teams are dealing with substandard conditions in hastily constructed Olympic villages, the US basketball “dream team” is residing on the luxury cruise ship Silver Cloud, moored in Rio’s harbor and surrounded by police and navy patrol boats.

Meanwhile, the use of the Olympics to promote nationalism and prepare for war is as virulent in the Rio games as at any time since Adolph Hitler convened the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

On Monday, it was announced that Russian athletes will be banned entirely from the Paralympics to be held next month in Rio in connection with charges of state-sponsored doping of athletes. Earlier, 118 members of the country’s track and field team were banned under a system relegating the decision to the federations of each individual sport.

Washington, the World Anti-Doping Agency, various NGOs and the Western media have waged a virulent campaign to exclude every Russian athlete from the Rio Olympics and prevent the country’s flag from even appearing there, as part of a broader effort to paint Russia as a “rogue” nation that must be stopped by force.

The campaign to bar Russia from the games is inseparably bound up with the growing US-NATO siege of the country’s Western borders, which has been steadily escalated since the US- and German-orchestrated coup that installed an ultra-right, anti-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014.

The sanctimonious denunciations of Russia for having corrupted an otherwise pristine sporting event reek with bad faith and hypocrisy. The anti-Russian campaign intentionally obscures the wholesale corruption surrounding the entire organization of the games as well as the rampant doping practiced by nearly every country.

The controversy, which has run in tandem with the Democratic Party’s neo-McCarthyite campaign denouncing Vladimir Putin for interfering in the US election, has been pumped up as part of the attempt to prepare public opinion for a military conflict with Russia that could quickly lead to nuclear war.

While this year’s Olympic Games will once again provide a display of astounding athletic ability by participants from across the planet, the entire event is overshadowed by a social system that is founded on inequality and exploitation, and threatens the very survival of humanity.

The Guardian: Apologist for nuclear war

By Laura Tiernan of WSWS

Last week, Britain’s parliament voted 472-117 to renew the Trident nuclear submarine programme.

Amid jeering and abuse heaped by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on their leader Jeremy Corbyn, 140 Labour MPs voted with the Conservatives in defence of Britain’s “nuclear deterrent.” The Trident vote revealed that there is a single party of war, cutting across party lines.

The media campaign surrounding the vote exposed the central aim of the attempted coup against Corbyn. Its aim is to install the Blairite forces who will ensure Labour continues to serve as the direct and pliant instrument of British imperialism.

As with every aspect of this campaign, the Guardian has played a key role.

On the eve of the vote, it provided a platform for Labour MPs demanding support for Trident, as well as those calling for an abstention—reserving its vitriol for Corbyn’s anti-nuclear stance.

The first of these sorties was launched by Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. He spoke for the vast majority of PLP members in a July 17 article headlined, “Economically and militarily, we must renew Trident.”

Emphasising Labour’s history as a party of war, Watson declared, “[N]ow is not the time to step away from our historic role as a nuclear power. When [Labour Prime Minister Clement] Attlee built Britain’s bomb, he did so because he knew our role in the world would be shaped by our capacity to defend ourselves and our allies; the logic of that Labour party position holds even truer today.”

He made clear the predatory interests behind the Trident debate, calling on Britain to step up its involvement in the NATO build-up against Russia: “I am pleased that the UK is committed to deploying our troops as part of NATO’s Baltic forces. Putin’s Russia looms, a mafia state built on chauvinism. Britain must play its part in holding it at bay.”

Labour MPs Clive Lewis and Emily Thornberry, who are nominally Corbyn supporters, contributed their own article, “This Trident vote is a contemptible trick. That’s why we are abstaining.”

Justifying their refusal to oppose the government motion, the pair wrote that Monday’s debate would be nothing more than “a political game … There is nothing new in this debate—a vote in principle was agreed in 2007. It is being held simply to sow further divisions inside the Labour party.”

To portray the vote on Britain’s nuclear program as merely a cynical political manoeuvre by the Tories is politically criminal. Both MPs are well aware of the context in which the Trident vote is being held—a growing arms race by all the major imperialist powers that threatens a third world war. Thornberry is heading up Labour’s Defence Review, while Lewis, a graduate from Sandhurst military academy who served in Afghanistan, is currently Labour’s shadow defence minister. Both are privy to high-level military briefings, especially in relation to the current NATO build-up against Russia.

While claiming to offer a third way between outright rejection and acceptance of the government’s motion, they made clear that any concerns they have over the Trident programme are of a militarist character. Budget outlays on Trident “will matter if our already highly stretched conventional defence capabilities must be cut to pay for it,” Lewis and Thornberry wrote. “If we choose to retain a nuclear capability, there are many cheaper alternatives than building the full complement of replacement submarines.”

The next day, just hours before the Trident debate, Guardian commissioning editor Archie Bland weighed in with an extraordinary opinion piece: “Banging on about Trident—it’s Corbynism to a T.”

Bland’s objective was to portray Corbyn’s planned opposition to Trident as irrelevant, because the issue lacked “salience” with the broader public.

“Do you prefer your potatoes mashed or roasted?” he asked his readers. “Which are better, cats or dogs? Is it reasonable for your aunt’s next-door neighbours to play loud music after 11pm? If pressed, you will have a view about all of these things. … But a view isn’t usually the same thing as a deep concern. Political scientists call this salience: the idea that, as well as what you think about something, it is worth asking whether you think about it.”

According to Bland, the attitude of millions of people to the danger of nuclear war is on par with the minor inconvenience of rowdy neighbours.

“They don’t care whether Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party,” he continued. “They no longer care about the invasion of Iraq, which remains a shibboleth for a huge segment of Labour activists, even though it began more than a decade ago and all of the key players have departed from the stage. And they certainly don’t care about the particulars of Trident.”

The Tories would “breeze through” the vote on Trident “in a spirit of complete unity,” he concluded, while “Labour appears hopelessly divided on something that most people don’t care about.”

Bland’s article provoked hundreds of objections on the Guardian’s comment thread.

Undeterred, Guardian journalist Owen Jones took up Bland’s theme in his own column the next day, concluding: “Those of us who believe Britain could set an example by disposing of its nuclear weapons should have the humility to accept we have not convinced the majority of people in this country, including those whose jobs currently depend on Trident and who have not been persuaded about an alternative economic plan. We have to at least start from there.”

The picture painted by Bland and Jones of an apathetic populace is an outright lie. Their aim is to delegitimise opposition to Trident—and to block any challenge to the imperialist war drive.

When Bland writes that the public “no longer cares about the invasion of Iraq” he is confusing the indifference of his fellow columnists, such as Jones, who speak for the most privileged layers of the upper middle class, with the egalitarian and oppositional sentiments of millions of workers and young people.

A critical aspect of the Guardian ’s coverage is its determination to downplay the threat of nuclear war. But Prime Minister Theresa May’s unprecedented and ominous declaration, made in the Trident debate, that she would not hesitate to authorise a nuclear strike killing 100,000 innocent men, women and children, shows what is at stake.

Her chilling admission was passed over in silence by Labour MPs and the Guardian duly stepped in to cover their tracks. The result was a comment by Giles Fraser, “Theresa May is lying over Trident. At least I hope she is.”

Fraser, a former canon chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and therefore in the professional business of granting benedictions, claimed that “parliament has just committed well over £100bn on a weapons system that we won’t use, that we mustn’t use, and that even the Russians know we won’t use. They know this because the only situation in which we would think about pressing the button would be precisely the situation in which there was no longer any point in pressing the button.”

His imaginary schema was based on the premise that the British ruling class would not initiate a nuclear attack. In his entire column, the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not appear. But the bombs dropped on both Japanese cities in August 1945, killing over 200,000 people, were nuclear first strikes by the United States. Declassified papers made public in 2013 revealed that British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally endorsed these atrocities.

On February 15, 2003, more than 1 million people in the UK joined global protests to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq— the largest anti-war protests in history. This opposition has not gone away. According to a YouGov poll published last June, opposition to the Iraq War has in fact increased over the past 13 years. Polls conducted over the past decade have also consistently registered majority opposition to Trident.

The Guardian is not merely a newspaper. It is an organising centre of the nominally liberal bourgeoisie. Claiming to stand for progressive opinion, its role is to police public discourse, upholding at all times the strategic imperatives of imperialism.

The problem is not apathy, as the Guardian claims, but the absence of a revolutionary leadership, programme and perspective. The instinctive opposition of working people has been deliberately confined to the parties and institutions of capitalism—the very system responsible for war, austerity and the growing assault on democratic rights.

In 2003, the Stop the War Coalition—led by figures such as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn—channelled mass protests behind impotent appeals to the Labour Party, the United Nations and imperialist powers such as France and Germany, to oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq. Corbyn addressed the mass rally in London’s Hyde Park, calling on Blair to hold a parliamentary vote on the war. Blair did so four weeks later. A pro-war vote by Labour and the Tories resulted, with British military action commencing the next day.

Corbyn’s record since becoming Labour leader in September 2015 has been one of abject capitulation to the Blairite warmongers on every critical issue. In the name of “party unity” he has: (1) refused to challenge Labour policy on Trident at the party’s National Conference; (2) allowed a free vote on British military action in Syria that resulted in bombing raids; and (3) opposed war crimes charges against Tony Blair and his accomplices, helping to sweep the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War under the mat.

Despite addressing rallies of thousands of supporters over the weekend, including a campaign launch in Salford on Saturday, Corbyn made no mention of Trident or the threat of war.

Catastrophic Identity Crisis

Theresa May Part 1

Because the first scene published yesterday of Liam Shakehands' new play Theresa May Part 1 was so popular he has given me unprecedented access to the second scene.

ACT 1 SCENE 2  A room in the Palace of Westminster

Enter Hilary Benn woad painted and packing many shooting irons. Behind follow Owen Smith and Paddy Ashdown with his pants up. They are woad painted also and on the warpath.

Benn:     [Taking out two pistols and cocking them]

                These two firearms which I see before me,
                With itchy fingers on their triggers poised,
                Can, in an instant, send our foe to hell.
                Two loud reports as both I squeeze at once,
                Then, as the smoke retreats, behold the view;
                Corbyn lying crumpled and deceased.

Smith:     Fine!
                These guns of yours are practical I'm sure,
                But did we not agree to stay our hand,
                Until the leader's ballot is resolved ?
                I might well win.

Benn:       How goes your bid in that?

Smith:     Uphill in truth.
                New membership has complicated things.
         
Benn:        Ah well,the C.I.A will topple him
                  At once, if all else fails. Hurrah the Yanks.

Ashdown:  Look friends, while we endeavour to depose
                   This left-wing fool, if just by happenchance
                   I get to drop my pants and blissfully
                   Begin to roger to my heart's delight,
                   I trust you will not spill the beans.

Benn:        Forsooth!
                  We might partake as well. Why not?

Exeunt all with a skip in their step

Pussyfooting With The Blairites

I make no apology for publishing other people's articles. I can't write it all.

Corbyn and McDonnell plead with UK Labour Party right wing for “unity”

From WSWS

Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell made an extraordinary plea for unity with the very MPs seeking to depose his closest ally, Jeremy Corbyn, in a coup.

Speaking Sunday to the BBC’s "Andrew Marr Show," McDonnell broke from the interview and, speaking directly to the camera, said, “Let me say to Labour Party supporters, Labour members, members of the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP], we have got to stop this now. There is a small group out there that are willing to destroy our party just to remove Jeremy Corbyn. We have got to stop them. We’ve got to unite.”

McDonnell was responding to the latest provocative move by the Blairite coup plotters, who claimed via accusations from Labour MP Seema Malhotra that “members of staff working for John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn” gained unauthorised entry to an office she had used in Parliament. The Observer, the sister paper of the Guardian, which supports the efforts to oust Corbyn, splashed this on its front page—even though its article included a statement from Corbyn’s office directly opposing the claims.

A spokesman for Corbyn said, “As an office manager on the leader of the opposition’s floor, Karie [Murphy] has a key to open all offices. She accessed the office in question to confirm when it would be vacated. It is a month since Seema Malhotra resigned as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, and the office is intended for the person holding that position.”

This latest manufactured incident followed yet more pleas for unity by Corbyn as he launched his leadership campaign Saturday in Salford.

The previous day, Labour MP Owen Smith, who is challenging Corbyn for the leadership, spoke at a meeting in nearby central Manchester. The events could not have been more sharply contrasted. In a city with a population of over half a million, Smith spoke in Manchester’s Friends Meeting House to just 300 people. Corbyn spoke to a capacity audience of 2,000 in Salford’s Lowry Theatre. The event was streamed live on Facebook with over 100,000 people logging in to watch and close to 200,000 having viewed it by Sunday evening. Ten simultaneous launch events across the country were held at the same time.

For weeks, Corbyn has been denounced by the right-wing acolytes of former Labour leader Tony Blair as being “unelectable” and “out of touch” with Labour voters, particularly in Labour’s “heartlands.” Using this to justify their coup against Corbyn, 172 MPs backed a motion of no-confidence in him. After trying to prevent a leadership contest taking place, Smith was chosen as the “unity candidate” who could supposedly combine a left feint with that mysterious “electability” of an inveterate opportunist.

The problem is that anyone who is fielded by the PLP is viewed with hostility by the broad mass of party members and seen as a pliant tool of those who have overseen Labour’s transformation into an openly big business, pro-war party and who are now intent on subverting Corbyn because he is pledged to oppose austerity, militarism and war.

On Saturday, the Guardian published a poll commissioned by Opinium and the Observer, which found that Corbyn is set to trounce Smith in the September 24 contest. Some 54 percent of Labour supporters said they support Corbyn, with Smith having the backing of just 22 percent.

Just 10 months ago, Corbyn crushed his three Blairite opponents, winning the support of more than 250,000 Labour members and registered supporters—more than all his opponents put together. All indications are that Corbyn’s support among Labour’s members has grown since then as a direct result of opposition to the attempted coup against him.

After failing to keep Corbyn off the ballot, the Blairites attempted to cut off 130,000 Labour members and supporters who had joined in the last six months from voting in the leadership contest. They were given just two days to register and pay a prohibitive £25 fee. Nevertheless, 180,000 people signed up. Labour’s membership under Corbyn’s leadership is now well over half a million.

The aim of the Blairites is not merely to depose Corbyn, but to thwart growing anti-capitalist sentiment and yearning for fundamental social change among millions of people. However, every manoeuvre attempted so far by the coup plotters has backfired. Indeed, their attempt to package Smith as the new rising star “in touch” with voters has not even survived a week of contact with the real world, to the point that Smith felt it necessary to declare in Manchester, “I’m as radical as Jeremy.”

The support for Corbyn is only an initial manifestation of far more profound political developments, rooted in the deep social polarisation between the classes in the UK. Nearly a decade of savage cuts carried out by successive Labour and Conservative-led governments since the 2008 global financial crash has resulted in millions of working people being pauperised. Young people, who make up much of Corbyn’s support, have no future, with the avenue of a decent free education and secure employment now denied them.

But far from offering their supporters a programme of struggle against the Blairites, Corbyn and McDonnell have capitulated to them at every turn in the name of preserving “party unity.”

McDonnell speaks of a “small group” opposing Corbyn, but this small group consists of the vast bulk of the PLP to whom he made his unity appeal. These MPs ignore all such pathetic appeals and instead join enthusiastically in the campaign, slandering Corbyn’s supporters as “violent thugs,” “anti-Semites” and “misogynists.”

In Salford, Corbyn too urged his supporters to seek unity with the coup plotters, saying, “I know some people are angry at the actions of some MPs, but where we have disagreement in the Labour Party we settle it through democratic means—no coups, no intimidation, no abuse... Whatever the result on the 24th of September, we’re going be a united movement to take on the Tories…”

No coups? No abuse? Democratic means? What does this have to do with the reality of the vicious right-wing offensive mounted against those Corbyn now urges to turn the other cheek?

Corbyn acts as a block on the aspirations of those who support him. He is all that stands between the party’s right wing and a political reckoning. Under conditions of mass revulsion felt by millions towards all the institutions of the ruling elite, including Parliament and its parties, he insists that any change can be accomplished only via a Labour government and Parliament. "Many of us have sought office in Parliament," he declared, "in order to effect those changes—but changes come because people want those changes to come and Parliament has to influence how those changes come about.”

To claim that Labour can be made to implement anti-austerity and anti-war measures, as does Corbyn, means to lie to the working class.

In the previous week, three quarters of Labour MPs voted to retain the UK’s nuclear missile arsenal, with many advocating its use in future conflicts. Prior to this, the Chilcot report into the Iraq War was released, providing devastating confirmation of the illegal character of the war and the criminal role of those—Blair and his supporters—who organized and led it in support of US imperialism. Corbyn, despite his professed opposition to both the Iraq War and Trident renewal, said nothing about either issue in Salford—also, one must assume, to further the cause of party unity.

To take a single step forward, those presently looking towards Corbyn for leadership must consciously reject the limitations he and his supporters place on them and adopt a genuinely revolutionary socialist perspective and leadership.