A spectre is haunting the world— the spectre of Communism. - 31 Oct 2018

A spectre is haunting the world— the spectre of Communism. All the powers of Old World have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre...

https://archive.is/vmJT0

Nevada: Worker Killed in Gold Mine Ceiling Collapse - Jason Holman - RIP - 31 Oct 2018

 

Underground worker killed in collapse at Nevada gold mine

Jason Holman, a 42-year-old underground mineworker from Goshen, Utah, was killed on October 25 in a collapse at the Lee Smith gold mine, 50 miles north of Elko, Nevada. Few details have been released, but according to a preliminary report from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), Holman, a powderman, was loading explosives into the rock-face when a 150-ton portion of the mine ceiling fell and “a portion of this cemented backfill, weighing approximately 5 tons, landed on top of the miner.” He appears to have died instantly. The incident is still under investigation by MSHA

Holman leaves behind three children—McKade, Tyson and Jaycee—and a loving family. The family could not be reached for additional comments, but his brother Shawn published a tribute on Facebook saying, “one of his goals he was working for and saving toward was taking his daughter Jaycee to Disneyland for the very first time.” According to the gofundme page set up by his family to pay for funeral arrangements, Jason was an avid outdoorsman who liked to hunt, fish and camp. At the time of this writing, the page has raised over $4,400, donated in small sums by other mineworkers and their families.

By all accounts, Holman was well-liked and respected by his coworkers. He had worked as an underground miner for 13 years, including 28 weeks at the Lee Smith mine prior to his death. The Lee Smith mine is one of many underground gold mines in Jerritt Canyon, a mining complex in the isolated Independence Mountains mining district of Northern Nevada that has seen a boom in gold extraction since the 1980s.

The Lee Smith Mine reaches depths of over 1000 feet below the surface. Small Mine Development, the contractor operating the mine, uses underhand mining with cemented backfill to extract the ore. This method was developed to facilitate hard rock mining in deep mines with poor ground conditions. Among two other mines, underhand cut and cemented backfill was developed and tested in the Lucky Friday silver mine in Mullen, Idaho.

Lucky Friday is the deepest mine in the United States, at nearly two miles below the surface. Two hundred and thirty mineworkers there have been on strike since March 2017 and have repeatedly rebuffed attempts to force them to accept a concessions contract that would reduce health benefits and compromise safety in the interests of profits.

The Lee Smith Mine was purchased out of bankruptcy in 2015, along with the entire Jerritt Canyon complex, by Jerrit Canyon Gold LLC, owned by Canadian billionaire Eric Sprott. Speaking to the Elko Daily Free Press after the buyout, Jerritt Canyon Gold’s CEO, Greg Gibson, promised an increase in gold production, saying that Sprott “is of the belief that there are a lot more ounces to come out of Jerritt Canyon.”

Sprott is one of the largest gold equity holders in North America. He purchases mines around the world, speculating that as gold prices rise and the global economy spirals into crisis, he will profit. Speaking earlier this month at the Precious Metals Investment Symposium in Perth, Australia, Sprott said, “If you were right on gold in 2000, on average you made 1700 per cent. Do it once, you’re set for life,” he said, touting his investment strategy as “stealing value.”

The mineworkers who dig the precious metals face dangerous conditions as a rule. In 2014, MSHA issued Veris Gold, the previous owner, 60 citations for safety violations at the Jerritt Canyon Complex. In 2015, Jason Potter, a 26-year-old jumbo drill operator, was killed at the Jerritt Canyon complex’s SSX Mine (also operated by Small Mine Development) when a 13-foot-long drill bit struck him. The MSHA report found management at fault for inadequate safety training. Just 10 days before Jason Holman’s death, two workers were injured in a steam explosion at the Jerritt Canyon Mill.

An underground miner who works in a mine adjacent to Lee Smith spoke about the conditions facing underground mineworkers. “Personally, for me, each shift as I enter the mine, I think about my friends that had passed and make a commitment to myself to come out safe … it is dangerous and there is no way to be 100 percent safe. If a miner isn’t scared each time they enter the hole, they aren’t ready to mine.”

Jason Holman’s death was the 14th metal and nonmetal mining fatality the US in 2018, and the 22nd including fatalities in the coal industry.

Fatalities in the mining industry are a component of the rising rates of workplace injuries and deaths in the US as a whole, as both the Republicans and the Democrats roll back regulations and the corporations cut wages and benefits and sacrifice safety for greater output and profit.

Some of the deadly mining accidents in recent years occurred under the Obama administration, which appointed former United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) safety official Joe Main to head MSHA. Among these accidents was the disaster at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, which killed 29 of the 31 coal miners at the mine.

The Trump administration has frozen new and pending regulations and is reviewing existing regulations in order to roll them back. Trump’s head of MSHA, former coal executive David Zatezalo, is overseeing a review of protections against the dust and emissions that contribute to skyrocketing rates of black lung disease among Appalachian coal miners.

As corporations bring in record profits, workers have seen a decade’s worth of declining wages and are working longer hours for fewer benefits, in hazardous conditions. At least 150 workers die every day from hazardous conditions, and according to the most recent government data, 2016 saw a 7 percent increase in workers killed on the job—up to 5,190 from 4,836 in 2015.
Other miners killed this month include:

Roger W. Herndon, 33, an auger helper at the Princess Polly Anna & JCT Enterprises LLC Surface Mine #1, in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, who was fatally injured on October 17 when he was struck by a piece of auger drill steel.

Brendan DeMaster, 40, of North Royalton, Ohio, a miner with 20 years experience, who was fatally injured October 2 at an underground zinc mine, which just opened in June in Gouverneur, New York. DeMaster was struck by a sudden burst of stemming sand, which had been ejected from a borehole that was being cleaned with high pressure air.

An 18-year-old miner, Anthony David Montoya of Hollis, Oklahoma, was fatally mauled by a grizzly bear while working at a remote silver mine in Alaska on October 1. He was working at a drill site on the edge of the Hecla Greens Creek Mine, one of the world’s largest silver producers, located about 18 miles south of Juneau on Admiralty Island.

October has been particularly deadly for miners throughout the world.

Twenty-one coal miners were killed in eastern China after a tunnel where 22 miners were working was blocked at both ends by coal after pressure caused rocks to fracture and break on October 20. The Longyun Coal Mining Co. Ltd. is located in Yuncheng County in Shandong province.
A 46-year-old miner in South Africa was also killed by head injuries suffered in an underground accident at Lonmin’s platinum mine. Lonmin, the world’s third largest platinum producer, is notorious for the Marikana massacre in August 2012. Seventeen striking miners were murdered and another 78 wounded when South African security forces opened fire on them during a series of violent assaults, which began when officials opened fire on rebellious miners.

https://gephardtdaily.com/local/utah-miner-dies-after-roof-collapse-at-nevada-gold-mine/

Lexington KY: Funeral for UPS Worker Killed on the Job Fixing Machinery - 27 Oct 2018

Funeral to be held today for UPS worker Andy Schanding, killed on the job in Lexington, Kentucky

27 October 2018

Anthony “Andy” Thomas Schanding, a 43-year-old United Parcel Service worker, was killed on the job Tuesday morning at the Mercer Road hub in Lexington, Kentucky. He suffered a fatal injury while performing maintenance on a conveyer at approximately 11:20 a.m. He was pronounced dead fifty minutes later, shortly after arriving at the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital. A funeral will be held today in the nearby city of Carlisle, Kentucky.

Andy leaves behind a loving family: his wife of 21 years, Sarah Dixon Schanding; a son Elliot and a daughter Emilee; his parents, Bradley and Bonita; brother David; and sisters Elizabeth and Kathy.

Andy Schanding (source: Elizabeth Hughes)

The family published a tribute on Facebook on Tuesday, describing Andy as “a private person [who] was humble, shy, quiet and genuine.” His sister, Elizabeth Hughes, wrote, “Your heart was so big, your smile was contagious and your love for your wife and children was enormous. You were a wonderful father and husband and the love between you and Sarah was admirable. You did good my brother now go rest easy.”

Andy Schanding had been employed at UPS for one year. Before then, he spent 20 years at Stamler/Joy Mining in Millersburg. He was born on December 11, 1974, and graduated from Nicholas County High School in 1994. According to the obituary published by his family, he enjoyed farming, karaoke, throwing darts and working on small projects. He was by all accounts a well-respected and liked worker, and his family has included employees at both Stamler/Joy and UPS among the honorary bearers at today’s funeral.

No information has been released by company management, the coroner’s office or the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Association as to how or why Schanding was fatally injured. Andy’s sister Elizabeth told the Herald Leader that he was always highly conscious about safety, both on and off the job. She said Schanding’s supervisor at UPS told the family that Andy was known at the plant for being cautious and always wearing his safety harness. He was wearing the harness when he was killed.

Andy’s brother in law, Tim Dixon, himself a former UPS employee and now an autoworker in Kentucky, told the Herald Leaderthat employers “squeeze every nickel” out of workers. “Companies are greedy,” he said. “That’s when mistakes are made.” Dixon added that Andy enjoyed his job. “I never saw anyone who loved to go to work as much as he did.”

Aftermath of the explosion in at the Lexington UPS Freight hub in May

Thousands of UPS workers are injured or killed in workplace accidents every year due to relentless company demands for speedup to maximize profits.

The day after Schanding was killed, UPS released its quarterly profit figures, showing a 20 percent year-on-year increase in third quarter profits to $1.5 billion. The company is on track to record a $7 billion profit this year. This money, enough to give every UPS worker around the world a $20,000 raise, will be passed on to investment funds and the billionaire financial parasites who control them, in the form of stock buybacks and dividend payouts. In the past twenty years, UPS has increased its dividend-per-share payout four-fold. It will hand over $3 billion in dividends in 2018.

The atmosphere of management harassment and intimidation in the warehouses has increased following the the Teamsters’ October 5 decision to defy the 54 percent “no” vote by UPS workers on its sellout four-year labor contract backed by management. Workers in hubs across the country report that the company has been inspired by the Teamsters’misleaders ignoring the workers vote to go on the offensive.

Schanding’s death is not an isolated incident.

In Rockford, Illinois, Lily, who earns $13 an hour and is attempting to raise three children with her husband, told us how a co-worker, who had received little training, had her finger ripped off by a rapidly moving box on the sorting line.

In Tennessee, Sean, a 32-year-old permanent part-time UPS worker, told us how his wrist tendon was torn trying to lift an overweight package. He was sent to a company-approved doctor, who proscribed anti-inflammatories and instructed him to return to work with a brace. Only five months later was he able to get the surgery he needed, and he has permanently lost range of motion in his arm. He is now living on poverty-level workers’ compensation payments trying to support his baby son and wife.

In Ontario, California, Irene, a 36-year-old porter of 10 years, revealed that workers are becoming dizzy and have to leave work early due to the polluted air in the warehouse. The fumes are caused by welding as part of ongoing construction work to install new, more highly-automated equipment. Many workers have become sick, including pregnant women workers on the line. Last year, Irene said, a 22-year-old worker had a seizure, fell on his head and was killed.


At the Blue Sky Parkway UPS Freight hub, also in Lexington but separate from the facility in which Andy Schanding was killed, an explosion in May injured two workers. A propane torch reportedly set off the explosion of tanks of acetylene (a gas used for welding) on a truck and trailer parked in the hub. The two workers who were hospitalized and six other workers in the vicinity were lucky to escape with their lives, having been sufficiently far away when the explosion occurred.

Every year, thousands of workers are killed on the job in America’s industrial slaughterhouse. The most recently-available government data, from 2016, reports 5,190 workers killed on the job, up by 7 percent from the year before. Another 50–60,000 workers die from occupational diseases, including Black Lung and cancers caused by workplace pollution. This means an average of 150 workers die every day on the job.

Battlefield Tactical Nukes Will Be Used - US missile treaty withdrawal: “Prepare for nuclear war” - 24 Oct 2018

24 October 2018

On Saturday, US President Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited Washington and Moscow from developing short- and medium-range missiles.

It is difficult to overstate the criminality and recklessness of this action. The lives of billions of people in Europe and East Asia have been deliberately placed in the crossfire of Washington’s nuclear buildup against Beijing and Moscow.

American military planners are intent on not only building, but using, nuclear weapons in combat. They aim to demonstrate to their potential adversaries that no humanitarian or moral constraints exist for them, and that Washington out-does its rivals not just in weapons, but in bloodlust.

These plans are being laid in secret. The New York Times has treated the US withdrawal from the treaty as a non-issue. It was not even front-page news, and the newspaper published no editorial or columns about it. Nor was it discussed on the Sunday talk shows.

The Democrats have been almost entirely silent on the consequences, and the danger of global war—or any opposition to war—has been excluded as an issue from the 2018 midterm elections, just two weeks away.

In the foreign policy press and the publications of think tanks, however, nuclear war is a preeminent issue. Even before the White House’s announcement, Foreign Affairs dedicated its current issue to a discussion of nuclear war, with its cover featuring a missile launch.

The issue features a column by Elbridge A. Colby, one of the principal authors of the National Defense Strategy published by the Pentagon in January, which proclaimed the effective end of the “war on terror” and the beginning of “great-power competition.”

Colby, the former deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development, titled his article, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.” He writes: “The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.”

“Any future confrontation with Russia or China could go nuclear,” Colby warns. “In a harder-fought, more uncertain struggle, each combatant may be tempted to reach for the nuclear saber to up the ante and test the other side’s resolve, or even just to keep fighting.”

A sane person would see this as an argument for the abolition of nuclear weapons. But in the minds of the Pentagon’s professional killers, it speaks to the urgent need to build and use such weapons.
“The best way to avoid a nuclear war,” Colby writes, “is to be ready to fight a limited one.” In this dangerous world, “US officials,” Colby writes, must demonstrate that "the United States is prepared to conduct limited, effective nuclear operations.”

In other words, Mr. Colby is advocating the use of nuclear weapons in combat, not as a doomsday scenario, but in an escalation of a conventional military conflict, whether in the Baltics against Russia, or in the Eastern Pacific against China.

There is an insanity to such arguments, but it is an insanity that has an objective basis. The capitalist world order, choking on the insoluble conflict between the nation-state and the global economy, is leading mankind toward a catastrophe.

While the INF treaty is with Russia, a major calculation behind the Trump administration’s withdrawal from it relates to the growing conflict with China. In an article hailing the decision, the National Interest called the move “China’s New Nightmare.” Washington, the journal wrote, risks “becoming significantly ‘out sticked’ in the ongoing ‘range war’ between military systems designed to safely control the increasingly unfriendly seas and skies of the Western Pacific.”

“US withdrawal from INF, however, could help reverse this dynamic,” it states, adding, “New American conventional systems… could be stationed in unsinkable, out-of-the-way locales” such as Japan, the Philippines and Australia. But while these countries are “unsinkable,” they are home to hundreds of millions of people. The populations living near such missile bases will be told, of course, that nuclear war is unlikely, even as policymakers, in secret documents, plan out exactly how many millions will die.

The driver of Washington’s nuclear brinkmanship is the protracted decline of the global economic power of the United States relative to its rivals, principally China. But this process has entered an acute phase in recent years, with a concerted effort on the part of the Chinese ruling elite to promote the country’s high-value manufacturing and high-tech sector.

In a speech announcing a new military and economic escalation against China earlier this month, US Vice President Mike Pence demanded that China cease its efforts to control what he called the “commanding heights of the 21st century economy,” including “robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence,” making it clear that under the Trump administration, the United States is “defending our interests with renewed American strength.”

“We’re modernizing our nuclear arsenal,” Pence threatened. “We’re fielding and developing new cutting-edge fighters and bombers. We’re building a new generation of aircraft carriers and warships. We’re investing as never before in our armed forces.”

The active preparations for nuclear war, which would be a total war complete with a police-state crackdown on all political opposition, are being made behind the back of the public, which overwhelmingly opposes it.

Far from opposing the military build-up, the Democrats have focused their criticism of Trump for the past two years on claims that he is insufficiently aggressive against Russia, which has been used as the pretext for imposing a regime of internet censorship aimed at silencing domestic opposition.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ Leadership Pushes “Change the Rules” Campaign to Back Capitalist Politicians - 22 Oct 2018

22 October 2018

Many workers across Australia will take part in union rallies on October 23 to express their opposition to the corporate offensive against jobs, wages and working conditions, and the assault on social spending being prosecuted by the federal and state governments. However, the openly stated aim of the “Change the Rules” protests organised by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is to channel these sentiments into the election of yet another big business federal Labor government.

The entire campaign is fraudulent. In its material, the ACTU leadership and its secretary Sally McManus have highlighted soaring inequality, exemplified by the fact that the richest one percent of the population owns more wealth than the poorest 70 percent. The union leadership have denounced the prevalence of casual and contract labour, which now accounts for up to half the entire workforce, and condemned to stagnant and falling pay.

Left out of the ACTU top's    rhetoric is the reality that all these conditions that workers face are the outcome of the decades-long collaboration by the union misleaders with the corporations and successive governments, both Labor and Coalition.

The very “Fair Work Australia” industrial legislation the unions claim to be fighting to change were imposed by Labor with their support.

In 2007, the ACTU and its affiliates launched the “Your Rights at Work” campaign, upon which “Change the Rules” is modelled. The aim was to channel hostility to the Coalition government of John Howard, and its Work Choices industrial relations regime, into the election of Labor.
One of the first acts of the new Rudd-Gillard Labor government was to pass the Fair Work legislation, which retained most of the draconian provisions of Work Choices. The laws, which illegalised virtually all industrial action and cleared the path for continuous pro-business restructuring, were praised and fully backed by the unions.

Ever since, Labor and the union leadership have invoked the Fair Work legislation to suppress any political or industrial struggle by workers. Time and again, the union mileaders have insisted that workers end strike action, accept wage cuts and acquiesce to sackings, because they have been given the green light by the pro-business Fair Work Commission, which the union apparatus asserts is an “independent umpire.”

The Fair Work regime itself was the outcome of the assault on the conditions of the working class that was launched after the coming to power of the Hawke-Keating Labor government in 1983.
The so-called Accords between the Labor government, the ACTU and the major employers facilitated a vast restructuring and deregulation of the economy. As part of this agenda, the union leadership enforced the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs and abolished the shop stewards’ committees and other forms of rank-and-file workplace organisation that called for opposition to the demands of the corporations for “international competitiveness”.

The result was the fastest growth of social inequality since the end of World War II and a social disaster in working class areas. Entire generations of workers and youth have been condemned to a future of precarious work and low wages.

In the 1990s, the ACTU leadership backed the Labor government of Paul Keating when it introduced the modern system of enterprise bargaining. This ended industry-wide negotiations over conditions, and tied workers to the immediate profit demands of their individual companies.

The complicity of the union leadership in the attack on the working class is starkly revealed in the virtual disappearance of strikes, the most elementary form of workers’ struggle against the employers. Since the introduction of enterprise bargaining, and especially since the imposition of the Fair Work legislation, the number of strikes has fallen to its lowest level in Australian history.
The unions misleaders have presided over one enterprise agreement after another which have slashed real wages, eliminated conditions and destroyed jobs.

The Australian Workers Union leaders, for instance, including when it was led by current Labor leader Bill Shorten, signed secret agreements with major employers that cut wages and abolished penalty rates for some of the country’s lowest-paid workers, including cleaners and agricultural labourers.

Across the fast-food and service sectors, penalty rates are virtually a thing of the past, along with sick and holiday leave and a living wage, after years of sweetheart deals between the unions leaders and major transnational companies.

In the manufacturing sector, the unions misleaders have overseen the shutdown of the car industry and the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs at the ports, in the steel and mining sectors, textiles and other industries.

The ACTU officials running the “Change the Rules” campaign apparently hope that workers suffer collective amnesia and have forgotten their bitter experiences with the Labor Party and the unions leadership over the past 30 years.

In a speech this month, McManus declared: “We have so often turned to the Labor Party to enact legislation that ensures working people have the rights they need.” She claimed that Labor was “the party of full employment” and “has the track record on reform that benefits the workers of Australia.”
As the record demonstrates, these are transparent and shameless lies.

If Labor returns to power, it will be a government of, for and by big business and the wealthiest layers of society, no different to the Coalition. Amid the deepest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the next government will cut education, healthcare and welfare, escalate Australia’s alignment with the militarist US-led confrontation against China and intensify the attacks on democratic rights, including the persecution of refugees.

The changes to industrial relations laws that the ACTU leadership is proposing a Labor government introduce are not intended to improve workers’ conditions, but assist the corporations continue to drive them down.

In her recent speech, McManus reiterated the ACTU’s call for the abolition of enterprise bargaining and the re-establishment of industry-wide agreements. She said that this was necessary because enterprise bargaining was no longer delivering sufficient boosts to “productivity,” i.e. cuts to employers’ costs and ever-greater profits.

Industry-wide bargaining, McManus declared, would allow “business owners” and union leaders “to come together to improve productivity.” McManus called for even greater powers for the Fair Work Commission, declaring that it should be able to arbitrate disputes to “make bargaining more efficient and resolve situations when groups cannot see past their own conflict to the point of common ground.”

In other words, McManus is advocating for an industrial relations system in which a handful of union officials, Fair Work bureaucrats and corporate representatives come together and impose cost-cutting agreements upon tens of thousands of workers across entire industries. McManus has previously cited Germany, where union officials sit on company and state boards alongside government employers, as a model to be emulated.

The fraudulent rhetoric over social inequality by the ACTU leaders is simply an attempt by the discredited union apparatus to try and keep control over workers. The unions leaders are terrified by the resurgence of the class struggle internationally, which this year alone has seen mass strikes by teachers in the US, lecturers in the UK, nurses in New Zealand and millions of workers across the Indian subcontinent and China—in opposition to the official trade unions misleaders.

In every struggle that emerges internationally, the unions misleaders function as strikebreakers and company agents. In an era of globalised production and capitalist crisis, the unions leaders, based on a nationalist and pro-capitalist program, operate as the representatives of their “own” national ruling class. They seek to ensure that national industry remains “internationally competitive” by forcing down wages and eliminating conditions.

"Leftist" ISO and DSA - Pro-Democratic Party - Pro-Imperialist Discover the US Backed Saudi War on Yemen - 23 Oct 2018

Amid crisis over Khashoggi murder

US State Department “socialists” discover the war in Yemen

By Barry Grey
23 October 2018

Anyone who carefully follows the publications of the various pseudo-left organizations in the United States will note how reliably they track the political line of the New York Times and other Democratic-Party aligned media outlets. These corporate media, in turn, reflect the positions of definite factions within the US intelligence establishment.

This is clearly seen in the response by Socialist Worker, the publication of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and Jacobin, which is closely aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to the state murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. These publications respond like political weathervanes to shifting currents within US imperialist policy-making and intelligence circles—in this case, growing dissatisfaction with the current ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The Obama administration gave bin Salman the OK to launch a war in March of 2015 to defeat Houthi rebels and reinstall the deposed US-Saudi puppet regime of Abd-Rabbu Monsour Hadi. Since then Washington has provided crucial military, logistical and intelligence assistance for a savage bombing campaign against civilian targets that has killed somewhere between 16,000 and 50,000 Yemenis, brought some 1.4 million people to the point of famine and caused a world record cholera epidemic affecting a million people.

The Trump administration has continued and deepened the Obama policy, forging even closer relations with the Saudi dictatorship and negotiating a $1.2 billion arms deal as part of a united front of Washington, the Sunni Gulf states and Israel against Iran.

For more than three years, SocialistWorker.org and Jacobin have been virtually silent on the war being waged by a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. A Google search of Socialist Worker shows a total of only eight articles since the outbreak of the war. A search of Jacobin yields a mere six articles. (The World Socialist Web Site, in comparison, has published dozens of articles, commentaries, Perspective columns and historical pieces exposing one of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century.)

In all but ignoring this made-in-the USA war crime, the ISO and the DSA have followed the lead of the major corporate media.

Now, however, amid the flurry of criticism of the crown prince following the murder of Khashoggi, a US resident and columnist for the Washington Post with close ties to US intelligence, the New York Times, the Post and the major TV news outlets have suddenly discovered the war in Yemen and even, though rarely, mentioned Washington’s role. Their newfound interest in the war is entirely cynical—a means of placing pressure on the House of Saud and the Trump administration to either rein in the crown prince or replace him with a different member of the royal family.

The ISO and Jacobin have followed suit. Hence the appearance on October 15 of the article “Will the Saudi regime get away with murder?” on Socialist Worker. The piece, by an unnamed “activist and writer from Saudi Arabia,” mentions the war in Yemen while focusing on Khashoggi’s longstanding ties to the Saudi monarchy. It states: “Since his self-exile, Khashoggi has transformed himself from a loyalist who as late as 2016 celebrated the execution of dissidents and praised the disastrous US-backed war for ‘saving Yemen’ into an ardent critic of Saudi Arabia’s ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (commonly referred to as MBS).”

The writer adds that Khashoggi was “well-connected in Washington—someone these elites can see and identify with.” The author continues: “But there may also be a developing sentiment that MBS is out of control and becoming an unreliable ally. He is responsible for a series of international and domestic crises that not only further destabilize the region, but his own rule.”

This shift within intelligence circles was signaled in a more public manner by Bernie Sanders, who gave a speech at Johns Hopkins University on October 9, one week after Khashoggi’s disappearance, titled “Building a Global Democratic Movement to Counter Authoritarianism.” Sanders focused on the Saudi regime, denouncing it for its internal repression and for “devastating the country of Yemen in a catastrophic war in alliance with the United States.”

Jacobin has published three articles on the Khashoggi killing that touch on the war in Yemen. The first (“Bernie’s New Internationalist Vision”) hails Sanders’ foreign policy speech as a genuine call to action against war and authoritarianism—while admitting that Sanders has voted repeatedly in favor of US military intervention and spoken of the need to maintain American military supremacy.
The second, by Branko Marcetic, cites statements by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham denouncing the Saudi government and speculates on the possibility of a “rift in US-Saudi relations” that is “long overdue.”

The third, posted October 17 (“How We Can End the Saudis’ War in Yemen”), also by Marcetic, argues that the way to end the war is to pressure 10 Democrats who previously voted against a Senate resolution calling for the US to end its participation in the war to reverse their vote. In all these articles, the pseudo-left publications write as advisers to factions of the state.

There are definite political reasons why the pseudo-left promoters of “human rights” imperialism downplayed the slaughter in Yemen for more than three years. Both the ISO and the DSA supported the war for regime-change in Libya, which ended with US-backed Islamist terrorists torturing and killing deposed ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and they back the ongoing war for regime-change in Syria—neocolonial wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed both countries.

They have accordingly directed their moral indignation against not the US and its allies, first and foremost Saudi Arabia, but rather against the Syrian regime and its backers, Russia and Iran, which they have conveniently labeled “imperialist” powers. Saudi Arabia’s internal repression and its bloodbath in Yemen, carried out with the indispensable aid of Washington, cut across their pro-imperialist narrative. Hence the virtual silence from these quarters.

To the extent that they have criticized the foreign policy of the Trump administration, they have done so largely from the right, in line with the New York Times and the Democratic Party—denouncing the administration for not arming the Syrian “rebels” with weapons capable of shooting down Russian warplanes and for insufficiently escalating the attack on Syrian President Assad and the confrontation with Russian President Putin.

They line up behind those factions of the US intelligence establishment that see Russia as the most pressing obstacle to the establishment of US dominance in the Middle East, which is seen, in turn, as crucial to imposing US hegemony over the Eurasian continent. Their assigned task is to provide a “left” rationale for US imperialist war and cultivate a pro-war constituency within sections of the upper-middle class whose political views are dominated by the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.

Now, however, in the wake of the murder of Khashoggi, there are signs that the winds are shifting in relation to the crown prince. With the war in Yemen deadlocked and the Saudi regime facing a growing social and economic crisis—the Wall Street Journal warned last week about bin Salman’s “debt binge”—there is increasing concern over the 33-year-old prince’s recklessness and impetuosity and the lack of control over his actions exercised by the Trump administration.

John Brennan headed the CIA under Obama when the US gave its blessings to the Saudi-led assault on Yemen. He also presided over Obama’s drone assassination program, which killed hundreds of Yemenis. But on October 12, Brennan published a column in the Washington Post denouncing the crown prince’s “inhumanity.” He concluded with a demand for US sanctions against all Saudis involved in the killing, a freeze on US military sales, suspension of all “routine” intelligence cooperation and a US-sponsored UN Security Council resolution condemning the murder.
Bloomberg published a commentary on October 17 that concluded with a quote from a long-time friend of Khashoggi and adviser to Turkish President Erdogan, who stated, “Jamal may have been seen as the focal point of an alternative governing power.”

Foreign Affairs on October 18 posted a piece by Daniel Benjamin, appointed in 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as coordinator for counterterrorism at the US State Department, declaring that the murder of Khashoggi “has evinced a recklessness that is deeply at odds with US interests.”

It is clear that factions within the US intelligence apparatus have grown increasingly concerned over the rule of the current crown prince and were promoting Khashoggi as part of a push to rein him in or possibly replace him. None of the US critics of the crown prince remotely suggest that the crimes of the regime call for a campaign of regime-change, as with Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad. But they fear a change at the top may be required to avert a collapse of the regime itself.

In suddenly discovering the war in Yemen and the crimes of the Saudi regime, the pro-imperialist, pro-Democratic Party organizations of the privileged middle class such as the ISO and the DSA are snapping into line behind those factions within the ruling class and the state with which they are allied.

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Trump’s threat to tear up nuclear pact with Russia met with alarm in Europe, silence from Democrats - 23 Oct 2018

By Bill Van Auken

23 October 2018

The threat issued over the weekend by US President Donald Trump to unilaterally rip up a key disarmament treaty with Russia has provoked vows from Russia to retaliate, expressions of sharp concern among Washington’s NATO allies and near total silence from Trump’s ostensible opposition in the Democratic Party.

Two weeks before the US midterm elections, not a single candidate, Democrat or Republican, is raising the growing danger of a new nuclear arms race and of direct military confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers as an issue. No section of the ruling political establishment has any interest in alerting the population to the real and present danger of a catastrophic nuclear war.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that Trump has vowed to scuttle was negotiated in 1987 between US President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, whose “perestroika” and “glasnost” policies paved the way to capitalist restoration and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A test launch of an American Titan II ICBM

The deal banned the production and deployment by the US and Russia of land-based ballistic missiles—both conventional and nuclear—with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310–3,420 miles). It represented a significant concession by Moscow—previously rejected by Gorbachev’s predecessors and the Soviet military command—resulting in the destruction of 1,752 Soviet missiles, including SS-20s aimed at Washington’s European NATO allies, as compared with 859 less powerful US missiles, most of them Pershing IIs pointed at Moscow and other Soviet targets. The deployment of the US missiles had provoked mass protests, particularly in Germany, over the fear that the arms buildup threatened to turn Europe into the main battlefield in a US-Soviet nuclear war.
That threat is now being revived between the US and Russia with charges and counter-charges, provoking new expressions of alarm in Europe.
Washington has charged Moscow with developing and deploying a new intermediate range nuclear missile, which Russia denies.
The danger that the dispute over the so-called intermediate-range nuclear missiles could turn into a direct military conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers became all too apparent earlier this month, when the US NATO ambassador, Key Bailey Hutchison, threatened a pre-emptive military strike against Russia. Hutchison told a press conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels that if Moscow continued its development and alleged deployment of the missile that Washington claims violates the INF treaty, the Pentagon was prepared to “take out” the missile.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has acknowledged in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review that it has already begun research and development on new conventional, ground-launched, intermediate-range missile systems. Moscow has further charged that anti-missile installations that the US has deployed surrounding Russia in eastern Europe could easily be converted into launchpads for offensive missiles.
Moscow responded Monday to Trump’s threat with a combination of offers to negotiate “mutual” grievances over the INF and threats to answer any US military escalation with one of its own.
“We need to hear the American side’s explanation on this issue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “Scrapping the treaty forces Russia to take steps for its own security.”

Delivering this “explanation” is US national security adviser John Bolton, the chief advocate within the Trump administration for abrogating the treaty and an anti-Russian hawk who had previously described Moscow’s alleged “meddling” in the US 2016 election as an “act of war.” Bolton met with his counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, and with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday, and is scheduled to hold talks with President Vladimir Putin today.

Reaction in Europe to Trump’s threat has been generally negative. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called it “regrettable.” French President Emmanuel Macron called Trump on Sunday. “The president noted the importance of this treaty, in particular for European security and our strategic stability,” Macron’s office said of the call. The governments of Italy and Spain issued similar statements.

British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson, meanwhile, reiterated the UK government’s subservience to Washington, declaring that Britain stands “absolutely resolute” with the Trump administration.

Should the Trump administration consummate the abrogation of the treaty, it would sharply escalate already rising tensions within NATO, posing the threat of a breakup and the consolidation of a new European military alliance.

China called upon Washington to “think twice” before ripping up the arms control treaty. A foreign ministry spokeswoman added, “It needs to be emphasized that it is completely wrong to bring up China when talking about withdrawal from the treaty.”

Washington is being driven to abrogate the treaty in large measure as part of its buildup toward war with China. Not a party to the bilateral accord, China has developed a significant force of land-based, conventionally armed, medium-range ballistic missiles to counter the US military buildup in its “pivot to Asia.” The Pentagon wants to counter this by deploying its own missiles in the region, but is barred from doing so by the INF treaty.

Meanwhile, in the US itself, the threat to tear up one of the most important arms control treaties of the 20th century, opening the door to the breakdown of all such agreements and a frenzied arms race to deploy “usable” nuclear weapons, has been met with near total silence, particularly by the Democratic Party, which is ostensibly running against Trump’s policies in the midterm elections.
One exception was Senator Robert Menendez, who is the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Menendez, who has denounced the Trump administration for not adopting a more confrontational stance against Russia, declared Monday: “There is no doubt that Russia is responsible for the degradation of the INF treaty. However, withdrawing from this treaty without a comprehensive strategy for addressing its underlying strategic implications and without consulting Congress or our allies threatens long-term United States’ national security interests.”

The Democratic Party supports the buildup to war against Russia and welcomes Trump’s threats against Moscow; that is what they have demanded from the outset of his administration. What Menendez is demanding, however, is that the Trump White House present a “comprehensive strategy” for military confrontation with the nuclear-armed power. At the same time, it is expressing concerns within the US military and intelligence apparatus that Trump’s unilateralism is undermining the NATO military alliance in Europe.

Within America’s two capitalist parties and the ruling political establishment generally, there exists no antiwar faction. Divisions between the Democrats and the Trump White House are limited to tactical matters of where and how the US should concentrate its global war drive.

The US ruling class as a whole supports the escalation of the conflict with Russia, regardless of the threat of nuclear war. The aim is to eliminate the Russian Federation as an impediment to US domination of the strategic energy producing regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, and ultimately to subjugate and divide it into a collection of semi-colonies of US imperialism.
Despite the basic unanimity of the two capitalist parties in support of war and reaction, there exists a powerful constituency for the struggle against war within the American working class. The US government, the corporate media and the major parties have all sought to conceal the real danger of a global nuclear conflagration from the broad mass of the population.

https://archive.is/GBbpr

Chicago: Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative Hold Election Rally for Left Liberal Democrats - 22 Oct 2018

Socialist Alternative and Democratic Socialists of America hold election rally for Democrats in Chicago

By Kristina Betinis
22 October 2018

Socialist Alternative (SA) hosted an election event, “Rally to Put Socialists in City Hall,” at the United Electrical Workers Hall in Chicago Thursday night to build support for three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates for Chicago City Council: Byron Sigcho Lopez (25th ward), Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd ward), and 35th ward alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, currently running for re-election.

The event was aimed at promoting increased collaboration between Socialist Alternative and the DSA, as both deepen their integration into the Democratic Party.

The DSA is a faction of the Democratic Party and is being promoted by sections of the party establishment and the media. Obama recently endorsed DSA member and New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Just hours before the rally began, the DSA’s Ramirez-Rosa endorsed Democratic candidate for mayor Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County board president and machine politician. Last year, Ramirez-Rosa had a short stint as candidate for Illinois lieutenant governor as part of Illinois Democrat Daniel Biss’s campaign.

Ramirez-Rosa endorsed Preckwinkle at the Logan Square “L” station, alongside alderman Will Guzzardi, a protege of Biss. Preckwinkle chairs the Cook County Democratic Party, long known for its corruption and duplicity. A Chicago alderman from 1991 to 2010, she has since been president of the Cook County Board, presiding over budget cuts to the county health and hospital system as well as the public defender’s office and the Cook County Jail, known internationally for its horrific conditions. She was an important early supporter of Barack Obama.

Somewhat embarrassed by these developments, Socialist Alternative members criticized the DSA for being too willing to endorse all and sundry Democratic officials, such as Preckwinkle. This is done with the aim of trying to maintain a nominal distance from the Democratic Party establishment, even as Socialist Alternative calls for collaboration with and support of Democratic Party candidates and policies.

Chicago Socialist Alternative leading member Teresa Powers chaired the event, proclaiming the organization’s willingness to work with any “progressives,” and outlined a “united front” electoral strategy for rent control and affordable housing initiatives, “taxing the rich,” and a civilian police review board, suggesting support for the Democratic Party’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

Emphasizing the threat posed by the far-right, Powers and the three city council candidates called for “left unity” and a new party to the fight against fascism. She described SA’s aim in building “a new party independent of the rotten Democratic machine,” but then said, “We don’t have resources to launch all this.”

This was intended to justify collaboration with the Democrats, and in fact any “new party” set up by Socialist Alternative would be at aimed at corralling support behind the Democrats, as Socialist Alternative currently does. During the 2016 elections, the organization virtually dissolved itself into the electoral campaign of US Senator Bernie Sanders, who ended up endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Proposals included a demand for a $15 minimum wage, “union rights for all” and lifting the ban on rent control in the city, an initiative supported by billionaire Democratic candidate for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. That a $15 minimum wage is wholly inadequate, given that the current city minimum wage stands at $12 per hour and is set to rise to $13 in 2019, passed by unmentioned.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, recently announced that he was raising the minimum wage at Amazon to $15 an hour, even as he moved to end bonuses and other pay schemes that will result in a pay cut for many Amazon workers. This move was praised by Sanders.

The speeches given by the three city council candidates were characteristically devoid of political content and leaned heavily on the personal identity of the speakers and their experiences. Rossana Rodriguez spoke of her experiences in Puerto Rico before moving to Chicago in 2009. Ramirez-Rosa attempted to portray his ejection from the Biss campaign over opposition to Israeli policies as a profile in courage.

2015 Democratic Party candidate for alderman, now a DSA member running in the 25th ward, Byron Sigcho struggled to explain his reasons for running as a socialist in this election, other than that it seems to be in fashion. The leader of the Pilsen Alliance and SEIU Local 73 official declared the likelihood of his electoral success: “Last time, I was only 70 votes from a run-off. So I believe in the people. I believe in the working class.”

In 2015, Sigcho’s platform included support for small businesses, “green” development initiatives, anti-gentrification policies and expanded policing.

There were comic moments, as attendees heckled Ramirez-Rosa about his endorsement of Preckwinkle, earning loud protests from DSA members. Rather than being treated as a central question of political principle, open endorsement and collaboration with the United States’ oldest bourgeois party was approached like a minor disagreement over tactics.

Speaking last, Socialist Alternative’s Kshama Sawant, a member of the Seattle city council, spoke on the “right way” to work with the Democrats, criticizing Ramirez-Rosa’s collaboration with leading Democrats and the recent endorsement.

Sawant rubs elbows at Democratic Party fundraisers, and she capitulated with the rest of the Seattle city council before Amazon in overturning a minuscule business tax under pressure from the megacorporation. The council even declared to the bourgeoisie in its letter, “We heard you.”
At the end of the speeches, a Socialist Alternative member rose to criticize Ramirez-Rosa’s endorsement of Preckwinkle, saying, “We have the opportunity to hold a sitting alderman’s feet to the fire.” DSA members again complained loudly, and SA organizers quickly shut him down and pulled him aside.

There are no principled differences between the DSA and Socialist Alternative. Both are seeking to provide a political cover for the Democratic Party, aware of growing opposition among young people and workers to the entire political system.

Since the election of Trump, the Democrats have sought to channel all opposition to the administration behind the right-wing, pro-war agenda of sections of the military and intelligence apparatus. The party is currently running an unprecedented number of actual CIA agents and other intelligence operatives for office in the 2018 elections.

Groups like the DSA and Socialist Alternative speak for privileged sections of the upper-middle class, including factions of the trade union apparatus, that support the policies of the Democrats and are seeking some way to give them a “left” gloss, the better to prevent a genuine socialist movement of the working class.

Archive 

New York Times and Washington Post Call for censorship - the invention of “fake news”

22 October 2018

Under conditions of mounting social opposition and escalating plans for military conflict, the US political establishment is moving ever more brazenly to implement internet censorship.

On Saturday, the two principal newspapers of the political establishment, the New York Times and the Washington Post, published editorials demanding an intensification of political censorship on social media. The Times, in “The Poison on Facebook and Twitter Is Still Spreading,” cited a supposed proliferation of “misinformation” on social media, including “homegrown campaigns spread[ing] partisan lies in the United States,” to demand much more aggressive action.

The Times praises journalists (that is, itself) along with “self-taught vigilantes” for forcing social media companies to act to take down content. However, much more fundamental action is required, it concludes. “[A]t this stage of the internet’s evolution, content moderation can no longer be reduced to individual postings viewed in isolation and out of context. The problem is systemic, currently manifested in the form of coordinated campaigns both foreign and homegrown.”

The solution: Social media companies must internalize censorship procedures on a much more systematic level. “The role that outsiders currently play, as consumer advocates and content screeners, can easily be filled in-house.” The social media companies, that is, must themselves become the “gatekeepers” of information, as former Times editor Bill Keller once referred to his newspaper.

The Washington Post, for its part, warned of the supposed threat played by “domestic disinformation.” Twitter and Facebook are, the Post wrote, “finally starting to articulate their responsibility not to facilitate manipulation, no matter who pulls the strings.”

What is the “domestic disinformation” that Facebook and Twitter are fighting, with the full support of the Times and the Post? That question was answered positively earlier this month, when Facebook removed a series of popular left-wing media accounts, including organizations opposing war and police violence, in the name of fighting “fake news.”

The term “fake news” (or “misinformation”) has been introduced very deliberately and consciously into the vernacular of American and international politics as the catch-all justification for censorship. The media uses the term without ever explaining exactly what it means, hoping that the population will simply accept that it is something bad that must, of course, be blocked.

When most people think of the term “fake news,” they think of the headlines in supermarket tabloids about alien invasions and two-headed grandmothers giving birth to quintuplets. But when the New York Times and the leading US intelligence agencies use the term, they mean something entirely different: reporting that cuts across the efforts of the state to promote war and political viewpoints that challenge the establishment.

Included in this journalistic amalgam are such assertions as: The US is preparing for total war, that it organized the coup in Ukraine in 2014 in alliance with fascistic forces, that it has staged chemical weapons attacks in Syria to justify its campaign of regime change, that both parties in the US function as paid servants of the corporate and financial elite—this is all “fake news.” As for the fact that political operatives, including figures like Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, are conspiring with the establishment media to censor the internet under the guise of combatting “fake news”—this, no doubt, is itself “fake news.”

In her memoir, Hillary Clinton—whose defeat in 2016 was the occasion for broadly introducing the term “fake news”—explained that this “fake news” consists of true statements that served to discredit her in the public eye. As she put it, “WikiLeaks … helped accelerate the phenomenon that eventually came to be known as fake news.” There were “wild tales” spread about the “terrible things I must have said behind closed doors and how as president I would be forever in the pocket of the shadowy bankers who had paid my speaking fees.”

The only “tales” spread by WikiLeaks were the transcripts of Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, where she pledged to expand the influence of the rich in politics, and copies of emails by leading figures in the Democratic National Committee conspiring to rig the Democratic nomination contest in Clinton’s favor.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ publisher, is still paying the price for his role in this intolerable breach of the wall of media lies and propaganda. On Tuesday, Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs committee, penned a letter to Lenin Moreno, the president of Ecuador, effectively blackmailing the whole country for continuing to shelter the dissident journalist and demanding that he be turned over for prosecution.

In March, the US special forces held a conference to discuss state censorship, whose proceedings were documented in a report by the Atlantic Council. It warned, “Technology has democratized the ability for sub-state groups and individuals to broadcast a narrative with limited resources and virtually unlimited scope.” By contrast, “In the past, the general public had limited sources of information, which were managed by professional gatekeepers.”

In other words, the rise of uncensored social media allowed small groups with ideas that correspond to those of the broader population to challenge the political narrative of vested interests on an equal footing, without the “professional gatekeepers” of the mainstream print and broadcast media.
A principal aim of the campaign for censorship is to restore these “gatekeepers” and to restrict the public’s access to warnings of the imminent war danger.

Notably, when Google initiated a change in its page ranking algorithm last year in the name of fighting “fake news,” the WSWS’s coverage of the threat of war was most dramatically affected. Search terms associated with the danger of world war that had previously returned the WSWS in the top 10 results no longer took visitors to the WSWS.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.”is attributed to Aeschylus in Ancient Hellas.  That saying applies today with one exception: Truth is being strangled in anticipation of war. And all in the name of combating “fake news”! We have truly entered the realm of Orwell’s 1984 

Nothing frightens the ruling class more than that the working class will be informed. The escalating campaign for war and censorship expresses the deep crisis confronting the ruling elite. Facing growing social opposition and a wave of working-class struggle, the ruling elite sees in war and its accompanying attack on democratic rights the means to defend its rule through naked repression.

President Trump says US will withdraw from Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty - US To Target China and Russia With Nuclear First Strike - 22 Oct 2018

By Alex Lantier

22 October 2018

Speaking at a campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday, President Donald Trump said Washington will repudiate the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and develop intermediate range nuclear missiles. “We’ll have to develop those weapons,” he said. “We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out.”

With this decision, Washington is scrapping the entire nuclear arms control framework that emerged from the Cold War. In 2001, Washington repudiated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, so it could begin working on a “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles. Now it is scrapping the 1987 treaty that bans US or Russian manufacture and deployment of nuclear missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 kilometers (310-3,420 miles). For the first time since 1972, there is to be no treaty limiting the major powers’ deployment of nuclear arms.

Washington is aggressively stoking a nuclear arms race, with Russia and China first in its gun-sights, which would provoke stepped-up missile deployments across Europe and East Asia. It points to the immediate and growing risk of nuclear war between the major powers.

Trump blamed his decision to scrap the INF treaty on Moscow and Beijing: “Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years and I don’t know why President Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out. … Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, ‘Let’s all of us get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons,’ but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with with our military.”

Moscow condemned Trump’s statement as “blackmail” against Russia. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told TASS: “At first glance, I can say that apparently the INF Treaty creates problems for pursuing the line towards the US total domination in military sphere…This would be a very dangerous step, which, I’m sure, won’t be just understood by the international community, but arouse serious condemnation of all members of the world community.”

Ryabkov said he would discuss it with US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who supports killing the INF treaty. Bolton arrived yesterday in Moscow for two days of talks starting today.
Trump’s attempt to blame Moscow and Beijing for his decision is a transparent political fraud. The US repudiation of nuclear arms control treaties is part of a longstanding, aggressive foreign policy aiming to exploit US military supremacy in the aftermath of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union to counterbalance the effects of its accelerating economic decline in world affairs. The 2001 repudiation of the ABM treaty was part of the Bush administration’s turn to war, including the illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, to dominate the Eurasian landmass.

The Democratic Party escalated this policy, launching wars in Libya and Syria while initiating a “pivot to Asia” to confront China in Barack Obama’s first term. In his second term, together with its European allies, Obama backed a far-right coup in Ukraine that toppled a pro-Russian government and provoked an all-out military confrontation with Russia in Eastern Europe. Washington and its European allies have deployed tens of thousands of troops on the very borders of Russia.

The coup in Ukraine and the resulting escalation by Washington and the European imperialist powers in Eastern Europe set the world on course towards nuclear war. Amid the NATO military build-up against Russia, Washington first alleged in July 2014 that Moscow was developing a ground-launched cruise missile system violating the INF treaty. Recently, on October 2, US Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchinson took the extraordinary step of threatening to bomb Russia to “take out” these missiles, after again denouncing Russia for violating the INF treaty.

It is not Russian but US aggression that is driving Washington’s decision to scrap the INF treaty. In fact, powerful factions of the US military and foreign policy establishment have been campaigning for years to scrap the INF treaty—not because of Russia, but to threaten China.

After Obama launched the “pivot to Asia” in 2011, Beijing sought to develop intermediate-range missiles capable of hitting US aircraft carriers and military bases in the Western Pacific, to deter Washington from using them to attack China. As the balance of power in that region shifted ever more in China’s favor, voices in US ruling elite began to call for scrapping the INF treaty, using tensions with Russia as a cover for a policy designed to target China.

In 2014, the  National Interest published an article, “China’s Missile Forces Are Growing: Is It Time to Modify the INF Treaty?” It wrote that “forward-based missile forces could be a partial solution to emerging operational problems in the Western Pacific.” However, the INF treaty bans Washington and Moscow from having the type of missiles the Pentagon would deploy to the Western Pacific to target China. So, it added, “How might Washington leverage current tensions with Moscow to improve its long-term military posture vis-à-vis Beijing? One option is to abrogate INF.”

Admiral Harry Harris, who recently stepped down as commander of the US Pacific Fleet, became an aggressive proponent of renegotiating or scrapping the INF treaty. Last year, Harris said that he considered arms control “problematic,” as the INF treaty limits “our ability to counter Chinese and other countries’ cruise missiles, land-based missiles.”

Testifying to the US Senate this March, Harris made clear that scrapping the INF treaty as critical to trying to re-establish full US military dominance of the Pacific Ocean. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China has ground-based ballistic missiles that threaten our basing in the western Pacific and our ships,” he said. “We have no ground-based capability that can threaten China because of, among other things, our rigid adherence…to the INF treaty.”
Washington’s repudiation of nuclear arms control as it seeks to maintain global military dominance is a warning to the working class in America and worldwide.

With the major powers pledge to spend massive sums on their arsenals of missiles and nuclear warheads, led by Washington, who pledged in 2014 to spend $1 trillion to modernize its nuclear arms, untold social resources are being squandered on creating conditions for a nuclear war. Governments internationally are determined that the costs of this insane policy are to be borne by workers, through austerity and attacks on living standards.

The construction of an anti-war movement based in the working class is a critical necessity, objectively posed by the rapid development of the danger of wars that could end in a nuclear conflagration.

https://archive.is/8wMgh

Year One of the #MeToo - Reactionary Movement Opposes Fair Trials, The Right to a Lawyer, Presumtion of Innocence,- 19 Oct 2018

(Pictured: #MeToo Hypocrite Asia Argento)

 

One year of the #MeToo movement

By David Walsh
19 October 2018

The #MeToo movement is one year old this month. Articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine detailing allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein launched the campaign. Dozens and dozens of accusations have followed.

The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day.

Instead of bringing about an improvement in conditions, in fact, the #MeToo movement has helped undermine democratic rights, created an atmosphere of intimidation and fear and destroyed the reputations and career of a significant number of artists and others. It has taken its appropriate place in the Democratic Party strategy of opposing the Trump administration and the Republicans on a right-wing footing.

The sexual hysteria has centered in Hollywood and the media, areas not coincidentally where subjectivism, intense self-absorption and the craving to be in the limelight abound.

The McCarthyite witch-hunt encountered so little opposition in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Hollywood in large measure because of the lack of political preparedness of the American artistic-intellectual left, under the influence of Stalinism and the Popular Front. However, combined with that, there was also the fact that to save their careers—and their swimming pools, in Orson Welles’s famous quip—individuals opportunistically turned against former friends and colleagues, “named names,” broke off relations, often apparently without a qualm. One should recall the immortal phrase of actor James Dean, “explaining” why he had consented to work with director-informer Elia Kazan, about whom he had previously spoken only with contempt, “He made me a star.”

There should be no illusions about the morals that have long prevailed in the film and related industries. A great many attractive young women and men, desperate for fame, find themselves at the mercy of influential or even relatively lowly, “gatekeeper” figures, male and sometimes female, who seem to control their future destinies. This is a situation overripe for abuse. It is not primarily about sex, but about the assertion of power.

It would take a contemporary Theodore Dreiser or F. Scott Fitzgerald to depict the sort of fantasy about the golden world of celebrity—and the dread of not being allowed to share in it—that animates a great number of young people in America, especially under conditions where the alternative for many seems to be an economic or psychic abyss.

(Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: “He felt so out of it, so lonely and restless and tortured by all that he saw here, for everywhere that he looked he seemed to see love, romance, contentment. What to do? Where to go? He could not go on alone like this forever. He was too miserable. … It was so hard to be poor, not to have money and position and to be able to do in life exactly as you wished. … So much for the effect of wealth, beauty, the peculiar social state to which he most aspired, on a temperament that was as fluid and unstable as water. … How marvelous to be of that world.”)

No one should be naïve about the extent to which many of the aspirants consent to sexual activity in the name of succeeding in a career, justifying it as one of the unpleasant overhead costs associated with “making it,” or even self-deceptively bathing certain situations, which involve nothing at their core but cold, calculated moves, in a quasi-romantic aura.

Embarrassment and remorse may set in later, especially if things do not go quite right. Individuals, including actresses whose careers—through no fault of their own in many cases—are stagnating or fading, may blindly and vindictively concentrate their disappointment or disillusionment with Hollywood retroactively on a figure such as Weinstein. (Moreover, as we have noted before, in some cases the sexual misconduct campaign has actually revived careers and opened up new financial possibilities. It is empty-headed to go on lauding the “bravery” of accusers who come forward, when they generally meet with media acclaim and have even done quite well out of the whole business.)

One has no special reason to think well of today’s crop of film personalities, who have pursued success under bad artistic and ideological conditions, where social indifference and self-centeredness have been transformed into positive virtues. As we wrote last year, “To be brutally frank, there is a great difference between the situation facing a working class woman, on the one hand, for whom acquiescing to sexual pressures in a factory or office may be virtually a life-and-death issue, and the choices open to an entertainer or performer, on the other, who plays along in the interests of advancing a career.”

In their rage and disorientation, a variety of #MeToo promoters have come up with the idea that “women must be believed” when they make accusations of sexual misconduct, even in the absence of any other proof. It is a painful reality that there are certain situations that may, especially well after the fact, hinge only on the opposed say-so of two individuals. That undoubtedly leaves open the possibility that certain perpetrators may escape punishment.

But the alternative, simply relying on the accuser’s word, is worse and makes a mockery of the presumption of innocence or even the requirement that the preponderance of evidence must point to guilt. Then we are truly in the realm of the witch-hunt and the lynch-mob.

Like men, women lie—as such notorious episodes as the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till cases, along with the more recent ones involving Tawana Brawley, false accusations against the Duke lacrosse team, “Jackie” at the University of Virginia and the charges against CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi, demonstrate.

Precisely because women face particular and hypocritical penalties for “unorthodox” or disapproved of types of sexual behavior, they have an incentive to lie under certain circumstances.

Along the same lines, moreover, one would simply be ignoring social and psychological reality to ignore the truth of novelist Alfred Döblin’s comment that precisely because women make up a “downtrodden sex that keeps battling to assert itself,” like “terrorists,” they do “not shrink from the most inhumane acts of violence.” Vengefulness can be an inverted expression of psychologically or socially oppressed and hurtful conditions, but that does not ennoble it or legitimize making a virtual program out of it. “I don’t care about innocent men facing punishment because women have suffered so much!,” the subtext of much of the feminist commentary, is a dreadful and shameful slogan without the slightest progressive content to it.

The Economist recently reported the results of polls conducted in November 2017 and September 2018, indicating that the “year-long storm of allegations, confessions and firings has actually made Americans more sceptical about sexual harassment.” The magazine reported, “The share of American adults responding that men who sexually harassed women at work 20 years ago should keep their jobs has risen from 28% to 36%. The proportion who think that women who complain about sexual harassment cause more problems than they solve has grown from 29% to 31%. And 18% of Americans now think that false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished.” The article added, “Surprisingly, these changes in opinion against victims have been slightly stronger among women than men.”

This growing skepticism on the part of the general public, who increasingly tend to view celebrities like Rose McGowan, Asia Argento and others as neurotic self-promoters or worse, has a generally healthy component. It is also one of the factors behind the ramping up of the rhetoric and the frenzy in #MeToo, Democratic Party and pseudo-left circles during the Brett Kavanaugh-Christine Blasey Ford confrontation. These forces have largely failed to persuade the American public, and now more and more tend to berate it.

However, their efforts have consequences. In so far as the dishonest, sensationalized journalistic “exposés” of Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker, the New York Times reporting staff and numerous others unravel, as they well may, this will undermine the claims and accusations of genuine victims of sexual abuse and creates the danger of a backlash. The recklessness of Farrow, Jessica Valenti, Rebecca Traister and company in this regard is merely another expression of their profound, petty bourgeois indifference to the fate of the mass of the population, including its female half.

Sexual assault and violence, most of it against women, are significant and horrific social phenomena, no matter whose statistics one chooses to rely on. The invasion of one’s body is one of the most damaging and humiliating possible experiences. Sexual abuse expresses the brutality of class society in one of the forms in which it appears in the everyday life of individuals and communities. Poor and immigrant women, the socially defenseless and dispossessed generally, the very young, those at the mercy of the rich and powerful, those dependent on their employers or on government officials, are the most vulnerable. However, violence within and among the oppressed is also a fact of life in bourgeois society. Those who have been maltreated may themselves maltreat others. Studies have revealed, for example, a sharp increase in domestic violence in families where layoffs have occurred.
In any event, despite occasional lip-service, no one in the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, now led by wealthy, influential individuals like Tina Tchen, Barack Obama’s former assistant, speaks up for working class women, who are left to their fate.

All in all, #MeToo is a reactionary response to a real social problem.

The emptiness of middle class feminist complaints about the unfairness and injustice of present-day society is shown by their selectiveness. They could not care less about the thousands of men who die in industrial accidents or the tens of thousands of men and boys who overdose from opioids or commit suicide on an annual basis. That suffering is entirely taken for granted, along with the murderous havoc wreaked by American military interventions all over the planet, often carried out these days in the name of “human rights” or even “women’s rights.”

Those who complain the loudest tend to have the least to complain about. Professional women have made great strides in the past several decades. According to UK researcher and academic Alison Wolf, “Among younger men and women [in the advanced capitalist countries] with equal education levels, who have also put in equal time in the same occupation, there are no gender pay gaps left,” although women continue to be financially punished if they have children (unless they are tremendously wealthy).

The numbers of female lawyers, physicians, dentists, accountants and other professionals have leaped in recent years. Wolf explains that in the US, “women have gone from 3 percent of practising lawyers in 1970 to 40 percent today, and over half of all law students.” The Russell Sage Foundation notes that “the number of professional degrees completed by men has declined slightly (from 40,229 in 1982 to 34,661 in 2010), while women’s professional degree completion has increased almost twentyfold—from 1,534 professional degrees in 1970 to 30,289 in 2010.”

A portion of this newly affluent and independent social layer is hungry for more, and sees incumbent, still better-situated males as rivals to be displaced—if necessary, by ruthless and underhanded means. This ferocious in-fighting, “gender cleansing,” within the upper middle class breaks into the headlines in the form of the #MeToo movement and the numerous attempts to oust academic and media figures over charges of sexual misconduct, many of which prove to be either overblown or invented.

German socialist Clara Zetkin pointed out as long ago as 1896 that bourgeois women’s “demand for sex equality in carrying on an occupation … means nothing else than the realisation of free trade and free competition between men and women. The realisation of this demand awakens a conflict of interest between the women and men of the middle class and the intelligentsia.” On the other hand, “the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be—as it is for the bourgeois woman—a struggle against the men of her own class.” She fights “hand in hand with the men of her own class.”
To justify and facilitate their advancement at the expense of supposedly bestial or predatory men, the #MeToo feminists have attempted to impose their own moral code. This has little to do with safeguarding women in general and workplace safety in particular. It has had no positive impact whatsoever on America’s workplaces, where tyrannical conditions for both genders—increasingly reminiscent of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—prevail.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the sexual witch-hunt has been the effort to stigmatize a wide range of sexual activities, “including,” as we have pointed, “many that reflect the ambiguities and complexities of human interactions.”

In some unhappy and sordid revival of American Puritanism or Victorianism, prominent men have been denounced for promiscuity (for example, “serial dating”), adultery and, in one nationally publicized case, “flirting that veered suddenly into sexual territory, unwanted sexual advances and consensual sexual relations that ended abruptly” (i.e., breaking off a relationship without sufficient warning!).

Alongside this is the anti-democratic and spurious effort to criminalize “gray-zone sex” experiences, those, for instance, where individuals agree to have sex, but one thinks better of it after the fact. Thus, we get the disgusting attack on comedian Aziz Ansari by a woman who had an unhappy encounter with him and proceeded to complain to a journalist about it—“3,000 words of revenge porn,” in the words of Atlantic columnist Caitlin Flanagan. “The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari,” Flanagan went on. “Together, the two women [including the journalist] may have destroyed Ansari’s career, which is now the punishment for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque to the disappointing.”

In the spirit of that attempted destruction, a deplorable article at Jezebel by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd informs us that “#MeToo’s next direction is toward a deeper look at some of the most common and harder-to-define experiences. It’s looking toward a more equitable world in which women and other marginalized genders can live less fearfully, by digging deeper into the gray areas and educating all of us about the harm they perpetuate. … How do we talk about behavior that is harmful and inequitable but isn’t illegal? How do we talk about the women affected by it? And what happens when accusations of such behavior are made against someone who is supposed to be an ally?”

This is the “lawless frontier,” as the WSWS has argued, where “punishment will be meted out through public humiliation and ridicule,” and where the “subjective, personal and arbitrary are being advanced as an alternative basis for establishing criminal liability.”

The “gray area” must also include various forms of sexual fumbling and miscommunication, including the making of “unwelcome” or “unwanted” advances, which, if banned, would effectively put an end to new sexual relationships of any type ever coming into being.

Categorizing every misstep or badly chosen word as a form of abuse is inhuman and reactionary nonsense, which, if taken at all seriously, will do tremendous harm to the psyches of countless young women and men in particular.

Meanwhile the daily struggle to earn a living, clothe and house a family and navigate an unstable social and political environment preoccupies the vast majority of working class people, female and male. On top of that, a larger and larger number are coming to realize that a radical change in the entire social order is necessary.

But the #MeToo witch-hunters are not part of and are fiercely hostile to that struggle.

Physical Reality is a 'Social Construct?' - 'Grievance Studies' Hoax Articles Co-Author Helen Pluckrose Interview - 18 Oct 2018

A discussion with Helen Pluckrose, co-author of “Grievance Studies” hoax article

By Eric London
18 October 2018

On October 2, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian published an article titled “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,” which detailed the results of a year-long effort to publish false hoax articles, deliberately comprised of made-up data and bogus, reactionary conclusions, in academic journals associated with gender, race, and sexual orientation studies.

I recently spoke with Helen Pluckrose about the study and its political and intellectual significance.

(James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian)

 

Eric London: How did this article come about? Was there a straw that broke the camel’s back that made the three of you realize you had to launch this project ?

HP: I think we each had different straws break our backs. We were looking at terrible epistemology and the way that postmodernism and identitarianism enabled inconsistent ethics. The ethical problem is basically the rejection of objective knowledge. They believe that knowledge is constructed in the service of power and perpetuated through language, and the inconsistent ethics that are inevitable when you think this way. Looking through identity, we are told it is okay to be prejudiced against some people, for example. It is a mess.

EL: The fact that the postmodernist nonsense you wrote has been published says a lot about the pseudo-intellectual atmosphere at American universities. How toxic is the culture in these circles?
HP: I’ll give you an example. We went to Portland State University, where Peter [Boghossian] teaches, to explore the argument that men and women may have different interests on average, that this might explain different uptakes of jobs, and that if we want to get more women into tech, then perhaps jobs should be made more attractive to the things women are interested in. It was never suggested that women can’t do tech, but this was how it was interpreted because of this idea that knowledge is a construct and that therefore if you acknowledge differences between men and women you are saying women are inferior.

We received threats, some of which were bluster, but some of which were serious. They ranged from threats to throw dirty diapers at us to using grenades at our meeting. We had to arrive early and hide. We engaged bodyguards. Some protesters got up and walked out and physically damaged the sound system. We needed a police escort off the premises. This is just because we wanted to talk about the significant amount of scientific evidence that there actually are biological differences between women and men.

This is not just a question of a few mad students. This is a broader social problem. I am a historian, and I am interested in women’s issues and gender equality. And I can be threatened and dismissed for saying that men and women might not be psychologically identical? That is dangerous.

EL: Can you describe the types of pressures academics are under to conform to this hysteria over identity and postmodernism?

HP: We are hearing a lot from academics. There has been a surge of letters to us since we revealed ourselves. The pressure of course depends on what field you are in, but you are likely to come against constraints about the way in which you are allowed to do your work no matter what. I have so many emails saying things like, “well done,” they wish they could speak out, but they cannot lose their jobs. One person wrote saying something to the effect of, “I know it seems cowardly, but teaching is my life.” There are so many who would like to speak out, but they are afraid of being dogpiled.

EL: What about the response has surprised you? Has it been what you expected?

HP: I’m getting some nastiness, obviously. People are accusing us of being fascists and Nazis and generally evil, but I can ignore that. What tends to be coming from the left-wing academics who are postmodernists is confirming what we’ve said. They’re defending the papers as good scholarship! They are saying the only thing wrong is that we invented names and supplied false data on occasion.
This is a norm now. We were often accused of straw-manning when we said this problem was happening. But this proves that the problem in these circles is not just a few outliers of crazy identitarians; it is common in the identity-based studies, what we call grievances studies.
And another thing: Someone actually wrote to us saying we were paying “too much attention to white people” when we argued white children should be put in chains on the floor of the classroom. This was a sign we were white-centric or something.

EL: The video you published is hilarious, and I applaud you for finding th e element of humor in this, but when I got to the part where you describe having your re-write of Hitler’s Mein Kampf get accepted in an academic journal, that was where the smile left my face. Can you tell us about that?

HP: You know, even after we revealed ourselves as hoaxers, we’ve found it strange. Some people are still defending that article, saying it was a good part of Mein Kampf! In both the identitarian grievance studies and fascism you still get totalitarianism, militancy, and grievances, even though identity people are coming from a left perspective
.
But what we mainly wanted to do with that article was to show that this feminist and postmodernist theory can be manipulated to support anything. We found a text which is the opposite of social justice and we managed to make the theory work for it.

EL: Many of these people call themselves “left-wing”—do you think that is a fair label?

HP: Well, it was initially taken up by people with the same kind of aims to equalize society, to help the marginalized. I don’t doubt some of their motives. But one thing is, they have always been very opposed to the socialist left. When they say oppressive forces are being maintained by discourse, they mention white supremacy, the patriarchy, etc., but the class analysis was completely lacking from the start. There is almost no attention paid to working class issues.

EL: Your study is about “grievance studies”—why did you choose this word in particular?

HP: We’re trying to define what we’re looking at. It isn’t everyone in the humanities. It is a specific approach which is a kind of Social Justice approach with capital “S” and capital “J.” It is this approach where people are seeking to uncover prejudice and bias and oppressive language which is keeping people down. Grievance studies sets out to “problematize” everything.

EL: But when you use the word “grievance,” it seems to raise the fact that there are social grievances underlying the identity politics milieu.

HP: Well, I think one of the reasons that class is such a neglected issue for them is because they can’t mention class because to do so would include them in the category of the oppressor. They are writing identity and postmodernist literature about themselves.

It is interesting that postmodernist ideas are strongest in the most elite universities. There was a study which argued that at community colleges and colleges with the highest proportion of students who work while they study—that there is much less attention paid to this grievance culture.
In other words, it is rising in an elite context. It isn’t a coincidence that most of the academics who address grievance studies neglect class, because it would not only complicate their narrative; it would also implicate them as not oppressed but as the dominant, powerful group.

EL: And inequality within racial groups is growing astronomically. Among African-Americans and Latinos in the US, for example, inequality is now greater than among whites.

HP: About a year ago there was a study that showed class divisions among African Americans are high and that prejudices against them were much more based on class than race. The study showed that people who had African names and were conceived of as upper class immigrants were getting many more call backs for jobs than people with African-American names who were perceived to be poorer. The study argued it wasn’t about skin color but about class and culture.

EL: Should your article provide us with hope that there are more like you hiding out in academia?

HP: I’m sure there is good work getting done by smart people, but it is just difficult to get it published. Mostly, the serious work comes from outside academia. I’m currently looking at the differences between materialism and postmodernism, for example, in post-colonial studies. This debate does seem to be taking place in that field. The self-described materialist or Marxist academics who are critical of the postmodernists do tend to be a minority themselves. They have pointed out that the postmodernists are in elite institutions in the west, while the materialist academics are predominantly in previously colonized countries.

This type of philosophy does only support the wealthy. The people who are taking on these ideas of identity do tend to be middle class, who either have the time to study this or who are actually at an elite university.

EL: Do you think there’s any significance to the fact that you have published your article in the midst of a growth of the extreme-right in countries across Europe and the Americas? What do you think accounts for this process?

HP: The main left parties, by abandoning their liberal commitments and their economic base in the working class, have dropped the ball. They have become less credible, and they are losing elections. They are intensifying fears going on about Islamism, they are fanning racial divisions, gender divisions, and in the process they are pushing people to the right.
Yes, awful things are happening on the right, and that is the clearest danger. But we need to focus on the left, on our side, too, to make us credible so that we can appeal to the average working human being. This is a serious problem.

EL: And the Democrats are doing further damage by attacking the presumption of innocence and by claiming through the #MeToo campaign that all accusers should be believed, no matter what.

HP: The left, by moving away from objective reality, by moving away from truth, has fed into this abandonment of the notion of due process. Essentially by prioritizing identities, the whole “believe women” thing has caught on in these layers.

It may be well intended, and it is awful when women aren’t believed, but by advocating for blind belief on the grounds of the accusers’ identity as women rather than individual action and the underlying facts is undermining confidence in the “left.” It is a Kafka trap, it is totalitarian. What we need is a strong, rational, objective left to oppose this type of politics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181018092644/https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/18/inte-o18.html