The federal Labor government has overseen the biggest fall in living standards in at least half a century. And Australian household income has dropped by more than in any comparable country in the last two years, <a>according to a recent report</a> published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young people in particular <a>have been screwed</a> by rising rents and falling wages.
People are rightly pissed. According to <a>polling in mid-October</a>, Anthony Albanese’s net approval rating has fallen to a new low of negative 14 percent, and the ALP’s primary vote has sunk to 31 percent. 
Yet, if you took the Labor PR machine seriously, you’d think the government was doing all it could to help people economically. There is endless talk about “cost-of-living relief” and bragging about the measures Labor has implemented. But what has the government really done?
The prime minister’s website has a special “cost of living relief” page that highlights every policy Albanese is trying to promote. At first glance, the listed measures appear to be designed to put more money into the pockets of struggling people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a different story. Many big-ticket relief items are just handouts to big business—a transfer of tax dollars to mega-corporations already raking in super-profits from charging higher prices. 
Take the energy rebate, which reduces annual household energy bills by $300. While it has helped millions struggling with eye-watering bills, it is also a $3.5 billion gift from taxpayers to the energy companies that have been ripping us off in the first place. And it’s hardly one they need. AGL, Australia’s largest electricity generator, recorded a 189 percent increase in underlying profit to $812 million in the last financial year. Origin Energy’s profit surged 172 percent to $1.2 billion, on top of an 83.5 percent increase the previous year. They are raking it in. 
The government could have capped energy prices, or imposed a super-profits tax on the energy behemoths, and saved the tax money for something else, like housing. But it is too wedded to the idea that companies have an ordained right to extract as much profit as possible through the market, regardless of the social consequences. 
It took the same approach to child care. Last year, the Child Care Subsidy was lifted and broadened to include more households. Once again, the government is just handing stacks of money—$10.7 billion, to be precise—to, in many cases, private for-profit childcare centres.
A <a>report released at the end of last year</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that any financial benefits from increases to the government subsidy were largely, if not wholly, eroded by increased day-care fees. It also found that “childcare fees across all services have grown faster than inflation and wages since the introduction of the subsidy”.
Like the energy companies, childcare companies are rolling in cash. G8 Education, Australia’s biggest listed childcare company, posted a 53 percent profit increase in 2023 and paid its CEO a $3 million package. That same year, G8 increased its fees by nearly 25 percent. 
So the government’s great plan means that parents are out of pocket just the same, the Treasury is poorer, while the companies increase their margins. Great “relief” if you can get it.
Then there’s the housing crisis, which needs no introduction. Labor promises to fix it by building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade through the $32 billion Homes for Australia plan. It’s already failing: forecasts from Oxford Economics in July showed that the government will miss its target by more than 20 percent. 
More to the point, Labor’s entire plan follows the same investor- and developer-first model that created the housing crisis in the first place.
This is most notable with the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—Labor’s answer to affordable housing. It’s another handout to private developers, construction firms and investors. The HAFF fact sheet repeatedly states that “one of the key objectives of the program is to encourage private investment in social and affordable housing”. The model is designed to get private investors to team up with a social housing provider to purchase, renovate or build new housing stock by handing over government money to ensure each project remains profitable. 
Take it from Conscious Investment Management chief investment officer Matthew Tominc, who has established a $200 million fund to cash in on the plan. He told the Financial Review that the HAFF would likely offer investors a net 8 to 12 percent return, guaranteeing no losses. So the big winner will again be—you guessed it, the investor class.
As for anyone not in the social housing sphere, which is most people, the government is basically hoping and praying that spending money on infrastructure will encourage developers to build more homes. But it’s doing nothing to ensure those homes will be affordable—the generous tax concessions and other incentives for investors remain untouched.
Another category of cost-of-living relief is the Stage 3 Tax Cuts, which could also be called “tax cuts that will help ordinary people a bit, but disproportionately benefit the rich and further entrench economic inequality”. Accurate, if a bit wordy. 
Finally, there are measures that aren’t objectionable but are so small that it’s almost like the government is playing a joke on the rest of us. 
For instance, the government claims it’s “delivering a better deal for renters” by raising Rent Assistance. The payment is available only to eligible welfare recipients—a fraction of the renting population. It’s also minuscule—it was raised by 10 percent to a maximum rate of $211 a fortnight for a single person with no children (the current median fortnightly rent is about $1,250). 
Eligibility for the single-parent payment has been extended to when the youngest child turns 14, up from 8, but still below 16—where it was when the Gillard Labor government reduced it in 2013. It’s also a maximum of $987.70 per fortnight. How anyone is supposed to live on that is one of society’s great mysteries. And despite a recommendation from the government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the below-the-poverty-line JobSeeker payment has hardly been touched.
Wage rises also slide into the “did you even notice?” category. The government congratulates itself for backing a 3.75 percent pay rise for minimum- and award-wage workers and a 15 percent pay rise for aged care workers. It’s good that the workers got a pay rise, but it’s hardly enough. 
Even with two significant wage increases, aged care workers will still receive only $25 to $30 an hour, depending on their role. We’re talking about small bumps to extremely low wages. As of July, average real wages for all workers were still nearly 5 percent lower than before the pandemic.
To top off this list of do-little policies, Labor’s latest offering is banning debit card transaction fees, which banks charge when you buy something with a debit card. Obviously, the move is supportable. But touting it as a game-changing measure is absurd. 
It’s like the Albanese government is parodying itself. In the last financial year, Australian banks made $40 billion in profit, an 8 percent increase on the previous year. Prolonged high interest rates have been a windfall for the so-called Big Four—the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Westpac—which charge a higher interest rate on loans than they pay into savings accounts. 
Debit fees range from 0.5 to 1 percent of the cost of a transaction. Sure, we should all hang on to that money, but will it make the slightest difference to the crushing weight of rising rents, mortgages, bills, groceries and everything else? No.
Labor is taking us for a ride. They know there’s a crippling cost-of-living crisis and they don’t want to take on big business, but they also want to win the next election. So they’re giving handouts to big business, throwing pennies at the rest of us and calling it relief.

Eleanor Morley

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

Socialists and the US civil rights movement: an interview with Joel Geier

Australian university students have been accused of blindly following their American counterparts in setting up violent, hate-filled Gaza solidarity encampments. In a hysterical opinion piece for the Australian on 4 May, right-wing commentator Gerard Henderson wrote that they are playing an “imitation game”.
Henderson is just one voice among many in the Australian establishment denouncing and vilifying a bunch of university students who are registering their moral opposition to a genocide that has slaughtered more than 35,000 people.
The encampments, which have now spread to a dozen Australian campuses, were indeed inspired by the mass rebellion of US university students. Henderson thinks that this is embarrassing. It’s not as embarrassing as him having gainful employment only because he writes what his boss Rupert Murdoch thinks. Or as embarrassing as him styling his wardrobe after the boardroom directors he spends his life trying to please.
In fact, most of the political right takes its cues from across the Pacific.
Students in the US have faced a relentless torrent of abuse, repression and outright violence from university management, the president, Congress and the cops. It has been shocking. They have been called anti-Semites, suspended from their degrees and doused in chemical sprays before being arrested and dragged out of their campuses.
The right is agitating for the same things to happen here.
First, there is the ideological offensive against the encampments. US president Biden recently described the movement as fostering a “ferocious surge” of anti-Semitism. This is the same tired slander that has been used to demonise pro-Palestine activists for decades. Protesters have been accused of making campuses “unsafe” for Jewish students, despite the fact that the only serious attack—apart from the ones carried out by police—was when a large mob of Zionists violently attacked the encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This line of attack has been taken up with gusto by the Australian establishment. 
Sarah Henderson, the Liberal opposition’s education spokesperson, said in a press release on 9 May that the encampments have become “hotbeds of anti-Semitic activism”. Ten days earlier, she asserted that there was “escalating harassment, intimidation and threats of violence by pro-Palestinian activists”. Yet Henderson has not shared a shred of evidence to substantiate her extreme accusations. Indeed, the University of Sydney, which has been her main target, has not found a single case of anti-Semitism from the encampment, according to a spokesperson for the university.
These are just straight up lies, imported directly from America. 
But you know who is under attack? The million people sheltering in Rafah, who have spent the week hiding from Israel’s carpet bombing, while their main supply line for humanitarian aid was cut off by the Israeli military.
In an address to Sydney’s Central Synagogue on 3 May, Liberal MP Julian Leeser said: “The idea that young Jewish Australians do not feel safe getting an education is anathema to me”. Again, these accusations were made without citing a single case where the safety of a Jewish student has been threatened by an encampment. The only documented case where a Jewish student’s safety has been at risk in recent weeks was when a group of Zionists hurled fireworks at the Adelaide University encampment, where an anti-Zionist Jewish activist was spending the night.
There is a group of students who cannot safely access an education right now—the students of Gaza. Israel has destroyed every single one of Gaza’s twelve universities, and more than 80 percent of schools have been severely damaged, according to the United Nations. Those that are still standing have been turned into refuges for internally displaced Palestinians. More than 14,000 children have been murdered.
Sydney shock jock Ray Hadley took the idiocy about a thousand levels further while he was interviewing Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton on his 2GB radio show. He said the university encampments were the “same type of thing” as the 1938 Kristallnacht Nazi pogrom in Germany, when Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, and hundreds were killed. This is beyond hyperbole—it’s a cynical co-optation of one of history’s greatest crimes to slander a group of peace activists.
Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese agreed that the ubiquitous Palestine-solidarity chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a “very violent statement”. The Group of Eight, a body representing Australia’s leading universities, has written to the attorney-general to seek advice on whether using the word “intifada”, which means “uprising” in Arabic, is a breach of federal law, vowing to act immediately if they are given clear legal authority. 
Student activists in the US have been heavily penalised by university management. Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and others suspended dozens of students who refused to pack down the encampments.
There are signs that Australia’s vice-chancellors are pursuing a similar line of repression. Students at some campuses have reportedly been issued with formal disciplinary proceedings for actions related to the encampments. Sydney University’s vice-chancellor Mark Scott wrote in an email to all staff and students that he “would not hesitate to take firm and decisive disciplinary action” if students engaged in activities that disrupt the regular functioning of the university.
But students are protesting precisely because of the obscenity that these institutions can carry on as normal while directly contributing to the genocide in Gaza through ties to weapons companies and partnerships with complicit Israeli institutions. 
The most shocking scenes coming out of the US have been the hordes of police smashing up the camps. Hundreds of students have been grabbed, zip-tied and arrested by cops invited onto campus by university management. In many instances, cops ripped off the face masks of protesters afraid of being doxed and shoved them in front of the media’s cameras. At the University of Amsterdam, Dutch police drove a bulldozer straight into the encampment. This is the most severe state violence at Western university campuses since the 1970s.
While vice-chancellors have not yet called in the riot cops to clear the encampments here, there are voices in Australia calling for the same kind of treatment. Sarah Henderson demanded in a press release on 29 April that vice-chancellors should “expel students and call in the police”. Victoria Police told the Age that Deputy Commissioner Neil Paterson wrote to university chancellors encouraging them to shut down the camps. According to a report in the Guardian, Daniel Aghion, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, has been calling on education ministers and vice-chancellors to dismantle the camps.
They want to see the same kind of violence witnessed in the US. They want police to march onto campus, violently arrest staff and students, and destroy the encampments. 
The Australian Jewish Association, a leading Zionist organisation, published what is basically an incitement to violence on X (formerly Twitter) on 7 May:
“It should surprise nobody that Nazi encampments on Australian universities make many people angry. We never condone anything illegal but with the Albanese Govt and university heads missing in action, nobody should be surprised if members of the public take matters into their own hands.”
If you call your opponents Nazis, then almost any kind of response is fair game. This is a statement justifying the Zionist violence at Monash and Adelaide universities, and justifying whatever may come next. We’ve already seen where this can lead at UCLA. For hours, Zionists attacked the camp with weapons and chemical spray while the cops stood and watched.
If an Islamic organisation tweeted a similar statement, they would be denounced, and potentially prosecuted, as violent terrorists. Macquarie University’s Randa Abdel-Fattah has been pilloried by the press for weeks for the crime of hosting a children’s event at the Sydney University encampment. Leading Liberal MPs have called on Macquarie University to strip her research funding. Yet a Zionist organisation can justify and condone actual violence meted out to peaceful protesters, and nobody bats an eyelid.
This is what the attacks on the encampments are all about—stifling criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, by any means necessary. The entire Western establishment has lined up behind the bloodshed. Our politicians, media and universities are all complicit. But history will remember who was on the right side of this fight: the students and their supporters.

Gaza solidarity encampments under attack

Israel’s war on Gaza has passed the 200-day mark. It is the longest continual military assault on Palestine since the war that established Israel in 1948 and is now the bloodiest by a long stretch. The Israeli military has killed at least 34,000 Palestinians, and around 7,000 are thought to be missing, likely buried under the rubble of the destroyed enclave.
All the terrible scenes ubiquitous to war are being beamed out of Gaza in real time. Over the last fortnight, mass graves were found at two hospitals previously raided by Israeli soldiers: at least 392 bodies at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis and hundreds more at Al Shifa hospital in northern Gaza. The bodies reportedly show signs of torture and executions. Palestinian Civil Defence officials say that ten of the bodies were found with their hands bound; twenty are thought to have been buried alive. Identifying many of the victims is proving difficult due to the mutilation of the bodies.
Northern Gaza, which was cut off from the rest of the strip for months, is heading towards famine. The charity Save the Children says that 27 children had died of malnutrition and dehydration by the beginning of April. 
Meanwhile, the daily shelling and bombing continue.
In recent weeks, tensions have only increased. When Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria and Iran retaliated by launching more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles toward Israeli territory, the region seemed to be on the brink of a much larger war.
In the end, neither side thought it opportune to escalate further. But while Israel continues to lob missiles into neighbouring countries, the threat of a wider conflagration remains.
According to some speculations, US President Joe Biden offered not to stand in the way of an invasion of Rafah to convince Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to back down from attacking Iran. The city in southern Gaza has taken in at least 1 million displaced Palestinians since October, and Netanyahu has insisted for weeks that it will be his next target. Israel last week stepped up air strikes on the area, and government spokesman David Mencer said that the military is “moving ahead” with the planned invasion.
There has been growing international pressure on Netanyahu to reduce the number of civilian casualties. The genocide is unpopular in the West, particularly among electoral constituencies that Biden, Australian PM Anthony Albanese and other centrist leaders rely on. But the pressure has come only in the form of statements.
Biden has announced US$17 billion in additional aid for Israel. In March, the Washington Post reported that the United States had quietly approved more than 100 arms sales since October. The genocide is being armed and funded by the leaders of the so-called free and democratic world.
But another group of people in the West is taking a principled stand against genocide—US university students. Over the last week and a half, thousands across the country set up protest camps in solidarity with Palestine.
Young people are much maligned by politicians and the media, particularly when they express strong progressive or left-wing political opinions. They are told just to focus on their studies, defer to their elders and wait until they’re old enough to know better. 
The courage and decency that the students have shown put to shame the genocidal impulses of the adults in charge.
Columbia University in New York was the first to erupt, after hundreds of students established a camp on university lawns and demanded that the administration cut ties with Israeli apartheid and weapons companies. The response was sharp and swift—100 students were arrested and suspended after just 24 hours. 
But the images of cops streaming into the campus to smash the camp and drag away protesters quickly inspired thousands more students across the country to join the movement. At the time of writing, protest camps have been established on 40 campuses.
There is a flavour of 1968 to this rebellion. That year, the anti-Vietnam War movement exploded, riots rocked the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and a mass demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was brutally attacked by police, the National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. Two years later, the Ohio National Guard killed four student protesters at Kent State University.
The current situation has not reached that level of violence. But students are facing a similar enemy over a similar issue. The entire liberal establishment has fallen in behind Israel, from the Democratic president to the heads of the Ivy League colleges. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik threatened to call in the National Guard. But as in 1968, the violence and intimidation have only angered wider layers of students and faculty.
One good thing that came out of the Vietnam War was the mass radicalisation formed in response to it. A generation of young people turned their backs on an establishment that had exposed the depths of its own brutality. Many participants in that movement drew more far-reaching conclusions about the nature of capitalist society and devoted themselves to fighting for a better world. 
Let’s hope this generation follows in their footsteps.

US campus revolt shows the bankruptcy of the ‘adults in charge’

Australian workers have been hit with the biggest drop in living standards in half a century. Since the end of 2021, real household disposable income has fallen from $62,000 a year on average to $56,000, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data. And little is being done to alleviate the hardship.
In the 2010s, living standards didn’t increase much. But they jumped during the pandemic because of increased financial support from governments and the inability of households to spend much under the lockdowns. But they’ve been rapidly falling in recent years, for several reasons.
First is rising consumer prices. Over the past three years, prices have risen by more than 16 percent, according to the latest quarterly consumer price index figures from the Bureau of Statistics. Non-discretionary items (things you generally must pay for, such as food, electricity and rent) have gone up by nearly 20 percent. While headline inflation has dropped in recent months, things aren’t getting cheaper—prices are just rising at a slower pace than they were twelve months ago.
More people are relying on charity to get by. One-third of households experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023, meaning they compromised on their meal choices or skipped whole meals or days of eating, according to the latest Foodbank Hunger Report. Three-quarters of those experiencing food insecurity did so for the first time that year.
Inflated prices have been blamed on supply chain disruptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and catastrophic weather events. But another major factor has been the opportunistic profiteering of business owners. An Australia Institute report found that, in 2022, Australian companies increased prices by $160 billion above their increased costs for wages, taxes and other inputs. That’s an extra $160 billion taken from consumers and pocketed as profits. The banks, supermarkets, energy companies and airlines are all in on it, recording record profits and payouts to shareholders. 
Second is the housing crisis. Twenty-five years ago, the average house was worth nine times the disposable household income per capita; now it’s sixteen and a half times, according to data from the Bureau of Statistics. Prices have risen astonishingly in some cities: 57 percent in Adelaide since the end of 2019, 51 percent in Brisbane and 38 percent in Sydney. 
So a lot of people are taking on a lot more debt, which has become more expensive to service. The average new mortgage nationally is about $620,000, according to the Bureau of Statistics. Increasingly, young people can’t buy into the market without help—parental assistance for new home purchases is up from 12 percent in 2010 to 75 percent today.
Repayments on expiring fixed rate mortgages taken out before interest rates started rising in 2022 have increased by an average of 64 percent. To take a whole set of averages, a single person with an average mortgage on the average income would need to spend 3.6 weeks of every month’s wage on mortgage repayments—this is clearly impossible. 
What do you do if you can’t buy a house? You rent, of course. But there’s serious trouble there as well. On average, rents have gone up by about one-third since mid-2020. And forking out a significant chunk of your income to a landlord is now a perverse privilege; rental vacancies are at a record low of 1 percent.
Again, this is a crime with a culprit. Decades of Labor and Liberal housing policy have encouraged speculative investment in housing. Extensive tax concessions have helped a small minority purchase an increasing share of dwellings, while public housing stock has been annihilated, forcing an upward trend in prices for the rest of the housing market. 
Third, wages have not kept up with inflation. Rising prices wouldn’t be such an issue if wages were keeping pace. But since March 2021, wages have risen on average by 9 percent, while inflation rose 14.6 percent. The last three years have wiped out more than a decade of wage growth. As house prices jumped 30-50 percent over the last five years, wages rose only 12 percent.
Real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) started to rise a little last year, but they have not risen more than inflation on non-discretionary items, and they have not risen for all workers.
Consequently, household savings are rapidly being depleted. Many households built savings buffers during the lockdowns, which helped to soften the financial blow of the last few years. But a report by comparison website Finder estimates that almost half of all households have less than $1,000 saved, and one in five have nothing at all. Only the top 20 percent of households have maintained their savings. 
The one small solace of the last few years has been that unemployment has not risen sharply. But it is starting to tick up, and many people with a job do not get paid enough to make ends meet—more than a half of those suffering from food insecurity have at least one family member in paid work. 
The only options available to people to deal with these financial pressures are to reduce their standard of living by reducing consumption, work more or take on debt. 
According to the Bureau of Statistics, household spending plateaued late last year, rising only 0.1 percent, while spending on discretionary items fell by 0.9 percent compared to the same period the previous year. In the December quarter, businesses ran down the amount of stock they had on shelves and in storage: why stock items no-one can buy? 
The number of people working more than one job has increased to a record high of almost 1 million, and credit card debt is up 17 percent since September 2021, according to Reserve Bank figures. 
The overall picture of the last few years is that prices have gone up, real wages have gone down and people are taking on larger amounts of debt. 
Meanwhile, the total wealth of Australia’s billionaires increased by 70 percent in the first three years of this decade, according to the latest Oxfam Inequality Report, and fully doubled for the richest three Australians.
The Labor government has done little to ease the cost-of-living crisis. It has claimed the tiniest of measures as great victories, for instance a $40 increase to fortnightly welfare payments and $500 energy subsidy for very-low-income households. But these apply only to a minority of those feeling the pressure, and the households that receive them are still worse off than they were three years ago.
Labor has also trumpeted the Housing Australia Future Fund as a major step in tackling the housing crisis. But when you crunch the numbers, the new funding is enough to build around 6,000 homes a year. There are currently 175,000 people on the social housing waitlist, and it’s increasing by 10-15,000 a year. 
It’s easy to think of policies that would ease the burden: cap prices on essential items, substantially lift welfare payments, limit the number of houses any individual can buy, build more public housing, cap rents.
And it’s not as though Labor isn’t spending any money. It has committed $370 billion to purchasing nuclear-powered submarines, provides more than $11 billion a year in subsidies and tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry, forgoes $50 billion a year with its property investor tax incentives and is cutting income taxes to benefit high income earners disproportionately.
None of this should come as a surprise. On the eve of the 2022 federal election, future Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the National Press Club that Labor wants to be a “pro-business, pro-employer party”.
Since Labor took office, the Greens have publicly criticised some of the worst aspects of the government. They have positioned themselves as the party of renters, opposed the regressive stage 3 tax cuts and called for Labor to raise the rate of welfare to $88 a day. 
But political parties must be judged not just by what they say, but by what they do. And the Greens have done little. Despite holding the balance of power in the Senate, the Greens have not used this to force substantial concessions out of Labor. After criticising key policies like the HAFF, they have folded and ended up voting them through. This is no way to mount a challenge to a right-wing government.
The other institution one might expect to fight for workers in a time like this is the trade union movement. Again, things have been sadly lacking on this front. Union density is at an all-time low of 12.5 percent—which drops to 5 percent for workers in their early- to mid-20s—but there are still around 1.4 million union members in Australia. If mobilised, this power would be formidable. 
But the approach of the Australian Council of Trade Unions has not been to organise and fight. Instead, it has pumped out endless surveys, inquiries and press releases. This is an elaborate way of doing nothing. 
There was an uptick in industrial disputes in 2021, largely due to a few big public sector strikes such as by teachers and nurses in NSW. But the outcome was dismal. The unions wrapped up their campaign in the lead-up to the 2023 NSW state election and jumped on board Chris Minns’ Labor campaign. Only the teachers won a pay rise above inflation, which was partly reflective of the fact they were the worst paid teachers in the country and there were serious concerns that too many would leave the state during a teaching crisis.
It’s been a long time since there was a genuinely combative union movement in Australia, but it’s even worse under an ALP government. The union leaders are structurally and politically tied to the Labor Party and basically function as a wing of the government when Labor is in office. The unions talk a lot about the cost-of-living crisis, but their fire is aimed solely at major corporations, without a peep about the government. 
We need to rebuild a genuine fighting left, in politics and in the unions. A left that won’t capitulate, compromise and sell out.

The ongoing assault on workers in Australia

Bruce Lehrmann is a rapist. That’s the conclusion, on the balance of probabilities, that Justice Michael Lee drew at the conclusion of Lehrmann’s defamation trial against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. It has since been plastered on the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald (“A Lying Rapist”) and Herald Sun (“Rapist and Loser”).
There has since been an outpouring of joy among the many people repulsed by the slimy, sleazy Lehrmann. His hubris was his own downfall. That he might now be forced to declare bankruptcy is another satisfying potential outcome of the trial.
The case is strikingly similar to that of Ben Roberts-Smith, war criminal and murderer. He brought a defamation case against three journalists and the publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age
and the Canberra Times, and lost in similarly spectacular fashion. In June last year, a court found that Roberts-Smith was, again on the balance of probabilities, involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan men while deployed with Australian special forces.
Yet, apart from the outcomes of the defamation proceedings, there isn’t a whole lot to celebrate about the two cases. What they’ve both proved is that if you’re from the right school and have the right networks, you can get away with basically anything.
Neither Lehrmann nor Roberts-Smith have been charged and convicted for the crimes that they have been found to have committed. They were instead hoist with their own petards—victims of their own arrogance rather than the rigour of law enforcement. Both were allowed to walk out of the courtroom as free men, and neither is likely to spend a single day in prison for raping a coworker or murdering civilians. 
In fact, they both received substantial perks for their behaviour.
Take Lehrmann. In the final weeks of the defamation proceedings, Taylor Auerbach, a former Channel Seven producer with an axe to grind, revealed the lengths the network went to secure an interview from this man who had been accused of raping a woman inside Parliament House in the early hours of a Saturday morning in 2019. According to Auerbach, Seven footed the bill for a couple of big nights out with Lehrmann that included cocaine, sex workers and $10,000 spent on Thai massages. The network also paid for a year’s rent of a beachside apartment, worth $100,000.
Channel Seven gave Roberts-Smith the plum job of general manager of Seven Queensland, and then bankrolled his legal fees during the defamation proceedings. There is still an entire display dedicated to him in the Hall of Valour at the Australian War Memorial. In September, instead of sitting inside a prison cell, Roberts-Smith was sitting alongside Zachary Rolfe, the ex-cop who killed a young Indigenous man in 2019, in an Instagram photo from Bali captioned “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
The court proceedings highlight something else. Despite the victories in the Lehrmann and Roberts-Smith cases, the trials are nevertheless a loss for journalists trying to hold the rich and powerful to account. Australian defamation law is weighted in favour of plaintiffs because it assumes that a defamatory statement is false and then requires the defendant to establish that it is true—guilty until proven innocent. 
But proving innocence is incredibly costly. Cases are expensive to defend (the Lehrmann case <a>is predicted to have cost</a> Network Ten at least $10 million) and time consuming (the Robert-Smith trial lasted for 110 days). This is all a huge deterrent to reporting on crimes committed by powerful people, particularly when anonymous whistleblowers are key sources.
All in all, the message from both these cases is that if you have the right connections or can make yourself a cause célèbre
for the right-wing media, you can get off with a light touch. Just think twice before suing for defamation.

Lehrmann verdict: elite loser rapist walks free

The world is a very volatile place. Two major invasions have occurred out within two years—a reminder of how deadly and destructive global capitalism is.
First was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the tanks rolled across the border in February 2022, almost 10,000 civilians have been killed, according to the United Nations. Include soldiers and the death toll rises to anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000—the most serious military conflict in Europe since World War Two.
Then came Gaza. Civilian casualties quickly outstripped those of Ukraine: at least 20,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s relentless bombardment, although the figure is likely much higher— it’s hard to count bodies trapped below piles of rubble.
Neither of these wars was predicted, which raises the question: Where will be next?
For the last few years, the US security establishment has focused on containing the rise of China and preparing for a potential war with it in the future. The Biden administration pulled out of Afghanistan, imposed sanctions on Chinese tech industries and handed out enormous subsidies to help domestic industries rebuild US war-fighting capabilities. 
A key topic of discussion and inquiry for analysts of all political persuasions has been the relative decline of US imperialism. Many argue that its star power peaked in the 1990s after the USSR collapsed and that, while no other country comes close to its political and economic might, US hegemony has been irrevocably weakened. 
The invasion of Iraq was a disaster for US power, China has grown in strength, and old foes like Russia and Iran have flexed their muscles in several areas. But the precise international balance of power is difficult to discern. 
The US has obvious strengths. No other country has the resources to focus its military on three fronts, as the US is currently doing by providing weapons and intelligence to Ukraine and Israel while building its presence in and near Asia. China—whose geopolitical weight is the product of its astonishing economic rise—now seems to be struggling with its post-pandemic recovery and ailing property sector.
But the general climate of global instability also poses challenges for the US ruling class. Ukraine and Gaza are not conflicts that the US wants. Indeed, one of the main frustrations inside the Pentagon in the last decade is that the War on Terror proved to be a distraction stalling the pivot to Asia. The US is now bearing the burden for two more conflicts that have little to do with addressing its key strategic rival: China. (For example, more than half of all military aid sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded has come from the US, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.)
This dilemma is now playing out inside the US Congress. The extreme right of the Republicans opposed assistance to Ukraine from the beginning of the war. But in recent months, a wider section of the party has also raised hesitations; spending packages for new military assistance have stalled in the Senate and the House.
While the security apparatus is loathe to give a free kick to Russia, it’s possible that, as the war drags on, the desire to cut and run could spread. Ukraine’s spring counteroffensive, designed to claw back lost territory from Russia, largely failed. Instead, both countries are in a quagmire—neither seriously advancing nor losing much ground. US weapons stockpiles are depleting as it ships rockets and missiles to Ukraine. This can’t go on forever, particularly now that the US is underwriting Israel’s war.
After all, the primary concern of the US was never to defend the people of Ukraine—if the US cared about civilian populations, it wouldn’t be assisting the annihilation of Gaza. The motivations are far more cynical: not letting an enemy get runs on the board, strengthening relations with other NATO members and establishing that no serious conflict takes place in this world without a green light from, of the involvement of, its leading superpower.
Palestine also poses problems for the United States. While the war has once again proven the unparalleled strength of the Western alliance, there are obvious drawbacks. The US successfully paraded as the great defender of self-determination and democracy in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it has decisively lost the moral high ground over Palestine. And it’s not clear how much longer and what the regional implications will be of the US-backed genocide. 
It’s also too early to tell what the broader consequences of this war will be for world imperialism and US power. Aside from the drain on US resources that Israel has become, Washington in its positioning against China is courting two important Muslim-majority countries in South-East Asia—Indonesia and Malaysia—the populations and governments of which are, to varying degrees, pro-Palestinian. 
The Biden administration has nevertheless advanced US interests in several ways. It pursued the economic war started by Trump but has done so to greater advantage. Targeted prohibitions on US corporate investments in Chinese tech industries seems to be effective. Perhaps most consequential is the ban on Chinese access to the most advanced microchips, which are critical for a range of industries. As a sign of US strength, it has even prevented third countries from exporting to China inputs used in semiconductor manufacturing. This is partly about weakening China as an economic rival but will also hamper its military development.
The Pentagon is jumping on new developments in artificial intelligence. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced in August that, in preparing for a possible war with China, the US is developing autonomous weapons systems to further its advantage. “We’ll counter the [People’s Liberation Army’s] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat”, she said.
It’s not only the major powers that are preparing for greater military conflict. All across the world, countries are expanding their military capabilities. Global military spending reached an all-time high of US$2.4 trillion in 2023. States that previously have been reluctant to spend big on their armies, such as Japan and Germany, have flipped in the last two years. So in late 2022, <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinas-defence-spending-growth-continues-apace/">Japan unveiled</a> its biggest military build-up since World War Two, and <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2023/07/05/germany-unveils-increased-defense-budget/">Germany announced in August</a> that it will soon reach the NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on “defence”, a measure on which it has long fallen short.
Then there are nuclear weapons. Despite years of talk about nuclear disarmament, the world is heading in the opposite direction. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the nine nuclear-armed states are all modernising their stockpiles and the global inventory of warheads has increased. And the US Defence Department recently announced that it is developing a new variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb.
There’s another side to all this. The major players are stuck in a bind. The forces of global competition have pushed them towards confrontation, but in the short term this can cause its own problems. Forty years of globalisation have connected the world’s biggest countries by countless economic threads. Unravelling them risks destabilising the entire global economy.
So there are sanctions, chest-beating and intensifying war games in the South China Sea. But Western and Chinese leaders have also made a renewed push for diplomacy—however milquetoast—to try to cool some of the economic tensions. In April, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan suggested that the US is not “decoupling” from China (severing economic ties between the two), but “derisking” (honing in on a few strategic sectors). Sullivan described this as a “small-yard, high-fence” strategy. Nevertheless, US imports from China fell 25 percent in the first six months of 2023, according to the US Commerce Department.
There’s also an element of the unknown: What will happen if Trump wins the 2024 election? Will another surprise conflict erupt in the coming years? Could a Western or Chinese naval exercise in the South China Sea get out of hand and provoke a confrontation? Prediction is for the most part a fool’s game. But in this climate, so is betting on stability.
Taken together—the increased military spending, the new wars in Europe and the Middle East, the bellicose rhetoric and the economic warfare—all the elements portend a dangerous situation. There are forces pushing the world towards greater conflicts. If there is one take-home message from world imperialism in 2023, it’s that capitalism is incapable of providing any kind of lasting peace.

World imperialism today

From the early days of colonisation to this century’s “War on Terror”, Britain, France and the United States and its allies have terrorised the Middle East and North Africa.
Western countries talk a lot about their claimed global role promoting democracy over dictatorship, freedom over terror, enlightenment over barbarism. Yet they are responsible for monumental death and destruction. Think of the transatlantic slave trade, the genocides stemming from colonisation, the mass slaughter of two world wars, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, napalm in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq—and so much more.
The Middle East has been a central target of Western imperialism because it is home to two things that matter a great deal to the people who run capitalism: oil and trade routes.
Oil has been capitalism’s most important resource since it emerged as a key energy source in the early twentieth century. It’s one of the dirtiest sources of energy, but because it is abundant and highly profitable, the global transport system has never been weaned off it. 
The region’s first large oil deposit was found in Iran in 1908; the Anglo-Persian Oil company was established the following year to exploit it. The name suggests that it was a joint venture, but it was a British company and fittingly changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Its first major customer was the British Navy.
In the years that followed, oil was discovered across much of the region, which led to a ceaseless scramble for the commodity—and for the entire region, which is today estimated to contain about half of the world’s known reserves. Whoever controls these controls a pillar of the world economy. 
The conflicts have not always been about direct consumption of the oil. The United States, for example, is a net exporter of oil, but control or at least significant influence over the Middle East gives that country’s capitalists leverage against their competitors, who rely on imported oil. That’s why so many wars have been waged for control of the Middle East. 
Sometimes, people in power are quite open about this. UK Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd put it bluntly in 1958, referring to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia: “At all costs these oil fields must be kept in Western hands. We need, when things go wrong, to ruthlessly intervene”. In 1990, as the United States was preparing to wage war on Iraq under the pretence of liberating neighbouring Kuwait, Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence, said: “If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn’t give a damn”. 
Then there are trade routes: some of the world’s most important run through the Middle East. Because capitalists are always trying to increase their profits, they have for centuries attempted to reduce costs by finding cheaper sources of raw materials, cheaper pools of labour, or just bigger markets for their products. So supply and production chains extend all around the world, and are particularly dependent on seaborne trade to move commodities between regions.
For instance, Egypt’s Suez Canal is the main route between Europe and Asia, and carries roughly 12 percent of global trade. The Strait of Hormuz is a pathway through which roughly one-third of the world’s oil passes. It connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and is bordered by Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Musandam Governorate, an exclave of Oman.
At the September G20 meeting in New Delhi, India, US President Joe Biden announced a new trade route connecting India and Europe via the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. Its purpose is to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which was originally conceived in part to link East Asia and Europe via a “new Silk Road” of rail freight infrastructure through the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
Controlling access to such routes, or at least making sure they are controlled by allies, is a requirement of any global power. That’s why the United States often talks about “freedom of navigation” (a euphemism meaning navigation according to the rules laid out by the US) in the South China Sea, and why there have been major conflicts over who controls Suez and the Persian Gulf.
The most obvious problem that the West has faced in trying to control the Middle East and North Africa stems from the fact that it is inhabited by other people. Millions of them, in fact, who hold the crazy idea that, because they live there, they should control the resources and should exercise full sovereignty in the way that, for example, the US government does in its own territory in North America.
The West has traditionally responded to such sentiments by using violence and coercion and labelling as “terrorism” any resistance to its rule.
In the early years, this was straight up colonisation. The British and French first went in during the scramble for world domination in the nineteenth century. France occupied Algeria in 1830, and Britain entered Aden (now in Yemen) nine years later. Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Morocco followed. 
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War One, it was open slather for the victors of the war. If you’ve ever wondered why some borders in the Middle East are remarkably straight, bearing no relation to geographic features like mountain ranges and rivers, the answer lies in a clandestine London meeting at 10 Downing Street in late 1915. 
In attendance was British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, warmongers Lord Kitchener and Lloyd George, and diplomatic adviser Mark Sykes. They had gathered to discuss how to carve up the crumbling empire. Sykes slid his finger across a map and said: “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the last ‘k’ in Kirkuk”. 
This became the basis of the agreement (known as Sykes-Picot) drawn up with French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot a few months later. They took out a map, a ruler and a pencil, and with a few small markings dictated the fate of millions of people. Britain took what is now Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, while France claimed Syria and Lebanon. In 1920, this setup was mandated by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.
But British and French power was waning (soon to be replaced by the might of the United States), and direct colonial rule in the style of India and Algeria was not really an option for militaries weakened by the war. As well, the people of the region made it clear that they wanted self-determination, not to be under the mandate of a European power. In the following decade, movements for self-rule were crushed in Iraq, Egypt and Syria. 
To retain control of the region’s resources, Western imperialists developed two strategies to establish and maintain their power.
The first was installing local dictators who would do the West’s bidding in return for a share of the bounty. The British backed the sons of the sharif of Mecca, Faisal and Abdullah, as the rulers of Iraq and Jordan respectively, and supported the shah of Iran. The Middle East is as divided by social class as anywhere else in the world: there is a mass of poor workers and farmers who struggle to eke out an existence, and a minority of billionaire kings and capitalists rich from the oil wealth. 
By the 1950s, the United States had replaced Britain as the dominant global power, and it has since adopted the same strategy of finding friendly local rulers while intervening to force “regime change” if a state falls out of line. This is one of the great hypocrisies of Western imperialism: when a dictatorial state is an adversary, like Russia or China, its leaders are labelled brutal dictators who must be pulled into line, but when a similar state is friendly, like Saudi Arabia, there is no such rhetoric.
This largely explains the War on Terror—the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan that slaughtered more than a million people. The excuse was the 9/11 terrorist attack in the US, but the intention was to reshape the region to make it more compliant with US capitalism’s interests.
Yet such grand designs have time and again been challenged by mass movements to oust the pliant regimes, such as when the 1979 Iranian revolution overthrew the US-backed monarchy, or by resistance that has thwarted US wars, like the armed resistance that emerged in Iraq after the US invaded.
So another complementary strategy was needed: Israel. Israel’s importance to Western imperialism has nothing to do with its domestic resources—Israel doesn’t really have any—but is due to the strategic role its founders pledged to play within the region.
The leaders of the European Zionist movement in the early twentieth century, which was at the time a right-wing fringe element of the large Jewish community, appealed to the British government to let them establish a Jewish-only state in Palestine. Their proposal was: if you let us do this, we will be your number one most faithful ally in the Middle East. 
Britain backed the proposal in 1917, and the United Nations formally sanctioned the partitioning of Palestine in 1947. From day one, Israel began to prove its worth to the West. Five neighbouring Arab countries mobilised their armies in response to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, but were swiftly beaten. In 1956, Israel joined a British military assault on Egypt when the nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal.
And in 1967, Israel defeated the armies of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in just six days, taking over more territory in the process. Following this victory, the US viewed Israel as its most vicious and loyal attack dog in the region. Between 1967 and 1972, US aid to the country jumped from $13 million to $600 million a year. Israel has remained the biggest recipient of US aid ever since. It has been armed to the teeth with US weapons and enjoys full support from the West for every brutal attack on Palestine.
The thing that ultimately made Israel different to the other regional regimes was that its people, not just its government, could be counted on. Israeli Jews are an oppressor nation consciously aligned with Western imperialism. They will not, unlike the workers of Iran or Egypt for example, rise in revolt against their own government and its ties to the United States. Jewish Israelis may break with this or that Israeli government, but the big majority are unlikely to break with Zionism. That’s what makes the country the most reliable partner of the West.
The West has destroyed the lives of millions of people across the region for its own cynical reasons: profit and power. It has no intention of changing course now—there is too much power and too many profits at stake. 
According to the US Department of Defense, there are more than 30,000 US troops stationed across Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman. It has shown again and again that it will mobilise these forces—and many more—if ever there is a challenge to its rule.

Western terror in the Middle East

Joel Geier has been a socialist activist in the United States since the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and Berkeley free speech campaign in the 1960s. He has written extensively on American politics, the Democratic Party, economics and imperialism. Joel spoke to Eleanor Morley while in Australia last month about the Biden administration’s attempt to strengthen American empire.
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The race to the 2024 US presidential election is well and truly under way, and Joe Biden appears to be making his economic program the centrepiece of his re-election campaign. Could you explain what this program, dubbed “Bidenomics”, is all about?
Biden’s economics are not separate from his foreign policy. This is guided by the fact that the United States is no longer the sole superpower: it has a competitor—China. And China has become more effective on the world market; it is the top trading partner for 120 countries. That’s an enormous shift from twenty years ago. For almost all of those countries, the top trading partner would once have been the United States. 
There is a new struggle for world domination. It has some flashpoints, like Taiwan or the South China Sea, but it’s also economic. For instance, China has set up the Belt and Road Initiative, which is an attempt to integrate the Eurasian market under Chinese domination.
The United States has started to act against that. First was the pivot to Asia, which was Obama’s attempt to start modernising the American armed forces, including a $1 trillion modernisation of nuclear weapons. But it didn’t in any way change the big dynamics.
Next, Trump comes in and starts a trade war with China that is chaotic, incompetent, a failure. But it does bring to public consciousness the struggle with China. Trump also begins the first round of economic sanctions, most notably against Huawei.
Then the Biden administration enters with the following proposition: neoliberalism is a failure; we have to change the economics of what’s going on in order to compete against China. The administration has proposed a new industrial policy: a series of measures to expand the American economy so that it is capable of taking on China.
There are three key measures: infrastructure, subsidies for “green energy” (things like electric vehicles and solar panels) and sanctions on Chinese semiconductors and other high-tech commodities to slow down the progress of the Chinese economy.
The Biden administration was already leaning this way before the election—you could see this in articles written by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. But the COVID pandemic and invasion of Ukraine pushed even harder in that direction.
COVID caused a massive disruption of supply chains. You couldn’t get masks—they were made in China. You couldn’t get ventilators. Many of the pharmaceutical drugs and medical equipment the US needed are made in China. That focused the mind during the pandemic.
And this spread to other parts of the economy. Parts of it shut down because companies couldn’t access inputs from China. The auto industry, all sorts of military equipment, much of it relies on supply chains that lead back to China. Concerns about this had been going on for some years, but all of a sudden it became very clear that the American economy is dependent upon decisions made by the Chinese Communist Party. What?! Why did you fight the Cold War for 50 or 60 years? 
And then comes the war in Ukraine. And one of the things that they learnt from this is that the United States no longer has the military-industrial complex capable of carrying out a long-term war. That now has to return to US soil. The US became the dominant imperialist power in World War Two because it was the “arsenal of democracy”; it produced all the planes, ships, tanks, guns and bullets for the Allies. Without this, the Allied war effort would have failed. This is no longer the case. Overall, the United States no longer has the military-industrial complex it needs to take on a war with China for world domination. 
China has 50 percent of all the world’s shipyards; the United States has 1 percent. The US made thousands of ships in World War Two; it is no longer capable of doing so. Instruments for military planes are made in China; security cameras for US military bases are made in China; the list goes on.
The Biden administration is now attempting to start the process of rebuilding the American industrial and military complex. It is focused on world domination. That’s what its economic program is about.
What has the Biden administration done to try revive America’s industrial base? 
Trump and the Republicans gave money directly to corporations that they presumed would then invest it. It was a total failure. The Biden administration is still giving money to corporations but in a different way.
The first is through investment in infrastructure—roads, railroads, harbours, bridges—all of which have been allowed to decay. Everyone is for that, but it’s still a subsidy to corporations because it’s designed to improve the transportation and circulation of goods. You can make more profit if you have a good railroad.
The second thing is subsidising green energy: electric vehicles, solar panels and things like that. Why are they doing this? The United States is now the leading oil producer in the world, but it wants to have enough oil to be able to export to its allies. This is not just for the profits of the oil companies, but will be a necessity if there’s war. 
The US produced 80 percent of the oil used by the Allies in World War Two. Much of its military plans were designed to keep Germany from accessing the Romanian oil fields, and to keep Japan from getting oil. That’s what some of this is about. The United States now produces 20 million barrels of oil and gas; it has gone from being the biggest importer of oil a decade ago, to now exporting some oil. It wants to be able to do more of this as it prepares for the future.
The third thing is to prevent China from accessing high-tech equipment, like advanced semiconductors. If the United States is dependent upon China for lots of things, China is dependent on American high tech. Its economy and war machine depend upon it.
As a result of the war in Ukraine, the US has re-established itself in Europe, so much so that it is now preventing the Europeans from sending high-tech semiconductor inputs to China. For example, the Americans have now prevented the Dutch company Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography from sending ultraviolet lithography machines, which are needed for building semiconductor machines, to China. It takes away a good chunk of their market, but the Americans forced it through.
Biden hasn’t presented these measures to the American public as though they are just about beefing up industry and the military—he has pitched it as a new dawn for the working class, as a return to the New Deal. Are American workers getting anything out of the subsidies?
Biden presents the program as though it will be good for workers, who will be able to get a well-paid union job without needing a college degree. But it is not a subsidy to the poor, it is a subsidy to the corporations through the expansion of the US economy. While it may lead to more industrial jobs, it’s not putting any money in any workers’ pockets right now. But that’s not how Biden is talking about it.
The Democratic Party has not raised the economy as an issue in elections in years. The 2020 election, for example, was COVID from the vantage point of the Democrats, the economy from the vantage point of the Republicans. In 2022, the Republicans argued against the Democrats on inflation, and the Democrats argued for abortion. For the first time in decades, Biden is attempting to make the economy a Democratic Party issue again. 
The Democratic Party vote used to be based on the working class. American workers in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and into the ’70s voted more for the Democratic Party than British workers voted for the Labour Party in Britain, or German workers voted for the Social Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was the party of social security, of unemployment insurance, of a minimum wage and then of Medicare. But then they totally adopted neoliberalism, and there have been no reforms in 50 or 60 years. There have been some changes: equal marriage, abortion and so on, but economically there has been nothing. Wages for industrial workers have not gone up in 50 years.
The result for the Democratic Party has been immense. For instance, the state that was most heavily Democratic was West Virginia—the coal miners. It is now the second most heavily Republican state. The Democratic Party abandoned the working class to hitch its wagon to neoliberalism and globalisation. So, they started to lose workers’ votes, since they could not run on working-class issues. 
Republicans started to make different arguments to workers—that the elites think they’re contemptible, which is actually true of the Democratic Party. It’s the party of the upper middle class, of the professionals, doctors, lawyers, professors. The party represents the top 5 or 10 percent of the population—it is totally contemptuous of the working class. It’s for making some amelioration for the poorest people, but the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1968.
So they started losing the white working class, but they could say, “That’s because they’re racist, we’re going to run on diversity and equity, and we have demographics on our side—the country will no longer be majority white because of the growing Hispanic and Asian population”. And then they started to lose the Hispanic working class, then the Asian, and now 20 percent of the Black population are voting Republican.
The Republicans have also picked up on the Democrats’ identity politics and are running Black and Hispanic candidates. For example, of the eight or nine people who are running in the Republican presidential primary, one is Black, Tim Scott, two are Indian Americans, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
So the Democratic Party all of a sudden has come to the conclusion that they’re not going to have a natural majority and they need to go back to winning the working class. This is their program, or their opening program, to try win the working class.
How effective has Bidenomics actually been?
Well, there’s a capital boom going on in the United States. A lot of it is European capital, and the auto industry, like Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, BMW, they’re starting to build factories in the United States because of the subsidies for electric vehicles. 
Then there are the subsidies for semiconductors. Semiconductor plants are being built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Samsung, Intel and so on. This is all one of the reasons why the rise in interest rates has not raised unemployment and cut consumption.
So, the program is working in that sense—it’s reinvigorating at least sections of American industry. I think that from the vantage point of American imperialism, it’s the most successful administration in 30 years. It has re-established its power in Europe. It is doing so in the Pacific, with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, many of the Pacific islands. It still has to re-establish its ties in Latin America and in Africa, but it has been very quick to achieve this in just two to three years. 
But it’s not enough to convince workers—they don’t necessarily see their living standards going up. You could say in the long run they may, but in the long run, we’ll all be dead, as Keynes said. They have not come up with anything that immediately raises the standard of living of the working class, which is why Trump is still viable, and why Biden is unpopular.
We’re in a world of much greater instability—economically, politically, militarily, any way you want to see it—than what has gone on for decades. This is becoming a totally different period than the 40 years of neoliberalism and globalisation. And that’s particularly true in the United States.

Bidenomics and the strengthening of US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

While prices are soaring and millions of people are struggling to make ends meet, the ALP is boasting about a $22 billion budget surplus that it refuses to use to help alleviate the cost-of-living crisis.
The federal government raked in more from tax revenue than it spent over the 2022-23 financial year. It is the first time that a surplus has been recorded in Australia in fifteen years. Treasurer Jim Chalmers initially forecast a surplus of $4.3 billion when the federal budget was delivered in May; the additional cash largely comes from higher than expected tax revenues from workers and from higher commodity export prices.
In a September press release, Chalmers congratulated the Albanese government’s “responsible economic management and spending restraint”. Labor politicians are lauding themselves as responsible managers of Australian capitalism, rubbing it in the faces of the conservatives, who say that they are the best friends of business.
“If the Albanese government had continued on the same path as the former government”, Chalmers continued, “we would be nowhere near a surplus”. See! We’re even better at balancing a budget than the Liberal Party!
But let’s dig a little deeper into the phrase “spending restraint”. In the context of a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living-crisis, what this means is more pain for workers and their families who are doing it tough. We have skyrocketing rents; mortgage repayments that have doubled; rising supermarket, energy and petrol prices; and a social welfare system that is failing to provide adequate support to those who need it. Foodbank Australia is currently providing food relief to about 1 million people each month.
In July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters: “Australian families will look at the federal budget and say it is good that we have a government that is putting in place responsible budget management in order to put that downward pressure on inflation”.
This might be true of the families in the top 3 percent of income earners, who will receive almost half of the benefits of the Stage 3 tax cuts, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which were reaffirmed in the May budget. 
The government also reduced spending on health (from $115.5 billion in 2021-22 to $104.0 billion in 2023-24), reduced funding to government schools in real terms and announced that $74 billion will be slashed from the National Disability Insurance Scheme’s funding over the next decade.
But hey, it’s all in the name of “responsible budget management”.
Instead of being spent on paying off various international lenders, what could $22 billion have done for workers?
According to Anglicare Australia, it would cost the government roughly $20 billion per year to raise the rate of all welfare payments to $88 a day. This would lift almost 2.3 million people—including 840,000 children—out of poverty. There would still be enough left over to provide everyone in the country with free public transport at a price of $2.2 billion, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office.
Or to tackle the crisis from another direction, $22 billion could be spent on building 73,000 new public homes, which would start to put a dent in the decade-long public housing waiting list.
But instead, we are told to rejoice in the wonders of fiscal responsibility.
If the government aimed even higher, it could tackle poverty and the housing crisis at the same time. The Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union recently commissioned Oxford Economics Australia to analyse how a super-profits tax could resolve the housing crisis. It found that taxing “excess” profits of companies with an annual turnover of more than $100 million (just 0.3 percent of companies in Australia) at 40 percent would generate an additional $28 billion in annual government revenue. Labor has, unsurprisingly, ruled this out.
Instead, it is sticking to the doctrine of economic rationalism first introduced by the Hawke and Keating governments in the 1980s and carried on by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello. This called for reduced social services, lower taxes on businesses and the rich, deregulation and privatisation of public assets—in other words, more money for big business and less for everyone else. This is what the obsession with budget surpluses is all about.
No doubt many people hoped that the election of a Labor government would turn the tide of Australian politics back in favour of working people. They have been sorely disappointed.

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

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US campus revolt shows the bankruptcy of the ‘adults in charge’

The ongoing assault on workers in Australia

Lehrmann verdict: elite loser rapist walks free

World imperialism today

Western terror in the Middle East

Bidenomics and the strengthening of US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

Labor boasts about budget surplus while people go hungry

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