US President Donald Trump has thrown Ukraine to the wolves. After carrying out a brutal invasion for three years, during which a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded with a large slice of the country’s territory, while Trump is demanding a substantial stake of its resource wealth for the US.
This is imperial plunder at its finest: powerful countries ripping up a weaker one for their own benefit.
Commenting on the war in recent weeks, Trump has repeated his strange views on the world’s hierarchy of suffering. According to him, the main victim of the European slaughter is the US, because it has sent “hundreds of billions of dollars” in aid (like most of Trump’s comments, this is a gross exaggeration). The villain is Ukraine for continuing to resist Russian imperialism. And exhausted Russia, with its unfairly maligned dictator, deserves a break. 
This is Trump’s enduring view of international politics: poor little America has been ripped off by everyone. It is as unhinged as his ramblings about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. 
The US spent the greater part of the last century invading other countries, overthrowing governments and exploiting half the globe through its multinational corporations. Now, Trump wants to amp it up by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, subsuming Canada and turning Gaza into a playground for US billionaires.
Putin, for his part, has sent the Russian military and mercenaries on bloody rampages through Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and West Africa, and shielded his fellow dictators from popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
It appears that everyone wants to play the victim now. The European powers and the United Kingdom say that Trump has abandoned them—that they have been left to fend for themselves in the noble task of protecting weaker countries. They say they must massively beef up their military spending to develop much bigger and much deadlier armed forces.
The European Commission has moved to allow €800 billion in additional borrowing by EU governments to “substantially increase” military spending. Germany’s incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to raise half a trillion euros for the military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut the foreign aid budget to increase military spending. This is all on top of a 30 percent increase in EU member states’ spending on the military since 2021.
Their justification for military expansion is one of the more Orwellian pieces of capitalist propaganda: that more weapons equal more peace. In reality, they want only to defend and extend their own national interests in an increasingly unstable world.
The increased spending will come at an enormous cost to European and British workers, who have already endured waves of austerity over the last fifteen years. The money will have to come from somewhere, most likely health and social services that matter far less to the capitalists than lower taxes and subsidies for business. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it plainly in an article titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”:
“The welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal ... I have come to doubt whether rich, democratic societies can make difficult reforms—except in a crisis. Chronic discomfort isn’t enough. An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”
While workers get poorer, those at the top get richer from an expanding war machine. According to the US State Department, US weapons manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales last year. This made 2024 one of their most profitable years ever, thanks to the slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza and the military buildup around China. European weapons companies’ stocks have soared in the last week. 
There is much speculation about why Trump has sold out Ukraine. Some chalk it up to his erratic nature and admiration of dictators. While Trump does indeed seem to have an affinity for Putin (an authoritarianism to aspire to, perhaps), there’s an underlying imperialist logic to his actions—one that has nothing to do with peace. 
The biggest threat to US global supremacy is China, the world’s second-biggest economy, which has significantly modernised its military over the last decade and formed an alliance with Russia. The US has been trying to “pivot” its war machine to confront China for years; there’s just a disagreement among US elites over how exactly to do it. 
The Biden administration favoured strengthening multilateral international alliances, such as NATO, while building the military-industrial complex at home. 
Trump favours a more transactional approach—get the best deal with whatever country—which can mean extorting traditional allies. Some in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that the US should try to cleave Russia away from China, or at least weaken their alliance. In addition, Trump has grumbled for years that the US shoulders the economic burden of Western military alliances—he wants the Europeans to spend substantially more, rather than rely on a US security guarantee.
There has been much handwringing among global commentators about Trump’s approach, particularly about what it means for the “rules-based order”. In foreign policy speak, this refers to the post-World War Two set of rules administered through bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, which supposedly protect the sovereignty of individual countries, preserve peace and curb excessive uses of power. 
But one only has to look at the Vietnam War, successive invasions of the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and countless other atrocities to see that the “order” was an alliance of powerful countries, including the US, Europe, the UK, Japan, Australia and others, who used economic or military pressure to rig the world in their favour. 
The US’s allies and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media are upset that the rules are possibly being altered. But they’re all still playing the same dirty game: powerful countries ruling the world through shifting networks of alliances. 
The Trump administration also demands higher military spending from Australia, an increasingly important country for the US because of its location in Southeast Asia and willingness to host US military and spy bases. Eldridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Defence Department, said last week that Australia needs to increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP. Australia is already trekking in this direction, spending a record $56 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, this year. Treasury expects it to rise to 2.4 percent in 2027-28.
Many Australian commentators are beginning to urge the government to join the global military buildup. Take the Australian Financial Review’s Christopher Joye: 
“We have to be able to produce our own ballistic missiles with the ability to strike any place on the planet. We need independent nuclear power and the capacity to enrich weapons-grade uranium for strategic optionality. And we need scores of nuclear submarines ...”
The Labor government has steadfastly refused to criticise Trump in any way, even over Ukraine, for fear of pissing off the new president, in part fearing that the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal be put at risk. But that deal ought to immediately be scrapped. Writing at the Conversation last year, Australian National University visiting fellow Peter Martin noted:
“Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the $268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.”
The threat of a future global war seems so far away that many don’t take it seriously. The climate change and attacks on our living standards and the oppressed seem, and are, more immediate. But every new increase to a military budget, every new nuclear-powered submarine and every new speech about the threat of China takes us a step closer to that reality. 
The Ukrainian experience gives us a horrifying glimpse of what such a war might look like: the military tactics of old—protracted trench warfare in which millions of young soldiers are fed through the meat grinder—combined with cutting-edge technology such as kamikaze drones and AI-assisted cyber warfare. Not to mention that there are now enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all of humanity. Inside Russia, Putin has overseen an authoritarian crackdown to suppress any whiff of dissent to his invasion.
Workers and the oppressed worldwide have no interest in any of this—wars are the consequence of rivalries among the world’s ruling class spilling out into armed competition. Trump, Starmer, Merz and the rest are ramping up nationalist rhetoric to convince their populations to accept the economic burden of this remilitarisation drive. 
But you won’t ever see Elon Musk, Gina Rinehart, Donald Trump or Anthony Albanese on the battlefield—they make the rest of us fight on their behalf. Our world is run by monsters who will send millions to die if it means a bigger slice of the capitalist pie for themselves.
We have to build a socialist alternative to this never-ending nightmare of death and destruction. Unless we fight back, they will keep playing the same game of war and conquest, with us as their pawns.

Eleanor Morley

Resist the new militarism

A student at the University of Sydney has been threatened with suspension for writing Palestine solidarity statements on a whiteboard using a non-permanent marker. It is the latest of dozens of misconduct charges levelled against activists by the university over the last year.
Luna,* a postgraduate international student, received a notice of misconduct from the academic registrar on 3 February, alleging that she engaged in “inappropriate and unreasonable conduct” by writing the following slogans in January:
USyd invest in weapons manufacturing (Thales, Lockheed Martin), USyd supports genocide in Gaza.
USYD Vice Chancellor Mark Scott supports Gaza Genocide.
From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.
As of 13 January 2025, 46,600+ dead in Gaza. USyd cut ties with genocide.
The university appears to have used CCTV footage and electronic student card tracking to identify Luna.
The Registrar claims that the conduct breaches several university policies, including clauses in the Campus Access Policy introduced at the end of last year in response to the Palestine solidarity campaign. 
In addition to purportedly prejudicing “the good order and government of the university” and “good name or academic standing of the university”, writing on a whiteboard also allegedly constitutes “protest activity on university lands”. Such activity must be “orderly and peaceful”, cannot be held inside any building, and requires 72-hours advance notice to the administration. 
The alleged conduct is also said to be an act of graffiti, which is defined as “the placement of posters, notices, advertisements and similar items” on any area that has not been “designated for official notices” by the university.
Basically, the administration has ruled that students who want to exercise their democratic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and to protest must organise something that is nothing like a protest using means of communication that prevent any meaningful mass communication. Even writing on a whiteboard is beyond the pale.
The administration has told Luna that she will likely be expelled, suspended or receive a reprimand if she is found guilty of the alleged misconduct. It also warns that “the penalties applied will be more severe [bold in original] in the event that you deny the conduct, which is ultimately found to be substantiated, than if you admit the conduct at this stage”.
This threat—an attempt to pressure Luna not to defend herself against the allegations—is far from empty, given her visa status. As a transgender woman from a country that criminalises and punishes non-binary expressions of gender, she is currently seeking asylum in Australia. For now, she holds a student visa, which means her right to remain in the country depends on her continued enrolment. 
Luna wrote to the university on 24 February asking for more time to respond to the charges. Specifically, she requested an extension until after 21 March (when she will gain a bridging visa) so that she can “assess this matter in a clear-headed fashion without worrying about being deported to danger”. The university refused the request the following day, reaffirming that the “likely penalty if the conduct is admitted at this stage is suspension”.
In its initial misconduct notice, the university insisted that the entire process “must be kept confidential”; otherwise, it “may take disciplinary action”. This clause is ubiquitous in misconduct charges at Sydney University, supposedly to stop victimisation against complainants. It might make sense in cases involving accusations of serious abuse or violence. But it is illegitimate to include the clause in cases where the administration itself levels misconduct charges against activists. One can only assume the intention is to keep the spurious misconduct process opaque and free from external scrutiny. 
After the details of the complaint were made public on 5 March, the university quickly entered crisis management, publishing two responses on its website. The first claimed that the suspension threat was a simple “administrative error” and, finally, granted Luna a time extension to respond. 
The second stated that the administration had contacted Luna, “confirmed the likely penalty range does not include potential suspension” and “apologised”. The university refused to relent following private communication with Luna but quickly backed down (partially—the charges still stand) after being forced to answer publicly for its behaviour. 
This entire case is a farce. Student activism has historically included acts far more rebellious than scrawling solidarity messages on a classroom whiteboard. Sydney University appears determined to wipe out criticism of its dirty deals with weapons manufacturers and suppress support for the Palestinian cause—or at least to extraordinarily limit how such support can be expressed.
* Name has been changed at the student’s request to protect them from retaliation.

Sydney University threatens to suspend student for writing on a whiteboard

One of the great myths of US President Donald Trump’s political career is that he’s an anti-establishment warrior, fighting on behalf of the everyman. 
The corporate media have pushed this narrative, publishing hundreds of articles arguing that Trump represents the revenge of the “white working class”—a term used by elites of both the liberal and right-wing varieties to refer to either dumb uneducated masses or salt-of-the-earth patriots, respectively. 
Indeed, this is the way he’s pitched himself since 2015. “Today we are not just transferring power from one administration to another”, Trump said in his first inauguration speech. “We are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.” His early calls to “drain the swamp” (remove nefarious lobbyists and insiders from Washington) have evolved into Elon Musk’s DOGE: they claim they are ending the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on programs designed by a DEI-obsessed urban elite. Or, in Musk’s words, “@DOGE will reprogram the base code of the matrix”.
The claim that an army of billionaires taking state power somehow represents a victory for factory workers, nurses, receptionists and agricultural labourers is absurd. They have climbed their way to the top by trampling on those below. 
Musk, who has fast become something like an unelected co-president, is the richest person on the planet. Just half of his US$360 billion net worth could end world hunger by the end of the decade. He made his fortune after getting a hefty leg up from his emerald-mine-owning dad, and protects it today by resisting unionisation inside his companies (Tesla workers make 30 percent less than members of the United Auto Workers). In 2023, Musk said: “I disagree with the idea of unions ... I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing”. What?
Trump has a net worth of US$6.4 billion, according to Forbes
magazine (though he claims it’s much higher). His wealth comes from a substantial inheritance and a career in real estate, although his most valuable asset is Truth Social, his hard-right Twitter knock-off. He first gained super stardom by telling a succession of people “you’re fired” on reality show The Apprentice and for twenty years owned the Miss Universe pageant organisation (in which creepy old men like him leer at bikini-clad young women). He owns a multimillion-dollar Manhattan penthouse plated with gold. 
Man of the people he is not.
Trump has assembled the wealthiest administration in history, with thirteen billionaires appointed to government posts. His cabinet is worth at least US$7 billion. These people have made their wealth by exploiting millions of workers and the environment and hoarding profits in offshore tax havens. 
In case there is any illusion that they might be forgoing their own interests to rule in the interests of American workers, just take a look at what the Trump administration has done since taking office.
In late February, the House of Representatives moved forward a mammoth budget blueprint that contains much of Trump’s legislative agenda. In it are massive tax cuts—worth up to US$4.5 trillion—and deep cuts to social spending. The tax cuts, which mostly extend those made during Trump’s first administration, mostly benefit the already wealthy. Medicaid and Medicare (which provide health insurance to poor and elderly Americans), student loan repayment plans and school breakfast and lunch programs that serve low-income children have all been slated for cuts. 
This is what the administration is really about: taking from the poor to give to the rich. Trump is Robin Hood in reverse. 
The DOGE cuts will also have a terrible impact on working people, not least the tens of thousands of public sector workers who have just lost their livelihoods after being fired by Musk. Public education is under attack, as are whatever measly regulations exist to put a check on corporate power.
There’s nothing new in this political strategy. Former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed to represent the “silent majority” of everyday Americans, who supposedly shared their conservative world view. During their bid for power, the Nazis said they wanted to serve the German people who had been betrayed by the elites. They even went so far as to call themselves socialists, just “national socialists” interested only in the good of the German masses. When winning an election requires securing the votes of a substantial section of the population, overtures must be made to the issues they care about. But once the political right takes power, it’s a different story.
The “anti-elite” message can ring a little true because the Democrats indeed come from another wing of the US elite. When in power, they rule for the rich. The squabble between the major parties does not represent a battle between opposing class interests, but simply different strategies for managing capitalism.
The MAGA crowd are picking on the vulnerable to stoke divisions among workers, all of whom will be oppressed by Trump’s administration. He’s using hyper-nationalist rhetoric to try to bind a section of the population to his project: generate fear about and loathing towards a purported enemy within—migrants and progressives, among others. 
Like many of Trump’s business ventures (google “Trump University”), it’s a con job to enable his wealthy capitalist friends to get even richer than they already are.

MAGA’s elite ‘anti-elites’

The hard right is making serious ground globally. But, while increasingly powerful, their ideas are not hegemonic. Now is not the time to despair, but to fight for a better world.
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There’s an undeniable sense that a right-wing vibe shift has taken place over the last eighteen months. Bashing migrants, trans people and women’s rights is “in”, as is climate denialism and the unfettered right of billionaires to accumulate as much money as possible. The hard right have become normalised; they are the mainstream in politics.
Donald Trump’s re-election and his rapid-fire assault on the oppressed and regulatory departments are the pinnacle of this new political era. He campaigned on assertions that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of US society and eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio. He celebrated his success in appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned national abortion protections. He vowed to abolish the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Authority. And now that he’s taken office, he’s holding good on many promises, while threatening US territorial expansion.
But it’s not just the US. The far right is on the march across Europe, surging in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, on the verge of taking power in Austria, and ruling Italy and several Central European countries. Many trace historical links to 1930s fascist parties. In Australia, Liberal leader Peter Dutton has borrowed elements of the MAGA playbook, lashing out at the “woke agenda”, lamenting that young men are “disenfranchised and ostracised” by diversity initiatives and setting up his own DOGE-inspired shadow minister for government efficiency. 
Unsurprisingly, corporate America is also going MAGA. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has inserted himself into the heart of the Trump administration, while using his control of X to promote far-right parties internationally. In a speech to the fascist Alternative for Germany party, Musk encouraged Germans to move beyond “a focus on past guilt” less than a week after performing a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration. 
The titans of Silicon Valley—where many of the richest men in the world made their billions—have embraced Trump. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sports a gold chain, encourages companies to embrace “masculine energy” and recently dropped diversity initiatives. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is spending $40 million for the right to make a documentary about first lady Melania Trump, live streamed Trump’s inauguration and, along with many other tech billionaires, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. There was a revolving door of corporate leaders bending the knee at Mar-a-Lago in the months before Trump took office.
It’s unsurprising, because these are the people set to benefit the most from an administration that is gutting regulations seen as impediments to the rich making money. In a world that feels more unstable (economies are stuttering, climate change is wreaking havoc and the threat of global war is looming), Trump promises a more ruthless administration focused only on “making America win”. Be under no illusion: it’s corporate America he is referring to. 
Diversity, equity and inclusion programs fitted the vibe of the 2010s and early 2020s, when millions of people mobilised to demand racial justice and the #MeToo movement excoriated misogynistic corporate culture. Companies adapted to try to maintain relevance amongst their consumer base. But that moment has passed, and the naked pursuit of profit and power, the preferred state of affairs for the billionaires, is making a comeback. “I feel liberated”, a top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... It’s a new dawn.”
Right-wing politics also feels ascendant in broader society and popular culture. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have infected a growing section of young men with their noxious brand of hyper-misogyny and hustle culture. Trump received loud cheers during the Super Bowl live stream. Joe Rogan rules the airwaves. #YourBodyMyChoice trended immediately after Trump’s election. UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell received barely a slap on the wrist for a pro-Hitler rant that called the Nazi leader “a good guy”.
This all amounts to a dangerous new normal in world politics. For anyone who cares about the plight of the oppressed, this is serious cause for concern. It also raises a few important questions: How did we get here? And what can we do about it?
The first thing to note is that it’s not the case that everyone is now a bigot. Trump did not win by a large margin—at 1.8 percent, it’s the smallest since 1968—and nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home. Only one newly elected president has had a lower approval rating than Trump since the end of World War II: himself, in 2017. Across Western Europe and the UK, a majority of voters still reject the far right. If Dutton wins the upcoming federal election, it will be because of the ALP’s failure to help ordinary people during the cost-of-living crisis: every Australian poll conducted in the last twelve months shows more than two-thirds of respondents do not support Trump.
Polling also indicates that many of the key right-wing talking points are not very popular. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal access to abortion in most or all cases (which has increased since the Dobbs decision), according to the Pew Research Center. In June last year, Gallop found that more than six in ten Americans opposed banning access to gender-affirming care for minors. Only 37 percent of US adults support Trump’s call to deport all undocumented migrants, according to a survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In the cultural sphere, Chappell Roan, who loudly promotes LGBTI rights and supports Palestine, is the pop star of the moment. And apparently Trump’s cheers at the Super Bowl were challenged by loud jeers—Fox sport just edited those bits out.
The next thing to understand is that the right has not risen to power because the masses turned fascist. The story of electoral politics in 2024 was the crisis of incumbency: parties that have overseen the rising cost of living of recent years were booted out of office. For instance, in the United Kingdom the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, but now that they’re just dishing out more of the same, the far-right Reform UK party has surged in the polls. Politicians of all stripes are being punished for rising inequality.
In addition to that, official politics has for years been shifting to a harsher, more racist edge. For the last fifteen years, everyone from the traditional conservatives to the social democratic parties has tried to deflect anger away from themselves and on to migrants—it’s a classic case of divide and rule. Fortress Europe—the decade-long effort to keep migrants out of Europe by building barbed wire fences and letting at least 25,000 refugees drown in the Mediterranean—was not constructed by the fascists, but the political “centre”. Last year, deportations under Biden surpassed Trump’s record. When all we are hearing from politicians and the mainstream media is that we can’t afford a house because migrants are flooding the borders, is it any wonder that people start to believe this?
Popular consciousness is not only hardening to the right, but polarising to the left as well. There are countless examples of this: from young people demanding action on climate change, growing acceptance of trans people and outrage over attacks on abortion rights, not to mention the popular response to Luigi Mangione assassinating a health insurance CEO in New York last year. As the world becomes a nastier place, many are looking for a progressive alternative. 
So how do you square this circle with the rise of the right? For one thing, it’s easier for the right. Despite their anti-establishment rhetoric, they fit much more neatly into the system, venerating hierarchies, national divisions, racist scapegoating and profit making. They’re not trying to overthrow capitalism and create a society of genuine equality—quite the opposite. When it comes to electoral politics, the right has the advantage: for instance, the left doesn’t have the support of the richest person on the planet (and nor would we want it).
But mistakes have also been made by the left. Many have tried to transform the centre left parties into a weapon for economic and social justice. This means that organising efforts are wasted on hopeless projects like the Democrats or Labor-type parties. When these parties continue to betray their hopeful supporters, people become demoralised and withdraw from politics entirely. We saw this with Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and even more left-wing, but limited, electoral projects in Europe. 
The other mistake is thinking that the bosses can be compelled to right society’s wrongs. “Woke capitalism” and diversity programs still gave us soaring inequality, accelerating climate change and the genocide in Gaza. 
Left-wing people feel defeated while the right is ascendant, which has a broader impact on society. The right-wing trolls who were hiding in subreddits five years ago are now brimming with confidence.
Instead, we need to look towards forms of organising that history has shown can push back against the right and the ills of capitalism more broadly. Protests are an essential part of that strategy. At the start of last year, support for the German far right fell after mass protests swept the country. The Black Lives Matter uprising—the largest protests in US history—helped put the final nail in the coffin of the first Trump administration. They’re also a way to gather those who share a common outrage and vision for society, cutting against the atomisation and demoralisation that the system relies on. 
Working-class power is the other necessary element. Imagine if every teacher in the US stopped work to stop Trump from gutting the Education Department. Or if every doctor and nurse went on strike against cuts to public health or the health insurance vultures. Without the labour of ordinary people, their system would come to a standstill.
But we also need a political alternative: socialist parties that fight this shitty system, instead of capitulating to or compromising with it. Politics that fights for workers, for migrants, for trans people and women’s rights, against war and genocide and greenhouse-gas-emitting corporate criminals. 
We’re living in an increasingly dangerous world. The rich want to stamp down harder on workers, the oppressed are having hard-fought rights stripped away, and the threats of war and climate catastrophe loom large. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for anyone with a shred of decency. It’s time to join the fight.

Resisting the right-wing vibe shift

Donald Trump has nominated about two dozen monsters in an administration that is sure to inflict serious damage on workers and the oppressed in the US and beyond. Trump’s team members want to cut taxes for the wealthy and slash whatever paltry regulations exist to protect workers and the environment from capitalist greed. Many of them are anti-abortion and determined to make life hell for undocumented migrants and trans people. They’ve climbed their way up the slimy ladders of far-right politics and corporate America; now they’ve found themselves at the top of the most powerful state in the world. 
Trump’s top picks—all announced in quick succession on X—are a who’s who of the US far right, from Fox News presenters to prominent conspiracy theorists and arch-reactionary billionaires. This is hardly surprising. Trump has spoken of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the US, accused Haitian migrants of eating pet cats and dogs, floated using the national guard or military to handle “radical left lunatics” and suggested that police be allowed “one really violent day” to crack down on retail crime. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has supported a nationwide abortion ban and espoused the far-right “great replacement” theory.
One of the first nominees was Matt Gaetz, a Republican congressional representative from Florida, as attorney general. After just a week, he stepped aside to avoid the release of details of an investigation into allegations that he had sex with a minor. Gaetz was quickly replaced by Pam Bondi, previously the attorney general of Florida and on Trump’s defence team during his first impeachment trial in 2020. Trump also selected his lawyer, Todd Blanche, for deputy attorney general.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to deport all undocumented migrants living in the US, estimated by Pew Research Center to number more than 11 million people. He’s announced two candidates to enforce this most fascist of his policies. Tom Homan, the new “border czar”, was head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement last time Trump was in power and has since defended heinous policies like removing children from their parents at the border. On a podcast with Donald Trump Jr last week, Homan said his anti-migrant campaign will be one of “shock and awe”. 
He will be assisted in this by Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota and nominee for Homeland Security secretary, who boasted at a National Rifle Association convention last year that her one-year-old granddaughter already owned two guns. While governor, Noem deployed South Dakota National Guard members to the US-Mexico border in Texas. She was recently banned from the land of all nine Indigenous tribes in her state over a comment that tribal leaders focus more on benefiting from drug cartels than they focus on the wellbeing of their own children.
Trump has nominated China hawks Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, and Mike Waltz, another Florida Republican and a former Green Beret, for secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively. This area has had the most continuity in US politics over the last decade: both Democrats and Republicans agree that it’s time to prepare for World War Three. Rounding out the foreign policy trio is Pete Hegseth as defence secretary. Hegseth is an army veteran turned conservative media personality, hard-right culture warrior and defender of US soldiers accused of war crimes. His body is covered with tattoos of iconography associated with far-right Christian nationalists and white supremacists.
Then there are the billionaires. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, poured in at least $130 million to Trump’s campaign, for which he is now being handsomely repaid. His personal wealth has soared by at least US$80 billion since markets responded to Trump’s election with glee; along with fellow billionaire and Trump acolyte Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk will be heading the new Department of Government Efficiency. 
Despite the meme acronym, this is no joke—their remit is to slash and burn jobs, spending and regulations across government agencies. It should be noted that DOGE isn’t an official government department but a presidential advisory committee. The intention is for Musk (who cut 80 percent of Twitter’s staff when he bought the company in 2022) and Ramaswamy to draw up a list of targets to be presented to Trump, as the pair outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article. They’re promising US$500 billion in cuts, including, in their words, to “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood”—a women’s health body. Presumably Musk will also recommend Trump take the axe to areas like the Environmental Protection Agency that have been a thorn in the side of his own companies. 
Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financier who donated at least $6 million to Trump’s campaign, has been nominated for commerce secretary—the role responsible for enacting Trump’s promise of significant tariffs on imports. Alongside him will be hedge fund billionaire Scott Bessent as treasury secretary. Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and Trump’s fourth-largest donor, will be education secretary.
Trump’s energy policy, as articulated during the campaign, is “drill, baby, drill”. Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota, the third largest oil and gas-producing state in the country, will be secretary of the interior (responsible for managing public lands) and the new “energy czar”. Chris Wright, chief executive of the world’s second largest fracking company, is set to become secretary of energy. In a 2023 video, Wright declared: “There is no climate crisis”. 
Perhaps the craziest picks in this new madhouse are those responsible for the health of 330 million US citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaxxer in chief and enemy of fluoride in the water, will now be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr Mehmet Oz, a TV personality and grifter who peddles quack supplements and weight loss products from which he financially benefits, will serve under Kennedy as the head of Medicare and Medicaid. 
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”, wrote Italian communist Antonio Gramsci from a fascist prison in 1929. He was describing a time of great upheaval for global capitalism, and the political “monsters” produced by the system as a consequence. History, once again, repeats.

Trump’s monsters

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.

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.

Resist the new militarism

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

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

Gaza solidarity encampments under attack

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

The ongoing assault on workers in Australia

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