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A Socialist Equality Party (SEP) online public meeting last Sunday reviewed the historic collapse in support for Australias dominant parliamentary parties in the May 21 national elections and the socialist program required to combat the pro-war and social austerity policies now being implemented by the new Labor government.

Attended by over 120 people, the meeting was the only public forum held by any party since the election. Its extended Q&A session, following the main speakers, provided a much-appreciated forum for democratic discussion about the election result and the class battles now unfolding in Australia and internationally.

Senate candidate and SEP assistant national secretary Max Body chaired the meeting, with SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp, WSWS journalist and SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell and Sri Lanka SEP National Secretary Deepal Jayasekera the featured speakers. SEP candidatesPeter Byrne, Jason Wardle, Mike Head and John Daviscontributed during the Q&A session.

The livestreamed event, which included detailed graphics, can be viewed in its entirety above.

Opening the meeting, Max Boddy explained that the low combined primary vote of just 68.3 percent for the Liberal-National Coalition and the Labor Party constituted a historic political crisis for Australias ruling elites. Labor won office, he said, but its primary vote dropped to 32.6 percent, another record low for the party, with its vote falling in 85 of Australias 151 electorates.

Millions of workers and young people saw no fundamental difference between Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition and instead voted for the so-called minor parties or independents, Boddy said.

The ongoing decline in support for the establishment parties, the speaker explained, motivated their bi-partisan imposition last year of new election laws that deregistered the SEP and other parties, blocking their party names from appearing on ballot papers.

In the face of these anti-democratic obstacles, the SEP conducted a vigorous and powerful intervention during the short election period, winning 10,723 votes across the three states, Boddy said. We have always said a vote for our party is a conscious one. Never has this been so true as in this election, he added.

SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp told the meeting that the world political situation is characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat and referenced Leon Trotskys Transitional Program.

Our meeting has been called to discuss the Australian election but it is not possible to understand this event outside the international situation in which it was held, she said. The worlds population face threats on multiple fronts, she continued, reviewing the disastrous and ongoing COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the danger a global nuclear conflagration, and the surging inflation, food shortages, poverty, hunger and starvation.

The war in Ukraine against Russia, which was planned, devised and orchestrated by the US and NATO, is the working out of long-held perspectives to colonise and subjugate Russia and China to the interests of US imperialism, she said, which will be paid for by a war against workers at home.

Trotskys prediction that mankind faces socialism or barbarism is a very stark and real one today, the speaker said, and emphasised that this crisis could only be resolved by the independent mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective.

The task today, Crisp said, is to turn the developing struggles of the working class, now emerging in every country into a conscious political movement against capitalism.

Deepal Jayasekera, the national secretary of the SEP in Sri Lanka, told the meeting that huge foreign debts, the COVID-19 pandemic, a collapse of the tourist industry, and the war in Ukraine had led to a catastrophic implosion of the islands economy.

This had produced three months of mass anti-government protests and two general strikes demanding resignation of President Rajapakse and his government over skyrocketing prices and shortages of fuel, cooking gas and basic food items and hours-long power outages, he said.

The trade unions are playing a treacherous role in this situation and doing their utmost to defend the government by blocking any independent political and industrial action by the working class. This has allowed the regime to appoint a new prime ministerRanil Wickremasingheto unleash a new round brutal austerity and secure an International Monetary Fund bail-out loan, he explained.

Like our Australian comrades, Jayasekera continued, the SEP is advocating the formation of rank-and-file committeesaction committeesin every workplace, factory, plantation and neighbourhood, independent of the unions, to lead the struggles of the working class for their basic social and democratic rights.

In this way, he concluded, we are taking forward the struggle for a government of workers and peasants committed to socialist policies, as part of the broader struggle for socialism in South Asia and internationally.

SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell, the final speaker, said the SEP was alone in warning during the election that whichever party won government, its program would be dictated by the global breakdown of capitalism, the US confrontations with Russia and China, and the predatory interests of the financial oligarchy. This analysis, he said, has proven completely correct.

The new Labor government, he continued, is a right-wing government that represents the banks, the corporations and the military-intelligence establishments of Australia and the US

Labors pro-business agenda will provoke mass opposition in the working class and pointed to recent strikes by nurses, teachers, aged care staff, bus drivers, and disputes involving many other sections of the working class.

In every instance, these struggles come up against the trade unions, which are not workers organisations in any sense of the term and are responsible for the record low wages and the social crisis that flows from them, he said.

Like other speakers, Grenfell stressed the necessity for workers to break from the trade unions and establish independent rank-and-file committees to defend the wages, jobs and basic rights on the basis of a socialist program. There is no national solution, and there is no short cut The decisive issue is building a socialist leadership of the working class, he said. Concretely, that means joining and building the SEP, which Id urge everyone here to do.

The reports provoked a range of questions from those in attendance and a collection of almost $3,700 donated to the SEPs special election fund. Some of those participating met the SEP during the election campaign and were attending their first party event. Questions were asked and fully answered about quantitative easing and inflation, the minimum wage, the social crisis facing young people, the significance of Trumps January 6 attempted coup for workers in Australia, whether it was possible or necessary to unite the left, and the role of protest groups based on racial identity politics.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

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Socialist Equality Party meeting discusses crisis of Australia's two-party system and the way forward for the working class - WSWS

Another day, another anti-market measure from our Conservative Government. Yesterdays White Paper on the private rented sector is another instalment in the familiar story: the Government deserts Conservative principles; the Opposition criticises it for not going far enough; and politics moves further to the Left.

To understand the problem, you have to go back 150 years to Frdric Bastiat, the great French economist yes, there are some and his 1850 essay What is seen and what is not seen. In his parable of the broken window, he notes that if a shopkeeper gets in a glazier to fix a broken window,the glazier is paid and is better off. That is what is seen. But thatdoes not make it logical to smash windows to make glaziers better off.What is not seen is what the shopkeeper might have preferred todowith the money and how that might have been better overall.

So far, so obvious. But this logic is ignored every day in practice by governments and yesterdays White Paper is a good example.

Its centrepiece is to abolish Section 21 that is, no-fault evictions. But there is much more. For example, it will end arbitrary rent review clauses, control who you can rent to, and radically change the existing tenancy system so that tenants have much greater rights to leave when they wish.

These provisions all deal with admitted problems. Sometimes tenants are asked to leave when they dont want to, are required to stay when they would rather not, or must pay more rent when the market requires it.

But these problems dont arise because there are suddenly lots of bad landlords. There are some, but there always were. They arise because our housing market if it can be called a market at all is such a mess, and in particular because there is a huge shortage of housing. We dont build enough houses for the population we have, that population is going up by a million people every three years, and housing is gummed up by a high transaction tax (stamp duty) and property taxes which disincentivise efficient use of what stock there is.

The White Paper deals with the symptoms not these causes, and so will make the problems worse. What is seen, in Bastiats words, is that some tenants will get to keep their tenancies when their landlord wants to end them, and everyone will applaud the Government for its social conscience. What is not seen is that housing supply will decline further, pressure on the housing stock and rents will increase, productivity will continue to fall as people cant get housing where they need it in forms that suit them, and the underlying problems will grow, not decline.

This is inevitable. If you cant be sure you can get your house back, why rent it out? If you dont know youll be able to charge rent to cover the cost, why make improvements? You might think your reasonable circumstances allow you to end a tenancy or increase the rent, but unless the Government ora court agrees, thats tough. And forthose who take the risk anyway, theextra paperwork will make renting less worthwhile. Profits will decline and the quality of the housing stock will follow.

Yes, ending no-fault evictions was inthe manifesto, so the Government has every right to proceed with that, ifnot with everything in the White Paper. But it doesnt make it sensible. The manifesto also promised planning reform and building more houses. Doing that would limit the damage caused by the White Paper. But planning reform has been scrapped, while the rented sector changes go ahead. The result will be higher rents,less choice, and worse conditions for everyone.

This is how collectivism spreads. Wherever there is a problem, instead of dealing with the causes, alleviate the symptoms. Unhappy tenants? Dont try to fix the housing market, but limit rent increases and make evictions impossible instead. Energy prices too high? Dont reform the market just tax and distribute the proceeds to deserving recipients.

Then in turn the new measures produce further unintended consequences, which themselves need fixing, and so the cycle continues. I confidently predict the next step, sooner than you think, will be a ban on leaving houses vacant for more than a few months.

These restrictions on property rights dont just hit productivity and growth. By limiting freedom to choose, they gradually change the kind of society we live in. Every step on this road may seem reasonable in isolation. The measures seem justified, the costs seem limited. But there is only one end to the journey: you dont live in a free society. Instead, you live in one where you cant use your property as you wish, only as government says you can. That is collectivism that is socialism.

Were not as far down the collectivist road as many others in Europe but we are gaining fast. We have to realise we cant buy off the collectivists with a little of what they want. If you pay them Danegeld, they come back for more. The end of that game is oppression and shame, and the nation that plays it is lost.

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The Tory assault on buy-to-let is another step on the road to socialism - The Telegraph

Seventy-five years ago this past spring, on March 12, 1947, US President Harry S. Truman went before a joint session of Congress to request $400 million in military and economic support for the governments of Greece and Turkey.

World War II had ended less than two years earlier. But, unlike his predecessors in the White House after World War I, Truman did not talk about any postwar return to normalcy. He began his remarks on an ominous note, speaking of the gravity of the situation which confronts the world today, as though a new world war were imminent.

The bulk of the short speech that followed is forgotten. Trumans remarks are memorable only for a line that came near the end, when the president announced what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine: I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

With those words, Truman sought to arrogate to the United States the right to intervene all over the world based only on Washingtons own say-so about who free peoples were and were not. In this way, the Truman Doctrine committed the US to the following 75 years of wars, coups, interventions, dictatorships and massive military budgets that continue up to the present, in the proxy war in Ukraine.

In the special dictionary of American foreign policy words mean their opposite. The free people discovered by Truman and the 13 presidents who have followed turn out to comprise a most inglorious list: Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal; Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia; Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam; the Shah Pahlavi in Iran and the House of Saud on the Arabian Peninsula; Batista in Cuba and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti; Mobutu in Zaire and Mubarak in Egypt; the bloody juntas of South America and the apartheid regime of South Africa; the Contras in Nicaragua and Bin Ladens Mujahedeen in Afghanistan; the terrorists of the Al Nusra Front in Syria and the KLA drug cartel in Kosovo. One could go on and on.

The US puppet government in Kiev is just the latest incarnation. It was created in a 2014 CIA-organized coup whose shock troops were fascistsfascists who are now being handed billions of dollars in high-tech killing machines.

Greece has the dubious distinction of being first on the list. There, the right-wing monarchist government of George II was struggling in a civil war against the partisansthe workers and peasants who had done the bulk of the fighting against the Nazi occupiers and fascist collaborators in World War II. The partisan movement was dominated by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which, in turn, was dominated by Stalinwho was prepared to betray the country to Britain as part of the sphere of influence he had secretly promised to Churchill in 1944.

Stalins treachery in Greece was predictable. What was demanded of the KKE had already been carried out by its counterparts in Italy and France: the handing over of the working class to the bourgeois government. These actions had been at least as necessary to the postwar stabilization of European capitalism as American arms and money. Stalin ultimately kept his promise, ordering the Greek Communists to submit in 1949.

Yet in 1947 it was still unclear that the Greek Stalinists could contain the aspirations of the massesor for that matter, that the discrediting of the Greek ruling class, which had cooperated with Hitler and Mussolini in World War II and had supported the fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the late 1930s, could be overcome. Yugoslav partisans under Tito had taken power just to the north. If the Greek partisans won, all of the Balkans would fall outside of the American world order. This, the Truman administration feared, would make the position of Turkey untenable. In that case the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, then as now of paramount geostrategic importance, would be lost.

In any case, Great Britain, which was supposed to have been minding the area on behalf of global capitalism, was bankrupt. Indeed, the immediate impetus for Trumans speech was a secret blue paper, delivered by Lord Inverchapel, UK ambassador to the US, informing Secretary of State George Marshall that London could no longer afford to support the monarchists in Greece, and would withdraw its 40,000 soldiers stationed there. Britain also had no capacity to prop up Turkey against Soviet demands for joint control over the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which for 150 years the Royal Navy had tended as a gate first against the Russian tsars and then against the Soviet Union.

Truman acknowledged British imperialisms terminal decline matter-of-factly. The British Government, which has been helping Greece, can give no further financial or economic aid after March 31, he told Congress. Great Britain finds itself under the necessity of reducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece. It is difficult to imagine a more unceremonious end to the British Empire than this, the American president announcing it as if it were the closure of some overextended second-tier bank.

No tears were shed for Britain in the joint session assembled before Truman. After all, Washingtons aim all along had been to supplant the old mother countryto put it on rations, as Trotsky had foreseenand to achieve mastery over all the great powers. Gore Vidals Washington D.C., in its fictional treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelts last days, captured something of the mood:

The ravaged old President, even as he was dying, continued to pursue the high business of reassembling the fragments of broken empires into a new pattern with himself at center, proud creator of a new imperium. Now, though he was gone, the work remained. The United States was master of the earth. No England, no France, no Germany, no Japan left to dispute the Republics will. Only the mysterious Soviet would survive to act as the other balance in the scale of power.

Roosevelts high business had fallen to Truman, whose elevation to the vice-presidency in 1945 represented a shift to the right within the Roosevelt administration and the Democratic Party. Truman replaced Henry Wallace, who had favored some form of postwar cooperation with the mysterious Soviets. Truman, the Kansas City ward heeler risen through the patronage of the Pendergast political machine, had already expressed his thoughts on cooperation in 1941 after Nazi Germany launched its genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible, said Truman, then a second-term senator from Missouri.

Trumans lack of compunction over mass killing was more than rhetorical, as he showed on August 6 and 9, 1945, with the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic attacksstill the only ones in world historyhad no immediate military purpose, though they did give the world an object lesson, as historian Gabriel Jackson pointed out, that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United Statesfor anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of governmentblurred the difference between fascism and democracy. Truman later said that he never lost sleep over the several hundred thousand Japanese civilians killed.

Coldblooded as his decision was, Truman, in fact, represented the golden mean of American foreign policy thinking in the late 1940s. Well to his right were the generals George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, who agitated for an immediate, direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, whatever the cost. Truman would later cashier MacArthur for insubordination in the Korean War, when the generals demands for a nuclear attack on China threatened world war, as well as the constitutional principle of civilian control of the military.

The president was no dove, however. His position was close to that of Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who believed, incorrectly, that the Soviet Union was hellbent on world domination. It was Acheson, in fact, who drafted the Truman Doctrine speech. A more moderate position was held by George Kennan, the Russia expert who believed, correctly, that Stalin only wanted reasonable assurances of the Soviet Unions defensive position. Kennan was alarmed by the messianic tone of Trumans speech, as well as its Manichean worldview.

Whatever the tactical differences, all agreed with Time editor Henry Luce that World War II had announced the dawning of an American century in the 20th that would surpass in glory the Pax Britannia of the 19th. Yet in spite of Americas powerful military, its unrivaled industrial production, and the almighty dollar, there never would be a period of hegemony for Washington like that which London enjoyed over the course of the 1800s. This was not because the American ruling class faced a serious challenge from another imperialist power, but because it faced a rival that had not yet concretized itself in the time of the Victorian British bourgeoisie: world socialist revolution.

When the American ruling class first reached out to take the mantle of global hegemony under Woodrow Wilson, with the entry of the US into World War I, it was immediately confronted by the October Russian Revolution, and, simultaneously, by the powerful 1916-1922 American strike wave. Lenin and Trotsky offered a path forward to the oppressed masses, including those in the US, that went far beyond the pious and self-serving pronouncements of Wilsons Fourteen Points, which not even the Allied powers could suffer.

Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points, Georges Clemenceau muttered at the Versailles peace conference. Why, God Almighty has only ten! The American ruling class responded to obstinacy from Britain, France and Japan by retreating into isolationism, and to the October Revolution by elevating anti-communism to the status of a quasi-state religion.

Now, in 1947, Truman announced his intention to seize that which Wilson had in his grasp but could not hold. Yet despite its degeneration under Stalin, the Soviet Union still acted as the other balance in the scale of power, as Vidal observed. The planned Soviet economy, though distorted by bureaucracy, had survived the devastation of the Nazi Wehrmacht and was growing strong enough to present American capitalism with a formidable military and technological rival. It was, moreover, productive enough to provide economic and military aid to the nationalist movements of the decolonizing Third World. The economic policies of these movementsnationalization of key industries, import substitution policies, tariffs and the likethreatened the global ambitions of American capitalism. It was against just this sort of nationalism that the US, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, anointed itself as world policeman and embarked down the path of Cold War.

The bill for aid to Greece and Turkey passed both houses of Congress by wide margins and was signed into law by Truman on May 22, 1947. This was followed on June 5 by the announcement of the Marshall Plan, which provided massive funding to Western Europe, and which laid the groundwork for the integration of the continents economies into a common market. Then, on July 25, Congress passed Trumans National Security Act, which centralized military authority under the National Security Council and created the Central Intelligence Agency, the scaffolding for the permanent military-intelligence deep state.

Within the specific historical context of 1947, Truman was responding as much to developments in the American class struggle as he was to developments in the Balkans and Anatolia. In 1945 and 1946, American workers had launched the largest strike wave in US history. Many of the strikes were wildcats waged in defiance of the official trade unions. This explosive postwar strike wave came within a dozen years of the 1934 citywide strikes in Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolisthe last of which was led by Trotskyistsand the 1936-1937 sit-down strike movement, which, radiating outward from Detroit, reached near-insurrectionary proportions. The postwar strike wave also came within living memory of 1917.

The Truman administration therefore linked the crusade against communism abroad with an attack on dangerous subversives within the US. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had warned Truman in advance of his speech that in order to secure funds for Greece and Turkey he would have to scare the hell out of the American people.

On March 21, 1947, just nine days after he went before Congress to request military aid to Greece, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835 creating the Employees Loyalty and Security Program, which subjected every federal government worker to loyalty investigations by the Civil Service Commission and the FBI. Any employee could be fired if agents found reasonable grounds of disloyalty, a word the order did not define. Some 3 million workers were investigated. In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to issue its Hollywood subpoenas. Purges in all sectors of American public life followed, culminating in Sen. Joe McCarthy and the Senate hearing witch-hunts of the early 1950s. American intellectual, cultural, and social life has never fully recovered from the anticommunist malignancy.

Three months after launching the purge of federal employees, on June 20, 1947, Truman vetoed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. The veto was a cynical maneuver designed to curry favor, in advance of the 1948 presidential election, with the national union federations, the AFL and the CIO, which had condemned Taft-Hartley as a slave labor bill for its outlawing of the closed union shop. Truman knew full well that the veto would be overridden by Congress, which is precisely what happened. After it became law, he invoked it a dozen times in a bid to break strikes he declared a danger to national security.

A crucial provision in Taft-Hartley required union leaders to sign affidavits that they were not members of communist or socialist parties. The CIO, the federation of industrial unions spawned by the great strike wave of the 1930s, used this mechanism to purge 11 affiliated unions containing 1 million membersprecisely those socialist-minded workers who had led the struggles of the Great Depression. Rejecting any connections with socialism, the American unions staked themselves to the profitability of business and the conception that American capitalism would always be dominant, a wager symbolized by the head of the UAW, Walter Reuther, and his Treaty of Detroit with General Motors in 1950, which surrendered working class demands for industrial democracy in exchange for the corporations institutionalization of collective bargainingfor a seat at the table with the executives and politicians.

But American capitalism would not always be dominant. The project of saving world capitalism on the basis of the hegemonic power of one nation could not overcome the contradiction within capitalism between world economy and the nation state. And so, in paradoxical fashion, what was required to maintain the sort of American Century imagined by the Truman Doctrine simultaneously undermined it. While economic rivals, especially West Germany and Japan, emerged from the ashes of World War II, partly with the help of Marshall Plan cash, with the newest technology, Washingtons massive military spending required to defend free peoples everywhere distorted the US economy, left its infrastructure in decay, and contributed to endless outflows of dollars, sustainable owing only to the greenbacks status as the world reserve currencyand ultimately, from the early 1970s onward, by carrying out ever-deeper attacks on the standard of living of American workers.

There is one final issue that connects the Trumans speech 75 years ago to the present: the role of the lie in politics. The Truman Doctrine, as the ideological foundation of American foreign policy, was based on a series of falsehoods: that American imperialism conducts its foreign operations on behalf of freedom and democracy; that socialism is the mortal enemy of the American people; and that American-style capitalism and the free market are the endpoint of history and the best of all possible worlds.

The Truman Doctrine deepened the gap between the American ruling classs invocation of democracy, on the one side, and the ever more violent and intolerable reality for workers in the US and the world over, on the other. That chasm, which separates bourgeois ideology from objective realityand which imparts to official American culture its insufferable phoninesswidened over the ensuing 75 years, which saw countless crimes committed by US imperialism abroad and at home. Now, in the face of the threat of world war, the many millions left to die in the COVID pandemic, global hunger, ecological catastrophe, inflation, the rise of fascism and the blight of mass school shootings, the foundational lies of the American ruling class have reached the point where they can be stretched no further.

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Originally posted here:
From Greece to Ukraine: 75 years of the Truman Doctrine - WSWS

(AP Photo/John Locher)In this Feb. 19, 2020, photo, Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talk during a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC.

By Ross Douthat | The New York Times

| June 18, 2022, 4:00 p.m.

There were many bad things about the period in American politics between Donald Trumps escalator descent in summer 2015 and the arrival of the COVID pandemic: chaos, polarization, corruption, hysteria, the usual list.

But one notable good thing about that period was the return of intellectual ferment and policy ambition. Effectively, both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders demonstrated that more things were possible in American politics than had appeared the case in the dreary mid-Obama era, and populists and socialists rushed to fill the space theyd cleared with ideas for right-wing industrial and family policy, with Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

But you could argue that what really created this new sense of possibility, what helped Trump defeat the Republican establishment and lifted the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and (prepandemic) 2020, was the sense that America had more room to just spend money than the establishment in the Obama era had believed.

When deficits skyrocketed during the Great Recession, not just Tea Partyers but also lots of respectable centrists assumed that there were real inflation and debt-crisis risks on the horizon. In this landscape, Washington became obsessed with fiscal grand bargains, and any kind of policy innovation seemed to require brutal pay-fors: If you wanted new liberal social programs, you needed sweeping tax increases; if you wanted reform-conservative support for work and family, you needed sweeping entitlement reform.

Except that the inflation expectation was wrong, and the U.S. economy chugged along below full capacity. As this became apparent, the green-eyeshade spirit gradually dissolved, and socialism and populism took over for the Simpson-Bowles commission and former Rep. Paul Ryans budgets. The idea of pay-fors didnt go away entirely: One obstacle to the major infrastructure bill that Trump promised and never delivered was congressional Republicans posturing as deficit hawks, and Sanders famously feuded with Sen. Elizabeth Warren over how to pay for their overlapping Medicare proposals. But mostly Republicans returned to a deficits-dont-matter insouciance, while the left had its own intellectual apparatus, modern monetary theory, to justify spending to the moon.

In certain ways the policy response to the pandemic was the apotheosis of this trend: bipartisan spending bills, extraordinary spending levels, negligible concern about the deficit. But today the COVID relief bills look like an endpoint as well as a peak. In effect, the temporary crisis spending filled in all the fiscal space that policy entrepreneurs had envisioned being filled by permanent commitments. We saved businesses and propped up (and then some) state and local governments; we didnt institute Medicare for All or a permanent expansion of the child tax credit.

And then, at last, inflation made a comeback and just like that, the era of free-lunch policymaking came to an end.

That end may not be permanent; we dont know yet what the inflation rate or the economy will look like in 2024. But right now it feels as if both ambitious socialists and creative populists had a window of opportunity for unconstrained policymaking that opened in the mid-2010s, lasted through the Trump presidency and slammed closed under Joe Biden.

An atmosphere of constraint does not preclude all legislative creativity. There are certain things that Democrats can fund just by raising taxes on the rich, for instance, and perhaps some version of Build Back Better that balances new spending with upper-bracket tax hikes can still emerge from the long courtship of Sen. Joe Manchin. Among Republicans, Sen. Mitt Romneys family-benefit proposal pays for itself with reforms to the welfare state and the tax code; presumably other ideas from the populist right could do the same.

But given Americas existing fiscal commitments, the return of inflation deals a real blow to grand ambitions on the left, because there are few signs that the median voter (or the typical wealthy Democratic donor) is prepared to accept tax increases on the scale required to pay for the full Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an agenda. It also creates substantial problems for politicians trying to hold together a downscale-upscale coalition on the right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, has flourished by attacking wokeness in schools while also raising teacher salaries, but its hard to imagine his donors would be enthusiastic about a similar approach nationally if it required higher taxes on the rich.

This doesnt mean that either populism or socialism is about to disappear. As Patrick Brown writes in Politico, with the ebbing of libertarian and corporate influence on the party, Republicans seeking a working-class conservatism have a more open ideological field for their ambitions than in the past. And theres a similar dynamic among Democrats, where the key inflation hawks in the Biden era have been gadflies like Manchin and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, with the core of the party, relative to the Obama era, standing way off to the left.

But fiscal conditions, the inflation rate and donor pressure still matter, no matter which ideological faction has the upper hand. And there are a lot of ways for ideology to manifest itself, some of them requiring less fiscal space than others. What happened on the left after Sanders lost to Biden and the George Floyd protests took off in 2020, the dramatic shift from economic to cultural revolution, offers a case study in how radical energy gets redirected into culture war when its economic ambitions seem blocked off.

The right has long experience with this kind of redirection, and ample enthusiasm for cultural conflict. So expect more of it, from both sides, under conditions of fiscal constraint. And expect a slow-dawning realization among the serious-minded socialists and populists that the best time to carry out their big ideas, the best moment for a radical policy departure, may have already come and gone.

Ross Douthat | The New York Times(CREDIT: Josh Haner/The New York Times)

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Ross Douthat: Inflation is closing the doors that Trump and Sanders opened - Salt Lake Tribune

Five years ago, on June 14, 2017, the Grenfell Tower inferno took the lives of 72 men, women and children, including two who later died in hospital. More than 70 others were injured and 233 people barely escaped with their lives, suffering the most traumatic experiences as many of their loved one perished. Located in the heart of London, it was the worst UK residential fire since World War II.

They died after a small fire broke out in a kitchen in one of the fourth-floor flats in the early hours of the morning. Within minutes the fire spread to engulf the entire 24-storey concrete and steel structure, fuelled by highly combustible ACM (aluminium composite material) cladding. The cheap material was stuck to the buildings exterior as part of a refurbishment determined by cost-cutting.

So much death and destruction occurred because the tower, built in the 1970s and previously a safe building, had been turned into a death trap by the profiteering of corporations operating in an environment where they could get away with anything due to the deregulation and privatisation policies imposed by successive Conservative and Labour governments.

Grenfell is seared into the consciousness of the working class in Britain and internationally. In a statement less than two weeks after the fire, on June 27, 2017, The political implications of the Grenfell Tower fire, the World Socialist Web Site made fundamental points deserving recollection on this anniversary.

We wrote, In years to come it will be necessary to refer to the political life of Britain in terms of before and after Grenfell. This is because the tragedy has so cruelly exposed the underlying reality of social relations between the classesand it did so in London, one of the richest cities in the world, and in Londons richest constituency.

The article continued, The horrifying loss of life epitomises the devastation capitalism has wrought on generations of working people. It is the outcome of a vast and ongoing transfer of societys wealth from the poor to the rich

The burnt-out husk of the tower points an accusing finger at the criminality of the political sociopath Margaret Thatcher and all those who followed herBlair, Brown, Cameron, Mayin an orgy of social vandalism designed to line the pockets and fill the coffers of the global elite.

The WSWS stressed that the shock the tragedy has produced is mixed with outrage. Millions understand that Grenfell was not an accident, but a crime.

The crime was that of social murder, a concept coined by Frederick Engels, the co-founder of scientific socialism, in his 1845 study The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels wrote that the ruling elite of the day, in forcing the working class to live in deprivation and squalor, committed social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time.

Five years later, the main issue to be addressed is why not a single person in political or corporate circles has been brought to justice for this heinous crime.

The central organisational mechanism in preventing such a reckoning has been the official inquiry that was used to justify the de facto closing down of the Metropolitan Polices criminal investigation. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry is still taking evidence five years later, when everyone knows, and knew within hours of the inferno what caused it and who was responsible.

Years ago, the Metropolitan Police declared they would not seek to bring any prosecutions until after the inquiry completes its work. According to an update last month, the inquiry will take more evidence in July before closing hearings and drafting its report. No end date has yet been set for when its glacier-like proceedings will be completed.

The Inquiry was called just one day after the fire by then Prime Minister Theresa May, with her widely despised Conservative government fearing a social explosion. Two days after the fire, hundreds of local people stormed Kensington Town Hall to demand justice for the victims of the fire.

Evidence presented to the inquiry last month showed that while May was calling the inquiry, meetings were held in Cabinet Office briefing rooms on June 16, attended by Downing Street staff and officials from the Ministry of Defence. Senior civil servant Mark Sedwill, formerly Mays national security advisor at the Home Office, wrote that the government should consider designating someone as gold minister to handle the situation: They would have to drop everything else. I fear this will become our New Orleans otherwise. This expressed the governments fear of an outbreak of social unrest as had occurred in the aftermath ofHurricane Katrinain the United States as Bush administration alternately ignored and denied aid to its victims.

The Public Inquiry has become the favoured means of ensuring that social rage is contained and diverted into safe channels. It is for this reason that Mays inquiry was immediately backed by the Labour Party, then led by its nominal left leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the trade unions, in particular the Fire Brigades Union, and Britains pseudo-left tendencies.

It was crystal clear then that the Inquiry would facilitate a cover-up led by a hand-picked stooge of the establishment, former High Court judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick. Its sole function was to subordinate all demands for justice to a process that would protect the guilty. May and Moore-Bick agreed that any investigating of causes of a social, economic and political nature were ruled out and that the Inquiryunder the Labour governments 2005 Inquiries Acthad no power to lay criminal charges. At the insistence of the political and corporate figures giving evidence, the attorney general and the Inquiry later agreed that these criminals would be granted immunity from any prosecution resulting from their oral evidence.

The Socialist Equality Party demanded from the outset that the guilty were arrested and prosecuted. These included leading figures in the Conservative-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, its tenant management organisation (KCTMO),and the owners of the firms who manufactured and installed the deadly cladding.

We also named former Mayor of London (2008-2016) and now Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who told protesting firefighters in 2013 to get stuffed after they warned his savage cuts would kill. The callousness of the ruling elite expressed in Johnsons statement was a precursor to his vicious response to mounting deaths in the pandemic when he declared as prime minister, Let the bodies pile high in their thousands. This murderous agenda has seen almost 200,000 deaths from COVID.

On the second anniversary of the fire, the Socialist Equality Party urged the Grenfell families and their legal teams to withdraw all co-operation from the governments rotten inquiry.

Today it is still business as usual, with millions of people potentially facing the same horrific fate as those who died at Grenfell in dwellings the length and breadth of Britain. Despite the government promising to fix all such buildings, there are 1,100 residentialtower blocksinLondonalone that still have serious fire safety issues, including high rises with the same flammablecladding that destroyed Grenfell Tower.

Nationally, the Evening Standard noted Monday, More than 486 high-rise buildings in the country were found to be covered in Grenfell-style ACM cladding.

The latest figures show that 58 of them still have the cladding and that remediation work is under way on 27. Work is yet to begin removing the ACM from the remaining 31 buildings.

At a public meeting on August 19, 2017, in a venue just metres from the burnt-out tower block, Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Chris Marsden said, The SEP urges all survivors, local-residents and workers everywhere to place no confidence in Mays rotten whitewash of an inquiry, or in Labours attempt to make it more palatable. They must rely on themselves alone, on their social power. Workers must demand that all those guilty of social murder at Grenfell in both political and business circles are arrested, charged and put on trial.

The main lesson of Grenfell is do not trust the state, its political parties and its institutions to act in the interests of working people. What is required above all is a break from the straitjacket imposed by the Labour Party, the trade unions and the pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Workers Party that trail in their wake. The occasion of the fifth anniversary must become the occasion for a renewed and politically independent fight for justice that can finally bring the criminals to account.

The WSWS has an archive of hundreds of articles on the Grenfell fire. We urge our readers to share these widely and to support the Grenfell Fire Forum, initiated by the Socialist Equality Party.

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The Grenfell fire and fight for justice five years on - WSWS