By Andre Damon, wsws.org

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[dropcap]S[/dropcap]peaking at the White House Tuesday, US President Donald Trump attempted to walk back statements he made just 24 hours earlier at his summit in Helsinki, Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he questioned claims by US intelligence agencies that the Russian government “meddled” in the 2016 election.

Trump’s about-face followed a full-court press campaign by all US media outlets, the US intelligence agencies, the Democrats, and leading figures in the Republican Party, who demanded that he reaffirm the US government’s confrontational stance toward the world’s second most powerful nuclear power.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s meeting with Putin, the Democrats treated him like an invincible colossus. It was impossible, they said, to seriously oppose his reactionary Supreme Court nominee, and nothing could be done to hold him to account for his criminal policy of breaking up refugee families, which was called child torture by the United Nations.

In fact, the Senate had just voted with overwhelming bipartisan support to approve his massive Pentagon budget increase, which included provisions for keeping open the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and allowing the fascistic demagogue to proceed with his unprecedented military parade in Washington.

But the moment Trump did something that cut across a central pillar of American foreign policy, the Democrats and the media ferociously sprang into action.

Trump’s questioning of the unproven narrative of the intelligence agencies was met with absolute hysteria and the implication that anyone failing to hold their unsubstantiated allegations as incontestable is nothing but a Russian agent.

In the post-World War II period, even within the tradition of American cold war liberalism, the activities of the FBI and CIA were always treated with extreme skepticism: as enormous and real threats to the survival of American democracy.

For nearly half a century, it was noted, J. Edgar Hoover ran a police state-within-a-state through the FBI. The FBI and CIA, functioning as a law unto themselves, spied on and blackmailed American political figures, carried out coups around the world and were widely believed to have been involved in the assassination of an American president.

The Watergate scandal, the Church Commission of the 1970s and the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, not to mention the intelligence agencies’ role in fabricating the “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction ahead of the invasion of Iraq, their criminal mass domestic surveillance and their role in drone murder, made clear that these are criminal organizations, willing to use any means to expand their own power at the expense of democracy.

But now, these organizations have been elevated by the media into America’s quintessential guardians, and their word declared to be the gospel truth. Any discussion of their role in torture, domestic spying and drone assassinations has been shelved.

Trump was denounced as a traitor, in language that seemed to invite a military coup. His conduct was squarely declared “unacceptable” and he was, so to speak “shown the instruments.” The warning last year by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, “You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” was demonstrated in practice.

Faced with implacable and universal pressure from within the political and media establishment, as well as the military and intelligence apparatus, Trump was forced to beat a retreat.

This entire sordid episode expresses the degree to which there is overwhelming institutional commitment within the US ruling elite for conflict with Russia, if necessary to the point of nuclear war. This war drive, which aims at the transformation of Russia into what would be for all intents and purposes a colony of American imperialism, has become an unchallengeable pillar of American foreign policy. Trump can commit any violation of human rights, can traduce constitutional norms at will, but he may not question this axial precept of American politics.

The universality with which this argument is accepted within the US political establishment makes clear, as the World Socialist Web Site has long insisted, that there exists no constituency for democracy within the American ruling elite.

It likewise vindicates the assessment by the WSWS that the fundamental dispute between Trump and the Democrats centers on foreign policy. What cannot be allowed is any divergence from what are seen as the key strategic interests of US imperialism.

In other words, the Democrats’ opposition to Trump is entirely from the right. On domestic issues, the Democrats are effectively in alliance with Trump. They support his tax cuts, his attacks on social spending, and, with minor caveats, his reactionary social and immigration policies. They distinguish themselves from Trump only in that they identify unconditionally with the US intelligence apparatus, and are more directly ruthless in the pursuit of US geopolitical interests, as opposed to Trump’s more transactional focus on economics.

The various factions of the ruling elite, in other words, are fighting out their differences through the method of the palace coup, of reactionary intrigue within the state. But one voice has not been heard in this ferocious, right-wing faction fight: that of the working class.

In addressing the crisis that has erupted within the state as the result of the coming to power of Donald Trump, the working class must bring its own methods to bear: those of the class struggle, animated by a socialist perspective... Only through these means can the ruling class’s drive to war and dictatorship be averted.

By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org

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[dropcap]M[/dropcap]illions of people across the globe have been riveted to the live media coverage of the efforts to rescue 12 members of a boys’ football team and their coach from a flooded cave complex in northern Thailand.

The discovery of the lost team members, nine days after they disappeared into the Tham Luang complex on June 23, seemed little short of miraculous. No less remarkable have been the grueling—and thus far successful—efforts to bring them out alive.

The boys, ages 11 through 17, and their coach, 25-year-old Ekaphol Chantawong, appear to have maintained their spirits and cohesiveness under the frightening conditions of being trapped underground in the darkness, without food and surrounded by rising water.

Four of the boys were brought out of the cave on Sunday, and four more on Monday. The last four and their coach were expected to be rescued today.

The divers who carried out the rescues were compelled to make an 11-hour round trip, leading the boys, some of whom couldn’t swim, through submerged passages so narrow that they must remove their air tanks to pass.

The dangers involved in the operation were underscored by the death on Friday of a former Thai Navy SEAL who was returning from a mission to deliver oxygen tanks to the cave. Rescuers concluded that they had no choice but to proceed nonetheless, given the threat of monsoon weather raising the water level in the caves, even as oxygen has diminished to dangerously low levels.

The entire rescue effort has been characterized by an outpouring of human solidarity and concern for the fate of the young people trapped beneath the earth, together with international collaboration and the deployment of immense resources to achieve the aim of bringing them out alive.

Of the 90 expert divers participating in the dangerous rescue, over half were volunteers who rushed to Thailand from abroad. Chinese cave rescue experts have worked alongside US personnel, while a team of drainage specialists from the Netherlands arrived on the scene to help with pumping the water out of the cave.

While the self-sacrifice and immense skill of the rescuers, along with the international cooperation and seemingly unlimited resources that have been mobilized behind the effort, are inspiring, they inevitably raise the question of why similar qualities cannot be brought to bear upon the far larger daily tragedies and catastrophes confronting millions of working people and youth around the globe.

The answer lies in the global domination of capitalism. The profit system not only subordinates the social good to the accumulation of wealth by a wealthy elite, it prevents the mobilization of international resources in a rational manner by upholding the division of an increasingly economically integrated world into rival nation-states. Beset by intractable economic, social and geopolitical crises, world capitalism, with the US in the lead, produces only increasing financial parasitism, staggering levels of social inequality and a drive toward world war. 

 There are millions of young people trapped beneath the US-supplied bombs and missiles raining down upon Yemen in a brutal Saudi-led war backed by Washington that has brought 8 million people to the brink of starvation. Last year alone, 50,000 Yemeni children starved to death, while thousands more lost their lives to bombings and a rapidly spreading cholera epidemic. There is no international rescue effort on their behalf, not to mention any media attention to their plight—only increased support from the US government for those who are killing them.

US wars and imperialist economic depredation have forced 68.5 million refugees from their homes, sending this vast population, many of them children, to the borders of Europe and the US. Far from rescuing them, the governments of Europe and America treat them as criminals bent on “infesting” their countries. In Europe, concentration camps for refugees are being erected in Germany and throughout the continent.

In the US, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy has meant the arrest and imprisonment of every refugee attempting to cross the border.

While much of the drama in Thailand has centered on the parents of the trapped youth keeping vigil outside the cave entrance waiting to be reunited with their children, in the US, thousands of young children have been ripped from the arms of their immigrant parents as a means of punishing and deterring refugees.

The hypocrisy of capitalist governments in the face of the ongoing cave rescue knows no bounds. Among those offering to send aid to Thailand is the extreme right-wing government of Hungary, which recently made it a criminal offense for any of its citizens to provide assistance to refugee children.

And Trump tweeted on Sunday: “The U.S. is working very closely with the Government of Thailand to help get all of the children out of the cave and to safety. Very brave and talented people!”

His administration proved wholly unable and unwilling to mobilize such bravery and talent, not to mention resources, when Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, killing at least 5,000 people and leaving the island devastated to this day.

In the first decade of the last century, during the heyday of imperialism, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg called attention to the hypocrisy of the humanitarian pretensions of the imperialist powers in the face of natural disasters, given their murderous brutality in suppressing any opposition to their domination.

The disaster then was the eruption of Mt. Pelee on the island of Martinique, which killed some 40,000 people.

Citing the massacre of Africans by the British, Filipinos by the Americans, and colonial peoples in other lands by all the major powers, Luxemburg wrote:

“And now they have all turned to Martinique, all one heart and one mind again; they help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the havoc-wreaking volcano. Mt. Pelee, great-hearted giant, you can laugh; you can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping carnivores, at these beasts in Samaritan’s clothing. But a day will come when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is seething and boiling, whether you heed it or not, and will sweep the whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth.”

Today, the stark contrast between the feigned concern and sympathy of Trump and other “beasts in Samaritan’s clothing” for the young people trapped in the cave in Thailand and their brutality toward the working class and oppressed people around the globe is emblematic of a society dominated by inequality, violence and oppression, and ripe for socialist revolution.

AT BOTTOM, A GLITTERING, OPPORTUNISTIC CELEBRATION OF GENDERISED PRIVILEGE, TO SUIT THE TASTES OF THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS. 

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Ocean’s 8: A “gender-swapped” caper

By Carlos Delgado, wsws.org
20 June 2018

Ocean’s 8, directed by Gary Ross (Free State of Jones, The Hunger Games, Pleasantville), is the latest in the Ocean’s franchise of heist films. It is a loose continuation of the Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen trilogy (2001, 2004 and 2007) directed by Steven Soderbergh, themselves based upon Lewis Milestone’s 1960 Ocean’s 11.

The new film opens with Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), sister to the recently deceased Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney in the Soderbergh opus), securing her release from prison with a tearful—and insincere—vow to leave behind her criminal past and live “the simple life.” Upon leaving prison, she promptly steals cosmetics and scams her way into an upscale hotel room.

She reunites with Lou (Cate Blanchett), an unscrupulous bar owner and Ocean’s former partner in crime. Ocean convinces her to take part in a heist she has plotted while in prison: stealing a $150 million diamond necklace during the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s highly exclusive and garish Met Gala in New York City.

Ocean and Lou round up a team of thieves in a sequence familiar to anyone who has seen a work of this type before. The heist crew includes computer hacker Nine Ball (Rihanna), street hustler and sleight-of-hand expert Constance (Awkwafina), down-on-her-luck fashion designer Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter), diamond expert Amita (Mindy Kaling) and a “fence” who deals in stolen goods, Tammy (Sarah Paulson).

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With the help of sophisticated computer technology and a few fairly ridiculous plot contrivances, the team penetrates the Met’s security system and prepares for the theft, which involves lifting the six-pound piece of jewelry from the neck of the arrogant and self-involved actress Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway). Meanwhile, Lou discovers that Ocean is planning to pin the crime on her former lover Claude Becker (Richard Armitage), whose treachery had led to her five-year prison sentence. Lou accuses Ocean of “running a job in a job,” but goes along with the plan anyway.

Under Ocean’s leadership, the team navigates the opulent and celebrity-filled gala, attempting to steal the necklace while evading security staff, cameras and high-tech anti-theft measures. The final act, which involves Kluger’s discovery of the plot and Ocean’s revenge on Becker, limps to a finish.

The creatively bankrupt Hollywood studio machinery, which seems increasingly incapable of doing anything but churning out sequels, remakes, “reboots,” and “reimaginings” of commercially successful franchises, has of late made appeals to identity politics by creating “gender-swapped” versions of popular films, where women inhabit roles that had previously been played by men. Far from being an attempt to showcase the talents of the performers involved, much less appeal to the broad mass of women whose experiences are excluded from the cultural landscape, such efforts are cynical and nakedly mercenary attempts to squeeze blood from the stones of once-lucrative franchises.

Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films themselves were always dull exercises in cynicism and self-satisfaction. His Ocean’s Eleven was part of his turn toward more conventional filmmaking after the box office failure of his absurdist Schizopolis. More than anything, the film reflected the pressures exerted on filmmakers, including talented and sensitive ones like Soderbergh, to “go with the flow” and produce financially successful blockbusters.

These pressures have now imposed themselves on Ross, who only two years ago directed the remarkable Free State of Jones about an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. That film was one of the more intelligent and artistically successful major film releases in recent memory. It was also the target of racialist attacks from the identity politics crowd for daring to depict poor white farmers fighting side-by-side with former slaves against the plantation elite that oppressed them both.

Since the release of Free State of Jones, the film industry has become even more suffused with identity politics, now centering around gender issues and the upper middle class “MeToo” movement. The supposedly “progressive” significance of “female-led” films is used as a pseudo-democratic smokescreen to justify the careerism of a layer of wealthy performers and privileged professionals seeking their own “place in the sun.” The pressures on filmmakers, both direct and indirect, to conform to this campaign are immense, perhaps even more so for someone like Ross who ran afoul of these forces with Free State of Jones.

Nevertheless, it has to be said that Ocean’s 8 is an artistic step backward for Ross, and a considerable one at that. Even by the low standards of the Hollywood blockbuster, it is a tedious, empty-headed and pointless film.

It is perhaps not surprising that the critical response to Ocean’s 8, while somewhat lukewarm, is still significantly more positive than the hostility directed toward Free State of Jones. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, for example, who derided Free State of Jones as a “stultifying” film with a “white savior” protagonist, wrote that Ocean’s 8is “a heist caper that looks gorgeous, keeps the twists coming and bounces along on a comic rhythm that’s impossible to resist. What more do you want in summer escapism?”

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A number of reviews praise the film for supposedly depicting “badass women,” but this is far from the truth. The plodding, lifeless script (co-written by Ross and Olivia Milch) is so devoid of tension that its performers hardly have an opportunity to exhibit anything resembling bravura or boldness. The cast is mostly wasted. Bullock’s easygoing confidence is somewhat more watchable than was Clooney’s irritating smirk, but outside of a few moments of playful chemistry with Blanchett she mostly looks bored. Hathaway is able to hit some comic beats with her smug, self-obsessed Kluger, but the rest of the cast is given little to work with.

Ocean’s 8 livens up a bit during the heist itself, with Ross’s camera fluidly tracking the intricately choreographed movements of the team of thieves while spirited jazz music plays in the background. But the fawning depiction of the Met Gala (which raises more than $10 million in a single night), replete with celebrity cameos and red-carpet lavishness, leaves one sick to one’s stomach. We’ve come some distance from Free State of Jones’s Newton Knight declaring that “No man shall stay poor so that another man can get rich.”

If the filmmakers had set out to prove that a female-led studio film can be just as vapid as a male-led one, they have succeeded. One hopes that everyone involved will set their sights higher next time.

By Mike Head, wsws.org

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Last Sunday, Australia’s Channel 7 network broadcast an interview with Jennifer Robinson, an Australian-born, London-based lawyer who represents WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. She issued a clear demand for the Australian government to carry out its responsibility to secure his freedom, as an Australian citizen.

The interview and 10-minute segment on the nationally-televised “Sunrise” morning program was a significant break in the general silence within the Australian corporate media on the more than seven-year detention of Assange. It came amid a renewed international campaign to fight for the unconditional freedom of the courageous journalist, who has continued to expose the war crimes, regime-change operations and mass surveillance conducted by the US and its allies around the world.

One of the central demands of this campaign is that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government act immediately to secure Assange’s freedom and his right to return to Australia, with guaranteed protection from any US request for his extradition on conspiracy and espionage charges. These charges can carry the death penalty.

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Robinson’s interview came three days after she accompanied two Australian consular officials to meet with Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought political asylum on June 19, 2012. The visit was the first made by Australian officials to the Australian citizen in the six years since he has been effectively imprisoned inside the embassy, denied the right to obtain medical treatment or sunlight and outdoor physical exercise.

In her “Sunrise” interview, Robinson posed the pressing question: “What diplomatic representation is the Australian government willing to provide to protect Julian Assange from the risk of US extradition?”

Robinson pointed out that the Trump administration had taken “a far more public and aggressive stance” against WikiLeaks and Assange than even the Obama administration, under which a Grand Jury indictment was made for Assange’s arrest.

Since Trump’s election, Robinson explained, key members of his administration had called for WikiLeaks to be “taken down,” and for ways to be found to prosecute Assange, regardless of the US Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteeing free speech.

“When will the Australian government, which is uniquely placed to provide a resolution to this case, step forward to provide assistance?” she asked.

Robinson said Assange was willing to “face British justice, but not the risk of US injustice.” He is prepared to face court for breaching his British bail conditions when Ecuador granted him political asylum, but must have a guarantee against extradition to the US.

Such a guarantee was “standard procedure,” Robinson said. “If the Australian government would come to the fore, the case could be resolved quickly.”

As Robinson emphasised, both US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state, had made clear their intent to imprison Assange and shut down WikiLeaks, which Pompeo last year described as a “hostile non-state intelligence service.”

US threats against Assange escalated from March 2017, when WikiLeaks began publishing a massive leak of CIA documents, dubbed “Vault 7.” The documents lay bare a vast system of surveillance, hacking and cyberwarfare directed against the people of the United States and the entire planet.

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As the WSWS reported at the time, the documents indicate that the CIA has developed “more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses and other ‘weaponized’ malware” allowing it to seize control of devices, including Apple iPhones, Google’s Android operating system and devices running Microsoft Windows. By hacking these devices, the CIA can also intercept information before it is encrypted on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo, Confide and Cloackman.”

These revelations came on top of the fury in the US political establishment after WikiLeaks published emails exposing the Democratic Party National Committee’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton’s secret speeches promising to protect the interests of Wall Street.

Since March 28 this year, Assange has faced further mistreatment, and is now in imminent danger. Under pressure from Washington, Ecuador’s government has deprived him of any form of communication with the outside world, including visitors. It has also threatened to renege on Assange’s asylum, and hand him over to waiting British police. Just before he was cut off, Assange had tweeted links to the WSWS series exposing the unprecedented number of former CIA agents running as Democrats in this year’s US midterm elections.

After Robinson’s interview, New Matilda, an Australian media outlet, published a commentary by Kellie Tranter, a lawyer and human rights activist. She detailed documents, obtained by freedom of information requests, showing that Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had refused to “seek to ‘resolve’ Mr Assange’s case.” Bishop’s refusal followed the February 2016 findings of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) that Assange was being arbitrarily detained by Britain and Sweden in violation of international human rights law.

On February 12, 2016 Bishop, a former lawyer, signed a Ministerial Submission stating “we are unable to intervene in the due process of another country’s court proceedings or legal matters, and we have full confidence in the UK and Swedish judicial system.”

Tranter disclosed two further statements from Bishop’s department, on June 7 and 8 this year, adhering to the refusal to act on the WGAD verdict, even though in May 2017 Sweden finally dropped its trumped-up “investigation” into the sexual assault allegations against Assange. Among the exposures made of the politically motivated and dubious character of these allegations was a detailed examination undertaken by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program on July 23, 2012 (see: “Sex, Lies and Julian Assange”).

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Tranter explained that the Swedish decision meant that the only outstanding “court proceeding” was the “relatively minor one of a breach of bail conditions by Assange when he sought asylum in 2012.” Tranter stated: [I]t is incumbent upon a civilised nation to protect its citizens from risks posed by other nations to that citizen’s wellbeing.”

As a legal analysis published yesterday by the WSWS explained, both international and Australian law establishes that the Australian government clearly has the “discretion”—that is, the power—to take action against the United Kingdom in order to protect Assange, including, potentially, legal action in the British courts.

Robinson’s “Sunrise” interview is the second breach in the wall of corporate media silence. On June 2, Fairfax Media newspapers carried an opinion piece by Greg Barns, a barrister who is an adviser to Assange and WikiLeaks.

Barns called on Turnbull and Bishop “to assist in ensuring that this Australian citizen is no longer at risk of being subjected to US detention and can therefore leave the Ecuadorean embassy. This is because a key hurdle to Australian involvement in the Assange case has been removed, namely the Swedish warrant.”

On May 28, the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International called for international action to defend Assange  and endorsed the vigil being prepared by WikiLeaks’ supporters outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on June 19, and other vigils being organised around the globe.

In the same statement, the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), with the support of journalist and film-maker John Pilger, announced a demonstration to be held at Sydney Town Hall Square on Sunday, June 17 at 1:00 p.m. The rally will demand that the Turnbull government honour its responsibilities to Assange and intervene to secure his right to return to Australia, with guaranteed protection from any US extradition request.

Every effort must be made to mobilise the full strength of the international working class to win Assange’s freedom, as part of the defence of all basic democratic rights. Under the Trump administration, the American state and its allies have ramped up their efforts to destroy WikiLeaks and Assange as part of a broader agenda of censoring, silencing and intimidating every critical and independent media organisation.

Since WikiLeaks was created in 2006, both it and Assange have made an immense contribution to the exposure of great power criminality and abuses. That role will become even more important as the US and its partners, including Britain and Australia, escalate the drive toward trade war and war against China and Russia, and any other country regarded as a threat to Washington’s post-World War II hegemony.

We urge all our readers to join the demonstrations, vigils and other actions that are being organised internationally and to fight for an end to the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Direct to consumers tv ads, like the one above, an obnoxious intrusive nuisance at best, constitute a big part of the cost of drug "production" in the US. They are naturally written off at tax time as legitimate deductions.

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