The Crisis Of Neoliberalism In Honduras

Yanis Iqbal

As the Covid-19 pandemic rages in Honduras, the healthcare infrastructure is increasingly coming under stress. Due to decades of privatization in the health sector, the role of the Ministry of Health and the Honduran Institute of Social Security (IHSS) has drastically diminished. Almost 9 out of 10 people in Honduras are not covered by any type of health insurance and 1.5 million Hondurans (18% of the population of 9.9 million people) don’t have access to health services.

Moreover, there are only 6,590 beds in the entire country, translating into 9.5 hospital beds per 10,000 citizens (compared to Cuba’s 59 beds per 10,000 inhabitants). The healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP is a measly 7.83%, lower than the average of 14% in the Americas. With an extremely weak public health edifice, Honduras is finding it difficult to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and in April 2020, doctors and social workers announced “their withdrawal from the hospitals if the biosecurity equipment and resources necessary to avoid further contamination by the virus are not provided.”

The government has chosen to ignore these demands of health workers, leading to Honduran health workers protesting, with the support of Honduran Medical Association (CMH) and IHSS, for the provisioning of biosafety equipments.

The roots of present-day administrative malfunctioning can be located in the 28 June 2009 Honduran coup in which the left-leaning president Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales was deposed. Under the presidency of Manuel Zelaya, Honduras had joined Petrocaribe, founded by Hugo Chavez in 2005 and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), founded by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004. Furthermore, Manuel Zelaya also increased the monthly rural and urban minimum wages to $213 and $290, respectively, representing a 50% rise.

In April 2009, a constitutional convention or constituyente was called to replace the 1982 constitution, drafted under the guardianship of USA. The creation of this constituyente was sought to be done through the Cuarta Urna or fourth ballot box on June 28, 2009. In this nonbinding poll, voters were to be asked whether the upcoming presidential election should include the election of delegates to a constitutional convention. The Cuarta Urna project was enthusiastically supported by Bloque Popular (Popular Bloc), a grass-roots organization which later fused with Coordinadora Nacional de Resistencia Popular (Popular Resistance National Coordinating Committee) to give birth to the anti-coup National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP).

Manuel Zelaya was progressively transgressing the politico-economic limits defined by the Honduran oligarchy and had to be overthrown. On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was flown by the Honduran military to Costa Rica at gunpoint and in pajamas. This “pajama-clad expatriation” was tacitly supported by the US government and on the day of the coup, Barack Obama merely asked Honduran people to “respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter” and resolve disputes “through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

highfalutin and pompous statements made by him during the “To Learn From History, Not Be Trapped by It,” speech: “I am here to launch a new chapter of engagement that will be sustained throughout my administration.” Obama’s new chapter of engagement was probably one where coup-plotters were authorized under the aegis of United States to arbitrarily subvert any government.

After the coup, a temporary government of Roberto Micheletti, the President of Congress, was cobbled up. Micheletti’s basic function was to violently discipline the rebellious Honduran population into peacefully voting in the post-coup election and shift the ideological plane from “coup” to “elections”. This objective of suppressing anti-golpista dissent was done through a violent process of militarization which involved, inter alia, the imposition of curfew, declaration of a state of siege and an unwarranted attack on social activists and organizations.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the Micheletti period included “deaths, an arbitrary declaration of a state of emergency, suppression of public demonstrations through disproportionate use of force, criminalization of public protest, arbitrary detentions of thousands of persons, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and grossly inadequate conditions of detention, militarization of Honduran territory, a surge in incidents of racial discrimination, violations of women’s rights, serious and arbitrary restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, and grave violations of political rights.”

When a thorough state-sponsored tactic of terrorization was completed, general elections were held in which, through a witch-hunt against anti-coup voices, a right-wing candidate named Porfirio Lobo Sosa was elected. This illegitimate election result was eagerly embraced by the US State Department which issued a statement implicitly awarding plaudits on coup-plotters for efficiently eliminating opposition and holding bogus elections: “We commend the Honduran people for peacefully exercising their democratic right to select their leaders in an electoral process that began over a year ago, well before the June 28 coup d’etat.”

Hilary Clinton also played her role by relegating the patent occurrence of coup and instead prattling about elections: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.” It was the Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon who wrote to Hilary Clinton, advising her how to handle the delicate Honduran situation: “As we think about what to say, I would strongly recommend that we not be shy. We should congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect today’s vote to the deep democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should call on the community of democratic nations (and especially those of the Americas) to recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the Honduran people.”

During Porfirio Lobo’s presidency, human rights abuses worsened and militarization increased. According to Human Rights Watch, “Honduras failed in 2011 to hold accountable those responsible for human rights violations under the de facto government that took power after the 2009 military coup.” As per the 2011 Annual Report produced by Amnesty International on the human rights conditions in Honduras, under the Porfirio administration “Freedom of expression came under attack. Little progress was made in repairing the damage to human rights protection and the rule of law that followed the 2009 coup. Impunity for human rights violations by military and police officers persisted. Human rights defenders were subject to intimidation.”

Judicial independence too was compromised through the politically-motivated expulsion of “four judges – Tirza del Carmen Flores Lanza, Ramón Enrique Barrios, Luis Alonso Chévez de la Rocha, Guillermo López Lone – and Public Attorney Osmán Fajardo Morel” for their involvement in anti-coup demonstrations. Militarization took place through the deployment of soldiers in the two largest cities of Honduras – Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. USA funded this militarization through its military and security aid which increased by 50% from 2010-12. The funding for the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) too enlarged by 33% and an additional $45 million was also allotted for the expansion of Soto Cano Air Base and the establishment of 3 new US bases. In 2011, the US Department had spent $67.4 million on military contracts in Honduras, $89 million on the Soto Cano Air Base and exported military electronics to Honduras worth allegedly $1.3 billion.

In 2012, $26 million was funneled to Honduras through a program called “Honduras Convive”, designed by the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a unit of USAID whose “activities are overtly political, based on the idea that in the midst of political crisis and instability abroad there are local agents of change whose efforts, when supported by timely and creative U.S. assistance, can tip the balance toward peaceful and democratic outcomes that advance U.S. foreign policy objectives.”

While this militarization of Honduras was happening, Porfirio Lobo was stealthily advancing his neoliberal agenda. He proposed a “Model Cities project” in which Zones of Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) would be created. These zones would be indemnified from the application of any law and could unrestrictedly exploit workers and sign treaties with transnational corporations. This law was initially rejected by the Supreme Court because it simply threw out the constitution from the proposed zones. Later, a “technical coup” took place wherein Juan Orlando Hernandez, at that time the president of the Congress, deposed four out of five members of the Sala constitucional (Constitutional Chamber). Oscar Chinchilla, the fifth justice, was left untouched because he was faithful to Orlando Hernandez.

After this illegal manoeuvre, four new justices were appointed. The Model Cities Law, which had been earlier rejected, was now passed by the Supreme Court. Along with the creation of economic exploitation zones, the government of Porfirio Lobo also held a business exhibition called “Honduras is Open for Business” in which Carlos Slim, at that time the richest man in the world, was also present. The aim of the business conference was to ‘relaunch Honduras as the most attractive investment destination in Latin America’.

In 2013, general elections were held in which the Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), headed by Xiomara Castro (wife of Manuel Zelaya), would also be participating. These elections presented the ruling National Party with enormous challenge because it was the first time that anti-coup forces were electorally participating in Honduran politics. To avoid LIBRE from winning, the National Party used a variety of tactics such as vote buying, selling election table credentials, violence and voter intimidation. According to the Report of the National Lawyers Guild Delegation to the November 2013 Election in Honduras, the November 2013 elections included “the purchase of MER credentials by the National Party, irregularities in the recording and transmission of actas [vote tallies], the distribution of discount cards to National Party voters, and irregularities with voting registration rolls which resulted in the inclusion of ineligible voters and the exclusion of eligible voters.”

During the election campaign, 18 LIBRE candidates and their family members were murdered and 15 were subjected to armed attacks. As said by Jenny O’Connor,  the “LIBRE party (Libertad y Refundacion Party) pre-candidates, candidates, their families and campaign leaders have suffered more killings and armed attacks than all other political parties combined. The disproportionate number of killings of LIBRE candidates seems a clear indication that many of the killings have been politically motivated.”

Despite the occurrence of serious irregularities and blatant violence, the US Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske said that “In general it has been a transparent process, beginning with the representation of the persons at the electoral tables, later the public scrutiny, the representation of all the parties in the computer center.” The Secretary of State John Kerry also legitimized the fraudulent electoral process through his unaccountably fulsome praise of the Honduran government: “The Honduran people turned out in record numbers to vote on November 24, and we commend the Honduran Government for ensuring that the election process was generally transparent, peaceful, and reflected the will of the Honduran people.”

Through an election process covered with blood and gore, Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) emerged as the president, supposedly receiving 36.89% of the total votes. With the election of JOH to power, the militarization of Honduras accelerated and slowly, JOH’s authoritarian election slogan “a soldier on every corner” was being materialized. In 2013, JOH established a police unit called Intelligence Troop and Special Security Response Groups (TIGRES) whose ostensible function was to “protect the security of the population and their belongings”.

This elite military-police squad is financed by the Inter-American Development Bank and uses the opaque security slush fund created through the 3% security tax on all financial operations to carry out its operations. TIGRES is trained by the “U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) and members of the Comandos Jungla, an elite force of the Colombian police” and is also funded by the US Department of State through the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). Apart from TIGRES, 17 additional security force units also receive US military aid.

To carry out the crucial process of militarization, JOH inserted a provision in paragraph 5, Article 7, of Decree 168 through the Decree 286 of 2013. According to the provision, “the military police shall also have all those functions and actions that may be ordered by the President of the Republic”. Furthermore, Article 4 of Decree 168 of 2013 nebulously states that the military police will receive “the training necessary for dealing with the public.” Through constitutional changes, unabated militarization was unleashed. As a natural corollary of militarization, human rights abuses greatly increased and according to the 2014 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Honduras was suffering from “serious human rights problems”. These included “violence against detainees; lengthy pretrial detentions and failure to provide due process of law; threats against journalists;” and “encroachment on indigenous lands and discrimination against indigenous and Afro-descendent communities;”.

Militarizing Honduras directly facilitated the proliferation of narco-operations in which JOH and his brother were involved. According to US prosecutors, JOH had collaborated with a drug-trafficker named Geovanny Daniel Fuentes Ramírez in 2013 and “took $25,000 in exchange for protecting the trafficker from law enforcement.” Apart from working with Fuentes Ramirez, JOH had also personally received a $1 million bribe from drug lord El Chapo to subvert the 2013 Honduran elections.  Juan Antonio Tony Hernandez, JOH’s brother, was also convicted by the US District Court for trafficking 200,000 kilograms of cocaine, together with machine guns.

US attorney Geoffrey Berman said that “Former Honduran congressman Tony Hernandez was involved in all stages of the trafficking through Honduras of multi-ton loads of cocaine that were destined for the U.S. Hernandez bribed law enforcement officials to protect drug shipments, solicited large bribes from major drug traffickers, and arranged machine gun-toting security for cocaine shipments.” In addition, Tony Hernandez “funneled millions of dollars of drug proceeds to National Party campaigns to impact Honduran presidential elections in 2009, 2013, and 2017.”

Other than being a narco-trafficker, JOH is also a corrupt politician responsible for a “multimillion-dollar embezzlement of social security funds”. In this massive fraud, $350 million was stolen from IHSS, the governmental social security institute catering to more than 700,000 beneficiaries of the social security regime and roughly 900,000 beneficiaries of the health regime. The IHSS scam included “overpaying almost $400,000 for 10 ambulances and buying overpriced medicines which were then repeatedly stolen and resold to the IHSS.” JOH admitted that $150,000 of the IHSS money was spent on his election campaign.

In 2017 Honduran national elections, the 2013 spectacle of outright fraud was repeated. The overly illicit and absurd scene during the elections was pithily described by a report produced by NACLA: “National Party activists are buying voting table credentials from other parties to ensure access to tally sheets; the polls are closing early; votes are being bought outright.” According to the 2017 “Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights”, the election was marred by “the issuing of blank credentials to parties and the related buying of votes; the lack of independence of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal; the lack of transparency and unreliability of the system of electronic transmission and counting of votes; and, further to the adoption, in 2017, of the Law on financing, transparency and accountability of political parties and candidates, the non-functioning of the mechanisms established by that law.”

Due to all these procedural irregularities, Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro was compelled to say it was “impossible to determine the winner with the necessary certainty”. In the post-election period, JOH’s government dictatorially cracked down on protests, leaving 31 dead. Before this violent crackdown, the British government had sold spy equipments to Honduras worth $370,154. These equipments include “sophisticated spy technology which can be used to intercept, monitor and track emails, mobile phones, and online messaging services such as WhatsApp”.

Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, the government of JOH is persecuting human rights defenders and during the first few weeks of the pandemic 45 human rights defenders suffered attacks or harassment and 7 journalists were detained or assaulted. Between March and April, more than 6,000 people have been detained for protesting over layoffs and scarcity of food. All this has been made possible by the declaration of a state of sanitary emergency and curtailment of basic constitutional rights such as freedom of expression, association and assembly. According to the International Forum for Human Rights in Honduras, “the health emergency, coupled with a precarious health system, weak institutions, the shortage and privatization of water resources, and serious problems of corruption, militarization and exploitation of natural resources will deepen the risks faced by the Honduran people.” The need of the present is to wage an effective socialist offensive against the right-wing JOH administration and reclaim Honduras from US imperialism and the domestic oligarchy.

It’s Not Just Meat: All Farm and Food Workers Are in Peril

Stan Cox

COVID-19 outbreaks are now reaching far beyond the meatpacking industry. Migrant farmworkers in fruit orchards and vegetable fields, long the targets of intense exploitation, are seeing their health put in even greater jeopardy as they’re pushed to feed an increasingly voracious supply chain in pandemic-time.

With the pandemic rolling on unchecked, the fragility of the entire U.S. food system and the vulnerability of its workforce is coming into stark relief. Eliminating that fragility—a result of the industry’s single-minded pursuit of profit—will require shifting the priority to the lives of the people who produce our food, the landscapes where they live and work, and, ultimately, to resolving the global ecological emergency.

Southern New Jersey, for example, has seen hundreds of migrant farmworkers become infected with the virus. According to WHYY radio in Philadelphia, many of the twenty to twenty-five thousand seasonal workers who arrive in South Jersey each year to harvest fruits and vegetables sleep in cramped dormitories and eat in crowded cafeterias. Yet state guidelines allow farm managers, if they find their operations shorthanded, to keep infected workers on the job; they can forget paid sick leave.

As in meatpacking, confined workplaces of all kinds are being hit hard. A complex of hydroponic greenhouses in upstate New York was an early focus of coronavirus spread. A single Southern California city, Vernon, has seen outbreaks in nine food facilities processing coffee, tea, frozen foods, deli meats, seaweed, baked goods, and other products.

Yakima County, Washington, has the highest per capita coronavirus infection rate on the entire West Coast. Fifty percent of the county’s people are Latinx, many of them working in agriculture and food and getting hit hardest by the virus. Seven hundred fruit-packing workers throughout the county started walking out on strike in May over lack of health safeguards. They reach settlements in June, with employers agreeing to provide personal protective equipment and follow the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines.

Workers also went out on strike at a large pistachio farm in California’s Central Valley in late June after the farm’s management hid from them the fact that dozens of their coworkers had tested positive for the virus while at the same time failing to provide them with masks and gloves. The workers had learned of the outbreak only through the media

The town of Immokalee in southwest Florida, which is at the center of a large, intensive vegetable growing area, now has the highest COVID-19 case numbers of any zip code in the pandemic-wracked state. State officials say that’s largely because of increased testing. But medical researchers beg to differ. They see fertile ground for the coronavirus to flourish in the densely packed buses and vans that take workers to the fields, as well as in worker housing, which consists mostly of mobile homes, each with numerous occupants.

Gerardo Chavez, speaking for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has long pushed for the rights of the area’s migrant labor force, told a local TV station, “This is not something that happened just because. It happened because people there are poor, they live overcrowded. They travel to work under not very safe conditions many times, and that makes them the perfect place for COVID-19 to spread.”

The “farm worker paradox”

The current public-health crisis in food production and processing has grown directly out of the drive for profit. In recent decades, the overriding goal of the agriculture and food industry—a sector whose pace and production were once strictly dictated by the seasons and the weather—has been to turbocharge profits by maximizing output per hour per worker.

It doesn’t have to be like that. In a system motivated by nutritional goals rather than profit, a much more widely dispersed workforce producing at non-exploitative rates of output could easily produce enough food to meet this country’s needs.

Instead, under the protection awarded to businesses producing essential goods, the industry is loosening the screws of exploitation only slightly, further threatening the health and lives of workers and their families.

This treatment of an essential workforce is in keeping with what the economist Michael Perelman has called the “farm worker paradox” in which he asks, “why those whose work is most necessary typically earn the least” (in pandemic-time, we can add, “…and are most compelled to risk their lives and their families’ lives.”)

The paradox exists, observes Perelman, because of the circular logic of capitalism. Economists argue that farmworkers earn low wages because they are not highly “productive”; that is, collectively, they generate low profit per worker. But that’s because everyday food sells cheap, and it’s cheap largely because many of those who produce it earn near-starvation wages.

Now workers are forced to risk infection by a debilitating, often deadly, virus in order to keep production costs down and profits up.

In contrast, coronavirus infection rates remained low for months among the older, largely white independent farmers who produce staple foods like wheat, oats, rice, and dry beans in sparsely populated areas of the country. That isolation resulted from the decline of small family farms and the consolidation of land into fewer and fewer hands over the past four decades.

Such rural areas—where depopulation of the countryside and small towns has meant a withering of local economies, culture, and health care—have been rendered highly vulnerable to a pandemic that is now coming for them.

Reversing the destruction

The changes needed to reduce the vulnerability of the food system and its workers to infectious disease have already been needed for decades on humanitarian and environmental grounds. Addressing the climate emergency in particular requires such deep changes. The imperatives are clear:

Abolish feedlots and other confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Convert the tens of millions of acres now being used to grow dent corn and soybeans (for feeding confined cattle) to pasture and hay production, and eventually, perennial food-grain/pasture crops. Then cattle can eat what they were born to eat: grasses and forage legumes.

Break up the meat-industry behemoths and ban foreign ownership. Decentralize meat production and processing and regulate much more strictly for health and safety.

Such measures would result in better but smaller national supplies of meat and poultry. No problem. Deep reductions in consumption of animal products—especially feedlot- and CAFO-raised meats—have long been needed for nutritional and ecological concerns, most prominently their heavy climatic impact.

For fruits and vegetables, reduce the velocity of production in fields and factories to a humane, ecologically supportable pace that can meet the highest standards for workers’ rights, safety, and economic security. Grow those crops close to the populations who will be eating them—as much as possible in backyard or community gardens and greenhouses.

Done right, localizing vegetable production would not reduce the total output. Vegetables currently occupy only 3 percent of national cropland, so they could easily be dispersed among myriad small plots of land in every state, every community.

What we’ll no longer have, however, is access to every type of fresh vegetable and fruit any day of the year. Eating what’s in season will make a comeback.

Adaptation will be necessary. In northerly regions, vegetables can be grown in simple, inexpensive, unheated greenhouses almost year-round (a practical alternative to the fanciful idea of urban “vertical farming,” which envisions raising crop plants indoors without soil, under artificial light—that is, in botanical intensive care units).

In summer and fall, home and community canning operations could make locally grown produce available all year, as they did in the war years of the 1940s. That would diversify the northerly vegetable diet in winter and spring.

Supplies of staple grain and bean crops, in contrast, come to us from hundreds of millions of acres across vast swaths of rural America. Only a tiny fraction of that production could be localized, but that’s not a problem. Those crops (and products like flour that are made from them) are dry, have long shelf lives, and can be efficiently shipped to every part of the country by rail.

More near-term policies could come through federal legislation. It has been proposed that farm workers’ right to organize should be guaranteed, and a path to citizenship should be available for all essential workers who need one; there should be opportunities for farm workers to becomes independent farmers; and rural transportation and communication systems need improvement.

Now is the time to build a new, more humane, more robust food system on the ruins of the one that has failed us. This nation can have an ample, nutritious food supply without exploiting and endangering the people who produce and process it.

Australian court backs secret trial on East Timor bugging exposure

Mike Head

After weeks of closed-door proceedings, an Australian court ruled on Friday in favour of a federal government application for a virtually secret trial of a lawyer accused of helping to expose Australia’s illegal bugging of East Timor’s cabinet room in 2004, during oil and gas negotiations between the two countries.

The ruling highlights the extraordinary lengths which the Liberal-National Coalition government, assisted by the Labor Party opposition, is going to obscure from public view the operations of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the overseas spy agency that carried out the bugging, and the rest of the US-linked intelligence apparatus.

Above all, this is because the entire network of mass surveillance, cyber warfare and spying operations is directly involved in the escalating US confrontation with China. The Timor bugging itself, which was ordered by the Howard Coalition government, illustrates how governments, at the highest level, utilise this network for anti-democratic operations, completely behind the backs of the population.

Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Supreme Court Judge David Mossop declared that material identified by federal Attorney-General Christian Porter as “national security information” should be kept in camera during the forthcoming trial of Bernard Collaery.

Mossop rejected an attempt by Collaery, a former Liberal Party attorney-general in the ACT, to challenge Porter’s “national security” claim. Collaery faces a possible lengthy jail term for allegedly disclosing evidence of the bugging, produced by his whistle blower client, an ex-ASIS officer identified only as Witness K.

In 2004, the then foreign minister, Alexander Downer, approved an ASIS operation to bug the room used by East Timor’s negotiators during maritime boundary negotiations with Australia.

At stake was not just control over underwater oil and gas reserves worth billions of dollars. By maintaining the lion’s share of the resources, Australian imperialism also retained a grip over the tiny impoverished statelet. East Timor is strategically located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, close to key shipping routes on which China and other Asian countries heavily rely.

It remains unclear exactly how little evidence will be heard in open court. But Collaery’s lawyer, Christopher Flynn, said the ruling would cause “essential elements of the trial” to be closed to the public. “Open justice is an essential part of our legal system, the rights of defendants and of our democracy,” he said outside the court. “This case should be heard in public.”

However, the Labor Party signalled its support for the use of the National Security Information (NSI) Act. Shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, only said Labor would follow the proceedings, supposedly to ensure that Collaery is not denied the right to a fair trial. But the NSI laws are incompatible with fair trials.

The holding of closed-door trials violates the fundamental democratic principle of public jury trials established by centuries of struggle against tyranny, including the English Revolution of the 1640s, which overthrew Charles I and ended the use of the secretive and arbitrary Star Chamber court to suppress political dissent and execute opponents of the regime.

The return to such methods is a warning of the police-state measures to which governments are resorting to block exposure of, and opposition to, the mass spying, diplomatic conspiracies and war preparations being intensified by Washington and its closest allies, such as Australia.

Flynn said “strong evidence” was heard in Collaery’s favour during the pre-trial hearing. These witnesses included Gareth Evans, a former Australian Labor foreign minister, Admiral Chris Barrie, an ex-chief of the defence force, John McCarthy, a former ambassador to the United States, and Anthony Whealy, an ex-judge. The court also heard from former East Timor leaders Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta, Flynn said.

Despite these voices from within the political establishment of both countries, the judge ruled against a public trial. This underscores the far-reaching scope of the legislation invoked by the government, the NSI Act.

It was enacted by the Howard government in 2004, backed by the Labor Party, under the guise of pursuing the “war on terror” launched in 2001. Like all the “anti-terrorism” laws imposed since 2001, the NSI Act goes far beyond terrorist-related activity.

The WSWS warned in 2004 that the NSI Act “permits trials on terrorism, espionage, treason and ‘other security-related’ charges to be held in complete or partial secrecy.” We explained that the Act also facilitated frame-ups: “In closed court sessions, judges can allow government witnesses to testify in disguise via video and, in some circumstances, exclude defendants and their lawyers from trial proceedings.”

The NSI Act defines “national security information” to mean information “that relates to national security or the disclosure of which may affect national security.” The legislation further defines “national security” to mean “Australia’s defence, security, international relations or law enforcement interests.”

This language is vague and sweeping enough to cover anything that might damage the corporate interests of major Australian companies, such as Woodside Petroleum, which had a huge stake in the Timor Sea bonanza, as well as anything that could expose intelligence and military arrangements with the US.

The legislation applies to any “federal criminal proceeding,” so it will cover trials on charges under the unprecedented “foreign interference” laws introduced in 2018. The first such charges have been threatened following the raids conducted last Friday by the domestic spy force, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Federal Police on the home and parliamentary office of the New South Wales state Labor MP, Shaoquett Chaher Moselmane, over his public views opposing the escalating offensive against China.

Apart from outlawing working with a “foreign organisation” to advocate political change, the “foreign interference” laws further criminalise the leaking or publication of any material deemed to damage the country’s military, intelligence or economic interests.

The government is also demanding closed-door proceedings in the trial of an ex-military lawyer, David McBride, who exposed a cover-up of civilian killings and other violations conducted by Australian Special Forces units during the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

McBride’s lawyer, ex-independent senator Nick Xenophon, recently revealed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” television program that Attorney-General Porter had declared as “national security information” 80 percent of the documents involved in the case.

Xenophon said this had blocked the defence lawyers from studying the thousands of pages of documents, except during two-hour sessions, after which they had to hand in their notes. Such a regime makes a mockery of any notion of a fair trial.

These are not the only secret trials. Last year it was revealed that an ex-soldier and intelligence officer, known only as “Witness J,” had been convicted and imprisoned in Canberra for 15 months via a criminal trial that was completely hidden from public knowledge, let alone scrutiny. Prime Minister Scott Morrison then specifically defended the holding of such secret trials.

This assault on basic legal and democratic rights matches the brutal methods being used in the persecution of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. With the backing of the Australian government, he remains incarcerated in a maximum UK prison, facing extradition to the US on “espionage” charges for exposing the war atrocities and anti-democratic conspiracies of the US government and its allies, including those in Canberra.

This offensive goes beyond covering up the past crimes of the military and intelligence apparatus. It is being driven by preparations for even greater crimes. Amid Washington’s increasingly provocative economic and military confrontations against its rivals, particularly China, the Australian ruling elite has taken a front line in the conflict with Beijing.

Royal Mail workers in the UK face jobs massacre

Paul Lee

Royal Mail has announced that 2,000 managers will be made redundant shortly. The restructuring that was promised after the previous CEO Rico Back was sacked has now begun.

The cull in management is in anticipation of broader changes demanded by Royal Mail’s ruthless drive for profits that will lead to upwards of 20,000 postal jobs being lost. This was the estimate of the Communication Workers Union (CWU). However, given that Royal Mail is losing £1 million a day, the jobs carnage will likely be higher still.

In the first phase of restructuring, Royal Mail has said it wants to save £130 million on “people costs” by March 2021. This offensive is being driven by the insatiable demand of shareholders, including many hedge funds, for profit.

It is now a decade since pensions expert John Ralfe commented he believed Royal Mail had become a hedge fund that delivered letters. At the time, only the BBC’s Robert Peston, of all the major media networks, ran with the story. Today, Royal Mail’s investors are rendering this earlier appraisal prophetic.

Over the last few weeks, several press articles have begun to appear revealing the agenda pursued by hedge funds—such as BlackRock, Pictet, Egerton Capital, and Adelphi Capital—which has largely been kept from postal workers.

Management job cuts will mainly fall on “back-office” roles, including finance, commercial and IT, and will be followed by massive redundancies from the rest of the workforce. This is in preparation for the breakup of Royal Mail.

Presently, Royal Mail Group has two arms, the UK Parcels, International and Letters (UKPIL) division, and General Logistics Systems (GLS), which was purchased by Royal Mail in 1999. There have been numerous articles in the press calling for GLS to be hived off and sold. As Daniel Roeska, from Bernstein, said, “We believe it would be in shareholders’ best interests to split the company in two and let shareholders themselves decide on the future of the two businesses.

“If GLS stays within the Group, we see a substantial risk that cash flows from it or sale proceeds will be consumed in part by the UK Parcels and Letters transformation. In its current form, Royal Mail Group is worth less than the sum of its parts.”

Selling off GLS contains great dangers for Royal Mail and could weaken the company in the face of its competitors. However, this restructuring is profit-driven and also parcel driven. As one writer put it, “no one noticed that they did not get their credit card statements on Saturdays during the coronavirus restricted operating times, but they still got their parcels, and that is what consumers generally want.”

If GLS were to be sold off, it would pave the way for the rest of the business to be split up. This would result in the Universal Service Order (USO), guaranteeing six-day delivery anywhere in the country, being partially discarded, the loss-making letters part of UKPIL being separated off, with the government picking up the tab, and the creation of a new parcel division.

The talk of restructuring has attracted several financial vultures, including the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský, who recently purchased an 8 percent stake in the company. Křetínský, known as the “Czech sphinx”, took a £150 million stake in Royal Mail. The move has heightened speculation that he will launch a takeover bid.

Like many capitalists from Eastern Europe, Křetínský became rich following the sell-off of state assets in the Czech Republic. As Jérôme Lefilliâtre noted in Libération, “A key deal for him was the acquisition in 2013 of the Eustream gas pipeline in Slovakia, which transports Russian gas to Western Europe. This was a very good financial coup, bringing in several hundred millions of euros a year and giving him the means to further invest and grow. His journey is punctuated by scandals and dubious business deals, which have regularly erupted near him without incriminating him completely or personally. The term ‘second-generation Czech oligarchs’ refers to influential Czech businessmen, who are very active in the economy, the media and politics, and who do not come from the generation that made their fortune at the time of the privatisations of the 1990s, but later, from the 2000s onwards. Daniel Křetínský is one of them.”

A by-product of this restructuring has been that postal workers health has been put at risk. Already, four postal workers have died from COVID-19 because of the lack of safety measures at Royal Mail offices obsessed with maintaining profit margins at all costs.

Concerns over the growing number of COVID-19 cases have led to multiple walkouts by postal workers at sites across the country, amid reports of inadequate safety procedures. Royal Mail finally admitted that six workers at the Barnsley depot tested positive for the coronavirus.

When postal workers heard about these cases, they walked out on strike, closing the office for fear of further outbreaks. Royal Mail has intimated that there could be further cases. A spokeswoman said, “We are aware of a total of six positive confirmed cases of coronavirus at Barnsley’s Royal Mail sorting office with further cases possible as investigations and staff testing continues. Several staff are self-isolating… The building remains closed for deep cleaning before reopening is considered”.

Royal Mail trotted out its usual lie that it “takes the health and safety of its colleagues, its customers and the local communities in which we operate very seriously.” But postal workers at the Barnsley office had been complaining for months that proper safety equipment had not been provided and that the use of face masks has not been made compulsory. Many workers have now booked independent tests for the virus because they no longer trust Royal Mail with their health.

The struggle by postal workers for better protection against COVID-19 is a vital issue, but it is now bound up indissolubly with the fight over job losses and changes to working conditions.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the CWU offered up postal workers as a “fifth emergency service” and to work with management and the Johnson government “in the interests of the nation.” But while postal workers were being fed this fantasy by the CWU, at enormous cost to their health, Royal Mail was looking after the interests of its shareholders—making substantial profits from its parcel business. In the last three months, this has seen the share price skyrocket.

The CWU’s demobilising of opposition to the attacks of Royal Mail management has now emboldened the hedge funds to demand more, to get as much profit out of Royal Mail as possible, bleed it dry, and then move on to the next target.

To take forward the struggle in defence of postal workers’ health and to oppose the onslaught on jobs and pay demands the formation of rank-and-file committees.

These committees must begin to coordinate a company-wide counter-offensive, rejecting the CWU’s call for collaboration with management and take the international class struggle as their starting point. Against plans to carve-up and hive off the company, the demand must be for Royal Mail to be nationalised without compensation and placed under workers’ control.

New report exposes staggering level of social inequality in Canada

Louis Girard

A report released on June 17 by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) reveals staggering levels of social inequality in Canada. Often portrayed in the corporate media and official politics as a “kinder,” more “progressive” society than the United States, Canadian capitalism is exposed in the study as an oligarchic social order.

According to the PBO, the share of wealth held by the top one percent of Canadians is 25.6 percent. This is almost double the estimate of 13.7 percent given by Statistics Canada.

The following table from the PBO report shows the distribution of total wealth—the sum of financial, real estate and other assets, minus all liabilities—for 2016.

The first column in the table shows a 20 percent slice of the population (or quantile) in the wealth pyramid; the second column shows the share of total wealth held by that quantile according to Statistics Canada; and the third column the share of the same quantile according to the PBO study.

According to the new PBO estimates, the top one percent in Canada owns about as much as the poorest 80 percent. The upper middle class and petty bourgeoisie, the 9 per cent immediately following the top one per cent, own 30.8 per cent of the wealth.

The millionaires and billionaires in the richest 10 per cent of the population own a staggering $5.829 trillion.

Beyond this top 10 per cent, which requires a net family fortune of $1.4 million to be part of, the share of wealth drops drastically.

The remaining 90 per cent of the population, the vast majority, owns a mere 43.6 per cent of the total wealth, down sharply from Statistics Canada’s estimate of 52.4 percent. The poorest 40 percent have almost nothing (1.2 percent).

These new figures give the lie to the ongoing efforts of Canada’s ruling class to project the image of a “fairer” society than the “rapacious dollar republic.”

While in the United States, the world’s most unequal advanced capitalist country, the three richest people own as much as the poorest half of the population, in Canada, 44 billionaires held in 2019 a combined fortune of $141 billion, slightly more than the poorest 40 percent of Canada's population.

The difference in wealth inequality between the two countries is purely relative. On both sides of the border, the fundamental trend is towards an ever-widening wealth gap between the working class, on the one hand, and the capitalist oligarchy and the most privileged sections of the middle class, on the other. This is a global process. According to international charity Oxfam, the richest one percent of the globe’s population possesses twice as much wealth as the poorest 6.9 billion.

The closer one gets to the extremes, the wider the wealth gap becomes. The richest 0.01 per cent, just 1,500 Canadian families, hold a combined $574 billion, compared to $128 billion for the poorest 40 per cent—more than 6 million families.

The vast wealth gap has immediate and devastating consequences for people’s lives. The poorest sections of society are more likely to suffer from health problems, receive a substandard education, and die many years earlier than their ultra-wealthy counterparts.

The more accurate, and damning, picture of the profound social inequalities generated by Canadian capitalism emerges from a closer analysis of the available data on wealth distribution.

The PBO explained its methodology by comparing it to that used by Statistics Canada in its 2016 Survey of Wealth Distribution, where the wealth of Canada's richest family was estimated at “only” 27 million—this in a country known for its many billionaires.

Statistics Canada’s gross “error,” according to the PBO, stemmed from the fact that its survey was based on a questionnaire. Knowing that the wealthy generally shun such questionnaires, Statistics Canada sought to compensate by overrepresenting the regions where rich families are known to reside, but this manifestly proved to be insufficient.

The PBO adopted a more objective approach for its own study, based on the work of economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, who deservedly have an international reputation as researchers on social inequality. The model developed by the PBO cross-references figures from Statistics Canada’s latest survey with the National Balance Sheet Accounts (household financial statements) and Canadian Business magazine’s list of the 100 “Richest People” (where the lowest entry had wealth of $875 million). This data is all publicly available.

According to the PBO, its study was motivated by the need to determine the financial impact of various proposals made during the 2019 federal election. One of these was an election promise of the social-democratic NDP to impose a one percent tax on the fortunes of families worth more than $20 million. In fact, it is the derisory nature of such a measure—which the pro-business, pro-austerity NDP had no real intention of implementing anyway—that emerges from the study.

The accumulation of wealth in very few hands at the top of society and widespread poverty and misery among the general population are products of the capitalist profit system. But it would be wrong merely to see objective and impersonal economic processes at work. The dramatic acceleration of social inequality over the past four decades, which is not captured by the snapshot provided by the PBO report, is the result of the brutal austerity agenda imposed by the ruling class and all of its political parties. The immense social wealth generated by the labor of working people is channeled to the top of the social pyramid through a combination of tax cuts for big business and the rich, privatization and deregulation, the gutting of public services, and constant attacks on wages, benefits and pensions.

This process has accelerated with the coronavirus crisis, which was used as a pretext for a massive bailout of big business and the financial aristocracy by the Trudeau Liberal government at a cost of over $650 billion. Between March 16 and May 16, the first two official months of the COVID-19 pandemic that claimed thousands of lives and plunged millions into unemployment, Canada’s top 5 billionaires saw their fortunes increase by nine percent, according to Forbes magazine.

Underscoring the unanimity within the ruling elite on this policy, the Trudeau government received the crucial support of the trade unions and NDP as it carried out this unprecedented transfer of wealth, which will sooner rather than later lead to a new round of savage attacks on the working class. This renewed onslaught on working people will be justified by repeating the false refrain, fully contradicted by the PBO figures, that “there is no money” for critical social services and wage increases.

The widening wealth gap in Canada as well as in the US and elsewhere points to an increasingly oligarchic society. The relentless attacks on the living standards of workers are accompanied by an assault on democratic rights at home, and a turn to militarism and imperialist aggression abroad.

To oppose this, the working class must mobilize as an independent political force in the struggle for social equality and for a workers’ government that will reorganize the economy along socialist lines to meet the social needs of all.

US Supreme Court upholds abortion access, eliminates executive watchdog and opens federal death chambers

John Burton

Traditionally, the US Supreme Court issues significant rulings the week before the summer recess begins with the Fourth of July holiday. This week will be no exception.

On Monday, the court narrowly upheld the right to abortion access in a decision widely feared to be headed in the other direction. In other rulings, however, the court strengthened the unitary executive by curtailing congressional power to create a watchdog, and opened the death chamber door for dozens of federal executions, the first three scheduled for next month.

In Monday’s most publicized ruling, June Medical Services v. Russo, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to strike down a reactionary Louisiana law that would have regulated all of the state’s abortion clinics out of existence by requiring their doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

Joined by the three other Supreme Court “liberals,” Justice Stephen Breyer ruled that the Louisiana law was “almost word-for-word identical” to a Texas law the Supreme Court addressed in 2016. That majority decision was also written by Breyer.

Breyer demonstrated that the state’s hospital privileges requirement was a transparent pretext to close clinics for ideological reasons. The evidence presented in the trial court established that “abortion in Louisiana has been extremely safe, with particularly low rates of serious complications.”

Clinic staff and physicians testified that it proved “necessary to transfer patients to a hospital far less than once a year, or less than one per several thousand patients.” Physicians on the hospital staff admit those rare patients that experience a complication. In sum, whether the clinic “physician has admitting privileges is not relevant to the patient’s care.”

The Louisiana law, like the Texas law struck down four years earlier, had “the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion.” Breyer wrote. This “undue burden” violated the constitutional right to abortion access established in 1973’s Rowe v. Wade ruling.

Despite Monday’s victory, which apparently will allow Louisiana’s three remaining clinics to remain open for the time being, efforts to choke off abortion access have succeeded in large areas of the South and the Midwest. The states of Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia have only one clinic each. More challenges, including legislation to define a fetus with a viable heartbeat as a living human being, are currently working their way through the courts.

The 2016 decision was rendered after the death of Antonin Scalia left a vacancy. Trump replaced him with Neil Gorsuch, and then Anthony Kennedy, the justice who provided the decisive vote for striking down the Texas law in 2016, was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. Both Trump judges were expected to vote against abortion access, and they did not disappoint.

The changes on the court were expected by many to create the five-vote bloc that could open the floodgates for state laws to deny access to abortion. However, this was, for the present, frustrated by Chief Justice John Roberts, who provided the deciding margin in Monday’s ruling, not because he agreed with Breyer’s reasoning, but out of an adherence to “stare decisis,” the doctrine that precedents should be followed in all but the most exceptional cases.

Roberts’ position suggests that the overruling of Rowe v. Wade, a passion of the Republican right, may require more changes of personnel on the high court. Some have hoped publicly for the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that Trump can replace her with a third anti-abortion judge.

Regardless, the Supreme Court has become a focal point of the 2020 presidential campaign. Chief Justice Roberts, whose own ideological leanings are extremely conservative, is maneuvering between the two factions on the court with the goal of protecting the institution’s credibility, which has been in tatters since it stole the election for George W. Bush 20 years ago.

Chief Justice Robert’s conduct is reminiscent of Justice Owen Roberts—no relation—an appointee of Herbert Hoover who regularly sided with the reactionary “four horsemen” to block New Deal legislation. In response, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed legislation to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices so as to create a new pro-New Deal majority. But Roberts unexpectedly voted in 1937 to uphold the constitutionality of a minimum wage law, which became known as “the switch in time that saved nine.”

Today, however, US capitalism lacks the resilience it had in the 1930s, and petty maneuvers will not save it from its own internal contradictions.

In a second ruling, the Supreme Court, again by a 5–4 vote, invalidated congressional legislation aimed at protecting the director of the federal agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis to regulate subprime mortgages and other forms of consumer debt that crashed the world economy. The legislation said the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could not be removed by the president absent good cause.

Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, joined by the four right-wing justices, found that the legislative effort to shield the director from political pressure violated the separation of powers. The decision provides a sweeping rationale to defang congressional watchdogs and represents a further slide toward the unconstrained “unitary executive” coveted by the extreme right.

Finally, the Supreme Court denied by a 7–2 vote a petition for certiorari by four condemned inmates to review a 2–1 lower court decision that rejected their challenge to the legality of federal execution protocols. Justices Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor voted in favor of the Supreme Court hearing the case, which requires four votes. All the others, including Breyer and Elena Kagan, voted against. There are no opinions explaining the reasoning.

“Even as people across the country are demanding that leaders rethink crime, punishment and justice, the government is barreling ahead with its plans to carry out the first federal executions in 17 years,” Ruth Friedman, an attorney for Daniel Lee, the first inmate scheduled to be executed next month, said in a statement.

The whole affair is ghoulish and morbid from top to bottom. Life sentences without the possibility of parole insulate society from truly dangerous persons. Capital punishment continues to exist to terrify workers, who are the exclusive victims of the barbaric, antiquated and arbitrary practice.

Carrying out a Trump agenda to reinstate and accelerate executions, dating back to the notorious frame-ups of the “Central Park Five,” Attorney General William P. Barr announced last summer that the United States Department of Justice will kill inmates by injecting a single drug, pentobarbital. After considering evidence, the lower court ruled that the new protocol violated the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which requires that executions be carried out “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence is imposed.” State law requires a three-drug cocktail.

Two appellate judges newly appointed by Trump reversed, reinstating the executions. One ruled that the statute referred only to the general method of execution: in this case lethal injection as opposed to hanging or electrocution, for example. The other Trump justice ruled on a separate ground, asserting that the statute referred only to broad state laws and not to the specific execution protocols. Such is the small change of sophistry on which lives can turn!

The federal government has carried out three executions since restoring the death penalty in 1988, the last in 2003. There are now 62 prisoners on federal death row, and the door to the execution chamber is wide open for them.