US preparing major ground offensive against Iraqi city of Mosul

Thomas Gaist

The US military will direct a major military offensive against the Iraqi city of Mosul beginning as early as April, an official with the Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM) told reporters in a conference call Thursday.

The plan calls for the US military forces in Iraq to prepare air, artillery and ground attacks against the densely populated city of 1.4 million, where an estimated 2,000 fighters affiliated with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are reported to be entrenched.

The main body of the US-overseen Iraqi expeditionary force will be comprised of five brigades of Iraqi recruits, who will receive training at US-run camps before the operation begins, the CENTCOM official said.

US military advisors and special operations detachments will accompany the Iraqi troops, the official said.

The offensive will mark a bloody new phase of Operation Inherent Resolve, which has organized nearly 2,500 US and coalition strikes against Iraq and Syria and deployed some 2,600 US ground troops to Iraq since it began in August 2014.

Mosul fell to ISIS in June of last year, when a force of approximately 1,500 Islamist fighters routed Iraqi government forces with 15 times as many troops. Many residents, who had faced sectarian-based repression by the US-backed regime in Baghdad, welcomed the expulsion of its forces from the city. In a debacle for US policy in the region, ISIS extended its grip over at least a third of the country as US-trained and equipped security forces melted away.

Prior to the invasion by ISIS, Mosul, a city of more than a million people, had already been devastated by the US war and occupation that began in 2003. Approximately half of the city’s population, more than 500,000 people, fled as ISIS consolidated its control over northern Iraq last summer.

Washington’s plan to retake the city with some 25,000 Iraqi government troops directed and led by US “advisors” and backed by American fire-power threatens to unleash the kind of barbaric siege that was inflicted upon the population of Fallujah under the US military occupation.

The plans for US ground forces to fight alongside front-line Iraqi troops, directing strikes and providing combat support, stands in direct contradiction to President Barack Obama’s assurances last year that his administration “will not be sending US troops back into combat in Iraq.”

US and allied forces launched a fresh round of some 25 airstrikes against targets across Iraq and Syria on Wednesday and Thursday, pummeling targets near Haditha, Kirkuk, Mosul, Sinjar, Tal Afar, Al Hasakah and Kobani.

Even as the Pentagon was unveiling the plans for a siege of Mosul, the US and Turkey announced an agreement to arm and train new battalions of “moderate” Syrian “rebels” at the rate of 5,000 fighters a year.

While Washington claims that these forces are being prepared to combat ISIS, both Turkey and the so-called “rebels” are preparing another sectarian-based offensive aimed at overturning the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Whatever differences exist between Washington and Ankara, the move threatens a further escalation of the US imperialist intervention in the region and of the bloodbath in Syria.

An initial deployment of more than 400 US troops will oversee the training programs, Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby confirmed, adding that the total may increase into the thousands.

The Syrian militants will receive instruction in light arms and “more sophisticated” military specialties at US-run camps in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, in preparation for operations backed by US air and ground support. The Obama administration has already begun the delivery of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and equipped with radios for calling in US airstrikes.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and leading strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has placed the coming Iraq offensive within the context of a strategy for a wave of US military operations in the Middle East, Africa and beyond, in a paper published last week, titled “Boots on the Ground, The Realities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.”

Cordesman argues that the US military must learn from the experiences of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in which large US occupation forces won tactical victories while failing to enable local militaries to “stand on their own.”

The US must turn to lighter, more flexible deployments to maintain control over urban centers and vital natural resources, as central governments fragment and rebel militias increasingly dominate the hinterland, Cordesman argues.

“The ability to rapidly insert small cadres of ‘stiffeners’ like Special Forces, Rangers, and Marine combat teams may be more critical than to try to move large U.S. combat units,” he writes.

Such “high mobility strike forces” would bolster the conventional armies of “host countries” with logistical support, airstrikes and tailored use of the most advanced weapons systems, thus insuring a modicum of stability in countries of critical importance to the US government.

Indicating possibilities being considered inside the Obama administration for future interventions in Iraq and Syria, Cordesman argues that the US must develop joint forces capable of “controlling populations” and securing “key parts of the economy” amid conditions of “lasting attrition,” praising the recent success of operational, mentor and liaison teams (OMLTs) in Afghanistan in providing “forward assistance in urban warfare tactics.”

Syriza capitulates to the EU

Robert Stevens

The Greek government has repudiated its election pledges, agreeing Friday to a four-month extension of the existing loans and austerity programme dictated by “troika” of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

After nearly a month of negotiations with the political representatives of the European banks, Syriza has accepted the conditions demanded by the troika. The Eurogroup statement noted the agreement remained conditional on Greece presenting, on Monday, a “first list of reform measures, based on the current arrangement.”

Syriza’s proposals must be approved the following day by the Eurogroup and the troika, who will “provide a first view whether this is sufficiently comprehensive to be a valid starting point for a successful conclusion of the review.”

April was set as a deadline for Greece to complete a final list of austerity measures, which will be “further specified and then agreed” by the troika.

Without Greek compliance with these orders it will not receive billions of euros in further loans it requires in order to avoid defaulting on its debt of €320 billion.

Opening the press conference following five hours of talks, Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said Greece had given “their unequivocal commitment to honour their financial obligations” to creditors. He stressed, “Economic recovery cannot be put in danger, fiscal stability cannot be put in danger, financial sector stability cannot be put in danger.”

Before the Eurogroup meeting began, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a press conference with French President François Hollande. She insisted that the Greek government had still not moved far enough in accepting the brutal cuts agreed to by the previous New Democracy-led government.

Merkel warned, “There is a need for significant improvements in the substance of what is being discussed so that we can vote on it in the German Bundestag, for example next week.”

As negotiations were taking place, at least a billion euros were withdrawn from Greece’s banks due to fear that no agreement would be reached. A reporter from Greece’s SKAI TV commented, “They came here determined to have a political solution, otherwise on Tuesday it would have been necessary to enforce capital controls [on Greek banks].”

Syriza’s agreement to continue enforcing austerity measures under the dictate of the European banks is the inevitable outcome of its class position and social interests.

Commenting on the political and social backlash Syriza will face, Pavlos Tzimas, a Greek political commentator, said, “Very heavy concessions have been made, politically poisonous concessions for the government. It’s going to be a crash test on the domestic front for the government.”

Immediately following the press conference German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble spoke in similar terms: “The Greeks certainly will have a difficult time to explain the deal to their voters. As long as the programme isn’t successfully completed, there will be no payout.”

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis earlier signalled that Syriza was ready to accept virtually anything. Athens had “gone not an extra mile [but] an extra 10 miles” in its proposal for the extension, he said. Other euro zone nations would have to meet Greece “not half way, but one-fifth of the way” in order to reach agreement.

The announcement on Friday followed by only one day the German governments’ emphatic rejection Thursday of a proposal by the Greek government for an extension of its previous credit agreement with the EU.

In that proposal, presented by Varoufakis, Greece insisted that the “new government is committed to a broader and deeper reform process aimed at durably improving growth and employment prospects, achieving debt sustainability and financial stability.” In the vaguest terms, it called for “enhancing social fairness and mitigating the significant social cost of the ongoing crisis.”

As soon as the text of the proposal from Varoufakis was made public, the German Finance Ministry rejected it. Financial Times writer Peter Spiegel pointed out that Germany took particular exception to language that “seems to leave main points open to negotiation” by stating that the “purpose of the requested six-month extension of the Agreement’s duration” is “to agree the mutually acceptable financial and administrative terms…”

For Europe’s ruling elite, there are no “mutually acceptable financial and administrative terms,” only an unconditional surrender.

Reuters published a document it said, “describes Germany’s position” in response to Varoufakis’s letter. It states that Greece’s request “opens immense room for interpretation” and includes no clear commitment to successfully conclude the current programme, and it falls short of a clear freeze of Greek measures.”

The document spelled out the precise wording that would be acceptable. It stated, “We need a clear and convincing commitment by Greece, which may just contain three short and well understandable sentences: ‘We apply for the extension of the current programme, making use of built-in flexibility. We will agree with the institutions any changes in measures from the existing MoU. And we aim at successfully concluding the programme’.”

In the end, this is what Syriza agreed to. It balked only at returning with an agreement that explicitly called on it to impose the hated “Memorandum of Understanding”—the list of austerity measures originally agreed to as part of the loan agreement. Syriza was allowed to have the “troika” renamed as the “institutions” and the “Memorandum of Understanding – MoU” recast as the “Master Financial Assistance Facility Agreement” (MFAFA)

However, the MFAFA, the official name of the loan agreement, includes language requiring that Greece “comply with the measures set out in the MoU,” that is, with the austerity measures dictated by the European banks.

The abject capitulation of the Syriza government exposes the utter political bankruptcy of the myriad petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations throughout the world who just a few weeks ago hailed the electoral victory of Tsipras as an earth-shaking event. Far from denouncing Syriza’s betrayal, these groups will work overtime conjuring up excuses and justifications. But broad sections of the Greek working class will see the agreement for what it is: a cynical and cowardly act of political treachery.

Guantanamo in America

Andre Damon

In the years following the beginning of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” a series of revelations have exposed the horrific torture practices used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, CIA “black sites” and other prisons abroad, as a matter of state policy.

These barbaric practices, which were documented in stomach-churning detail in the CIA torture report released last year, are rooted in the aims of US imperialism to plunder and dominate the world, and to suppress by force all opposition to its predatory aims. But the same ruling class that is waging imperialist war abroad is waging a class war at home, presiding over the enormous enrichment of the financial oligarchy at the expense of the working class.

There is no hard line between the foreign and domestic policy, a fact that was given concreteness this week in the revelation, published in the Guardiannewspaper, that one of the top interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had pioneered the methods he used at the torture camp working as a detective in Chicago.

According to the Guardian, Richard Zuley obtained at least one wrongful murder conviction by methods that he would later use at Guantanamo Bay: Prolonged shackling in “stress positions,” threats against family members, threats that the accused could be subject to the death penalty if they did not confess and demands that those under torture implicate themselves and others.

The newspaper cites the example of one Chicago woman who Zuley kept shackled to a wall for more than 24 hours, until she confessed that she and her ex-boyfriend had committed a murder. She remains in prison to this day. Another, Lathierial Boyd, was released in 2013 after spending 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Zuley’s background and his outstanding ability to extract confessions was noticed by administrators at Guantanamo Bay, who set him to work in a team of torturers at the prison.

Among Zuley’s victims, according to the Guardian, was Ould Slahi, author of the recently-published book Guantánamo Diary, in which he recounts being tortured, sexually assaulted and beaten to within an inch of his life at the prison, to the point where he would sign any confession his torturers would put before him.

The revelations, declared the Guardian, express “a continuum between police abuses in urban America” and the torture perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. The case of Zuley is hardly an aberration, however. The American ruling class presides over a country that incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other in the world, where the brutal treatment of prisoners is a daily reality.

A recent report from the ACLU, for example, documents the horrific conditions facing over 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the US prison system, including the mentally ill, mentally handicapped and children. The barbaric practice has been declared a form of torture by the United Nations.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 95 percent of those subjected to solitary confinement reported developing symptoms of psychological illness, such as panic or anxiety attacks and hallucinations. In Texas alone, there are more than 100 prisoners who have spent more than 20 years in tiny cells for 22 hours a day, with virtually no direct contact with any other human beings.

Domestic prisons, which are increasingly being used to hold those accused of terrorism, often as a result of entrapment by intelligence agencies, are likewise introducing rules similar to those in force abroad. Next week, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the body that oversees civilian penitentiaries, will implement a new rule that, in the words of law professor David M. Shapiro “all but prevents prisoners incarcerated in the United States and suspected of connections to terrorism from speaking with their families.”

Shapiro notes that another set of recently-introduced methods “make an unprecedented inroad into the attorney-client privilege, permitting federal agents to intercept communications between certain prisoners deemed a threat to national security and their attorneys.” He adds that prisons in New York and Colorado have already used these methods.

The prison system, which is topped off by the continued barbaric practice of state-sanctioned execution, is only part of a broader apparatus, including a massive and militarized police force that kills with impunity and an intelligence system that spies on the population in violation of basic democratic rights. Whether under Democrats or Republicans, Bush or Obama, the state functions ever more openly as an instrument of violence and repression.

If the methods utilized at Guantanamo and elsewhere represent in part the “export” of techniques used within the US, it is also true that the brutal methods honed by the ruling class abroad will be and are being transferred ever more directly back into the United States, applied to suppress the growth of political opposition to war and social inequality.

The reemergence of torture, forced confession, and other “medieval” practices is part of the repudiation of democratic legal and political forms of society under the pressure of growing social inequality.

The American financial aristocracy, which makes its wealth through fraud and swindling, and the degraded thugs they hire to carry out their dirty work in prisons, precincts, and torture chambers, see the legal norms of due process and equality under the law as mere impediments to their wanton plunder, violence and murder.

Freezing temperatures spell misery and danger to America’s poor

Jeff Lusanne & Evan Blake

Record low temperatures and wind chills across the eastern United States have caused at least a hundred deaths so far this winter, particularly among the most vulnerable sections of society, including the extremely poor and the elderly. For the millions of homeless men, women, and children in America, each day is a struggle for survival.

Three recent deaths have brought the number of cold-related fatalities in Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is located, to at least 21 this winter. During the 2013-14 winter season, there were 32 cold-related fatalities in Cook County alone.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with homeless people in Chicago this week.

“Winter is an everyday struggle,” said Matt, who has been homeless for over a year. “The temperatures and wind chills below zero are really, really bad for people in my situation,” he said. “Sometimes it gets to the point where your hands and your feet—they burn, and they hurt. I got frostbite on my toe last year because I was sleeping, and overnight, my foot ended up outside my blanket, and one of my toes turned black.”

Matt

For over six years, he had worked as a floor hand on oil rigs in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, as well as the Gulf of Mexico. Last September, he moved to Chicago as his mother was dying of cancer, and began drinking upon her passing away. He entered rehab, which cost him his entire life savings, so that he left “with nothing but my sobriety—no money. I’ve been living on the street, staying away from drinking, but trying to get enough money for food and shelter.”

He spends mornings at O'Hare International Airport, where yesterday the normal and wind chill temperatures were at their absolute lowest this winter (-8 degrees, -20 with wind chill). From 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. he made a mere $6 while soliciting travelers.

“Everyday I'm trying to get the $15 for a room at a men's only hotel nearby. It's a cheap room; a little cubicle with drywall and the ceiling is chicken wire. The big shelter—Pacific Garden Mission—is ridiculous. They force religion on you, you can't eat unless you go to church. There is theft, fights, body lice, and bed bugs. Sometimes it is so overcrowded that you have to sleep on the floor,” he said.

“I've done job training, and temp services, but nothing's come out of it. This block—with the Chicago Board of Trade—has big money. But the guys in the $3,000 suits will only hand you a dollar. I get helped more by lower middle class people than well-off people.”

Ronda and Dan are married, and live in a tent outside. On cold nights, their only respite comes from piling up layers of blankets. Dan said that “The worst part is getting up and leaving.”

Ronda

Like many, they find the city's homeless shelters overcrowded, dangerous, and unhealthy. For warmth during the day, they go to the libraries, and on bitter cold nights they occasionally ride the trains all night. Dan noted that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has placed signs at the end of each line prohibiting riders from re-boarding trains going the opposite direction, unless they exit and pay to reenter. A significant number of homeless people in Chicago ride the 24-hour Red and Blue Lines to stay warm.

Thursday was the coldest morning in Chicago in 79 years, and temperatures are expected to continue at record lows. The first week of February brought Winter Storm Linus, which was the third heaviest snowstorm on record in Detroit and the fifth heaviest on record in Chicago.

The National Weather Service has issued wind chill warnings across the entire Midwest and Northeast regions, extending as far south as Tennessee and Georgia.

A state of emergency was declared in Tennessee Monday due to extreme cold weather, with sub-zero temperatures and snowfall across the state, and icy conditions on many roads. There have been ten confirmed deaths in the state attributable to the cold weather, including five from hypothermia and four due to motor vehicle accidents on icy roads.

Douglas King, 64, was found dead on Wednesday from hypothermia near East 11th Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, roughly two hours after he was turned away from a nearby homeless shelter, allegedly for acting belligerent. The same day, an unidentified 48-year-old man was also found dead from hypothermia in Shelby County. On Thursday, a 64-year-old woman and 69-year-old man in Henry County and an 85-year-old man in Sequatchie County were all found dead from hypothermia.

The tenth death this week in Tennessee was a male dialysis patient who was unable to receive treatment in Hickman County. There were over 15,000 residents without power throughout Tennessee Thursday afternoon, down from 33,000 on Wednesday. With continued mass power outages amid the ongoing storm, the weather-related death toll is expected to rise significantly in Tennessee and throughout the country.

In Lexington, Kentucky, James Clifton, 56, was found dead on Tuesday in a deserted mobile home, with blankets being his only access to heat. On Sunday, 24-year-old Madalyn Suchor, a nurse at the University of Kentucky hospital, was found dead outside her apartment.

Australian government launches vicious attack on human rights commissioner

Will Morrow

The Australian government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded to last week’s release of a Human Rights Commission (HRC) report exposing the appalling conditions facing child refugees in detention by launching a vicious political attack on the commission and its chairwoman, Gillian Triggs.

The HRC report, “The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention,” is based on interviews with hundreds of refugee children incarcerated in the detention camps run by the Australian government on Christmas Island and Nauru. It provides damning evidence of the catastrophic impact of the illegal detention policies of successive Coalition and Labor governments.

The report concluded that “the laws, policies and practices of Labor and Coalition Governments are in serious breach of the rights guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” It called for a Royal Commission into the detention of child refugees.

Speaking in parliament on February 12, the day after tabling the report, Abbott declared that “it would be a lot easier to respect the Human Rights Commission if it did not engage in what are transparent stitch-ups like the one released the other day.” He explicitly rejected the call for a Royal Commission. In an interview with 3AW Radio host Neil Mitchell, Abbott declared that the HRC should be “ashamed of itself.”

While refusing to respond to a single issue raised by the report, Abbott claimed that the HRC’s decision to conduct the inquiry, months after Labor lost the 2013 federal election, was determined by partisan political aims of attacking the Coalition. As Triggs herself noted, however, the data collected in the report covers children detained for over a year—spanning both governments.

Abbott’s attack let loose an extraordinary and vindictive witch-hunt against the commission and against Triggs herself by other government ministers and the Murdoch media. Coalition MP George Christensen declared that Triggs “has effectively sidelined herself and the HRC from having any credibility with the Abbott government... she needs to tender her resignation.” Liberal backbencher Andrew Nicolic also called on Triggs to resign, saying her position was “untenable.”

Right-wing Murdoch shock-jock commentator Andrew Bolt claimed Triggs had “betrayed” refugees and that “the best she could now do for them is resign as president of the taxpayer-funded Australian Human Rights Commission and hand over to someone not so obviously an activist.” Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph tabloid launched a personal smear-campaign with an article containing lurid allegations about Triggs’ treatment of her severely disabled daughter.

A February 13 article in the Age newspaper revealed that the Abbott government had spent the previous months doing everything it could to suppress the report. After receiving the HRC report last November, the Abbott government delayed tabling it in parliament until the very last day required by law. Over this time, the government placed immense pressure on Triggs to resign. According to the Age, an official acting on behalf of Attorney-General George Brandis orally requested to Triggs to resign, without providing any reason, and suggested that “some other position” would be made available if she did so.

This witch-hunt is a crude attempt to silence Triggs and any opposition to the government’s anti-refugee policies more broadly. In the wake of these events, Australian Bar Association president Fiona McLeod SC and Law Council of Australia president Duncan McConnel published a joint statement declaring the campaign against Triggs and the HRC as “unprecedented” and “alarming.” It stated that “personal criticism directed at her or at any judicial or quasi-judicial officer fulfilling the duties of public office as required by law is an attack upon the independence and integrity of the Commission and undermines confidence in our system of justice and human rights protection.”

The extraordinary campaign against Triggs is aimed at deflecting attention from the findings of the HRC report, which included:

* At the time of the report’s completion, there were 584 children detained in onshore centres, another 179 on Nauru and 304 on Christmas Island. Of these, 56 were unaccompanied by any guardian. 204 were aged 2–4, 336 were primary-school age, and another 153 were infants. From January 2013 to March 2014, 128 children were born in detention. The average detention time for both children and adults was over a year.

* From January 2013 to March 2014, 128 children committed desperate acts of self-harm. Another 171 children threatened to do so. The age of the children involved ranged between 12 and 17 years. In total, 105 children were assessed by the government’s own psychological team as being of “high imminent risk” or “moderate risk” of suicide or self-harm and required ongoing monitoring. Some 34 percent of the detained children were defined as having mental illness.

* The living arrangements for many families consists of a single 3 x 2.5 metre shipping container “room,” to which the children are confined for most or all of the day. Asked to give three words to describe their detention, 58 percent of the children used the words “sad, unhappy, depressing, mentally affecting, crazy making,” another 20 percent said “Nothing to do/boring/watching time/frustrating/no school,” and 20 percent used the word “hopeless.”

* In response to the question of why they felt unsafe in detention, 31 percent referred to fighting among refugees, another 24 percent referred to desperate protests involving self-harm by detainees, and another 28 percent said they or other people around them were mentally unwell.

The government’s response to the report’s conclusion that it was in breach of international conventions highlights the utter hypocrisy of Canberra’s “human rights” diplomacy. Australian governments, Labor and Coalition, have repeatedly supported the US in its use of bogus “human rights” pretexts to mount diplomatic provocations and military interventions. These include the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing regime-change operation in Syria, and the new US-led war in the Middle East.

Yet, when the official human rights watch-dog in Australia demonstrates that governments, past and present, are brazenly flouting basic democratic rights and international law, a political campaign is waged to denigrate its chairperson. If a similar sequence of events occurred in a country that had come into the cross-hairs of US and Australian imperialism, it would be cited the pretext for regime change.

The Labor opposition’s response is no less cynical. Immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the attack on her was “outrageous” and a case of “shooting the messenger.” Yet Labor is just as responsible for the heinous treatment of refugees, which is also documented in the HRC report. The previous Gillard Labor government reopened the Pacific Island gulags on Manus Island and Nauru, and declared that asylum seekers would never reach Australia. Indefinite detention in these hell-holes is being used to discourage other refugees from exercising their basic democratic right to claim asylum in Australia.

While the HCR report refers only to the detention of children and families, the mandatory detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru violates international law. The horrors facing asylum seekers, both children and adults, are a direct consequence of these conscious bipartisan policies, which are being used to divert the immense social tensions within Australia into reactionary xenophobic channels.

Polish trade unions end miners’ strike

Markus Salzmann

The trade unions in Poland have brought a two-week strike by miners to an end, reaching an agreement with the government that enables it to intensify the attacks on jobs and wages at a later date.

Representatives of the trade unions and government signed a statement last Friday that immediately halted the strike at the coal company Jastrzebska Spolkamit (JWS). In exchange, the company’s chief, Jaroslav Sagorowski, is to resign, as the trade unions had demanded. A district court in Gliwice declared the strike to be illegal. But large sections of the workforce were unwilling to respect the judgement.

The despicable deal was negotiated between company management, the trade unions and government. Miners at several company sites had been on strike for two weeks, after management declared a number of collective agreements to be void and unveiled cost-cutting measures. In the future, miners will work six instead of five days a week for the same wages. In addition, one-off payments and bonuses were to be cut.

Strikers showed enormous militancy during the course of the struggle. At JWS headquarters in the Silesian city of Jastrzebie, there were clashes between protesting miners and the police, who used tear gas and rubber bullets.

The agreement was greeted with relief in Polish and European business circles. JWS stocks rose by 11.7 percent to 26 zloty. As the PAP news agency reported, based on comments from departing chief executive Sagorowski, both sides signed agreements in secret talks that will bring significant savings for the company.

The company had been losing 30 million zloty (€7.2 million) per day, during the strike. Prime Minister Eva Kopacz warned of the collapse of the company after more than 5,400 workers occupied the mines.

The shares in mining firms KGHM Polska Miedz and LW Bogdanka rose noticeably after the ending of the strike.

The strike occurred 11 days after an agreement between the government and trade unions at another mining company, Kompania Veglova (KV). Here, the workers were protesting against the laying off of 5,000 workers and the planned closure of several mines.

After 10 days of protests and strikes, Kopacz had to withdraw her plans.

The minister for state property, Vlodzimiers Karpinski, described the trade union deal at KV as an “historic agreement,” and Kopacz explicitly thanked the union for its work.

In recent weeks, it was clear that the workers exerted considerable pressure on the government and JWS management and that a broad movement against the government was only averted by the union’s despicable role. Government representatives praised the “responsible” conduct of the trade unions on several occasions.

The deputy chairman of the Solidarity trade union at JWS, Savomir Brudziński, declared that the miners did not want to strike, but they were compelled to do so by Sagorowski. This shameful lie was exposed by the strike vote. More than 18,400 workers voted for strike action and only 236 against.

Trade union spokesman Piotr Szereda repeatedly made public statements that participation in the strike was voluntary so as to encourage workers to break the strike.

Last week, the union voted to accept a savings programme totalling 140 million zloty (€33 million). The only concession they demanded was the resignation of Sagorowski. Szereda declared, “The operator should ask itself if one man is worth all of the losses.”

The agreement at JWS serves to prepare deeper attacks on the workforce. “Kopacz has failed,” wrote the Gazeta Wyborcza. “It is unlikely that the signed agreement will resolve any of the problems.”

JWS made net losses of 305 million zloty in the first three quarters of 2014. A year earlier, the company made a 71 million zloty profit in the same period. Poland has Europe’s second-largest coal reserve. More than 100,000 people are employed in the mining industry. The companies are losing an average of €15 per ton due to dilapidated infrastructure and falling energy prices.

The fact that the government has temporarily abandoned the restructuring plan is due to fears over mass protests in an election year. Presidential elections take place in May and parliamentary elections in October.

“From the political standpoint, there is a risk of protests if the sector is fully and comprehensively restructured, which means eliminating jobs,” an economic adviser to the government was cited by the Financial Times. “But viewed economically, it is the only viable solution.”

Polish Deputy Economy Minister Tomasz Tomczykiewicz declared in a radio broadcast that the privileges of the miners were a relic of the country’s socialist past.

President Bronislav Komorovski from the Citizens Platform (PO), which is also the party of Prime Minister Kopacz, is concerned over his reelection. He is threatened with losing votes in the country’s impoverished south, where the mining is concentrated.

But above all, an expansion of the protests is feared. In January, sections of doctors protested against pay rates in the health sector. On Wednesday, hundreds of farmers drove to Warsaw with their tractors, where they blocked the main streets. Among other things, they are demanding compensation for government measures in the milk and pig meat markets. The West Pomeranian farmers are also calling for a halt to the sale of state land to foreign investors. In Pyrzyce, for example, 60 percent of all land has been promised to foreign investors.

The country’s trade unions, especially the two major associations Solidarity and OPZZ, have a long record of sabotaging workers’ struggles. Solidarity emerged in the huge workers’ strikes of the 1980s against the Stalinist regime. At the time, it had around 10 million members. But its support for the reintroduction of capitalism in Poland and the destruction of jobs and social rights that went with it resulted in it losing around 90 percent of its members in the 1990s.

Today, only around 12 percent of the workers are organised in trade unions. As the social crisis deepens, Solidarity is emerging ever more openly in opposition to the working class. The union established close relations with the PO during the government of Kopacz’s predecessor, Donald Tusk. The OPZZ, as part of the Stalinist state party in Poland, also has a legacy of suppressing workers’ strikes and protests.

It is beyond doubt that strikes and other forms of social conflict will increase. In these struggles, Polish workers must organise independently of the trade unions. The coming strikes by miners will only be successful if they are led as part of a European-wide struggle for genuine socialism and the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Canadian NDP declares willingness to enter coalition with Liberals

Dylan Lubao

Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the trade union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP), has reiterated that his party is amenable to forming a coalition government with the Liberals—until recently Canadian big business’s preferred party of government—after this year’s federal election.

Mulcair touted the possibility of Canada’s social democrats joining hands with the Liberals, who when they last held office carried out the greatest social spending cuts in Canadian history, in an interview on The West Block, a Global TV political affairs program, in late December.

Asked by West Block host Tim Clark if the NDP would ally with the Liberals in the event that no party wins a parliamentary majority, Mulcair said his party would “wait and see” the election results before determining its course of action. However, he went on to emphasize that it was the NDP that proposed the abortive 2008 coalition pact between the two parties, whcih the the Liberals later scuttled.

“Don’t forget,” said Muclair, “we’re the ones who made it a priority in 2008 to put the coalition idea on the table. We wrote it and signed it and the Liberals walked away from it.”

For good measure, Mulcair noted that he personally had played an important role in negotiating the 2008 coalition deal, which unravelled after the Canadian ruling class rallied round Conservative Prime Minster Stephen Harper and his use of the undemocratic office of the Governor-General to shut down parliament so as to prevent opposition MPs from exercising their constitutional right to defeat the government.

While Mulcair is concerned that if he is too forward in promoting a coalition it could cause NDP votes to bleed to the Liberals, this is hardly the first time he has placed on record his readiness to ally with them. “We’ve always said we’re ready to work with other parties,” declared Mulcair when the coalition question was raised last February. “We’re a progressive party. We want to get results.”

The NDP is currently the Official Opposition to the ruling Conservatives. But opinion polls have long shown it badly trailing both the Conservatives and the Liberals, who suffered their worst ever electoral defeat in 2011.

Mulcair’s West Block comments were directed at the trade union bureaucracy, large sections of which have indicated that they will drop their traditional across-the-board endorsement of the NDP, in favour of a call for a “strategic vote” for the candidate best-positioned to defeat the Conservative nominee.

The unions’ “Anybody But Harper” campaign is being modeled after their “Stop Hudak” campaign—the drive the unions mounted in Ontario to prevent the coming to power of Tim Hudak and his Conservatives. In practical terms, this campaign meant stumping for the re-election of a Liberal government that, with the NDP’s backing in a minority parliament, had imposed massive social spending cuts and a two-year public sector wage freeze and illegalized teacher job action.

By highlighting the NDP’s role in the abortive 2008 coalition, Mulcair is trying to reassure the union bureaucrats that any frictions over the unions’ throwing much of their considerable organizational and financial muscle behind the Liberals will not be an impediment to the social democrats joining hands with the Liberals in a coalition if the parliamentary arithmetic makes this possible. Indeed, Muclair’s remarks were meant to remind the unions that the social democrats were the chief protagonists of the coalition in 2008 and stand ready to reprise that role in 2015.

The NDP post-2011

Mulcairs’s comments were also an effective admission that the social democrats’ best chance at entering the halls of power is in an alliance with the Liberals.

Since becoming the Official Opposition in 2011, the NDP has hemorrhaged working class support, witnessed repeated defections from its ranks to the Liberals, and been drubbed at the polls in a string of provincial elections and federal by-elections, as well as several high-profile mayoralty races.

The NDP had placed great stock in capturing power in British Columbia in May 2013, with the aim of using it to showcase a pragmatic, business-friendly NDP. Instead, the right-wing Liberals were returned to office for a fourth successive term in an election marked by a near record-low turnout.

The NDP, which in 2009 had formed its first ever government in Nova Scotia, was trounced in the 2013 Nova Scotia election. After four years in which it implemented major social spending cuts, hiked various regressive taxes and electricity rates, and upheld Nova Scotia’s notorious anti-union “Michelin bill,” the Nova Scotia NDP was reduced to third place, winning just seven of seats.

Underlying the decline in the NDP's political fortunes is its unstinting defense of capitalism and its anti-worker record when in power, which have alienated wide sections of the working class. A political vehicle of the trade union bureaucracy and privileged sections of the middle class since its formation in 1961, the NDP has shifted ever further to the right over the past three decades, repudiating its milquetoast national reformist program and embracing capitalist austerity and imperialist war.

It responded to its sudden and entirely unanticipated elevation to Official Opposition in 2011 by mounting a full court press to convince the Canadian the ruling elite it could supplant the Liberals as their “left” party go government. Toward that end, the NDP immediately moved to purge any reference however nominal to socialism from its constitution and chose Mulcair, a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister, to replace the late Jack Layton as party leader.

Mulcair has taken every opportunity to reassure the ruling class that his party will not raise income taxes for the wealthy, although they are at record lows, will maintain corporate tax rates below those in the US, and reduce taxes still further for small business. With much fanfare, he recently announced an NDP government would raise the federal minimum wage to $15, but this would not even take effect until 2019 and actually increase the wages of less than 1 percent of all Canadian workers!

As under Layton, Mulcair’s NDP has supported an aggressive, imperialist foreign policy, lauding Canada’s participation in the NATO war for regime change in Libya, echoing the Harper government’s full-throated support for last summer’s Israeli invasion of Gaza, and endorsing Canada’s role in the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president and the subsequent NATO threats and aggression against Russia.

The NDP’s opposition to Canada’s participation in the new US-led war in the Middle East is founded upon purely tactical considerations. The NDP fully supports the US-drive to expand its strategic dominance of the world’s most important oil-exporting region by combating ISIS and deposing the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, but would prefer this be accomplished by funnelling weapons and funds to local militias.

Contrary to the attempts by the corporate press to paint irreconcilable differences between the NDP, Liberals, and Conservatives, the official record demonstrates that all of them are committed to defending the interests of Canadian big business at home and abroad, differing only in terms of tactical considerations and questions of lifestyle and identity politics.

The 2008 coalition agreement

The NDP have been in a de facto alliance with the Liberals for most of the least ten years, beginning with Layton’s 2004 decision to establish a “blue ribbon” committee led by NDP elder statesman Ed Broadbent to investigate the possibility of an NDP-Liberal coalition and the NDP’s decision the following spring to back the Martin Liberal government and its budget in exchange for a few tiny social spending increases.

The NDP’s coalition committee met steadily until 2008, when Layton signed a formal agreement to enter into a Liberal-led coalition government.

An analysis of the proposed 2008 coalition's policy accord furnishes all the evidence necessary to completely dispel any notion that a Liberal-NDP coalition would be a “progressive” alternative for Canadian workers—a coalition that the NDP is again actively courting.

The policy accord took as its starting point a commitment to “fiscal responsibility”—a euphemism for subservience to big business and its mantra of international competitiveness. It outlined the need for investment in key sectors of the economy, like auto and forestry, to “create and save jobs”, but made this contingent on raising corporate profits through plant closures, job cuts, and contract concessions, including wage cuts.

Particularly noteworthy was the NDP's complete abandonment of two of its main “progressive” policy planks from the 2008 election campaign—the rescinding of the Conservative government's five year, $50 billion scheme of corporate tax cuts and the withdrawal of Canadian Armed Forces’ troops from Afghanistan. In the name of acting “on the economy and in the interest of Canadian families,” the NDP pledged in the coalition agreement to fully implement the Conservative-Liberal corporate tax cut and to back Canada playing a leading role in the neo-colonial Afghan counter-insurgency war through 2011.

Current Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has sought to quash all talk of a coalition, saying that there are “very big impediments” to such a partnership with the NDP. Given that the two parties share right-wing, pro-business positions, and have collaborated closely in provinces like Ontario to the detriment of the working class, Trudeau’s dismissal of a coalition should be recognized for the ploy it is. The Liberals calculate they will be able to oust the deeply unpopular Conservatives and return to power without the help of the NDP or at least without having to enter a formal alliance through a coalition or policy accord in a minority government situation.

Workers should take note that the Harper government has itself only broadened and extended the anti-working class offensive mounted by their predecessors in the successive Chretien-Martin Liberal governments. Between 1995 and 1998 the Liberals carried out the greatest social spending cuts in Canadian history, slashing tens of billions from Medicare and post-secondary education and shredding unemployment insurance. Then in 2000, they dramatically slashed corporate and capital gains taxes, in what the neo-conservative National Post hailed as a “Canadian Alliance” budget.

The Chretien-Martin Liberal governments also massively expanded the national security apparatus, including adopting the draconian 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act and approving systematic spying on Canadian’s electronic communications, and began the rearmament of the Canadian Armed Forces, while joining US-led wars in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

Various considerations will inevitably play a role in determining whether a Liberal-NDP coalition government will ultimately manifest itself after the upcoming elections. What is abundantly clear is that the Canadian working class will pay dearly for such a government, which will remain faithful in all essentials to the current Conservative program of capitalist austerity and predatory war.

Up to six million face Obamacare penalties for 2014

Toby Reese

February 15 marked the final day to sign up for a health insurance plan for 2015 on the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace or on one of the state-run exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). With limited exceptions, uninsured people who failed to sign up by this deadline face substantial fines for failure to obtain coverage in 2015.

According to projections released last month by federal officials, as many as six million people will have to pay a penalty for going without health insurance in 2014, the first year of Obamacare coverage. This means that between two and four percent of all taxpayers lacked medical coverage for all or part of 2014. Another 15 million to 30 million people were uninsured but qualified for an exemption.

Under the “individual mandate” of the legislation, popularly known as Obamacare, individuals and families who do not have insurance through their employer or through a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid—and have not enrolled in a plan that meets the Minimum Essential Coverage requirements (MEC) of the ACA—face a tax penalty.

The penalties are up substantially this year, rising from $95 or one percent of income in 2014, to $325 or two percent of income in 2015, whichever amount is greater. The fee, referred to by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the “Individual Shared Responsibility Payment,” will automatically be taken from tax refunds or added to the tax owed, unless an exemption is met.

While there are reportedly over 30 exemptions, the most common include having a gap in coverage that is less than three months and conditions of economic hardship, in which annual premiums available for purchase exceed eight percent of household income.

The fee for not having health insurance is calculated as either a flat dollar amount or as a percentage of income over a certain threshold, whichever is greater. Using the flat dollar method, a family will be charged $325 per adult and $162.50 per child, up to a maximum of $925.

For a married couple with two children with a household income of $75,000 filing taxes jointly, the threshold for 2015 is set at $20,600, leaving $54,400 to be charged at the two percent rate—a $1,088 penalty.

Marisa Bowlden told a local California ABC news station, “I was fined over $300 for myself not having insurance and over $300 for my husband. ... I just want to know who did I hurt by not being covered? Am I truly a criminal and NEED to be “fined” … ? really crazy government we have. I can’t stand how the working family gets hurt.”

“Open enrollment” for Obamacare plans began November 15, 2014, and ended February 15 in most states. Although millions of working families and individuals have yet to file their taxes for 2014, and have not yet seen the effect of the new tax penalties, it may also be too late to avoid the penalties for 2015.

Stan Dorn of the Urban Institute told the Washington Post, “It’s the fact that if you didn’t apply by February 15, you have no way of escaping the penalty in 2015. … It’s not something a lot of people have necessarily thought through."

As in 2013 and early last year, the federal HealthCare.gov web site faced technical glitches again during the last week of 2015 enrollment. According to the web site, many individuals were unable to complete the enrollment online or faced extended hold times and were unable to enroll over the phone before the deadline. As a result, the site states that enrollment for these individuals only—who must verbally attest to meeting one of the stipulated conditions—will be allowed until February 22 to complete their sign-up.

Many of the state exchanges had similar issues and have followed suit, extending their deadlines by one week for those experiencing difficulties. The state of Washington has decided to extend the enrollment period for another two months to encourage more sign-ups.

In describing the “Individual Shared Responsibility Provision,” the IRS website states, “It is important to remember that choosing to make the individual shared responsibility payment instead of enrolling in minimum essential coverage means you will also have to pay the entire cost of all your medical care. You won’t be protected from the kind of very high medical bills that can sometimes lead to bankruptcy.”

In other words, if you cannot afford health insurance and seek medical care, you will be charged for the health services and you will be fined by the government.

Compounding the economic hardship for working families and individuals, those who did purchase a plan and received a premium subsidy from the federal government must now go through a reconciliation with the IRS. If an individual or family ended up earning more money than reported when applying for health insurance, they may now owe back part or all of the subsidy they received to help pay for the health plan. The Treasury Department estimates that 4.5 million to 7.5 million people received Obamacare subsidies in 2014.

Households were told to estimate their projected income for the year when they initially signed up for coverage, a task made difficult for some families due to fluctuating incomes and periods of joblessness. Households were instructed to report changes in income, but unemployment, multiple part-time jobs, or self-employment oftentimes make it difficult for families to calculate their annual earnings until they complete their tax filings.

Janice Riddle told CNN that when she filed taxes, she was forced to pay back $470 for each month she received the subsidy in 2014 due to forgetting to report her new job to have the subsidy reduced. After stating that she did not even use the health coverage, she exclaimed, “I was blindsided that the subsidy has to be paid back.”

Adding to the public’s bewilderment, the IRS has issued three new forms for individuals who bought health insurance through an exchange or did not have minimum essential coverage. These individuals will need to fill out the Health Insurance Marketplace Statement (1095-A), Premium Tax Credit (Form 8962) and/or Health Coverage Exemptions (Form 8965). The three forms include 28 pages of instructions and additional calculations for determining the tax refund or payment. Many individuals and families who file their taxes with the simplest 1040EZ form will no longer be able to use it if they get a tax credit.

Many people who count on tax refunds to make payments on credit cards, home repairs or other necessary household spending may be shocked to find their entire tax refund absorbed by the IRS due to the new method of linking taxes to the health care system.

The White House currently claims that over 11.4 million have signed up for private health coverage as a result of ACA. In the coming year, many will begin to understand the implications of Obamacare and its goal of undermining the entire health system in the United States.

The reality of the health care overhaul is coming home for millions of Americans in the form of these tax penalties and subsidy repayment demands. Those who have actually purchased coverage have also discovered that legislation touted by the Obama administration as providing “near universal,” quality health care often comes with annual deductibles in excess of $5,000 and other high out-of-pocket costs.

The central aim of the health care overhaul is to dragoon millions of ordinary Americans—under threat of financial penalty—into purchasing cut-rate policies from private insurance companies, who are profiting from the new stream of cash-paying customers. The legislation is also aimed at providing the framework for businesses and the public sector to end employer-sponsored health insurance and foist the responsibility for obtaining health coverage more squarely on the backs of the working class.

Obama, port owners line up against West Coast dockworkers

Rafael Azul

Dispatched to San Francisco by President Obama, US Labor Secretary Thomas Perez met Wednesday with representatives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association, days after the employers’ association locked out 20,000 dockworkers at 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States.

The purpose of the meeting, held under a media blackout, was to give the ILWU its marching orders to squash the resistance of dockworkers and impose another sellout agreement that will attack long-time job protections, living standards and working conditions.

The White House intervention follows calls by a bipartisan group of congressmen and a major retail association—dependent on imports that flow through the docks—for Obama to use the Taft-Hartley Act to break any strike that might erupt. The administration is particularly concerned that dockworkers could link up with the ongoing strike of oil workers and become a catalyst for a broader movement of workers against more than a decade of stagnant wages.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach area has become a cauldron of social opposition. Oil workers are striking at the nearby Carson refinery, and workers at the Torrance ExxonMobil refinery, which was hit by an industrial explosion Wednesday, expressed their determination to join the walkout in defiance of the United Steelworkers selective strike policy.

On Thursday evening, the United Teachers Los Angeles said its 31,000 teachers and other professional employees might strike for higher wages after the UTLA accepted unpaid days off during the 2007-2009 recession and no wage increases for eight years.

On Wednesday, the PMA distributed its “best and final offer” to employees at ports from Los Angeles, California to Seattle, Washington, a move that could lay the groundwork for the declaration of an impasse and a full lockout at the docks. Over the last two weeks the PMA has locked out employees for six days, costing workers thousands of dollars in lost overtime and holiday pay.

The PMA is using lockouts and the threat of a government intervention to prevent workers from engaging in any kind of job action to resist the ongoing destruction of jobs and casualization of the workforce. The PMA is also offering an insulting three percent annual raise in the five-year contract offer. Fearing that it could not push such a deal through rank-and-file workers, the ILWU has extended the contract for nine months, giving the PMA and the government ample time to prepare a strikebreaking operation.

In 2002, the ILWU gave employers the right to use computer technology to slash jobs, and in 2008 it allowed automated cargo-handling equipment. In addition, management won the right of bypassing the union hiring hall on a case-by-case basis, to employ its own permanent and contingent workers, as new technology was introduced into the ports. This undermined the achievement won in the 1934 San Francisco general strike, which abolished the hated “shape up system,” where management picked which workers would have a job that day.

The 2008 contract went a long way toward eliminating some of the agreements on guaranteed hours and the sharing of work linked to the introduction of labor saving container technology in the 1970s.

Disputes were left up to a so-called neutral arbitrator. In practice, the union insists that the arbitration has not been neutral and demands the right to replace those arbitrators that have links to the industry and big capital. The PMA has refused.

Six years into the global financial crisis, longshore workers are in no mood for another giveback contract. Three years ago, in a bitter dispute in Longview, Washington against EGT, a grain exporter, the rank and file showed their determination to fight despite government threats. President Obama mobilized the Coast Guard to escort ships headed to the EGT terminals, openly siding with management against the ILWU.

In the agreement that ended the dispute, brokered by former Democratic governor Chris Gregoire, the ILWU made concessions that gave the company and the port of Longview the right to utilize non-ILWU workers and blacklist militant workers from their facility.

More recently, in 2014 in the port of Los Angeles, dockworkers refused to cross and instead joined picket lines set up by port truck drivers, until they were forced back to work by the ILWU itself. In a cynical maneuver, the ILWU and port management agreed to temporarily extend the previous labor agreement so an arbitrator could use the no-strike pledge in the contract to order dockers to cross the truckers’ picket lines. This severely undermined the drivers’ fight to formalize their status as employees instead of “independent contractors” who could be hired and fired at will, and forced to pay for the maintenance, fueling and insuring of trucks they leased from the port operators.

Now the PMA is coming for more.

On the weekend of February 7 and 8 and on the following three-day holiday weekend, the PMA locked out ILWU personnel. The employers association also sharply reduced night shift work. The move virtually paralyzed the unloading of ships in 29 West Coast and Hawaiian ports that handle one fourth of US trade worth about one trillion dollars annually. The PMA claimed it was responding to an ILWU-organized go-slow tactic that has been in effect since October 2014.

The employers claim the ILWU in Southern California has unilaterally cut shifts for crane operators from 110 per day to 35, “resulting in tens of thousands of containers sitting on the docks”; of not providing skilled workers through the hiring hall as needed by the PMA; and of not sending out skilled crane operators. The ILWU, for its part, insists that changes in port operations and shortages of trailers for the shipping containers have made the work slow.

The dispute takes place as rapid technological changes are transforming the entire industry. The congestion at the Ports in Los Angeles, Oakland and elsewhere is in large part the product of the development of mega ships, capable of carrying more than 10,000 20-foot containers, that exceed the outmoded capacity of many US ports.

Citing Neil Davidson, ports analyst at London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants, the Financial Times wrote: “US container terminals are the least productive in the developed world, largely because operators, worrying about labor unrest, have been reluctant to invest in modern equipment.”

The ILWU has repeatedly acceded to the demands for labor saving changes while seeking to defend the institutional interests of the union apparatus, primarily a minimum number of dues-paying members. The problem is not technology, however, but the control of technology by large corporations and financial institutions, which are only interested in increasing the exploitation of workers and boosting profits.

The contingency of labor that now looms over the West Coast docks is part of global process: workers on tap, subcontracting, zero hour contracts, pay for performance, a modern form of the shape up. To fight, dockworkers must take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the ILWU and mount a struggle to mobilize the broadest layers of the working class—truckers, teachers, oil workers and others—against the giant corporations, both big business parties and the capitalist system they defend.