A warning to US oil workers: The United Steelworkers’ record of betrayal

Shannon Jones

With the selective strike by US oil refinery workers in its third week, a warning must be issued: There is an unbridgeable gulf between the determination of the refinery workers fighting to reverse the impact of decades of declining living standards and safety conditions, and the sabotage of their struggle by the United Steelworkers union (USW).

The USW has severely limited the strike, forcing the workers to fight with only a small fraction of their strength. It is negotiating behind the backs of the workers, refusing to disclose anything about the six company proposals already put on the table—offers so rotten that even the USW didn’t dare to bring them back to the rank-and-file for a vote. The union is promoting the self-defeating policy of petitioning the big business politicians who are all in the pockets of Big Oil.

Pickets at the Tesoro Golden Eagle Refinery in Martinez, California

USW President Leo Gerard is a trusted ally of Corporate America, appointed by Obama to sit on his trade policy and American Manufacturing Partnership committees, where he collaborates with executives to make their businesses more “competitive.” In other words, he is complicit in cutting labor costs through speedup, wage cutting and outsourcing. Gerard is well paid for his troubles, making $217,206 a year as USW president, along with additional sums in other capacities.

Vice President Gary Beevers, who is leading the oil industry negotiations, made $172,099 in 2013. The top eight USW officials collectively took home $1.5 million and the top 21 officers a combined $3.5 million, about $170,000 each. Their incomes would put them in the middle ranks of oil company management, and that is symptomatic: the union functions not as the representative of the workers, but as an industrial police force for the company.

For three decades, the USW has worked with Wall Street investment bankers to impose the crisis of the steel industry on the backs of steelworkers, retirees and their families. It has long ceased to function as a workers organization or concern itself with improving the lives of its members and their families. Instead, it operates as a business, whose sole purpose is maintaining the salaries and expense accounts of the officials who staff its offices.

The origins of the USW

The USW arose out of the militant industrial struggles of the 1930s, largely led by socialists and left-wing workers, which established the mass industrial unions. Some of the bloodiest battles of the CIO movement took place during the 1937 Little Steel Strike, including the Memorial Day Massacre, when police murdered ten striking workers in south Chicago. By the time the post-World War II strike wave was over, workers had won important gains in wages, benefits and working conditions, despite the ferocious resistance of the steel bosses.

But the leadership of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which became the USW, was from the first dominated by a politically right-wing layer of officials, headed by Philip Murray and David McDonald, with ties to the Catholic Church hierarchy, the Democratic Party and the American government.

During the anti-communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s, they drove out the rank-and-file socialist militants who had spearheaded the struggle to build the union. They backed the merger of the CIO with the reactionary AFL in 1955, and consolidated a parasitic bureaucracy that ultimately presided over the collapse of both the USW and the AFL-CIO as a whole.

McLouth Steel workers in Washington DC, April, 1982

For some years, however, steelworkers were still able to make gains, thanks to the economic conditions of the post-World War II boom and the dominance of American industry in the world market.

Thus, in 1959, when the USW called a nationwide steel strike, more than 500,000 workers walked out, shutting down most of the industry for 116 days, a conflict that ended only with a Taft-Hartley injunction issued by the Eisenhower administration. The eventual settlement, despite the conservative bureaucracy, included a wage increase, the first-ever cost-of-living escalator clause, and substantial improvements in pensions and health benefits.

As late as 1970-1971, the USW was able to negotiate wage increases of 10 percent a year with only the threat of a strike, under conditions of significant struggles by other sections of the labor movement, including Teamsters, GM workers, postal workers and longshoremen.

The situation changed in the 1970s as powerful global competitors began to challenge the dominance of US industry. The recession of 1973-1974 brought mass layoffs of industrial workers for the first time since the Great Depression.

The response of the USW and other unions to this economic sea change was to embrace the policies of corporatist union-management collaboration, insisting that workers tie their future to the unconditional defense of American corporations against their global competitors. At the same time, they maintained the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party, even as the Democrats moved further and further to the right and openly attacked workers in struggle.

Flowing from this, the unions insisted that workers accept massive concessions and downsizing in order to strengthen the competitive position of US industry. To this end, the unions offered their services to management to sabotage and suppress the efforts of workers to defend their jobs and living standards. This was accompanied by the integration of the unions into the structure of management through the creation of joint labor-management committees.

Following the decision of US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to impose a huge increase in interest rates in 1979, mass layoffs and bankruptcies spread across the steel industry, along with demands for concessions. The USW sought to divert workers’ anger through the promotion of national chauvinism and Buy American campaigns, including anti-Japanese bumper stickers carrying the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

This nationalist poison served only to conceal the ever greater collaboration of the USW with the US-based corporate executives and their collusion in the betrayal of strikes, the imposition of wage and pension cuts, and the shutdown of scores of steel mills in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Youngstown and other cities.

The struggles of the 1980s

In the course of the 1980s, a series of militant strikes by steelworkers threatened to break out of the control of the union leadership. In each case, the USW worked to isolate and wear down the strikers. The USW allowed the movement of strikebreakers into the plants and stood by when so-called Democratic allies of labor mobilized police and National Guard troops to attack picket lines.

When 2,200 copper miners struck Phelps Dodge in 1983, the USW allowed the strike to drag on for months. In the meantime, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, mobilized the National Guard to attack picket lines and escort strikebreakers. As a result, the strike was crushed and the local union decertified.

Copper miners on the picket line in Morenci, Arizona during the 1983 strike against Phelps Dodge

The Workers League, the forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party, intervened in the Phelps Dodge strike to warn the workers that the USW and AFL-CIO policy would lead to disaster, and to fight for a political alternative. At that time, when tens of millions of workers still looked to the unions to defend their jobs and living standards, the Workers League advanced the demand for the unions to break with the Democrats and build a Labor Party based on a socialist program, as a means of fighting for the political independence of the working class and a mass struggle for socialist policies.

At Phelps Dodge and many other struggles, this campaign for the building of a mass political movement of the working class against capitalism won a wide hearing. Leaders of the Workers League addressed meetings of the copper miners, air traffic controllers, meatpackers and other workers involved in bitter struggles, and the Bulletin, the Workers League’s newspaper and a forerunner of the World Socialist Web Site, was the most widely read publication on many picket lines throughout the United States.

In 1985, the USW abandoned pattern bargaining in the steel industry, leading to a series of isolated and uncoordinated strikes and lockouts in which workers’ attempts to resist concessions were betrayed. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel declared bankruptcy and cancelled its union contract. After a bitter lockout, in which workers were essentially abandoned, the USW agreed to a concessionary contract slashing wages in exchange for the creation of union-management committees at every level of the company.

Following a record six-month lockout at USX in 1986-1987, the USW agreed to concessions along with the elimination of thousands of jobs. A statement published in the Bulletin on February 6, 1987, headlined “USX betrayal: Vital lessons for all labor,” drew the lessons of this struggle:

Front page from weekly Bulletindenouncing USW betrayal of USX workers

“To say that the steelworkers who fought the record 184-day lockout, the longest work stoppage in the history of the steel industry, were betrayed by the treachery of the USWA bureaucracy is an understatement. To put it bluntly, the four-year contract, which includes $2.50 an hour wage cuts and job combinations leading to nearly 1,400 layoffs, is mild compared to what is now on the agenda.”

The Bulletin warned, “The treachery of the labor bureaucrats is opening the floodgates for a new wave of wage-cutting, union-busting and unemployment even worse than the last six years.”

The result of these betrayals was a massive destruction of jobs in the steel industry, with total employment falling from 453,000 in 1979 to 168,000 in 1995. Throughout this period, the USW sought to offset the loss of dues-paying members by establishing new sources of income through its collaboration with management.

One such scheme was the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), or “workers’ buyout.” At McLouth Steel outside of Detroit, the USW negotiated a buyout in 1988 that slashed wages and gutted work rules in exchange for workers’ ownership of 85 percent of common stock. In 1995, the company went bankrupt. The workers lost their stock and their jobs.

Restructuring the industry—and the union

When the US steel industry faced another severe crisis in the late 1990s, the USW responded by working with vulture capitalists such as Wilbur Ross, head of private equity firm International Steel Group (ISG), to restructure the steel industry on the backs of workers and retirees.

This turn by the USW was signaled by the hiring of investment banker Ron Bloom as a union advisor in 1996. Bloom, who was later appointed to President Obama’s task force overseeing the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, was a specialist in organizing worker buyouts, operating an “investment banking advisory boutique” on Wall Street. In 1994 he was involved in the effort by United Airlines pilots to organize a buyout of the failing company in exchange for $4.9 billion in wage and benefit concessions. In the end, workers were hit with massive pension benefit cuts when the company declared bankruptcy.

As a USW adviser, Bloom worked closely with the current USW president, Leo Gerard. Bloom oversaw the imposition of concessions and job losses in the name of improving the “competitive” position of US steel companies against their overseas rivals.

According to an article in the March 4, 2007 Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the USW “pushed for mergers among more than 80 steel companies big and small, the better to face the real competition—government subsidized steel corporations overseas. That effort has included going to Wall Street to help finance the mergers.”

In addition to “sacrificing thousands of jobs,” the Gazette noted, the union also “agreed to relax work rules so that workers could be shifted more easily from one role to another,” and “worked with management to deal with ‘legacy costs,’ the increasing burden of pensions and health care for retirees.”

Locked out USX steelworkers at the Clairton, Pennsylvania Works, August, 1986

The results of the pro-company policy were catastrophic for steelworkers, their families and their communities. In 2001, for example, the USW pushed for the merger of ISG and bankrupt LTV Steel. The deal, approved by the USW, destroyed 7,500 jobs and paved the way for the elimination of health care for 50,000 retired and laid-off workers. Meanwhile, retirees’ pensions were slashed when the bankrupt steelmaker dumped the pensions into the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

In 2003, Bethlehem Steel, another company targeted by ISG, terminated health care and life insurance benefits for 95,000 retired workers and their dependents and handed pensions over to the PBGC.

After the purchase agreement with ISG, Bethlehem CEO Robert Miller praised the role of the USW in consummating the deal. “This dramatic turnaround in the prospects for the industry has been made possible by the innovative new labor agreement with the USW,” he declared.

While wrecking the lives of steelworkers and retirees, the actions of the USW served to enrich speculators like Ross and other corporate raiders. In 2004, the 17 top steel companies reported after-tax profits of $6.6 billion. Ross later sold off his stake in ISG to an Indian entrepreneur, pocketing billions in the process.

In exchange for helping to impose concessions, the USW pressed for seats on company boards of directors. It also helped establish Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Associations (VEBAs) to handle payment of retiree benefits. By establishing VEBAs, the companies were able off to offload their retiree liabilities.

The VEBAs amounted to a payoff to union officials, who took over the task of imposing cuts in benefits. The VEBA set up by the USW at Goodyear later became the model for a similar deal between the United Auto Workers and the auto companies in 2007.

Much like its corporate “partners,” the USW has sustained itself over the past quarter-century through mergers with other, equally bankrupt but smaller unions, including the United Rubber Workers; the Aluminum, Brick and Glass Workers Union; the American Flint Glass Workers Union; and the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), itself the product of the 1999 merger of the United Paperworkers International Union and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.

It was the merger with PACE in 2005 that brought the oil workers, now locked in a partial strike of the oil industry, into the USW. The oil workers did not flock to the USW to join a thriving organization with a history of fighting for its members. They were acquired by a business that calls itself a union in order to facilitate its role as subordinate of giant corporations.

The USW has pursued the same corporatist strategy in the oil refining industry as in basic steel. Following the merger with PACE in 2005, the USW worked with the Obama administration to help the private equity firm Carlyle Group acquire the Sunoco refinery in Philadelphia. The deal, consummated in 2012, involved the USW agreeing to concessions, including reductions in overtime pay.

In 2012, the USW endorsed Obama’s reelection campaign, with Gerard praising the president for turning around “an economy he inherited that was nose-diving towards a depression by focusing on jobs, manufacturing and enforcing US trade laws.” In fact, Obama’s “focus on manufacturing” consisted of working with the UAW and other unions to reduce wages, health care and pensions so sharply that manufacturers began shifting production from China, Mexico and other low-wage countries back to the US.

Meanwhile, the US president has proven to be a tool of Big Oil just like his Republican predecessor. This was shown in his kid-gloves treatment of BP after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the Justice Department’s decision last year to drop the pursuit of criminal charges against Tesoro for the 2010 explosion that killed seven oil workers in Washington state.

Even as it was endorsing Obama for a second term, the USW betrayed the three-month struggle of Cooper Tire workers in Findlay, Ohio. The workers were locked out for opposing the company’s demands for a wage cut.

Locked out Cooper Tire workers on the picket line in Findlay, Ohio, January 2013

Although the USW sat on a $150 million strike fund, it refused to provide strike benefits, handing out only a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards for groceries, and negotiating a separate contract at a Cooper Tire plant in Texarkana, Arkansas while workers in Findlay were still locked out. The USW then pushed through a contract that expanded the power of management to re-rate jobs, lower wage rates, and drive out older, higher-paid workers, replacing them with young workers making $13 an hour.

At every point during the struggle in Findlay and countless other fights over the last 35 years, workers confronted the USW not as an ally, let alone an organizer of struggle, but as an agent of management.

As this record makes clear, in the current strike the USW stands on the side of the billionaire owners of the oil industry and against the strivings of refinery workers for a decent standard of living, safe working conditions and a secure retirement.

From this, certain conclusions need to be drawn. The revival of militant working class struggles requires a break with this rotten organization, which is committed to the defense of American capitalism, and the building of new, democratic rank-and-file committees of struggle.

Above all, the working class needs a new political strategy—one that is based on the perspective of socialism, i.e., the international unity of the working class fighting for common ownership and democratic control of industry in the interests of human need, not private profit.

This requires a rejection of the American nationalism promoted by the USW and the adoption of an international strategy, based on the unity of workers throughout the world in a common struggle against the oil and steel multinationals. It requires a break with the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin parties of Wall Street, and the building of an independent party of the working class.

The Socialist Equality Party and its online publication, the World Socialist Web Site, fight to develop the program and leadership required for this struggle. We encourage oil workers interested in finding out more to contact the SEP.

UN delays war crimes report on Sri Lanka

Manusha Fernando

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) agreed last week to delay the release of an international inquiry report on Sri Lankan human rights violations from March until September on the recommendation of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al-Hussein. The decision follows a request by Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera for a postponement.

The delay is a clear concession to the newly-installed Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and was clearly given the green light from Washington, which had been exploiting the issue to put pressure on previous President Mahinda Rajapakse. The Sirisena government has rapidly shifted its foreign policy alignment away from China and towards the United States and its aggressive “pivot to Asia” against Beijing.

The report was prepared by an international commission appointed by the Human Rights Commissioner following a resolution approved at the UNHRC meeting last March. The resolution sponsored by the Obama administration called for an international inquiry into human rights violations during the final months of the war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

The Rajapakse government was responsible for terrible war crimes. According to an expert UN committee, the Sri Lankan military killed an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in its indiscriminate bombardment of LTTE-held territory, including of hospitals and aid distribution centres. It was also responsible for other gross violations of democratic rights, including extra-judicial killings and disappearances.

The US fully backed the communal war waged by successive Colombo governments, including its renewal in 2006 under Rajapakse, and turned a blind eye to the military’s atrocities. However, with the LTTE’s defeat imminent, Washington became increasingly concerned at Beijing’s growing influence in Colombo and used the “human rights” issue to push Rajapakse to break from China.

After backing two previous resolutions supporting internal Sri Lankan inquiries, the US last year stepped up the pressure by pushing for an international investigation inquiry last March. Such an inquiry threatened possible war crimes charges against senior government and military figures, indicating that the US was losing patience with Rajapakse.

When Rajapakse called an early presidential election last November, Sirisena quit the government and joined up with opposition parties to stand as their candidate. This political manouevre was prepared through months of intriguing that clearly involved the Obama administration. After Rajapakse’s defeat last month, the Sirisena government quickly moved to strengthen ties with Washington.

The decision to delay the UNHRC report followed Sri Lankan foreign minister Samaraweera’s visit to Washington where he met with US Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to get their support. The US and Britain have already signaled their support for the delay. A spokesman for the UN secretary general declared he would “positively engage with the new Government and support its efforts.”

UN Human Rights Commissioner Al-Hussein said that “many victims of human rights violations in Sri Lanka, including those who have bravely come forward to provide information to the inquiry team, might see this is as the first step towards shelving, or diluting, a report they have long feared they would never see.” He offered the flimsy reassurance that his decision was a “onetime postponement” and only to give Colombo government more time.

Samaraweera, however, is pushing for a “domestic mechanism” to work with the UNHRC to investigate human rights violations which he admitted had taken place during the war. He also promised to take action against those responsible for violating human rights and claimed his government would re-establish “good governance” and democratic rights.

Like the previous Rajapakse government, neither Sirisena nor his allies, including the pro-US United National Party (UNP), has the slightest interest in democratic rights. Sirisena was a senior minister in the Rajapakse government until November. The right-wing UNP started the war in 1983 and is notorious for its attacks on democratic rights.

Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Samaraweera urged the international community, including the human rights community, “to be patient,” noting that “this is a time of fragile transition [in Sri Lanka].”

The reference to “fragile transition” highlights the unstable character of the Sirisena government as well as the political situation in Colombo. The new government fears that Rajapakse could exploit the release of the UNHRC report to whip up patriotic sentiment during parliamentary elections due in June and make a comeback that could threaten the government. Rajapakse’s supporters have already started a campaign on the chauvinist slogan of “Defend the Motherland.”

At the same time, Sirisena rests on a disparate collection of parties that include the Sinhala extremist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) which was part of the Rajapakse government and fully supported its war and war crimes. He is also is looking for support from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which is using the human rights issue to press for a power-sharing arrangement between the island’s Sinhala and Tamil elites.

Even as the Colombo government requested a postponement, the TNA-dominated Northern Provincial Council (NPC) passed a resolution calling for the publication of the UNHCR report. The tensions within the Colombo government and among its allies will sooner or later lead to political crises.

The Sirisena government’s call to delay the UNHRC report is another clear demonstration that it has no intention of holding to account those responsible for war crimes and gross human rights abuses. For all its posturing about “democracy,” Sirisena, like Rajapakse, will be just as ruthless in suppressing any opposition in the working class to the austerity agenda being demanded by international finance capital and to which his government is committed.

Canada’s NDP belatedly opposes Conservatives’ draconian “anti-terror” bill

Roger Jordan

After a wait of almost three weeks, Canada’s trade union-based New Democratic Party (NDP) finally announced last Wednesday its position on Bill C-51, the Conservative government’s draconian “anti-terrorism” bill.

Speaking in parliament, party leader Thomas Mulcair vowed that the NDP will vote against the legislation, which Prime Minister Stephen Harper has falsely promoted as directed against “jihadi terrorism.”

“Mr. Harper and the Conservatives have intimidated the Liberals into supporting this deeply flawed legislation, “declared Mulcair. “We in the NDP are going to fight it.”

Mulcair noted that legal “experts warn that broad measures in this bill could lump legal dissent together with terrorism.” He added that “the bill would give significant new powers to CSIS (Canadian Security and Intelligence Service) without addressing serious deficiencies in oversight.”

The previous day, Mulcair had asked Harper about a Bill C-51 provision that would empower CSIS to use illegal means to “disrupt” any act of civil disobedience or other “unlawful” activity it deems might threaten Canada’s “economic stability” or “infrastructure.”

Under this provision, Canada’s secret police could mount all manner of “dirty tricks” against government opponents, including breaking into their homes and offices to confiscate documents, stealing funds, destroying computers and other property, planting libelous allegations and staging “false flag” acts of vandalism and other provocations. The only provisos are that a judge must approve a “disruption” target and CSIS’s illegal activities must not cause anyone “bodily harm.”

Harper’s response to Muclair was of a piece with the aggressive campaign the Conservatives have mounted in recent weeks to attack and smear anyone who has challenged their false narrative of a Canada under siege by “jihadis”—a narrative the government is pushing to justify Canada’s expanding role in the new Mideast war and sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home.

The Prime Minister refused to engage with, let alone answer the question posed by the leader of Canada’s Official Opposition. Instead he characterized it as a conspiracy theory, derisively labelling Mulcair and his NDP “the black helicopter fleet over there.”

This blustering dismissal of Bill C-51’s sanctioning of the targeting of government opponents for mass surveillance and state attack and provocations should fool no-one. Such statements come from the head of a government that has effectively illegalized strikes by federal sector workers on the grounds worker job-action threatens “economic stability”.

Time and again since 2011, the government has criminalized strikes, including by workers at Canada Post, Canadian Pacific Railways, and Air Canada. Had the trade unions not sabotaged the latest strike at CP Rail that began just over a week ago, the government was going to outlaw it invoking the very same formulation of a threat to Canada’s “economic stability” that appears in Bill C-51.

On Wednesday, Harper again denounced the NDP for daring to question Bill C-51, declaring that “the NDP's positions on this issue become more and more irrelevant, more and more unconnected to Canadians' real concerns … more and more extreme.”

Significantly, Harper’s position has been echoed by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, who previously rushed to declare his party’s backing for Bill C-51. "The fact is the NDP has not once in its history supported strengthening anti-terror measures in this country," declared Trudeau.

Harper’s curt dismissal of any substantive discussion of Bill C-51’s provisions follow repeated statements in which he has implied that anyone expressing even the mildest criticism of his government’s pro-war, anti-terror rhetoric is an appeaser of, if not an outright apologist, for terrorist groups. Last month when Muclair raised a question over the Canadian military’s growing combat role in Iraq, Harper charged that the NDP leader is more concerned with the well-being of ISIS terrorist than Canadian soldiers.

Far from this being simply a question of Harper’s abrasive personal style, such hostility towards any critique of government policy expresses a growing crisis of bourgeois democratic forms of rule. As social tensions mount domestically, and the Canadian elite attempts ever more aggressively to assert its imperialist interests abroad, the ruling class is increasingly turning to authoritarian forms of rule and to delegitimize and criminalize any opposition.

The NDP’s belated vow to “fight” Bill C-51 in no way signifies a genuine and principled rejection of the police state measures that have been adopted in Canada since 2001 or of Ottawa’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy.

Mulcair avoided making a concrete statement on the NDP’s stand on Bill C-51 for as long as possible, waiting until the first day that the bill was to be debated in parliament to do so. Oriented and beholden to big business, the NDP only came out in opposition to Bill C-51after it had become clear that a section of the ruling elite, represented most prominently by the Globe and Mail, opposes it, because it fears such an open break with bourgeois democratic norms will further delegitimize the state and it institutions. (See:Canada: Why is the Globe and Mail denouncing Harper’s latest “anti-terrorism” bill?)

For all of his talk about fighting the bill, Mulcair’s statements and those of his colleagues have made clear that they are in full agreement with the reactionary “war on terror” narrative that the Conservative are using to justify it.

On the same day as Harper tabled the legislation, NDP foreign affairs spokesman Paul Dewar released a statement in which he rejected any attempt to question the government’s motives. Everyone in parliament was agreed on the need to keep Canadians safe, he proclaimed, before attacking the government from the right for cutting funding to the police and security agencies.

Mulcair continued along similar lines last week. In an opinion piece explaining his party’s position in the right-wing National Post, Mulcair began by emphasizing his fundamental acceptance of the government’s anti-terror narrative. “In recent months, horrific terrorist attacks have shocked the world and united Canadians. Mourning has brought us together and strengthened our resolve to defend our way of life against the cowards wanting to intimidate us and erode our freedoms,” Mulcair intoned.

Returning to a theme that has become a trademark of the NDP, Mulcair went on to note, “The government has cut the budgets of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and CSIS, while top officials have testified that they do not have the resources to monitor terrorism suspects while keeping other areas of policing fully funded.”

In both his article and parliamentary appearance, Mulcair demonstrated the fraudulent character of the NDP’s opposition to the Conservatives’ purported anti-terror legislation by invoking the United States and President Obama as good examples of how to approach the issue. Mulcair wrote approvingly of Obama’s counter-terrorism measures, which he said engaged with communities, and stated in parliament that the US model of Congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies should be adopted in Canada.

Such comments are made about a US president who has invoked the crimes of Islamacist terrorists whom Washington was until only recently using as proxies in a “regime change” war in Syria to justify a new US war in the Middle East. And who has presided over the National Security Agency’s blanket world surveillance operations, the persecution of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and the summary execution of “terrorist” suspects by drone-strike.

Mulcair concluded his National Post article by offering the government some friendly advice, writing, “The official opposition urges the government not to railroad this bill through. Instead, hear from experts and others concerned about this bill at committee. We urge the Liberals to reconsider their position to support the bill unconditionally and hope that all parties will agree to practical amendments to strengthen oversight and protect Canadians' freedoms.”

Were such parliamentary oversight to be established it would do nothing to curb the powers of the spy agencies contained within the new law. It is only necessary to look at the situation in the United States, Britain and elsewhere to see how little such cosmetic mechanisms have restricted the illegal activities of the intelligence agencies and the growth of “the state within the state.”

While Muclair is now, belatedly striking a pose as a principled opponent of Bill C-51, the reality is he and his fellow social democrats ultimately chose to come out against it for tactical, largely electoral, reasons.

With an election due by October at the latest, the NDP desperately needs an issue on which it can differentiate itself from the Liberals. Since assuming the role of Official Opposition in 2011, the NDP has veered so far right large swathes of the population rightly see the party’s positons as virtually indistinguishable from those of the Liberals. Indeed in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the NDP propped up a Liberal government for over 18 months, ending only last May. Moreover, Mulcair recently reiterated that in the event of a hung parliament the NDP is ready for form a coalition government with the Liberals at the federal level.

With Trudeau siding so openly with the government, Mulcair and the NDP leadership have cynically concluded that the party can use Bill C-51 as a “wedge” issue in the hopes of redeeming something of their tattered credentials as a “left” and progressive political force. In the same vein, the NDP feared that were it to embrace the Conservatives’ legislation it would bleed support to the Greens. Green leader Elizabeth May has made a point of opposing Bill C-51, warning that it could be used to “disrupt” environmental and aboriginal groups opposed to the Conservatives’ program of tar-sands development and pipeline-building.

UK steps up militaristic propaganda against Russia

Julie Hyland

A cross-party House of Lords committee has slammed British foreign policy as too inactive and accused the UK and Europe of “sleepwalking” into the crisis in Ukraine.

The report, The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine, has been hailed as the first extensive, “objective” account of Russia-European relations. It is nothing of the sort.

According to Lord Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, a lack of expertise in the UK Foreign Office and the European Union, led to a “catastrophic misreading of the mood” in Russia in the run-up to the crisis.

The report says that member states had “displayed a worrying lack of political oversight” regarding negotiations with Ukraine on the Association Agreement in November 2013. “Having said that, Russia misread the Ukrainian appetite for a trade agreement with the EU. The combination led to the crisis we have today, which neither side saw coming.”

Such claims stand reality on its head. Far from “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis, the EU, alongside the US, actively fomented it.

Former President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the Association Agreement, aimed at subordinating Ukraine to the diktats of the EU and International Monetary Fund, triggered the February 2014 Western-backed coup. With the aid of fascist thugs, the regime of President Petro Poroshenko was installed, which duly signed off on the agreement while instigating a brutal civil war against its Russian-oriented opponents in the east of the country.

The report acknowledges that “the EU knew that the Russians ‘did not like what was happening’ but assumed ‘Ukraine could simply ride over that’.”

It is a moot point as to whether this was really the thinking in foreign office circles. The Russian plutocracy around President Vladimir Putin had been accommodating to the Western powers, desirous only to be admitted to the top table of the capitalist club. But regime-change in the country hosting Russia’s strategic naval base and with a large Russian minority could only be interpreted as a hostile and provocative act by the US and the EU. It made clear that the major imperialist powers had no intention of allowing an independent capitalist Russia, but were working on longstanding geostrategic plans for its encirclement and dismemberment.

The resulting civil war in Ukraine has provided the pretext for a significant expansion of NATO, with the deployment of a 5,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force to be stationed in states on Russia’s borders.

The Lords report was compiled between July and December 2014 and written up in January this year. It does not deal with the failure of the Kiev regime to subdue opposition in the east militarily, nor the threat of martial law in response to rising social and political discontent in the west.

These failures are behind Washington’s threat to directly arm Ukrainian forces. With a potentially catastrophic escalation of hostilities against Russia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande brokered a cease-fire in Ukraine, with Putin’s support. But the deal has resolved nothing, while the humiliating withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Debaltseve has only fuelled US ire.

The Lords committee is concerned at the prospect of a rupture within the EU. While it praises the unity of member states up to this point, it warns that there “seems to be less consensus on a constructive way forward, and a resulting danger that current unity could dissolve.” It notes political divisions within Germany as to relations with Russia.

The report speaks of establishing “ground rules within which the two sides [the EU and Russia] can work to their mutual benefit,” which must include “an understanding of legitimate Russian concerns.” But the real message is to prepare for tougher action against Moscow.

The EU’s “relationship with Russia has for too long been based on the optimistic premise that Russia has been on a trajectory towards becoming a democratic ‘European’ country,” it states. Instead, “Russia is increasingly defining itself as separate from, and as a rival to the EU.”

“The model of European ‘tutelage’ of Russia is no longer possible,” it concludes. The EU should supply massive funds to Ukraine, and extend financial sanctions against Moscow in the event of a breakdown of the Ukraine ceasefire, including against its financial sector.

Of particular note, the report sets out the need to differentiate “between the Russian state and the Russian public,” with the EU playing a “greater role in supporting civil society within Russia.” It cites positively the comments of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Coordinator of Open Russia, on the need to “talk to opposition leaders, to civil society representatives and to people who frankly could be the face of the Russia of tomorrow.”

Open Russia, launched by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is described as aiming to unite pro-European Russians in a bid to challenge Putin’s grip on power.

This is backed up with calls by the Lords committee for NATO and the EU to respond to “hostile actions of any kind” by Russia to be met “with a strong response.”

The report complains that, as a signatory to the 1994 Budapest memorandum, governing security assurances to Ukraine, “the UK had a particular responsibility towards the country and it has not been as active or as visible as it could have been.”

This codifies numerous complaints within military and ruling circles that parliament’s surprise failure to authorise military intervention against Syria in August 2013 has left the UK on the “sidelines.”

The UK government must now develop a “strategic response for the long-term” on Russia, the Lords committee insists.

Simultaneous with publication of the report, government ministers have stepped up propaganda against Russia.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon provocatively compared the “threat” posed by the Putin regime to the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) and warned that NATO had to be ready to respond to any further aggression, “whatever form it takes.”

Prime Minister David Cameron warned of an extension of sanctions against Moscow, that “will have economic and financial consequences for many years to come if you [Russia] do not desist.”

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond pointedly refused to rule out authorising “lethal” weapons for Ukraine, stating that while the decision had not yet been taken, the UK “could not allow the Ukrainian armed forces to collapse.”

Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank Friday, Sir Adrian Bradshaw, second-in-command of NATO’s military forces in Europe, stated that the alliance must prepare for a “Russian blitzkrieg” against the continent.

Two days earlier, Royal Air Force Typhoon jets intercepted a pair of Russian aircraft flying over international waters near Cornwall. British fighter jets have been scrambled more than 40 times against Russian military planes alleged to be encroaching UK airspace since the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition took office in 2010.

An essential aim of the sabre rattling against Russia is to provide a rationale for a massive increase in defence spending. The UK is still the largest spender on defence in Europe, at more than £40 billion last year. But the ruling elite are now insisting that military spending must be “ringfenced” from austerity measures to fight the “Russian threat.”

Conservative chair of the Defence Select Committee, Rory Stewart, called for a manifesto pledge to protect defence spending by all the parties in the May election, claiming that “Putin will be looking for” any sign of “weakness.”

Two former defence ministers, Tory Sir Peter Luff and Labour’s Bob Ainsworth are among nearly 30 MPs who have signed a motion demanding the next government maintain defence spending. Writing in the right-wingSpectator magazine, Retired Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon and retired Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham called on all political parties to “weaponise defence” in the election.

Australia: Sydney city council attacks the homeless

Gabriela Zabala

Council officers backed by up to 40 New South Wales police officers confiscated the property of about 20 homeless people living under a Wentworth Park light-rail viaduct in Glebe, an inner-Sydney suburb, earlier this month. The callous attack on Sydney’s poorest and most vulnerable residents is in response to growing numbers of homeless people sleeping in the street in Sydney.

According to local residents, council officers arrived at the viaduct at around 7.30 a.m. on February 11 and began dismantling shelters and tents and seizing property. Chairs, tables and other vital necessities, including food and water, were thrown in large dumpster bins and removed.

Police told the homeless that they were not permitted to erect tents because this was “camping” and in violation of council laws. The residents were also told that they were only allowed to have one sleeping bag and two bags of possessions.

Following the operation, Sydney City Mayor Clover Moore, a so-called independent backed by the Labor Party and the Greens, issued a statement insisting that the council was not evicting the homeless from Wentworth Park and had “no plans to do so.”

The council, Moore cynically declared, was responding to complaints last year about “unauthorised camping” and had been “working with rough sleepers” about “keeping the area tidy.”

The Sydney City Council, in fact, told the homeless residents in January that the area would be subjected to a “clean up.” On February 6, the homeless were given an ultimatum, declaring that unless they removed tents, structures, furniture and other possessions that were “infringing on the public space,” these items would be forcibly confiscated.

Wentworth Park homeless told the World Socialist Web Site that the council seizure of their property was not the first attempt to force them out of the area. Last year Sydney council officers seized residents’ tents, personal belongings and medication, as well as their identification documents and papers.

Jimmy, 68, an art teacher who has post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, heart disease and other chronic illnesses, said council officers took his tent and most of his belongings.

Jimmy

“I’m a human, not an animal,” he said. “If I have a home, I can create. What will my grandchildren say when they see how I live? When I returned to my home, everything was gone except a blanket on the ground. I like to live like a man, not a dog.”

Janet, 50, who has been living at the park for more than a year, previously worked as non-certified carer and a cleaner. She lost her job and became homeless because she could not pay the $200 weekly rent for a boarding house room. A New Zealand citizen, she is not entitled to any social welfare. Before becoming homeless, Janet volunteered with Occupation Sydney, which assists homeless people access social services. She also helps other park residents.

Janet explained that the homeless were forced to submit numerous applications for welfare and housing but they rarely heard back from these agencies. She had assisted one Wentworth Park resident apply for accommodation but four months later he was told by the state’s public housing provider to try and find private rental accommodation.

Janet

Median rent for a two-bedroom house in Glebe is over $770 per week, a two-bedroom apartment $700 and one-bedroom apartment around $430 per week. The unemployment benefit for single people without dependents is only $515 per fortnight.

Janet’s niece Aggie, is unemployed and has lived under the viaduct for seven months. Although interviewed for several jobs, she has been unable to secure employment because she has no fixed address. She said that council operations against the homeless were occurring throughout Sydney.

“We didn’t know our rights and we allowed them to do this. They just took our things and dumped them in the bin,” she said. Without basic identification, she added, many residents had difficulty applying for welfare and jobs.

Aggie explained that there were a number of youth living in Wentworth Park. She said they were picked up once a fortnight by Department of Community Services (DOCS) workers. They were not provided any real assistance but taken for pizza and Coke and then dropped back off at the park in the evening.

Dean, 37, a former farm and hotel worker, was previously employed at a Kings Cross hotel. He lost his job and was evicted from his home by police. “We can’t present for work interviews without clean clothes,” he said.

Dean

Local residents in Glebe were outraged by the council treatment of the homeless and have donated bedding, clothing, food and other items. Margaret, a public housing tenant in the area for more than a decade, said that the homeless were traumatised when council officers and the police arrived. “Tents, mattresses, belongings, one man’s false teeth and another’s passport were all thrown into a garbage truck and taken away,” she said.

Margaret explained that the viaducts were empty when she first moved to Glebe but that “more and more people have made these arches their homes. In the last couple of years it’s the worst it’s ever been. These are desperate, vulnerable people. It’s a terrible situation.”

The growing numbers of homeless, she added, was “an indication of the governments’ housing policy and the shortage of affordable housing…These cities cater for the high end of town. The disadvantaged are being squeezed and more and more people are making the street their home. As the high end of town develops, people are being cast off with little regard for the communities that are shattered.”

The council operation against Wentworth Park residents is a brutal response to the growing numbers of homeless people in inner-city Sydney. Homelessness Australia, the national peak body, estimates that there are over 28,000 homeless people in New South Wales with hundreds sleeping rough.

While Sydney is home to some of Australia’s wealthiest people, hundreds of poverty-stricken people are sleeping rough every night in Belmore Park, Woolloomooloo, St James, Circular Quay, Martin Place and at other city locations.

This month’s Sydney City Council operation runs in tandem with the ongoing cuts to public housing spending, the deliberate run-down and privatisation of state-owned housing by consecutive state government throughout Australia—Liberal and Labor alike.

In New South Wales alone there are over 57,000 eligible applications—or more than 120,000 people—on public housing waiting lists. At the same time public housing in inner-city Sydney such as Glebe, Surry Hills, Redfern, Waterloo and Millers Point is being privatised and opened up for further gentrification with huge profits going to developers and the real estate and finance industry.

The council assault on the homeless follows recent state and federal government cutbacks in homeless welfare spending. Two days before Christmas, the Abbott government slashed $21 million from annual homeless spending, and axed National Shelter, the Community Housing Federation of Australia and other agencies. In November 2013, the state Liberal government slashed $6 million in homeless funding to the Sydney area.

Australian government uses Sydney siege report to ramp up anti-terror laws

Peter Symonds

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has seized on a joint federal/state government review of the December 15–16 Lindt café siege in central Sydney, not only to justify the elevation of the incident into a major national crisis, but to foreshadow draconian new anti-terror measures due to be announced in a speech today.

Abbott, who is under considerable pressure following a leadership challenge just a fortnight ago, playing the anti-terror card for all he is worth. Speaking yesterday after releasing the review, he declared that the “inescapable conclusion” was that “the system has let us down” and indicated that he intended to appoint a counter-terrorism “tsar” to beef up the police and security apparatus.

Abbott branded the hostage-taker Man Haron Monis “a monster” who “should not have been in our community” to justify a further crackdown on asylum seekers, welfare recipients and to tighten or introduce new laws across a range of issues from bail to citizenship and firearms. He also made clear that the Coalition government would introduce new legislation to ban organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, which opposes violent terrorism but is critical of US and Australian military interventions in the Middle East.

The prime minister sought to again wind up a climate of fear and uncertainty, saying that the threat of terrorism was worsening, to justify the new inroads into legal and democratic rights. “Australia has entered a new, long-term era of heightened terrorism,” he said, which meant the country “would need to revisit the debate between the rights of the individual and community protect.”

Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten has already indicated bipartisan support declared that it was not “beyond the wit and wisdom of the Australian parliament to get the balance right. If the prime minister has specific measures in mind then we will study that.” The Labor Party has rubberstamped, with minor amendments, the barrage of anti-terror legislation pushed through by the Abbott government over the past year.

In fact, what the Sydney siege demonstrates is the blatantly political character of the “war on terror.” A standoff involving an unstable, erratic individual, who was well known to police and intelligence agencies, was transformed into full-scale national emergency. Thousands of police locked down much of central Sydney. No serious attempt was made to negotiate Monis’s limited demands creating a highly strained situation inside the Lindt café that ended tragically in a police shoot-out in which Monis and two hostages were killed.

The report of the Joint Commonwealth-New South Wales Review released yesterday is a whitewash designed to cover-up the extensive relations between Monis and various federal and NSW government agencies, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and NSW police.

It is necessary to recall that just months before the Sydney siege hundreds of heavily-armed police and ASIO agents had mounted the largest ever anti-terror raids in Sydney on September 18. Fifteen premises were raided and 17 people detained all on the basis of one phone conversation allegedly threatening to kill a person at random. The raids took place as Abbott announced the dispatch of Australian war planes and troops to join the new US-led war in the Middle East.

The claims that the police had thwarted an imminent “terror threat” rapidly fell apart, however. Only one person was charged with a terrorist-related offence—a vague charge of conspiracy. While the media repeated lurid claims that Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) “terrorists” were planning a beheading, the police later admitted the word “behead” had not be used over the phone. Moreover, the weapon that was allegedly to be used turned out to be a plastic sword.

From the Abbott government’s standpoint, the raids had failed to create the climate of public fear that it wanted.

The central function of the review is to obscure the lies and contradictions contained in the official account of last December’s events. While some 800 police and ASIO agents were mobilised on the basis of one intercepted phone call in September, Monis who had been on the radar of police and ASIO ever since he arrived in Australia in 1996 as an Iranian refugee, managed to wander into Martin Place in central Sydney—an area bristling with CCTV cameras—and take over a café without anyone in the security apparatus supposedly being alert to such a possibility.

The review concluded that “right up until that fateful day in December 2014, and notwithstanding the fact agencies were familiar with Monis over many years and repeatedly examined his case and any new information that emerged, ASIO and law enforcement agencies never found any information to indicate Monis had the intent or desire to commit a terrorist act.” This claim is simply not credible.

Monis was a mentally unstable individual who had a long history of publicity seeking for his various grievances. He was wanted in Iran on fraud charges, postured as a Shiite cleric and spiritual healer, repeatedly tried to ingratiate himself with ASIO and the police by offering information on various “terrorist plots” and sent insensitive letters to the family of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan blaming them for the crimes of the US and Australian governments.

As outlined in the review, ASIO carried out four investigations into Monis. On two occasions—during the Pope’s tour of Australia in 2008 and the 2011 Royal visit—the AFP identified Monis as “a person of interest” because of his “obsessive preoccupations and fixated interest in High Office Holders and dignitaries.” Indeed, Monis had fired off letters of protest around the world to everyone from the US president to the British queen, always providing copies of his correspondence to ASIO.

The review deliberately obscures the nature of relations between Monis and ASIO which has a track record of exploiting such unstable individuals as spies and provocateurs. No explanation is given as to why ASIO gave Monis an adverse security assessment in January 1999 as “indirect, and possibly a direct, risk to national security” then overturned it the following year. Given his repeated offers to assist, ASIO could well have strung him along as a useful, if unreliable, asset.

The review insists that there were no warning signs that Monis’s previous opposition to violent terrorist acts had changed. In the course of 2013–14, Monis was under intense pressure from a battery of charges that had been brought against him, including charges of sexual assault during his time as “spiritual healer” and accessory to the murder of his former wife. He alleged that he was physically abused while on remand in November 2013. In October 2014, he was charged with 37 further counts of sexual assault.

On November 17, Monis posted a declaration on his web site that he had converted from Shiite to Sunni Islam and pledged his allegiance to the “Caliph”—a reference to the various Sunni extremist groups, including ISIS whose goal is to restore the caliphate. Between December 9–12, the National Security Hotline receives 18 calls and emails relating to Monis and calling attention to his Facebook page. Yet, ASIO, according to the review at least, assessed that Monis had no “desire or intent to engage in terrorism” and took no action.

It is totally implausible that ASIO did not recognise that Monis’s actions represented an abrupt change in his attitudes. His conversion to the Sunni sect, which the review simply notes in passing as “unusual,” meant the embrace of organisations that bitterly denounce all Shiites as heretics and apostates. The danger signs were there but were simply ignored, raising the question as to whether a high-level decision was taken to allow the attack to proceed and provide the needed pretext for ramping up “war on terror.”

Whatever the answer to that question, the Sydney siege succeeded where the September police raids failed. It has enabled the Abbott government to bring forth a new slew of anti-democratic laws and measures while justifying the continued involvement of the Australian military in the criminal US led war in Iraq and Syria.

The Danish roots of the Copenhagen terror attack

Jordan Shilton

The shooter responsible for the deaths of two people in separate incidents in Copenhagen over the weekend, Omar El-Hussein, reportedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a Facebook post shortly before he launched his terror attack.

The revelation produced renewed warnings of copycat attacks from other ISIS supporters. Danish media reported earlier this week that a group of people had published a message on Facebook hailing Hussein as a hero, and that the intelligence agency (PET) was monitoring their activity.

However, it now appears El-Hussein never received training from ISIS or Al Qaeda forces in the Middle East. His turn to terrorist activity was produced by conditions in Denmark and the depraved militarism of the major powers in the Middle East and Africa, in which the government in Copenhagen has taken full part.

El-Hussein was a member of a violent gang in Copenhagen and was later radicalised during a two-year prison sentence for stabbing a 19-year-old on a subway train in 2013.

The shooting was a reactionary, disoriented response to the right-wing anti-immigrant chauvinism, imperialist militarism, and assaults on the social conditions of the working class which was embraced by all the major Danish political parties. His demoralised embrace of individual terrorism reflects the terrible consequences of the crisis of political perspective in the working class.

El-Hussein was involved in the gang wars that have intensified on Copenhagen’s streets in recent years. Aydin Soei, a sociologist who met El-Hussein and other members of his “brothas” gang in 2011, described conditions confronting immigrant youth in the inner cities.

He told CNN: “It was an environment with a lot of gang wars where you couldn’t move around freely. The gang wars in Copenhagen started back in 2008 when El-Hussein was 15 years old and that’s the environment he’s been a part of. The gang wars meant that the amount of weapons, the amount of violence exploded, so that the generation that he's from has become much more hardcore than any other generation we've seen in Denmark before him.”

The disorientation and lack of perspective that have driven sections of youth into such a lifestyle were the direct outcome of policies pursued by successive Danish governments and the inability of the and pseudo-left parties to offer any opposition to them.

Although the right-wing Conservative-Liberal government under Prime Minister and subsequent NATO General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen began a sharp turn to the right, this project has been carried further since 2011 by a coalition of the Social Democratic and Socialist People’s parties, which received parliamentary backing from the Pabloite Red-Green Alliance during the first two years of the coalition.

These forces have worked constantly to block the a political movement of the working class against the reactionary policies of the Danish bourgeoisie. The absence of a progressive outlet for growing social anger paved the way for some among the most alienated layers of society to view reactionary, Islamist-inspired terrorism as the only available alternative.

From 2002, the Conservative and Liberal parties governed with the support of the far-right Danish People’s Party. During their nine years of rule, an unprecedented shift to the right took place. At the initiative of the DPP, the government reformed Danish immigration laws to make them among the most restrictive in Europe, making it harder for refugees to settle and for families to unite in Denmark.

At his trial in 2012, the fascist Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik explicitly praised Denmark’s immigration regime, adding that had Norway adopted a similar approach, he would not have carried out his terrorist attack.

Anti-immigrant chauvinism was coupled with a brutal assault on the working class. According to a report published in December 2014, Denmark ranked among the top five European Union members for the fastest rise in economic inequality between 2008 and 2012. While the wages of the poorest had declined by over 1,000 kroner per month ($152) in real terms, the wealthy had seen a jump in their pay by an average of 14,000 kroner.

Indicating the extent of the shift, only Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary experienced a greater increase—all countries that faced the near collapse of their banking sector, or that were subject to European Union and IMF bailouts.

Amid this growing social polarisation, immigrants formed one of the most exploited sections of the working class. Immigrants are four times more likely than Danish nationals to be unemployed, and four in ten children from an immigrant background lived in households where both parents were unemployed. A staggering eighty percent of married couples who received Denmark’s kontanthjælp unemployment benefit in June 2014 came from immigrant backgrounds.

El-Hussein, who was born in Denmark to Palestinian immigrants, grew up in this environment. He lived in the impoverished district of Norrebro, a predominantly immigrant area which in recent years has become synonymous with gang violence. In late 2014, the US state department went so far as to warn US citizens in a travel advisory not to visit Norrebro at night.

El-Hussein was not only influenced by dire social conditions. Those who knew him described him as a capable student who had lost his way, and as someone deeply concerned with the plight of the Palestinian people. His initial entry in to gang violence coincided with the NATO bombing of Libya, which led to the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime and the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

As he entered prison, the Syrian civil war was in full swing, with the funding of opposition forces by the US and its allies strengthening Islamist extremism in the country and in neighbouring Iraq.

El-Hussein witnessed the aftermath of these events from a prison cell, where he increasingly came under the influence of extremist Islam. The authorities acknowledged that his behaviour changed to such an extent during his detention that they reported it to Danish intelligence.

As El-Hussein turned towards Islamism, Copenhagen participated aggressively in imperialist wars operations in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2011, the Danish parliament voted unanimously to back the NATO assault on the Gaddafi regime in Libya, sending six F16 fighter jets to participate in the bombardment. Copenhagen also sent troops to the US-led war in Iraq and to Afghanistan as part of the NATO mission.

In 2011, the Social Democrats were elected to power. Forming a government with the support of the Stalinist Socialist People’s Party and with parliamentary support from the pseudo-left Red-Green Alliance, it took up seamlessly from where the previous government had left off. Social inequality has continued to deepen under the impact of the new coalition’s austerity budgets, and the ostensibly “left” government has been just as willing to stir up anti-immigrant chauvinism in response to virtually every social problem as its right-wing predecessor.

The deeply reactionary climate produced by the combination of relentless anti-immigrant chauvinism, social misery and imperialist aggression is replicated throughout Europe. Governments nominally of the right and left have embraced such policies as part of their reckless drive to defend the interests of the capitalist class around the globe, offering no resistance to social attacks and imperialist war. It is in this environment that the most alienated and demoralised individuals, like El-Hussein, find their way to the reactionary programme of Islamist terrorism.

Massachusetts public transit crisis drags into fourth week

John Marion

As another storm added snow and ice this weekend to the record amounts in the Boston area, the crisis of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) continued to deepen.

Commuters crowd platform at Davis Square station in Somerville, Massachusetts

As of February 17—nearly three weeks after a Red Line subway fire that presaged the system’s breakdown—more than 100 of the 218 Red Line cars were still out of service. Only 48 of 120 Orange Line cars and 102 of 219 Green Line cars were in service. Red Line service beyond North Quincy and Green Line B service beyond Kenmore Square are not expected to resume until Monday.

During the first two weeks of February, only 8 percent of trains on the Fitchburg commuter rail line were on time. On the Newburyport/Rockport line, 14 percent of trains were on time; on the Stoughton line on-time performance was less than 20 percent. Of the four morning trains that usually run into Boston from Stoughton, the only one that wasn’t cancelled last week arrives at South Station after 9 a.m., making it impossible for workers to be on time.

Most station platforms along the MBTA’s commuter rail are not protected from the weather. The local media have not reported any cases of frostbite, but a serious risk exists as wind chill factors drop below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius) and trains are cancelled without warning.

While salaried professionals who are able to work from home have been using that method as a backstop, hundreds of thousands of retail, restaurant, custodial and other hourly workers are losing wages because of the breakdown of public transportation. State law requires that businesses pay at least three hours of wages to workers who report for work when the employer is closed, but travel time to and from work is not paid. Many commutes that are normally less than an hour have been stretched out to several hours since the first blizzard hit at the end of January.

The Boston Globe, citing US Census figures, reported that more than 40 percent of low-wage workers in Massachusetts use public transportation. TheGlobe interviewed a Dunkin’ Donuts worker who lost $148 of gross pay after being forced to miss two shifts. The woman, who has a 6-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter, might not be able to make rent this month.

Those who are able to drive have also faced extraordinarily long commutes because of streets narrowed by snow banks and clogged with traffic. Exorbitant prices for parking have accompanied competition for spaces.Masslive.com interviewed a barber who works on commission and lost five days of work to the storms. His subway commute is normally 25 minutes, but on a day when the barbershop was open he drove into work—a two-hour drive because of traffic—and had to pay $38 at a parking garage.

IHS Global Insight estimates that a one-day shutdown of business in the state would result in $194.11 million in lost wages, $40.45 million in lost retail sales and total economic losses of $265 million.

Last week it was revealed that the state has used prison labor to shovel outdoor subway tracks and maintenance yards. While the state also put out a call through the Boston Building Trades union for volunteers to shovel at $30 per hour, about 50 inmates from the state Department of Correction were added to the crew. According to a report by American Prospect, the median wage for state prisoners in the US is 20 cents per hour. Prison laborers are not eligible for workers’ compensation if hurt in the hazardous job of shoveling snow from subway tracks.

The crisis is affecting school children as young as 6th grade, who were on vacation last week but return to school on Monday, February 23. Following a wildcat strike by school bus drivers in October 2013, the Boston School Committee forced through an austerity measure in March 2014 that replaced dedicated school buses with MBTA passes for some students. While 6th and 7th graders are given the “option” of using school buses, students in 8th grade and above have to take public transportation. More than 15,000 students have been affected by the MBTA’s crisis.

Governor Charlie Baker, who as secretary of administration and finance in the late 1990s was instrumental in saddling the state’s transportation system with debt, made the strange declaration last week that shoppers should turn Valentine’s Day into “Valentine’s Week” in order to increase the revenues of retailers.

On Friday, Baker named a seven-member commission of experts to study the causes of the MBTA’s collapse. While claiming that this body will diagnose the system’s problems and offer practical recommendations, Baker—who recently cut the MBTA’s fiscal year 2015 operating budget by $14 million due to a state deficit—is incapable of addressing the billions of dollars of deferred maintenance that have caused the crisis.

Even if he offers proposals of additional capital bond issuances, these will come with a heavy price. According to the MBTA’s fiscal year 2014 financial statements, it pays about $270 million per year in interest on capital debt. On the operating side of its budget, it receives state revenues from the regressive sales tax, but also issues bonds with future sales tax revenues as collateral. In other words, it borrows against future state revenues that will be paid disproportionately by the working class.

Baker gave his new commission until the end of March to issue a report. In all likelihood, he is hoping that the crisis will have passed by then so that he can bury the issue.

Baker, along with the Democrats who control both houses of the state legislature, will continue the pretense that society does not have enough wealth to fix the MBTA’s infrastructure. In reality, simply expropriating the assets of the state’s billionaires would provide more than enough money.

The 2014 Forbes list of the world’s 400 wealthiest people included six Massachusetts residents, among them Fidelity Investments President Abigail Johnson; her father, Edward C. Johnson III (who has his own fortune) and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

The latter has made his billions through the paper/packaging industry, real estate, and owning a professional football franchise. Like many in his class, he demands public funds be spent to increase the wealth of his empire. Last week, at the height of the MBTA’s crisis, the Foxboro Reporter revealed that MassDOT (the Department of Public Transportation) had signed a secret deal with the Kraft Group in which the state promised to spend at least $23 million on a rail bed that would provide weekday commuter rail trains to the businesses around the Patriots’ stadium.