Amazon CEO makes $3.3 billion in a few hours

Evan Blake & Eric London

Last Thursday evening, Amazon’s billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos made $3.3 billion when the tech giant reported its eighth consecutive profitable quarter, adding $50 a share to the value of its stock in after-hours trading.

To acquire $3.3 billion, a US Amazon worker making the average $12.41/hour would have to work 133,064 years—roughly the length of time modern humans have lived on earth. It would take Amazon workers in China, Brazil, India, and Mexico who are paid even lower wages much longer than that.

If the entire 200,000 person Amazon workforce in the US began working on January 1 at this wage, they would make a collective $3.3 billion in wages only at the end of August. A US warehouse worker would have to work almost two weeks just to make enough to buy a single share of Amazon stock (worth about $940)—and that’s before tax!

Bezos’s evening bonanza brings his net worth to $80.6 billion, making him the third wealthiest person on earth. Bezos is poised to become the world's richest person by year's end.

Among the world's billionaires, Bezos has experienced the largest growth in his personal wealth so far this year, adding $15.3 billion since January 1, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Over the past year, Bezos has earned $22.4 billion, and in the last five years he has earned an astounding $62.5 billion.

To put this in perspective, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that it would cost roughly $51 billion—$11.5 billion less than Bezos has earned in five years—to provide access to water and sanitation for the entire global population, which would save millions of lives annually.

The average Amazon warehouse worker in the US makes roughly $25,792 each year before tax. Thus, in the past year, Bezos earned 868,486 times the average Amazon worker, and over the past five years he has earned nearly this same amount, $23,782, per minute .

Amazon and Bezos exercise an inordinate amount of control on the political system. In 2016, Amazon’s Political Action Committee gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to 129 congressmen—29.6 percent of the total—and 35 senators, both split almost evenly between both Democratic and Republican representatives. Bezos also owns one of the country’s most influential newspapers, the Washington Post .

Bezos’s billions and his influence come through the exploitation of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers worldwide, who go to work each day and produce far more value for the company than they receive in wages. This is where the company’s profit comes from.

In all the countries in which it operates, Amazon is engaged in efforts to suck its workers dry of every penny of profit. In Germany, Amazon recently implemented a new policy of collective punishment for its workforce aimed at dissuading workers from taking sick days that they have the right to under German law.

The policy stipulates that workers are eligible for a group bonus of 6-10 percent only if the entire group has used a minimum amount of sick days. This pits workers against one another and places immense pressure on individuals not to take time off to recover from illness for fear of being blamed for taking away their coworkers’ bonuses.

Over the last five years, Amazon’s revenue has increased more than the cost of revenue (which includes labor costs). That means that each year, the level of exploitation at Amazon increases while workers receive a smaller proportion of Amazon’s gross profit. From 2012 to 2016, the difference between the company’s total revenue and the cost of revenue, including labor costs, increased from $15.12 billion in 2012 to $47.72 billion in 2016. That’s tens of billions of dollars of wealth that workers produce but will never see.

Behind the billions of dollars on the company’s balance sheets are the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers whose daily economic struggles are funding Bezos’s lavish lifestyle.

Last October, he bought Washington DC’s largest house—a 27,000 square foot former textile museum—for $23 million in cash. To purchase just a single square foot of Bezos’ mansion, an Amazon worker making $12.40 would have to work 68.7 hours.

The house has 14 bathrooms, 10 bedrooms, and 11 fireplaces. Bezos’s nearby neighbors include Barack Obama, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as well as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Bezos’ wealth is not a product of individual “greed,” it is a product of the capitalist system, which is based on the private ownership of the means of production by a tiny sliver of the world’s population which increases its wealth through the exploitation of the working class of the world.

It is the working class, at Amazon and in all industries and workplaces, which produces society’s wealth. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the nationalization of Amazon and all major corporations, the seizure of the wealth of the rich, and its redistribution to meet the needs of the human race.

This requires a political struggle for the unity of the working class of all nationalities against the corporations and the political parties and governments they control, as well as against their wars for corporate plunder. The World Socialist Web Site encourages all Amazon workers to share this article as widely as possible on social media and to contact us to learn more about the fight for socialism.

New report documents pervasive hunger in America

Shelley Connor 

A report released by Feeding America on May 4 reveals that one out of every eight people, and one out of every six children, did not consistently have access to food in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available. While there has been an overall decline over the past several years in food insecurity rates, hunger and poverty levels have not declined to pre-recession levels, the report states.

Moreover, the gap between income and the money needed to buy adequate food for the millions of people classified as food insecure is growing. And the existing government food programs, increasingly starved of funding, are scandalously inadequate to meet the immense social need.

The report is a further exposure of the government/media narrative that the US has recovered from the Great Recession and, as former President Barack Obama said at the end of 2015, “things are pretty great in America.” Obama, of course, was speaking for his real constituency—Wall Street and the wealthy, who monopolized an even greater share of the national wealth thanks to his right-wing policies.

Donald Trump is taking off where Obama left off, plundering the economy and enriching the financial aristocracy even more shamelessly. With profits, stock prices and the personal fortunes of the rich at record levels, the ongoing hunger crisis stands as an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system.

Using United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) data, Feeding America, a nonprofit that operates food banks, mapped food insecurity throughout each county and congressional district in the United States. The compiled statistics offer a sobering insight into the living standards of large sections of working class and lower-middle class Americans:

* In 2009, the year after the Wall Street crash, some 50 million US residents were food insecure. While that number fell to 42 million in 2015, the budget shortfall for food insecure individuals averaged $527 a year. This represents an increase of 13 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 2008.

* Children are more vulnerable to hunger than the general population. On average, 21 percent of children across all US counties are food insecure, compared to 14 percent of the general population. Some 41 percent of the children in Issaquena County, Mississippi are food insecure, and in 14 counties, over 100,000 children cannot expect consistent meals.

* Twenty six percent of food insecure individuals nationwide are unlikely to qualify for government nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, better known as food stamps), Women Infants and Children (WIC) and free or reduced-price school meals. In 76 US counties, the majority of food insecure individuals are likely to be ineligible for government assistance. In Douglas County, Colorado, near Denver, about two-thirds of the county’s 28,280 food insecure individuals are unlikely to qualify for government nutrition aid.

One in four food insecure individuals report that they applied for government assistance and were denied.

This is no mystery given that in many states a family of four has to earn less than $31,980 a year to qualify for food stamps. In other words, the family has to be living in the most dire poverty.

* Millions of people with jobs are living in hunger. Some 57 percent of food insecure people earn more than the (absurdly low) federal poverty level.

* Eighty-nine percent of the counties with the highest rates of food insecurity are located in the South.

* Rural counties make up 63 percent of all US counties, but account for 76 percent of the counties facing the highest rates of food insecurity.

However, while urban counties have lower rates of food insecurity, many have huge numbers of people living with hunger. Los Angeles County has a relatively “low” rate of food insecurity at 12 percent, but it is home to 1.2 million food insecure individuals, including 480,000 children. The counties with the highest number of food insecure people are New York, Los Angeles, Harris (Houston), Cook (Chicago), Maricopa (Phoenix), Dallas, San Diego, Wayne (Detroit), Tarrant (Fort Worth) and Philadelphia.

Diana Aviv, CEO of Feeding America, characterized the report as “grim news.” She continued: “It is disheartening to realize that millions of hardworking, low-income Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to feed themselves and their families at a time that our economy is showing many signs of improvement…”

Widespread and entrenched hunger in the richest country in the world is not the result of cosmic forces or an act of God. It is the product of deliberate policies carried out by both parties, acting in the interests of the ruling corporate-financial elite. The SNAP program was cut repeatedly under the Obama administration, including the $8.7 billion reduction Obama signed into law in February of 2104, stripping more than 500,000 people of food stamp benefits.

One day after Feeding America issued its report, Trump signed into law a bipartisan budget measure extending funding of the federal government through the end of the 2017 fiscal year, September 30, which includes a further $2.4 billion cut in food stamps. The same measure allocates an additional $15 billion for the military over the next five months plus $1.5 billion more to further militarize the United States’ southern border. The Democrats hailed the measure as a victory for the people and defeat for Trump.

The $16.5 billion combined allocation for war abroad and the war on immigrants at home would go a long way in covering what Feeding America calls the annual “food budget shortfall” for America’s food insecure population—estimated at $22.3 billion.

If that full amount were deducted from the net worth ($81 billion) of America’s richest billionaire, Bill Gates, the computer mogul would still be left with nearly $60 billion. Speculator George Soros, the 19th richest American, could cover the hunger deficit and still have a cool $3 billion to spare.

A social system that condemns millions to hunger in order to sustain the meaningless and corrupt lifestyles of a new aristocracy is doomed. It deserves to perish.

On the eve of the French presidential election

Alex Lantier

Tomorrow, tens of millions of people across France will vote in the presidential runoff election in the midst of an unprecedented political crisis and under a state of emergency that suspends democratic rights. The candidates of France’s two discredited traditional parties of government, the Socialist Party (PS) and The Republicans (LR), have been eliminated. However, the choice voters face constitutes an unanswerable indictment of France’s ruling elite.

On the one side there is Marine Le Pen of the neo-fascist National Front (FN), the descendant of France’s Nazi-collaborationist regime in World War II. She has hailed Donald Trump’s election on a nationalist “America First” program of war and protectionism, and called for France to abandon the European Union and the euro currency so as to do maximum economic damage to Germany, France’s main trading partner. At home, she would use the Socialist Party’s state of emergency and the mass electronic spying apparatus to set up a fascistic police dictatorship, ban immigration, carry out mass raids and end free schooling for non-French children.

Le Pen’s opponent, the PS-backed banker and current favorite Emmanuel Macron, is not an alternative to the FN. An ally of Berlin and the Democratic Party in Washington, Macron supports NATO’s war drive against Syria, North Korea and Russia, which threatens to provoke war between nuclear-armed powers, and is calling for a return of the military draft. At home, he intends to maintain the state of emergency and use it, together with the PS’s hated labor law, to tear up contracts and social rights, including public health care and pensions, won by European workers over generations of struggle in the 20th century.

Whichever candidate wins, France will be ruled by a government that represents the interests of finance capital and is dedicated to a program of class war within the country and imperialist war beyond its borders. With seven in ten voters angry at the choice of candidates, class conflict of revolutionary dimensions is being prepared in France and across Europe.

After a quarter-century of war and EU austerity following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, two-thirds of the French people say the class struggle is a daily reality of life. Among young people, who have known nothing but the social and economic collapse that has unfolded since the 2008 Wall Street crash, an unmistakably revolutionary mood is building.

In the EU’s recent “Generation What” survey of hundreds of thousands of European youth, 61 percent of Frenchmen under 34 said they would be willing to participate in a “large-scale uprising” against the political system. Over 60 percent of youth gave the same answer in Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.

The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), is calling for an active boycott of Sunday’s second-round ballot. This position is very different from a call for individual abstention.

The PES call for opposition among workers and youth to both candidates is grounded in fundamental political principles. The entire experience of the international class struggle, extending over more than a century, has demonstrated the politically fatal consequences of entering into electoral alliances with a bourgeois party. Time and again, the subordination of the working class to one reactionary party of finance capital in order to prevent the victory of a supposedly more reactionary bourgeois party has led to political disaster. It will be no different this time. There is a political logic to such politics. If Macron wins the election, the workers will be told that they must not fight for the defeat and overthrow of his government, lest the FN come to power.

There is no clever electoral maneuver that can solve the political crisis that confronts the working class. The call for a boycott is correct because it raises the political consciousness of the working class and prepares it for the struggles that lie ahead.

The key issue is to provide a Marxist and internationalist perspective and build the revolutionary leadership in the working class required for these struggles.

Many workers in France have drawn conclusions from the last time virtually the entire political establishment, including the so-called “far left” parties aligned with the PS, united behind a right-wing politician supposedly to block the FN—the 2002 runoff between Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac. The result has been an intensification of attacks on the working class, a further lurch to the right by the traditional ruling parties and a steady growth in the influence of the neo-fascists.

It is necessary to reject the entire reactionary framework of this election and the political system that produced it. The working class must advance its own independent political alternative, beginning with an active boycott of Sunday’s runoff.

The PES warns that to the extent that forces like Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (UF) movement and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) adapt themselves to the “lesser evil” argument and succeed in blocking revolutionary opposition to Macron from the left, they only strengthen the FN. The position of these pseudo-left forces in the election will only bolster the neo-fascists’ efforts to present themselves as the sole antiestablishment party, increasing their authority in the event that Macron is elected and provokes mass social opposition as a result of his anti-working class policies.

Mélenchon’s position is a cowardly abdication of political responsibility. He received 20 percent of the vote. Yet while he declines to explicitly support Macron, fearing that this would discredit him with his voters, he is doing everything he can to prevent a mobilization of the working class against Macron and Le Pen. After calling for UF to run in the June legislative elections, Mélenchon announced that he is willing to become Macron’s prime minister.

Such a statement, making clear that Mélenchon is willing to oversee domestic policy amid a mass military buildup and an aggressive foreign policy led by Macron, shows that UF and its allies are a dead end for voters seeking peace and social equality.

As the old political setup around the PS and LR collapses, the only way forward for workers is a conscious political break with the PS and its periphery and a return to the revolutionary road. The complete dead end of the French political establishment is rooted in a mortal crisis of the world capitalist system, which is plunging into the abyss of war and dictatorship.

To mount a revolutionary counteroffensive in opposition to the PS, Macron and the FN, the working class needs its own party and political leadership. On this centenary of the October Revolution, the PES advances itself as the representative of the irreconcilable socialist and internationalist program of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 and the heritage of Trotskyism defended by the ICFI. It appeals to workers and youth who agree with its analysis of the elections to support the PES, study its program and join the struggle to build it as the political vanguard of the working class in France.

Turkish government launches crackdown on Internet, opposition parties

Halil Celik

In the aftermath of its extremely narrow victory in the April 16 constitutional referendum and amid widespread allegations of voting fraud, the Turkish government is escalating its crackdown on political opposition and the Internet as part of the country’s ongoing state of emergency.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s constitutional amendment aims to give the president dictatorial powers over other branches of government. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is now moving ahead with attempts to intimidate and crush any organization that could potentially pose an obstacle to its rule.

With a new statutory decree issued on April 29, the government dismissed 3,974 people from state institutions, including 484 academics, on allegations of being connected with “terrorist groups.” This came two days after the suspension of some 9,000 police officers and arrest of about 1,000 others for alleged links to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who was declared by the Turkish government to be the main suspect in last year’s failed July 15 coup attempt.

The Republican People’s Party (CHP), the leading force of the bourgeois “No” campaign, has itself become a target in the crackdown. According to the daily Cumhuriyet, the AKP has drawn up a motion to lift the parliamentary immunity of the CHP’s chairperson and six other deputies and sent it to parliament.

The same CHP voted for a bill to amend the constitution to strip MPs of immunity from prosecution on May 20, 2016. The amendment was proposed by the AKP after Erdogan accused the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) of being a legal extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against Turkey for Kurdish autonomy. Since then, 14 deputies, including two chairpersons, of the HDP have been arrested.

On April 29, in another move to suppress dissent, the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, Turkey’s telecommunications watchdog, blocked online encyclopedia Wikipedia “for the protection of public order, national security or the well-being of the public.” The state-run Anadolu News Agency cited the statement as declaring that Wikipedia “has become part of an information source which is running a smear campaign against Turkey in the international arena.”

Under the eight months of state of emergency, Turkish government has repeatedly blocked access to Twitter or Facebook and banned hundreds of web sites, and closed down hundreds of media outlets, jailing some 230 journalists.

The escalating crackdown is a clear sign of growing crisis in the Turkish ruling class. Being well aware of mounting unrest and anger within the working masses, Erdogan plans to more strictly hold the reins of his own party. On May 2, he rejoined the AKP and became the first Turkish president with party membership since 1961, when a constitution banning presidential party membership came into force after a military coup in 1960 overthrew the Democrat Party government of then-President Celal Bayar.

It is expected that Erdogan will be elected as chairperson of the AKP and launch extensive changes, including a possible purge within his party, at the extraordinary congress scheduled for May 21.

The CHP former chairperson and long-time leading member Deniz Baykal has also called for a party congress. In a televised interview on Tuesday evening, Baykal said that he told Kilicdaroglu that the CHP congress should elect a chairperson who would also be the party’s candidate in the 2019 presidential elections.

Baykal’s proposal points to the CHP leadership’s readiness to accept Erdogan’s anti-democratic amendment leading Turkey into a presidential dictatorship. The CHP has already made clear that it has no intention of opposing the drive to dictatorship. Immediately after the referendum, it declared the “necessity of a social consensus on the constitution,” while cynically calling the legitimacy of the referendum into question. As thousands of people went into the streets to protest the fraudulent referendum results, the CHP moved to end the protests.

Meanwhile, the Turkish army is also escalating cross-border operations against both the PKK and the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, the main US proxy fighting the Islamic State (IS), further worsening Ankara’s relations with its NATO partners. Turkish air and artillery strikes have also provoked sharp criticism from Moscow, which said that they violated fundamental principles of international relations.

At a meeting with Turkey’s Chief of General Staff on April 28, U.S. European Command General Curtis Scaparrotti explained growing concerns over Turkish artillery attacks on Kurdish forces working with US troops in Syria. After Turkish strikes in the last week of April, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said they “were not approved by the coalition and had led to the unfortunate loss of life of our partner forces” in the fight against IS.

Following the Turkish attacks and cross-border fire between the Turkish military and YPG, US forces have begun monitoring the Syria-Turkey border along with Syrian Kurdish forces. Meanwhile, Moscow has reinforced its troops in Afrin, another PYD/YPG-controlled region at the western end of the Turkish-Syrian border, further away from the main Syrian Kurdish area.

Erdogan’s dictatorial and militarist agenda has further undermined Turkish–European Union (EU) relations, which have fallen to an unprecedented low point since the July 15 coup attempt. The EU denounced Erdogan’s mass crackdown and “human right violations,” refusing to hand over dozens of Turkish officers and officials who fled to Europe after the failed coup. Ankara responded by slamming the EU for harboring “terrorists.”

After weeks of political conflict, escalated by reactionary bans by the Austrian, German and Dutch governments on Turkish government officials’ campaigning for a “Yes” vote in the referendum, EU lawmakers called last week for a formal halt to talks over Turkey’s EU membership. They cited Erdogan’s dictatorial policies and large-scale electoral fraud in the referendum.

On May 2, European Commissioner Johannes Hahn told reporters, “The focus of our [Turkish-EU] relationship has to be something else,” while cynically stating that Turkey was “moving away from a European perspective.”

Only days before, however, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel sounded a different note on the issue. At a meeting of European foreign ministers on 28-29 April in Malta, he told reporters he was “strictly against” nullifying Ankara’s bid for EU membership: “It does not improve things by cancelling something before we have something new to offer.”

These words, signaling the willingness of the EU to focus on working with Erdogan to block immigration to Europe and prosecute the Syrian war, were followed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s remarks that Europe “should not push Turkey away.” Speaking to the Berliner Zeitung, she stated that as a NATO member, Turkey is “an important partner in the fight against Islamist terror. … You should not just push away such a partner, even in view of negative developments that we must address.”

The EU is Turkey’s biggest foreign investor and trading partner, and has reached a reactionary agreement with Ankara to keep Syrian refugees out of the EU.

Turkish President Erdogan continues his cynical thundering against the EU. On May 2, he insisted that Turkey was not the EU’s “door keeper.” He added: “There is no option other than opening chapters that you have not opened until now. If you open them, that’s great. If you don’t, then goodbye.” Pointing to the hypocrisy of European governments’ criticisms of his ongoing crackdown and state of emergency, Erdogan called on Brussels to “lift the state of emergency in France, first.”

Woman jailed in Britain for six months for begging for 50 pence

Paul Armstrong

Worcester County Court recently sentenced a vulnerable woman to six months in prison for the “crime” of asking two people in the street for 50 pence.

The judgment, delivered in February of this year by District Judge Mackenzie, justified the custodial sentence on the grounds that that the conduct of the woman—identified in the court documents as Marie Baker—constituted a repeated breach of a civil injunction against her.

The power to issue a civil injunction of the kind, which prevented Baker from begging from anybody in the City of Worcester, is enshrined in the Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014.

Baker was jailed for what were fourth and fifth breaches of the anti-social behaviour injunction. She had already been jailed for one day, 28 days and three months respectively for previous breaches.

The fact that publicly asking for the sum of 50 pence can result in six months imprisonment means, literally, the criminalisation of poverty.

This is made all the more overt by the Court’s recognition that the request was neither aggressive nor persistent. “She has been told ‘no’ and she has not persisted,” the judge in the case said.

District Judge Mackenzie described Baker as “a fragile individual,” who “has difficulty reading and writing,” and “difficulty in understanding.” Yet the Court ruled that there was no indication that “she lacks capacity to deal with matters.”

Baker was refused any legal representation on the basis that she failed to obtain legal aid—a legal protection which has been devastated by a ruthless bipartisan attack culminating in the recent Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Too poor to fund a solicitor herself, Ms Baker was denied legal representation.

District Judge Mackenzie justified the sentence by saying that to “simply give repeat injunctions and allow people to go continuing begging, continuing to persist in a nuisance to the population,” would leave the injunction “without some real teeth.” The Court needed to “mark the blatant repeat breaches of this injunction with something meaningful.”

While the Court expressed regret in its judgment, its actions suggest the opposite: Baker had already been jailed three times, with each sentence substantially longer than the previous.

The denial to Baker of any legal representation is the direct consequence of the brutal assault against legal rights and the criminalisation of the working class through increasingly punitive sanctions. The anti-social behaviour legislation—which is now extending the sentencing power of courts—has historically been an area of law enabling civil rather than criminal redress.

The District Judge admitted that Baker’s appearance as a litigant in person “came close” to breaching her right to a fair trial under the Human Rights Act 1998. One has to wonder, what would be considered an actual breach of her human rights, taking into account her illiteracy and financial hardship!

Without legal representation, Baker was heavily disadvantaged in her trial. It is no surprise that she was unable to procure the prerequisite evidence for her principal defence arguments—that of mistaken identity; calling upon CCTV evidence for corroboration; that she had an alibi; and that a police officer had fabricated the prosecution’s evidence.

According to the Independent, “Ms Baker claimed she had an alibi and believed CCTV images would prove her account, but she struggled to provide the evidence. She also claimed mistaken identity and said police ‘had got it in for her’ but both were dismissed by the judge.”

Without doubt, legal representation, as admitted by the District Judge in this case, would have resulted in a more favourable outcome for Baker, and she would have been better equipped to put forward an effective defence.

The reality is that, without a legal representative, Baker was given an unfair trial. She was unable to challenge her remand, and unable to ensure that correct procedural regulations (enshrined in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and its Codes of Practice) were followed in relation to her remand and the investigation against her.

She also could not understand the implications of the minutiae of such investigation for her trial, the weight of evidence against her and the legal and evidentiary burdens required for the trial. Neither did she know how to conduct a plea in mitigation based on knowledge of the Court’s sentencing powers.

Baker’s inability to get legal representation was described by the District Judge as being a typical, rather than a unique, problem experienced by those facing the offence of contempt of court for breach of a civil injunction.

Had the test for legal aid been one of means (as it generally is in criminal cases), Baker would have likely received legal aid. However, for those accused of contempt of court for breaching an injunction, criminal legal aid is required in such cases even when the trial is in a civil court, and criminal legal aid for contempt of court is not means tested.

Recent annual cuts to legal aid equating to a figure of £220 million will continue year on until 2018 under the Conservative government. A study from Amnesty International concluded that the year before the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 entered into force, legal aid was granted in 925,000 cases, whereas in the year after it entered into force, legal aid was granted in only 497,000 cases (a 46 percent decline).

Baker is ultimately a victim of years of relentless austerity, which has plunged millions of people into poverty and destroyed essential social services.

The result of this savagery is that a new era has been ushered in which there is a growing prevalence of media headlines, such as the case of Baker, which were commonplace during the Dickensian period.

Alitalia bankruptcy exacerbates social tensions in Italy

Marianne Arens

The Italian airline Alitalia filed for bankruptcy on April 25. One day earlier a workforce referendum on a restructuring plan was voted down. Two-thirds of Alitalia pilots, flight attendants and ground crew rejected the planned job cuts and pay cuts.

All of the trade unions represented at Alitalia had previously agreed to the restructuring plan, which amounted to little more than extortion. In addition to the major trade unions Cgil, Cisl Uil and UGL, the professional unions Trasporto Aereo, Anpac and Anpav also participated in the vote.

The company’s shareholders refused to invest a single cent in the airline until the workforce agreed to cuts. The main shareholder with 49 percent of shares is Etihad Airways (Abu Dhabi); the remainder are held by the Italian consortium CAI, headed by Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo.

Alitalia CEO Luca Cordero di Montezemolo announced his resignation from the company board a few weeks ago. The multimillionaire, who had previously led Fiat, Ferrari and Maserati, had negotiated a rescue plan with the Ministry of the Economy and trade unions. The plan envisaged pay reductions of eight percent and the slashing of nearly one thousand jobs. Other reports referred to 1,700 job cuts, especially among ground crew. Indirectly, the measures impact over 20,000 employees at subsidiaries, suppliers and third-party companies, for example Alitalia Cargo, CityLiner, Carpatair etc.

The unions sought to portray the cuts plan as the best possible option following negotiations. Then to the surprise and consternation of the management, trade unions and government, 67 percent of the 12,500-strong Alitalia workforce rejected the restructuring plan.

It now appears that the government of Paolo Gentiloni is ready to accept Alitalia’s bankruptcy. It has deliberately broken with the practice of past governments. So far, every Italian government, from Prodi to Berlusconi to Monti, had ensured that the state took responsibility for Alitalia liabilities. This policy is evidently at an end.

“The conditions necessary for nationalization are not at hand,” declared Premier Paolo Gentiloni (Democratic Party) on television. His economics minister Pier Carlo Padoan said: “The government is not ready to participate in a possible capital increase for the company, either directly or indirectly.”

The company now has a lifespan of just six months. During this period, Alitalia is to be put under the control of a bankruptcy administrator and financed with a bridging loan of four hundred million euros. This loan must also be approved by the EU Commission.

Major airlines are already circling Alitalia like vultures anticipating that the company will probably be broken up and sold off. Transport Minister Graziano told the press that they would sell the company “to the best bidders,” although any final decision resides with the largest shareholder, i.e., Etihad.

Lufthansa recently emerged as a prospective buyer: The German airline, which took over the bankrupt Swiss Air a few years ago, could wait for insolvency and then take over parts of Alitalia at a bargain price.

Malaysia Airlines has expressed interest in the acquisition of six to eight Alitalia jets. British aviation groups could also try to buy an Italian location on favourable terms in order to have a leg within the EU following Brexit.

Fierce competition on the part of low-cost airlines is already taking place for coveted slots, such as the start and landing rights in Rome-Fiumicino or Milan-Linate.

Some representatives of Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement (M5S), which in 2008 had supported Alitalia going bankrupt, are now calling for the nationalization of Alitalia. Their role models are group holdings such as ENI, Leonardo SpA or Trenitalia, whose main shareholder is the state.

There is nothing progressive, however, in this proposal. Under conditions of capitalist crisis it recalls the nationalization measures of the fascist dictator Mussolini. Under his direction, the state holding IRI was established in 1933. Without abolishing capitalism, much of Italian industry was placed under the direct control of the fascist state. For workers, this process was accompanied by brutal dictatorship and war.

The Alitalia Group emerged from the IRI trust after the Second World War. Up until the 1990s it was a state-owned corporation, and was then gradually privatized by 1996. Since then it has faced bankruptcy a number of times.

Following the stock market crash of 2008, a consortium of Italian companies and banks took over the airline. Five thousand jobs were slashed from the workforce of 20,000. Six years later, Etihad Airways posed as rescuer in need to avert another bankruptcy. The takeover of 49 percent of shares by Etihad in 2014 was accompanied by the radical restructuring of the airline, the destruction of even more jobs and a further worsening of wages and working conditions.

This is the reason why the pilots, flight attendants and soil workers rejected the latest plan. “There is real anger among the workers,” said Riccardo Canestrari, coordinator of the Anpaz pilots union, after the rejection vote. “People are fed up with promises, and the level of trust is now under zero.”

The move to plunge Alitalia into bankruptcy and endanger more than 12,000 jobs is criminal. It reveals the conditions which underlie the continual attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions taking place in every country.

The global competition for profit threatens both the functioning of modern transport systems and the living conditions of the working class. The government openly takes sides with the banks and investors. Having sought to persuade workers to swallow the bitter pill of yet another poisonous restructuring plan, the trade unions are now conspiring to assist management in breaking up the company and tossing what’s left to the vultures.

The fact that the Alitalia workforce withstood pressure from all sides and rejected the restructuring plan, demonstrates its militancy. What is necessary, however, is an international and socialist program that unites workers across borders.

The Alitalia employees have repeatedly resorted to strikes and protests to oppose the attacks on their jobs. Strikes took place in February 2017 and the last one was on April 5. Almost at the same time there were strikes by ground staff in Berlin and at airports in France and Great Britain. These struggles must be united and guided under a socialist perspective with the aim of abolishing the bankrupt capitalist profit system.

Higher education and upward mobility increasingly inaccessible to poor in the US

Kathleen Martin

As the gap between rich and poor grows, so does the disparity in the attainment of higher education and, in turn, upward social mobility.

A study published in late April by the Urban Institute focused on wealth and social mobility shows that individuals from high-wealth families are more than 1.5 times as likely to complete two to four years of college by age 25 than those from low-wealth households.

Household wealth is measured by total family wealth relative to others in the study (including home equity), and upward social mobility is defined as “the likelihood an individual whose parents did not graduate from college completes at least two or four years of college.”

Participants of the study were broken into four household wealth quartiles: high, $223,438 and above; middle-high, $45,000-$223,437; low-middle, $2,000-$45,000; and low, $2,000 and less.

Data released last year in a separate study by the Pew Charitable Trusts gives a better idea of how many people in the population would fall into each category more generally. While both studies break data into different wealth brackets, loosely comparing the correlating statistics to correctly understand the placement of most Americans into these quartiles gives a better idea of how many people are actually likely to climb out of economic despair, or to have “social mobility.”

Nearly one-fifth, or 19.34 percent, of all US households total have negative wealth. Negative wealth means that the total sum of all debts exceeds the value of that household’s assets. If correlated to the results of this study, one-fifth of the population would automatically fall into the “low-wealth” quartile of $2,000 or less used in the Urban Institute study.

Others have noted that this section of the population with negative wealth is expected to increase rapidly in the near future due to the massive amounts of student loan debt weighing on millions of young college graduates today, with small likelihood of repaying the debt and even less likelihood of being able to afford a house or even a car of their own.

The authors of the study note: “We analyze total wealth, not relying exclusively on housing wealth.” However, the poorest households lost the greatest total portions of their wealth following the 2008 mortgage crisis, including what is commonly the largest contributor to a working class person’s wealth: their home. The youth participating in the study from this section of the population have only a 30 percent chance of completing two years of college, and a 14 percent chance of completing four.

“[O]nly 29 percent of youth from the bottom quartile of the family wealth distribution complete two or more years of college education,” the study notes, “and only 26 percent are upwardly mobile—that is, complete at least two years when neither parent graduated from college.” In comparison, 78 percent of youth in the top quartile complete two or more years of higher education, and 61 percent are upwardly mobile. The study also notes that this latter disparity widens when contrasting the differences between the quartiles and four-year degree completion.

The next quartile, low-middle, is a household whose wealth is anywhere from $2,000 to $45,000. According to the Pew data, 13.42 percent of US households have wealth ranging from zero to $19,999, with over half of that percentage falling closer to the low end. The remaining 6.31 percent makes up households with $5,000 to $19,999 in wealth.

The study did not gather specific information on academic success, employment during college, whether or not the participant had children, and what kind of institution the participant was enrolled in. This, too, makes a difference, given that the majority of low-income (and likely low-wealth) students cannot afford to attend 95 percent of American higher education institutions. Youth with family responsibilities and full-time jobs, unstable housing, and a host of other challenges are much less likely to have success academically than their wealthy peers.

While the parents of students from low-income and low-wealth families are not expected to contribute as much financially to the cost of their child’s tuition, and while overall the cost of attending a junior or community college is much less expensive than a traditional four-year college, the financial strain is proportionally greater on families with less money.

“These results suggest that family wealth can help children complete college, even holding constant other characteristics such as family income and education,” the authors of the Urban Institute concluded. “Wealth might provide the needed resources for families to get their children in and through college, or wealthier families may live in areas with better schools and social networks that help them get to college.”

Pentagon in talks with Baghdad on permanent US occupation of Iraq

Bill Van Auken

The Trump administration and the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi are engaged in negotiations over a proposal that would maintain a permanent US troop presence in Iraq, according to American and Iraqi officials cited by the Associated Press (AP).

The talks come more than 14 years after the US military invaded the country and unleashed a bloodbath that cost over a million lives and left the entire country shattered. The ostensible purpose of the permanent US presence is to train Iraqi forces and to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after the anticipated fall of its last stronghold in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who commanded the 1st Marine Division during the Iraq invasion and was responsible for numerous atrocities committed in the country, is leading the talks with Iraqi officials, according to the AP report.

The Obama administration formally withdrew US forces, which at their highpoint numbered 170,000, in 2011. The American military presence, however, never fully ended. Under the so-called Operation Inherent Resolve launched in 2014 following the overrunning of Mosul and a broad swathe of Iraq by ISIS, US forces have risen officially to 5,000, while the real number of troops is well over 7,000 as the Pentagon uses temporary deployments to escalate the American intervention.

According to the AP, US forces would remain after Mosul’s fall, deployed in at least five bases around the city as well as ones on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

“There is a general understanding on both sides that it would be in the long-term interests of each to have that continued presence,” a US official told the news agency. “So as for agreement, yes, we both understand it would be mutually beneficial. That we agree on.”

The official said that the number of American troops that would remain indefinitely in Iraq would be “several thousand...similar to what we have now, maybe a little more.”

The discussions are unfolding under the shadow of the more than six-month-long bloody US-backed offensive by Iraqi government forces against Mosul. American warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and heavy artillery have played a decisive role in the siege, reducing much of the city to rubble and inflicting thousands of civilian casualties. US special operations troops are participating alongside Iraqi forces in the battle to retake the city.

In the latest atrocity, a strike by US warplanes killed at least 11 civilians in a district of western Mosul on Thursday. The Shafaaq news web site, quoting local sources, reported that women and children were among the dead.

The Pentagon routinely denies responsibility for civilian deaths or grossly underestimates the toll inflicted by American airstrikes. It has been compelled, however, to open an investigation into a March 17 attack that is estimated to have killed over 200 people, including over 100 people who had taken refuge in one house.

After the horrific scale of the carnage inflicted by the strike became known, both US and Iraqi military spokesmen attempted to blame the deaths on ISIS, claiming that it had herded people into a house booby-trapped with explosives and then lured the American warplanes into attacking it.

Survivors of the airstrike have angrily denounced these claims as lies. The survivors, according to AP, “described a horrifying battlefield where airstrikes and artillery pound neighborhoods relentlessly, trying to root out ISIS militants, leveling hundreds of buildings, many with civilians inside, despite the constant flight of surveillance drones overhead.”

Ali Zanoun, one of only two people to survive the strike on the house where more than 100 died, told the news agency that it had belonged to a local businessman who had sheltered a dozen families seeking refuge. It was thought to be safe because it was only two stories and therefore not of use to ISIS snipers. Zanoun denied that ISIS had ever entered the house, much less planted explosives there.

Zanoun spent five days buried in the rubble, surrounded by the remains of 20 members of his family, before he was rescued. “My entire family is gone,” Zanoun told AP. “They melted. Not even a fingernail or a little bone found.”

According to Iraq Body Count, an independent monitoring group, US airstrikes killed 1,117 people in western Mosul in March and April alone. The UN, meanwhile, has released evidence showing that 1,590 residential buildings have been destroyed in western Mosul over the same period.

At least 400,000 people have been displaced by the US-backed siege, while conditions for the hundreds of thousands more who remain in western Mosul are described as catastrophic. The same Western media that last year cried crocodile tears about conditions in Aleppo, Syria, in order to feed US war propaganda against Russia and the Syrian government, has largely ignored the bloodbath now unfolding barely 300 miles to the east.

If the US and Iraqi government forces do succeed in retaking all of Mosul, while reducing this ancient city on the banks of the Tigris river to rubble, it will by no means spell an end to the savage conflict that was unleashed by the US invasion in 2003.

Sectarian divisions, manipulated by the US occupation as part of a divide-and-rule strategy, will only be exacerbated by the siege. It is being waged by a predominantly Shia army, backed by Shia sectarian and Kurdish militias, against a largely Sunni population, which had bitterly resented repression by the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad before ISIS took control in 2014.

Washington will no doubt utilize continuing sectarian conflict as a pretext for maintaining and escalating its military intervention in the country. The aim of this intervention, like the 2003 invasion itself, will be to further the drive for US hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East and to counter the considerable influence of Iran in Iraq and the region as a whole.

Puerto Rican bankruptcy: A prelude to savage austerity and pension cuts

Rafael Azul & Jerry White 

Puerto Rico formally declared bankruptcy on May 3 before a special tribunal created last year. The island, a US territory, had budgeted $800 million for the next five years’ debt payments, far short of the $3.5 billion creditors are demanding. As expected, the creditors, which include large Wall Street hedge funds, rejected the offer.

With this declaration, Puerto Rico became the first US territory or state to place itself into a process like the municipal bankruptcies, which have become increasingly common in the United States. Officially Puerto Rico owes some $72 billion to various vulture funds and another $50 billion for so-called unfunded pension liabilities to public employees.

Since January 2, when newly elected governor Ricardo Rosselló declared the island in a financial emergency it has been an open secret that the MIT-educated leader of the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista-PNP) and former Hillary Clinton delegate at the Democratic National Convention would throw the island into bankruptcy.

While Puerto Rico was historically barred from declaring bankruptcy, Congress enacted a law last year allowing bankruptcy-like proceedings. According to the PROMISE Act legislation passed last year in Congress and signed by Obama, a US Supreme Court justice will now appoint a tribunal to oversee the bankruptcy process. While this includes forcing creditors to accept a reduction in the principal and accumulated interest, it is certain that the interests of Wall Street will take precedence over those of working-class Puerto Ricans, just as it did in Detroit in 2013-14.

During the Detroit bankruptcy, US federal judge Steven Rhodes used the bankruptcy law to override state constitutional protections and slash the pensions and health benefits of city employees while organizing a fire sale of public assets. Rhodes was hired as an adviser in 2015 by Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro García Padilla, along with former New York Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch, who co-chaired Obama’s “State Budget Crisis Task Force” that called for nationwide pension cuts and financial restructuring.

At the time, Rhodes declared that Puerto Rico “was exactly like Detroit.” In fact, the island’s debt of more than $120 billion is larger than Detroit’s by a factor of nearly seven, and its liquidation will require even more savage attacks.

Accumulated interest represents at least two-thirds of the debt. The hedge fund managers and their high-powered legal firms are expected to fiercely oppose any measure that reduces their anticipated gains.

The new, and unelected, tribunal will be in charge or “restructuring” the island’s economy, i.e., destroy education, pensions, social programs; privatize public property; sack and further destroy the living standards of Puerto Rican workers, in the interests of bondholders.

As the New York Times noted Wednesday, “While the court proceedings could eventually make the island solvent for the first time in decades, the more immediate repercussions will likely be grim: Government workers will forgo pension money, public health and infrastructure projects will go wanting, and the “brain drain” the island has been suffering as professionals move to the mainland could intensify.”

The outcome is likely to be even worse than the fiscal plan outlined by Governor Rosselló, which calls for shifting all current government workers from pensions into 401(k)-style retirement plans. Current retirees will continue to receive their traditional monthly pensions, but the amounts are to be reduced by about 10 percent on average. The governor says this is the only alternative to the sacking of 45,000 public sector employees.

The declaration of bankruptcy crowns a decade-long process of recession and austerity affecting the living standards of the Puerto Rican middle and working class, and causing an exodus of emigrants to the US mainland (an option not available to the thousands of undocumented Haitian, Dominican, Jamaican workers, and those of other nationalities, residing in Puerto Rico). Up until June 2015 the collapse in living standards had been tempered somewhat through the issuance of Puerto Rican bonds.

The bankruptcy declaration occurred two days after a general strike and massive Mayday protests and by thousands of Puerto Rican workers denouncing plans to gut workers’ pensions and benefits. The demonstrators marched on San Juan’s financial district, many wearing black shirts, and chanting, “Ricky is selling our island!” in a reference to the hated governor. Large numbers of workers consider the debt illegitimate and refuse to pay for it.

The trade unions, however, are determined to block any serious struggle against the political establishment and the Wall Street banks. After a meeting with the governor last week, Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees called on Rosselló to include the unions in the restructuring process. AFSCME has 13,000 members in Puerto Rico inside the Union Servidores Públicos Unidos (SPU).

In an interview with elnuevodia.com, Saunders said, “We think we should have a seat at the table, especially in discussions that have to do with the reducing health benefits and pensions. We may have ideas that should be heard.

“We are not alien to these problems. Although in the case of Puerto Rico this is a larger problem, we were involved in the bankruptcy of Detroit and we were responsible partners but with a seat at the discussion table. Some of our ideas were accepted, and the union proved to be a responsible partner.”

Indeed, AFSCME and the other unions played the key role in blocking the mobilization of the working class against the looting of pensions, health care and public assets and preventing the “civil unrest” bankruptcy officials anticipated.

Wednesday’s announcement is bound to increase social tensions and the class struggle on the island as the population faces the same predatory measures imposed on the workers of Detroit, Greece and elsewhere.

Since the announcement in June 2015 that Puerto Rican debt could not be paid, most of the austerity measures, including those under the terms of the PROMISE act, such as the closure of hundreds of schools and sacking of thousands of teachers, have impacted the working class and poor people. Already two-fifths of Puerto Ricans live in extreme poverty, by US and Caribbean standards.

Among those who oppose any federal rescue package is President Donald Trump himself, who declared his opposition in Twitter, saying that there should be “no bailout” for the island. However, the bankruptcy restructuring of Puerto Rico will set a new precedent for savage attacks on workers throughout the United States.

As the Times noted, “While many of Puerto Rico’s circumstances are unique, its case is also a warning sign for many American states and municipalities—such as Illinois and Philadelphia—that are facing some of the same strains, including rising pension costs, crumbling infrastructure, departing taxpayers and credit downgrades that make it more expensive to raise money.”

The human cost of the US-Mexico border: More than 6,000 bodies found since 2000

Eric London

Between 2000 and 2016, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has discovered the remains of 6,023 undocumented people who died crossing from Mexico into the United States.

This shocking figure, cited in a May 4 article in the New York Times, underreports the total death toll. According to one Texas sheriff, “I would say for every one [body] we find, we’re probably missing five.” That is, the number of undiscovered bodies could be in the tens of thousands.

Bodies turn up along the US-Mexico border “with stunning regularity,” the Times report notes. In one border area, Brooks County, Texas, 550 bodies have been discovered since January 2009, the month of Barack Obama’s inauguration. At a single ranch in Texas, 31 bodies have been discovered since 2014. CBP unceremoniously throws some of the bodies together in “cluster graves,” often without removing them from biohazard bags.

Many of the bodies are unrecognizable, charred from the desert sun or picked away by vultures. Along well-traveled migrant paths, “the dead line the way.” Cadavers belonging to children are found alongside their stuffed animals. One woman who froze to death was found wearing a plastic trash bag for warmth.

In 2015, Francisco Gonzalez, a former machinist from Mexico, called emergency services from the middle of the desert, begging border patrol to arrest him to save his life. He told the dispatcher he was returning to the US to meet his newborn daughter for the first time, after having been deported for driving under the influence by the Obama administration. When officials could not locate him, Gonzalez gave the dispatcher his wife’s phone number and said, “Call her and tell her I didn’t make it. Call her and tell her I love her and for her to take care of our baby.” He died in the desert shortly thereafter.

Daniel Martinez, an assistant professor of sociology at George Washington University, told the Times, “If this were any other context, if these were deaths as a result of a mass flood or an earthquake or a major plane crash, people would be talking about this being a mass disaster.”

Indeed, the Times notes that the total number of bodies is greater than the total number killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined. And despite the drop in immigration since the election of Donald Trump, the number of bodies found in the first months of 2017 already equals the number found in all of 2010.

The mass casualties along the US-Mexico border are the outcome of deliberate policies of the US government, both Democrat and Republican, going back at least two decades. Under programs like “Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Hold-the-Line,” first enacted under Democratic President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, the government secured heavily populated border crossings with military defenses and increased patrols concentrated in cities like San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas.

The consequence was entirely predictable and indeed predicted. Immigrants fleeing economic and political crisis were forced to cross through deadly desert regions, where temperature can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius).

Further barriers to entry were erected under Bush (including with the Secure Fence Act of 2006, supported by Democrats) and under Obama. The “deporter-in-chief” Obama signed legislation in 2010 that further militarized the US border with the use of Predator drones, and deployed 1,500 National Guard troops to keep out desperate migrants.

Now, under Trump, the American ruling class is going even further. Along with the construction of a “wall” on the US-Mexico border, Trump is pledging to “unshackle” border control agents, who function as a modern-day Gestapo.

The Trump administration has already deported tens of thousands and plans on hiring thousands of immigration and border control officials. Mass detention centers established under Obama are being doubled in size, and the federal government is working with police agencies across the country to round up immigrants. The Trump administration has established a program, known as VOICE, the aim of which is to publicly denounce immigrants charged with crimes in a manner similar to the Nazi press’s attacks against Jewish criminal defendants in the 1930s.

The refugee crisis is the product of imperialism and the irrational capitalist nation-state system.

The thousands of impoverished people who die in the US deserts are fleeing poverty and war caused by decades of imperialist exploitation and US military intervention across every corner of the world. The US laid waste to the entire Central American isthmus, backing dictators, funding death squads, and fanning the flames of civil wars which left hundreds of thousands dead through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

The story is the same in the Middle East and North Africa, where a record number of migrants are escaping US-backed wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, desperately seeking refuge in Europe and drowning by the thousands in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2015, the UN reported that there are an unprecedented 65.3 million refugees, more than the entire population of the United Kingdom.

Advances in technology have brought humanity to a level of world interconnectivity that would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago. Cell phones, the Internet, global supply chains, and advances in transportation mean that residents of the world’s most isolated villages can communicate with friends and loved ones in the world’s metropolises and learn of world events at the swipe of a finger.

But the potential for human progress is restrained by the fact that a handful of exploiters control the world’s productive forces and dictate the policies of governments.

As a result, conflicts between nation states intensify and a third world war is an immediate possibility. Far-right parties in the US, UK, France, Germany and elsewhere are being brought into government, directing popular opposition to inequality and poverty against immigrants. Under the banner of national supremacy each major power, as Leon Trotsky wrote in his 1934 essay Nationalism and Economic Life, is “protecting himself by a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets.”

The Socialist Equality Party opposes the division of the world into competing nation states and opposes all forms of nationalism, the poisonous ideology of this outdated system. As the 18th century philosopher Montesquieu said, “I am necessarily a man, only accidentally am I French.” The SEP insists that all people have the right to travel safely as they choose, without visas, passports, or the threat of harassment or deportation.

This cannot be accomplished so long as a tiny section of the world’s population controls its wealth and defends it with hedges of bayonets—and nuclear weapons. To bring the international character of the world economy into harmony with the material needs of the world working class requires world socialist revolution.