AT&T and other US telecoms begin wave of layoffs

Mark Witkowski

AT&T, the largest telecom firm in the US, has announced a new wave of layoffs, which will begin in early 2018. This comes after AT&T laid off hundreds of installers in its DirecTV unit despite having announced strong subscriber growth. AT&T recorded $10.4 billion in profits in the first three quarters of 2017, after a $20 billion profit in 2016.

Just before the Christmas holiday, AT&T laid off 700 DirecTV home installers, according to a New York Post report. A subsequent report from the Chicago Tribune said the telecom giant cut an additional 600 employees in the Midwest. The company cut another 700 jobs in the Southwest region, according to an unnamed source cited by DSLReports.

Telecom firms traditionally announce a “Reduction in Force” (RIF) late in the year in order to have workers off the payroll before the New Year when their benefits and vacation time reset. While such RIFs traditionally hit lower-level managers, these job cuts have affected hundreds of hourly technicians.

AT&T has attributed the layoffs, which could number in the thousands, in part to “technology improvements” related to its declining landline voice and data services. The new job cuts, however, are just a prelude to the blood-letting that will result from a wave of industry mergers, including the proposed $85 billion AT&T and Time Warner deal.

The layoffs were announced shortly before AT&T announced it would pay $1,000 bonuses to each of its 200,000 workers and invest an additional $1 billion in capital spending in 2018 due to Trump’s newly passed tax rules.

AT&T effectively handed the Trump administration a propaganda tool to support claims that his tax cuts for corporate America and the super-rich would trickle down to workers. Trump quickly pointed to the bonuses while neglecting to mention the layoffs.

The bonuses for workers are actually regressive because they are not compounded into base pay, used to calculate pensions and future pay raises, and can be tied to various corporate profit and productivity metrics that employees have little control over.

The move by AT&T is aimed at bolstering its support with the Trump administration, which is currently holding up the merger, largely because of the president’s hostility to Time Warner’s CNN news network.

If approved the deal would give AT&T control over media content, which is more lucrative than the delivery of content, and result in one of the largest media monopolies ever, with the telecom giant taking control of CNN, HBO, Cinemax, Warner Bros. Pictures, Castle Rock Entertainment and others.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union has claimed the new layoffs are an “act of bad faith” and a violation of the union’s four-year labor agreement covering 20,000 AT&T workers in the southwestern US. Far from organizing the genuine opposition of hundreds of thousands of CWA workers around the country, the union filed a toothless lawsuit in a US district court and a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The complaint charges that the layoff of 713 workers in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and other states, and their replacement with non-union subcontractors, was a “bad faith diminution of the bargaining unit.”

The lawsuit is little more than a public relations stunt aimed at shoring up the dues income of the union apparatus, while covering up the CWA’s long-standing collusion in the downsizing of the industry.

After the CWA signed a sellout agreement covering 20,000 AT&T Mobility workers in mid-December, the union issued a press release offering its “full support for the AT&T-Time Warner Merger,” a move that will destroy tens of thousands of jobs. So much for the CWA’s slogan of “fighting corporate greed.”

Having long abandoned the principle of “No contract, no work,” the CWA kept wireless AT&T Mobility workers on the job for 11 months after the expiration of their contract. Facing rank-and-file opposition, the union called a three-day strike in May, which was joined by 17,000 wireline workers in California and Nevada. This was another publicity stunt that was shut down before it had any impact on AT&T.

AT&T Mobility pickets in Culver City, California during last May's three-day strike

The four-year deal for the AT&T Mobility workers will help the union extend its reach into the wireless division—and increase dues income—while maintaining substandard wages and benefits for wireless workers.

Predictably the CWA called this sellout a “groundbreaking” victory. Pay raises barely keep pace with inflation. While the CWA touts the $19-an-hour workers will be making at the end of the contract, this is less than the hourly wage needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment in many states, and most metropolitan areas in the US.

It is also about half what CWA employees earn in the legacy landline units where, for example, business office representatives at Verizon’s New York City locations are paid over $35 an hour while technicians earn over $40 an hour. Far from advancing wages the CWA is working with the telecom companies to use the low wages in the wireless units as the benchmark for lowering wages throughout the industry. Meanwhile, the CWA will be able to collect dues from these miserably paid workers.

The CWA press release on the contract celebrates how calls would be routed to call centers in the US. As it has done in the past, the CWA promotes its nationalist agenda in line with Trump’s America First economic program, which pits workers in the US against their class brothers and sisters in the Philippines and other countries, and blocks a common international struggle by the working class.

The CWA functions as a tool of the corporations and both big business parties. In July 2015, CWA President Chris Shelton accompanied other union officials at a White House meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss the danger of a “wages push” by millions of workers coming up for new labor contracts.

After leaving the meeting, Shelton and other union leaders systematically blocked any unified action by telecom, auto, steel and public-sector workers, and instead extended contracts or signed deals with meager pay raises that were more than eaten up by increased health care contributions pushed by the Obama administration.

Facing a rank-and-file rebellion by 39,000 Verizon workers, the CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) did everything to isolate and defeat the seven-week walkout before signing a deal with higher out-of-pocket medical costs, a reduction in sick leave and other concessions. Verizon workers who have spoken to the WSWS Telecom Worker Newsletter say they still have not seen the CWA contract a year and a half after the conclusion of the strike.

CWA chief Chris Shelton and other union leaders meet with Obama in July 2015 (Source: CWA)

As for the IBEW, it has followed up its betrayal of New England Verizon workers with its treacherous isolation of the 11-month strike of 1,700 Spectrum workers in New York and New Jersey.

After colluding with the Democratic Obama administration, the unions are now cozying up to President Trump.

Millions of people are opposed to the administration’s attack on net neutrality, which gives internet service providers power to censor web sites and data. It will also give telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon a greenlight to scale back on investments, since restricting the flow of data requires less robust transmission networks, and allowing the companies to trim their workforces further.

While issuing perfunctory criticism of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal net neutrality, the CWA has no more intention of fighting this undemocratic measure than fighting “corporate greed.” As one union bureaucrat speaking on the repeal of net neutrality privately told this reporter, who is a member of CWA at Verizon, “I don’t see the problem with it. It’s making our stock go up.”

Trump administration to roll back regulations on offshore drilling

Matthew Taylor 

Nearly eight years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil and toxic chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico, the Trump administration has moved to repeal regulations on offshore drilling that were implemented in the aftermath of the disaster.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), a division of the Department of Interior, issued a proposal last week that would eliminate multiple safety measures required for offshore oil drilling operations.

The proposal would make significant changes to the well control rule, a series of safety requirements that cover many aspects of offshore oil drilling, including the use of safety equipment, best operational practices, and reporting requirements that were intended to prevent future spills.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the administration intends to remove the word “safe” from a section of the regulations, allowing the BSSE far greater latitude in issuing drilling permits.

Rules requiring third-party inspections of safety equipment would also be repealed. This would include inspections of blow-out preventers, whose failure in 2010 contributed significantly to the Deepwater Horizon spill. The proposal would also eliminate rules that mandate real-time streaming of data on oil drilling operations to onshore facilities where regulators monitor production.

The BSSE has also issued a stop-work order on December 7 on a study conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine intended to “review and update the bureau’s offshore oil and gas operations inspection program to enhance safety,” according to the Academies’ web site. This followed a similar order issued in August by the Interior Department suspending a study by the same organization on the impact of surface coal mining operations on the health of residents in central Appalachia.

The regulatory repeal follows the announcement by the Interior Department in October that it intended to sell leases for all remaining unleased areas on the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico. At approximately 77 million acres, roughly the size of New Mexico, the sale would be the largest in US history.

The auctioning off of the remaining waters in the Gulf are in line with the administration’s policy of rescinding environmental protections to clear the way for commercial interests. In April, President Trump ordered a review of Obama-era regulations governing where offshore oil exploration is allowed. Those regulations banned oil drilling off the southeast Atlantic coast and the coast of Alaska. The administration has also sought to abolish or reduce federally protected marine sanctuaries. This would be a boon to the commercial fishing industry as well as the oil companies.

On Thursday, The Trump administration released its first proposal for new oil exploration in the oceans. Included in the proposal are multiple regions off of the Alaskan coast that have long been targeted by energy companies. Environmental groups have opposed efforts to open these pristine areas up for drilling. Public efforts to ban drilling in these areas had been largely successful in recent decades due to public outrage after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which devastated marine life and was the largest oil spill in US history until the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

New areas in the Atlantic and Pacific would be opened for drilling for the first time in decades. The administration’s proposal would grant nine new leases in the Atlantic Ocean, with two in the north Atlantic, three each in the central and southern Atlantic, and one off of the coast of Florida. There are no current leases in the Atlantic, and the last sale was in 1983.

Seven new leases will be offered along the Pacific coast. In 1969 an oil spill of some 3 million gallons occurred off of the coast of Santa Barbara, California, sparking public outrage and leading to the eventual ban on drilling along the west coast. No new leases have been granted in the Pacific since 1984.

In seeking to justify the rollback the Trump administration and its allies in the energy industry have promoted the lie that opening up new areas for oil drilling will boost the economy and make the United States “energy independent.” The document released last week announcing the new Gulf leases claims that the rule changes “would fortify the Administration’s objective of facilitating energy dominance though encouraging increased domestic oil and gas production.”

The notion that the United States can free itself from the need to import foreign oil by increasing domestic production is false. The US currently imports at least 40 percent of its oil each year, or over 3 billion barrels annually. Figures compiled by the US Energy Information Administration ranks the United States’ proven oil reserves at tenth globally, with an estimated 39,230 million barrels. This is a fraction of the reserves held by top-ranked Venezuela (300,878 million), Saudi Arabia (266,455 million), and Canada (169,709 million). Further, much of the new oil discovered in the United States in recent decades requires hydraulic fracturing to extract, making it far more expensive to produce than sources in the Middle East and elsewhere.

On an annual basis, the US consumes approximately 25 percent of the world’s petroleum, while producing only 6 percent.

The assertion that thousands of high paying jobs will be created by new oil exploration is also misleading. While some new jobs will undoubtedly be created, the workers employed will be subjected to the same dangerous and exploitative conditions that have led to the deaths of hundreds of oil workers in the last decade. Their jobs will also be highly tenuous, as the global price of oil has long been a weapon wielded by the US and its allies in OPEC.

Included in the various countries that the United States has targeted for regime change is Russia, which has over twice the proven oil reserves of the US; Iran, which has four times the proven reserves; and Venezuela, with nearly 10 times the proven reserves. Petroleum sales are the largest source of state revenues for each of these countries. If the Trump administration decides to target any, or all, of these states by slashing the price of oil in concert with the Gulf monarchies which control OPEC, thousands of workers in the US and globally will lose their jobs.

Berlin Senate authorises brutal deportation of refugee family before Christmas

Carola Kleinert 

On December 15 the Ajazaj family was woken at three in the morning. Police officers stood at the door of their flat in the Berlin suburb of Lichtenrade and demanded the family pack essential baggage. A van was waiting on the street to transport the parents with their three daughters, Klara, 8, Lejman, 4, and six-month-old Carolina to the city’s main airport Schönfeld. At 8:30 a.m., a deportation plane then flew the family to Tirana, the Albanian capital.

The family has lived in Germany since February 2015. After rejection of their application for asylum, the family received a temporary stay in 2016. The father, 31-year-old Xhezo Ajazaj, had made a name for himself as a tiler in a local company. His 29-year-old wife Artjola planned to begin training as a geriatric nurse. Klara, in the third grade of the Käthe Kollwitz elementary school, and her sister Lejman speak more German than Albanian.

All of the family’s efforts to integrate were fruitless. A vote by the Berlin Hardship Commission recommending a right to stay for the family was rejected out of hand by Berlin Interior Senator Andreas Geisel (SPD). He declared that “prevailing law” had to be implemented and went onto defend the nighttime raid on the family.

Neighbours and friends of the family, including the manager of the firm for which Xhezo Ajazaj worked, have angrily protested against the brutal action of the Berlin Senate—a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Left Party and Greens. A petition against the deportation on the Internet platform change.org, addressed to the Immigration Office and Interior Senator Geisel, received 2,000 signatures in the space of two weeks.

This latest deportation underlines the vicious nature of the refugee policy of the Berlin coalition. The Left Party, which fills the post of Senator for Social Affairs and Integration (Elke Breitenbach), and the Greens play a particularly despicable role. They are quite prepared to criticise such deportations verbally but in practice play along.

Hakan Tas, Left Party spokesman for internal affairs, declared that even former Interior Senator Henkel, a Christian Democrat, had not organised such deportations in winter. Katina Schubert, the leader of the Berlin Left Party, tweeted succinctly that the deportation contradicts “the spirit of the coalition agreement” and a “human rights-based integration policy.” The Interior Senator had failed to use his “room for maneuver,” she complained.

Green MEP and immigration lawyer Canan Bayram complained that “getting someone out of their flat at three o’clock” was not allowed and “incompatible with the coalition agreement.” Based on the crimes of the Nazis, when “people were picked up and deported at night,” she said there was general agreement “not to undertake state action before six a.m.”

The fact is that neither Left Party nor the Greens prevented the deportation. Their criticisms merely provide a fig leaf for the reactionary policies of the SPD and are aimed at silencing all opposition.

Between January and the end of October 2017, the Berlin Senate deported a total of 1,427 people, including 632 to Moldova, 150 to Albania, 101 to Kosovo and—despite protests from the refugee organisation Pro Asyl—19 to Iraq, where war still rages. In November, a further 122 were deported, bringing the total to 1,549. This figure will rise further when details of the deportations in December emerge.

Nationwide, more than 22,000 people had been deported by October. In addition, there were tens of thousands of “voluntary” returns. Asylum seekers from so-called “safe countries of origin” were especially affected. The list of such countries include the Balkan states, including the NATO member Albania. Asylum applications of refugees from these countries are rejected out of hand.

Refugees have also been deported to Afghanistan, which has been repeatedly rocked by bombings and is not yet considered a safe country of origin. According to the federal Interior Minister de Maizière (CDU), those deported are regarded as “threats.” In fact, many of the deportation transports have included people who have been living productive lives in Germany for years and have not even committed minor traffic offences.

So far the Berlin state government, which has been in office for over a year, has refused to participate in mass deportations to Afghanistan. Currently, however, coalition leaders are discussing changing their policy to include deporting those alleged to be “threats.”

At the same time, the Berlin Senate is working closely with the Immigration Office to force as many refugees as possible to “return voluntarily” after their asylum applications have been rejected. This group includes Afghans. In the coalition program of the SPD, the Left and the Greens in Berlin, this policy of “voluntary return” was adopted as an allegedly more humane alternative to forcible deportation.

Taking into account the many people “persuaded” to return to avoid forced deportation, the number of “repatriations” from Berlin in 2017 has more than doubled.

The Berlin Senate is increasingly pursuing the same racist course as the current conservative- social democratic federal coalition, a deliberately targeted policy of “foreigners out.” This is confirmed by a document from the senate administration, reported on by the Berliner Morgenpost at the end of November.

Together with two social democratic senators from Bremen and Hamburg, Geisel wants to enforce an extension of residence requirements for refugees, which would ban refugees from leaving their assigned neighbourhoods. The legal regulation is due to expire in August 2019. The SPD senators claim that the abolition of the residence restriction would lead to an increased influx of refugees into cities and overload social services.

It is a blatant attempt by the SPD to incite impoverished sections of the population in Berlin, dependent on Hartz IV and other social benefits, against those fleeing war and misery, who in the past have experienced considerable social solidarity in German cities.

Russia: Siberian shoe factory fire kills 10 workers

Clara Weiss

At least ten workers died Thursday in a fire at a shoe factory in a small village in the Siberian region of Novosibirsk. The tragedy is only the latest in a series of workplace accidents and fires which take the lives of at least 15,000 workers in Russia every year.

According to media reports at least seven of them were Chinese immigrant workers. The others might have been from the Central Asian republic Kyrgyzstan, and one might have been from Russia, but other media reports suggest that all victims were Chinese.

The relatively scarce Russian media reports indicate that the fire broke out around 8:47 a.m. local time, and was extinguished only at around 1 p.m. local time, destroying about 2,000 square meters of the factory.

Over 80 firefighters were involved in extinguishing the fire, which quickly released heavily toxic smoke due to the material that were used for producing shoes. According to a local media report, firefighters had great problems extinguishing the fire, because of the way the factory was constructed and because of the extreme cold.

One member of an emergency response team told the news agency Interfax: “[The victims] tried to extinguish the fire before the arrival of the firefighters. However, they died of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

The number of victims might still rise since the factory employed some 30 people, all of them immigrant workers. While the reasons for the fire has not been determined, local media reports suggest that violations of fire safety regulations might have caused the fire.

Factory fires like the one in Siberia are an indictment of capitalist restoration in the former USSR. As far as the Russian oligarchs, and rising entrepreneurs are concerned, anything goes when it comes to exploiting the working class. Even minimum investments in maintaining or establishing safe working conditions are not made. They have no penalties or punishment to fear. Thus, basic safety provisions are lacking in innumerable workplaces, warehouses, mines and factories in Russia.

The result has been a shockingly high rate of workplace-related deaths. While the Russian government officially reports about 3,000 workplace deaths per year, the International Labor Organization found that the real number was approximately 15,000. Some 190,000 workers die annually as a result of exposure to dangerous conditions at work.

More recent accidents include a fire at an oil factory, operated by Russia’s largest privately-owned oil company Lukoil, which killed at least 4 workers in early October 2017. A few weeks later, in a particularly gruesome incident, a 31-year-old mother was boiled alive in a candy factory, leaving behind a 10-year-old son.

None of these statistics include the millions of immigrant workers who come to Russia, permanently or seasonally, voluntarily or as a result of human trafficking. The majority of them come from the deeply impoverished countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus, where wages are lower and unemployment is often higher than in Russia. However, there is also a sizeable immigrant working class population from China, particularly in the Russian Far East.

Often, employers and factory owners feel they can maintain even worse working conditions for immigrant workers who have little to no rights, especially if they are undocumented immigrants or have been the victims of human trafficking, a widespread occurrence throughout the former USSR.

There have been several fires in recent years with high death tolls at factories and workplaces that employ mostly or exclusively immigrant workers. Thus, at least 17 workers from Tajikistan, the most impoverished of all Central Asian republics, died in a fire at a Moscow textile factory in early 2016. Another 17 workers from Kyrgyzstan died in August of 2016, in a warehouse fire in Moscow.

In addition to the catastrophic conditions in Russia’s factories, the deterioration of social conditions has made it difficult or impossible for fire fighters and doctors to help those affected by accidents in time to save their lives. As of 2008, the rate of deaths in fires in Russia was eight per 100,000, eight times higher than it was in the United States, Britain or Greece. In what is geographically the largest country in the world, there are only some 5,000 fire stations. Notably the much smaller Poland has over 15,000 fire stations.

Chinese president orders troops to be “ready to fight”

Mike Head 

Reflecting mounting global and internal tensions, Chinese President Xi Jinping conducted a “mobilisation meeting” of the country’s armed forces on Wednesday, ordering soldiers to be ready to fight and win wars.

Speaking at a large military assembly in the northern province of Hebei, Xi told about 7,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers they should fear “neither hardship nor death” as they obeyed their orders.

Xi’s speech was a measure of the escalating pressure on the Chinese regime by the US “pivot to Asia”—launched by Barack Obama and ramped up by Donald Trump—to combat China’s growing influence, if necessary by war. The unprecedented military rally was also an indication of the buildup of the armed forces to deal with mounting domestic unrest.

Like the US and other governments around the world, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) administration, which represents a thin layer of the super-rich billionaires, is resorting to nationalism and militarism in response to growing geo-strategic conflicts and internal political discontent.

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP regime, reported that troops assembled in 4,000 separate locations across China to hear Xi’s address.

Sending a calculated message, the publication highlighted the event on its front page yesterday. It showed thousands of soldiers, lined up in battle gear, chanting in response to Xi, alongside a photograph of him addressing them, clad in combat fatigues and black leather gloves.

Xi, who is also general secretary of the CCP, spoke in his capacity as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC)—effectively the armed forces commander-in-chief. The People’s Daily emphasised it was the first time the CMC had held a mobilisation meeting for the whole armed forces.

According to the newspaper, Xi declared that the PLA should “create an elite and powerful force that is always ready for the fight, capable of combat and sure to win in order to fulfill the tasks bestowed by the party and the people in the new era.”

Another CCP publication, the Global Times, called the assembly a “landmark” event. “This is the first time since the founding of the country that instructions on military training have been directly issued by the chairman of the CMC, and it shows that improving combat readiness is now a strategic mission for the Chinese military,” Xu Guangyu, a retired major general, told the Global Times.

Xu presented the shift as a defensive reaction to the expansion and increasing combat readiness of the much larger US military. “China can’t copy the US measures to improve combat capability through actual combat overseas since our national defence policy is defensive rather than offensive. Therefore, military training becomes extremely important for China.”

On the same day that the CCP staged the assembly, Trump used Twitter to blatantly threaten a nuclear war against North Korea, the small impoverished state that sits on China’s northeastern border, just 800 kilometres from Beijing. Taunting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Trump wrote: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

The turn by China’s venal, corrupt and despotic capitalist class to military mobilisation is not only a reaction to Washington’s war-mongering, however. It expresses the material interests and aspirations of the wealthy elite that has arisen rapidly in China since the restoration of capitalism under CCP leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s and 1980s.

Song Zhongping, described as a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times that the ceremony demonstrated the new norm of military training after the 19th CCP National Congress, held last October.

That congress saw Xi, who came to power in 2012, consolidate his position as state president, party general secretary and military commander, after ousting factional rivals and restructuring the PLA to concentrate control in the CMC, which he chairs.

As the WSWS explained at the time, Xi has emerged not as an unchallengeable political strongman, but as a Bonapartist figure, seeking to maintain party unity by balancing, arbitrating and suppressing the conflicting interests in the CCP’s massive bureaucratic police-state apparatus.

Domestically, the social chasm between the party bosses and billionaires, and the vast majority of the population whose cheap labour has underpinned global capitalism for three decades, is generating explosive class tensions, aggravated by signs of economic turmoil.

This year, while officially forecasting growth to continue at around 6.7 percent, Chinese officials are warning of “over-capacity” in traditional industries, “structural contradictions” in the economy and financial risks produced by record levels of debt.

Around 600 strikes or protests were reported during the first eight months of 2017, according to the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based monitoring web site, which said this tally may represent only 10–15 percent of the actual number. This was despite increased police powers to break up demonstrations.

Unable to credibly claim to represent “socialism,” the CCP is drumming up nationalism, invoking an image of restoring China to a mythical great power status, in a bid to divert the disaffection of the working class.

The social powder keg is being exacerbated by Trump’s “America First” threats of trade war and nuclear conflict. Trump is ratcheting up Obama’s “pivot” even more openly and aggressively, reflecting the view in American ruling circles that Beijing is a key obstacle to Washington’s world dominance.

Trump’s National Security Strategy, released last month, branded China and Russia as “revisionist powers” and “hostile competitors” seeking “to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests” and “challenge American power, influence, and interests.” In essence, the document called for the preparation for a new era of “great power” conflict and world war.

Under Xi, China has reacted to Washington’s offensive by accelerating its own military build-up and efforts to assert economic power. Xi’s One Belt, One Road policy, in particular, involves ambitious transport and infrastructure projects to link up the Eurasian landmass, excluding the US and encouraging the European powers to loosen their ties to Washington.

While the CCP has sought to postpone a confrontation with the US, bowing to some demands for greater trade and investment access in China and for punitive sanctions on North Korea, it has refused to back down on critical strategic issues such as Chinese land reclamation in the South China Sea. Xi’s military “mobilisation” ceremony is another warning that global capitalism, with the US in the lead, is threatening to plunge humanity into another, even more terrible, world war.

British National Health Service faces escalating crisis due to chronic underfunding

Dennis Moore

The British National Health Service (NHS) is in the midst of an escalating crisis caused by prolonged underfunding and a surge in demand this winter. Patients face extremely long waits, and many hospital trusts are unable to provide adequate care.

At least 21 trusts—responsible for multiple hospitals—have reported this week that they are on “back alert,” meaning they cannot guarantee patient safety and provide the full range of their services. Many other hospitals are severely strained.

British Prime Minister Theresa May and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt both issued statements this week seeking to deflect growing public outrage.

Bob Kerslake, chairman of the board of Kings College hospital trust in London, resigned from one of the UK’s largest NHS trusts. He tweeted, “[T]he Govt & regulator are unrealistic about the scale of the challenge facing the NHS & the Trust. I want to pay tribute to the staff & their excellent patient care.”

Kerslake quit after a long dispute with the NHS watchdog over finances, saying that ministers are in denial about the reality of how much extra money the NHS requires. A senior figure in British politics and head of the civil services as recently as 2015, he resigned just days before NHS Improvement, which regulates the health service’s finances in England, was to put Kings College into “special measures” because the hospital had not been able to meet its budget for this year.

The hospital had agreed a plan with NHS Improvement that it would have a deficit for the year of £38 million. Instead, the deficit is likely to be in the region of £96 million.

In an article written for the Guardian, Kerslake explained that he was standing down because hospitals are being asked to meet unrealistically demanding savings targets.

Kings has drastically reduced spending on expensive agency staff and consultants. However, the overall financial situation has gotten worse since it took over the running of the troubled Princess Royal hospital in Bromley in 2014. In the last two years, the hospital has made savings of £80 million, twice the average of other hospitals, yet has not in any way resolved the financial crisis it faces.

Kings is one of the busiest hospital trusts, serving a population of over 1 million people in southeast London. It is considered a centre of medical excellence, with specialist expertise in several areas, performing well on cancer waiting times, with some of the best health outcomes in the country.

The hospital serves a diverse and often deprived community. It was one of the capital’s leading trauma centres treating the victims of the Westminster Bridge and London Bridge terror attacks, and those affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower.

Kings, like many hospitals across the UK, is facing an increased demand on services, while having to face increased costs for drugs and medical supplies.

The chief executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, had asked for an extra £4 billion a year from the government. What was offered in the Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond’s recent budget fell far short of this, a mere £1.6 billion. There was no increased spending for social care, which has faced unprecedented demands and is at breaking point with a funding gap of £2.5 billion.

Following the budget, Stevens said the refusal to pay the £4 billion needed by the NHS for 2018-19 would lead to increased rationing of care, increased waiting times, and “painful” choices about what a cash-strapped health services could and could not afford.

Professor Anita Charlesworth, director of research at the Health Foundation think tank, backed Kerslake’s claim that the financial problems in the NHS were due to underfunding. “Hospitals in the NHS are caught between a rock and a hard place. Emergency admissions have increased by 3.4 percent in the first half of this year, there is a shortage of 30,000 nurses and it has proved really hard to free up beds occupied by people who are medically fit to leave but need social care support,” she said.

The NHS Confederation represents 240 trusts in England and has urged the government to ditch its policy of giving the NHS small increases, saying it deserved a greater share of national income.

Niall Dickson, the confederation’s chair, said that Hammond’s £1.6 billion increase is what the NHS needs just to stand still for the coming year 2018-19. Total health spending in England for the year 2017-18 is nearly £124 billion and is expected to rise to over £127 billion by 2020-21, taking inflation into account.

A report by the National Audit Office in 2016, “Financial Sustainability of the NHS”, found that for the years 2015-16, 66 percent of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts (156 out of 238) were in deficit.

Several years ago, the NHS was asked to find £22 billion in savings by 2020.

Health experts from the Nuffield, Health Foundation and Kings Fund have said that tight spending in recent years and increase in demand for services have been “taking a mounting toll on patient care.” They add that there is “growing evidence that access to some treatments is being rationed and that quality of care in some services is being diluted.”

A joint statement by the three institutions in response to the government’s autumn budget raised grave concerns about the impact of seven years of austerity, a growing demand for services, and the devastating toll this is taking on the NHS. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) 2017 State of Care report has warned that health and care services are at full stretch, and some services have deteriorated. Key waiting time standards are routinely being missed all year round, with the four-hour waiting time for treating patients in A&E not being met since July 2015.

The 62-day standard for beginning treatment for cancer following an urgent referral has not been met for three years.

In July 2017, there were 900 patients with acute mental health needs that were inappropriately placed outside their local area, due to a lack of available inpatient beds.

The CQC notes that the care that patients receive across England is mostly good, and is due to the efforts of NHS staff, who are delivering compassionate care in challenging circumstances. Yet the delivery of good quality care cannot be predicated on the compassion of overworked NHS staff in the absence of properly funded services.

The official narrative pumped out about targets and inefficiency stands in stark contrast to the fact that productivity in the NHS is actually improving by 1.7 percent a year, and is outperforming the wider economy. Yet this will not resolve the underlying crisis, with the lack of funding.

Sally Gainsbury, senior analyst at the Nuffield Trust, said, “I don't think this is a story about Kings. I think Kings is the canary down the coal mine.”

Hospitals had been asked to cut their costs in real terms by 4 percent annually since 2011, which was “the equivalent of spending this year £750 in real terms on a patient that you would have spent £1000 on in 2010.”

The Dow at 25,000: The bonanza for the oligarchy continues

Nick Beams

The surge of the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index past 25,000 points yesterday marks a further escalation in the speculative binge that has gripped Wall Street and global stock markets over the past year, signifying a massive transfer of wealth to the heights of society.

It took just 23 days for the Dow to jump from 24,000 to its latest milestone, the shortest period between 1,000-point increments in the index’s history.

During 2017, the S&P Global Broad Market Index soared by 22 percent, the biggest increase since the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. This represents a rise of around $9.6 trillion in market value. The FTSE All-World index rose 1.6 percent in December, notching up 14 straight months of gains, the longest such run on record.

The market escalation has prompted predictions that it will continue into 2018, with some forecasters even pointing to a market “melt up” in the coming period.

Notwithstanding a slight increase in global growth over the past year, the market surge is not an expression of a recovery in the world economy, a decade after the eruption of the global financial crisis. Rather, it is a mechanism for an accelerating transfer of income to the upper echelons of society. For example, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos increased his wealth by $33 billion in the past year.

All arms of government and the financial institutions are directed toward fuelling the equity bubble. In the first place stand the US Federal Reserve and the other major central banks around the world. They have pumped an estimated $15 trillion into global financial markets and sent interest rates to historic lows, providing the conditions for the share buybacks and financial mergers that have played such a significant role in boosting the stock markets.

The extent of this financial largesse is indicated by the fact that central banks have bought up virtually all the bonds issued by the governments of the world’s 10 biggest economies over the past two years—a key factor in keeping interest rates close to zero in real terms.

These policies represent a continuation and deepening of the process that began 30 years ago in response to the US stock market crash of October 1987, when US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan guaranteed that the financial spigots would be opened to sustain asset prices.

The response to every financial storm throughout the 1990s and early 2000s has been the same: the provision of still more money to finance the next round of speculation, culminating in the bailout of the banks after 2008 and the policy of quantitative easing over the past decade.

These measures have been pursued in tandem with the slashing of spending on social services, along with health and education. In the US, as in all the other major capitalist economies, government policies—whatever the political colouration of the regime in power—are based on austerity measures aimed at transferring the wealth created by the labour of the working class up the income scale.

Having just handed out a bonanza to the corporations and the ultra-wealthy in the form of the biggest tax cuts in history, all sections of the US political establishment are united in developing an agenda that makes ever-deeper inroads into the provision of social services.

The character of the stock market boom can be gauged by contrasting the situation with that in previous periods.

Over the past nine years of economic “recovery,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shot up by 177 percent, while the real US gross domestic product has grown by only 19 percent.

Over a similar period 50 years ago, between 1959 and 1968, the Dow grew by only 22 percent, while the real economy grew by 48 percent, or more than twice the current rate.

The massive growth of stock values has occurred during the worst economic “recovery” in the post-war period, characterised by historically low levels of investment, falling productivity growth and stagnant wages.

The parasitic nature of the boom is evidenced by the fact that about one-quarter of the total increase in share prices has come from just five of the largest US companies by market value: Apple, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

The characteristic feature of these firms is that their profit accumulation derives not from investment in plant and equipment and the employment of large numbers of workers, as with the industrial giants of the past, but via the appropriation of wealth through intellectual property rights, a modern form of rent. This form of parasitism ultimately depends on the super-exploitation of workers in China and other cheap-labour regions.

Amazon, in contrast to the other technology giants, has a big workforce. Its massive share price increase reflects its role in driving smaller distribution networks out of business through a combination of monopolistic market power and the slave-like exploitation of its impoverished workforce.

There is another, no less decisive, aspect to the stock market boom: the suppression of the class struggle and the virtual disappearance in recent decades of major strike actions.

This is not the result of some organic incapacity of the working class to rise to the challenges that confront it. Rather, it is the outcome of the role of the trade unions and the political parties, supported by the various pseudo-left tendencies, which have dominated it for decades.

The crucial role of these organisations in facilitating the stock market bonanza is not the result of “mistakes” or incorrect assessments, but derives from their material interests and privileges, which are rooted in the maintenance of the private profit system.

With the beginning of the New Year, however, there are indications that the working class is once again preparing to enter into convulsive struggle, as evinced by mass demonstrations in Iran, the latest wildcat strike by auto workers in Romania, and growing labour militancy throughout Europe and the Middle East.

The capitalist profit system constitutes nothing less than a coordinated instrument for the transfer of the wealth of society to its upper echelons and their hangers-on. It cannot be changed through a perspective of reform, but only through its overthrow and the reconstruction of society from top to bottom on the basis of a socialist program.

That is, as Marx put it, there is no way forward other than the “expropriation of the expropriators,” ending the private ownership of the means of production and establishing a socio-economic order to meet human need. The necessity to undertake the political rearming of the working class in the fight for this perspective is the conclusion that must be drawn from the stock market frenzy, and the growth of poverty and social misery that accompanies it.

Indian Foreign Policy and the Hafiz Saeed Problem

Abhijit Iyer Mitra

On Friday, 29 December 2017, the Government of India faced a major public embarrassment, one that provides some insights into the failure of intelligence. What it shows is one of three things: a failure of gathering, collation and transmission of intelligence; a failure to archive, collate and assess foreign policy; or, possibly, a serial failure of both intelligence and foreign policy fronts and a diagnostics problem within the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

Background
On 21 December, India voted for a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), condemning the US' decision to shift its embassy to Jerusalem (a move thus supportive of the Palestinian position and condemnatory of the Israeli and US position). On 29 December, pictures started circulating on the Internet of a meeting between the Palestinian ambassador to Pakistan, Walid Abu Ali, and wanted terrorist, head of the Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), and founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Hafiz Saeed. By the time India lodged a diplomatic protest and Palestine formally recalled Abu Ali, documentary and photographic evidence emerged of at least two previous meetings (August 2014 and December 2014). While knowledge of these meetings may not have changed India's vote, the Ministry of External Affairs' (MEA) actions in dealing with the snafu seems to indicate no prior knowledge of the meetings, which was particularly galling in the backdrop of the 21 December vote.

Implications
Hafiz Saeed is one of India's most wanted men, responsible for masterminding the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, and as such a prime target for 24/7 surveillance by India. Given his accessibility to the public, keeping tabs on him is not particularly challenging, complemented by the Difa-e-Pakistan Twitter handle and coverage by Pakistani newspapers. This points to one of two possibilities. Either Indian intelligence is not equipped to perform such basic OSINT activities as what Indian Twitter users can. Or, such intelligence existed but was buried deep in the system and could not be archived for efficient extraction when required to make policy decisions, either on 21 December when the UN vote happened, or indeed on 29 December when pictures of the December 2017 meeting surfaced.

What is however known for a fact is that even after the situation blew up publicly, the diplomatic protest note sent to the Palestinians referred only to the December 2017 meeting, which indicates that the MEA had no knowledge of the previous meetings (by this time, the open source verification of previous meetings had not emerged). This is particularly worrying as it implies that either the MEA did not seek intelligence inputs on previous meetings, or that despite requests such inputs were not provided, that there was no intelligence on the subject to provide, or that the MEA decision was taken despite knowing the scale and extent of links between the Palestinian Authority and Hafiz Saeed.

While the last option points to questionable policymaking, the previous three possibilities beg the question, why has the MEA not invested in public source intelligence gathering  or outsourcing the work to a think-tank? This is all the more jarring given the minister-in-charge's penchant for playing twitter agony-aunt. If it is assumed that the MEA has in fact invested in such open source intelligence gathering, then clearly the archiving and retrieval systems were not in place for such intelligence to be used rapidly and in a policy-relevant manner.

What is most indicative of systemic failure on the MEA's part is the Palestinian explanation, which was accepted without demur by South Block. First, it made the Palestinian state's regret over its ambassador's actions conditional, dependent on India's continuing support to the Palestinian position. Second, it claimed the meeting was a mistake, ignoring the fact that there were several meetings. Incredulously this would also lead on to accept that Walid Abu Ali, a former Palestinian Intelligence official, did not know who he was deep in conversation with, given the fact that the LeT was co-founded by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, who for a while had cooperated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) against Israel.

Finally, the PMO's functioning must be examined. By all accounts this is a prime minister who takes a great deal of interest in foreign policy. That the PM has not been able to diagnose and institute rectifying measures since the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) debacle (where official statements emanating from Delhi were in significant variance from ground reports from Vienna and Seoul) does not instil confidence in his stewardship of intelligence matters. Depending on preferences and biases, it can be concluded that either intelligence or the MEA have been tried and found wanting, or that all have failed in equal measure, as there were no redundancies in place to damage control the situation. What is however undeniable is the PMO has neither diagnosed the problem over the last three years, or taken corrective action.

Social Media Madness: the Russia Canard

Norman Solomon

For several months we’ve been hearing a crescendo of outcries that Russia used social media to sway the 2016 presidential election. The claim has now been debunked by an unlikely source — one of the most Russiagate-frenzied big media outlets in the United States, the Washington Post.

Far away from the media echo chamber, the Post news story is headlined: “There’s Still Little Evidence That Russia’s 2016 Social Media Efforts Did Much of Anything.”

The article focuses on “what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts.”

In fact, the ballyhooed Facebook ads were notably not targeted to be seen in swing states, the piece by Post journalist Philip Bump reports. As for the much-hyped tweets, they were smaller than miniscule in quantity compared to overall election-related tweets.

But don’t expect the fervent canard about Russian manipulation of social media to fade away anytime soon. At this point, the Russiagate atmosphere has become so toxic — with incessant propaganda, credulity, fear-laced conformity and partisan opportunism — that basic logic often disintegrates.

One of the weirdest aspects of claims that Russia undermined the election with social media has involved explaining away the fact that few of the ads and posts in question actually referred to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or the election. Instead, we’re told, the wily Russians tried to help Trump by inflaming social divisions such as racial tensions. It’s a rampant storyline (rendered here by NBC News political director Chuck Todd) that’s reminiscent of the common claim during the civil rights movement that “outside agitators,” such as Russian-directed reds, were inflaming and exploiting racial tensions in the South.

From there, it’s just a hop skip and jump to smearing Americans who dissent from U.S. orthodoxies as useful idiots who serve the interests of plotters in the Kremlin.

Of course history is not exactly repeating itself, but it’s rhyming an awful lot. There are real parallels between the McCarthy Era and today’s anti-Russia fervor in the United States.

Despite all the information and analysis that have strengthened progressive understanding in this country during the last few decades, fixating on Russia as culpable for the election of Trump has been widely irresistible. Perhaps that fixation is less upsetting than deeper realization of just how rotten the U.S. corporate system of injustice has become — and how the forces that brought us the horrors of the Trump presidency are distinctly homegrown.

Narratives scapegoating Russia now have an extremely powerful grip on the USA. The consequences include heightened U.S.-Russia tensions that absolutely mean heightened risks of nuclear war — and worsening threats to democratic discourse at home.

The conditioned reflex to label as somehow “pro-Putin” any opinion that overlaps with a Kremlin outlook is becoming part of the muscle memory of much of the American body politic. Countless journalists, pundits, activists and politicians have fallen under the Russiagate spell. They include the liberal primetime lineup on MSNBC, where — as the media watchdog group FAIR pointed out last month — Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes routinely bypass stories of great importance in order “to lead with minutiae from the ongoing Russia investigation that has consumed MSNBC‘s coverage like no other news event since the beginning of the Trump presidency.”

Across most of the media landscape, the meme that Russians attacked American democracy with social-media posts has been treated as self-evident.

In a typical exercise of the conformity that afflicts the national press corps, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine, David Corn, wrote this fall that the House intelligence committee needed more staff to investigate, in his words, “how” — not whether — “a foreign adversary attacked American democracy.” His piece breathlessly declared that “the Trump-Russia scandal” was “expanding — it now includes new revelations regarding Moscow’s use of social media in the United States to influence the 2016 campaign.”

That kind of stenography for powerful spin may snag cable TV appearances and lucrative book contracts, but it’s a notable disservice to journalism and democracy.

Meanwhile, most Democrats on Capitol Hill are eager to engage in such rhetoric. So, it was just another routine appearance when Senator Richard Blumenthal went on CNN a week before Christmas and declared “there is increasing evidence that the Russians are continuing their attack on our democracy.” He said: “The Russian attack on our elections in 2016 was endlessly ingenious and inventive, using all kinds of social media, all kinds of intermediaries, sources of information for them.”

To put it mildly, that sort of bombast gains vastly more airtime than discussing the urgent need for détente between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow has climbed with her ratings to great mass-media acclaim, while advancing herself from the outset of the Trump presidency as one of the most prominent and irresponsible Russia baiters in U.S. media. At this rate, when Maddow retires — if she and the rest of us are lucky enough to avoid a nuclear holocaust — she can look back on a career that deteriorated into an obsessive crusade against Russia that increased the chances of World War III.

In the poisonous media environment that keeps boosting her fame and fortune, it’s grotesquely fitting that Maddow — time after time after time — has devoted so much of her program to the illusory Russian assault on democracy via social media.

That’s the way it goes in the propaganda-polluted land of Russiagate.

President-elect George Weah opens Liberia for plunder

Eddie Haywood

Former football star George Weah was declared the winner in Liberia’s run-off election December 28, defeating incumbent Vice President Joseph Nyuma Boakai. Allegations of vote fraud by Boakai forced the runoff after a contested poll held in October. The run-off margin for Weah was a decisive 61.5 to 38.5 percent.

The contest for president took place between several representatives of the Liberian wealthy elite. Weah, the candidate of the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) party, campaigned on an anticorruption platform. Weah’s running mate for vice president, Jewel Taylor, is the former wife of imprisoned ex-president Charles Taylor.

Other candidates included Vice President Boakai of the outgoing Sirleaf government, Prince Johnson, the former Chief Training Officer of imprisoned ex-president Taylor, multimillionaire businessman Alexander Cummings, and MacDella Cooper, a fashion model and Weah’s former girlfriend.

The election has been hailed by the corporate media as a major victory for democracy and the first peaceful transfer of power since 1944. Washington and the European powers telephoned to congratulate the newly elected president. International media have largely characterized Weah’s victory as part of the sweeping to power of so-called “antiestablishment” political figures, such as Donald Trump in the US, Narendra Modi in India and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

On behalf of Washington, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders congratulated Weah in a statement: “This is Liberia’s first peaceful transfer of power from one democratically elected head of state to another in decades, and represents a major milestone for Liberia’s democracy. The United States is deeply committed to our longstanding relationship with Liberia and its people. We will continue to support the success of this historic democratic transition and the peace and prosperity of Liberia.”

In November 2016, when Weah was a senator, he congratulated Donald Trump on his election and made the vapid assertion that the “United States of America, exercise the very tenets of democracy they have introduced to other nations around the globe, the Americans did not disappoint as they proved to the rest of the world why they are a true role model and one of the prime architects of modern democracy.”

That Weah casts the election of Trump as evidence that the ruling class in Washington “exercises the very tenets of democracy” is a telling exposure of Weah’s own political orientation and social outlook.

As a wealthy ex-footballer and businessman, his claims of being antiestablishment are a fraud. Weah occupies the wealthiest layer of Liberian society.

Weah took advantage of widespread disaffection with the corrupt Sirleaf regime, seeking to redirect social anger away from the social catastrophe experienced by the masses by waging a hollow campaign against corruption, casting the blame on the Sirleaf government for Liberia’s economic woes.

Revealing the true character of a Weah government before it has even been inaugurated, Weah gave a clear indication that he is prepared to offer up Liberia’s economic resources and its masses to the transnational banks and corporations for plunder. In his first speech as president-elect, Weah declared that he was working to assemble a cabinet in the days before his inauguration on January 22, and was already pursuing the task of expanding Liberia’s revenue base, stating, “To investors, we say Liberia is open for business.”

Since it possesses immense economic resources, particularly minerals, oil and gas, American and European corporations are lining up to carve Liberia up for profits and have expressed their pleasure at the prospect of a Weah government.

In the same speech, and after praising outgoing president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Weah issued empty threats to the corrupt clique making up Sirleaf’s government: “Those looking to cheat the Liberian people through corruption will have no place.” In condemning corruption, Weah seeks to assure investors that their money will be safe in Liberia.

As a measure of his cynicism in claiming that he will hold anyone to account for corruption, Weah indicated his willingness to pursue collaboration and peace with the country’s former rulers: “We are not enemies. We welcome you with open arms as we try to build our country.”

Weah takes the reins of power amid a slowing economy and exacerbated social misery for the Liberian masses. He will preside over a government wracked by corruption that metastasized over the 12 years of the Sirleaf government. The extent of corruption spooked banks and corporations, resulting in a further decline in Liberia’s economy.

Liberia’s economy has yet to recover from the devastating impact of the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak that gripped Western Africa, including Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria, with Liberia experiencing the worst of the epidemic, with nearly 5,000 deaths. The outbreak had a devastating impact on the health care infrastructure of the country, which was criminally starved of vital funding from the outset.

After 12 years of corruption and mismanagement under the Sirleaf government, unemployment has skyrocketed in Liberia, along with chronic poverty. The majority of the population lives without access to electricity, and in the capital city Monrovia alone, only 7 percent have access to electricity. The cost per kilowatt-hour in Liberia is the most exorbitant in the world.

Liberia ranks 177 out of 188 in development, making it one of the poorest countries on earth. 80 percent of the population lives on $1.25 a day. As 70 per cent of the total population is under 35 years of age, young people are left with little hope or prospects for the future.

Weah appealed to the masses’ disgust over the failure of the Liberian ruling elite to ameliorate the deteriorating economic situation by making cynical promises to eradicate the criminality of the Sirleaf government.

Exposing this cynical exercise to combat corruption as a fraud is the fact that Weah chose Jewel Taylor, the wife of former president Charles Taylor, now serving 50 years in prison after his conviction by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as his running mate.

Notably, Taylor provoked an uproar when she stated during the campaign that the former president “still had promises to keep” and called for “putting Mr. Taylor’s agenda back on the table.”