Japan’s working poor

Kurt Brown

The social gulf between rich and poor in Japan is widening. Two decades of economic stagnation and pro-market restructuring have severely undermined the previous system of life-long employment that provided a relatively secure livelihood for significant sections of the workforce.

There has been a staggering rise in the proportion of the workforce engaged in poorly-paid, part-time work, on which many young people and women, in particular, are forced to depend.

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) categorises workers into two broad classes: regular and non-regular. The former generally work full-time. The latter are mainly part-time, contract, temporary (e.g., daily or very short term), employment agency and rehired retired workers.

In 1994, based on Statistics Bureau data, there were 9.71 million non-regular workers out of a total of 47.76 million, or 20 percent of the labour force, not counting those self-employed or company executives. In the September quarter of 2017, their numbers had increased to 20.5 million out of 54.86 million, or 37 percent of the total.

The most recent MHLW survey of employment conditions, released in December 2015, noted that reasons for hiring non-regular workers included lower wages and flexibility in hiring and firing workers. On average, non-regular workers are paid only 60 percent of the rate of regular workers for doing the same work.

An editorial last November in the Mainichi newspaper, decrying the country’s “vicious poverty cycle,” pointed out that the income gap was exacerbated because many non-regular employees have far less hours.

“There are major differences in how much a worker brings home, depending on their employment status,” the editorial reported. “The average permanent worker pocketed some 4.87 million yen [about $US44,000] in 2016, while non-permanent staff averaged 1.72 million yen [about $US15,000]—a yawning gap of about 3.15 million yen. This divide has widened every year since 2012, when the agency began monitoring permanent and non-permanent worker income separately.”

Non-regular workers are far less likely to receive insurance and other benefits. For example, more than 90 percent of regular workers have employment insurance, health insurance and employee pensions, but only 67.7 percent, 54.7 percent and 52 per cent of non-regular workers, respectively, have the equivalent coverage.

This two-tier wage system is a major contributing factor to rising levels of poverty. The Mainichi editorial noted that the relative poverty rate—those below half of median disposable income—fell slightly from 16.1 percent in 2012 to 15.6 percent in 2015. However, 50.8 percent of single-parent households were in poverty—the worst rate for all the developed OECD countries.

As 68 percent of non-regular workers are female, many of the single parent families in poverty are women responsible for raising children. In a MHLW survey of living conditions, 38 percent of single-mother households reported having no savings and 83 percent said they had difficulty making ends meet.

It is not hard to see why. A single mother living in Tokyo, for example, supporting a high school aged child and earning 2.7 million yen (approximately $24,500) annually would likely be working two jobs. That level of income would mean that she would receive no welfare support.

Public high school fees are approximately 0.4 million yen every year. Additionally, most Japanese children attend cram school outside of normal school hours to improve their marks in the country’s highly competitive educational environment. Cram school fees for two subjects might total 0.5 million yen annually.

Rent for an average two-bed room apartment would be about 1.4 million yen. Home cooked meals, with limited opportunity for eating out, would cost about 0.5 million yen. Taking just these items, the total already exceeds the single mother’s annual salary, before taking into account transport, internet, telephone, clothing and other essentials.

MHLW data released last June showed that 13.9 percent of Japanese children under 18, or one in every seven, live in poverty. An article published in the Tokyo Weekender last May pointed out that non-profit organisations have sprung up in response to the growing hardships facing children.

Hiroko Kondo opened Japan’s first children’s cafe in 2012 when she heard about a student who was not eating properly because of a sick mother. “She wasn’t able to cook so there were days when the child would eat school lunch and a banana, and that was it,” she told the magazine. “You see so much food around, it shocked me that there were people not getting enough.” Kondo estimated that about 400 such cafeterias provided cheap or free food to children in need.

Hayato Hanaoka, author of the book “Child poverty may destroy Japan,” told the Tokyo Weekender: “It’s the kind of poverty that’s difficult to identify. Kids from poor backgrounds often have cellphones and computer games, so on the surface everything looks fine, yet dig deeper and you see families struggling with the cost of education.”

The Mainichi concluded its editorial with a plea for a plan to tackle poverty but no concrete proposals. Neither the government nor the opposition parties has any intention of addressing the social crisis, apart from mouthing platitudes and making empty promises. Confronting a huge and mounting public debt, successive governments have made deep inroads into the country’s limited welfare system.

In 2016, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe simply denied that poverty existed in Japan. He told a parliamentary committee: “There is no way Japan is in poverty … By global standards, we’re definitely one of the wealthiest [countries].”

The widening chasm between rich and poor is already leading to social tensions and opposition. Last April, some 1,500 young people took to the streets in Tokyo to demand a minimum wage of 1,500 yen ($US13.50) an hour across the country—up from the current 823 yen an hour.

Rie Fujikawa, a 25-year-old member of the student-led Aequitas organising group, told the media: “We want to eat something other than bean sprouts and poultry. We want to buy children what they want.”

Another bonanza year for highest paid UK CEOs

Dennis Moore

New research on the pay gap between the highest paid Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 bosses and average worker pay shows that the UK’s superrich continue to accumulate wealth.

Carried out by two organisations, the High Pay Centre and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the research shows that chief executives of these companies were paid at the end of 2016 a median average wage of £3.45 million a year—equating to 120 times the £28,758 earned by full-time workers.

The High Pay Centre is a non-partisan think tank that focuses on “pay at the top of the income scale” and monitors “pay at the top of the income distribution.” The CIPD is a professional association for human resource management workers.

The joint report noted that January 4 was “Fat Cat Thursday,” marking the day when some of the UK's top bosses had already made as much money by lunch time in 2018 as the average UK worker will make in the entire year.

The date of January 4 was calculated by the High Pay Centre/CIPD based on their assumption that “FTSE 100 CEOs work 12 hours a day, including three out of every four weekends, and take only 19 days holiday per year—i.e. 320 days of work a year, or 3,840 hours. This works out at pay of £898 per hour, meaning that it would take around 32 hours’ work to reach the UK median earnings figure of £28,758.”

Announcing their latest findings, the High Pay Centre explains, “The CEO to average worker ratio of 120:1 is based on figures from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2017.” It notes that the 120:1 ratio is the latest figure available, adding, “The 122:1 figure CIPD and the High Pay Centre referenced quoted in its August 2017 report [“Executive pay: Review of FTSE 100 executive pay packages”] was based on 2016 data.”

The highest paid FTSE 100 CEO was Sir Martin Sorrell, who is employed by advertising firm, WPP. He was paid £48 million—down on the £70 million WPP paid him in 2015—though there will no doubt be various non-salary payments involved.

It is expected that this year’s top paid listed company boss will be Jeff Fairburn, the CEO of York-based house builder Persimmon. He is expected to collect a bonus of £110 million, and Persimmon is sharing out a further £400 million to 150 executives and middle managers. Using government figures, the Guardian calculated that this bonus would enable the building of 1,375 council houses—enough to provide for every homeless family in Yorkshire.

Persimmon shares have doubled in value since the introduction of the government’s “help to buy” scheme in 2013. This involves the Treasury providing a loan worth 20 percent towards the overall value of a property, with the prospective buyer providing an initial deposit of 5 percent.

The help to buy scheme was heralded as a way of enabling young people to get onto the housing ladder, while at the same time increasing demand for houses. It has been a massive boon for the corporations in the housing sector, with £10 billion of tax payers’ money spent. A report by Morgan Stanley last year showed that rather than increasing opportunities for first-time buyers to own a home of their own, money has gone into boosting the profits of companies such as Persimmon, Barratt, and Taylor Wimpey.

The introduction of the scheme has also pushed up house prices, making them more unaffordable for first time buyers. Yet the government is proposing to hand over another £10 billion of taxpayers’ money to this scheme. In 2016, half of all Persimmon homes sold were via the help to buy scheme.

Greg Beales of the Shelter housing charity said, “It is hard not to see this as profiteering from a housing crisis which is getting worse, at a time when more than 300,000 people have spent Christmas without a place to call home.”

The gap between corporate executive pay and that of the rest of society is enormous.

Denise Coates, the founder of the Bet365 online gambling site—not a FTSE 100 company—was paid a staggering £199,305,000 along with dividend payments of £18 million for the year 2016. This equates to a weekly income of £3.8 million, or 7,000 times the average full-time worker.

Even before she received the £217 million plus, she and her family were worth £5 billion. Coates is now Britain's richest female, with a personal fortune estimated at £3.06 billion—paid for by untold human suffering. Those gambling on the site wagered £47 billion for the year 2016, and revenues from gambling for 2016/17 increased by 39 percent, to a record £2.15 billion. Profits resulting from gambling shot up by 15 percent to £514 million.

The Gambling Commission industry regulator estimates there are now 2 million people who have problems with gambling, or are at risk of addiction. In 2016, the entire gambling industry donated just £8 million to research, education, and treatment.

The increase in income inequality has a direct correlation to overall levels of poverty. The day-to-day lives of millions of people are fraught with worry as to how they will pay for basic utilities, while shouldering ever-increasing levels of accumulating personal debt.

The biggest ever survey of households carried out in the UK—by the Financial Conduct Authority last year—found that half of all UK adults are financially vulnerable, with one in six people not being able to cope with a £50 increase in monthly bills, including mortgage repayments.

The figures include 4.1 million people who are facing serious difficulty and are not able to meet credit card and bill payments. The most over-indebted are 25-34-year-olds, with 19 percent having no savings and a further 30 percent only having £1,000 saved.

The wealth of the super-rich is predicated on the exploitation of workers, many of whom are paid low wages, are on zero-hour contracts, or defined as apprentices. A survey of 500 apprentices last year found that two in five were spending more money completing their apprenticeships than they were earning. They were paid as little as £3.50 an hour, and after paying for work clothes, travel and childcare costs, have little if anything to live on. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of apprentices paid less than the legal minimum wage increased from 15 to 18 percent.

The Adam Smith Institute think tank rejected criticism of the UK’s CEOs. Responding to the High Pay Centre/CIPD research, it said it was a "mistake" to be concerned about skyrocketing executive pay. Sam Dumitriu, the head of research at the institute, suggested, “Given how important the decisions a CEO makes are to the success of a firm, it would be shocking if they were not extremely well paid.”

"The High Pay Centre are wrong to link high pay at the top with low pay at the bottom," he added. "Politicians should be careful.”

Facebook and Google outline unprecedented mass censorship at US Senate hearing

Andre Damon

Behind the backs of the US and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

The character of this apparatus was detailed in testimony Wednesday from representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, chaired by South Dakota Republican John Thune.

The hearing was called to review what technology companies are doing to shut down the communications of oppositional political organizations. It represented a significant escalation of the campaign, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to establish unprecedented levels of censorship and control over the Internet.

Armed with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems, these technology companies are free to remove and block the communications of their users at the behest of the government, in a seamless alliance between Silicon Valley and the major US spy agencies.

Monika Bickert, head of Global Policy Management at Facebook, told lawmakers that the social media giant now employs a security team of 10,000 people, 7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content,” and that, “by the end of 2018 we will more than double” the security team.

This group includes “a dedicated counterterrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism.” In other words, there is a revolving door between the technology giants and the state intelligence and police forces, with one increasingly indistinguishable from the other.

Bickert pointed to the growing use of artificial intelligence to flag content, saying Facebook does not “wait for these… bad actors to upload content to Facebook before placing it into our detection systems,” bragging that much of the “propaganda” removed from Facebook “is content that we identify ourselves before anybody” else has a chance to view it.

She added that Facebook has partnered with over a dozen other companies to maintain a blacklist of content, based on “unique digital fingerprints.” This means that if a piece of content, whether a video, image, or written statement, is flagged by any one of these companies, it will be banned from all social media. This database now includes some 50,000 pieces of content and is constantly growing, officials said.

In other words, the technology giants have created an all-pervasive system of censorship in which machines, trained to collaborate with the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies, are able to flag and block content even before it is posted.

Juniper Downs, global head of Public Policy and Government Relations at YouTube, likewise boasted that Google uses “a mix of technology and humans to remove content,” adding that YouTube relies on a “trusted flagger program” to provide “actionable flags” based on the flaggers’ experience with “issues like hate speech and terrorism,” words that imply that these “trusted flaggers” are connected to US intelligence agencies.

“Machine learning is now helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos as they were before,” Downs said, adding that Google’s censorship machine is virtually automated. She said that this year there will be “10,000 people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies.”

Downs declared that since June YouTube has “removed 160,000 videos and terminated 30,000 channels for violent extremism.” The company has “reviewed over two million videos” in its collaboration with “law enforcement, government,” and “NGOs.”

Downs stated that Google is actively engaged in promoting what she called “counter-speech,” that is, the promotion of propaganda narratives. She also pointed to Google’s Jigsaw program as deploying “targeted ads and YouTube videos to disrupt online radicalization,” and “redirecting” users to content that Google approves of.

The hearing also featured the testimony of Clint Watts, a former FBI official, former US Army officer, fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a leading promoter of social media censorship.

Watts presented the hearing with an unhinged justification for what these massive powers might be used for, in a hypothetical scenario he dubbed “Anwar Awlaki meets PizzaGate.”

“The greatest concern moving forward,” he said, “might likely be a foreign intelligence service, posing as Americans on social media, infiltrating one or both political extremes in the US and then recruiting unwitting Americans to undertake violence against a target of the foreign power’s choosing.”

In this formulation, social opposition, what he calls the “political extremes,” including left-wing politics, is the product of foreign intervention and therefore treasonous. It is also defined as “terrorist” in content and therefore criminal.

Watts expressed extreme fear over the widespread growth of opposition to the policies of US imperialism. He arrogantly decried, “Lesser-educated populations around the world predominately arriving in cyberspace via mobile phones will be particularly vulnerable to social media manipulation.”

The content of Thursday’s testimony points the far-advanced preparations for the establishment of police state forms of rule.

The effort to control speech online is driven by a ruling elite that is immensely fearful of social opposition. Amid growing social inequality and the ever-mounting threat of world war, broad sections of the population, and in particular the working class, are increasingly disillusioned with the capitalist system. Having no social reform to offer, the ruling elites see censorship as the only means to prop up their rule.

Given the explosive content of the statements made at Thursday’s hearing, it is extraordinary that they received no significant coverage in either the print or broadcast media.

“Fractures, Fears and Failures:” World’s ruling elites stare into the abyss

Bill Van Auken

Next week will see some 2,500 bankers, hedge fund managers, corporate CEOS, government officials and celebrities descend once again on the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Paying $55,000 a head as the price of admission, one could well assume that the representatives of the financial and corporate oligarchy drawn to the annual meeting, and the lavish parties that accompany it, have a lot to celebrate.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index published last month established that the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest 500 billionaires—many of whom will be in attendance—rose 23 percent over the past year, making them $1 trillion richer than at the end of 2016. And the obscene amounts of wealth keep rolling in, with the Dow closing at 26,000 Wednesday, recording its fastest ever 1,000-point rise.

Yet the principal report issued as the basis for the four days of meetings and closed-door discussions presents a picture of a global ruling elite living in mortal fear that growing economic and social crises, and, above all, the threat of world war and social revolution, may rob them of not only their fortunes, but their heads as well.

Titled “Fractures, Fears and Failures,” the WEF’s 2018 Global Risks Report includes subheads such as “Grim Reaping,” “The Death of Trade,” “Democracy Buckles,” “Precision Extinction”, “Into the Abyss”, “Fears of Ecological Armageddon” and “War without Rules.”

The report was drafted in conjunction with a survey conducted among nearly 1,000 banking and business executives, government officials and academics, which found that 93 percent of them feared a worsening of confrontations between the major powers in 2018. Fully 79 percent foresaw a heightened threat of a major “state-on-state” military conflict. The report cited both the confrontation between the US and North Korea, which has created the greatest threat of nuclear war since the height of the Cold War, and the increasingly complex inter-state conflicts produced by Washington’s military intervention in Iraq and Syria.

The fears of global war are well-founded. Last month, US President Donald Trump presented his new National Security Strategy, targeting Russia and China as “revisionist powers” standing in the way of the US assertion of global hegemony, and outlining an aggressive first-strike nuclear war policy, including against adversaries using conventional or cyber weapons.

This policy has been further fleshed out by a draft Nuclear Strategic Posture document to be unveiled by Trump later this month calling for the development of new smaller and more “usable” nuclear weapons for deployment on battlefields in Eastern Europe and Asia, making a full-scale global conflagration all the more likely.

This year’s gathering at Davos—sealed off and surrounded, as always, by thousands of troops and police—will be overshadowed by the attendance of Trump, the first US president to make an appearance since Bill Clinton 18 years ago. Aides indicate that Trump intends to deliver his standard “America First” tirade to the final session of the gathering.

While Trump’s speech may provide a particularly crude rebuff to the official slogan of this year’s forum— “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” —it will constitute only one of the more noxious symptoms of the unraveling of the entire previous framework for international economy and politics under the impact of capitalism’s deepening contradictions and the incapacity of the various rival capitalist state to create a new “shared future” or mend the world’s fractures.

The contents of the WEF risk report point to the deep and insoluble character of the crisis gripping global capitalism.

The document states that while “headline economic indicators,” i.e., the soaring rise in share prices that have fattened the portfolios of the Davos attendees, are positive, this only “masks continuing underlying concerns.”

“This has been the weakest post-recession recovery on record,” the report states, adding, “Productivity growth remains puzzlingly weak.”

The world capitalist economy, it continues, is beset by “unsustainable asset prices, with the world now eight years into a bull run; elevated indebtedness ... and continuing strains in the global financial system.”

In a section titled “Into the Abyss,” the document warns: “Against a backdrop of domestic and international political strife—and with economic policy-makers already operating in uncharted territory—the eruption of another global financial crisis could overwhelm political and policy responses. A systemic collapse of the sort that was averted in 2007-2008 could push countries, regions or even the whole world over the edge and into a period of chaos.”

In addition to “rising military tensions,” “military buildups,” “proxy conflicts” and multiple “flashpoints” threatening war, the document points to the danger of rising social tensions within every capitalist country.

“In many countries the social and political fabric has been badly frayed by many years of stagnating real incomes,” it states, pointing to figures illustrating decelerating wages and rapidly rising social inequality.

“High levels of personal debt, coupled with inadequate savings and pension provisions, are one reason to expect that frustrations may deepen in the years ahead,” the report states.

It also recalls the 2014 WEF Global Risk Report’s warning that one of the world’s greatest threats was a level of youth unemployment so high that it threatened to create a “lost generation.” The report notes dryly that in the four years since, this level has remained “broadly static.” It warns that with so many millions of young people without work, “generational clashes over fiscal and labour-market policies” may erupt.

Concern over explosive social divisions is coupled with a worried section dealing with the Internet, headlined “Digital Wildfires”. It decries “the intentional use of social media to spread misinformation,” i.e., exposures of the real conditions confronting working people in every country, as a challenge to “global governance.” The report welcomes measures taken by Google and Facebook, as well as governments, to crack down on the “disruptiveness of online misinformation” through outright censorship.

The political conclusions drawn by the report are particularly stark:

“Democracy is already showing signs of strain in the face of economic, cultural and technological disruption. Much deeper damage is possible: social and political orders can break down. If an evenly divided country sees polarized positions harden into a winner-takes-all contest, the risk increases of political debate giving way to forms of secession or physical confrontation. In these circumstances, a tipping point could be reached. A spiral of violence could begin, particularly if public authorities lost control and then intervened on one side with disproportionate force. In some countries—with widespread ready access to weapons or a history of political violence—armed civil conflict could erupt. In others, the state might impose its will by force, risking long reverberating consequences: a state ofemergency, the curtailment of civil liberties, even the cancellation of elections to protect public order.”

In other words, the world’s financial oligarchy is assembling in the exclusive and scenic Alpine resort of Davos to hold a frank discussion on the prospects for a new world war, the eruption of social contradictions into civil wars and the imposition of police state dictatorships.

What is described in the WEF report are conditions already emerging in the United States and every major capitalist country.

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, Leon Trotsky wrote of a capitalist ruling class that “toboggans with closed eyes toward an economic and military catastrophe.” While the WEF risk report suggests that at least some elements of today’s ruling elite see the catastrophe on the horizon, they are as powerless as their forebears of 80 years ago to prevent it.

This places the greatest urgency upon the working class formulating its own independent strategic response to the global capitalist crisis, based on the perspective of uniting workers of every country in the fight to reorganize society on socialist foundations.

Australian government continues deportations of New Zealanders

Tom Peters 

Alex Viane, 40, faces deportation from Australia to New Zealand, despite never having set foot in New Zealand and having no ties to the country. His parents, partner and baby daughter are all Australian citizens.

Viane was born in American Samoa and became a New Zealand citizen as a youngster, despite never being to the country. His family moved to Australia in 1990, when he was a child. Last July, Australian Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton ordered his deportation on “character grounds” due to undisclosed criminal convictions. Viane challenged the order, but the Federal Court dismissed his appeal on January 12.

Viane is one of more than 3,000 people who have been deported following an amendment in December 2014 to section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act. Anyone who has committed offences with prison sentences totalling 12 months or more can be expelled now, regardless of how long they have lived in Australia. Many people have been deported for minor offences, such as drug possession or shoplifting.

New Zealanders now make up the largest nationality group in Australia’s immigration detention centres, with approximately 175 people currently detained. In the past financial year, 664 New Zealanders had their visas cancelled. Under a long-standing agreement between the two countries, New Zealanders can live and work in Australia indefinitely without gaining citizenship. Out of more than 600,000 New Zealanders living in Australia, about 400,000 are not Australian citizens.

People who have spent no time in prison can be summarily deported also. Section 116 of the Migration Act gives the minister sweeping powers to cancel a visa if “the presence of the visa holder in Australia is or may be, or would or might be, a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community.”

On December 4, Radio NZ reported that a 21-year-old man, who has lived in Australia since he was six years old, was deported to New Zealand under section 116. The Brisbane resident was accused, but not convicted, of involvement in an alcohol-fuelled fight while celebrating his birthday.

Filipa Payne, from Iwi N Aus, which advocates on behalf of New Zealanders in Australia, told the World Socialist Web Site that parents were being separated from their children for minor offences.

Payne said: “I know a mother who’s being detained for shoplifting. She’s been shifted to a detention centre in Melbourne and her daughter lives on the Gold Coast. There’s a family that has been completely ripped apart.”

Both the Labor and Liberal-National parties in Australia are whipping up nationalism and xenophobia to scapegoat migrants for the social crisis and to prepare for war. Successive governments have imprisoned refugees indefinitely in inhumane conditions on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

The Australian media and political establishment is now demonising young African migrants. Minister Dutton has threatened to lower the age at which someone can be deported from 18 to 16.

Payne pointed to the lack of social services for migrant communities. “Instead of focusing so much hate on these African children, if there is a problem, why aren’t they offering help?” she asked. “I think that Australia’s white race policy is very much alive and there is a horrific amount of hate that comes from the government towards people from all sorts of nationalities. It’s abusive and it’s inhumane.”

Payne noted that A J Graham and Mehaka Lee Te Puia, members of the Rebels motorcycle gang, were deported to New Zealand last year despite Australia’s High Court ruling that their visa cancellations were invalid. Dutton issued new deportation orders, effectively overturning the court’s decision.

Anyone who challenges a deportation order under section 501 can be detained, sometimes for years. Payne has visited New Zealanders in immigration detention centres throughout Australia, including on Christmas Island, a remote territory in the Indian Ocean.

She described the appalling conditions: “There’s a whole lot of self-harming. People set fire to themselves, people sew their lips together. People ring me after they have seen someone slit their wrists. One person was asked to help someone hang themselves. I encourage people who have been in a detention centre to go and see a doctor and get a diagnosis for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Two New Zealanders died in 2015 and 2016 while awaiting deportation: Junior Togatuki and Rob Peihopa.

Iwi N Aus also works with New Zealanders in Australia who are unable to access social services, or have become homeless. Following legal changes in 2001, it became much harder to gain Australian citizenship and New Zealanders were barred from receiving unemployment and other benefits.

Two years ago, Payne met a mother forced to live with her children “in a container storage unit near Perth, because they had no income. The horrible thing is that the New Zealand mother had an Australian partner, who was abusive. The children were Australian citizens but had to stay in a container because their mother’s a Kiwi.”

Successive New Zealand governments have ignored the plight of NZ migrants affected by Australia’s discriminatory policies. Deportees are left with virtually no resources and frequently subjected to parole conditions when they arrive in New Zealand, despite having been punished already.

Payne explained that in 2015 the then-opposition Labour Party’s corrections spokesman Kelvin Davis joined her in visiting Australian detention centres and criticised the deportations. Since the Labour-led government took office in October 2017, however, “they’ve gone silent and I find it very disappointing.”

The Australian government, Payne declared, “should be denounced. Why is Australia on the Human Rights body of the United Nations, and why is the New Zealand government not opposing them? Why is trade more important than the hurt and abuse that is going on to New Zealand citizens, and children?”

Australia is New Zealand’s biggest trading partner and closest military ally.

On January 15, responding to Viane’s deportation, NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern opposed removal of New Zealanders with no links to the country, but told Newstalk ZB that Australia was “within their rights to do what they are doing.”

Like its Australian counterpart, NZ Labour has a long history of attacks on immigrants, particularly from the Pacific Islands and Asia. The party ran an anti-immigrant election campaign and formed a coalition with the New Zealand First Party, whose xenophobic positions parallel those of One Nation in Australia and President Donald Trump in the US. NZ First and Labour have led an anti-Chinese witch-hunt aimed at scapegoating foreigners for the housing crisis and bringing New Zealand into line with the US military-build up against China.

The Ardern government’s tacit agreement with Canberra’s brutal treatment of immigrants and refugees is a clear indication that it is planning similar attacks on their basic democratic rights in New Zealand.

Romanian prime minister resigns amid rising social tensions

Andrei Tudora & Tina Zamfir

Romanian Prime Minister Mihai Tudose and his deputy Marcel Ciolacu announced their resignation on Monday amid factional infighting within the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD) and rising social tensions.

This is the second change at the head of the government within seven months, after the PSD brought down its own government in a vote of no confidence in June 2017. The PSD leadership is accusing sections of the “deep state” of working to undermine the government.

This comes in the context of reports which surfaced last year that the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) and the CIA station in Bucharest had colluded to influence political decisions in the country.

The PSD national council adopted a resolution against the “parallel and illegitimate state,” accusing the DNA and sections of the secret services of attempting “to take control of the state.”

That the PSD is presenting itself as an opponent of the security services and proponent of democracy is a contemptible lie. The PSD is the party that built the edifice of a police state to shield itself from workers’ resistance to capitalist restoration.

The Social Democrats, who emerged from a section of the former Stalinist ruling party, have presided over a social catastrophe in Romania as the main party of capitalist restoration, leading governments in key moments when the bourgeois order was threatened. Having formed the first government after 1989 that led the drive to privatize and loot state property, it stabilized capitalism after the miners’ marches in 1999 and again after the conservative government of Emil Boc was brought down by mass anti-austerity protests in 2012.

It is by now openly recognized that army and secret service officers, promoted to high political offices and given virtual immunity from oversight during the PSD’s terms in office, played the crucial role in the country’s accession to NATO and collaboration in the criminal CIA black sites program.

The NATO war drive to encircle Russia and the increasing militarization of the country have exacerbated these trends in recent years. A bloated military budget, weapon acquisitions and constant military drills have been accompanied by an increasing role of the secret services in combatting “Russian influence” in the region. The Romanian ambassador to the US and former head of the SRI, George Maior, recently boasted in an interview for The Cipher Brief that Romania has become the second largest provider of secret information in NATO.

These developments should be a stark warning to the working class, that war preparations and the drive to police state dictatorship are well advanced, and supported by the entire bourgeois political establishment.

At the same time, however, there is increasing militancy among Romanian workers.

Autoworkers at Ford are locked in a struggle against management, the union and the PSD government. The US-based company is attempting to force a rotten two-year contract on the workers, aided by the government’s tax overhaul. The new law, which came into effect on January 1, shifts the tax burden completely onto the back of the workers by forcing them to bear the full cost of health care and social insurance. The new tax law represents an unprecedented attack on the historic and hard-fought gains of the working class.

The government has absurdly said that employers will raise salaries to compensate the workers’ loss of income. It is clear however that companies will see this for what it is: a signal from the government to increase the exploitation of workers. Companies have used it to blackmail workers into signing bad contracts, as in the case of Ford, outright lower workers’ incomes or grant temporary bonuses.

Health care and public sector workers are also protesting the new tax laws, with the PSD-linked unions holding token demonstrations in November. Family doctors are struggling against the government over mismanagement and lack of funding, with Sandra Alexiu, vice president of the National Society of Family Doctors accusing the government of trying to turn over primary medicine to private clinics. This is part of a cross-party drive to privatise health care.

Workers at the Dacia Renault Plant in Mioveni, who are constantly under the threat of production being completely moved to the company’s plant in Morocco, organised a massive demonstration against the PSD’s tax plans in November.

The ruthless exploitation of the working class has been a constant in Romania and across Eastern Europe ever since the region was transformed into a cheap labour platform after the restoration of capitalism in the 1990s. Corporations see the exploitation of the region’s working class as critical in their efforts to extract superprofits and reduce labour costs in the West.

The creation of a corrupt local oligarchy was intimately bound up with the EU’s eastern expansion, with fire-sale privatisations and the destruction of the welfare state being the only reforms prescribed by the EU and the IMF.

After the 2008 financial crash, Romania was again a staging ground for the EU’s continent-wide attacks on workers. The country saw the imposition of the harshest austerity measures in the EU, including brutal social experiments, such as the overnight closing of half the country’s hospitals. Since then, incomes have remained essentially frozen, despite a purported economic recovery and the highest reported rate of economic growth in the EU.

The social impact of the restoration of capitalism and the EU expansion in Eastern Europe is impossible to fully quantify. Government statistics routinely lie about a social crisis whose extent stands as an indictment of capitalism and the EU apologists’ nostrums of a progressive and social bloc.

The latest Eurostat figures show that Romania is the poorest country in the EU, while the National Statistics Institute reveal that it is the most unequal. This is a pale reflection of a situation in which a handful of plutocrats rule over a social wasteland.

The Eurostat report shows half the population without proper access to basic human needs. Another telling report by the Centre for the Study of Democracy NGO shows over 20 percent of Romanian households live in energy poverty, unable to afford to pay for or are without proper access to electric energy.

Unemployment statistics are consistently false, skewed not only by the large number of those who have stopped looking for work or are working as day labourers, but also by the estimated 4 million workers who have been forced to look for work outside the country.

The government's National Authority for the Protection of Children’s Rights reported in 2017 almost 100,000 children left in the country whose parents went to work abroad, with the Save the Children NGO saying the number is probably closer to a quarter of a million. These children, completely ignored by the state, suffer from economic deprivation and the accompanying emotional and psychological problems.

Finally, workers are employed in precarious conditions, without safety regulations or protection from abuse. Three accidents in the space of a few months have shed light on the dramatic situation facing Romania’s coal miners. Four workers died in October 2017 in accidents at the Lupeni and Uricani mines, both scheduled for closure, and another miner lost his life after an accident in December at the Livezeni mine.

UK: The political lessons of Carillion’s collapse

Julie Hyland 

The jobs, wages and pensions of tens of thousands of workers along with vital public services are in danger, following on the collapse of Carillion into liquidation on Monday.

Carillion employed 20,000 workers in the UK and 23,000 overseas. It went into compulsory liquidation with more than £2.2 billion debts, of which an estimated £800 million are in pension liabilities.

A major government contractor, it was involved in 450 contracts—involving schools, hospitals and prisons—and key infrastructure projects, including the HS2 high-speed rail network, the largest infrastructure contract in Europe.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Theresa May has said it will guarantee the salaries of those affected in the public sector. This is necessary to avoid an immediate collapse in key areas of social provision—including school meals and hospital services. But it is no guarantee for the future of these services, much less the jobs and conditions of those directly involved. Nor does it address the impact on workers’ pensions, which are now to be taken over by the already strapped state-run Pension Protection Fund.

The situation for private sector employees—including many agency workers—is even more precarious. Carillion spent almost £1 billion with local suppliers in 2016, many of them small firms that are now facing insolvency. The government said it would only guarantee the wages of private sector workers for 48 hours, until today.

Potentially thousands of employees can be made unemployed overnight. The government says it hopes other companies will take over Carillion’s contracts but—even if this happens—there is no doubt it will be at the expense of workers’ existing pay and conditions.

Already there are reports of workers being turned away from construction sites in the Midlands and Liverpool. Contractors, including Speedy, Van Elle, and Balfour Beatty, report they will be left millions out of pocket, sending their share prices tumbling.

Calls have been made for a public inquiry into Carillion’s collapse, especially given that the government continued to award the firm key public sector projects—including the £1.2 billion HS2 joint venture—despite repeated profit warnings over the last six months.

The Department for Business has called for a “fast-track” investigation into the conduct of Carillion’s directors, after the firm rewrote its pay policy to make it more difficult for executives to lose their bonuses in “circumstances of corporate failure.” This meant that former CEO Richard Howson, who resigned in disgrace last July, will continue to receive a £660,000 salary until October.

Demands are also being made for the Financial Reporting Council to examine Carillion’s accounts, including the actions of its auditors, KPMG. Only last year, the accountancy giant, which oversaw Carillion’s accounts since 1999 and received £29.4 million in fees, approved the firm’s viability for at least three years.

The extent of the political fall-out was indicated by the revelation that Carillion Chairman Philip Green—who oversaw the firm’s collapse—had been appointed as adviser on corporate responsibility to then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron under the previous Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

So great is the stench of corporate corruption emanating from these events that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper editorialised, “Capitalism gets a bad name when failing executives get unjust deserts. Carillion bosses must instead be held liable.”

Likewise, the conservative Daily Telegraph warned that what taxpayers “will emphatically not put up with is any sign that those at the company responsible for this mess walk away enriched. There have been too many instances of failure being rewarded. It is time it stopped.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has described Carillion’s collapse as a “watershed” moment and has promised that a Labour government will “end the PFI [Private Finance Initiative] rip off” and “run our public services for the benefit of the many, not the profits of the few.”

Along with the trade unions, Corbyn now calls for Carillion’s operations to be “nationalised” and the services it provided taken “in-house.”

Those responsible must indeed be held to account. But the naming and shaming of certain individuals is intended to conceal the more fundamental question of how and why they were able to get away with their socially criminal actions.

When CEOs, accountants, regulators and governments are all implicated in such events, it is not the failure or undoubted corruption of a single corporate entity that is at issue but the workings of the capitalist profit system itself.

The practices in which Carillion was involved are not peripheral to the world capitalist economy, but at its very heart. From the collapse of Enron in the United States in 2001, and Railtrack in the UK the same year, through—most significantly—to the 2008 financial crash and the multi-trillion bailout of the world’s leading financial institutions, a fundamental truth has been laid bare.

The profit-making operations of the global economy are not undertaken to meet—even in part—social needs. Rather, they are driven by the greed of a parasitic financial oligarchy and their political sponsors in government, and predicated on the destruction of the jobs, wages, services and social rights upon which billions of working people depend.

The Private Finance Initiative/Public Private Partnerships in which Carillion was so heavily involved are only one of the forms that this speculative mode of accumulation, which dominates the entire world economy, has taken in the UK.

First initiated by the Conservative government of John Major, and vastly expanded by the Blair Labour government, this involved major cuts in public spending along with the privatisation and asset-stripping of social services.

In 1999, the heavy building materials firm Tarmac was recreated as Carillion. In addition to a guaranteed government-supplied income from PFI projects—at extortionate rates of return—firms like Carillion were able to borrow heavily, inflating their profit rates that were then used to justify gargantuan payouts to its CEOs, shareholders and lenders.

The primary factor in ensuring the “success” of such firms was the political consensus across all parties on mounting an offensive against the working class through austerity, deregulation and the driving down of wages and conditions. In 2016, Carillion was among eight multinational building contractors who admitted in court that that they were involved in the blacklisting of up to 800 trade union members, who had protested health and safety conditions.

With CEOs, banks and shareholders reaping massive dividends, the opening of a revolving door between the corporations and Tory and Labour governments alike, and a trade union “movement” complicit in these conditions, Carillion was held up as one of the UK’s great “export” stories—until it was revealed to be completely worthless.

The wages, conditions and pensions of all workers impacted by Carillion’s collapse must be guaranteed. But to do so means recognising that what is at stake is not merely a single business model that can be replaced by some other form, such as the nationalisation and “in-house” model now proposed by Corbyn.

The government has, at least in part, already “nationalised” Carillion—in the same way it “nationalised” the banking industry in 2008—by offloading its debts onto taxpayers. Moreover, so extensive has the privatisation of the UK’s public services been that to speak of taking them “in-house” is meaningless.

What is required is breaking the stranglehold of the super-rich and their political defenders over society, and reorganising the economy to serve social need, not private greed. Politically, it involves not fruitless tinkering with the existing set-up but the recognition that it is beyond repair and that only a social revolution can provide a way forward.

Canadian businesses claw back wages from low-paid workers

Carl Bronski 

Workers in Ontario and across Canada have expressed outrage at actions taken by employers seeking to cut the take-home pay and benefits of minimum wage workers in the wake of the Ontario provincial Liberal government’s implementation of new employment standards.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s misnamed Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, which became law on January 1, is a key initiative of the provincial Liberals to rescue their abysmal poll numbers in the run-up to this June’s election. A central provision of the new law boosts the minimum wage for most workers from $11.60 (US$9.33) per hour to $14 (US$11.26) effective immediately, with another hike to $15 (US$12.06) scheduled for next January.

Prior to its implementation, the law was effusively praised by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups as a tremendous step forward for workers, with the International Socialists proclaiming it “historic.” However, the Liberals made sure there were so many loopholes in the legislation that employers have been able, notwithstanding the minimum wage hike, to reduce workers’ paychecks.

Within days of the wage increase, workers across the province began to receive notifications from their employers announcing reductions in take-home pay and benefits, and changes to workers’ employment status.

In a particularly scandalous move that has received much attention in the Canadian media, Ron Joyce Jr. and Jeri-Lynn Horton-Joyce, the owners of two Tim Horton’s franchises, and heirs to billionaire Ron Joyce Sr., the co-founder of the Tim Horton’s coffee shop empire, ordered their workers to sign a document acknowledging their loss of paid breaks, paid benefits and other monetary incentives. Workers at their franchises have calculated that the cutbacks—entirely legal under Wynne’s new standards—will cost a veteran full-time worker $51 per paycheck which, despite the minimum wage hike, means an actual wage cut.

Other employers have sought to exploit the gaping loopholes in the employment standards provisions to maintain their profit levels. Rainbow Foods has eliminated paid breaks. Car dealerships have shifted drivers’ status from wage labourers to “independent contractors.” Department store workers have reported cuts to their scheduled hours of work. A province-wide, all-day breakfast chain, Sunset Grill, boosted their prices and ordered a 25 percent increase in tip clawbacks to “offset” a 20 percent minimum wage hike.

“With this increase, it’s like a double whammy for us,” one Sunset Grill server told Vice News. “It’s like we don’t even get a wage increase at all.” Another said, “We basically run the restaurant. At the end of the day, this is an insult. We work our asses off.”

Under Ontario law, servers and other staff in “tip intensive” industries receive a lower minimum wage—currently just $12.10 per hour.

The cutbacks reach into every aspect of low-wage work. In industries requiring uniforms, workers have now been ordered to buy their own.

These loopholes are not an unfortunate by-product of the legislation. The trade union-backed Liberal government bent over backwards to assure businesses that their bottom lines would not be impacted. Shortly before the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act came into force, the Liberals handed a 1 percent corporate tax rate cut to small businesses on the first $500,000 of profits to offset the cost of any wage increases.

Moreover, the government added outright exemptions for some employers. F or example, the new law gives workers in Ontario 10 days of personal emergency leave, two of which are paid. In a provision kept secret by the government in the run-up to enactment of the legislation, the act denies all workers in the auto sector those same minimal protections. Instead, autoworkers will be entitled under provincial law to seven days of sick or emergency leave and three days of bereavement leave, all unpaid.

Due to a decades-long marketing campaign to sell the Tim Horton’s coffee chain as a cornerstone of Canadian cultural identity (although, awkwardly for nationalists, its current majority owner is the Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital), media attention has focused on the cuts at those franchises.

Reacting to the firestorm of outrage at the cuts, Premier Wynne branded the franchise owners who had imposed benefits cuts as “bullies” and called on them to follow “the spirit” of the law. This is rich coming from a premier who has repeatedly outlawed strikes to force workers to accept rotten concessionary contracts, slashed social spending and presided over public sector job cuts.

Andrea Horwath, leader of the provincial New Democratic Party, which propped up the strike-breaking, pro-austerity Liberal minority government from 2012 to 2014 and campaigned to the right of the Liberals in the last provincial election, questioned “independent contractor” re-classifications, but otherwise simply called on employers to “follow the law.”

None of these politicians cared to address the fact that the employers’ offensive against low-paid workers is entirely legal under the Liberals’ legislation. Together with the unions, they seek to present the issues involved as purely local in character, even though there is a relentless drive by big business in Canada and around the world to gut workers’ social rights and accelerate the transfer of wealth from working people to the rich and super-rich.

The response of the trade unions has been equally cynical.

At a protest outside a Toronto Tim Horton’s, Toronto and York Region Labour Council President Jim Cartwright called on franchisees to seek permission for price increases from their home office to offset the wage hike. Ontario Federation of Labour President Chris Buckley, appearing at another protest, echoed Wynne’s remarks, while avoiding any criticism of the Liberal government. For good measure, Buckley added some bluster about stepping up pressure on franchise owners for “fairness.” Buckley, as autoworkers who got to see him up close when he was the president of Canadian Autoworkers Local 222 know full well, has a long history of delivering such blather while presiding over the imposition of concession contracts and the elimination of jobs, including the CAW’s the infamous scuttling of opposition to the closure of the Oshawa GM Truck plant.

The union bureaucrats’ studious silence on the Liberal government’s role in launching the latest round of attacks on workers in Ontario comes as no surprise. With a provincial election approaching, the unions have already opened their war chests to fund yet another multi-million dollar pro-Liberal election campaign, conducted on the bogus pretext of “stopping” the Tories. In reality, the unions’ consistent support for the Liberals over the past 15 years has enabled the ruling class’ preferred party of government to enforce right-wing, anti-working class policies that go far beyond those implemented by the Progressive Conservatives under Mike Harris and his Common Sense Revolution. These include the privatization of public utilities, brutal social spending cuts and further tax handouts to big business and the richest 1 percent.

What the unions want to avoid at all costs is a broad-based working class mobilization against the political establishment and the capitalist profit system, because this would undermine their cozy corporatist relations with Liberals and big business as a whole. As part of the unions’ open transformation over the past three decades into pro-corporate entities with interests diametrically opposed to those of the workers they claim to represent, top union bureaucrats have been integrated into tripartite business-government-union committees and Liberal-led government consultative bodies. A prime example of this was the months-long “independent” review that laid the basis for the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act.

A mass working class movement directed against the entire political establishment and their accomplices in the trade unions is precisely what is required. Recent events in Ontario have once again thoroughly exposed the rotten politics of the pseudo-left groups who have promoted campaigns such as “Fight for $15 and Fairness,” which are aimed at boosting the pro-capitalist unions’ much diminished authority and helping them to develop a new dues base among low-wage, service workers. It is not possible to conduct a struggle for better wages and working conditions in alliance with organizations which seek to prop up the political parties responsible for decimating workers’ wages, living conditions and public services.

Workers at Tim Horton’s and other companies must take the struggle into their own hands. Action committees must be formed, controlled by rank-and-file workers, to lead the struggle for a livable income, which in major cities like Toronto or Ottawa would be well above $20 per hour. This is above all a political struggle, requiring the fight to develop the independent activity of the working class in opposition to all of the capitalist parties. This can be accomplished only through the adoption of a socialist and internationalist program to connect the struggles of workers in Ontario and across Canada with their class brothers and sisters internationally.

Trump administration escalates attack on data encryption

Will Morrow

The Trump White House is escalating the efforts of the previous Obama administration to circumvent and criminalize encryption of electronic communications and mobile devices used by billions of people around the world.

This was the theme of a speech by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Christopher Wray on January 9 in New York City before an audience of technology corporation heads and government officials. Wray referred to the use of electronic encryption as the “going dark problem,” a phrase coined by former FBI director James Comey as part of the Obama administration’s drive to remove any impediment on government spying. He explained that the issue “comes up in almost every conversation I have with leading law enforcement organizations, and with my foreign counterparts from most countries—and typically in the first 30 minutes.”

Wray claimed that the agency had not been able to act upon warrants to search 7,775 electronic devices because it could not break through their encryption. On this basis, he demanded that technology companies install backdoor systems into all of their devices that could be used by the intelligence agencies.

In a speech last October, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein went even further, singling out not only encryption of electronic devices, but the use of so-called end-to-end encryption in messaging systems, which are incorporated in mobile phone applications such as Whatsapp and Signal by default. The number of people using these applications has exploded to more than one billion, particularly in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of mass NSA spying.

End-to-end encryption relies on the principle of a public-private key system. Each user has a public key which others can use to encrypt messages to them, but which can only be decrypted with the private key that only the user possesses. In principle, this means that even the administrators of the messaging application server cannot access the message contents, because they are encrypted from end to end.

Rosenstein declared that “Billions of instant messages are sent and received each day using mainstream apps employing default end-to-end encryption. The app creators do something that the law does not allow telephone carriers to do: they exempt themselves from complying with court orders.”

Rosenstein openly admitted that the government’s main concern is not a relatively small number of criminal suspects, but the mass communications of the entire working class. “Encrypted communications and devices pose the greatest threat to public safety,” he declared, “when they are part of mass-market consumer devices and services that enable warrant-proof encryption by default.”

The deputy attorney general hinted that the Trump administration was moving to criminalize encryption. He complained that the “approach taken in the recent past—negotiating with technology companies and hoping they will eventually assist law enforcement out of a sense of civic duty—is unlikely to work. Technology companies operate in a highly competitive environment. Even companies that really want to help must consider the consequences. Competitors will always try to attract customers by promising stronger encryption.”

In other words, the problem facing both the government and the CEOs of technology companies—which are already integrated into the mass surveillance of the population—is that ordinary people are opposed to government surveillance. Rosenstein concluded: “There is no constitutional right to sell warrant-proof encryption. If our society chooses to let businesses sell technologies that shield evidence even from court orders, it should be a fully-informed decision.”

This is the pseudo-legal rationale for dictatorship. The logical corollary of Rosenstein’s claim that files and communications are illegal which are “warrant-proof” is that the government must have access to every email, text message, phone call and document of every person in the country. The Fourth Amendment right of the people to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” is rendered meaningless.

Rosenstein’s claim that the government is concerned only with communications for which it possesses a warrant is transparently absurd, given that the government already illegally spies on the communications of millions of people, including US citizens, operating with the strategy to “sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all and exploit it all,” as one NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden put it. This month, Democrats and Republicans voted together to maintain Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for the warrantless spying on individuals outside the US, as well as all of their contacts, including US citizens.

The bipartisan drive to illegalize encryption was escalated under the Obama administration in 2015 in the wake of the November Paris terror attacks and the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. The FBI claimed at the time that it could not break the iPhone passphrase of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by police in the attack.

The Obama administration organized a public lawsuit against Apple in February 2016, to force it to install a new version of the iOS operating system on Farook’s phone, which would allow the FBI to crack the phone’s passphrase. Apple refused, at least publicly, to do so, arguing that such an action could be replicated on other users’ devices and would set a precedent for the government to access the phone of any individual. In the end, the FBI dropped the lawsuit because it claimed it had been able to use an unnamed “third party” to crack the phone.

The purpose of the lawsuit was to utilize the initial shock and confusion among the population that accompanies such disasters to mobilize support for an attack on the rights of the entire population. Last November, the Trump administration served Apple with another subpoena to force it to unlock the iPhone of 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, the attacker at the Sutherland Springs, Texas shooting.

The Trump administration’s push to criminalize encryption is part of an international campaign. On July 31, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd called on WhatsApp’s owner Facebook to remove end-to-end encryption, arguing that it “aids terrorists.” The Australian government has introduced legislation seeking to force companies to provide the contents of encrypted communications.

The ruling class is being driven by its extreme fear of mass opposition to its right-wing policies and a growing political radicalization among workers and young people after more than 25 years of permanent war, growing social inequality, and more than 16 years of attacks on democratic rights under the fraudulent banner of the “war on terror.”

In the fight against this campaign, no confidence can be placed in the social media and technology corporations, such as Facebook and Google. While collaborating in mass spying, they are acting in lockstep with governments internationally to suppress growing political opposition by censoring left wing and opposition websites.