US requiring visa applicants to reveal social media information

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

The US State Department has begun asking most US visa applicants to provide information about their social media accounts. The policy that went into effect last Friday will give the government access to the personal data that is usually shared on social media, including photographs, locations and dates of various milestones.

In a statement reported in the New York Times, an official spokesperson downplayed the effects of the new regulations, claiming that they were merely an extension of existing rules: “We already request certain contact information, travel history, family member information, and previous addresses from all visa applicants.”

As of now, the State Department is only asking applicants to reveal their account handles. However, as acknowledged by then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in 2017, the administration has been seriously considering proposals that would require applicants to reveal all their passwords, giving the government full access to their accounts.

The implementation of the new policy, a manifestation of the long-proposed “extreme vetting,” is another step in the Trump administration’s war against immigrants.

Following up on his March 2017 executive order imposing a 90-day ban on the immigration of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen), Trump issued a memorandum claiming that the “executive branch [needed to] enhance the screening and vetting protocols and procedures for granting visas” in order to “avert the entry into the United States of foreign nationals who may aid, support, or commit violent, criminal, or terrorist acts.”

In March 2018, the State Department filed two notices announcing its intent to implement changes to the existing rules that would focus on the social media profiles of applicants. The plan outlined by the State Department at that time made it clear that the US government would “require nearly all visa applicants...to submit five years of social media handles for specific platforms...and with an option to list handles for other platforms not explicitly required.” In addition, applicants would be required to list “previous telephone numbers, email addresses, prior immigration violations and any family history of involvement in terrorist activities.”

While claiming that the new policy does not reflect any dramatic change in the existing framework of rules, administration officials have presented it as a much-needed and essential tool to deal with national security concerns. Framing it as a delayed response to the 2015 San Bernardino shootings (where one of the perpetrators had apparently posted various incendiary statements online that had remained undetected), the State Department has doubled down on the claim that the new measures will help protect the American people from possible “terrorist activities.”

But, as critics have pointed out, this is an extremely dubious claim, particularly given that there is no way to prevent those plotting attacks from using false names, creating fake identities or even framing others on social media. Beyond that, the idea that applicants would be expected to report on unspecified “terrorist activities” of family members, who might in fact be US citizens, constitutes an egregious attack on the freedom of speech and the freedom of association guaranteed under the US Constitution.

As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed out in its response to the State Department’s earlier notice, the threat to collect information on family members was bound to have a chilling effect not just on the applicants, but also citizens who would not be informed about how the collected data might be shared between various government agencies.

Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, explained at the time: “There is a real risk that social media vetting will unfairly target immigrants and travelers from Muslim-majority countries for discriminatory visa denials, without doing anything to protect national security.”

Reacting to the formalization of the proposal this past week, Shamsi told the New York Times, “This is a dangerous and problematic proposal,” pointing out that there’s been no evidence provided by the State Department that such kinds of vetting could actually help protect national security.

The new immigration policy will affect nearly 15 million visa applicants in 2020 alone. Given the sheer numbers, it must be noted that in addition to constituting an attack on privacy and democratic rights, these measures will increase processing times, leading to a further bottleneck in the processing of visa applications. The new requirement will result in a higher threshold, more complicated paperwork and longer wait times aimed at discouraging legal immigrants.

Over the past two years, the Trump administration has floated a series of measures to limit legal immigration including the denial of automatic birthright citizenship, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the introduction of a so-called merit-based system that would drastically reduce family-based visa applications and replace them with requirements based on education and skill, and the elimination of the diversity visa lottery system that grants 50,000 people the right to migrate to the US every year.

The global assault on jobs

Jerry White

The Australian telecom giant Telstra announced Tuesday that it would eliminate the jobs of 10,000 contract workers over the next two years, after having laid off 5,000 contractors last year.

The layoffs come as Telstra moves up its “T22” restructuring plan to slash the jobs of 8,000 direct employees—a quarter of its workforce—by the end of 2022. It is now cutting 6,000 direct jobs over the next several months in order to include the US$1.75 billion in savings in its 2019 financial reports.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Investors cheer as Telstra wields the axe on costs” summed up the attitude of the corporate-financial oligarchy to the destruction of workers’ livelihoods and families.

The cuts are part of a wave of mass layoffs being carried out internationally, as corporations respond to mounting signs of a global recession, exacerbated by Trump’s trade war policies against China and other countries. Finance capital is demanding brutal job cuts and reductions in labor costs so that the corporations can boost their profit margins despite shrinking markets and falling sales.

Other companies that have recently announced mass layoffs include:

General Motors

The biggest US car maker is cutting 14,000 salaried and production jobs and closing seven plants, five in the US and Canada. Two of the seven targeted facilities, located in other countries, have yet to be identified. In comments to a shareholders meeting Tuesday, CEO Mary Barra said the cuts would save $6 billion and “drive profitable growth.”

Ford

Last month, Ford announced that it was in the final phase of its “Smart Redesign” program and would cut 7,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its global salaried workforce, by the end of August. The automaker is slashing salaried positions in Germany, the UK and the US, and laying off thousands of production workers in Brazil, Russia, China and the US. But Wall Street considers this to be a mere down payment. A Morgan Stanley analyst recently said that Ford needs to slash another 23,000 jobs to meet its cost-cutting targets.

Fiat-Chrysler

On Tuesday, the corporate board of French carmaker Renault said that it would need more time to decide on a proposed merger with Fiat Chrysler, which would create the third largest automaker in the world. Like other mega-mergers, the tie-up would “lead to job cuts in Europe—where both automakers employ too many people making vehicles delivering too little profit,” the Detroit News reported Monday.

Volkswagen

The largest car maker in the world has established a “strategic alliance” with Ford and is slashing 7,000 jobs.

General Electric

The US-based transnational announced last week that it was cutting more than 1,000 jobs at its Belfort plant in eastern France and reneging on its pledge to create 1,000 new jobs due to a fall in demand for power plant equipment.

AT&T

The world’s third largest telecom cut more than 11,780 jobs last year even as it reported $19.4 billion in profits. The company received more than $20 billion in relief due to Trump’s corporate tax cuts.

Retail

British international retail giant Marks and Spencer is threatening to close 100 stores as part of a jobs massacre in the retail sector that saw the elimination of 70,000 jobs in the UK at the end of 2018 and 41,000 US jobs in the first two months of 2019 alone. German-based MediaMarktSaturn, Europe’s biggest consumer electronics retailer, has announced 700 layoffs.

Even as the job cuts escalate, the corporate-controlled politicians and media talking heads prattle on about the booming economy and record low levels of unemployment in the US. By this they mean record corporate profits, the quadrupling of the stock market and the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the ultra-rich since the 2008 financial crash.

America’s low official unemployment rate does not account for the fact that record numbers of workers have dropped out of the workforce—the labor participation rate is lower today than in 2007—and the jobs most workers have pay less, lack pensions and are devoid of any semblance of security. Real wages in the US fell by 1.3 percent last year, following a more than four-decade decline. A recent study in the UK showed that wages are worth a third less today than they were in 2008.

“You might have 25 jobs throughout your life and they’re often contract,” Wall Street analyst Maryann Keller told the Detroit Free Press for an article on the temporary and part-time jobs that have proliferated in the auto industry since President Obama’s restructuring of GM and Chrysler 10 years ago. “Prior to 2009, the old union contracts ensured you a job for life. It was preposterous and not affordable,” said Keller.

At the other pole of society, the corporate and financial oligarchy is spending more than ever on yachts, private jets and mansions. The Wall Street Journal just reported that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has plopped down $80 million to buy a penthouse and two adjacent units on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, Amazon workers are sleeping in their cars and collecting food stamps.

After the 2008 crash, the International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site warned that there would be no peaceful or “socially neutral” resolution to the global financial breakdown. In May 2009, David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), wrote:

This crisis is the form in which a fundamental restructuring of the American and global economy, and the social and class relations upon which it is based, is taking place. It can be resolved only in one of two ways: Either on a capitalist or on a socialist basis. The first, the capitalist solution, will mean a drastic lowering of the living standards of the working class in the United States, Europe and throughout the world. This solution will require massive internal repression, the destruction of the democratic rights of the working class, and the unleashing of military violence on a scale not seen since World War II.

The only alternative to this catastrophic scenario is the socialist solution, which requires the taking of political power by the American and international working class, the establishment of popular democratic control of industrial, financial and natural resources, and the development of a scientifically-planned global economy that is dedicated to the satisfaction of the needs of society as a whole, rather than the destructive pursuit of profit and personal wealth.

As with the 2008 financial crash, the ruling elite intends to make the working class bear the full weight of a looming downturn in the global economy, even as the state intervenes to protect and expand the wealth of the financial oligarchy. This was made abundantly clear Tuesday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said that the US central bank is prepared to cut interest rates again, triggering a stock market surge.

But the striving of the working class to assert its own solution has been suppressed by the unions in the US and around the world. In the years following the crash, they reduced strike activity to the lowest level since the early twentieth century. The last 18 months, however, have seen a resurgence of the class struggle, including the rebellion of US teachers; the wildcat strikes by maquiladora workers in Matamoros, Mexico; the Yellow Vest protests in France; and the upheavals in Algeria, Sudan and other African countries.

In Matamoros, workers revolted against the nationalist and pro-capitalist unions, marched to the US border to appeal to their American brothers and sisters to join the fight, and sent messages of solidarity to GM workers in the US and Canada fighting plant closings.

Around the world, millions of workers and young people are being radicalized. They are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is stealing their jobs and impoverishing their families, not immigrants and refugees as Trump and the far-right parties in Europe claim, echoed by the so-called “mainstream” parties and the trade unions.

This crisis poses fundamental political questions. The global assault on the social and democratic rights of the working class requires a globally coordinated response. This means rejecting the nationalist poison peddled by unions like the United Auto Workers, which promotes anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese chauvinism and pits workers against each other in a fratricidal struggle over who will work for the lowest wages and in the worst conditions. It also means rejecting the corporate-controlled Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, who occasionally refers to himself as a socialist while lining up with Trump’s trade war policies.

Instead, workers need to build rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by the workers themselves, to develop an industrial and political counteroffensive against the global capitalist system and coordinate their struggles on an international scale. Above all, it means the building the International Committee of the Fourth International to provide this resurgent class struggle with the revolutionary perspective and leadership it requires to enable workers to take political power in their own hands and build a socialist society.

Three reports expose extreme inequalities in Britain

Steve James

The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, visited the UK and Northern Ireland last year and received over 300 written submissions. His report’s summary, in unusually frank language, stated:

“Although the United Kingdom is the world’s fifth largest economy, one fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017. Policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. Close to 40 percent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated.”

Alston noted a “growing number of homeless families—24,000 between April and June of 2018.”

He observed that “it might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens ...”

One of the most striking developments highlighted is the growth of the “working poor.”

“Four million workers live in poverty, an increase of more than half a million in the last five years.” One in six of those referred to food banks are working, while 60 percent of those in poverty are families in which at least one person works. Even more striking, “a shocking 2.8 million people are in families where all adults work full-time” yet are still in poverty.

Alston confirms the extent to which the “social safety net” which once provided a guarantee against the most extreme levels of poverty and deprivation has been “systematically and starkly eroded.” He heard “time and again about important public programmes being pared down, the loss of institutions that previously protected vulnerable people, social care services at breaking point, and local government and devolved institutions stretched far too thin.”

The 49 percent cut in funding to local government between 2010/11 and 2017/18 resulted in 500 children’s centres and 340 libraries closing to 2016, while 8,000 librarians lost their jobs.

Large numbers of vulnerable children were at “greater risk of harm due to rapidly deteriorating front-line child protection services.”

The UN rapporteur devoted a large section of this report to the government’s Universal Credit (UC) scheme, which rolled six welfare benefits into one. He described local authorities and voluntary organisations preparing for UC to be introduced into their area “as if they were preparing for an impending natural disaster or health epidemic.”

UC impacted welfare claimants’ finances, mental health and work prospects. Its “perverse and catastrophic” five-week waiting period pushes “many who may already be in crisis into debt, rent arrears and serious hardship.” Deductions for advances, rent and utility arrears can consume as much as 60 percent of the already meagre payments.

Working UC claimants can experience huge monthly fluctuations in the amounts they receive, while the punitive regime of benefit sanctions for claimants falling foul of the government’s arbitrary and pointless job search requirements had succeeded in “instilling a fear and loathing of the system.”

Because UC is claimed online, the new scheme effectively excludes large numbers of the most vulnerable who have no smart phone or internet access. One third of new claims for UC are never completed, a UC telephone helpline is overloaded and operated by poorly trained staff, while many of the public libraries offering internet access have been closed. Many UC claims are automatically processed, giving rise to “errors of scale” with “millions of monthly transactions” found to be incorrect. Claimants are waiting months to be paid the right amount even when written evidence of a mistake is available.

Among Alston’s other findings were:

* More than 40 percent of children live in poverty.

* Half of all those in poverty are from families with a disability.

* Pensioner poverty is rising.

* Black and Asian families in the lowest fifth of income levels were “the most likely to live in poverty and deprivation.”

* Destitution is a “design characteristic of the asylum system.”

* People in poverty in rural areas were at particular risk of “loneliness and isolation” due to cuts in transport services, and lack of broadband or library access.

Despite bitter complaints from the British government, Alston’s report is be formally presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June.

By grotesque contrast, this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the annual roll call of Britain’s 1,000 wealthiest individuals, revealed that the super-rich had, over the last 12 months of general social immiseration, increased their personal worth by nearly £50 billion.

Collectively this infinitesimally small social layer account for £771 billion, although this figure is assumed to be considerably underestimated. Entry level for the rich list is now £120 million, an increase of £5 million from last year. Of the wealthiest 1,000, 151 are billionaires, six more than last year.

Britain’s entire annual social security budget last year was £222 billion.

A more detailed and comprehensive report into inequality was recently initiated by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), to be led by academic Sir Angus Deaton over the next five years.

An introduction to the Deaton Review, “Inequalities in the twenty-first century” by Robert Joyce and Xiaowei Xu, reports that Britain is one of the most unequal societies in the world, although weaknesses in both the Gini coefficient and the 90:10 ratio meant that both measures have failed entirely to capture the “runaway rise in top incomes.” For example, CEO pay to the FTSE 100 companies in the UK was, by 2017, 145 times higher than the average worker’s salary, up from 47 times higher in 1998.

Deaton and his partner, Anne Case, coined the term “deaths of despair,” referring to “deaths from suicide, drug and alcohol overdose and alcohol-related liver disease” while “deteriorating job prospects, social isolation and relationship breakdown may slowly be taking their toll on people’s physical and mental health.”

Introducing his report, in a speech titled “Inequality and the future of capitalism,” Deaton gave voice to the concerns of more astute advisers of the ruling elite. He warned, “Britain is divided as never before and, once again, many believe that their voice doesn’t count either in Brussels or in Westminster.”

“[T]oday’s inequalities are signs that democratic capitalism is under threat, not only in the US, where the storm clouds are darkest, but in much of the rich world ...” He recommended “repairs for democratic capitalism, either by fixing what is broken, or by making changes to head off the threats.”

Deaton harkened back with undisguised nostalgia to “the construction of the modern welfare state by Attlee’s government after the Second World War,” which he says had “tamed the beast” of capitalism. This is a forlorn wish indeed. His review is being prepared amid the shipwreck of Jeremy Corbyn’s declared project of pushing Labour to the left.

Instead Labour’s right wing, speaking for the super-rich, have declared even his meagre reform proposals beyond the pale. Corbyn has made endless retreats while his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell woos the City of London with pledges of loyalty to big business and the “national interest.” This guarantees that the storm clouds will continue to gather over capitalism and that the threat to its survival from the working class will grow.

Boeing rejects pilot simulator training for 737 Max 8

Bryan Dyne

Aerospace giant Boeing is proposing to proceed with new pilot training for its 737 Max 8 aircraft without the use of hands-on flight simulators. This cost-cutting measure continues the policy that led to the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 last October and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March, which killed a combined total of 346 passengers and crew.

According to CNN, part of Boeing’s plan to bring the grounded 737 Max 8 back into service is a computer-based training program which, like the company’s recommended pilot training on the aircraft before the two crashes, does not involve any time in an actual flight simulator. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which must ultimately approve any retraining regimen for the jet, has not yet announced its official training requirements.

Boeing’s proposal comes amidst mounting evidence of shoddy construction of its commercial jets, including its 737 Max line, which was brought into service in 2017 and quickly became the company’s biggest-selling aircraft and pushed Boeing’s stock price and profits to record highs. The FAA said Sunday that more than 300 Boeing 737 jets, including the Max, may have faulty wing parts that do not meet strength and durability standards. The FAA said it plans to order airlines to remove and replace the parts on impacted aircraft. It added that as many as 148 parts made by a Boeing supplier could be “susceptible to premature failure or cracks.”

The affected parts are slat tracks, which sit on the front of the wing and move along a track to create lift. They play an important role during take-off and landing.

Boeing’s proposal to skip flight simulator training for pilots when its grounded fleet of 737 Maxes is cleared to resume service is not an innocent one. Much of the criticism the company has faced is that the original training for the Max 8 for pilots who had flown previous versions of the 737 aircraft was an hour-long course on a tablet. This was part of a scheme by the company to reduce the cost of the new plane for airlines and minimize the time needed to get it into the air. Corners were cut in order to beat back a challenge from Boeing’s European-based rival Airbus, whose new short- and mid-range commercial jet was threatening to capture lucrative markets long dominated by the US giant as well as the rapidly growing Asian market.

At the time, the company, the FAA and the pilots unions all agreed that the minimal training was adequate.

The airplane manufacturer is proposing more of the same in order to hold onto market share for its most profitable aircraft. Flight simulators cost upwards of $15 million each and pilots typically train for hundreds of hours before they even get inside a real cockpit.

The CNN report came only one day after Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg gave an interview to CBS News in which he admitted that the company did not correctly implement the installation of its new Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), an automated anti-stall system that is believed to have been responsible for both crashes. Muilenburg also acknowledged that “our engineers discovered” the problem, but the company kept it hidden from the airlines, pilots and regulatory agencies until it was exposed by the crashes, both of which occurred within minutes of takeoff when MCAS was triggered by a faulty sensor and repeatedly forced the nose of the plane sharply downward.

In the same interview, Muilenburg attempted to shift scrutiny from Boeing’s leadership onto the workers, claiming that “there appears to have been a maintenance issue with” the angle-of-attack sensor, which fed data to MCAS that made the software force the two planes into a lethal nosedive. In previous comments, Boeing spokespeople have attempted to blame the pilots.

Muilenburg’s comments are further undercut by new reports revealing that Boeing changed how the MCAS software worked without informing those who knew about the system. The program was originally installed on the 737 Max 8 to compensate for the plane’s tendency to stall, a consequence of mounting a larger engine on the same body design as earlier 737s—another decision driven by Boeing’s desire to produce its answer to Airbus as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Originally, MCAS was capable of changing the pitch of a plane by only 0.6 degrees and it relied on input from two different sensors. However, Boeing changed the software to make it more aggressive, giving it the ability to automatically pitch the plane upward by 2.5 degrees, and allowing it to be triggered by input from a single sensor—one of the plane’s two angle-of-attack sensors.

FAA officials were not even directly aware of the existence of MCAS. An internal FAA review of its jetliner certification process found that no senior agency official participated in crucial assessments of the MCAS system, instead relying on Boeing employees to perform safety tests and analyses of potential hazards, under the terms of the 2005 Organization Designation Authorization program—a measure designed to further weaken federal oversight of the company.

Those that did sign off on MCAS were not made aware of the changes in the system because of FAA rules declaring that since the system had been certified, the changes did not warrant additional safety tests. This meant that the officials in charge of pilot training were not alerted to the change.

Mike Sinnett, a Boeing vice president, defending these decisions last November in response to the outcry over the Lion Air crash, said, “It’s been reported that it’s a single point failure, but it is not considered by design or certification a single point.” He added that this was so “because the function and the trained pilot work side by side and are part of the system,” ignoring the fact that many if not most of the pilots flying the 737 Max 8 did not know of the existence of MCAS.

What is absent from the press reports, however, is any suggestion that Muilenburg, Sinnett or any of Boeing’s leadership should be prosecuted in connection with the deaths of 346 people. Muilenburg was paid $23 million last year in compensation for Boeing’s accelerating rise on the stock market, achieved by a brutal cost-cutting drive, including the elimination of thousands of jobs. He was also rewarded for enriching big investors and speculators by overseeing billions in stock buybacks and dividend increases.

At least 116 injured in Russia factory explosions

Clara Weiss 

On Saturday, June 1, three blasts at the Kristall factory in the Russian city of Dzerzhinsk injured 116 people. As of this writing, 17 are still hospitalized. The factory produces explosives for the Russian military, including the FAB-500, the most powerful air bomb in the Russian defense industry.

Dzerzhinsk is a city of about 260,000 people, located in the Nizhny Gorodski oblast in central Russia. A former center of the Soviet chemical industry, more than 40 percent of the population are still employed in manufacturing. The Kristall factory, built in the Soviet period, now belongs to the major state-owned defense cooperation Rostech, which employs over 400,000 people. Its head, Sergei Chemezov, is a leading member of the ruling United Russia party and was put on the US sanctions list in 2016 as a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The blasts reportedly occurred at a unit in the factory that produces the highly explosive chemical trinitrotoluole (TNT), a standard component of dynamite. They were so powerful that windows in more than 300 apartment buildings, 70 kindergartens and 31 schools as well as several cultural buildings and gyms were shattered or torn out of the walls, spanning a radius of at least 3 kilometers. Footage of the blasts shows a major mushroom cloud rising over the city. Many buildings were also left without electricity.

An ensuing fire destroyed three storage units at the factory and two plants, and damaged the building of the factory management. The fire spread over 1,200 square meters, including 800 on the factory site as well as 400 cubic meters of the nearby forest. Some 400 firefighters were needed to extinguish the fire.

Among those injured were 44 workers at the factory. One of them is still in the hospital in critical condition. Many of the injured were local residents, including at least one child. Most residents had wounds inflicted by flying glass from shattered windows. It is generally believed that the number of injured was reduced because the blasts took place on a Saturday, when schools and kindergartens were closed.

Nikita Tumakov, who witnessed the blasts from his apartment, told a Russian newspaper: “At 11:50 a.m. the first explosion occurred. I was sitting at home in my room on a chair, and I was thrown off [the chair]. Everything in the apartment was turned upside down. Then I went out on the balcony, began to take a video, and the second explosion came with a major wave. My balcony was shaking.” Other residents confirmed that the effects of the blast could be felt in neighboring districts of the city. The blasts triggered a panic in the city, with many residents fleeing to the homes of friends or relatives in the region.

A state of emergency was declared in Dzerzhinsk as well as in the nearby villages of Pyra, Zhelnino, and Kordon Lesnoi. Workers in neighboring factories were evacuated.

On Sunday, workers of the city administration, nearby factories, volunteers, and other local residents spent hours trying to remove the rubble and broken windows. The damage caused is estimated to be in the millions of rubles (hundreds of thousands of US dollars).

The city’s mayor has assured the population that no toxic chemicals were released by the blasts and that radioactivity in the city was not increased above the allowed maximum. However, on social media, residents have expressed suspicions about these official assurances. The Russian state and its local agencies are notorious for downplaying, if not outright lying about, the scope of such disasters.

While no official explanation has been given for the blasts, everything indicates that gross violations of basic safety procedures at the factory were the cause. The general director of the Kristall factory had been removed from his position just before the latest blasts because of “problems with factory safety” after another explosion at the Kristall factory on April 4 had destroyed an entire shop. After all of these explosions, almost nothing remains of the original factory buildings (click here for footage).

The Kristall factory is only a particularly stark example of the dangerous workplace conditions facing millions of workers in Russia on a daily basis. On August 31, 2018, another blast at the Sverdlov factory in Dzerzhinsk, which also produces explosives for the military and is directly adjacent to the Kristall factory, killed six people.

According to a report by the Russian Ministry of Labor, 2,600 people died in 2017 because of accidents in production. This was an increase of 5 percent from 2016. The by-far deadliest occupations are in mining and construction. In stark contrast to the numbers provided by the Russian government, the International Labor Organization has estimated that some 15,000 workers in Russia die at their workplace every year, and that some 190,000 workers die annually as a result of exposure to dangerous conditions at work.

Responsibility for these deaths lies with the Russian oligarchy, which has emerged out of the destruction of the USSR by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Making close to no investments in new technologies and equipment, this oligarchy’s criminal neglect of basic infrastructure has resulted in countless fires and explosions at both factories and public buildings. Most recently, this included a horrific fire at a shopping mall in the mining city of Kemerovo a year ago, which took the lives of at least 64 people, many of them children, and a fire at a shoe factory in early 2018, which killed 10 migrant workers from China.

Warnings mount that trade war could bring recession

Nick Beams

An investigation by Chinese state authorities into why FedEx misdirected two packages sent to the technology company Huawei is likely to assume greater importance in the ongoing conflict with the US following a report that the misdirection was the result of “internal protocols” set up to comply with measures directed against the company by the Trump administration.

The misdirection took place when the packages shipped from Japan were sent to the FedEx global hub in Memphis instead of the intended recipient in China. When the news broke, FedEx apologized for the misdirection and said that “no external party required FedEx to make these shipments.”

But according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, changes in the company’s “internal protocols” to comply with the US crackdown on Huawei caused the company to misdirect the packages. “New restrictions on doing business with Huawei affected how FedEx handles Huawei’s packages,” the report said.

Beijing has launched an investigation into FedEx for “undermining the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese clients” and the commerce ministry has said it will compile a list of “unreliable” foreign companies following the US measures directed against Huawei that block it from US supplies of components.

The deepening economic confrontation between the US and China has been joined by the Trump administration’s decision to impose tariffs on Mexican goods, rising from 5 percent this month to 25 percent by October, on the demand that it take action to cut the flow of immigrants and refugees into the US. This has brought a series of warnings from Wall Street analysts of the consequences for financial markets and the economy more broadly.

Morgan Stanley recently warned that a global recession could start within nine months if the Trump administration goes ahead with its threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese goods and Beijing launches retaliatory action. In a separate analysis, JPMorgan Chase said the probability of a US recession in the second half of this year had risen to 40 percent from 25 percent a month ago.

In a report to investors, Chetan Ahya, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist, wrote that markets were underestimating the impact of the trade conflict. “Investors are generally of the view that the trade dispute could drag on for longer, but they appear to be overlooking its potential impact on the global macro outlook.”

These views were echoed by John Normand of JPMorgan Chase in London. He wrote: “The move down in markets over the past month is all about trade war, but I don’t think this is fully in the price. The economic data were weakening before tariffs went up so we’ve yet to see the economic consequences of trade.”

Manufacturing figures from May showed weakness across Asia and Europe, which underscored the global ramifications of the conflict between the US and China, he noted.

Manufacturing in the US is slowing markedly. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that US factories “are on track for their weakest showing this year since 2016.” It continued: “Manufacturing job growth has stalled since late last year and output has fallen in three of the past four months as demand for business equipment and commodities weakens in the US and abroad.”

In addition, orders for durable goods were down 0.1 percent in April from a year earlier, the first year-to-year decline since 2017.

Bank of America (BofA) has lowered its forecast for profit growth and drawn attention to the risk of recession arising from the trade conflicts. Savita Subramanian, the head of US equity strategy at BofA, has cut her estimate for profit growth in S&P 500 companies as rising tariffs impact costs. “Globalisation has benefited S&P 500 margins for decades, and protectionism coupled with rising wages/input costs poses risks to peak margins,” she wrote in a note to clients.

The indirect impacts from trade tensions, including falls in consumption spending, falling confidence and the ban on Huawei, among other issues, “are likely more extreme than direct impacts,” she added. “Worst case—an economic recession.”

A former governor of the People’s Bank of China, Dai Xianglong, has warned that if the economic conflict between the US and China continues to escalate it will have a major impact on the global economy.

“The consequences of the US-China trade war not only will be reflected in both countries, but will also extend to relevant regions, extend to the whole world,” he told a press event in Beijing last week. “If the China-US trade war continues to grow larger,” he added, “it may cause the global economy to decline and may cause a global financial crisis.”

The prospect of recession is reflected in the continuing fall in yield on long-term bonds, as investors seek safety, pushing up bond prices and bringing down yields.

The gap between the yield on three-month and 10-year Treasury bonds is growing—a movement regarded as heralding a recession. And the yield on the 10-year bond could go even lower, according to JPMorgan analysts. They expect the yield on 10-year bonds to be 1.75 percent at the end of the year, compared with a previous forecast of 2.45 percent.

The downward revision was made following Trump’s move to impose tariffs on Mexico. The tariff hikes against China had already brought considerable uncertainty, but the action against Mexico has added another dimension. Some companies, seeking to dodge the effect of the China tariffs, had been looking to shift some of their operations to Mexico, but those plans have now been thrown awry.

There is now general uncertainty over where the Trump administration could next strike. Will it be the threatened imposition of a 25 percent tariff on auto imports, hitting Japan, Germany and South Korea, or something completely unexpected like the tariffs against Mexico?

A graphic example of the turmoil was provided yesterday when the New York Times reported that, under pressure from US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the director of trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro, the administration was considering imposing tariffs on aluminium imports from Australia.

Australia was exempted from the 10 percent tariff imposed on aluminium in May last year on “national security” grounds and since then its exports to the US have sharply increased.

In the event, Trump rejected the push from within his administration. But the reasons for his decision, at least for now, only served to reveal the underlying content of the accelerating economic warfare. The cancellation of the Australian exemption was rejected on advice from senior officials at the Defense and State Departments, who argued that it would undermine the US-Australia alliance.

Australia is regarded as a frontline state in the military preparations against China, with its vital communications facilities and basing of US forces. As Trump put it when questioned on the report, “We’re doing a very special relationship with Australia.”

Algerian army suspends July 4 presidential elections

Will Morrow

On Sunday, the Algerian Constitutional Council cancelled presidential elections scheduled for July 4. Interim President Abdelkader Bensalah had called the elections in April, only a week after the resignation of long-time President Abdelaziz Bouteflika amid mass protests demanding his ouster and the fall of Algeria’s military regime.

The decision came amid continuing mass weekly protests of workers and youth in cities across Algeria, opposing the elections, Bensalah and the military dictatorship. In recent weeks, protesters repeatedly chanted slogans denouncing the elections and the military brass, such as “No elections with the gang,” “No dialog with symbols of the old regime.”

So overwhelming was the popular opposition to these elections, correctly identified as a fig leaf to maintain a corrupt regime, that no parties dared to stand candidates in them. Judges refused to participate in the preparation of election lists, with the Judges’ Club association issuing a statement noting that the election was “rejected by the people.” In the end, the Constitutional Council called off an election that was proving to be an embarrassment for the regime and only threatened to trigger a broader eruption of mass opposition.

The Constitutional Council’s suspension of the elections is not, however, an attempt to bow to the will of workers and youth and build a democratic regime. Power remains in the hands of military strongman General Ahmed Gaïd Salah. And by postponing the presidential election without setting a future election date, the Constitutional Council has effectively left Bensalah and Prime Minister Noureddine Bedoui, who are widely despised, in power indefinitely.

In its communiqué announcing its ruling, the Constitutional Council stressed that its purpose in postponing the election was to preserve the existing regime. It wrote, “it is essential to create adequate conditions to organize this election transparently and without bias, in order to preserve constitutional institutions that help realize the aspirations of the sovereign people. It is the duty of the head of state to summon the electorate and complete the electoral process through the election of the President of the Republic and the swearing of the constitutional oath.”

While the Constitutional Council issued its statement claiming to defend the aspirations of the Algerian people, the military regime is locking up and killing politicians and public figures in an effort to terrorize the population.

Reports and videos posted on social media show that demonstrations over the past month have more and more taken up slogans directed against the military, including “No to the Egyptian solution,” a reference to the 2013 coup of dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. While the regime is seeking to find some means of ending the protests, it is preparing a no less brutal crackdown than its counterparts in Egypt and Sudan, where the military government yesterday launched an assault on civilian protest encampments in Khartoum, using live ammunition to kill at least 35 people.

Last Friday’s demonstration in Algeria included widespread protests against the state-overseen killing in prison of Kamel Eddine Fekhar, a Kabyle separatist and former leader of the Front des forces socialistes (FFS), which is affiliated with France’s big-business Socialist Party. Arrested without a warrant on March 31, immediately after giving an interview published on Facebook, he was charged with “threatening state security” and “inciting racial hatred.” Fekhar allegedly died as a result of a 50-day hunger strike on May 28.

Fekhar’s death attracted international condemnation, with Amnesty International calling it “a result of nothing more than having expressed his opinions.”

Fekhar’s lawyer, Salah Debouz, pointed to the chilling effect the military regime intends for his death to have. “Now, anyone publishing his views or expressing an opinion on social media can be arrested for having criticized one or another official,” he told Le Point on June 3. “I think there are many more people in this situation than is known, because they do not have the means to pay for a lawyer and no one hears anything about them. It is easier to repress them.”

Louisa Hanoune, the general secretary of Algeria’s Workers Party (PT) and a close ally of the Bouteflika family, remains in prison after having been arrested on May 10 while appearing as a witness at a military trial of Bouteflika’s brother Saïd. Her arrest followed statements attempting to present herself as a critic of the military and was aimed at sending a message that any criticism of the army will be met with violent repression.

Hanoune had compared the Algerian army to the bloodstained Egyptian military dictatorship of General al-Sisi, effectively warning against support for Gaïd Salah. “Once in power, al-Sisi ordered the imprisonment of even the naive people among the activists and political parties who supported him, believing that the army would open a true democracy,” she said. The army has viciously retaliated, imprisoning Hanoune and preventing her doctors from visiting her.

The different bourgeois opposition parties are seeking to find a means of channeling workers and youth behind a fraudulent transition that, while utilizing more democratic phraseology, will leave the country in the hands of the corporate elite and be no less impervious to the social demands of the Algerian workers and rural oppressed for an end to crushing poverty and unemployment, particularly among the youth. Between a quarter and a third of youth are unemployed in a country where 70 percent of the population is aged under 30.

On June 3, El Watan reported that a collection of autonomous trade unions, which receive funding from the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy, and the self-proclaimed “Civil Forum for Change,” had launched a call for a new “responsible, serious and rational dialogue, as a means of resolving the present crisis” without Bensalah and Bedoui. The pseudo-left Workers Party and Socialist Workers Party, which is allied to the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France, are seeking to channel opposition behind a no less fraudulent demand for a “Constituent Assembly.”

Such demands are aimed at channeling the working class behind factions of the bourgeoisie, and preventing the working class from waging a struggle to take political power into its own hands, establish a workers government on the basis of socialist policies, and seek to extend its revolutionary struggles across the African continent and internationally. The fight for socialism is the only basis upon which the democratic and social demands of the working class can be fulfilled.

Military massacres protesters in Sudan

Bill Van Auken

Security forces in Sudan launched a bloodbath early Monday morning, using live ammunition to break up a more than five-month-old sit-in outside the country’s defense ministry in Khartoum, where tens of thousands of Sudanese have regularly gathered to demand an end to military rule and the transfer of power to a democratically elected government.

The Sudanese Doctors’ Committee put the confirmed death toll late Monday at over 30 and said that at least 116 people had been wounded. At least one of those who was killed is a child, an eight-year-old cut down by gunfire. The casualty figures are expected to rise dramatically, with many protesters still unaccounted for, and reports of security forces dumping bodies into the Nile River. Similar murderous repression reportedly has also been unleashed against protesters outside of the Sudanese capital.

Victims of Monday’s massacre

Troops from various military and police units descended upon the encampment, led by soldiers wearing the desert camouflage fatigues of the Rapid Support Force (RSF), a brutally repressive paramilitary outfit that has been used by the regime in Khartoum to suppress regional rebellions in Darfur and in the east of the country. The RSF is led by Lt. Gen. Hamdan Dagalo (popularly known as “Hemeti”), the deputy chair of the country’s currently ruling junta, the Transitional Military Council (TMC), and widely viewed as an aspiring dictator.

The troops rushed in using tear gas, stun grenades and live ammunition. Video posted online showed soldiers with whips surrounding and flogging unarmed demonstrators, including elderly men and women.

Photographs were also posted of snipers deployed in high rise buildings overlooking the protest site. They opened fire on anyone attempting to record the events with cellphone cameras.

One protester recounted: “They shot me in my right thigh because I was carrying someone with a bullet wound to his head ... An officer hit me with his gun and I dropped the man I was carrying. He then stepped away and shot him again in the head and told me ‘now you can go bury him.’”

In addition to shooting and beating protesters, the troops burned down tents erected at the sit-in and sealed off the area with machine gun-mounted trucks.

There were also reports of armed security forces besieging local hospitals where the wounded had been taken, firing live ammunition inside the facilities and blocking volunteers and doctors from entering. Video shared by doctors showed security forces beating medical staff at the Royal Care Hospital in Khartoum.

Protesters driven out of the site outside the defense ministry continued to demonstrate and erect barricades in the streets of Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman. In neighborhoods throughout Khartoum, people poured into the streets to protest the junta’s actions, barricading streets with bricks and burning tires and blocking bridges. Similar mobilizations were seen in Omdurman. Firing by security forces continued to be reported in both cities as well as elsewhere in Sudan.

Protesters erect barricades in streets of Khartoum

Among the chants heard were: “If you disperse the sit-in, we will protest in every street” and “You’ll have to kill us all.”

Shortly before the military onslaught against the protesters, the regime cut off power to the area. The internet was also shut down throughout Sudan.

The ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) issued a preposterous statement claiming that the crackdown had targeted only “unruly elements” from a neighborhood adjacent to the protest site, nicknamed “Colombia” and known for a high crime rate.

“What is going on is targeting Colombia adjacent to the sit-in area and not targeting the sit-in. Dangerous groups infiltrated among the protesters in the sit-in area,” a spokesman for the TMC said.

He went on to call for a “return to negotiations” between the junta and opposition groups organized under the umbrella of the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change (FDFC) as “the quickest way to resolve the problem.”

In the face of mass protests, the TMC seized power on April 11 in a preemptive coup against the 30-year ruler of Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir. Its aim has been to preserve the military-dominated regime by ousting its chief.

The assault on the protest had been openly prepared for days after negotiations between the junta and the civilian opposition front broke down over whether a military or a civilian would head a transitional regime during a proposed two-year transitional period in preparation for presidential elections.

Demonstrators remained in the streets, rejecting the protracted transition and demanding an immediate end to the ruling junta.

On Saturday, the ruling TMC issued a statement declaring that the “sit-in has become a threat to the country.”

While Washington issued a pro-forma statement from an undersecretary at the State Department condemning the “coordinated and unlawful violence” in Khartoum and a vague opinion that the Sudanese people “deserve a civilian-led government that works for the people, not an authoritarian military council that works against them,” the reality is that the military crackdown was prepared in the closest collaboration with the principal US allies in the region.

The shift toward iron-fisted repression immediately followed a tour conducted by the head of the TMC, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Dagalo, of the three countries that have been the main backers of the military regime, which are also Washington’s chief allies in the Arab world: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It is clear that Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai—with Washington’s tacit blessing—gave the green light for the bloodbath.

The assault on the sit-in recalls the even bloodier crackdown organized by Egypt’s dictatorial ruler Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo’s Rabaa Square in 2013, killing at least 1,000 people, including women and children, who were protesting the Sisi-led coup that toppled Egypt’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi. Having drowned in blood the Egyptian revolution that overthrew the 30-year US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, el-Sisi has no intention of seeing a similar revolutionary upheaval struggle unfold unhindered in Egypt’s southern neighbor, Sudan.

The Cairo regime issued a statement demanding that “all Sudanese sides commit to calm, self-restraint and return to the negotiating table.”

As for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, their ruling monarchs have pledged $3 billion to prop up Sudan’s ruling junta. The Sudanese military has in return sent troops to support Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s near-genocidal war against Yemen.

During their visit, the UAE’s ruling crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, pledged to help the Sudanese generals “preserve Sudan’s security and stability.”

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the organizer of last year’s brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi as well as dozens of beheadings of political dissidents, presumably offered similar backing.

After the meeting in Riyadh, Lt. Gen. Dagalo stated that “Sudan stands with the kingdom against all threats and attacks from Iran and the Houthis (Yemen’s anti-Saudi rebels).”

Such allegiance undoubtedly trumps all other considerations in Washington, where the focus of Middle East policy has been the consolidation of an anti-Iranian axis in preparation for a new and far more dangerous US imperialist war of aggression in the region.

At the same time, there is fear within US imperialist circles as well as among the ruling strata throughout the Middle East and North Africa that the popular revolt in Sudan will feed the growing wave of strikes and mass protests in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and throughout the region.

For the masses of Sudanese workers and poor, the way forward lies not through the calls by the bourgeois- and petty-bourgeois-led opposition for a civilian-led transitional government, which would also serve as a façade for the continued rule of Sudan’s small, wealthy elite and its military henchmen.

The only means of defeating the counterrevolutionary conspiracies of Washington, its regional allies and the Sudanese ruling clique lies in an independent struggle led by the working class to take power and seize the country’s wealth as part a broader struggle of the working class throughout the region and internationally to put an end to capitalism and build a socialist society.

Mental health crisis in Australia’s refugee camps

Max Boddy 

Reports have emerged of a wave of suicide attempts by refugees incarcerated by Australia on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island since the May 18 federal election, in which the Liberal-National Coalition was returned to power.

Sudanese refugee Abdul Aziz Adam, back in Manus after recently receiving a human rights prize in Geneva, last Thursday tweeted that at least 31 men had tried to commit suicide since the election.

Another Manus detainee, Iranian-born journalist Behrouz Boochani, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the situation was “out of control.” He reported that numerous detainees also were not eating due to depression, and the poorly-equipped local hospital at Lorengau was over-run. “I have never seen Manus Island like this,” he said. “I have never seen people like this.”

Boochani told Australia’s SBS News that Lorengau hospital staff were frustrated because they were unable to cope with the sudden, large numbers of refugees arriving at the hospital.

So torturous are the conditions confronting the more than 500 asylum seekers still on Manus—some for nearly seven years—that many have inflicted bodily injury to themselves. Photos published on Aziz Adam’s Twitter account show a man being led off to a medical van with deep bloody lacerations along his torso, abdomen and arms.

Manus Island chief of police David Yapu described the situation as “very critical,” saying it is something the Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australian governments needed to look at “because the more they [the refugees] live [here] they develop this stress and depression.”

Yapu later announced the deployment of a heavily-armed paramilitary police unit, notorious for violent abuses, to Manus because of “daily” suicide attempts and rising tensions. “Attempted suicide is usually by weapons, overdose on medicines and hanging,” he said. “It’s become a concern to us.”

The dispatch of the riot squad indicates the readiness of the PNG authorities to once again unleash brutal repression against the refugees. Police violence has been used repeatedly in the past in order to suppress resistance to the barbaric indefinite detention imposed on them by the Australian government, most recently in November 2017. Police killed one detainee and seriously wounded several others in February 2014. What followed was a blatant official whitewash.

Accurate reports on the latest unrest have been limited, due to government censorship. Australia’s Border Force Act, adopted with the backing of the Labor Party, makes it a crime, punishable by two years’ imprisonment, for anyone providing medical or other services to the detainees to publicly disclose any information on the conditions in the detention facilities.

The Liberal-National government has made no direct comment on the situation in the camps, which currently imprison 906 men and women: 547 on Manus and 359 on Nauru.

The medical crisis worsened immediately after the Australian election. Many detainees evidently saw the Coalition’s re-election for another three years as the death knell of any possibility of freedom.

During the election campaign, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to deflect rising working class discontent by blaming immigrants for “congestion” in Australia’s major cities and announcing a cut in the annual immigration quota.

Morrison also stepped up the assault on refugees, vowing to repeal recently passed medical evacuation legislation, which supposedly permits seriously ill detainees requiring medical treatment to be temporarily transferred to Australian hospitals.

Since the legislation came into effect in February, only 40 emergency transfers have taken place. The legislation gives the home affairs minister and the intelligence agencies veto power over the transfers.

Morrison is remembered for his time as immigration minister, during which he launched “Operation Sovereign Borders” in 2013. This military operation set a global precedent for repelling refugees, utilising the Australian navy to seize refugee boats and forcibly turn them around. Because of the operation’s military secrecy, the number of boats that were intercepted or sank at sea is unknown.

In reality, however, the election of a Labor Party-led government would have done nothing to change the horrors faced by the detainees. Labor leader Bill Shorten had vowed that a Labor government would “fully resource” Operation Sovereign Borders.

Moreover, it was the Gillard Labor government, kept in office by the Greens, that re-opened the prison camps in 2012. Prime Minister Julia Gillard specifically declared that refugees would be detained for many years, in order to deter asylum seekers.

During this year’s election campaign, Labor leaders claimed it was never their intention to detain refugees indefinitely. This was a lie. In 2013, Labor’s reinstalled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decreed that no detainee would ever be permitted to enter Australia, effectively consigning them to languish in the camps indefinitely.

In a bid to head off the growing public support for the refugees, Labor had promised to accept an offer by New Zealand to transfer 150 asylum seekers from the camps annually, but this would still have left many more incarcerated for years.

Whether or not Labor would have honoured this arrangement, it would have changed nothing for those who remained imprisoned. In the election, the Socialist Equality Party was the only party unconditionally defending the basic democratic right of all refugees and immigrants to live, study and work in Australia, or anywhere in the world, with full citizenship rights.