Extorting Ukraine is Bad Enough- But Trump Has Done Much Worse

Rebecca Gordon

Recently a friend who follows the news a bit less obsessively than I do said, “I thought George W. Bush was bad, but it seems like Donald Trump is even worse. What do you think?”

“Well,” I replied, “in terms of causing death and destruction, I suspect Bush still has the edge.” In fact, the U.S.-led forever wars begun under the Bush administration have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan (almost half a million by one respected estimate). And those are only directly caused, violent deaths. Several times that many have reportedly died from hunger, illness, and infrastructure collapse.

Millions more have become refugees. The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) says that, worldwide, “[t]here are almost 2.5 million registered refugees from Afghanistan. They comprise the largest protracted refugee population in Asia and the second largest refugee population in the world.” The numbers for Iraq are even higher. UNHCR reports that 3.3 million Iraqis were displaced by the various conflicts that followed the U.S. invasion of 2003 (though most of them remain in-country). Eleven million people, a quarter of the population, still need humanitarian aid.

Things are so bad that, since early October, Iraqis in Baghdad and some other cities have united across sectarian lines to risk death and injury in demonstrations demanding changes from the government. As Reuters explains it:

“After decades of war against its neighbors, U.N. sanctions, two U.S. invasions, foreign occupation, and sectarian civil war, the defeat of the Islamic State insurgency in 2017 means Iraq is now at peace and free to trade for the first extended period since the 1970s. Oil output is at record levels. But infrastructure is decrepit and deteriorating, war-damaged cities have yet to be rebuilt, and armed groups still wield power on the streets.”

So much for Operation Enduring Freedom. In terms of creating sheer human misery, George W. definitely has The Donald beat for now. But despite Trump’s frequently voiced desire “to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he may yet do more harm than his Republican predecessor.

At the very least, he deserves impeachment as much as Bush did.

ITMFA

Back in 2006, when Bush was president, a reader of the gay sex-advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage suggested a campaign to “Impeach the Mother-Fucker Already.” ITMFA was the mock acronym — a play on Savage’s frequent advice to readers in bad relationships that they should DTMFA (the “D” being for “dump”). In response, Savage would have a bunch of ITMFA pins and buttons made and raise about $20,000, which he split between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two Democratic senatorial campaigns.

In 2017, Savage again took stock of the country’s situation. “I didn’t think I’d see a worse president than George W. Bush in my lifetime. But here we are,” he wrote. So he added a new line of T-shirts, hats, and mugs to the ITMFA store, and sales have allowed him to donate more than $250,000 to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Of course, Savage wasn’t the only one already talking about impeachment in 2017. That June, Representatives Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Al Green (D-TX) actually presented an impeachment resolution on the House floor. Its single Article of Impeachment accused President Trump of using the power of his office to “hinder and cause the termination of” the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election by threatening and ultimately firing FBI Director James Comey. It also cited Trump’s efforts to get Comey to “curtail” an investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn who had briefly served as the president’s national security advisor. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about calls he made to Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. soon after Trump’s election victory.

Since October 2017, Representative Green has repeatedly introduced a different set of Articles focused on the president’s obvious and vocal racism:

“In his capacity as President of the United States… Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the society of the United States, brought shame and dishonor to the office of President of the United States, sowing discord among the people of the United States by associating the majesty and dignity of the presidency with causes rooted in white supremacy, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or neo-Nazism on one or more of the following occasions…”

The resolution goes on to list a number of Trump’s racist interventions, including calling some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazi protestors who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (and one of whom murdered counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd), “very fine people”; sharing on social media anti-Muslim videos originally posted by Britain First, a minor English far-right party; attempting to prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. by executive order; attacking professional football players for taking a knee during the national anthem; accusing Puerto Ricans of throwing the U.S. “budget out of whack” in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma; and insulting Representative Frederica Wilson, an African American congresswoman, by calling her “wacky.”

The House has repeatedly rebuffed Green’s efforts, most recently in July 2019, when it voted 332-95 to table the measure, effectively killing it.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

Impeachment Fever Rising

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, even with a 54% majority in the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership has long resisted calls to impeach the president, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a masterful job restraining the party’s left wing. Whatever I thought of her position on impeachment then, I had to admire her consummate parliamentary skills. She happens to represent my congressional district, so I’ve been a Pelosi-watcher ever since I worked for her opponent in her first congressional primary in 1987.

Impeachment advocates had hoped this would change with the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the report did document numerous presidential efforts to obstruct the inquiry, the special counsel declined to speculate on the question of Trump’s guilt, arguing that Justice Department rulings prohibit the indictment of a sitting president. Nevertheless, in his first public statement, Mueller made it clear that his team’s work did not exonerate the president: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

With their eyes on the 2020 election season, however, Democratic Party centrists continued to argue that, because Trump would inevitably survive a trial in the Republican-dominated Senate, impeachment was a futile exercise. Worse, it might well stir up the president’s base and so improve his chances of reelection.

That all changed this August with a whistleblower’s revelation that the president had used a July 25th telephone call to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. At the time, Trump had, without explanation, also frozen $391 million in U.S. military aid previously appropriated by Congress to help Ukraine resist separatists and their Russian allies fighting on its territory.

Under pressure, the White House released a two-page synopsis of the call, thinking that this would calm things down. It had the opposite effect. In that document, which is not quite a transcript and might not be complete, Zelensky, a comedian elected president after playing that very role in a popular TV series, told Trump that Ukraine was “almost ready to buy more Javelins [U.S. anti-tank missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.”

Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…” (The ellipsis, which may or may not represent missing material, marks the end of his sentence.) Trump was referring to a discredited conspiracy theory in which a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server, hacked by Russia during election 2016 according to the Mueller investigation, ended up in Ukraine. (There is, in fact, no missing server, here or in Ukraine.)

Later, Trump asked Zelensky to look into a previous Ukrainian government’s ousting of prosecutor Viktor Shokin for corruption. Specifically, he wanted his counterpart to check out the theory that then-Vice President Joe Biden engineered Shokin’s dismissal to protect his son, Hunter, who then held a seat on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch that was under investigation. It seems clear that Shokin really was corrupt and that Joe Biden’s role in his ouster was unremarkable. (It seems equally clear, as Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox, that the younger Biden “had no apparent qualifications for the job,” which paid up to $50,000 a month, “except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.”)

Finally, Donald Trump had done something bad enough — strong-arming a foreign leader into digging up dirt on a likely Democratic Party presidential candidate — to convince the House leadership to initiate impeachment proceedings. Trump had already openly called on Russia to release 33,000 supposedly missing Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 election. He had now invited a second country to interfere in U.S. elections and then tripled down by publicly asking China to do the same. All of this should be enough to demonstrate that the president has violated his oath of office on multiple occasions. ITMFA.

High(er) Crimes and Misdemeanors

Extorting political favors is bad enough, but Donald J. Trump has done so much worse, even if his true highest crimes and misdemeanors aren’t ever likely to make it into the Articles of Impeachment finally sent to the Senate. These, to my mind, would include:

* Violating U.S. responsibilities toward refugees under international humanitarian law as defined in treaties and conventions this country long ago signed and ratified: In his behavior towards asylum-seekers and other migrants at our southern border, Trump, who began his 2015 election campaign by denouncing Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” has as president turned his back on decades of international consensus on the rights of refugees. He, of course, oversaw an administration that instituted a cruel policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants, causing thousands of children to be cut off from their parents. He also allowed such children to be held for weeks in stinking, filthy cages near the U.S. border.

More recently, he has pursued “safe third country” deals with the very nations — El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — that people are fleeing, in part, because of drug cartel violence and their governments’ inability, or unwillingness, to stop it. How can Mexico, for example, be a “safe” alternative for Salvadorans fleeing gang violence when its own citizens are seeking asylum in the United States for similar reasons?

He has also slashed to 18,000 the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States annually. (One hundred and ten thousand were accepted in Barack Obama’s final year as president.) He has, in other words, caused the country to turn its back on its international responsibilities, as well as on millions of human beings in desperate need of help around the world.

* Unlike other wealthy people elected president, Donald Trump refused from the outset to put his assets in a blind trust, arguing that “conflicts of interest laws simply do not apply to the president.” The purpose of such a trust is to prevent officials from knowing whether actions they take will result in personal financial benefit. Instead, Trump retained ownership of all his assets through a revocable trust, run for his sole benefit by his own children, and about which he receives regular updates.

The Constitution’s “emoluments” clause prohibits federal office-holders from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Nevertheless, Trump has continued to benefit personally from money spent by foreign governments at his hotels (and golf clubs), especially his still relatively new Trump International Hotel a few blocks from the White House.

And it’s not only foreign diplomats, domestic lobbyists, and the like who have felt obliged to patronize such Trump properties. On a recent visit to Ireland, Vice President Mike Pence chose to stay at the president’s Doonbeg hotel and golf club, a distant 181 miles from Dublin where his meetings were being held. But there was no presidential pressure involved, as Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short assured reporters: “I don’t think it was a request, like a command. I think that it was a suggestion.” (It’s always possible, of course, that a presidential suggestion carries more weight than your average TripAdvisor review.) The New York Times reports that Pence’s Great America Committee PAC has spent more than $225,000 at the Trump International Hotel, among other Trump properties, since 2017.

Not to be outdone by mere elected officials, the U.S. Air Force has acknowledged that it has lodged airplane crews at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland at least 40 times since 2015, most of them since he was elected, at a cost of more than $184,000.

And undoubtedly such examples just scratch the surface of what a president who happens to be an international real-estate developer can rake in when he puts his mind to it.

* He has caused this country to unilaterally violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement that successfully confined Iran’s nuclear development to serving its domestic energy needs: In May 2018, the president rashly pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration had successfully negotiated. This move has not only induced Iran to begin violating the terms of the agreement, but has destabilized the balance of power in the Middle East, leading to tit-for-tat vessel seizures and further inflaming relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in dangerous ways. In September, for example, the Trump administration blamed Iran for a drone and missile attack that seriously damaged two key installations where much of the Saudi’s oil is refined.

* His dishonest, vicious, and racially charged rhetoric has cheapened political discourse in this country and is helping to hollow out our democracy: Free conversation about political issues, including sharp disagreements, is essential to a democratic society. But such conversations are only possible when the people involved can assume that everyone will make a good faith effort to tell the truth as they see it, to argue honestly, and to respect each other’s right to participate in the conversation. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called this approach “discourse ethics” and it should be at the very heart of democratic life.

Trump, of course, is a specialist in telling lies (more than 12,000 of them during his presidency so far, according to the count of the Washington Post). When the head of a democratic nation routinely treats lying as if it were a kind of truth telling in disguise, it changes the rules of political conversation. How can you argue with someone who “trumps” you not with logic, but with “alternative facts”?

Add to that the president’s constant use of insults, especially racially charged ones, to rule some participants out of the conversation altogether. He typically employs adhesive nicknames to “prove” (without evidence) claims about his opponents’ failings (“Crooked Hillary [Clinton],” “Shifty [Adam] Schiff”). Many of his ugliest insults are directed at women of color, calling African American congresswoman Maxine Waters “crazy” with an “extraordinarily low IQ,” for example. Perhaps most famously, he tweeted that four progressive Democrats (and women of color) known as “The Squad” should “go back” to where they came from:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

Of course, the four (New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib) are, in fact, part of “our government.” They are members of Congress. And by “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” Trump must have meant the United States, because that’s where three of them were born. The fourth, Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Remembering Robert Drinan

Thinking about Trump’s impending impeachment reminds me of one of my heroes, Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and congressman from Massachusetts in the Nixon years. He was the first in Congress to call for the president’s impeachment — not for the cover-up of what the White House called “a third-rate burglary” of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, but for what he considered a much worse crime: the multi-year secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia.

That bombing campaign had begun under President Lyndon Johnson, but it expanded in a staggering way in the Nixon years. According to Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program, the U.S. flew more than 231,000 sorties over 115,000 sites, dumping “half a million or more tons of munitions” on that country. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger memorably relayed President Nixon’s orders on the subject to General Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Drinan asked his colleagues in Congress, “Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?” Their answer was that they could, although Nixon resigned before the House could vote on its articles of impeachment.

I’m reminded of Robert Drinan now, because once again we’re threatening to impeach a president, this time for a third-rate attempt to extort minor political gain from the government of a vulnerable country (without even the decency of a cover-up). But we’re ignoring Trump’s highest crime, worse even than the ones mentioned above.

He has promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, the 2015 international agreement that was meant to begin a serious international response to the climate crisis now heating the planet. Meanwhile, he’s created an administration that is working in every way imaginable to ensure that yet more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. He is, in other words, a threat not just to the American people, or to the rule of law, but to the whole human species.

And for that he richly deserves to be impeached and convicted.

Death, Misery and Bloodshed in Yemen

Kathy Kelly

“Strike with Creativity” proclaims Raytheon.

Writing about his visit to the world’s largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon’s stall: “Strike with Creativity.” Raytheon manufactures Paveway laser-guided bombs, fragments of which have been found in the wreckage of schools, hospitals, and markets across Yemen. How can a weapons manufacturer that causes such death, bloodshed, and misery lay claim to creativity?

Greta Thunberg, sitting alone outside her school as she initiated a movement of climate strikes, could properly invoke the words “Strike with Creativity.” She inspired Friday classroom walkouts, worldwide, by young people protesting destruction and death caused by climate catastrophe. Her admirable goal is to save the planet by promoting such strikes.

Coming from Raytheon, the words “Strike with Creativity” sound chilling, -grotesque.

Consider the Raytheon weapons now demolishing Yemen. Fragments of Raytheon and other U.S. manufactured weapons dot blast sites where Yemeni survivors struggle to collect body parts and scattered bits of clothing, which are needed to compile lists of the dead.

In September, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) hit a detention center in the Dhamar governorate, in the northern highlands of Yemen with seven airstrikes that killed at least 100 people and “pulverized” the area, according to Bethan McKernan, reporting for The Guardian. “It took five days to remove all the bodies impaled on metalwork ripped from the walls in the blasts,” she wrote.

After the attack, McKernan interviewed Adel, a 22-year-old security guard  employed at the site. His brother, Ahmed, also a guard, was among those killed. Adel pointed to a blanket, visible on the second floor of a building where the guards had slept. “You can see Ahmed’s blue blanket up there,” said Adel. “There were 200 people here but now it’s just ghosts.”

Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Saudi-led coalition bombarding and blockading Yemen have killed tens of thousands, wrecking the country’s already enfeebled infrastructure and bringing Yemen to the brink of a famine that may kill millions. President Trump signaled additional support for Saudi Arabia on October 11 when the U.S. military announced it would send thousands more troops to the kingdom, bringing the number of U.S. troops there to 14,000.

Just as Greta Thunberg insists adults must become intensely aware of details and possible solutions regarding the climate catastrophe, people in the U.S. should learn about ways to end economic as well as military war waged against Yemen. For us to understand why Yemenis would link together in the loose coalition of fighters called Huthis requires deepening awareness of how financial institutions, in attempting to gain control of valuable resources, have pushed farmers and villagers across Yemen into debt and desperation. Isa Blumi writes about this sordid history in his 2018 book, Destroying Yemen, What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World.

Blumi details how Yemen’s society, largely independent and agrarian, became a guinea pig for International Monetary Fund (IMF) “development projects” which, based on strikingly colonialist theories of  modernization, crushed grassroots institutions and amounted to “cost-effective ways of prying Yemen’s wealth out of its peoples’ hands.”

Local Development Associations, for example, were formed during the 1970s to help people hang on to their land, cooperatively determine what crops they would grow and decide how they would use the profits. But U.S. Agency for International Development “experts” pressured these groups to instead produce “cash crops strictly meant for export.”

“After all,” Blumi writes, “with the right kind of cash crop and the use of American labor-saving technology, pesticides and fertilizers included, Yemen’s villagers were no longer needed in the fields. Alternatively, they could work in cities in sweatshops producing clothes for a global market or the soon booming oil and gas projects.”

Blumi’s book documents the fiercely stubborn creativity with which, decade by decade, Yemenis kept surprising the West, exploring and pursuing countermeasures to resist its exploitative control, and risking the West’s destructive anger.

Yemenis resisted U.N. and IMF prescriptions of global integration and debt peonage. When farmers desperate for cash went to work in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, “they consistently sent remittances home to families that saved the cash and invested in local projects, using local bank transfers.” Imams and village leaders encouraged people to resist imperialist “modernization” projects, knowing that the West’s preferred “modern” role for them was as wage slaves with no hope of developing a better future.

The “Huthi” movement began when Husayn al-Huthi, an opponent of Yemen’s dictatorial (and Western-allied) Saleh regime, tried to defend the water and land rights of locals in the Sa’adah province in northwestern Yemen. Sharing what was then a porous and informal border with the KSA, they often found themselves in disputes with Saudi border patrols. They also resisted ‘structural adjustment’ demands by the IMF to privatize some of Yemen’s best farming and grazing land. When the dictator Saleh made criminal concessions to the KSA, al-Huthi and his followers persisted with protests. Each new confrontation won over thousands of people, eventually spreading beyond Sa’adah.

Blumi cites numerous instances in which Yemen’s economic assets were pillaged, with Saleh’s approval, by “well-heeled global financial interests” who now designate Saleh’s successor Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi as Yemen’s “internationally recognized government.” Hadi governs from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, due to a stunning lack of Yemeni support.

Strike with_Creativity cartoon – Sean Reynolds

In 2008, an extremely wealthy member of the bin Laden family aimed to build a bridge across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen to Djibouti. The project could generate hundreds of billions for investors, and quicken the process of exploitative modernization; but it would also require building railways and roads where there are only villages now. People living along the coastline of the Red Sea would be in the way.

Since 2015, fighting has been concentrated in this area, called the Tihama. Control of the coastline would also allow financial takeover of potentially profitable Yemeni fisheries. Blumi says billions of dollars of annual income are at stake, noting with irony that a war causing starvation is being waged, in part, to gain control over food assets.

A recent United Nations report says that Yemen is now “on course to become the world’s poorest country” with 79 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 65 percent classified as “extremely poor.” The Yemen Data Project estimated 600 civilian structures have been destroyed, monthly, in Yemen, mostly by airstrikes.

“Staple food items are now on average 150 per cent higher than before the crisis escalated,” says a 2019 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Teachers, health workers and civil servants in the northern parts of the country haven’t been paid in years,” according to the same report.

Mainstream media reports could convince concerned onlookers that Yemenis have been particularly vulnerable to violence and war because they are socially and economically backward, having failed to modernize. Blumi insists we recognize the guilt of financial elites from multiple countries within and beyond the Gulf states as well as institutions within the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. It’s wrong to blame “eighty percent of a country’s population currently being starved to death”

Here in the United States, news commentators discussing the Trump impeachment story liken the breaking developments to “bombshell after bombshell.” In Yemen, real and horribly modern bombshells, made in the United States, kill and maim Yemeni civilians, including children, every day.

Greta Thunberg continues calling us to join her on an unfamiliar, unprecedented, and arduous path to change course as our world careens toward terrifying devastation. We’re offered a chance to resist destructive, albeit “modern” means of exploiting the planet’s resources. A true strike for creativity, necessarily challenging militarism and greed, will help prevent the hellish process of destroying Yemen.

New Zealand housing crisis worsens under Labour government

John Braddock

Nearly two years into its term in office, and ten months after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that 2019 would be her Labour Party-led government’s “year of delivery,” one of New Zealand’s major social issues—housing—is embroiled in an escalating crisis.

New Zealand and Canada are two countries with the most unsustainable housing markets in the world, according to Bloomberg. They have the highest cost of housing compared with wages, beating Australia, the UK, Norway and Sweden (which are all vulnerable), and the highest house price to rent ratio. Housing costs have soared due to rampant speculation, overwhelmingly by wealthy NZ-based investors.

The biggest city, Auckland, population 1.65 million, is the focus of the housing bubble, with average prices over $900,000. Between 2013 and 2018 Auckland’s population expanded by 11 percent, while the number of private dwellings increased just 6.5 percent. In 2017, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment put Auckland’s housing shortfall at 44,738 homes.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of investment properties sit empty, with their value steadily increasing. Census figures show last year there were 33,360 unoccupied houses in Auckland alone, an increase of 6,000 (18 percent) compared with 2013.

Due largely to the construction of apartment blocks, rental supply is far outstripping new owner-occupier dwellings. Nevertheless, there is still a desperate shortage of rental properties in the major cities.

The number of rentals increased 25 percent over the past decade while home ownership went up just 5 percent. Every year since 2013 the gap has grown, with 9,725 completed homes in 2017 compared to an estimated increase in demand of 18,007.

In a country where home ownership has, since the 1930s depression, been considered essential to maintaining decent living standards, 35 percent of households now live in rented accommodation. The number of those renting under 65-years-old doubled between 2013 and 2018. Statistics NZ data indicates that owner-occupiers now come almost exclusively from the upper salary bands, above $84,500 per annum.

In the capital, Wellington, the demand for rental properties has this year pushed median weekly rents up by $60 to $540 per week. The increase equates to $3,120 over 12 months. The inner city, where students are largely concentrated, has the highest median weekly rent at $575, up 15 percent on last year.

Working-class areas are equally squeezed. The Dominion Post reported in July that a two-bedroom property in Lower Hutt, “priced in the low $400s,” was one of the Wellington region’s most in-demand rental listings: it attracted 76 enquiries in its first two days.

Nationwide, median weekly rents hit $500 in April for the first time, a 5.3 percent increase over the previous year. Last month, the number of people waiting for public housing grew to more than 13,000, a record number, despite a $50 million increase in government emergency accommodation funding.

This increase in funding has proven totally inadequate to addressing the worsening crisis. At least 40,000 people, one in 100, are homeless, but the May budget only provided funding for just over 1,000 new emergency housing places. While the state’s Housing NZ remains the largest residential landlord, with 60,000 properties, successive governments have not only failed to maintain an adequate supply of decent social housing, much of it has been sold off.

The New Zealand Herald reported last month that many Auckland landlords are charging the government exorbitant amounts of money, often $300 a night, to temporarily accommodate homeless people. Beneficiary advocates told Radio NZ that landlords are “profiting” off the homeless while offering none of the support that proper public housing needs. One owner was charging $2,100 per week for a three-bedroom suburban house in South Auckland.

Poland: Law and Justice Party wins second term in office, loses majority in the Senate

Clara Weiss

The far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) won 43.49 percent in Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Poland, up from the 37.6 percent it received in the previous parliamentary elections in 2015.

The Civic Coalition (KO), comprised of, among others, the liberal Civic Platform (PO), the Polish Greens, and the Nowoczesna (“Modern”) party, received only 27.40 percent. The Lewica coalition, which includes pseudo-left parties like Razem (Together) and Wiosna (Spring) as well as the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), had hoped to achieve between 20 and 27 percent, but received only 12.56 percent of the votes. Voter turnout stood at 61.7 percent.

PiS retained its majority in the Sejm (lower house of parliament), but lost its majority in the Senate where it will now hold 48 seats. The opposition parties from KO and the Lewica and the PSL will together also hold 48 seats.

While PiS polled over 60 percent in its traditional bastions in the predominantly rural East and southeast of the country, the liberal opposition failed to win a majority in all but one region.

Nevertheless, the electoral victory for PiS was narrower than the ruling party had expected. PiS headquarters, according to a report by Politico, were “far from euphoric.” In an evident sign of nervousness within the party, its head Jarosław Kaczyński stated, “We received a lot, but we deserve more.”

The election marks a deepening of the years-long political crisis in Poland. Since PiS became the ruling party in 2015, when it won an overwhelming majority in both houses of parliament, it has implemented far-reaching methods aimed at creating an authoritarian regime by criminalizing speech and historical research on Polish anti-Semitism, whipping up xenophobic and nationalist sentiments, and transforming Poland into a leading bulwark of US imperialism’s war preparations against Russia, spending billions on military armament and the creation of paramilitary structures.

PiS has thus stood at the forefront of the international turn of the bourgeoisie to the right and the promotion of far-right forces and militarism. This has created conditions in which the largest march of fascists in Europe since the end of World War II took place in the Polish capital Warsaw in 2017. Last year, Polish president Andrzej Duda and prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki demonstratively joined a demonstration of a quarter million people dominated by the far-right on the occasion of Poland’s “Independence Day.”

The fact that PiS was nevertheless reelected is largely due to the incapacity and, indeed, unwillingness of the official opposition to capitalize on the social and political opposition to PiS in the working class. For years, the official opposition parties have focused their criticism of PiS on appeals to the EU and especially German imperialism. They are speaking for a section of the bourgeoisie and upper middle class that is as fervently pro-war and anti-Russian as PiS but fear that the latter’s almost exclusive reliance on the US as an ally endangers Poland’s geopolitical and economic interests.

Their biggest fear, however, is that a genuinely left-wing opposition to the PiS government will emerge from within the working class. In the spring, 300,000 Polish teachers went on a national general strike, one of the largest in Poland since 1989, when the Polish People’s Republic was destroyed by the Stalinist bureaucracy and capitalism was restored. The strike shook the entire political establishment in Poland and provided an inkling of the enormous class and political tensions that have been building up in the country.

Teachers were seething with anger not only over the poverty wages they receive, but also about the education reform by PiS that has been aimed at transforming schools into a vehicles for nationalist and historically revisionist propaganda.

However, the PO-aligned teachers’ unions worked systematically to sabotage the teachers’ strike. Blacking out all political issues from the strike, they eventually sold it out, leaving teachers without virtually any gains after an embittered 17-day struggle.

The unions also opposed any renewed strike before the elections, even though a vast majority of the teachers have indicated that they were ready to go on strike again. The unions eventually called for a national work-to-rule protest which began on Tuesday in a effort to dissipate teachers’ anger.

According to recent statistics, Polish teachers make only 59 percent of the average pay of teachers in the European Union.

The liberal opposition has consciously decided to focus exclusively on mobilizing its traditional base in sections of the upper-middle class, and the EU-oriented educated intelligentsia. Throughout the campaign, the opposition refused to make any appeals to social discontent, and made barely a mention of the dictatorial measures, historical revisionism and build-up of fascist forces openly pursued by PiS.

Under these conditions, PiS, has been able to exploit the opposition’s collaboration in stifling workers’ anger and the fact that the liberal parties are correctly associated with years of devastating austerity and privatization programs.

Germany: Thousands of job cuts at Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank

Gustav Kemper

After Chief Executive Martin Zielke announced the elimination of 4,300 jobs at Commerzbank in September, Deutsche Bank folowed suit by publicly revealing that 9,000 jobs will be cut at its operations in Germany alone. This amounts to half of the 18,000 global job cuts announced by one of the world’s largest banks in July, a much larger number than had been expected.

Following the failure of merger talks between Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank in April, both banks have pursued savage restructuring plans at the expense of their workforces so as to boost payouts to shareholders and prepare for future takeover battles. Justifying his decision to cut jobs, Zielke declared bluntly that Commerzbank wants “to be an active player in the game of merger poker.”

As in other economic sectors, the banking industry is undergoing a “showdown for global leadership,” as business daily Handelsblatt put it with reference to the German industrial giant Siemens.

Siemens chief executive Joe Kaeser has spoken of a “merger endgame.” A similar agenda is being pursued by the steel producer ThyssenKrupp. The formation of global monopolies is also under way in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors, as shown by the takeover of America’s Monsanto by Germany’s Bayer AG.

Commerzbank’s restructuring programme will involve the closure of 200 of its 1,000 banks. Although 2,000 additional jobs are to be created in other areas, such as operations, IT, and regulatory affairs, the skills required for these jobs are not comparable with those of workers in the banks.

The cost of the job cuts and bank shutdowns has been calculated at €850 million. An additional €650 million is to be invested in digitalising the bank’s operations. The bank intends to raise the costs for these investments by selling its 70 percent share of Poland’s mBank.

The subsidiary Comdirect, 82 percent of which is owned by Commerzbank, will be taken over in full so as to integrate the strong digital operations used there.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007, the value of Commerzbank shares has collapsed from over €200 to less than €5, a drop of around 97 percent. Germany’s federal government rescued the bank during the crisis with the injection of €15 billion. After the bank paid back the fixed investments in 2011 and 2013, the government retained a 15 percent share in the bank. This was valued at the time at €5.1 billion, but with the current share price it amounts to around €1 billion. The rescuing of the bank was thus paid for through billions in taxpayers’ money and thousands of job cuts.

The declining number of bank branches in Germany demonstrates this trend. According to Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, the total number of bank branches in Germany dropped from 40,000 in 2007 to just under 28,000 in 2018.

Opinion polls indicate Canada’s elections to end in hung parliament

Keith Jones

With the campaign for Canada’s Monday, October 21 federal election in its final days, opinion polls strongly suggest that no party will win a parliamentary majority.

The governing Liberals and the Conservatives are neck and neck, each supported by slightly less than a third of the electorate. During the course of the campaign, the ruling class’s traditional parties of national government have bled support to the NDP, the social-democratic party supported by a wing of the trade union bureaucracy, and to the

The corporate media concedes there is little popular enthusiasm for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals or for the Conservatives and their prospective prime minister, Andrew Scheer. Much of the electorate, pollsters claim, will cast their vote more to oppose a party than out of support for, and confidence, in their actual ballot choice.

The election campaign has been distinguished above all by its parochial and essentially fraudulent character, with the official policy debate revolving round the parties’ rival plans for tax cuts and, in the case of some, modest social spending increases.

Excluded from the official campaign has been any substantive discussion, or for the most part even mention, of the multiple, interconnected crises roiling world capitalism—from trade war and the growing likelihood of a 2008-style financial implosion, to the surge in great-power tensions, and the unprecedented political crisis embroiling the United States, far and away Canada’s most important economic and strategic partner.

In a silence that bespeaks consent, none of the parties has made an issue of the Trudeau government’s plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on buying new fleets of battleships and warplanes, and to hike military spending by more than 70 percent by 2026. Similarly, discussion of Canada’s ever deepening integration into Washington’s military-strategic offensives against China and Russia, and in the oil-rich Middle East—any of which could ignite a global conflagration—has effectively been censored by all-party agreement.

The Liberals, NDP, Greens, and Bloc all claim urgent action is needed to deal with climate change. But their proposals, based as they are on the inviolability of production for profit and the capitalist nation-state system, are at best pathetically inadequate and pie in the sky.

With unions’ backing, NDP prepares to ally with big business Liberals

For the past four years, the NDP was hard put to distinguish itself from the big business Liberals, even as the Trudeau government pursued rearmament, cut corporate taxes, further expanded the powers of the national security apparatus, and criminalized or threatened to criminalize job action by postal and other workers. When the election campaign began, the NDP with barely 10 percent support in the poll was facing an electoral debacle. But after a campaign in which the social democrats made a very calibrated and calculated appeal to popular anger over social inequality, precarious unemployment, student debt, an increasingly privatized health care system and an economy “rigged” against the “people,” their support has apparently rebounded.

Buoyed by the prospect of the NDP holding the “balance of power” in a minority parliament, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced late last week his party’s six “urgent priorities” for post-election negotiations with Trudeau and his Liberals. Not only are these priorities, which include such minimalist measures as a reduction in cellphone bills, vaguely worded and things that the Liberals have for the most indicated they favour. Singh stressed that the NDP would only insist on a discussion on how to advance them.

Then on Sunday, Singh proclaimed that in the name of preventing the Conservatives from returning to power, the social democrats would be ready to consider serving in a Liberal-led coalition government. In 2008, the NDP, with the full support of the trade unions, responded to the eruption of the greatest crisis of world capitalism since the Great Depression by entering into an abortive agreement with the Liberals to replace Stephen Harper’s Conservatives with a coalition government committed to $50 billion in corporate tax cuts, “fiscal responsibility,” and waging war in Afghanistan through 2011.

Underscoring the NDP’s continuing full-throated support for Canada’s imperialist alliances, the NDP issued a statement Monday demanding Ottawa work “with our allies in the EU and NATO”—that is those principally responsible for the endless wars ravaging the Middle East—to end Turkey’s reactionary invasion of northern Syria, targeting the country’s Kurdish minority.

Prime Minister Trudeau has responded to the tightening of the election race by amplifying his claims that voting Liberal is the only way to deliver a “progressive” government that will “stand up” to US President Donald Trump, and prevent the coming to power of a Conservative government, akin to that of Ontario’s hated right-wing populist premier Doug Ford, that will dramatically slash social spending.

This is all demagogy and lies.

It was the Chretien-Martin Liberal government, elected on the basis of denunciations of the Conservatives’ “fixation” with the deficit that implemented the greatest social spending cuts and the biggest tax cuts for big business and the rich in Canadian history.

And while Trudeau, following the advice of the IMF, somewhat eased austerity at the federal level on coming to power in 2015, his closest provincial allies, the Philippe Couillard-led Quebec Liberal government and Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario Liberal government, implemented sweeping social spending cuts.

Mass strikes and protests force Ecuador’s president to cancel austerity decree

Andrea Lobo

A mass protest movement of 12 days—involving mass marches by workers, indigenous peasants and students, three days of national strike, widespread roadblocks and the occupation of key oilfields—forced the US-backed administration of Lenín Moreno late Sunday to annul the elimination of fuel subsidies dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The decision does not mean IMF reforms are permanently off the table, only that the Ecuadorian ruling class, in league with US and European imperialism, is buying time to formulate a new strategy to enforce devastating austerity.

After Moreno’s announcement from the coastal city of Guayaquil where his government had retreated, the streets of the capital Quito turned from a battlefield into a mass celebration, with chants, music, caravans and fireworks celebrating the rescission of the measures after heavy sacrifices on the part of workers and peasants. In total, the repression left 8 people dead, 1,340 injured and 1,192 arrested, according to Ecuador’s Ombudsman Office.

On Tuesday, fuel prices, which had risen dramatically, were sliding back down. The agency in charge of transportation fees said it would meet to withdraw the recent hikes. Schools and the national congress re-opened after nearly two weeks closed, while the government said that all state-owned oilfields would resume operations this week.

Moreno’s new decree, however, makes clear that the ruling class is only seeking a better footing to eliminate the subsidies, and that those organizations negotiating the retreat will play a key role in the next offensive, while they ram through a new labor reform and other social cuts also announced on October 2. These forces are exposed as loyal servants of the interests of foreign capital and the local financial oligarchy.

The workers and the toiling masses in Ecuador and internationally must use the breathing space to extract the sober lessons of this experience. This month’s events show that any struggle against social inequality and dictatorship must be based on the fight against imperialism and for the overthrow of the entire system of capitalist exploitation on an international scale. The genuine spontaneous anger of workers, peasants and youth may be sufficient to force the ruling class into a temporary retreat, but to transform society on the basis of socialist egalitarianism, a revolutionary Trotskyist leadership is necessary.

The repeal of “decree 883” eliminating fuel subsidies resulted after a round of talks between Moreno, his cabinet, and the indigenous leadership headed by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), which was leading the protests in partnership with the trade unions and several opposition parties.

The breaking point for the government was the warning by these organizations that they were unable to keep a lid on social anger.

Initially, this fear led the trade unions to call off the national strike on October 4. The transportation union leader, Abel Gómez, declared: “Analyzing the situation in the country, the chaotic situation that the transportation system is in, and having expressed our disagreement with our government…the transportation workers responsibly announce to the Ecuadorian people the end of our strike.”

Then, during the first televised hour of the talks Sunday—the UN mediators asked the media to step out during the final three hours—the president of CONAIE, Jaime Vargas, said, visibly shaken, “I’m being pressured by the rank-and-file. ‘How much is the government paying you?’ they ask.”

Leonidas Iza, the head of the Cotopaxi indigenous movement, was even more explicit: “We are not seeing things objectively. Even we were surprised by the amount of people. I don’t think [ex-president Rafael] Correa could mobilize that. … Nobody wants war, but we need to resolve the issues now and that depends on who is ruling Ecuador.”

The repeal demonstrates that the ruling class’s greatest fear is that workers and peasants will break free from the organizations that have for decades channeled opposition behind one or another faction of the bourgeoisie.

US Supreme Court term begins with new threats to democratic rights

Ed Hightower

Last Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States began its 2019-2020 term. The court is slated to hear cases involving a number of democratic and civil rights issues, including the separation of church and state, the right to abortion, equal employment for homosexual and transgender persons, the rights of immigrants and those defending them from state repression, and the rights of criminal defendants.

The term begins under a newly consolidated 5-4 far-right majority, including Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. They join Clarence Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee and opponent of democratic rights, and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, both committed reactionaries appointed by George W. Bush.

On October 7, the court heard arguments in two major cases concerning the rights of criminal defendants. Of particular significance is Kahler v. Kansas, which considers whether the US Constitution allows states to abolish the insanity defense. The insanity defense, which asserts that the defendant lacked the ability to know right from wrong, dates back hundreds of years, although defense attorneys rarely employ it and courts even more rarely permit it.

The oral arguments revealed the eagerness of Justice Gorsuch to eliminate this already narrow and seldom used legal doctrine. A zealous supporter of capital punishment, Gorsuch wrote the opinion in Bucklew v. Precythe in April of this year, which treated legal efforts to oppose the death penalty with unprecedented contempt, even in cases where the mode of execution clearly amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned under the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.

Also on October 7, the court heard arguments in Ramos v. Louisiana concerning the constitutional requirement that a jury verdict in state court for conviction of a criminal offense be unanimous. The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to a trial by an impartial jury. Although it does not explicitly call for a unanimous verdict, that concept was so prevalent at the time of ratification that it did not merit a specific mention, and all federal criminal cases afford the defendant the right of a unanimous jury.

This provision is a critical component of the presumption of innocence and the principle that the burden of proof rests with the prosecution. The unanimity requirement enjoins the jury to adopt the appropriate seriousness and intensity in deliberations about a defendant’s freedom, or even life. It thus upholds the high burden of proof for criminal cases, that of guilt beyond a “reasonable doubt.”

Nonetheless, most justices at the oral arguments appeared disinclined to rule that the Sixth Amendment requirement had been “incorporated” to apply to state criminal proceedings.

Three cases this term threaten workplace discrimination protections for homosexuals and transgender persons. All three center on the interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws employment discrimination on the basis of sex. The question before the court is: Does discrimination against homosexuals (in the cases Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda and Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia ) or transgender persons (as in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) consist of discrimination on the basis of “sex?”

During oral arguments on October 8, the right-wing bloc appeared ready to hand another victory to the advocates of bigotry. (In the previous term, the 7-2 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop supported a confectioner’s “free speech right” to not make a wedding cake for a gay couple. The ostensibly liberal justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer joined the right-wing bloc in that opinion).

Chief Justice Roberts posed the question to the employees’ attorney: “What about the response that you do not need to know the sex of the people involved; you can just have a policy against same sex [relationships]? So you don’t care whether the participants [in same-sex relationships] are women or men.”

A series of Gallup polls conducted in May 2019 show overwhelming public support for the rights of homosexuals and transgender persons. Large percentages answered affirmatively that gays would be suitable for a series of professions—salesperson (95 percent), soldier (83 percent), doctor (91 percent), clergyman (72 percent), elementary school teacher (81 percent), high school teacher (83 percent) and member of the president’s cabinet (88 percent)—indicating a narrow base of support for discriminatory employment policies.

Asked whether new laws are needed to protect these groups from discrimination, 53 percent said “yes.” Seventy-five percent of respondents said gays and lesbians should be able to adopt children. Likewise, 71 percent said transgender men and women should be able to openly serve in the military.

Several cases to be heard this term have serious implications for the rights of immigrants.

In Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the Supreme Court will decide the fate of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave limited legal protections to some 800,000 young people who immigrated to the United States as undocumented children. President Trump nixed the program in September 2017 as part of his administration’s xenophobic agenda. There is a high probability that the court will find Trump’s action a permissible exercise of his executive powers over administrative agencies, in this case, the Department of Homeland Security .

Another important immigration case involves the federal prosecution of immigration attorney Evelyn Sineneng-Smith because she allegedly “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States” illegally, and profits from it.

French President Macron launches Islamophobic campaign after Paris police office attack

Anthony Torres

French President Emmanuel Macron’s October 7 speech at the Paris police headquarters, where an intelligence employee killed five people in a knife attack on October 3, marks a further milestone in his turn towards a neo-fascist policy. While covering over the deeper underlying causes of the attack, Macron issued a violent call to “eradicate” Islamism.

The alleged attacker, Mickaël Harpon, who was 45 and of Martiniquais origin, had worked as an IT employee of the Paris police for almost 20 years. At the time of the attack, he was employed by the intelligence division of the Paris police. Between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. on October 3, Harpon, who had low-level deafness, reportedly stabbed multiple police officers inside the building, before descending into the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, where he was shot and killed by police.

According to investigations since the attack, Harpon reportedly adhered to a “radical vision of Islam” for approximately 10 years. Police now claim he became more radicalized over the past five years. He had reportedly limited his contact with women, defended the 2015 Islamic State terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo among his colleagues, and sent 33 text messages on religious issues on the day of the attack to his wife, who is now at the center of police investigations.

In his speech last Tuesday, Macron was silent about France’s and NATO’s promotion of Islamist terror networks to wage war in Syria, along with the additional workload on police as a result of the government’s violent police repression of anti-inequality protests. One year after his salute to Marshall Pétain as a “great soldier,” Macron called for the formation of a police state to wage war against Islamists.

“Your colleagues have fallen victim to a rogue and deadly Islam that it is our responsibility to eradicate,” Macron said. “The administration alone and all the services of the State cannot overcome the Islamist hydra … A society of vigilance must be built.”

Macron said that to prevent such attacks required the fomenting of an atmosphere of anti-Islamic denunciations. The population must “know how to identify at school, at work, in places of worship, close to home, looseness, deviations, those small gestures that signal a distance from the laws and values of the Republic,” he said.

Thus, a person of Muslim faith practicing Ramadan or praying several times a day may be denounced as “far from the laws and values of the Republic.” They could be opened to prosecution, or even dismissed if they are employed by the national public transportation networks, which can dismiss their staff on the basis of investigations requested by the intelligence agencies into potential “radicalisation.”

Projecting an indefinite period for this campaign, Macron said that “defeating radical Islamism will take time. This is the challenge of a generation. It is a long-term task that is always too slow, but it is also a necessary task from which we will not give up anything. Quite the contrary.”

Macron’s lies make clear how political lies about imperialist wars abroad are used to reinforce the drive towards a police state at home. The emergence of the “Islamist hydra” is above all the product of imperialism, not of Islam or Muslims.

Halt the jobs massacre in the UK auto industry: For a joint struggle at Honda, Nissan, Ford and Vauxhall

Richard Tyler

Last Monday saw the announcement that the Honda Logistics facility in Swindon would close in 2021, destroying the jobs of its 1,200-strong workforce.

On Thursday, Gianluca de Ficchy, chairman of Nissan Europe said a no-deal Brexit—the UK leaving the European Union’s Single Market and Customs Union without an agreement—would place “the entire business model for Nissan Europe … in jeopardy,” threatening the jobs of 7,000 at its Sunderland plant.

In April this year, Honda announced the closure of its main production plant in Swindon, also set for 2021, costing 3,500 jobs. Then in June, Ford said it was shutting its Bridgend engine plant in autumn 2020 with the loss of 1,700 jobs. In July, Vauxhall threatened to move production out of its Ellesmere Port plant if Brexit made it unprofitable, destroying 1,000 jobs.

The livelihoods of an estimated 12,000 others currently employed in the Honda supply chain locally in Swindon and further afield are at risk. According to one analyst, the closure of the Honda plant would remove £2.4 billion from the economy in the South West, devastating many local businesses and services dependent on the wages of those working in the factory—70 percent of whom live in Swindon. They estimate that total job losses could easily reach 17,000, approximately 8 percent of the town’s population.

According to one estimate, the Nissan plant in Sunderland supports another 30,000 jobs in Britain.

At a stroke, some 15,000 jobs of those employed directly in the UK auto industry face the axe. Including those working in the wider supply chain, this potentially threatens the pay packets of some 75,000 people, almost 9 percent of the jobs in the sector.

The misery that would result from such an assault would be profound. The cuts to the welfare system mean those who lose their jobs are forced to exist on a pittance or must accept minimum wage “McJobs.” Those with mortgages face falling behind in their repayments, and the threat of repossession by the banks and mortgage companies.

Confronted by such a jobs massacre, the trade unions’ protracted opposition to mounting any fightback is a bitter indictment of their role as co-managers and company policemen, whose real function is to ensure nothing threatens the smooth running of industry. In Swindon, Unite General Secretary Len McClusky told car workers in March, “We are not going to let this [the plant closure] happen, not without a fight.” But far from organising a fight to defend jobs, Unite officials have negotiated redundancy terms for the closure of the Honda plant, selling off the jobs of future generations.

Speaking outside the Honda Logistics facility, one union official told a WSWS reporter that “the decision has been taken by Honda, what can you do? We’ve negotiated the best redundancy package, and nobody wants a fight.”