Hiroshima 75: The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence!

Francis A. Boyle

The human race stands on the verge of nuclear self-extinction as a species, and with it will die most, if not all, forms of intelligent life on the planet earth. Any attempt to dispel the ideology of nuclearism and its attendant myth propounding the legality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must directly come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8, 1945, and violated several basic provisions of the Regulations annexed to Hague Convention No. 4 Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907), the rules of customary international law set forth in the Draft Hague Rules of Air Warfare (1923), and the United States War Department Field Manual 27-10, Rules of Land Warfare (1940). According to this Field Manual and the Nuremberg Principles, all civilian government officials and military officers who ordered or knowingly participated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been lawfully punished as war criminals. The start of any progress toward resolving humankind’s nuclear predicament must come from the realization that nuclear weapons have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but rather have always constituted illegitimate instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior.

THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

The use of nuclear weapons in combat was, and still is, absolutely prohibited under all circumstances by both conventional and customary international law: e.g., the Nuremberg Principles, the Hague Regulations of 1907, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocol I of 1977, etc. In addition, the use of nuclear weapons would also specifically violate several fundamental resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly that have repeatedly condemned the use of nuclear weapons as an international crime.

Consequently, according to the Nuremberg Judgment, soldiers would be obliged to disobey egregiously illegal orders with respect to launching and waging a nuclear war. Second, all government officials and military officers who might nevertheless launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and Protocol 1, and genocide, among other international crimes. Third, such individuals would not be entitled to the defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. Fourth, such individuals could thus be quite legitimately and most severely punished as war criminals, up to and including the imposition of the death penalty, without limitation of time.

THE THREAT TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter of 1945 prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense as recognized by article 51 thereof. But although the requirement of legitimate self-defense is a necessary precondition for the legality of any threat or use of force, it is certainly not sufficient. For the legality of any threat or use of force must also take into account the customary and conventional international laws of humanitarian armed conflict.

Thereunder, the threat to use nuclear weapons (i.e., nuclear deterrence/terrorism) constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: namely, planning, preparation, solicitation and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, Additional Protocol I of 1977, the Hague Regulations of 1907, and the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, inter alia. These are the so-called inchoate crimes that under the Nuremberg Principles constitute international crimes in their own right.

The conclusion is inexorable that the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, maintenance, storing, stockpiling, sale, and purchase as well as the threat to use nuclear weapons together with all their essential accouterments are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law. Thus, those government decision-makers in all the nuclear weapons states with command responsibility for their nuclear weapons establishments are today subject to personal criminal responsibility under the Nuremberg Principles for this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism that they have daily inflicted upon all states and peoples of the international community.. Here I wish to single out four components of the threat to use nuclear weapons that are especially reprehensible from an international law perspective: counter-ethnic targeting; counter-city targeting; first-strike weapons and contingency plans; and the first-use of nuclear weapons even to repel a conventional attack.

THE CRIMINALITY OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

As can be determined in part from the preceding analysis, today’s nuclear weapons establishments as well as the entire system of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by all the nuclear weapon states are criminal — not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal under well established principles of international law. This simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons can be utilized to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism to which many citizens in the nuclear weapons states have succumbed. It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that concerned citizens can proceed to comprehend the inherent illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of the policies that their governments pursue in their names with respect to the maintenance and further development of nuclear weapons systems.

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE/TERRORISM

Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind. Nonetheless, a small number of governments in the world community continue to maintain nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. This has led some international lawyers to argue quite tautologically and disingenuously that since there exist a few nuclear weapons states in the world community, therefore nuclear weapons must somehow not be criminal because otherwise these few states would not possess nuclear weapons systems. In other words, to use lawyers’ parlance, this minority state practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism practiced by the great powers somehow negates the existence of a world opinio juris (i.e., sense of legal obligation) as to the criminality of nuclear weapons.

There is a very simple response to that specious argument: Since when has a small gang of criminals — in this case, the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is legal or illegal for the rest of the community by means of their own criminal behavior? What right do these nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behavior they have ipso facto made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized nation state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this manner. Moreover, both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it quite clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states likewise has no right to opt out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behavior as the least common denominator of international deportment. Ex iniuria ius non oritur is a peremptory norm of customary international law. Right cannot grow out of injustice!

To the contrary, the entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states under the doctrine known as “nuclear deterrence,” which is really a euphemism for “nuclear terrorism.” This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/terrorism currently practiced by the nuclear weapons states is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. So it is up to the rest of the international community to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy as soon as possible.

THE HUMAN RIGHT TO ANTI-NUCLEAR CIVIL RESISTANCE

In light of the fact that nuclear weapons systems are prohibited, illegal, and criminal under all circumstances and for any reason, every person around the world possesses a basic human right to be free from this criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/terrorism and its concomitant specter of nuclear extinction. Thus, all human beings possess the basic right under international law to engage in non-violent civil resistance activities for the purpose of preventing, impeding, or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes. Every citizen of the world community has both the right and the duty to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons systems by whatever non-violent means are at his or her disposal. Otherwise, the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs, and the planet earth will become a radioactive wasteland. The time for preventive action is now!

COVID-19 takes hold in Papua New Guinea

John Braddock

After appearing to hold the COVID-19 pandemic at bay for the past several months, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) government last week confirmed dozens of new cases in the capital, Port Moresby. PNG’s Pandemic Response Controller David Manning, also announced a new case in Lae, the capital of Morobe province, some 300kms from Port Moresby.

Health worker performs CPR during simulation (Photo: UN Papua New Guinea)

As of August 3, the total number of cases was 110, including three victims hospitalised in critical condition and two deaths. In mid-July, the country had recorded just 11 cases of COVID-19, before then surging to over 30 within a week. Now, 90 percent of cases have been recorded in the past 14 days.

Government modelling suggests more than 5,000 people may have the virus. Only around 10,000 have been tested in a population of nine million and Manning declared the virus is now “widespread” in the capital. His deputy, Acting Health Secretary Dr Paison Dakulala admitted last Thursday that authorities were playing “catch-up” with contact tracing.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has just stepped up its response, deploying more emergency medical staff to strengthen testing capacity and medical supply delivery. Following a request from PNG, Australia dispatched a token eight-member crisis response team.

Many of the recent cases are health workers at the Port Moresby General Hospital, where all non-essential services were suspended. Hospital workers had repeatedly raised concerns about their own safety, the lack of adequate personal protective equipment and staff shortages sparked by the need to quarantine some health workers. The hospital’s CEO Paki Molumi said patient care had been affected by the shortages.

Dakulala also warned that the main isolation facility in the capital, the Rita Flynn Centre, can only hold up to 72 patients and is expected to reach capacity. COVID-19 positive patients may be forced to isolate at home.

Authorities had earlier announced a cluster outbreak at the Central Public Health Laboratory, situated on the hospital grounds, where coronavirus testing is conducted. This followed a previous outbreak at Port Moresby’s central military barracks.

With community transmission rapidly taking hold, Prime Minister James Marape announced a two-week lockdown of Port Moresby on July 27, including a curfew under the Pandemic Act. Only essential businesses can open and the curfew runs between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Schools are closed for 14 days, and no motor vehicles are allowed to operate except taxi services. There is also a ban on all domestic flights from Port Moresby for 14 days.

A PNG academic told Radio New Zealand that without the enforcement of strict health measures it will be “difficult” to contain COVID-19. Henry Ivarature from the Australian National University said the PNG government had “erred” as the recent surge in cases developed. He said it had invested more in a “security approach” than one based on public health policy, and “I think that’s coming back to hurt the government now.” Manning, who leads the pandemic response unit is, significantly, also the Police Commissioner.

COVID-19 is set to overwhelm the country’s fragile and ill-equipped healthcare system. Port Moresby governor Powes Parkop told Australia’s ABC that the capital faced “a situation that we dreaded,” declaring: “We simply don’t have the capacity, we don’t have enough space in isolation facilities, in the hospital, we don’t have enough medical officers and we don’t have enough equipment.”

The Guardian reported in April that the looming arrival of coronavirus “has terrified the public.” The health system, which has just 500 doctors and 5,000 hospital beds, cannot deal with even routine illnesses. The General Hospital has appealed for donations of face masks, gloves, protective face shields, and hand sanitiser, as well as pillowcases, blankets, mattresses and laundry detergent.

The prospect of the virus spreading in the former Australian colony threatens a catastrophic social crisis. According to Oxfam, 37 percent of the population lives on less than $US1.25 a day. In Port Moresby tens of thousands live in crowded, unofficial settlements. Malaria, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever, drug-resistant tuberculosis and polio are all rife. More than 60 percent of the population has no access to safe drinking water.

Explosive social struggles will undoubtedly erupt. Repeated strikes by doctors and nurses over the decrepit conditions in the health system have occurred since 2016. Following a sit-in on March 26 by nearly 600 Port Moresby nurses protesting inadequate personal protective equipment, over 4,000 nurses were ready to strike over the lack of preparation for a coronavirus outbreak. The strike was averted by the PNG Nurses Association which, not for the first time, called it off at the last minute.

The deepening crisis in PNG has major implications for the wider region. According to WHO statistics, there are currently some 500 cases scattered across the Pacific. Fiji, the Pacific’s second largest country, on Friday confirmed its first COVID related death, among eight active cases. The same day, the number of cases in the Northern Marianas rose by two to 42.

If the virus spreads more widely it could devastate the Pacific Island communities, which have populations with high rates of co-morbidities and public health systems that are fragile and at full capacity, even before the pandemic. Last year 83 people, mainly children, died in Samoa in a measles outbreak that originated in New Zealand.

According to a study published in the Lancet in July, COVID-19 has the potential to cause “substantial disruptions to health services,” due to cases overburdening the health systems and response measures limiting usual programs. Particularly in poor countries, disruptions to services for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria could lead to substantial loss of life over the next five years, the report warned.

The regional imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, are showing cynical indifference to the social disaster unfolding in their former colonial possessions. The Australian government recently announced a paltry $US500,000 aid package for PNG to respond to COVID-19, following a donation of personal protective equipment for health workers.

New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs Ministry declared in June that the Pacific will need “significant investment” to recover from the economic devastation of COVID-19, even if the virus itself is kept at bay. The ministry concluded, however, that its priority is to reinforce the Labour government’s “Pacific reset” strategy—i.e. to upgrade NZ’s diplomatic and military presence in lockstep with Washington’s and Canberra’s escalating confrontation with China.

California’s Apple Fire burns 20,000 acres, forces thousands from their homes

Peter Ross

A massive fire broke out Friday afternoon in a rural area 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Three potential arson fires rapidly merged and spread through more than 1,900 acres Friday night, forcing hundreds of residents of Cherry Valley, Banning Bluff, and other nearby communities to evacuate. Extreme temperatures, low humidity and high winds drove the fire deep into the San Bernardino National Forest and up the southern face of the San Gorgonio Mountains over the weekend.

Firefighters struggled to slow the aggressive spread of the fire over the rugged and inaccessible terrain, and by Monday morning the fire had burned more than 26,000 acres (about 41 square miles) and was only 5 percent contained. More than 1,300 firefighters have been assigned to the fire, along with hundreds of fire engines, nine helicopters and two air tankers. “It is steep terrain, rugged terrain,” Captain Fernando Herrera of Cal Fire told the Palm Springs Desert Sun. “We rely a lot on the aircraft to do the work during the day.”

The eastern flank of the fire has already moved into the western section of the Morongo Reservation, home to over 3,500 Mission Indians. In the west, the fire has spread into San Bernardino County, threatening the Forest Falls community in the national forest, and forcing mandatory evacuations for the town of Oak Glen.

Strong westerly winds and high temperatures prevailed on Monday, amid an extended heat wave across the region. “Given the fuel, given the weather, given the topography and where this is going, this fire is not going to stop tonight, it's going to keep going,” Lisa Cox, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service told reporters.

The fire has produced massive smoke columns visible throughout much of Southern California, which have formed pyrocumulus clouds that have generated their own strong winds. Plumes of smoke have been swept as far as Las Vegas and central Arizona. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has issued air quality advisories for much of the Inland Empire and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. Unsafe smoke levels are of special concern for the sick and elderly, and are known to increase the severity of COVID-19, of which there are almost 40,000 active cases in Los Angeles County alone.

No deaths or injuries have been reported from Apple Fire, but evacuation orders have so far affected over 8,000 people from more than 2,600 residences. Among those who had to evacuate was Cherry Valley resident Rick Stewart, 67, who evacuated with his wife and three grandchildren as the fire approached his house. “I was terrified. You have no idea the amount of heat that came off that. Literally burning your face,” Stewart told the Desert Sun.

An evacuation shelter has been set up at a high school in the town of Beaumont, but only a small number of evacuees have reportedly come to the shelter. Only 32 evacuees stayed in Red Cross-provided hotel lodging Saturday night. “Folks not taking advantage of it over concerns about COVID-19, we have measures in place. We planned for this months ahead,” Cal Fire’s Captain Fernando Herrera explained to CBS News.

The low turnout at the evacuation shelter is doubtlessly due to a pervasive sentiment of distrust for the way state and federal authorities have handled the pandemic: the policies of the political establishment are correctly perceived as criminally indifferent to the safety of the broad population and many fear that staying in emergency shelters will increase their risk of contracting the deadly coronavirus.

A string of record-breaking wildfires has torn across California since 2017, including the Ranch Fire, the largest in the state’s history, and the Camp Fire, which completely destroyed the town of Paradise. Despite the growing danger of wildfires, the state has systematically cut funding for social infrastructure, including firefighting and wildfire prevention, and has increasingly relied on thousands of low-paid prison inmates to work as firefighting “hand crews.”

Due to COVID-19—which has hit California’s prisons particularly hard—less than half of these crews will be available during the 2020 fire season. To compensate, California lawmakers have set aside $85.6 million to hire additional firefighters, even as they have cut firefighters’ salaries by 10 percent, and slashed $680 million from the state budget for environmental protection.

Even as thousands of people were forced from their homes in yet another catastrophic fire under conditions of a historic pandemic, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom made a television appearance Monday afternoon to congratulate his administration for “encouraging signs” in the fight against COVID-19. Meanwhile, the state is posting death rates which are 25 percent higher than in April.

Currently, there are more than 150,000 homeless people in California, and tens of thousands more are out of work and at risk of eviction as extended federal unemployment benefits were allowed by Congress to expire at the end of last month. To this number must be added the tens of thousands whose homes and lives are endangered by the constant threat of wildfires, while an indifferent ruling elite looks on.

New COVID-19 infections take hold in first week of attempted cruise industry restart

Tom Casey

While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) ban on cruise ship sailings, combined with the Cruise Line Industry Association’s (CLIA) voluntary industry suspension will remain in effect until the end of September, several European cruise and ferry enterprises have recently begun to resume scaled-down operations. These initiatives mark the beginning of a wave of attempts at a “phased” reopening since its shutdown in March due to the coronavirus.

MSC Grandiosa (Credit: Tom Rees, WikiMedia Commons)

The new sailing efforts come within the context of the ongoing failure of cruise companies and governments to repatriate thousands of ship workers since spring. As the WSWS has documented, thousands of stranded employees have remained stuck at sea for months, pushed off of company payroll, unable to meet their expenses at home, and having little information about when they will be reunited with their families. Since May, there have been nearly a dozen non-COVID-19-related deaths which are widely suspected to have been suicides.

A press release by the CDC calculates that as of July 10 there were 14,702 crew remaining on board 67 ships in US waters. The report also declares that there have been 99 disease outbreaks on 123 different cruise ships, with a total of 2,973 “COVID-19 or COVID-like illness cases” and 34 deaths. While the CDC release only refers to vessels under the US Coast Guard’s tally, there are likely thousands more stranded crew members on dozens of ships worldwide.

Among the first ship operators to resume sailings was Hurtigruten, a Norwegian-owned cruise and ferry company specializing in “scenic cruising,” or voyages which dock at fewer ports of call in favor of itineraries that do not require passengers to leave the ship. This weekend, Hurtigruten announced that it would suspend its recently resumed operation of the MS Fridtjof Nasen and the MS Roald Armundsen, after 36 passengers and five crew on board the latter tested positive for COVID-19.

AIDA cruises, a German brand operated by Costa Cruise Lines (Italy), a subsidiary of the Carnival Corporation/Carnival UK group (US/UK), also announced this weekend that it would be unable to continue its plans to restart passenger operations out of German ports for the first week of August.

On Wednesday, July 22, 750 Filipino and Indonesian crew members arrived in the port of Rostock, Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania in order to join the AIDAmar and AIDAblu ships for planned employee-only voyages. These sailings were scheduled in order for the company to implement its newly updated onboard health and safety procedures. Prior to boarding, however, 10 crew members tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Following the isolation of the infected workers, the company issued the following statement: “None [of the confirmed cases] are related to the regular on-board operations. […] The entire arriving crew was tested in their home countries before their departure to Germany. Another PCR test was carried out directly prior to the boarding. [This] shows that the strict hygiene protocols AIDA Cruises has developed with the authorities are effective and that the company has taken the right preventive measures. [...]”

The company blamed the government of Italy, the flag state for all ships in its fleet, for its inability to carry out planned cruises. The Italian government neglected to give its final approval to the company’s voyages out of Rostock and Hamburg.

Last week, the Miami Herald reported on a memo leaked in social media groups by employees of MSC Cruises. The document presented updated protocol for all shipboard workers upon the resumption of the company’s sailings. A bullet point which banned all “non-emergency” shore leave for crew sparked widespread opposition, as the ability for employees to leave the ship during normal operation is a necessary component of a job in which long work hours and no days off are a prominent feature.

While MSC Cruises is the world’s fourth largest cruise company, it is the world’s largest cruise operator that is a privately-held company. While the Switzerland-registered enterprise has officially stated that it awaits the approval of local health agencies before it resumes its sailing, it has acknowledged that it has begun the process of bringing employees to locations where the ships are docked in preparation for reopening.

While the company recklessly moves ahead with its plans, dozens of its crew still remain imprisoned on its vessels around the world. A Mauritian worker on a stranded MSC ship who wished to remain anonymous confirmed with the WSWS that the company has been chartering flights to send Mauritian crew to Genoa, Italy, in preparation of its resumed sailings.

“This is outrageous. I’ve been waiting to go home since the end of March. It’s really hard to survive like this,” the crew member said, concluding, “it should be a fundamental right for any citizen to return home.”

The response to the coronavirus pandemic by the Mauritian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth, has been a particularly naked expression of the self-serving calculations of the country’s national business elite, as the WSWS has reported. Weeks after it implemented a shakedown policy in the form of expensive travel restrictions on its citizens returning from abroad, the Mauritian ruling class has demonstrated that it will spare no account in meeting the needs of the tourism industry—it merely seeks to reap a better price for doing so.

On July 25, TUI cruises, owned by Royal Caribbean, Ltd., (US) through TUI AG, a German tourism company, became the first European ship operator to sail a large cruise vessel since the industry shutdown. “Mein Schiff 2,” a 2,900-passenger ship filled with only 60 percent of its operating capacity sailed on a scenic, 3-day voyage to Norwegian waters with no ports of call.

A telling report from New York Daily News last week painted a chilling picture of the cold calculations involved the resumption of the cruising industry. The reopening will inevitably be built on the prolonged misery of employees who are financially desperate from a prolonged period without work. The report states, “after months of shutdowns, the German cruise ship industry is betting on shorter trips to help reignite the business, which was badly affected by the ongoing coronavirus crisis. […] The Western European nation of 83 million has been widely seen as a success in the fight against COVID-19, with just over 206,000 cases and 9,201 fatalities, about one-fifth of the death toll in the U.K.”

Put in plain language, cruise corporations around the world see potential outbreaks of illness onboard, and whatever personal damages or deaths that may result, as a secondary factor to the resumption of business operations and the accumulation of their profits.

Cruise crew should categorically reject any return to work under the deadly conditions which are being pushed by the international cruise and ferry corporations. The right to safe repatriation must be demanded by ship workers as a basic prerequisite for any and all resumption of cruising operations.

Seafarers who are stranded on ships, those who are on active duty, and those who are at home with or without future assignments must form rank and file organizations to ensure that no restart of the industry is possible under the current conditions. These committees must be connected with similar organs of struggle in factories, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces around the world as part of the broader struggle by the working class to transform society on the basis of its own class interests—that is, of international socialism.

Britain’s jobs massacre continues

Margot Miller

Workers are facing an economic calamity as businesses continue to shed jobs. The losses are across all industries—a trend apparent before the pandemic—with the UK’s largest car producer Jaguar Land Rover announcing redundancies, as well as car dealerships, bus maker Alexander Dennis, the distillery industry, retailer Selfridges, holiday giant Tui, and The National Trust.

The government imposed a national lockdown on March 23, though many non-essential online businesses like Amazon and Asos remained open, while outbreaks of the virus continued in workplaces. Winding down the lockdown has driven millions back to work in unsafe conditions, resulting in alarming spikes across regions like the north west and west Yorkshire. The government is intent on reopening schools in September, despite opposition from parents and teachers.

But many have no jobs to go back to. Young people have been especially hard hit, as many work in hospitality and retail. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), joblessness among 16-24-year-olds increased by 47,000 over last year.

Since the pandemic struck, 13,000 jobs have gone in the UK car industry as demand has plummeted. Car production halved this year, costing 11,000 jobs. With the UK expected to produce just over 880,000 new cars, this marks the lowest output since 1957. Jaguar Land Rover is planning 2,200 redundancies across the industry.

Bus maker Alexander Dennis, which employed 2,700 worldwide before the pandemic, has had no new orders since March and is cutting 650 jobs. Sites in Guildford, Scarborough and Falkirk will be affected. Owned by Canadian NFI Group, the company made 1,250 buses for the UK in 2019. Alexander Dennis chief executive Colin Robertson said the bus industry faced an “unprecedented crisis” and called on the government to make good its pledge to order 4,000 environmentally friendly buses.

Pendragon, which owns car dealers Evans Halshaw and Stratstone, plans to cut 1,800 jobs from its workforce of 8,000. Evans Halshaw caters for mass market selling brands including Peugeot, Renault, Vauxhall, and Ford. Its Stratstone chain sells marques such as BMW, Ferrari, and Jaguar Land Rover. Many of these losses were planned before the pandemic, with the virus acting as an accelerant. Pendragon, which will retain 150 dealerships, expects to save around £35 million a year.

Car dealerships, like high street chains, have suffered closures due to increased competition from online retailers and behemoths like Amazon.

Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders boss, Mike Hawes, said the latest car manufacturing report made “grim reading” and that the future of the UK car-making “depends on securing a good deal” as part of Brexit negotiations. This does not seem a realistic prospect, with a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, and America an unreliable and inadequate trading partner.

Despite Boris Johnson’s Conservative government allowing itself to be pressured into backing the US in its trade war with China, 6,500 distillery jobs could go due to President Donald Trump’s threat to levy 25 percent export tariffs on UK gin, vodka and blended whisky. Britain exports spirits worth £1.5 billion to the US each year.

Last October, the US imposed a 25 percent tariff on UK single malt Scotch whiskey—fall-out from the EU-US trade dispute between plane makers Airbus and Boeing, according to the industry. The UK Spirits Alliance has turned to International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to challenge the tariffs before the US Trade Representative review on August 12.

KPMG International Services is the first of the big four accountancy organisations to announce redundancies in Britain, planning to slash 200 posts due to falling demand for its consultancy services—an indication that the economy will not return to its pre-pandemic levels. It is planning to cut employer contributions to pensions, currently at 4.5 percent of salaries. In July, Accenture announced it was contemplating reducing its UK workforce by eight percent.

The National Trust has announced 1,200 redundancies since it closed its houses, parks, gardens, and cafes at the start of lockdown. With 5.6 million members, the charity manages some of the UK’s key cultural heritage sites and places of natural beauty. Laying off 13 percent of staff out of a total of 9,500 would save £60 million. The trust has already imposed a recruitment freeze, as well deferring or ending projects worth £124 million.

Another visitor attraction, the Eden project in Cornwall, is set to shed between 200 and 220 jobs after losing £7 million in visitor revenue this year. The project boasts two biomes containing plants from diverse environments and promotes sustainability.

As well as culture and leisure, the holiday industry continues to be severely impacted, despite the government easing restrictions on trips abroad—in its typically shambolic fashion. Tui plans the closure of 166 travel agencies on the high street in the UK and Ireland, after losing £747 million in the first half of 2020. After a brief lifting of restrictions, the government removed Spain from its list of safe destinations for tourists and reintroduced a 14-day quarantine for travelers from Spain. Tui responded by cancelling all flights to the country.

While 900 jobs are on the line, Tui has said that for now 70 percent of employees affected would transfer to home working. The company has closed 70 stores in France with 600 job losses, citing the increasing number of online bookings as a major factor in addition to the pandemic.

The response of Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association General Secretary Manuel Cortes was to “call on Tui and other employers to engage with our union so we can jointly lobby government.”

British Airways, part of the International Airways group, originally planned 12,000 redundancies. It has reached an agreement with BALPA, the pilots union, to accept 270 job losses and major pay cuts.

After revealing that BA had a timetable to fire and rehire thousands on August 7, Unite leader, Len McCluskey, wrote a grovelling appeal to BA chief Alex Cruz, urging that the “only way to have a lasting peace and avoid months/years of industrial unrest is to work with us to achieve an acceptable way forward.”

Upmarket Selfridges is the latest major high street chain to announce job losses across its four stores and impacting 450 jobs, or 14 percent of its staff. Even before the pandemic, the high street was struggling to compete with online retailers due to high rents. John Lewis has also revealed plans to shut eight of its department stores, while Debenhams is up for sale to avoid liquidation.

Manufacturer of household appliances Dysons is set to lose 900 jobs, 600 from its UK workforce. Last year, owner Sir James Dyson came out top in the UKs rich list, increasing his wealth from £3.6 billion to £16.2 billion. Meanwhile, the working class is facing impoverishment as jobs go and wages are slashed.

DW Sports, a gym and sports retailer, is to enter administration, putting 1,700 jobs at risk. It operated 73 gyms and 75 stores across the UK, with all stores now set to close and saving gyms dependent upon deals worked out with the administrators.

The ONS reported that the number of workers on UK company payrolls decreased by 649,000 between March and June, a fall of 2.2 percent. This figure did not include the self-employed who were unable to work.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that ten percent of the 9.4 million employees who were once on the government financed furlough scheme will become unemployed when it ends completely in October. In May, the ONS revealed half a million people who are technically employed are not in work and not receiving pay.

The OBR warned that unemployment could soar to four million without the development of an early vaccine. This warning was underscored by a survey conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce, which found 29 percent of businesses would cut jobs in the next three months.

Stricter lockdown reimposed in Philippines as cases top 100,000

Joseph Santolan

The Philippines recorded a record 5,000 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend bringing the country’s tally to more 100,000 cases according to the Department of Health. The Philippines now has the second highest number of cases in Southeast Asia, behind Indonesia. The Duterte administration responded on Sunday night by announcing a return to the strict lockdown conditions of modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ).

Two of Manila’s largest government hospitals were forced to close last week because of the number of infected healthcare workers. Most hospitals report that they are beyond capacity and can no longer take any new patients, as they lack adequate facilities and beds. The Philippine Medical Association warned, in a letter issued over the weekend, that if urgent measures were not taken to curb the spread of the virus the entire medical system was on the verge of collapse.

The Duterte administration has responded to the pandemic with authoritarianism and anti-scientific nonsense, attempting to maintain control of the population and to resume the profit-making operations of banks and major businesses.

The Philippine government imposed one of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world, which it enforced through draconian police measures. Over 76,000 people were arrested between March 17 and July 25 for violating curfew or lockdown. More than 900 complaints of torture and inhumane treatment have been filed with the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights.

The police converted Operation Tokhang, the warrantless door-to-door searches conducted as part of the war on drugs, into an alleged hunt for people with symptoms. The government called on the population to report their neighbors if they suspect they might have symptoms. According to the Washington Post, the police have killed a number of “suspects” in their homes as a result of these warrantless searches.

While conducting door-to-door searches, imposing curfews, and carrying out mass arrests, the Duterte government has done next to nothing to detect, trace or isolate the disease. Confronted with a shortage of masks and hygiene supplies, Duterte told the public last week that they should clean their masks with gasoline. Medical professionals responded that if the public followed Duterte’s instructions they would likely contract a respiratory disease.

The Philippine economy confronts its worst contraction in over three decades. Unemployment has reached record levels. The most recently available government data is for April and it reveals that 7.3 million adults were unemployed, a 17.7 percent unemployment rate, which is an all-time high.

An additional 13 million reported that they had jobs but were unable to report to work. The figures have only worsened since April. Extrapolating from the available data, it seems that over half the population has no immediate source of income.

Remittances from migrant workers are a mainstay of the Philippine economy and they have declined substantially as a result of the global crisis.

Confronting an immense loss of profits, banks and major corporations have clamored for workers to be sent back to their workplaces. On June 1, the government responded by placing the capital region under less stringent general community quarantine (GCQ) measures. The police repression continued and young people faced arrest for violating curfew, but the working population was expected to return to work. COVID-19 cases soared.

Of the new cases reported this weekend, 2,737 were in Manila. More than half of all recorded cases, over 55,000, have been in the intensely crowded Metro Manila area. Thus far, the government has officially reported over 2,000 fatalities, but these numbers doubtless grossly under-represent the actual figures.

The catastrophic figures are a result of the government’s refusal to carry out mass testing combined with its back-to-work campaign of the past two months.

Confronting a soaring infection rate and the imminent collapse of the medical system, Duterte on Sunday night announced that he was reimposing the strict conditions of modified enhanced quarantine (MECQ) on the capital region of Metro Manila and its surrounding areas, scheduled to last from August 4 to 18. The general population will be confined to their homes and public transportation will again be shut down.

A majority of the population is struggling to secure their basic necessities. Mass outrage is mounting.

At midnight on Sunday night in a nationwide televised address, Duterte launched a tirade against health care workers who have publicly criticized the government response to the global pandemic. “Do not try to demean the government,” he said.

The president repeatedly returned in his speech to the idea that workers were threatening revolution. He responded with veiled threats of dictatorship, declaring, “I will implement order, changing this government, without informing you. Would you be happy with that? So if you are really on a rampage, you want revolution, fine, let’s start it, go ahead.”

ArcelorMittal lays off hundreds of steelworkers in Indiana, Ohio

George Gallanis

ArcelorMittal, the world’s second largest steel producer, laid off 877 workers last Saturday at its Indiana Harbor Mill in East Chicago in northwest Indiana. Seven hundred seventy-four workers will be laid off indefinitely, and 103 salaried employees will be laid off permanently.

ArcelorMittal Steel Mill, East Chicago, Indiana (Credit: Flickr.com/David Wilson)

Also on Saturday, 353 operations and 72 maintenance employees were laid off at ArcelorMittal’s Eggers Avenue plant in Cleveland, Ohio. In a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice sent last Saturday to the state of Indiana, ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor Vice President and General Manager Wendell Carter said, “Many of the company’s customers closed their operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their reopenings, business conditions continue to be depressed during the pandemic, with no significant improvement in demand for the products we manufacture foreseen in the near term. This has had a direct impact on our business.”

The layoffs in Indiana and Ohio are part of an ongoing global assault on steelworkers’ jobs and working conditions. In early June, workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Ilva, Italy, in the country’s impoverished south, struck in opposition to plans to slash 5,000 jobs.

At the same time, the company has forced workers to labor under unsafe conditions in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, jeopardizing the health and lives of workers and their families. At ArcelorMittal’s plant in the Mexican port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, at least 21 workers have died from COVID-19.

While the company has spent years enriching its investors via stock buybacks and dividends, it has sought to justify its attacks on workers by pointing to its recent disastrous financial performance. The company announced last week a net loss of $559 million for the April-June quarter, worsening substantially from last year’s second quarter net loss of $447 million. Sales plummeted to $11 billion, compared to last year’s second quarter earnings of $19.3 billion. For the first half of 2020, sales decreased by 32.9 percent to $25.8 billion when compared with $38.5 billion for the first half of 2019, primarily due to lower steel shipments, which declined 23 percent from last year’s first half.

Despite the drop in revenue and income, the company has managed to pay down debt, with net debt down to $7.8 billion at the end of June.

The forced and reckless reopening of the economy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has spurred steel production more recently, driven in part by the resumption of production by auto plants. Integrated steel mills rely on auto production for about half their demand, and ArcelorMittal’s plants in northwest Indiana feed the nearby Ford Chicago Assembly Plant, which reopened in mid-May.

Along with the restart of production, backed by both the Trump administration and Democratic Party state governors, the cheap-money policies of the Federal Reserve and the transfer of trillions to banks and corporations via the CARES Act have massively reinflated the stock market. ArcelorMittal’s share price has rebounded 43 percent since late March.

With demand for steel ticking back up, the companies have moved recently to reopen partially idled plants. US Steel announced last month it would restart another blast furnace at its Gary Works in Indiana to meet increased demand in part due to the reopening of the Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, and yesterday, ArcelorMittal announced it would restart its #4 blast furnace at Indiana Harbor.

Nevertheless, the steelmakers are determined to use the economic crisis to implement even more painful attacks on jobs and working conditions, adding to a yearslong assault on workers.

Last week, ArcelorMittal’s Chief Executive Officer Lakshmi Mittal indicated further “structural changes,” i.e., cost cuts, were being considered, saying in the second quarter earnings statement, “There are now signs of activity picking up, especially in regions where lockdowns have ended, but clearly it is prudent to remain cautious about the outlook. Against this context, we are examining what structural changes might be required to ensure the company is well configured to prosper in the coming years as demand recovers.”

The layoffs in Indiana and Ohio will have a devastating effect on local communities. Before the pandemic and economic crisis, 36 percent of Gary, Indiana’s residents, which sits to the east of East Chicago, lived below the official poverty threshold of $24,600 for a family of four as of 2017. The Food Bank of Northwest Indiana recently reported that it distributed about 1.1 million pounds of food in June alone. In 2019, the food bank distributed 5.1 million pounds of food for the entire year.

ArcelorMittal is the second-largest steel producer in the world, surpassed this year by China’s Baowu, and the largest in the United States. According to ArcelorMittal USA, it employs approximately 18,000 workers at 27 operations in the United States.

Of these 18,000, some 15,000 hourly production, maintenance, office and technical are members of the United Steelworkers union (USW), which has worked hand in hand with companies for decades to shutter steel mills, decimate jobs and force through concessions agreements.

Since the 1980s, the USW has rammed through contracts which have gutted the living standards of steelworkers and undermined their safety. In 2018, the union sought to suppress the widespread opposition to further givebacks in contract negotiations that year, ignoring unanimous strike votes at ArcelorMittal and US Steel, while seeking to channel anger behind reactionary nationalism and anti-Chinese chauvinism.

The recent and tragic death of 71-year-old steelworker George Salinas at the Indiana Harbor Mill is the latest outcome of decades of collusion between the union and the company.

The fight for the defense of jobs and safe working conditions requires steelworkers to take matters out of the hands of the pro-corporate USW and form new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file safety committees, linking up with their brothers and sisters throughout the US and around the world.

At plants in Michigan and Ohio, autoworkers have formed rank-and-file safety committees independent of the United Auto Workers union in order to demand protection from the coronavirus and an end to retaliation. As one Toledo Autoworker put it, “Workers must stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ and form rank-and-file committees and link up with auto workers and other sections of workers.”

Migrant farmworkers in Spain protest amid COVID-19 surge

Alice Summers

Migrant agricultural workers across Spain are protesting their appalling and unsanitary living and working conditions, which are leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections.

Around 100 migrant farmworkers took part in a protest in the northern Castilla La Mancha region near the city of Albacete, after 400–500 workers were forced into confinement in deplorable conditions in an abandoned factory due to a COVID-19 outbreak affecting at least 23 farmworkers. The workers, many from West Africa, had been housed collectively, without privacy or facilities to sleep and wash. The farm which employed them had refused to provide accommodation, and hotels in the area refused to provide the workers rooms.

In the peak of summer, temperatures in the factory reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and electricity and running water supplies were limited or non-existent.

The workers left their forced confinement and blocked traffic on one of Albacete’s main roads, demanding information about confinement measures and humane treatment. Police sent to enforce the confinement called reinforcements and attacked the demonstrators.

After the demonstration, authorities in Albacete announced plans to re-house the workers, transferring them by bus to Albacete’s IFAB exhibition centre on July 22. The new facilities are wholly insufficient to safely accommodate the workers, however. Hundreds of people are housed in a single hall divided into two by an awning, facilitating a rapid spread of the virus.

The charity Médicos del Mundo (Doctors of the World) wrote that the exhibition centre “does not have the necessary means to guarantee the health of hundreds of people: there is no way to isolate, there are insufficient bathroom facilities and no health care system in place to monitor positive cases and their contacts.”

It continued, “The response of local and regional authorities is far from guaranteeing health and safety as announced by the Ministry of Health.… The solution to an outbreak is not to shut people up in a space without minimum living conditions and without adequate health control and monitoring.”

A number of workers housed in the IFAB centre have gone on hunger strike in protest, according to Salyf Sy, president of the Albacete Association of African Immigrants.

In another protest, around 30 migrant workers set up camp outside the town hall of Lepe, in the southern region of Andalusia, after the shanty town accommodation in which hundreds of migrant workers lived was destroyed by fire. Three separate fires were registered in these shanty towns in a single week. At least one person was injured, and hundreds lost their possessions and were made homeless.

Authorities offered temporary hostel accommodation for around 70 people, though 200 had been made homeless. “It’s always the same,” Antonio Abad of the Collective of African Workers told Público. “A solution is offered for a couple of days until things cool down and people start to disperse … They don’t provide real solutions.”

Protesters camped outside the town hall demanded suitable accommodation, carrying placards with slogans such as “They [the agricultural companies] called for workers. They got people.”

Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, denounced conditions facing migrant workers across Spain and called on authorities to “immediately improve the deplorable working conditions of seasonal migrant workers, before people die.”

Fires destroyed “the only accommodation available for the seasonal workers when they arrive in Spain,” de Schutter stated. “Local authorities have so far ignored the more than 170 people who have ended up on the streets.” These incidents “lay bare the urgent need to regulate the working conditions of migrant workers, and, therefore, to guarantee decent working and living conditions,” he added.

The Spanish Ministry of Defence has sent a military taskforce to oversee the installation of tents, beds and living equipment in a migrant camp in Lepe.

In early July, numerous migrant farmworkers, mostly women from Morocco, also protested in nearby Cartaya, after they were left stranded in Spain when their home country closed their borders to stem the spread of coronavirus. Over 7,000 migrant workers were left without funds and in limbo after their harvesting contracts ended.

Many workers live without electricity or running water, stated the local Andalusian association Mujeres 24h. “The farms that we have been able to access are not suitable for a long-term stay. Many are prefabricated modules, designed for non-extreme weather conditions, with large concentrations of people in very small spaces, which doesn’t meet the rules of hiring in the origin[al] agreement,” it stated.

While local officials claimed to have provided the women with food, the workers dispute this, saying that they have been entirely reliant on meagre charity from their employer.

Morocco’s Foreign Affairs Ministry reopened its borders to citizens and residents on July 14, but many of the women are still stranded: ferries to Morocco are scheduled only from the ports of Sète, in France, and Genoa, in Italy—both over 1,000 kilometres away. Travelers on ferries and flights back to Morocco must provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test less than 48 hours old. However, most of the workers do not have the money to travel or for coronavirus testing, Mujeres 24h reports.

The appalling conditions facing migrant farm workers in Europe constitute an indictment of the capitalist system. Low-paid agricultural workers are treated as entirely dispensable, forced to work back-breaking days with few rights, in appalling conditions bordering on modern-day slavery.

Médicos del Mundo report that many employers refuse to give workers contracts, and “mafia middlemen often take off with around 80 percent of their tiny salary… [Workers] labour from dawn to dusk for around 2 to 3 euros an hour.”

With unbounded cynicism, Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias of the pseudo-left Podemos party, which rules in coalition with the Socialist Party (PSOE), told the Spanish Congress that migrant workers’ conditions “bring shame” to Spain. However, he claimed he is “very proud” of having “contributed to an unprecedented social safety net.”

This crisis is of the PSOE-Podemos government’s making. It enacted austerity and was criminally inactive in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to death and destitution on an unprecedented scale. The pandemic has had a particularly brutal impact on farmworkers and other highly exploited and vulnerable layers of workers.

Last week, Health Minister Salvador Illa announced that of the 201 coronavirus outbreaks recorded that week, most were linked to temporary workers or gathering places like bars and clubs. María José Sierra, head of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies, also reported that 34 COVID-19 hotspots in Spain are linked to horticultural companies employing temporary workers, with around 700 cases reported amongst these workers.

At the weekend, El País reported that a staggering 44,868 people in Spain have died of coronavirus, far exceeding the 28,434 deaths recorded by the Spanish Ministry of Health. El País tallied data for deaths “from COVID or from suspected COVID” registered by Spain’s 17 autonomous regions to arrive at this figure. This death toll makes Spain the second worst hit country in Europe, exceeded only by the United Kingdom.

Teachers protest Jordan government’s closure of union and harsh crackdown

Jean Shaoul

Several thousand teachers took to the streets of Irbid, Jerash, and other cities on Saturday to protest the government’s decision to shut down the Jordanian Teachers Syndicate union and demand the release of its board members.

The 13 detained union leaders are currently on hunger strike in Jordanian prisons.

The protests follow rallies last Wednesday, where the police were out in force in the capital, Amman, after the government warned people not to demonstrate, amid threats of arrests and detention. They come in the wake of the attorney general’s decision on July 25 to close the teachers’ union for two years, a raid on the union’s headquarters and the arrest of acting chairman Nasser Nawasreh on charges of incitement.

The union’s council was summoned for questioning on “criminal and corruption charges” after government officials accused the syndicate of having an “Islamist” agenda, meaning that it was allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. On July 15, the Court of Cassation officially dissolved the Brotherhood’s Jordanian branch and closed its offices. King Abdullah’s relationship with the Brotherhood, once one of the monarchy’s strongest supporters, turned sour after the organization supported the 2011 Arab Spring protests.

While Hassan Abdallat, Amman’s prosecutor-general, did not specify what the alleged crimes were, he said they included “financial violations” and issued a gagging order on the case, including social media.

The government’s clampdown on the Jordanian Teachers’ Syndicate, which has 140,000 members, came just days after the union organised a rally in Amman attended by hundreds of teachers demanding the government abide by its agreement to increase the teachers’ abysmally low wages by 35–75 percent, according to experience and seniority. The starting salary of a public-school teacher with a university degree is $500 a month, barely over the “absolute poverty line” of $479 for a family of five each month. After the first year, a teacher gets an automatic annual increment of $5 to $13, depending on qualifications and experience, rising to a maximum of $635 a month. As a result, many teachers take a second job to support their families.

The teachers went on a nationwide strike for a month at the start of the school year in 2018, affecting 1.3 million students, in one of the longest public-sector strikes in the country’s history. The agreement to end the strike included a pay increase for this year. But last April, the government cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the pretext for abandoning the agreement and freezing all public sector wage increases.

In mid-March, the government imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, closing its borders, banning flights and ordering people to stay indoors, and even closing grocery stores and pharmacies for three days, before organizing deliveries of basic commodities directly to neighbourhoods and later allowing food shops and pharmacies to open. The security forces vigorously enforced the curfew, fining thousands of people, and impounding cars.

While the two-month-long lockdown was largely successful in limiting the spread of the virus—to date there have been 1,208 confirmed cases and 11 deaths—it has had a devastating effect on people’s livelihoods in a country already in the grip of a severe economic crisis with little or no social safety net.

Official unemployment in the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic took effect, had reached 19.3 percent. Inflation has risen as a result of a 3.7 percent tax on basic commodities, one of a raft of austerity measures including privatisations implemented to secure a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Jordan’s tourism sector, which with its world-famous heritage sites such as Petra accounts for 10 percent of GDP, has evaporated.

According to Jordan Labour Watch, Jordan’s formal market will lose about 140,000 jobs—10.5 percent of the 1.35 million jobs in both the private and public sectors.

The return of tens of thousands of the more than 1 million well-qualified Jordanians—Jordan has a population of 10 million—working in the Gulf is further impacting on unemployment as falling oil prices, lockdowns and the pandemic’s economic fallout have led to massive job losses.

The Gulf countries are using the crisis to curtail the number of migrant workers, who make up a significant proportion of their workforce. This has had a major impact on remittances back to Jordan. Jordan’s central bank reported a reduction of 5.4 percent for the first quarter of 2020 compared to last year.

Jordan has in turn ordered migrant workers—numbering around 800,000 mainly low-paid workers from Egypt and Yemen employed in agriculture, construction and catering—to leave the country. While the government announced that most businesses could reopen, it insisted that at least 75 percent of their employees would have to be Jordanians.

The lockdown has gutted state revenues and led to the sharpest economic contraction in two decades. With the economy expected to shrink by 3.5 percent this year, the government, whose debt already exceeds GDP, has again turned to the IMF to secure a $1.75 billion loan.

The country hosts the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including more than 745,000 registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other countries—although the actual numbers are far higher than this—plus an estimated 2 million Palestinians.

Jordan has been badly hit by the US’s termination of its $300 million annual funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, representing about a quarter of the agency’s budget. The cuts have had a devastating impact on schooling and essential services, such as medical clinics and trash collection, for hundreds of thousands of refugees in the country.

Jordan is host to more than 1.4 million Syrian refugees, only half of whom are registered. According to the UNHCR, whose operations in Jordan were only 58 percent funded in 2019, one third of refugees who were working previously are now out of work. While around 160,000 refugees have returned to Syria. Many, unable to prove ownership of their property, have no homes or jobs to return to, while others fear retribution and military conscription.

As poverty and social unrest rise, the government has used the draconian emergency laws introduced in March to curtail democratic rights and crackdown on opposition, arresting activists over comments on social media. In April, the military arrested top executives of Roya TV after it screened a crowd of labourers complaining about their inability to work because of the lockdown.

These attacks on democratic rights—even criticizing the royal family is a crime—and living standards are being implemented in the interest of transnational corporations and Jordan’s tiny financial elite, which rules the country with an iron fist.

King Abdullah has announced parliamentary elections in November, but this is just a sop to public opinion and a rubber stamp for his unelected government. Abdullah, who is closely aligned with US imperialism, uses his prime ministers as a fig leaf, sacking them with monotonous regularity as sacrificial lambs to save his own skin and his family’s wealth.

Trump installs ex-general and anti-Islam bigot in top Pentagon post

Patrick Martin

In an action that combines authoritarian contempt for Congress and a direct appeal to racist and fascist sentiments, President Trump has installed retired Army Gen. Anthony Tata in a top policy-making position in the Pentagon.

Trump took the action after Tata withdrew his name Sunday from consideration for the post of undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-ranking position in the Department of Defense. Tata withdrew following the cancellation—with only an hour’s notice—of a July 30 confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

According to the Pentagon announcement, Tata “has been designated as the official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to the Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Dr. James Anderson.” Anderson had been named as a temporary fill-in for the post after the previous undersecretary, John Rood, was forced out for opposing Trump’s action in withholding military aid to Ukraine—the decision that led to his impeachment last December.

Under the thoroughly anti-democratic procedure employed by the White House with increasing frequency, when the Senate declines to confirm his nominee, Trump simply appoints the person to fill the position of top deputy to the vacant post, and the new “acting” deputy becomes a temporary replacement filling the vacancy more or less indefinitely.

Trump applied the same technique last fall when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposed the nomination of former Virginia state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for the number-two position in the Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli is now the acting deputy, serving under the acting Secretary Chad Wolf, meaning that the huge department, with more than 240,000 employees, is entirely run by Trump nominees who have not been confirmed by the Senate.

Tata, former planning director of the 82nd Airborne Division and later deputy commander of the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, was forced to retire as a brigadier general in 2009 after an investigation into allegations of adultery (considered a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice). He went on to hold several high-level positions in the Republican-run state government of North Carolina. His nomination for Pentagon policy chief was called into question after his record of Islamophobic remarks on Twitter came to light.

Among other things, in tweets posted in 2018, Tata called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and a Muslim who “did more to help Islamic countries than any president in history.” He also described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of.”

A political supporter of President Trump, Tata was a regular commentator on Fox News before taking a position with the Pentagon as a senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He at one point accused former CIA Director John Brennan of having issued a coded order for the assassination of Trump and urged Brennan to commit suicide rather than be prosecuted for treason.

After Democrats on the Senate Armed Service Committee called on Tata to withdraw, a Pentagon spokesman issued a disclaimer, saying, “The general himself has stated that he does not believe or support the comments he made. He issued a letter to the committee retracting those statements.”

Tata’s letter dismissed his attacks on Obama and Islam as a “few misstatements,” which, “while grievous, are not indicative of who I am.” He deleted the remarks only after his nomination to the top Pentagon job led the media to dig up his social media history.

Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), a former paratrooper who is the ranking Democrat on the Armed Service Committee, condemned Trump’s appointment maneuver for undermining the military, saying that his “goal is to hollow out, politicize, and undermine the Pentagon the way he has the State Department and Intelligence Community. …”

“This is an offensive, destabilizing move,” he added, calling the method of Tata’s appointment an “insult to our troops, professionals at the Pentagon, the Senate, and the American people. … Clearly, President Trump wants people who will swear allegiance to him over the Constitution.”

The other Democrats on the committee—Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters—all backed Reed in opposing the nomination. Besides the Democrats, at least two committee Republicans, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, had indicated they were likely to oppose Tata’s confirmation.

The installation of General Tata is part of a larger process in which Trump is seeking to fill positions in the national security apparatus with fascist-minded individuals completely loyal to him personally, while removing anyone with ties either to previous administrations or to his own former defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis.

Four top Pentagon officials announced in late June that they were leaving the administration, including the two top technology officials, Michael Griffin and Lisa Porter, the top foreign policy official, Kathryn Wheelbarger, and the acting comptroller, Elaine McCusker. Previous departures, according to an account in the New York Times, included Esper’s chief of staff, Eric Chewning; Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs; and two Navy secretaries, Thomas Modly and Richard Spencer.

Trump has also installed an ultra-right figure, filmmaker Michael Pack, a longtime associate of former Trump counselor Stephen Bannon, as head of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America. Pack carried out a full-scale purge of all the agencies that broadcast American government propaganda to the world, installing ultra-right figures loyal to Trump.

Voice of America Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara announced their resignations after Pack took over. He then dismissed the heads of Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and the Open Technology Fund.

Trump appointed another former Bannon associate, Sebastian Gorka, for a four-year term on the National Security Education Board, which oversees a program aimed at training US citizens in foreign languages useful for the pursuit of the foreign policy interests of American imperialism.