Multi-millionaire Charlie Mullins brands UK workers “lazy” and “selfish”

Julia Callaghan

Charlie Mullins, founder and chairman of the UK’s largest plumbing firm, Pimlico Plumbers, has been given an open door to the media in recent weeks to give voice to the contempt of the ruling elite for the working class.

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson et al. have been forced to make transparent efforts to project a “caring persona” and conceal their class prejudices to avoid a social explosion during the pandemic. Therefore, Mullins has become the go-to-guy for the right-wing media, a rent-a-gob, to say what they all really think’that workers are all “lazy”, “selfish” “scroungers”, who should get back to work ASAP.

As COVID-19 cases continue to resurge, the government’s back-to-work-at-any-cost campaign requires the ending of the jobs furlough scheme and all measures protecting workers, their families and their livelihoods. Mullins, “plumber to the stars” with a personal fortune of £70 million, is given centre stage to justify this policy’which will be fully completed by November’by insisting that “time’s up”, asserting that workers have been “taking advantage”, “sponging off the government”, and that anything in the way of “getting the economy going” should be scrapped.

The 67-year-old’s anger is heightened by the fact that plumbing is one of the few sectors to have experienced a spike in business during the COVID-19 crisis. In the first half of July, Pimlico Plumbers saw an increase of more than 10 percent on the same period last year. In one week in July it booked in more jobs than any other week in the company’s 40-year history.

For Mullins, the sun is shining, and he needs his workers to make his hay. But with some workers staying at home, above all, those with co-morbidities, heightening the threat posed by the virus or with aging relatives, he complains, “You’ve got less people in your company that can create revenue for you.”

For his openly right-wing views and crass style of expressing them, and for his ability to play the “self-made man” who knows about “hard graft”, Mullins has been afforded banner headlines, live interviews and even the opportunity to pen his own articles. He has made multiple appearances on Sky News, Channel 4 News, BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, BBC 5 Live, TalkRADIO, BBC Sunday Morning, ITV’s This Morning, Good Morning Britain, and several BBC regional news stations. He has written personally in the Daily Mail and the i newspaper.

Of the furlough scheme he says, “We need to … stop this stupid culture of people thinking that they can sit at home and just be paid for it.” Those hesitant to go back to work while the pandemic still rages are “milking the system”. “The problem is,” he sneers, “most people’s workplace is too far from the beach for them.”

For Mullins, the fear of catching or passing on a virus that has taken almost three-quarters of a million lives worldwide and caused as yet unknown long-term damage to over 20 million is a sackable offence. In the Daily Mail, he wrote, “I’ve heard all the excuses—people are worried about catching Covid-19, or they’re afraid of infecting a vulnerable relative who is self-isolating. But to any employee who tells me that they don’t want to come back, who wants to string out the furlough … I’ve got one thing to say: we don’t want you back. So far I’ve already told 30 former staff: ‘Don’t bother coming in, ever.’”

Even those working from home don’t escape Mullin’s wrath. He says, “I don’t think they’re going to be motivated enough to say that they’re doing a proper day’s work.” They are “very selfish”, “sitting about in their pyjamas” and “couldn’t care less about nobody else or the economy.”

“You’re gonna create a culture,” he says. “It’s like the people on benefits. They’re never gonna wanna come off it.”

Mullins’ most recent on-air outing was to slam the proposal to give sick pay to workers forced to quarantine when returning from holiday in a country on which the government belatedly placed travel restrictions. “No way. They’re not sick,” says Mullins. “If we start paying people £100 a week to sit at home and do nothing we’re back to square one. The economy can’t afford it.”

This is a man who spends £300,000 on holidays every year talking about many for whom losing two weeks’ pay during quarantine has serious financial implications.

Not one of the media outlets has compared the meagre weekly statutory sick pay of £95.85, or even the £34 billion cost of the furlough scheme, which has preserved almost 10 million jobs, to the astronomical £350 billion handed over to UK corporations in March. The funneling of this unprecedented sum of public money straight into the pockets of the corporate elite was conducted without even a parliamentary vote and has barely been mentioned since.

Mullins did not help his case by conducting his media interviews from one of his several million-euro villas in the Spanish resort of Marbella, filmed against sun-drenched backdrops including swaying palm trees and his swimming pool.

Workers, suffering the worst global health crisis in a century, and facing economic devastation under a system completely incapable of prioritising lives over profits, hit back on social media. Many wrote of the relentless media attention given to this obscene caricature of a man, asking, “How come Charlie Mullins gets so much airtime?”, “Why is Charlie Mullins on BBC news several times in a week?” and “It’s a Mullins monologue.”

Some pointed to the class issue that sits at the heart of the conflict. One worker tweeted, “An alarm bell is ringing out loud and clear: One rule for us; another rule for everyone else.” Another wrote that Mullins is “the worst type of capitalist, slagging off his employees, whilst he sits on his pile in Marbella. He’d run workhouses if allowed.”

Others wrote of the desperation the coronavirus crisis has brought into their own lives. One said, “Charlie Mullins is really getting my back up. My company has reopened and I’ve not been brought back when I want to. Furlough/lockdown has ruined everything for me. My mental health has suffered and my marriage has fallen apart and I’m still out of work.”

There are those who question how Mullins can be an authority on employment issues at all, referring to the seven-year legal battle he eventually lost in 2018 over the classification of his engineers as “self-employed”, in an attempt to reduce his costs and remove their basic employment rights. “Not sure I can agree with tax dodging Charlie Mullins who fought tooth and nail to avoid having to financially treat his employees as employees despite in every other way treating them as employees,” tweeted one.

Losing the high-profile case has not changed his business model and all Pimlico Plumbers engineers continue to be “self-employed.”

Mullins cites Margaret Thatcher as his business inspiration and forced his entire staff (the “self-employed” included) to wear black armbands when she died. He has donated tens of thousands of pounds to the Tories and was particularly close to his admirers, former Prime Minister David Cameron and former Chancellor George Osborne, who had him in “every four or five months.” In return for his generous donations to the Tory Party—and of course “services to the plumbing industry”—Mullins was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 2014. He intends to campaign to become mayor of London in 2021.

Stonehaven rail disaster due to UK’s neglected railway earthworks

Steve James

The horrifying train wreck near Stonehaven, Scotland, last week, was the result of the dilapidated condition of Britain’s rail infrastructure.

Starved for decades of essential maintenance funding, the railways have been transformed by successive governments into state-subsidised cash cows for private corporations.

Three people—two train crew and a passenger—were killed, and six other passengers injured on the 06.38 service from Aberdeen to Glasgow, on August 12. The victims were driver Brett McCullough, conductor Donald Dinnie and passenger Chris Stuchbury, a tugboat captain. One of the injured remains in hospital.

The train was nearly empty, with only nine passengers. Had the service been anywhere near full capacity, fatalities and injuries would have been much higher.

Aerial view of the 2020 Carmont derailment (source: gov.uk)

The high-speed train, consisting of two diesel power units and four passenger coaches, left Aberdeen on time amid atrocious weather conditions of thunderstorms and torrential rainfall. Parts of the UK had just experienced one month’s rain over a few hours. Stonehaven saw 65mm of rain in two hours. Schools, reopening in Scotland for the first time since the national lockdown, and transport were disrupted across the region.

Why the train departed is unclear. Two previous southbound trains from Aberdeen had been cancelled, as were subsequent services. Driver McCullough’s sister Salina commented on social media that she held train operator ScotRail responsible. ScotRail is owned by transport conglomerate Abellio.

Addressing ScotRail, she wrote, “During one of the worst storms to hit Scotland, you sent my brother out to drive a beast of a train. ... I wish Brett had refused, but that wasn’t in his nature, he would never let anyone down.”

The train left Stonehaven, 15 minutes by rail from Aberdeen, on time, only to receive a radio message a few miles out of Stonehaven, warning that another train driver had seen a landslip further down the line.

The train was instructed to return to Aberdeen and reversed on the southbound line to a set of points. Here the train was held for a couple of hours while an engineer drove to the site to switch the manually operated points. The train then switched to the northbound line and set off back towards Stonehaven.

In the intervening period, another landslip appears to have blocked the northbound line, at a particularly deep gully at Carmont, just south of Stonehaven, which the diverted train hit at a speed of around 50 mph.

According to Tony Miles of Modern Railway magazine, the speed limit on that section of railway was 65 mph. Miles told the Times , “There would be no reason then, even under caution, unless it had been explicitly agreed with the Network Rail controllers, for the train not to proceed normally at line speed.”

He continued, “The sad fact is that because of the terrain, and on a bend, if the train encountered a landslip there would be little time, even with the application of the emergency brake, to avoid a collision.”

The train jumped the track, continued for 100 metres, then hit the parapet of a bridge. The front power unit and a passenger coach tumbled down an embankment where the engine caught fire. Two other coaches jack-knifed, one ending up upside down on top of another. Only the rear coach and power unit remained upright.

An off-duty rail worker, Nicola Whyte, who was injured in the crash, walked three miles to raise the alarm. Emergency services had difficulty reaching the scene. Four fire fighters suffered minor injuries in the rescue operation.

That such a clearly avoidable tragedy should occur on the main line south from Aberdeen, a city with a conurbation of over 300,000 people, points to a crisis in rail infrastructure, particularly earthworks, maintenance across Britain.

State controlled Network Rail (NR), which owns the rail network and leases lines to private train operating companies, reported its intention to carry out emergency inspections of dozens of “higher risk trackside slopes” with similar characteristics to the Aberdeenshire crash site. Some inspections would be carried out from helicopters.

NR CEO, Andrew Haines, blamed climate change. Railways in Britain, said Haines, were “designed for a temperate climate, but it’s challenged when we get extremes such as storms and floods.” NR intended to mobilise its “extreme weather action teams,” open a dialogue with meteorologists, and review plans to monitor high risk sites.

Speaking to the BBC, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the crash was shocking because “these accidents on the railways are thankfully so rare.” But it is only down to chance and the many interventions of railway staff, including conductors—who the train companies and government want to remove from trains—that many more such incidents have not taken place.

Other landslips occurred the same day, including in Fife, Scotland. The Shrewsbury to Llandrindod Wells “Heart of Wales” line suffered extensive damage. Many services across the UK were disrupted by flooding.

Roads were also affected. A major landslip on the A83 “Rest and be Thankful” road in Argyll and Bute, occurred the previous week. Some 6,000 tonnes of rocks and mud blocked the busy rural route, necessitating a 58-mile diversion. The A83 has been blocked by landslips repeatedly over the last decades.

Three investigations into the Stonehaven incident have been launched. The first is a joint investigation by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), Police Scotland and the British Transport Police. This is being directed by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. A second independent investigation is being conducted by the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB). The UK government under Conservative Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has ordered Network Rail to carry out an investigation, due to report by September, into “wider issues” that may have led to the crash.

The British and Scottish authorities, ScotRail and NR, will all be seeking to avoid responsibility for a catastrophe that has been long in the making.

NR’s own June 2018 Earthworks Technical Strategy document makes clear that the company, and therefore both the government and the devolved administrations, have long been aware of the network’s vulnerability.

NR maintains 190,000 “earthwork assets” near about 19,000 km of track. Many were constructed in the 19th century “on an unprecedented scale”. This has resulted in a “legacy of over-steep embankments and cuttings across the network” which, when compared with assets controlled by modern design codes are “inherently disadvantaged”. “The asset count, age, degradation and current rate of strengthening provide a unique management challenge on a macro scale.”

NR’s response to these challenges, arising from Britain’s historic role as one of the first industrial powers in the world, is based on reducing costs, “risk management” and managing public perceptions. The NR document states that “our organisation’s approach to risk management is determined by risk appetite and tolerance.”

It complains that “Perceptions of the asset base and expectations of its ability to perform will often need careful management, particularly at times of heightened potential for failure during prolonged wet weather.”

NR note that the winters of 2013/14 and 2015/16 showed the “susceptibility of the asset base to failure.”

Only earthworks deemed the most dangerous will be dealt with quickly while the organisation aspires to renew or refurbish a mere “0.5% and 1.0% of the asset base” every five years. At that rate it will take between 500 and 1,000 years to refurbish them all. Neither of the earthworks that collapsed near Stonehaven appear to even have had monitoring devices—one of the essential maintenance tools NR claims it will eventually roll out—installed.

All such plans are being disastrously undermined by Network Rail’s cost-cutting. It carried out a reduction of its maintenance staff by 12 percent between 2009/10 and 2013/14, down by 2,169 to 15,813. Then it set a target of 2019 of further cost-cutting of 20 percent.

As with the Grenfell Tower disaster and the coronavirus pandemic, the Stonehaven rail crash exposes the systemic elevation of profits above the safety of the population. Every area of life is being subordinated to the accumulation of wealth by a super-rich elite and the corporations they run.

Germany’s IG Metall trade union preparing to enforce jobs massacre and deep wage cuts

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Germany’s IG Metall trade union is preparing to cooperate with the major corporations in the metal and electronics industries to enforce hundreds of thousands of job cuts. The main target in this will be the auto sector.

Big business and the trade unions are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to secure the upper hand in the intensifying global trade war by imposing savage attacks on workers. While the federal government used the first phase of the pandemic to transfer over €1 trillion to the major corporations, the past several weeks have been dominated by the push to get everyone back to work so that the corporate elite can begin raking in profits once again.

This is also the purpose of the relaunching of regular in-person classes in schools, which under conditions of a resurgence of the pandemic can only be described as a criminal experiment in herd immunity. The actions of IG Metall are characterised by the same ruthless subordination of life and limb to the profit dictates of the major corporations.

On July 22, IG Metall executive member Jürgen Kerner announced in the Wirtschaftspresse München that he and his trade union colleagues expect that companies in the metal industry will lay off 300,000 workers. The greatest restructuring is to be expected in the auto sector, including parts suppliers, he said. Another example is the airline industry, including Airbus and its suppliers. The IG Metall’s chief treasurer also indicated that the steel industry faces a large wave of redundancies.

IG Jörg Hofmann (Credit: IG Metall)

When Kerner claims that among “the core tasks of a trade union is to fight within the workplace and frame the future,” workers should be on guard. IG Metall’s core task over recent decades has been the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the shuttering of plants against the strong opposition of workers. This remains true today.

Kerner, a member of the Social Democrats for many years, knows full well that the coronavirus pandemic is merely being advanced as the pretext for the loss of 300,000 jobs. He sits on the supervisory board of seven large companies, including Siemens Inc., Traton Inc., and Airbus Operations Ltd. He is deputy chairman of the supervisory board for ThyssenKrupp, MAN, MAN Truck & Bus, and the Premium Aerotic Ltd. Alongside his six-figure salary as a top union official, he can also claim hundreds of thousands in additional fees for his supervisory board positions.

The trade union bureaucrat knows very well what the companies’ real reasons for the job cuts are. Even Kerner acknowledged that the planned restructuring is not simply due to the pandemic. “A large portion of the 300,000 is about optimising the companies under cover of the coronavirus,” he said. Many of the plans were completed long before the pandemic.

Most major automakers announced a wave of job cuts last year in response to the transition to electric vehicles and increased automation. This year, the number of lay-offs has been concretised. Daimler is cutting 30,000 jobs, VW 20,000, Audi, a VW subsidiary, 10,000, BMW 16,000, and Opel several thousand. ZF Friedrichshagen, the largest auto parts supplier, is cutting 15,000 jobs, while Bosch and Schaeffler are eliminating 2,000 each. Hundreds of smaller suppliers are axing tens of thousands of jobs.

The steel industry, which is one of the main suppliers of raw materials for production industries, is also facing a major wave of restructuring. ThyssenKrupp has announced the closure or sale of its heavy plate steel factory in Duisburg, as well as the factories producing stabilisers and springs for the auto industry. Outokumpu is closing its sites in Wilnsdorf and Heidenheim.

This is an international process. Airbus, whose leadership is in close contact with the IG Metall treasurer Kerner through its supervisory board positions, plans to cut 15,000 jobs across Europe. Renault plans to cut 15,000 jobs, while 20,000 will go at Nissan. Japanese automaker Mitsubishi is even considering pulling out of Europe altogether.

Albert Vaas, an analyst with Boston Consulting, told financial daily Handelsblatt that there is “foreseeably a 5 to 10 percent overcapacity in production in the market.” Within the EU, around 3.7 million people are employed directly or indirectly in the auto sector, including 820,000 in Germany.

These developments are not confined to the manufacturing and electronics sectors. There is no branch of the economy where mass lay-offs have not been unveiled, including by airlines, travel companies and retail outlets.

In the emerging class conflicts, the trade unions stand on the side of their respective corporations and governments. They draft the mechanisms by which mass layoffs and unprecedented wage cuts are enforced.

For example, the Outokumpu works council is currently drafting a proposal for pay cuts of up to €700 per month, allegedly to save jobs.

The pattern of using the threat of job cuts to slash wages was also proposed by Kerner, who suggested the combining of the struggle to defend jobs with the upcoming round of collective bargaining at the end of the year in the manufacturing, electronics and steel sectors.

By that point, IG Metall will have established the mechanisms to praise the wage cuts as a great “success,” because compulsory redundancies will have been ruled out and the number of job cuts will be lower than the original announcement. All of this has long been under preparation in the supervisory boards, where company and trade union representatives work closely together. However, given the scope of the coming attacks, IG Metall is insisting that the state intervenes on behalf of the companies once again.

Firstly, IG Metall is demanding billions in subsidies for the corporations under the guise of supporting environmentally friendly products. Kerner stated that the companies must be kept afloat with state support because there is no viable alternative. The state should, for example, subsidise “green steel” (made using hydro power instead of coke) and hydrogen-powered trucks to make them “competitive on the market.”

At the same time, IG Metall is appealing for a lengthening of the short-time work programme so that they can buy time and drag out the attacks on workers throughout next year.

According to the latest figures, 6.7 million workers received short-time work payments in May. Most of them receive 60 percent (67 percent for parents) of their last net wage, meaning they must accept huge pay cuts. Some large companies and public corporations top this up to around 80 percent of a worker’s previous wage, but this still results in a pay reduction of 20 percent. The increase of short-time work payments agreed in April by the federal government was a fraud and will only benefit a handful of workers.

The current short-time work regulations will expire in March 2021. The IG Metall and other trade unions are demanding an extension to March 2022. Earlier this month, Reiner Hoffmann, head of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) reiterated this demand in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag. The current crisis is hitting “us at a time in which many key sectors, like auto, are under tremendous pressure to change, and international relations are extremely tense,” said Hoffmann.

“Pressure to change” and “extremely tense international relations” are euphemisms to describe the rapidly intensifying rivalries in the world market, which governments are fighting out with tariffs and sanctions, and the companies and trade unions with cost-cutting at the expense of the working class.

For example, the supervisory board and the head of the works council at Daimler’s main plant in Stuttgart-Untertürkheim have proposed saving thousands of jobs by cutting jobs at parts suppliers. “With a larger number of personnel, we can actually cut costs even more,” he explained to Handelsblatt. “How? Quite simple: by doing many of the activities ourselves that we previously outsourced at considerable cost.”

The works council at BMW is also pushing to reduce spending on outsourcing, such as at Nedcar in the Netherlands. If the works councils get their way, the planned Daimler plant in Hungary and a BMW factory in Turkey will not be built.

VW central works council chairman Berndt Osterloh called for an additional model to be produced at the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, which is the largest auto plant in Europe and currently only running at half capacity. This would necessarily mean that a model would be cut from another plant.

In plain language, this means that the job cuts should be carried out in other countries, but not in Germany. When trade union officials like Kerner now appeal for the state to intervene, because job cuts would play into the hands of the far-right, they are turning reality on its head. With its national division of the working class and constant cuts, the IG Metall acts as a breeding ground for and the cause of the rise of the right.

Workers in Germany, across Europe and internationally can only take forward their struggle against this by organising independent action committees, unifying their struggles internationally, and taking up the fight for socialism to place the interests of society above the profit drive of big business.

US steps up war against Huawei

Nick Beams

The Trump administration has announced new bans on Huawei aimed at crippling the Chinese telecommunications giant and eliminating it from the rollout of 5G mobile phone technology around the world.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced on Monday that companies will have to obtain a license to sell Huawei any microchip that has been made using American equipment or software.

The latest move further tightens restrictions already introduced on Huawei. US companies had previously been allowed to sell microchips made by US companies so long as they had not been designed by Huawei.

The Wall Street Journal reported that under the new regulations, Huawei will now not be able to buy “even widely available, off-the-shelf chips made by overseas firms, placing severe new limits on Huawei’s ability to source parts.”

The significance of the latest move was underscored by Dan Wang, an analyst at Gavekal Research, who told the Financial Times: “The US government has passed a death sentence on Huawei.”

He said the company was “probably finished as a maker of 5G network equipment and smartphones once its inventories run out early next year.”

Huawei has built up stocks in anticipation of the US moves but it will not be able to replenish them once they run out.

The Commerce Department said the new rules were intended to counter Huawei’s efforts to obtain workarounds to previous restrictions, including finding foreign companies to supply it with chips.

Ross said that the administration had worked to restrict Huawei’s access to US technology. But the company had worked through third parties “in a manner that undermines US national security and foreign policy interests. This multipronged action demonstrates our continuing commitment to impede Huawei’s ability to do so.”

The latest measures were again accompanied by unsubstantiated assertions that Huawei is engaged in spying operations on behalf of the Chinese government and its intelligence services.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday, Trump said: “We don’t want their equipment in the United States because they spy on us. They know everything—they knew everything we were doing. Huawei is a way of—is really—I call it the spyway.”

US authorities have furnished no evidence that Huawei is spying on behalf of Beijing, in contrast to the details provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and others that the NSA and US agencies conduct surveillance on an industrial scale.

Huawei officials have previously said that one of the reasons for the bans imposed on it is because US spy agencies find it easier to conduct their espionage through backdoors provided by American firms.

The latest measures go far beyond excluding Huawei from operating in the US—that had largely been achieved—but are aimed at eliminating it from the global market for 5G technology where it has become the market leader. Huawei is also the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment and has overtaken Samsung as the largest seller of smartphones.

The US semiconductor industry stands to lose billions of dollars from the latest move. As the Wall Street Journal noted, major companies, including Qualcomm, had been lobbying the Trump administration to ease earlier restrictions, not strengthen them.

The head of the Semiconductor Industry Association, John Neuffer, said the new regulations would bring “significant disruption to the US semiconductor industry.”

“We are surprised and concerned by the administration’s sudden shift from its prior support of a more narrow approach intended to achieve stated national security goals while limiting harm to US companies,” he said.

Neuffer said sales to China provided US companies with the profits to innovate. However, one of the reasons the US has fallen behind in developing new technology is that past profits have not been put into research. Rather they have been used to finance share buybacks and other forms of “financial engineering” to boost stock prices.

The “shift” to which Neuffer referred has come about because the real concern is not the claim that Huawei is engaged in spying. It is the threat posed to US economic—and in the longer term military—dominance by the technological advances being made by China as the US economy and financial system is mired in ever-increasing parasitism.

These geo-economic and geo-strategic concerns are now the driving force of US policy, whatever the immediate consequences for the bottom line of US corporations.

Reflecting the orientation of his administration, and behind it the US military and intelligence establishment, Trump responded to the claim that bans imposed on the Chinese messaging app WeChat would hurt US sales in China with a dismissive “whatever.”

The message delivered by Attorney-General William Barr in a major speech in July was that US corporations must get on board with the administration’s anti-China objectives or risk being branded as agents of foreign interference.

The latest US moves against China, extend beyond Huawei and other tech giants. They are now reaching into finance, sparking concerns in sections of the media.

Sydney Morning Herald economics commentator, Stephen Bartholomeusz, noted that the recent financial sanctions imposed on 11 senior Hong Kong officials, taking advantage of the dollar’s key role in the global financial system, had far reaching implications and could be extended to include Chinese banks and other financial institutions.

“China is fully aware,” he wrote, “that if the US were to fully weaponise the dollar’s dominance it could cause chaos within its financial system.”

In a column published earlier this week, Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman pointed to what he called the “decoupling” of the world’s two largest economies. It had much further to go and the hope of business that “things will soon get back to normal” was misplaced.

The “decoupling” was already spreading “beyond technology and into finance.” For the past four decades, he wrote, business logic had prevailed over strategic rivalry. “But we are in a new world in which political rivalry overrides economic incentives.

“This is not just Trumpian folly. There is now bipartisan consensus in Washington to get tough on China, even if it hurts corporate profits.”

He noted that finance had become a field of conflict and the sanctions deployed against Iran and Venezuela were beginning to be used by the US in its conflict with China.

The risks associated with the US sanctions against Chinese officials, effectively shutting them out of the US financial system, were manageable. “But what happens if and when financial sanctions are applied to major Chinese companies?”

“The past 40 years of world history,” he concluded, “have been built around globalisation and the rapprochement between the US and China. But that world is fast disappearing.”

Rachman did not spell out what is replacing it. But the evidence is clear—an economic, technology and financial war by the US against what it considers its main rival, the logic of which is military conflict.

UN Tribunal finds only one guilty of Hariri assassination and no evidence of Syrian or Hezbollah involvement

Jean Shaoul

Confounding the expectations of the imperialist and regional powers, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) declared that there is no evidence the Hezbollah leadership or the Syrian government were involved in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

After 14 years of deliberations, yesterday the court in The Hague issued a guilty verdict against Salim Jamil Ayyash, one of the four low-ranking Hezbollah members charged with conspiracy to carry out the massive suicide car-bomb attack that killed Hariri and 21 others on February 14, 2005. It cleared the other three accused on all counts and announced the withdrawal of the warrants for their arrests.

The tribunal was set up in 2007 under pressure from Washington as the result of a UN Security Council resolution, originally to investigate claims that the assassination had been carried out by Syria, and only later switching to Hezbollah.

The investigation and trial in absentia of four Hezbollah members in a hybrid court with Lebanese criminal law and international and Lebanese judges has cost nearly $1 billion, half of it borne by Lebanon’s bankrupt government and much of the rest by the US and France.

The verdict was due on August 7, but postponed due to the August 4 Beirut port blast so as not to detract from a verdict widely expected to blame Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shi’ite party that forms Lebanon’s largest parliamentary bloc and has sat in government for the last 14 years.

Hariri was the billionaire owner of the Saudi-based construction company Solidere that was rebuilding Beirut’s downtown area destroyed during the 1975-1989 civil war. He had close ties to the US, France, and the Gulf monarchs.

Judge David Re said, “The trial chamber is of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Hariri and some of his political allies. However, there was no evidence that this Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Hariri’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”

Charges against a fifth Hezbollah suspect were dropped after he was killed in Syria in 2016. As Hezbollah denied any involvement and refused to reveal the four remaining men’s whereabouts, they were tried in absentia, with the case resting on circumstantial evidence. According to records of their mobile telephone data, the men were close to the bombing and their phones went silent immediately afterward.

The STL’s long-awaited ruling implicating just one suspect is a setback for the US and its local stooges, who planned on using a more damning verdict to further their bid to eliminate Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon and to step up the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran—aimed at overturning the government and installing a client regime. The STL has been touted as a model for an investigation into the cause of the Beirut port blast that is also being attributed to Hezbollah.

Hariri was one of a long line of prominent politicians, businessmen, journalists, and officials who have died violent deaths in Lebanon over the last 30 years. Variously attributed to Israel, Syria, Lebanese political factions, mafia-style gangs, and Islamist terrorists, they testify to the country’s political instability under the impact of the US-led wars in the region as Lebanon became the focal point in the contest between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, France and its allies, and Syria, Iran and its allies—Hezbollah and Amal within Lebanon—and Hamas in Palestine.

The assassination was initially seized upon by the Bush administration to blame and denounce Syria. Damascus had been granted tutelage over Lebanon as a reward for its support for the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1990, via the US-Saudi brokered Taif Accords that ended the Lebanese civil war.

Not only was the charge unsubstantiated, the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad had nothing to gain and everything to lose by engineering Hariri’s assassination under conditions where the United Nations Security Council, under pressure from Washington, had passed Resolution 1559 the previous September, demanding that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

The Bush administration was seeking the overthrow of the Syrian regime, which the Pentagon had long accused of sheltering a “command-and-control” centre of Iraqi Baathists, allegedly planning the attacks on US forces in Iraq, as well as Palestinian groups opposed to Israel, including Hamas. In the event, using the assassination as justification, Washington achieved most of its desired outcome with the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon just weeks later, bringing Lebanon firmly within the US orbit.

The powers that most clearly stood to gain from Hariri’s assassination and blaming the crime on Syria were the US and Israel, both of whom have an unparalleled record of assassinating their political opponents, with car bombings in Beirut a regular feature of Mossad’s operations.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration won support for a United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon to determine the identity of Hariri’s killers, even though he held no state position at the time. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals were arrested and detained without charges for four years.

In July 2006, the US gave the green light to Israel to wage war to eradicate Hezbollah. A six-week operation killed more than 1,200 people, injured many more, damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and devastated much of the country’s infrastructure, but failed to achieve its political objective. Instead, Hezbollah, not the Sunni and Christian forces in the government, won popular support for its leading role in opposing Israel. State Department cables subsequently released by WikiLeaks revealed that the ruling pro-US Forward Movement of Sa’ad Hariri, Rafiq’s son, had discussed with the US the preparations for a military attack by Israel against Hezbollah.

Later, when Washington sought to bring Damascus in from the cold to isolate Iran, the STL and Sa’ad Hariri reversed themselves, saying they no longer believed that Syria was involved in the assassination. The four generals were released, with Hariri later admitting they had been framed up on false evidence.

Hariri and the STL then switched their attention to Hezbollah, blaming rogue elements in the group, an accusation Hezbollah denied. This created acute political tensions that led to a standoff between the two rival blocs at Beirut airport and established Hezbollah as the most powerful force in the land. In the years that followed, Hezbollah has been represented in all Lebanon’s governments, earning it the undying hatred of Washington, Riyadh, Paris, and Tel Aviv.

Sa’ad Hariri, who was present as the court in The Hague gave its ruling, said, “We accept the verdict of the tribunal and want justice to be implemented,” adding that he wanted “just punishment” for the criminals. Making clear that he (and presumably the US) intend to proceed as planned in targeting Hezbollah, he told reporters, “I think everybody’s expectation was much higher than what came out, but I believe that the tribunal came out with a result that is satisfying.”

The fraudulent STL represented an attempt by the US to channel and divide workers along sectarian lines, in pursuit of its own geo-strategic interests. Its purpose has been to mobilise forces against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran and to suppress any unified struggle of impoverished workers in the Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

Only an independent intervention by the working class can prevent a wider war in the Middle East. Workers, irrespective of their religion, language, or ethnicity, must unite in opposing the growing danger of imperialist intervention, the deepening assault on their living standards, and the attempts to incite sectarian divisions. What is required is a unified struggle by workers against the cause of their oppression—the capitalist system—and for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Chinese prime minister: 600 million people earn less than $145 a month

Lily Zhao

On May 28, during a press conference after the National People’s Congress, Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, stated that “there are still some 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 RMB ($US145). It’s not even enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.”

This comment about the impoverished existence of more than a third of the country’s population provides a glimpse into the staggering level of social inequality and the harsh living conditions faced by workers.

While almost half of its population earns less than $145 a month, China recorded 373 billionaires in 2020, the second highest figure in the world. There is also a significant upper middle class. China is the largest market for all Western luxury brands, accounting for 33 percent of the global market in 2018.

Li’s comments were in response to a question raised by a journalist from People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

People near tibet province. (Image Credit: Flickr user 43423301N07)

The journalist pointed out that 2020 was originally planned as the deadline to win “the battle against poverty”—a campaign to lift 70 million people out of poverty launched by the government in October 2015. The reporter then asked if that will still be fulfilled this year, given the huge declines in household incomes of many due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Li acknowledged that “before Covid-19 struck, there were some five million people living below the poverty line”, and “because of the disease, some may have fallen back to poverty”. But he then declared that the government “[has] confidence that we are going to ensure the essential needs of our people and achieve our target.”

However, as his own figures made clear, the bright picture painted by Li of completely eradicating poverty by the end of this year has nothing to do with the social reality facing people in China. The very austere measure of absolute poverty excludes hundreds of millions who are struggling to survive on very low monthly incomes.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China, as of 2018, the rural population was about 564 million, and their average annual disposable income was just 14,617 RMB ($US2,090), or about 1,218 RMB ($174) a month. In poverty-stricken areas in the countryside, the average drops to about $138 every month. So the rural population constitutes a large portion in the 600 million people referred to by Li whose monthly income is below $145.

On top of low wages, job opportunities in the countryside are in short supply. Even though the official unemployment rate in rural China is not published, ethnographic studies have shown that there are few factories or companies around most villages. Those that exist are only able to employ a few handfuls of people.

The low wages and scarce work opportunities in the countryside are one of the major factors contributing to the huge population of migrant workers in China who seek higher-paid jobs in the cities to support their families in the countryside. In 2019, there were 174.25 million rural migrant workers in China, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

However, while the average monthly income for migrant workers was about three times higher than in the countryside, living in the cities is still a struggle. Even the official average monthly income does not reflect the actual income of migrant workers. A study by the International Labour Office explained that economic inequality among migrant workers is a lot higher than among the general urban population, so a large portion of migrant workers earn significantly less than the reported average.

Migrant workers experience great job insecurity, changing jobs every one or two years on average. Many work without a written contract, which makes it extremely hard for them to get compensation when facing wage arrears and work injuries. The majority work overtime on a daily basis and on weekends as well, with, at most, two or three days off every month. Without overtime, they do not earn enough to cover their living expenses in the cities, let alone to send money back home. Factory managements use the threat of taking away overtime to discipline militant workers who express discontent over wages and working conditions.

Urban living costs are high, especially in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen where a large portion of migrant workers live. A 2010 ethnographic study calculated that the entire annual average income of a migrant worker would not be enough to buy even 1 square-metre of an apartment on the periphery of Beijing. During the past decade, the average housing price in Beijing has doubled.

To reduce rental costs, most migrant workers live in shantytowns, or “villages within cities”, that are crowded and whose infrastructure is usually substandard. The average living space is only a few square metres per person. Most own little or no furniture, and have to share public bathrooms with residents of an entire floor or building. Some choose to live in factory dorms, where they usually share a room with many others, have virtually no private space, and have limited access to essentials like hot shower water.

Migrant workers have very limited or no access to most social services in the cities like education and pensions. In 2017, according to the Ministry of Education, there are 15.5 million “left-behind children” in China, whose parents work in the cities throughout the year and leave them in the countryside because schools in the cities either have very limited admissions for non-local students, or require a large extra-tuition payment. For the workers themselves, a study by Wuhan University shows that less than 22 percent are covered by the basic old-age pension schemes in the cities where they live.

The plight facing migrant workers is shared by working class youth and many urban workers: low wages, unemployment, high living costs, mortgage, and poor access to high quality education and health care. A survey conducted by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) in 2019 shows that 56.5 percent of urban households are burdened by debt, and 75.9 percent of the debts are from house mortgages. According to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study, “between 2010 and 2016, the share of debt held by highly indebted households—with a debt-to-income (DTI) ratio above 4—increased from around a quarter to almost half.” Among low-income households, the DTI ratio has increased to almost 6. The study concluded that these conditions will make low-income groups most vulnerable to “adverse income shocks”.

The COVID-19 pandemic is exactly such a “shock.” It has intensified not only the debt crisis of many families but rendered the living conditions of the working class ever more precarious. The job market is contracting. This year’s college graduates, and rural migrant workers who have finally made their way back to the cities, are confronting unemployment. There are many reports of severe wage cuts and refusals to pay compensation to replace salaries lost during the months of lockdown.

While the vast majority of people struggle to get a decent wage, housing, social services, and education, there is a distinctively different reality for the super-rich in China. China is now one of the most socially unequal countries, with a Gini co-efficient of 0.465 in 2019. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that the annual average disposable income for the top 20 percent of the population is 70,639.5 RMB ($10,091), almost 11 times higher than that of the bottom 20 percent, and twice than that of the next 20 immediately below them. The PBOC survey referred to previously shows that among urban populations, the assets of the top 20 percent household constitutes 47.5 percent of total assets, while the bottom 20 percent only constitutes 2.6 percent.

Prime Minister Li’s concern for the hundreds of millions on low incomes is as meaningless as the government’s “battle against poverty” campaign. The source of the enormous social inequality is the opening up of the country in the 1980s as a cheap labor platform for foreign investment by the Chinese Communist Party as it overturned the gains of the 1949 Revolution and restored capitalism. It is the unhindered exploitation of workers that has enriched the resultant layer of parasitic billionaires and super-rich in China, as well as capitalists around the world.

SAG-AFTRA’s Health Plan restructuring faces massive opposition

Marc Wells

The Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union sent out a memo to its 160,000 members announcing that its health plan will undergo a massive restructuring. The move has provoked enormous opposition from current and retired performers and other media professionals who need health care coverage more than ever due to the continued spread of COVID-19.

The three basic modifications, which will come into full effect on January 1, 2021, are:

1. Changes to the earnings requirements that will reduce the number of participants who qualify for the plan.

2. Increased premiums that result in more revenue to the plan.

3. Benefit changes that reduce plan cost but increase participants’ out-of-pocket costs.

The type of coverage received under SAG-AFTRA’s health care plan has been based on income. To get Tier I coverage a union member has to have an income of at least $35,020 a year. The inferior Tier II coverage has an income threshold of at least $18,040 a year. Income is typically based on wages paid for individual film, TV, stage or recording sessions and residuals from past performances.

The restructuring eliminates the two tiers and brings the threshold to $25,950 a year for participants under 65. For many retired members over 65, the new plan means loss of SAG-AFTRA health care, since they will no longer be allowed to use their residuals income to qualify for the new threshold, with a few exceptions, until 2022.

This will translate into a loss of supplemental coverage for a vulnerable layer of older members, as well as primary coverage for many others who, in light of today’s state of the entertainment industry, find it hard, if not impossible, to get sufficient sessional union work (and residuals if applicable) to reach the $25,950 annual threshold.

The union argues that those who no longer qualify for coverage can either pay for COBRA coverage—out of workers’ own pockets—or may be eligible for coverage through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). After the first year, during which the plan offers a discounted COBRA rate, this will mean substantially higher premiums and other costs for low-income individuals and families.

Premiums are being increased considerably. The union fund is also demanding that members with more dependents pay a steeper increase. Therefore, an individual participant will be hit by a 25 percent increase. Add one dependent and the premium will jump 52.5 percent. With two or more dependents the increase is a whopping 99.2 percent, or nearly double the old premium.

The new plan will now exclude spouses who may have an employer’s plan. Moreover, deductibles are also doubled (from $250/500 to $500/1,000) and the out-of-pocket maximum for out-of-network services is being eliminated, potentially exposing members to financial disaster.

Rank-and-file opposition has been massive. A petition launched by a few performers received nearly 14,000 signatures in three days and social media sites have blown up with denunciation of the union.

David Christian, for example, wrote, “I worked my tail off for 28 years to get lifetime medical at 65, and to have the SAG/AFTRA Health Plan Trustees pull the insurance that we've all worked so hard for is unconscionable and an absolute betrayal.”

Todd Giebenhain said, “I have Cystic Fibrosis and this is tantamount to war against our own members. Which therefore inherently threatens the entire industry. We need extra assurances that we will be covered by our union at all costs, at all debt levels possible, during this pandemic. This action against the sick and retired, let alone every individual actor, is exactly the opposite. Completely inexcusable and evil. Lifetimes of work, and trust in the eventual benefits of our contributions, amounting to a death sentence for many. What good is keeping the Health Fund in the black for future years if it causes the union to implode upon itself in the meantime?”

Gerald Webb commented, “Our leadership has failed us. Worse, they put a theatrical contract in front of us to vote on knowing the poor state of the pension plan and hid it from us until after the contract vote.”

George Bryson added, “60 years as a SAG member. Now I don’t make the money I used to make. It’s ok. I’ve got health insurance from SAG. I’m old and now can relax. Now you’re stripping my health insurance away. Your decision is going to kill me and many of my retired, older, SAG member friends. Horrible decision!”

The union claims that, out of the 33,000 current health plan participants and their 32,000 dependents, 3,300 members and 2,700 dependents won’t qualify according to the new eligibility requirements. This is a substantial underestimation of the damage that is based only on preliminary data. The reality will doubtlessly be harsher since entertainment production remains shut down and making any sessional income this year is practically impossible.

The fact that only 20 percent of the total SAG-AFTRA membership is even eligible for coverage, moreover, speaks volumes about the state of the entertainment industry and the precarious conditions for hundreds of thousands of artists and performers who have do not even have medical coverage.

Claims by some of the union health fund trustees that the union waged a huge battle to protect medical coverage are nothing but lies. David White, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director, chief negotiator and health fund trustee recently told a membership conference, “It’s union trustees versus management trustees on many of these decisions.”

The SAG-AFTRA Health Plan is governed by a board of 40 trustees, made up of 20 union trustees and 20 producer trustees. It is based on the corporatist program of labor-management collusion, which has produced disastrous consequences for workers in every industry. In order to protect the profits of the giant entertainment firms, the union signed agreements that allowed them to make contributions to the fund that were far below the rate of medical cost inflation.

Last month, SAG-AFTRA pushed through a new, three-year contract with television and theatrical producers with less than 30 percent of the membership voting. While SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris called the deal “a terrific wage package and an outsized increase in SAG-AFTRA Health Plan contributions,” the agreement included only a one percent increase in the producers’ contribution to the fund in the first year, with options to divert 0.5 percent from workers’ meager three percent wage increases in years two and three.

Both the producers and the union trustees are pointing to increasing deficits to justify the cuts. The fund has been suffering since the SAG and AFTRA merger in 2017. What followed was a succession of fund deficits: $48 million in 2018, $50 million in 2019, with a projected $141 million this year and $83 million next year. The board advised that, at the current rate, reserves would have run out by 2024 and the restructuring was “necessary in order to protect the plan.”

With the producers responsible for 80 percent of the plan’s funding, the union—which maintains a formal separation from the union trustees—has claimed that the economic downturn as the chief reason for the restructuring. However, industry executives have made it clear that the cuts were planned long before the pandemic.

Michael Estrada, Chief Executive Officer for the plan, commented in a Zoom conference that rising health care costs were the chief driving force for the benefit reductions. “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the health plan, the trustees must balance the relationship between revenues and expenses,” declared Estrada. “Since they have less control over the revenue to the plan, primarily determined by the bargaining parties, the trustees focused their attention on expenses.”

SAG-AFTRA officials have feigned surprise and shock over the cuts. It is simply not credible, however, that only a month or so before the announcement of a major health care coverage restructuring the president of the union had no idea about what was being planned. It is far more likely that this was worked out between the union and management behind the backs of union members.

At a more fundamental level, the union’s collusion in the attack on health care benefits is the result of the capitalist profit system, which the unions fully support. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters and other unions control trillions of dollars in pension and health care funds, which have become a lucrative source of investment income for the union bureaucracy. These union business executives now have a financial incentive to cut benefits and lower the life expectancy of union members in order to retain more money in these investment funds.

This is why performers and every other section of workers need to build new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to fight for what workers need and not what the corporate and financial oligarchy say is affordable.

The mobilization of workers to fight the pandemic and demand full health care coverage for all has to be guided by a socialist program in opposition to both corporate-controlled parties, including Democratic presidential nominee Joseph Biden who, as vice president in the Obama administration, oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the super-rich in US history.

In act of high seas piracy, US hijacks Iranian oil bound for Venezuela

Bill Van Auken

The US interdiction of oil shipments bound from Iran to Venezuela represents a dangerous escalation of the “maximum pressure” sanctions that Washington has imposed against both countries, raising the threat of armed conflict.

The Department of Justice issued a statement Friday bragging that it had carried out the “largest-ever seizure of fuel shipments from Iran.” It said that “approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum” had been stolen “with the assistance of foreign partners.”

There has been no indication of what “foreign partners” were involved in this act of piracy, but US officials claim that the seizure did not involve military force. Rather, it appears that some combination of threats and bribes were used to convince the Greek owners of the four tankers carrying the fuel— identified as the Bella, Bering, Pandi and Luna, all of them flying Liberian flags–to give it up.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the threats included sanctions against the ships’ owners and crews that would prevent them from accessing US ports, US banks and US dollars.

The Greek-owned tanker Bella, one of four ships from which the US hijacked oil bound for Venezuela.

The pseudolegal basis for Washington’s act of high seas piracy was a seizure order issued by a US District Court judge in Washington, DC based upon the Justice Department’s claim that the oil constituted “foreign assets or sources of influence” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a major component of the Iranian military, which Washington has branded as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” This designation, imposed without any justification in April of last year, represented the first time that Washington has deemed a branch of another country’s government as “terrorist.”

Since unilaterally abrogating the JCPOA nuclear deal between the major powers and Tehran in 2018, the Trump administration has imposed a crippling economic sanctions regime against Iran tantamount to a state of war, while building up US forces in the region in preparation for military confrontation.

Gloating over the operation, President Donald Trump falsely claimed at a White House press briefing last Friday, “We seized the tankers, and we’re moving them ... to Houston.”

In reality, the oil was offloaded from the Greek-owned vessels onto tankers contracted by the US military. Two of these transfers took place off the coast of Oman, and two off the coast of Mozambique. The Greek-owned ships themselves were not seized.

While denouncing the US action, Iranian officials have pointed out that the oil had already been sold to Venezuela and did not belong to Iran. Furthermore, the ships themselves were neither owned nor flagged by Iran.

When the seizure order was issued in July, Iran denounced it at the United Nations as an act of “piracy.”

“Any attempt on the high seas to prevent Iran from involving itself in legal trade with any country that it chooses would be an act of piracy, pure and simple,” Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for the Iranian mission to the UN, said in a statement. “This is a direct threat to international peace and security and contravenes international law, including the United Nations Charter,” he added.

Iran had warned that any attempt to interdict its own ships would be met with swift retaliation. “The Islamic Republic will reciprocate any hostile action to contain its legal rights and has not allowed any country to take any such action so far,” an official of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council warned.

The Iranian military’s boarding of the tanker Wilda in the Gulf of Oman last week was an apparent response to the US oil seizure. The vessel appeared to be owned by the same Greek shipping company that agreed to surrender the oil from the four tankers targeted by Washington.

The US act of piracy follows Iran’s successful shipment of $46 million worth of gasoline and petroleum products, including diluents needed by Venezuelan refineries to turn the country’s crude oil into gasoline, to the South American country in May. Iranian tankers carried the cargo. Washington reacted with rage toward this breaching of the “maximum pressure” sanctions regime that it has imposed against both Iran and Venezuela.

At the time, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned, “If our oil tankers face problems in the Caribbean Sea or anywhere in the world by the Americans, they will face problems reciprocally.” Iranian officials warned that if Iran was prevented from shipping oil, then no country would be able to do so, suggesting a possible blockade of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which some 30 percent of sea-borne oil products pass.

The seizure of the Venezuelan-bound oil by means of threats and bribery is just one step from the use of US military force against Iranian shipping that would spark a major new war in the Middle East, which in turn could provoke a global conflagration.

The worldwide crisis that has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, most intensely within the United States itself, has done nothing to blunt the aggressive pursuits of US imperialism and militarism.

Iran, with over 345,000 coronavirus cases and more than 20,000 recorded deaths, has been the worst hit country in the Middle East. While Venezuela had initially appeared spared the horrific toll being recorded in Brazil, Peru, Chile and Colombia, it is now recording over 1,000 new cases daily, while reporting less than 300 deaths. The spread of the deadly virus has been accelerated by the return of Venezuelans who migrated to other Latin American countries in search of work as the Venezuelan economy cratered under the impact of falling oil prices and the punishing US sanctions regime.

Washington sees the crisis and the immense human suffering that it entails as another weapon of war, to be exploited in its quest for hegemony over the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Even as millions are infected and hundreds of thousands die, the threat of a global war that could claim the lives of billions only continues to grow.

US military threats against Venezuela have escalated since April, when Trump took the stage at a supposed COVID-19 briefing to announce the dispatch of a naval task force to the Caribbean for the so-called purpose of stopping drug trafficking, in particular, from Venezuela.

Under the phony pretext of narcotics interdiction—90 percent of the world’s cocaine comes out of Colombia, whose right-wing government is Washington’s closest regional ally—the Pentagon has deployed the largest military force in the region since the 1989 US invasion of Panama.

The US military deployment against Venezuela was followed by an abortive invasion at the beginning of May by mercenary units led by ex-US special forces troops. A Venezuelan court last week sentenced two former Green Berets, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, to 20 years in prison for their part in the operation, which was aimed at seizing and killing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has vowed that Washington will use all means to secure the release of the mercenaries.

US aggression against both Venezuela and Iran, which respectively hold the world’s first and fourth largest oil reserves, is bound up with the strategic confrontation between the US and China, which has cemented ties with both countries.

Iran has become even more of a focus for US military aggression following the revelation last month that Beijing and Tehran had signed a 25-year “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement involving $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iranian infrastructure in return for guaranteed energy exports. The deal also includes a significant security component, allowing China to deploy some 5,000 security forces to guard its projects, make free use of Iranian bases and build a port on the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

US imperialism is not about to surrender enforcement of its unilateral sanctions regimes against Venezuela or Iran. Significantly, the Trump administration has announced that Elliott Abrams, convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, will now serve not only as its special representative to Venezuela, where he has led the administration’s unsuccessful attempts at regime change, but as its special envoy to Iran as well.

The appointment signals a shift towards stepped up aggression. Driven by US imperialism’s attempts to offset its crisis and decline by military means, the threat of war against both Iran and Venezuela is sharpened by the domestic crisis of the US itself and may be accelerated by the electoral calendar, with a new war a distinctly possible “October surprise.”