COVID-19 Changes Work in Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

In a great workplace, most people would work independently of their immediate boss, and they might even like what they do. Having enough time and being flexible is increasingly more important to many employees in Germany. Even before the Coronavirus pandemic, there were more and more German companies that started to realise that the work of the future does not lie in a distant future any longer. Recent changes in work arrangements in Germany are not all about technology, albeit technologies such as Zoom, cloud computing, platform works, and algorithms have aided recent changes in German work arrangements.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, German companies and corporations have started to realise that work can be done very differently from how it was done in the past. What is happening in Germany no longer lies in the distant future. It is happening today. Since early 2020, nobody had a fixed work desk at Cologne’s headquarters of the European insurance giant AXA. Those few employees who still come into the office and do not work from home enter AXA’s open-plan offices – not a good idea during a global pandemic. AXA’s office is nicely furnished with fake forest wallpaper and basketball baskets. Those few arriving in the morning, look for a desk that has not been occupied – which is plenty nowadays. AXA’s “no desk policy” applies equally to everyone, whether the head of Germany’s subsidiary, departmental bosses, and it even applies to students on an internship.

However, Germany not only experiments with new work designs, Germany, as expected, has plenty of regulations when it comes to working hours. For example, employees at a Bielefeld digital agency Rheingans have been working only five hours a day since 2017 instead of eight. During this time, the company did not go bankrupt. Instead, it has managed to accomplish the same workload. Beyond that, employees get the same salary. Every day after 1 pm, workers have plenty of time for social activities, outings, hobbies, friends, family, and volunteering.

Germany’s medical technology manufacturer Braun is currently testing an organisational model in which – instead of following the classical managerialist structure of departmental hierarchies –employees can volunteer to participate in what Braun calls team circles. These flat-hierarchy teams engage in large and new projects and are organised in a self-managed manner. However, top management’s control has not disappeared.

Core changes such as this have emerged in recent work re-arrangements in Germany. To some extent, these transformations have altered Germany’s traditionally rigid hierarchical patterns of work. For several years now, the concept of flat organisational structures has been making the rounds in corporate boardrooms, management conferences, academic publications, and in corporate team coaching. In Germany, this new approach to work is seen as an answer to the question of what work can look like in a digitised and increasingly individualistic corporate world. German supporters of flatter organisational structures are convinced that the era of all-controlling managers hiding behind office doors and on top floors is largely over.

Virtually, the same goes for the classic – i.e. highly inflexible – 9-to-5 working day as well as for rigid corporate structures so profoundly ingrained into Germany’s work psyche. No longer might there be a hierarchy of managerial levels in a pyramid-like organisation chart with the CEO as a rule. The time in which new ideas are only implemented after they have been tested down to the last detail should also be over. The Coronavirus pandemic has changed that. Some German companies and corporations are moving towards a greater tolerance for trial-and-error tests for new corporate structures. Old inflexibilities are quickly being eliminated.

According to one recent study, 74% of German companies have put the topic of work re-organisation on the corporate agenda. Some even talk about an epochal upheaval in Germany’s work arrangements. This might transform German office work for good. Given recent developments, this might well be a serious trend. What will be required in the future are plenty of companies that realise they can no longer avoid very serious changes to the way work is done. In many German offices, people are starting to recognise that rigid hierarchical forms of organisation simply no longer work.

In some cases, German companies simply have to react to the demands of employees as well as the Coronavirus pandemic and change their organisational structure. Often these changes or some of them will remain into the future. Many people in Germany’s white-collar workforce want to engage, to contribute ideas. They want to be more flexible when it comes to working hours and a better work-life balance. Germany’s labour market has been moving in this direction for years.

Even in Germany, more and more people are working part-time. Part-time work was just a tick over 14% in 1990. But today, it is almost a third of Germany’s entire workforce. Like everywhere, German women, in particular, have been driving this change. Almost half of them work part-time. Still, men, especially younger men, are slowly catching up. 11.5% of all men were employed part-time in 2019 compared to just 2% in the early 1990s.

The departure from Germany’s traditional 40-hour week – already a fact in Germany’s powerful metal industry since the 1990s – fits two further facts. Since 1990, the productivity of every hour worked in Germany has grown by almost half – unlike wages! This indicates automation, robotics but also work intensification. On the downside, Germans also work longer and longer as they get older. This also indicates a trend toward further work intensification. But overall, Germany is in the midst of a massive redistribution of work. The new flexibility, combined with a very serious increase in working from home, is supported by a serious desire to spend less time commuting to work. But these trends are neither universal nor evenly spread.

In most cases, German white-collar work remains tied to fixed working hours. Until the Coronavirus pandemic, office work was still locked in a specific location – the office. With the possibilities of digitised work and a serious push from the Coronavirus pandemic, German bosses have realised that these old forms of work are no longer working. Furnished by IT, the need for employees to work in a specific location is vastly diminishing. Cloud computing has facilitated this move even further. Some German work experts already believe this is the end of the classic office.

Still, work will continue to mean that there are specific work processes to be followed, and there will also be places where you can meet – virtually or physically. The Coronavirus pandemic has given these changes a very significant boost. Suddenly, some of Germany’s relatively rigid corporate executives have become somewhat open to questioning the need for a physical presence. The Coronavirus pandemic and the rise of Zoom has also challenged the need for business trips. Contrary to what many thoughts, the topic of new work arrangements not only concerns Germany’s relatively tiny group of start-ups and digital agencies. Greater flexibility applies to many companies, and it applies to small business companies with less than 500 employees.

The main reason why these changes are well received is that they fit perfectly with employees’ desire for greater self-determination and meaningful work. This applies particularly to young and highly qualified Germans just entering the world of work. Outsourcing, automation, and an increased used of robots have eliminated plenty of strenuous, dangerous, and monotonous tasks. Outsourcing, automation and an overall move towards the service industry has given employees some opportunities to develop rather freely. This utopia has been as old as automation itself.

During the early 1930S, the economist John Maynard Keynes assumed that workers would only have to work three hours a day. That did not quite materialise. Later, the same optimism was found in the work of the philosopher Jeremy Rifkin. He also assumed that the increase in production through digitisation would make large parts of conventional work superfluous. But the reality of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic is far more depressing than Keynes assumed. Keynes wasn’t able to foresee the Coronavirus pandemic. As the Coronavirus pandemic hit economy after economy, millions of workers around the world are facing unemployment. Many workers have lost their jobs because of the Corona pandemic, and many will continue to do so.

What has been shown, once again in the current crisis, is that it is precisely those professions that are indispensable to social life – health workers, for example – that are often the ones that are furthest away from the aforementioned new forms of work. In many of these professions, employees would be happy if the same altering rigidity of working time would apply to them as well as the 40-hour workweek they are expected to work.

Long before the Coronavirus crisis, it became clear that even in Germany, its steady rise in productivity has not been possible without exhausting (over)work. In addition, Germany has the largest low-wage sector in Europe. Nearly eight million people – more than one in five working people in Germany – earn less than €11.40 (US$ 14.-) per hour in 2018. Most of these are women. Many are forced to take on multiple jobs to get by.

Current developments led to the question, whether the hope of decent work and space for self-development, in the midst of tougher global competition and a global crisis, will remain an illusion. In many German companies and corporations, there are still rigid power structures occupied by Germany’s corporate apparatchiks. These cannot be discussed away. All the much-trumpeted hype about new organisational models, flatter hierarchies and trust should not obscure this.

For a very long time, many have not understood why the move to new forms of work proceeded so slowly in Germany. German managers remain highly sceptical about new forms of work compared to their non-German counterparts. Perhaps, one should be very clear about this. The main task of companies is not to create decent work, to design work sensibly, and to make work humane. Ever since Karl Marx, this remains the truth even though many people don’t like to hear that.

The central purpose of a company is to make profits and to satisfy its customers. Many German companies and corporations and their corporate apparatchiks have no interest in meaningful work arrangements, cooperation, working closely with Germany’s trade unions and works councils, as well as extending Germany’s well-known co-determination. Instead, Germany’s rigid managers merely ensure that the corporate mission is carried out as quickly, as efficiently, and as cheaply as possible. In other words, work arrangements are nothing more than an element to gain even greater efficiency, productivity, and profit-maximisation.

Perhaps German companies and corporations would be well advised to mentally separate internal work organisation and cooperation from its customers. If German managers fail to create good and decent working conditions, workers and trade unions might – one day – be powerful enough to enforce such changes onto Germany’s corporate apparatchiks. As for today, the trend is in the opposite direction. In Germany, like in many other countries, the number of jobs without collective bargaining coverage is increasing.

During the 1980s, more than a third of all German workers were still organised in trade unions. Today, it is well below 20% and union membership is concentrated in old industries, and union members themselves are on the older side of Germany’s age pyramid. Worse, the number of jobs without collective bargaining has increased from 24% to 43% between 1998 and 2018. Not surprisingly, those German workers with the weakest trade unions representation are workers with the lowest wages. It pays to be a union member, and that is why capital fights tooth and nail against trade unions. Unlike workers, they know what they are doing just as Warren Buffet said,

“There’s class warfare, all right,

but it’s my class, the rich class,

that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

But even among the young, well-educated knowledge workers of the digital economy, trade unions no longer have a good standing. Worse, new work arrangements may even reinforce the de-unionisation trend. One reason is that to many younger workers, trade unions have been made to appear unnecessary and old-fashioned. To rely on collective bargaining and trade unions has been removed from their mind-set.

Unknowingly, these young professionals are taking a new risk. The home office can quickly become home sourcing – like outsourcing. Once executives and their corporate apparatchiks realise that it doesn’t really matter where their employees are located, the idea to replace them with freelancers workers or “home sources” from other countries like China, India, Romania, etc. where wage levels are much lower, is a short step. Given the way, the mind of many corporate apparatchiks work, this is a real danger.

With the Coronavirus pandemic and new work arrangements on the horizon, old contradictions between capital and labour have not gone away. Much of this is at the heart of a manifesto on the Future of Work after Corona signed by more than 3,000 scientists worldwide– including Thomas Piketty, Rahel Jaeggi, and Nancy Fraser. In mid-May this year, it was simultaneously published in dozens of media outlets around the world – in the midst of the Corona crisis. The need for such a manifesto has shown that employees are still seen as an interchangeable resource. In reality, employees remain the key to the success of employers and even more so for those who invest their work, their health, and their life in a company.

To achieve decent work in a post-Coronavirus world, stakeholders must formulate a clear and comprehensible vision of what a world of work of the future should look like. Work should be more flexible. But it should not fall behind the achievements of current labour regulations and labour laws. Most importantly, the transformation process towards digitalisation, working from home, etc. needs to be based on participation and the giving up of old and out-dated decision-making power currently still held by corporate apparatchiks. Corporate leaders should, for once, not hide that behind the smart but deceptive rhetoric of Managerialism.

Today, it is still a fact that employees are mostly excluded from the management of companies. Still, capital claims the right to manage without realising that it is getting in the way of an innovative workplace desperately needed for the future. The capital-labour contradiction remains the most important reasons for the stark imbalance when it comes to the governing of the workplace.

Beyond that, there is still the option of Taking Back the Economy. Truly participatory models for online platforms have already been developed. These are Platform Cooperatives. Among the many examples is New York’s Up & Go. At first glance, it appears like a standard App through which cleaners offer their services. At the surface, it operates at the same principle as it happens on platforms like Handy and Taskrabbit or Germany’s helpling.de. For the latter, it is customary in these corporate platforms to have no security, while workers hardly earn a minimum wage. As a viable alternative, there are collaborative platforms like Up & Go.

Up & Go‘s fifty cleaners are all immigrant women from South America. Unlike the corporate behemoths of the internet, they own the company. Up & Go’s workers pay 95% of the revenue to themselves. The rest goes to the digital infrastructure. When customers book an Up & Go service, the boss comes. All workers are the boss. Up & Go is an attempt to combine the best of two worlds of the global cooperative movement. For customers, it is easy to book help quickly through the App. For the female workers, there is the safety of a regular job and the pride of being an entrepreneur.

Yet, platform cooperatives make up only a tiny market share. Worse, not all will survive in competition with corporations behemoths like Uber, Germany’s Lieferando and others. These corporations have very little say on workers’ participation, cooperation, and co-determination.

This is precisely where the proposal of The Future of Work after Corona manifesto comes in. It proposes that states should issue job guarantees so that no one is forced to accept poor working conditions. Unsurprisingly, no other proposal in the manifesto has met with as much scepticism from the corporate business press. The elimination of unemployment seems to be unwanted. Capitalism always had unemployment. In fact, it thrives on unemployment so much so that a standard 5% unemployment rate is presented as “normal” and even healthy by many neoliberal economists.

Still, there is also strong support for states to underwrite a national job guarantee. It comes from a non-neoliberal macroeconomic perspective. Economies can be stabilised by such a job guarantee. After a slump in the economy, for example, – like the one during the current Corona crisis – workers and the economy do not have to contend with the negative consequences of job losses and reduced consumer demands. These benefits outweigh the potential cost of a state-issued job guarantee.

Such a guarantee can be a vital step towards unconditional basic income or UBI. UBI seeks to decouple work and income from life. Most likely, the vast majority of people would use their newfound UBI freedom for meaningful self-determined activities. Next to UBI, a regulated and state-supported labour market will continue to play a central role. On the way to UBI, a state-guaranteed job might be designed to eliminate the working poor. Even those highly skilled workers in Germany’s top companies may, at some point, ask themselves, why do we still have these dysfunctional, out-dated, anti-democratic structures at work?

Anti-Turkey alliance emerging in the Arab World

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The intended target of the UAE-Israel alliance is not Iran but Turkey, whose regional clout poses a threat to Gulf rulers, says David Hearst, the editor in chief of Middle East Eye.

In an article titled – A new message resounds in the Arab world: Get Ankara – Hearst wrote Saturday: Israel had been saying for some time to Arab diplomats that it no longer regarded Iran as a military threat. The head of Mossad, Yossi Cohen, told Arab officials that Iran was “containable”.

The new foreign invader threatening the Arab world is not the Persian, nor indeed the Russian – but the Turk as reflected in the speeches at the virtual Arab League conference in Cairo on Wednesday which endorsed the UAE-Israel relations by rejecting a call to condemn the deal.

At the Arab League Foreign Ministers’ virtual meeting the UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash said: “The Turkish interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries is a clear example of negative interference in the region.” Gargash accused Turkey of threatening the security and safety of maritime traffic in Mediterranean waters, in a clear violation of relevant international laws and charters and of the sovereignty of states.

Gargash was followed by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, who  said that Turkish interventions in many Arab countries represented the most important threat to Arab national security. “Egypt will not stand idly by in the face of Turkish ambitions that are manifesting in northern Iraq, Syria and Libya in particular,” he said.

Ahmed Abu Al Ghait, Secretary-General of the Arab League, said: “The past period witnessed growing bullying and hostility by regional powers towards our Arab region, and the escalation of interference in the affairs of our Arab countries by two neighboring countries, namely Iran and Turkey.”

As for Turkey, Abu Al Ghait said Ankara continued to occupy large parts of the Syrian territories, and began its attacks on Iraqi lands and recently, it plunged into the Libyan civil war with direct military intervention. Abu Al Ghait said the League is following the situation in Libya with great concern, and hopes that the Libyan parties will reach a permanent agreement and a comprehensive ceasefire.

The chorus of statements against Turkey last week, did not go unnoticed in Ankara, Hearst said and quoted an unnamed Turkish source as saying: “The UAE has been undertaking the job to isolate Turkey in operational levels….. They have been financing it. However, the real enablers of this strategy are Israel and some US politicians close to the pro-Israeli lobby. They have been part of any effort to establish an alliance against Turkey. They have been backing the UAE in the interest of the Zionist and Evangelical alliance, especially before the presidential elections in November which could bring electoral support for their offices.”

The Jordan Times

The Jordan Times, the official voice of the kingdom, published an article in July saying: “Turkish troops and Ankara backed militias are active in three Arab countries: Libya, Syria and Iraq. This is a geopolitical reality that the Arab world, as well as the international community, must acknowledge and react to.

“In fact, Turkey’s territorial, political and economic ambitions in these countries and beyond are advertised by top Turkish leaders including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“Turkey now has military bases in Qatar, Libya, Somalia, Northern Cyprus, Syria and Iraq; and not all with the consent of legitimate governments.”

It is disturbing that Arab countries have taken sides rather than work together to stop foreign intervention in their internal affairs. It is feared that this violation of Arab countries will lead to further fractures in intra-Arab ties paving the way for long-term foreign domination, the Jordan Times concluded.

The French connection

There are other foreign actors in this push to declare Turkey the new outlaw of the Eastern Mediterranean, Hearst pointed out adding:

The French military’s role in supporting the Gaddafi-era army general, Khalifa Haftar, in his war-crime-ridden attempt to capture the Libyan capital is as well-documented as the use of Emirati planes and Russian snipers. Recently, however, during his forays into Beirut, President Emmanuel Macron has further spread France’s rhetorical wings.

On the first of two trips to the shattered Lebanese capital, Macron said: “If France doesn’t play its role, Iranians, Turks and Saudis will interfere with Lebanese domestic affairs, whose economic and geopolitical interests are likely to be to the detriment of the Lebanese.”

In the meantime, French warships have been holding joint exercises with Greek ones amid an oil-drilling dispute off Cyprus, which Turkey claims violates its maritime borders.

Macron maintains that his dispute is not with Turks, but with Erdogan. This tactic has been tried before and failed. The problem is that in confronting UAE-backed forces in Libya, or upholding Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, or bombing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Iraq, or targeting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria, Erdogan has the full support of the Turkish army and all major Turkish political parties.

Why is Turkey being confronted now?

For all the domestic reservations over his role as president, Erdogan has created Turkey as an independent country whose armed forces are capable of confronting Russian forces in Syria and Libya, but one that keeps its place at the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Hearst.

Turkey’s economy is the size of Saudi Arabia’s, and its military is self-sustaining. Turkey started manufacturing high-technology drones when Israel and the US refused to supply them. It is forgotten today, but Israeli planes once trained on Turkish airfields because of the shortage of airspace back home, according to informed Turkish sources.

When it discovers gas in the Black Sea, Turkish companies have the technology to develop the fields and supply the domestic market – unlike Egypt, whose reliance on British, Italian and US companies means it reaps a fraction of the rewards from its gas fields, Hearst argued.

National (In)Security and the Pentagon Budget

Mandy Smithberger

A Post-Coronavirus Economy Can No Longer Afford to Put the Pentagon First

The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can’t afford to feed them enough food.

In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s top contractor, reported that, compared to 2019, its earnings are actually up — yes, up! The company’s success led the financial magazine Barron’s to call it a “pandemic star.” And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Trump administration’s recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.

And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, “It’s becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better” than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.

The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it’s also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities of Washington have been all these years. Americans — the Trump administration aside — are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to safely reopen schools. It’s none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost. In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls — and count on it, they will come — to “rebuild” the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, leaving this country in a distinctly weakened state.

A New Budget Debate?

For the past decade, the budget “debate” in this country has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted “war spending” that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account. While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the Pentagon’s ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.

In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means a Biden or Trump administration will have an enormous opportunity to significantly reshape federal spending. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there’s more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the still-raging pandemic is creating.

In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country’s major engine for creating jobs. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenth of those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that’s “well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.”

As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, this country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy. And such investments would pay additional dividends by making our communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient.

Defense Contractors Campaigning for Bailouts

At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what’s still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) “national security” and the foreign policy that goes with it, including this country’s forever wars. That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program. My colleagues and I are also continually tracking the many officials who leave the Pentagon to go to work on the boards of or to lobby for arms makers or leave those companies and end up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security state. That’s known, of course, as the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door.” And as President Trump recently noted, it helps ensure that those endless wars never end, while stoking an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. While his actions on behalf of the arms industry don’t back up his rhetoric, his diagnosis of the problem is largely on target.

And yet, as familiar as I am with the damage that the weapons industry has done to our country, I still find myself shocked at how a number of those companies have responded to the current crisis. Almost immediately, they began lobbying the Department of Defense to make their employees part of this country’s “essential critical infrastructure,” so that they could force them to return to work, pandemic or not. That decision drew a rare rebuke from the unions representing those workers, many of whom feared for their lives.

And mind you, only then did things become truly perverse. In the initial Covid-19 relief bill, Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to help respond to the pandemic. Such aid, as congressional representatives imagined it, would be used to purchase personal protective equipment for employees who still had to show up at work, especially since the Department of Defense’s own initial estimate was that the country would need to produce as many as 3.3 billion N95 masks in six months. The Pentagon, however, promptly gave those funds to defense contractors, including paying for such diverse “needs” as golf-course staffing, hypersonic missile development, and microelectronics, a Washington Post investigation found. House appropriators responded that money for defense contractors “was not the original intent of the funds.”

And now those defense contractors are asking for yet more bailouts. Earlier this summer, they successfully convinced the Senate to put $30 billion for the arms industry in its next coronavirus relief bill. As CQ Roll Call reported, the top beneficiaries of that spending spree would be the Pentagon’s two largest contractors: Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The pandemic has certainly resulted in some delays and unexpected expenses for such companies, but the costs borne by the weapons industry pale compared to the devastation caused to so many businesses that have had to close permanently. Every sector of the economy is undoubtedly facing unexpected costs due to the pandemic, but apparently the Department of Defense, despite being by far the best-funded military on the planet, and its major contractors, among the richest and most successful corporations in America, have essentially claimed that they will be unable to respond to the crisis without further taxpayer help. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the lead Democrat for the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee recently pointed out that, even though contractors across the federal government are facing pandemic challenges, no other agency has asked for additional funds to cover the costs of the crisis. Instead, they have worked on drawing from their existing resources.

It’s laughable to suggest that the very department that already has by far the most resources on hand and is, of course, charged with leading the country’s response to unexpected threats can’t figure out how to adjust without further funding. But most defense contractors see no reason to adapt since they know that they can continue to count on Washington to bail them out.

Still, the defense industry has become impatient that Congress hasn’t already acquiesced to their demands. In July, executives at most of the major contractors sent a letter to the White House demanding more money. In it, they included a not-so-subtle threat of electoral consequences for the president and Senate Republicans in close races if such funds weren’t provided. Only one major contractor, Northrop Grumman, has stayed away from such highly public lobbying efforts because its CEO apparently had the common sense to recognize that her company was doing too well to demand more when so many others are desperate for money, particularly minority-owned businesses, many of which are likely to never come back.

On a Glide Path to Disaster?

There are signs, however, that someday such eternal winners in the congressional financial sweepstakes may finally be made accountable thanks to the pandemic. This summer, both the House and the Senate for the first time each considered an amendment to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. Such efforts even received support from at least some moderates, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), although it went down to defeat in both houses of Congress. Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) refused to support the specifics of the amendment, she did at least express her agreement with the principle of needing to curtail the Pentagon’s spending spree during this crisis. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, I’m keenly aware of the global threats facing our country,” she said in a statement she released after the vote. “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”

The first real test of whether this country will learn any of the right lessons about national security from this ongoing pandemic moment will undoubtedly come in next year’s budget debate when the question will be: Is everything finally going to be on the table? As I previously wrote at TomDispatch, giving the Pentagon trillions of dollars in these years in no way prepared this country for the actual national security crisis of our lives. In fact, even considering the Pentagon’s ridiculously outsized budget, prioritizing funding for unaffordable and unproven weapons systems over healthcare hurt its ability to keep the military and its labor force safe. No less significantly, continuing to prioritize the Pentagon over the needs of every other agency and Americans more generally keeps us on a glidepath to disaster.

A genuinely new discussion of budget priorities would mean, as a start, changing the very definition of “security” to include responding to the many risks we actually face when it comes to our safety: not just pandemics, but the already increasing toll of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, and a government that continues to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected over everyone else.

At the simplest level, the “defense” side of the budget ledger should be made to reflect what we’re really spending now on what passes for national security. That means counting homeland security and veterans’ benefits, along with many other expenses that often get left out of the budget equation. When such expenses are indeed included, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project has discovered, the real price tag for America’s wars in the Greater Middle East alone came to more than $6.4 trillion by 2020. In other words, even to begin to have an honest debate about how America’s other needs are funded, there would have to be a far more accurate accounting of what actually has been spent in these years on “national security.”

Surprisingly enough, unlike Congress (or the Pentagon), the voting public already seems to grasp the need for change. The nonprofit think tank Data for Progress found that more than half of likely voters support cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10% to pay for domestic priorities like fighting the coronavirus. A University of Maryland poll found bipartisan majorities opposed to cutting funding generally with two notable exceptions: Pentagon spending and agricultural subsidies.

Unfortunately, those in the national security establishment are generally not listening to what the American people want. Instead, they’re the captives of a defense industry that eternally hypes new Cold War-style competition with China and Russia, both through donations to Washington think tanks and politicians and that infamous revolving door.

In fact, the Trump administration is a military-industrial nightmare when it comes to that endlessly spinning entrance and exit. Both of his confirmed secretaries of defense and one acting secretary of defense came directly from major defense contractors, including the current one, former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper — and the Biden administration seems unlikely to be all that different. As the American Prospect reported recently, several members of his foreign policy team have already circumvented ethics rules that would restrict lobbying activities by becoming “strategic consultants” to the very defense firms aiming to win more Pentagon contracts. For example, Biden’s most likely secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, became a senior adviser to Boston Consulting Group and the first three years she was with that company, it increased its Pentagon contract earnings by a factor of 20.

So whoever wins in 2020, increased spending for the Pentagon, rather than real national security, lies in store. The people, it seems, have spoken. The question remains: will anyone in Washington listen to them?

What A City-Wide Lockdown Means – Evidence from Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

Amidst 93,000 daily cases and 80,000 deaths, some cities in India are experiencing a lockdown because of the the Coronavirus pandemic also known as Covid-19. Just a few months ago, Germany’s capital Berlin experienced the very same. If Berlin’s experiences is anything to go by, here is what such a lockdown means for you and your city.

During the partial lockdown in Berlin, Berliners experienced less road traffic. Recent economic , social data and general statistics show how the Coronavirus has changed Berlin for good and for bad. According to the city’s statistic office, ten per cent more people stayed in parks in Berlin from March to mid-April, even though the police and virologists made this very difficult for a while – a small change. Many have the feeling that the city is no longer the same. Overall, the data showed what the Coronavirus crisis did to Berlin:

It was the dream of Germany’s environmental Green Party, inside Berlin’s current Red-Red-Green state government, to open parks and have fewer cars on the road. Berlin is run by the Greens together with the centre-left social-democratic SPD and the semi-socialist progressive Die Line. For a long time, their goal has been more public transport. It only took the nightmare of a deadly pandemic to make it a reality, at least temporarily. According to data from Apple, car traffic in Berlin fell by 54 per cent at the height of the initial restrictions. Apple has analyzed so-called “anonymized” search terms, navigation maps and traffic information.

For this, 15 kilometres of so-called “pop-up cycle paths” have been set up in Berlin’s hip suburb of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in recent weeks. These cycle pathways are simply separated from the road with temporary construction site bars. Still, the planning and implementation of new cycling infrastructure have taken years. Over recent years, the number of passengers on public transport has decreased by 70 per cent leading to further congestions throughout the city. Worse for public transportation, is the fact that Berlin’s state transport authority BVG “thinned out” – as it calls it – the usual state tram system during the Coronavirus crisis. Berlin’s BVG announced that there is no point in driving hot air back and forth – trams with virtually no passengers on board.

Drinks and Netflix are Up

Meanwhile, Berliners have increasingly reached for the bottle. According to a local bottle shop called “Getränke Hoffmann”, sales of wine in the Berlin and the adjacent state of Brandenburg has increased by 20 per cent in March. And that of spirits and beer by 15 per cent. Even with that, Berlin remains just below Germany’s national average, according to Germany’s Society for Consumer Research. The agency has found that 34 per cent more wine was sold throughout Germany, 31 per cent more spirits – Schnapps – and 11.5 per cent more beer.

Berlin’s bars and restaurants usually source their drinks wholesale. Now that they have all closed, people buy privately and drink at home. Nevertheless, it is reassuring that car traffic has decreased over the same period. People are now using more electricity at home, as the rapid growth of Netflix shows. Netflix alone has reported 15.8 million new customers. Still, the Coronavirus crisis – a crisis that even has impacted the sex industry.

Romance has Changed

Germans have always been a bit worried about sex. Under the heading “Coronavirus Sex”, a German website called “Deutsche Aidshilfe” lists in great detail the dangers of contagion with COVID-19 during sex. The website answers pressing questions such as: Is fellatio dangerous? And cunnilingus? And rimming? Yes, yes and yes! Oh no! Even cuddling and getting undressed with less than 1.5 meters distance stand next to each other is seen as dangerous – hard times in Germany’s Tinder capital Berlin. For this, users seem to have taken the tips of the Deutsche Aidshilfe for safe pandemic sex to heart. Sexting, for example, does not pose any risks even in the age of Coronavirus. In fact, dating portal Tinder has seen a 20 per cent increase in messages sent among users.

The Berlin-based sex toy manufacturer Amorelie.de currently sells about 50 per cent more remote-controlled vibrators, which can be used via an app and can thus be used virtually over all distances. However, the demand for its set boxes, such as the 14 Days Sex Life Challenge, for couples who have to kill time together in isolation, also increased by 65 per cent. A spokeswoman for the online sex shop Orion has a less lusty explanation for the trend. In economically turbulent times, you put aside larger expenses and indulge in smaller luxury or indulgence goods – some buy expensive lipstick, others just a vibrator or lingerie.

Traffic is down

If you seek to have a good time in another way, you can drive around at the Kottbusser Tor, Alexanderplatz or Hermannstraße. In the city, which is otherwise classified by the police as particularly crime-ridden, there are also fewer perpetrators in the absence of victims. Since 1 March, Berlin police have recorded fewer thefts, burglaries in shops, sexual offences and violent acts compared to the same period last year. Berlin’s police say there were 5.4 per cent fewer crimes overall. In particular, the reduction in violence is a huge relief for Berlin’s official agencies which no longer have to worry about pub brawls.

Homelessness Increases

It wasn’t that long ago that the issue of Berlin’s homeless was a big mystery to politics. Berliners still remember that barely a year ago during winter (2018/2019) Berlin’s Senate had no ideas for emergency accommodation at the end of November in sub-zero temperatures. Berlin’s state transport authority, the BVG, even refused to leave tube stations open overnight for safety reasons. In the end, all the city did was provide an emergency toilet at Moritzplatz underground station.

Even before Coronavirus, no one knew how many homeless people there were in the city, let alone where they were. It is impossible to find out and may even be impossible to help Berlin’s homeless. In January, a cumbersome, large-scale census attempted for the first time to use volunteers to record the number of homeless people. People who have always dealt with the concerns of the most vulnerable in society now see the Coronavirus crisis as a great opportunity.

Contact Ban and Video Calls

Despite the ban on personal contact – or perhaps better “because of” – the ban on personal contact, many Berliners became suddenly aware of what their colleagues private living environment looked like. Via video calls, they see ugly curtains, poorly sorted bookshelves and even of the colors of co-workers’ briefs on a clothes rack in the background. The newly established home office, combined with the inevitable video conferencing, provides insight into other people’s privacy that we have never seen before. But the realization that 90 per cent of all business meetings could be done online have been revolutionary.

Network node operator De-Cix reports that the use of video calls has increased by more than 50 per cent since the Coronavirus crisis. It demands a lot of data transfer volume, which is why overall Internet traffic increased by 10 per cent in February. Up to 9.1TB per second were transmitted in Germany alone. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office reports that sales of toilet paper have recently fallen by two-thirds – perhaps an early indication that the Coronavirus crisis is slowly ending in Berlin. Right now, there is no end of the Coronavirus in sight in India but eventually, it will end and, like Germany, India will have changed.

Congressional investigation opened into deaths of 27 soldiers this year at Fort Hood, Texas

Chase Lawrence

Over the last year, Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas has been the scene of a string of murders, deaths, assaults, and other criminal behavior. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes has dubbed the base the Army’s “most crime ridden post.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy stated in a visit to the base that it had the “highest, the most cases for sexual assault and harassment and murders for our entire formation of the US army.” Just within the past year 27 soldiers have died either on the base or in Killeen, with five homicides, seven suicides, eight accidents, two deaths from disease, and five as-of-yet undetermined deaths. A 28th soldier from the base was killed in combat.

Democrat representatives Stephen Lynch (Massachusetts), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, and Jackie Speier (California), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel, sent a letter Tuesday to McCarthy requesting information and documents on the deaths and announcing a joint investigation by the subcommittees into the spate of deaths.

The letter cited Army data that documented an average of 129 felonies annually at Fort Hood between 2014 and 2019. These felonies include homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and robbery. For a base which hosts many active military personnel deployed around the world, Fort Hood has seen more soldiers die at the base and in the city of Killeen than soldiers killed in combat since 2016.

Fort Hood was also the site of some of the most infamous deadly shootings on a military bases with 13 dead and 30 wounded by then Major Nidal Hasan in 2009, and another shooting in 2014 carried out by Army Specialist Ivan Lopez who killed 4 and injured 14.

Representatives Lynch and Speier claimed that they would investigate and report on the reasons behind the murders and seek justice for the soldiers and families “who may have been failed by a military system and culture that was ultimately responsible for their care and protection.”

An “independent command climate review” has been announced by McCarthy.

The investigation was prompted by protests over the murder of a female soldier, Specialist Vanessa Guillen, who was allegedly sexually harassed before her murder. Her family called for a congressional investigation because of the long delay in searching for her by the military. Her family also alleged that Guillen’s fear of retribution prevented her from reporting the harassment to her superiors, a move that could have prevented her murderer from remaining in a position to kill her.

The leading causes of death at Fort Hood this year were accidents, followed by suicides, then murders. This only deviates slightly from the US military as a whole, where murders rank behind illness and injuries (which are distinct from accidents) as causes of death. Otherwise, the deaths on the base correspond to the military’s casualties on bases in general.

A July 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service found that between 2006 and 2020, “a total of 17,645 active-duty personnel have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.” Of these deaths, 74 percent, or 13,068, are attributable to Non-Overseas Contingency Operations (Non-OCO), meaning on military bases outside of combat. Out of these, 93 percent happened in the United States, with the rest happening in countries with bases such as Germany and Japan.

Accidents accounted for 39 percent of Non-OCO deaths, while self-inflicted deaths accounted for 30 percent and illness / injury accounting for 23 percent. Homicide accounts for 4 percent of Non-OCO deaths.

Of the murders at Fort Hood this year the victims were overwhelmingly soldiers drawn from working class areas and of low-rank.

On March 1, Specialist Shelby Tyler Jones, 20, was shot in Killeen outside of a strip club and later died of his wounds, with 15 people either witnessing or involved in the incident. Jones joined the Army in 2017 as a cavalry scout from the small town of Jena, Louisiana. According to US Census numbers, 20 percent of residents of the parish where Jena is located live in poverty. It is likely that Jones joined, as many others do, to escape poverty.

The Army Times reports that Jones was a member of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, also called the Brave Rifles, and deployed to Iraq in Operation Inherent Resolve between May 2018 and January 2019. The 3rd Cavalry regiment commander said that Jones was a “dedicated professional who truly loved his family and the Army.”

Guillen, 20, was killed with a hammer in a base armory by a fellow soldier after having been continuously sexually harassed, reportedly by the suspect. The suspect shot himself after having been confronted by law enforcement. Guillen was born to immigrant parents and grew up in Houston, Texas. The poverty rate in Harris County stands at 1 out of every 5 people.

During the search for Guillen the body of another missing soldier, Private Gregory Morales, was found. Morales had been put down as a deserter at the time that he went missing in August 2019.

On May 18, Pfc Brandon Scott Rosecrans, 27, was shot and killed in his Jeep Wrangler by a civilian allegedly following a disagreement over a gun sale. Rosecran hailed from Kimberling City, Missouri, a town with around 2,300 people located in Stone County, Missouri. Rosecran joined the Army in May 2018 and had served as a quartermaster.

By and large, the military enlists working class people from impoverished areas who have few other options to make decent living or afford higher education after high school. The aforementioned are representative of the rank-and-file. US Army infantry usually receive around $20,000 in pay, not including benefits and housing. Despite the Pentagon’s massive budget, the rank-and-file of the US military is still afflicted by poverty, and with that comes social ills, suicide, homicide, and poor health.

Fort Hood, which is situated in Killeen, Texas, is one of the largest military bases in the country, housing 36,500 soldiers and another 30,000 family members. It is situated on 340 square miles of land and is home to an almost 200,000-acre training area and two airstrips. According to the US Army’s website, it is home to an extensive collection of military units that play and have played key roles in the last three decades of unending war with seven brigades, two divisions, a battalion, III Corps headquarters, a regiment, a garrison and medical center, and the US Army Operational Test Command.

The base also has around 500 tanks, 1,600 tracked vehicles, 10,000 wheeled vehicles, and 200 aircraft including AH-64 attack helicopters.

Many of the base’s brigades are deployed or have been deployed recently overseas in some capacity and have long histories of being used in US imperialism’s wars and occupations, with most recent being Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers based at Fort Hood have been killed in these deployments.

This, combined with the poverty of the rank-and-file, the absolute indifference of the military to them, and the fostering of backwards and reactionary sentiments in the military, provides the necessary context in order to understand why the base, in fact the entire military, is beset by this wave of death.

COVID-19 outbreak at Virginia migrant detention center caused by repression of anti-police brutality protesters

Joe Williams

A COVID-19 outbreak at an immigration detention center in rural Virginia was caused by the rapid transfer of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assault teams chauffeured into the area by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of the crackdown on anti-police brutality protests that broke out throughout the United States in late May and early June.

As of Sunday, 339 of the facility’s inmates and staff at the Immigration Centers of America (ICA) private prison in Farmville, Virginia have tested positive for COVID-19. The outbreak is the most serious recorded at any immigrant detention center across the country. Last month the World Socialist Web Site reported that the outbreak claimed the life of a 72-year-old detainee and Canadian national, James Thomas Hill.

The revelation of the source of the outbreak is part of an ongoing lawsuit brought against the detention center by four migrant detainees. According to sources inside ICE that spoke to the Washington Post, prisoners were moved to the Farmville center in order to give cover for the Trump administration’s operation involving militarized agents of the state apparatus to repress protests in Washington, DC.

Detention facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018 (Photo US Customs and Border Protection).

“They needed to justify the movement of SRT [special response teams],” a Department of Homeland Security official told the Post. According to ICE lawyer Yuri Fuchs, “there is an ICE Air regulation that requires detainees and staff to be on the same flight, so they’re being moved around,” referring to the colloquial name of a program ICE uses to shuttle prisoners, material, and personnel around the country on charter commercial flights.

This open admission by a United States federal official of the use of immigrant detainees as human shields for an operation of mass repression prompted federal judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia to help cover for the overshare of information by rewording the sentence into a legally permissible action: “I think what you’re saying then is when you move inmates, or detainees, you have to have ICE people with them,” Brinkema said. “That’s got to be what that means.” Fuchs replied: “Yes.”

The units sent on the flights were Special Response Teams (SRTs), ICE’s most elite paramilitary units. Actual security and logistics for the transfer of prisoners was handled by private security firms and regular ICE officers, while the SRT troops deployed to the DC protests as soon as they landed.

According to the administration’s cover story, the prisoner transfers were done to alleviate overcrowding and allow social distancing at ICE prisons throughout the US. This account is directly contradicted by multiple current and former DHS officials who took part in the operation. They confirmed to the Post that the primary purpose of the flights was to mobilize SRTs to DC, over the objections of DC field office commanders.

The officials stated that numerous other immigration prisons in the country were less filled than Farmville at that time, including a facility in Arizona that supplied many of the infected inmates who were transferred, which was at only 35 percent capacity at a time when Farmville was 57 percent full.

It is also likely that ICE simply fabricated any documents or information needed to effect the transfers. Jeffrey Crawford, Director of Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the for-profit prison company that owns the Farmville facility, told the Farmville Town Council that the local ICE field office rejected the proposed transfer because there wasn’t enough room at the nearby jail to quarantine the transferees appropriately.

According to Crawford, ICE headquarters responded that quarantine was not necessary because all of the inmates were known to be uninfected. But when they arrived, one was visibly sick with COVID-19 symptoms and tested positive right away. The rest of the group was then tested, with 51 coming back positive.

“We were assured before they came that these folks were healthy. We were told that one of the facilities where the detainees were coming from had no instances of COVID-19. In hindsight, we believe we’ve discovered information that that is not accurate. But that is what we were told at the time,” the ICA director complained. It is difficult to say which is more jarring, ICE’s criminal disregard for detainees’ health or the ignorance and greed of the ICA officials, who were only too eager to increase the prisoner headcount at the for-profit facility.

In essence, these immigrants were collateral damage in the attempted coup d’état launched by the Trump administration against Constitutional rule in the United States in June. The apparatus of state repression was hindered not one iota by concerns that this move would seed coronavirus throughout the country, or in Farmville—a rural, mountainous region with two major universities.

SRT’s have been central to the Trump administration’s strategy of using shock-and-awe tactics, including overtly fascistic methods like snatch-and-grab disappearances in unmarked vehicles, to suppress protests against police murder. In addition to Washington, DC, paramilitary shock troops from Arizona, Texas, and Florida have been deployed against protesting workers and youth in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode one sees the American ruling class’s equal disdain for democratic rights and the lives of the population. It points to the overtly fascistic character of the US immigration agencies, which are emerging as the incubators for paramilitary domestic repression units. While immigrants currently bear the brunt of this apparatus, it is directed at the working class as a whole.