Perpetrator of terror attack in Vienna was under state surveillance

Peter Schwarz

Reactions to Monday’s brutal terrorist attack in Vienna, which claimed four lives and injured 22, have followed a well-known pattern. Politicians around the world express their horror, pay their condolences and then, in the same breath, demand further powers for the police and secret services along with tougher action against immigrants.

“We will fight terrorism together with determination,” said European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, announcing a new EU counterterrorism agenda for next year. “Islamist terrorism is our common enemy. The fight against these murderers and those encouraging them is our common fight,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn called for “a strategy against Islamism.” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer promised to make Europe’s security situation the main topic of the next meeting of EU interior ministers on November 13. “We can only stop the terrorists and their backers together,” he said.

The perpetrator, Kujtim Fejzulai, posted this picture on his Instagram account

Stephan Mayer (Christian Social Union, CSU), state secretary in the German Interior Ministry, demanded that every avenue be used to deport allegedly dangerous persons and serious criminals to their country of origin. Andrea Lindholz (CSU), chair of the Interior Committee of the German Bundestag, demanded “modern powers to monitor encrypted messenger services in justified cases of suspicion.”

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said in an interview with the daily Die Welt: “The EU must in future focus much more on the problem of political Islam. I expect an end to falsely understood notions of tolerance and at last an awareness in all European countries of just how dangerous the ideology of political Islam is for our freedom and the European way of life.”

The president of the EU Parliament, Antonio Tajani, called for the establishment of a European FBI to coordinate the work of the police and secret services throughout Europe.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted in flawed German: “We, the French, share the shock and grief of Austrians after an attack in Vienna. ... This is our Europe. Our enemies must know who they are dealing with. We will not give in.”

US President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter: “After another heinous act of terrorism in Europe, our prayers are with the people of Vienna.” He accused his challenger Joe Biden of wanting to increase the number of refugees from terrorist nations by 700 percent and “turn the entire [US] Midwest into a refugee camp.”

The mantra that protection against terrorist attacks requires an upgrade of the security services and tougher measures against immigrants deliberately hides the real background to such attacks, in particular the role played by the secret services. In reality, the terrorist attack in Vienna—like similar attacks in France, Britain and Germany before it—serves as a welcome pretext for governments to create police states aimed, not at protecting the population from terrorist attacks, but rather the ruling classes from popular anger and discontent.

The world’s ruling elites anticipate fierce class struggles resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, which has already claimed 280,000 lives in Europe alone due to the criminal policies of European governments, combined with the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. Former reformist parties and unions have moved so far to the right that they are no longer able to control and direct such struggles into harmless channels. This is why state surveillance and forms of state repression are being systematically expanded.

What is strikingly characteristic about the Vienna attack is that it took place literally under the eyes of the police. Twenty-year-old Kujtim Fejzulai, who roamed through downtown Vienna armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, a handgun and a machete, shooting and stabbing passers-by indiscriminately, was well known to the authorities.

Born and raised in Vienna, Fejzulai had Austrian and North Macedonian citizenship. In September 2018, he was arrested in Turkey and sentenced to 22 months prison in Austria for attempting to join the Islamic State in Afghanistan and Syria. After eight months in prison he was released on probation in December 2019.

Following the terror attack on Monday, Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (Austrian Peoples Party, ÖVP) claimed the terrorist had managed to “deceive the judiciary.” The Derad association, which specialises in the deradicalization of Islamist offenders and was taking care of Fejzulai, contradicted this statement, reporting that he had never been considered “deradicalized” and was subject to strict conditions of parole.

This did not prevent him from travelling to Slovakia in July 2020 to buy ammunition for his AK-47 assault rifle. As the Slovakian newspaper Denník N reports, citing security circles, he did not receive the ammunition because he could not present a firearms license. Instead, the Slovak authorities informed their Austrian colleagues about his visit and attempt to buy ammunition. The Austrian Interior Ministry has confirmed this information following a request from the German news outlets the Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR.

The Austrian authorities were therefore warned of the danger but decided to let him roam freely although they could have immediately arrested Fejzulai on the basis of violating his probation. Whether elements in the Austrian security apparatus, which was under the control of the extreme right-wing Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) from 2017 to 2019, were involved in the attack, or whether they just looked the other way, remains unclear. But to claim that the attack took place merely due to unfortunate “mishaps” is untenable. The assassin himself can no longer be interrogated—he was shot by police.

In the meantime, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack and the IS-related propaganda channel Amaq has published a video in which Fejzulai confesses to the crime. The Austrian authorities have arrested a number of persons and are investigating at least 14 people from the killer’s circle. Two young men have also been arrested in Switzerland in connection with the Vienna attack. It is not yet known whether they are part of any organisation or were merely in loose contact with Fejzulai.

In almost all of the major terrorist attacks in recent years, the perpetrators were under surveillance by the security authorities. For example, Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016, killing 12 people, was being monitored by the state criminal investigation departments of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and Berlin and also by the German intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz. On at least one occasion, Amri was personally driven from the Ruhr area (NRW) to Berlin by an undercover secret service agent. Cherif and Said Kouachi, who committed a massacre six years ago in the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were also known to the French authorities for more than 10 years and were under surveillance.

Islamist terrorist organisations such as the IS, along with Al Qaeda, which was responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, owe their origins to the imperialist wars conducted in the Middle East and often maintained relations with imperialist intelligence agencies. Al Qaeda was originally backed by the CIA to recruit Islamist fighters against the Soviet army in Afghanistan. IS-related groups were then deployed in Libya and Syria to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad before they developed into an independent entity in Iraq.

Australian report reveals widespread food insecurity

John Harris

Foodbank, one of Australia’s largest providers to relief charities, released a report last month on the growth of food insecurity across the country amid the ongoing covid-19 pandemic.

The report was based on a survey of 1001 people who had experienced food insecurity in the past 12 months, conducted between June 25 and July 15. All of the respondents had answered in the affirmative to the question: “In the past 12 months, were there any times that you ran out of food and couldn’t afford to buy any more?”

Currently, 43 percent of all food insecure people are going a whole day without eating at least once a week, compared to 30 percent in 2019. Last year, 15 percent of Australians experiencing food insecurity were seeking food relief at least once a week. In 2020, this has doubled to 31 percent. Some 28 percent of Australians experiencing food insecurity in 2020 had never done so before.

Hundreds of international students lining up to collect food vouchers in Melbourne, June 1 [Credit: @BeauNewham, Twitter]

Charities have seen the demand for food relief increase by some 47 percent since March. This has largely been driven by emergency assistance requests from international students, visa holders and casual workers, more than two million of whom continue to be denied wage subsidies or welfare payments by the government.

The most acute economic and social impact of the pandemic is being felt by youth who are far more likely to be working in insecure casual employment. Approximately “65 percent of food insecure Gen Zs (aged 18-25) are going hungry at least once a week compared to 25 percent of food insecure Baby Boomers (56-74) and 25 percent of Builders (Age 75+)” the report stated.

It highlighted the significant impact the pandemic has had on Australia’s labor market. According to official figures, between March and July, the number of employed Australians decreased by 556,800 people and the unemployment rate increased from 5.2 percent to 7.5 percent.

These employment figures cover over the true extent of the social crisis. According to Roy Morgan, the levels of unemployment and underemployment across Australia reached 22.3 percent in September, down from a high of 27.4 percent in March (approximately 2.4 million people), in the midst of lockdowns. Anglicare’s recent Job Snapshot report revealed there are eight Jobseekers for every entry-level position, but the charity stated that even this could be an underestimation.

A Good Shepherd study reported that “two in five Australians have experienced negative employment changes since April this year.” This included reduced pay and hours, being temporarily stood down, taking leave to avoid loss of pay or being sacked, along with many other changes to employment.

The mass job cull by major companies, enforced by the trade unions, has left many casual workers on the precipice of a disaster. One of the most exploited sections of the working class, they have no guaranteed hours of work and are vulnerable to being underpaid or dismissed by their employers at a moment’s notice.

Many of the industries hardest hit by COVID-19, such as hospitality, retail, tourism and accommodation, account for a large proportion of casual workers across Australia.

Jodie, whose story was featured in the Foodbank report, explained that she lost her job as a casual worker at a motor vehicle repair shop in New South Wales (NSW) when the pandemic began.

“It was very sudden,” she said. “I’d never had to worry about food before this year. Even though I was a casual, I was still working six times a week. So I went from earning $1,100 a week down to a carers pension which I’m still a few weeks off being approved for.” She reported that her partner also lost some 50 percent of his income when the coronavirus crisis struck.

Demonstrating the breadth of similar experiences, some 69 percent of charities have seen an increase in the number of newly unemployed people seeking food relief.

Cost of living has consistently been cited as the main reason many have reported experiencing food insecurity with unexpected expenses or large bills (41 percent) and rent and mortgage payments (35 percent) as the most common reasons.

Since the pandemic began, only 61 percent of those who have experienced food insecurity have accessed food relief. Those who have not sought assistance cite concerns that other people need help more than they do (33 percent), embarrassment (33 percent) and shame (30 percent).

The report states that those “who were already struggling before the coronavirus hit felt the effects more quickly and more seriously.” Prior to the pandemic, those accessing food relief were overwhelmingly low income families, the unemployed, single-parent families, the homeless and people with mental illness. Since March, they have been forced to access food relief more frequently.

Many live payday to payday and therefore cannot adequately safeguard against sudden emergency situations. In March, when panic buying and stockpiling began, the most vulnerable confronted increased food scarcity, as many of the basic essentials (like pasta, toilet paper, rice, canned goods and long-life milk) disappeared from supermarket shelves.

The additional government assistance programs introduced in March alleviated some of the difficulties for those relying on welfare payments. According to a survey conducted by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), 80 percent of respondents said that they were eating better and more regularly due to the increased payments.

In September, the federal Liberal-National Coalition government began to roll back the additional subsidies. The JobSeeker welfare payment has now been reduced from an extra $550 a fortnight to only $250, with further reductions scheduled. JobKeeper wage subsidy payments have also been brought down from $750 a week to only $500. Foodbank reported that charities have seen an additional 25 percent increase in food demand since these payments were first reduced.

The charity stated that “35 percent receiving assistance don’t know how they will cope.” Some 80 percent expect the cuts mean they will definitely have to skip meals and further reduce the amount of food that they purchase.

Maria, a founder of Survivors R Us, a charity that assists those who have suffered domestic violence, told Foodbank: “I have never seen the line as long as it was just to come and get some food… My ordering has gone up twofold to try and keep up with the demand… We probably had around 100-150 people a week before the pandemic and this has gone up to about 500 people a week… My only fear is when [government assistance] is rolled back… I think we’ll actually increase again because [people] are not going to be coping.”

Currently, Australia has far fewer COVID-19 cases than the Americas, Europe and India. However, the pandemic has exposed the real state of class relations, by accelerating and deepening the existing social, political and economic crisis. According to an earlier 2019 Foodbank report produced, prior to the pandemic, approximately 21 percent of all Australian’s were food insecure, slightly above one in five people.

The widespread poverty is the result of a decades-long assault on social spending by governments, Coalition and Labor alike, and a protracted offensive against jobs, wages and conditions, enforced by the trade unions. Amid the deepest global crisis since the 1930s, these attacks against the working class have only escalated over the past year.

Israel demolishes Palestinian village in occupied West Bank

Bill Van Auken

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops and police stormed a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, using bulldozers and backhoes to destroy the homes of 11 families and leaving 74 people, including 41 children, without shelter in the rain and in the midst of a new upsurge in the coronavirus pandemic.

The demolition of the village of Khirbet Humsah, located in the north of the Jordan Valley, was the largest such action in nearly a decade. It was carried out under the pretext that the dwellings had been erected on land reserved for Israeli military exercises.

The residents, who raise livestock, said that they have lived there since 1967, when Israel illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem, displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Israeli security forces demolishing homes in Khirbet Humsah (Credit: Sarit Michaeli, B'Tselem)

“This is a great injustice,” Khirbet Humsah resident Harb Abu al-Kabash told the Israeli daily Haaretz. “We didn’t know they were coming and we didn’t prepare, and now we are facing rain.” A father of eight, Abu al-Kabash, added that “they came in the past to demolish a few structures, but this was the largest demolition so far, it’s the entire village.”

B’Tselem, the anti-occupation Israeli NGO, provided a grim account of the scope and criminality of the IDF demolition: “The forces demolished 18 tents and sheds that housed 11 families, numbering 74 people in total, 41 of them minors. The forces also demolished 29 tents and sheds used as livestock enclosures, three storage sheds, nine tents used as kitchens, 10 portable toilets, 10 livestock pens, 23 water containers, two solar panels, and feeding and watering troughs for livestock. They also destroyed more than 30 tons of fodder for livestock and confiscated a vehicle and two tractors belonging to three residents.”

Yvonne Helle, a UN humanitarian coordinator in the occupied Palestinian territories, said that Israeli forces had destroyed 76 structures in Khirbet Humsah, “more than in any other single demolition in the past decade.”

Residents of the village had filed petitions over the course of years with the Israeli High Court against the threat to evict them, all of them denied.

The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammed Shtayyeh, denounced the demolition and charged that Israel “chose this evening to commit another crime” because it knew that world attention would be focused on the US elections.

Peter Santo, the spokesman for the European Union, which had provided assistance to the demolished Palestinian community in Khirbet Humsah, condemned the action by Israel, while urging it to halt all such demolitions, particularly in the face of the threat from COVID-19. Santo also pointed out that 52 Palestinian schools are currently slated for demolition, denying the right of children to an education.

The EU’s statements of regret over Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian population and laments that they impede the already stone-dead “two-state solution” are never translated into any action.

Unsurprisingly, Washington, in the throes of an unprecedented election crisis, said nothing about the latest Israeli war crime. The Trump administration, in any case, has declared its support for Israel’s settlement policy, while the Democrats and their presidential candidate Joe Biden have provided unstinting support for Israel.

According to data compiled by B’Tselem, more than 800 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have lost their homes to demolitions so far this year, more than half of them children. This number is higher than that for any full year since 2016. Israeli forces also demolished 301 Palestinian non-residential structures in the first ten months of this year, including humanitarian infrastructure such as water cisterns and electricity grids, denying the Palestinian population vitally needed resources to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The patent aim of this campaign of demolitions and destruction—justified in the name of building regulations and military necessity—is to make life for Palestinians unbearable so that Israel can seize more and more of their land.

The latest brutal destruction and eviction was carried out in what is designated as Area C under the 1993 Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. It remains under Israel’s military control, as opposed to Areas A, which is administered by the Palestinian Authority, and B, which is administered jointly by the PA and Israel.

Area C, which occupies three-fifths of the West Bank, includes 135 settlements housing some 390,000 Israelis, along with 532 villages and communities that are home to 150,000 Palestinians. While Area C comprises a contiguous territory that includes virtually all of the West Bank’s natural resources, Areas A and B are made up of 165 separate pieces of land, divided by settlements, security roads and military checkpoints and virtually surrounded by Area C.

Palestinians in Area C are barred from building any homes or digging wells or erecting any other kind of infrastructure without securing military permits, which are almost invariably denied. According to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, less than 2 percent of permit applications were approved between 2009 and 2016.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signaled earlier this year his intention of annexing the bulk of Area C, including the Jordan Valley, as part of a “Greater Israel” policy. To the extent that the Palestinian population would not be expelled from these territories, they would be subjected to apartheid-style oppression, backed by the “Nation State Law” enacted under Netanyahu, which establishes Jewish supremacy as the foundation of the state.

While Netanyahu formally agreed to postpone the annexation as part of the US-brokered “peace” deal with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (in reality a deal to solidify an anti-Iranian bloc in preparation for region-wide war), de facto annexation continues uninterruptedly.

With the prospect that Trump will be removed from the White House in January, there have been growing demands for Netanyahu to push ahead with annexation.

Yossi Dagan, the head of the Settlements Council in the northern West Bank, told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu must proceed to an immediate implementation of the Israeli annexation plan, “because with each passing day, things become more difficult.” Similarly, Knesset Member Bezalel Smotrich of the extreme right-wing Tkuma party said that if Trump loses the US elections, “we will have to pressure Netanyahu to implement and establish sovereignty before Joe Biden becomes president.”

These hysterical demands aside, there is no reason to believe that a Biden administration will do anything to hinder Israel’s annexation policy.

The Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, which is dedicated to political and decolonization affairs, voted by an overwhelming majority Wednesday for a resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlement policy. Its resolution charged that Israel is guilty of “the transfer of nationals of the occupying Power into the occupied territories, the confiscation of land, the forced transfer of Palestinian civilians, including Bedouin families, the exploitation of natural resources, the fragmentation of territory and other actions against the Palestinian civilian population and the civilian population in the occupied Syrian Golan that are contrary to international law,” i.e., the Geneva Conventions, which were enacted in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of similar actions carried out by Germany’s Nazi regime.

Global coronavirus death toll reaches daily record of over 9,000

Benjamin Mateus

While the world remained riveted to their social media devices and news channels waiting on any decisive results that would determine a hotly contested election in the United States between fascistic Donald Trump and his right-wing Democratic opponent Joe Biden, almost silently and inconspicuously the global death toll from COVID-19 reached a harrowing record daily figure of 9,057, shattering the previous high set on April 17.

By every prediction, this is only a prelude to a catastrophic health crisis that threatens to make the last 10 months of the pandemic appear as a dress rehearsal and mere child’s play. The ruling class remains indifferent to the plight of those who, after several days to weeks of struggling for their breath, have perished, their memory blotted out of existence.

Nurse performs a coronavirus test outside the Salt Lake County Health Department Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, in Salt Lake City, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

In the face of over 9,000 deaths, the Dow Jones soared 542 points on Thursday to close at 28,390, ensuring the best week since April when the policy of herd immunity was inaugurated with the opening of commerce and the drive back to work. Despite a record 113,000-plus COVID-19 cases Thursday, the Wall Street Journal hailed the drop in jobless benefits.

Meanwhile, Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, has pledged to keep interest rates at near-zero for at least three more years. Such developments hark back to the insistence by the White House that there would be no future lockdowns, emboldening the markets.

The Worldometer COVID-19 dashboard estimates total deaths to date attributable to COVID-19 at 1,238,375. The seven-day moving average has edged up to 7,110, exceeding the peak reached in mid-April with 7,047 deaths per day. With an astounding 3,916 deaths on Wednesday, Europe accounted for 43 percent of all the deaths in 24 hours, with infections spreading throughout the continent and eastward. The United States has consistently led in the death counts, now with over 1,000 daily.

The world is fast approaching 50 million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. With each passing month, the rate of daily cases has been climbing. There were 569,546 cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, a single-day high. The seven-day moving average has risen from 400,000 cases per day to over 500,000 per day in less than two weeks. In other words, the rate of new cases will see 15 million added to the overall total each month. Yesterday saw more than 600,000 infections in just one day.

Health authorities have repeatedly been warning that the virus is highly contagious and deadly. If it is allowed to spread uncontained, hospitals will reach overcapacity, and intensive care facilities will quickly be overwhelmed. There is a direct correlation between the state of national health care systems and deaths from COVID-19.

As cases across Europe have exploded, nation after nation has been forced to reimpose some form of lockdown or restrictions in hopes of containing the transmission while sustaining commerce through half-measures such as curfews, restricted hours and the closing of bars and restaurants. The continent posted a single-day high of over 310,000 cases Wednesday.

Greece has joined the UK, France and Germany in imposing a three-week nationwide lockdown. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis admitted that without these restrictions, he feared the health system would rapidly collapse. Greece has seen an exponential rise in cases, now approaching 3,000 per day, a nearly tenfold increase from the same time a month ago. The country has the lowest intensive case unit (ICU) beds per capita in Europe.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte has issued a nationwide overnight curfew and imposed tighter restrictions in regions where infections are surging and available hospital beds are running short. With a single-day high of 34,505 cases Wednesday, Italy had 428 deaths. The highest death count, on March 27, was 921.

With hospitals and ICUs reaching capacity, countries like Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK have attempted to introduce half-measures to check the population’s movement. Frustrations are mounting. Protesters in Spain clashed with police over the weekend against the restrictions. Health Minister Roberto Speranza, a proponent of a national lockdown, said, “The epidemiologic curve is still very high. What worries me is the absolute figure, which shows a terrifying curve. Either we bend it, or we are in trouble.”

In France, students and teachers are organizing strikes protesting Macron’s policy to keep schools open, which places them in danger from the ever-prevalent virus. France saw close to 60,000 new cases, with 363 deaths reported Wednesday. Despite having increased its ICU capacity by 25 percent, Germany fears that its ability will hit a watershed moment in December. France and Switzerland fear this moment will come sooner, over the next two weeks. With Europe’s worst COVID-19 infection rate of 1,735 cases per 100,000, Belgium’s hospital system is at the breaking point.

Even Sweden has changed its tune by imposing new restrictions, as cases have suddenly climbed. The government has forecasted that the winter will be brutal and grim. Stefan Lofven, Sweden’s prime minister, told reporters on Tuesday, “How we act now will determine what kind of Christmas we will be able to celebrate, and who will be able to take part.” Even their state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, has had to profess that “overall, the development is moving in the wrong direction in many different ways.”

The situation is most dire in the United States, with deaths approaching a quarter million before this month’s end and every effort being made by the political establishment to oppose any form of lockdown to contain the pandemic.

Meanwhile, field hospitals have been opened again in Wisconsin and Texas as hospitals have reached breaking points. Texas is the first state to surpass 1 million COVID-19 cases. Though much has been said about the virus driving deeper into rural communities, it is reemerging in the densely populated Northeast. Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut have seen record cases. By December, projections show that the US death rate will climb to 1,700 per day.

Hospitals are turning to short-term traveling nurses to fill in vacancies. Many clinical staff are quitting, burnt out by months of difficult and emotionally wrecking work. Rural regions suffering from a chronic shortage of medical staff face catastrophe as hospitals are going into financial insolvency. Many of their patients, in critical condition, are being transferred to larger centers for intensive care, creating gridlock within the health care infrastructure, adding a new level of chaos to the national response.

Social media platforms implement aggressive censorship during the 2020 US elections

Kevin Reed

The major social media platforms stepped up their censorship operations before, during and after election day on Tuesday as the ruling establishment—especially the Democratic Party and the US intelligence state—attempted to control online public political discussion and debate.

All of the platforms assembled teams of moderators and used some form of fact-checking labels on content posted by users about the elections purportedly to “slow the spread of disinformation.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies remotely during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on antitrust on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in Washington. (Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP)

In the case of Twitter, posts were fact checked after they were determined by a combination of algorithms and human analysts to be “false claims.” The Twitter labels—which have been used on numerous tweets by President Trump since the polls closed on Tuesday evening—included two different messages.

The first of these Twitter fact-checking labels allows posts in question to be displayed but with a label below them which states, “Official sources may not have called the race when this was posted.” Used primarily on Tweets claiming election victories, the label also contains a link to a Twitter “Election Results” page that hosts the video feed of an “authoritative news source” such as ABC News.

Another Twitter fact-check label covers up the posted content and says, “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” Twitter users can still see the content by clicking on a “View” button, but they are not permitted to share or comment on the content in question.

Opting for a reactionary dragnet censorship approach, Facebook has placed a fact-checking label on every single post by all users that in any way mention the election. The fact-check label says, “See the latest updates on the 2020 US Election” and includes a link to the Facebook Voter Information Center.

This extraordinary measure by Facebook—no doubt also accompanied by a mechanism that throttles the circulation of the posts—shows the enormous fear that predominates within big tech that any post about the elections by users has the potential to go viral on the platform and spread outside of their control. As of this writing, the outrageous Facebook blanket labeling of political posts by users has not been mentioned anywhere in the corporate news media.

Other fact-checking labels from Facebook—which were also used on numerous posts from Donald Trump post-election day—are designed to suppress claims about vote counting or election results.

Facebook fact-checking label placed on every single post that contained a comment or link to information about the 2020 US elections

One label says, “Election officials follow strict rules when it comes to ballot counting, handling and reporting,” and the another says, “Final results may be different from the initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.” Both of these labels state that their source is the Bipartisan Policy Center and contain links to the Facebook Voter Information Center.

In the case of YouTube, the fact-checking label is displayed below posted videos and says, “US elections: Results may not be final. See the latest on Google,” and includes a “Show Me” button that links to a curated Google search result on the elections with a national election summary at the top of the page from the Associated Press.

Reuters reported that TikTok removed a video by a group called Republican Hype House that featured “a false claim that Michigan found 138,000 ballots in a lake.” TikTok said the video violated its policy against misleading information.

The alignment of the social media censorship operation during the elections with the interests of the Democratic Party and the US intelligence state is evident in a report published in the New York Times on Monday entitled, “What to Expect from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on Election Day.”

Starting off with a reference to the unsubstantiated assertion that social media was misused by Russians “to inflame American voters with divisive messages before the 2016 presidential election,” the Times endorses the 2020 censorship regime of the platforms. The Times journalists, including Daisuke Wakabayashi, write that the social media companies have spent four years and billions of dollars to “clamp down on falsehoods and highlight accurate and verified information.”

In one significant passage, the Times states that one of the Facebook teams—among the 35,000 people working on “election security operations”—is led by a former National Security Council operative. This unnamed individual has been tasked with leading an effort to search for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by “accounts that work in concert to spread false information.”

The Times also reports that Facebook has set up a “war room” of employees working remotely in order to “identify efforts to destabilize the election.” As reported previously on the WSWS, Facebook has “special tools” prepared for election-related violence and, although the details of these censorship techniques have not been revealed, their purpose is to slow down or squash the spread of information on the platform identified as “inflammatory.”

The Times goes on to state that “Facebook has also worked with government agencies and other tech companies to spot foreign interference.” Exposing the fraud about the unconfirmed threats of “foreign interference,” it is legitimate to ask: Why is it necessary to label the comments of every single user, including all 223 million US users, who is making a comment about the 2020 elections?

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that the social media companies had been implementing election censorship operations for weeks and developing it right up to the day before the elections. The FT report says, “Facebook, in particular, raced out eleventh-hour policy changes, confirming just hours before election day that it was temporarily disabling its recommendations tool that directs users to join political groups, and also temporarily restricting Instagram users from discovering certain content from users they do not know.”

It is clear that these reports tell only part of the story of what the social media companies are doing to block the exchange of ideas on their platforms and make sure that political discussion that falls outside of the two-party system—especially left-wing, socialist and class-conscious dialogue—gets stifled and is prevented from getting widespread exposure.

Another 751,000 US workers file for unemployment benefits as job growth slows

Jerry White

Another 751,000 American workers filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits during the week ending Oct. 31, the US Department of Labor (DOL) reported Thursday. There were also 362,883 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the federal program that provides benefits to independent contractors, the self-employed and gig economy workers who do not qualify for state unemployment aid.

The media highlighted the fact that initial state claims fell by 7,000 from the week before and have fallen for three weeks in a row. The narrative of the supposedly robust recovery of the economy will likely continue tomorrow when the government releases employment figures for October, which analysts expect to show an increase of more than half a million jobs. However, job growth has slowed substantially recently since first spiking in May and June when the Trump administration and both parties lifted partial lockdowns and non-essential businesses reopened.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary’s Church in Waltham, Mass. earlier this year. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

In September, there were 661,000 new jobs, meaning it would take 17 months for the US economy to return to pre-pandemic employment levels. On Wednesday, the hiring firm ADP, which conducts a separate survey of employers, said private companies only added 365,000 jobs in October, well below expectations for 700,000 positions.

Broad masses of working people are facing an economic and social disaster that is unparalleled since the Great Depression. The total number of workers who have filed jobless claims since the pandemic began has reached 66.7 million, the equivalent of nearly 42 percent of the nation’s workforce.

Currently, the number of people collecting some form of state and federal benefits is 21.5 million, compared to 1.44 million in a comparable week in 2019. The real number of jobless workers in America, however, is far higher. Millions have already exhausted their benefits, dropped out of the labor force or are being forced to work short hours with a sharp loss in pay.

The states and territories with the highest insured unemployment rates in mid-October were Hawaii (11.3 percent), California (9.5 percent), Nevada (9.2 percent), New Mexico (9.0 percent), Georgia (7.6 percent), Puerto Rico (7.6 percent), District of Columbia (7.1 percent), Massachusetts (6.9 percent), and Louisiana (6.8 percent).

The new surge in COVID-19 infections is expected to lead to a further slowdown in job growth. The latest Paychex-IHS Markit Small Business Employment Watch recorded a slowdown in small business hiring in October. At the same time, major corporations, including the airlines, hotels, retail and other industries, are using the pandemic to slash jobs and restructure their operations.

Nearly one in 10 businesses plan to lay off workers during the final three months of the year as a result of the pandemic, according to a survey of human resource executives at 330 companies conducted by the Conference Board last month, which was reported by USA Today earlier this week.

Over 28,000 Walt Disney workers are expected to receive email notices this Sunday informing them that their jobs have been cut at theme parks, resorts, theaters and other entertainment operations. Tens of thousands of other workers have been given layoff notices over the last several days at Boeing (7,000), Exxon Mobil (1,900), Charles Schwab (1,000), Nike (700) and ESPN (300). With a 25–30 percent decline in demand for printing and writing paper, the ND Paper company announced that it was laying off 130 of its 650 workers at its paper mill in Rumford, Maine, where one worker died from COVID-19 and 21 were infected in September.

Even as the number of infections hit a record high of 115,000 on Thursday and the death toll surpassed 240,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 542 points and Wall Street enjoyed its best week since April. The corporate and financial elite have already factored in that a Biden administration would secure its interests and quickly dispense with any campaign rhetoric about increasing taxes on the wealthy, particularly with a Republican Senate. The markets were also bolstered by the anticipation of another federal bailout and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s assurance on Thursday that the central bank would continue record low interest rates and its $4.2 trillion asset purchase program, which includes spending $120 billion a month to buy up the bad debts of the banks and other major corporations.

At the same time, the Democrats and Republicans have deprived jobless workers of any significant economic relief in a deliberate effort to pressure workers back into the factories and other workplaces to pay for the mountain of government and corporate debt. The cutoff of government stimulus checks and $600 per week federal supplement to state unemployment benefits has contributed to a massive reduction in personal income, according to a government study cited in a Quartz article, titled, “The boom in US GDP does not match what’s happening to Americans’ wallets.”

The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) found that personal income decreased $540.6 billion in the third quarter, in contrast to an increase of $1.45 trillion in the second quarter. “The decrease in personal income,” the report noted, “was more than accounted for by a decrease in personal current transfer receipts (notably, government social benefits related to pandemic relief programs) that was partly offset by increases in compensation and proprietors’ income.

Disposable personal income decreased $636.7 billion, or 13.2 percent, in the third quarter, in contrast to an increase of $1.60 trillion, or 44.3 percent, in the second quarter, the BEA reported. Personal saving was $2.78 trillion in the third quarter, compared with $4.71 trillion in the second quarter.

As a result, an estimated 54 million Americans are going hungry, 30 to 40 million face the danger of evictions and an estimated 8 million have gone into poverty since the pandemic hit.

At the opposite pole of society, the private fortunes of America’s richest 645 billionaires have risen by $845 billion—from $2.95 trillion to $3.8 trillion—and several corporations are seeing profits rise sharply. On Thursday, General Motors reported $4 billion in profits in the third quarter. This follows similar windfalls by Ford and Fiat Chrysler as all three Detroit automakers blew past Wall Street profit projections. Auto factories were reopened in mid-May after a two-month shutdown forced by a wave of wildcat strikes against the spread of the virus in the plants, which rank-and-file autoworkers carried out in defiance of the United Auto Workers union.

Workers who have been forced back into the infected factories are working harder and harder while wages stagnate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday that productivity in the third quarter rose by 4.9 percent, following a 10.6 percent increase in the second quarter, the largest two-quarter increase since 1965. Manufacturing productivity increases were even higher, rising at a 19 percent annualized rate.

At the same time, unit labor costs in the third quarter decreased at an annual rate of 8.9 percent and 18.2 percent in the manufacturing sector. This is driven by a 4.4 percent decrease in hourly compensation, the largest decline since 2009, when mass unemployment after the global financial crash was used to drive down wages, including a 50 percent pay cut for new hires in the auto industry overseen by the Obama administration.

Indian Magna Cosma workers continue strike against victimisation and for recognition of new union

Shibu Vavara & Sasi Kumar

Workers at an auto parts factory in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu have been on an indefinite strike since September 17 demanding the reinstatement of 18 victimised workers and recognition of their union.

Fifty-five of the 75 permanent workers at the Magna Cosma plant in the Sriperumbudur and Oragadam industrial hub, located 55 km southwest of Chennai, the state capital, have joined the industrial action.

Magna Cosma International India Private Limited is a part of Magna International, a Canadian global automotive supplier with 316 manufacturing operations and 84 product development, engineering and sales centres in 29 countries. The conglomerate employs over 125,000 workers in its global network.

Maruti Suzuki workers protesting several years ago to demand freedom for their imprisoned colleagues

The Magna plant at Vaddakupattu, a village in Oragadam, started manufacturing in 2013. It supplies auto parts to major companies, including Nissan, Ford, Hyundai and Kia.

As is widely practised in both public and private sector companies in India, Magna maintains a multi-tier work force to facilitate super exploitation, with just 75 permanent workers alongside 350 contract workers and 200 trainees.

Striking workers told the WSWS they have faced deteriorating conditions for three and half years, enforced by an openly pro-company union affiliated to the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), the union federation of the big business Congress Party.

Early this year they formed a new union affiliated to the Maoist Left Trade Union Centre (LTUC). The management responded by unleashing a witch-hunt against the militant workers who took the initiative in forming the new union. On March 19, it suspended six workers. The management also ordered the arbitrary transfer of another 12 workers to its plant in Pune, Maharashtra. After these workers refused to accept the forced transfers, they were also suspended.

The workers staged a protest and demanded the reversal of the company’s victimisations. On August 26, the permanent workers began a protest hunger strike. On September 17 they launched their strike. Although the strike involves a relatively small number of workers, it demonstrates a determination to fight for better conditions.

However, contrary to the expectations of the strikers, the LTUC has pursued its usual pattern of betrayal. The LTUC’s treacherous record includes its role in a 140-day strike in the same industrial hub by Motherson Automotive Technologies & Engineering (MATE) workers over higher wages, better conditions and union recognition from August last year to mid-January.

The LTUC isolated and betrayed the Motherson workers’ nearly five-month strike. It directed the strikers back to work on January 13 not only without meeting any of their demands but also leaving sacked 51 militant workers. This strengthened the hand of the management, culminating in July in the permanent dismissal of the 51 workers.

As at Motherson, the LTUC is working to isolate the Magna strikers, refusing to call out the contract workers and trainees at the plant. Such a call would inevitably raise the burning issues that the contract workers face—the need for permanency and higher wages.

No effort has been made by the LTUC, like during the Motherson workers strike, to appeal to workers in other Magna plants across India and globally, or to other sections of workers in the huge industrial hub and elsewhere in India.

Instead, the LTUC told the Magna strikers to make futile appeals to the right-wing AIADMK state government and the state Labour department to intervene to resolve their demands, despite the AIADMK’s open anti-working class record.

Some union officials from Sanmina and Ford appeared at the Magna strike and offered their verbal “solidarity” and some financial contributions. Ford Employees Union leader Selva visited the site on September 24, and declared support for the strike and gave some funds. He then told the strikers he would speak to the Ford company about their strike. He was not going to appeal to Ford workers, but to the management—underscoring the unions’ pro-company orientation.

The LTUC directed the Magna striking workers to go to nearby Panchayats (village-level local councils), including Vaddakkupattu, Chenna kuppam, Mampakkam and Panruti, to win support among village people and Panchayat leaders. According to a LTUC Facebook report, “they denounced the evil actions of the Magna management and said Tamil Nadu government should take action.” So, the campaign was again directed to appeals to the AIADMK government.

As well as the Motherson sellout, the Magna strikers must draw lessons from the bitter experience of workers at the Japanese-owned Maruti Suzuki car assembly plant at Manesar in the northern Indian state of Haryana.

In a monstrous company-government frame-up, 13 militant Maruti Suzuki workers are in jail serving life sentences for a murder they did not commit. This vendetta was unleashed in July 2012, in an attempt to suppress growing militancy at the plant, including strikes, protests and plant-floor sit-downs from mid-2011 against the company’s slave labour conditions.

India’s capitalist rulers were determined to persecute these young workers and make an example of them because they dared to challenge the brutal working conditions that prevail in the country’s globally-connected auto industry.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and the WSWS launched a global campaign to win the release of the Maruti Suzuki workers, exposing this conspiracy, which involves the entire political establishment, the courts and the police.

The attack on the Maruti Suzuki workers was initiated by Haryana’s Congress state government and supported by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance that held power in New Delhi until May 2014. When these governments passed into the hands of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP), the frame-up continued.

But no less determined to imprison the jailed Maruti Suzuki workers in a wall of silence are the Stalinist parliamentary parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India—and their respective trade union affiliates, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All India Trades Union Congress (AITUC).

The Stalinists are afraid that any fight to defend the jailed Maruti Suzuki workers would disrupt their political partnership with the Congress Party and their cosy relations with the employers. Exposure of the frame-up would also put the lie to their claim that the courts and other institutions of the Indian Republic constitute a “democratic” bulwark against the ruling class and the employers.

New documents show Mueller investigation unable to concoct charges against Assange and WikiLeaks

Oscar Grenfell

Previously redacted portions of the Mueller report into supposed Russian interference in the US, released this week, have shown that despite every effort, the Justice Department was unable to concoct evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on the part of WikiLeaks or Julian Assange in relation to their 2016 publications exposing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton.

The revelation is the latest proof of the fraudulent character of the entire “Russiagate” narrative, used not only to smear Assange, but also to justify expanded online censorship and to push for greater US military aggression. It is evidence that the US state had been attempting to manufacture criminal charges against Assange, before an indictment was finalised in late 2017 over WikiLeaks’ completely unrelated 2010 and 2011 publications.

Assange interviewed by CNN in August, 2016. The network had a strap beneath him reading “Political disruption” throughout most of the interview. (Credit: Screenshot CNN online broadcast)

The 13 new pages of the 448-page Mueller report were released on Monday as the result of a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed News.

The Justice Department has sought to block the full release of the report since it was brought down in March, 2019, including through the use of extensive redactions. In September, a US judge ruled that the government had violated the law by withholding sections of the report without legitimate cause, labelling some of the redactions as “self-serving.”

The contents of the new material shows why the Justice Department was so intent on keeping it hidden. The documents disclose that despite a two-year investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller came up with nothing to prove the collusion between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence that had been trumpeted by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and the corporate media.

This is in line with the character of the report as a whole, which was unable to substantiate any of the “Russian interference” in the 2016 US election that the Mueller investigation had been tasked with identifying.

The new pages reveal that one of the focuses of the Mueller investigation was laying the groundwork for criminal charges against Assange and WikiLeaks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This was premised on the assertion that the internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications and emails of Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, were hacked by the GRU Russian military intelligence agency before being published by WikiLeaks.

In May, it was revealed that CrowdStrike, a cyber security company handpicked by the Democratic Party to examine the DNC servers had been unable to find evidence that documents had ever been exfiltrated from them. In other words, there may not have been any successful hack, Russian or otherwise.

This aligned with Assange’s repeated insistence that Russia was not the source of the material. It lent weight to the claims of WikiLeaks collaborator and former British diplomat, Craig Murray, who has stated that he has personal knowledge of the source of the DNC documents, and that they were provided by “disgruntled insiders.”

Significantly, even though it is based on the discredited Russiagate framework, the newly-released material from the report concluded that there was no basis for laying conspiracy charges against Assange.

“The most fundamental hurdles” to such a prosecution, it stated, “are factual ones.” There was not “admissible evidence” to establish a conspiracy involving Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks and Trump campaign insider Roger Stone.

To justify the fact that all of the resources of the American state were insufficient to manufacture evidence of the theory that it had promoted for years, the Mueller report pathetically claimed that one of the problems was that WikiLeaks’ communications with the GRU were encrypted.

“The lack of visibility into the contents of these communications would hinder the Office’s ability to prove that WikiLeaks was aware of and intended to join the criminal venture comprised of the GRU hackers,” the report stated.

This is truly clutching at straws and desperately attempting to save face. Mueller was left to claim that the only possible evidence of a conspiracy was contained in encrypted messages that he and the intelligence agencies had presumably never seen!

The report concluded that an attempted prosecution would fail. “[S]uccess would also depend upon evidence of WikiLeaks’s and Stone’s knowledge of ongoing or contemplated future computer intrusions—the proof that is currently lacking,” it stated.

The centrality of Stone to the attempts to concoct charges against Assange underscores the frame-up character of the entire operation. After the Mueller report was finalised, Stone was successfully prosecuted. But it was not for involvement in any conspiracy. Rather, Stone was sent to prison for falsely claiming under oath that he had ever had any relationship with WikiLeaks or Assange.

The new documents show that Mueller was intent on establishing the grounds for a prosecution of Assange, with the precise allegations and charges a secondary matter entirely subordinate to the overarching goal of imprisoning the WikiLeaks founder.

Thus the Mueller investigation extraordinarily canvassed the possibility of charging Assange with having made “illegal campaign contributions” to Trump. These contributions were not financial, but were the publication of the DNC and Podesta emails.

Mueller was well aware that this would be an attempt to criminalise the publication of true and newsworthy information, concluding that such a prosecution would come up against the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Significantly, the Mueller report also warned that a conspiracy prosecution, even if evidence could be concocted, would confront similar obstacles. Precedent, it noted, had established that “the First Amendment protects a party’s publication of illegally intercepted communications on a matter of public concern, even when the publishing parties knew or had reason to know of the intercepts’ unlawful origin.”

The Russiagate narrative had already been entirely discredited before the release of new information from the Mueller report.

But the material further highlights the flagrant illegality of the US attempt to extradite Assange from Britain, and prosecute him on conspiracy and Espionage Act charges over WikiLeaks 2010–11 publications of the Iraq and Afghan war logs, US diplomatic cables and files from Guantánamo Bay.

All of the First Amendment issues relating to the 2016 publications apply with equal force to the 2010–11 releases. They were obtained by the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who had lawful access to them as an army intelligence analyst. The documents were published by Assange, who acted as an editor and a journalist exposing evidence of war crimes, human rights abuses and diplomatic intrigues.

That Mueller was seeking to lay the grounds for a criminal prosecution against Assange, on matters completely unrelated to those he has since been charged with, demonstrates the vindictive and political nature of the US Justice Department’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder.

It paints a picture of a US state apparatus, intent on silencing Assange because he exposed their crimes, searching for years to find some basis for bringing legal action against him. Virtually all of the evidence relating to the 2010–11 publications has been known for a decade. The Mueller report suggests, however, the US state may first have been seeking to charge Assange over the 2016 releases. Only as it became clear that this would fail was a December, 2017 indictment filed in relation to the 2010–11 material.

That indictment, which has since been repeatedly superseded, was based on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the exact same legislation Mueller unsuccessfully investigated prosecuting Assange under.

The clearly political character of the entire process means that Assange’s extradition to the US would be unlawful. Existing treaty arrangements between Britain and the US explicitly ban extraditions for offences of a political nature.

The latest Mueller material has been overshadowed by the 2020 US election crisis. It has been ignored by almost all of the publications that promoted the fraudulent Russiagate campaign, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The timing, however, is somewhat fitting. For the past four years, the Democrats, in line with their character as a party of Wall Street and the intelligence agencies, have sought to divert all opposition to the Trump administration into right-wing channels, including feverish claims that the president is an agent of Russia.

The current election crisis has underscored the utter bankruptcy of that strategy.