Wife of UK chancellor richer than the Queen: Rishi Sunak and the rule of the oligarchy

Jean Shaoul

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak failed to declare his and his wife’s wealth and any potential conflicts of interest on becoming a Minister of the Crown last year. He is in breach of all the rules supposedly designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

It was no secret in ruling circles that Sunak is the wealthiest man in the House of Commons, having become a multi-millionaire after working for just a few years for some of the big names in the City of London. That his wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of one of India’s richest businessmen, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of giant technology corporation Infosys, is also well known. But the scale of her personal wealth is staggering.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (centre) with Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (left) and (right) Dame Carolyn Julie Fairbairn, Director General of the CBI, London, September 24, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Frank Augstein]

Sunak’s declaration of his financial and business interests in the official register of ministers’ interests, one of the scantiest on record, was contradicted by a Guardian investigation based on publicly available information. It revealed that Murty’s shares in Infosys—part of a family stakeholding worth £1.7 billion--are worth £430 million, from which she receives millions every year in dividend payments. This makes her one of the richest women in Britain and wealthier than the Queen, whom the Sunday Times ’ Rich List reports as having a net worth of £350 million.

Murty’s Infosys shares form only part of her wealth. Sunak also failed to declare his wife’s 5 percent stake in International Market Management (IMM). IMM channels investments via a “letterbox” company in Mauritius—a tax haven—into two Indian subsidiaries that operate restaurants in India, reducing its tax obligations. According to the Guardian, the use of such letterbox companies in Mauritius has cost India between $10-15 billion over the past 20 years in capital gains tax, dividend tax, interest tax and loyalty payments.

Neither did Sunak declare that his wife holds direct shareholdings and directorships in several UK companies, including two that benefited from his furlough scheme. Instead, he simply declared his wife’s ownership of a small UK-based venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Ltd. He and his wife set up the company as a vehicle for investing her wealth in start-up businesses. Sunak then transferred all his shares to Murty before he entered parliament in 2015.

Sunak also concealed his own wealth, simply declaring he had put his own wealth into a “blind trust” that supposedly ensures he has no knowledge or control over its investment decisions, thereby avoiding disclosure. Spotlight on Corruption, an anti-corruption NGO, has exposed such devices as a fraud, noting that the ostensible safeguards can be circumvented and that such trusts “function as a tool to encourage the public perception that steps have been taken to manage conflicts of interests without requiring politicians to divest of their financial interests.”

Sunak only declared his ownership of property worth slightly more than £100,000, a sum that would barely buy a rundown tenement in Britain today. However, he and his wife own a £7 million five-bedroom home in Kensington, a £1.5 million 12-bedroom Georgian mansion set in a 12 acre estate in his constituency in the Yorkshire Dales, and property in the US.

Of issue is not just Mr. and Mrs. Sunak’s obscene personal wealth, but that he occupies, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself, the most important position in UK politics in determining public policy choices to favour others such as himself who are part of the super-rich—at the expense of the vast majority.

On the most immediate and personal level, since 2015 Infosys, which employs 10,000 people in the UK, has won government contracts worth £22 million. It has worked for the Home Office, signing a framework agreement that means it can be awarded multi-million pound contracts without competition.

Significantly, Sunak himself precipitated events leading up to the exposure of his fraudulent declaration, when he refused to disclose whether he will profit from the huge increase in the share price of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna, which has announced successful trials of its vaccine. Moderna was one of the biggest investments held by the Theleme Partners hedge fund he co-founded before entering parliament. As a partner in the fund, he would own a stake in the management company and have money invested in its fund.

Johnson’s government was fully aware of all of this. Yet the then head of propriety and ethics, Helen MacNamara, signed off Sunak’s registration of financial interests, even though Murty’s holdings in the family business was common knowledge. His fabulous wealth and specialist knowledge of how to protect it, both for himself and others, all but guarantees his continued elevation within government. Sunak, who became chancellor at the age of 39 within five years of entering parliament, is a man with no groundswell of popular support, or political experience. But he has been tipped as a future prime minister to replace the beleaguered Johnson.

Sunak is the living embodiment of government in the service of the financial oligarchy. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in February as the pandemic was causing stock markets around the world to plummet. He joined a government that became the first in the world to publicly admit to pursuing a policy of “herd immunity”—allowing the virus to spread throughout the population with virtually no obstacles in its path. This murderous and fascistic policy was consciously pursued so as not to jeopardize the profits of Britain’s banks and corporations. It is the grotesque expression of rule of, by and for the oligarchy.

Sunak used his first budget on March 11 to spearhead this policy, engineering a huge transfer of social wealth to the banks and major corporations that included £330 billion loan guarantees for business—a sum equal to 15 percent of GDP--£12 billion support for business, reduced business rates or no liability at all for the 2020-21 tax year and a pledge to cover businesses’ cost of providing statutory sick pay for up to 14 days for workers in firms with fewer than 250 employees, as well as £895 billion in quantitative easing (QE), subventions that far exceed those passed after the 2008 global financial crash.

Last week, this odious financial parasite announced an austerity offensive targeting working people to meet the cost of Britain’s economic collapse, with the words, “Our economic emergency has only just begun.”

The cost of the pandemic had already reached £280 billion, he declared, without explaining that the lion’s share of these costs were the result of his subventions to business announced in March. With the economy expected to be between 3 percent and 6 percent smaller by 2025, government debt would reach nearly 100 percent of GDP by 2025 thanks to such handouts to the banks and corporations.

The Chancellor Rishi Sunak works on his Spending Review speech with members of his team in his offices in 11 Downing Street (credit: HM Treasury FlickR)

He also neglected to say that the wealth of just the 1,000 richest people in Britain would almost cover the government’s debt.

Such is the degraded state of British political life today that there have been no calls for him to resign by the Labour opposition, in line with leader Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge of only “constructive opposition.” All that was demanded by the backbench Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi was that parliament’s toothless committee on standards in public life look into whether Sunak’s lack of disclosure breached the Ministerial Code and might “further erode public trust in politicians and bring parliament into disrepute.”

Trust in parliament could hardly be lower. Millions of workers view the Johnson government as a bunch of political criminals. The pandemic has confirmed that working people have no political vehicle to express their opposition to its gangster-like policies. With the Labour Party functioning as the government’s partner in crime and bodyguard, parliament has ceased to function in any genuinely democratic sense.

Kremlin girds itself for a Biden presidency, while still refusing to acknowledge his electoral victory

Andrea Peters

Speaking to a press outlet on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reported that the Kremlin is “carefully following what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic,” but continued to refrain from acknowledging Joe Biden as president-elect of the United States.

“It is premature to assess the consequences of the elections in the US for international relations before the announcement of official results,” stated Lavrov, adding that Russia “is prepared for any development of events.”

Should Biden assume the presidency, the foreign minister indicated that the Kremlin expects a return to Obama-era policies. Anticipating the possible coming to power of a rabidly anti-Russian White House in January, Lavrov insisted that collaboration with any American government be based on “honesty, mutual respect, and non-interference in internal affairs.”

The Kremlin in Moscow (Photo: A.Savin/Wikipedia)

Despite endless efforts by the Democratic Party and leading American press outlets to portray Trump as “soft” on Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin is aware of the immense threat to Russia’s geopolitical and economic interests posed by a successful Trump coup. As was made clear by the recent US and Israeli-orchestrated assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, the crazed policies of the Trump administration are no less likely than those of a future Biden administration to draw Russia into a disastrous war.

The same day that Lavrov issued his comments, NATO representatives meeting virtually identified Russia as the alliance’s major security threat, insisting that Moscow’s growing influence in Belarus and Nagorno-Karabakh and alleged deployment of “new missiles from the Far North to Syria to Libya” required new efforts “to contain Russia.”

While the Trump administration implemented numerous aggressive measures against the Kremlin—scrapping major nuclear treaties, extending anti-Russian sanctions and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars towards Ukraine’s military—the government being prepared by president-elect Biden is packed with anti-Russian fanatics who have been braying for war with Moscow and centrally involved in efforts to destabilize the country through the installation of pro-Western regimes across the post-Soviet sphere. The sense in Moscow is that however much hopes for an easing of tensions with the US were dashed by the realities of Trump’s four years in office, the situation is likely to become even worse under Biden.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s proposed secretary of state, avidly backed the US-orchestrated anti-Russian regime change operation in Ukraine in 2014. He advocated the use of harsh sanctions to punish the Russian population as a whole over the Russian annexation of the Black Sea peninsula Crimea. In comments made throughout the summer and fall of 2020, Blinken has promised that a Biden administration will aggressively “impose costs” and “deter” Russia through the expansion of NATO and stepped-up measures intended to wreck the Russian economy.

Jake Sullivan, who is slated to be Biden’s national security adviser and was a key figure in the Obama administration, played a central role in the Democratic Party’s effort to tar Trump with allegations of collusion with Russia as part of the Democrats’ impeachment drive. Avril Haines, who will take the post of Director of National Intelligence, was also deeply involved in claims of Russia’s supposed meddling in the 2016 elections. Jen Psaki, Biden’s pick as White House communications secretary, was the spin doctor who sought to cover up the implications of the revelations made in 2014 by US Ambassador Victoria Nuland that the US had poured $5 billion into “promoting democracy” in Ukraine.

In response to the news of the Biden appointments, Yuri Rogulev, director of the Foundation for the Study of the USA at Moscow State University, pointed in particular to the political resumes of Sullivan and Psaki and noted, “Nothing good looms for our country.” In a popular reflection of this mood, a survey by the news outlet Russia Matters found that just 10 percent of Russians anticipate that the country’s relationship with the US will improve under a Biden presidency and 30 percent think it will deteriorate.

Speaking on Wednesday at a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an alliance of post-Soviet states, Putin warned against “outside interference: financial injections, informational support, political support and so forth” in the affairs of CSTO member states. His remarks were directed in particular at the situation Belarus. Currently, the Kremlin is pressuring Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to leave office in an effort to prevent months of mass popular protests against Lukashenko from turning into a pressure point in the hands of imperialist powers allying themselves with so-called “democratic forces” in Belarus.

It is increasingly clear that this is precisely what is being prepared. The same day that Putin issued his warning about interference in the CSTO, the European Commission (EC)—the executive branch of the European Union—released a statement outlining its expectation that a Biden administration will defend the “territorial integrity and energy security” of Ukraine and “step up support for a peaceful democratic transfer of power” in Belarus. The EC appealed for Biden to hold a “summit on democracy.”

The Russian Air Force said Tuesday that so far this year it has detected 1,300 foreign spy planes operating near Russian territory. The same day the military made this announcement, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov expressed objections over US moves to deploy low-yield nuclear weapons to countries near Russia’s borders, which he described as a clear sign of “the return of the concept of limited nuclear war.”

The course which the conflict between the United States and Russia takes is also highly dependent on US policy towards China, which for both American political parties is emerging the primary target, as well as US relations with Europe.

Fyodor Lukyanov, one of Russia’s top foreign policy analysts and an adviser to the Kremlin, noted recently, “The rapid deterioration of the US-China relationship will define the whole atmosphere in the middle and long term … for Russia, it’s a big difference whether we face full-scale bipolar conflict between the United States and China which will require all other countries to take sides.”

He added, “Of course, in the Russian case, for now, there is no reason at all to expect Russia to lean toward the United States. But at the same time there is a growing and deepening debate in Russia about the relationship with China, which is very important.”

Tensions between the United States and various European countries with regards to Russia are also evident. At the center of the present situation is the construction of Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline connecting Russian suppliers to Germany via the Baltic Sea. After delays brought on by US sanctions, it was just announced early this week that the companies involved in Nord Stream 2—Gazprom and a number of European partners—had secured full financing for the project and even chosen the ship that would finish laying the pipeline.

Spanish generals call for mass murder in fascistic leaked WhatsApp chats

Alejandro López

On Wednesday, the news site Infolibre published a series of messages on a private WhatsApp chat group of top retired Spanish air force officers discussing the political situation. The report became a trending topic on Twitter. It shows retired generals and colonels proclaiming their loyalty to fascism and their hatred of the left, boasting of links to active-duty officers, and calling for a coup to murder tens of millions of people.

Many of the chats came from the telephone of retired Major General Francisco Beca, the lead signatory of a letter by 39 high-ranking Spanish air force officers to the European Parliament and to King Felipe VI, demanding action against the elected Podemos-Socialist Party (PSOE) government. These messages confirm the warning made by the WSWS: this letter was part of discussion of a fascist coup at the highest levels of the officer corps.

Fascist Spanish General Fransisco Franco (1892 – 1975) (Photo: Anefo/Wikipedia)

Beca refers to Myths of the Civil War, Pío Moa’s book defending General Francisco Franco’s 1936 fascist coup that began the Spanish Civil War and established the 1939-1978 Franco dictatorship: “As a good fascist, I have read it, and if what it says is true (I believe it is) there is no choice but to start shooting 26 million sons of b*tches.” Beca repeatedly calls for mass murder to “extirpate the cancer,” writing in another chat: “I think what I’m missing is to shoot 26 million people!!!!!!!!”

Franco’s 1936 coup, Beca writes in another message, led to “a few years of progress, though a few people had it rough. Spain is full of uncontrollable people and the only thing to do is to make people cultured, which is impossible with the left. It is sad, but this is the Spanish reality.”

Under the dictatorship that Franco established after his victory in the civil war, millions passed through concentration camps, mass censorship was imposed, education and health care were limited to the wealthy, and protests and strikes were savagely suppressed. Torture and murder were routine in Francoite Spain’s police stations. Referring to the Franco regime in one message, Beca said: “All that is left to do (unfortunately) is for history to repeat itself.”

Beca’s fascist and genocidal leanings were shared by other retired officers on the chat. Speaking of supporters and voters of the PSOE, Podemos and their allies, one retired captain in the chat, José Molina, wrote: “I want all of them and all their descendants to die. That’s what I want. Is that a lot to ask for?,” to which Beca replied: “But Curro [his nickname for Molina], for them to die they have to be shot and 26 million bullets are required !!!!!!!!!!”

These messages recall Franco’s infamous interview with U.S. journalist Jay Allen in 1936, during the Civil War, when he insisted that he would stop at nothing in his war to crush the Republic and repeated revolutionary uprisings of the Spanish working class. Allen said, “You’ll have to kill half of Spain.” Franco replied: “I said, I will pay any price.”

The stench of fascism has spread widely through the officer corps. In one message, retired colonel González Espinar boasted that he has discussed his coup-plotting widely among air force officers: “I already said it in a speech to the JEMAs [Chiefs of the Air Force Staff] Lombo, Gallarza, etc. ... and in more than one hundred dinners at the EA [Air Force] .... ‘GIVE ME AN ORDER!!’ [...] And that is what we would say to the King.”

Infolibre also published a long, obscenity-laden dialogue between González Espinar and retired colonels Ángel Díaz Rivera, calling for a coup to repress Catalan nationalist parties. When Díaz Rivera said “someone will have to start doing something (legal or illegal) against these sons of b*tches,” González Espinar replied: “It’s a pity I’m not active to divert a hot flight from Bárdenas [military airfield] to the home of these sons of b*tches.”

These chats are a warning to the Spanish and international working class. They expose the fraud of official Spanish propaganda on the 1978 Transition from fascist to parliamentary rule. Not only was the 1977 full amnesty for the crimes of fascism, agreed between the Franco regime, the PSOE, and the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party (PCE), supposed to guarantee lasting democracy under Spanish capitalism. Spain’s full integration into NATO and the European Union, it was said, would “professionalize” the Spanish army.

In reality, the Spanish officer corps’ close ties to the US and other European armed forces encouraged its well-known fascist tendencies. The officers in this WhatsApp group were born and started their careers under Francoism, but they served under the parliamentary regime and worked closely with US and other European armed forces. The Infolibre report thus sheds light on the degraded atmosphere prevailing in the military command across North America and Europe.

As these WhatsApp chats were being written, the NATO powers were pursuing both a military build-up against nuclear-armed Russia and China, and a “herd immunity” policy on COVID-19 that has seen over 600,000 deaths in NATO countries. Broad sections of the ruling class have totally lost their heads. Their reckless, murderous policies clearly reflect their view that tens of millions of working people should be exterminated.

The only way forward against the pandemic and the threat of war and fascism is to mobilize the working class independently of the established liberal, social-democratic and middle class “left populist” parties and their trade union allies.

On Wednesday, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Podemos Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias initially maintained a deafening silence on the leaked WhatsApp messages. Previously, PSOE Defense Minister Margarita Robles had claimed that officers writing in to declare their loyalty to the king was “legitimate.” On Wednesday, it was left to PSOE lawmaker Odón Elorza to impotently ask deputies of the far-right Vox party in Congress whether he, his family or other PSOE lawmakers are “among those 26 million people to be shot.”

Vox lawmakers responded by defending the fascist officers. Macarena Olona replied that she did not know whether Elorza was on any lists, as the WhatsApp messages are not from Vox. However, she then claimed that the fascist officers are fighting for the “unity” of Spain, and brazenly declared: “Of course they are our people.”

In fact, Vox party leader Santiago Abascal sent the fascist WhatsApp group a voice message. In a friendly tone, Abascal says: “Good afternoon, I am Santi Abascal and they tell me it is mandatory to greet this group. A hug to all and long live Spain!” It is unclear who told Abascal this WhatsApp group was important, or why he wanted to “greet” their coup plotting.

Yesterday, Iglesias finally broke his silence to issue a criminally complacent statement dismissing the threat altogether. He told RTVE that the officers’ statements are “scandalous” because they put the king in an “inconvenient position. However, he insisted, “What these retired gentlemen are saying poses no threat. … If some Francoite gentlemen think giving the head of state a Francoite tinge does him a favor, they do not understand that it makes more Spaniards feel like Republicans.”

Podemos and its various political satellites are far more afraid of opposition to “herd immunity,” austerity and war developing on their left, in the working class, than they are of a fascist coup. They are deliberately and consciously covering up the danger of a turn to military dictatorship.

ILO survey reveals COVID-19 impact on Bangladeshi women garment workers

Wimal Perera

A recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) entitled “Gendered impacts of COVID-19 on the garment sector” points to the toll of the pandemic on female workers in the Bangladeshi garment industry.

Published in early November, it draws from “Better Work,” an earlier collaboration between the ILO and the International Finance Corporation on the conditions of garment employees in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya, Lesotho and Vietnam.

Bangladeshi garment workers block a road demanding their unpaid wages during a protest in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, April 16, 2020. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)

While the stated aim of “Better Work” is to “improve working conditions in the garment industry and make the sector more competitive,” its real concern is that rising job and wage uncertainties accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic will produce social explosions in these countries.

In 2019, the garment industry employed an estimated 65 million workers in the Asia-Pacific, accounting for 75 percent of all garment workers worldwide. Over four million of these workers are employed in Bangladesh, with women accounting for roughly 80 percent of the workforce.

The ILO’s November report warns that garment workers in lower- and middle-income countries confront a “high risk” of job losses and decreased working hours because of the pandemic. “These job losses,” it continues, “are likely to disproportionally impact women.” The positions that are destroyed “may well never return.”

COVID-19 continues to rage unchecked through Bangladesh, with the government insisting that workers and the rest of the population accept this as the new normal. According to yesterday’s statistics, almost 470,000 have been infected and the death toll has climbed to 6,713.

In Bangladesh, tens of thousands of garment workers were retrenched following the government’s limited and ill-prepared lock down. Many of these workers, the report states, “are still owed wages for completed work” and are “unable to access basic necessities such as food, rent money or medical expenses for their households… Without adequate social protection measures and safety nets in place, loss of wages means that millions of workers and their families are facing poverty and hunger.”

The report notes women workers “are more likely to be directly and indirectly discriminated against” when they are retrenched because they take maternity and pregnancy leave or have to take time off for other medical conditions and family responsibilities. Garment industry employers are also less likely to rehire female workers close to or over the age of 35, opting to hire younger women.

The report states that some factory owners have used the pandemic to inflict “economic harm” on workers using “unacceptable practices, such as withholding information about actual pay and hours and not paying correctly for overtime.”

When the Bangladeshi government “reopened” the economy in late April, the report continues, factory owners did not implement serious measures to prevent workers being infected by COVID-19. In fact, physical distancing—whether on company-provided or public transportation, at workplaces or overcrowded factory-provided accommodation—could not be observed.

The pandemic has also produced rising rates of depression and mental stress amongst all workers and the young. “Unemployment has harmful health effects on both women and men workers, with men more susceptible to some forms of immediate ill-health,” the report states.

The study references previous pandemics, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and H1N1 (swine flu), which produced high levels of depression and a greater risk of suicide amongst unemployed men. A webinar held in late October by the Citizen’s Platform revealed that two-thirds of young people surveyed said they were depressed about their future income prospects and were undergoing mental stress.

Referring to social indices from previous economic recessions, the ILO study observes that long-term unemployment amongst women garment workers has a serious impact on the well-being of their families.

It states, the “loss of women workers’ incomes in lower-income households has a greater longer-term impact when compared to men because women tend to invest more of their income in their children’s health services, education and nutrition.”

In a lame and utopian appeal to the Bangladeshi ruling elite, the ILO study calls for “effective amelioratory actions” to prevent a return to the “pre-existing inequalities.” It also advocates a continuation of what it claims were “previous important gains regarding poverty reduction and gender equality in the garment sector.”

These appeals will fall on deaf ears. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her government are focussed on protecting big business and the wealthy. The Hasina government responded to the pandemic with 21 stimulus packages—a total of $US14.14 billion, according to the Financial Express—with only a pittance going to workers and the poor.

The Hasina government claims that its development programmes are on track to officially elevate the country’s status from the current least developed country to a so-called “developing country” in 2024. This label has no real meaning for the millions of poverty stricken Bangladeshi workers.

While Bangladesh’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate has averaged about eight percent in the past five years, it is expected to drop to 4.4 percent in 2020. The World Bank, however, predicts that it will fall to just 1.6 percent this year.

None of this growth has reduced the vast gap between the rich and poor, with the lion’s share of any increase in the national income going to the wealthy. In 2015, the richest 5 percent of the population were 121 times richer than the poorest 5 percent. The impact of COVID-19 will only deepen this social gulf.

The terrible plight facing tens of thousands Bangladeshi garment employees was revealed in a recent comment by a young worker to the CNBC network.

Prior to the pandemic outbreak in March this year, 22-year-old Mousumi had a new job at a garment factory and was making about 10,000 taka ($118) a month. She lost her job after the lockdown and joined a new factory in August. She now earns just 8,500 taka per month, far less than what she was paid at the previous plant.

Trudeau names top military officer to lead Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout

Laurent Lafrance

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last week that Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin has been named to lead the large-scale distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Canada. Fortin is the current chief of staff of the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC), a unified command centre for army, air force, and navy operations that directs most Canadian Armed Forces’ missions in Canada and around the world.

Fortin’s new assignment attests to the growing role the military is playing in public life. It is part of the ongoing efforts of the trade union and New Democratic Party-supported Trudeau Liberal government to give the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) a “humane” façade, and this for two reasons: to cultivate a base of support for the CAF’s role in advancing Canadian imperialist interests around the world through aggression and war, and to legitimize the military’s increasing deployment at home to meet domestic “emergencies.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

At the same time, the fact that public health authorities and social services are deemed incapable of leading a mass vaccination campaign is a damning indictment of the austerity policies all the political parties have pursued over the past three decades. Despite warnings of the threat posed by pandemics for well over a decade, nothing was done by the ruling class to prepare health and social services to counter it.

Fortin has occupied a series of leadership positions in the course of his nearly 30-year military career as a loyal defender of Canadian imperialism’s predatory interests around the globe. He was commander of the NATO training mission in Iraq in 2018–2019, and was the chief of staff of the CAF’s Task Force Kandahar and Joint Task Force Afghanistan between 2009 and 2010. Fortin also led a platoon of the United Nations Protection Force in 1993–1994 during the Bosnian war that saw the partition of the former Yugoslavia along ethnic and religious lines.

As the vice president of logistics and operations for the newly created “National Operations Centre,” Fortin is leading a team of about 30 CAF personnel that have been quietly working for months on the vaccine campaign. The National Operation Centre was created as a “hub” within the Public Health Agency of Canada and will play a key role in major public health decisions.

The nomination of Fortin came only days after Ontario Premier Doug Ford picked former CAF head and leading Afghan War proponent Gen. Rick Hillier to lead that province’s vaccine campaign. Ford justified his decision on the grounds that to immunize the population, “We need military precision. We need the discipline that only a general can bring to this task.”

The Trudeau government has said the CAF will lead the planning and logistics for the vaccine distribution, including the cold storage requirements for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Other tasks the CAF will be asked to perform include “data-sharing,” implementing “risk-mitigation tools,” and conducting “a series of exercises” ahead of the vaccination rollout.

The federal and provincial governments’ reliance on the military during the pandemic is an indictment of all the establishment parties of the ruling class, from the Liberals and Conservatives to the NDP, Parti Quebecois and Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec, which have imposed decades of brutal social spending cuts, ravaging public services. Since coming to power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals have picked up where the Harper Conservatives left off by imposing real-term reductions in the transfers made to the provinces to pay for health care. This criminal neglect has created conditions in which many of Canada’s long-term care facilities have become killing fields during the pandemic. Last spring, provincial governments in Ontario and Quebec were forced to call in the military to deal with horrific conditions that were described by one observer as akin to a “concentration camp.”

Even if one accepts the self-serving claims of Trudeau and Ford that only the military is capable of conducting such a large-scale operation, this begs the question as to why its resources cannot be placed at the disposal of civilian-led public health agencies at the federal and provincial levels, where many of Canada’s leading experts on infectious diseases and vaccinations work.

The answer is that the ruling elite is not concerned primarily with saving lives and containing the pandemic, but at advancing the interests of Canadian imperialism. They hope that by granting the military such a prominent role in what Trudeau has dubbed the “greatest mobilization effort Canada has seen since the Second World War,” they can boost popular acceptance of the armed forces and thus legitimize Canada’s rearmament and war plans under conditions of accelerating geopolitical tensions.

In its 2017 national defence policy document, the Trudeau government announced a 70 percent increase in military spending over the next 10 years so as to boost the CAF’s capabilities to uphold the US-led world order, including by playing an increasingly significant role in Washington’s military-strategic encirclement of nuclear-armed China and Russia.

Well aware that the pandemic is acting as an accelerant of inequalities and class tensions, the ruling class is also determined to expand the presence of the military in daily life so as to suppress working class opposition. At the beginning of the pandemic, the CAF committed 24,000 regular and reserve troops to its pandemic response mission, known as Operation Laser. Back in March, Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance declared these soldiers were “on a war footing” and had to be ready for a potential “worst-case scenario,” which a CBC report described as widespread civil unrest. Retired Lieutenant-General Alain Parent added at the time that the soldiers would not simply provide medical support, but would assist in “surveillance, security and augmenting law and order.”

These were not idle threats. The military, with government support, immediately seized on the pandemic to implement long-planned surveillance projects.

A small unit associated with the troops deployed to the most hard-hit Ontario nursing homes, the Precision Intelligence Team (PIT), was secretly tasked with collecting intelligence on oppositional sentiment among the population on the dubious claim it would help the work in nursing homes. Through “data-mining” of social media posts, the team gathered information on posts critical of the Ford government’s failure to protect the elderly and turned it over to the government.

Then in August, the Ottawa Citizen revealed that in April, the CJOC developed and began implementing an “information operations” plan aimed at “shaping” public opinion and “exploiting information,” so as to deter civil unrest. This plan was explicitly based on the methods the CAF developed during its decade-long role in the US-led neo-colonial, counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan. Although that particular project was shut down by top military commanders, a series of similar propaganda and spying operations are either ongoing or in planning.

Despite all the bluster about the “greatest mobilization since the Second World War,” the reality is that the Canadian military will be overseeing a vaccine rollout that is fully subordinated to the giant pharmaceutical companies’ drive for a profit bonanza and thus totally inadequate.

Due to the fact that production and distribution of critical life-saving vaccines remain in private hands, the Public Health Agency has had to warn that at most 3 million Canadians (less than 10 percent of the population) will receive the COVID-19 vaccine in the first three months of the rollout. This number is not even likely to cover all “high priority groups,” which have been designated as seniors in long-term care homes, people at risk of severe illness and death, first responders, health care workers, and some Indigenous communities. The Trudeau government has also had to acknowledge that vaccination in Canada will lag behind that in the US, the UK and Germany, and even poorer countries like Mexico, which is producing its own vaccine.

The COVID-19 vaccines are a tremendous scientific achievement that must be made freely available to every human being, but the capitalist profit system makes this an impossibility. To do so requires seizing the ill-gotten fortunes of the super-rich and transforming giant private enterprises, including the pharmaceutical and logistics giants like Pfizer and Amazon, into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities. Production facilities around the world must be requisitioned to produce enough doses of clinically approved vaccines to ensure swift access for working people in every country.

In the meantime, nonessential production must be shut down with full compensation for all workers so they do not have to choose between risking their lives and being left destitute. To fight for such a program, which the ruling elite rejects out of hand because it would cut into their bank balances and share portfolios, the working class must intervene independently into the health and social crisis with its own socialist and internationalist program to contain the pandemic and save lives.

Absent such a struggle, the capitalist class will exploit the vaccines to advance their own selfish class interests. For the Trudeau government, the propaganda campaign claiming that all resources are being mobilized to vaccinate the population as soon as possible is a vital component of its drive to keep the economy and schools open as new infections reach record highs. The goal of this homicidal strategy is to make workers pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars the Liberal government, with the full support of all the opposition parties, has funneled into the financial markets, the banks and corporate coffers, since the pandemic began, so as to guarantee the wealth and profits of the rich and super-rich.

New US unemployment claims top 712,000 as mass layoffs continue

Jacob Crosse

Historically unprecedented job losses continued in the US for the 37th straight week with the Department of Labor’s (DOL) latest unemployment claims report revealing another 712,000 first-time unemployment claims filed for the week ending November 28. The figure is a slight decline from last week’s revised total of 787,000, but still nearly three times the pre-pandemic average of 225,000 weekly claims.

The drop in claims owes more to difficulties in reporting due to the Thanksgiving holiday than to a prevailing trend, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in a note regarding the claims quoted by CNBC. “Initial claims likely will rebound strongly next week, probably rising above the 800K mark for the first time in eight weeks,” Shepherdson added.

Pedestrians wearing protective masks wait on line for food donations during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Corona neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

The out-of-control spread of the coronavirus—the result of homicidal “herd immunity” policies enacted by capitalist governments the world over—has had predictable, terrible consequences in the US with daily new cases regularly exceeding 200,000, hospitalizations of over 100,000 and a daily death total approaching 3,000.

As hospitals reach capacity limits and increasingly resistive and angry health care workers, teachers, and autoworkers begin to organize independently of the trade unions to protect their lives, coworkers, communities and families, some state and local governments have begun to enact criminally belated and limited restrictions without additional financial relief for workers and small business owners, leading to further layoffs and business closures.

The latest unemployment report also showed that 288,701 initial claims were made for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) bringing the combined total of new claims across state and federal programs to once again over 1 million for the week.

For the week ending November 14, the DOL reported 8.69 million people were claiming PUA benefits while another 4.56 million were claiming Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) benefits. Overall, roughly 20.1 million people are claiming benefits across all state and federal programs according to the report, with roughly 13 million enrolled in either PUA or PEUC, both created as part of the CARES Act and set to expire in just three weeks on December 26.

The ongoing job losses are compounded by stagnant job growth in normally high employment sectors around the holidays, such as the retail and restaurant industry, which usually see increased spending. On Wednesday payroll company ADP released its job figures which showed that only 307,000 workers were added to their private payrolls, nearly 170,00 less than what was predicted and 98,000 less jobs than were added in October.

Statistics from the data firm Womply give some indication to the squeeze small businesses owners are under, with an estimated 21 percent of all small businesses closed at the start of November, up 5 percent from June. Womply also found that consumer spending at small businesses declined 30 percent compared to a year earlier, as millions save what little they have for necessities.

Without any available jobs, unemployed workers are forced to continue filing for unemployment. Continuing claims saw a marked decline in the latest report down to 5.52 million, a drop of 569,000 from the 6.1 million reported the previous week. This metric isn’t a sign however that workers are returning to work, instead it indicates that more workers have exhausted state benefits limits, which typically expire at 26 weeks but can be as low as 12, and have moved onto federal programs, or dropped off entirely.

For hundreds of thousands of workers—nine months into the pandemic—the struggle just to receive owed benefits is still ongoing. Thousands of workers in states from Washington to Wisconsin have received letters in the last month demanding they return hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to the state in alleged “over-payments” which in many cases, were never received to begin with.

In Wisconsin, the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) sent an “overpayment” letter to 62,000 people demanding a total of $44 million be paid back. Speaking to TMJ4, Stephanine Russell, an accountant, said the DWD sent her a letter requesting $16,200, an amount she noted she, “never received.”

Russell contends she followed the states instructions “verbatim,” and answered all the questions regarding her application “correctly and honestly,” yet the DWD still insists she owes the money. “It’s not funny at all but it’s almost laughable that they think someone is just going to blindly pay,” she told TMJ4. “And it’s shady. It seems really shady.”

A similar situation is unfolding in Washington where some 26,000 people who were receiving PUA benefits received an “overpayment” letter along with a suspension of future payments, after the state’s Employment Security Department determined that they were ineligible. Receiving a bill for more than $14,000, “definitely [peaked] my anxiety and is nerve-wracking,” Blake Whitmore said in an interview with KIRO7.

For those who have received PUA benefits, some 13 million so far, a Government Accountability Office report released on Monday revealed that 27 of the 41 states participating in the program reported paying out a weekly benefit that was not much, or at all, higher than the minimum weekly benefit. The PUA insurance is supposed to be based off of a claimants’ tax returns and other proofs of income and adjusted accordingly. In 29 of those states the minimum PUA benefit is below the weekly poverty limit with states such as Illinois paying out as little as $51 a week, while the minimum payment for worker in Alabama is a Scroogelike $45 a week.

While millions grapple with pandemic unemployment benefits, the end of the year will also mark the end of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, leaving up to 40 million people at risk of eviction, according to the Aspen Institute. Barring action, January 1 will also mark the resumption of collections on defaulted student loans by the US Department of Education; as of June 2019, the national student loan debt reached $1.6 trillion with an estimated 44.7 million people in the US having some debt.

With the virus running rampant, and another coronavirus relief bill purposefully stuck in months long “negotiations” between the two parties of big business in Congress, and a vaccine still months away for millions, the corporations and Wall Street are taking advantage of the crisis by restructuring the labor force through mass layoffs and job cuts, fueling the rise of share values with Thursday’s Dow Jones Industrial Average closing out at a near record 29,969.52.

On Wednesday Southwest Airlines, which received $3.2 billion in CARES Act relief, announced it was sending Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notices to 6,828 workers. The company had previously sent out batches of notices earlier in the month leaving 7,273 workers at risk of losing their job between January and April 1, 2021. Despite thousands of workers accepting early retirements and buyouts earlier this summer to avert layoffs, Russel McCrady, vice president of labor relations for Southwest laid the blame on workers for refusing to agree to another $500 million in costs cuts.

“Due to a lack of meaningful progress in negotiations, we had to proceed with issuing notification to employees who are valued members of the Southwest family,” McCrady wrote in a statement. “We are willing to continue negotiations quickly to preserve jobs if we can achieve the support that allows Southwest to combat the ongoing economic challenges created by the decline in demand for air travel.”

Even though the airline industry has received over $25 billion through the CARES Act, a recent US Transportation Department report found that between passenger and cargo airlines, nearly 29,000 fewer workers were employed compared to the previous month. Since March 2020, 81,749 jobs have been eliminated in the industry, with United Airlines, which received $2.75 billion in CARES Act funding eliminating 29,243 jobs or 32 percent of its workforce, while Delta, which received $5.4 billion in grants and low-interest loans through the CARES Act, also cut 32 percent of its workforce, some 28,751 workers.

Joining the parade of layoffs, and after previously announcing layoffs totaling 28,000 across major theme parks, Walt Disney announced last week an additional 4,000 jobs would be eliminated, with roughly 1,800 of the cuts taking place in Florida. The company, which revealed during an earnings call in August that it had $23 billion in cash reserves, reinstated executive pay and salaries following the release of the earnings report. Last year Disney CEO Bob Iger, through salary and bonuses, “earned” $47.5 million.

As jobless workers go to bed hungry and parents explain to their children why they will not be receiving holiday gifts this year, the uber-wealthy continue to hoard all of the wealth created by the working class for themselves. A recent report by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that between 1979 and 2019, wages for the top 1 percent have increased by 160 percent while wages among the bottom 90 percent increased by only 26 percent over the same period

At the pinnacle of wage earners, the top .1 percent, the growth is even more staggering with a 345.2 percent increase in wealth since 1979. For comparison’s sake, the average worker in the bottom 90 percent earned $30,880 in 1979 and is today only earning $38,923, meanwhile the average member of the upper 1 percent made $291,329 in 1979, now commands a salary of $758,434. For the top .01 percent the level of theft is even more staggering, from $648,725 in 1979, to $2,888,192 as of 2019.

At Germany’s “Auto Summit,” IG Metall backs major corporations in international trade war

Dietmar Gaisenkersting & Ulrich Rippert

The IG Metall trade union is playing the key role on behalf of German auto companies in the international trade war. A week ago, at their so-called “Auto Summit,” the German government—a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Christian Social Union (CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD)—agreed with the auto companies and the union on additional billions of euros to support the auto industry. Now the union is pushing for quick implementation of the funding.

On Nov. 17, a number of federal ministers, state premiers, union representatives and the leaders of the governing parties, the CDU/CSU and SPD, took part in a virtual auto summit alongside leading car industry representatives. In June, the German government had already allocated almost €50 billion from its €130 billion economic stimulus package to the auto industry. Now it is providing an additional €3 billion to the auto and auto supplier industries.

BMW headquarters in Munich

“IG Metall welcomes the resolutions at today’s auto summit,” declared IG Metall Chairman Jörg Hofmann. The resolution includes important demands raised by the union, he continued. The issue now was implementing the decisions without delay.

In particular, the union leader was pleased with the government’s support for the “Best Owner Group” investment fund initiated by IG Metall. This private equity fund was set up by the union in the summer and aims to buy up and restructure auto and supplier companies threatened by insolvency. In this way, the fund aims to secure the supply chains for the auto companies while at the same time slashing “overcapacities” or closing down companies completely. IG Metall is using its own financial resources for this purpose and is demanding taxpayers’ money from the government to finance and accelerate the restructuring of the German auto industry.

The German government supports this initiative. It will devote €1 billion for a “Future Fund for the Automotive Industry” so that the industry, the unions and science can work together to develop “medium and long-term transformation strategies for the auto industry,” explained government spokesman Thorsten Seibert.

“But also the other decisions,” according to IG Metall, “such as the acceleration of the expansion of charging infrastructure and the promotion of battery cell production are important impulses.” In addition, the purchase premium of up to €9,000 for purely electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids will be extended until 2025, a measure which corresponds to about another €1 billion in aid for the industry. The government had already extended this so-called “innovation premium” this summer until the end of 2021.

A further billion euros is available for the replacement of older trucks. Half of this money is to go to the federal Ministry of Transport to purchase new trucks, and half to companies to renew their own fleets.

Predictably the heads of the German auto industry also welcomed the new billion-euro funding commitments of the government. Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess said he was delighted that Germany would become the “leading market” for electric mobility following the auto summit.

IG Metall claims that the state funding will be used to make the restructuring of the auto industry to produce electric vehicles “socially acceptable” and that this will benefit employees. This is simply a lie.

First, the greed of the auto company executives, owners, shareholders and investment funds that dictate all the important decisions of the auto concerns is boundless. Every aspect of production is aimed at increasing returns, profits, share prices, dividends and personal enrichment. While the corporations collect vast sums of government money, the billions are passed on to shareholders—not only indirectly via rising share prices, but also directly.

Hardly had the first round of the €50 billion aid been paid out in the spring, at a time when all the major auto and supplier plants financed their workforces via state-financed short-time working allowances, than the sports auto manufacturer Porsche announced it would be distributing €952 million in dividends to shareholders. Around half of this, almost half a billion euros, went directly to the Porsche family itself.

Shortly afterwards, BMW shareholders received dividends of over €1.6 billion. A large proportion flowed into the bank accounts of the main owner families Quandt and Klatten. Susanne Klatten is the richest woman in Germany, with assets of €21 billion. Together with her brother Stefan Quandt (assets of €15 billion), she owns just under 50 percent of BMW shares.

When this “dividend payment at state expense” became known in May, the news triggered fierce protest. As a result, further information about the distribution of profits was kept under wraps. When Volkswagen decided to pay a dividend of around €2.4 billion at the end of September, the media remained silent.

Secondly, the state money is being used to prepare the auto companies for a global economic war, to be fought out at the expense of the workforce. The measures divide workers along national boundaries and thereby prevent a common struggle against the internationally operating auto companies. This division of workers is in turn exploited to depress wages and working conditions even further. And finally, based on experience, trade war is only the prelude to military war. Both the First and Second World Wars had their origins in the irreconcilable economic and strategic clash of interests between the major capitalist powers.

In early 2019 the German minister of economics, Peter Altmaier (CDU), had already presented his concept for a “National Industrial Strategy 2030.” It stated: “Industrial policy strategies are experiencing a renaissance in many parts of the world; there is hardly a successful country that relies exclusively and without exception on market forces to accomplish its tasks.” And further: “There are obviously strategies of rapid expansion with the clear aim of conquering new markets for one’s own economy and—wherever possible—monopolizing them. Altmaier stressed the role of state financing to develop “completely new mobility concepts” in the auto industry.

IG Metall expressly supports this national government strategy and its associated trade war offensive. A new start in industrial policy is overdue, explained Wolfgang Lemb, managing member of the IGM executive, in response to Altmaier’s paper. But “promotion based on an indiscriminate watering-can principle” would not be target-oriented. The state had to take on more responsibility; the market alone could not fix the problems. It was important to expand “national industrial policy leeway in competition and public procurement law.” Key industries must be identified and supported “with industrial and policy instruments such as structural funds or a European Investment Bank.”

The trade union is well aware this will involve further attacks on workers’ wages and working conditions. The Altmaier paper already stated that the “considerable lead of German industry in terms of technology and quality,” which has offset the “advantage of much lower wage and manufacturing costs in important emerging markets,” is “slowly but surely” melting away. As a result, “competitive pressure is also increasing in areas where German companies have been unrivaled to date.”

In response, IG Metall is drawing up its own plans for rationalization and restructuring, dressed up as usual with flowery titles such as “Pact for the Future 2030,” but which in fact are intended to cut jobs and workers’ social standards. The union criticizes the auto companies from the right and demands they step up the fight against their international rivals—above all the US and China.

IG Metall complains that Tesla owner Elon Musk, who is building a mammoth factory for electric vehicles in Grünheide near Berlin, as well as the world’s largest auto battery factory, was able to rely on the policies of former US President Barack Obama, who had favored the US auto industry. At the same time, the government of China under Xi Jinping is massively supporting its domestic auto companies and pushing ahead with the expansion of electric vehicles. IG Metall warns the German auto companies against regarding China only as a large sales market, while ignoring the fact that the country is at the same time a powerful and dynamic competitor.

The union agrees with the German government that in view of intensified global competition, the German auto industry must be rationalized and “global champions” developed—with comprehensive state support.

The fact that this “auto pact” is directed against autoworkers is also evident in the current COVID-19 pandemic. The virus is spreading rapidly, with between 120,000 and 150,000 people dying of the coronavirus every month in Europe. Safety measures in many companies are completely inadequate, and many staff are confined to overcrowded buses and trains on the way to and from work, but the union is doing nothing to increase the safety of workers.

On the contrary. In early summer, the IG Metall union called for the accelerated resumption of industrial production and demanded the rapid restoration of supply chains. It opposes any demand to stop production in non-essential operations. Along with the government and corporate management, it puts the profit system above the life and health of the workers.

Union safety representatives on works councils are instructed to keep quiet about company coronavirus infections and deny employees important information about the number of people infected, their immediate contacts and necessary quarantine measures. As was the case at VW at the end of April, the works councils and shop stewards on site glorify the alleged safety at factories, although they know much better.

Under these conditions, it is becoming increasingly urgent for workers to free themselves from the straitjacket of the trade unions and organize and control themselves independently. That is why the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) are calling for the creation of independent action committees to discuss and organize immediate measures not only to improve work safety, but also defend all jobs, wages and benefits.

This requires a political break with the reactionary concepts of Germany’s so-called “social partnership” and co-determination policy. For decades IG Metall and other trade unions spread the lie that the interests of capital and labor could be negotiated and balanced in partnership. Now it is becoming apparent on a daily basis that this propaganda serves only to mask the role of the trade unions as the handmaiden of the corporate bosses. The unions declare that workers must accept mass layoffs, social cuts and COVID-19 deaths in the workplace in order to save capitalism.

Over 40 million people captive in modern slavery worldwide: ILO

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

More than 40 million people worldwide are victims of modern slavery, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). In addition, more than 150 million children are subject to child labor, accounting for almost one in ten children around the world.

“Modern slavery is used as an umbrella term covering practices such as forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, and human trafficking. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power,” the ILO states on its website.

To raise awareness, the U.N. commemorates Dec. 2nd as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. December 2nd marks the date of the adoption, by the General Assembly, of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others of December 2, 1949).

The focus of this day is on eradicating contemporary forms of slavery, such as trafficking in persons, sexual exploitation, the worst forms of child labor, forced marriage, and the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.

The ILO further states that private economies earn $150 billion in illegal profits every year out of slavery. Additionally, 150 million children are subjected to child labor – almost one in 10 children around the world. One million children are trafficked each year for cheap labor or sexual exploitation, the report said.

Slavery has evolved and manifested itself in different ways throughout history. Today some traditional forms of slavery still persist in their earlier forms, while others have been transformed into new ones. The UN human rights bodies have documented the persistence of old forms of slavery that are embedded in traditional beliefs and customs. These forms of slavery are the result of long-standing discrimination against the most vulnerable groups in societies, such as those regarded as being of low caste (Hindus), tribal minorities and indigenous peoples.

Alongside traditional forms of forced labor, such as bonded labor and debt bondage there now exist more contemporary forms of forced labor, such as migrant workers, who have been trafficked for economic exploitation of every kind in the world economy: work in domestic servitude, the construction industry, the food and garment industry, the agricultural sector and in forced prostitution.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international document adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, prohibits slavery. The document, which enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings, states that “no one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

Some countries have slowed down or slipped backward in their efforts by reducing the number of victims identified, decreasing anti-slavery funding or cutting back on support systems, the report mentioned. While an estimated 16 million people are trapped in forced labor, only 40 countries have investigated public or business supply chains to look at such exploitation, the report implied. In nearly 100 countries, forced labor is not considered a crime or is a minor offense, it said.

Ending modern slavery by 2030 was one of the global goals adopted unanimously by members of the U.N. five years ago. But at today’s rate, achieving that goal is “impossible,” the report said. It would require freeing some 10,000 people each day for the next decade, it said.

Insanity reigns — the US, Israel and Iran

Ron Forthofer

All too often, events occur that make me feel that I am living in ‘Bizarro World’. The recent talk and extensive US corporate media coverage about whether or not the US and/or Israel will soon attack Iran is one of these occasions. The alleged rationale for such an attack is the possibility that Iran might pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. This rationale ignores the religious ruling or fatwa issued by the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons.

In its reporting on the possibility of the US or Israel attacking Iran, the US corporate-controlled media usually fails to mention that these threats are illegal under international law. Of course, illegality is not an issue for the media when these two countries are involved.

In addition, also seldom mentioned is the fact that the US is the only nation that has dropped atomic bombs on another country. The US is also a country that many nations claim has not complied with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Moreover, Israel is a country that has not even accepted the NPT and also has nuclear weapons. Also generally ignored is the fact that the US and Israel routinely violate international law with their unprovoked attacks on other nations. These are the two nations threatening Iran over the possibility that it might develop nuclear weapons. Such incredible hypocrisy and the media fails to call it out!

Note that Iran has gone the extra mile to demonstrate its willingness to reach a diplomatic resolution, but that is not enough for the US under President Trump and Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu. For example, in 2015 Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US. This deal, also endorsed by the UN Security Council, restricted the development of Iran’s nuclear program. During the next few years, Iran was in full compliance with the agreement.

Even more bizarre, despite Iranian compliance, in 2018 the US pulled out of the agreement. The US then reimposed sanctions and imposed new sanctions on Iran. In an attempt to destroy the Iranian economy, the US also threatened nations that traded with Iran. These illegal and barbaric US sanctions, still in effect during the covid-19 pandemic, have tremendously harmed the Iranian people and the US image. Despite all of this, Iran continued to honor the agreement for a full year after the US withdrawal.

Note the US National Intelligence Estimate has repeatedly concluded Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. Many former high-ranking Israeli intelligence and military officials agree that Iran is not an existential threat to Israel. Thus, in a sane world, wouldn’t there be international pressure being placed on the US and Israel over their nuclear weapons and over their war crimes? Instead, in this ‘Bizarro World’, because the US and Israel demand it, the focus is on Iran and its attempted development of a nuclear energy option.

In addition, given this background of no credible evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program nor of an existential threat to Israel, maybe the real motivation for the US and Israel is not about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Perhaps the goal is for a change in leadership in Iran to someone more compliant with US and Israeli plans. The US has used its illegal unilateral sanctions to cause suffering among the Iranian people in a misguided effort to get them to reject the current Iranian leadership. Despite overwhelming evidence that this approach doesn’t work, the US continues to use this barbaric, illegal and flawed tactic.

Why do the US and Israel continue to play the risky game of needlessly provoking Iran? One possible reason is that Netanyahu would like to see Iran respond in order to draw in the US into a military conflict with Iran. His thinking may be that the US would so weaken Iran, something that Israel cannot do without using its nuclear weapons, that Iran could no longer prevent Israel from achieving hegemony in the Middle East. Perhaps the revenge motive drives Trump and the US neocons. They cannot forgive Iran for overthrowing the Shah and humiliating the US in 1979 as well as for Iran following its own interests.

The recent provocations may also serve domestic considerations for Trump and Netanyahu even if they don’t lead to a military conflict. For Netanyahu, this focus would distract from his criminal trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. For Trump, the provocations would make it more difficult for President-Elect Biden to rejoin the JCPOA. Who knows for sure in ‘Bizarro World’?

One crucial concern for the US and Israel is the relationship among Iran, Russia and China. How would Russia and China react if the US and Israel were to attack Iran? Might such an attack lead to a much larger conflict that could escalate to a nuclear war? Thus these needless US and Israeli provocations may be more risky than the dangerous duo of Netanyahu and Trump want to admit.