Don’t be Fooled that Corporations’ Motives are Moral

Leonard C. Goodman

The second impeachment of President Trump, this time for inciting a riot, got a big boost when dozens of large corporations endorsed the effort. Amazon, American Express, Blue Cross Blue Shield, BP, BlackRock, Dow Chemical, Goldman Sachs, and other major companies announced their support for impeachment by stopping donations to Republicans who refused to certify the Electoral College vote. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook have banned Trump from their platforms, while his lender Deutsche Bank has reportedly cut off funding to his golf courses and hotels.

These moves by major corporate donors helped convince 10 House Republicans to join the Democrats in voting for impeachment, even though their defection from Trump will likely invite challengers in future GOP primaries. Trump’s impeachment now moves to the Senate for trial. The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority to convict a president, meaning at least 17 Republicans would need to join all 50 Democrats and independents in the new Senate.

According to a January 13 Associated Press article, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke to “major Republican donors last weekend to assess their thinking about Trump and was told that they believed Trump had clearly crossed a line.” McConnell now sees the “House Democrats’ drive to impeach Trump as an opportune moment to distance the GOP from the tumultuous, divisive outgoing president.”

All this is more proof that the big corporations control the levers of power in D.C. And in case you think that these corporations are taking a moral stand against Trump or to protect our constitutional democracy, don’t be fooled. These companies have purchased our representatives outright, destroying democracy. They are enemies of working people and the environment. Amazon busts unions and pays poverty wages, forcing its workers to rely on food stamps to survive while its head, Jeff Bezos, has increased his net worth by nearly $70 billion since last March. BP is one of the world’s biggest polluters; its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which covered 68,000 square miles, killed 11 people and inflicted untold ecological damage. BlackRock is the world’s biggest financial backer of fossil fuel companies and has worsened the global climate crisis exponentially.

The sole objective of these corporations is stability, which they expect President Joe Biden to restore. They already got their tax cuts, deregulation, and bailouts from Trump. Now they want him to leave the stage. They don’t care if the president is a Democrat or Republican. They own and control both of those parties. They just want someone less erratic and disruptive.

In 2003, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney told outright lies to convince Americans that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and was seeking nuclear weapons. All to justify a war that killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. When proof of this deception came out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected calls to impeach Bush. No one was held accountable for this monstrous war crime, nor for the regime of torture used to cover up the fraud. To the contrary, CIA Director George Tenet, who helped the president perpetrate the fraud and the coverup, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

The failure to hold war criminals to account guarantees that their crimes will be repeated by future leaders. Indeed, in 2011, the Obama administration again told lies to convince Americans that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was supplying his soldiers with Viagra to encourage mass rape, and that he was planning to massacre civilians in Benghazi. These official lies spurred the NATO bombing campaign that killed thousands of innocents and transformed Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.

War is incredibly profitable to the weapons manufacturers and Wall Street. Thus our major corporations will never support impeachment hearings for war crimes. The corporate donors demand that future presidents be free to lie us into disastrous (but profitable) wars without fear of impeachment.

Trump may well deserve to be impeached for inciting a riot, even though his trial in the Senate will be largely symbolic as it won’t take place until after he has left the White House. But the focus on Trump as the villain will allow other culprits to avoid scrutiny. For example, the assault on the U.S. Capitol was planned for weeks out in the open on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen were encouraged to come to the Capitol on January 6 and stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president-elect. Yet our well-funded Department of Homeland Security and 17 intelligence agencies somehow failed to protect the Capitol.

The Capitol Police has more than 2,000 officers and a nearly half-billion-dollar budget, bigger than the budgets for police departments like Atlanta and Detroit. It has one mission: to defend 2 square miles. Yet observers report that only a fraction of the force was on duty January 6, and that some of those officers may have aided the rioters. When Black Lives Matter protesters were feared to pose a threat to monuments and landmarks last summer, the National Guard was immediately brought in and the protesters were violently suppressed. But this time, requests to bring in the National Guard were denied or delayed.

An investigation into the failures of law enforcement before and on January 6 is critical. Especially since President-elect Biden has already announced plans to pass a new Patriot Act to combat “domestic terrorism.” In other words, just like after 9/11, our government wants to reward its own incompetence by expanding its powers. History teaches that agencies like the FBI will use their expanded powers to hunt down and neutralize the left. In the 1960s, the FBI used programs like COINTELPRO to harass civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and to crush the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and the American Indian Movement, all under the guise of weeding out “extremism.”

Congress itself deserves scrutiny for its dismal performance during the pandemic. Most other governments around the world recognized that if you require businesses to shut down, you must take care of workers. Countries like Australia, Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Canada are all providing subsidies and support for furloughed workers. But here in the wealthiest country on earth, Congress responded to the pandemic by passing the CARES Act, which protected the profits of the investor class and left most workers out in the cold. Many Americans are understandably feeling desperate and betrayed.

I recently wrote about the growing movement on social media to pressure progressives in the House (aka the “Squad”) to “Force the Vote” on a Medicare for All bill that was introduced nearly two years ago with more than 100 cosponsors. Although the bill has the overwhelming support of the people, Pelosi has refused to bring it to the floor for a public debate and a vote. Why? Because the major donors to the Democratic Party prefer our for-profit health care system in which millions of Americans face bankruptcy when they get sick, even if they have insurance. I wrote that the Squad had the leverage to demand a vote on Medicare for All in exchange for assuring Nancy Pelosi’s reelection as speaker. Indeed, members of the Squad like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got elected promising to stand up to corporate Democrats like Pelosi and to fight for Medicare for All.

On January 3, 2021, Pelosi was reelected speaker of the House. Not one member of the Squad withheld their vote for Pelosi or made the demand of a floor vote for Medicare for All a subject of protest during the proceedings. The speed at which the Squad has collapsed and been co-opted into the fold of the corporate Democrats is demoralizing for the true progressives who supported their campaigns and believed their promises. It shows that people don’t change the Democratic Party; it changes them. It also illustrates why it is time for a People’s Party that is not funded by corporations.

The spectacle of another impeachment trial also lets the mainstream press off the hook for its part in fueling the rage that erupted on January 6 at the Capitol. Once great bastions of unbiased journalism have become partisan tools of the corporate parties. While half of the country is told that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, the other half is told that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and that Trump is a Russian agent.

I do want to kick off the new year with something hopeful. President-elect Biden has nominated a respected and experienced diplomat to be CIA director. William Burns is a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to Russia. Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, says, “Burns can be counted on to help Biden resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal—the more so, since Burns played a key role in getting the negotiations with Iran started.” There is also hope that Burns will be able to bring the CIA back toward its original mission of unbiased intelligence collection instead of what the CIA has become—a dangerous paramilitary organization involved in drone targeting and regime-change operations around the globe.

Here’s to keeping hope alive and to better times in 2021!

Viral Inequality and the Farmers’ Struggle in India

Colin Todhunter

According to a new report by Oxfam, ‘The Inequality Virus’, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95tn. The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.

At the same time, hundreds of millions of people will lose (have lost) their jobs and face destitution and hunger. It is estimated that the total number of people living in poverty could have increased by between 200 million and 500 million in 2020. The number of people living in poverty might not return even to its pre-crisis level for over a decade.

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and head of Reliance Industries, which specialises in petrol, retail and telecommunications, doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. He now has $78.3bn. The average increase in Ambani’s wealth in just over four days represented more than the combined annual wages of all of Reliance Industries’ 195,000 employees.

The Oxfam report states that lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent. At the same time, 84 per cent of households suffered varying degrees of income loss. Some 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

The authors also noted that income increases for India’s top 100 billionaires since March 2020 was enough to give each of the 138 million poorest people a cheque for 94,045 rupees.

The report went on to state:

“… it would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to make what Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic… and three years to make what Ambani made in a second.”

During lockdown and after, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the cities (who had no option but to escape the country’s avoidable but deepening agrarian crisis) were left without jobs, money, food or shelter.

It is clear that COVID has been used as cover for consolidating the power of the unimaginably rich. But plans for boosting their power and wealth will not stop there. One of the most lucrative sectors for these people is agrifood.

More than 60 per cent of India’s almost 1.4 billion population rely (directly or indirectly) on agriculture for their livelihood. Aside from foreign interests, Mukesh Ambani and fellow billionaire Gautam Adani (India’s second richest person with major agribusiness interests) are set to benefit most from the recently passed farm bills that will lead to the wholesale corporatisation of the agrifood sector.

Corporate consolidation

A recent article on the grain.org website, ‘Digital control: how big tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)’, describes how Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill are cementing their stranglehold.

The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. This system is based on corporate centralisation and concentration (monopolisation).

Grain notes that in India global corporations are also colonising the retail space through e-commerce. Walmart entered into India in 2016 by a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com which, in 2018, was followed by a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon now control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart are using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to lure customers towards their online platforms. According to Grain, when the two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during a Diwali festival sales blitz, India’s small retailers called out in desperation for a boycott of online shopping.

In 2020, Facebook and the US-based private equity concern KKR committed over US$7 billion to Reliance Jio, the digital store of one of India’s biggest retail chains. Customers will soon be able to shop at Reliance Jio through Facebook’s chat application, WhatsApp.

The plan for retail is clear: the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops. It is similar in agriculture.

The aim is to buy up rural land, amalgamate it and rollout a system of chemically-drenched farmerless farms owned or controlled by financial speculators, the high-tech giants and traditional agribusiness concerns. The end-game is a system of contract farming that serves the interests of big tech, big agribusiness and big retail. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to be replaced by large industrial-scale farms.

This model will be based on driverless tractors, drones, genetically engineered/lab-produced food and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils patented and often pirated from peasant farmers.

Farmers possess centuries of accumulated knowledge that once gone will never be got back. Corporatisation of the sector has already destroyed or undermined functioning agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security.

And what of the hundreds of millions to be displaced in order to fill the pockets of the billionaire owners of these corporations? Driven to cities to face a future of joblessness: mere ‘collateral damage’ resulting from a short-sighted system of dispossessive predatory capitalism that destroys the link between humans, ecology and nature to boost the bottom line of the immensely rich.

Imperial intent

India’s agrifood sector has been on the radar of global corporations for decades. With deep market penetration and near saturation having been achieved by agribusiness in the US and elsewhere, India represents an opportunity for expansion and maintaining business viability and all-important profit growth. And by teaming up with the high-tech players in Silicon Valley, multi-billion dollar data management markets are being created. From data and knowledge to land, weather and seeds, capitalism is compelled to eventually commodify (patent and own) all aspects of life and nature.

Foreign agricapital is applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre (in comparison to the richer nations) agricultural subsidies. The public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests.

Such interests require India to become dependent on imports (alleviating the overproduction problem of Western agricapital – the vast stocks of grains that it already dumps on the Global South) and to restructure its own agriculture for growing crops (fruit, vegetables) that consumers in the richer countries demand. Instead of holding physical buffer stocks for its own use, India would hold foreign exchange reserves and purchase food stocks from global traders.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital via foreign direct investment (and loans). The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows. This financialisation of agriculture serves to undermine the nation’s food security, placing it at the mercy of unforeseen global events (conflict, oil prices, public health crises) international commodity speculators and unstable foreign investment.

Current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy, which has led to its recolonization by foreign corporations as a result of neoliberalisation which began in 1991. By reducing public sector buffer stocks and introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of unscrupulous billionaires.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Indeed, a recent piece on the Research Unit for Political Economy site, ‘The Kisans Are Right: Their Land Is At Stake‘, describes how the Indian government is ascertaining which land is owned by whom with the ultimate aim of making it easier to eventually sell it off (to foreign investors and agribusiness). Other developments are also part of the plan (such as the Karnataka Land Reform Act), which will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land.

India could eventually see institutional investors with no connection to farming (pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals) purchasing land. This is an increasing trend globally and, again, India represents a huge potential market. The funds have no connection to farming, have no interest in food security and are involved just to make profit from land.

The recent farm bills – if not repealed – will impose the neoliberal shock therapy of dispossession and dependency, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector. The massive inequalities and injustices that have resulted from the COVID-related lockdowns are a mere taste of what is to come.

The hundreds of thousands of farmers who have been on the streets protesting against these bills are at the vanguard of the pushback – they cannot afford to fail. There is too much at stake.

Switzerland’s Dangerous Turn to the Far Right

Franklin Frederick

On 25 September 2020, the Swiss Parliament passed a revision of the federal anti-terrorism law. This new law provoked many protests, some quite vehement, including the launch of a national referendum. One of the main instruments of direct democracy as practised in Switzerland, the people’s referendum allows the citizenry to vote to approve or nullify laws voted by Parliament. To organize such a vote, 50,000 valid signatures are required (from an overall population of 8.6 million) accompanied by each signatory’s legal address, subsequently certified by the relevant authorities. Owing to the pandemic, the collection of signatures has been done mainly on-line, and the result seems to have already exceeded double the required number.

This popular reaction to the new legislation is very welcome because, according to the website of those who launched the referendum (https://detentions-arbitraires-non.ch/), the new law would abolish the presumption of innocence: “The measures provided for in the law are not to be ordered by a court, but by the police on the basis of mere suspicion (no evidence needed). This violates the European Convention on Human Rights” to which Switzerland is a party.

The website points out further violations of the European Convention: “One can be placed under house arrest for up to nine months without evidence, on mere suspicion. This would make us the first and only Western country to have such arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The only exception: the USA with its camps in Guantanamo.”

Even more disturbing, the new law violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, for its measures allow the imposition of compulsory registration and a ban on minors 12 years and up leaving the country, as well as house arrest from the age of 15. The protection of minors is thus seriously undermined.

Fifty law professors from Switzerland have communicated their concerns to the federal government (the Federal Council):  https://www.amnesty.ch .

And experts from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights itself warned that this new legislation violates international human rights standards in the way that it expands the definition of terrorism, and would set a dangerous precedent for the suppression of political dissent worldwide.

The experts were particularly alarmed that the bill’s new definition of ‘terrorist activity’ no longer requires the prospect of any crime at all. On the contrary, it may encompass even lawful acts aimed at influencing or modifying the constitutional order, such as legitimate activities of journalists, civil society and political activists.

The experts also warned against sections of the bill that would give the federal police extensive authority to designate “potential terrorists” and to decide on preventive measures against them without meaningful judicial oversight.

Under the guise of the ‘fight against terrorism’, many governments seek to suppress any legitimate criticism of the neoliberal economic model. Thus, laws supposedly created to ‘defend democracy’ are actually instruments in defence of a particular economic order: neoliberalism. What is new in this Swiss legislation is the possibility of criminalisation of young people from the age of 12 (!), as mentioned above.

The obvious target of such criminalisation is the climate movement. An increasing number of young people have taken to the streets in various parts of the world with clear and forceful criticism of the lack of effective action by governments in relation to the seriousness of global warming, drawing attention above all to the contradiction between neoliberal capitalism and environmental preservation. This movement has grown exponentially in Switzerland, becoming a political force to be reckoned with.

In September 2018, for example, the largest demonstration ever recorded in the history of the city of Bern occurred: some 100,000 people, mostly young, took to the streets in protest. This movement had a decisive effect on the parliamentary elections that followed in October, leading the Green Party to obtain the largest vote in its history.

On 21 September 2020, the young activists occupied Bern’s Federal Square, in front of the Parliament building. This action produced a considerable stir the international media, and messages of support to the activists came from various parts of the world, including from the Landless Movement (MST) and several parliamentarians from Brazil.

The occupation, which was totally peaceful, was shut down by the police and triggered reactions that were not without overtones of outright hysteria from many members of parliament and a major part of the Swiss media, all of whom condemned the activists’ ‘illegal’ action. Some parliamentarians even asked the intelligence service to investigate the young people. More recently, another Swiss parliamentarian compared the occupation to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol by far-right demonstrators!

Under the new law, most of the young people involved in the occupation could be accused of ‘terrorism’ – and punished accordingly. Thus, fighting for the future of the planet has become a ‘crime’ to be punished by the state!

But how was it possible that legislation allowing the criminalisation of children from the age of 12 as ‘terrorists’ was proposed and approved by the parliament of a country as democratic and enlightened as Switzerland?

Such legislation has long been the dream of the extreme right in Brazil, which has fought fiercely for the possibility of criminalising both social movements and young people. Bolsonaro and his supporters would love to enact similar legislation in Brazil and will probably try to follow this Swiss example.

The political forces in Switzerland behind this law have a long history, which is also partly the history of the construction of the neo-liberal order itself.  In an important book, The Road from Mont Pélerin, a collection of essays by several authors on the history of neo-liberalism, Dieter Plehwe wrote in the ‘Introduction’:

The transnational dimension of the local/national history of neoliberalism has been particularly strong in the U.K. and the United States. Switzerland also deserves recognition as a particular transnational neoliberal space because of the hospitality of Swiss neoliberal intellectuals and institutions to Austrian, German, and Italian refugee neoliberals. It was certainly not mere coincidence that the Mont Pélerin Society was founded in this country: only Switzerland provided neoliberal intellectuals the intellectual and institutional space and financial backing needed to organize an international conference of and for neoliberals right after World War II. Until the end of the 1950s, it remained easier for neoliberals to congregate in Switzerland than anywhere else: four of the ten Mont Pélerin Society meetings between 1947 and 1960 took place in Switzerland. It took more than ten years after the war for a meeting to be held in the United States.

Those political and economic forces that made Switzerland so receptive to neoliberal ideology by providing neoliberals the intellectual and institutional space and the financial backing, ahead of any other country, are still very active and are the driving proponents of the new law.

In another essay in The Road from Mont Pélerin Keith Tribe wrote:

What distinguishes neoliberalism from classic liberalism is the inversion of the relationship between politics and economics. Arguments for liberty become economic rather than political, identifying the impersonality of market forces as the chief means for securing popular welfare and personal liberty.

Thus, any criticism of neoliberalism becomes criticism of freedom itself, and should be punished by the State as ‘terrorism’.

And in the same book, Rob van Horn and Philip Mirovsky observed that ‘neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of how to engineer the state in order to guarantee the success of the market and its most important participants, modern corporations.’

Many of these large corporations have been the target of the climate movement’s most incisive criticism, causing much damage to their corporate public image. It is not surprising, then, that the market’s ‘most important participants’ are behind the drafting of specific legislation to control these ‘abuses’.

That such an anti-terror law has been passed by the Swiss parliament reveals the power of neoliberal ideology within this country and the ability of large corporations to influence governments and legislation even in a recognized democracy such as Switzerland.  At a time when neoliberalism is failing all over the world, a reaction from the neoliberal establishment is to be expected, for neoliberalism can be sustained only by lying, by force or by a combination of the two. But the neo-liberal lie can no longer hoodwink the world’s peoples, for the failure is too visible, too eloquent. Neoliberalism, for its own survival, is left with the use of violence and repression, by all possible means, including legal ones.

Switzerland’s humanitarian and democratic tradition is now in the hands of its young activists. The climate movement has the potential to transcend borders and generations, to unite the North and South of the planet in a common struggle for our mother Earth against its those who exploit it. But the combined reaction of economic and state power can be overwhelming, and laws like these clearly show the risks and dangers to which these young people are exposed. It is up to each of us now to support this struggle with the creativity, affection and joy that the preservation of life deserves.

Spanish fascists vote to save Podemos party’s bank and corporate bailouts

Alejandro López

Spain’s minority Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has passed a bailout handing billions of euros to the banks and corporations thanks to support from the fascist Vox party. The vote sharply exposes the class policy that is pursued. While Vox and Podemos are routinely presented as different anti-system populists—one right and another, supposedly, “left”—both are in the service of the financial aristocracy.

On Thursday, the PSOE-Podemos submitted the “Royal Decree for the Modernization of the Public Administration and for the Execution of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan” in parliament. The law had already been approved in November, with barely any press comment, let alone public debate. However, it required ratification by parliament.

As the WSWS noted in November, the law specified how €140 billion in EU bailout funds will be funneled to banks and corporations. Large companies from Spain’s main stock exchange, Ibex-35, such as Endesa, Iberdrola, Ferrovial and Inditex, are already drafting plans to receive billions.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias (Wikimedia Commons)

The reactionary character of the law is clear. Tens of millions of workers and small business owners have only received meagre COVID-19 furlough schemes, if any at all, but billions of euros are to be handed over to the financial aristocracy. It also exposes the lie that there is “no money” for a scientifically guided shelter-at-home policy to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and thus save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Europe.

On Thursday, however, the PSOE-Podemos government’s law faced defeat. There were 177 votes against and 173 in favour, after the separatist Catalan Republican Left (ERC) changed its vote. Bucking its consistent support over the past two years for the PSOE-Podemos government, even when it sent ERC leaders to jail on trumped-up charges of sedition and rebellion, the ERC decided to vote against the law. The ERC feared that if it supported the government, its own vote would collapse in the upcoming February 14 Catalan regional elections.

El País wrote: “The government, which has spent the last hour anguishing over the prospect Congress will overturn the most important decree, that of the management of European funds, the same one that has brought down the Executive in neighbouring Italy, believes it has one last unexpected trump card.” The “trump card” was the fascist Vox party.

After Vox abstained in the vote to allow the EU bailout to pass, Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo thanked the party: “The government’s gratitude to all those who protected Spaniards and have understood the message. Today parties had to show if they were up to the problems that Spain faces. There will be few times when politics must be so sincere. I thank you in advance.”

This cynical language notwithstanding, the law represents a historic assault on the working class. It is the main mechanism through which the financial aristocracy will enrich itself in the coming years. It will be paid with pension and labour reforms, wage slashes and cuts in health care and education spending, and above all, by continued “herd immunity” policies condemning hundreds of thousands of people across Europe to die—all with the support of Podemos and the trade unions.

The PSOE-Podemos government’s “herd immunity” policy has already cost the lives of over 80,000 people and infected over 2.6 million. The government will continue to claim that in order to “save the economy,” shelter-at-home policies must be rejected. This comes just weeks after Vox’s demand for no shelter-at-home was immediately responded to by the PSOE-Podemos government with insistence that these were not on the agenda.

The vote exposes that the EU bailout policy, as well as the health and financial policies of the PSOE-Podemos government, enjoys the full support of the fascists. It tears to shreds the “anti-fascist” pretensions of Podemos.

In May, Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias called Vox “anti-democratic.” He said Vox defended “the interests of those who have no country other than money” and who “will never defend the general interest.” Iglesias said, “You are not on the side of the Spanish families, you are not patriots, you are on the side of vultures and speculators. You are not a Spanish party but a party of false architects and shameless people who sign irregular projects to enrich themselves with real estate speculation while working to criminalize poor families.”

Podemos stands, however, in the same trench with the “vultures and speculators.” Vox works to drive the political agenda to the right, rehabilitate the bloodstained 1939–1978 Spanish fascist regime led by Francisco Franco, and promote anti-immigrant hatreds in order to divide workers and attack democratic rights. Its program is to install a neo-fascist dictatorship. In this they are aided by Podemos, which provides cover for the implementation of a policy agenda that enjoys the support of the fascists.

The vote also exposed the character of the advanced fascistic coup plans Vox and sections of the army have been plotting over the past year. As the WSWS has noted, while ostensibly targeting the PSOE-Podemos government, which has tried to lull workers to sleep by denying the mounting evidence that officers are plotting a coup, the coup is in fact aimed at working class opposition.

The bailout mechanism is a fundamental part of the political economy of ruling elite’s murderous “herd immunity” policy. The enrichment of the ruling class can only be continue if workers are sent to work and children to school amid a pandemic. Vox abstained precisely so that it can pin blame for this reactionary policy on Podemos and continue to posture as an “anti-system populist” party, even as it supports handing hundreds of billions to the super-rich at the expense of tens of thousands of workers’ lives.

Some of Vox’s supporters—like the far-right web site OkDiario ’s director, Eduardo Inda—claim this was a “historical and tactical error that will take a tremendous toll [on Vox], and a betrayal of Spaniards.” For these sections, Vox has missed a golden opportunity to bring down the government and further its coup plans.

The faction of Vox that prevailed in the vote, however, decided to bid its time. Since Podemos, on the most fundamental issues, is implementing policies it supports, it could afford to wait. It manifestly calculates that will be able to profit further from growing working class anger at the bailout, austerity and herd immunity policies implemented by Podemos, inciting nationalism and strengthening its position before a coup to impose a military regime is attempted.

This vote has thus exposed Podemos as a tool of the fascistic policies of the ruling class—as are the various bankrupt nationalist and separatist parties. The Basque separatist party Bildu, with its six lawmakers, were essential for the approval of the law. Bildu, formerly the Batasuna party, was the political wing of the armed group ETA which waged a six-decade armed struggle to carve out a capitalist mini-state in the economically rich Basque Country.

Until their dissolution in 2018, Bildu (Batasuna) and ETA were promoted by many pseudo-left groups like the Pabloite Anticapitalistas as part of a “radical left” struggle against the Spanish state. Since ETA ended its armed struggle, however, the Basque nationalists have rapidly integrated themselves into the state apparatus, both in the Basque Country and, increasingly, in Madrid.

The WSWS noted on Bildu in 2018: “For these aspiring upper-middle-class layers, ETA has been an obstacle to their further progress. Its dissolution opens the door to participating more fully in the exploitation of the region’s working class.” Its leader, Arnaldi Otegi, relished “a new situation” which “opens many windows of opportunity.” Nearly three years later, amid the deepest economic and political crisis since the end of the Franco regime in 1978, Bildu is helping implement “herd immunity” against the Basque and Spanish people.

15,000 students involved in rent strikes in 55 UK universities

Ioan Petrescu

UK students are engaged in the largest rent strike in decades, in protest against their mistreatment and exploitation throughout the pandemic. There are currently strikes ongoing in at least 55 universities, with over 15,000 students nationwide now signed up to withhold their next rent payment and new rent strikes starting almost daily.

The strike wave began last term, after the Conservative government encouraged students to travel from all over the country, and the world, to gather in universities, as part of its criminal programme of reopening all education settings and the economy. Inevitably, huge outbreaks of COVID-19 ripped through campuses, forcing thousands of students to self-isolate.

More and more universities had to switch to fully online learning. However, this was done on an ad-hoc basis, resulting in a significant deterioration in the quality of education, which was plagued by issues such as Wi-Fi problems, lack of equipment to attend online classes and lack of contact with lecturers.

Students organise rent strike at University of Manchester. The banner on the Owens Park Tower reads "Put Students and Staff before Profit" (Credit: Twitter/@rentstrikeUofM and tke.media)

University administrations also failed to provide adequate mental health or quarantine support, with reports of some students going hungry as they were not allowed to leave their accommodation and were only provided one meagre meal a day. Several universities took the confinement of their students as an opportunity for profiteering, charging those self-isolating extortionate amounts for low-quality food packages.

The contempt with which students were treated was summed up at the University of Manchester, where metal fencing was erected around student residences in the middle of the night and a student occupation was met with a mob-handed police response.

Rent strikes at dozens of universities began to swell, as students refused to pay full accommodation fees for such reduced services and abusive treatment. Actions at Bristol University and the University of Manchester won rent rebates of 30 percent, in Manchester’s case for the whole first term, inspiring strike plans at dozens of other universities.

Most groups have a similar set of demands, including a reduction in rent of between 30 and 50 percent, no repercussions for rent strikers, and better wellbeing and mental health support plans for students. Many rent strike movements have established links of solidarity between staff and students, demanding a no-redundancies policy for all staff and PhD students.

A huge spur was given to the strikes by the government’s guidance, issued in the New Year as part of the national lockdown, telling students not to travel to their universities. This meant that students were paying rent for rooms that they are now instructed not to use, as their contracts usually last for 12 months. No provisions were made to suspend or refund students’ costs. The government provided just £20 million in additional “hardship funds” to universities.

Many students have been thrown into a grave financial crisis as a result. The lockdown has necessarily closed the hospitality and retail sectors in which young people generally find employment to pay their way through university.

This has had a particularly sharp effect on international students from poorer backgrounds, who need to work to pay their exorbitant international fees—of around £14,000 to £20,000 a year—as well as their rent. A joint survey of international students by the Migrants Right Network and Unis Resist Border Controls found that more than half said they were destitute or at risk of becoming so. The Newham Community Project in East London is providing food packages to 1,300 students every week.

Facing mass opposition, universities and private student accommodation providers have offered a patchwork of rebates and single payments of varying sizes. Some, like Cambridge, University College London and Bristol, have offered a full rebate for the weeks students are forced to stay at home. However, these offers frequently come with big caveats attached. Bristol’s offer, for example, does not apply to students who came back to halls this month, even if only for one night, to collect their belongings.

Other institutions have provided partial refunds or a fixed payment. Queen Mary University of London is offering a 30 percent reduction for the term, while Salford University and Lancaster University are providing “good will” payments of £1,200 and £400 to each student.

Private accommodation provider Unite Student has offered a 50 percent reduction for the four weeks up to February 14 and Student Roost has offered a refund for six weeks’ worth of rent, both of which must be applied for to be received. Two other private providers of student accommodation, Campus Living Villages and Sanctuary Students, told the Financial Times that they would continue to charge full fees.

This amounts to a fraction of the rents due to be paid this term. The fact that students are still being forced to hand over millions of pounds for rooms they cannot use is the most glaring expression to date of their exploitation by a thoroughly marketised system of higher education.

Since the higher education “reforms” started by the 1997 Labour government, and accelerated since 2010, universities have become businesses—more interested in squeezing profits from students, and especially international students—than providing high quality education. Since most university funding now comes from student fees and rent, universities have been thrown into fierce competition with each other for student numbers and become increasingly entangled with big finance, private investors and property developers.

The student accommodation market alone is valued at more than £50 billion in the UK. Last February, the multi-trillion-dollar investment management firm Blackstone bought IQ Student Accommodation from giant US investment bank Goldman Sachs for £4.7 billion, in the largest private real estate transaction in the UK to that point.

Before Christmas, universities kept their incomes flowing by working with the government to sell the myth that students could gather together at “COVID-secure” campuses across the country, in the middle of a pandemic, with no risk of mass infection. The resulting concentration of students on campus was a danger not just to students themselves, but to their families and the wider community. The promises of a normal university experience quickly fell to pieces.

As the pandemic reached new and devastating heights with the start of the second term in the New Year, the lie of a safe return to the campuses became completely untenable and the exploitation naked. There is not even the pretence of a normal university experience to cover for the continued charging of fees and rent.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) supports the rent strikes. We fully back their expansion and demand the full refund of all tuition fees and rent paid for this academic year, to be funded from the pandemic profits of the major corporations and the billions handed to big business and banks by the government which must be reclaimed.

This would be the first step in the necessary struggle to dismantle the marketised system of higher education and establish a fully funded system of free, high-quality university education for all. Only then will students stop being treated as cash cows.

Such a struggle must be waged entirely independently of the National Union of Students (NUS) which did nothing to organise the rent strikes, only supporting them after the fact—with a few union officials appearing at some of the strikers’ online rallies. They have confined their action to statements and petitions calling on the government to act. After the mass protests against the tripling of tuition fees in 2010, the NUS entirely adapted itself to the marketised regime.

Triple shock of US sanctions, oil price collapse and the pandemic decimates Iranian living standards

Jean Shaoul

Iranian workers and their families are reeling under the combined impact of US sanctions, the oil market collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Iran’s GDP had already fallen by 6.8 percent in the financial year before the pandemic-induced recession took its toll, as oil revenues halved following the expiry of the Trump administration’s short-term waivers of sanctions on those countries importing Iranian oil.

The Trump administration’s punitive sanctions were imposed in 2018, after the US scuttled the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, with the aim of crashing its economy and provoking “regime change.” The sanctions effectively bar Iran from selling its oil—the lifeblood of the Iranian economy—causing crude oil production to fall to its lowest level in 40 years and oil storage facilities to be filled to capacity and depriving the government of a major source of its revenues.

Tehran, capital of Iran (Wikimedia Commons)

Just five days before leaving the White House, President Donald Trump expanded Washington’s punitive sanctions to other key industries, including Iran’s marine, aerospace, aviation and steel sectors.

Revenues fell even further in 2020 following the global oil market collapse, with oil production now less than 2 million barrels per day, about half that in 2018. This contraction, expected to lead to a further 3.7 percent decline in GDP for 2020-21, comes in the wake of a decade-long decline in per capita GDP income. Iran’s currency, the rial, has lost 43 percent of its value against the dollar.

This, together with years of austerity imposed by successive governments with the support of all factions of Iran’s political establishment, has led to inflation rising to 46 percent, mass unemployment, with a devastating impact on household budgets as the cost of food and housing soared, and ever-deepening social inequality, with the Gini coefficient of inequality reaching 35.6, according to the Iran Economic Monitor.

These rising living costs have eroded wages, driving many young people out of the city centres where rents are high into the outer suburbs, satellite towns or back to their families in the impoverished rural areas. They have decimated the value of the government’s cash transfers to those with little or no income, despite an increase announced last autumn.

At least 55 percent of Iranians are poor, with half of these living in extreme poverty, a five-fold increase since the reimposition of US sanctions in 2018, because wages are totally inadequate to meet their basic needs.

Last November, a video went viral on Iranian social media showing Bandar Abbas municipal officials demolishing a single mother's rickety shed, erected without a permit. The destruction of the shack that was home to herself and three children, one of whom is disabled, drove 35 year old Tayyebeh to attempt suicide by setting fire to herself, by no means an isolated phenomenon. The furore that followed forced the municipality to pay for her hospitalisation and local commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to offer to build her a home if the city provided the land, although such promises are rarely fulfilled.

Illegal construction is widespread, but the authorities routinely turn a blind eye to the business tycoons and officials involved in such projects, while declining requests for homes and demolishing the illegally constructed shacks built by homeless families. It highlights the reactionary character of the clerical regime that has escalated its attacks on the working class as it has sought to reach some accommodation with the imperialist powers.

Iran has been hard hit by COVID-19, with more than 1.41 million cases recorded along with nearly 60,000 deaths, numbers—widely believed to be a gross underestimate--that make Iran the worst affected country in the Middle East.

This is in large part because of the devastating impact of decades of US sanctions on the country’s health care system, preventing Iran from obtaining medicines and supplies to treat coronavirus cases, cancer patients, and other deadly diseases. But fraud, mismanagement and profiteering by Iran’s pharmaceutical companies are widespread, with multiple reports of the hoarding and stockpiling of vital medical supplies, even as officials call on an enraged public to cut down on their doses.

Like its counterparts around the world, the government has put the interests of big business before the lives of ordinary people and is now in the midst of a third partial series of restrictions, including night traffic curfews imposed by a massive police operation, that have pushed more households into poverty.

COVID vaccine (Stock image credit: Envato)

Iran is unlikely to be able to begin a mass vaccination programme until the end of the year at the earliest. It has signed an agreement with the COVAX consortium, led by the Vaccine Alliance Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO). COVAX is one of the three arms of the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) accelerator set up to ensure that all countries, including low-income ones, could acquire coronavirus diagnostics, treatment and vaccines.

This should provide nearly 17 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a cost of $244 million or $14.5 a shot for less than 10 percent of Iran’s 83 million population, far less than the two-thirds needed to curb the spread of the pandemic. A further 21 million doses are to be imported from foreign manufacturing firms directly and the rest to be produced locally through joint ventures with other countries.

At the end of last year, following repeated claims by Iranian officials that US sanctions were preventing them from making payments to COVAX, Abdolnaser Hemmati, the governor of Iran’s Central Bank, announced that the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had finally approved the transfer of money to a Swiss bank to pay for the vaccines. Hemmati told state TV, “They [the Americans] have put sanctions on all our banks. They accepted this one case under the pressure of world public opinion.”

Vaccination issue has become deeply politicised amid the growing popular anger over the Rouhani government’s mismanagement of the economy, the pandemic and the lack of vaccines.

There is a bitter factional fight within Iran’s ruling elite in the run up to the presidential elections on June 18 and after the inauguration of President Joe Biden in the US, who had pledged during his election campaign to rejoin the 2015 nuclear accord between Tehran and the major powers.

The “hardline” faction around the deeply conservative Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is using the opportunity to attack the faction around President Hassan Rouhani who negotiated the agreement with the Obama administration. This takes place amid every indication that Biden intends to continue enforcing the “maximum pressure” campaign of draconian sanctions and military provocations that have plunged working people into poverty and destitution, while threatening to provoke the region into a calamitous war.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has banned the import of vaccines from Britain and the US, leading the Iranian Red Crescent Society to refuse 150,000 vaccines donated by Pfizer. Speaking on television, Khameini said, “Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are forbidden… They're completely untrustworthy. It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations.”

He also lambasted French-made vaccines, saying, “Given our experience with France’s HIV-tainted blood supplies, French vaccines are not trustworthy either,” referring the contaminated blood scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.

Speaking at a press conference in Moscow last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that Iran had approved Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and that it planned to import and produce it. Iran has signed an agreement with Cuba to collaborate on a locally made vaccine, while Shifa Pharmed, an Iranian pharmaceutical company has begun human trials of the country’s first domestic vaccine.

Strikes mount in Turkey against austerity and herd immunity policies

Ozan Özgür

The Turkish government’s murderous response to the pandemic and the collapse of social conditions for millions is increasingly driving workers into struggle to defend their basic rights.

On Friday, workers at Amana Foods went on a wildcat strike reportedly to protest the company firing a fellow worker after workers joined a trade union tied to the Türk-İş confederation.

Last Tuesday, construction workers at the Galataport site in Istanbul went on a wildcat strike to demand their unpaid wages. The company said it would pay their wages on February 5, but workers continue to reject working at the site.

Mass demonstration in Kadıköy, İstanbul, January 6, 2020 [Credit: @ boundayanisma on Twitter]

A week before, angry construction workers at the Istanbul Finance Center site stormed the canteen to protest insect-ridden food, breaking glasses and tables. While companies have made massive fortunes, workers live and work in deplorable conditions.

Growing job cuts and forced “unpaid leave” practices are driving a growing wave of strikes. A metalworkers’ strike of the Birleşik Metal-İş union (DİSK) at the Baldur factory in Kocaeli has continued since December 25. About 90 metalworkers at the Ekmekçioğulları company in Çorum are protesting job cuts in front of the workplace. And Migros supermarket workers have waged a struggle against a forced “unpaid leave” attack by the company after they joined a trade-union.

While these struggles are signs of growing opposition within the working class, they all remain isolated and under the control of the unions. Whatever their posturing, all of the union confederations are implicated in collaborating with the government and big business to force workers to generate profits under unsafe conditions. This directly raises the need to build independent rank-and-file safety committees in all workplaces to save lives and defend social rights amidst the pandemic.

The policies implemented by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the pandemic have left millions of workers unemployed or on unpaid leave with only 1,170 TL (US$156) monthly in 2020, increased to only 1,420 TL after the New Year. The government, supported by the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), extended this forced “unpaid leave” until July 2021. Millions have also been forced to take a short-time working allowance.

Moreover, the cost of living is endlessly increasing. The Turkish Statistical Institute (Turkstat) estimated that Turkey’s 2020 inflation rate stood at 14.6 percent—nearly three times more than the official 5 percent target of Central Bank (TCMB). Turkey is one of a few countries with a double-digit inflation rate. Nonetheless, the reliability of Turkstat’s calculations is being widely questioned.

The issue is raised whether the state is manipulating these figures to hide the pandemic’s true impact and suppress workers’ demands for higher wages. The state has an interest in keeping the official inflation rate low to avoid giving raises to public employees, retirees and other workers.

Many studies suggest the real inflation figure is much higher, at 30–38 percent. For example, the Inflation Research Group (ENAG) uses the standards of “Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose” (COICOP) of the UN Statistics Department, a common inflation calculation method adopted by many countries. It calculated the 2020 annual inflation rate as 36.72 percent.

The ENAG found that annual price increases for staple products was even higher: 55 percent for butter, 80 percent for sunflower oil, 66 percent for olive oil, 35 percent for cheese, 67 percent for olives, 53 percent for chicken and 130 percent for eggs.

The Erdoğan government set the 2021 minimum wage, received by nearly 10 million workers in Turkey, at the hunger level of 2,825 Turkish liras (US$380) monthly—an increase of only 500 Turkish liras (US$67). The government is seeking to calm workers’ anger by claiming that the minimum wage has been increased by more than 7 percentage points above inflation.

However, Turkey has the second-lowest minimum wage in Europe, only above Albania. The 2020 minimum wage was just 2,374 TL (around US$320), close to minimum wage levels in China. The Turkish bourgeoisie and state seek to keep wages competitive against low wages in East Asian and Eastern European countries, and to allow unfettered exploitation by local and international capital.

The minimum wage hovers around the “hunger limit”—the monthly food expenditure a family of four needs in order to have a healthy diet. In December 2020, for a family of four, this hunger level was 2,592 TL (US$345) and the poverty threshold was 8,436 TL (US$1,124), according to research conducted by Türk-İş, Turkey’s largest union confederation. The monthly cost of living for a single worker was 3,146 TL (US$419).

The 2020 state budget deficit, projected to be 139 billion TL as 2020 began, turned out to be 173 billion TL. Public debt has risen more than 40 percent, rising from 1.1 trillion TL in 2018, to nearly 2 trillion TL in November 2020.

While billions are pumped into the ruling elite’s bank accounts through low-interest loans and stimulus packages in Turkey and internationally, this debt must be paid by the working class through increased exploitation and attacks on basic social rights. The government is exploiting the pandemic for low wages, increased exploitation and violent attacks on social rights. The economic burden of the pandemic in Turkey has been unloaded onto workers and the poor; the impoverishment of the working class has seen an unprecedented acceleration.

To finance this massive debt, the Erdogan government has implemented successive increases in many basic product prices and taxes in January. While the working class and poor pick up the tab, a tiny elite has made vast fortunes profiteering from the pandemic. The BIST-100 stock index has risen nearly 80 percent since its lowest level (842 points) on March 23, 2020.

The “herd immunity” policy—which has led to 2.5 million confirmed cases and 26,000 deaths in Turkey, including those of 360 health care workers—is massively benefiting the financial aristocracy. Profits at Turkey’s top 10 banks have surged by 36 percent compared to 2019.

Turkey’s largest industrial enterprises increased their profits significantly. In the January-September 2020 period, Koç Holding increased its net profit to 8,481 billion TL, with a 94 percent increase compared to the same period of 2019. Sabancı Holding increased net profits by 69 percent in the third quarter of 2020 compared to the same period of the previous year, making a total profit of 3.8 billion TL in the nine-month period.

The only way forward for the working class to fight the pandemic and defend social rights is a struggle against the capitalist system. This means organizing and mobilizing internationally, independent of the unions, to stop nonessential production with full compensation for workers and small businesspeople, in a fight for socialism to save lives.

Commerzbank cuts 10,000 jobs in Germany, with union support

Gustav Kemper

Commerzbank’s share price jumped 6 percent when CEO Manfred Knof announced last week that 10,000 full-time jobs would be cut and 340 of the bank’s 790 branches would be closed. The jobs massacre is the price Commerzbank staff are expected to pay for the bank to achieve a return on equity of about 7 percent by the end of 2023 through cost savings of €1.4 billion.

Anyone who thought this would provoke an outcry from the trade union Verdi has been taught better. “We can largely support this strategy because it is correct in terms of the target picture,” Verdi representative Stefan Wittmann told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. His only objection was that “the timeline for staff reductions until the end of 2023 provided for in the new strategy is far too short.”

The supervisory board is to vote on the new plans this week. It is already becoming apparent that the job cuts will be approved there—perhaps in a somewhat longer time frame. The trade union and its representatives on the supervisory board have already proven to be reliable co-managers of the financial institution in the past, to the delight of the shareholders.

Commerzbank branch (Image: Donald Trung / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Last year, Wittmann told the financial magazine Der Aktionär that the then head of Commerzbank, Martin Zielke, and the chairman of the supervisory board, Stefan Schmittmann, were “overworked conflict avoiders” who were running away from the crisis. Verdi had always worked closely with management and had proposed rationalisation and structural measures at an early stage. “The figure of 10,000 by the end of 2023 is too high. But to cut a high four-digit number of jobs—we can accept that under the right conditions,” he continued.

The chairman of the General and Group Works Council, Uwe Tschäge, who is also deputy chairman of the Supervisory Board, told finance daily Handelsblatt at the time that he was not opposed to the job cuts if they were “socially accommodated.”

“There must be no compulsory redundancies, we will fight for that,” Tschäge said. He added that Commerzbank must choose a “reasonable period of time” and provide enough money for partial retirement models and similar devices. He wanted to be able to understand why and where management was cutting jobs. He expected support from the federal government as a major shareholder to ensure that employees were “dealt with decently.” What was important to him, Tschäge said, was “that the bank is in a stable position even after restructuring and that it can continue to develop.” In other words, that it makes more profit again!

No wonder business magazine Capital then proposed Tschäge as interim head of the supervisory board. It reassured shareholders, “That a works council representative—in this case, by the way, a trained banker—heads the supervisory board may frighten arch-capitalists, but there are examples of this working smoothly.”

After the resignation of Commerzbank managers Zielke and Schmittmann, the search began for a new board with enough toughness to enforce the cost-cutting measures that shareholders—above all the financial shark Cerberus—were already demanding at the time. Commerzbank boss Knof, who was appointed at the beginning of January, had already proved in his past positions that he had this quality.

As head of Deutsche Bank’s private and corporate client division, Knof had cut 50 percent of administrative positions last year. Before that, he was head of financial services company Allianz AG Germany.

Hans-Jörg Vetter, who has been chairman of the supervisory board since August, also has experience in restructuring banks. After the banking scandal that led to the collapse of the Bankgesellschaft Berlin in 2001, he realised a “restructuring plan” under the newly elected Social Democrat-led Berlin Senate (state executive), to which up to 10,000 jobs fell victim, while the assets of investors and shareholders were saved using billions of taxpayers’ money.

These are the qualities required of bank managers today to secure such institutions in the fierce cut-throat competition on the international financial markets and to preserve the huge fortunes of the wealthy. This competition also determines the policy of the federal government, which does everything to defend its “national champions” in the financial sector, and which are important for financing foreign trade and investments abroad. The federal government—with a 15.6 percent stake and the largest shareholder—fully supports Commerzbank’s strategic plan.

The coalition of federal government, corporations and trade unions is directed against the working class, which they seek to prevent from rebelling against the continuing destruction of jobs and lowering of living standards.

The unions completely subordinate workers’ interests to the profit drive of the corporations, in the banks as well as in industry. Wittmann is not an isolated case but represents a clique of functionaries who call the shots in all trade unions. They deliberately try to hoodwink and betray workers using every trick in the book.

For example, in an interview with news weekly Der Spiegel, Verdi deputy chairperson Christine Behle supported the job cuts at Lufthansa. “The fact that capacity has to be cut is an economic decision that is not wrong from the outset,” she explained.

A Hamburg Airbus works council member remarked that one only had to “look at the sky empty of planes” to understand that there was “staff overcapacity” and that the IG Metall union had to “make it possible for people to leave [the company] voluntarily.” Countless similar statements could be quoted.

The Left Party is playing an equally rotten role. In a statement on the massive job cuts at Commerzbank, its leader Bernd Riexinger, a former Verdi official, said the federal government must finally conclude from experiences like this, “It’s not the owners of the companies who have to be saved, but the jobs and the benefits of the company for the general public.”

Riexinger is trying to make the workforce believe that the government can be pulled onto their side. This is absurd. The grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats is unreservedly on the side of the banks and corporations. For years, it has cut social spending and driven whole countries (like Greece) into abject poverty through austerity dictates. In the coronavirus crisis, it supports big business with gigantic sums (according to Deutsche Bank calculations, a total of €1.9 trillion), while schools and hospitals lack the most basic necessities. Now it is already drawing up plans to claw back these funds at the expense of working people.

As the largest shareholder, the federal government is one of the driving forces behind the job cuts. It became involved in Commerzbank during the financial crisis in 2008. Last summer, Economics Minister Peter Altmaier announced he intended to sell off the government’s stake at a profit in 2021.

The jobs at Commerzbank—just as in the auto industry, the retail trade and in many other sectors where mass redundancies are imminent—can only be defended in a fight against the government, the corporations and their henchmen in the trade unions.