France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon appeals to President Macron against the fascistic coup-plotting military generals

Alex Lantier

The April 21 call by over 20 retired French military generals, published in the neo-fascist magazine Valeurs A ctuelles, for “the safeguarding of the nation,” including through a military intervention and the deaths of thousands in France, has lifted the veil on a mortal crisis of the political regime.

In 2017, then-presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron urged a vote for himself against Marine Le Pen in the name of opposing the danger of fascism. Since then, he has relied relentlessly on the security forces to repress “yellow vest” protesters, students and striking railway workers mobilised against his austerity policies. His government is now pursuing a murderous policy in response to the pandemic, has put in place a repressive “global security” law and is pushing through a new law against what his government claims is an Islamist “separatist” threat. Under these conditions, it is clear that the Macron government itself is incubating neo-fascist cliques in the state apparatus.

Any major crisis unmasks the role of political tendencies. While the Socialist Equality Party (PES) calls for the independent mobilisation of workers against the danger of a far-right coup, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France is encouraging the working class to rely on the action of Macron and the top military brass.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Wikimedia Commons)

At a press conference on Wednesday, Mélenchon complacently downplayed the danger of a neo-fascist putsch. He asked the population “not to confuse this handful of agitators, who will be punished, with the army of the Republic, which for the most part is faithful to its obligations to the country.”

Mélenchon denounced any attempt at insurrection, calling on Macron to restore order in the state apparatus. “Directing or organising an insurrectionary movement is punishable by life imprisonment and a €750,000 fine,” he said, demanding that the government crack down on the same security forces that Macron has been applauding since he took office.

“So we must punish the guilty, and we demand the punishment of the guilty. We ask that the Minister of Justice do his job. … We demand that the public prosecutor initiate proceedings,” Mélenchon said. He drew up a long list of senior officials whom he invited to intervene against the coup generals, starting with the Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly.

We ask that the military intelligence services, two of whose retirees have signed this text, sift through it and find out who is active and who is really retired. Of those who are active, we ask that they be struck off the army. .... I ask her [Parly] to tell us where she stands on the punishment of those who had infiltrated the army and organised small gatherings of Nazis. Have they been expelled from the army? Are there others? Have investigations taken place?

The main purpose of this intervention is to put workers to sleep. His attempts to reassure his voters that the coup plotters do not currently have the majority of the army with them are worthless. Thousands of officers who signed the appeal, linked to the right-wing press and to the neo-fascist presidential candidacy of Marine Le Pen, are thinking toward a military intervention on French soil, whose deaths, as the generals wrote, “will number in the thousands.”

The question is not only how to stop a neo-fascist putsch, but also how to undermine the drive to military dictatorship. Yet this process is not linked to the forces around Marine Le Pen alone. The Macron government itself, with its violent police repression and its anti-democratic laws, is just one of the governments driving the collapse of democracy.

Macron’s own silence on these coup threats speaks volumes about the impotence of Mélenchon’s calls on the government to stop the coup plotters. This silence is not just a personal mistake by Macron, but part of an international and historic collapse of democratic and electoral norms.

Earlier this year, on January 6, 2021, US President Donald Trump launched an attempted putsch on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., in an attempt to prevent the US Congress from certifying the election victory of his opponent, Joe Biden. Trump attempted the coup in the face of widespread working class opposition to him and his deadly, openly laissez-faire policy on the pandemic. Security forces only stopped the putsch at the last minute, after the Pentagon delayed the deployment of the National Guard for several critical hours.

The entire ruling class in Europe knows that anger is rising among workers against economic inequality and the criminal “herd immunity” policy pursued by governments. While Europe is in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, it has seen more than a million coronavirus deaths. On the other hand, its billionaires have become $1 trillion richer in a year.

Sitting on a volcano and fearing a social eruption at any moment, the ruling class is preparing to protect itself through the repression of opposition and strengthening of the state. This also promotes the growth of fascist forces, in the police and among army officers, who are terrified of the social anger they feel rising around them, and know they are indispensable to Macron and the Fifth Republic.

To pull the rug out from under the feet of the neo-fascist generals requires the independent mobilisation of the working class. This is the only perspective upon which a fight can be waged, confiscating the €2 trillion handed to the corporate elite in bailouts over the past year, imposing a scientific health policy to stop the virus and preventing the drive toward a police state, by transferring power to the workers, the vast majority of the population.

While Mélenchon rejects any independent mobilisation of the working class, even his warnings about the dangers posed by the army are intended to lull his audience to sleep. He points out that the letter appeared on the 60th anniversary of the Algiers putsch of April 21, 1961, during the Algerian war, led by generals hostile to President Charles de Gaulle’s preparations to grant independence to Algeria. He states:

The 21st is the anniversary of the putsch of the felonious generals in Algeria. ... I was a bit surprised not to find more people protesting against such a document. This is the first time, in a civilised country, since the events I mentioned a moment ago, those of the Algerian war, that is to say 50 [sic] years ago, that we see retired military personnel in France intervening as a group to appeal to their active-duty colleagues to intervene, in order to reestablish I don’t know what vague “civilizational” values.

If Mélenchon suggests that he is taking de Gaulle’s response to the 1961 coup as a model, it is a decoy and a political trap for workers.

De Gaulle stopped the 1961 putsch by calling on the army to disobey the orders of the generals and on the French population to support him against the putschists, whose support came from the European colonists in Algeria and from sections of General Franco’s fascist regime in Madrid. The French army, which was still a conscript army at the time, refused to support the putschists. The few units of paratroopers, colonial troops and the Foreign Legion loyal to the putschists were quickly isolated, and the coup attempt collapsed.

In 2021, Mélenchon is trying to build a coalition between the Macron government, the PS, Unsubmissive France and the trade union apparatuses against the far-right coup plotters, under transformed objective conditions. Not only has Macron remained deafeningly silent about the attempted coup, but the French army has an entirely different character. The professional army, experienced in the bloody crimes of the neo-colonial wars in Mali and Afghanistan, looks much more like the paratroopers of the 1960s than the conscripts of the time.

Above all, the economic foundations of European capitalism are completely rotten. De Gaulle relied on the support of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), which had a mass working class base, and on the economic boom of the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975), which was then in full swing. Macron comes at the end of 30 years of austerity across Europe, following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and a million deaths in Europe (and 100,000 in France) from coronavirus.

Macron hailed the collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a great soldier in 2018, before launching the riot police against the “yellow vest protesters,” precisely because he himself relies on neo-fascist sentiments in the state apparatus against popular opposition.

The profound shift to the right of the capitalist political establishment in France has profoundly transformed the political forces that Mélenchon appeals to. While Industry Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher and former PS presidential candidate Benoît Hamon all linked the current putschists to those of Algiers in 1961, Mélenchon suggested that he would easily form a political front with them:

We are not demanding any kind of exclusivity in the capacity to respond to the situation. And besides, I’m sure that, in addition to those who have already expressed themselves, and who did well to do so without delay, we will be heard and that we will consult each other.

The working class must be warned: the forces that Mélenchon wants to mobilise will do nothing against the danger of a neo-fascist coup. This is demonstrated by Mélenchon’s Spanish allies, the Podemos party led by Pablo Iglesias. They have been politically complicit in threats by neo-fascist officers to launch a coup to kill “26 million” left-wing voters and break up any opposition to the policy of herd immunity pursued by the ruling social democrats and Podemos.

As deputy prime minister, Iglesias denied that there was a danger of a coup, even after the publication of WhatsApp text messages in which the generals applauded Franco, fascism and called for massacres of the left. On TVE1 TV, he said: “What these gentlemen say, at their age and retired, in a chat, having had too much to drink, poses no threat.”

Mélenchon is only putting workers in France to sleep in a different way in the face of the threat of a neo-fascist coup. The organisations on which he bases himself, particularly the trade unions, have severed any connection to the working class. Indeed, the CGT reacted to the threats in Valeurs A ctuelles by indicating that it intends to deepen its integration into the military and intelligence community. The Stalinist union federation said in a statement:

This affair confirms the need to strengthen citizen control of areas affecting defence. The CGT underlines, in this respect, that the High Council of the Military Reserve, on which it sits, no longer meets at the frequency provided for in its rules. It is however an essential place for citizens’ intervention and the indispensable link between the Army and the Nation. It is for this very reason that the CGT is in favour of recognising the right to unionise within a confederate framework for the military.

There is a profound opposition, rooted in history, among the workers of France and Europe to the danger of the extreme right. The decisive question is to break through the complacent propaganda of pseudo-left forces like Mélenchon, and to organise the workers’ opposition independently of the national trade union apparatuses to fight the pandemic and the danger of a coup. In France, this requires the building of the PES as an alternative to failed pseudo-left politicians like Mélenchon.

Amazon steps up violations of workers privacy with new surveillance methods

Claude Delphian

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, unveiled to shareholders this month a plan to track workers' motions on the job to the point where the company will control which muscle groups are used on a given day.

He said they are “developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from MSD [muscular-skeletal disorder] risks.” Presented by Bezos as a way to prevent injuries on the job, this invasive program will be used to ramp up Amazon’s exploitation of its workforce.

This is only the latest in a series of recent invasions of workers’ privacy by Amazon. Last month, Amazon confirmed that it was requiring delivery workers to install company surveillance software in their smart phones via an application called “Mentor,” which tracks their location both on and, in some reported cases off, the job.

An Amazon fulfillment center (Wikimedia Commons)

This revelation was followed by a CNBC news report that Amazon was installing camera apparatuses from a company called Netradyne in drivers’ vehicles, which record “100 percent of the time.” The corporation is a 2015 San Diego startup founded by two former senior Qualcomm employees.

Netradyne’s camera system is designed to capture the road, the driver, and both sides of the vehicle. The camera system, called “Driveri” is powered by Artificial Intelligence that not only can note any accident or near-mishap, but also drivers’ facial expressions, hand signals, and personal activity.

While Amazon management has responded to criticism by claiming these systems are to “improve driver safety,” this extensive surveillance is used in the first instance to pressure workers to work throughout their shifts at the fastest possible pace, at the expense of their own safety and sanity.

Amazon’s offsite monitoring mirrors the character of work in its warehouses, where workers are expected to complete a task every six to nine seconds. The surveillance tech is also used to degrade and demoralize workers, discourage socializing and conversation, and suppress free speech in opposition to unsafe working conditions and poor wages.

Amazon delivery drivers face grueling hours, intense scheduling, and increasing harassment from operational managers. The Mentor system developed by Amazon monitors the activity of contract drivers who provide “last mile” deliveries. The intent of such surveillance is designed to log the third parties’ performance while giving management a vast amount of data in order to exert power over the workers.

Amazon is at the forefront of a corporate campaign to normalize the most extreme forms of workplace surveillance. The invasive practices recall the infamous National Security Agency slogan revealed seven years ago by whistleblower Edward Snowden: “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All, “Sniff it All” and “Know it All.”

Amazon’s new recording systems are a radical increase over previous forms of invasive surveillance. In the 1960s, crude time-based clocks or stenographs often graphed the time it took for professional drivers to travel to a location, the time spent there and the speed of travel. Managers would review the graphs and on occasion have reason to discipline drivers for failures to perform.

In the 1990s, barcode scanners were used to track packages from the point of pickup to the point of delivery. This allowed management to see the time it took for a package to travel from the initial pickup to the final destination. By the 2000s, most commercial truck fleets in the United States’ over-the-road industry used Qualcomm equipment mounted on top of their cabs to access satellites to see real-time vehicle movement and stop or down times.

Customers expecting delivery could track their shipment and know when to expect delivery. Such tracking is still in wide use today by the United Parcel Service, United States Postal Service, and FedEx.

Beginning around 2015, cameras mounted inside the windshield of vehicles, including motor coach buses, began to be used to follow the visual scene of the outside traffic movement as well as the driver. GoPro, Inc. was a popular vendor of these cameras often seen on the helmets of motorcyclists.

Amazon is developing this software to a higher and more sinister level, with every moment of a worker’s shift monitored from multiple angles, and a worker cannot so much as sneeze without a permanent video and audio record being logged into management databases and preserved for eternity. This “drive for safety” policy is the framework for blaming workers for all injuries and property damage that occur on the road, the result of stress or overwork or simply from conditions that workers have no control over.

Amazon has invested heavily to expand its fleet over the recent period. Mercedes-Benz/Dodge vans with Amazon’s logo on the side and similarly marked cars are a more common sight in US cities. Amazon is also investing millions in the acquisition of independent airplane fleets, much like the fleets owned by FedEx and UPS. With the growing reach of its monopoly, its abusive practices and systematic violations of workers’ privacy are finding their way into more and more industries.

In November, leaked documents revealed the activities of a secretive division of the company entitled the Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), which employs former government intelligence officials dedicated to compiling and analyzing data for the purpose of anticipating and suppressing opposition within the workforce. This was followed by revelations that Amazon has hired the infamous Pinkerton agency, which has specialized in strikebreaking for US companies since the late 19th century, to infiltrate its facilities, spy on workers, and provide data for GSOC.

Amazon’s surveillance of its workforce isn't limited to workers at the job. In 2018, the World Socialist Web Site exposed the hiring by Amazon’s workers’ compensation administrator Sedgwick of a private detective to spy on an injured worker in an effort to undermine her claim for compensation. In December 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced five services for sale to other companies that use sensors and artificial intelligence to monitor workers.

Mounting popular anger in India over Modi government’s criminal mishandling of pandemic

Wasantha Rupasinghe

With the daily official death toll from COVID-19 now well above 3,000 and new infections averaging more than 370,000 per day, India is now the epicentre of the global pandemic.

Across India, there is mounting popular anger over the failure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to contain the virus. People are outraged at the lack of oxygen in hospitals, the absence of critical drugs to treat the sick, and the horrific scenes of crematoriums burning bodies round the clock yet still struggling to deal with the influx of corpses.

“He [Modi] has lit funeral pyres in every house,” Neena, a woman mourning the death of her younger brother Praveen, 50, cried in a video posted April 25 on YouTube by India's weekly magazine Caravan.

Relatives prepare to cremate COVID-19 victims at a ground that has been converted into a crematorium in New Delhi, India, Saturday, May 1, 2021. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Amit Sharma)

The Caravan video, which carries an on-the-spot report from a crematorium at Old Seemapuri, a locality in North-East Delhi, shows bodies of COVID-19 victims being burnt throughout the night as more corpses continue to arrive. Sitting in the crematorium next to the wrapped body of her dead brother, Neena angrily cursed Modi, “He has destroyed the whole country. This Modi, for what does he take our votes? Is he taking votes to kill people?” She added: “Is he going to play his politics on all our funeral pyres? He is watching the spectacle of our pyres.”

The weeping woman condemned the lack of health facilities which led to her brother’s death, saying, “My younger brother, he couldn't get a bed. We roamed across all of Delhi with him but he couldn’t get a bed, he couldn’t get oxygen. Who is responsible for this? Modi, the Delhi government—who is responsible?”

Similar grisly tragedies have been playing out on a daily basis as the country's ramshackle healthcare system, particularly in the Delhi National Capital Territory, has been overwhelmed by a tsunami of COVID-19 victims. On May 1, twelve people died at Delhi’s Batra hospital after an 80-minute disruption of its medical oxygen supply.

The hospital's executive director, Dr. Sudhanshu Bankata, told NDTV that further deaths could not be ruled out, commenting, “These are patients whose oxygen levels sank when supply was low... It is hard to revive such patients. The next 24-48 hours are critical … 220 patients are currently on oxygen support.”

“The biggest bottleneck,” added Dr. Bankata, in an interview with the Hindustan Times, “is that Delhi requires 700MT of oxygen daily but was allocated 490MT, which never comes,” “Our requirement (depending on the number of ICU and non-ICU beds) was assessed to be 6.5MT but we are allocated only 4.9MT because of this shortage.”

The Batra hospital tragedy is one of many. Last week, 25 COVID-19 patients died at Delhi’s Jaipur Golden hospital when its oxygen supply ran out.

According to Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) head Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi received only 312MT out of its reduced 380 MT oxygen allotment last Friday.

Over the past two weeks, Kejriwal has made repeated desperate appeals to Modi’s central government for help. As early as April 1, the prime minister’s office was warned of an impending catastrophic oxygen shortage. However, not until April 22 did it begin diverting oxygen intended for industry to the country’s overrun hospitals.

The Modi government and its predecessors, whether led by the BJP or the Congress Party, bear responsibility for the current catastrophe. They never spent more than a pathetic 1.5 percent of GDP on public health care. Kejriwal’s AAP administration and the other opposition-led state governments are also criminally culpable for the unfolding disaster. Despite numerous warnings from scientific experts, they refused to pour massive resources into strengthening medical infrastructure during the 16-month long pandemic. And like the central government, the state governments have all vehemently opposed closing non-essential businesses, providing social support to those affected by the crisis, and other urgently needed public health measures even as India’s COVID-19 infections surged from mid-February onwards.

All indications are that the spread of the pandemic throughout India will continue to accelerate in the days and weeks to come, fueled by new, more infectious and lethal variants and the authorities’ gross and malign negligence.

On Saturday, daily COVID-19 cases surpassed 400,000-for the first time, with India officially registering 401,993 new infections, a world record. Active cases currently stand at a staggering 3.3 million, which represents almost one-sixth of the 19.16 million cases India has recorded since the pandemic began. After 3,689 daily deaths were recorded Saturday, the official death toll stood at 215,542.

Modi has assured big business that he will not undermine their profit interests by imposing a national lockdown to contain the rampaging pandemic. In his April 20 “address to the nation,” he vowed, his government would “save the country from lockdown,” not save the population from the ravages of the virus. He similarly urged state governments to consider lockdowns only as a last resort and focus instead on “micro containment” measures, so as to keep the economy “open” and profits rolling in for big business.

Experts, including many of those advising the government, insist that the only way to break the accelerating transmission of the virus is to impose a national lockdown. “Some members of the COVID-19 task force, a technical expert body that advises the Central Government are ‘pushing hard’ for a national lockdown,” reported the Indian Express yesterday. The chairperson of this task force, V.K. Paul, reports directly to Prime Minister Modi.

The Express quoted a member of the task force, as saying, “The COVID-19 task force is trying to say this very aggressively for the last few weeks. That we should tell the people at the top that we should have a lockdown.” Another member commented, “A nationwide lockdown rather than what we are doing now, in bits and pieces across states, because of the simple fact that it is spreading all over.”

The experts who spoke to the Express in support of a national lockdown highlighted three key factors to back their demand. One of them was “growing anger building up” among overwhelmed health professionals and worker. A member said, “They (the doctors) ask why we are not doing anything to contain the spread. We have ambulance after ambulance lined up, patients pleading, perpetual shortage of oxygen cylinders, there is a lot of unrest among doctors. There has to be a pause. Infection among health-care workers is also rising.”

Another critical issue the Express reported is “the situation emerging in rural India,” which “needs to be urgently addressed.” A task force member elaborated, “We don’t know what is going to happen there [in rural areas]. Forget critical care infrastructure, small towns and villages aren’t prepared at all. We cannot live in denial.”

The Modi government is doing everything it can to resist demands for a lockdown, which would interrupt the flow of corporate profits to the banks and super-rich to whom it is beholden. This is why it stubbornly ignored weeks of warnings of the calamity now befalling the country. For example, Reuters reported yesterday that the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium or INSACOG, a forum of scientific advisers set up by the government, had warned Indian officials in early March that a new and more contagious “double mutant” COVID-19 variant had taken hold in the country. “Despite the warning,” complained four of the five INSACOG scientists who spoke with Reuters, “the federal government did not seek to impose major restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.”

Quoting Ajay Parida, director of the state-run Institute of Life Science and a member of INSACOG, Reuters continued, “INSACOG researchers first detected B.1.617 which is now known as the Indian variant of the virus as early as February.” Emphasizing that the new variant of the virus was of “high concern,” the forum's findings—that this could more easily enter a human cell and counter a person's immune response to it—were shared with the Indian health ministry before March 10. However, the health ministry delayed its publication for about two weeks (till March 24), and then omitted the words “high concern” in its media statement, in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to cover up the danger.

When Reuters asked what lay behind the government’s indifference and hostility towards the INSACOG’s findings, Shahid Jameel, chair of the scientific advisory group, complained, “Authorities were not paying enough attention to the evidence when they set policy.” “Policy,” he added, “has to be based on evidence and not the other way around. I am worried that science was not taken into account to drive policy.”

As the World Socialist Web Site has alone forcefully argued from the pandemic’s early stages last spring, the policy that the Modi government and Indian ruling elite and their counterparts across the world have pursued, whatever the official rhetoric, is none other than the murderous, pseudo-scientific policy of “herd immunity.”

In pursuit of this policy Modi, acting on behalf of the profit interests of India’s CEO’s and billionaires, has kept the economy open, allowing the deadly virus to spread unchecked throughout the country. Moreover, this has been done with full knowledge that it would lead to mass death. Last May, as the BJP government was aggressively scaling back lockdown measures, one of Modi’s “health” advisors, Jayaprakash Muliyi, cavalierly dismissed the prospect of “at least two million” Indians dying from the pandemic, saying “Mortality is low, let the young go out and work.”

German airline Lufthansa announces a further 10,000 job cuts

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

For the first quarter of 2021, German airline Lufthansa recorded a loss of €1 billion and simultaneously announced the elimination of a further 10,000 jobs.

An initial announcement of 30,000 redundancies was already increased to 50,000 last year. With the job cuts now unveiled, this figure will rise to 60,000, or more than 43 percent of the 138,000 employees at the airline in 2019. According to company figures, 24,000 full-time jobs have been eliminated over the past 12 months.

Lufthansa’s finance director, Remco Steenbergen, has threatened to impose compulsory redundancies. “We’re preparing for layoffs,” he warned at the quarterly update. The intention is to cut 10,000 full-time jobs “or make comparable savings in staffing costs.” This will serve as the pretext for the trade unions to enforce further wage cuts, allegedly with the aim of saving jobs.

Lufthansa Cargo Boeing 777 (Image: Christian Junker / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The trade unions active at Lufthansa, including the service employees union Verdi, the Cockpit Association (VC), and Independent Flight Attendants Organisation (UFO), offered wage concessions to Lufthansa last year totaling €1.3 billion. Cockpit agreed to cut pilots’ wages by up to 50 percent. As a result, Lufthansa saved some €600 million. The UFO agreed to savings that will cut costs for the airline by half a billion euros by the end of 2023.

Then in November 2020, Verdi gave up employees’ holiday and Christmas pay, as well as accepting a wage freeze and the suspension of all benefits until the end of 2021. Thus “the ground staff are shouldering cost-cutting contributions of over €200 million to overcome the crisis,” stated Verdi deputy leader Christine Behele, who is also deputy chair of Lufthansa’s supervisory board. On the basis of the agreement with ground staff, up to 50 percent of staffing costs for this group of employees could be saved, enthused human resources chief Michael Niggemann.

Wage concessions on such a large scale represent “a new dimension of trade union sellouts,” as the World Socialist Web Site commented in early December.

The airline is now reporting that operating profits declined to €4 billion, compared to €8.2 billion during the same period a year earlier. Therefore, despite a 60 percent loss of revenue compared to the same period last year, from €6.4 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to €2.6 billion this year, the losses were halved, from €2.1 billion to €1 billion.

The sellout from last year is now entering its second round. The current loss of €1 billion is to be squeezed out of the remaining workforce. The company is currently negotiating with the VC and Verdi unions on further cuts for 2022.

Lufthansa chief executive Karsten Spohr complained that Lufthansa and the Cockpit Association have stumbled in the crisis from one temporary solution to another. The crisis agreement under which pilots’ salaries are reduced runs out already next March, he added.

He then explained how the cuts are to be made permanent. In December, Lufthansa calculated it had a surplus of 1,000 pilots and co-pilots, or about 20 percent of all cockpit employees. The goal of the current talks between Lufthansa and VC is to cut costs by means of compulsory part-time work. “Ultimately, five pilots will then do the job of four, everyone flies 80 percent and nobody has to leave,” stated Spohr. It hardly needs to be noted that wages will also be cut by 20 percent.

VC has already declared its support for such part-time arrangements for the 5,000 pilots at Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cargo, GermanWings, and Lufthansa Aviation Training (LAT).

The situation at Lufthansa Cargo demonstrates that these job and wage cuts are not simply the result of the coronavirus pandemic. While all passenger airlines have recorded losses, Lufthansa’s freight business made record profits. This is not only because passenger aircraft are serving as freight carriers. Due to the increased demand for freight and a limited supply of providers, prices are currently high. Lufthansa Cargo earned an operating profit of €314 million.

Nonetheless, Lufthansa announced two months ago that it will lay off close to half of its freight pilots. The industry website aero.de reported in early February, “While Lufthansa Cargo went into the crisis year 2020 with 475 pilots, the airline plans in the future to employ just 250 freight pilots, according to sources associated with the company.”

One pilot told the website, “We’ve been flying to the limit for our Lufthansa over recent months, and now our wages will be cut from August and freight contracts increasingly outsourced to Aerologic. The atmosphere is boiling over.” Aerologic is a joint venture between DHL and Lufthansa Cargo, and does not operate with collective agreements. The wages at this cheap-labour subsidiary are therefore lower than at the parent companies.

This way of doing business will be familiar to readers of the World Socialist Web Site. Several airlines and air travel companies operate according to this business model. At WISAG Ground Service at Frankfurt Airport, 230 baggage handling and bus workers have been struggling for six months to defend their jobs.

In December, WISAG laid off employees who had worked for decades at the airport because they refused to switch to another subsidiary and give up all of the rights they had laboured to achieve. The billionaire Wisser family is now employing temporary contract workers on lower wages to perform the work of the experienced, laid-off workers.

While workers are being bled dry on the pretext of the coronavirus pandemic, the board of directors and shareholders are using the pandemic to gorge on billions of euros.

Early last year, the federal government handed Lufthansa a bailout programme of €9 billion. This led to a rapid rise in the company’s stock value and increased the wealth of shareholders. At the same time, it was used to finance the restructuring programme.

The fact that companies receiving state support are prohibited from paying out performance-based bonuses to managers has largely been ignored by the Lufthansa board. According to a report in Der Spiegel, a legal report produced by the law professor Dirk Verse in January on behalf of the supervisory board came to the conclusion that company management can make good on their claim to certain long-term performance-based benefits that were granted prior to the state’s intervention.

At the Lufthansa supervisory board meeting on March 3, the paying of this portion of bonuses was to have been confirmed. The federal government intervened, not because they didn’t want the executives to have the bonuses, but because the payments violated European competition law and could have played into the hands of Lufthansa’s European rivals.

Lufthansa’s directors and supervisory board are now determined to end their dependence on taxpayers’ money. This would clear the way for bonus payments, and even dividend payouts to shareholders.

At the beginning of April, Lufthansa announced that at its annual shareholders’ meeting on Tuesday it will ask shareholders to vote on a capital injection of €5.5 billion in order to pay back the government bailout. According to Spiegel Online, the airline’s management has only used around €3 billion of the bailout funds to date, and instead sought to raise money over recent months on the private capital market. As a result, Lufthansa has already paid back a €1 billion loan from the state-controlled KFW Bank ahead of schedule.

If management is demanding a reduction in staffing costs, the trade unions subserviently rush to oblige. And when the issue is rescuing the multi-million-euro incomes of top executives, the trade union representatives on the supervisory board are only too happy to assist. They are handsomely rewarded for doing so. In 2019, the 10 so-called employee representatives on the Lufthansa supervisory board earned over €1 million for their close collaboration in drafting cost-cutting proposals and job cuts.

Australia: Liberals survive Tasmanian election due to near-record low Labor vote

Mike Head

After cynically calling an election nearly a year early to try to claim credit for supposedly protecting Tasmania from the global COVID-19 pandemic, the state Liberal Party government has barely scraped back into office.

The result underscores the instability of the political establishment nationally. Premier Peter Gutwein’s government suffered an electoral swing against it for the second election in a row, but survived because the Labor Party’s vote plunged to just 28.4 percent, a near-record low.

Due to postal vote counting and the state’s complicated proportional representation system, it will be a week before it is known whether Gutwein’s government will hold a majority in the 25-seat lower house of parliament, or fall one seat short, on 12. Throughout the campaign, Gutwein declared he would resign rather than lead a minority government, but his plea for a strong majority government fell flat, leaving his fate uncertain.

Premier of Tasmania Peter Gutwein, voting in the state election. (Image credit: Peter Gutwein Facebook)

The Liberal Party banked everything on replicating the results in recent Australian state and territory elections—in Western Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory—which Labor governments won by posturing as successfully defending their populations against the pandemic.

Gutwein’s parochial slogan, repeated endlessly, was: “Tasmania is now one of the safest places on the planet.” No infections have been reported in the state since a severe outbreak in the island’s northwest in April 2020, after which the state borders were closed for months.

Yet the Liberals lost votes, in sharp contrast to the 4 percent and 18 percent increases in the share of the primary vote obtained by the Labor governments in Queensland and Western Australia at their state elections last October and March.

Significantly, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the federal Liberal leader, was kept out of Tasmania throughout the campaign, as he had been in Western Australia, where the March 13 election saw the Liberals decimated.

Morrison and his government are increasingly loathed, including because its claims of pandemic “safety,” like those of Gutwein, are disintegrating in the face of the vaccine shambles, failed hotel quarantine facilities and frequent coronavirus outbreaks across the country.

With counting still continuing, the Liberals’ vote fell 1.5 points to 48.7 percent, on top of a similar loss of support in the previous 2018 state election. But Labor’s 4.2 point drop meant it lost one seat, to be left with nine.

This is Labor’s third such drubbing in Tasmania since its 2010 to 2014 coalition government with the Greens was defeated in an election landslide after imposing austerity measures. In the multi-member Hobart-based electorate of Clark, Labor’s vote fell to 22 percent, its lowest ever in any Tasmanian electorate.

The Greens’ vote rose marginally, by 1.9 points, to 12.2 percent, after the party’s worst result in decades in 2018, so the Greens will retain their two seats.

Several heavily-publicised “progressive” Independents became the initial recipients of the political discontent, obtaining 6.3 percent of the vote, up 5.2 points. One Independent, a local mayor, Kristie Johnston, is likely to secure a seat in Clark, where she currently sits on 11.4 percent of the primary vote.

Another symptom of the political instability is that the candidate on whom the Liberals are now counting to clinch majority government is Madeleine Ogilvie, who was a Labor MP from 2014 to 2018. Her pre-election defection to the Liberals underscored the lack of any real difference between the two main capitalist parties.

Labor’s debacle, on top of its 2019 federal election loss, points to the underlying breakup of its support in the working class nationally, regardless of its recent state and territory victories, which were based on claiming to oppose the Morrison government’s most aggressive demands for economic reopening amid the pandemic.

Despite appalling conditions in public health, housing and education, Labor’s claims to address the social blight lacked any credibility. That was not least because of its own record in inflicting deep cuts to schools and public services while in office from 2010 to 2014 in partnership with the Greens, matching the similar role of the federal Greens-backed Labor governments under Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

Tasmanian workers remain the poorest in the country, with average earnings more than 13 percent below the national figure. Public hospital waiting lists have skyrocketed. The number of people waiting for an outpatient appointment has topped 51,000—nearly a tenth of the state’s population.

Reports have long surfaced in the media of nurses being forced to work double shifts due to shortages, emergency departments battling to cope and ambulances forced to queue outside before patients are admitted.

There has been a similar jump in the number of people waiting for public housing, rising 9 percent in a year to more than 3,800. Rent and house prices have surged, leaving more people homeless or struggling to find a home they can afford.

Labor’s pro-business program was highlighted when it ditched its 2018 election posture of limiting the spread of gambling machines, which cause widespread financial losses and social distress in working class areas. This year, Labor secretly signed an agreement with the hospitality industry to “support the right” of pubs and clubs to operate poker machines, in line with the Liberals’ stance.

Having led Labor to two election defeats, state party leader Rebecca White could face a leadership challenge from David O’Byrne, who is backed by several trade union bosses. But Labor’s political disease goes far deeper, reflecting decades of enforcing the dictates of the corporate elite in collaboration with the unions, especially since the Hawke and Keating federal Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 and their Accords with the unions.

According to media reports, Labor’s third consecutive election disaster in Tasmania could trigger a takeover of the state party branch by Labor’s national executive, on the pretext of curbing the infighting between rival factions of the union bureaucrats who control the selection of parliamentary candidates. That would make the Tasmanian branch the second—after neighbouring Victoria—to be under national executive rule because of worsening factional brawling and local branch-stacking.

For the Greens, the outcome was only slightly less disastrous than their 2014 and 2018 results, in which they lost more than a third of their previous votes. While posturing as a progressive “third party,” raising concerns about global warming and the social crisis, the Greens have a long record of propping up capitalist governments.

The Greens joined their first de facto coalition with a Tasmanian Labor government from 1989 to 1992, and later backed a similar arrangement to maintain a minority Liberal government from 1996 to 1998. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Labor-Greens government of 2010 to 2014 destroyed 1,000 public sector jobs. Current Greens leader Cassy O’Connor was a key minister in that government.

French Agency for Development (AFD) Digital Challenge Innovation 2021

Application Deadline: 26th May 2021

Eligible Countries: Francophone and Anglophone African countries

To be Taken at: France

About the Award: “Innovate for climate and biodiversity” is the theme at the heart of the fifth edition of the AFD Digital Challenge. 

Startups, associations and research centers developing digital solutions on the themes presented below are eligible.

Reducing the digital footprint:

• Digital tools and services for the reduced energy consumption of networks and data centers,
• eco-construction and tools used to reduce the consumption of terminals and boxes,
• eco-design of digital equipment and services,
• recycling of electronic waste.

Innovating to build a sustainable economy:

• Digital technology to reduce the impact of land, air, sea and river transport,
• digital technology to promote sustainable territories,
• services numériques de diffusion de bonnes pratiques pour l’environnement et le climat à destination du secteur public, des entreprises et des citoyens,
• digital services for the dissemination of best environmental and climate practices for the public sector, businesses and citizens,
• digital services for green finance,
• digital tools and services for agro-ecology, traceability and limiting agricultural losses.

Preserving natural resources:

• Preventing and reacting to natural disasters: data and prediction, warning systems, business continuity plans for climate incidents, civil protection systems, etc.
• contributing to the preservation of ecosystems and helping the most vulnerable populations to adapt to climate change.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: 

1. Your project is related to one of the themes presented above and detailed in the rules
2. Your project is already on the market and is in the seed/launch phase
3. Your project has a legal structure as well as a sustainable and autonomous business model
4. Digital technology is at the heart of your solution

You’re a start-up, an association, or a research center and you meet our eligibility criteria?

Then apply below

Number of Awards: 5 startups

Value of Award: 

• 20 000 €
• International Visibility
• A  tailor-made support program “Acceleration pack”

How to Apply: apply here

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Award Provider: French Agency for Development

Half of Sexual Crimes Related to Alcohol Consumption By Perpetrator

Bharat Dogra

Nearly four years have passed, but Himachal Pradesh has still not recovered  from the shock and agony felt at the time of a most terrible rape and murder of a 16 year girl, called Gudiya by the media, while she was returning from a school and had to also pass a small stretch of forest on her way to home. The shock of those days was recalled on April 28 when, after a long investigation, which had several twists, a tree-cutter named Nillu was found guilty of murder and rape. What became evident in the course of investigation was that he had been drinking around the time the terrible crime  was committed, the liquor bottle was also found near the dead body. It also became clear that he  was a habitual drinker who was also involved in other molestation incidents around the same time.

In fact if we trace the circumstances in which some of the most terrible sexual crimes were committed in recent times, in quite a significant number of these crimes the fact of the perpetrator of the  crime being under the influence of liquor would be noted. This is not just incidental, the close linkage between alcohol /substance abuse and sexual  crimes has been repeatedly confirmed by several studies in various countries.

However several studies are from western countries where the context in an important respect is different  from  developing countries like India. This difference is that in most parts of India particularly villages liquor  consumption by women is very less or negligible. While many western studies reveal that both the perpetrator and the victim had been drinking in a significant number of cases, this would not apply to most parts of India and many other developing countries where the social situation is similar to India.

The World Report on Violence and Health (WRVH) says that alcohol abuse is  an important factor in sexual violence. The WRVH says that both from the perspective of the assaulter and the victim, alcohol and drug consumption increases the risk of sexual violence, including rape. In the context of the victim this report says that consuming alcohol or drugs makes it more difficult for women to protect themselves “by interpreting and effectively acting on warning signs.” In the context of the assaulter this report says that alcohol has been shown to play a disinhibiting role in certain types of sexual assault.

According to a widely cited paper on ‘alcohol and sexual assaults’ by Antonia Abbey, Tina Zawacki and others of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (USA), “ at least one half of all violent crimes involved alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, the victim or both. Sexual violence fits this pattern. Thus across disparate population studies, researchers consistently have found that approximately one half of all sexual assaults are committed by men who have been drinking alcohol. Depending on the sample studied and the measure used, the estimates for alcohol use among perpetrators have ranged from 34 to 74 percent. Similarly, approximately one third of all sexual assault victims report that they were drinking alcohol at the time of assault with estimates ranging from 30 to 39 per cent. However, these researchers also point out that while a woman’s alcohol consumption may place her at increased risk of sexual assault, she is in no way responsible for the assault. The researchers rightly say that the perpetrators remain legally and morally responsible for their behavior.

According to a  report from the National Task Force on College Drinking (USA), 1400 college students die each year in alcohol related accidents, 5, 000,00 are injured and there are 70, 000 victims of alcohol related sexual assault or date rape. A study by Tests and Livingston  mentioned women’s narrative description of incapacitated rape which indicates that many were unconscious and found out later that they were raped, or else were only dimly aware of what was happening and so were unable to stop the assailant.

Hence there is much more need for drawing attention to alcohol and substance abuse related factors in the overall many-sided efforts to reduce sexual crimes as much as possible.

Students occupy four universities in Britain as rent strikes continue

Henry Lee

Students at four universities in Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham began occupying campus buildings last week in protest over their treatment as "cash cows".

The protests follow the return of millions of students to university campuses across the UK. Despite even the Johnson government's reckless "roadmap" for reopening the economy stating that higher education providers should not reopen for in-person teaching before May 17, many universities have encouraged students to travel across the country to return to rented halls.

Banners hanging either side of the entrance of the occupied Samuel Alexander building at the Oxford Road campus in Manchester reading “Students and Staff Unite and Fight” (credit: WSWS media)

Office for National Statistics data for March found that three quarters of students had already returned to the same accommodation they had been using in the previous term. The university administrations, backed by the media, have mounted a propaganda campaign to insist all students return as soon as possible. In April, the University of Portsmouth even produced a template letter for its students to send to MPs, which said the closure of campuses "hurts students, benefits no one and is inconsistent with other government decisions."

Students know the main thing "hurt" by their remaining at home is the universities' and property companies’ ability to collect their exorbitant rent. Thousands of students at around 50 universities have joined rent strikes since January 2020, demanding refunds on the rent they have been paying for halls they could not even access due to travel restrictions, or in which they were forced to self-isolate after being drawn to campuses by lies about "Covid-secure" conditions.

These strikes secured partial refunds and concessions at many universities, with the University of Sheffield granting refunds of 30 percent to students who could not access their halls, and the University of Manchester conceding a 30 percent rent reduction for the first term after students occupied a building on the Fallowfield campus in December. However, the concessions universities made were limited.

The University of Sheffield offered a refund of just two weeks rent to students on practical courses, such as medicine, who had no choice but to return. The refund in Manchester was not extended to the second term.

The universities refusal to offer any further concessions, has sparked the new round of occupations at the University of Nottingham, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, and University of Manchester.

On April 22, Manchester students occupied the Samuel Alexander building containing the School of Arts, Languages of Cultures, in support of the demand for a 30 percent rent rebate for the second term, a cash rebate of £1,500 for all students, and that the university's senior management team be elected by staff and students. They are demanding the university withdraw the threat of compulsory redundancies for library staff, and to end police patrols on the Fallowfield campus.

Students at Sheffield Hallam have occupied the Cantor building. Despite paying in some cases up to £170 per week in rent, many Hallam students complain of poor and squalid living conditions. They have reported mice and rat infestations and leaking sewage and being left without hot meals or working toilets. Students at the University of Sheffield, occupying the Arts Tower building, have reported being charged £30 for poor food parcels, with students who requested vegetarian food given meat.

Students at the Sheffield universities and at Manchester also report being intimidated by security guards entering private dorms and police entering dorms without a warrant. Police violence and intimidation has been a major issue facing students during the pandemic. Students on the University of Manchester Fallowfield campus have been subject to numerous police and security measures since returning in September, including an incident of racial profiling of a student by university security, and an incident where the university put up steel fencing around the site and forced students to travel through a security checkpoint.

Two of the student protestors at Sheffield Hallam were victims of brutality by university security, having been pinned against the floor at the Cantor building occupation.

When the rent strikes began in January, many of the organisers declared their intention not just to fight for rent refunds, but against the system of marketisation in higher education, which has transformed universities into profit-making businesses. Students are treated primarily as customers, or sources of income, with ever-increasing targets set for university "recruitment" teams, particularly aimed at international students, who pay inflated fees. The occupations and rent strikes show that young people are looking for a way to wage a struggle for basic demands the profit-driven universities refuse to meet.

In a meeting hosted by the pseudo-left People's Assembly on Wednesday evening, addressed by University and College Union (UCU) General Secretary Jo Grady and National Union of Students (NUS) President Larissa Kennedy, both insisted students must stop talking about “marketisation”.

Grady falsified the record of the UCU, both over its role in allowing the government to open campuses during the pandemic, and in its recent strikes against the undermining of the Universities Superannuation (pension) Scheme (USS). Her claim that the UCU "took a strident position" in opposing campus reopenings at the start of the academic year in reality consisted only of appeals to university managements and open letters to the Conservative government regarding safety concerns—but with no call for industrial action by its 130,000 members.

Just as dishonest was her claim that "In 2018 student occupations were central in getting UCU members progressive good deals in the USS strike." The strikes to defend the pension scheme in 2018 ended with a miserable sellout, with the employers’ offering up a promise to listen to the report of a “Joint Expert Panel,” the findings of which were promptly ignored.

One of the “progressive good deals” put to the membership in March 2018 was described by Grady herself as “a needless capitulation.” She was not union leader at the time and knew that voting against the sellout deal would win her backing in a leadership contest. She was elected after her predecessor, Sally Hunt, was ousted by members following the 2018 USS sellout. Her current apologetics confirm that the role of the UCU as a tool of management in imposing unsafe working conditions and cuts in pay, terms, conditions and jobs remains unchanged.

Grady put forward a “friendly suggestion” that although it was clear students were receiving less contact time due to the burden of marketisation on staff resources, “when we’re trying to tell people that, it doesn’t really make sense to them”. The NUS sang from the same hymn sheet, with Kennedy asking, “We're here talking about 'marketisation'—what average student do you know that's talking about marketisation? I'm so sorry, like, I love you folks, but nobody cares.”

The real concern of the UCU and NUS is that any criticisms of privatisation threatens their lucrative role as part of the university governance structure.

In contrast, most students speaking from the occupations traced the source of their mistreatment to the market system now established in higher education, and expressed opposition to the reckless reopening of campuses in the midst of a pandemic.

A speaker from the University of Sheffield occupation echoed comments he had made to the Tab web site, describing the local student’s union as “a puppet of the university”. The Manchester students recalled the role of their students’ union during the previous occupation, which attempted to sell out the struggle for a mere five percent rent refund.

To take their struggle forward, students must unite with education workers throughout the sector in a joint offensive. A successful struggle cannot be conducted through the NUS or educations unions that have strangled every fight of student and education workers over decades.

Dozens killed in crush at Israeli religious festival

Jean Shaoul

At least 45 people have died and 150 were injured, 40 in a critical condition, in a crush Friday at a religious celebration on Mount Meron in northern Israel. It is one of Israel’s worst civilian disasters.

The Lag B’Omer festivities at Meron, where a second-century Jewish sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai was buried, usually attracts hundreds of thousands of people who dance, sing, and make bonfires around his tomb. Attendance this year is estimated at 100,000.

Mourners carry the body of a person who died during Lag B'Omer celebrations at Mt. Meron in northern Israel, at his funeral in Jerusalem on Friday, April 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

While the cause is not yet entirely clear, it appears that the crush was precipitated at about 1.00am Friday morning after some celebrants slipped on steps, causing dozens of people to fall over and the many hundreds behind to fall on top of them in a “human avalanche.”

Photographs later in the morning show the scene covered with thousands of blue plastic bottles, crushed by the crowds that had stepped on them, that may have caused the crowd to slip and fall.

Witnesses described scenes of total confusion and chaos, with Eliyahu, who was injured in the crush, telling Ha’aretz, “We tried to leave, but the police had closed all kinds of areas and weren’t letting us leave.” “We begged them to open the gates to get out, but the police for some reason didn’t let people leave and everyone was pushed, and people were simply trampled to death. I didn’t understand what was happening and fainted,” he added.

Two other witnesses told Ha’aretz that a police barricade had prevented people from leaving, contributing to the overcrowding. Rabbi Aharon Boimel said he avoided the compound the entire evening fearing disaster, saying, “We've warned of overcrowding there in the past—and what we feared most happened. If police had not positioned barricades at the compound the disaster would have been greater.”

According to TV news Channel 12, it was the bottleneck where the disaster started rather than the number of total worshipers at the site that drove the tragedy. The entire site has only one entrance through one access road that meant that the police—5,000 had apparently been deployed to steward the event—should have been able to control the number of people entering the site. Film showed police officers trying to stop people from fleeing the scene, either because they did not appreciate the extent of the danger or because they were trying to prevent a stampede from spilling out into other areas of the site. Television images showed a side door in the passageway that had been locked shut.

According to the police, while the site had the same capacity as usual, bonfire areas had been cordoned off as a Covid-19 precaution—they had been banned last year—possibly creating unexpected chokepoints for the participants.

Hours after the crush, the families of those who had lost their lives had yet to be notified amid a complicated effort to identify the victims.

Attendance at the event was higher than last year when restrictions were in place to halt the spread of the virus, but very much lower than usual because there were few overseas visitors and non-Hasidic Israelis.

Despite warnings from Israeli health officials that the mass celebrations could become a super spreader event, the authorities, having lifted restrictions on social gatherings after the third lockdown, allowed the event to go ahead. It was the largest gathering since the start of the pandemic.

The police have started an investigation, while the Attorney General said that an inquiry had started into the policing of the event, with the Department for Internal Investigations already at the scene to determine whether there was any criminal culpability on the part of the police. Major General Shimon Lavi, the Northern District police chief, declared that he bore full responsibility for the deadly event. However, a senior police official pinned responsibility for the tragedy on the government and public officials for allowing unrestricted access to the celebrations, resulting in overcrowding and the tragic stampede.

He said, “This narrow passageway was approved by engineers,” pointing to the location of the crush, adding, “The Northern District of the police was prepared for any eventuality ahead of the Thursday holiday celebrations. Major General Lavi toured the site in advance and told organizers he was worried that barriers put in place were dangerous for children. He also met with religious leaders on the scene who demanded a larger participation be allowed but he resisted. Imagine how much worse things could have been.” He said, “It is the responsibility of the state.”

A police spokesperson Commander Eli Levi, told Ynet that all relevant government authorities had approved the passageway where the crush occurred and “Everyone understood that after festivities were banned last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, there would be large crowds at Mount Meron this year.” Indeed, officials had said prior to the event that hundreds of thousands would be allowed to participate.

There were chaotic scenes as people tried to leave the scene of the disaster, with masses of people, including small children waiting for hours for transport. A massive bussing operation was being rolled out in a haphazard and ill-directed way, causing people to stop passing buses to ask their destinations and adding to the already enormous traffic jams and confusion in the narrow lanes around Mount Meron.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who toured the site on Friday morning with Public Security Minister Amir Ohana and police, described the tragedy as a “heavy disaster.” According to reports in the Hebrew media, some of the worshipers who remained at the site booed and heckled the prime minister and chanted slogans against him.

Israel, a member of the OECD, the club of the world’s richest nations, is famous for its high-tech inventions, has the most powerful air force in the region and a huge arsenal of nuclear bombs, and has long threatened to bomb Iran, a thousand miles away. Yet it could not manage the mass gathering safely.

It follows the entirely avoidable deaths during the pandemic of nearly 6,500 people in Israel and 3,231 Palestinians living in the territories illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, and the untold suffering of hundreds of thousands more as Netanyahu, like his counterparts across the globe, put profits before lives.

The ultra-orthodox communities had been particularly badly hit. Already among the poorest members of Israeli society, living in overcrowded conditions, they were always going to be vulnerable to the coronavirus. Their unemployment rate—they are largely employed in low skilled, low wage sectors if they work at all and most do not—rose twice as much as the rest of the population due to the lockdowns, while their infection rate was nearly five time higher.

The ultra-orthodox or Haredim, by no means a monolithic bloc, are made up of numerous sects and leaders, each with their own customs and traditions. While the religious parties have been instrumental in keeping Netanyahu in power, the Haredim are enormously distrustful of the government and secular, public authorities.

Netanyahu, in return for their support, has made numerous dispensations, including allowing them to keep their schools open, which do not teach a core curriculum of math, science, and English but focus on religious studies, and granting de facto exemptions from social distancing and lockdown restrictions, as well as exemption from military service.

This has served to heighten tensions between religious and secular Israelis, which Netanyahu and the ruling elite have encouraged as a means of dividing opposition to economic and social policies that have created one of the most unequal countries within the OECD.

The latest tragedy demonstrates once again that the “existential threat” to Israeli working people lies not with Palestinians or its neighbours in the region. Israel’s Palestinian citizens in nearby towns and villages set up stalls, handing out free food and drink for the thousands of Jewish worshipers trying to make their way out of the area in the wake of the tragedy.

The threat lies with the readiness of Israel’s financial oligarchy to sacrifice the lives and welfare of Israeli workers and their families for its own selfish interests.