UK billionaire wealth explodes amid devastation of the working class

Simon Whelan & Thomas Scripps

The number of UK billionaires increased by 24 to 171 last year, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. This is the biggest jump since 1989, when the Sunday Times began cataloguing the fortunes of the UK’s super-rich.

The Rich List comprises the 1,000 wealthiest people or families resident in the United Kingdom ranked by their net wealth. The list is not limited to British citizens and includes individuals and families born overseas but who predominantly work and/or reside in the UK.

Leonard Blavatnik, 2018 (credit Wikimedia Commons-Mark Neyman/Government Press Office-Israel)

Overall, the richest 250 people on the Rich List increased their wealth by 16.3 percent, up to £658.1 billion.. The 171 billionaires increased their combined wealth by £106.5 billion (21.7 percent) to £597.3 billion.

These are doubtless underestimates. The Rich List estimate subjects’ wealth from a range of public information, based on values in January each year: “We measure identifiable wealth, whether land, property, racehorses, art or significant shares in publicly quoted companies. We exclude bank accounts—to which we have no access…” In January, using last year’s Rich List, the Resolution Foundation pointed to the massive sums of wealth hidden away by super-rich, estimating that the share of the national wealth claimed by the UK’s top 1 percent was not 18 percent as previously claimed but closer to 25 percent.

The grotesque fortunes catalogued by the Rich List have swelled as the lives and living standards of vast swathes of workers have been destroyed by the pandemic and its economic fallout.

More than 150,000 people have been killed by Covid-19, nearly half a million hospitalised, and countless thousands more left with serious long-term health consequences.

Millions have been thrown out of work or seen their wages and conditions slashed.

In April 2021, there were 2.6 million people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, compared to 1.4 million in March 2020. By November 2020, 700,000 people were newly driven into poverty, including 120,000 children. The number of households in destitution—meaning they are unable to afford basics like food, shelter, heating and clothing—more than doubled to 421,000.

Three million more people have started claiming Universal Credit welfare payments. One in six new claimants has reported skipping meals and 30 percent said they could not afford to eat fresh fruit and vegetables daily. More than 60 percent said they would be unable to replace or repair electrical goods if they broke or put aside enough cash to save £10 a month, and over a quarter had fallen behind on housing payments.

Close to 700,000 people have been threatened with no-fault evictions, and at least 70,000 actually thrown out of their homes, despite a nominal government ban on evictions.

Large numbers of those still in work suffered massive falls in their income. According to an Office for National Statistics survey last October, 40 percent of those furloughed in the private sector did not have the 80 percent of wages paid by the government topped up by their employer. Low-paid workers were the most likely to receive no additional support from their employers, meaning that at the end of last year 2 million people were earning less than the pitifully low minimum wage of £8.72 an hour, quadruple the figure a year earlier. Even before the pandemic, in-work poverty was at a record high of 17.4 percent.

This collapse in the living standards of the working class was justified and enforced by the trade unions and the Labour Party as being in the “national interest” of shared sacrifice in response to the pandemic. As the Rich List proves, the only “sacrifice” has been on the side of the workers, in the “interest” of a super-rich fraction of society.

Direct comparisons between the fates of the two classes are stomach-turning. The more than £100 billion gained by the billionaires in 2020-2021 dwarfs the £63 billion in emergency government funding given to health and social care services to cope with the Covid-19 crisis. The windfall enjoyed by just 171 people is equivalent to the total cost of the furlough and Self-Employment Income Support Scheme.

Sir Leonard Blavatnik, the richest man on the list, with a fortune of £23 billion, saw his wealth grow by £7.2 billion last year. This alone could more than fund the government’s temporary £20-a-week increase to Universal Credit. Conservative ministers have signaled their intention to scrap this measure in September, plunging an estimated nearly one million people, including nearly half a million children, into poverty.

The devastation suffered by the working class and the ever-expanding fortunes of the oligarchy are part of the same process. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government and its de facto coalition partner—the Labour Party—responded to the pandemic by bailing out the corporations to the tune of more than £1 trillion through business loans and quantitative easing. They worked with the trade unions to enact a murderous herd immunity strategy to keep workers at their jobs producing the profits necessary to make good these vast debts.

This has opened the floodgates to an all-out assault by the employers on workers’ conditions, used to drive the fortunes of the super-rich even higher. Brutal “fire and rehire” tactics are now ubiquitous. By January this year, an estimated one in 10 workers in the UK had been forced to reapply for their jobs on worse pay, terms and conditions, according to a survey by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Workers at British Airways, British Gas, Go North West, SPS Technologies and SAICA have already suffered thousands of job losses and thousands of pounds-worth of pay cuts under threat of this tactic—facilitated by the Unite and GMB unions. Workers at Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Argos and Weetabix are fighting the same danger. In the public sector, teachers are threatened with an unprecedented extension of the working day and nurses with an effective pay cut.

The pandemic has both exposed and deepened the extreme social polarisation in the UK. In December last year, the Resolution Foundation calculated from 2016-18 data that if the median household saved every penny of disposable income, it would take them more than 400 years to reach the current level of wealth of the richest 1 percent. An obscenely rich oligarchy and the broad mass of working people confront each other as two irreconcilably opposed classes, each of whose continued existence depends on waging war against the other.

The Go North West bus workers picket line at the Queen’s Road depot in Manchester on the first day of their strike. February 28, 2021 (credit: WSWS media)

The way the latest Rich List highlights this reality has prompted the usual insincere and impotent soul-searching in ruling circles. Robert Watts, who compiled the list, remarked in a gallingly callous understatement: “The fact that many of the super-rich grew so much wealthier at a time when thousands of us buried loved ones and millions of us worried for our livelihoods makes this a very unsettling boom”. His comments echo concerns in factions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and International Monetary Fund that rising social inequality in the context of the pandemic threatens widespread social unrest—leading to recent less-than-half-hearted appeals for higher taxes.

Students back on UK campuses amid explosive growth of Indian covid variant

Henry Lee

University students began returning to campus on May 17, during the Johnson government’s reopening the economy while removing restrictions on the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first reopening of campuses last September led to the massive spread of Covid-19, forcing thousands of students to self-isolate after travelling away from friends and family. The government is repeating the same reckless policy, recommending that all students be “eligible to return to in-person teaching and learning.”

A sign reading "COVID ROOMS" at the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university last term (credit: WSWS)

Around one million students in England alone have been told to return to campus in every major town and city in the country. This was sanctioned by the government in the full knowledge that dangerous and highly contagious mutations of the virus were in circulation in Britain. This includes the main Indian variant, B.1.617.1, which is highly transmissible and now detected in at least 43 countries. Speaking to the BBC Today programme Thursday, Imperial College London epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson confirmed, “It’s now in well over the majority of local authority areas in the country and is now the dominant strain, the majority of new cases are of the variant—that is obviously concerning. It’s gone from being really a small minority a month ago to the majority variant.”

Campus returns are being sanctioned despite the government advising online Tuesday, with no announcement made, that people not even travel into and out of the eight areas hit hardest by B.1.617.1: Kirklees, Bedford, Burnley, Leicester, Hounslow and North Tyneside, Bolton in Greater Manchester and nearby Blackburn. This “advice” was changed the next day to “unless necessary” after a protest led by the Labour Party, in line with its own support for ending containment measures.

The government recommendation is that students “should get tested twice a week upon return”, with the vaccination campaign and the availability of mass testing held up as ensuring campus safety. However, more than 50 percent of the adult population have yet to receive a second dose. Office for National Statistics data show less than 21 percent of under 40s have been vaccinated, and the lateral flow tests available on campuses and widely used in schools are not authorised for “test-to-enable” purposes.

An expert on the government’s Joint Committee for Vaccinations and Immunisation has warned that lateral flow tests “are not ‘green light’ tests. You cannot be sure that if the test is negative you are not infectious and you must continue to take the usual precautions.” The use of these tests would lead to 60 percent of asymptomatic cases being missed, enabling more “super spreader” events.

While the World Health Organization recommendation was that any negative lateral flow test should be followed up with the more accurate PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test, to enable the December return of students from campuses the government recommended that only positive lateral flow results be confirmed by a PCR test. This guaranteed that many asymptomatic students infected with COVID-19 were told it was safe to travel home for Christmas. For the latest reopening, confirmatory PCR testing has been scrapped completely.

When the promises of a “covid-secure” return in September proved to be lies, it led to a mass rebellion among students, with thousands joining rent strikes and protests to demand compensation for the way they had been treated. Many universities were forced to make concessions, offering rent rebates and refunds for students unable to travel to their accommodation.

The successes of the rent strike movement in the first term of the academic year inspired thousands more students to withhold their rent in January, but also stiffened the resolve of university management teams to avoid making further concessions, and claw back lost income. Coordinated occupations at the University of Manchester, University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University this term were met with physical violence from security teams, and were forced to end after threats of disciplinary and legal action. Students and staff have denounced the University of Bristol after it hired private debt collectors to pursue rent strikers.

In an online meeting hosted by the pseudo-left People’s Assembly during the occupations, two contrasting perspectives were put forward. Students involved in the occupations expressed hostility to the whole marketised system of education, where universities are run as businesses, opposed the reckless reopening of campuses and called for nationwide action.

By contrast, leaders of the National Union of Students (NUS) and University and Colleges Union (UCU), sought to tie students to limited protest on their own campuses. Both denounced the students for raising political issues, with UCU General Secretary Jo Grady describing their concerns about marketisation as “a bit niche”, and NUS President Larissa Kennedy bluntly claiming that “nobody cares”.

The UCU has put up no real opposition to the return to campuses, with Grady complaining only, “The decision to return to in-person teaching on university campuses when classes for the vast majority of students have already finished is a distraction, placing more workload on to burnt out staff.” She politely advised, “It would be much safer to delay any in-person teaching until September when many more students and staff will have been vaccinated.”

Scientists in the Independent SAGE group, which has criticised aspects of the government’s pandemic response, warned in February that “college campuses are at risk to develop an extreme incidence of COVID-19 and become super-spreaders for neighbouring communities.” It recommended that online teaching be maximised, to reduce transmission on campuses and to prevent the spread of variants when students travel across the country.

Announcements from universities that there will be no in-person teaching for most courses this term despite the return to campus, and that online lectures may continue into the next academic year, have been met with anger from students asking why they have been asked to return to campus.

Some have demanded a return to “normal” lectures, with a petition set up by a student at the University of Leeds signed by over 3,500 students and parents, denouncing plans for blended learning in the next academic year. Echoing government propaganda that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” the petition demands, “Normality must return in all areas of society, and most importantly we demand a complete return to in-person teaching for all students at the University of Leeds.”

In reality, media propaganda that young people are not at risk from the coronavirus is false, and the further removal of restrictions will put students at risk from the long-term effects of Covid-19. The full reopening of the economy is a direct attack on working class youth and students, who often pay for their studies by taking front-line jobs which expose them to infection. Universities have taken advantage of the pandemic to cut at least 3,000 jobs, degrading further the quality of education. Hypocritical statements from the government that universities must “provide consistently good courses for all students” are exposed by the proposal to halve the subsidy for arts and other courses not among “strategic priorities.”

Fourteen killed in cable car crash in Italy

Allison Smith

Three people have been arrested under suspicion of causing a cable car to crash in the northern Italian mountainside resort town of Stresa. The crash killed 14 people, including two children.

The cable car was about 300 metres from its peak when the structure’s load-bearing cable snapped at the last pillar, before the dock and the emergency brakes failed to deploy. The car that was headed in the opposite direction, down the mountain, does not appear to have had any mechanical issues; however, those passengers had to disembark using the car’s emergency stairs because the cable broke before the car was docked.

Rescuers search for evidence in the wreckage of a cable car after it collapsed near the summit of the Stresa-Mottarone line in the Piedmont region, northern Italy, Wednesday, May 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

Italian Alpine Rescue and Speleological teams sent to search for survivors after the crash last Sunday morning found the cable car smashed to pieces, with only one survivor, a five-year-old Israeli boy, whose two-year-old brother, parents and grandparents were all killed upon impact.

Crash witness Grazia Aguzzi recounted to La Repubblica that, “Around 12:30 p.m., there was a loud bang, then it sounded like something was rolling, and then there was another loud bang. Finally, everything was silent.” Another witness, Vanessa Rizzo, who works at Equus Valley Riding School in Stresa, told La Repubblica, “We heard a small bang and then we saw the cables flying on the ground. We saw the other people coming down with the other cabin: they had them come down with the stairs. When the fire department arrived, they couldn’t get through because the cables were in the road.”

The survivor, whose name is Eitan, was saved by the embrace of his father. He was taken to the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin where he is being treated for very serious injuries, including cranial and thoraco-abdominal trauma, and fractures to the lower limbs. The boy is expected to recover, and yesterday doctors began waking him from a pharmacologically-induced coma.

Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Cicognani of the Italian Carbinieri police told reporters that they arrested the owner of the company that manages the cable car service, Ferrovie Mottarone S.r.l., and the director and chief operating officer of the company that maintains the structure. This after workers and technicians interviewed by police admitted that the emergency brake system was deliberately rigged with a “fork” (spreader) on the cables to prevent the emergency break from engaging in the event of an emergency.

Had the emergency break been functioning, it would have prevented the disaster. The manager instructed that it be turned off because the cables were malfunctioning, and maintenance was unable to solve the problem, or only partially solved it.

The decision to disable the brakes was based on entirely mercenary calculations. The cable car had been put back into service on April 26, but was immediately plagued by recurring problems that hampered operations. An attempt was made to fix it in early May, but the brakes continued to lock repeatedly. To properly fix the problem would have required a more prolonged repair and shutdown, immediately after the reopening of business following the partial coronavirus lockdowns in the country.

The disaster is just one expression of the disastrous consequences of the profits-before-lives policy that has been pursued at large by the entire ruling class across Europe, who have worked to keep businesses open at all costs and permitted the deadly spread of the coronavirus.

Area residents expressed their grief for the families and their anger that the disaster could not have come at a worse time, as the country is still suffering economic devastation and massive loss of life caused by the criminal mismanagement of the pandemic by the Italian government.

There is also a massive show of support for the victims and rescuers on social media, with people from all over Italy posting via the La Tribuna di Stresa Facebook group and on Twitter, with the hashtags #stresa, #mottorone and #stressamottorne trending over the past 48 hours.

A message on the official Twitter account of Italy’s firefighters reads. “Silence and sorrow are what is left today of the cable car tragedy in Stresa. Be strong, Eitan. Italy’s firemen are all with you.”

The last Italian cable car crash—the Cavalese cable car disaster, also known as the Massacre of Cermis—occurred in 1998 when a United States Marine Corps EA-6B prowler aircraft flew too low, against Italian airspace regulations, and cut the supporting cable of a cable car. The gondola hurled 80 metres to the ground, killing all 20 people on board. The Marine captain and navigator were exonerated in a military tribunal and the charges were also dropped against the other two marines.

Italians are also still reeling from the 2018 Morandi Bridge collapse in Genoa, Italy that killed 43 people and displaced an entire neighbourhood beneath it. To date, no one has been prosecuted—including the billionaire Benetton family that owns the operational license for the toll-bridge—for this entirely preventable incident.

The Verbania public prosecutor’s office say they are continuing their investigations into the Stresa crash to “evaluate the possible involvement of other people,” verify their initial findings, collect further evidence, and ascertain the culpability of those involved.

Further complicating matters, the region of Piedmont is in the midst of taking over the ownership of the cable car, and it is unclear what liability, if any, the regional authorities will have in this incident.

Prosecutors say that documents seized from Ferrovie Mottarone will be examined, including the reports on the 2016 overhaul of the entire structure, which by law must be transmitted to the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure for approval. They will also analyze footage from surveillance cameras, which were seized, to see who was present in the days leading up to and during the incident.

In perfunctory remarks on Sunday evening, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi—best known for his draconian austerity measures against Greece, Portugal and Spain in the wake of the 2008 global economic crash—released a statement saying, “I learned with deep sorrow the news of the tragic accident of the Stresa-Mottarone cable car. I express condolences on behalf of the whole government to the families of the victims, with a special thought for the children who were seriously injured and their families.”

In response to Draghi, Corrado Guzzetti, the brother-in-law of Vittorio Zurloni, one of those killed in the crash, told ANSA news, “You can’t die taking your family to a quiet place, or fall from a bridge [a reference to the Morandi bridge collapse], the condolences of politics only make me more angry, because the responsibility for these tragedies is theirs.” Zurloni, 55, died alongside his partner Elisabetta Personini, 37, and their 5-year-old son Mattia, just one month after the two were married.

Once more on the issue of anti-Semitism in Germany

Johannes Stern

During Israel’s onslaught on Gaza this month, German politicians were in propaganda mode around the clock. They defended the murderous bombardment of Gaza with the claim that Israel has the right to defend itself. At the same time, they denounced all protests against Israel’s war policy as anti-Semitic, even when organisers explicitly spoke out against anti-Semitism.

The WSWS made clear in a previous comment that criticism of Israel’s brutal actions has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. On the contrary, the assertion that the Zionist regime’s terrorising bombardment of a largely defenceless population is taking place in the name of all Jews is drawn straight from the traditional arsenal of anti-Semitism.

Alexander Gauland (right) and Björn Höcke at the AfD election party in Erfurt after the state elections in Thuringia on Oct. 27, 2019 (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)

“An anti-Semite is not someone protesting against the crimes of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has struck an alliance with extreme right-wing parties, has one foot in jail and can only stay in power through endless provocations,” we wrote. “An anti-Semite is someone who equates ‘the Jews’ with the policies of the Israeli government.”

We also pointed out that the accusation of anti-Semitism was raised by forces deeply implicated in right-wing, anti-democratic and militarist conspiracies that are the real source of the threat of anti-Semitism.

Two interviews with former German President Joachim Gauck and current Parliament President Wolfgang Schäuble underscore just how far advanced this dangerous development is. Both have played a central role over recent years in Germany’s return to an aggressive great power foreign policy. They now openly appeal for more tolerance towards and an understanding for the far-right, and thus defend forces that are, in fact, anti-Semitic.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Schäuble summed up the reactionary character of the entire official anti-Semitism campaign. He agitated against immigrants allegedly “calling for the destruction of Israel,” blustered about the “problem of an imported anti-Semitism from Islamic-dominated countries,” and denounced the “anti-Semitism of the far-left.” At the same time, he defended the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) against the accusation of anti-Semitism and went so far as to praise the fascist party as an ally in the struggle against it.

Over recent years, the established parties have integrated the AfD into parliamentary work and adopted its reactionary policies. Schäuble now praises them with the remark, “In parliament, the AfD is also awkwardly attempting not to be pushed into the anti-Semitic corner. Like all other parties, it voted unanimously for the establishment of an anti-Semitism commissioner for the federal government and for a resolution on anti-Semitism.”

In reality, the “anti-Semitism resolutions” adopted by parliament during the last legislative period have nothing to do with the struggle against anti-Semitism. On the contrary, like the current campaign, their goal was to support the war policy pursued by Israel and the imperialist powers in the Middle East and suppress any opposition to it.

Schäuble’s attempt to present the AfD as a spearhead in the struggle against anti-Semitism is a deliberate provocation. The party is full of racists and anti-Semites. Its leading members, including honorary chairman Alexander Gauland and the party’s leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, trivialise the Holocaust, praise the Nazi Wehrmacht (army), and agitate against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.

It is a fact that anti-Semitic attacks and acts of violence in Germany, including the terrorist attack on a synagogue in Halle in October 2019, are overwhelmingly perpetrated by right-wing extremists.

In the first three months of this year, the government recorded 428 criminal acts and six acts of violence motivated by anti-Semitism, most of which were perpetrated by right-wing extremists. 378 of the crimes and five of the acts of violence were categorised as “right-wing political criminality.” By contrast, only one act of violence and one “other” crime were categorised as “political criminality: foreign ideology,” and two crimes were designated “Political criminality: religious ideology.”

Schäuble knows these numbers. He was forced to admit to the FAZ that the perpetrators are “mostly not immigrants, but right-wing extremists.” Despite this, he praises these political forces. In the interview, he even came to the defence of Gauland’s statement that Hitler and the Nazis were “bird poop in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” Gauland has “apologised for this comment so often that I must say that this is not an expression of anti-Semitism, but of a totally wrong presentation of history.”

A presentation of history that Schäuble and the ruling class are deliberately propagating. Asked by the FAZ—which regularly gives Gauland space for his Nazi agitation—whether the distancing of the AfD from these positions was merely tactical, Schäuble responded cynically, “As Parliament President, I take seriously what everyone says. By the way, I’m happier if the AfD participates in the Holocaust commemoration on 27 January than if they don’t.”

Schäuble remained silent about the fact that the AfD has repeatedly boycotted official Holocaust commemorations or used them to ridicule the victims of fascist terror and legitimise the Nazis’ crimes. In 2019, for example, Marc Jongen, the AfD’s ideological leader, justified the carefully planned war of extermination that claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens and led directly to the Holocaust as a “reaction” to Stalinist acts of violence.

Significantly, Jongen based himself on the right-wing extremist Humboldt University professor Jörg Baberowski, who works closely with the government and is vehemently defended against all criticism by all parties in parliament. Baberowski justified the crimes of the Nazis and Hitler. In 2014, he declared in Der Spiegel his explicit support for the now dead Nazi apologist and anti-Semite Ernst Nolte. He stated, “Hitler was not a psychopath, and he wasn’t vicious. He did not want to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table.”

The extent to which the top representatives of the capitalist state support the right-wing offensive was underlined in an interview with Gauck in Der Tagesspiegel. In it, the former German president and pastor railed against an alleged “intolerance of the virtuous,” which designates “valid questions or opinions too swiftly as dangerous for society or right-wing extremist.” But it is precisely “a characteristic of an open society that it can cope with differences and doesn’t prohibit people who present views that someone doesn’t particularly like or despises.”

Gauck made no secret about the “views” he was talking about. When Der Tagesspiegel reminded Gauck that he once called for this “tolerance” for AfD voters, and asked him if “this now applies to the Lateral Thinkers and anti-vaxxers,” Gauck replied, “Absolutely. But please don’t get the wrong idea. Tolerance doesn’t mean accept.” But one cannot “exclude everyone who is dissatisfied with the coronavirus policy.”

This is crystal clear. The so-called “Lateral Thinker” protests are dominated by far-right and fascist forces who explicitly declare their views by carrying the flag of the German Empire and anti-Semitic insignia. Gauck and the entire political establishment not only tolerated its protest marches in the past, but openly supported them because they serve to intimidate opponents of the government’s criminal coronavirus policies and press ahead with the reopening of the economy, which has already claimed more than 87,000 lives in Germany.

The ruling elite is also increasingly basing itself on fascist and anti-Semitic forces in its foreign policy. This was shown clearest of all during the fascist coup in Ukraine in 2014, when then-Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has since become German President, met Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda Party, in the German embassy in Kiev. Tyahnybok is a notorious anti-Semite who rails against “Jewish swine and other vermin” in his speeches. His role models are Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Schuchevytch, who were involved in the mass murder of thousands of Ukrainian Jews.

The official anti-Semitism campaign must be decisively rejected. The millions in Germany and around the world, including many Jewish workers and young people, who are horrified by the murderous wars pursued by Israel and its imperialist backers and protest against this, are not anti-Semites.

Future of Australian steelworks in doubt as UK fraud office investigates Gupta

Martin Scott

The future of the Whyalla Steelworks in South Australia (SA) hangs in the balance as the fallout continues from the recent collapse of Greensill Capital.

The Gupta Family Group Alliance (GFG), which owns the Whyalla plant, owes an estimated $6 billion to Greensill, and is now the target of a liquidation operation by Credit Suisse, a major Greensill creditor.

GFG Alliance executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta marches with union officials and ALP senator Kim Carr in Whyalla, South Australia, September 2017. (AAP Image/David Mariuz.)

The plant’s 1,500 workers, as well as around 400 workers at GFG’s metallurgical coal mine at Tahmoor in New South Wales, now find their livelihoods threatened by the speculative wheeling-and-dealing of the financial elite.

While GFG insists “significant progress” has been made in negotiations with Credit Suisse, three of its British plants have already been put up for sale, leaving the jobs of 1,500 workers in Stocksbridge, Brinsworth and West Bromwich in doubt.

The UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced on May 14 that it was investigating GFG over “suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering… including its financing arrangements with Greensill Capital.”

It was also revealed this week that the Gupta-owned Wyelands Bank, which is currently being wound up, has been under investigation since 2018 by both the SFO and the National Crime Agency.

In a letter to Australian Workers’ Union members, SA State Secretary Peter Lamps rushed to quell any “unnecessary speculation and angst” among workers. Lamps assured them: “The refinancers have clearly indicated they seek to support profitable businesses and jobs.”

Immediately following the UK announcement, White Oak Global Advisors, the US-based lender hailed as a possible “white knight” for GFG, withdrew from discussions of a $777 million rescue package for Gupta’s Australian and British operations.

White Oak said it was “not in a position to continue discussions with any company that is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for money laundering.”

Within hours, White Oak issued a somewhat contradictory statement insisting that it would continue carrying out “due diligence” of GFG’s Australian business, keeping the door open on the refinancing deal.

Even if the White Oak deal goes through, it offers no guarantee for workers. The company has a reputation as “an aggressive fund,” taking on debt considered too risky for banks, and will demand high returns, which will only be satisfied by wage cuts or the slashing of jobs.

White Oak has been working with Gupta since at least February 2019, when it extended a $200 million borrowing facility to GFG, which was subsequently paid back (with a 10 percent yield) from the proceeds of a junk bond sale by another Gupta company, InfraBuild.

GFG’s books are replete with these sorts of complex high-risk manoeuvres that have nothing to do with the production of steel or other activities of workers, but which nevertheless expose all 35,000 of the company’s employees to the vicissitudes of financial speculation.

Primarily through Greensill, GFG secured billions of dollars in loans on the basis of “future receivables” years in advance of production. Closer scrutiny of Gupta’s enterprises following the collapse of Greensill has revealed that many of these “prospective” sales were to companies that have never had any association with GFG and which have expressed no intention of buying anything from the company.

GFG acquired Whyalla Steelworks in 2017 in a fire sale following the collapse of previous owner Arrium. In preparation for the sale, the Australian Workers’ Union rammed through a deal forcing employees to accept a 10 percent pay reduction, a 2.5 percent cut to superannuation and reduced overtime. These losses have still not been recouped.

The Whyalla and Tahmoor plants were among a large number of distressed assets acquired in a global purchasing spree that saw GFG founder Sanjeev Gupta labelled the “saviour of steel.”

At the time of the acquisition, then federal Labor Party leader Bill Shorten applauded Gupta’s “bold vision,” and said the deal promised a “bright future for Australian steel.”

Gupta promised an ambitious list of investments in Whyalla and associated businesses around the country, which were eagerly backed by the Liberal and Labor parties as well as the unions. Most of these grand plans have come to nothing.

In May 2018, Gupta announced plans to build 10 gigawatts of energy production and storage capacity—almost one fifth of Australia’s existing energy capacity. So far this has only amounted to a small test rig at Cultana, near Whyalla, which GFG has now announced its intention to sell.

The same year, Gupta unveiled a project to build electric cars at the site formerly occupied by General Motors Holden (GMH) in Elizabeth, SA. This effort was enthusiastically supported by then Labor Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis, who penned an appeal asking GMH to sell assets to GFG. Despite Gupta’s insistence in April 2019 that the company would “definitely be launching a car within this year,” no vehicle has eventuated.

A more than $A1 billion proposal to build “one of the largest steel plants in the world” at Whyalla was shelved in June 2020. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the South Australian and federal Liberal governments had offered substantial funding for the upgrade but Gupta declined to proceed.

A new plan was then unveiled for a hydrogen-powered “green steel” plant at Whyalla, part of Gupta’s aim to become the “world’s largest carbon-neutral steel producer by 2030.”

At the same time, GFG announced that it was embarking on a 30 percent cost-cutting exercise at the steelworks. While Gupta promised no jobs would be lost, he noted “Whyalla certainly has been struggling,” and that “we cannot have operations that lose money.”

This announcement appears to have headed off any negotiations for a new enterprise agreement at the plant to replace the sell-out arrangement set up after the collapse of Arrium.

Despite Gupta’s dire assessment last year, and the current perilous circumstances, the AWU continues to insist that “the outlook for the company, for the steel industry and the Australian economy more generally is positive.”

The union is in lockstep with both major parties in pointing to the implications for Australia’s “sovereign capability to make steel” if the Whyalla plant is closed, a concern closely bound up with mounting preparations for war. This raises the possibility of a government bailout, although SA Treasurer Rob Lucas has explicitly ruled out any plans to nationalise the business.

The situation confronting workers at Whyalla, Tahmoor, and other GFG-owned businesses around the world will not be resolved by an injection of cash from a “white knight” investor or a government bailout. Either will result in a boost to shareholder profits, paid for by stepped-up attacks on workers’ jobs and conditions. The unions have repeatedly enforced these attacks, as well as the destruction of entire industries, such as car production.

Australian government prepares to slash disability services

Max Boddy

The Liberal-National government has declared its intent to dramatically rein in the costs of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), potentially threatening the care provided to its almost 450,000 participants and those seeking services in the future.

Last week, the recently-installed NDIS Minister Linda Reynolds told a parliamentary committee the scheme was on an “unsustainable growth trajectory.” She accused the public sector workers of too much “empathy” in applying the “reasonable and necessary” test for providing access to the scheme.

In reality, the NDIS, legislated by the last Labor government in 2012, has always been based on removing government responsibility for the care of people with a disability by outsourcing the services, creating a profit-driven “disability market.”

The NDIS was designed to cut government spending by dismantling previous institutional facilities. However, such is the level of need that the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), which administers the NDIS, said expenditure on the scheme grew by 23 percent between 2019–20 and 2020–21.

According to the May 11 federal budget, the NDIS will cost some $30 billion by 2024–25. Far from being “unsustainable,” that is only a fraction of the billions of dollars that the budget continued to pump into the hands of the corporate elite by way of subsidies and incentives.

The government’s only concern is that $30 billion is some $8 billion more than the original estimate of $22 billion per year outlined by the Productivity Commission—the pro-market think tank that drafted the scheme.

In reality, $30 billion is not enough. John Walsh, a former NDIS board member and an associate commissioner of the Productivity Commission report, told a parliamentary inquiry that the total cost of meeting the support needs of all people with a disability under the age of 65 would be $50 billion.

Walsh said successive Labor and Liberal-National governments had “persisted with an ideology of welfare and paternalism.” He claimed this had resulted in “total reliance” on “Tier 3” support—individual support plans or vouchers—while there was “poor implementation and eventual defunding” of Tier 2 services, called Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC).

The Productivity Commission had recommended the ILC tier to funnel people with psychosocial disabilities and supposedly low-level support needs into “mainstream” services and away from disability support.

According to the NDIS Actuary, there are 2.5 million people under 65 with a disability, but only 430,000 access the NDIS as participants. The rest must get support through ILC services.

Many of the NDIS participants have complex needs, including assistance with daily living, respite care, travel assistance, equipment such as walkers, home modifications, and specialist disability accommodation. Some need support workers to allow participation in social and community events and recreation, assistance dogs and their support, education support, and services such as psychologists, physiotherapy, exercise physiology and occupational therapy.

To slash costs, the government is planning to impose so-called “independent” assessments to determine eligibility to the scheme. The assessors are allied health professionals contracted by the government to conduct three-hour interviews to determine individuals’ funding.

This is to replace the submission of reports from individuals’ own treating specialists, as previously required by the NDIS. According to documents seen by the Guardian, the government plans to save an estimated $700 million over four years.

The assessors will use a series of questionnaires, dubbed “assessment tools.” The data collected will be used to allocate various scores to a person to determine their functionality.

There is intense concern among people with a disability, their carers and disability advocacy groups about the introduction of the assessors. They see their use as a mechanism for locking them out of the scheme or reducing their funding, with all the NDIS participants having to be reassessed.

In one example, a nine-year-old girl, Eliza Tape, who took part in a trial in January was deemed to have no mobility issues, despite having an intellectual disability and a condition that gives her brittle bones, so she often has to use a wheelchair.

Sue Tape, Eliza’s mother, told the Guardian she was only aware of the inaccuracies because she specifically requested the report. “I would imagine if I’m asking for a new wheelchair for Eliza because she grows out of the current one, they’re going to look at the independent assessment, and it says she doesn’t have any mobility issues,” Tape said.

The deep opposition to the assessors has forced the government to delay their implementation for now but Reynolds remains committed to it. The Australian reported this week: “She is expected to make a decision on them later this year.”

Documents obtained by the Guardian also reveal the establishment of an NDIS Sustainability Action Taskforce (SAT). Its three aims are to “slow net growth in participant numbers,” “slow growth in spend per participant” and “strengthen operational discipline.” Another goal is to “increase participant exits” from the NDIS, through the “targeted review of existing participant plans.”

The Labor Party’s shadow NDIS minister, former party leader Bill Shorten, said this was “proof positive the Morrison government has no plan for Australians with disability except slash, slash, slash.”

This is a fraud and a coverup. Shorten was an architect of the NDIS in the previous Labor government. The NDIS has seen the closure of government-run public health services and institutions for disabled people. This has resulted in the premature deaths of numbers of people forced to rely on the privatised for-profit NDIS system. These outcomes are not aberrations, but inherent to the scheme itself.

The NDIS was always designed to further privatise the disability and health industry. Another federal Labor government would only deepen the outsourcing of health services.

Senate clears passage of economic warfare legislation directed at China

Patrick Martin

The US Senate moved towards passage of the United States Innovation and Competition Act Thursday night, providing more than $200 billion to fund economic warfare directed primarily against China, but also against other US competitors in Japan and Western Europe.

The key vote came Thursday afternoon on a motion to close debate and block any filibuster, which passed by a margin of 68–30, easily clearing the 60-vote threshold. While 30 Republicans voted against cloture, it was supported by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and 17 other Republicans, in return for Democratic agreement to bring several amendments up for vote.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The bill, co-written by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Todd Young of Indiana, incorporates a half dozen separate pieces of legislation, some introduced in response to the acute shortage of computer chips that has forced the partial shutdown of the US auto industry, others driven by allegations of Chinese “theft” of US intellectual property.

Co-sponsors of the legislation include Republicans Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, and Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware, the senator with the closest personal ties to President Biden.

The various bills reported from six Senate committees carried such titles as the Endless Frontier Act, the Strategic Competition Act and the Meeting the China Challenge Act. In their combined form they run to more than 1,400 pages. The right-wing Heritage Foundation summarized the overall bill as beginning “an overdue debate on how to tackle long-term strategic competition with China.”

Among the provisions are a list of ten “key technology focus areas” to be developed by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Openly anti-China provisions include sanctions on Chinese entities accused by the US government or US corporations of cyberattacks or intellectual property theft, as well as a review of US export controls to restrict export of technologies to China on a variety of “human rights” and “national security” grounds.

The bill also establishes a fund to counter Chinese influence globally and encourages “public diplomacy”—i.e., the promotion of illusions in the beneficent role of the United States—in the Indo-Pacific region. The bill also codifies in law the temporary prohibition of US-China cooperation in space, which had previously been extended from year to year.

Much of the bill is a gigantic slush fund for the computer chip industry. The US share of the global market has fallen from 40 percent in 1990 to only 12 percent today. The $52 billion “CHIPS for America Fund” will subsidize US-based semiconductor producers, mainly Intel and Texas Instruments.

This is directed against other Asian countries in addition to China, since production delays in key chip producers in Japan and especially Taiwan have had a huge impact particularly on the US auto industry.

A raft of American cities are expected to engage in bidding wars for new semiconductor plants financed by the fund, similar to the contest for a new Amazon headquarters a few years ago. Both Indianapolis, Indiana, and Buffalo, New York, are said to have a leg up in this competition because of the role of Young and Schumer as the bill’s co-sponsors.

Some $2 billion of the CHIPS fund is set aside to build chips specifically required by the US military-intelligence apparatus.

About $81 billion over four years will be distributed through the National Science Foundation for research in areas of critical technologies, both commercial and military. Another $17 billion will go directly to research funded by the Department of Energy, which conducts or underwrites most US research into nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

An additional $10 billion will finance NASA’s manned landing systems program, operated under contract by Blue Origins, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In effect, this is a $10 billion handout to the richest man in the world. It also has significant military applications, particularly as the US government prepares for a struggle with China in outer space.

In debate on the Senate floor, Schumer called the bill a “once-in-a-generation investment in American science and American technology.” He boasted, “This legislation will set our country on the path to out-innovate, out-produce and out-compete the world in the industries of the future.”

“At its core, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act is about maintaining America’s role as the global economic leader,” he continued. “Today the reality is that semiconductors are a strategic industry… If we don’t take steps to bolster our competitiveness, it’s clear that our competitors will forge ahead of us.”

The principal Republican co-sponsor, Todd Young, spelled out the ideological underpinning of the bill. “Right now, the Chinese Communist Party is emphasizing to the world that the United States is a divided nation,” he said. “This is a rare opportunity to show the authoritarians in Beijing, and the rest of the world, that when it comes to our national security, and most importantly our China Policy, we are united.”

More than 60 organizations, including antiwar and scientific groups, issued a joint letter warning that its “anti-China framing” would feed xenophobia. “Worryingly, both political parties are increasingly latching onto a dangerously short-sighted worldview that presents China as the pivotal existential threat to US prosperity and security and counsels zero-sum competition as the primary response,” the letter declared.

These concerns cut no ice with either the Democratic or the Republican parties. The House version of the Senate bill is to be introduced by Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of the San Francisco Bay Area and is the leading House ally of Senator Bernie Sanders, thus constituting the so-called “left” of the Democratic Party.

The anti-China message was further reinforced by the speech delivered by President Biden Thursday afternoon in Cleveland, where he proclaimed the coronavirus pandemic all but over, hailed the US economic recovery which he said was now underway, and declared that his goal was to insure that the United States retained its economic status as “number one in the world.”

COVID pandemic spawns vaccine billionaires amid global mass death

Bill Van Auken

Profits reaped from the production of COVID-19 vaccines have spawned nine new billionaires with a combined wealth of $19.3 billion. They have likewise fattened the portfolios of eight existing billionaires with fortunes tied to corporations involved in vaccine production by $32 billion.

These staggering figures, exposing an obscene accumulation of private wealth in the midst of global mass death and immiseration, were released in a report produced by an alliance of aid organizations in advance of a G20 Global Health Summit.

Family members pray next to the burning pyre of a person who died of COVID-19, at a crematorium in Srinagar, May 25, 2021. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)

The report estimates that the newly minted fortunes of Moderna and Pfizer CEOs and investors-turned-billionaires could pay to vaccinate all 780 million people in the so-called “low-income countries” 1.3 times over.

The $32 billion raked in by the pre-existing billionaires over the past year would pay for the full vaccination of all 1.4 billion people in India. The country is the new epicenter of the COVID-19 catastrophe, where infections have doubled in the past two months. Recorded daily deaths have risen to 4,000, overwhelming the health care system and overflowing crematoriums and burial grounds with bodies.

The new vaccine billionaires include Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO ($4.3 billion); Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech ($4 billion); Timothy Springer, an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna ($2.2 billion), and Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman ($1.9 billion).

The foundation for the immense wealth amassed by these individuals was laid by government-funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and university laboratories, along with the outlay of some $10.5 billion in public funding for the development and production of vaccines.

The private appropriation of socially produced scientific achievements has allowed Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and other corporations to jack up the price of the vaccines at least 20 percent over their production costs and secure monopoly control that bars countries desperately needing vaccines from making cheaper generics.

On top of that, the fortunes of the big pharma-biotech billionaires have been swelled by a soaring stock market underpinned by huge government cash infusions. Moderna’s share prices, for example, have quadrupled over the past year.

The Moderna and Pfizer CEOs and investors may be among the most direct, but are hardly the only, “pandemic profiteers.” As the annual report by Forbes magazine spelled out last month, the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires surged by more than 60 percent last year, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion. This, as the pandemic and its socio-economic effects have wiped out at least 255 million full-time jobs globally over the past year and will, according to the World Bank, push another 150 million people into extreme poverty in 2021.

While the production of vaccines has yielded immense fortunes for a tiny layer within the ruling oligarchy, the vast majority of the world’s population have been denied access to vaccinations. Distribution of vaccines has been hobbled by nationalism, profiteering and the outright sabotage by the major imperialist powers of any coordinated international campaign to combat the pandemic.

The corporations and finance capital have ferociously resisted calls for the World Trade Organization to waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines, effectively breaking the production monopolies. The companies and their lobbyists have insisted that the waiver would be ineffective because it would take months to transfer technology and develop manufacturing capacity in other countries. They have been making this argument for months, while the people of these countries are dying, deprived of the vaccines that could save their lives.

At the opening of the World Health Organization’s 74th World Health Assembly on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that the number of coronavirus cases so far this year has surpassed those for all of 2020 and that, given existing trends, the number of COVID-19 deaths will outstrip 2020’s total death toll within the next three weeks.

In a report released last week, the WHO estimated that three times more people may have died from the pandemic than is reflected in official figures. This would put the real global death toll at over 10 million.

Pointing to the vast inequality in global vaccine distribution, Ghebreyesus declared that “the ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic.” He noted that 75 percent of the world’s vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries.

“There is no diplomatic way to say it. A small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world’s vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world,” he said, while pointing to the “vastly inadequate” doses supplied to COVAX, the global agency created to supposedly assure equitable vaccine distribution.

The stated aim of COVAX was to distribute two billion doses by the end of 2021. As of early this month, it had managed to distribute just 70 million doses to 125 countries, less than enough to vaccinate 1 percent of their combined populations even once.

Africa, with 17 percent of the world’s population, accounts for just 1.5 percent of vaccinations worldwide. COVAX has been able to distribute just 300,000 doses for the 15 million people of Somalia, 355,000 doses for 23 million in Niger and 175,000 for 6.8 million in Libya. In the Middle East, just 336,000 have been provided for 39 million Iraqis, 364,800 for 43 million Algerians and 164,000 for 4.7 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Similar figures prevail in impoverished countries in Latin America, where Bolivia, for example, has received just 421,000 doses for its 12 million people; and in Asia, where the Philippines has gotten just 2.6 million doses for a population of 108 million.

COVAX was deprived of vaccines from the outset, and its mission of equitable distribution was sabotaged as the major imperialist powers, with Washington in the lead, signed deals with Pfizer, Moderna and other companies bypassing the international agency to buy up the lion’s share of vaccines for themselves.

The dire effects of this vaccine nationalism have been exacerbated further as the Indian government has responded to the uncontrolled surge of the pandemic that its own policies fueled by ordering the country’s Serum Institute (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, to halt all exports. As a result, tens of millions of health care workers in the world’s poorest countries who had received a first dose of the vaccine will not be getting a second.

The US and the European imperialist powers have responded to the crisis with promises of vaccines that amount to less than a drop in the ocean. The Biden administration has pledged 80 million doses, and the European Union 100 million.

With new records of global infections and deaths being set daily, this response appears not only heartless, but irrational and indeed lunatic. There will be no end to the global coronavirus pandemic on a national basis. As the WHO’s Ghebreyesus warned Monday, “No country should assume it is out of the woods, no matter its vaccination rate.” With the virus spreading uncontrollably in India, Brazil and other countries, the threat remains that new vaccine-resistant variants will emerge.

The criminal indifference of capitalist governments and ruling classes to the burning need for a global vaccination campaign is in sync with their entire homicidal response to the pandemic. From the outset, they have subordinated the defense of human life to the profit interests of the banks and corporations and a ruling oligarchy that has concentrated unfathomable wealth in its hands.

The pandemic has laid bare the necessity of abolishing the capitalist nation-state system, expropriating the wealth accumulated by the financial oligarchy and ending private ownership of the means of production as the preconditions for defending the rights and interests of working people, including life itself.