The Missing and the Dead in El Salvador

Carmen Rodríguez

In El Salvador, reports of dead bodies abandoned on side of the road or in poorly traveled areas are commonplace. The country remains on the list of violent countries in Central America. In May alone, the number of homicides reached 484 deaths.

Meanwhile, the government refuses to treat the issue of disappearances as a problem and its officials prefer to say that the country is a “cool” place to visit. “At last people no longer see El Salvador as the kingdom of war or gangs. Today they see us as the coolest country in Latin America,” said the head of the ruling party’s deputies Cristian Guevara in one of the sessions of the Legislative Assembly.

“Given these delusions of progress and success by the government, it is likely that there will be no thorough or technical investigations to find missing persons in the country and new guidelines will be set up soon, in light of the actions by this ex-cop, to set up a criteria for witnesses and legal benefits. That’s why they have their own prosecutor, to hide the truth and support a permanent propaganda campaign”, said human rights expert Celia Medrano to the Americas Program.

After responding to an emergency call in mid-May, police searched a house and uncovered dozens of bodies, most of them girls and women. The scene was like something out of a horror movie. Detectives who continue to exhume human remains from the back yard believe there are at least 40 bodies at the site. Located in a rural area of Santa Ana in Chalchuapa to the west of the capital, the house is owned by retired former policeman Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez. Salvadoran police officers arrived to investigate allegations that the murder of a woman and her daughter had taken place on the property. While detained, Osorio Chávez confessed to murdering the two people.

The Union of Judicial Employees of El Salvador, which includes workers and forensic experts of Legal Medicine (SEJES) denounced that the director of the agency, Pedro Martinez, ordered the forensic experts not to carry out the tests to determine the causes of death of all the remains found in the graves in Chalchuapa.

“There are protocols to follow, standardized guidelines of how the autopsy procedure is done, it is our main function. And when they tell us to do other types of incomplete examinations, they are biasing the information, they are distorting reality. These are arbitrary and dangerous measures, and we owe it to society to demand robust expert investigations. But information is being centralized”, said María de los Ángeles Álvarez, forensic expert of Medicina Legal, to journalists.

The house contained at least seven graves with human remains. Prior to his May arrest, Osorio Chavez had been investigated for sex crimes and rape. According to police, he was part of a criminal gang operating in the western part of the country in recent years. When there was talk of the involvement of ten other people in the case, the Attorney General’s Office announced that in exchange for their collaboration they had extended the ex-cop the benefit of participating in the case as a protected witness.

Since the news broke, many Salvadorans have traveled to the area where the excavations continue in the hope of getting news, looking for their children, siblings or missing relatives. According to data collected by human rights organizations, so far 5,381 Salvadorans are reported missing.

But the press quickly diverted the public’s attention from the macabre event after President Bukele announced the use of bitcoin as the country’s currency.

Bukele’s government has also been known for hiding and blocking access to information, especially when it comes  to corruption, murders, violence and missing Salvadorans. In April, the security minister, Gustavo Villatoro, said in an interview on a Salvadoran television channel that the figure of disappearances in the country is “a feeling” sparked by the reduction in homicides.

“It is not strange that a government that has achieved a high concentration of power, based on a complex and effective apparatus of lies has as its priority to hide the truth to the detriment of the rights and suffering of victims of such horrendous crimes as the disappearance and forced disappearance of persons,” said Celia Medrano.

Israel Ticas, an experienced forensic expert from the Attorney General’s Office, was punished for confirming to journalists that there were at least 40 bodies and human remains in the ground. Several journalists who covered the discovery told Americas Program that employees of the Presidential House arrived at the site and prevented all non-official journalists from having access to the information.

“At the beginning, the forensic experts on the scene told us that it is very likely that there are more than 40 bodies in the house. But shortly after the media began to arrive, people from the Presidential House arrived and told us that all information would be handled by them and from then on everything has been very hermetic,” said a Salvadoran journalist who was at the house, where excavations are still being carried out to recover more bodies and human remains.

Two weeks later, the Security Minister publicly asked people who have missing relatives not to publish photos and messages denouncing disappearances. He also criticized the use of social media to make these denunciations. Furthermore, a month before the bodies were found in the property of the former policeman, the director of the Salvadoran Police Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, downplayed the importance of the reports of missing persons and denied the data.

It is worth noting that the police chief confirmed that since March there has been an increase in reports or complaints of missing persons, but he said that this is due to missing persons changing addresses or leaving the country without informing their relatives about it. “We have had a slight increase, but in reality these cases have multi-causes, factors cause a person to move from one place to another or leave the country,” assured the police chief.

Neither the president, nor the first lady of El Salvador, nor any other high-ranking government official have spoken or sent any message about the bodies that continue to be found at Osorio Chavez’s house. Moreover, pro-government deputies refused to observe a minute of silence at last week’s Assembly session.

Meanwhile, members of the National Police informed reporters that Osorio Chavez owns another house in Zacatecoluca, north of the Salvadoran capital. They do not rule out the possibility that he was also hiding bodies on this property.

Republican-led states enact fascistic laws that ban the teaching of “divisive concepts”

Renae Cassimeda

In recent months, Republicans in nine states—Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Montana, Utah and Georgia—have passed fascistic laws or other measures that ban the teaching of what they term “divisive concepts” related to racism and sexism in public school curricula and employee training programs, with some including social class among the topics that are banned.

Texas and Florida have explicitly banned the use of the New York Times’ 1619 Project in curricula, while Idaho, Montana and Florida have banned the use of critical race theory (CRT) in K-12 public schools and higher education.

Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who encouraged the state's school board to ban the 1619 Project and critical race theory (Image Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky)

Additionally, nine states have similar bills that have either been introduced or are already moving through legislatures, with bills in Michigan, Ohio and South Carolina also explicitly banning the use of CRT and the 1619 Project. Another seven states withdrew or deferred legislation on the topic earlier this year, with most set to be reintroduced later this year.

The World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) unequivocally condemn these antidemocratic laws. As Marxists, we have fundamental disagreements with the theoretical foundations and historical claims of both CRT and the 1619 Project, but we oppose all efforts to censor them. Only under conditions in which all literature is made available for open debate and discussion can the historical and theoretical issues confronting students and workers be clarified.

The various state bills all use the same model legislation, entitled “The Partisanship Out of Civics Act” (POCA), written by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and education writer for the right-wing publication National Review. Each of the state bills includes specific language from Section B.6-7 of POCA, prohibiting the use of concepts related to “systemic racism or other like ideas.”

Kurtz’s explanation and defense of POCA, published in the National Review, notes that the act also adapted language from an executive order issued last year by Donald Trump, which banned CRT training for federal government employees and contractors.

Most of the bills and laws do not explicitly refer to or ban CRT but rather ban the teaching of concepts associated with CRT. They can be interpreted by local and state officials as prohibiting a wide range of left-wing and progressive viewpoints. Teachers have already begun to be victimized for supposedly violating these laws, including in Tennessee and Oklahoma.

While large sections of the media have falsely presented these bills as centered solely on the banning of CRT, they, in fact, represent a sweeping attack on First Amendment rights, historical truth and public education.

The bill passed in Tennessee last month, arguably the most far-reaching, specifically targets the teaching of all social antagonisms, class conflict and revolution by prohibiting “promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government” and “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people.” Similar language has been included in the Kentucky, Maine, and now withdrawn Arkansas and South Dakota bills.

Wisconsin and South Carolina have proposed legislation that would require educators to publish their curriculum materials on school websites to allow for policing the content of educators’ lessons. The Tennessee and Arkansas laws, as well as proposed bills in Maine and Wisconsin, withhold state funding for schools that “knowingly violate the prohibitions,” and the Kentucky, Maine and Pennsylvania bills subject teachers who violate the law to disciplinary action and termination.

The use of Kurtz’s model legislation underscores the top-down character of this campaign, which involves the leadership of the Republican Party and its backers among the corporate and financial elite. Following the traditions of McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, which sought to ban Marxist literature in the US as part of a broader assault on free speech, the Republicans aim to falsify history to promote a fascistic nationalist mythology at public educational institutions and state government agencies. These right-wing lawmakers are part of the same party that attempted to carry out a coup on January 6 to install Trump as a presidential dictator.

In May, fascist strategist Steve Bannon stated on his podcast, “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” A recent article in NBC News notes the role of “dark money” conservative forces pushing to overturn elected school boards, which is also being waged as a campaign against CRT to provide cover for a broader effort to install right-wing and far-right school board members in cities across the US.

There are now at least 165 local and national groups throughout the country that have carried out campaigns to recall school board members deemed too left-wing in at least 50 districts, with more recalls documented in the first six months of this year than the total for any other year on record. Many of these groups evolved out of the right-wing parents’ groups that pushed for schools to reopen at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Republicans’ fascistic attacks on public education have provoked enormous opposition among educators and parents, becoming the most frequent topic of discussion in the various Facebook groups where teachers are active. Teachers correctly see the recent legislation as a gag on what to teach as well as an erasure of history.

In response to a meme posted on CRT, one teacher noted: “While I would not debate this meme understand that we are being censored and that’s not a good thing.” Another commented that the Republicans aim “to limit academic freedom in order to appease a fascistic base” and “conform to a nativist, whitewashed curriculum reminiscent of the Hitler Youth.”

Additionally, over 70 scholarly and educational groups have signed a statement opposing the raft of right-wing legislation, noting that the bills “risk infringing on the right of faculty to teach and of students to learn” and that “a free and open society depends on the unrestricted pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.”

While most educators are not aware of the tenets or scope of critical race theory, officials in the Democratic Party, the teachers unions and the corporate media have responded to the right-wing attacks by defending and promoting CRT and the 1619 Project. In recent weeks, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who sits on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has endorsed CRT and the 1619 Project in multiple interviews.

In a recent interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC, Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the 1619 Project, framed the Republicans’ laws entirely in racial terms, saying, “[t]hey are clearly designed to stoke white resentment, to really feed into this narrative that white Americans are under attack, that they are the primary victims of racism.” She downplayed the severity of the measures, stating, “Even though the laws seem silly, I don’t think the emotions and the kind of real hysteria they’re intended to evoke is silly at all.”

Both Weingarten and Hannah-Jones, who speak for the Democratic Party, provide cover for the far-reaching attacks on democratic rights being carried out by the Republicans. Both remain silent on the threat of fascism and say nothing about the clear efforts to create a national patriotic mythology through historical falsification.

Weingarten and National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, who collectively represent roughly 4.7 million educators, have done nothing to mobilize the enormous opposition among teachers, parents and students to the antidemocratic measures being enacted or proposed in half of all US states.

In this, they are merely continuing their years-long policy of isolating teachers opposed to the broader assault on public education. This was expressed throughout the wave of teachers strikes in 2018-19, when the national teachers unions conspired with state officials to end each strike as quickly as possible, and even more sharply over the past year as they isolated every wildcat strike that broke out in opposition to the premature reopening of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The national teachers unions, as well as their state and local affiliates, are corporatist bureaucracies embedded in the state apparatus. They fear above all any mobilization of educators and the working class fighting to defend public education and democratic rights.

Berlin: Food delivery workers strike to defend sacked colleague

Markus Salzmann & Ulrich Rippert

On 9 June, about one hundred workers employed by the Berlin food delivery service known as Gorillas took spontaneous strike action to defend a fellow worker who had been summarily sacked. The affected worker is one of the company’s so-called “riders.”

Gorillas evidently operates on the principle of “hire and fire.” On Twitter, the Gorilla employee concerned, Santiago, described what had taken place. On Wednesday morning, at the end of his shift, he was approached by a woman on the pavement in front of the delivery service’s warehouse at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The woman did not identify herself, but merely declared he was fired with immediate effect. The employee was stunned and outraged and sought to inform fellow workers of what had taken place.

The news spread like wildfire. A few hours later, almost 70 Gorillas workers from different shifts and locations gathered in front of the delivery service’s warehouse and demanded an explanation from management. When no explanation was forthcoming, the workers spontaneously decided to go on strike. The riders piled up their bicycles to form a barricade in front of the entrance to the warehouse and access was blocked.

In order to defuse the situation, a manager from the company decided to halt operations at the “Charlie” location and discuss with the workers. In the event, this discussion turned out to be “very unsatisfactory.” The workers decided to extend their struggle and formed a bicycle convoy of about 100. The strikers went to the company’s main depot in Berlin-Mitte to blockade the food warehouse there but were prevented from doing so by a large police presence.

In addition to demanding the reinstatement of Santiago, the strikers called for the abolition of the company’s six-month probationary period and an end to all arbitrary dismissals. In future, there should be no more dismissals without three prior warnings.

"Solidarity with Santiago"

The pretext for the dismissal was Santiago’s failure to attend work that day at the arranged time. In fact, the young man had informed his shift supervisor (Rider-Op) that he would be late. Contrary to management’s statements that there had been “negative feedback” about him, colleagues stated that Santiago was one of the best-ranked riders. At a protest rally against his dismissal, it was stressed that his sacking should be understood as a threat against all workers.

The management uses the six-month probationary period, which is very long for such a job, to fire employees without reason. Gorillas founder and CEO Kağan Sümer brazenly told the media that if “someone is fired, it is in the interest of our community.”

The strikes and blockades continued at the Prenzlauer Berg location on June 10. Workers had earlier carried out a spontaneous strike, last February, after management failed to guarantee secure conditions for riders following the harsh onset of winter.

Gorillas promises to deliver food to customers within 10 minutes. The company hired thousands of workers within a short period of time. The riders are mostly young people and students, often from abroad, who urgently need a job to make ends meet. Gorillas pays just 10.50 euros per hour for the strenuous work involved. Consequently, work and cost pressures are considerable. Based on a delivery fee of 1.80 euros, the ordered goods have to be packed within minutes and delivered quickly in all weather and traffic conditions.

Under this enormous pressure, working conditions are almost unbearable. Riders are currently racing through Berlin in the middle of a heat wave. The German television station ZDF describes some of the consequences as follows: Back pain due to heavy, bulky deliveries; assignments at short notice that make any sort of private life extremely difficult; and uncertain wage payments and permanent pressure.

Der Spiegel also describes the working conditions as “in part hellish.” Several other delivery services have also been reported to maintain dangerous working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Distance regulations are difficult to observe in the narrow warehouses, and disinfectants and FFP2 masks are also not available everywhere.

A female driver described the hard work to Zeit-Online. She complained about the sometimes very heavy loads, such as bottles in backpacks, which have to be transported over cobblestones on bikes without suspension. Although no more than ten kilograms should be carried per order, this figure is not checked. The heavy transports have caused bruises on her back. Several employees wrote an open letter to complain: “We are drivers, not racehorses.”

In order to survive the pressure of competition, delivery services are resorting to increasingly drastic means to monitor workers. The food delivery service Lieferando was recently severely criticized after reports that its couriers were being monitored by a tracking app. To work for the company, employees have to download the app onto their mobile phones, but it remains unclear what data is being retrieved by the management.

In fact, the business model of the start-up is built on the principle of the extreme exploitation of its workers. Gorillas was founded in the spring of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Investors poured more than 280 million euros into the food delivery service in just four months, enabling it to achieve a market valuation of one billion dollars in record time. This ranks the company as a so-called “unicorn” in business circles.

The delivery services market has grown rapidly in recent years, with no end in sight. Several competitors vying with Gorilla for market share are waiting in the wings. The Turkish company Getir, for example, has now expanded its operations to Germany.

Getir is described as a pioneer in express food delivery. In 2015, the company was founded in Istanbul and experienced enormous growth during the pandemic last year. Orders can currently be placed via the app in thirty Turkish cities. Since the end of January, the firm has expanded to London and Amsterdam. In addition to the American market, the focus is now also on Germany and France. To this end, the company raised a total of $550 million from investors. Getir currently has a market valuation of $7.5 billion.

Other delivery services with allegedly even shorter delivery times and lower costs are about to enter the market. The delivery service Flink is also in direct competition with Gorillas. The start-up, built in cooperation with the German retail giant Rewe, also raised 245 million euros in start-up capital in a very short time and is now active in 18 cities across Germany.

Levels of fierce competition were already evident in the past with other delivery services. For example, the delivery service Lieferando achieved monopoly status through its takeover of Foodora and the demise of Deliveroo. The Dutch parent company of the food delivery service, Just Eat Takeway, is increasing its turnover by more than half, to around 2.4 billion euros in 2020.

The Gorillas workers’ industrial action has received wide support, with dozens of statements of solidarity from many countries appearing on social media such as Twitter. It is becoming increasingly clear that similar forms of extreme exploitation are affecting more and more people. A new, important layer of the working class has emerged: young, militant and very well connected internationally.

Miserable working conditions, where maximum performance is demanded and often less than the minimum wage is paid, together with no social security, no sickness benefit or pension contributions, etc.—these conditions are no longer an exception, but increasingly the rule.

Many companies in Germany’s leading industrial sectors, such as the auto and auto supply industry, electrical industry, steel processing and others, have used the pandemic as an opportunity to implement mass dismissals, wage cuts and a deterioration of working conditions. Parts of companies are being outsourced and workers forced to work under far worse conditions.

Ruling circles and the German government are very concerned about the growing willingness to fight, as shown in the spontaneous Gorilla strike. They are afraid that the militancy of the precariously employed workers will combine with growing resistance against mass dismissals and wage cuts in industrial enterprises, transport companies and public administration.

To counter this, trade union-led works councils are to be formed in delivery services and other areas of precarious employment. The aim is to mobilize the unions to prevent spontaneous strikes and any broader mobilization of workers. To this end a so-called “Works Council Modernization Act” was passed in the Bundestag last month to facilitate the formation of works councils. At Gorillas, the formation of a works council was initiated earlier this year in close cooperation with Germany’s Food and Hostelry union (NGG).

The Socialist Equality Party (SGP) rejects this initiative. A works council led by the NGG will not improve working conditions. Wherever the NGG or other unions have influence, wages and working conditions have invariably deteriorated in recent years.

Germany’s long-standing Works Constitution Act obliges works councils to “cooperate in a spirit of trust” and to comply with all agreements, and the works council is prohibited from calling strikes and other industrial action. Instead, it is obliged to work for the “welfare of the company.”

The formation of a works council will not abolish slave labour at Gorillas, but rather regulate and cement it. At the same time, the organizing of spontaneous strikes is made much more difficult because during the term of contract agreements workers are legally obliged to keep the peace, i.e., a ban on strikes.

We urge workers at Gorillas to form an action committee based on the tradition of independent workers’ councils, free from the influence of the union bureaucracies, which function as a company police force. Such an action committee is able to link up with workers in other production and administrative sectors and other countries, to develop a common strategy, not to “humanize” slave labour and make it bearable, but rather abolish it.

WHO warns that Delta variant of coronavirus will “pick off” the unvaccinated

Patrick Martin

Officials of the World Health Organization issued a stark warning Monday that the Delta variant of coronavirus posed a major danger to the world’s population and that rates of serious disease and death could rise significantly unless vaccination efforts were stepped up, particularly in the poorer countries.

At a press briefing, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that Africa, the Americas and Asia “are facing steep epidemics. These cases and deaths are largely avoidable. … The inequitable access to vaccines has demonstrated that in a crisis, low-income countries cannot rely on vaccine-producing countries to supply their needs.”

Cemetery workers transport the remains of a COVID-19 victim for burial in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Saturday, May 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Mario De Fina)

Ghebreyesus harked back to the denial of anti-retroviral drugs to countries affected by HIV, and the price-gouging of insulin supplies for countries affected by diabetes, although the drug has been known for a century. Criticizing the pharmaceutical industry, he argued for sharing technical knowledge and waiving intellectual property rights: “The COVID-19 crisis has shown that relying on a few companies to supply global public needs is limiting and dangerous.”

Dr. Maria Van Kerkove, the WHO technical lead on COVID-19, explained that the Delta variant was spreading rapidly around the world, because “it has an opportunity to spread given that we have increased social mixing, relaxation of public health and social measures, or the inappropriate use of public health and social measures. … And given that we don’t have full vaccination, it will spread.”

The Delta variant has been detected in 92 countries, she said, but so far the two-dose vaccinations “remain effective against severe disease and death, but we need two doses to be administered.

“Public health measures are effective but need to be administered longer,” she said, adding, “Some countries have public health measures and the vaccine. Some have public health measures without the vaccine. That is not a fair fight against this variant.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, also emphasized the dangers of the new variant for people of the poorer countries who have largely been deprived of access to the vaccines by the policies of the main vaccine-producing countries.

“This particular Delta variant is faster, it is fitter, it will pick off the more vulnerable more efficiently than previous variants,” he said, “and therefore if there are vulnerable people left without vaccination, they remain even at further risk.

“All of the viruses have been lethal in their own regard. This virus has the potential to be more lethal, because it is more efficient in the way that it transmits between humans, and it will eventually find those most vulnerable individuals who will become severely ill, have to be hospitalized, and potentially die.”

He concluded, “We can protect those people now with relatively small transfers of vaccine from the global supply. We can protect those vulnerable people, those front-line workers. And the fact that hasn’t happened, as the director-general has said again and again, is a catastrophic moral failure at the global level.”

What all three officials of the global health agency were remarking on—while avoiding naming any names—was the policy of vaccine nationalism, hoarding vaccines, and refusing to waive intellectual property rights, engaged in by the major imperialist powers, particularly the United States, Britain, France and Germany.

The Biden administration in the United States has flatly refused appeals that Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson be required to transfer technology to India, South Africa and other developing countries that have existing pharmaceutical production capacity, and to stop price-gouging for shipments of the life-saving vaccines.

Britain and the European Union have adopted a similar policy for their own drug manufacturers.

All the imperialist powers treat vaccine supplies as a weapon in the global struggle for influence, power and strategic advantage against China and Russia, as well as against each other.

As for the warnings by WHO doctors and scientists that the Delta virus will “pick off” the vulnerable, there are many in the ruling classes of the imperialist powers who regard that as a positive feature. They regard the lives of the elderly and infirm in their own countries as a drain on resources that could go to profits and the amassing of personal wealth. They care even less for the lives of hundreds of millions facing disease and death in the poor countries.

Dr. Ryan noted, quite correctly, that “convergent evolution” is a growing threat to humanity as a whole. The mutation of the coronavirus is facilitated and fueled by the existence of a large pool of unvaccinated people. No variant has yet found the deadliest combination of transmissibility and lethality, he said, but the Delta variant is a major step in that direction. There will be many more potential new variants if the pandemic is not shut down.

Hundreds of millions of people are in danger in the imperialist countries as well, despite the efforts by governments and the corporate media to spread complacency and declare the pandemic over. In Britain, the Delta variant has now become the dominant strain. It now accounts for 19 percent of all US cases, up from 7 percent two weeks ago.

Eight US states have had sharp increases in the number of cases over the past week because of the Delta variant. All of them are states with low vaccination rates and state governments which have halted virtually all public health measures against COVID-19.

The Biden administration issued Monday an international distribution list for a pathetic 80 million doses of US-owned vaccines. Given that there are nearly 6 billion people unvaccinated in the world, this barely qualifies as a drop in the bucket. Much of it is intended for the use of the ruling elite and military forces in client countries, like the 2.5 million doses for Taiwan, which has rejected the offer of the Chinese-made Sinovax, to the detriment of its own people.

As for the 2 billion doses in aid, pledged by the US and other G7 powers at their recent summit, given that effective vaccination with most vaccines requires two doses, this amounts to a declaration that only 1 billion of the 6 billion unvaccinated people in the world can expect any help from the wealthy imperialist countries. The remaining 5 billion people will face the terrors of a lethal virus with only masks and limited social distancing, if that.

Ousting of National Party leader highlights political instability in Australia

Mike Head

Yesterday’s sudden, apparently largely unanticipated, deposing of the deputy prime minister and National Party leader Michael McCormack has pointed to an accelerating fracturing of Australia’s parliamentary establishment.

No figures were released but reportedly by just 12 votes to 9, National Party members of parliament opted to return Barnaby Joyce to those posts from which he had been ousted in February 2018.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, right, and deposed Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack brief the media in Canberra, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk)

The narrow margin is a sign of unresolved rifts in the rural-based party, and the Liberal-National Coalition government as a whole. In the short-term, Agriculture Minister David Littleproud will stay as the Nationals’ deputy leader. He voted for McCormack but then chose not to run after a spill motion was called and may seek to displace Joyce in the months ahead.

Joyce’s “resurrection” has the potential to further destabilise the Coalition government, which has been shaken by one crisis after another in recent months, not least the worsening debacle of the COVID-19 vaccine operation, which has opened the door to a resurgence of the pandemic.

Even as the National MPs were meeting behind closed doors in the parliament building, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was convening an “emergency” meeting of the bipartisan National Cabinet with state and territory government leaders over the vaccine crisis.

Joyce’s revival is a clear blow to Morrison and his authority within the government. Having just returned from the G7 summit in Britain, Morrison was still in quarantine in the official prime ministerial residence as the Nationals “spilled” McCormack, with whom Morrison has worked closely.

The corporate media has largely depicted Joyce’s return in terms of opposition by coal mining industry-related factions of the National Party to Morrison’s efforts to push the Coalition toward accepting the goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050, as now demanded by the Biden administration in the US as well as the European capitalist powers.

Driving the Coalition infighting, however, are wider and deeper conflicts, bound up with growing popular political disaffection, soaring social inequality and the escalating US offensive against China.

Joyce is a right-wing populist, backed by the most far-right elements within the National Party. Decades of corporate economic restructuring, accompanied by the dismantling of former national-based protectionist measures such as collective marketing schemes, have shattered the National Party’s former base among family farmers. Tens of thousands have been driven from the land to make way for agribusiness conglomerates.

Joyce has a record of railing demagogically against globalisation and big banks, falsely claiming to represent the interests of small farmers and workers in regional areas, and of trying to whip up nationalist and anti-Chinese sentiment. He fully backs Washington’s strident stance against Beijing, having previously branded China “our security threat” and agitated against Chinese investments in Australian-based agribusinesses. In 2019, Joyce succeeded in securing a Morrison government ban on a takeover by a Chinese company of the country’s largest milk processor, Lion Dairy and Drinks.

In the most immediate sense, Joyce’s comeback means the Coalition agreement with the Liberal Party, led by Morrison, must be renegotiated, with Joyce likely to demand stronger representation in the cabinet and more explicit backing for the coal mining industry.

Just over two years ago, in March 2019, during a previous bid to retake the leadership, Joyce raised the prospect of terminating the Coalition if he succeeded. There was “no law saying the Nationals and Liberals must be together,” he declared. Putting the interests of inner-city Liberals ahead of regional Nationals was “just like political serfdom, we will look after ourselves,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

For now, it seems that Morrison and Joyce will seek to patch up the Coalition, although it may be days before a new partnership agreement and ministerial line-up is adopted.

There is dismay in the government and the big business media. Today’s Australian Financial Review editorial voiced alarm over the “running body count of party leaders.” The Australian, a Murdoch flag-bearer, said McCormick’s removal was “an unwelcome reminder of the revolving-door syndrome in which deposed leaders destabilise a party as they plot their return.”

The Morrison-Joyce combination would be the eighth change of leadership since the Coalition took office in 2013. The departure of previous National Party leaders and the deposing of prime ministers Tony Abbott in 2015 and Malcolm Turnbull in 2018 came on top of the ousting of four prime ministers from 2007 to 2013—John Howard, Kevin Rudd (twice) and Julia Gillard.

In 2018, figures within the National Party’s most big business-aligned factions, such as former party leader John Anderson, teamed up with Turnbull to force Joyce to resign from the leadership, supposedly because of an extra-marital affair and sexual assault allegations. But that was a mask for the underlying fissures wracking the Coalition.

Joyce’s “resurrection” marks a revival of attempts by the most right-wing elements within the Coalition to turn it into a more Trump-style movement to divert growing social unrest in nationalist, anti-Chinese directions, amid more signs from recent state elections of collapsing support for both the major ruling parties: Labor and the Coalition.

Joyce has been a strong backer of the coal industry, including a potential government-financed coal-fired power station in central Queensland, advocated by one of his supporters, Senator Matt Canavan.

Many corporate interests, however, including in agribusiness, are now investing in carbon “farming” and trading schemes as profitable means of exploiting the schemes being introduced by the major powers internationally in the name of addressing climate change.

Key business groups, among them the National Farmers Federation and Business Council of Australia, support the Australian government signing on to the net zero 2050 emissions target at November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland. They fear the imposition of “carbon tariffs” by US and European governments on the pretext of upholding the target.

From that standpoint, the Australian Financial Review denounced the Nationals’ decision to “rehabilitate a destructive climate populist as its leader.” It would undercut “the confidence of capital markets and investors” in funding gas projects and other supposed “decarbonisation” ventures.

Asked yesterday about his threat as a backbencher to cross the floor of parliament to vote against a net zero 2050 target, Joyce defiantly said he would seek the “best deal for regional” local jobs and industry, “as opposed to a Danish one or a German one.”

On China, Joyce said the Nationals had been right to call for tougher foreign investment laws, “when everyone was calling us bigots and rednecks.” He added: “Now they just call us correct.”

Driving this political crisis are two related factors, both intensified by the global pandemic. One is the anxiety in the ruling class to divert the mounting discontent in the working class—over ever-more glaring social inequality and declining living conditions—into anti-immigrant, jingoistic and militarist directions. These fears are compounded by signs of a global upsurge in working-class struggle.

The other factor is the stepped-up demands from the Biden administration for Australia’s unconditional alignment with the US in its economic and military confrontation with China, Australian capitalism’s largest export market, despite widespread popular opposition to war and US militarism.

In response to the convulsion in the government, the Labor Party has stepped up its pitch to the financial elite, outlined at Labor’s recent national conference, that it is the party best able to govern in periods of social unrest and war.

Party leader Anthony Albanese said the Nationals’ leadership shift showed the government was being “self-indulgent” at a time of national crisis, whereas he was “focused on the needs of the Australian people.” Albanese said he would welcome an early election to “end this circus.”

Working closely with the trade unions, the Labor leaders are talking up the prospect of an early election in order to try to corral working-class discontent back behind the election of yet another big business Labor government, like those of Hawke and Keating, and Rudd and Gillard.

How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality

Chuck Collins

A new IPS/Inequality.org report finds that the U.S. continues to suffer from the extreme and growing wealth and power of inherited-wealth family dynasties – and the growth of their extreme wealth accelerated during the pandemic.

The report, “Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality,” tracks the 50 wealthiest families from 1983 to 2020 using data from Forbes.

IPS researchers found that by 2020, the 50 families had amassed $1.2 trillion in assets. For the 27 families on the Forbes 400 list in 1983, their combined wealth had grown by 1,007 percent, from $80.2 billion to $903.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, and for the  five wealthiest dynastic families, their wealth increased by a median 2,484 percent during 37 years. The Walton family led the pack with an increase of 4,320 percent, while the Mars candy family saw its wealth increase 3,517 percent.

While media attention focuses on first-generation billionaires – and their shocking tax avoidance as chronicled by ProPublica – we neglect to look at the troubling growth of dynastic families and the changes in tax policies that will enable the children of today’s billionaires to become tomorrow’s oligarchs.

As the report argues, in a healthy democratic society with a functioning tax system, wealth disperses over decades as people have children, pay their taxes, and give to charity.  But with a weak tax system on wealth – as confirmed by the recent leak showing low billionaire taxes – we are now seeing wealth accelerate over generations, leading to consolidated wealth and power.

The “Silver Spoon Oligarch” report finds that inherited wealth dynasties are growing not only due to an inadequate tax system, but also excessive hiding of wealth in dynasty trusts, and low charitable giving by multi-generational wealth dynasties. It also finds that members of the inherited wealth generation are using their wealth and power to rig the rules to get more wealth and power. Some are even using their charitable donations and political giving to press for lower taxes.

Other key findings from the report include:

Dynastic wealth grows much faster than the wealth of ordinary families. The 27 families who were on the Forbes 400 list in 1983 had a median increase in their net worth, adjusted for inflation, of 904 percent over those 37 years. In contrast, between 1989 and 2019—the most recent year available—the wealth of the typical family in the U.S. increased by just 93 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

The wealth of the very top grew even faster. The five wealthiest dynastic families in the US have seen their wealth increase by a median 2,484 percent from 1983 to 2020. For example:

+ In 1983, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and his children were worth just $2.15 billion (or $5.6 billion in 2020 dollars). By the end of 2020, Walton’s descendants had a combined net worth of over $247 billion, an inflation-adjusted increase of 4,320 percent.

+ The Mars candy dynasty has seen its wealth increase 3,517 percent over the past 37 years, from $2.6 billion in 1983 (in 2020 dollars) to $94 billion by 2020. The Mars family also stands out for the miniscule amount of money they have stored in family foundations—$48 million as of 2018—in contrast to the large sums they have spent on public policy advocacy to change tax laws.

+ Cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder and her descendants have seen their wealth grow from just $1.6 billion in 1983 (in 2020 dollars) to $40 billion in 2020. This is a growth rate of 2,465 percent. A hefty portion of that growth has come in just the past five years: the Lauder family’s assets have grown 119 percent since 2015, for an average growth rate of 16.9 percent each year.

Dynastic wealth is persistent and consolidating. Of the 20 wealthiest families on the list in 2020, 13 were already in the top 20 in 1983. Only 4 of the top 20 wealth dynasties are new to the list since 1983.

Wealth for dynastic families has grown significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the top 10 families on the Forbes dynasty list have had a median growth in their net worth of 25 percent.

Dynastically wealthy families wield a great deal of political power, and use it to further their interests. The report profiles dynastic family members who spend millions lobbying for favorable tax, labor, and trade policies, give to candidates, campaigns and PACs, serve on policy advisory boards; and even serve in government themselves. For example, members of the Busch, Mars, Koch, and Walton families have together spent more than $120 million over the past ten years on lobbying directly for tax, labor, and trade policies favorable to their businesses and investments.

Dynastic families wield a great deal of philanthropic power and can use it to further their self-interest. The report examined more than 248 foundations set up by the top 50 families, housing more than $51 billion in assets. While many move much-needed revenue to broader public interest charities, others fund groups working to reduce taxes on the wealthy and roll back regulations that constrain corporate profits. Some funnel millions to donor-advised funds, which can fund dark-money political advocacy. And in a few cases, family members have used them to compensate themselves.

The report profiles all of the 50 families, including the Waltons, the Kochs, the Mars family, and many others, some well-known and some relatively unknown.  A section of the report entitled, “The Six Habits of Highly-Entrenched Dynasties,” details how family dynasties hoard and protect their fortunes from taxes.  These include tax avoidance, low-charitable giving, formation of dynasty trusts, and lobbying for tax breaks.

The report includes a number of recommendations, including greater oversight of taxation, wealth taxation and abolition of certain kinds of trusts.

The report concludes:

These trends are alarming for the health of a republic that aspires to widely held prosperity and opportunity. If we stay on our current trajectory, families of inherited wealth will exert ever more control over public policy and the public pocketbook. But we can choose to move in a new direction: to enact economic policies that strengthen society as a whole, ensuring equal opportunity and dignity for all, not just the very few.

Wither Encryption: What Operation Trojan Shield Reveals

Binoy Kampmark

My, were they delighted.  Politicians across several international jurisdictions beamed with pride that police and security forces had gotten one up on criminals spanning the globe.  It all involved a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, led in conjunction with a number of law enforcement agencies in 16 countries, resulting in more than 800 arrests.  The European Union police agency Europol described it as the “biggest ever law enforcement operation against encrypted communication”.

The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, and some $48 million in cash, both tangible and digital.

Operation Trojan Shield arose because of a grand dupe.  It involved recruiting an FBI informant who had developed an adulterated version of the encryption technology platform Anom, to be used on modified cell phones for distribution through a range of organised crime networks.  The platform included a calculator app that relayed all communications sent on the platform back to the FBI.   “You had to know a criminal to get hold of one of these customised phones,” the Australian Federal Police explained. “The phones couldn’t ring or email.   You could only communicate with someone on the same platform.”

The users were none the wiser.  For three years, material was gathered and examined, comprising 27 million intercepted messages drawn from 12,000 devices.  This month, the authorities could no longer contain their excitement.

While the criminals in question might well have been mocked for their gullibility, the trumpeting of law enforcement did not seem much better.  A relentless campaign has been waged on end-to-end encryption communication platforms, a war against what policing types call “going dark”.  To add some light to the situation, the agencies pine for the creation of tailored back doors to such communications apps as WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal.

Few could forget the indignant efforts of the FBI to badger Apple in 2016 to crack the iPhone of Syed Farook, the San Bernardino shooting suspect.  Apple refused.  The battle moved to the courts.  In what has become something of a pattern, the DOJ subsequently dropped the case by revealing that it had “successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple Inc.”  The DOJ then requested that a court order of February 16 demanding Apple create software with weakened iPhone security settings be vacated.  By refusing to reveal how it had obtained access to the phone, government authorities had thrown down the gauntlet to Apple to identify any glitches.

In 2020, a number of international politicians with an interest in the home security portfolio released a joint statement claiming to support “strong encryption, which plays a crucial role in protecting personal data, privacy, intellectual property, trade secrets and cyber security.”  A casual glance at the undersigned would suggest this to be markedly disingenuous.  Among them were: Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary; William P. Barr, US Attorney General; Peter Dutton, Australian Minister for Home Affairs.

Having given nods of approval for encryption as “an existential anchor of trust in the digital world”, the ministers took aim at the various platforms using it.  On this occasion, it was the “challenges to public safety” posed by the use of encryption technology, “including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children.”  (The battle against solid encryption is often waged over the bodies and minds of abused children.)  Industry was urged “to address our concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access.” This would involve companies having to police illegal content and permit “law enforcement to access content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

Cases like Anom demonstrate that there is seemingly no need for such intrusions, bells of alarm, and warnings about safety.  The police have sufficient powers and means, and more besides.  As with such matters, the danger tends to be closer to home: police zeal; prosecutor’s glee; a hatred of privacy.  Joseph Lorenzo Hall, senior vice president at the non-profit Internet Society, is convinced of that fact.  “When law enforcement agencies claim they need companies to build in backdoors to help them gain access to the end-to-end encrypted communications of criminals, examples like Anom show that it’s not the case.”

John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy makes the same point.  “What this case shows is that global law enforcement is perfectly capable of mobilising a multiyear caper to get around exactly the kinds of problems about encryptions that they’ve been talking about without breaking the encryption of the apps that keep you and [me] private.”

The Australian wing of the operation had even greater extant powers of access to encrypted messages.  The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 is one of those beastly instruments many law enforcement agencies dream about.  It might also suggest why Australia, a nominally small partner, might have been asked by the FBI to be involved in the first place.  When asked if this was the case, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested that the question be put to US authorities.  For him, the AFP’s hardly impressive technical efforts were to be praised.

None of this is enough for the Morrison government, which is intent on further pushing the surveillance cart in such proposed laws as the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, and the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill).  The former would permit the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to issue a new range of warrants for combating online crime; the latter would create a system by which Australian agencies would be able to access stored telecommunications from identified foreign communication providers in cases where Australia has a bilateral agreement.

Operation Trojan Shield has again shown that calls for weakened encryption are to be treated with due alarm.  Almost silly in all of this was the fact that the FBI and fellow agencies made it a demonstrable fact, undercutting their very own arguments for a more invasive surveillance system. The next play is bound to come from the criminal networks themselves, who, wounded by this deception, will move towards more conventional encryption technologies. The battle will then come full circle.  In countries such as Australia, where privacy is a withering tree, the encryption debate is a dead letter.