US sending 3,000 troops to Afghanistan as major cities fall to Taliban

Bill Van Auken

The Pentagon announced Thursday that the US is sending 3,000 US soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan with the ostensible mission of securing US diplomatic facilities in Kabul and organizing the evacuation of American civilians. Britain is sending 600 soldiers for the same purpose. The US deployment of one Army and two Marine infantry battalions has been ordered as the lightning offensive of the Taliban—and the unmitigated rout of the US-backed Afghan security forces—has steadily tightened a noose around the Afghan capital.

Taliban in Kunduz city, northern Afghanistan on Aug. 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Abdullah Sahil)

The collapse of security forces loyal to the US puppet regime in Kabul accelerated exponentially on Thursday with the Associated Press reporting the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, in the south. It came on the heels of the fall to the insurgency of Herat in the west.

Both cities have populations of approximately 600,000. Kandahar is the historic birthplace of the Taliban and constituted a major military center for both the US-led occupation and the Afghan regime. Herat, a predominantly Persian-speaking city, is the strategic gateway to Iran.

These defeats leave the government of President Ashraf Ghani in control of little outside of Kabul. He staged an emergency trip to Mazar-i-Sharif, a besieged city of half a million in the north, in an attempt to mobilize forces loyal to Afghan warlords responsible for some of the worst crimes of the country’s bloody civil war of the 1990s.

In southern Helmand province, the capital city of Lashkar Gah has nearly fallen to the insurgency, with the Taliban capturing the police headquarters Thursday. US warplanes have carried out airstrikes in an attempt to halt the Taliban advance, killing and wounding civilians in the city.

The heavily armed US troops being dispatched to Afghanistan will reportedly be deployed to Kabul’s international airport. Another Army brigade combat team of between 3,500 and 4,000 US troops is being sent to Kuwait to be on “standby” for a possible rapid deployment to Afghanistan.

With some 4,200 employees, the US Embassy in Kabul is one of the largest in the world. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday that it would be drawn down to a “core diplomatic presence.”

US President Joe Biden had initially announced that all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 2011, in fulfillment of an agreement negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha in February 2020. While the overwhelming majority of US troops and military contractors have already left Afghanistan, the official day for the completion of the pull-out was moved up to August 31. Washington stated that it was leaving a force of 650 soldiers and Marines behind to guard the US Embassy and the Kabul airport.

The Pentagon has been providing armed support for the puppet regime’s security forces in the form of “over the horizon” airstrikes, including by B-52 strategic bombers, and drone attacks which have led to an escalation of civilian casualties and destruction in urban areas under siege by the Taliban.

US military and intelligence officials have been cited by the Washington Post as predicting that Kabul could fall to the Islamist insurgency in 30 to 90 days. Previously, these same sources had assumed that no provincial capitals would be taken before the fall. Their latest predictions were made, however, before the stunning defeats suffered by the Kabul regime over the last 48 hours.

There is every reason to believe that the new US deployments are aimed not merely at evacuating US personnel, but at forestalling, at least temporarily, the precipitous overrunning of Kabul by the Taliban and a humiliating spectacle like that in South Vietnam in 1975, with US personnel fleeing from the Saigon embassy rooftop. Whether they are merely the advance guard of another US military intervention in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans remains to be seen.

The fall of Kandahar and Herat on Thursday evening followed that of Ghazni, a strategically important provincial capital that straddles the main highway linking the capital of Kabul to the country’s south. Qala-i-Naw, the capital of Badghis Province, in northwest Afghanistan, was also taken by the Taliban Thursday night, leaving it in control of 12 of the country’s 34 provincial capitals.

In one city and district after another, Afghan national security forces have either surrendered without a fight or merely stripped off their uniforms and melted into the general population. Taliban fighters captured the headquarters of the Afghan army corps in Kunduz in charge of the north of the country Wednesday without a struggle, taking control of large stocks of arms, Humvees and a military helicopter.

Washington is desperately trying to broker a deal with the Islamist movement. The perpetual US envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, formerly the representative of Unocal oil company’s interests in the country, was dispatched to Doha for talks that have included China, Russia, Pakistan, the European Union, Germany, the United Nations and the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Also present was Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation and President Ghani’s electoral rival in elections that he and his supporters claimed were rigged.

The talks in Doha reportedly produced an offer to the Taliban of a power-sharing agreement in exchange for a cease-fire. Iran declined to take part in the negotiations.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan told the media that any such deal hinged on the removal of US-backed Afghan President Ghani. Khan has bitterly denounced Washington, charging that the US only wants Pakistan to clean up the “mess” Washington has created in Afghanistan. He added that his government, faced with US alignment with India, has “options” in terms of its relations with China.

Washington’s determination to broker a “political settlement” in Afghanistan is driven not by concerns over terrorism or the rights of women, but rather US imperialism’s interests in preventing China, Russia or Iran from expanding their influence in the country.

It is to that end that US troops are once again being deployed in the longest war in American history.

Consumer prices continue to rise, with inflation rate at 13-year high

Trévon Austin

Rising prices on essential goods and services have erased the meager wage gains American workers have seen since the start of the year, resulting in most Americans earning less than they were before the coronavirus pandemic began.

Trader Robert Arciero works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

The pace of inflation slowed somewhat in July but remained elevated, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Despite reassurances from the White House and corporate media that the inflation is “transitory,” prices continue to rise rapidly, although at a slightly slower pace than in May and June. Last month’s increase still held inflation rates at a 13-year high.

A major driver of July’s moderation was an easing in the rise of used-car prices, which had been a significant driver of inflation over the past few months. According to the Labor Department, used car prices rose just 0.2 percent from June to July, compared to an earlier month-by-month surge of 10.7 percent in June.

Over the past 12 months, the used car index is still up nearly 42 percent, a gain matched only by gasoline prices. Fuel prices have risen sharply in the past few weeks, reaching a national average of $3.19 as of Thursday, the most expensive average of the year and $1.01 higher than the same time last year.

The Consumer Price Index, used to gauge the average rise in the price of goods, rose by 5.4 percent in the year through June. It’s the second straight month of year-over-year increases at that level, a trend not seen since 2008. According to Labor Department data, prices rose 0.5 percent from June to July, a milder increase than in recent months but enough to outpace recent wage gains and drop real wages by 0.1 percent over the month.

The data marks the latest month rising prices have continued to eclipse wage gains as the cost of groceries, gasoline, hotels, restaurant dinners and other items increased. Much of that gain was driven by price increases in food and fuel. Labor Department statistics show core prices, which excluding more volatile commodities like food and energy, rose 0.3 percent in July from a month earlier after rising 0.9 percent in June. Over the course of the year ending in July, core consumer goods rose an average of 4.3 percent.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which tracks changes in prices for goods and services targeted towards and consumed by individuals, climbed by 3.9 percent through May. Producer price inflation, another metric used to track prices, rose 7.8 percent over the year leading up to July. This exceeded the expectations of economists and marked a record high since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began calculating the index in 2010.

Meanwhile, the cost of dining out jumped 0.8 percent, registering its largest monthly gain since February 1981, the Labor Department reported. Home dining also got costlier, as the price index for food consumed at home like meat, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 0.7 percent. Personal services costs, including the price of haircuts, rose 1.2 percent between June and July for a year-on-year increase of 3.1 percent.

Another worrying trend is rising housing and rent costs. Average housing prices increased another 0.3 percent in July, building on similar gains in previous months. From the same time last year, housing prices have risen by 2.4 percent.

The broad surge in the cost of living points to growing hardship and demonstrates the severe impact inflation is having on the livelihoods of American families, amid the most destructive pandemic in a century.

According to Harvard economist Jason Furman, workers’ compensation rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate from April to June. However, prices rose faster, leaving inflation-adjusted real wages 0.7 percent lower than they were in December 2019 and 2 percent below their pre-pandemic trend. In June, economic historian Dr. Tyler Goodspeed calculated that real wages have declined every month in the last year, due to the significant month-over-month increases in overall prices.

While workers increasingly find it more difficult to make ends meet, the wealthiest layers of society continue to amass obscene amounts of wealth. According to a recent Oxfam report, the world’s 2,690 billionaires added around $5.5 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, bringing their collective net worth to $13.5 trillion, an increase of almost 69 percent. The wealthy have seen their fortunes grow more since March 2020 than in the previous 15 years.

Much of this growth was fueled by the injection of trillions into the financial markets, on a much larger scale than was carried out in the 2008–09 bailout. Since the beginning of the pandemic, capitalist governments around the world have subordinated societal health to the pursuit of profit.

The Biden administration has demanded the reopening of schools, even as the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly, so parents can continue to produce profits for the capitalist class. Meanwhile, workers are faced with an increasingly desperate situation. The Century Foundation estimates roughly 7.5 million workers who’ve relied on pandemic-era unemployment benefits will be cut off from jobless aid altogether when these benefits expire on September 6.

Federal corruption probe of UAW officials continues

Marcus Day

The federal investigation into corruption by officials in the United Auto Workers union (UAW) is continuing, according to a report earlier this week by the Detroit News, despite the settlement reached between the US government and the UAW last December.

The UAW’s “Solidarity House” headquarters, undergoing renovations (WSWS)

The years-long investigation has revealed widespread criminality among the top echelons of the UAW, including bribe-taking in exchange for company-friendly agreements, embezzlement of union dues, and kickback schemes with vendors. The illicit funds were used to pay for lavish lifestyles for UAW executives, such as months-long getaways at Palm Springs, endless golf outings, luxury goods and high-priced meals. While the incomes of UAW officials swelled though both illegal and “legal” means over the last 40 years, workers’ jobs and livelihoods have been decimated in one sellout contract after another.

To date, 12 UAW officials, including two of the last four union presidents, and three Fiat Chrysler employees have pleaded guilty to various charges stemming from the investigation.

In December, the UAW and federal prosecutors settled the government’s case against the union itself. Neil Barofksy, a former regulator of the bank bailouts during the Bush and Obama administrations, was selected in April by the US Attorney’s office as the independent monitor tasked with overseeing and enforcing the terms of the six-year consent decree established by the settlement.

According to the Detroit News, federal prosecutors requested last month that Barofsky be granted access to search warrants and related documents from earlier in its investigation. As monitor, Barofsky is nominally tasked with continuing to investigate corruption within the UAW and has the ability to initiate disciplinary proceedings against UAW officials for criminal behavior or for associating with “barred persons,” including those indicted in the corruption probe.

Significantly, the US Attorney’s court filing states that “[s]ome of the overall investigation remains pending,” and asked that the search warrant documents remain sealed and unavailable to the public. Federal prosecutors had indicated in a filing earlier this summer that the government had “not yet completed its criminal investigation of all targets of the UAW corruption investigation.”

Additionally, Barofksy is reportedly set to meet with former UAW President Gary Jones, who oversaw the sabotage and betrayal of the 40-day General Motors strike in 2019. Jones was indicted and pleaded guilty for his role in a scheme to embezzle over $1 million in workers’ dues.

Clearly desperate to serve as little as possible of his slap-on-the-wrist sentence of 28 months in a white-collar prison, Jones may well be seeking to rat out more of his fellow gangsters. The Detroit News reported that Jones aided federal prosecutors in securing the indictment of Dennis Williams, Jones’s predecessor as UAW president. Williams also pleaded guilty to his role in the embezzlement scheme and received a similarly light 24-month sentence.

UAW Vice Presidents Joe Ashton, Jimmy Settles, Cindy Estrada and General Holiefield stand with President Bob King and Secretary Treasurer Dennis Williams after their election in Detroit, on June 16, 2010. Ashton and Williams have both been indicted and pleaded guilty in recent years, while Holiefield died before charges could be filed. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The News points to one current UAW vice president, Cindy Estrada, and one former, Jimmy Settles, as potential targets of the ongoing federal investigation.

Settles oversaw the UAW’s Ford department until his retirement in 2018, after which he received a lucrative appointment from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan as head of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods. According to the News, members of Settles’s staff were previously questioned by federal investigators, who also issued grand jury subpoenas, as part of their probe of his ties to a top union vendor.

Estrada, for her part, currently oversees the UAW’s Stellantis department, as well at its department of higher education, having previously led the union’s GM department. Estrada is particularly despised among autoworkers for her role in negotiating secret agreements with GM to outsource jobs at its Lake Orion and Lordstown Assembly plants, which in the latter case was the prelude to the shutdown of the plant.

Like her fellow top UAW executives, Estrada has seen her pay rise dramatically over the last decade, taking in $220,506 in compensation in 2020, up from $167,000 in 2015, while autoworker pay has consistently failed to keep up with inflation. UAW tax filings also show that the union paid more than $7,000 in legal fees for Estrada between 2019 and 2020. Estrada had previously been vying earlier this year for the position of UAW secretary-treasurer but withdrew from the running.

Charities run by Estrada and Settles were reportedly the subject of earlier investigations by federal prosecutors. A charity run by then-UAW Vice President for Chrysler General Holiefield, the “Leave the Light on Foundation,” was found by prosecutors to be the conduit for payouts from company executives. Holiefield died in 2015, before he could be indicted.

While the Detroit News, which has maintained close ties to federal officials throughout their investigation, pointed to Estrada and Settles as targets, they are by no means the only possibilities. Rory Gamble, who retired as UAW president at the end of June, was previously cited as the subject of investigations by the News. Current UAW President Ray Curry, who was union secretary-treasurer from the beginning of the federal corruption probe, has also had legal fees paid for by the UAW for unexplained reasons over recent years.

As the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter previously explained, Barofsky’s powers as independent monitor are limited to responding to only the most egregious misconduct within the union, and he does not have oversight over contract negotiations between the companies and the UAW, which will retain their pro-corporate character.

At the same time, the selection of Barofsky—a prominent critic of the Wall Street bank bailout program following the 2008 economic crisis—is an indication of the seriousness with which the government continues to view the question of the UAW’s stability. The Biden administration and broader sections of the state are no doubt concerned that the UAW’s credibility among workers continues to disintegrate despite the years-long effort to “clean up” the most blatant criminality by union executives.

Reopening schools poses major risks to children's lives

Bryan Dyne

The accelerating coronavirus pandemic is a clear and present danger to children in the United States and around the world. Cases have spiked, and pediatric hospitals are increasingly overwhelmed.

Teddy bears are placed on the bed of a child at the pediatric unit of the Robert Debre hospital, in Paris, France, Wednesday, March 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

In the US, again the world epicenter of the virus, an estimated 14.3 percent of all coronavirus cases have occurred in children, a percentage which has steadily increased since the beginning of the pandemic. Last week there were more than 93,000 new pediatric cases in the US, including nearly 1,000 in Mississippi schools alone, a massive jump from the 72,000 new child cases recorded during the last week of July.

Child hospitalizations are also on the rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that more than 1,400 children were hospitalized for COVID-19 over the past week, setting a new record of 239 child admissions each day. In total, 4.3 million children have been infected. The most tragic cases have been the estimated 445 who have died from the disease.

In addition, estimates from studies conducted in the US and United Kingdom show that tens or hundreds of thousands of those infected also have, or will have, long-term symptoms. Reports have emerged of complete short-term memory loss, extreme fatigue, insomnia and continued changes in smell and taste.

Quantitatively, these cognitive deficiencies have been measured as a loss of between two and seven IQ points. A loss of two IQ points is the equivalent of lead poisoning. A loss of seven IQ points is worse than a stroke.

Moreover, such symptoms are becoming more widespread. Data collected in the UK from last year indicated that between 2 and 4 percent of children experienced some subset of these symptoms, and that these symptoms have in some cases persisted for over a year.

After the emergence of the Alpha variant and the now dominant Delta variant, those percentages increased substantially. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, noted during a congressional hearing in April that up to 15 percent of young people infected could “end up with this long-term consequence, which can be pretty devastating in terms of things like school performance.”

In the context of school reopenings, such figures are nothing short of horrific. There are roughly 50 million K-12 students in the US, along with a further 20 million college students. In the world in which they live, where federal and state governments are forcing them back to in-person learning, some 49,000 youth are threatened with death, while more than 10 million are threatened with the equivalent of lead poisoning or worse. It is as if the poisoning of Flint, Michigan is being repeated in every state.

The magnitude of what has already occurred was acknowledged by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US CDC. She stated before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions last July that, “One thing just I want to note with the children is: I think we fall into this flawed thinking of saying that only 400 of these 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been in children. Children are not supposed to die, so 400 is a huge amount.”

At the same time, Walensky made no attempt to square these remarks with the fact that the Biden administration is still planning to send kids back to schools. That same week, Walensky asserted in an interview that “I remain emphatic that our schools need to open in the fall. They need to open for full, in-person learning.”

The head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has joined Walensky in demanding the reopening of schools, declaring that “The number one priority is to get kids to be back in school.”

Such policy statements are rank insanity. Sending students back to schools by the Trump administration last fall, and the inevitable mixing and transmission that occurred among students, staff, teachers and parents, helped trigger the colossal surge in infections that led to a quarter million infections each day last January.

Now, before schools are fully open, new cases are already more than double what they were a year ago, setting the stage for a wave of cases and deaths unlike any experienced so far.

Schools also present a unique opportunity for the virus to mutate beyond the already immensely infectious Delta variant. As children are not yet able to get vaccinated, and because the dominant Delta variant is able to infect both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, it will be able to pass freely and frequently between the two populations. This raises the likelihood that a new variant will emerge that, as Dr. Anthony Fauci noted, “has an equally high capability of transmitting but is also much more severe,” one which may escape current vaccines all together.

The situation is the exact same or worse in countries around the world. In Indonesia, children make up an estimated 12.5 percent of new cases while hundreds die each week. In Brazil, recent excess death estimates have found that the number of children who have died from the pandemic is 2,975, almost triple the official number of 1,122.

The drive by government officials to reopen schools is not, however, simply a matter of individual irrationality. The international character of this drive is based on the need of the capitalist class to do everything they can to get parents back to unsafe working conditions to further extract surplus value from the working class and pay for skyrocketing corporate profits.

And while this drive is certainly propelled by various financial oligarchs, it is more fundamentally an objective process bound up with the laws of capitalist development. The rate of profit must increase, under capitalism, and for these reasons children must be sent back to school and parents sent back to work.

It is also for these reasons that capitalism as a socioeconomic system must be abolished. In a rational society, school and non-essential business closures would be implemented immediately as a measure to stop the spread of the disease, with full financial compensation to workers and small businesses impacted by the closures. Lockdowns would be combined with the massive expansion of testing, contact tracing and necessary health care facilities to care for those infected.

Wall Street instead declares that there is “no money” to save lives while gorging itself on trillions of dollars generated off the backs of the working class. Workers must take the opposite view, that there is “no money” for capitalists and every resource necessary directed toward saving lives.

Sixty nine dead in Algeria as forest fires devastate the Mediterranean region

Alex Lantier

At least 69 people have died in Algeria, according to the latest reports, as forest fires and record temperatures ravage the north of the country and the entire Mediterranean basin. It is the greatest loss of life in this series of wildfires which now stretch from Turkey and Greece across the Balkans, Italy and Spain to Algeria.

In this photo taken Wednesday, Aug.11, 2021, smoke invites the mountains after wildfires in the village of Larbaa Nath Irathen, neat Tizi Ouzou, in the mountainous Kabyle region, 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Algeria's capital of Algiers. Wildfires in Algeria that already have killed at least 69 people burned through the mountainous Berber region as the North African country contended Thursday with a heat wave like the ones fueling fires in Southern Europe. (AP Photo/Fateh Guidoum)

In Algeria, the fires are concentrated primarily in Kabylia, east of the capital, Algiers. The Algerian regime has given partial details on military losses, while many villages are surrounded by vast walls of flame in the mountains.

“It is with great sadness that we learned of the deaths of 25 members of the National Popular Army (ANP), after they managed to save over 100 citizens from forest fires in the Béjaïa and Tizi Ouzou areas,” Algerian President Abdelmajide Tebboune declared Tuesday. The National Defense Ministry added that 18 of the deceased soldiers and six other badly burned soldiers came from the 57th Light Infantry Battalion stationed at Ichelladhen. Seven other wounded soldiers, four of whom are severely burned, are of the 4th Independent Infantry Battalion.

ANP and local authorities are finding many civilian victims, often rural laborers who died while trying to protect their crops and livestock. Yesterday, 26 people were found dead in the village of Agulmim.

Wednesday morning, Algeria’s General Directorate of Civil Protection counted 69 active fires in 14 wilayas (police prefectures) of the country. The Tizi Ouzou wilaya, the worst-hit, had 24 of these fires; since August 9, it has seen 116 forest fires in total.

Already staggered by the 2019 hirak protests, a mass movement of youth and workers against the military regime, the Algerian ruling class felt forced to criticize the lack of equipment and preparation to fight the fires. The Berber-nationalist Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and the Workers Party (PT), close to the Algerian regime, both criticized the lack of firefighting planes. Already in June, forest fires in the Khenchela areas had underscored the urgent necessity to acquire such aircraft.

Yesterday, in a nationally-televised speech, Tebboune announced that aircraft had arrived that could bring the fires under control. Until then, Algerian authorities were forced to rely on military helicopters to drop water on the fires.

Tebboune declared, “I instructed the prime minister, as the fires began, to request aircraft from our European partners, but unfortunately no country responded favorably to our requests, as all the aircraft were already deployed to fight fires in Greece and in Turkey. But two French aircraft have arrived today, two Spanish aircraft are due to arrive tomorrow, and a further Swiss aircraft should arrive in the next three days. With all these planes, it will be possible to get the forest fires under control.”

Tebboune added that the military had been designated to coordinate the purchase by the Algerian state of firefighting aircraft from international aircraft manufacturers.

Yesterday, French firefighting aircraft began operations, dropping loads of water on the region of Béjaïa. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “In the face of the tragedies facing the friends of France, our solidarity is without limit. To the Algerian people, I would like to bring all our support. As soon as tomorrow, two firefighting aircraft and a command airplane will be deployed to Kabylia, which faces violent fires.”

In fact, the fires devastating Algeria and the entire region expose above all the lack of international preparation and coordination in the face of climate change. Responsibility for this lies above all with the European imperialist powers. While European countries are spending billions of euros on military spending increases, and while Paris sends fighter-bombers and drones to wage war in Mali and across the Sahel region south of Algeria, the most essential equipment and infrastructure for fighting fires is lacking.

Extreme heat and drought are affecting large parts of the Mediterranean basin. A heat wave is beating all record temperatures, with Sicily, Turkey and Tunisia all recording temperatures of 49°C (120°F).

These conditions facilitate the eruption of gigantic fires. In eight days, Greece has seen 586 fires that claimed three lives. Hundreds of fires in Turkey have claimed at least eight lives, and over 500 fires in Italy have claimed four lives and led to the declaration of a state of emergency in Sicily. In the former Yugoslavia, North Macedonia has also declared a state of emergency due to fires, which are also devastating the border region between Bosnia and Croatia.

In the final analysis, the cause of these disastrous events is the incapacity and the refusal of the capitalist classes around the world, over several decades, to plan an environmental policy that could halt global warming. According to several investigations and environmental models produced by climate scientists, this warming will violently impact the Mediterranean.

“It’s going to be a desert climate all around the Mediterranean by the end of the century,” Levent Kurmaz, of Istanbul’s Bogazici University, told the British Independent. The newspaper added that by then, “the climate in southern Turkey, southern Greece and southern Italy will be similar to that of Cairo and the southern Iraqi city of Basra now.”

Tebboune and other Algerian officials are claiming that all the forest fires are the work of criminals and have launched a wave of arrests, supposedly to identify the arsonists. Djamel Bensmaïl, aged 35, died in a lynching in Larbaâ Nath Irathen on Tuesday, after a crowd falsely identified him as an arsonist while he came from the city of Miliana to help fight the fires. Yesterday, inhabitants of the town presented an apology to his father.

In reality, it is apparent that the fundamental cause of these fires, and especially of their massive scale, is global warming and the disastrous oversight of the economy by the ruling class.

Yesterday, Abdelkader Benkheira, the former Director for Fauna and Flora of Algeria’s General Forestry Directorate, explained to Middle East Eye the vulnerability of Mediterranean forests to fire and its link to global warming. He said, “The forest materials have a great deal of resin and are very flammable. There is also a great deal of other living material such as underbrush and scrub in which there are trees, including oak and olive trees.”

Weather conditions like the current ones, he added, provoke fires and even explosions in such areas. “Forests are living environments, trees and resin in particular sweat and give off gases called terpenes. These virtually inflammable gases play a major role in propagating such fires and are even capable of provoking explosions inside large forest bodies, especially in uneven terrain, when proper air circulation is lacking. Then one has a process of gas concentration that can lead to spontaneous explosions.”

Global warming, which also intensifies conditions of drought in the region, can set off mega-forest fires, Benkheira explained.

He said, “Caused by global warming, water stress is bearing down with enormous force on Mediterranean forests, reinforced by rising temperatures and growing frequency and strength of heavy winds. … This water stress leads to a reduction of humidity in the soil. This unwatered soil leads to stressed vegetation, which is almost completely dry, and so is easily flammable. And then there are the periods of violent winds.”

As the deaths of millions of people worldwide in the COVID-19 pandemic points to the failure and the political criminality of capitalist ruling elites, the Mediterranean forest fires again show the urgent necessity for workers to overthrow them in an international socialist revolution that can impose rational health and environmental policies.

Australia’s highest court gives green light to casualisation

Martin Scott

The High Court of Australia handed down a unanimous ruling on August 4 that a worker’s status as casual or permanent is determined solely by the words of their written contracts.

High Court of Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

Without a single dissenting vote, the country’s supreme court declared that employment contracts “accepted” by workers prevail, even if contradicted by “the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the employment relationship.”

This is a class-war ruling. The judges resuscitated the myth of “freedom of contract,” winding back decades of class struggle against this doctrine. As workers know full well, there is no “freedom” or “equality” of bargaining power in being forced by an employer to sign a contract in order to be employed.

This verdict clears the way for a deepening of the offensive against the working class, which has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling gives employers a free hand to define workers as casuals, without even the limited protections afforded by the Fair Work Act, National Employment Standards or enterprise agreements.

Last week’s decision also has far-reaching implications for other insecure forms of work, including the increasingly common practice of sham contracting, rife in the gig economy. Millions of workers are already employed as casuals or supposedly independent contractors, with the highest rates among young workers.

Andrew Stewart, a professor of law at the University of Adelaide, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “It’s an open invitation to businesses to hire workers as independent contractors rather than employees—meaning they don’t just miss out on annual leave, but minimum wages, limits on working hours, the right to complain of unfair dismissal, and maybe super and workers’ compensation as well.”

The decision overturned a May 2020 Federal Court finding in the case of WorkPac Pty Ltd v Rossato, which held that a worker, employed as a labour-hire casual but working full-time hours rostered up to a year in advance, should receive the same entitlements as a full-time employee.

Although employed by labour-hire firm WorkPac, Robert Rossato worked for three and a half years at Glencore coal mines in Queensland, under what has now become an increasingly typical arrangement in Australia’s $202 billion-a-year mining industry.

The Federal Court finding was hailed as a “big win” by the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU), which had launched a class action to recover workers’ unpaid entitlements. This has been quickly revealed as a dead end.

In March, the Liberal-National Coalition government introduced legislation that sought to nullify the Federal Court finding. The Fair Work Act amendment defined casuals as workers given no “firm advance commitment to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work.”

Under the new law, regular casuals can ask for a permanent job after 12 months, but employers have the right to say no.

Casual employment was not defined under the Fair Work Act when it was introduced by the Rudd Labor government in 2009. That opened the door to rampant casualisation.

That reality has been underscored by the High Court ruling. In fact, the Morrison government’s amendment was irrelevant to Rossato’s case, because he had already brought legal action before it was introduced.

However, the March definition now applies retroactively to all workers previously hired as casuals, further giving the green light to casualisation.

The High Court verdict prompted an ecstatic response from the financial press. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) published four celebratory articles on the day of the finding. Its August 4 editorial said it was “a win for black letter law against judicial activism” and a “victory for freedom and primacy of contract.”

The ruling will have immediate ramifications for gig economy workers. In recent months, rideshare and food delivery workers have legally challenged the standard practice of engaging workers as “independent contractors” rather than employees.

These efforts to obtain a minimum hourly wage and some basic rights have been severely limited by the insistence of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) that they be confined to the courts. Like all the trade unions, it has opposed any industrial action.

Already, food delivery company Deliveroo has said it will use the High Court ruling to bolster its appeal against a Fair Work Commission (FWC) ruling in May that rider Diego Franco was an employee, not a contractor, and therefore protected by unfair dismissal laws. A Deliveroo spokesperson said: “The High Court’s decision is a big step in a positive direction.”

On Friday, the FWC itself declared that the Rossato decision called into question whether the “real substance, practical reality and true nature” of the relationship between Deliveroo and Franco could even be considered, or if the FWC could only take into account “the terms of the contract(s) between the parties.”

Despite the threat posed to casual and gig workers, TWU national secretary Michael Kaine was quick to continue the union’s efforts to sow parliamentary and legal illusions. He claimed there was still “legal ambiguity” and called for “regulatory intervention.”

Kaine’s comments are a desperate bid to save face as the Franco verdict unravels, after also being claimed as a major win for the TWU.

Similarly, Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus said the High Court decision showed “there is an urgent need for stronger laws to provide basic rights to casuals.” McManus even appealed to Prime Minister Scott Morrison to “crack down on the rampant casualisation of the workforce.”

McManus is yet again pleading to the government which, less than six months ago, passed legislation to speed up the casualisation of the workforce. This dovetails with her collaboration with the government throughout the pandemic, exemplified by Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter calling her his “BFF [best friend forever].”

Labor leader Anthony Albanese, who has previously claimed that a Labor government would protect casual workers, has remained silent on the High Court ruling. Labor’s industrial relations spokesperson Tony Burke only vaguely promised to “overturn the government’s scheme.”

The reality is that successive Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal-National, have eviscerated the rights of workers. The drive toward increased casualisation took off under the trade union-backed Hawke-Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s.

Why Banning Free Porn Would Hurt, Not Help, the US

Addison J. Hosner

The First Amendment is under siege, but not in the way most would expect. There has been an increasing sentiment in the United States to outright ban free pornography. The sentiment is spreading across Europe as well, with countries like Germany taking the banning of certain pornography websites to a national level. No matter your moral stance on explicit adult content, calls for such sweeping regulation should give us all pause as we consider the cascading effect this could have for future regulation on the protections of the freedom of speech and expression.

To be fair, this is far from the first time a nation has banned porn. Currently, 37 countries in the world have sweeping bans against pornography, with many others having heavy censorship and restricted access, including some surprise nations such as the United Kingdom and Australia. But from Playboy Magazine to Pornhub, explicit adult materials have been a part of the American media industry dating back to the early 20th century. By many accounts, the first pornographic film produced in the United States is 1915’s “A Free Ride,” a 9-minute piece of history dating back to the days of World War I. However, today’s pornographic industry isn’t constrained to 35mm film and movie theaters, all you need is the internet and device to access it.

Many Americans conflate their personal morals and objective views of the law of the land. However, one only has to look to The Supreme Court of the United States to understand the difficulty in regulating what some would consider “obscenities.” It has been held that sex and obscenity are not synonymous, and that the State has no business in telling a person sitting alone in their own home what books they may read or what films they may watch. Yet here we are today with calls for regulations to do just that. In fact, in the state of Utah such regulations are already being put in place.

Justifications for banning free porn have ranged from the claim that it’ll protect the minds of innocent children to a concern about addictive and antisocial conduct that may arise from porn consumption. But banning porn won’t fix either of those concerns.

If lawmakers think banning free porn will keep kids from accessing explicit content online, they’ve simply misunderstood how the internet and data transmission works in the 21st century.

Backchannel file sharing websites such as The Pirate Bay, and message boards such as 4chan, allow users to share content anonymously and instantaneously. This ban would be akin to the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Shutting down free porngraphic websites wouldn’t solve anything, it would just prompt the mass migration of free pornographic content to these backchannels. It might seem like a surface victory for those who think they are doing the right thing, but all they would have accomplished is the creation of another outlet for viewing — one that could easily be exploited by bad actors to spread malicious content to devices which would further security breaches and potentially dangerous exposure.

Instead of banning porn, parents should step up their game when it comes to sex education and handling their kids sexual curiosity.

Claiming the ban would curb addictive and antisocial behavior arising from porn consumption is a clear example of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. A recent study by the University of New Brunswick investigating pornography consumption and tolerance found that those who advocate to have porn banned are more likely to have sexist and misogynistic attitudes about women than those who support pornographic adult content. Overall, pornography consumption was either irrelevant in predicting sexism or was associated with greater egalitarianism, quite the opposite of the continued narrative equating pornography consumptiom to the objectification of women. Proponents of banning pornography also turn to arguments of the addictive nature of porn consumption, but then fail to hold the same contempt for social media addiction which is a far more wide-spread issue among children, adolescents, and adults alike. By their logic, we should ban facebook, instagram, cigarettes, sugar, alcohol — where does it stop?

Finally, there’s the moral claim that porn is just wrong. But if all the ban is trying to do is regulate morality, that betrays a misunderstanding of the function of government. In an increasingly sensitive society, the precedent a ban based on moral grounds would set could invite a dangerous and slippery slope of overregulation. Where would it stop? The unforseen consequences of legislation being based on moral principles, many of which gleaned from a religious basis, would result in the degradation of the separation of church and state and the expression of free will. The suppression of pornography on this basis would permit the government to certify and enforce a moral code that reinforces and justifies the political status quo. This is not a world any American should advocate for.

If there is one thing we should have learned by now as Americans, it is that prohibitions have always failed, and a prohibition on pornography would be no different. If we permit the governmental regulation of free speech simply on the basis that speech conditions and influences society, then that would be the end of the freedom of speech as we know it.

UK High Court sides with US against Assange

Thomas Scripps

The UK’s High Court has allowed the United States to appeal on two additional grounds the refusal of Julian Assange’s extradition by a lower court.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks still held in Belmarsh maximum security prison, is threatened with extradition on charges under the Espionage Act with a potential life sentence for revealing state war crimes, torture, surveillance, corruption and coup plots.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange [Credit: AP Photo/Matt Dunham]

On January 4, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked extradition, ruling that it would be oppressive by virtue of his mental health and put him at substantial risk of suicide.

Lawyers for the US government sought to appeal the decision on the five grounds:

1. That Baraitser made errors of law in her application of the test under section 91 of the 2003 Extradition Act, which bars extradition if the person’s mental or physical condition would render it unjust or oppressive.
2. That she ought to have notified the US ahead of time, to give the government the opportunity to provide assurances to the court that Assange’s health would be looked after.
3. That the judge should not have accepted or at least given less weight to the evidence of the defence’s principal psychiatric expert, Professor Kopelman.
4. That Baraitser erred in her overall assessment of the evidence on suicide risk.
5. That the US has since provided the UK with a package of assurances about the conditions in which Assange would be held.

The US was initially granted leave to appeal on grounds one, two and five, but denied three and four. At a preliminary hearing yesterday in front of Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Farbey, that decision was overturned and grounds three and four were granted as well.

Their decision confirms that the January 4 ruling against extradition was only a tactical pause in an ongoing pseudo-legal manhunt, which is again proceeding apace.

Baraitser’s original decision accepted every one of the prosecution’s anti-democratic, factually unsustainable arguments except on the single point of Assange’s mental health, leaving his fate hanging by a thread. Now the US is being given the opportunity to bulldoze this last remaining obstacle.

As Assange’s legal team argue in their Notice of Objection, none of the points made in the appeal by the US stand up to scrutiny.

On ground one, the US lawyers “identified no errors of law in the approach taken by the District Judge” who applied the relevant “Turner test” in a manner consistent with the recent case of Lauri Love.

On ground two, the court was under no obligation to prompt the US to provide assurances.

On ground five, the new US “assurances” are nothing of the sort—they are conditional and have been given and broken in previous cases. Moreover, they have been introduced at such a late stage that they cannot be properly tested and contradict “the long-held and vitally important principle” that “parties to an extradition hearing should deploy all their evidence and raise all relevant issues at a single extradition hearing.”

Grounds three and four, Edward Fitzgerald QC maintained yesterday, representing Assange, are simply “unarguable.”

Claire Dobbin, representing the US, claimed that since defence expert medical witness Professor Kopelman had failed to record in a preliminary report that Assange was in a relationship with Stella Moris and had conceived two children with her—of direct relevance to the question of his mental health—he was guilty of misleading the court and his evidence ought to have been ruled inadmissible or given far less weight.

But Baraitser did not fail to carry out, in the words of the prosecution’s appeal, an “exacting analysis as to why Professor Kopelman” acted as he did. In fact, Fitzgerald explained, she “was fully aware of the criticism” and had “asked herself the right question” as to whether or not, in the context of his broader conduct, this called into question his impartiality.

In her January 4 ruling, Baraitser stated that she “did not accept that Professor Kopelman failed in his duty to the court when he did not disclose Ms. Morris’s relationship with Mr. Assange.” She described Kopelman’s omission as “an understandable human response to Mrs Moris’s predicament,” which had not led to her being misled.

One does not need to accept that Baraitser came to this decision out of concern for legal principle to point out the bankruptcy of the US’s arguments. As Fitzgerald stated at yesterday’s hearing, “It is unarguable that there is a principle that any lapse, however understandable… renders the whole of an expert’s evidence inadmissible… You have to take it in context and look at the overarching duty” of impartiality.

In her arguments yesterday, Dobbin characteristically asked of Kopelman’s “human response,” “what does that even mean?” Fitzgerald later powerfully set out the extraordinary oppressive circumstances in which Kopelman made his decision: “There had been a surveillance organisation which was taking DNA from the [Assange’s] baby’s nappy, which was saying special attention should be placed on Stella Morris, which was examining measures to either kidnap or poison him [Assange].”

Fitzgerald was referring to UC Global, the company which provided security for the Ecuadorian embassy while Assange was confined there and has since been accused by two of its former employees of having been employed by the CIA.

His comment broke through the veil which separates the courtroom proceedings, in which Assange’s case is assumed to be a fairly argued matter of law, and the reality in which the US is waging a dirty campaign for the WikiLeaks founder’s head. While Kopelman is dragged over the coals for trying to protect Assange’s family from America’s professional thieves and assassins, the US can proceed with a case based in large part on the admitted lies of a convicted fraudster and FBI asset!

On ground four, Fitzgerald cited at length Baraitser’s “clear, comprehensive and, we would say, unassailable” reasoning in coming to her conclusion on Assange’s substantial risk of suicide. The US lawyers’ argument, he concluded, amounted to the barefaced demand that the appellate court “re-evaluate the whole thing and reach a different conclusion from the person who heard all the evidence.”

After an hour’s adjournment, the high court judges accepted the US lawyers’ arguments, acknowledging that “in general this court rightly takes a cautious approach when considering findings of fact… made by the judge below,” but claimed that Kopelman’s actions made this case “unusual”. The final appeal hearing was scheduled for October 27-28.

Moris spoke to journalists outside the court. “What has not been discussed today is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and Julian’s life. The constant threats and intimidation that we have endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for over ten years.

“Threats against me, threats against our children, death threats against Julian’s eldest son Daniel. Threats on Julian’s life, threats of a 175-year prison sentence. And the actual ongoing imprisonment of a journalist for doing his job. These are sustained threats to his life for the past ten years. These are not just items of law. This is our lives. We have the right to exist. We have the right to live, and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.”

Yesterday’s decision is a warning. The official Don’t Extradite Assange (DEA) campaign and its carefully targeted and promoted supporters such as former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have encouraged appeals to the good sense of the Biden administration or the British judiciary. At a meeting in London in February 2020, Tariq Ali told the crowd, “Hopefully as the case moves upwards to superior courts, we will find some judges who are prepared just to be decent.”

This is criminal complacency. Assange’s fate must not be left in the hands of the warmongering Biden or the venal British legal system. His freedom depends on the political mobilisation of the international working class, now entering into struggle all over the world, in defence of democratic rights.