Germany: Train drivers launch third consecutive strike for better wages and working conditions

Marianne Arens

At 2 in the morning on Thursday, train drivers and other railway workers began a third consecutive strike to obtain better wages and working conditions. In freight transport, a strike had already begun on Wednesday afternoon. It is becoming increasingly clear that the industrial action raises political issues which cannot be resolved or left in the hands of the trade union that called for the strikes, the German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL).

Striking railway workers in Frankfurt

The offer made to strikers on Tuesday by the management of the Deutsche Bahn (DB) railway company is a sham. Deutsche Bahn remains insistent on cutting the company pensions of railway workers and freezing wages for 2021.

GDL leader Claus Weselsky accused the DB board of seeking to destroy his union. He said that although the GDL had recently gained about 4,000 new members, the DB management was not prepared to comply with a contract already agreed with the GDL.

Earlier this year, a new law on Collective Bargaining Unity (Tarifeinheitsgesetz, TEG) has been applied to the railways which stipulates that companies can only conclude contracts with the union which has the largest number of members in that workplace. In most railway companies, the larger union is the Rail and Transport Workers’ Union (EVG), which has already agreed to a pay freeze and has ordered its members to work during the strike, effectively forcing them to scab on workers in the GDL.

On Thursday, the DB board also took legal action against the train drivers’ strike. Martin Seiler, the board member responsible for human resources, applied to the labour court in Frankfurt am Main for a temporary injunction to ban the industrial action. According to Seiler, the strike did “not fall into the framework of applicable law.”

The Labour Court threw out the application the same evening, stating it was not possible to determine sufficiently in summary proceedings whether inadmissible strike objectives were being pursued. Deutsche Bahn has announced that it will appeal against the court’s decision, and the Regional Labour Court in Frankfurt scheduled the appeal for Friday.

Drivers and conductors, who have worked day and night during the coronavirus pandemic, are very bitter about the action taken by the DB executive. “We have practically no weekends off, have different working hours every day, have been on the job throughout the pandemic. Who is of systemic importance here?” said one striking train driver at Frankfurt’s main station. “The DB executive awards itself bonuses worth millions, but nobody cares about us.”

In fact, the offer made by DB to the workers is a new provocation. Deutsche Bahn did agree to pay a one-time coronavirus bonus of “600 or 400 euros” and “shorten” the duration of the contract from the originally planned 40 months to 36 months. In these three years, however, wages would increase by a total of just 3.2 percent, under conditions of soaring inflation which is already nearly 4 percent in Germany. The DB board still refuses to pay even one cent more in 2021.

At the same time, the board of directors is raking in millions. The annual financial statement of Deutsche Bahn for 2019 listed total remuneration of the six board members at more than 7.4 million euros; in addition, more than 1.3 billion euros is listed in provisions for the pensions of retired board members.

The head of Deutsche Bahn, Richard Lutz, pocketed more than 1.7 million euros in 2019. Ronald Pofalla, DB’s Board Member for Infrastructure and former chief of staff of the German Chancellery, raked in just under 1.25 million. Martin Seiler, the head of Human Resources who is leading contract bargaining, took home more than 800,000 euros.

“The inequality is unimaginably blatant,” a striking train attendant in Frankfurt commented. “I have huge difficulty finding any affordable housing here in Frankfurt. You can’t find anything in the city for less than 800 euros, and yet I am often expected to turn up here at the station in the middle of the night to work.”

Like other strikers, including very young ones, this train conductor was particularly outraged by the board’s attacks on the company pension. “We want at least the hope that we can live reasonably securely when we retire. Poverty in old age is definitely an issue. For example, my grandma is now in a situation where she has to live on a monthly pension of just 650 euros.”

Train drivers and conductors are fighting over social issues that affect all workers. They are in conflict not only with the DB board and the German government, which owns Deutsche Bahn, they also face the hostility of the rest of the trade unions and all of Germany’s main political parties.

The head of the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB) Reiner Hoffmann and EVG chairman Klaus-Dieter Hommel have publicly denounced the strikes and stabbed train workers in the back. The leading election candidate of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, has described the strike as “theatre” and “completely unreasonable” and called upon Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) to intervene.

For its part, the GDL is also neither willing nor able to lead a principled struggle for a real improvement of wages and working conditions. It has only called for limited strike action: two strikes of two days, and now a five-day stoppage, but vehemently rejects an indefinite strike.

At the same time, the demands set by the GDL also mean a real wage reduction, even if they were fully implemented. The GDL is demanding 1.4 percent more pay this year and 1.8 percent next year to cover a 28-month period, plus a coronavirus bonus of 600 euros. In 2014, the GDL called off a strike on short notice, although it had been confirmed as legal by a labour court.

The career of Martin Seiler, the personnel director of Deutsche Bahn, illustrates the close relations between the trade union bureaucracy and management. For 15 years Seiler was a works council member and trade union section leader, first of the German Postal Workers’ Union, then of the service trade union Verdi. In 2003, he moved to the management of Deutsche Post AG, and twelve years later became Labour Director at Deutsche Telekom, responsible for 70,000 employees. At the beginning of 2018, he took over as personnel director at Deutsche Bahn in charge of 320,000 railway employees.

The German media is acting as a mouthpiece for management in the rail strike. This is another issue that deeply angers strikers. The media describe the strike as a pure “power play” by the GDL. All of the news reports about the strike on Wednesday contained the sentence: “Despite a new offer from Deutsche Bahn, train drivers began their announced strike this morning.” None of the media outlets said a word about what the “offer” really entailed.

A team from the German public broadcaster ZDF filmed and interviewed several train drivers in front of Frankfurt’s main station on Wednesday morning, but the subsequent broadcast featured just one sentence from the strikers alongside a number of spiteful comments critical of the strike.

WHO reports fifth “variant of interest” as COVID pandemic worsens

Benjamin Mateus

This week the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the presence of a fifth variant of interest called “Mu,” designated by the alpha-numeric code B.1.621, with several characteristic mutations that make it more resistant to vaccines.

It was first identified in Colombia in January 2021. Though the global prevalence of the Mu variant globally remains low, it accounts for 39 percent of all strains sequenced from Colombia and 13 percent from Ecuador, and its frequency has consistently been rising.

The designation “variant of interest” means that the new version of the virus has genetic markers suggesting a potentially increased capability to infect or increased resistance to vaccines, but it has not yet risen to the level of “variant of concern,” which actually demonstrates increased transmissibility, lethality or resistance in the field.

Additionally, scientists in South Africa announced that they have detected a new variant designated as C.1.2, first discovered during the country’s third wave in May. Though the strain has not been designated a variant of interest by the WHO, it has spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific into nine countries, including China and New Zealand.

The C.1.2 appears to harbor a significant number of mutations with an unusually high mutation rate, which makes it important to track. Newsweek wrote, “It was found to contain many mutations that were found in all variants of concern (VOCs) and three variants of interest (VOIs), as well as additional changes within the NTD (C136F) RBD (Y449H), and adjacent to the furin cleavage site (N679K).

The pre-print study noted, “Like several other VOCs, C.1.2 has accumulated a number of substitutions beyond what would be expected from the background SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary rate. This suggests the likelihood that these mutations arose during a period of accelerated evolution in a single individual with prolonged viral infection through virus-host co-evolution.”

Currently, there have been more than 220 million COVID-19 infections reported and 4.56 million deaths attributed to complications from the infections. The moving average in cases has peaked at close to 660,000 cases per day, while the average in deaths is skirting 10,000 each day. Regionally, the Americas and Europe have seen cases reach previous highs. These developments are being compounded by both the return to school and the reopening of all nonessential businesses and travel.

The United States continues to remain the epicenter of the pandemic during the Delta phase of the pandemic. It has now surpassed 40 million reported cases and 663,000 deaths. The moving average has reached 164,000 new cases per day, having climbed 14 percent from two weeks ago. The average daily death toll has jumped to more than 1,500 per day, a 67 percent rise in the same period.

US hospitalizations continue to climb, with close to 102,000 having been admitted for treatment. Approximately a quarter of these are in intensive care units.

The push to get children back to schools will only produce more devastating results as the majority of them remain unvaccinated. The American Academy of Pediatrics noted that for the week ending August 26, 2021, children accounted for 22.4 percent of reported weekly COVID-19 cases, meaning nearly one in four cases are among this layer of the population.

Since July 22, 2021, when the number of pediatric cases was at 38,000 for the week, that figure has risen to 204,000, just shy of the winter peaks. And all schools have yet to open.

However, rather than acknowledging the failed and bankrupt proposition that children must return to in-class instructions, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put her usual spin on the matter, saying at a press briefing, “Cases, emergency room visits and hospitalizations are much lower among children and communities with higher vaccination rates. Vaccination work!”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations (IHME) modeling projection, which estimates total reported deaths by December 1, 2021, has been revised upwards. The IHME now expects that more than three-quarter million Americans will have died by then, a social crime for which the capitalist ruling class and its two parties are primarily responsible.

A Johns Hopkins webinar yesterday highlighted South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida as reporting more COVID cases per capita than any other state or any single country across the globe. This demonstrates the lethal role—in a literal sense—of the ultra-right campaign against vaccination, masking, social distancing and all other public health efforts, spearheaded by Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The policies of Democratic governors and the Biden administration are merely a slower route to the same destination, since reopening schools, social venues and workplaces, with or without masking, means facilitating the spread of coronavirus with all its horrific consequences.

At the Johns Hopkins webinar, one of the experts on the panel, Dr. Bill Moss, the executive director at the International Vaccine Access Center at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, pointed out that allowing hospitals throughout much of the country where the pandemic has accelerated to be inundated by patients was a serious mistake.

Dr. Moss went on to say, “I think one of the most egregious failures of our society, one of our gravest sins as we look back at this particularly during this wave, will be allowing hospitals to be overwhelmed. We have overwhelmed the hospital staff; we are seeing shortages in nurses and respiratory therapists and other hospital personnel. We’ve seen limited bed capacity in hospitals, particularly in intensive care units in a number of counties and states. We are seeing shortages of oxygen. And we should just not be in this place where our health system is overwhelmed now that we ... have three safe and effective vaccines. That was more understandable in the winter surge when vaccines were just being rolled out. … But this is impacting on people who don’t have COVID and need health care services.”

He also went on to indirectly fault the Biden administration’s early messaging on the vaccines giving “false hope that vaccines were going to prevent infections,” calling for public health measures to prevent infection. Vaccines have always been intended for the prevention of severe disease and not infections.

At the present rate of infections, the world will reach 300 million reported cases of COVID-19 by January 2022, the beginning of the third year of the COVID pandemic. With 5.4 billion doses of vaccines administered thus far, the world will have reached 8 billion, or about one dose for every person on the planet, before the year’s end. But the inequity in the distribution continues to disadvantage the poorest nations.

This inequity could be further exacerbated if it becomes necessary to administer booster vaccines on a mass basis in the countries where most of the population has already been inoculated, particularly in Europe and America, because of declining effectiveness of the vaccines and increased ability of the Delta variant to evade immunity.

It is also conceivable that if newer strains create conditions that the vaccines are deemed insufficiently ineffective, the leading pharmaceuticals will have to return to the drawing board and manufacture the next generation of vaccines against the latest variants, with the chilling possibility that the global vaccination would have to start all over again.

With more than 20,000 daily infections, Kerala emerges as India’s COVID-19 epicenter

Yuan Darwin

The south Indian state of Kerala, which is governed by the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF), has become the new epicenter of the country’s COVID-19 catastrophe. Since late July, Kerala has experienced a high and growing number of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, fueled by the deadly Delta variant.

Health workers leave in an ambulance after a COVID-19 vaccination drive at a shopping mall in Kochi, Kerala state, India, Friday, Aug. 27, 2021. (AP Photo/R S Iyer)

For weeks Kerala has recorded around half or more of all India’s new COVID-19 infections, and on some days this week Kerala accounted for 70 percent of new cases nationwide. Yet the state’s population of 35.8 million represents just 2.75 percent of India’s 1.39 billion inhabitants.

On Friday, the state’s total COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began reached 4.12 million, with 32,097 infections reported in the preceding 24 hours. According to the extremely under-reported official figures, Kerala’s death toll rose to 21,149, with 188 fatalities since the previous day.

Between August 23 and Thursday, September 2—that is an eleven-day period—Kerala recorded 355,560 new infections and the seven-day average of daily new cases rose from 17,896 to 29,804. Kerala’s test positivity rate, meanwhile, has risen to an astronomic 20 percent.

Dr. Samiran Panda, head of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said that the increase in cases in Kerala “is an early warning signal.” Pointing to the pattern in the state over the last three months—a drop in cases, followed by a temporary lull and then a surge—he warned that the third wave of the pandemic has begun in Kerala.

If Kerala is now leading India into a third wave of COVID-19 infections, it is because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led state administration has joined the Narendra Modi-led central government in prioritizing corporate profits over saving lives. The Kerala government exempted export industries from the state-wide lockdown it imposed in April and May at the height of the second wave, then when infections began to decline moved to quickly roll back any pandemic mitigation measures. This even included allowing mass Muslim and Hindu religious festivals to proceed unimpeded in late July and mid-August, a decision that was widely decried by health experts across the country and which has undoubtedly contributed to the current surge in infections.

In response to the current surge of the virus, the state government has belatedly imposed weekend curfews and, as of last Monday, a night curfew—measures which will neither affect the profit generation of big business nor bring the pandemic under control.

Kerala’s devastating second and third waves of COVID-19 infection and death constitute tragic refutation of the CPM’s and LDF’s claims that they have shielded the state from the worst of the pandemic. This narrative was promoted, at least until recently, by internationally influential corporate media voices, including the BBC, Washington Post, New York Times, and Guardian, and pseudo-left websites like Jacobin in the US. The UK’s Prospect Magazine named former Kerala Health Minister KK Shailaja as the “top thinker” of the COVID-19 age in September 2020, while the Financial Times called her one of the “inspiring women of 2020.”

In reality, Kerala’s Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led administration has pursued essentially the same ruinous, ruling-class driven pandemic policy as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s other state governments.

Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were quick to embrace the homicidal approach associated with the phrase “herd immunity,” with a top government advisor openly declaring in May 2020 that the economy should be reopened because this would result in “only” 2 million deaths. As India’s deadly April-May 2021 second pandemic wave peaked, hospitals turned away patients in droves for want of beds, drugs and trained personnel and India officially reported thousands of new COVID-19 deaths each day, Modi infamously declared that it was necessary to “save India from lockdown,” not the virus.

As a result, India has suffered a catastrophic loss of life. While officially India has recorded 440,000 COVID deaths, a series of studies have placed the real figure at five to ten times higher. According to a comprehensive study by the US-based Center for Global Development, based on multiple data sets, between April 2020 and June 2021 there were between 3.4 million and 4.7 million “excess,” i.e., COVID-19-related, deaths.

A review of the Kerala LDF government’s response to the pandemic demonstrates that the longer the pandemic has continued the more indistinguishable its policies have become from those of the Modi regime.

Like India’s entire ruling elite, the LDF government blithely disregarded the warnings coming from the World Health Organization and other scientific experts in the first months of 2020 about the global threat posed by COVID-19. On February 14, 2020, after Kerala’s first three COVID-19 patients were declared recovered, the Stalinist government’s then finance minister, Thomas Isaac, tweeted: “Kerala has won the battle with Corona Virus (sic).” On March 29, 2020, Kerala Chief Minister and CPM Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan wrote in the party’s English weekly Peoples Democracy: “This pandemic has brought many developed countries to a standstill. Kerala is giving a tough fight, to curtail the spread of this virus. The LDF Government of Kerala is leading this fight right from the forefront.”

All these premature boasts and lies have now been exposed. In fact, from the beginning, the Kerala Stalinist government, together with the entire political establishment, systematically downplayed the virus danger and projected an air of normalcy to justify keeping the “economy open.”

On March 24, 2020, the BJP government imposed a calamitous ill-prepared lockdown with only a few hours’ notice. It failed to halt the spread of the virus because it was not accompanied by elementary public health measures and social support for the hundreds of millions who lost their livelihoods overnight. In response to demands from big business, the government started easing the restrictions from the end of April, leading to an exponential growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The return to work triggered a sharp rise in infections, with the number of confirmed cases rising by almost 500,000 in June, 1.1 million in July, and just shy of 2 million in August. This resulted in a long wave of infections and death through last summer and fall, and then to a far more devastating second wave, fueled by new variants, that began in mid-February in 2021.

In comparison with the central government and most other Indian states, the Kerala government mounted a larger public health response and took stricter anti-COVID-19 measures during the pandemic’s first wave, and this did have a material impact. Infections and deaths were kept relatively low, and this in a state that had to cope with a large number of infected migrant workers expelled from the Middle East. However, the Stalinist government’s moves in line with Modi to gradually ease those restrictions resulted in the virus’s resurgence in Kerala.

Echoing Modi, Kerala Chief Minister Vijayan told a July 24, 2020 press conference: “In the all-party meeting held to discuss the COVID-19 situation, a majority of the members had also opined against total lockdown. So at present there is no need to impose total lockdown.”

Less than two weeks later, the state government issued an order withdrawing and watering down COVID-19 restrictions. The new order allowed for the resumption of long-distance KSRTC (Kerala State Transport) bus services, and for shops, markets, banks, offices, financial institutions, factories, industrial establishments, and opened tourist spaces to function normally from Monday to Saturday. Establishments in the public sector, including government offices, Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), companies, autonomous organisations, and commissions were allowed to function as usual from Monday to Friday.

When Modi proclaimed the fourth phase in his “unlockdown” in September 2020, the Stalinist state government, ignoring all warnings of health experts, followed suit by adopting further relaxations. This included greenlighting in-house dining in hotels and restaurants across the state, and allowing government offices, including PSUs, to operate with 100 percent attendance. These unscientific relaxations led to a resurgence of mass infections and a sharp rise in deaths.

On September 29, 2020, due to an alarming rise in COVID-19 infections in Kerala, the Indian Medical Association (IMA) wrote a warning letter to the state government. It demanded the declaration of a “health emergency” in the state, which “would help the public grasp the gravity of the situation and ensure that they practice more caution” and “also help implement stricter restrictions to curb contact transmission and start preparatory measures to expand infrastructure to handle more cases.”

Flouting these warnings, Vijayan arrogantly told reporters the same day, “Everyone is aware how critical the situation is. Yet, the government doesn’t want to go toward a complete shutdown.” During October-November 2020, the Kerala government opened all tourist destinations, like hill stations, adventure and blackwater tourism spots, and beaches.

When India was ravaged by a tsunami of coronavirus infections in the second wave, Veena George, health minister in the LDF government, said, “We cannot be in an indefinite lockdown. Kerala has been implementing measures foreseeing these things.” As the virus raged across the country, leading to the collapse of hospitals, the Kerala Stalinists allowed factories and industrial sites in the state to function with 50 percent attendance.

On July 18, 2021, the IMA termed the decision of Kerala to ease restrictions ahead of various religious festivals as “retrograde.” The organisation cautioned that a third wave of the pandemic may be inevitable if appropriate steps were not taken. “The rise in cases is owing to flaws in government policies. They are allowing mass gatherings, conducting offline physical examinations, and [limited] lockdowns are being done [only] on alternate days,” said IMA President Dr. J. A Jayalal.

The fact that Kerala’s LDF government has implemented essentially the same criminal pandemic policy as Modi and his BJP underscores that the Stalinists serve the same big business masters. For the past three decades, the CPM and its close ally, the Communist Party of India (CPI), have played a pivotal role in the Indian ruling elite’s drive to transform India into a cheap labour platform for global investors, implementing what they themselves have termed “pro-investor” policies. They have responded to the mass struggles that have erupted against Modi, fueled by his government’s criminal handling of the pandemic and drive to make the masses pay for its economic fallout through intensified exploitation, by redoubling their efforts to tie India’s workers and toilers to the Congress Party and various caste-ist and regionalist parties, with a view to replacing Modi and his BJP with an alternate right-wing government after the 2024 elections.

Six people stabbed in New Zealand terror attack

Tom Peters

A man was shot dead by police yesterday after carrying out a horrific stabbing attack in a Countdown supermarket in LynMall in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city. Six people were hospitalised with stab wounds and three are in critical condition.

LynnMall, where the Auckland terror attack took place. Photo taken March 29, 2020. (Source: Wikipedia)

Auckland is currently under a strict lockdown, following an outbreak of the Delta variant of COVID-19, but many people were reportedly shopping at the supermarket or waiting for vaccinations at the nearby pharmacy.

The attack began without warning around 2:40 p.m. and unfolded in the space of about 2–3 minutes, before the man was shot. Videos posted to social media showed terrified groups of people running out of the mall and screaming. Others shut themselves in a room inside the pharmacy.

“People were panicking, everyone was calling their families, calling the police,” one witness told Radio NZ. A woman told Newshub the man yelled “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing two women in front of her. “I just realised, ‘Oh my god, I have to run.’ It was chaos, people started screaming,” she said.

In a press conference, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described what happened as a “terrorist attack” by a man with “ISIS-inspired” extremist views. He was a 32-year-old Sri Lankan national, who arrived in New Zealand in October 2011 and “became a person of national security interest from 2016,” she said.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said they were concerned about the man’s ideology and he was under 24-hour surveillance. The man obtained a knife inside the supermarket, he said. When the attack started, armed police officers, who had followed him into the supermarket, intervened. “When he approached them with the knife, he was shot and killed,” Coster said. The man had acted alone.

Many questions remain about the attack. Ardern said she was limited in what she could say by previous court orders relating to the perpetrator. A court last night ruled that the man’s name could be published, which is likely to happen later today.

Coster told the media he expected there would be “questions about whether police could have done more” to prevent the attack. He said officers had “intervened as quickly as they could.”

The New Zealand Herald reported that the man had been “previously arrested for allegedly planning a ‘lone wolf’ knife attack.” He “was considered a threat to public safety after twice buying large hunting knives and possessing Islamic State videos.” He had also searched online for instructions about bomb-making.

He first came to police attention in 2016 after making Facebook comments showing “support for ISIS terrorists involved in the Paris attacks in November 2015 and the Brussels bombing in March 2016.” He was arrested after attempting to leave the country in May 2017, allegedly to join ISIS fighters in Syria. He was held in custody for more than a year, and denied bail, before pleading guilty to charges of restricted material. He was released in August 2018 on a supervision order.

In July this year, the man was again sentenced for possession of objectionable ISIS propaganda materials, this time to 12 months’ supervision in the community. He was also facing charges for an alleged attack on a prison guard, while he was held on remand in Mount Eden Prison last year.

The fact that the attacker was under constant monitoring, follows an established pattern. Individuals who took part in the Paris and Brussels terror attacks, and numerous others in Europe and the United States, were already known to intelligence agencies and the police, which failed to stop them. Invariably, these attacks have been used by governments to justify increased funding and more sweeping powers for these agencies.

Islamic State (ISIS) is itself the product of US and European imperialist interventions, which were supported by New Zealand and Australia. In the Libyan war in 2011, NATO relied on jihadist militias to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi; similar forces were then funded and armed by the US and its allies for the disastrous war against the Assad regime in Syria. Many militia members subsequently joined ISIS, which invaded large parts of Iraq and Syria, and has spread into Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The LynnMall attack comes two-and-a-half years after NZ’s worst mass shooting, in which fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant massacred 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch. That massacre was followed by a royal commission of inquiry, which whitewashed the role of successive Labour Party and National Party governments in whipping up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments—including through their participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The royal commission claimed that Tarrant acted alone and could not have been stopped. In fact, Tarrant was active in far-right forums online, and had links with such groups internationally. He had previously been reported to police in Australia, after sending a death threat on social media. A member of the gun club where he trained in New Zealand said he had informed police about violent and anti-Muslim language used by members of the club. Yet police in both countries claimed to have no prior knowledge of the gunman.

Since the March 15, 2019 attack, the Labour government has poured more resources into the spy agencies and introduced legislation to expand the state’s powers to censor material posted online. New “anti-terror” laws were passed to expand the ability to spy on individuals, including those who have not been charged with anything.

The Auckland attack, like the Christchurch attack, is already being used to demand tougher laws. Ardern said the authorities had not been able to imprison the attacker because “we haven’t succeeded in using the law to the extent we would have liked.”

Commentators have pointed to a “loophole” in the existing law, which means someone cannot be charged under the Terrorism Suppression Act for planning an attack. The Counter Terrorism Legislation Bill currently before parliament would expand the offences that can be categorised as a terrorist act, but Ardern said it was “speculative” to say whether the proposed law would have made a difference in this case.

Auckland’s Labour Party mayor Phil Goff complained to Newstalk ZB yesterday that “there was an absence of ability under the law” to imprison the perpetrator “for what he might have been thinking about doing but hadn’t done.” He also declared that the man “undoubtedly would have expressed the sort of views that might be encompassed by hate speech laws, but at the moment you can’t do anything about that.” The government is seeking to introduce hate speech legislation, which could easily be used to attack basic rights to freedom of speech, including left-wing and socialist voices.

After the Afghanistan debacle, Berlin and Brussels pursue independent European war policy

Johannes Stern

Germany and the European Union are stepping up their offensive for an independent European war policy after the debacle in Afghanistan. At an informal meeting in Kranj, Slovenia, the EU defence ministers discussed on Thursday the establishment of a rapid reaction force that could also act independently of the US military.

EU defence ministers pose for a group photo in front of the Brdo Congress Centre in Kranj, Slovenia, 2 September 2021 (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)

The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will prompt the EU to establish its own permanent force, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borell said after the meeting.

“It’s clear that the need for more European defence has never been as much evident as today after the events in Afghanistan,” Borrell said. “There are events that catalyse history. Sometimes something happens that pushes history, it creates a breakthrough, and I think the Afghanistan events of this summer are one of these cases.”

The European powers had initially reacted with a mixture of disillusionment and outrage to the withdrawal of US troops and the rapid collapse of the pro-Western puppet regime in Kabul. Now they seek to position themselves so that in the future they will be able to carry out military operations like the one in Afghanistan without Washington’s support.

European defence policy will “only be credible if we are also able to launch complex military operations outside our borders,” the acting EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Industrial Policy Thierry Breton told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. This would require an EU intervention force that could be mobilised quickly, “with all that that implies in terms of logistics, preparations and command structures—and with a view to the risks for those men and women who would be deployed for Europe.”

Even before the meeting in Kranj, Borell had published a guest column in the New York Times. Under the headline “Europe, Afghanistan is Your Wake-up Call,” he pleaded for the establishment of a European military force and a further increase in European defence spending.

“Alongside increasing pivotal military capabilities—airlift and refueling, command and control, strategic reconnaissance and space-based assets—we need forces that are more capable, more deployable and more interoperable,” he wrote, adding, “But we must go further and faster. The European Defence Fund, established to boost the bloc’s defense capabilities, will receive close to 8 billion euros, or $9.4 billion, over the next six years. That should be used to significantly support collaborative research and the development of much-needed defense technologies.”

Borell left no doubt that the EU is not concerned with “human rights” or “democracy,” the propaganda used to justify US-led military interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, but with the enforcement of imperialist interests through war.

“A more strategically autonomous and militarily capable EU would be better able to address the challenges to come in Europe’s neighborhood and beyond” and “to defend its interests,” wrote Borell in the Times .

The EU would not only have to fight “threats,” such as “the risk of renewed terrorist attacks” and “irregular migration,” but also fight back against other powers. “China, Russia and Iran will have greater sway in the region, while Pakistan, India, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies will all reposition themselves,” he warned. Europe cannot “cannot let them be the only interlocutors with Afghanistan after the Western withdrawal” and “along with the United States, has to reframe its engagement.”

German imperialism is behaving particularly aggressively. In a statement, German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU) complained that Europeans had not been able to prevent the withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan. “We Europeans hardly offered any resistance to the US decision to withdraw because we were unable to do so for lack of our own capabilities,” she complained on Twitter.

That is unequivocal. If Berlin had had its way, the brutal 20-year war effort, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in pursuit of imperialist control and exploitation of the resource-rich and geostrategically important country, would have continued. For Kramp-Karrenbauer and the German bourgeoisie, the central lesson from Afghanistan is not less but more rearmament and war.

According to the defence minister, “Europe must now become stronger in order to make the Western alliance as a whole stronger on an equal footing with the USA.” In doing so, one should not stop at “the question of whether we want a ‘European intervention force’ or not.” The central question for the future of the European Security and Defence Policy is “how we finally use our military capabilities together in the EU! With what effective decision-making processes, real joint exercises and joint missions.”

In order to implement the war plans, “coalitions of the willing could move forward in the EU after everyone has made a joint decision.” It would also be necessary to examine whether EU member states “establish regional responsibilities for security, train special forces together and jointly organise important capabilities, such as strategic airlift and satellite reconnaissance.” Germany was already “in discussion with interested EU states on these issues.”

Workers and youth across the continent must take this as a warning. The ruling class in Germany has long been working feverishly to organise Europe under its leadership in order to rebuild itself as a major foreign policy and military power after losing two world wars. After German reunification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy 30 years ago, leading politicians and military leaders have been pleading for a stronger role for Germany in Europe and the world.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2014, then Federal President Joachim Gauck and his Social Democratic successor Frank-Walter Steinmeier, together with the current President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), finally announced the return of German militarism. This was followed by a massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr, the redeployment of German combat troops to the Russian border and new war missions in the Middle East and Africa. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ruling class is now exploiting the debacle in Afghanistan to push forward the offensive it has begun.

The federal government can only appear so aggressive because its course is also supported by the nominally “left” opposition parties. More than two decades after the Greens helped launch the first German war mission since the end of World War II in Kosovo, they are at the forefront of the German-European war offensive.

In the current election campaign, the Green candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock, consistently criticises the Grand Coalition from the right with regard to a German-European great power policy. In the last television debate, she accused the CDU/CSU and SPD of “ducking away” internationally and called for a “more active German foreign policy.”

The Left Party also has both feet in the camp of German imperialism. In the elections, it is eyeing a government alliance with the SPD and the Greens and has long since made it clear that as a governing party it would support NATO and German missions abroad.

On August 25, the Left approved the “deployment of armed German forces for military evacuation from Afghanistan.” While the majority of the parliamentary group abstained, five MPs, including its spokesperson on security policy, Matthias Höhn, openly voted for the deployment.

There is something megalomaniac about the plans of the ruling class to replace the US as the leading interventionist power. But they must be taken with deadly seriousness. Ultimately, the same fundamental contradictions of capitalism that lie behind the aggression of US imperialism and which, after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, increasingly directly conjure up the danger of nuclear war with Russia and China, are fueling the German-European military offensive.

This in turn intensifies the conflicts between the imperialist powers themselves—also within Europe.

US auto corporations announce more layoffs in North America as global semiconductor chip shortage continues

Jessica Goldstein

General Motors and Ford, along with Stellantis, have all announced extended plant shutdowns across North America over the past week. All three corporations have cited the global shortage of available semiconductor chips as the reason for the shutdowns, which will place thousands of US workers on temporary layoffs after the Labor Day weekend.

The assembly line at the Ford Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan [Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File]

The semiconductor chip shortage has impacted the auto industry since January 2021. Production at chip makers throughout the world, which is globally concentrated in Taiwan, was disrupted by government lockdowns aimed at controlling the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Further disruptions were caused by the demand and allocation for chips in the communications technology sector, as corporations saw a rise in demand for laptops and wireless devices as more workers and students shifted to remote work and learning.

In the auto industry, semiconductor chips are used in infotainment systems, navigation systems, driverless technology and heated seats. It is estimated that the average vehicle built with these systems requires 50 to 150 chips on average for production. The ongoing shortage is exacerbated by the fact that the global pandemic continues to cause outbreaks among workers worldwide and spurs labor shortages as well as limited lockdown measures that interrupt production and supply chains.

GM will halt production at eight plants in North America starting next week. It will close its pickup truck plants in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Silao, Mexico for at least one week starting Monday. It will idle its Wentzville, Missouri plant for at least two weeks, where workers build mid-sized pickups and large vans. The plants in Lansing Delta Township in Michigan and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where workers build midsize SUVs, will also idle for two weeks. Its CAMI SUV plant in Ontario, Canada and the SUV plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico will be idled through the week of September 27. Ramos Assembly in Mexico will also remain shut down through September 13.

While most production workers will not work during the shutdowns, GM is intent on continuing to generate profits at any cost and will keep parts of some of the plants running. Dan Flores, a GM spokesman, told USA Today that “During the downtime, we will repair and ship unfinished vehicles from many impacted plants, including Fort Wayne and Silao, to dealers to help meet the strong customer demand for our products.”

It is unclear what kind of final assistance, if any, is being offered to workers by the corporations or the unions at the plants, including the United Auto Workers in the US and Unifor in Canada. In the US, workers have struggled financially during the revolving door of plant shutdowns due to the impact of the global supply shortage of chips throughout 2021.

Ford has also announced two-week production shutdowns at three plants that produce trucks, Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Missouri, Ford Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, Kentucky, and Dearborn Truck in Dearborn, Michigan. Throughout the past year, while Ford shut down less profitable Transit Van production at the Kansas City plant, it kept workers on the lines to produce its highly-profitable F-150 pickup trucks. Ford announced that sales of its F-Series trucks fell nearly 23 percent for the month of August, likely prompting the decision to halt production when compounded with the ongoing parts shortage.

Stellantis shut down its Ram truck plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan in the past week and will idle two other plants in the coming week due to the chip shortage. Both its Jeep plant in Belvidere, Illinois and its Chrysler minivan plant in Windsor, Ontario will stop production for at least two weeks.

Workers at the Belvidere assembly plant have been idled off and on due to the semiconductor chip shortage since February 2021. The plant has indefinitely cut half of its hourly workforce beginning June 1. Two weeks later, Stellantis extended a plant shutdown and announced the layoff of its second shift this year, which would leave the plant operating on one shift only. The plant was idled again beginning July 5 and then reopened August 2 with one shift only reporting for work.

Autoworkers in the US who are eligible for supplemental unemployment benefits through the companies they work for have found their benefits coming late or short on several occasions, with little to no help from the UAW in assuring that they are paid. Furthermore, workers in the US who have applied for their legally eligible state unemployment benefits during the wave of shutdowns have also found it difficult to secure needed benefits on time due to overwhelmed and under-resourced state unemployment systems.

The pandemic has only deepened the crisis of the auto corporations. While demand began to re-emerge following the lifting of initial lockdowns in countries around the world in 2020, sales have not reached pre-pandemic levels. According to data analytics company JD Power and Associates, US light vehicle sales fell nearly 18 percent in August year over year, while the average vehicle sale price reached a record high price of over $41,000.

Workers are feeling the brunt of this, facing layoffs due to market conditions, which are out of their control, and left to fend for themselves. At the same time, workers at auto assembly and auto parts plants throughout the US are fighting back against unsafe working conditions in the midst of COVID, speed-up, and mandatory overtime with little to no time off. In the US, the UAW has done nothing to help workers fight back against these attacks on their living standards while the corporations continue to report billions in profits.

Instead, the UAW has consistently revealed itself to be a partner in corporate management. In the past year, it has kept auto plants running throughout the pandemic, allowing thousands of workers across the country to become exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has led to serious illness and even death among workers in the auto plants, which it actively covers up in the interest of the corporations. It has rubber-stamped the layoff of thousands of workers at the Belvidere Assembly plant, forced through a concessions contract at Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia, which rank-and-file workers voted down three times, and is attempting to do the same to rank-and-file workers at Dana auto parts facilities across the US.

The UAW, like the corporations that it serves, offers no solution except stoking nationalist hatred toward foreign workers. pitting workers in one country against workers in other countries over who can provide the cheapest labor.

The stoking of nationalism has ominous implications amid rising, geopolitical tensions, particularly in light of the US drive toward economic and military confrontation with China.

The closing of plants due to chip shortages stands in contrast to the auto companies’ refusal to shut down production and pay workers full wages and benefits to stop the spread of COVID-19. The majority of governments in countries around the world have opted for either “herd immunity” or mitigation strategies in response to the pandemic, but not eradication and elimination, meaning that economic interests are placed before the interests of eradicating the pandemic, thus allowing it to continue to spread and become more virulent.

Australian government promotes bogus modelling for “living with COVID virus” plan

Patrick O’Connor

The entire Australian political and media establishment has spent much of the last month promoting COVID-19 modelling commissioned by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the state premiers to justify the rushed lifting of lockdown measures and other restrictions.

This modelling, known as the Doherty Report, is endorsed by all the state and territory governments, Labor and Liberal, and likewise accepted as good coin by every major corporate media outlet. This is despite the numerous questionable and even outright false assumptions underlying the report’s projections of the likely outcome of “opening up” the economy when first 70 percent and then 80 percent of the eligible population is vaccinated.

Technicians prepare Pfizer vaccines at the newly opened COVID-19 Vaccination Centre in Sydney, Australia [Credit: James Gourley/Pool Photo via AP, File]

An examination of the Doherty Report makes clear that it can be properly understood not as a scientific document but rather as an ideological mechanism through which the Australian ruling elite hopes to condition the population for mass COVID-19 infection, with an accompanying wave of deaths and serious, life-long illnesses.

The modelling was conducted by the Doherty Institute, a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and The Royal Melbourne Hospital that is financed through government funding and donations from major corporate sponsors such as the Myer and Pratt Foundations. It was tasked with detailing the likely effects of implementing the four-phase “National Plan” to remove COVID-19 restrictions, which all federal and state governments agreed to on July 2 via the so-called national cabinet.

The Doherty Report concluded that “the requirement for stringent lockdowns [will be] unlikely at 70% population vaccine coverage.”

This was immediately seized on by federal and state governments, especially the New South Wales Liberal-National government, which on behalf of big business and finance capital has spearheaded the sabotage of the national elimination of coronavirus transmission. “As the Doherty report says, once you get to 80 percent double dose and you have to open up, everyone will have to learn to live with Delta,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian declared last month.

Before examining the Doherty Report’s projections, the following are just some of the dubious assumptions and procedures underlying the modelling:

• The report assumes that there are a total of nearly 4,000 intensive care unit (ICU) beds available nationally, when in fact there are just over 2,000 ICU beds. This extraordinary error remains unexplained.
• The modelling assessed the implications of reopening while assuming just 30 initially active COVID-19 cases. Currently there are more than 20,000 active cases.
• The report assumed a 90 percent reduction in COVID-19 transmissibility for those who have received a vaccine double dose. Emerging scientific studies from highly vaccinated countries such as Israel indicate that vaccinations are far less effective than that for reducing transmissibility of the Delta strain of the virus.
• The modelling assumed a reproduction rate (Reff) of 3.6 (that each person with COVID will infect an average of 3.6 people). Again, the Delta variant has shown potential reproduction rates significantly higher. The Doherty Institute, without explanation, made no attempt to model outcomes for different reproduction rates.
• The Doherty Report’s projections were limited to 180 days of infections. Many of the document’s graphs feature an exponential curve that is abruptly cut off at this arbitrary 6-month limitation. The longer term health implications of the pandemic were simply ignored.
• Also important is the caveat of having 70 or 80 percent of the eligible population vaccinated. Because under-16s were not eligible when the modelling was prepared, all of the reopening forecasts leave hundreds of thousands of children vulnerable. Only last week was it confirmed that 12–15 year-olds can receive Pfizer, but the rollout has not begun and will not be completed when the “reopenings” are set to begin. There is no approved vaccine for children under 12. The 70–80 percentage rates of the eligible population, if those under 16 are excluded, respectively translate to 56 and 64 percent of the total population. In other words, even at the upper end of the government’s vaccination targets more than one in three people will be unvaccinated.
• The report modelled different outcomes for an optimal functioning of the test, trace, isolate, quarantine (TTIQ) system, and for a partially effective TTIQ system. No modelling was done for a scenario in which enormous case numbers swamp the TTIQ system and render it ineffective. This failure is all the more extraordinary given that contact tracing has already collapsed in Sydney and is under enormous strain in Melbourne.

The modelling for TTIQ optimal functioning, which was explicitly commissioned by the federal government, produced especially absurd data.

For example, the Doherty Report purported to show that with optimal TTIQ and 70 percent vaccination rate for the eligible population, in six months there would be just 2,737 symptomatic infections and 13 deaths! In other words, under conditions where there are nearly 13 and higher daily deaths amid current lockdowns (or more accurately partial lockdowns) in Sydney and Melbourne, the Doherty Report projects the same casualty rate but over six months, in conditions with no lockdown measures.

The nonsensical nature of this modelling was embraced by the government, and promoted in the manner of a “big lie.”

Health Minister Greg Hunt declared on August 24: “With optimal public health measures and no lockdowns, [the impact of reopening] can be significantly reduced to 2,737 infections and 13 deaths. That’s the path which we’re pursuing.”

The “path” being pursued by federal and state governments is in reality one of mass death.

Even with all the false and questionable assumptions underlying the Doherty Report, it projected that opening up at 70 percent vaccination for the eligible population in conditions of partially effective testing, tracing, isolating, and quarantining, would lead within 180 days to nearly 400,000 symptomatic COVID infections and 1,500 deaths.

As appalling as that projection is, it almost certainly represents a vast underestimation of the situation.

Very different modelling was released in pre-publication form on August 24 by a group of epidemiologists and scientists including Dr Zoë Hyde of the University of Western Australia and Professor Tom Kompas of the University of Melbourne.

Their report, “What vaccination coverage is required before public health measures can be relaxed in Australia?” concluded that for the government’s planned “Phase C” of the reopening at 80 percent vaccination of the eligible population—i.e., no lockdowns but some targeted restrictions—there will be 114,000 hospitalisations and 25,000 deaths.

If the government proceeds to “Phase D” at the same level of vaccination, i.e., no public health or border restrictions, the report projected “approximately 50,000 fatalities—multiples of the annual fatalities from influenza in Australia—and 270,000 cases of long COVID.”

The report concluded that a full opening up would still result in approximately 5,000 fatalities and 40,000 cases of long COVID even if four relatively stringent criteria were met: (1) children and adolescents are vaccinated, (2) vaccination rates for those over 60 and for other vulnerable groups is at least 95 percent, (3) people vaccinated with AstraZeneca receive an mRNA booster, and (4) vaccination coverage for the entire population is at least 90 percent.

The media has buried this report, despite, or rather because of, the significance of the projected mass infection and death. Every wing of the corporate press—from the frothing Murdoch outlets to the “liberal” Nine newspapers and the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)—is baying for an end to lockdowns.

This campaign necessarily requires the promotion of the bogus Doherty Report and the suppression of rival scientific modelling that points to the real implications of the drive to reopen schools, dragoon workers back into their workplaces, and eliminate all restrictions hindering the profit-making activities of the corporations. To the extent that the real scope of the danger becomes more widely understood, the ruling elite is threatened with mass opposition from below.