German government invests billions into prolonging Ukraine war

Peter Schwarz

As part of its G7 presidency, the German government is seeking to raise €50 billion in financial aid for Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced at a press conference on Tuesday evening. “A significant part is already covered by pledges, but there is still something missing,” he reported.

Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Photo: DBT / Leon Kuegeler / photothek)

A significant part of this sum will go towards the massive rearming of the Ukrainian army. In this way, Germany and the other NATO powers are pursuing the declared goal of continuing the war until Russia is completely defeated, even if this takes months or even years. In doing so, they are deliberately accepting the risk of a nuclear confrontation that would render large parts of the earth uninhabitable.

The German government has allocated several billion euros for arms deliveries to Ukraine. By the end of March, it had approved arms deliveries worth €186 million for Ukraine, according to the Ministry of Economics. Last Friday, it became known that it was increasing the so-called strengthening aid for partner countries in crisis regions from €225 million to €2 billion this year. More than half of this sum is to go towards armaments for Ukraine.

Also last week, the European Union increased its funding for arms deliveries to Ukraine from €1 billion to €1.5 billion. According to Chancellor Scholz, this money is also “to a large extent a German contribution.”

So far, the biggest donor has been the US, which since the start of the war on February 24 has handed over weaponry worth $3.2 billion to Ukrainian troops, trained Ukrainian soldiers and also provided logistical support to the Ukrainian army. But with the sums now announced, Germany is not far behind the US.

The weapons which are being supplied range from vast quantities of ammunition to highly effective anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to artillery pieces, tanks and combat aircraft. While there is still a public debate in Germany about whether to limit what is sent to so-called defensive weapons or also to supply heavy offensive weapons, Scholz made clear that there has long been a division of labour among the NATO partners.

Whereas Germany has so far mainly provided machine guns, bazookas, anti-aircraft missiles and equipment from Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) stockpiles, Ukraine can now directly access German arms companies, with the German government picking up the bill. “We have asked the German arms industry to tell us what materiel they can supply in the near future,' Scholz explained. “Ukraine has now made a selection from that list, and we are providing it with the money it needs to make the purchases.” These included, he said, “what can be used in an artillery engagement.”

Scholz evaded the question of whether this also meant heavy weaponry, such as tanks and cannons. He rejected the delivery of heavy weapons from Bundeswehr stocks on the grounds that the Bundeswehr could not do without them without weakening its own operational readiness—a view shared by senior generals. At the same time, he made clear that the US and the Netherlands would be “helped” to equip Ukraine with heavy artillery from their stocks. In the longer term, something like this could certainly also be supplied from Germany.

The German government has also long since given the green light for the delivery of heavy weapons from former German Democratic Republic (East German) stocks that are in the possession of Eastern European NATO members. Now, in a kind of “roundabout swap,” it also wants to compensate Eastern European countries that supply Ukraine with heavy Soviet-style weapons with modern weapons, he said.

The gigantic arms shipments to Ukraine underline that NATO is waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Its goals are not freedom and democracy for Ukraine, which serve merely as a means to an end, but the subjugation of Russia, control over its vast landmass and unhindered access to its valuable raw materials. The invasion of Ukraine by the reactionary regime of Vladimir Putin, in response to NATO’s encirclement of Russia, has provided the latter with the necessary pretext to put these plans into action.

Chancellor Scholz, speaking to the press after an online summit with the heads of the governments of the US, France, Britain, Poland, Canada, Italy, Romania and representatives of the EU, left no doubt about NATO’s real goals. It is seeking the military defeat and economic ruin of Russia and has no interest in ending the war any time soon through a ceasefire.

“Our common goal, the goal of dozens of nations that are now supporting Ukraine with financial aid and with military supplies, is to make the Ukrainian military capable of resisting the Russian attack,” Scholz stressed.

He accused the Russian president of being responsible for war crimes. A “dictatorial peace,” as Putin had in mind, was unacceptable. “Together with our partners in the EU and in NATO, we are in complete agreement: Russia must not win this war. We will continue to actively support Ukraine.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) was even more outspoken. During a visit to the Latvian capital Riga, she said that Berlin would continue to help Ukraine militarily in the medium and long term in its defensive struggle against Russia. “It is also about the next three months and also the next three years. And here Germany will be able to contribute more.” The supply of armoured vehicles was also “not taboo for Germany, even if it sometimes sounds that way in the German debate,” she added.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s former Defence Minister, also insisted on the supply of heavy weapons. “I do not distinguish between heavy and light weapons,” she explained in an interview with Bild. The Ukrainian armed forces must get what they need and could handle, she said. Ukraine could win the war, she said, but it was necessary to prepare for the fact that “at worst, the war could last for months, even years.”

The financing of the Ukrainian war with billions of euros shows the real meaning of the “turn of the times” that Chancellor Scholz proclaimed in the Bundestag (federal parliament) at the beginning of the war. Some 81 years after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which cost the lives of almost 30 million Soviet citizens, including millions of Jews, German tanks are again rolling towards Moscow.

Even the Berlin correspondent for the BBC, which is otherwise fully on the side of NATO, had noticed this. He quoted the foreign policy spokesman of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group, Nils Schmid, saying, “There will be no cooperation with Russia in the foreseeable future. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if necessary, defence against Russia.”

The BBC journalist then commented, “Unexpectedly harsh words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany’s historical guilt and moral duty to make amends for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at any price.”

Under the pressure of the deepest social, economic and political crisis of world capitalism since the 1930s, German imperialism is returning to its old militarist traditions. The risks it is taking in doing so are enormous. The Russian government has the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world and has threatened to use it if NATO further intensifies its offensive.

Workers denounce $20.5 million payout to Stellantis chief as job cuts mount

Shannon Jones

Amid continuing reports of auto layoffs, the announcement that Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares will receive a compensation package of $20.5 million has sparked anger among autoworkers.

Investor watchdog group Phitrust said $71 million was a more realistic estimate of the value of the pay deal. Automotive News Europe calculated that if Tavares met all the targets in the various incentive plans he has been awarded he could receive more than $238 million by 2026. A meeting of Stellantis shareholders also approved a $3.7 billion (3.3 billion euro) annual dividend for investors, to be paid on April 29.

In justifying the payout to Tavares, Giorgio Fossati, Stellantis' general counsel, pointed to the company’s “performance.” The automaker reported net income of €13.22 billion in 2021, or about $15 billion. Revenue rose 14 percent last year despite production cuts due to shortages of microchips and other parts and the continued impact of the global pandemic, which has sickened tens of thousands of autoworkers and killed unknown hundreds.

These massive profits were literally coined off the “blood, sweat and tears” of autoworkers all over the world. Workers have been forced to labor in unsafe factories while facing brutal speed-up with alternating periods of layoffs. Meanwhile, workers have seen their already inadequate pay levels further ravaged by inflation, which is now accelerating under the added impact of war in Ukraine.

Despite this, Tavares notoriously recently denounced North American Stellantis workers for “excessive” absenteeism even as the pandemic continued to sicken and kill autoworkers. More than half of Stellantis’ 2021 profits came from its North American operations.

Workers coming in for the second shift at the Warren Truck Assembly plant in suburban Detroit (WSWS Media)

A Stellantis worker at the Jefferson North plant in Detroit, responding to the gigantic pay award to Tavares, said, “It boils down to they make sure they get paid while they cut wages and reduce the workforce. What is wrong with cutting their wages?”

She continued, “They are quick to cut the workforce, but we are not the problem, the issue is the CEOs and presidents, they say the company is going under, then why are you getting so much money but the people that build the vehicles have to take a pay cut?”

A veteran Stellantis Belvidere, Illinois worker said, “It doesn't really surprise me, that seems to be the new standard operating model among the CEOs, to deliver as quick profits as possible, while leaving whole communities in ruins.

'Which ties in with all these mergers that have been taking place lately, it's nothing but a power grab, cut and consolidate so they can manufacture scarcity and charge more for their products.'

Even while it attempts to fill depleted inventories, Stellantis is engaging in ruthless job-cutting and restructuring as it prepares to shift to electric vehicle production.

The question of the Stellantis CEO pay became a topic in the French presidential election contest between Macron, the “president of rich,” and the neo-fascist Marine Le Pen. Reflecting fears of the reaction in the working class to the lavish payout to Tavares, both issued hypocritical statements criticizing the size of the pay deal. Macron, who handed out massive amounts to the rich during the pandemic while calling for workers to sacrifice, called the pay package “astronomical.” Le Pen, who has threatened violent attacks on immigrants, said the Tavares pay award was “shocking.”

In February, Stellantis announced plans for 2,600 “voluntary” job cuts in France, which could reach as high as 10,000 by the end of 2025. The company pledged at least $5.7 billion of “synergies” as part of the merger between Fiat Chrysler and PSA Group. The company has been sending harassing e-mails to workers advising them on how to find jobs at other companies and even offering tips on writing resumes.

This follows reports that Stellantis is cutting jobs at its Detroit area assembly plants, including 500 at the Jefferson North Assembly plant and up to 900 by the end of the year at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant. There have also been smaller numbers of layoffs at Sterling Stamping and Warren Stamping.

Last month Stellantis sent layoff notices to 579 workers at its Belvidere, Illinois Assembly plant as the first step in plans to eliminate more than one-half of the remaining workforce of 1,800 at the factory that builds the Jeep Cherokee SUV. The facility once employed 5,000.

Stellantis is also halting production at its Mangualde factory in Portugal. The closure, due to the global semiconductor shortage, will impact 900 workers. It is also closing its factory in Kaluga, in Russia, due to parts shortages related to the war in Ukraine.

While Tavares’ pay package is large compared to other European CEOs, it is tiny in comparison to what many American CEOs rake in. Leading the pack is Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who became eligible for $23 billion in performance incentives from the electric vehicle maker. Musk is the world’s wealthiest individual, with assets in the range of $280 billion.

Other US auto executives are continuing to receive massive payouts, with Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley getting $22.8 million in 2021. GM CEO Mary Barra is expected to continue her reign as the highest-paid executive among the Detroit automakers when her 2021 pay figure is announced. She received almost $23.7 million in 2020 as the pandemic ravaged autoworkers. Barra’s net worth was estimated as at least $173 million as of April 1, 2021.

At the same time as they preach the necessity of cost cutting and sacrifice the auto companies have used the bumper profits of recent years to enrich shareholders and corporate officers. In addition, capitalist governments have lavished tax abatements and other sweeteners on the auto companies. The US government is offering huge subsidies to the auto companies in the form of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. Meanwhile, capitalist politicians claim there is “no money” for healthcare, education and other vital services needed by the working class.

Ford and GM, as well as Japanese carmaker Toyota, announced cuts in production due to the chip shortages. Ford in Europe is attempting to pit workers at its plant in Saarlouis, Germany against workers at its facility in Valencia, Spain over which site will close, at the cost of thousands of jobs. The site to be “saved” will be determined on the basis of the cuts the unions can impose on the backs of workers.

Parts suppliers are being impacted by the cost-cutting as well, with Tenneco Automotive announcing the beginning of layoffs and the eventual closure of its plant outside Dayton, Ohio at the cost of 650 jobs. Waupeka Foundry in Tennessee announced Wednesday it is laying off 540 workers at the facility that makes castings for the auto industry.

The accelerating attack on jobs, coupled with skyrocketing living expenses and unbearable working conditions, is driving autoworkers around the world into a conflict with pro-company unions, including the United Auto Workers in the US.

Sri Lankan government deploys military, defends police shooting of protesters

Pani Wijesiriwardena & K. Ratanayke

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government are justifying the police opening fire this week on thousands of unarmed people protesting fuel price hikes. The police attack, which occurred on Tuesday in Rambukkana, about 95 kilometres northeast of Colombo, killed K.B. Chaminda Lakshan and injured about two dozen others.

The Rambukkana protests erupted over delayed petrol deliveries and sharp new price increases in petrol and diesel announced on Monday. On Tuesday demonstrators blocked main highways and a railway line. Police began directing tear gas at thousands of protesters in the afternoon and then suddenly, without warning, opened fire with live rounds.

Lakshan, a 40-year-old father of two from Naranbedda, a village near Rambukkana, was shot. He died soon after being admitted to Kegalle hospital. A police curfew imposed over the whole area on Tuesday evening was lifted yesterday morning.

Sri Lankans hold up their mobile phone torches during a vigil condemning police shooting at protesters in Rambukkana, 90 kilometers (55 miles) northeast of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Tuesday, April 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The Rambukkana protest was part of the ongoing anti-government demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of working people and youth that have swept across the island over the past two weeks. The struggles are a response to spiraling inflation, shortages of essentials, including food, medicine and fuel, and extended daily power outages.

The Sri Lankan government is attempting to impose the burden of the unprecedented economic crisis produced by the pandemic and the Ukrainian war crisis on the working class and the rural and urban poor. The nationwide demonstrations are demanding the immediate resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government, with around 10,000 people gathered in Colombo’s Galle Face Green as the main protest centre.

Lakshan’s funeral is being held today amid a huge military mobilisation aimed at trying to intimidate the population. Using his power under the Public Security Ordinance, President Rajapakse on Wednesday night called on the army, navy, and air force to assist police to “maintain order” in Rambukkana and adjacent areas in the Kegalle district until April 23.

In a Wednesday night Twitter message, Rajapakse cynically claimed he was “deeply saddened” by the Rambukkana incident while adding, “I urge all citizens to refrain from violence as they protest.”

Chaminda Lakshan (Photo: Facebook)

Echoing this, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse declared he was “deeply distressed following the tragedy in Rambukkana” and said there would be “a strict, impartial investigation.” The police, he added, have “always served Sri Lanka with utmost honour.” In a thinly-veil threat, Rajapakse demanded that protesters “engage in their civic right with equal respect and honour.”

This followed a chilling national address last week in which Prime Minister Rajapakse “reminded” Sri Lankans how Colombo had crushed anti-government protests in the 1980s and deployed massive military force against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during a decades-long communal war.

Prasanna Ranatunga, Sri Lanka’s minister for public security, directly condemned the Rambukkana protesters, telling parliament that the police had opened fire as a “last resort.” He repeated false police claims that agitators had attempted to set fire to a petrol tanker, which, he claimed, could have resulted in a bigger disaster.

The Rajapakse government has appointed several committees to investigate what happened at Rambukkana. Inspector General of Police (IGP) Chandana Wickremaratne quickly declared there would be a police inquiry headed by a senior superintendent. Yesterday he announced that the Criminal Investigation Department would conduct another investigation.

The public security ministry has also appointed an Independent Board of Inquiry, while another is to be held by the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission, a legally toothless body.

As in the past, these inquiries will be a sham, aimed at downplaying and covering-up the police brutality. If they are unable to hide the truth, these inquiries will try to find one or two scapegoats.

False claims about violent demonstrations or protesters blocking transport are being used by the government to justify its mobilisation of the military.

Chief of Defence Staff and Commander of the Army General Shavendra Silva has issued a statement declaring that army and other military forces have been deployed since April 20 to “assist unhindered passage of transport movements” following a request from the Inspector General of Police. The military is currently providing “protection” to oil tanker trucks.

Silva said the military had “not to-date caused any hindrance” to anti-government protests. However, he falsely added, “a few elements, who have shown up at those places were seen in the past few days engaged in particularly blocking road movements, causing inconvenience to the general public and transport of fuel supplies and essentials to different island-wide areas.”

In a media statement, Wickremaratne claimed that the police had to use “minimum force” to stop a group attempting to set fire to a tanker with 30,000 litres of fuel during the Rambukkana protest and to prevent major damage.

Numerous eyewitnesses in Rambukkana have rejected Wickremaratne’s claims that protesters had attempted to set fire to the tanker and that “minimum force” was used. The police official has not explained how the use of live ammunition constituted “minimum force.” Reports are now emerging about the brutal police attack on unarmed people.

Dr. Shenal Fernando, secretary of the Government Medical Officers Association, told the media that union members had revealed that 15 people had been admitted to Kegalle hospital surgical wards with injuries caused by live ammunition. Three people were being treated in the hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU), with one patient in a critical condition.

The ICU patients included a 37-year-old man with injuries to his abdominal cavity, a 40-year-old man with chest and abdominal cavity wounds, and an 18-year-old boy with abdominal cavity injuries.

A Kegalle hospital doctor told the World Socialist Web Site that all the injured patients had been shot from behind, above the knee and whilst running. Lakshan was admitted with a cardiopulmonary resuscitation situation, i.e., he was dying. Lakshan had worked as a cook and earned additional income by supplying fodder for domesticated elephants.

An eyewitness at Tuesday’s Rambukkana protest said drivers had gathered at the fuel distribution centre on Monday evening because its manager had told  them a tanker would arrive there by midnight and that fuel would be dispensed the next morning.

“There had been around 500 vehicles parked along both sides of the road outside the gas station,” the eyewitness said. They started protesting, he said, when the tanker did not turn up and the next morning blocked the main Kegalle-Rambukkana road and then the railway line.

“A tanker arrived at the gas station at around 10 am on Tuesday but people found out that there was not sufficient fuel. They continued to protest but it was not violent. In the afternoon, police started firing tear gas and started shooting,” he said.

Another eyewitness told a Colombo television news report that police spokesmen were lying. People were “not even armed with a razor blade, let alone attacking the fuel tanker,” he said. The police attacked unarmed innocent protesters who had earlier even provided them with lunch, he added.

“Day by day the government is terrorising people,” he said. “They’re blaming innocent people who have anxiously queued for days to buy petrol or diesel.”

The violent police attack in Rambukkana, a decision taken at the highest levels of the Rajapakse government, is a clear indication that state repression is being prepared on a far broader and more violent level.

After claiming pandemic is over, Australian Labor Party leader contracts COVID-19

Martin Scott

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese has tested positive for COVID-19 less than two weeks into a six-week election campaign.

Albanese’s infection exposes the lies promoted by both major parties to justify the ending of public health measures and the endangerment of millions of working people in the interests of corporate profit.

Together with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Albanese has presented the pandemic as a thing of the past, superseded by a mythical “economic recovery.”

Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese talks to the audience during a debate with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Brisbane, Wednesday, April 20, 2022. (Jason Edwards/Pool via AP)

In the first election debate on Wednesday night, both were on stage mask-less, in front of a similarly unprotected audience. Fittingly, the forum, at which Albanese was likely infectious, was hosted by Murdoch’s Sky News, notorious for its undermining of public health and science over the past two years.

In their contributions at the debate, Morrison and Albanese said nothing about the  6,842 needless deaths from COVID-19, more than two-thirds of which have occurred since the beginning of the year. Yesterday, a further 51 deaths were reported, the highest single-day figure for more than a month and the 30th-highest since the beginning of the pandemic. Another 46 deaths were reported today.

Around the country, 3,236 people are currently hospitalised with COVID-19. According to official figures, which massively understate the spread of infection due to the conscious dismantling of testing by state and federal governments, almost 5.6 million people in Australia have contracted the virus.

The election campaign has proceeded in an utterly reckless fashion, as large contingents of politicians, staffers and journalists travel around the country for publicity stunts, with no regard for the trail of infection they will leave behind.

This election bubble, completely divorced from the hardships and concerns of working people, and from the real state of the pandemic, has burst. With Albanese’s infection, reality has intruded on an unreal official campaign.

Just hours before testing positive, Albanese visited an aged care facility on the New South Wales (NSW) South Coast, meaning he may have exposed the vulnerable residents to the deadly virus. More than 2,000 aged care residents have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

According to the Australian Financial Review, at least four journalists in Albanese’s entourage had tested positive to the virus prior to the Labor leader. It is not known how many other senior Labor politicians have been exposed.

Despite sharing the debate stage with Albanese on Wednesday night, Morrison is continuing his campaign. The prime minister contracted COVID-19 early last month and is therefore exempt from close-contact rules and not even required to test for the virus.

Media commentators have moronically stated that Morrison is not at risk due to his prior case, in willful ignorance of the thousands of reinfections documented over the past four months. Not a single corporate pundit has voiced concern over the fact that the prime minister and his entourage may be functioning as a traveling super-spreader of the virus.

The infections are hardly surprising.

Health authorities and government figures around the country, Labor and Liberal-National alike, claim the Omicron BA.2 wave has “peaked.” In fact, more than 50,000 new infections were recorded in Australia yesterday, bringing the total number of active cases to 369,910. In more than two years of the pandemic, there have been only 53 days when more people were infected.

The fact that both Albanese and Morrison have been infected in recent weeks is a clear sign that community transmission is much more widespread than the official figures indicate. Overwhelmingly, the victims are working class. Unlike Albanese and Morrison, workers in factories, warehouses, hospitals and schools have no control of their environment and can do little to protect themselves if a wave of infection sweeps through their workplace.

The catastrophic pandemic is completely off the agenda in the federal election because Labor and the Liberal-Nationals are in total agreement. The continuing crisis, along with Albanese’s infection, is a direct product of the “let it rip” policies adopted by the National Cabinet and every state, territory and federal government, Labor and Liberal alike.

This is fundamentally a class question. Among workers, hardest hit by the health, economic and social impact of the pandemic, there is broad support for the elimination of the virus. But the official parties have made clear that they are interested only in business, not health advice.

Albanese is pitching Labor to the financial elite as the only party capable of carrying out the “big reforms” demanded by big business to “boost productivity” and “build a stronger economy.” This includes the overturning of any public health measures that could possibly stand in the way of corporate profits.

The decision last December by the NSW Liberal-National government to scrap density limits, mask mandates, QR code check-ins and vaccination requirements has been widely criticised as a pivotal moment that massively accelerated the devastating spread of Omicron. In reality, the continuous dismantling of public health measures around the country, while cases surged, has only been possible because of the close collaboration of Labor, particularly Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

On December 15, there were 6,233 cases of COVID-19 in NSW, just 3.4 percent of the 185,898 active in the state yesterday. Yet the entire political establishment, with the eager backing of the corporate media, declares the pandemic over.

The Victorian Labor and NSW Liberal-National state governments announced Wednesday that virtually all of the few remaining public health measures against COVID-19 would be scrapped.

From 6 p.m. in NSW and 11:59 p.m. in Victoria, close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 cases will no longer be required to self-isolate. The Queensland Labor government followed suit today, announcing that close-contact isolation will end from next Thursday.

In NSW and Victoria, masks will no longer be required except for on public transport, in hospitals, aged care facilities, airports and aircraft. Capacity limits for public transport and venues will be removed, and proof of vaccination will no longer be required for entry into venues in Victoria. In NSW, vaccine mandates will be removed for all workers except those in aged care and disability.

From April 30, unvaccinated international travelers will no longer be required to quarantine on arrival in NSW or Victoria. In NSW, they will be required to take a RAT within 24 hours of landing, while in Victoria, post-arrival testing will only be “recommended.”

The removal of the seven-day isolation rule for close contacts was demanded by big business lobbyists because up to 20 percent of workers in many sectors were unable to work due to infection or exposure to COVID-19.

In fact, since late last year, countless industries have been granted exemptions, forcing potentially infectious workers back on the job in order to maintain company profits. Australia’s unions have facilitated this reckless drive, enforcing the slashing of restrictions while cynically calling for rapid antigen tests (RATs), masks and other measures explicitly aimed at keeping factories open.

Demonstrating the role of the unions, Health Services Union (HSU) National President Gerard Hayes last week voiced his support for the removal of isolation rules, declaring: “If you are fully vaxxed, return a negative test and have no symptoms, you should be able to go to work.”

This stands in complete opposition to the health workers supposedly represented by the HSU. During a NSW-wide strike on April 7, a Newcastle health worker interrupted HSU and Labor speakers at a stop-work meeting, saying: “COVID is the biggest issue here. You haven’t mentioned it. We work with COVID every day, numbers of us have been sick.”

Earlier this month, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce blamed the close-contact rules for chaotic scenes and major delays at the nation’s airports. The NSW and Victorian governments moved swiftly to exempt aviation workers, placing staff and passengers at risk while doing nothing to resolve the congestion.

Australian Industry Group boss Innes Willox claimed: “The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.”

In other words, the bipartisan actions of Australian governments have created such a wave of mass infection that society cannot function. The solution demanded by business and now enacted by the Victorian, NSW and Queensland governments is to remove the few remaining measures aimed at preventing illness and pretend the pandemic is over.

Macron-Le Pen debate shows rising danger of far-right dictatorship in France

Alex Lantier

The debate between neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen and incumbent President Emmanuel Macron shows the mounting danger of fascistic dictatorship in France.

The debate was relatively muted. Macron, a banker whose staff has warned him against appearing arrogant, and Le Pen, who has spent a decade “de-demonizing” her neo-fascist party, both visibly strained to avoid outbursts or mannerisms that could alienate voters. Both made clear their respect for each other, with Macron in particular repeating telling Le Pen, “You are right.” Ultimately, the debate showed above all the very limited character of the differences separating Macron from a political descendant of the collaboration with Nazism in France.

The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) has insisted that the struggle against the danger of far-right rule can only proceed by the independent mobilization of the working class, rejecting both candidates and boycotting the election. This is the best way to prepare the struggles that will emerge against the vicious attacks that the winner in the election—be it Le Pen or Macron—will launch against the workers.’

The debate began on the question of inflation and workers’ purchasing power, which has collapsed amid a surge in prices for energy and food. Le Pen said she “only met Frenchmen who said they can no longer make ends meet” and criticized the staggering rise in natural gas prices internationally and in France as NATO countries impose sanctions on Russian gas exports.

Macron attacked Le Pen’s social demagogy largely from the right, arguing that any attempts to address popular grievances against his policies were unrealistic. He accused her of having voted against his government’s measure temporarily freezing any further increase in natural gas prices. After Le Pen accused Macron of making 400,000 people fall under the poverty line during his term, he accused her of questioning business privileges: “You will not decide for the employer, Mrs Le Pen. You will not dictate what salaries will be.”

Both candidates aligned themselves with the war NATO is waging against Russia in Ukraine and were silent on Biden’s comment that the Pentagon is considering the possibility of 45 to 60 million deaths. As Macron applauded NATO’s policy of waging war against Russia in Ukraine, Le Pen responded: “The efforts you have made to try to find, in the name of France, ways and means for peace deserve support.”

Under conditions where significant layers of workers in France are considering a Le Pen vote out of anger at Macron, one must state that this endorsement of Macron’s Russia policy is one point among many that shows that Le Pen is also a tool of the French banks and financial aristocracy.

When Le Pen called Macron’s deeply unpopular call to raise the retirement age to 65 an “intolerable injustice,” and Macron reacted by attacking Le Pen’s plans for financing pensions, this provoked a brief exchange on the pandemic. “Do not lecture me on the financing of my plans,” Le Pen said, criticizing the “600 billion euros in extra debt” Macron made during his term.

Macron replied by defending his murderous policy of mass infection on the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already cost 144,000 lives in France alone. Trillion-euro pandemic bailouts massively enriched the banks, with the fortune of billionaire Bernard Arnault going from $70 billion to $167 billion. But Macron hypocritically claimed it was a defense of lives, health, and small businesses: “How dare anyone say that we helped big businesses? Ask small businesses, artisans ... Those numbers, we saved lives with them.”

Le Pen, whose party denounced COVID-19 vaccines that were highly popular in France, was silent on the mass deaths through which Macron enriched his billionaire friends and backers. Her attempts to exploit the “yellow vest” protests for social equality against Macron also fell short, as she also applauded Macron’s cops who violently assaulted them. “The ‘yellow vests’ aspired to democracy, they were not listened to,” Le Pen lamented, before saying that police should have the right to a “presumption of legitimate self-defense” in cases of police brutality.

Macron took Le Pen’s raising of the police as an opportunity to attack her from the right. He denounced Le Pen for having criticized “the policemen of Mr Darmanin,” Macron’s interior minister, after they brutally threw a protester out of one of Le Pen’s press conferences.

As the debate drew to a close, they turned to attacks on immigration and Islam. Le Pen violently denounced immigrants: “We face true barbarism, a turn to savagery. We are wounded, we are brutalized, people jump at our heads and try to murder us. It cannot continue like this.” She also denounced the Islamic veil as a “uniform imposed by Islamists.”

Macron responded by warning Le Pen, “You will trigger civil war,” and, with unparalleled hypocrisy, posing as a defender of “universalist France.” He declared that it would be “to betray the Republic” if France became “the first country in the world to ban a religious symbol in public spaces.”

In fact, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Macron imposed an “anti-separatist law” allowing for the arbitrary dissolution of Muslim associations and the repression of their officials by the state. This law was imposed by Gérald Darmanin, a sympathizer of the far-right Action française party, who then denounced Le Pen as “soft” on Islam. That is, Macron sought to distract from mounting class tensions by inciting xenophobia and nationalism and bolstering fascistic forces in the police-state machine.

Against Macron, it must be added that France has already become a country that totally bans religious symbols, the burqa and the niqab, in 2010. If Macron truly believed that this betrayed the Republic and democracy, he could clearly have denounced this anti-democratic measure when he took office in 2017. But he did not, and his “democratic” posturing against Le Pen is political charlatanry.

The debate testified to a reactionary consensus that has emerged in the ruling class over the period since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. NATO imperialist wars, from the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq and Yugoslavia to Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Mali and now Russia have received ever deeper support in ruling circles. Similarly, the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy and the permanent inciting of xenophobic hatreds has shifted the entire ruling class far to the right.

After having implemented a policy of mass death on COVID-19 and acquiesced to the NATO war drive against Russia, whatever residual commitment to democratic rights might have existed in French ruling circles has evaporated. 

On Wednesday night, as he concluded the debate, Macron told Le Pen: “I fight your ideas, I fight your party, [but] I respect you as a person.” This is an unambiguous signal that the French bourgeoisie is willing to accept a neo-fascist in the Elysée presidential palace, and that Macron himself is on an extreme-right course.

Mélenchon pledges to serve as French prime minister under Macron or neo-fascist Le Pen

Alex Lantier

In an hour-long prime-time interview on BFM-TV last night, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former presidential candidate of the France insoumise (LFI) party, called on the French people to elect him as prime minister in the June legislative elections. He pledged to serve as prime minister under whichever of the two presidential candidates wins in the April 24 runoff, incumbent President Emmanuel Macron or neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.

Mélenchon’s announcement that he will serve under either of the two extreme-right candidates is a slap in the face to the nearly 8 million people who voted for him. Millions backed Mélenchon to express their hostility to both Macron and Le Pen, notably Muslim workers threatened both by Le Pen and Macron’s own Islamophobic “anti-separatist” law. Yet Mélenchon, instead of trying to marshal opposition to the next president, made clear he would collaborate with the next president, even if this president is a neo-fascist.

This points to the significance of the call by the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), to build a movement in the working class to reject both candidates, boycott the election, and prepare the struggles to come against the next president. The PES alone is arming workers and youth with a perspective for an irreconcilable struggle against both reactionary candidates.

Mélenchon is objectively in an extremely powerful position. He won the support of voters under 35, carried the working class districts of France’s major cities, and won 10 of France’s 16 largest cities. If he tried to rally his voters against both Macron and Le Pen, calling for them to engage in strikes and protests, he could rapidly shut down the French economy. Such an action, carried out in opposition to NATO war threats against Russia and official inaction on the COVID-19 pandemic, could have a vast global impact, as did the May 1968 French general strike.

Mélenchon, however, aims not to politically mobilize but to political suppress his voters, making clear that they should resign themselves to a far-right presidency that will enjoy the political support of the presidential candidate for whom they voted.

Mélenchon cynically tried to present this ultra-reactionary policy as a “militant” struggle. He claimed that he is asking French voters to massively vote for LFI, which currently is leading in races for 105 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, so that LFI could form a government and name Mélenchon prime minister. “I will be prime minister not by the grace of Mr Macron or Mrs Le Pen, but because the French people will have wanted this,” he said.

When BFM-TV interviewer Bruce Toussaint asked him under which presidential candidate he would agree to serve as prime minister, Mélenchon replied, “That is a rather secondary issue.” Asked again by Toussaint whether he would really serve under a neo-fascist president if Le Pen won in the polls, Mélenchon indicated that he would, saying, “Vox populi, vox dei.”

Mélenchon told Toussaint that his views on neo-fascism had changed and become far less hostile than they were 50 years ago, at the foundation of the far-right National Front (today the National Rally of Marine Le Pen) in 1972. He said, “At the very beginning of the struggle against the National Front, I took a very harsh position. Inspired by the past, I said that we should not accept them... Now the question is not posed that way for me. It is posed in the sense that fundamentally [Marine Le Pen] carries with her a vision of France which means that it is fundamentally another France. It is not the France in which we are.”

Mélenchon indicated that his differences with Le Pen are concentrated on the question of the rights of people born on French soil to automatically receive French citizenship, and on whether to organize a referendum on banning the Islamic veil in France.

The extremely limited character of the disagreements Mélenchon claims to have with neo-fascism makes clear that Mélenchon himself has travelled far to the right. He is part of a deeply reactionary consensus in the French ruling class in favor of totally abandoning the struggle against COVID-19 and participation in a NATO war with Russia in Ukraine. Indeed, Mélenchon did not even mention the pandemic in the BFM-TV interview, though around a thousand people die of COVID-19 each week in France.

Mélenchon was also silent on how Macron has plunged the state deep into debt during the pandemic to finance bank bailouts that massively enriched the financial aristocracy, with the 500 wealthiest individuals in France increasing their wealth by 40 percent in the year after the launching of the bank bailout plans. This made French public debt surge to around 115 percent of France’s Gross Domestic Product.

On the war in Russia, where forces in the media have repeatedly accused Mélenchon of complicity with the Kremlin, he reassured BFM-TV that he supports NATO. He recalled that on the morning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he criticized Moscow and claimed that Russia bears “sole responsibility” for the war.

It is only in this context that one can evaluate the few demagogic promises made by Mélenchon. He noted that “Millions of people are caught by the throat in this country,” pledged to cap natural gas prices and increase the minimum wage to €1,400 monthly, and proposed citizen-initiated referendums as in Switzerland. But one cannot finance a meaningful increase in workers’ living standards while wasting countless billions of euros on bank bailouts and war.

The defense of fundamental social rights requires a determined assault on the privileges of the super-rich, the impounding of public funds that they have pilfered, the end of the war, and a struggle to stop mass deaths from COVID-19. But it is absurd and false to claim that one could implement such policies as a prime minister answerable to a President Macron or Le Pen.

This is why the PES calls for an active boycott of the second round, to steel workers and youth for a struggle against the reactionary presidential candidates and unify them in a class-based opposition to the next president. It is now clear that this call places the PES in direct opposition not only to Macron and Le Pen, but also to Mélenchon. In the name of a positive re-evaluation of neo-fascism, Mélenchon is extending political support to both reactionary candidates.

Moreover, it makes clear the opposition between the PES and not only Mélenchon, but all the bankrupt parties whom Mélenchon is proposing to unify in a so-called Popular Union. He told BFM-TV that the Greens, the Stalinist French Communist Party, and the Pabloite New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) could all join the coalition he is proposing. The NPA has already responded positively to Mélenchon’s call, issuing a “Letter of the New Anti-capitalist Party to the Popular Union” declaring that “we are happy about the initiative you have taken” and concluding, “We must meet in the coming days.”

What Mélenchon is doing is not unifying the left in struggle, but regrouping a coalition of bankrupt petty-bourgeois parties that support imperialist war and mass infection with COVID-19, and that are clearly prepared to sanction alliances with neo-fascism.

Survey shows majority in Germany rejects an energy embargo against Russia

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Even though the warmongers in the German government are calling for an immediate halt to the imports of Russian gas, oil and coal, the mood among the population is different. This has now been confirmed by an Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research survey.

In the poll, 57 percent of respondents were in favour of continuing to obtain oil and gas from Russia. Only 30 percent would support a complete energy embargo, and only 24 percent agreed with former German President Joachim Gauck’s demand to freeze “for freedom”; that is not even one in four.

In front of a supermarket in Munich-Moosach, Havva speaks out against war

The representative survey, conducted by the Allensbach Institute on behalf of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), was carried out between 25 March and 6 April, which interviewed a total of 1,075 people. The background to the survey is rising inflation and exploding energy prices in Germany, which affect the majority of the population and about which most expressed concerns.

Inflation had already risen sharply before the Ukraine war. The huge sums of money with which the federal government and the European Central Bank drove up stock market prices and the fortunes of the rich to dizzying heights in first two years of the pandemic have turned into inflationary tendencies.

At the same time, workers’ incomes fell, and 20 million lives were sacrificed to the pandemic worldwide. The disruption of supply chains caused by the pandemic and the sanctions against Russia have in turn greatly accelerated these inflationary tendencies, for which workers are now expected to pay.

But for working people, the experiences of the last few years have not gone by without leaving a mark in their consciousness. And while the imperialist warmongers may decide on sending more arms deliveries to Ukraine, spending billions on the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and demand a total energy embargo against Russia, the mood in the working class is completely different.

Not only do workers reject skyrocketing prices and the halting of gas, oil, and coal supplies, but they also resolutely oppose war and the fact that hundreds of billions of euros are being spent on military armaments and destruction while there is supposedly no money for urgent social needs.

The greatest concerns expressed are regarding the current price increases; 71 percent of respondents are very worried about this, and 62 percent worry about being able to pay their energy bills. The proportion of those who expect difficulties with their energy bills in the future has risen from 26 percent in 2019 to 86 percent.

A large majority experience the increased heating costs and higher fuel prices for petrol and diesel as a burden, with 68 percent of respondents saying that the increased prices for heating were a burden or a strong burden on them. A strong or very strong burden due to the increased fuel prices was indicated by 61 percent of car drivers and 51 percent of all respondents.

Due to the increased prices, many people have already adjusted their daily behaviours; 54 percent in relation to shopping, where they now pay more attention to prices and bought less; 47 percent are setting their home heating temperature lower; and 37 percent said they drove less to save fuel. Only 17 percent of respondents said that they had not changed their consumption behaviour at all despite inflation.

The FAZ article notes that people’s concerns were not just a reaction to reports in the media, “but also the result of daily personal experience.” In the meantime, 64 percent consider the goal of keeping energy prices low, so that electricity, petrol and heating cost as little as possible, to be particularly important. In late summer 2021, this figure was 54 percent.

The drastic price increases are hitting working people and the poorest in society particularly hard. In March, inflation in Germany climbed to 7.3 percent, with price increases particularly high for food and energy costs, often in double digits. The current level of inflation makes life unaffordable for families, pensioners, and welfare recipients, many of whom do not have sufficient money coming in to put enough food on the table every day.

High energy costs mean that low-income earners, welfare recipients, pensioners, students, and basic income recipients can no longer pay their rents and utilities and are threatened with homelessness. On average, German households spend 37 percent of their net income on housing and energy, but for those with a monthly household income below €1,300 this rises to 50 percent. For them, a further increase in prices for food, electricity, heating costs and rent is unsustainable.

For all these reasons, the voices being raised against the government’s arms spending and war policy are increasing. This is completely hidden in the media, but is clear on social media, as well as in the interviews that WSWS teams has been conducting outside factories and at shopping centres.

For example, in front of a supermarket in Munich, Yela spoke out clearly against the current rearmaments orgy: “You do not help anyone with more and more weapons,” she said. “And the population has to pay for it all.” Although she works very hard, she already “spends more than half of my salary on rent.”

Outside a BMW plant, one worker commented on the escalating military campaign against Russia: “Like twice before in history, this could lead to world war. Except now they’re risking nuclear war.” On the social media, Gerd wrote: “I find it frightening that many have learned nothing from history. The agitation against Russia is unbearable. We all know that the West is not entirely innocent of what is happening now—and supplying weapons to Ukraine will make it worse.”

Over 200 homeless deaths recorded during 2021 in Toronto

Steve Hill

Toronto city authorities have brutally attacked and dismantled homeless camps (Credit: Mark McAllister, @McAllister_Mark/Twitter)

Recently released data from Toronto Public Health (TPH) revealed that 216 people experiencing homelessness died in the city of Toronto in 2021. The annual death toll among the city’s homeless has more than doubled within the past five years.

The data is based on information supplied by around 250 health and social agencies supporting people experiencing homelessness. In each of the five years of data collection, from 2017 to 2021, the largest number of deaths was among those aged 40 to 59 years. Males have consistently made up approximately three-quarters of all deaths.

Drug toxicity is the largest single cause of death, rising from 32 percent of all recorded homeless deaths in 2017 to 55 percent in 2021. Other major causes of death include hypothermia, suicide, homicide, accidents, pneumonia, cancer and cardiovascular disease.  In 2021, 132 of the 216 deaths occurred in shelters, almost four times the 35 deaths recorded in shelters in 2017.

Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor at Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto, said that Mayor John Tory, city councillors and the Shelter Support and Housing Administration should all be held to account for their failure to tackle homelessness. “The problem will not just go away until people are housed. And so, we saw a 50 percent increase in deaths, and it’s an enormous number that somebody has to take account for. It’s not an acceptable number. I think a great number of these deaths were preventable,” he said.

A.J. Withers, a steering committee member of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and adjunct faculty in critical disability studies at York University, said some of the deaths happened when the shelter system was more than 99 percent full. The absence of safer indoor shelter space, the dismantling of encampments and the toxicity of street drugs were “deeply concerning,” Withers said. “The lack of safe supply, the lack of access to overdose prevention sites and lack of access to appropriate harm reduction really means that people die,” he insisted.

“As the city does things like criminalize people in encampments, people get pushed further and further away from support systems and people die.” Withers added that the real death toll among Toronto’s homeless population is probably far higher because hospitals and emergency rooms do not report deaths of unhoused people to TPH.

Dr. Andrew Boozary, a primary care physician and executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at the University Health Network, said Toronto cannot “go back to normal” because homelessness was already a public health crisis before the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself has affected unhoused people disproportionately, he added.

“The solution to homelessness is housing. Shelters or encampments are not solutions to homelessness, it is housing. And so, we really need to ensure that every level of government is committed to housing as the solution. And if we don’t see that concerted effort, these rates will only continue to increase,” warned Dr. Boozary. “And that’s on us as a society, because these rates are increasing, not because of individual failures, but because of our failure on delivering housing as a human right.”

Toronto’s 24-month housing and homelessness plan aims to create more than 3,000 new affordable housing opportunities by the end of the year, including 2,000 with social supports, according to the city. In February 2022, Toronto councillors approved an accelerated housing plan to provide an additional 300 “housing opportunities” through partnerships with housing providers and private market landlords.

Yet even if these targets are met, which is very much an open question given the miserable record of all levels of government in funding homeless prevention projects, it would mean that less than half of the more than 7,000 people officially experiencing homelessness in the city would receive assistance. In 2021, it was estimated that there were 7,347 homeless people in Toronto. Specific groups that were overrepresented included indigenous people, racialized people, people who first experienced homelessness as children, people who experienced foster care and people who identify as 2SLGBTQ+.

Both the provincial and federal governments have abdicated their responsibility to ensure one of the most basic social needs, housing, for the population. Every aspect of life, including the right to a roof over one’s head, has been subordinated to the predatory demands of the banks and financial oligarchy. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this year:

Decades of public policy decisions aimed at slashing budgets and making billions available to big business and the super-rich have created a situation where every year over 235,000 Canadians are homeless at some point. Another 1.7 million working people live in precarious housing, which in simple terms means they are one pay cheque, one accident, or one illness away from sleeping on the street. All of the established political parties, from the New Democrats on the “left” to the right-wing Tories, are responsible for this state of affairs. They abolished social housing programs in the late 1980s and 1990s, enforced massive attacks on wages and working conditions and gutted social programs that helped keep low-income earners off the street.

The supply of housing and its pricing have been left to rapacious property developers and institutional real estate investment corporations. While the cost of housing declined somewhat in 2020 as people stayed put due to the pandemic, the numbers began to climb again last year. In November 2021 the average rent for all property types in the Greater Toronto Area was $2,167 a month, a 4.3 percent increase from the year before. Average home prices increased $200,000 to $1.3 million in the one-year period to March 2022.

A single person working full-time for the $15.50 an hour minimum wage would barely be able to meet the average cost of a rental unit, which is to say that nearly 100 percent of his or her income would be required for housing alone.

None of the established political parties has any intention of changing this miserable state of affairs. On the contrary, governments at all levels are slashing funding for basic services as the federal government enforces multibillion-dollar spending increases for the military to ensure that Canadian imperialism can continue to wage war around the world.

In March, Toronto city authorities indicated that five homeless shelter sites set up during the COVID-19 pandemic would be decommissioned over the coming year. Two of these, the Better Living Center on Princes’ Boulevard and the former Days Inn on Queen Street, are to close by May 15.

At the federal level, the Liberal government has refused to commit the necessary resources to meet its demagogic pledge in 2017 to make housing a human right.

The latest federal budget, presented by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland earlier this month, included more than $8 billion in additional military spending, including a pledge to provide Ukraine with $500 million worth of additional weaponry this year. The $8 billion increase is over and on top of the increases already built into the Defence Department budget under the Trudeau government’s 2017 commitment to raise military spending by more than 70 percent to $32.7 billion per year by 2026.

Moreover, the government has pledged that further increases are in the pipeline to ensure Canada is ready to wage “strategic conflict” with Russia and China, just as soon as it and the Canadian Armed Forces can determine how the additional funding best be spent.

In her budget speech, Freeland called housing the 'most pressing economic and social issue in Canada today.' But very little of the new funding the government announced for housing is directed at the homeless and at reducing housing costs and improving the quality of housing for those with low incomes. Much of it was in the form of increased tax credits and tax-free savings accounts for those buying homes, and virtually all the additional money Ottawa is providing for building new homes is to flow through for-profit construction projects.        

'There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors here,' David Hulchanski, a housing and community development professor at the University of Toronto, told CBC. 

The corporate media, including columnists for the neo-conservative National Post, has praised Freeland for reining in government spending, i.e., tightening the screws on social programs to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled to the banks and big business during the pandemic. The budget’s passage in parliament was secured with the votes of the NDP. With the full-throated backing of the trade unions, the NDP has agreed to prop up the Liberals in parliament until 2025 under a “confidence-and-supply” agreement, thereby providing “stability” to a government committed to austerity at home and waging imperialist war in league with Washington abroad.

In evaluating the federal budget, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness stated, “(T)he government still lacks a clear strategy to achieve the goal of ending chronic homelessness and the budget most disappointingly did not go far enough to create an Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy.”

Last year, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario concluded that it was unlikely that the province would achieve its goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2025. It found that more families were using shelters and that individuals were living in shelters for a greater length of time. The province’s 2020-2025 Poverty Reduction Strategy does not commit to any additional homelessness program spending.