Tunisian workers hold one-day general strike against rising food prices

Alex Lantier

On June 16, workers across Tunisia walked out in protest against President Kaïs Saïed’s plan to rewrite the constitution and slash vital subsidies that keep wheat and bread affordable for workers. Wheat and grain prices have surged on global markets due to rampant speculation, and now the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine that has prevented Russia and Ukraine from exporting their wheat.

A week before the strike, Tunisian Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri had reported that wheat subsidy costs this year would rise 1 billion dinars to 4.2 billion dinars (€1.3 billion). This is 3.5 percent of Tunisia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the equivalent of the annual budget of the Health and Labor ministries, she reported. Echoing the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is calling for “strict limiting of wage spending” and “better targeting of subsidies,” Boughdiri called for “gradual revision of subsidies for staple goods, but without at all eliminating them.”

In January 2021, ten years after a revolutionary uprising of the Tunisian working class toppled President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, youth came out in Tunis and nationwide to protest the lack of democratic rights and what were already then rapidly-rising food costs.

“People are hungry. They want revenge against the state. I won’t lie about it, they want another revolution,” one youth in Tunis told the press, while his friend said: “The police don’t dare to come here. Even the Tunisian media doesn’t come here. No one listens to what we have to say.”

A trader bringing food from the countryside to Tunis said: “Everybody I spoke to [in the villages] was angry. It’s all age groups. Even children aged 10 are angry. … I see families of up to 10 members who can’t afford [the food prices]. They don’t even have 200 millimes for a baguette.”

This year, inflation and, in particular, the explosion in food prices is a taking place around the world, now accelerated by the NATO-Russia war. As the IMF and the Saïed administration work to starve Tunisian workers by slashing state subsidies that have so far prevented speculation in global grain markets from making bread unaffordable, anger and opposition in the working class is reaching explosive levels.

The General Union of Tunisian Labor (UGTT) bureaucracy, a longstanding pillar of the Ben Ali regime that now works closely with Saïed and international banks, felt compelled to call a one-day strike for June 16. The working class responded massively. Airports, mass transit, post offices, energy companies, ports, wheat, fuel and phosphate monopolies and other workplaces shut down on June 16. Fully 96.2 percent of UGTT members participated in the strike.

“Our wages are low and the prices are getting higher ... and meanwhile, [Kais Saïed] is very stubborn. He is making decisions alone without consulting us,” UGTT official Naza Zuhein told AP at a march of striking workers in Tunis, stressing that life in Tunisia has “become impossible.”

“We, as citizens, as public sector employees, are burdened with a great part of the charges of state debt,” complained another worker alongside Zuhein.

While Saïed maintained a deafening silence on the strike, refusing to make any public statement, his government is clearly terrified of the mounting anger in the working class. Mezri Haddad, an associate of Saïed who was also a close supporter of Ben Ali before his regime was toppled by the workers, denounced the strike as an act of treason: “The UGTT’s decision to launch a general strike is an anti-national action that has the character of high treason and a threat to national security,” Haddad said.

Despite the mounting panic in the Saïed administration, US and global financial firms are stressing that they must work closely with the UGTT bureaucracy as their only hope to impose starvation conditions without provoking a new working class uprising. The Fitch ratings agency wrote: “Passing political and economic reforms without the UGTT’s backing would be challenging.”

In reality, however, what the last decade has conclusively shown is the bankruptcy of the Tunisian bourgeoisie and the UGTT, their failure to establish a democratic regime breaking the domination of imperialism over Tunisia, and the continuing discontent among workers and youth. Kaïs Saïed exemplifies this political bankruptcy. Originally presented as an anti-corruption candidate, he suspended parliament last year and is trying to establish absolute rule over Tunisia.

Now even more than in 2011, when the uprising in Tunisia triggered a revolutionary struggle in Egypt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, the political crisis in Tunisia is directly bound up with world conditions and the international class struggle. After a decade of reckless money-printing by the major central banks for bank bailouts of the super-rich, prices are exploding around the world. And the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine is sowing the seeds of horrific famine in north Africa and internationally.

Africa overall depends on Russia and Ukraine for 44 percent of its wheat, and Tunisia specifically depends on Ukraine for over 70 percent of its wheat. However, as Washington threatens to confiscate Russian dollar holdings in international banks, and Ukraine has mined its ports which are blockaded by Russian warships, it is impossible for Tunisia and countries across Africa to import desperately needed grain and foodstuffs.

These conditions are driving growing strikes and protests by workers demanding wage increases and protection from rising prices not only in Tunisia, but around the world. On Monday, one-day nationwide strikes will take place in the Moroccan and Belgian public sectors after a one-day strike yesterday in Italy. Spanish steelworkers and postmen and French truckers are going out on strike as are airline and airport workers across Europe.

The emerging struggle between the working class and the Saïed regime and its associates in the UGTT bureaucracy has vital lessons for workers not only in Tunisia but around the world. The failure of the 2011 uprising in Tunisia to secure its aims was not due to the failure of the working class to struggle. It struggled mightily, but it did not have a revolutionary internationalist perspective and leadership that would allow it to take power into its own hands after toppling Ben Ali.

In Tunisia, Saïed’s attempt to establish a one-man dictatorship is increasingly acknowledged to be bound up with deep-rooted economic problems related to social inequality.

“This strike is the culmination of the collective failure of ten successive governments, of the UGTT, of the IMF and the international partners of Tunisia. The transition towards democracy was not accompanied by any change in the economic structure of the country,” Denison University economics professor Fadhel Kaboub told Arab News.

Australia threatened with blackouts as profiteering generating companies withhold supply

Terry Cook

Events this week highlighted the potentially catastrophic failure of Australia’s energy “market,” dominated by profit-driven power generation, distribution and retail companies. People in several states were threatened with blackouts because electricity-generating companies withdrew supply.

Eraring Power Station [Source: Wikimedia]

The crisis could still leave tens of thousands of households without power in the midst of a severe cold snap. In the states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) the supply shortfall last week was projected to be 1,454 megawatts and 1,726 megawatts respectively.

Blackouts were only narrowly averted after the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) initially intervened under its Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) scheme to pay some corporate energy consumers to reduce their demand.

This bandaid solution alone will result in millions of dollars of public money being handed over in compensation to the affected consumers.

So acute was the energy supply problem, that not just households but public hospitals were asked to cut down on usage, including not using appliances and turning off potentially vital equipment not in continuous use.

Significantly, the supply shortfalls rapidly emerged after AEMO initially imposed temporary price control caps of $300 per megawatt-hour (MWh) as wholesale electricity prices continued to soar, averaging more than $675 per megawatt-hour.

That measure was supposed to exercise some meagre control over the giant companies that own the country’s major power generators, such as Origin Energy, AGL and EnergyAustralia, whose overriding concern is making profits and enhancing “shareholder value.”

Power companies began withholding available capacity from the electricity market, claiming that the cap was too low to cover their costs because of the soaring global prices of coal and gas, largely produced by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

The generators clearly intended to force AEMO to instruct them to make capacity available to the grid, entitling them to millions of dollars in compensation under the National Electricity Rules.

Such compensation is much higher than that for losses occurred or operating under the $300 MWh cap, which requires an application to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC).

Backed by the Labor government, AEMO ultimately suspended the spot market for wholesale electricity for the first time since 1998. Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the federal government would back any moves by AEMO, supposedly to have reliable supply in the grid.

According to the Australian Financial Review, this would result in AEMO compensating companies to the tune of “hundreds of millions” of dollars in the current quarter alone, on top of the almost $100 million it paid to generators during 2021 after directing them to put more supply into the market.

AMEC chairwoman Anna Collyer said companies who apply for compensation would be “protected from losses.” Not surprisingly, Australian Energy Council chief executive Sarah McNamara, who represents 20 electricity and gas businesses, said they supported AEMO’s decision.

There are now three compensation schemes for generators: one for those directed to enter the market before the market suspension, one for those operating at a loss before the market suspension and, now, one for those operating in the suspended market. On top of this is the RERT scheme, where companies are either paid to cut their power usage or to provide alternative supplies, such as diesel standby, to the grid.

While the multi-billion dollar power companies are laughing all the way to the bank, the cost of the massive compensation they have conspired to grab will be passed on by electricity retailers to working class households and small users, who are already struggling to meet soaring electricity bills.

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman declared it “was impossible to operate the system under current conditions while ensuring reliable, secure supply of electricity.”

“Right now,” Westerman stated, “we see the market is not able to deal with all the factors thrown at it. Frankly, those factors are quite extreme, ranging from generators that are both planned and unplanned outages, very high demand.”

What are these “factors?” Above all, the rapacious generating companies withholding capacity from the market to drive up the price of electricity on the spot market and then extort millions of dollars in compensation.

A guaranteed supply of electricity—an essential requirement for life in a modern society, especially in increasingly severe weather conditions—has been further undermined by faltering power infrastructure. This is due to the lack of investment in maintenance by the power companies, particularly in the ageing coal-powered generators they acquired through the privatisation of these previous state assets.

Several key generators were out of action or operating at reduced capacity. There were multiple outages at Liddell and Bayswater power stations in NSW and problems with three units at Callide and three at Gladstone in Queensland. Though the latter remain state-owned, they operate under the pressures of the privatised electricity market.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attempted to blame the previous Liberal-National government. “You can’t fix a decade of inaction in 10 days,” he said. “This is a direct result of a failure to invest, of a failure to have an energy policy.”

However, the decades-long rampant profiteering revealed again in the crisis is the outcome of a process put into train in the 1990s by the Keating Labor government. It initiated the privatisation of the generation, distribution and retailing of electricity in order to lay the foundations for the National Electricity Market, which became operational in 1998.

This drive was accelerated under the Gillard Labor government’s 2012 Energy White Paper, which demanded that state governments privatise the remaining electricity assets, then estimated to be worth more than $100 billion.

Labor’s claim that privatisation would produce competition and provide incentives to power producers to be efficient, resulting in lower electricity prices, have proven to be a monumental fraud.

Moreover, while delivering bonanzas to the financial markets and associated businesses, this process has been accompanied by the destruction of thousands of jobs and the slashing of working condition across the sector to ramp up profits and investor dividends.

This offensive has been facilitated every step of the way by the trade unions. Again and again, they worked to divert the widespread popular opposition that erupted, including among power workers, to limited protest activity and bankrupt appeals to governments to change course.

In 2008, for example, the previous NSW Labor government announced it would sell the state-owned retail corporations of Energy Australia, Integral Energy and Country Energy, and lease the generation corporations, Delta Electricity, Eraring Energy and Macquarie Generation.

While calling limited protests and work stoppages, the unions participated in a sham “consultation” process enshrined in the NSW and federal Labor Party platforms that was designed to stifle workers’ opposition and ultimately rubberstamp the ongoing privatisation of public services.

Today, many former and current union officials sit on the boards of electricity sector investors, such the Australian Super and IFM Investors superannuation consortium, which owns 50.4 percent of Ausgrid, a NSW electricity distributer.

US Constitution: Bad Medicine for Children

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Public health is about curative, rehabilitative, and especially preventative healthcare for everybody, no exclusions. Failed public health was on display during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The United States has the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths per capita” among 11 high-income countries, according to one infectious disease specialist.

Similarly, local authorities allowed dangerous levels of lead to persist in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, and other cities. Lead damages the brain of young children and recently was shown to have contributed to lowered IQs in 170 million Americans who are now adults.

The constitutions of only a few governments speak of people’s right to health or healthcare. Without offering specifics, the U.S. Constitution mentions a duty to “promote the general welfare.” The Constitution provides for political freedoms, but concentrates on devices aimed at diffusing political power. Examples are checks and balances, federalism, and separation of powers.

Its framers were fearful of political factions and their jostling for political power. In Federalist No. 10 (1787), James Madison explains: “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide … into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.”

The “common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property, he adds; “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) sought to protect wealth and private property; they made suitable arrangements for governing. Public health was not on their agenda, not least because the scientific basis for preventing sickness, injuries and deaths did not yet exist.  Subsequently the U.S. government’s commitment to “promote the general welfare” remained weak. A tradition of healthcare as private enterprise has contributed to smothering public health.

Widespread disregard for public health and for teaching about prevention has contributed to sectors of the people embracing irregular views. Anti-vaccine bias is one of them.

Similarly, agitators dealing with gunfire killings put forth skewed notions of constitutional law. By any rational standards, the killings represent a public health problem, just as do injuries and deaths from accidents, automobile accidents included.

In the same vein, abortion opponents obsess about prevention in the name of preserving life. Their position would be commendable from the public-health point of view, if their passion did not disappear once a baby was born.

A general weakening of child-health advocacy and ultimately of preventative programs exemplifies the current plight of public health endeavors in the United States. Serving to illustrate is the high U.S. incidence of preventable childhood deaths.

In comparison with young people in 16 other high-income countries, younger Americans experience the “highest age-specific mortality rates for every age group under age 25,” according to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Infant mortality in the United States ranks as the highest by far among 11 high-income nations; The U.S. infant mortality rate is greater than that of 49 other countries.

Childhood poverty in the United States is elevated. One current estimate is that 18% of U.S. children in the United States live in poverty; in 2019, 26% of Black children lived in poverty.

That’s important, because the more U.S. parents are afflicted by poverty, the more likely their babies will die.  The National Center for Biological Information notes that, “Higher infant mortality among low socioeconomic groups has been recognized as a societal problem in the US for 140 years.”

Epidemiologists cite the association of prematurity with infant death and the role of poverty in contributing to premature birth. But, according to one analyst, poverty also impinges upon full-term babies. These babies born to low-income parents die at a rate 1.4 to 1.8 times higher than do the babies of higher income families.

Babies are more likely to survive if their caretakers have material resources. The fact of governments or societies being well-resourced does not matter. That’s evident in a study showing that the U.S. “gross domestic product health expenditure,” which is the highest among 14 western nations, exerted no effect on reducing childhood deaths. However, the U.S. income-inequality gap, greater than that of any of those 14 nations, was “highly significant.”

Similarly, the United States registers the highest gross national income per capita among the 38 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Even so, the U.S. infant mortality rate exceeds that of all but three of those states.

The United States has a money-distribution problem. Not enough ends up where it might “promote the general welfare.” Where does the money go?

Oxfam reports that, “global food giant” Cargill company, based in Minnetonka, Minnesota and owned, for the most part, by the world’s 11th richest family, has provided members of that family with $42.9 billion, up $14.4 billion since 2020; that the Walton family, owning half of Walmart’s shares, has gained $238 billion – up $8.8 billion since 2020; that Moderna company converted $10 billion in government funding for a Covid-19 vaccine into $12 billion in profits; that vaccine manufacturer Pfizer company last year paid $8.7 billion in shareholder dividends.

Wealth of the world’s billionaires grew “more in the first 24 months of COVID-19 than in 23 years combined.” Their total wealth is “equivalent to 13.9 percent of global GDP.”

The Constitution’s authors were in the dark when they were trying to discipline ruling-class factions. They could not know that European and North American capitalists would be plundering a new industrial and colonial world to accumulate wealth and enlist governments in their service.

U.S. governments would take on an increasingly prominent role in that project. To distribute wealth for the common good was not in the cards.

For one thing, the Constitution imposed rules aimed at blocking full democracy. These include two-thirds majority requirements, indirect elections of presidents (and, for a while, senators), the disproportionate electoral power of small states, voting limitations, and a powerful judicial branch. The framers of course made accommodations for slavery.

Some framers bemoaned the “danger of the leveling spirit” or saw an “excess of democracy.” For delegate Rufus King, “the unnatural Genius of Equality [was] the arch Enemy of the moral world.”

Architects of the Constitution used the ploy of divide and rule to control entities of their new government. They could not know how, later on, defenders of capitalism would use that tool to great effect while seeking to break apart the unity of people in resistance. Those in charge now create divisions through tension over guns, abortion, and equality for African-descended people.

Such is the setting for our fight for children’s lives, for universal healthcare, and more. The time is right for unity, yes, and for radical solutions.

New Zealand: Change of police minister signals shift to the right

Tom Peters

On June 13, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced changes to a number of ministerial roles which signal a further shift to the right by the Labour Party-led government. New ministers have been installed in the police, justice and immigration portfolios, and the parliament’s speaker will also be replaced.

Chris Hipkins with Jacinda Ardern (Image: Chris Hipkins Facebook)

The most significant change is the demotion of Poto Williams, who will lose her job as minister of police, to be replaced by senior minister Chris Hipkins. Ardern declared that “the focus on the portfolio and where it needs to be has been lost in recent times” and “we need to get back to basics.” The move portends a more openly hardline “law and order” stance.

The Ardern government is presiding over record levels of social inequality, soaring inflation, and a mounting death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. As in every other country, the ruling class is responding to the worsening crisis by strengthening the repressive powers of the state, in preparation to confront opposition from the working class.

Williams, whose family is from the Cook Islands, worked in the disability and family violence sector prior to entering parliament in 2013. She was made police minister after Labour was re-elected in 2020 in an effort to repair the image of the police, following widespread opposition to plans to give officers more access to guns, and protests over the police murder of George Floyd in the US and police brutality and racism in New Zealand.

While the government claimed it was addressing concerns about police “culture,” and has hired more female and ethnically diverse officers, nothing fundamental has changed. So far this year there have been two fatal shootings by police, including one of an unarmed 22-year-old man in Taranaki. In March, Radio NZ reported that “New Zealand police kill at 11 times the rate of police in England and Wales.”

Ardern, however, claimed that the “environment” had changed since the “controversy” surrounding armed police in 2020. She noted that the police budget has increased by 35 percent and police numbers by 15 percent since Williams was appointed. “The focus has changed and with it we’ve changed the ministerial lineup,” she said. The new minister will oversee “record investment in the front line” and “deal with the current escalation in gang tensions and violence” and “youth offending.”

For several weeks, the media and opposition parties have attacked the government for failing to address gang-related violence and “ram raid” robberies by young people. Recent headlines refer to a “fortnight of fear,” a “sense of lawlessness” and a “youth crime wave” in Auckland, the country’s biggest city.

On June 8, opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon told Newshub that Williams “needs to be removed by the prime minister and replaced with someone else… She isn’t providing the leadership, she’s not been getting the tools and the frontline police don’t feel backed up.”

National has demanded a major increase in police powers, including for officers to have greater access to guns, more powers to search purported gangs’ premises and vehicles without a warrant, and to stop alleged gang members associating with each other. The party also wants to ban gang “patches and insignia” from being displayed in public and on social media. Such measures would be a major attack on freedom of association and freedom of expression.

Ardern told Radio NZ she would not implement National’s “reactionary” proposals. She added, however, that her government has asked police to identify what additional “tools” they need to “come down hard” on the gangs.

Notwithstanding the recent media focus on youth crime, it has declined over the last decade. Ministry of Justice figures show that offending by children aged 10–13 and young people aged 14–16 dropped by 65 and 63 percent respectively between 2011 and 2021. The country’s prison population has also fallen from 10,820 in March 2018 to 7,669 four years later.

The media coverage deliberately obscures the fact that recent ram raids and shootings involve a minuscule proportion of young people.

The hysteria is also directed against any understanding of the relationships between crime, gang membership and the social crisis, which is the responsibility of the current Labour government and all of the administrations that preceded it.

In areas such as South Auckland there is deeply entrenched poverty, impacting more than one in four children. According to Auckland Council, one in three young people experience “housing deprivation,” i.e. unstable, unhealthy or overcrowded housing. South Auckland is also one of the areas worst-affected by COVID-19, with the local Middlemore Hospital overrun with cases.

Across the country, there is growing despair and alienation, compounded by the lack of healthcare and social services. According to TVNZ, police “received just under 30,000 calls last year alone” for “threatened or attempted suicides,” an increase of 87 percent compared with 2015.

The government, far from addressing the social breakdown, has used the pandemic to hand over tens of billions of dollars to the rich, exacerbating the inflationary crisis and the housing bubble. Now, it is boosting the police to deal with the fallout from its austerity policies and plummeting real wages.

Williams’ replacement, Chris Hipkins, has yet to announce specific policy changes as police minister. But he has already gained a reputation for ruthlessness in his roles as education minister and COVID-19 response minister. Hipkins has overseen the lifting of public health restrictions and the unsafe reopening of schools and businesses after the government ditched its previous Zero-COVID policy last October. The change was driven by the demands of the business elite, which views public health measures as a drain on profits, and enforced by the corporatist trade unions.

This year, the Omicron variant has spread rapidly across the country, infecting well over a million people—more than one fifth of the population. Hospitals are inundated, and around 10 people are dying with the virus every day.

The COVID-19 portfolio has been handed to Dr Ayesha Verrall, formerly the associate minister. Ardern told the media that the job was less demanding because “we are now very much in a steady management of the pandemic.” She added that the pandemic “is not over,” but the government acts as though it is: it has ended the use of lockdowns and border quarantine measures, and scrapped vaccine mandates.

The normalisation of mass infection and death is underscored by the resignation of Trevor Mallard as parliament’s Speaker, also announced by Ardern on June 13. He will be replaced by the relatively unknown MP Adrian Rurawhe.

For months, the opposition National and ACT parties have demanded Mallard’s resignation and attacked his hardline response to anti-vaccination protesters who occupied parliament’s lawn earlier this year. Mallard called in the police to clear out the protesters, and issued trespass notices to a number of former MPs who visited the occupation site. The Labour government, having adopted the main demands of the right-wing protesters for an end to public health measures, wants to put an end to any discussion of the issue.

The worsening healthcare crisis, however, cannot be swept under the rug, any more than the soaring cost of living. As is taking place internationally, these developments will drive workers in New Zealand into struggle against the Ardern government’s pro-business agenda.

Canada announces further arms shipment to Ukraine as calls grow for industry to shift to “wartime footing”

Roger Jordan

Defence Minister Anita Anand announced Wednesday that Canada will send C$9 million worth of replacement barrels for the M-777 artillery pieces it sent Ukraine earlier this year. Coming on the sidelines of a meeting in Brussels of the 40-nation US-led Ukraine Contact Groups, the latest shipment brings to C$147 million the total that Canada’s Liberal government has spent on military aid for Ukraine since tabling its 2022–2023 budget in early April.

In that budget, the NDP-supported Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government pledged to provide Ukraine with half-a-billion dollars’ worth of armaments by March 2023.

Under Operation Unifier, the Canadian Armed Forces played a major role in training and reorganizing Ukraine's military to prepare for war with Russia (Photo Credit: DND)

Wednesday’s meeting underscored that as Ukraine’s military position deteriorates, and hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers lose their lives on a daily basis, the Western imperialist powers are determined to further escalate their involvement in the US-NATO war with Russia. The Biden administration, which pledged a further US$1 billion in weapons for Kiev Wednesday, is determined to “break the back of Russia,” so as to reduce it to the status of a semi-colony, seize its resource wealth, and intensify US imperialism’s strategic encirclement of China.

Canada, which has depended for more than eight decades on a close military–strategic partnership with Washington to advance its own global predatory ambitions, is fully on board with this reckless agenda, including the provocations Washington is mounting against China in the Asia-Pacific, even while waging war on Russia.

Anand made clear in remarks following Wednesday’s meeting that the imperialist powers are planning for an extended period of military conflict. Making a direct appeal to weapons manufacturers and other industrial companies to expand production, Anand declared, “There is a continued need to provide equipment and military aid to Ukraine, and governments across this world only have so much inventory. And therefore the next step is for industry to see itself as having a role.”

Anand continued, “We are seeing the need for more industry scale-up. So for example, in the area of ammunition, that’s a key area that we need industry to continue to fortify themselves.”

What Anand is saying is that the Liberal government and its US allies are planning for many months, if not years, of warfare with Russia, irrespective of the number of casualties suffered by Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. This incredibly reckless policy increases the danger that the conflict could expand into a direct clash between Russia and the US and its NATO allies fought with nuclear weapons, threatening the lives of millions of people throughout Europe and beyond.

Discussions of the need for a dramatic expansion of war production have been ongoing within Canada’s political elite and military top brass for some time. Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Wayne Eyre, told the CBC in early May that Canadian industry must move to a “wartime footing.” Eyre stated, “I think what this has shown though is we need to increase the capacity of [the] defence industry. Given the deteriorating world situation, we need the defence industry to go into a wartime footing and increase their production lines to be able to support the requirements that are out there, whether it’s ammunition, artillery, rockets, you name it. There’s a huge demand out there.”

Eyre is working closely with Anand and Deputy Defence Minister Bill Matthews to develop a comprehensive rearmament plan, including the procurement of new fleets of warplanes, warships and submarines. Anand declared at a Global Affairs Canada conference in early May sponsored by arms manufacturers, “We meet daily, sometimes twice daily. That’s the type of team I like to lead and that’s the type of team that will continue to deliver in this area.”

In its push to ramp up war production, the Canadian government will rely on its close ties to the trade union bureaucracy to maintain labour discipline throughout heavy industry and arms manufacturing. The Trudeau government has experience in this area, having worked with Unifor to ensure the supply of C$15 billion worth of armoured vehicles to the blood-soaked Saudi dictatorship to wage its brutal war in Yemen, which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and plunged millions into hunger and starvation. When extremely limited criticism of this arms deal was raised by the New Democrats during the 2015 federal election, then–Unifor President Jerry Dias stepped in to tell the social democrats in no uncertain terms to shut up—a demand with which the pro-war NDP quickly complied.

Canada’s important role in escalating the war with Russia builds on its years-long support for the far-right regime in Kiev. Ottawa was a key supporter of the fascist-spearheaded 2014 Maidan coup, which removed the pro-Russian elected president, Victor Yanukovytch, and brought to power a pro-Western puppet regime in Kiev. Canada subsequently deployed military trainers to Ukraine, who were involved in providing instruction to the far-right Azov Battalion and other fascist groups as they were integrated into the country’s armed forces. At the same time, Ottawa joined NATO’s massive expansion of military force in Eastern Europe, agreeing to lead a NATO battalion in Latvia, one of four NATO advanced battlegroups in the Baltic Republics and Poland.

Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Melanie Joly confirmed that Ottawa is implementing the planned increase of its military contingent in Latvia. “We had 700 troops and we are increasing that now by 450. We are now 1,300 troops in Latvia. We also increased our presence by making sure there is a frigate in the Baltic Sea,” she told the Canadian Press.

Canada will send six CF-18 fighter jets and 200 military personnel to Romania next month to support NATO air provocations against Russia. Bordering Ukraine to the south, Romania lies on the strategically critical Black Sea.

As Ottawa joins in the rapid escalation of hostilities with Russia, it is also ratcheting up tensions with China. Following the lead of the Biden Administration, which is seeking to provoke Beijing into a conflict by overturning the decades-long policy of strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan, Canada has conducted a series of air reconnaissance missions designed to provoke a response from Beijing. Supported by Australia, the US and Japan, Canadian planes took part in reconnaissance missions ostensibly aimed at enforcing UN sanctions on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program between April 26 and May 26. A Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman accused Canada of using the “excuse” of enforcing UN resolutions to conduct operations that were “endangering China’s national security and the safety of frontline personnel on both sides.”

Earlier in May, the Trudeau government confirmed in a long-awaited announcement its decision to ban Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from the country’s 5G and 4G networks. The aggressive move, which is part of a US-led campaign to cripple China’s major tech companies, underscores Ottawa’s support for the diplomatic, economic, and military moves led by Washington against Beijing aimed at blocking China’s rise as a strategic competitor.

The Trudeau government’s aggressive role as an attack dog for American imperialism around the world enjoys unanimous support within the political establishment. The social democratic New Democrats entered a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with Trudeau in March to guarantee his minority government a parliamentary majority through June 2025. The explicit aim of the agreement was to ensure “political stability”—i.e., the ability to enforce unpopular policies of waging war against Russia, rearmament, and attacks on the working conditions and living standards of workers to pay for the massive bailouts of the super-rich during the pandemic and the tens of billions needed to fund Canada’s preparations for World War III. The NDP’s votes secured the passage of the Liberals’ latest budget, which included an additional C$8 billion in military spending increases on top of the massive defence spending hike first unveiled in 2017.

Any criticism of the Trudeau government within the political establishment on these issues comes from the right. In a statement on the Huawei ban, the NDP complained that the move was “long overdue,” and accused the Liberal government of dragging its feet on the issue. “It has taken the Liberal government three years to make this decision while other Five Eyes countries made their positions known much sooner. This delay,” it continued, “only worked to raise serious questions at home and among our allies about the Liberal government’s national security commitments and hampered the domestic telecommunications market.”

The opposition Conservatives are demanding that the Trudeau government take an even more belligerent stance against Russia and have repeatedly accused the Liberals of being “soft” on, if not outright appeasers of, China.

The media, led by the Globe and Mail, and the Conservatives and New Democrats, launched a broadside against the Liberal government earlier this week following a sensationalized “exposure” of the fact that a low-level official from Global Affairs Canada, Canada’s foreign ministry, attended Russia Day celebrations at the Russian embassy in Ottawa last week. The “outrage” expressed by the opposition parties forced Trudeau to declare the official’s participation “unacceptable” and promise it would never happen again. “Conservatives have long been calling on the Liberal government to do more to isolate the Putin regime in the world, including by expelling Russian diplomats, as our allies have done,” stated interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen.

US squanders $80,000 every minute on nuclear weapons

Andre Damon

The United States spends over $80,000 every single minute on nuclear weapons, more than every single country in the world combined, according to a new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

The massive annual spending on these weapons of mass destruction is more than the  federal government spends on primary and secondary education programs. 

Despite rising inflation and a raging pandemic, the United States is massively expanding its nuclear arsenal, with spending on nuclear weapons surging 14 percent between 2020 and 2021. 

While the US spent $44.2 billion on nuclear weapons in 2021, China spent $11.7 billion, and Russia spent $8.6 billion.

Annual nuclear weapons spending by country (Source: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

Using the terror of these weapons of mass destruction, the criminal oligarchy in Washington threatens the whole world with “fire and fury” at a minute’s notice, purely at the discretion of one person—the President.

The report found that major corporations providing nuclear weapons contracts to the US and its allies had their nuclear arms contracts double in 2021. “Companies in France, the United Kingdom and the United States were awarded $30 billion in new contracts (some spanning decades into the future), twice as much as they received in 2020.”

The report noted that in 2021, the Department of Defense requested $28.9 billion for “Nuclear Modernization,” including the “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, B-21 Bomber, Long-Range Stand Off Weapon, Columbia class submarine, missile warning” and “$7 billion for Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications.”

US annual defense budget (Source: Pentagon 2023 Budget overview)

But this already gargantuan nuclear spending was further expanded in the 2023 Pentagon budget, which declared, “Modernizing the Nation’s nuclear delivery and command, control, and communications systems is the Department’s number one priority, and these programs are funded in the FY 2023 budget request.”

It declares, “Recapitalizing nuclear platforms, delivery systems, and the associated support systems will require significant investment over the next 20 years.”

The official budget document quotes Navy Admiral Charles A. Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, as declaring,  “Our existing nuclear forces are the minimum required to achieve our national strategy. We must modernize and recapitalize the nation’s nuclear triad, nuclear command and control, nuclear complex and supporting infrastructure to meet presidential objectives.”

The budget proposes to upgrade and modernize every single aspect of the US nuclear arsenal, from nuclear submarines to bombers and missiles. It includes $35.4 billion to “develop, procure, and modernize” the United States’ nuclear weapons, including:

• $6.3 billion for the Columbia-class Ballistic Missile Submarine;
• $5 billion for the B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber;
• $3.6 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, a new class of intercontinental ballistic missiles; and
• $1 billion for the Long-Range Stand-Off (LRSO) Missile, a new generation of nuclear cruise missiles.
• In addition, the budget allocates $56.5 billion for “Lethal Air Forces,” including the purchase of 61 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters at the price of $11 billion. It allocates another $25 billion for missile defense, $7.2 billion for “long-range fires,” including hypersonic missiles, and $27 billion for the “Space Force” created under former President Trump.

A list of nuclear weapons systems being totally overhauled by the US defense department from the 2023 Defense Budget Overview.

In 2016, President Barack Obama initiated the most dramatic expansion and modernization of America’s nuclear forces since the end of the Cold War, at a projected cost of $1.2 trillion. 

Obama’s nuclear arms race sparked what commentators at the time called the “second nuclear age.” In contrast to the Cold War’s doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” this “second nuclear age” would, in the words of a 2016 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, involve combatants “thinking through how they might actually employ a nuclear weapon, both early in a conflict and in a discriminate manner.” 

In 2018, the Trump administration intensified the arms race initiated under Obama by unilaterally withdrawing from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, freeing the United States to ring Russia and China with short-range nuclear weapons capable of hitting major cities in a matter of minutes. 

This was accompanied by the systematic expansion of the US nuclear modernization program, the cost of which subsequently ballooned to nearly $2 trillion. 

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons report further reviews the corrupt nexus between major corporations, lobbyists and leading think tanks, which function as paid-for agents of the arms manufacturers. The report notes: 

At least twelve major think tanks that research and write about nuclear weapons in India, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States collectively received between $5.5 million and $10 million from companies that produce nuclear weapons. The CEOs and board members of companies that produce nuclear weapons sit on some of their advisory boards, serve as trustees and are listed as “partners” on their websites. 

The Atlantic Council, according to the report, “received between $590,000 - $1,284,992 from eight companies that produce nuclear weapons: Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, Safran and Textron. Additionally, the Atlantic Council received between $50,000 - $99,999 from a national laboratory working on nuclear weapons, Los Alamos National Laboratory.”

The Brookings institution think tank, for its part, “received between $575,000 and $1,149,997 from three companies that produce nuclear weapons: Leonardo, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This represents an inflation-adjusted increase of between $287,075 and $574,149 from past year funding. The Brookings Institution reported a new funder, Leonardo, and constant funding from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.”

These think tanks are routinely quoted in the press, who treat the proclamation of these corrupt representatives of the arms dealers as the gospel truth.

Ultimately, however, the damage caused by the colossal squandering of social resources on nuclear weapons pales in comparison to the damage that would be caused if these weapons were used.

With the United States massively escalating its war against Russia, the prospect of the weapons of mass destruction that the United States uses to cajole and bully the whole world being put to use is an increasingly dangerous reality.

Scholz, Macron and Draghi in Kiev: European imperialism backs escalation of war against Russia

Peter Schwarz

Anyone who believed that the leading European powers were adopting a more peaceful course vis-à-vis Russia than the United States was proven wrong on Thursday.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi traveled together on a special train to Kiev to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Kiev, Romanian President Klaus Johannis joined the party.

The message that the four of them conveyed was unequivocal. While the war with Russia is increasingly becoming a war of attrition without a foreseeable end, claiming hundreds of lives every day, they are doing everything they can to escalate and prolong it. They promised to supply Ukraine with more heavy weapons and to raise the prospect of accession to the European Union (EU). In doing so, they consciously accept the danger of a nuclear, third world war.

Chancellor Scholz stressed the symbolic significance of the joint visit as the leaders traveled to Kiev. “It is important that the heads of government of the three major countries now go to Kiev and show their support for Ukraine in this very special situation of war,” he said. The aim was not only to demonstrate solidarity, he said, but also to continue providing financial, humanitarian and military assistance “as long as is necessary for Ukraine's struggle for independence.”

At a joint press conference with Zelensky, Macron, Draghi and Johannis, Scholz then assured: “We also support Ukraine with the supply of weapons, and we will continue to do so as long as Ukraine needs our support.” Specifically, in addition to the anti-aircraft Cheetah tank, the tank howitzer 2000, the modern anti-aircraft system Iris-T and the special radar Cobra, Scholz promised the delivery of multiple rocket launchers in consultation with Britain and the US.

Macron also promised to supply additional howitzers. “In addition to the twelve Caesars [self-propelled howitzers] that have already been delivered, six more are to be added in the coming weeks,” he said.

Zelensky was enthusiastic. Weapons would be delivered, including those desired by Ukraine, he said. “Germany is helping us a lot with this,” he added. He described the prospect of EU candidate status as a “historic choice for Europe.”

The day before, the defence ministers of the so-called Ukraine-Defense Contact Group, which includes 30 NATO members, as well as Sweden, Finland, Georgia, Moldova, Australia and a dozen other countries, decided at a meeting in Brussels on a massive increase in arms supplies.

Artillery pieces, multiple rocket launchers, combat drones, armored vehicles, anti-ship missiles and other weaponry will be supplied to Ukraine as quickly as possible. The US and its allies hope the additional weaponry will turn the course of the war in favour of Ukraine, with Russia currently controlling one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

The lion’s share will come from the US, which has increased its arms supplies by another $1 billion. But the European powers are not simply following the US, as some critics claim. They are pursuing their own imperialist interests.

The massive rearmament of Ukraine, the deployment of ever-greater numbers of NATO troops on the Eastern European border with Russia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the EU are changing the character of the European Union. It is evolving from its origins as an economic union more and more openly into an imperialist military alliance directed against Russia, China and ultimately against the US, as well as the European working class.

While the Ukrainian oligarchs and the country’s right-wing and corrupt elites dream of a place at the banquet table in Brussels, EU membership would be a nightmare for Ukrainian workers. Even during the absorption process, which usually lasts for years or decades, the government must curtail all “superfluous” social expenditure.

Mario Draghi, who now advocates Ukraine’s admission to the EU as Italy’s head of government, was head of the European Central Bank from 2011, when it imposed an austerity program on the Greek working class as part of the so-called Troika, which plunged millions into bitter poverty and drove thousands to death.

In the Eastern European countries that have been members of the EU for more than 15 years, workers continue to toil for starvation wages for international corporations, while social infrastructure has been decimated and one corrupt regime follows another in power.

In the twentieth century, Germany tried twice to bring Ukraine under its influence. The first was in 1918 during the dictated peace of Brest-Litovsk, when it forced the revolutionary government in Moscow to abandon Ukraine and established a puppet regime, which was last led by the brutal tsarist officer and dictator Pavlo Skoropadskyi. Then, in 1941, in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, it murdered millions in the territory of today’s Ukraine to create “living space” for Germans.

Scholz’s visit to the Kiev suburb of Irpin, where he lamented Russia’s “unimaginable cruelty,” was the height of hypocrisy. He could have disembarked on the way from the city centre at Babi Yar, where the German Wehrmacht murdered 34,000 Jews from Kiev within 36 hours on September 29 and 30, 1941. But this would not have suited the Kiev regime, which reveres Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and his organization of Ukrainian nationalists as “heroes.”

When the US and its allies destroyed entire cities, including Baghdad, Mosul, Fallujah, Tripoli, Belgrade and Gaza, no corresponding pilgrimages like the one held Thursday took place. The morals of Scholz, Macron and Draghi are dictated exclusively by imperialist interests at home and abroad.

A decisive motive for the rearmament of Germany, which will triple its defence budget this year, and the whole of Europe is the intensification of the class struggle. The ruling classes of Europe and the US are responding to the growing rebellion against the deadly consequences of the pandemic and the effects of inflation by rearming against external and internal enemies. War and militarism have always served as a means of forcibly suppressing the class struggle.

President Macron, who is facing a wave of strikes and is in danger of losing his parliamentary majority on Sunday, announced at a military trade fair four days before his trip to Kiev that France and the EU were “living in a war economy in which we must become permanently organised.”

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht announced the formation of a new “Territorial Leadership Command,” largely unnoticed by the public, which is responsible for the defence and logistics of NATO in Germany as well as for “Homeland Security.” The domestic operations of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr), which are in fact forbidden, are thereby placed under the same command as the war offensive against Russia.

“With the new command, we can provide the necessary forces for a national crisis team very quickly, if necessary, in addition to the purely military tasks,” Lambrecht explained. She cited the COVID-19 crisis unit in the Chancellery, which is headed by a Bundeswehr general, as a role model.