Number of police officers in UK schools increases by 300 in one year

Liz Smith

“Over-policed and under-protected: The road to Safer Schools,” a report by the Runnymede Trust think tank, reveals that there are 979 police officers in Britain’s schools.

This is an increase of nearly three hundred, or 43 percent, since the last research available, from 2021. The Safer Schools Officers (SSOs) are overwhelmingly in schools with high numbers of students eligible for Free School Meals (FSM), a key poverty indicator, and which also have higher numbers of black and minority ethnic students.

SSOs have powers that ordinary police officers do not. They may have ongoing permission to be present on school property which ordinary police officers do not. They are assigned to a school or a cluster of schools under a generally vague Safer Schools Partnership (SSP).

Half of the SSOs (489) are based in London in areas where social conditions are appalling. There are plans to further increase the number of SSOs by seven percent (65 officers) across the UK.

The Runnymede Trust think tank report, “Over-policed and under-protected: The road to Safer Schools" [Photo: runnymedetrust.org]

The report presents only a partial picture, based on a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to police forces in the UK of which only 43 responded. The forces that did not respond are Kent, Leicestershire, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Sussex, Northern Ireland and Lancashire Police Constabularies. They cover some densely populated areas, with schools in impoverished areas, including: the city of Leicester, where 20 percent of neighbourhoods are among the most deprived 10 percent nationally; Derby and the former mining areas of Chesterfield and Bolsover; and Lancashire, where towns like Blackburn, Burnley and Darwen have over 35 percent of child poverty.

According to a July 7, 2022 written answer to a question from a Green Party London Assembly representative on the number of police in schools, the office of London Mayor Sadiq Khan answered, “As of June 2022, the MPS have over 370 SSOs delivering 622 SSPs and a further 329 schools who have named officer support. In total 1014 schools either have an SSP or named school officer.”

The impetus for the Runnymede Trust research was the case of Child Q, which “brought to attention the presence of police in schools”. Child Q was a then 15-year-old black girl wrongly accused of possessing cannabis, who in 2020 was strip searched by Metropolitan Police at her school in Hackney. She was menstruating at the time.

The arrest triggered protests against the Met, who are still under investigation. An FOI by the Guardian in March 2022 revealed, “Metropolitan Police conducted around 9,000 strip searches on children in the past five years.”

A Children’s Commissioner’s report into the “Strip Search of Children by the Metropolitan Police Service in 2022” found that “of the 650 children strip searched by the Metropolitan police between 2018-2020, 95% were boys, and over half of the boys searched were black.” This widespread criminalising of children is potentially causing long-term psychological damage.

The drive to embed police in schools took place under the Labour government of Tony Blair (1997-2007) which in 2002 brought in the “Safer Schools Partnership Programme”. This was part of a raft of policies seeking to penalise parents and young people for social problems previously dealt with by social services and school welfare programmes, including the introduction of fines and imprisonment of parents for their child’s non-attendance.

The Runnymede Trust report comments, “This marked a development in the role and activities of police officers in school, who in the decade after, were tasked with a range of multi-agency preventative and enforcement work based in the school setting.”

The report identified a further shift rightwards when, following the police killing in 2011 of Mark Duggan, riots erupted in Tottenham and quickly spread across the country. In November 2011, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government introduced the Ending Gang and Youth Violence scheme. This insisted on the placement of police officers in schools as important to “identifying potentially at risk” young people and referring them for “further intervention to address their behaviour”.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism and preventing “radicalisation”, the Prevent Strategy was introduced by Labour in 2003, with the deliberate aim of demonising Muslims while reinforcing the apparatus for surveillance and intimidation to be used against the entire working class.

Prevent had its remit widened in 2011 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government. In 2014, Prevent led to the introduction of “British values” in the school curriculum. This includes the promotion of “British democracy” and the “rule of law,” under conditions in which civil liberties are under a sustained offensive. The Ofsted inspection criteria for judging schools also insists that these supposed values are for all British citizens to adhere to.

In 2015, legislation made it a statutory duty for school, local authority, prison and National Health Service staff to report any individual deemed “vulnerable” to radicalization to the Prevent programme. A 2019 report by Liberty revealed that UK police forces have full access to private information, including the political views, of the thousands of men, women and children referred to Prevent. The information is available to police forces through the National Police Prevent Case Management (PCM) database, centrally managed by the national counter-terrorism body.

West Midlands Police [Photo by West Midlands Police / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0]

The section of the report “Young People’s Experience of a Regular Police Presence in Schools” shows the extent to which the presence of police in schools is now a daily experience for many children. It reports that 37 percent of children attended a school with a regular police presence. It notes, “Thirty-nine young people who attended or had attended a school with a regular police presence provided qualitative comments about their experiences. The vast majority of views expressed here were negative.”

Overall, the Greater Manchester report shows that the presence of police in schools stigmatises both schools and their students. Their presence “creates a climate of fear, anxiety and hostility for young people, particularly for those that are already marginalised,” with young people’s well-being, mental health, and attainment all impacted. “Put simply, police in schools feed a school-to-prison pipeline.” This forms part of the Runnymede Trust’s summary.

In the last two decades, state schools have been transformed into holding pens where teachers are subject to intense scrutiny, working within a national curriculum imposed with all the many legal government directives flowing from Safeguarding and Prevent legislation. One of the points made in the Manchester report is that the presence of police in schools adds to “existing school punishments – including detentions, isolation and exclusions, for example – this poses a real barrier to the positive development of young people.”

Behaviour policies in schools have as their core principle a punitive individual approach to the social problems that many young people find difficult to “leave at the door”. Over the last 15 years of austerity pastoral support in schools has been slashed, with under-resourced workers spending their entire time dealing with child protection and pressing social needs such as access to food, clothes, and welfare benefits--a situation that can only intensify under conditions of a severe economic crisis.

The Runnymede report pays lip service to wider social inequalities, but insists  throughout on prioritising race as the defining problem of a police presence in schools separate from any identification of the common class basis of the targeting of pupils, whether they are black, Asian or white. It insists, “The government should require all police forces in England to discontinue any further participation in Safer Schools Partnerships and withdraw Safer Schools Officers from schools”, because their presence, “disproportionally discriminates against black and ethnic minority pupils.”

The increasing police presence in schools and the entire policy of criminalising the classroom must be ended. While there is plenty of money to pay for police in schools, there is no money to pay for desperately needed education workers and other required additional staff. More must be trained and recruited to create a nurturing not a hostile environment. Tens of billions of pounds must be poured in to support children and young people with their educational, social and mental health needs.

Germany’s housing crisis: 700,000 more homes needed

Elisabeth Zimmermann

At a press conference in Berlin on January 12, 2023, the Social Housing Alliance presented the results of its recent study, “Building and Housing in Crisis—Current Developments and Repercussions on Housing Construction and Housing Markets.” Based on its research, the new study comes to the alarming conclusion that there is currently a shortage of 700,000 homes in Germany.

On entering office, the federal government, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) Greens and the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), pledged to build 100,000 new homes per year. In fact, only 20,000 social housing units (i.e., housing for less well-off members of society) have been completed.

The study was prepared by the Pestel Institute in Hanover and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft (ARGE) für zeitgemäßes Bauen in Kiel (Working group for contemporary building in Kiel). It was commissioned by the Berlin-based Social Housing Alliance, which includes the trade union IG BAU and the tenants’ association, as well as a Caritas social welfare association and two building associations active in housing construction.

The study finds a record shortage of affordable housing and especially of social housing. In its first year in government, the coalition of the SPD, Greens and FDP only managed to complete 250,000 to 280,000 new flats instead of the 400,000 planned.

Demonstration against excessively high rents in Berlin, 11 September 2021 [Photo: WSWS]

In addition, the situation is likely to worsen. Many social flats are coming to the end of their contract period, and too few new ones are being built. On the other hand, the population increased from 80.5 million in 2011 to around 84.5 million in 2022. While births in 2022 fell to their lowest level since 2014, and the death surplus reached a record high (not least due to the pandemic), net immigration rose to a peak of 1.5 million, largely due to the intake of refugees from Ukraine.

Matthias Günther, head of the Pestel Institute and responsible for the study, spoke about this development at a press conference on January 12. According to Günther, the situation on the social housing market is dramatic. At the same time, Germany already has a “record housing shortage of more than 700,000 missing flats.” According to Günther, it is the “largest housing deficit in more than 20 years.” He added, “In the case of affordable housing, the already massive supply gap is getting bigger; in the case of social housing, it’s long since reached an intolerable level.”

The Tagesschau newspaper highlighted the housing crisis in a special report on January 12. The report read: “Millions of social housing units are lacking. The smallest number are being built in areas where housing is needed, because that’s where the least money can be made for the construction industry.”

As it turns out, the stock of social housing is actually in decline. During the 1990s there were about 3 million social housing units in Germany; today there are only 1.1 million. The report is based on figures from the social association VdK, according to which there is currently a need for 5 million social housing units. VdK President Verena Bentele points out that today not only people who have been living in poverty or on low wages for a long time are dependent on social housing, but also a large number of families who were relatively well off a few years ago, but who are now in financial difficulties due to huge rent increases and the explosion of energy costs.

In common with the study, the Tagesschau report points out the discrepancy between the number of social housing units pledged and those actually built in 2022: in fact, the number of social housing units at the end of the year was down by about 27,000 compared to 2021. And in the course of the year, the number of social housing units which lost their controlled rent status after 25 to 30 years exceeded that of the 20,000 new state-subsidised buildings.

The Building and Housing in Crisis report shows that building projects, whether subsidised or not, are generally becoming more and more expensive. This is due to a number of factors: a large increase in the price of building materials as a result of disrupted supply chains since the coronavirus, rising inflation and the explosion of energy prices associated with the anti-Russian sanctions, and increased interest rates on bank loans. In the past, investors in state-subsidised construction projects were still able to earn a return on their investment, even with basic rents of €6 per square metre. But today, any such returns are eaten up by extra costs. For this reason, many cities only continue work on current construction sites, but hardly plan any new projects.

At the press conference on January 12, Professor Dietmar Walberg, ARGE Institute director, summed up the current construction costs: “The new construction of a rental flat in a large city today costs on average almost €3,980 per square metre. Added to this are apportioned costs of a good €880 for the land. Together, that makes almost €4,900 for a square metre of living space in rental housing. With that, we have clearly placed ourselves out of a range that makes freely financed new construction possible in the first place.” According to his forecast, by the middle of this year the cost of new construction will have increased by 148 percent, almost two-and-a-half times the figure from 2000.

Excessive rents in the large cities are already driving more and more people into hardship. More than 11 million tenant households in Germany are entitled to a housing entitlement certificate (WBS), and thus to social housing. However, social housing is only available for one in 10 of those entitled. As the report shows, there are only 1.1 million social housing units left in Germany.

By contrast, at the end of the 1980s, there were still about 4 million social housing units in West Germany alone. While in 1987 there were 25 social housing units for every 100 tenant households, today there are only five and this disparity is expected to worsen.

The Alliance demands that the government and the state urgently create a special fund for social housing. As a first step, €50 billion are needed for this special fund by 2025. This is the only way to achieve the target of 380,000 social housing units in this legislative period, set by the government in its coalition agreement. Three-quarters of the sum for the special fund “Social Housing”—at least €38.5 billion—must come from the federal government, the Alliance demands. The rest to be financed by the individual German states.

How is the federal government reacting to this alarming report?

Far from drawing conclusions from the report and providing the necessary financial means as soon as possible to build new social and affordable rental housing, Federal Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Construction Klara Geywitz (SPD) responded with the terse statement: “I presume that the figure of 400,000 flats in 2022 and 2023 is unachievable.”

The minister is seeking to buy time, declaring that a new construction target of 400,000 dwellings per year is realistically only achievable from 2024. Although the final completion statistics for 2022 will not be available until May, neither Geywitz nor other members of the government assume that this target will be reached.

Contractors also express strong doubts that the target can be reached in the foreseeable future. The television station ntv quoted on January 23 under the headline “Hard times for people looking for housing—Geywitz cashes in on the coalition’s housing construction target,” the assessment of the Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies (GdW) is that, at least in the medium term, the construction of just 200,000 flats per year is realistic.

The study presented by the Social Housing Alliance presents a great deal of valuable information on the housing shortage as one of the major social issues facing the working class. The demands for massive investment in social housing and more generally the construction of affordable housing are necessary and justified.

However, the results and analyses of the same study show that no positive change can be expected from the current government any more than from previous ones. After all, it is previous governments, in which the SPD has played a leading role, which are responsible for the catastrophic situation on the housing market.

Most recently, the government led by Olaf Scholz (SPD) was able to pull a special fund of €100 billion for the Bundeswehr out of the hat, and the budget for militarism and war is constantly being increased. At the same time, spending on health and education was massively reduced in the latest federal budget. The government has switched to warfare, and there is no money left in its war chest to combat social problems.

In Berlin, there were already mass protests in 2018 and 2019 against the deplorable housing situation, and the demand to expropriate major property companies, such as Deutsche Wohnen, gained mass support. Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets in many other cities against housing shortages and exploding rents.

On September 27, 2021, the day for the election of the government, 56.4 percent of Berliners voted in a referendum for the expropriation of the big housing corporations that rake in profits from the misery of millions of people. However, the Berlin Senate, a coalition of the SPD, Greens and Left Party, which hypocritically supported the referendum during the election campaign, has a ditched the majority decision of the city’s electorate.

PC manufacturer Dell announces 6,650 job cuts, 5 percent of total workforce

Kevin Reed

Dell, the multinational personal computer manufacturer and technology corporation, announced mass layoffs on Monday as part of a restructuring plan after a dramatic decline in computer sales in 2022.

Although the number of layoffs have not been disclosed officially by Dell, Bloomberg reported Monday that 5 percent of the company’s global workforce will be eliminated, or approximately 6,650 jobs.

In a post on Monday on the Dell Technologies Blog, entitled “Preparing for the road ahead,” company Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke said, “Market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future” and previous steps taken “to stay ahead of downturn impacts” are “no longer enough.”

Clarke said the restructuring will affect the global sales, services and ISG engineering groups within the $30 billion corporation based in Round Rock, Texas. ISG is the division of Dell that provides corporate IT infrastructure and cloud computing solutions.

The Dell corporate executive—who has an estimated net worth of $257.5 million—went on to say, “Some members of our team will be leaving the company” and that making the job cuts was necessary “for our long term health and success.”

While the corporate parent Dell Technologies has other business units in smartphones, televisions, software, network and information security systems, 55 percent of its annual revenue comes from personal computer sales.

With 133,000 employees, Dell is the third-largest manufacturer of personal computers with 17.5 percent of worldwide market shares, behind Lenovo (24.1 percent) and HP (19.4 percent) and ahead of Apple (9.8 percent).

During the pandemic, Dell and other computer manufacturers benefited from a dramatic boom in sales. PC makers reported their fastest sales growth in 20 years at the beginning of 2021, when businesses and schools bought notebook computers in record numbers for employees working and students learning remotely.

According to International Data Group (IDG), a total of 348.8 million PCs were sold in 2021, the largest number since 2012, and a reversal of a years-long decline as consumers and businesses spent more money on smartphones and tablets.

By April 2022, the boom in computer sales was over, and by the end of the year, global PC sales had fallen by 28 percent. While all the other manufacturers experienced declines, Dell’s sales fell the farthest, dropping 37 percent in 2022.

The mass layoffs at Dell are the latest in a series to hit technology workers. Lenovo (6,000 job cuts announced in December) and HP (6,000 job cuts announced in November) had already taken measures in response to the 2022 sales drop. Among the other largest tech layoff announcements have been Alphabet/Google (12,000 jobs), Meta/Facebook (11,000 jobs), Microsoft (10,000 jobs) and Salesforce (8,000 jobs).

On January 31, PayPal announced 2,000 job cuts, or 7 percent of the company workforce. Like all the other corporate executives who have delivered news about layoffs, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said the cause was the “challenging macroeconomic environment,” and that cuts were part of “right-sizing our cost structure” and “focusing our resources on our core strategic priorities.”

Writing as if from the same script, the corporate officers express regret that the layoffs are necessary and pledge to provide assistance to those losing their jobs. In some cases, the executives take personal responsibility for the decisions that did not account for the changes in the business climate.

In every case, the layoffs—which have tragic consequences for those seeking jobs when all the employers are shedding workers—are presented as coming about by unforeseen and inexplicable business circumstances.

However, the deepening mass layoffs in the technology and other industries can be traced directly to government policy and, specifically, the steep interest rate increases of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks over the past year.

These rate increases are designed to impose the inflationary crisis—itself the product of central bank policy of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system going back to the Great Recession of 2008—onto the working class by driving the economy into recession and deliberately increasing unemployment.

Zelensky government in turmoil amidst reports of impending Russian offensive

Clara Weiss

The Zelensky government is in turmoil amid indications that Russia is preparing a new offensive with the hundreds of thousands of recruits who were drafted in the partial mobilization drive since September 2022.

On Sunday, the head of the parliamentary faction of the ruling Servant of the People Party, Davyd Arakhamia, announced that Oleksandr Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, would step down and be replaced by Maj. General Kyrylo Budanov, currently the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence. Writing on Telegram, Arakhmia stated “war dictates changes in personnel policy” and announced that Reznikov would be transferred to head the Ministry of Strategic Industries, whose head Pavlo Riabikin would in turn also be dismissed.

Reznikov has been implicated in a major corruption scandal in which high-ranking officials were reported to have gone on vacation, accepted massive bribes or made use of vehicles that were sent to Ukraine by NATO to help evacuate refugees from the war. Defense Ministry officials have been accused of procuring food for the military at massively inflated prices. Reznikov’s deputy, Viacheslav Shapovalov, was already forced to resign.

Reznikov has been a central figure in negotiating the tens of billions of dollars in weapons that are being funneled by NATO into Ukraine. A few weeks ago, he bluntly declared that “Ukraine is a member of NATO de facto.”

As of this writing, the official removal of Reznikov has not occurred with some outlets reporting that the Ukrainian parliament will be voting on it. Reznikov has publicly denied Arakhamia’s announcement that he would be transferred to head the Ministry of Strategic Industries, declaring that he would not take the position, even if it was offered to him. Ukrainian media have reported that, as a military general, Budanov is legally not allowed to assume the position of the head of the defense ministry, which is reserved to civilian leaders.

However, in a meeting on Monday by Zelensky with the military high command, which included the chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny, the head of the National Security Council, Alexei Danilov, and military commanders, Budanov was reported as a participant, whereas Reznikov was not. According to the Ukrainian press, the meeting focused on preparing for a potential Russian offensive in the very near future. Following the meeting, Zelensky announced that he would replace a series of regional officials with figures who have a military background.

As part of the corruption scandal, there have also been raids by the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) on the homes of the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and the former Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who is notorious for his ties to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

The corruption scandal involving some of the country’s best known politicians and oligarchs has no doubt highlighted the callous criminality of Ukraine’s oligarchy, which has shamelessly used the war as yet another opportunity to engage in plunder, while the population is suffering extraordinary deprivation and mass death. However, the claim that what is involved in the shake-up of the Ukrainian state and ruling class is a fight against “corruption” cannot be taken at face value.

Within the Ukrainian state apparatus and oligarchy that have emerged out of the restoration of capitalism by the Soviet bureaucracy—itself one of the largest orgies of organized plunder in history—the alleged fight against “corruption” has long been a preferred method of settling political scores and conflicts within the ruling class and cover up the intervention of the imperialist powers in these conflicts.

The purge of the state apparatus now unfolding is the largest since the beginning of the war, surpassing that of last summer when the head of Ukraine’s Secret Service and long-time ally of Zelensky was dismissed and 651 state employees were investigated for treason. As the WSWS noted at the time, there were clear indications of a direct intervention by Washington in this purge.

This time too, the Western press has openly welcomed Zelensky’s crackdown on high-ranking officials as an effort to prove to NATO that Ukraine would not tolerate the misuse of the tens of billions of dollars in military aid that have been flooding the country.

There are also reports of significant tensions within the Zelensky administration and the ruling Servant of the People Party as well as between Zelensky and the army’s Chief of Staff Valery Zaluzhnyi.

Zaluzhnyi, who is being touted as a potential rival to Zelensky in the 2024 presidential election, is an open admirer of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and fascist mass murderer Stepan Bandera and has been repeatedly photographed with far-right paraphernalia. Shortly after celebrating Bandera’s 104th birthday on January 2, Zaluzhnyi had his first in-person meeting with US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley earlier this year.

Now, he is engaged in a public conflict with Zelensky, as Zaluzhnyi has angrily opposed what amounts to a significant cut in pay for military employees and employees of the interior ministry that took effect with new salary regulations set by the government on February 1.

The current purge of the Ukrainian state was preceded by the high-profile resignation of one of Zelensky’s top advisors, Oleksyi Arestovych, in mid-January, who was attacked by the military and the far right after he had publicly suggested that Ukrainian air defense was responsible for a missile that hit a residential building and killed dozens of people. Since his resignation, Arestovych has repeatedly gone public with warnings that Ukraine could lose the war and cease to exist as a state.

Days after Arestovych’s resignation, a helicopter carrying the entire leadership of the Ukrainian interior ministry crashed, leaving five of its officials dead, including the Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky, a close ally of Zelensky and central figure in the wartime leadership. No successors for their positions have been named in the two weeks since.

The crisis of the Zelensky government is unfolding as NATO is dramatically escalating the war against Russia. The US and Germany have promised Kiev the delivery of hundreds of Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks, and several NATO members are now openly discussing the deployment of F-16 fighter jets.

The escalation has been accompanied by a flurry of meetings by high-ranking officials of the Biden Administration and the Pentagon in Kiev since mid-January. It was later also reported that the director of the CIA, William Burns, also traveled to Kiev to meet with Zelensky. Also in January, the US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley has toured Europe to prepare troops, in his words, “to go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.”

Amidst this escalation by NATO and reports of a planned offensive by Russia, the Zelensky government has begun to publicly acknowledge that it finds itself in a highly precarious military situation. Russian forces are making advances in the fight over Bakhmut, the focus of the fighting in East Ukraine over the past months.

This weekend, Zelensky publicly complained that the “fighting spirit” in the population had markedly declined. He later acknowledged that the fighting near Bakhmut “is getting tougher.” His government has stepped up efforts to crack down on “deserters” and the WSWS has received reports that men across the country are now being forcibly drafted into the military off the streets.

Three months ago, in November, Joint Chiefs Chair Milley declared that both Ukraine and Russia had each suffered about 100,000 casualties in the war so far. This figure has no doubt increased dramatically since. While catastrophic for both sides, proportionally these figures mean far higher losses for Ukraine, which had a prewar population of 40 million as opposed to Russia’s 140 million.

Over 8 million people have fled the country since the beginning of the war and several million of those remaining are living in territories controlled by Russia. The vast majority of the working population, already the poorest in Europe before the war, is now completely impoverished. According to the latest figures of the World Food Program, over almost one in four children (22.4 percent) are suffering from chronic malnourishment and 12.8 million Ukrainians who still live in the country have only “insufficient food consumption.”

The capitalist economics and imperialist geopolitics behind the earthquake disaster in Turkey

Ulaş Ateşçi

Yesterday, two powerful earthquakes shattered the Turkish-Syrian border region. A 7.7 magnitude quake centered in the southern Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş in the early morning was followed by a massive aftershock, of magnitudes 7.6 in the afternoon. The quakes, felt as far away as Lebanon and Cyprus, have left thousands dead and tens of thousands desperately awaiting rescue, buried under the rubble.

In Turkey, the quakes destroyed at least 6,200 buildings, killed 2,921 people and injured 16,000 in 10 cities, where over 15 million people live. Hospitals, roads and airports all have been destroyed or damaged, and damage to electricity transformers and natural gas lines is leading to widespread power and gas outages.

People and emergency teams search for people in the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaziantep, Turkey, Monday, February 6, 2023. [AP Photo/Mustafa Karali]

In Syria, devastated by the NATO alliance’s 12-year war for regime change, the confirmed death toll has already exceeded 1,300. The ongoing war is preventing rescue teams from reaching many areas. Parts of northwest Syria are under the control of the Turkish army and its Islamist proxies, while northeastern Syria is under the control of US forces and their Kurdish nationalist allies.

Tragically, with many people still trapped under collapsed buildings in both Turkey and Syria, the death toll is set to rise substantially. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to spend the night in freezing temperatures or in buildings damaged by the earthquake. The World Health Organization has warned that the death toll may rise eight-fold, to nearly 30,000.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has declared seven days of national mourning, but people across the earthquake zone are largely being left to cope on their own.

With only 9,000 Turkish rescue workers mobilized, no official teams have yet arrived in many places. Miners from various provinces are volunteering to go to the region to join search-and-rescue efforts. While the Turkish government boasts of producing killer drones and long-range missiles capable of hitting Athens, people trying to rescue their friends and loved ones from under the rubble are being to left to work with picks and shovels.

The callous reaction of the financial oligarchy to the disaster was summarized by the Istanbul stock exchange: After the earthquake, shares of cement companies soared.

The massive death toll from these earthquakes is an entirely preventable and widely foreseen tragedy. It is in reality not a natural disaster but a social crime for which the capitalist system bears responsibility.

Yesterday’s earthquakes occurred in the world's second-most seismic region, the so-called “Alpide Belt.” Located on major fault lines, it has a long record of earthquake disasters. The 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey killed nearly 18,000 people and injured tens of thousands more, according to official statistics.

Scientists have increasingly warned that yesterday’s disaster was imminent and implored public authorities to strengthen buildings, warning that failing to do so would come at a horrific cost in lives.

After the Elazığ earthquake in January 2020 in Turkey, Hüseyin Alan, the chairman of the Chamber of Geology Engineers, stated that besides İstanbul, 18 city centers—including Kahramanmaraş and Hatay, which suffered major damage from yesterday’s quake—are on “active faults with high potential to produce earthquakes.” In a major earthquake, buildings there would be “destroyed,” he stated.

Prof. Dr. Naci Görür, one of Turkey’s most respected geologists and advocates of building earthquake-resistant cities, has long pointed to the comparison between Japan and Turkey. He wrote that only four people died from earthquake damage from the 7.4-magnitude quake in Fukushima in 2022, while nearly 20,000 people died in the 1999 Marmara earthquake of the same magnitude. This underscores that virtually all the deaths in yesterday’s quake in Kahramanmaraş could have been avoided.

Görür has been drawing attention to the danger of major earthquakes in this region for years. In a TV program last night after the earthquake, Görür said his team had prepared a project to prevent these losses, but that the authorities had ignored it.

Görür once again warned of a major Istanbul earthquake. A magnitude-7 quake is expected in this mega-city of at least 16 million. While Istanbul city hall, controlled by the bourgeois opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), claims it would cause “only” 14,000 deaths, Görür predicts that the actual death toll could exceed 400,000.

Building earthquake-resistant housing is a critical global problem that capitalism has proved incapable of solving. A 2021 article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science by Chinese, Australian, US, Canadian and German scientists found that in 2015, a staggering 1.5 billion people lived in earthquake-prone areas. This number is rising rapidly, mainly in vulnerable countries of the Middle East and Central and South Asia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Today, the level of development of science and industry is such that earthquake-resistant cities could be built worldwide. Why has social infrastructure gone constantly neglected, the call to redesign cities and renovate buildings to make them earthquake-resistant gone ignored, as were appeals to prepare for post-earthquake rescue and treatment?

Yesterday’s earthquakes occurred at the epicenter of the US-led NATO powers’ three-decades long campaign of imperialist wars in the Middle East following the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Syria has been devastated by a 12-year NATO proxy war that has cost over 500,000 lives and displaced over 10 million people.

Many Syrian refugees who fled Syria to save their lives and live in poverty in southern Turkey have been abandoned to their fate after the earthquake.

Dozens of NATO states have made token statements about sending aid to their NATO ally Turkey, while largely ignoring the victims of the same disaster in Syria, which remains under a crippling US sanctions regime that denies its population access to medical and other resources desperately needed not only to confront the current catastrophe but to sustain daily life.

In reality, the leaders of the imperialist governments, who hypocritically offer condolences to earthquake victims, are primarily responsible for the war in Syria and the catastrophic squandering of social wealth on war, rather than on public health and safety.

All major social issues today, including averting natural disasters, are by nature global problems requiring a socially-coordinated solution. Yet the private profit interests of the bourgeoisie and the division of the world into rival nation-states stand in the way of any progressive response. This is why there has been no worldwide scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic or to global climate change.

Instead, the imperialist powers, whose criminal “let it rip” policies on the COVID-19 pandemic have led to the deaths of over 21 million people globally, now threaten all humanity with World War III by escalating their war on Russia in Ukraine.

Estimate by Airfinity places COVID-19 deaths in China over 1.3 million

Benjamin Mateus

According to the UK-based predictive health analytics company Airfinity, as of February 6, 2023, the estimated cumulative deaths from COVID-19 in China since December 1, 2022, have reached 1.3 million. In just over two months, pandemic fatalities in China have surpassed the figure for official deaths in the US since the pandemic began three years ago. The US toll stands at 1.13 million, with close to 500 people dying each day.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to insist on adhering to an extremely narrow definition of COVID-19 deaths, releasing figures which are acknowledged to be vast undercounts by every reputable scientific body with their wide experience in the behavior of the coronavirus, including its latest iteration of Omicron.

Reuters noted on February 4, 2023, that Chinese health officials reported that between January 27 and February 2, only 3,278 COVID-related in-hospital deaths had occurred. And among these deaths, only 131 deaths were related to respiratory failures, bringing the cumulative tally since December 8 to 82,238.

People look after their elderly relatives receiving medical treatment at an emergency hall of a hospital in Beijing, Saturday, January 7, 2023. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]

Since China officially lifted its Zero-COVID policy on December 7, a tsunami of infections has washed across the country. Government officials called it the exit wave, expressing the hope that the country would emerge from the “dynamic” public health efforts it had mounted to protect the lives and well-being of its population.

It was the unrelenting pressures imposed by global finance capital to bring online its economic engines, and not protests by a mere several hundred university students decrying the infractions on their liberties by the Zero-COVID policy, that were decisive in the about-face.

Given the popularity of the Zero-COVID policy among the Chinese working class, officials sought to assure them that Omicron was truly mild, a lie perpetrated by every other national government that used the highly contagious and deadly strain to carry out a strategy for mass infection and an end to pandemic restrictions.

The new policy in China required a complete cover-up of the real toll in terms of excess deaths that the population was forced to accept in the bureaucracy’s deal with the West. This was exemplified by China’s Vice Premier Liu He’s address to the billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos, proclaiming that China was open for business again.

As the Airfinity update noted, the Omicron surge spread with such ferocity that instead of a second wave during and after the Chinese Lunar New Year, the country experienced one enormous wave of infection peaking in mid- to late-January. Accordingly, they revised their estimates of daily deaths up to 36,000 per day at the peak, accounting for the scale of infection and the impact on health systems as they sought to absorb the massive number of severely infected people.

In particular, rural China faced the hardship of both having a much older population and lacking sufficient health care resources—including basic medications like ibuprofen to reduce high fevers being out of stock—to manage the crisis. As one physician, Dong Chunhong, in the rural region of China’s Shaanxi province recounted in the Telegraph, “People came knocking on my door until midnight. I was exhausted. My whole family had a fever. I wasn’t feeling well, but I still had to serve my people.”

Dong added that the tiny village of Gongjiahe that he lives in has 1,136 people. He believes more than half were infected and 90 percent survived, although he imagined many died at home without his knowledge.

Anecdotal stories about loved ones succumbing to the virus have become legion in press reports. Either hospitals are too crowded to accept more patients or resources are lacking at fever clinics to treat patients. Many of the infected end up waiting at home in the hopes of recovering. However, as their health begins to fail and their need for oxygen becomes acute, they are brought back to hospitals and clinics for immediate attention. Not surprisingly, their families are told their loved one passed away from heart disease. As one man examining his wife’s death certificate mused, “I didn’t know she had such a disease.”

A report released in mid-January by Peking University had estimated more than 900 million people (64 percent) in the country had been infected, with numbers expected to rise during the mass internal migration of the Lunar New Year, which will drive the virus deeper across the country. Notably, their estimates had placed the level of infections in some rural and remote provinces at upwards of 80 to 90 percent, corresponding to a level of deaths that remain uncounted.

In a grim report, attempting to contextualize the hidden deaths in China during the exit surge, the New York Times examined the obituaries of scholars and scientists published over the last four years by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

As the report noted, there are about 1,700 members distributed almost equally between the two institutions. Although the obituaries didn’t specify the exact cause of death other than “illness,” there was an appreciable jump in deaths during the surge weeks compared to previous months (during Zero COVID) on the order of more than five-fold higher. In total 40 scholars and scientists—molecular biologists, nuclear physicists, wildlife scientists, etc.—perished in the two months straddling the New Year when previously on average about three died per month.

The Times report added, “The data drawn from the obituaries are far from conclusive … still, obituaries published by other institutions showed similar spikes in late December and early January. From 2019 to 2021, the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of the top engineering schools in the world, had published between one and three obituaries for professors and staff members in those months. Between December and last month, it announced 29 deaths.”

Aside the combined loss of cumulative knowledge and scientific accomplishments that such distinguished institutions produce for the benefit of society, one must acknowledge, given their prestigious positions with potential access to a better standard of health care, that the toll on the working class of China has been even higher during the last few weeks of mass infection.

A brief glimpse into the social media platform Weibo provides context into how the population is reeling from the betrayals by their government leaders in protecting them and their families from the ravages of the infection.

In response to a post on January 16 from Zhejiang province on the death of their grandfather, responses included, “One could really say that your grandfather was murdered by those health care experts who promoted that [Omicron] is a mere cold, that [infections] are all asymptomatic and the Zero COVID should be lifted.” Another wrote, “I was at the hospital a couple of days ago but could not get access to a bed. I had to stay in the emergency room. It was filled with elderly people, and basically every day we had someone pass away … my whole perspective about life was challenged during that couple of days.”

Indeed. As such grievances are being shared by the population, which is going through a shared catastrophic and horrific experience watching family members become sickened or die, in the financial sector there is only jubilance as the shares for Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker and a major iPhone assembler for Apple, jumped more than 48 percent year-on-year.

Revenue in January reached a record high of more than $22 billion, according to Reuters. A statement issued by the company notes that operations at the Zhengzhou campus, site of worker protests against unsafe public health conditions, are back to normal. In the cold rhetoric of finance, Foxconn said, “Based on market consensus for first quarter 2023, January revenue came in slightly ahead. The outlook for the first quarter will likely reach market expectation.”

50,000 people protest Danish government’s planned scrapping of public holiday to pay for military spending increase

Jordan Shilton

An estimated 50,000 people joined a demonstration in Copenhagen Sunday against the Danish government’s plan to scrap a public holiday to help fund increased military spending. The proposal emerged out of weeks of closed-door talks between the Social Democrats and their right-wing coalition partners and aims to help hike Danish military spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2030.

Social Democrat Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, together with her right-wing Liberal and Moderate party coalition partners, intend to scrap Store Bededag (Great Prayer Day) as a public holiday from 2024. The holiday has been recognised since the 17th century, when it was introduced following the Reformation to replace several holidays previously recognised by the Catholic Church. The holiday takes place on the fourth Friday after Easter.

The vast majority of those participating in Sunday’s protest were much less concerned with the religious significance of the day than they were with the fact that they stand to lose a paid public holiday to fund the military and weapons of war. According to Danish public broadcaster DR, an educator who addressed the rally said, “We need time to process what we experience every single day, and we need time to recover physically and mentally, and we need time where we can focus on our families and ourselves.”

A social and health care assistant added, “For too long we have put up with too much. All too often I see my colleagues being affected by stress, burnout, compassion fatigue due to a stressful day.

“That is why I’m standing here today, to demand my and my colleagues’ right: the right to be human; we should have time to recover, recharge, and be able to pay our bills.”

The Social Democrat-led government intends to enforce a huge hike in defence spending to reach 2 percent of the GDP by 2030. This is seen by the entire political establishment as essential to fund Denmark’s role in the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine, and the expansion of NATO capabilities in the Nordic, Arctic, and Baltic regions.

The government has calculated that it can generate 3.2 billion kroner (about €430 million) through increased tax revenues and reduced subsidies by adding an extra workday each year. The government has offered to increase wages by 0.45 percent to compensate workers for the loss of a paid holiday. However, this increase will not apply to anyone on social welfare programs or pensions. The savings the government will make by freezing these transfer payments amid high inflation amount to 700 million kroner of the 3.2 billion kroner that will be redirected to the military.

Sunday’s demonstration was called by the Danish Trade Union Confederation following a series of smaller local protests over recent weeks. Recognising the strength of public opposition to the government’s plan, most opposition parties have also come out against it. However, they all support the military spending increase, and are merely urging the government to find less provocative ways to make social spending cuts to fund it. For their part, the unions have close ties to the Social Democrats, who have made a major contribution to the rightward lurch of official Danish politics over recent years. In power since 2019, they have adopted the far right’s racist immigrant policy, expanded military spending, and provided weapons to Ukraine.

Eight opposition parties, ranging from the far-right Danish People’s Party and New Right to the pseudo-left Red-Green Alliance/Unity List (RGA) and Socialist People’s Party, issued a statement opposing the abolition of the public holiday.

Socialist People’s Party leader Pia Olsen Dyhr appealed to the government to enter “tripartite talks” with the unions and employers’ groups to agree on an increase of working hours throughout the year so that the public holiday could be retained. She also called for the decision on scrapping the public holiday to be postponed until after the next election, pointing to the fact that none of the parties in government campaigned in support of the move. Olsen Dyhr’s position was backed by former Liberal Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The fact that all the opposition parties back the government’s attacks on social spending and workers’ rights to expand the defence budget is underscored by their unanimous backing for the war in Ukraine. Last march, when Frederiksen was leading a Social Democrat minority government backed by the RGA and Socialist People’s Party, she negotiated a plan to increase defence spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2033. The agreement, supported by the Socialist People’s Party, Liberals, and Conservatives, also committed to holding a referendum to abolish Denmark’s opt-out from the European Union’s defence policy. Although the RGA formally opposed the March agreement, it was only thanks to its sustained parliamentary support for the Social Democrats since 2019 that Frederiksen was in power to negotiate it. At its party conference in May, the RGA agreed to drop its firm opposition to Danish NATO membership to underscore the party’s support for the imperialist war on Russia.

After Frederiksen’s Social Democrats emerged from the 1 November general election as the largest party, she negotiated with the Liberals and Moderates a shorter timetable for the military spending increase. When the Social Democrat/Liberal/Moderate coalition programme was unveiled on December 14, it contained the commitment to reach the 2 percent defence spending goal by 2030, and specified the abolition of the Store Bededag public holiday as the means by which three years could be cut from the original timetable. The coalition agreement, the first between parties from Denmark’s traditional “left” and “right” blocs in over four decades, also included a major income tax cut for high earners and plans to restructure the health care system to expand the role of private providers.

The emergence of mass popular opposition in Denmark to the ruling class’s subordination of all areas of social life to militarism coincides with an upsurge of workers’ struggles across Europe against the drive to make them pay for imperialist wars. In France, millions of workers are expected to participate Tuesday in nationwide protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s assault on pensions, which is aimed at slashing public spending on the elderly to fund an increase in French military spending. In Britain, strikes by National Health Service workers, rail workers, and teachers are resisting real-terms wage cuts, public spending austerity, and privatisation by a Conservative government determined to sharply increase defence spending.

The Case of the Chinese Balloon

Mel Gurtov

During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. In recent times, a number of countries, including the US and France, have launched data-gathering balloons. The Chinese military last year reported favorably on many uses for such balloons, including for surveillance, communication, weather information, and communication. The detection yesterday of a Chinese balloon hovering over Montana, where the US houses ICBMs, probably falls into the category of military surveillance, though the fact of the matter remains to be determined.

To my mind, the US has overreacted to the discovery, postponing an important visit to Beijing by the secretary of state. Granted, a Chinese high-altitude balloon should not have been floating over US territory; as Secretary Blinken said, it violated sovereignty and international law. Still, there are mitigating circumstances, to wit:

+ This is not the first time Chinese balloons have appeared in US skies, without incident.

+ The US routinely deploys spy planes and satellites over Chinese territory.

+ The data presumably collected by the Chinese balloon may not be all that sensitive; China has far more sophisticated ways of acquiring military intelligence.

+  Most importantly, the incident does not warrant the postponement of Blinken’s visit.

Even assuming the worst—that the Chinese balloon was for intelligence gathering and not (as Beijing claims) for weather reporting—the incident could and should have been treated as a diplomatic episode. We should recall other serious US-China encounters, such as the US shooting down of a Chinese jet over Hainan Island, and the US bombing of a target in Serbia that turned out to be the Chinese embassy. Both those incidents resulted in loss of life by the Chinese, and consequent US apologies.

In all these incidents, the common thread is diplomacy. The job of diplomats is to reach an understanding that bad conduct will not be repeated, and that an incident is not an act of war. If US-China relations were positive today, the tension of the latest incident would not have stopped Blinken from going to Beijing. In the balloon incident, the Chinese did apologize. That should have been sufficient to justify the trip, whose purpose is to reduce tensions and promote mutual understanding.

Macron hosts Netanyahu in Paris to plan Israeli arms deliveries to Ukraine

Samuel Tissot

Last Thursday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris. This was Netanyahu’s first official foreign visit since he once again became Prime Minister on December 29 last year.

While no official remarks or transcript were published after Macron and Netanyahu’s meeting, the details of the conversation given to the major newspapers by government officials make clear that the purpose of the meeting was to plan the escalation of NATO’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s provocations against Iran.

French president Emmanuel Macron, right, welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to their meeting at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, France, Thursday, February 2, 2023. [AP Photo/Michel Euler]

The meeting took place amid the efforts of imperialist powers to drastically escalate the war in Ukraine. In the first week of January, Macron became the first NATO leader to announce the delivery of tanks to Ukraine, which has now led to the delivery of 120 advanced battle tanks and even more advanced missile systems to the front lines by EU powers and the United States. It is now widely expected that, in a further escalation, NATO countries will soon deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.

In this context, Netanyahu used the meeting to play his “Ukraine card,” agreeing to send Israeli armaments to Ukrainian forces at his meeting with Macron. In exchange, he sought assurances from France and her European allies that the 2015 Iranian Nuclear treaty will not be revived, and that European powers will continue to turn a blind eye to Israeli bombing raids against Iran, the far-right character of Netanyahu’s government, and its repressive measures at home.

According to a source quoted in Le Monde who had knowledge of the meeting, Netanyahu promised the French president that Israel would deliver “military things” to Ukraine. Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen is due to travel to Kyiv next week to finalize the delivery of Israeli arms to the Ukrainian army.

In return, “Macron expressed his readiness to weigh sanctions on the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.)” In Friday’s press conference after Thursday’s meeting, Netanyahu stated that, “France and Israel are drawing much closer in the way they see the Iran threat.”

The two leaders both lead crisis-riddled regimes that are reviled by broad sections of their populations. As their meeting took place, millions of French and Israeli workers and youth were protesting their respective governments. Indeed, it is more or less apparent that Netanyahu hoped his first official state visit would provide favorable publicity as new Prime Minister and allow him to gloss over massive internal opposition to his regime.

In Israel, demonstrations against Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government and its proposed judicial reform have continued into their fifth week. On Saturday, tens of thousands marched in 20 cities across the country, protesting Netanyahu’s attempted reform to emasculate the judiciary and block prosecution of Netanyahu himself, and against his government, which is made up of far-right nationalists, racists, and homophobes.

In France, Macron oversees an equally fragile regime. The president is facing mass protests of workers and youth against his overwhelmingly unpopular pension reform and rapidly declining standards of living. On January 31, 2.5 million people marched against the reform, according to the French unions, and even the government’s own figure of 1.27 million protesters was a record. This followed a one-day strike on January 18 that was also supported by millions.

The closed-door meeting took place as Netanyahu’s government is waging a series of violent assaults on the Palestinian people, with 32 people killed by Israeli forces or settlers in January alone. This included the Israeli security forces’ raid on the Jenin refugee camp on January 26, which killed 10. Netanyahu’s new offensive is part of his government’s use of state violence to massively expand settlements in the West Bank and suppress any domestic opposition to annexation of Palestinian territories.

Even behind closed doors, Macron did not condemn the murderous policies of the Israeli state. Instead, he cautioned Netanyahu: “If you continue what you are doing in Palestine, it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia to accept an agreement with you.”

In other words, Macron only objects to an escalation of violence against Palestinians insofar as it threatens the NATO-backed axis of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran in the Middle East. Indeed, in 2022 Macron’s government denounced charities and organizations which label the Israeli state’s persecution of its Palestinian population and the privileged legal status of Jewish citizens as apartheid.

Macron is clearly concerned by the instability of Netanyahu’s regime. According to the leaked remarks, the French president told Netanyahu that the judicial reform “opens a crisis unprecedented since the birth of the state in 1948,” and warned that if it goes through, “Paris should conclude that Israel has moved away from a common conception of democracy.”

Macron’s criticisms, though they make clear that the imperialist bourgeoisies are well aware of the anti-democratic character of the present Israeli regime, are shot through with hypocrisy. In alliance with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, the “president of the rich” has overseen his own battery of anti-democratic laws, including the discriminatory anti-Muslim law and the Global Security Law, which outlaws taking photos or video of police.

Macron’s refusal to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s judicial reform or Israel’s murderous suppression of Palestinians, despite his misgivings about their geopolitical consequences, flows from the bloody policies of the NATO powers themselves. Above all, they now seek to secure extensive Israeli support for imperialist war against Russia in Ukraine. Macron’s own pension cut aims to free up the state budget to fund French imperialism’s rapid rearmament and delivery of weapons to Ukraine without cutting into the wealth of the super-rich.

Macron and Netanyahu are widely aware of mass opposition to their regimes and the NATO-Russia war. That is why these two “democratic” leaders met behind closed doors in order to plan the next stage of escalation of the war in Ukraine and how to continue efforts to provoke the bourgeois-nationalist Iranian regime into an action that can be seized upon to justify all-out war against Iran.

The fact that two such widely reviled politicians can come together and plot military attacks on major powers like Russia and Iran must be taken as a warning by masses of workers internationally. The danger that the Ukrainian war could spread across the entire Middle East, and turn into a direct conflict between major, nuclear-armed powers, is very real.

Moreover, neither Macron nor Netanyahu see the eruption of political opposition and social protest in the working class and youth in any way as a reason to change their policies. Instead, they are trying to create conditions to double down on their reactionary policies by accelerating their military escalation and demanding that the population rally to them and to the armed forces in order to prosecute the wars which they themselves are playing a decisive role in launching.