What is Maximus, the call center contractor which laid off hundreds in the US South?

J. L’Heureau

Maximus Call Center workers demonstrate in November 2022. (Photo: Call Center Workers United/Facebook)

The layoffs last month of hundreds of Maximus call center workers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and Bogalusa, Louisiana last month has generated significant opposition from workers at the company.

Among Maximus workers, there is a strong mood for a fight in defense of jobs. But any campaign must be based on an understanding of what workers are up against. Maximus is not just a particularly greedy employer, but a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation with deep ties to the US government.

Founded in 1975, Maximus Inc. is a federal communications contractor headquartered in Tysons, Virginia, half an hour outside of Washington D.C. It has over 39,000 employees in 10 countries and is the parent company of dozens of subsidiaries across the globe, including the US, United Kingdom, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Singapore and South Korea.

One worker at the call center in Bogalusa explained their working conditions as follows to the World Socialist Web Site :

[The] workload is incredibly high and stressful. I handle at least two calls a day where I am verbally abused. I take on average over 50 calls a day with average handle times of 10 minutes in the Medicare division. I have seen coworkers burst into tears/terminated because of the micromanaging and unrealistic expectations. You can also have 50 calls that are deemed excellent but if you make a mistake on one call you are punished. The break times are short. We receive one 30 minute unpaid lunch break and two paid 15 minute breaks. Since I have started working at Maximus, I have noticed that I am drinking more and my mental health has declined. I can't afford to see a doctor, despite paying $100 a month in deductions for my employee health plan.

According to its “Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results for Fiscal Year 2022,” the company’s revenue “increased 8.9% to $4.63 billion, compared to $4.25 billion for the prior year,” and it reached “[r]ecord signed contracts awards of $10.5 billion, which includes awarded Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services contract for Contact Center Operations valued at $6.6 billion.” The company’s current market capitalization is $4.55 billion, and the net worth of CEO Bruce Caswell is nearly $78 million.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) issued a report in May 2021 documenting the codependency between federal contracting and private businesses, using Maximus as the example. The report exposes the mechanisms through which Maximus maintains its monopoly on federal contracts:

Maximus relies entirely on public contracts for its business, and contracts with federal agencies have become an ever-greater part of its business, fueled by acquisitions of other contractors. Initially acting as a subcontractor on the $5.5 billion ten-year call center contract between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and prime contractor General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), Maximus became the largest federal call center contractor in 2018 when it paid $400 million in cash to take over the call centers and the GDIT contract. With the purchase Maximus brought in $670 million in new revenues annually, increasing the company’s overall federal contracting business segment to over $1 billion. After this acquisition, Maximus became the employer of approximately 10,000 workers at the CMS call centers. …

Maximus holds other federal contacts [sic] as well, with the Centers for Disease Control, Department of Education support, and the Veterans Administration, and to continue its growth the company spends $800,000 a year on lobbying the federal government. As Maximus assures its investors, the barriers to entry for providing government services—including the complexity of the bidding process itself and some pre-approval requirements—can limit the pool of competitors for federal agencies to choose from. Under the current acquisition framework, Maximus has an incentive to offer to do the work for a bargain price no matter the impact on workers.

Speaking to Federal Times in July 2022, Virginia-based attorney Todd Whay said, “The government is looking for the cheapest contractor,” and that what “competitors are likely going to offer is going to be the bare minimum in terms of wages.”

Federal Times cited a September 1965 report from the House Education and Labor Committee on the Service Contract Act (SCA), enacted that same year to establish a base minimum wage for service workers contracted through the federal government, compared with workers directly employed by federal government departments. The report sheds light on how the federal government has aided the financial operations of Maximus:

The Federal Government has added responsibility in this area because of the legal requirement that contracts be awarded to the lowest responsible bidder. Since labor costs are the predominant factor in most service contracts, the odds on making a successful low bid for a contract are heavily stacked in favor of the contractor paying the lowest wage. Contractors who wish to maintain an enlightened wage policy may find it almost impossible to compete for Government service contracts with those who pay wages to their employees at or below the subsistence level.

The Institute for Policy Studies, in its 28th annual Executive Compensation Report, released last June, reviewed “compensation over the past year at the 300 publicly held U.S. corporations that had the lowest median wages in 2020.” Its “key findings” exposed how working and middle class “tax dollars are fueling corporations with extreme CEO-worker pay gaps,” adding: “Of the 300 companies in our sample, 40 percent received federal contracts between October 1, 2019 and May 1, 2022. The combined value of these contracts over this three-and-a-half year period [equaled] $37.2 billion.”

The report found that: “Maximus, the top contractor in our sample, has held $12.3 billion in federal contracts over recent years. The company’s contracts include deals to service federal student loans and operate Obamacare and Medicare call centers. In fiscal year 2021, federal contracts made up 45 percent of Maximus total revenue.”

A separate report entitled, “Customer Disservice: Examining Maximus, the Federal Contractor that just became the largest student loan company in the world,” was published in March 2022. Co-sponsored by the CWA (Communications Workers of America) and the Student Borrower Protection Center, it revealed that “Maximus—though virtually unknown to the general public—is a long-time participant in the federal student loan system.” It continued:

From 2000 to 2006, Maximus contracted with the Department [of Education] as a private collection agency (“PCA”) collecting on student loans in default. Since 2013, Maximus has served as the default loan servicer for the Department’s entire defaulted loan portfolio....

[B]eyond the nearly 13 million borrowers for whose accounts Maximus and Aidvantage [the company’s servicer of performing loans] now have sole day-to-day management responsibility, in 2020 Maximus was also selected as one of five “Business Process Operations” vendors by the Office of Federal Student Aid. In this role, Maximus provides a wide range of back-office functions across the federal student loan system for millions more people with student debt, including operating call centers that answer borrowers’ questions about student loan repayment. This means that Maximus is now the largest student loan servicer in the world, managing a staggering $449 billion of debt owed by almost 13 million borrowers and playing a key part in millions of additional borrowers’ repayment sequences.

The report exposed the company’s modus operandi as follows:

Maximus, Inc., the parent company to Maximus Federal Services, is a massive government services company that rakes in nearly $4 billion taxpayer dollars every year, ostensibly towards the goal of “helping government serve the people.” While Maximus’s share of the Department’s student loan portfolio is impressive, the company’s numerous and lucrative contracts with other public service-oriented agencies reveal the true size and scope of the private company’s central role within the federal and state governments.

The many inroads that Maximus has made into the broad expanse of the federal public service landscape are connected by a single thread: Maximus has focused on the provision of critical public service functions to the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans. The company recognizes that the strength of its business model lies in its entanglement with the vital services the federal government provides to people. In a disclosure to its investors, Maximus explains that by targeting “the most vulnerable populations,” the firm “helps insulate our services from significant downward pressure, particularly during an economic downturn.”

It should be added that its parasitic leechings off “the most vulnerable populations” are on behalf of its primary stockholders such as BlackRock, Victory Capital Management, The Vanguard Group, Mackenzie Investments and SSgA Funds Management, Inc.

The deep integration of Maximus with the government and the financial oligarchy underscores that the layoffs are part of a broader jobs bloodbath currently taking place, with tens of thousands of jobs cut in the tech sector in the past few months. This is the outcome of deliberate policies employed by Washington and the Federal Reserve to rein in the push by workers for better wages by ramping up unemployment. A key element in this strategy is the leveraging of higher interest rates to reduce hiring demand.

These policies are also generating massive social conflict. In December and January, more than 40,000 graduate students in the University of California system struck across the state for living wages. Also last year, 120,000 railroaders were pushing for national strike action, to which Congress responded by passing an anti-strike law. In Europe, millions of workers in the UK and France have taken part in national strikes against similar austerity policies. The response of governments everywhere to this is the same—to double down on cuts and to escalate attacks on core democratic rights, including the right to strike.

Stepping up US war preparations against China, Victoria Nuland visits South Asia

Rohantha De Silva

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland visited Nepal, India and Sri Lanka between January 28 and February 1, before travelling to Qatar. Her trip coincided with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s recent trip to South Korea for high-level meetings with President Yoon Suk-yeol and Defense Minister Lee Jong-seop.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. China has not done enough, she said, to meet International Monetary Fund requirements to unlock a bailout package for Sri Lanka. [Photo: Eranga Jayawardena/WSWS]

Nuland, who served under former US presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, is infamous for her aggressive pursuance of Washington’s geopolitical interests. She played a key role in the 2014 fascist-led coup that overthrew the pro-Russian Ukraine government of President Viktor Yanukovich.

In 2013, Nuland bragged that Washington had “invested over $5 billion” in the Ukrainian opposition, and in 2014, she was recorded on a telephone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selecting the head of a post-coup government and discussing US collaboration with neo-fascist forces like the Svoboda party.

Nuland spent January 29 and 30 in Nepal, where she met with Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and several other officials. She was the highest-ranking foreign dignitary to visit the country since Dahal’s election as prime minister on December 25.

In Kathmandu she denounced unnamed “autocrats” for “trying to change global rules by force”—a provocative reference to Beijing and Moscow.

Washington repeatedly and falsely promotes its political and military aggression against Russia and China as missions to defend “democracy.”

Underscoring US efforts to enlist Nepal in the military-strategic offensive against China, Nuland declared: “It’s enormously important for the US to have partners like Nepal.” Sandwiched between China and India, Nepal is caught in the intensifying strategic conflict between the US and India on one side, and China on the other.

Nepal is receiving heightened attention from Washington since Dahal, leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), became prime minister with the support of K.P. Sharma Oli, head of the pro-China Communist Party of Nepal—United Marxist-Leninist. It was expected that Dahal would become prime minister backed by Sher Bahadur Deuba, leader of the pro-India Nepali Congress. The US and India fear that the Dahal government will be closely aligned with Beijing.

On February 5, a few days after Nuland’s visit, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power arrived in Kathmandu. Nepal is due to receive $US500 million under the US Millennium Challenge Corporation project. Washington has also agreed to provide another $659 million in economic assistance through USAID in the next five years. The aid is clearly aimed at undermining the influence of China, which remains Nepal’s largest foreign investor.

On January 31, Nuland travelled to India where she met with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and later Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra. Media reports said Nuland and Jaishankar discussed the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Pacific, and the “many points of convergence” in the India-US relationship.

It was Nuland’s second meeting with Jaishankar in the past two months. At their previous meeting, on December 15 at the UN headquarters, Jaishankar and Nuland discussed their efforts to support “security in the Asia Pacific and globally.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden will meet three times this year—at the G7, Quad and G20 summits—while US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to visit India next month.

India is Washington’s principal military-strategic partner in South Asia. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has been transformed into a frontline state of the US war drive against China. New Delhi has bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral alliances with the US, Japan and Australia. New Delhi and Washington are collaborating closely to enlist Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives into this anti-China military-strategic offensive.

As Nuland was visiting New Delhi, Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met with his US counterpart Jake Sullivan and other senior officials in Washington to inaugurate the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (ICET) dialogue between the two countries.

In an exclusive interview with Mint, former Indian envoy to the US Arun Singh said the ICET would provide mechanisms for the two countries to “explore and deepen collaboration in several critical and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum, 6G, space, semiconductors and biotech.” Singh said the “rise of China” was a factor in driving this collaboration.

Nuland visited Sri Lanka on February 1 where she met with President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Nuland declared that Washington supports the Colombo government’s efforts “to stabilize the economy, protect human rights, and promote reconciliation” and that both countries were together for “an inclusive, prosperous and secure future for all Sri Lankans.”

Nuland’s call for a prosperous future “for all Sri Lankans” is totally hypocritical. The extreme economic and political crisis facing the country, which was worsened by COVID-19, was even more dramatically intensified by the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

Contrary to Nuland’s bogus claims, the Wickremesinghe government, working in tandem with the US and the International Monetary Fund, is brutally imposing the full burden of this crisis onto millions of already impoverished workers, rural toilers and their families.

Nuland also used her Sri Lankan trip to further denounce Beijing. She declared: “We expect that China will provide credible and specific assurances regarding its readiness to join the rest of us in meeting the IMF standards regarding debt restructuring. We are seeing the rest of Sri Lanka’s creditors come forward with those assurances, and now all eyes are on China to do the same.”

Nuland’s comment is a reference to Sri Lanka’s negotiations with its creditors on the restructuring of Colombo’s defaulted loan repayments, as demanded by the IMF.

Immediately responding to Nuland’s provocative remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning stated: “What was said by the US side does not reflect the truth. The Export-Import Bank of China has already provided Sri Lanka with the letter to express support for its debt sustainability. Sri Lanka has responded positively and thanked China for that.”

Mao called on the US to, “Show some sincerity and actively do something to help Sri Lanka weather the current difficulties… rather than jabbing fingers at China’s close cooperation with Sri Lanka.”

Nuland’s trip to Sri Lanka—the second within a year—further indicates the prominence Washington gives to the strategically located Indian Ocean nation and the intensification of US preparations for war against China.

Intact hominid skull found in China offers insights into human evolution

Frank Gaglioti

The announcement in November of the discovery of what appears to be a near-intact hominid skull in China is a stunning discovery. It has the potential of further revealing the complex intricacies of human evolution particularly in China and the Eurasian landmass more generally. Complete hominoid skulls are a rare find and can offer an important opportunity to gain further insights into human evolution. 

The skull of Yunxian 1, an earlier find at the site. [Photo: Gary Todd]

The discovery of a near-intact hominid skull should be welcomed, as its analysis will further add to our knowledge of humanity’s complex evolutionary history. 

The skull is named Yunxian 3 as it was discovered 20 kilometres west of Yunyang, formerly known as Yunxian, in central China’s Hubei province. It was found on 18 May 2022, 35 meters from two other skulls, known as Yunxian Man or Yunxian 1 and 2, discovered in 1989 and 1990 respectively. The excavation site is known as Xuetangliangzi in the city of Shiyan’s Yunyang district.

The Yunxian site is located on a terrace on the Han River, a tributary of the Blue River in the Hubei Province, at 550km north-east of Wuhan and 40km west of Yunxian. 

Yunxian 3 was found half buried in an upright position. So far scientists have revealed the forehead, including the brow ridge and eye sockets, as well as the top, back and left cheekbone of the skull. Gao Xing, paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, told Nature that it is not known if the teeth and the lower jawbone are still present. Gao Xing is excavating the skull.

‘No obvious deformation has been found. It is in very good condition and features the typical characteristics of Homo erectus,’ Gao told the Global Times.

Fieldwork is currently underway to fully excavate the skull, which is a meticulous and laborious task. This will be followed by extensive analysis to extract as much information as possible.

“It’s a wonderful discovery, unlike those earlier discoveries, which were crushed and distorted after millennia underground, the third skull, Yunxian 3, seems to be in good condition,” palaeoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris Amélie Vialet, who worked on the Yunxian 2 skull, told Nature.

The earlier discoveries were dated at between 1.1 million and 800,000 years old using sediments and nearby fossils. Dating was done using Uranium series and Electronic Spin Resonance on some teeth of the Yunxian fauna.

‘Preliminary studies showed that the No 3 skull should belong to the same period of time as the No 1 and No 2,’ Gao said.

Based on Vialet’s three dimensional analysis of Yunxian 2, the skulls are considered to be members of the archaic hominid species Homo erectus. It is highly likely the current discovery is of the same species.

H. erectus is thought to have originally evolved 2 million years ago. The species is one of the most widespread, with fossils found in Africa and across the Eurasian landmass to China and southeast Asia (Java man). The species is thought to have become extinct 117,000 years ago, based on a fossil found in Ngangdong Java in 2019.

Skeletal remains of “Java man” in an Indonesian museum [Photo by Peter Maass / CC BY 3.0]

Eugene Dubois discovered the first H. erectus fossil in Java in 1891. It was originally dubbed Pithecanthropus erectus or upright ape man. 

Scientists think H. erectus was relatively large, probably standing about 1.5m tall. The brain size was about 800 cubic centimetres, about 60 percent smaller than modern humans, but 50 percent larger than the earlier australopiths. They were one of the first humans to walk upright and had modern body proportions, such as long legs and shortened arms adapted for a life out of the trees.

They were technologically adept, with a sophisticated tool kit known as Acheulean stone tools, consisting of hand axes and blades. H. erectus had the ability to control fire.

H. erectus had a more diverse diet than its predecessors, which meant its teeth were smaller, as they didn’t require robust chewing adaptations, giving it a more gracile face. 

Because of the widespread nature of H. erectus and its long existence, it is considered a highly variable species across its range.

Vialet told Nature that the “Yunxian 1 and 2 skulls share some features with older Javanese fossils, and others with younger Homo erectus fossils from mainland Asia. Like the Javanese fossils, they are large, big-brained skulls.” But, she says that they are “less heavily built, a characteristic that usually indicates a more modern individual.”

Scientists consider the Chinese populations of H. erectus to be highly variable. It is not known if this is due to each population evolving independently, or successive waves occurring out of Africa.

Palaeoanthropologist at Shandong University Yameng Zhang said, “More complete Chinese H. erectus like Yunxian 3 are crucial to answer this question.”

Vialet is currently comparing Yunxian 2 to European hominid populations to see whether the Chinese specimen could be similar. She told Nature that Yunxian 3 should be compared with Chinese as well as European hominid fossils, such as the 1.4-million-year-old face from the Sima del Elefante cave in Atapuerca, Spain. 

A jawbone fragment discovered in northern Spain on June 30 is considered to be the oldest hominid fossil discovered in Europe so far. It has been estimated as 1.4 million years old. Scientists have identified it as a new species, Homo antecessor, that evolved from H. erectus and may have been an ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans. A comparison with Yunxian 3, if its jaw bone is found intact, will be critical.

Scientists think that H. erectus originated in Africa about 2 million years ago, probably from an australopith or early Homo species, and then migrated across the Eurasian landmass to Asia and southeast Asia. Paleoanthropologists studying H. erectus think that it may be an ancestral species to modern humans, H. sapiens.

Although the African and Asian H. erectus specimens have been designated into one species, their relationship is still very controversial. 

The skull of Yunxian 2, another skull found earlier at the site. [Photo: Gary Todd]

A comment published in Nature Education Knowledge Project in 2013 by Professor Adam Van Arsdale at the Department of Anthropology, Wellesley College, put forward a possible classification of H. erectus. Some scientists consider the species restricted to eastern and southeast Asia, with fossils from the Lower Pleistocene through the Middle Pleistocene, dated at approximately 1.4 to 0.2 million years ago. Earlier fossils from (Caucasian) Georgia and Africa that have similarities to the eastern and Southeast Asian H. erectus, but also have more primitive traits, are designated as Homo ergaster. While fossils from the Middle Pleistocene (1.25 to 0.7 million years ago) found in Europe are classified as Homo heidelbergensis.

“Our current findings have shown that human evolution in East Asia was continuous. The links between Homo erectus and later Homo sapiens are still unclear, but this issue is a key to decoding the origins of modern human beings in East Asia. Indisputably, the skull fossil can provide crucial evidence,” Gao said.

Allegations of Adani Group corruption shake India's financial markets, Modi government

Kranti Kumara

The stock valuation of the Adani Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates, has been more than halved in the two weeks since a Wall Street investment firm published a scathing report charging its owners and management with corrupt practices.

The sudden reversal in the Adani Group’s fortunes has shaken India’s financial markets and the country’s far-right, Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

There are mounting fears the financial contagion will spread, as the Adani Group’s shrinking market capitalization impacts the balance sheets of India’s banks, which are already weighed down by a mountain of debt, and other major lenders and investors.

India’s opposition parties, meanwhile, are pointing to the extent to which the Adani Group, and its chairman, Gautam Adani—who up until a few weeks ago was being touted as Asia’s richest person—have benefited from extensive, often times obtrusive, BJP government support. Modi himself has a decades-long association with the rags-to riches oligarch Gautam Adani, whose wealth has grown exponentially since the BJP came to power in New Delhi in May 2014.  

Gautam Adani with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [Photo: Twitter/Gautam Adani]

On Jan. 24, Hindenburg Research published a report titled “Adani Group: How the world’s 3rd richest man is pulling the largest con in corporate history.” It accused the Adani Group—which is comprised of 9 publicly listed entities, seven of them headed by Gautam Adani—of pervasive accounting fraud and brazen stock manipulation to puff up the Group’s financial valuation. It has done so, the report alleges, by creating an “empire” of shell companies in Mauritius, Cyprus, UAE and other places, which have indulged in illegal “stock-parking,” “wash-trading” and money laundering.

India’s corporate media have promoted the meteoric rise of Adani and his Adani Group as a quintessential example of “India’s growth story.” In doing this, they have ended up saying more than they intended for Adani is indeed emblematic of the raft of newly minted Indian billionaires and multimillionaires that has arisen over the past three decades through the state-enabled looting of public assets, massive tax cuts and other concessions, and the brutal exploitation of the country’s impoverished working class.

That the key to Adani’s success has been his close ties to Modi and his government has long been an open secret. He has benefited from the privatization of huge swathes of publicly built infrastructure, including seaports, electricity generation and transmission, coal mines and airports. These assets were invariably sold off for way less than they were worth, and with much of the money for their purchase coming from unsecured loans extended to Adani by India’s public sector banks.

Adani, who has frequently accompanied Modi on his foreign travels, has also benefited from high-level BJP government interventions, some of them apparently delivered by Modi himself, to smooth the path for large foreign acquisitions.

Recently, Adani traded on India’s burgeoning military-security partnership with Israel and Modi’s close connections to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to acquire Israel’s Haifa port. Earlier, the Adani Group acquired the rights to develop the vast, highly polluting Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia.   

The Adani Group’s corrupt modus operandi sheds light on the crony capitalism that is the hallmark of the Modi government. It duplicates on the national stage the “Gujarat model” of economic development that Modi pioneered during his tenure as Gujarat chief minister from 2001 to 2014. The “Gujarat model” essentially consisted of making government policy and the state bureaucracy totally subservient to the profit interests of private corporations, with those industrialists and businessmen close to Modi being first in line to benefit from the fire-sale of government assets and other “pro-investor” policies. Meanwhile, worker protests were ruthlessly suppressed.

As Ashok Swain, a professor at Uppsala University observed to the Asia Times, Adani’s spectacular personal enrichment is mind-boggling and clearly inextricably bound up with his ties to Modi and the BJP government. “Before Modi became the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September 2013, Adani’s worth was $1.9 billion,” explained Swain, “In August 2022, while Covid pushed 230 million Indians into poverty, Adani’s worth went up to $137 billion. Why does anyone need Hindenburg Research to write a report?”

On January 29, with its stock already in freefall, the Adani Group issued a 413-page “reply” to the charges of corporate criminality outlined in the Hindenburg report. Unsurprisingly, it wrapped Gautam Adani in the national flag, saying that the charges made in the report were a “calculated attack on India.”

In its response, Hindenburg Research pointed out that only 30 of the 413 pages dealt in some fashion with the issues raised in its original report, and that the Adani Group had failed to provide any sort of answers to 62 of the 88 questions that report raised. It went on to say that “India’s future is being held back by the Adani Group, which has draped itself in the Indian flag while systematically looting the nation.”

Initially the Modi government maintained a deathly silence on the Hindenburg Research report. But the rout of the Adani Group on Indian and US stock markets, prompted the finance minister to issue a statement pledging that regulatory authorities will do their jobs, and insisting that “the macroeconomic fundamentals of our economy and image, none of it is affected.”

This, however, failed to reassure international investors. Following the nosedive in the share prices of Adani Group companies, the giant US bank Citigroup issued a statement saying it will no longer accept either Adani Group shares or bonds as collateral for new loans. Similar steps have been taken by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse and the British lender Standard Chartered.

As of Monday, February 6, the shares of Adani group companies had lost a combined total of around $110 billion from their estimated valuation of $218 billion when the Hindenburg Research report was released.

A further rout in Adani Group companies’ share prices on Monday was only arrested because India’s stock market and regulatory authorities stepped in to restrict the maximum slide in Adani stock prices to minus 5 percent for a subset of Adani companies and minus 10 percent for Adani Transmission. The share prices of all the companies concerned slid to these limits.

In recent days, Adani Group share prices have slightly rebounded. There is every reason to believe that this is due to fresh injections of funds from India’s public sector banks and other predominantly state-owned corporations like the Life Instance Corp. of India, already a large Adani Group investor.

Despite its public pose of calm, the government is clearly acutely concerned about both the economic and political fallout of the potential unraveling of the Adani Group.

The Modi government and India’s corporate media are continually tub-thumping about India’s “world-beating” economic growth. The reality is very different.

In the 2023-24 budget, tabled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1, the government announced a massive allocation of Rs. 13.7 trillion ($167 billion) for capital expenditure for improving or building seaports, roads, bridges and other infrastructure all for the benefit of big business. While India’s existing infrastructure is woefully inadequate, the principal reason for the massive hike in infrastructure spending was to kick-start the economy, under conditions where private investment has been falling for years. This is because India’s companies are weighed down by debt and, when they can’t benefit from government largesse in the manner of the Adani Group, prefer to engage in stock buybacks and other financial manipulations rather than invest. 

In an action that points to the government’s extreme sensitivity about any exposure of Modi’s close ties to Adani, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla ordered large parts of a speech by Congress Party leader Rahul Gandhi raising questions about the government’s relations with the Adani Group and Modi’s pre-2014 relationship with Gautam Adani from the parliamentary record.

Modi has also hit back by dragging up numerous scandals that demonstrate that the Congress Party-led government that held office from 2004-14 was immersed in numerous corrupt dealings with various Indian business houses. What Modi of course could not and would not say is that this vast nexus of government-business corruption has greatly expanded under his rule; is rooted in the very DNA of Indian capitalism; and has grown exponentially since the Indian ruling class formally abandoned its state-led capitalist development strategy in 1991 in favor of full-scale integration with the imperialist-led world capitalist order. 

Both Adani and Modi hail from the state of Gujarat. Their close association dates back to 2003, that is shortly after Modi came to national prominence because of his role, as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, in instigating and overseeing the February 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. This mass killing by Hindu-terrorist gangs linked to the BJP and its allied organizations resulted in the gruesome deaths of at least 2,000 innocent persons, mostly Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of other impoverished Muslims were rendered homeless and forced to live in squalid refugee camps which exist even till now.

Subsequently at an event organized by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) in February 2003 in New Delhi, where Modi was the chief guest, two well-known industrialists, Rahul Bajaj and Jamshyd Godrej, aggressively grilled Modi onstage about the “law and order” situation in Gujarat.

This angered Adani and several Gujarat industrialists. They broke with the CII for having brought “disrepute to Gujarat” and then formed a body named the Resurgent Group of Gujarat to promote the state under Chief Minister Modi as an unmatched business-friendly state. They initiated a biennial business summit, “Vibrant Gujarat,” which showcased Modi as an autocratic leader who would cater to the profit interests of corporations by brooking no opposition from the government bureaucracy, popular protests or worker agitations.

This event soon came to be a major draw for Indian and global investors, with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the CII, which had issued a groveling apology to Modi for what had happened at its 2003 event, all serving as sponsors.

By ruthlessly implementing pro-investor policies, Modi soon endeared himself to Indian industrialists such as Ratan Tata, scion of the Tata empire, who at an earlier time would have shunned a Hindu supremacist thug like Modi. Nevertheless, Adani continued to have a preferential relationship with Modi.

In 2014, Indian big business propelled the would-be Hindu supremacist strongman and his BJP to power so as to intensify the class war assault on India’s workers and toilers and more aggressively assert their great-power ambitions on the world stage. Adani’s ascent among India’s billionaires would soon attain warp speed, making him briefly last year the world’s second wealthiest person. Five days ago, Forbes listed him as 18th, with an estimated fortune of “merely” $60 billion.

US Navy attacked Nord Stream pipeline, says Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh

Andre Damon

The destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany was a terror attack carried out by the US Navy, in a mission planned before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published Wednesday.

On September 26, a series of explosions destroyed the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which shipped natural gas from Russia to Germany. While no one has publicly admitted responsibility, US officials have expressed satisfaction at the pipeline’s destruction.

A promotional photo published by the US Navy for the "research" operation during the BALTOPS 22 war game, which Hersh alleges was used to plant the explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines. [Photo: US Navy]

Seymour Hersh is one of the world’s leading investigative journalists, who exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. He also contributed to revealing the Watergate scandal and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. While Hersh, as usual, does not report his sources, and his accusations cannot be independently verified, his reporting has been confirmed again and again in the past.

Hersh alleges that:

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

The terrorist attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines destroyed civilian infrastructure valued at over $20 billion. It resulted in the single largest spill of methane gas in human history, releasing the equivalent of 14.6 million tons of CO2, with a major climate impact. The attack contributed to a spike in energy prices through Europe and the entire world.

In congressional testimony in January, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said, “I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

These statements strongly suggested that the US and its allies viewed the attack favorably. They also made it appear likely that the attack had been directed by Washington through an intermediary, such as the Ukrainian special forces.

According to Hersh, however, the attack was not only planned by the United States, but actively conducted by the US Navy. If true, what occurred was a staggeringly reckless attack on Germany, a NATO ally of the US. The United States fought against Germany in two world wars, in which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were killed. In 1917, the United States nominally entered World War I in response to the German policy of indiscriminately sinking American civilian ships using submarines.

In his report, Hersh explained the economic significance of the Nord Stream pipelines:

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance…

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe…

America’s political fears were real: [Russian President] Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America…

As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

Hersh does not note that following the shutoff of European natural gas imports from Russia, the US massively increased its natural gas exports to Europe, leading to record profits for US energy companies.

As one European official told Politico, “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the US because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.”

Hersh reports that plans for the American attack on Nord Stream 2 were already in the making ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He writes:

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, [National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

Hersh claims that Sullivan proposed a “plan for the destruction” and that he was “delivering on the desires of the President.”

Describing the reasoning among the war planners, Hersh writes, “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

On February 7, ahead of the invasion, US President Joe Biden declared publicly, “If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

According to Hersh, Biden’s statements shocked the planners of the operation.

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack…

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

The US Navy would, according to Hersh, plant the explosives during the BALTOPS 22 military exercise, which involved dozens of warships and thousands of personnel. The US Navy published a press release regarding deep-sea diving operations during the exercise, including a picture of a deep-sea diver.

While the explosives were planted during the exercise, according to Hersh, the White House ultimately decided not to trigger the explosions immediately, and instead allowed them to be remotely detonated in September.

Hersh’s report included rebuttals from the White House, which declared in response to his story, “This is false and complete fiction,” and from the Central Intelligence Agency, which declared “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who shared the article on Twitter, responded to the denials from the White House, “Can you think of any examples from history of a secret operation that the White House was responsible for, but strongly denied? Besides, you know, that little ‘mass surveillance’ kerfuffle.” Snowden was referring to the illegal NSA mass surveillance program created after the 9/11 terror attacks, which he publicly exposed in 2013.

Meanwhile, the entire US media has treated the attack as if it were an unsolved mystery, despite statements by US and NATO officials openly welcoming the bombings. Continuing a wall of silence, the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have not reported Hersh’s article, or even the denial by the White House.

After earthquake, Syria abandoned to its fate as Turkey seeks to quell public anger

Ulaş Ateşçi

The impact of Monday’s massive earthquakes on the Turkish-Syrian border is steadily worsening. As of this morning, the death toll in Turkey has reached 12,873, while reports indicate that at least 3,162 people are confirmed to have died in Syria.

Aerial photo shows the destruction in Kahramanmaras, southern Turkey, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. [AP Photo/Ahmet Akpolat]

World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Europe Dr. Hans Kluge announced a “grade 3 emergency” in the region. Three days after the earthquakes, tens of thousands of people are thought to still be under the rubble in the freezing cold in both countries.

Millions of people affected by the earthquake in Syria, ravaged and divided by the civil war fomented by the NATO powers since 2011, are largely abandoned to their fate. The US and European powers still refuse to lift the crippling sanctions imposed on the country. Moreover, US forces’ continued occupation of oil fields in northeastern Syria deprives Damascus of critical revenue to deal with the disaster.

The World Food Program of the United Nations said in late January that hunger in Syria was at its highest level since 2011. It stated that 12 million Syrians don’t know where they will get their next meal, and 2.9 million are at risk of starvation.

In Turkey, there is enormous public anger over the failure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government to take any precautions against the expected earthquakes, despite many warnings from scientists, and over the inadequate and uncoordinated official response to the earthquakes. The government is more interested in suppressing this social opposition than in saving those trapped under the rubble.

Erdoğan made this clear in his remarks on the catastrophe during his visit to the earthquake zone yesterday. “These things have always happened. These are things that are part of fate,” he said, falsely portraying the preventable deaths of tens of thousands as an inevitable “natural disaster,” rather than a social crime.

In Kahramanmaraş, the epicenter of the earthquake, Erdoğan said: “Our work in the earthquake zones will accelerate and become much more comfortable. At first, there were problems at airports and roads in some places. We will overcome them too. Today we are more comfortable, tomorrow we will be more comfortable.” In reality, it is known that the first hours after a major earthquake are critical for rescuing those trapped under the rubble.

Speaking in Hatay, another city badly damaged by the quake, Erdoğan said: “Of course there are shortcomings. The conditions are very clear. It is not possible to be prepared for such a major catastrophe.” Calling for a period of “unity and solidarity”, he attacked criticism of his government’s late and inadequate response as “filthy negative campaigns.”

The government’s restriction of access to Twitter during Erdoğan’s visit to the region sparked massive outrage. With pro-government media blacking out the situation in the earthquake zone, and even cutting off the speeches of earthquake victims, Twitter had become the main independent news center in the country. Moreover, many people still trapped under the rubble were making their voices heard on Twitter.

Erdoğan’s statement, “It is not possible to be prepared for such a major catastrophe,” is a political lie. In fact, scientists have been warning for years that major earthquakes are extremely likely in this region, and indicating what could be done to avert mass death.

After the January 2020 Elazığ earthquake, well-known geologist Professor Naci Görür warned about the Kahramanmaraş area, noting that there might have been a “stress transfer” to the fault lines in the region. Drawing attention directly to the location of the Kahramanmaraş earthquake, Görür said: “The last earthquake in the Türkoğlu region of Kahramanmaraş was 7.4 in 1513. So this is also an earthquake-prone area. We need to pay special attention to these places. We have to take mitigation measures now.”

However, measures that the central government, governorships and local governments could have taken in coordination to prevent earthquake devastation were not taken, and millions of people were were left to their fate.

While a total of 6,444 buildings have collapsed in Turkey, more than 2,700 have collapsed in Hatay, one of the hardest-hit provinces. Hatay Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Lütfü Savaş said yesterday, “Everywhere is really destroyed. We could only reach 2-3 percent of the destroyed buildings.” This could mean that tens of thousands of people are still under the rubble in Hatay alone.

However, it was known that Hatay, like other major cities in the region, is located on fault lines. Aslıhan Gündoğdu’s master’s thesis on Antakya, the central district of Hatay, titled “Urban Regeneration Policies in Turkey: A Field Research on Urban Regeneration in Antakya,” published in 2019, stated the following:

80 percent of the buildings in the urban area consist of risky structures. Although these facts have been put forward in reports, and it is known that this city is in urgent need of transformation, no significant work has been done on this issue to date.

The devastating implications of the failure to strengthen buildings and public infrastructure in Antakya and other cities, to make them earthquake-proof, is now apparent. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are trapped under collapsed buildings, and their chances of being rescued from entirely preventable deaths are fading by the hour.

Speaking to BBC Türkçe in Antakya yesterday, an aid volunteer said: “People are waiting by the rubble. There are living people inside… There is very little work in the rubble. The situation is very bad.”

Geophysical engineer Professor Övgün Ahmet Ercan’s estimates of the number of people still under the rubble are frightening. Yesterday, he said, “It is a place where there are about 4 million buildings. While 13 million people live in these buildings, about 7,000 buildings have collapsed, and people are desperate.”

He added: “According to my calculations, approximately 200,000 people were under the collapsed buildings, based on assuming there are 4 floors and 8 apartments [in every building]. The number of people pulled out of the collapse is about 8,000.”

Murat Ağırel, a columnist for the daily Cumhuriyet who is in the earthquake zone, said yesterday that in Hatay, “people have given up hope in the state, and everyone is trying to pull out their relatives under the rubble with their own means … Everyone is coming here to help, but there is still a lack of coordination. There are also teams coming from abroad. The pain here is indescribable. Unfortunately, there are places where no teams have reached.”

He added the following:

We are living in a situation of diminishing hope. After this hour, we are going to hear huge cries. Because people have blatantly died. Before, we used to call out from above the rubble ‘can anyone hear our voices?’ Now people are calling out from below the rubble ‘can anyone hear our voices?’ The main problem is lack of coordination, the main problem is the mentality of ‘with the blessings of our president,’ the main problem is the inability of state institutions to come together and carry out the work in a coordinated manner.

Social anger is growing in the earthquake region and across the country. In Adıyaman, which was severely affected by the earthquake, the governor was met with protests by earthquake victims. Yesterday, it was announced that the governor of Ordu had been temporarily appointed to replace him, while Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Adil Karaismailoğlu was also met with protests in the city.