Governments make provocative offer to German public sector workers

Marianne Arens

The latest offer made by the federal and local governments to public sector workers is a provocation. The offer does not come close to covering the wage losses due to current inflation levels, let alone the wage cut ensuing from the last contract. What public sector workers are being offered amounts to a massive real wage cut.

The employers’ side presented the offer on February 23 in Potsdam at the end of the second round of negotiations. Prior to that, the German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and Karin Welge, who represents the municipalities as mayor of Gelsenkirchen, held two days of talks with the main public service union, Verdi, led by Frank Werneke. Werneke rejected the employers’ offer on behalf of his union and the civil servants’ association and announced new warning strikes to take place up until a third round of talks takes place from March 27 to 29.

Werneke and his fellow bureaucrats will use the period up to the new round to strike a deal with their fellow SPD party colleagues Faeser and Welge that is only just above the current offer. This modus operandi has now become commonplace for Verdi. For example, at the end of November 2021, the contract bargaining battle for state employed public service workers was sold out in similar fashion in the third round of negotiations.

There is therefore only one way to prevent the biggest real wage cut since the founding of the Federal Republic: The struggle must be organised independently of Verdi and the leadership of the negotiations taken out of the hands of its highly paid union bureaucrats. To this end, independent action committees must be set up that network nationwide and internationally.

The lead negotiators: Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and Verdi boss Frank Werneke [Photo by BMI]

The offer on the table provides for an increase in salaries of just 5 percent over the course of more than two years. The term of the contract is to last 27 months (from January 1, 2023 to March 31, 2025). The first wage increase of just 3 percent is proposed for October 1, 2023, i.e., after nine months of workers forgoing any wage increase. An additional 2 percent is due to be paid in June 2024.

The current soaring rate of inflation is to be “compensated” by two one-off payments, the first of which, €1,500, is due to be paid in May 2023 and the second, of €1,000, in January 2024. However, these one-off payments favoured by government will have no lasting effect on wages and are at best a drop in the ocean. The money can only be used to settle some immediate debts with wages remain painfully low, while the price of fuel, heating, housing and food continues to rise.

In the last contract agreement in October 2020, Verdi agreed to a graduated wage increase of 3.2 percent over a period of 28 months. Since then, however, prices have risen by around 12 percent according to the official inflation rate, and by 7.9 percent in the past year alone. Even under the optimistic assumption that inflation will fall to 7 percent this year and 5 percent next year, price levels would still be around 25 percent higher when the contract now on offer expires compared to the year 2020. Salaries, on the other hand, would have risen by only 8.2 percent. This corresponds to a real wage reduction of about 17 percent within five years!

For apprentices, students and trainees, there is also to be just a 5 percent wage increase over 27 months; again with one-off payments (€750 in May plus €500 in January 2024) also planned.

The proposal makes particularly regressive provisions for health workers who have suffered the most during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of being compensated for their hardships, they are now to be further fleeced, which will undoubtedly only exacerbate the already dire staffing situation in the health service.

The Federation of Municipal Employers’ Associations (VKA) has written that the offer contains “important points for municipal employers that affect the sphere of hospitals and care facilities, communally owned banks and utilities.” In particular, in the future, institutions declared to be in “economic difficulties” are to be allowed to bypass agreed pay scales, for example, for the nursing service or for doctors.

For professional workers in higher pay grades, the employers promise to top up their “annual bonus.” This amounts to returning to the better paid a fraction of what has been withheld from all workers for years. For example, years ago a 13th and 14th month’s salary in the form of Christmas or holiday bonuses had been commonplace for all public service workers.

Such achievements have been systematically dismantled over the years with the consent of the union. The federal, state and local governments have systematically privatised, outsourced and “liberalised” the public service during the past 30 years. With the help of Verdi and its predecessor unions, contract bargaining rounds were split into numerous individual areas. In the public sector, even the contract bargaining rounds of the country’s individual states (TVL) were separated from those of the nation as a whole and its municipalities (TVöD).

The end result of these cuts is staff shortages and growing work stress everywhere. A large part of the workforce, including airport workers and rubbish collectors, are fobbed off with wages barely above the minimum wage. In the pandemic, many of them were celebrated and applauded as “systemically important,” while their real wages plummeted. The costs of energy and food, which far exceed the official inflation rate, are a particular burden on lower income groups.

At the same time, the government has pulled out of its hat a €100 billion special fund for the German army and supplied huge amounts of weapons to Ukraine, although there is supposed to be “no money” for social needs. This has all been done with the consent of the Verdi leadership, which supports militarism. For example, in Munich during the recent security conference, the flights of official visitors to the war summit were explicitly excluded from Verdi’s warning strikes.

Millions of workers all over Europe are no longer prepared to sacrifice their standards of living for war, rearmament and the billions in profits made on the stock exchanges. This is shown by the large participation in the warning strikes in Germany. In France, millions are fighting against the deterioration of their pensions, and in Britain hundreds of thousands of public and private sector workers have been on strike for months against the attacks on their wages, jobs and the right to strike.

In Germany, strikes are taking place at airports, in hospitals, day-care centres and throughout the public sector. During the second round of negotiations in Potsdam, strikers from municipal clinics, city cleaning, administrations and waterworks demonstrated. On Wednesday, trainees, students and interns in the public sector, who have to live on a starvation wage, will go on strike. Strikes are also taking place at post offices, on the railways and in private industry.

The unions are desperately trying to keep this pent-up anger under control. For postal workers, Verdi reluctantly raised a demand for a wage increase of 15 percent and in the public sector the demand for a monthly increase of at least €500, i.e., an increase of more than 10.5 percent for lower wage groups.

It is precisely the militancy on the part of workers that has aroused the ire of business and banks and their henchmen in politics. The negotiators on the employers’ side have made it clear that a minimum wage increase of €500 per month is out of the question. Such an amount would far exceed the budgets of the municipalities, declared the mayor of Gelsenkirchen. Another employer spokesperson is quoted in the Handelsblatt as saying that agreeing to €500 per month would be sending “the completely wrong signal at a time when the municipalities are desperately looking for managers and persons in positions of responsibility.”

The interior minister also rejected the demands, saying: “They simply stand in opposition to difficult budget discussions both at a federal level and especially in the municipalities.” Faeser described the provocative offer as “very good and very fair” and an “expression of respect” for the workers.

The municipalities are also systematically stonewalling. The federal government says that the current demands are not economically viable. The business association BDA has even called for some kind of legal ban on strikes following the strikes at airports. Political and business leaders are determined to pass the costs of war and militarism onto the working class and ensure the stock market boom continues at their expense.

In so doing, they work closely with the trade unions. This is the purpose of the government’s Concerted Action initiative, which has met several times to coordinate attacks on wages, jobs and social spending.

Verdi leader Frank Werneke has only rejected the latest offer and spoken of “absolute dissent” between the partners in the negotiations because he fears losing control. The union leadership knows it is sitting on a powder keg. It is therefore carefully separating out the warning strikes, conducting them region by region and as minimal “pinpricks,” so as to avoid a conflagration. The Verdi leadership is doing everything in its power to break off the struggle as quickly as possible.

The growing crisis of declining obstetric services in rural America

Benjamin Mateus

President Joe Biden’s ending of the public health emergency declaration related to the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11 will take a catastrophic toll on the already precarious state of rural hospitals and obstetric care. 

Traffic passes the publicly owned Greenwood Leflore Hospital, in Greenwood, Miss., Friday, Oct. 21, 2022. The hospital closed its labor and delivery unit on Nov. 30, 2022. The closure means the area's women will need to travel about 45 minutes to give birth at a hospital, and without focused hospital support, the city's only OB/GYN clinic could struggle to provide maternity care. [AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis]

Millions of Americans will abruptly lose their Medicaid health insurance, which means that many rural hospitals across the US that serve poorer, underserved populations will lose the federal assistance that has kept their doors open and theirs lights on, and helped pay their skeleton crews of health care workers.

At present, more than 600 rural hospitals, or about one-third, are at risk of closure due to receiving less reimbursement than the cost of delivering their life-saving services. Over 200 such facilities are poised to close in the next two to three years. Administrators, trying to keep their systems afloat, are curtailing or discontinuing unprofitable services like maternity care, endangering the reproductive health of these communities, such as in the Southeast, rural Ohio and Appalachia, where chronic poverty is systemic. 

In all, 36 percent of US counties, mostly rural, are considered maternity care deserts, defined as a county without a hospital or birth center that offers obstetric care and has no obstetric providers. More than 7 million women live in areas where there is limited or no access to such obstetric services.

A survey of hospital administrators before the COVID-19 pandemic found that 20 percent had indicated their system would not be providing labor and delivery services in the next five years. The onset of the pandemic accelerated the shutdown of obstetric services.

In particular, lack of access to prenatal care and follow-up care with their doctors or midwives after the end of their pregnancies has serious health consequences for women and their infants. Chronic health issues like high blood pressure can go unrecognized, leading to severe complications such as preterm delivery, preeclampsia and even massive life-threatening hemorrhage. 

Not surprisingly, a 2018 investigative study on the loss of hospital-based obstetric services and birth outcomes in rural counties published in JAMA found higher rates of out-of-hospital and preterm births, as well as low utilization of prenatal care. 

Expectant mothers in rural areas typically drive close to 25 miles to see their doctor for a prenatal visit. With the closure of obstetric services, that distance will usually double to 60 miles on average. Studies have shown that the longer the distance to prenatal care, the higher the chance of developing high blood pressure, which remains one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. 

This leads in turn to complications for infants, who will most likely need to stay longer in the hospital after delivery under a higher level of care, such as in a neonatal ICU. This also means that the medical costs of pregnancies can skyrocket. The average cost of preterm and low-birthweight care and deliveries is above $76,000, but can exceed $110,000. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2023 the average cost of pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care in the US is $18,865.

Driving the abandonment of obstetric services are low Medicaid reimbursement rates, an epidemic of staffing shortages, as well as the declining birth rates experienced in these areas. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, at least 89 obstetric units were shuttered in rural hospitals across the country between 2015 and 2019. Since 2020, the number of US counties that are categorized as maternity care deserts has increased by 2 percent. 

The American Hospital Association noted that in 2020 only half of rural community hospitals were offering maternity care. Yet one in 10 babies are born in rural community hospitals, which has significantly contributed to the disproportionate rates of maternal mortality in rural America compared to the rest of the country. 

Dr. Anne Rossier Markus, PhD, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, explained that she had reservations about the term “maternity care deserts.” As a visual representation of the issue, “it implies that there’s nothing there, which isn’t true. The community is living there. There’s history, there are relationships, there are practices there.”

The rural and urban divide was recently placed into context by a National Center for Health Statistics study published in May 2022 by Lauren M Rossen et al., which found that in 2017 rural women had a maternal mortality ratio (MMR) 45 to 65 percent higher than other women. (Rural MMR 34.4 per 100,000 live births versus medium/small urban MMR 23.7 per 100,000 live births and urban MMR 20.9 per 100,000 live births.) While rates of MMR were relatively stable from 1999 to 2017 in urban regions, they have increased by 60 percent in rural areas during this period, according to the authors. 

As an aside, while it had appeared that maternal mortality rates in the US had been climbing over the last two decades, the implementation of a pregnancy checkbox on death certificates after 2003—but adopted by states in a staggered fashion—made it seem that trends in MMR were rising when in fact these rates were already much higher than previously thought. 

The authors summarized in their conclusions, “Currently, we are unable to determine how much of the increase in rural MMRs during 1999-2017 was due to true increases in maternal mortality, increased identification of maternal deaths (i.e., under-ascertainment after the checkbox), or false positive deaths (i.e., over-ascertainment before the checkbox). True increases in maternal mortality in rural areas are plausible given recent trends in rural mortality overall, and documented barriers to maternal and obstetric care in rural areas, which could contribute to inadequate obstetric care for rural women.”

They also stated that it was possible that many of these deaths were misclassified. They called for initiatives to improve the National Vital Statistics System.

With respect to the Rossen et al. report, a 2021 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that “many rural counties lack hospital obstetric services, meaning those hospitals or emergency rooms lack trained staff or the necessary equipment to manage prenatal care. This occurs in part due to difficulties recruiting and retaining maternal health providers in rural areas. … When hospitals and obstetric units close, rural and underserved areas lose the infrastructure that supports providers, like obstetrician-gynecologists, specialists, and licensed midwives.” Pregnant women living in rural areas face delays in necessary care due to the long distances they need to travel and the associated prohibitive costs.

Not frequently mentioned is the fact that maternal deaths rose by 25 percent during 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-related deaths. The state of pregnancy compounds the risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. While maternal deaths not related to COVID-19 remained on par with pre-pandemic years—754 in 2019, 759 in 2020, 777 in 2021—there were 102 COVID deaths among pregnant women in 2020 and 401 in 2021. In 2021, COVID caused 34 percent of all maternal deaths.

Also significantly aggravating maternal mortality in rural US regions was the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. States like Kentucky, Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska, which have some of the strictest abortion laws, also have some of the worst maternal and child health outcomes and the lowest investment in at-risk populations, according to National Public Radio (NPR).

Dr. Anne Banfield, an OB-GYN with experience working in rural West Virginia, told NPR, “The post-Roe situation, and the issues we have with maternal mortality, and the issues that we have with access to care in rural areas in the United States … are all coming together in a way that is going to make our battle against maternal mortality 1,000 times worse.”

The United States, which spends more on health care than other high-income countries, both on a per capita basis and as a share of GDP, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among these nations. This is attributable to high rates of cesarean section, inadequate prenatal care and social factors of poverty that drive obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other chronic illnesses that are increasingly affecting younger populations.

The US maternal mortality rate is currently three times higher than in other high-income countries. These atrocious rates reflect in large part reliance on a profit-driven system of health care delivery that disenfranchises the well-being of the US population on the basis of simple economics.

Massive surge in COVID infections across Canada as federal Liberal government suspends dispatch of rapid test kits

Steve Hill

Canada is in the grip of a massive COVID-19 surge that is going virtually unreported. According to figures from Tara Moriarty, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, one in 43 Canadians was infected as of February 26. This equates to almost 900,000 people.

Moriarty is co-founder of COVID-19 Resources Canada, a group of Canadian researchers, clinicians and community members that has provided logistic and scientific support since the start of the pandemic. The group’s weekly forecasts and estimates are the only reliable source of information on the pandemic in Canada, which has been ignored and declared over by the corporate-controlled and state-funded media alike.

Moriarty warned in her weekly forecast for February 12 that a surge of infections was imminent. The COVID-19 forecast for Feb 19-25, 2023 stated that the current infection rate is about one in 43 people. Compared to the lowest point of the pandemic in Canada, waste water indicators, infections and Long COVID cases were about eight times higher; hospitalizations were about six times higher; and deaths were about four times higher.

The organization’s Hazard Index is calculated from three equally weighted categories: Current infections and spread; health care system impact; and mortality. It rates provinces in categories: Severe; very high; high; elevated; moderate; and low. For February 19, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were in the “severe” classification, with Nova Scotia experiencing about one in every 31 people infected. Waste water indicators, infections and Long COVID cases were about 11 times higher; hospitalizations were about six times higher; and deaths were about 13 times higher compared to the lowest point in the pandemic.

By the time of the February 26 report, Canada’s overall risk on the scale rose to “very high.” Significantly, not a single province or territory fell into the “low” or “moderate” categories, the two lowest on the scale. Only one province, Newfoundland, was categorized as having “elevated” risk.

Based on data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, Moriarty noted that one in five people now has a health condition that might be related to a previous COVID-19 illness. The official death toll from COVID-19 in Canada is now over 51,000. As of February 25, the seven-day average for deaths was 34 every day.

The response by the ruling elite to the renewed flood of infections is to try and cover it up and remove the limited services they provided earlier in the pandemic. The CBC reported Thursday that the federal Liberal government suspended the shipment of rapid test kits to the provinces at the end of January. This criminal decision, which prevents even the most basic tracing of infections, was taken without any public discussion. Health Canada blandly noted in an email to CTV News that it still has 90 million test kits in its inventory. Eighty thousand of these will expire within six months and over 6 million within the year.

This decision by the federal government is in keeping with the Liberals’ embrace of a strategy of “forever COVID.” As soon as the infectious Omicron variant emerged in late 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau oversaw the abandonment of almost all public health mitigations. After the fascistic “Freedom” Convoy occupied downtown Ottawa for three weeks and blocked border crossings with the US in January and February 2022, Trudeau gave the go-ahead for the dismantling of all remaining measures by provincial governments across the country.

Governments and health authorities insist that the population must now learn to “live with the virus.” Vaccination clinics are closing, data collection and reporting are ending and specialized pandemic services are being withdrawn. 

The staffing situation in hospitals remains dire. Nurses continue to leave the profession due to burn-out from mandated overtime caused by high vacancy rates. Three years of a pandemic emergency on top of decades of underfunding from all levels of government have placed an unbearable burden on the health care system.

According to the Manitoba Nurses Union, in Winnipeg alone, a city with a population of 750,000, nurses worked nearly 650,000 hours of overtime in 2022. Province-wide, Manitoba nurses logged over 1 million overtime hours in 2022.

With the health care system already overwhelmed and collapsing, governments of all political stripes are winding down specialized services for those seriously affected by the virus and shifting everything to primary care.

In British Columbia, the New Democratic Party government’s Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) announced the closure of its four post-COVID recovery clinics in Vancouver, Victoria and the Fraser Valley. The interdisciplinary program, which also offers educational resources and classes, currently includes doctors, nurses, social workers, and physiotherapists. At the end of March, the four regional clinics will transition to one centralized, virtual program, which will only provide educational resources and self-management tools. The program will no longer offer access to a doctor. Instead, those who were referred to the clinics have been informed that they will have to visit a family doctor or a walk-in clinic.

BC’s NDP health minister, Adrian Dix, claims there is no longer the same demand for the regional clinics as there was two years ago. BC has a notorious record for systematically under-reporting cases and deaths.

 Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare in Windsor, Ontario, also offered a COVID Recovery Program until it was scrapped due to lack of funding in July 2022. The program included consultations with occupational and physiotherapists, and a support group led by a social worker. However, the resources to fund the initiative were all borrowed from existing assets, with no additional support provided by the provincial Tory government. When the hospital could no longer sustain the extra burden, many people were left with nowhere to go for support.

Advocates and those suffering from Long COVID stress that access to doctors specialized in their condition is crucial to recovery because general practitioners are not always knowledgeable about the potential long lasting effects of COVID-19. A major issue for those seeking treatment for Long Covid is the recognition from health care providers that the condition is both real and serious. 

The drive to shift the burden of post-COVID care from hospitals and dedicated clinics to a desperately under-resourced health care system underscores the contempt for the lives of working people felt by the political establishment. Telling those recovering from COVID to visit their primary care physician ignores the well-known fact that 6 million adults in the country currently do not have access to a family doctor. That number is only expected to increase as Canada continues to fall behind its peers in the OECD, with the number of doctors per capita already well behind countries such as Germany and France. A recent report by the Royal Bank of Canada predicted that the current shortfall of 17,000 doctors in the country will rise to approximately 44,000 before the end of the decade. This lack of access to doctors creates pressures and outcomes that cascade throughout the entire health care system.

Biden seeks renewal of warrantless spying powers

Kevin Reed

The Biden administration has mounted a campaign urging Congress to renew provisions of a US law that legalizes secret, warrantless surveillance of individuals and organizations all over the world on the grounds of “national security” interests.

President Joe Biden [AP Photo/Patrick Semansky]

On Tuesday, senior White House officials called on Democrats and Republicans in Congress to reauthorize Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), especially its Section 702, before it expires on December 31, 2023.

Although the American political and media establishment will not say so, it is well known that FISA Section 702 was passed in 2008 to provide a legal fig leaf for secret US intelligence and FBI surveillance of the electronic communications of people both inside and outside the country.

This secret spying activity, which compels the cooperation of communications service providers and internet and social media platforms in a conspiracy against fundamental Constitutional rights, was exposed in detail for the first time by Edward Snowden in 2013.

As explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Section 702 authorizes the US government to routinely collect and search the online communications of innocent Americans “without a warrant through what are commonly called ‘upstream’ and ‘PRISM’ (now called ‘downstream’) surveillance.” These activities violate Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The details of PRISM were disclosed by Snowden in a series of documents that indicated it is “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.” The program enables the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather targeted electronic communications from the major internet service providers on demand without a warrant, store them in massive databases and search through them as they see fit.

In a letter dated February 28 to the four leaders of the Senate and House, Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines say the prompt renewal of the surveillance law is urgent because it has “proven invaluable again and again in protecting American lives and U.S. national security.”

However, the examples given by AG Garland and DNI Haines of the effectiveness of Section 702 are taken straight from the propaganda list of enemies of US imperialism such as “conventional and cyber threats posed by the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.”

While the examples provided contain no details of the lives that were supposedly saved through illegal spying, the joint letter does say that Section 702 was used to carry out the “successful operation against Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2022.” That is, the extrajudicial targeted drone assassination of al-Zawahiri in a suburb of Kabul, Afghanistan by the CIA in the early morning of July 31, 2022.

The letter reads like a public relations statement and includes the obligatory justification of the FISA law due to its “comprehensive system” designed by Congress to “ensure this irreplaceable intelligence tool protects the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons has worked.”

It says that US citizens need not worry about the illegal surveillance because, “Section 702 can only be used to target individual non-US persons located outside the United States, it may not be directed against Americans at home or abroad, or any person, regardless of nationality, known to be located in the United States.”

However, given the nature of electronic communications as a global phenomenon, such assurances are completely irrelevant, and specifically targeting individuals from other countries, even if it were technically possible, is also a violation of their basic rights in any case.

The Biden administration officials give a sketchy description of the procedures of the FISA law, including the functioning of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and its annual “comprehensive review of the program.” FISC almost never denies a request for warrantless surveillance—after nearly 40 years of its existence, the court approved 99.998 percent of the applications—effectively making it a rubber stamp for the intelligence agencies.

The letter goes on to say that FISC has consulted with outside advisors on multiple occasions “as it exercises its rigorous and ongoing oversight of the U.S. Government’s implementation of and compliance with these procedures.” AG Garland and DNI Haines also claim that their respective offices “scrutinize all Section 702 collection decisions, review U.S. person queries, and evaluate and take remedial action to address identified incidents of non-compliance.”

However, as numerous oversight and compliance reports have shown, those performing the surveillance have routinely violated the procedures of the FISA law and continued to carry out queries and electronic spying on US citizens, claiming that such crimes were an inadvertent mistake. No one has ever been charged or prosecuted for these violations of the US Constitution. 

There is no doubt that the urgency behind the White House campaign for Congress to act on the renewal of Section 702 is motivated by the geostrategic aims of the Biden administration and connected with the war against Russia in Ukraine, and the intensification of the military provocations against China.

The first version of the FISA law was passed in 1978 following the revelations of the domestic spying operation carried out by the White House of Richard Nixon in the years prior to and during the Watergate crisis that began in 1972. Forty-five years later, the FISA law has been converted into its opposite and has become an indispensable element of the US imperialist military-intelligence apparatus both at home and overseas.

One need only review the biography of White House intelligence director Haines to see that those who are requesting reauthorization of illegal spying under the cover of Section 702 are themselves criminals who belong behind bars. 

Before President Biden nominated Haines for Director of National Intelligence, the first woman to hold the position, she had built up a resume of lawlessness as a legal hack for the US State Department during the Bush administration (2003-2006) and then with the Obama Administration (2008-2010).

In 2013, Haines was selected by Obama as Deputy Director of the CIA where in 2015 she protected the intelligence personnel involved in the hacking of the computers of Senate staffers who were writing the Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. Haines played a major role in redacting the Senate report, allowing only 525 of the 6,700 pages in the document to be released to the public.

During her years in the CIA, Haines worked directly with then-Director John Brennan in selecting individuals for targeted drone killings. She wrote the legal policies, guidelines and procedures for carrying out the drone attacks that resulted in the murder of innocent civilians.

Financial markets signal more interest rates hikes to come

Nick Beams

Financial markets are sending out clear signals that while it may not proceed at the same rapid pace as last year, when there were four consecutive interest rate hikes of 0.75 percentage points (75 basis points), the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks will continue to tighten monetary policy.

The initial gloss put on the rate hike decisions was the need to “fight inflation.” As that fiction is increasingly exposed, the real objective stands out more clearly. That is the further suppression of wages, already well below the rate of price increases, by slowing the economy and inducing a recession if that proves necessary.

In conditions where large sections of the European working class are pressing forward with wage demands in the face of the highest price rises in four decades, European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde has made clear the driving force behind the higher interest rate regime of all the central banks.

Last week, as the ECB prepares for its next interest rate increase later this month, she said the central bank was “looking at wages and negotiated wages very, very closely.”

Isabel Schnabel, a German representative on the ECB’s executive board and a spokesperson for what is regarded as the “hard line” of that country’s finance capital sector, said wage growth of 4 to 5 percent—less than half the current rate of European inflation—was “too high to be consistent with our 2 percent inflation target.”

Wage suppression is long-term policy of the ECB with its chief economist Philip Lane remarking last November that “even after energy and pandemic factors fade… wage inflation will be a primary driver of price inflation over the next several years.”

Fed chair Jerome Powell has also made it increasingly clear the suppression of wages is the objective of the US central bank, even as he has acknowledged that pay increases are not the cause of inflation.

Speaking to reporters after the latest meeting of the Fed’s policy-making body at the beginning of February he said: “You don’t see [a wage-price spiral] yet. But the whole point is… once you see it, you have a serious problem. That’s what we can’t allow to happen.”

In other words, strikes and other forms of industrial action by workers to even maintain their living standards must be suppressed at all costs. Here the Fed, as with other central banks, is working in tandem with the trade unions which play the role of industrial policemen.

For a brief period, the financial markets inclined to the view that with the reduction of the rate rises first to 50 basis points and then to 25, the Fed might be easing its rate tightening cycle and the days of cheap money, which have sent stock markets to record highs, may be coming back, at least in some form.

But those hopes have largely been dispelled in light of data which have continued to show that what the Fed characterises as a “tight” labour market remains, along with remarks by members of its policy-making body that it is not done.

On Wednesday the yield, or interest rate, on the benchmark US Treasury bond rose to above 4 percent for the first time since last November in anticipation of higher interest rates from the Fed.  Yields rose again yesterday, along with a rise in the value of the dollar on currency markets.

Rates on the 10-year bond are now at their highest point in around a decade. The yield on the two-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, its highest level in 16 years. Significantly it meant that yield curve inversion—a situation where, contrary to normal experience, the rates at the shorter end of the market are higher than those at the longer end—was at its steepest in 42 years.

Yield curve inversion is widely regarded as an indicator of a developing recession.

In its analysis of the market shift, the Financial Times (FT) noted: “Expectations have changed drastically over the past month after releases of hotter-than-expected US economic data. Investors at the start of February anticipated that rates would peak at just under 5 percent in the second quarter.”

Now the belief is that the Fed rate will rise from its current range of 4.5-4.75 percent to 5.5 percent by the third quarter. A rate of increase of this size is expected to increase unemployment by hundreds of thousands.

The main set of data impacting on market expectations came from the Labor Department which reported early in February that the unemployment rate fell to a new low, “potentially extending upward pressure on wages,” as the Wall Street Journal commented.

At the same time inflation is not receding, with the latest data showing that the Fed’s key measure, the personal consumption expenditure price index, increased in January.

In a recent article, the FT cited comments by an economist, Bill Diviney, at the financial firm ABN Amro, which spelled out the class logic of the policies being pursued by finance capital.

“Given tight labour markets, it is clear that central banks want to see convincing signs that the economy is turning down and subsequently that unemployment will turn up,” he said.

In the recent period, as it has become glaringly obvious, both from statistics and the experiences of life for billions of people the world over, that wages are not the cause of inflation, and there is no wage-price spiral, attempts are being made to put forward the claim that the central bank agenda is a mistake, the result of a misdiagnosis.

Economist Dr Jim Stanford of the Australia Institute has calculated on the basis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data that 69 percent of Australian inflation is due to profit gouging by corporations.  Calculations in other major economies would no doubt show the same results.

His conclusion is that the focus of the Reserve Bank of Australia on wage restraint, and by implication that of every other central bank is “misplaced.”

What flows from such an analysis is that if the facts of economic life are brought to light, then this policy can be corrected.

This is false. The central banks have not made a mistake. They are pursuing a consciously directed class-war agenda against the working class on behalf of the corporate and financial elites.

The handing out of trillions of dollars to the financial markets since the 2008 crisis by the central banks, a process accelerated with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, together with the refusal by the ruling elites to eliminate COVID-19, lit the fires of inflation.

They have been further stoked by massive government war spending in all major countries and profit gouging by the giant food and energy corporations and now the central banks are seeking to make the working class pay for the deepening global crisis through unending cuts in real wages.

The Coup in Israel

Mel Gurtov

Israel has always been touted as America’s most reliable friend in the Middle East, a bastion of democracy in a region dominated by autocracies. Now that picture is fraying as the far-right coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes power.

Beholden to the bloc called Religious Zionism, Netanyahu is pursuing a far-right agenda on two fronts: further chipping away at the Palestinians’ fundamental rights of citizenship and property, and pushing for so-called judicial reform. Let’s look more closely at the latter issue, the most dangerous threat today to Israel as a democracy.

Judicial Dismemberment

Arguing that Israel’s Supreme Court is “the most activist court on the planet,” Netanyahu is targeting the judiciary in a way that promises an end to Israel’s democratic experiment, not to mention dismissing plausible charges against him of corruption that are before the high court. His agenda would essentially put the Supreme Court at the mercy of the executive branch.

While Netanyahu argues that the reforms would mean more “balance” between the prime minister, the Knesset (parliament), and the courts, in fact they would remove most checks on Netanyahu’s power. This is because a bare majority of the Knesset — 61 out of 120 seats, which Netanyahu’s coalition has — would be able to override any Supreme Court decision and thereby legislate whatever the far right wants without fear of judicial oversight.

That essential check on the prime minister’s power would be eliminated because Netanyahu would be able to appoint justices and judicial watchdogs—appointments that have traditionally been made by independent bodies.

This descent into authoritarianism has contributed to a new round of violence in the West Bank between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. It’s the usual story: a killing by one group is used to justify a killing by the other.

This latest cycle has led to a vigilante-style “pogrom,” as some are calling it, by settlers, who torched a Palestinian town as revenge for the shooting of two Israelis, which was in revenge for . . . and so on. I have to think that this escalation of violence is linked to the widespread despair among Palestinians and Israelis alike over Netanyahu’s embrace of absolutism.

Dire Warnings

Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president—a largely ceremonial post, but one that does carry moral weight—issued a grave warning January 24. He declared:

“The democratic foundations of Israel, including the justice system, and human rights and freedoms, are sacred, and we must protect them and the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The dramatic [judicial] reform, when done quickly without negotiation, rouses opposition and deep concerns among the public.”

He added, “The absence of dialogue is tearing us apart from within, and I’m telling you loud and clear: This powder keg is about to explode. This is an emergency.” Herzog is conferring with all sides, desperately seeking a pause in submission of legislation to the Knesset.

Indeed, it is an emergency. In a biting op-ed in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman quotes Netanyahu’s former attorney general, the man who brought charges of fraud and bribery against Netanyahu, as saying: “If there is no independent judiciary, it’s over. It’s a different system of government.” The ruler will “have prosecutors of his own, legal counsels of his own, judges of his own. And if these people have personal loyalty to him, there is no supremacy of the law. This is a sinkhole. We’ll all be swallowed up by this.”

Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, and army chief of staff, has warned of a “constitutional crisis.” He urged a response in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King—nonviolent protest, a “duty” when government “breaks the rules of the game and stands contrary to the country’s own fundamental norms and value system.”

Protest

The far-right’s false reform effort amounts to a coup, and about 60 percent of the Israeli public has come to that conclusion. So have former leaders of Mossad, the military, and business.

Massive rallies against the proposed changes have already occurred as the legislation makes its way through the Knesset. This is a big deal: Israel’s position as a democracy in the midst of Middle East autocracies will be gravely undermined, and once again US ties to Israel—already plagued by Israeli repression of the Palestinians over many decades—will be tested.

Friedman asked President Biden for a comment on the coming judicial changes in Israel and got this response:

“The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary. Building consensus for fundamental changes is really important to ensure that the people buy into them so they can be sustained.”

Very diplomatic intervention, but hardly a stirring cry for resistance. No US administration has ever gone beyond verbal chastisement of Israel for violations of human rights or undemocratic practices.

As of today, the Israeli opposition is fighting an uphill battle, as the ruling coalition is determined to steamroller the judicial legislation through parliament. The Labor Party leader expressed the opposition’s anger, saying:

“dialogue is only possible with a complete freezing of legislation accepted by all parts of the coalition, and preserving the red lines of an independent legal system in Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis didn’t take to the streets to end up as a stamp of kosher certification for [the far right’s] principles. This is the time to escalate the protest, until democracy prevails.”

The global context for Netanyahu’s Israel is the rise of illiberal democracies elsewhere—in Erdogan’s Turkey and Orban’s Hungary, for example, and in Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Trump’s America.

These regimes, with democratic facades that hide assaults on courts, the press, and free elections, reflect aggrandizing political power at the expense of civil liberties, independent institutions, and civil society.

That is what Israelis who are taking to the streets are really fighting for. They should have not only our personal support but the support of liberals and progressives in Congress.

Greece’s worst train disaster kills at least 40

Robert Stevens

The worst train disaster in Greek history has claimed the lives of at least 40 people with dozens of people still unaccounted for.

A passenger train, on route from Athens to Thessaloniki, crashed head-on into a freight train shortly before midnight Tuesday, outside the town of Tempe in central Greece. The passenger train was reportedly travelling at between 140 km/h (87 mph) and 160 km/h (99 mph), and the freight train at 100 km/h.

Debris of trains lie on the rail lines after a collision in Tempe, about 376 kilometres (235 miles) north of Athens, near Larissa city, Greece, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. A passenger train carrying hundreds of people, including many university students returning home from holiday, collided at high speed with an oncoming freight train before midnight on Tuesday. [AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos]

The passenger train was travelling north after leaving Larissa station, and the freight train travelling south from Thessaloniki to Larissa. After the collision, the mangled train fell into a field alongside the tracks.

Eight rail employees were among the dead, including the two drivers of the freight train and the two drivers of the passenger train, according to Greek Railroad Workers Union President Yannis Nitsas.

The fire brigade said Wednesday that 66 of the estimated 85 people injured in the collision had been taken to hospitals in Larissa. Six are in intensive care.

The rescue operation required 150 firefighters, using 17 vehicles and four cranes. Forty ambulances were mobilised. Around 200 people who suffered minor injuries or were unharmed were taken by bus to Thessaloniki.

Many of the around 350 passengers onboard were students returning home to Thessaloniki—Greece’s second city has a large university population—after holidays during Greek Orthodox lent. Greek Reporter said, “The head of the emergency unit in Larissa hospital, Apostolos Komnos, said most of the dead were young people, in their 20’s.”

On collision the first four carriages of the passenger train were derailed. The first two carriages caught fire and were 'almost completely destroyed,” and “no longer exist”. said regional governor of the Thessaly region, Kostas Agorastos.

With first two carriages crushed, the third carriage—the restaurant car—vaulted over them and caught fire. There were reports of passengers being flung through train windows. Some bodies were found as far as 40 metres from the railway line.

Survivor Angelos told AFP, “It felt like an earthquake… I saw scenes of horror in the first carriages. I'm still shaking.”

Another survivor, Stergios Minenis, told Reuters, “We heard a big bang… We were turning over in the carriage until we fell on our sides and until the commotion stopped. Then there was panic. Cables, fire. The fire was immediate. As we were turning over we were being burned. Fire was right and left.

“For 10, 15 seconds it was chaos. Tumbling over, fires, cables hanging, broken windows, people screaming, people trapped.”

“I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. It's tragic. Five hours later, we are finding bodies,” a rescuer told AFP.

Chief coroner at Larissa’s general hospital Roubini Leontari said Wednesday that 35 bodies are “right now are in the morgue while the transfer of other bodies is continuing… Some bodies were completely carbonized and are unrecognizable, for the most part it is young people”.

The BBC reported, “The local fire department previously said the train car which caught fire hit temperatures of 1,300C (2,370F), while Larissa's mayor Apostolos Kalogiannis has indicated some of those who died would only be identifiable via DNA testing.”

Greece’s previous worst train crash occurred in 1972, when people died in a head-on collision between two trains, also near Larissa. When the final death toll is made, it could top the 80 people who died in a high-speed derailment in Spain in 2013, after a train overturned near Santiago de Compostela. The deaths already exceed by far the last comparable head-on collision on the European rail network in 2016, in Bad Aibling in Germany killed 12 people. 

Greece’s New Democracy (ND) conservative government has declared three days of national mourning.

The political fallout was immediate with Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Kostas Karamanlis resigning Wednesday afternoon. The heads of the privatised Hellenic Railways Organisation and its project branch ERGOSE also stood down.

It is not possible at this stage to identify the immediate causes of the tragedy, but is it known that both trains had been travelling towards each other on the same line for several kilometres. The 27.3 kilometre section of track in which the crash occurred was double-tracked and had automatic controls installed, but switching and signaling were still being controlled manually.

A 59-year-old station master was arrested in Larissa and charged with involuntary manslaughter by negligence, unintentionally causing mass bodily harm by negligence and dangerous interference with transport. The station master denies any wrongdoing and reportedly said the accident was down to possible technical failure. The station master took up his position 40 days ago, after a year’s training.

Whatever the immediate causes, pinning responsibility on a single individual is a cover-up.

Many understand that the causes run much deeper in a society in which basic services and infrastructure has been massively degraded or destroyed over the past 15 years of scorched-earth austerity carried out by successive governments, including SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left). Thessaloniki’s student associations have demanded a full investigation with no “cover-up”. On Wednesday evening protesters gathered outside the headquarters of Hellenic Trains in Syggrou Avenue in the capital Athens. One banner read, “It was not a mistake, nor an unfortunate moment, their profits are placed above life”. Another read, “Our dead, their profits”.

The protest was brutally attacked by riot police using stun grenades and tear gas, with the demonstration moving on towards parliament.

As the attack was taking place Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address, “Everything shows that the drama was, sadly, mainly due to a tragic human error.”

Commenting on the dire state of the rail network between Greece’ s two largest cities, train drivers' association president Kostas Genidounias told ERT, “Nothing works. Everything happens manually throughout the Athens-Thessaloniki network. Neither the indicators, nor the traffic lights, nor the electronic traffic control work.” Nikos Tsikalakis, leader of the main rail workers union, told Radio ENA that there are only 750 rail employees nationally, far below the required 2,000 plus.

The Guardian reported, “On measures including overall fatalities per kilometre, Greece’s rail safety record has been the worst in the EU over the past decade, according to statistics from the EU railway agency – although this is easily skewed by its small network, about 2% of the UK’s size. A high proportion of deaths have been track workers rather than passengers.”

During half of that period, Greece’s former state rail network and rolling stock company have been under private ownership, the result of an ongoing €55 billion euro mass sell-off of state assets demanded by the European Union, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and financial institutions during an austerity offensive carried out by successive governments led by ND, the social democratic PASOK and SYRIZA (in office from 2015-19).

In June 2010, as savage austerity measures worsened, rail workers held a nationwide 24-hour strike against a proposed privatisation of 49 percent of the state rail network, TrainOSE, which was to launch a three-year programme of privatisations in exchange for onerous loan terms from the EU and IMF.

The privatisation of TrainOSE eventually took place under SYRIZA in 2017 with Ferrovie Dello Stato Italian—the Italian state-owned railway holding company—buying Greece’s railway for just €45 million euros. This was followed by the newly privatised TrainOSE paying an equally knockdown purchase price of €22 million for the state rolling stock maintenance business EESSTY in 2018. More than five years after privatisation, safety systems are still not fully automated on Greece’s antiquated rail network.

There have been many warnings that a serious incident could take place as a result of cuts and a failure to implement the required technology. Less than a month ago, referring to two recent train accidents on the same line, a circular from the train drivers union to its members read, “We are not going to wait for an “upcoming train disaster” to see them [government, rail company] shed crocodile tears…”