Many school buildings in England at risk of collapse

Margot Miller

Schools in England are in such perilous state of structural degradation after years of cutbacks and lack of maintenance that many could collapse, putting both pupils and staff in danger. The Conservative government has been forced to acknowledge this, but will not guarantee the necessary remedial work to make them safe.

For the past two months the Department for Education (DfE) has refused to make public its Building Conditions Survey Data. This report lists the schools in need of urgent repair. They fear an outcry from parents and school staff, which could further ignite the wave of strikes over the cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by the devastating consequences of the pandemic and Ukraine war.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak meets Secretary of State for Education Gillian Keegan, October 25, 2022. London, United Kingdom. [Photo by UK Government/Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

A coalition of trade unions recently wrote an open letter to Education Secretary Gillian Keegan February 16 highlighting the “shocking” state of schools which could end up “costing lives”, asking the government what action it was taking to eradicate the risk of building collapse. They also raised the issue of asbestos in school buildings, a material associated with deadly cancers. Signatories included the National Education Union (NEU), NASUWT, Unison, Unite, GMB and Community.

The government’s response was to shrug off responsibility for ensuring the safety of children and staff, saying that if they are made aware of imminent risk of building collapse then “immediate action is taken to ensure safety and remediate the situation.”

The government is fully aware some schools are at risk of collapse. In its annual report released in December, the DfE wrote, “There is a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools which are at or approaching the end of their designed life-expectancy and structural integrity is impaired. The risk predominantly exists in those buildings built in the years 1945 to 1970 which used ‘system build’ light frame techniques.”

The “light frame techniques” refers to the use of Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC), a cheaper alternative to concrete, which becomes life-expired after 30 years. Its use continued into the 1980’s, being thermally efficient, fire resistance and lightweight making for speedier construction.

Aerated autoclaved concrete, close-up view [Photo by Marco Bernardini, own work / CC BY-SA 3.0]

According to the DfE, “The likelihood of the school buildings safety risk increased in October 2021 due to the increased numbers of serious structural issues identified. The impact and likelihood are unlikely to reduce in 2022, as there was no agreement to increase condition funding or the scale of the rebuilding programme at SR21 [spending review 2021].”

The report raised the risk of building collapse from “critical-likely” as of April 2021 to “critical-very likely” in March 2022, after “serious structural issues” were found in five schools in the year to October 2021.

The schools included St Anne’s in Liverpool, closed for a long-term rebuild, Fearnville Primary in Bradford, when a teacher was hospitalised after being hit by a falling ceiling tile, and Fortis Academy in Birmingham after a concrete ceiling panel hit a desk.

In January this year, a piece of cladding fell off the roof of a school in Sheffield injuring a parent. The parent, Carla, was waiting to pick up her two children outside Dore Primary School whena 12-15ft-long fascia board with 4in nails fell off the roof and hit her on the head. Carla suffered a black eye, underwent an MRI scan and had to take three weeks off work. She has since suffered from tinnitus and has trouble reading.

“It is horrifying that we’ve got to this point,” she told the Guardian. “Our children’s school buildings are literally falling apart and it feels like it is only a matter of time before something even more serious happens.

“My injuries are bad enough but the fact that this could so easily have been a child doesn’t bear thinking about. I know the school is doing everything they can, but I also know that they don’t have the funds.”

This is only the latest in a series the past year involving school buildings with potentially fatal consequences.

• In December, the Angel Road Junior School site in Norfolk was forced to close permanently, such was the state of disrepair. The Evolution Academy Trust said it could “no longer guarantee the safety of pupils, staff and visitors.”
• In July, the ceiling of a classroom at the Winston Churchill School in Woking collapsed during school time. Luckily, there were no casualties.
• In June, firefighters were called to school in Brent when the top half of a tower collapsed onto the roof of the sports hall. Fortunately, no one was injured.
• In March, Burnside Academy in Sunderland was forced to close after “structural movement” was precipitated by routine maintenance work.

Several schools have suffered partial roof collapses directly attributable to the use of RAAC in building materials. The situation is complicated by the fact that there is no official record of the materials used to build schools.

The DfE’s permanent secretary Susan Acland Hood was recently questioned by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee concerning the safety of the school estate. She told MPs that “a big clump of school buildings in England are coming to the end of their design life, all at the same time.”

The government is carrying out structural surveys on all schools in England, over five years, but they are visual and very limited.

The amount of remedial work is not determined by need but what the government is prepared to spend. Schools need £11.4 billion immediately for repairs to make them safe, but the government is only offering £1.8 billion for this year out of £13 billion it earmarked for building improvements since 2015. The government has a target of upgrading and remediating merely 500 schools out of a total of 32,226even though a third of schools were built between 1960-1980 when RAAC was used widely.

According to National Achievement Survey research by the House of Commons library, capital spending on school buildings fell from 2009/10 to 2021/2022 by 37 percent, or 50 percent in real terms. The school estate is being run down as part of austerity cuts to pay for the banking collapse in 2008/9, the pandemic bailout, and the defence budget increases to pay for the war in Ukraine—all at the expense of the health and safety of pupils and staff.

The education unions did nothing to secure the safety of their members or pupils in their charge during the pandemic. During the current pay strikes, they make no mention that their members work in buildings that could collapse on them but are busy negotiating below inflation pay deals.

The Labour Party whether led by Jeremy Corbyn or Sir Keir Starmer have marched in lockstep with the Tories in all the austerity cuts since 2010. Current party leader Starmer made clear that Labour in office would put the economy, i.e. profits, first. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader (2015-2019), he co-wrote a letter along with his Chancellor John McDonnell instructing local Labour councils to impose Tory cuts.

The Hamburg massacre: Symptom of a brutalized society

Gregor Link & Johannes Stern

The fatal shootings in Hamburg killed eight people on Thursday evening at the premises of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious community. The victims include four men and two women, between 33 and 60 years, as well as the unborn child of another woman. The dead also include the suspected murderer, Philipp Fusz, who, according to the investigating authorities, “executed himself” following the crime. Eight other people were injured, four seriously, with several needing immediate hospitalization.

Corpses are carried out of a Jehovah's Witness building and loaded into hearses in Hamburg, Germany Friday, March 10, 2023. Shots were fired inside the building used by Jehovah's Witnesses in the northern German city of Hamburg on Thursday evening, with multiple people killed and wounded, police said. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber ]

In a statement on its website Friday, the religious community said it was “deeply saddened” by the horrific rampage on the members of its congregation. “Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of the victims as well as to the traumatized eyewitnesses. The chaplains of the local community are doing their best to offer them assistance in this difficult hour.” According to the latest reports, four of the wounded are still fighting for their lives. The Jehovah’s Witnesses reject blood transfusions.

While many questions remain unanswered, there is no question that this was one of the worst fatal attacks in Germany in recent memory. At a joint press conference Friday noon, the Hamburg state Interior Ministry, the investigating public prosecutor’s office and spokesmen for the Hamburg police provided the following account of the crime:

Philipp Fusz (35)—armed with a semi-automatic handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition—shortly before 9 p.m., entered the parking lot of the building where the service was being held. There, he had first fired ten shots at the car of a witness, who was able to save herself, being only slightly injured, and make an initial emergency call. Subsequently, Fusz had opened fire through the windowpanes on the 36 worshippers gathered in the hall and had gained access to the interior of the building “constantly using [his] firearms.” In total, the alleged perpetrator fired 135 shots at his victims—a massacre.

Video taken by a resident shows a person dressed in black repeatedly shooting into the building from the outside through a broken window until the person finally enters the building and continues shooting inside. According to consistent statements from police and uninvolved witnesses, one person fled to the second floor when emergency personnel arrived. While the police secured the first floor and proceeded upstairs, a final shot was heard, whereupon the suspected perpetrator and the murder weapon were found.

Chief of Operations Matthias Tresp told the press that it was a “lucky coincidence” that members of a special unit of the Hamburg riot police were in the vicinity. A total of almost 1,000 officers were deployed in the police operation, including 52 federal police officers and special forces from Schleswig-Holstein. Later, 15 more magazines and 200 additional rounds of ammunition were found in Fusz’s apartment; data media and writings were also seized.

In recent days, more information about the alleged perpetrator has become known. Apparently, Fusz had developed psychological problems and a strong hatred for the religious community to which he himself had belonged until a year and a half ago. According to Hamburg’s Interior Senator (state minister) Andy Grote (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Fusz had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses “voluntarily, but not on good terms.” Media reports shedding light on Fusz’s background paint a picture of a personality who was outwardly inconspicuous but also characterized by self-aggrandizement, doom-mongering and ideological delusions.

On his website, Fusz presented himself as a “multicultural” and “self-confessed European” and offered his services internationally as a “business consultant”—for a daily rate of €250,000. He justified the horrendous fee by claiming that his “work” should provide clients with “leverage or added value of at least €2.5 million.” At the same time, Fusz propagated a crude, religious worldview laced with right-wing extremist elements.

In late 2022, he published a tract titled “The Truth About God, Jesus Christ and Satan: A New Reflected View of Epochal Dimensions.” The pamphlet, which Fusz describes on his website as a “standard work ... for all sciences related to humanity, public relations, politics, economics and ethics,” has since been deleted from Amazon and other online platforms. According to media reports, it also contains anti-Semitic messages, calling Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “human instrument of Jesus Christ” and the persecution of Jews an “act of heaven.” Hitler, he says, received his idea of a “millennial kingdom” from Jesus and wanted to implement it for him.

While it is unclear whether and to what extent Fusz’s religious glorification of Hitler motivated the rampage—Jehovah’s Witnesses were brutally persecuted by the Nazis—the perpetrator was known to authorities. In December, the Hamburg firearms authority had issued him a weapons permit. According to Hamburg Police Chief Ralf Martin Meyer, an anonymous letter had been received by the police in January asking the authorities to “check Fusz’s behaviour and weapons permit.”

In February, Fusz was then visited by the firearms authorities. But although the officers immediately found that some of the ammunition was not properly stored, this only resulted in a verbal warning. According to Meyer, there were no indications in publicly available sources that Fusz was an extremist. This claim is obviously false and raises serious questions about the role of the security services, which in Germany are riddled with right-wing extremists.

If leading government politicians, such as federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD), are now calling for tighter gun laws in response to the massacre, this is also intended to distract from the deeper causes of the violence. Massacres are becoming more frequent not only in the US, where more than 70 people have already died in mass shootings this year, but also in Germany. Following the far-right terrorist attacks in Munich (July 2016), Halle (October 2019) and Hanau (February 2020), which specifically targeted immigrants and Jews, four massacres have occurred at educational institutions alone since the beginning of 2022.

• In January 2022, an 18-year-old student shot and killed a young woman and injured three others in a lecture hall at Heidelberg University.
• In May 2022, a 21-year-old former student at Lloyd Gymnasium in Bremerhaven shot a school secretary with a crossbow, critically injuring her.
• In June 2022, a 34-year-old man in Hamm killed a 30-year-old female teaching assistant and injured two 22-year-old female students and a 22-year-old male student in a rampage at Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences.
• In January 2023, a 55-year-old teacher was stabbed to death at a vocational college in Ibbenbüren. The alleged perpetrator, a 17-year-old student, turned himself in to the police.

The increase in this mass violence cannot simply be explained by individual motives and problems. It has deeper social causes that are systematically ignored by politicians and the media. Against what social and political background did the rampage in Hamburg take place? These are only some of the most obvious aspects:

In Ukraine, the NATO powers are waging a murderous proxy war against the nuclear power Russia. Although hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers die every day and the conflict conjures up the threat of a devastating third world war, the German government rejects a negotiated settlement. The ruling class is using the war as an opportunity to reassert itself as a major military power after its horrific crimes in two world wars.

The military offensive is accompanied by deafening war propaganda. Deadly weapons such as rockets and tanks are cynically glorified as messengers of peace, and Nazism is trivialized (“Hitler was not vicious”) by university professors who are courted by the media. While the military has been given €100 billion virtually overnight, spending on education, social services and health care is being massively cut. Mass layoffs are the order of the day; poverty, stress, insecurity and fear characterize the lives of millions.

Added to this is the experience of the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 170,000 people in Germany alone. Over the last three years, human life has been systematically subordinated to profit. Leading politicians conducted a fascistic debate about how many lives should be sacrificed to the interests of the economy and declared that human dignity did not necessarily include the right to life and was thus not “absolutely” protected by the constitution.

Another 10,000 layoffs at social media giant Meta

Kevin Reed

Meta, the $500 billion parent company of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that it will lay off 10,000 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce.

Meta's logo on a sign at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022. [AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez]

In a memo to the Meta staff posted on his Facebook profile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan, and that “we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”

Zuckerberg wrote that, with less hiring, the layoffs would immediately impact and “further reduce the size of our recruiting team” and will hit the company’s tech groups in late April and business groups in late May. The job cuts and firing freeze will also impact the Meta international teams.

The new announcement follows 13,000 job cuts in November and brings the layoffs at the largest social media company in the world to 23,000 out of 87,000 workers, or 26 percent, within five months. In addition to Facebook, which has 2.9 billion worldwide active users, Meta also owns the popular platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, each with 2 billion worldwide active users.

The Meta layoffs also increased the total number of tech workers laid off in the US in 2023 to 138,302 by 485 companies, as tracked by the website Layoffs.fyi. The other large layoffs in tech this year have included 12,000 at Google, 10,000 at Microsoft, 8,000 at Amazon, 8,000 at Salesforce and 6,650 cuts at Dell.

Meanwhile, media reports on Tuesday said that Apple—the most valuable company on Wall Street with a market capitalization of $2.4 trillion—would be delaying bonuses for some of its divisions and is planning to freeze hiring in an effort to cut costs. Bloomberg reported that people, who asked not to be identified, said the frequency of bonuses would be reduced and “limiting hiring for more jobs and leaving additional positions open when employees depart.”

While half of the 300,000 tech layoffs since the beginning of 2022 are among a few dozen of the largest corporations, the other half of the eliminated jobs have been lost by over 1,000 smaller companies. These firms have been hard hit by the economic slowdown and rapid rise in interest rates, both spearheaded by the Federal Reserve Bank.

Layoffs have also been carried out in the entertainment, retail, banking and auto industries with job cuts announced recently at Disney, Waymo, Citigroup, General Motors and Rivian.

The job cuts at Meta are being demanded by powerful financial interests among Wall Street investors, who watched their share values fall from a peak of $378 in September 2021 to a low of $90.79 in early November 2022 or a decline of 76 percent. Since the first round of layoff announcements late last year, the Meta stock value has more than doubled and stands at $194.02 as of this writing.

In his memo CEO Zuckerberg is presenting the layoffs at Meta as part of a strategic vision called “Year of Efficiency,” involving the “flattening of our orgs” and “building a better technology company.” He also wrote, “A leaner organization will execute its highest priorities faster.”

However, the motivating hand of Wall Street still found its way into his buzzword-laden justifications for the massive attack on the Meta workforce. He wrote, “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”

In other words, investors are putting Zuckerberg on notice that his cost cutting is not going fast enough. As reported by The Byte, “investors are growing more and more upset at CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. … Disgruntled investors have had—and will continue to have—only one choice while he’s still in power: sell, sell, sell.”

The timing of the new round of Meta layoffs points to a connection between the ongoing destruction of tech jobs, the Federal Reserve Bank’s rapid interest rate increases and the failure of the tech industry-focused Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) over the weekend.

Even though hundreds of thousands of jobs have been shed in the tech sector because of the Fed rate increases that began in March 2022, the value of Wall Street tech stocks fell by nearly $4 trillion last year, and the investors are demand further massive cost cutting.

Meanwhile, the Fed rate increases led to the insolvency of SVB because the bank’s management and top tech customer depositors sought to make risky investments in government bonds that fell dramatically in value over the past year.

The collapse and bailout of SVB has further destabilized the tech industry globally. For example, Wired reported on Monday that the insolvency of SVB “has reverberated across India’s tech sector.” The Santa Clara, California-based bank had “a large number of Indian companies with US venture capital funding, and much of India’s $13 billion software-as-a-service industry, which services American clients.”

According to Anand Krishna, founder of fintech startup Inkle, “This was a global catastrophe. A serious number of jobs were at risk everywhere from small towns in India that you’ve never heard of to San Francisco. A lot of startups in India are still remote, and those jobs were at serious risk because people were running out.”

Russia downs US drone as NATO plans major escalation in Ukraine

Andre Damon

On Tuesday, an American MQ-9 Reaper military drone crashed near the Russian coastline during an encounter with two Russian fighter jets 6,000 miles from US territory.

Whether the American aircraft was rammed by a Russian jet, as the Americans claim, or crashed after it was forced to take evasive action, as the Russians assert, it was the first time that the Russian Air Force had downed an American aircraft since the end of the Cold War.

MQ-9 Reaper drone [credit: US Air Force]

The crash marks yet another dangerous milestone in the spiraling war between the United States and Russia, which is expanding in intensity and metastasizing on a global scale.

In its press briefing, the Pentagon did not provide any meaningful information on the incident. It refused to explain where the drone was, what it was doing near Russian airspace, whether it was armed, or what kind of mission it was performing, beyond “surveillance.”

The Pentagon did not deny claims by Russia that the drone had its transponder turned off and that it was headed toward Russian airspace.

A US official told the New York Times the aircraft was flying about 75 miles southwest of Crimea, which would have put it perhaps 100-150 miles from the Russian mainland.

US surveillance operations over the Black Sea and NATO airspace are a critical component of the operations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which are not only funded and armed by the US military, but directed by it.

In February the Washington Post reported that nearly all long-range missile strikes launched by the Ukrainian military relied on targeting provided by the United States.

In October, Canadian Broadcasting Company reporter David Common flew aboard a NATO reconnaissance flight near the Ukrainian border. He noted that NATO “allies share this intelligence in real time with the Ukrainians.” He also stated that the airman “describe watching Russian radar signatures disappear after being engaged by Ukrainian jets and missiles.”

He concluded that this reality “does give you a sense of how NATO does have involvement, really, in the Ukrainian conflict.”

Pentagon spokespeople responded to Tuesday’s crash with platitudes bordering on the ridiculous. The crash was the result of “juvenile,” “unsafe,” and “unprofessional” action on the part of the Russian fighter crews, they claimed.

The flight was “routine,” as if providing targeting information for combat troops in the largest war in Europe since World War II was “routine.”

Such statements explain nothing. As Rand Corporation political scientist Samuel Charap explained, “I would bet the MQ-9 was operating in an area that was of particular military significance to Moscow.” He continued, “The Russians would have had a clear military reason for what they did—this wasn’t a random act of lashing out. And Russian pilots would have been following instructions from ground control, not freelancing.”

In order to understand this incident, it is necessary to understand its context.

On January 20, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley pledged that Ukraine and its allies would “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” This sweeping declaration pledged the entire credibility of NATO and the United States to the military defeat of Russia.

But less than two months later, it has become clear that this goal is unlikely, even with the massive commitment of funds and military hardware that has already been deployed, without a massive expansion of US involvement in the conflict.

On Monday, the day before the downing of the jet, the Washington Post published its most pessimistic assessment of the conflict to date.

“Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses, pessimism grow,” the article was headlined. It stated, “The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.”

It added, “US and European officials have estimated that as many as 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of Russia’s invasion early last year.”

The Ukrainian forces are “suffering from basic shortages of ammunition, including artillery shells and mortar bombs, according to military personnel in the field.” A Ukrainian commander the Post interviewed said that the “few soldiers with combat experience” were “all already dead or wounded.”

The commander added, “There’s always belief in a miracle,” noting it might be “a massacre and corpses,” but “there will be a counteroffensive either way.” He described the turnover in his unit: “Of about 500 soldiers, roughly 100 were killed in action and another 400 wounded, leading to complete turnover.”

For the US and NATO powers, Ukrainians are nothing more than cannon fodder in the conflict with Russia. Even with the gargantuan US military investment in Ukraine, however, the present levels of mass death in the war, which British Defence Minister Ben Wallace said was approaching “First World War levels of attrition,” is tilting the balance of forces toward Russia, whose population is three times larger.

According to internal US government documents published as part of the Pentagon Papers, the preeminent reason for US involvement in Vietnam was to avoid a “humiliating defeat.” It is just such a prospect that the United States faces, unless it massively expands its involvement in the war.

Just such an expansion is being actively prepared. On Tuesday, just hours after the Pentagon announced the downing of the drone, Politico reported that a group of senators from both US political parties called on the Pentagon to prepare to send F-16 fighters to Ukraine.

Declaring that “we are now at a critical juncture in the conflict,” the senators called on the Pentagon to “take a hard look at providing F-16 aircraft to Ukraine.”

Ultimately, the achievement of the United States’ goals in the conflict are impossible outside of the direct deployment of NATO troops to the war zone.

But given the total lack of popular support for such an action, it will take some massive event to galvanize public support for the required intervention.

Whatever mission the US surveillance drone was flying, it was no doubt related to the Washington’s next steps in the conflict, which threaten to make all the blood spilled so far just a down payment.

SVB collapse exposes deep problems in US financial system

Nick Beams

In the wake of the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) on Friday, the second-largest bank failure in US history, followed by the takeover of the New York-based Signature Bank by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on Sunday, the third largest, questions are being raised about the stability of the entire US financial and banking system.

Santa Clara Police officers exit Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California, Friday, March 10, 2023. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is seizing the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, marking the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. [AP Photo/Jeff Chiu]

There was a certain irony in the demise of Signature. One of its board members was Barney Frank, a former House of Representatives member and co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank legislation, brought down in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis which was supposed to prevent a repetition of such events.

As a result of SVB’s demise, depositors withdrew $10 billion from Signature leading to its being taken over. “We had no indication of problems until we got a deposit run late Friday, which was purely contagion from SVB,” Frank told the business channel CNBC.

The Fed and the FDIC, with the full backing of the Biden administration, which has pledged to do “whatever is needed,” have justified their actions -- full coverage for wealthy uninsured depositors at SVB as well as increased liquidity provisions for banks—on the grounds of “systemic risk.”

If that is the case, then it means that all the regulations and measures introduced after the 2008 crash, embodied chiefly in the Dodd-Frank Act, are not worth the paper they are written on.

There are divergences in financial markets over what has been done.

Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel and a strident advocate of “free markets,” told the Financial Times the rescue of uninsured depositors should not have taken place.

“The US is supposed to be a capitalist economy, and that’s breaking down before our eyes,” he said.

The losses to depositors would have been minimal and would have “driven home the point that risk management is essential.”

Others have a completely opposed position, including prominent hedge fund manager Bill Ackman who called for major intervention, tweeting that “our economy will not function effectively without our community and regional banking system.”

During the meetings between the Fed, the FDIC and the US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, venture capitalists, who formed much of the client base of SVB, intervened heavily and played the military card.

One anonymous source involved in the lobbying campaign, cited by the Financial Times (FT), said the theme of their pitch was “this is not a bank.”

“This is the innovation economy. This is the US versus China. You can’t kill these innovative companies.”

The SVB crash was triggered by two interconnected processes set in motion by the Fed’s interest rates over the past year as it seeks to batter down the wages upsurge of the working class in response to the highest inflation rate in four decades.

The tech-sector, especially in the most speculative areas involving the financing of start-ups by venture capital firms, has been heavily affected with the flow of money into new projects drying up. This led to money which had previously poured into SVB, one of the main conduits for this process, being withdrawn.

SVB had invested the money it received in 2020 and 2021, when the Fed was providing money virtually for free, into Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. However, the interest hikes have meant that the market value of these financial assets has fallen below their book value and SVB made losses when it came to sell them to meet the cash outflow.

When a move by SVB to strengthen its capital base with a new share issue failed, the FDIC intervened.

There is no doubt that SVB’s dependence on Treasury bonds and its failure to hedge its operations, apparently in the belief, held by other sections of the market as well, that the Fed would have to start to cut rates in the not-too-distant future was a significant factor in its collapse.

But the SVB case, notwithstanding its peculiarities, has thrown the spotlight on other banks whose position has worsened with the decline in the value of their holdings of Treasury bonds.

According to research undertaken by economists from five major universities and reported on by the FT under the headline “The US bank system is more fragile that you’d think,” the problems that hit SVB are present on a wide scale.

The study found that with the rise interest rates “the US banking system’s market value of assets is $2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets.”

It said a case study of the SVB failure was illustrative because “10 percent of banks have larger unrecognised losses larger than those at SVB. Nor was SVB the worst capitalised bank, with 10 percent having a lower capitalisation than SVB.”

It noted that: “Even if only half of uninsured depositors decide to withdraw, almost 190 banks are at a potential risk of impairment to insured depositors, with potentially $300 billion of insured deposits at risk. If uninsured deposit withdrawals cause even small fire sales, substantially more banks are at risk.

“Overall, these calculations suggest that recent declines in bank asset values very significantly increased the fragility of the US banking system to uninsured depositor runs.”

SVB has been described as something of an outlier because of its heavy dependence on government bonds and mortgage-backed securities which it did not hedge for a loss of value.

But those issues notwithstanding, the study reported on a major change.

“Prior to the recent asset declines all US banks had positive bank capitalisation. However, after the recent decrease in value of bank assets, 2,315 banks accounting for $11 trillion of aggregate assets have negative capitalisation.”

This means that the final balance of what they owe is greater than the capital stock of the company meaning that the risk of insolvency increased.

Government bonds are not the only asset being hit by the interest rate rises. Real estate, particularly commercial real estate, where the effects are compounded by reduced demand for office space because of the COVID pandemic and the increase in working from home, is also a potential source of turbulence.

An article by Robert Burgess, the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, published yesterday, drew attention to real estate as a source of vulnerability for banks, with commercial real estate loans making up close to 24 percent of all their loans.

“If market participants are wringing their hands over the potential fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, just wait until they look at the banking industry’s exposure to the rapidly weakening commercial real estate sector,” he wrote.

According to Burgess, it seemed as if every day brought news of some big property going into default, noting that in the past weeks “an office landlord controlled defaulted on about $1.7 billion mortgage notes on seven buildings in San Francisco, Boston and New York.”

The ongoing fallout from the SVB collapse has both political and financial policy consequences.

On the political front it has completely exposed the Biden administration as the bagman for the wealthy, the super-rich and financial speculators, prepared to dole out money, in whatever quantity necessary, to protect their interests.

It has major consequences on the monetary policy front with the Fed due to meet next week. Before the SVB collapse, it was considered likely that in view of what the Fed continually refers to as the “very tight labour market” it would revert to an increase in its interest rate of 50 basis points, after dropping to a 25-basis point rise in February.

Now the betting in the markets is that a 25-basis point rise is the maximum, with some predictions that it will make no rise at all. And longer-term policy is completely up in the air. The central policy of the Fed has been to keep raising rates, in the name of “fighting inflation.” But this objective, as the SVB collapse has so graphically revealed, threatens to set off a major financial crisis.

Chinese-brokered deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia raises alarm bells in Washington

Peter Symonds

In what is something of a diplomatic coup for China, an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran to ease tensions and reestablish diplomatic relations was announced in Beijing last Friday. The two rival powers have been engaged in a fierce competition for influence throughout the Middle East that has been a significant factor in the region’s conflicts and worsening instability.

Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, right, shakes hands with China's most senior diplomat Wang Yi, as Saudi Arabia's National Security Adviser Musaad bin Mohammed al-Aiban looks on during an agreement signing ceremony between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Beijing. [AP Photo/Nournews]

Formal diplomatic relations ended after the Saudi regime, which is based on an extreme form of Sunni fundamentalism, executed prominent Shiite cleric and government critic Nimr Baqir al-Nimr in 2016. His beheading prompted protests inside Iran that led to the storming of the Saudi diplomatic mission. Since then, relations have only deteriorated as the countries backed opposing sides in the wars in Yemen and Syria.

Under last Friday’s agreement, Saudi Arabia and Iran will have two months to negotiate the re-establishing diplomatic relations and the reopening of embassies, as well as to activate security cooperation arrangements. Few details have been made public but the deal is reportedly said to include reducing mutual propaganda warfare as well as direct and indirect attacks on each other’s interests in the region.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Arabia agreed to rein in Iran International, a Saudi-funded, Farsi-language satellite news channel which Tehran has accused of fomenting the months of anti-government protests in Iran. The head of Iran’s intelligence agency has branded the channel as a terrorist organisation.

Iran has agreed to curb cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia by Houthi rebels in Yemen who control large areas of the country and have been fighting a war against a Saudi-led military coalition since 2015. A truce negotiated last year remains in place as the Houthis and Saudis have held talks aimed at ending the conflict.

While efforts to ease tensions have been underway for several years with Iraq and Oman acting as mediators, China played the main role in securing the deal. Last Friday, top Beijing diplomat Wang Yi hailed the agreement as a “victory” adding that China would continue to address global issues. He declared that it “set an example for resolving conflicts and differences among countries through dialogue and consultation.”

In what was a thinly-veiled criticism of the US, Wang declared that the agreement demonstrated how the two nations were “getting rid of external interference, and truly taking the future and destiny of the Middle East into their own hands.” The Chinese diplomatic intervention in the Middle East comes as the US is escalating its war against Russia in Ukraine and accelerating preparations for conflict with Beijing in Asia.

The Biden administration has made a muted response to the Saudi-Iranian deal. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby gave qualified support, saying: “To the degree that it could deescalate tensions, all that’s to the good side of the ledger.” He then pointedly added that the US was not stepping back from its role in the Middle East.

Commentaries in the American media, however, point to deep concerns in Washington that Beijing has stolen a march on the US and is playing a more prominent role in the strategic oil-rich region.

An article published in the Hill, entitled “China-brokered Iran-Saudi deal raises red flags for US,” cited the comments of Atlantic Council analyst Jonathan Panikoff, who declared: “It should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you’ll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill.”

While the US and its allies maintain crippling economic sanctions on Iran on the pretext of preventing it from building nuclear weapons, Washington relied on its longstanding ties with the Saudi monarchy in its interventions in the Middle East.

US-Saudi relations, however, have soured since Biden’s trip to Riyadh last July. Three months later OPEC slashed oil production by 2 million barrels a day in an arrangement reportedly put together by Saudi Arabia and Russia to keep oil prices high. Saudi Arabia has further galled Washington by not condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

For its part, the Biden administration has riled Saudi Arabia by ending US military support for its Yemen war, limiting arms sales and not responding to Saudi appeals for assistance in starting a civilian nuclear program.

China has seized the opportunity to strengthen relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping met Arab leaders in Riyadh last December where he suggested a high-level gathering in Beijing of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) with Iran this year—a plan that was embraced by all sides.

Clearly China’s position as a major energy purchaser and trading partner throughout the region played a significant role in engineering an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran as a prelude to the broader meeting in Beijing later this year.

Iran in particular is confronting a major economic and financial crisis as a result of the US-led sanctions regime with its currency plunging precipitously against the US dollar and inflation hitting more than 50 percent in January in urban areas. Amid the sanctions, China remains the largest buyer of Iranian oil and its biggest trading partner. Bilateral trade last year was $15.8 billion up 7 percent from the previous year.

As part of a state visit by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Beijing in mid-February, Iran sent its top nuclear negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani to lay the basis for a deal with Saudi Arabia. While Raisi met with Xi, Bagheri Kani raised Iran’s demands behind the scenes with Chinese officials. He reportedly called on China to intervene in international talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal abruptly terminated by Trump as a step towards ending sanctions. He also appealed for Chinese investment and support for the Iranian currency. In return, Iran agreed not to set preconditions on talks with Saudi Arabia.

Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who was in Beijing last week for negotiations to finalise a deal told the Iranian media that the state visit had paved the way for “very serious negotiations between Iranian and Saudi delegations… Addressing misunderstandings and looking at the future can help develop stability and regional security.” Following the announcement of the agreement last Friday, the Iranian currency rose more than 10 percent against the US dollar.

In the volatile global conditions fueled by a deepening international economic crisis, the US-NATO war in Ukraine and a looming conflict with China, the deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia has more the character of a temporary truce than a lasting agreement. Like every other part of the world, the Middle East—the target of US imperialist wars—is caught up in the intensifying US confrontation with Russia and China. Saudi-Iranian rivalry, which is played out throughout the Middle East through the propaganda prism of competing Islamic fundamentalisms, can rapidly plunge back into conflict.

Whatever its immediate reaction to last Friday’s deal, Washington has no intention of allowing Beijing to extend its influence in the Middle East, or anywhere else in the world, and will not hesitate to use every dirty trick in the book to prevent it.

The United States and Human Rights: a History of Hypocrisy

Melvin A. Goodman

Photograph Source: Sistema Nacional de Bibliotecas – Public Domain

The United States is a human rights hypocrite.  No country has been more aggressive in lecturing others about human rights and no country has been less willing to take part in international efforts to halt crimes against the peace or even genocide.  The United States has been one of the major obstacles in the creation of an international military force under the auspices of the United Nations to prevent “crimes against the peace.”

Thanks to Charlie Savage’s excellent reporting in the New York Times, we currently find the Pentagon blocking the efforts of the United States to share intelligence with the International Criminal Court (ICC) regarding Russian war crimes in Ukraine.  The Departments of State and Justice as well as the intelligence community support providing the ICC with compelling evidence that has been collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations.  The Department of Defense, however, is resisting the sharing of such intelligence, citing the danger of a precedent that could be used by the ICC to prosecute American soldiers.  Unlike former presidents, President Joe Biden should stand up to the Pentagon and permit the sharing of our intelligence.

The Clinton administration’s handling of the Treaty of Rome, which was enacted in 1998 to create the ICC, is an excellent example of presidential cowardice.  President Clinton had a history of caving into the  right-wing opposition and the military establishment.  In this case, he signed the Rome Statute but refused to send it to the Senate for ratification.  In his first term, pressure from conservatives in the Congress led Clinton to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as well as the United States Information Agency.  Pressure from the Pentagon also stopped Clinton from supporting various United Nations resolutions to prevent the use of cluster bombs and land mines as well as to prohibit the use of teenagers in combat.

In the first year of his administration, Clinton was faced with a decision to help stop the genocide in Rwanda, but he hid behind the advice of UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright and others to avoid getting involved in stopping this terrible tragedy.  The French government was willing to intervene to stop the massacre of the Tutsis, and merely wanted the United States to provide the heavy lift capability to transport French soldiers and their equipment.  At that time, only the United States had such a capability.

As for the Rome Statute, President George W. Bush withdrew Clinton’s signature from the agreement in 2002; meanwhile the Congress had passed laws to limit U.S. support of any kind to the ICC.  The administration of George H.W. Bush did nothing about the crimes of Serbs against Bosnian and Croatian Moslems in the Balkans in the early 1990s.  There was ample of evidence of these crimes collected by Senator Chris Van Hollen, who was serving as a staffer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time.

The Obama administration was unusual in providing rewards for the capture of fugitive warlords in Africa whom the court had indicted, including rebel leaders in Uganda and the Congo.  The ICC’s very first judgment took place in 2012 against Congo rebel leader Oyilo for forcing children into military service.

Ironically, when the Obama administration decided to pursue regime change in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi, it justified the use of force on the basis of Gaddafi’s “crimes against the peace.”  On this occasion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice pressed for the use of force. The murder of Gaddafi in 2011 has left Libya as a failed state and a model of domestic horror.  The United States could have been accused of a “crime against the peace.”

On an earlier occasion, the Eisenhower administration opened the door to crimes against humanity in the Congo in the late 1950s, when it sanctioned the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.  This event opened the way to the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seko, the most brutal leader in Africa’s brutal history.

A series of administrations from Harry Truman’s to Ronald Reagan’s refused to even sign the UN Convention regarding the Punishment of Genocide because of the Pentagon’s opposition to the use of the term “genocide.”  It was not until the last year of Reagan’s second term in 1988, that Secretary of State George Shultz and others pressed for a U.S. signature. “Genocide” itself is a relatively new term, created by a Polish jurist, Raphael Lemkin in 1944.  Lemkin melded the Greek word “genus,” meaning tribe or race, with the Latin word “cide,” meaning killing.  Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own words denying the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians could be used to make a case against Putin’s genocidal warfare.  Like the United States, however, Russia is not a member of the ICC, and the Court cannot pursue cases in absentia.

One of the serious obstacles to preventing future war crimes is the failure for the United States and others to seek accountability for crimes that have been committed.  Unfortunately, there is no better example of U.S. hypocrisy regarding human rights and war crimes than the failure to seek accountability for CIA crimes in the wake of 9/11.  CIA director George Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin provided false intelligence to President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify an illegal invasion of Iraq.  Tenet and McLaughlin are respectively a managing director at the Allen and Company investment bank and a Distinguished Practioner-in-Residence at the School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.  Tenet was also a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, and left government service with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award that can be given to a civilian.

And it gets worse.  The two lawyers at the Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who prepared the unconscionable “torture memoranda” used by the CIA, are respectively a faculty member at the law school at the University of California and a federal judge.  The CIA official, Gina Haspel, who sent the cable that ordered various CIA stations to destroy tapes of torture and abuse eventually received Senate confirmation as the director of CIA.

 Early warning did nothing to prevent or address genocidal crimes in Europe or Africa, and the lack of accountability has added to these tragedies.  The creation of an international network to share intelligence and coordinate actions could provide some framework for dealing with crimes against humanity.  It is high time that we return to Articles 42 and 43 of the United Nations, which allows for member states to create an international peace force to restore international peace and security.

Workers’ Party of Turkey backs Kılıçdaroğlu in presidential election

Hakan Özal

Erkan Baş, chairman and deputy of the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) was one of the first politicians to congratulate Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu after the Nation Alliance chose him as its presidential candidate for the May 14 elections.

Erkan Baş, 2019 [Photo by Yol TV / CC BY 3.0]

On Tuesday, when TV100 asked him, “Would you support Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the presidential candidate of the Nation Alliance,” Baş replied: “Let’s defeat him in the first round.” 

This means the TİP will support Kılıçdaroğlu in the presidential election against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and advise its own alliance members, led by the Kurdish-nationalist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), to do the same. The HDP’s over 6 million voters could well swing in the election results.

The TİP’s assembly, which convened in the earthquake-hit Hatay province over the weekend, decided that “the Central Executive Committee is authorized to make a decision on supporting Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy in consultation with the democratic public opinion, especially with the allied organizations in the Labour and Freedom Alliance.” 

This confirms the World Socialist Web Site’s (WSWS) analysis of the Labour and Freedom Alliance (EÖİ),” as “a so-called ‘left’ political extension of the Nation Alliance of bourgeois opposition parties led by the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP).”

The WSWS explained that EÖİ’s function was “to drive the growing anger and opposition of workers and youth to both President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ‘Nation Alliance’ into the channels of the capitalist establishment and thus suppress it. This means preventing the development of an independent revolutionary movement of the working class, the key to genuine change.”

In Turkey, as all over the world, the masses of workers and youth are looking for a way forward and are shifting to the left amid rising living costs largely due to the official response to the COVID-19 pandemic and NATO’s war against Russia. This has been accelerated by the colossal earthquake disaster that caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths. As an expression of this political shift, the TİP has seen rapid growth in recent months. 

However, it does not represent a way forward but functions as a dam in front of the growing search for a genuine socialist alternative among the masses. In fact, the TİP and the Labour and Freedom Alliance, let alone the Nation Alliance, have no viable solutions to the fundamental problems facing the working class and the oppressed masses.

The TİP, like the Erdoğan government and the bourgeois opposition, ignores the pandemic and the public health catastrophe it has caused, causing over 300,000 deaths in Turkey alone. The TİP, which claims to defend “peace program” everywhere, is silent about the pro-NATO character of the HDP or the Nation Alliance. While pointing to the growing social inequality under Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002, it also hides the fact that the CHP-led Nation Alliance also represents finance capital and seeks to massively enrich it.

“We will fulfill our responsibility to rid the country of the palace [i.e., Erdoğan] regime, but we also need to see our interlocutors,” Baş said in the same interview, adding: “First we need liberation, then we need re-establishment.”

The TİP, which advances the bankrupt “lesser evil” policy that dominates the pseudo-left internationally, argues that the task of getting rid of the right-wing Erdoğan government falls not to the working class, but to the Nation Alliance, which represents another right-wing faction of the same ruling class. This alliance, whatever its rhetoric, seeks to manipulate broad popular opposition to the Erdoğan government. It is favored by the Biden administration in Washington, as well as other NATO powers.

Asked for his opinion of the slogan “one vote for TİP [in the parliamentary elections] and one vote for Kılıçdaroğlu [in the presidential election],” Baş replied: “This shows that some of our line is understood.” He continued that after the Nation Alliance comes to power, the TİP will assume the main opposition role and for this, citizens should vote for the TİP.

Baş claimed that his party would support the new government’s “decisions for the benefit of the citizens,” but that it would uncompromisingly oppose the that government’s “neoliberal policies, privatization of education and health care.”

Thus the TİP is fully aware that if the Nation Alliance wins the elections, it would continue the essential policies of Erdoğan. Ali Babacan, the leader of DEVA party, one of the members of the alliance, served as foreign and economy minister in the AKP governments from 2002 to 2015. Babacan, who enjoys the trust of financial elites in Washington, London and Frankfurt, is rumored to be the economy minister of a potential new government.

Another member of the alliance, Ahmet Davutoğlu, leader of the Future Party, was Erdogan’s foreign minister from 2009 to 2014 and then his prime minister from 2014 to 2016. Davutoglu was a leading architect of Ankara’s dirty role in NATO’s regime change war in Syria, mobilizing Islamist jihadists as their proxies.

The fact that Baş is demanding votes for a right-wing bourgeois alliance, whose pro-imperialist and anti-working class character is evident to him and to others, means that his party is consciously complicit in the crimes that a potential new government will commit.

Contrary to the claims of the TİP and other pseudo-left parties, masses of workers and youth do not have to choose between the factions of the bourgeoisie. This bankrupt middle-class nationalist perspective only serves to politically disarm and disorient workers everywhere.

From Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain and the Left Party in Germany, the WSWS has comprehensively analyzed the destructive political role and the theoretical and historical roots of the pseudo-left internationally. In 2015, in his Foreword to The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique, David North, Chairman of the WSWS International Editorial Board, described this political tendency internationally as follows:

The pseudo-left denotes political parties, organizations and theoretical/ideological tendencies, which utilize populist slogans and democratic phrases to promote the socioeconomic interests of privileged and affluent strata of the middle class. Examples of such parties and tendencies include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, and numerous offshoots of ex-Trotskyist (i.e., Pabloite) and state capitalist organizations such as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) in France, the NSSP in Sri Lanka and the International Socialist Organization in the United States.

Founded in 2017 following a split in the Stalinist Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) in 2014, the TİP sought to orient and adapt more openly to the bourgeoisie and imperialism under the guise of being “with the masses.” Its party leaders were elected as deputies from the HDP, which is represented in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. However, the TİP’s main goal has been to serve as a bridge between the Turkish bourgeois-nationalist parties led by the CHP and the Kurdish bourgeois-nationalist HDP.

The TİP uses left-populist rhetoric to keep the social and democratic aspirations of the masses and their growing opposition to the capitalist order within parliamentary boundaries. The dirty record of its pseudo-left allies internationally, indicates that a similar political trap is being set in Turkey.