Study sheds light on massive police violence in Germany

Marianne Arens

Shoving, fist strikes and painful pressure points, shackling and restraining, twisting joint and limbs, choking and kicking, attacks with tasers or pepper spray, use of police dogs and water cannons—the list of methods by which the police in Germany assault and maltreat their victims is long. As if that were not enough, victims are also faced with the fact that police esprit de corps and closeness to the judiciary practically prevent these offenses from being prosecuted and punished.

Federal riot police during a demonstration against a Castor transport [Photo by Montecruz Photo / CC BY-SA 2.0] [Photo by Montecruz Photo / CC BY-SA 2.0]

These are the findings of a large-scale study presented by criminologist Tobias Singelnstein and his team at Goethe University in Frankfurt in early May. The document, “Violence in Service. Excessive use of force by police and its processing” (Gewalt im Amt. Übermäßige polizeiliche Gewaltanwendung und ihre Aufarbeitung) can be downloaded free of charge from the university’s publishing house. Its contents document not only the frightening extent of police violence, but also that such violence remains virtually without consequences for the perpetrators.

The study, which was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), was obviously prompted by the broad public debate on police violence unleashed at the G20 summit in Hamburg. Under then First Mayor of Hamburg and now German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats, SPD), a state of siege was imposed on the city and unrestrained police violence was unleashed against protesters and uninvolved bystanders.

Singelnstein cites the Hamburg G20 summit in the introduction as a “prominent example of the lack of a reappraisal of excessive police violence.” In addition, he refers to the case of 16-year-old Senegalese Mohamed Lamine Dramé, whom Dortmund police officers killed with multiple shots from an automatic gun, as well as other cases. These instances have triggered a still-unresolved controversy about the use of violent force. In fact, Dramé’s murder in Dortmund was just one of four police killings in a single week.

The results of the latest study now show that excessive—and unpunished—use of force is part of everyday life for police. By contrast, the conclusions Professor Singelnstein draws from his own research findings are rather toothless: he recommends respecting the independent judiciary, as well as the introduction of individual identification and body cams among police in all German states.

Yet the larger context is obvious: the increasingly brutal police excesses and their acceptance by the capitalist state and its parties can only be understood as a response to a new upsurge in class struggle. Dissatisfaction with the ruling coalition government in Berlin, which is ever more openly committed to war and social inequality, inevitably invokes social resistance. With no established party representing the interests of the broad population, the state is resorting ever more directly to its organs of violence—to the police, the judiciary and the armed forces—to defend the narrow stratum of the wealthy upper echelons against the working class.

A similar situation presently exists in France, where the state organs are applying hard power against protesters on an almost daily basis, or in the United States, where fatal police shootings now occur several times a day. In Germany, too, the extent of police violence now documented by the “Violence in Service” study can only be understood in this context.

According to Professor Singelnstein’s team, this is the first time that “a large-scale quantitative survey of victims of police violence” has been conducted in Germany. Using trust-building intermediaries (“gatekeepers”), the authors located nearly 6,000 people from hard-to-reach, vulnerable or stigmatized groups and interviewed in detail 3,373 of them who had definitely been affected by police violence. Subsequently, 63 interviewees from the police, judiciary and public prosecutor’s office, as well as lawyers and victim counselors had their say. After five years of research, the results of the analysis are now available.

Its content is shocking. For example, 19 percent of all interviewees reported serious injuries, such as to joints, sensory organs, and broken bones. In the case of police operations outside major events, one in four (25 percent) was similarly affected. The risk of serious injuries was especially high in cases when choking and restraints were employed. Violence in police custody was also frequently reported.

The team divided those affected into three broad categories: first, demonstrations and large events of a political nature (55 percent); second, soccer and other mass events (25 percent); and third, conflicts during ID checks and similar situations outside of large events (20 percent).

Only 16 percent of participants were found to have an immigrant background, which is a lower proportion than in the population as a whole. The largest proportion with an immigrant background and of People of Color (PoC) showed up in conflicts that occurred outside of major events: in and around traffic stops, operations against third parties, apartment and house searches, deportations, etc.

The research team acknowledged a large unknown in the area of deportations. Here, it only had practical access to indirect reports, which came from interviews with lawyers and counseling centers, since those directly affected could hardly be reached for the study.

The employee of a counseling center said: “Most of all, we have to deal with police violence during deportations, and there it is specifically about sedation, shackling, humiliation, beatings and (...) simply degrading behavior, degrading behavior by police officers, etc.”

The brutality of the crackdown is underscored by a report in which an eyewitness attempted to film police violence with a cell phone. It was the case

... of a Syrian refugee who filmed an arrest of an African man because the officers sat on the latter’s back. And the arrested man was screaming, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, and the officers kept going anyway. And then he filmed it ... and then they broke his arm, so to speak, a spiral fracture, so that he would drop the cell phone. And to this day—that was a year ago—and to this day he still has pain. And the [proceedings] were discontinued, even though there were witnesses, and he was charged with committing bodily harm.

The police often deal with mentally disturbed people in an unnecessarily violent manner. There is strong prejudice against the “three Bs:” “drunk, crazy, stoned,” (“betrunken, bekloppt, bekifft”) as one police officer admitted in an interview. This greatly lowers the inhibition threshold, the people concerned are informally addressed (the German language has a informal and formal pronouns) and they are often arbitrarily injured (since people who are drunk or on drugs are supposedly “less sensitive to pain”).

Elsewhere, a police officer admits in an interview that “Japanese massage sticks” of his own making circulated among his colleagues. They would be attached to a small ribbon in the sleeve and could be used in unobserved moments to inflict great pain on the victims in certain parts of the body.

Not only is the study frightening, equally frightening is the way major daily newspapers have reacted to it. The Süddeutsche Zeitung interviewed, of all people, the notoriously right-wing police ideologue Rainer Wendt, chairman of the reactionary professional association Deutsche Polizeigewerkschaft (DPolG), about its contents. He claimed: “There is no structural problem with the use of force by the police.”

Wendt described the demand for mandatory individual identification of police officers as a “political fighting instrument of left-wing parties to publicly discredit the police and to place its officers under general suspicion of unlawful use of force.”

Wendt”s brash assertion that the accusations against police officers are baseless and unfounded are based on the disastrous practice of the German judiciary and prosecutors’ offices, which hardly ever bring charges—as rare as they are—to trial and even more rarely convict the accused. This exactly was a stated goal of the study: to highlight those many cases that are never tried in court.

The results of the study are clear: although cases of assault by officers are on the rise, it is extremely rare for them to be reported to the police. The overwhelming majority of respondents chose not to press charges because they assumed they would be unsuccessful. In most cases, they were unable to identify the police perpetrators. In addition, there was also a justified fear that the accused police officers would file a counter complaint.

Less than 10 percent (9.2 percent) of the respondents indicated they had filed a complaint, most with the intention that “something like this does not happen again.” Of the small number of cases that were reported at all, the vast majority were dropped due to “insignificance” or “lack of sufficient suspicion.”

For comparison, the study cites statistics from 2021, when only 2.3 percent of charges of unlawful use of force by police officers were tried and nearly 98 percent were dropped. And of the 80 accused police officers who actually went to trial in a capital case in 2021, only one in three (27 people) ended up being convicted—a proportion far below the average.

Singelnstein admitted that these results had ultimately surprised even him, the expert: “How small, after all, the power of complaint of those affected is, and how great, in contrast, the power of definition of the police.”

The study expresses relatively clearly that it is essentially class issues that trigger police violence. Those targeted are primarily people who are at the bottom of the social ladder and have no lobby. One lawyer is quoted as saying:

I think that the more marginal the milieu of the accused, the more likely it is that the police will act more harshly if something escalates, right? ... But this is a purely emotional thing—that foreigners, asylum seekers, so to speak, are not in the sense of ... There are also many German Turks here, ... they are German citizens. But just from their ethnic origin I think they run the risk of being tackled harder.

In the case of demonstrations, the main factor (80 percent) cited for excessively violent police treatment is “political orientation.” For events outside of large-scale demonstrations, political orientation ranks second for use of force at over 40 percent, ahead of factors such as age, gender or ethnicity. Almost all those reporting police violence in the context of a demonstration or political action described themselves as “tending left-wing.”

Groups of people who are perceived as “socioeconomically worse off” and for whom “no legal resistance can be expected” are particularly frequently targeted by the police. According to the study, this affects “marginalized groups such as racialized persons, LGBTIQ persons, homeless or other subaltern groups,” as well as People of Color (PoC). In it, the mention of “homeless” and “subalterns” in particular points to the class issues at stake: members of the working class, whether as professionals, unemployed or refugees, are particularly likely to be victims of police violence.

An interview with a police officer documents the far-right sentiment and militaristic language that circulates among police forces:

Well, it just depends on what the order is at the moment. If there’s a high threshold for intervention, then you let yourself be spat on for two hours and then all of a sudden they say, “Now you can proceed!”—and then Poland is open.

Jobless rate rising in Australia, while tax cuts grow for wealthy

Mike Head

Two developments in Australia last week underscored the true class character of the now one-year-old Albanese Labor government. While feigning sympathy for the families “doing it tough,” the government is delivering a bonanza to the rich.

Stood down or unemployed workers lining up for welfare at inner-west Sydney Centrelink in early 2020. [Photo: WSWS]

One announcement was a rise in the unemployment rate—driven up by government-backed central bank interest rate hikes. The other was the release of a report showing that the cost of the government’s “stage three” income tax cuts, overwhelmingly for the wealthy, has grown to $313 billion over the next decade.

After 11 interest rate increases by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) since last May, thousands of workers have begun to lose their jobs as intended by the bank and the government. Official unemployment jumped from 3.5 percent to 3.7 percent in April according to seasonally adjusted figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

In fact, the number of jobs actually fell by an estimated 4,300, with a 27,100 drop in full-time employment exceeding a 22,800 increase in part-time workers. That pushed the number of workers officially classified as unemployed to 528,000, even by the artificially-low estimates of the ABS—that is, working less than one hour a fortnight.

Another 880,000 workers were classified as under-employed—wanting more hours of work. The situation was even worse for younger workers, with the youth unemployment rate lifting from 7.8 percent to 8.6 percent—the highest in almost a year.

This is just the beginning. Both the central bank and the government predict, and base their calculations on, the unemployment rate hitting 4.5 percent, probably by late next year. That means throwing another 150,000 workers out of a job.

This is not an unfortunate side-effect of the interest rate rises, as claimed by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, RBA governor Philip Lowe and corporate economic commentators. The central purpose of the rate rises is to lift the level of joblessness in order to further suppress workers’ wage demands, even if this triggers a recession, after a year in which workers have already suffered the biggest cut in real pay since World War II—4.5 percent.

The rate hikes have nothing to do with fighting inflation, as the bank and the Labor government insist. Worldwide, the inflationary spiral has been caused by the pumping of trillions of dollars into the financial markets by capitalist governments and central banks since the 2008-09 global financial crisis. That has been compounded by the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine on supply chains and energy prices, plus profit gouging, especially by the food and energy conglomerates.

Chalmers’ response to the growth of joblessness was contemptuous. He confirmed the government’s expectations, while trying to downplay the hardship it would cause. “We have expected for some time that the unemployment rate will tick up a bit as a consequence of higher interest rates, combined with some pretty serious global uncertainty,” he said.

This is under conditions in which rising unemployment will intensify the financial, personal and social stress already caused by the soaring interest rates, which have cut at least $1,200 a month off the income of average home mortgage holders. The underlying cost-of-living and housing crisis has seen working-class households depending on charity foodbanks in record numbers.

While the Labor government is thus making workers and their families bear the burden of the deepening capitalist economic crisis, it is handing the wealthy the lion’s share of $313 billion in stage three income tax cuts over the next decade.

New Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) costings show that the estimated cost of the tax cuts, due to commence next year, has risen from $254 billion to $313 billion, mainly due to higher incomes at the top and the inclusion of an additional year in 2033-34. 

The PBO found that the tax cuts will cost $20.4 billion in their first year, 2024-25, rising every year to $42.9 billion in 2033-34. These handouts dwarf the meagre “cost of living” package, said to be worth $14.2 billion over four years, which the government attempted to make the headline of its May 9 budget.

The stage three cuts add to the benefits afforded the highest-income recipients in the first two stages implemented by the previous Liberal-National government, all with the support of the then Labor opposition.

Stage three introduces a virtual flat tax system. It reduces to 30 percent the marginal rate of tax for everyone earning between $45,000 and $200,000 a year. The PBO costings confirm that this further enriches the wealthiest households at the expense of the poorest.

Income recipients in the top 20 percent are set to garner about two-thirds of the proceeds—$227.6 billion of the total of $313.1 billion—as their average incomes rise from $109,200 in 2023-24 to $155,600 by the end of the decade.

Even that underestimates the handouts to those at the very top. Someone taking home more than $180,001 a year will enjoy an annual tax cut of $17,700 by 2030-31. For a dual-income household, that would mean $35,000 a year.

But the poorest 20 percent of the population, some 5.3 million people, will get nothing at all because their incomes are projected to remain less than $45,000 a year.

This will accelerate the growth of social inequality—the ever-increasing accumulation of wealth in the hands of the most affluent 10 percent, above all the super-rich 1 percent, while workers and youth suffer declining living conditions.

Confronted by outrage among workers, students and welfare recipients, Chalmers defended the handouts. He told the Guardian the tax cuts “kick in at $45,000” and “it is actually a defensible objective” to try to reduce “bracket creep”—the increased tax take as incomes rise. 

But the PBO costings reveal that those earning between $45,001 and $60,000 will get just $3.7 billion—or about 1.2 percent of the benefit—over the decade, while low-wage workers and all those left far below the poverty line after the budget’s paltry increase of $2.80 a day to welfare payments, get not a cent.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also attempted to deflect the anger, saying Labor had tried to amend the Coalition government’s legislation to remove the stage three tax cuts. That is a fraud. Labor voted for the bill after offering token amendments in the Senate, knowing in advance they would be defeated.

Moreover, Albanese and Chalmers have repeatedly emphasised their commitment to delivering the tax cuts, despite not even mentioning them in the May 9 budget. Chalmers tried to stonewall on the issue when questioned by journalists, before finally admitting that they would cost $69 billion over the four years. 

In the budget papers, the Labor leaders also tried to bury the vast planned increase in military spending, including the $368 allocated for AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines. They know that these immense outlays have fueled widespread anger and concern.

Labor is also slashing crucial social spending. The May 9 budget contained further cuts in real outlays on public health, education and housing, and targeted the National Disability Insurance Scheme for a $74 billion reduction over a decade, without providing any detail as to how that would be imposed.

Regardless of the public fury, the Labor government will not change course, however. It is fully committed to delivering both the austerity and tax cuts demanded by the financial oligarchs and the war preparations against China demanded by Washington.

Toxic Contagion – Funds, Food and Pharma

Colin Todhunter

In 2014, the organisation GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food in its report Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland. The report Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World (ETC Group, 2022) confirmed this.

Small farmers produce up to 80% of the food in the non-industrialised countries. However, they are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The period 1974-2014 saw 140 million hectares – more than all the farmland in China – being taken over for soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane plantations.

GRAIN noted that the concentration of fertile agricultural land in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day. While industrial farms have enormous power, influence and resources, GRAIN’s data showed that small farms almost everywhere outperform big farms in terms of productivity.

In the same year, policy think tank the Oakland Institute released a report stating that the first years of the 21 century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale. An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, were reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights.

Institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity, pension funds and university endowments, were eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.

This trend was not confined to buying up agricultural land in low-income countries. Oakland Institute’s Anuradha Mittal argued that there was a new rush for US farmland. One industry leader estimated that $10 billion in institutional capital was looking for access to this land in the US.

Although investors believed that there is roughly $1.8 trillion worth of farmland across the US, of this between $300 billion and $500 billion (2014 figures) is considered to be of “institutional quality” – a combination of factors relating to size, water access, soil quality and location that determine the investment appeal of a property.

In 2014, Mittal said that if action is not taken, then a perfect storm of global and national trends could converge to permanently shift farm ownership from family businesses to institutional investors and other consolidated corporate operations.

Why this matters 

Peasant/smallholder agriculture prioritises food production for local and national markets as well as for farmers’ own families, whereas corporations take over fertile land and prioritise commodities or export crops for profit and markets far away that tend to cater for the needs of more affluent sections of the global population.

In 2013, a UN report stated that farming in rich and poor nations alike should shift from monocultures towards greater varieties of crops, reduced use of fertilisers and other inputs, increased support for small-scale farmers and more locally focused production and consumption of food. The report stated that monoculture and industrial farming methods were not providing sufficient affordable food where it is needed.

In September 2020, however, GRAIN showed an acceleration of the trend that it had warned of six years earlier: institutional investments via private equity funds being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into industrial-scale concerns. One of the firms spearheading this is the investment asset management firm BlackRock, which exists to put its funds to work to make money for its clients.

BlackRock holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Danone and Kraft Heinz and also has significant shares in most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms: those which focus on providing inputs (seeds, chemicals, fertilisers) and farm equipment as well as agricultural trading companies, such as Deere, Bunge, ADM and Tyson (based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018).

Together, the world’s top five asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group – own around 10–30% of the shares of the top firms in the agrifood sector.

The article Who is Driving the Destructive Industrial Agriculture Model? (2022) by Frederic Mousseau of the Oakland Institute showed that BlackRock and Vanguard are by far the biggest shareholders in eight of the largest pesticides and fertiliser companies: Yara, CF Industries Holdings K+S Aktiengesellschaft, Nutrien, The Mosaic Company, Corteva and Bayer.

These companies’ profits were projected to double, from US$19 billion in 2021 to $38 billion in 2022, and will continue to grow as long as the industrial agriculture production model on which they rely keeps expanding. Other major shareholders include investment firms, banks and pension funds from Europe and North America.

Through their capital injections, BlackRock et al fuel and make huge profits from a globalised food system that has been responsible for eradicating indigenous systems of production, expropriating seeds, land and knowledge, impoverishing, displacing or proletarianizing farmers and destroying rural communities and cultures. This has resulted in poor-quality food and illness, human rights abuses and ecological destruction.

Systemic compulsion 

Post-1945, the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank with the World Bank helped roll out what has become the prevailing modern-day agrifood system under the guise of a supposedly ‘miraculous’ corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive Green Revolution (its much-heralded but seldom challenged ‘miracles’ of increased food production are nothing of the sort; for instance, see the What the Green Revolution Did for India and New Histories of the Green Revolution).

Ever since, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have helped consolidate an export-oriented industrial agriculture based on Green Revolution thinking and practices. A model that uses loan conditionalities to compel nations to ‘structurally adjust’ their economies and sacrifice food self-sufficiency.

Countries are placed on commodity crop production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.

Today, investment financing is helping to drive and further embed this system of corporate dependency worldwide. BlackRock is ideally positioned to create the political and legislative framework to maintain this system and increase the returns from its investments in the agrifood sector.

The firm has around $10 trillion in assets under its management and has, according to William Engdahl, positioned itself to effectively control the US Federal Reserve, many Wall Street mega-banks and the Biden administration: a number of former top people at BlackRock are in key government positions, shaping economic policy.

So, it is no surprise that we are seeing an intensification of the lop-sided battle being waged against local markets, local communities and indigenous systems of production for the benefit of global private equity and big agribusiness.

For example, while ordinary Ukrainians are currently defending their land, financial institutions are supporting the consolidation of farmland by rich individuals and Western financial interests. It is similar in India (see the article The Kisans Are Right: Their Land Is at Stake) where a land market is being prepared and global investors are no doubt poised to swoop.

In both countries, debt and loan conditionalities on the back of economic crises are helping to push such policies through. For instance, there has been a 30+ year plan to restructure India’s economy and agriculture. This stems from the country’s 1991 foreign exchange crisis, which was used to impose IMF-World Bank debt-related ‘structural adjustment’ conditionalities. The Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy locates agricultural ‘reforms’ within a broader process of Western imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy.

Yet ‘imperialism’ is a dirty word never to be used in ‘polite’ circles. Such a notion is to be brushed aside as ideological by the corporations that benefit from it. Instead, what we constantly hear from these conglomerates is that countries are choosing to embrace their entry and proprietary inputs into the domestic market as well as ‘neoliberal reforms’ because these are essential if we are to feed a growing global population. The reality is that these firms and their investors are attempting to deliver a knockout blow to smallholder farmers and local enterprises in places like India.

But the claim that these corporations, their inputs and their model of agriculture is vital for ensuring global food security is a proven falsehood. However, in an age of censorship and doublespeak, truth has become the lie and the lie is truth. Dispossession is growth, dependency is market integration, population displacement is land mobility, serving the needs of agrifood corporations is modern agriculture and the availability of adulterated, toxic food as part of a monoculture diet is feeding the world.

And when a ‘pandemic’ was announced and those who appeared to be dying in greater numbers were the elderly and people with obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, few were willing to point the finger at the food system and its powerful corporations, practices and products that are responsible for the increasing prevalence of these conditions (see campaigner Rosemary Mason’s numerous papers documenting this on Academia.edu). Because this is the real public health crisis that has been building for decades.

But who cares? BlackRock, Vanguard and other institutional investors? Highly debatable because if we turn to the pharmaceuticals industry, we see similar patterns of ownership involving the same players.

A December 2020 paper on ownership of the major pharmaceuticals companies, by researchers Albert Banal-Estanol, Melissa Newham and Jo Seldeslachts, found the following (reported on the website of TRT World, a Turkish news media outlet):

“Public companies are increasingly owned by a handful of large institutional investors, so we expected to see many ownership links between companies — what was more surprising was the magnitude of common ownership… We frequently find that more than 50 per cent of a company is owned by ‘common’ shareholders who also own stakes in rival pharma companies.”

The three largest shareholders of Pfizer, J&J and Merck are Vanguard, SSGA and BlackRock.

In 2019, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations reported that pay outs to shareholders had increased by almost 400 per cent — from $30 billion in 2000 to $146 billion in 2018. Shareholders made $1.54 trillion in profits over that 18-year period.

So, for institutional investors, the link between poor food and bad health is good for profit. While investing in the food system rakes in enormous returns, you can perhaps double your gains if you invest in pharma too.

These findings predate the 2021 documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset, which also shows that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. ‘Competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks.

Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only Vanguard and Black Rock.

A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to $20 trillion.

While individual corporations – like Pfizer and Monsanto/Bayer, for instance – should be (and at times have been) held to account for some of their many wrongdoings, their actions are symptomatic of a system that increasingly leads back to the boardrooms of the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard.

Prof Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University says:

“Today, capitalist power can be summed up with the names of the three biggest investment funds in the world: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisor. These giants, sitting at the centre of a huge galaxy of financial entities, manage a mass of value close to half the global GDP, and are major shareholders in around 90% of listed companies.”

These firms help shape and fuel the dynamics of the economic system and the globalised food regime, ably assisted by the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and other supranational institutions. A system that leverages debt, uses coercion and employs militarism to secure continued expansion.

Italy hit by worst floods in a century

Thomas Scripps

The worst flash floods in a century claimed 13 lives in Italy this week, left 20,000 people homeless and thousands more without power. Two dozen rivers burst their banks in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, causing nearly 300 landslides, affecting 41 cities and towns, damaging 400 roads and submerging 5,000 farms. Cracks in river embankments mean other areas are still at risk.

The catastrophe is the latest in a spree of natural disasters in Italy now being made a regular fact of life by capitalism-driven climate change. It follows floods in the same region just two weeks earlier which killed two people and caused an estimated €1-2 billion in damages.

Rescuers checks buildings in the flooded village of Castel Bolognese, Italy, Wednesday, May 17, 2023. [AP Photo/Luca Bruno]

Formula 1’s Imola race scheduled to take place in the region this weekend has been cancelled, while musician-songwriter Bruce Springsteen was widely criticised for his selfish and insensitive decision to go ahead with a concert in Ferrara Thursday evening.

An average of more than two months’ rainfall fell in just 36 hours across Wednesday-Thursday, rising to six months’ rainfall (50cm) in some areas. Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, commented that “two records were broken in 15 days in the same region. An event like the one that occurred on 2 May might happen once in a century, but then another hit 15 days later.”

The response from the neo-fascist Meloni government has been totally inadequate, with rescue efforts hampered by flooded roads. A crisis meeting has been called for next Tuesday.

Residents and experts have pointed to failures to prepare adequate flood defences or regulate the development of riverbanks. Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci admitted no regional dams had been built for 40 years. A 2018 report by the European Court of Auditors found problems with the implementation of flood protection plans across the continent, specifically citing one river basin in Italy with an estimated €1.1 billion gap between planned and available spending.

Addressing the problem of unplanned, profit-hungry urban and agricultural development, President of the National Council of Geologists Arcangelo Francesco Violo referred to the impact of “intensive and disorderly urbanisation in recent decades along with high density soil consumption.”

Biologist Andrea Agapito of WWF Italia commented likewise that riverside vegetation, with a vital “sponge effect”, had been removed and “areas of natural flooding… occupied by settlements and crops.” The organisation called for “A climate change adaptation policy that goes beyond how to handle emergencies and considers the effects of ordinary planning.”

But the Italian government only published its National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change last December, after close to four years of delay and amid criticisms of severe underfunding.

Moreover, even if fully funded, such measures can only address the first symptoms of a runaway climate crisis which will overrun all “adaptations” if left unchecked. Italy’s civil protection agency estimates that 94 percent of its municipalities are prone to natural disasters. Violo commented that the floods were part of a chain of “extreme [weather] events that have a major impact on urban territory”, even in areas where “maintenance is carried out.”

The latest floods are the product of two climate change-related processes. The first is “An increase in rainfall overall per year, for example, but a decrease in the number of rainy days and an increase in the intensity of the rain in those few days when it rains,” in the words of Antonello Pasini, a climate scientist at Italy’s National Research Council.

The impact of the torrential rain was then exacerbated by the effects of the prolonged drought Italy suffered, along with much of Europe, last year—the continent’s worst on record and likely the worst in the last half a millennium.

Europe is warming roughly twice as quickly as the global average, already 2.2 degrees Celsius hotter over the past five years compared to the pre-industrial average. 2022 saw the continent’s hottest ever recorded summer, with roughly 20,000 people killed by extreme heat.

In Italy, average summer temperatures were consistently two/three degrees above the seasonal average, and in some places 10 degrees above. The heat itself killed over 700 people across 33 major cities, a 20 percent rise over earlier averages. It also hardened the soil, increasing the risk of severe flooding.

Mauro Rossi, a researcher from Italy’s National Research Council (CNR), explained how prolonged drought “dries the soil and modifies its permeability in various ways”, which, coupled with “extreme rain events”, makes flooding much more likely.

Similar causes contributed to the deaths of 12 people on the southern island Ischia in a landslide triggered by torrential rain last November; 11 people in flash floods last September in the Marche region; and another 11 in an ice avalanche in the Italian Alps last July. Such events are becoming increasingly common, threatening livelihoods as well as lives.

According to Italy’s farmers’ association Coldiretti, extreme weather events in Italy have been five times more frequent this year than a decade ago, based on data from the European Severe Weather Database. The organisation commented, “This multiplication of extreme events has caused over six billion euros’ worth of damage to agriculture in 2022, 10 percent of the [value of] national production.” The drought caused crop yields to fall by up to 45 percent last year.

Italy’s experience is not unique. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported that a record 126,000 people were forced from their homes by flooding in Europe and Central Asia in 2020. Major storms displaced 6,200 people.

In 2021, floods across Europe killed at least 243 people most of them in Germany and Belgium—left 200,000 homes without power and caused tens of billions of euros’ worth of damage. It was the deadliest natural disaster in Germany since the 1962 North Sea Flood, killing close to 200 people in the fourth richest economy in the world.

Thirty-nine climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution group have since concluded that the warmer air resulting from global heating, allowing it to hold more water vapour, made the disaster 1.2-9 times more likely to happen, increasing the intensity of downpours in the region by 3-19 percent.

The effects of climate change are even more devastating in the Global South. Events in Italy are currently paralleled by those in Somalia, where flash flooding after the worst drought in four decades has killed at least 22 people and displaced a quarter of a million, according to the Somali Disaster Management Agency. The drought killed an estimated 43,000 last year—half of them children under five.

Pakistan is still reeling from the worst floods in its history last summer, and one of the costliest in world history, killing over 1,700 people, displacing millions; destroying well over a million houses, 22,000 schools and 13,000km of roads; killing over a million livestock and devastating swathes of agricultural land.

The causes of these disasters, and how to reverse them, are known and have been for decades. Two months ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the final instalment of its Sixth Assessment Report stating unequivocally that “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” requiring “Deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” and “Rapid and far-reaching transitions”.

It politely noted “gaps” between policy pledges and reality and in required global investment, “barriers to redirect[ing] capital to climate action” and “finance flows fall[ing] short of the levels needed.” In plain English, this means that the capitalist class is incapable of solving the climate crisis, with every new disaster showing the consequences for the rest of humanity.

What is required is a revolutionary transformation of ownership and production, replacing the blindly destructive guiding principle of private profit with the planned and sustainable fulfilment of human needs.

UK asylum seeker housing protections scrapped

Paul Bond

The British government will deny asylum seekers basic housing protections in order to move them from hotels into the private rented sector. Private landlords in England and Wales will be “temporarily” exempted from regulations covering everything from electrical safety to minimum room sizes.

The announcement follows Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill, which is passing through parliament and imposes blanket denials of the right to asylum and the expansion of internment camps. Barges, ferries and military sites are being refitted for detention. Next month, the first 50 (of up to 500) asylum seekers will be housed on three-storey barge the Bibby Stockholm.

A hotel in Leicestershire used to house asylum seekers [Photo by Crep171166 / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

According to the Guardian, the Home Office intends to use a total of 10 old cruise ships, ferries and barges for the purpose, with Braverman “close to confirming” an 1,800-capacity cruise ship to be docked in the Mersey.

Plans are also being made to expand the use of repurposed army barracks like former Royal Air Force base Manston. Designed as a holding centre for 1,000, last October, its 4,000 detainees were suffering from scabies, norovirus, diphtheria and MRSA, as well as being subject to violent abuse. A coroner’s inquest is still ongoing into one death of an asylum seeker who tested positive for diphtheria.

Currently, more than 50,000 asylum seekers are housed in hotels. With space in barges and military sites still limited, the Conservative government is forcing them into substandard and unregulated accommodation.

Private landlords are required to have a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) licence from local authorities if they let to more than one household in a single property.

The licences require landlords to obtain an annual gas safety certificate, a declaration from a qualified electrician that electrical fittings are safe, and to provide working smoke alarms for every inhabited storey of the building, plus a carbon monoxide alarm in every inhabited room with a gas or oil heater. If requested, landlords must supply a written declaration of the safety of electrical appliances and furniture. They are obliged to provide all tenants with a written statement of the terms of occupancy.

Regarding living space, bedrooms for one person aged 10 or over cannot be smaller than 6.51 square metres, while those for two or more aged 10 or above must be at least 10.22 square metres. A room for one child under 10 must be at least 4.64 square metres.

These requirements will be shelved for asylum seekers, with landlords allowed to house them for up to two years without a license. The Refugee Action charity pointed out that the proposal means private Asylum Accommodation Service Contract providers, who make millions in profit from public funds, will be exempt from paying HMO licence fees to local authorities, and will not be required to pay for property repairs.

Mary Atkinson of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants told press that the present accommodation for asylum seekers is already substandard, “with people seeking sanctuary housed in cramped, windowless rooms smaller than prison cells. Without HMO licences, already traumatised people will be at risk of living in places that are unfit for human habitation.”

Polly Neate, of homeless charity Shelter, said the government was “putting thousands of people, including children and older people, at serious risk.”

The government is overseeing a downward spiral of already dreadful conditions. Asylum seekers in hotels report cramped, overcrowded, unhygienic rooms with extremely unhealthy food and poor-quality healthcare. A Migrant Voice reports tells the story of one person living for a year in a two metre by two metre room with no windows, commenting, “His isolation and hopeless and generally dehumanised situation had a devastating impact on his mental health, leading to self-harming and two suicide attempts.”

The anti-democratic nature of the government’s asylum accommodation plans is mirrored in the method through which the draconian measures are being enacted. The licensing proposal is being presented as a statutory instrument rather than a bill, meaning it will not go to a full parliamentary vote. Instead, it will be presented to a committee of 16-18 MPs for consideration and approval. It received a low-key announcement, being scheduled to coincide with Gove’s high-profile Renters (Reform) Bill.

Press attention has focused on that bill’s elimination of so-called “no fault evictions.” Under Section 21 of the Thatcher government’s 1988 Housing Act, landlords can serve an eviction notice on tenants who complain about disrepair rather than fixing the problems. This is routinely being used to evict tenants in order to jack up the rent.

But its elimination is hedged with potential loopholes that allow its continuation by different means. The bill strengthens landlords’ right to evict tenants for antisocial behaviour, using the government’s own catch-all definition of this as “any behaviour capable of causing nuisance or annoyance.”

Easier eviction for antisocial behaviour was urged by the National Residential Landlords Association, and there was intense lobbying by the Property Research Group established by Tory MP Kevin Hollinrakethe landlord of five properties. Nearly one in five Tory MPs, 68 in total, are private landlords. Braverman is one of five such who make more than £10,000 a year in private rent. 16 Labour MPs, including frontbenchers David Lammy, Emily Thornberry and Lucy Powell, are also private landlords.

The attack on asylum accommodation and strengthening of powers against “anti-social behaviour” are connected. On waiving HMO license requirements, the Local Government Association (LGA) warned of “the increase of substandard buildings” and “adverse impacts on the safety and wellbeing of asylum seekers.” They pointed to “a range of negative consequences,” including the “community cohesion implications of potential antisocial behaviour and increased pressure on public services.”

Thousands more a year will find themselves in these dire circumstances as the government accelerates its anti-migrant agenda. At a Council of Europe summit in Iceland, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reached a new agreement on British cooperation with the European Union border force Frontex around “critical operational and strategic challenges including the situation in the Channel.”

Sunak linked the attack on migrants with the government’s push for war against Russia, saying “we must also learn the lesson of this war—by being prepared to confront threats to our societies before they become too big to deal with. That includes acting on cybersecurity and AI, and it means tackling illegal migration.”

The prime minister also met Siofra O’Leary, president of the European Court of Human Rights, as part of his campaign to annul the court’s Rule 39 orders, which have been used to block the government’s deportation flights to Rwanda. The Illegal Migration Bill would allow the home secretary to ignore Rule 39 orders.

At the far-right National Conservatism conference last weekend, Braverman called for further restrictions on legal migration, while Gove blamed migration for the housing crisis.

New housebuilding is drastically below the government’s targets, thanks to relaxation of those targets by Gove. Under pressure from Conservative MPs seeking to make it easier for local authorities to refuse planning permission, the minister last year made the annual target of 300,000 new homes voluntary rather than compulsory. Trade body the Home Builders Federation suggests construction will fall to 120,000.

The government is seeking to scapegoat asylum seekers for a wider crisis, and they have the loyal support of the Labour Party’s. Labour’s Matthew Pennycook criticised the government proposal by saying it was “not bringing down the standards in HMO asylum accommodation to the minimum [presumably considered appropriate],” but “exempting them entirely.” At the same time, he made clear that Labour shares the Tories’ view of “the hotel crisis.”

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has previously insisted, “Speeding up claims, deporting people when their claims are unsuccessful, that’s the way to tackle the problem with the immigration system instead of spending millions housing people in hotels.”

Greek general election takes place amid mass discontent with rotten political set-up

Robert Stevens

The Greek general election takes place on Sunday, with its political parties in crisis amid mass discontent in the working class, whose social position has been decimated by over a decade of austerity.

Four year ago, the conservative New Democracy (ND) party was the underserving beneficiary of popular hatred towards SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left)—which had just imposed four years of even worse cuts than had previous ND and social democratic PASOK governments. SYRIZA came power on a landslide after promising to end austerity.

This year the voting age has been lowered to 17 for the first time. Those aged 16 will be able to vote if they turn 17 in an election year, including this year. In another first, Greek citizens living abroad will be permitted to vote in their country of residence, meaning more than 9.8 million Greeks are eligible.

SYRIZA passed the laws while in power but is unlikely to benefit significantly. It is an indictment of the organisation—the doyen of pseudo-left parties internationally—that despite a further four years in opposition, it is unable to offer anything to convince workers it would shape their lives for the better.

Up to 13 percent of voters, including many young people, are undecided who to vote for, reflecting popular hostility to the whole range of pro-capitalist parties which have conspired to wreck workers’ living conditions. Political realities in Greece were encapsulated this February by the tragic Tempi train crash, as millions protested for weeks over the preventable deaths of 57 mainly young people as a result of years of budget cuts and privatisation.

Demonstrators hold a banner reading in Greek "Murderers" during a protest for victims of the Tempi rail disaster. Athens, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. [AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis]

SYRIZA was unable to benefit from this opposition. No-one forgot that it was SYRIZA that primed the state-owned TrainOSE for privatisation, including by keeping the workforce at unsafe levels, before selling it off for peanuts to Italian railway operator Ferrovie Dello Stato Italiane.

Going into the election, ND’s lead over SYRIZA has fallen from a long-standing double-digit lead but is still around 5-7 points. PASOK is in third place in the polls on around 10 percent.

It is expected that the first round will give no party a working majority, with attempts to be made to establish a coalition. An agreement between ND and other right-wing parties is a possibility, or an alliance with PASOK. A complication is that one of the main factors in ND’s political crisis is last year’s revelation that the National Intelligence Agency (EYP) illegally hacked the phone of PASOK president Nikos Androulakis.

The government and its media backers are fighting the election on the basis that the economic measures they have implemented have stabilised Greece and made it highly investible once again as a profitable haven for the banks and corporations.

Earlier this year, Bank of Greece governor Yannis Stournaras said he was “confident” that credit rating agencies would upgrade Greek bonds within months, to investment-grade credit rating, after over a decade when they were deemed junk bonds.

But for this to happen, it would require the new government to continue brutal austerity. Stournaras declared, “Greece has managed to correct macroeconomic imbalances and improve price and wage competitiveness, but structural competitiveness remains low compared to other eurozone members,” and “A sustainable fiscal effort will be needed” by the incoming government.

Turning Greece into an investor’s paradise requires a further onslaught against a working class already bled dry. Inflation reached over 12 percent last year, yet average annual wages are still around 25 percent below their peak from 2009 according to OECD data. Pay was brutally suppressed by the SYRIZA government, with the minimum monthly salary going up to just 650 euros from 586 euros over its period in office. Young people are paid pittance wages but many still cannot get a job with youth unemployment at nearly 25 percent.

Used as a test bed for austerity across Europe, Greece has seen parties across the political spectrum carry out an historic reduction in the living standards of workers, facilitated by the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy which acts as a partner to the governing parties.

Greece's Prime Minister and New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, right, and leader of the main opposition Syriza party, Alexis Tsipras, laugh before a debate at the premises of public broadcaster ERT in Athens, Greece, Wednesday, May 10, 2023. Heads of Greece's political parties participate in a televised debate ahead of the country's May 21 elections. [AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis]

The mouthpiece of finance capital, the Financial Times, insists that this class war agenda be stepped up. It editorialised this week that Greece “is one of the fastest growing economies in the bloc, and its central bank governor expects it to regain its investment-grade credit rating this year,” however, “it is vital that the next government builds on the hard-won progress. The foundations for the economic revival were forged by successive governments enacting austerity measures, including tax rises, public sector wage controls and changes to pensions.”

This is the FT’s prescription even as it notes how the “high cost of living has … compounded the suffering of Greeks following years of austerity: the share of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion is one of the highest in the EU.”

An example of this grinding poverty was given in a Reuters interview with a working-class Athens resident. Niki Klaoudatou, a 40-year-old telephone company employee, told the news agency she was earning just 850 euros a month, the same as she “did as a 20-year-old supermarket worker in 2004.”

The article noted, “Klaoudatou, who shares a small apartment in the Athens suburb of Alimos with her two children and her mother, has seen her mortgage rise to 450 euros a month, 100 euros more than a year ago. She shares expenses with her mother, who receives a monthly pension of around 850 euros. But still the family cannot make ends meet.”

As well as high fuel prices, workers’ income is leeched by rising food prices and an array of regressive taxes including a 13 percent value-added tax on food products and sales tax on essential goods such as milk and bread. On her attitude to the election, the mother said, “I’m going to vote for a small party, more to show that I am not happy with the bigger parties.”

None of the parties of the ruling class offer any alternative for the working class. SYRIZA proposes nothing more than increasing the monthly minimum wage to just 880 euros, and public sector workers’ pay by 10 percent—going nowhere near compensating for the losses over the past decade. Its proposals to reinstate an annual bonus pension up to 500 euros and raise all pensions by 7.5 percent are similarly pathetic, and would in any case be junked as soon as demanded by international investors.

In a debate held between the main party leaders earlier this month, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras emphasised the restraint shown in the party’s spending proposals, insisting that he was “fully aware of the country’s fiscal capabilities.” He has declared himself open to participating in any governing coalition, not wanting to “exclude anyone in advance.” In 2015, SYRIZA entered government with the xenophobic Independent Greeks as its junior partners.

Whatever rotten coalition emerges will maintain the offensive against the working class. It will do so as part of Greece’s continuing commitment to a NATO alliance now waging war against Russia. Athens is NATO’s highest military spender in GDP terms, 7.44 billion euros last year, representing 3.54 percent of GDP. This is even higher than the United States’ 3.46 percent.

In the party leaders’ debate, Tsipras said his party would “obviously honour the defence contracts Greece has signed, but will fight to bring projects to the Greek defence industry as well.” He complained, “it is unacceptable that a programme of 14-15 billion euros has not brought a single euro to the Greek defence industry.”

The debate he contributed so enthusiastically to was framed around a supposedly imminent invasion from Turkey. Asked by ERT’s host what he would do in government if Turkish commandos landed on a Greek islet, former SYRIZA finance minister and current leader of MeRA25 (European Realistic Disobedience Front) Yanis Varoufakis responded, “The defence of our national space is an obligation we all have.”