Train horror in India: Another crime of decaying capitalism

Arun Kumar & Patrick Martin

The deadliest train crash in India in more than a quarter of a century has killed nearly 300 passengers and injured more than 1,000. It is a tragedy that has horrified the world and exposed the criminal neglect of basic infrastructure by the ultra-right regime of Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi and the capitalist governments that preceded it.

Rescuers attempt to remove body of a victim of from passenger train that derailed in Balasore district, in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, Saturday, June 3, 2023. [AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool]

Three trains collided in Balasore district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha last Friday night, two of them high speed passenger trains moving in opposite directions, the third a freight train heavily laden with iron ore. The Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore is a four-line station, with two main lines in the middle and two loop lines on either side. The Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express from Chennai in southern India to Howrah in eastern India was travelling at 128 kmph in one main line and Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express was coming from Howrah at 126 kmph along other main line.

According one railway official, the northbound Coromandel Express diverted from the main line into the side loop, where it “crashed into a goods train full of iron ore stationed there” that “absorbed all the shock of crash as it was very heavy.” Another official said that 12 of the 22 cars in the passenger train were derailed by the collision, and some were thrown in the path of the southbound Superfast Express, which smashed into them and itself derailed.

It is not yet known why the northbound train changed direction, but the crash is being attributed either to an incorrect signal or a malfunction of the signaling device. Before any investigation, the Modi government seized on the initial reports to pin responsibility on the railroad workforce at the local level to divert attention from how its own policies contributed to the disaster.

Shedding crocodile tears over the huge loss of life, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rushed to express his “distress” over the accident. “Whoever made the mistake, strong action will be taken,” he declared, making clear that scapegoats would be found and punished to cover up decades of neglect by successive governments.

In reality, the Indian ruling class, and Modi as their current representative, care nothing for the passengers smashed and dismembered in the collision. Most were migrant workers from across the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand who are working in Chennai and nearby areas. Others were patients coming back from treatment in southern India’s private hospitals.

As media reports showed, the crash created a hellish scene filled with dismembered bodies. Rescuers could be seen climbing atop the wrecked trains to break open doors and windows using cutting torches, while local residents were trying to free the hundreds of people trapped in the rail cars.

A survivor from Coromandel Express, Ramesh, told ABP Nadu: “When the accident took place, the whole train wobbled and all of us fell down. We could not process anything. When we came out of the coach, we were shocked to witness multiple coaches derailed and one of the coaches crashed into another coach.”

Recollecting the horrific scene, Ramesh said that many of the people were stuck in the mangled remains of the train. Villagers immediately rushed for help and started rescuing the people. Eventually, the police and medical professionals reached the spot.

Modi’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Sunday that the reason for the accident was “a change in electronic interlocking” used to avoid collisions and that an investigation would show “who was responsible for that mistake.” But the statistics of deaths on the Indian rail network show that there is no “mistake” or “accident,” but the responsibility lies with successive governments.

Despite the horrific toll, Friday’s crash was exceeded by three other train disasters in India, including a 1995 crash when some 358 people were killed in a collision between the Purushottam Express and the Kalindi Express near Firozabad in Uttar Pradesh in northern India.

Even worse is the daily death toll from passengers thrown off trains—most riding on rooftops of overcrowded passenger cars—and people killed on the tracks, run over by speeding trains. According to the most recent figures, 16,000 people died in 19,000 accidents in 2021 on the Indian rail system. This averages out to 49 accidents per day, killing 45 people.

In an attempt to appease mounting anger over official negligence, Modi announced an ex-gratia payment of 200,000 rupees ($US2,427) for the next of kin of the deceased, and 50,000 rupees for the injured from the PM’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF). This is a drop in the bucket for a government that currently spends 6.33 trillion rupees ($76.8 billion) on the military—the third largest war budget in the world, trailing only the US and China.

While the Modi government and state authorities now are desperately trying to cover up their own responsibility, it is clear that decades of neglect and cost-cutting have resulted in a serious erosion of rail infrastructure and necessary safety measures.

A report published in the Hindu on May 31, just two days before Friday’s accident, which was headlined, “Increase in train accidents worries Indian Railways”, stated:

“The Railway Board recently took up the issue of loco pilots [locomotive engineers] being deployed over and above their prescribed working hours resulting in a threat to the safety of train operations. Going by the rules, duty hours of the crew could not exceed 12 hours under any circumstances, said the official, who did not want to be quoted... Worried over the increase in train accidents across the rail network, the Railway Board has called for urgent steps to fill vacancies and reduce the long working hours of locomotive pilots.”

Advanced technologies are available to prevent “human errors” and “signal failures” but have not been widely implemented. Railway officials have admitted that the train anti-collision system “Kavach” was not available on the route where the Friday accident took place.

In any case, the experience of rail workers in many countries is that even when the most modern technology is introduced, it is not used to make railroad operation safer, but to increase the profits of the rail bosses and their financial backers. This has been the purpose of Precision Rail Scheduling (PSR), introduced in recent years in both the United States and Canada, which has been used to reduce railroad crews to the status of industrial serfs, on call 24/7 for work.

The Modi government’s attitude to the carnage on the country’s rail system reflects the same cynical indifference towards the lives of the poor working people evident in the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people were allowed to die because of the criminal policy of the pro-business regime in failing to implement necessary health measures.

All over the world, the frenzied drive towards imperialist war and profit-gouging by the ruling elite has led to a colossal neglect in infrastructure building and maintenance. This is reflected in disasters such as the rail crash in Tempi, Greece, in which 57 people were killed, mostly students returning from their holidays, and the derailing of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, which poisoned the small town—air, water and soil—with chemicals carried in the train’s tank cars.

In India, where the railroads are owned by the state, the same process is at work. The Modi government ignores public services, which are crucial for millions of workers and rural poor—a staggering 8.4 billion people use the railroad passenger system each year. Meanwhile, the government has been lavishly spending for military armaments, including highly sophisticated drones, warplanes, tanks, missiles and nuclear weapons, as it has rallied behind the US imperialism in its war drive against China.

All the main bourgeois parties in India share responsibility for this program of militarism and war against the working class at home. The Congress Party, now in opposition, has ruled the country for more than half of the time since independence in 1947, and has likewise ignored basic safety in India’s railway network.

The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, made a mild criticism of the neglect of rail safety, but it has propped up Congress Party governments and non-BJP coalitions for three decades, thus sharing their responsibility for the disaster. They are just as enthusiastic proponents of Indian capitalism as Congress and the BJP.

Brazil’s Congress launches January 8 coup inquiry as Lula covers for the military

Tomas Castanheira

More than four months after the fascist storming of the seats of political power in Brasilia by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Congress has begun a Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI) into the Acts of January 8, 2023. The presentation of the agenda for the six-month investigation, which was scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed until next week.

Pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators invade Brazilian government buildings. [Photo: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil]

The events that this Commission of Inquiry are to investigate represent the biggest shock to Brazil’s civilian regime since it was established in1985-88, after 21 years of military dictatorship. The attempted coup of January 8, which was unquestionably prepared at the highest echelons of the state and the armed forces, revealed that sections of the Brazilian ruling class are determined to dispense with any democratic facade and reestablish dictatorship as their means of exercising political power.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in January, the attack in Brasilia “represented both the culmination of the offensive by Bolsonaro and his civilian and military allies to promote a coup to overturn the election, and the first episode in a new political stage of the developing fascist movement in Brazil.”

The response of the Brazilian establishment in the following months, particularly that of the Workers Party (PT) government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has demonstrated that there exists no faction of the bourgeoisie that is capable or willing to respond to the growing fascist threat. The conditions in which the parliamentary investigation into the coup attempt is being held only confirm this elementary truth. 

The long delay in convening the Commission of Inquiry is the result of the PT government’s determination to prevent a public investigation into the conspiracy that, in the words of the president himself, came close to toppling him from power “so that some general could take over the government.”

After working to dissuade congressmen from the PT itself from convening an inquiry, the Lula government entered into frantic negotiations with its far-right allied parties, such as União Brasil, to block the CPMI. In February, the government leader in Congress, Randolfe Rodrigues, declared that they were “working to disarm this CPMI,” which he said was “led by the opposition” in order to “obstruct the ongoing investigations [into the] responsibility of those who committed the terrorist acts of January 8, 2023.”

The government was forced to invest heavily—with an ample distribution of public offices and funds, according to media reports—to get its allied parties to withdraw support for a proposal that it effectively characterized as sabotage of ongoing investigations into the coup attempt. This very fact reveals the fragile foundations upon which the PT’s power rests.

While the PT fought to limit investigations exclusively to the secret operations of the Federal Police and the Supreme Court (STF), the fascistic opposition led by Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) doggedly sought the opening of the public inquiry into the coup that it itself had planned. The PL and its allies aim to use the CPMI to create a platform to wave the political banners of the January 8 coup, while spreading the lie that the PT was the real architect of the invasion of government buildings, having purposefully undermined security and infiltrated agents responsible for “acts of vandalism.”

This false narrative by Bolsonaro’s supporters gained momentum after the leak in mid-April of security camera footage showing Lula’s Institutional Security Cabinet minister, Gen. Gonçalves Dias, walking among the protesters occupying the Planalto presidential palace. In response, the government fired Gonçalves Dias and agreed to set up the Commission of Inquiry to reaffirm, according to Randolfe, that “we were not the executioners of January 8, we are the victims.”

Even after having agreed to the inquiry, the Lula government is openly seeking to derail the work of the investigation. On the eve of its installation, Randolfe and the leader of the PT caucus, Zeca Dirceu, had dinner with the president of the commission, Arthur Maia, of União Brasil. According to Veja magazine, they demanded from Maia “‘responsibility’ in dealing with the military.” A participant interviewed by the magazine summarized the contents of the discussion: “The government recognizes that the relationship with the Armed Forces is not good and that it is not possible to stretch the rope, put the military against the wall, and throw the CPMI over them.”

The discussion reported by Veja is entirely consistent with the attitude and objectives openly pursued by the PT. On the opening day of the CPMI, May 25, Zeca Dirceu declared to CNN that this investigation “actually should not even exist.” According to the PT leader, “the political class should be dealing with hunger, job creation, education, health care,” and most importantly, “approving a new sustainable fiscal regime.”

In other words, as it seeks the unity of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to confront a working class increasingly impatient with the decline in its social conditions, the PT cannot allow the public agenda to be lost in exposing and fighting a fascist conspiracy within the state.

In particular, the PT wishes to prevent at any cost the exposure of the military high command’s engagement in systematic attacks on the legitimacy of the electoral process; its official support for a “popular mobilization” to overthrow the elected government; and its conspiratorial discussions, reported by various sources, of a possible uprising to consolidate a coup.

As it refuses to disarm the civilian and military forces acting to overthrow democracy, the PT seeks to buy their favors. In a revealing interview, Navy Commander Marcos Olsen, sworn in last month, declared: “I find it absolutely justifiable, in light of all that has occurred, that the president [Lula] has his reservations about the military in an ideological political context.... But, since the first conversation I had with him, he has always been concerned about assuring investments for the Force.”

Despite Lula’s attempts to cover up the tensions between his government and the military by showering it with increasing state resources, his government cannot buy its way out of these contradictions. American imperialism, which conspired alongside the Brazilian military to overthrow the elected government of João Goulart in 1964, remains a key player in this process. 

Seeking to secure its strategic interests in Latin America, permeated by its growing war campaign against Russia and China, Washington is again establishing independent and extra-constitutional relations with the Brazilian military. This alarming fact was made explicit by the leaked Pentagon documents, which revealed that Brazilian Navy officials maintained contacts with the US government, seeking to shift the Lula administration’s foreign policy towards a closer alignment with Washington. 

Recently, the daily Estado de São Paulo reported that the Brazilian Army organized a major international seminar with the US and NATO countries, from which it deliberately excluded Russia and China without consulting the government. According to the newspaper, along with a recent episode in which the Ukrainian government requested the purchase of Brazilian armored vehicles directly from the Ministry of Defense, the seminar was seen among Lula’s officials “as an example of how military diplomacy clashed with that of the government.”

Electricity and rent hikes expose Australian government’s “cost-of-living” budget

Max Boddy

Soaring electricity prices and rents are having a devastating impact on working-class households in Australia, further demonstrating the fraud of the Labor government’s depiction of its May 9 budget as providing “cost-of-living relief.”

Striking NSW public sector workers march in Sydney, 8 June, 2022. [Photo: WSWS]

Electricity prices will increase between 20 and 25 percent from July 1, in the middle of winter, for about 600,000 customers across New South Wales, southeast Queensland and South Australia, the Australian Energy Regulator confirmed last week.

In addition, half a million Victorian residents and small businesses will be affected by separate increases of $350 and $750 on average. This is all despite wholesale power prices being significantly lower than 12 months ago, and the Albanese government introducing token energy price caps last year.

While Labor has announced a one-off rebate of up to $500, barely offsetting the increase, this will only be available to qualifying pensioners and concession card holders. The level of this rebate varies according to location—in the Australian Capital Territory, eligible residents will receive just $175, far less than the anticipated price increase.

These rises make a mockery of the Labor Party’s 2022 election promise to reduce household power bills by $275, as part of a “better future.”

Rents are also becoming unaffordable, adding to the housing and homelessness crisis generated by 11 home mortgage interest rate rises since May 2022. This week’s latest ANZ CoreLogic housing affordability report showed an average rent rise of more than 10 percent over the past year.

The report revealed that a median income household would require 30.8 percent of income to service a new lease, while those on lower household incomes would need 51.6 percent of their income. Housing costs above 30 percent of income are regarded as the definition of housing stress, making it hard for households to make ends meet.

Data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has demonstrated that the cost-of-living crisis is accelerating, not slowing down. Monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures released last week show inflation over the twelve months to April rose to 6.8 percent from the 6.3 percent reported in March.

Quarterly CPI figures showed an increase of 7 percent in the 12 months to March, down slightly from 7.8 percent in the December quarter, but the prices for most essential goods and services continued to surge. 

Food and non-alcoholic beverages rose another 1.6 percent in the March quarter, with fruit and vegetables rising 2.4 percent and other food products 3.2 percent. Dairy and related products rose 1.9 percent, producing an annual increase of 14.9 percent. 

Secondary education costs rose by 4.9 percent in the March quarter and tertiary education a massive 9.7 percent, soon to be driven higher by the inflation indexation of student fee debts, which is causing thousands of students to quit their studies.

Even this data underestimated the impact on working-class households. Separate ABS annual cost-of-living figures showed that increases ranged from 7.1 percent to as high as 9.6 percent, depending on household types. 

The employee household category, which includes working-class families, experienced the 9.6 percent rise, the highest since 1986. That was primarily driven by a year-on-year increase in mortgage interest of 78.9 percent, plus a 7.9 percent rise in food and non-alcoholic beverages prices.

People have taken to Twitter to show their online shopping invoices. @RealAnitaWhite said the price of home brand white bread from Woolworths had nearly doubled from $1.50 in September 2016 to $2.70.

A 1kg block of cheese that cost $7.70 in March 2020, now cost $10. Milk products priced at $5.70 for in March 2020 were now $10.

These tweets were part of a campaign by the Australian Council of Social Service to ask the Labor government to raise the sub-poverty rate of welfare payments. It was joined by others revealing their shopping lists on Twitter, showing there was nothing more they could cut from their bills.

But Labor’s budget increased welfare payments by an insulting $40 a fortnight, less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day.

As the product of 11 interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia, the average mortgage repayment for borrowers with a $600,000 mortgage has increased by around $1,200 a month.

The central bank is intent on using the rate rises to slow the economy and push up unemployment, even at the cost of a recession, in order to further drive down workers’ real pay. Wages already trailed inflation by 4.5 percent last year, the biggest recorded fall since World War II, with the trade unions enforcing pay deals that are far below the cost of living.

Both the bank and the Labor government base their calculations on the official jobless rate rising from 3.7 percent to 4.5 percent by next year or 2025, which would mean the loss of 150,000 jobs.

Overall, it is already clear that Labor’s budget, its second since taking office, will do nothing to halt the cost-of-living crisis. Moreover, its $14.6 billion “cost of living” budget package over four years was dwarfed by the $69 billion to be spent on “stage three” income tax cuts over the same period, overwhelmingly handed to Australia’s wealthiest people.

Labor’s two budgets also contained some $40 billion in social spending cuts, including to public health, education and housing. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is one of the biggest targets, with the government planning to slash $74 billion over the next decade.

At the same time, military spending is being ramped up, including $368 billion set aside for the purchase of AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, designed for use in a US-led war against China. This war drive will be paid for by ever-deeper attacks on working-class conditions.

Russian autoworkers protest low wages

Andrea Peters

Ulyanovskiy Avtozavod UAZ main entrance. [Photo by Yuriy Lapitskiy / CC BY-SA 2.0]

Workers at an auto factory in Ulyanovsk, Russia, spontaneously shut down production on May 17 in protest over low wages. The plant is owned by one of the country’s major producers of buses, trucks and off-road vehicles for consumers, the government and the military. Activity was brought to a halt for several hours when dozens of men and women laid down their tools at the lunch hour and refused to restart the line until that night.

Law enforcement arrived, and seven workers were detained and brought to the local police station. Their protest was, according to the director of the Ulyanovsky Avtomobilniy Zavod (UAZ), “an illegal action” that interfered with the production process. The workers were later released without charge.

Parliamentary Deputy Aleksei Kurinny, a member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Russia (KPRF), accused the autoworkers of “sabotage” on the grounds that the factory is part of Russia’s military-industrial complex and fulfills orders necessary for the maintenance of the war effort. While no legal action has been taken against the strikers, Kurinny’s statement was a threat directed not just against the UAZ workers but all those who are unwilling to sacrifice themselves to support the Kremlin’s military machine. Sabotage accusations carry with them the possibility of extensive prison sentences.

In a video statement, UAZ workers rejected Kurinny’s charge, saying they were defending their interests, inviting him and others to come see the conditions in the factories and declared that they would get their raise “not thanks to politicians who live off our taxes” but due to their own efforts.

According to the workers, the average monthly salary at the UAZ factory is about 20,000 rubles ($260), with the highest paid seeing their earnings peak at around 31,000 to 32,000 rubles ($406-$419). They want all workers in the plant to be bumped up to the next skill and qualification tier and for compensation at that tier to be raised. In addition, they are demanding the removal of the clause from their contract that makes wage indexing dependent upon “the financial capacity of the company.”

UAZ as well as the general prosecutor brought in to investigate the dispute and the region’s minister of economic development have rejected the workers’ demand for a change to their tier status. They also said they were lying about their incomes.

Prosecutor Andrei Yefremkin told the newspaper Kommersant that his inspection “has so far found no violations,” and “the statement about the workers being paid 20,000 rubles does not quite ring true.” Repeating the position of the company, he declared that “their wages are higher than the regional average,” implying that this fact, even if it were not false, invalidates workers’ demand for better compensation.

The same line came from Ulyanovsk Minister of Economic Development Nikolai Zontov, who told the press, “On the whole, UAZ in terms of average wages corresponds to the average wage level in the automotive components and car manufacturing industry. The region itself is now in 60th place in Russia in terms of the average wage,” he opined as if such a ranking is some sort of achievement.

UAZ says that wage hikes in 2021 and 2022 have been adequate to meet workers’ needs and points to further planned increases, which will boost salaries by 12 percent overall for 2023. But even if one were to accept the company’s claims about what their line employees actually make, 2023’s boost would bring them up to just 45,000 rubles, less than $600 a month.

The company and state officials as well as the trade union have also sought to deny that there was really any real protest on the shopfloor. They claim it was just some sort of gathering in which workers, unplanned and in the middle of their shift, asked to speak with management.

Viktor Bychkov, chairman of the trade union committee at the plant, told Kommersant, “It was not a rally, but a meeting with the management, expressed in a loud form.”

He said he would “work through the legitimate demands with management” but would explain to his members that some of what they wanted, in particular the wholesale transition to a higher wage tier, was “illegitimate.” Bychkov defended the company’s outsourcing of work as necessary during “periods of high production load” and denied that his members are paid less than these temporary employees.

Conditions in Russia’s auto industry, which saw vehicle production fall by 56 percent in 2022, are extremely tense. Having been closely integrated into global auto production, the industry was particularly hard hit by the draconian economic sanctions imposed by the US and EU since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Despite an uptick in output, producers continue to impose unpaid furloughs and temporary shutdowns due to supply chain problems. At the start of May, UAZ extended its one-week holiday closure by six days. Workers were told they could use some of their paid vacation time during that period if they wanted to.

Russia’s largest auto production conglomerate, AvtoVaz, halted operations at some plants between April 4 and 24, a move they had intended to postpone till later in the year but could not delay. In June, AvtoVaz facilities in Tolyatti and Izhevskiy will switch to a four-day week for a period of three months. The company is citing shortages of electrical parts and problems in the car market as the reason.

In an interview with Tsargrad.tv, economist Yevgeny Nadorshin, commenting on the recent protest at the UAZ plant, stated that given the crisis in household incomes in Russia and the country’s efforts to ramp up industrial production, “without a doubt” there would be growing wage demands from Russian workers.

While inflation has eased over the last year in Russia, the country’s state bank just announced that the price reprieve was temporary and is now over. Inflation is once again on the uptick and will hit between 4.5 and 6.5 percent in 2023. Workers’ real incomes will continue to fall.

The stage is being set in Russia for major social conflicts. The relentless pressure on workers’ living standards coincides with and is exacerbated by the escalating US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine.

In the war, the Russian ruling class is seeking some sort of accommodation with imperialism that allows it to exploit Russia’s natural resources and the Russian working class without direct interference by the major capitalist powers. But the imperialist powers are seeking not accommodation but military defeat. The Kremlin, having taken the US and NATO’s bait in invading Ukraine, has entangled the Russian working class in a bloody debacle.

Strikes across Italy opposing Meloni’s social cuts and war policy

Marianne Arens

On Friday, May 26, Italian transit workers in both private and public companies, including local and long distance services, began a 24-hour strike, as did many public school workers. In as many as 25 cities, drivers of trains, streetcars and buses as well as teachers and, in Trieste, dock workers, struck for higher wages and against precarious and insecure jobs. In Milan, Naples and Turin, strikers marched through the city center chanting, “Abbassate le armi, alzate i salari!” (Down with arms, up with wages!).

In Rome, schoolchildren and students answered the call of the Unione sindacale di base (USB) union, and demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Education. In Lombardy, the train service of the Trenord company was suspended for 24 hours, while Trenitalia went on strike from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. In Naples, the entire public transport system, including the metro, bus, streetcar and cable car, was suspended for 24 hours, as was the case in Turin and Palermo. Workers also struck in Genoa, Florence, Livorno, Bari and Catania. The toll stations on the major highways likewise went on strike, causing long lines to form.

Striking furniture industry workers on April 21, 2023 [Photo by Fillea Cgil / flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0]

Clashes occurred in Milan as strikers moved toward the heavily guarded Confindustria corporate headquarters. Demonstrators tried to break through the barriers, throwing tomatoes and eggs. Police officers, reinforced by military police, countered with shields and batons.

Excluded from the strike were certain high-speed Frecce and ICE trains. The city of Rome and the flood-affected regions of Emilia-Romagna and Marche were also exempted from the transit strike, as was air traffic. At airports, a national strike has been announced for Sunday, June 4.

The key demands were: €300 net monthly wage increase and adjustment of wages to inflation; €10 minimum hourly wage for all those whose earnings are still below that; and an end to precarious, temporary and low-paid jobs.

In May there were several strikes in Italy demanding increased wages and greater job security. They are part of a growing movement throughout the European working class, from France, Spain and Britain to the warning strike movements in Germany and Scandinavia and the recent teachers strikes in Romania.

In Italy, a four-hour national transport workers strike took place on May 2. On May 3, air traffic controllers went on strike, supported by Air Dolomiti and Vuelding flight attendants. On May 19, ground crew workers at all Italian airports went on strike against exploitation, starvation wages and precarious conditions. At ITA Airways, the successor to Alitalia, which is being taken over by Lufthansa, there have already been several walkouts protesting the elimination of 4,000 jobs.

The strike movement is directed against the pro-business social and war policies of the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who belongs to the fascist Fratelli d’Italia. The Meloni government is trying to extend the expired collective agreement in the public sector until 2024, replace it with arbitrary and puny inflationary bonuses and so impose the budget constraints dictated by Brussels.

The government has approved a new decree for labor and social affairs that includes cuts in social benefits and a relaxation of regulations on short-term employment contracts. In May, the three traditional union confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL held three large rallies opposing these policies, with 30,000 to 40,000 workers participating in each of Bologna, Milan and Naples.

Meloni is implementing tax cuts for entrepreneurs and the rich. In populist manner she compares taxes on small businesses and the self-employed to mafia protection rackets. Her finance minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti (Lega), cut by three-quarters an excess profits tax on energy companies that Meloni’s predecessor, Mario Draghi, had introduced. Another tax giveaway on the government’s horizon involves abolishing Italy’s extra tax on high-horsepower Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Maseratis.

Meloni is concurrently in the process of phasing out the Citizen’s Income (Reddito di cittadinanza). This was the central election promise of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. Although it was only a drop in the bucket, it has provided around 1 million needy people with an additional social assistance of up to €780. To the applause of EU partners and financial markets, Meloni announced back in November 2022 that she would grant the Citizen’s Income only for a limited period in 2023 and abolish it altogether from 2024 on.

At the same time, poverty in Italy is on the rise. According to the Caritas poverty report, 5 million Italians live in absolute poverty. The south in particular is turning into a poorhouse: poverty there has doubled in the last 10 years to 10 percent of the population. Throughout Italy, 1.4 million children are at risk of poverty. Youth unemployment is on the rise, as is the precariousness of work, for which reasons among the “absolute poor,” immigrants are particularly affected. While 7.2 percent of all Italians are poor, among immigrants, poverty affects one in three (32.4 percent).

The gaping social inequality is not solely due to tax giveaways to the rich and entrepreneurs nor the austerity measures dictated by the EU. War policies are devouring billions. In her militarist policy, Giorgia Meloni is continuing the pro-NATO course set by Draghi. She supports Ukraine with military and financial aid and is arming the army and police state in Italy. In March, she visited President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev and promised him an air defense system. A few days ago she in turn received the Ukrainian head of state in Rome.

Meloni is at pains to highlight her agreement with the EU’s right-wing, militaristic and highly dangerous policies. Like Germany, Great Britain and France, Italy is to arm itself for a third world war at the expense of the working population.

The Italian trade unions, as in other countries, are vicarious agents of capital. In this capacity they work closely not only with the Democrats, who have carried out massive social cuts when in government, but also with Meloni. For example, Maurizio Landini, leader of the largest trade union confederation, CGIL, and a former member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), invited Meloni to speak at the last trade union congress.

Because the traditional CGIL, CISL and UIL union federations are so deeply entangled in the Italian economy, members are leaving them in droves. The USB, which called a strike on May 26, and other unions such as Cobas, CUB, etc. are trying to fill the vacuum. But their national orientation and perspective is essentially no different from that of the old union bureaucrats.

Time and again, unions call for one-day strikes so as to maintain control over a growing movement and to prevent a social uprising against war and capitalism from occurring. Their leaders are linked to Italy’s pseudo-left and Stalinist parties, from Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) and the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), newly formed in 2016, to Potere al Popolo (PaP), Sinistra Italiana and the Democrats. Both USB leader Pierpaolo Leonardi and Cobas leader Piero Bernocchi are close to the Rifondazione Comunista, which supported the Romano Prodi government’s policy of budget cuts and war between 2006 and 2008.

In the recent local elections, union bureaucrats, when they spoke out at all, supported the PD (Democrats). PD’s newly minted leader Elly Schlein, 38, whose only trump card is her relative youth, began her career on Barack Obama’s campaign team in the US and has been vice president of Emilia-Romagna for two years. In the elections, however, the bankrupt policies of the so-called “left camp” have led to another, even more significant electoral victory for the right and fascists around Meloni.

In Emilia-Romagna, these bankrupt policies are particularly evident. The recent massive flooding, which has claimed 15 lives, relentlessly expose their blatant failure. In this region, where the “left” camp has been in government for 78 years, everything that is necessary to prevent floods, landslides and other disasters has been neglected.

Not only has infrastructure been neglected, soils paved over, rivers straightened and mountains deforested, and long overdue dam work repeatedly postponed. The austerity measures in the public sector are now also taking their toll. There is a shortage of well-trained and reasonably paid workers, including agronomists, urban planners, structural and civil engineers, firefighters, social workers and many more.

The disastrous flooding shows the true face of the capitalist crisis. While those in charge in Rome and Bologna argue over responsibilities and funds, the people in the flooded region are left to fend for themselves and rely on the help of volunteers.

Psych examiner reported “no suicidal thoughts” days before Epstein death

Gabriel Black

2011 photo taken at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion. From left: James E. Staley, at the time a senior JPMorgan executive; former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers; Epstein; Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder; and Boris Nikolic, who was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s science adviser.

A psychological examiner reported that Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and sex-trafficker, had “no suicidal thoughts” and a “clear mental status” in the days leading up to his death while in prison in 2019, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

The information about Epstein’s time in prison comes as an ongoing lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase continues to reveal information about his relationship with the rich and powerful.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Jes Staley, a major financier and close confidant of Epstein, alleges that he and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, communicated “for years” about Epstein. This stands in sharp contrast to Dimon’s claim to not “know anything” about Epstein until 2019.

The lawsuit is being pursued by the US Virgin Islands and an unnamed woman who was the victim of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. The suit alleges that JPMorgan Chase facilitated Epstein’s sex-trafficking of young women at his Caribbean villa.

Staley was a significant player in Epstein’s world and was a leading financier himself. The Journal claims JPMorgan Chase has “sought to pin the bulk of the relationship [with Epstein] on Staley.” The bank has sued Staley on these grounds.

Staley was a leading executive at JPMorgan and considered to be a “leading candidate” to succeed Jamie Dimon, according to the Journal. Following his exit from JPMorgan Chase in 2013, Staley took over Barclays in 2015, one of the largest multinational banks, with assets over 1.5 trillion British pounds.

Staley is accused of sexually abusing a young woman through Epstein’s trafficking operation, an allegation he denies. He stepped down from Barclays in 2021, following investigations into his well-known relationship with Epstein.

Dimon and JPMorgan have both denied Staley’s claims. “I don’t recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein until the stories broke sometime in 2019. … I didn’t even—had never even heard of the guy, pretty much,” stated Dimon. 

One entry from Epstein’s calendar, dated March 2, 2010, notes a meeting including Epstein, Dimon and Staley. JPMorgan told the Journal that Dimon did not attend.

If Staley’s claims are true, it suggests that JPMorgan was more conscious of its dealings with Epstein, including the financial backing Epstein required to run his trafficking operation, than the bank lets on.

The day after the Journal released this information, on Friday, the Associated Press announced that it had obtained some 4,000 pages of documents from the federal Bureau of Prisons regarding Epstein’s imprisonment. The documents, some of which are now publicly available, were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. 

While the WSWS has only reviewed some of these documents so far, selections regard Epstein’s mental health, following his placement on suicide watch and psychiatric observation in late July, 2019.

An official log from his psych examiner notes in his “Suicide Risk Assessment”:

No mental health history, no substance abuse history, no suicide history, no suicidal thoughts. Clear mental status.

Later on, in multiple psychological observation follow-ups, the psychologist notes, 

Denied suicidality; He stated he would never harm himself as he wants to be alive to fight his legal case and go back to live his life.

Two days before Epstein died, the final psych check-up reads,

No acute symptoms, distress or mental health concerns; denied suicidality, some concerns with sleep. Happy he received his PAC # [Personal Access Code, used to make phone calls] to make phone calls and requested to speak with someone without it being on a speakerphone. Wanting his books he left in the suicide watch area. Interacting and getting along with his cellmate. Getting ready of this [sic] attorney visit.

In 2019, following the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death, the WSWS wrote that

[T]he efforts of the media—and the New York Times in particular—to dismiss out of hand any suggestion that Epstein’s death was the result of anything but a suicide reek of a high-level cover-up.

The night Epstein died the two cameras outside his cell malfunctioned. Two guards, who were supposed to make regular rounds of his cell, failed to do so.

Dr. Michael Baden—a former New York medical examiner present at the official autopsy—claimed Epstein’s wounds were more consistent with strangulation and assault. The chief New York City medical examiner, however, disagreed, stating it was due to suicide.

While it is possible that Epstein was misleading his psych interviewer, the observer’s reports also correspond with those of Epstein’s lawyers who stated he was in “good spirits” before he died.

In the coming months, more high-powered figures are expected to give evidence. Sergey Brin, Google co-founder; Michael Ovitz, former president of Disney; Mortimer Zuckerman, real estate mogul; Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; and Thomas Pritzker, executive chair of Hyatt have all been subpoenaed as part of the ongoing Virgin Islands case.

US Supreme Court issues far-reaching attack on the right to strike

Tom Carter

The US Supreme Court building as seen at dusk in Washington D.C. on October 22, 2021. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that is a massive attack on the right of workers to strike. By an 8-1 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing an employer to file a lawsuit and recover monetary compensation for “damages” incurred as a result of a strike.

Existing labor law requires striking workers to take “reasonable precautions” to protect the employer’s property from being unnecessarily damaged by a sudden work stoppage. In its decision Thursday, the Supreme Court invoked and expanded this concept to such an extent that it would, taken to its logical conclusion, make any strike illegal if it causes any harm to the company’s bottom line.

Damaging the company’s bottom line to the maximum extent possible utilizing the power of the organized rank and file is, of course, the whole point of a strike, which is a fundamental democratic right and an essential form of workers’ collective self-defense.

In her dissenting opinion, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the sole justice to vote against the decision, suggested that the issue in the case was nothing less than whether workers are legally free or whether they are “indentured servants,” who can be prohibited by law from putting down their tools.

“Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master,” Jackson wrote. Existing labor law, she continued, protects the right of workers to a “collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor.”

The remaining eight Supreme Court justices disagreed. The ostensibly “liberal” justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined the six-justice bloc that constitutes the far-right majority in an opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Christian fundamentalist appointed by former President Donald Trump.

Under the legal framework adopted by the majority, as Jackson implies, workers are effectively reduced to the status of unfree laborers by default, bound to work for their employers against their will unless and until special permission is granted from above to stop.

The case arose from a strike of cement truck drivers that took place at a concrete works operated by Glacier Northwest in Kenmore, Washington. After the workers’ contract expired on July 31, 2017 and the company refused to accept the minimal terms put forward by the Teamsters, the union was compelled to call a strike on August 11, 2017.

Of the 80 to 90 concrete truck drivers in the collective bargaining unit, 43 were scheduled to work on the day the strike began. On a typical work day, the drivers would pick up and deliver between three and six truckloads of concrete. Meanwhile, the concrete would continuously be prepared (“batched”) at the work site and loaded onto the trucks throughout the day. The concrete delivery trucks are fitted with rotating drums that prevent the concrete from hardening during transit.

When the appointed time for the strike arrived at Glacier Northwest, some of the trucks were at the company’s yard in the process of being loaded and some were out for delivery. There were 16 drivers who had undelivered concrete on their trucks at the time the strike started. Ignoring management’s demands that they deliver the concrete, those drivers safely returned their trucks to the yard fully loaded. This was accomplished without any damage to the trucks, to any equipment or to the environment.

Glacier Northwest claimed that it was “damaged” by the strike because some of the concrete could not be delivered and therefore could not be used. This is wholly frivolous as a factual matter.

Because the concrete is “batched and delivered” throughout the work day, any work stoppage would necessarily interrupt that process and potentially cause the loss of some of the concrete. More importantly, from a legal standpoint, the drivers’ contract had already expired, so the company cannot claim to be “surprised” that the drivers abruptly walked out, given that they had already long since fulfilled the legal requirements of the agreement they had been working under.

The union, as required by law, gave management 60 days’ notice. If anything, management should have been grateful that the trucks were all safely and conscientiously returned after the strike started, instead of left on the side of the road where they could have been damaged by the hardening concrete. Under the circumstances, Glacier Northwest had nobody to blame for any “damages” but itself.

Nevertheless, the company angrily retaliated against the striking workers by sending out discipline letters and filing a lawsuit against the Teamsters local in Washington state court. The union then complained to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that the discipline letters as well as the lawsuit constituted illegal retaliation. The Washington Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit, and the NLRB General Counsel sided with the union, issuing a complaint that the lawsuit was meritless and that the company’s conduct violated federal labor law.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the foundation of the “labor relations” framework imposed under then President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” employers have historically been prohibited from separately filing lawsuits over strikes, requiring them instead to go through the same state-controlled process that the unions must use, namely the NLRB. In 1959, the Supreme Court announced a rule generally precluding state courts from hearing any lawsuits involving labor activity.

The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Glacier Northwest opens the floodgates for employers to unilaterally file lawsuits in the event of every future strike, claiming that they unfairly suffered “damages” as a result of workers’ failure to take “reasonable precautions” to make sure that the company was not harmed by the strike.

If workers at a fast food restaurant walk out over intolerable working conditions, for example, they can now face a lawsuit from the company for the loss of perishable food left out in the open or even the loss of the company’s expected profits during the time frame of the strike. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of such lawsuits, they can be filed on the most frivolous or wholly fictional grounds to intimidate and threaten workers and drain their resources.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s decision will doubtless provide a further pretext for the union bureaucracies themselves not to call strikes, invoking the excuse that “we can’t go on strike or the company will sue us.”

The only strikes envisioned under this framework are token, theatrical “strikes” carefully orchestrated by prior agreement between the union bureaucracy and management so as not to cause any harm to the company’s bottom line. As for real industrial actions organized by the rank and file from below, aimed at causing decisive economic injury to a company if workers’ demands are not met, that kind of activity is to be branded illegal “sabotage.”

The Supreme Court’s decision is aimed squarely at keeping the growing tide of workplace militancy in the United States within safe channels as major contract battles loom on the immediate horizon, including in the auto industry and at UPS. Moreover, in the context of the escalating US-NATO war in Ukraine, the decision is a further confirmation of the historical law that imperialist war abroad means attacks on democratic rights at home.

While Thursday’s decision is a massive and authoritarian attack on the right to strike, the concurring opinions filed by the Supreme Court’s most extreme right wing indicated they would go even further. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, would have permitted Glacier Northwest to sue the union simply based on the company’s allegation that concrete had been damaged intentionally. Thomas and Gorsuch, in a separate concurring opinion, raised the possibility of overturning outright the 1959 case prohibiting employers from filing lawsuits outside the NLRB.

Notably, while President Joe Biden proclaims himself “the most pro-union president in history,” his administration failed to defend the striking concrete truck drivers in the case before the Supreme Court. The Biden administration’s official position was that it was “supporting neither party” in the dispute and merely arguing that the case should be decided through the NLRB process. But the Biden administration went out of its way to argue in its brief that “accepting the allegations” made by Glacier Northwest as true, the concrete truck drivers “failed to take reasonable precautions” to prevent harm to the company.

The Biden administration’s brief also cited, in an appendix, the “findings and declaration of policy” of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 itself, which declared that the government’s goal was to “eliminate” those “practices by some labor organizations” that “have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce by preventing the free flow of goods in such commerce through strikes and other forms of industrial unrest or through concerted activities which impair the interest of the public in the free flow of such commerce.”

In so many words, the Biden administration argued that the existing national legal framework of “labor relations” should be retained because it was put in place to prevent and control strikes, with the assistance of the trade union apparatus.

Thursday’s decision attacking the right to strike was handed down by a court that has been stacked with unelected far-right operatives, which is in the midst of waging an unrestrained offensive against democratic rights all down the line (having abolished the right to abortion last year), and which is currently embroiled in a bribery and corruption scandal that calls into question the legitimacy of any of the Supreme Court’s decisions over recent decades.

At the center of that scandal is far-right Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas, a high-level Republican operative and close Trump ally. Among other things, Justice Thomas has been exposed accepting undisclosed luxury vacations bankrolled by billionaire Republican real estate mogul Harlan Crow, a vicious anti-communist and collector of Nazi memorabilia.

While Thomas is the most brazen offender, the corruption scandal extends to varying degrees to nearly every justice on the court in recent decades, as well as the current chief justice himself. Jane Roberts, for example, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in purported legal recruiting fees by one of the law firms that went on to argue a case in the court.

The decisions emanating from this corrupt court are evermore lawless and reactionary, crisscrossed with tendentious and illogical reasoning and double standards.

It is worth pointing out that when socialist autoworker Will Lehman attempted to file a lawsuit in federal court in November 2022 challenging the suppression of the vote in the UAW elections, he was told that he could not file a lawsuit and must instead go through an administrative process. But as demonstrated by Thursday’s decision, when an employer wants to dodge that administrative process, the Supreme Court rushes to intervene and bends the law in whichever direction it needs to be bent to deliver a result in favor of management.