Signs of political instability in Chinese regime

Peter Symonds

China’s Defence Minister General Li Shangfu has not been seen in public for the past three weeks, sparking speculation in the Western press that he is under investigation over corruption. He was last seen publicly when he gave a speech to the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum on August 29. Earlier in August, he travelled to Moscow and Minsk to meet with top Russian and Belarusian officials.

China's Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu during a visit to Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Moscow, Russia, Monday, April 17, 2023. [AP Photo/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service]

Li had been expected to travel to Vietnam on September 7‒8 to attend a meeting but the trip was cancelled at the last minute, ostensibly for “health reasons.” US ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel drew attention to Li’s absence last week when he claimed that the defence minister had not met with Singapore’s Navy commander.

Questioned a week ago about Li’s apparent disappearance, a foreign ministry spokeswoman told reporters she was not aware of the situation. Requests for comment by Reuters to China’s State Council and Defence Ministry elicited no response. No official statement or comment has appeared subsequently this week.

According to unnamed sources cited by Reuters, Li is under investigation for corruption over equipment procurement, along with other senior officials of the Equipment Development Department of the Central Military Commission, which he headed from 2017 to 2022. The US imposed sanctions on Li in 2018 for his involvement in the purchase of Russian military equipment.

Although the defence minister is not the top-ranking defence post, Li serves on the Central Military Commission chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is in overall command of the military. Moreover, he is one of China’s five state councillors—a position that outranks that of ordinary ministers.

The absence of Li from public view comes in the wake of the disappearance of Foreign Minister Qin Gang—also in unexplained circumstances. Qin vanished from public view for a month before he was removed from office in late July and replaced by state councillor Wang Yi, the former foreign minister. His non-appearances over that month were also for “health reasons.”

Speculation in the Western media about Qin’s fate ranged from investigation over corruption, resentment in the foreign ministry over his young age, to an alleged affair with a TV anchor while serving as Chinese ambassador to the US.

The Wall Street Journal gave more credence to the last explanation in an article this week. It claimed, citing unnamed sources, that a meeting of senior Chinese officials was briefed last month on the party’s investigation into Qin and told he was dismissed over “lifestyle issues.” It found that had he had a child as a result of an extramarital affair and that concerns were raised about whether China’s national security had been compromised.

China’s State Council, however, still lists Qin has one of the five state councillors. According to the Wall Street Journal, China’s foreign ministry and the State Council information office did not respond to questions about Qin.

In the absence of any official statement, and limited information, there are more questions than answers about what has happened to Li and Qin and why. Sex scandals and charges of corruption are exploited by the ruling classes worldwide as the means for destroying political opponents in internal factional warfare.

The most significant aspect of the clouds hanging over two top Chinese ministers is that they were both handpicked appointees of Xi. They were installed in March as the National People’s Congress voted a third term for Xi as Chinese president. Qin, who is just 57, in particular, was regarded as one of Xi’s protégés who had been catapulted into top positions within foreign affairs.

The regime headed by Xi confronts mounting economic difficulties at home even as the US intensifies its confrontation and preparations for war against China. The government has set a modest target for economic growth of just 5 percent for 2023—well below the 8 percent regarded by the regime as necessary to maintain employment and social stability. The property market has been hit by the failure of prominent developers. High debt levels, particularly at the provincial government level, are raising questions about the stability of the finance system.

Urban youth unemployment, which is contributing to social tensions and signs of political radicalisation among young people, soared to more than 20 percent this year before publication of the figures was discontinued. Moreover, the ending of the zero-COVID policy that has led mass infection and millions of deaths, is fueling hostility and opposition to the regime.

Xi is coming under intense pressure from Washington on all fronts—diplomatically, economically and militarily. US President Biden has maintained the huge tariffs imposed on China under Trump and intensified bans on the export of the most advanced chips and chip-making equipment to China in a bid to cripple its hi-tech industries. Even as the US wages war against Russia in Ukraine, it is ramping up a web of military alliances directed against China, expanding joint war games in the region and continuing its military provocations in waters close the Chinese mainland.

In this context, there is certainly the potential for rifts to emerge within the Chinese regime and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Western media routinely portrays Xi as an unchallenged strongman or, in the words of Biden, as a “dictator.” In reality, he is in a precarious position—a Bonapartist, balancing between CCP factions, between social classes and on the international stage.

An article in the Japanese newspaper, Nikkei Asia, on September 5, highlighted the internal tensions that apparently emerged last month at the annual beachside retreat of party leaders at Beidaihe. Written by senior staff writer Katsuji Nakazawa, who had served as correspondent in China, the report said party elders had been unusually critical of Xi for his handling of the country’s multiple crises.

According to the Nikkei, the party elders convened their own meeting ahead of the retreat before dispatching representatives to Beidaihe to confront Xi and other leaders face-to-face. “The gist of the message was that if the political, economic and social turmoil continues without any effective countermeasures being taken, the party could lose public support, posing a threat to its rule,” article stated.

The article claimed that Xi responded by venting his frustration and pointing the finger at his three immediate predecessors—Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. “All the issues that were left by the previous three leaders are on my shoulders,” he reportedly told his top aides. “I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”

In the aftermath of the Beidaihe gathering, Xi did not attend the G20 summit in New Delhi earlier this month. He deputised Premier Li Qiang to go instead. Xi has not attended the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly taking place in New York, sending Vice President Han Zheng in his place.

There may be many explanations for Xi’s absences, as well as the removal of Qin as foreign minister and the apparent disappearance of defence minister Li. However, taken together and in the context of the mounting problems and crises confronting Beijing, they do point to rising tensions and conflicts within the CCP bureaucracy and more broadly of political instability in China.

Australia: Molycop slashes 250 steelworker jobs in Newcastle

Martin Scott

Steel manufacturer Molycop announced this week it will slash 250 jobs, around half of the existing workforce, at its plant in Newcastle, a major regional city north of Sydney, New South Wales (NSW).

Inside Molycop’s Waratah plant [Photo: Molycop]

The cuts are part of a major restructure of Molycop’s Australian business. Primary steel production, including the plant’s electric arc furnace and bar mill, will be shut down, after more than a century of steelmaking at the facility. The factory will continue to produce railway wheels, grinding balls for the mining industry, and other specialty products, from steel milled elsewhere.

The workers, including some who have been at the factory for decades, were informed at the start of their shifts on Thursday of the cuts, which will take effect from early next year.

With no other steel mills in the surrounding Hunter region, sacked workers are likely to be forced into lower-paid jobs or long-term unemployment. This is a devastating blow for workers, amid soaring inflation and interest rates, and on top of real wage cuts imposed in previous years.

The unions covering workers at the plant publicly denounced the sackings, but accept the partial closure of the factory as a finished question. The union leadership is promoting the conception that “nothing can be done” in order to allow the plant to run without disruption, both before the shutdown, and after, in the section that will continue operating.

This is a lie. The company is not going out of business—it is worth an estimated $2 billion and has billions of dollars in annual revenue from the ever-more lucrative mining sector.

The multinational corporation was acquired for $1.6 billion in 2016 by American Industrial Partners (AIP), a US-based private equity firm, after the collapse of Molycop’s previous owner, Arrium. Now, AIP is cutting jobs to boost profits and make Molycop more attractive to potential investors as it prepares to float the company on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The slashing of jobs at Molycop can and must be fought, but only if workers take matters into their own hands. Such a struggle is impossible behind a union bureaucracy that insists that management’s decision is final, and which is collaborating with the company to prevent opposition.

After declaring the move a “sad day for the Hunter and a sad day for the Australian manufacturing industry,” Australian Workers Union (AWU) NSW secretary Tony Callinan told the Newcastle Herald the union would work with Molycop to “minimise the pain.”

The “pain” the union bureaucracy is seeking to “minimise” is not that of workers, but of management, by ensuring the smoothest possible transition of workers onto the scrapheap.

“Expressions of interest for voluntary redundancies from across the entire site will hopefully minimise forced redundancies,” Callinan continued. In other words, workers who have escaped the first blow of management’s axe will be pressured to sacrifice their own livelihoods to save their coworkers.

Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) organiser Brad Pidgeon echoed this, cynically suggesting there might be an upside to the mass sacking of workers he supposedly represents. He said: “There’s a lot of mixed emotions, we do have some members that are looking at retirement options, so redundancy may be beneficial for them.”

Pidgeon continued to plead the company’s case, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the shutdown was the result of “ongoing cost pressures, energy market, transport costs as well.” The steel used to make Molycop’s finished product was, he said, “cheaper now to import from overseas as opposed to manufacturing it here through scrap steel.”

Last year, the AWU, along with other trade unions, went hand-in-hand with business lobbyists to demand that the federal Labor government introduce a cap on gas prices for major manufacturers.

The result of this was the Energy Price Relief Plan, rammed through parliament with support from the Greens in less than nine hours last December. Falsely presented as a means of protecting ordinary people from skyrocketing energy bills, the scheme was, in reality, aimed at slashing the energy bills of big corporations, while still protecting the profits of fossil fuel companies. 

Thursday’s sackings expose as a lie the pretext—of protecting jobs and working conditions—upon which the unions dragooned workers, including from Molycop, into this pro-business campaign.

The unions have also promoted Molycop’s demands for intensified “anti-dumping” legislation, blaming cheap steel from China for job losses. This has nothing to do with protecting workers’ interests, but is instead about tying them to the company’s ability to compete profitably on the global market.

Equally fraudulent is the broader claim of the union-backed federal Labor government that it is working to build new manufacturing jobs. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Newcastle on Wednesday, to promote the National Reconstruction Fund, an initiative ostensibly aimed at boosting employment in the sector.

Albanese declared, “There is nothing we can do that is more important than make more things here.” As the slashing of jobs at Molycop, less than 4 kilometres away and not even 24 hours later, shows, there is something “more important”—the profits of big business.

Following Molycop’s job cut announcement, federal Labor Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic shed crocodile tears: “I feel for the families who have young kids who are wondering why their parents are so anxious because they are thinking about how they will pay the bills and put food on the table.”

While Husic claimed he was only informed of Molycop’s plans on Wednesday night, he revealed he had been working with the company “over many months… on different issues, particularly on steel industry policy.”

Labor’s aim in such backroom discussions had nothing to do with what workers want and need. Instead, the government is collaborating with management to advance the interests of “Australian” capital, by ensuring that businesses are “internationally competitive,” i.e., that costs are low and profits are high.

The role of the union apparatus is to serve as an industrial police force, ensuring workers make the necessary “sacrifices” to facilitate these government-business cost-cutting demands.

At Molycop and elsewhere, the unions have long used the threat of job losses or plant closure to shut down opposition to wage- and condition-slashing enterprise agreements, and tell workers they must make sacrifices to protect their jobs.

In 2015, the AMWU and Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union of Australia (CEPU) accepted company demands for no wage increase, followed by 1.5 percent in 2016 and 2017. Since then, all three unions at Molycop have helped the company keep pay increases below inflation to maximise profits.

In 2019, the AWU and AMWU used the threat of total closure of BlueScope’s steel plant at Port Kembla to push through wage-cutting agreements. Four years earlier, in 2015, the unions had worked with BlueScope to impose the destruction of 500 jobs and a three-year pay freeze.

This mechanism was also used by the AMWU, in collaboration with Labor and the car manufacturers, to drive down wages and conditions in a decades-long process that led to the destruction of the entire industry.

3,000 job losses planned at Tata Steel as company receives £500 million subsidy from UK government

Simon Whelan

Three thousand jobs are being cut at Tata Steel in the UK “within months not years.” Two thousand will go at Port Talbot in Wales, the largest steel-making plant in the UK, with a further thousand across Tata’s six other UK plants—almost 40 percent of the workforce.

Thousands of local jobs, especially around Port Talbot, in subsidiary industries and supply chains are also threatened, as are small businesses ultimately reliant on wages paid to Tata workers.

Tata Steel works at Port Talbot. [Photo by Phil Beard / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The jobs bloodbath is part of a restructuring plan conceived between Tata and the Conservative government. The corporation will receive a government subsidy of almost £500 million towards a £1.25 billion purchase and installation of two electric arc furnaces at Port Talbot.

Tata executives freely admitted they have worked the existing blast furnaces to the end of their profitable lifespan. The UK government has given them a half-a-billion-pound helping hand to have them replaced and keep the profits flowing. Overall, the Tata Group—with subsidiaries in iron, steel, textiles, tea, automotive and aviation production—is worth an estimated $311 billion.

British Chancellor Jeremy Hunt recently told the Financial Times that the UK’s industrial strategy would not entail big state handouts across the economy. True to his word, they are reserved for the major corporations and the super-rich, while Tata workers get redundancy notices.

The subsidy comes just a few weeks after the government handed Tata another £500 million to build a “gigafactory” manufacturing vehicle batteries for Tata-owned carmaker Jaguar-Land Rover. Ministers are engaged in separate discussions with British Steel over its own £500 million package.

Port Talbot’s current blast furnaces are coal-powered and produce virgin steel. The new electric furnaces are less labour-intensive and can be powered by less-polluting fossil fuels or renewable energy sources. They produce recycled steel from scrap metal, which is readily available in the UK.

Tata Steel and the government have inevitably tried to dress up the move as part of a shift towards a greener economy. But the replacement of the two furnaces will only “reduce the UK’s entire carbon emissions by around 1.5 percent”. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reneging on already inadequate targets for UK carbon emissions reductions and handing out new oil and gas licenses like candy.

Blast furnaces will be kept in operation at other Tata UK facilities and other steelmakers, since the new electric furnaces cannot reach the temperatures required to produce the same quality steel.

The government’s real motivation, besides protecting profits, was spelled out by Tata’s statement welcoming the subsidy, which noted the project would “bolster the UK’s steel security.”

A UK-based steel industry is central to the geo-political designs of British imperialism, which is heavily involved in supplying the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and preparing a rapid expansion of its own military to participate in the escalating conflicts with Russia and China.

If Tata had sought to sell their UK-based operations but no private buyer could be found, or threatened to close their steel production facilities, the UK government would have foregone its devotion to the free market and nationalised such critical industrial facilities.

The trade unions are playing a politically criminal role, accepting job losses as a fait accompli while trying to secure a place at the table with management—under the fig leaf of urging no compulsory redundancies. They have overseen a staggering decline of the industry over the past 50 years, from 300,000 workers in the 1970s to just over 33,000 in 2021. One strike after another was sold out following the betrayal of a near-14-week national steel workers’ strike in 1980, paving the way for waves of redundancies and below-inflation pay deals.

When the latest job losses were announced last Friday, General Secretary of the steelworkers’ union Community Roy Richus responded, “Unions should have had a seat at the table throughout this process”. Community’s Assistant General Secretary Alasdair McDiarmid said likewise of the failure to include the union bureaucracy, “Tata and the Government should have consulted with the unions well in advance of the announcement”.

Neither uttered a single word about fighting the redundancies. The word “strike” never crossed their lips.

Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary Paul Nowak was the same: “Ministers must press pause and urgently get around the table with unions. It beggars belief that they have been locked out of talks.”

This Tuesday, the unions got their wish, with Tata executives meeting representatives of the Community, GMB and Unite unions and allowing them sight of the plans to close Port Talbot’s blast furnaces as soon as January 2024.

Fresh from talks with the company planning 3,000 job cuts, the union bureaucrats were much happier.

Charlotte Brumpton-Childs, a GMB national officer, said, “Today’s meeting with Tata bosses was the first step in the long process of consulting meaningfully with our members over steel job losses.” A spokesperson for Community propagandised, “We want to work with Tata and the government to deliver a decarbonisation strategy that respects our red lines and crucially protects our members’ jobs through ensuring a just green transition.”

Ensuring a “just green transition” is not a matter of polite discussion with shareholders and executives, but of class struggle. Left in the hands of the corporations, the move to greener production will be used to increase profits at the expense of jobs and wages. Workers must fight to make the super-rich pay for new technologies and reduced emissions.

In the hands of the unions, “green” talk is just an attempt to prettify the company’s plans and pacify opposition. They do not want a struggle because, like the government, they are totally committed to securing Britain’s military-industrial base.

Last week, delegates at the TUC’s congress overwhelmingly backed a GMB motion supporting British imperialism’s involvement in the NATO war effort in Ukraine, calling for “financial and practical aid from the UK to Ukraine” and “The immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories occupied since 2014”—including Crimea and the eastern Donbas regions.

The congress before, the TUC backed another GMB motion declaring, “Congress … recognises that defence manufacturing cuts have hindered the UK’s ability to aid the Ukrainian people under brutal assault from Putin’s regime. Congress believes that the world is becoming less safe and the policy carried in 2017 in favour of diversifying away from defence manufacturing is no longer fit for purpose.”

Reacting to the Tata job losses, GMB General Secretary Gary Smith commented in this vein, “Our country cannot be secure without a functioning domestic steel industry.”

Events at Tata Steel show what the militarist position of the trade unions means for the working class: subjecting workers simultaneously to the profit demands of the corporations and the military and economic war drive of British imperialism, while the unions forcibly keep the industrial peace.

Canada-India relations in turmoil after Ottawa accuses Modi regime of assassinating Sikh separatist in BC

Keith Jones

Relations between Canada and India are in turmoil following Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement Monday that the country’s security and intelligence agencies are “pursuing credible allegations … agents of the Government of India” were behind the assassination of an Indian-born Canadian citizen in British Columbia last June.

It is unthinkable that Trudeau would have made such a statement without Canada’s security agencies having incontrovertible evidence of Indian government involvement in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an outspoken proponent of an independent Sikh state (Khalistan).

Canada and all the western imperialist powers are assiduously courting India as a key element in their efforts to counter and thwart a rising China. Towards that end, they have turned a blind eye to the sweeping attacks Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-supremacist government is mounting on democratic rights and its relentless whipping up of communalism. Dramatically increasing Canada’s economic and security ties with India were key elements of the Trudeau government’s anti-China “Indo-Pacific strategy,” which was drafted in close consultation with the White House and released with much fanfare last December.

Shortly after Trudeau’s announcement, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told a press conference that Ottawa was expelling an Indian diplomat, Pavan Kumar Rai, whom she identified as the top Canadian-based representative of New Delhi’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

The Modi government’s response was fast and furious. It dismissed any suggestion India had a hand in Nijjar’s assassination as preposterous, ordered the tit-for-tat expulsion of a Canadian diplomat and accused Ottawa of protecting pro-Khalistan terrorists.

On Tuesday, a chastened Trudeau pleaded, “We are not looking to provoke or escalate.”

New Delhi, however, has only become more belligerent. On Wednesday, India’s Foreign Ministry issued an advisory urging Indians traveling in Canada and especially the large numbers of Indian nationals studying there to beware of “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate crimes.” On Thursday, New Delhi indefinitely suspended the issuing of travel visas to Canadians and announced that the number of Canadian diplomatic personnel in India will be sharply reduced.

At a press conference Thursday, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi accused Canada of “interference” in India’s “internal affairs” and reiterated New Delhi’s charge that Ottawa’s claims of an Indian government role in Nijjar’s murder are “politically motivated.” “Canada,” said Bagchi, “should worry about its growing reputation as … a safe haven for terrorists,” adding that its response to some two-dozen Indian requests to extradite persons New Delhi accuses of terrorism and “anti-India” activities “has not been helpful at all.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau upon his arrival at Bharat Mandapam convention center for the G20 Summit, in New Delhi, India, Saturday, Sept. 9, 2023 [AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File]

The Modi government has been emboldened by the strong support given it by the Congress Party, the rest of the bourgeois opposition and India’s corporate media, some of whom have coupled their condemnations of Canada’s “outrageous” charges with bald assertions of the Indian state’s right to carry out extrajudicial assassinations. Even more important has been the muted response from Washington, London and other western capitals.

According to Ottawa, Trudeau raised the issue of India’s orchestration of Nijjar’s murder with Biden and the heads of government of other key Canadian allies earlier this month during the G-20 summit in New Delhi. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is reported to have likewise shared its findings with its closest partners, including fellow members of the US-led Five Eyes global telecommunications spying network.

Imperialist powers choose to ignore crimes of Modi regime

Yet, as has been widely noted in the press, beginning with the New York Times and Washington Post, the US, Britain and the other western powers have for all intents and purposes chosen to look the other way, so as not to harm relations with New Delhi and their efforts to integrate it ever more fully into the US military-strategic offensive against China. In August, it was revealed that at Washington’s prodding, India’s Chief of Defence Staff has ordered an urgent high-level study of what support India would provide the US in a war with China.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported, “Weeks before Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau aired an explosive accusation that Indian officials may have been behind the slaying of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia, Ottawa asked its closest allies, including Washington, to publicly condemn the murder. But the overtures were rebuffed, underscoring the diplomatic balancing act facing the Biden administration and its allies as they work to court an Asian power seen as a crucial counterweight to China.”

When pressed by reporters on the issue Wednesday, White House spokesman John Kirby bleated that the Biden administration is “deeply concerned” by the allegations India organized an assassination on North American soil. Later, the White House spin doctors—no doubt responding to negative commentary about Biden’s remarks of the same day touting an anti-China US infrastructure initiative together with Modi’s India and the tyrannical Saudi regime—sent out an email that said, “Targeting dissidents in other countries is absolutely unacceptable and we will keep taking steps to push back on this practice.”

All of this is an object lesson in imperialist geopolitics and the western powers’ cynical and hypocritical manipulation of charges of human rights violations and transgressions of international law. When it comes to their own actions or those of prized allies, international law is ever malleable and the most monstrous and blatant violations of human rights can be ignored, downplayed or excused.

Were we speaking of the alleged involvement of Russia or China in an extrajudicial assassination in Canada—America’s neighbour, ostensible closest ally and the only country with which it is bound by a joint defence command (NORAD)—the White House and for that matter the Times and the Post would be speaking of the urgent need to impose punishing sanctions and convene the UN Security Council.

Canadian imperialism of course has its own long record of illegal wars and aiding and abetting criminal violence—including, to name but two examples, the torture of Afghan peasants rounded up in dragnet counterinsurgency operations and working with Islamicists to overthrow Libya’s Gaddafi regime. And it routinely apologizes for or ignores the atrocities and crimes committed by the US, Britain, France and other allies, including Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians.

On Friday, Trudeau will play host to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and present him as the leader of a “democratic” Ukraine subject to an “unprovoked” and “genocidal” attack by Russia. In fact, Canadian imperialism along with the US and its other NATO allies are those principally responsible for the devastation of Ukraine and the horrendous loss of Ukrainian and Russian lives. They goaded Russia into launching its reactionary invasion, by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, orchestrating a 2014 coup against Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian government and sabotaging the Minsk Accords. They and have relentlessly worked to expand the conflict by pouring in tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry. Canada, through its decades-long promotion of far-right Ukrainian nationalism and assistance in integrating the fascist supporters of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists into Ukraine’s military, has played a particularly foul role.

If the Trudeau government is up in arms over the Indian government’s extrajudicial murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil, it is first and foremost because it is a challenge to the sovereignty, legitimacy and authority of the Canadian capitalist state. It also no doubt fears it could trigger violent reprisals, and under conditions where Canada has already seen a huge growth in far-right political violence. The most deadly act of terrorism in Canadian history was the 1985 bombing of Air India’s Flight 182 from Toronto to London by pro-Khalistan terrorists in which 329 people, most of them Canadians, died.

While the murder of a political opponent living in a western country is something new, it is in very much in keeping with the methods of the far-right Modi regime, which is acting with increasing brazenness as a law unto itself. This includes using sedition and anti-terrorism laws to indefinitely detain journalists and anti-government activists without trial; copying the Israeli government tactic of arbitrarily bulldozing the homes of Muslims and/or political opponents; using trumped-up and manipulated criminal cases to sideline bourgeois opposition leaders; and stoking animosity and violence against Muslims with vendettas against cow-slaughter and “Love Jihad” (interfaith relationships.)

The communalist Khalistan demand and the reactionary politics of independent India

Opposition to the Indian government’s murder of Nijjar and the more general exposure of the anti-democratic and criminal methods that New Delhi is using to stamp out support for Khalistan in India and in the Sikh diaspora in no way implies support for the reactionary demand for a Sikh communo-religious state.

The Khalistan movement is the historical outcome of the toxic communal politics (“divide and rule”) practiced by the British colonial regime and which the Indian bourgeoisie adopted after its premier party, the Indian National Congress of M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, betrayed the mass anti-imperialist movement and connived in the 1947 partition of South Asia into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. The demand for a Sikh state was first raised in the run-up to Partition. Its chief proponent, Master Tara Singh, was one of the principal fomenters of mass anti-Muslim violence in the Punjab in 1947.

In the 1970s, Congress Party Prime Minister Indira Gandhi helped midwife the modern Khalistan movement, when she patronized the Sikh fundamentalist zealot Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who championed the claim Sikhs were a “nation,” as part of her maneuvers against her opponents in the traditional Sikh communal party, the SAD. This reactionary intrigue disastrously backfired, with the rise of an armed militant Khalistani movement, which the Indian state savagely suppressed, including by storming the Golden Temple, the most sacred Sikh religious site, in June 1984 (Operation Blue Star). Some four months later, after Indira Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her, Congress Party leaders incited a pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi and other cities in which many thousands died.

Subsequently, the Indian ruling class succeeded in pacifying the predominantly Sikh Punjab. But the Khalistan demand has continued to be widely promoted in the Sikh diaspora, including Canada, which has the largest Sikh population outside India.

The coming to power of the BJP, which incessantly promotes Hindu supremacism, is no doubt contributing to a strengthening of minority communalist sentiments, including among the Sikhs of the Punjab. In what was a brazen attempt to delegitimize and provide a pretext for the Modi government to suppress the months-long 2020–2021 farmers’ agitation, it claimed that the protest had been infiltrated and was being manipulated by Khalistanis.

There is no support within the Canadian ruling class for the Punjab’s secession from India. Insofar as Canadian politicians have consorted with pro-Khalistan Sikh community leaders, it is as part of the ethnic-identity community political mobilization that is the stuff of the country’s reactionary bourgeois politics.

The political establishment initially rallied around the Trudeau government in denouncing India. But with Ottawa’s ostensible allies leaving it in the lurch to pursue closer ties with Modi, and the diplomatic and potentially economic costs to Canadian imperialism mounting, rifts are rapidly appearing. The far-right leader of the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, has suggested the government was far quicker to accuse its Indian ally than to act on intelligence-agency leaked allegations of Chinese electoral interference.

White House acknowledges the pandemic is not over by offering to send out free COVID tests

Benjamin Mateus

The White House announcement that the Biden administration will resume free distribution of COVID-19 rapid antigen test kits amounts to an admission that the pandemic is not over and that the American population remains in grave danger from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

COVID-19 antigen home tests indicating a positive result. The Biden administration is resuming free distribution through the mail. [AP Photo/Patrick Sison]

The reinstatement of free distribution of COVID-19 tests through the mail, set for September 25, is an about-face for the Biden White House, which has repeatedly flouted COVID protocols. According to the administration, $600 million will be provided to 12 manufacturers of domestic COVID-19 tests to make 200 million more test kits for distribution by the federal government.

As epidemiologist and health economist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, chief of the COVID Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute and co-founder of the World Health Network, noted on his social media, “Biden White House basically admits that COVID is not over.” However, this change in public health tactics should not be construed as a serious response to the pandemic.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said yesterday at a photo opportunity with reporters, “The president wanted to make sure that no one can go without tests. We will once again up our program to make sure Americans have access to a test.” He also attempted to downplay questions from reporters that insurance companies were denying payments on COVID vaccines and the difficulty for children to obtain these life-saving shots.

Yet no one bothered to ask Becerra whether the pandemic is really over, whether the ending of the emergency phase was premature or why this sudden change in response to COVID in the White House when just less than three weeks ago Jill Biden contracted COVID again and Biden showed his clear disdain for public health when he walked to the podium unmasked during a press brief before flying to India for the G20 Summit.

He declared smiling, “I want to explain to the press, I’ve been tested again today. I’m clear across the board. But they keep telling me, because this has to be 10 days or something. I got to keep wearing it,” showing his KN95 mask. He quipped, “But don’t tell them I didn’t wear it when I walked in.”

Clearly, the hidden data sets on actual infection rates and health system capacity which HHS and CDC withhold from the public must have alarmed them and caught them off guard, given the approaching winter season. According to the only reliable early warning system in place which is currently also being employed as the only reliable tracker of the pandemic, national levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater peaked last week corresponding to approximately levels reached near April 2020’s peak and correspond to more than 650,000 daily COVID infections.

Modeling estimates by infectious disease modeler JP Weiland estimates that nearly 12 percent of the US population was infected during the current surge and possibly another 7 percent may become infected over the next six weeks. This would place the figure at approximately 66 million infections since the latter part of June. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 1.13 million Americans have succumbed to COVID-19 with the estimated cumulative excess deaths in this period standing at 1.36 million, according to Our World in Data.

The current variants being monitored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), indicated EG.5 (Eris), which accounts for nearly a quarter of the sequenced Omicron variants, may be beginning its retreat giving way to the “FLip” variant FL.1.5.1 which is now approaching 14 percent of all sequences. HV.1, which does not possess a “FLip” mutation, is presently the fastest growing variant among the Omicron strains circulating.

How the highly mutated BA.2.86 (Pirola) will play out will have to be seen, as only a few sequences of this variant have been detected and analyzed (68 sequences since September 7, 2023) across several continents. As a recent Lancet report remarked, “[This] variant might be spreading silently worldwide,” leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a variant under monitoring on August 17, 2023, only three days after its initial discovery.

Recent analysis indicates that its reproductive number is 30 percent higher than the common XBB.1.5 variant which is the target of the recently approved mRNA vaccine boosters. Pirola’s reproduction number is equivalent to or even higher than that of EG.5.1, suggesting that “BA.2.86 potentially has greater fitness than current circulating XBB variants including EG.5.1.”

According to Dr. Ellie Murray, epidemiologist at Boston University, in a recent interview with the World Socialist Web Site, the current Omicron variants are as virulent as the original strain that first appeared in Wuhan in December 2019. The false idea that these variants will continue to grow more benign was dispelled with the Delta variant, but continues to be peddled by health authorities and the media. If the current strains evolve to Delta’s level of potential lethality, they will pose a major threat to the population.

Already, the current surge of infections has led to a rise in the death toll and hospitalizations. As of the week ending September 9, 2023, weekly COVID admissions reached 20,538, a three-fold higher rate than in the first week of July. These figures are projected to climb as the rollout of the COVID boosters is just getting underway. COVID weekly deaths have nearly doubled to 860 as of August 19, 2023. Given the lag in reporting fatalities, the current death toll is likely far higher.

Meanwhile, as the reality of the pandemic begins to weigh on commerce and social activities, some healthcare systems such as the University of Chicago Medical Center have turned to restoring mask mandates on their staff when in direct contact with patients. It should be recalled that many states and hospitals in 2022 had discontinued masks and screening tests for symptom-free patients.

Since these guidelines have been set aside, the actual number of in-hospital acquired and nursing home COVID infections remains unknown, but they are definitely on the rise. Lethality of a COVID infection among patients admitted is as high as 9 percent, underscoring the impact comorbidities and underlying illnesses can have with COVID regardless of prior infections or vaccinations. Anecdotally, several of this writer’s medical residents have had to take leaves of absence after contracting COVID and there are cases of people who have died at his institution after they acquired COVID as inpatients.

The CDC’s accounting suggests COVID has already killed 47,000 people in the first eight months of this year, and the pandemic remains one of the top 10 causes of death in the country for 2023.

A glimpse of the growing concern among health officials was given by the presentation made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) last week (September 12, 2023) when they recommended mRNA boosters be given to everyone six months of age and older.

Their modeling projections found that with “universal vaccine recommendations” in place, they can potentially avert more than 400,000 hospitalizations and over 40,000 deaths in the course of two years. Although the report didn’t offer absolute figures on what the estimates are but only differences, recent experience suggests potentially 80,000 or more people may die from COVID annually because of active severe COVID. There is no category for COVID deaths later than 30 days after infection, and the risks posed by Long COVID and post-acute COVID syndrome to the various organs in the human body is not even considered.

By all accounts, the CDC’s ending of collecting figures on excess deaths associated with COVID-19 next week only deepens their anti-public health and anti-science stance.

Additionally, the report underscores that the risks of death, invasive mechanical ventilation and intensive care unit admission increase considerably with the number of underlying medical conditions. Those with one condition can see a 50 percent increase in these risks. Those with two to five underlying conditions can see a two-to-three-fold increase.

Of those 65 years or older, more than 70 percent have at least one condition and more than 50 percent have two or more such conditions. Nearly a third of the population over 18 carries at least one underlying risk factor for a heightened risk of severe COVID for their age category.

The report summarized, “[The] COVID-19 burden is currently lower than at previous points in the pandemic, however the absolute number of hospitalizations and deaths is still high. Although hospitalization rates are currently low in some age groups, we have seen rates increase in recent weeks and anticipate further increases as we enter respiratory virus season. Infants and older adults have the highest COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates. Children and adults with no underlying medical conditions still experience severe illness due to COVID-19. High proportions of underlying conditions may put certain groups at increased risk for severe outcomes due to COVID-19.”

The report also highlighted the important fact that about one-third of the American population remains concerned about getting COVID and more than half worry about serious COVID-19 illness among their family.

The ruling elites have from day one operated under the perspective of malign neglect where the needs to maintain and accumulate profits remains their primary focus regardless of the real state of the pandemic and the risks it poses to generations of people that face repeated infections. The free COVID tests are a token to ameliorate the potential that the pandemic as a trigger event exposes the parasitic and destructive nature of the capitalist ruling elites.

Amazon to hire 250,000 new US workers, increase average starting pay to $20.50

Alex Findijs

Amazon has announced it plans to hire an additional 250,000 new workers in the United States in time for the holiday season, while increasing average starting pay from $19 to $20.50. The move will substantially increase the size of the workforce of the world’s largest retailer, which already has more than 1.5 million workers globally.

This mass hiring round will include a mix of seasonal, part-time and full-time positions and is substantially larger than last year when the company sought to bring in an additional 150,000 employees.

Amazon’s wages increases, of course, are not an act of charity, but stem from a labor crisis facing the company. In the summer of 2022 a leaked internal memo from Amazon management warned the company may exhaust the available labor supply in major cities around the country by 2024. Amazon’s incredibly high turnover rate of 150 percent per year, driven by infamous working conditions where workers are pushed to the point of exhaustion by electronic monitoring, has produced a situation where many new hires do not stay longer than 90 days and the company struggles to retain workers every year.

For years this was a preferable situation. High turnover kept labor costs down and stifled unrest among the workforce. However, now that Amazon threatens to burn through its available labor supply, there is concern among management that it cannot continue to grow unless it offers higher wages. A report by Engadget in 2022 found that high turnover rates were costing Amazon $8 billion a year. By investing a few billion in raising starting pay, Amazon hopes to increase retention and cut down on the cost that poor employee retention has on its profit margin, which was still a considerable $33.36 billion in 2021.

The announcement by nonunion Amazon comes less than a month after the “ratification” of a new five-year contract at UPS by the Teamsters union. Among other things, the wage increases at Amazon expose the UPS contract as a miserable sellout. The union bureaucrats presented the UPS deal as “historic,” primarily on the basis of an increase in starting pay for part-time warehouse workers from $16.65 to $21 per hour.

At the same time, it also created a new lower tier among part-timers, by making new hires ineligible for the $7.50 general wage increases which existing part-timers will receive over the next five years. Instead, new hires will get only a 50 cent annual wage progression, while starting pay will be frozen at $21 per hour until 2027.

Even UPS delivery drivers, one of the few relatively good-paying jobs left at the company, will get only around 18 percent pay increases over five years, less than the rate of inflation.

Since the Teamsters first allowed UPS to implement part-time work in the 1970s, part-timers have grown into a super-exploited layer covering roughly two-thirds of the shipping giant’s workforce. They frequently are unable to afford rent and even food and are forced to work multiple other jobs to make ends meet.

Like Amazon, turnover among UPS part-timers is extremely high, with only a small minority lasting five years or more at the company. They have very little opportunity to move up to full-time jobs, with many waiting years or even decades before a position opens up. The new contract pledges UPS to “create” a pathetic 7,500 new full-time jobs over five years.

As a result of decades of betrayals, which saw inflation-adjusted wages for part-timers fall by roughly two-thirds between 1978 and 2013, UPS warehouse workers have made substantially less than even nonunion Amazon workers for years. Starting pay at Amazon, depending on location, averaged between $16 and $26 per hour under the old system, and when the new UPS contract went into effect last month it finally put starting pay at slightly above the then $19 per hour average rate at Amazon.

Now, less than a month after the UPS contract was passed under dubious circumstances, that wage gap has already been substantially closed. Starting pay at Amazon under the new rates will go up to between $17 to $28 an hour, and workers in select locations may also receive a $1,000–$3,000 signing bonus. According to Amazon, an average new employee can expect a 13 percent wage increase over the next three years. Based on this figure, an Amazon worker starting at $20.50 an hour can anticipate an hourly rate of just over $23 after three years of work.

In other words, the supposedly “historic” pay increases in the UPS contract in reality only keep pace with market forces, which are driving up labor costs for many low-wage employers across the country. In fact, the contract helps to limit UPS’ exposure to the tightening labor market by freezing the starting rate at $21 per hour for four years, finally increasing to $23 per hour in the last year of the contract.

It is likely that average pay at Amazon will once again overtake UPS over the life of the contract. Amazon claims that it has raised the starting wage by more than 50 percent over the past five years. If this trend continues, then Amazon workers could make an average starting wage of around $26 by 2028, $3 more than at UPS. Indeed, Amazon may very well have followed the contract negotiations at UPS closely when projecting its wage needs over the coming years.

UPS management is openly boasting that the contract will keep labor costs down over the length of the contract and the new $21 an hour rate eliminates the need for market rate adjustments for cities with higher costs of living.

DAAD NELGA Short-Stay Research Fellowship 2024

APPLICATION DEADLINE:

12th October 2023

Tell Me About DAAD NELGA Short-Stay Research Fellowship:

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit
(GIZ) as commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to organize support measures for the “Network of Excellence for Land Governance in Africa (NELGA)”.
NELGA is a partnership of over 70 leading African universities and research institutions with proven leadership in education,
training and research on land governance.
The objectives of NELGA are:
▪ Enhancing training opportunities and curricula on land governance in Africa;
▪ Promoting demand driven research on land policy;
▪ Connecting scholars and researchers across Africa;
▪ Creating data and information for monitoring and evaluation on land policy reforms;
▪ Strengthening policy-research linkages.
DAAD is offering research fellowships for research stays or field studies in Central Africa

WHICH FIELDS ARE ELIGIBLE?

Applicants must have a background in land governance/ land management or a related field (e.g. land administration, land
economics, urban and regional planning, geomatics).
Applications must cover the following key areas:
▪ Land conflict prevention
▪ Land conflict analysis
▪ Land conflict resolution
Special consideration will be given to proposals that address topics that support NELGA’s research initiative on “Sustainable
Management of Cross-Border Agropastoralist Conflicts in Central Africa”. A factsheet on the research initiative accompanies this announcement

TYPE:

Fellowship

Who Can Apply For DAAD NELGA Short-Stay Research Fellowship?

We invite staff members, students and young researchers of NELGA partner institutions with a background in land governance or a related field to apply for funding for NELGA research fellowships.
Applicants must
▪ have completed at least a first university degree (undergraduate) at a state or state-recognized institution of higher education;
▪ be enrolled or a staff member at one of the NELGA partner universities or associated institutions;
▪ return to their studies/duty station at the end of the fellowship;
▪ be nationals of an African country;
▪ be granted leave of absence by their home institution for conducting a field study

Female applicants and candidates from less privileged regions or groups are especially encouraged to apply.

WHICH COUNTRIES ARE ELIGIBLE?

African countries 

WHERE WILL AWARD BE TAKEN?

The fellowships are tenable in the field, at a state or state-recognized institution of higher education or a non-university research institute in Central Africa. The fellowship does not provide financial support to research at the applicant’s home institution.

HOW MANY AWARDS?

Not specified

What Is The Benefit Of DAAD NELGA Short-Stay Research Fellowship?

The fellowship consists of:
▪ a flat-rate travel allowance: EUR 280 for in-country, EUR 430 for neighbouring countries, EUR 630 for in-region, EUR 980 for out of region;
▪ a monthly research allowance of EUR 460.

The fellowship does not cover living expenses. One month after the end of the fellowship the fellow must provide a detailed report on the implementation of the research and its findings. The fellowship is not renewable. Funding is only eligible once per year, per topic and per educational stage.

HOW LONG WILL AWARD LAST?

The fellowships are tenable for a period of one up to three months, depending on the project in questions and the applicant’s timetable. Only full months are fundable. The fellowship is not renewable.

How To Apply:

Applicants will be required to:

1. register online via the DAAD-Portal (if not already registered): https://portal.daad.de/
2. apply online under the following link: Click here
   For technical questions regarding the DAAD-Portal, please contact portal@daad.de.
   Documents to be submitted
   ▪ DAAD application form, duly filled (available in the DAAD-Portal);
   ▪ Curriculum Vitae, including list of publications (if applicable);
   ▪ detailed description of the research proposal and a description of previous research work (max. 10 pages);
   ▪ weekly schedule of planned research work;
   ▪ letter confirming supervision by an academic adviser at the host institute, which refers to the applicant’s
   proposal and confirms that the host institute will provide a workplace (not applicable for studies in the
   field);
   ▪ copies of university diplomas/certificates and transcripts of record of all annual academic examinations (incl. explanation of grading system);
   ▪ a recent reference from a university teacher which provides information about the applicant’s qualifications

Visit Award Webpage for Details