25,000 jobs at risk at Stellantis plants in Italy

Marianne Arens

Planned job cuts at Stellantis in Italy next year will lead to the destruction of up to 25,000 jobs in car production. This was announced on August 8. Ferdinando Uliano, chairman of the Christian Metalworkers’ Union FIM/CISL, said that Stellantis wants to eliminate at least 12,000 jobs in its Italian plants, and this will also mean the loss of an additional 12,000 to 13,000 jobs at parts suppliers.

The announcement was preceded by a round table (tavolo automotivo) in Rome led by the Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy (Mimit) Adolfo Urso, who belongs to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s fascist ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy). In addition to Stellantis representatives, all three major metal unions—Fiom/Cgil, Fim/Cisl and Uilm—participated. Speaking to Italian TV station La7, Stellantis HR chief Giuseppe Manca said: “Stellantis has communicated to the unions the Group’s plan for Italy, which assigns a mission to each plant by the end of the decade.”

Stellantis Italy was created in spring 2021 through the merger of Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) with the French PSA group (Peugeot, Citroën). Since then, jobs at Fiat have been systematically reduced. Shortly before the merger, Fiat had about 55,000 employees; today there are only about 43,000, of which about 15,000 are in the Turin region.

Stellantis’s plans in Italy are part of a global jobs massacre affecting plants across Europe and the US. “If the brands don’t bring in money, we will shut them down,” Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares threatened a few weeks ago. For example, another 1,000 jobs at Opel in Germany are in acute danger. Again and again, production is interrupted by phases of short-time work. In Austria, the Opel plant in Aspern was closed last month, affecting 220 employees. In France, Stellantis has cut 600 jobs at its Mulhouse plant.

In the US, 2,450 workers are to be laid off at the beginning of October at the truck assembly plant in Warren, Michigan. Previously, 2,000 temporary workers and hundreds of employees were laid off from other American plants.

In Italy, the job massacre by Stellantis is aimed at the heart of the Fiat Group, which also includes Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Maserati. Fiat (short for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), was synonymous with Italian car production 50 years ago, with over 2 million vehicles rolling off the assembly line annually in Turin alone. Today, Fiat has been systematically dismantled by Stellantis, and new models such as the E-Fiat 600 are being built in Poland and elsewhere.

This relocation of Fiat models to Eastern Europe sparked a heated argument earlier this year between Meloni and Stellantis, or the Agnelli family, the former owner of Fiat. Meloni explained, “If you want to sell a car advertised as an Italian jewel, this car has to be made in Italy.” She demanded to increase domestic car production to 1 million vehicles per year.

Stellantis boss Tavares, on the other hand, demanded better conditions from the Italian state in the form of incentives for the purchase of electric cars and the subsidising of its energy costs. This will enable him to increase his annual production from about 750,000 vehicles (2023) to 1 million.

Relations between the Meloni government and the Agnelli family have been strained for some time. The daily La Repubblica, which is controlled by the Agnelli family, is more politically supportive of the former ruling Democratic Party (PD). The newspaper has long accused Meloni of privatizing important state-owned companies, such as the energy company Eni, although the former PD heads of government also privatized state-owned companies.

Meloni has countered with the accusation that the Agnelli family, or its holding company Exor, “sold Fiat to the French.” Exor is Stellantis’s largest single shareholder at 15 percent, and Agnelli’s grandson John Elkann holds the position of co-chairman alongside Tavares at Stellantis.

The conflicts mainly revolve around how the Italian ruling class can safeguard its profit interests in a world market that is increasingly in crisis. While Tavares and Elkann are shifting production to countries with low wages and costs, Meloni is fomenting nationalism to divide the working class. However, the jobs can only be defended if the workers unite internationally and fight together.

This is what the trade unions, which are themselves nationalist and deeply integrated into Italy’s capitalist economy, are trying to prevent. They are part of the conspiracy against the workers. Their entirely toothless protests against the job cuts at Stellantis cannot hide this fact. Their main objective is to prevent a working class uprising.

Rocco Palombella, chairman of the metal union Uilm, described the clear-cut plans as “hypothetical” and addressed Stellantis with a warning: “Factories also have a social role to play in the country.”

Fim General Secretary Uliano also only publicly warned of the massacre of 25,000 jobs next year in order to appeal to the government. He said: “In 2025, both the related industries and Stellantis will exhaust the social safety nets. If action is not taken in time, there will be mass redundancies.”

He called for the welfare benefit for short-time work, which the state grants to workers under the so-called “Cassa Integrazione,” to be extended. Currently, payments from the Cassa Integrazione are limited to three years.

Michele De Palma (Fiom/Cgil) argued that the government and Stellantis should jointly draw up a “strategic and extraordinary plan for the Italian automotive industry” and lamely demanded that the transition to electric vehicles must also be just for workers.

All three unions already signed an agreement with Stellantis on March 27, 2024 to cut around 5,000 jobs. It is supposed to run through “voluntary redundancies,” which merely means that workers give up their jobs under pressure and for a meager severance pay.

In Turin, 1,500 employees are to go “voluntarily,” and both assembly line workers, technicians and white collar workers are affected. For months, over 2,000 workers involved in the production of the E-Fiat 500 and the Maserati in Mirafiori have been repeatedly affected by short-time work. In order to avert an imminent closure, the workers occupied the traditional Mirafiori plant in Turin for three days in February.

The Pomigliano d’Arco plant near Naples, the former Alfasud production site, is also threatened with closure. In July, a strike for several hours took place against the unbearable heat in the workplace. In Pratola Serra, Fiat workers went on strike for a day in February after a 52-year-old colleague was crushed and killed by a machine.

Hundreds of jobs are currently being cut in Pomigliano, Melfi (Basilicata), Termoli (Molise), Cassino (Lazio) and Pratola Serra (Campania). Again and again, workers are temporarily—sometimes for months—released from work and put on short-time work benefits.

Ukraine continues offensive inside Russia

Clara Weiss

The Ukrainian military’s offensive into two Russian border regions, Kursk and Belgorod, is entering its second week. Kiev claims to have captured 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), including at least 74 settlements and hundreds of prisoners of war. The troops carrying out the first invasion of Russia since the end of World War II were trained in the UK, and are using American and German battle tanks as well as American-supplied HIMARS rockets. 

A destroyed Russian tank lies on a roadside near Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. [AP Photo]

So far, Ukraine has blown up two bridges in the region and has interdicted a key rail line that the Russian army used to deliver supplies and troops to the front in Ukraine. 

The destruction of the bridges has also disrupted ongoing efforts to evacuate residents from the combat zones in both Kursk and Belgorod. Over 180,000 people have already been evacuated, and the continuing evacuations indicate that the Kremlin is not anticipating a quick end to the fighting.

Nevertheless, according to Russian news reports, a significant number of civilians still remain in areas now occupied by Ukrainian forces. The Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited Russian pro-Kremlin war journalist Aleksandr Kharchenko as saying, “A large number of our citizens are under the control of the Ukrainian forces.”

On Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that the goal of the incursion was to create “a buffer zone.” He stated, “it is now our primary task in defensive operations overall: to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions.”

Russian authorities also claim that Kiev is preparing an attack on the nuclear power plants in the Russian region of Kursk and Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, currently controlled by Russian forces. Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, is ongoing.

Underscoring both the involvement of the US in the operation and its predatory character, retired general David Petraeus, one of the greatest war criminals of the US invasion of Iraq, and later head of the CIA, praised the Ukrainian invasion on the BBC Global News Podcast. “This is not unlike when we did the invasion of Iraq, a great armored brigade did the thunder run through Baghdad and ends up on the airfield and they said, ‘Hey, let’s just gonna stay here’. Let’s develop the situation, let’s see what happens from here, how does the enemy respond. I think that’s where they are.”

Whatever the immediate military and political calculations behind the incursion, its underlying strategy and goals reveal the imperialist character of the war waged by the imperialist powers against Russia. NATO deliberately provoked the invasion by the Putin regime in order to use Ukraine as a staging ground for a much broader war whose ultimate goal is the carve-up of the entire region. 

No one has been more open about these goals than Ukraine’s military leadership. Both the ex-head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have repeatedly been photographed with a map of a carved-up Russia, divided up between different powers. Based on this map, a substantial portion of what is now southeastern Russia, including the Kursk, Belgorod and Rostov regions, would fall to Ukraine in a modern-day version of the long-standing aim of the fascists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to establish a “Greater Ukraine”.  

A map of a carved-up Russia. Both the former head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have been photographed with this map in their offices since 2022.

This strategy includes not only military offensives into Russian territory but also terrorist attacks within Russia, such as the March Moscow Crocus City Hall attack, which killed over 140 people, and political assassinations. From the standpoint of the imperialist powers, the ultimate aim is to weaken the Putin regime militarily and politically, in order to create conditions for its overthrow by NATO-backed sections of the Russian oligarchy and state apparatus as part of an effort to bring the entire region under their direct control. 

The Putin regime, which has emerged as a Bonapartist regime out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism, is, by its very class and political nature, extremely vulnerable to such pressures. As the WSWS has explained, its principal function consists of  safeguarding the vast social privileges of the oligarchy. It has sought to do so by balancing, first, between different sections of the oligarchy, second, between the oligarchy and imperialism, and third, between the oligarchy and the working class. But the entire strategy of imperialism and its proxy in Ukraine, which consists of both ever more aggressive military offensives and systematic efforts to fuel tensions within the oligarchy, is undermining the Kremlin’s policies.

So far, the Putin regime’s response to the first imperialist-backed invasion of the country since the defeat of the Nazis by the Red Army in World War II has been markedly muted, itself one of many indicators that conflicts are indeed raging behind the scenes. The incursion came shortly after the Putin regime initiated a major purge of its army leadership. Moreover, just days before the incursion, the Kremlin had negotiated a prisoner swap with Washington, in which it released several of the most prominent representatives of the NATO-backed opposition, most notably Vladimir Kara-Murza and several members of the team of the late Alexei Navalny, long the central stooge of imperialism in the oligarchy.

A lengthy interview aired by Russia’s leading state TV channel, “Rossiia,” with the president of Belarus and one of the principal allies of Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, on Saturday, provided some insight into the considerations and heated discussions within the oligarchy. Lukashenko reiterated Putin’s warnings that NATO was preparing a direct entry into the war which would mean “World War III”. He stated that with the invasion of Kursk, Ukraine was trying to provoke Russia into a general mobilization to “destabilize society from within, we are not prepared to do this, we don’t want this.” Lukashenko also claimed that Ukraine had amassed 120,000 troops on its border with Belarus and that Minsk had responded by mobilizing a third of its military—some 65,000 men—to the already heavily mined border. He then spoke at length about Belarus’s preparations for a potential war with NATO member Poland and threatened that Ukraine’s Kursk invasion could end in its own “destruction.”

He insisted repeatedly, “We don’t want escalation. We don’t want this war against all of NATO. We don’t want it. But if they go for it, then we won’t have a choice.” Lukashenko then discussed the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia on Belarusian territory. When asked whether he was prepared to “press the red button,” he emphatically declared that he was, as soon as the borders of Belarus were violated. “If you don’t want this, then let’s sit down at the negotiating table and let’s end this little fight [i.e., the war in Ukraine].” He went on to claim that there are “no Nazis” in Ukraine anymore and that the Kremlin’s supposed goal of the “de-Nazification of Ukraine” had been effectively accomplished.  

Of course, the Putin regime, which is itself steeped in Great Russian chauvinism and maintains extensive ties to the far-right, never wanted, nor could it undertake, a serious struggle against fascism. Nevertheless, these statements by Lukashenko, made on Russian state television as Ukrainian troops on Russian soil are using Nazi insignia on their uniforms, suggest that significant sections of the state and oligarchy are responding to the invasion by intensifying discussions on how to reach a negotiated settlement with imperialism as fast as possible. 

At the same time, other sections in the oligarchy warn that the country must prepare for a protracted war and a potential second mobilization. One characteristic comment on the right-wing pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad.Ru evoked the memory of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, and warned that “Victory will require a protracted war.”

Record temperatures spread wildfires in Greece and southern Europe

John Vassilopoulos

Wildfires have again taken hold this summer in Greece, Italy, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria and other south-eastern European countries.

Nearly 10,000 hectares (approx. 40 square miles) of mostly forest land was burnt in northeastern Attica in a fire that erupted on August 11 in the village of Varnavas, 30km north-east of the Greek capital Athens.

Flames burn a vehicle at a business during a fire in northern Athens, August 12, 2024 [AP Photo/Aggelos Barai]

Aided by gale force winds and high temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius, a wall of flames over 25 metres high and covering a 30km radius spread south and reached Athens’ northern suburbs of Nea Penteli, Patima Halandriou and Vrilissia—just 14km away from the centre of Athens.

This is the first time since 1981 that a fire has reached an urban area in the outskirts of the capital. The sky of Attica was covered with black smoke with the Hellenic Thoracic Society advising those suffering with lung and heart problems to avoid going outside.

The blaze was the second largest the Attica region has experienced since 2009, when just over 13,000 hectares of forest land were burnt. Last year Greece saw the biggest fire in the European Union since 2000 when around 90,000 hectares were burnt in the Evros region of northern Greece near the land border with Turkey, resulting in the death of 18 refugees.

Due to this week’s fires, thousands were evacuated including patients and staff from a children hospital and a military hospital, both near Mount Penteli. The body of a 65-year-old worker was discovered in the bathroom of a burnt out factory in Patima Halandriou, where she was seeking shelter. She had been employed at the factory for 20 years.

The blaze raged for more than 40 hours with firefighters still putting out remnants of the fire three days later. It led to extensive power cuts, after at least 120 power poles were damaged.

The increasing frequency of fires in Greece are the result of climate change, which has led to record high temperatures, with June and July this year the hottest since records began. Temperatures approaching and even above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) are becoming the norm during the summer in large parts of Europe.

This is part of a wider trend across the continent, which is sweltering under a heatwave with fires also breaking out in Italy’s Latina Province and in the north of Portugal. Record temperatures in Spain prompted the government to declare a drought emergency with water restrictions imposed on the island of Tenerife. The Mediterranean is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which according to the United Nations Environment Programme is heating up 20 percent faster than the global average.

In July, wildfires ripped through Albania, beginning in the south of the country and travelling north. Further fires broke out in recent weeks in Albania, Bulgaria and Sardinia. At the end of July, an elderly man in North Macedonia was killed in a forest fire burning since early July.

Research by the Barcelona-based Institute for Global Health found there were more than 47,000 heat related deaths across Europe because of high temperatures last year, the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest in Europe. Greece had the worst heat related mortality rate in Europe, with 393 deaths per million compared with the European average of 88.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said: “We constantly have to become better. And from any mistakes and any fire that gets out of control we always we always have to see what we can learn and what we can do better.”

The reality is that the conservative New Democracy (ND) government has learned nothing since it came to power in 2019. In the last eight years 13 major fires have burnt more than 45,000 hectares of forest land within Attica, 37 percent of the region’s total.

Scientists have raised concerns about the long-term effects on the health of Attica’s inhabitants—nearly 40 percent of Greece’s total population. With only 0.96 sq. metres of green space per inhabitant, Athens already has one of the worst ratios of green spaces per capita in the world—well below the minimum of 9 square metres per capita recommended by the World Health Organisation.

In April, Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias announced a 2.1 billion programme to combat natural disasters caused by climate change with a view to upgrade its crumbling fire service fleet of planes, helicopters and fires engines. None of this will be available in the next two years.

Between 2020 and 2010, €1.1 billion was cut from forest protection and forest fire service due to successive austerity packages imposed at the behest of the European Union and International Monetary Fund. The trend has continued. The national park in Mount Parnitha north of Athens only has seven rangers to cover an area of 35,000 hectares of forest land. Speaking to Documento in April Forestry and Environmental Scientist Eleftherios Stamatopoulos said: “If we invested in the management of forests with the 145 million euros that [fire fighting] Air Tractors cost we could have covered the needs of forests for twenty years.”

Greece’s fire service is understaffed by 4,000, while fire-fighters have an average age of 47 and most fire engines are more than 20 years old. Fire-fighters are routinely shipped all over the country to fight blazes. Speaking to Documento last month the president of the Panhellenic Union of Temporary Firefighters recounted his recent experience of being shipped from Thessaloniki in Northern Greece to fight a fire in Keratea in Southern Attica: “They sent personnel from Thessaloniki with five vehicles and 20 of us crammed in a small space. We got to Keratea and I was dropped off in an area where I knew none of the roads. We arrived at 4pm after an eight-hour road-trip in a 25-year-old vehicle with no air conditioning”.

Greece’s population is often left to their own devices to fight fires that break out. On the Mega Channel, Dimitris Megagiannis, a livestock farmer in Penteli, said following the recent fire in Attica: “Nothing’s left of my farm. There have been many fires here since 1995 and we have put all of them out with a fire engine that was always here. Today we are at the mercy of God: Not one firefighting plane or fire engine. It was just me with my son and two buckets of water the whole time. Until I couldn’t take any more at some point and I passed out and don’t know what happened afterwards. When I came to after 10-15 minutes I heard my animals bleating and dying.”

Financial support offered to those affected by fires is risible. Owners of burnt homes are offered between €5,000-10,000 and small businesses between €2,000-4,000.

In a tweet with the hashtag #EUSolidarity, Janez Lenarčič, European Commissioner for Crisis Management, boasted of the EU’s in fact minimal assistance to Greece which consisted of “2 planes from the rescEU fleet from Italy, one rescEU helicopter from France and ground firefighting teams from Romania and Czechia.”

Cuts to the fire service are an EU-wide phenomenon, despite the increase of wildfires across the continent due to climate change. According to Eurostat, 10 countries cut firefighting jobs between 2021 and 2022, with the largest drops recorded in France, Romania, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Belgium. France cut its firefighters by 5,400, while Romania and Portugal slashed their firefighters by 4,250 and 2,907 respectively.

The pseudo-left Syriza, now Greece’s official opposition, has tried to make political capital of the Attica fires. In a statement the party denounced “the audacity and irresponsibility of Mr Mitsotakis, which is unprecedented.”

But having governed the country between 2015 and 2019 Syriza bears as much responsibility as ND for the devastations wrought by forest fires in Greece over the last years. After betraying its massive popular mandate to end austerity in the summer of 2015, the Syriza government signed a third austerity package from the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. This imposed even deeper spending cuts, decimating the living standards of millions. Syriza, which presented itself as a fervent defender of the environment, presided over the forest fire in the summer of 2018 at Mati, a small coastal town outside Athens, in which over 100 lost their lives.

While Modi professes concern for the jobless, his government’s budget escalates class war

Kranti Kumara

The first budget of Narendra Modi’s third term as India’s prime minister demonstrated—were any further proof needed—that he and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government intend to press forward with their class war agenda.

With the BJP losing its parliamentary majority in last spring’s quinquennial election, there was much press commentary claiming a politically weakened and “humbled” BJP would be forced to be more accommodating to the opposition and receptive to popular pressure. The Congress Party-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) opposition bloc, including the Stalinist parliamentary parties, made like claims.

This has all proven to be a delusion.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi displays the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) symbol, lotus, during a road show while campaigning for national elections, in Chennai, India, Tuesday, April 9, 2024 [AP Photo/AP Photo]

The reconstituted government, dubbed by the press “Modi 3.0,” is pursuing the same far-right course as its predecessors: whipping up communalism, prosecuting political opponents, expanding India’s involvement in Washington’s incendiary military-strategic offensive against China, and implementing a raft of anti-worker, “pro-investor” policies.

The 2024-2025 budget, presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23, doubled down on the pro-big business policies Modi and his BJP have been pursuing since they came to power in May 2024. These include massive corporate tax cuts, a fire-sale of government assets to billionaires like Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, austerity in social spending, and the further expansion of “business-friendly” Special Economic Zones.

The budget did see a modest shift in policy, with the government touting it as a “job-creating” budget. However, on closer examination this shift proved to be largely rhetorical and the much vaunted job-creation schemes just another mechanism for the government to provide huge subsidies to big business.

The budget’s purported focus on job creation was a crude attempt to allay mounting popular anger over mass joblessness, especially among youth. This anger was a major factor in the BJP’s loss of more than 60 seats in last spring’s election.

Although forced to make a grudging admission that unemployment is a major problem, Sitharaman tried to maintain that the Indian economy is the envy of the world. After pointing to the troubled state of the world economy, she affirmed in her budget speech, “India’s economic growth continues to be the shining exception and will remain so in the years ahead.”

She claimed that the budget expenditure was in line with the Modi’s government’s bombast of India becoming “Viksit Bharat” (Developed India) by 2047, a century after the end of British colonial rule in 1947.

The rosy picture Sitharaman presented of the Indian economy is belied by the crisis it is facing on multiple fronts. These include tepid private capital investment, falling foreign direct investment, spiraling government debt, endemic poverty, abysmal human infrastructure and mass unemployment and under-employment.

The total expenditure announced in the budget amounts to Rupees (Rs.) 48.3 trillion ($575 billion). This is in contrast to the $4 trillion 2024 budget of the government of China, the only country with a comparable sized population. A huge portion of India’s budget—Rs. 16.1 trillion ($190 billion) or 33.4 percent— is being financed through government debt.

The single biggest budgetary expenditure at Rs. 11.63 trillion ($138.45 billion), representing more than 24 percent of the whole budget, is interest payments on the accumulated government debt.

A further 13 percent of India’s budget is consigned to the military and India’s continuing push to develop a blue-water navy and a triad (land, air, and underwater) nuclear-weapons delivery capacity.

For the 2024-25 fiscal year, the military budget has been set at Rs. 6.2 trillion ($74 billion). This is a 4.4 percent increase over the amount budgeted for 2023-24, which itself was a whopping 13 percent higher than in 2022-23. India’s military expenditure is the world’s fourth largest after the US, China and Russia.

As has long been the case, the bulk of the new weapons-purchases are aimed at China. New Delhi is also hiking its spending on roads, airfields, and fortifications along the India-China border, where the two sides have been locked in a tense, border stand-off for the past four years. The Border Roads Organization is receiving a 30 percent increase.

India has long been one of the world’s largest arms importers. But a key part of the Modi government’s plans to enhance India’s economy and global power is to develop an arms-export industry, including by having Indian firms serve as cheap-labour subcontractors for US weapons manufacturers.

The sums the Modi government has budgeted for the military are almost triple its combined allocation for healthcare and education. Total spending on education—including public school education, literacy programs, and higher education institutions such as the IITs (Indian Institutes for Technology)—is Rs. 1.21 trillion ($14.3 billion). The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has been allocated Rs. 909 billion ($11 billion) or less than $8 for each Indian man, woman and child.

To applause from domestic and international capital, the Modi government once again allotted large sums to developing and improving India’s woeful infrastructure such as highways, ports, railways and electricity generation. Around Rs. 11.11 trillion ($132 billion), or more than a fifth of the budget, is to be spent on infrastructure projects. Such publicly funded capitalist “development” overwhelmingly benefits private businesses—both those who secure the lucrative contracts to build and manage the infrastructure and those who gain access to far more efficient links to domestic and global markets.

The Modi government has repeatedly slashed corporate taxes and it did so again in its latest budget, reducing the tax rate for foreign-owned companies to 35 percent from 40 percent.

In her budget speech, Sitharaman claimed the BJP’s budget was focused on assisting the “development” of India’s “four major castes,” whom she described as the poor, the women, the youth and the farmers. This new “caste” classification was a political dig at the Congress-led INDIA alliance. It has placed the call for a nationwide, Hindu-caste-based census and the extension of reservation (an affirmative action-type program for Dalits and other historically-discriminated against lower caste and tribal groups) at the centre of what it touts as a “social justice” agenda. In fact, the push for a further expansion and entrenchment of reservations is a right-wing scheme that will only serve to spread more “equitably” capitalist misery and divert working people from class struggle and the fight against the capitalist profit system into fratricidal caste conflicts.    

Predictably, Sitharaman’s bravado about assisting the poor, the women, the youth and the farmers proved to be utterly hollow.

No serious measures were announced to alleviate the grinding poverty of the at least 800 million people who live on less than $3.10 (Rs. 260) per day. Due to the jobs crisis and constant increase in prices of day-to-day food items, the social conditions of these most oppressed workers and their families have worsened dramatically since the government effectively left them to fend for themselves at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21.

The government is continuing to slash price subsidies and otherwise practice austerity, with a pledge that “fiscal consolidation” will lower the debt to GDP ratio to 4.9 percent in the current fiscal year and to 4.5 percent next year.  

Most of the schemes outlined by Sitharaman to “develop” the “four castes” involve “public-private” partnerships. Women “entrepreneurs” are to be encouraged to open measly home-businesses such as making fritters, preparing packaged meals and other such items on a small scale. This “women’s empowerment” will be financed by micro loans from the government.

Sitharaman announced that the Modi government has allocated Rs. 2 trillion ($24 billion) for job-creation, with industries offered three different subsidy schemes to hire first-time employees. She further claimed that this will provide jobs to 41 million youth, an entirely concocted figure, over the next five years.

Under the schemes, Indian big and to some extent medium-sized businesses are to be handed over billions of dollars in subsidies, with no guarantees that the companies won’t use the schemes to “rollover” employees, replacing those on their existing payrolls or laying off workers once the subsidy expires only to hire another subsidized worker.

There is certainly no shortage of jobless candidates. According to India’s Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the unemployment rate for youth aged 15 to 29, excluding students, exceeds 45 percent. Even this figure is a significant undercount as the CMIE defines a person working at least 1 hour a week as “employed.”

In order to further “incentivize” private companies to hire new employees, the government plans to provide industrial training to youth in around 1000 industrial training institutes to provide them the job-skills employers are seeking.

One of the job schemes involves the government compensating a corporation for a new employee’s first month’s salary up to Rs. 15,000 ($180).

A second scheme would compensate both employers and new hires for their contributions to the Provident Fund, the retirement savings account.

The budget does not even bother with job-creation for the desperately poor in rural areas who eke out a living by taking up whatever manual jobs are available.

The Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), enacted in 2005, is to be further starved of funds. This program guarantees 100 days of menial work, such as ditch digging, to one member of a rural family per year.

The MNREGA has repeatedly been oversubscribed, with eligible people routinely turned away despite the state’s claims of “guaranteed employment.” Yet the Modi government is allocating a mere Rs. 860 billion ($10.2 billion) to the program.

As for farmers and the poor, the other two “castes” the Modi government claims it is focused on assisting, the budget allocations that benefit these two groups have been slashed.

The allocation of Rs. 1.52 trillion ($18 billion) in the budget for agriculture and allied industries is entirely geared towards developing 109 “new high-yielding and climate-resilient varieties of 32 field and horticulture crops … for cultivation by farmers.”

On the other hand, the fertilizer subsidy which farmers desperately depend upon to reduce input costs has been cut to Rs. 1.64 trillion ($20 billion). This amounts to a 35 percent cut, not taking the massive inflation into account, from the actual expenditure of Rs. 2.51 trillion ($32 billion) in the 2022-23 financial year. It is also a noticeable decline from the estimated spending in the previous 2023-24 fiscal year of Rs. 1.9 trillion ($23 billion).

As far as the poor are concerned, the government continues to slash the allocation to the Department of Food and Public Distribution. Rs. 2.13 trillion ($25 billion) has been budgeted for 2024/25, down significantly from the estimated expenditure of Rs. 2.22 trillion ($27 billion) in 2023-24, and massively from the actual expenditure of Rs. 2.8 trillion ($36 billion) in 2022-23.  

Fully 950 million people in India, including some in the “middle classes,” are dependent upon the Public Distribution System (PDS) under which wheat, rice, sugar and kerosene cooking oil are provided at subsidized prices to families. According to several UN agencies, around 75 percent of India’s population, that is more than 1 billion people, cannot afford to eat nutritious food.

Chinese steel giant warns of “long cold winter”

Nick Beams

The statement by China’s top steelmaking firm, which accounts for 7 percent of global output, that the industry faces a severe crisis, underscores the extent of the slowdown in the Chinese economy and its global significance.

China Baowu Steel Group [Photo: AUCOTEC]

Outlining the company’s half-year position on Wednesday, Hu Vangming, chair of China Baowu Steel Group, said the “winter” would be “longer, colder and more difficult than we expected.”

In comments to Bloomberg, he said in the process of resolving it, cash was more important than profit and “financial departments at all levels should pay more attention to the security of the company’s funding.”

His remarks were echoed by Hou Augui, the general manager at the state-owned firm, who said “the current situation in the steel industry is more severe that the downturns of 2008 and 2015.” All departments had to “pay close attention to the security of cash flows and develop long-term cash balance plans.” When companies announce their focus of attention is cash flow it is a sign they are in trouble.

The immediate source of the crisis is the slump in construction and property development, one of the chief sources of demand for steel.

According to an analysis by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, reported in the Financial Times, new construction starts in China fell 24 percent in the first half of this year on top of declines of 21 percent and 39 percent in 2023 and 2022, respectively.

The two previous downturns in 2008 and 2015 were resolved by government stimulus measures and the consolidation of steel plants out of which Baowu itself emerged in 2016. But the Chinese government has eschewed such measures in the present situation due to concerns over rising debt levels in the property and construction sectors.

There have been calls from both within China and internationally for the government to take action but apart from minor initiatives and some easing of credit by the People’s Bank of China there has been no response. The focus of the government is on investment in “high quality productive forces” concentrated in the high-tech area.

The latest data on the Chinese economy, coming in the wake of GDP growth of 4.7 percent in the second quarter down from 5.3 percent in the first, showed no signs of an upturn.

Reporting on the latest numbers, Bloomberg said: “China’s weakening economic momentum failed to pick up as sluggish confidence weighs on consumption and investment, putting the government’s annual growth target risk.”

Fixed asset investment slowed to 3.6 percent in the first seven months of the year. Spending by state-owned enterprises rose by 6.3 percent in the first seven months of the year compared to 6.8 percent in the first half, while “that of private firms stagnated from a year ago.”

Commenting on the latest data, which showed that industrial production rose by 5.1 percent in the year to July, compared to 5.3 percent the previous month, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the economy had made “stable and steady progress” in July. However, it warned there was “an increasing negative impact from the changing external environment, while domestic demand remains insufficient. The switch from old to new growth drivers is causing temporary pains.”

A sign of those pains is that bank loans to the real economy, used for investment and productive expansion, fell for the first time in 19 years.

Reflecting the downturn in construction, the NBS said steel production volumes had fall by 4 percent year-on-year in July and cement output was down 12.4 percent.

In an expression of widely-held views, Serena Zhou, senior China economist at the Japanese financial firm Mizzuho Securities, told Bloomberg: “We believe the economy faces a significant threat from self-fulfilling deflation expectations. The government’s top priority should be to break this downward spiral early with more assertive measures.”

Ding Shung, chief economist for Greater China and North Asia at Standard Charter, said the economy’s momentum had slowed. This “posed more challenges to the goal of achieving around 5 percent growth this year.”

Problems in the steel industry are not confined to China, reflecting the wider slowdown in the global economy.

On Wednesday, the German steel company Thyssenkrupp reported that it expected to make a loss for the year ending in September in the mid-to-high, three-digit million euro range. Previously it had reported it expected a loss in the low three-digit million euro range.

In a sign of a worsening situation, the company’s announcement was the third time this year it has increased its estimates of expected losses because of lower sales.

Thyssenkrupp said reduced momentum in the automotive, machinery and construction industries had weighed on the company, and it had had to contend with lower prices and decreased volumes.

In the third quarter of the financial year—that is the three months to the end of June—it posted a net loss of €54 million, compared with a profit of €83 million over the same period a year ago, on sales that had fallen by 6 percent.

The downturn in the steel industry, generally regarded as the backbone of the industrial economy, which is most sharply reflected in China, will have major ramifications for iron-ore exporting countries, notably Brazil and Australia.

In the past three years, global prices for iron ore, Australia’s biggest export earner have fallen from a peak of $US215 per tonne to $US97 and are expected to fall even further, to $US70 or lower. This will have a major impact on government revenues that are highly dependent on the taxes from iron ore sales.

It is estimated that for every $US10 fall in the price, Australian GDP drops by $A6.5 billion and government tax revenues by $A1.3 billion.

For the past decade and half, since the global financial crisis of 2008, the Australian economy has been sheltered to some extent by the growth in the Chinese economy, in particular the construction boom promoted by the Chinese government. That period has now ended along with the super-profits enjoyed by the iron ore companies, setting the stage for major economic shocks.

The fall in prices is not confined to iron ore. The price of nickel, a key industrial metal, has fallen by more than two thirds in the past two years, down from $US50,000 per metric to around $16,500. Prices of lithium have also collapsed in the past 12 months leading to hundreds of sackings.

The fall in the ore price along with other industrial minerals will have major political ramifications as well.

There was a small foretaste of what is coming in the Labor government’s budget papers in May. While it forecast a surplus for the current year of $9.3 billion, largely on the back of iron ore revenues, the budget was expected to fall into a deficit of $28.3 billion (around 1 percent of GDP) the following year and $42.8 billion the year after.

Those estimates could well be revised down in light of the developing crisis in the global steel industry. This means that the attacks on the working class under the Albanese Labor government, which have resulted in the biggest cuts in living standards in 50 years, will be intensified by whatever government comes to power after the federal elections scheduled to be called by next May.

Ukrainian troops trained in UK before attacking Kursk

Andre Damon

The UK’s Sun reported Friday that Ukrainian troops who participated in the attack on the Russian province of Kursk had trained in the United Kingdom, adding to the growing evidence of NATO’s leading role in preparing and coordinating the attack.

A destroyed Russian tank lies on a roadside near Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. [AP Photo]

“A month before they were dispatched to Kursk, some of the unit were sent to England where they underwent a few days of training alongside British soldiers,” the Sun reported. A major focus of the training was raids on high-rise buildings.

The UK, US, France and Germany have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops on their own territory, teaching them how to operate the advanced weapons systems that have been provided to Ukraine and are now flowing into Russian territory.

The list of NATO-provided military hardware confirmed to be deployed in the Kursk offensive is growing. On Thursday, Sky News reported that Challenger 2 main battle tanks from the UK were being deployed as part of the offensive.

This follows confirmation from Voice of America that HIMARS long-range missiles had been used in the offensive.

Vladislav Seleznyov, a former spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff, told Voice of America that HIMARS were “critical to the stunning advance.

“The real scourge of the Russian army is the HIMARS, which turns into ashes a huge amount of weapons, equipment and personnel of the Russian army,” Seleznyov said.

Nikolay Patrushev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told Izvestia that the attack on Kursk was “planned with the involvement of NATO and Western special services.”

He added, “NATO countries have supplied Kiev with weapons, military instructors, and continuous intelligence while controlling the actions of neo-Nazis.”

The US media, citing unnamed American officials, has claimed that the US and NATO were not informed of the attack beforehand. However, this claim is entirely unbelievable, given the high-level coordination required to wage such a large-scale offensive using sophisticated NATO hardware.

The Guardian reported on Friday that “Western armor was at the heart of the assault, with no apparent restrictions on their use, including US Stryker and German Marder armored vehicles ... and even reportedly some of Britain’s donated squadron of 13 remaining Challenger 2 tanks.”

The Guardian also reported that “between Thursday night and Friday morning last week, Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian convoy on a highway 25 miles inside the border, in a strike whose accuracy and absence of artillery craters suggested it involved Himars rocket artillery. Dozens were probably killed.”

Nick Patton Walsh, the chief international correspondent of CNN, appeared to have walked into Russia without obtaining permission during a broadcast this week alongside Ukrainian military forces.

“This is where Russia begins,” Walsh said as he walked over the border:

It’s startling to see the steady flow of military vehicles, including what appears to be an ambulance and armor, passing through the Russian border point. That is the border post that was heavily hit when Ukraine moved in over a week ago. Russia’s borders here are completely undefended. It’s also remarkable the freedom with which the Ukrainian military are moving around here. They simply aren’t afraid of the drones that have hampered their every move for the past months.

He added, “Now this is what’s so startling about this offensive, the volume of Western-supplied armor that we’re seeing passing back and forth, their passage through here, up into Russia, unimpeded.”

On Thursday, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, said that Ukrainian forces had advanced up to 22 miles during the offensive so far.

In a statement published on X on Thursday, the UK’s Ministry of Defense claimed that “since August 6, 2024, Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russia’s Kursk region to a depth ranging between 10-25km over a frontage of approximately 40 km.”

It added, “After initial disarray and disorganization, Russian forces have deployed in greater force to the region, including likely from elsewhere along the contact line. They have also begun to construct additional defensive positions in an effort to prevent Ukrainian advances.”

The state of Ukraine's Kursk incursion as of August 15 [Photo by Ecrusized / CC BY 1.0]

In its assessment of the offensive, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported that “Ukrainian forces continued to marginally advance southeast of Sudzha on August 16 amid continued Ukrainian operations in Kursk Oblast.”

The ISW also reported that Ukrainian strikes destroyed two significant bridges in Kursk Oblast using HIMARS strikes, which “will complicate Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) in the area.”

As a growing range of advanced weapons continue to flow into Russian territory, the pretense that NATO is not a participant in the war and that the conflict is a “defensive” war by Ukraine is falling away. The goal of the NATO powers to use the war to overthrow the Russian government and force the dissolution of Russia is being more and more openly stated.

Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, gloated about Ukraine’s offensive. “I think psychologically, this blow is tremendous to Putin, especially among elites, because he’s supposed to be the protector,” McFaul told MSNBC.

“And now for a second time in as many years, he has failed to do so,” McFaul said, referencing last year’s uprising by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner group.

Kremlin expands internet censorship amid NATO escalation of the war against Russia

Maxim Zotov

In late July and early August, Russian users of the video sharing platform YouTube began complaining en masse about service disruptions. Earlier, there had already been talk of the blocking or slowing down of service on YouTube. Thus, in April, Alexei Pushkov, the chairman of the commission on information security of the Federation Council's (the upper house of the Russian parliament), suggested that YouTube be temporarily slowed down for the national holidays in May, including May Day. He justified this proposed measure by arguing that the company does not want to cooperate with the Russian authorities and continues to block channels and videos of state media.

This combination of images shows logos for companies from YouTube and Facebook. [AP Photo/AP Photo]

On July 12, Rostelecom (a telecommunications company) warned about a possible deterioration of access to YouTube due to technical problems in the company’s operation. On the same day, the Russian newspaper Gazeta.Ru reported that the service would likely be slowed down in late July and early August, and blocked entirely in the fall.

The press secretary of President Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Peskov, denied that the authorities intended to block YouTube and claimed that all the problems were the result of the obsolescence of equipment, which Google has not updated for more than 2 years due to sanctions. Google said that there are no technical problems on the part of the company.

Already on July 25, Alexander Khinshtein, a member of the State Duma (the lower house of Parliament), reported that the download speed of YouTube on computers may drop to 40 percent by the end of that week and up to 70 percent next week. According to him, this is due “not only to the actions of the authorities, but also to the company’s disregard for its basic infrastructure” and is directed not against users, “but against the administration of a foreign resource,” which “still believes it can violate and ignore” Russian laws with impunity.

On August 3, the news agency TASS announced that YouTube stopped uploading videos in high quality, and in the morning of August 8, many users were unable to access the service both on smartphones and computers, with more than 32,000 recorded complaints. However, five days later, YouTube resumed normal service and only some 2,000 complaints were received.

In a clear indication that the authorities are indeed seeking to limit access to YouTube by all means, Roskomnadzor began sending e-mails to the owners of sites distributing ways to bypass YouTube's slowdown, demanding that they remove this information from the internet.

Then, on July 30, Roskomnadzor proposed to block the distribution of all information about VPN [Virtual Private Network] services online. VPN services are popular in Russia among many internet users because they allow them to avoid surveillance by the authorities and to access sites that are otherwise banned.

Previously, an order prohibiting the advertisements and information seeking to popularize VPNs had been in effect since March 1. At that time, this ban did not extend scientific and technical information about VPN. Now any information, including scientific information, about VPNs is prohibited. It is assumed that the order will be in effect from March 1, 2025 to September 1, 2029. As of April this year, Roskomnadzor had already blocked about 150 VPN services. Beginning next year, the number of blocked VPN providers is likely to increase significantly.

And on August 2, the Federation Council passed a law on the “de-anonymization” of the owners of public groups and pages on social media networks and messenger apps with more than 10,000 subscribers. According to this law, the owners of such groups can no longer retain anonymity online but must report their identities to Roskomnadzor. According to Gazeta.Ru, “There is no talk of blocking channels without identification, but they will not be able to place advertising, collect donations, and other channels will not be allowed to repost from their accounts.”

Eventually, on August 9, Roskomnadzor blocked Signal, a messenger known for its security and safety, which provides end-to-end encryption, and is widely used especially in Europe and North America. The justification provided by the Russian authorities were unspecified violations of Russian law by Signal.

In Russia, various websites, social networks and messengers have already been actively blocked since the beginning of the war in 2022. Thus, many social media platforms owned by the company Meta, which is banned as “extremist” in Russia, were blocked, including Instagram and Facebook, which is banned entirely. The social network X (Twitter) was also blocked. And in March 2022, because of a law banning “fake news” websites and social media platforms, the company that owns Tik Tok suspended uploading new videos and broadcasting airings. The law providing for the ban of websites and blogs that allegedly spread “fake news” had been introduced in 2019 by the Kremlin amid a strike of 12,000 truckers in southern Russia in which social media played a central role. 

The new wave of far-reaching restrictions of internet freedom comes amid a significant escalation of NATO’s war against Russia. Last week, the Ukrainian armed forces, backed by NATO, for the first time launched a large-scale attack on Russian territory, the political goal of which is to provoke Russia into a response that could be used as a pretext to fully draw NATO into the conflict. Just prior to this incursion, NATO began delivering F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

US and European imperialism are recklessly escalating the conflict, seeking to subjugate Russia and turn the entire region into a raw material appendage of imperialism.