Military massacres protesters in Sudan

Bill Van Auken

Security forces in Sudan launched a bloodbath early Monday morning, using live ammunition to break up a more than five-month-old sit-in outside the country’s defense ministry in Khartoum, where tens of thousands of Sudanese have regularly gathered to demand an end to military rule and the transfer of power to a democratically elected government.

The Sudanese Doctors’ Committee put the confirmed death toll late Monday at over 30 and said that at least 116 people had been wounded. At least one of those who was killed is a child, an eight-year-old cut down by gunfire. The casualty figures are expected to rise dramatically, with many protesters still unaccounted for, and reports of security forces dumping bodies into the Nile River. Similar murderous repression reportedly has also been unleashed against protesters outside of the Sudanese capital.

Victims of Monday’s massacre

Troops from various military and police units descended upon the encampment, led by soldiers wearing the desert camouflage fatigues of the Rapid Support Force (RSF), a brutally repressive paramilitary outfit that has been used by the regime in Khartoum to suppress regional rebellions in Darfur and in the east of the country. The RSF is led by Lt. Gen. Hamdan Dagalo (popularly known as “Hemeti”), the deputy chair of the country’s currently ruling junta, the Transitional Military Council (TMC), and widely viewed as an aspiring dictator.

The troops rushed in using tear gas, stun grenades and live ammunition. Video posted online showed soldiers with whips surrounding and flogging unarmed demonstrators, including elderly men and women.

Photographs were also posted of snipers deployed in high rise buildings overlooking the protest site. They opened fire on anyone attempting to record the events with cellphone cameras.

One protester recounted: “They shot me in my right thigh because I was carrying someone with a bullet wound to his head ... An officer hit me with his gun and I dropped the man I was carrying. He then stepped away and shot him again in the head and told me ‘now you can go bury him.’”

In addition to shooting and beating protesters, the troops burned down tents erected at the sit-in and sealed off the area with machine gun-mounted trucks.

There were also reports of armed security forces besieging local hospitals where the wounded had been taken, firing live ammunition inside the facilities and blocking volunteers and doctors from entering. Video shared by doctors showed security forces beating medical staff at the Royal Care Hospital in Khartoum.

Protesters driven out of the site outside the defense ministry continued to demonstrate and erect barricades in the streets of Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman. In neighborhoods throughout Khartoum, people poured into the streets to protest the junta’s actions, barricading streets with bricks and burning tires and blocking bridges. Similar mobilizations were seen in Omdurman. Firing by security forces continued to be reported in both cities as well as elsewhere in Sudan.

Protesters erect barricades in streets of Khartoum

Among the chants heard were: “If you disperse the sit-in, we will protest in every street” and “You’ll have to kill us all.”

Shortly before the military onslaught against the protesters, the regime cut off power to the area. The internet was also shut down throughout Sudan.

The ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) issued a preposterous statement claiming that the crackdown had targeted only “unruly elements” from a neighborhood adjacent to the protest site, nicknamed “Colombia” and known for a high crime rate.

“What is going on is targeting Colombia adjacent to the sit-in area and not targeting the sit-in. Dangerous groups infiltrated among the protesters in the sit-in area,” a spokesman for the TMC said.

He went on to call for a “return to negotiations” between the junta and opposition groups organized under the umbrella of the Forces for the Declaration of Freedom and Change (FDFC) as “the quickest way to resolve the problem.”

In the face of mass protests, the TMC seized power on April 11 in a preemptive coup against the 30-year ruler of Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir. Its aim has been to preserve the military-dominated regime by ousting its chief.

The assault on the protest had been openly prepared for days after negotiations between the junta and the civilian opposition front broke down over whether a military or a civilian would head a transitional regime during a proposed two-year transitional period in preparation for presidential elections.

Demonstrators remained in the streets, rejecting the protracted transition and demanding an immediate end to the ruling junta.

On Saturday, the ruling TMC issued a statement declaring that the “sit-in has become a threat to the country.”

While Washington issued a pro-forma statement from an undersecretary at the State Department condemning the “coordinated and unlawful violence” in Khartoum and a vague opinion that the Sudanese people “deserve a civilian-led government that works for the people, not an authoritarian military council that works against them,” the reality is that the military crackdown was prepared in the closest collaboration with the principal US allies in the region.

The shift toward iron-fisted repression immediately followed a tour conducted by the head of the TMC, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Dagalo, of the three countries that have been the main backers of the military regime, which are also Washington’s chief allies in the Arab world: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It is clear that Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai—with Washington’s tacit blessing—gave the green light for the bloodbath.

The assault on the sit-in recalls the even bloodier crackdown organized by Egypt’s dictatorial ruler Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo’s Rabaa Square in 2013, killing at least 1,000 people, including women and children, who were protesting the Sisi-led coup that toppled Egypt’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi. Having drowned in blood the Egyptian revolution that overthrew the 30-year US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, el-Sisi has no intention of seeing a similar revolutionary upheaval struggle unfold unhindered in Egypt’s southern neighbor, Sudan.

The Cairo regime issued a statement demanding that “all Sudanese sides commit to calm, self-restraint and return to the negotiating table.”

As for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, their ruling monarchs have pledged $3 billion to prop up Sudan’s ruling junta. The Sudanese military has in return sent troops to support Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s near-genocidal war against Yemen.

During their visit, the UAE’s ruling crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed, pledged to help the Sudanese generals “preserve Sudan’s security and stability.”

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the organizer of last year’s brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi as well as dozens of beheadings of political dissidents, presumably offered similar backing.

After the meeting in Riyadh, Lt. Gen. Dagalo stated that “Sudan stands with the kingdom against all threats and attacks from Iran and the Houthis (Yemen’s anti-Saudi rebels).”

Such allegiance undoubtedly trumps all other considerations in Washington, where the focus of Middle East policy has been the consolidation of an anti-Iranian axis in preparation for a new and far more dangerous US imperialist war of aggression in the region.

At the same time, there is fear within US imperialist circles as well as among the ruling strata throughout the Middle East and North Africa that the popular revolt in Sudan will feed the growing wave of strikes and mass protests in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and throughout the region.

For the masses of Sudanese workers and poor, the way forward lies not through the calls by the bourgeois- and petty-bourgeois-led opposition for a civilian-led transitional government, which would also serve as a façade for the continued rule of Sudan’s small, wealthy elite and its military henchmen.

The only means of defeating the counterrevolutionary conspiracies of Washington, its regional allies and the Sudanese ruling clique lies in an independent struggle led by the working class to take power and seize the country’s wealth as part a broader struggle of the working class throughout the region and internationally to put an end to capitalism and build a socialist society.

Mental health crisis in Australia’s refugee camps

Max Boddy 

Reports have emerged of a wave of suicide attempts by refugees incarcerated by Australia on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island since the May 18 federal election, in which the Liberal-National Coalition was returned to power.

Sudanese refugee Abdul Aziz Adam, back in Manus after recently receiving a human rights prize in Geneva, last Thursday tweeted that at least 31 men had tried to commit suicide since the election.

Another Manus detainee, Iranian-born journalist Behrouz Boochani, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the situation was “out of control.” He reported that numerous detainees also were not eating due to depression, and the poorly-equipped local hospital at Lorengau was over-run. “I have never seen Manus Island like this,” he said. “I have never seen people like this.”

Boochani told Australia’s SBS News that Lorengau hospital staff were frustrated because they were unable to cope with the sudden, large numbers of refugees arriving at the hospital.

So torturous are the conditions confronting the more than 500 asylum seekers still on Manus—some for nearly seven years—that many have inflicted bodily injury to themselves. Photos published on Aziz Adam’s Twitter account show a man being led off to a medical van with deep bloody lacerations along his torso, abdomen and arms.

Manus Island chief of police David Yapu described the situation as “very critical,” saying it is something the Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australian governments needed to look at “because the more they [the refugees] live [here] they develop this stress and depression.”

Yapu later announced the deployment of a heavily-armed paramilitary police unit, notorious for violent abuses, to Manus because of “daily” suicide attempts and rising tensions. “Attempted suicide is usually by weapons, overdose on medicines and hanging,” he said. “It’s become a concern to us.”

The dispatch of the riot squad indicates the readiness of the PNG authorities to once again unleash brutal repression against the refugees. Police violence has been used repeatedly in the past in order to suppress resistance to the barbaric indefinite detention imposed on them by the Australian government, most recently in November 2017. Police killed one detainee and seriously wounded several others in February 2014. What followed was a blatant official whitewash.

Accurate reports on the latest unrest have been limited, due to government censorship. Australia’s Border Force Act, adopted with the backing of the Labor Party, makes it a crime, punishable by two years’ imprisonment, for anyone providing medical or other services to the detainees to publicly disclose any information on the conditions in the detention facilities.

The Liberal-National government has made no direct comment on the situation in the camps, which currently imprison 906 men and women: 547 on Manus and 359 on Nauru.

The medical crisis worsened immediately after the Australian election. Many detainees evidently saw the Coalition’s re-election for another three years as the death knell of any possibility of freedom.

During the election campaign, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to deflect rising working class discontent by blaming immigrants for “congestion” in Australia’s major cities and announcing a cut in the annual immigration quota.

Morrison also stepped up the assault on refugees, vowing to repeal recently passed medical evacuation legislation, which supposedly permits seriously ill detainees requiring medical treatment to be temporarily transferred to Australian hospitals.

Since the legislation came into effect in February, only 40 emergency transfers have taken place. The legislation gives the home affairs minister and the intelligence agencies veto power over the transfers.

Morrison is remembered for his time as immigration minister, during which he launched “Operation Sovereign Borders” in 2013. This military operation set a global precedent for repelling refugees, utilising the Australian navy to seize refugee boats and forcibly turn them around. Because of the operation’s military secrecy, the number of boats that were intercepted or sank at sea is unknown.

In reality, however, the election of a Labor Party-led government would have done nothing to change the horrors faced by the detainees. Labor leader Bill Shorten had vowed that a Labor government would “fully resource” Operation Sovereign Borders.

Moreover, it was the Gillard Labor government, kept in office by the Greens, that re-opened the prison camps in 2012. Prime Minister Julia Gillard specifically declared that refugees would be detained for many years, in order to deter asylum seekers.

During this year’s election campaign, Labor leaders claimed it was never their intention to detain refugees indefinitely. This was a lie. In 2013, Labor’s reinstalled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decreed that no detainee would ever be permitted to enter Australia, effectively consigning them to languish in the camps indefinitely.

In a bid to head off the growing public support for the refugees, Labor had promised to accept an offer by New Zealand to transfer 150 asylum seekers from the camps annually, but this would still have left many more incarcerated for years.

Whether or not Labor would have honoured this arrangement, it would have changed nothing for those who remained imprisoned. In the election, the Socialist Equality Party was the only party unconditionally defending the basic democratic right of all refugees and immigrants to live, study and work in Australia, or anywhere in the world, with full citizenship rights.

New Zealand budget delivers billions for the military, starves public services

Tom Peters

The Labour Party-led government delivered its second budget on Thursday, which it fraudulently promoted as a “wellbeing” budget. Finance Minister Grant Robertson told parliament it would address “New Zealand’s poor mental health outcomes, significant numbers of children living in poverty” and the environmental crisis.

In fact, despite nationwide strikes by teachers and nurses, the budget continues to starve essential services, including healthcare, education and housing, which have been subject to more than a decade of severe austerity measures since the global financial crisis of 2008.

The aim of the Labour-led government, no less than the 2008-2017 National Party government, is to keep taxes low for the rich and corporations, while making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalism and intensifying preparations for war.

The economy faces deepening turmoil internationally, driven primarily by the Trump administration’s economic war against China, New Zealand’s largest trading partner. Robertson warned in a post-budget speech on Friday: “There is a global slowdown and it is impacting on New Zealand… The US-China trade war is showing no sign of actually stopping at this point.”

The New Zealand Herald’s financial commentator Brian Fallow noted that an “air of dark foreboding” surrounded the budget’s discussion of international risks. There was also “the increasing risk that Britain will crash out of the European Union without a deal, or of a shooting war in the Gulf.”

Economic growth for the year to June 2019 is expected to be 2.4 percent, down from a previous Treasury forecast of 2.9 percent. Treasury expects gross domestic product (GDP) to expand by 3 percent next year, but most media commentators have described this as overly optimistic. Any further reduction would mean spending cuts. The government’s self-imposed “budget responsibility rules” mandate that core government spending remain under 30 percent of GDP.

According to an analysis by the Herald, overall spending is about 5.4 percent more than last year’s budget, when inflation and population growth are accounted for.

The most significant funding boost is to the Defence Force, increasing its allocation by an extraordinary 23 percent, from $4.11 billion last year to $5.06 billion in 2019-2020. Much of this will go toward buying four new air force planes. The Labour-led government, with the right-wing nationalist NZ First playing a major role, is upgrading the military in order to fully integrate the country into the US build-up to war against China.

Likewise, the intelligence agencies, the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service, received a funding boost of about 25 percent each. With social unrest and global tensions rising, the aim is to further enhance their ability to spy on the population in New Zealand, the Pacific region and countries such as China.

The opposition National Party, which leaked key details of the budget two days early, hypocritically denounced Labour for having “money for tanks but not for teachers.” In fact, the spending is part of a bipartisan plan, announced in a 2016 Defence White Paper, to spend $20 billion on military upgrades over 15 years. Labour and the Greens backed the plan, while NZ First demanded even more money be spent on war preparations.

An increase of $614 million for the Ministry of Education will barely cover population growth and inflation. It does not address the deep crisis in schools. The day before the budget was announced, 52,000 teachers took part in one of the biggest strikes in New Zealand’s history to demand pay increases of 15 to 16 percent—following an effective decade-long pay freeze—smaller class sizes, more resources and less workload.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, along with much of the media, promoted an extra $1.9 billion in funding for mental health, suicide prevention and addiction treatment programs. The money, however, spread across five years, is completely inadequate given the scale of these social problems. And it is not matched by increased capacity in hospitals.

Funding for the country’s District Health Boards is $300 million below what is needed to maintain current services, according to the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists. “Many hospital services will continue to struggle with increasing demand, and current unmet need for services is unlikely to be addressed,” the association stated.

There is a worsening situation in public hospitals, including a drastic shortage of staff. Tens of thousands are languishing on surgery waiting lists, including elderly people and young children. Last year, 30,000 nurses and healthcare assistants held a nationwide strike demanding improved wages and staff-to-patient ratios. The struggle was eventually shut down by the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, which imposed a sellout deal.

This year, 3,000 junior doctors have conducted five separate strikes. Ambulance paramedics, anaesthetic technicians and midwives have also taken industrial action.

Claims that the budget will reduce poverty, which affects one in four children, are completely hollow. The decision to index unemployment benefit increases to the average wage is expected to lift weekly welfare payments by a miserable $17 by the year 2023. The government’s own Welfare Expert Advisory Group recommended increasing poverty-level benefits by 47 percent, which the government rejected.

There are no measures to properly address the housing crisis. At least 40,000 people, one in 100, are homeless, but the budget only provides funding for just over 1,000 new emergency housing places.

The median weekly rent hit $500 in April for the first time, after a 5.3 percent annual increase. The government’s main response has been the Kiwibuild scheme, which underwrites private developers to build houses and sell them for profit. The scheme has proven to be a debacle. Labour promised it would deliver 100,000 “affordable” houses over 10 years, but so far only 79 have been built, most of them priced around $500,000 or more—well beyond the reach of most families.

Claims that the budget will deliver “environmental wellbeing” are a fraud. A Zero Carbon Bill, mandating carbon neutrality by 2050, is completely meaningless because none of its emissions reduction targets can be enforced. A $229 million budget allocation to “clean up waterways” will largely provide handouts for the agriculture industry, one of the main sources of pollution.

The Ardern government’s second budget sets the stage for increased social inequality and class struggle. Secondary teachers are planning further industrial action, starting next week. Other sections of the working class and young people will follow, coming into ever-more direct conflict with the Labour Party and its pro-business program of austerity and militarism.

Australian billionaires celebrate soaring wealth, while wage case leaves millions in poverty

Mike Head

Just two weeks after a federal election in which the issue of worsening social inequality was almost totally buried, the annual Australian Financial ReviewRich List has glorified the growth of the fortunes of the super-rich.

“The so-called ‘top end of town’ just got richer,” the financial newspaper trumpeted on Friday. Its editorial said the Rich 200 List “celebrates this opportunity society in which people can get ahead, and in doing so create wealth, jobs and more prosperous futures for many others.”

This was published a day after the federal government’s Fair Work Commission ruled that the minimum wage must remain below the poverty line for many working class families. Such are the “prosperous futures.”

According to the Rich List: “The 200 wealthiest individuals or families in Australia now control wealth totaling $341.8 billion.” That is up by 21 percent from 2018’s tally of $282.7 billion. Members of the “top 10” did even better. Some virtually doubled their fortunes in 12 months.

The results illustrate once again the acceleration of social inequality since governments around the world bailed out the financial elite after the 2008 global economic breakdown. The 200 people on the list represent a tiny fraction—0.0008 per cent—of the population.

The newspaper continued: “[T]he 2019 Rich List is one full of records: 91 billionaires, an average wealth of $1.7 billion (up from $1.4 billion), and a cut-off of $472 million—a healthy $85 million higher than last year.”

When the Rich List was launched in 1984, the first full year of the Labor government of Bob Hawke, the 200 richest people had a combined wealth of $6.4 billion. There has been a staggering 53-fold increase in wealth for the top 200 in just 35 years. Building on the vast redistribution of wealth carried out by the Labor government from 1983 to 1996, they have more than doubled their share in three decades.

Despite the myth of Australia being a relatively egalitarian society, it now ranks eighth most unequal, in terms of wealth, among the so-called developed nations.

Most of the bonanza has come from speculative and parasitic activity. Of the 200 on the Rich List, nearly a third—63—are “property moguls.” Their profits have come from soaring house prices, at the expense of homebuyers. As a result, Australian household debt levels are among the highest in the world.

Another 39 on the list made their money through “investment” or “financial services,” reflecting the growing domination of the financial elite. A further 29 “cashed in” through “retail” empires, despite a wave of store closures and job losses. Mining magnates made up 20 places on the list, boosted by a temporary global surge in iron ore prices.

There were 14 technology entrepreneurs listed, led by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founders of Atlassian, an IT software company. The doubling of its Nasdaq-listed shares in recent years meant their combined wealth nearly doubled in 2018, from $10.32 billion to $19.38 billion.

Few industrialists appeared on the list, due to the continuing devastation of basic industry. One exception was Anthony Pratt, described as the “cardboard box king.” For the third year in a row, he took the No. 1 spot with an estimated wealth of $15.57 billion, up from $12.90 billion.

In reality, the exception proved the rule. Nearly half of his box-making and recycling operations are now based in the US. President Donald Trump slashed the corporate tax rate and granted instant write-offs for investment, so Pratt’s overall pre-tax earnings grew 15 percent to $1.26 billion.

Second on the list was iron ore billionaire Gina Rinehart, worth $13.81 billion, followed by Meriton apartment developer Harry Triguboff, who “defied the property slowdown to lift his wealth from $12.77 billion to $13.54 billion.” Hong Kong-based property developer Hui Wing Mau was in fourth spot, on $9.09 billion.

The Financial Review presented the extravagance of the wealthy as a necessary part of “being rich.” Once they “made it to the top, it’s expensive to look the part.” It reported: “Through all of the housing turmoil, they have traded, upgraded and extended their mansions and penthouses, seemingly oblivious to the downturn outside their gates.”

Last September, Atlassian’s Cannon-Brookes bought Fairwater, the biggest private waterfront estate on Sydney Harbour, at Point Piper, for $100 million, breaking all records for an Australian home. The year before, Atlassian’s co-founder Farquhar, bought an adjoining harbour-front residence for what was then a record $71 million.

Those buying mansions since the start of 2018 included Jerry Schwartz (Vaucluse, Sydney for $67 million), Richard Scheinberg (Bellevue Hill, Sydney, $58 million), Owen Kerr (South Yarra, Melbourne, $30 million), Prudence MacLeod (Potts Point, Sydney, $14 million), Tony Tartak (Airlie Beach, Queensland, $14 million) and John Kinghorn (Mosman, Sydney, $10 million).

Mining magnate Clive Palmer, who spent an estimated $60 million on an election advertising campaign for his far-right United Australia Party, which advocates for lower taxes on the wealthy, bought four luxury residences around Queensland for $24 million.

These purchases provide only a limited picture of the obscene levels of inequality. A 2017 report, based on previously unavailable data, showed that the top 1 percent owned about 20 percent of total household wealth, and the richest 10 percent had more than half. The poorest 40 percent owned less than 3 percent. The bottom 20 percent had a negative balance of minus 0.2 percent. That is, they owned nothing, or their personal debts exceeded their assets.

The latest Poverty in Australia report, released last October, found that there were over 3 million people (13.2 percent) living below an austere poverty line of 50 percent of median income. This included This poverty line was just for a single adult living alone, or $909 a week for a couple with two children.

Nevertheless, the Fair Work Commission judges rejected calls to raise the minimum wage to a “living wage.” They said the increase required “to lift these household types above the relative poverty line would run a significant risk of disemployment and of adversely affecting the employment opportunities of low-skilled and young workers.”

Fair Work Australia president, Justice Iain Ross, one of the former high-ranking trade union officials on the tribunal, admitted that many households were below minimum standards for a “healthy living.” Among them were part-time working single parents with children and single-income couples, both with and without children.

The tribunal increased the minimum rate by just 3 percent to $19.49 an hour, or an extra $21.60 a week, not even enough for a daily cup of coffee. In effect, the judges gave a green light to the expansion of super-exploitation, absurdly claiming that low-paid jobs could often act as a “stepping stone” to higher-paid employment.

Fifty-five inmates killed in Brazilian prisons

Gabriel Lemos 

Between last Sunday and Monday, 55 inmates were killed in four prisons in Manaus, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Amazonas. According to the Amazonas government, the murders were caused by a fight between two internal factions of “Família do Norte” (Northern Family), Brazil’s third largest criminal organization, which controls the drug traffic in the northern region of the country.

The inmates were strangled or stabbed to death with sharpened toothbrushes, according to the secretary of Penitentiary Administration of Amazonas, Marcus Vinícius de Almeida. Eleven of those killed were “provisional” inmates, that is, they had not been tried or convicted yet of any crime. Forty percent and 65 percent of the inmates in Brazilian and Amazonas’ prisons, respectively, are in the same situation.

The first response from fascistic president Jair Bolsonaro’s justice minister of the government, the far-right Sergio Moro, who is responsible for Brazil’s public security system, was to transfer the leaderships of the factions responsible for the deaths to federal prisons. According to Moro, federal prisons are “based on those American ‘super-max’—they are maximum security prisons with individual cells, which they cannot escape from, where there is no rebellion, and no communication of the prisoner with the outside.”

Moro has also sent troops of the penitentiary intervention task force to the state of Amazonas. Created in 2017 by the government of President Michel Temer, the penitentiary intervention task force is assigned to “backing state governments in situations of extraordinary crisis in the penitentiary system to control inmates’ riots and solve other problems,” according to a statement released by the justice ministry.

What led to the creation of the task force were the deaths of 126 inmates in the first 15 days of 2017 in riots that occurred in the three Brazilian states, among them Amazonas, where the riots began. Far from being an isolated and unexpected incident, this week’s deaths are part of what has become the norm in the terrible and inhumane Brazilian penitentiary system.

The escalation of this slaughter has been caused by a 300 percent increase in the prison population in the last two decades, especially since the beginning of the “war on drugs” initiated by former Workers Party (PT) president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006.

The situation has been worsened by the Brazilian economic crisis, which, according to the Justice Ministry, led to a 75 percent cut in the prison system’s budget in 2018. Furthermore, with the increase in incarceration rate showing no sign of abating, in both 2015 and 2016, 85 percent of the funds for the building of new prisons had already been slashed.

Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, with more than 700,000 inmates crammed into facilities designed to accommodate only a little more than 400,000. The inhuman conditions of overcrowding and lack of proper sanitation led to the deaths of 6,380 inmates under state custody between 2014 and 2017.

In 2017, 80 prisoners were beheaded in clashes inside penitentiaries in six Brazilian states.

The precarious Brazilian penitentiary situation particularly affects the state of Amazonas, one of the poorest in the country, with the most crowded prisons. The state penitentiary system has 11,390 prisoners in facilities built for 2,554, and in the Anísio Teixeira complex (CAJ), the prison where this week’s massacres began—the same one where the 2017 riots began—there are 929 prisoners in cells meant for 454.

This situation in Amazonas is aggravated by the fact that the CAJ and the other prisons where this week’s massacre took place have been privatized since 2014. This for-profit prison operation is essentially criminal in nature. The company that manages the prisons, Umannizzare Prisional Management, receives from the state government of Amazonas 4.7 thousand reais per month per inmate, almost twice as much as for inmates in the rest of the country. At the same time, in 2015, out of the 250 employees that were supposed to be working in the CAJ, the company had hired only 153. Umannizzare employees have also filed several labor suits against the company, and a prison guard was killed during one of the riots in the prison.

The situation of the Brazilian penitentiary system has become even more explosive with the repressive measures of Bolsonaro government, which are being enthusiastically supported by Workers Party (PT) state governors.

Justice Minister Sérgio Moro, the former judge in charge of the federal attorney’s office linked to the “Operação Lava Jato” (Car Wash Operation) which indicted former PT president, Lula da Silva for corruption, is an advocate of “law and order” measures that tend to strengthen Brazil’s repressive apparatus, even in face of the tragic consequences of such policies over the last two decades.

With utter contempt for workers suffering daily at the hands of the murderous Brazilian security forces, he tweeted a week before the massacre, on May 16: “The solution cannot be impunity for anyone who violates the law, kills, steals private property or diverts public money. It is not possible to be lenient with violent crime, organized crime or corruption. This is the spirit of the anti-crime bill.”

Moro was referring to the bill he sent to the Brazilian Congress in early February which amends several points of the Brazilian penal code. One of the most outrageous measures in Moro’s bill—which has caused wide revulsion to the point of pressuring the Brazilian Congress to threaten to reject it—alters the definition of legitimate self-defense. The change would allow police officers to walk free if they murder suspects as a result of “fear, surprise or violent emotion.” The measure codifies Bolsonaro’s campaign promise of a carte blanche for police murders, as “fear” is invariably—from the United States to Brazil, Mexico and Central America—the universal excuse of fascistic officers who shoot even kneeling suspects in back of the head.

In addition, Moro’s anti-crime bill increases penalties for those who resist a legal order—a clearly intimidatory measure—and reduces the possibility of alternative sentences and the postponing imprisonment while the case is reviewed by an appeals court.

In a BBC report, Moro said, “What has been done in the anti-crime bill is a proposal for a selective hardening. These are measures that enhance investigations, that harden the serving of sentences ... Let’s toughen the regime against the kind of crime that really needs hardening.”

Significantly, those most enthusiastically embracing Moro’s anti-crime bill—which rather than reducing crime will inevitably increase the level of imprisonment in the country—have been the PT’s governors in the northeastern state of Bahia, Rui Costa, and of Ceará, Camilo Santana.

Soon after the announcement of Moro’s bill, Costa said that “I conceptually declare my support [for the bill],” advocating “toughening legislation to combat high rates of violence.” In addition to being an advocate of military police repression in Bahia, Costa is facing a teachers’ strike at state universities that began in early April. In a report of the Bahia News website of May 29, Costa defended the slashing of the striking teachers’ wages, saying that “otherwise it turns into vacation.”

Camilo Santana, the governor of Ceará, announced on Wednesday a draconian austerity program in the state, which freezes both hiring and the wages of the state’s public sector workers. In early 2019, the state of Ceará went through a crime wave that made Santana one of the Bolsonaro government supporters. After hiring a known promoter of inmate torture, Mauro Albuquerque, to head the state’s prison system in early 2019—as a “reward” for his work under another PT governor in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte—he has backed Bolsonaro’s proposal to extend the anti-terrorism law, which was approved by former PT President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, to include actions such as “setting fire to buses” and “damaging public buildings.”

In February, in an interview for Exame magazine, Santana bluntly said that “it is necessary to review the laws of Brazil, which must be tougher,” and that this is why he participated in the announcement of the anti-crime bill in Brasilia, which he viewed as “an important step in the fight against crime.”

These attitudes of the PT state governors have stripped the party of its mask of alleged opposition to the Bolsonaro government. Their pro-Bolsonaro stance also includes their support for the federal government’s reactionary pension “reform”. In the same interview with Exame, Camilo said, “I have always been in favor of the pension reform ... I have a huge pension deficit that is growing like a snowball. I have taken a number of measures over the past four years, but reform is needed at the national level.”

France illegally arming Libyan coastguards to stop refugees from Africa

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier

While hundreds of thousands of refugees are attempting to escape Libya to Europe, the Macron government in France is providing the Libyan coastguard with six ships to catch refugees sailing to Europe and return them to Libya, where they are imprisoned in concentration camps. The policy, which has been condemned by multiple human rights organizations because of the prevalence of torture, rape, slavery and murder in the camps, is both barbaric and illegal.

At a February security conference in Munich, Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly informed Faïez el-Sarraj, the President of the Government of National Unity based in Tripoli, that France had purchased six boats for Libya. The purpose was to stop the flow of migrants attempting to journey across the Mediterranean. According to the press, the ships, built by the company Sillinger, which equips the French special forces, include dedicated supports for the Libyan regime to mount machine guns.

On May 10, the Paris Administrative Court rejected the request of eight human rights organizations—including Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, Cimade, and Migreurop—to suspend the boats’ delivery. They had pointed to European and UN embargoes against the sale of arms to Libya, and the “foreseeable consequences of the delivery of the six boats for the human rights of migrants and refugees intercepted and returned to Libyan soil.”

In the French-language press, a deafening silence reigns over the atrocious conditions in which refugees are being held in Libyan camps built with the financial support of the European powers. By 2017, human rights organizations and CNN had reported torture, sexual abuse and murder in the detention centers.

Last November, La Croix interviewed Vincent Cochetel, special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, on the conditions for refugees detained in Libya.

When asked whether the practicing of slavery in Libya reported in 2017 was disappearing, Cochetel replied: “On the contrary, these practices have increased in number. As it is more difficult to leave Libyan soil, traffickers need to monetize their investment by exploiting even more detainees who are sold or lent by the day. In addition, detention situations have deteriorated.”

He added, “We don’t know much about detention centers controlled by traffickers and militia. But … since the beginning of the year, 14,595 people have been intercepted at sea by the Libyan coastguard and repatriated to Libyan soil. Some of them were finally able to return home with the help of the International Organization for Migration. But it is clear that a large proportion of them have been sold to traffickers to be used for labour on farms or construction sites, or even, for women, for sexual exploitation.”

Cochetel’s testimony underscores that the denunciations of human trafficking by European countries are entirely cynical, because the concentration camps they have built are an essential component of the financial strategy of these networks. According to Cochetel, Libyan law specifies that any irregular foreigner must “pay a fine or hard labour. This legal framework promotes human trafficking and the detention system is part of its business model.”

Libya is currently experiencing a resurgence of civil war between the militias that NATO powers supported during the imperialist war waged in 2011 to destroy the Gaddafi regime. The growth in military conflict, against the backdrop of a struggle for influence between Paris, Rome and other regional powers in the strategic and oil-rich country, only intensifies the suffering of refugees.

Marshal Khalifa Haftar, in conflict with the puppet government in Tripoli, launched an offensive in early April to conquer the capital. According to UN agencies, at least 278 people were killed, 1,332 injured and 35,000 displaced. The International Committee of the Red Cross stated: “The humanitarian situation in and around Tripoli has deteriorated severely in the past three weeks.”

Michael Neuman of MSF, an NGO that still has staff on the ground in Libya, testified to La Croix: “Libyan coastguards are menacing when they intercept migrants at sea, and systematically send them to detention centres. France is complicit in these practices.”

Nevertheless, despite unequivocal evidence, the Paris Administrative Court approved the transfer of the six French ships to Libya to force the refugees to remain in that country: “The decision to make such a free transfer of equipment intended for the Libyan armed forces is not detachable from the conduct of France’s external relations.” The court therefore declared itself incompetent to issue a judgment preventing the transfer of the vessels to the Libyan coastguard.

In other words, French foreign policy is not “detachable” from the torture, rape and murder of thousands of refugees, and a calculated disregard for their basic democratic rights. French policy follows the strategy of Rome, which has also concluded agreements with militia, particularly in Sabratha, to prevent boats from departing for Europe.

This also underlines the fraudulent nature of the official propaganda calling upon workers and youth to vote for pro-EU parties, supposedly to block the rise of neo-fascist organizations. In fact, the imperialist war in Libya has paved the way for the criminalisation of European foreign policy, in line with the xenophobia openly incited by the extreme-right.

This is an unforgettable lesson in the nature of the imperialist war in Libya—as well as the charlatanry of the pro-imperialist petty-bourgeois “left” who applauded NATO’s bombing of Libya as a “humanitarian” operation to liberate the country from Gaddafi.

Postmodernist essayist Bernard Henri-Lévy and the leaders of Olivier Besancenot’s New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) insisted that the country should be bombed, and that rebel Islamist or tribal militias must be armed in order to overthrow the regime. In 2011 Professor Gilbert Achcar of the NPA said that French imperialism should be called upon to protect Libya: “We are in a situation where the population is really in danger and there is no other alternative to protect them.”

These representatives of the wealthy middle classes, whose careers depend on their presence in the official media or on the state funding of their university research, have all adopted the view that imperialism could liberate Libya through a democratic revolution. It was a pack of lies. Now their “democratic revolution” has restored slavery and the most atrocious abuses, partly financed and facilitated by European money and military equipment.

Pakistan government prepares savage austerity following IMF “bailout”

Sampath Perera

Pakistan’s Islamic populist Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) government is preparing to bring down a savage austerity budget next month, after reaching agreement with an International Monetary Fund (IMF) technical team on a $6 billion “bailout” and “structural adjustment” package.

Reports describe the terms of the bailout—which still requires approval from the IMF’s Board of Directors—as the toughest ever accepted by Pakistan, which has received IMF aid 21 times since 1950 and more than a dozen times in the past 30 years.

At a press conference last Saturday, Hafeez Shaikh, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s principal economic adviser, bluntly declared that the upcoming budget would be “an austerity budget.” He claimed the “army, civilian and private institutions are on the same page,” and that all of them will participate in “serious, sustained and structured reforms and difficult decisions.”

The IMF is demanding that Pakistan reduce its annual budget deficit by $5 billion or 0.6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). It is also demanding Islamabad increase tax revenue by 36 percent, or the equivalent of 2.2 percent of GDP. Dodging a question on whether the budget of Pakistan’s nuclear-armed military will be cut, Shaikh affirmed that the “sovereignty [of Pakistan] will be protected by giving every possible sacrifice.”

Defence and debt servicing currently consume more than half of all Pakistan government expenditure. Shaikh’s refusal to countenance any reduction in the defence budget means that the cuts to social and development spending will be even more savage. Reported plans include the elimination of subsidies for electricity, gas and petroleum products.

Shaikh did not elaborate where the increased tax revenue would come from. The tax evasion of Pakistan’s ruling elite, both government-sanctioned and illicit, is notorious—to the point that even the IMF advocates it do more to support the infrastructure needed to make Pakistani capitalism more “competitive.” But the pro-big business PTI, like all its predecessors, will undoubtedly ensure that most of the burden of any tax hikes falls on Pakistan’s impoverished workers and rural toilers.

According to a 2018 World Bank report, 30 percent of Pakistanis are living in poverty, and one in every five Pakistanis is malnourished.

Islamabad and the IMF technical team reached agreement on the proposed bailout against the backdrop of intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. Washington, which over the past 15 years has downgraded its traditional strategic partnership with Pakistan in pursuit of closer ties with its arch-rival India, is seeking to exploit Pakistan’s economic crisis to disrupt Islamabad’s burgeoning economic and military-strategic ties with Beijing.

Last summer, shortly after the PTI government was elected to office, the Trump administration threatened to use its influence in the IMF to block any bailout, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring that the US had no interest in rescuing Chinese creditors.

Since then, Washington has repeatedly raised concerns about Pakistan’s growing economic reliance on China, and in particular the more than $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. Not only would the CPEC dramatically expand Chinese-Pakistani economic ties. It has major strategic implications, as it would link western China to the Pakistani Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, providing a means for Beijing to partially counteract Pentagon plans to blockade China by seizing Indian Ocean and South China “chokepoints,” in the event of a war or war crisis.

The May 12 announcement of the proposed IMF-Pakistan bailout package in no way means Washington has relented in its opposition to the CPEC or in its determination to limit and disrupt ties between Islamabad and Beijing. If the deal is subsequently approved by the IMF, over whose policy the US retains a commanding say, it will only be because Washington calculates it has leveraged Pakistan’s economic crisis to the optimum.

In recent months, Pakistan has sought to curry the Trump administration’s favour by assisting it in launching “peace negotiations” with the Taliban. Washington is also no doubt concerned about the impact of a refusal of all and any IMF assistance to Islamabad. Such action would only push Pakistan further into China’s economic and strategic embrace, and could trigger an economic collapse that would be disruptive to an already fragile world economy.

Full details of the IMF-Pakistan package have yet to be announced. But there is also much to suggest that the IMF has made “transparency” about the financing and other details of the CPEC a condition of its bailout package.

The proposed agreement falls far short of the $12 billion Islamabad originally sought, but will provide a desperately needed injection of funds to its depleted foreign reserves.

Uncertain of its chances of securing IMF assistance and wary of the draconian terms it expected would be attached to any “bailout,” the PTI government secured $9.2 billion in assistance from China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last fall. Nevertheless, the government continued backroom negotiations with the IMF, and repeatedly imposed austerity measures to demonstrate its determination to implement “politically difficult” pro-investor “reforms.”

However, Pakistan’s economic position has continued to deteriorate in recent months. Pakistan’s rupee is among the worst performing currencies in Asia, with its value plunging more than 40 percent since December 2017 against the US dollar. Inflation has risen to 9 percent in recent months.

“Pakistan is facing a challenging economic environment, with lackluster growth, elevated inflation, high indebtedness, and a weak external position,” the IMF statement announcing the bailout agreement said.

Apart from demanding austerity, the IMF is also expected to have insisted on an aggressive drive to privatize state-owned “loss making” enterprises.

Prime Minister Imran Khan, who posed as a vociferous critic of the IMF while in opposition and promised an “Islamic welfare state” as part of his election campaign last year, has restructured his government in recent weeks so as to demonstrate to the IMF that he is ready to impose its diktats on the population.

This has involved elevating to senior positions in his government a number of people who played leading roles in imposing neo-liberal reforms under the hated, US-backed dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf.

Khan picked Shaikh, Musharraf’s minister for privatization, as his chief economic adviser after firing his finance minister, Asad Umar. In addition, to serving in Musharraf’s government, Shaikh oversaw the implementation of a previous round of IMF austerity measures, while serving as finance minister of the Pakistan People’s Party government that came to power after Musharraf’s regime unraveled. Shaikh is popularly reviled for refusing to provide any meaningful relief to the millions of people severely affected by unprecedented floods in 2010.

Khan has named Ijaz Shah, who served as head of the Intelligence Bureau under Musharraf, to run the Interior Ministry. Shah’s appointment is a sharp warning to the workers and toilers that the PTI government is preparing to face down the inevitable eruption of popular opposition to its policies with vicious state-repression.

The new governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Reza Baqir, was himself for 18 years a senior IMF employee, and as such played a leading role in designing and implementing anti-worker “structural adjustment” programs in multiple countries. When the announcement was made that Baqir was becoming the head of Pakistan’s central bank, he was the IMF’s Senior Resident Representative to Egypt, advising President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi on the austerity measures to be implemented by his blood-soaked military dictatorship.

The London based Financial Times responded to the announcement of the IMF package for Pakistan by publishing an editorial that demanded it “enforce strict targets in Pakistan.” After warning against possible backtracking by Islamabad in the face of popular opposition, the mouthpiece of Britain’s financial elite urged the IMF to leverage the bailout against China. “An IMF programme will at least help in that goal, and limit the country’s growing overdependence on China,” declared the Times. It then went on to insist that the IMF require “full transparency on the currently opaque terms of Pakistan’s bilateral loans (from China), and the repayments due after Beijing invested $62 billion in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.”

Russian health care workers protest over wages and staffing

Andrea Peters

Emergency health care workers in the Penza oblast, Russia, several hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow, staged a work-to-rule strike in late May over wages and working conditions. The labor action in the region of 1.3 million people is an expression of the anger mounting across the country over the impact of the government’s ongoing “optimization of health care,” which has led to the shuttering of facilities, pay cuts, and increased burdens on an already overstretched public system.

Medical assistants at Penza’s emergency unit refused to work unless their teams were fully staffed, nurse-anesthetists refused to perform their duties unless accompanied by the appropriate doctor, and drivers refused to operate faulty vehicles. The 138 employees demanded a wage hike and an increase in the number of response teams to the federally mandated minimum such that units can reach the sick within 20 minutes of an emergency call.

Union leaders acted quickly to call off the action, announcing on Friday that they had reached an agreement with local officials to create a joint commission to address the “economic” and “technical” issues raised by the workers. Union representatives said they are “prepared for dialogue.” None of the workers’ demands have been met.

The protest by Penza’s medical workers comes on the heels of similar actions elsewhere. At the end of April, nurses in Kemerovo oblast in Siberia announced a strike over massive cuts to the health care system due to a 1.7 billion ruble (US$26 million) budget shortfall. The governor responded by declaring the action impermissible and a “shame on the honor of the region.”

In early March, health care providers at an emergency unit in Moscow oblast staged a work-to-rule strike over low wages, low staffing, and the burdens created by the closing of medical facilities in neighboring areas. In mid-March, 500 demonstrators protested in Okulovka, a town of 10,000 midway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, over similar issues.

Throughout the country, public doctors are leaving the profession due to abysmally low salaries and impossible working conditions—facilities lack basic medicines and equipment, such that medical personnel cannot treat patients or are forced to rely on primitive techniques. As is common throughout the world, those with money increasingly turn to private practices for care, creating huge inequalities in the quality of medical services people receive and extraordinary burdens on families desperate for treatment.

The worsening state of Russia’s public health care system is bound up with the Putin government’s “optimization” plan, which has taken advantage of the already deplorable state of medical services to mount further attacks. Particularly in the country’s regions where population is declining, the economy is stagnant, and job opportunities are few, the government has set about consolidating medical facilities, axing staff, eliminating clinics, liquidating specialty departments, and vastly increasing the demands on whatever and whoever remains.

All of this has been done in the name of making a more rational use of resources, which is simply a cover for cutting expenditures by ending access to care for millions of people. Like the changes to the health care system carried out under the Obama administration in the United States, the so-called reforms of the Putin government are overwhelmingly regressive.

In an interview with the press outlet IA Regnum on April 3, Yekaterina Negoda, a medical worker in Kaluga, south and slightly west of Moscow, noted that “optimization” is driving up the death rate. According to her, reforms carried out in Kaluga in 2018 caused mortality in the oblast to exceed the birth rate by 13 percent.

The assault on public health care comes alongside the raising of the retirement age, which is now at such a level that a significant portion of the population will die before it ever sees its pension. Widespread protests against the changes to the pension system unfolded throughout 2018, in yet another sign of the increasing unpopularity of the Putin government.

As occurred with the pension protests, right-wing forces in Russia are attempting to take advantage of the outrage within the population over health care. Alexei Navalny, the US-backed liberal opponent of President Putin, is a key figure behind the recently organized Alliance of Doctors, a supposedly independent trade union aimed at leading the demonstrations against the miserable state of the medical system.

Navalny is an ardent supporter of free-market policies and the total subordination of society to the profit interests of big business. While casting himself as a crusader against a corrupt Kremlin, his opposition to the Putin government is rooted in his support for American imperialism and that section of Russia’s oligarchy that wants to exploit the population as a junior partner of Washington. A Navalny government would continue and intensify all of the attacks against the working class in Russia that have unfolded over decades.

To carry out their struggle in defense of public health care, Russia’s medical workers must reject the effort of Navalny and all other political forces to channel social anger behind one or another form of capitalist right-wing politics. The genuine allies of Russia’s working class in its fight to defend public health are the workers around the world—in the United States, Great Britain, Honduras, Bolivia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Po

Following European elections: EU summit haggles over top jobs

Peter Schwarz 

The last polling stations in the European elections had barely closed when haggling broke out among the heads of government over the top jobs in the European Union. They gathered for a summit in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the future leading personnel in the EU.

The meeting concluded without a decision being taken. The conflicting interests could not be reconciled in the short term. To avoid a conflict erupting in public, current EU Council President Donald Tusk was tasked with drafting a list of proposed names ahead of the next EU summit at the end of June.

A total of five top jobs are at stake: the European Commission President, the President of the European Central Bank, the EU Council President, The EU Foreign Policy Representative, and the President of the European Parliament. The first three in particular wield considerable power.

The EU Commission President controls a staff of 32,000 officials and employees, which is closely tied to the 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels who seek to influence the EU. Largely outside of any democratic control, this apparatus exercises substantial influence over all areas of European political and economic life.

The European Central Bank determines EU monetary policy. Unlike the EU Commission, the Central Bank is independent, meaning it is free from any controls or orders from elected committees. Monetary policy is determined within the closed circle of the financial aristocracy, from which the ECB President usually comes.

The EU Council President is responsible for organizing the meetings of the heads of government and the meetings of other departmental ministers, and therefore chiefly responsible for the EU’s main executive and legislative periods, although the latter responsibility is shared with the European Parliament.

To date, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, who always had a majority in parliament, divided the posts up among themselves. Of the current occupants, three are members of the conservative European People’s Party, (Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Council President Tusk and EU Parliament President Antonio Tajani). Although ECB President Mario Dragghi is a non-party figure, he was helped into power in 2011 by the EPP members Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. The EU Foreign Policy Representative, Federica Mogherini, is a social democrat.

The EPP’s dominance of the top officials ensured the significant influence over the EU of Germany, where Angela Merkel of the EPP has held power for 14 years, for most of that time in a coalition with the SPD.

However, social democrats have been forced from power in France and Italy. In the newly-elected European Parliament, the conservatives and social democrats control just 332 of the 751 seats, or 44 percent. In the old parliament, they held 401 seats. To secure a majority, they are now dependent on support from the Liberals or Greens.

The political differences between all of these parties are minimal. They have all shifted sharply to the right over recent years, supporting the EU’s austerity policies, its military rearmament, the construction of a police state apparatus and the enforcement of inhumane refugee policies, and they will continue to do so.

This shift to the right has intensified the national divisions within the EU and given them an increasingly aggressive character. This finds expression in the splintering of the European parliament into several competing factions.

French President Emmanuel Macron has made clear that he will not accept a German Commission President. By contrast, German Chancellor Merkel has insisted on supporting the EPP’s Manfred Weber, who ran as the party’s lead candidate in the election. The Commission President is proposed by the heads of government, but must receive the parliament’s majority support.

In France, the EPP has virtually no representation. Its representative, Les Républicains, won a mere 8 percent of the vote. The Socialist Party did even worse, obtaining just 6.2 percent. Macron’s own party, La République En Marche, came second with 22.4 percent, behind Marine Le Pen’s right-wing extremist Rassemblement National with 23.3 percent. Macron’s party joined the liberal group in the European Parliament, which increased its representation to 105 seats as a result.

The disputes over influence and positions are being driven by more deep-going conflicts that have been developing over a longer period. Macron has repeatedly been met with opposition from Berlin in his attempt to further integrate the EU’s finance policy. Frictions also exist over plans to establish a European army and a European arms industry independent of the United States, which both Berlin and Paris support. Paris was outraged when Germany temporarily halted weapons exports to Saudi Arabia following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And while Macron advocated a hardline stance on Brexit, Merkel indicated her readiness to offer Britain concessions.

With the request for Tusk to propose a list of candidates, these conflicts will now continue to rage behind the scenes, and may be reconciled with a filthy compromise.

The public is being systematically lied to about the real issues that are at stake. For example, the German government justified its support for Weber by referring to the principle of lead candidates, which was introduced at the last European elections but has no legal basis. According to this, only a candidate who stood as the lead candidate for one of the European parties can be elected as Commission President. As a result, so the argument goes, they receive democratic legitimacy.

This argument is evidently absurd. Weber was chosen as the lead candidate by the inner circle of his party, which then won less than a quarter of the vote across Europe. Even in Germany, a survey found that only 32 percent of voters support Weber becoming Commission President, while 59 percent are opposed.

It remains unclear whether Merkel will insist on appointing Weber. There are suggestions that she may concede in order to secure the position of ECB President for current Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, who is seen as an austerity hardliner.

Another possible candidate for Commission President is Margarete Vestager, who is currently commissioner for EU competition affairs. The Danish member of the liberal group would receive Macron’s support and could be backed by the Greens as the first woman to lead the Commission.

Some observers believe that the haggling over the top jobs could drag on for months. However, one thing is clear: Whatever the makeup of the new Commission being worked out behind the scenes, it will continue the right-wing, anti-working class policies enforced by its predecessor.

Fresh Israeli elections after Netanyahu fails to form a government

Jean Shaoul

Late Wednesday night, an ashen-faced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated legislation to dissolve the shortest Knesset (parliament) in Israel’s history and hold fresh elections.

They will take place in three and a half months, the minimum period for an election campaign under law, on September 17. This is only two weeks before Netanyahu’s pre-indictment hearing on a raft of corruption charges on October 2 and 3.

Calling fresh elections is an expression of the crisis of bourgeois rule gripping Israel, provoked by the twin pressures of the decades-long military suppression of the Palestinian people and deepening social inequality within Israel itself, which ranks among the highest in the developed world. Political and social tensions are so great that the traditional mechanisms of bourgeois democracy are breaking down—mirroring the political upheavals taking place throughout world.

Netanyahu has failed to form a governing coalition within the legal deadline with his former far-right nationalist and ultra-Orthodox partners, seven weeks after they and his Likud party collectively won 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset in the April 9 elections.

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the right-wing, secular Yisrael Beytenu (Israel is our Home) that won five seats in the Knesset, refused to join his coalition. He had resigned his post as Defence Minister last year over Netanyahu’s “softness” on Gaza, leaving the government with a majority of one and precipitating an early election.

Lieberman insisted that the new government support a law forcing ultra-Orthodox Israelis to serve in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), a proposal anathema to Netanyahu’s religious party partners. Lieberman refused all attempts to modify the law, saying, “I won’t to be party to a Halachic government,” referring to religious Jewish law.

Lieberman added, “We will go to elections again, and the people will determine whether they want a right-wing government or a Haredi [religious] government.” He claims that there are between 20 and 25 legislators who support a state run on the principles of Jewish law, including stricter laws for transport and store opening hours on the Sabbath and greater control over determining Jewish identity that would affect his own, largely Russian, supporters.

This has sparked a vicious furor, with Likud accusing him of trying to turn the conscription issue into a war over religion.

Netanyahu was equally incapable of reaching an agreement with his other right-wing partners, despite his attempt to buy support by introducing legislation to expand the number of ministers in his cabinet. They all sought to use his weakened position to extract the maximum concessions at the expense of their rivals.

According to a report by Channel 12, Netanyahu even approached the Labour party and offered chairman Avi Gabbay the Finance Ministry and three other portfolios, without success.

The final straw was the refusal of Moshe Kahlon, the finance minister and leader of the Kulanu party, which holds four seats, to support a coalition made up of just 60 Knesset members because it would be almost impossible for the government to function, particularly as the forthcoming budget would require further attacks on workers’ living conditions in the face of a ballooning national debt and fiscal deficit.

The crisis is engulfing Netanyahu at a time when he, his family and large sections of Israel’s political elite are in the grip of several major corruption scandals. His wife Sara has just agreed to a US$15,000 plea bargain to evade criminal prosecution over allegations she misused US$78,000 of state funds. Already weakened by Lieberman’s defection, Netanyahu called the election ahead of schedule in a desperate attempt to outmanoeuvre Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit over his expected indictment for multiple charges of corruption involving allegedly granting regulatory concessions to businessmen in return for lavish gifts or favourable news coverage.

Netanyahu viewed the elections as a means of derailing the attempt to prosecute him, calculating that victory would give him a “personal mandate” to rule. To strengthen his electoral position, he even forged an alliance with the fascist and anti-Arab terrorist Jewish Power, comprised of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane advocated the “transfer” of Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries and a ban on intermarriage between Jews and Arabs. His Kach Party was banned as a terrorist organisation.

Netanyahu pledged before the election that he would not seek an immunity bill to prevent the indictment of a sitting prime minister and legislators, but but afterwards demanded immunity legislation. Now, irrespective of whether Likud—as is expected—wins again in September, it will be too late to push through the immunity and override bills. Furthermore, the likelihood of any of his right-wing partners signing a coalition agreement with someone facing prosecution in what appears to be an open-and-shut case is all but zero. Netanyahu therefore faces the certainty of a challenge for the leadership from within Likud.

Netanyahu began the process of dissolving the Knesset on Monday to ensure that no one else became prime minister. It prevented President Reuven Rivlin from calling on Benny Gantz, the former IDF Chief of Staff who leads the main opposition bloc Blue and White, or his rival within the Likud Party, Gideon Saar, to form a government.

The elections are expected to cost US$131 million, which—according to the Ministry of Finance—includes US$58 million in subsidies for party campaign costs and US$73 million for the election itself, under conditions where the parties themselves are saddled with debts from the last elections.

In whatever way this conflict is resolved, it will produce an intensification of the drive toward war, the assault on living standards and the destruction of democratic rights.

Israeli workers and youth cannot afford to remain passive spectators as the ruling class works out its internal conflicts at the expense of their economic, social and democratic rights. The fight of the working class for its interests—an end to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians and the growing threat of war against its neighbours and Iran, along with a vast redistribution of wealth and social equality—raises the urgent necessity for a mass political movement of Israeli and Palestinian workers, independent of and opposed to both the Israeli and Palestinian political parties, against the capitalist system and for socialism.