Russian journalist Ivan Golunov released after campaign against his arrest

Clara Weiss 

On Friday, June 6, the well-known investigative journalist Ivan Golunov was arrested in the center of Moscow and charged with the illegal consumption and distribution of drugs. After several days in confinement, during which he was physically abused, Golunov was released and put under house arrest on Monday. He was released from the house arrest and the charges against him were dropped on Tuesday.

The 36-year-old Golunov, who had earlier worked for the business newspapers Forbes, Vedomosti and Kommersant’, and now writes for the Latvia-based outlet Meduza—all of them close to the liberal opposition—was arrested in broad daylight in the center of Russia’s capital on Friday. Police claimed that they found five packages of the amphetamine mephedrone on him during the arrest, and they found more drugs at his home, including packages of cocaine.

Golunov insists that he is innocent and that the drugs were planted on him to persecute him for political reasons. In his work, Golunov has exposed corruption cases involving the mayor and the vice-mayor of Moscow, as well as numerous other figures close to Putin. His outlet Meduza reported that Golunov had been receiving threats in recent months.

According to Meduza, Golunov was deprived of sleep for two days, and severely beaten during interrogation. On Saturday, he had to be hospitalized with doctors noting, among other things, a concussion and a broken rib.

Despite Golunov’s demands, the police refused for several days to test him for drugs. A drug test on Monday for a court hearing found that Golunov had not consumed any illegal substances. A district court in Moscow released Golunov on Monday and put him under house arrest for two months. Pictures released by the Interior Ministry that allegedly showed drugs at Golunov’s home were later proven to have been taken in other houses during drug raids by the police. The frame-up character of Golunov’s arrest has been so obvious that even the state-sponsored media raised questions about it.

The Moscow ombudsman, the capital’s head of the Interior Ministry and the State Prosecutor General all became involved in the case, and an advisor of Russian President Vladimir Putin asked to receive reports on it.

Several hundred people reportedly protested on Saturday for Golunov’s release; further protests are planned for Wednesday, June 12, which is a national holiday in Russia. On Monday, Kommersant’, Vedomosti and RBC all carried the same front page, entitled “I/We are Ivan Golunov.” A joint editorial declared that Golunov might have been arrested because of his “professional activity” and demanded that the actions of the Interior Ministry be investigated. The issues of the three newspapers sold out within a few hours and are now being auctioned off online. Famous Russian artists, journalists, rappers and comedians joined a video denouncing Golunov’s arrest.

Hashtags like #IamIvanGolunov and #FreeGolunov found significant support on Twitter. According to social media statistics, the name Ivan Golunov was mentioned more often than any other name on social media on Tuesday, including that of President Putin.

[Picture: The front pages of Kommersant’, Vedomosti and RBC on Monday]

Apparently stunned by the blowback and fearing that the opposition to Golunov’s arrest could escalate and trigger a larger movement against the Putin regime, the Interior Ministry decided on Tuesday to have all the charges dropped and announced that Golunov would be released from house arrest. The policemen involved in his case were suspended.

There is little question that the arrest of Golunov was politically motivated and constitutes an assault on free speech and other basic democratic rights. It occurred under conditions of a global war on journalism, which has been spearheaded by the illegal persecution of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange. It struck, not least of all, because of that context, a core in Russian society.

However, the political forces opposing Golunov’s arrest are thoroughly reactionary and do so not in the interest of “free speech,” but for the purposes of advancing the imperialist-led anti-Putin campaign. They include the right-wing, pro-US Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny, who has participated in fascist-led “Russian Marches,” British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and various mouthpieces of US imperialism, including the New York Times.

In an exercise of shameless hypocrisy, the same politicians and media that have fully supported the persecution, torture and illegal detention of Julian Assange, and the censorship of the Internet, now decry the arrest of Golunov as an assault on free speech and media freedom.

In a particularly stark example, British Foreign Secretary Hunt, who had denounced a UN report exposing the systematic torture of Julian Assange as “wrong” and has publicly endorsed Assange’s extradition to the United States, tweeted: “Very concerned by arrest of Russian investigative journalist, Ivan Golunov of @meduzaproject. Journalists must be free to hold power to account without fear of retribution. We are following his case closely. #FreeGolunov #DefendMediaFreedom.”

On Tuesday, the New York Times, which has blacked out almost entirely the US-led persecution of Assange and Chelsea Manning and the protests internationally against their detention, reported extensively on the arrest of Golunov and protest actions against it under the headline “Reporter’s Arrest Sets Off Widespread Protests in Russia.” By Monday, the newspaper had already run another long article on “free speech” in Russia, quoting one figure associated with the liberal opposition after another, to decry the assault on free speech under Putin and praise the opposition’s activities on YouTube.

It is not difficult to understand the reasons for the New York Times’ concern with “free speech” in Russia: it directly coincides with the interests of US imperialism, which for years has been engaged in a massive campaign aimed at pressuring, undermining and ultimately toppling the Putin regime in Russia.

In the case of Golunov, the defense of “free speech” by the US media and Western politicians is facilitated by the fact that he, like many Russian journalists close to the liberal opposition, has focused his investigations on corruption cases involving figures that were close to or politically aligned with the Russian president, including former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who was toppled in a US- and German-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. His journalistic work thus could be easily exploited for the anti-Putin campaign in the Western media and by the pro-US liberal opposition in Russia.

Had Golunov dared expose war crimes of US imperialism or any other major imperialist power, these outlets would have no doubt maintained near-complete silence about his case, as they have done with regard to the persecution of Assange and Manning, and the charges brought against a French journalist who exposed French arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the criminal war in Yemen.

US flight attendants speak out over uniforms that cause illness

Brian Brown & Tom Hall

Body rashes. Burning throat and eyes. Coughing and headaches. These are just some of the medical symptoms American Airlines flight attendants have been dealing with since the rollout of new uniforms for more than 70,000 airline employees in September 2016.

Many Delta Air Lines workers are reporting similar health issues with their work uniforms, which were produced by a different manufacturer.

One of many flight attendants with irritated skin symptoms. Credit: AFA-CWA

“They rolled out three years ago, and when I opened the box, this awful fishy, chemical smell hit me,” one American Airlines flight attendant told the World Socialist Web Site.

“I washed everything several times. My house stunk. I tried to wear it, and it gave me rashes, headaches, chest tightening, dry cough,” she continued. “I figured out it was the uniform. I quit wearing it and was better, but if I was around others wearing the uniform, I got the symptoms. I would get rashes on my chest, neck and arms. I wore the skirt that was lined. My arms would get a rash because they would brush against the skirt. It’s been going on three years.”

After discussing her symptoms with co-workers, she realized that her physical ailments were widespread and that their uniforms were likely the cause. “We just sort of figured it out. That was the only common denominator, and you felt better when you took it off within an hour,” she said. Over 5,000 American Airlines employees have filed complaints that their uniforms have made them ill.

The company is preparing to replace the uniforms with those provided by a different supplier. However, this change will not be completed until 2022. In the meantime, American Airlines is allowing workers who experienced illness to choose alternative clothing until the new line of uniforms is completed sometime in 2022. However, uniforms from the new manufacturer, Lands’ End, have been the source of almost identical complaints from flight attendants at Delta.

American Airlines and the company that supplied the uniforms—Twin Hill, a subsidiary of the company Tailored Brands, which also owns clothing outlets Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank—have stated, “The uniforms are safe and designed with the appropriate levels of chemicals used to sustain the quality of the work uniforms.” American Airlines insists that its uniforms are safe to wear and have spent millions on tests to prove that the uniforms are safe.

American Airlines

Twin Hill has been dealing with lawsuits from other airline industry workers making similar complaints about the safety of their uniforms. Around 10 percent of employees at Alaska Airlines reported adverse reactions when it rolled out Twin Hill uniforms in 2011. Alaska Airlines later dropped Twin Hill as its uniform vendor, but not before flight attendants filed a lawsuit against Twin Hill in 2013. A similar suit by American Airlines flight attendants filed last year is still pending.

Independent studies have found high levels of carcinogenic material in the uniforms’ fabric. However, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) union conducted its own research on the uniforms and found that one piece of the uniform, a collar, was found to have levels of cadmium higher than the acceptable textile industry standard. The APFA’s test also determined the uniforms contain formaldehyde, nickel, and tetrachlorophenol, a corrosive chemical known to cause eye irritation.

A Harvard study from 2017 also found a high correlation between the introduction of Twin Hill uniforms at Alaska Airlines and self-reported symptoms such as rashes and irritated skin, shortness of breath and blurred vision.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, issued a health hazard evaluation of symptomatic reactions believed to be tied to uniforms supplied to the tens of thousands of American Airlines employees.

“We are the new Radium Girls,” Heather Poole, a flight attendant and published author who has detailed working conditions facing flight attendants, told the World Socialist Web Site.This refers to female factory workers in the early 20th century poisoned by the radioactive material in the self-luminous paint they used to paint watch dials. The companies lied to their workforce, claiming the paint was harmless, even as their employees suffered from anemia, necrosis of the jaw and other symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Heather Poole, American Airlines flight attendant. Credit: Heather Poole

“It took them years to get sick, so the company would deny responsibility. But they had tumors on their faces and other horrific injuries. Their bones would disintegrate from the inside out and their jaws would fall off. And the company was able to legally deny it when it was so obvious. It was mostly women workers, who considered it a highly desirable job. It’s the same with us.

“You have to understand that these uniforms are not resale clothing. At Lands’ End, the shirt you wear is not the same as my uniform. That’s part of our problem because the airline, in public statements, compares our uniforms to retail items by the same companies. But they put chemicals like formaldehyde in our uniforms, and a lot of other things we don’t know about, to make it durable.”

Heather took medical leave in August 2018 after she began experience symptoms such as shortness of breath, elevated heart rate and fatigue. “Then I started having anxiety. I almost dreaded going to the airport. Why was I having these feelings? And this young flight attendant said that the heart monitor on her watch saw heart-rate spikes.”

She says that, to her knowledge, not a single worker has successfully obtained workers’ compensation benefits due to adverse reactions to their uniforms. American Airlines uses the infamous claims administration company Sedgwick to handle its workers’ comp cases. The World Socialist Web Site has interviewed Delta flight attendants and Amazon workers who have suffered serious workplace injuries only to be systematically denied care by Sedgwick and even harassed by Sedgwick’s private detectives.

“Sedgwick spins it by claiming that it is just allergies, meaning they don’t have to cover it,” Heather said. “How do you find a doctor? When you do, how does he know what the chemicals are when the company keeps insisting it is safe?

“The union is doing nothing,” she added. “They are just counting numbers. Twin Hill got to them, I think, because they are not helpful at all anymore.”

The widespread health problems reported by airline workers come in the context of a regime of brutal cost-cutting and exploitation by management at major air carriers, the result of years of consolidation and layoffs in the industry. Delta Air Lines recently was exposed attempting to lock a flight crew into their aircraft as it sat at the gate. The crew was approaching the company’s maximum duty hours, the most they can be required to work without a break.

Fearing a delay or cancellation if the crew insisted on taking their break, and without a backup crew available, Delta management instructed the gate agent to keep the door to the jet bridge closed.

“A lot of flight attendants are afraid to speak,” Heather said. “They will just fire you. It’s like an abusive relationship. Because of seniority, you don’t just start over where you left off, you start off at the bottom at less than $20,000 per year. If you speak out, they’ll find a reason to fire you. There are so many loopholes that it’s easy to fire.

“At first, I felt so hopeless. I felt like, ‘they’re just going to get away with it.’ But I decided to publicize it. Every day I write about it and tweet about it. My co-workers hear me and are going to learn about it. Before social media, they could bury this kind of stuff. Now, they can’t make it disappear.

“It’s criminal what they’re doing and they think they can get away with it, and they have for so long. But then it gets to be too big. And then they get caught. They’ve gotten so cocky they can’t cover it up anymore.”

Australia: Worst economic slowdown since global financial crisis

Mike Head 

Among the many lies told throughout the recent Australian election campaign was that the economy was headed for a period of recovering, and then accelerating, growth. This fraud underpinned all the bogus spending promises, as limited as they were, of both the ruling Liberal-National Coalition and the opposition Labor Party.

As the Socialist Equality Party warned during the election, this charade has been quickly shattered. Mounting concerns about the fallout from the worsening trade and economic war launched by the US against China are compounding the impact of falling house prices, plunging construction work and declining real wages.

Gross domestic product (GDP) figures released last week showed that economic growth was just 0.4 percent in the three months ended March. The resulting 1.8 percent annual expansion was the weakest since the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and just half the post-World War II average of 3.5 percent.

For the first time since the 1982 recession, per capita GDP—economic output per person—fell for the third consecutive quarter, confirming that a per capita downturn has already begun.

Financial industry analysts are warning of the possibility of the first outright recession for nearly 30 years. AMP economist Shane Oliver revised up his probability of a recession in 2020 from 15 percent to 25 percent.

The GDP results were far lower than even the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) downgraded forecast of 1.7 percent for the 12 months to June 30, let alone the 2.75 percent growth forecast in the government’s recent budget and its pre-election economic and fiscal outlook.

Because of the slump, rising unemployment and near-zero inflation, the RBA cut official interest rates by 25 points to an all-time low of 1.25 percent last Tuesday. These are uncharted waters, well below the “emergency” 3 percent level set in 2009 amid the global meltdown.

Because of the speed of the slide toward recession, the finance markets are betting on further rate cuts. Trading on rates futures imply a 50-50 chance of another cut to 1 percent next month. A majority of 44 economists polled by Reuters predicted a second cut in August, with some also expecting a third move.

In a speech last Tuesday, RBA Governor Philip Lowe said it was “not unreasonable” to expect a cash rate of 1 percent by the end of the year, with “the main downside risk being the international trade disputes, which have intensified recently.”

Lowe also referred to the “main domestic uncertainty” in his statement the next day announcing the rate cut. He referred to “the outlook for household consumption” being “affected by a protracted period of low-income growth and declining housing prices.”

The GDP figures revealed that household spending climbed only 1.7 percent over the year, barely more than population growth. This reflects nine years of declining income, especially for working class people. Overall, average household disposable income remains lower in real terms than in 2010.

Consumption of “discretionary” items, such as restaurant meals and entertainment, fell in the March quarter, while consumption of essentials, like electricity, health services and rent, continued to climb.

Years of stagnating or falling real wages have sent the average household debt to income ratio to a record high of near 200 percent, creating financial stresses now intensified by falling home prices. Since a six-year property bubble began bursting in 2017, house prices have fallen 14.9 percent in Sydney and 11.1 percent in Melbourne, the two biggest cities.

The downturn in the housing market is also leading to falling construction. In the March quarter, it declined 2.5 percent, and was 3.1 percent lower over the year, a far cry from 10 percent plus annual growth rates achieved as recently as three years ago.

The residential construction slump is set to deepen, with dwelling approvals in April down 24 percent on a year ago.

Recession has been avoided, so far, by increased government infrastructure spending, primarily on business-related projects, and higher prices for iron ore exports, due to global supply disruptions, including a burst dam disaster in Brazil.

Government spending accounted for nearly 80 percent of GDP growth over the past 12 months.

The latest signs of recession followed a shock inflation result of zero during the March quarter. This indicated a rapidly stalling economy and pushed the annual rate down from 1.8 percent to 1.3 percent. Financial commentators expressed fears of a deflationary spiral, in which heavily-indebted consumers delay purchases in the hope of waiting for lower prices.

Adding to the slump are major job cuts, including an estimated 50,000 jobs lost so far in the construction industry.

The former government-owned telecom giant Telstra announced last week it would eliminate the jobs of 10,000 contract workers over the next two years, after having laid off 5,000 contractors last year. Telstra is also axing the jobs of 8,000 direct employees—a quarter of its workforce—by the end of 2022. It is currently cutting 6,000 direct jobs over the next several months.

The Roy Morgan survey company reported that unemployment in May was at 10.3 percent, 0.5 percent higher than the same period last year, with 166,000 fewer people employed than 12 months ago.

This estimate is much higher than the current official Australian Bureau of Statistics rate for April of 5.2 percent. In addition, according to Roy Morgan, 1,223,000 workers (9.2 percent of the workforce) are now under-employed, that is seeking more work.

That made a total of nearly 2.6 million workers either unemployed or underemployed, equal to 19.5 percent of the workforce.

There are indications of worse to come. Job advertisements plummeted in May, recording the largest monthly decline since just after the 2008-9 crisis. According to ANZ Bank’s job ads series, new postings fell by 8.4 percent in May after seasonal adjustments. That left total ads down 14.9 percent over 12 months, the sharpest annual decline since 2013.

The super-rich, however, have enjoyed spectacular increases in wealth during the same year, at the expense of the working class. The 200 individuals or families on the Australian Financial Review Rich List boosted their collective wealth by 21 percent to $341.8 billion, as real wages continued to stagnate.

German Interior Ministry attacks press freedom

Gregor Link 

At the beginning of April, the World Socialist Web Site described a bill federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer submitted to the cabinet for approval, an Intelligence Services “Enabling Act.” This assessment has now been fully confirmed. The harmlessly titled bill “For the Harmonization of the Secret Service Law” hides a comprehensive attack on fundamental democratic rights.

The law “removes the remaining restrictions on the activities of the secret services, which were anchored in the constitution and laws of the Federal Republic after the terror of the Third Reich,” we warned. It undermined basic rights, such as postal and telecommunications secrecy and the inviolability of the home.

Meanwhile, more details and plans have become known. For example, the current bill allows the intelligence agencies to secretly spy on journalists and their editors. The secret services would be permitted to hack the servers, computers and smartphones of publishers, broadcasters and freelance journalists.

This would remove editorial confidentiality, which enables journalists to protect their sources. Reporters Without Borders (ROG) warns that the prohibition on “seeking the identity of a journalistic source through searching editorial offices could be circumvented digitally via an online search.” This would mean “media workers and their sources lose the basis for a trusting cooperation,” said ROG CEO Christian Mihr.

In an online search, the authorities would use “Trojan” programs. These exploit security vulnerabilities, using programs the authorities usually purchase on the black market, which are infiltrated into the target system, and, unnoticed by the user, enable the remote viewing of files, programs and messages on a device. They can also manipulate the device.

According to the bill, this would be possible without those involved having committed a crime. It is enough if it involves a “political process” that is “of concern to the intelligence service.” Judicial approval is not necessary—the domestic intelligence service itself would weigh up whether its interests outweighed the right to editorial secrecy. Only the so-called G-10 parliamentary commission, which meets in secret, would control these decisions.

Reporters Without Borders points out that such online raids would be just the tip of the iceberg. Other measures included in the draft law that allow the secret services to spy on journalistic work include monitoring encrypted communications between media workers and sources, retrieving travel data for research trips and establishing international databases accessible to both intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies.

In a statement, the German Journalists Association (DJV) describes the “secret digital spying on editorial staff, journalists and their sources” as an attack on journalists’ right to refuse to testify and notes, “The secret service would become a further authority, after state attorneys and other authorities that can practically decide themselves on the proportionality of monitoring journalists.”

Press freedom is currently under attack worldwide. Its harshest expression is in the prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. As WSWS has long warned, his persecution and imprisonment have created a precedent for the criminalization of journalism.

Just last week, police raided the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) editorial offices, and the home of a News Corp Australia editor, and confiscated around 10,000 documents, including notes, drafts, minutes of meetings and e-mails. In both cases, the authorities were seeking the origin of information about war crimes committed by Australian military personnel in Afghanistan and the surveillance plans of the secret services.

Under the guise of the new secret service law, the uncovering of state crimes and preparations for dictatorship in Germany is now to be criminalized. Although the grand coalition—comprised of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD)—lost its majority in the European elections, and is further weakened by the crisis of the SPD, it is pushing forward the rearmament of the state apparatus. This is directed against the entire population.

The federal and state interior ministers will discuss plans in Kiel from June 12 to 14, allowing the security authorities to have comprehensive access to all types of electronic devices. Home assistance systems such as Amazon’s “Alexa,” digital voice assistants such as Apple’s “Siri” and Google’s “Assistant,” as well as “smart” televisions, refrigerators, lawn mowers, alarm systems and cars, will be bugged to provide law enforcement with insight into every aspect of daily life. Even gaming platforms will in future be infiltrated by the secret service.

While the intelligence agencies have been able to read normal SMS messages and listen in to landline phones for many years, according to news weekly Der Spiegel, Interior Minister Seehofer (CSU) wants to ensure that even encrypted chats and phone calls can be read and intercepted in future. To this end, messenger services such as WhatsApp and Telegram would be obliged to record the communications of their customers and provide them in unencrypted form to the authorities. Providers who do not comply with this would be banned by the Federal Network Agency for Germany.

Increasingly, state circles are openly calling for the formal abolition of the separation of powers between the police and intelligence services, which has long been ignored in practice. The legal separation of these powers had been enshrined in Germany’s post-war constitution to prevent a resurgence of Hitler’s Secret State Police (Gestapo).

For example, on the 70th anniversary of the Basic Law, as the post-war constitution is called, Torsten Voß, head of the Hamburg state secret service, called for a weakened “modified separation law.” In Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Interior Minister Lorenz Caffier (CDU) demanded a rethinking of the separation rules at a meeting of the East German secret service authorities in Schwerin. These are regarded as “sometimes a huge obstacle” for the machinations of the authorities.

Hamburg state Interior Minister Andy Grote (SPD) was also open to the weakening of the separation rules, stating that it would enable the targeting of Muslim children more efficiently.

The moves to return to a police state and dictatorship in Germany do not spring solely from the brains of a few interior ministers. The unprecedented attacks on the basic democratic rights of the working class are a global phenomenon, in which the ruling classes everywhere are reacting to growing social and political resistance to social inequality and militarism.

Aerospace and defense giants United Technologies and Raytheon announce merger

Kevin Reed 

The aerospace and defense corporations United Technologies (UTC) and Raytheon announced a merger over the weekend that will create a single giant entity worth a reported $100 billion. Following rumors that a deal was in the making, the two companies published a website on Sunday that made the “all-stock merger of equals” plan official.

The new firm—to be called Raytheon Technologies Corporation (RTC) and finalized in the first half of 2020—will include all of Raytheon, a leading defense industry contractor, and the defense and aerospace divisions of UTC. The latter firm had already announced plans last November to divest its Otis elevator and escalator and Carrier heating and cooling divisions. In corporate-speak, UTC said at the time that the decision allowed for “strategic focus and financial flexibility to deliver innovative customer solutions and drive long-term value.”

On the website announcing the merger under the title “Defining the Future: Aerospace and Defense,” the combined annual sales of the two entities are calculated at $77 billion. This is for UTC Pratt & Whitney fighter jet engines ($21B), UTC Collins Aerospace commercial and military aviation systems ($22B), Raytheon intelligence, space and airborne systems ($18B) and Raytheon missile and integrated defense systems ($16B).

The merger press release explains that the combined corporation “will offer a complementary portfolio of platform-agnostic aerospace and defense technologies.” It then gets to the heart of the matter, saying the deal “will offer expanded technology and R&D capabilities to deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions aligned with customer priorities and the national defense strategies of the U.S. and its allies and friends.”

Raytheon Tomahawk crusie missile [Credit: US Navy]

Consolidation in the defense and aerospace industries has been intensifying in recent decades, leaving all but a handful of huge contractors to provide the US military with the weapons it uses to raise entire cities, destroy countries and kill millions of people. According to the New York Times, getting bigger gives these firms “more scale and cost savings that can be poured into research and development, as well as shareholder returns.”

Indeed, a bullet point in the UTC-Raytheon press release highlights the fact that the deal is expected to return $18 to $20 billion in capital to shareowners within the first 36 months of the combined company. An investor selling point for the merger—as well as a likely rationale for US government regulatory agency approval of the deal—is that there is little overlap in capabilities and products between the two firms.

Wall Street and the corporate media are giddy over the creation of a new American military colossus. For the financial elite, the prospect of a single entity that is second to Boeing in aerospace and Lockheed-Martin in defense is too good to be true.

Raytheon traces its history back to the electronics industry of the 1920s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With connections to MIT, the company developed radar systems for the US military during WWII. In the post-war era, the company specialized in missile guidance technologies and consumer products such as refrigerators, air conditioners and microwave ovens.

Beginning in the 1980s, Raytheon made a series of acquisitions that included the Beech Aircraft Corporation, Chrysler and General Motors defense and electronics divisions, Hughes Aircraft Company and Magnavox Electronic Systems. By the year 2000, Raytheon had divested itself of most divisions not related to the defense industry.

Among Raytheon’s most important products is the Tomahawk subsonic cruise missile. Every US military operation and regime change campaign since the Gulf War of 1991—from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Syria—have included the launching of Raytheon-made Tomahawk cruise missiles, mostly from naval ships and submarines.

In April 2017, the US Navy launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airfield, claimed by the Trump administration without proof to be the launching site of a government chemical attack on civilians. One year later, another 66 cruise missiles were fired on a supposed “Syrian chemical weapons facility.” For each one of these missiles, the Pentagon paid Raytheon at least $1.4 million.

The Tomahawk missile can be launched from long distance (800–1500 miles), fly at extremely low altitudes (90 to 150 feet), at subsonic speeds (550 mph) and can follow moving targets. After launch, the missile is propelled by its own engine and is nearly undetectable. It contains a 1,000-pound fragmentary warhead that often includes bomblets designed to cause maximum destruction and human casualties upon impact.

Enormous sums are being poured into further development of the Raytheon Tomahawk cruise missile, including weaponizing any remaining fuel during short range attacks into a “fuel-air explosive” that creates a thermobaric explosion more powerful than the onboard warhead.

United Technologies was founded as United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) in the 1930s and specialized in commercial and military aircraft frames and engines. During WWII, it also entered into business dealings with the US military and signed lucrative wartime contracts.

After the war, its Pratt & Whitney and Sikorsky divisions provided jet engines and helicopters in both the military and commercial markets. UAC also made acquisitions in post-war passenger rail systems for Penn Central Railroad and Amtrak.

UTC’s Pratt & Whitney brand of military jet engines is among the most widely used in the world. With over 7,000 engines utilized by the militaries of 34 countries—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway and other allied nations—UTC is the world’s foremost provider of war-making jet propulsion technology.

Pratt & Whitney’s F135 engine is used in the US Air Force F-22 Raptor (made by Lockheed Martin), a stealth and super-maneuverable “single weapons platform.” The F-22, which costs $150 million apiece, has a glass cockpit and is armed with six missile launchers, four long range and two short range. The four launchers can be replaced with two bomb racks that can carry one 1,000-pound or two 250-pound bombs in each.

The Pratt & Whitney powered F-22 can also carry air-to-ground weapons with guidance systems and it has an internally mounted 20mm rotary cannon that is embedded on the right wing. The fighter jet can drop a guided bomb from 50,000 feet while cruising at Mach 1.5 and hit a moving target from 24 miles away. The F-22 was used in airstrikes against Libyan air defense in March 2011 and also in airstrikes against Syria in September 2014.

The combination of Raytheon and United Technologies demonstrates several features of capitalism in the twenty-first century. Firstly, that the parasitic financial elite is demanding ever-greater monopolistic enterprises to sustain their accumulation of untold billions and trillions of dollars regardless of the destructive purposes of their investments. Secondly, that the greatest accomplishments of science and technology are subordinated to the military-industrial complex required by American imperialism to further its ambition as the barbaric hegemon of world affairs.

When asked about the merger on Monday, President Donald Trump said he was “a little concerned” about the deal and the potential it has to eliminate competition in the defense sector.

During an interview on CNBC, Trump said, “It’s hard to negotiate when you have two companies and sometimes you get one bid. … The United States has to buy things; does that make it less competitive?” He should know, since exclusive bids were a cornerstone of his real estate hustling operations. In any case, it is likely that the Pentagon and Wall Street will have their way regardless of Trump’s phony objections.

Australia: Telstra to destroy 10,000 contract jobs over two years

Oscar Grenfell

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, announced last Tuesday that it will eliminate 10,000 contract positions over the next two years. This follows its unveiling in June last year of a plan to destroy 9,500 permanent jobs by 2022.

The company has claimed that it will hire an additional 1,500 workers, meaning that the net reduction of permanent positions would be 8,000. It is likely, however, that many of the new employees will be based overseas, enabling Telstra to pay poverty-level wages and further slash labour costs.

The mass sacking, involving the rapid scrapping of almost 19,500 jobs, is the largest in Australian corporate history. It is part of an offensive, being enforced by state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal-National Coalition alike, and the corporatised trade unions, against the jobs, wages and conditions of workers across the country.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn signaled that the contract positions would be rapidly eliminated. “Given the uncertainty this creates I have therefore been keen to get most of the changes and most of the reductions behind us as quickly as possible,” he said.

Penn touted an “extensive program of support” that is supposedly in place for the workers who lose their jobs. When it announced its restructure in June 2018, Telstra stated that it would establish a “transition program” to “assist” sacked workers, but funding is a paltry $50 million.

Contractors, moreover, do not have even the limited rights of permanent employees. They often lack basic entitlements, including long-service leave and holiday pay, and will not receive redundancy payments on a par with permanent workers.

In a separate announcement late last month, Telstra signalled that it would destroy 6,000 of the permanent positions to be abolished by the end of June.

The company has already sacked 4,700 workers since June 2018, and will eliminate another 1,300 jobs over the coming weeks. The sackings thus far have reportedly hit office workers and call centre operators, along with some staff in frontline customer service roles.

Penn has also flagged further job cuts over the coming period, in addition to those that have already been announced.

The far-reaching restructure has only been able to proceed as a result of the support of the trade unions, which have suppressed any opposition from workers and sought to ensure an “orderly” retrenchment of jobs.

Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) Deputy National President Brooke Muscat complained that the latest job cuts showed a “lack of strategic focus.” “Instead of being ready for our digital future, they are flailing,” she said.

Other union officials have made similar comments but have no fundamental opposition to the restructure and huge job losses.

In June last year, for instance, Alex Jansen, the New South Wales state secretary of the Communication Workers Union, condemned Telstra for allegedly failing to inform the unions of the sackings before they were publicly announced.

Last year CPSU Deputy National President Rupert Evans promoted the illusion that Telstra could be pressured to provide the “skills and training employees need to shift into new role.”

Since then, the unions have called no strikes or taken any action to oppose the layoffs. Instead they initiated a petition, and have directed workers to make futile appeals to the federal Coalition government and the Labor opposition to come to their aid.

In negotiations for a new enterprise agreement covering some Telstra workers, the Communications Electrical Plumbing Union has barely mentioned the job cuts. Instead they have called for a pitiful 12 percent pay rise over three years and organised a handful of isolated stoppages and token work bans.

The union is helping Telstra to carry out a sweeping overhaul of its entire business, under a plan dubbed “Telstra22.” The company is writing off $500 million worth of back-office equipment and seeking to digitise its customer service and management operations. Telstra is also splitting its retail and infrastructure activities, in an attempt to boost share prices.

The restructure is partly motivated by intensifying competition within the telecommunications sector, resulting from the emergence of digital technologies that undermine existing business models. Telstra and its chief rival, Optus, have been competing for dominance of the new 5G market to be rolled out over coming years. Last December, Telstra announced that it was beginning to trial a new 5G network.

The sackings at Telstra are part of a broader corporate offensive against jobs, including in “white collar” industries. In December 2017, the National Australia Bank announced that it would destroy 6,000 jobs over three years. In April, mining company BHP began moves to eliminate 200 staff from its Perth office.

In every instance, the unions have facilitated the job destruction.

At Telstra, the unions have enforced a continuous offensive against jobs and conditions for over three decades.

In 1991, the unions backed the federal Labor government’s corporatisation of the company, which was then publicly-owned. The move, which was part of a broader pro-business overhaul of the economy by Labor and the unions, set the stage for the telecommunications company to be fully privatised by the Coalition government of John Howard in 2005.

At the same time, the unions have overseen a continuous reduction in jobs at the company. In 2001, the company’s workforce numbered more than 48,000. At the beginning of last year, the figure was around 30,000. With the recently announced layoffs, Telstra’s workforce will have been more than halved within 20 years.

The record makes clear that a struggle in defence of jobs and against the mass sackings can only take place through a rebellion against all of the unions.

New organisations, including independent rank-and-file committees, are required to break the isolation enforced by the unions. Such committees need to turn to other sections of workers in Australia and internationally who face similar attacks and to develop a unified industrial and political campaign to defend all jobs and improve wages and conditions.

Above all, a new political perspective is needed, based on the fight for a workers’ government and socialist policies, including placing Telstra and the telecommunications sector, along with the banks and other major corporations, under public ownership and democratic workers’ control.

Mass protests erupt in Hong Kong

Peter Symonds

A massive demonstration and march through the streets of Hong Kong yesterday against planned changes to its extradition law is a clear sign of a growing political radicalisation of broad layers of the population determined to defend basic democratic rights.

The proposed amendments to the Fugitive Ordinance law would expand the current extradition arrangements to include China. This has provoked widespread concern that the Beijing regime could use the legislation’s provisions to have political opponents and religious dissidents, indeed, anyone regarded as a threat, dispatched on trumped-up charges to the Chinese mainland to be tried and jailed.

According to the organisers, more than a million people took part in yesterday’s protest—almost one in seven of Hong Kong’s total population of 7.4 million. Placards and banners included “No China extradition!” and “Step Down Carrie Lam!” Chief Executive Lam is Hong Kong’s top official and thus responsible for the legislation.

Protesters in Hong Kong (Credit: Twitter: Denise Ho)

The vast crowds included a wide array of student organisations, migrant workers from southern China, political parties, religious groups and non-profit organisations, as well as many thousands of concerned individuals. At least 90 shops shut their doors to enable their employees to take part.

Marchers chanting “Open the street!” surged past police barricades to surround the Hong Kong legislative building where the law is due to be heard again on Wednesday. Five hours after the march began, the Legislative Council complex was still surrounded as organisers foreshadowed further protests. In the early hours of today, riot police used batons and capsicum spray to violently disperse the remaining protesters.

Smaller protests took place in 29 cities around the world, including New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Taipei demanding the legislation be withdrawn. “I’m here today because I fear that I might be extradited to mainland China for crimes that I didn’t commit,” Henry Lee, a Hongkonger currently living in Melbourne, told the South China Morning Post.

Yesterday’s mass demonstration is the latest in a series of protests that have been mounting since the extradition legislation was first mooted in February, despite assurances from Lam that political and religious dissidents were not at risk and the independence of the Hong Kong courts was assured. Fears have grown as the executive has sought to ram the amendments through the Legislative Council by-passing committee scrutiny. Tensions have erupted into physical clashes between legislators over anti-democratic procedures.

The annual vigil in Hong Kong on June 4 to mark the Tiananmen Square massacre drew record numbers, with more than 180,000 people filling all six soccer fields and adjoining areas of the city’s Victoria Park. They came not only to demonstrate their opposition to Beijing’s barbaric military crackdown 30 years ago, but also out of concern over the extradition legislation. Undoubtedly, the protest included those who fled to Hong Kong in 1989 and fear they could be arrested and sent back.

Britain handed back its former colony to China in 1997 on the basis that Hong Kong would be a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a large degree of autonomy under its Basic Law. Beijing’s policy of “One Country, Two Systems” maintained capitalist property relations in Hong Kong, which, in turn, served a critical function for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as it accelerated capitalist restoration on the mainland. Foreign corporations, and indeed Chinese companies, set up headquarters in Hong Kong, where their operations in China were solidly guaranteed by its long-established commercial law.

Despite its claims to abide by Hong Kong autonomy, the CCP regime has repeatedly attempted to encroach on democratic rights in its bid to suppress political opposition on its doorstep. In 2003, half a million people marched in Hong Kong to oppose a National Security Bill that would have effectively extended China’s police state measures to the city. The bill was shelved indefinitely.

In 2014, mass protests erupted over Beijing’s plans to maintain tight control over the choice of Hong Kong’s chief executive, who wields wide powers in the administration of the city. While bourgeois liberal opponents such as Democratic Party founder Martin Lee were prepared to compromise, student groups took to the streets to demand free and open elections, sparking street occupations that lasted for weeks before they petered out and were suppressed by the police. Beijing made no changes to its highly restrictive vetting of candidates for the post of chief executive.

If the current protests against the anti-extradition legislation are to go forward, lessons must be learned from past experiences. Chief among these is the political perspective that needs to be fought for.

The failure of the 2014 Occupy or Umbrella movement was not a result of a lack of determination or courage of its youthful participants. Rather, it stemmed from the fact that its leaders from the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism, while more militant in their tactics and more forthright in their demands, had no political alternative to conservative liberals such as Martin Lee.

Once again, Democratic Party figures such as Lee are prominent in the current protests against the extradition law. They are aligned with sections of Hong Kong’s corporate elite that have opposed the legislation out of concerns that it could undermine the courts and Hong Kong’s attractiveness as a base for investment in China.

Lee and his allies are also promoting the dangerous illusion that the United States can be enlisted to fight for democratic rights in Hong Kong. Last month, Lee led a delegation to Washington, which met with, among others, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as well as the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The Trump administration has not the slightest concern for “human rights” in Hong Kong or anywhere else for that matter, but will seek to exploit the movement as part of its escalating confrontation and war drive against Beijing.

Hong Kong is one of the most socially polarised cities in the world and is becoming more unequal every year. The economy is dominated by a handful of multi-billionaires, while the majority of the population struggle even to put a roof over their heads, with many forced to live in makeshift accommodation such as “cage houses.”

The struggle for democratic rights in Hong Kong must be based on the working class and is bound up with the broader fight against austerity and for basic social rights such as decent jobs and wages. This means a political struggle based on a socialist program against the domination of the present protests by figures like Lee and other defenders of capitalism, who are organically hostile to any mobilisation of the working class.

It also means a rejection of all those who base their opposition to the extradition laws on Hong Kong parochialism and stoke hostility not only to the CCP regime, but to mainland Chinese in general. The fight for democratic rights in Hong Kong will go forward only to the extent that it turns to and champions the struggles of all Chinese workers for their democratic and social rights.

Above all, a revolutionary leadership must be built in the working class based on the historical lessons of the protracted struggle of the Trotskyist movement for socialist internationalism against Stalinism in all its forms, including Maoism, which is responsible for the police state regime in Beijing. This is the perspective for which the International Committee of the Fourth International fights.

Social Democrats return to government in Denmark with xenophobic programme

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen is expected to head the next Danish government and replace Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen from the conservative-liberal Venstre party.

The Social Democrats won only one seat more in Wednesday’s parliamentary elections compared to 2015 and even lost votes, winning 25.9 percent of ballots cast. However, the collapse of the far-right Danish People’s Party, as well as significant gains by the Social Liberals and the pro-Greens Socialist People’s Party give the so-called “red bloc” a majority of 91 in the 179-seat parliament. At 84.5 percent, turnout was slightly lower than four years ago.

The big loser in the election was the Danish People’s Party, which had supplied the Rasmussen government with its majority. The extreme right-wing party dropped from just under 21 to 8.7 percent and only has 16 instead of 37 deputies in the new parliament. However, the Social Democrats have completely adopted the xenophobic programme of the right-wing extremists and want to continue it in government.

In addition to three more radical right-wing parties, which together won 5 percent of the vote and one of which, the New Right, now has four deputies, Venstre has also benefited from the collapse of the People’s Party. It gained 3.9 percent and now has 43 instead of 34 deputies.

In the election four years ago, the parties of Rasmussen’s “blue block” had won 90 seats, the “red block” parties 89 seats, with the extreme right-wing People’s Party joining the government. In November 2016, it withdrew but continued to support the Rasmussen government.

Rasmussen mercilessly intensified the devastation of the welfare state initiated by the previous Social Democratic government, for which Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries have long been known. Spending on pensioners was cut, one in five schools and one in four hospitals were closed. However, the world’s highest taxes on working-class families, who had funded the welfare state, were not lowered.

According to Christian Hallum of Oxfam Denmark, basing himself on figures from the Danish statistics office, inequality in Denmark has risen by 20 percent over the past year. That is more than in most other countries. Six out of seven “reforms” in the past year have increased the income inequality of Danish citizens, Hallum told the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad. The number of children now being raised in poverty has increased by 25 percent as a result.

Immigrants are being made the scapegoats for these anti-social policies. The Minister for Foreigners and Integration, Inger Støjberg (Venstre), imposed one law after another making life increasingly miserable for foreigners and immigrants.

For example, refugees arriving at the border have their jewelry and other valuables taken away; a ban on the burqa has been issued. Children who live in districts officially classified as “ghettos” face being taught compulsory courses in “Danish values.”

Two years ago, Støjberg celebrated the fiftieth measure tightening up immigration law with a cake bearing 50 candles. A ticker on her ministry’s web site shows the number of new restrictions; there are now 114, with the result that hardly any asylum seekers come to Denmark.

The Social Democratic Party under Frederiksen voted in parliament for all 114 of these measures. Even when the government planned to house “criminal asylum seekers” on an uninhabited island late last year, the Social Democrats remained silent.

The refugees are to be deported to the island of Lindholm, which was previously the location of a university laboratory where researchers investigated animal diseases. For this reason, the only ferry to the island bears the name “Virus.” Now, the university must decontaminate the island, because refugees are to be accommodated there from 2021. “You are not wanted in Denmark,” Minister Støjberg wrote on Facebook, “And you will feel that.”

The Social Democrats abstained on the vote on the plan in parliament. Already in 2000, the then Social Democratic Interior Minister Karen Jespersen had planned to intern asylum seekers who had committed a crime on a remote island.

Under the Social Democratic Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, from 2011, Frederiksen was labour and later justice minister. After defeat in the 2015 general election, she took over the party leadership from Thorning-Schmidt and copied the racist policies of the People’s Party.

“Nobody is a bad person just because he is worried about immigration,” Frederiksen said. Like the far-right, she too blames refugees, and not the decisions of big business and politicians, for the dismantling of the welfare state. “Our welfare model is under pressure,” she wrote in a programmatic statement, “as is our high level of equality and our way of life.” She told her biographer that it was “increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is being paid for by the lower classes.”

The Danish Social Democrats want to limit immigration from non-Western states and set up reception centres for asylum seekers outside Denmark.

In the election campaign, Frederiksen had already announced that in the event of an electoral victory, her government would continue to work with the People’s Party on immigration issues. She is seeking to form a social democratic minority government that secures parliamentary majorities on a case-by-case basis. This is not uncommon in Denmark, but still requires firm agreement with other parties.

Frederiksen touts her right-wing extremist path as a model for the whole of Europe and has called on European Social Democrats to do the same.

The rightward shift of Danish Social Democrats once again underscores the fact that there is no limit below which it would not go. The party stands for massive social cuts, militarism, police state and openly racist politics. They are seeking to make the right-wing superfluous by taking their place.

Teachers struggles erupt across Latin America

Andrea Lobo

On Thursday, while teachers and doctors across Honduras were confronting death-squad activity as they continued their month-long strikes and demonstrations against the privatization of education and health care, 75,000 educators were taking to the streets in Santiago, Chile, and hundreds demonstrated in San José, Costa Rica.

Elsewhere in Latin America, tens of thousands of teachers joined a general strike on May 31 against the endless austerity and cuts to real wages by President Mauricio Macri’s administration, and a million workers and students marched across Brazil on May 15 against cuts to public education. Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico have also seen major strikes by teachers earlier this year against attacks on funding and pay.

In every country, teachers face the same scourge—cuts to their real salaries, bonuses and pensions, along with the ruining of their workplaces and lack of didactic materials, privatization drives, the demonization by the corporate media and capitalist politicians, the growing poverty and lack of social services that their students and communities face along with growing repression and attacks against basic democratic rights.

The source of these social attacks is also the same. As the crisis of global capitalism deepens and warnings mount of another imminent crash triggered by the US economic war against China, the financial and corporate ruling elites are intensifying their financial parasitism, which increasingly relies on leeching money from existing social wealth like pensions and the resources assigned to public spending.

In Latin America, a short period of minor increases in social spending under the so-called “Pink Tide” governments—allowed by a surge in commodity prices in turn fueled by China’s growth— has been followed since 2014 by an abrupt lurch back to economic stagnation, attacks against jobs and wages and social austerity.

Whether countries have been ruled by openly right-wing regimes, such as the governments of Macri in Argentina, Sebastián Piñera in Chile, Iván Duque in Colombia, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras, or forces in some fashion associated with the “Pink Tide”, as in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Venezuela and Uruguay, the imposition of the weight of the economic downturn on the working class and public services it relies upon is universal.

At a time in which teachers need to be appealing with every ounce of energy and time to the rest of the working class in each country and to teachers internationally to take a united stand against endless austerity, the trade unions, including those seeing the need to call strikes in order to let off steam, as in Costa Rica, Honduras and Chile, are channeling each of these struggles behind futile negotiations with bourgeois governments that are proven enemies of public education and the working class as a whole.

The response by the ruling class to this resistance led by teachers has been the same everywhere: claims that there is “no money”, along with police state repression and reprisals. Above all, however, they have counted on the trade unions to isolate and betray the strikes. Not one of these struggles has met the demands of teachers and other workers.

In Honduras, education and medical staff in the public sector have carried out strikes, mass demonstrations and roadblocks since late April against two bills aimed at facilitating mass layoffs and the further privatization of these services demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The National Party regime, which was installed in a military coup backed by the Obama administration in 2009, has deployed US-trained special forces accompanied by police and plainclothes agents to shoot live ammunition at demonstrators and kidnap them.

On Monday, the body of Yefrin Guillermo Arias García, a young doctor who was participating in the protests, was found in the western department of Copán. Several videos by bystanders surfaced online this week showing armed groups snatching demonstrators and taking them away in vehicles, recalling the activities of death squads during the US-instigated civil wars in the region during the 1980s and 1990s.

In Chile, for two Thursdays in a row, the infamous Carabineros special forces violently repressed marches in the cities of Santiago and Valparaiso with water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets and stampedes.

Teachers are fed up with conditions in Chilean schools, citing rodent infestations, infrastructural damage, unsanitary bathrooms and a lack of textbooks more than two months after classes started. The ongoing indefinite strike, however, began soon after protests erupted over the elimination of history from the core curricula in high schools, which is widely perceived as a concerted step by the right wing to suppress the history of the murderous Pinochet dictatorship.

After teachers in Costa Rica led a 93-day public-sector strike betrayed by the trade unions last year—the longest strike in the country’s recorded history— the government has become emboldened and has targeted educators.

The partial and intermittent strikes this week called by one of the three main education unions, APSE, was triggered by the outrage among teachers caused by a bill banning strikes in the education sector and the recently approved “Law to Bring Legal Security over Strikes and its Procedures.” The latter bans all strikes against government policies as well as the setting up of picket lines and roadblocks, and establishes an expedited process for ruling the strikes illegal.

One only needs to look at the events in Honduras and Chile to know what the enforcement of such a measure looks like.

The turn to murderous repression and attacks against democratic rights to enforce the austerity dictates of the IMF and Wall Street has the complete backing of US imperialism.

On Wednesday evening, US Chargé d’Affaires Heide Fulton tweeted: “I expressed today my gratitude to the Honduran security forces protecting the US embassy in Honduras for your service,” while tagging the Honduran Police and Military pages.

On the other hand, despite efforts by the press to portray teachers as “selfish” and “lazy”, their leadership role in the fight against social austerity has elicited widespread support among broader layers of the working class.

Parents from La Esperanza, in the western Honduran department of Intibucá, have been occupying the María Teresa Castellanos Kindergarten since last month to protest the privatization bills. Claudia, a mother said to Hoy Mismo, “We will back teachers until the end.”

Similarly, last year’s strike in Costa Rica won the active participation in marches and roadblocks of hundreds of thousands in the first weeks.

The strikes in Latin America are unfolding in the context of a global wave of struggles by educators from the United States to New Zealand, to Poland, to India and North Africa.

The globalization of capitalist production has created similar attacks on educators and the working class as whole in every country, with the strikes of teachers and other workers in each country taking on the character of linked battles in one world struggle.

The decisive question facing teachers and the working class as a whole in Latin America and internationally is that of breaking the stranglehold of the trade unions and forming new fighting and democratic organizations, rank-and-file committees at each workplace and neighborhood to take the conduct of each struggle into the hands of the workers themselves, and uniting them across sectors and borders as part of an international and political movement for power and a socialist alternative to bankrupt capitalist system.