It’s Time for a Robot Tax

Nick Licata

Taxing robots sounds unnatural, almost sci-fi like. While I use “robots’ to personalize automation, the reality is that workers, human beings, are being replaced by automation, often in the form of robotic functions in our major industries.

The coronavirus pandemic will push the automation of work into hyperdrive as a huge section of our employment force is laid off. As of May 7, 2020, over 33 million workers have applied for unemployment benefits out of a labor force of 165 million that peaked in February 2020.

The number of unemployed with no benefits will also go higher as federal aid is reduced because many will no longer be eligible. In 2016 there were about 26 million were nonfarm (unincorporated) sole proprietorships, with an estimated three-quarters of them with no employees. Many of these people had not been eligible for unemployment insurance. Because of congress’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) self-employed workers, including independent contractors, can now collect unemployment benefits.

Those benefits will stop long before the pandemic does if the Republicans control either chamber of Congress in 2021. In the push to restart our economy, Republicans are resisting any continuation of funding for these workers. Companies are also facing more employees, particularly those represented by unions, requesting a safe work environment requiring protective measures like safe distancing. Meat packing plants are just the most publicized example of this tension. Robots do not need safe distancing, nor do they organize for a safe work environment.

The pandemic’s long term impact will be an additional new incentive to automate work production and services. Business leaders have recognized the displacement of human labor by robotics for some time. Tesla co-founder and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, “There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better (than a human). These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.” To mitigate this trend other billionaires are promoting a tax on robots.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told online publication Quartz, that if a robot replaces a human worker, there should be a tax on robotics to offset automation’s societal effect. Gates said that replacing human labor with machines can have a positive impact if it frees up people to use their human empathy and understanding to help the many who need help to survive and enjoy life. However, the money to allow them to assist the larger community needs to come “from the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there; some can come directly in some kind of robot tax.”

Billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, said that robotics and artificial intelligence “is going to cause unemployment and we need to prepare for it.” In response to Gates’ robot tax suggestion, Cuban tweeted “There should be a tax and some should be paid in stock of the company.”

Their concerns are backed up by PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s Big Four accounting firms, which released a study in 2017 that estimates 38% of US jobs could be lost to automation by the early 2030s. Employees in the industries related to transportation, manufacturing and retail would be the most likely to lose their jobs to robots. Meanwhile, in response to these concerns, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said“I’m not worried at all,” and added that AI and robotics “isn’t even on their radar screen”.

However, Business Day columnist Kevin Roose, attending the 2019 World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, reported that executives there claimed that if they don’t automate jobs as quickly as possible, their competitors will. A spokesman for Cognizant, a technology services firm, described the conflict that these executives must address. On one hand they “absolutely want to automate as much as they can,” and on the other hand they are “facing a backlash in civic society.”

To address that backlash, businesses argue that “workers whose jobs are eliminated by automation can be “reskilled” to perform other jobs in an organization.” The unfortunate news for those fired is found in a January 2019 report by the World Economic Forum that estimated that only one in four can be profitably reskilled by private-sector programs.

Only a few politicians have shown interest in a robot tax. Former San Francisco Board of Supervisor Jane Kim had created a task force to explore an automation tax because income disparity in her district could be attributable to the use of robots. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also advocated for a robot tax during and after his presidential run. But such no robot tax has been pushed in Congress.

The huge number of unemployed workers has kicked our economy into the basement. Consumer demand, which accounts for 70% of our economy growth, has steeply declined. The result is a calamitous fall in sales and profits for most businesses, forcing them to lay off employees, which further erodes consumer demand. If total wages remain depressed, last year’s demand will not return for the foreseeable future. This will compel businesses to search for ways to reduce their costs. And, that swings the door wide open to automation, the silent killer of human employment.

Candidate Donald Trump ran on a platform of getting jobs back to those that lost them. Think of the coal industry. There were multiple causes for the decline in jobs in coal production, such as the competition from lower-sulfur Wyoming coal, or the production of cheaper natural gas, or world decline in demand for coal. Trump ignored them and emphasized government regulation while the Democrats focused on automation as the cause.

Trump just talked about getting back jobs, although there are now less coal miner jobs than when he got elected. Hillary Clinton’s approach was more honest, and more tone deaf. She bluntly said, the nation was going to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Her answer was a $30 billion plan to secure their health care and pension benefits, offer tax credits and job training, and economic development. Long on details, but no punch line: I’ll get the jobs back.

This is why a robot tax carries a better political message. It’s not the usual promise of the government spending more of your money to help the needy. It’s simple; the robot that replaces every worker or reduces their pay, will be taxed. Automation does provide benefits: faster service and more production, and lower labor costs. But the savings are not shared with the employees. If automation does not produce additional work opportunities at comparable wages, then the consumer market shrinks, while profits increase. The result is wealth is concentrated among the owners and investors, while those working are cut free to seek lower paying jobs.

A robot tax stops that trend by shifting a portion of business profits to the workers by funding a viable social net to protect their living standards and provide training for new jobs at equal or better wages. Now is the time for Congress and candidates this November to raise it as a serious attempt to resurrect our economy and save or create jobs for the millions who are unemployed now and perhaps for years to come.

Stop the $2 Billion Arms Sale to the Philippines

Amee Chew

On April 30, the U.S. State Department announced two pending arms sales to the Philippines totaling nearly $2 billion. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Bell Helicopter, and General Electric are the main weapons manufacturers contracted to profit from the deal.

Following this announcement, a 30-day window for Congress to review and voice opposition to the sale commenced. It is imperative that we stop this avalanche of military aid for Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s regime.

Duterte’s human rights record is atrocious. If the arms sale goes through, it will escalate a worsening crackdown on human rights defenders and on dissent — while fomenting an ongoing bloodbath. Duterte is infamous for launching a “War on Drugs” that, since 2016, has claimed the lives of as many as 27,000 souls, mostly low-income people summarily executed by police and vigilantes.

In Duterte’s first three years of office, nearly 300 journalists, human rights lawyers, environmentalists, peasant leaders, trade unionists, and human rights defenders were assassinated. The Philippines has been ranked the deadliest country for environmentalists in the world, after Brazil. Many of these slayings are linked to military personnel.

Now, Duterte is using COVID-19 as a pretext for further militarization and repression, despite the dire consequences for public health.

Around the world, and particularly for the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the contradiction between military capacity and human well-being. This arms deal is yet another example of the U.S. government’s gross misallocation of resources towards war profiteering and militarization, rather than health services and human needs. The Pentagon’s bloated budget of trillions has done nothing to protect us from a public health catastrophe, and has failed to create true security.

Only a complete realignment of federal priorities away from militarization, here and abroad, and towards strengthening infrastructures of care will.

Duterte’s Militarized Response to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a pretext for Duterte to impose military checkpoints, mass arrests, and de facto martial law throughout the Philippines.

As of late April, over 120,000 people have been cited for quarantine violations, and over 30,000 arrested — despite the severe overcrowding in Philippine jails, already exacerbated by the drug war. “Stay at home” orders are ruthlessly enforced by the police, even as in many urban poor communities, people live hand-to-mouth.

Without daily earnings, millions are desperate for food. By late April, a majority of indigent households had still not received any government relief. A thousand residents in Pasay were forced into homelessness when their informal settlement was destroyed in the name of slum clearance at the beginning of the lockdown, even as the homeless are arrested and thrown in jail.

Duterte has placed the military in charge of COVID-19 response. On April 1, he ordered troops to “shoot dead” quarantine violators, causing human rights abuses to immediately surge. The next day, a farmer, Junie Dugog Piñar, was shot and killed by police for violating the COVID-19 lockdown in Agusan del Norte, Mindanao.

Police have locked curfew violators in dog cages, used torture and sexual humiliation as punishment against LGBTQ people, and beaten and arrested urban poor people protesting for food. Beatings and killings to enforce “enhanced community quarantine” continue. Meanwhile, a teacher was arrested simply for posting “provoking” comments on social media that decried the lack of government relief, while a filmmaker was detained two nights without a warrant for a sarcastic post on COVID-19.

Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Resistance

In the face of widespread hunger, inadequate health care, and lethal repression, vibrant grassroots social movement organizations have created mutual aid and relief initiatives providing food, masks, and medical supplies to the poor.

Cure Covid, a network of volunteers across myriad organizations in the greater Metro Manila region, has organized relief packs and community kitchens for thousands, while engaging in community organizing to strengthen mutual aid. Movement organizers are calling for mass testing, basic services, and an end to the militarized COVID-19 response.

KADAMAY is a mass-based organization of 200,000 urban poor people across the Philippines that has been at the forefront of resisting Duterte’s drug war and reclaiming vacant housing for homeless people. In 2017, KADAMAY led 12,000 homeless people in occupying 6,000 vacant homes that had been set aside for the police and military in Pandi, Bulacan. Despite repression and intimidation, #OccupyBulacan continues to this day.

With COVID-19, KADAMAY has led mutual aid efforts and #ProtestFromHome pot-banging actions, with video disseminated on social media, to demand relief and health services, not militarization. In immediate reprisal for voicing dissent after one pot-banging, the national spokesperson of KADAMAY, Mimi Doringo, was threatened with arrest. In Bulacan, a community leader was taken to a military encampment and told to cease all political activity and “surrender” to the government or he would get no relief aid.

Efforts at mutual aid are being criminalized and targeted for repression. Since late April, police have carried out mass arrests of relief volunteers, alongside street vendors and those seeking food. On April 19, seven relief volunteers from Sagip Kanayunan were detained while on their way to distribute food in Bulacan, and later charged with inciting “sedition.” On April 24, 50 urban poor residents in Quezon City, including a relief volunteer, were detained for not carrying quarantine passes or wearing face masks. On May 1, ten volunteers conducting relief with the women’s organization GABRIELA were arrested while conducting a community feeding in Marikina City.

This targeting is no accident. Since 2018, an executive order by Duterte has authorized a “whole-of-nation approach” to counter-insurgency, through a broad array of government agencies, resulting in increased repression against community organizers and human rights defenders generally.

The crackdowns against mutual aid and survival have prompted campaigns on social media to “stop criminalizing care and community.” Save San Roque, a network supporting the resistance of urban poor residents against demolition, has started a petition to immediately release relief volunteers and all low-level quarantine violators. Human rights organizations are also petitioning for the release of political prisoners, many of them low-income farmers, trade unionists, and human rights defenders facing trumped up charges, including the elderly and ill.

As a direct result of the government response focused on militarization, rather than adequate health care, food, and services, the Philippines has among the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Southeast Asia, and the pandemic is quickly worsening.

Colonial Roots

Today’s U.S.-Philippine military alliance has its roots in the U.S. colonization and occupation of the Philippines over a hundred years ago.

Despite granting the Philippines independence in 1946, the U.S. has used unequal trade agreements and its military presence to maintain the Philippines’ neocolonial status ever since. For decades, propping up oligarchic rulers and preventing land reform guaranteed the U.S. cheap agricultural exports. The U.S. military assisted with countering a string of continual rebellions.

U.S. military aid still continues to facilitate corporate extraction of Philippine natural resources, real estate monopoly, and repression of indigenous and peasant struggles for land rights — particularly in Mindanao, a hotbed of communist, indigenous, and Muslim separatist resistance and the recent center of military operations.

The Philippine armed forces are focused on domestic counter-insurgency, overwhelmingly directing violence against poor and marginalized people within the country’s own borders. Philippine military and police operations are closely intertwined. In fact, historically the Philippine police developed out of counter-insurgency operations during U.S. colonial rule.

The U.S. military itself maintains a troop presence in the Philippines through its Operation Pacific Eagle and other exercises.

In the name of “counterterrorism,” U.S. military aid is helping Duterte wage war on Philippine soil and repress civilian dissent. Since 2017, Duterte has imposed martial law on Mindanao, where he has repeatedly dropped bombs. Military attacks have displaced over 450,000 civilians.

Carried out with U.S. backing and even joint activities, Duterte’s military operations are shoring up the corporate land-grabbing of indigenous lands and massacres of farmers organizing for their land rights. Paramilitaries backed by the armed forces are terrorizing indigenous communities, targeting schools and teachers.

In February, prior to the announced arms deal, Duterte nominally rescinded the U.S.-Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which allows U.S. troops to be stationed in the Philippines for “joint exercises.” On the surface, this was in response to the U.S. denying a visa to former drug war police chief Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa. However, Duterte’s revocation of the VFA is not immediately effective, and only begins a 6-month process of renegotiation.

The proposed arms sale signals that Trump intends to strengthen his military backing for Duterte. The Pentagon seeks to maintain a close military “partnership.”

End U.S. Military Aid 

A growing international movement, in solidarity with indigenous and Filipino communities, is calling for an end to military aid to the Philippines. U.S. direct military aid to Duterte’s regime totaled over $193.5 million in 2018, not counting pre-allocated amounts and donated weapons of unreported worth. Military aid also consists of grants to purchase arms, usually from U.S. contractors.

Relatedly, the U.S. government regulates the flow of private arms sales abroad — such as the current proposed sale. Sales brokered by the U.S. government are often a public subsidy to private contractors, using our U.S. tax dollars to complete the purchase. Congress must use its power to cut the pending sale off.

The latest proposed $2 billion arms sale includes 12 attack helicopters, hundreds of missiles and warheads, guidance and detection systems, machine guns, and over 80,000 rounds of ammunition. The State Department says these, too, would be used for “counterterrorism” — i.e., repression in the Philippines. Due to lack of transparency and Duterte’s deliberate efforts to obscure aid flows, U.S. military aid may well end up providing ammunition to the armed forces waging Duterte’s drug war, to vigilantes, or to paramilitaries, all without public scrutiny.

Duterte is using the pandemic as a pretext to continue crushing political opposition. He has now assumed special emergency powers. Even prior to the pandemic, in October 2019, police and military raided the offices of GABRIELA, opposition party Bayan Muna, and the National Federation of Sugar Workers, arresting over 57 people in Bacolod City and Metro Manila in one sweep.

Tragically, repression is quickly escalating.

On April 30, after weeks of police intimidation for conducting feeding programs, Jory Porquia, a founding member of Bayan Muna, was assassinated inside his home in Iloilo. Over 76 protesters and relief workers were illegally arrested on May Day, including four youth feeding program volunteers in Quezon City, four residents who posted online photos of their “protesting from home” in Valenzuela, two unionists holding placards in Rizal, and 42 people conducting a vigil for slain human rights defender Porquia in Iloilo. Sixteen workers in a Coca-Cola factory in Laguna were abducted and forced by the military to “surrender” posing as armed insurgents.

The U.S.’s war machine profits its private contractors at our expense. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Boeing relied on the Pentagon for a third of its income. In April, Boeing received a bailout of $882 million to restart a paused Air Force contract — for refueling aircraft that are in fact, defective. But for-profit weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers should have no place steering our foreign policy.

Congress has the power to dissent but must act swiftly. Rep. Ilhan Omar has introduced a bill to stop arming human rights abusers such as Duterte. This month, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, Communications Workers of America, and others, will launch a bill specifically to end military aid to the Philippines. In the meantime, we must urge Congress to stop the proposed arms sales to the Philippines: please sign this petition to do so.

The COVID-19 pandemic is baring the need for global solidarity against militarization and austerity. In taking up the fight against the deep footprint of U.S. imperialism, here and abroad, our movements will make each other stronger.

Learning During The Pandemic

Shreya Urvashi

India has started Lockdown 4.0 with dismal numbers. We are already over 1 lakh cases, and as much as NITI Aayog would predict otherwise, the slump in cases is yet to come. A large part of the country’s 1.3 billion population has been at home since over 50 days now; I say a large part because it excludes the homeless and the migrant workers. While several NGOs and citizens have been working untiringly at their individual capacities to help them out, no one can provide a rationale for the inhuman treatment meted out not only to the workers but entire communities. Images of lakhs of families trudging across hundreds of kilometres, some even losing their lives in the attempt, will be seared in our conscience for a long time.

The luckier population, on the other hand, has been working from home. Along with the adults, children as young as those in pre-school have started classes online- because even if there is a pandemic, academic productivity cannot be stopped. The inefficacy of this needs to be pointed out. Classes continue to focus on the development of logic and technical skills, vehemently ignoring the lessons from the pandemic- to develop feelings of empathy and solidarity, and to attempt to derive the meaning of our existence.

With the vaccine still not out and the globe in an indefinite crisis, the fact is that online classes for the foreseeable future are here to stay. As soon as the lockdown was announced, there was an almost overnight shift to online classes by many schools, colleges, and universities. Though some entities (mostly private-run) were able to shift comparatively smoothly, it becomes crucial to ponder about the broader ramifications of the introduction of virtual learning on our education system.

We are not only a huge population; we are also a highly diverse population. Standardizations have consistently been problematic, be it in education or in policy. Thus, deciding what is better always comes at a cost. What is non-negotiable, however, is the concomitant parochialization of those decisions.

Some advantages of virtual classes are apparent. Sitting at home reduces the stress of waking up every morning and traveling, sometimes up to 25-30 kilometers, to reach the institution. It also gives more time for other work. The mental health of teachers and students have improved due to this. But the said process is classist, as well as exclusionary. It does not consider those students for whom their educational institutions are a welcome break from the repressive environment at home. Moreover, what about the children who get left out in the process? What about the children who do not have laptops or smartphones? What about the children who are currently walking back home to their villages with their families? How long will they continue to be absent from classes? And if and when they do manage to come back, how will they be accommodated? Will this just further consolidate the ideas of merit and legitimate knowledge?

In light of these questions, I try to analyse the challenges and problems associated with the prospect of virtual learning. First is the availability of technology and adequate infrastructure. The foremost in this regard can be considered the availability of a computer or laptop, fast internet connectivity, and the guided help of those familiar with its usage and functions. If either the practitioner or the learner is not comfortable with the virtual set-up, it can lead to a significant decline in the quality of knowledge dissemination. As a preliminary study would show, access to computers/laptops and fast internet connectivity is still a challenge for most Indians.

Second is a corollary. While the emphasis becomes inequitably on understanding the different software and its features, “learning” often gets ignored. This has shown lacunae in support and financial issues on the one hand, and in the pedagogical and methodological aspects on the other. Elements such as an exciting learning culture, adequate pedagogical structures, and the creation and adoption of engaging and stimulating teaching styles and materials are essential for a conducive learning environment.

Further, most students in public schools and universities in India, especially in rural and semi-urban parts or from specifically disadvantaged groups, do not have access to either the technology nor the pedagogy and materials associated with the prospect of virtual learning.

The challenges that the pandemic has brought for the education sector in our country are manifold. There was already growing discontent with the quality and autonomy of education. The physical and technological infrastructure was already lagging much behind the global standards India aspires to reach. The shift to virtual learning in this scenario has further complicated the problems. We need to formulate a strategy to overcome our already existing obstacles of quality and academic productivity deterioration, along with shifting a lot of material online.

At this stage, it is vital to keep in mind that virtual learning is ultimately just an aid to the teaching-learning process rather than its essence.

Australian universities exploit NTEU deal to slash facilities, jobs and conditions

Mike Head

University managements across Australia are escalating their cuts to campuses, jobs, pay and conditions in response to last week’s national COVID-19 “heads of agreement” struck with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).

Employers have welcomed the opportunity to slash wages by up to 15 percent, and still impose forced redundancies and eliminate thousands of casualised jobs via the deal. At the same time, a number of the 39 public universities have decided to continue imposing their attacks outside the NTEU’s national framework.

Either way, the employers are exploiting the NTEU’s unprecedented offer of pay cuts to step up the drive to inflict the burden of the worsening global pandemic on the backs of university workers and students. They are taking full advantage of the union’s role in suppressing the outrage and resistance of university workers while the NTEU pursued its backroom talks for six weeks on the sacrifices it volunteered to impose on its members.

On top of destroying the livelihoods of thousands of casual and contract teachers and professional staff, universities are unveiling campus closures and further job losses. Central Queensland University this week said it was shutting down three campuses at the Sunshine Coast, Yeppoon and Biloela and cutting its workforce by nearly 200 through “voluntary separations,” while warning of further unspecified cost reductions.

Some managements, including at the largest universities, are confident they can individually carry out whatever attacks they want, with the union’s help, via existing NTEU enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) or variations to them.

In its statement, the University of Melbourne said it shared many of the NTEU’s framework “principles” but did not need to resort to the measures permitted by the national deal, “such as stand downs, forced leave, forced reduction of hours, large pay cuts of up to 15 percent and deferral of incremental progression.”

Instead, “we remain committed to working collaboratively with the Union, and our workforce, to explore measures to fend off the real and present risk to jobs, and to the viability and success of the University.”

Likewise, University of Newcastle vice chancellor Alex Zelinsky told staff last Friday the management would not participate in the national deal but would instead liaise with staff, including union representatives, to determine the “most appropriate measures” for the university.

Other universities that have indicated they may not sign up to the national deal with the NTEU include Sydney, Macquarie, Murdoch, Central Queensland, Sunshine Coast, Flinders, Edith Cowan, University of Technology Sydney and the Australian Catholic University. They will seek their own deals with NTEU branches, utilising or modifying EBAs that have already allowed them to axe jobs and conditions.

By April, one-third of casuals at the University of NSW had reported they had lost work. This reportedly cost them an average $626 a week, and 42 percent were working unpaid hours. Correspondingly, the NTEU has permitted full-time staff to be pressured into working overtime so that the casuals can be laid off.

This ongoing collaboration by the NTEU with the employers further exposes the fraud of the “day of action” proposed for tomorrow by the NTEU and the pseudo-left groups, which are trying to prop it up in the face of the anger of university workers over its sellout.

Protests, such as car cavalcades to government offices, are planned on the basis of the slogan, directed to federal Education Minister Dan Tehan: “You have one job Dan! Save higher ed.” NTEU members are being urged to send “selfies” (self-portraits with placards) and messages carrying that slogan to the union, for it to relay to Tehan.

The reality is that Tehan is doing exactly the job he has been assigned by the Liberal-National government and the political establishment as a whole: That is, to use the pandemic to accelerate years of funding cuts, initiated by the Labor-Greens government of 2010 to 2013, and accompanying measures to transform universities into business corporations serving the interests of the corporate elite.

While pleading with Tehan and the government for a “rescue package,” the NTEU is underscoring its ongoing agreement with the underlying corporate agenda of completely turning tertiary education into a lucrative revenue-generating industry, while servicing the narrow job training requirements of big business.

That is the true meaning of another NTEU “day of action” slogan: “We’re not going to let our sector hit the wall without a fight.” This “sector” is Australian capitalism’s third highest export earner, bringing in more than $30 billion a year, much of it from full fee-paying international students.

As for “without a fight,” that corresponds to the pleas of the pseudo-left groups, such as Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, which have implored the NTEU leadership to at least appear to put up a fight against the government and the cuts in order to contain the outrage of university workers and students.

Aware of the widespread hostility to the NTEU’s agreement, these groups have felt compelled to advocate a “no” vote when the union puts the deal to a proposed national plebiscite of its members. At the same time, they are promoting the “day of action” and advising the very same union that has orchestrated this attack to put on a show of resistance in order to try to keep a political and organisational grip over university workers.

Socialist Alliance’s Green Left Weekly this week anxiously fretted that the NTEU had “not led with a general fight for jobs across the sector, opting to focus on collaboration through negotiation.” It said if the union conducted “a social and industrial fight,” that would provide the NTEU with “opportunities for organising, mobilising, building student and community support and securing a better outcome.”

In the same vein, Socialist Alternative’s Red Flag insisted that, despite the NTEU’s support for wage-cutting, university workers had to rally behind the union, because: “If you’re on the side of workers, then you support unions.” It suggested “modest” protest actions to “throw some sand in the gears of the processes that are reducing our wages and conditions” and to “increase the unions’ ability to engage in sustained strike action.”

This is a cynical cover for the unions. For the past three decades, ever since the unions enforced the prices and incomes Accords and “enterprise bargaining” assault of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996, the unions have systematically suppressed strikes to their lowest level for a century.

In response to the global capitalist breakdown triggered by the pandemic, the unions are now taking their class collaboration to its logical conclusion, summed up by Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus, who vowed to give the employers “everything they want.”

Irreconcilably opposed to these anti-working class apparatuses and their pseudo-left satellites, the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) and the Socialist Equality Party advocate the formation of Action Committees of workers and students at universities, independent of the pro-capitalist trade unions, to oppose these attacks.

We call for a unified struggle against the assault on jobs, pay and conditions and for the basic social right to free, first-class education for all students, including international students, and full-time jobs for all university workers.

This means a struggle to completely reorganise society along socialist lines, including the allocation of billions of dollars to public education, instead of big business and the wealthy elite being bailed out by huge “stimulus packages.”

Sunday Times Rich Listers receive billions in UK government handouts

Simon Whelan

The publication of the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List was a more muted affair than usual. Amidst the pandemic lockdown and tens of thousands of deaths in the UK, there was little of the usual glorification of excessive wealth.

Instead, the Sunday Times felt it appropriate to issue an editorial reminding the ruling elite that the vast majority--who live a million miles removed from those on the list--know that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

For the last three decades, it read, the purpose of the Rich List has “been to record that the rich have been getting richer.” This year, for the first time since the 2008/2009 global financial crash, the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in the UK fell. While claiming that the vast majority “have made it onto the list through their own endeavours,” it notes, “Despite this, there will be few tears shed over the news that Britain’s super-rich have seen £54 billion wiped off their combined wealth in the past two months. At a time when the economy is diving into its deepest recession in three centuries, the fact that the coffers of the rich are not overflowing as much as they were will elicit little sympathy. It comes at a time when 7.5 million people are on the government’s job furlough scheme and are hugely uncertain about what the future will bring. There have also been a record 2.5 million claims for universal credit.”

The robbery of the public purse by the oligarchy via Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £350 billion bailout scheme has not gone unnoticed, the Times warns. “This is even more the case when, as we report today, 63 of the UK’s richest people—including 20 billionaires—have turned to the government for help during the COVID-19 crisis by putting workers on the furlough scheme under which the Treasury pays 80 percent of their wages.”

Robert Watts, the compiler of the list, wrote, “Some might feel that examining the finances...of Britain’s wealthiest people is obtuse—insensitive, even—at a time when tens of thousands of people are losing their lives and millions of us are worrying about our livelihoods, which directly or indirectly often depend on the businesses these people run.”

But even while making these points, the Sunday Times can’t help but crassly declare, “COVID-19 has claimed thousands of lives, locked the British public indoors for two months and taken an unprecedented chunk out of the economy, so it should come as no surprise that it has taken a swipe at the Sunday Times Rich List too. Had the list been compiled in February, the combined wealth of the richest 1,000 would have risen for the 11th straight year to just under £800bn.”

The newspaper only records known assets of its listed 1,000, and while there may have been a fall in declared wealth, it is not by much. Overall wealth is down 3.7 percent to £742.6 billion, while the minimum wealth needed to enter this year’s list has stayed at the 2019 level of £120 million. This year’s list witnessed the billionaire count fall by 4 to 147.

Five of the country’s 20 richest people own companies that have furloughed workers through the Tory scheme. The Office for Budget Responsibility suggests the furlough scheme would cost the taxpayer approximately £63 billion gross by June and it has recently been extended to October.

The Sunday Times identified at least 63 names who have a significant financial stake in companies receiving publicly funded furlough financial support. The true figure is likely to be much higher because there is no public list of furloughed companies, and some claims will have gone unreported.

The pandemic has exposed how these buccaneers of the “free market” are happy to claim government welfare. The maxim “profits are private, losses public” was never more appropriate.

Those with their cap out for public funds include Gopi and Sri Hinduja, who topped last year’s list with £22 billion. They are down £6 billion this year and off the top of the list. The brothers have furloughed some of their 360 employees at Optare, their North Yorkshire-based bus-making firm.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a tax exile in Monaco and top of the 2018 Rich List, is chairman and chief executive officer of the Ineos chemicals group—estimated to have a turnover of $80 billion. The pandemic lockdown has reduced Ratcliffe’s wealth, to £12.15 billion. He co-owns the Pig hotel chain, which has furloughed most of its staff. Ratcliffe is demanding an emergency government-funded loan of approximately £500 million to bail out Petroineos—a joint venture with state-owned PetroChina.

Another major beneficiary of the furlough operation is Tim Martin, owner of the Wetherspoons pub chain. Worth £311 million, Martin told his staff to go and get work in a supermarket during the pandemic.

The Weston family—with some £10.53 billion and owners of Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason, Primark and Heal’s—have risen from number 13 to 8 in the list. They have tens of thousands of staff on the taxpayer’s payroll.

Billionaires who have met public opprobrium for availing themselves of taxpayer funds include Sir Richard Branson, who has a personal fortune of £3.625 billion. Branson has paid no personal tax in the UK for 14 years. He placed 8,000 Virgin Atlantic staff on furlough and is seeking an additional £ 500 million in public funds. After his first request was knocked back, Virgin Atlantic announced plans to cut 3,150 jobs and cease operations at Gatwick Airport.

Sir Philip Green, lampooned recently by Steve Coogan in the movie Greed, has £930 million. He has furloughed 14,500 of the 16,000 staff from his Arcadia retail empire.

Mike Ashley is worth £1.949 billion. As the pandemic took hold, he claimed that his discount sportswear shops were an essential public service and should remain open during the lockdown. His Frasers Group has 18,000 employees, with the majority furloughed. Ashley owns Newcastle United, the first Premier League soccer club to use the furlough scheme for all non-first-team staff.

The owners of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, Joe Lewis, worth £3.992 billion, and Daniel Levy, worth £329 million, furloughed the club’s staff, before buckling as public anger mounted and reversed their decision.

Other super-wealthy employers simply sent employees to the dole queue. Hundreds of workers at Wren Kitchens, owned by the Healey brothers, Eddie and Malcolm—collectively worth £2 billion—were dismissed because they were “underperforming” just as the pandemic lockdown began. Workers were subsequently unable to claim government furlough support.

Coverage of the Sunday Times Rich List made much of how diverse the multimillionaires and billionaires are. The Guardian was embarrassing, writing a profile of pop star Rihanna headlined, “The new queen bee: Rihanna is crowned Britain’s wealthiest female musician.” Breathlessly it exclaimed, “The megastar enters the Sunday Times UK Rich List musician category at No 3 with a £468m fortune, beating Adele, Ed Sheeran and Mick Jagger.” Rihanna’s wealth could be properly celebrated at last now she was “[e]ligible for inclusion in the newspaper’s annual list since she moved to London over a year ago.”

The Sunday Times main editorial pointed out that some Rich Listers “have responded to the crisis by pouring money into communities that need help and by increasing their philanthropic contributions.” But it warned, “The UK’s richest need to do a lot more, though, to avoid a backlash…in the period of enhanced inequality that is likely to follow this crisis. Recessions always hit the poorest hardest, and this one will be no exception. The rich have to demonstrate their willingness to put much more back than they have taken out. …”

Almost identical statements were made by the Times after 2008. But all the super-rich did was continue to pile up gargantuan wealth, while tens of millions of workers suffered a decade of savage austerity to pay for the bailout of the banks and corporations.

Civilian casualties mount as foreign powers continue to fuel Libya’s civil war

Alberto Escalera

Intense shelling of civilian-populated areas and key infrastructure in and around the Libyan capital of Tripoli has escalated over the past several weeks, despite a 24-hour curfew enacted in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

On Saturday, a spokesman for the Libyan health ministry announced that seven more civilians were killed and 17 others injured when shellfire launched by the Libyan National Army (LNA), under the command of Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar, struck a shelter in the Fornaj district of the Libyan capital for people previously displaced by the conflict. Among those killed in the Saturday artillery barrage was a five-year-old boy from Bangladesh.

Libya has been the scene of a bloody civil war since the NATO-led bombing and assassination of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. For nearly a decade, armed factions serving as proxies for foreign interests have been carrying out a protracted fight that has led to the division of the country into two competing power centers. The LNA, which controls vast swaths of eastern and southern Libya and is aligned with an influential faction within the House of Representatives, a rival parliamentary body that relocated to the eastern city of Tobruk near the Egyptian border in 2014, is being armed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, France and Russia.

Until recently, the LNA had scored a series of military successes since initiating its Western offensive last year to overthrow the UN-recognized government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is based in Tripoli. The GNA is being backed by Italy and Turkey.

The United States has backed both sides in the conflict. While initially supporting the GNA government immediately following the 2015 Skhirat Agreement, the Trump administration has recently signaled support for Haftar, a former Gaddafi general and long-time CIA asset, after his forces launched their offensive to take Tripoli.

Saturday’s shelling followed a previous attack on May 8, in which LNA artillery fire struck the Port of Tripoli, the Mitigia International Airport and a coastal road close to the residences of the Italian and Turkish ambassadors, killing at least three, including one civilian. That same week, five other civilians were reported killed and 46 others injured in similar attacks. In late April, LNA artillery fire struck the Royal Hospital in Tripoli resulting in extensive damage to its intensive care unit and prompting an evacuation of patients and staff.

In one of the bloodiest attacks to take place during the year-long siege of the Libyan capital, 53 migrant men and boys were killed and 130 others injured last July when an LNA airstrike hit the Tajoura Detention Center, a migrant “holding” facility located on the outskirts of Tripoli, where over 600 refugees who had been attempting to reach Europe, were imprisoned under inhumane conditions.

For its part, the GNA government forces have recently stepped up their efforts to retake two strategic footholds controlled by Haftar loyalists in the western part of the country.

Last month GNA forces began a counteroffensive to recapture the al-Watiya airbase, a strategic LNA foothold located southwest of Tripoli, from which Haftar’s forces have been launching air raids against the area in and around the capital. The GNA counteroffensive was prepared for by weeks of aerial bombing carried out using newly acquired armed drones supplied by Turkey. The GNA has also recently intensified its airstrikes against the city of Tarhouna, a critical operations center along LNA supply lines extending from Bani Walid, located southeast of the capital.

A UN report released earlier this year found that since the beginning of the LNA’s western offensive through the end of last year, at least 287 civilians were killed and 369 others injured. Airstrikes have accounted for 60 percent of civilian deaths.

Libya possesses substantial oil and natural gas deposits, the majority of which are located in fields within the Sirte Basin to the east, an area that saw intense civil war fighting in 2016, and the El Sharara and El Feel fields within the southwestern Murzuq Desert.

There is an extensive network of pipelines that connect the oil and gas fields in the south to export terminals along the northern coast. Due to its crippled industrial infrastructure and limited processing capacity, much of Libya’s domestic oil consumption is dependent on refined oil that is reimported from countries like Italy.

The civil war in Libya is fueled by a complex interplay between the competing interests of international energy monopolies on the one hand, and local power struggles to control oil and gas export revenues on the other.

The Italian energy giant ENI, through its joint venture with Libya’s National Oil Corporation, (NOC) controls the el-Feed oil field along with other concessions in the Ghadames Basin in the southwest of the country, as well as critical export and refining facilities in the north to which oil and gas extracted from French, Spanish, Austrian and Norwegian-controlled sites within the el-Sharara field, also in the southwest, must be transported through existing pipelines. Until recently, this had given Italian interests significant leverage over their international competitors.

Additionally, while nearly two thirds of oil and gas production in Libya takes place in territory currently controlled by the LNA in the east, export revenues are collected by the UN-recognized GNA government in Tripoli.

The recent sharp plunge in international oil prices has only exacerbated tensions. In January, the LNA began a systematic blockade of export terminals and pipelines in the west in an effort to deny the GNA government critical export revenue. Oil production has dropped significantly since the beginning of the blockade from an estimated 1.2 million to 300 thousand bpd, with an estimated loss of $1.4 billion in revenue to the NOC’s coffers.

Adding further complexity to the situation, Turkey’s intervention into the conflict on behalf of the GNA is rooted in broader regional conflicts within the eastern Mediterranean. Ankara, which has significant investments in Libya, recently signed a maritime border demarcation agreement with the GNA government to obtain rights to offshore drilling in the eastern Mediterranean, a highly contested area with newfound deposits from which Turkey’s neighbors are attempting to exclude it. The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), which includes Cyprus, Israel, Greece, Jordon, the Palestinian Authority, Italy and Egypt, is attempting to position itself as a major player in the European energy market, while marginalizing Turkish influence in the region. The formation of the EMGF also poses a direct challenge to Russian natural gas interests in the European market.

The mounting toll in terms of civilian casualties in Libya’s protracted civil war represents yet a further indictment of the fraudulent “humanitarian” pretexts advanced by pseudo-left academics and parties to justify their support for imperialist intervention. They portrayed the 2011 US-NATO bombardment of Libya and use of Al Qaeda-linked militias as proxy ground forces as a crusade for “democracy” and “human rights”. In fact, it was a war for regime change and plunder that shattered Libya society, killed tens of thousands and now could cost the lives of many more because of the country’s unpreparedness in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.