How Ecuador’s Democracy is Being Suffocated

Vijay Prashad & Pilar Troya

A recent poll showed that if Andrés Arauz Galarza were allowed to run in Ecuador’s presidential election of 2021, he would win in the first round with 45.9 percent of the vote. The pollsters found that Arauz—who was the minister of knowledge and human talent from 2015 to 2017—wins across “all the social strata and regions of the country, with a slight weakness among the richest voters in the country.”

Andrés Arauz entered policymaking and government when Rafael Correa was the president of the country, from 2007 to 2017. A stint at the Central Bank led to a career in the planning department (SENPLADES), before Arauz became a minister in the last two turbulent years of Correa’s government. There was not a whiff of corruption or incompetence around Arauz in his decade of service; when Correa left office, Arauz went to Mexico to pursue a PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Far behind Arauz in the polls is Guillermo Lasso Mendoza, the candidate of the right. Lasso, who is a wealthy banker, had run against the current President Lenín Moreno in 2017 but lost. He is the consensus candidate of the right wing, which cannot seem to advance his standing in the polls. He sits frozen at 32 percent.

Those polled said that Arauz was by far the most attractive candidate. But, if the ruling bloc in Ecuador has its way, Arauz will not be sworn in as the next president of the country next year. They will use every means to suffocate democracy in their country.

Correa and Moreno

The government of Rafael Correa, who is now living in Belgium, attempted to move a broadly left agenda while in office from 2007 to 2017. The Citizens’ Revolution that Correa led passed a progressive constitution in 2008, which put the principle of good living (buen vivir in Spanish and sumak kawsay in Quechua) at its heart. Government investment to strengthen social and economic rights came alongside a crackdown on corporate (including multinational) corruption. Oil revenue was not parked in foreign banks, but used to invest in education, health care, roads, and other basic infrastructure. From Ecuador’s population of 17 million, nearly 2 million people were lifted out of poverty in the Correa years.

Correa’s government was anathema to the multinational firms—such as the U.S.-based oil company Chevron—and to the Ecuadorian oligarchy. Chevron’s dangerous case for compensation against Ecuador, brought before Correa took office, was nonetheless fiercely resisted by Correa’s government; the Dirty Hand (Mano Negra) campaign put enormous international pressure against Chevron. Chevron worked closely with the U.S. embassy in Quito and the U.S. government to undermine Correa and his campaign against the oil giant. Not only did they want him out, but they wanted the political tradition of the left—called Correistas by shorthand—out as well. Moreno, who was once close to Correa, switched sides and became the main instrument for the fragmentation of the Ecuadorian left.

In the election of 2017, Moreno defeated Guillermo Lasso, who is running again in 2021. But, within a short time, Moreno sharply moved rightward. He worked closely with Lasso in the National Assembly to undermine each advance made by the government of Correa. They defunded education and health care, withdrew labor rights and rights to housing, wanted to sell off Ecuador’s refinery, and deregulated parts of the financial system. A consequence of these policies has been Ecuador’s appalling response, including accusations of deliberate undercounting, to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attack on the Correistas

Moreno and his right-wing allies needed to inoculate themselves from any criticism. They went on a frontal attack against the Correistas.

The first battleground was to fragment the Correista political organization and to deny the Correistas a political platform. A February 2018 referendum was barreled through the country that allowed the government to destroy the democratic structures of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Judiciary Council, the attorney general, the comptroller general, and others. With the assistance of the CNE, Moreno divided and took control of Correa’s party, the Alianza Pais.

When the Correistas tried to regroup and form a party, the institutions of the state blocked them. They said that the proposed names were misleading or that the signatures collected were invalid. By 2019, the Correistas used the Fuerza Compromiso Social platform to run for local elections in 2019. This platform was then banned in 2020.

In Brazil, the oligarchy prevented former president Lula from contesting the 2018 election; that process resulted in a new concept, lawfare—using the law as a political instrument. The same sort of lawfare was used in Ecuador to ensnare Correa and to prevent him from running for office. Correa was accused of bribery—with the bizarre notion of “psychic influence” (influjo psíquico) at the root of the case. The eight-year sentence inflicted upon him prevented him from running for office in Ecuador; that he was in Belgium meant that he could not, however, be arrested and imprisoned.

Election of 2021

The Correistas, using their platform of Union for Hope (Unión por la Esperanza), made an alliance with the Movimiento Centro Democrático to be able to run a candidate for the presidential election of 2021. Arauz won the primaries and was nominated as the presidential candidate. The party decided to have two vice-presidential candidates—both Correa and Carlos Rabascall.

The CNE’s president Diana Atamaint indicated that the CNE would disqualify Correa from the ballot, and even suggested that Arauz’s candidacy is illegal as a consequence of having Correa as his running mate. Matters are at a stalemate, as lawyers scurry about trying to find a solution to this crisis. The CNE has until October 7 to fix the matter. The first round for the election is on February 7, 2021.

The Insanity of Sustainability

Peter Koenig

“Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War” – Plato.

This wisdom is as valid today as it was 2,500 years ago. Wars go on and on. They are exactly the anti-dote of sustainability. Though, they may be the only “sustainability” modern mankind knows – endless destruction, killing, shameless exploitation of Mother Earth and its sentient beings, including humans.

Yes, we are hellbent towards “sustainably”, destroying our planet and all its living beings, with wars and conflicts and shameless exploitation of Mother Earth – and the people who have peacefully inhabited her lands for thousands of years.

All for greed, and more greed. Greed and destruction are certainly “unsustainable” features of our western “civilization”. Not to worry, in the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth will survive. She will cleanse herself by shaking and shedding off the destroyers, the annihilators – mankind. Only the brave will survive. Indigenous people, who have abstained from abject consumerism and instead worshipped Mother Earth and expressed their gratitude to her daily gifts. There are not many such societies left on our planet.

In the meantime, we lie about the sustainability we live in. We lie to ourselves and to the public at large around us. We make believe sustainability is our cause – and we use the term freely and constantly. Most of us don’t even know what it is supposed to mean. “Sustainability” and “sustainable” anything and everything have become slogans; or household words.

Such buzz-words, repeated over and over again, are made for promoting ideas, and for bending people’s minds to believe in something that isn’t.

We pretend and say that we work sustainably, we develop – just about anything we touch – sustainably, and we project the future in a most sustainable way. That’s what we are made to believe by those who coined this most fabulously clever, but untrue term. It is the 101 of a psycho-factory.

As Voltaire so pointedly said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities.”

Sustainability. What does it mean? It has about as many interpretations as there are people who use the term – namely none specific. It sounds good. Because it has become – well, a household word, ever since the World Bank invented, or rather diverted the term for “sustainable development” in the 1990s, in connection, first, with Global Warming, then with Climate Change – and now back to both.

Imagine! – There was a time at the World Bank – and possibly other institutions, when every page of almost every report had to contain at least once the word “sustainable”, or “sustainability”. Yes, that’s the extent of insanity propagated then – and today, it follows on a global scale, more sophisticated – the corporate world, the mega-polluters make it their buzz-word – our business is sustainable, and we with our products promote sustainability – worldwide.

In fact, sustainable, sustainable growth, sustainable development, sustainable this and sustainable that – was originally coined by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, the Rio Summit, the Rio Conference, and the Earth Summit – held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June in 1992.

The summit is intimately linked to the subsequent drive on Global Warming and Climate Change. It exuded projections of sea level risings, of disappearing cities and land strips, like Florida and New York City, as well as parts of California and many coastal areas and towns in Africa and Asia. It painted endless disasters, droughts, floods and famine as their consequence, if we – mankind – didn’t act. This first of a series of UN environment / climate summits is also closely connected with the UN Agendas 2021 and 2030. The UN Agenda 2030 incorporates or uses as main vehicle – the 17 “Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)”.

In a special UN Conference in 2016, Bill Gates was able to introduce into the 16th SDG “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”, the 9th of the 12 sub-targets – “By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.”

These 17 sustainable development goals, are all driving towards a Green Agenda, or as some prominent “left” US Democrat-political figures call it, the New Green Deal. It is nothing else but capitalism painted Green, at a horrendous cost for mankind and for the resources of the world. But it is sold under the label of creating a more sustainable world.

Never mind, the enormous amounts of hydrocarbons – the key polluter itself – that will be needed to convert our “black” economy into a Green economy. Simply because we have not developed effective and efficient alternative sources of energy. The main reasons for this are the strong and politically powerful hydrocarbon lobbies.

The energy cost (hydrocarbon-energy from oil and coal) of producing solar panels and windmills is astounding. So, today’s electric cars – Tesla and Co. – are still driven by hydrocarbon produced electricity – plus their batteries made from lithium destroy pristine landscapes, like huge natural salt flats in Bolivia, Argentina, China and elsewhere. The use of these sources of energy is everything but “sustainable”.

According to a study by the European Association for Battery Electric Vehicles commissioned by the European Commission (EC), “The ‘Well-to-Tank’ energy efficiency (from the primary energy source to the electrical plug), taking into account the energy consumed by the production and distribution of the electricity, is estimated at around 37%.“https://ec.europa.eu/transport/sites/transport/files/themes/strategies/
consultations/doc/2009_03_27_future_of_transport/20090408_
eabev_%28scientific_study%29.pdf.
See also Michael Moore’s film “Planet of the Humans” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=emb_title .

Hydrogen power is promoted as the panacea of future energy resources. But is it really? Hydrocarbons or fossil fuels today amount to 80% of all energy used worldwide. This is non-renewable and highly polluting energy. Today to produce hydrogen is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, similar to electricity.

As long as we have purely profit-fueled hydrocarbon lobbies that prevent governments collectively to invest in alternative energy research, like solar energy of the 2nd Generation, i.e. derived from photosynthesis (what plants do), hydrogen production uses more fossil fuels than using straight gas or petrol-derived fuels. Therefore hydrogen, say a hydrogen-driven car, maybe as much as 40% – 50% less efficient than would be a straight electric car. The burden on the environment can be considerably higher. Thus, not sustainable with today’s technology.

To enhance your belief in their slogans of “sustainability”, they put up some windmills or solar cells in the “backyard” of their land- and landscape devastating coal mines. They will be filmed for propaganda purposes along with their “sustainable” buzz-words.
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The World Economic Forum (WEF) and the IMF are fully committed to the idea of the New Green Deal. For them it is not unfettered neoliberal capitalism – and extreme consumerism emanating from it, that is the cause for the world’s environmental and societal breakdown, but the use of polluting energies, like hydrocarbons. They seem to ignore the enormous fossil fuel use to convert to a green energy-driven economy. Or, are they really not aware? Capitalism is OK, we just have to paint it green (see this https://www.globalresearch.ca/great-reset-revisited/5723573, and this https://www.globalresearch.ca/iwf-und-wef-vom-grosen-lockdown-zur-grosen-transformation-covid-19-und-die-folgen/5724357 .
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Let’s look at what else is “sustainable”- or not.

Water use and privatization – Coca Cola tells us their addictive and potentially diabetes-causing soft drinks are produced “sustainably”. They tout sustainability as their sales promotion all over the world. “Our business is sustainable from A to Z. Coco Cola follows a business culture of sustainability.”

They use enormous amounts of pristine clean drinking water – and so does Nestlé to further promote its number One business branch, bottled water. Nestlé has overtaken Coca Cola as the world number One in bottled water. They both use primarily subterranean sources of drinking water – least costly and often rich in minerals. Both of them have made or are about to sign agreements with Brazil’s President to exploit the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, the Guarani, underlaying Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both proclaim sustainability.

Both Coca Cola and Nestlé have horror stories in the Global South (i.e. India, Brazil, Mexico and others), as well as in the Global North. Nestlé is in a battle with the municipality of the tiny Osceola Township, in Michigan, where residents complain the Swiss company’s water extraction techniques are ruining the environment. Nestlé pays the State of Michigan US$ 200 to extract 130 million gallons of water per year (2018).

Through over-exploitation both in the Global South and the Global North, especially in the summer, the water table sinks to unattainable levels for the local populations – which are deprived of their water source. Protesting with their government or city officials is often in vain. Corruption is all overarching. – Nothing sustainable here.

These are just two examples of privatizing water for bottling purposes. Privatization of public water supply on a much larger scale is at the core of the issue, carried out mostly in developing countries (the Global South), mainly by French, British, Spanish and US water corporations.

Privatization of water is a socially most unsustainable feat, as it deprives the public, especially the poor, from access to their legitimate water resources. Water is a public good – and water is also a basic human right. On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights.

The public water use of Nestlé and Coca Cola – and many others, mind you, doesn’t even take account of the trillions of used plastic bottles ending up as uncollected and non-recycled waste, in the sea, fields, forests and on the road sides. Worldwide less than 8% of plastic bottles are recycled. Therefore, nothing of what Nestlé and Coca Cola practice and profess is sustainable. It’s an outright lie.

Petrol industry – BP with its green business emblem, makes believe – visually, every time you pass a BP station – that they are green. PB proclaims that their oil exploration and exploitation is green and environmentally sustainable.

Let’s look at reality. The so far considered largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was a giant industrial disaster that started on April 20, 2010 and lasted to 19 September 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, spilling about 780,000 cubic meter of raw petroleum over an area of up to 180,000 square kilometers. BP promised a full cleanup. By February 2015 they declared task completed. In reality, two thirds of the spilled oil still remains in the sea and as toxic tar junks along the sea shore and beaches; they have not been cleaned up – and may never be removed. – Where is the sustainability of their promise? Another outright lie.

BP and other oil corporations also have horrendous human rights records – just about everywhere they operate, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia. The abrogation of human rights is also an abrogation of sustainability.

In this essay BP is used as an example for the petrol industry. None of the petrol giants operate sustainably anywhere in the world, and least where water table-destructive fracking is practiced.

Sustainable mining – is another flagrant lie. But it sells well to the blinded people. And most of the civilized world is blinded. Unfortunately. They want to continue in their comfort zone which includes the use of copper, gold and other precious metals and stones, rare earths for ever more sophisticated electronic gear, gadgets and especially military electronically guided precision weaponry – as well as hydrocarbons in one way or another.

Sustainable mining of anything unrenewable is a Big Oxymoron. Anything you take from the earth that is non-renewable is by its nature not sustainable. It’s simply gone. Forever. In addition to the raw material not being renewable, the environmental damage caused by mining – especially gold and copper – is horrendous. Once a mine is exploited in a short 30- or 40-years’ concession, the mining company leaves mountains of contaminated waste, soil and water behind – that takes a thousand years or more to regenerate.

Yet, the industry’s palaver is “sustainability”, and the public buys it.

In fact, our civilization’s sustainability is zero. Aside from the pollution, poisoning and intoxication that we leave around us, our mostly western civilization has used natural resources at the rate of 3 to 4 times in excess of what Mother Earth so generally provides us with. We, the west, had passed the threshold of One in the mid-sixties. In Africa and most of Asia, the rate of depletion is still way below the factor of One, on average somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6.

“Sustainability” is a flash-word, has no meaning in our western civilization. It is pure deception – self-deception, so we may continue with our unsustainable ways of life. That’s what profit-bound capitalism does. It lives today with ever more consumerism, more luxury for the ever-fewer oligarchs – on the resources of tomorrow.

The sustainability of everything is not only a cheap slogan, it’s a ruinous self-deception. A Global Great Reset is indeed needed – but not according to the methods of the IMF and WEF. They would just shovel more resources and assets from the bottom 99.99% to the top few, painting the “new” capitalism a shiny bright green – and fooling the masses. We, The People, must take The Reset in our own hands, with consciousness and responsibility.
So, We the People, forget sustainable but act responsibly.

Troika of Imperialist Projects From NATO, Quad to D-10

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The colonial and imperialist powers have imposed bipolar world order after the Second World War by establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The idea was to destroy every alternative like USSR experiments and establish capitalism as the only political and economic ideology. The hegemonic world politics emanating from it during 1945 to 1953 had created conditions for the growth of the Cold War from 1953 to 1962. The temporary peace during détente has ended with the renewed tension between Washington and Moscow. From the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to the Euromissile crisis of late 1970s, the world has witnessed the imperialist manoeuvres to dominate political power and control economic resources of the newly independent countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The newly independent postcolonial countries were denied in their attempts to be free from these twin power blocks by following independent foreign policy under the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The neo-colonial economic policies and imperialist military adventures by the European and American powers have destroyed the abilities of the NAM countries to pursue independent foreign and economic policies. The defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam was a temporary jolt to its imperialist missions. The American imperialism restarted its military engine under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan by establishing international arms race under the programme called ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’ (SDI) led by the NATO on 23 March 1983. The cold war ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 but the imperialist war machine did not stop. It was further strengthened by forming new imperialist alliances after the fall of Soviet Russia in 1991.

The US emerged as the dominant imperialist power after the fall of Soviet Russia. The US and European imperialism led by the NATO has produced deaths and destitutions in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Latin America. The NATO continues to play a significant role in consolidating American imperialist hegemony till the rise of China as a formidable power, which can challenge the dominance of American imperialism today. The powers in Washington are recklessly on overdrive to reverse the conditions for a multipolar and democratic world order. The salvo of US imperialism is threatening world peace by reviving its anti-Asian imperialist projects by setting up regional and global formations against China. In this new age of imperialism, there is no competition among imperial powers for dominance. The collaborations have replaced competition among erstwhile imperialist and colonial powers. The NATO was the first major form of imperialist collaboration, which continue to exist and expands its military adventures to change political regimes in the name of democracy. In reality, the NATO prefers right wing and authoritarian client states and dictatorial governments. From Asia to Latin America, Middle East, the NATO has played a major role in the withering away of democracy. The groupings and regroupings of nation states by forming economic, political, religious and cultural blocks are shaping new forms of imperialist polyverse within fragile world order.

The imperialist and colonial collective called the NATO as an organisation should have been abandoned after the fall of Soviet Union. But NATO has started consolidating and expanding its based in different forms in the name of expanding free market democracy. From the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) to the creation of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the NATO has played a key role. The military campaign was not enough to defeat alternative forces fighting against the NATO. The anti-Communist Visegrad Group was also established by the NATO to implement its imperialist military ideology. The Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) was a product of this ideological narrative of the NATO within the framework of free market democracy to consolidate European and American capitalism. The social, economic and political perils of Europe today are products of its own making. The imperialist military-industrial and corporate alliances are destroying liberal democracies in Europe and diminishing its economic strengths by marginalising Europeans. The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States is a further consolidation of transatlantic capitalism, which will accelerate further marginalisation of working people in Europe.

The NATO and its ideological frameworks of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and wars ideologies are deterritorial by nature. Its global ambitions cannot be confined within a territory.  It intends to dominate the world both in political, economic and cultural terms by expanding capitalism alias free market democracy with the brute force of military. It forms alliances with reactionary religious, cultural and political forces to dismantle and replace democracies with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. The NATO’s wars for democracy are regime change by military means in reality. The wars and conflicts in Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Asia are part of the NATO’s design to establish friendly regimes concomitant with interests of American and European imperialism upholding the interests of the capitalist classes.

The NATO has established an informal strategic forum called the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) between the United States, Japan, Australia and India. The mission and vision of such a strategic forum was shaped by the NATO think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The CSIS Alliances and American Leadership Program is pushing the Quad towards a formal military alliance like the NATO in Asia Pacific region. So, the Quad can be called ‘Asian NATO’. The CSIS calls such an alliance as diamond. Shinzo Abe has called it as an “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity”. It sounds exactly like the Charter of Paris for a New Europe based on the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, which proclaimed to ‘build, consolidate and strengthen democracy as the only system of government’. In reality, it accelerated the establishment of unfettered capitalism in Europe. In reality, the Quad (Asian NATO) is against Asia and interests of the Asian people in letter and spirit. The central idea is to contain and destroy Chinese model of economic development by fueling regional wars and conflicts between India and China. It against the peace and prosperity in Asia. It is against regional and world peace. It was informally created during the natural calamity like Tsunami and attempts are being made to formalise it during global health crisis. How does military exercises help in disaster relief and rehabilitation of people? The human tragedies are inseparable part of imperialist designs. The outcomes are not going to be different. If the dreams of the Quad become a reality, it would be a disaster; threatening peace in Asia and destroy prosperity in the world.

The Group of Seven (G7) countries; Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States are expanding their political, economic and regional base by formally adding South Korea, India, and Australia into the group. It is rebranded as new D-10; a group of ten leading democracies in the world. It is promoted by Washington and Westminster to isolate China and its role in world politics and economy. There are no political, economic and ideological coherence between these countries. The anti-Chinese, anti-socialist alternative and unfettered capitalism are three defining binding forces for such an alliance. It does not care about issues of people and their living conditions in these ten countries. The D-10 is an extension of American and European capitalism and its dominance. The countries like Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Poland are going to be occasional participants. Boris Johnson calls it as golden opportunity for ‘Global Britain’.

From NATO, Quad to D-10; the troika of imperialism in all its reincarnations follow its old maxim outlined by Hastings Ismay in 1949. The maxim was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,”. In 2020, the maxim is to check the rise of peace and prosperity in Asia by fueling conflict between China and India. The conflicts and wars in Asia will accelerate economic growth in America and Europe with the help of defence trade. The military industrial complex will be net beneficiaries at the cost of people, their lives and livelihoods. It will ruin both in their path towards economic and social progress. Historically, old and new imperialisms in all their reincarnations are against peace and human values of freedom and democracy. It is within this context; the world needs an anti-imperialist front to struggle against all forms of imperialism at home and abroad. India and China need to understand and realise these imperialist designs for the fall of Asia again. Therefore, Japan, India and China need to work together for peace by developing mutual trust among themselves and among their immediate neighbours to defeat these new imperialist designs. The regional peace and prosperity in Asia depend on Japan, India and China; whereas world peace depends on its international commitment to fight imperialism in all its forms.

Why Older Persons Matter Today?

K M Seethi

“No one should be alone in their old age,” Santiago, the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea reflects in despair. Fisherman Santiago’s sorrows speak volumes about how loneliness is terrible, yet Hemingway sends the message that there are umpteen ways of coping with the sorrows of loneliness. The lesson in the novel is that no one can stave off loneliness that life may toss on, but one can always make the best of it, as the protagonist in the novel grapples with. That’s surely easier said than done. Battling loneliness and stigma has always been an excruciating agony of the elderly in actual life across countries. Needless to say, this is quite evident in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the ‘International Day of Older Persons’(IDOP) is observed on October 1 every year, the United Nations seeks to ensure that the special needs of the elderly people are taken care of by disseminating the key agenda set by the General Assembly way back in 1990 in line with the  ‘Vienna International Plan of Action on Ageing’ and the resolution of the World Assembly on Ageing. In fact, these two endeavours led to the dedicated day for the older persons. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out that as we observe the 30th anniversary of the IDOP, the whole world is absorbed in reckoning with “the disproportionate and severe impact” that the pandemic “has wrought on older persons around the world – not only on their health, but on their rights and well-being” (United Nations 2020a).

As the world body stated, IDOP 2020 will focus on the role of the health care workforce in contributing to the health of older persons, besides underscoring the role of women which is rather unappreciated and, in most cases, they are poorly rewarded. It is quite significant that this year’s observance will also foster the ‘Decade of Healthy Ageing’ (2020-2030) and “help bring together UN experts, civil society, government and the health professions to discuss the five strategic objectives of the Global Strategy and Action plan on Ageing and Health while noting the progress and challenges in their realization.” The international strategy is well integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being of all at all ages” (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2015a).

Admittedly, there has been a drastic change in the very composition of the world population during the last few decades. During 1950-2020, there was a significant rise in the life expectancy worldwide (from 46 to 68 years). Studies say that there are more than 700 million persons aged 65 or over. In the next three decades, the number of elderly persons worldwide will be more than double, and all regions will witness a rise in the size of the older population. This will be seen mainly in the Global South countries. The largest increase will be recorded in Asia, particularly in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia. The fastest increase in the number of elderly is also expected in West Asia and Northern Africa. Among the Global South countries, less developed countries excluding the least developed countries will be home to more than two-thirds of the world’s older population by 2050.

Thus, it is quite natural that ageing and health has become a priority issue globally. The SDGs underlined that “no one will be left behind.” It seeks to ensure “healthy lives” and promote “well-being at all ages” (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2015a; 2015b; United Nations Development Programme 2017). Even though such proclamations remain a distant goal in the neoliberal era—with little hope of blanket promises to ‘social security’ and welfare measures—the state and non-state actors are expected to make commitments to the protection of vulnerable people such as elderly whose number has been increasing in low-and middle-income countries (Seethi 2020b).

Evidently, COVID-19 has already taken a heavy toll of fatalities from the older persons. It is for the first time that the people over 65 are more susceptible to risks and fatalities than they were any time in the past (CDC 2020; WHO 2020c). The pandemic of 1918-19—which killed more than 50 million people and caused more than 500 million (one-third of the world population) infections across the world—was not so fatal for the elderly. The worst victims were the adult population. However, COVID-19 has already set devastating health scenario for the elderly. This is quite evident from the  pattern of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, Spain, England, Italy, China, Brazil, Russia, India and other countries in Europe. There were also some alarming reports, in the early stage of the pandemic, that a section of hospitals in the West had discouraged older people approaching for medical care in the context of declining facilities such as ventilators (Seethi 2020a).

Organisations working for the well-being of older people reported that the COVID-19 has intensified the violence, abuse and neglect of older people around the world across the world (Age International 2020). These cases manifest in diverse ways, such as physical, psychological, verbal, financial and sexual abuse, besides neglect. Older women also remained at higher risks, and people with disabilities and those with support needs also suffer. There were further reports that economic stresses caused by the pandemic situation are intensifying the incidence of economic abuse of older people (Ibid).

The United Nations has admitted that the pandemic has triggered deep anxiety, fear and miseries for the ageing population in the world. As the virus has swept across countries in the Global South, the death rate for ageing population could mount even higher and there will be more and more cases of abuse, mistreatment, humiliation and discrimination (United Nations 2020b).  The UN noted that even before the onset of the pandemic, a significant section of the elderly people around the world were living in poverty and leading a life of social exclusion. In the background of the pandemic, the UN warned that the emerging situation “may significantly lower older persons’ incomes and living standards.” It also noted that the “downturn will most likely have a disproportionate impact on older women, given their limited access to income” (United Nations 2020b; ILO 2018). The world body also recorded that the spread of coronavirus in care homes etc has taken “a devastating toll on older people’s lives, with distressing reports indicating instances of neglect or mistreatment.” It pointed out that the older persons living in refugee camps, informal settlements and prisons “are particularly at risk, due to overcrowded conditions, limited access to health services, water and sanitation facilities, as well as potential challenges accessing humanitarian support and assistance” (United Nations 2020b).

During the current pandemic conditions, the older persons in many countries face age discrimination in the choices on health care, in deciding the urgency and priority of medical attention, and life-saving remedies. The deteriorating COVID-19 situation may also lead to a drop of critical services for other illnesses, further increasing risks to the lives of older persons. It is true that while the pandemic cases have grown in number even after months, overloaded hospitals and medical services contend with challenging decisions around the choices and use of facilities. According to WHO, the recovery from the pandemic is an occasion “to set the stage for a more inclusive, equitable and age-friendly society, anchored in human rights and guided by the shared promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to Leave No One Behind” (WHO 2020b).  However, it is a challenging task for nations and international organisations to provide the older people with the much-needed support to access their social security and other safety measures. No doubt, COVID-19 has vitally affected their life-world situations in a bewildering way. Even as the pandemic persists in recurrent stretches across countries, medical prognosis goes to the level of unsure conjectures if this dreadful coronavirus could be contained now or in the near future. In any case, the longer the bouts of infections, the harder for the elderly across the world. However, not many of them can live in contemplation, as Gabriel García Márquez wrote, that the secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude!

Machines Are Not Bodies

Anandi Sharan

Machines are not bodies. A body knows how it feels, a machine does not. The goal and purpose of life for humans and other living beings is to create and contribute to the peace and harmony in our environment so that we can be in touch with the feelings in our bodies and in those around us. To be happy and healthy we need a pollution free environment.

Living beings are being analysed to death in anatomy classes, dissected when alive, subjected to cruelty in the name of science, destroyed by earthmovers and by radiation generated as a fall out from providing mobile communication. Researchers, the employees, the wage slaves, the greedy directors and the greedier shareholders and owners of legal persons have lost the ability to worship their own bodies and those of other living things. Instead they consider bodies nothing but servants to their greed, to be fixed if there is a problem by surgeons and dispensers of pharmaceutical products.

What is worship? It is nothing more complicated than being at peace and in harmony with our surroundings and marveling at the sheer beauty of living and non-living beings. Together the living and non-living beings create the super-organism known as the biosphere. And the biosphere runs on love. The biosphere is composed of billions of living bodies that send feelings to their brains and make decisions on how to live the next moment of their lives based on such feedback. Noise pollution but also of course pollution of food and water sources interferes with our ability to listen to our bodies and respond intelligently to the feelings that our bodies create.

How could the ability of humans to create words and concepts, which in and of itself is not wrong, become such a runaway disaster that writers and apologists for capitalism routinely liken living bodies to machines?

Just because a man-made object can be understood because it is man made, they think an object running on nature’s love can also be understood. But living beings and the systems that connect them are their own unique form of things that clubbed together are called life. Mankind may have launched a digital revolution thanks to figuring out the mathematics of sending signals with electricity, but this revolution not only does nothing to enhance either the purpose or beauty of living and non-living bodies and their interactions, it is actually making the world a dying hell on earth.

Living bodies are beautiful because we can never understand them, we can only observe them and listen to them. A person knows they have grown up when they have the ability not only to have a huge range of pleasurable feelings but to stop them when they have to. The body sends signals that the mind need not follow blindly. The delight that a human being experiences in such a moment when they realise they have grown up, is beyond the capacities of machines. There is no such thing as “artificial intelligence”. AI is an ideology constructed by capitalism in order to make humans addicted to machines. The biosphere, ecosystems, and living beings in interaction with non-living beings, are intelligent because nature has evolved over around half a billion years to relish its own growth, its own evolution and the interdependence of its billions of parts. Each part is both independent and connected. Each living body is both conscious of itself and of those around it. Every living being and non-living being needs to be some part of the greater whole for its continuance and for its own purpose as nature only knows.

When we are one such creature we know because our body is designed for that knowledge. Judges who are hungry make less humane decisions than judges after lunch. (Ref 1 . I don’t agree with the title of the research paper, but here is the link to the research). The paper provides evidence that there is truth in an old saying that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” It is as simple as that. When you are happy you want others to be happy. If there is noise the noise pollution interferes with your ability to be happy or to react to feelings in your body to keep yourself, let alone others, healthy and happy.

Also, consciousness is not a uniquely human thing. Consciousness is simply the ability to manage our lives by observing and acting on the body mind feedback. We share the ability to be conscious of our own bodies and the feelings we generate with billions of other creatures and ecological systems. Feelings are what the body sends us to realise we are alive, and then act in ways to extend our lives and the life of the whole on which we depend and of which we are a part.

So the urgent question most normal humans who are not infected by the industrial civilisation are asking these days is, why would an international civilisation build its self-declared self-image and goal on the ability of its scientists and capitalists and politicians and generals to devise ever more fancy ways of pillaging, destroying and killing living systems and bodies?

Politics is sadly not about matters of the heart. It is a harsh power struggle between workers and capital, landowners and bonded labourers, rapists and victims, evil men and innocent bodies. Because the agenda of humanists has been hijacked by liberals, capitalist legal persons are benefiting from constitutional protection whilst living bodies are being treated like garbage.

One thing we can do in the present political situation is to exercise the small power to intervene in politics that we have by writing letters or making phone calls to polluters, expressing what I have tried to talk about in these few paragraphs above. We must badger every single user and manufacturer of any kind of noisy machine in India and in the world to stop making and manufacturing machines.

Today what happened to me was that after months of peace thanks to the Corona virus, the noise pollution at the back of my house wreaked havoc once again in the neighbourhood. A man, or maybe his daughter, an owner of a legal person, had decided to begin construction of some kind or the other on their site. What this man either did not know or did not care enough about, is that every single machine that is run on an injection engine or some other fossil fuel engine is usually breaking the law. This includes cars, JCBs, bulldozers and generators. The permitted decibels in a mixed commercial and residential neighbourhood in India are the same as for residential neighbourhoods, which is 45 dB at night and 55 dB during the day, whereas these machines just mentioned have dB levels when you are near them of nothing much less than 90 dB, often as high as 120 dB. The closer you are to the source of the noise the louder it is.

If instead of a capitalist system we had a socialist one, we might also have enforcers of the law for the benefit of the public. But we don’t. We don’t have a caring educated elite that wishes to enforce the law for the benefit of everyone and of living beings, we only have greedy pigs running India and the world. (In Switzerland I hollered at a neighbour using a concrete plate vibrator to lay his new garage drive the same as I regularly holler at neighbours violating noise
pollution norms here.) I holler because they are individuals to whom I have already tried to explain patiently many times before. Hollering is noise. It is unpleasant but it can make a person listen. One should not raise one’s voice. I am sorry.

The point is, I consider it my duty to myself and my neighbours to see that anything going on in this world as I experience it complies with the law and the terms and conditions of Government permissions, on matters of noise pollution especially. Noise pollution is not only noise. The noise is a warning, as it would be in a forest, of something dangerous. It is dangerous for living bodies to be exposed to noise. Living beings need certain sounds to help them live, the sound of the voices of their loved ones, the sound of running water because we need water and so we love it, and so on. The noise made by industrial civilisation on the other hand is the noise of hell. As far as I am concerned, noise pollution makes me get up and fight it.

Companies all over the world flout environmental norms during demolition, construction and operational activities in their factories and infrastructure installations and on the roads. It is a disgrace to humanity and to the 200 odd constitutions of the nations of the world. These corporate houses trumpet their allegiance to the constitutions of their country loudly at their head offices, and at site they treat us living beings who are their neighbours or workers worse than garbage. They do not seem to understand that climate change, deafness, heart failure, extinction of animals, soil degradation, hot house earth, malnutrition and respiratory disease and all other illnesses are caused by company owners and employees who do not comply with the law. They have forgotten that to live is by definition to be a worshipper of life and beauty.

If such people do not understand what is good for living beings and themselves, we should consider them uneducated and in need of re-education. If they have no love or respect for the mystery, the beauty and the love that is the source, purpose and meaning of life, we should use our tiny powers as letter writers and users of phones to re-educate such ignorant polluters.

We do not have to pull out the big gun of the threat of climate change only, to persuade them of life’s logic. Peace and quiet when we can meditate, eat, sleep, play, dance, in peace, is good for our human body and that of the other human and animal bodies around us. What more exactly do humans and the biosphere as a whole need except their / our / its health? Machines don’t make us healthy or happy. To be happy and healthy we need a peaceful and harmonious environment, which in this day and age means a pollution free world including a world free of noise.

By educating polluters to worship living bodies and their mysterious ways, or using some other language to convey the amazing bio-logical feedback mechanisms of bodies and feelings, we will exercise a small amount of power in the political realm to defend the beauty and logic of love over hate, and peace over noise. It is not good enough to fine polluters after the pollution has occurred. We need to be active citizens to ensure the pollution doesn’t start in the first place. We need to educate company owners so that they understand that there is no cure for ill-health except peace and happiness. Stop manufacturing and using cars! Cars make us sick because of the pollution including their horrible levels of noise.

Owners and employees of companies should not do things that make animals or humans, ecosystems and the biosphere, sick. They should not further drive forward this hell in the world that is turning earth into a hothouse that will no longer support life. Let us help them re-educate themselves about what it is to be human.

Australian unions plead for continued secretive talks with government and employers

Mike Head

The Australian Council of Trade Unions last week issued an anxious plea for the federal Liberal-National government and employer representatives to prolong their “confidential” talks with union bureaucrats in order to finalise “reforms” of workplace conditions.

For four months now, trade union leaders have been closeted away in five industrial relations (IR) “working groups” with the government and business chiefs, at the invitation of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

At the same time, they have worked together to keep a lid on unrest amid the worst mass unemployment since the 1930s Great Depression and to enforce returns to work in unsafe conditions despite the spiraling global COVID-19 pandemic that has resulted from the same corporate profit drive.

Behind a veil of secrecy, the union chiefs have been discussing how to keep suppressing working-class opposition as impoverishment deepens, while they exploit the pandemic to help impose the destruction of thousands of jobs and the decimation of workers’ wages and basic conditions.

Various tactical differences, however, caused the talks to fail to meet their deadline last week to present their proposals to the government. In response, ACTU secretary Sally McManus appealed for the backroom bargaining to continue in “a new phase of bilateral meetings between the various parties and the Morrison government.”

In her media release, McManus pleaded: “We remain hopeful that an agreement can be reached which will benefit working people and the national interest.” She said it was necessary to “reach common ground” at “a time of unprecedented national crisis.”

By the “national interest,” McManus means the interests of the ruling capitalist class, which is intent on further restructuring the economy at the expense of the working-class as the government cuts JobKeeper wage subsidies and JobSeeker dole payments to poverty levels to coerce workers into low-paid work on worse conditions.

Pledging to keep all the details hidden from workers, McManus criticised some employer groups for publicly opposing aspects of the deals being struck with the unions. “[I]t has become obvious that a number of employer lobby groups no longer wish to respect the confidentiality agreement or engage with this process in good faith,” she complained.

According to media reports, Industrial Relations Minister and Attorney-General Christian Porter is now conducting informal talks with select unions and employers in the hopes of getting agreements over the line after formal discussions ended without clear consensus.

If the last-minute talks fail to achieve agreement among the parties, Porter said the government would take ideas from each working group and “try and build them into a product that can A) grow jobs and B) make its way through parliament.”

Some working groups got close to agreement. McManus reportedly finalised a deal with Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott, representing the largest companies. They proposed to axe the supposed “better off overall test” (BOOT) for registering a workplace pay deal, clearing the way for enterprise agreements to openly reduce the conditions of workers.

In return, union-negotiated agreements would be fast-tracked through the Fair Work Commission—the federal industrial tribunal. This would further entrench the unions as the ruling elite’s preferred mechanism for enforcing cuts to conditions via “enterprise bargaining” and anti-strike laws.

BOOT has done nothing to prevent countless union-imposed agreements that have lowered wages, slashed conditions and facilitated job destruction. However, it became the basis for several legal challenges to sweetheart deals between the unions and major companies, especially in the fast food and supermarket industries.

The abolition of BOOT would remove any impediment, no matter how contrived and cosmetic, to sweeping attacks on jobs and conditions in new union enterprise agreements.

The prioritising of union deals also would take to a new level the corporatist partnership established between the unions and the employers under the Accords of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996.

However, various employer groups, including Master Builders Australia, which represents construction companies, objected to preference being given to union agreements, demanding equal fast-tracking for non-union deals.

Another deal close to consummation is designed to reverse a court ruling that gave some regular casuals access to annual leave and other entitlements reserved for permanent workers, which could cost businesses $40 billion.

Business leaders, the corporate media and the government had denounced the ruling, saying it would reduce employers’ “flexibility” to keep their staff on insecure work arrangements and “cripple” firms struggling with the pandemic.

In the casuals working group, the unions reportedly felt optimistic they could strike a bargain after the small business lobby split from other employers to back a potential compromise. Casuals would get a chance to convert to permanent employment after a set period, perhaps nine months, and in return forgo back pay claims.

Leaks to the media indicated that the unions rejected the proposal because it would only give workers the opportunity to ask for a permanent job, which employers could too easily decline. Nevertheless, “there was general agreement around the concepts,” one source told reporters.

In the group dealing with simplification of industrial awards, Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia (COSBOA) chief executive Peter Strong told the media that his group’s proposal was “still in the mix.”

COSBOA proposed a series of 24 schedules that would allow small businesses greater workforce flexibility. Businesses with fewer than 40 employees could pay a single weekday and weekend pay rate, effectively scrapping after-hours penalty rates, and hire part-time workers without paying overtime rates.

The “compliance” group reportedly failed to reach agreement after unions sought higher penalties for underpayment of workers. The group discussing four-year union-enforced agreements on new work sites apparently could not agree on the size of projects to qualify for such an agreement, which would prohibit industrial action.

Whether or not all the deals are ultimately finalised, the unions will step up their collaboration with the government and big business. They will intensify the attacks on workers’ pay and conditions in response to the “unprecedented national crisis” produced by the pandemic and the worldwide economic crash.

That record is already clear. As soon as the pandemic erupted in March, the ACTU rushed to help the government allow employers to scrap basic conditions under the JobKeeper subsidy, even as big business took the lion’s share of the hundreds of billions of dollars handed out under the scheme and other corporate bailout packages.

In addition, without any consultation with their members, the unions rapidly organised the gutting of pay and conditions for millions of workers in the retail, hospitality and clerical industries.

For her services in supervising these assaults, McManus was personally thanked by Morrison and Porter, who proclaimed her his “BFF” (best friend forever). Once falsely promoted as a “militant” when she was installed as ACTU boss in 2017, McManus became the darling of the media. The Murdoch-owned Australian congratulated her for having “recognised the merit of employer concerns.”

This is no aberration produced by the pandemic. The close personal relations between the unions, employers and government take to new depths the decades-long role of the unions as a ruthless industrial police force, first displayed under Hawke and Keating.

Amid growing social inequality, unsafe conditions and widespread impoverishment, the unions and their “best friends” know that the scene is set for the eruption of major working-class battles. The essential issue for workers is to mobilise independently, against the unions, as well as the governments and the corporate elite. That requires a socialist program to reorganise society on the basis of human need, not corporate profit and private wealth.

Detroit City Council defies public opposition and renews facial recognition contract

Kevin Reed

The Detroit City Council voted 6-3 on Tuesday to extend a software support contract with the provider of facial recognition technology used by the city police department despite broad-based public opposition to the system.

A majority of the Council of nine Democrats voted to approve a two-year, $220,000 upgrade and maintenance contract with South Carolina-based DataWorks Plus from whom the city originally purchased its facial recognition technology platform in 2017.

Promotional image of the case management module of the FACE Plus facial recognition system from DataWorks Plus (Photo credit: DataWorksPlus.com)

The vote at the virtual council meeting on Tuesday was preceded by a one-hour public comment period in which callers overwhelmingly opposed the renewal of the contract with DataWorks Plus.

The opposition to reapproval of the facial recognition surveillance tools used by the Detroit Police Department (DPD) also took the form of a car caravan protest that drove past the home of Councilman Andre Spivey, a proponent of the city’s system, during the meeting.

The previous three-year contract between Detroit and DataWorks Plus for its “FACE Watch Plus real-time video surveillance system” expired in July and the City Council put off a scheduled vote at that time on the renewal amid growing public opposition. Protests against police violence in Detroit, as part of the nationwide movement that was sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, have also taken up the demand for putting a halt to the use of facial recognition by DPD.

With the endorsement of Democratic Party Mayor Mike Duggan, Detroit purchased the facial recognition system for $1 million in 2017 without public review or discussion. The system has been integrated into the much-touted Project Green Light program, a public-private partnership where business owners pay for the installation of video surveillance cameras on their premises, which are connected to the DPD’s Real Time Crime Center in downtown Detroit.

The face images captured on the 600 surveillance cameras across the city are being checked by DPD against various “mug shot” and driver’s license photo databases to identify individuals within minutes. Detroit Police Captain Aric Tosqui claimed on Tuesday that the FACE Watch Plus system was used 106 times this year, resulting in 64 matches and assisting in 12 arrests.

However, in at least two instances, individuals were misidentified by the system and wrongfully arrested by DPD. Michael Oliver, 25, was arrested and charged with felony larceny in May 2019 after police uploaded a cellphone video into the facial recognition system and it falsely returned his identity. Robert Williams, from Farmington Hills, Michigan, was arrested in front of his family in January of this year and falsely accused of stealing expensive Shinola watches based on video surveillance images from a retail store that were processed by DPD.

The use of facial recognition systems by law enforcement is on the rise across the country by city, state and federal agencies despite massive public opposition and the fact that the technologies violate constitutionally protected rights of free speech and against unreasonable searches and seizures. These increasingly integrated systems are gathering face images of everyone 24/7 in public spaces, enabling police agencies to identify where people are, what they are doing and who they are with at all times.

Speaking at a recent public hearing, Art Thompson, Detroit’s Director of Public Safety and Cyber Security, said, “We already own the license to operate the software (and) we already bought and own the software … it is a part of what DPD has access to. It’s no different than buying a cell phone ... for a few years you get upgrades and at some point, when those upgrades stop, you still own the hardware.” The city’s information technology department also said that there were ways to cover the costs of the maintenance contract without council approval anyway.

In other words, the DPD was going to continue using the facial recognition system regardless of the Council vote. This means that the Democrats on the City Council who are in favor of the technology wanted to go on record supporting the invasive system as part of their law-and-order politics.

City Councilman Gabe Leland, who voted for the contract, talked about a “delicate balancing act” between “empowering DPD with more tools, empowering victims and also protecting the general public.” Detroit Councilman Roy McCalister Jr. claimed, “nothing is 100%” and, “People who are just living their daily lives and who are attacked, we want to make sure their constitutional rights and their privileges are just as much protected as well.”

The councilmen are echoing the position of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners Chair Willie Bell, who released a statement that said, “Facial recognition is part of 21st Century policing, just as DNA became part of policing in the last century.” Bell claimed that the use of facial recognition tools can be part of “constitutional, community-focused policing and safer communities … working together, and building up each other, our families and our city.”

Many of the most outspoken opponents of facial recognition technology in Detroit are preoccupied with study results that have shown higher error rates by the systems when matching face images of people with darker skin. This fact has fueled a campaign based entirely upon racial considerations rather than the fundamental democratic and class issues posed by secret around-the-clock government surveillance of the public.

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, the accuracy of facial recognition technologies has improved dramatically in recent years. The report says, “As of April 2020, the best face identification algorithm has an error rate of just 0.08% compared to 4.1% for the leading algorithm in 2014, according to tests by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).”

As the resolution and color sensitivity of video cameras have advanced with 4K technology and the processing power of computers, along with improvements to artificial intelligence and deep learning systems, the error rates are dropping dramatically.

As previously explained on the World Socialist Web Site, the preoccupation with racial disparities in facial recognition algorithms is aimed at assisting the state with making improvements to the systems and rendering them less likely to misidentify individuals of all racial groups rather than demanding an immediate halt to the illegal surveillance of the public.

Ukrainian miners strike for better pay and conditions in defiance of the unions

Jason Melanovski

Sixty iron ore miners in the city of Krivoy Rog in eastern Ukraine have spent almost the entire month of September underground, carrying out a strike for increased pay and benefits and against the incompetent oligarch-backed management.

Beginning on September 3, twenty-nine workers refused to come to the surface, occupying the October Mine which belongs to the privately owned Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Company (KZRK). Within days, three other nearby iron ore mines had joined the strike and the number of miners occupying the mines had grown to 393.

While the number of miners remaining underground has fallen due to health issues incurred by staying underground for such long periods of time, workers have continued to strike with the support of their families and the Ukrainian working-class who have carried out protests supporting them both in Krivoy Rog and the capital of Kiev.

The Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Company is jointly owned by financial firms Metinvest and Privat, which are owned by Ukraine’s billionaire oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov and Igor Kolomoisky, respectively.

While Akhmetov has a net worth of over $6 billion, workers at the Krivoy Rog October Mine reported making just $330 a month. They work 1,200 meters underground in extremely dangerous conditions.

After striking in 2017 and receiving assurances that wages would rise in increments, management has recently cut off all raises and reverted to its former poverty wages.

As a result of their direct confrontation with Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, striking miners and their families have reported being harassed by management, with their personal details and addresses menacingly posted to social media by KZRK’s management. Thugs, who had been tipped off by company management that the workers were not at home and how to best break into their homes, have broken into the apartments of strikers.

While the Krivoy Rog workers are nominally represented by the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine, the union has done its best to prevent he miners’ occupation from spreading. It has even refused to call it a “strike” so as not to anger the Ukrainian government. Workers and their families have led the occupation independently from the union, setting up tents outside the company’s headquarters and circulating their own petitions.

Predictably, the miners’ courageous strike has been met with a media blackout from much of Ukraine’s oligarch-controlled capitalist press. The media blackout is motivated, above all, by fear that the strike could spread further throughout Ukraine and to other former Soviet republics. In August, a strike wave, which also included many miners, shook the government of Alexander Lukashenko in neighboring Belarus.

Despite the media blackout, within days following the outbreak of the Krivoy Rog strike, reports surfaced of workers taking inspiration from the miners and carrying out their own actions against the ruling class.

On September 8, workers at the Berdyansk Sea Trade Port, located approximately 400 km southeast of Krivoy Rog, stopped work and demanded the resignation of the port’s management.

Later on September 14, three-hundred workers at a pipe plant in the northeastern city of Sumy likewise stopped work and demanded payment for unpaid wages.

On September 21, workers at the Kremenchuk Automobile Plant, which is owned by another Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Kostyantyn Zhevago, stopped work and took to the streets. They blocked the streets in front of the factory to demand promised wages that have not been paid out in over eight months.

As a result of the ongoing privatization of state-owned enterprises that has been carried by successive Ukrainian governments and accelerated by the current regime of President Volodomyr Zelensky, many Ukrainian workers have seen their wages, benefits, and working conditions plummet. Their factories have been passed from one oligarch-owned investment firm to another, following privatization. Agreed upon contracts are often violated by management and workers in both the private and public sectors can go months without pay.

Like all over the world, the coronavirus pandemic has led a further, massive deterioration in the already miserably low living standards of broad sections of the working class. Ukraine is now in the midst of a second wave and has recorded several new record highs of new cases in the past few days. As of September 30, there were over 202,0000 confirmed cases in the country of just over 40 million.

The strike in Krivoy Rog itself was preceded by a strike of coal miners at the Nadiya coal mine in the western region of L’viv who struck underground and occupied the mine throughout the summer due to unpaid wages. The strike only ended when the Ukrainian government intervened and promised to compensate the miners for unpaid wages. The government also announced that it would investigate the mine’s management for its failure to pay the salaries and selling coal at below-market prices.

Ukraine’s mining industry employs approximately 194,000 workers. Despite extremely hazardous conditions and crumbling equipment and infrastructure, it is still highly valued by international finance capital due to the large amount of mineral deposits present in the country.

According to Innspired Investing News, Ukraine “is home to one of the largest proportions of iron ore deposits on the planet with an estimated 27 billion tons accounting for more than 10 percent of the earth’s reserves.” The country also has the highest titanium reserves in Europe as well as large deposits of coal, natural gas, oil, salt, sulfur, graphite, magnesium, kaolin, nickel and mercury.

Both the current Zelensky government and the previous regime of Petro Poroshenko have carried out a policy of closing Ukraine’s remaining unprofitable state-owned mines while privatizing the more profitable ones, which contain sought after minerals such as iron ore.

President Zelensky, who was born and raised in Krivoy Rog, has neither commented on the miner’s strike nor visited his hometown to speak with the striking workers.

Zelensky is well aware that to do so would anger the very same forces to which he owes his entire political career. Last week it was revealed by the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, that Zelensky’s own Servant of the People party only exists due to the beneficence of the oligarch and Krivoy Rog mine-owner Rinat Akhmetov, who doles out approximately $2.5 million per month to back Zelensky and his party. Above all, Zelensky fears drawing any further attention to a strike that threatens to encourage a much broader movement by the working class.