FAA clears Boeing’s deadly 737 Max 8 aircraft to fly again

Bryan Dyne

On Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration rescinded its order to ground the now infamous 737 Max 8 aircraft, along with its sister model, the 737 Max 9. The agency originally grounded the Max 8 more than 20 months ago after two crashes—Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 in Indonesia, and Ethiopian Airlines 302 in March 2019—killed 346 men, women and children.

Wall Street also celebrated the announcement, with Boeing stock jumping six percent Wednesday morning. Boeing’s stock as a whole has risen nearly 40 percent since its most recent low on October 30, on the assumption that the Max 8 was coming back to service. CEO David Calhoun is expected to make about $11 million this year in salary, stock options and other bonuses, plus an additional $7 million if the Max fully re-enters service. The company’s shareholders stand to make tens of billions more if their Boeing stock returns to its pre-grounding highs.

A Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner at the Renton, Washington assembly plant [Credit: AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File]

Airlines are also banking on the return of the Max 8. In anticipation of getting full authorization to use the aircraft, American Airlines was the first airline to announce a return to service for the beleaguered jet, scheduling a once-a-day round trip flight for the Max 8 from New York to Miami and back, starting December 29. Southwest and United have announced plans to start Max 8 commercial flights sometime next year.

To date, no executive who oversaw production of the plane or regulatory official who approved it has been charged, much less prosecuted, for the development, manufacture and marketing of the deadly plane and the death of 346 passengers and crew on the two flights. Ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who spearheaded the development and production of the 737 Max project, left the company in January of this year with salary, stock options and bonuses totaling $80.7 million.

The FAA action is the last major hurdle needed for the Max 8 jet to return to service in US airlines. Alongside the announcement, the FAA also released the design changes that will need to be implemented on each aircraft before it is approved for airworthiness. These include updated hardware and software and a new pilot training regimen that has yet to be approved, as well as maintenance for the 850 aircraft that have been sitting idle for more than a year and a half.

The order also revealed the continued complicity of the FAA with the corporate criminality of Boeing. The agency claims it worked “diligently to identify and address the safety issues” surrounding the hardware and software that were the direct cause of the two crashes. Calhoun shed crocodile tears for the victims, proclaiming, “We will never forget the lives lost in the two tragic accidents that led to the decision to suspend operation.” But no one took stock of the fact that Boeing knew of the dangers posed by the plane and hid them from pilots and the general public, all the while getting a rubber stamp to proceed from the FAA and the pilots’ union.

To review, the immediate cause of both crashes was the previously little-known mechanism called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). The software was installed to compensate for the plane’s inherent tendency to stall, a potentially catastrophic problem which still remains, and was given the authority to override pilot controls if the system deemed it necessary. Moreover, Boeing ultimately gave MCAS ten times the control over the pitch of the plane than it told test pilots, meaning it could easily crash the plane given faulty inputs.

This is exactly what happened in both crashes; each plane’s angle of attack sensor wrongly indicated a stall and because only a single sensor was tied to MCAS, rather than the industry standard of two or three for redundancy to prevent such problems, the software forced both flights into an unrecoverable dive. Black box recordings of the pilots bear this out, as they tried to pull up or disable MCAS during the last moments of their lives.

Moreover, Boeing knew of these dangers and concealed them from test pilots during the Max 8’s certification. Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot at the time of the aircraft’s development, called MCAS “egregious” and noted that it was “running rampant” in Boeing’s simulators, causing crashes. Leaked internal emails showed employees incredulous at the development of the Max 8, commenting, “This is a joke. This airplane is ridiculous.” A different message exclaimed, “I’ll be shocked if the FAA passes this turd.”

During this same period, one of the aerospace giant’s former senior managers, Ed Pierson, wrote a letter directly to then-CEO Muilenburg warning that “deteriorating factory conditions” at the Renton, Washington Boeing 737 production facility would inevitably produce faulty and potentially deadly aircraft. Both sets of reports were ignored and the production and distribution of the Max 8 went on full steam ahead.

Moreover, Boeing did not warn pilots of the possibility that the MCAS system caused the first crash, even though the system was suspect at the time. Instead, they worked behind the scenes to release a software patch in an attempt to hide the fact that there was an issue in the first place. In a tragic irony, they announced this fix, admitting this deadly problem existed in the first place, the day after the second crash.

That such alarms were never raised comes strictly down to profit considerations. Boeing was particularly concerned with maintaining its edge in a competitive race against its European-based rival Airbus to maintain and strengthen its dominance of the market for short- and mid-range aircraft, particularly in the rapidly expanding Asian market. Airbus had a one-year jump over Boeing in the development and production of its new plane, the A320neo aircraft.

To compensate, Boeing wanted to continue using the 50-year-old 737 chassis in developing a “new” plane, to cut down on development time and production costs. As the National Transportation Safety Committee of Indonesia explicitly noted during its investigation of the Lion Air Flight 610 crash, the aerospace giant used an old airframe in order to save time and money, developing an airplane that did not have “significant areas of change at the product level,” and used MCAS to ensure that there would not be “a simulator training requirement for pilots.”

The dangers outlined in that report, along with numerous congressional hearings, have been ignored by US airlines in favor of the empty promises from Boeing and the FAA that the Max 8 is now living up to its mandate of being “one of the safest airplanes ever to fly.” They, along with the company, regulators and trade unions that allowed the Max 8 crashes, are the ones who ultimately killed the first 346 victims, and will be responsible for all those that follow.

Youth suicides and mental health disorders on the rise amid pandemic depression

Genevieve Leigh

Just three days before his 13th birthday, Hayden Hunstable died by suicide in his bedroom in Aledo, Texas. He died in April, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hayden’s father attributed his son’s death to the pandemic, which suddenly turned his life upside-down.

“This is a kid who loved life, was the life of the party,” his father, Brad Hunstable, said of his son Hayden. Hunstable explained at the time that his son seemed happy and showed no previous signs of depression, but he was deeply affected by being separated from his friends and his routine.

Since Hayden’s death, mental health issues, in the most severe cases leading to suicide, have risen dramatically among youth throughout the US.

Just last week, at a Corona-Norco school board meeting in southern California, newly appointed Superintendent Sam Buenrostro revealed the shocking news that five district students had killed themselves since the start of the crisis. He did not provide their names and ages.

New data from a nationwide survey of young Americans, ages 18-24, has shed further light on the scale of the unfolding mental health crisis. The survey, “The State of the Nation,” examined depressive symptoms among these young adults, including thoughts of suicide, generalized anxiety and disruption in sleep.

Overall, across four national waves (in late May, late June, late August and mid-October), researchers found alarming rates of depression, with nearly half of this young adult population—47.3 percent—showing at least moderate depressive symptoms in October, the highest level since June.

This figure is close to 10 times the pre-pandemic rate, which was already staggering.

The source of this crisis is no mystery. The youthful years are meant to be a time filled with hope, optimism and idealism. For those coming of age in 2020, this time presents itself instead as a nightmare.

Young people have suffered immensely from isolation, not being able to see their friends and socialize in the way that is so necessary for healthy human development. Those who are a bit older have watched the death toll from the virus climb each day, in disbelief, as it now surpasses a quarter of a million people.

They have heard the stories, or know first-hand, of the social misery taking place—people dying alone in hospital beds without a loved one allowed in the room to say goodbye. Millions have themselves waited with their parents in the food lines that stretch for miles. Others have lost their homes, ruthlessly evicted even as millions more are added to the list of unemployed each month.

They have been violently shaken into adulthood watching their parents suffer from the anxiety, grief and depression brought on by the economic catastrophe sweeping the country.

There are millions of working-class parents and young people struggling to survive who are looking for answers to this immense crisis. They want what is best for their children and are willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to secure for them a safe environment and hopeful future.

In this context, the Democratic and Republican parties, aided by their mouthpieces in the bourgeois media, are attempting to exploit the severe mental health crisis among youth, and the anxiety felt by parents, to force the reopening of schools on the basis that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease.”

They claim that keeping children home will ultimately be worse for their health than sending them back to school where they may catch the virus and spread it others.

In fact, the Corona-Norco School Board, where these five student suicides occurred since the start of the pandemic, is using these tragedies to justify reopening the elementary schools in January. They make no attempt to explain how reopening the elementary schools will address the mental health crisis of those in the high schools. All five of this year’s suicides were high school students.

Consider for a moment the options provided to working class families in 2020 in the most “advanced” capitalist country in the world: keep your child at home to suffer emotionally and socially while you struggle to keep your job to put food on the table, or send your child back to school, risking their lives, the lives of your family and the community at large.

These two “options” amount to no choice at all.

What will be the impact on young students if they lose a teacher? Or if they discover they have been turned into a vector for the disease and infected their parents or grandparents? What will be the impact on students’ mental health to return to a school where they can see their friends but are not allowed to interact in the same ways as before?

The fact of the matter is that there exists in society vast resources, science and technology to meet the widespread emotional, social and educational needs of youth, while keeping them safe from the virus.

Under a socioeconomic system guided by science and reason, that is, under socialism, workers would be compensated for staying at home to care for their children. Online learning would be well funded and rationally organized to prevent burnout and to account for the emotional and social toll taken on children.

The immense productive forces of the Tech Giants would be mobilized to provide children the necessary technology, including high speed internet, needed to participate in online schooling.

More fundamentally, a socialist system would take into account not only the bare minimum needed for teachers to teach and students to learn but the needs of the whole person. Cultural events such as plays, operas and other arts performances would be organized and live streamed free of charge to the public. The most advanced technology would be utilized to help families connect with loved ones whom they could not see in person; and regular conferences would be streamed to the public relaying the most up-to-date and reliable scientific findings on the virus, and how to stay safe.

Nothing of the sort is being prepared. Rather, the ruling elites, represented by both the Democratic and Republican parties, are engaged in a ruthless drive to reopen schools.

The main initiative of the ruling class after the onset of the pandemic in late February and early March was to secure a multitrillion-dollar bailout to Wall Street and the giant corporations. After this legislation was passed, with unanimous support, workers and their families were left to deal with the immense social fallout on an individual basis.

As for the $1,200 so-called stimulus check, for most families this lasted about two weeks. The following months were filled with immense loss for workers: their loved ones, jobs, health insurance, homes, and for many, the ability to provide for their families and children.

This campaign is part of a broader strategy of the US ruling class to keep the economy open no matter what the cost.

Whether they admit it or not, capitalist governments around the world have adopted the policy of “herd immunity,” that is, allowing the virus to spread without restraint. Even conservative estimates say this policy will lead to more than 23 million deaths globally in the coming years. The ruling class is relentlessly pursuing this policy because it is the only way to ensure that profits continue to flow, unhindered.

The primary concern of the ruling class since the onset of the pandemic has not been the health and well-being of the population, but rather the health and well-being of the profits of Wall Street.

Marx wrote that the capitalist political economy regards the individual worker “like a horse” in that “he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.”

The capitalist system degrades and dehumanizes workers, no matter the personal suffering and loss. This degradation and dehumanization are all the more ruthless and blatant when the bourgeoisie confronts a crisis on the scale the world confronts today. And it is expressed in nearly every facet of life.

The staggering mental health crisis that workers and young people face today is a byproduct of an entire social system that is predicated on sacrificing lives for the sake of private profit and wealth.

The thousands of people who take their lives each year are the victims of a decayed social order defined by staggering levels of inequality, decades of the artificial suppression of the class struggle by the unions, 30 years of unending wars and police brutality and the degradation of social and cultural life.

Skyrocketing youth suicides speak volumes about the state of society. And no faction of the ruling class has anything close to an answer for such problems. The real answer, however, is emerging more openly and more forcefully every day.

While this generation is coming of age under incredibly difficult circumstances, they are also living in the midst of an immense resurgence of the class struggle all over the world.

They are seeing firsthand who is “essential” to society—that is, the doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers who have sacrificed so much for the betterment of society in these trying times. On the other hand, the parasites of society are also becoming clearer as giant corporations and the ultrarich continue to profit, to the tune of billions of dollars, off the social misery of the masses.

Leon Trotsky once noted that even under the most dire economic conditions, only a tiny percentage of the population would be driven to end their own lives. “But peoples never resort to suicide,” he pointed out. “When their burdens are intolerable they seek a way out through revolution.”

Managers at Tyson pork plant took bets on how many workers would contract COVID-19

Tom Hall

The plant manager at Tyson’s largest US pork plant ran a betting pool with supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would become infected with coronavirus, according to a recent lawsuit. So far, over 1,000 workers in the Waterloo, Iowa plant have been infected and five have died. Management also deliberately lied to the public about the extent of the infection and ordered workers with symptoms to remain on the job.

While appalling, the situation at the Waterloo facility is far from unique. Nationwide, at least 50,000 meatpacking workers have been infected since the start of the pandemic and at least 253 have died, according to the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest meat processing company, leads the industry with more 11,000 confirmed infections and 35 deaths. Major outbreaks also occurred at Tyson’s pork plant in Perry, Iowa, where more than 60 percent of the workforce tested positive, and two plants in Columbus Junction and Camilla, Georgia, where together six workers died.

Tyson Foods processing plant. (Image Credit: Tyson Foods Inc)

The callous indifference to human life of the management at this particular plant is the direct outcome of the policy of “herd immunity” pursued by the entire corporate elite, sacrificing human life by keeping production going as the pandemic rages. Tyson’s fourth quarter earnings report blew past analysts’ expectations, nearly doubling its net income to $692 million and reporting increased sales volume for pork, chicken and prepared foods.

While falsely claiming that any pause in production would threaten the American public with starvation, in reality Tyson is ramping up pork production to take advantage of falling output from Asian and German competitors, according to the Motley Fool, which declared the company was living “High Off the Hog.” The company’s pork and beef sales jumped by 15 and 11 percent respectively, and Tyson reportedly increased exports to China sevenfold in the first quarter.

The lawsuit, filed by Isidro Fernandez, accuses top Tyson executives of responsibility for the death of his father Oscar Fernandez. The complaint argues that top management was fully aware of the danger of the virus and how it was spreading throughout the plant and other facilities nationwide but lied to the public and to workers, claiming that no infections had occurred at all.

Plant manager Tom Hart and other managers not only neglected elementary safety measures, according to the complaint, but explicitly directed supervisors to ignore symptoms and to force workers to remain on the job even when they were known to be positive. Manager John Casey reportedly referred to the coronavirus as a “glorified flu” and told workers not to worry because “everyone is going to get it.” Meanwhile, top managers “started avoiding the plant floor because they were afraid of contracting the virus,” delegating their responsibilities to low-level supervisors.

Management may have been directly responsible for introducing COVID-19 into the plant, the legal complaint contends. Tyson transferred workers from its Columbus Junction and Camilla plants after the two facilities were temporarily shut down due to major outbreaks and sent them to the Waterloo facility without any testing or health screenings. Contractors and other third parties were also allowed to enter the plant without health screenings.

In one case cited by the complaint, a worker was allowed to finish his shift after vomiting while on the floor. Workers were not even provided with elementary personal protective equipment, such as surgical masks.

In a single night, April 12, nearly two dozen workers were sent to the emergency room, according to the complaint. However, only four days later, “Tyson company officials publicly denied a COVID-19 outbreak at the Waterloo Facility.” Working conditions at the plant were so bad, with workers packed shoulder-to-shoulder in unsanitary conditions, that the local sheriff declared he was “[shaken] to the core” after visiting the plant.

The plant finally shut production temporarily beginning April 20, according to the complaint, due to “a lack of healthy labor.”

In addition to direct threats, Tyson and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) agreed to the payment of $500 “thank you bonuses” to workers who did not miss a shift for three consecutive months. Exploiting the economic hardship of workers, the bonuses were used as an incentive for workers to stay on the job even if they were sick.

The filing describes conditions resembling a modern-day version of The Jungle, the classic muckraking novel about the early 20th century Chicago meatpacking industry by Upton Sinclair, which depicted exhausted workers falling to their deaths into vats where they were ground up into lard. However, there is one crucial difference: while the publication of that novel led to the Meat Inspection Act and workplace safety legislation, federal, state and local government authorities have been involved from the beginning in the conspiracy with Tyson to cover up infections and immunize the giant corporation from prosecution.

In April, after coming under pressure from county officials, Tyson’s CEO Noel White met with Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds to secure an executive order stating that only the state government, and not local authorities, had the authority to close businesses. On April 28, President Trump issued an executive order under the Defense Production Act keeping meatpacking plants open during the pandemic. The Iowa Occupational Health and Safety Administration (IOSHA) also suppressed workers’ complaints against Tyson at both Waterloo and Perry.

In a public statement yesterday, Tyson effectively acknowledged the truth of the allegations by suspending Hart and other supervisors without pay. The company announced an internal investigation, headed by former President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. The choice of Holder, a wealthy attorney for Wall Street before and after his stint in federal government, is a clear signal that the “investigation” will be a whitewash.

During his time as US Attorney General, Holder shielded the major banks from criminal prosecution in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crash. He also spearheaded major assaults on civil liberties, siding with the police in every civil rights case in federal courts and playing a key role in the military-style occupations of Boston in 2013 and Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore in 2014. He is also the author of the “Holder Doctrine,” the position that it is legal for the president to assassinate US citizens without trial.

An earlier company statement, issued Wednesday, denied the allegations and cited the praise the company received from Waterloo Mayor Quentin Heart, county officials and UFCW Local 431 President Bob Hart during a tour of the facility in early May. “Tyson has gone above and beyond to keep their employees safe and I support the reopening of the facility,” Hart is quoted as saying. “This pork plant and all of the measures they’ve put in place are an example of how to effectively set up a safe work environment for the employees,” the UFCW bureaucrat declared.

In Greeley, Colorado, JBS workers walked out in July after six workers had died in the plant and UFCW Local 7 instructed workers to remain on the job. Yesterday, the union local issued a flyer instructing workers to social distance from their families and loved ones on Thanksgiving, even as the UFCW allows workers to be crammed together inside of infected slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants.

If Biden takes office in January, his policies will be essentially no different than Trump. In a video conference with five Democratic and five Republican governors on Thursday, Biden declared, “I am not going to shut down the economy, period” and repeated twice, “No national shutdown.” These statements came just days after Biden met with top corporate executives and union officials, including UFCW International President Marc Perrone, to recruit the unions to his campaign “get the economy back on track” in the midst of the greatest health catastrophe in generations.

With the death toll surpassing the 250,000-mark earlier this week, it is more apparent than ever that it is up to the working class to take action to halt the spread of the deadly disease. This means organizing rank-and-file safety committees independently of the pro-corporate trade unions to expose the truth about the spread of the disease in meatpacking plants, assert workers’ control over line speed and health and safety, and reach out to the broadest sections of the working class to wage a common fight to save lives.

Walkouts and a general strike must be prepared to shut down nonessential production and demand that the billions in corporate profits and trillions the US Congress handed to Wall Street be redirected to guarantee full income to workers and small businesses affected by the shutdown. At the same time, massive resources must be allocated to provide full protective equipment, regular testing, free medical treatment and the safest working environment possible for essential workers.

War crimes report: Australian special forces murdered 39 Afghans

Oscar Grenfell

An official report into alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan was released yesterday, revealing “credible information” that special forces soldiers illegally executed 39 civilians and prisoners, and committed other atrocities that violate international law.

The document is the outcome of a four-year investigation, initiated by the military in 2016 and headed by retired Major General Paul Brereton. Its scope was the period from 2005 to 2016.

An Australian special forces soldier murdering an unarmed Afghan civilian [Screenshot from footage leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year]

While nominally independent, the inquiry was essentially an in-house operation, stacked with current and former military officials and conducted under a shroud of secrecy. It served as an exercise in damage-control, aimed above all at whitewashing the responsibility of senior military command and successive Labor and Liberal-National governments for the war crimes, under conditions in which they were beginning to emerge in the press.

The information contained in the report is nevertheless a damning exposure of the utterly criminal character of the 19-year US-led occupation of Afghanistan, and of the Australian military. It reveals that murder, torture and abuse were routine tools for the subjugation of an impoverished and hostile population, in a predatory war aimed at securing resources and control of the geo-strategically critical Central Asian region.

Brereton and his colleagues stated that there was “credible information” of 23 occasions in which Afghans were illegally killed. The victims of those incidents number 39. They included civilians and potential fighters who were hors de combat (out of combat), because they were wounded or in custody. Twenty-five Australian soldiers are allegedly implicated.

The heavily-redacted section of the report, detailing the killings, indicates a consistent modus operandi in many of the murders.

On multiple occasions, the report indicates that a “throwdown” weapon or radio was placed next to the corpse of a murdered civilian or prisoner before it was photographed. This was so those responsible could claim they had acted in self-defence or that the victims had been killed in a fire-fight.

The investigation found “credible information” of “blooding.” Junior special forces soldiers would be instructed by their immediate superiors to murder detained Afghans so that they would experience their “first kill.”

Incidents are also listed, during which soldiers “inflicted severe pain” on Afghan detainees, and “caused them injury,” indicating the use of torture.

Many questions remain about the events listed in the report. They are described in sparse, bureaucratic language. There is no information provided about the methods, or the exact circumstances of the killings.

The dates (aside from year), places and names of those involved are all redacted, on the grounds that the public release of the information could jeopardise future prosecutions. This means there is no possibility of cross-referencing them with killings that have already been reported in the press. The hundreds of interviews conducted during the investigation, and other evidence, remain classified.

Several incidents are completely redacted. One of them is described as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.”

Little is detailed about 28 incidents of alleged breaches of law, which the investigation found were “unsubstantiated,” or the 11 more that are described as “discontinued.” They included claims of waterboarding and soldiers holding a knife to a man’s testicles. The secretive character of the inquiry means that the basis of its findings on those incidents cannot be scrutinised or examined by the media. They will not be referred to the police, or any other body for further investigation.

The report does, however, give some indication of other killings that were deemed “lawful.” It refers to knowledge of throwdowns in 2012 and 2013 “for the purpose of avoiding questions being asked about apparently lawful engagements when it turned out that the person killed was not armed, as distinct from facilitating or concealing deliberate unlawful killings.” The practice was described as “dishonest and discreditable,” “rather than an aid for covering up war crimes.”

Questions are also raised by references to another secret inquiry, which preceded the Brereton investigation. Dr. Samantha Crompvoets was commissioned by senior military command in 2015 to provide a “snapshot” of special forces operations and to probe allegations of war crimes.

According to the Brereton report, Crompvoets “said that she was given the impression that there had been a ‘large number of illegal killings’ that had been ‘reverse engineered.’” Afghans would be killed, and then subsequently placed on the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) of targeted militants.

That claim, which is only briefly mentioned in the Brereton report, is highly significant. The JPEL was a Coalition-wide list of individuals who were to be killed or captured, on the basis that they were allegedly high-level Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters and officials.

In 2010, WikiLeaks published the US army’s Afghan war logs, revealing the existence of a secret American assassination team, Task Force 373. Its targets were selected on the basis of the JPEL. Because of the flagrant illegality of these operations, the JPEL was a highly sensitive issue for the Coalition militaries. If Australian forces were placing Afghans on the list after they were murdered, it would likely have been known at a high level of the Coalition military command.

Aside from the many issues that are hinted at, but not illuminated, the character of the Brereton report, as a continuation of the protracted cover-up of Australian war crimes, is demonstrated by its insistence that senior military command was completely ignorant of the illegal actions.

“While it would have been much easier to report that it was poor command and leadership that was primarily to blame for the events disclosed in this Report, that would be a gross distortion,” the investigators declare. “But for a small number of patrol commanders, and their protégées, it would not have been thought of, it would not have begun, it would not have continued, and it would have been discovered. It is overwhelmingly at that level that responsibility resides.”

These patrol commanders, in some squadrons of the Special Air Service Regiment and the 2nd Commando Regiment, had fostered a “warrior culture.” They had covered up the violations of law, and operated with considerable autonomy from any branch of senior military command.

The purpose of this narrative is to legitimise the central claim of the report: that no military officials, above the level of patrol command, or government representatives knew anything about the war crimes.

This assertion is utterly implausible. The special forces were Australia’s fighting force in Afghanistan. They worked closely with allied troops, in sensitive operations, during a war that was widely opposed by the Australian and world population. It is therefore difficult to believe that their activities were not closely monitored by military intelligence, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and US intelligence agencies, all of which would have reported back to military command and to governments.

A number of the crimes, moreover, were committed in the years immediately following WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of the Afghan war logs, including 17 of the confirmed murders, which are listed as having occurred in 2012. In the wake of the WikiLeaks release, which revealed war crimes and heightened popular opposition to the occupation, governments and their agencies would have been closely following the activities of the elite Coalition fighting units, for fear of further exposures.

The entire character of the Brereton investigation—its secrecy, the prominence within it of senior military officials and the four years required to produce a report that conceals more information than it reveals—points to a cover-up.

This is underscored by the fact that the investigation has proceeded alongside the attempt by Australian authorities to prosecute David McBride, a former military lawyer, for leaking information of the war crimes to the press. McBride still faces the prospect of decades in prison for the exposure, which also triggered an unprecedented federal police raid of the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Meanwhile, government ministers have stated that any prosecution of the 19 soldiers who have been referred by Brereton to the federal police, could take up to a decade. The report notes that the investigators modelled their efforts on inquiries into alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan by the British state. They did not result in any prosecutions.

The report’s release has been greeted by utterly hypocritical hand-wringing from the Liberal-National Coalition government, the Labor Party opposition and the corporate media. They have spoken of a “national shame,” and a “betrayal” by the special forces soldiers.

All of this is aimed at hiding the fact that the murders, torture and other war crimes were the result of an illegal, neo-colonial war of occupation, the longest in Australian history. It has been overseen by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments and supported by the entire political and media establishment.

Those responsible for the war crimes include the Coalition governments of prime ministers John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, and the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

India’s unprecedented economic contraction deepens mass social misery

Kranti Kumara

The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s incompetent and chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unmitigated socio-economic and medical disaster, with tens of millions of workers and their families forced to go hungry due to job and income losses and the pandemic raging across the country out of control.

In late March, the autocratic Modi government announced, without any forewarning, a hastily improvised coronavirus lockdown. As businesses shut down, tens of millions of wage-workers—both day-labourers and those earning regular salaries in the formal sector—lost their jobs. With the Indian economy contracting by an unprecedented 23.9 percent in the April-June quarter, the unemployment rate shot above 20 percent.

Impoverished workers employed under the MNREGA program. (Photo Credit; Centre of Indian Trade Unions)

Unaccompanied by any serious mobilization of resources to provide systematic coronavirus testing, contact tracing and vastly improve the country’s ramshackle public health system, the lockdown utterly failed to halt the spread of the deadly pandemic. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has risen by a multiple of 47, since the BJP central government, supported by opposition-led state governments, abandoned virtually all lockdown measures at the end of May and, in the name of reviving the economy, effectively embraced a policy of “herd immunity”—letting the virus run rife through the population. As of yesterday, India had almost 9 million confirmed cases, second only to the US, and an undercounted official death toll of over 131,000.

The government’s calamitous response to the pandemic and callous, class indifference to the fate of working people was highlighted first and foremost by the suffering inflicted upon the impoverished migrant workers. As a result of the lockdown, tens of millions of internal migrant workers got stranded in cities all over the country, having lost their daily wages and in many cases their housing. Left by the authorities to fend for themselves without income or food, millions of migrant workers walked hundreds of kilometers to reach their home villages. In the process, they inadvertently helped spread the virus from urban to rural India.

With no jobs available in their villages, these workers have been compelled to compete for the menial jobs, such as ditch-digging, made available under the government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee program (MNREGA). MNREGA formally guarantees one member of every rural family 100 days of manual work per year at a sub-minimum wage rate that varies, depending on the state, from to 202 to 284 rupees per day (roughly US $2.70-$3.80). Despite the steep increase in demand for these jobs, the Modi government has cut the MNREGA budget by 13 percent this fiscal year.

In the current (April 2020 to March 2021) fiscal year, India’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to fall by double digits, an unprecedented contraction. The National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India’s oldest independent economic policy research institute, estimates that the country’s GDP will shrink by a massive 12.6 percent, while Moody’s in an updated forecast issued yesterday estimates a contraction of from 10.6 to 10.8 percent.

India’s April-June GDP contraction of 23.9 percent was far and away the biggest among the world’s twenty largest economies. Economic activity rebounded somewhat in the second quarter. On a year-to-year basis, economic analysts are forecasting a second quarter decline in the order of 8.6 to 13 percent. But the recovery has slowed in recent weeks, with one prominent Indian economic think-tank speaking of “recovery fatigue.”

Even prior to the pandemic, the Indian economy was facing a serious crisis with a steep fall in the economic growth rate to a mere 4.2 percent in the 2019-2020 fiscal year, and a massive growth of “non-performing” corporate debt that threatens to cripple the country’s banks. Just a few years ago, an 8 percent economic growth rate was considered the bare minimum needed to absorb the 1 million new entrants into the job market every month and avoid social unrest.

As would be expected, the current historic contraction has impacted every sphere of economic activity. This has led to a massive growth in joblessness—among day-labourers, workers in large manufacturing enterprises, and also professionals such as software engineers, teachers and accountants—further depressing consumer demand.

A recent article in the London-based Financial Times, “Suicides rise after virus puts squeeze on India’s middle class,” noted that despite their “earning top degrees in business administration or engineering, many graduates have been forced to shelve their aspirations and take jobs working as drivers for Uber or food delivery companies.”

The current slump has intensified a long-term decline in India’s labour-force participation rate that dates back to the beginning of the 21st Century. According to the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE), a prominent private business information company, the Employment Rate in October was a mere 37.6 percent. Employment Rate is defined as the percentage of the working age population that partook in some regular economic activity.

In India, about 67 percent of the population, or about 900 million people, are estimated to be between the ages of 15 and 64. An Employment Rate of only 37.6 percent implies that little more than a third of the working-age population is engaged in some regular economic activity, whether as a street vendor, factory worker, day-labourer, salaried employee or as a small business owner. Even if one excludes students, housewives and retirees, this means that there are hundreds of millions who are not “employed,” and thus entirely dependent on their families or must eke out a miserable existence through sporadic and irregular economic activity. Even among the so-called employed, the overwhelming majority are employed in the unregulated “informal sector,” enduring brutal working conditions, low pay and zero benefits.

Salaried jobs, which include occupations such as security guards, have disappeared at an alarming rate over the past six months. CMIE estimates that salaried jobs have fallen from 86 million to 65 million, a job loss of 21 million.

The situation in rural areas, with many migrant daily-wage workers stuck in their villages, is nothing less than a social calamity. Given that over 800-900 million persons in India survive on less than $2.50 per day, the current economic devastation has pushed hundreds of millions to the brink of starvation.

This shocking reality was underscored by a study titled “Affordability of nutritious diets in rural India,” published in the Food Policy journal in October. According to the authors, in rural areas, where the majority of Indians still live, close to 75 percent of the population would not be able to afford the cheapest possible nutritious diet even if they spent all of their earnings on food.

Although these findings are based upon household survey data of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) from 2001-2011, it would be no exaggeration to state that the current reality is worse than a decade ago. Despite this, the Indian government claims that country has achieved “food security.”

Due to a collapse in economic activity, both national and state government finances are in absolute shambles. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor C. Rangarajan has estimated that the combined fiscal deficit of the state and national governments this year will be a historic high of 14 per cent of the GDP.

Because of the precariousness of Indian government finances, Moody’s Investor Services has downgraded the country’s sovereign credit rating to one level above junk with a negative outlook. This mirrors similar ratings by the Fitch and Standard and Poor’s credit rating agencies.

The BJP government’s “answer” to the economic crisis has been to intensify the Indian ruling elite’s class war assault. To attract investment, it has accelerated a privatization drive; pushed through legislation aimed at promoting precarious contract-labour and that guts restrictions on layoffs and plant closures in the “formal sector; and adopted a farm “reform” that boosts agri-business at the expense of small farmers.

The Modi government has also doubled-down on the Indian ruling class’ military-strategic partnership with US imperialism, using the current border conflict with China as both a means to justify integrating India ever more fully into Washington’s anti-China war drive and to deflect public anger over the social crisis. With Washington’s explicit support, India is trying to attract American companies under pressure to “decouple” from China to make India an alternate production-chain hub.

All of this will invariably mean a further boost in military expenditures by New Delhi, whose $70 billion military budget is already the world’s third largest, and further draconian cuts to social expenditure.

A head-on clash between Modi, his pro-big business, Hindu supremacist BJP government and India’s increasingly rebellious working class is fast developing. Albeit with the aim of diverting the growing social anger behind the opposition Congress Party and other right-wing forces, India’s unions have felt compelled to call a one-day nationwide general strike for Thursday, Nov. 26.

US jobless claims surge

Jacob Crosse

On Thursday, the US Department of Labor jobless claims report revealed that another 742,000 people filed first time unemployment claims, an increase of over 30,000 from the previous week and the highest number in a month. The increase in filings upends claims of an imminent economic “recovery” and underscores the urgent need for indefinite financial relief for jobless workers, small business owners and their families.

The figures are based on the week ending November 14, just before several states such as Michigan, California, Oregon, Illinois and New Mexico began implementing stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders to lessen the out-of-control spread of COVID-19, which has risen dramatically in the last two weeks in the US from roughly 90,000 daily cases to over 160,000 cases, according to data compiled by Worldometers. Over 255,000 have died in the US due to COVID-19 as of this writing.

People wait to speak with representatives from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission about unemployment claims Thursday, July 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

The haphazard, chaotic and criminally delayed lockdown measures taken by some governors and mayors, which do not include the shutting down of “superspreader” factories and schools in response to overwhelmed hospital systems, have not been accompanied by an infusion of stimulus, leaving locked down workers and small business owners to fend for themselves.

Thursday’s report showed that another 233,000 workers were added to the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, bringing the total to 4.38 million, while claims for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program increased by 23,863 last week, raising the total to 320,234. The 233,000 added last week just to the PEUC program is about 8,000 more total claims compared to a typical week prior to the pandemic.

Between state unemployment and federal claims, the DOL (Department of Labor) has recorded 35 straight weeks of over 1 million jobless claims, an unprecedented number that has no historical comparison since tracking began. In addition to gig workers such as DoorDash, Uber and Lyft drivers, “independent contractors” and construction workers have seen employment opportunities evaporate as entire industries went into lockdown in March and never recovered.

An analysis of employment data by the Associated General Contractors of America found that only eight states, plus Washington D.C. had returned to or exceeded pre-coronavirus employment levels. The eight small states that saw mild recovery were South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Idaho and Maine. Only Virginia added more than 4,000 jobs while Idaho and Maine combined accounted for 300.

Meanwhile, California, with a significantly larger workforce, has seen a decline of over 6 percent in jobs, leading to 54,900 fewer workers employed from February through September compared to last year. This is followed by Texas, which reported 51,900 fewer construction jobs available, a 6.8 percent year-to-year decline, and New York reporting an 11 percent decrease.

Roughly 20.3 million people are still receiving some form of unemployment either through the state or federal pandemic unemployment programs that were created as part of the CARES Act at the end of March. Both of the programs are set to expire on December 26, leaving an estimated 12 million workers with nothing.

The coming “benefits cliff” is exacerbating mental health stressors for millions of people. “I’m in panic mode now, and depression is starting to set in because I don’t know how we’re going to pay the oil bill,” Laurie Jones, a laid off worker, told the Maine Beacon. “When I lose unemployment, I don’t know how we’re going to keep the lights on.”

The report revealed that continuing claims, that is people who had previously filed and were receiving funds, declined by 429,000 to roughly 6.4 million, the lowest since the pandemic began. This isn’t to say that 429,000 people got a job; instead, for many it is likely their unemployment eligibility has run out and they have simply dropped off.

For those who are still receiving benefits, the meager funds provided are not enough to keep pace with daily expenses. “I’m living on $216 a week,” said Jones. “It sucks.”

Data from the Federal Reserve shows that over 10 million fewer people are employed compared to the beginning of this year, a drop from a February high of 153 million to 142 million as of October 2020. The evaporation of millions of jobs and the deaths of thousands of people hasn’t been enough to satiate the voracious appetites of Wall Street investors and large corporations as layoffs continue to be announced.

On Wednesday, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Pat Foye released a “doomsday” budget that aims to slash service by 40 to 50 percent, increase fares and tolls, and eliminate 9,367 jobs, pending federal intervention. The changes are slated to go into effect as early as May and would cut the MTA workforce by about 13 percent.

“Firing 9,000 workers and slashing 40 percent of subway and bus service would cost millions of New Yorkers several hours of commuting time each week and devastate the city for decades to come,” said Betsy Plum, executive director of the Riders Alliance.

The MTA is seeking $12 billion in funding this year, while the American Public Transportation Association, a lobbying and advocacy group dominated by the transit agencies themselves, estimates that without $32 billion in emergency funding, six in 10 public transit systems in the US will see significant service reductions and layoffs in the coming months.

In Michigan, where roughly 952,000 people are currently collecting some form of unemployment compensation, an estimated 250,000 people could be laid off in the hospitality sector in the coming months, Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association president and CEO Justin Winslow told MLive.

In Lexington, Kentucky document-management company Lexmark, which employs 2,000 workers in the US, including 1,400 in Lexington alone, announced nationwide layoffs would begin on Wednesday. Despite workers accepting a pay freeze in March to stave off the unspecified number of layoffs, the company wrote it was proceeding with “taking this difficult step to ensure that Lexmark is positioned for long-term success.”

Even Major League Baseball champions the Los Angeles Dodgers, who signed a 25-year $8.35 billion television deal with SportsNet LA in January 2013 to help catapult the organization to a Forbes valuation of $3.4 billion this past year, announced layoffs on Thursday. Refusing to state how many workers would now be jobless, the organization cited “widespread economic devastation caused by the coronavirus,” in justifying the layoffs.

In addition to the Dodgers, the Oakland A’s announced in October that it would lay off 20 percent of their employees. The San Francisco Giants and Boston Red Sox also announced they would be laying off 10 percent of their workforce, while the Chicago Cubs eliminated 60 jobs in their business department this past September. Earlier reports also indicate that the Houston Astros and Baltimore Orioles have implemented an unspecified number of layoffs.

Despite ongoing layoffs and record-setting unemployment claims, which have led to an additional 8 million people falling into poverty since May according to researchers at Columbia University, “negotiations” on another relief bill to extend unemployment benefits and eviction protections continue to prove fruitless, as intended.

Nearly four months after the $600-a-week federal unemployment enhancement expired, with over 54 million in the US facing food insecurity, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Thursday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have “agreed to sit down and the staffs are going to sit down today or tomorrow to try to begin to see if we can get a real good Covid relief bill.”

When it comes to interfering with Wall Street profits, President-elect Joe Biden revealed again that his and the Democratic party’s commitment to science was merely a “hypothetical.” During a Thursday question-and-answer session with reporters, Biden dismissed any talk of a nationwide lockdown, despite nearly 2,000 people succumbing to the virus on November 18, with cases rising in all 50 states.

“It was a hypothetical question,” Biden angrily said in response to a reporter mentioning the concept of a nationwide lockdown. “I am not going to shut down the country, period.”

Biden added, “I’ll say it again: No national shutdown. … there’s no circumstance which I can see that would require a total national shutdown. I think that would be counterproductive.”

Increased use of food banks by middle-income families in UK as food poverty surges

Dennis Moore

Charities have identified an increase in the number of middle-income families being forced to use food banks.

These families are defined as the “new hungry” and constitute a growing layer of those who had previously had decent incomes and led a comfortable lifestyle. Now they are increasingly having to claim welfare benefits and use food banks to be able to feed themselves and their families.

The Feeding Britain network, a charity working with food banks, reports that its members have started providing food to middle-income families, often with mortgages and cars. They were typically business owners and the self-employed, thrown into financial crisis because they had lost their jobs during the pandemic and not been picked up by the benefit system.

Footprints in the Community food bank in northern England receives recent donation (Image credit: Twitter/Footprints_UK)

“We now see families at food banks who before the pandemic were able to pay their bills and still be comfortable enough to put food on the table. For the first time in many years that is no longer the case,” said the charity’s national director, Andrew Forsey.

The wider use of food banks by what would have only recently been considered a more affluent layer is a growing trend and an indicator of how the pandemic has created a far-reaching cost of living crisis.

Prior to the pandemic, the majority of those using food banks were typically destitute, without financial means, awaiting welfare benefit payments or low-paid workers not earning enough to feed themselves or their families.

Food banks have been handing out more and more food parcels throughout the pandemic as increasing numbers of families and individuals struggle to survive. Feeding Britain’s network of charities reported a staggering increase in demand from those needing food aid between March and September. This is expected to get a lot worse during the current lockdown.

The Beaumont Leys Food bank in Leicester went from providing food to 50 families to 500 families a week as the pandemic took hold in March. The NewStarts food bank in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire reported that demand had risen by 700 percent over the same period. Bonny Downs community association in East Ham, London handed out food to 4,000 people between April and June and there were lengthy queues forming an hour before the food bank opened.

Many of those who have lost their jobs are having to claim Universal Credit (UC) for the first time and are confronting the bitter reality that what they receive is not enough to live on. The Tory government increased UC by a meagre £20 a week following the onset of the pandemic, taking the total amount for an individual’s living expenses from just £73 to the still paltry £93 a week.

Jen Coleman from Black Country Food Bank said, “The £20 increase [in Universal Credit] has not meant that those in poverty have suddenly become better off, it has meant that they have been able to survive.”

While the UC increase was miniscule, millions will be thrown into yet deeper poverty if the government press ahead with their proposal to remove the £20 a week top-up, planned for April 2021.

For millions of workers and young people, the preceding decade was characterised by the imposition of austerity and cuts to essential services, driving a rise in the number of families depending on food banks to feed themselves. In the last five years, demand for emergency food has increased and since the onset of the pandemic the number of those being forced to use food banks has shot up—with half of those using food banks doing so for the first time.

Food charities reported that the first full month of lockdown in April this year was their busiest ever, with Britain’s biggest food bank network, the Trussell Trust, reporting that in the last two weeks of March demand for food parcels increased by 81 percent compared to the same period in 2019. It gave out 89 percent more food parcels in April than the same time last year, with the number of families requiring help doubling.

In the first six months to September, a record 1.2 million emergency parcels were handed out by the Trussell Trust. The number of food parcels the organisation handed out to children rose by 122 percent, with 470,000 parcels going to them.

In May, the Food Foundation reported that over 5 million people in the UK were living in households with children who had experienced food insecurity during the lockdown. The government and the Labour Party had to be forced by a popular campaign launched by England footballer Marcus Rashford to extend its free school meals programme to include the six-week summer holidays.

Data from the Trussell Trust, which runs 1,300 food banks, showed that greater demand was due to people moving from a wage income to benefits and people working for low wages. Low income, benefit delays and sickness or ill health were the three main reasons people were being referred to a Trussell Trust food bank, according to its latest report.

In 2017, 1.5 million people experienced destitution and were not able to afford essentials. Modelling carried out by Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University forecast that the economic impact of the pandemic in 2020/21 will lead to 670,000 additional people being pushed into destitution for the remaining part of 2020—a consequence of losing jobs, income and businesses.

This will translate into an additional 300,000 emergency food parcels having to be distributed in the last quarter of 2020, an increase of 60 percent on the same time last year.

Many of those who have been furloughed throughout the pandemic have lost 20 percent of their income as the scheme only covers 80 percent of wages. This disproportionately affects the low-paid who were typically already living a hand-to-mouth existence when working full-time. In the coming winter months, many of these families face the stark choice between paying for heating or putting food on the table.

The government’s main concern during the pandemic was to protect the interests of big business and finance, handing billions to the banks and the corporations, implementing a “herd immunity” policy and providing pitiful to non-existent financial support to furloughed workers and those who lost their jobs. The effect of this policy was to starve especially low-paid workers back into unsafe workplaces.

The burden of feeding the increasing numbers of people unable to find work has meanwhile been placed at the foot of overstretched food banks and charities, now feeling the strain of growing demand as more and more people end up hungry.