Nearly seven million German adults are heavily indebted

Elisabeth Zimmermann

In Germany, almost one in 10 adults cannot make ends meet with their income. This is shown by the recently published Debtor Atlas 2020 published by the credit agency Creditreform. According to this report, over 6.85 million people over age 18 are heavily indebted.

The Debtor Atlas analyses and documents the level of private indebtedness of individuals unable to pay bills over a longer period of time, unable to pay multiple credit instalments or who had to file for private bankruptcy.

The Debtor Atlas shows a slight decrease compared to last year. However, it does not yet take into account the longer-term effects of the pandemic: The atlas is based in part on data from the Federal Statistical Office from the year to May 2020, as well as on its own extrapolations. The next report will doubtlessly show a massive increase in debt figures.

Compared to last year, almost 70,000 people are now less indebted, a decrease of just under 1 percent. However, this does not apply to all regions: The highest private debt rates by city and district often overlap with the highest poverty regions. For example, in the Ruhr area, the indebtedness of private individuals and households has risen to over 18 percent in the cities of Herne and Gelsenkirchen and to 17.5 percent in Duisburg. The city with the highest private debt is Bremerhaven with 21.8 percent.

People are ordered to wear mandatory face masks due to the coronavirus pandemic at a shopping street in Cologne, Germany, October 22, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Martin Meissner]

Considering the whole of Germany, Creditreform researchers are warning of “the calm before the storm.” In light of the deep economic crisis that is developing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, they are going on the assumption that near-future private indebtedness and private insolvencies will increase enormously. Patrik-Ludwig Hantzsch, head of Economic Research at Creditreform, predicts the consequences of the pandemic will surpass in seriousness those of the 2008–2009 global economic crisis.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, around 700,000 people have lost their jobs (as of the end of August 2020). Many hundreds of thousands of further jobs are under threat. More than 7 million people were or are working reduced hours. According to Creditreform estimates, around 2 million freelancers and self-employed are struggling to survive.

Almost 15 million households in Germany have to cope with lower incomes. They must cover rent, day-care and sustenance, regardless. Those whose income had hardly sufficed before the pandemic are increasingly faced with the alternative of paying their bills or putting food on the table.

The pandemic and its economic consequences are exacerbating the growth of social inequality. Creditreform researchers assume that the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen as a result of the pandemic and that debts will accumulate at one end of the spectrum to the same extent as fortunes will grow at the other. They point out that in spring it was mainly jobs in the low-wage sector that vanished, like restaurants and cab companies, to name but a few. Young professionals on limited contracts and casual workers were and remain strongly affected.

One important reason long cited by Creditreform as central to the indebtedness of private individuals and households is the steady increase in the number of long-term low-wage earners. In 2020, 640,000 cases of indebtedness are attributable to long-term low incomes. This number has nearly trebled since 2015 when 230,000 cases of indebtedness triggered the introduction of the low-wage category. These cases account for 9 percent of all private indebtedness.

Responsible for the rapid growth of the low-wage sector are the Agenda 2010 and the Hartz laws introduced in 2005 by the SPD/Green government of Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer with the support of the trade unions. The Debtor Atlas cites the following figures from the Federal Statistical Office to illustrate the massive social impact this policy has had:

“One in five employees (21 percent) in Germany worked in the low-wage sector in April 2018. This means that around 8 million jobs paid below the low wage barrier (€11.05 per hour). … At 1.5 million, most low-wage jobs were reported in the retail sector, with 1.2 million in the hospitality industry. This means that a good two-thirds (67 percent) of all jobs in the hospitality industry were low wage, more than in any other sector. By comparison, the share of low-wage jobs in the retail sector was 29 percent, with the second highest share of 54 percent in agriculture, forestry and fishing, which employs around 310,000 people.”

The coronavirus pandemic is making the situation much worse, and many young people are currently losing their jobs or apprenticeships. In particular, students who have to work in parallel to their studies cannot find replacements for lost part-time work in catering and similar areas. Their precarious situation will be reflected primarily in next year’s report. In the current Debt Atlas 2020, the number of indebted young people fell by 303,000 to 1.1 million compared to the previous year.

However, indebtedness among older people has risen sharply. In the age group 50 to 59, it rose by 73,000 to 1.3 million cases; in the 60 to 69 age group by 84,000 to 725,000 cases; and in the age group 70-plus by 89,000 to 425,000 cases. These debt figures provide a further insight into the growth of poverty among seniors and the social dimension of the pandemic: Older people who cannot live from their pensions have to take on additional work, even though, as senior citizens, they count among the particularly vulnerable.

Significantly, the number of marginally employed over-60-year-olds has risen sharply as many in this group cannot get by on their pensions. The growing indebtedness is even more pronounced among those “marginally employed in part-time jobs.” Here the increase since 2003 has been 691 percent.

In a separate chapter, the Creditreform study looks at the extremely high level of debt among private consumers in the US and the UK. Both countries are particularly hard hit by the coronavirus. In the US, more than 250,000 people have now died of COVID-19 as a result of the criminal policy of “herd immunity” advocated and enforced by both capitalist parties, Republicans and Democrats. In Britain, the official death toll is over 65,000, although the unofficial number is far higher.

In both countries, as in Germany, the coronavirus crisis is used to carry out extreme attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions. In the US, almost 58 million people can no longer pay their bills; 30-40 million are threatened with eviction. More than 41 million workers have lost their jobs since March this year. The real unemployment rate is at least 20 percent. Even before COVID-19, 37 million Americans suffered from hunger. In the meantime, their number has continued to rise. Tens of millions are dependent on the assistance of Foodbanks.

In Britain, unemployment has risen from 4 to 10 percent just this year. Over 14 million people live in poverty. The situation will become even worse for millions of workers after government support measures expire at the end of October.

In Germany, too, the effects of poverty, unemployment, low-wage work and indebtedness are reflected in an ever-increasing rush on food banks. According to the last survey, in 2019 1.65 million people across Germany used food banks to obtain food. Forty-four percent are adults, 30 percent children and young people, 26 percent senior citizens. The number of older people in particular, as well as children and young people, has risen alarmingly by 20 percent and 10 percent, respectively, within a year.

The enormous scale of social inequality expressed in the private debt of millions of people has been exacerbated by the actions of capitalist governments around the world since the outbreak of the pandemic. Last spring, hundreds of billions of euros, dollars and pounds were tossed into the throats of corporations and banks in the form of so-called aid packages. This served to keep share prices high so that the rich and the richest could enrich themselves yet further.

The pandemic has a definite social component. While millions of workers have to pay with their lives and health to keep the economy and schools running, despite the dangers of COVID-19, the fortunes of the super-rich grow beyond measure.

Strikes and protests across Germany against regular school operations

Gregor Link & Philipp Frisch

The incidence of infections in German schools has long since run out of control. Often, dozens of students and teachers are infected at a single school. But the federal and state governments have made clear that they want to keep schools fully open at all costs and are systematically covering up coronavirus cases. Under these conditions, students throughout Germany are beginning to take the protection of their health and their families into their own hands.

After student strikes in Greece and Poland and strikes by teachers in France, students in Germany are also organizing school strikes and protests in more and more cities. They are no longer prepared to be sacrificed for a policy that puts the profit interests of billion-dollar corporations before the most basic needs of the population.

Last Monday, students at the Hugo-Kükelhaus-Berufskolleg (HKBK) in Essen went on an “indefinite strike,” calling for hybrid teaching, i.e., a mixture of classroom and distance learning in which classes are divided up and taught in rotation. The WSWS has reported on this.

Schoolchildren crowd in a school center in the Hacheney district of Dortmund

“We are afraid,” the HKBK student council wrote in a statement on the strike. “Fear of infecting grandma and grandpa. Fear of infecting ourselves. Fear of losing people who mean a lot to us.” While “outside of schools [safety] measures were being intensified,” they continued to sit “day after day, for hours together in close quarters.” The Essen students appealed to their classmates at all “secondary and vocational schools in the country to do the same as us!”

The WSWS spoke with Luisa Maria Cagnazzo, the HKBK student spokesperson, who reported many confirmed cases at the school. She said she had had personal contact with one person. “If classes continued to run as they have, I think it is inevitable that you become infected,” says Luisa. “Classes have divided themselves independently into A and B groups according to individual class size. They are now alternating between distance and in-person classes to halve the number of contacts.”

Luisa reports that students are being put “under enormous pressure” by the authorities, the Education Ministry and the government, and explains, “Many are afraid of getting a six [bad mark] if they go on strike. I don’t think that’s right. It’s not acceptable that our education system punishes students for taking responsibility for the health of their fellow human beings.”

Regarding the reasons why students are being put at risk and under pressure, Luisa said, “Schools are to remain open to maintain regular operations and thus the economy.” The strike is intended to show “that the health of students, teachers and their families is more important. In our opinion, the whole class should be quarantined in case of infection.” Several student councils “who want to join our struggle” had contacted them.

Students have also organized protests at the Gauß-Gymnasium in Worms after coronavirus cases were confirmed there, most recently in the upper school. Like the HKBK students in Essen, they are also demanding hybrid classes with divided learning groups, so-called A/B weeks. “We sit cheek to cheek next to each other and have no distance between us at all,” says Can, a student at the high school, in an interview with broadcaster SWR. His classmate Sarah adds, “I think that conditions at the moment simply don’t work at all. The measures are simply impossible.”

Not even the immediate neighbouring classmates of infected students are quarantined, reports student representative Emanuel Bauer. Nor had they been tested. “And the direct neighbours are still sitting here in the school,” explains Emanuel. The state government of Social Democrats (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens and the SPD-led state Education Ministry in Rhineland-Palatinate insist that classes remain full and that all pupils attend. Questioned by broadcaster SWR, the health authority did not want to comment and merely let it be known that everything was “following the rules.”

In Hesse, where the state government is particularly notorious for its herd immunity policy, pupils have founded the unverantwortlich.org (irresponsible.org) initiative. They collect photo statements on their Instagram account from students protesting against the life-threatening regular operations and the inaction of the federal and state governments. The World Socialist Web Site spoke about this with Altay, a founding member of the initiative, who is in 12th grade in Hesse.

Altay, too, is demanding that the coronavirus measures recommended by the public health body Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which envisage halving class sizes when there are more than 50 cases, be adhered to. “Also, we are demanding that education provision is ensured for all pupils and that air filters are installed throughout the school,” he explains. “Although there have already been several cases of infection at our school, the RKI’s measures have so far hardly been implemented at all. In other respects, too, the only things that are being done are merely symbolic. In Hesse, just enough money has been made available to install two air filter systems at each school.”

Altay impressively describes the effects of the criminal policies being pursued by the federal and state governments against students, teachers and parents. “When I go to school in the morning, I feel as if I am going to a state-ordered ‘coronavirus party.’ The corridors and refectories are still full. Despite the cold, ventilation continues to be provided regularly, of course. When I wrote a paper today, I was so cold that I had to keep pressing my hands in my lap to continue writing.”

The founders of unverantwortlich.org were pleasantly surprised by the good response to their initiative. “Our demands are essentially common sense among students and teachers. The student body has overwhelmingly supported our demands, and we have also received broad support from the public. Many people have contacted us and thanked us personally, including parents.”

The students are also supported by teachers from Hesse. “We can’t go on like this, the risk of getting infected and the psychological burden for all involved is too great,” Wolfgang Kuhn, a teacher at the vocational Martin Luther King School, explained to the Hessische-Niedersächsische Allgemeine .

Many other comments by teachers on social media make clear that the education minister’s supposed concern for “child welfare” and educational inequality has nothing to do with reality. On the contrary, decades of austerity policies in education—enforced by all parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament)—have created the current situation. The policy of the Hesse Ministry of Culture (responsible for education) had “dumbfounded” him, Kuhn said.

Given the mass protests by pupils and teachers in Greece, Poland and France, Altay said, unverantwortlich.org declared “our solidarity with all our fellow pupils on this earth who are fighting for their rights and their health.”

To link these struggles together, students must build rank-and-file committees for safe education. All the establishment parties—from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Left Party—are pushing the herd immunity policy using a mixture of political and administrative coercion and cover-ups. The rank-and-file committees must therefore be completely independent of these parties and the trade unions, which sometimes “critically” support this policy but are more often in the front lines of helping to implement it.

Tamino, a founding member of a network of action committees in Karlsruhe, says concerning the ongoing herd immunity policy advocated by all parties, “This shows, I think, simply once again that capitalism is not ethical and in no way a system of the many, of the masses, but only a system of the 1 percent, which even allows massive dying among the masses for the benefit of the 1 percent. Thus, it is neither moral nor democratic.”

Berdan, who goes to a vocational school in Dortmund not far from the HKBK, and who co-founded an action committee there in August, explains, “That is the essence of capitalism. It did not surprise me that the ruling classes put human lives at risk. This happened too often in the past.”

Given the rapid spread of the virus in classes and school buildings, students must not lose any time. They must expand the strikes and understand that they are ultimately in conflict with capitalism, which is willing to sacrifice the health and lives of ordinary students, teachers and parents for the interests of the economic and financial elites. Only anti-capitalist, i.e., socialist, conclusions can be drawn from this insight.

Boris Johnson announced end of national lockdown, prepares surge of COVID-19

Thomas Scripps

UK prime minister Boris Johnson revealed yesterday the government’s plans for ending its one-month “lockdown” on December 2 and for allowing gatherings over Christmas.

Thousands more will be allowed to die in the coming weeks to secure the corporations’ holiday season profits, with a renewed surge of the virus coinciding with the typical peak of the flu season.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a Covid-19 Press Conference on Saturday October 31 in 10 Downing Street. (Picture by Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street)

From Wednesday next week, all non-essential shops, gyms, hairdressers and other personal care businesses in England will be allowed to reopen, along with places of worship. The “Tier system” will be reintroduced with some modifications. Pubs, restaurants and cafes can now only act as takeaways in areas under Tier 3 restrictions and pubs and restaurants can only reopen fully in Tier 2 areas if they serve “substantial meals”. Reduced numbers of spectators will be allowed into indoor and outdoor sporting events.

The so-called “rule of six” will be reinstated, allowing up to six people from different households to meet indoors or outdoors in Tier 1 areas, only outdoors in Tiers 2, and in limited outdoor settings in Tier 3. But even these limited restrictions will be scrapped for a period over Christmas. The Telegraph reports that up to four households will be allowed to come together in one home for December 24-28. The paper suggests that restrictions on pubs and restaurants will also be lifted for those five days.

These measures confirm that Johnson is proceeding with its “herd immunity” policy His partial lockdown was never intended to save lives, but to prevent a politically catastrophic overwhelming of the National Health Service (NHS) this December and provide a pretext for loosening restrictions in the commercially critical Christmas period. Now households will also be allowed to travel across the country and spend multiple nights under one roof.

This is the common policy of the European ruling class, with governments, to a lesser or greater degree all preparing to wind down minor additional public health measures introduced this autumn. Britain is once again leading the way in this murderous campaign, having taken 20 days longer than the rest of Europe to bring the R (reproduction rate) of the virus below 1 during the first wave in spring, according to the OECD.

Business interests and their mouthpieces in the media have already taken their cue. The Daily Mail cheered yesterday, “Brace for Christmas shopping! The High Street re-opens next week with the end of national lockdown as Boris Johnson draws up plan for family 'bubbles' to gather for Christmas”. The Times likewise nodded its approval with the headline, “Boris Johnson to ease Covid lockdown with Christmas shopping spree”.

Scientists warning of the disastrous impact of these decisions have been sidelined. Andrew Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at University College London and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told the BBC last week: “My personal view is we’re putting far too much emphasis on having a near normal Christmas. We know respiratory infections peak in January, so throwing fuel on the fire over Christmas can only contribute to this.

“We’re on the cusp of being able to protect those elderly people who we love through vaccination and it would be tragic to throw that opportunity away and waste the gains we’ve made during lockdown by trying to return to normality over the holidays.”

Hayward stressed he was speaking in a personal capacity. The Guardian reported that other SAGE members, who have not spoken out, share this view.

Bristol epidemiologist and Independent SAGE member Dr Gabriel Scally put the situation most sharply, telling ITV, “There is no point in having a very merry Christmas and then burying friends and relations in January and February. We need to think very seriously about Christmas and how we’re going to spend it.”

Public Health England, on SAGE’s advice, have admitted that every one day of relaxed restrictions over Christmas will require five days of tighter restrictions. In other words, even aside from the effects of lifting restrictions next week, the government intends to throw away even whatever minimal impact the current one-month lockdown has, in order to boost the corporations profits over Christmas.

Increased infection rates over the winter will accelerate an already far-advanced epidemic. The prevalence of coronavirus remains at a dangerously high level. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Coronavirus Infection Survey for November 20, around 730,000 people were infected with the virus in the week up to November 14. Although the rise in the number of new daily infections appears to be falling slightly, roughly 39,000 people were still contracting COVID-19 every day that week.

Nationally, the R rate was still above one. Infection rates among primary and especially secondary school-aged children continue to increase.

As restrictions are lifted and these numbers begin to rise again, renewed strain will be placed on a health service already reeling from the last 10 months. Four out of five intensive care consultants surveyed by the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine report that their unit is stretched by a shortage of doctors and nurses. Sixty percent of intensive care units (ICUs) have nursing vacancies and 40 percent have to close beds weekly due to staff shortages. Fifty-four percent have broken the guideline 1:1 ratio of nurses to patients in ICUs due to a combination of high patient and low staff numbers.

Workers throughout the National Health Service (NHS) report extreme burnout, with thousands indicating their intention to leave the health service.

Barely a trace of this catastrophe makes its way into the corporate media. No reports mention that 13,000 people have already been killed by COVID-19 in the last two months, roughly corresponding with the second wave of the pandemic, according to official figures. The hundreds dying every day are treated as little more than a cost of doing business.

This reflects the unanimity of the ruling class in imposing a “herd immunity” policy. The Labour Party continue to back Johnson to the hilt, with sections outflanking him on the right. Liverpool’s Labour mayor, Joe Anderson, yesterday called for a more widespread reopening of pubs and restaurants.

Workers overwhelmingly oppose this calculated endangering of human life, but Labour and the trade unions are working systematically to prevent this opposition gaining a political voice and leadership. Through their efforts, the political tone is increasingly set by the most right-wing political forces, arguing for an end to virtually all restrictions.

Mark Harper, chair of the 70-strong “Coronavirus Recovery Group” of ferociously anti-lockdown Tory MPs, has already warned Johnson the group may vote against his plans—“Many will hold their judgement on these measures until we know which areas will go into which tiers…”

Former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith was even more bullish, writing in the Daily Mail on the morning of the prime minister’s announcement, “the plan to introduce a toughened-up three-tier system to replace it [the national lockdown] does not sound like any meaningful let up in the devastating restrictions the country faces.” Fellow Tory MP Nus Ghani wrote in the Telegraph, “We cannot continue to live in this childlike cycle of repeated, damaging lockdowns”, and called for a “different and enduring strategy for living with the virus”.

The Telegraph, a leading anti-lockdown voice, accused Johnson in an editorial of working to a “defeatist” timescale and declared that pubs and restaurants “deserve better.” Fraser Nelson, the editor of its Spectator magazine, wrote last week, “There will be no Boris reset until he breaks the endless lockdown cycle”, singing the praises of the Swedish governments herd immunity model.

These are only the most extreme advocates of the policy of mass death already being pursued by all the major parties, in service to corporate profits and the stock market. Workers and young people must intervene on their own independent political platform if a further terrible loss of life this winter is to be prevented. The prospect of a vaccine next year only makes the deaths suffered in the meantime all the more criminal.

Australian university union blocks opposition as cuts to jobs and conditions intensify

Mike Head

Thousands more jobs are currently being eliminated by the managements at Australia’s public universities. Every week brings new announcements of retrenchments as the employers exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate pro-business restructuring operations.

This further wave of redundancies, both “voluntary” and forced, is on top of about 90,000 job cuts since March, as estimated by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the main trade union covering university workers.

This offensive has reached a qualitatively new level. At the University of Sydney and elsewhere, entire departments are being shut down or subjected to “spill and fill” attacks. That is, tenured academics and other permanent staff members are being retrenched and forced to apply for smaller pools of jobs, and on reduced pay and conditions.

NTEU worker protest (Wikimedia Commons)

None of this would be possible without the role of the NTEU. From the outset of the pandemic in March, it has opposed and blocked a unified industrial and political struggle against the unprecedented assault.

With university workers isolated from each other as a result—university-by-university and even department-by-department—the managements have been emboldened to unveil far-reaching cuts. Announcements in recent weeks include:

• “Spill and fill” retrenchments of learning centre and medical science departments at the University of Sydney, on top of about 500 “voluntary” redundancies across the university.
• At least 36 “change proposals” at Western Sydney University, some involving forced redundancies or redeployments, in addition to hundreds of “voluntary” redundancies.
• About 180 forced and “voluntary” job losses at Southern Cross University, in northern New South Wales (NSW), together with the merger of six schools into four faculties.
• A university-wide restructure at Brisbane’s Griffith University, which involves the destruction of 300 jobs, on top of voluntary retirements.
• The scrapping or reduction by La Trobe University, in Victoria, of about a dozen “financially unviable” disciplines in the arts and education, including creative arts, Hindi, Indonesian, modern Greek studies, planning and community development, and philosophy, despite staff having agreed to a 10 percent pay cut.
• The elimination of more than 350 jobs at University of Technology, Sydney.
• The destruction of more than 300 jobs at Sydney’s Macquarie University.
• The cutting of more than 15 percent of the workforce in a major restructure at the University of New England, in central NSW.
• At least 500 courses are under consideration to be cut or consolidated at the University of Newcastle, with five faculties to be consolidated into three.
• The University of Wollongong’s new “One-UOW” plan will mean an as-yet unknown number of job cuts.
• The outsourcing of basic services, such as AV, printing, telephony, IT and library, at the Australian National University in Canberra, on top of the elimination of nearly 500 jobs by forced or voluntary “separations.”
• Melbourne’s Swinburne University to retrench 10 percent of its total workforce.

Worse is to come in 2021, due to deeper government funding cuts. The global resurgence of the pandemic also means there will be even fewer full fee-paying international students next year. A recent report by the Mitchell Institute said overseas applications to study in Australia have collapsed by more than 80 percent since March, and the number of international students is expected to be just 300,000, or half the pre-pandemic total, by mid-2021.

At each university, the response of the NTEU has been to appeal for consultation with the union on how to implement cost-cutting, while opposing any industrial action. Invariably, the statements issued by NTEU officials say their members accept the need for cuts to cope with revenue losses caused by COVID-19—thus opening the way for job losses—but the proposals go beyond what is necessary.

Nationally, the NTEU is telling university workers to “draw breath” and prepare for the next round of enterprise bargaining in 2021. Yet, in that “bargaining” the union will volunteer more sacrifices of wages and conditions on the false pretext of preventing even more job losses. In fact, the NTEU’s starting point will be based on the discredited “job protection framework” of April–May, when the union offered the employers pay cuts of up to 15 percent, before being forced to abandon the package in the face of rank-and-file outrage.

In the November edition of the union’s Sentry magazine, NTEU national president Alison Barnes told members: “As the year draws to a close, we should stop and draw breath for a minute and reflect on what we’ve been forced to deal with: the biggest crisis the higher education sector has ever faced.”

Barnes was forced to concede the utter failure of the union’s efforts to convince various right-wing senators and the university vice-chancellors—the same people unleashing the job cuts—to oppose the Liberal-National government’s Job-Ready Graduates Bill, which will accelerate the cuts and the elimination of courses that do not meet the needs of the corporate elite.

Barnes’s “end of year” message amounts to accepting, as a fait accompli, the destruction of jobs and conditions that has occurred throughout 2020. At the same time, the union is imploring members to sign up to training sessions in the rules of enterprise bargaining.

“Enterprise bargaining is our opportunity to win improved working rights and conditions for higher education workers,” the union’s NSW secretary Michael Thomson and assistant secretary Damien Cahill claimed in one typical email.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Enterprise bargaining was first imposed on workers by the unions and the Keating Labor government in the 1990s. It is designed to atomise the working class and erode conditions, by subordinating workers to the requirements of “their” individual employer. This process has gone on for four decades, allowing the public universities to be casualised and transformed into corporate entities.

The managements and the NTEU will use the 2021 round of union bargaining to cement the deep cuts already inflicted in 2020 and demand even more sacrifices by university workers. That was confirmed in early October. An NTEU national council meeting, comprised of officials and branch delegates, “reaffirmed the NTEU’s higher education policy positions”—that is, the concessionary “job protection framework.”

Despite this, the pseudo-left parties behind the NTEU Fightback group and the National Higher Education Action Network are striving to prevent university workers from breaking out of the NTEU’s political and industrial straitjacket.

In its report on the NTEU council meeting, the NTEU Fightback Facebook page faithfully echoed the union leadership’s call. It declared that its “supporters will be building the union from the ground up, fighting our darndest against the current job cuts, and preparing for the fight of our lives in the next bargaining round.”

The group declared its readiness to “support NTEU officials when they serve the memberships’ interests,” while claiming it would oppose them when they don’t.”

In reality, the bitter experiences of 2020 have confirmed that the NTEU, like the rest of the trade unions, is organically opposed to the interests of its members and the working class as a whole.

The pseudo-left groups, such as Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance and Solidarity, aspire to become the leadership of the union themselves. They are following in the footsteps of earlier members of their groups, such as Alison Barnes and Michael Thomson, who are today presiding over the destruction of jobs and conditions.

The Socialist Equality Party and the Committee for Public Education are fighting to clarify these issues for university workers and urging them to draw the essential conclusion—the need to form genuine new working class organisations, rank-and-file committees, completely independent of the trade unions.

These committees would seek to organise a nationwide, unified struggle for secure well-paid jobs and basic rights, protect staff and students from unsafe COVID-19 conditions and link up with educators nationally and internationally who are facing similar critical struggles against the impact of the worsening global crisis.

This means challenging the capitalist profit system and turning to a socialist perspective based on the total reorganisation of society in the interests of all, instead of the financial oligarchy.

Deep budget cuts face mass transit systems throughout the United States

Nick Barrickman

Public transit systems have announced plans for massive budget cuts and layoffs as federal emergency aid has run out in localities across the United States. Transit administrators and experts have called for continued infusions of cash to help stave off significant cuts as mass ridership has not picked up from its precipitous fall off in the spring.

In Washington, DC, representatives of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), popularly known as Metro, announced plans to eliminate 1,400 of the system’s nearly 12,000 workers through layoffs and early retirements. The transit system has reported losses of nearly $100 million per-month throughout the course of the pandemic, exhausting the $767 million in funds it received under the CARES Act stimulus.

A subway conductor wearing a face mask in the Bronx borough of New York (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Despite the near-total reopening of the system to the public in August, fare revenue is 78 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels. “Metro officials say they have run out of options to avoid making difficult decisions as they grapple with the crisis brought on by the pandemic,” states a Washington Post report. The system has reported a $176 million shortfall.

In a bid for increased revenue, the transit system has announced plans to return to the collection of bus fares in January. During spring, the WMATA had suspended the collection of bus fares and only allowed rear door boarding on the buses. Now, bus operators will be given a plastic shield in return for a resumption of front door boarding.

Last weekend, WMATA reported that a second transit worker, a storage room clerk, had died from COVID-19. According to WMATA, 435 workers have tested positive for COVID-19.

The decision to cut WMATA funding follows the decision of transit systems throughout the United States to announce plans to lay off workers and cut services. Last week, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced 9,367 layoffs, along with a universal wage freeze for all employees. Additionally, 40 percent of bus services could be axed in the country’s largest public transit system. The MTA has reported a projected $6 billion budget deficit for 2020.

In Philadelphia, representatives of the South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) announced that “every option will be considered” as the system projects a $350 million budget deficit.

Earlier this month, SEPTA announced that it would be suspending overnight rail service for its Market-Frankford and Broad Street lines. SEPTA officials have largely remained quiet about other cuts to services. SEPTA general manager Leslie Richards stated last week to the Philadelphia Inquirer that the system was considering reductions “both on the cuts side, as well as on how we need to make changes. We simply cannot afford to approach it in any other way.”

A September report by the New York-based TransitCenter projected that a 40 percent service cut on SEPTA would result in 400,000 people losing access to transit in the Philadelphia region. The Inquirer quotes TransitCenter spokesperson Ben Fried, who declares: “Once cuts are made, it is not a matter of just snapping back to normal as soon as you put your budget back together again,” i.e. the cuts will become permanent.

Earlier this month, Boston’s Metropolitan Bay Transportation Agency (MBTA) announced it would be cutting weekend commuter rail trips, 25 different bus routes as well as ferry and overnight subway services. In October, the MBTA reported 330,000 daily trips on average in its system. This is down from over 1.26 million daily before the pandemic.

In October, the San Francisco-based Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system announced forced retirements for employees along with other cuts. The system has a $33 million deficit projected for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending June 2021. The 2021 fiscal year budget is also predicted to have a deficit of $177 million. As of last month, BART ridership was at 13 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Arkansas’s Rock Region Metro system announced this month that, due to “the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on local government budgets,” it would refrain from asking local governments for pre-pandemic levels of funding. According to Arkansas Online, the transit system was able to tap $2.2 million in CARES Act funding for this year, “money that won’t be available in future years.”

As a part of the March CARES Act package, Congressional leaders gave $25 billion to transit systems in the US. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has asked Congress for another infusion of funds for regional transit systems as the pandemic continues to ravage the US population, reporting over 200,000 daily cases for the first time last week.

According to APTA, without such funding, nearly 6 in 10 transit systems will face cutbacks in the near future. “If you look at the worst outcomes, I think for some, it could mean dramatic reductions in service,” stated APTA CEO and president Paul Skoutelas in a September report. “For some, it may even mean, unless there is additional forthcoming resources, they may even have to shut down.”

The budget cuts are being prepared despite significant numbers of low paid essential and other workers being forced to rely on public transportation. Science Daily interviewed researchers from Ohio State University who found that “in cities in the Midwest and the deep South, most public transit users have jobs where they still had to come in to work during the pandemic and didn’t have any other choice.”

“These are the health care workers, people working service jobs, working in grocery stores, people who clean and maintain buildings,” stated researcher Harvey Miller, director of Ohio State’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis.

Under conditions where essential workers have been forced to bear the brunt of the pandemic, Democratic and Republican Party-controlled jurisdictions are demanding that workers, whom they manipulatively refer to as “heroes,” now must suffer the consequences of budget deficits.

Rather than mobilize workers in defense of their livelihoods, various trade union officials have begged for additional funds from the presumptive administration of president-elect, Democrat Joe Biden. This, despite Biden’s pledges to serve the interests of Wall Street as well as his history of enforcing austerity as part of the Obama administration during the last major financial crisis in 2008-2009.

Zoom cancels meetings at several universities on Zoom censorship

John Conrad

Over the last month, Zoom, the widely-used online conferencing platform, has been facing tremendous backlash against its recent censorship of online meetings at several prominent universities.

In late September, the company shut down an online seminar at San Francisco State University (SFSU) titled “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled,” featuring Palestinian rights activist Leila Khaled. This was followed in late October by the company’s termination of three online events, organized in solidarity with SFSU, at New York University (NYU), the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH), and the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

Zoom removed the SFSU seminar from its platform the day before it was scheduled to take place, responding to mounting pressure from various pro-Israel and Zionist groups. The company argued that the meeting was “in violation of Zoom’s Terms of Service” because it may violate federal laws by providing “material support” for terrorism. This is referring to Khaled’s long-time membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was added to the US Department of State’s list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” in 1997.

In an email to The Intercept, Zoom Spokesperson Andy Duberstein made it quite clear that the company can bar anyone from using its services. In his email, Duberstein notes a section of the company’s terms of services that states, “Zoom may investigate any complaints and violations that come to its attention and may take any (or no) action that it believes is appropriate, including, but not limited to issuing warnings, removing the content or terminating accounts and/or User profiles.”

Zoom’s cancelation of SFSU’s seminar was followed by Facebook’s removal of the event’s livestream link and promotional material from its platform. Facebook also issued threats to shut down the online pages of the event’s sponsors. YouTube shut down the livestream of the seminar on its platform 23 minutes after it had started.

The ludicrous arguments put forward by Zoom, Google and Facebook that the event was providing “material support” for terrorism is invalidated by the fact that not only was Khaled participating in a personal capacity, not as a representative of the PFLP, but she was not getting paid to speak at the event.

Zoom’s blatant act of political censorship was met with widespread denunciations by educators and students around the world, and at least a dozen major universities planned to hold online meetings in solidarity with SFSU on October 23. Zoom, acting on information provided to them by “third parties,” shut down three of these meetings the day that they were scheduled to take place. Numerous organizations, including the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), have strongly denounced the censorship by Zoom as a flagrant attack on free speech on campuses.

In stark contrast to the protest of faculty, students and organizers, the university administrations of both NYU and SFSU sided with Zoom.

In his response to a letter from the organizers of NYU’s censored October 23 meeting, NYU President Andrew Hamilton defends Zoom’s actions, writing, “While their interpretation might be open to argument, it is not a surprise that businesses will steer away from actions that they believe may leave them open to criminally liability.” He concludes the letter by writing, “I would also note that terrorist violence conflicts with academic freedom.” Hamilton made it quite clear that the university is not taking any steps to prevent future acts of censorship.

In fact, NYU itself has in the past sought to prevent student clubs, including the IYSSE, from holding meetings on campus by denying them official status. The university maintains close ties to Facebook and the US state apparatus. It is also playing a significant role in the surveillance of political activity on social media.

Most recently, NYU settled the “anti-Semitism” lawsuit filed by a former student at the beginning of the year. This lawsuit was part of the state-led effort to equate criticism of the crimes of the Israeli government and capitalism with violent attacks against Jews. The aim of this campaign is to slander and criminalize left-wing criticism of capitalism and imperialism. Even though the investigation by the U.S. Department of Education cleared NYU of any wrongdoing, the university has agreed to adopt the reactionary definition of anti-Semitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This definition was incorporated into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by an executive order issued by the Trump administration in December 2019.

SFSU President Lynn Mahoney declared that the university “does not believe that the class panel discussion violates Zoom’s terms of service or the law” and emphasized that SFSU “remains steadfast in its support of the right of faculty to conduct their teaching and scholarship free of censorship.” However, SFSU has also made it clear that it has no intention of taking any serious steps to combat future censorship.

Zoom’s dramatic escalation of censorship on its platform has major implications. Over the last 11 months, the company has become one of the primary sources of communication and information distribution for over 300 million people worldwide. Unable to operate in-person, countless academic institutions, schools and businesses have become largely dependent on Zoom to conduct classes, conferences, group meetings, and one-on-one discussions. Moreover, the platform is widely used by political organizations to hold political meetings, conferences and rallies.

Zoom’s actions are part of a much broader attack on free speech by capitalist governments around the world. Working with Google, Facebook and other major tech companies, the bourgeoisie in all countries have sought to crack down on the dissemination of progressive, anti-war, left-wing, and socialist material online. Social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, have, over the last few months, put in place strict regulations that require the “fact checking” of posts and events in order to slow “the spread of misinformation.”

New Zealand government, media downplay Australian war crimes in Afghanistan

Tom Peters

An official report documenting war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, including the killing of at least 39 civilians and prisoners, released on November 18, has been virtually ignored by New Zealand’s Labour Party government and much of the media.

The report, produced by an inquiry headed by retired Major General Paul Brereton, was aimed at limiting the damage to Australia’s elite special forces. The report implicates 25 unnamed soldiers in the killings but no one has yet been charged and any prosecutions could take up to 10 years. The inquiry shielded commanding officers, saying they had no knowledge of what was clearly a common practice of murdering unarmed Afghans, including children.

An Australian Special Forces soldier murdering an unarmed Afghan civilian (Screen capture from video disclosed to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation earlier this year)

New Zealand is a close military ally of Australia and the two countries’ armed forces have worked together in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other imperialist wars and interventions. Both countries are members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, led by the United States.

The Brereton report, which was front page news in every major Australian newspaper last Friday, was buried by NZ’s major news websites, the New Zealand Herald, Stuff, TVNZ and Newstalk ZB. Newshub reporter Olivia Leeming echoed the Australian media’s line that most Australian troops “served with honour” and the military’s “reputation has potentially been sullied by the actions of a few.” Only the state-owned Radio NZ (RNZ) treated the report as a major story.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has not condemned Australia’s war crimes. She made no comment on the Brereton report, and was not asked about it, during interviews on Monday with RNZ and Newstalk ZB , or at her weekly press conference, which lasted 40 minutes.

Defence Minister Peeni Henare responded to the revelations by telling RNZ that “no New Zealand service personnel were persons of interest to the inquiry.” He said the relationship with “our closest ally” would “remain strong” and he had no concerns about the culture in the NZ special forces. An editorial in Christchurch’s the Press echoed this, declaring that NZ soldiers “do not seem to share the nihilistic lack of values that have been exposed by the Brereton report.”

In fact, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed during nearly two decades of war by the US and its allies, including both Australia and New Zealand. The atrocities stem from the criminal, imperialist character of the war, aimed at cementing US control over the strategically important region. The occupying troops view the civilian population as hostile. Drone strikes, bombings, assassinations and torture are the methods used to instill terror in the population.

The war, accompanied by propaganda from the media and politicians depicting Muslims as potential terrorists, emboldened fascists in Australia and New Zealand, including Brenton Tarrant, who last year massacred 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch. The Brereton report shows that the terrorist, painted in the media as an isolated individual, was actually engaged in similar actions to SAS troops in Afghanistan.

The NZSAS took part in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Successive Labour Party and National Party governments redeployed these forces, whose services as highly-trained killers were greatly valued by Washington. In 2007, the NZSAS received a rare citation from US President George Bush for “heroism and outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy in Afghanistan.”

The NZSAS has been accused of war crimes including the killing of Afghan civilians and handing over prisoners for torture by others. A lengthy royal commission of inquiry into the 2010 Operation Burnham, a night-time raid on a village in which the NZSAS participated, confirmed in July this year that a child and at least seven other people were killed. Labour’s Attorney-General David Parker defended the killings, saying they were “undesirable” but “legal.”

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) had initially denied that the raid took place, after the details were exposed in the 2017 book, Hit and Run, by journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson. Hager wrote on the Spinoff website that the cover-up went beyond the NZDF: “Throughout the inquiry process a team of lawyers representing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and intelligence agencies made submissions and spoke at hearings, in virtually every instance presenting legal advice that implied NZDF had done nothing wrong.”

Commenting on the Australian war crimes report, Hager told RNZ yesterday he believed NZ forces had behaved similarly. He said: “Anyone working in this field, including me, has heard a series of similarly ugly rumours of guilty secrets inside our SAS, just like they lasted for so long inside the Australian SAS just as guilty secrets… What we had with Operation Burnham was just one incident.”

The Green Party, which is part of the Labour-led government, issued a statement saying it “strongly condemns” the alleged killings by the Australian SAS. Greens defence spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said: “These revelations compound my relief that last term we worked with [the] government to ensure New Zealand troops withdrew from what began as America’s illegal war in Afghanistan.”

In fact, although the Greens voted against the NZSAS participating in the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the party later supported the NZ Army’s involvement in the war on the phony pretext that the soldiers were engaged in “peacekeeping.” The Green Party supports the government’s multi-billion dollar modernisation and expansion of the armed forces, saying they will be used for “humanitarian” purposes.

The trade union-backed Daily Blog said the Australian SAS crimes called into question the Operation Burnham inquiry, which editor Martyn Bradbury described as a “whitewash.” He also claimed that while former Prime Minister Helen Clark’s Labour Party government had led the country into the war in Afghanistan, “Alliance MPs stood firm [against it].”

Bradbury quoted former FIRST Union leader Robert Reid’s tweet: “Respect to Laila Harre and other Alliance MPs who opposed NZ’s involvement in this terrible war at the cost of their own political careers.”

Bradbury and Reid are brazenly falsifying history. The pseudo-left Alliance Party, which was part of Clark’s coalition government, voted in parliament in 2001 to support sending the NZSAS to Afghanistan. Harre, who was minister of women’s affairs, “didn’t oppose [the decision] in caucus or cabinet,” the New Zealand Herald noted on November 22, 2001.

Nine out of ten Alliance MPs voted in favour and one abstained. Soon afterwards the party disintegrated, unable to continue posturing as a “left” alternative to Labour.

The Daily Blog and FIRST Union both supported the Labour Party and the Greens in the October election. One union official wrote in Jacobin that Labour’s victory was “a win for the whole political left.” In fact, the Labour government is overseeing rapidly rising poverty and inequality, while funneling billions to big business, the banks and the military.

The Ardern government is intent on covering up New Zealand and Australian war crimes in Afghanistan because it is strengthening the alliance with US imperialism, as Washington ramps up its threats and preparations for war against Iran and China.

Yesterday, Ardern held a 20-minute conversation with US President-elect Joe Biden, which she described as “very positive and warm.” She told the media Biden wanted to “reinvigorate the relationship” and she had invited him to New Zealand next year for the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS security treaty being signed between the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Biden names national-security team of right-wing militarists

Patrick Martin

President-elect Joe Biden sent a clear message to the world and to the American people with the first announcement of the top appointees to his cabinet and White House staff: the number one priority of the incoming Democratic administration is to build a US-led front of imperialist powers in preparation for stepped up military pressure and outright war on Russia and China.

All six of the appointments announced Monday in press releases—the nominees themselves will be introduced to the public later today—are in the sphere of foreign policy and national security. All are veterans of the Obama-Biden administration, and many were confirmed in those earlier positions by a Republican-controlled Senate led by Mitch McConnell, demonstrating that Biden intends to form a government entirely acceptable to the Republican right.

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken speaks during a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, March 6, 2015. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

The six officials named Monday include:

Antony Blinken, secretary of state: Blinken is a long-time Biden national-security aide in both the US Senate and during Biden’s vice presidency, and he was deputy secretary of state in 2015-2016.

Jake Sullivan, national security adviser: Sullivan succeeded Blinken as national security adviser to Vice President Biden, as well as serving as chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Avril Haines, director of national intelligence: Haines was on Biden’s staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then on the Obama-Biden National Security Council, before serving two years as deputy director of the CIA in 2015-2016.

Alexander Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security: a Cuban-born son of immigrants, Mayorkas is a career domestic security official who was deputy secretary of DHS in the Obama administration, which deported more immigrants than any previous government.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations: the highest ranking African American in the career foreign service, Thomas-Greenfield was named ambassador to Liberia by George W. Bush, then State Department personnel chief under Obama and later assistant secretary for African Affairs. She was forced out by Trump in 2017 and became a counselor with the Albright-Stonebridge Group, a foreign policy think tank for Democrats headed by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate: the former senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state, now 76, co-chaired Biden’s climate change task force along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He will head a US effort to rejoin the Paris climate accord.

The first and most obvious fact about all six nominees is that they are dedicated defenders of American imperialism and the interests of Wall Street. Several are multi-millionaires, while all are comfortably within the top tier financially. Blinken, for example, is the son of a founder of Warburg Pincus investment bank, Donald Blinken, who was for 12 years chairman of the board of the State University of New York.

For all the hosannas in the media over the “diversity” of these initial appointees—one African American, one Hispanic, two women—these facets of their identities are entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to the victim of torture in a CIA secret prison that the torturer (or her boss in Washington) is female. It doesn’t matter to refugee children separated from their parents by immigration agents that the DHS secretary is Hispanic. It doesn’t matter to the victims of US military aggression that the diplomat who defends this violence before the world is black.

The emphasis on diversity is used to distract from the reactionary character of the foreign policy orientation of the incoming Biden administration, which his apologists seek to disguise using the skin color, gender and national origin of the personnel who will carry it out.

There has been little discussion in the media of the significance of Biden choosing, in the midst of a nationwide and worldwide public health catastrophe that has already taken the lives of a quarter million Americans, to announce his foreign policy team first. If victory over coronavirus was the number one priority, as Biden claimed during the fall campaign, why not announce those who will head up the Department of Health and Human Services and other agencies with the main responsibilities for the fight against the pandemic?

This is a signal that the real point of difference between the Democrats and Trump is not his catastrophic performance in relation to COVID-19. While Trump now openly embraces “herd immunity” and dismisses the death toll as inconsequential, the Democrats will pursue essentially the same policy, and Biden has flatly rejected any new lockdown of the US economy.

Ever since Trump took office, the focus of Democratic Party opposition has been on foreign policy, particularly Trump’s allegedly “soft” line on Russia and his pullout, albeit largely rhetorical, from US commitments to Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now that Biden expects to be in control of US foreign policy in less than 60 days, he is demonstrating that this will be the initial focus of policy changes.

Both major pro-Democratic Party newspapers emphasized this in their coverage of the Biden team’s rollout. The Washington Post wrote, “Biden is planning to prioritize foreign policy as a major pillar in his administration, with vows to reassemble global alliances and insert the United States into a more prominent position on the world stage.”

The New York Times was even blunter, identifying China as the main target of the new administration. In a front-page profile, the Times described Blinken as “a defender of global alliances” and said that he “will try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China…” It identified trade in the Indo-Pacific region, technology investments, and Africa as areas in which the US would be “competing with China.”

Other profiles have noted that Blinken and Biden were generally aligned on foreign policy issues during the Obama administration, except on two occasions—the US attack on Libya, and US policy towards Syria—where Blinken favored more aggressive US intervention and Biden was more cautious.

The two were completely in step in relation to Ukraine, where Blinken played a key public role in turning the Crimean secession and reunification with Russia into a major international crisis. Blinken was the main US spokesman advocating heavy sanctions on Russia, not only to punish the Putin government but the population of the country as a whole. In a speech at the time, he said sanctions were needed to “demonstrate to the Russian people that there is a very hefty fine for supporting international criminals like” Putin.

Of the other appointees, Avril Haines is also a close personal associate of Biden, serving on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was chairman, then moving to the National Security Council in the Obama-Biden White House before her two years at the CIA. After leaving the government when Trump came in, Haines joined Blinken at the newly formed WestExec Partners, a national-security think tank peddling advice to US corporations. Another partner was Michele Fluornoy, the former Pentagon official under Obama who is widely expected to be Biden’s choice as secretary of defense.

Late Monday, after the rollout of the group that Biden called the “crux” of his national security team, the Biden transition revealed that his next major cabinet pick was former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen to serve as Treasury secretary. This underscores the absolute subservience of the incoming administration to Wall Street, since Yellen was identified with the Fed policy of unrestrained opening of the financial spigots to support the financial markets during the 2008-2009 Wall Street crash.

Yellen was a top Fed official from 2004 on, working with then chairman Ben Bernanke, moving up to vice chair in 2009 and appointed by Obama to succeed Bernanke in 2013. Trump declined to reappoint her to a second term in 2017.