Papua New Guinea embroiled in ongoing political turmoil

John Braddock

The government of Papua New Guinea (PNG), led by Prime Minister James Marape, has plunged into turmoil after the defection of over a dozen MPs to the opposition. The crisis comes barely 18 months after Marape ousted previous Prime Minister Peter O’Neill in a similar manner over corruption allegations, leading to his arrest in May.

PNG Prime Minister James Marape (left) with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in 2019 [Credit: Wikimedia Commons]

The defectors included 12 cabinet ministers, among them Deputy Prime Minister Sam Basil and leader of the National Alliance Party, Foreign Affairs Minister Patrick Pruaitch. Basil, leader of the United Labour Party, had been appointed deputy prime minister just last month in a Cabinet reshuffle, justified by Marape as necessary for the “stability” of his coalition.

Basil said “the cries of the people” had spurred the defectors to act, adding that the country had gone backwards under Marape’s leadership. The timing appears to be linked to plans to bring forward a vote of no confidence, which can only occur 18 months after a prime minister takes office, i.e., not before November 30.

Marape declared on Facebook that he would not be easily removed. “It’s not over until it’s over, leadership has its moments,” he said. The government staved off the no confidence vote last week by passing the budget before abruptly adjourning parliament until April.

While the opposition coalition currently holds a parliamentary majority, it was caught out by the government’s manoeuvre. The opposition had earlier called for an adjournment vote, which they won. An estimated 43 opposition MPs, including the defectors, then travelled to remote Vanimo to prepare for the confidence vote.

On November 16, however, parliament’s speaker Job Pomat announced that opposition leader Belden Namah had no right to call an adjournment and that parliament was still in session. The house sitting was brought forward to 10 a.m. the next day. With the opposition absent, the government mustered the required quorum of one third of all 111 MPs. With less than half MPs present, they approved the budget without any debate, before adjourning parliament.

The legality of the sitting was promptly challenged in court by O’Neill. Both camps are now waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the matter, and on a separate case previously brought by Namah challenging the legality of last year’s installation of Marape as prime minister.

A vote of no confidence remains possible next April, but it would be unlikely unless the governor general dissolves parliament and calls an early poll. According to the parliamentary rules, a confidence vote cannot be put any later than next July.

The cynical manoeuvring between rival groups of parliamentarians highlights the vast gulf that separates the poverty-stricken PNG masses and the country’s corrupt and venal political elite.

Marape last week summoned public service heads, including the police commissioner and defence force commander, for a briefing. His message, later broadcast to the general population, was that nobody should “get caught up” in the crisis. “Leave politics to the politicians,” he said, “remain focused and get on with your life.” Police have mobilised extra personnel to beef up “security” around the capital Port Moresby.

Behind the turmoil is the spiraling social and economic crisis intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. After a period of several months during which the country remained isolated from the pandemic, a surge in cases erupted in July and August. PNG has now recorded 609 cases of COVID-19 with seven deaths. Only 30,000 people have been tested from the population of 8 million.

The pandemic has caused major disruption. The massive Ok Tedi mine was at the centre of a COVID-19 outbreak over August and September with staff and contractors accounting for the majority of the almost 200 confirmed cases in Western province. A shortfall in production due to a six-week shutdown is likely to continue for some time.

Despite the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases, the government last month lifted some restrictions it had previously imposed. Police Commissioner David Manning, who is also the pandemic response controller, opened international flights from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Solomon Islands, in addition to Australia which already had access. The daily curfew in Port Moresby was also lifted.

Before the pandemic hit, the economy was already reeling from a collapse in earnings from the major resources industries. There is a severe budget shortfall, with government debt near 40 percent of GDP. In May, Marape was reportedly seeking a $US2 billion bailout from international institutions, including the IMF and Asian Development Bank (ADB), to prevent PNG becoming a “failed state.”

Radio NZ reported on November 19 that before his defection, Basil had authorised a “large payout” from the supplementary budget to address the “towering challenges” of the economy. The government secured an IMF loan of $US340 million and another $28 million from the ADB to “restructure” Air Niugini. The IMF and ADB are certain to demand brutal attacks on the social position of the working class in return.

On taking office, Marape had resorted to nationalist demagogy, proclaiming he would “take back PNG,” and pledged “regime shifts” in the resources industry to “bring more wealth to the people.” He stirred fears in Canberra with a proposal that the Chinese government refinance the national debt of 26 billion kina ($A11.3 billion). While this did not eventuate, Marape signalled a move away from an “aid-donor” dependency on Australia.

The government then announced it would not extend the lease on the Porgera goldmine that contributes some 10 percent of the country’s total exports. The mine’s Canadian operator Barrick Gold and Chinese partner Zijin Mining condemned the move as “tantamount to nationalisation without due process,” and initiated legal action. With 3,500 jobs on the line, and millions of dollars in lost revenue accumulating each week a deal was struck. It will see PNG take a major share of equity, while Barrick retains operatorship. The mine, however, is still not reopened.

The extraction projects have done nothing to improve the lives of the people. Members of the ruling class, on the other hand, have reaped enormous personal wealth through their collaboration with Australian imperialism and services rendered to the giant transnational corporations.

PNG remains among the poorest countries in the world, despite having lucrative natural resources. Most of the country’s people confront limited or non-existent health care, education, and other social services and infrastructure, with preventable disease and other indices of social distress comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.

PNG’s former colonial overlord, Australia, will be watching developments closely. Prime Minister Scott Morrison deferred a planned trip to Port Moresby this month after Namah challenged the timing as “highly suspicious,” suggesting it was “bad diplomacy” that would unduly influence local politics.

Canberra will not, however, hesitate to act to defend the billions worth of investments by Australia’s multi-national companies. PNG is, moreover, on the frontline of great power competition with China in the Pacific, as far as both Canberra and Washington are concerned. It is a contest in which Australian imperialism is determined to maintain its hegemony.

New ultra-right Supreme Court majority invokes religion to block COVID-19 safety measures

John Burton

Using specious claims of religious liberty to trump scientifically based measures for protecting public health by limiting large, lengthy indoor gatherings, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 shortly before midnight Wednesday that local authorities cannot prevent mass religious services in areas where COVID-19 transmissions are spiking.

The decision is the Supreme Court’s first to curtail the power of local officials to enact public health measures to protect the population from the pandemic. It is also the first Supreme Court ruling to rest entirely on the new, ultra-reactionary five-justice majority created by the installation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett delivers remarks after Trump announced her as his nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the US, Sept. 26, 2020 [Credit: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks]

In response to a sharp upsurge in positive COVID-19 cases, last October New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that established a “red” zone in the area immediately around a documented severe infection cluster. Among the consequences, most lengthy indoor gatherings are banned. Religious gatherings in the red zone itself are limited to 10 people. Moving further away from the epicenter, in “orange” zones the limit increases to 25 people, and in “yellow” zones religious gatherings can be up to fifty percent of capacity.

The limitations on religious gatherings have a strong foundation in science. Large numbers arrive and leave services at the same time. Co-worshipers tend to physically greet one another, sit or stand close together in poorly ventilated indoor spaces for an hour or more, share or pass objects, and sing or chant in ways that promote airborne transmission of the virus.

It is no surprise that multiple religious gatherings have been identified as “superspreader” events traced earlier this year to hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 infections and tens of thousands of deaths. According to Stanford University research published in Nature magazine, religious aggregations, along with restaurants, gyms, and hotels “produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened.”

Rather than using video and other technologies to protect public health—even Pope Francis has conducted mass online—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and two Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Queens sued New York to block enforcement of the executive order. Last summer, the Supreme Court turned down similar requests from Nevada and California.

Nothing has changed other than the court’s composition, with Amy Coney Barrett, a reactionary professor from Notre Dame who belongs to an evangelical faction of Catholics, replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leader of the court’s moderate liberals, only a week before Trump’s election defeat.

The ruling on the New York case is an unmistakable sign that for the foreseeable future the nine-member Supreme Court will be dominated by an aggressive five-justice, ultra-reactionary bloc of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the three Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Barrett.

The political tensions within the court itself are demonstrated by the issuing of six separate opinions—the majority opinion, which appears to have been written by Barrett, a vitriolic concurrence by Gorsuch, another concurrence by Kavanaugh, and dissents by the conventionally conservative chief justice John Roberts, and by moderate liberals Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. A seventh justice, the reactionary Samuel Alito, delivered a harshly right-wing speech earlier this month to the Federalist Society in which he portrayed all COVID-19 restrictions, not just the church limitations, as attacks on constitutional freedoms.

As a technical matter, the ruling was unnecessary because the injunction was being sought to maintain the status quo while the case worked its way through the lower courts. A hearing is set in the Court of Appeals for early next month. In the meantime, the risk waned from “red” to “yellow,” and the restrictions were lifted. The Supreme Court could have declined to act on the application for an immediate stay and nothing would have changed.

The majority opinion rests on the paranoid assertion that the restrictions “single out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment” in violation of the “minimum requirement of neutrality” under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The premise is nonsense. The only reason that religious facilities are mentioned in the order is to give them preferential treatment over comparable locations, such as restaurants and theaters, where throngs congregate inside for extended periods. Those places must close entirely.

Ducking this distinction, the majority cited provisions that allow certain stores and salons to remain open. The comparison to places of worship is invalid because those establishments do not attract the same density of crowds for the same extended periods of time, and the activity is less likely to spread the virus.

According to the Supreme Court majority, “the Governor has stated that factories and schools have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 ... but they are treated less harshly than” places of worship. That is absolutely correct, but the rational solution is to close those factories and schools too, not to increase the spread of the virus through additional vectors such as large religious gatherings.

The dissents by Breyer and Sotomayor highlight the horrific toll the pandemic has already exacted, particularly in the boroughs of New York City. “The nature of the epidemic, the spikes, the uncertainties, and the need for quick action, taken together, mean that the State has countervailing arguments based upon health, safety, and administrative considerations that must be balanced against the applicants’ First Amendment challenges,” Breyer wrote.

Sotomayor, whose dissent was joined by Justice Elena Kagan, added, “Amidst a pandemic that has already claimed over a quarter million American lives, the Court today enjoins one of New York’s public health measures aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 in areas facing the most severe outbreaks,” an action that “will only exacerbate the Nation’s suffering.”

Commentators on the ruling have noted how Gorsuch’s concurrence drips with sarcasm and directs venom at the dissenters. One example: “According to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”

In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts answered with the obvious, that “it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.” With the case still working its way through the lower courts, Roberts said there was no reason to rule so long as the strict restrictions were not in effect.

“To be clear,” Roberts wrote in direct response to Gorsuch’s crude attack on the three moderate justices, “I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’ yielding to ‘a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,’ or ‘sheltering in place when the Constitution is under attack.’ They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”

The ruling makes clear that the Supreme Court is entering a period of reaction reminiscent of the “Four Horsemen” era that ended during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and even that of Chief Justice Roger Taney, which produced the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the pro-slavery ruling that was among the triggers for the Civil War.

Today, it is all varieties of democratic rights, workers’ rights, abortion rights, civil rights and environmental protections that are being queued up for the chopping block.

New IRS rule will push many US small businesses to the brink

Jessica Goldstein

The U.S Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a new ruling November 18 which will affect millions of small businesses that received a portion of the total $717 billion in relief funds from the US Small Business Administration (SBA) through the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) beginning in April 2020.

A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Illinois [Credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]

Revenue Ruling 2020-27 and Revenue Procedure 2020-51 clarify “the tax treatment of expenses where a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan has not been forgiven by the end of the year the loan was received,” according to the US Treasury Department website.

The latest ruling outlines a number of restrictions that small businesses owners will face if they attempt to deduct business expenses from their annual tax returns if those expenses were paid for with money from a PPP loan. It states that a small business which “applies for loan forgiveness in 2020 and reasonably expects that its loan will be forgiven... may not deduct otherwise deductible expenses paid for with PPP funds.” The same rule applies to small business owners that have not applied for a PPP loan in 2020 but plan to do so in 2021 and who expect that the loan will be forgiven.

This affects a great majority of small businesses, who due to their ability to maintain full-time employees with the loans are expected to be eligible for some level of forgiveness. The rate of forgiveness is reduced if a small business spends the loan on anything other than rent, mortgage, utilities and payroll costs, and if wages were reduced by over 25 percent for employees earning less than $100,000 per year.

Faced with a mounting economic crisis which was exploding the social tensions in the US caused by mounting inequality, the federal government enacted the PPP as part of the over $3 trillion CARES Act. The PPP officially authorized up to $349 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses to pay employees during the crisis, up to $100,000 on a yearly basis per employee and $10 million per business or non-profit organization.

Small businesses in the US are allowed to deduct business expenses before ordinary income rates are applied each year. For many small business owners, the ability to write off significant amounts of operating costs and expenses spells the difference between staying afloat or going under financially.

After the PPP application process had begun, the IRS released Notice 2020-32 in May, which outlined that a small business that received a loan would not be able to deduct otherwise deductible expenses if paid with funds from a PPP loan that was later forgiven.

These types of expenses include rent, mortgages and utilities, but also a number of others which small, independent retail shops, restaurants, service centers, studios, and others have had to take on to operate as safely as possible under conditions which no substantial form relief from the federal government was provided to working class people and small business owners. These could include personal protective equipment, plexiglass barriers, sanitizers, cleaning services, webconferencing tools, packaging and shipping costs, air filtration devices, outdoor dining permits and furnishings and more.

For many small businesses, the costs of operating during the pandemic have come at great expense. Out of an estimated 31 million small businesses in the US, at least 97,966 have closed permanently as of September, according to data from the online review site Yelp. Taking into account the number of unreported closures and accelerating rate of closures since COVID-19 spiked again in July, the real number of permanent small business closures in the US is likely far higher.

The latest IRS ruling will further devastate many small businesses in the US that have been staring down destitution. Varying lockdown measures across the US and the shift to remote work and schooling upended certain sections of the small business economy. The World Economic Forum noted October 6 that “in the US as a whole, data suggests that nearly a quarter of all small businesses remain closed” either temporarily or permanently during the ongoing health crisis and that “many of these temporary closures are looking to be permanent.”

The World Economic Forum suggested that 37 percent of small businesses in the leisure and hospitality sector have recorded no transactions since mid-March when statewide lockdown orders first went into effect. It also reported that over half of small business closures in the retail and nightlife categories have become permanent.

To add insult to injury, Gallup reported that the average holiday spending budget for individual Americans is expected to drop by over 14 percent this year compared to 2019, to the lowest level since 2016. The drop in spending will disproportionately affect small businesses, which lack the capital and resources to offset the projected sales dip.

Ostensibly enacted to preserve workers’ jobs, in many instances the PPP took on the form of an added corporate bailout. Far from glorifying the small business owner and entrepreneur as it likes to proclaim, the US federal government gave nearly three quarters of all larger loans under the program to large organizations including big corporations, religious institutions, charter schools, and Democratic and Republican think tanks.

There is ample reason to believe these large-scale recipients make up the bulk of those using the loans for their own financial interests, instead of using them to preserve employment. As the WSWS noted in its perspective, “What the rich are thankful for” on November 25, “An MIT team concluded that the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] handed out $500 billion in loans yet saved only 2.3 million jobs over roughly six months… the annualized cost of the program comes out to roughly $500,000 per job.”

Although large corporations dominate the total share of wealth, small businesses make up a significant section of the US economy. According to the World Economic Forum, small businesses employ nearly half of all workers in the US private sector. The closure of more small businesses and layoffs that will follow when business owners cannot make ends meet because of the IRS rule will fan the flames of the ongoing social crisis well into 2021.

Leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center expose worldwide conspiracy to suppress workers’ resistance

Tom Carter

On Monday, Motherboard, a project of Vice News, published the contents of dozens of documents leaked from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), a secretive division of the company dedicated to spying on the approximately one million Amazon workers worldwide and suppressing resistance to the company’s exploitative practices.

Amazon fulfillment center in San Fernando de Henares, Spain [Credit: Wikipedia/Álvaro Ibáñez]

According to Motherboard, the leaked documents, which date from 2019, show that the GSOC surveillance apparatus tracks in detail “the exact date, time, location, the source [and] the number of participants” in any acts of opposition by Amazon workers, including everything from “strikes” to “the distribution of leaflets.”

GSOC operatives also track political and organizational discussions online, emerging leaders among workers, workplace grievances, union organizing efforts, and the activities of workers on social media and on company listservs.

In particular, according to Motherboard, Amazon intelligence operatives have been tracking with great sensitivity the larger social movements emerging around the world, including everything from the “yellow vest” protests in France to environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes.

One such report on the “yellow vest” protests reads, in part: “Protests in Paris are planned, both by striking union members and [Yellow Vests], on 7 December. A march is planned by Yellow Vest activists [sic] from Bercy at 1130 CET to porte de Versailles via Austerlitz, Denfert, Place de la Catalogne and porte de Vanves. It is unclear whether striking unions will participate in the same march organized by [Yellow Vests] but it is expected of them to join starting at Montparnasse.”

Amazon’s GSOC operatives are clearly concerned that social movements emerging around the world could quickly draw in significant numbers of Amazon workers, disrupting the company’s global operations and profits.

Also exposed by the leaked documents are links between Amazon and the infamous Pinkerton detective agency. In November 2019, according to the leaked documents, Amazon “inserted” Pinkerton spies into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, purportedly to investigate whether management was engaged in wrongful hiring practices.

The leaked report states that “PINKERTON operatives were inserted into WRO1 ADECCO between 2019-11-19 and 2019-11-21,” but that the investigation had not reached a conclusive determination. “WRO1” is Amazon’s designation for the Wroclaw warehouse and Adecco is the Amazon contractor operating the facility.

The information that has been revealed so far about the company’s relationship with Pinkerton is limited, but the exposure of Pinkerton spies being “inserted” into a warehouse to provide intelligence to GSOC in itself raises numerous questions.

How many Pinkerton spies have been “inserted” into Amazon warehouses globally? How many other warehouses have had corporate spies in them? Have Pinkerton spies or GSOC informants attended political meetings of Amazon workers outside the workplace?

Besides Pinkerton operatives, how many other spies have been “inserted” into Amazon warehouses? Have these spies violated workers’ legal and democratic rights in the countries where they have been “inserted,” including the right to privacy, the right to freedom of association, the right to organize, and the right to free speech?

Amazon, an international conglomerate valued at $1.5 trillion, is headed by the world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune is estimated at around $200 billion. While the company’s earnings and market capitalization have soared during the coronavirus pandemic, management’s failure to ensure safe working conditions has triggered walkouts and protests among Amazon workers around the world. By October, around 20,000 Amazon workers in the US had been confirmed to have been infected with the virus.

The Pinkerton detective agency has a villainous history of surveillance, infiltration, violence, and other anti-democratic schemes directed against the workers’ movement in the US stretching back more than a century and a half. It was the Pinkertons who helped bring phrases like “labor spies” and “gun thugs” into the national vocabulary.

Pinkerton spies played an infamous role in the suppression of “The Long Strike” of 1875, which witnessed some of the bloodiest and bitterest episodes in all of labor history. In the aftermath of the strike, twenty Irish immigrants, dubbed the “Molly Maguires,” were martyred after drumhead trials between 1876 and 1879, including ten hanged in one day on June 21, 1877, known as the “Day of the Rope.”

Particularly during the Coal Wars (1890–1930) and the nationwide struggle for the eight-hour day, squads of thugs from companies like Pinkerton could be found anywhere that management was trying to suppress workers’ resistance.

Pinkerton agents were called in during the Colorado Coalfield War in 1914, during which National Guard soldiers machine-gunned striking workers and their families in the Ludlow Massacre. Around 300 Pinkertons were brought into Chicago to escort scabs through picket lines the day before the Haymarket Square massacre on May 4, 1886. And a small army of Pinkerton thugs were dispatched to suppress the 1892 Homestead steel strike, where they opened fire on a crowd of workers and their families in a massacre that made the name “Pinkerton” notorious internationally.

Private intelligence agencies like Pinkerton, which played a major role in the suppression of workers’ struggles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were largely displaced in the US by the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as by the expansion of city and county police departments by the mid-20th century. However, the Pinkerton agency still survives to this day as a division of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, where the Pinkertons are billed as providers of “intelligence” and “protection” services.

In a more recent example, Pinkerton agents escorted right-wing extremist and “Campus Watch” founder Daniel Pipes to a provocation at York University in Toronto in 2003. And in 2018, striking Frontier Communications workers in West Virginia and Virginia reported to the World Socialist Web Site that agents from Pinkerton and Securitas USA had been hired to monitor and intimidate the strikers.

In a statement responding to the leaked documents, Amazon management acknowledged that it had hired Pinkerton agents but claimed that that they were only providing security for high-value shipments.

“We have business partnerships with specialist companies for many different reasons—in the case of Pinkerton, to secure high-value shipments in transit,” the company’s representative stated. However, this statement is directly contradicted by the text of the leaked documents, which show Amazon “inserting” Pinkerton agents into a warehouse in Poland as part of an investigation that had nothing to do with “securing high-value shipments in transit.”

Amazon’s official statement also included this remarkable sentence: “We do not use our partners to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.” Far from providing any sort of reassurance to Amazon warehouse workers, this carefully-worded statement, even if it is to be believed, implies only that “partners” like the Pinkertons do not directly gather intelligence on warehouse workers. In other words, Amazon’s GSOC takes care of that sort of dirty work in-house.

Indeed, in September, Vice News exposed an intricate spying operation by Amazon against its Flex Drivers, with company operatives infiltrating private Facebook Groups to snitch on efforts to organize opposition. Later in September, a whistleblower revealed that management operatives have been monitoring opposition on listservs at the “amazon.com” domain.

These exposures came alongside revelations of the company’s efforts to hire ex-military, ex-police, and ex-intelligence agents for the positions of “Intelligence Analyst” and “Senior Intelligence Analyst” at GSOC. These veterans from the repressive apparatus of the state and with experience in imperialist wars abroad are being tasked with monitoring “threats” to company profits from industrial actions by workers.

In an article published on September 28 documenting Amazon’s campaign of surveillance and repression against its own workforce, the World Socialist Web Site compared the activities of Amazon’s GSOC to the role of the Pinkertons a century ago.

This comparison turned out to be accurate in more ways than one: not only does Amazon’s 21st-century apparatus of surveillance and repression resemble a high-tech version of the Pinkertons—it turns out that Amazon has hired the actual Pinkertons.

It is important for workers to be on guard against the ruthless efforts by GSOC and its security “partners” to monitor and block any effort to organize resistance. Amazon workers are encouraged to spread awareness of these practices among fellow workers and to contact the International Amazon Workers’ Voice to report any additional evidence of such efforts by management.

However, this opposition to Amazon’s repressive apparatus does not imply any support for the ongoing efforts of various trade unions and their affiliates to win union recognition at Amazon warehouses. These unions have spent decades cooperating with management to betray their existing memberships, and if successful in winning legal representation at Amazon, they will play the same role in muzzling and suppressing the voices of Amazon workers.

Amazon workers should join with fellow workers in other industries who have rejected the efforts of unions to impose their corrupt bureaucracies on workers’ struggles, as in the case of auto workers at the Faurecia Interior Systems facility in Spring Hill, Tennessee, who rejected UAW representation in March, as well as the auto workers at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee who have twice rebuffed the UAW.

The World Socialist Web Site and the International Amazon Workers’ Voice are assisting Amazon workers with the establishment of rank-and-file safety committees in their workplaces. These committees will function to expose the management cover-up of the spread of the coronavirus, to defend workers against surveillance and retaliation by company spies, as well as to resist the efforts of the Democratic Party and their trade union affiliates to hijack and control workers’ opposition.

These committees will fight to unite all workers in the logistics industry, not just those directly employed by Amazon, in a common struggle to advance demands based on the needs of the working class, not demands of the world’s richest person for more profits.

To fight against a colossal global conglomerate like Amazon, which has its tentacles and security “partners” encircling the world, Amazon workers must reject the nationalism promoted by the unions and embrace a common struggle with their brothers and sisters in every country. Just as Amazon’s “security operations” are global, workers’ opposition must also be organized globally.

Top scientist assassinated as Israel and US stage war provocations against Iran

Bill Van Auken

The brutal assassination Friday of top Iranian nuclear physicist Moshen Fakhrizadeh marks a major escalation of the US-Israeli campaign to provoke a war with Iran in the less than two months before the scheduled end of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The Iranian scientist was ambushed by a team of assassins Friday morning in Absard, an eastern suburb of Tehran. His vehicle was attacked with automatic weapons fire, and then a pickup truck loaded with lumber covering explosives blew up next to the scientist’s car.

Photographs of the scene posted online showed the damaged vehicle surrounded by shattered glass, bits of wood, car parts and a puddle of blood.

Scene of the assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh [Credit: Fars News Agency via AP]

Three to four of the terrorists were reported killed in the incident. Fakhrizadeh and his wounded bodyguards were rushed to a nearby hospital, but doctors were unable to revive him.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif confirmed the killing, writing on Twitter: “Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators. Iran calls on the international community—and especially EU to end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.”

While officials in Israel and the US refused to comment on the assassination, the response in both countries left little to the imagination as to the authorship of this extraordinary act of international lawlessness. Trump triumphantly retweeted a comment by an Israeli journalist that the murder represented “a major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”

Israel’s Jerusalem Post, reflecting the views of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commented that the assassination was “a major signal that Israel and the United States will not give up on preventing the country from obtaining such weaponry. The message is clear: Remember, no nuclear scientist is safe.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that “One American official—along with two other intelligence officials—said that Israel was behind the attack on the scientist.” It added that “It was unclear how much the United States may have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and have long shared intelligence regarding Iran.”

Fakhrizadeh, 63, was a professor of physics at the Imam Hussein University in Tehran and a former head of Iran’s Physics Research Center (PHRC). An expert on nuclear technology, as well as missile production, he led a previous Iranian nuclear program known as Amad (Hope), which was terminated in 2003. Israel and the US alleged that the program was directed at determining the feasibility of building an Iranian nuclear weapon. Tehran has insisted that the program, like all of its nuclear operations, was for civilian purposes only.

Iran’s Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami reported that Fakhrizadeh had, in addition to his work on nuclear and military technology, been the leader of the team that developed one of the first Iranian kits for diagnosis of coronavirus.

In 2018, in a presentation of alleged nuclear documents stolen from a Tehran warehouse, Netanyahu showed a slide bearing a photograph of Fakhrizadeh, while making the unsubstantiated allegation that the scientist was involved in a covert operation aimed at pursuing an Iranian nuclear weapon. In what amounted to a clear threat of assassination, Netanyahu declared that Fakhrizadeh’s was “a name to remember.”

Screenshot of video in which Netanyahu in 2018 signaled that Fakhrizadeh was a target

Tehran had rebuffed requests by the (International Atomic Energy Agency) IAEA to interview Fakhrizadeh for fear that information would be passed on to Tel Aviv to assist in organizing his murder.

In the period preceding the signing of the nuclear accord between the major powers and Tehran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Tel Aviv organized a string of assassinations of prominent Iranian scientists, killing five and wounding several others.

The killings were combined with acts of sabotage, including the use by both the US and Israel in 2010 of the “Stuxnet” computer worm to destroy about 1,000 of Iran’s 5,000 centrifuges operating at the country’s main nuclear center at Natanz.

In July of this year, a major fire at Natanz caused extensive damage to the facility, in particular its workshops and laboratories dedicated to assembling and testing newly developed centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. Israeli intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the fire had been caused by a bomb smuggled into the facility.

These attacks have been joined with the “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump White House after it unilaterally abrogated the JCPOA in 2018. This regime of ever-tightening economic sanctions, tantamount to a state of war, has ravaged Iran’s economy, while condemning millions of Iranians to hunger and disease, choking off vital medicines and medical supplies in the midst of the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh is the highest-profile attack on Iran since the January 3 US drone missile murder of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, one of the country’s top officials, after he arrived at Baghdad’s international airport for an official state visit.

It comes less than a week after Prime Minister Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a semi-secret trip to the Saudi city of Neom for a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose principal topic was Iran. While bin Salman was reportedly less than enthusiastic about a military strike against Iran—no doubt fearing Saudi oil installations would be a likely target for retaliation—both the Netanyahu and Trump governments have been pushing relentlessly toward confrontation.

There is no doubt that the latest assassination was discussed with and approved by Pompeo and the Trump administration. It is the latest and most serious in a series of provocations being carried out by both the US and Israeli governments with the objective of igniting a war.

In addition to the latest assassination, Tel Aviv has carried out increasingly aggressive and openly declared airstrikes against Iranian and Iranian-connected targets in Syria, including three in the last week alone. The latest, on Friday, reportedly killed at least 19 people in Syria’s embattled eastern region of Deir Ezzor.

For its part, the Trump administration has vowed to introduce new sanctions aimed against Iran on at least a weekly basis over the next two months to tighten the economic stranglehold over the country.

At the same time, the Pentagon has steadily built up offensive forces in the Persian Gulf, dispatching B-52s and a squadron of F-16s to the region, while deploying the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in the Gulf.

According to both the New York Times and Reuters, Trump met with his national security cabinet on November 12 to discuss a proposal to conduct airstrikes against Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, a war crime that could claim the lives of thousands. While Trump’s top aides reportedly talked him out of launching such an attack, there are still mounting fears that military action is being prepared, with Pompeo and his aides insisting during the secretary of state’s Mideast tour that the option remains “on the table.”

Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, in an article on Axios, cited unnamed Israeli officials as saying, “The Israel Defense Forces have in recent weeks been instructed to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. will conduct a military strike against Iran before President Trump leaves office.” Such preparations no doubt include an escalation of Israel’s own plans to attack Iran.

Why would the Trump administration launch a military attack on Iran, unleashing a potentially world catastrophic war in the Persian Gulf, in what are ostensibly its last few weeks in office?

Bourgeois foreign policy analysts have suggested that the aim is to sabotage any attempt by an incoming Biden administration to rejoin the JCPOA and lift sanctions against Iran.

While Biden’s statements along these lines are highly conditional, indicating that he would demand significant new concessions from and continue military aggression against Iran, there are elements within the US ruling establishment that see an immediate war as the only means of achieving US hegemony over the Middle East and denying its strategic energy resources to American capitalism’s chief rival, China.

Under conditions in which Trump still refuses to concede the election, a war and potential mass casualties for US troops deployed in the Middle East could be seized upon -- much as the 9/11 attacks were -- as the pretext for carrying out far-reaching extra-constitutional measures, including the declaration of a state of emergency, imposing martial law and nullifying the transfer of power.

The danger of war and dictatorship, which will continue whatever the final outcome of the 2020 election, can be answered only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class in a struggle to break the control of society by the financial-corporate oligarchy and restructure economic life on a socialist basis.

UK government pandemic policies lead to several suicides among students

Danny Knightley

Many young adults in the UK have been driven to breaking point during the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the murderous “herd immunity” policy pursued by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government. Millions of young people are suffering from acute stress, anxiety, and depression.

Medical experts predicted that social isolation and economic stress caused by the coronavirus pandemic would have a damaging impact on mental health. The Lancet medical journal noted that young people would likely suffer the most mental distress.

A sign reading "COVID ROOMS" at the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university (credit: WSWS)

Stress levels among students intensified when it was announced in September that they were expected to return to campuses and would face fines if they did not. The World Socialist Web Site warned that forcing pupils and students back into schools and campuses would have devastating consequences.

Not only did the return to campuses lead to a quadrupling of coronavirus cases between September and October, but it also provoked a sharp deterioration in students’ mental health. In some cases the tragic result has been students taking their own lives.

A survey carried out by University College London, University of Sussex and Imperial College London found almost 10 percent of respondents reported suicidal ideation or thoughts of hurting themselves in some way.

Finn Kitson, aged 19, was found dead at the Fallowfield campus of the University of Manchester on October 8, following a surge of coronavirus cases at the university and throughout the city. Police said they were not treating the death as suspicious and the university maintained that it was not coronavirus related. Finn’s father, Michael Kitson, an academic, disputes this and highlighted the toll of being locked down on students’ mental health as a key factor in his son’s death. Michael said in response to a news article claiming Finn’s death was not COVID-19 related, “This is not true. If you lockdown young people because of Covid-19 with little support, then you should expect that they suffer extreme anxiety.”

The Tab, a youth and student culture web site, reported October 28, “Eight university students have died since the beginning of term one, meaning that at least one student has died every single week for the past month.”

The pressure students are under can result in some falling prey to drug dealers. Several deaths of students this term are reportedly drugs related. The media reported two mothers having to return and identify the bodies of their 18-year-old daughters within hours of dropping them off at Newcastle University last month.

A National Union of Students (NUS) survey found that 42 percent of participants reported having contemplated self-harm and that 30 percent have self-harmed.

Suicide prevention charity PAPYRUS stated that student life under lockdown is threatening the fragile mental health of thousands of young people. Papyrus’s Ged Flynn, said, “Right now students who have never been to university, or have been away from university and gone back, are suddenly plunged into a new reality that very few of us have ever encountered… Some are frightened, away from home, trying to navigate new ways of learning and new relationships and that’s incredibly challenging for anyone.”

The NUS found that 53 percent of respondents reported increased levels of stress. Moderate to high symptoms of anxiety were reported in 69.6 percent of participants with previous mental health problems and in 45.7 percent of those without previous mental health problems. 55.3 percent reported overeating in response to their mood during lockdown. 54.9 percent reported eating less to control their weight and 64.2 percent reported weight concerns.

As if the stress and fear of living away from family and support networks, many for the first time in their lives, in the middle of a deadly pandemic was not bad enough, students and young people have been targeted by the right-wing media and government as being one of the primary reasons for the spread of COVID-19.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock warned that young people ignoring social distancing rules risked triggering a second wave of the pandemic and urged them not to “kill their grandparents” by spreading the virus. Despite the lurid claims, it was the government that instructed over a million students to travel to campuses in universities nationwide and then provided neither support nor a test and trace network.

The additional strain on young people’s mental health has been sanctioned to keep afloat university institutions, which require students on campus paying extortionate tuition and accommodation fees.

Stigmatization has resulted in students being disproportionately targeted and effectively locked up on campuses. Students have reported difficulties in accessing food. In Oxford University, a student told the WSWS that while in isolation, due to a member of their household testing positive, they were provided with only one meal a day by the university. Friends and family were denied access to supply food. An email was then circulated falsely boasting of how the university had provided three meals a day to students.

Students have been obstructed by security and police surrounding accommodation buildings, denying entrance or exit, as was the case at the University of Manchester. There the authorities spent £11,000 in a security operation to surround Fallowfield Halls to stop students leaving after coronavirus cases were reported. Students broke down the fences in protest.

The NUS survey found that “80 percent of respondents reported being worried about how they would manage financially as a result of the pandemic.” This points to a major cause in the rise of anxiety and other mental health issues. As a result of economic uncertainty, the numbers enrolling for university have increased by 3.5 percent.

Students at the entrance to the Courtrooms halls of residence at Bristol university (credit: WSWS)

Students are still expected to pay the same inflated tuition fees of £9,250 for online learning and with limited access to resources available during in person learning. With 2.2 million people filling out jobless claims in the last month, young people are the hardest hit. As most work at events or in the service industry, young people have seen their employment opportunities vanish over the last six months.

Many students are struggling to support themselves, with one in five unable to pay their rent, and a further 72 percent worried about their ability to pay rent; having to resort to selling their clothes and other possessions to make ends meet. Swansea University reported an average increase of 190 percent in applications for its hardship fund, while Cardiff Metropolitan University said it had seen a 125 percent increase.

Despite surges in COVID-19 cases, the government is again lifting national lockdown restrictions next week, in part using student and young peoples’ deteriorating mental health as a pretext. Another NUS survey discovered that “62 percent of respondents say that they are either somewhat or very scared about catching the coronavirus.”

Lifting lockdown restrictions without providing financial support will lead to students and youth being forced back to unsafe workplaces, with 62 percent having to work alongside study. This would lead to an enormous increase in students becoming infected and in turn infecting may others. This would render obsolete the even the inadequate “bubble” and “household” system put in place at schools and universities to supposedly minimise contact.

The mental health crisis among young people and workers brought about by the malign neglect and homicidal policies of the Johnson government, and by ruling elites across the world, can only be confronted by the organization of the international working class and youth.

This struggle must be carried out independently of the National Union of Students, and education unions, who despite carrying out surveys and making occasional perfunctory denunciations of government policy, have made no attempt to mobilise the student body to protest the deplorable situation on campuses. On the contrary, the NUS defended sending students back to campuses.

Students and educators must form their own independent safety committees, not just to ensure safe working and studying conditions, but as a vital means to ensure the provision of the urgent and necessary resources and treatment to all those suffering under the prolonged strain of the pandemic.

UK Chancellor launches austerity offensive: “Our economic emergency has only just begun.”

Robert Stevens

Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced years of austerity to come in his Spending Review yesterday.

“The UK is forecast to borrow a total of £394 billion this year, equivalent to 19% of GDP,” he said, “The highest recorded level of borrowing in our peacetime history.”

Sunak declared ominously, “Our health emergency is not yet over. And our economic emergency has only just begun.”

The cost of the pandemic had already reached £280 billion, said Sunak, and the “scarring” from it would mean an economy between 3 percent and 6 percent smaller by 2025 than it otherwise would have been. “Due to elevated borrowing levels, and a forecast persistent deficit, underlying debt is forecast to continue rising in every year, reaching 97.5% of GDP in 2025-26.”

The cost of this unprecedented economic collapse will be paid in its entirety by the working class.

The Chancellor Rishi Sunak works on his Spending Review speech with members of his team in his offices in 11 Downing Street (credit: HM Treasury FlickR)

After a decade of pay restrain that has gutted living standards, Sunak announced a pay freeze for four million workers--a real-terms pay cut, with official figures this week showing that inflation rose to 0.7 percent year on year in October. The cost to the state of employing 5.5 million public sector workers is around £190 billion annually. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates that the pay freeze will save the government £23 billion if imposed over the next three years.

For the two million lowest paid workers, the National Living Wage will be increased by just 2 percent—only in line with inflation. This was the recommendation of the Low Pay Commission, which in March had consulted on whether pay should be increased for the over-25s by a paltry 49p in April 2021, from £8.72 to £9.21 an hour. But after talks with government and business the Commission scaled down its recommendation to the 18p an hour announced by Sunak.

The only exception to the public sector pay cut is that more than one million National Health Service workers--including doctors, nurses and other hospital staff--will receive a pay rise. What rise would be paid was not laid out, but the government calculated that to slash NHS workers’ pay even further in the middle of a pandemic that has taken the lives of at least 612 health and social care workers--and over 70,000 in the entire population--would be political suicide.

The pandemic has seen hundreds of thousands jobs already wiped out, as corporations have utilised the crisis to implement long-planned restructuring programmes and streamline their operations.

Sunak announced a meagre £3 billion three-year “Restart Programme” he claimed would assist “over a million people who’ve been unemployed for over a year,” before declaring, “But I have always said: we cannot protect every job.” He warned the Office for Budget Responsibility “expects unemployment to rise to a peak in the second quarter of next year, of 7.5 percent--2.6 million people.” Other estimations are that unemployment could reach twice that rate.

The ruling class must impose its austerity agenda by force. Pay had to be cut and further unemployment was inevitable, Sunak intoned, but nothing could get in the way of making the financial resources available for beefing up the repressive forces of the state. He boasted that the “criminal justice system will increase by over a billion pounds. We’re providing more than £400 million to recruit 6,000 new police officers—well on track to recruit 20,000. And £4 billion over four years to provide 18,000 new prison places.”

The “Prime Minister,” he declared, “has announced over £24 billion investment in defence over the next four years, the biggest sustained increase in 30 years. Allowing us to provide security not just for our country but around the world.” Militarism abroad means an escalation of the class war at home to pay for it. Indeed, the projected £23 billion saving from the pay freeze is almost exactly the same as the military budget increase.

While workers’ pay is to be eviscerated in the immediate period ahead, the ruling elite and their media mouthpieces are fully aware that this is only a down payment on an offensive against the working class that will make the “age of austerity”, launched by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, pale in comparison.

Another major assault being pushed through by the government in the Spending Review is that millions of retirees will see the future value of their pensions drastically cut. Sunak never mentioned this in his speech, but documents released alongside the Spending Review included a concluded “consultation on the Reform to Retail Prices Index (RPI) Methodology”. This includes a planned change in the way pension payments are calculated from 2030. At present those receiving defined benefit workplace pensions see their pension payments rise each year in line with the rising cost of living. Under the new system, from February 2030 their pensions will be worth less.

The BBC noted, “Women and new retirees will be hardest hit by the changes… Over time, the value of their pensions could be thousands of pounds less than they might have expected. A 65-year-old now will see their total retirement income drop by 4% or 5% compared with their expectations. That is an £8,000 drop for a 65-year-old woman with average life expectancy.”

Sunak’s Spending Review must be seen in the context of confidential briefing documents drawn up by the Cabinet Office and seen by the Guardian. The newspaper published exclusive extracts from them yesterday. One of the briefings warns of a “systemic economic crisis” as the UK leaves the European Union amid a raging pandemic. “There is a notable risk” that “Winter 2020 could see a combination of severe flooding, pandemic influenza, a novel emerging infectious disease and coordinated industrial action, against a backdrop of the end of the [Brexit] transition period,” it warns.

The document, written in September, warns that global and British food supply chains will be disrupted by “circumstances occurring concurrently at the end of the year.” The Guardian writes of the briefing’s contents, “Stockpiles built up at the end of 2019 were diminished during the pandemic and cannot easily be replenished.”

The health and social care system are in uncharted territory, warns the Cabinet document. The Guardian quotes a section: “The pandemic has and will continue to limit the capacity of the health and care sector to prepare for and respond to the end of the transition period,” with a “sustained level of system disruption from November until at least April.”

More than anything the ruling class know and are fearful that their onslaught against workers must intensify the class struggle. The briefing, notes the Guardian, outlines “threats of disruption to essential services, and analysts’ confidence in their assessments are ranked by a traffic light system—red, amber and green. Areas marked as high or moderate concern include public disorder, law enforcement, ‘impact on low economic groups’, adult social care and food and water supplies.”

The pro-Tory Spectator magazine’s Kate Andrews, in a mailshot headlined, “Sunak’s Spending Review reveals a devastated economy,” concluded, “Many of the hard choices have been left for another day. But today’s economic update would suggest that far more will need to be done in coming years to get spending under control… The economic reality this government will be forced to reckon with in the future may spark a political emergency too.”