The Muslim world’s changing dynamics: Pakistan struggles to retain its footing

James M. Dorsey

Increasing strains between Pakistan and its traditional Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, is about more than Gulf states opportunistically targeting India’s far more lucrative market.

At the heart of the tensions, that potentially complicate Pakistan’s economic recovery, is also India’s ability to enhance Gulf states’ capacity to hedge their bets amid uncertainty about the continued US commitment to regional security.

India is a key member of the Quad that also includes the United States, Australia and Japan and could play a role in a future more multilateral regional security architecture in the Gulf.

Designed as the backbone of an Indo-Pacific strategy intended to counter China across a swath of maritime Asia, Gulf states are unlikely to pick sides but remain keen on ensuring that they maintain close ties with both sides of the widening divide.

The mounting strains with Pakistan are also the latest iteration of a global battle for Muslim religious soft power that pits Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Turkey, Iran, and Asian players like Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Islamic movement.

A combination of geo- and domestic politics is complicating efforts by major Muslim-majority states in Asia to walk a middle line. Pakistan, home to the world’s largest Shiite Muslim minority, has reached out to Turkey while seeking to balance relations with its neighbour, Iran.

The pressure on Pakistan is multi-fold.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan charged recently that the United States and one other unidentified country were pressing him to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Pakistani and Israeli media named Saudi Arabia as the unidentified country. Representing the world’s second most populous Muslim nation, Pakistani recognition, following in the footsteps of the UAE and Bahrain, would be significant.

Pakistan twice in the last year signaled a widening rift with the kingdom.

Mr. Khan had planned to participate a year ago in an Islamic summit hosted by Malaysia and attended by Saudi Arabia’s detractors, Turkey, Iran and Qatar, but not the kingdom and a majority of Muslim states. The Pakistani prime minister cancelled his participation at the last moment under Saudi pressure.

More recently, Pakistan again challenged Saudi leadership of the Muslim world when Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi complained about lack of support of the Saudi-dominated Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) for Pakistan in its conflict with India over Kashmir. The OIC groups the world’s 57 Muslim-majority nations. Mr. Qureshi suggested that his country would seek to rally support beyond the realm of the kingdom.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on a visit to Pakistan earlier this year, made a point of repeatedly reiterating his country’s support for Pakistan in the Kashmir dispute.

By openly challenging the kingdom, Mr. Qureshi was hitting Saudi Arabia where it hurts most as it seeks to repair its image tarnished by allegations of abuse of human rights, manoeuvres to get off on the right foot with incoming US President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, and fends off challenges to its leadership of the Muslim world.

Pakistan has not helped itself by recently failing to ensure that it would be removed from the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force, an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog, despite progress in the country’s legal infrastructure and enforcement.

Grey listing causes reputational damage and makes foreign investors and international banks more cautious in their dealings with countries that have not been granted a clean bill of health.

Responding to Mr. Qureshi’s challenge, Saudi Arabia demanded that Pakistan repay a US$1 billion loan extended to help the South Asian nation ease its financial crisis. The kingdom has also dragged its feet on renewing a US$3.2 billion oil credit facility that expired in May.

In what Pakistan will interpret as UAE support for Saudi Arabia, the Emirates last week included Pakistan on its version of US President Donald J. Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

Inclusion on the list of 13 Muslim countries whose nationals will no longer be issued visas for travel to the UAE increases pressure on Pakistan, which relies heavily on exporting labour to generate remittances and alleviate unemployment.

Some Pakistanis fear that a potential improvement in Saudi-Turkish relations could see their country fall through geopolitical cracks.

In the first face-to-face meeting between senior Saudi and Turkish officials since the October 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, the two countries’ foreign ministers, Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Mevlut Cavusoglu, held bilateral talks this weekend, on the sidelines of an OIC conference in the African state of Niger.

“A strong Turkey-Saudi partnership benefits not only our countries but the whole region,” Mr. Cavusoglu tweeted after the meeting.

The meeting came days after Saudi King Salman telephoned Mr. Erdogan on the eve of a virtual summit hosted by the kingdom of the Group of 20 (G20) that brings together the world’s largest economies.

“The Muslim world is changing and alliances are shifting and entering new, unchartered territories,” said analyst Sahar Khan.

Added Imtiaz Ali, another analyst: “In the short term, Riyadh will continue exploiting Islamabad’s economic vulnerabilities… But in the longer term, Riyadh cannot ignore the rise of India in the region, and the two countries may become close allies – something that will mostly likely increase the strain on Pakistan-Saudi relations.”

Private sector and Conservative Party cronies reap over £17 billion in government contracts during pandemic

Robert Stevens

Vast profits were made by a small number of UK companies during the first wave of the pandemic, in what was akin to war profiteering.

At least 15 companies handed contracts without tendering or oversight had connections to the Conservative government in what is being described as a “chumocracy”.

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) into 8,600 contracts signed during the pandemic found that government officials awarded contracts worth £17.3 billion to private sector firms. Of this £10.5 billion (58 percent) was awarded directly without any tendering of contracts. £12.3 billion was paid out by government for the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) and £2.9 billion in Testing and Tracing contracts.

Health Minister Matt Hancock at a Downing Street media briefing during the pandemic

The government utilised European Union procurement laws to sidestep having to put contracts out to competitive tendering that is supposedly designed to ensure best value for money.

Several huge contracts went directly to friends of government ministers and others with close connections to government figures. Some awarded lucrative contracts worth hundreds of millions had no experience of working in the medical supplies industry.

To push through awarding contracts without the usual scrutiny, the government set up, via the Department of Health, a high priority channel to process the claims of individuals wanting to supply PPE that had been raised by ministers, MPs, peers and senior NHS staff.

According to the Times, “About one in ten suppliers whose offer was processed through this channel (47 out of 493) obtained contracts to supply PPE, compared with less than one in a hundred suppliers that came through the ordinary lane (104 of 14,892). It [the NAO] added that the sources of the referrals to the high-priority lane were not always recorded on the team’s case-management system.”

Among those receiving contracts was Alex Bourne, who used to run a pub, The Cock Inn in Thurlow, frequented by Health Secretary Matt Hancock. The pub is located close to the Hancock’s former constituency home in Suffolk.

Hancock attended the pub’s reopening after a refurbishment in 2016 and nominated it for an award the following year. Before he moved from his constituency home in 2018, Hancock posted a photo of himself pulling a pint in the pub with Bourne on his parliamentary website. When the deal became public knowledge, Bourne, a former captain in the British army, commented, “I know Matt Hancock, he’s not a friend, he’s an acquaintance.”

Bourne won a government contract for supplying medical vials, a business he had no expertise in or even basic knowledge of, by sending a personal WhatsApp message to Hancock. He wrote, “Hello, it’s Alex Bourne from Thurlow.” The message set in train a fast-track process under which it is estimated that Bourne received contracts worth at least £30 million for supplying vials for coronavirus tests. Bourne and Hancock exchanged text and email messages over several months, with Bourne also admitting, according to the Guardian, that he participated in a Zoom meeting in August “attended by Hancock, [Prime Minister] Boris Johnson and several dozen suppliers in the Covid test-and-trace programme.”

Literally anybody, with the right connections, was able to reap lucrative rewards from the public purse.

In 2018, Bourne set up Hinpack, a manufacturing company which produced plastic cups and takeaway boxes for the catering industry. It was through repurposing this company that Bourne was able to win his DHSC contract.

NHS products of the kind Bourne was to manufacture must be produced in a sterile environment. Bourne had no “clean rooms” from which to produce products vitally important to public health. Instead, the Guardian reported, Bourne “paid a manufacturer of bouncy castles and blimps to make him a specially commissioned inflatable structure to unpack and decontaminate incoming supplies, which his lawyers described as a room that was intended to be ‘comparatively contamination-free’ but ‘not medical-grade sterile’.”

From this makeshift operation Bourne supplied the National Health Service, via several distributors, with tens of millions of vials and 500,000 plastic funnels for test samples.

Conservative Party councillor Steve Dechan won several contracts to import PPE from China. Dechan was elected to Stroud Town Council as a Liberal Democrat, before defected to the Tories in 2018. In the 2019 general election he campaigned for sitting Tory MP Siobhan Baillie.

P14 Medical, also known as Platform 14, was suffering large financial losses in 2019 but was able to win the contract without any tendering process. In July the government published who had won a number of contracts, with P14 securing the third largest awarded. P14, specialists in pain management technologies, won three PPE supply contracts worth £272 million.

Dechan commented after the contract details were made public, “I only know a couple MPs through local campaigning on issues, only met ministers (no current ones) on [general election] campaign trails. Never discussed PPE.”

Several firms securing contracts were connected to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former chief advisor, Dominic Cummings. Open Democracy noted last month, “Public First is run by James Frayne--who has been a close associate of Cummings for more than 20 years--and Rachel Wolf, a former Gove adviser who co-wrote the Conservative Party’s 2019 election manifesto.”

During the pandemic Public First secured more than £1 million of public contracts without tender.

Cumming worked with a company, Faculty, on the Vote Leave campaign in 2016. During the COVID crisis, Faculty was awarded three contracts worth £3 million for data analysis.

Ayanda Capital (specialists in currency trading and offshore property), were named in the NAU report after winning a PPE contract worth £253 million. The Daily Mail noted, “The deal was brokered by Andrew Mills, who was one of 12 advisers to the Board of Trade, chaired by International Trade Secretary Liz Truss. Mr Mills is also a ‘senior board adviser’ to Ayanda Capital.”

UK-based private healthcare corporation Randox, which develops, manufactures and markets diagnostic reagents and equipment for laboratory medicine with a distribution network in 145 countries, was granted nearly £500 million to provide private-sector testing. Despite it having to recall 750,000 flawed test kits its contract was extended. Among Randox’s board members is Tory MP Owen Paterson, who is paid £100,000 a year by the firm.

In August, a Sunday Times investigation found that 12 contracts were handed out to three firms with links to Conservative Party members or donors.

Meller Designs won deals worth £163 million, including for supplying hand sanitiser and face masks. The firm, normally supplying home and beauty products to high-street retailers, is run by Tory donor David Meller. Meller has gifted £65,000 to the Tories over the last decade. He was previously a trustee of the right-wing Policy Exchange thinktank, founded by Gove. The Byline Times website noted, “Meller Designs recorded turnover of £12.8 million in 2019 and £13.7 million in 2018. If the company didn’t trade for the rest of 2020, its turnover would have increased elevenfold on the previous year, based on these Government contracts alone.”

Another major Tory donor, Steve Parkin, has given the party more than £500,000. A firm he founded, Clipper Logistics, secured a £1.3 million contract to distribute PPE.

Prior to the pandemic, the government slashed the national stock of PPE supplies by 40 percent in a criminal cost cutting measure. To offset the disaster they created, the Tories allowed literally anyone to supply PPE. A £32 million PPE contract was awarded to PestFix Ltd, a pest control company in Sussex.

Among those cashing in the PPE supply bonanza was Florida-based jewellery designer Michael Saiger.

Saiger was handed UK government contracts worth £200 million without any competition. The Daily Mail reported on the profiteering involved, “Some [contracts] appear to have been negotiated at well above normal market rates. For example, in a £70.5 million deal signed in May, the taxpayer acquired 10.2 million surgical gowns at an effective cost of £6.91 each. That was nearly 50 percent more than the average market price (£4.60) at the time, and seven times the pre-pandemic cost of £1.05.” It added, “It appears that when he signed the various DoH contracts… Saiger, a former male model, did not have a manufacturer in place to fulfil various aspects of them. He also had no obvious prior experience of supplying medical equipment or shipping it in large quantities to Europe.”

Saiger enlisted Gabriel Gonzalez Andersson, a Madrid-based businessman, to assist with “procurement, logistics, due diligence, product sourcing and quality control” of PPE. Andersson ended up being paid £21 million by the UK taxpayer for his work on just two government contracts to supply the NHS. Details of the profiteering only emerged after being raised as part of legal proceeding in a court case in Miami.

The BBC reported that Saiger signed three more agreements to supply the NHS in June with millions of gloves and surgical gowns. “When the UK government paid up, his go-between, Mr Andersson, would have been in line for a further $20m in consulting fees. But the court documents allege that once the agreements had been signed, Mr Andersson stopped doing any work for Mr Saiger.”

It is unclear, said the BBC, if “Andersson received any of the money for this second batch of deals. This led to PPE deliveries being delayed to NHS frontline workers, Mr Saiger claims, and the company ‘scrambling’ to fulfil the contracts by other means.”

Sri Lankan government orders schools to reopen, threatening thousands with COVID-19

Pradeep Ramanayake

The Sri Lankan government reopened schools last Monday, creating the conditions for a catastrophic spread of COVID-19 among school populations. The decision was taken in defiance of widespread opposition by parents, teachers and students.

Students washing hands in plastic basins established in schools in July (WSWS Media)

The government closed all schools on March 13 in response to rising national concern over the rapid global spread of the highly infectious virus and reopened on July 6. Confronted three months later with a sudden increase in infections, the government closed them again on October 5.

Schools in the Western Province, where the highest number of cases have been reported, however, did not reopen and last week education authorities were forced to quickly close schools in other provinces.

All schools in Kandy city were closed a day after last Monday’s “re-openings,” along with several schools in Kurunegala district, Ambalangoda in the south, the central hills plantation area, Kilinochchi in the north and Kalmunai in the east.

On Tuesday, it was reported that the parents of two children from the same family attending two major schools in Ambalangoda tested COVID-19 positive. Almost all of the 8,000 students at those schools did not attend the following day. Twenty-five students and eight teachers from these schools are now in quarantine.

According to reports, only 10 percent of students attended Sri Lankan schools last Monday, indicating that most of the population had rejected Education Minister G.L. Peiris’s “assurances” that schools were safe. Even after repeated urging by government health authorities and the media only about 50 percent of students had attended by Friday. Teacher attendances were also noticeably low, despite having been directed by education authorities to report for work.

COVID-19 cases are surging across the country with infections recorded at many state institutions and workplaces, including factories and universities, and in remote villages. The government, however, is attempting to conceal the real situation with an inadequate number of tests being carried out.

Empty Sri Lankan class room (WSWS Media)

According to the current official figures, the number of infected in Sri Lanka is over 23,500 and the number of deaths is at 116. About 16,000 of these infections have been diagnosed since the beginning of October.

Education Minister Peiris, citing a World Health Organization (WHO) warning that the pandemic was expected to last for another two and a half years, declared that school closures this long would mean the “shutdown of children’s futures.”

The minister has no concern about the “children’s future” but is attempting to dismiss the WHO’s warnings to justify reopening schools but without adequate safety measures and testing regimes in place.

Earlier this month, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, like his counterparts around the world, declared that it was necessary to “carry out normal activities while controlling the disease.” In other words, people should accept living with the deadly pandemic in order to maintain the profit interests of big business.

Rajapakse’s mantra was repeated by the secretary to the education ministry, Kapila Perera, and Army Commander Shavendra Silva, head of the Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak Taskforce.

Appearing on national television last Wednesday, Silva was asked about how to change the population’s attitude towards the “new normalcy.” He responded by declaring, “We gave examples [to people] of how we have worked successfully during the pandemic.”

Silva claimed that grade 5 scholarship and advance level examinations were held without any problem. Limited reports, however, indicate that scores of teachers and students were infected during these examinations.

Classes being conducted without social distancing (WSWS Media)

Colombo, in fact, has left it up to each school through a committee headed by the principal to decide on holding classes. Principals, however, have criticised the government, saying it was attempting to pass all responsibility for coronavirus infections in the schools onto the committees.

In another indication of its contemptuous attitude to students, teachers and their families, the government has only allocated 37 million rupees ($US200,000) to more than 6,000 schools that reopened on Monday. If divided by the number of schools, this will not even cover one day’s minimum healthcare at each school. Hand sanitation currently consists of water basins and soap that have been placed at the school entrances.

A majority of teachers and students attending school travel long distances each day on congested public transport services and in most schools up to 40 or 50 students share small class rooms.

Government “concerns” over the health and education of students are bogus. The budget allocation for health in 2021 is 30 billion rupees less than 187 billion rupees allocated in 2019 and education has been reduced from 166 billion rupees in 2019 to 126 billion in 2021. By contrast, spending on defence and the police will be 440 billion in 2021, up by about 50 billion from 2019.

Several teachers spoke last week to the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) about the school re-openings.

A teacher from Getambe school near Peradeniya, said: “There is total chaos in society. Most of the students travel by bus and, like the crowded classrooms, this is impacting on student attendance. Is the government trying to kill people? It has also used the pandemic to avoid paying teachers a salary increase.”

Referring to the government’s imposition of an Essential Services order on port workers, he added: “I denounce the forceful driving of port employees to work by declaring it an essential service.”

A teacher from the Western Province explained that it was not possible to maintain safe physical distancing in schools: “The government claims that it has restarted schools out of concern for the people. This is a lie and aimed at assuring people that they now have to live with the pandemic. What is the limit? How far do we have to go with this? People have to fight against this situation.”

A Madampa Central College teacher in Ambalangoda said: “We were instructed to hold online lessons during the period when the schools were closed and although we did it, only 20 percent of students attended. Without providing the necessary technological facilities for students it is not possible to carry out this sort of undertaking.”

A teacher from St. Joseph’s College in Maskeliya said: “I strongly condemn the government decision to re-open the schools, particularly in this Maskeliya area, where my school is and several virus cases have been located. Our students are mostly plantation workers’ children, who live in very poor housing conditions and without proper basic facilities.”

There are four main teachers’ unions in the plantation areas, including the Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU), the Up-Country Teachers Forum, Up Country Teachers Federation, and a Ceylon Workers Congress-affiliated union. The St Joseph’s College teacher explained that some of these unions had released statements calling on teachers and students to take safely measures themselves.

Although the CTU had criticised the government for not implementing proper safety measures, he said, all these unions had supported the government and the re-opening of schools.

On Monday the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) teachers’ group issued a statement on the WSWS Sinhala language site entitled, “Oppose the reopening of schools under unsafe conditions! Build Safety Committees of Teachers Students and Parents to Save Lives from the pandemic!”

The statement called for the closing of all schools and universities until the pandemic was brought under control: full payment of the salaries of teachers and other employees; increased COVID-19 testing; proper facilities for online education; and the provision of adequate training for teachers to conduct online classes.

The statement explained that these demands would only be realised in struggle against the capitalist profit system and would involve the working class rallying the poor and oppressed mass in the fight for socialism and a workers’ and peasants’ government in Sri Lanka.

Barbaric murder by Brazilian security guards sparks protests, repression

Miguel Andrade

Thousands of Brazilian workers and youth have taken to the streets in six cities since November 20 to demonstrate against the barbaric murder by security guards of João Alberto Freitas, a 40-year-old worker from of Porto Alegre, capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. In addition to Porto Alegre, the federal capital Brasília and four of the country’s five largest cities saw protests—São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza.

Demonstration against the killing of João Alberto Freitas in Porto Alegre. (Credit: Ezequiela Scapini/Brasil de Fato)

The police have yet to explain the circumstances of the murder. Video footage shows Freitas being escorted out of a Carrefour supermarket while his wife was still paying for their purchases. He appears to make a rude gesture towards one of the guards on the way out, after which he is thrown to the ground and beaten barbarically. He was then held to the ground with one of the guards pinning him with his knee, dying in front of his wife—a scene reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd in the United States and so many other murders by police around the world.

Public information available about Freitas makes clear the social conditions that are the backdrop to such horrific violence. Freitas lived in the Vila do IAPI housing project, personally inaugurated by the bourgeois-nationalist president Getúlio Vargas in 1953 as a model social housing complex at the heart of a bustling industrial region, which is now filled with crumbling and empty warehouses. The project, a testimony to the former reforms in working class living conditions that have since been abandoned by every faction of the ruling establishment, is known as the birthplace of one of the most iconic interpreters of Brazilian popular music, Elis Regina. Freitas was forced to retire after an industrial accident at the local airport limited use of one of his arms, but even so worked as a welder with his father when there was work available.

João Alberto Freitas (Facebook)

Family and friends charged that racism motivated the hate-filled reaction of the guards, at the same time providing testimony of widespread harassment of working class customers by store security. Freitas was black, while both guards are white. They are being held in custody, and the police have acknowledged that racism is an official line of investigation.

The murder happened on the eve of Brazil’s national Black Consciousness Day, November 20, which is recognized in the federal calendar and is a local-level holiday in more than a thousand cities across the country. It pays homage to the day in 1695 when Portuguese troops captured and beheaded Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of the longest-lasting and most powerful of the inland settlements built by runaway slaves in Brazil, known as quilombos. The first demonstrations against the murder were coordinated with organizers of traditional Black Consciousness marches, which in many cases re-routed their traditional marches to local Carrefour branches, where they were met with shock police and cavalry troops.

Federal authorities have reacted with utter hostility toward the outpouring of grief and rage over the murder of Freitas, one of the almost 6,000 Brazilians killed by police each year, six times more than in the United States, which has a population a third larger than that of Brazil. A disproportionate number of victims are recognized as black by the national statistics bureau, IBGE, which combines the numbers of those self-declaring as “black” and “brown” in the country’s historic skin-color classification. They comprise 75 percent of police victims, as compared to 56 percent in the population. Some 1,500 white Brazilians are killed by police every year, 50 percent more than all those killed in the US.

Protest outside Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre (Credit: Luiza Castro/Sul21)

Freitas’ murder is directly bound up with the terror regime imposed upon workers by Brazil’s capitalist state: one of the assassins is a Military Police soldier working illegally as a private security guard, a widespread practice throughout the country.

In response to the murder and protests, Bolsonaro took to Twitter to proclaim that “miscegenation” had left Brazil free of racism, and to denounce those attempting to “destroy the Brazilian family” and replace it with “conflict, resentment, hatred and class division.” He ominously warned that “those instigating the people into discord” are “in the wrong place. Their place is in the trash.”

The next Saturday, he opened his remarks to the G20 meeting by again hailing “the Brazilian national character” and denouncing “attempts to import to our territory tensions alien to our history.” On Saturday, the Época magazine revealed that the head of the federal broadcasting agency, the EBC, ordered that the agency ignore the murder.

Bolsonaro’s threats were put into practice in no time. Even before rubber bullets, tear gas and mounted police were unleashed against demonstrators in the evening of November 20, the Catholic Church leadership in Rio de Janeiro took the unprecedented decision to cancel the Black Consciousness Day mass in the city’s historic central district of Gloria, due to threats of violence by far-right Catholic fanatics, who opposed the use of traditional African religious artifacts in the ceremony.

The fascistic president is openly adopting a thesis that had been until very recently the dominant ideological approach of the Brazilian ruling class towards “national unity” and the suppression of opposition to social inequality. It has extolled Brazil’s history of miscegenation, as opposed to Jim Crow segregation in the United States and ethnic conflicts in Europe and elsewhere, claiming that it has rendered Brazil a nation free not only of racism, but of all internal conflicts, and that those who differ should be swiftly suppressed. In Brazil, Bolsonaro proclaimed, there are only two colors, “green and yellow,” the colors of the Brazilian flag.

Bolsonaro, a close ally of US President Donald Trump and his far-right adviser Steve Bannon, is resurrecting an apparently outmoded and anachronistic view—in terms of contemporary bourgeois public opinion dominated by identity politics—that Brazil is free of internal divisions as a “racial democracy.” This ideological campaign is being conducted in furtherance of an international offensive of imperialist militarism, austerity and reaction. Its aim, as that of racism itself, is to divide and weaken the rising activity of the working class drawn from every racial, ethnic and religious background.

Bolsonaro’s focus on the “importing of conflicts” represent a grave and double threat to Brazilian workers. At the same time that he endorses far-right and police riots against demonstrators, he is consciously seeking to exploit divisions provoked by the turn by a significant section of the ruling class to identity politics and racialist communalism, as well as their unanimous adoption by the pseudo-left.

These forces have mounted an increasingly right-wing attack on the so-called “racial democracy myth,” portraying it as a barrier to the development of a “black identity” among Brazilians. They pretend to fight racism and the hypocrisy of the past by elevating race as the primary category, thereby enabling Bolsonaro to pose as an opponent of racism. At the same time, they seek to subordinate workers to capitalist identity politics, which benefits solely a narrow “rainbow coalition” of reaction by appointing “black” and “brown” capitalist managers and officials in the repressive state apparatus.

This danger was on display in the response of the media and the political establishment to the recent Black Consciousness Day.

November 20 saw the bourgeois press inundated with reports of how companies had to do more to promote black leaders, with the conservative O Estado de S. Paulo —formerly a fierce opponent of affirmative action—calling attention to the fact that none of the presidents of the 100 largest companies traded on the São Paulo stock exchange are black. The CEO of the Brazilian branch of Carrefour, Noel Prioux, made a televised speech on the most watched prime-time program, Globo’s Jornal Nacional, declaring that the murder of João Alberto Freitas was “beyond his comprehension” as a “white and privileged” person.

Signaling a renewed right-wing lurch by the Workers Party (PT), former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on Twitter that “racism is the origin of every abyss in this country.”

The latest unemployment figures indicate that 15 percent of Brazilians are out of a job. Brazil is being hit by a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic without ever coming close to controlling the first, and unemployment will soar even further. More than 170,000 Brazilians have already died, leaving millions with their lives destroyed emotionally and financially. The economic crisis resulting from the pandemic is vastly accelerating the war drive among the imperialist powers, which is itself making necessary brutal austerity and impoverishment the world over.

The horrifying murder of João Alberto Freitas is a sharp exposure of capitalist barbarism. Such crimes, from Brazil, to the US, to France and around the globe, are provoking an ever more militant reaction by the working class internationally. The latest demonstrations in Brazil were without question connected to a much larger movement of millions of workers and youth of every background against police violence, racism, social inequality and the murderous “herd immunity” policy of the ruling class.

Spain’s Podemos to oversee distribution of EU bailout funds to the super-rich

Alejandro López

Last week, with barely any press comment, let alone public debate, Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government unveiled a law specifying how billions of euros in EU bailout funds will be funneled to banks and corporations. It takes place as the government claims that de-escalation of anti-COVID-19 measures is needed because “there is no money” for a scientific fight against the virus.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks in the Spanish parliament in Madrid, Spain, Monday, Dec. 30, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

In July, after five days of acrimonious negotiations in Brussels between EU member states, the EU announced a financial stimulus programme to transfer €750 billion to the financial aristocracy. The amount allocated to Spain, €140 billion, including €72 billion in grants, made it the second-biggest recipient after Italy. On his return to Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that day was “one of the most brilliant pages in EU history has been written.” Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias hailed it as “a breath of fresh air for the European project.”

The reactionary class content of this project is unmistakably clear. While tens of millions of workers and small business owners have only received (or are still waiting for) meagre COVID-19 furlough schemes, billions of euros are to be handed, with unprecedented speed, to the banks and major corporations.

A draft royal decree specifies that most of handouts will be for Strategic Projects for Economic Recovery and Transformation ( Proyectos Estratégicos para la Recuperación y Transformación Económica – PERTE). These projects will foster public-private partnerships to “strengthen those projects” that contribute “to economic growth, employment and the competitiveness of our country.”

The draft law is tailored to large corporations and banks, who, given the “magnitude of the risks associated with these projects” will work closely with the state. Due to the complexity of these projects, level of resources required and volume of the investment, their main targets are clearly companies in Spain’s Ibex 35 stock exchange, and not small businesses, let alone the working class.

As El Periódico noted, “The idea is that the PERTE will channel part of the funds to generate traction projects, led by large companies, but in which small and medium enterprises will also enter into execution and in which the state actively participates in their design. An example would be to create the necessary infrastructure to develop the electric car value chain in Spain, from the battery factory to the chargers in urban centres where users plug in vehicles.”

The Spanish Confederation of Employers’ Organizations (CEOE), Spain’s main big business association, is designing 20 “macro-projects” and will present them to the state in coming weeks.

Due to civil service cuts in recent decades, Madrid has traditionally faced issues with disbursement of EU funds. A new, fast-tracking procedure has therefore been designed with lower controls and supervision.

To prevent “excess bureaucracy” from hindering the enrichment of the financial aristocracy, the decree states that “the dispatch of these projects will have priority over any other, and the control body must rule within five business days.” However, “when due to exceptional circumstances there is an accumulation of files that prevents compliance with the period of five business days, the General Accountant of the State Administration will adopt the necessary measures to guarantee the effective compliance of this period.”

Significantly, large companies may receive advanced funding even before the project starts. This ranges between 50 and 90 percent.

Podemos reacted to the draft law leak with anger—not at the fact that billions will be handed to the financial aristocracy, but that such disbursements would not have Pablo Iglesias’ signature on it. Iglesias demanded that he be admitted onto the Commission to execute the Transformation and Resilience Plan for the Spanish Economy—the commission set up to manage the funds.

Iglesias said there is “a lot of anger about this issue” and a “rectification from La Moncloa,” the prime minister’s residence, was required. He added, “the logical thing is that I should be there.” Soon after, the government included Iglesias on the commission.

Since the inauguration of the coalition government in January, Iglesias has been the chief spokesman and defender of the government’s measures in parliament, tasked with presenting them as “left.” He also sits on the Intelligence Affairs Commission, the body directing the National Intelligence Centre, and recently toured Latin America with the Spanish King Felipe VI. His colleague, Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz, has overseen the back-to-work policy enforced by the trade unions.

The integration of Podemos in the bailouts testifies to the reactionary character of petty bourgeois “Left Populist” politics. It comes as they have demonstrated their readiness to defend the financial aristocracy’s wealth even at the cost of workers’ lives.

Over the past year, protests against the PSOE-Podemos’ austerity, “herd immunity” and unsafe back-to-work policies, have been met with police violence and threats to deploy the army. At the same time, since the PSOE-Podemos government passed the Digital Gag Law, as it is known, opposition websites and social media are being increasingly monitored by the police and intelligence agencies.

Amid this context, and terrified at the exposure of right-wing role of Podemos, forces orbiting around Podemos like the Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Workers' Revolutionary Current—CRT) are trying to suppress this opposition by promoting illusions in the trade unions.

In its piece on the bailout mechanism, they declare that “workers are not going to obtain any direct benefit from these funds as they are designed, basically to guarantee corporate profits and especially those of large companies. It is necessary to occupy the streets, snatching them from the reaction and impose on the union bureaucracies a plan to fight for an emergency programme so that the capitalists pay for the crisis.”

In fact, the same union bureaucracy they are appealing to has been campaigning for months in defence of the EU funds. It is busy setting up a forum with the CEOE to advise the government on the funds. According to union sources of El País, “UGT and CCOO will immediately designate teams to participate in the negotiations [on the projects to be funded] to be presented to the EU.”

The unions are also cynically claiming that they are not subject to austerity conditions from Brussels. On Wednesday, the General Secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, said “There is no negative conditionality, there is no position on the part of the [European] Commission… the funds are for us to look into the future.”

As Sordo well knows, the PSOE-Podemos government is preparing labour reforms, pensions cuts and slashing billions in public expenditure in next year’s budget to reduce the deficit as promised to Brussels. Meanwhile, the unions are negotiating wage “moderation” with the CEOE.

The decisive question facing the international working class is to ensure its political independence from these reactionary, middle class forces. The only way to address the pandemic and growing social inequality is to impound the fortunes of the financial aristocracy and to confiscate the massive sums of public money illegitimately handed over to the ruling class by Podemos.

Microsoft’s new “Productivity Score” helps employers spy on workers

Mike Ingram

Microsoft has expanded the analytics provided with its Office 365 suite of productivity applications into a “full-fledged workplace surveillance tool” according to privacy advocates.

The tool, called Productivity Score, allows employers to know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams over the previous four weeks and on what type of device.

The software gives managers access to 73 pieces of granular data about employee behaviors, all of which is associated with employees by name. Microsoft denies the software is workplace surveillance, but privacy advocates say it most certainly is.

Vienna-based researcher Wolfie Christl tweeted a screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard, writing that “Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it’s built into MS 365.”

“A new feature to calculate ‘productivity scores’ turns Microsoft 365 into a full-fledged workplace surveillance tool,” Christl added.

Microsoft claims that the software is not designed as a tool to monitor employee work output activities. A September blog post by Anthony Smith, introducing the product, claimed, “we safeguard against this type of use by not providing specific information on individualized actions, and instead only analyze user-level data aggregated over a 28-day period, so you can’t see what a specific employee is working on at a given time. Productivity Score was built to help you understand how people are using the productivity tools and how well the underlying technology supports them in this.”

In an email to The Register Christl refuted the software giant’s claim, saying the system “does clearly monitor employee activities.” He referenced Microsoft’s own promotional video which shows a list of clearly identifiable users. Posting the video on Twitter, Christl wrote: “Employers/managers can analyze employee activities at the individual level (!), for example, the number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc.”

Screenshot of the Productivity Score dashboard

While Productivity Score is not enabled by default, when companies enable it, the software automatically shows data on individual employees. Employers can anonymize user data or opt out of using user-level data at all, but managers have to manually change the settings. Employees have no control over this whatsoever.

The software dashboard provides a so-called peer benchmark, which measures the company against other companies for each metric collected, meaning companies using the product are sending analytics data back to Microsoft.

The documentation for Productivity Score shows the extent of workplace surveillance the software allows. “Person metrics” include data such as the number of hours a person spent in meetings and on email outside of working hours and the number of emails sent. The system also monitors “low-quality meeting hours” which is defined as, the “Number of meeting hours in which an attendee multitasked, attended a conflicting meeting, or attended a meeting that exhibits Redundancy (organizational).”

Employees are assigned an “influence” score “that indicates how well connected a person is within the company. A higher score means that the person is better connected and has greater potential to drive change.” The product documentation states. The software also has a “Diverse tie score” indicating how varied and broad a person’s connections are and a “Strong tie score” recording how many “strong and tight engagements a person has had.”

J.S. Nelson is an associate professor of law at Villanova University who studies workplace surveillance. She told Forbes the software is “horrendous.” “Why are they monitoring people this way and what is that telling people about the relationship they should have with their employers in the workplace? What message are you sending?” she asked.

More invasive employee monitoring tools such as Teramind can capture any user activity, including screen recordings, live views of employee computers, and track emails, keystrokes and even video sessions. These are specialized products and regarded as overly intrusive by many workers.

A Computerworld article from October this year examined how COVID-19 and the move to remote working has spurred faster adoption of employee monitoring software by companies seeking to boost productivity and spy on workers outside of the office.

The article quotes Brian Kropp, group vice president of Gartner’s HR practice. “When COVID-19 hit, we found that within the first month, 16 percent of companies put new tracking software on the laptops of remote employees,” Kropp said. By July that number had risen to 26 percent of companies.

Kropp said that even before the pandemic, companies were moving in the direction of “passively monitoring our employees, listening to them and watching them, and asking them less and less.”

“What the pandemic has done is just accelerate the speed at which that is happening. ... They were going to get there eventually; the pandemic has just accelerated the future into the present,” Kropp said.

The development of Productivity Score now gives companies similar tools without the need to roll out new software. The near-ubiquitous presence of Office 365 in the workplace gives employers ready-made surveillance of their employees.

While the office suite market is dominated by Google with 59.41 percent, Microsoft Office 365 is used by over a million companies worldwide with close to 600,000 companies in the US alone. Under conditions of a global pandemic that has forced the closure of offices around the world and enforced remote working from home, Microsoft is giving corporations the tools to drive up productivity and monitor workers’ activity 24 hours a day.

The metrics provided by Productivity Score will be used by corporations to identify low scoring employees and facilitate more layoffs with increased exploitation of those remaining, under an ever-present pressure to improve their scores.

Ethiopian military seizes control of regional capital after offensive against Tigray province

Jean Shaoul

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced Sunday that government forces were “fully in control” of Mekelle, the regional capital of Ethiopia’s northern province of Tigray.

He claimed the military had entered the city in the “last phase” of the conflict with the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). Military operations in the Tigray region had ceased, he said, although federal forces would “continue their task of apprehending TPLF criminals and bring them to the court of law.”

The neighbouring province of Amhara has sent its uniformed “special forces” to support the military and maintain security, while civil servants have also arrived from Amhara to take over the running of some of Tigray’s western towns and cities. Both moves will fuel ethnic tensions.

Ethiopia regions (credit: map for use on Wikivoyage, English version)

The army’s takeover of Mekelle follows the offensive that began after the expiry of Abiy’s ultimatum for dissident local leaders to surrender expired Wednesday evening.

Abiy had called on the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the local ruling party, to surrender to prevent the assault on the city. He threatened Mekelle’s 500,000 citizens, saying “We call on the people of Mekelle and its environs to disarm, stay at home and stay away from military targets [and] to do their part in reducing damages to be sustained because of a handful of criminal elements.” He urged them to support the federal government against the TPLF “in bringing this treasonous group to justice.”

Military officials had earlier warned there would be “no mercy” if residents of Mekelle did not distance themselves from the TPLF and leave while they still could. Such action targeting civilians is a breach of international law, prompting Human Rights Watch’s Laetitia Bader to warn “Treating a whole city as a military target would not only [be] unlawful, it could also be considered a form of collective punishment.”

TPLF leader Debretsion Gebremichael defied Abiy’s ultimatum, declaring that his people were “ready to die” defending their homeland and their right to self-determination and that “Their brutality can only add [to] our resolve to fight these invaders to the last.”

Abiy launched the military offensive in Tigray, home to around six million people, on November 4, claiming that the TPLF had started it by overrunning army bases and slaughtering non Tigrayan officers and its purpose was to restore “enforce constitutional order and the rule of law.”

Parliament declared Tigray’s regional government illegal and voted to dissolve it. The Tigray leadership was accused of having “violated the constitution and endangered the constitutional system” by holding regional elections in September after Abiy postponed this year’s promised elections, ostensibly due to the pandemic, as anti-government protests and opposition mounted. The Tigrayan elections came in the wake of bitter disputes between the federal government and the TPLF that says it has been marginalised since Abiy became prime minister in February 2018.

Parliament said a new caretaker administration would hold elections and “implement decisions passed on by the federal government.” It declared that the TPLF should be branded a terrorist group after blaming it for a massacre of ethnic Amhara in Oromia on November 2.

Abiy is determined to secure the removal of the TPLF leadership and establish a new leadership subservient to the federal government as part of his broader plan to centralise its authority at the expense of the devolved regions, amid mounting ethnic tensions that threaten to tear Ethiopia apart.

There were reports of fighting between Tigrayan and federal forces in several towns in the province. While it is believed that there have been heavy casualties on both sides, there is little reliable information about what is happening because the federal government in Addis Adaba has cut the telephone and internet lines to Tigray, arrested journalists, deported the Crisis Group’s Ethiopia Senior Analyst William Davison on November 21, and prevented people reaching the province.

As well as military clashes, hostilities have spread to civilians, with ethnic violence between Tigrayans and Amhara, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. According to an investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, a Tigrayan youth group with the complicity of local security forces had killed at least 600 civilians from the Amhara and Wolkait ethnic groups in Mai Kadra two weeks ago. Tigrayan leaders have denied this. Tigrayan refugees have reported atrocities by Amhara militia fighting alongside federal forces.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, have died in the conflict so far, with up to a million people displaced as civilians fled the fighting. Around 43,000 from western Tigray around the towns of Humera and Kansha have fled to neighbouring Sudan. The Kassala region is one of Sudan’s most impoverished regions that is struggling to cope with the influx of refugees and is in urgent need of assistance. Ethiopian troops and paramilitaries are reportedly now preventing Tigrayans reaching or crossing the border.

According to the UN, shortages have become “very critical” in Tigray region, with cash and fuel needed to run diesel-powered generators running out. A report published last week said that food for nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees living in neighbouring Tigray would run out in a week and more than 600,000 people who rely on monthly food rations have not received them this month. Ethiopia has some 1.7 million refugees and internally displaced people living in camps.

The worst locust swarm to hit Ethiopia in 25 years is compounding the crisis. Last year locusts destroyed 350,000 tonnes of cereals and three million acres of pasture, resulting in a million people across the country needing emergency food assistance. This year’s damage is expected to be worse, given the recent heavy rains.

According to a United Nations (UN) internal document seen by Reuters, the conflict in Tigray brought efforts to combat the locust swarms to a halt as Tigrayans were being mobilised for war. According to a recent report by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 600,000 Tigrayans are dependent on food assistance, while another million people receive other forms of support, all of which are now disrupted, as banks are closed and roads are blocked.

Abiy has refused all calls from the UN, the European Union, the African Union and international agencies to negotiate with the TPLF, claiming that the military operation was a “law enforcement operation” aiming to remove “traitorous” rebel leaders and restoring central authority in accordance with Ethiopia’s devolved constitutional system. He insisted, “A fundamental element of the international legal order is the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states… We respectfully urge the international community to refrain from any unwelcome and unlawful acts of interference.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who holds the chair of the African Union, sent three high-level envoys for Ethiopia, but the federal government in Addis Ababa refused to allow them to meet the TPLF leadership.

The UN’s efforts to arrange mediation appears to have been stymied by Washington, which has long viewed Ethiopia as a key ally and proxy in the Horn of Africa.

The desperate situation confronting Ethiopia is bound up with the escalating crisis of world capitalism and the resultant great power rivalry that led over the last decades to the fragmentation and disintegration of a region that includes Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti. The Horn is an arena of intense great power and regional rivalry for control of oil reserves and mineral resources in neighbouring countries, and the sea route through the narrow Bab al-Mandeb straits through which much of Europe’s oil passes—with the US and Europe engaged in a ferocious struggle with China.

The Trump administration played a key role in bringing Abiy to power in 2018 as part of its efforts to loosen the country’s dependence on Chinese investment initiated under the TPLF-dominated government, open up the state-owned economy to global corporations and banks and counter the spread of China’s influence across the continent.

Tibor Nagy, the US assistant secretary for African affairs, expressed his backing for Abiy saying “This is not two sovereign states fighting. This is a faction of the government running a region that has decided to undertake hostilities against the central government.”