The Senate Parliamentarian has dealt a strong blow to the Fight for $15 movement by ruling that a federal minimum wage increase cannot be included in the stimulus bill. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing back with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that do not pay at least $15 an hour.
This is just the latest battle in a struggle over big business wage practices that goes back decades. There was a time when landing a job with a large corporation was, even for blue collar workers, a ticket to a comfortable life — good wages, generous benefits, and a secure retirement. Women and workers of color did not share fully in this bounty, but they generally did better at big firms than small ones.
All this began to unravel in the 1980s, when big business used the excuse of global competition to chip away at the living standards of the domestic workforce. This took the form of an assault on unions, which had played a key role in bringing about the improvements in the terms of employment. In meatpacking, for instance, what had been a high-wage, high-union-density industry turned into a bastion of precarious labor.
When large corporations off-loaded a substantial portion of their employment costs, they created a higher burden for the public sector. As their pay and benefits shrank, workers turned to the social safety net to fill the gap. Programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) that were originally designed for employees of small firms and for the unemployed became a lifeline for the workforce at some Fortune 500 companies.
From a social point of view, this was a good thing — but it also created a situation in which taxpayers were in effect subsidizing the labor costs of mega-corporations. This became an issue in the early 2000s with regard to Walmart, and there were unsuccessful efforts in states such as Maryland to require large firms to spend more on employee healthcare.
Although the issue receded from public attention, figures such as Senator Sanders have sought to keep it alive, putting the main focus on the employment practices of Amazon.com. In 2018 Sanders helped pressure the giant e-commerce firm to raise its wage rates by introducing legislation that would have taxed large companies to recoup the cost of government benefits given to their employees.
Now the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders is continuing his effort from a position of even greater influence. In the lead-up to the Senate Parliamentarian’s ruling, he held a hearing on whether taxpayers are subsidizing poverty wages at large corporations. As in 2018, just highlighting the issue had a concrete impact. At the hearing the chief executive of Costco announced that his company would raise its minimum pay rate to $16 an hour. This came a week after Walmart hiked its rate to $15 but only for a portion of its workforce.
After years of wage stagnation, it is heartening to see that large companies are beginning to feel some pressure to boost their wage rates. Yet rises of only a few dollars an hour will not do the trick. Pay needs to be substantially higher than $15 an hour. That’s why the real solution to the problem is not voluntary corporate action but rather collective bargaining. Amazon and Walmart could assist their workers much more by dropping their opposition to unionization.
Having a voice at work would solve not only the pay problem but also the crisis in healthcare coverage and other benefits. The scope of that crisis was made plain by another speaker at the Senate Budget Committee hearing. Cindy Brown Barnes of the Government Accountability Office summarized research showing that an estimated 12 million adults enrolled in Medicaid and 9 million adults living in households receiving food stamp benefits earned wages at some point in 2018.
The GAO had more difficulty determining the portion of these populations employed at large corporations. That is because only a limited number of the state agencies administering Medicaid and food stamps collect and update employer information on recipients.
The partial data is still revealing. Among the six states providing employer information for Medicaid recipients, Walmart was in the top ten in all, while McDonald’s and Amazon were in five. Among the nine states providing employer information for food stamp recipients, Walmart was in the top ten in all, while McDonald’s was in eight and Amazon was in four.
These findings provide valuable information for the Sanders campaign against poverty wages. Companies such as Amazon—which recently reported that its annual revenues in 2020 were up 38 percent and its profits nearly doubled to $21 billion—can well afford to pay employees a living wage and provide the benefits necessary for a decent standard of living.
Public safety net programs are essential to society, but those who are employed by mega-corporations should not have to make use of them.
As the COVID-19 death toll mounts, Tamil nationalist parties in Sri Lanka are appealing to India’s ruling Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This comes amid growing war tensions driven above all by US imperialism. The incoming Biden administration, which recently bombed Iranian-linked militias in Syria, is also threatening China, intensifying tensions across the Indian Ocean region between China and Washington’s main regional ally, India.
The class content of Tamil nationalist appeals to the BJP is virtually self-evident. The BJP is a violently anticommunist party with a long, bloody tradition of inciting communal massacres of Muslims. It has adopted the “herd immunity” policies championed by US imperialism on the pandemic, as well as allying with Washington against China. By appealing to the BJP, the Tamil nationalists are seeking virulently right-wing alliances to pursue “herd immunity” policies, whip up communal hatred and back imperialist war policies against working class opposition.
Indian Prime Minister Modi of the BJP (Source: Wikipedia)
They are responding to the February 15 comments from BJP Chief Minister of Tripura state Biplab Deb, who said that Home Minister Amit Shah wanted the BJP to take over Sri Lanka. “We have to expand the party in Sri Lanka, Nepal and win there to form a government,” Deb quoted Shah as saying. Deb also attacked the Chinese Communist Party, “The communists claimed that their party was the world’s largest party. But Amit Shah made the BJP the largest party in the world.”
Maravanpulavu Sachchidanandan, who leads Sri Lanka’s Hindu-extremist Shiva Senai, soon endorsed Deb’s remarks. Calling the BJP “the safest movement for Hindus in the South Asian region,” he hailed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a global protector of Hindus, calling for the building of the BJP in Sri Lanka. “Only such a movement and leaders like Modi and [Indian Interior Ministry] Amit Shah can resolve the problems of the Hindus in Sri Lanka. This is why we have decided to start the BJP here.”
This is a provocative, barely veiled threat of violence against the working class. The BJP has sought to violently repress mounting strikes and farmers protests against its austerity agenda and also mass protests that erupted before the pandemic against its anti-Muslim citizenship law. Moreover, the Indian state has already invaded and occupied much of the Tamil-majority north of Sri Lanka between 1987 to1990.
Nonetheless, several prominent Tamil nationalist politicians in Sri Lanka have supported Deb. Tamil National Party leader K. Shivajilingam, who joined an east-to-north march in Sri Lanka led by Hindu clerics last month, endorsed the call of the Hindu fanatics, saying, “There are communist parties all over the world. In that case, why should there not be another international in the name of the BJP?”
He denounced the Sri Lankan government’s decision to award a Chinese company a contract to generate electricity and solar power on three small islands off Sri Lanka’s northern coast. “The Eelam Tamils will never permit Chinese companies on this soil,” Shivajilingam said, adding, “This [Chinese contract] must be immediately withdrawn. If not, we the Tamil people will take things into our own hands; that the government must understand.”
Shivajilingam threatened that if the Sri Lankan government did not toe an anti-China line, US and Indian troops could invade Sri Lanka. “In the Indo-Pacific region, if you were to act against India and the United States, certainly there would be a major conflict. … There is no guarantee that perhaps American or Indian troops might not land and stay in the North and East” of Sri Lanka.
He threatened to back an ethnic partition of Sri Lanka, with India annexing the Tamil Eelam state. “Understand that many countries in the world are broken and fragmented. If you want, the island of Sri Lanka would be divided into two parts, one for the state of Tamil Eelam and another for the state of Sri Lanka. Understand that the Chief Minister would be elected, and everyone would have to go to [India’s] New Delhi Parliament and Upper House.”
Addressing the Modi government, he pledged, “You must seek your security. We, the Eelam Tamils, will stand by it.”
Other Tamil nationalists endorsed founding the BJP in Sri Lanka, speculating that it could help their maneuvers with the Sri Lankan government in Colombo. Tamil National Alliance (TNA) official S. Shritharan said he would “welcome” the BJP into Sri Lanka if it supported ethnic Tamil control of the North and East. He added that “the Sinhala nation must accept the art, culture, autonomy, sovereignty, Tamil nationalism and language of the Tamil people.”
Such remarks expose the violent shift to the right by the Tamil nationalists amid the pandemic and mounting geostrategic tensions in the region. Since the defeat and massacre of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim workers and youths have increasingly mobilized together in strikes and protests against austerity and police-state policies. This staggered and terrified Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil bourgeois parties, cutting across their nationalist politics.
While the Tamil bourgeois nationalists reacted in fear of the movement from below, they pursued an ever more openly neo-colonial, communal strategy. In 2015, they supported the US-backed regime change operation in Colombo to oust then-President Mahinda Rajapakse, whom Washington saw as too close to China, and set up a US-backed, pro-austerity government. After it collapsed in 2019, however, and the Rajapakse brothers returned to power, the Tamil nationalists became ever more hysterical in their right-wing, anti-China rhetoric.
The pandemic has brought these conflicts to unprecedented intensity. The Modi government has been shaken by the mass strikes by public sector workers and protests by farmers. Now, as infections and deaths again mount across South Asia, all factions of the bourgeoisie are pursuing a murderous “herd immunity” policy, provoking bitter opposition among workers and youth.
There are signs that Tamil nationalists’ pro-BJP rhetoric may have gone too far, from the standpoint of Washington and New Delhi. On February 24, US Ambassador to Sri Lankan Alaina Teplitz met with TNA officials Mavi Senadhirasa, S. Sritharan, and C.V.K. Sivagnanam. She also met Jaffna Mayor V. Manivannan of the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF). Manivannan reportedly hailed Vice President Kamala Harris for her Tamil ancestry and appealed for US assistance. After these meetings, several of their online videos of the Hindu east-to-north march were taken down.
The Tamil nationalists’ endorsements of the BJP are nonetheless a warning to workers in Sri Lanka and internationally. The workers and toiling masses do not and cannot forget the horrific trail of blood and pillage left behind by the Indian army in 1987-90 in areas of Sri Lanka it occupied, but the Tamil nationalists are seeking allies in New Delhi. However, the bourgeois nationalists are pressing on to the right, as international class and geopolitical tensions reach explosive dimensions.
It is three decades since the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka and the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the Indian bourgeoisie and the Tamil nationalist parties have fully integrated themselves into the imperialist-dominated world capitalist market and shifted far to the right. The Tamil nationalists’ anti-China outbursts, aiming to curry favor with US imperialism and Modi, are inseparable from their bitter hostility to the working class.
By appealing to Modi, they seek allies against a renewed upsurge of workers struggles, notably in Sri Lanka—with strikes by tea plantation workers, health care workers protests against the disastrous pandemic response and mass protests across the North and East in September.
The alternative to the reactionary politics of the Sri Lankan and Indian regimes and to their Tamil nationalist allies is advanced by the Socialist Equality Party. It counterposes to the plots of New Delhi, Colombo and the Tamil nationalists the international mobilization and unification of the working class, across all the region’s ethnic and state boundaries, in a struggle for state power and for socialism. It is the only way to halt the imperialist war drive and impose a scientifically-based policy to stop the pandemic.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak presented a £65 billion budget yesterday for the Conservative government funneling a vast tranche of money into the coffers of big business.
It was trailed that Sunak would extend the jobs furlough scheme, under which around 11 million workers whose companies are unable to operate during pandemic lockdown have received up to 80 percent of their wages paid by the state. At the end of January, it was still supporting 4.7 million workers. But even with the scheme in place, Sunak was forced to acknowledge that since last “March, over 700,000 people have lost their jobs.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves No 11 Downing Street for the House of Commons to deliver the 2021 Budget. 03/03/2021. London, United Kingdom. (credit: Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street-FlickR)
The government’s herd immunity policy has led to at least 135,000 dying in the pandemic, and the presence of several highly contagious variants of the virus in Britain. But for the ruling class the continued flow of profits is all that counts. The Tories have laid out a roadmap to reopen the entire economy by June 21, with all schools open from next week.
Knowing that, in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s own words, this will result in “more infections, more hospitalisations and… more deaths,” the government fears an explosion of social and political opposition. In an effort to prevent this the furlough scheme is being extended until October—at a cost of around £20 billion. But beginning in July, immediately after the economy is fully opened, furlough support will be cut each month with employers expected to pay 10 percent towards the hours their staff work, increasing to 20 percent in August and September when the scheme will end.
Sunak also announced the continuation of the £20 a week increase to the Universal Credit welfare benefit, claimed by millions of unemployed workers during the pandemic, for another six months.
More than double this amount was handed over to big business, bring total government spending on the crisis to more than £400 billion. Sunak said that since the start of the pandemic, “Our economy has shrunk by 10 percent—the largest fall in over 300 years. Our borrowing is the highest it has been outside of wartime. It’s going to take this country—and the whole world—a long time to recover from this extraordinary economic situation. But we will recover.”
The recovery he refers to is in the profits of corporations and the fortunes of the super-rich, to be paid for out of the hides of the working class.
Sunak explained, “The government is providing businesses with over £100 billion of support to get through this pandemic,” adding, “so it is fair and necessary to ask them to contribute to our recovery.”
This contribution amounted to a Corporation Tax increase from 19 percent to 25 percent to be introduced in two years’ time, in 2023, which the government stressed “will remain the lowest rate in the G7.”
While the Corporation Tax increase was given all the headlines, a massive “Super Deduction” £25 billion two-year tax break scheme for business was rolled out immediately that cancels this increase out. This allows large corporations to invest in “plant and machinery” and “reduce their taxable profits by 130 percent of the cost,” said Sunak. “Under the existing rules, a construction firm buying £10 million of new equipment could reduce their taxable income, in the year they invest, by just £2.6 million. With the Super Deduction, they can now reduce it by £13 million.”
Sky News economic editor Ed Conway described the super-deduction boon to business as “pretty extraordinary. I’ve never heard of anything like this certainly being used in the UK… The cost more than outweighs the cost coming back from Corporation Tax increases.”
In another giveaway described by Sunak as a “£6 billion tax cut for business”, the holiday for business rates will continue until the end of June and will be cut by two-thirds for the rest of the year. For eligible retail, leisure or hospitality businesses with a rateable value below £51,000 they would “over the next financial year, pay no business rates whatsoever.” Another £5 billion in new grants for businesses was announced for when they reopen from next month.
The ruling elite were assured that the state coffers would always be available to them, with Sunak promising “if further action is needed as the situation evolves—I hope the whole House knows, I will not hesitate to act.”
The budget confirmed that the ruling elite is hell-bent on a class war agenda post-Brexit to finish the “Thatcher Revolution”.
Describing the budget as “The first in almost fifty years outside the European Union,” Sunak announced eight new Freeports which are “special economic zones with different rules to make it easier and cheaper to do business. They’re well-established internationally, but we’re taking a unique approach.”
Britain’s Freeports would have “Simpler planning—to allow businesses to build; Infrastructure funding—to improve transport links; Cheaper customs—with favourable tariffs, VAT or duties; And lower taxes—with tax breaks to encourage construction, private investment and job creation.”
Among the Freeports announces were ones on the Thames in London, East Midlands Airport and another covering the entire Liverpool City Region in the northwest of England.
Tax breaks for corporations are to be paid for with stealth taxes on workers’ wages. Sunak announced a freeze to the threshold for income tax for the lowest paid until 2026, after a small rise this April. The lowest paid start paying 20 percent income tax from when they earn £12,500 a year. The freeze will cost workers £2 billion next year and £8 billion a year within five years. New changes mean that by 2026, a million more workers will be in the higher rate of tax, and 1.3 million more who are currently outside of the tax system will be paying the basic rate.
Sunak announced an increase of just 2.2 percent in the National Living Wage, with the Daily Mirror noting, “It equates to a pay rise of just 19p an hour for basic-rate workers—the majority of whom have already taken a 20 percent hit over the past year due to mandatory furlough.”
There is not a scintilla of difference between the pro-business policies of the Tories and the Labour Party. Responding to the chancellor, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer insisted, “Our economy is still shut and our businesses are on life support, so it is right that corporation tax is not rising this year or next.”
Starmer grotesquely compared the “the millions of key workers who are having their pay frozen,” and “the families paying more in council tax and the millions of people who are out of work or worried about losing their job” to “businesses being swamped by debt”.
In anticipation of the budget, on February 18, Starmer delivered a grandiosely titled speech, “A new chapter for Britain,” insisting that the government not increase tax on business, including Corporation Tax, at a time when Sunak was hinting at a rise.
Leading Blairite Alan Johnson in a Guardian op-ed this week boasted, “With enterprises struggling, the Conservatives have lost their trust. Labour can now be the party of business.”
“There are those on the far left who think it’s the duty of the party to impose tough taxes on business, and they recoil at the thought of Labour opposing Tory proposals to increase corporation tax,” he wrote. But Labour opposing a Corporation Tax increase was “smart politics.”
It was only the political embarrassment caused by Starmer’s initiative that forced a recalibration, with Labour backing the delayed Corporation Tax increase and Starmer maintaining his stance of “constructive opposition” to the Tories. But had Shadow Chancellor Annelise Dodds delivered a Labour budget it would have likely been more right-wing and anti-working class than that offered up by the multi-millionaire Sunak.
A rocket attack on the sprawling Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq’s western province of Anbar early Wednesday has heightened the threat of a further escalation of US military aggression in the country and the wider region.
Iranian rockets targeting the the Ain al-Assad air base in January 2020. (Credit: https://en.irna.ir)
The 10 rockets that fell on the base, which houses US and other NATO troops, claimed no casualties, but one US civilian contractor died of a heart attack while sheltering during the assault. Iraqi security officials said little damage was inflicted on the base, while witnesses told local media they had seen flames and a long plume of black smoke.
Raising the prospect of another round of US military action, President Joe Biden told reporters, “We are following that through right now... we’re identifying who’s responsible and we’ll make judgments.”
The rocket attack follows last week’s US air strikes against facilities near the Iraqi border used by Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militias in Syria. Those strikes, the first military action ordered by the new Democratic president, were initially reported to have killed 17 people, while later reports said that just one person died.
While there was widespread speculation that the rockets fired on Ain al-Asad were in retaliation for the US strike in Syria, as of Wednesday evening no group had claimed responsibility. The area surrounding the base is overwhelmingly Sunni and not under the control of the predominantly Shia Hashed al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an official arm of Iraq’s military, which the US military attacked last week in Syria.
The US claimed that last week’s air strikes were in retaliation for a February 15 rocket attack on a US base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital Erbil, which killed a single military contractor from the Philippines. That attack, however, was claimed by a little known group, while it was disavowed and condemned by the PMF.
There are no doubt many forces with motives for attacking the US military in Iraq, where the American intervention that began in 2003 led to an estimated one million deaths.
Anger against the continuing US occupation—officially numbered at 2,500 troops—soared in January of last year after President Donald Trump ordered the drone missile assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, considered the second most powerful figure in Iran, after he arrived on an official state visit at Baghdad’s international airport. Also killed in the drone strike was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the de facto leader of the PMF militias, along with several aides to both men. Following this drone massacre there were massive protests, and the Iraqi parliament voted for a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of all US and other foreign forces from Iraq.
The possibility cannot be discounted that remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) are staging missile attacks against US bases, including with the potential motive of provoking US retaliatory attacks.
In any case, the Biden administration is pursuing its own ends in resuming US military violence in the region. Last week’s US air raid represented the first American attack inside Syria since December 2019, on the eve of the January 3 Suleimani assassination.
Following that assassination, Iran staged a limited retaliation, firing missiles into the same Ain al-Asad air base that was hit by rockets on Wednesday. While no US troops were killed in the 2020 missile strike, it was later reported that more than 100 soldiers suffered concussive brain injuries. The Trump administration decided not to take any military action in response to the Iranian attack.
The unilateral US air strikes last week in Syria, carried out in violation of international law and with no congressional authorization, represented a dangerous escalation of US militarism, with the potential of triggering a catastrophic new war in the Middle East and beyond.
The US action was aimed in large measure against Iran. The Biden administration claims it is seeking to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal struck between Iran and the major powers, which was unilaterally abrogated by Trump. Yet it has taken a hard line against Tehran, insisting that it will not rejoin the agreement until Iran reverses the increases in uranium enrichment it carried out in protest over both Washington’s ripping up of the accord and the European powers’ refusal to challenge the draconian sanctions imposed under the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign.
This sanctions regime, which has killed many thousands of Iranians, including from the coronavirus pandemic, remains in place under the Biden administration. Meanwhile, Washington has indicated it will demand a re-negotiation of the JCPOA to include tight restrictions on Iran’s conventional ballistic missile program as well as a rollback of Iranian influence throughout the Middle East, thereby firmly subordinating the country to the drive for US hegemony in the region.
More broadly, the attack on Syria signaled the Biden administration’s pursuit of more aggressive US imperialist policy globally, escalating the interventions and provocations carried out under Trump from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe, the South China Sea and beyond.
On Monday, the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) delivered a report to Congress calling for additional spending of roughly $27 billion between 2022 and 2027 in preparation for a “great power” confrontation with China. The report calls for “new missiles and air defenses, radar systems, staging areas, intelligence-sharing centers, supply depots and testing ranges throughout the region,” DefenseNews reported.
An unclassified executive summary obtained by the military website quoted Adm. Philip Davidson, the commander of INDOPACOM, telling Congress that the proposal provides “several flexible deterrent options including full [operational plan] execution if deterrence should fail.” By “full execution,” the admiral is undoubtedly referring to nuclear war.
US President Joe Biden held his first bilateral head-of-government meeting as president with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau via video conference last week. The Feb. 23 meeting adopted a comprehensive plan to expand and strengthen the US-Canada economic and military-strategic partnership to pursue trade war against their common great-power rivals and modernize military infrastructure in preparation for war.
President Joe Biden speaks after holding a virtual meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Underscoring that the Canada-US alliance is a key element in advancing both imperialist powers’ predatory global ambitions, the Trudeau-Biden summit was given the character of a joint cabinet meeting. It was attended by leading personnel from both governments, including US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, their Canadian counterparts, respectively, Mark Garneau, Harjit Sajjan and Chrystia Freeland, and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford.
The Roadmap for a Renewed US-Canada Partnership, issued by Biden and Trudeau at the summit’s conclusion, outlines plans to expand cooperation across the board with the aim of reasserting North American imperialist world dominance. The “blueprint” for a “whole-of-government” partnership includes plans to modernize NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command), secure “strategic” production chains and minerals critical for military and high-tech industries, and make North America the world leader in “clean” energy industries.
The mainstream media largely treated the meeting as a pro forma event, which recycled traditional boilerplate rhetoric about the strength of Canadian-American friendship and was held to demonstrate the return to bilateral “normalcy.”
To be sure, Biden did want to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who repeatedly roiled Canada-US relations, including by threatening to scrap NAFTA. But the Roadmap does not represent a return to “business as usual” in US foreign policy, which, as a preliminary matter, would be bad enough, as millions of people in the war-torn countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya can attest.
Rather, it represents an intensification and revamping of the eight-decade-old military-strategic partnership between Washington and Ottawa under conditions of unprecedented global capitalist crisis. The coronavirus pandemic, acting as a trigger event, has exacerbated the rivalries between the major powers, increased social inequality, and led to a radicalization of the working class that places mass class battles on the order of the day. To defend the wealth and advance the global interests of the capitalist oligarchies that rule the US and Canada, Ottawa and Washington are forging a “renewed partnership” to enhance North American “competitiveness,” i.e., mount savage attacks on the working class at home, and pursue “strategic competition” against their common great-power rivals.
Preparations for great power conflict
The two leaders agreed to modernize the North American Aerospace Defence Command to strengthen continental defence capabilities. This initiative, the Wall Street Journal estimates, will cost US $40 billion. Canada’s proposed portion of this massive sum, $6 billion, is equivalent to a third of Ottawa’s $19 billion (CAN $23.4 billion) annual defence budget.
As part of the Roadmap, Trudeau and his Liberal government also reaffirmed their pledge to rapidly increase annual defence spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product, an increase of more than one third from its current level. This was coupled with a bilateral commitment to strengthen NATO, which for more than seven decades has been pivotal to projecting US imperialist power in Europe and the Middle East.
Established during the Cold War, NORAD is seen by military planners in Washington and Ottawa as critical to the great-power confrontations of the future, especially with Russia and China. Its purpose is discussed in ever more openly aggressive and provocative terms. Whereas in the past its existence was justified with claims about the need to stop incoming missiles from the Soviet Union or Russia, it is now bluntly stated that instead of taking out the “arrows,” Canada and the US must strike the “archer,” i.e., carry out first-strike attacks on launch sites in Russia and China.
The mad plan to modernize NORAD for potential war with nuclear-armed Russia and China will invariably involve renewed pressure for Canada to join the US ballistic missile defence shield. Canada’s military establishment has long favored Canada joining the missile shield, but governments have dared not proceed because of widespread public opposition to participating in a program which, its name notwithstanding, is aimed at making a catastrophic nuclear war “winnable.”
As part of their Roadmap, Washington and Ottawa also agreed to establish an “expanded Canada-US Arctic dialogue” to discuss “continental security, economic and social development, and Arctic governance.” The Arctic is becoming a major arena for geopolitical confrontation due to climate change, which is opening up the region’s shipping lanes to great power rivalries and inciting a race to control its increasingly accessible energy and mineral resources.
In a similar vein, the Roadmap pledged to “increase cooperation to strengthen cybersecurity, and to confront foreign interference and disinformation.” As part of their efforts to protect critical infrastructure in North America, the two countries will implement a “Framework for Collaboration on cybersecurity in the energy sector.”
The Canadian and US ruling elites intend to underpin these plans for war with closer economic cooperation, including by further developing the ever more explicit protectionist trade bloc consolidated under the Trump administration. The Roadmap heaps praise on the protectionist US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the replacement to NAFTA negotiated by Trump and Trudeau with the support of the trade unions.
The Roadmap takes explicit aim at China. It calls on both countries to “more closely align our approaches to China, including to address the challenges it presents to our collective interest and to the international rules-based order,” i.e., US global dominance. The document denounces the Stalinist regime in Beijing, which defends the interests of China’s capitalist oligarchy, for “its coercive and unfair economic practices, national security challenges, and human rights abuses.” This language is all but identical to the lurid denunciations of China made by the NDP and Canada’s other establishment “left” parties in recent months, including the unfounded allegation that Beijing is guilty of “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim minority.
The document is no less strident in assailing Russia. It condemns Moscow’s “egregious mistreatment of Aleksey Navalny,” a far-right pro-imperialist stooge. It also denounces Russia’s “gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” a reference to the Kremlin’s response to the 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev, which the US and Canada helped orchestrate. The Roadmap also notes that Biden and Trudeau discussed the situation in the Middle East and Venezuela, two areas where Canadian imperialism has supported its US ally in mounting regime-change operations.
Dominating the economy of the future
Despite Biden’s difference in style from Trump, he is pursuing a like protectionist economic agenda and with the same aim: to retain American global economic and geostrategic primacy against its rivals through trade war, diplomatic intrigue, and military conflict. While Trump framed this policy with far-right “America First” rhetoric and celebrated unilateral US action, Biden has emphasized his support for “multilateral” institutions and US-led “multilateral” initiatives against China and Russia.
This aggressive agenda is masked with phony blather about “democracy,” “human rights,” and “inclusiveness.” As part of the Roadmap, Canada announced its support for Biden’s convening of a “Summit for Democracy”—a cynically-titled initiative that will serve as a thinly-veiled cover for provocations and threats against China and Russia.
With a view to confronting Russia and China, but also their ostensible European and Japanese imperialist allies, the Roadmap calls for increased Canada-US collaboration to ensure North American dominance in key emerging technologies, including those essential for transitioning to non-carbon-based energy.
It announces that Canada and the US will “launch a strategy to strengthen Canada-US supply chain security.” This will include building “the necessary supply chains to make Canada and the United States global leaders in all aspects of battery development and production.” The document continues, “To that end, the leaders agreed to strengthen the Canada-U.S. Critical Minerals Action Plan to target a net-zero industrial transformation, batteries for zero-emissions vehicles, and renewable energy storage.”
The Critical Minerals Action Plan was developed in 2019 by the Trump administration and Trudeau government, with the aims of reducing the dependence of North America’s twin imperialist powers on China for 17 rare earths and minerals. These materials are crucial to the manufacture of missile systems, computer screens, electric vehicles, lasers, and other hi-tech devices, i.e., the key elements of the equipment required to wage military conflict and dominate the world economy in the decades to come.
These bilateral initiatives take place in parallel with Biden’s readying of an executive order to strengthen US supply chains. He is expected to order 100-day reviews of four strategically important economic areas: “computer chips, high-capacity batteries, pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients, and critical minerals and strategic materials, like rare earths.”
Biden and Trudeau also committed to initiating a “joint ministerial” dialogue on climate change with the aim of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. A major goal of this “dialogue” will be to press other “democratic” countries, under the guise of bogus pledges to fight climate change, to line up against China and Russia, which have poor emissions records, and accept Washington’s hegemony in emerging technologies and energy markets. The climate change initiative will “hold polluters accountable,” the Roadmap asserts, including by working to prevent “unfair trade by countries failing to take strong climate action.” That is, it will impose tariffs and other penalties on Russia and China, and attempt, as the Trump administration did, to banish Huawei and other leading Chinse-based tech firms from strategically significant markets.
The hollow references to “unfair trade,” coming from a country whose violation of international law is second to none, could just as easily be turned against erstwhile allies to enforce US imperialist demands. It is worth noting in this regard the bipartisan US opposition to the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which Democrats and Republicans alike have denounced, including for its environmental risks.
In the run-up to the Trudeau-Biden summit, there was much media discussion about Canada pressing for an exemption from the “Buy America” provisions of Biden’s economic-stimulus infrastructure-building program. However, the White House would only promise at this point to take Ottawa’s concerns into account.
The refrain from Canada’s corporate and political elite, including the trade union bureaucracy, is that Ottawa must press for Washington to eschew “America First” protectionism in favour of a “North America First” agenda. They view expanding the Canada-US military-security alliance and new or enhanced partnerships on energy, strategic supply-chains and mineral “security” as vital. Vital to ensuring privileged access for corporate Canada to the US market and to upholding American capitalist hegemony, which is critical to the assertion of Canadian imperialism’s own predatory global interests.
In February, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg dismissed the appeal of Abdul Hanan, a farmer from Kunduz, against the Federal Republic of Germany over a 2009 massacre in Afghanistan. Hanan, who also appeared on behalf of his village, had filed the complaint alleging inadequate judicial investigation of the deaths of his two sons, who were eight and twelve years old when they were killed.
The two children, Abdul Bayan and Nesarullah, and more than a hundred other people (the exact number has not yet been firmly established), most of them civilians, were killed on 4 September 2009 when two US warplanes bombed a crowd that had gathered around two stalled tankers on a sandbank of the Kunduz River. The order for the attack had been given by Col. Georg Klein of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces)|.
It was the largest massacre ordered by a German officer since the Second World War. But after eleven years, it finally remains unpunished.
September 4, 2009: Afghan police officers at the site of the massacre (AP Photo, file)
From the beginning, the Attorney General’s Office had refused to press charges against Klein and his air traffic control officer. Hanan had then tried to force an indictment through a so-called “proceedings to force criminal prosecution”. However, he had failed in all German courts with his motions, brought by the renowned human rights lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck from Berlin. The Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, the Federal Court of Justice and finally the Federal Constitutional Court had not even allowed them. This has now been rubber-stamped by the ECHR.
The non-profit human rights organisation European Centre for Constitutional Rights (ECCR), which supported Hanan, called the Strasbourg decision “disappointing, as the German military’s policy of secrecy and the de facto denial of procedural rights to those affected were not reprimanded”.
Plaintiff Abdul Hanan described the last twelve years as “an ordeal for my family and the families of the other victims”. He said they had never received an official apology from the German government. “All we wanted is for those responsible for the attack to be held accountable and for us to be properly compensated.”
The German government is not prepared to do that. To this day, it holds the stated view that the airstrike was “permissible under international law and thus justified under criminal law”. Although it has given small sums of money to the survivors and surviving dependents, it has expressly not linked this to the recognition of any legal obligation.
The ECHR dismissed Hanan’s complaint, although the court acknowledged that there had been a whole series of glaring deficiencies in the investigation of the case. The decision is final. Further appeals are no longer possible.
This has far-reaching significance for German militarism. The Bundeswehr is assured that it has nothing to fear from the prosecuting authorities and the judiciary when it causes large-scale collateral damage among civilians.
Eleven years ago, when it closed the investigation against Colonel Klein after only four weeks, the Attorney General had already determined that it was only impermissible to kill numerous civilians when dropping bombs if “the expected civilian damage is disproportionate to the expected concrete and immediate military success”.
In all the proceedings against Klein and his German comrades, it was repeatedly claimed that he had done everything possible at the time of the attack to get a picture of the situation and could not have known that it was mainly civilians who were near the tankers. This is demonstrably false.
The German military relied only on a single informant of dubious reliability who was not on the spot and even lied to allied NATO forces to push through the bombing. The subsequent investigations by the Bundeswehr, public prosecutors and the courts were aimed at giving Klein and his comrades a clean bill of health. All this has now been justified or brushed aside by the ECHR.
For example, after discussions with the Ministry of Defence, the state Attorney General’s Office in Dresden, which was initially responsible for the case, handed it over to the Federal Attorney General’s Office, which is under the authority of the Ministry of Justice, i.e., the federal government. The ECHR did not find this relevant, as there was no evidence that such instructions had been given, or that the Ministry of Defence had tried to influence the proceedings, it said.
The ECHR also rejected the applicants’ objection that the investigators in Afghanistan had not been independent of the suspects. The Strasbourg judges did note that “it would have been better in terms of independence if the initial assessment on the ground had not been carried out exclusively by members of the Kunduz Provincial Reconstruction Team who were under the command of Colonel K.”. However, it was the mens rea [subjective ideas, knowledge and will] of Colonel Klein that mattered anyway. “Realistically speaking”, the investigations had therefore not been influenced.
The ECHR, like the German Attorney General and the German Federal Constitutional Court, did not consider it necessary to question witnesses other than Klein himself and his comrades in the German command post, not even the Afghans affected by the airstrike or the American pilots who carried it out.
The court also saw no need to question military experts or to re-enact the situation in the command centre. After all, the ISAF investigation team—comrades or subordinates of Colonel Klein—consisted of “military experts from various countries”.
The Strasbourg judges were also not particularly bothered by the fact that it had not been determined how many victims there had been and how many of them were civilians. After all, the liability of Colonel Klein had depended on his subjective view.
The fact that the investigations were discontinued without even once hearing the complainant of the father of two persons killed by the air raid appeared “problematic at first sight” to the ECHR, because it could not be ruled out that Hanan had relevant information, in particular about the identity of the persons present at the bombing site. After all, the plaintiff could still have produced relevant information even after the investigation had been discontinued.
Three judges placed a dissenting opinion on record. According to them, the ECHR should have dismissed the complaint as inadmissible from the outset. This was in line with the official legal opinion of Germany, Britain, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Accordingly, the applicant had had no right to invoke the European Convention on Human Rights and the ECHR had no jurisdiction.
The majority of the judges took a different view: first, Germany had been obliged by international law to investigate the airstrike; second, the Afghan authorities had been legally barred from investigating (because of an agreement with the international troops in their country); and third, the German law enforcement authorities had also been called upon to investigate under national law.
Legal observers, who were otherwise critical of the ruling, praised it as a possible “milestone” in ECHR jurisprudence. It is nothing of the sort. Those politically and militarily responsible went scot-free. Colonel Georg Klein was promoted and still serves as a general in the Bundeswehr.
Georg Klein (AP Photo / Anja Niedringhaus, File)
The plaintiff and the other victims and survivors, on the other hand, leave empty-handed; they are awarded no compensation, and no one is held accountable for the death and destruction they suffered. In the end, it took little more than the military commander’s statement that he had acted in good faith to legally wash him clean of the blood of dozens of innocent men, women, and children.
The result was no different in the civil courts. In November last year, the Federal Constitutional Court did not accept a constitutional complaint by survivors of victims of the Kunduz massacre, who had been denied damages and compensation for pain and suffering by the lower courts. The constitutional court judges in Karlsruhe ruled coolly that “not every killing of a civilian in the context of armed conflict also constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law”. Colonel Klein had made a “valid prognosis decision” from his point of view at the time.
The lower court, the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH), had gone even further and had fundamentally rejected public liability claims against German soldiers on armed missions abroad because of the possible impairment of Germany’s “ability to form an alliance and its scope for shaping foreign policy”. The Federal Constitutional Court, on the other hand, had expressly left open the question of whether public liability claims were possible in the case of military missions abroad. It did not have to decide on this because Colonel Klein had not acted unlawfully in the specific case.
Taken together, these rulings send a clear message that officers and soldiers need not fear punishment when they kill civilians, nor even facing charges in a criminal court. The judgements provide a blank cheque to German militarism, which is massively rearming and preparing to wage war all over the world again. Only a week after the ECHR ruling, the German government extended the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mandate until January next year and published plans to intervene militarily in the Indo-Pacific and other regions of the world, in addition to existing missions, such as in Mali.
In the Nuremberg Trials that followed the defeat of the Nazis in World War Two, the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (Hitler’s Army), Wilhelm Keitel, was convicted and executed as a war criminal, among other things, because he had given the following order in Yugoslavia: “It is ... not only justified, but it is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success.”
Today, according to the Attorney General, it is permissible to kill civilians if it is “proportionate to the expected immediate and concrete military success”. The ECHR has now given this its legal blessing.
In oral arguments held Tuesday, the right-wing majority of the US Supreme Court (six of the nine justices) displayed a level of contempt for the right to vote that has no modern parallel.
While the immediate legal questions at issue involve the interpretation of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the practical and political implications might be translated into everyday language as: does the US federal government still have the authority to prohibit racial discrimination in state election laws?
The US Supreme Court building in Washington DC (Wikimedia Commons)
The cases under review—Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee—concern two racially discriminatory voting regulations in the state of Arizona, one of which invalidates any ballots cast “out of precinct” and another which criminalizes “ballot harvesting,” a politically-charged title for the simple act of transporting another person’s ballot to the appropriate polling station on their behalf.
While the Supreme Court will not make a ruling in the cases until May or June, the overall tenor of the oral arguments—given the core democratic right at issue—warrant some examination.
The laws in question emerged as part of the deluge of voter suppression measures following the high court’s infamous 2013 Shelby County decision striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The proliferation of “voter fraud” initiatives has only swelled since Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in November 2020. To this day, the former president and architect of the January 6 coup attempt maintains that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud, a false and unsupported conspiracy theory.
In 2016 the Arizona legislature made it a felony to collect and deliver another person’s completed ballot, with very narrow exceptions, punishable by two years’ imprisonment and a $150,000 fine. The law served to disenfranchise the state’s American Indian population, only 18 percent of whom have access to regular mail services. Latino and African-American voters also make use of third-party ballot collectors more frequently than white voters, mainly because of greater poverty and social isolation.
Former Arizona state senator Don Shooter championed the measure. Shooter leads the fascistic Yuma County Tea Party. He made regular appeals during his tenure to anti-Latino racism, blaming demographic changes for improving election prospects for Democrats. He infamously appeared at one legislative meeting dressed as a Mexican mariachi performer, with a cigar in his mouth and a bottle of tequila in a holster. Shooter’s racist proclivities formed part of the lower courts’ records and are not in dispute.
Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy serves the same discriminatory and anti-democratic ends. In its ruling below the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit concluded that “Arizona election officials change voters’ assigned polling places with unusual frequency” and that polling precincts are sometimes “located so counterintuitively that voters easily make mistakes.”
Between 2012 and 2016 Maricopa County, home to more than 60 percent of Arizona’s population, cut the number of polling places by 70 percent, with a disproportionate reduction in minority communities. Native Americans, Hispanics and African Americans in Arizona are twice as likely as whites to vote outside of the precinct to which they had been assigned.
In sum, both of the policies before the court bear the unmistakable marks of racially motivated voter suppression.
Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor posed some questions which had the general character of a warning that if Arizona’s voting restrictions should survive, little would remain of America’s tattered constitutional-democratic political framework.
The aging reactionary Clarence Thomas appeared unmoved by the ostensibly small number of disenfranchised voters, hinting that he might base his legal findings on a de minimis rationale—that the purported violation is too small to matter in the eyes of the law. (The legal notion comes the from Latin de minimis non curat lex which means “the law does not concern itself with trifles.”) In Thomas’ novel theory, thousands of suppressed votes are literally trifles.
Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett also nodded at a de minimis rationale for upholding the Arizona laws in question. She hinted in one question that the appropriate legal standard might be to assess the discriminatory impact of the state’s voting system as a whole rather than a particular measure. Such a legal standard—which would permit a dash of disenfranchisement here and there, now and then—would represent a departure from 40 years of legal precedent as well as an attack on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
It is noteworthy that while justices openly debated how much voter suppression was too much, they never considered the question of whether voter fraud—the supposed pretext for the Arizona laws—exists at all. According to numerous studies, in-person vote fraud of the kind alleged incessantly by Republican Party officials is effectively nonexistent (truly de minimis ).
For his part, Chief Justice John Roberts legitimized the “voter fraud” justification for banning third-party ballot collecting. More significantly he implied that evidence of discriminatory intent by a single state legislator might be insufficient in proving that a given election law had an illegal and racist motivation. Roberts even mentioned disgraced former Arizona state senator Don Shooter by name.
The most revealing words uttered at Tuesday’s oral arguments came from George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito, who asked the following question to the attorney for the Democratic National Committee:
“What concerns me is that your position is going to make every voting rule vulnerable to attack under Section 2 [of the VRA] to the same extent that the out-of-precinct policy is—was found to—violate Section 2 by the Ninth Circuit, because people who are poor and less well educated on balance probably will find it more difficult to comply with just about every voting rule than do people who are more affluent and have had the benefit of more education .” (Italics added.)
One might rephrase the question: if the Supreme Court follows controlling precedent in applying the Voting Rights Act to these discriminatory laws in Arizona, how can the ruling class reduce the presence of working class voters in elections and from the political process as a whole?
Just a few weeks ago and a few hundred feet away from the US Supreme Court building, a fascistic mob attacked the Capitol with the intent to overturn the November 2020 presidential election. Tuesday’s ruminations in the Supreme Court—essentially on the issue of how much voter suppression is permissible—should serve as another warning that American democracy is on life support.
Wage arrears have been a serious and long-standing issue confronting millions of workers in China since the capitalist restoration in 1978. For the year 2020, according to the China Labour Bulletin, there were at least 660 collective protests by workers against wage arrears covering almost all provinces. From the Workers’ Calls-for-Help Map, which tracks individual workers’ attempts to appeal for help on social media, 207 cases related to wage arrears have been recorded since September 2020. These records are certainly an underestimation as many grievances are not reported on the local news or in social media.
The struggles of workers amid already heated social tensions are regarded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a serious threat. In January 2020, Prime Minister Li Keqiang hypocritically signed a regulation designed to make sure migrant workers receive their pay. In reality, the CCP regime has, in recent years, been deepening its attacks on the democratic rights of workers and using all means to prevent them from demanding their unpaid wages—through legislation, vilification and arrests.
Tech workers in China
In November 2019, in a case where construction workers sued for wage arrears, the Supreme People’s Court made a ruling that significantly increased the difficulties workers face when attempting to recover their wages. The ruling, in essence, only allowed workers to demand wages from an intermediate person or agent who subcontracted a work project, and denied the right of workers to demand wage arrears from the main contracting company.
Specifically, Mingfa, a real estate company in Huai’an, Jiangsu contracted to carry out a construction project in 2016 for another company called Fujian Sihai Construction. In fact, the project was carried out by an individual, Peng, who was affiliated with Sihai, but not employed by it. Peng did not engage his own construction team, but instead subcontracted the project to a group of construction workers.
However, the real estate company did not pay for the construction as indicated in the contract. So the leader of the group of construction workers sued Peng and Sihai Construction, demanding the 359,849.50 RMB ($US51,400) in arrears. The High People’s Court in Fujian Province (where Sihai Construction is based) ruled in favor of the construction workers and issued an order to enforce this payment.
In the enforcement order, the provincial High People’s Court established that neither Peng nor the construction company possessed any assets that could be used to pay back workers and implemented restrictions on large expenditures by Peng. As a result, despite the favorable ruling, construction workers did not receive their pay in the end.
The construction workers later appealed to the Supreme People’s Court, the top court in China, demanding that the real estate company, Mingfa, should also be held at least partially responsible for the payment of their unpaid wages. However, the Court ruled that the construction workers had only a labor service relation with Peng, who subcontracted the project to them, but this did not constitute a contractual relation with Peng. Therefore, the Court declared that, in a narrow legal sense, the “construction undertaker” was Peng, not the construction workers. Since only the “construction undertaker” has the right to demand payments from original contractor, Mingfa, the construction workers had no right to demand wages from Mingfa directly.
This ruling has far reaching implications for workers, shutting off the already very limited means for workers to demand unpaid wages. The employment of workers via subcontractors is very common in the construction industry. Wage arrears happen very frequently with 54 percent of the protests reported by the China Labour Bulletin in 2020 being in the construction sector. As one lawyer from Wuhan University commented, this ruling will “undoubtedly have disastrous consequences in practice.”
Workers who demand their pay are not only oppressed by the judicial system, but are also attacked and vilified by the state through the media.
In recent months, various articles have appeared denouncing protests by workers to demand their wages. For instance, when reporting on a protest by more than 20 construction workers demanding wages on January 20, several local media characterized the workers as “marching illegally” and accused the leading worker of “intentionally instigating other workers into protests.”
The police have also brutally intervened in many workers’ protests. Seven workers were detained for weeks after the aforementioned protest in Guangdong Province in January. Another worker in Jiangsu Province who threatened to jump off a crane tower unless he was paid was also detained by the local police for 10 days. The police have also issued statements that there would be “zero tolerance” against future attempts of migrant workers to demand wages through “malevolent means.”
Such statements are outrageous. Nothing is done about the real criminals—the employers who fail to pay the wages on which workers rely. Moreover, workers resort to protests because there are no “benevolent” avenues to be paid what they have earned.
The city of Tongxiao in Zhejiang Province has gone even further with a recent regulation published on February 7 that establishes a blacklist for employees who exhibit “abnormalities” in labor disputes. The criteria for “abnormalities” include: applying for arbitration at the same labor department more than five times in a year, filing more than 10 complaints at the same social security office within three years, and appealing to the same social security office to demand wages more than three times every year. The personal information of any blacklisted worker is be published on the city court’s official website and through social media. This information will also be circulated through the local employment markets.
This anti-working class regulation, despite claiming to “regulate local labor market through legal means,” clearly serves to intimidate and bully workers to prevent any opposition being voiced.
The source of the widespread practice of failing to pay wages is not merely the greed and criminality of individual company owners and construction project contractors. The suppression of workers’ protests over unpaid wages is carried out with the active involvement of the police, media, the judicial system—in short, the Stalinist CCP state apparatus that enriches itself through the oppression and exploitation of the working class.
