Bucking US threats, China and Iran sign 25-year treaty

Alex Lantier

This weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Tehran and signed a 25-year treaty with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif. The terms of the treaty were not disclosed. However, US news outlets noted that an earlier draft of the treaty, obtained by US officials and shown to the New York Times, entailed $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iran in exchange for exports of Iranian oil, as well as a strategic alliance.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, pose for photos after the ceremony of signing documents, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, March 27, 2021. Iran and China on Saturday signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement addressing economic issues amid crippling U.S. sanctions on Iran, state TV reported. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Beijing is defying economic sanctions imposed by former US President Donald Trump after he unilaterally scrapped the 2015 Iranian nuclear treaty in 2018, and that incoming US President Joe Biden has yet to remove. In February, Biden suddenly bombed an Iranian-backed militia in Syria, killing at least 17 people.

Beijing’s decision to sign the treaty with Tehran followed a disastrous US-China summit earlier this month in Alaska. During remarks to the press before summit proceedings even began, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly lectured Wang that China must accept a “rules-based international order” set by Washington, or face “a far more violent and unstable world.” Afterwards, US Pacific Fleet commander Admiral John Aquilino threatened that a US war with China over Taiwan “is much closer to us than most think.”

By signing a treaty with Tehran, Beijing is signaling that it has concluded that it must make its own preparations against a Biden administration that will be aggressive and relentlessly hostile. It is no doubt confirmed in this view by continuing, groundless war propaganda from US politicians, debunked by scientists, alleging that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.

At the Anchorage conference, Wang replied to Blinken by contrasting China’s commitment to international law with US imperialism’s foreign policy in the Middle East. “We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries because all of those would only cause turmoil and instability in this world. And at the end of the day, all of those would not serve the United States well.”

Before traveling to Tehran, Wang hosted his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, for talks in the Chinese city of Guilin, shortly after Biden provocatively denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” who does not have a “human soul.”

At the signing of the treaty this weekend, Iranian and Chinese officials both made pointed criticisms of Washington’s threats. Zarif called China a “friend of difficult days,” adding that “we thank and praise the stance of China during the oppressive sanctions.”

Wang replied, “Relations between our two countries have now reached a strategic level, and China is seeking to promote inclusive relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. … The signing of the road-map for strategic cooperation between the two countries shows Beijing’s will to promote ties to the highest possible level.”

According to China’s state-run Global Times, Wang told Iranian officials “China is willing to oppose hegemony and bullying, safeguard international justice and fairness as well as uphold international norms together with people of Iran and other countries.”

The treaty, first discussed between Iranian Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016, deepens economic ties with the Middle East that Beijing has sought to develop with its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure program. Citing Iranian Ambassador to China Mohammad Keshavarz-Zadeh, the Tehran Times reported that the treaty “specifies the capacities for cooperation between Iran and China, especially in areas of technology, industries, transportation and energy.” Chinese firms have built mass transit systems, railways and other key infrastructure in Iran.

While Washington has not yet publicly reacted to the Iran–China treaty, US officials have previously denounced it as a fundamental challenge to Washington’s interests, combining “war on terror” propaganda with attempts to revive Cold War anti-communism.

Amid speculation last December that the treaty would be signed, Director of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff Peter Berkowitz denounced it to Al Arabiya. He claimed it would be “very bad news for the free world” if the treaty were adopted: “Iran sows terrorism, death and destruction throughout the region. To be empowered by the People’s Republic of China would only intensify the threat.”

The three decades since the US-led Gulf War against Iraq and the Stalinist regime’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 have exposed such rhetoric. The elimination of the Soviet Union as the main military counterweight to the NATO imperialist powers did not lead to peace, nor was Iran the main source of “death and destruction.” For three decades, Washington and its European imperialist allies have laid waste to countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, killing millions based on lies such as the claim that Iraq was hiding “weapons of mass destruction.”

Berkowitz’s denunciations of Iran and China are bound up with growing concern in Washington that it could lose its globally hegemonic position due to the debacles of its wars, its fading industrial and economic weight, and now its disastrous handling of the pandemic.

Since the NATO powers launched a war for regime change in Syria in 2011, supporting first Islamist and then Kurdish nationalist militias, Iran, Russia and increasingly China have intervened to bolster Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. With the China–Iran treaty, it is now clear that these NATO wars carry in them the seeds of a global conflict, as in the 20th century, for control of world markets and strategic advantage.

The rising industrial weight of Asia and specifically China as a workshop for transnational corporations has intensified these geopolitical conflicts. China’s trade with the Middle East rose to $294.4 billion in 2019, having surpassed US trade with the Middle East in 2010. Beijing is Tehran’s leading trade partner and plans to further develop infrastructure linking China through Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to its key export markets in Europe under its Belt and Road Initiative.

The fate of the China–Iran treaty is highly uncertain. Certainly, it faces powerful domestic opposition within Iran, where broad sections of the ruling class have unsuccessfully sought to develop ties with Europe in the face of US sanctions. Former President Mahmoud Amhadinejad pledged that “The Iranian nation will not recognize a new, secret 25-year agreement between Iran and China,” when the treaty was first announced in June.

Chinese media were at pains to deny US allegations that the treaty was aimed at Washington. The Global Times complained that the China–Iran treaty was “interpreted by some Western media from a geopolitical competition perspective…to portray the normally deepening bilateral cooperation between China and Iran as a challenge against the US.”

Beijing and Tehran are not looking for war with Washington, but US imperialism has made clear that it reserves the right to bomb or invade anyone it sees as a challenge to its hegemony. The Chinese and Iranian regimes—oscillating between seeking a deal with and defying the imperialist powers—ultimately have no progressive solution to this growing danger of war, rooted in the bankruptcy of the world capitalist system. In the final analysis, avoiding a war requires the international mobilization of the working class.

The China–Iran treaty underscores how the global redistribution of economic and industrial weight has undermined the existing international alliances and geopolitical alignments. The contradiction that the great Marxists of the 20th century identified as driving to world war—between world economy and the outmoded nation-state system—emerges again with enormous force. The critical question that emerges is to mobilize the working class on an international, socialist program against war.

The Real Danger of the Pentagon’s New Indo-Pacific Plan

Simone Chun

The Pentagon recently asked Congress for an astronomical $27 billion budget increase to support a massive military buildup in Asia  as part of its new Indo-Pacific plan, which calls for a substantially more aggressive military stance against China.

With the US already ranking first in military spending worldwide and holding more than 290 military bases in the Asia-Pacific region alone, this aggressive buildup is being proposed at the most financially precarious moment in US history. According to the Congressional Budget Office report released this month, federal debt is projected to reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021 before surpassing its historical high of 107% in 2031 and going on to nearly double to 202% by 2051. According to Doug Bandow, “Uncle Sam is headed toward insolvency.”

How can the Biden administration sell such an expensive foreign policy proposal to the American public in these economically depressed times? By publicly stoking moral outrage and militarism in the US–as well as throughout the Asia-Pacific region–in the name of launching a crusade ostensibly in defense of human rights. This strategy was on full display when Secretary of State Blinken echoed bipartisan political rhetoric about the “Chinese threat” during his visit to Asia last week. In a stream of condescending self-righteousness, he unleashed a deluge of recrimination against China and North Korea while pontificating on American exceptionalism.

Instead of taking a fresh direction on behalf of the new administration and sending a message that America’s top diplomat is intent on finding common ground in Asia, Blinken made clear that the Biden administration will hew close to the fundamentals that have guided the prevailing policy of containment reflected most recently in Bush’s Axis of Evil, Obama’s Pivot to Asia, and Trump’s confrontationalism.

Blinken’s performance seemed tailored to the US domestic audience; a rallying call to win support for the upcoming battle: selling the Pentagon’s costly Asian military buildup plan–and the unprecedented profits it represents for the US military industrial complex–to Congress and American public. Unsurprisingly, US corporate media amplified Blinken’s message, exulting: “Blinken blasts aggressive China, North Korea’s systematic and widespread rights abuses.” At the same time, Blinken and his team have been hard at work in reinforcing  an anti-China stance among their lynchpin Far Eastern military outposts–South Korea and Japan– by ensuring that the respective governments of these garrison states continue to unswervingly toe the US line with regard to Beijing.

But even if the administration succeeds in selling its new crusade to Congress and American public, the unprecedented buildup being proposed would have its most devastating consequences at home, rather than in far-flung military theaters. Firstly, its demand for enormous spending on expensive weapon systems would exacerbate America’s financial insolvency. The administration’s proposal includes nearly $5 billion in the next year alone for new missile defense systems and nuclear-capable naval craft as part of an aggressive forward-deployed military strategy that profits weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics.

Secondly, it will engender a human rights crisis at home, much in the same vein as the Red Scare during the Cold War and the War on Terror did. Public support for the Indo-Pacific plan will depend on amplifying to the extent possible the threat from the East using time-tried methods of demonizing “threatening Others”, such as China, North Korea. As militarism, racism and xenophobia go hand in hand, this will inflame anti-Asian sentiment and scapegoating–a trend that is already well under way due to bipartisan political rhetoric about origins of Covid-19 and the rise of China. Anti-Asian sentiment has already risen to unprecedented levels in 2020, with crimes against Asians increasing by more than 150% in the past year.

If the Biden administration truly cares about a moral order in Asia, it should take global leadership to address the formative role that US militarism has played in the current state of Asian affairs. The foremost opportunity to embark on an alternative to the path of war lies in the Korean Peninsula, where the US continues to exert overwhelming economic and military pressure in the wake of a brutal war that claimed some 5 million lives, over half of whom were non-combatant Korean civilians. The staggering civilian cost of the Korean war far exceeded the non-combatant death rate of both WWII and the Vietnam War, and amounted to more than 10% of the entire Korean civilian population. US refusal to sign a formal peace agreement with the North means that the 70-year old conflict has never officially ended, leaving scores of Koreans–including some 100,000 Korean-Americans–separated from their loved ones in the North.

The Biden administration can begin down this alternative moral path by supporting bipartisan Congressional bills such as the Enhancing North Korean Humanitarian Assistance Act and the Divided Families Reunification Act, both of which would go a long way toward generating goodwill with North Korea without giving up any strategic advantage whatsoever on the part of Washington. Such symbolic but significantly humanitarian acts of goodwill would garner support from allies while earning the trust of “foes”, and would mitigate the risks of military confrontation, financial insolvency, and human rights crises at home and abroad.

The working class in Germany pays the cost of the pandemic

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The coronavirus crisis does not affect everyone equally. As a trigger event, it has exacerbated the crisis of capitalism and the social inequality that accompanies it. The ruling class is pursuing a ruthless profits-before-life policy. While at the top of society, the corporations and banks enrich themselves and profit from the governments’ billion-dollar bailouts, workers and their families pay for it with wage losses, job cuts, short-time working and their health and lives.

Last Wednesday, March 24, the death toll from COVID-19 in Germany exceeded the threshold of 75,000 for the first time. At the same time, the Federal Statistical Office announced that in 2020, because of the pandemic, wages fell in nominal terms for the first time since surveys began in 2007.

Gross monthly earnings, including special payments, fell by 0.7 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year. Consumer prices rose by just under 0.5 percent. Thus, employees were left with 1.1 percent less pay in real terms, as calculated by the Federal Statistical Office. Since this is the national average, the losses for those affected vary widely.

Berlin metalworkers demonstrate against real wage cuts in front of the City Hall in early March 2021

The paid weekly working hours of full-time employees fell significantly, by an average of 2.9 percent last year compared to 2019. The strongest decline was in the hospitality sector, 19.4 percent, followed by the arts, entertainment, and recreation sector with a 9 percent decline. Working hours in energy supply and the finance and insurance industries declined by only 0.4 percent each.

The lower income groups were hit particularly hard by the wage cuts. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers suffered the biggest wage losses with an average of 1.6 and 2.5 percent, respectively. The earnings of workers with managerial functions increased by an average of 0.2 percent.

The downward swings in wages in 2020 are much more severe than during the global financial and economic crisis in 2009 when nominal earnings were still up marginally by 0.2 percent and real wages fell by 0.1 percent.

Last year’s negative wage growth also has an impact on pensioners. Since pension rates are based on wages over the previous year, there will be no pension increase in the West this year and only a very slight increase in the East of Germany. This is due to the fact that, more than 30 years after reunification in 1990, pensions in the former East Germany have still not been adjusted to the level in the West. In terms of wages, this gap is even wider.

Many employers are using the pandemic as an excuse to cut jobs and wages. However, the general wages’ reduction is not only due to mass short-time working and job losses. The wage restraint of the trade unions has also contributed significantly to this. The IG Metall union, for example, simply suspended collective bargaining at the beginning of 2020 and is still negotiating wage cuts and mass job losses in the current round of collective bargaining.

The danger of contracting COVID-19, becoming seriously ill and dying from it, also hits workers and the poor particularly hard worldwide. In Germany, there have always been local and regional reports on this, but no comprehensive data collection or systematic findings. In the major media, such questions of social inequality and class issues have so far been largely ignored.

The connection between a person’s social situation—the work, income, housing and living situation—and the risk of contracting COVID-19 has now been addressed in several reports and recent surveys.

These include a Panorama programme on March 3 on broadcaster ARD. According to research by broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutscher Zeitung paper, 14 out of 16 federal states have no information about which people are particularly frequently infected with the coronavirus. But, as the accompanying report states:

Those who live in the Berlin district of Neukölln face almost twice the risk of being infected with coronavirus than those in neighbouring Treptow-Köpenick. What is the reason for this? That is not known. What is striking: In Neukölln, 7,000 people live on one square kilometre, in Treptow 1,600. In Neukölln, the unemployment rate is 16 percent, in Treptow 8 percent. The differences in household income are similar: In Neukölln it is €1,825 per month, in Treptow-Köpenick €2,200. In Neukölln, 47 percent of the inhabitants have an immigration background, in Treptow only 17 percent.

On March 22, the online edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported a study in Cologne confirming that COVID-19 mainly affects people in poorer neighbourhoods:

The coronavirus belt stretches across Cologne. On the map by the Fraunhofer Institute, a blue band stretches from Chorweiler, the high-rise housing estate in the northwest, to the south-east of the megacity. It is above all the old industrial and working-class districts on the right bank of the Rhine signaled by deep blue on the scientists’ graphic: Here, where more unemployed people, more housing benefit recipients and more people with an immigration background live in Mülheim, Kalk or Porz, the citizens most frequently contract COVID-19. The virus plagues the weak, and it spares the rich on the other side of the river in the prosperous west of the cathedral city.

Those who are described as “socially vulnerable” or “disadvantaged” in the media are workers with and without an immigrant background. They often work in low-paid jobs that are considered essential, such as care, cleaning, postal services, logistics, grocery stores and public transport, to name just a few occupational areas. They cannot work from home and have fewer opportunities to protect themselves from infection. Also, they often have worse and cramped living conditions due to high rents and low incomes.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published a fact sheet on its study “Social differences in COVID-19 mortality during the second wave of infection in Germany” on March 16. The core statements are:

· During the second wave of infection in autumn and winter 2020/2021, COVID-19 mortality in Germany rose sharply, reaching a peak in December and January.

· According to the reports of the public health authorities, more than 42,000 people diagnosed with COVID-19 died in December and January. Of these, about 90 percent were aged 70 and older.

· The increase in COVID-19 deaths was greatest in socially disadvantaged regions of Germany—among both men and women.

· In December and January, COVID-19 mortality was about 50 to 70 percent higher in highly socially disadvantaged regions than in regions with low social disadvantage.

The RKI study is based on the reporting data on COVID-19 deaths submitted by the health authorities to the RKI. For the analysis of social differences, the reporting data at the level of the 401 districts and independent cities were linked with the “German Index of Socioeconomic Deprivation” (GISD). This index on the extent of socioeconomic deprivation considers several regional education, employment and income indicators.

The results of this study by the RKI are an indictment of the policies of the federal and state governments. At no time since the beginning of the pandemic have they even considered a proper lockdown, including all nonessential businesses, to bring the coronavirus under control. The overriding principle has always been to put economic interests above the needs of the population—profits before lives!

It is above all workers and the poor, pensioners and the sick who must pay for these policies with their health and lives. Even now, when the number of infections is soaring again, and the new strains of the virus are increasing the danger even more, the government is not prepared to protect the population through a proper lockdown. It refuses to close factories, schools and day-care centres, to compensate affected workers by paying full wages, and to provide consistent support to poorer households.

With hospitals overflowing, Macron defends his “herd immunity” against the virus

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, the Journal du dimanche (JDD) published an interview with Emmanuel Macron in which he defended the European Union’s (EU) catastrophic management of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued to refuse a lockdown, while hospitals are completely overwhelmed.

A few pages later, the JDD informs its readers that hospitals in the Paris region are starting to choose which patients are given life-saving intensive care treatment. Faced with an influx of serious cases, health workers are being forced to choose which patients to treat, condemning to death patients they would otherwise have saved. Nevertheless, as Europe passes the 900,000 death mark and France overtakes Russia and the UK as the country with the most cases of COVID-19 in Europe (4.5 million), Macron says he will not change his failed health policy.

In an article entitled “I assume completely,” Macron displayed a blatant disregard for the lives of the French people: “For the next few days, we will look at the effectiveness of the braking measures, and if necessary, we will take those that are required. But at this time nothing has been decided.”

A nurse holds a phone while a COVID-19 patient speaks with his family from the intensive care unit at the Joseph Imbert Hospital Center in Arles, southern France, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

However, this so-called “braking” is a debacle, as the number of daily cases of COVID-19 has risen from 25,000 to over 40,000 in one month. Already 95,000 people have died of COVID-19 in France, and only 3.8 percent of the French are fully vaccinated. Macron, however, intends to make the population suffer a new pandemic peak, long predicted by scientists, due to the generalisation of the English variant.

Macron insisted that despite the predicted death toll, he refuses any even temporary closure of schools and non-essential workplaces: “We are doing everything to strengthen health protocols so that we can keep schools open.” As deaths on a horrific scale loom, Macron hammered home the point that closing schools, the focus of any real lockdown policy to stop the virus, “must remain a last resort.”

Yet it was by September 2020 at the latest that the “last resort” should have been put in place, as the resurgence of the virus following the premature lifting of the March 2020 containment had already been confirmed. Now that the virus has spread out of control and there is a clear danger of a collapse of the medical system, Macron refuses a containment to break the contagion’s momentum.

A letter from 41 Parisian hospital doctors, entitled “We will be forced to triage patients,” announced in the JDD the imminence of the total overflow of hospitals, in “the next fortnight.” They declared:

“(W)e wish to explain transparently the situation we will have to face and how we will deal with it. In this disastrous medicine situation, where there will be a clear mismatch between needs and available resources, we will be forced to triage patients to save as many lives as possible. This triage will involve all patients, Covid and non-Covid, especially for access to critical care for adult patients.”

They note that this triaging has already begun, “since major medical and surgical deprogramming has already been imposed on us … We have never experienced such a situation, even during the worst periods in recent years.”

Another op-ed by a doctors collective, entitled “By forcing carers to decide which patient should live, the government is hypocritically abdicating responsibility,” warned of the social and moral catastrophe the government is unleashing. The triage strategy, they wrote, “as a consequence of the current health response strategy ... is far removed from the elementary rules of ethics, which advocate that admission to intensive care should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, in the sole interest of the patient.”

They add that as the carers are “forced to act in an unethical manner, they will certainly not come out of this unscathed. It is likely that many of them will be left with permanent psychological scars.”

When, in March 2020, hospital wards in northern Italy were overwhelmed and began to triage their patients, the barbarity of the process shocked the world. Spontaneous walkouts in the automotive, steel and machine-tool industries in Italy, which spread in Europe and to the US, compelled governments to enact lockdowns. The French employers association worried over the “extremely brutal change of attitude of the workers,” while Macron adopted a strict lockdown and claimed to declare “war” on the coronavirus.

Workers, fighting to defend lives, were met with criminal indifference by the financial aristocracy and its political representatives, who were advocating a policy of profits and death. While the EU showered the banks and big business with trillions of public funds in bailout packages, the financial aristocracy pushed for a return to work and school as soon as possible to ensure a continuous flow of profits to the financial markets.

One wonders today: if this is the “war” Macron claims to be waging on the coronavirus, what would capitulation and collaboration look like?

For months now, scientists have been warning of the risks to the public from Macron’s inaction. In January, the president of the National Scientific Council, Jean-François Delfraissy, warned of the danger posed by the variants then raging through the UK: “We realise that if we continue without doing anything more, we will find ourselves in an extremely difficult situation beginning in mid-March.”

Dominique Costagliola, an epidemiologist who had also highlighted the need for strict lockdowns in January, said in March: “It’s naive to pretend Macron is an epidemiologist.” She asked, “Why did we not listen to Jean-François Delfraissy when, on 24 January, he explained that the new variants were a game changer?”

The Macron government, which was clearly pursuing the herd immunity policy advocated more openly by Trump and Johnson, while denying this reality in front of the media, has been turning a deaf ear to scientists for months.

On March 22, Health Minister Olivier Véran explained that the government had coldly predicted weeks or months of death in hospitals: “I remain very worried about the health situation. ... We will have to face a very large wave in the hospitals that will take weeks to die down. We’re going to have some difficult images to endure in the hospital.”

Macron, in his interview with the JDD, permitted himself the luxury of shedding a few crocodile tears over the fate of patients to whom his government is preparing to block access to treatment. He said, “It is not said enough, but many people in intensive care come from modest backgrounds. There’s a lot of unfairness in the way the disease hits.”

Yet it is precisely because the coronavirus hits working people hardest that Macron intends to leave patients to their fate. In his indifference to the pandemic, the “president of the rich” obeys the same class hatred that has marked his entire term in office.

This confirms the central lesson of all the struggles waged by workers against Macron: there is nothing to negotiate with him, and the trade union apparatuses and their political allies who play this game are only complicit in his political criminality. It is a question of organising the mobilisation of workers throughout Europe and internationally, independently of the unions, in order to impose a scientific policy against the coronavirus. The aim of this movement must be to transfer political power to the workers, and to expropriate the financial aristocracy that has organised this disaster.

UK police and government step up repression against Police Bill protests

Robert Stevens

Protesters were brutally attacked by police during demonstrations of thousands of people held for the second consecutive weekend in UK cities against the draconian Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill.

The Bill has passed its second reading and is expected to return to Parliament in June for its final stages before becoming law. Given the Conservative’s 80 seat majority, the Bill will pass.

Demonstrations against the Bill are routinely described in the media as “violent” and protesters as a “mob”, but the real violence has been carried out by police against those defending their right to protest which faces elimination if the Bill becomes law.

Police attack protesters and press in Bristol 26.3.21

On Thursday, it emerged that police claims that officers suffered injuries at the hands of the mainly young demonstrators in last week’s protests were lies. Last Monday, Avon and Somerset police, who oversee policing in Bristol, issued a statement claimed that “a total of 20 officers were assaulted or injured and two of them were taken to hospital after suffering broken bones. One of them also suffered a punctured lung.”

This was used by the government and their echo chamber media to demand that protesters face the full force of the law, as police pledged mass arrests.

On Wednesday, another Avon and Somerset statement admitted that “following a full medical assessment of the two officers taken to hospital, neither were found to have suffered confirmed broken bones.” Head of Avon and Somerset Andy Marsh admitted that no police officer had suffered a punctured lung.

Bristol has been at the centre of the protests, with a third demonstration held Friday night. Around 1,000 mainly young people gathered at College Green and held a peaceful protest as they marched around the city centre.

After being blocked by a phalanx of riot police with shields and batons from protesting outside Bridewell Police Station, protesters staged a sit-down protest in the Haymarket area. A four-deep line of riot police stood between them and the station. At around 10pm squadrons of riot police, including police on horseback and with dogs, moved to disperse the crowd. In the face of repeated assaults by police, they chanted “we are peaceful what are you?”

The brutal operation lasted well over two hours, included the use of mounted police charges with police making 10 arrests. Mobile phone footage on social media shows police attacking defenceless people with riot shields and hitting others with batons. One female protester was punched in the face by a police officer. A prone man who looked to be in a semi-conscious state as he lay in a gutter was attacked and dragged along the street by police.

A young woman, Jasmine York was attacked just days after suffering injuries from police the previous Sunday—including from a police dog and a baton strike. York told the Guardian, “A policewoman barged me with her shield and I tripped. I fell to the floor and I went on to my back. My phone went and my keys went [out of my pocket]. I had my knees up to my chest and my arms over my head. I had two policewomen on my left using their shields to batter me, and two men on my right and they were hitting me with batons.”

Riot police officers on the rampage in Bristol on March 26

A journalist for the Daily Mirror, Matthew Dresch, suffered a brutal attack which he posted film of on Twitter with the comment, “Police assaulted me at the Bristol protest even though I told them I was from the press.” The footage, included in the video above, has been viewed nearly 2 million times.

The police were egged on Friday night by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel. Johnson made sure to mention a single firework that was thrown at police lines during the disturbances, as he denounced “a mob intent on violence and causing damage to property. The police and the city have my full support.”

The frenzied law and order offensive was once more backed by Labour Party Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees. After again claiming that outsiders had come from other cities “to protest or to cause conflict,” he declared, “Avon and Somerset Police in Bristol have shown they are capable of managing protests well and with sensitivity and have developed a strong culture of working with our communities.”

On Saturday, protests continued with demonstrations in Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, Bradford, Brighton, Bath, Falmouth and Cardiff. Up to 1,000 protested in Sheffield, first gathering in Devonshire Green before marching around the city centre with sit-downs on the street outside the main police station on Snig Hill and the Town Hall on Pinstone Street.

In Manchester, hundreds protested in the city’s St Peter’s Square including sitting down and blocking trams there and in the Piccadilly Gardens area. Greater Manchester Police forcibly removed protesters and arrested 18 people between the ages of 17 and 27. Legal observer Ciara Bartlam, a barrister, told the Manchester Evening News, “They [the police] told protesters to move and at that point, as soon as the command was given to move, the officers became heavy-handed and pushed protesters off quite physically—grabbing, lifting, throwing protesters off the tracks… '

As he did last week when police confronted anti-Police Bill demonstrators and when he spoke in favour of police breaking up a small protest of National Health Service workers earlier this month, Labour’s Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said, “GMP had to manage a challenging situation carefully and we did not see a repeat of scenes seen in other parts of the country recently.”

There is even disquiet within ruling circles at the naked lurch to authoritarian police state measures, and the risk that this will inflame social and political tensions and expose the police as an instrument of state repression directed against the working class.

Michael Barton, the head of crime operations for policing nationally, and chief constable of Durham constabulary until 2019, told the Guardian that the new laws could result in “paramilitary policing”. He continued, “I’m not in favour of even more restrictive measures. Surely after an historically unprecedented year-long curfew, in peacetime, the government could show some common sense and gratitude for such incredible forbearance to allow civil liberties to once again flourish. Or are they happy to be linked to the repressive regimes currently flexing their muscles via their police forces?”

The powers in the Police Bill “dangerously edge in that direction” of “a paramilitary-style police force.” If passed, “Police chiefs will be seen as the arbiters of what is and is not allowed when it comes to protest.”

Sir Peter Fahy, the former chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, referred to the case of Ricky Tomlinson, one of the Shrewsbury 24 construction workers framed up by the police for their role in a 1972 national strike, amid a period of enormous working class struggles that ended in the bringing down of the Heath Conservative government. Last week, after nearly 50 years, the 24 had their convictions quashed. Fahy commented that the Police Bill “is short-term and politically driven,” adding, “It is a reaction to what happened with Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter [protests], in the same way Ricky Tomlinson was a reaction to the industrial strife of the 1970s. Policing was drawn into a particular stance and pose.

“It reminds me of the [1984-85] miners’ strike when policing was mobilised for a political reason. It took policing a long time to recover… The policing of protest can cause long-term damage.”

Australian population declines for first time since World War I

Martin Scott

The number of people in Australia declined in the September quarter last year, the first such occurrence since before 1916.

Estimates released last week by the Australia Bureau of Statistics revealed that the country’s population dropped by 4,239 to 25,693,059 in the three months to September 2020. By comparison, in the 19 years to March 2020, Australia’s population grew by an average of 84,165 each quarter.

Population growth is typically second-highest in the September quarter, so the year-on-year decline was actually higher, at 111,022.

The Centre for Population, established in 2019 under the treasury department, predicts that the nation’s population will grow by just 0.2 percent in the year to July 2021, a dramatic reduction from the annual average of 1.7 percent over the last decade.

The immediate cause is the dramatic reduction in immigration as a result of COVID-19 border restrictions. But “natural increase,” defined as the difference between the number of births and the number of deaths in a given period, also fell over the quarter, continuing a decline that has been underway since 2012.

Immigration has been the primary driver of Australia’s increasing population for most of the last 20 years and was the source of 64 percent of the country’s growth in the year to March 2020.

Net Overseas Migration (NOM) is expected to remain negative until at least 2022-2023, based on estimates released in December, when the federal government’s vaccine roll out promised to allow a relaxation of international border restrictions by the end of October 2021. With the vaccine roll out in a shambles and far behind target, the forecast may not be met.

This presents a major problem for the Australian economy, which for decades has relied heavily on population growth as a driver of productivity. Since 1991, the country’s population growth has exceeded the overall OECD figure in all but one year, and in 2019 the Australian figure of 1.52 percent was almost three times the OECD number of 0.54 percent.

Australia’s rapid population growth has masked economic downturns. While the country had only five quarters of negative GDP growth between 1991 and 2018, per-capita GDP fell in 21 quarters over the same period.

International students are the largest cohort of migrants, making up more than 30 percent of net overseas migration. According to data from the Department of Home Affairs, 189,477 visas were granted to higher education students in the 12 months to June 2019.

Overall university operating revenues fell by $1.8 billion last year, in part due to the lack of international students, and are set to plunge another $2 billion in 2021. International students are forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars in up front fees, and have been treated as cash cows by governments and university managements for decades amid continuous cuts to funding for the sector.

With the sharp fall in international student numbers, university managements, with the backing of the unions, responded last year by slashing as many as 90,000 jobs and intensifying a protracted assault on staff wages and conditions.

The government’s Higher Education Relief Package, announced in response to the COIVD-19 pandemic, did nothing to replace the $4.6 billion shortfall in international student tuition fees as students were either prohibited from entering the country or forced to leave by the Liberal-National government’s refusal to provide them with any financial support.

Instead, the pandemic was exploited to bring forward a major restructuring of higher education aimed at further subordinating Australia’s universities to the immediate vocational needs of big business and the state.

The overall economic impact is much larger than the fall in tuition fees, however. In 2018-19, international students were worth at least $38 billion to the Australian economy, making education the country’s fourth-largest export.

Over 500,000 temporary visa holders left Australia between March 2020 and February 2021 as a result of the widespread destruction of jobs and the fact that they were denied the JobKeeper wage subsidy and JobSeeker welfare payments throughout the pandemic.

This exodus has created havoc in industries, such as horticulture, that have come to rely on a steady stream of backpackers, students, and other migrant workers who are at once desperate for funds and subject to draconian restrictions on where and how much they are allowed to work. These workers are frequently on sub-poverty level wages or are paid in kind with food and boarding, and have been subjected to brutal mistreatment.

According to horticulture peak body Growcom, a shortage of 26,000 seasonal workers has cost the industry $45 million in unharvested crops over the last six months.

In a stark example of the irrationality of capitalist production, this supposed “labour shortage” comes in circumstances where almost two million Australian workers are unemployed, and hundreds of thousands more are likely to be thrown on the scrapheap as JobKeeper ends this week.

The ruling elite has argued that JobKeeper and the JobSeeker supplement must end in order to force unemployed city-dwellers to take up poorly-paid, short-term work in rural areas. The Morrison government has floated cutting welfare recipients off their benefits if they do not make the move. Other “solutions” it has advanced to the supposed labour shortage include quarantine exemptions for seasonal Pacific Islander workers.

The only solution not on the table is decent pay and long-term stable employment.

In recognition of the economic imperative to not only resume, but accelerate, the importation of migrants for super-exploitative, cheap labour, a federal Joint Standing Committee on Migration has issued an interim report insisting that the COVID-19 crisis must not be allowed to go to waste.

The report said: “Now is the time to attract highly talented individuals and businesses to Australia. This is an opportunity we will never get again and we need to ensure Australia gets those settings right.”

In other words, the unprecedented restructuring of the Australian workforce, carried out with the backing of Labor and the unions under the pretext of the pandemic, must be intensified.

The report called for the repeal of multiple restrictions on the recruitment of overseas workers, including requirements for jobs to be advertised locally and offered to the unemployed. Under the recommendations, employers would no longer be required to contribute to the Skilling Australia Fund, which supports trainees and apprentices. Places on repatriation flights and in quarantine hotels would be reserved for migrant workers while the international border remains closed.

The Labor opposition, which supports the pro-business overhaul of the economy, has responded to the report with nationalist denunciations. Speaking on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Insiders” program on March 21, Shadow Home Affairs Minister Kristina Keneally objected to the “almost laughable” report on the grounds that accepting its recommendations would “leave Australian workers behind.”

Keneally declared that “this government has let temporary migration soar to historically high levels, and that has had an effect on the ability, particularly of young Australians, to get into the workforce.”

Workers and young people should reject this with the contempt that it deserves. Labor and the unions are promoting nationalism to divert attention for their own responsibility for the social crisis. Both have presided over the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the closure of entire industries, to boost the profits of the corporate elite. This has led to the casualisation of the workforce, and has created a situation where all workers, migrant and non-migrant, are compelled to compete for an ever-decreasing number of full-time jobs.

Labor’s nationalist rhetoric is aimed at preventing a unified struggle by the working class against the corporate offensive, which it fully supports. Its purpose is to divide workers along national lines, and to scapegoat foreign workers for the mounting social hardships confronting all sections of the working class.

The fight against inequality and the corporate onslaught on jobs, wages and conditions, can only go forward on the basis of an internationalist perspective, aimed at uniting every section of workers in a struggle for their common class interests.

This must include the demand that all workers, wherever they are from, have the right to live, work and study in Australia, or anywhere else, with full citizenship rights and with decent wages and conditions, as a fundamental democratic right.

Myanmar military guns down 114 people in deadliest daily toll

Peter Symonds

In a bloody crackdown on Saturday, police and troops in Myanmar shot and killed at least 114 people as protests continued across the country against the February 1 military coup that ousted the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the latest tally by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, at least 423 people have been killed since the coup.

As the junta tightens its censorship, details of what is happening in the streets of Myanmar are becoming increasingly limited. As of March 18, the last newspapers that were independent of the regime suspended publication, leaving the population dependent on online media and social media, which have also been hit by restrictions and shutdowns imposed by the junta.

Protesters take positions behind a makeshift barricade as armed riot policemen gather in Yangon, Myanmar, Monday, March 8, 2021. (AP Photo)

In its round up of the military’s violence, Myanmar Now confirmed that the highest number of casualties had occurred in the two largest cities—28 deaths in Yangon and 38 in Mandalay. The killings, however, extended across the country, an indication of the extent of the protest movement against the coup. The internet publication provided some details of events in Yangon’s townships:

* At least four people were killed and several injured in the suburban township of Dala when troops opened fire on protesters outside a police station demanding the release of two women.

* Four people were shot and killed in Insein during a protest crackdown.

* A one-year-old baby was wounded after being shot in the eye with a rubber bullet in Yangon’s Mayangone township.

In Mandalay, among those killed was a 13-year-old girl in Meikhtila who was shot in her house after security forces opened fire on residential areas. She was one of at least six children between the ages of 10 and 16 who were killed across the country on Saturday.

Dozens of deaths were reported in other towns, such as Dawei and Kawthaung in Tanintharyi region; Monywa, Sagaing and Shwebo in Sagaing region; Myingyan and Sintgaing in Mandalay; Kyaikhto in Mon State; and Pathein in Irrawaddy region.

The Irrawaddy provided further details of events in Yangon’s Insein township, where residents set up roadblocks in the early hours of Saturday. Police and soldiers moved in and the killings began from 6 a.m. Insein residents fought back with whatever they could find—from broken bricks to slingshots, Molotov cocktails and burning piles of tires.

A nurse who was part of a local medical team told the publication that among the dead and wounded were a drinking water deliveryman and other bystanders. She denounced the military as “devils,” asking: “How can a human being behave like this? I can’t even find any proper words to describe their brutality.”

Reports have emerged of heavy fighting between the military and various ethnic militias, predominantly in the country’s north. An estimated 3,000 people fled across the border to Thailand after military jets bombed areas controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU) militia, killing at least three civilians.

The brutal military crackdown continued on Sunday as protests re-emerged in a number of cities and towns. Eyewitnesses reported that security forces opened fire on a funeral for a 20-year-old student in Bago near Yangon. While casualties have not been confirmed, another 12 people were killed yesterday in shootings elsewhere in Myanmar.

Saturday’s killings took place as the junta celebrated Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day, featuring a military parade in the capital, Naypyitaw. At the parade, junta leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, absurdly declared that the military would protect the people and strive for democracy.

The military has attempted to justify its seizure of power with false accusations that national elections held last November, won overwhelming by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), were rigged. It has also claimed that young protesters are being misled by “foreign henchmen”—again without any substantiation.

It is certainly the case that the US and its allies are seeking to exploit the situation in Myanmar for their own purposes. Saturday’s killings were followed by an outpouring of diplomatic protests. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted that his country was “horrified by the bloodshed perpetrated by Burmese security forces, showing that the junta will sacrifice the lives of the people to serve the few.”

In a staggering display of hypocrisy, the heads of the military of the US and 11 American allies, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea and New Zealand, issued a statement condemning the use of force against unarmed protesters. “A professional military follows international standards for conduct and is responsible for protecting—not harming—the people it serves,” it sanctimoniously declared.

All these powers are responsible for war crimes, including the killing of civilians, in the illegal wars of aggression by US imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The Biden administration is ramping up another “human rights” campaign in a bid to further its strategic interests in Myanmar and the broader Indo-Pacific region. The campaign is directed in particular against China and Russia, which demonstrated their support for the junta by sending representatives to Saturday’s military parade.

The US has no interest in democratic rights in Myanmar, or anywhere else for that matter. Biden was vice-president in the Obama administration which brokered a rotten deal between Suu Kyi and the military to free her in 2010 and allow elections on the basis of an anti-democratic constitution. Suu Kyi effectively became the roving ambassador for a military-dominated regime, most graphically exposed by her defence of the military’s atrocities against the Muslim Rohingya minority in 2017.

The Obama administration regarded the agreement as a major diplomatic achievement because Myanmar, which had been closely aligned with China, shifted its foreign policy stance toward the US. All of sudden, in Washington’s propaganda, Myanmar was no longer “a rogue state” but “a developing democracy” and US relations developed on all levels—including with the country’s military. Obama’s intervention in Myanmar was part of his broader “pivot to Asia” against China, including preparations for war.

Now the Biden administration, as it ramps up its confrontation with China, sees the opportunity to again exert pressure, including by imposing sanctions, to fashion a regime in Naypyitaw more aligned with Washington. The US is perfectly willing to again use Suu Kyi and ignore her defence of the military’s crimes against the Rohingya. Suu Kyi and her NLD represent sections of the capitalist class in Myanmar that are hostile to the military’s economic domination and have oriented to the West for support.

Suu Kyi’s willingness to function as apologist for the military’s atrocities highlights the political weakness of the protest movement against the February 1 coup. While the protests have involved broad layers of the population, including sections of the working class, opposition leaders have limited its aims to the reinstatement of the NLD government led by Suu Kyi, which repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice democratic rights and accommodate to the military.

A genuine struggle for democracy needs to address the pressing social issues confronting working people, which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—unemployment, low wages and exploitative conditions, grinding poverty. All sections of the bourgeoisie, including those represented by the NLD, are hostile to a mass movement of the working class that begins to raise its own class demands that can be fulfilled only through the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government and socialist policies.

The Suez Canal blockage and the globalization of production

Jean Shaoul

The colossal implications of one of the largest container ships in the world, the Ever Given, running aground and blocking Egypt’s Suez Canal have been felt internationally.

The huge container ship, wedged across the canal since last Tuesday during a seasonal sandstorm, was finally freed from the shoreline in the early hours of this morning by tugboats. Efforts to fully refloat it are ongoing at the time of writing.

The blockage of a vital artery of the world economy by a single ship—an accident waiting to happen—reveals fundamental aspects of modern society.

The ship is owned by the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, operated by the Taiwanese company Evergreen Marine Corporation, flagged in Panama and carrying goods worth $89 million.

Production and economic activity have become internationally integrated to an unprecedented extent, linking the working class in every country into a powerful interconnected network, such that the disruption of a single major transit hub quickly makes itself felt throughout the globe.

In this photo released by the Suez Canal Authority, tug boats and diggers work to free the Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned Ever Given, which is lodged across the Suez Canal, Sunday, March 28, 2021. (Suez Canal Authority via AP)

Almost 50 percent of the vessels that transit the Suez Canal are container ships carrying car components, appliances, apparel and consumer electronics to and from continents. Goods heading for Europe will themselves be integrated into components to be shipped to the Americas and the rest of the world, often for final assembly elsewhere.

However, under the irrational, anarchic capitalist social order, with the world divided into rival nation states, there has been virtually no serious preparations for an event like the Suez Canal jam, which has long been predicted, given the huge expansion in the number and size of container “mega-ships.”

With more than 450 vessels now waiting at either end of the canal, analysts believe that the insurance industry could be facing claims in excess of $100 million. However, the final bill, including compensation for delays, loss of revenue for the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), potential damage to cargo and the cost of refloating the ship, could include sums even higher.

While the precise causes of the Ever Given accident have yet to be determined, it points to the incompetence and corruption endemic in the Egyptian state apparatus. The SCA, the state-owned and largely military-run corporation responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Suez Canal, including its computerized traffic management system, pilots and dredging, has sought to downplay the severity of the incident and is unable to say how long it will take to unblock the canal. The chief of the SCA, Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, has already announced that the agency is discussing compensation for the waiting ships, implying negligence on the SCA’s part.

But the global implications are far greater. Analysts are warning that the blockage threatens a severe disruption to global trade supplies, with massive repercussions on global supply chains that now rely on minimal levels of stocks commensurate with just-in-time production techniques, and consequences for workers’ jobs and consumer prices. It is likely to further fuel national antagonisms.

The Suez Canal is one of the world’s busiest waterways, linking the Indian Ocean, the Red and Mediterranean Seas. The canal is traversed by 19,000 vessels a year, carrying $10 billion of goods every day, or an estimated 13 percent of global trade by volume, and around 10 percent of the world’s oil, mostly between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

As sea trade has grown, the size of container ships has also grown, driven by the need to lower shipping costs and achieve economies of scale. The average size of container ships is now five times larger than just 20 years ago, paving the way for both fewer ships and enormous cost reductions, to the extent vessels capable of carrying 20,000 20-foot equivalent containers are operated with a crew of just 20. But such ships are too deep and large to transit some shipping routes, such as the Panama Canal, or dock at some port quays, requiring significant investment to accommodate the ships, handle their loading and unloading and manage the scheduling to avoid port congestion.

With the Suez Canal blocked, some ships began to divert around the southern tip of Africa, a much more hazardous route, adding up to two weeks to the journey and with higher labour and fuel costs. This in turn will exacerbate the shortage of containers and container ships and create delays, shortages of goods and higher prices, with oil prices rising 7 percent in response to the news of the blockage. A report published by the German insurer Allianz Global estimated the bottleneck could cost global trade $6 billion to $10 billion a week.

Smaller tankers and oil products, like naphtha (a liquid fuel) and fuel oil exports from Europe to Asia—about 20 percent of Asia’s naphtha is supplied by the Mediterranean and Black Sea via the Suez Canal—will also be affected if the canal remains blocked for several weeks.

The traffic jam in the Suez, when eventually freed up, will in turn lead to further congestion and disorganization as ships flood into ports which are already overstretched due to the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Suez Canal event also emerges amid severely hampered supply chains, including widespread shortages of semiconductors, a key component in cars, smartphones, PCs, tablets and TVs, the brutal winter storm in Texas last month, slowing production of plastic goods, and a major backlog of container ships in Southern California ports.

The blockage of the Suez Canal threatens a further intensification of geopolitical tensions under conditions in which numerous flashpoints exist and have been multiplying. Ships forced to reroute from the Red Sea towards South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope face the threat of piracy off the coasts of East Africa and West Africa, which have seen an increase in pirate kidnappings in recent months, leading several shipping companies to call on the US Navy to provide escorts.

Russian Foreign Ministry official Nikolai Korchunov argued the need for the development of new shipping routes, including a northern sea route through the Arctic Ocean, which has itself become the focus of increasing geopolitical conflicts as the adjacent countries seek to assert their territorial claims to secure access to the vast energy reserves and rare materials that are believed to be in the Arctic region.

Today, the global nature of capitalism is beyond dispute, as is the reactionary nation-state system that is driving the world’s major capitalist powers ever closer to global war and increasing social inequality at home, while preparing dictatorial forms of rule.

Capitalism has demonstrated over and over again that it is impervious to science and reason, criminally irrational and utterly opposed to addressing any social problems even as it demands ever fatter profits. Coming amid the pandemic, which has already killed 2.7 million people worldwide, it only confirms the necessity of abolishing the capitalist system and replacing it with an internationally coordinated, rationally and scientifically directed system of economic planning, based on equality and the satisfaction of human need: socialism.