Mexico’s ruling Morena party suffers losses in midterm elections

Don Knowland

Mid-term elections held yesterday for the Chamber of Deputies of the Mexican Congress and 15 of 32 state governorships, along with the mayoral posts (alcaldías) of the 16 boroughs (delegaciones) of Mexico City, which holds a federal entity status akin to the states.

The preliminary results showed significant losses for the ruling party Morena (National Regeneration Movement) and its head, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO), who was elected in a landslide in 2018.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Three hundred of the 500 congressional seats were up for direct election of candidates, the remaining 200 being allocated proportionally based on those results. Morena is projected to win about 190 seats in the lower house, a loss of about 60 seats.

Morena maintains a majority of upwards of 280 seats, in combination with its “Together We Make History” allies, the pseudo-left Labor Party (PT, Partido de Trabajo), the increasingly right-wing Ecological Green Party (PVEM), which picked up around 30 seats and the socially conservative Solidarity Encounter Party (PES), which will at most win a handful of seats.

However, the ruling party has lost its two-thirds supermajority that would empower it to implement changes to the Mexican Constitution without the support of additional parties. AMLO has said he wants to change the constitutional reform opening up the energy sector to private and foreign companies that was adopted at the outset of the term of the prior corrupt president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

That energy program was pushed through by the three parties that now make up the “right-left” Va por Mexico (Go for Mexico) electoral coalition consisting of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), the previously governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Peña Nieto, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the supposed “left” part of the coalition. They picked up the bulk of the seats that Morena lost.

Once the third-strongest party after the PRI and PAN, the PRD, “social democratic” in name only, will gain just over a dozen seats, having pursued a trajectory which in fact is ever more to the right.

Morena did considerably better in the state elections for governors. It won 10 or 11 of the 15 seats up for grabs, in addition to the one it previously held. That will extend its power over a number of states, several largely rural—Baja California, Baja California Sur, Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tlaxcala, Zacatecas, and possibly oil-rich Campeche, while an allied PT/PVEM candidate will likely win in San Luis Potosí.

Morena’s biggest defeat was in Mexico City, a stronghold of parties aligned with AMLO since the late 1990s. AMLO was once mayor, and the current mayor is Claudia Sheinbaum, a leading contender to succeed him as Morena’s next presidential candidate in 2024. Morena had held 11 of the 16 alcaldías, but appeared likely to win only six or seven of them.

COVID-19 hit especially hard in the city, and discontent simmered over the collapse of an elevated metro line in May, killing 26 riders and injuring many more. AMLO’s current Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard was mayor when this train was built. The criminal negligence and corruption involved was clear for all to see.

Monday morning, AMLO still claimed to be “happy, happy, happy” with the results of the lower house election, and he emphasized Morena’s gains in the governors’ races. He also claimed that the vote showed the Mexican people supported his call for a “fourth transformation” of Mexico, as epoch-making as independence from Spain, late 19th-century bourgeois liberal reforms and the Mexican Revolution a century ago.

AMLO continues to claim that he has used the first half of his six-year term to lay the foundations for his fourth transformation, and will get down to reforms “in earnest” in the next three years of his term in office. He has maintained a favorability rating of upwards of 60 percent, and Morena yesterday had more than double the votes in the lower house elections than the next closest party, the PAN.

But his alleged accomplishments have amounted to nothing and class tensions in Mexico are boiling over.

Over 56 percent of the working population continues to work in the informal sector and lacks social security. This is a proportion that has grown over time and will not disappear with AMLO’s promised “fourth transformation.” Rather, it is the product of a system unable to sustain Mexico’s population.

In the early 1990s, former PRI President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, privatized the economy, including the banks, and opened the country to market forces, that is to increased exploitation by US and European imperialism. His claim was that the economy would grow and ultimately bring prosperity to all.

That never happened. Mexico’s growth since has averaged a mere 2.2 percent annually. Poverty only grew. The 10 richest people in Mexico accumulated the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent of the country, according to a 2018 report by Oxfam, and that gap has only been exacerbated under AMLO.

Corruption became endemic, an issue that AMLO claimed he would take head on. The government’s “war” on the drug cartels, which ended up favoring certain cartels over others, led to many thousands killed or disappeared. Under AMLO murder rates remain at near record highs.

López Obrador has elevated the political influence and budget of the Mexican military, which has a long record of corruption, extrajudicial killings of workers and other abuses. This is part of a turn of the Mexican oligarchy toward authoritarian forms of rule anticipating the further discrediting of the entire political establishment. The Morena administration even created a new National Guard to perpetuate the military’s internal deployment and used it increasingly to harass striking workers.

The latest elections proved the bloodiest in modern Mexican history. Over 800 candidates were subjected to violence, and 36 were murdered.

While AMLO did increase the minimum wage slightly, and makes murky claims to have established billions of dollars of direct social transfers to underprivileged groups, there is very little to show for it. In truth his government’s financial policy has been along neoliberal lines: aversion to indebtedness, control of inflation, austerity and balance in public spending and rejection of any expropriation of the private sector.

The policies of AMLO and his government as to the COVID-19 pandemic have been nothing short of criminal. Factories were to remain open, and especially those of big US companies; profits could not be impaired. The Morena government refused to expand fiscal spending to counteract the impact of COVID-19 on employment, forcing many to work in dangerous conditions.

Health measures and spending were utterly inadequate. Vaccinations have proceeded at an appallingly slow pace.

The result has been at least a half million excess deaths. And by all estimates, an additional 10 million were pushed into poverty.

A guest column by a Mexican economist on the Spanish web page of the New York Times on Sunday recognized that Mexico had long since become two countries, one composed of a small sliver of the rich, and the other of masses of poor people.

Emphasizing that López Obrador “is a less radical politician than he is accused of being and more responsible for public affairs than he is given credit for,” the column went on to argue:

This disparity threatens the very social fabric of the nation. For ethical reasons but also for political prudence, it is urgent to avert the risks of social instability that derive from the difficult coexistence of these two Mexicos. And given that the opposition has so far been unable to offer an alternative to this problem, I am convinced that López Obrador is the only viable option to avoid the despair of the majorities and what it could entail.

In other words, this despair could easily lead to a popular rebellion. This expresses the true function of López Obrador and his political program: to promote the deception that it can meet the needs of the vast majority of the population.

AMLO is nothing more than a fake left representative of the class interests of a criminal Mexican bourgeoisie, and is fully complicit in its crimes.

German trade unions support destruction of jobs and worksite closures at Lufthansa Technik

Marianne Arens

Hundreds of Lufthansa workers protested on Wednesday, June 2, against planned worksite closures and partial shutdowns at the German airline’s line maintenance operations. Lufthansa Technik GmbH, a subsidiary controlled 100 percent by Lufthansa, plans to close its worksites in Bremen, Düsseldorf, Hannover, and Leipzig, while the closure of sites in Hamburg and Frankfurt is taking place in stages. Out of a total of 1,350 jobs, 780 are at immediate risk. Around 180 workers protested in Frankfurt and about 230 in Hamburg against the airline’s job-cutting plan.

Lufthansa airplane (Flickr)

The layoffs at the Lufthansa Technik sites are part of the massive restructuring plan being implemented by Lufthansa, using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext. In reality, the planned job cuts had long been waiting in the desk drawer of airline chief executive Karsten Spohr. A Lufthansa spokesperson confirmed this with the remark, “The air travel crisis of course makes it necessary to undertake changes, the necessity for which were already apparent prior to the crisis.” Although Lufthansa received €9 billion last year from the German government’s emergency COVID-19 bailout, the company destroyed 60,000 jobs worldwide.

The World Socialist Web Site has been warning for many months that the pandemic is not merely the product of a natural disaster. The explosive spread of the virus is the direct result of the capitalist “profits before lives” policy, which is aimed at sending workers into dangerous workplaces and their children back into school. At the same time, hundreds of billions of euros were pumped into the major corporations and banks in the name of coronavirus emergency bailouts.

The bill is now being paid by the working class in the form of layoffs, plant shutdowns, and attacks on workers’ benefits secured over decades of struggle. Lufthansa provides a prime example of this. In May 2020, its business report noted a total of 138,000 employees, while today it is officially 110,000, or 28,000 fewer. Tens of thousands of additional jobs face destruction, entire business areas will be outsourced, and collectively bargained pay rates decimated. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting on May 4, the board confirmed its intention to axe a further 10,000 full-time jobs, including compulsory redundancies. The stock market backed the plan, driving up the price of Lufthansa shares.

While a job at Lufthansa guaranteed a secure, decent-paying job once upon a time, the airline now conducts blatant wage dumping. This was underscored in a recent Report Mainz segment on the closure of Lufthansa subsidiaries GermanWings and SunExpress Deutschland. Laid-off pilots and flight attendants are attempting to be rehired by the newly established company EuroWings Discover, but are either being turned away or rehired on the basis of sweeping wage cuts and part-time contracts. Almost all new hires are temporary.

Under these conditions, it is necessary for workers to take matters into their own hands. The WSWS and Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) propose the building of rank-and-file action committees to cooperate across company and national divisions in order to lead a struggle against these attacks and for decent-paying, secure jobs for all. To this end, the International Committee of the Fourth International, to which the SGP belongs, has founded the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. Its goal is to develop a conscious international movement of the working class.

This requires above all a break with the nationalist and essentially anti-worker orientation of the trade unions. All of the crisis contracts agreed at Lufthansa over the past year to impose layoffs, shutdowns, and wage cuts were signed by the trade unions active at the company. These include Verdi, VC (Cockpit Association), and UFO (Independent Organisation of Flight Attendants). They all agreed last year to income reductions totalling €1.3 billion, including the elimination of holiday pay and Christmas bonuses for ground crew and technical workers, and a wage freeze and cancellation of all benefits until the end of 2021.

These voluntary income reductions in the billions were described by the World Socialist Web Site as “a new dimension of trade union sellouts.” The trade union leaders are not workers’ representatives, but co-managers for the company. Verdi’s Christine Behele is also deputy chair of Lufthansa’s supervisory board. The trade unions have fully embraced the capitalist business model, placing the competitiveness of Lufthansa on the world market ahead of the interests of workers and their families.

Already on April 6, 2020, the trade unions published a declaration of loyalty to the “Dear Herr Executives” of German Lufthansa, in which they explicitly declared their “support for all necessary measures to stabilise our company in these difficult times.” The IGL (Industrial Air Traffic Union) and TGL (Technical Air Travel Union) also signed this document of utter capitulation.

The rallies held last week in Frankfurt and Hamburg are part of the trade unions’ strategy of stabilising the company. On the one hand, they are aimed at concealing the fact that the union leaders have long ago accepted and signed off on the job cuts and worksite shutdowns. On the other, they serve to control the mounting anger in the workforce.

Verdi, which called for the protests, claimed to be surprised by the prospect of compulsory redundancies and accused Spohr of making “wrong business decisions.” Verdi trade union secretary Uwe Schramm made this point in a press release from Verdi in the state of Hesse. At the same time, he stoked illusions in the German federal government, claiming that it is working “at all levels during the current coronavirus crisis for the retention of Lufthansa and its jobs.”

Workers must interpret this as a declaration of hostility to their interests. The reality is that the federal Grand Coalition government has nothing but contempt for the interests of workers. Its ruthless “profits before lives” policy has produced close to 90,000 coronavirus deaths in Germany alone. The attacks at Lufthansa are also being encouraged by the government. The government even previously urged that job cuts be imposed at an even faster pace.

The unions support this course and do everything in their power to pit workers at different plants, companies, and subcontractors against each other, and divide them. At one of the airports, Verdi is bitterly complaining about the fact that Lufthansa has outsourced the Line Maintenance division for EuroWings at its main site in Düsseldorf to an external competitor of Lufthansa Technik.

The fate of WISAG service workers at the Frankfurt airport demonstrates the consequences this will have for workers at the suppliers, service providers, and subcontractors. The service company WISAG, controlled by the Frankfurt oligarch Claus Wisser, is an expert in exploiting the pandemic for ruthless and illegitimate layoffs planned long before the crisis. At the end of last year, WISAG laid off 230 experienced workers, who had worked at the airport for 20, 30, and even 40 years, throwing them on the streets with ridiculous compensation packages of €3,000 or €4,000.

Under the slogan “Today us, tomorrow you,” a group of these workers took up the struggle against their layoff and organised a series of rallies and an eight-day hunger strike at Frankfurt airport’s Terminal 1. The WISAG workers laid a black funeral wreath in front of the Verdi headquarters because the union did nothing to protect their jobs.

Since then, it has been revealed that a second company under the WISAG Group is carrying out layoffs. At Aviation Services GmbH (ASG), 87 workers have been laid off. Those targeted are precisely the workers who have decades of experience at the airport, and they have been offered ridiculous “social plans” like the WISAG workers.

At ASG, the unions affiliated with the German Union Confederation (DGB) have shown that they serve the interests of the corporations and the capitalist profit system, not those of the workers. At ASG, which is responsible for cleaning the interior of aircraft, workers are part of the IG Bau union. The union authored an online letter in which it stated that it had been aware of the impending layoffs since July 2020.

Exaggerated claims for G7 tax deal

Nick Beams

The announcement by G7 finance ministers over the weekend that they had agreed to push for a minimum 15 percent corporate tax rate as part of a bid to eliminate tax havens for major global corporations has been presented as the beginning of a new era of multilateralism and even a significant step towards social justice.

Closer examination of what was actually agreed to, and whether it can even be implemented in further negotiations going beyond the G7 group of the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada, reveals the empty character of these assertions.

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, back centre, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, centre right, at a meeting of finance ministers from across the G7 nations at Lancaster House in London, Friday June 4, 2021. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool via AP)

The main promoter of the exaggerations was US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, anxious to advance the claims of the Biden administration that it is taking a lead role in managing the affairs of global capitalism in contrast to the “America First” doctrine of the Trump administration.

Yellen said the G7 finance ministers had made a “significant, unprecedented commitment… that provides tremendous momentum towards achieving a robust minimum global tax rate of at least 15 percent.

“That global minimum tax would end the race to the bottom in corporate taxation, and ensure fairness for the middle class and working people in the US and around the world.”

It would also help the global economy thrive, she added, encourage countries to educate and train their workforces and invest in research and development as well as infrastructure.

Others also waxed lyrical about the impact of a new tax regime. France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire said the G7 countries had “risen to the challenge of this historical moment.” Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi called the deal a “historic step towards a fairer and more equitable society for our citizens.”

But the figures do not support these statements. According to estimates by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has been involved in negotiations for a uniform tax regime over the past eight years, the proposals, if implemented, could generate an additional $50-$80 billion a year in revenue, but the actual sum raised would vary significantly depending on the final agreement. And spread over a large number of countries any tax boost will not meet the claims being made for it.

Moreover, the G7 deal is only the first step in implementation. Much has still to be determined in the wider negotiations, involving 139 countries, being conducted by the OECD. The next stage will be to win the backing of the G20 group of countries, which are to meet in Venice next month.

Critics of the proposal have said the 15 percent rate is too low. The UK IPPR social justice research group told the Financial Times (FT) it “would not be enough to end the race to the bottom” in which countries cut their tax rates to attract global corporations.

Pointing to the wider geo-political concerns of Washington, an FT report on Monday said the tax deal was the “first substantive proof of revived international co-operation since President Joe Biden brought the US back to the negotiating table.”

It stated that “privately” some ministers had indicated the urgency for a G7 deal in order to “demonstrate that rich countries still mattered, in a bid to show the world that the 21st century was not going to be dominated by rules set by China.”

Notwithstanding the mutual backslapping, significant differences remain. They centre on the moves by countries to impose taxes on global corporations, in particular hi-tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Apple, on the revenues they raise in their markets.

These had been the subject of a major conflict with the US as the UK, France and Italy sought to force these companies to pay more tax on the revenue they raised even if they did not have a physical presence there.

In response to the moves for a digital tax, the Trump administration had announced a series of retaliatory tariffs against what it claimed was discrimination targeting American companies. These were suspended until the end of this year while negotiations took place.

Yellen then brought forward the proposal for the 15 percent minimum global tax and agreed that the largest global corporations with profit margins of at least 10 percent would have to allocate 20 percent of their profits to countries where they make their sales. This would overturn the previous regulation that companies were only taxed in countries where they had a physical presence.

Yellen pushed for European countries to immediately drop their new digital taxes in return for gaining tax rights under the new deal. But they have said they will abolish the taxes only when a global agreement is reached. Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said after the G7 deal was announced that her government intended to go ahead with the digital tax as well.

The G7 communiqué did not provide a clear determination. It said: “We will provide for appropriate co-ordination between the application of the international tax rules and the removal of all Digital Services Taxes, and other relevant measures, on all companies.”

There are a number of barriers to cross before any final international deal is reached. Apart from securing agreement at the G20 and the international adoption of the new rules under the OECD negotiations, the definition of what constitutes the “largest and most profitable” global companies is still to be worked out.

There is also the question of whether countries which have tax rates below 15 percent will sign off. One of the most significant is Ireland, which has a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate and has become the headquarters for tax purposes of a number of major technology and pharmaceutical companies. The Irish government has said it wants to keep its low tax rate regime in place.

“Any agreement will have to meet the needs of small and large countries, developed and developing,” the Irish finance minister tweeted after the G7 deal was announced.

The biggest barrier could prove to be the US Congress. The Wall Street Journal noted that the new approach advanced by the Biden administration may run into Congressional opposition “where some lawmakers are wary of moving before other countries.” Some proposals “could require the US Senate to ratify changes to tax treaties, which would take a two-thirds vote and at least some Republican support.”

And it is not even certain that the deal will result in higher levels of taxation on the most profitable companies because the proposed global tax regime of 15 percent may bring pressure for lower corporate taxes in some countries.

This was evidenced in the business reaction in Australia where the present corporate tax rate is 30 percent.

According to Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott, with a tax rate double the proposed 15 percent global minimum, Australia was “severely exposed in its ability to attract global capital.”

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Wilcox said the G7 agreement was the opportunity to have “a long-delayed discussion in Australia about business taxes.” He claimed that a tax rate of 30 percent and other regulatory measures meant Australia had “one of the very highest ratios of business income tax to GDP in the OECD.”

This reaction indicates that rather than halting the race to the bottom, the deal could give it a new twist.

Nukes, Lies and Invisible Murder

Robert Koehler

Let’s listen in for a moment to the gentle, awkward language of mass killing:

The employment or threat of employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations. . . . Integration of nuclear weapons into a theater of operations requires the consideration of multiple variables. Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.

This is a sneak peek into a 2019 report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff called “Nuclear Operations,” which Brian Terrell quoted recently. The document was, for some reason, publicly posted in the waning days of the Trump administration, then — oops — quickly removed, but not before it was downloaded by the Federation of American Scientists.

As The Guardian noted, the document, the first of its kind in 14 years, seemed to indicate a creepy shift in Pentagon thinking: from nuclear deterrence to actually fighting (and of course winning) a nuclear war.

The report even included a quote from Dr. Strangelove, by which I mean Herman Kahn, the high-profile strategist of the Cold War era who was one of several inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s iconic character. “My guess,” says Kahn, “is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.”

OK, shrug and move on, right? We survived the Cold War, so any remaining “duck and cover” fear can be stored in the attic of our collective consciousness. Except for the occasional lone nut with a gun — showing up at a school, shopping mall, church, synagogue, massage parlor — violence serves the cause of human safety; it’s the core of our self-defense. And therefore, as the above quotes demonstrate, good violence, even though it may occasionally kill or dismember children, shatter lives, spread toxicity, must be discussed abstractly and strategically. We aim moral rancor only at our enemies, who have been previously dehumanized.

And thus global — and especially American — militarism continues uninterrupted and fully funded. Joe Biden’s 2022 defense budget proposal, for instance, is $754 billion, up $14 billion from Trump’s last defense budget. This includes $715 for the Pentagon and nearly $16 billion for nuclear weapons development and modernization, because . . . this is just the way things are.

As Slate reports, the Biden budget “calls for full speed ahead on new weapons for all three legs of the nuclear triad” — land-based ICBMs, the B-21 bomber and a new nuclear-armed submarine.

“. . . hawks of both parties,” Slate notes, “are likely to breathe a sigh of relief that Biden has ignored the pleas of some Democrats to whack the defense budget in order to pay for more social programs. Biden is upping everything, including taxes and deficits, to pay for everything.”

And the budget also includes something called the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which focuses on China, establishing it as our current primary adversary and perhaps launching a new cold war with it — as though, what else is new? There’s nothing harder than trying to govern a country without a clear enemy. Not simply a “threat,” mind you — which could include current and future pandemics, not to mention climate change and ecological devastation — but an enemy. When you have an enemy, you can focus the entirety of your thinking on strategy and tactics. No need for complexity. No need to listen, to grope for understanding. No need to acknowledge your own vulnerability and face the unknown. Just modernize your nukes.

But without such courageous vulnerability, peace is impossible. Militarism creates the illusion of safety, though of course its endless presence creates just the opposite. Peace work is not a tool for a leader to summon. It’s deeply complex, requiring an attitude of “power with” rather than “power over” one’s potential enemy.

Joseph Gerson, president of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, puts it with clarity. Instead of shaking our weapons at China, we should pursue “mutually beneficial diplomacy” with it.

“Instead of increasing military spending to reinforce U.S. dominance,” he writes, . . . that money should be spent to export billions of vaccine shots to countries in need before new variants renew the pandemic here in the United States. With our housing shortage, real security lies in funding massive home construction. And, with the seas rising and a new fire season upon us, cooperation — not war — with China is essential if the climate emergency is to be contained.

He adds: “Yes, challenge China on its human rights violations, but do so in tandem with opposing police violence and the prison-industrial complex in the U.S.”

Such a world — such leadership — is within our reach, but first we must free ourselves from the mindset of militarism, which is perpetuated not merely by politicians and generals but, inexcusably, by much of the media, which compliantly speaks their language. In militaryspeak, civilians may be bombed but they’re never murdered, at least not by us. If we can’t avoid acknowledging their deaths, then they become collateral damage, necessary for “the restoration of strategic stability.”

UK universities and colleges continue attacks on staff jobs and conditions

Ioan Petrescu

Nearly 1,300 staff at the University of Liverpool are striking in protest against planned job cuts in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. The three-week strike began on May 24, coinciding with the end of year examination period, and is set to have a considerable impact.

The university originally intended to cut up to 47 staff, but this was revised down to 32 after the University and College Union (UCU) threatened industrial action.

Announcing the reorganisation in February, Louise Kenny, Executive Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the university, said, “Project SHAPE, which will bring about a major realignment of the University’s Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, was implemented in order to help tackle the extreme health inequalities and unmet health needs in the Liverpool City Region, both of which have been brought to the fore throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Staff protesting at Liverpool University at a rally during the strike (WSWS media)

The Vice-Chancellor claimed the university needs the “headroom” provided by cutting jobs to have enough money to build a new research centre. But Liverpool University had a turnover of £584.7 million in 2020, as well as an operating surplus of £54.7 million. It has the seventh largest endowment of any university in England, at £168.3 million. Kenny herself receives an estimated £410,000 per year from the university and recently boasted of selling a mansion in Ireland for €3.25 million.

The reality is that the job cuts are central to the marketisation and privatisation of the sector that has proceeded apace under the framework of the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act.

The UCU was reluctant to call the strike, waiting more than a month and a half between the results of the ballot, backed by 84 percent of members, and the start of the action. It was forced to take action under immense pressure from the rank-and-file who want to defend their jobs and conditions.

In the last few weeks, the union has made clear that it is not opposed to redundancies in principle, only with the way the university goes about them. According to a union spokesman, its main objections are that the employer “relied on the use of flawed data to assess performance and was widely criticised by experts” and that “the criteria remain opaque, lack transparency and the university has refused to tell staff what data it is using to choose who to sack”. The UCU is a specialist in assisting universities to reduce staff numbers, provided this is done on a “voluntary” basis.

World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke to a young staff member in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at a rally of striking staff. He explained how the cuts and restructuring at the university would have a detrimental impact, particularly on vital coronavirus research. “Some of the staff [who are being made redundant] have been doing research on COVID. We were known as the Institute of Integrative Biology. Part of the mission statement was a recognition that a lot of biology is increasingly an interdisciplinary subject. There is a lot of room for interdisciplinary research on coronavirus, and so one of the sad things about this whole restructure was the breakdown of that Institute, of that kind of idea that we all work on different things, but they have relationships to each other.

“One of the first things that struck me and struck a lot of people is the fact that they were doing this during a pandemic when people are so vulnerable.”

Asked about the government’s response to the pandemic, he said, “It seems wild what's happened with the herd immunity. It is all coming out in the [Dominic] Cummings hearing. It is just baffling, this kind of acceptance that people are going to die, and you know the various comments that we have heard about something like ‘bodies piling up’, seems completely inhuman to me. I suppose it is what can happen when you have a concentration of power among a few people.”

The faculty member expressed his concerns about the privatisation of higher education. “There's an infiltration of private capital into public education,” he said. “There's a building, just down the road, there's an entire floor that’s owned by Unilever. It's this sort of stuff that people have warned about for ages; that we spend all this public money on research, and then the profit is reaped by shareholders and people who are already very wealthy.” Asked about his opinion of the UCU, he explained, “I haven’t much historical knowledge, but they are not by the workers or for the workers.”

Attacks on jobs and conditions are happening at other universities around the UK. University College Birmingham is planning to axe 73 senior lecturer jobs and replace them with 42 new staff hired on cheaper contracts and increased workloads. The cuts would threaten teaching in the schools of business, tourism and creative industries, and health, sport and food. Many of the 73 staff threatened with the sack have been at the university for over 20 years.

The UCU has not called for any kind of industrial action against these attacks, instead complaining that the union has not been consulted and given the opportunity to sell the cuts to its membership before they were announced. UCU regional official Anne O’Sullivan said, “Proposals to cut 73 senior staff and create 42 new roles with non-negotiated changes to the pay and grading structure are a clear breach of the university’s legal obligations… We are calling on the university to meet with us to find a solution that protects jobs and student learning before it is forced to defend itself in court.'

Luminate Education (previously Leeds City College Group) has announced a restructuring plan that will see 39 jobs cut across multiple sites, including Leeds and Harrogate colleges. The proposals would affect adult and community learning and hair and beauty staff across Leeds, as well as business and learning support staff at Harrogate College. Jobs in adult education will be cut at several sites in Leeds including at Mabgate, Beeston and Rothwell. Any new alternative posts created in the restructure will have reduced pay and changes to terms and conditions. The UCU is using identity politics to divide Luminate Education staff, with its main objection not being the cuts themselves, but rather that 90 percent of the positions affected are filled by women.

The role of the UCU in facilitating job losses is seen clearly at the University of Chester. The union posted a news piece on its website boasting that, “The university originally announced 86 redundancies, but negotiations with trade unions have led to a number of posts being saved.”

Emboldened, the university plans to cut 27 jobs in the English, humanities, history, archaeology, engineering, geography and media departments by July. There is strong opposition among staff and student, who have carried out joint protests. Over 150 staff attended the “biggest ever” UCU Chester branch meeting and voted by 96 percent “to pursue all means necessary to oppose all compulsory redundancies.” The union was sure to leave the door open to “voluntary” redundancies.

160 killed in massacre at Solhan in northern Burkina Faso

Kumaran Ira

In the night on Friday and early Saturday morning, the West African nation of Burkina Faso saw one of the bloodiest massacres of the entire French-led war in the Sahel. A raid killed at least 160 people, including 20 children, and wounded over 40, in the village of Solhan in northern Burkina Faso’s Yagha province, bordering Niger. As of this writing, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Hamadi Boubacar, the mayor of the neighboring town of Sebba said, “Many assailants arrived on about 20 motorcycles around 2:00 a.m. They principally attacked the mining site next to the village of Solhan.” The attackers were “pitiless and killed all those they found in their path,” Boubacar added.

A gold rush in the area, near both Niger and Mali, has turned Solhan into a crossroads were people of many different ethnicities and tribes meet and live together. Boubacar explained: “Solhan is a big village, many people live there because of gold, more than 30,000 people. The people who were attacked came from all over the province. There are even people from Bouri, the regional capital, from Sebba, and from nearby villages. There are people of many ethnicities.”

French soldiers of the 126th Infantry Regiment and Malian soldiers, March 17, 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)

A local source in Solhan told AFP that the assailants attacked homes and carried out “executions” after striking a position of the Volunteers for the Defence of the Motherland (VDP) militia, which backs the Burkinabè national army.

The VDP was created in December 2019 to assist Burkina Faso’s army as ethnic militias and other armed groups have spread across the area amid the war in Mali and across the Sahel. VDP volunteers receive only two weeks of military training before deploying to work alongside the security forces, carrying out surveillance, information-gathering or escort duties. The VDP have suffered more than 200 fatalities, according to an AFP tally.

An anonymous local told the Associated Press that as he visited relatives in a medical clinic in Sebba, near Solhan, he saw many wounded arrive at the clinic. “I saw 12 people in one room and about 10 in another. There were many relatives caring for the wounded. There were also many people running from Solhan to enter Sebba … People are very afraid and worried,” he said.

The Burkinabè government has declared 72 hours of national mourning, from June 5 to 7. President Roch Marc Christian Kabore condemned the attack as “barbaric” and “despicable,” adding: “We must remain united and solid against these obscurantist forces.”

The European powers made token statements of sympathy. The European Union (EU) condemned “barbaric and cowardly attacks.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced on Twitter a trip “this week” to Burkina Faso and that he would express “the solidarity of France during my trip this week to Burkina Faso.”

In fact, the escalating bloodshed in this region, which includes many of the poorest countries in the world, is the product of France’s eight-year, neo-colonial war in the Sahel. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have all seen a resurgence of violence. As it sought to pursue a policy of divide-and-rule to maintain its control over the area, France and its NATO allies have stoked ethnic conflicts and backed various rival militias, resulting in a resurgence of bloody massacres across the region.

Saturday’s attack occurred in the so-called “three borders zone” between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which has been regularly targeted by Islamist armed groups tied to Al Qaeda, state security forces, and ethnic violence perpetrated by rival militias. In March, assailants killed 137 people in coordinated raids on villages in the southwestern Tahoua region of Niger after another attack killed at least 58 villagers in the nearby region of Tillabery.

Attacks have been on the rise ever since March 2019, when gunmen killed 160 people in the largely Fulani village of Ogossagou in the Malian region of Bankass, bordering Burkina Faso. There was widespread suspicion that French and Malian officials tacitly backed the massacre: it targeted an ethnic group in which Islamist militias have recruited more forces, and Malian officials apprehended but did not prosecute members of the militia that had carried out the massacre.

Burkina Faso

The so-called G5 Sahel force set up by France—comprising troops from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger—is participating in military operations alongside French and Malian forces.

Recently, human rights organizations have accused Burkinabè security forces of carrying out atrocities against the population in the name of counter-terrorism. According to a Human Rights Watch report last July, based on local residents’ accounts, the security forces unlawful killed several hundred men on suspicion of supporting armed Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda.

The atrocities in Solhan came just weeks after Defence Minister Cheriff Sy and other top brass visited Sebba to assure people that life had returned to normal, after several military operations in the area. Significantly, although security forces were deployed near the village, they did not arrive on the scene after the massacre began. This has again raised widespread questions over potential complicity of the security forces with the assailants in the recent massacre.

Al Jazeera reporter Nicolas Haque said, “There was also a military barracks not far away from where the attack took place. But they did not react. They never arrived on the scene. It’s a feeling that people across the Sahel now share in—that they cannot rely on their security forces to protect them.”

Over 2.2 million people are internally displaced in the Sahel by the fighting, according to UN figures. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) stated, “almost 7,000 people were killed during 2020, making it the deadliest year in the Central Sahel since the conflict began.” At least 2,400 civilians were killed in attacks in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2020. GCR2P noted, “In Burkina Faso and Mali, more civilians were killed by local militias and national security forces than by attacks by Islamist armed groups.”

Alex Vines, director of the Africa Programme at the British think-tank, Chatham House, told Al Jazeera, “I’m afraid we are going to have to expect more similar types of reports.” Remaining silent on European imperialist powers’ role in the region, he blamed the massacre on African governments: “The governments are increasingly weak and ineffective. And they are not providing the security that populations need. And so armed groups … are filling those gaps.”

Vines blandly predicted that the bloodshed spreading from Mali would engulf virtually all of West Africa. “It’s all very serious and it is spreading regionally. This isn’t just about the Sahel,” he said, adding, “there are overspill security incidents now, in countries along the Gulf of Guinea coast. So, think Benin, think Togo. The Ghanaians are particularly worried about what’s happening along their border with Burkina Faso. Ivory Coast, also. This is becoming increasingly an international issue.”

These horrific massacres are in fact the toxic product of years of war and neo-colonial intrigue, that can only be stopped by unifying workers across West Africa and Europe in a movement against imperialist oppression and military-police rule.

Spain’s Anticapitalistas back anti-migrant press campaign targeting Morocco

Alejandro López

Spain’s petty-bourgeois Anticapitalistas party is inciting pro-imperialist hysteria against Morocco. It is falling in line with the campaign unleashed by the liberal press against Morocco after Rabat opened its side of the border, allowing migrants to cross into Spain’s enclave in northern Morocco, Ceuta, in makeshift boats and dinghies. An estimated 10,000 entered, many of them families or children.

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government responded by implementing the savage policy advocated for months by the fascist Vox party, militarising the border. It deployed the army, special forces and thousands of police to Ceuta, summarily rounding up and illegally deporting thousands of migrants, many of them children.

Last week, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez reacted furiously after a communiqué from Rabat declared it opened its side of the border to pressure Madrid to recognise Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony annexed by Rabat in 1975, as part of Morocco. Additional concerns of Morocco’s monarchy no doubt included deflecting mass anger from official mismanagement of the pandemic and Israel’s attack on Gaza. Rabat opened its border with Spain after mass protests on Israel’s bloody bombing campaign targeting the Gaza Strip.

View of the border fence that separates Spain, left, and Morocco, right, as seen from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, June 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Sánchez focused only on his conflict with Morocco over Madrid’s former colonial possession, saying last week that “they have used immigration, that is, the assault on the Spanish borders by more than 10,000 Moroccans in 48 hours, due to disagreements in foreign policy, this seems unacceptable.” He claimed it was “inadmissible,” describing Morocco’s actions as akin to “attacking borders.”

The PSOE-Podemos government’s campaign against Morocco has the de facto support of the Anticapitalistas. This party, which left Podemos last year to better serve the government from the outside, aligned itself on the anti-immigrant campaign of the PSOE and Podemos. It seized on the entry of migrants to accuse Rabat of “blackmail” and “human rights violations” while peddling illusions that the PSOE-Podemos government defends democratic rights.

Anticapitalistas leader Teresa Rodríguez said: “What is happening in Ceuta is the result of externalizing the borders to countries where Human Rights are systematically violated, such as Morocco, in exchange for permanent blackmail.” She proposed that “the Government should show courage” to “manage its own borders without depending on Morocco.”

Rodríguez’s “solution” is in fact what the PSOE-Podemos has done by deploying the army and police, and brutally expelling thousands of migrants. Madrid has also refused the support of Frontex in Brussels, stating they can manage the Ceuta crisis without the EU’s anti-migrant task force.

In Brussels, European Member of Parliament (EMP) Miguel Urbán, who was elected in a Podemos slate but has remained as EMP even after his tendency broke with Podemos, intervened in a plenary session in the European Parliament. He denounced “The umpteenth exercise of blackmail by Morocco.” He said externalising borders “gives unscrupulous dictatorships a blackmail weapon. If we want to end this blackmail and protect migrants’ human rights, there is only one way: to dismantle the policies of Fortress Europe.”

Urbán’s claim that the EU can dismantle Fortress Europe to defend a more humane migrant policy is ludicrous. The entire ruling class in Europe is rapidly shifting to the right, aware that anger is rising among workers against social inequality and the criminal “herd immunity” policy it has pursued on the pandemic. While Europe is in its deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, it has seen more than a million coronavirus deaths. On the other hand, its billionaires became €1 trillion richer in a year.

To defend this ill-gotten wealth, and with inequality at unsustainable levels, the ruling class is preparing for repression. In France and Spain, factions of the military are openly plotting coups and avowedly preparing for civil war against the working class. In Germany, all parties are pressing ahead with militarism and are implementing in practice the programme of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The army, police and intelligence agencies are riddled with far-right terrorist networks.

The Pabloites are also agitating for Spain to more aggressively to intervene in Western Sahara, its former colony annexed by Morocco in 1975, to organise a referendum on self-determination. Anticapitalistas has doubled down on these calls since war erupted between Morocco and the Algerian-backed bourgeois-nationalist Polisario Front last November.

At that time, Anticapitalistas posted a neo-colonial statement calling for the re-establishment of Spanish rule over its former colony. It demanded Spain “assume its role as formally administering the territory and guarantee respect for the human, social and economic rights of the Saharawi people as a step prior to ensuring a just, peaceful, democratic and lasting solution to this conflict, which inevitably requires respect for the right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people.”

If Madrid adopted such a hawkish position, trying to physically seize its former colony now controlled by Morocco to organise an independence referendum, it could easily lead to war.

Spain’s historical record in the region is brutal. During intermittent wars with Moroccan tribes between 1909 and 1927, Madrid’s punitive “pacification” campaigns massacred civilians, bombed markets and settlements, and used incendiary bombs to set fire to defenceless villages and cultivated fields. Madrid also used rape and poison gas attacks as weapons of war targeting civilian populations.

These wars bred a generation of fascist military officers like General Francisco Franco who used similar methods against the working class at home—culminating in the July 1936 fascist coup, the Spanish Civil War and a four-decade Francoite regime in Spain, between 1939 and 1978.

The position of Anticapitalistas on Morocco reflects the longstanding support for imperialism of this petty-bourgeois, pro-capitalist party. It endorsed the US-NATO war against oil-rich Libya in 2011. In the name of “democracy, social justice, and the improvement of the situation of women,” two leaders of Anticapitalistas, Esther Vivas and Josep Maria Antentas, condemned the “anti-imperialism of some sectors of the left” and advocated “the political and economic international isolation of the [Libyan] regime and the unconditional supply of weapons to the rebels.”

The European powers and the US then employed precisely this strategy to wage a war for regime change in Libya. It cost over 30,000 deaths, leaving Libya in ruins. The country still is mired in a civil war between competing Islamist factions that NATO had supported, which has killed thousands and displaced over 100,000 people.

The goals of Spain’s participation in the Libyan war, defended by Anticapitalistas, are not hard to see. Last week, a decade after Anticapitalistas backed the Libyan war, Sánchez travelled to Libya with several businessmen, including Josu Jon Imaz, the head of Spain’s major oil company, Repsol. Libya is among the 10 countries with the most oil reserves in the world, and the daily El País, commented on Sánchez’s trip by citing anonymous state officials who said: “This country is sitting on a treasure.”

Defending democratic rights in northern Africa, including on the Moroccan-Sahrawi conflict, requires first of all rejecting the vicious imperialist campaign against migrants. Madrid’s attempts to endow its policy of plunder with a “democratic” veneer by citing the Moroccan monarchy’s crimes are saturated with imperialist hypocrisy. The defence of democratic and social rights cannot be left to either the blood-soaked representatives of the former colonial powers, or any of the bourgeois-nationalist factions, but requires the international unification of the working class in a revolutionary, socialist struggle against imperialism.

Amid surging pandemic, Sri Lankan government criminalizes strikes by public sector workers

Keith Jones

Critical developments are taking place in the South Asian island-state of Sri Lanka that workers throughout the world must be aware of and actively oppose.

Over the past two weeks, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapakse has issued two decrees that arbitrarily rewrite the country’s laws to strip nearly one million public sector workers of the legal right to strike.

These workers now face draconian punishments, including mass firings and lengthy jail terms, if they strike against the government’s homicidal response to the pandemic and its drive to intensify the exploitation of the working class and slash public services. The decrees also criminalize any individual or organization that advocates for strike action.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapakse, center. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The immediate target of the first decree, issued on May 27, was a threatened strike by 12,000 village government officers, who were demanding COVID-19 vaccinations, but it stripped hundreds of thousands of other public sector workers of their basic rights. The union representing village workers immediately called off the impending job action.

Five days later, on June 2, Rajapakse issued a second decree on the eve of a threatened walkout by workers at many major hospitals. It extended the ban on strikes to health care and other government workers.

The two decrees cover port, railway, bus transport, petroleum, gas, state bank and insurance workers; nurses, doctors and other health care workers; government administration workers, workers at state-owned food distribution companies; and employees of Sri Lanka’s nine provincial councils.

Workers who defy the strike ban can be fired. They also face fines of between 2,000 and 5,000 rupees, “rigorous imprisonment” of two to five years, the seizure of their “movable and immoveable property” and the removal of their professional credentials.

Any individual who seeks to “incite, induce or encourage” someone subject to the strike ban to not attend work, whether through a “physical act or by any speech or writing,” is likewise liable to fines, property seizures and jail terms of up to five years.

Without warning, let alone any public debate, basic democratic rights, including the rights to free speech and to strike that are guaranteed in Sri Lanka’s constitution, have been abrogated with the stroke of a pen.

The first decree makes a brief mention of the pandemic, claiming that the government services and departments under the strike ban are “essential” in the “face of the COVID-19 pandemic.” In reality, it is the government and the Sri Lankan ruling class that have sabotaged any science-based response to the pandemic by systemically prioritizing profit interests over saving lives.

Since April, the pandemic has surged across the island. The official death toll has more than doubled in just the past five weeks to 1,656. New infections, according to the government’s figures, are currently averaging more than 3,000 per day, a gross undercount. Yet the Rajapakse government, with the full support of the opposition parties, has insisted that the “economy” and especially major export industries, like the garment sector, tea and rubber plantations, must keep running.

Demands for personal protective equipment (PPE) and the vaccination of frontline workers have figured large in a growing wave of public sector workers struggles, which the government fears will intersect with mounting unrest among plantation and other private sector workers.

The Rajapakse government is also looking nervously across the Palk Strait at the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where there have been numerous strikes and protests by Hyundai, Renault-Nissan and other autoworkers against the lack of COVID-19 protections amidst a catastrophic surge in the pandemic.

The Rajapakse government’s herd immunity policy is the cutting edge of its drive to increase profit extraction from the working class, including through a further round of brutal IMF austerity measures.

It is all the more necessary to alert the international working class about these developments because the “opposition” parties, corporate media, trade unions and pseudo-left groups have all maintained a complicit silence on the decrees. Apart from a statement last Thursday from an alliance of postal, teacher and health care unions that expressed “regret” over the decrees, the arbitrary abrogation by presidential fiat of basic democratic rights has been completely ignored.

The government has not, as of yet, sought to deploy its new draconian powers against public sector workers. Fearful of sparking mass working class unrest, it has not initiated sanctions against more than 20,000 nurses, doctors, lab technicians and other health care workers who went ahead with a previously scheduled five-hour walkout last Thursday.

But a headlong confrontation between the Sri Lankan ruling class and its state apparatus, on the one hand, and the working class and oppressed rural toilers, on the other, is on the order of the day.

In preparation for a confrontation with the working class, Rajapakse has stacked the government apparatus with military officers who cut their teeth in the 30-year war against the island’s Tamil minority; cultivated extreme right Sinhala-Buddhist organizations; and plotted to change the constitution to enhance the president’s arbitrary powers. Recently, one of Rajapakse’s ministers mused that the president should “become” more “like Hitler.”

The developments in Sri Lanka are of vital importance to workers around the world. The dictatorial methods employed against Sri Lankan workers will be used against workers everywhere.

Everywhere, the ruling elites are determined to make workers pay for the crisis of global capitalism, enormously exacerbated by the pandemic. The catastrophic impact of the pandemic—more than 3.5 million dead worldwide—is the direct consequence of the decision of governments to prioritize corporate profits over lives. The bailout of the rich, moreover, is to be followed by the destruction of public services and increased exploitation.

But this class war program is encountering growing resistance, including from Volvo Truck workers in the US, Vale Inco miners in Canada, teachers and bus drivers in Brazil, autoworkers in India, and BHP copper miners in Chile. Resistance is increasingly breaking through the decades-long suppression of working class struggle by the corporatist trade unions and the establishment “left” parties.

In response, the ruling class is turning to authoritarian methods of rule, criminalizing social opposition and cultivating far-right forces. In Colombia, the US-backed Duque regime has unleashed murderous police violence against mass protests over tax increases, crushing poverty and ever-mounting social inequality. In Spain and France, there have been public coup threats from military officers.

In the US, the center of global capitalism, Trump, with the support of the Republican Party leadership and important sections of the military-security apparatus, attempted a coup in plain sight, culminating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

The Sri Lankan bourgeoisie is mired in debt, faces an increasingly rebellious working class, and is bitterly divided over its geopolitical orientation as South Asia has emerged as a central arena in the US offensive against China. Moreover, none of the issues that led to Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war have been resolved.

Changing what needs to be changed, every capitalist ruling elite faces similar intractable problems for which its response is intensified worker exploitation, reaction, militarism and war.