UK’s petrol crisis highlights collapse of European road freight industry

Thomas Scripps

For the last week and a half, British petrol stations have been gridlocked by drivers seeking scarce supplies of fuel.

Petrol stations normally operate with their storage tank at 40 percent capacity and rely on “just in time” deliveries to replenish stocks. Two weeks ago, the ongoing shortages of HGV and fuel tanker drivers disrupted supply chains, leading to panic buying.

Between September 22 and 29, there was a 190 percent increase in the number of people driving to petrol stations, peaking at over 400 percent on September 25. Each customer bought 22 percent more fuel on average than normal.

At the height of the crisis on the weekend of September 25-26, average fuel capacity at petrol stations fell to 16.6 percent, with 50 to 90 percent running completely dry in different areas of the country. On September 28, national traffic fell to 86 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Healthcare staff and other key workers warned they would be unable to get to work.

A sign reading "We Have No fuel, waiting on delivery" at a fuel station in sourthern England (WSWS Media)

Although stocks have begun to increase again, one fifth of stations in London and the South East are still without fuel, and 18 percent had only one grade available. In the rest of the country, 8 percent are empty and a further 6 percent have only one grade.

Shortages have contributed to a sharp rise in the price of fuel, with petrol at an eight-year high and closing in on a record. This has also been driven by a global increase in the cost of oil, up ten percent over September and is expected to climb further.

After first ignoring the problem for days, the government announced on September 25 that it would launch a temporary visa scheme asking 5,000 lorry drivers to come from Europe to work in the UK delivering fuel and food from the end of this month—until Christmas Eve when they would be thrown out again.

Popular uproar forced the extension of this scheme to the end of February. But whereas the government is seeking to recruit around 300 drivers immediately, the Times and the Department for Business report that so far just 27 have applied. Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims the number is 127.

On September 30, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab suggested using low-level offenders to plug the HGV shortage.

On October 4, the army was deployed to much fanfare to help with fuel supplies. Two hundred soldiers were made available, but only half have the skills necessary to drive tankers.

The fuel crisis has sparked a wave of well-deserved outrage against the government and its catastrophic Brexit policy. But the events of the last two weeks point to a broader crisis of the European economy.

According to think tank Transport Intelligence, the UK’s shortage of roughly 76,000 lorry drivers (elsewhere estimated at 100,000) is part of a general shortage of some 400,000 drivers across Europe. Poland is the worst affected, with a shortage of 124,000, 37 percent of positions, though this is most likely the result of Polish drivers working in more prosperous European Union countries. In Germany, 45,000-60,000 are missing; in France, 43,000; in Spain and Italy, 15,000; in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, between 2,500 and 5,000.

Shortages have been affecting the road freight sector for 15 years and have been aggravated by the pandemic and the recent reopening of the economy driving up demand. This pan-European breakdown in such a vital economic sector is the result of decades of private profiteering and deregulation which have eroded logistics workers’ pay and conditions.

There are over half a million people with HGV licenses in the UK, but well over 200,000 of them are choosing not to take up vacancies. A survey of over 600 industry figures in the UK by the Road Haulage Association found that retirement, changing working rules, the pandemic, low pay, (not to mention appalling working conditions) and drivers leaving the industry were some of the main reasons for the lack of workers.

The average age of a UK lorry driver has climbed to 55—less than 1 percent are younger than 25. From 7,500 retirements a year in 2010, the sector went to 10,000 a year in 2020, or 4 percent of the workforce. The total number of people employed as drivers fell 7 percent between 2019 and 2020.

The same process has been at work in Europe. Politico reported EU advocacy director at the International Road Transport Organisation, Raluca Marian warning that it was “easy to calculate an apocalyptic scenario” for the EU, based on events in the UK. In Europe, the average age of a driver is 44.

The crisis is more acute in Britain in part because of Brexit. Somewhere between 10,000-20,000 EU drivers left the UK after it withdrew from the union. Brexit-related delays at ports and disruption to import-export routes have also played a role, exacerbating the longstanding export imbalance between the UK and Europe which requires many lorries to return from Britain empty and making the routes relatively less desirable for businesses.

But the dominant factor is the UK’s more rapid destruction of workers’ protections and wholesale embrace of the free market since the Thatcher government came to power in 1979. UK hauliers have so thoroughly gutted the conditions of their workers, including by hyper-exploiting cheap, predominantly Eastern, European labour, that UK-based workers have left the industry in droves.

Over 55,000 domestic drivers left the industry in just the last 18 months. The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the especially appalling conditions these workers have confronted throughout the pandemic, and on strike action organised by rank-and-file drivers this August. Richard Simpson, former editor of Trucking Magazine, wrote in the Guardian, “Why would they want to return to the job? Facilities are poor, the hours brutal and the responsibilities onerous. And these are only going to get worse.”

Fundamentally the same causes lie behind shortages of agricultural workers, abattoir workers, construction workers, care home staff and nurses, among others. Basic socio-economic infrastructure has been run down under the rule of a super-rich oligarchy whose only concern is the debt and speculation fueled expansion of their stock market portfolios, with scant regard paid to the maintenance of even the most basic industries and social infrastructure, let alone the development of a skilled and adequately paid workforce.

Even senior Tory politicians have, anonymously, blamed the current crisis on “a failure of the free market” and accused UK businesses of being “drunk on cheap labour”, according to the Telegraph .

The deployment of the armed forces to an increasing range of basic social tasks—5,000 to aid with testing, vaccination and medical care during the pandemic, and now roughly a hundred each to help the Scottish ambulance service and the fuel tanker sector—is the most striking confirmation of British capitalism’s ongoing collapse.

Not only can the free market not provide the necessary workers, but the state also has no resources to mobilise except its armed forces, and even these can barely muster a few hundred people with the required skills.

No amount of social hardship will prompt the oligarchs or their representatives to change course, whether under Johnson or the far-distant prospect of a Labour government. Their solution is the stepped-up exploitation of the working class and a reflexive turn towards authoritarian measures. The use of the army will inevitably lead to demands for stepped up recruitment to plug gaping holes in the economy. But these forces will then be employed to break workers’ resistance to poverty wages and sweatshop conditions.

For the working class, the only way out of this crisis is to utilise its immense social power as the engine of the European and world economy to seize control of society from the super-rich. Production must be organised not on the basis of anarchic, cut-throat competition for private profit, but rational, democratic planning to fulfil social needs.

Canada’s military sends nurses to Alberta hospitals as COVID-19 crisis worsens

Dylan Lubao

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage out of control in Alberta, with an increasing number of reports that overwhelmed hospitals are being forced to deny care to patients. On Monday, the Canadian Armed Forces deployed a contingent of eight critical care nurses to Edmonton, the provincial capital, to assist with overwhelmed ICUs.

The Delta-driven fourth wave has seen the most hospitalizations in Alberta since the pandemic began, with 1,079 people now actively under care. Alberta Health Services (AHS) reports that out of 347 ICU beds, including recently added “surge” beds, 307 are in use. Dr. Verna Yiu, head of AHS, was forced to admit that hospitals “are only able to keep pace with some of these sort of numbers because, in part, some of our ICU patients have passed away.”

Emergency and ICU departments have essentially been forced to implement aspects of their triage protocols, under which those deemed least likely to survive are denied needed care. Dr. Paul Parks, head of emergency medicine for the Alberta Medical Association, told CTV News that some critically ill COVID-19 patients who would normally be on ventilators in the ICU have been denied them because of a lack of resources and staff.

Dr. Parks warned that full implementation of triage is not far off. This would include making decisions about which patients, including children, would receive life-saving care, and potentially removing some COVID-stricken patients from ventilators. AHS has been forced to cancel approximately 8,500 surgeries since August, including 805 pediatric surgeries, as the health care system simply cannot cope. Some twenty pregnant women were treated for COVID-19 symptoms in Alberta’s hospitals during August and September. At least one tragically lost her life.

Further pressure is building on the health care system from the as yet poorly understood impact of Long COVID. According to an article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, 80 percent of patients treated in an Alberta hospital for COVID-19 returned to the emergency room within one month of being discharged. Out of those who returned, 17 percent were readmitted to hospital.

Under these conditions, the arrival of the military nurses, along with 20 medical professionals from the Canadian Red Cross and five or six intensive care staff from Newfoundland and Labrador, is woefully inadequate. The CAF nurses would add, at most, resources for five ICU beds.

Since Premier Jason Kenney announced in July that Alberta was “Open for summer” and subsequently dropped all public health measures to stop the spread of the virus, the number of new COVID-19 cases has rapidly risen to over 1,500 per day. On average, 15 people are dying every day, reaching levels unseen since the second wave of the pandemic last winter, before vaccines were made widely available to the public.

UCP Premier Jason Kenney and Alberta Chief Medical Office Deena Hinshaw have pursued a ruinous pandemic reopening policy modelled after that implemented by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

One of the main vectors for transmission of the virus is schools, which were opened with literally no mitigation measures by the United Conservative Party (UCP) government a month ago. Kenney and his ministers claimed that school was the safest place for children to be, suspended all contact tracing, and ordered health authorities not to release infection numbers in schools or identify schools with outbreaks.

Government data shows that children aged 5 to 9 have the highest infection rate of any age group, registering a staggering 726.7 infections per 100,000 people as of October 4. Children aged 10 to 19 were the second-most infected, at 548.4 per 100,000. Underscoring the role of schools as a primary vector of infection, adults aged 30 to 50 experienced similar infection rates, indicating that parents are catching the virus from their school-aged children.

In response to widespread public anger at the raging spread of the virus in schools, the Edmonton Public School Board appealed Tuesday to the UCP government to close all schools in the province for at least two weeks. This desperate plea came just days after the board reported that at least one COVID-19 case had been detected in over three-quarters of its schools.

To contain mounting popular outrage, the UCP government has reintroduced a few token measures, including contact tracing and rapid testing in schools. These measures, entirely necessary as part of a comprehensive eradication strategy, are totally inadequate to deal with the current crisis.

The Canadian Medical Association and the Alberta Medical Association have both appealed to ordinary Albertans to lobby the government for a firebreak lockdown of schools and economic activity until the situation in hospitals can be stabilized. The AMA’s open letter declares, “The time to act is now. Dire times call for drastic measures.”

A petition circulating on Change.org demanding the resignation of Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw and the implementation of a firebreak lockdown collected over 1,700 signatures in the first two days. This action comes on the heels of well-attended and widely-supported protests over the summer against the UCP’s reopening drive, which were led by doctors and other medical professionals, independently of the trade unions. Numerous grassroots groups of parents, teachers, and health care workers devoted to opposing the herd immunity policy have also been established.

A ThinkHQ poll released on Monday shows that Kenney’s popularity has nose-dived. Of 1,100 respondents, 77 percent disapproved of Kenney’s leadership during the pandemic, including 61 percent who strongly disapproved. Even among those who voted UCP in the last election, Kenney’s approval does not exceed 40 percent.

Yet this healthy class anger towards Kenney, an unalloyed representative of the banks and big business, finds no political expression in official channels. The Trudeau Liberal government kept quiet during the summer as Kenney dismantled COVID-19 protections, and only shifted to criticizing him when it suited the Liberals’ electoral needs during the federal election campaign. While the New Democratic Party opposition has attacked Kenney and the UCP for their disastrous handling of the pandemic, the NDP when in power carried out steep cuts to health care and other public services, earning them the ire of millions of working class Albertans and leading to their ouster after one term in office. Moreover, the NDP government in neighbouring British Columbia is pursuing essentially the same pandemic policy as Kenney.

The union bureaucracy, for its part, has done everything in its power to smother and sabotage all social opposition. With hospitals on the verge of implementing triage protocols and schools infested with the virus, the Alberta Federation of Labour, with 175,000 members, has not organized a single protest or proposed that workers take any action. In its latest statement, the union body merely issued a polite appeal to the “provincial and federal governments,” the same governments responsible for the unfolding health care catastrophe.

In a recent interview with CTV, Heather Smith, the president of the United Nurses Alberta union, explicitly discouraged any talk of strikes or protests, insisting, “It’s time to take action, not political, but health action.” The Alberta Teachers Association, besides tepidly calling for a vaccine mandate for its members, has been virtually silent as thousands of educators and their students are exposed to and catch a deadly virus.

Six refugees die at the Polish-Belarusian border as illegal deportations in the EU rise

Martin Kreickenbaum

The plight of refugees stranded in the no man’s land on the border between Poland and Belarus is becoming increasingly dramatic. At least six people have now died of cold and hunger in the last two weeks.

Despite these deaths, the Polish government is abiding by its criminal policy of not letting any refugees into the country. The government’s announced state of emergency has been extended for another 60 days and heavily armed soldiers are sealing the border. The regime in Warsaw has the full backing of the European Union, which holds the Belarusian government primarily responsible for the humanitarian crisis.

In fact, Warsaw and Brussels bear full responsibility for the appalling suffering of the refugees stranded in the border strip between Poland and Belarus. Contrary to international obligations under the Geneva Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, the Polish authorities have refused to even accept the refugees’ asylum applications.

Refugees in no man's land on the Polish-Belarusian border (AP Photo/Michal Kosc)

It remains unclear how many refugees are camped in the boggy forest area along the 418-kilometre borderline between Poland and Belarus in temperatures around zero. The state of emergency imposed on September 2 by the Polish government over a three-kilometre width of the border region means that journalists, refugee aid organisations and lawyers are forbidden from entering the zone. At the same time, the Polish government has imposed a news blackout. In addition to 2,500 heavily armed soldiers, 4,000 border guards and 600 police officers patrol the narrow strip.

As a result, only scraps of information about the dramatic situation of refugees have reached the public. What is known is that a camp of 32 refugees from Afghanistan—including four women, a 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy—have been stranded since August near the village of Unsnarz Gorny, awaiting EU protection. Trapped between barbed wire fences and surrounded by armed soldiers, the desperate people kept shouting in English to Polish soldiers: “We want international protection!”

Amnesty International has presented evidence that this group of refugees was subjected to illegal deportation. “Our analysis irrefutably shows that their position shifted overnight from Poland to Belarus at the end of August,” said Eve Geddie, Director of Amnesty’s European Institutions Office. She went on to explain that “forcibly returning people seeking asylum without assessing their individual protection needs is a serious breach of European and international law.”

The refugees remain on bare ground without any protection and have received no assistance from the Polish side. One of the refugees told the Polish foundation Ocalenie that they had practically no drinking water and nothing to eat. Only the Belarusian soldiers were prepared to share their own food rations with the Afghans in the no man’s land. “No one is telling us how to proceed. I think they are waiting until someone dies here. If nothing happens here, people will die of hunger and cold in the next few days.”

A 52-year-old Afghan woman suffering from severe kidney disease pleaded, “Have mercy on us! Take us somewhere, just get us out of here! All we ask is that you save our lives. Even if you won’t give us shelter, at least save our lives!”

Even prior to the state of emergency, Polish border guards prevented anyone from assisting the refugees. The Tageszeitung reported that residents of a nearby village wanted to send the refugees a pot of hot soup and some pizzas, but border guards did not allow the food to be passed on. “Orders from above!” one border guard explained to justify the cruelty.

Another group of 26 Syrian refugees is stranded near Terespol, and was also surrounded by armed Belarusian and Polish soldiers. The group includes three girls aged six, seven and eleven. The refugees have also been denied any help and are forced to share a single water bottle.

Meanwhile, at least six refugees have fallen victim to this inhumane policy. On September 19, the first four Iraqi refugees were found dead from hunger, cold and exhaustion. Two more refugees were found dead between September 24 and 27.

In particular, the case of the Iraqi woman found dead a few metres across the border on Belarusian territory on September 19 highlights the brutality of the Polish soldiers and border police in the mistreatment of refugees.

The Tageszeitung reported that the young woman was already on the Polish side with her husband and three children and wanted to dry their wet jackets and shoes in a village where a family had taken them in. Police, however, had been informed about the border crossing and forced the family barefoot back towards the Belarusian side. When the woman collapsed from exhaustion, her husband and children were herded across the border. The woman’s lifeless body was dragged several metres across the border, where she was found surrounded by her family.

The Polish government has blamed the Belarusian regime of Alexander Lukashenko for the dramatic situation at the border. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of the right-wing populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) said that “people are being instrumentalised by Lukashenko for his foreign policy. This is an attempt to trigger a major European migration crisis.” A joint statement by the heads of government of Poland and the Baltic EU member states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said the sudden increase in migrants seeking to cross the EU’s eastern border was “planned and systematically organised” by Lukashenko.

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski justifies the Polish government’s refusal to even hear the refugees’ asylum requests with allegations that the refugees have links to Islamist and terrorist organisations. According to Kaminski, “competent authorities” had found that of the 200 refugees apprehended in Poland, 50 had “a criminal past, including links to terrorist groups.”

“These are young, combat-trained men who had participated in armed formations in the Middle East,” he provocatively claimed.

Kaminski did not provide any factual evidence, however, and launched the type of accusations against the refugees that one associates with a fascist regime. He claimed that the refugees under investigation were linked to the beheadings of hostages, child abuse and paedophilia, and had sex with animals. He presented photographic material allegedly taken from the refugees’ mobile phones and declared the refugees to be “a serious threat to Poland’s national security.” In the event, his “evidence” quickly turned out to be completely fabricated.

Such false accusations are being used to introduce a harsh regime that strictly denies any refugee the right to claim asylum. Instead, people seeking protection are simply driven illegally back across the border into Belarus. Interior Minister Kaminski stated that since the beginning of August there have been “more than 9,400 attempted illegal border crossings.” Twelve hundred refugees have been taken to guarded reception camps and in 8,200 cases a crossing has been prevented.

In most cases, these were illegal deportations. “The situation is completely irregular and against the rules. And we observe with alarm that with the rules of the state of emergency, access is made even more difficult and impossible. We are trying to gain access at least for ourselves and some other organisations,” declared Rafal Kostrzynski of the Polish branch of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

For its part, the Polish government is seeking to extend the state of emergency in the border region for another 60 days, thereby further excluding aid organisations and journalists. The refugees would then remain without food and protection and continue to be helplessly exposed to abuse by soldiers and border police.

This barbaric policy of refugee rejection by the Polish authorities has the full backing of the European Union. A spokesperson for the EU Commissioner for Migration, Ylva Johannson, stressed that cooperation with Poland was of great importance to ensure the protection of the EU’s external borders in the interest of all 27 EU member states. He cynically added that the Commissioner had “once again underlined the importance of protecting EU values and fundamental rights.”

In fact, Johannson also blames Lukashenko for the crisis in the border region and defames refugees as terrorists. “We should not fool ourselves about this. What Lukashenko is doing may well lead to terrorists and other criminals coming to the EU. That’s why everyone who comes to the EU must be registered and checked.”

As one of the leading European powers, the German government plays a key role in enforcing the EU’s murderous exclusion policy. In a statement reeking of cynicism, the German government spokesperson Steffen Seibert declared a week ago that “humane solutions for these people have to be found quickly… in line with European and international law.” He then repeated the mantra that the government in Belarus was responsible for “instrumentalising refugees and migrants,” in a manner that was “completely unacceptable.”

Trial of the November 2015 French terrorist attacks opens in Paris

Kumaran Ira

The trial of the November 13, 2015 Paris terrorist attacks opened in a special criminal court in the French capital on September 8.

The attacks, which killed 130 people and injured 350 in Paris and the surrounding suburb of Saint-Denis, are yet another demonstration of the bankrupt and reactionary character of terrorism. Those responsible for the attacks are guilty of mass murder. Marxists have always insisted that nothing socially progressive could emerge from the indiscriminate and arbitrary annihilation of human lives, which disorients the working class and undermines popular opposition to police state measures.

In this Nov. 13, 2015 photo, a woman is evacuated from the Bataclan concert hall after the terrorist shooting in Paris. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

For almost a month, the relatives of the victims have been taking the stand to recall the events of the attacks. Their tragic and genuine sentiments contrast sharply with the hypocrisy of the prosecution’s arguments and the media propaganda surrounding the trial, which is silent on the war waged by France and the other NATO powers in Syria.

Nonetheless, there is an insoluble link between the “war on terror” and the state of emergency imposed after the attacks of November 13, 2015, on the one hand, and the French and NATO intervention in Syria and Libya since 2011, on the other hand. These wars have cost more than 400,000 lives and forced more than 10 million people to flee their homes, leaving behind devastated societies.

Indeed, to wage wars in these two countries, the NATO powers used the same Islamist networks that committed the Paris attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria soon emerged as the most powerful “rebel” militia and thus the most likely to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Already in August 2012, US officials had confessed that among the Syrian rebel forces supported by NATO were members of al-Qaeda, the network that committed the 9/11 attacks.

The political hollowness of the trial is seen in the fact that none of the officials from the NATO countries who carried out this policy will be questioned, let alone placed in the docks.

The trial, the largest criminal hearing ever held in France, will last nine months. Twenty defendants are being tried, including Salah Abdeslam, 31 years old, the only survivor of the Islamic State (IS) cell that carried out the attacks. The prosecution dossier makes up 542 volumes, or one million pages. Nearly 1,800 civil parties, including relatives of victims and survivors, are expected to testify in the trial. At least 145 days of hearings are planned.

Of the 20 defendants, 14 are present, including 11 already detained. Six more are being tried in absentia, five of them presumed dead, including the French jihadist brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain, who were allegedly killed in February or March 2019 in an air strike in Syria. Fabien Clain is believed to be the man who recorded the audio message claiming responsibility for the November 13 attacks.

During the hearing, the main accused, Abdeslam, coldly justified the attacks by citing the French bombing against the Islamic State. “We attacked France, targeted the civilian population, but it was nothing personal,” he said. “The goal is not to stir the pot but to be sincere,” he added, assuring that the attacks were a response to “French bombings on the Islamic State” in Syria.

When in 2014 the Islamic State intervened militarily in Iraq against the pro-Iranian neo-colonial regime built by the US occupation of that country between 2003 and 2011, a conflict emerged between the Islamic State and the imperialist powers. The compromise between French imperialism and the Islamic State, which served as its conduit in Syria and was thus financed for these purposes by corporate giants like Lafarge, collapsed.

The United States and its allies reacted with alarm to the Islamic State’s capture of many cities in Iraq, including Mosul. They attempted to isolate IS in Syria, mobilizing other jihadist forces, including the Al Nusra Front, against Assad, and to crush the IS advance in Iraq. When NATO launched attacks against the Islamists in Iraq, it angered the IS, which felt betrayed. In retaliation, the IS planned to commit attacks on European soil, under the illusion that terrorist acts would force French imperialism to change its policy.

“Francois Hollande said we fought France because of its values, but that is a lie,” Abdeslam added, denouncing the “French planes that bombed the Islamic State, men, women, children. ... Francois Hollande knew the risks he was taking by attacking the Islamic State in Syria.”

Yet, while concentrated on utilising the Islamists for their geostrategic goals in the Middle East, European states responded to the threat posed by these same networks inside Europe only with police measures targeting democratic rights and legitimizing neo-fascism.

It is an established fact that several terrorists who committed terrorist attacks in Paris were known to European and American intelligence services. In the aftermath of the attacks, many media outlets revealed that most of the Islamists involved in the Paris suicide attacks, including their alleged organizer, were known to French and Belgian security services long before November 13, 2015. But no intelligence or police service took steps to prevent them from unleashing their murderous violence.

The United States, Turkey and Iraq all warned France before November 13 that plots were afoot; Turkey provided the name of one of the men involved, Ismael Omar Mostefai, known to French authorities since 2010. Mostefai was able to travel to Syria in 2013, despite being included on an official terrorist watch-list flagging him as a security risk, and then return to France in 2014. He was one of the attackers who massacred nearly 100 people at the Bataclan in Paris before committing suicide.

After the attacks, the PS government of President François Hollande carried out an unprecedented series of attacks on democratic rights. It declared a state of emergency and mobilized more than 100,000 security forces across the country, greatly increasing the powers of the police and the army. Hollande proposed amending the French constitution to constitutionalize the state of emergency, a measure of dubious legality imposed during the Algerian war in 1955, and the ability of the state to strip the nationality from individuals, a measure previously used to repress members of the Resistance to Nazism.

These attacks on democratic rights have gone hand in hand with the intensification of wars in Africa and the Middle East, under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

The trial will not resolve any of the questions raised by the attacks of November 13, 2015. Since then, the entire political establishment has moved rapidly towards dictatorship and the legitimisation of the far right. Under the pretext of creating “national unity,” Hollande officially invited the president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen, to the Élysée Palace.

Elected in 2017, Macron intensified these attacks on democratic rights. He mobilized the police to repress the “yellow vest” protests against social inequality. He imposed a charter of principles on the French Islamic council and enacted an “anti-separatist law” which, under the cover of combating “Islamist separatism,” sought to prevent Muslim criticism of French imperialism’s predatory wars.

Biden administration defends CIA against torture victim

Patrick Martin

The Biden administration argued before the US Supreme Court Wednesday that torture victim Abu Zubaydah, real name Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, should be denied the right to obtain additional information about the circumstances in which he was tortured.

The Department of Justice cited the “state secrets privilege,” an all-purpose assertion of national security interests that does not exist in the Constitution or in law, but was created by the Supreme Court in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to assist the US military in covering up the deaths of airmen in the crash of an experimental plane.

Abu Zubaydah drawing of the CIA application of sleep deprivation during his torture at a black site in Thailand in 2002

Since then, the privilege has been steadily extended under both Democratic and Republican administrations, becoming the pretext for the government whenever it wants to use the blanket of “national security” to conceal inconvenient facts.

It is particularly flimsy in the case of Abu Zubaydah, since the facts being suppressed are well known and have been reported in the corporate media and widely discussed and commented on. Some have even been documented in the lengthy Senate report on CIA torture released, in an abbreviated form, in 2014.

Abu Zubaydah was detained in Pakistan in 2002. He was presented by the CIA as a prize catch in the early stages of the “war on terror,” supposedly a top aide to Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda. He was held in CIA torture centers in Thailand and Poland over a period of four years and subjected to a range of brutal treatment, before his interrogators concluded that he was merely a driver for Al Qaeda and had no information of any importance.

In the course of one period of particularly savage abuse, the prisoner was waterboarded 83 times in a month. He was also confined in a coffin-sized box for 11 days, and hung upside down for long periods. After the interrogators learned he had a phobia for insects, bugs were added to the psychopathic mix. In course of his detention, he lost an eye, and, by some accounts, suffered a mental breakdown. He was eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay, where, according to federal officials, he is being held incommunicado for the rest of his life.

The names of the CIA contractors who carried out the waterboarding and supervised the other torture, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, have long been known. Their depositions have been taken and they have provided extensive accounts of their actions. Nonetheless, they have never been prosecuted in the United States.

The current case arises from an investigation in Poland, where prosecutors have sought to bring charges against the Polish accomplices of the CIA, but have been blocked by the US refusal to allow information on Abu Zubaydah to be turned over. The “state secrets” include official acknowledgement that the Polish government was an accomplice in establishing the “black site” at Stare Kiejkuty, even though Poland’s former president has confirmed that this was the case, and the issue has been the subject of hearings before the European Court of Human Rights.

At Wednesday’s hearing, acting solicitor general Brian Fletcher, appearing for the federal government, explained that the Biden administration was supporting a motion first brought by the Trump administration last December, seeking to quash the request by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers that details of his confinement in Poland should be released to the Polish prosecutors.

There seemed to be general agreement among the justices that the “state secrets” privilege should be upheld, with some quibbling over whether the privilege could be applied to information that is not secret, but public knowledge. Justice Elena Kagan held Fletcher’s job in the Obama administration, and is therefore very familiar with the assertion of the state secrets privilege by the executive branch.

None of the justices expressed any concern over the savage torture of Abu Zubaydah or the likelihood that he will spend the rest of his life in the American gulag.

Instead, they focused on narrow procedural questions, such as how the state secrets privilege should be applied in the case of a motion for discovery where some of the material sought was secret and some was not. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the assertion of then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, finding that the CIA detention site in Poland and Zubaydah’s torture there were no longer a secret, because they had been revealed in other legal proceedings and in the Senate report.

Chief Justice John Roberts remarked that official confirmation of the existence of the torture facility in Poland would constitute a “breach of faith with our allies and friends around the world.”

At the end of the hearing, three justices, Stephen Breyer, Neil Gorsuch, and Sonia Sotomayor, asked Fletcher whether Zubaydah himself could be made available to the Polish prosecutors, as a witness to his own torture. Fletcher promised an answer to that question, as well as a follow-up question on why Zubaydah was still imprisoned, but would not respond directly.

The main significance of the case and the hearing is the continuity, over four administrations, in the defense of CIA torture and the torturers themselves, as well as their accomplices around the world. The Bush administration authorized and carried out the torture. The Obama administration refused to punish either the torturers or those, like CIA official Gina Haspel, who destroyed evidence of the torture. The Trump administration promoted Haspel to head the CIA, and Trump openly boasted of his support for torture. Biden, vice president under Obama, is going forward with the same policy.

Massive strike by steelworkers in South Africa

Patrick Martin

More than 150,000 steel and metal workers went on strike Tuesday in South Africa, demanding substantial wage increases from the employers and vowing to stay out until they achieve this goal. The strike is not a one-day or limited protest, but open-ended, to demand an immediate wage increase of eight percent this year, and inflation plus two percent in each of the next two years.

The first day of the strike, called by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), had a celebratory character, with thousands of workers, wearing red shirts thronging the streets of Johannesburg and other cities in powerful demonstrations.

Striking members of NUMSA (Source: Twitter/Unati Msuthu)

Wednesday’s events demonstrated the seriousness of the class confrontation that has begun. In Boksburg North, 50 kilometers east of Johannesburg, private security guards opened fire and shot and wounded one striking worker, who was taken to a local medical clinic. Police claimed to be investigating a case of attempted murder. No arrests had been made but the police confirmed the shooting and that the victim “was among the people wearing Numsa T-shirts.”

In Booysens, just south of Johannesburg, a group of workers demonstrated outside a factory, and police opened fire with rubber bullets, with at least one worker taken to the hospital for treatment of their injuries. The police claimed they were reinforcing the security guards at the factory when the workers refused orders to disperse.

Another confrontation took place in Krugersdorp, 50 miles west of Johannesburg, but no shots were fired at the striking workers, according to news reports.

Strikers were active in five of South Africa’s nine provinces, and marches and picket lines were staged everywhere. The strike is expected to swell to a total of 300,000 once other workers in the affected factories, including some unions allied to NUMSA, join in.

The workers are demanding an increase of 8 percent in the first year (the official inflation rate in consumer prices was 4.9 percent as of August 2021), followed by inflation plus 2 percent in the second and third years of any agreement. If the country’s inflation rate remains at roughly 5 percent a year, this would come to 22 percent over three years.

The Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA) has countered with an offer of 4.4 percent for 2021, inflation plus 0.5 percent in 2022, and inflation plus 1 percent in 2023.

The strike was virtually 100 percent effective in steel mills and metalworking factories throughout the country. The executive director of the National Association of Automotive Component and Allied Manufacturers, Renai Moothilal, warned that the auto industry would be affected soon. “We urge parties to speedily resolve the impasse and prevent long-term damage and possible line stoppages to vehicles being assembled in SA and abroad,” he told Reuters.

The auto industry directly employs 110,000 workers in South Africa and accounts for nearly 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The steel industry is the largest in Africa and, together with metalworking, accounts for nearly 15 percent of the country’s GDP, some $44 billion. The largest steelmaker is ArcelorMittal of South Africa, the local branch of the global giant.

The steel and metal workers strike is the first since 2014, when the workers struck for four weeks, with a significant impact on the South African economy.

The steel and metal workers will be reinforced Thursday by millions of workers taking part in a one-day strike called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), to pressure the African National Congress (ANC) government over its economic policies.

The one-day strike is an effort by COSATU to let off steam in what is clearly an escalating movement of the South African working class. The country was rocked by widespread rioting in July, triggered by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma, but driven by mounting anger in the working class over inflation, the coronavirus pandemic, and decades of broken promises by the bourgeois nationalist ANC regime.

COSATU General Secretary Bheki Ntshalintshali said the purpose of the strike was to demand “urgent action from policymakers in government and decision-makers in the private sector to stop the attacks that are directed at workers. Both the public and the private sector have been blatantly undermining collective bargaining.”

The COSATU head complained that companies which had received financial incentives from the government as part of its response to the COVID pandemic were “either hoarding or exporting cash out of the country” rather than investing it within South Africa.

COSATU is part of the government against which workers are striking Thursday, alongside the ANC and the South African Communist Party. A similar one-day protest in 2020 involved three million workers, but this year some other union federations have refused to join COSATU in the one-day strike.

The steel and metal workers’ strike testifies to the explosive social and economic relations that characterize post-apartheid South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized country.

The ANC, since coming to power in 1994, has represented a corrupt layer of the black bourgeois and upper petty-bourgeois elite at the expense of the masses of workers and poor. The regime has enforced the dictates of the multinational corporations, including through the violent suppression of the working class, as seen in the 2012 Marikana Massacre when police murdered 34 striking platinum miners.

South Africa has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. The top 20 percent of the population take more than 68 percent of income.

Spanish authorities declare COVID-19 will become “endemic”

Alice Summers

Regional governments in Spain have declared that COVID-19 will become “endemic” in the population, in the latest escalation of the Socialist Party (PSOE)–Podemos government’s criminal campaign to abandon public health measures and force Spain’s inhabitants to “live with the virus.”

Epidemiologically, the term “endemic” describes the constant presence and prevalence of a disease within the population of a certain area. It refers to a state where a disease reaches such a level that most of the population has developed immunity. Viruses such as the common cold are considered endemic.

Regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

By declaring COVID-19 “endemic,” the Spanish ruling class is signaling its intention to allow the uninhibited spread of infection, and to permit seasonal surges that could strain hospitals to their breaking point. Far from being a response to the inevitable transmission of an undefeatable, if relatively benign, virus, it is a deliberate decision to let a deadly disease rip through the population, no matter the cost in health and lives.

Reporting the epidemiological situation in the northern region of Navarra, the Navarrese Institute of Public and Working Health (ISPLN) claimed the pandemic is practically over, but that the virus would continue to proliferate. “Unless new and unexpected factors emerge,” the report declared, “we could be at the end of the pandemic situation in Navarra. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 is going to permanently stop circulating, but it will probably be incorporated into the list of infections which spread endemically or in seasonal epidemics.”

“It can’t be ruled out that COVID-19 could cause waves in autumn and winter,” the ISPLN document continued, “but they will probably have a progressively smaller health impact thanks to the high vaccination coverage and the application of other preventative measures by the population. In correctly-vaccinated people, the risk of COVID-19 is not more than that of other common diseases like flu.”

The claim that COVID-19 will naturally become less deadly and is “like flu” is a lie with no scientific basis. Further mutations made possible by the failure to contain and end the pandemic can produce yet more deadly strains, as the emergence of the much more transmissible and lethal Delta variant of the virus has shown.

Last Friday, the regional premier of the Basque Country, Iñigo Urkullu, also declared that the virus was becoming “endemic” in the region. Urkullu told the Advisory Commission of the LABI (Basque Civil Protection Plan) that “the Basque Country is moving from a pandemic situation to an endemic situation.”

“We can take a new step,” he stated, to allow the region to “move forward with the decree establishing the end of the health emergency” if the trajectory of the virus remains “positive.”

Speaking on the viral situation in the Basque Country, Urkullu stated: “It is a descending, stable and sustainable trajectory. We find ourselves in a different situation [than earlier in the pandemic] and therefore must have different responses.”

On Tuesday, the Basque government then proceeded to end the “Health Emergency” that had been in place in the region, lifting virtually all health-related restrictions other than the obligation to wear masks in crowded public spaces. It is Spain’s sixth region to remove the vast majority of measures, after Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Navarra and Madrid.

The announcements by the Navarrese and Basque governments exemplify the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the ruling class across Spain and internationally. It comes only a couple of weeks after Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), and one of the PSOE–Podemos government’s key advisors on the pandemic, called for the “normalisation” of the disease.

Speaking to a meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, Simón falsely presented COVID-19 as a fairly harmless disease and downplayed the risks associated with it, comparing Spain’s pandemic response to “shooting a fly with a bazooka.”

“It’s very likely that Spain will not have any more major epidemiological waves,” Simón claimed. “There could be a sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth wave, but they won’t be like the others.”

The current situation in Spain “has nothing in common with what we were seeing before,” Simón added. “There could be another ripple [of the pandemic] in some specific groups, but the situation in Spain, right now, is very favourable, making it possible, bit by bit, to normalise the situation.”

These calls to “normalise” COVID-19 or to allow it to become “endemic” come as several hundred people continue to die of the virus every week in Spain, and tens of thousands more are infected. Many thousands of these individuals will suffer from persistent symptoms of the coronavirus for many weeks or even months after infection, with serious potential long-term health consequences including multi-organ damage, cognitive impairment, severe fatigue and muscle pain.

These policies are justified with arguments that large-scale vaccination campaigns have fundamentally changed the pandemic situation—rendering the disease far less dangerous—and that it is impossible to completely eradicate the virus.

Both of these claims are lies. While immunisation is an invaluable tool in the fight against the pandemic, it is not alone sufficient to prevent serious illness, and must be combined with scientifically guided public health measures to suppress transmission.

Furthermore, the example of countries such as China—a society of more than 1.4 billion people—shows that an elimination strategy can be successfully pursued. Despite being the birthplace of the virus, China was rapidly able to bring the outbreak under control with a raft of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing, safe isolation of infected patients, and strict travel restrictions.

These measures have kept deaths from the pandemic in China below 5,000—a tiny fraction of the total fatalities in Spain and in most other “advanced” capitalist countries. After eliminating the virus within its own borders, China has also fought off repeated outbreaks of the Delta variant imported via international travel.

Other countries such as New Zealand, which initially pursued a “Zero Covid” policy and had almost entirely suppressed viral transmission, have recently abandoned this strategy, turning towards the “herd immunity” policy pursued by the vast majority of capitalist governments across the world. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday that her government would be “transitioning to a new way of doing things,” arguing that the Delta variant is a “game-changer.”

There is nothing inevitable about continuing lethal waves of the pandemic in New Zealand, Spain or any other country. The successes achieved by China and a few other capitalist states show the pandemic can be fought. The potential exists to mobilise social resources to eradicate COVID-19. If measures were implemented in a globally coordinated manner across the world, the pandemic could rapidly be ended.

Spain’s PSOE–Podemos government has proven utterly hostile to a scientifically led policy to eliminate the pandemic and save lives. Like the ruling class across Europe, it has placed corporate profits and the wealth of a super-rich elite above all else, seeing over 100,000 deaths as simply the cost of doing business.

Deepening problems for Chinese economy

Nick Beams

The major economic and financial problems in the Chinese property development sector continue to mount with the announcement by Fantasia Holdings this week that it had failed to make a payment on a bond.

Just a few weeks ago, Fantasia issued an assurance that it had “no liquidity issue” but on Monday announced “that it did not make the payment” on a $206 million bond.

A man wearing a protective mask walks in front of an electronic display board in the lobby of the Shanghai Stock Exchange building in Shanghai, China, Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. (AP Photo)

Last month Evergrande, the most indebted property development company, missed a payment on a dollar-denominated bond, triggering a 30-day grace period before a default is declared.

The question being asked in Asian markets is how far the financial crisis will spread to other property developers, which account for a large portion of the high-yield or so-called junk bond market.

Dickie Wong, the head of research at the Hong-based Kingston Securities, told the Financial Times: “There’s nothing investors can do… the worst is yet to come.”

The rating agency Fitch said Fantasia has $1.9 billion due on offshore bond payments by the end of next year as well as 6.4 billion renminbi ($US992 billion) of onshore bond payments due in the same period.

The crisis goes far beyond real estate given the crucial role it has played in the 13 years since the global financial crisis in 2008 when the Chinese government turned increasingly towards property development as a central driver of economic growth.

Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf wrote yesterday that the most serious issue to arise from the crisis was that the economy’s dependence on demand from investment in real estate had to end. “That will impose a huge adjustment and create a big headache for authorities: what can replace property investment in creating demand?” he wrote.

Wolf cited statistics pointing to the fact that well before the Evergrande crisis, the Chinese growth model, based on high levels of investment, was running out of steam. Total fixed investment averaged around 43 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2019, five percentage points higher than between 2000 and 2019. But in the latter period GDP growth had started to fall, indicating a drop in investment returns so far as the overall economy is concerned.

At the same time, debt has been rising. Household debt jumped from 29 percent of GDP in 2010 to 61 percent in 2021, while non-financial corporate sector debt rose from 118 to 159 percent of GDP in the same period.

Wolf cited the finding from a 2020 paper by economists Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang that when its flow-on effects are considered the Chinese property sector accounted for 29 percent of GDP in 2016.

He claimed that because the government controlled the Chinese financial system, a financial crisis could be averted—a position advanced by many others. But this supposition has yet to be tested by the events now unfolding.

The major impact, he said, was that property investment would collapse and this would have a “large negative effect on local government finances.” The taxing powers of local governments are restricted, and they depend on the flow of revenue from land sales to finance infrastructure projects.

According to the research by Rogoff and Yang, cited in the article, “a 20 percent fall in real estate activity could lead to a 5–10 percent fall in GDP, even without amplification from a banking crisis, or accounting for the importance of real estate as collateral.” And, according to Wolf, “it could be worse.”

He held out the prospect that growth could continue if there was a shift away from wasteful investment and increased consumption spending flowing from a redistribution of income towards poorer households. This would require “big reforms” combined with a shift away from property and a transition from high carbon emissions, also requiring “big policy changes.”

The model based on wasteful investment had reached its end and had to be replaced, he concluded.

But this fact has long been recognised by the Chinese regime and was the basis for the launching in 2015 of the Made in China 2025 plan that set out the need to develop hi-tech industries.

However, it has run into a major barrier—the domination of US imperialism over the world economy exercised through its design of vital computer chips and the pre-eminent position of the dollar in the international financial system.

The US is determined to crush Chinese high-tech development by all means necessary because it is seen as a threat both economically and militarily.

This policy, initiated under Trump, continued and deepened by the Biden administration, is exemplified most clearly in US actions against the Chinese high-tech telecommunications company, Huawei, regarded by the Xi Jinping regime as a vital component of the next stage of economic development.

Three years ago, Huawei, which had poured major investment into the development of communications technology, was on the edge of becoming the world’s leading developer of the global 5G phone infrastructure.

Last month Huawei chairman Eric Xu said the company’s revenue from the sale of smartphones will drop by $30 to $40 billion this year from the $136.7 billion of sales in 2020 with no prospect for recovering that money in the next few years. Earlier Xu had said the company’s goal was simply to survive.

The destruction of its smartphone business is seen in the fact that despite having made significant advances in the development of 5G infrastructure—many of the patents are held by Huawei—its latest smartphone will be only 4G.

The actions of US imperialism with regard to Huawei are emblematic of its position with regard to the Chinese economic development as whole—its reduction to what amounts to status of an economic semi-colony.

In the period when Chinese growth was dependent on the export of cheap consumer goods and low-tech industrial components, it was regarded by the US as a “strategic partner” summed up in the invention of the term Chimerica by the economic historian and media commentator Niall Ferguson.

Now China is a “strategic competitor.” The methods employed by the US against Huawei are a 21st century form of imperialist gangsterism. The phone company has been excluded from the development of telecommunications networks on the spurious grounds that it is a “security” threat.

US firms that supplied it with computer chips have now been banned from doing so. The ban has been extended to companies from other countries by threatening them with a cut-off of their own supplies from US firms if they continue to sell components to Huawei. And there is the ever-present threat that firms which defy US directives will be excluded from the global financial system because of the dollar’s pre-eminence.

With US firms banned from dealings with Huawei, Google stopped offering services such as Gmail, and YouTube to its phones. From a position where it was once the leading smartphone supplier in the world, Huawei has now dropped out of the top five.

The collapse of the old model of Chinese economic advance, based to a major extent on property development, and the barriers being erected by US imperialism to a model based on high-tech development contain the potential for a major economic crisis.

The perspective of the regime so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” based on capitalism, has proven to be a chimera and the mounting economic problems will lead to the eruption of social and political struggles by the multi-million Chinese working class.