Sri Lankan president declares state of emergency to suppress mass protests over austerity

Deepal Jayasekera

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse imposed a state of emergency yesterday in response to the growing anti-government demonstrations in Colombo and throughout the country over fuel and cooking gas shortages, the skyrocketing cost of essential food items and lengthy daily electricity cuts.

A Sri Lankan man shouts anti government slogans during a protest outside Sri Lankan president's private residence on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, March 31, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

The emergency was necessary, the declaration said, for “public security, the protection of public order and the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the life of the community.” The reference to “maintenance of supplies and services,” makes clear that the real purpose of Rajapakse’s state of emergency is not just to suppress current protests but is directed against the rising wave of working-class strikes and protests against the government’s austerity measures.

The Rajapakse government faces a severe economic crisis due to drastic falls in export income, tourist visits, declines in remittances and increasing foreign debt repayments. This is has been worsened by COVID-19 pandemic and now the Ukraine war.

In February, Sri Lanka only had foreign exchange reserves to pay for one-and-a-half months of imports, drastically impacting on supplies of fuel, cooking gas and even medicine. The lack of fuel for power plants has led to electricity shortages with long queues for fuel and cooking gas commonplace throughout Colombo and outlying areas.

The government’s decision last month to embrace harsh International Monetary Fund-dictated measures, including the further devaluation of the rupee, cuts in subsidies and restructuring of the public sector will see even deeper attacks on the jobs, living conditions and wages of the working class.

The current protests against the Rajapakse government are taking a more and more spontaneous and mass character. On March 31, about 100 demonstrators blocked the road to President Rajapakse’s private residence at Mirihana, Nugegoda, in Colombo’s outer suburbs. Protesters tried to storm the president’s home, chanting “Gota, go home,” and demanding that he resign.

Fifty people, including Sanjeewa Gallage, a free-lance video journalist, were arrested by police. Gallage who was assaulted by the police and injured, has complained that police prevented him from going to hospital for treatment.

Two journalists, Nisal Baduge and Waruna Wanniarachchi from the English-language Daily Mirror, who were covering the protest, received multiple injuries to their heads and arms after being hit by stones and other blunt objects. Three police officers, including an assistant superintendent of police, were injured in clashes with the protesters.

Twenty-eight of those arrested, were brought before courts and 22 granted bail with six others remanded until April 4. The remainder were being treated in hospital for injuries receiving during the police crackdown.

Agents provocateur are seen in video footage taken at the Mirihana protest when a few vehicles, including a police bus and jeep, were set alight. The video, which has been posted on social media, clearly shows that the bus was on the same side as the police, not where protesters were. An unidentified person is seen setting fire to the bus. Police took action to stop the individual, strongly suggesting that the incident was used to justify the subsequent police attack, including the use of tear gas, on protesters.

Ajith Perera, 26, who attended the Mirihana protest told Al Jazeera: “We came to protest the unbearable cost of living, fuel shortages and electricity cuts… The decision to come to the president’s house was spontaneous. We want the president, who has caused so much destruction, to go home.” Mohamed Asri, 21, another protester said, “The economy is got so bad that we can hardly eat two meals [a day]. Things were never this bad in my lifetime. Gota has to go.”

Anti-government protests erupted elsewhere in the Colombo area, including Kelaniya and Mount Lavinia. In Kelaniya, protesters used burning logs to block the main highway from Colombo to Kandy, the hill country capital. Saman Wanasinghe, a protester, told the media: “I am angry, everyone is angry… Who knows what will happen now? There will be protests all over.”

In an attempt to stop the protests spreading, the police imposed an immediate curfew in North, South and Central Divisions of Colombo, as well as in Nugegoda, Kelaniya and Mount Lavinia. While the curfew was lifted at 5 a.m. on Friday, the Inspector General of Police declared a curfew for the whole of the Western Province from midnight until 6 a.m. Saturday.

Underscoring the Rajapakse government’s moves to criminalise all protests, the Presidential Media Division (PMD) declared on Friday that “an extremist group” was behind the protests near Rajapakse’s residence. It provided no evidence for this accusation. It also claimed that many of those arrested were “organised extremists.”

A communal adjective was not added to the accusations of “extremism.” However, the use of communalism to try and derail the mass protests and justify state repression will not be long in coming. Rajapakse seized on the 2019 Easter Sunday terror bombing by Islamic extremists to whip up anti-Muslim chauvinism and since his election has fomented anti-Tamil sentiment.

Islandwide protests against the Rajapakse government are being organised via social media in Colombo and other cities for Sunday, April 3. Those organising the demonstrations have urged people to come to the streets “for ourselves, our country and our future.” They have called on those attending to bring handwritten placards but without the name of any political party.

Parliamentary opposition parties, such as the right-wing United National Party (UNP), the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the National Freedom Front (NFF), a government ally, have distanced themselves from the planned protests. Their response points to the fears in the political establishment that the mass anti-government unrest is developing outside their control.

The JVP nervously declared that the “general public has a right to protest against this crisis,” but expressed concern that the protests “cannot be traced back to a recognisable and accountable organiser or group.”

A UNP statement issued on Thursday afternoon said that it “will not be joining any protests organised by anonymous groups.” The NFF described the demonstrations as “Sri Lanka’s version of the Arab Spring,” then added that 11 parties that make up the government coalition, including the NFF, did not support the April 3 protests.

The Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), the main parliamentary opposition party, is attempting to exploit growing popular opposition against the government for its own political gain. The SJB said it supported the protests but denied having anything to do with their organisation.

While criticising the Rajapakse government, the UNP, SJP and JVP have no fundamental opposition to its economic policies and the IMF-dictated austerity measures. The UNP and SJB has previously called on the government to approach the IMF. The JVP is maintaining a silence over the IMF measures, indicating that it would implement same policies if in office.

The Rajapakse government knows well that its austerity measures will not be implemented easily and will provoke mass opposition from the working class and the rural poor. This is why it has declared a state of emergency and is increasingly relying on police state methods of rule.

Organisers have called for the April 3 protests to be “non-political,” reflecting widespread public hostility to all the major parties. Workers must recognise that they are facing a political fight not only against the government but the entire political establishment that defend capitalism and support austerity measures.

Protests by themselves, no matter how large and militant, will not resolve the crisis facing working people. The central issue is not “no politics,” but the fight for a socialist and internationalist perspective to put end the capitalist system that puts profits ahead of everything else—including the health and lives of the working class.

Biden administration announces end of Title 42 anti-asylum policy, issues a fast pass for Ukrainian refugees

Norisa Diaz

On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a Public Health announcement confirming it was terminating the use of the Title 42 Order on May 23. The move is in accordance with statements earlier this week by the Biden administration that it will halt the immigration ban initiated by the Trump administration at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump cited public health concerns in order to justify the closure of the United States’ borders to migrants and halt all applications for asylum.

A group of migrants rest on a gazebo at a park after they were expelled from the U.S. and pushed by Mexican authorities off an area where they had been staying, Saturday, March 20, 2021, in Reynosa, Mexico [Credit: AP Photo/Julio Cortez]

As recently as last month the Biden administration defended the extension of the policy, lifting it only for unaccompanied minors, while continuing to deny asylum for families and adults.

However, in recent weeks a growing number of Ukrainian refugees have landed at US border crossings fleeing the US/NATO-led war. Many are arriving in Mexico on flights from Paris to Mexico City and Tijuana. These refugees are presenting themselves primarily at the San Ysidro crossing at the US/Mexico border in San Diego, the most frequently crossed border in the world.

Unlike their counterparts from Latin America, the Ukrainian refugees are being processed and entering the United States in a matter of hours or days, what is essentially a fast track as tens of thousands wallow in migrant encampments along the border awaiting their turn for the processing of asylum.

Despite their quick turnaround, many are commenting on the inhumane conditions in the border processing jails. Mark Lehmkuhler, a US citizen, reported that his fiancée who is a Ukrainian citizen was held overnight in a detention center. He told NBC news that she had to sleep in a holding cell with metal benches cramped with nine other women. They were given thin mats and forced to use an open toilet in the room.

“There is no rhyme or reason why they treated people like this. Nobody was prepared,” Lehmkuhler said.

The announcement of the ending of Title 42 and the arrival of a growing number of Ukrainian refugees is treated in the mainstream media as entirely separate phenomena.

The reality of the situation is that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, which oversaw unprecedented numbers of deportations under the Obama administration, had no intention of lifting Title 42. Since assuming office in January 2021 the Biden administration has defended the anti-migrant policy in response to litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other immigrant rights groups.

The Biden administration is compelled to formally drop the immigration policy because it cannot justify the hypocrisy of allowing Ukrainian refugees into the country, an act which directly undermines the Title 42 policy currently in place.

Simultaneously, all COVID-19 mitigation measures have been dropped throughout the country even as the US reached the grim milestone of over 1 million dead. Despite growing case numbers of infections by the BA.2 Omicron subvariant, the administration has overseen the lifting of all mask mandates in schools and indoor settings. The argument that Title 42 was needed in the “interest of public health” no longer holds water with the dropping of all COVID-19 restrictions and the full resumption of international travel.

Title 42 was first initiated in March of 2020 by the Trump administration, which cited the COVID-19 pandemic as justification for halting the processing of asylum cases for hundreds of thousands of migrants. The statute comes from a 1944 law which grants the President broad powers to block foreigners from entering the country in order to prevent the “serious threat” of a dangerous disease.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s fascistic immigration adviser who long saw the special protections children are granted under asylum law as a major hurdle, seized on the crisis to carry out this policy. Miller had, in fact, attempted to invoke the law twice before, during a mumps outbreak in the immigration jails and once again during the flu season.

Trump, Miller and the Republican Party and its far-right allies have been at the forefront of the lifting of restrictions and reopening campaigns. Yet the public was supposed to believe the lie that Title 42 was carried out to stop the spread of COVID-19, while simultaneously pushing for the full reopening of the economy and herd immunity policies.

Millions turned out to the polls in 2020 believing a Biden administration would provide a more humane response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ruthless immigration policies of Trump, but the opposite has been the case. The Democratic Party has shown its bipartisan agreement with brutal crackdowns on immigration, defending both Trump era policies of Title 42 and the 2019 Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) also known as “remain in Mexico” that requires every person seeking asylum in the US to wait in Mexico while a judge evaluates his or her claim.

In February the Biden administration deported its 20,000th Haitian migrant, according to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) as the administration has chartered flights filled with deportees.

In the run-up to the May 23 expiration of Title 42, the Biden administration has been working to stop migrants from Central and South America before they reach the southern border. Washington, which has historically treated Latin America as its backyard, is demanding that governments step up their immigration controls and crackdown on travel without visas. In his State of the Union address last month, Biden confirmed, “We’re securing commitments and supporting partners in South and Central America to host more refugees and secure their own borders.”

Throughout March, Biden hosted Colombian President Iván Duque at the White House, and US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas met with officials in Costa Rica and Mexico, which play key roles in transit routes from South America and abroad.

Costa Rica began requiring visas for Venezuelans and Cubans in February with the purpose of slowing their migration north. Mexico began requiring the same from the two countries in January.

As a result of these new visa requirements, Al Jazeera reported that “US authorities encountered Venezuelans along the US-Mexico border 3,072 times in February, down sharply from 22,779 times a month earlier” which “demonstrate[s] the impact of Mexico’s new requirement for Venezuelans which took effect January 21. Colombians, who do not require visas for Mexico travel, were encountered 9,600 times, up from 3,911 times in January.”

These countries have been targeted as they host growing numbers of migrants. Thousands of Haitians seeking asylum in the US pass through Colombia every week. Colombia is also home to some 1.8 million Venezuelans fleeing political and economic turmoil. Costa Rica is receiving tens of thousands of Nicaraguans annually since political protests and crackdown began in 2018.

The lifting of Title 42 and the crackdown on migrants in Central and South America, will be for the purpose of stopping migrants before they reach the border, whatever the cost, while saving face and allowing Ukrainians to enter the US who take direct flights to Tijuana and Mexico City.

Radicals and other middle class layers, who view the world entirely through racial lenses, are denouncing the acceptance of Ukrainian refugees as “racist double standard.” But such a stance neglects the connection of the plight of ordinary Ukrainians fleeing war to Washington’s war aims, which are bound up with the threat of a nuclear world war that would engulf the entire planet and bear the heaviest tolls on the working masses in each country and of all races.

China rejects EU calls to cut ties with Russia over Ukraine war

Alex Lantier

Hostile EU remarks after yesterday’s virtual European Union (EU)-China summit point to the rising global tensions provoked by NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine. EU officials sought but did not obtain Chinese guarantees that Beijing will honor sanctions Washington and the EU powers have unilaterally imposed on Russia.

People walk past a video screen displaying an image of Chinese President Xi Jinping at an exhibition in Beijing, March 1, 2019 [Credit: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]

The run-up to the summit was dominated by EU and US threats against China, as they poured billions of dollars of arms into Ukraine for use against Russian troops. Beyond threats of sanctions, there were mounting denunciations of China’s Zero-COVID policy in the European media, while US Indo-Pacific Command head Admiral John Aquilino called on Washington and its allies to be “prepared at all times” for war with China over Taiwan.

On March 25, an unnamed senior EU official told Politico the EU has “very reliable evidence that China is considering providing military aid to Russia. … We’re concerned about the fact that China is flirting with the Russians.” The official said the EU would “impose trade barriers against China” if China helped Russia militarily or financially, as “this is the only language Beijing understands.”

US officials had already claimed Russia had asked China for military aid. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan demanded China not “bail out” Russia from US-EU sanctions: “We will ensure that neither China, nor anyone else, can compensate Russia for these losses. In terms of the specific means of doing that, again, I’m not going to lay all of that out in public, but we will communicate that privately to China …”

Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang rejected Sullivan’s claims, calling for a diplomatic settlement to the war and denying that China is arming Russia. “What China is doing is sending foods, medicine, sleeping bags and baby formula, not weapons and ammunition to any party,” Qin said, adding: “We are against wars, as I said. … China’s trusted relation with Russia is not a liability. It’s an asset in the international efforts to solve the crisis in a peaceful way.”

Chinese officials also briefly expressed hopes that the EU-China summit could revive the EU-China trade deal negotiated with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron in December 2020, shortly before Merkel left office. The deal’s ratification was suspended, however, after the EU echoed unsubstantiated and false US assertions that China is carrying out a “genocide” of the Uighur ethnic minority in its western Xinjiang province, which borders Russia.

Another item in the EU-China summit was China’s freezing of trade with Lithuania, a former Soviet Baltic republic, after Lithuania opened formal trade representation for Taiwan in its capital, Vilnius. Chinese officials have said they view this as a European threat to repudiate the “One China” policy and encourage Taiwan to declare itself a fully independent state. Sections of the European foreign policy establishment have advocated using this policy to encourage parts of mainland China like Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia or Tibet also to declare independence, dividing China.

Lithuanian Deputy Prime Minister Mantas Adomėnas explained that this policy is driven by hostility to communism and to the Chinese government. “We see the threats and dangers which arise out of the expansionist policies of Communist China,” Adomėnas told CBC. “We wanted to curtail this … and support democracy in Taiwan.”

Margarita Šešelgytė, director of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University, said Lithuania’s anti-China policy aims to obtain US military aid against Russia. She said, “For us, being a small country in the vicinity of Russia is a very bad scenario. So how do we become more attractive to the United States? Broaden our foreign policy and also be part of US policy in the Asian region.”

With these explosive conflicts, it came as little surprise that brief official statements on yesterday’s EU-China summit indicated that no agreements had been reached.

After meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen criticized China’s position on Ukraine: “We exchanged very clearly opposing views. This is not a conflict. This is a war.” She demanded, “China should, if not support, at least not interfere with our sanctions [on Russia] … equidistance is not enough.”

“We will also remain vigilant on any attempts to aid Russia,” EU Council President Charles Michel said at the press conference with von der Leyen, adding: “We raised our concerns about China’s treatment of minorities in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and of the people of Tibet.”

Chinese officials told the South China Morning Post that Xi supported “the EU playing a leading role” in talks on Ukraine and asked EU officials to address the security concerns of all powers, including Russia. “The root cause of the Ukrainian crisis lies in the regional security conflicts that have accumulated in Europe for a long time. The fundamental solution is to accommodate the legitimate security concerns of all parties concerned.”

The imperialist powers have no intention of giving security guarantees to Russia, however, or to any other country in their gun sights. Russian President Vladimir Putin undoubtedly launched a bloody war in Ukraine, which is reactionary and divides Russian and Ukrainian workers. However, while Putin launched the war and bears political responsibility for it, Russia is neither the more powerful nor ultimately the more aggressive party to the conflict.

As Ukrainian troops and far-right militias fight Russia to a draw, it is clear Putin’s invasion was a desperate, preemptive move as NATO turned Ukraine into an heavily-armed base directly on Russian borders.

Since the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, the NATO powers and, above all, the United States have sought to counterbalance growing economic weakness with military force. Washington led decades of NATO wars that shattered Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and cost millions of lives. In 2017, the US National Security Strategy declared, moreover, that US military objectives were to wage “great power conflict” with countries like Russia and China.

These conflicts underlie Xi’s refusal to cut off ties with Moscow, for now at least. As US officials demand regime change in Russia, Putin’s ouster, and Russia’s return of regions such as Crimea to Ukraine, it is increasingly clear that the NATO powers aim to break up and crush Russia and China. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bluntly said Washington aims “to destroy, break, exterminate, strangle the Russian economy and Russia as a whole.”

Chris Johnson, a former CIA agent working on China, told the Financial Times that Beijing fears US-led regime change in Russia. He said, “if they even are considering providing assistance [to Russia], that speaks volumes about … Chinese fears that Putin could fall, unleashing chaos on their northern border unseen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

The only progressive solution to the reckless, aggressive policies of the imperialist powers is the mobilization of the working class in an international, anti-war movement. While Russia and China can use their military and nuclear arsenals to try to threaten NATO, it is apparent that the mounting danger of war does not deter the NATO powers. Rather, they are risking a global military clash that could escalate into nuclear war, betting that this opens up unprecedented opportunities for plunder.

In a Washington Post column titled “The West is winning the economic battles in Putin’s war against Ukraine,” US Council on Foreign Relations fellow Sebastian Mallaby gloated: “China’s economy is far larger and more sophisticated than Russia’s, but it looks newly vulnerable.” Mallaby speculated Washington could seize the trillions of dollars China has earned over decades of exporting goods to US and European markets, just like it is threatening to seize Russian dollar reserves that Moscow earned exporting oil and gas to world markets.

He wrote, “Beijing’s $3 trillion-plus stockpile of foreign-currency assets looks less potent. If Russia’s reserves could be frozen, so could China’s. Likewise, if Russia can’t generate leverage from its highly concentrated exports—until its invasion of Ukraine, it supplied more than half of Germany’s imported natural gas—it appears unlikely that China will be able to fight sanctions by threatening to cut exports of consumer electronics.” This would undoubtedly be one of the largest acts of imperialist theft in history.

Stellantis announces hundreds more job cuts at Belvidere, Illinois plant, as layoffs continue to roil auto global industry

Marcus Day

Stellantis NV, the world’s fourth-largest automaker, is planning to cut hundreds more jobs at its Belvidere assembly plant in northern Illinois, according to a letter sent to workers by United Auto Workers Local 1268 on March 25.

Exterior of Belvidere Assembly (WSWS Media)

A Stellantis spokesman told local news station WREX that the company was “making additional staffing reductions to operate the plant in a more sustainable manner.” The cuts will be achieved through a combination of early retirement packages and involuntary layoffs, the company said.

The Belvidere factory, which produces the Jeep Cherokee SUV, has already suffered thousands of layoffs over the past three years, with five rounds of job cuts in the last 13 months alone. The plant is currently operating with 1,812 hourly workers on just one shift. As recently as 2019, the plant, then operated by Stellantis’ predecessor Fiat Chrysler, had more than 5,000 workers across three shifts.

Stellantis is seeking to reduce employment at Belvidere to “603 non-skilled and 199 skilled trades employees,” the UAW local wrote in its March 25 letter to workers. The company was planning to issue WARN layoff notices to 579 employees beginning March 28, the letter stated, raising the question of whether more cuts are planned later this year to reach the company’s targeted headcount. The layoffs will impact those even with decades of seniority at the plant, as far back as 1994.

Beyond Stellantis, the layoffs will almost certainly cascade throughout the local supply chain, threatening jobs at plants operated by parts producers such as Magna, Syncreon, and Android Industries, as well as others.

Seeking to chloroform workers and block a struggle in defense of jobs, UAW Local 1268 wrote, “We don’t believe they will be able to make all these cuts, don’t make any irrational decisions at this point. We believe this is completely unobtainable and we will know more in the near future.”

Local 1268 officials said they were scheduled to meet in Detroit last week with the UAW vice president for Stellantis, Cindy Estrada, to discuss the layoffs. Such talks, however, have the character of a conspiracy against workers aimed at ensuring an “orderly” draw-down of jobs at the plant and preventing a serious struggle by workers. Estrada—who recently announced she would retire at the end of her term, and had previously been named as a target in the federal corruption investigation into the UAW—is notorious for having repeatedly negotiated painful concessions behind autoworkers’ backs, including outsourcing jobs at GM’s Lake Orion and Lordstown assembly plants.

The savage attack on jobs at Belvidere by Fiat Chrysler and then Stellantis have already had a devastating impact, confronting workers and their families with impossible decisions to either uproot and transfer hundreds of miles away, live apart indefinitely or take lower-paying jobs in the area.

Until recent years, the Belvidere plant had been the largest private employer in the region and one of the few remaining sources of relatively better-paying manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate in the economically hard-hit Rockford metro area, which is roughly 90 miles northwest of Chicago, stood at 7.9 percent as of February 2022, the highest among major urban areas in Illinois and more than 50 percent higher than the state average.

Pointing to the widespread social, economic, and political crisis in which the layoffs are taking place, a veteran worker at Stellantis Belvidere told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “All of this, including the pandemic and war in Ukraine, is looking more like an economic collapse that’s going to make the recession look like a walk in the park.

“Homelessness is at an all-time high already and it’s only growing,” he continued. “Even when Wall Street takes a nose dive the billionaires, hedge fund managers and too-big-to-fail financial institutions will be insulated from the fallout that is to follow.”

Consumer prices are surging, and the Federal Reserve is moving to raise interest rates to counteract rising wages. Under these conditions, the ruling elite is seeking to distract attention from an increasingly disastrous domestic situation via the rapid escalation of a war drive, he said. “What better way to distract people than to antagonize WWIII.”

Chip shortage, supply chain disruptions continue to idle plants

Intermittent layoffs have continued to grip the global auto industry more broadly, causing considerable uncertainty and financial strain for workers.

In addition to Belvidere, Stellantis announced recently that it would be indefinitely laying off 98 workers at its Sterling Stamping plant in suburban Detroit, where five workers died of COVID-19 in 2021. The company’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit is also temporarily shut down until May for scheduled retooling. In Canada, the company is planning to cut the second shift at the Windsor, Ontario van plant later this year.

General Motors announced Thursday that it would be idling its Lansing Grand River assembly plant in Michigan next week, with a spokesman ascribing the downtime to parts shortages unrelated to semiconductors. GM had previously announced that it would be temporarily shutting down its Fort Wayne, Indiana, assembly plant for two weeks beginning April 4 due to a lack of microchips. The Fort Wayne plant produces the lucrative Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500 pickup trucks.

Ford also announced in recent days that it would idle its Flat Rock assembly plant in suburban Detroit for one week beginning Monday, also due to a chip shortage.

Even as workers at plants such as Belvidere assembly and GM’s Fairfax assembly have faced near-continual layoffs, workers at plants that produce the auto giants’ top-selling, highest-margin pickups and SUVs, such as Stellantis Sterling Heights assembly, have faced relentless demands for overtime, with their plants driven to run almost non-stop.

The impact on autoworkers’ jobs extends internationally, with supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the US-NATO conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine is a major exporter of neon gas, which is critical for microchip production, and international transportation routes and trade have been snarled by the conflict and US-led sanctions against Russia.

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares said this week that the company’s van plant in Kaluga, Russia, operated as joint venture with Mitsubishi, will soon run out of parts and be unable to operate. The company’s Jeep plant in Melfi, in southern Italy, will also a face a slowdown beginning next week due to a worsening chip shortage, with roughly 1,500 workers furloughed a day.

Despite the automakers benefiting from rising prices and reaping bumper profits—with Stellantis seeing its earnings nearly triple from 2020 to 2021—a brutal new wave of restructuring is being prepared, as the corporations engage in a furious struggle to dominate electric vehicle technologies and markets.

The Detroit Three, GM, Ford and Stellantis, have all announced massive investments in EVs over the coming decade, which they expect to offset by dramatically intensifying the exploitation of workers. Stellantis has stated that it will invest $35 billion in EVs by 2025, while at the same time targeting double-digit profit margins.

Stellantis CEO Tavares and his counterparts are all attempting to extort massive tax breaks from local, state, and national governments, in return for promises—easily broken—for new investments in EV manufacturing facilities. Auto industry analysts have for years put a question mark over the future the Belvidere plant, which is situated far from the core of Stellantis’ operations in the Detroit area. To attract renewed investment to the plant as well as other EV makers, Illinois’ billionaire Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed a package of major corporate tax credits last year. Press reports in recent months have indicated that Stellantis is considering assigning production of new Dodge Charger and Challenger EVs to Belvidere.

The company recently announced that it would be investing $4 billion to construct a battery facility in Windsor, just across the border from Detroit, as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solution. Ontario Premier Doug Ford boasted that the province put up “hundreds of millions” of dollars in incentives to lure the company. Stellantis is also reportedly searching for a US location for a second North American battery plant.

The UAW, with the support of the White House, is seeking to expand its reach into the new battery plants and other EV facilities, offering its services as a “reliable partner” to the automakers and hoping to secure new dues streams. In remarks at a press event this week, UAW President Ray Curry noted that the battery plants “are joint ventures, and they are apart from the national agreements,” meaning that workers at these facilities will face even more brutal conditions and ultra-low wages.

Heading into the Detroit Three contract negotiations next year, the automakers and the UAW are preparing a similar strategy to the one they carried out in 2019 and in previous years. Massive concessions will be demanded to “save jobs,” with the future of Belvidere or other plants held as ransom. In fact, this is already being carried out in Europe, where Ford is working with the Spanish and German trade unions to pit plants against each other in a fratricidal concessions bidding war, with the losing plant slated to be shuttered. But as previous experience shows, no amount of concessions will provide a guarantee against plant closures and layoffs.

However, the assault being planned against autoworkers threatens to eclipse even the attacks of preceding decades, as brutal as they were. With the enormous capital investments required by the transition to EVs, the auto companies must extract even greater profits. Further, the enormous amounts of resources being channeled by capitalist governments towards war must be paid for by workers, who face an historic battle.

Global food crisis fuels international class struggle

Eric London

The war between the US-NATO and Russia in Ukraine has lit a fuse to the powder keg of the global class struggle. In the span of just a few weeks, the war and unprecedented US and EU sanctions against Russia have profoundly destabilized the world’s productive forces, throwing already-frail global supply chains into disarray, strengthening inflationary tendencies, and crippling global food and gas production.

People queuing for kerosene in Kandy, Sri Lanka on 22 March, 2022 [Credit: WSWS Media]

A social and economic crisis that was worsening before the war began has now metastasized, bringing billions of people to the precipice of destitution and hunger.

Shock is beginning to give way to action. Significant strikes and demonstrations are breaking out across the world in the largest wave of social protest since before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The imperialist politicians and geo-strategists who spent years drawing up the blueprints for war are discovering that despite all their careful planning, they set their bloody plans into motion on top of a massive social fault line.

The protests are heterogenous in terms of race and religious background, international in scope, and are based in a working class that is larger, more urban and more interconnected than ever before. In more advanced and less developed countries alike, the protests revolve around the same demand: the rising cost of living is intolerable, conditions must change, and they must change now.

This is the social force that has the power to stop the drive to world war and prevent nuclear disaster. This global movement is unfolding by the hour.

On Thursday night, a large demonstration blocked the road to President Gotabaya Rajapakse’s private residence in Colombo’s outer suburbs, demanding his resignation. The right-wing government is implementing a ruthless IMF austerity regime as masses of people struggle to find medicine, food, milk and gas.

Diesel fuel has run out, currency is scarce, and long power outages blacken the country. A 31-year-old school teacher in Batticaloa told the Indian Express, “On Sunday I stood in a gas queue starting at 4 am. There is a shortage of milk powder. One has to struggle for rice and daal. There are no candles and many medicines have disappeared. I have a salary, but can we eat money?”

Similar movements are developing across the Middle East and North Africa, where Ukraine and Russia provide the bulk of wheat and cooking oil and where Ramadan, the Islamic holiday of fasting and feasting, is set to begin.

The United Nations declared Thursday that social conditions are “at a breaking point” across the region due to food shortages. The New York Times wrote Thursday that scarcity and price increases “crush household and government budgets alike in countries that had nothing to spare, raising the possibility of the kind of mass popular unrest not seen since the Arab Spring protests a decade ago, which stemmed in part from soaring food prices.”

In Egypt, the Times noted nervously, “videos of ordinary people venting about food prices have gone viral on social media under the hashtag ‘revolution of the hungry.’”

The US-backed al-Sisi dictatorship has deployed the military to distribute food and set price controls for bread. Al-Sisi addressed the nation and urged the population to “rationalize” food consumption during Ramadan.

In Tunisia, where workers first sparked the Arab Spring, the Middle East Eye wrote Thursday that “strikes intensified last week,” and as a result, “Ezra Zia, US undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, visited the country.”

Food riots involving thousands of people took place across Iraq last week as the country, still reeling from a US invasion and occupation that killed a million people, was gripped by a serious shortage of food and flour.

Protests are also developing south of the Maghreb, in African countries where the working class has exploded in size and social weight and whose backbone includes many young people with the Internet in the palms of their hands. The average sub-Saharan African spends 65 percent of his household earnings on food. On Wednesday, the head of the Africa Development Bank said of the surge in food prices caused by the war in Ukraine: “If we don’t manage this very quickly, it will destabilize the continent.”

Protests in Sudan over shortages worsened by the war have coincided with powerful strikes of teachers and youth. Yesterday, a mass protest took place in Khartoum over the military government’s inability to stop the spiraling cost of living and where one 23-year-old protestor was killed.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to a report published Thursday by Al Jazeera, “rising fuel prices, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have sparked fears of increased social unrest,” forcing the government to reshuffle the cabinet to preempt social anger.

In South Africa, where large riots took place last summer, the head of a major youth non-profit described the social situation as “a time bomb that is ticking and could explode in our faces at any given moment.”

This movement is also developing in the world’s imperialist centers. In Spain, a weeks-long strike by truckers has brought international shipping to a standstill and galvanized broader support in the working class over the rising cost of living. The PSOE-Podemos government has ordered grocery stores and retailers to limit what customers can purchase, as the major business confederations demand action to prevent an imminent social explosion.

In Germany and Austria, diesel will now be rationed. Large demonstrations over the cost of living took place last month in Albania.

In the United States, the cockpit of world imperialism, the emerging strike movement is driven above all by inflation and the spiraling cost of living. Five thousand teachers are on strike in Sacramento, California, following a two-week strike by teachers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in March.

In an ongoing strike by 600 oil refinery workers in Richmond, California, workers explain they cannot afford to fill their own cars with the gas they refine.

Thirteen hundred copper miners in Utah and 50,000 grocery store workers in California are slated to strike in the coming days, while a contract for tens of thousands of dock workers on the west coast expires in a matter of weeks.

In the US and Canada, the government has banned or blocked major strikes by rail workers at BNSF and Canadian Pacific.

Rising prices in the main imperialist countries will intensify the class struggle as the war continues. According to Thursday’s US Commerce Department data, inflation will cost households an average of an extra $433 each month, or $5,200 in the next year. Given that half the country has less than $500 in emergency savings, workers will be driven into struggle by urgent necessity.

The impact of the war on living conditions is going to intensify dramatically in all countries in the coming weeks. Strategic food reserves are woefully inadequate in all countries excepting China.

Making matters worse, Ukraine and Russia are not only leading producers of staple food and oil, but Russia and Belorussia also lead the world in the production of most fertilizers, which Putin has announced will be subject to strict export restrictions in response to US and EU sanctions. This could cut global crop yields in half.

Rising cost of Diammonium phosphate (DAP) fertilizer year-to-year

With the pandemic and the threat of world war as the immediate backdrop, a social reckoning of historic proportions is past due. Since the Arab Spring and the global protests of 2018–19, the ruling class’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has prioritized profits over life and led to the deaths of 20 million people.

Stopping war means ending capitalism, and this requires political leadership. Unlike in an earlier period, the international working class owes no political loyalty to the parties of Stalinism, Social Democracy and bourgeois nationalism, which are seen as directly responsible for existing conditions of poverty and inequality.

In each country, the trade unions are a block on this developing movement, serving the capitalist governments and corporations by isolating workers, preventing them from striking, and demanding that they support the US-NATO war drive, no matter the dangers and no matter the cost to working people.

Representatives of the middle-class pseudo-left who once professed verbal support for socialism are now cheerleaders for NATO’s wars and zealous defenders of the trade unions.

The Financialization of the Global Care Economy

Marina Durano

The promise of 300 million global jobs in care as a key feature of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic is a tempting invitation for investors seeking new profit opportunities, especially if more public monies are committed. Mature segments of the care sector that have received massive private investments — such as health care, nursing homes, and long-term care — tell us that we need democratized finance to build a care economy that ensures alignment of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and care receivers’ rights.

To generate 300 million jobs by 2035, annual investment of 3.2 percent of global GDP will be required. More than three-quarters of the new employment will benefit women, and over 80 percent of these new jobs will be formal work, according to a new ILO report. Women’s rights organizations want increased public spending on care to redistribute responsibilities between families or households and care provided by government agencies. Meanwhile, care gaps have been filled by arranging services from a spectrum of care givers spanning domestic workers, non-profit or volunteer groups, and corporate or even multinational providers. Should public investments deliver, we can expect a trend towards consolidation in the sector, making it even more attractive for private investors.

Increasingly privatized and financialized

Public spending crowds-in private investment, as health care and long-term care has shown. However, other policies also entice private-sector investment in care, such as public-sector management practices focused on efficiency and productivity (as in Canada, UK, and the United States), more liberal foreign-ownership rules (as in India, China, and some Southeast Asian countries), and greater opening of procurement policies to foreign contractors (as in Turkey). Labor market flexibilization is an essential ingredient, as demonstrated by the long-term care home sector in British Columbia in Canada, where sectoral bargaining and contracting protections for care workers have been removed.

Private equity investments in health care in particular spark serious concerns. Between 2010 and 2019, such investment in the health care sector rose from $41.5 billion to $119.9 billion in the United States, with new investments focused on in-home health care and outpatient care. Multilateral financial institutions, such as International Finance Corporation (IFC) and CDC Group, have partnered with private equity investors in health care to support sustainable development goals for health. In Africa, the IFC launched the Africa Health Care Fund, whose first closing raised $57 million to support small and medium-scale enterprises in health clinics and diagnostic centers.

An estimated 20 percent of global infrastructure projects in health care are in developing countries. Public-private partnerships are a frequent financing option for health care delivery, blending design, build, finance, maintain, operate and manage components. Lesotho and Peru already have complex projects in operation combining infrastructure with clinical and non-clinical services. A few other countries in  Latin America are planning or operating PPPs in health care and many other countries are looking to join the club.

Venture capital firms chasing high returns on technological innovations are interested in telehealth and telemedicine. One major market entrant, Amazon Care, launched nationally in the United States in February 2022, having entered into a partnership in 2019 with the UK’s National Health Service to provide health care information.

Unhealthy outcomes

Private equity investors in health care are gaining notoriety, however, as their profit motives conflict with well-being outcomes for care recipients in their institutions. Case studies bear out concerns about the quality of care and ethical standards in health facilities owned by private equity investors due to the pronounced focus on revenues. Studies comparing for-profit with not-for-profit facilities find lower staffing ratios in the former or highly skilled staff replaced by less skilled teams, all with a view to reducing personnel costs. One study between 2000 and 2017 using data on nursing homes merged with patient-level data in the United States found that “going to a PE [private equity]-owned facility increases 90-day mortality by about 10 percent for short-stay Medicare patients, while taxpayer spending over the 90 days increases by 11 percent”. The same study found a higher probability that patients in private-equity owned facilities would be on anti-psychotic medications, experience reduced mobility, and report more intense pain.

Democratize finance to build care economies

The association of poor health outcomes with private equity raises the question of the feasibility of designing democratic — even egalitarian — financial institutions to fund well-being outcomes. Some proposals include expanding into non-profit credit unions, public investment banking, progressive management of sovereign wealth funds, inclusive ownership funds within corporations controlled by their workers, anti-trust regulation to reduce concentration in finance, and even nationalizing banking. When finance cares, we might have a genuine care economy.

Peru imposes mandatory school attendance as COVID risks rise

Cesar Uco & Don Knowland

Throughout the pandemic, COVID-19 in Peru has claimed more lives per capita than in any other country in the world. Only recently was its death rate surpassed by Bolivia.

Figures announced on March 23 by Peru’s Health Ministry, Minsa, indicate that since the beginning of the pandemic there have been 3,542,602 positive cases and 211,944 deaths.

Between March 14 and Monday, March 28, all Peruvian public schools have reopened. By March 28 more than 8 million students already had returned to classrooms (75 percent public and 25 percent private).

Line for vaccinations and tests at army barracks in Lima (Credit: ANDINA/ Vidal Tarqui)

Peru’s Ministry of Education (Minedu) announced that the reopening is mandatory for all students: “With the new regulation we are working on, the principles of voluntariness and gradualness will no longer apply; therefore, it will be a massive and mandatory return for all.”

To support the back-to-school push, Peru’s bourgeois media has cited statistics from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center as of March 22 that COVID deaths over a seven-day average were 39, a significant drop from this year’s peak of 135 on January 22, which was mostly due to the BA.1 Omicron subvariant. This is compared to the worst trimester of the Delta strain, which saw an average of over 700 deaths per month in February-April 2021.

Such figures only provide an illusion that the coronavirus crisis is abating. A deeper look shows the current danger from COVID-19 remains high, particularly at schools.

First, although Minsa announced some minor steps to protect students from contracting COVID-19, they have been effectively eroded by the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) permitting 100 percent occupancy in school buses, and 100 percent class occupancy if a one-meter distance is somehow able to be implemented. Confining students together in close proximity creates a ready transmission belt for spread of the virus, even with masking.

Second, recent figures indicate severe failures in Minsa’s strategy to fight the pandemic, particularly on the vaccination front.

La República recently characterized the fight against the pandemic as “directionless,” specifically referring to “gross errors” in the government’s vaccination program.

According to Minsa, out of a population of 32.9 million inhabitants, 25,188,282 have been fully vaccinated. The number of doses administered is claimed to be 64,576,385.

Minsa had asserted that vaccination numbers are not going down. But data analyst Juan Carbajal told La República he has calculated that since the current Minister of Health Hernán Condori took office on February 8, “the vaccination rate has dropped by 54 percent at the national level,” and that the decrease since February includes the first, second and third doses.

Carbajal added that while pediatric vaccinations had begun on January 24, “such is the drop that we are at the level of the first days and we have yet to give 46 percent of children their first dose.”

The Ombudsman’s Office offered another piece of information pointing to the precariousness of Minsa’s program: there are 15 million Peruvians who have not had a third dose, another indication that vaccinations are in decline.

Condori initially stated that further vaccinations were on schedule, but recently admitted that 2 million vaccines will expire on March 31 before they are administered. The health minister then tried to wash his hands of the matter, stating that throughout the pandemic there have been “expiring vaccines,” and that his predecessors had received the COVID-19 vaccines with two-month expiration dates.

The Comptroller General of the Republic has confirmed that 2,449,000 Astra-Zeneca doses expire March 31, and that an additional 2.6 million will expire April 30.

Third, Peru’s National Health Institute detected cases corresponding to the subvariant Omicron BA.2 beginning in the first half of February. Full opening of schools is especially irresponsible given evidence of its health dangers and its rapid spread in other countries.

As CNN recently reported, “the BA.2 strain is on the rise in the United States and already accounts for one-third of COVID-19 infections.” Moreover, “it can cause more serious disease and appears capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against COVID-19 new research suggests … and like Omicron, it appears to largely escape immunity created by vaccines.”

The BA.2 Omicron subvariant is already sweeping Europe and Asia. A massive increase in COVID-19 in Austria has been reported since January, after protective measures were ended, largely due to BA.2. France, Germany and the UK likewise have seen COVID surges due to Omicron BA.2. And the BA.2 subvariant is fueling a new COVID surge in Australia.

Minsa, Minedu and Peru’s bourgeois press appear to be oblivious to all of the above risks. The Peruvian ruling class is “all in” with the strategy of “learning to live with the virus” and “let it rip.”

According to the World Bank, Peru already lags other countries in the region in education spending as a percentage of GDP at 3.9 percent, well behind Brazil (6.2 percent), Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.4 percent), Ecuador (5 percent), and Colombia (4.5 percent).

Also, according to UNESCO, with data adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), Peru invests $3,471 per student, less than most South American countries: Chile $8,933, Argentina $7,752, Brazil $6,674, Uruguay $6,192, and Colombia $4,807.

The health of Peru’s students, like education spending, has now become an entirely secondary concern, subordinate to profit interests.

Behind the reopening of schools and relaxing sanitary measures is the Peruvian bourgeoisie’s desperate need to revive the economy by any and all means, as the country faces its greatest economic and political crisis in recent times.