Survey shows majority in Germany rejects an energy embargo against Russia

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Even though the warmongers in the German government are calling for an immediate halt to the imports of Russian gas, oil and coal, the mood among the population is different. This has now been confirmed by an Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research survey.

In the poll, 57 percent of respondents were in favour of continuing to obtain oil and gas from Russia. Only 30 percent would support a complete energy embargo, and only 24 percent agreed with former German President Joachim Gauck’s demand to freeze “for freedom”; that is not even one in four.

In front of a supermarket in Munich-Moosach, Havva speaks out against war

The representative survey, conducted by the Allensbach Institute on behalf of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), was carried out between 25 March and 6 April, which interviewed a total of 1,075 people. The background to the survey is rising inflation and exploding energy prices in Germany, which affect the majority of the population and about which most expressed concerns.

Inflation had already risen sharply before the Ukraine war. The huge sums of money with which the federal government and the European Central Bank drove up stock market prices and the fortunes of the rich to dizzying heights in first two years of the pandemic have turned into inflationary tendencies.

At the same time, workers’ incomes fell, and 20 million lives were sacrificed to the pandemic worldwide. The disruption of supply chains caused by the pandemic and the sanctions against Russia have in turn greatly accelerated these inflationary tendencies, for which workers are now expected to pay.

But for working people, the experiences of the last few years have not gone by without leaving a mark in their consciousness. And while the imperialist warmongers may decide on sending more arms deliveries to Ukraine, spending billions on the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and demand a total energy embargo against Russia, the mood in the working class is completely different.

Not only do workers reject skyrocketing prices and the halting of gas, oil, and coal supplies, but they also resolutely oppose war and the fact that hundreds of billions of euros are being spent on military armaments and destruction while there is supposedly no money for urgent social needs.

The greatest concerns expressed are regarding the current price increases; 71 percent of respondents are very worried about this, and 62 percent worry about being able to pay their energy bills. The proportion of those who expect difficulties with their energy bills in the future has risen from 26 percent in 2019 to 86 percent.

A large majority experience the increased heating costs and higher fuel prices for petrol and diesel as a burden, with 68 percent of respondents saying that the increased prices for heating were a burden or a strong burden on them. A strong or very strong burden due to the increased fuel prices was indicated by 61 percent of car drivers and 51 percent of all respondents.

Due to the increased prices, many people have already adjusted their daily behaviours; 54 percent in relation to shopping, where they now pay more attention to prices and bought less; 47 percent are setting their home heating temperature lower; and 37 percent said they drove less to save fuel. Only 17 percent of respondents said that they had not changed their consumption behaviour at all despite inflation.

The FAZ article notes that people’s concerns were not just a reaction to reports in the media, “but also the result of daily personal experience.” In the meantime, 64 percent consider the goal of keeping energy prices low, so that electricity, petrol and heating cost as little as possible, to be particularly important. In late summer 2021, this figure was 54 percent.

The drastic price increases are hitting working people and the poorest in society particularly hard. In March, inflation in Germany climbed to 7.3 percent, with price increases particularly high for food and energy costs, often in double digits. The current level of inflation makes life unaffordable for families, pensioners, and welfare recipients, many of whom do not have sufficient money coming in to put enough food on the table every day.

High energy costs mean that low-income earners, welfare recipients, pensioners, students, and basic income recipients can no longer pay their rents and utilities and are threatened with homelessness. On average, German households spend 37 percent of their net income on housing and energy, but for those with a monthly household income below €1,300 this rises to 50 percent. For them, a further increase in prices for food, electricity, heating costs and rent is unsustainable.

For all these reasons, the voices being raised against the government’s arms spending and war policy are increasing. This is completely hidden in the media, but is clear on social media, as well as in the interviews that WSWS teams has been conducting outside factories and at shopping centres.

For example, in front of a supermarket in Munich, Yela spoke out clearly against the current rearmaments orgy: “You do not help anyone with more and more weapons,” she said. “And the population has to pay for it all.” Although she works very hard, she already “spends more than half of my salary on rent.”

Outside a BMW plant, one worker commented on the escalating military campaign against Russia: “Like twice before in history, this could lead to world war. Except now they’re risking nuclear war.” On the social media, Gerd wrote: “I find it frightening that many have learned nothing from history. The agitation against Russia is unbearable. We all know that the West is not entirely innocent of what is happening now—and supplying weapons to Ukraine will make it worse.”

Over 200 homeless deaths recorded during 2021 in Toronto

Steve Hill

Toronto city authorities have brutally attacked and dismantled homeless camps (Credit: Mark McAllister, @McAllister_Mark/Twitter)

Recently released data from Toronto Public Health (TPH) revealed that 216 people experiencing homelessness died in the city of Toronto in 2021. The annual death toll among the city’s homeless has more than doubled within the past five years.

The data is based on information supplied by around 250 health and social agencies supporting people experiencing homelessness. In each of the five years of data collection, from 2017 to 2021, the largest number of deaths was among those aged 40 to 59 years. Males have consistently made up approximately three-quarters of all deaths.

Drug toxicity is the largest single cause of death, rising from 32 percent of all recorded homeless deaths in 2017 to 55 percent in 2021. Other major causes of death include hypothermia, suicide, homicide, accidents, pneumonia, cancer and cardiovascular disease.  In 2021, 132 of the 216 deaths occurred in shelters, almost four times the 35 deaths recorded in shelters in 2017.

Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor at Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto, said that Mayor John Tory, city councillors and the Shelter Support and Housing Administration should all be held to account for their failure to tackle homelessness. “The problem will not just go away until people are housed. And so, we saw a 50 percent increase in deaths, and it’s an enormous number that somebody has to take account for. It’s not an acceptable number. I think a great number of these deaths were preventable,” he said.

A.J. Withers, a steering committee member of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network and adjunct faculty in critical disability studies at York University, said some of the deaths happened when the shelter system was more than 99 percent full. The absence of safer indoor shelter space, the dismantling of encampments and the toxicity of street drugs were “deeply concerning,” Withers said. “The lack of safe supply, the lack of access to overdose prevention sites and lack of access to appropriate harm reduction really means that people die,” he insisted.

“As the city does things like criminalize people in encampments, people get pushed further and further away from support systems and people die.” Withers added that the real death toll among Toronto’s homeless population is probably far higher because hospitals and emergency rooms do not report deaths of unhoused people to TPH.

Dr. Andrew Boozary, a primary care physician and executive director of the Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine at the University Health Network, said Toronto cannot “go back to normal” because homelessness was already a public health crisis before the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself has affected unhoused people disproportionately, he added.

“The solution to homelessness is housing. Shelters or encampments are not solutions to homelessness, it is housing. And so, we really need to ensure that every level of government is committed to housing as the solution. And if we don’t see that concerted effort, these rates will only continue to increase,” warned Dr. Boozary. “And that’s on us as a society, because these rates are increasing, not because of individual failures, but because of our failure on delivering housing as a human right.”

Toronto’s 24-month housing and homelessness plan aims to create more than 3,000 new affordable housing opportunities by the end of the year, including 2,000 with social supports, according to the city. In February 2022, Toronto councillors approved an accelerated housing plan to provide an additional 300 “housing opportunities” through partnerships with housing providers and private market landlords.

Yet even if these targets are met, which is very much an open question given the miserable record of all levels of government in funding homeless prevention projects, it would mean that less than half of the more than 7,000 people officially experiencing homelessness in the city would receive assistance. In 2021, it was estimated that there were 7,347 homeless people in Toronto. Specific groups that were overrepresented included indigenous people, racialized people, people who first experienced homelessness as children, people who experienced foster care and people who identify as 2SLGBTQ+.

Both the provincial and federal governments have abdicated their responsibility to ensure one of the most basic social needs, housing, for the population. Every aspect of life, including the right to a roof over one’s head, has been subordinated to the predatory demands of the banks and financial oligarchy. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this year:

Decades of public policy decisions aimed at slashing budgets and making billions available to big business and the super-rich have created a situation where every year over 235,000 Canadians are homeless at some point. Another 1.7 million working people live in precarious housing, which in simple terms means they are one pay cheque, one accident, or one illness away from sleeping on the street. All of the established political parties, from the New Democrats on the “left” to the right-wing Tories, are responsible for this state of affairs. They abolished social housing programs in the late 1980s and 1990s, enforced massive attacks on wages and working conditions and gutted social programs that helped keep low-income earners off the street.

The supply of housing and its pricing have been left to rapacious property developers and institutional real estate investment corporations. While the cost of housing declined somewhat in 2020 as people stayed put due to the pandemic, the numbers began to climb again last year. In November 2021 the average rent for all property types in the Greater Toronto Area was $2,167 a month, a 4.3 percent increase from the year before. Average home prices increased $200,000 to $1.3 million in the one-year period to March 2022.

A single person working full-time for the $15.50 an hour minimum wage would barely be able to meet the average cost of a rental unit, which is to say that nearly 100 percent of his or her income would be required for housing alone.

None of the established political parties has any intention of changing this miserable state of affairs. On the contrary, governments at all levels are slashing funding for basic services as the federal government enforces multibillion-dollar spending increases for the military to ensure that Canadian imperialism can continue to wage war around the world.

In March, Toronto city authorities indicated that five homeless shelter sites set up during the COVID-19 pandemic would be decommissioned over the coming year. Two of these, the Better Living Center on Princes’ Boulevard and the former Days Inn on Queen Street, are to close by May 15.

At the federal level, the Liberal government has refused to commit the necessary resources to meet its demagogic pledge in 2017 to make housing a human right.

The latest federal budget, presented by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland earlier this month, included more than $8 billion in additional military spending, including a pledge to provide Ukraine with $500 million worth of additional weaponry this year. The $8 billion increase is over and on top of the increases already built into the Defence Department budget under the Trudeau government’s 2017 commitment to raise military spending by more than 70 percent to $32.7 billion per year by 2026.

Moreover, the government has pledged that further increases are in the pipeline to ensure Canada is ready to wage “strategic conflict” with Russia and China, just as soon as it and the Canadian Armed Forces can determine how the additional funding best be spent.

In her budget speech, Freeland called housing the 'most pressing economic and social issue in Canada today.' But very little of the new funding the government announced for housing is directed at the homeless and at reducing housing costs and improving the quality of housing for those with low incomes. Much of it was in the form of increased tax credits and tax-free savings accounts for those buying homes, and virtually all the additional money Ottawa is providing for building new homes is to flow through for-profit construction projects.        

'There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors here,' David Hulchanski, a housing and community development professor at the University of Toronto, told CBC. 

The corporate media, including columnists for the neo-conservative National Post, has praised Freeland for reining in government spending, i.e., tightening the screws on social programs to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled to the banks and big business during the pandemic. The budget’s passage in parliament was secured with the votes of the NDP. With the full-throated backing of the trade unions, the NDP has agreed to prop up the Liberals in parliament until 2025 under a “confidence-and-supply” agreement, thereby providing “stability” to a government committed to austerity at home and waging imperialist war in league with Washington abroad.

In evaluating the federal budget, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness stated, “(T)he government still lacks a clear strategy to achieve the goal of ending chronic homelessness and the budget most disappointingly did not go far enough to create an Urban, Rural and Northern Indigenous Housing Strategy.”

Last year, the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario concluded that it was unlikely that the province would achieve its goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2025. It found that more families were using shelters and that individuals were living in shelters for a greater length of time. The province’s 2020-2025 Poverty Reduction Strategy does not commit to any additional homelessness program spending.

Ukraine uses US facial recognition technology to terrorize families of dead Russian soldiers

Jason Melanovski & Andrea Peters

A Ukrainian soldier stands near an apartment ruined from Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine, Wednesday, Apr. 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Ukraine is employing US-made facial recognition technology to scan the faces of dead Russian soldiers and, after having matched the images to online profiles, sending the photos to the relatives of the deceased.

The practice, which is a clear violation of Geneva Conventions and protocols that state that the bodies of dead soldiers must be afforded respect and cannot be subject to ill treatment, was reported on by the Washington Post last Friday. The American newspaper described the macabre and demented campaign, however, as if it were a legitimate military tactic, albeit one that might backfire.

According to Ukrainian officials cited in the story, the US firm Clearview AI gave the country the technology. It has since been used to conduct more than 8,600 facial recognition searches. With the photos of dead Russian troops in hand, a database of 20 billion images from social media and the internet is sifted through in order to identify the individuals. About 10 percent of searched images are from VKontakte, Russia's most popular social media site.

Ukraine’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers working directly for Kiev, has sent photos of corpses to 582 families. The Post article emphasizes their efforts to contact, in particular, mothers of the dead.

“A stranger sent a message to a Russian mother saying her son was dead, alongside a photo showing a man’s body in the dirt—face grimacing and mouth agape,” reported the newspaper. “The recipient responded with disbelief, saying it wasn’t him, before the sender passed along another photo showing a gloved hand holding the man’s military documents.”

The mother replied, “Why are you doing this? Do you want me to die? I already don’t live. You must be enjoying this.”

She is correct. The Post implies that the aim of the photo-sending campaign is to sway the Russian population against the Putin government but notes that it is likely to be “seen inside Russia not as a welcomed exposure to the truth but as a humiliation by the enemy” and trigger the opposite reaction.

Observing that a “dangerous new standard for future conflicts” is being set, Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London told the Post, “If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric.’ And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’”

Both the Ukrainian and American military, which are aiding and abetting this work, are fully aware that the primary impact of this practice will be to drive Russian families mad, with the likely outcome that it tilts them towards support for Moscow’s invasion. Thus, the only clear purpose is to revel in Russian deaths and feed the most depraved anti-Russian sentiments, which are central to the ideology of Ukraine’s far right.

The highest levels of the Ukrainian state are involved in this work. Three government agencies confirmed use of the technology—the National Police, the Defense Ministry and a third agency that asked Clearview to keep its identity confidential. In addition, two other government institutions are employing the software, but Clearview declined to name them for unknown reasons.

Clearview AI executive Hoan Ton-That, a descendant of the Royal Family of Vietnam, according to the company’s website, told the Post that “more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.”

The company “holds weekly, sometimes daily, training calls over Zoom with new police and military officials looking to gain access.”

Both the relationship between Clearview AI and Kiev and the practice of sending photos of cadavers to Russian families is being directed by Washington.

Contact between the Ukrainian government and the New York City-based Clearview AI was initially made in early March through Clearview advisory board member Lee Wolosky, a former US ambassador who has held posts under four US presidents in the areas of national security and counter-terrorism and most recently was special counsel to President Biden. The company’s advisory board is stacked with other former top US officials, including Richard Clarke, Owen West and Thomas Feddo.

Clearview AI sells access to its technology to 3,100 active users, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. Raymond Kelly, the former police commissioner of New York City, also sits on the advisory board.

The deployment of the Clearview technology on the battlefield in Ukraine is part of the American government’s massive arming of the country, which has included $2.6 billion in weapons deliveries, including tanks, anti-tank missiles and other advanced weapons systems, in just the last few weeks.

Beyond tormenting Russian families, Ukraine is using this technology to scale up its internal repression. According to the Post, an individual at Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Ministry told the company that Kiev is using “the system to identify people who had been detained in the country and check their social media for anything suspicious, including their ‘range of contacts’,” with over 1,000 searches done in just a few weeks.

Imperfections in Clearview’s technology mean that many may be misidentified. Such mistakes, in a country where vigilante lynchings are now rampant, could easily result in immediate death for the accused. As Albert Fox, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Reuters, “We’re going to see well-intentioned technology backfiring and harming the very people it’s supposed to help.”

Furthermore, the Ukrainian government is arresting people on the basis of allegations that they are pro-Russian “traitors.” Millions of Ukrainian citizens, however, are of Russian or mixed ancestry, and speak Russian at home. They could easily, on the basis of little, no or distorted evidence, be accused of aiding the enemy. The weaponizing of Clearview’s technology in the context of a conflict that can easily escalate into a fratricidal internal war has grave implications, as the use of the software to identify individuals’ “range of contacts” poses the prospect of a mass terror campaign directed against large sections of Ukraine’s population.

In a February investor presentation, Clearview AI declared it is seeking to raise $50 million to vastly expand its operations and data collection powers so that “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable.” In addition to the fact that the proxy war in Ukraine, with no end in sight, will serve as a reliable source of revenue for both Clearview AI and the entire US defense industry, it is a training ground for new methods of war and repression.

Ton-That told the Post that his company’s efforts are a “good example for other parts of the US government to see how these cases work.”

The article in one of the US leading liberal newspapers was notable for its blasé attitude towards what are clearly war crimes being committed by Ukraine. It never even used the term or made mention of international law with regards to the treatment of the dead. It said nothing about well documented public displays of Russian soldiers’ bodies, floggings of alleged Russian sympathizers and ethnic minorities, or other recent heinous examples of Kiev’s forces taunting the relatives of dead troops.

In one video circulating on social media currently, the Ukrainian military is seen contacting by video chat the mother of a Russian soldier named Ilya.

“Ilya is gone. He got sick and died. He got lost. That was his first mistake. The second mistake is that he got lost in Ukraine. And his third and final mistake he [made is] that he died,” stated the laughing Ukrainian soldier. He adds, “Dogs will eat him. That’s all. We don’t even have time to bury them. We don’t have time to bury them. We are killing too many too fast.”

The Russian government is accused of genocide and war crimes by the US and its NATO allies. The media everywhere repeats these claims, which as of yet remain to be investigated or proven according to international standards. But the Ukrainian military’s brutal acts against civilians and soldiers, which they advertise on social media as a point of pride, are ignored or, in the present case with regards to Clearview’s technology, treated as a tactic worthy of experimentation.

This is revealing in two respects. First, it demonstrates that the claim that Kiev is waging a war, with the support of the US and NATO, in defense of a democratic country intent on securing the rights and liberty of its people is a lie. Second, it shows what Washington and its allies are prepared to do to Russians and all others who fall in their gunsights in the future.

Airline workers throughout US oppose overwork, health and safety violations

Nick Barrickman

Anger among airline workers in the US, like their counterparts around the world, is reaching a boiling point over chronic understaffing, work overload and lack of safety precautions in the face of a new surge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Transportation Security Administration, air travel has rebounded to 90 percent of its pre-pandemic levels. This has occurred even while staffing is “about 3,000 employees short of the staffing levels from the same period,” writes Yahoo! News, citing figures from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).

The number of pilots who reported being unable to work because of fatigue spiked by 330 percent last month, making fatigue the airlines’ “number one safety threat,” the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) wrote in a letter to management earlier this month. Pilots say airline managers are telling them to handle too many extra flights because of short staffing.

In recent weeks, pilots, flight attendants and other workers at Delta, Spirit and Southwest have picketed in Detroit, Orlando, Las Vegas, Dallas and other cities over unsafe conditions.

Flight attendants picket at Harry Reid Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 15 (Source: AFA)

“It’s horrible out there,” said a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines to the World Socialist Web Site. “Southwest keeps adding more and more responsibilities on you, with no additional pay.” If flight attendants try to call off work due to exhaustion, they are met with a “mandatory fact-finding meeting and compliance irregularity reports,” which amount to a threat of disciplinary action. “It’s just not worth it,” she said.

On Tuesday, Spirit Airlines flight attendants held pickets at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after a series of flight cancellations left thousands of crew members and passengers stranded without room, board or any communication from management. Flight attendants held signs, reading, 'Think it’s bad flying Spirit? Try working here.” Other signs denounced rampant overwork and violations of workers’ contracts.

'We get our schedules a month ahead of time,” one flight attendant told the Detroit News. “If I’m working for three days, I pack clothing, medication, everything I need for three days. If it becomes six, that affects our lives, our health, our families,” she said.

Spirit Airlines has experienced several massive “operational meltdowns” since flights picked up in late summer 2021. In a colossal organizational failure, the airline cancelled 61 percent of its flights last August over a three-day period, without a word from management.

A worker told the Detroit News that fellow crew members and she were left for nearly a week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida during the affair. “Despite messages sent to management, the group didn’t hear anything for five days, resulting in ‘no-shows’ for subsequent assigned flights out of cities they weren’t in,” the publication wrote.

The airline, which is based in the Miami metropolitan area and has roughly 40 percent of its air travel centered in the region, was forced to cancel 30 percent of its flights earlier this month.

The company has since announced that it was scaling back its scheduled flights “by 5% to 6% in June after making smaller adjustments in April and May,” reports the Wall Street Journal. These moves have been duplicated at other airlines, with Jetblue announcing a 10 percent reduction in flights for the time being as well.

The company plans to ramp up its schedule in anticipation of the busy summer months. “Our biggest concern is that all of this has happened ahead of our summer schedule, which will be the biggest flying schedule that Spirit has ever put out,” stated an Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) official to the industry publication Simply Flying.

Airport workers are also coming into struggle, particularly over the impact of inflation on their already poverty-level wages. On March 30, airport contract workers in 20 different US cities staged protests denouncing poverty-level pay. According to Tampa-based WMNF, some contract workers are classified as tipped labor and only receive a base pay of $6.98 an hour.

Frank, a wheelchair assistant, told the radio station that while qualifying as a tip worker, he was “strictly prohibited” from asking for tips. “Without any way to make that direct ask, tips are unreliable at best,” he said.

These struggles are part a series of battles by airline workers across the globe. Air New Zealand flight crews on Boeing 787 and 777 wide-body jets are defying management reprisals and striking to demand improved wages for workers making little more than the minimum wage. In Germany, workers at Frankfurt Airport have waged a months-long fight against the firing of 230 ground workers by the service company WISAG.

The COVID-19 pandemic initially hit the airline industry very hard, with a 95 percent fall in air travel and $35 billion in losses. Both corporate-backed parties responded by handing the airlines nearly $54 billion in federal stimulus money, based on the claims that airlines would protect the jobs of their employees. Instead, they carried out mass layoffs and then subjected their employees to brutal conditions once flights resumed.

The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and other unions campaigned on behalf of industry for government bailout money. At the same time, the unions blocked any struggle by airline workers to fight layoffs, pay cuts and abusive conditions, which drove even more workers out of the industry.

The airline industry has been at the forefront of efforts to enforce the unsafe resumption of business since the Omicron surge of the pandemic. In October, Nicholas Calio of the Airlines for America lobbying group claimed that the full reopening of travel was “critical to reviving economies around the globe.”

The airline lobby was also instrumental in getting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cut COVID-19 quarantine time in half last December from 10 days to only 5. The Associated Press reported at the time that this measure was necessary because “the sheer number of people becoming infected—and therefore having to isolate or quarantine—threatens to crush the ability of hospitals, airlines and other businesses to stay open, experts say.”

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Florida, a Trump appointee, handed another gift to the airlines, allowing them to end masking requirements on all flights. Several airlines immediately ended mandatory masking on their flights.

AFA President Sara Nelson, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, made it clear the union would not carry out any struggle against this deadly measure and instead urged workers to look to the Biden administration to protect them and the flying public. “We will soon have more legal analysis on what this means and what next steps may be taken in court by the government,” Nelson said in a statement.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it would appeal the judge’s ruling. The appeal process, which could take months, has no practical impact on the lifting of mask mandate. The Biden administration could have but did not demand a stay of enforcement of the judge’s order until the appeal process ran out.

In fact, the Biden administration welcomes the lifting of the mask mandate and has insisted that workers “live with the virus.” From the beginning both big business parties have sacrificed the lives of workers to corporate America.

How Hypersonic Weapons Work

Iain Boyd

Rendering of a Hypersonic Missile. US Air Force.

Russia used a hypersonic missile against a Ukrainian arms depot in the western part of the country on March 18, 2022. That might sound scary, but the technology the Russians used is not particularly advanced. However, next-generation hypersonic missiles that Russia, China and the U.S. are developing do pose a significant threat to national and global security.

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems, including hypersonic systems. These new systems pose an important challenge due to their maneuverability all along their trajectory. Because their flight paths can change as they travel, these missiles must be tracked throughout their flight.

A second important challenge stems from the fact that they operate in a different region of the atmosphere from other existing threats. The new hypersonic weapons fly much higher than slower subsonic missiles but much lower than intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. and its allies do not have good tracking coverage for this in-between region, nor does Russia or China.

Destabilizing effect

Russia has claimed that some of its hypersonic weapons can carry a nuclear warhead. This statement alone is a cause for concern whether or not it is true. If Russia ever operates this system against an enemy, that country would have to decide the probability of the weapon being conventional or nuclear.

How hypersonic missiles threaten to upend the relative stability of the current era of nuclear weapons.

In the case of the U.S., if the determination were made that the weapon was nuclear, then there is a very high likelihood that the U.S. would consider this a first strike attack and respond by unloading its nuclear weapons on Russia. The hypersonic speed of these weapons increases the precariousness of the situation because the time for any last-minute diplomatic resolution would be severely reduced.

It is the destabilizing influence that modern hypersonic missiles represent that is perhaps the greatest risk they pose. I believe the U.S. and its allies should rapidly field their own hypersonic weapons to bring other nations such as Russia and China to the negotiating table to develop a diplomatic approach to managing these weapons.

What is hypersonic?

Describing a vehicle as hypersonic means that it flies much faster than the speed of sound, which is 761 miles per hour (1,225 kilometers per hour) at sea level and 663 mph (1,067 kph) at 35,000 feet (10,668 meters) where passenger jets fly. Passenger jets travel at just under 600 mph (966 kph), whereas hypersonic systems operate at speeds of 3,500 mph (5,633 kph) – about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) per second – and higher.

Hypersonic systems have been in use for decades. When John Glenn came back to Earth in 1962 from the first U.S. crewed flight around the Earth, his capsule entered the atmosphere at hypersonic speed. All of the intercontinental ballistic missiles in the world’s nuclear arsenals are hypersonic, reaching about 15,000 mph (24,140 kph), or about 4 miles (6.4 km) per second at their maximum velocity.

ICBMs are launched on large rockets and then fly on a predictable trajectory that takes them out of the atmosphere into space and then back into the atmosphere again. The new generation of hypersonic missiles fly very fast, but not as fast as ICBMs. They are launched on smaller rockets that keep them within the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Hypersonic missiles are not as fast as intercontinental ballistic missiles but are able to vary their trajectories. U.S. Government Accounting Office.

Three types of hypersonic missiles

There are three different types of non-ICBM hypersonic weapons: aero-ballistic, glide vehicles and cruise missiles. A hypersonic aero-ballistic system is dropped from an aircraft, accelerated to hypersonic speed using a rocket and then follows a ballistic, meaning unpowered, trajectory. The system Russian forces used to attack Ukraine, the Kinzhal, is an aero-ballistic missile. The technology has been around since about 1980.

A hypersonic glide vehicle is boosted on a rocket to high altitude and then glides to its target, maneuvering along the way. Examples of hypersonic glide vehicles include China’s Dongfeng-17, Russia’s Avangard and the U.S. Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike system. U.S. officials have expressed concern that China’s hypersonic glide vehicle technology is further advanced than the U.S. system.

A hypersonic cruise missile is boosted by a rocket to hypersonic speed and then uses an air-breathing engine called a scramjet to sustain that speed. Because they ingest air into their engines, hypersonic cruise missiles require smaller launch rockets than hypersonic glide vehicles, which means they can cost less and be launched from more places. Hypersonic cruise missiles are under development by China and the U.S. The U.S. reportedly conducted a test flight of a scramjet hypersonic missile in March 2020.

Difficult to defend against

The primary reason nations are developing these next-generation hypersonic weapons is how difficult they are to defend against due to their speed, maneuverability and flight path. The U.S. is starting to develop a layered approach to defending against hypersonic weapons that includes a constellation of sensors in space and close cooperation with key allies. This approach is likely to be very expensive and take many years to implement.

With all of this activity on hypersonic weapons and defending against them, it is important to assess the threat they pose to national security. Hypersonic missiles with conventional, non-nuclear warheads are primarily useful against high-value targets, such as an aircraft carrier. Being able to take out such a target could have a significant impact on the outcome of a major conflict.

However, hypersonic missiles are expensive and therefore not likely to be produced in large quantities. As seen in the recent use by Russia, hypersonic weapons are not necessarily a silver bullet that ends a conflict.

COVID-19 infection spread in Australian schools exacerbates staffing crisis

Erika Zimmer & Carolyn Kennett

Large numbers of Australian schools are facing an unprecedented staffing crisis as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep through classrooms. The decades-long crisis in public education is now reaching a breaking point.

In January, state and federal governments insisted that schools be reopened for face-to-face teaching and that there would be no return to remote learning, regardless of the infection rate. The “let it rip” policies adopted by both Labor and Liberal-National Coalition governments across the country reflected the demands of big business and finance capital for an end to all restrictions that impinged on their profits, with schools required to be open so that parents could be forced back to their workplaces.

A high school classroom in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia (Lynn D. Rosentrater/Flickr)

Even minimal mitigation measures in most states were removed, including the lifting of many mask mandates and the downgrading of close contact rules. By late February, COVID cases had once again begun to surge under the influence of the BA.2 variant. Schools were acting as vectors for the rapid spread of the virus—case numbers soared among children and teenagers, and thousands of teachers have been infected.

New South Wales (NSW) is the worst affected state, both in terms of infection rates and the ensuing staffing crisis. More than 117,000 NSW children aged between 10 and 19 have reported a positive test in just the last month. In addition, over 74, 000 children under 10 were infected.

In the final week of the school term earlier this month, 20 percent of school-aged children were absent from their classroom due to a COVID-19 infection or exposure. More than 20 schools across the state had directed students to learn from home due to teachers either being sick or self-isolating and because replacement staff could not be found.

The Independent Education Union (IEU), which covers staff in non-government schools, reported: “The teacher shortage in schools throughout NSW and the ACT has intensified to breaking point, with one Sydney Catholic secondary school, Brigidine College, having closed for the entire week because so many staff and students are off sick with COVID or isolating because of it.”

In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in the second last week of term, 1,040 cases of COVID-19 were reported in 114 of the territory’s 137 schools. Parents and carers of students at Calwell High School received an email notifying them that students in Years 7 and 8 would go to remote learning for the last week of the term.

Teachers at Queanbeyan High School in southern NSW walked off the job last month, protesting ongoing staff shortages. The school of around 500 students made headlines the previous week when its principal told parents that students in Years 7 to 10 would only be able to attend in-person classes for three days a week due to chronic teacher shortages.

Queanbeyan High School is not an isolated case. Last week it was reported that more than 1,400 class periods at a high school in the regional town of Dubbo have been affected by staff shortages in the last ten weeks. Students have been forced to spend classes on the school oval, with two or three teachers supervising.

Several teachers have contacted the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) to report the dire situation in their schools.

One wrote: “Our school has approximately 600 students whose parents’ income is one of the lowest in the state. Student enrolment is about 40 percent Aboriginal. So far in Term 1, we have had 766 merged or uncovered one-hour classes. In 2021 we had 849 total. Currently we have between 6-8 classes combined in the school hall with minimal supervision. Often kids come to school to spend four out of five classes in minimal supervision. It is the staffing shortage, and it is biting hard.”

Another said that at her school, each day an average of eight students were away with COVID-19 in every class. She related that the school had organised a Year 7 field trip, and that every student on the trip subsequently tested positive. The teacher told the CFPE, “I can’t see an end to the pandemic because a new variant will come through. When you are in a tiny room with 27 children how is this going to stop?”

Two teachers at different schools reported that due to staff shortages over a hundred children were placed in the school hall with minimal supervision.

The situation is deteriorating across Australia. In Western Australia (WA), whose state government had pursued an effective COVID suppression policy until the beginning of 2022, there have been almost 18,000 positive tests in children under 10, and 23,500 in 10-19 year olds. Of the state’s 1,100 schools, 1,045 have reported positive cases since the start of the year, and more than 5,000 staff have had COVID.

In Tasmania, 30 percent of children aged between 5-11 have tested positive for the virus. This is alongside 16.7 percent of children in the 0-4 age group, 25.1 percent aged 12-15, and 26.9 percent of those 16-19. Information about the number of teachers affected is not available.

Queensland schools are also facing critical staff shortages as COVID-19 cases rise among students and staff. Last month it was reported that 1 in 50 children in schools had tested positive for COVID. The latest case numbers indicate that 118,000 young people under the age of 20 have contracted the virus this year.

Widespread staff shortages are the product of not just the COVID-19 pandemic—they emerge from decades of funding cuts and neglect by both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition governments at the federal and state levels. A recent report estimates the cumulative under-funding of public schools from 2019 to 2029 will amount to about $21 billion.

At the start of 2022, some 2,383 permanent positions remained unfilled in NSW alone, almost double the 1,250 teacher vacancies public schools in the state faced at the start of 2021. Over the past month, teachers in public schools in metropolitan and country areas have staged protest actions against understaffing and worsening workloads.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the teacher unions in every state have worked with governments to herd teachers back into classrooms packed with mostly unvaccinated children. When teachers have tried to raise their concerns in meetings and on social media, the unions have worked to suppress the discussion and censor dissenting voices. Their chief concern is that the disastrous situation confronting public schools threatens to get out of their control.

Even when the unions raise limited concerns about staff shortages, COVID is not mentioned.

Angelo Gavrielatos, the president of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, recently tweeted: “If you know the cause of the #teachershortage - uncompetitive pay and crippling workloads - by definition you know the solution.” A teacher replied: “Skilled professionals entitled to a safe workplace. 1000s of teachers infected at school Term 1. Many infected twice in 1 term. Recurring illness, long term disability & death will be the eventual result of virus that causes brain shrinkage & organ damage.”

President of largest Canadian Union of Public Employees local resigns amid corruption scandal

Sterling Oliver & Roger Jordan

Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 79, based in Toronto, Ontario, has been thrown into crisis after the local’s president, David Mitchell, was forced to resign by the national CUPE office. Mitchell allegedly accepted under-the-table money from Local 79 Vice President Jason Chan. Local 79 is the largest local in CUPE, which is in turn Canada’s largest trade union with over half a million members in health care, education and municipal services.

Jason Chan and David Mitchell (Credit: CUPE Local 79)

Mitchell helped Chan acquire a lucrative position on the board of the Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS) Sponsors Corporation. OMERS is the pension fund for municipal and provincial employees with over 500,000 active and retired members. Chan is the representative of CUPE Local 79 on the OMERS board.

The allegations came to light after an OMERS investigation into Chan found he was allegedly providing part of his $46,000 retainer for sitting on the board to David Mitchell. Chan claims he did “nothing wrong,” refusing to resign from his position as VP of Local 79 and from the seat on the board of OMERS, despite the requests from the CUPE national office that he do so.

The Toronto Star quoted an anonymous member of CUPE Local 79 who said that Mitchell helped Chan get on the board because of his background in finance. According to his LinkedIn profile, Chan received a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, specializing in Finance, from York University. He went on to get a certificate in Accounting from Ryerson University and has worked as an accountant for the city of Toronto since the spring of 2008. He has been a director for OMERS since spring 2018.

Both Chan and Mitchell apparently saw no problem with their scheme. The whole thing began to unravel early this year, when Chan refused to continue under-the-table payments to Mitchell. In an email to the Star, Chan claimed he was paying Mitchell from his “own pocket” and not with the OMERS retainer.

Chan explained to the Star that the OMERS retainer gave him a higher salary than Mitchell. Mitchell complained to him that the vice president should not be making more money than the president. Chan grudgingly agreed to give “some of his money” to Mitchell to preserve the hierarchy of the union. Chan confessed Mitchell threatened to take him to small claims court to get some of the retainer after Chan refused to make more payments.

David Mitchell, a city of Toronto employee and now former president of CUPE Local 79, has been a member of Local 79 since March 1989, according to his LinkedIn profile. This is a man who is a creature of the union bureaucracy, and it shows.

The CUPE Local 79 scandal reveals the kind of people who occupy positions within the union bureaucracy in the public and private sectors. Both Chan and Mitchell possess zero ethical standards when it comes to advancing their own personal financial and career interests through the corporatist trade unions.

Corruption and unethical practices are rife throughout the union bureaucracy. Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union with over 300,000 members, was shaken by a kickback scandal involving its longtime president, Jerry Dias, who resigned last month after it was revealed that he had accepted a $50,000 payment to encourage employers of workers represented by Unifor to purchase COVID-19 test kits from a specific manufacturer.

The Unifor and CUPE corruption scandals express the nature of the unions as corporatist entities with intimate ties to the corporate elite and municipal, provincial and federal governments. They function as gatekeepers of capitalism, policing the class struggle and enforcing the demands of corporations onto the rank-and-file membership. Their upper echelons are populated by privileged middle class bureaucrats who look after themselves and other members of the “club,” while selling out rank-and-file workers in concession-filled contracts. They are handsomely compensated both “legally” and otherwise for services rendered to the ruling elite.

This process has been decades in the making. Over the past 40 years, the unions have emerged as the key institutions for suppressing the class struggle. Their top officials have integrated themselves fully into the pro-employer “collective bargaining” and “labour relations” systems, taking full advantage of the substantial financial rewards accruing from their corporatist ties to the state and big business.

This development culminated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when all the unions, including Unifor and CUPE, sabotaged workers’ protests and job actions against dangerous working conditions. Declaring that strikes by workers against the return to COVID-infested workplaces were “illegal,” union bureaucrats worked hand in glove with the federal and provincial governments to reopen the economy at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

The fact that a scandal has gripped CUPE is of particular significance given the tendency among Canada’s pseudo-left and other “progressive” layers to portray it as one of the more “left” and “militant” unions. Whereas Unifor has unabashedly developed close political ties with the Liberal Party in Ontario and at the federal level over recent years, expressed most clearly in Dias’s emergence as an effective adviser to the Trudeau government prior to his fall from grace, CUPE cultivated a more independent image.

Politically, it tended to back the pro-austerity New Democrats in election campaigns and played a less prominent role in the “anybody but Conservative” campaigns that have become the mechanism through which Unifor, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and other so-called “labour organizations” drum up support for the big business Liberals during election campaigns. CUPE bolstered its supposed radical stance with bogus references to the NDP’s long abandoned claim to be a “party of labour,” the better to cover its endorsement of the NDP’s pro-imperialist and anti-worker politics.

The portrayal of CUPE as some kind of alternative was always a fraud. When the Liberals and New Democrats announced their “confidence-and-supply” agreement last month, which will allow the Trudeau government to wage war abroad, build up military spending and continue its public spending austerity, the entire trade union bureaucracy applauded the arrangement as a significant step forward.

CUPE has imposed concessions-filled contracts and sold out strikes no less ruthlessly than its counterparts in Unifor, the USW, UFCW and many more. Last November, CUPE sabotaged a strike by over 22,000 New Brunswick public sector workers for better wages and benefits at the very point where it was starting to generate public support and could have been turned into a direct political struggle against the pro-austerity Higgs government.

In April 2021, CUPE bowed to anti-democratic back-to-work legislation imposed by the Trudeau government to smash a strike by 1,100 dockers at the Port of Montreal. The Trudeau government’s explicit backing for the employers allowed them to maintain a brutal scheduling regimen and draconian disciplinary process that has seen dozens of militant workers fired over recent years.

At the outset of the pandemic, CUPE Local 79 and Local 416 divided Toronto’s outside and inside workers from each other in contract negotiations to impose sellout deals just weeks apart. Despite being in a legal position to strike, Local 416 extended the strike deadline before ramming through a rotten agreement concluded with the city at the 11th hour of talks.