United Nations report declares “perpetual occupation” as “the underlying root cause” of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Jean Shaoul

A report commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council states that Israel's “perpetual occupation” of Palestinian areas and its refusal to end it underpin the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis.

The authors insist that ending of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since their capture by Israel in the 1967 Arab Israeli war in full conformity with the UN’s Security Council resolutions is essential to end “the persistent cycle of violence.”

Israeli security forces take positions during clashes with Palestinians following a demonstration against Israel's annual nationalist march through Jerusalem, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sunday, May 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

The report, published June 7, is the first by a Commission of Inquiry headed by former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay and two other experts from India and Australia, set up last year following an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. That war killed at least 261 people, including 67 children, in Gaza, and 14 people, including two children, in Israel.

The Commission is the first to have an “ongoing” mandate from the UN human rights agency. This includes alleged human rights abuses before and after the war and the investigation of the “root causes” of the tensions.

The report states, “What has become a situation of perpetual occupation was cited by Palestinian and Israeli stakeholders to the commission as the one common issue” that amounts to the “underlying root cause” of recurrent tensions, instability and protracted conflict. The evidence convincingly indicates that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation. Instead, it is pursuing “clear policies for ensuring complete control” over the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem, and is taking steps to alter the demography through its creation of a repressive environment for the Palestinians and a favourable one for Israeli settlers.

The Commission says that Israel has failed to uphold international law and conventions relating to war and human rights and carry the UN’s previous recommendations. These include ending the occupation, ceasing settlement expansion, ending forced evictions, ceasing the policy of administrative detention, particularly of children, lifting the restriction of freedom of movement that fragment Palestinian society, including by lifting the blockade on Gaza, allowing Palestinians access to their natural resources, and eliminating laws and practices that discriminate against Palestinians, including road segregation for the exclusive use of the Israeli population.

The commission accuses Israel of affording “different civil status, rights and legal protection” for Palestinians living in Israel, noting that Israel operates a three-tier system of laws granting different rights to Jewish Israeli citizens, Palestinian citizens of Israel and East Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents. It cites Israel’s Nation-State of the Jewish People Law (2018) as effectively constituting racial discrimination by granting nationality rights only to its Jewish as opposed to Palestinian citizens and the recent renewal of a law that denies citizenship to Palestinians married to Israelis, calling for action to ensure equal human rights.

Last week, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s fragile coalition lost its razor-thin majority and was unable to secure the first reading of a bill renewing civilian legal rights for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political bloc had opposed it trying to bring down the government. If the bill does not pass by the end of this month, Israeli settlers will be formally placed, like the Palestinians, under military law and denied entry into Israel.

The report warns that “impunity” for perpetrators of violence is feeding resentment among Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. This is an implicit indictment of Washington and the major European powers that have built up Israel’s military and provided political and diplomatic support, particularly at the UN Security Council where the US has vetoed scores of resolutions condemning Israel’s actions. The commission will, it concludes, examine the responsibilities of “third States in ensuring respect for and full compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in Israel and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The report will be discussed at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next week, which has no power to make legally binding decisions.

Israel predictably dismissed the report. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it “a waste of money and effort” that amounted to a witch-hunt. Israel had boycotted the inquiry, accusing it of bias, and barred entry to its investigators.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price cynically reiterated the US’s opposition to the inquiry, saying the report does nothing to alleviate US concerns over “a one-sided, biased approach that does nothing to advance the prospects for peace.” The Trump administration pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 over what it described as its “chronic bias” against Israel, with the Biden administration only fully rejoining this year.

The world’s mainstream press has not seen fit to comment on the UN’s report, including those champions of human rights imperialist intervention the New York Times and the Guardian. Their silence underlines the hypocrisy of US/NATO claims to be defending “democracy” in Ukraine while they provide support for an apartheid and militarist regime in Israel.

The commission’s report comes as Bennett’s coalition government, made up of parties across the political spectrum including those ostensibly supporting a Palestinian statelet, is unleashing a torrent of repression against the Palestinians in the West Bank, including deliberate killings and injuries, arbitrary arrests, torture, persecution and collective punishment. Last Wednesday and Thursday, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians across the West Bank in just 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed this year to 62. Riot police and mounted units have injured hundreds of protesters and arrested hundreds more as they crack down on those protesting Israeli brutality and unbearable social conditions.

As far as Israel is concerned, no one is immune from its murderous activities. Last month, the Israeli military deliberately shot and killed Shireen Abu Akleh, the widely respected veteran Al Jazeera Arabic reporter, who was clearly visible and wearing a press identifier. According to Reporters Without Borders, this brings to 35 the number of journalists killed while working in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2000. Abu Akleh’s murder and the police’s attack on her funeral procession make clear that Israel will not tolerate the reporting of its brutal suppression of the Palestinians.

Bennett has issued orders to shoot Palestinians who pose no immediate threat and called for the formation of armed vigilante groups, based in part on civilian volunteers, including from the “New Hashomer” (The New Guardian), a far-right militia.

The silence of the imperialist powers confirms the cynicism of their use of “human rights” rhetoric to justify wars, military interventions, coups, regime change operations, referral to the International Criminal Court and sanctions against those who threaten their predatory interests.

The US and NATO have denounced Russia for “war crimes” in Ukraine and China for committing “crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uyghurs” based on unconfirmed or non-existent evidence. Washington’s support for Israel is bound up with Tel Aviv’s role as its attack dog against its rivals in the region and its own policy of normalising wars of conquest, occupation and repression. It signifies that the brutal methods used by Israel in suppressing the Palestinians will be used against the working class and youth that revolt against the ruling elites’ dictates putting the pursuit of corporate profit before human need.

Assange denounced as UK’s dictatorial National Security Bill passes second reading

Thomas Scripps

The British government is updating Official Secrets Act legislation with more sweeping and draconian provisions. On Monday, while attention was focused on the Conservative no-confidence vote in Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Priti Patel’s National Security Bill passed its second reading in Parliament.

Existing espionage offences under the Official Secrets Acts 1911, 1920 and 1939 are to be replaced with “a suite of new offences and accompanying powers”.

Home Secretary Priti Patel (left) and Prime Minster Boris Johnson (Credit: Hannah McKay Pool via AP)

The offence of “obtaining or disclosing protected information” is exceptionally broad. Protected information includes “any information… which either is, or could reasonably be expected to be, subject to any type of restrictions of access for protecting the safety and interests of the UK.” The “safety and interests of the UK” is summarised in the explanatory notes as “the objects of state policy determined by the Crown on the advice of Ministers.”

An offence is committed if a person “obtains, copies, records or retains protected information, or discloses or provides access to protected information” for a purpose “that they know, or ought reasonably to know, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom” and if “the foreign power condition is met”.

This condition applies if the act is deemed to have been “carried out for or on behalf of a foreign power,” including through “an indirect relationship”. The explanatory notes add, “A person may intend to benefit a foreign power even if their conduct is motivated by financial gain, or a desire to cause harm to the UK as a result of a grievance. Provided that the person is aware that their conduct will benefit the foreign power and chooses to engage in that conduct with this knowledge, the test will be met.”

The offence of “assisting a foreign intelligence service” is even more loosely defined. A person “commits an offence if they know or reasonably ought to know that conduct that they are engaged in is of a kind that it is reasonably possible may materially assist a foreign intelligence service in carrying out UK-related activities.”

A memorandum on the bill’s relation to the European Convention on Human Rights admits that another offence, “Unauthorised entry etc to a prohibited place”, could affect protest activity. It adds, “However, the Government considers that any interference with Article 11 (freedom of assembly) would be justified in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, or for the prevention of disorder or crime.”

Obtaining or disclosing protected information will carry a life sentence. Assisting a foreign intelligence service will carry 14 years and unauthorised entry to a prohibited place either six months in prison or a £5,000 fine.

This is a war propagandists’ charter, pushed through amid the NATO offensive against Russia, designed to criminalise protest at military sites and journalism exposing government lies used to prepare and justify military aggression. Monday’s debate on the National Security Bill was littered with references to the primary targets of world imperialism“Russia”, “the Kremlin”, “China” and the “Chinese Communist Party”. The bill would allow for a more ferocious crackdown on broadcasters in some way linked to foreign governments than has already been seen with the bans on channels like Russia Today (RT), and closures of thousands of YouTube and social media accounts.

The terms of the legislation are so broad as to catch anyone carrying out journalistic work inconvenient to the British state. The central figure in this new evisceration of democratic rights is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison awaiting Patel’s say so for extradition to the United States. He faces life imprisonment on charges under the Espionage Act for journalism exposing US war crimes, coup plots and human rights abuses and the complicity of the UK and other allies.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange greets supporters from a balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. [Credit: AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File]

Assange was spitefully referenced throughout the debate. Conservative MP and former justice secretary Sir Robert Buckland demanded a means of “ensuring that those such as Julian Assange who dump data in a way that has no regard for the safety of operatives and other affected people are still subject to criminal sanction,” adding later, “None of us wants to see Julian Assange and his type carry sway here.” Tory Privy Councillor Sir John Hayes denounced “a WikiLeaks-type disclosure dressed up as being by a guardian of liberty or some such other nonsense.”

Police powers set out by the National Security Bill are a legal codification of Assange’s decade of persecution by the UK. The home secretary is empowered to require an individual “to reside at or within a specified residence”, “remain wholly within the residence during the specified hours”, “impose restrictions on an individual entering specified areas or places”, restrict “the individual’s access to financial services”, prohibit “an individual from possessing or using electronic communications devices without permission, and impose conditions on the possession or use of any permitted devices” and to “impose restrictions on the individual’s association or communication with other persons.”

Any of these measures can be imposed for a year after seeking a court’s permission, but without the target being made aware of the application. If the government declares the case “urgent”, they can proceed before receiving the court’s permission. Measures can be renewed four times, up to a maximum of five years.

Recalling plans for the assassination or rendition of Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden, the bill grants immunity for crimes carried out abroad by UK agents provided they are deemed “necessary for the proper exercise of any function of the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service or GCHQ or the proper exercise of any function of the armed forces.”

The Labour Party gave full-throated support to Patel’s legislation. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper paid “tribute to those who work in our intelligence and security services”, declared that “defending national security would be at the very heart of a Labour Government” and stressed the party’s willingness to “work constructively with the government on our national security”.

Asked by Tory MP Theresa Villiers if she would “condemn the WikiLeaks-type mass dumping of information in the public domain,” Cooper replied, “Yes, I strongly do, because some of the examples of such leaks that we have seen put agents’ lives at risk, put vital parts of our national security and intelligence infrastructure at risk and are highly irresponsible.”

As far as Labour MPs raised criticisms, they were to say Patel had not gone far or fast enough. The current National Security Bill does not reform the Official Secrets Act 1989, though the government intends to do so. Its provisions are more directly relevant to Assange and WikiLeaks.

Labour’s Kevan Jones warned that if the 1989 Act is not changed, “we will have a situation where someone can get life for foreign espionage under this legislation, but only two years under the Official Secrets Act 1989.” Another of the “current problems” with the 1989 legislation is “the requirement to prove damage from unauthorised disclosures is in most cases a real barrier to prosecution”.

Minister for Security and Borders Damien Hinds hurried to reassure his colleague that under the National Security Bill “the maximum sentence for an indiscriminate disclosure—a bulk data dump—will be higher than it is today if that act is done for a foreign power or the disclosure would materially assist a foreign intelligence service, even if not procured by that foreign intelligence service itself.”

If necessary, the government plans to go further. In a consultation document published last summer, “Legislation to Counter State Threats”, the Home Office wrote that it “welcomes” a recommendation by the law commission to increase the maximum sentence for unauthorised disclosures as set out in the 1989 Act. It goes on, “we do not consider that there is necessarily a distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures.”

UK benefit agency to be given powers to search premises and arrest claimants

Dennis Moore

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is to be given sweeping surveillance and police powers, including the power to arrest benefit claimants, search premises, seize evidence and impose fines on those merely suspected of committing benefit fraud.

The measures were announced by Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey in the Conservative government White Paper, “Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System.”

Front page of the White Paper, "Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System" (Source: gov.uk)

While many in Britain are wondering how they will pay for soaring food and fuel bills, living hand to mouth, and even dependent on food banks, the government is proposing to spend £613 million over three years in its offensive against the poor.

The White Paper’s Ministerial Foreword by Coffey and David Rutley, the Minister for Welfare Delivery states, “We plan to modernise and strengthen our powers. Subject to parliamentary time, we will legislate for new powers to help our officers investigate potential fraud and apply new penalties to punish fraudsters.”

The minister’s pledge to bring “together the full force of government and the expertise of the private sector, working with the new Public Sector Fraud Authority announced by the Chancellor at the Spring Statement.”

The proposals include employing an extra 1,400 front line staff in counter fraud teams, who will conduct more compliance interviews, investigations and enhanced checking of benefit claims. There will be an additional new 2,000 strong team set up to carry out targeted case reviews of existing Universal Credit claimants, including checking entitlement to benefit and a claimants’ personal circumstances.

The DWP will be given increased powers to investigate third party data, including accessing details of a claimant’s bank account and other data that might include what financial transactions have taken place in their accounts. At present the DWP are only allowed to access data from specific named organisations set out in legislation, including financial institutions, childcare providers, utility companies, credit reference providers and landlords. This list is to be widened to include any information holder the DWP believes could hold information to prove or disprove a fraud allegation.

At present the DWP are only able to investigate potential fraud that has taken place in relation to some benefit payments and not others, such as grants. This is to be extended to all DWP payments.

The information gathering powers the DWP currently use are outlined in the Social Security and Administration Act 1992, and can only be used by specially trained officers based on an ongoing criminal investigation. The government proposes that the DWP will have the power to investigate a claimants claim to benefit without having to first commence criminal proceedings, amounting to an investigation based on suspicion alone.

The government plan to give specific officers working for the DWP the power to arrest and apply to search and seize evidence in criminal investigations where they suspect fraud. At present the DWP carry out investigations into a claimant that is suspected of fraud, but it has been the police who will arrest someone.

The DWP are looking to completely overhaul the present system of civil penalties. These currently range from a flat rate fine for giving incorrect information through to criminal prosecution. The new system proposes to include a financial penalty that will be a percentage of the overpayment incurred. The new penalty will not be offered to the claimant as an alternative to prosecution but will be imposed on claimants that the DWP do not prosecute.

This will be based on meeting a civil burden of proof, sitting below criminal fraud, but above error, and will be applied to cases that have been fully investigated to a criminal standard but for whatever reason have not made it to the courts. Allowing the DWP to impose a financial penalty against a claimant in a case that has not made it to court does not allow them to establish their innocence. These penalties will be imposed while at the same time expecting the claimant to repay the benefit back the DWP believe has been defrauded.

The overall amount of benefit fraud is tiny in comparison to the DWP’s budget. The figures for the year 2020/21 show that total DWP spend was £211 billion, of which just 3 percent was fraud. This included fraud that was carried out by organised criminals. A May 2020 ITN News report showed that the DWP prevented £1.9 billion of fraud carried out by organised criminals, with data from the DWP showing that this involved 152,000 claims that had nothing to do with individual claimants.

To justify the investment of £613 million in counter fraud, the claim is made that this will stop an estimated £2 billion losses in fraud and error over the next three years and over £4 billion of loss over the next five years.

This is in stark contrast to the estimated amount of welfare benefit unclaimed by those who have an underlying entitlement. Figures published in the annual review by Entitled To, an organisation providing online benefit calculators to encourage take up rates for benefits, estimate that there is £15 billion of benefits unclaimed each year.

The foreword to the White Paper is an indictment of this rotten government, stating “Anyone who has been a personal victim of fraud will know first-hand how damaging the financial emotional impact can be”.

Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey (left) at an OECD Ministerial meeting on employment and labour markets, June 2022 (Credit: DWP Press Office/Twitter)

Yes. The entire population are victims of fraud and corruption on a gigantic scale. The Johnson government handed out tens of billions of pounds in contracts throughout the pandemic, including many to their cronies. The April 2021 TI-UK report, “Track and Trace”, showed that £18 billion of contracts awarded between February and November 2020 included one in five that raised “red flags” for possible corruption. This included 73 flagged contracts worth £3.7 billion, accounting for 20 percent of all reported pandemic related contracts.

Safeguards that had been put in place to prevent corruption were removed without adequate justification. The report included a particular area of concern, the “VIP channel” later renamed the “high priority lane”. This was aimed at “triaging” the government’s emergency response by circumventing normal tendering procedures, allowing the selection of personal protective equipment (PPE) bids based on referrals from “MPs, peers and senior officials”.

The government propose to hunt down benefit claimants, but those who have defrauded the tax system on a vast scale continue to get away with their crimes. The Guardian reported last year that tax lost due to non-payment, fraud and avoidance increased to £35 billion according to official figures. Even according to figures from Her Majesty's Revenues and Customs (HMRC), tax lost to fraud amounted to at least £15.2 billion, but campaigners estimate that billions of pounds more were likely to have been shifted away from the UK to tax havens by multinational companies

The government proposes these attacks, to be overseen by authoritarian means, while decimating millions of people’s lives due to the spiraling cost of living. Many of those being investigated were plunged further into poverty last October, when the government removed the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit put in place during the pandemic. The uplift was a lifeline worth over £1,000 annually to six million people, many of them the working poor. It was the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the welfare state began more than 70 years ago. Just this single cut will plunge an estimated 800,000 people into poverty.

On IMF orders, Pakistan’s government imposes massive price hikes ahead of crisis budget

Sampath Perera

At the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Pakistan’s grand coalition government has increased prices for electricity, natural gas and petrol by a shocking 47 percent, 45 percent, and 40 percent, respectively.

The coalition, which is led by the rival Muslim League (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), assumed power in April amid a deepening socioeconomic crisis in the poverty-stricken country. It is committed to imposing brutal austerity measures in order to convince the IMF to lift the suspension it has placed on Islamabad’s loan disbursements and negotiate a further multibillion-dollar emergency loan.

The devastating price increases were imposed in two rounds over the past two weeks by withdrawing energy price subsidies. In addition to the direct increase for energy and fuel, the price rises will cascade throughout the economy, triggering a further acceleration of inflation, including food prices.

Even before the pandemic and the price-shocks caused by it and the US-NATO war in Russia, Pakistan had among the highest child malnutrition rates among so-called developing countries. According to a National Nutrition Survey from the last decade, nearly 44 percent of all Pakistani children are stunted and 15 percent are wasted. ( Borgen Project)

All indications are that further attacks in the form of tax increases, subsidy cuts, and the sell-off of public enterprises will be included in the federal budget for the 2022–2023 financial year, which starts July 1. The budget is to be announced on Friday, June 10.

In May, Pakistan’s grossly understated year-to-year official inflation rate was 13.76 percent. The Express Tribune, which questioned the “glaring contradiction” in official data in a June 4 article, quoted Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, who termed the official figures “false.” He estimated that the real annual inflation rate is as high as 38.17 percent, and that prices are currently increasing at a “staggering” 7 percent per month.

The immediate aim of the government, led by prime minister and PML-N leader Shehbaz Sharif, is to win IMF approval. In early March, the IMF suspended the release of the remaining $3 billion of a previously agreed-upon loan after the former prime minister, Imran Khan, announced he was reinstituting government subsidies for energy. The loan suspension has also effectively blocked Pakistan’s ability to raise funds from international lenders.

Despite Khan’s rhetoric prior to coming power about creating an “Islamic welfare” state, he is a staunch advocate of the pro-investor, anti-working-class reforms advocated by the IMF. During his first two years in office, his government implemented two rounds of some of the “toughest” IMF-dictated austerity measures and “structural reforms” in Pakistan’s history. Then, to persuade the IMF to release a further loan tranche, his government signed on to a new raft of right-wing measures in January, including curtailing and eliminating price subsidies.

After presiding over the wholesale destruction of jobs through privatization and other “restructuring” measures, Khan all but abandoned tens of millions to fend for themselves during successive COVID-19-pandemic–triggered economic shocks. His government covered up the true scale of the virus’s spread and the death toll. While Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, has officially recorded only 31,300 COVID deaths, estimates based on excess mortality put the true figure at 700,000 or more.

Khan’s sole aim in restoring energy subsidies was to prevent the mounting popular anger against the policies of his Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government from exploding, amid a fresh surge in global oil and food prices, fueled by the US-instigated Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The PML-N and PPP are no strangers to imposing socially regressive policies and have repeatedly worked with the IMF during their turns in government. In his inaugural address as prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif promised a “paradise” for investment, which means ever-closer alignment with the hated “pro-market” policies demanded by the IMF.

Pakistan’s ruling elite pushed hard for the new government to impose the massive electricity, natural gas and petrol increases, which removed a major obstacle to reviving cooperation with the IMF. But there is an evident sense of fear in Islamabad, because the political establishment is well aware of the price hikes’ socially explosive character.

The IMF, for its part, has made clear that the removal of Khan’s subsidies is only a first step. The government has reportedly been attempting to negotiate the percentage of the deficit it must eliminate in the budget to secure IMF support. The continuing “uncertainty” over an IMF–government agreement led Moody’s to recently downgrade Pakistan’s economic outlook to “negative” from “stable.” Earlier this week, the rupee hit an all-time low of 203.45 rupees per US dollar.

Speaking to Bloomberg in late May, Pakistan Finance Minister Miftah Ismail acknowledged that Islamabad’s allies, including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and China, rejected requests for emergency financial support. “All roads lead to the IMF,” Ismail said, adding that “all of them say we need to go to the IMF first.” According to reports, a loan or restructuring of an existing loan facility worth $2.3 billion by Pakistan’s “all-weather ally” China has yet to be finalized.

In the meantime, the country’s foreign reserves declined to $9.7 billion last week, roughly enough to pay for another six weeks of imports. Ismail told the press that Pakistan will have to raise a staggering $41 billion in the next 12 months from external lenders. According to a June 7 Dawn report, more than half of this, some $21 billion, will simply go to debt repayments. Nevertheless, Ismail said he was “very, very confident” the government will “soon have an agreement with the IMF.”

If Ismail is confident, it is because his government’s determination to comply with the IMF is essentially endorsed by the entire ruling elite. This includes the military, which wields immense power in Pakistani politics and greenlighted Khan’s ouster in April, because they feared he was too unpopular to push through more draconian IMF measures and had drifted too far from Washington. The upcoming budget reportedly includes a 6 percent increase in military spending, even as ever-greater numbers of ordinary people are pushed into hunger and starvation.

This week, the government also withdrew its decision, announced with much fanfare shortly after it took the reins of power, to extend the workweek for government workers to six days. To save fuel, the workweek will revert to five days. Amid sweltering heat, in some places as high as 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, government-imposed power cuts last four to six hours in urban areas and over eight hours elsewhere.

The country’s establishment media acknowledges the “hardship” that will befall the masses but insists there is no alternative to going to the US-dominated IMF and implementing its diktats. Media outlets argue that the measures proposed by the government are “tough” but “necessary decisions” to prevent a crisis on the scale of that now roiling Sri Lanka. Since the 1950s, the crisis-ridden state of Pakistan’s immensely wealthy ruling elite has drawn IMF loans 22 times, while Sri Lanka has done so 16 times.

Hit by a massive balance-of-payments crisis, the Sri Lankan government recently defaulted on its foreign debt. Shortages and skyrocketing prices of essentials and hours-long power outages have provoked weeks of nationwide protests against the government, with the working class increasingly coming to the fore as the decisive oppositional force in a series of general strikes.

What concerns Pakistan’s capitalist elite and its media mouthpieces is not that the financial ruin, poverty and hunger now being experienced by Sri Lanka’s workers and toilers will soon be inflicted on their Pakistani class brothers and sisters. Rather, the Islamabad establishment is fearful that the mass anger that has erupted in Sri Lanka, and has increasingly taken the form of a political movement against the capitalist ruling elite as a whole, will be replicated in Pakistan.

Dawn, Pakistan’s most influential English-language daily, nervously opined in a June 6 editorial titled “No more perks”: “It is time for a reckoning. The tinderbox of public discontent demands nothing less.” The editorial urged the government to “impose highly visible, across-the-board austerity measures on the ruling elite immediately,” insisting no half-measures will suffice.

Such “equality of sacrifice” would of course amount to nothing more than a charade, with any tax increases on the rich at most causing them to put off one or another luxury purchase, while ordinary Pakistanis are increasingly forced to go without one or more meals on a daily basis.

According to press reports, the government intends to allot 28 billion rupees (US$135 million) per month to “protect the poor from the burden of petrol and diesel price hikes.” Even if this materializes, it will be a drop in the ocean. Each of Pakistan’s poorest 14 million families, encompassing 85 million people, would receive 2,000 rupees (US$9.89) per family per month or 329 rupees (US$1.63) per person. By comparison, 10 kilograms of wheat costs over 700 rupees, while a liter of petrol costs 209.86 rupees.

Factory and health care workers strike, protest in Russia and Georgia

Andrea Peters

The entire shopfloor at the Urals Compressor Factory (UKZ) in Yekaterinburg, Russia, walked off the job on Tuesday in protest against the failure of the company’s owners to pay them several months’ worth of salary. The plant’s 316 employees, who make parts for medical and military equipment, are owed in total 13.4 million rubles—about $233,000—in outstanding wages.

The strike is just the latest action taken by workers in the assembly, foundry, heat treatment, tool and mechanical sections at the enterprise, which since October 2021 has repeatedly failed to pay salaries. In March 2022, workers laid down their tools and then again in May 2022, resuming work only after UKZ promised to give them their pay, as ordered by the local prosecutor. They have gotten nothing, however, for two months, apart from 1,000 rubles last week out of 100,000 they were supposed to receive.

We don’t have enough money to even get to work,” one worker told the press. “You can’t even get on a bus for a ruble.”

The plant, which has holes in the roof, is evidently falling apart. In a video posted on the Telegram social media channel Ural Mash, one can see piles of rubble on the factory floor. “You get refreshing drops of rain on your head,” one worker reported.

The company claims it is owed millions by customers and is saddled with massive debts, having failed to pay its taxes and for supplies. Workers report a steep fall in production, with daily output recently dropping to just two units a day from 60.

But UKZ’s insistence that it suddenly does not have the means to pay its employees just because of poor market conditions and government taxes is unconvincing. “I worked there,” wrote one person on Telegram. “The suits looted it and this is the sad result.” “Let the epaulets [an ornamental decoration pinned to the uniform of a high-ranking person] dig into them. Then they’ll find the salaries, the [money for] the utility bills and everything else,” said another. Referring to the wholesale theft of publicly-owned industry by the newly-emerging rich in the 1990s, one worker declared, “It’s time to take back the plants and factories.”

The strike in Yekaterinburg follows walkouts and slowdowns in April and May by sanitation workers in Novosibirsk, doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians in Bashkortostan, taxi and delivery drivers in Tver and Moscow, and poultry workers in Sakhalin.

In the former Soviet country Georgia, which borders Russia to the southwest, workers at a mineral water bottling company are also on strike. They too have not been paid for two months. The entire 800-person workforce at two Bojomi plants walked off the job on May 31, demanding payment of back wages, a 25 percent wage increase, a collective bargaining agreement, an end to what workers describe as “blackmail and threats of layoff” for those who criticize the company, and the reinstatement of 50 personnel previously laid off for protesting.

On Tuesday, laborers threw eggs at police cars that sought to bring strikebreakers into the plant. Workers say the company is offering their jobs to Georgians from other parts of the country, as well as Ukrainians and Russians, attempting to attract them with promises of a salary that is three to four times what they currently pay in order to break the strike.

The day before the conflict with police broke out at Bojomi’s factory gates, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that the government would be buying a majority stake in the concern, taking over ownership of the company from the Russian-based Alfa Group, whose head, Mikhail Fridman, is under anti-Russian sanctions, the immediate cause of the financial crisis at the company.

Georgia’s head of state insisted that it would ensure the end of “the suffering and oppression” at Bojomi, a dubious promise given that Georgia’s average monthly salary is $356 a month, more than 20 percent of its population lives in poverty, and its major industries, such as mining, are well known for being death traps.

In the country’s capital on Tuesday, medical workers protested against terrible working conditions and low wages. Senior emergency personnel make about $61 a shift, junior staff about $48, and drivers just $36. Doctors, nurses and ambulance teams are demanding a 100 percent wage increase and the reinstatement of a monthly bonus, about $180, that had been stripped from them because the government in Tbilisi recently declared the COVID-19 crisis to be over, terminated all public health measures, and ended all extra payments for health care employees. Workers insist, however, that the number of emergency calls has not decreased.

Refusing to increase wages, the Georgian Ministry of Health is instead proposing that emergency health care employees’ hours be changed such that they work 12-hour days, as opposed to 24-hour days spaced 3 days apart—in other words, that they trade one misery for another.

Discontent among workers is widespread throughout the former Soviet sphere. Over the last seven months, thousands of health care employees, taxi drivers, railway, fertilizer plant, oil and agricultural workers have protested and gone on strike in countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Conditions are only worsening due to the US/NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. Whatever claims the governments of these states, particularly the Baltic countries, make about the willingness of their people to sacrifice to wage war against Moscow, millions of workers cannot and will not accept the ruin of their livelihoods so that Russia can be carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey and handed out to the rich.

Russia too is facing a growing jobs crisis, despite the Kremlin’s insistence that the unemployment rate is the lowest ever. The country’s Central Bank just acknowledged Wednesday that job vacancies have been declining for the past several months, with March showing 17 percent fewer available positions compared to the previous month. HeadHunter, a labor market analysis firm, reported the next day that one-third of Russia’s workers are fearful they will lose their jobs.

Layoffs continue to be announced at industrial enterprises across Russia. Volkswagen is trying to dismiss hundreds of employees at its plant in Nizhni Novgorod by offering them six wage payments if they voluntarily leave. In Tikhvin in Leningrad Oblast, a car plant and an IKEA facility employing 7000 people will close. The Barnaul Machine Tool Plant in Altai is going to let go 500 workers, more than previously planned. In Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region, 1,200 workers at the residential construction company Sibpromstroi will lose their jobs.

Airport strikes hit Paris and spread across Europe

Alex Lantier

A one-day strike yesterday by ground crew and firemen at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris forced the cancellation of one-quarter of flights through the airport, one of Europe’s largest. Workers were demanding a €300 monthly raise amid spiraling increases in the cost of living in France and internationally.

They also demanded more staff, as layoffs during the pandemic have left airports unable to deal with the current surge in air travel. The Workers Force (FO) union estimated that 15,000 airport workers lost their jobs in the last two years, leaving the remaining “workers under pressure.” The Airports of Paris (ADP) authority is currently looking to fill 4,000 positions.

Sylvia, a security screener at Charles de Gaulle Airport, told reporters: “All of us struggle to make it to the end of the month; all of us have debts we need to make payments on.” She noted that security staff make “only a few euros above the minimum wage.”

Strikes also took place at smaller regional airports in France. Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union officials at Carcassonne Airport explained its one-day strike on June 8, telling L’Indépendant: “We want our tasks to correspond really to what we were hired to do. Each time staff levels fall, management gives workers tasks not in their contracts. ... Management is making no concessions. The director said he will announce something on June 17.”

Airport strikes in France are part of an escalating wave of struggles across Europe and internationally by airport and airline workers, a powerful section of the working class that can rapidly shut down broad sections of the world economy.

The day before the strike in France, airline and air traffic controllers in Italy walked out at airports across the country. Some 68 flights in Milan Malpensa, 40 in Milan Bergamo, and 15 each in Linate and Turin were canceled as air traffic controllers and workers at Alitalia, RyanAir, EasyJet, Volotea and other airlines went on strike over pay and working conditions. Controllers strikes downed operations at Milan, Turin, Verona, Genoa, Cuneo, Bologna and Parma airports.

Italian union officials told the Corriere della Sera that the airline workers strike was against “violation of minimum wage rules set by the national contract, continuing depressed wage levels, arbitrary reductions in pay, non-payment of sick days, the corporation’s refusal to give mandatory vacation days during the summer season, and the lack of water and meals for staff.”

RyanAir broke off contract negotiations on June 8 in Spain, where dozens of airports could go on strike; it also faces threats of strikes in Italy, Portugal, France and Belgium.

Beyond Italy and France, airport strikes have spread across much of Europe in recent weeks, as airlines have massively overbooked passengers to try to recoup profits lost in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when few passengers were traveling. This intensifies infection risks , as a new wave of COVID-19 starts across Europe, and governments abandon all public health measures against contagion. All this creates impossible working conditions for airport and airline workers.

Last month, International Air Transport Association (IATA) Director Willie Walsh insisted that air traffic would return to pre-pandemic figures by 2023, despite staff shortages and renewed waves of infection.

“We’re seeing very strong bookings. Certainly all the airline CEOs that I’m talking to are seeing not just good demand for year-end travel, but they continue to see demand as they looked through the year,” Walsh said. He shrugged off warnings about high oil prices and strikes, insisting that the focus should be on profits. “I don’t think we should be distracted from the fact that we are seeing a strong recovery,” he told the Irish Independent.

This ruthless search for profits at workers’ expense has provoked a wave of strikes across Europe that could intensify over the summer.

In April, Polish air traffic controllers defeated a threat of mass sackings, walking off the job to overwhelmingly reject government demands for a wage cut of up to 70 percent. The Polish government was stunned by the threat of a total shutdown of air traffic in a country centrally located for the NATO war against Russia. It decided to bide its time, temporarily withdrew its wage cut demand and used the services of the ZZKRL controllers union to end the strike.

At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, baggage handlers and security personnel could go back on strike during the summer after Dutch unions shut down their strikes in April and May. Dutch union official Joost van Doesburg admitted that workers are still overwhelmed with work and angry: “Something big has to happen. I am shocked, and the members are frustrated. It is completely out of control. Staff members are literally falling over.”

This week, balloting began among workers at London’s Heathrow Airport on whether to strike this summer. Unions for ground staff at the airport agreed to a 10 percent pay cut during the pandemic, which they justified citing the fall in the number of passengers. But management has since reinstated its normal bloated salaries while continuing to freeze workers’ wages despite the global surge in inflation. The vote result is expected on June 23.

On June 8, Lufthansa announced the cancellation of 900 flights in July, issuing a statement that declared: “The entire air industry, especially in Europe, is currently suffering from bottlenecks and staff shortages. This affects airport, passenger assistance, air traffic control, and airline staff.” Frankfurt Airport, Lufthansa’s central hub, has warned that staff shortages could lead to major delays in what is Germany’s largest airport.

This followed a one-day strike in March by German airport security screeners that shut down all departures from Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, Stuttgart, Cologne/Bonn and Düsseldorf airports. While unions ended the action, none of the workers’ underlying grievances have been addressed.

The key question facing airport workers is the need to unify their struggles internationally and break free of the debilitating, national framework imposed by union bureaucracies that work closely with management and capitalist governments and seek to defeat their own members. For this, workers need to build rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to coordinate and lead their actions.

The various national unions are utterly bankrupt. They divide the working class along national lines and sell out each strike piecemeal. In this way, explosive social opposition is bottled up, suppressed and subordinated to the unions’ maneuvers with capitalist governments.

A unified European strike of airline workers and air traffic controllers could shut down much of the continent’s economy and demonstrate the vast social power of the working class. It could not only impose improved working conditions and wages, but set off a movement in the broader working class against the problems of imperialist war, the criminal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and social inequality and the surging cost of living.

Financial house of cards becoming increasingly shaky

Nick Beams

There are a growing number of indications that global financial markets could be hit with a storm potentially as serious as the March 2020 meltdown at the start of the pandemic.

A sign for a Wall Street building, Wednesday, May 19, 2021, in New York (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Since that crisis, when the $23 trillion US Treasury market, the basis of the global financial system imploded, markets have been sustained by the trillions of dollars pumped in by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks on top of the quantitative easing measures developed after the 2008 global financial crisis.

But now central banks are reversing course, lifting interest rates and seeking to wind back their asset holdings in response to four-decade high inflation in a bid to clampdown on workers’ wage demands.

The most immediate sign of growing stress is the loss of liquidity in key areas of the financial system. Markets are deemed to be liquid when relatively small transactions only provoke a very small response. Conversely, an illiquid market is one in which a minor transaction can set off large movements leading to rapid, and unexpected, changes in financial conditions.

A report in the Financial Times (FT) this week drew attention to the worsening liquidity conditions.

“Liquidity across US markets,” it said, “is now at its worst level since the early days of the pandemic in 2020, according to investors and big US banks who say money managers are struggling to execute trades without affecting prices.”

It cited one investment officer at a financial firm who said bluntly: “Liquidity is terrible.”

Minutes from the latest policy meeting of the US Fed show that officials “were concerned with the problems being created in the Treasury and commodities market by weak liquidity,” the article said.

According to a Bloomberg index, the health of the US Treasury market is at its worst level since the March 2020 meltdown.

The FT report also cited findings from the major US bank JPMorgan Chase which warned that “liquidity recently started declining again, and market depth over the last three months is now the lowest since March 2020.”

An example of the kind of violent movement which can occur took place last month when the two US retail giants, Walmart and Target, saw a combined total of $71 billion wiped off their share market valuation in just two days—the biggest plunge since the Wall Street crash of October 1987—when they reported that rising costs were affecting their bottom line.

The rapid rise in global inflation, especially energy, is a key factor in the growing instability. The head of the commodities trading firm Jeremy Weir warned at a conference this week that the oil market could enter “parabolic state.” That is, their rise would resemble the right-side of a U-shaped graph.

He warned that oil prices could rise to as much as $150 a barrel. This echoed remarks made earlier this month by JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon that the US economy and its financial system were facing a “hurricane” and the oil price could rise to $150 or even $175 a barrel, up from its already high level of around $120.

Weir warned that price hikes of this magnitude would bring about a recession.

“If we see very high energy prices for a period of time we will eventually see demand destruction. It will be problematic to sustain these levels of and continue global growth,” he said.

Another source of instability is the shift in monetary policy by the European Central Bank. The ECB will raise its base interest rate from its present negative level by 0.25 percentage points in July and again in September by at least the same amount. But the ECB’s policy statement, issued after its meeting yesterday, said “a larger increment will be appropriate at the September meeting” if inflation persists or worsens.

The euro zone is facing a period of much lower growth and a recession as a result of the continuing effects of the pandemic and the sanctions it has imposed on Russian energy supplies. Under so-called “normal” conditions, this would indicate that a loosening of monetary policies to provide a stimulus to the economy.

But that is no longer possible with inflation in the euro zone now running at 8 percent and expected to go higher.

The lift in interest rates threatens to widen the gap between the yields on the bonds of the stronger northern European economies, Germany and the Netherlands, and those of the more indebted south, Italy and Spain.

The widening of this gap, coupled with a banking crisis, threatened the very existence of the euro as a single currency in 2012, which led to the then ECB President Mario Draghi pledging to do “whatever it takes” in order to stabilise the financial system.

The effect of the withdrawal by the ECB from its bond-buying program in July is another area of concern.

At the end of May, the ECB owned €341 billion worth of company debt, having increased its holdings by almost €140 billion since March 2020.

The dependence of the corporate bond market on the ECB was highlighted in remarks by Barnaby Martin, the head of European credit strategy at Bank of America, to the FT.

“The ECB became not just the buyer of last resort but the buyer of first resort. The sheer volume they were buying was enormous,” he said. The question is what will be the market reaction to the withdrawal of this support which starts next month.

Under the policy of quantitative easing major hedge funds were raking in billions of dollars hand over fist because of the availability of ultra-cheap money. But the major investment fund Bridgewater is now anticipating a sell-off in corporate bonds that will not be short lived.

“We’re in a radically different world,” one the company’s chief investment officers told the FT. If the Fed was committed to bringing down inflation to 2 percent “they may tighten in a very strong way, which would then probably crack the economy and probably crack the weaker [companies] in the economy.”

The growing instability in financial markets, rampant inflation and the threat of recession underline the essential meaning of the political economy of the past decade and a half. All the measures undertaken by the central banks to try to avert an economic and financial breakdown have only created the conditions for ever-deeper crises.

Air travel chaos deepens as airlines pursue profits at expense of jobs and living standards

Robert Stevens

Workers across Europe have responded with industrial action and strike ballots to an onslaught on their jobs, wages and conditions by the airline industry.

Profit gouging by the aviation industry has led to a catastrophic situation of queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports across the continent, with hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded and with many losing thousands of euros and pounds.

People queue to enter Dublin airport [Photo by @twigthewonder/Twitter]

This week, ground crew and firefighters struck at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and at several smaller airports in France. Italian air traffic controllers and workers at budget airlines have held four-hour stoppages. In the spring, airline workers struck in Poland and at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport third-busiest in Europe.

More strikes are being prepared, including at London’s main Heathrow Airport and at Scandinavian carrier SAS AB across Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

The European airline crisis afflicting millions is entirely due to the rush by the ruling elite to recklessly end public health measures under conditions in which, to shore up their profits and stock market valuations, they had already decimated the infrastructure of the industry during the pandemic.

Under conditions in which airline traffic is back to 95 percent of what it was pre-COVID, many airlines and airports cannot function since the vast majority of almost 200,000 European aviation staff made redundant over the past two years have not been replaced. This is just the tip of a global iceberg. The Financial Times reported this week, “According to research by consultancy Oxford Economics, compared with pre-Covid levels, there were 2.3mn fewer jobs in the aviation industry by September 2021. These figures include a 29 percent fall in contracted staff at airports, such as ground-handlers, where 1.7mn jobs were lost.”

The Euronews website cited Aéroport de Paris Chief executive Augustin de Romanet who “estimated that Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport and nearby Orly airport had a combined workforce shortage of 4,000 employees.”

It is now common at the UK’s main airports to see queues of people overflowing outside terminals. For many this is just the start of what they describe as an “inhumane” experience, producing distressing scenes. Many waiting to board what are in effect flying COVID-incubation tubes have been forced to sleep in terminals across the continent, with no support from the airlines. The BBC reported that one man, a diabetic who takes lifesaving medication related to a triple heart-bypass, was left abandoned in Amsterdam for three days. He said he had been “thrown under a bus” by EasyJet, with the airline cancelling two flights at short notice.

People queue for security checks at Copenhagen Airport. June 8, 2022. (Credit: Gareth Herincx/Twitter)

Nothing works at the airports, where staff shortages are acute including at security checks. Training and vetting new staff to replace those let go during the pandemic takes around three months.

Arriving at destinations, passengers have been forced to wait for hours to collect their luggage. Footage posted last week showed passengers at Manchester Airport climbing through a baggage carousel curtain in an attempt to retrieve stranded luggage.

The person filming the scenes told the Manchester Evening News, “I do not think that anyone got their bags, but I don’t know, and the police came armed. They were closing shutters and walking around making the point. People were just trying to get their own bags back.”

A passenger told the newspaper, “At first, when we landed, we had to wait for the steps to get off the flight because there was no people around to do that apparently.” After getting through passport control, “we went to the baggage reclaim hall. There were hundreds of people there and luggage everywhere on the floor. Some of it was dated from May 27—It had been there for three days.”

One of Manchester Airport’s main baggage handlers is Swissport, which operates at 285 airports globally. In a cost-cutting operation, it shed 20,000 of its 65,000 strong workforce during the pandemic. In June 2020, Swissport announced it would lay off 4,500 staff in Britain, 53 percent of its entire national workforce. Six months later, with the collaboration of the trade unions, it had pushed through almost 3,200 job cuts. Only now, well into the holiday season, the same firm declares its plan to recruit another 30,000 workers to deal with its self-created mess.

Airlines are responding to the crisis by demanding even more from their workforce. József Váradi, chief executive of Wizz Air, the Hungarian-based budget airline, responded to reports of his staff’s crippling fatigue by insisting they get over it. This includes pilots who are responsible for the safety of thousands of people. The Financial Times reported that Váradi issued an internal video briefing on staff shortages forcing cancellations of Wizz flights in which he warned, “We cannot run this business when every fifth person on a base reports sickness because the person is fatigued. We are all fatigued, but sometimes it is required to take the extra mile.”

Airlines have massively overbooked flights to try to recoup profits lost during the first two years of the COVID pandemic. One can only imagine the horrors that could result from such a policy, as drained staff, who cannot cope as it is, fight a losing battle to deal with overwhelming numbers of passengers.

The situation will only worsen, with the inews site citing comments from the easyJet branch of the French SNPL pilots’ union warning the airline that without extra staff being recruited their “mental health is at stake”. SNPL declared, “Literally hundreds of employees in distress have fed back how chaotic our operations have become recently, to unprecedented levels… We are actually convinced that our disruption hasn’t even peaked yet and frankly this is a frightening prospect.”

According to the FT, “during the peak months between July and September it [Wizz Air] would fly 40 percent more than in 2019.” All that counts is the bottom line with Váradi salivating, “Summer is going to be profitable, but we will [have to wait and] see how profitable it will be”.

The chaotic and criminal herding together of millions of people at dysfunctional airports who have ditched every safety measure—under conditions in which not only is the pandemic not over, but even more virulent COVID strains are in circulation—will lead to yet more death and long-term illness. In Britain COVID rates have shot up as the summer holiday season has got underway. In the week ending June 2, according to the Office for National Statistics, around 990,000 people had COVID (1.5 percent of the population). This represents around one in 65 people, up from about one in 70 the week before. The surge is being driven by Omicronvariants BA.4 and BA.5.