US Supreme Court authorizes indefinite detention of immigrants and immunizes Border Patrol agents from brutality claims

John Andrews

In a pair of related cases decided June 13, the US Supreme Court upheld the challenge by Biden administration lawyers to three lower court rulings that entitled non-citizens to request a bail hearing while waiting for their objections to deportation to be resolved.

Immigrant families held in overcrowded Border Patrol detention center in McAllen, Texas [Credit: OIG]

Because of these reactionary rulings, thousands of immigrants who pose no danger and no risk of flight, and who are asserting valid legal claims to remain in the United States, will remain jailed under medieval conditions as their cases wind through the backlogged and indifferent immigration courts.

In a third case decided on June 8, Border Patrol agents, perhaps the most thuggish of all federal law enforcement officers, were granted broad immunity from constitutionally based lawsuits for excessive force brought by US citizens.

Antonio Arteaga-Martinez was arrested in 2018 after six years in the United States while awaiting the birth of his first child because he entered without documents. An asylum official found credible Arteaga-Martinez’s claim that he would face persecution and torture if deported to Mexico. Arteaga-Martinez sought to be reunited with his family while his petition for a “withholding of removal” order worked its way through the immigration courts, followed by the inevitable appeals.

Writing for eight of the nine justices, the leading “liberal,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reversed the lower court ruling requiring the federal government to provide a bail hearing within six months, at which an immigration judge could consider traditional criteria for releasing someone in exchange for the posting of a cash bond, such as danger to the public or risk of flight. 

Sotomayor, indifferent to the devastating impact that indefinite imprisonment for immigration violations has on working families, based her decision on a pedantic, result-driven reading of the governing statute, which, she  added, could be changed. Sotomayor left open the option that Arteaga-Martinez could present a constitutional challenge on remand to the lower court.

Stephen Breyer dissented, writing that a 2001 case, Zadvydas v. Davis, resolved the issue, preventing the government from detaining immigrants indefinitely. If deportation was not likely in the “reasonably foreseeable future,” immigrants must be released absent some good reason to detain them, Breyer wrote. Arch-reactionary Clarence Thomas agreed that Zadvydas was controlling, but instead urged that the earlier decision be overruled.

The second case, Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, involved two class actions filed on behalf of non-citizens jailed for more than six months. Both lower courts issued class-wide injunctions ordering bail hearings on the grounds that due process rights were being violated.

Reactionary Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, did not just rule that the lower courts were wrong, but that the detainees had no right to bring the lawsuit in the first place. He wrote that federal law “generally prohibits lower courts from entering injunctions that order federal officials to take or to refrain from taking actions to enforce, implement, or otherwise carry out specified statutory provisions.”

Despite her simultaneous ruling against the statutory right to bail hearings, Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Breyer, on the grounds that Alito’s ruling made it impossible for people to band together in challenging government misconduct that could not be challenged individually. She wrote that the ruling will “leave many vulnerable noncitizens unable to protect their rights.”

These reactionary rulings occurred against the background of a surge in arrests along the Mexican border. US Customs and Border Protection announced there were 239,416 arrests in May alone, a pace of nearly three million detentions annually. The mass arrests are fueled in large part by the Biden administration’s failure to terminate the unconstitutional Title 42 summary exclusion policy, instituted by the Trump administration, which effectively abolishes the right to asylum on the southern border of the United States.

In last week’s case, Egbert v. Boule, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the right-wing majority, ruled against Robert Boule, a US citizen who runs the “Smuggler’s Inn,” a bed-and-breakfast that abuts the Canadian border.

Boule was a paid government informant who found himself at odds with Erik Egbert, a local Border Patrol agent. While arguing over a Turkish guest legally in the United States, Egbert threw Boule against a car and then slammed him to the ground. When Boule filed a formal complaint, Egbert used his government connections to retaliate by triggering a tax audit.

Boule filed a federal lawsuit under the well known 1971 precedent Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents, which authorizes claims for money damages against federal officials based on constitutional violations. Right-wing justices have been attacking and restricting Bivens for decades. Although Thomas declined to straight-out overrule Bivens, his opinion reduced its scope to the approximate size of a postage stamp.

While the facts may seem somewhat trivial, the decision has far-reaching legal consequences.

Thomas referred at length to Alito’s 2020 decision in Hernández v. Meza, a sickening case where the Supreme Court “declined to create a damages remedy for an excessive-force claim against a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican national across the border in Mexico.”

Although Bivens was decided two years after Chief Justice Earl Warren retired, it stands as one of the landmark decisions from the relatively brief period in the last century when the Supreme Court was popularly perceived as an institution that protected democratic rights. Thomas, speaking for the reactionary majority, wrote not only that Bivens would likely be decided differently today, but that “we are now long past the heady days in which this Court assumed common-law powers to create causes of action.”

Finally, Thomas wrote, “In Hernández, we declined to authorize a Bivens remedy, in part, because the Executive Branch already had investigated alleged misconduct by the defendant Border Patrol agent... Boule nonetheless contends that the Border Patrol’s grievance process is inadequate because he is not entitled to participate and has no right to judicial review of an adverse determination. But we have never held that a Bivens alternative must afford rights to participation or appeal... Thus here, as in Hernández, we have no warrant to doubt that the consideration of Boule’s grievance against Agent Egbert secured adequate deterrence and afforded Boule an alternative remedy.”

In other words, because a law enforcement agency rubber-stamps the actions of its employees, without “rights to participation or appeal,” there is no need for a lawsuit.

Coinbase terminates 1,100 employees following 25,000 tech sector layoffs since May

James Martin

The US-based cryptocurrency exchange company Coinbase announced mass layoffs and cut over 18 percent of its workforce on Tuesday after it abruptly locked out employees from their work systems. More than 25,000 tech workers have also been laid off since May as the stock market bubble continues to burst.

On Tuesday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced in a blog post that the company had terminated 1,100 employees due to a “crypto winter.” Cryptocurrency prices, including those for Bitcoin and Ethereum, have crashed by 70 percent amidst the growing global financial instability. Following a record high value of $3 trillion last fall, cryptocurrencies are now worth around $1 trillion.

FILE - An advertisement for Coinbase, center, is displayed on NASDAQ billboard in Times Square, New York, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

Hundreds of Coinbase employees in the United States woke up on Tuesday to find that they no longer had access to the company systems, and learned of their termination via an HR note sent to their personal emails. Over 8 percent of the Coinbase employees in India were also part of the global layoffs.

“Yesterday I woke up early to work on a deck and got a weird error message when I tried to start my laptop,” said a Coinbase employee on the social media platform LinkedIn. “A quick Google search revealed that Coinbase had cut 18 percent of its workforce.”

Another software engineer wrote, “I was also part of the Coinbase 18 percent. My whole org was cut. After three years they broke up with me and my fiance via text message—11 days before our wedding, and a couple months before the birth of our daughter.”

White-collar employees affected by the layoffs spanned multiple departments at Coinbase, including hundreds of software engineers, product designers, product managers, customer support workers, recruiters, data scientists, marketing professionals, researchers, analysts and more.

Two weeks ago, Coinbase rescinded hundreds of offers for incoming employees who had quit their previous jobs. Tech workers who came to the United States with a visa suddenly found themselves forced to leave the country.

Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of Coinbase, wrote in a blog post, “We appear to be entering a recession after a 10+ year economic boom. A recession could lead to another crypto winter, and could last for an extended period.”

Coinbase’s rise was part of a speculative frenzy in cryptocurrencies fueled by the cheap money policy of the Federal Reserve of the last decade followed by decades of attacks on the living standards of the working class.

Armstrong indicated that the company grew too quickly. In the beginning of 2021, Armstrong said the company only had 1,250 employees. By early 2022, that number exceeded over 6,000 employees globally.

Armstrong explained how employees were terminated in the blog post. “If you are affected,” he wrote, “you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected.”

Part of the reason for the abrupt layoffs was the leak of an employee petition for a vote of no confidence in the executive team. The petition’s complaints included opposition to the rescinding of “offers to new employees despite promising them that their offers would not be rescinded two weeks earlier, leading to a massive negative reception from the public and the industry at-large.”

In response, Armstrong arrogantly dismissed the employee petition publicly on Twitter, saying, “This is really dumb on multiple levels…if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!”

Armstrong’s blog post after the termination of employees went on to callously justify the termination. “Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information,” he said, “it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business.”

Layoffs mount across the global tech industry

The sudden layoffs at Coinbase follow a surge of layoffs across various tech sector companies, but tech startups specialized in finance and real estate carried out the heaviest layoffs. According to the tech layoff aggregator website Layoffs.fyi, nearly 17,000 were laid off in May, up more than 350 percent from April. At least 8,821 have been laid off in June so far.

Some of the tech companies that laid off dozens to hundreds of workers globally in June so far include Wealthsimple (159), Redfin (470), Compass (450), BlockFi (250), Crypto.com (260), OneTrust (950), Stitch Fix (330), Cazoo (750) and Carbon Health (250).

Istanbul-based Getir, a food delivery service, laid off 4,480 workers in May, one of the largest layoffs in the global tech sector. Swedish financial tech company Klarna laid off 700. India-based healthcare startup MFine laid off 600. The US-based startup Carvana that delivered used cars laid off over 2,500 workers.

One of the largest layoffs in the past six months was the unraveling of mortgage-lending technology firm Better.com, which has laid off over 3,900 workers since last December. Vishal Garag, the CEO of the company, fired over 900 workers via a Zoom video call. The shocking announcement was followed by insults by Garag, who told employees they were not working hard enough. On the anonymous employee app Blind, Garag went on to trash workers who spoke out, calling one angry worker an “ingrate.”

The wave of layoffs in the tech industry, reminiscent of the early days of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, are part of the unraveling of the stock market in the last few months and part of the deepening crisis of the global capitalist financial system. Most of these companies were drunk on venture capital funding, burning cash to grow quickly while seeking quick returns in the stock market rally during the pandemic.

The business models most tech startups relied on with venture capital funding meant spending more than they brought in from revenue, with the expectation of delayed profitability up to a decade later. But with financial liquidity in the markets drying up and global recessionary fears looming with skyrocketing inflation and central banks raising interest rates, the tech-heavy NASDAQ has suffered heavy losses, with investors and shareholders selling stocks in companies that do not bring immediate returns.

“The music has stopped”

In the past two years alone, capitalist governments across the globe, including chiefly in the United States, threw trillions at the financial system to boost the profits of corporations and the financial banks in response to the pandemic. The response of the ruling class in every country to the pandemic was not to protect the world’s population from mass death, but to ensure that the frenzied speculation and profits extracted from the working class did not stop. Millions across the world have died while Wall Street soared.

But as commentators such as Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve official, have observed, “the music has stopped.”  Corporate debt has ballooned to over $11 trillion. The turbulence in Wall Street and the financial house of cards are rapidly coming apart at the seams as the pandemic has destroyed the global supply chain of labor and the US-NATO conflict in Ukraine against Russia has accelerated inflationary tendencies across the globe and caused food, gasoline and other commodities to surge in price.

The latest measure of inflation in the US, at 8.6 percent year over year, caused the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates. The chief target of the interest rate hikes is not curbing inflation, but above all to stop the drive for higher wages by workers in the US and internationally against decades of wage stagnation.

The turbulence among tech startups and the collapse of cryptocurrency startups in particular has made CEOs more vocal in their attacks on their workforce. Jesse Powell, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange KrakenFX, responded to growing internal employee frustration on a number of issues. “I entertained debate for a bit,” Powell said in a tweet, warning, “Back to dictatorship.”

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, recently announced he would cut 10 percent of Tesla’s white-collar workforce. The billionaire sociopath, who has endorsed the fascistic Ron DeSantis for president, is currently negotiating a deal to purchase the social media platform Twitter for $44 billion, and hinted in a virtual town hall meeting to Twitter employees that he intends to carry out layoffs at Twitter as well. “Right now the costs exceed revenue,” he said. His rambling and delusional speech that spanned topics from aliens to how he intends to improve the platform was widely ridiculed by Twitter employees, according to leaked reports.

Future funding for COVID-19 testing and treatment “Probably Dead”

Benjamin Mateus

The June 16 hearing on the federal response to COVID-19 made clear that congress will not pass further funding for measures to blunt the impact of the pandemic, despite evidence of the growing dominance of the latest contagious and deadly B5 subvariant of Omicron in the United States.

The expiration of funding means that uninsured Americans may soon be forced to pay for testing, treatment, and vaccines out of pocket.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky lamented during the hearing, “I’m deeply concerned that a lack of additional funding for other response activities will end or substantially scale back critical COVID response work.”

Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah’s testimony was seen as the death knell of the negotiations over continued COVID response funding.

The initial proposal of $80 billion late last year was reduced to $30 billion, by March to $22 billion, and more recently to just $10 billion, “but the deal collapsed as Democrats raised questions about the removal of international aid from the package and lawmakers of both parties objected to a separate plan to lift pandemic restrictions at the border,” according to the Washington Post.

Romney said, “I and a number of other members have worked over a number of months with members of this party and across the aisle to develop a supplemental bill to provide the $10 billion to address this inability to purchase these things …  you can manage my surprise when I find out that on June 8 the federal government did in fact prioritize $5 billion for the purchase of additional vaccines and $4.9 billion for therapeutics and $300 million for additional monoclonal antibodies.”

He added, “But it chose not to do so in February, March, April, or May, citing the inability to do so. So, the administration has recklessly and unilaterally spent taxpayer’s money, we have runaway inflation, but instead of taking an accurate inventory of the funds they had at their disposal … For the administration to provide information to us that was patently false is something which dramatically attacks that trust that I have, members of my party and both parties have.”

Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the panel’s chair, had explained in her opening remarks, anticipating the criticism: “The fact the administration has had to resort to allocating resources from our long-term needs to keep our short-term response afloat – that’s not a solution. That’s a stopgap.”

White House office of management and Budget, Associate Director for Health Topher Spiro, had said on Twitter, “To be clear, we were forced to divert dollars from next-generation vaccines and therapeutics, vaccine production, testing capacity, and PPE. These tradeoffs were necessary because Congress failed to act.”

What would happen if this funding were not secured?

These include funding for next-generation vaccines, including mucosal and intranasal vaccines, which can potentially offer sterilizing immunity against infection, would fall aside. Research into therapeutics would suffer irrevocably. Testing capacity would implode while immune-evading new variants are ripping across the globe even as global deaths begin to inch up again.

Research into the impact of Long COVID on the population and critical studies in pediatrics and MIS-C and long-term post-COVID surveillance of pregnant mothers would stall. The uninsured and underinsured would be left out of the arsenal of therapeutics that exist. The ability to purchase life-saving monoclonal antibody treatment, especially for immunocompromised individuals, would collapse. In short, it is the complete implosion of the fragmented public health infrastructure.

The working class must heed the warnings that the federal government and the politicians in both parties are incapable of any legitimate response to the pandemic. They have, from day one, discredited themselves as lacking any principles upon which to base their leadership.

An internal analysis by the Biden administration’s scientific advisory has warned that the fall and winter may bring a massive wave of infections and deaths. Meanwhile, Long COVID continues to afflict millions leading to a mass disabling social crisis, which will have significant health consequences for the population and the crumbling health infrastructure.

The Raymond James Financial Services, a premier investment management firm, sent a note to their clients after the hearings stating, “New COVID Funding Probably Dead: We are very skeptical more COVID money will be made available and believe the Administration will now need to move more quickly toward a system where COVID vaccines, treatments, and testing are provided through the traditional supply chain and purchasing apparatus in the US health system.”

During the hearing, no effort was made to place the pandemic in its appropriate social context and offer a clear, compelling response why elimination remains the only viable solution. The dominant policy of “learn to live with the virus” was never challenged and enjoyed bipartisan support. Not one senator or expert witness entertained to consider the lessons offered by China’s response to the pandemic in Shanghai. Instead, they persisted in their efforts to tarnish the country and allude to lab leak theories.

During the proceedings, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, FDA Head Dr. Robert Califf, and the entire committee membership – including Senators Bernie Sanders and Tim Kane, who now suffers from Long COVID, spoke and participated in the nearly three-hour event without a mask, potentially making it another high visibility super spreading event.

At one point, Walensky, even after informing Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine that numerous studies have demonstrated that mask mandates have decreased the number of infections, made everyone aware that no one was wearing a mask. One could have asked her why she ever rescinded previous mask mandates if they proved so effective?

Just one month ago, every media outlet and the Biden administration acknowledged that more than one million Americans had perished in less than two years of the pandemic. Walensky also informed the committee that cases across the country had been climbing. Currently, 67 percent of the population resides in counties with medium to high COVID transmission levels, twice the levels from a month ago.

That fact that President Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was online and isolated at home because he had tested positive for COVID, was not missed by the committee members who all sent him well wishes for a speedy recovery.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra has tested positive for COVID twice in less than one month and is isolated at home. Should Walensky and Califf in the next two or three days test positive, it would mean that the entire head of public health would be positive for COVID simultaneously.

David North, chairman of the Socialist Equality Party, said on Twitter, “I will not be sending them get-well cards. They are deserving victims of the criminally irresponsible policies they have foisted upon the public. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is raging out of control, thanks to the deliberate dismantling of all anti-COVID measures.”

Throughout the hearing, HELP Ranking Member Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina barraged the witnesses to provide him a plan asking, “What is the end game?” meaning when will HHS declare the emergency phase of the pandemic over.

Burr observed, “Let me say, we have removed all the mask requirements and eliminated testing requirements to enter the country. Title 42 is a CDC decision, and you said in your response to your letter to me that you were lifting it because … we have the tools, tests, and vaccinations; therefore, there is no longer a public health emergency.”

HHS must give a 60-day warning before it rescinds the emergency declaration. The implications would be considerable for the population affecting coverage, costs, and payment for COVID-19 testing, treatment, and vaccines. Access to medical countermeasures like vaccines, tests, and treatments through FDA emergency use authorization would be affected, and coverage to health systems and providers would be removed.

It was made clear that there is no money for a pandemic that has killed millions across the globe and will continue to kill, but the billions to prosecute a dangerous war in Ukraine against a nuclear-armed Russia can be made readily available at the drop of a hat with an unlimited purse string at their disposal and no questions asked. Burr speaks for Wall Street and the financial oligarchs when he asks what the endgame is. Clearly, the answer is, “Declare the pandemic over and get back to work!”

Tunisian workers hold one-day general strike against rising food prices

Alex Lantier

On June 16, workers across Tunisia walked out in protest against President Kaïs Saïed’s plan to rewrite the constitution and slash vital subsidies that keep wheat and bread affordable for workers. Wheat and grain prices have surged on global markets due to rampant speculation, and now the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine that has prevented Russia and Ukraine from exporting their wheat.

A week before the strike, Tunisian Finance Minister Sihem Boughdiri had reported that wheat subsidy costs this year would rise 1 billion dinars to 4.2 billion dinars (€1.3 billion). This is 3.5 percent of Tunisia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the equivalent of the annual budget of the Health and Labor ministries, she reported. Echoing the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is calling for “strict limiting of wage spending” and “better targeting of subsidies,” Boughdiri called for “gradual revision of subsidies for staple goods, but without at all eliminating them.”

In January 2021, ten years after a revolutionary uprising of the Tunisian working class toppled President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, youth came out in Tunis and nationwide to protest the lack of democratic rights and what were already then rapidly-rising food costs.

“People are hungry. They want revenge against the state. I won’t lie about it, they want another revolution,” one youth in Tunis told the press, while his friend said: “The police don’t dare to come here. Even the Tunisian media doesn’t come here. No one listens to what we have to say.”

A trader bringing food from the countryside to Tunis said: “Everybody I spoke to [in the villages] was angry. It’s all age groups. Even children aged 10 are angry. … I see families of up to 10 members who can’t afford [the food prices]. They don’t even have 200 millimes for a baguette.”

This year, inflation and, in particular, the explosion in food prices is a taking place around the world, now accelerated by the NATO-Russia war. As the IMF and the Saïed administration work to starve Tunisian workers by slashing state subsidies that have so far prevented speculation in global grain markets from making bread unaffordable, anger and opposition in the working class is reaching explosive levels.

The General Union of Tunisian Labor (UGTT) bureaucracy, a longstanding pillar of the Ben Ali regime that now works closely with Saïed and international banks, felt compelled to call a one-day strike for June 16. The working class responded massively. Airports, mass transit, post offices, energy companies, ports, wheat, fuel and phosphate monopolies and other workplaces shut down on June 16. Fully 96.2 percent of UGTT members participated in the strike.

“Our wages are low and the prices are getting higher ... and meanwhile, [Kais Saïed] is very stubborn. He is making decisions alone without consulting us,” UGTT official Naza Zuhein told AP at a march of striking workers in Tunis, stressing that life in Tunisia has “become impossible.”

“We, as citizens, as public sector employees, are burdened with a great part of the charges of state debt,” complained another worker alongside Zuhein.

While Saïed maintained a deafening silence on the strike, refusing to make any public statement, his government is clearly terrified of the mounting anger in the working class. Mezri Haddad, an associate of Saïed who was also a close supporter of Ben Ali before his regime was toppled by the workers, denounced the strike as an act of treason: “The UGTT’s decision to launch a general strike is an anti-national action that has the character of high treason and a threat to national security,” Haddad said.

Despite the mounting panic in the Saïed administration, US and global financial firms are stressing that they must work closely with the UGTT bureaucracy as their only hope to impose starvation conditions without provoking a new working class uprising. The Fitch ratings agency wrote: “Passing political and economic reforms without the UGTT’s backing would be challenging.”

In reality, however, what the last decade has conclusively shown is the bankruptcy of the Tunisian bourgeoisie and the UGTT, their failure to establish a democratic regime breaking the domination of imperialism over Tunisia, and the continuing discontent among workers and youth. Kaïs Saïed exemplifies this political bankruptcy. Originally presented as an anti-corruption candidate, he suspended parliament last year and is trying to establish absolute rule over Tunisia.

Now even more than in 2011, when the uprising in Tunisia triggered a revolutionary struggle in Egypt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, the political crisis in Tunisia is directly bound up with world conditions and the international class struggle. After a decade of reckless money-printing by the major central banks for bank bailouts of the super-rich, prices are exploding around the world. And the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine is sowing the seeds of horrific famine in north Africa and internationally.

Africa overall depends on Russia and Ukraine for 44 percent of its wheat, and Tunisia specifically depends on Ukraine for over 70 percent of its wheat. However, as Washington threatens to confiscate Russian dollar holdings in international banks, and Ukraine has mined its ports which are blockaded by Russian warships, it is impossible for Tunisia and countries across Africa to import desperately needed grain and foodstuffs.

These conditions are driving growing strikes and protests by workers demanding wage increases and protection from rising prices not only in Tunisia, but around the world. On Monday, one-day nationwide strikes will take place in the Moroccan and Belgian public sectors after a one-day strike yesterday in Italy. Spanish steelworkers and postmen and French truckers are going out on strike as are airline and airport workers across Europe.

The emerging struggle between the working class and the Saïed regime and its associates in the UGTT bureaucracy has vital lessons for workers not only in Tunisia but around the world. The failure of the 2011 uprising in Tunisia to secure its aims was not due to the failure of the working class to struggle. It struggled mightily, but it did not have a revolutionary internationalist perspective and leadership that would allow it to take power into its own hands after toppling Ben Ali.

In Tunisia, Saïed’s attempt to establish a one-man dictatorship is increasingly acknowledged to be bound up with deep-rooted economic problems related to social inequality.

“This strike is the culmination of the collective failure of ten successive governments, of the UGTT, of the IMF and the international partners of Tunisia. The transition towards democracy was not accompanied by any change in the economic structure of the country,” Denison University economics professor Fadhel Kaboub told Arab News.

Australia threatened with blackouts as profiteering generating companies withhold supply

Terry Cook

Events this week highlighted the potentially catastrophic failure of Australia’s energy “market,” dominated by profit-driven power generation, distribution and retail companies. People in several states were threatened with blackouts because electricity-generating companies withdrew supply.

Eraring Power Station [Source: Wikimedia]

The crisis could still leave tens of thousands of households without power in the midst of a severe cold snap. In the states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) the supply shortfall last week was projected to be 1,454 megawatts and 1,726 megawatts respectively.

Blackouts were only narrowly averted after the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) initially intervened under its Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) scheme to pay some corporate energy consumers to reduce their demand.

This bandaid solution alone will result in millions of dollars of public money being handed over in compensation to the affected consumers.

So acute was the energy supply problem, that not just households but public hospitals were asked to cut down on usage, including not using appliances and turning off potentially vital equipment not in continuous use.

Significantly, the supply shortfalls rapidly emerged after AEMO initially imposed temporary price control caps of $300 per megawatt-hour (MWh) as wholesale electricity prices continued to soar, averaging more than $675 per megawatt-hour.

That measure was supposed to exercise some meagre control over the giant companies that own the country’s major power generators, such as Origin Energy, AGL and EnergyAustralia, whose overriding concern is making profits and enhancing “shareholder value.”

Power companies began withholding available capacity from the electricity market, claiming that the cap was too low to cover their costs because of the soaring global prices of coal and gas, largely produced by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

The generators clearly intended to force AEMO to instruct them to make capacity available to the grid, entitling them to millions of dollars in compensation under the National Electricity Rules.

Such compensation is much higher than that for losses occurred or operating under the $300 MWh cap, which requires an application to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AMEC).

Backed by the Labor government, AEMO ultimately suspended the spot market for wholesale electricity for the first time since 1998. Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the federal government would back any moves by AEMO, supposedly to have reliable supply in the grid.

According to the Australian Financial Review, this would result in AEMO compensating companies to the tune of “hundreds of millions” of dollars in the current quarter alone, on top of the almost $100 million it paid to generators during 2021 after directing them to put more supply into the market.

AMEC chairwoman Anna Collyer said companies who apply for compensation would be “protected from losses.” Not surprisingly, Australian Energy Council chief executive Sarah McNamara, who represents 20 electricity and gas businesses, said they supported AEMO’s decision.

There are now three compensation schemes for generators: one for those directed to enter the market before the market suspension, one for those operating at a loss before the market suspension and, now, one for those operating in the suspended market. On top of this is the RERT scheme, where companies are either paid to cut their power usage or to provide alternative supplies, such as diesel standby, to the grid.

While the multi-billion dollar power companies are laughing all the way to the bank, the cost of the massive compensation they have conspired to grab will be passed on by electricity retailers to working class households and small users, who are already struggling to meet soaring electricity bills.

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman declared it “was impossible to operate the system under current conditions while ensuring reliable, secure supply of electricity.”

“Right now,” Westerman stated, “we see the market is not able to deal with all the factors thrown at it. Frankly, those factors are quite extreme, ranging from generators that are both planned and unplanned outages, very high demand.”

What are these “factors?” Above all, the rapacious generating companies withholding capacity from the market to drive up the price of electricity on the spot market and then extort millions of dollars in compensation.

A guaranteed supply of electricity—an essential requirement for life in a modern society, especially in increasingly severe weather conditions—has been further undermined by faltering power infrastructure. This is due to the lack of investment in maintenance by the power companies, particularly in the ageing coal-powered generators they acquired through the privatisation of these previous state assets.

Several key generators were out of action or operating at reduced capacity. There were multiple outages at Liddell and Bayswater power stations in NSW and problems with three units at Callide and three at Gladstone in Queensland. Though the latter remain state-owned, they operate under the pressures of the privatised electricity market.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese attempted to blame the previous Liberal-National government. “You can’t fix a decade of inaction in 10 days,” he said. “This is a direct result of a failure to invest, of a failure to have an energy policy.”

However, the decades-long rampant profiteering revealed again in the crisis is the outcome of a process put into train in the 1990s by the Keating Labor government. It initiated the privatisation of the generation, distribution and retailing of electricity in order to lay the foundations for the National Electricity Market, which became operational in 1998.

This drive was accelerated under the Gillard Labor government’s 2012 Energy White Paper, which demanded that state governments privatise the remaining electricity assets, then estimated to be worth more than $100 billion.

Labor’s claim that privatisation would produce competition and provide incentives to power producers to be efficient, resulting in lower electricity prices, have proven to be a monumental fraud.

Moreover, while delivering bonanzas to the financial markets and associated businesses, this process has been accompanied by the destruction of thousands of jobs and the slashing of working condition across the sector to ramp up profits and investor dividends.

This offensive has been facilitated every step of the way by the trade unions. Again and again, they worked to divert the widespread popular opposition that erupted, including among power workers, to limited protest activity and bankrupt appeals to governments to change course.

In 2008, for example, the previous NSW Labor government announced it would sell the state-owned retail corporations of Energy Australia, Integral Energy and Country Energy, and lease the generation corporations, Delta Electricity, Eraring Energy and Macquarie Generation.

While calling limited protests and work stoppages, the unions participated in a sham “consultation” process enshrined in the NSW and federal Labor Party platforms that was designed to stifle workers’ opposition and ultimately rubberstamp the ongoing privatisation of public services.

Today, many former and current union officials sit on the boards of electricity sector investors, such the Australian Super and IFM Investors superannuation consortium, which owns 50.4 percent of Ausgrid, a NSW electricity distributer.

US Constitution: Bad Medicine for Children

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Public health is about curative, rehabilitative, and especially preventative healthcare for everybody, no exclusions. Failed public health was on display during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The United States has the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths per capita” among 11 high-income countries, according to one infectious disease specialist.

Similarly, local authorities allowed dangerous levels of lead to persist in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, and other cities. Lead damages the brain of young children and recently was shown to have contributed to lowered IQs in 170 million Americans who are now adults.

The constitutions of only a few governments speak of people’s right to health or healthcare. Without offering specifics, the U.S. Constitution mentions a duty to “promote the general welfare.” The Constitution provides for political freedoms, but concentrates on devices aimed at diffusing political power. Examples are checks and balances, federalism, and separation of powers.

Its framers were fearful of political factions and their jostling for political power. In Federalist No. 10 (1787), James Madison explains: “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide … into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.”

The “common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property, he adds; “Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) sought to protect wealth and private property; they made suitable arrangements for governing. Public health was not on their agenda, not least because the scientific basis for preventing sickness, injuries and deaths did not yet exist.  Subsequently the U.S. government’s commitment to “promote the general welfare” remained weak. A tradition of healthcare as private enterprise has contributed to smothering public health.

Widespread disregard for public health and for teaching about prevention has contributed to sectors of the people embracing irregular views. Anti-vaccine bias is one of them.

Similarly, agitators dealing with gunfire killings put forth skewed notions of constitutional law. By any rational standards, the killings represent a public health problem, just as do injuries and deaths from accidents, automobile accidents included.

In the same vein, abortion opponents obsess about prevention in the name of preserving life. Their position would be commendable from the public-health point of view, if their passion did not disappear once a baby was born.

A general weakening of child-health advocacy and ultimately of preventative programs exemplifies the current plight of public health endeavors in the United States. Serving to illustrate is the high U.S. incidence of preventable childhood deaths.

In comparison with young people in 16 other high-income countries, younger Americans experience the “highest age-specific mortality rates for every age group under age 25,” according to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Infant mortality in the United States ranks as the highest by far among 11 high-income nations; The U.S. infant mortality rate is greater than that of 49 other countries.

Childhood poverty in the United States is elevated. One current estimate is that 18% of U.S. children in the United States live in poverty; in 2019, 26% of Black children lived in poverty.

That’s important, because the more U.S. parents are afflicted by poverty, the more likely their babies will die.  The National Center for Biological Information notes that, “Higher infant mortality among low socioeconomic groups has been recognized as a societal problem in the US for 140 years.”

Epidemiologists cite the association of prematurity with infant death and the role of poverty in contributing to premature birth. But, according to one analyst, poverty also impinges upon full-term babies. These babies born to low-income parents die at a rate 1.4 to 1.8 times higher than do the babies of higher income families.

Babies are more likely to survive if their caretakers have material resources. The fact of governments or societies being well-resourced does not matter. That’s evident in a study showing that the U.S. “gross domestic product health expenditure,” which is the highest among 14 western nations, exerted no effect on reducing childhood deaths. However, the U.S. income-inequality gap, greater than that of any of those 14 nations, was “highly significant.”

Similarly, the United States registers the highest gross national income per capita among the 38 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Even so, the U.S. infant mortality rate exceeds that of all but three of those states.

The United States has a money-distribution problem. Not enough ends up where it might “promote the general welfare.” Where does the money go?

Oxfam reports that, “global food giant” Cargill company, based in Minnetonka, Minnesota and owned, for the most part, by the world’s 11th richest family, has provided members of that family with $42.9 billion, up $14.4 billion since 2020; that the Walton family, owning half of Walmart’s shares, has gained $238 billion – up $8.8 billion since 2020; that Moderna company converted $10 billion in government funding for a Covid-19 vaccine into $12 billion in profits; that vaccine manufacturer Pfizer company last year paid $8.7 billion in shareholder dividends.

Wealth of the world’s billionaires grew “more in the first 24 months of COVID-19 than in 23 years combined.” Their total wealth is “equivalent to 13.9 percent of global GDP.”

The Constitution’s authors were in the dark when they were trying to discipline ruling-class factions. They could not know that European and North American capitalists would be plundering a new industrial and colonial world to accumulate wealth and enlist governments in their service.

U.S. governments would take on an increasingly prominent role in that project. To distribute wealth for the common good was not in the cards.

For one thing, the Constitution imposed rules aimed at blocking full democracy. These include two-thirds majority requirements, indirect elections of presidents (and, for a while, senators), the disproportionate electoral power of small states, voting limitations, and a powerful judicial branch. The framers of course made accommodations for slavery.

Some framers bemoaned the “danger of the leveling spirit” or saw an “excess of democracy.” For delegate Rufus King, “the unnatural Genius of Equality [was] the arch Enemy of the moral world.”

Architects of the Constitution used the ploy of divide and rule to control entities of their new government. They could not know how, later on, defenders of capitalism would use that tool to great effect while seeking to break apart the unity of people in resistance. Those in charge now create divisions through tension over guns, abortion, and equality for African-descended people.

Such is the setting for our fight for children’s lives, for universal healthcare, and more. The time is right for unity, yes, and for radical solutions.

New Zealand: Change of police minister signals shift to the right

Tom Peters

On June 13, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced changes to a number of ministerial roles which signal a further shift to the right by the Labour Party-led government. New ministers have been installed in the police, justice and immigration portfolios, and the parliament’s speaker will also be replaced.

Chris Hipkins with Jacinda Ardern (Image: Chris Hipkins Facebook)

The most significant change is the demotion of Poto Williams, who will lose her job as minister of police, to be replaced by senior minister Chris Hipkins. Ardern declared that “the focus on the portfolio and where it needs to be has been lost in recent times” and “we need to get back to basics.” The move portends a more openly hardline “law and order” stance.

The Ardern government is presiding over record levels of social inequality, soaring inflation, and a mounting death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. As in every other country, the ruling class is responding to the worsening crisis by strengthening the repressive powers of the state, in preparation to confront opposition from the working class.

Williams, whose family is from the Cook Islands, worked in the disability and family violence sector prior to entering parliament in 2013. She was made police minister after Labour was re-elected in 2020 in an effort to repair the image of the police, following widespread opposition to plans to give officers more access to guns, and protests over the police murder of George Floyd in the US and police brutality and racism in New Zealand.

While the government claimed it was addressing concerns about police “culture,” and has hired more female and ethnically diverse officers, nothing fundamental has changed. So far this year there have been two fatal shootings by police, including one of an unarmed 22-year-old man in Taranaki. In March, Radio NZ reported that “New Zealand police kill at 11 times the rate of police in England and Wales.”

Ardern, however, claimed that the “environment” had changed since the “controversy” surrounding armed police in 2020. She noted that the police budget has increased by 35 percent and police numbers by 15 percent since Williams was appointed. “The focus has changed and with it we’ve changed the ministerial lineup,” she said. The new minister will oversee “record investment in the front line” and “deal with the current escalation in gang tensions and violence” and “youth offending.”

For several weeks, the media and opposition parties have attacked the government for failing to address gang-related violence and “ram raid” robberies by young people. Recent headlines refer to a “fortnight of fear,” a “sense of lawlessness” and a “youth crime wave” in Auckland, the country’s biggest city.

On June 8, opposition National Party leader Christopher Luxon told Newshub that Williams “needs to be removed by the prime minister and replaced with someone else… She isn’t providing the leadership, she’s not been getting the tools and the frontline police don’t feel backed up.”

National has demanded a major increase in police powers, including for officers to have greater access to guns, more powers to search purported gangs’ premises and vehicles without a warrant, and to stop alleged gang members associating with each other. The party also wants to ban gang “patches and insignia” from being displayed in public and on social media. Such measures would be a major attack on freedom of association and freedom of expression.

Ardern told Radio NZ she would not implement National’s “reactionary” proposals. She added, however, that her government has asked police to identify what additional “tools” they need to “come down hard” on the gangs.

Notwithstanding the recent media focus on youth crime, it has declined over the last decade. Ministry of Justice figures show that offending by children aged 10–13 and young people aged 14–16 dropped by 65 and 63 percent respectively between 2011 and 2021. The country’s prison population has also fallen from 10,820 in March 2018 to 7,669 four years later.

The media coverage deliberately obscures the fact that recent ram raids and shootings involve a minuscule proportion of young people.

The hysteria is also directed against any understanding of the relationships between crime, gang membership and the social crisis, which is the responsibility of the current Labour government and all of the administrations that preceded it.

In areas such as South Auckland there is deeply entrenched poverty, impacting more than one in four children. According to Auckland Council, one in three young people experience “housing deprivation,” i.e. unstable, unhealthy or overcrowded housing. South Auckland is also one of the areas worst-affected by COVID-19, with the local Middlemore Hospital overrun with cases.

Across the country, there is growing despair and alienation, compounded by the lack of healthcare and social services. According to TVNZ, police “received just under 30,000 calls last year alone” for “threatened or attempted suicides,” an increase of 87 percent compared with 2015.

The government, far from addressing the social breakdown, has used the pandemic to hand over tens of billions of dollars to the rich, exacerbating the inflationary crisis and the housing bubble. Now, it is boosting the police to deal with the fallout from its austerity policies and plummeting real wages.

Williams’ replacement, Chris Hipkins, has yet to announce specific policy changes as police minister. But he has already gained a reputation for ruthlessness in his roles as education minister and COVID-19 response minister. Hipkins has overseen the lifting of public health restrictions and the unsafe reopening of schools and businesses after the government ditched its previous Zero-COVID policy last October. The change was driven by the demands of the business elite, which views public health measures as a drain on profits, and enforced by the corporatist trade unions.

This year, the Omicron variant has spread rapidly across the country, infecting well over a million people—more than one fifth of the population. Hospitals are inundated, and around 10 people are dying with the virus every day.

The COVID-19 portfolio has been handed to Dr Ayesha Verrall, formerly the associate minister. Ardern told the media that the job was less demanding because “we are now very much in a steady management of the pandemic.” She added that the pandemic “is not over,” but the government acts as though it is: it has ended the use of lockdowns and border quarantine measures, and scrapped vaccine mandates.

The normalisation of mass infection and death is underscored by the resignation of Trevor Mallard as parliament’s Speaker, also announced by Ardern on June 13. He will be replaced by the relatively unknown MP Adrian Rurawhe.

For months, the opposition National and ACT parties have demanded Mallard’s resignation and attacked his hardline response to anti-vaccination protesters who occupied parliament’s lawn earlier this year. Mallard called in the police to clear out the protesters, and issued trespass notices to a number of former MPs who visited the occupation site. The Labour government, having adopted the main demands of the right-wing protesters for an end to public health measures, wants to put an end to any discussion of the issue.

The worsening healthcare crisis, however, cannot be swept under the rug, any more than the soaring cost of living. As is taking place internationally, these developments will drive workers in New Zealand into struggle against the Ardern government’s pro-business agenda.