A nationwide strike at Deutsche Post was extended through Saturday evening. It had begun at 5 p.m. Thursday afternoon, when the walkout by the night shift paralyzed sorting centres. And on Friday, parcel and letter delivery workers went on strike all day. The Verdi service union, which called the strike in two stages, is responding to the enormous willingness to fight that is spreading at Deutsche Post.
Postal workers are fighting for a wage increase of 15 percent over a period of 12 months. Trainees are to receive an extra €200 a month. According to a spokesman for Deutsche Post, some 16,700 postal workers had already joined the strike by midday on Friday, including 2,700 in Berlin and Brandenburg alone, 2,000 in southwest Germany, 2,500 in Bavaria and 5,500 in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. As a result of the strike, about 2.3 million parcel shipments and 13 million letters were left behind on Friday, which is more than half of the average daily volume.
Postal cart [Photo by Bernd Schwabe / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Despite the problems involved, a large proportion of the population supports the postal strikes as being justified. This is expressed, among other things, in the comment sections of the media.
For example, a worker writes in the comments on broadcaster RBB’s website: “Am I responsible for inflation? Am I waging war? Is it all my decisions? What are 15 percent wage demands compared to the reality of our expenses for living, livelihoods and pensions!”
Another writes that it is “more than justified and more than necessary to give workers a share of the profits and the increase in productivity, all the more so because otherwise the profits simply flow to the shareholders.”
The Deutsche Post corporate board has dismissed the workers’ pay demand as “unrealistic.” However, it has reported profits of more than €8 billion in each of the last two years. At the same time, it refused to pay employees the tax-free bonus of €3,000 made possible by government funding. Now the board, backed by the union, wants to continue its policy of enriching shareholders at the expense of the workers.
The previously state-owned Deutsche Post—now, “Deutsche Post DHL Group”—has pushed through an unprecedented reduction in wages and deterioration in working conditions since privatization. Entire divisions have been outsourced to subsidiaries and subcontractors. Today, almost 88 percent of the workforce—140,000 out of 160,000 on union-agreed contracts—are classified in pay groups 1 to 3, which range from €2,108 to €3,090 monthly gross. However, many distribution centres are located in expensive major cities, where rents and living costs are constantly rising.
In December, figures from the Federal Statistical Office showed that salaries in the postal and parcels sector have risen much less than in the economy as a whole since 2011. In those 10 years, they have increased by only 6 percent, while average incomes in the overall economy have increased by nearly 24 percent.
At the same time, night work and overtime have increased. In 2021, about 60 percent of mail carriers and sorters also had to work weekends. And one-in-seven postal employees also worked between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Furthermore, the Federal Statistical Office data revealed a high level of atypical employment relationships. In 2021, nearly one-in-three postal, courier and express drivers (31 percent) was either employed on a temporary or part-time basis, in marginal employment or temporary agency staff. Thus, sorters and parcel and letter deliverers are fobbed off with low wages for hard back-breaking work, while the corporation, like the other logistics groups, profits not least from the growth in online shopping. This explains the great willingness to strike in the postal and distribution centres.
However, the strikers confront the danger that Verdi will sell them out again this time. The union’s chief negotiator, Verdi’s deputy chairwoman Andrea Kocsis, is deliberately vague in her demand for “inflation compensation” and a “share in the company’s success.” This functionary, who collects more than half a million euros a year from supervisory board bonuses alone, is preparing to strike a rotten deal in the third round of negotiations to be held on February 8 and 9.
The current demand for a 15 percent pay increase was made against the will of the union. In a survey in which more than 43,000 members took part last autumn, the 10.5 percent demand currently being tabled by Verdi for the public sector was rejected by postal workers as insufficient. Sixty-five percent of Deutsche Post union members rejected that demand as too low, and some 91 percent said they were ready to strike.
In 2020, the last time there was industrial action at Deutsche Post, the union thwarted the willingness to strike and made the cuts in real wage possible with its settlement. The last agreement stipulated that wages and salaries would not rise at all in 2020 and then only by 3 percent on January 1, 2021, and by another 2 percent on January 1, 2022. By agreeing a contract period of 28 months, Verdi gave Deutsche Post almost two-and-a-half years of industrial peace.
In the meantime, the Verdi leadership, like the entire union bureaucracy in Germany, supported and went along with the profits-before-lives policy in the coronavirus pandemic, the escalating armaments spending and war policy of the coalition government. While the profits of the rich and shareholders have skyrocketed like never before, inflation has eaten away at wages with unprecedented increases in food and energy prices.
African National Congress (ANC) President Cyril Ramaphosa was forced to abandon his planned trip to the World Economic Forum’s (EEF) annual meeting in Davos. His government faces growing anger over the widespread power outages by Eskom, the state-owned electricity company that generates that 90 percent of South Africa’s power.
Last week, Eskom announced its worst ever power cuts are set to last indefinitely, surpassing last year’s record when it imposed at least 100 days of rolling blackouts that left factories, workplaces, schools, hospitals and households without electricity for up to 11 hours a day. The power cuts are believed to be costing around $235 million a year.
Ramaphosa with American President Joe Biden, September 2022. [Photo: The White House]
Unable to work amid an unemployment rate of 33 percent, many have lost their income. The streets remain unlit, traffic lights don’t work and there is massive disruption on the roads, while railways have almost ceased to function. Frustration and anger have grown as workplaces are forced to close, food has rotted amid disrupted supply chains, and crime has soared, amid the severe heat of the southern hemisphere summer and lack of water.
Adding to workers’ fury, the regulatory authorities have allowed Eskom to raise its prices by up to one third over the next two years as it faces insolvency. This comes as South Africa’s annual inflation rate is running at 7 percent in December, its highest rate since the rise in global food prices in 2008-09, with basic foods prices increasing by 12 percent over the last year. A loaf of white bread now costs 16.18 rand compared with 13.55 a year ago and the price of fuel has risen by 56.2 percent.
The rand has fallen from 15 to the US dollar to 17 in the last year, amid fears that instability could hold back the “reforms” demanded by the international financial institutions and markets as national debt rises to 84 percent of GDP. The South African central bank has sought to shore up the rand by raising interest rates seven times in the last year and is expected to raise them again his month.
People have taken to the streets after being left without electricity for more than 40 hours. In the eastern port city of Durban, residents put tyres and trees along the road and set them alight.
In a bid to alleviate Eskom’s financial crisis and allow it to import diesel to run its power stations, the ANC government has announced it will take over most of its $25 billion debts.
The company’s problems are a devastating indictment of the ANC, whichalong with the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUM), the country’s largest and most powerful trade union co-founded by Ramaphosa, and the Stalinist South African Communist Party—sought to suppress black South African workers’ struggles and prevent a revolutionary struggle against the hated apartheid regime, thereby ensuring the survival of South African capitalism. Its policy of “black empowerment” was a cynical cover for anti-working-class politics aimed at creating a thin layer of black capitalists, of whom Ramaphosa, one of South Africa‘s richest men, has been the prime beneficiary.
While the coal industry was previously under the control of large, white-owned corporations, after the ANC came to power in 1994, black businessmen were steadily given ownership of more than half the industry along with many associated activities. Its operations are subject to widespread racketeering as criminal gangs divert coal bound for power stations and sell it abroad for a far higher price, sending discarded inferior coal—mixed with rock and scrap—to the power stations that wrecks the generators.
Eskom and the coal industry have created vast fortunes for a handful of black business leaders at the expense of workers forced to pay extortionate prices for electricity.
The ANC, whose interests are inextricably bound up with Eskom’s monopoly and the commercial viability of coal has until recently restricted Eskom’s supply from private providers, including suppliers of other sources of energy, and its ability to purchase diesel. Eksom now operates just half of its nominal capacity.
Andre de Ruyter, Eskom’s outgoing chief executive, famously declared that when he took on the job in 2020, he was congratulated on becoming “the head of South Africa’s biggest crime syndicate.” Having failed to clean up the corruption, de Ruyter has resigned citing a lack of political support. Police are now investigating claims that he was poisoned, after reportedly drinking a cup of coffee laced with cyanide.
ANC chair and Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe, who declares himself a “coal fundamentalist” opposed to renewable energy such a solar and wind power, even accused Eskom of seeking the overthrow of the government.
The power outages have vastly exacerbated Ramaphosa and the ANC’s political crisis. Last year’s local elections saw the ANC lose its majority amid increasing anger over its corrupt rule, while opinion polls show the ANC’s support declining further as next year’s elections approach.
A dark passage during a power outage in a Johannesburg shopping centre, South Africans are struggling in the dark to cope with increased power cuts that have hit households and businesses across the country. The rolling power cuts have been experienced for years but this week the country’s state-owned power utility Eskom extended them so that some residents and businesses have gone without power for more than 9 hours a day. Thursday, June 30, 2022. [AP Photo/Denis Farrell]
At last year’s May Day rally in Rustenburg, a major mining centre, where he was the Confederation of South African Trade Unions’ (COSATU) guest of honour, Ramaphosa was booed off the stage by striking gold miners at Sibanye-Stillwater. There have been strikes and protests over the cost of living, power outages and widespread unemployment, forcing COSATU and the rival South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) to call a “mass stay away” of non-essential workers in August demanding the ANC take action.
Ramaphosa managed to retain his leadership of the party in December despite a damning parliamentary report into the theft of a vast sum of cash at his Phala Phala game farm that recommended a parliamentary investigation.
Calls are growing for a national shut down in opposition to Eskom’s blackouts and 18.6 percent electricity tariff hike in April and a further 12.74 percent hike next year. John Steenhuisen, leader of the largest opposition party the Democratic Alliance, said his party was organising a march to ANC headquarters in the commercial capital Johannesburg against the “ANC-engineered crisis.”
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema, a former leader of the ANC’s youth section, declared, “We are our own liberators; we must remove the ANC from power but even before that, Ramaphosa must fall with immediate effect and failure to do that, we must push him out of office.”
Next month, Spanish-Russian journalist Pablo González will have been in prison for a year after being arrested for allegedly spying for the Russian government. González was detained on February 28, days after the NATO-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, as he covered the refugee crisis in the Polish town of Rzeszow. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Pablo Gonzalez [Photo: #FreePabloGonzález]
On November 24, a regional Polish court in the southeastern city of Przemysl ruled that González’s preventative detention would continue for a further three months—taking his imprisonment to a full year. This is the third time his detention has been extended, after previous court orders in May and August, despite González not having been put on trial or found guilty of any crime. Last week, the appeals court of the Polish town of Rzeszów rejected González’s appeal against the extension of preventive detention.
No proof has been presented that the journalist handed any information to the Russian secret services or that he ever had any intention of doing so. Among the spurious “evidence” cited by the Polish authorities is that González, who has dual nationality, was in possession of two passports bearing different names, one Russian and one Spanish—implying that one was a false identity used for espionage.
González’s Russian passport names him as Pavel Rubtsov, using his father’s surname; his Spanish document identifies him as Pablo González Yagüe, using his mother’s two surnames. Pablo is the Hispanicised version of the Russian name Pavel.
The arrest of a journalist on unsubstantiated espionage charges is an anti-democratic attack on freedom of speech. It is a reactionary measure aimed at intimidating reporters and silencing opposition to the official, state-sanctioned narratives on the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine instigated by Washington and its NATO allies.
It has far-reaching implications for the ability of journalists to report on and criticise the actions of the imperialist powers globally, amid a concerted campaign to obscure and falsify the real origins of the war in Ukraine, presenting it as a one-sided Russian attack on its defenceless neighbour.
In reality, the war in Ukraine is the latest escalation in the imperialist drive to militarily encircle and weaken Russia, which has seen NATO expand hundreds of miles eastward since the end of the Soviet Union, provoke a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and carry out dozens of large-scale military exercises on Russia’s borders.
Since the Russian invasion in February last year, Washington and its NATO allies have funneled billions of dollars in weapons, training and other military aid to Ukraine, and encouraged this country to take direct offensive action targeting Russian territory. Madrid had donated €238 million in military aid to Ukraine by October last year and is now training hundreds of soldiers on Spanish soil.
The Spanish coalition government of the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos is fully complicit in the arbitrary detention of González. At the end of July, during an official visit to Poland, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated that the arrest of the journalist had been discussed with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, but refused to provide any specific information about the conversation. Since then, the PSOE-Podemos government has done nothing to secure González’s freedom.
At the end of November, at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers to discuss the war in Ukraine, Spain’s PSOE Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares issued a pathetic appeal to his Polish counterpart, Zbigniew Rau, to bring González to trial “as soon as possible … once the investigation is completed.”
But speaking to the Spanish press the same day, Albares made clear that his government would do nothing to defend González: “We have to respect the Polish legal system in this matter. What I am asking is that, as soon as possible, he can be brought to trial, where he has a right to [legal] defence, as he has already had. His lawyer knows the charges, he can present whatever appeals he wants. He [González] has access to him.”
This utter disregard for the democratic rights of its own citizen makes a mockery of any claim by Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government to be a “progressive” or even “left-wing” administration. After making a few perfunctory calls for González’s freedom after his arrest earlier this year, the “left-populist” Podemos, the junior partner in the Spanish government, has largely dropped the issue.
Recent letters, reported in the Spanish press and revealing the appalling conditions of González’s imprisonment, are an indictment of the PSOE-Podemos government. In a letter to the platform #FreePablo received on November 21, but likely written earlier in the autumn, González had expressed his concerns about the Polish winter weather and his poor state of physical and mental health.
“Over here, truthfully, nothing much is new; it’s what solitary confinement is like,” the letter begins. “Most of the time I’m in good spirits, although I sometimes have moments when I’m feeling much lower. It’s been several months in complete isolation and it’s weighing down on me.”
“I suppose that this winter we will not have heating,” González continued. “They [the Polish government] have barely anything for schools, so imagine the prisons. … I asked, and the Spanish Embassy has asked too, for thermal indoor clothing. They refused. On the other hand, the [prison] director did allow me to have an extra blanket.”
Speaking about his cell block, the journalist’s letter added: “In my section [of the prison] the windows don’t open, and there is no way of ventilating; it’s hot in summer and condensation builds up in winter.” As for food, González explained that “I’m lacking protein; what I do consume I have to buy with the money that is sent to me from outside the prison. I’m lacking a lot of vitamins, so I’m fighting to be able to buy them, as well as antioxidants.”
In a separate letter to the Polish interior minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, also towards the end of November, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also described the “particularly hard conditions” facing González.
“He has to use handcuffs at all times when he’s allowed out of his cell, his cell and bathroom are constantly watched by cameras, the prison officers make him undress various times a day and put him through meticulous searches,” the RSF letter explains. It continues: “He is only allowed to shower once a week and he has not received a visit from a dermatologist for weeks for his skin problem.”
Denouncing the “unusually severe preventive methods” used against González, RSF also adds: “The [Polish] authorities have refused to inform him about what the accusations of spying are based on, and the journalist has still not been given a trial.” RSF does not, however, call for González’s release, instead making a tentative plea to the Polish government to “consider if it is necessary to keep a person who is presumed innocent in isolation for such a long time.”
After millions across France joined a one-day strike against Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform on January 19, a confrontation is rapidly emerging between the Macron government and the working class. The leadership of this struggle must be taken away from the trade union bureaucracies that negotiated this reform. The experience of the last year shows how the French union bureaucracies are aiding the ruling class’s systematic attack on workers’ living standards.
People gather on Place de la Republique during a demonstration against proposed pension changes, Thursday, January 19, 2023 in Paris. Workers in many French cities took to the streets Thursday to reject proposed pension changes that would push back the retirement age. [AP Photo/Lewis Joly]
2022 was marked by a global surge in inflation to 9 percent and 10.1 percent in the Eurozone according to Eurostat. France saw inflation of 6.2 percent in 2022, with a peak expected in early 2023 of 7 percent according to The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).
Workers are the main victims of inflation and the economic crisis. In addition to the difficulties of eating and heating themselves, workers are collectively experiencing a drop in real wages of over 2 percent, even according to understated official statistics. In the Obligatory Annual Negotiations (NAO), where the union bureaucracy negotiates pay scales with employers, workers only obtained an average increase of 3.7 percent in 2022, well below inflation.
Workers will have to oppose the results of NAOs between the union bureaucracies, the state and employers in 2023. In the September-October French refinery strike, the workers of TotalEnergie and Esso demanded a 7 percent pay rise. Isolated by the unions and requisitioned by the state, the refinery workers only got an under-inflation raise in line with what was initially negotiated by the union bureaucracy before the strike.
In 2023, unions in many industries are again agreeing to increases well below inflation, expected to run at 7 percent or more this year. At Stellantis, despite several walkouts and a demand for an 8.3 percent pay rise, the Workers’ Force (FO) trade union group welcomed the final 5.3 percent increase: “We have achieved a fair level of negotiation, and above all one that can be applied immediately to the general increases, whereas management initially wanted to spread them out over the year.”
At Sodexo an all-union settlement only obtained a 4.5 percent pay rise for 2023.
For 2023, Decathlon workers were offered a humiliating 1.8 percent increase, or €24 monthly. In contrast, Decathlon’s deputy CEO, Jean-Marc Lemière, announced that in view of “the company’s economic performance and the stability of its financial situation,” he had decided in June to distribute €453 million in dividends to shareholders, which showed “the good economic health” of the company.
At the RATP, which manages Paris’s mass transit services, FO and the National Union of Autonomous Trade Unions (UNSA) negotiated an increase of €372 gross per month in return for an increase in drivers’ working hours. This will result in a reduction in the number of rest days from 121 to 118 in 2023, then to 115 in 2024.
The surge in exploitation of the working class is leading at the same time to a record explosion of corporate profits in France and internationally. In 2022, companies on the Paris based CAC-40 stock market recorded record annual profits. According to estimates by FactSet, the sum of the profits of the 40 largest companies listed in Paris is expected to reach €172 billion. This is up 34 percent from €128 billion in 2021. Compared to 2019, the last year “before COVID,” total profits have more than doubled.
The 40 companies in the CAC-40 distributed a record €80.1 billion to their shareholders in 2022, in dividends or share buybacks. According to the financial newsletter Vernimmen.net, dividends paid out amount to €56.5 billion, compared to €45.6 billion in 2021 and €28.6 billion in 2020.
This surge in inequality and class conflict is not a phenomenon isolated to France but the product of a global crisis of capitalism. Driven by soaring stock prices, the wealth of the super-rich has soared over the past decade. According to Oxfam’s Inequality Report, of every $100 of wealth created, $54.4 went into the pockets of the wealthiest 1 percent, while 70 cents went to the bottom 50 percent.
Food and energy price inflation is largely the result of the looting of the international working class by financial markets and corporations. According to Oxfam, “Food and energy companies are making record profits and paying unprecedented sums to their wealthy shareholders and billionaire owners.”
Oxfam continues: “For example, the fortune of Bernard Arnault, the richest man in the world, has doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, from €85.7 billion in 2020 to €179 billion in 2022. The CEO of the LVMH group has “a fortune equivalent to that of 20 million French people.” As an example, Oxfam estimates that “2 percent of the current wealth of French billionaires (which stands at €544.5 billion) would be enough to finance the pension system, without having to go through the reform and the planned increase in the legal retirement age.”
The same essential picture emerges across Europe. In the UK, the total dividend paid by the FTSE-100 index is expected to reach a record £79.1 billion in 2022, compared to £78.5 billion in 2021, excluding special dividends. The British bourgeoisie, which is also using the trade union bureaucracy to stifle a wave of strikes, intends to continue its plunder according to the analysis site AJBell: “Pre-tax income is expected to rise by 4% in 2023, while ordinary dividends are seen rising by 8% to £87.7 billion.”
In Spain, a country governed by a PSOE-Podemos alliance, the joint profit of the Ibex index will reach €56.321 billion in 2022. According to FactSet, this is just 2.5 percent less than the all-time record in 2021. According to a BME study, “In this context, there is a positive reading for the Spanish stock market, since the group of companies in the Ibex-35 presents a defensive sectoral structure against environments of inflation and rising real interest rates.”
The rise in inequality cannot be stopped by electing nominally “left-wing” capitalist governments. Elected in 2015 in Greece, Syriza (the “Coalition of the Radical Left”) betrayed Greek workers’ opposition to the EU memorandum in a referendum. Despite the mass opposition of Greek workers to austerity, the Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras imposed the austerity policy of the European Union and the banks.
Today in Spain, the pseudo-left Podemos party is overseeing the handing out of bailout funds to major corporations and banks, many of which have received billions of euros in direct state aid. This free money has fueled massive inflation in the value of all financial assets and wealth of the ruling class. In return, Podemos is pushing this inflationary crisis and the recession created by the financial aristocracy onto the backs of the workers.
The unions and the pseudo-left are participating in the transfer of record wealth from the workers to a parasitic ruling elite. At the same time the reduction in living standards of the working class is being used to release tens and hundreds of billions of euros to finance the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine.
As the number of homeless people in the United States continues to grow, state and local governments are enacting new laws targeting the poorest and most vulnerable segment of society.
A homeless encampment can be seen in San Francisco, Monday, December 12, 2022. [AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez]
According to the recent 2022 Homelessness Assessment Report compiled by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on any given day in 2022 there were 582,500 homeless people in the US. Among that number, 60 percent stayed in city or state sponsored homeless centers, with the remaining 40 percent sleeping on the streets or in an improvised shelter. Between 2020, when the last report was issued, and 2022 the homeless rate increased by approximately 1 percent.
According to Consumer Price Index data for 2022, rental costs increased by an average of 8.3 percent over the previous year. Shelter costs, when considered as a whole, which includes rent or mortgage payments, utility bills and other expenses related to housing represented 40 percent of the core inflation increase over the past year.
For most of the working class, housing costs account for the largest part of their monthly income. The second largest expense is food, which rose in cost by 10-12 percent in the last year. Considering the already tenuous state of most workers’ finances, this spike in inflation has had the predictable effect of pushing more people into homelessness.
As more and more workers are forced into homelessness under the strain of record inflation and rising rents, they find themselves trapped between a collapsing social system and oppressive new laws passed to conceal the failures of capitalism.
Forty-eight states already had existing anti-homeless laws prior to 2022. In four states (Texas, Florida, California, and New Hampshire) “camping” in any public place is banned. In New Hampshire, sleeping anywhere in public is outlawed. There are dozens of other laws on the books in various states which prohibit loitering, vagrancy, or panhandling.
State laws will often overlap with various municipal laws, both of which are frequently found by the courts to be unconstitutional. Legislators rely upon the fact that those targeted by these laws have few resources to challenge their validity. According to the National Homelessness Law Center, 60 percent of lawsuits challenging anti-panhandling or anti-camping laws are successful, as well as 77 percent of lawsuits challenging loitering, loafing, or vagrancy bans.
Several new anti-homeless laws took effect in the last year. In Missouri, the state legislature has coupled a ban on sleeping in public places with the withdrawal of state funds for permanent housing. In Tennessee, a law passed last July makes sleeping in a tent on public property, under a bridge, or on an interstate exit a felony punishable by imprisonment, the first of its kind in the nation. In Los Angeles and Portland, two cities with large homeless populations, their respective city councils have passed various restrictions on encampments.
In many states the anti-homeless laws being passed are based on model legislation formulated by the ultra-right Cicero Foundation. The institute was founded in 2016 by billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale is also the co-founder of the tech company Palantir, which has created software used by the police and military. According to Pew, nine bills have been introduced in six states over the past two years based on the Cicero model, whose features include “state-sanctioned encampments with a six-month residency limit, a ban on permanent encampments and penalties for cities that refuse to remove them.”
The passage of these new laws and ordinances is often accompanied by large -scale police raids of homeless encampments where tents, blankets, and other personal belongings of encampment residents are confiscated or destroyed.
In New York City under the administration of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams the police have carried out dozens of raids on encampments and makeshift shelters. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 the city moved more than 8,000 homeless individuals into hotel rooms as a measure to control the spread of the virus. Little more than a year later, however, the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio rescinded the policy and moved to relocate the homeless to barracks style shelters.
The city has set up a hotline for residents to report homeless encampments and has tasked transit police with evicting people who are sleeping on subway trains. In January of 2022 the NYPD conducted 133 “clean-ups,” or raids, on various encampments, many of which house a single individual and consist of little more than carboard boxes.
Although it is city policy to offer homeless victims of police raids access to shelters, many refuse. The city-backed shelters are frequently overcrowded and dangerous, and are vectors for the spread of COVID-19.
India’s Narendra Modi-led Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has responded with vitriol to a BBC documentary that examines the current prime minister’s role in facilitating and overseeing the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom.
The communal violence that convulsed the western Indian state of Gujarat for three days, from February 28 through March 2, 2002, officially killed 1,044 people, of whom the vast majority, 790, were Muslims. The true death toll is believed to be closer to 2,000. In addition, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Muslims were rendered homeless after mobs of vigilantes—some led by well-known BJP politicians, others by leaders of Hindu communalist groups closely associated with the BJP—terrorized them and burned their homes to the ground.
The role Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister from 2001 to his ascension to the prime ministership in 2014, played in instigating and enabling the February-March 2002 pogrom has long been known.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi [Photo: Narendra Modi Facebook page]
Under conditions of a war-crisis with Pakistan whipped up by India’s then-BJP-led national government, Modi fomented anti-Muslim violence. He did so first by immediately blaming Muslims for a February 28 train fire at Godhra in which 59 Hindu fundamentalist activists perished, and in a manner that effectively declared Gujarat’s Muslim minority collectively responsible; then by supporting calls from Hindu communalist groups for a state-wide general strike. When, as could only be expected given the state-backed communal incitement, anti-Muslim violence erupted, Gujarat’s chief minister instructed police not to intervene.
If Modi has not spent the last two decades languishing in a prison cell it is because he has been protected by a highly communalized state apparatus, from the police and judiciary to the Gujarat state and Indian governments, with the complicity and support of India’s capitalist ruling elite.
That said, the two-part documentary titled “India: The Modi Question,” the first part of which aired on BBC 2 last Tuesday, has provided additional corroboration of the calculated and coordinated character of the 2002 “riots” and Modi’s culpability in mass murder.
The documentary cites at length from a secret British government report on the Gujarat pogrom, whose very existence was hitherto unknown. It was prepared by a Foreign Office inquiry team that travelled to the western Indian state shortly after the communal bloodletting.
The report says that “the extent of the violence was much greater than reported,” and was well-orchestrated: “a systematic campaign of violence” with “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing.” The report goes on to state that “The aim of the riots was to purge Muslims from Hindu areas,” adding that “Widespread and systematic rape of Muslim women” was perpetrated to terrorize the populace.
The report highlights the role of activists from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in fomenting the violence. The VHP is an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization dedicated to the revival of the “Hindu nation.” Modi has been a life-long member of the RSS and routinely consults its leaders on major government decisions.
However, the BBC report underlines that the Hindu communalist thugs of the VHP and their ilk could never “have inflicted so much damage without the climate of impunity created by the state government.” For that, it asserts, “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”
The BBC documentary also points to the results of a separate investigation conducted by the European Union. That inquiry reportedly concluded that ministers in Modi’s BJP state government “took an active part in the violence and the senior police officers were instructed not to intervene in the rioting.”
“India: The Modi Question” also includes an interview with a former diplomat, whose identity is not revealed and who presumably was actively involved in the work of the Foreign Office inquiry team. “At least 2,000 people were murdered during the violence,” says the ex-diplomat. “The vast majority were Muslims. We described it as a pogrom–a deliberate, and politically driven effort targeted at the Muslim community.”
The BBC documentarians also interviewed the then-British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who, as one of the architects of the illegal 2003 US-British invasion of Iraq, has hands, like Modi’s, that are dripping with blood.
Straw explained the background to the Foreign Office establishing the Gujarat inquiry team, saying, “These were very serious claims–that Chief Minister Modi had played a pretty active part in pulling back the police and in tacitly encouraging the Hindu extremists.”
Straw called the team’s report “very thorough,” then defended the British Labour government’s failure to make its findings known on the grounds that it would have hurt Britain’s interests, i.e., the commercial and strategic interests of British imperialism. While Straw was invoking “human rights” in fronting British imperialism’s predatory foreign policy, including in justifying the Iraq war, when it came to India, he had, he claims, “fairly limited” options. “We were never going to break diplomatic relations with India,” he says, “but it is obviously a stain on his (Modi’s) reputation.”
Much further evidence of Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat pogrom emerged in the months and years after the British Foreign office conducted its inquiry—an inquiry, it need be noted, that did not have at its disposal any of the compulsory investigative powers of the Indian police and courts.
Of especial importance is evidence provided by Haren Pandya, revenue minister in Modi’s Gujarat state government, and Sanjiv Bhatt, a deputy commissioner of police who participated in an “unofficial meeting” Modi convened at his residence on the night of Feb. 27, 2002. According to Pandya, who was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in March 2003, the meeting had a singular purpose. Modi instructed those assembled to “allow people to vent their anger and not come in the way of a Hindu backlash.” In 2009, Bhatt testified that he was present at that meeting and corroborated Pandya’s account.
But at every step of the way, Indian authorities have thwarted investigation of the 2002 events, especially any in which Modi and his chief henchman, India’s current home minister, Amit Shah, were implicated. The few convictions that have taken place have generally been the result of tenacious efforts on the part of the victims, as in the case of Blikis Bano, who was 21 and five months pregnant when she was brutally gang-raped in 2002, while 14 other members of her family were killed.
So blatant were the efforts of the police, judicial and government authorities in Gujarat to shield those responsible for the 2002 pogrom that ultimately the Supreme Court was compelled to intervene. India’s highest court, however, was quick to put its ill-deserved reputation for judicial probity at the service of Modi and his accomplices.
This culminated in a verdict last June that will live in ignominy. The Supreme Court dismissed the plea of Zakia Jafri, the widow of a Congress MP who was slaughtered along with 68 others in a Muslim neighbourhood of Ahmedabad on February 28, 2022, that it investigate whether their deaths were part of a “larger conspiracy”—that is, a calculated campaign of anti-Muslim violence and ethnic cleansing.
In so doing, the court not only absolved Modi, Shah and the Gujarat authorities, giving them a so-called “clean chit,” it denounced Jafri and her co-petitioner, the journalist and activist Teesta Setalvad, for wanting “to keep the pot boiling for ulterior design,” and said they should themselves be “in the dock” and prosecuted. The next day, citing this Supreme Court judgment, the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Setalvad and R.B. Sreekumar, a former top Gujarat police officer who has exposed police complicity in the pogrom.
This is part of a larger process in which the Indian ruling class has embraced Modi as the “strongman” it needs to wage class war against India’s workers and toilers and aggressively pursue its great power ambitions in alliance with US imperialism. The BJP, whose activist base is made up of fascistic Hindu supremacists, has been transformed into its principal party of government. In addition to leading India’s national government, it now holds power in some two-thirds of India’s states.
As elsewhere, the rise to power of far-right forces has been facilitated at every point by the sharp turn to the right of the ostensible “left” and liberal parties. In the name of fighting “Hindu fascism,” the twin Indian Stalinist parliamentary parties, the CPM and the CPI, have for decades subordinated the working class to the big business Congress Party, and where they have held power in various states, they have implemented what they themselves describe as “pro-investor” policies.
Two decades on, the Gujarat pogrom remains a festering wound on the Indian body politic. Tens of thousands of Muslims driven from their homes by the events of February-March 2002 are now ghettoized in what are for all intents and purposes internal displacement camps.
Modi and his BJP continue to use the 2002 events to rally their Hindu supremacist base and polarize the electorate. In the run-up to last year’s Gujarat state election, the state government released to a hero’s welcome all 11 of those sentenced to life prison terms for their role in the murder of Blikis Bano’s family.
The BJP also delisted its sitting state legislative assembly member for the Naroda neighbourhood of Ahmedabad so that it could stand as its candidate Payal Kukrani, the 30-year-old daughter of a BJP activist who was convicted for the Naroda Patiya Massacre, in which 96 Muslims were killed.
Predictably, India’s government, much of the corporate media and the BJP’s extensive diaspora network have responded to the BBC documentary with a deluge of vitriol. Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi denounced it as a “propaganda piece,” shaped by “bias” and a “colonial mindset.”
Well aware of Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, Western imperialist governments initially thought it wise to keep some distance from him. He was not allowed to travel to the UK for a decade or so, and only after he became Indian prime minister in 2014 was he welcome in Washington. But that is all ancient history.
Throughout his nine-year tenure as prime minister, but especially since his re-election in 2019, Modi and his BJP have fomented anti-Muslim and anti-minority bigotry with the ideological aim of transforming India into a Hindu rashtra (a state where the supremacy of Hindus is acknowledged and minorities live in sufferance), and with the political aim of channeling mounting social anger over mass joblessness and deepening poverty and social inequality along reactionary lines and splitting the working class. Yet this communalist gangster is now lauded and feted by the likes of Biden, Macron, Scholz and Trudeau as the leader of the world’s most “populous democracy” and a staunch defender of “freedom” against autocratic China.
In keeping with this, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rushed to disassociate himself from the BBC’s exposure of Modi’s role in the Gujarat pogrom. He told the British Parliament Wednesday he did not agree with its “characterization” of India’s prime minister.
Sweden and Finland are moving ahead with negotiations to finalize defence cooperation agreements (DCA) with the United States in what amounts to a further escalatory step in the US/NATO war with Russia. The agreements, which would allow US troops to operate unhindered on both countries’ territories, and store weaponry and other equipment at advanced bases, would strengthen Washington’s ability to open up a northern front in its drive to subjugate Russia to the status of a semi-colony and seize control of its natural resources.
Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson met in Helsinki (left) and Pekka Haavisto, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Finland (right). [Photo by Finnish Government/Dean Calma / IAEA / CC BY 2.0]
Sweden’s right-wing coalition government led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson declared in its announcement of bilateral talks with Washington that the DCA would enable Stockholm to “get more effective and faster support from the US in crisis or war situations.” Defence Minister Pål Jonson told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the deal will allow the US to store weaponry at bases in Sweden during peacetime and deploy more rapidly in a crisis, adding, “We are moving from being close partners to allies.”
A similar process is underway in Finland, where Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told Iltalehti on January 8 that talks on the bilateral deal are in the preliminary stages. Haavisto’s ministry said in a statement that the agreement would “create conditions for closer cooperation if the security situation so requires.” Washington is “the most important external actor in Northern Europe,” the statement continued, before adding that Washington “is committed to security in Finland and Europe.”
Finland and Sweden’s joint application to join NATO last May marked a major escalation of the US-led military confrontation with Russia in northern Europe. While Finland shares a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia, Sweden is strategically positioned on the northwest of the Baltic Sea, placing forces based there in easy striking distance of St. Petersburg and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which lies just 300 kilometres southeast of the Swedish island of Gotland.
While the vast majority of NATO members, including the European imperialist powers, are determined to integrate Sweden and Finland into NATO as quickly as possible, Turkey has refused to approve the applications, citing Sweden’s alleged protection of Kurdish nationalists with ties to the PKK. Unanimous consent by all NATO members is required to approve a new member.
DCAs are critical in facilitating the deployment of American military personnel on foreign soil. They regulate the extent to which American soldiers will be subject to local laws, grant Washington sweeping authority to move troops as it sees fit, and allow the US military to create forward supply bases for weaponry and military equipment. The US currently has 17 DCAs with EU members and six with non-EU states.
Last June, Washington and Oslo announced the finalization of a DCA to facilitate the expansion of American military activity, especially in Norway’s Arctic, where it shares a 196-kilometre border with Russia. It included four “agreed areas,” zones to which US forces have unhindered access. In and around these “agreed areas,” US forces can exercise authority over Norwegian citizens, including by taking a “proportionate” response to any perceived security threats. The areas include Ramsund Naval Base and Evenes Air Base in the arctic.
In a submission to the Norwegian parliament, the country’s Judge Advocate General, Sigrid Redse Johansen, noted, “The access to exert authority (and power) is located with each troop member, and authority can be exerted towards anyone who comes into contact with the agreed area or who, in extraordinary cases, comes in the way of an American operation … Power can thus be exerted by any American troop member towards Norwegian civilians to restore order or protect the force.”
Johansen also addressed the lack of controls in place for Norwegian authorities to challenge US decisions or actions, writing in somewhat understated language, “Genuine Norwegian control over the conditions for the USA’s exertion of power do not appear prominent.”
The agreement also gives US authorities the first right to prosecute soldiers who commit crimes off-duty, and define what is considered an act of duty. In other words, American forces can act with virtual impunity while in the country.
The agreements Washington is negotiating with Finland and Sweden appear set to contain similarly sweeping provisions guaranteeing US military operations and legal immunity. As Teemu Tanner, Finland’s ambassador to Norway, put it in an interview with High North News, “I think we can learn a lot from how Norway builds its NATO activities.”
In November, Finland, Sweden and Norway announced the upgrading of a trilateral defence agreement to enable joint military activities in the Arctic areas of all three countries. The agreement allows for joint exercises, military planning and the carrying out of joint military operations in a crisis situation. It followed the participation of Finnish and Swedish troops in a joint brigade under Norwegian command in NATO’s Cold Response exercise last August.
Also in November, Sweden’s new right-wing government announced a plan to massively increase military spending in order to reach the NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence. The coalition, which is led by the conservative Moderates but relies on support in parliament from the fascistic Sweden Democrats to obtain a majority, intends to hike military spending by 64 percent by 2028. Just days after this announcement, the government unveiled a military aid package to Ukraine worth 3 billion kronor (about €270 million). It included an air defence system and light armoured vehicles, and totaled 1 billion kronor more than all Sweden’s previous aid packages to Ukraine combined.
Earlier this month, the government revealed a plan to reintroduce civilian conscription. Young people will be trained in disaster relief and other emergency services at the municipal level in a move that the government explicitly linked to the need to strengthen Sweden’s defensive capabilities in the event of a war. Military conscription was already reintroduced by the Social Democrat government in 2017. The latest plan commits to doubling annual military conscripts to 10,000.
A major factor driving the intensifying conflicts over the Arctic is the vast quantities of oil, gas, and rare earths in the region, which are becoming easier to access due to the impact of capitalist-induced climate change. Territorial claims involving Arctic states, which include Canada, Denmark, Russia and the United States, are also being driven by the opening up of new trade routes as the ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean recedes. The US, Canada and the European imperialist powers are determined to strengthen their respective positions in the region, recognizing that it could mean access to the resources necessary to play a big part in the clean energy economy of the future, control the flow of world trade, and gain a military-strategic edge over their rivals.
Underscoring the vast economic interests at stake in the region, Swedish iron ore miner LKAB revealed last week the discovery of a huge deposit of more than 1 million tons of rare earth oxides in Kiruna in the Swedish Arctic. While the site represents less than 1 percent of global rare earth deposits, according to US Geological Survey estimates, it is the largest such find in Europe. LKAB explained that the deposits were sufficient to supply a “substantial part of Europe’s needs” for electric vehicle production as part of the so-called “clean energy transition.”
Far from being motivated by the desire to stop climate change, the key concern of the European powers is to reduce their dependence on Russia and China for critical economic supplies so that the European imperialist powers can act more aggressively on the world stage, not only against Russia and China, but ultimately where necessary the United States. As Ebba Busch, Sweden’s Minister for Energy and Business,\ and leader of the right-wing Christian Democrats, put it, “electrification, the EU’s self-sufficiency and independence from Russia and China will begin in the mine.”
On Friday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley gave a briefing at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they pledged the United States to the military defeat of Russia.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley speaks during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington on Nov. 16, 2022. [AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File]
Milley announced the commitment of the United States and NATO to “go on the offensive to liberate Russian-occupied Ukraine.” He repeated that Ukraine would use NATO armored vehicles and tanks to go on the “tactical and operational offensive to liberate the occupied areas.”
With this declaration, the entire prestige of the NATO alliance is being staked on the reconquest of all Ukrainian territory, which according to the United States includes both the entire Donbas and the Crimean Peninsula.
As the immense challenges posed by the new American strategy emerge in the coming months and as the death toll among Ukrainian troops rises, the demand will inevitably be made for the direct deployment of NATO troops in the war. This would mean that American and Russian soldiers would be shooting at each other in the first general engagement between nuclear-armed states in history.
Milley is an active-duty military officer, and Austin is a retired four-star general who was granted a special dispensation from Congress to serve in the civilian office of defense secretary. These two four-star generals were effectively setting the foreign policy of the United States, in a sweeping display of the power of the military in American society.
The explicit assertion by Milley and Austin that the weapons being provided by the US and NATO are of an offensive, not defensive character, is a 180-degree reversal of public statements by the Biden administration, which justified the escalation of US involvement in the war with the declaration that it would not provide “offensive” equipment.
“The equipment that we’ve provided is defensive, as you know, not offensive. And we see that as being a difference,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said at a briefing in May.
“The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment,” Biden said that same month, “and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand—and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say—that’s called ‘World War III.’”
Late last month, Biden declared, “The idea we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there, would have the prospect of breaking up NATO, and breaking up the European Union.” He added, “They’re not looking to go to war with Russia, they’re not looking for a third world war.”
If one accepts both the public statements of Milley and the repeated assertions of Biden, it would mean that the United States is in reality at “war with Russia.” This undeclared war is being waged without congressional authorization or any effort to seek the approval of the American people.
The announcement by NATO that it is sending offensive weapons to Ukraine has exposed the Biden administration’s entire narrative of US involvement in Ukraine as a fraud. It has repeatedly claimed that the US and NATO are not involved in the war. But NATO is not only a party to the conflict, it is its driving force.
Like with all wars, as the fighting progresses, the debate over who “fired the first shot” fades away, and the real, complex social forces driving the war come into view.
Throughout 2022, the Biden administration claimed that it was intervening in the conflict in order to save Ukrainian lives. In the year-long conflict, it has become clear that America’s only use for the Ukrainian population is as cannon fodder for a war to dominate the Eurasian landmass.
Opening the meeting, Austin declared, “As President Biden said, this is a decisive decade for the world.” This was a quotation from Biden’s introduction to the United States’ National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States “will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors.”
Throughout the event, there was no mention of the word “ceasefire” or “peace.” Instead, Milley declared, “This war, like many wars in the past, will end at some sort of negotiating table.”
But what Milley was describing as a “negotiating table” is like the one plated aboard the USS Missouri, in which Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the unconditional surrender of Japan, with the alternative being, in the words of the Potsdam Declaration, “prompt and utter destruction.”
Following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities and a series of fire-bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, that war, too, ended at the negotiating table.
Even as they admitted that the United States’ intentions in the war were fundamentally offensive, the generals engaged in the obligatory lies and hypocrisy with which the gears of war are oiled.
“International aggression, where large countries use military force to attack small countries and change recognized borders, cannot be allowed to stand,” declared Austin. This comes from a country that has, in the past quarter century alone, illegally attacked or occupied Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
Austin continued, “It’s about the world that we want our children and grandchildren to inherit.” In fact, the catastrophe unleashed by US imperialism in its “decisive decade” will, if not stopped, leave the next generation with a charred wasteland, if there is a generation left to witness it.
Responding to NATO’s assertion that its goal is the defeat of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, penned a brief statement on Telegram: “The loss of a nuclear power in a conventional war can provoke the outbreak of a nuclear war. Nuclear powers do not lose major conflicts on which their fate depends.”
The position of American imperialism, however, is that the use of nuclear weapons—either by Russia or the US itself—cannot be a deterrent in the escalation of the conflict. In an editorial published Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal demanded strikes inside of Russian territory, declaring, “Why should a dictator who rolled over a foreign border be free to claim his territory as sacrosanct?” It concluded, “The rejoinder is that Mr. Putin might unleash a nuclear weapon, but the past months have shown that he will make that decision based on his own calculations in any case.”
This editorial reflects the utterly reckless mood that has gripped the capitalist oligarchy, which sees war as a way out of the myriad social, economic, and political crises gripping the capitalist social order.
The social forces driving the war were shown at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where billionaires and the heads of major banks hobnobbed with Ukrainian oligarchs and warmongers, such as the disgraced former British Prime Minister Boris “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands” Johnson, who declared, “Give them the tanks! There’s absolutely nothing to be lost.”
