Over 90 percent of Europeans worry about the rising cost of living

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The latest Eurobarometer survey found that 93 percent of Europeans are very concerned about the rising cost of living. High food and energy prices meant nearly 40 percent of the EU population are already struggling to pay for things, and almost one in two says his or her standard of living has fallen. Another 39 percent expected their standard of living to fall this year.

A homeless man walks along a street in a shopping district in central London, Thursday, February 2, 2023. [AP Photo/Kin Cheung]

For the Eurobarometer survey, some 27,000 citizens were interviewed in all 27 EU member states in October and November last year. The survey was commissioned by the European Parliament and published last week.

In it, 39 percent of respondents said they had difficulty paying their bills “most of the time” or “occasionally.” That is an increase of 9 percent since the autumn of 2021, when 30 percent of respondents voiced this problem.

The concurrence and multiplicity of crises is particularly reflected in the concerns of the European population: the coronavirus pandemic, the escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the associated risk of a third, nuclear world war and the impact of all these developments on people’s lives. Two-thirds of respondents are not satisfied with the measures taken by national governments and European bodies to counter these dangers.

In immediate second place to concerns about the high cost of living, respondents cited fear of poverty and social exclusion (82 percent). And almost as many said they were worried about climate change (81 percent) and fearful of the war in Ukraine spreading to other countries (also 81 percent). Fear of nuclear war was cited by 74 percent of all respondents.

In all EU member states, more than seven in 10 respondents expressed concern about high inflation and the rising cost of living. In Greece, 100 percent of respondents expressed this worry, in Cyprus 99 percent, and in Italy and Portugal 98 percent. Rising prices, including particularly sharp increases in food and energy prices, are felt by all sections of the working class—regardless of gender, age, origin, educational or professional background.

The following countries experienced above-average declines in living standards, particularly due to sharp increases in food and energy prices: In Cyprus, 70 percent of respondents said their standard of living had already declined; in Greece, 66 percent; in Malta, 65 percent; in France, 62 percent; and in Portugal, 57 percent.

In Hungary, 44 percent of respondents (slightly below the EU average of 46 percent) said their standard of living had already declined as a result of the pandemic, the Ukraine war and economic crisis. Forty-seven percent of Hungarians surveyed (compared to 39 percent for the EU average) were worried about their situation worsening in the coming months. More than 80 percent were afraid of an expansion of the Ukraine war.

One cause of high inflation is the impact of the cheap money policies pursued by central banks in the US and Europe. Governments have also thrown support packages worth hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and other currencies at the corporations and the rich over the past decade and a half. This has been done to keep stock prices high and to protect their profits. These trillion-dollar giveaways, which have increased sharply since the outbreak of the pandemic, are now to be recovered through the intensified exploitation and impoverishment of the working class.

Other factors also continue to fuel inflation: These include the decline in the labour force due to coronavirus deaths, ongoing infections, and the effects of Long-Covid. The criminal profits-before-lives policies of capitalist governments around the world are responsible for this. Further, the war that the USA and NATO are waging in Ukraine against Russia, the threats of war against China and the related insane rearmament spending that all countries in Europe, with Germany in the lead, are engaged in are also part of this.

Last but not least, the price gouging by the large corporations, especially in the food and energy sectors, is significantly contributing to inflation. The prices runups come to about 20 percent for food and about 60 percent in the energy sector. Working people and the poorest sections of the working class are particularly affected.

The recently published Oxfam report also shows that the gulf between rich and poor has widened enormously worldwide. More than 800 million people are suffering from hunger, which is about one in 10 of the world’s population; and millions do not know how to make ends meet. But at the same time, the billionaires are seeing gigantic increases in their wealth.

As the Oxfam report shows, the corporations and super-rich are the crisis “winners.” They are profiting from the suffering and death caused by the pandemic and the energy crisis. For example, 95 food and energy corporations worldwide more than doubled their profits in 2022. They made $306 billion in windfall profits and distributed $257 billion (84 percent) of that to their shareholders. (Oxfam defines profits as windfall if they exceed the 2018-2021 average by 10 percent or more.) Since the start of the pandemic, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population has pocketed about two-thirds of the growth in global wealth.

In Germany, the trend is even more extreme. Of the growth in wealth produced in Germany in 2020 and 2021, 81 percent went to the richest 1 percent of the population. At the same time, tens of millions of workers suffered losses in their real wages. People already living in poverty are unable to pay a large proportion of their bills and must decide whether to spend the money on food or on heating.

Blinken green lights Israel’s far right government suppression of Palestinians

Jean Shaoul

Swallowing his “concerns” that the recent wave of violence could lead to a third intifada, or uprising, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the go ahead to suppress the Palestinians as the two leaders discussed plans for operations against Iran.

Speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem after meetings Netanyahu and later with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Blinken made the usual ritual incantations of support for a “two-state solution” meaning a mini-Palestinian statelet of isolated Bantustans subservient to Israel. This was a policy rejected decades ago by the fascistic and racist forces in Israel’s newly installed government, to the extent of supporting the November 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, for signing the Oslo Accords in 1993.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands during a news conference, on January 30, 2023 in Jerusalem. [AP Photo/Ronaldo Schemidt]

Blinken all but acknowledged this and its catastrophic implications, saying “What we’re seeing now for Palestinians is a shrinking horizon of hope, not an expanding one. And that, too, we believe needs to change” as he tossed some loose change —$50 million in new American funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency that provides aid to the Palestinian refugee camps—at Abbas’s feet.

Blinken said he had heard “deep concern about the current trajectory” of escalating tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. But beyond calling on Abbas to restore the PA’s coordination with Israel’s security services, abandoned after the Israeli massacre in Jenin, to refrain from pursuing cases against Israel in the International Criminal Court and appealing for a “de-escalation” he put forward no new proposals.

Neither did he exert any pressure on Netanyahu to rein in Israel’s security forces and settlers that have killed 32 Palestinians so far this year. Far from it, he declared that “America’s commitment has never wavered. It never will.”

Blinken just shrugged his shoulders, saying “It is fundamentally up to them. They have to work together to find a path forward that both defuses the current cycle of violence and, I hope, also leads to positive steps to build back some confidence.”

His de facto support—along with the silence of the major European powers—for Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians and its illegal occupation of their land since the 1967 Arab Israeli war is bound up with the dependence of US imperialism on Israel as the guardian of its predatory interests in the resource-rich region, and as its subcontractor in its covert war against Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen—under conditions where Iran and Russia are forging ever closer relations.

Netanyahu, responding in an interview with CNN on Tuesday to a question about US concerns that expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank could exacerbate tensions, pointed to the Trump administration’s brokering of the Abraham Accords. The Accords had normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, led to increasing military, economic and technological ties and side-lined the Palestinian issue.

He said, “I went around them (Palestinians), I went directly to the Arab states and forged with a new concept of peace… I forged four historic peace agreements, the Abraham Accords, which is twice the number of peace agreements that all my predecessors in 70 years got combined.”

Netanyahu added, “When effectively the Arab-Israeli conflict (comes) to an end, I think we’ll circle back to the Palestinians and get a workable peace with the Palestinians.” By this he meant that the venal Arab bourgeois regimes would do nothing to defend the Palestinians and would be satisfied with an insincere pledge of a future settlement—in which they can “have all the powers that they need to govern themselves. But none of the powers that could threaten (us) and this means that Israel should have the overriding security responsibility.”

Since taking office at the end of December, his government, stacked with fascists, racists and homophobes, is pursuing its coalition agreement that asserts its commitment to territorial expansionism, Jewish Supremacy and the mass repression of the Palestinians.

Netanyahu is doubling down on his government’s attacks on the Palestinians, promising to “strengthen” the settlements in response to shooting attacks in Jerusalem including a suicide attack by a lone Palestinian on a Jerusalem synagogue Friday night, in which seven Israelis were killed, and the shooting of an Israeli father and son on Saturday by a 13-year-old Palestinian.

These shootings follow a wave of violence on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, provoked by the escalating attacks over the last year by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), police and armed settlers that led to the death of 271 Palestinians, mostly in the West Bank, in 2022 and last Thursday’s massacre during a raid on the West Bank city of Jenin that left 10 Palestinians dead, the deadliest such raid in years.

There were nearly 150 violent settler attacks on Palestinians across the West Bank over the weekend. On Monday, the IDF opened fire on a car supposedly driving suspiciously, killing the driver, 26-year-old Nassim Abu Fouda, in Hebron.

Netanyahu, speaking ahead of a cabinet meeting Sunday said, “Our answer to terrorism is an iron fist and a powerful, swift and precise response.” The “iron fist” included: the immediately sealing of attackers’ family homes, over and above Israel’s longstanding practice of demolishing the houses at a later date; the revocation of Israeli residency, citizenship and national insurance rights of “families of terrorists that support terrorism and removing them to the territory of the Palestinian Authority”; easing of restrictions on Israeli civilians carrying guns; bolstering military and police units; and the confiscation of weapons from Palestinians.

Netanyahu also called for legislation to allow “the immediate dismissal of workers who have supported terrorism, without need for a hearing.” While he did not say what measures he would take to strengthen the settlements, the IDF said on Saturday it had already moved an additional battalion to the West Bank.

The new proposals have sparked concerns that they will fuel the growing violence between Israelis and Palestinians and precipitate an all-out war, with Ramadan and Passover set to coincide in April.

At the same time, the government is stoking a constitutional crisis within Israel that has aroused mass opposition, with tens of thousands taking to the streets on four successive Saturday evenings in Israel’s major cities. It plans to neuter the judicial system by curtailing the High Court’s ability to strike down laws, allowing parliament to override any such rulings, and doing away with the post of attorney general. This would pave the way to end Netanyahu’s corruption trial and facilitate more rapid settlement construction in preparation for annexing much of the West Bank.

The government is also set to introduce new legislation overturning the Supreme Court’s decision to bar ultra-Orthodox Shas Party leader Arieh Dery from serving as both Interior and Health Minister. The court had ruled it “unreasonable” to appoint “a person who has been convicted three times of offenses throughout his life, and he violated his duty to serve the public loyally and lawfully while serving in senior public positions.” The legislation, if passed, will deny the court any authority to intervene in ministerial appointments.

Also planned, is the closing of Israel’s public broadcasting corporation and the muzzling of the media, restricting the publication of “sensitive information” as defined in the Privacy Protection Law. This would include “data on the personality, intimate affairs… opinions and beliefs of a person” and thus ban any opinion recorded in a conversation. This would outlaw any statement casting doubt on the credibility of a prime minister charged with corruption.

Simcha Rothman, from the fascistic Religious Zionism Party and chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, has introduced legislation aimed at severely limiting workers' right to strike in key sectors such as electricity, water, transport, health, the stock exchange and the Bank of Israel, while making any sympathy strike illegal unless approved by a secret ballot of the union’s members in which at least half the members voted.

COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children in the US, study finds

Emma Arceneaux

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, (JAMA) on Monday shows that COVID-19 is a leading cause of death among children ages 0-19 in the United States.

By analyzing death certificates of children and young people in the United States between August 1, 2021 and July 31, 2022, researchers found that COVID-19 ranked “eighth among all causes of death, fifth in disease-related causes of death (excluding unintentional injuries, suicide and assault), and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory disease.”

The period of study included the Delta and Omicron waves of the pandemic, which ripped through US schools and caused record infections, hospitalizations and deaths among children. However, the authors found that even in the pre-Delta period of the pandemic, COVID-19 still ranked as the ninth-leading cause of death in children. As well, the disease was a leading cause of death within each age group, ranking seventh among ages less than 1 and ages 1-4; sixth among children ages 5-9 and 10-14; and fifth among those ages 15-19.

Arihana Macias, 7, gets a compress after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children five to 12 years at a Dallas County Health and Human vaccination site in Mesquite, Texas, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. [AP Photo/LM Otero]

The findings explode the myth that COVID-19 is mild in children and that it is nothing more than the “flu.” Influenza itself is a harmful disease that needlessly kills between dozens and hundreds of children in the US each year, including at least 91 this season according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. Still, COVID-19 is far deadlier than the flu.

The study identified 821 deaths in which COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death, compared to 472 deaths attributed to “influenza and pneumonia” in the same period, which, the authors note, is a category that may include multiple pathogens. The crude death rate among children (reported deaths compared to the estimated population size) for COVID-19 was 1.0 per 100,000, compared to .6 per 100,000 for “influenza and pneumonia.”

The authors note that their findings may underestimate the true mortality burden of COVID-19 in children for a number of reasons, including that “analyses of excess deaths have suggested under-reporting bias for COVID-19 deaths” and that the “criteria for classifying COVID-19 deaths is heterogeneous across states and has changed over time.” Further, they only counted those death certificates which listed COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death and not a contributing cause of death; nor was the impact of long-term sequelae (Long COVID) likely captured in their data.

Significantly, a recent study by the CDC found that at least 3,500 people in the US have died from Long COVID since the start of the pandemic, though the true figure is certainly higher for many of the same reasons cited above, in addition to the fact that guidance for clinically identifying and reporting Long COVID is continuously changing. 

Among children, the CDC has found that those previously infected with COVID-19 were at higher risk of a number of serious and potentially life-threatening conditions affecting the lungs, heart, veins and kidneys. These include increased incidences of cardiomyopathy and myocarditis, heart conditions which account for approximately 11.8 and 4.6 percent of cardiovascular deaths in children respectively, according to a study in the American Heart Journal. The umbrella term “diseases of the heart” ranked as the seventh leading cause of death among children in the JAMA study.

Additionally, over 9,300 children have been afflicted with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a serious condition associated with COVID-19. The CDC has recorded 76 deaths in children due to MIS-C to date.

The finding that COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children comes as President Joe Biden, who declared in September that the “pandemic is over,” announced Monday that in May the federal government will terminate both the public health emergency and the national emergency declared for the pandemic.

In practice, this means that what little remains of free testing, vaccines and treatments will be cut off and the cost of these essential measures will be offloaded by the ruling class onto the backs of the working class. At the same time, millions of people are set to lose Medicaid health insurance beginning April 1, and extra food assistance provided to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients will also end in March.

The pandemic, in reality, continues to maim and kill thousands of people in the US each week. Even with severe limitations in testing and data reporting, the current 7-day rolling average for deaths in the US is 468 per day according to Our World in Data, or 3,276 per week.

Children are also dying each week. As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained in its reporting on pediatric COVID-19 deaths, the database for classifying deaths based on death certificates lags far behind the agency's COVID-19 Data Tracker that records deaths based on direct reports from state health agencies. Official death certificates can take as long as six months to be finalized.

According to Data Tracker, 2,032 children ages 0-17 have died from COVID-19, 57 of whom were added in January 2023.

By comparison, the CDC’s interactive page monitoring the pediatric mortality impact of influenza recorded 2,147 deaths between 2004 and the present. In other words, COVID-19 has killed approximately as many children in three years as influenza did in nearly 20 years.

Children ages 5 to 11 wait in line with their parents to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a pediatric vaccine clinic set up at Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana, Calif., Nov. 9, 2021. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

It is no hyperbole to characterize the pandemic as a brutal and ongoing experiment upon an entire generation. The latest sero-prevalence survey by the CDC estimates that 96.3 percent of all US children have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 at least once. In total, over 180,000 children in the US have been hospitalized over the course of the pandemic.

Whereas in 2020 and 2021 there remained limited mitigation measures in schools, these were virtually all thrown out in 2022 under the “guidance” of the CDC itself and with the full endorsement of the national teachers unions, which have played the instrumental role of stifling educators’ opposition to mass infection and forcing millions of teachers and students back into virus-filled classrooms. These conditions led to the unprecedented “tripledemic” that ravaged the pediatric population this past fall, filling hospitals to capacity with children sick with RSV, flu, COVID-19 or any combination of the three.

On the world scale, a study published in December found COVID-19 to be the leading cause of death globally in 2021, ahead of both ischemic heart disease and cancer. CNN reported that preliminary figures show that despite killing fewer Americans in 2022 than 2021, COVID-19 is projected to remain the third leading cause of death in the US overall for 2022.

By consciously pursuing policies of mass infection that will lead to millions of deaths each year, capitalist governments around the world have carried out a program of “social murder,” particularly targeting the elderly and immunocompromised.

In the statement, “2023: The global capitalist crisis and the growing offensive of the international working class,” Joseph Kishore and David North write that “there is no precedent in modern history for governments that are not openly fascistic implementing policies that it is known will result in mass illness and death. But this is precisely what all the capitalist states have done over the course of the pandemic.” This response, they continue, can leave no doubt as to how these governments will respond to even greater threats.

That these policies have not spared children, the most innocent and helpless layer of society, proves the total incorrigibility of the entire capitalist system, including both the Republican and Democratic parties and the pseudo-left organizations that provide cover for the latter. Despite the existence of all the necessary medical and technological tools to totally eliminate COVID-19 on a world scale, all matters of social life, including public health, are subordinate to private profit.

Price-gouging drives record profits at US energy giants

US energy giant ExxonMobil posted an annual profit of $55.7 billion Tuesday—the largest ever for any US energy company.

ExxonMobil’s profit figure was $10 billion more than its previous high of $45 billion in 2008 and its return on capital was an extraordinary 25 percent. ExxonMobil share prices rose 80 percent last year. Only tech giants Apple and Microsoft have reported higher profits so far.

Chevron reported record 2022 profits of $35.5 billion. ConocoPhillips, Marathon Petroleum and other major energy companies are also expected to report record or near record profits.

The gasoline price board is shown at a gas station in Menlo Park, Calif., March 21, 2022. [AP Photo/Jeff Chiu]

These record profits are the result of both price gouging by the oil companies and the slashing of costs, including the suppression of wage increases to below the rate of inflation.

Oil prices have surged over the past year with the eruption of the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine, fueled by the imposition of sanctions on Russian energy exports.

The report on oil company profits follows the publication of a report by UK-based charity Oxfam showing that during the pandemic the super wealthy became even richer, corralling two-thirds of new wealth created, as much as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. Food and energy companies more than doubled their profits in 2022 amid expanding poverty and hunger worldwide.

Following the pattern of other large corporations, ExxonMobil is using its windfall to further enrich investors. ExxonMobil launched a $50 billion share buyback program in December and is increasing dividends. Last week Chevron announced a $75 billion stock buyback program.

In response to public indignation over the report of record oil company profits, a White House spokesman issued a demagogic statement professing surprise and outrage while Biden sent out a tweet Tuesday night criticizing “Big Oil” for paying “shareholders billions instead of reinvesting profits.”

However, far from an isolated case of corporate excess, the bonanza for the oil giants is the inevitable consequence of the anti-working class and pro-big business policies being pursued by the Biden administration. This has included the stoking of inflation by shoveling unlimited amounts of essentially free government cash into the coffers of Wall Street, vast increases in military spending to pursue conflict with Russia and China and the disastrous impact of economic disruption caused by the refusal of governments to implement the public health measures needed to halt the ongoing pandemic, now in its fourth year.

The Biden administration has, meanwhile, enlisted the trade union bureaucracy to suppress strikes and hold down pay increases well below the rate of inflation to make the working class pay the cost of its reckless policies. This included the imposition of a miserable well-below-inflation wage settlement on the backs of 30,000 oil workers in the name of “national unity,” coinciding with the launching of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine last year. This was followed in November by Biden’s sponsorship of strikebreaking legislation imposing a management-dictated contract on the back of more than 100,000 US railroad workers.

The White House has supported the US Federal Reserve Board program of raising interest rates in order to drive up unemployment to beat back workers’ wage demands. At a press conference Wednesday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the US central bank would continue with its policy of interest rate increases, announcing a further 0.25 percent rise in its benchmark rate. He restated the Fed’s intention to keep raising rates for the foreseeable future, citing a “strong labor market” and “elevated” wage growth.

Wall Street has blamed the surge in inflation on “excessive” wage gains by workers resulting from the relative availability of jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, price increases have significantly outpaced whatever minimal wage gains workers have been able to wring from employers. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages overall increased 5.1 percent in 2022 while the Consumer Price Index rose 6.5 percent, down from 9 percent last summer. However, the prices of basic items have risen in excess of that. Food prices are up 10 percent over the year and egg prices alone have gone up 60 percent. Butter is up 31 percent and lettuce 25 percent. The average price of gasoline is down since highs last year of $5 per gallon but still stands at $3.50 per gallon, having risen 30 cents per gallon in the last month. Gas prices are set to rise further when an EU ban on gas imports from Russia takes effect February 5.

A large portion of the rise in oil company profits is due to the artificial driving up of oil prices by the energy conglomerates. A study published by liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute in April found that 54 percent of the recent overall growth in prices can be attributed to higher profits, while only 8 percent was attributable to higher unit labor costs.

Not only are ExxonMobil and other large corporations profiting off, and in fact stoking, inflation, they are avoiding paying most taxes on their windfall. The Center for American Progress reported that ExxonMobil’s effective tax rate was just 2.8 percent despite a nominal 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate. Chevron paid only $174 million in federal income taxes despite earning $9.5 billion last year, an effective rate of 1.8 percent.

The top rate was lowered to 21 percent from 35 percent under the Trump administration and left at that level while Democrats controlled the White House and both branches of Congress.

Other large corporations paid little or no taxes in 2021 including Amazon (6.1 percent), Ford (1 percent), General Motors (0.2 percent), Bank of America (3.5 percent) and FedEx (4.2 percent).

Some paid no taxes, like AT&T, which had no tax liability in 2021 despite $29.6 billion in earnings, claiming instead a refund or credit of $1.2 billion.

The mock indignation of Biden and various capitalist politicians aside, the massive profits reaped by the oil companies at the expense of the living standards of workers show the incompatibility of the private ownership of the energy industry with the well-being of broad masses of the population. The conflict between the public interest and private profit is being further brought to the fore by the existential challenge posed by climate change and implacable corporate opposition to a globally coordinated program to reorient away from fossil fuels.

Caterpillar handed investors $6.7 billion in 2022, while demanding more concessions from workers in next contract

Marcus Day

Caterpillar equipment seen at a Ziegler CAT dealer. [AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall]

On Tuesday, global construction and mining equipment manufacturer Caterpillar announced its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings for 2022. The earnings report showed substantial sales increases and strong profitability over the previous year, which the company utilized to reward its investors with a $6.7 billion payout via share buybacks and dividends. Since 2018, Caterpillar has distributed more than $23 billion to its investors, or roughly $12.6 million every day.

The bonanza for Caterpillar’s shareholders—dominated by major investment firms like the Vanguard Group, State Street Global Advisors and BlackRock—comes at the same time that the company is preparing to demand a new round of concessions from nearly 7,000 US workers in the United Auto Workers union whose six-year contract with CAT expires on March 1. The workers, for their part, are seeking to win major improvements in wages, benefits, paid time off and working conditions, and reverse years of givebacks overseen by the UAW bureaucracy. On Friday, workers voted by a near-unanimous 98.6 percent to authorize a strike.

“Our global team delivered one of the best years in our nearly 100-year history, including record full-year adjusted profit per share,” CEO Jim Umpleby said in a statement accompanying the earnings release. Although the figure was not included in the latest earnings report, Umpleby no doubt received a handsome payout himself last year; between 2019-2021, he took in more than $72.5 million in combined salary and other compensation, according to the company’s financial filings.

Responding to the earnings report, one Caterpillar worker in East Peoria told the WSWS sarcastically: “Looks like they’ll be able to afford some good help.”

Caterpillar’s fourth-quarter revenue rose to $16.6 billion, up 20 percent compared to the same period last year, buoyed by continued price increases. Revenue ended up 17 percent for 2022 overall, hitting $59.4 billion. The company’s prices have risen 14 percent recently, the highest rise in a decade, according to a report by a Bank of America research analyst cited by Reuters.

The company also reported a strong year-over-year growth in operating profit, rising 15 percent to $7.9 billion.

In addition to a record-high full-year profit per share, adjusted operating profit margins also rose to an all-time high, hitting a robust 17 percent in the fourth quarter.

The company projected further growth in revenue and profit in the coming year, stating that it expected higher prices to “more than offset manufacturing costs.”

However, in an indication of the headwinds posed by the broader economic and political crisis, profit per share saw a sizable decline year over year in the fourth quarter and missed financial analysts’ estimates, falling 29 percent to $2.79 a share. Executives attributed the drop-off in fourth quarter earnings to elevated material and freight costs from ongoing supply chain problems, as well as unfavorable foreign exchange rates with the US dollar. Wall Street reacted negatively to the news, driving the company’s share price down sharply before it recovered somewhat, remaining 5 percent below its recent all-time high.

Significantly, no reference was made in the company’s conference call with financial analysts Tuesday to the looming UAW contract expiration or the possibility of a strike. Wall Street representatives likely have little doubt that Caterpillar management is preparing an aggressive response to a walkout, based on the company’s well-known reputation for its no-holds-barred approach to its workforce.

The company has seen years of strong profitability based on the long-term suppression of labor costs, which it has wrung out of its global workforce by combining ruthless strikebreaking and reliance on the pro-corporate trade union bureaucracies. In 2017, the UAW pushed through a six-year contract over widespread opposition—with the largest local voting it down—which sanctioned the closure of the company’s plant in Aurora, Illinois, and provided only two 2 percent annual wage increases.

Summing up what workers are looking to win in the approaching contract struggle, one Caterpillar worker told the WSWS, “More y time [paid time off]. More vacation days. More pay. Better retirement benefits.”

Another veteran worker in the Peoria area told the WSWS: “What they paid out to the shareholders alone would pay for all our demands. Restore pensions, wage increase, COLA, profit sharing, health care, everything.

“Of course it has never been a matter of ‘CAN they.’ It’s strictly a question of ‘WILL they.’ With undisguised contempt they snap their fingers in our face and say ‘you don’t deserve it.’

“At our ‘start of shift’ meeting today, one of the talking points was a year-end summary of safety ‘incidents’ for 2022. 433 for Mapleton facility alone. Including x number of recordable injuries, x number of first aid visits, x number of burns, and so on. No mention of the two fatalities.”

In 2022, Steven Dierkes, a 39-year-old worker at Caterpillar’s Mapleton, Illinois, foundry, fell into a vat of molten metal after being on the job less than two weeks.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) said in a report following its investigation that the death was attributable to Caterpillar’s “willful” safety violation and “failure to meet its legal responsibilities to ensure the safety and health of workers” but fined the company only $145,027—roughly equivalent to just two days’ pay for the company’s CEO. The death was the second at the foundry in just six months.

Concluding, the Caterpillar worker said, “We simply do not register in their minds as living things, let alone human beings.”

The struggle at Caterpillar, in contrast to previous years, is taking place amid a renewed eruption of the class struggle internationally, which is increasingly taking the form of a rebellion against the corrupt trade union bureaucracies. Over the course of the past two years, workers in the UAW have repeatedly voted to reject pro-corporate contracts negotiated and endorsed by union executives, including by overwhelming 90 percent margins at Volvo Trucks and John Deere in 2021.

Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Programme 2024/2025

Application Deadline: 30th May 2023

To Be Taken At (Country): USA

About the Award: During their stay at a host American university, Humphrey Fellows are invited to take graduate courses relevant to their professional interests.  However, as the Humphrey Fellowship is not a degree program, participants spend a considerable portion of their time engaged in professional development activities including: consultations and affiliations with U.S. faculty and experts, field trips, workshops, research projects, and the development of practical useful strategies that could be applied in the Fellows’ home countries.

Field of Study: The Humphrey Fellowship offers opportunities in the following fields:

• Sustainable Development
• Economic Development
• Educational
• Public Health 

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

• Have a minimum of a four-year undergraduate degree from S.A. (BA + Honors)
• Have a minimum of five years of full-time professional experience beyond the attainment of a first university/undergraduate degree prior to July 2020
• University lecturers have to have management or policy responsibilities and experience. Exceptions apply to teachers of English as a foreign language and specialists in substance abuse preventions and treatment
• Demonstrated Leadership Ability: candidates should have achieved positions of significant responsibility at the national, regional or local level and show clear promise to assume greater future leadership roles
• A record of public service in the community: candidates careers must reflect a present and future commitment to public service, broadly defined in the public, NGO, or private sector

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Fellowship provides for:

• Payment of tuition and fees at the assigned host university;
• Pre-academic English language training, if required;
• A living allowance, including a one-time settling-in allowance;
• Accident and sickness coverage;
• A book allowance; one-time computer subsidy;
• Air travel (international travel to and from the U.S. for the Program and domestic travel to required program events);
• A Professional Development allowance for professional activities, such as field trips, professional visits and conferences.

Duration of Programme: 10 months

How to Apply: The online application can be accessed HERE

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans

John W. Whitehead

Photograph Source: Chad Davis – CC BY 2.0

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”

— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

It’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.