Chile’s pseudo-left government rams though laws giving police, military license to kill

Mauricio Saavedra

Chile’s Stalinist-pseudo-left administration of Gabriel Boric is stampeding the country onto a dangerous law-and-order course. Under the guise of being tough on crime, drug trafficking, irregular immigration and other right-wing tropes, all the parties in the governing coalition have supported the ramming through in record time of 15 pieces of legislation that further enshrine a police state.

The most significant of these laws grants the repressive arms of the state a license to kill, protecting their actions with a legal fig leaf. These authoritarian powers, not seen since the darkest days of military rule, are being granted under conditions of a renewal of mass opposition to war, dictatorship and austerity across the globe.

President Gabriel Boric signing police state laws, with ministers of Defense, Interior and Justice, and government spokesperson. [Photo: @Presidencia_cl]

The state has been aided by the entire corporate media, which acts as a stenographer of the intelligence and military apparatus. It has cultivated a climate of terror to justify unrestrained calls for a state of emergency to be imposed in Santiago and Valparaíso, Chile’s two most populous cities.

Meganoticias, T13, 24 Horas, CVH Noticias have for months bombarded the population, on a daily and even hourly basis, with updates meant to portray a veritable deluge of crimes by migrants and gangs engulfing the country—claims that are belied by statistics.

The xenophobic and jingoistic campaign against migrants, among the most oppressed section of the working class, is combined with accounts of a police force that is supposedly under-resourced and unable to cope.

The sickening and reactionary attempt to deify the police reached a fever pitch this week with the fatal shooting of another cop, Officer Daniel Palma, the third death in the space of a month. Officer Alex Salazar was killed in a hit and run by a drunken driver on March 14, while Sgt. Rita Olivares was fatally shot last Sunday after responding to a supposed house robbery that turned out to be a drug heist by one gang against another.

“Today, all Chilean men and women mourn the death of Daniel. A few days ago it was for Rita, before for Alex, who unfortunately also joined an already too long list of martyrs of the Carabineros de Chile,” Boric said in a televised speech on Thursday.

Martyrs! Members of the very institutions that from 1973 to 1990, the years of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s US-backed military junta, were responsible for the forced disappearance, execution and torture of tens of thousands are now hailed as “martyrs”!

Boric continued: “It is time to act together and we have been doing so. … In this there is no left or right. We are united in this crusade and as the Government of Chile we will continue to speak with facts…”

Every other government minister, senator, deputy and state official of the ruling coalition has tweeted along similar lines, calling for national unity with the right and extreme right to extend the powers of the Carabineros, the PDI (civilian police), the Gendarmerie, and the Armed Forces.

“The additional resources,” Boric boasted “will be financed with emergency funds from the public treasury, not reallocations, not funds already earmarked for something else, and other funds that have not been committed in the budget for the year 2023.”

On the 50th anniversary of the US-backed military coup, Boric’s pseudo-left government is erecting a police state, directing an extra US$1.5 billion per year to the security budget, which represents an extraordinary increase of more than 40 percent. These resources will fund pilot projects such as the massive police operation to be carried out against 30 working class municipalities, which together concentrate a third of Santiago’s population and are accused of being responsible for half the violent crimes.

The Nain-Retamal Law

There are two aspects to this law. The first is punitive, drastically increasing the penalties for civilians accused of endangering the life and physical integrity of Carabineros, Investigative Police, Gendarmerie, the Armed Forces and their dependents.

The media’s fear-mongering notwithstanding, the number of cops killed in Chile is relatively low; six officers have died in 11 months.

A number of the deaths have resulted from confrontations with organized crime that remain murky. Those who shot Officer Palma, for example, were driving a car they had hired from a retired military officer, begging the question of their relationship. According to an investigation by the CIPER news site, over the last decade there were 38 cases where Carabineros, Army, Navy and Air Force personnel were involved in trafficking weapons to organized crime.

The main purpose of the punitive aspect of the law is to intimidate the population with the threat of longer jail terms and heavier fines for opposing deeply entrenched social inequality. The government is particularly concerned over the growing struggles of students and youth, teachers, health professionals and other workers, pensioners and indigenous communities, who have borne the brunt of regressive free-market policies.

Thousands of youth and workers were rounded up during the 2019 anti-capitalist demonstrations, many framed up on false charges of acts against the police.

During the same period, 11,000 complaints of human rights violations were filed against law enforcement and the military. The allegations against the state agencies included illegal imprisonment, torture, rape and sexual assault, mutilations, mock executions, attempted murder and murder. Yet only 17 agents have been convicted while another 101 have been formally charged, including the general director of Carabineros, Ricardo Yáñez.

Only last Tuesday, dozens of protesting teachers and parents were violently attacked by Carabineros, and Andrés Ojeda, a community leader, was detained during the protest. Resumen reported that the protest was initiated by parents’ centers on the island of Chiloé following the Municipal Corporation’s decision to pay 500 teachers 58 percent of their salaries. “It was violent, here in Chiloé one is not accustomed to this behavior on the part of the Carabineros,” Pamela Carrasco of the Ancud Communal Teachers’ Association told the regional news site. “It was a very tense situation.”

The second aspect of the law provides law enforcement and the armed forces legal protection, or “privileged self-defense” when using lethal force. In an Orwellian twist, legitimate self-defense will be automatically presumed for state agents, while victims of state violence and repression will have to prove their innocence.

This is in anticipation of protests, strikes and mobilizations in which police-state repression is guaranteed.

Since 2019, the right-wing administration of former President Sebastián Piñera and the Boric administration have decreed no less than five states of emergency, allowing for the deployment of the armed forces. These have been in response to the eruption of mass anti-capitalist demonstrations, the unrest during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, against the indigenous Mapuche communities’ land claims in the southern Macrozone during the mega-plantation fires in summer, and most recently against the irregular influx of refugees and migrants in the northern border regions.

Besides states of emergency, the Congress has approved the use of the military to protect public and private “critical infrastructure” such as banks, utilities, communications and logistics. It has allowed the military to assist in policing the border regions. Moreover, moves are afoot, at the instigation of the fascistic UDI and Republican Parties, to deploy the armed forces in working class communities to ostensibly control drug trafficking, delinquency and organized crime.

The Nain-Retamal Law states that police officers or military personnel who “make use of  service weapons, less lethal weaponry or non-lethal elements, to repel any violence or overcome resistance against the authority, may not be separated from their duties or see their remuneration affected, as long as the respective administrative investigation is not concluded (emphasis added).”

“It shall be legally presumed” that exemption from prosecution is met when law enforcement and the military perform public order and internal public security functions. “In such cases, it shall be understood that there is a rational use of the means employed if, by reason of his position or on the occasion of the fulfillment of public order and internal public security functions, (the State agent) repels or prevents an aggression that may seriously affect his physical integrity or his life or that of a third party, using weapons or any other means of defense (emphasis added).”

“In investigations initiated by the Public Prosecutor’s Office” Carabineros, the PDI, Gendarmerie and the armed forces and their dependencies “shall be considered as victims or witnesses … for all legal purposes, unless the proceedings allow attributing them punishable participation, in which case they shall acquire the status of accused… (emphasis added).”

If it is demonstrated that there was no rational need to use the service weapon or less lethal weaponry, the Court “shall consider this circumstance as a mitigating circumstance and reduce the sentence by one, two or three degrees… (emphasis added).”

Finally, the Nain-Retamal law will punish the use of torture with a slap on the wrist: “Any public employee who … applies, orders or consents to the application of unlawful coercion or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, which in its severity does not constitute torture, shall be punished with the penalties of minor imprisonment in its medium to maximum degrees…”

Deputies and senators from the pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the Stalinist Communist Party (PC), the two main blocs in the ruling coalition, publicly declared they would take the Nain-Retamal law to the Constitutional Court on the conviction that “the fight against crime must be carried out with unrestricted respect for human rights.”

They dropped this militant crusade within minutes of Boric enacting the law, giving “support to the government in the fight against crime. It will not insist before the Constitutional Court and hopes that the government’s announced bills will consider our objections to the law, in the reaffirmation of the validity of human rights.”

Against the ever-growing danger of a nuclear conflagration in Europe and Asia, amid the skyrocketing cost of living, mass unemployment, economic depression and the growing threat of dictatorial rule, the logic of the class struggle necessarily leads to a fight for power, as recent events in France, Israel, Sri Lanka and elsewhere testify.

Australia: Leaked data shows thousands of people caught COVID-19 in hospitals last year

Clare Bruderlin

Leaked figures from the Victorian Health Department, published last week in Melbourne’s Age newspaper and the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) reveal that more than 3,200 people are suspected to have contracted COVID-19 in hospitals in Victoria between January 1 and October 26 last year. Of these patients, at least 344—or more than 10 percent—died.

These figures from Australia’s second most populous state are an indication of what is without doubt occurring in hospitals across the country as COVID wards are disbanded and mask mandates in clinical settings scrapped.

Staff prepare to collect samples at a drive-through COVID-19 testing clinic at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. [AP Photo/Mark Baker]

According to the Age and SMH reports, Monash Health, the largest metropolitan health service in Victoria, as well as Austin Health have closed their COVID wards and now isolate patients in single rooms or with other infected patients.

Healthscope, which operates a number of private hospitals across Australia, confirmed that it has removed its mask mandate for staff and visitors, “unless deemed necessary due to clinical indication.”

A healthcare worker at Box Hill Hospital, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs told the media that COVID-positive patients are no longer segregated from other patients in designated wards but are placed in private rooms on the general ward. “Previously if you were on the COVID ward you knew you were on the COVID ward and you would wear PPE all the time. Now there’s a little bit of COVID floating through the ward,” the worker said.

The removal of public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 is the result of the deliberate policy of Labor and Liberal-National governments—federal, state and territory—to sacrifice the health and lives of the population for corporate profits.

This policy has only been intensified under the Albanese federal Labor government, which dismantled virtually all public health mitigations against the pandemic, including mask and vaccine mandates and isolation requirements, and has overseen the closure of mass COVID testing facilities.

Official statistics show more than 11,000 COVID-19 fatalities in the ten months since Labor took office last May 21, compared to fewer than 8,500 deaths in over two years, under the former Liberal-National Coalition government.

Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s federal government, along with state and territory governments, also ended daily reporting of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths in September last year and moved to a stripped-back weekly reporting.

Official figures on infections are all but meaningless as governments at all levels have largely shut down the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) testing system and wound back access to the less reliable rapid antigen tests (RATs), the results of which are no longer mandatory to report.

Nonetheless, even with the limited figures available, the number of COVID infections are growing, particularly in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. Cases increased last week for the seventh week in a row, with every state and territory reporting more infections than the previous week. The death toll continues to grow, with 98 COVID-19 deaths recorded across the country in the week to Friday, 31 March.

Hospitalisations are also increasing. The number of people in Victoria hospitalised with COVID grew last week by almost 60 percent to 183 patients. There are currently some 1,561 COVID-19 patients hospitalised across Australia and 32 in Intensive Care.

Under these conditions, mask mandates continue to be removed in clinical areas of hospitals and other healthcare settings. Even when masks are provided to staff and visitors, they are typically surgical masks, which are not adequate for preventing airborne transmission of COVID-19.

Responding to the SMH article, one NSW health worker wrote: “The COVID ward in my local hospital has also been disbanded, with COVID patients treated in general wards. Visitors asked to wear a surgical mask but not enforced… seems we rely on the goodwill of people nowadays. As a health worker it’s frustrating watching people walk the corridors maskless knowing we have vulnerable patients in hospital.”

Another person wrote: “I am one of these people who caught COVID in the RMH [Royal Melbourne Hospital]. I waited in ED over 5 hours with a ruptured appendix. There were few seats and the only ones available were next to the seats that were assigned to suspected COVID patients. These seats were just marked with red tape… After discharge, I was very unwell and ended up with pleurisy and was admitted to a private hospital. I was one of the lucky ones… I am over 50, a carer, an employee, mother and daughter—I do not consider myself ‘old’ and believe I still have loads to contribute to my community.”

The continued spread of COVID-19 has exacerbated the catastrophic conditions in public healthcare, contributing to overwhelmed emergency departments and chronic staffing shortages. These conditions are the product of decades of funding cuts to public healthcare under both Labor and Liberal-National governments.

Despite the mounting crisis, the federal Labor governments October budget cut pandemic funding and payments to the states and territories for public hospitals are expected to decrease by more than $755 million this financial year and $2.4 billion over four years. Whilst demanding “sacrifices” from workers and real-wage cuts, the Labor government is allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for military weaponry to prepare for involvement in a US-led war against China.

Last Saturday, the Labor government officially ended COVID-19 pandemic leave payments for workers in high-risk settings, including disability care, Aboriginal healthcare and hospital care sectors, who were eligible for a lump sum payment of up to $750. This will now only be available to aged care workers.

The implementation of “let it rip” COVID policies and the deepening assault on healthcare would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of the trade unions. They have overseen workers being forced back into unsafe workplaces and enforced the “let it rip” policies of governments, at the cost of workers’ health and lives, just as they have implemented deepening wage cuts and attacks on workers’ conditions for decades.

None of the health unions opposed the ending of basic public health measures to stop the spread of COVID. In fact, they promoted the slashing of these measures. Their position was expressed sharply by the NSW Health Services Union state secretary, Gerard Hayes, who called for the ending of the COVID-19 isolation requirements, voicing his concern in the media about their impact on the “economy”—i.e., big business profits.

Over the past year there have been strikes and protests by nurses, aged care workers, paramedics and orderlies, over the issue of wages as well as intolerable and unsafe working conditions. In NSW alone, some 50,000 public sector nurses and midwives went on strike five times last year. Last November, 18,000 public sector nurses in Western Australian walked out for 24 hours, defying a ban ordered by the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC), the state Labor government of Mark McGowan and the efforts of the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) to impose a sell-out.

In their fight for decent wages and safe working conditions, workers confront the trade unions, which have isolated strikes, blocking health workers from taking unified action and linking up their struggles with those of other sections of workers, including teachers and rail workers who have also taken industrial action over the past year.

Australian building company collapses destroying hundreds of jobs and impacting thousands

Paul Bartizan

On March 31, two large Australian building companies collapsed, joining a long line of business failures in the construction industry.

Porter Davis Homes had 1,500 partially built houses in Victoria and 200 in Queensland, as well as almost 800 signed house-building contracts ready to start. The Lloyd Group had 59 projects underway, mostly for state and local governments including education, health and aged care buildings.

Major Australian home construction industry companies collapse. [Photo by Brett and Sue Coulstock / CC BY 3.0]

The majority of Porter Davis’s 410 directly employed staff were sacked, apart from a skeleton crew retained by the liquidators to wind up the company. All 200 Lloyd Group employees were made redundant. Thousands more workers employed by subcontractors and suppliers will be devastated financially.

Porter Davis reportedly owes money to around 2,000 creditors, while some subcontractors, including bricklayers, plumbers, plasterers and painters, have reportedly not been paid since before Christmas.

The two bankruptcies follow many shutdowns over the past year in both the house building industry and commercial construction.

2022 saw the failure of house builders Snowdon Developments, Waterford Homes, Langford Jones Homes, Pivotal Homes, Solido Builders, Wulfrun Construction and Westernport Constructions, among many others. Australia’s largest house builder, Metricon, was rescued, potentially only temporarily, with a last minute cash injection of $30 million.

Probuild and Condev, major commercial builders with billions of dollars’ worth of construction underway, also collapsed last year.

On Tuesday, Melbourne-based home builder Simonds Group announced it would slash 70 jobs, ten percent of its permanent staff, following a similar cut in August last year.

In June last year, one industry body estimated that 50 percent of building companies were experiencing negative equity, that is, they had more debts than assets. Another report predicted that 9 percent of builders would collapse over the financial year 2022–23.

Construction company insolvency has risen by 90 percent, from 761 for the comparable period last year up to 1,447 for the current financial year to date.

The collapse of building companies and the destruction of thousands of construction industry jobs is a product of a deepening global crisis of capitalism.

The “let-it-rip” COVID-19 policies adopted by governments worldwide have caused labour shortages and supply chain disruption, leading to sharp rises in building material costs, which rose 17 percent in the 2021–22 financial year. The US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine has pushed energy and commodity prices even higher.

On top of these inflationary pressures, ten consecutive monthly interest rate rises by the Reserve Bank of Australia (from a historically low 0.1 percent in May 2022 to 3.6 per cent now) have further squeezed builders who entered into fixed-price contracts with no mechanism to pass on cost increases to buyers. These hikes have nothing to do with combating inflation but are intended to increase unemployment and drive down wages.

In addition to the destruction of jobs and the financial hit to subcontractors, the wave of home builder collapses has left around 4,500 new home buyers stranded with an unfinished house or a potentially unrecoverable deposit. If home buyers can find another company to complete their build, they are likely to incur a substantial cost penalty over their initial outlay. Skyrocketing interest rates means some will not be able to afford to engage new builders.

Grant Thornton, the liquidation firm appointed by Porter Davis, announced that the 779 buyers who had paid a deposit and signed a contract but were awaiting a construction start will lose their deposits, as compulsory insurance coverage only starts when the ground is broken.

The Victoria Managed Insurance Agency was established to provide compulsory insurance for home builders and may pay out up to 20 percent of the contract price, up to $300,000, to house buyers. But it does not cover deposits if construction has not commenced. The Queensland Building and Construction Commission provides a similar scheme in that state.

The average deposit required to get finance to purchase a new home in Australia is now at an unaffordable 110 percent of average annual income.

As with all these collapses, customers and workers suffer the biggest losses, while the banks and major companies are the first to be repaid. Porter Davis’s largest secured creditor is the Commonwealth Bank.

Porter Davis had reportedly been offering discounts of up to $50,000 to house buyers who signed up and paid a deposit from February up until their collapse last week.

The Lloyd Group had 29 projects underway in Victoria and 30 in New South Wales. Frankston City Council, a local government in Melbourne’s south, had four projects with the Lloyd Group. They stated that, despite due-diligence checks on the financial status of the Lloyd Group, they had not foreseen any issues until the announcement of liquidation.

The string of collapses in residential construction illustrates the irrationality of the capitalist system itself, taking place as it does amid a major shortage of affordable housing across the country.

A 2021 Australian government-funded review found that “an investment of around $290 billion will be required over the next two decades to meet the shortfall in social and affordable housing dwellings.” Yet the federal Labor government has promised only a $10 billion investment fund, supposedly to deliver just 30,000 affordable homes over the next five years, a fraction of the more than 500,000 needed to address the shortfall.

This meagre pledge, which will do nothing to resolve the housing crisis, illustrates the priorities of the Labor government, especially when compared to the $368 billion that it has committed for nuclear-powered submarines to fight a US-led war against China.

Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews made clear they would not underwrite the collapsed builders, stating “we’re not the financier of last resort.” By contrast, state and federal governments handed out billions of dollars to keep major corporations and the banks profitable in the early stages of the pandemic. As a consequence, the full burden of the construction crisis will be borne by house buyers and workers whose jobs and savings are destroyed.

The Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) and other building unions have said nothing about the collapse of Porter Davis and Lloyd Group, in line with their silence on previous failures in the residential building sector.

But there is clearly real concern among workers about the state of the industry more broadly. On Wednesday, thousands of building workers took part in mass rallies around the country, demanding wage increases in line with inflation.

The CFMMEU leadership, compelled to call these events by workers’ anger and frustration, is seeking to channel it behind plaintive appeals to state and federal Labor governments. But the mounting sentiment among workers for real action was reflected in the left posturing of the bureaucrats, who issued vague allusions to the possibility of general strikes.

The CFMMEU offers no way forward for workers, whether they are subcontractors and sole-traders building houses or working on major commercial projects. The union has worked for decades to drive down wages and conditions in the construction industry, under the pretext that “competitiveness”—i.e., a race to the bottom—was the only way to preserve jobs.

This is because the CFMMEU, like all the trade unions, is no longer a workers’ organisation in any form. The union is a major player in commercial property development through the joint union-industry controlled Construction and Building Unions Superannuation (CBUS) fund, meaning it has an active interest in driving up industry profits at the expense of wages and conditions.

Rising rents in Germany plunge many into poverty

Carola Kleinert

In addition to skyrocketing food and energy prices, rising rents are driving more and more people into poverty. The high rents are already unaffordable for millions. The proportion of affordable housing and social housing on the housing market is falling rapidly. In 2025, there will be a total shortage of 700,000 apartments nationwide, with the trend growing.

Apartments in Berlin-Kreuzberg [Photo by SA / CC BY 4.0]

Not even two years after the coalition government’s grandiose promise to build 300,000 new apartments and 100,000 social housing units annually, new housing construction has almost come to a standstill due to high interest rates and the profit lust of the housing corporations. The result is rapidly rising rents in a heated housing market.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, 58 percent of the population living in almost 20 million single- and multi-person households (so-called “main tenant households”) had to pay an average of 27.8 percent of their net household income in rent last year. For 3.1 million households, rent even swallowed up at least 40 percent of their income.

The limit for “affordable rents” (30 percent mark) unanimously invoked by politicians and associations is pure eyewash. It says nothing about disposable income after deducting housing costs and has “socially unacceptable effects,” according to the Berlin Tenants’ Association. A rent of 30 percent of income is perhaps still manageable for a household with two low-earning adults. But after deduction of rent costs, families with more than three children would not even be left with the minimum welfare rate per head at their disposal.

Because of the lack of affordable housing, some 8.6 million people (10.5 percent of the population) were jammed into overcrowded apartments in 2021.

Single parents and families suffer the worst from the housing shortage. In 2021, nearly one in three families with at least three children and 28.4 percent of single parents lived in overcrowded housing. In addition, 11.9 percent of single people lived in apartments that were too small. Among other households without children, the overcrowding rate was 6.5 percent.

A comparison between urban conurbations and the countryside shows that the overcrowding rate in larger cities is disproportionately high at 15.5 percent. In smaller cities and suburbs, 8.6 percent of the population live in apartments that are too cramped and in rural areas that figure is 4.9 percent.

In Lower Saxony, with its 8 million inhabitants, there was a shortage of 100,000 apartments. In North Rhine-Westphalia’s metropolitan areas along the Rhine, rents rose more sharply in 2022 than on average over the past 10 years, despite the rent cap in force there. In the Berlin-Brandenburg conurbation, with its more than 5 million inhabitants, in 2019 there was a shortage of 345,000 apartments for one-person households alone, according to a report by the Berlin Senate (state executive).

Certain population groups are particularly likely to be affected by the housing shortage. For example, nearly 18 percent of minors are crammed into apartments that are too small.

Among older people aged 65 and over, the figure is only 3 percent, but this says nothing about their household situation. Pensioners, widowed or divorced people and single parents in particular often face the insoluble problem of not being able to rent a smaller, less expensive apartment on their reduced household income because there are simply too few of them.

Behind the statistical figures lies the struggle for sheer survival.

Social welfare organizations and food banks are sounding the alarm and reporting an almost unmanageable rush of people in need, many of them pensioners and families. They cut out even the most basic necessities and sometimes go hungry in order to be able to pay the monthly rent and provide for their children.

As early as 2021, the VdK social association had warned: “Those who are widowed often fall into poverty. Older women living alone are financially overwhelmed by the rising rents. But they also cannot move into another apartment because there is no affordable housing. Out of shame, they do not apply for basic benefits, and the poverty spiral continues. We are talking about old people who have to save on food and medication because of the high cost of housing.”

Klaus-Dieter Gleitze of the Lower Saxony State Poverty Conference warns, “The poor are partly resigned, frustrated, are busy with bare survival in the meantime, because they have to worry about how they can even heat or feed themselves.” The fear of social decline has also reached into the middle social layers of society.

Hundreds of thousands of students are affected by the same existential worries. Without the support of well-earning parents, the overpriced rooms in shared flats or student dormitories can hardly be afforded. Jobs alongside studies are often underpaid. There remains hardly any money for food or even books. “Neither basic subsistence payments nor housing allowance or student loans have been adjusted by the federal government to the actual costs of rent, energy and food,” criticizes the Paritätische Wohlfahrtsverband charity umbrella organisation.

In the Berlin state executive, where alternating coalitions of Social Democrats (SPD), Left Party, Greens and Christian Democrats (CDU) have systematically organized the housing shortage for 25 years, it has long since reached better-earning layers. In 2021, more than half of Berliners voted in a referendum for the expropriation of large housing corporations like Vonovia. Nevertheless, the (now outgoing) SPD-Green-Left Party state coalition under Franziska Giffey (SPD) refused to implement the decision. Giffey, the future building senator (state minister) in the new Berlin government, has made it clear she will continue to ignore the referendum.

As is the case throughout Germany, the state government in Berlin has failed to implement its promise to build new housing. While too little affordable housing is being provided, thousands of social housing units are falling out of social provision and are being transferred to the general, overpriced housing market.

In Berlin, the number of social housing units fell from 115,000 to 96,000 in five years. Nationwide, 3 million social housing units were still available in the early 1990s; now there are only 1 million.

Increasingly, people are giving up their homes completely to live on campsites. According to housing researchers, camping vans (RVs) instead of apartments, as is familiar above all in poor regions in the US, could also become “the new normal” in Germany.

Last year, according to the German government, at least 37,000 people lived on the streets and another 263,000 people, including many refugees, had no place of their own and lived with friends or in emergency shelters. The number of unreported cases is many times higher. Housing associations speak of up to 417,000 people without their own home.

To counter the extreme housing shortage, the head of the Pestel Institute, which specializes in the real estate sector, Matthias Günther, is calling for the creation of a special “social housing fund” of €50 billion throughout Germany.

But the federal government will not sacrifice a single cent to counter the massive decline in new construction plans and investments in social housing. While investors are withdrawing from housing projects (for normal earners) because construction costs have risen so sharply, Federal Construction Minister Klara Geywitz (SPD) tries to talk her way out of it with the excuse that “politics” has little influence on such circumstances as “high material costs, supply bottlenecks, high interest rates—triggered by the coronavirus pandemic and the Ukraine war.”

Of course, that is a lie. The federal coalition government, which single-handedly spent hundreds of billions to “rescue” the financial industry and large corporations during the pandemic and now arm the Bundeswehr (armed forces), is not investing billions into distressed social housing, education or other socially relevant areas. Instead, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner and his government colleagues, who categorically reject tax increases for the rich, are looking for ways to save €70 billion in order to comply with the debt ceiling.

While the cost of living is exploding, the employers’ associations, with the support of the unions, are imposing pay freezes and cuts in real wages across the board, as is currently the case at Deutsche Post and in the public sector. The scale of the social crisis will lead to fierce class struggles, as in France, where millions have been protesting for weeks against pension cuts.

ProPublica documents corrupt relations of Supreme Court arch-reactionary Clarence Thomas with billionaire Republican donor

Barry Grey

On Thursday, the investigative journalism website ProPublica published an extensive and damning report documenting the fact that Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has for decades enjoyed luxurious vacations paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire far-right Republican donor.

Crow, the Dallas, Texas, heir to a real estate fortune and leading figure within far-right corporate and political circles, has treated Thomas and his wife “Ginni” to cruises on his super yacht, trips on his private jet and annual retreats at his private resort in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Pampered by valets and servants, fed by private chefs and housed in remote mansions, the Thomases have mingled with the heads of right-wing think tanks, anti-democratic judicial groups and corporate bosses.

Over the course of more than 20 years, the cost of these junkets would add up to millions of dollars if the Thomases had to pay for them. None of these gifts have been reported by Thomas, in violation of the minimal ethical standards and laws that apply to federal officials, including judges and Supreme Court justices.

A cropped image of a painting that hangs at billionaire Harlan Crow's private Topridge resort, featuring him sitting next to Clarence Thomas. Across from Thomas and Crow, are lawyers Peter Rutledge, Mark Paoletta and billionaire Leonard Leo. (center) [Photo: Sharif Tarabay via ProPublica]

To cite some details from the ProPublica report:

• In 2019, the Thomases made a trip to Indonesia via Crow’s private jet. They spent nine days island-hopping from Crow’s 162-foot yacht, staffed by attendants and a private chef. The cost of that trip alone is valued at $500,000.

• Crow has hosted Thomas at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive California all-male retreat, as well as at his ranch in East Texas.

• Roughly a decade ago, Thomas went on a river day trip around Savannah, Georgia, and an extended cruise in New Zealand on Crow’s yacht.

According to the article, ProPublica based its investigation on “fight records, internal documents distributed to Crow’s employees and interviews with dozens of people ranging from his superyacht’s staff to members of the secretive Bohemian Club to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor.”

Crow is a major figure in right-wing Republican organizations, including the anti-tax Club for Growth and the extreme “free market” American Enterprise Institute. He sits on the board of the Hoover Institution, a CIA-linked foreign policy think tank. He has publicly given more than $10 million to Republican candidates as well as donations—likely far higher—to groups that do not disclose their donors.

He recently named Marxism as his greatest fear.

To call these revelations evidence of a conflict of interest is a vast understatement. In fact, they expose the real economic and class interests that Thomas, and the court as a whole, serve.

As ProPublica reports:

During just one trip [to Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks] in July 2017, Thomas’ fellow guests included executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. The painting of Thomas at Topridge shows him in conversation with Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.

The Supreme Court, whose unelected justices are appointed to lifetime terms, is institutionally undemocratic. For the vast bulk of its history, it has served as a bastion of political reaction—upholding slavery until the slave system was smashed by the Civil War (the Second American Revolution), later sanctioning Jim Crow segregation, safeguarding capitalist property and profits against the working class, and increasingly over the past half-century attacking and dismantling democratic rights.

Since joining the high court in 1991, Thomas has been on its extreme right, playing a key role in discrediting the body—portrayed by the media and the politicians as august and unimpeachable—before the eyes of the working class. In 2000 he joined the five-member Republican majority in halting the vote count in Florida and stealing the presidential election for George W. Bush, the loser of the popular vote. Thomas signed on to an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that declared the American people had no constitutional right to vote for the president.

In this Sept. 20, 2019, file photo, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, right, and wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas arrive for a State Dinner with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington. Lawyers who aided former President Donald Trump's coup regarded an appeal to Justice Thomas as a “key” to their success. [AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File]

He is clearly implicated in the conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and maintain Donald Trump in power as dictator. He refused to recuse himself from cases relating to the attempted coup of January 6 and its cover-up, despite the fact that his wife, “Ginni,” played a major role in the plot. A leading member of fascistic groups, she worked to convince state legislators in Republican-controlled states that voted for Biden to reject pro-Biden electors and unilaterally approve pro-Trump elector slates. She promoted Trump’s fascist lawyers such as Sidney Powell and repeatedly texted Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to defy the results of the election and do whatever was needed to keep Trump in power. No wonder that Clarence Thomas issued the only dissent in voting to support an attempt by Trump to block the January 6 Committee from accessing Meadows’ text messages.

That committee, dominated by the Democrats, allowed Ginni Thomas to testify behind closed doors rather than in public in order to shield Justice Thomas and conceal his role and that of at least one other justice, Samuel Alito, in the conspiracy.

Thomas voted last year to overturn Roe v. Wade, marking the first-ever action by the Supreme Court to retract a previously established constitutional right, and condemning millions of women and children to poverty and ill health.

He has cruelly condemned perhaps hundreds of death row prisoners, deprived of basic due process rights and overwhelmingly poor and working class, by ruling against their appeals. The most recent example was last Monday, when the six-member Republican bloc on the court refused to hear the appeal of a death row prisoner whose lawyers had not been informed of exculpatory evidence by state prosecutors until after sentencing.

On Friday, Thomas responded to the ProPublica report by blandly denying any wrongdoing. In a statement issued through the court’s public information office, he wrote:

As friends do, we have joined [the Crows] on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them. Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.

The Democratic response has been predictably feckless. No leading legislator or Biden official has even called for Thomas’ resignation or removal.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, merely called for an “enforceable code of conduct” for high court justices. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse urged Chief Justice John Roberts to open an investigation. Elizabeth Warren, the supposed “scourge” of Wall Street, could only bluster that the ProPublica article was “a stark reminder that judges should be held to the highest ethical standards and free from conflicts of interest.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Thomas “must be impeached,” knowing that the Democratic Party will do no such thing.

No one in the Democratic Party or the media has compared the impunity given Thomas, despite the most grotesque levels of corruption and criminality, to the purge of Abe Fortas, a liberal Democrat who was blocked from becoming chief justice in 1968 under Lyndon Johnson and forced off of the Supreme Court by the Nixon administration in 1969.

Fortas, a veteran of the New Deal, argued the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright before the Supreme Court in 1963, establishing the right of indigent defendants to have defense counsel supplied by the state. He was named to the high court by Johnson in 1965. His elevation to chief justice was torpedoed by a coalition of Republicans and Southern segregationist Democrats, who used, in part, claims that his acceptance of $15,000 for nine speaking engagements at American University’s Washington College of Law was improper. However, the real basis of the opposition to his elevation was his liberal record, his support for civil rights and the fact that he was Jewish. Fortas called the campaign against his nomination as chief justice “anti-Negro, anti-liberal, anti-civil rights and anti-Semitic.”

The next year, after Nixon’s election, the White House and Attorney General John Mitchell used other allegations of financial misdeeds to threaten an investigation and force Fortas to resign from the court. This marked the end of the relatively brief period of liberal rulings under Chief Justice Earl Warren and the beginning of a sharp shift of the court to the right.

The contrast between the ruthlessness of the Republican-led purge of Fortas and the cowardice of the Democrats toward Thomas is stark.

The strike by Russian Wildberries workers and the growing instability of the Putin regime

Andrei Ritsky

Amidst the relentless war propaganda against Russia in the Western media, developments in the Russian working class receive little to no coverage. But over the past month, a strike by workers at Wildberries, a giant online shopping site, has resonated widely. Wildberries is a platform on which small and medium-sized entrepreneurs sell goods. They pay a commission to the corporation for the site’s services. The owner of Wildberries is the billionaire Tatyana Bakalchuk, who had estimated net worth $13.3 billion, as of 2021.

To ensure that goods can be delivered to customers, the company has 1) managers (who take orders remotely and ensure goods reach their destinations); 2) warehouse workers (who are responsible for checking for defects and packaging); 3) couriers (who bring goods either to a home or a delivery station); 4) owners and employees of the delivery stations (who are responsible for receiving, storing and delivering products to the customer). 

On March 3, Wildberries announced new rules under which if the buyer returns the product because of defects or because he was sent the wrong item, the worker at the delivery station is considered at fault and the entire price of the product is withheld from his wage. This was allegedly adopted “in order to protect against fraud at delivery stations.”

The company was not known for having good working conditions even before these new rules were put in place, and it suffers from very high staff turnover. All the hardships of the economic crisis in Russia fall on the shoulders of the workers and small business owners who have signed deals with the company. Bakalchuk has a scandalous reputation as a businesswoman.

The owners and employees at the distribution points lost their patience. At first, on March 14, they protested at the company’s headquarters, to no avail. The next day a full-fledged strike started in which distribution centers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Barnaul, the Kuzbass, Irkutsk, Chita, Vladivostok and others took part. Not all workers participated, but it put a certain amount of pressure on the company.

Even though the action at Wildberries was not a mass strike, it made a lot of noise and a number of government officials decided to intervene. The Federal Labor Office, the State Duma Deputy Corps, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and other government agencies, immediately began looking into Wildberries. The official explanation for this investigation was that “in order to preserve social stability during the special operation in Ukraine, prompt decisions were taken to resolve the situation between the parties to the conflict.”

In response, Wildberries retreated, the strike ended, and the authorities promised to find a resolution to the conflict. 

There are even plans to pass a “Bakalchuk Law,” which will allegedly allow for more oversight of retail giants such as Wildberries. While the strike itself may have had limited immediate impact, it gives food for thought and indicates just how insecure the Putin regime feels. The Kremlin chose to intervene immediately in a relatively small labor conflict in order to avoid a broader eruption of social tensions. 

In another indication of how concerned the Putin regime was, on March 14 —that is, during the Wildberries strike—the Russian president made a trip to Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia. The purpose of this trip was to put on a show of how the Russia’s leader communicates with the working class. Putin visited an aircraft factory, where he was given a tour and spoke with workers. 

This meeting had a clear propagandistic character. It was aimed at underscoring the supposed “consolidation of society.” During the gathering with the workers, Putin reiterated typical nationalist clichés. He noted that although “we are different people, we have one Motherland.” In a comment on the meeting, Alexei Martynov, director of the Institute of Modern States, wrote: “The logic of unity, the logic of the Russian people, the logic of the Russian character is that the more you put pressure on us, the more we unite, and in the end we always win—throughout the entire thousand-year history of our great state, no matter how threatened we are, no matter what horde stands against us: the Tatar-Mongols, Europeans, the West, or anyone else.”

Putin tried to draw a dividing line between his regime and Western countries, noting that “for the West, territories are important, but for us (Russia), people are.” This was his justification for Russia’s intervention in the Donbass and the start of the invasion of Ukraine. 

But in reality, for Putin, people’s lives are important only insofar as they can help to preserve his own existence and the existence of his regime, which stands atop the ruins of Soviet society. Putin is trying in every way to obscure the class contradictions in Russian society in order to ensure support for his war in Ukraine. For this he needs a strong state and a “consolidated” nation.

But this “unity” is a myth, a fact underscored by a report by the Labor Protest Monitor on labor conflict in Russia in 2022. The report’s concluding paragraphs state:

1. Labor protests have not disappeared. Their number has not decreased, although there was one period [toward the beginning of the war] when they almost stopped. However, subsequently the situation returned to last year's level.

2. In recent years, the dynamics [of labor conflicts] has changed significantly—there are more fluctuations and their scope has increased. The resulting picture can be characterized as feverish. But at the same time the tendency of growth remains, i.e., the general trend of the fluctuations is not downward, but upward, which is alarming.

3. Protests occur in the vast majority of regions of the country, with about the same frequency. Labor tensions persist almost throughout the entire country.

4. The distribution of protests across industries is largely unchanged. The structure remains the same—health care, transport and industry. In recent years, transport and health care have either taken a lead or remained in second place. 

5. In 2022, full or partial non-payment of wages again regained its status as a “super cause” [for labor conflict].

The report continued,

The main result of 2022 can be considered a dramatic change connected with forms of labor protests. Complaints and “petitions” can hardly be considered full-fledged forms of protest, rather these are cases when the situation has become intolerable for workers, but they are aware of the fact that open conflict is impossible for them. This is an indicator of the narrowing of the “corridor of possibilities”, when employees not only do not have the opportunity to express their disagreement with the actions of the employer, but they also have fewer opportunities to participate in the regulation of labor relations. In the future, this situation will contribute to the accumulation of latent irritation, fraught with the potential for deep alienation, if not a social explosion.

Based on this report, one can conclude that the political and economic situation in the country is far less stable than it may seem at first glance. The Putin regime is trying to present itself as good at playing on the world stage and capable of blocking the development of an internal crisis. That is why we can also anticipate an intensification of historical falsifications and repressions by the capitalist, restorationist regime in Russia.

The Putin regime understands that it needs to conceal its bourgeois character in every possible way, in order to maintain its status as a supposed “state of the people.” However, despite its isolation and the sanctions imposed on the country, the development of the global financial crisis will inevitably also affect Russia. This in turn will lead to an ever clearer manifestation of the capitalist essence of the regime. No matter how much Putin plays at being an all-powerful ruler, he is subject to the laws of the capitalist economy, which means he will launch a brutal attack on the rights and social position of workers in order to hold his ground in the conflict with imperialism. In light of these dynamics, we can anticipate that this year the class struggle in Russia will erupt, catching up with its level in the West.

Dark Mines: the Harsh Underbelly of Electric Vehicles

Joseph Grosso

Photograph Source: Oton Barros (DSR/OBT/INPE), Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE, http://www.dsr.inpe.br – CC BY-SA 2.0

Anyone perusing the business press in recent times will have surely noticed that the topic of electric vehicles features predominately on basically a daily basis. A recent report by the International Energy Agency states that EVs accounted for roughly one in every seven passenger cars brought globally in 2022. Norway remains the world leader with around 80 percent of new cars being EVs- thanks largely to a government buildout of charging stations. Iceland currently comes in second with around 60 percent. Both countries are blessed with huge amounts of renewable energy- hydroelectricity for Finland, geothermal for Iceland. In the U.S. EV sales almost doubled last year to about 6 percent. With the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act last year, which extended the $7500 EV tax credit for 10 years (with income and cost requirements and as long as a significant amount of the EV is manufactured in the U.S. and ), sales figure to receive another large increase this year.

The major car companies have announced billions of dollars in investments to catch up to Tesla and Chinese upstarts such as BYD. Toyota’s new CEO, Koji Sato, vows to correct his company’s slow start on EVs while Ford is apparently facing a host of challenges. Volkswagen recently released an EV model for the masses (to be priced at $25,000), something Tesla has been promising to do forever though it remains to be seen that the company will deliver the car by its stated 2025 target. Tesla’s stock price is itself a constant focus thanks to the company’s loudmouth owner.

If the pandemic revealed anything it is the importance of supply chains and logistics to modern life. This especially applies to EVs as there is a dirty secret to the green economy: it can be quite dirty. It is a certainty that globally mining will have to greatly increase to enable a significant decarbonization of the auto industry. An estimate by industry forecaster Benchmark Minerals projects that a six-fold increase in demand for lithium-ion batteries would mean up to 384 new mines worldwide. Regarding EVs, a widely-sited estimate by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute calculates that it takes about 16,000 miles for an EV to reach zero emissions considering the amount of energy that goes into building each car.

One prominent element used in lithium-ion batteries that make EVs run is nickel. Nickel lends a higher energy density and more storage capacity to batteries enabling EVs to get more miles out of a single charge. Indonesia is home to the largest nickel deposits in the world, around 22 percent of the global supply, particularly on the island of Sulawesi. Historically, nickel ore was exported from the area unprocessed however around a decade ago the Indonesia government banned its export in an effort to attract heavy industries. This led to the building of the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, known as IMIP, a sprawling 3000-hectare complex equipped with steelworks, coal power plants, and manganese processors, along with its own airport and seaport. The project was a joint venture between Chinese and Indonesian industrial companies.

Between 2020 and 2022 nickel production more than doubled to 1.6 million tons, almost half of the world’s entire output. In April 2022, a consortium led by the world’s second-largest EV battery manufacturer, LG Energy Solution, signed a $9 billion contract with the Indonesia Battery Company and mining company Aneka Tamben. A few months later in August 2022, Tesla agreed to a $5 billion contract with two Chinese companies working at IMIP, CNGR Advanced and Zhejiang Huayou Colbalt. Chinese companies are largely dominant in EV supply chains at this point, ironically in part due to a lack of concern for environmental issues (This dominance includes Rare-Earth metals. They get their name not from a lack of abundance but from the difficulty in extracting them. At last count China controls 71 percent of the world’s extraction and 87 percent of processing capacity). In fact, during the past three years Indonesia has signed more than a dozen deals worth more than $15 billion for battery materials and EV production with global manufactures including Hyundai, LG, and Foxconn.

The number of workers at IMIP has grown from 28,000 in 2019 to 66,000 today transforming what was a fishing village a decade ago to bustling industrial jungle. ‘It’s like a city was dropped in the middle of paradise’ Iman Shofwan, head of research for the Indonesia nonprofit JATAM recently told Wired magazine. Local infrastructure has struggled to cope with the sudden growth, leaving workers living in hastily built shacks and local homes and businesses plagued by long blackouts. Last September, Brookings Institute reported on the environmental impact of the nickel sector, with particular focus on is reliance on coal. Coal provides about 60 percent of Indonesia’s total electricity capacity- with industrial parks accounting for 15 percent of coal output. Waste from the industry has decimated local fishing and deforestation has increased erosion and the risk of flash floods. Workers toil for low pay, some for less than the minimum wage, in dangerous conditions. Strikes have been met with the typical repression. Two protesting workers were killed at the PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry smelter in January.

Gruesome as things appear in Indonesia, it gets worse in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Another ingredient in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries is cobalt. Cobalt ensures cathodes inside batteries do not easily overheat or catch fire and it helps extend battery life. While cobalt touches just about every piece of tech we use, the biggest player is now the EV sector which now consumes 34 percent of global production, 64,000 tons, a number that figures only to substantially increase as EVs increase. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in DRC. As Siddharth Kara describes in his recent book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, a good amount of this cobalt is dug up by ‘artisanal miners’, namely desperately poor people, including many children, for pennies a day. A report from the Cobalt Institute last May put the amount of cobalt in the global supply chain mined like this at 12 percent. Kara says the number could well exceed 30 percent. He estimates there are somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 tunnels dug by artisanal miners.

Kara’s description of the children being maimed and killed in collapsing mines in a country that was already the victim of perhaps the most ghastly example of Western imperialism and since independence has been plagued by dictatorship and war truly exposes the bottom of the global economy. Kara writes of the Tilwezembe mining site, home to the more child labor than any formal mine in Congo:

It is temptinja. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains.

EVs also use three times as much copper as gas powered cars along with loads of lithium. Some of the largest copper mines are found in Peru, the second largest copper producer in the world, where rural workers have recently been driven to revolt against a corrupt and unequal political system. Africa also has significant copper reserves and has seen production increase.

EVs are hardly the only pieces of cutting edge technology that exploit workers in the global south. The other development that has dominated the business press is the development of generative AI, such as Cseph GrossoohatGPT. Venture capital is pouring into AI startups, $3,6 billion into 239 AI deals from January to mid-March according to investment analysis for PitchBook, at a time the tech industry in general is seeing a mini-downturn due to higher interest rates choking off much of the cheap capital that flowed during the height of the pandemic. On March 17^th, Morningstar reported 139,000 tech-sector employees have lost their jobs since the start of the year. One of the larger issues that looms over its development is the fear that AI, and related algorithms, will replicate racist, sexist, and generally violent impulses of the flawed society of its creators. In January, Time magazine reported that OpenAI has used workers in Kenya to make ChatGPT less toxic. Partnering with a company called Sama, a San Francisco based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients. Data-labels sift through endless amount of gruesome internet content in order to label what is toxic to reinforce machine learning. For this effort, workers received a wage of between $1.32 and $2 per hour.

Facebook has also used Sama to employ workers in the brutal task of reviewing and removing banned content before it seen by users. Time describes workers struggling with PTSD conditions from constant exposure to very graphic content without consistent access to counseling that is supposed to be available. Again, efforts to organize for higher pay and better conditions run smack into hostility.

Such digital sweatshops have become more common in the Global South. Some years ago Jeff Bezos was perhaps the first to publicly use the term ‘microwork.’ Bezos proclaimed ‘Think of it as microwork, so for a penny you might pay for someone to tell you if there is a human in the photo.’ This was the introduction of Amazon Mechanical Turk. It has been emulated by competitors such as Clickworker, Appen, and Scale. Most tasks on these sites last barely a minute and earn pennies. For workers in the Global North these sites largely fall under the ‘gig economy’ with workers using them to boost hours and stagnant wages. However for many in the Global South, an estimated 20 million workers undertake microwork globally, it is a full time job which is understandable considering the large percentage of the global workforce that toils in the informal economy. A survey by the International Labor Organization found that 36 percent of such workers regularly put in seven days a week.

What is to be done? Consumers always have a part to play pressuring companies about labor and environmental standards. Yet multinational corporations already routinely claim that their subcontractors are thoroughly vetted and clean. Battery recycling can hopefully become an increasing factor but it will not negate the need for hundreds of new mines. Cities across the U.S. could be redesigned to include more public transportation and walkability to reduce the demand for cars. However this idea has become yet another pinned down in the endless American ‘culture’ wars.

Clearly much more is needed. Mining is a vital part of the modern world but if left unregulated it is brutal to workers and toxic to the environment. Mines need to be unionized and even worker controlled. However what global supply chains demonstrate is that we face planetary problems, from climate change to the crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria, to the dangers of AI therefore solutions will have to be international. This will require global planning and cooperation and an increasing decoupling of technology from market forces. Such a solution will not only free the world’s working class, but may well save all humans in the long run. This always sounds utopian, yet a better solution has yet to be put forward.