General strike in Italy opposes fascist Prime Minister Meloni’s austerity budget

Marc Wells

On Friday, half a million workers across Italy went on a one-day nationwide strike. The strike, called by several unions in response to mounting pressure from the rank and file, reflects broad working class opposition to the austerity policies and deepening social inequality overseen by fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Workers in Rome hold a banner reading "Wrong budget law, general strike" as they gather during a public and private sectors' national strike called by the labor unions to protest the government's budget law, Friday, November 29, 2024. [AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia]

Many sections of workers participated in the strike action, and protest marches were held in dozens of cities. Public transport was affected in numerous cities, as bus, subway and tramway drivers walked off the job. Baggage handlers at the Milan and Venice airports went on strike, as did WizzAir Malta pilots and cabin crews. Public schools were significantly impacted as teachers struck to demand better funding and to oppose austerity measures. Stellantis workers struck in Naples, as did workers at the Fincantieri shipbuilders and auto parts maker Marelli.

Italian workers oppose the Meloni government’s 2025 budget, which includes massive cuts to all social programs but increases the military budget by €2 billion, bringing it to a record €32 billion. This aligns the Meloni government with NATO’s spending objectives amid its war with Russia in Ukraine. Proposed across-the-board five percent cuts would devastate Italy’s public healthcare system, already teetering on the brink of collapse due to underfunding and staffing shortages. The same would apply to education, transportation and other essential services.

Public sector workers are being offered a paltry 6 percent wage increase over three years, against a cumulative increase in essential living costs since 2021 estimated at 16 percent. Furthermore, pensions are set to rise by a tiny €3 per month, while the Fornero Law raising the retirement age remains in force.

Workers also protested increasingly perilous working conditions leading to deaths on the job, dubbed by workers as “workplace homicides.” Moreover, the government’s draconian “Security Decree 1660” has introduced harsh penalties against various forms of protest and dissent, aimed at workers in general and immigrants in particular.

Against the strike and its impact on public transport, far-right Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini threatened to invoke minimum service requirements, which seek to curtail the right to strike inscribed in Article 40 of the Italian Constitution.

These measures are part of an escalating, global class war waged by the capitalist ruling elites on the workers that is provoking mounting opposition. The bourgeoisie’s savage movement to the right is epitomized by Meloni’s close ties with the cabal around fascist US President-elect Donald Trump, which is preparing a staggering $2 trillion austerity program against US workers to be overseen by the world’s richest man, billionaire Elon Musk.

In recent months Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, has publicly praised Meloni as “authentic, honest, and thoughtful.” Meloni, in turn, called Musk a “precious genius.” Musk has expressed interest in expanding his businesses in Italy, including Starlink satellite internet services and building a Tesla manufacturing facility, in return for tax cuts.

Massive budgetary attacks are similarly being prepared against the working class across Europe. In October, Britain’s Labour government adopted an austerity budget imposing £40 billion in spending cuts. Now, the French government is teetering on the verge of collapse over its budget, as the ruling class demands more military spending and spending cuts beyond the €60 billion the budget proposes.

The main political obstacle to a political counteroffensive of the working class against these threats are the bankrupt pro-capitalist parties and labor bureaucracies, linked to Stalinism, that seek to tie the working class to capitalism and subordinate it to austerity and imperialist war. This is the role played in Italy by the successor of the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) after its self-dissolution in 1991, the Democratic Party (PD).

The PD now has a decades-long history of attacking the workers. After World War II, the Italian bourgeoisie was compelled to grant labor laws and social benefits offering significant protections for workers. The Italian working class had organized mass strikes and armed uprisings against Mussolini’s fascist regime, and while the PCI blocked a socialist revolution, the capitalist class for a time had to make social concessions. But in the decades since the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, successive PD-led governments systematically rolled back these gains.

The much-hated 2014 Jobs Act, implemented by then-PD Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, undermined job security by easing restrictions on dismissals and facilitating precarious employment.

Now, current PD leader Elly Schlein is criticizing Meloni but at the same time endorsing further austerity reforms, declaring: “We stand with workers who demand dignity and justice. However, we must approach reforms responsibly to ensure long-term stability.”

The PD, like the Stalinist CGIL (Italian General Confederation of Labour) union bureaucracy and the social-democratic UIL (Italian Labour Union) bureaucracy, works to channel mounting working class anger into politically manageable avenues compatible with capitalist rule. Even facing Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party descends directly from Mussolini’s Fascist Party, the bureaucracies bend over backwards to maintain “social peace” and stabilize capitalism.

At the strike yesterday, Maurizio Landini, the secretary-general of CGIL, called for collaboration and dialogue with the Meloni government, stating: “This government must listen to the streets and open a serious dialogue with the trade unions to build a better future for all.”

Significantly, the transport unions limited the strike to 3 or 4 hours (depending on location), while exempting rail workers from the strike altogether and guaranteeing service in compliance with an Ordinance of the Minister of Transportation.

For workers, Meloni’s government represents a dangerous convergence of far-right nationalism, austerity and militarism. In its two years, it has aggressively pursued anti-immigrant policies, attacked democratic rights and participated in NATO’s imperialist wars. This is part of a broader global trend, where capitalist governments exploit economic crises to impose authoritarian measures and deepen inequality despite growing militancy and opposition among workers.

French government on brink of collapse over 2025 budget vote

Alex Lantier

French Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government, installed after the July 2024 elections, is hanging by a thread amid growing conflicts in the ruling elite over his 2025 austerity budget. Last night, Barnier went on prime-time TF1 news and threatened to ram the budget through parliament without a vote, using Article 49.3 of the constitution. He warned of “severe turbulence on financial markets” if the National Assembly reacted by censuring and bringing down his government.

New French prime minister Michel Barnier looks on right during the handover ceremony, Thursday, September 5, 2024 in Paris. [AP Photo/Stephane de Sakutin]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) coalition and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) have both threatened to censure the government over the budget, which imposes €40 billion in social cuts. The French state is already technically in violation of the law: it must approve a budget each year by October 1, which it has failed to do. But if the NFP and RN both voted to censure the government, it could lead to an unprecedented situation of France having no budget as the 2025 year begins.

The 2025 Social Security budget is to be presented on December 2, the end-of-year 2024 budget on December 4, and the full 2025 budget on December 18. In each case, censure votes against the Barnier government could be held in the National Assembly two days later.

The fall of Barnier’s government by itself would not stop French and European capitalism’s downward spiral of austerity and war. France’s parliamentary parties are not seeking to give expression to mass popular dissatisfaction with the established order. Rather, Barnier’s cuts are no longer deep enough to satisfy the bourgeoisie. A bitter debate is unfolding in the ruling class over how to recalibrate its policies as it prepares, sooner rather than later, for explosive conflicts with the working class.

After Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections, French imperialism is on the warpath against Russia and against the working class at home. Trump’s team is threatening to cut a staggering $2 trillion in US government spending and cancel US military aid to Ukraine for war with Russia. Top French diplomats have called to bomb Russia with French SCALP missiles and to send French ground troops to Ukraine to fight the Russian army.

Arming the French military for total war with Russia, and keeping French capitalism economically competitive amid the onslaught Trump is preparing against US workers, would require a massive plundering of financial resources from the French working class to the army and the banks.

Instead, ruling circles are increasingly dissatisfied with Barnier’s budget and the draft amendments proposed by government ministers and the Assembly’s parliamentary subcommittees. Members of Mélenchon’s NFP, far-right Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and leaders of right-wing government parties like Laurent Wauquiez of The Republicans (LR) have all intervened to eliminate spending cuts and posture as friends of the people.

“The budget-cutting objectives for 2025 increasingly lack ambition,” Le Monde wrote last week. “If it agrees to the demands of this or that person, letting go €500 million here, €1 or 2 billion there, can the government keep to its initial objective of solving the budget deficit? … Financial markets, already highly dubious of the announced focus on austerity, could at any time punish France by sharply raising interest rates.”

Charles Sitzenstuhl, a deputy of Macron’s Renaissance party, complained: “While Michel Barnier claimed budget deficits would be cut mainly by slashing spending and a bit by increasing taxes, each passing day shows the reverse: we are preparing budget stimulus like a left-wing government.”

As this dissatisfaction grew within the bourgeoisie, Le Pen ultimately shifted her position on Barnier. When Barnier’s minority government was initially formed, Le Pen and the RN pledged to support the government’s austerity agenda, vote for its measures in parliament, and provide it with a working parliamentary majority.

But on November 20, as NFP members including Mélenchon ally Eric Coquerel called to censure Barnier’s government to punish it for its austerity policies, Le Pen turned 180 degrees and said she might support censuring Barnier. She told RTL radio: “We will not accept any further reductions to the French people’s purchasing power. That is a red line for us. If the red line is crossed, we will vote for censure.”

Yesterday, Le Pen published a column in Le Figaro, defending threats to bring down Barnier and block the budget. This, she implausibly claimed, would have no major consequences: “Even if the government is censured, taxes would be gathered, state officials paid, pensions paid out, and health costs would be reimbursed. All the censured government would have to do would be to vote, in a caretaker capacity, a special law allowing at a minimum the continued application of the 2024 budget [into 2025], until a new government emerges and a formal budget is voted.”

The prospect of a vote by significant sections of the NFP and the RN that could bring down Barnier has intensified the factional struggle within the political establishment.

While NFP leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is campaigning to censure Barnier and predicting that his government will fall “between December 18 and 21,” other NFP officials oppose this. Former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of the big-business Socialist Party (PS) stated that bringing down Barnier “risks a big jump into a crisis of rule.” He called on “all democratic political forces” to be “lucid enough to rally together” to support Barnier.

Significantly, among those spreading rumors about a fall of the government is its titular leader, President Emmanuel Macron. At a recent meeting in the Elysée presidential palace, he told Renaissance officials: “The government will fall. She [Marine Le Pen] will censure it at a certain point, and it will come earlier than what people expect.” Macron, these officials told Le Parisien, thinks that “RN legislators could act on her threats in the coming days, during the votes of the different budgets in the National Assembly.”

The debate on the French budget is a carnival of political reaction. Neither the reactionaries supporting Barnier’s austerity budget, nor the bourgeois supporters of his parliamentary ouster represent the interests of workers.

The spread of H5N1 bird flu among animals and the growing possibility of a pandemic

Frank Gaglioti

Bar-headed goose wing flapping in Hadinaru lake, Mysore [Photo by Vinay bhat / CC BY 4.0]

The panzootic—a pandemic in animal species—of the highly pathogenic strain of the H5N1 of avian influenza is cutting a swathe through wild and domestic bird populations internationally, and has now jumped into numerous mammalian species, including humans, several times.

The virus has spread to every continent except Australia, where scientists estimate it may arrive in the southern hemisphere by spring via migratory birds from Antarctica. Scientists have warned that bird flu poses an enormous danger of a human pandemic, which could easily dwarf the devastation wrought by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 903 people have become infected with H5N1 since 2003. Of these, 463 died, a lethality rate of 51 percent. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with a much lower infection fatality rate, has killed over 27 million people. If a bird flu pandemic does develop, it would likely have a catastrophic impact globally.

Most strains of avian influenza found in wild bird populations have a low pathogenicity (LPAI) with no ill effect on the infected animals. There are two highly pathogenic strains (HPAI), H5 and H7 that are extremely lethal. The virus that has reached panzootic levels and is of most concern is H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b. A clade consists of viruses that have a common ancestor. 

Dr. Michelle Wille [Photo: Doherty Institute]

In a comment titled, “Chickens, ducks, seals and cows: a dangerous bird flu strain is knocking on Australia’s door,” senior research fellow at the Doherty Institute Dr. Michelle Wille maps the development of the panzootic from its first detection in a goose in China in 1996. The virus became established in wild bird populations and poultry, where it killed most of the birds it infected. It is spread through the migration of wild birds.

By 2003, the virus had become endemic in poultry in Southeast Asia. In an important communication by H. Chen et al., from the Joint Influenza Research Center at Shantou University in China and published in Nature in July 2005, “H5N1 virus outbreak in migratory waterfowl,” presciently warned that the virus “constitutes a major pandemic threat to humans.”

The communication described a mass-death event that occurred on 30 April 2005 of mostly bar-headed geese (Anser indicus) at Qinghai Lake in western China. By May 4, bird mortality was more than 100 per day. By May 20, approximately 1,500 birds were dead. The authors warned that the virus had the potential to migrate over the Himalayas. 

Chen et al. stated, “There is a danger that it might be carried along the birds’ winter migration routes to densely populated areas in the south Asian subcontinent, a region that seems free of this virus, and spread along migratory flyways linked to Europe. This would vastly expand the geographical distribution of H5N1.”

In fact, this is what occurred, with the virus spreading to Europe and Africa in 2005. In 2014, the virus again entered Europe and then spread to North America, and in 2016 it re-entered Africa.

In 2020, a major shift occurred when outbreaks in wild birds and poultry increased dramatically. 

Dr. Wille stated, “In 2021, reports streamed in of mass mortality events in Europe and the virus rapidly travelled the world. The world was in the grip of a ‘panzootic’ – a global pandemic in animals.”

By October 2021, the virus crossed the Atlantic and reached North America. A year later the virus travelled the length of South America. In October 2023, the virus was detected in brown skuas, scavenging birds in sub-Antarctic islands. In February this year, it was detected in Antarctica.

The avian influenza virus is made up of a single strand of ribonucleic acid (RNA) with a genome consisting of eight gene segments. The virus can evolve very rapidly as it has a huge propensity to mutate. When one virus is in a host cell also occupied by another type of virus, it can acquire genes from the other virus in a process known as reassortment, giving the virus the potential to make great evolutionary leaps.

Although the avian influenza virus is mostly restricted to birds, the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b has infected numerous mammal species including humans. This has usually occurred in scavenger species when it eats a dead infected bird. When the virus crosses over into non-avian species, which is known as a spillover event, this increases its chances of evolving to enable infection within the species. The more times this occurs, the greater the probability.

The H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b is known to be very lethal, with the panzootic killing a huge number of wild birds, poultry and mammals. Some bird species may have been driven to the edge of extinction. 

An assessment by Ashley Banyard and his team at the Influenza and Newcastle disease work group, Animal and Plant Health Agency, Weybridge, United Kingdom, published in an OFFLU bulletin in December 2023, “Continued expansion of high pathogenicity avian influenza H5 in wildlife in South America and incursion into the Antarctic region,” outlined the devastating impact in South America.

Although the virus only arrived in South America in October 2022, within one year it had killed 597,832 birds of at least 82 species and 50,785 mammals of at least 10 species, with most of the deaths occurring in Peru and Chile. Most of the mammals killed were South American sea lions (Otaria byronia), with approximately 32,000 deaths, and southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonina), with approximately 17,000 deaths. This gives a glimpse of the horrific slaughter of wildlife internationally, most likely in the millions.

The next step was the sub-Antarctic islands where the virus was detected in October 2023 in the South Georgia part of the Scotia Arc among several bird species. The first bird found with the virus was the brown skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) although numerous other infected species have been found since.

A microscopic photo of H5N1 Bird Flu virus (gold). [Photo: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

A groundbreaking paper published in Nature in April 2022, “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk,” shows that climate change increases the probability of spillover events in which dangerous viruses come into contact with human populations, thereby increasing the risk of pandemics. This occurs when animals that naturally harbour viruses are driven from their natural habitats due to the ravages of climate change.

Importantly, scientists have determined that the genetic changes in the bird flu’s genome, that have accelerated the development of the panzootic, have been driven by climate change. A comment by wildlife ecologist Diann Prosser at the Eastern Ecological Science Center located in Maryland Laurel US and her team, published in Nature Microbiology in November 2023, titled, “Climate change impacts on bird migration and highly pathogenic avian influenza,” stated that “Climate change patterns appear to parallel an unprecedented global spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).”

They note that “Three HPAI expansion events demarcating spread from a source region to a new, previously uninfected continent have coincided with EWEs (extreme weather events) and an increased amount of virus in the source region.”

In 2005, the avian influenza spread out of Asia and was followed by increased outbreaks in Asia that were associated with extremely low temperatures in Europe and earlier frosts that altered the migration of wild birds. In December 2014, the H5N8 virus spread from Asia to North America, with a large expansion of outbreaks preceding Super Typhoon Nuri that moved up the coast of Asia and across the Bering Strait to the North American Pacific Flyway. The expansion of H5N1 to the Americas, following the 2021–2022 winter transatlantic introduction of H5N1 from Europe to North America, was associated with cyclone storms in this period.

Prosser et al. continued, writing:

Phylogenetic analyses have shown high virus sequence identity between source and introduction regions, supporting the hypothesis of wild bird dispersal of HPAI, whether from natural migration patterns where species from cross-continent wintering grounds share breeding locations (for example, Iceland or Bering Strait region), or from rapid EWE-induced vagrant bird movements.

The current outbreak in US dairy cows poses an enormous threat to human populations. This threat is being expanded by the US ruling elites’ program of trashing basic public health measures in the interests of big business with the continuing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. “Forever COVID” is being expanded to avian influenza, but with even more lethal consequences if it becomes a pandemic.

The US dairy cattle outbreak was first detected in March and has now extended to 15 states across 650 dairy cattle herds. The inexorable spread of the virus is shown in California, the largest dairy producer in the US, where 248 cattle herds have been affected just in the last month.

The recent detection in Oregon of the H5N1 strain among pigs this October raises very serious concerns, as pigs are known to harbour numerous viruses and, as well, present the virus with a rich environment for reassortment.

Over 40 humans have been infected so far in the US, mostly people who were in close contact with cows. In Canada, a previously healthy teenager has now been hospitalized for over a week with H5N1, requiring a ventilator in order to breathe.

Principled scientists are raising the alarm. The editorial of the npj viruses journal published in May stated:

Further adaptation of HPAIV H5N1 to cattle must be prevented. Stringent measures such as testing regimes (e.g. via bulk milk diagnostics), strict transport controls, quarantine measures and optimized milking hygiene must be implemented. In addition, much more basic epidemiological data is needed …. It should also be considered that the most efficient virus shedding cows should be isolated or even euthanized.

A Science journal editorial published in July, titled, “Stop H5N1 influenza in US cattle now,” raised the alarm and warned, “Although the H5 2.3.4.4b virus seems poorly optimized for infection or spread in humans, with fewer than 20 cases since 2016, influenza leaves no room for complacency.”

However, these appeals are falling on deaf ears. Official “complacency” is a vast understatement. Indifference and even a eugenicist-style welcoming of the consequences of a devastating pandemic are more apt descriptions of the sentiments dominating in ruling circles. Even such basic requirements of testing and sequencing of viruses infecting affected animals is not being done in anywhere near a timely or rigorous manner, meaning scientists are flying blind to the scope of the virus.

The developing avian influenza panzootic and the growing possibility of a pandemic bring to the fore the existential questions for humanity of climate change and the destruction of public health, both of which must be stopped in order to control the growing threats.

German steelmaker Thyssenkrupp to cut 11,000 jobs

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Thyssenkrupp aims to cut 11,000 jobs in its steel division, which is 40 percent of the current total of 27,000 jobs. Germany’s largest steel company announced this on Monday, leaving steelworkers on the Rhine and Ruhr, in the Siegerland and Sauerland shocked. Meanwhile, the IG Metall trade union has made clear that it will support these attacks—provided, as with the cutbacks of recent decades, plant closures and compulsory redundancies are ruled out.

Steelworkers demonstrate in Duisburg on June 9, 2022 in front of the Thyssenkrupp Steel headquarters

On Monday, the management board of the company’s steel division presented the long-announced “comprehensive industrial future concept” to the strategy committee of the supervisory board. It is an austerity plan designed to secure profits in the escalating global trade and economic war at the expense of the workforce.

By 2030, 5,000 jobs are to be cut at steelworks and factories at all sites, and this also includes “a significant streamlining of the administrative functions.” The processing plant in Kreuztal-Eichen in the Siegerland region, which employs almost 600 people, is to be closed. The largest steelworks in Germany, in the north of Duisburg, is also likely to be particularly affected. Almost 13,000 people currently work there.

Another 6,000 jobs are to be shed through outsourcing to external service providers or through sales. This particularly affects the 3,000 steelworkers at Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) in the south of Duisburg.

Thyssenkrupp is the largest shareholder there with 50 percent, Salzgitter Stahl holds 30 percent, the French group Vallourec 20 percent. If the current purchase negotiations with the Hamburg-based financial investor CE Capital Partners (CEC) fail, “Thyssenkrupp Steel will hold talks with the other shareholders about mutually agreed closure scenarios,” the group explained.

The remaining 16,000 employees face wage cuts of 10 percent in order to bring personnel costs “to a competitive level,” according to the company. This is to be achieved, among other things, by cutting special payments and bonuses. Newly hired employees are to receive lower wages.

On the day the cuts were announced, Oliver Burkhard, the parent company’s chief human resources officer, announced that he would be resigning from this job on January 31, 2025. Burkhard, who was the North Rhine-Westphalia district leader of IG Metall before joining the group’s executive board, wants to devote himself entirely to his second job as CEO of the shipyard division Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS).

The arms manufacturer, which produces submarines and warships and employs 6,500 people, is almost drowning in orders because of escalating wars. It is currently working hard to go public, and Burkhard says he wants to concentrate fully on this task.

It is not yet known who will succeed him as head of HR at ThyssenKrupp. Within IG Metall, knives are already being sharpened. Tekin Nasikkol, the chairman of the general works council, will compete with other “distinguished” union officials for the job, which promises a salary of €400,000—per month.

Knut Giesler is likely to be among the applicants. The successor to Oliver Burkhard at IG Metall immediately declared his willingness to support the cutbacks in the steel division. Yesterday morning, he told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that the union’s “red lines” were layoffs and plant closures. As soon as a commitment not to do so was secured, he said, negotiations could begin.

Jürgen Kerner, deputy chairman of IG Metall and deputy chairman of the Thyssenkrupp supervisory board, took the same line, demanding, “We expect clear statements on the exclusion of redundancies and the preservation of all locations.”

A joint “Duisburg Declaration” by all Thyssenkrupp works council representatives is even clearer. “We do not close our eyes to the reality of the weak economy and the weak sales market in the automotive industry,” it says. They were also aware “that the European framework conditions for the steel industry are challenging.”

The works council reps are also calling for no compulsory redundancies and site closures. With this meaningless formula, IG Metall has already agreed to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the past—it also has other methods of pushing workers out of the company—and has ultimately accepted the closure of most threatened steelworks in the past.

The Thyssenkrupp board is familiar with this game. It has already made assurances that it remains its “declared goal” to “avoid compulsory redundancies.”

It is therefore already clear that IG Metall and its works council reps will follow the line of the group’s management. “We know that restructuring is necessary,” Giesler confirmed on Deutschlandfunk. “We have never opposed that.” But the break-up must “make sense.”

He and the IG Metall are demanding a financing commitment for the steel division of more than two years, as the parent company under CEO Miguel López had already given. The parent company is currently trying to transfer the steel division to a joint venture with Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. He already has a 20 percent stake in the steel division through his EP Corporate Group (EPCG). It is unclear whether he will end up with the desired 50 percent.

The disputes over the amount of the financing commitment led to the departure of several members of the management and supervisory boards of the steel division at the beginning of August. CEO Bernhard Osburg, Chief Human Resources Officer Markus Grolms (IG Metall), Chief Production Officer Heike Denecke-Arnold, Supervisory Board Chairman Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democrat, SPD) and his deputy, former IG Metall leader Detlef Wetzel, subsequently resigned.

At the time, the chairman of the steel works council, Ali Güzel, announced in the presence of Gabriel and Wetzel: “We will fight from tomorrow on. Someone has to stop this madness.” Almost four months later, nothing of the sort has happened. IG Metall has, like the proverbial deer in the headlights, waited spellbound for the announcement of the jobs massacre that has now been presented. It exceeds even the horror scenarios of the union, which had warned of the loss of 10,000 jobs.

Nevertheless, Giesler is jubilant that the capacity reduction in steel production will be less harsh than feared. Thyssenkrupp Steel wants to reduce its production capacity from the current 11.5 tonnes to 8.7–9 million tonnes per year.

Giesler expressed his satisfaction: “This would mean that both steelworks in the north of Duisburg would be retained.” The commitment to the DRI (direct reduction) plant was also “the right signal,” according to the IG Metall district manager. With the help of the direct reduction plant, the steel is to be smelted with “green hydrogen,” and thus CO2-free. The first blast furnace is under construction, with Thyssenkrupp receiving €2 billion in taxpayers’ money from the federal government and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

However, the construction of a second DRI plant is still in the air. Nevertheless, the management board plans to shut down blast furnaces 8 and 9 permanently after the first direct reduction plant goes into operation and to decommission blast furnace 1 (nicknamed the “Black Giant”) in 2031.

The works council complains that this would make the company dependent on steel suppliers. Furthermore, operating the Black Giant for another seven years would require investments of €300–400 million. Nobody believes that this will be made available for the old, CO2-spewing steel mill technology.

The steelworkers of Thyssenkrupp and HKM cannot defend their jobs without breaking with IG Metall and their works council reps. They must ally with their colleagues in the auto, chemical and other industries, where tens of thousands of jobs are also being destroyed. And they must join forces with workers in other countries and wage the struggle internationally.

The jobs massacre in the steel industry is not a natural disaster, but a consequence of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, which subordinates the needs of society to the profit hunger of billionaire oligarchs. A ruthless struggle for raw materials, energy and markets is being waged at the expense of the workers, which is now escalating into a third world war, as in the NATO war against Russia and in the Middle East.

The steel industry is particularly affected by the consequences—by the economic crisis in general, the slump in sales in the automotive industry, which is one of the main consumers of steel, and the price war on the world market. Now US President-elect Donald Trump has announced he will further raise tariffs on steel, which will particularly affect European steel producers.

The union bosses, with their high five-, six- and seven-figure incomes, are reacting by making the workforce pay for the pro-war policy and maintaining the shareholders’ profit interests.

Federal Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) has announced that domestic industry will be protected against international competition for security reasons—as a supplier to the arms industry. In other words, he is further tightening the screws of trade war and war.

In a joint statement with the Südwestmetall employers’ federation issued after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Baden-Württemberg association of the IG Metall supported NATO’s proxy war against Russia and announced: “These measures will demand sacrifices from all of us.”

Philippine political crisis: Threats of assassination, military coup, and impeachment

John Malvar

An immense crisis grips the Philippines—a political war between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Vice President Sara Duterte, complete with threats of assassinations, military coups, and impeachment. Driving the crisis are Washington’s preparations for war with China, far advanced, that have riven the Philippine ruling class.

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, left, in Quezon City, Philippines, Nov. 13, 2024, and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in Vientiane, Laos, Oct. 9, 2024. [AP Photo/Aaron Favila, Sakchai Lalit]

Vice President Duterte held a midnight press conference on November 24, saying there were threats against her life from the president and his political allies. Duterte announced that she had issued orders for the assassination of the President, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the first lady, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, first cousin of the President, in the event that she herself was killed. Her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, issued an appeal to the military in a speech live-streamed on Facebook, to turn on Marcos and Romualdez, an obvious call for a military coup.

The Vice Presidency of the Philippines is not a lame-duck of merely symbolic office. The Vice President oversees a tremendous network of government offices and aides, constituting a sort of shadow presidency, a rival to the seated president waiting in the wings.

Sara Duterte is inclined to the same vulgar, unhinged political tirades as her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte. “We made a mistake with that f**** Marcos…” she declared to the nation. The Dutertes brought the thuggish culture of provincial warlordism, a culture of private armies and gangster families that has plagued much of the Philippines for over half a century, to the national and international stage.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Sara Duterte became political allies in the 2022 presidential election, forming a slate they called the “Uniteam.” It brought together the Marcos control of the Ilocano-speaking North, and Duterte’s control of the southern island of Mindanao. During the campaign period, Marcos pledged that he would continue outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte’s approach to international relations, orienting Philippine politics more closely to China and away from the United States. More than any other politician, Sara Duterte was associated with this orientation to China. She often concludes her speeches in Mandarin, an attempt to appeal not to Chinese Filipinos who are overwhelmingly Hokkien speakers, but to Beijing.

Shortly after taking office, however, under tremendous pressure from the Biden administration, Marcos began to reintegrate the Philippines into the camp of Washington. He opened up basing facilities under the auspices of the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), resumed massive war games, and began aggressively prosecuting Manila’s claim to disputed islands in the South China Sea. The Biden White House quietly buried outstanding warrants issued by US courts for human rights violations and theft against the Marcos family.

The open conflict between Marcos and Duterte erupted over investigations in the Philippine legislature. The House of Representatives, despite its representatives being split along numerous different party lines, is aligned in a supermajority behind Marcos. Under the leadership of Romualdez, it organised a four-committee investigation (Quad-Comm) panel to identify links between Philippine offshore gaming operators, known as POGOs, the illegal drug trade, extrajudicial killings, and the Chinese. At the centre of all of the allegations raised by the so-called Quad-Comm investigation are connections between the Dutertes and claims of Chinese subversion and infiltration of Philippine society.

POGOs are online gambling businesses catering largely to an international Chinese clientele. They began operating in the Philippines in 2003 under the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration. They were immensely profitable and received official sanction and government regulation in 2016 when Duterte took office. Like call centres and other forms of offshore globalised labour, POGOs sprang up in many semi-rural parts of the Philippines. The Chinese government issued repeated appeals to the Duterte administration to end the POGOs, which they saw as circumventing China’s ban on gambling.

After a bevy of wild accusations raised in the press of kidnapping and criminal syndicates through the POGOs, an investigation was launched in the Senate, headed by Sen Risa Hontiveros. An ugly anti-Chinese atmosphere gripped Philippine politics. Hontiveros alleged that the POGOs were a plot of the Chinese government to infiltrate Philippine society. She attempted to expose individuals as having been born in China, and stripped them of their Philippine citizenship. She has alleged mass infiltration of the country by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), stores of Chinese military uniforms housed in POGOs, and denounced multiple people as Chinese spies. Two days ago, Hontiveros claimed that one of former President Duterte’s key economic advisers, Michael Yang, was an agent of Chinese intelligence.

In July, the Marcos administration banned POGOs. The Quad Comm investigation followed. The centre of its efforts, like those in the Senate, is the attempt to associate the Dutertes with alleged Chinese espionage by way of the POGOs and to strip them of their political power.

The House quad-comm investigation summoned the Vice President for interrogation in mid-November, claiming that she had misused her allocated budget of confidential and intelligence funds for personal benefit, bribery, and to oversee red-tagging and extrajudicial killings. The budget of the Office of the Vice President for 2025 was slashed from P2 billion to P733 million. Duterte declared that she would need to close ten satellite offices, and lay off 200 staff members as a result.

The hypocrisy of the House and Senate investigations is staggering. Both branches of the Philippine legislature, most of the representatives of which are still seated, overwhelmingly supported Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency and his war on drugs. Duterte had the largest supermajority support in the legislature in Philippine history.

Marcos has reoriented Philippine geopolitical ties back into the camp of Washington, however, and this has brought the Philippines to the brink of armed conflict with China. US medium-range missiles have been deployed to the northern Philippines targeting China. A joint US-Philippine military task force has been created to oversee confrontations with China in the South China Sea.

The investigations and accusations that have brought the Philippines to the current sharp political crisis originate in the consolidation of power around Marcos on the basis of this geopolitical reorientation. The lurid, racist accusations of Chinese espionage, all baseless, that run throughout the investigations express the political essence of the matter. The Marcos administration is isolating and cutting off the power of the Dutertes because they represent factions of the Philippine elite who are looking to secure better political and economic relations with China. Such improved relations can only come about if the Philippines distances itself from Washington’s aggression.

During quad-comm proceedings, Zuleika Lopez, Sara Duterte’s Chief of Staff, was charged with contempt. Arrest orders have been issued for other senior aides to the Vice President as well. Lopez was hospitalised for a panic attack. When the House ordered her transferred from the hospital to a detention centre, the Vice President and her head of security allegedly physically assaulted the police officer involved. The Quezon City Police District filed charges of direct assault against Duterte and the head of her security group on Wednesday. It was after these events that Duterte launched her midnight tirade threatening the assassination of President Marcos.

The charges were the pretext for Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner to order the replacement of the entire Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group by a new contingent appointed by the AFP. Duterte, maintaining that there were threats against her life, refused the new contingent of twenty-five officers and said that she would rely on a private team she would put together herself.

The security teams of the President and Vice President, while they are special military and police detachments, function to a large extent as a private army. It is a form of warlordism. Seventy-five police officers on Duterte’s team have already been removed. The military personnel will likely be removed today.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) served a subpoena to Duterte for her declaration that she had hired a hit-man to kill the President, should an attempt on her life succeed. The NBI stated that it was considering filing charges against Duterte for violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

The Anti-Terrorism Act was enacted by Rodrigo Duterte in 2020 as a means of suppressing dissent. It authorised arrest without warrant, warrantless wiretaps and surveillance, and was the mandate for the creation of the murderous National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that oversaw the suppression of left-wing organisations.

Rumours of military coup are circulating widely, as they always do during an intense political crisis in the Philippines. General Brawner told the press he was confident of the loyalty of the whole Armed Forces of the Philippines to the constitution. History has repeatedly proven that the loyalty of the generals and ranking officers of the Philippine military is not to the constitution but to individual members of the political elite. It is these personal loyalties that have shaped the many coup attempts that have rocked the country over decades.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte on November 25 issued an appeal to the military. “Nobody can correct Marcos. Nobody can correct [House Speaker] Romualdez. There is no urgent remedy. It is only the military who can correct it.” The Department of Justice said Duterte’s remarks “bordered on sedition,” and the Office of the Executive Secretary said it was treating them as “a blatant call for the military to launch a coup.”

Most fundamentally, the loyalty of the Philippine military brass is to the United States. Many of the leading officers received training at American military institutions, where they were trained in the geopolitical interests of Washington, the politics of violent anti-communism, and the art of torture and repression. Both this training and the history of martial law incline them to a personal loyalty to Marcos. Former Senator Antonio Trillanes, his career based on being a military officer who attempted to stage a coup, called for the immediate impeachment of Sara Duterte.

The Philippine National Police (PNP), on the other hand, are not the instrument of coup attempts and power grabs, but of day-to-day repression, of dead bodies in the streets and disappearances. The loyalty of the police in the Philippines, fed by the impunity of mass murder under Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called war on drugs, inclines to Duterte. Their perspective was articulated by Senator Ronald dela Rosa, former PNP chief, who told the press he agreed with Duterte’s appeal to the military. The police are not a force to overthrow Marcos, but disgruntled they can create immense instability.

The political allies of the Dutertes are scurrying for cover. Former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo—immensely politically influential, a longtime ally of the Dutertes, and herself closely associated with the sections of the Philippine elite oriented toward China—seems to be moving to the Marcos camp. She posed for pictures in the legislature with Speaker Martin Romualdez two days ago, both of them giving the cameras a thumbs-up sign.

UK Labour government sets asylum seeker deportations record

Robert Stevens

The anti-immigration offensive of Britain’s Labour government has seen a record number of deportations of asylum seekers since it came to power in July.

Home Office data reveals that 9,400 people have been deported to their home countries since then. The Daily Mirror reported last week, “Altogether, more than 25 bespoke returns flights have taken place since July 5th, returning individuals to a range of countries including Albania, Poland, Romania and Vietnam, plus the first ever charter to Timor-Leste, and the biggest ever returns flight to Nigeria and Ghana.”

Including the mass deportations to Nigeria and Ghana, the Labour government has organised what the right-wing press are hailing as the “three biggest returns flights in UK history.” A significant proportion of these are “forced deportations”—almost 2,600, an increase of 19 percent compared to 2023 when the Conservatives were in office.

Labour campaigned for election pledged to deport thousands more asylum seekers. Taking office it immediately scrapped the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy, denouncing the Tories for spending hundreds of millions of pounds on failed attempts to deport asylum seekers to the African country. No flights to Rwanda were able to leave Britain due to legal challenges against a policy flouting international law.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared the Rwanda policy “dead and buried”, with Labour shifting all existing funds allocated to it over to its new beefed-up Border Security Command (BSC) and Returns and Enforcement Unit.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper visiting Dover in May 2024 with Tory-turned-Labour MP Natalie Elphicke (left) [Photo by Keir Starmer / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Three weeks after Labour took power, on July 25, the Home Office announced that 46 migrants had been deported by plane to Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The flight to Vietnam was the first for deportations since 2022. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper crowed, “We have immediately replaced the flight planning for Rwanda with actual flights to return people who have no right to stay to their home countries instead.”

In August, Cooper promised to deport at least 14,385 “illegal migrants” by the end of the year, the highest rate since 2018. The government continually briefs the media on its anti-immigrant agenda to ensure front-page coverage and in the words of the Mirror, “it’s understood more flights are planned before the end of the year—to new countries the UK hasn’t previously charted flights to,” meaning Labour may well exceed its target.

Throughout the summer, the media have kept up a morbid running commentary on how many asylum seekers have been successfully kicked out of the country by Labour, documenting any “progress” made while keeping a score on how many asylum seekers are still arriving by boat. By August 31, the Daily Mail, a frothing anti-immigrant hate sheet, was splashing a headline lauding “The biggest deportation flight in history and how Labour have drawn first blood in battle against the small boat crossings”. This was a reference to asylum seekers whose only means to enter the UK is via the hazardous crossing of the Channel.

The article by right-winger Dan Hodges, who describes himself as a “tribal neo-Blairite”, is a paean to Cooper. Hodges backed her for the Labour leadership in the 2015 election in which she and another Blairite, Liz Kendall—now Starmer’s Work and Pensions minister—were routed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Hodges was crestfallen that boats were still able to make it to the UK’s shores: “Our new Prime Minister hit the dubious milestone of 6,000 new arrivals on August 27, the 54th day of his premiership”. But this was a Labour success as the Tories’ “Liz Truss reached it after just 29 days, Rishi Sunak after 38.”

Starmer was keeping asylum seekers out, enthused Hodges, because since the election “the rate of new arrivals has actually fallen—it is currently 25 percent lower than the 25,000 who had arrived by this stage in 2022. And that’s despite the warm weather and calm seas of the past month.”

This was down to the “decision to redeploy… huge resources” away from the Rwanda policy. Hodges cited a Home Office official who said, “One of Yvette’s first acts was to move 300 officials off Rwanda, and on to ordinary deportations”.

Hodges pointed to the “immediate results. Although it was done with little fanfare, on August 23 a flight left the UK with 220 illegal migrants on board. Though ministers won’t reveal the destination for reasons of diplomatic protocol, it represented the biggest single-day deportation in British history, and was processed without the last-minute lawyerly wrangling and recrimination associated with previous removal efforts.”

Hodges noted the close relationship between Cooper and Director General of Immigration Enforcement, Bas Javid—brother of the former Tory Home Secretary Sajid Javid. This has centred on deporting migrants from countries with “low grant rates”, as “there is virtually no chance of an asylum request being approved and options for a successful legal challenge are much more limited.” To fill deportation planes the government was “prioritising raids” on “car-washes, nail bars and some specific areas of the hospitality sector”.

Labour is doing everything to escalate its deportation regime, with Starmer telling reporters of the 9,400 already deported, “We have had the biggest single plane loads of returns going off, I think we have had the three biggest now that have ever gone off, so that is really good on returns.”

Starmer said he was working closely with the French, German and Italian governments—who have created a Fortress Europe with barbed wire fences sealing off the continent to asylum seekers, backed by vicious “pushback” operations, to ensure that known migrant routes are cut-off—and was “pressing hard” on law enforcement.

Italy’s government is led by the fascist Giorgia Meloni with whom Starmer has sought the closest relations since taking office, holding extensive talks at what he described as a “fantastic meeting” in Rome in September, and at leaders’ summits. The November 17 Sunday Times noted that the “pair discussed how her right-wing government had succeeded in reducing the number of migrants reaching Italy’s shores by boat, with the interior ministry reporting a 62 percent fall in arrivals over the first seven months of 2024. Frontex, the EU’s border force, has calculated a 64 per cent fall in the number of people arriving from north Africa and Malta.”

Flaunting his relations with Meloni, Starmer spoke on November 4 to the General Assembly of INTERPOL—the intergovernmental organization that co-ordinates police forces around the world.

Labour’s anti-immigration agenda is shrouded in Starmer’s oft-made statement about the need to “smash the gangs” who organise the boats making the Channel crossings. He declared, “People-smuggling should be viewed as a global security threat similar to terrorism. We’ve got to combine resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream, working together to shut down the smuggling routes.” As “illegal migration is, without question, a massive driver of global insecurity,” the prime minister declared, “I will work with anyone serious who can offer solutions on this—anyone.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as he hosts the European Political Community (EPC) Summit [Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

“Anyone” refers to the growing number of far-right governments in Europe, specifically Meloni’s of whom Starmer said, “We’re also working with Italy to dismantle the supply chains of maritime equipment, combat illicit financial flows, and strengthen our investigative capacities and our data sharing. And as part of the UK’s wider reset with the European Union, we are seeking a new security pact, including restoring access to real-time intelligence sharing networks.”

In the two weeks since, Starmer has centred praise on Italy’s “upstream work” in north Africa, in Tunisia and Libya, with which Rome has signed deals that intensify border security and train up the coastguard to prevent migrants escaping.

The Sunday Times reported that Cooper is working on a “series of Italy-style deals with several countries to help them stop thousands of illegal migrants setting off on the perilous journey to Britain. Named in the report were Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkey and Vietnam, with “‘co-operation and security’ agreements expected to be concluded before the end of the year.”

Labour have no differences with the Tories on “offshoring” asylum processing. It pulled the plug on the Rwanda scheme only because it was “unworkable”. Last month, Labour announced it had reached an agreement to deport any migrants arriving in the Chagos Islands in the British Indian Ocean territories to St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic 5,000 miles from the UK.

Hodges’ Mail piece cites a Downing Street source who said, “We’re not going back to the Rwanda scheme… It was a costly shambles. But we might have to look at some sort of offshore processing model to send a firm signal.”

The model is provided by Meloni, with Starmer “very interested” in Italy’s new five-year asylum seeker deal with Albania. The terms stipulate that the Balkan country hold 3,000 asylum seekers picked up by the Italian coastguard at any one time—roughly 36,000 across a year—in two camps while their claims are processed.