Push for harsher anti-immigrant measures in New Zealand

John Braddock 

Earlier this month, Michael Woodhouse, the immigration minister in New Zealand’s conservative National Party-led government, announced curbs to the country’s immigration levels. Prime Minister John Key said the changes followed a regular biennial review and were an adjustment “at the margins” of the intake.

In fact, the decision was in response to a rising clamour in the media and wider political establishment, including the trade unions, for a crackdown on immigration. A reactionary campaign has been whipped up, blaming immigrants and foreigners for sharply rising house prices, youth unemployment and deteriorating social conditions.

No sooner had the government announced the new rules than all the opposition political parties, various trade union spokesmen and the Salvation Army weighed in to condemn the government from the right, declaring that the restrictions were totally inadequate.

Fewer residence approvals will be granted for the next two years, with levels down to 85,000–95,000 from 90,000–100,000. For skilled migrants, the number of points required to qualify will be raised from 140 to 160 points. The number of places available in the capped Family Categories will be slashed from 5,500 to 2,000 per year. Other changes include temporarily closing the Parent Category, thus removing the right for migrants to bring their parents to New Zealand.

Last year, 52,052 people were granted residency, up from 43,085 in 2014. Around half of those came through the Skilled Migrant category. Many of the more popular jobs, such as chefs and retail workers, will no longer qualify for inclusion in the category. David Cooper of Malcolm Pacific Immigration said those without any university qualification would struggle to reach the required 160 points “no matter what experience” they had.

The measures represent a tightening of an already highly regulated immigration system. New Zealand’s immigration policy has always been exclusivist. Until the 1970s, an unofficial “White New Zealand” policy operated, initiated and promoted by the unions and the Labour Party, aimed at Chinese workers in particular.

Thousands of so-called “overstayers”—Pacific Island workers and their families—have been subjected to forced evictions. Currently 150 international students from India are fighting summary deportation because the agencies that placed them included false financial information on their study visa applications.

The hostile response by the Green Party to the government’s measures was particularly notable. In June, co-leader James Shaw had distanced the Greens from the Labour Party’s strident campaign for a cap on numbers, saying that blaming immigrants for the Auckland housing crisis “tears the fabric of New Zealand society.”

Last week, however, Shaw said that with rising concerns about “the impact on house prices, and infrastructure” the Greens now proposed to cap overall net migration at 1 percent of the population, including returning New Zealanders. Under this policy, immigration numbers would have been halved this year. Seizing on the Greens’ U-turn, Winston Peters, leader of the right-wing anti-immigrant NZ First Party, pointedly asked: “Who will call who racist and xenophobic now?”

The most significant voices in the foul anti-immigrant agitation, however, are the unions, in particular the Unite union, and the trade union-funded Daily Blog. The latter denounced the government’s immigration cuts as “window dressing” to “our overheated and deeply corrupt immigration system.” This position dovetails with Daily Blog’s regular anti-Chinese rants, accusing Beijing of starting a “trade war” and trying to colonise New Zealand.

Unite union director Mike Treen wrote on the blog that the 5 percent reduction in immigrant numbers was of “no consequence.” Whatever the government did, Treen said, “you can be sure they will keep on bringing in students and workers on temporary visas for their big business mates to use and abuse.”

The Daily Blog and Treen, a former leader of the Pabloite Socialist Action League, have been campaigning intensively against immigration for months. They attempt to clothe reactionary nationalism in “progressive” garb by feigning concern over the increasing pool of “vulnerable and easily exploitable labour” being used by employers to drive down wages.

Treen made an apparent call for “open borders” in a Daily Blog post on September 22, saying: “The bosses want us to see the migrant as the enemy undermining our wages and conditions. But there is nothing to gain by excluding them from New Zealand. We need to give the ones here more rights to stand up for themselves. It would then be much harder for the bosses to use migrant labour to undermine wages.”

This is totally hypocritical. All the trade unions, including Unite, have been instrumental in assisting “the bosses” to depress the wages and living standards of the working class—immigrant and non-immigrant alike. Unite has established itself as the main mechanism for disciplining oppressed youth in the fast food, retail, hotel and entertainment sectors. It works closely with some of the most rapacious employers, including Restaurant Brands and Sky City Casino, to enforce their conditions.

To cover its tracks, Unite has conducted high-profile campaigns to pressure the government over youth pay rates and “zero hours” contracts, but the fundamental position of young workers in poorly paid, insecure and highly-exploited work remains unchanged. Unite collaborates with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to vet applications by employers seeking to bring in overseas labour, while lobbying the government to crack down on the purported “hundreds of thousands” of temporary work visas, “low-skilled migrants” and foreign students “transitioning” into paid employment.

The pseudo-left groups are intimately tied up with this unprincipled political fraud. Both Socialist Aotearoa and Fightback have members employed by Unite. In order to distract attention from his union’s anti-immigrant agenda and support for highly restricted migration, Socialist Aotearoa leader and Unite senior organiser Joe Carolan recently organised protests against the impending deportation of the Indian students.

The perspective advanced “personally” by Treen is that workers should be able to live wherever they want with good wages and full rights—but for the time being NZ should end the “inhumane” policy of bringing in temporary migrants who are underpaid and have few rights.

This is completely bankrupt. The demands for more restrictions have nothing to do with defending jobs and basic rights but seek to shift the blame for the social crisis onto the most vulnerable sections of the working class, undermining a united struggle for decent jobs and conditions. Throughout their history the trade unions have consciously sought to redirect workers’ anger into divisive nationalist calls for “jobs for New Zealanders first.”

The only principled position is to fight as a practical matter right now—not at some indeterminate time in the future—for the right of all working people to live and work wherever they want, and with full social rights. This requires an international struggle, uniting workers in New Zealand with those in the Asia-Pacific and throughout the world, in defence of their common interests, on the basis of an anti-capitalist, socialist program.

Sri Lanka: New anti-terror measures lay foundations for police state

Nanda Wickremasinghe 

In mid-October the Sri Lankan cabinet approved the “policy and legal framework” for a new Counter Terrorism Act.

The planned legislation, which has been submitted to an all-party parliamentary national security committee to finalise, constitutes a far-reaching attack on fundamental democratic rights by widening the definition of terrorism to include practices generally regarded as normal political activity.

During his 2015 presidential election Maithripala Sirisena postured as a champion of democratic rights and promised, among many things, to repeal repressive laws such as the hated Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).

However, the new Counter Terrorism Act, which will replace the PTA, confers even wider powers on the government and consolidates the foundations for a police state. The real target of the new law is the working class—socialists in particular.

The act defines the following as terrorist offences:

* Threatening, attacking, changing or adversely affecting the unity, territorial integrity, security or sovereignty of Sri Lanka, or that of any other sovereign nation.

* Illegally or unlawfully compelling the Government of Sri Lanka or the government of any other sovereign nation, to reverse, vary or change a policy decision or to do or abstain from doing any act relating to the defence, national security, territorial integrity, sovereignty of Sri Lanka or any other sovereign nation.

* Illegally causing a change of the Government of Sri Lanka or of any other sovereign nation.

* Committing any act of violent extremism towards achieving ideological domination.

Under these sweeping definitions virtually any political activity can be legally suppressed.

To declare that “compelling a change of policies of the government of Sri Lanka or of any other sovereign state” is illegal means that the government can block all political or industrial action, protests and demonstrations against the government by the working class, the poor, students or any other section of the population.

Other definitions of terrorism include, “committing or threatening to commit or instigating acts of violence of any manner on any person, attempted murder, grievous hurt, wrongful confinement extortion; complete or partial destruction the state or private property; serious damage to the environment of Sri Lanka or that of any other sovereign nation, as the case may be, causing obstruction or damage to essential services or supplies.”

Recruiting members for organisations proscribed by the government, being leaders or members of such organisations and withholding information on terrorism are now offences, as is “knowing” or “having reason to believe” a person is conspiring to commit an offence of terrorism but not informing the police.

Significantly, “espionage” has been broadened to cover “any person who voluntarily engages in any illegal, unlawful or unauthorised act for the purpose of gathering any ‘confidential information,’ for the purpose of supplying such information to a person who is conspiring, preparing, abetting, or attempting to commit terrorism.” This means those involved in political exposures or investigative journalism can be targeted.

The new measures also propose the death penalty upon conviction by a High Court, if a death has occurred as a “reasonably foreseeable consequence” of oppositional activity. This is an extension of death penalty beyond the offence of murder, which involves conscious intent. Other punishments for “terrorism” include imprisonment for up to 20 years, heavy fines and confiscation of property.

The new Act also says that suspects have no right to seek legal advice following arrest for 48 hours or until the individual is brought before a magistrate. This changes current rights and creates the conditions for the use of torture to obtain confessions, for which the Sri Lankan police are already notorious. Hundreds of people arrested during the war against separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were convicted using the confessions obtained under police torture.

Under the proposed legislation, “a statement made by any person to a police officer holding a rank not below a Superintendent of Police either by himself or in response to questions” will be “admissible” against those arrested.

The police and the armed forces will be given wide powers of arrest, detention and investigation. To legitimise this, the act states that when members of the armed forces arrest a “suspect” he or she should be handed over to the police. Cordon and search operations can be carried out by both the police and armed forces.

Suspects taken into custody under the terrorism laws can be detained for up to six months through an order from a deputy inspector general of police and without being brought before a magistrate. The “counter-terrorism” package also covers offences committed by Sri Lankan citizens both at home and abroad, against the Sri Lankan government or a foreign regime.

The Sri Lankan Inspector General of Police is to establish a Specialised Counter Terrorism Division, tasked with the responsibility of preventing and investigating terrorism.

Sri Lanka’s planned new anti-terrorism laws are in response to growing popular opposition to the government’s austerity attacks on the living conditions of the working class and the poor and in line with its support for the US preparations for war against China.

After nearly 30 years of communal war against the separatist LTTE and the associated battery of measures to divide and suppress the working class, the Sri Lankan ruling class and its government are legislating new anti-democratic laws to establish the basis for dictatorial forms of rule. It is part of the escalating assault on the basic rights of the working class internationally.

Mexican defense secretary calls for more troops, greater powers in waging “war on drugs”

Kevin Martinez

Mexico’ Secretary of Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, has called for the country’s military to intervene even more directly into the 10-year-old “war on drugs.” Speaking at a seminar entitled “National defense and international humanitarian law,” Cienfuegos asked the government to recruit more troops and create a legal framework to allow the military to operate with impunity.

“There is a drain [on the army], and it’s obvious why: we are working all over the country, at all times, in the mountains and in the cities,” Cienfuegos declared. He warned that if the government wanted the army to do more, it would have to supply “more people.”

While the ostensible target of the Mexican police and military has been the drug cartels, in reality this conflict has served as a pretext to clamp down on social opposition. Large sections of the Mexican government of President Enrique Peña Nieto and the Mexican ruling class as a whole are among the beneficiaries of the drug trade and are intimately tied to both the drug cartels and US imperialism.

Given that the Mexican military has until now operated with carte blanche in the towns and countryside, Cienfuegos’ “legal framework” can only mean blanket immunity for soldiers who commit abuses. The general’s demand that the military have a more direct say in shaping government policy can only be taken as a grave warning to the Mexican working class.

In his comments General Cienfuegos remarked that the army had suffered from “fatigue” in its 10-year war against various drug gangs. When reporters asked about the lack of a legal body to monitor the army he contemptuously declared, “Ask the legislators, not me; I do not make the laws.”

The Mexican newspaper La Jornada noted that the three main political parties were taken aback by the general’s blunt comments, calling them “unusual.” Patricio Martinez, senator of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quoted as saying, “We need to correct, amend the Constitution so that the army can assist with civil authority.”

In comments last March, Cienfuegos called the deployment of the military in the drug war a “mistake” and said that corruption in the police force had to be stopped, adding ominously, “If we don’t do it, there is no one else who will.”

The army is responsible for much of the violence wracking Mexico today. It has now been revealed that an army unit was on the scene the night that 43 Ayotzinapa teaching students were kidnapped by police and presumably murdered in 2014. The 17th Army battalion protected the police and refused to help the survivors.

Cienfuegos also absolved the army of any responsibility for the Ayotzinapa massacre, as well as the army operation in Tlataya in which 22 civilians were massacred. In the Ayotzinapa case, Cienfuegos declared that the army had “absolutely no responsibility.” In the Tlataya massacre, Cienfuegos noted that four soldiers had been released without charges, while another three had yet to be tried.

Since the beginning of the drug war under President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012), 80,000 have died and 30,000 have disappeared. The Obama Administration has been instrumental in making sure the Mexican military is armed with the latest weaponry and logistics, providing more than $1.5 billion in US arms, equipment and training between 2008 and 2015.

The militarization of Mexican society is being presented as a crusade against not only drugs, but corruption and human rights abuses as well. In Veracruz, Governor Javier Duarte of the PRI was issued an arrest warrant on suspicion of ties to organized crime and money laundering. Guillermo Padres, a member of the PAN who was governor of Sonora, was also accused of corruption and has been pursued by authorities. President Peña Nieto is trying desperately to refurbish his image as an enemy of political corruption, especially after his own complicity in the Ayotzinapa massacre and other state attacks against teachers and workers becomes public knowledge.

In a related development, a federal judge based in Mexico City, Vicente Antonio Bermudez Zacarias, was shot dead in broad daylight while jogging. Zacarias was involved in legal rulings in the case of the 43 missing students. The media has accused gangs of being behind the killing; however, given the political sensitivity of Zacarias’ rulings, a government assassination cannot be ruled out.

The former police chief of Iguala, Felipe Flores, was also detained by the government after more than two years on the run. Flores had disappeared after the events of September 26, 2014, when the students were last seen in the custody of police. In the official story, the students were handed over to a local gang who murdered them, incinerated their bodies and dumped the ashes in a nearby river. Numerous forensics experts have since concluded this story to be impossible. Flores’ arrest may shed new light as to the true fate of the 43 missing students.

While the army and Cienfuegos have sought to project an apolitical public image in relation to the country’s worsening violence, the military has always sought to maintain the status quo in Mexico. The intervention of the army in political life, if history is any guide, has never been in the interest of the working class. The history of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and its CIA-backed military-police dictatorships, is a bloody reminder of this basic fact.

Mexico is not the only country to militarize it police force in the face of worsening violence. El Salvador and Honduras, two of the most violent countries in the world, have deployed the military to ostensibly fight gangs. In Argentina, President Mauricio Macri declared a public national emergency to pave the way for the militarization of the country’s anti-drug war.

In the face of worsening social inequality and rising social opposition, the Latin American bourgeoisie has sought to arm and strengthen its state apparatus to prepare for a bloody crackdown against workers, students, and peasants.

UK: Man who appeared on reality TV show “Benefits Street” dies in poverty

Alice Summers

A 43-year-old man, Lee Nutley, who was a resident on the street where the reality TV show “Benefits Street” was filmed , was found dead at his home in Stockton-on-Tees in North East England at the beginning of October. Hundreds of people attended his funeral, which took place October 20, to pay their last respects.

The exact cause of his death is unclear, although police reported they did not believe there were any suspicious circumstances. Nutley, who took part in the filming of Channel 4’s “Benefits Street” from 2014 to 2015, suffered from substance abuse problems, epilepsy and had been on and off anti-depressants for eight years. After being laid off by a construction company, he relied on paltry Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) payments while seeking medical help for his epilepsy, depression and anxiety.

Nutley’s already wholly inadequate income of £45 a week from his JSA was also repeatedly cut off due to Job Centre sanctions for allegedly missing scheduled meetings. Nutley denied missing them. On one occasion, filmed in the show, Nutley’s welfare benefits were sanctioned for a four-week period. This meant his JSA was not transferred into his account for another two weeks after that, effectively depriving him of any income for six weeks and forcing him to rely on food banks and the support of his neighbours to feed himself. Nutley was just one of countless people who have been driven to food banks, substance abuse and, in the worst cases, ultimately to their deaths after sanctions to their benefit claims.

There is clear evidence that benefits sanctions may be linked to increasing numbers of deaths. In 2015, a Freedom of Information Request by the Disability News Service revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had investigated, via peer reviews, the welfare payments of 60 people after their deaths. This is a procedure that must be undertaken when suicide is associated with DWP activity.

John Pring of the Disability News Service said that although the admission that the DWP had investigated 60 cases was highly significant, he suspected that the true extent of the problem could be far larger, with the number of deaths possibly ranging anywhere from 60 to several thousand.

In November 2011, the bodies of Mark and Helen Mullins were discovered in their home in the small market town of Bedworth, Warwickshire. The married couple had made a suicide pact. When the couple died, they had been living on just £57.50 a week for the last 18 months. This tiny sum, just £4.10 each per day, was the unemployment benefit that was claimed by Mark.

In another tragic case, David Wood starved to death in 2014 after his benefits were reduced to £40 a week when a mandatory DWP medical visit mistakenly found him fit for work.

Indeed, malnutrition and food bank usage are increasingly found to be linked to benefit sanctions. According to a report by one of the UK’s main food bank providers, the Trussell Trust, over 40 percent of people referred to food banks in the 2015/2016 period had experienced some form of problem with their benefits, whether through changes, delays or sanctions. Other reasons cited included low income and debt.

In October 2012, new rules were introduced that further strengthened the potential for sanctioning JSA or Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimants. This allowed for the sanctioning of benefits for a minimum period of four weeks, and for up to three years, if a claimant is deemed to not have taken sufficient steps to search for work, leaves a job voluntarily, or if they turn down an offer of employment.

Under the new rules, the DWP has sanctioned an estimated 1.97 million JSA claimants, as well as approximately 79,000 Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimants, between October 2012 and August 2016.

These attacks on welfare benefits are part of a wider assault on the working class by the ruling elite, which seeks to destroy the hard-won post-war social benefits system, which they deem to be an unbearable constraint on profit accumulation. The welfare system has suffered relentless cuts under both Labour and Conservative governments, under conditions in which real term wages are stagnating and employers demand increasing levels of productivity from their workers.

“Benefits Street” was filmed on James Turner Street in the Winson Green area of Birmingham. It was reported that 90 percent of the residents on the street claimed welfare benefits. TV programmes such as “Benefits Street” play an essential role in the propaganda offensive of the ruling class to demonise the poor and the unemployed, and are deliberately aimed at manipulating public opinion for further assaults on living standards and the creation of a more competitive, “flexible” and exploitative labour market.

Such reality TV shows aim to construct a distinction, based on the Victorian premise, between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor—that is, those who are deemed to be poor and reliant on state aid through no fault of their own and those who are as a result of their own “personal failings,” such as a lack of effort in finding employment, alcoholism or criminal leanings. No attempt is ever made to critically examine and present to the viewer the real causes of unemployment, substance abuse or crime, which are social ills rooted in the crisis-ridden capitalist system. However, the end result of such propaganda is to castigate all welfare recipients as “scroungers.”

These attempts to portray those on benefits as scroungers, drug addicts or criminals go hand in hand with efforts to accustom workers to ever more exploitative working conditions. In line with these aims, other television programmes such as the BBC’s “Britain’s Hardest Workers: Inside the Low Wage Economy” do their part to drive home to the working class the inescapable nature of the super-exploitive job market.

In this five-part documentary shown in August, 20 volunteers took part in real-life work situations, experiencing the same gruelling conditions faced every day by the UK’s 5 million minimum wage workers. The volunteers were pitted against each other, with the “least productive” leaving the show at the end of the episode, in order to demonstrate the cutthroat nature of the jobs market. The prize for the eventual “winner” was a minimum wage job for a year.

The high-pressure and exhausting nature of these low-paid jobs is evidenced by the stress and demoralisation of the volunteers, who regularly broke down in tears. The program invites viewers to draw the conclusion that in an increasingly competitive job market, workers should be grateful for their job, no matter how terribly paid or degrading.

The message of this foul propaganda is that workers must submit to their super-exploitation, because with the global economy in crisis, and governments around the world increasingly employing protectionist measures, Britons must now work harder to compete with other workers internationally. In this way, these documentaries do the government of the day an immeasurable service in providing the ideological justification for slashing wages and welfare, and driving up productivity.

Last October, Jeremy Hunt, Tory health minister, stated that proposed cuts to workers’ tax credits were essential as “[W]e want [Britain] to be one of the most successful countries in the world in 20, 30, 40 years’ time.” He added, “Essentially, are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard.” Following June’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union, the Conservative government is stepping up its demands that British workers compete with workers internationally.

Lee Nutley was one more tragic casualty in a class war waged against the working class by the ruling elite. His death, and the deaths of countless others forced into similarly terrible poverty, is an indictment of the capitalist system as a whole, where the living and working conditions of the working class are sacrificed in the name of increased productivity and profit.

Polish government prepares legal action against EU council president Donald Tusk

Clara Weiss

The Polish government, headed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, is preparing to mount a legal action against the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk. Tusk is a member of the opposition Civic Platform (PO), and was Polish prime minister from 2007 to 2014. With its campaign against Tusk, the PiS is trying to eliminate an important ally of the German government in the EU, weaken the opposition in Poland and foment anti-Russian sentiment.

The head of the PiS, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, has repeatedly declared that the government will not support a second Tusk presidency of the Council. He also threatened to prosecute Tusk. According to the Polish media Tusk is threatened with being charged with “diplomatic treason”, i.e. activities against the interests of Poland in cooperation with a foreign state. The charge involves a possible sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment. The Polish newspaper wSieci wrote that it is “very likely” that such a prosecution will go ahead.

The allegations concern Tusk’s relations with the Kremlin and, in particular, his political reaction to the aircraft crash in Smolensk in 2010, which resulted in the death of a large part of the Polish government, as well as representatives of the military and the Sejm (Polish parliament). Among the victims of the Smolensk crash was the Polish president at that time, Lech Kaczyński, the twin brother of the current PiS head.

The PiS maintains that the crash was not an accident, but rather an attack by Russia on the Polish government. It accuses the government under Tusk of concealing the “real” causes of the crash in conspiracy with the Kremlin.

Since taking power last autumn, the PiS government has stepped up its propaganda campaign significantly. In September, a government commission began to investigate the disaster. The chairman of the commission is Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, one of the most right-wing members of the Polish cabinet and a vehement supporter of the massive NATO military offensive against Russia.

In recent years, Macierewicz has repeatedly put forward various conspiracy theories to explain the incident in Smolensk. A movie showing widely in Poland at the moment supports the version of the crash propagated by the PiS. The film has been enthusiastically promoted by leading PiS politicians.

In fact, Tusk is no friend of the Kremlin. He and his party, PO, are among the fiercest warmongers in the EU. Following an EU summit on relations with Russia in October, Tusk said: “It is clear that Russia’s strategy is to weaken the EU.” He described the economic sanctions levied against Russia due to the Ukraine crisis as a “defensive” measure.

The Tusk government helped organize the coup in Ukraine in 2014, trained right-wing, paramilitary Ukrainian militias and launched the massive military campaign against Russia, which the PiS government has continued.

When the PiS describes this attitude as too soft, it makes clear the extent to which the current government is pressing for war with Russia. The threats against Tusk are aimed not least at intimidating genuine opponents of such a war.

The PiS is also attacking Tusk because he represents a wing of the Polish bourgeoisie that advocates close cooperation between Poland and Germany, within the framework of the EU. According to media reports, Tusk is in daily telephone contact with his successor as head of the PO, Ewa Kopacz. Despite his function in the EU, he remains the de facto leader of the party.

As president of the European Council, which consists of the heads of state and government of all member countries and is the real power center of the EU, Tusk works closely with Berlin. He has played an important role in keeping growing opposition on the part of the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) under the control of Germany. Apart from the PiS government, the governments of the Visegrad countries largely support Tusk’s political course.

The American web site Politico quoted an adviser to the German Social Democratic Party who said: “You can trust him, he is reliable, he can keep secrets to himself. Everyone knows that [German chancellor Angela] Merkel desperately needs Tusk to keep the Eastern European countries quiet and under control. She will never let him fall. She would rather sacrifice the presidency of the EU parliament, currently held by the German Martin Schulz, (SPD), in order to keep Tusk.”

Tusk works closely with Merkel and her government on many issues and advocates, along with Berlin and Paris, a “hard Brexit” for Britain.

Representatives of PiS had attacked Tusk after the Brexit referendum, which came as a major shock for the Polish bourgeoisie. Kaczyński accused Tusk of being “directly responsible” for the “no” vote because he had imposed harsh conditions on Great Britain in negotiations. Kaczyński said Tusk should “disappear” from the political stage.

The PiS government is also opposed to the plans for a European military union, an initiative mainly driven by Berlin and Paris, and is trying to establish close ties with the British government led by Theresa May. She hopes to use the Brexit to transform the EU from a political into a purely economic alliance. So far, however, negotiations between Poland and the UK have proceeded slowly.

The attacks on Tusk are not least of all aimed at eliminating an important ally of Berlin in the EU, thereby weakening the position of Germany, and hindering Berlin’s plans for a military union.

Eurowings strike grounds domestic German flights

Dietmar Henning

The 24-hour strike by flight attendants at Eurowings on Thursday practically grounded the entire air fleet of the Lufthansa subsidiary. According to the airline, almost all of its domestic German flights were cancelled and European flights were reduced. At Eurowings’ administrative headquarters in Cologne a rally organised by the Independent Flight Attendants’ Organisation (Ufo) drew around 150 employees.

In total, 393 out of 551 Eurowings’ flights were cancelled in Düsseldorf, Cologne/Bonn, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Berlin. The Lufthansa locations at Frankfurt and Munich were unaffected by the strike.

The aim of the strike was “not the fight for luxury privileges,” stated Ufo, but “the question of how to reduce the enormous burdens imposed by collective agreements.”

Eurowings circulated reports that the flight attendants were offered an average pay rise of 7 percent, adding in passing that this offer ran over the course of three years and three months.

Ufo lead negotiator Nicoley Baublies stated, “Eurowings’ offer of a 7 percent pay increase has only been spread by the media. We never received this offer.” Along with a pay increase, Ufo is demanding corresponding provisions for retirement and profit-sharing as exist at other Lufthansa subsidiaries.

The Eurowings board initially thought it could isolate the struggle because only around 400 cabin crew from the Eurowings Deutschland GmbH’s 23 planes could participate.

Ufo has repeatedly threatened to strike in the long-running contract dispute and announced strikes for Monday and Tuesday but then repeatedly acceded to offers from management. They called off planned strikes at the beginning of the week at the last minute to continue talks. Then on Tuesday night, talks broke down without result. At midday on Wednesday, Ufo announced it would take action.

A short time later, Ufo abruptly called upon its members at the larger Lufthansa subsidiary Germanwings to join a 24-hour strike. Germanwings, which is to be merged with Eurowings in the longer term, operates 58 Eurowings planes under a so-called wet-lease contract. Eurowings rents the planes along with the crews. As a result, 81 of the 92 Eurowings planes were affected yesterday by the strike, not just 23.

Ufo, which uses an open collective agreement at Germanwings regulating part-time work, declared negotiations on this a failure on Wednesday evening. This means the Ufo members at Germanwings are in a legal position to strike.

Last Sunday, Ufo informed its members at Germanwings that management had presented for the regulation of part-time working “no viable offer for negotiation despite contrary statements and renewed calls on our part.” Ufo also called again on management to negotiate with the union on Monday and Tuesday. “If these deadlines are not met, or no viable offer for talks is presented, we will have to consider whether job action has to be called to exert the necessary pressure on this issue.”

This was what happened on Wednesday evening. Baublies defended the strike on Thursday morning’s edition of Morgenmagazin on ZDF television, “In the end, the same goals and the same management are involved at both.” If the airline was not prepared to compromise, further strikes could be called. Already the previous evening he spoke of a two-day strike to DPA.

Eurowings immediately threatened to take legal action against the strike. “We will now make legal inquiries about who is responsible for this strike and reserve the right to take corresponding measures,” an Eurowings spokesperson told DPA.

The strike was disproportionate, the airline claimed. Ufo exploited a “seeming conflict” over part-time work to make the larger subsidiary Germanwings “overnight and without warning ready for a strike,” said the spokesperson.

In reality, the strike is more than justified. The Eurowings’ crews are resisting attempts to further reduce their already low wages and pension provisions, and poor working conditions. If the strike was “disproportionate,” then it is so in the opposite sense. The current conflict arose out of Lufthansa’s strategy to cut the wages and benefits of all 120,000 Lufthansa employees to the level of its cut-price airline subsidiary Eurowings. A proportionate response would be a strike by all Lufthansa employees.

With the inclusion of the Germanwings crews, Ufo has taken a small step in resisting the attempt by Lufthansa to play workers off against each other by dividing them into subsidiaries and thus impose wage-dumping. Thus far, the employees of each company, and in addition each group of employees, had been left to fight Lufthansa alone.

But the trade unions, including those like Ufo, Association Cockpit (VC) and others have accepted these divisions. This had the result of artificially separating the struggles and forcing each group of employees to make concessions.

The current strike makes clear how urgent it is to unite all employees at Lufthansa and throughout the airline industry internationally to defend and improve wages, pensions and working conditions.

It is becoming ever clearer that the interests of the airlines’ shareholders are incompatible with those of the workers. The justified demands of the employees, who undertake all the work at the company under increased pressure, can no longer be subordinated to those of the owners of capital.

The trade unions oppose this principled defence of the workers’ interests and pursue a tactic aimed at extracting concessions, not from management, but from workers.

The trade unions associated with the German confederation of trade unions (DGB), such as Verdi in the airline industry, are openly on the side of management and serve as a company police force to suppress all opposition from within the workforce. They are therefore deeply hated by most sections of the workers.

The trade unions accept the capitalist profit system as well as its nation-state framework. They subordinate the working class to the so-called imperative of the international market and conditions of competitiveness. Instead of calling on all airline workers to strike, Ufo turns to management and pleads for more negotiations.

A Ufo statement declared, “It is now in the hands of management to prevent or end further strikes. We are always open to constructive and fair offers or proposals.”

Selloff in global bond markets

Nick Beams

Global bond markets experienced a significant selloff last week, sparking fears that something much more serious could be developing.

German bonds experienced their worst month since 2013. Yields on the country’s 10-year securities, regarded as the benchmark for European financial markets, rose to their highest levels for six months. In the US, the 10-year treasury bond yield climbed to its highest level since June. (The yield on a bond moves in an inverse relationship to its price.)

The biggest selloff and rise in yields was in Britain where the return on a 10-year bond rose to a post-Brexit referendum high. Gilts, as they are called, have recorded their largest loss since the turmoil of the global financial crisis in January 2009.

The yield on these British bonds has risen from an historic low of 0.51 percent in the middle of August to 1.28 percent. This means that an investor who purchased bonds at the end of August has suffered a paper loss of £91,000 on every £1 million outlaid, or just over 9 percent, in the space of less than two months.

There are two main reasons for the bond sell-off. The first is the expectation of a December interest rise by the US Federal Reserve, coupled with uncertainty over the future of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) quantitative easing (QE) program of bond purchases. The second is signs that inflation may be moving upward, which tends to depress bond prices. This is because bonds pay a fixed income and rising prices reduce the income stream and lower the value of the principal in real terms in the future.

Peter Chatwell, head of rates strategy at Mizuho International in London, told Bloomberg: “The premise of the selloff so far was higher inflation and uncertainty on what the ECB is going to do next and particularly about how the next leg of quantitative easing would look.”

The ECB has said it will announce the future of its QE program, under which it purchases €80 billion worth of bonds per month, at the next meeting of its governing council in December. At present the program is due to end in March 2017. While an immediate cut-off appears unlikely, the ECB may decide to “taper” its purchases in the same way that the Fed did when it withdrew from bond purchases. Any move to extend the program without any indication of when it would start to be wound back would increase opposition from German financial authorities, who have been critical of the policy from the outset.

There is a general mood in financial markets that central banks may start to ease back on QE measures. One of the reasons for the sharp movement in Britain is that the economy expanded by 0.5 percent in the September quarter—a better result than expected in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote—and so Bank of England governor Mark Carney will be less inclined to further loosen monetary policy.

According to a report in the Financial Times, “investors are now broadly reassessing the willingness of the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan to maintain their aggressive unconventional measures” as the Fed “prepares markets for another US interest rate increase in December.”

As one fund manager told the newspaper, the bond market was at an “inflection point” as a result. “We’re seeing a general attitude shift. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

While the movements thus far are relatively small, they can have large consequences. The reason is that the policies of the world’s major central banks in pumping trillions of dollars into financial markets have created a bond market bubble. At one point, the price of bonds rose so high that some $10 trillion worth were trading at negative yields. That is, if an investor purchased these bonds and held them to maturity, they would suffer an overall loss.

The reason such purchases were made, however, was not to hold the bonds but to sell them for a capital gain when their price rose even further.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the “weak point” for bonds is that their “previous superstrong performance … makes them unusually vulnerable.”

This means that relatively small movements can have a large effect. A rise in the rate of inflation, for example, from 1 percent to 2 percent would not have major consequences in the real economy. But it would have a significant impact on financial markets if it were matched by the same rise in yields.

According to an article published by Dow Jones, it has been estimated that such an increase would reduce the value of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Broad Market Index, which measures global bond prices, by 6.9 percent, that is, a loss of about $3.36 trillion.

Such calculations throw a spotlight on the explosive contradictions at the very centre of the monetary policies pursued by the major central banks in the eight years since the financial crisis.

The stated aim of their agenda has been to lift the real economy. However, rather than produce any tangible boost—investment, for example, remains well below pre-2008 trends in all the major economies—the most significant effect has been to create a bubble in both equity and bond markets. Consequently, if interest rates do start to rise, either because of an increase in inflation or an uptick in economic growth—the stated aim of QE measures—there is the risk of a major crisis as a result of massive losses incurred in finance markets.

Moreover, there is a significant difference between the situation today and that of eight years ago. In 2008 the central banks stood outside the financial markets. Today they are major players and would therefore be directly involved in any market meltdown.

Sixty killed in new US-Saudi war crime in Yemen

Bill Van Auken

The murderous and criminal character of the US-Saudi war against Yemen, the poorest country of the Middle East, was laid bare once again Sunday with the report of an air strike that claimed the lives of scores of civilians in the Red Sea port city of Al Hudaydah.

The bombs struck a prison facility inside a government compound controlled by the Houthi rebel movement, which controls the north and west of the country.

According to reports from Yemen, more than 60 people were killed in the air strike, which demolished two detention centers, and at least 40 more were wounded. The Saudi warplanes used their familiar tactic of dropping bombs on the facility and then waiting for people to rush to the scene to search for survivors before bombing again to achieve the maximum death toll.

Prisoners and guards alike were buried in the rubble. Photographs released from the scene showed lines of bodies covered in sheets.

The prison bombing, which took place at about midnight Saturday, followed close on the heels of another air strike in the western city of Taiz in the western Yemeni highlands, the country’s third largest population center and a major cultural center.

Taiz has been the scene of bitter fighting between the Houthi rebels and Saudi-backed ground forces for the past year and a half.

Saturday’s raid there targeted the al-Salw residential district near the front lines, demolishing several homes. Among those struck was the house of Abdullah Abdo, in which the US-supplied bombs dropped by Saudi jets took the lives of 11 members of the same family. Many of the victims were children. Reportedly seven of the dead were women.

The air strikes Saturday were the bloodiest since October 8, when Saudi warplanes attacked a funeral home in the capital of Sana’a, killing and wounding at least 700 people. As many as 155 people died in that attack, which left many of the wounded without limbs and otherwise maimed. Like the latest strike on the prisons, it was a “double tap” bombing raid, timed to ensure that those rushing to the aid of the wounded would also be killed.

There is every reason to believe that this earlier attack was not a matter of collateral damage or mistaken targeting, but rather a deliberate attempt to decapitate the Houthi regime in Sana’a. The funeral that was hit was for the father of the government’s interior minister and was attended by a number of senior officials, who lost their lives.

In the aftermath of that horrific bombing, US officials issued mealy-mouthed statements to the effect that Washington’s support for the Saudi war was “not a blank check” and that it would be realigned in accordance with “American values.”

Since then, US aid has continued to flow. US planes are continuing to refuel Saudi fighters in midair so that they can carry out these murderous attacks. And the US Navy has itself joined the onslaught, launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at alleged Houthi radar stations, supposedly in retaliation for missiles fired at a US warship in the Red Sea. US military officials have subsequently acknowledged doubts about the supposed missile attacks, raising the possibility that a US Navy radar malfunction had generated ghost signals.

Just one day before the latest atrocities carried out against the Yemeni people, both the United States and Saudi Arabia were voted onto the United Nations Human Rights Council. The elevation to this panel of the two countries most responsible for killing an estimated 10,200 Yemenis in the past year and a half, the great majority of them civilians, and pushing at least half the population to the brink of starvation serves to unmask the hypocrisy of the entire “human rights” framework for justifying imperialist wars and interventions all over the globe.

This has particularly been evident in Syria, where the fate of eastern Aleppo, occupied by Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias, has been turned into the object of a crusade to demonize Russia for its support for the Syrian government’s attempt to retake the area and to prepare public opinion for a far wider war.

The propaganda denunciations of Russia over Aleppo have continued, despite a suspension of Russian and Syrian air strikes against the positions of the US-armed Islamist “rebels,” which is now entering its third week.

The Al Qaeda-affiliated militias have used the suspension of air strikes to mount their own offensive, which has been directed in large measure against the civilian population of government-controlled western Aleppo, where the vast majority of the city’s population lives.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group hostile to the Syrian government, reported Sunday that “rebel” shelling of western Aleppo had killed at least 41 civilians over a three-day period, at least 16 of them children. The Islamist militias have also used suicide car bombs in an attempt to breach government positions, also claiming civilian victims.

Among the “rebel” attacks Sunday was a barrage of shells containing toxic gases that struck the al-Hamadaniyeh area and the al-Assad residential suburb of Aleppo. According to reports, one person died from gas poisoning, while at least 35 people were sent to the hospital from the effects of chlorine gas.

In 2013, the Obama administration came to the brink of launching a direct military attack on Syria over allegations that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was responsible for a gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, which supposedly violated a “red line” set by Obama over the use of poison gas.

The Syrian government denied its responsibility for the attack, which coincided with the arrival of United Nations weapons inspectors in Damascus to investigate previous gas attacks and provided a convenient pretext for US military intervention against the Assad regime.

In the end, Washington accepted a face-saving deal brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin providing for the UN-supervised destruction of all of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles.

Subsequent reports, including by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, pointed to the Ghouta attack having been organized by the Turkish government working in league with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front in order to blame it on Assad and provide a means for the Obama administration to override popular opposition to another US war in the Middle East and launch military action in Syria.

There is, needless to say, no sign within the US and other western media of the kind of moral outrage and “humanitarian concern” evinced over the Russian bombing of Aleppo or the fabricated charges of Syrian government gas attacks over the recent crimes carried out against the people of western Aleppo. Rather, the New York Times Saturday wrote approvingly that “A coalition of Syrian insurgent groups said it had begun a major offensive on Friday to break the months-long siege of eastern parts of Aleppo.”

The Times went on to advance an alibi for the fact that the forces backed by the US against the Assad government are led by Al Qaeda. “The rebels argue that they cannot afford to shun any potential allies while they are under fire, including well-armed and motivated jihadists, without more robust aid from their international backers,” the report stated, providing an argument for the CIA and the Pentagon pouring more heavy weaponry and anti-aircraft missiles into the hands of Al Qaeda.

Political warfare explodes in Washington

Patrick Martin & Barry Grey

Just a week before Election Day, the crisis gripping the American ruling class and its state, marked by intractable and bitter internal conflicts, has erupted into open political warfare.

Last Friday’s letter from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey to Congress announcing new “investigative steps” in the probe of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, itself a manifestation of the crisis, has brought the underlying tensions to the boiling point. It has exposed raging conflicts within the FBI and, more broadly, the national security apparatus as a whole.

Comey’s cryptic letter acknowledged that the FBI has not actually reviewed a new batch of emails that “appear to be pertinent” to its previous investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business while she was secretary of state. The agency, he wrote, “cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.” This astonishing admission makes all the more extraordinary Comey’s decision to make the discovery of the new emails a public issue only eleven days before the election.

In a rapid-fire series of developments this weekend, Justice Department officials revealed that they had opposed Comey’s decision to send the letter, arguing that it violated a longstanding principle that no Justice Department or FBI action that might impact on a candidate should be announced within 60 days of an election.

The Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats lashed out at Comey for the timing of the letter. At a campaign rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Clinton said Comey’s action is “not just strange, it’s unprecedented.” She also tweeted that “FBI Director Comey bowed to partisan pressure,” suggesting that the letter was an effort to appease congressional Republican leaders opposed to Comey’s determination last July that there was no basis for criminal charges against Clinton over her use of a private email server.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to Comey suggesting that he had violated the law forbidding government employees to use their official positions to influence the result of an election. “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act,” he wrote. “Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.”

He added that Comey had “demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be clear intent to aid one political party over another,” because he had made public the renewed FBI interest in Clinton’s emails, but was silent on what Reid called “explosive information” supposedly connecting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to Russian government officials.

Here Reid was resorting to the Russia-baiting that has been the Clinton campaign’s main response to the publication by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of emails and other documents sent or received by campaign chairman John Podesta, including devastating information on Bill Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to obtain lucrative speaking engagements with corporations and business associations. Campaign spokesmen have refused to discuss the contents of the emails, claiming that they were hacked by Russian government agents and then handed over to WikiLeaks to damage Clinton and help Trump.

NBC News reported Sunday that the FBI has now obtained a search warrant to go through all 650,000 emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl.

The Wall Street Journal gave details, in a story posted on its web site Sunday afternoon, of the explosive internal crisis within the FBI that led to Comey’s letter to Congress. By this account, there has been a fierce battle within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice Department not only over the Clinton email investigation, but over separate investigations involving four FBI field offices (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Little Rock, Arkansas) into the operations of the Clinton Foundation.

More than eight months ago, FBI agents presented plans for a more aggressive investigation of the foundation to career prosecutors in the Justice Department, only to have the proposal blocked on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The FBI offices nonetheless continued their investigations, which were intensified after the Clinton email investigation was wound up in July.

The Journal report suggests that a substantial faction within the FBI was either convinced that top FBI officials were covering up criminal activities on the part of Hillary and Bill Clinton, or that the FBI dissidents were politically motivated to use agency resources to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, or both.

When top officials in the FBI and Justice Department opposed these efforts, open rebellion followed, expressed in leaks to the Wall Street Journal centrally targeting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for state senate in Virginia last year. According to some press reports, Comey sent his letter to Congress last week because he was convinced the information would become public anyway through further leaks by FBI subordinates.

The open warfare engulfing Washington on the eve of a presidential election reveals that the entire political system and the state apparatus itself are riven by tensions and conflicts so deep and bitter that they cannot be contained within the traditional framework of bourgeois elections. Fueling these tensions is the convergence of crises on the economic, geopolitical, internal political and social fronts.

The US and world economy remain mired in stagnation more than eight years after the 2008 Wall Street crash, and there are growing fears that central bank policies designed to buttress the banks and drive up stock prices are leading to a new financial disaster. The economic crisis is fueling social anger and alienation from the entire political system, as reflected in different ways in the mass support for the anti-Wall Street campaign of the self-styled “socialist” Bernie Sanders and the “America first” pseudo-populist campaign of Donald Trump.

Twenty-five years of unending war and fifteen years of the “war on terror” have failed to secure US hegemony in the Middle East and only heightened fears within the ruling elite that US imperialism is losing ground to rivals such as Russia and China. The disarray of US policy in the Syria, in particular, has led to bitter conflicts and recriminations over US policy and demands for a major escalation of military violence, not only in Syria, but throughout the Middle East. These are combined with calls for a more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China.

The great danger is that these conflicts are being fought out behind the backs of the working class by different factions of the same reactionary ruling class. Unless the working class intervenes as an independent political and revolutionary force, fighting for its own interests in opposition to all parties and factions of the capitalist class, the crisis will inevitably result in ever more right-wing policies at home and ever wider wars abroad, leading inexorably to a new world war.

The capitalist two-party system offers only two reactionary alternatives: the fascistic billionaire Trump, who demands a vast increase in military spending and authoritarian methods of rule, and the multimillionaire Clinton, the favorite of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, who would continue and escalate the right-wing policies of the Obama administration.

All factions of the ruling elite agree on concealing the implications of the world capitalist crisis from working people. Hence the degraded character of the bourgeois election campaign, with any serious discussion of the social crisis and the war danger drowned out by media sensationalism over a succession of sex scandals and anti-Russian propaganda.

Egyptian Kangaroo Court Confirms 20-Year-Prison Sentence On Morsi

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Amid mounting anger against the US-client government of Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi because of tax rises, soaring food prices, inflation and cuts in state subsidies, a kangaroo court in Cairo has confirmed a 20-year prison sentence against Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected President who was deposed by Al-Sisi in July 2013.

In April 2015, a Cairo court had sentenced Morsi to 20 years in prison for inciting violence against protesters who had staged a sit-in outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace in December 2012, when Morsi was still in power.

Twenty-year jail sentences were also confirmed against other senior figures from Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, including Mohamed el-Beltagy and Essam el-Erian. The men were convicted in April 2015 on charges including kidnapping, torture and the killings of protesters during unrest in 2012.

Morsi, elected in 2012 and overthrown in 2013, is facing several trials. After a controversial trial, he was sentenced to death in May 2015 for allegedly participating in violence against the police during the 2011 uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak, but his court appointed lawyers have appealed that verdict.

An Egyptian court cancelled the life sentences on Tuesday (Oct 25) handed out to former president Mohamed Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohamed Badie along with 15 other leaders of the banned group in an espionage case and ordered a retrial.

The court also cancelled death sentences handed out to 16 other Muslim Brotherhood members, including top leaders Khyrat el-Sharer and Mohamed el-Beltagy Ahmed Abdel Aty. Thirteen of the 16 were sentenced in absentia. The defendants were accused of spying, funding terrorism and disclosing national security.

Turkey’s president, Tayyip Erdoğan, had criticized the death sentence for Morsi and accused the west of hypocrisy. “The popularly elected president of Egypt, chosen with 52% of the vote, has unfortunately been sentenced to death,” Erdoğan said at a rally in Istanbul.

“Egypt is turning back into ancient Egypt,” he said, referring to the Pharaonic rule of the land that ended more than two millennia ago. “The west, unfortunately, is still turning a blind eye to Sisi’s coup,” he added. “While they abolished the death penalty in their own countries, they just look on as spectators at this execution in Egypt.”

Morsi, who has also been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of leaking state secrets to Qatar, has not appointed a lawyer to defend himself and has refused to recognize the legitimacy of the court proceedings, saying he remains Egypt’s legitimate president.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been blamed for the unrest in Egypt, which has resulted in the death of hundreds of people. Al-Sisi’s government designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in December 2013, making even verbal expressions of support punishable by imprisonment.

Hundreds of people have been sentenced to death in a crackdown following Morsi’s overthrow. Seven have been executed, including six defendants sentenced to death by a military court for allegedly participating in militant attacks.

More than three years after Sisi ousted Morsi, his promise to restore stability is wearing thin. Desperation and anger among Egyptians is mounting due to increase in food prices, while the double-digit inflation rate squeezes poor Egyptians.

According to the Middle East Monitor, core inflation is at seven-year-highs, near 14 percent, as a foreign exchange shortage and a hike in customs duties bite hard in a country that imports everything from sugar to luxury cars. The government raised electricity prices by 25-40 percent in August and is phasing in a 13 percent value-added tax approved by parliament in the same month.

As part of reforms aimed at clinching a $12 billion IMF loan needed to plug its gaping budget deficit, the government is also expected to cut petrol subsidies and devalue the Egyptian pound, prompting a further cycle of inflation in Egypt, where tens of millions rely on state-subsidized bread, the Middle East Monitor said adding: “Dollar rationing at banks has driven businesses toward the black market where the dollar is now selling for more than 15.5 pounds – a huge mark-up from the official rate of about 8.8.

Rumors have spread that Friday Nov. 11 will be a day of protest over economic conditions, the Middle East Monitor reported. Police have already detained about 70 people for inciting protests, accusing many of loyalty to the banned Muslim Brotherhood.