Pegasus and the Threat of Cyberweapons in the Age of Smartphones

Prabir Purkayastha

Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is haunting the Narendra Modi-led Indian government once again. Seventeen media organizations including the Wire, the Washington Post and the Guardian have spent months examining a possible list of 50,000 phone numbers belonging to individuals from around 50 countries. This list was provided by the French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. These investigations by the media organizations helped zero in on possible targets of these cyberattacks. The mobile phones of 67 of the people who were on the target list were then forensically examined. The results revealed that 37 of the analyzed phones showed signs of being hacked by the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware or signs of attempted penetration. Of the remaining 30, the results were inconclusive as either the owners had changed their phones or the phones were Androids, which do not log the kind of information that helps in detecting such penetration.

The possible targets not only include journalists and activists, but also government officials. This includes 14 heads of states and governments: three presidents (France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa), three sitting and seven former prime ministers, and a king (Morocco’s Mohammed VI). The three sitting prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Among the seven former prime ministers are Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, France’s Édouard Philippe, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel, according to the Washington Post.

Once the malware is installed on a target’s phone, the spyware not only provides full access to the device’s data but also controls the phone’s microphone and camera. Instead of a device for use by the owner, the phone becomes a device that can be used to spy on them, recording not only telephonic conversations but also in-person conversations, including images of the participants. The collected information and data are then transmitted back to those deploying Pegasus.

Successive information and technology ministers in India—Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ashwini Vaishnaw—have stated that “the government has not indulged in any ‘unauthorized interception’” in the country, according to the Wire. Both the ministers have chosen to duck the questions: Did the government buy NSO’s hacking software and authorize the targeting of Indian citizens? And can the use of Pegasus spyware to infect smartphones and alter its basic functions be considered as legal authorization under the Indian Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009 for “interception, monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource”?

I am going to leave the legal issues for those who are better equipped to handle them. Instead, I am going to examine the new dangers that weaponizing malware by nation-states pose to the world. Pegasus is not the only example of such software; Snowden surveillance revelations showed us what the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States and the Five Eyes governments do and shed light on their all-encompassing surveillance regime. These intelligence agencies and governments have hacked the digital infrastructure of other countries and snooped on their “secure” communications and even spied on their allies. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not spared from NSA surveillance.

The key difference between nation-states and cybercriminals developing malware is that the nation-states possess far greater resources when it comes to developing such malware. Take the example of a group called the Shadow Brokers, who dumped a gigabyte of weaponized software exploits of the NSA on the net in 2017. Speaking about this, Matthew Hickey, a well-known security expert, told Ars Technica in 2017, “It is very significant as it effectively puts cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who downloads it.” Ransomware hit big time soon after, with WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware creating havoc by using the exploits in NSA’s toolkit.

Why am I recounting NSA’s malware tools while discussing Pegasus? Because Pegasus belongs to NSO, an Israeli company with very close ties to Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA. NSO, like many other Israeli commercial cyber-intelligence companies, is founded and run by ex-intelligence officers from Unit 8200. It is this element—introducing skills and knowledge of nation-states—into the civilian sphere that makes such spyware so dangerous.

NSO also appears to have played a role in improving Israel’s relations with two Gulf petro-monarchies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Israel, therefore, sees the sale of spyware to these countries as an extension of its foreign policy. Pegasus has been used extensively by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to target various domestic dissidents and even foreign critics. The most well-known example, of course, is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and the Washington Post’s columnist, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

NSO’s market capitalization is reported to be in the range of $2 billion, making it perhaps one of the most expensive civilian cyber-intelligence companies. And its tools are frightening, as there does not seem to be any protection against them. Most of these tools are classified as cyberweapons and require the Israeli government’s approval for export, again showing the link between the Israeli state and NSO.

The other reason why Pegasus spyware is so dangerous is that it does not need any action on the part of the owner of a phone for the device to be hacked by the spyware. Most infections of devices take place when people click on a link sent to them through email/SMS, or when they go to a site and click on something there. Pegasus exploited a security problem with WhatsApp and was able to hack into a phone through just a missed call. Just a ring was enough for the Pegasus spyware to be installed on the phone. This has now been extended to using other vulnerabilities that exist within iMessage, WhatsApp, FaceTime, WeChat, Telegram, and various other apps that receive data from unknown sources. That means Pegasus can compromise a phone without the user having to click on a single link. These are called zero-click exploits in the cyber community.

Once installed, Pegasus can read the user’s messages, emails, and call logs; it can capture screenshots, log pressed keys, and collect browser history and contacts. It exfiltrates—meaning sends files—back to its server. Basically, it can spy on every aspect of a target’s life. Encrypting emails or using encryption services such as Signal won’t deter Pegasus, which can read what an infected phone’s user reads or capture what they type.

Many people use iPhones in the belief that they are safer. The sad truth is that the iPhone is as vulnerable to Pegasus attacks as Android phones, though in different ways. It is easier to find out if an iPhone is infected, as it logs what the phone is doing. As the Android systems do not maintain such logs, Pegasus can hide its traces better.

In an interview with the Guardian published on July 19, “after the first revelations from the Pegasus Project,” Snowden described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist… If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.” He called for an immediate global ban on the international spyware trade.

Snowden’s answer of banning the sale of such spyware is not enough. We need instead to look at deweaponizing all of cyberspace, including spyware. The spate of recent cyberattacks—estimated to be tens of thousands a day—is a risk to the cyberinfrastructure of all countries on which all their institutions depend. After the leak of NSA and CIA cyberweapons, and now with NSO’s indiscriminate use of Pegasus, we should be asking whether nation-states can really be trusted to develop such weapons.

In 2017, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft and no peacenik or leftist, wrote, “Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.” It is this concern that certain leading companies within the industry—Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and others—had raised in 2017, calling for a new digital Geneva Convention banning cyberweapons. Russia and China have also made similar demands in the past. It was rejected by the United States, who believed that it had a military advantage in cyberspace, which is something it should not squander.

Pegasus is one more reminder of the danger of nation-states developing cyberweapons. Though here, it is not a leak but deliberate use of a dangerous technology for private profit that poses a risk to journalists, activists, opposition parties and finally to democracy. It is a matter of time before the smartphones that we carry become attack vectors for attacks on the very cyberinfrastructure on which we all depend.

24 Muslim Brotherhood members sentenced to death in Egypt

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

An Egyptian kangaroo court on Thursday sentenced 24 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death in two separate cases, the daily Sabah reported.

The state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper said the Damanhour Criminal Court ordered the death penalty for 16 defendants affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, including Mohamed Sweidan, a regional leader of the organization, for their involvement in the bombing of a police bus in Rashid (Rosetta) city in the Beheira governorate in 2015.

Six of the defendants were tried in absentia. The report added that the blast killed three police officers and wounded 39 others. The same court also handed down the death penalty to eight Muslim Brotherhood members, including two in absentia, who were accused of killing a police officer in December 2014 in Ad Dilinjat city in Beheira.

There are no exact figures for death penalties issued in Egypt this year except for 10 handed down in April and those upheld against 12 Muslim Brotherhood leaders over the Rabaa sit-in dispersal case in 2013.

Founded in 1928 in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood became the main opposition movement in Egypt despite decades of crackdown, and has inspired side movements and political parties throughout the Muslim world. But it is still banned in several countries, including Egypt, for its alleged links to terrorism.

Earlier in 2021, Amnesty International denounced Egypt’s “significant spike” in recorded executions. The human rights organization estimated a more than threefold rise to 107 last year, from 32 in 2019.

American Muslim groups urge suspension of US aid to Egypt until el-Sisi Regime cancels politically-motivated executions

The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest coalition of major national, regional, and local Muslim organizations, on June 28 sent a letter to Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken calling on the Biden administration and Congress to demand that “the Egyptian government halt its plans to conduct a mass execution of democracy activists, faith leaders, and other political prisoners in the coming days.”

The USCMO letter in part said:

Indeed, Egypt is ruled by a brutal military dictatorship with no regard for human rights, democracy, or justice. Under the military’s reign, Egypt has become the world’s third-largest executioner. In October and November 2020 alone, the junta executed 57 men and women. A 2020 Amnesty International report found that of those 57 people, over a quarter were “sentenced to death in cases relating to political violence following grossly unfair trials marred by forced ‘confessions’ and other serious human rights violations including torture and enforced disappearances.”

So far in 2021, 51 men and women have been put to death, including a Christian monk. In 2014, Impartial UN experts described the Egyptian government’s mass executions of political prisoners as a “continuing and unacceptable mockery of justice that casts a big shadow over the Egyptian legal system.”

The mass detention of political prisoners has been ongoing since 2013, when the Egyptian military overthrew the democratically elected government and massacred over a thousand anti–coup demonstrators at Rabaa Square, an atrocity Human Rights Watch called “the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.”

Egypt the third-most prolific executioner in the world after China and Iran

Since the rise to power of Field Marshad Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt following the overthrow of his predecessor Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the country has seen a wave of repression against political dissidents, sparking outrage from human rights organizations.

The widespread use of the death penalty has become a major focus for concern, as hundreds of people have been sentenced to death since 2013. So far, at least 51 men and women have been executed in 2021 alone, according to the Middle East Eye.

In 2020, the number of executions in Egypt tripled from the year before, making the country the third-most prolific executioner after China and Iran, according to Amnesty International.

Many of those executed have been described by rights groups as “prisoners of conscience” detained due to their political opposition to the el-Sisi government.

According to the Geneva-based Committee for Justice rights group, at least 92 opponents of el-Sisi have been executed since 2013, and final death sentences have been issued for 64 others who may be executed at any moment.

No End to Escalating Repression

Egyptian authorities intensified their repression of peaceful government critics and ordinary people during 2020, virtually obliterating any space for peaceful assembly, association or expression, Human Rights Watch said in its World Report 2021.

The parliament approved President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s extension of a nationwide state of emergency for the fourth year in a row. The authorities used the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to silence critics including health workers, journalists and bloggers, and to keep hundreds, if not thousands, of detainees in pre-trial detention without judicial review.  In May, President al-Sisi approved amendments to the Emergency Law that expanded the executive branch’s power. The Covid-19 outbreak exacerbated abysmal detention conditions, with a ban on prison visits from March to August without alternative means of communication. Dozens of prisoners died in custody, including at least 14 apparently due to Covid-19.

“Ten years after Egyptians ousted Hosni Mubarak, they now live under the harsher, suffocating security grip of President al-Sisi’s government,” said Amr Magdi, Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The Interior Ministry’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other security forces forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily arrested, and tortured detainees, including children. Many arrests were made on baseless charges of “joining a terrorist group” and “spreading false news.” Families of dissidents abroad were also subjected to collective punishment, including home raids and arrests. In September and October, the authorities arrested over 1,000 protesters, dissidents, and bystanders in response to small but widespread protests across the country.

A new age of surveillance and control in India

Javed Iqbal Wani

With the recent Pegasus scandal, the relationship between state surveillance and democratic practices are in sharp contention. It seems that control has become the sacrament of state in India based on a conception of sovereignty that operates by strictly regulating and punishing those considered as the foes of the regime. In India the key challenge it seems remains the decolonisation of administrative authority and power. There is a strong element of suspicion towards citizens who disagree with the ideology of the regime. Since coming to power in 2014, the current government has actively tried to underwrite most relations of power and authority. Such an approach is set in a paradigm of security, where political paranoia and anxiety has gained primacy over justice. Given the emphasis on market driven development and self-sufficiency approach propagated by the government, one would expect the state to make itself less visible in the everyday life of the citizens. However, there is an increasing presence of the state felt in the quotidian lives of its citizens against, what the Union government has time and again argued, a condition of desolation and anarchy leading to ‘anti-national’ activities. As a result, what is proposed is that state sovereignty requires protection of institutions of security.

The problem with such a security paradigm is that it pursues an imposed mode of political life and become more an issue of power and obligation than of participative and deliberative democracy. The urge of the Union government is to continue disciplining citizens and to slow down any opposition to its policies and ideology. Thus, control emerges as a substantive issue here. The Union government is trying to surreptitiously comport itself in its imagined crises. By unleashing institutions like the National Security Agency and Enforcement Directorate, and laws such as UAPA etc., the government has repeatedly tried to embody a new form of state power yet keeps insisting on the autonomy of these institutions. More recently the allegations of snooping on various ‘persons of interest’ by utilising a shady organisation like NSO, has raised new questions about its approach. If the allegations are true, it can be deduced that the state is sourcing and deploying new technologies to conduct its dirty work. This secret condition of governance in India makes the political utterly vulnerable and scuttles established ‘rule of law’ practices.

In the name of ‘national interest’ the Union government has in a way proposed that citizens must come to terms with a life in which accepted surveillance, security and discipline are the precondition of the ‘new’ citizenship. It is arguing for divesting the citizens of democratic deliberation and dissent. Recently, with various intellectuals and activists arrested under the draconian UAPA points out that the space to critique the political rationality of the government is shrinking at a great pace. In the current scenario it seems that one’s ideology, if it differs from the government, is weaponised against oneself. The ambitions of the government are increasingly becoming opaque to the citizens.

In the era of the ongoing pandemic and the many challenges it has created, a government is expected to practice an ethic of care and not animosity. It is expected to listen and constructively respond to the queries and anxieties of its people. Care and not control should take precedence in establishing confidence amongst the citizens. Relentless urge to control has put limits to governments’ own civility and has created a wedge between democracy and authority. Authority without responsibility is an imminent danger facing India right now.

Russia conducts military drills in Central Asia and China as US completes troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

Clara Weiss

Against the backdrop of the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is set to be completed by the end of August, and the rapid take-over of large parts of the country by the Taliban, Russia began military drills with Turkmenistan on Friday, July 30, that are set to run until August 10.

Russia also began 10-day-long military drills on August 1, together with the Tajik armed forces and the armed forces of Uzbekistan. The drills will take place at the Harbmaidon training ground on the Afghan-Tajik border. Tajikistan and Afghanistan share a 800-mile-long (1,303 kilometers) frontier, which has been effectively taken over by the Taliban.

The deeply impoverished country hosts a Russian military base. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu expressed alarm this week about a strengthening of ISIS in Afghanistan amid the US troop withdrawal. He said that Russia was strengthening the military capabilities of its base in Tajikistan and ramping up the training of Tajik forces.

Tajik National Army troops (Image credit: Russian Ministry of Defense CC BY 4.0)

On July 22, Tajikistan held its largest military readiness drills since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, involving around 100,000 servicemen, 130,000 reserve troops and 1,000 armored vehicles. According to Eurasianet, Tajik military recruitment officers have been touring the country, drawing up lists of young people who could be called up as wartime reservists.

From August 9-14, Russia will also conduct its first joint military drills with China since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a joint statement published by Moscow and Beijing on Thursday, “The exercise is aimed to consolidate and develop the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era, deepen the practical cooperation and traditional friendship between the two militaries, and further demonstrate the two sides’ resolve and capability to fight against terrorist forces and jointly safeguard regional peace and security.”

The drills in the northern Chinese Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region will involve some 10,000 troops along with aircraft, artillery and armored equipment. Both militaries are set to establish a joint command center to oversee the drills. The statement said, “The two sides’ participating troops will be mixed into teams to make plans jointly and conduct training together, in a bid to verify and improve both troops’ capabilities of joint reconnaissance, search and early warning, electronic information attack, and joint attack and elimination.”

The military drills come as the US has resumed bombing Afghanistan in support of government troops that have been rapidly losing territory to the Taliban amid the US troop withdrawal. The Kremlin has also been concerned about news reports suggesting that the US is seeking to establish a military base in one of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

As talks between the Taliban and the official Afghan government have stalled and preparations for the military drills were underway, both Moscow and Beijing welcomed Taliban delegations in July.

On Wednesday, Beijing welcomed a delegation led by the Taliban’s deputy head, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, for a two-day visit. It was the highest profile visit so far by the Taliban to China. Beijing declared that the Taliban would play “an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction” of the country. China is particularly concerned about the potential bolstering of Uyghur separatist organizations, which have long-standing ties to the Taliban, going back to the CIA-orchestrated war against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul in the 1980s. At the time, China supported the US involvement in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. However, the Afghan war also turned out to be central for the training and arming of Uyghur separatist and terrorist organizations, which to this day maintain close ties with US imperialism .

By now, the Taliban have seized much of the Afghan province that directly borders China’s Xinjiang province, which is home to the majority of the Muslim Uyghur population in China and is claimed by Uyghur separatists as “East Turkestan.” The Taliban has earlier published statements, welcoming Chinese investments and assuring Beijing that it would not intervene in China’s domestic affairs. A spokesman for the Taliban’s political office, Mohammad Naeem, stated on Wednesday that it had again “assured China that Afghan territory will not be used against the security of any country.”

Earlier in July, Taliban delegations visited Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat, as well as Moscow. The visit by a Taliban delegation to Moscow on July 7-8 was, in fact, the third such visit this year. Although the Taliban has been banned in Russia as a terrorist organization since 2003, the Russian government has for many years been in relatively open contact with the Taliban.

According to Russian press reports, at the July meeting the Taliban promised that it would not allow Afghanistan to become a staging ground for attacks on Russia since it had “very good relations” with Moscow. The Taliban also assured Moscow that it would not violate the Afghan-Tajik border or any other border with Central Asian countries.

Speaking to Gazeta.Ru, Vladimir Dzhabarov, a member of Russia’s Federal Council and the ruling United Russia party, emphasized, “We will cooperate with any lawfully established [Afghan] government. If the Taliban become the lawful government, of course, we will establish relations with them, but under the condition that they will not be hostile toward our country.” He added that Russia “hasn’t had the kind of openly negative relationship with them [the Taliban] as the Americans did.”

A political expert, Stanislav Pritchin, cautioned that the Taliban was a very heterogeneous organization and that its central leadership could make no credible promise about the actions of its forces in Afghanistan’s north since they were recruited from various groups, some of which have their own political agenda. Andrei Kazantsev from the Moscow Higher School of Economics also speaking to Gazeta.Ru, stressed that Russia’s main concern was to prevent ISIS from consolidating its position in Afghanistan.

In recent months, Russian foreign policy think tanks have increasingly focused on analyzing the impact of the US troop withdrawal on Central Asia and discussing Russia’s own foreign policy strategy. Fyodor Lukyanov, who is Russia’s leading foreign policy pundit and maintains close ties to the Putin regime, recently wrote in the think tank journal Russia in Global Affairs, that the withdrawal marked the “end of an epoch in American and world politics.” He noted, “To some extent, Washington doesn’t care about what will happen now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Biden speaks a lot about democracy and freedom, but he understands that America’s possibilities are limited and that priorities have to be set. His choice is clear: the opposition to China by means of uniting the ‘free world’ against it. To keep the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan without any hope of achieving any real success will not further this goal.”

Also writing for Russia in Global Affairs, Timofei Bordachev stressed that the Kremlin should approach the troop withdrawal from the standpoint of its implications not just for regional but for world politics. While stressing that in terms of immediate security threats that Russia should work closely with the Central Asian states to bolster defense capacities, he wrote, “If the Taliban were to come to power or plunge the country into a new civil war, it would not damage major Russian projects.” He continued, “[t]he new reality in Kabul is not a threat, but an opportunity to adjust the existing formats of relations with partners—regional and not only.

“Much more important” for Moscow than the immediate regional implications, he emphasized, was “how the new situation in Afghanistan will affect Russia’s position in relations with China, India, Turkey, Iran, even with the United States and Europe.” Particular attention should be paid, Bordachev continued, to a possible involvement by Turkey in Afghanistan; the impact of the situation on China’s position in Pakistan and South Asia in general and its implications for India’s foreign policy strategy.

Severe smoke continues to blanket North American west

Adria French

The wildfire season in the United States and Canada has continued to spread smoke across the North American west. In the US, Oregon’s Bootleg Fire has grown to more than 413,000 acres (645 square miles)—over half the size of Rhode Island. Fires also burned on both sides of California’s Sierra Nevada and in Washington state and other areas of the West.

The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 87 large fires have burned more than 1.7 million acres so far in the US, and a total of more than 3 million acres have been scorched since January. Large fires are also active in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, as well as across Canada.

A firefighter walks a path as the Glass Fire burns along Highway 29 in Calistoga, Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

The scale of the fires has cast smoke and in some cases ash across the entire continent. Air quality alerts were issued along the East Coast last week and will continue until at least Tuesday in cities such as Minnesota, where the air quality has been classified as either “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy.” Strong winds also blew smoke from California, Oregon, Montana and Washington as far east as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

The dangerous levels of smoke in the atmosphere, quantified as the air quality index, are particularly dangerous for millions of agricultural workers, who are forced to work in increasingly inhospitable conditions. Over half of all farmworkers are undocumented, and the median income for all farmworkers is just $7,500 per year, making them particularly vulnerable to the health and safety issues posed by the smoke. Moreover, child labor is legal in agriculture, with 12 year olds forced to work days comparable to their adult counterparts.

At a flower farm in Willamette Valley, Oregon, one worker who spends nine hours a day, six days a week planting, growing and packaging flowers for retail sales reported experiencing painful physical conditions. “The smoke doesn’t let you breathe well. My throat hurt. There was a lot of black dust I was breathing in, and dirt coming from my nose,” the worker, who asked to remain anonymous, reported to the Salem Statesman-Journal .

Her employer did not offer to pay workers if they chose to go home, so she continued working. Nothing has changed in her working conditions since last September, when smoke from the Beachie Creek and Lionshead fires started building up in the valley.

Thousands of agricultural workers in the area worked in smoky conditions during last year’s Labor Day fires. Farmworker advocates reported hearing from countless people describing headaches, nausea, loss of appetite and other smoke-related symptoms, as well as pressure to continue working in dangerous conditions.

“The acute effects cause irritability, nausea, shortness of breath,” said Sam Joseph, a pulmonary and critical care physician and professor at the Washington State University Elson S. Floyd School of Medicine to Northwest Public Broadcasting.

Breathing the air is dangerous on a day-to-day basis, and doctors say chronic exposure to smoke, year after year can lead to long-term health problems, especially for people with underlying heart and lung problems, children and senior citizens. Farmworkers are especially at risk.

Joseph said long-term exposure to wildfire smoke can lead to chronic cardiovascular diseases, like heart attacks (both fatal and nonfatal), irregular heartbeats and increased severity of asthma. These health problems are most troublesome for people who already experience heart and lung issues.

“In all smoke exposure, you’re exposed to lots of particles and chemicals,” Joseph said. “Some of the chemicals include carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and particulate matter, which we call soot.”

Earlier studies have shown pollution from wildfire smoke is worse than scientists previously thought. In a report from 2017, researchers found smoke plumes had three times as much pollution as predicted in earlier estimates.

Wildfire smoke may also greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has to date killed more than 630,000 people in the US and 4.2 million internationally, as noted by official figures. According to new research from the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Desert Research Institute, Washoe County Health District, and Renown Health in Reno, Nevada, coronavirus cases increased nearly 18 percent after wildfire smoke covered Reno between August and October in 2020.

The authors compared the smoke levels in northern Nevada, which experienced 43 days of elevated levels of smoke to those elsewhere in the United States such as San Francisco, which experienced 26 days of elevated levels of smoke. They found that the health impacts caused by smoke can make individuals more susceptible to COVID-19, a largely respiratory disease.

“We believe that our study greatly strengthens the evidence that wildfire smoke can enhance the spread of SARS-CoV-2,” said Gai Elhanan, one of the lead authors of the study.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visits the US as a lackey of the banks

Santiago Guillen

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s recent three-day trip to the United States has yet again made very clear the class interests defended by the Spanish government formed by Sánchez's Socialist Party (PSOE) and his pseudo-left ally, Podemos.

Significantly, Sánchez did not visit the capital, Washington D.C., nor did he publicly meet with Joe Biden or any other official representative of the US government. Instead, he met with investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other major corporate heads. Sánchez was traveling not as a representative of the Spanish people, as is usually presented in the capitalist media but as a lackey in the service of Spain’s banks and corporations.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks during a news conference. (AP Photo/Paul White)

The explicit aim of the trip was to attract investments from large vulture funds and other possible US investors. Using the 140 billion euros Spain expects to receive in European Union (EU) bailout funds in exchange for massive attacks on the working class—pension and labour reforms and austerity—the PSOE-Podemos governments hopes to obtain an additional €500 billion in private investment.

During his visit, Sánchez met with a long list of banks and fund managers: Ares Management Corporation, Bank of America, Blackstone Group, Bank of New York Mellon, Brookfield Asset Management, Roko Capital Management, J.P. Morgan, Catterton Partners, Lone Star Funds, Morgan Stanley, Providence Equity Partners, Soros Fund Management, Wellington Management Group and also the US Chamber of Commerce in Spain.

Sánchez offered all of them guarantees that he will continue his attacks on the working class. In Spain, Podemos promotes the lie that a new labour reform is part of “social measures” to improve working conditions, but in the United States, Sánchez made clear that he intends to escalate attacks on workers.

As El País explained, “The Prime Minister explained to them that the labor reform, agreed with Podemos and also negotiated with Brussels, will mean that Spain is moving towards the German model of labor relations, where there is social peace but also flexibility for employers to adapt to circumstances through the use of furlough schemes, without redundancies.”

By German model of labor relations, Sánchez really was talking about the notorious Hartz laws, which created conditions for the emergence of a huge low-wage sector. This in turn served as a lever to smash wages and working conditions, wiping out many thousands of well-paid industrial jobs. The result of the “model” hailed by Sánchez has been an explosion of social inequality. In Germany, there are 136 billionaires and 542,000 millionaires. On the other hand, 13 million people live in poverty, the highest number since German reunification in 1991.

Sánchez boasted to investors that pro-Podemos unions will suppress the class struggle, El País added: “Sánchez explained to them that Spain is a country with few strikes, with social peace and constant negotiation between employers and unions.” In other words, the trade unions play a fundamental role in suppressing the class struggle and working with big business to impose wage cuts, plant closures and pension reforms.”

He also told them not to worry about his government’s new housing law. This was of special interest to these hedge funds: Blackstone is Spain’s largest landlord, with more than 40,000 homes out of the nearly 240,000 managed by hedge funds in Spain, while Lone Star owns around 15,000. Pedro Sánchez made clear that he had no intention of limiting their profits by regulating rents.

This issue affects millions of workers and youth. According the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages (PAH), since 2008 there have been more than one million evictions in Spain.

In addition to the real estate sector, other groups such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Providence or Wellington have strong investments in various sectors such as mobile telephony, energy, banking, food and other sectors in Spain. But it is global investment fund BlackRock that has the largest slice of Spain’s economy, with €17 billion worth of shares in 18 of the 35 companies of the IBEX-35, Spain’s principal stock market index.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management corporation, with $9 trillion in assets under management as of June 2021. It holds stakes in almost all major multinational companies, including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Monsanto and Apple among others. To understand its size and influence, it is enough to say that if it were a country, it would be the world’s third largest economy by size. Its president and CEO, Larry Fink, is known as “the fixer,” for being the person who “fixes things in the financial market.” Sánchez reportedly held a private, one-on-one meeting with Fink.

Podemos has covered for Sánchez’s visit. Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz declared, “I suppose they have talked about taxes,” adding that this is “the only interesting thing about a visit to a large investment fund.” She concluded, “The president has done his job,” then cynically explained, “Investment funds are in the world to make money and governments, especially progressive ones, are there to improve people’s lives.”

Díaz’s cynicism has no end. She and her government have done nothing but work tirelessly, with the collaboration of the trade unions, to benefit these investment funds. The examples are many.

Spanish banks laid off 15,000 workers in the first six months of this year, all rubber-stamped by the trade unions and endorsed by Díaz herself. This has allowed the banks to announce last week €4 billion in profits, which will keep BlackRock and the IBEX-35 happy.

The monthly rise in electricity bills that is ruining millions of workers, green lighted by the PSOE-Podemos government, is benefiting large Spanish corporations like Iberdrola. The latest pension reform, signed by the government and trade unions with the employers, opens the way towards the privatization of pensions through company pension plans—in line with the aggressive promotion of these schemes by the hedge funds in Spain and throughout Europe.

These hedge funds have also profited from the herd immunity policy pursued by Madrid and the European Union, prioritising corporate profits over workers’ lives. While these firms made billions in profits, the cost in human lives of this policy has been over 100,000 deaths in Spain and over 1.1 million across Europe. Europe is now confronting a new wave under the virulent Delta variant, as capitalist governments across the continent continue to aggressively reopen the economy.

Reopening of German economy provokes deadly fourth wave of pandemic

Johannes Stern

The daily number of coronavirus infections is rising rapidly in Germany. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 3,142 new infections in one day, about 1,500 more than a week earlier. Even over the weekend, when there are usually far fewer reports, there were more than 2,000 new infections each day, about 500 more than in the previous week, according to the RKI.  

The seven-day incidence rate has more than tripled in the last three weeks—from 4.9 on 6 July to 17.5 on 1 August. The 7-day mean has risen from 579 to over 3,000 in the same period. 

Central train station in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Daily deaths and hospital admissions are also on the rise. The RKI reported 30 deaths on Friday and 21 on Saturday. According to Johns Hopkins University data, the seven-day mean for deaths was 34 on July 30, having doubled in the previous ten days. The seven-day hospitalisation rate—that is, how many Covid 19 hospitalisations there are per 100,000 residents in a week—rose to 0.41, up from 0.29 in mid-July. 

The rapid development of the pandemic is exacerbated by the spread of the highly contagious delta variant. According to the RKI, it is now responsible for 91 percent of cases in Germany. 

As a result of the ruthless policies of the federal and state governments in reopening the economy, it will only be a matter of a few weeks before the daily infection figures reach new records. In the UK, Spain and France, tens of thousands are already infected with the virus every day. On Friday, 29,622 new infections were reported in the UK, 24,753 in Spain and 24,309 in France. There was a seven-day incidence rate of 299.9 in the UK, 367.4 in Spain and 217.3 in France.

Earlier this week, Chancellery chief Helge Braun (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) even warned of 100,000 new daily infections in Germany in September. Incidence rates of over 800 are “unfortunately not unrealistic”, he told Bild am Sonntag. Currently, there is “an increase in numbers of 60 percent per week. If the delta variant spreads at this rate and we didn’t counter it with an enormously high vaccination rate or a behaviour change, we would have an incidence rate of 850 in just nine weeks. That would correspond to 100,000 new infections every day!”

Such rates of infection would signify the complete overloading of the health system and another wave of mass deaths. In a model at the beginning of July, the RKI calculated how intensive care utilization could develop in autumn and winter. According to this model, intensive care units would already be heavily utilised, with 6,000 COVID-19 patients at an incidence rate of 400.

Already in previous pandemic waves the health system was overstretched and tens of thousands of people died of the virus in Germany alone. Speaking to broadcaster ZDF, former President of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) Uwe Janssens warned against a repeat of this scenario. “We saw last year what the consequences are if you wait too long and do nothing. This seems to be repeating itself.”

The assessments of serious virologists and the dramatic development of infection rates in Europe and internationally refute the lies of politicians and the media that the danger from the virus has been averted. 

An internal RKI paper leaked to the press last week clearly states: “The more cases occur, the more cases of the severe progression of the illness (hospitalisations/ICU) and deaths are registered—with some delay—the higher the burden on the health system. If the incidence rate is very high, the number of these adverse effects also increases, as does the number of severe cases requiring hospital or ICU treatment.”

The paper also notes that “more than 40 million people in our population [...] currently do NOT have full vaccination protection,” warning that “high vaccination rates alone are not sufficient to keep the fourth wave flat.” Therefore, “additional basic protection measures are necessary” to “lower the fourth wave.”

Despite warnings from its own biomedical lead research body, the federal and state governments are sticking to their aggressive reopening policies, ruling out necessary lockdown measures. 

“As long as our vaccines against the delta variant work so well, a classic lockdown is no longer necessary,” Braun claimed. Earlier, Economics Minister Peter Altmeier had told Bild am Sonntag: “We must and will prevent a new lockdown.”

This is the position of all the capitalist parties who, throughout the pandemic, have put the profits of big business and the interests of German imperialism above the lives of the population. In essence, they follow the line of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has long called for the lifting of all coronavirus protection measures and a return to “normality.”

At state level, the Left Party and the Greens are now aggressively pushing for the opening of schools. On 6 August, Berlin, which is governed by a coalition of the Social Democrats, Left Party and Green Party, will become the third federal state, after Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Hamburg, to return to full in-person teaching after the summer holidays. All other federal states are then to follow by the beginning of September, including Thuringia, led by the Left Party, and Green-governed Baden-Württemberg. 

The same plans exist for the universities. On Thursday, the Berlin Senate (state executive) announced the resumption of face-to-face teaching in the upcoming 2021-2022 winter semester. “In the winter semester, around 200,000 students are expected again at the state, confessional and private universities in Berlin,” declared a joint statement by the Senate Department for Science and Research and the state conference of rectors and presidents of Berlin’s universities. 

The return to schools and universities, which the trade unions also support, will massively accelerate the spread of the virus throughout the population. The health and lives of the approximately 14 million pupils and students in Germany are also at stake. The vast majority of young people are unprotected. Only just under 40 percent of all 18-59-year-olds in Germany are fully vaccinated. Among those under 18, the vaccination rate is as low as 1.5 percent.

Current experience leaves no doubt that Covid-19 is also a deadly threat to young people.  

The situation in Indonesia is particularly dramatic. According to the Indonesian Society of Paediatrics, there are currently more than 360,000 confirmed cases in children, which corresponds to one in eight infections. In recent weeks, over 700 children have died from COVID-19, including over 150 in the week of 12 July alone. What is particularly shocking is that half of them were less than five years old.

In Brazil, COVID-19 is the leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 19. In the first half of 2021 alone, at least 1,581 young people died from the virus. 

And even in developed countries, where the delta variant is spreading rapidly, the number of hospitalisations and deaths among children is rising. In the UK, more than 40 children are now hospitalised with COVID-19 every day. And the number of infected children and adolescents is also increasing in Germany. According to the RKI’s weekly report, there is currently “an increase in incidence rates especially in the age groups 10-34 years.”

The mass death and suffering, previously known only in times of war, must be stopped. More than 91,600 people have already died from Covid-19 in Germany alone. Across Europe, there have been over 1.1 million coronavirus deaths, and worldwide, more than 4.2 million have officially succumbed to the virus. Recent studies suggest that the actual death toll is much higher.

US officials reject further lockdowns despite 100,000 daily new infections

Bryan Dyne

The Biden administration’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, rejected “lockdowns” as a measure to contain the virus on Sunday, the same day reported cases in the US spiked above 100,000 for the first time since February, and as cases globally neared 200 million.

In other words, 1 in every 39 people on the planet have contracted the disease, with 1 in 10 having gotten COVID-19 in the United States. Moreover, the massive surge in cases has new record highs in hospitalizations in places such as Austin, Texas, where there are now only seven open ICU beds in a metropolitan region of 2.3 million. In Florida, a record 10,207 people are hospitalized with confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

A member of the medical staff measures the temperature of a traveller at a autobahn park place near Gries am Brenner, Austrian province of Tyrol, at border crossing with Italy on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson )

There is every possibility that Chicago will follow after its Democratic Party-run city government allowed the super spreader Lollapalooza music festival, with its 400,000 attendees, to go forward. In other words, across the US, local, state and federal governments are doing the exact opposite of what is needed to contain the deadly contagion, and promoting policies and events which all but guarantee the continued spread and evolution to more deadlier forms of the ongoing pandemic.

And while deaths, which stand at 320 a day, have not risen as sharply in the United States as cases have, the rise in hospitalizations raises the danger that patients again begin dying from an inability to receive adequate treatment, dangers which were made clear in the first weeks and months of the pandemic in 2020.

Worldwide, deaths caused by the pandemic stand at more than 4.2 million, a figure which currently climbs at more than 9,000 a day. These figures, moreover, are known underestimations. In May, the Economist noted that the actual number of lives lost to the deadly contagion, using excess death counts, is likely to be two to four times higher than official figures, suggesting a real global tally of between 8–16 million dead.

Such staggering death counts are all the more horrific under conditions where the pandemic is accelerating. In a press conference Friday, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned, “On average, in five of WHO’s six regions, infections have increased by 80 percent or nearly doubled over the past four weeks. In Africa, deaths have increased by 80 percent over the same period. Much of this increase is being driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant, which has now been detected in at least 132 countries.”

In absolute numbers, the most recent low point of daily cases was on June 21, when there was an average of 360,000 cases a day. Since then, as the Delta variant has spread around the world, daily case counts have climbed to more than 581,000. And while daily deaths have not had as dramatic an increase, it is worth understanding the worldwide, deaths caused by the pandemic have not been below 7,600 a day since last November.

Not incidentally, it was last November that cases had reached a “mere” 50 million and officially counted deaths had reached 1.2 million, 10 months after the pandemic began. Now, only nine months later, cases and deaths have increased four-fold.

Unlike last November, however, when even limited lockdowns and other social distancing measures were considered by the world’s capitalist governments, such critical and life-saving policies are being discarded out of hand. Similar to the US, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended the country’s lockdown in July, and the government of Narendra Modi in India refused to implement a national lockdown even as the Delta variant emerged and surged, while at the same time attacking state and local officials for implementing just modest measures.

That no lockdowns are being planned is criminally irresponsible at best. Fauci himself noted that, “things are going to get worse.” Indeed they are. The spread of the Delta variant in the US, which has become the dominant variant of the virus in every region of the world except South America, where the Gamma variant remains most prolific, has caused case counts in the US to rise by more than six-fold in less than two months. Some 13,000 people have died from the virus over that same period. The country as a whole has suffered 35.7 million cases and just under 630,000 deaths.

The measures that have been put forward to contain the spread of the disease are inadequate at best. The current drive by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to note in which counties the spread of the pandemic is “substantial” and to recommend masking indoors. At the same time, leaked internal documents make clear the agency is well aware of the dangers of the Delta variant and the need for more stringent measures to contain the virus, and has been blocked by the Biden administration.

At the same time, figures such as Fauci have turned toward blaming individuals for not getting vaccinated as the underlying cause for the continued spread of the disease, stating, “We have 100 million people in this country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not getting vaccinated.”

Nowhere does Fauci mention the fact that hundreds of millions of people in the US and billions around the world wouldn’t have had to get vaccinated if governments around the world had responded in a rational and scientific manner to the coronavirus pandemic when it first emerged. While it is true that many are reluctant about getting the vaccine, the fault for the pandemic itself lies at the feet of capitalist governments in the US, Europe, Australia and elsewhere that placed corporate profits above human lives.

It is also worth noting that one of the chief purveyors of misinformation about the pandemic—that it is safe to have school and work amid the pandemic, that mask mandates can be dropped and that testing, contact tracing and lockdowns are unnecessary to contain the pandemic—has been the government which Fauci works for. These anti-scientific conceptions have been pushed for months by both Biden and his predecessor Trump and have played a significant role in the anti-scientific attitude of millions toward vaccines.

Nor does anyone in the US media or political establishment raise the necessity of vaccinating the planet to actually eradicate the pandemic; vaccines are treated as a solely national question. The evolution of the Delta variant, however, makes clear that stopping the pandemic in just one country is impossible when the coronavirus is allowed to spread essentially uncontrolled elsewhere. Variants inevitably emerge that are “fitter” and “faster,” in the words of WHO’s Dr. Mike Ryan, and that may totally escape immunity granted by vaccination.

The dangers of unevenly vaccinating the world are spelled out in the spread of cases both in the US, where cases are spiking most sharply among the unvaccinated, and around the world, most of which still does not have easy access to vaccines. In India, where excess death estimates place the number of fatalities at about four million, more than 40,000 people come down with COVID-19 each day, citing official figures, and the full vaccination rate is just 7.4 percent. In Brazil, where more than 550,000 have died, less than 1 in 5 is fully vaccinated.

Other countries are in equally or worse dire straights. In Iran, where the Delta variant has caused daily cases to more than triple and daily deaths to more than double in the past six weeks, the fully vaccinated rate is less the 3 percent. In Thailand, which had been relatively untouched by the pandemic until the Delta variant hit it in April, only about 5 percent of its population are vaccinated amid daily case counts that were less than 100 at the beginning of April and have skyrocketed to more than 16,000 now.

Even countries with higher vaccination rates such as Mexico and Turkey, 20 percent and 33 percent full vaccination rates, respectively, have had sharp increases in their case counts as a result of the Delta variant. Such countries are both examples of the virulence of this new variant, the dangers it and more evolved mutations pose. They and virtually every other country also highlight the need for a globally coordinated and scientifically planned response to end the pandemic.

New Zealand nurses reject third union-backed pay deal

John Braddock & Tom Peters

About 30,000 nurses and health care assistants voted last week to reject the latest pay offer from the 20 District Health Boards (DHBs), which was backed by the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO).

The rejection of the sellout deal by what the NZNO described as a “clear majority,” is a setback for both the union and the Labour-led government, which is attempting to impose a three-year pay freeze across the public sector. The NZNO confirmed that two strikes previously approved by members, on August 19 and September 9-10, will go ahead “unless an acceptable offer is made.”

Nurses held a nationwide strike on June 9 after rejecting two previous offers that would have increased wages by just 1.38 percent, less than half the 3.3 percent inflation rate. The NZNO provoked widespread anger when it cancelled a strike scheduled for July 29 before presenting the revised agreement for a vote.

New Zealand nurses on strike in 2018 (WSWS Media)

The latest offer did not address low wages or the increasingly desperate staffing crisis in public hospitals caused by decades of underfunding. The NZNO initially claimed it was pushing for a pay increase of 17 percent over two years but the proposed salary increase is just $1,800 and a back-payment of $1,200.

The union attempted to disguise the rotten deal by including money from an entirely separate “pay equity” deal, still under negotiation, which will purportedly bring nurses’ salaries to match similar male-dominated professions.

By conflating the “pay equity adjustment” with the salary offer, the NZNO claimed that base rates will go up by $5,800 (7.5 percent for a nurse at the top of the pay scale). A lump sum payment of $6,000, funded through the pay equity settlement, is an “advance” to be recouped when the deal is finalised.

Nurses have rejected the entire charade. But that did not prevent NZNO advocate David Wait falsely claiming, after the vote, that the DHBs had made “promising moves” on pay.

According to Wait, the nurses primarily rejected the deal because it was not clear how DHBs will be held “accountable” if they do not provide safe staffing. “Nurses don’t want more vague promises that the problem will be fixed in the future,” he declared.

In fact, the contract provisions governing hospital staffing allocations were written with the collaboration of the NZNO. Pledges of “transparency” and “accountability,” which do not commit the government to anything, were part of the sellout deal pushed through by the NZNO in 2018, despite widespread opposition from nurses.

The intransigence of nurses and healthcare assistants has rattled the Labour-Green Party government. Health Minister Andrew Little took the unusual step of holding a press conference to denounce the outcome. Attempting to browbeat the nurses, Little declared that the forthcoming strikes will be “hugely disruptive to public health services, and to the people who need them.”

Little made the revealing comment that “the proposal was one [the union] put to the government. The Nurses Organisation members have rejected their own union’s proposal.” In a Radio NZ interview, Wait tried to deny this, claiming that “we don’t recommend deals to our members, our members make the decisions all by themselves.”

However, the NZNO took the offer to its members for a vote, cancelled a planned strike without asking members, and claimed in a press statement on July 16 that “significant progress has been made in negotiations with the district health boards.”

The union told members at the start of negotiations that it was seeking a pay increase of 17 percent over two years. The reality is the union leadership worked with the government to come up with a proposal to effectively freeze wages and staffing levels, setting a benchmark for attacks across the public sector.

The NZNO is in fact following the same playbook it employed in the 2018 sell-out, when it presented multiple inadequate deals designed to wear workers down, isolate them and convince them that no better deal was possible.

Little was forced to admit under questioning that only half the 20 DHBs have met the requirements to manage safe staffing levels agreed to in 2018. But he still insisted that there are “already enforceable” measures in place with “accountability mechanisms.” In fact, hospitals are in crisis, frequently operating at up to 120 percent capacity, with emergency departments regularly overwhelmed.

There is immense anger among nurses towards the government, as shown during the June 9 strike when Little was booed off the stage outside parliament. He has now launched a social media campaign to portray nurses as greedy and unreasonable, prompting hundreds of angry comments.

Phil wrote on Little’s Facebook page: “Andrew, stop acting like Donald Trump. Firstly, the nurses are worth much more than this, and secondly, safe staffing levels is the major impasse… the government doesn’t hold the moral high ground in this discussion.”

Kaewyn commented that she previously supported the Minister, but “what you have said today and how you have twisted and manipulated the facts is just disgusting. You are trying to turn public opinions against nurses with your nasty rhetoric. I work within the health system and I know the facts of how unsafe it actually is… it’s terrifying.”

Deborah wrote: “We should not have to fight this hard for safe working conditions. Safe staffing has been talked about for the entire span of my nursing career, and it’s worse now than it ever was. Stop promising and start doing!”

Little, a former leader of the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), has been tasked with leading Labour’s assault on a key section of the working class. He is also the minister in charge of re-sealing the Pike River mine in order to bury critical evidence of the causes of the explosion that killed 29 miners in 2010. As head of the EPMU at the time, Little played a key role in covering up the culpability of the company.

The Labour Party-led government, like others around the world, is now imposing austerity measures to pay for its pro-business response to the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ardern government has handed over tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for businesses, while the Reserve Bank printed billions more to purchase bonds from the commercial banks.

The trade unions are determined to suppress the growing confrontation and prevent nurses from linking up with other sections of the working class who are seeking to fight back against the endless attacks on living standards.

Other sections of the health workforce, including doctors, midwives and technicians, are now entering into fresh struggles. Along with nurses, they are part of an international upsurge of the working class triggered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In every country, workers confront not only managements and governments, but the trade unions, which act as the industrial police force.