Obama budget cuts target high school counselors

Nancy Hanover

A cynical event honoring the School Counselor of the Year was held at the White House at the end of January. The photo-op was purportedly part of “600 new actions to help more students prepare for and graduate from college.”

The “600 actions” are largely pledges by dozens of colleges to increase the number of graduates, with various college-funded programs to utilize analytics, provide “transparency in outcomes” and “encourage accountability.” No suggestion was made of the need to provide funding for school counselors.

Just the opposite. In the 2015 education budget request, the president has again requested the termination of the only real federal support for districts to provide counseling, the Elementary and Secondary Education Counseling (ESEC) grant program. Obama has called for all funding for the program to be folded into a general “wellness” scheme.

Among the largely cosmetic pledges in his public relations package, however, was support for an alternative to school counselors—the College Advisor Corps, a nonprofit that is creating a subclass of untrained college “mentors.” The initiative is lifted from the playbook of an increasingly discredited Teach for America.

When schools are hit with budget crises—as have been unremitting during the entire Obama administration—school counselors and other non-classroom personnel are the first on the chopping block. Spending on K-12 schools has been cut in 44 out of 50 US states between 2007 and 2012. Additionally, Title I—the federal program for the most impoverished schools—declined under the Obama administration by 10 percent last year, and funding for students with disabilities fell another 11 percent.

These cuts have translated into the loss of some 300,000 school district jobs nationally since 2008 and led to a catastrophic shortage of counselors and psychologists.

Presently there is one college counselor for every 471 students in the United States. California has only one counselor for every 1,016 students. In 2008, the ratio nationally was 1-to-457. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) considers 1-to-250 a desirable ratio. Today students can expect to meet with a school counselor, on average, for 20 minutes in an entire school year. One in five high schools has no counselors on staff at all.

The ASCA says the most devastating impact is among the youngest learners. “At the elementary level, there are lots of classroom lessons and activities that go on to help students develop the academic skills and behaviors that they need in order to be successful throughout their entire academic careers,” said ASCA assistant director Eric Sparks. He added, “With fewer counselors to support them, those kids are not getting the school counseling programming, and they’re not getting the individual services that they need.”

Brian Martin, a former counselor from Hamilton, Ohio, said, “The student-to-counselor ratio is higher than it has ever been ... (as) schools are almost being asked to serve as social service agencies.”

Belle Allen, a guidance counselor since 1996, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that years ago “we did a lot of scheduling, a lot about colleges, but now there are a lot of mental health issues that students are dealing with.” More than 50 percent of US schoolchildren are living in poverty, and rising social tensions are inevitably reflected in the school environment.

At the same time, high school students are left without assistance despite the fact that the college application process (not to mention the struggle for financial aid) becomes more complicated every year. A series of standardized tests, fees and acquiring numerous written recommendations are the baseline demands for even one college application. Some students submit as many as a dozen of these applications, with countless additional forms for winning some type of financial aid or scholarship.

The College Advising Corps (CAC) began in 2004 at the University of Virginia. After being feted by the Obama administration and turned into a nonprofit last year, it is growing rapidly.

Funded by foundations, university partners and the federal government via AmeriCorps, CAC recruits newly-minted college graduates, preferably minorities, and places them in schools where the majority of students are low-income.

At the recent “College Opportunity Day of Action,” Michelle Obama enthused, “School districts are partnering with nonprofits and colleges to provide training for counselors once they’re in our schools [emphasis added].” She continued, “Nonprofits are stepping up to improve student-and-counselor ratios and bringing recent graduates into schools to serve as role models and mentors.”

Similar to Teach For America, the new college graduates receive a paltry six weeks of training and are then placed in the most needy schools. In an article largely favorable to CAC, Education Week describes the functions of these “near-peer” advisers. “At a corps training session last fall, advisers were encouraged to adapt games, such as Monopoly and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with questions related to the college search.

“‘To give them 40 minutes of fun, it makes them happy and creates a dialogue for them to come to us when the time is right,’ said Molly Thompson, 23, an adviser at two central Pennsylvania high schools.”

A far cry from “improving the student-and-counselor ratio,” this operation will be used to justify the further elimination of counseling services for students in poor school districts.

The CAC has now branched into 14 states with 470 advisers in 483 high schools. CAC aims to be in 1,000 schools by 2020, according to Education Week. Presently, 30 percent of the corps members are funded by AmeriCorps and earn between $24,000 and $30,000 a year. After one year, they are entitled to a $5,600 education credit that can be used to pay down student loans. The median salary of a high school counselor in 2012 was $53,600.

As an indication of the road ahead and the business possibilities inherent in the program, Bloomberg Philanthropies has recently begun financing an e-advising initiative. The e-advising works in conjunction with CAC, but provides even fewer services—merely a remote phone contact—for students seeking help.

Once more, the Obama administration brings together business interests, foundations and nonprofits to undermine essential services, attack the rights associated with public education, eliminate trained professionals and substitute well-meaning but untrained young people who are themselves being denied the right to a secure and decent job.

Record cold weather in the US leads to spate of deadly house fires

Evan Blake

Since December 21, the first day of winter, there have been 576 fatalities attributable to residential fires in the United States, according to the United States Fire Administration’s website, which compiles media reports on US house fires. Of this total, 84 were children age 14 or younger, and 175 were senior citizens age 65 or older.

Texas, with 43 home fire fatalities, Ohio with 42, and Michigan with 35, have seen the highest number of deaths from residential fires.

In recent days, much of the eastern US has experienced records low temperatures in numerous cities, increasing the danger of house fires and other cold-related deaths. For working-class families, traditional home heating costs during this period of extreme cold have soared, forcing many to partially heat their homes with unsafe space heaters, or forgo heating altogether.

Cold weather has extended deep into the southern US. In Orange Park, Florida, a schoolteacher in her 60s was killed on Friday morning, when her house was engulfed in flames that began from a space heater. The house did not have smoke detectors.

A house fire in Knoxville, Tennessee early Thursday morning killed three people. James Overton, 73, Edith Overton, 63, and their disabled son Derek Overton, 47, were all killed by the fire, the cause of which has not been released. The fire has been designated as “weather-related,” which means that the deceased were not the victims of foul play and that the fire was accidental, not intentional.

On February 11, a mother and her three children died in a trailer house fire at the Gary Malone Trailer Park in South Point, Ohio. Ashley Mays, 25, her son, Elijah Parker, 5, and her twin 11-month-old sons Anthony and Preston Walker passed away in the fire. The family lived with Ashley’s girlfriend, Dorothy Walker, 32, and her 9-year-old son Hunter, who were not home when the fire broke out.

Mays’ next-door neighbor, Ryan Luther, told the Ironton Tribune, “When I moved here, I was homeless. Ashley was very helpful. You could ask her for anything and she would do anything for anybody. It’s devastating when something like this happens.”

Investigators have found that the fire began in the center of the trailer, but have yet to determine a cause. According to the State Fire Marshal’s Office in Ohio, there were no smoke alarms found inside the trailer.

Neighbor Rebecca Davis criticized the trailer park landlord’s maintenance practices, telling local news station WOWK-TV, “It is possible that any of [the trailers] could go with the way he has them rigged up.”

Ohio’s Revised Code states that there is no “state-level” code requiring a single family’s home to have detectors, nor are landlords legally obligated to install them. So far this winter, there have been 24 house fire fatalities in Tennessee alone.

On Thursday, February 12, a house fire in Mosinee, Wisconsin, killed siblings Neatha Carwile, 68, and Hershel “Fred” Bauman, 75. Autopsy reports indicate that both died from smoke inhalation. The smoke detectors in their apartment were not working at the time of the fire.

The two victims were found in the upstairs apartment of a duplex. It is unclear why the two were unable to escape, but police investigators have said that Bauman had physical limitations that could have made escaping difficult. His sister was caring for him at the time of their deaths.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but foul play is not suspected and authorities believe the fire began in the couple’s kitchen. Two adults and their grandchild, who live in the lower duplex, were able to get out safely.

Japan rewrites foreign aid rules to include military assistance

Ben McGrath

The Japanese government announced last week that it would provide aid for the first time to foreign militaries through its Official Development Assistance (ODA) program. The move is part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s aggressive diplomatic efforts to build Japanese influence and ties, particularly in Asia, on all levels, including military.

To implement such measures, the cabinet re-wrote Japan’s foreign aid policy for the first time in more than a decade. “Based on the new framework, we will promote more strategic development assistance and further contribute to the peace, stability and prosperity of the international community,” said Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida.

Far from contributing to international “peace” and “instability,” the change to foreign aid policy is aimed at forging new military partnerships as part of Abe’s so-called “pro-active pacifism.” The previous foreign aid policy explicitly banned the use of the ODA budget to assist foreign militaries.

Japan has in the past provided aid to foreign militaries but never through its official aid program. The military assistance will be taken out of what is a shrinking foreign aid budget. The total aid budget was set as 542 billion yen ($4.5 billion) for the upcoming fiscal year—the 16th consecutive annual cutback. The figure is less than half of the peak level of 1.2 trillion yen in 1997.

Kishida justified the cabinet’s decision by saying, “Given that militaries now play an important role in non-military activities such as post-conflict rebuilding and reconstruction, as well as disaster relief, we’ve clarified our policy of non-military cooperation.”

The government’s claims that such assistance will only be used for non-military purposes are completely fraudulent. Firstly, the line between military and non-military equipment and aid is an elastic one. Secondly, any assistance to foreign militaries will increase their overall resources.

Commentators have already questioned vague wording of the re-written ODA charter which declares, “Where military forces or personnel are involved in development assistance for civil or nonmilitary purposes such as disaster relief, each case is studied specifically with a focus on practical significance.”

Eiichi Sadamatsu, the director general of Japan’s Center for International Cooperation, remarked, “The sentence is quite vague. What does ‘practical significance’ point to? What are the criteria for studying each case?”

The Abe government is already using Japan’s military, or Self-Defense Forces (SDF), as an instrument of foreign policy, including through interventions in natural disasters. In 2013, it dispatched 1,180 SDF personnel to the Philippines following the devastating typhoon Haiyan—one of the largest military deployments in a relief mission.

Its real purpose was to enhance Japanese standing in the Philippines and to undermine Chinese influence. A government source told the Asahi Shimbunat the time, “That response is aimed at holding China in check as well.”

In announcing the new ODA charter, Abe took a thinly veiled swipe at Chian, declaring that this new “non-combat” aid would also assist in protecting the “rule of law.” The Abe government has repeatedly accused Beijing of failing to abide by international law in its maritime disputes with Japan and other neighboring countries.

In reality, Japan, backed by the United States, has taken an aggressive stance in its dispute with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Tensions with China sharply escalated in September 2012 after the Japanese government unilaterally changed the status quo by “nationalizing” the rocky outcrops.

Japan recently announced the possibility of Japanese air and naval patrols in the South China Sea where China is engaged in territorial disputes with South East Asian neighbors, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam. Last year, a standoff between China and Vietnam took place after a Chinese state-owned company placed an oilrig in waters claimed by both countries. During the tense month-long standoff, Chinese and Vietnamese vessels rammed each other threatening to trigger a wider conflict.

Japan has already agreed to provide patrol boats to the Philippines, Vietnam and Sri Lanka in a move that will only compound tensions with China. Ten vessels are to be sent to the Philippines later this year and six will be delivered to Vietnam. Tokyo has also raised the possibility of providing patrol boats to Indonesia.

Abe has made Japan’s relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) a key part of his foreign policy. Since coming to office in December 2012, he has visited all ten ASEAN countries, the first Japanese prime minister to do so.

The Japanese government is pursuing this foreign policy agenda as part of the US “pivot to Asia”—a comprehensive diplomatic offensive and military build-up by the US and its allies directed against China. Within this context, Abe is remilitarizing Japan and strengthening its influence in the region in order to further its economic and strategic interests.

Last July, Abe announced a controversial “reinterpretation” of Japan’s constitution that formally bars the country from waging war. The decision to allow so-called “collective self-defense” opens the door for Japan to take part in wars of aggression so long as it is in alliance with the US or other nations.

This month, Abe has placed the revision of the constitution as a whole on the government agenda—most likely in the aftermath of upper house elections in mid-2016. He is exploiting the recent murders of two Japanese citizens by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to try to whip up support for deeply unpopular constitutional amendments, including the lifting of all restraints on the use of the military in wars.

The recent decision to allow ODA assistance to be provided to foreign militaries is one aspect of this militarist agenda.

Argentina charges US interference in crisis over prosecutor’s death

Rafael Azul

The political crisis precipitated by the mysterious January 18 death of Alberto Nisman has continued to deepen after a mass march called by fellow prosecutors and backed by the government’s right-wing opponents drew large crowds into the streets of Buenos Aires Wednesday to mark one month since the Argentine federal prosecutor was found with a fatal bullet wound to his head.

Supporters of the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner denounced the march as a maneuver of the political right and forces within the state apparatus aimed at bringing about a “soft coup,” while charging that foreign governments—particularly Washington—have attempted to manipulate the case to pursue their own geostrategic interests.

A week before his death, Nisman had announced that he would accuse Fernandez de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and other officials as well as employees of intelligence services of making an illegal and secret agreement with the government of Iran to protect Iranian “spies” who were allegedly involved in the 1994 suicide car bombing at the Argentina Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building that killed 85 people. Nisman had produced a 290-page report about the case, and among papers found in his apartment were requests for criminal warrants against both Fernandez de Kirchner and Timerman.

While there is no evidence that Nisman was murdered—forensic reports on the bullet’s path are consistent with an act of suicide—there is widespread skepticism in Argentine society that Nisman took his own life. This is not only a matter of the timing of his death, but also long experience with political and judicial corruption and impunity for state criminals, going back to those who carried out the mass killings, disappearances and torture under the former military dictatorship.

While undoubtedly such sentiments found expression in the February 18 demonstration, dubbed a “march of silence,” those who played the key role in organizing it are themselves fully complicit in this corruption and impunity, including the federal attorneys, veterans themselves of cover-ups and frame-ups of workers and the left.

On the eve of Wednesday’s march, a White House spokesman stated that the Obama administration is “concerned” about the issues arising from Nisman’s death and is continuing to “monitor closely” the events in Argentina.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio and other congressional Republicans have called for an international investigation into Nisman’s death and for sanctions against Argentina unless it severs ties with Iran. Nisman had ties to Rubio, who invited him to testify before a Senate panel, before the visit was barred by the Argentine government.

In a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Timerman declared that Argentina would not tolerate being turned into a “theater for operations of politics, intelligence or, even worse, more serious actions, because of conflicts that are completely unconnected with its history.”

This rhetoric, however, was belied by Timerman’s proposal in the same letter that the US raise the issue of the 1994 bombing in its talks with Iran on the latter’s nuclear program, effectively subordinating Argentina to US imperialist maneuvers with Iran.

Nisman was appointed in 2004 by President Nestor Kirchner (the current president’s late husband) to head up the investigation of the 1994 bombing and had produced documents that charged the president and other government officials with cover-up and a secret agreement with Iran to impede the investigation and protect the alleged perpetrators.

Nisman collaborated in the investigation with SIDE (now renamed SI), a notorious and powerful intelligence and secret police agency that played a role in the savage repression of the working class and left-wing youth in Argentina, as well as in the infamous “Plan Condor,” collaborating with the CIA in chasing down exiled political opponents of the military fascist dictatorships in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Nisman worked with SIDE chief Jaime Antonio Stiuso, who had been with the agency since 1972.

Fernandez de Kirchner has accused Stiuso of directing and manipulating Nisman (and perhaps murdering him) for his own political purposes. Stiuso is now in hiding. According to the Madrid daily El País, Nisman came forward with his indictment—widely described as a political document—right after Stiuso was fired from SIDE last December and amid fears that a prosecutor aligned with the government would replace him.

That SIDE and elements like Stiuso continued to wield power within the state more than three decades after the end of the military dictatorship is a damning indictment of all the civilian governments that followed, including that of Fernandez de Kirchner. All of them bowed to the repressive apparatus, while also relying upon it to defend the state and both foreign and Argentine capital against the working class.

The intimate involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the case is undeniable. These included the Israeli Mossad, as well as the US CIA and FBI. Nisman and SIDE worked in close contact with these agencies—in SIDE’s case before and after the AMIA bombing.

While the Lebanese Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, the group had largely been dissolved by this point. Both it and the AMIA attack suspiciously coincided with negotiations between Argentina and Iran on a resumption of nuclear cooperation (Argentina had suspended shipments of nuclear material a few months before the embassy bombing). There are suspicions that the bombings were carried out with the aim of disrupting Argentine-Iranian relations.

During the course of the AMIA bombing investigation it came to light that SIDE had received warnings from the Brazilian intelligence service, as well as Argentine consulates in Milan and Beirut, that an attack on AMIA was in the works and allowed it to happen. In the aftermath of these bombings, however, SIDE (discredited by its role under the dictatorship, and having suffered substantial cuts in its personnel and budget) was reconfigured as an “anti-terrorist” agency, assuming greater powers with restored funds.

There exists ample evidence of the continuing presence of anti-Semitic elements in the Argentine armed forces and police, and in SIDE itself. Those elements, which were given free reign under military rule, now sense a change in the political climate. The Nisman crisis has brought out of the woodwork these openly fascistic elements (in recent days, leaflets were brazenly distributed in Jewish neighborhoods in Buenos Aires that read “the only good Jew is a dead Jew; Nisman = good Jew,” while Nazi symbols were painted on the walls of buildings in the area). Argentina has the sixth largest Jewish population in the world.

Right-wing opposition parties, meanwhile, are blocking legislation to abolish SIDE and create a new intelligence agency.

There is a parallel between SIDE and the American CIA. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the US were carried out by persons known to US intelligence, just as SIDE had known about the impending AMIA bombing. The political establishment is, in both cases, dominated by the intelligence apparatus and determined to prevent any real accounting for these events.

US and UK intelligence agencies hacked cell phone encryption keys

Nick Barrickman

Beginning in 2010, a previously undisclosed unit of the British GCHQ acting with support from the NSA, the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), penetrated the internal networks of cell phone SIM card manufacturing companies in order to steal encryption keys before the phones came to market, according to documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and published this week on the Intercept .

The latest revelations of hacking to spy on cell phone communications underscore the criminality of the operations undertaken by the NSA and GCHQ and their companion agencies in imperialist countries around the world.

The documents show that MHET agents “cyberstalked” employers at SIM card manufacturers, monitoring their social media accounts, emails and other personal information with technology provided by the NSA in order to gain means to infiltrate their employers’ networks. “These people were specifically hunted and targeted by intelligence agencies, not because they did anything wrong, but because they could be used as a means to an end,” said the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian to the Intercept .

Subscriber identity modules, or SIM cards, store identification information for cell phone users, including encryption keys that protect vital personal information that is transferred from a phone to a wireless carrier. By obtaining the encryption keys of mobile devices, intelligence agencies are able to bypass a phone’s security to monitor all communication on a given device, including voice communication, text messages and emails.

Over a three month period, “millions of keys were harvested” and shared with the NSA, which has the capability to process millions of keys per second, according to the Intercept. Gemalto, the world’s largest producer of SIM card technology, had hundreds of thousands of encryption keys stolen as part of the GCHQ’s DAPINO GAMMA program in early 2010, while MHET sought to develop similar means to infiltrate other manufacturing firms. The Interceptnotes that the team’s largest “score” of keys was in its hacking of the Chinese technology firm Huawei, a company that the US government has accused of collaborating with Chinese intelligence.

The documents expose as lies claims made by President Obama in early 2014 that “… people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures.”

“Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” Matthew Green, a cryptology expert at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told the Intercep t. Green stated that the latest revelations were “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”

The Intercept notes that, due to the document only revealing the activities of MHET in its incipient period, “It is impossible to know how many keys have been stolen by the NSA and GCHQ to date,” adding that, “even using conservative math, the numbers are likely staggering.” Considering the fact that the NSA/GCHQ obtained each user’s encryption key illegally, allowing them to circumvent requirements to obtain warrants and other formalities, there is no official record of who the government is monitoring.

The documents show that, in addition to operating in collusion with private firms to monitor the population, the intelligence agencies also freely break the law in order to achieve the same ends.

The monitoring of the world’s population illegally by the US and Britain goes far beyond the practices engaged in by those countries, such as China and Russia, that western imperialism seeks to target for military intervention and often accuses of cyber espionage.

The latest documents come as representatives of the US intelligence community have called for the ending of encryption software altogether, claiming that it hampers the job of law enforcement. “Encryption isn’t just a technical feature; it’s a marketing pitch. … And my question is, at what cost,” said FBI director James Comey to an audience late last year at the liberal Brookings Institution.

“Perhaps it’s time to suggest that the post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far in one direction—in a direction of fear and mistrust,” Comey said in reference to the public’s reaction to the whistleblower’s revealing of mass government spying.

US preparing major ground offensive against Iraqi city of Mosul

Thomas Gaist

The US military will direct a major military offensive against the Iraqi city of Mosul beginning as early as April, an official with the Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM) told reporters in a conference call Thursday.

The plan calls for the US military forces in Iraq to prepare air, artillery and ground attacks against the densely populated city of 1.4 million, where an estimated 2,000 fighters affiliated with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are reported to be entrenched.

The main body of the US-overseen Iraqi expeditionary force will be comprised of five brigades of Iraqi recruits, who will receive training at US-run camps before the operation begins, the CENTCOM official said.

US military advisors and special operations detachments will accompany the Iraqi troops, the official said.

The offensive will mark a bloody new phase of Operation Inherent Resolve, which has organized nearly 2,500 US and coalition strikes against Iraq and Syria and deployed some 2,600 US ground troops to Iraq since it began in August 2014.

Mosul fell to ISIS in June of last year, when a force of approximately 1,500 Islamist fighters routed Iraqi government forces with 15 times as many troops. Many residents, who had faced sectarian-based repression by the US-backed regime in Baghdad, welcomed the expulsion of its forces from the city. In a debacle for US policy in the region, ISIS extended its grip over at least a third of the country as US-trained and equipped security forces melted away.

Prior to the invasion by ISIS, Mosul, a city of more than a million people, had already been devastated by the US war and occupation that began in 2003. Approximately half of the city’s population, more than 500,000 people, fled as ISIS consolidated its control over northern Iraq last summer.

Washington’s plan to retake the city with some 25,000 Iraqi government troops directed and led by US “advisors” and backed by American fire-power threatens to unleash the kind of barbaric siege that was inflicted upon the population of Fallujah under the US military occupation.

The plans for US ground forces to fight alongside front-line Iraqi troops, directing strikes and providing combat support, stands in direct contradiction to President Barack Obama’s assurances last year that his administration “will not be sending US troops back into combat in Iraq.”

US and allied forces launched a fresh round of some 25 airstrikes against targets across Iraq and Syria on Wednesday and Thursday, pummeling targets near Haditha, Kirkuk, Mosul, Sinjar, Tal Afar, Al Hasakah and Kobani.

Even as the Pentagon was unveiling the plans for a siege of Mosul, the US and Turkey announced an agreement to arm and train new battalions of “moderate” Syrian “rebels” at the rate of 5,000 fighters a year.

While Washington claims that these forces are being prepared to combat ISIS, both Turkey and the so-called “rebels” are preparing another sectarian-based offensive aimed at overturning the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Whatever differences exist between Washington and Ankara, the move threatens a further escalation of the US imperialist intervention in the region and of the bloodbath in Syria.

An initial deployment of more than 400 US troops will oversee the training programs, Pentagon spokesman Admiral John Kirby confirmed, adding that the total may increase into the thousands.

The Syrian militants will receive instruction in light arms and “more sophisticated” military specialties at US-run camps in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, in preparation for operations backed by US air and ground support. The Obama administration has already begun the delivery of pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and equipped with radios for calling in US airstrikes.

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and leading strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has placed the coming Iraq offensive within the context of a strategy for a wave of US military operations in the Middle East, Africa and beyond, in a paper published last week, titled “Boots on the Ground, The Realities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.”

Cordesman argues that the US military must learn from the experiences of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in which large US occupation forces won tactical victories while failing to enable local militaries to “stand on their own.”

The US must turn to lighter, more flexible deployments to maintain control over urban centers and vital natural resources, as central governments fragment and rebel militias increasingly dominate the hinterland, Cordesman argues.

“The ability to rapidly insert small cadres of ‘stiffeners’ like Special Forces, Rangers, and Marine combat teams may be more critical than to try to move large U.S. combat units,” he writes.

Such “high mobility strike forces” would bolster the conventional armies of “host countries” with logistical support, airstrikes and tailored use of the most advanced weapons systems, thus insuring a modicum of stability in countries of critical importance to the US government.

Indicating possibilities being considered inside the Obama administration for future interventions in Iraq and Syria, Cordesman argues that the US must develop joint forces capable of “controlling populations” and securing “key parts of the economy” amid conditions of “lasting attrition,” praising the recent success of operational, mentor and liaison teams (OMLTs) in Afghanistan in providing “forward assistance in urban warfare tactics.”

Syriza capitulates to the EU

Robert Stevens

The Greek government has repudiated its election pledges, agreeing Friday to a four-month extension of the existing loans and austerity programme dictated by “troika” of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

After nearly a month of negotiations with the political representatives of the European banks, Syriza has accepted the conditions demanded by the troika. The Eurogroup statement noted the agreement remained conditional on Greece presenting, on Monday, a “first list of reform measures, based on the current arrangement.”

Syriza’s proposals must be approved the following day by the Eurogroup and the troika, who will “provide a first view whether this is sufficiently comprehensive to be a valid starting point for a successful conclusion of the review.”

April was set as a deadline for Greece to complete a final list of austerity measures, which will be “further specified and then agreed” by the troika.

Without Greek compliance with these orders it will not receive billions of euros in further loans it requires in order to avoid defaulting on its debt of €320 billion.

Opening the press conference following five hours of talks, Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said Greece had given “their unequivocal commitment to honour their financial obligations” to creditors. He stressed, “Economic recovery cannot be put in danger, fiscal stability cannot be put in danger, financial sector stability cannot be put in danger.”

Before the Eurogroup meeting began, German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a press conference with French President François Hollande. She insisted that the Greek government had still not moved far enough in accepting the brutal cuts agreed to by the previous New Democracy-led government.

Merkel warned, “There is a need for significant improvements in the substance of what is being discussed so that we can vote on it in the German Bundestag, for example next week.”

As negotiations were taking place, at least a billion euros were withdrawn from Greece’s banks due to fear that no agreement would be reached. A reporter from Greece’s SKAI TV commented, “They came here determined to have a political solution, otherwise on Tuesday it would have been necessary to enforce capital controls [on Greek banks].”

Syriza’s agreement to continue enforcing austerity measures under the dictate of the European banks is the inevitable outcome of its class position and social interests.

Commenting on the political and social backlash Syriza will face, Pavlos Tzimas, a Greek political commentator, said, “Very heavy concessions have been made, politically poisonous concessions for the government. It’s going to be a crash test on the domestic front for the government.”

Immediately following the press conference German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble spoke in similar terms: “The Greeks certainly will have a difficult time to explain the deal to their voters. As long as the programme isn’t successfully completed, there will be no payout.”

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis earlier signalled that Syriza was ready to accept virtually anything. Athens had “gone not an extra mile [but] an extra 10 miles” in its proposal for the extension, he said. Other euro zone nations would have to meet Greece “not half way, but one-fifth of the way” in order to reach agreement.

The announcement on Friday followed by only one day the German governments’ emphatic rejection Thursday of a proposal by the Greek government for an extension of its previous credit agreement with the EU.

In that proposal, presented by Varoufakis, Greece insisted that the “new government is committed to a broader and deeper reform process aimed at durably improving growth and employment prospects, achieving debt sustainability and financial stability.” In the vaguest terms, it called for “enhancing social fairness and mitigating the significant social cost of the ongoing crisis.”

As soon as the text of the proposal from Varoufakis was made public, the German Finance Ministry rejected it. Financial Times writer Peter Spiegel pointed out that Germany took particular exception to language that “seems to leave main points open to negotiation” by stating that the “purpose of the requested six-month extension of the Agreement’s duration” is “to agree the mutually acceptable financial and administrative terms…”

For Europe’s ruling elite, there are no “mutually acceptable financial and administrative terms,” only an unconditional surrender.

Reuters published a document it said, “describes Germany’s position” in response to Varoufakis’s letter. It states that Greece’s request “opens immense room for interpretation” and includes no clear commitment to successfully conclude the current programme, and it falls short of a clear freeze of Greek measures.”

The document spelled out the precise wording that would be acceptable. It stated, “We need a clear and convincing commitment by Greece, which may just contain three short and well understandable sentences: ‘We apply for the extension of the current programme, making use of built-in flexibility. We will agree with the institutions any changes in measures from the existing MoU. And we aim at successfully concluding the programme’.”

In the end, this is what Syriza agreed to. It balked only at returning with an agreement that explicitly called on it to impose the hated “Memorandum of Understanding”—the list of austerity measures originally agreed to as part of the loan agreement. Syriza was allowed to have the “troika” renamed as the “institutions” and the “Memorandum of Understanding – MoU” recast as the “Master Financial Assistance Facility Agreement” (MFAFA)

However, the MFAFA, the official name of the loan agreement, includes language requiring that Greece “comply with the measures set out in the MoU,” that is, with the austerity measures dictated by the European banks.

The abject capitulation of the Syriza government exposes the utter political bankruptcy of the myriad petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations throughout the world who just a few weeks ago hailed the electoral victory of Tsipras as an earth-shaking event. Far from denouncing Syriza’s betrayal, these groups will work overtime conjuring up excuses and justifications. But broad sections of the Greek working class will see the agreement for what it is: a cynical and cowardly act of political treachery.

Guantanamo in America

Andre Damon

In the years following the beginning of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” a series of revelations have exposed the horrific torture practices used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, CIA “black sites” and other prisons abroad, as a matter of state policy.

These barbaric practices, which were documented in stomach-churning detail in the CIA torture report released last year, are rooted in the aims of US imperialism to plunder and dominate the world, and to suppress by force all opposition to its predatory aims. But the same ruling class that is waging imperialist war abroad is waging a class war at home, presiding over the enormous enrichment of the financial oligarchy at the expense of the working class.

There is no hard line between the foreign and domestic policy, a fact that was given concreteness this week in the revelation, published in the Guardiannewspaper, that one of the top interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had pioneered the methods he used at the torture camp working as a detective in Chicago.

According to the Guardian, Richard Zuley obtained at least one wrongful murder conviction by methods that he would later use at Guantanamo Bay: Prolonged shackling in “stress positions,” threats against family members, threats that the accused could be subject to the death penalty if they did not confess and demands that those under torture implicate themselves and others.

The newspaper cites the example of one Chicago woman who Zuley kept shackled to a wall for more than 24 hours, until she confessed that she and her ex-boyfriend had committed a murder. She remains in prison to this day. Another, Lathierial Boyd, was released in 2013 after spending 23 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Zuley’s background and his outstanding ability to extract confessions was noticed by administrators at Guantanamo Bay, who set him to work in a team of torturers at the prison.

Among Zuley’s victims, according to the Guardian, was Ould Slahi, author of the recently-published book Guantánamo Diary, in which he recounts being tortured, sexually assaulted and beaten to within an inch of his life at the prison, to the point where he would sign any confession his torturers would put before him.

The revelations, declared the Guardian, express “a continuum between police abuses in urban America” and the torture perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. The case of Zuley is hardly an aberration, however. The American ruling class presides over a country that incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other in the world, where the brutal treatment of prisoners is a daily reality.

A recent report from the ACLU, for example, documents the horrific conditions facing over 80,000 people in solitary confinement in the US prison system, including the mentally ill, mentally handicapped and children. The barbaric practice has been declared a form of torture by the United Nations.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 95 percent of those subjected to solitary confinement reported developing symptoms of psychological illness, such as panic or anxiety attacks and hallucinations. In Texas alone, there are more than 100 prisoners who have spent more than 20 years in tiny cells for 22 hours a day, with virtually no direct contact with any other human beings.

Domestic prisons, which are increasingly being used to hold those accused of terrorism, often as a result of entrapment by intelligence agencies, are likewise introducing rules similar to those in force abroad. Next week, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the body that oversees civilian penitentiaries, will implement a new rule that, in the words of law professor David M. Shapiro “all but prevents prisoners incarcerated in the United States and suspected of connections to terrorism from speaking with their families.”

Shapiro notes that another set of recently-introduced methods “make an unprecedented inroad into the attorney-client privilege, permitting federal agents to intercept communications between certain prisoners deemed a threat to national security and their attorneys.” He adds that prisons in New York and Colorado have already used these methods.

The prison system, which is topped off by the continued barbaric practice of state-sanctioned execution, is only part of a broader apparatus, including a massive and militarized police force that kills with impunity and an intelligence system that spies on the population in violation of basic democratic rights. Whether under Democrats or Republicans, Bush or Obama, the state functions ever more openly as an instrument of violence and repression.

If the methods utilized at Guantanamo and elsewhere represent in part the “export” of techniques used within the US, it is also true that the brutal methods honed by the ruling class abroad will be and are being transferred ever more directly back into the United States, applied to suppress the growth of political opposition to war and social inequality.

The reemergence of torture, forced confession, and other “medieval” practices is part of the repudiation of democratic legal and political forms of society under the pressure of growing social inequality.

The American financial aristocracy, which makes its wealth through fraud and swindling, and the degraded thugs they hire to carry out their dirty work in prisons, precincts, and torture chambers, see the legal norms of due process and equality under the law as mere impediments to their wanton plunder, violence and murder.

Freezing temperatures spell misery and danger to America’s poor

Jeff Lusanne & Evan Blake

Record low temperatures and wind chills across the eastern United States have caused at least a hundred deaths so far this winter, particularly among the most vulnerable sections of society, including the extremely poor and the elderly. For the millions of homeless men, women, and children in America, each day is a struggle for survival.

Three recent deaths have brought the number of cold-related fatalities in Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is located, to at least 21 this winter. During the 2013-14 winter season, there were 32 cold-related fatalities in Cook County alone.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with homeless people in Chicago this week.

“Winter is an everyday struggle,” said Matt, who has been homeless for over a year. “The temperatures and wind chills below zero are really, really bad for people in my situation,” he said. “Sometimes it gets to the point where your hands and your feet—they burn, and they hurt. I got frostbite on my toe last year because I was sleeping, and overnight, my foot ended up outside my blanket, and one of my toes turned black.”

Matt

For over six years, he had worked as a floor hand on oil rigs in North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, as well as the Gulf of Mexico. Last September, he moved to Chicago as his mother was dying of cancer, and began drinking upon her passing away. He entered rehab, which cost him his entire life savings, so that he left “with nothing but my sobriety—no money. I’ve been living on the street, staying away from drinking, but trying to get enough money for food and shelter.”

He spends mornings at O'Hare International Airport, where yesterday the normal and wind chill temperatures were at their absolute lowest this winter (-8 degrees, -20 with wind chill). From 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. he made a mere $6 while soliciting travelers.

“Everyday I'm trying to get the $15 for a room at a men's only hotel nearby. It's a cheap room; a little cubicle with drywall and the ceiling is chicken wire. The big shelter—Pacific Garden Mission—is ridiculous. They force religion on you, you can't eat unless you go to church. There is theft, fights, body lice, and bed bugs. Sometimes it is so overcrowded that you have to sleep on the floor,” he said.

“I've done job training, and temp services, but nothing's come out of it. This block—with the Chicago Board of Trade—has big money. But the guys in the $3,000 suits will only hand you a dollar. I get helped more by lower middle class people than well-off people.”

Ronda and Dan are married, and live in a tent outside. On cold nights, their only respite comes from piling up layers of blankets. Dan said that “The worst part is getting up and leaving.”

Ronda

Like many, they find the city's homeless shelters overcrowded, dangerous, and unhealthy. For warmth during the day, they go to the libraries, and on bitter cold nights they occasionally ride the trains all night. Dan noted that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has placed signs at the end of each line prohibiting riders from re-boarding trains going the opposite direction, unless they exit and pay to reenter. A significant number of homeless people in Chicago ride the 24-hour Red and Blue Lines to stay warm.

Thursday was the coldest morning in Chicago in 79 years, and temperatures are expected to continue at record lows. The first week of February brought Winter Storm Linus, which was the third heaviest snowstorm on record in Detroit and the fifth heaviest on record in Chicago.

The National Weather Service has issued wind chill warnings across the entire Midwest and Northeast regions, extending as far south as Tennessee and Georgia.

A state of emergency was declared in Tennessee Monday due to extreme cold weather, with sub-zero temperatures and snowfall across the state, and icy conditions on many roads. There have been ten confirmed deaths in the state attributable to the cold weather, including five from hypothermia and four due to motor vehicle accidents on icy roads.

Douglas King, 64, was found dead on Wednesday from hypothermia near East 11th Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, roughly two hours after he was turned away from a nearby homeless shelter, allegedly for acting belligerent. The same day, an unidentified 48-year-old man was also found dead from hypothermia in Shelby County. On Thursday, a 64-year-old woman and 69-year-old man in Henry County and an 85-year-old man in Sequatchie County were all found dead from hypothermia.

The tenth death this week in Tennessee was a male dialysis patient who was unable to receive treatment in Hickman County. There were over 15,000 residents without power throughout Tennessee Thursday afternoon, down from 33,000 on Wednesday. With continued mass power outages amid the ongoing storm, the weather-related death toll is expected to rise significantly in Tennessee and throughout the country.

In Lexington, Kentucky, James Clifton, 56, was found dead on Tuesday in a deserted mobile home, with blankets being his only access to heat. On Sunday, 24-year-old Madalyn Suchor, a nurse at the University of Kentucky hospital, was found dead outside her apartment.

Australian government launches vicious attack on human rights commissioner

Will Morrow

The Australian government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott responded to last week’s release of a Human Rights Commission (HRC) report exposing the appalling conditions facing child refugees in detention by launching a vicious political attack on the commission and its chairwoman, Gillian Triggs.

The HRC report, “The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention,” is based on interviews with hundreds of refugee children incarcerated in the detention camps run by the Australian government on Christmas Island and Nauru. It provides damning evidence of the catastrophic impact of the illegal detention policies of successive Coalition and Labor governments.

The report concluded that “the laws, policies and practices of Labor and Coalition Governments are in serious breach of the rights guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” It called for a Royal Commission into the detention of child refugees.

Speaking in parliament on February 12, the day after tabling the report, Abbott declared that “it would be a lot easier to respect the Human Rights Commission if it did not engage in what are transparent stitch-ups like the one released the other day.” He explicitly rejected the call for a Royal Commission. In an interview with 3AW Radio host Neil Mitchell, Abbott declared that the HRC should be “ashamed of itself.”

While refusing to respond to a single issue raised by the report, Abbott claimed that the HRC’s decision to conduct the inquiry, months after Labor lost the 2013 federal election, was determined by partisan political aims of attacking the Coalition. As Triggs herself noted, however, the data collected in the report covers children detained for over a year—spanning both governments.

Abbott’s attack let loose an extraordinary and vindictive witch-hunt against the commission and against Triggs herself by other government ministers and the Murdoch media. Coalition MP George Christensen declared that Triggs “has effectively sidelined herself and the HRC from having any credibility with the Abbott government... she needs to tender her resignation.” Liberal backbencher Andrew Nicolic also called on Triggs to resign, saying her position was “untenable.”

Right-wing Murdoch shock-jock commentator Andrew Bolt claimed Triggs had “betrayed” refugees and that “the best she could now do for them is resign as president of the taxpayer-funded Australian Human Rights Commission and hand over to someone not so obviously an activist.” Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph tabloid launched a personal smear-campaign with an article containing lurid allegations about Triggs’ treatment of her severely disabled daughter.

A February 13 article in the Age newspaper revealed that the Abbott government had spent the previous months doing everything it could to suppress the report. After receiving the HRC report last November, the Abbott government delayed tabling it in parliament until the very last day required by law. Over this time, the government placed immense pressure on Triggs to resign. According to the Age, an official acting on behalf of Attorney-General George Brandis orally requested to Triggs to resign, without providing any reason, and suggested that “some other position” would be made available if she did so.

This witch-hunt is a crude attempt to silence Triggs and any opposition to the government’s anti-refugee policies more broadly. In the wake of these events, Australian Bar Association president Fiona McLeod SC and Law Council of Australia president Duncan McConnel published a joint statement declaring the campaign against Triggs and the HRC as “unprecedented” and “alarming.” It stated that “personal criticism directed at her or at any judicial or quasi-judicial officer fulfilling the duties of public office as required by law is an attack upon the independence and integrity of the Commission and undermines confidence in our system of justice and human rights protection.”

The extraordinary campaign against Triggs is aimed at deflecting attention from the findings of the HRC report, which included:

* At the time of the report’s completion, there were 584 children detained in onshore centres, another 179 on Nauru and 304 on Christmas Island. Of these, 56 were unaccompanied by any guardian. 204 were aged 2–4, 336 were primary-school age, and another 153 were infants. From January 2013 to March 2014, 128 children were born in detention. The average detention time for both children and adults was over a year.

* From January 2013 to March 2014, 128 children committed desperate acts of self-harm. Another 171 children threatened to do so. The age of the children involved ranged between 12 and 17 years. In total, 105 children were assessed by the government’s own psychological team as being of “high imminent risk” or “moderate risk” of suicide or self-harm and required ongoing monitoring. Some 34 percent of the detained children were defined as having mental illness.

* The living arrangements for many families consists of a single 3 x 2.5 metre shipping container “room,” to which the children are confined for most or all of the day. Asked to give three words to describe their detention, 58 percent of the children used the words “sad, unhappy, depressing, mentally affecting, crazy making,” another 20 percent said “Nothing to do/boring/watching time/frustrating/no school,” and 20 percent used the word “hopeless.”

* In response to the question of why they felt unsafe in detention, 31 percent referred to fighting among refugees, another 24 percent referred to desperate protests involving self-harm by detainees, and another 28 percent said they or other people around them were mentally unwell.

The government’s response to the report’s conclusion that it was in breach of international conventions highlights the utter hypocrisy of Canberra’s “human rights” diplomacy. Australian governments, Labor and Coalition, have repeatedly supported the US in its use of bogus “human rights” pretexts to mount diplomatic provocations and military interventions. These include the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing regime-change operation in Syria, and the new US-led war in the Middle East.

Yet, when the official human rights watch-dog in Australia demonstrates that governments, past and present, are brazenly flouting basic democratic rights and international law, a political campaign is waged to denigrate its chairperson. If a similar sequence of events occurred in a country that had come into the cross-hairs of US and Australian imperialism, it would be cited the pretext for regime change.

The Labor opposition’s response is no less cynical. Immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the attack on her was “outrageous” and a case of “shooting the messenger.” Yet Labor is just as responsible for the heinous treatment of refugees, which is also documented in the HRC report. The previous Gillard Labor government reopened the Pacific Island gulags on Manus Island and Nauru, and declared that asylum seekers would never reach Australia. Indefinite detention in these hell-holes is being used to discourage other refugees from exercising their basic democratic right to claim asylum in Australia.

While the HCR report refers only to the detention of children and families, the mandatory detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru violates international law. The horrors facing asylum seekers, both children and adults, are a direct consequence of these conscious bipartisan policies, which are being used to divert the immense social tensions within Australia into reactionary xenophobic channels.

Polish trade unions end miners’ strike

Markus Salzmann

The trade unions in Poland have brought a two-week strike by miners to an end, reaching an agreement with the government that enables it to intensify the attacks on jobs and wages at a later date.

Representatives of the trade unions and government signed a statement last Friday that immediately halted the strike at the coal company Jastrzebska Spolkamit (JWS). In exchange, the company’s chief, Jaroslav Sagorowski, is to resign, as the trade unions had demanded. A district court in Gliwice declared the strike to be illegal. But large sections of the workforce were unwilling to respect the judgement.

The despicable deal was negotiated between company management, the trade unions and government. Miners at several company sites had been on strike for two weeks, after management declared a number of collective agreements to be void and unveiled cost-cutting measures. In the future, miners will work six instead of five days a week for the same wages. In addition, one-off payments and bonuses were to be cut.

Strikers showed enormous militancy during the course of the struggle. At JWS headquarters in the Silesian city of Jastrzebie, there were clashes between protesting miners and the police, who used tear gas and rubber bullets.

The agreement was greeted with relief in Polish and European business circles. JWS stocks rose by 11.7 percent to 26 zloty. As the PAP news agency reported, based on comments from departing chief executive Sagorowski, both sides signed agreements in secret talks that will bring significant savings for the company.

The company had been losing 30 million zloty (€7.2 million) per day, during the strike. Prime Minister Eva Kopacz warned of the collapse of the company after more than 5,400 workers occupied the mines.

The shares in mining firms KGHM Polska Miedz and LW Bogdanka rose noticeably after the ending of the strike.

The strike occurred 11 days after an agreement between the government and trade unions at another mining company, Kompania Veglova (KV). Here, the workers were protesting against the laying off of 5,000 workers and the planned closure of several mines.

After 10 days of protests and strikes, Kopacz had to withdraw her plans.

The minister for state property, Vlodzimiers Karpinski, described the trade union deal at KV as an “historic agreement,” and Kopacz explicitly thanked the union for its work.

In recent weeks, it was clear that the workers exerted considerable pressure on the government and JWS management and that a broad movement against the government was only averted by the union’s despicable role. Government representatives praised the “responsible” conduct of the trade unions on several occasions.

The deputy chairman of the Solidarity trade union at JWS, Savomir Brudziński, declared that the miners did not want to strike, but they were compelled to do so by Sagorowski. This shameful lie was exposed by the strike vote. More than 18,400 workers voted for strike action and only 236 against.

Trade union spokesman Piotr Szereda repeatedly made public statements that participation in the strike was voluntary so as to encourage workers to break the strike.

Last week, the union voted to accept a savings programme totalling 140 million zloty (€33 million). The only concession they demanded was the resignation of Sagorowski. Szereda declared, “The operator should ask itself if one man is worth all of the losses.”

The agreement at JWS serves to prepare deeper attacks on the workforce. “Kopacz has failed,” wrote the Gazeta Wyborcza. “It is unlikely that the signed agreement will resolve any of the problems.”

JWS made net losses of 305 million zloty in the first three quarters of 2014. A year earlier, the company made a 71 million zloty profit in the same period. Poland has Europe’s second-largest coal reserve. More than 100,000 people are employed in the mining industry. The companies are losing an average of €15 per ton due to dilapidated infrastructure and falling energy prices.

The fact that the government has temporarily abandoned the restructuring plan is due to fears over mass protests in an election year. Presidential elections take place in May and parliamentary elections in October.

“From the political standpoint, there is a risk of protests if the sector is fully and comprehensively restructured, which means eliminating jobs,” an economic adviser to the government was cited by the Financial Times. “But viewed economically, it is the only viable solution.”

Polish Deputy Economy Minister Tomasz Tomczykiewicz declared in a radio broadcast that the privileges of the miners were a relic of the country’s socialist past.

President Bronislav Komorovski from the Citizens Platform (PO), which is also the party of Prime Minister Kopacz, is concerned over his reelection. He is threatened with losing votes in the country’s impoverished south, where the mining is concentrated.

But above all, an expansion of the protests is feared. In January, sections of doctors protested against pay rates in the health sector. On Wednesday, hundreds of farmers drove to Warsaw with their tractors, where they blocked the main streets. Among other things, they are demanding compensation for government measures in the milk and pig meat markets. The West Pomeranian farmers are also calling for a halt to the sale of state land to foreign investors. In Pyrzyce, for example, 60 percent of all land has been promised to foreign investors.

The country’s trade unions, especially the two major associations Solidarity and OPZZ, have a long record of sabotaging workers’ struggles. Solidarity emerged in the huge workers’ strikes of the 1980s against the Stalinist regime. At the time, it had around 10 million members. But its support for the reintroduction of capitalism in Poland and the destruction of jobs and social rights that went with it resulted in it losing around 90 percent of its members in the 1990s.

Today, only around 12 percent of the workers are organised in trade unions. As the social crisis deepens, Solidarity is emerging ever more openly in opposition to the working class. The union established close relations with the PO during the government of Kopacz’s predecessor, Donald Tusk. The OPZZ, as part of the Stalinist state party in Poland, also has a legacy of suppressing workers’ strikes and protests.

It is beyond doubt that strikes and other forms of social conflict will increase. In these struggles, Polish workers must organise independently of the trade unions. The coming strikes by miners will only be successful if they are led as part of a European-wide struggle for genuine socialism and the overthrow of the capitalist system.