Australian workers denounce budget cuts and austerity drive

Our Correspondents

Workers from a variety of industries spoke to WSWS correspondents after yesterday’s trade union rallies in Sydney and Melbourne, explaining what issues led them to join the protests and discussing the political questions raised by the speakers’ promotion of the perspective of returning another Labor government.

Joel, an air-conditioning worker from the large Barangaroo building site in Sydney, said he was forced to shift from Queensland to Darwin, then to Sydney, to find work in the construction industry.

Joel

“I’m here because I want to defend my rights at work,” he said. “Most of the blokes had to travel halfway around Australia just to get work… But living away from home allowances have been scrapped and replaced by start-at-the-gate payments. I have travelled to my last three jobs at my own cost.”

Joel was incensed by the move by the Abbott government to increase the retirement pension age to 70, on top of the previous Labor government’s raising of the age from 65 to 67. “I can’t work to 70! Physically, I can’t. People will be dying at work and they’ll just take them out in wheelbarrows.”

Asked about the calls issued at the rally to oust the state and federal Liberal-National governments and, by implication, elect Labor governments, Joel replied: “Just get rid of the Liberals? That doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t work like that…

“We’ve traded one government for another for long enough now, and no one seems to be getting a better deal… It’s a vicious cycle. Eventually it will get to a stage when there will be no wage rises. The minimum wage will be what you get.”

When we said the Socialist Equality Party was standing in the New South Wales election to advance the fight for the working class to take power and establish a workers’ government that would implement a socialist program, Joel said: “I don’t know if Australian workers are ready for a total commitment, but maybe if someone showed a voice, if maybe the Socialist Equality Party could be the voice, then people could follow.”

When the discussion turned to the Abbott government’s commitment of 300 more troops to the US-led war in Iraq and Syria, and the wider danger of war, Joel commented on the use of terrorist-scare campaigns by governments around the world to stir up pretexts for military interventions and the victimisation of government opponents domestically.

“Terrorism is an easy script,” Joel noted. “You can circulate allegations against one little group and say, ‘they’re the terrorists, they’re their bad guys.’ It’s easy to do. Who’s to say that people who still earn a decent wage, like we do in construction, standing in the street defending our rights, aren’t the terrorists? Everyone can get bracketed like that.”

Joel voiced scepticism in the Abbott government’s response to last December’s Sydney café siege, which the government transformed into a national terrorist emergency. “They built it out of proportion. He [the hostage-taker Man Haron Monis] was just an angry guy who was about to go to prison and that was his day, so that he didn’t have to go to jail.”

Nut-Cea, a Filipino-Australian community services volunteer, was one of many community service workers and volunteers who joined the rallies to protest against the cutting of federal funding to their organisations, which was announced just before Christmas.

Nut-Cea

“We had our funding removed for this year, so we don’t know what is going to happen with us,” Nut-Cea explained. “We assist Filipinos who arrive to settle in Australia. We received $75,000 a year federal funding last year, but now nothing.

“It’s a bigger issue too. It’s all the community services. Services like ours provide English-language assistance to everyone through libraries. I blame the Liberals at the moment for this, because they are the government.”

A retired high school teacher who worked in schools for 35 years said she came to the rally because she was “most upset” by the Abbott government’s budget cuts which were targeted against the poor and disadvantaged. “Let’s have equality,” she said. Although she was a Labor supporter, she admitted: “I don’t know if putting Labor back in will make anything different.”

The retired teacher added that she had been outraged by the previous Labor government’s treatment of refugees. “Kevin Rudd came up with the worst thing in cruelty—sending people to Manus Island!”

The teacher condemned Labor Party leader Bill Shorten for giving bipartisan backing to the decision to dispatch 300 more troops to Iraq. “There should be a referendum on war,” she said. “Bill Shorten shouldn’t have supported the decision to send more troops. He should stand up and be counted. We shouldn’t be fighting along with America. It all started with George W. Bush and Tony Blair in England—that was his downfall.”

David, a bus driver from western Sydney, was angry about the pressure on workers by the private bus firms contracted by the state government. He gave the example of the Liverpool to Parramatta T80 route. “There is not enough time. Every single bus stop you pick up passengers. By the end of the trip you will always be 10–15 minutes late. When you come back for the next trip always the passengers complain. Some of them get aggressive or punch you. But it’s not our fault.”

David

“We tell the union, but unfortunately the Transport Workers Union is not like it was before. They are more friendly with the employers, honestly. This started under the Labor government. I always said that Labor and Liberals were the same.

“When it is Liberals in government, Labor comes to motivate the unions to come to have demonstration to win support for the Labor. But when Labor is in power you can’t see any more demonstrations.”

Discussing the threat of war, David said: “It is all the US, it’s about the economy, it’s about controlling the oil. Killing people is nothing for them.” He said ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] had originated from the Islamic fundamentalists that Washington had earlier supported in Afghanistan and Syria.

In Melbourne, Alistair, a shipyard worker, explained: “I will be out of work this month. Job losses have been going on for decades. The government is not giving people any work to do. I have been at BAE in Williamstown for 33 years. The shipyard employs about 400 people plus contractors... I am 63 years old and I don’t think I will get another job.”

Alistair

Alistair commented: “I think that BAE is one of the richest companies in the world. War is good business.”

Luke, a building worker for 22 years, said: “The government wants to take our conditions away, such as overtime and double time. Everything is going down. We work like donkeys in the rain and wind at the top of buildings.”

Luke expressed concern about what was happening to workers internationally, and about the future. “Look at what is happening in Greece,” he said. “There are no pensions there. Pensions here are very low already—$200 a week—and you can’t live on this. How many millions of dollars are going to the war in the Middle East, and how many children are going to cry because their fathers were killed?”

German Left Party backs Schäuble and European austerity policies

Johannes Stern

The Left Party voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending the so-called aid programme for Greece until the end of June. In the parliamentary vote, 41 members of the Left Party fraction voted yes, 10 abstained and only 3 voted no. All together, 542 members of parliament agreed, 32 voted no and 13 abstained.

The class character of the Left Party—at its core, it is a right-wing bourgeois party—has seldom been so apparent. By agreeing to “Greek aid,” the Left Party is backing the German government, the European Union (EU), the banks and their brutal austerity policies in Greece and Europe as a whole. It is openly providing its blessing to a policy it previously pretended to reject.

Two years ago, Gregor Gysi, chair of the Left fraction in parliament, gave a speech to parliament, in which he said: “The rescue packages are not for the Greeks, but exclusively for the banks, investors and hedge funds. They and no one else are receiving this money.”

He called the austerity measures attached to the package “so antisocial that it more than astonished me.” Then he warned of the consequences: “the minimum wage in Greece must be cut from 751 to 586 euros a month. Wages must be cut by 22 percent. Fifteen thousand public sector workers must be laid off this year and 150,000 must be laid off by 2014. Pensions will have to be reduced by 14 billion euros in the next three years.”

As recently as December of last year, the deputy fraction president of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, declared, “We do not want to let ourselves be ensnared by this strategy. This is not our policy.... Furthermore, this course is wrong because it will provide a breeding ground for resentments and hostility to foreigners. We reject it because it is essentially a Christmas bonus for the speculators. You will never see us participating in this.”

So much for the “never” of the Left Party! Though there has been no change of course in Greece—besides the fact that austerity is now being carried out by Syriza, the Left Party’s Greek affiliates, in coalition with the right-wing Independent Greeks—Gysi announced to the enthusiastic approval of the parties in government on Friday, “a large majority of us agree to Greece’s request for an extension of the aid programme by four months.”

To justify this course, Gysi fell back on the same propaganda lies frequently peddled by Greek minister president Tsipras and his finance minister, Varoufakis. “The left government in Greece is now breaking with the failed policies of cuts. This is changing Greece. It is changing Europe and us as well,” Gysi declared. Syriza’s programme is “the end of the dictatorship of the Troika,” he said, and “a clear declaration of war on the failed policies of neo-liberalism.”

In reality, the opposite is the case. After the capitulation of the Tsipras government to Schäuble and the EU a week ago on Friday, Varoufakis sent a list of proposals for new austerity measures to Brussels on Monday.

Gysi and the Left Party are just as conscious of the right-wing character of the programme for which they voted as their Greek affiliate, which worked it out. This point is underscored by a revealing document published by the Left Party-linked Junge Welt newspaper on Saturday. Two leaders of Syriza, Dimitris Belantis and Stathis Kouvelakis, “inform” the German Left Party members of parliament about the right-wing programme of their party in order to demand that they vote against the extension of the aid programme.

The letter reveals the cynicism and hostility to workers of the entire petty bourgeois milieu on which pseudo-left parties such as Syriza and the German Left Party base themselves.

The letter begins: “We want to inform you and your parties about the content of the provisional agreement between the Greek government and the leadership of the euro zone on February 20 2015—or at least how we understand it. At the same time we want to give you a brief assessment of the content of the reform list sent by our Finance Minister Gianis Varoufakis to the Eurogroup. Neither text corresponds to the main points of Syriza’s electoral program me. What is even worse, they make it impossible to implement the main points of that program me ” (emphasis added).

The letter goes into “a few examples”: “Increasing the minimum wage to 750 euros [that is, its 2009 level] cannot be in the short-term decided ‘unilaterally’ by our Parliament. It can only be a long-term perspective, subject to the condition that it doesn’t harm the country’s ‘competitiveness’. The privatisations that are already completed will be left untouched. For those that are still underway, the process should be completed ‘respecting their legality’. No objection of principle to privatisations is be found at any point in the text.”

Later, it says: “Almost no bill may pass in Parliament without prior consent of the Troïka, which has now been renamed the ‘Institutions’, and it can’t be introduced without measures compensating its financial cost. This means that even the measures for the solution of the humanitarian crisis should be designed so as to entail no net budgetary impact.”

It even admits, “We wish to stress that the extension of the financing agreement of 2012 for four months without complying to the Memoranda, and to all their legal implications, is politically and legally impossible. To separate the financing agreement from the Memoranda is simply impossible. This means that, in violation of Syriza’s central commitment to the Greek people, the Memoranda and the set of laws enforcing them will remain substantially in place.”

And then comes the climax: “For us, it is clear that the ratification of this agreement by the European parliaments, with the consent of the parties of the radical Left, goes against the interest of the Greek workers and of the Greek people.... In our opinion, a ‘no’ vote will help the Greek Left and in particular Syriza to realise its programme. Conversely, a ‘yes’ can only create illusions and future disappointments.”

Anyone still maintaining “false illusions” in the supposed “left” politics of Syriza or the Left Party should read the lines that conclude the letter. After these two leading Syriza members have declared that the right-wing programme of their party “goes against the interest of the Greek workers and of the Greek people,” they implore the Left Party to vote against it, so that they can “realise” it better!

The fact that the Left party voted in favour of the so-called aid programme by a large majority must serve as a warning to the working class. Amid a rapid intensification of the crisis of capitalism in Europe, the German Left Party is ready to take on the responsibility of leading the federal government in order to carry out austerity policies in Germany and all over Europe.

The ruling elites heard the message loud and clear. A comment in theSüddeutsche Zeitung declared, “Gysi’s people have accomplished a shift and—with a clear majority for the first time—agreed to an EU aid package. They are doing what has always been asked of them: instead of warming themselves with the dogma that Europe only stands for the power of the banks, they have ventured out into the frost of political realism for the good of Syriza. One should congratulate the Left Party on its self discipline.”

Saskatchewan Fire Department refuses to answer call; two children die

Ashley Tseng

Two First Nations children were killed in a house fire on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on February 17, after the fire department in the neighbouring village of Loon Lake refused to respond to an emergency call because the reserve was behind on its firefighting services bill.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers were the only first responders to arrive, at 1:30 in the morning. By then, the house was already engulfed in flames. Two-year-old Harley Cheenanow and his one-year-old sister Haley were both pronounced dead at the scene, after being carried out of the burning house by their father. Their grandmother, who was also in the house, managed to escape the blaze.

The mayor of Loon Lake, Larry Heon, who doubles as the village’s fire chief, callously defended his decision not to dispatch a fire engine to the scene, arguing that the fire department’s resources needed to be rationed for those who paid their bills, and that a firefighting team would have been too late to save the children anyway.

The reserve’s firefighting services contract with Loon Lake expired in October 2012, with an outstanding balance of $3,380.89.

For their part, the reserve’s leaders, led by Band Chief Richard Ben, say they believed that the financial dispute between the reserve and the Loon Lake fire department was resolved and that payments were made. They went on to claim that they were not aware that an outstanding balance would prompt the Loon Lake fire hall not to respond to an emergency call from the reserve.

The dispute which cost the lives of two innocent children was over how much the band owed Loon Lake for firefighting costs. Until October 2012 the reserve was charged an annual $5,000 retainer fee, with an additional charge for every call the firefighters responded to. Since then, the band has been paying the volunteer fire hall on a per-fire basis.

According to letters between the Makwa First Nation and Loon Lake, the cost of fire services include: $400 per hour for a fire truck, $300 per hour for a water truck, $30 per hour for a fire chief, and $25 per hour for a fire fighter. Considering how all fires have a minimum three hour call out, one fire response call handled by two volunteers costs at least $1,350.

Although the reserve has had a working fire truck for five years, it lacks the proper hoses to connect to the reserve’s fire hydrants. There is also nobody on site trained to operate the vehicle. A metal shed that once served as the fire hall burned down 30 years ago. Due to a lack of infrastructure, fire trucks kept on reserves in unheated facilities often freeze up in the cold northern climate rendering them useless for emergency calls.

In each of the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 fiscal years, the Makwa Sahgaiehcan reserve received only $11,000 for fire protection from the federal government, which, under Canada’s colonial-style Indian Act, has constitutional authority over First Nation reservations.

In total, Ottawa spends a paltry $26.3 million a year on fire protection services for more than 600 First Nations reservations across Canada. The level of funding is so low that in the province of Ontario, no First Nation has been able to purchase fire equipment since 2012. In two notorious cases in Manitoba, residents on a reserve were forced to use snow to extinguish a blaze that killed a two-month-old girl and, in another fire, were forced to deploy potable water trucks in the absence of any fire equipment. Last year alone on Saskatchewan’s First Nation reserves, five children perished in house fires.

The Saskatchewan tragedy once again lays bare the horrific living conditions faced by Canada’s First Nations people. Aboriginal children living on a reserve die in house fires at a rate 10 times the national average. A large amount of housing stock on native reserves is built below standard building codes. Due to housing shortages and endemic poverty, many homes are greatly over-crowded.

An auditor general’s report found that 44 percent of existing housing units constructed with government funding need major renovations. In addition, standard fire regulation codes do not apply on reserve properties under conditions where many homes are heated by make-shift wood stoves.

Government neglect and under-funding extend into virtually every aspect of life on Canada’s native reserves. A 2013 United Nations report found that 96 of the lowest 100 Canadian communities rated on a “Well-Being Index” were First Nations communities. Life spans for native people fall far below the national average. Diseases such as tuberculosis are rampant in some communities. Education opportunities are deplorable—fewer than 50 percent of students on reserves graduate from high school. Boil water advisories are, on average, in effect at any given time on over 100 of the 631 native reserves. Suicide rates are astronomical. In one reserve that was evacuated because of a contaminated water supply, 21 youth between the ages of 9 and 23 killed themselves in one month alone. Incarceration rates for aboriginals are nine times the national average. A native youth is more likely to go to prison than to get a high school diploma.

Poverty conditions are not restricted to those living on reserves. Natives in urban centres, which comprise about half of the one million overall population, have the country’s highest unemployment rate, second only to the rate for native reserves. Nationwide, an estimated 48 percent of aboriginal people are unemployed.

Australian union rallies seek to divert anger over attacks on wages and services

Our Reporters

Amid the deepening crisis of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the country’s peak union body, staged a “National Day of Action” yesterday to try to head off and contain the intense hostility among workers to the mounting assault on their wages, working conditions and social services.

NSW nurses marching

About 10,000 workers marched through Melbourne, 5,000 rallied in Sydney, and 2,000 in Brisbane, with smaller events in Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Hobart, Darwin and numbers of regional centres. The trade unions called no stoppages for the rallies, but building workers walked off several major construction sites, despite threats of $10,400 fines by the federal government’s Fair Work Building and Construction agency for taking “unlawful industrial action.”

There were also sizeable contingents of nurses and other health workers, alarmed by budget cuts and threats to scrap penalty wage rates—which would amount to wage cuts of up to 30 percent—and community service workers and volunteers, who are fighting the de-funding and possible closure of emergency relief, welfare, health, educational and advisory services.

Banners and placards voiced outrage at an entire range of attacks on the working class, including cuts to health and education spending, and plans for sharp rises in medical and education fees. Others denounced the gutting of funding for hundreds of community services and the widening social inequality. Among the most prominent concerns were moves foreshadowed by the Abbott government’s Productivity Commission to abolish penalty rates and cut the minimum wage.

With key austerity measures from the Abbott government’s last budget—particularly medical fees, welfare cutoffs and tertiary education fees—still stalled in the Senate because of the widespread opposition to them, the ACTU bureaucrats called the rallies in the lead-up to this year’s budget in May in order to channel the anger back behind the return of yet another Labor government.

Speaking at a Gold Coast rally, ACTU president Ged Kearney said the unions were determined to kick the Liberal-National government out at the next federal election, which is due in 2016. She invoked the prospect of making the Abbott government a “one-term” government, following the recent defeats of the first-term Liberal-National state governments in Victoria and Queensland.

Socialist Equality Party (SEP) members and supporters campaigned at the rallies, explaining that any return to Labor governments would only deepen, not stop, the attacks taking place, and that the working class needed a new political perspective.

At the Sydney rally, SEP candidates in the March 28 New South Wales election, including SEP national secretary James Cogan, discussed with workers the need to take up the fight for a workers’ government and a socialist program. Supporters circulated copies of the party’s election manifesto and a statement by Cogan exposing the fraud of the Labor Party’s claim to oppose privatisation and austerity.

SEP candidate James Cogan speaking with workers

Significantly, there were no Labor Party speakers on the platforms in Melbourne and Sydney, for fear of reviving memories of previous Labor government attacks on jobs, welfare and the public sector.

At the Sydney rally, all the official slogans were directed against Abbott and the electricity grid privatisation plan of his New South Wales state counterpart, Premier Mike Baird. Speakers called on the participants to repeatedly chant “NSW not for sale” and “We say fight back.” There was no mention of the fact that the last state Labor government sold off most of the electricity network, let alone the long record of Labor government privatisations going back to the selloff of Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank by the Hawke government in the 1990s.

Unions NSW secretary Mark Lennon declared: “We are here for one reason alone: to tell Baird and Abbott to leave our work rights alone.” Without once referring to the Labor Party, he and trade union leaders from the building, health, electrical and community services sectors urged workers to “defeat” the Liberal governments, just like they had been “defeated” in Victoria and Queensland.

Community service workers at Sydney rally

In Melbourne, ACTU secretary Dave Oliver likewise invoked the 2007 defeat of the previous Howard Liberal-National federal government, without mentioning the anti-working class record of the ensuing Labor government of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, which led to its landslide defeat in 2013. “Ten years ago John Howard and his government attacked us,” Oliver said. “We went on and kicked them out. We’re going to fight the Abbott government.”

One exception to the lack of any explicit mention of the Labor Party occurred in Brisbane, where Annastacia Palaszczuk, the new Queensland Labor premier, was called to the stage, where she pledged to “stand up to Abbott and his arrogance.” Palaszczuk claimed: “We now have a new era in Queensland, a government that will listen, a government that will deliver, a government that is focused on jobs—jobs for your family and jobs for future generations.”

In reality, her government has already foreshadowed stepped-up austerity measures because of the collapse of coal, gas and other mining export prices, which are leading to mine closures and thousands of job losses in the former “mining boom” state. Just the previous day, state Treasurer Curtis Pitt reported that during 2014 the state’s economy shrank by 3.4 percent and business investment fell by 20.3 percent.

Palaszczuk’s government is already moving to impose the burden of the slump on workers, just as its Labor predecessor, the government of Premier Anna Bligh, unleashed a $15 billion privatisation of rail, electricity and other services, destroying thousands of jobs, in 2009 after the financial markets stripped the state of its AAA credit rating amid the global economic breakdown.

As in Queensland, any return to Labor governments at the state or federal level will simply pave the way for even more brutal attacks on working people under conditions of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation in Australia and internationally.

German, Romanian officials plan further escalation against Russia

Markus Salzmann

Three months after his election victory, the new Romanian president, Klaus Johannis, visited the German capital last week. Following a conversation with President Joachim Gauck, he was received by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Topics discussed included the situation in Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, as well as trade relations between the two countries.

Merkel reiterated her support for the aggressive stance of many east European states against Russia. She assured Romania, a NATO and European Union (EU) member state bordering Ukraine and Moldova, of her support. It was important that “we direct our attention not only to the Baltic States and Poland,” explained Merkel after the meeting. Geographically, Romania was “in a prominent strategic position”, she said.

Johannis supports the agreement negotiated in Minsk by Merkel with the presidents of France, Russia and Ukraine. He said that the stability of Ukraine was “in the interests of all Europe”. However, he also advocated harsher sanctions against Moscow and blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin for the crisis in Ukraine.

In an interview with broadcaster ARD before meeting Merkel, he demanded a stronger NATO presence in Romania and the entire Black Sea region: “Romania does not feel threatened militarily and we do not expect the conflict to spill over to Romania. But we want to be prepared for any development. That means the support of NATO.”

Merkel responded cautiously, explaining that NATO had agreed on important steps at its summit in Wales. “We must first focus on implementing these steps. Then we should also talk about further requests by Romania.” In Wales, NATO had committed to increasing its troop levels in eastern Europe, but this does not go far enough for many eastern European governments.

The demand of the Romanian president coincided with remarks by NATO Commander in Chief-Europe General Philip Breedlove. He warned that Moscow could try to prevent a rapprochement with the West with the help of Russian troops stationed in the rebellious region of Transnistria. “In Moldova and other places,” Moscow is already pursuing “a broad information campaign,” Breedlove claimed.

Already last year, Breedlove came out in favour for stronger intervention in the Black Sea region. He said that Russia would “militarise” Crimea and so extend its control over almost the entire Black Sea region. Regional conflicts have massively intensified. The US is planning to establish a new rocket base in Romania this year, while Russia will increase the capacity of its Black Sea fleet.

The right-wing Romanian paper România Liberă expressed fear that Johannis’s close collaboration with Merkel could weaken the “Bucharest-London-Washington” axis. “The sole political axis in which Romania can be sure Russia will not exert its influence is the one connecting us with London and Washington. Berlin, by contrast, still wants to believe that it can engage in rational discussion with Putin”, the paper commented.

Nevertheless, Merkel promised Moldova her support. The country, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, will receive “considerable aid from the European Union,” she said. Merkel and Johannis declared unanimously they were “closely bound politically” with Moldova, and supported the new government of Chiril Gaburici.

Destitute Moldova confronts a deep political crisis, exacerbated by the aggressive course of the Western powers against Russia. Russian-speaking Transnistria split from Moldova in a short and bloody war in 1991. Russian troops are still stationed there today.

Merkel and Johannis also discussed economic relations between the two countries, saying that they wanted to strengthen economic collaboration. The EU and business circles constantly raise cynical demands that Bucharest fight against corruption and nepotism.

Since the collapse of the Stalinist Ceausescu regime and the restoration of capitalism at the beginning of the 1990s, a fierce struggle between rival cliques has raged in Romania over access to the levers of power and associated financial rewards. Whether they be ex-Stalinists of the former Ceausescu regime or advocates of the free market, they all share contempt for the working class and lust for money and influence.

According to the web site Clean Romania, more than 30 ministers who have served in the last three governments have either been charged with corruption or have already been given prison sentences. This involves the cabinet of the Socialist Democratic Party prime minister Adrian Năstase (2000-2004), who himself has served a term of imprisonment; liberal premier Câlin Tăriceanu (2005-2008); and Emil Boc (2009-2012), as well as the current government of Victor Ponta, five members of which face charges.

Moreover, hundreds of government officials, family members and establishment party members are deeply implicated in corruption. TV screens show politicians in handcuffs almost daily. The fight against corruption has long been used to eliminate political opponents. The different bourgeois political camps routinely hurl accusations of corruption against each other.

The conservative Johannis won the second round of the presidential election in November last year against social-democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta. He had previously been mayor of Sibiu in Transylvania since 2000. He has close ties to conservative circles across Europe.

He has received his marching orders from the imperialist powers, to put an end to the trench warfare in Romanian politics and implement radical austerity measures. On this basis, the Süddeutsche Zeitung called on him to “reform parties, politics and government” and change “the state’s modus operandi.... This applies particularly to budget planning.”

US-Iran nuclear talks hint at a possible deal

Peter Symonds

The latest round of talks in Montreux, Switzerland between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programs ended yesterday with signs that the framework of an agreement could emerge before the deadline of March 31.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, in remarks clearly aimed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that he would not allow politics or “external factors” to distract him from the ongoing negotiations. “No one has presented a more viable lasting alternative for how you actually prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So folks, simply demanding that Iran capitulate is not a plan.”

On Tuesday, Netanyahu delivered an anti-Iran tirade to an extraordinary joint session of the US Congress, denouncing what he called a “bad deal” that would lead to a “nuclear nightmare.” While he did not spell it out in his speech, the Israeli prime minister has repeatedly indicated what he regards as the alternative—military attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities if it refuses to agree to completely dismantle all its nuclear plants and programs.

In a Reuters interview on Monday, President Barack Obama outlined US demands that Iran agree to “double digit years of keeping their program where it is right now and, in fact, rolling back elements of it that currently exist.” Washington is also insisting on a highly intrusive UN inspection regime to ensure “we’ve got a way of verifying” any agreement.

According to the Wall Street Journal, US negotiators are pressing Tehran to substantially wind back its uranium enrichment plants and other facilities to ensure that it would take at least a year to produce enough nuclear fuel to construct a weapon. “While there is no explicit agreement on the 12-month break-out period, officials say there is a growing understanding on all sides that it must be part of a deal,” the newspaper reported.

Kerry is exploiting the harsh US-led economic sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy, as well as the implicit threat of military attack, to extort major concessions from Iranian negotiators. The unsubstantiated allegation that Iran is building nuclear weapons—repeatedly denied by Tehran—is particularly hypocritical, given Washington’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

For Iran, the crucial issue is to ensure the lifting of all sanctions—something that Washington is yet to accept. While Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was upbeat on the prospects for a deal, he bluntly declared on Monday that the US and its allies “must once and for all, come to the political understanding that sanctions and agreement don’t go together. If they want an agreement, sanctions must go.”

Any nuclear agreement with Iran would mark a significant shift in US foreign policy. As far as Washington is concerned, such a deal has never been primarily about Iran’s nuclear programs. It has always been bound up with broader geo-political considerations—in the first instance ensuring American domination in the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.

For more than a decade under the Bush and Obama administrations, the US has imposed economic sanctions and repeatedly threatened to wage war against Iran on the pretext of destroying its nuclear capabilities. Obama continues to insist that all options, including the military one, remain “on the table.”

Washington’s overriding aim has been to fashion a regime aligned with US economic and strategic interests. With the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, the Iranian regime signalled its willingness to make significant concessions to reach an accommodation with the US. Now Washington is seeking to pursue the same broad objectives through negotiations on the nuclear issue.

This orientation has provoked sharp divisions in Washington, particularly among Republicans and Democrats very closely aligned to Israel and other US allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, that are deeply hostile any rapprochement with Iran. Having organised this week’s speech by Netanyahu, Republican leaders are seeking to block an agreement by enacting legislation to ensure that any deal must have Congressional approval.

While well aware that a deal could damage relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration is no doubt looking for Iranian concessions on a range of strategic issues in the Middle East and beyond. In its new war in the Middle East, the US has already coordinated its military operations to some degree with Iran, which is supplying advisers and equipment to prop up the Shiite-dominated regime in Baghdad.

At the same time, Washington is seeking to pacify existing allies. Kerry has flown to the Saudi Arabia to meet today with King Salman and Gulf State foreign ministers. Saudi Arabia, which has long regarded Iran as its chief regional rival, is deeply concerned that it will be marginalised if Washington ends sanctions and establishes closer relations with Iran.

However, the Obama administration’s pursuit of a deal with Iran is driven by considerations that go beyond the Middle East. Amid a deepening global economic breakdown and rising geo-political tensions, the US is engaged in an aggressive and reckless confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, while “rebalancing” its military forces to the Indo-Pacific region against China. As it prepares for possible war against two nuclear-armed powers, the US is seeking to enlist, or at least neutralise, Iran which occupies the strategic crossroads between the Middle East and Central Asia.

In a recent comment entitled, “The intersection of three crises,” Reva Bhalla, a Stratfor think tank analyst, commented that the worsening European economic crisis, tensions with Russia over Ukraine and talks with Iran were “inextricably linked.” Having foreshadowed a breakdown of the Minsk agreement over Ukraine, she argued that the US must prepare accordingly for conflict with Russia.

“But focusing on the Eurasia theatre entails first tying up loose ends in the Middle East, starting with Iran,” Bhalla wrote. “If the United States is to realistically game out scenarios in which US military forces confront Russia in Europe, it needs to be able to rapidly redeploy forces that have spent the past dozen years putting out fires ignited by sprouting jihadist emirates and preparing for a potential conflict in the Persian Gulf [with Iran].”

After noting that a US-Iranian understanding would go well beyond the nuclear issue, Bhalla suggests: “It will draw regional contours of an Iranian sphere of influence and allow room for Washington and Tehran to cooperate in areas where their interests align.” She concludes: “The United States, regardless of which party is controlling the White House, will rank the threat of a growing Eurasian conflict well ahead of de-escalating the conflict with Iran.”

The Obama administration’s ability to conclude a deal with Iran, in the face of open opposition from Israel and sections of Congress, remains to be seen. The next round of talks begins next week on March 15. Obama will review any framework agreement before proceeding to consider a full detailed agreement, scheduled to be concluded by June 30.

New York City mayor bids out final school bus routes without job protections

Sandy English

New York City’s Department of Education, now run by the city’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, has announced that it is accepting bids from companies to operate a number of school bus routes, mostly for children with special needs who cannot otherwise get to school. These bids will lack the Employee Protection Provision (EPP) that guaranteed workers’ seniority rights and wage scales for over 30 years.

The move is an unmitigated disaster for over 4,000 school bus drivers, attendants (matrons) and mechanics, who will either lose their jobs or be forced to accept substantially reduced wages and benefits in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the US.

This is the third in three rounds of such bids. The previous two were conducted under the administration of the former mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. While his successor, de Blasio, allowed the bid awards that Bloomberg put into place to stand, and the resulting layoffs to unfold under his watch, this round will be the first entirely of de Blasio's own making.

De Blasio delayed the bid competition for over a year, all the while claiming to be open to some sort of resolution to protect workers’ jobs and wages. He passed the buck in calling on the state legislature in Albany to legislate the EPP back into city contracts. Issuing these bids has exposed the complete fraud of de Blasio’s attempt to posture as a friend of the school bus workers.

The performance period in the bids begins in 2016. With workers on the 4,000 routes in the final year of their current contract with carry-over EPP, it is unclear whether the companies will carry out immediate layoffs and wage reductions at the end of this year or whether they will be bound by the terms of the previous contract with the city. (There are rumors of a one-year contract among bus workers.)

On February 15, 2013, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 shut down a strike of 9,000 school bus workers against the administration of then-Mayor Bloomberg over the issue of eliminating the EPP from the bidding process. In an attempt to mask its betrayal, it solicited and received a letter from the five Democratic mayoral candidates that, if elected, they would “revisit” the guarantee of the EPP in the bidding process.

Drivers and matrons on strike in the Bronx in 2013

While the union has said nothing to the workers about this latest attack, the failure to include EPP in the new bids has not surprised many bus workers who have seen their living standards crash in the last two years.

One school bus worker, Jose, told the WSWS, “I lost my job at Atlantic Express shortly after the strike. A lot of workers lost their jobs because when the contract expired at the end of the school year, we lost our EPP. This is what Bloomberg wanted.

“I am now doing the same work as before, driving school children and certified by the Board of Education, at a company called L&M, for a little bit more than one half of my original pay. In order to survive I need to work the weekends.

“I thought de Blasio was more for the workers, for poor people, and that is what my fellow workers thought as well. A lot of them said that we should all vote for him, and they did. I don’t trust de Blasio anymore. The union told us to vote for him as well. The union is corrupt. They are making money.”

Renne, also a former driver for Atlantic, said, “De Blasio has turned his back on us. The union has turned its back on us. I heard there was a master pick yesterday, and I’m waiting to hear what happened. I’m lucky because I have 23 years, and I am working. But I worked with a woman for six years who had 10 years with the company. When her unemployment ran out after the strike, she was forced to return to work as a new-hire and start over. As a new-hire, she is now making $11 an hour.”

A driver for the Reliant bus company said, “This morning the union rep said it will be difficult to get the EPP back. I did not say anything because I know that means we will never get the EPP again. That is a big problem. We don’t have vacation or overtime, even if we come back seven or eight o’clock at night.”

Over the last two years over five thousand workers have faced a similar fate as bids were let out in a process that began under the Bloomberg administration. But the union continued to promote the lie that was the basis for stopping the 2013 strike—that the Democrats would be different than Bloomberg.

For over 30 years, the bids were taken with the EPP guarantees. Language mandating the EPP was written into the bids after the bus workers’ 1978 strike. When Bloomberg announced in 2012 that the protections would be removed, the union treated this as the whim of a selfish billionaire. It was unable to prevent a strike, but it systematically worked to isolate it from other workers in New York City and to limit the number of pickets at garages.

Worker at union meeting in 2013

After calling off he strike, Local 1181 Present Michael Cordiello showcased his meetings with de Blasio and other Democratic politicians, and bragged that the Democratic-dominated New York State Senate would pass a law enshrining the EPP protection. Small groups of his supporters rallied at City Hall to keep up the farce that pressure would restore the EPP.

Finally, last year the de Blasio administration added a one-time $42 million budget item for the bus workers, a fraction of the $400 million that the city is saving by cutting the EPP. Only about half of the money has been used by bus companies to rehire veteran drivers. Only one company, Reliant, is using the funds, and it refuses to pay drivers overtime. At least two or three thousand laid off workers are still unable to get jobs.

In October of last year Members for Change, an opposition slate in the union, organized a rally in front of City Hall to deliver a petition to the mayor demanding that laid off workers be included in the upcoming “master pick” to fill open positions based on established seniority. No representative from de Blasio came out to meet the demonstrators, but that did not discourage the leaders of Members for Change from exhorting the bus workers to “keep agitating” with de Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat.

The Members for Change slate has also appealed for support from the Federal government, and US Labor Secretary Thomas Perez is now suing to nullify the results of the last union election, which the Cordiello faction won.

The plan to destroy the rights of bus workers was first made public in a document of Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission, which is made up of billionaires, charter school operators and, significantly, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former president of the United Federation of Teachers, representing more than 100,000 teachers and paraprofessionals in New York City.

In a 2012 report, the Commission noted the need to reduce “the biggest cost drivers in education and areas where spending exceeds the rate of inflation, including special education, transportation, pension and benefits.” Several times, the report emphasized the need to “Identify ways to reduce transportation costs…”

In the last few years, conditions for the entire working class in New York City have deteriorated. Not only is the city rife with police violence, but new figures show that the cost of living has increased 20 percent in the last five years. The homeless population now tops 60,000, and the poverty rate has climbed steadily upwards, due, in part, to the conditions of unemployment and slave wages to which bus workers and former bus workers have been reduced.

Many school bus workers, aware that their enemies are not only in the corporate offices but also in the White House, City Hall and the union headquarters, have asked, “What do we do now?”

Target announces layoff of several thousand workers in US

Matthew MacEgan

On Tuesday, the retail giant Target announced that it planned to cut several thousand jobs over the next two years as part of a restructuring that will free up $2 billion in costs to be invested in bolstering its online business. Chief Executive Officer Brian Cornell said about the planned layoffs, which will mostly occur at its Minneapolis headquarters, that “cutting complexity at headquarters will make us more competitive” (emphasis added).

The restructuring is part of a “revival plan” outlined by Cornell, which purportedly will drop about $2.1 billion into a handful of key product lines, the development of smaller urban stores, and the improvement of the company’s e-commerce. Target executives unveiled a five-year plan where half of that amount, $1 billion, will be spent on digital capabilities, including services that will improve sales obtained through smart-phone shopping.

Target, which has consistently lagged behind its competitors in online revenue, rewrote 75 percent of the code in its e-commerce platform in 2014, and offered free shipping during the winter holiday season in order to better compete with Amazon, Wal-Mart and Best Buy. Its holiday sales rose 3.8 percent, the highest increase in three years. The restructuring will enable 350 of its 1,800 stores, up from 139 that have the capability now, to ship online orders by October.

The company projects sales growth of 1.5 to 2.5 percent this fiscal year and claims it will have the capacity to buy back up to $2 billion worth of its own shares this year and $3 billion annually in following years. Target CFO John Mulligan told Wall Street that he expected digital sales to rise by 40 percent this year.

The restructuring announcement comes just two months after Target Canada declared bankruptcy, closed all of its 133 retail outlets in the country, and laid off 17,600 workers. The push into Canada was spearheaded by former CEO Gregg Steinhafel who invested $7 billion in the expansion in less than two years. The company recorded losses of at least half that amount.

Steinhafel was fired last May, but was still allowed to remain on the executive board for several months as an “advisor” and was provided with a severance package of $61 million. However, only $15.9 million was initially disclosed due to limitations on cash paid up front. Obscured was his acceptance of a further $33.1 million in non-qualified deferred compensation, $1.2 million from a pension that he didn’t have to pay back and $10.8 million in stock options.

The total amount exceeded what all 17,600 Canadian workers received as severance combined, and will also likely exceed severance paid to the new crop of displaced workers, many of whom are new or part-time employees who will not even receive unemployment benefits from the United States government.

Many other companies have announced layoffs in recent months. In August, Scientific Gaming Corp. bought the slot machine manufacturing company Bally Technologies and announced that it will lay off one fifth of its employees in order to save $83 million. In December, KBR, the Houston engineering and construction company, announced a major restructuring of its business that would eliminate 1,000 jobs. The company stated that it aimed to “simplify the structure, reduce overhead costs and create a more market-focused business.”

Oilfield services company Weatherford International announced last month that it planned to lay off 8,000 workers, 15 percent of its employees, in order to reduce spending following the recent sharp drop in oil prices. They expect to save around $350 million annually. CEO Bernard J. Duroc-Danner stated that “we are ready to react swiftly to a dramatically changing landscape.”

Other energy-related companies have made similar announcements that bring the total number of known oil-worker jobs lost to nearly 30,000. BP announced in January that it would be laying off workers due to slumping oil prices, but declined to disclose how many jobs would be cut. Halliburton announced last month that it will cut between 5,200 and 6,400 jobs as oil and gas production slows down. Baker Hughes revealed in January that it will lay off 7,000 workers, and Schlumberger announced that it would lay off 9,000.

Petraeus gets slap on the wrist in state secrets case

Thomas Gaist

Former top general and CIA chief David Petraeus passed classified secret information to his lover, including details of ongoing covert operations and names of undercover agents, and subsequently lied about these actions to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Petraeus transferred the notebooks to Paula Broadwell in August 2011 while he was head of the CIA. The books contained a range of state secrets including US war plans, intelligence capabilities, and minutes from National Security Council meetings and private one-on-one discussions between the general and President Barack Obama, according to the Washington Post.

Broadwell requested the information as part of her research for a biography of Petraeus, published as All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. The evidence makes clear that Petraeus knew he was passing extremely sensitive information to his mistress.

“Umm, well, they’re really, I mean they are highly classified,” Petraeus can be heard telling Broadwell on an audio recording from 2011.

Less than a month before his affair with Broadwell became public, Petraeus lied to US government investigators, saying that he never transferred any secret information to her. An FBI team seized the notebooks from Petraeus’ residence in Virginia in April 2013, nearly half a year after the retired general signed an FBI statement declaring that he no longer possessed documents containing classified information.

The FBI had ordered Petraeus questioned after discovering emails between Broadwell and Jill Kelley, a wealthy socialite known for hosting lavish parties for top Pentagon officials at her residence in the Tampa, Florida area.

Senator John McCain, a leading congressional representative of the military-intelligence apparatus, voiced his unshaken solidarity with Petraeus, saying that he had already “expressed deep regret” and that “it is time to consider this matter closed.”

“Petraeus will continue to provide his outstanding service and leadership to our nation, as he has throughout his distinguished career,” McCain said.

While Edward Snowden and numerous other whistleblowers have been threatened with death and subject to extensive vilification in the media for revealing grave crimes by the government, Petraeus will pay a fine of $40,000 and will not face any jail time, according to federal attorneys.

The former general’s treatment is in sharp contrast to the savage penalties imposed on Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who exposed some of the crimes of American imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq by downloading classified material and sending it to WikiLeaks for publication.

Manning is serving a 35-year prison term, while Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has been locked up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he sought asylum three years ago.

Far from being prosecuted for war crimes, for which Manning, Assange and others have provided ample evidence, Petraeus has enjoyed a well-publicized career in the upper echelons of the American military-intelligence apparatus.

Prior to his downfall, Petraeus rose steadily through the military, culminating in the command of multinational forces in Iraq during 2007-08, then command of CENTCOM and of occupation forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus assumed leadership of the CIA in September 2011, and ran the top US intelligence agency for more than a year before the Broadwell relationship became public.

Since leaving the CIA in November 2012, Petraeus has been welcomed with open arms by the financial and academic establishment, working as a globe-trotting consultant for New York investment house Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP (KKR) and been appointed to professorships at the City University of New York (CUNY), the University of Southern California, and the University of Exeter.

Petraeus apparently fell afoul of political currents in Washington, under circumstances that remain murky even today. He was kicked upstairs from Afghanistan to the CIA in the summer of 2011, at a time when Republican Party circles were seriously discussing him as a possible presidential or vice presidential candidate against the Obama-Biden reelection ticket.

His ouster from the CIA was also politically timely. Petraeus handed in his resignation within days of Obama’s reelection, paving the way for John Brennan, Obama’s top national security aide and the overseer of the drone missile assassination program, to return to the CIA and become its director.

His resignation came only two months after the events in Benghazi, Libya, when a US diplomatic post and a CIA annex were attacked by Islamists who had been working with the agency as part of its efforts, first to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, then to attack the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Since then, the Republican hue and cry over Benghazi, itself motivated by an effort to discredit then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, has served to divert attention from the primary role of the CIA in the events in Libya, which remain uninvestigated to this day.

Judge limits evidence on role of main perpetrator of Boston Marathon bombings

Barry Grey

The federal trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got under way Wednesday amid extraordinary security surrounding the Boston courtroom, which was packed with reporters and victims of the April 15, 2013 bombings.

Boston police closed off streets that, even during major trials, are normally kept open. Barricades kept the public at a distance, while K-9 units guarded the building, a helicopter hovered overhead, and police boats stood by in Boston Harbor.

Even before the jurors were seated, Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. issued a ruling limiting the ability of lawyers for the 21-year-old defendant to discuss the role of his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in the planning and execution of the terrorist attack that killed three people and wounded another 264. The judge granted a prosecution motion to largely exclude evidence concerning the relationship between Tamerlan and Dzhokhar until the sentencing phase of the trial.

The ruling indicates the government’s intention to tightly control the information emerging from the proceedings so as to marginalize or exclude questions relating to extensive contacts over a period of years between the FBI and Tamerlan, who is believed to have organized the attack. The older Tsarnaev brother was killed in a shootout with police on April 19, 2013, four days after two pressure cooker bombs packed with nails and shrapnel were detonated near the downtown Boston finish line of the marathon.

In their opening statements to the jury, neither the prosecution nor defense lawyer referred to the still unexplained failure of federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security Department to prevent the bombings, even though the FBI and CIA had been warned multiple times by the Russian security service of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Islamist terrorist sympathies, the FBI had questioned the older brother and his parents, and Tamerlan had been placed on US terror watch lists.

Last year, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s defense team filed papers with the court alleging that the FBI had attempted to recruit Tamerlan Tsarnaev as an informant. The defense has requested all information relating to the FBI’s investigation of the older brother, but the government has objected to the release of such documents.

The defendant is charged with more than 30 counts relating to the bombings, many of which carry the death penalty. The charges include the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology policeman on the evening of April 18, three days after the bombings.

In 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to all charges.

In her opening statement, however, lead defense counsel Judy Clarke acknowledged that her client was involved in the terror attack. “It was him,” she told the jury. She called the bombings a “series of senseless, horribly misguided acts carried out by the two brothers,” and said Dzhokhar should be held accountable for his crime.

But she argued that her client had been lured and bullied into participating in the attack by his older brother, who was the author and chief protagonist of the crime. Clarke, who has represented defendants in a number of high-profile capital cases, is clearly seeking to convince the jury to spare her client’s life and instead sentence him to life imprisonment, the only alternative sentence if he is found guilty.

Prosecutor William Weinreb focused on the horror of the bombings and the terrible physical and emotional toll they took on innocent bystanders, including an eight-year-old child who was one of the three fatalities. He insisted that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was an independent actor, motivated by an Islamist extremist ideology and outrage over the US government’s treatment of Muslims around the world. His statement made clear that the government intends to seek the death penalty.

The Boston bombings became the occasion for the police-military lockdown of Boston and its environs, an area with over one million residents, on April 19, 2013, following the killing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and escape of Dzhokhar. Boston and its surrounding communities were flooded with thousands of heavily armed police and National Guard troops. They occupied the streets, supported by machine-gun-mounted armored vehicles, Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters.

Residents were ordered to “shelter in place” while police, with automatic weapons drawn, carried out warrantless house-to-house searches. The mass transit system was shut down, passenger train service was halted, and businesses, schools, universities and other public facilities were closed.

It was an unprecedented police-state operation. As the World Socialist Web Site noted at the time, the scene resembled the American occupation of Baghdad. This massive mobilization of police power was deployed, supposedly, to track down one 19-year-old suspect.

Just as there was virtually no expression of opposition to this dry run for dictatorship by any section of the media or political establishment at the time, the lockdown of Boston has been omitted from current commentary on the opening of the trial. This makes all the more important the posing of some of the unanswered questions regarding the events of April 2013, which are likely to be excluded from the court proceedings as well as the media coverage of the trial.

These include:

· Why did the FBI and CIA fail to respond to warnings from Russia’s security agency FSB in 2011 and 2012 concerning Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s support for Islamist separatist and terrorist organizations in Russia’s North Caucasian regions of Chechnya and Dagestan? Why did they ignore Russia’s request that Tsarnaev be prevented from traveling to these regions?

· Why did the FBI clear Tamerlan Tsarnaev of harboring terrorist sympathies in 2011 after supposedly carrying out an intensive investigation? Why did the agency claim there was no “derogatory” information against him, even though it suspected him of having participated in the Waltham, Massachusetts murder of three Jewish men, including a “best friend,” on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks?

· Why was he allowed to travel to Dagestan in January of 2012, without even being questioned at the airport? He remained there for six months and reportedly made contact with Islamist groups that have carried out terror attacks against Russian targets. Why was he allowed to return to the US without even being stopped at the airport and questioned on his return?

· Why did the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security Department fail to inform their state and local counterparts on the Boston joint terrorism task force of their contacts with Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the Boston Marathon?

These unanswered questions strongly suggest that US intelligence was seeking to use Tamerlan Tsarnaev to further its covert anti-Russian operations among Chechen and Dagestan separatists. These regions also supplied many of the foreign fighters recruited by the CIA for its proxy war for regime change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

This connection is underscored by another critical fact ignored by the US media—the role of Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers. In the 1990s, Tsarni ran a US group called the Congress of Chechen International Organizations, which helped supply anti-Russian insurgents in Chechnya with military equipment. The organization was registered at the home of his father-in-law, Graham Fuller.

Fuller had been vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA under President Reagan, and had worked for the agency in a number of countries, including serving as CIA station chief in Kabul.

Dozens killed in fatal methane blast at east Ukraine coal mine

Robert Stevens

Thirty-two coal miners were killed, another is missing and more than a dozen hospitalised with injuries, following a suspected methane gas blast Wednesday at the privately-owned Zasyadko coal mine located near the separatist-held city of Donetsk. Eight years ago, the same mine experienced Ukraine’s worst ever mining disaster.

In a country which is virtually bankrupt and is only being kept afloat by International Monetary Fund loans, miners at Zasyadko have continued to work despite being near the frontline of a warzone.

In January, 500 miners were trapped underground at Zasyadko after artillery fired by Ukrainian armed forces hit the electricity station that supplies the pit with power. A union official told a Ukrainian TV channel there had been no fighting in the area in recent days.

At least 230 workers were in the shaft when the explosion occurred around 3:20GMT local time. During the afternoon, authorities in Donetsk announced that over 198 people had been able to escape from the mine.

While the number of fatalities has yet to be confirmed, Ukrainian parliament speaker Volodymyr Hroisman announced shortly after the blast that 32 miners had been killed. Other sources initially reported that as many as 77 miners had died in the blast.

As a rescue operation was put into place, the head of the Kievsky district in Donetsk, Ivan Prikhodko, said no communication could be established with the miners trapped underground. The Emergency Ministry and the Independent miners’ trade union said there were either 73 or 207 people underground at the time. In the afternoon, a trade union official told journalists that 47 miners remained missing inside the mine.

The sister of missing miner Alexei Novoselsky was one of about 30 relatives desperate for information about their loved ones. She pleaded in tears to a rescue worker at the entrance to the mine, “Tell me, are there survivors? Why are you concealing the truth?”

Most reports said a build-up of methane gas which ignited was the probable cause of the blast. The head of the Donetsk People’s Republic emergency services Aleksey Kostrubitsky told the media, “Presumably, it was a methane explosion.”

Zasyadko, a deep mine with levels of methane well-known to be particularly hazardous, is infamous as the location of many disasters. Since 1999, more than 240 miners have lost their lives in the pit at Zasyadko.

Following a methane explosion at a mine, it is critical that workers are rescued as quickly as possible. A medical worker on the scene who was asked about the chance of survival for those trapped in the shaft said, “It’s getting smaller and smaller all the time, because of the methane, the hot air, burns to the airways.”

The BBC reported the comments of a welder at the mine who said, “I’ve been down the pit for 23 years, and this is the fourth explosion that I can recall. If they didn’t get them out straight away, then later they will only retrieve bodies. An explosion is a terrible thing.”

The Zasyadko mine is the largest in Ukraine, employing 10,000 people and producing up to 10,000 tons of coal per day. In 2013, it produced 1.4 million tonnes of coal. The mine is part-owned by Yukhym Zvyahilsky, once an acting prime minister of Ukraine and now an MP. He is described by the BBC as “a local leader with money and influence.” During the final years of the Soviet era, from 1979 through 1992, Zvyahilsky was a director of the Zasyadko mine.

The mine plays a critical role in supplying the industrial operations of Ukrainian oligarchs, under conditions in which the civil war has led to a fall in total coal production. Due to disruption of operations, national coal production fell by 22 percent in 2014 to 65 million tonnes. By the end of 2014, Zasyadko was still supplying coal to coke and chemical works in the Donetsk region owned by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch. Akhmetov is the 47th richest man in the world, worth an estimated $15.4 billion. 

In November 2007, 101 miners were killed at Zasyadko in Ukraine’s worst ever pit disaster. The workers were killed after the mine filled with methane gas that then exploded. The tragedy was one of three incidents that year which resulted in fatalities.

Zasyadko opened in 1958 and was never properly modernised. Following the restoration of capitalism in Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the vast majority of mines were left in a decrepit and unsafe condition. In the 20 years prior to 2007, just 10 out of approximately 200 pits were modernised. The majority of mines are completely run-down, with many not even deploying sensors to warn of the danger of gas.

From 1991 to 2002, pit tragedies claimed the lives of 435 miners in Ukraine, many due to explosions and fires. In March 2000, a methane gas explosion in the Barakova mine killed more than 80 miners. By 2006, according to the State Committee on Industrial Safety and Labour Protection, 6,751 industrial accidents were recorded in coalmining enterprises, with 168 of them resulting in a fatality.

In short, the Zasyadko mine, among many others in the country, is a death trap. The hundreds of miners’ lives taken at the pit in just the last 15 years are an indictment of Ukraine’s capitalist coal industry. A cemetery built next to the mine holds the graves of many miners. Reuters quoted the head of security at the mine who said, “When there’s an accident, we bury them all here. Coal is a costly business.”

The human cost of mining in Ukraine is indeed staggering. By 2007, it was estimated that for every million tonnes of coal produced in Ukraine, five miners died and 350 were injured. On average, one miner died underground each day.

The deaths at Zasyadko reveal yet again the bloody price that workers living in the former Soviet Union are paying for the restoration of capitalism—a system that sacrifices the safety of workers at the altar of profits.