Australian trade unions spearhead slashing of wage penalty rates

Mike Head

Australia’s largest trade union, covering retail workers, has initiated a “template” agreement with employers that seeks to deliver one of the corporate elite’s central demands—the dismantling of after-hours penalty rates in order to help drive down pay levels to match the deep cuts imposed on workers in the US and Europe.

Hailed as “historic” and “landmark” by business leaders, the deal signed between the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA) and Business SA abolishes penalty rates on Saturdays and weekday evenings, reduces rates for Sundays from a 100 percent loading to 50 percent, and cuts public holiday rates from 150 percent to 100 percent.

The agreement potentially covers, in the first instance, 40,000 low-paid shop assistants working in South Australian small businesses. They had no say in the deal, which the SDA wants to impose on them in return for employer-backed coverage of their employees. Like the rest of the union movement, the SDA depends on membership fee collection deals with employers.

Some retail workers immediately denounced the union. Michael Demasi from Adelaide, who stands to lose nearly $50 a shift for Sunday work, condemned the SDA for “failing to represent workers’ interests.” An SDA member for 10 years, he told Fairfax Media: “That a major union can work against us, it’s a stab in the back for people like me who have been paying their fees for so long. It sets a bad precedent.”

This precedent will devastate workers’ living standards. Among the first and hardest to be hit will be young and poorly-paid workers in insecure casual or part-time jobs, especially in the retail, hospitality and tourism industries. But at least 1.5 million workers, including throughout the healthcare, manufacturing and construction industries, rely on penalty rates to provide up to 30 percent of their income.

Without penalty rates, which were established more than a century ago as the result of hard-fought struggles by the working class, they will be unable to pay their monthly bills, including mortgage payments.

Politically, the agreement sends a wider signal: the unions, and the Labor Party, are ready to enforce an all-out assault on wages and working conditions. This offensive is being dictated by big business amid the sharpening impact of the post-2008 world economic breakdown on Australian capitalism, which has seen the prices for its major exports—iron ore, coal and natural gas—halved in less than a year.

There has been mounting frustration in ruling circles with Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government. Confronted by intense public hostility to its budget cuts to social spending and moves to dismantle working conditions, Abbott has publicly abandoned his promises to produce budget surpluses, and put off plans to scrap penalty rates until after the next federal election.

In January, under escalating pressure from business to slash labour costs, Abbott backed a call by the government’s Productivity Commission for the removal of penalty rates and the cutting of the minimum wage. Later, however, with his government increasingly unravelling, Abbott’s ministers declared that no such steps would be taken before the scheduled 2016 election. This provoked an outcry from business groups.

Business SA chief executive Nigel McBride, who negotiated the South Australian deal after being approached by SDA state secretary Peter Malinauskas, said business needed an urgent solution because of the absence of political will from the Abbott government. “This will be a first in Australia,” McBride said. “It is the leading national example of a peak chamber and a peak union getting together.”

Labor Party leaders immediately seized upon the deal, saying it proved that penalty rates could be removed more quickly with the help of the unions. They referred specifically to the “enterprise bargaining” and “Fair Work” mechanisms imposed on workers by the unions and the previous Labor governments of prime ministers Hawke, Keating, Rudd and Gillard.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten, a former union boss, hailed the agreement as a “win-win,” saying he was open to further such deals around the country. “For me, the lesson is you can do it in the current system,” he said. Mark Butler, a senior shadow minister and another ex-union official, said Labor had supported such deals since the 1990s. “This is what we envisaged when Paul Keating’s government put together the enterprise bargaining model,” he said.

Nervous about the response of workers, Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Dave Oliver was more cautious. Nevertheless, he endorsed the removal of penalty rates, so long as workers got more than “a big fat nothing” in return. Just three weeks ago, the ACTU staged “Day of Action” rallies, demagogically claiming to oppose the scrapping of penalty rates, and urging workers to return Labor governments in order to defend their basic rights.

In an attempt to justify the agreement, SDA national secretary Gerard Dwyer called it “an amazing step forward” for his members, because they supposedly gained the right to refuse to work on weekends and public holidays. In reality, as now, most employees would have no choice but to work those hours, for fear of being replaced by one of the nearly 800,000 workers already officially unemployed.

The SDA claimed that the deal would not cut workers’ wages overall. In return for losing penalty rates, a full-time shop assistant’s base pay rate would increase by 8 percent from $703.90 a week to $760 a week, and then by two 3-percent increments to $806 by July 2016. After tax, this would still leave them below the poverty line. In any case, these small rises would be eroded rapidly by inflation, and the penalty rates will be gone for good.

That is why the Abbott government embraced the agreement. Employment Minister Eric Abetz said the South Australian negotiators “should be applauded for taking a constructive approach.” Likewise, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry hailed the deal, saying it provided scope for an agreed national template. The Murdoch-owned Australian called it a “significant boon to business” that “augurs well for the future of workplace relations in Australia.”

The Business Council of Australia, representing the largest conglomerates, said it was a “commonsense deal,” but insisted on a more sweeping abolition of penalty rates throughout the entire economy. Having paved the way for the offensive, Labor and the unions will do everything in their power to satisfy this demand. The SDA’s agreement is a demonstration to the financial elite of their capacity to out-perform the Liberal-National Coalition in inflicting unprecedented attacks on workers.

This historic deal to dismantle penalty rates is a damning exposure of all those, such as the various pseudo-left groups, who present the unions as “workers’ organisations” and Labor as a “lesser evil” compared with the Coalition. Labor and its union enforcers are agencies of the capitalist elite—apparatuses for imposing the destruction of jobs, hard-won conditions and living standards, in order to make Australian capitalism “competitive” under conditions of a worldwide assault on the working class.

Australian property bubble could be heading for a bust

Nick Beams

Australia’s growing property bubble, especially in and around the country’s largest city, Sydney, could be on the way to bursting, with far-reaching social, economic and financial consequences.

That conclusion emerges from two recent reports on household indebtedness and the dependence of the country’s four major banks on lending for property, and a warning issued yesterday by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

Last week, Barclays bank’s chief Australian economist, Kieran Davies, issued the findings of research showing that private sector debt had risen to 206 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), up from 191 percent before the global financial crisis. This ratio placed Australia in the top 25 percent of the most leveraged countries.

When it came to household debt, Australia had the leading position, at 130 percent of GDP. Household debt includes credit cards, overdrafts and personal loans, but the largest component is mortgage debt.

The mortgage debt level could climb further if the Reserve Bank cuts its base interest rate below its already historic low of 2.25 percent. Any reduction in interest rates fuels an increase in house prices, forcing home buyers to take on increased mortgages and leaving them exposed to even small rate rises in the future.

Davies warned that the household debt level was a “vulnerability” in the event of another global financial shock, although he did not expect any immediate problems because interest rates would remain low in 2015. In other words, as long as cheap money continues to flow, house prices and mortgage debt will keep escalating.

In its analysis, Lazard, a global financial advisory and asset management firm, warned of potential financial instability and the growing exposure of the four major banks to the housing market.

Lazard analyst Phil Hofflin said record household debt in the property market could be a “worrying” scenario. He noted that the median price for houses in the inland country town of Wagga Wagga was higher than for Chicago.

Recalling the impact of the US mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, he said: “What happened in the US in terms of wealth effect when property fell could be worse here because property dominates Australians’ balance sheet … and because property prices are so high in the first place.”

Hofflin was involved in recapitalising the Westpac bank after it ran into problems during Australia’s last recession during the early 1990s. He warned that, taking into account rental yields, costs and taxes, residential property was trading at 60 times earnings, four times the value used by investors to assess shares.

Bank lending has shifted during the property boom. In 2000, banks’ lending to business matched their home lending. By 2010, for every $1,000 of home lending, only $600 was lent to businesses. This trend has continued since then. House mortgages now comprise about two thirds of the money owed to the banks.

Mortgage lending has proved to be highly profitable and the major banks’ share prices have risen accordingly.

Bank capitalisations are now equal to 35 percent of the Australian stock market, a figure Hofflin said he had never seen before. Globally, bank capitalisations average about 9 percent of stock markets. Even in the Japanese property boom that began to collapse in 1990, the figure was two thirds of the current Australian level.

In its latest Financial Stability Review, the Reserve Bank of Australia also voiced its concerns about “speculative demand” in the housing market, fuelled by the supply of cheap credit. It said that new lending to property investors had risen by 150 percent in New South Wales over the past three years, with strong growth in the neighbouring state of Victoria.

This forms a marked contrast to the rest of the economy. For the first time in 50 years, businesses are about to record their third annual decline in investment. According to an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey, mining investment is expected to fall by 20 percent in 2015–16.

While a sharp decline was expected in mining, the 21 percent predicted drop in manufacturing investment was not. In fact, the various economic models produced by the Treasury department and the RBA assume that increases elsewhere in the economy will compensate for the lower mining investment decline. Clearly this is not happening.

The RBA faces an acute dilemma. On the one hand, the drop in business investment, coupled with ongoing rate-cutting by the world’s major central banks, is creating pressure to further reduce its base rate. On the other hand, any rate cut will further inflate the property bubble.

The RBA also pointed to a surge in commercial property prices, which was out of line with fundamental economic conditions, and could lead to a sudden decline. “The risk of large re-pricing and associated market dislocation in the commercial property sector has increased,” it said, adding that there were clear signs of oversupply in some markets.

Commercial property lending, while dwarfed by the housing market, posed a “disproportionately large risk to banks” and was responsible for episodes of stress in the banking sector, both in Australia and internationally, the RBA said.

Speaking at a business lunch yesterday, ANZ banking group chairman David Gonski said conditions in financial markets were “quite scary.” Urging the RBA not to cut interest rates again, because that would further boost share and property prices, he said: “There is no doubt in my mind that risk is being put as somewhat secondary at times by investors in relation to the search for yield.”

A major downturn in any sector of the financial markets could rapidly set in train processes leading to a recession—the first in Australia for almost a quarter of a century—resulting in an escalation in unemployment. The social consequences will be far-reaching. Working class families, often relying on two incomes to repay mortgages of hundreds of thousands of dollars, will be thrust into poverty virtually overnight.

The California drought: Water-rationing plan leaves corporate interests untouched

Evan Blake

The unprecedented drought gripping California has deepened for the fourth consecutive year, having already set new records for the lowest annual precipitation levels on record. 2014 brought the highest calendar-year temperature for the state, while this February was the hottest on record and this January the driest.

A recent study conducted by Daniel Griffin and Kevin J. Anchukaitis found that the current episode “is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.”

Last Thursday, California Governor Jerry Brown announced a new bill, which he claims will provide $1 billion in drought-related spending, mostly on flood protection. The bill merely expedites funds already approved by California voters, and will do nothing to resolve the state’s dire water crisis.

Last Tuesday, the California State Water Resources Control Board intensified emergency legislation targeting residential “water wasters,” initially implemented last summer. The law imposes a $500 fine for offenses including excessive lawn watering.

Both measures leave untouched the giant agribusinesses and oil corporations that account for a majority of the state’s water usage and dominate the political system.

On Sunday, Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Governor Brown whether “considering how much water…is used for fracking [hydraulic fracturing]…isn’t that alone enough reason to prohibit fracking or temporarily stop it?”

Brown sought to deflect the question, responding: “No, not at all. First of all, fracking in California has been going on for more than 50 years. It uses a fraction of the water of fracking on the East Coast for gas, particularly.”

Throughout his entire political career, dating back to the 1970s, Brown has been entirely beholden to Big Oil, while posturing as a defender of the environment. He has accepted at least $2 million in campaign contributions from oil corporations since 2006, including Chevron, Occidental Petroleum, Southern California Edison, Valero Energy, Tesoro Corp, Conoco Phillips and Aera Energy (owned jointly by Shell and ExxonMobil). Most of these companies donated the maximum amount possible to Brown’s reelection campaign last November.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, for years, state regulators knowingly allowed oil companies, mostly in the impoverished Central Valley, to pump their waste water into groundwater aquifers that contained drinkable water.

Every year, the oil industry in California produces roughly 130 billion gallons of wastewater, as the state is the third-largest oil producer in the US. Kern County, home to most of California’s oil and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) wells, has the worst air quality of any county in the US, along with some of the highest rates of cancer and respiratory illness.

Climate change, a byproduct of the oil corporations’ unrelenting drive to accumulate profit, has played the most significant role in determining the length and severity of the ongoing drought, as well as the likelihood for future droughts.

On March 12, the leading bourgeois press outlet in the state, the Los Angeles Times, prominently featured an op-ed penned by NASA’s senior water scientist, Jay Famiglietti, titled “California has about ONE year of water left. Will you ration now?”

Famiglietti begins the op-ed by stating that “Right now the state has only about ONE year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” He proposes a water rationing scheme across “all of the state’s water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial.”

Despite the calls by experts to place restrictions on business, last Tuesday the State Water Resources Control Board furthered emergency drought regulations that target solely consumers, leaving agribusiness untouched. Local water districts must restrict lawn watering to twice weekly, among other tepid reductions in consumers’ water usage.

The state will now place local water agencies under intense scrutiny, ensuring that they levy $500 daily fines against “water wasters” that were first enacted last summer. Over the past year, few fines were doled out locally, with one notable exception being Santa Cruz, which issued over $1.6 million in penalties against individual consumers. The cities of San Ramon and Dublin, both east of Oakland, issued $40,000 in combined fines.

Instead of adopting any sort of progressive policy to implement well-known, rational planning methods that would ensure the viability of California’s water supply for future generations, the existing political setup seeks to reduce the highly complex issue to merely punishing individual consumers.

The drought has already devastated thousands of working-class families, as an estimated 17,100 agricultural laborers lost their jobs during last year’s growing season alone, with that number expected to rise significantly this year. The brunt of these job losses occurred in the agricultural heart of the state, the Central Valley, a stretch of land roughly 450 miles long, from Bakersfield in the south to Redding in the north, and between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west.

Between the spring of 2013 and the spring of 2014, water levels in groundwater basins throughout the Central Valley fell by 50 feet or more, amid a race to drill ever-deeper and more expensive groundwater pumps. In one of the Central Valley’s most productive agricultural regions, Tulare County, 874 well permits were issued in the first six months of 2014 alone, 44 more than the county issued in all of 2013.

In the process, hundreds of private wells across Tulare County dried up, leaving thousands of East Porterville’s working-class residents without water. The state’s only response to this dire crisis has been to provide limited amounts of bottled water to inhabitants, with no plans implemented to develop water infrastructure for residents.

A package of three bills signed last September by Brown will implement the first-ever groundwater regulations in the state, but will have no effect until 2040, and even then will not require businesses to report how much water they pump individually. Barring an end to the drought, which scientists have noted could become a decades-long “megadrought,” all remaining groundwater will have long disappeared by that time.

The legislation passed last Tuesday does nothing to curb groundwater usage by the agricultural giants, the only ones capable of shelling out upwards of $400,000 to drill the 2,000-foot (600-meter) pumps required to extract dwindling groundwater reserves.

Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of California’s total water usage, while the remainder is used by urban industry and household consumers, with outdoor landscaping accounting for roughly half of total urban usage. Thus, at most the recent regulations will cause a 5 percent reduction in the state’s total water usage.

California produces over 99 percent of all almonds, pistachios, olives, walnuts, rice, plums, dates, figs, raisins, artichokes, kiwis, peaches and pomegranates grown in the US, and is also the leading producer of dozens of other food commodities. In recent decades, international demand has led to a large transition toward growing orchard and vineyard crops.

During the drought, many farmers have fallowed even more of their traditional vegetable crops, diverting water toward almond trees and other orchards, which take longer to mature and are thus a larger CAPITAL INVESTMENT. California currently grows roughly 80 percent of the world’s almond supply, in addition to 43 percent of all pistachios and 28 percent of all walnuts, and these cash crops are indispensable to maintaining profitability.

The “almond empire” is centered in the San Joaquin Valley, home to the largest almond-growing monopoly in the world, Paramount Farming. Paramount’s owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, are closely connected to Governor Brown, as well as Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and other state politicians, and have influenced water policy in the state for decades.

This couple is the modern-day reincarnation of the most corrupt aspects of former Los Angeles Mayor Frederick Eaton and his associate Joseph Lippincott, immortalized in the character of Noah Cross, played by John Huston in the 1974 Roman Polanski classic Chinatown. In addition to Paramount Farming, their holding company also owns Paramount Citrus and Paramount Farms, the world’s largest growers of citrus and pistachios.

Financial interests, including New York-based retirement and INVESTMENT fund TIAA-CREF and Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a subsidiary of the insurance and financial services giant Manulife Financial, have recently joined the bumper crop frenzy, becoming some of the largest nut growers in California.

Despite the proven efficiency of drip irrigation for orchard and vineyard crops, 20.3 percent of all vineyard and 13.4 percent of all almond and pistachio crops in the state continue to be grown using flood irrigation methods. Thus, almond trees alone PRESENTLY account for 10 percent of California’s total annual water usage, more than the combined domestic usage of the state’s 38.8 million inhabitants.

There are immense efficiencies to be gained through the statewide adoption of crop-specific irrigation methods and other efficiency improvements. Yet any such rational reorganization is blocked by the interests of the US financial oligarchy, which, controlling the entire political system, will not abide any impingement on its profits.

UAW president insists auto workers must “face the facts” of global competition

Jerry White

The two-day Special Bargaining Convention of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit concluded Wednesday with the UAW outlining no specific demands for the auto companies in upcoming talks for new contracts covering 139,000 General Motors, Ford and Chrysler workers.

Special Bargaining Convention in Detroit

In an earlier period, at least until the late 1970s, rank-and-file workers would closely follow and even participate in such conventions. The majority of the workers in the factories today took no notice of the event, and few look to the UAW, after decades of betrayed struggles, to improve their lives.

The event was a charade organized by and for the trade union apparatus. This included the ritual of a “discussion” on bargaining goals that did not evoke any serious opposition from the 900 vetted delegates.

UAW officials ordering WSWS reporter from press conference

The whole operation was carefully vetted. While granting the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News and other corporate-controlled news outlets access to a post-convention press conference with UAW President Dennis Williams, the World Socialist Web Site was barred. Claiming the WSWS had not been “accredited”—even though a request had been submitted on time—UAW Communications Director Sandra Davis and several sergeants-at-arms ordered this reporter out of the conference room.

As for ordinary workers, their presence was expressed only in the worried comments from officials about a potential rebellion by workers against the UAW itself. In their public statements and in comments made by delegates to this reporter, ONE repeatedly heard how “tough” the negotiations this year were. By this they meant difficulty not with the companies, but with restive workers who want to recoup their losses from UAW-backed concessions under conditions in which the auto companies are making record profits.

UAW President Dennis Williams

UAW officials mouthed empty rhetoric about “bridging the gap” between tier-one and tier-two workers and “fighting to rebuild the middle class” after decades of rising CEO pay and inequality. “I truly believe that our companies know that we can be both creative and thoughtful,” Williams declared in the main address. “But make no doubt about it, they also know that as we share in the bad times, we must equally share in the good times.”

Such statements are entirely for show, however. Behind the scenes, the UAW has already assured the auto executives that it will do nothing to adversely affect the COMPETITIVENESS and profitability of the US-based automakers.

“We face many challenges this year, and there is a lot at stake,” Williams said of the many contracts the UAW and other companies face this year. However, he said, “There is a global economy, and competitors that have advantages economically and governments that manipulate currencies and put up barriers to imports.”

The companies could not make “bad decisions,” he said, referring obliquely to the cover-up of deadly defects that undermined GM profits. “Nor can we not face the facts or the realities,” he declared, making it clear that he expected the delegates push back against any demands that would make the companies “uncompetitive.”

After collaborating for decades in the destruction of jobs and the decimation of industrial centers, the slashing of wages is now at the center of the UAW’s “growth strategy.” In his report to the convention, Vice President Jimmy Settles, who is in charge of negotiations with Ford, boasted that the UAW had made the automaker’s US plants so COMPETITIVE that it relocated production from low wage countries back to the US, adding 3,000 more dues-paying members.

The collaboration of the UAW and the intervention of the Obama administration had made Fiat-Chrysler Automotive (FCA) the fastest growing car company in the United States, Vice President Norman Jewell boasted. He neglected, however, to mention the new report from the Center for Automotive Research that showed how the unlimited expansion of tier-two workers sanctioned by the UAW had allowed FCA to undercut the labor COSTS of GM and Ford by $10 an hour.

This has prompted the TWO automakers to ask the UAW to set up a new, third-tier of “low-skill” workers who would earn even less than current tier-two workers. While Williams demagogically declared that “there are already too many damned tiers” in his speech, he did not rule out the new lower wage category. In fact, a new tier of lower paid workers was at the center of a UAW deal at Lear’s Hammond, Indiana plant last year.

The UAW has already accepted the abolition of overtime pay after eight hours, poverty level wages for new hires and an end to cost of living adjustments and annual wage increases for “legacy” workers. As a reward, the corporations and the Obama administration handed the UAW billions in corporate shares and cash payments to its myriad joint training, safety, real estate and INVESTMENT schemes.

In his address, Williams praised Obama for “SAVING” the auto industry in 2009 and, in contrast to the Republicans, appreciating the value of unions and “collective bargaining.” Indeed, the Democrats recognize the value of these corporatist organizations for the suppression of the class struggle. The concessions imposed by the UAW spearheaded the transformation of the US into a cheap labor haven, leading the developed world in the percentage of low-paying jobs.

Williams reiterated the UAW’s undying support for capitalism, while warning of the dangers of social inequality and the collapsing influence of the trade unions. “A free market society must have working men and women with disposable incomes, who have real purchasing power to consume goods; that’s not a myth, that’s a fact…A society built on low wage jobs does not deliver purchasing power.”

Williams’ picture of capitalism has no relation to modern reality. Instead he is hearkening back to a bygone era before the decay of American capitalism and the loss of its world dominance. Over the last four decades, financial parasitism, not the manufacture of goods, has BECOME the dominant mode of wealth accumulation for the ruling class. To augment these riches, the financial aristocracy is setting out to destroy every gain won by the working class—decent wages, health care, pensions, public education and other social rights—and expand its exploitation of workers around the world.

The working class must respond no less ruthlessly. For that, the UAW and other pro-capitalist and nationalist unions are worse than useless: they are the greatest impediments.

The Germanwings Airbus crash: What is the state of airline safety?

Dietmar Henning

An Airbus plane belonging to the Lufthansa subsidiary Germanwings crashed in the Alps in southern France on Tuesday morning, killing all 144 passengers and 6 crew MEMBERS. Shortly after reaching its official flying altitude of 11,600 metres, the plane began to descend rapidly. The descent lasted eight minutes.

Pilots suspect that their colleagues were prompted by a sudden drop in cabin pressure to begin a sharp descent before they lost consciousness due to lack of oxygen. The descent to a lower altitude should have balanced out the drop in pressure. But it would seem the pilots either never regained consciousness, or did so too late.

However, it remains unclear why flight 4U9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed. The security firms and companies involved in the investigation have declared that weeks or even months could go by before a precise cause can be determined, if ONE ever can be.

In light of the latest tragedy it is necessary to examine the state of safety conditions in the international airline industry.

The Airbus 320 is ONE of the most widely used aircraft in the world. Together with planes from the same family of aircraft, it is considered to be extremely safe. Almost 6,400 A320 planes have been provided to airlines since 1988. On Tuesday alone, around 3,000 A320s were in the air.

The plane involved in the accident was 24 years old, having been supplied to Lufthansa in 1991. According to company information, the last major safety check was performed in the summer of 2013, and the last minor maintenance was carried out on the day before the accident. Experts commented that the age of an aircraft does not play a major role in regular and carefully conducted maintenance. However, every round of maintenance is more expensive than the last.

According to planespotters.net, the average age of the Germanwings fleet is 23.8 years, while Lufthansa’s entire fleet averages 13.8 years. Lufthansa is attempting to exchange its aging fleet, but according to newspaper reports, they do not have enough capital to do so quickly.

The plane involved in the accident also remained on the ground on Tuesday morning for several hours in Düsseldorf due to technical problems. According to Spiegel Online, there was a problem with the nose landing door. This is the flap that opens and closes to allow the nose wheel to come out for landing. “However, this problem was fully resolved, meaning that as of 10:00 yesterday, morning, the aircraft was once again in regular service,” a Lufthansa spokesman explained.

While the technology used in the aircraft is increasingly complex, experts are divided over its use. Although it ensures higher levels of safety, if it breaks down the planes are extremely difficult to fly manually. The so-called fly-by-wire technology in modern aircraft is designed so that it is increasingly computer technology rather than pilots steering the plane.

Interventions by the pilot are first checked by the safety system, with every action the pilot makes essentially being a request for the technology to determine whether or not it could produce danger. In this way, the risk of human error is supposed to be eliminated.

However, a major problem arises when the technology fails. In November of last year, an Airbus A321 belonging to Lufthansa flew from Bilbao, Spain, to Munich. A crash was nearly caused by icing on the sensors, which caused the sensors to supply incorrect data to the on-board system. In this case, the plane also made a rapid descent of approximately 1,000 metres per minute. It took considerable effort on the part of the pilots to switch off the automated system in order to bring the plane manually under control and SAVE the lives of the 109 passengers and crew.

Lufthansa stated that following this incident, all sensors on the A320 series of aircraft would be replaced. But warnings about the danger of icing on sensors on aircraft in the A320, A330 and A340 series had already been made by the European Agency for Air Safety (EASA) TWO years earlier. Despite these warnings, the close call last November was required in order to convince Lufthansa of the need to replace the sensors.

The growing range of technology demands a higher level of training for pilots. The pilots’ trade union Cockpit has been criticising the neglect of such training for some time. The laws on training have been written for aircraft from the 1950s and 1960s.

Instead of altering the regulations to meet the safety requirements of passengers and crew, they are adjusted to meet the demand for profits by the airline companies. In October 2013, the European Parliament adopted a European regulation on airline service working time proposed by the transport commissioner that came into force in 2014.

According to the new regulation, pilots can be required to fly up to 11 hours at night. Along with the night flying time, the time spent waiting before a flight, so-called preparation time, is also included. The EASA, which is closely connected with the airline industry and companies, considers a maximum of 14 hours to be justified. In extreme cases, this can be increased to 22 hours, with the pilots on duty until landing.

Rather than the interests of passengers and crew determining policies in the airline industry, the lives and working conditions of the employees, and the safety of passengers are subordinated to STOCK MARKETS and their demands for cuts in the airline industry

In the 1990s, budget airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet entered the European market. Somewhat later, the airline companies from the Gulf states, including Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, as well as Turkish Airways and Air China, began to compete with the European and American leaders in long-haul flights. Since then, the working conditions of employees and the safety procedures in the planes have been in a downward spiral. The burden of the COMPETITIVE struggle for profits has been borne by the crews and passengers.

Germanwings emerged in 2002 as Lufthansa’s competitor to the budget airlines. In the meantime, the process has gone even further, and Germanwings is to be shuttered and its routes taken over by the even cheaper Eurowings. Labour COSTS on Eurowings are reportedly 40 percent lower than for the remaining 5,400 pilots at Germanwings and Lufthansa.

The strikes by Lufthansa pilots, which have been ongoing for almost a year, are directed against the company’s strategy, led by CEO Karsten Spohr. He has made his position in the struggle with the pilots clear. For him, there is no right to good living standards and decent pay if share dividends are declining.

For the same cost-cutting reason, maintenance on aircraft is being reduced. Zeit Online cited a Lufthansa technician who is also responsible for Germanwings. “In the past, aircraft were maintained every day, but now almost all airlines only carry out maintenance every second day.”

An air traffic controller told the WSWS that even aircraft with technical problems are sometimes allowed to fly. In case of safety problems arising due to the self-check by the pilot shortly prior to departure, the plane will be flown with the safety and back-up systems. Since a repair is cheaper at a domestic hanger than at another airport, it is better on the company’s bottom line to fly such an aircraft back to the home airport to be checked over by the company’s own technicians. In this way, the cost of a delayed or even cancelled flight can be SAVED.

Cuts are also made to fuel costs, sometimes through the use of modern technology. However, extremely risky methods are also used to push down costs. In July 2012, THREE Ryanair planes had to carry out emergency landings because they had too little fuel in their fuel tanks. Cockpit reported at the time that an increasing number of pilots at German airlines were being threatened with disciplinary measures if they used too much fuel.

The growing budget air travel market is leading to intensified COMPETITION. This does not only come at the expense of working conditions and pay of crews, but endangers the lives of thousands of passengers every day. As long as airline safety is subordinated to the demands and profits requirements of the airline companies and their shareholders, Tuesday’s disaster involving the Germanwings plane will not be the last, regardless of what was ultimately responsible for the plane crash and the deaths of 150 people.

Canada plans dramatic expansion of its role in Mideast war

Roger Jordan

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper presented a motion to parliament Tuesday endorsing the extension of Canadian military operations in Iraq for a further twelve months, and their expansion into Syria.

According to the Conservative government’s plan, the Canadian Special Forces personnel currently deployed in northern Iraq, officially to assist and train Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, will remain in the country until 30 March 2016. Whilst the government continues to insist that no Canadian troops will be involved in ground combat in Iraq, the mission has already seen Canadian troops engaged in frontline firefights and helping direct air strikes.

The six CF-18 fighter jets that have been bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq since last October, together with two surveillance aircraft and an air re-fuelling plane, will now expand their operations into Syria.

Debate on Harper’s motion is due to commence today, with a further day’s debate scheduled for next Monday. A vote is expected on Monday evening.

The expansion of Canada’s role in the conflict to Syria constitutes a new act of aggression and is a major step towards Canada’s participation in an explicit war for regime change in Damascus.

Significantly, Harper has shifted his position from last October, when he said that Canadian participation in air strikes in Syria would be conditional on a formal request from Bashar al-Assad’s government. On Tuesday, Harper declared that the Syrian government’s approval is no longer needed. “In expanding our air strikes into Syria, the government has now decided that we will not seek the express consent of the Syrian government,” he told parliament.

Hitherto, none of the US’s western war-coalition partners have agreed to join it in bombing targets in Syria.

Under international law, such action is illegal and tantamount to an act of war. While the government continues to insist that the Canadian military intervention in the Middle East is directed solely at the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the US and its allies—including Canada—have not renounced their goal of ousting Assad. Indeed, the official US war strategy is that ISIS’s defeat should be the prelude to a renewed push for regime change in Damascus.

Responding to a question on the mission’s expansion, Harper endeavoured to cast the US-led war coalition as opponents of extremism and defenders of the innocent. “Our allies have indicated they are taking necessary and proportionate military action in Syria on the basis that the government of Syria is unwilling or unable to prevent (ISIS) from staging operations and conducting attacks there, including attacks that ultimately include this country as a target.”

What a fraud! The United States and its allies are in reality chiefly responsible for the growth of ISIS and other religious extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. As part of a divide and rule strategy, Washington stoked sectarian divisions in Iraq after its illegal 2003 invasion. In 2011, the outbreak of the Syrian civil war was seized upon by the imperialist powers to provide aid and military training to the so-called “rebels,” composed overwhelmingly of Islamist forces such as the Al-Nusra Front and the groups which would later form ISIS. The Harper government and its ally in Washington only began viewing ISIS as a threat when it seized territory in Iraq and destabilized the entire region.

The attempt in the government’s parliamentary motion to cast the intervention as a humanitarian exercise is aimed at concealing the mission’s true purpose, which is the consolidation of US hegemony in the region against its strategic rivals. This includes a push for regime change in Damascus so as to remove the only government allied with Iran in the Middle East, and thereby increase pressure on Teheran to reach an accommodation with the west. More broadly, it is aimed at further isolating Russia and China.

The government’s request for a twelve-month extension of the mission is significant. At the latest, Canada will hold a general election on 18 October. The Conservatives have already made plain their intention to frame the election around “jihadi terrorism,” painting themselves as the only party prepared to vigorously confront the “jihadis” at home and abroad. Through this bellicose and anti-Muslim appeal, the Conservatives hope to rally the most reactionary and backward sections of the population behind aggressive militarism in pursuit of Canadian imperialism’s interests abroad and sweeping attacks on democratic rights at home, as exemplified by Bill C-51.

The response of the two main opposition parties to the government’s expansion of the war reveals once again the lack of any principled opposition to militarist aggression within the Canadian ruling elite. Announcing their intention to vote against the motion, the Liberals criticized the government for its lack of a “clear” strategy. Liberal leader Justin Trudeau noted that if his party formed the government after the upcoming election, it would seek to shift the Canadian mission to focus exclusively on training Iraqi forces and providing humanitarian aid.

Thomas Mulcair, leader of the official opposition New Democrats (NDP), covered up the imperialist agenda being pursued by the government and sought to resurrect the NDP’s tattered anti-war credentials.

In his address to the House of Commons, Mulcair asserted, “Military planners will tell us that for a mission to succeed it must have two things. It must have a well-defined objective and a well-defined exit strategy. This mission has neither. The Conservatives simply have no plan.”

This is poppycock. While the military plans may still be a work-in-progress, the US has a very definite strategic agenda, one shared by the Canadian ruling class and that has underlain the repeated US military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia over the past decade and more: removing all obstacles to American hegemony over what is the world’s most important oil-exporting region.

The NDP is not ignorant of this. If it chooses to cover it up, it is because its agrees with the goal of maintaining the strategic dominance of what for decades has been the Canadian bourgeoisie’s principal partner, differing merely on the best means to secure it.

Mulcair demonstrated this clearly in his subsequent remarks, in which he reiterated that “UN missions and NATO missions are the kinds of internationally sanctioned campaigns that New Democrats can and have been able to get behind.” He then went on to trumpet the NDP’s support for the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, stating, “In 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi started dropping bombs on his own civilian population, New Democrats supported the international efforts to protect Libyans… Of course, when the mission of protection of the civilian population became one of a so-called regime change, it was New Democrats who asked the right question—to replace it with what?”

This is a thoroughly dishonest presentation and on multiple accounts. The NDP twice voted in favor of Canada’s participation in the Libyan war, including long after NATO had abandoned any pretense that it was anything but a war for regime change. Second, from the outset it was evident that the “rebels” that Canada, with the NDP’s full support, were promoting as agents of “democratic” change were in fact a reactionary cabal of Islamists, defectors from the Gaddafi regime, and longtime CIA assets.

This has again been sharply exposed thanks to an Ottawa Citizen article on secret Canadian military reports on the situation in Libya at the time of the NATO intervention in March 2011. The reports raised concerns that a NATO bombing mission to weaken or remove Gaddafi would only strengthen Islamist militias with ties to extremist groups. As an article by David Pugliese on the released material commented, “military members would privately joke about Canada’s CF-18s being part of ‘Al-Qaeda’s air force,’ since their bombing runs helped to pave the way for rebel groups aligned with the terrorist group.”

Mulcair’s response to Canada’s participation in striking ISIS targets in Syria was also highly revealing. The NDP leader repeated verbatim the imperialist propaganda used to argue for western military intervention to overthrow Assad. “It is especially disturbing,” said Mulcair, “to see the Prime Minister now openly considering an alliance of sorts with the brutal dictator and war criminal, Bashar al-Assad…It is a regime that not only uses chemical weapons on civilians, it uses snipers against women and children. It is a regime that actually collaborated with ISIS.”

Beyond Mulcair’s complete avoidance of the inconvenient truth that it was actually the US and its allies who collaborated with the extremist forces who now comprise ISIS against Assad, his open attack on the Damascus regime reflects the NDP’s unwavering support for the broader goal being pursued by the imperialist powers in the Mideast war—the imposition of pro-US regimes in Damascus and throughout the region.

Clash of oligarchs shakes Ukrainian regime

Bill Van Auken

Early Wednesday morning, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that he had sacked Igor Kolomoisky as governor of the eastern industrial region of Dnepropetrovsk.

The action came in the midst of an escalating confrontation between the two billionaire oligarchs over the control of two of Ukraine’s most profitable enterprises. This dispute threatened to spiral into armed clashes after paramilitary forces loyal to Kolomoisky, clad in camouflage and carrying automatic weapons, stormed the headquarters of the two firms, the Ukrainian oil company Ukrnafta and the oil pipeline firm Ukrtransnafta.

The armed takeovers followed actions by the government to wrest the management of the two companies from Kolomoisky’s control. While both firms were majority state-owned, Kolomoisky had sizable minority holdings—42 percent in the case of Ukrnafta—and manipulated their management to serve his own profit interests. In tandem with the firing of Kolomoisky as governor, Poroshenko signed into law legislation that allowed the government to exercise its majority vote and reassert control.

Kolomoisky, like the rest of the Ukrainian oligarchs, enriched himself through the so-called “dirty privatization” following the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. Energy companies, manufacturing industries and virtually every other facet of the former state-run economy were taken for a fraction of their value and in many cases seized by armed thugs acting on behalf of Kolomoisky and other rising oligarchs.

This layer is the principal social base of the Poroshenko government, just as it was of the government of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a US-backed and fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev little more than a year ago. It was the turn by the predominant factions in the ruling oligarchy against him and toward subordination to the US and the European Union that sealed Yanukovych’s fate.

Kolomoisky is widely seen as one of the major winners in the coup, using it to assert increased control over the state apparatus and to further enrich himself. A significant number of legislators in the Verkhovna Rada, or national parliament, came to office with his backing.

One of them, Andrei Denisenko, made a show Monday of resigning from Poroshenko’s Bloc, denouncing the “ongoing deterioration of the democratic regime into authoritarian.” He further charged that Poroshenko had cut a secret deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to fire Kolomoisky as Dnepropetrovsk governor. Three other legislators followed his lead in breaking from the ruling coalition.

There were reports in Kiev that the US ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, intervened in the crisis to mediate between the rival oligarchs, coming down on the side of Poroshenko.

It is scarcely likely, however, that this is the end of the matter. Kolomoisky, who owns Ukraine’s largest bank and main television channel, along with major industrial interests in the Dnepropetrovsk region, has also financed right-wing and fascistic militias that have constituted the main fighting force of the Kiev regime in seeking to suppress a separatist movement in the eastern Donbass region.

One of these outfits, the Azov battalion, fights under a swastika-like banner and has been implicated in war crimes against the civilian population in eastern Ukraine. The Dnepro and Aydar battalions, also backed by Kolomoisky, have been involved in similar crimes.

There were unconfirmed reports that Kolomoisky had ordered 2,000 militiamen to head to Kiev, while Poroshenko had sent two battalions of National Guard troops to keep order in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city. On Monday, Poroshenko declared that no governor in Ukraine would be allowed to maintain “pocket armed forces.”

Further contributing to the atmosphere of crisis in Kiev, the government Wednesday had two members of Poroshenko’s cabinet arrested and hauled away in handcuffs on charges of corruption during a nationally televised cabinet meeting, just hours after Kolomoisky’s dismissal.

Arrested before the TV cameras were Sergiy Bochkovsky, director of Ukraine’s state emergencies service, and his deputy, Vasyl Stoyetsky. They were charged in an alleged kickback scheme involving overpayment for fuel for government vehicles.

Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk hailed the arrests as evidence of the government’s commitment to fighting corruption, as demanded by the international lending agencies that are keeping Kiev afloat. “This will happen to everyone who breaks the law and sneers at the Ukrainian state,” Yatsenyuk said.

The arrests were no doubt a further settling of scores within the universally corrupt Ukrainian oligarchy and its regime. Just last week, the former chairman of the Ukrainian State Financial Inspection, Nikolai Gordienko, issued a report charging Yatsenyuk with covering up state corruption involving billions of dollars. A draft resolution has been submitted to parliament calling for a special commission to be formed to investigate the activities of the prime minister, whose meteoric rise was sponsored by two of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, Dmytro Firtash and Viktor Pinchuk.

The bitter internecine struggles erupting within the government brought to power by the February 2014 US-backed coup only serve to underscore that for all of the Western propaganda about the new regime representing a triumph of “democracy” and “freedom,” it has only effected a redistribution of wealth and power among a clique of rival oligarchs. The sharpening of the struggles between them is driven by the increasingly desperate economic crisis confronting Ukraine and, hence, the shrinking of the pool of wealth from which they can steal.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) earlier this month approved a $17.5 billion emergency bailout for the Ukrainian regime, part of a four-year, $40 billion package. While the great bulk of this money will go into the coffers of Ukraine’s creditors—and the pockets of its oligarchs—the plan and the austerity measures that it demands spell ruin for the great majority of the country’s population.

Average monthly wages amount to just $170, while the official inflation rate stands at nearly 30 percent. According to one estimate, when the plunging value of the country’s currency is taken into account, the real rate is 272 percent. The government has already approved sharp cuts to pensions, social programs and public workers’ salaries, while freezing the minimum wage. At the same time, the price of gas and other utilities is set to triple.

Ukraine’s minister of finance, the US-born, former State Department official Natalie Jaresko, is carrying out a campaign for further relief, including a radical restructuring of $15 billion in Ukrainian debt, insisting that the $40 billion IMF bailout is not enough to stave off a disaster.

According to Bloomberg News, she is warning in particular that there is growing danger of a revolt from below over the drastic decline in living standards since the US-backed coup. “If, God forbid, there is another revolution, it won’t be of the same kind,” she said.

US backs Saudi airstrikes against Houthis in Yemen

Niles Williamson

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adair Al Jubeir, announced Wednesday night from Washington, D.C. that his country, in coordination with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, had begun airstrikes on Houthi rebel positions inside Yemen. He said that Saudi Arabia and others in the coalition were prepared “to protect and defend the legitimate government” of President Adb Rabbu Mansur Hadi.

Jubeir declared that Saudi Arabia would do “whatever it takes” to keep Hadi in power.

The Saudi strikes are backed by the Obama administration, which released a statement stating that the US was providing “logistical and intelligence support.” A ground offensive involving 150,000 Saudi troops is also reportedly being prepared. 

Airstrikes were reported at the Sanaa airport and at the Al Dulaimi military base. Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a MEMBER of the Houthi’s Ansarullah politburo, warned that the airstrikes would set off a “wide war” in the Arabian Peninsula. “The Yemeni people are a free people and they will confront the aggressors. I will remind you that the Saudi government and the Gulf governments will regret this aggression," Bukhaiti told Al Jazeera news.

According to US officials, Saudi Arabia has also positioned heavy artillery and other military equipment on its border with Yemen. At a weekend meeting of Gulf state princes and defense ministers, Saudi officials had PRESENTED their plans for air strikes against Houthi targets and a naval blockade of Houthi supply routes. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud Al Faisal, told reporters earlier this week that his country was prepared to “take the necessary measures for this crisis to protect the region.”

With the latest developments Yemen’s escalating civil war has openly taken on the character of a regional conflict, involving both Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy is now openly backing Hadi as the legitimate leader of the country, while Shiite-dominated Iran has called for him to cede power, giving its support to the Houthis, who belong to the Zaydi Shiite sect of Islam.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia, which receives military support from the United States, has undertaken military incursions to suppress popular Shiite uprisings in neighboring countries. In late 2009, the Saudi military launched operations against the Houthi militias inside Yemen in coordination with the government of former president and longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudi monarchy also dispatched troops to Bahrain in March 2011 to suppress protests by that country’s Shiite majority against the dictatorship of Sunni King Hamad bin Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa.

A letter sent by Hadi to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday asked for the adoption of a resolution supporting “all means necessary, including military intervention, to protect Yemen and its people from the continuing Houthi aggression”.

The beleaguered Hadi reportedly left Yemen on Wednesday as Houthi rebel fighters backed by army units loyal to former president Saleh seized the Al Anad airbase in Lahj province as well as Aden’s international airport and central bank headquarters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Hadi fled Aden on a boat with the assistance of a retinue of Saudi Arabian diplomatic officials to escape the impending Houthi assault. Reports of Hadi’s departure were denied by Yemen’s chief of national security, Major General Ali Al Ahmadi, who told Reuters, “He’s HERE, he’s here, he’s here. I am now with him in the palace. He is in Aden.”

Until their evacuation last weekend, US and European special forces soldiers had used the Al Anad airbase to coordinate military operations and drone missile strikes against MEMBERS of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in southern and eastern Yemen.

The Houthis seized the base as they pushed south towards the port city of Aden, where Hadi had fled after escaping house arrest in Sanaa in February. The president had been forced to announce his resignation and dissolution of the government after the Houthis seized control of the presidential palace in January.

The Houthi rebels, who took control of the capital of Sanaa in September 2014, began their advance south last week after fighting broke out in Aden between forces loyal to Saleh and Hadi over control of the international airport.

Wednesday’s advance put the Houthis within striking distance of the compound where Hadi has been marshaling military forces still loyal to him in an attempt to reassert control over the country. Fighter jets manned by Yemeni air force pilots supporting Saleh have been strafing the compound for the last few days.

The loss of Al Anad air base amid the complete collapse of the US puppet regime headed by Hadi is the latest debacle for American imperialist foreign policy following in the wake of Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The disastrous intervention of American imperialism in Yemen has stoked long-simmering sectarian tensions to the point of explosion, completely destabilizing the deeply impoverished Arab country.

Al Anad was ONE of the key sites used by the US military and CIA to launch drone strikes inside Yemen. According to estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the drone war, which began under the direction of US president Barack Obama in 2009 with the assent of then-president Saleh, has killed more than 1,000 people. The massively unpopular drone strikes were also supported by Hadi, who came to power in 2012, after Saleh was ousted by mass protests.

After the Houthi rebels seized control of Sanaa in January, the Pentagon worked to establish relations with them in order to continue drone strike operations against alleged Al Qaeda militants. The last reported strike came on March 1 in Bayda province, killing as many as THREE people. It was in an area where Houthi militants had been fighting members of AQAP.

Underscoring the debacle in Yemen, the Pentagon admits that it has lost track of more than $500 million worth of weapons and equipment amid the ongoing fighting. US military officials testified in recent closed-door congressional hearings that they have no idea whether the equipment has fallen into the hands of either Houthi fighters or Al Qaeda militants. “We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone,” a legislative aide told the Washington Post.

Among the US equipment provided to the Yemeni government since 2007 that has now been lost are 200 M-4 rifles, 1.25 million rounds of ammunition, 160 Humvees, and 4 Huey II helicopters. An additional unknown amount of weapons and equipment provided by the CIA and Pentagon through classified programs has also been lost.

The firing squad returns to America

Barry Grey

On Monday, Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed into law a bill reinstating the firing squad as a method of execution. The bill gives the state government the option of shooting prisoners if it is unable to secure the drugs needed to kill them by lethal injection.

In signing the measure, Herbert, a Republican, acknowledged that firing squads are “a little bit gruesome.” However, he and other state officials argued, it was a practical necessity if the state killing machine was to keep operating.

Other states, likewise driven by a determination to continue executing prisoners, are considering reviving methods most people had long considered relics of a more barbaric past, or employing new means for killing human beings.

The Wyoming state House of Representatives earlier this year passed a bill to bring back the firing squad, but the measure died in the state Senate. The state House in Alabama voted this month to reintroduce the electric chair. Republicans in the Oklahoma state legislature are proposing to put prisoners in sealed chambers and asphyxiate them with nitrogen.

Many states ban the use of nitrogen to euthanize animals, but Oklahoma Republican House member Mike Christian is enthusiastic. “I believe the use of nitrogen hypoxia will be the thing of the future once it’s passed in Oklahoma,” he declared. But then, Christian is not particularly picky when it comes to ways and means of terminating human life.

Last year, following the lethal injection torture of Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett, during which the condemned man writhed in agony for 45 minutes before succumbing, Christian emphatically reiterated his support for the death penalty: “I really don’t care it it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions.”

Lockett was one of three capital felons who suffered prolonged agony last year when states—Arizona in the case of Joseph Wood and Ohio in the case of Dennis McGuire—decided to kill them with untested drug combinations provided by poorly regulated and anonymous compounding pharmacies. State governments are finding it increasingly difficult to secure lethal drugs for executions because the European Union has banned their sale to the US by European firms, in line with its official opposition to capital punishment, while major US firms are pulling back from providing the chemicals.

There are also mounting legal challenges to executions using the drugs. The US Supreme Court, which has repeatedly upheld the death penalty, is slated to hear a case next month brought by Oklahoma death row prisoners challenging the state’s lethal injection procedure as a violation of the US Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Some states are rushing to legally bar the identification of companies that supply lethal injection drugs in a bid to keep the death penalty assembly line running. Last year, the Ohio House approved a bill to grant anonymity to such firms for 20 years, and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that this information could legally be kept secret.

Over 3,000 people languish on America’s death rows, part of the 2.4 million who comprise the world’s biggest national prison population. They are overwhelmingly working class and poor, and disproportionately African American and Latino. Earlier this month, a female death row inmate in Georgia came within hours of death for the second time in a week before being sent back to her cell to await her next rendezvous with the executioner.

Support for state murder is by no means the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Last year, President Obama rushed to defend the death penalty following the “botched” execution of Clayton Lockett, articulating the overwhelming bipartisan consensus within the American ruling class in support of this barbaric practice.

How is this systematized sadism and violence to be explained? Can we expect to see demands for the return of other practices? What about drawing and quartering, evisceration, garroting?

The revival of the firing squad reveals the real state of class relations in America. It must be considered within the broader context of state sanction for torture, extrajudicial drone assassinations, police killings and the militarization of all facets of social life. It is being carried out by a ruling class that is waging unrelenting war on the working class, including the destruction of pensions and health benefits and the denial of such elements of civilized life as water, gas and electricity.

The seemingly gratuitous savagery of the corporate-financial elite and its political agencies reflects both the bankruptcy of their system—capitalism—and their fear of the growth of working-class opposition.

It is fitting that Utah should revive the firing squad on the centenary of the execution of revolutionary labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill. Born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Sweden, Hill immigrated to the US and became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. He was executed by a Utah firing squad on November 19, 1915, after a frame-up murder conviction.

Hill’s fate underscores the fact that capital punishment and all of the other forms of state coercion and repression are directed against the working class and its revolutionary potential.

The Marxist truths about the nature of capitalism and the irreconcilable conflict between the two major classes—the capitalist class and the working class—are increasingly emerging in the experience of masses of people: that, for example, the state consists in its essence of special bodies of armed men and, in the words of Engels, “prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds,” and that the state is “the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class,” a means of “holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”

The Challenge Of Our Time Is Challenge Of Education: A Virus Corrupting And Destructing Young Minds

Fayaz Ahmad Bhat

The present society in which we live in is experiencing many changes, alterations. The social relations and interaction are swinging like a pendulum kabi (sometimes) here and kabi there. With continuous changes and fluctuation in the society and social relation, hapless creatures (human beings) are subjected to many challenges and confrontations. Sociologically, speaking a change in a society or social relations is one of the most important factors, exposing hapless creatures to new challenges and confrontations. Arnold Toynbee, maintained that every society faces challenges posed by environment, internal and external elements. The nature of response to these challenges determines the fate of society. The changes and challenges in a society are not something new or modern. Societies from the antiquity have been experiencing these changes and challenges but the changes in the present society have brought in new challenges and confrontation. Poverty, gender inequality, terrorism, environment pollution, human trafficking, gender discrimination, are the main confrontations the modern society is facing. But the most dangerous of all challenges of present society especially of third world is “education” rather, would I prefer to call it schooling or literacy.

Bowles and Gintis, (1976) acknowledged the contribution of school education in reducing mass illiteracy and providing learning chances to people but argued that school education could not deliver what enlightened reformers hoped from it. The scholars like Ivan Illich, Paul Freire, Apple, Bowels, Reids, Bourdieu and many others highlighted the role and function of schooling in reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. Although most of these studies were west and Europe centric but represented the scenario of other parts of the globe as well. The challenges and confrontations posed by schooling in west and Europe are not same in the societies having a different social, political and economical setup, but have introduced new challenges and confrontation there. The promotion of mass schools and schooling in these countries by national and International actors is producing a large chunk of mal-educated people. This endangers the future of these countries and poses threat to the whole world.

In my recent interaction, I met a few mal-educated chunks in Indian administered Kashmir during an interactive cum lecture arranged by Ignited Minds Circle, a circle claimed ‘to provide a way for students to develop a scientific temper’. During the interaction theory and hypothesis of mal-education got again affirmed. It was observed the group consisted many mal-educated children some of them having deficiency of educational nutrients like gender sensitivity, value neutrality, cultural relativity etc. The most affected of mal-educated lot, I found a few children are over nutritional. Over nutritional, in a sense that the quantity and the amount of educational nutrients they have been provided are over nutrition. This has radicalized them and developed self syndrome among them. The only version of truth before them is their version. The best of creatures under the sun are only and alone they. Had they been exposed to the world they would have never developed this disease? They would have got a chance to burn some calories. There software would have not been corrupted and destructed by a virus called radicalization, intolerance and ethnocentrism had there been installation of antivirus. The texts (books, audio, video etc) they are installed are full of viruses and without installation of any antivirus they are highly insecure and prone to mal-function. It is about this “education” system and group about which Bertrand Russell, way back read, “Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education”.