Pompeo signs US-Greek military alliance and threatens Iran, Russia, China

Alex Lantier & V. Gnana

Aggressive US and European foreign policy is intensifying the risk that great-power conflict over the Balkans and the Middle East can trigger global war. This is what emerges from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s six-day tour of Italy, ex-Yugoslav republics of Montenegro and Macedonia and Greece. After Trump aborted US military strikes on Iran in June ten minutes before they provoked all-out war between the United States and Iran, Pompeo’s tour focused on threatening Iran and its nuclear-armed allies, Russia and China.

Pompeo traveled amid an explosive crisis in Washington and its relations with its nominal European and Turkish NATO “allies.” Much of his time on the trip was instead taken with questions on what he heard while on Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and whether it could be used to further the campaign to impeach Trump. Though Washington announced $7.5 billion in trade war tariffs against Europe during Pompeo’s tour, he did not bother to visit the three largest European economies: Berlin, London and Paris.

The heart of Pompeo’s trip, however, was a relentless denunciation of Iran, Russia and China, and the signing of a US military treaty with Greece targeting these countries and an ostensible NATO ally of America, Turkey. Examining Pompeo’s remarks Saturday in Athens, it is impossible not to recall how, after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, such Balkan conflicts triggered the outbreak of World War I.

The Balkans, Pompeo declared, “remain an area of strategic competition.” He blamed the bloodshed and conflict provoked by three decades of US-led NATO wars in the region on Iran and its allies.

Pompeo denounced “the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose terrorist proxies have destabilized the Middle East, turned Lebanon into a client state, and helped create a refugee crisis that continues to impact Greece to this day.” He also denounced “malign Russian influence, both within Greece and within your nation’s neighbors,” and China for allegedly “using economic means to coerce countries into lopsided deals that benefit Beijing and leave its clients mired in debt.”

Pompeo then publicly bragged about the hypocrisy of his own presentation of the drive for US military control of the region—as a disinterested favor done to Greece. He said, “Look, it’s a bit selfish: America needs to keep Greece successful to help secure the Eastern Mediterranean.”

Pompeo’s brief for war is a pack of lies that does not even convince the secretary of state himself. It is not Iran that has set the Middle East aflame, but decades of NATO wars, US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and NATO’s use of Al Qaeda forces since 2011 for a proxy war for regime change in Syria. Then, in 2014, Berlin and Washington backed a fascist-led coup in Ukraine that plunged the country into civil war, nearly provoked war with Russia and led to an arms race in Europe.

Responsibility for the millions of deaths in these wars and the tens of millions of refugees they created, lies not with Iran or Russia, but with Washington and its European allies.

Today, Washington’s hopes to militarily dominate Eurasia lie in tatters. Last month, Trump implied that the only way to US victory in Afghanistan was to annihilate the country with nuclear bombs. He boasted that he could win the war “in a week” but did not want to, as “I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”

Since 2011, the Syrian conflict has evolved into a proxy war between Washington, the European imperialist powers, the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms, and their Islamist and Kurdish militia proxies, on the one hand, and the Syrian government backed by Iran, Russia and China on the other. The war led to a crushing defeat of the US-aligned forces, bottled up in pockets in northern Syria, and led to a surge in US-Turkish tensions. While Kurdish militias face attack from Turkey, the Islamist militias face attack from Syrian government forces backed by Russia.

US trade war threats and naval operations in the Indian and Pacific Oceans aiming to isolate China and halt its economic growth before it overtakes America also directly impact Europe. Much of Pompeo’s trip was devoted to attacking China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for Eurasian infrastructure. He pressed Macedonia to abandon a BRI-funded highway and Italy to abandon its official support for the BRI, approved earlier this year in Rome, and deny Chinese firm Huawei access to Italian Internet infrastructure.

With relentless war threats against Iran and its alliance with Greece, Washington is making clear that it will not tolerate these setbacks and is responding aggressively with a new escalation.

The Lies of Capitalism

Eve Ottenberg

Neoliberals love to quote the World Bank’s rosy statistics about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Unfortunately, those statistics are skewed and manipulated to the point of outright prevarication, as Seth Donnelly demonstrates in his new book, “The Lie of Global Prosperity.” He quotes a breathless World Bank press release, “soon 90 percent of the world’s population will live on $1.90 a day or more.” No matter that translated into local currency at local prices, in many places that $1.90 per day purchases the equivalent of 30 cents a day or that $1.90 per day means the pauperization of billions – for as Donnelly shows, a truer metric of avoiding desperate poverty is over $5 per day. If that far more honest measure is applied, 80 percent of South Asians and sub-Saharan Africans are, Donnelly explains, horribly impoverished. Even more disturbing, achieving a 70-year life expectancy requires $7.40 a day, something the world’s cold and pampered capitalists will certainly not shell out or even allow for the billions of wretchedly poor.

Best exemplifying the World Bank’s ideologically biased poverty measures – biased to glorify capitalism – is how it uses statistics about China. “The free health care, education and food that people received in Mao’s China do not enter into the calculation. As a result, Chinese people, who achieved new levels of food security and saw their life expectancy double in this [Mao’s] period were found to be on the whole ‘extremely poor’…the Chinese only ceased to be ‘extremely poor’ once they lost their collective lands, food rations and medical care and began making iphones and other export goods under atrocious conditions.”

When there are too many destitute people to conceal, neoliberal UN organizations and the World Bank simply erase them. “The World Bank statistically elevated by more than 100 percent the dollar incomes of Haitians, thereby artificially reducing poverty” in 2016, Donnelly writes. He then points to the 836 million Indians who live on fifty cents a day, in conditions that are “utterly deplorable.” But creative statistics disappear poverty by underestimating food costs for the poor.  These costs soar higher in poor countries than rich ones due to neoliberal trade pacts that harm Third World agriculture. Donnelly attributes food price gouging in the Third World to agribusiness’ death grip on the world food system.

That the World Bank, UN groups and magazines like the “Economist” fabricate statistics to lie about poverty should surprise no one. After all, as Donnelly reports, the World Bank assumes that economic growth automatically reduces poverty. But we can put that myth to rest, given that the majority of all people live on about $3 a day, according to a Pew expert Connelly cites. Globally, 4.3 billion or 60 percent of humankind lives below $5 per day. Donnelly quotes a Pew report that 71 percent of the world population is low income, “with most living in severe poverty.” Capitalism has deracinated and dispossessed hundreds of millions, if not billions of the rural poor, and packed them like sardines into shanty-towns in cities in the Global South, as Mike Davis documented in his indispensable work, “Planet of Slums.” As many on the left have observed, for most people on earth, capitalism has been an unmitigated disaster.

Most deceptive, indeed devious, is the neoliberal claim of an ascendant middle class.  The Pew report defines this as living on between $10 and $20 per day. From 2001 to 2011, this middle income population doubled to 783 million, a fact much ballyhooed by capitalism’s boosters. But “this was only half the increase…of those living between $2 and$10 per day. By 2011, the global middle class represented only 13 percent of the world population.” Most of this increase occurred in China, very, very little in India, Africa, Southeast Asia or Central America. Donnelly also argues that the term “middle class” misleads. Living on $10 to $20 per day is “more like livening on anywhere between $3 and $7, converted to local currencies [and paying local food prices]. This is far below the U.S. poverty line of $15.77 per person per day.” So basically much of the world’s so-called middle class is actually poor.

Donnelly invokes Via Campesina, which organizes peasant farmers, the Haitian Fanmi Lavalas associated with the heroic liberation theologian Jean Bertrand Aristide – twice elected president in Haiti and twice overthrown in U.S.-backed coups – the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, Black Lives matter and the Standing Rock Sioux resistance, as correct responses to capitalism’s crimes. Donnelly knows quite well that the systematic global plunder called capitalism “cannot be tamed to make it either sustainable or humanely acceptable.” More movements are needed, especially now that in addition to pauperizing billions through obscene inequality, unchecked fossil capitalism, big money industrial agriculture, a planet-heating, meat-based diet and the wildly destructive, incessant pouring of concrete threaten the habitability of earth. Capitalism causes ecocide, and endless growth is cancer, as is already visible with extreme weather. Anti-capitalists must illuminate the link between destitution and a poisoned world and must refute the lie that over-population is why our world is dying. The citizens of Bangladesh, drowning in climate-altered floods, have a miniscule carbon footprint compared, say, to the U.S. military. We live in the Capitalocene, not the Anthropocene. Blame where blame is due.

And we better dismantle capitalism, before it dismantles us.

New US study warns: India-Pakistan Nuclear war can kill over 125 million people

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Amid rising tension over Kashmir between the two nuclear neighbors, India and Pakistan, a new US study examines how such an hypothetical future nuclear conflict would have consequences that could ripple across the globe.

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could, over the span of less than a week, kill 50 to 125 million people that is more than the death toll during the six years of World War II, according to the research by Colorado University Boulder and Rutgers University.

The study published Wednesday said if India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield.

“The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2° to 5°C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities,” the study added.

Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe, the study warned and added: Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons.

The picture is grim. That level of warfare wouldn’t just kill millions of people locally, said CU Boulder’s Brian Toon, who led the research published in the journal Science Advances.

Here are excerpts of the US study conducted by ten experts:

Neither Pakistan nor India is likely to initiate a nuclear conflict without substantial provocation. India has declared a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, except in response to an attack with biological or chemical weapons.

Pakistan has declared that it would only use nuclear weapons if it could not stop an invasion by conventional means or if it were attacked by nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the two countries have had four conventional wars (1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and many skirmishes with substantial loss of life since the partition of British India in 1947. Therefore, the possibility of conventional war becoming nuclear is of concern.

Chinese factor

India has one of the largest conventional militaries in the world, with about 1.4 million active duty personnel. India has not deployed tactical nuclear weapons. Indian nuclear strategy requires that a significant number of high-yield bombs be held back in case China joins a war on the side of Pakistan. Because Pakistan is a small country with only about 60 cities with more than 100,000 people, India would not need all of its 250 weapons to destroy Pakistan’s cities.

We assume that India will keep 100 nuclear weapons in its arsenal to deter China from entering the war. Chinese involvement would greatly amplify the destruction discussed below. As China expands its presence in Pakistan as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is an element of China’s broader “Belt and Road Initiative,” the odds of a Pakistani-Indian war spreading to China would appear to be increasing.

Urban targets

Of India’s 150 weapons that can be used against Pakistan, we assume that about 15% will fail. In this case, failure is primarily due to the weapons not being delivered or failing to explode. Most urban targets in Pakistan are so large that precise targeting is not needed to hit them. Therefore, our scenario suggests 125 weapons actually exploding.

We further assume that there are 25 targets in Pakistan that are isolated military bases or industrial facilities located in regions with low populations and little combustible material. We do not include these in computing fatalities or environmental damage. Therefore, we assume that India has 100 strategic nuclear weapons to use on urban counter-value targets or military counterforce targets that are located within urban areas, such as military bases, industrial facilities, oil refineries, nuclear weapons facilities, and airports.

Pakistan also has one of the largest militaries in the world, with about half as many active duty personnel as India has. We assume that, in 2025, Pakistan will have 50 tactical weapons with yields of 5 kt to be used against an invading Indian army.

We assume that 20% of these will fail or be overrun by the Indian Army. Many of these tactical weapons might be used in sparsely populated areas with little flammable material. Accordingly, we only consider the remaining 200 strategic weapons when computing fatalities or smoke created from fires.

Of these 200 strategic weapons, we assume that 15% will fail to be delivered to the target but that the remaining 170 will be detonated over their targets. We further assume that 20 of these explosions will be over isolated military, nuclear, or industrial areas. The balance, 150 weapons, will thus be used against India’s urban counter-value targets and military counterforce targets located within urban areas.”

War scenarios simulation

A crisis simulation exercise in Sri Lanka during 2013 organized by the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and involving retired senior military and civilian analysts from India and Pakistan found that “a limited war in South Asia will escalate rapidly into a full war with a high potential for nuclear exchange”. In our scenario, with the Indian government having been severely damaged, the Indian Army brings a number of tanks to the border and crosses into Pakistan and also crosses the Line of Control in Kashmir.

On day 1 of the nuclear conflict, Pakistan uses 10 tactical atomic bombs with 5-kt yield inside its own borders with low air bursts against the Indian tanks.

The conflict continues on day 2 when Pakistan uses another 15 tactical weapons with 5-kt yield on the battlefield, whereas India detonates two air bursts against the Pakistani garrison in Bahawalpur and deploys 18 other weapons to attack Pakistani airfields and nuclear weapons depots, partially degrading Pakistani retaliatory capabilities.

Nevertheless, on day 3, Pakistan responds with a barrage of nuclear ballistic and cruise missiles on garrisons, weapon depots, naval bases, and airfields in 30 locations in Indian cities (30 air bursts with 15- to 100-kt yield each) plus another 15 tactical bursts with 5-kt yield. India also uses 10 strategic weapons against Pakistani military bases on day 3. Because of panic, anger, miscommunication, and protocols, escalation cannot be stopped now.

On days 4 to 7, cities in India are hit with 120 strategic weapons, and those in Pakistan are struck with 70 air bursts with 15- to 100-kt yield. In total, Pakistan’s urban areas are hit with 100 nuclear weapons using airbursts, and India’s urban areas are hit with 150 nuclear weapons using airbursts. In addition, Pakistan has used 40 tactical nuclear weapons successfully and 20 strategic weapons successfully on targets not in urban areas, whereas India has used 25 strategic weapons successfully on targets not in urban areas.

Even one nuclear weapon explosion in a city can do a great deal of damage. For example, in the most densely populated urban area in Pakistan, a 15-kt airburst at the optimum height to maximize blast damage could kill about 700,000 people and injure another 300,000. With a 100-kt airburst over the same region, roughly 2 million fatalities and an additional 1.5 million nonfatal casualties could occur. Similar numbers would result for nuclear explosions over large Indian cities.

World War II casualties

During WWII, it is estimated that about 50 million people were killed, not considering those who died from disease and starvation over 6 years. Because of the dense populations of cities in Pakistan and India, even a war with 15-kt weapons could lead to fatalities approximately equal to those worldwide in WWII and a war with 100-kt weapons could directly kill about 2.5 times as many as died worldwide in WWII, and in this nuclear war, the fatalities could occur in a single week.

The world’s annual death rate from all causes is about 56 million people per year. Therefore, a war between India and Pakistan in our scenario with 15-kt weapons could kill the same number of people in a week as would die naturally worldwide in a year, effectively increasing the immediate global death rate by a factor of 50. A regional catastrophe would occur if India and Pakistan were to engage in a full-scale nuclear war with their expanding arsenals.

India would suffer two to three times more fatalities and casualties than Pakistan because, in our scenario, Pakistan uses more weapons than India and because India has a much larger population and more densely populated cities. However, as a percentage of the urban population, Pakistan’s losses would be about twice those of India. In general the fatalities and casualties increase rapidly even up to the 250th explosion due to the high population in India, whereas the rate of increase for Pakistan is much lower even for the 50th explosion.

Conclusion

India and Pakistan may be repeating the unfortunate example set by the United States and Russia during the “cold war” era: that is, building destructive nuclear forces far out of proportion to their role in deterrence…. Compounding the devastation brought upon their own countries, decisions by Indian and Pakistani military leaders and politicians to use nuclear weapons could severely affect every other nation on Earth.

20,000 jobs and six plants threatened at German tire maker Continental

Marianne Arens

The auto supplier and tire manufacturer Continental plans to cut at least 20,000 jobs over the next 10 years and close five plants worldwide. The company plans to wipe out 15,000 jobs by 2024 and has not ruled out compulsory redundancies.

The company’s executive announced what is alleged to be its biggest ever reorganisation on September 25 following a supervisory board meeting in Hanover. According to the announcement the company plans to invest more than €1 billion in software development and electro-mobility. However, the board also made crystal clear that employees will have to pay for the conversion in production. The slashing of 20,000 jobs, or 8 percent of company’s current workforce of 244,000, is expected to reduce gross expenditure by €500 million each year from 2023 onwards.

Six Continental factories are to be closed worldwide. These include the plant in Roding (Upper Palatinate, Bavaria) with 540 employees and in Limbach-Oberfrohna (Saxony) with 1,230 employees, the factory in Pisa (Italy) with almost 1,000 workers, a plant in Malaysia and two factories in the United States. The two US plants are in Newport News, Virginia (740 employees) and Henderson, North Carolina (650 jobs). In Malaysia, 270 workers are affected at the Continental plant in Petaling Jaya.

At the Babenhausen site in Hesse, 2,250 out of a total of 3,600 jobs are to be cut. In order to “reduce costs in development to a competitive level” (as stated in a company press release), research and development activities are to be withdrawn from the location.

With its attack on jobs, the company is reacting, as the press release states, to “the decline in global auto production.” The company’s “Strategy 2030” took into account “several parallel developments: an increasingly digitised world of work, the looming crisis in the auto industry and the accelerated technology change in the motor sector due to stricter emissions legislation.”

Additional major factors playing a role are the upcoming Brexit and trade war with the US. German car exports to the US and China fell by over 20 percent in the first half of 2019. “We are not slipping into the crisis, we are in the middle of it,” complained Continental CEO, Elmar Degenhart, on the sidelines of the IAA Motor Show.

For the past 10 years, the group has been controlled by the super-rich Schaeffler family, which holds 46 percent of shares and is majority shareholder. The board’s response to the global crisis follows a well-known pattern: workers must suffer in order to rescue share prices and profits.

To this end companies such as Continental have been able to rely for decades on the services of the two German unions, IG Metall (IGM) and IG Chemie.

Following the recent meeting of the supervisory board, IGM board member Christiane Benner said that the company’s so-called “employee representatives” had “not agreed to close sites in Germany.” On the supervisory board they had merely supported “an open-ended audit.” Benner is the deputy chairman of the Continental supervisory board and takes home over €200,000 a year. The money allegedly benefits the union-friendly Heinrich Böckler Foundation.

Hong Kong’s chief executive invokes emergency law against protest movement

Ben McGrath

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam proceeded yesterday with her threat to invoke a colonial-era law, the Emergency Regulations Ordinance (ERO), to step up police repression of the protest movement now in its 18th week. Lam announced that face masks of any type will be banned at rallies beginning today.

Government opponents immediately called for protesters to defy the ban. Hundreds gathered yesterday at Chater Garden for a march through Hong Kong’s Central district wearing masks. When the ban goes into effect today, those charged with violating the order could face a year in prison and fines of up to $HK25,000 ($US3,188). The ban also allows police to force people to remove facial coverings in public areas. Failure to do so could lead to six months in jail and a fine of $HK10,000 ($US1,275).

Lam claimed that the ban was needed as “almost all protesters who carry out vandalism and violence covered their faces.” However, the use of medical face masks is extremely common in Hong Kong not only by protesters seeking to protect themselves against retribution but also by people dealing with illnesses and poor air conditions.

Police are being given a free hand to stop and question almost anyone they please. The ban will also be used as a pretext by police to further ramp up the violence that has become commonplace in recent weeks and to justify a brutal crackdown.

The invocation of the ERO demonstrates that the oppressive apparatus in place in Hong Kong did not originate with Beijing, but instead with British colonial rule. It was first enacted in 1922 to break up strikes as the working class moved into conflict with capitalism and was last used by the British to suppress strikes and demonstrations in 1967.

The sweeping ERO, which allows the government to make any regulation it deems to be in the “public interest,” is line with increasingly draconian methods being used around the world. In invoking the mask ban, Lam pointed out that other countries had used similar measures, including France in attacking the “yellow vest” movement.

Some have questioned whether the use of the ERO is legal. Stuart Hargreaves, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, stated, “In my view it is incorrect to view the ordinance as a blanket power for the government. There is nothing in it that overrides the requirement that all other laws comply with the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s constitution).”

In reality, however, the police in Hong Kong are stepping up their violent attacks on protesters even as Lam seeks to open a “dialogue” with more right-wing elements of the protest movement.

On Tuesday police shot 18-year-old protester Tsang Chi-kin using live rounds. He is currently in a stable condition following surgery but has been formally arrested and charged with rioting and assaulting a police officer. Thousands protested on Wednesday over the shooting, including with marches and sit-ins at schools. Previously, the police had fired live ammunition as a warning, but this was the first time a protester had been shot.

Ecuadorian government arrests hundreds and deploys military against nationwide strike

Andrea Lobo

Ecuador has been rocked by a nationwide strike and widespread protests following the announcement Tuesday by the right-wing government of Lenín Moreno of an austerity package involving $1.4 billion in annual cuts.

The specific measure that unleashed the demonstrations was the elimination of gas subsidies, which went into effect at midnight Wednesday and increased gas prices from $1.85 to $2.30 per gallon and diesel prices from $1.03 to $2.27 per gallon.

Since Wednesday, transportation workers have been on strike. They have been joined by workers and students across the country, who have set up roadblocks and held demonstrations. The price hike is particularly incendiary in a country whose main product is petroleum, which accounts for 30 percent of exports.

The trade union confederation Workers’ Union Front (FUT), the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) and the Popular Front, which is led by the Stalinist Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE) and includes the Federation of University Students (FEUE) and the National Teachers Union (UNE), among other unions and activist groups, called a national strike for Wednesday and Thursday.

Demonstrators clash with the police during a protest [Credit: AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa]

This is the second major national strike this year after a five-day strike in July—the largest in 14 years.

Amid a global resurgence of the class struggle and protests against social inequality, including mass demonstrations in Hong Kong and Iraq that are also defying police state repression, protesters in the streets of Ecuador are demanding the repeal of the entire austerity package and the resignation of Moreno.

Since taking office, Moreno has sought to accommodate in every way with the demands of global finance and, particularly, Washington. In a treacherous act, his government turned on WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange, who had been granted political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy to escape the prospect of a rendition to the US over his exposures of American war crimes. In April, Moreno repudiated the asylum altogether and invited British police into the embassy to drag Assange to a prison cell.

As in the rest of Latin America, the Ecuadorian ruling elite has responded to an end to the commodities boom in 2013 and a stagnating global economy by reversing previous improvements and attacking workers’ social rights.

Poverty and inequality are bouncing back and the economy is growing at a paltry rate of 0.2 percent per year, while “inadequate employment”—underemployment or employment for less than the minimum wage—has already jumped from 41 percent to 56 percent since 2014. The gas price hike is expected to sharply raise the prices of a whole host of staple goods.

Far from advancing a serious strategy to fight these social attacks by the Ecuadorian ruling class and its imperialist patrons, the political forces and trade unions leading the current strike are calling for a “gradual” approach and “national unity” to “give direction to this nefarious government,” in the words of Nelson Erazo, president of the Popular Front. These bankrupt appeals can only pave the way for the ruling class to turn more sharply toward military repression and authoritarian rule in order to impose its economic dictates.

On Wednesday night, Moreno suspended classes for Thursday and Friday at all schools and universities and responded to the spread of protests the following day by imposing a national state of exception for 60 days, involving the deployment of the military against demonstrators and suspension of the right to assemble and strike.

“With the goal of controlling those who want to impose chaos, I’ve ordered the state of exception at the national level,” said Moreno, who called demonstrators “coup perpetrators.”

Soldiers and police have used tear gas and violent charges with military vehicles against marches and roadblocks. Multiple videos on social media and corporate news outlets Thursday showed police on motorcycles running over demonstrators who were lying on the ground and kicking them, while beating up journalists.

The presidency issued a cynical communiqué Thursday “repudiating” the “incidents this October 3 against journalists and media.” The minister of interior, María Paula Romo, talked of “lots of false information and false videos circulating on social media,” implicitly threatening to impose censorship.

On Friday, the government reported that it had made 350 arrests, mostly in the country’s largest city, Guayaquil. The previous day, it had indicated that there had been 14 people injured, 215 blocked highways and 21,500 demonstrators mobilized in 281 places. These are likely underestimations.

Iraq in flames

Bill Van Auken

Iraqi security forces opened fire on unarmed civilians for the fourth day in a row Friday as protesters poured into the streets once again in defiance of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s declaration of a round-the-clock curfew.

The death toll was reported at 65 Friday night, with more expected to be killed in overnight clashes. The real number of dead is undoubtedly far higher. The number of wounded, from live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon, has been reported at over 1,500.

Anti-government protesters chant slogans during a demonstration in Baghdad on Friday [Credit: AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed]

Heavily armed soldiers, members of Iraq’s elite counterterrorism squads and riot police have been deployed in an attempt to prevent demonstrators from marching on central Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and on the Green Zone, the heavily fortified center of the Iraqi government, the US and other Western embassies and the various military contractors hired to prop up the regime. Snipers on rooftops have been deployed to pick off protesters.

The government has shut down the internet across Iraq in its bid to suppress the organization of fresh protests. There have also been reports of masked death squads going to the homes of known activists and assassinating them.

Thus far, these repressive measures have proved counterproductive, with every state killing fueling the popular anger against the government. Unrest has gripped the impoverished Shia neighborhoods of Sadr City, where more than a decade ago militias confronted American troops. Crowds there reportedly have set fire to government buildings as well as the offices of Shia-based parties that support the government.

The protests, which have demanded jobs, improved living conditions and an end to corruption, are the largest and most widespread that have broken out in Iraq in the more than 16 years since Washington launched its war to topple the government of Saddam Hussein.

Most of those confronting US-trained security forces in the streets are unemployed youth and young workers whose entire lives have been shaped by the criminal US war of aggression, the subsequent eight years of US occupation and the bitter sectarian conflicts instigated by Washington as part of its divide-and-rule strategy.

The effects of the US war amounted to sociocide, i.e., the systematic destruction of an entire society. The number of Iraqis who lost their lives due to the war is estimated at well over a million. What had been among the most advanced healthcare, education and social welfare systems in the Middle East were demolished, along with the bulk of the country’s infrastructure.

Washington launched the 2003 invasion based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and the predatory conception that by militarily conquering Iraq it could seize control of the vast energy resources of the Middle East and thereby offset the decline of US imperialism’s global hegemony.

The Iraq war, however, just like the US-organized wars for regime change in Libya and Syria, resulted in a debacle. Within three years of withdrawing most of US troops from Iraq, the Obama administration began sending another 5,000 back in to wage the so-called war against ISIS, which reduced the predominantly Sunni cities of Anbar province and Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, to rubble.

Having spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed the lives of 4,500 troops—along with tens of thousands of wounded—Washington has proved utterly incapable of establishing a stable US puppet regime in Baghdad.

The current prime minister, Abdul Mahdi, is typical of the politically bankrupt bourgeois politicians that the US war and occupation brought to the fore. Initially a Ba’athist, he became a leading member of the Iraqi Communist Party before switching his allegiance while in exile to the Islamist ideology of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Finally, he found his way into the puppet regime erected by the Americans in 2004 as its “finance minister.”

Attempting to rule Iraq on the basis of sectarian politics, these elements have succeeded only in looting the country of hundreds of billions of dollars. They have failed to provide either jobs, essential services such as water and electricity, or the reconstruction of the country’s shattered infrastructure.

In the same speech in which he announced the round-the-clock curfew, Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi insisted that there was no “magic solution” to resolve the demands of the youthful demonstrators.

The demonstrators know, however, that Iraq, which boasts the fifth largest crude oil reserves in the world, is taking in more than $6 billion in oil revenues every month, and that the lion’s share of this wealth is flowing into the hands of foreign capitalists and a narrow Iraqi financial elite, along with corrupt politicians and their cronies. There is nothing “magical” in understanding that, placed under the control of Iraqi working people, this vast wealth could be used to meet the desperate social needs of tens of millions.

The protests have shaken the regime to its core precisely because they are centered in the country’s majority Shia population, the ostensible base of the ruling parties. What is emerging in Iraq as elsewhere in the Middle East is the resurgence of the class struggle in opposition to the sectarianism and repression through which imperialism and national ruling cliques have dominated the region.

This social eruption is part of a broader movement that has seen protests against Gen. Sisi’s police-state dictatorship in Egypt, mass demonstrations against IMF-style austerity measures in Lebanon and the more than month-old strike by 146,000 teachers against the Jordanian government.

These struggles are exposing once again the political bankruptcy of the national bourgeoisie, not only in Iraq, but throughout the Arab world. From the Ba’athist regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, to outright stooges like Abdul Mahdi and Sisi, this class has proven organically incapable of resolving any of the democratic and social demands of the Arab masses or establishing any genuine independence from imperialism.

Taking place against the backdrop of the rising threat of yet another US imperialist war, this time against Iran, it is noteworthy that the upheavals in Iraq have been met with undisguised hostility in both Washington and Tehran.

Iranian officials have suggested that these mass protests against unemployment, intolerable living conditions and government corruption are the work of “infiltrators” backed by a combination of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Clearly, the bourgeois-clerical rulers of the Islamic Republic fear that the revolt in Iraq can serve as a spark to reignite the mass protests of the Iranian working class that broke out in 2017-18 against unemployment, falling living standards, and sweeping social cuts.

For its part, the US State Department has issued a pro forma declaration affirming the right to protest in the abstract, while deploring “violence”—by the demonstrators, not the security forces—and appealing for “calm.” Meanwhile, the US corporate media has largely ignored the mass protests and the Iraqi regime’s bloody repression.

One need only imagine the response of the “human rights” imperialists to the gunning down of scores of demonstrators in Iran, Venezuela, Russia or any other country targeted by Washington for regime change. In the case of Iraq, however, US imperialism desperately fears that the revolutionary intervention of the masses will cut across its war aims.

The events in Iraq assume immense international importance under conditions in which there is an absence of a mass antiwar movement in the US and internationally. This is bound up with the role played by the pseudo-left. These political tendencies, which emerged out of the middle-class protest movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, have moved sharply to the right. Reflecting the social interests of privileged layers of the upper middle class, these groups, some of them still claiming to be socialist, have played a key political role in providing justifications for imperialist intervention and mass slaughter under the cynical banner of “human rights.”

The mass social upsurge in Iraq—widely seen as a potential battleground for a US war against Iran—points to the only way forward in stopping a new and more terrible war in the Middle East, and with it the threat of a global conflagration.

It is the struggle of the working class against capitalism, in Iraq, the broader Middle East, the United States and internationally, that provides the foundation for the emergence of a new mass antiwar movement. This movement must be armed with a program of socialist internationalism to unify workers all over the world to put an end to the source of war, social inequality and dictatorship: the capitalist system.

Indonesia: Student unrest continues as tens of thousands of workers set to strike

Oscar Grenfell

Large student protests continued in Jakarta and other major Indonesian centres on Monday and Tuesday in defiance of violent police repression and strident denunciations by senior ministers in the government of President Joko Widodo.

The demonstrations, which grew last week to become some of the largest student mobilisations in two decades, are in opposition to attempts by the parliament to introduce a regressive new criminal code and the passage in September of legislation defanging the official anti-corruption body.

Protesters have also raised broader issues, including a call for an end to “militarism” in Papua and West Papua, amid a brutal army crackdown in those provinces, and demands for government action to put an end to massive peat fires that are enveloping the major cities with a toxic haze.

The protests have continued, despite Widodo’s postponement of any parliamentary vote on the criminal code, which includes a raft of anti-democratic measures criminalising various sexual activities, and explicitly anti-communist provisions.

Student protesters in Jakarta on Monday, Credit: @kaylstr (Twitter)

On Monday afternoon, thousands of student and youth protesters marched towards the House of Representatives compound in central Jakarta. Unlike during rallies the previous week, they were blocked from approaching the building by police barricades and heavily-armed officers. The protest coincided with the final plenary session of the parliamentary body, for the 2014 to 2019 term.

During the clashes that ensued when protesters sought to breach the barricade, hundreds were injured, while hundreds more were detained. Police allegedly used a barrage of tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, prompting mass panic.

Jakarta authorities acknowledged 210 injuries. A hospital spokesman told the Jakarta Post that 38 of those wounded were taken to Partamina Hospital in South Jakarta. In an indication of the demographics of the emerging movement, 22 of them were university students and nine were high school pupils.

Skirmishes continued into the evening, with police claiming that protesters threw rocks at them and resisted dispersal. The following day, authorities announced that they had arrested some 519 people, who were being subjected to questioning to determine whether or not they were students.

The mass-roundup follows police violence last week, including arrests of prominent artists critical of the government and a brutal crackdown on protests. Police agencies have also been scouring social media to identify “troublemakers.”

On Thursday, two students were killed in the town of Kendari in South Sulawesi, after police attacked demonstrations there. While the exact circumstances of their deaths are not clear, one of the students was shot and another had received major head injuries. The fatalities occurred the same day that Amnesty International Indonesia called for an urgent investigation into “mass police violence” against the demonstrations.

The government has responded by branding the protesters as “rioters,” and accusing them of seeking to disrupt the ceremonial presidential and parliamentary inaugurations that occurred earlier this week.

Attempts to dampen-down the unrest, however, may be further complicated by plans by tens of thousands of workers to take strike and protest action on Wednesday next week.

New US tariffs escalate trade war with Europe

Alex Lantier

The Trump Administration announced on October 2 that it would impose $7.5 billion in punitive tariffs on European Union exports to America, based on a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against EU subsidies to Airbus. After Washington imposed $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese exports and a 25 percent tariff on EU steel last year, to which China and the EU replied with billions in retaliatory tariffs, this new move sets the world’s major economies on a course to all-out trade war.

Trump called it a “big win for the United States.” US officials, who are also preparing sanctions on EU auto exports, said they would impose a 10 percent tariff on Airbus aircraft and 25 percent tariffs on various EU agricultural and industrial goods. US aircraft manufacturer Boeing had called for a 100 percent tariff on Airbus planes, apparently trying to lock Airbus out of the US markets.

EU officials, who have brought a similar WTO suit against US subsidies for Boeing and are waiting for a ruling authorizing tariffs against US products, threatened to retaliate. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström declared, “Our readiness to find a fair settlement remains unchanged. But if the US decides to impose WTO-authorised countermeasures, it will be pushing the EU into a situation where we will have no other option than do the same.”

Trucks hauling shipping containers drive near containers stacked five-high at a terminal Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2019, on Harbor Island in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

In an article titled “Europe can do more than Trump realizes,” the Sueddeutsche Zeitung warned that US tariffs on $40 billion in EU auto exports “could sink Germany into an economic crisis.” However, it threatened, “America in 2018 sold products worth 270 billion euros to Europe, three times more than it did to China. Does Trump really want to endanger this, a year before his re-election bid? Retaliation from Brussels could do serious damage to the US economy.”

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are acting with staggering recklessness. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, the dominant factions of the ruling class still recognized that trade war policies in the last great capitalist economic collapse, the Great Depression of the 1930s, had disastrous economic and military consequences. The Davos Economic Forum noted, “Protectionist policies helped precipitate the collapse of international trade in the 1930s, and this trade shrinkage was a plausible seed of World War II.”

A decade later, however, both sides are stoking the same economic rivalries—even though, twice in the 20th century, these exploded into world war between US and European capitalism.

The potential dangers in terms of job losses and economic dislocation are incalculable. In today’s world of transnational production, the imposition of tariff barriers on international trade not only threatens to eliminate millions of jobs involved in assembling finished aircraft, cars or other manufactured products that are then exported across national borders. It also threatens to wreak havoc across the supply chain of each manufacturing corporation, whose activities depend on rapidly and cheaply assembling products from parts made around the world.

The last year has seen a wave of warnings, as the various tariffs went into effect, that they could tip the economy back into a recession like the 2008 Wall Street crash. The World Bank’s 2018 Global Economic Prospects report noted: “A broad-based increase in tariffs worldwide would have major adverse consequences for global trade and activity. An escalation of tariffs up to legally-allowed bound rates could translate into a decline in global trade flows amounting to 9 percent, similar to the drop seen during the global financial crisis in 2008-09.”

The blow would be particularly serious amid signs that world capitalism is already falling back into its first coordinated global recession since 2008. With US manufacturing contracting and Germany sinking into recession, world trade growth will sink to only 1.2 percent this year, according to WTO estimates, the slowest since 2008.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the various US-EU tariff disputes, there will be no peaceful long-term settlement of these conflicts. Rather, global relationships and institutions that have formed the framework of world economy for decades are disintegrating in the face of historically rooted, objective contradictions of the capitalist system.

Trump said as a presidential candidate that nuclear war in Europe was not “off the table” and called the NATO alliance with Europe “obsolete” upon his election—to which the EU powers replied by pledging to spend hundreds of billions of euros to build their own independent military forces. Since then, Washington and the EU have imposed escalating tariffs, causing the failure of last year’s G7 summit, and clashed over US threats of a new neo-colonial war on Iran. With the latest tariff ruling, these intractable economic and military conflicts are reaching a new, even greater intensity.

Shortly after the establishment of the EU in 1992, one of its main founders, French President François Mitterrand, told a journalist in a moment of candor: “France does not know it, but we are at war with America—yes, a permanent, rival, economic war without any obvious casualties. Yes, the Americans are very brutal, voracious, they want an unlimited domination over the world. It is an unknown war, a permanent war, without visible dead yet a war to the death.”

The year before, the Stalinist bureaucracy had restored capitalism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But the elimination of the Soviet Union as a military and political counterweight to the imperialist powers has only intensified the contradictions of capitalism that underlay the world wars and social revolutions of the 20th century: between world economy and the nation state system, and between socialized production and private appropriation of profit. After three decades of escalating inter-imperialist economic rivalry, the world is yet again teetering on the brink.

The antipode to the growth of nationalism, trade war and militarism is the resurgence of the international class struggle. From the mass strikes of auto workers and teachers across North America, to “yellow vest” protests in France, mass movements against military regimes in Sudan and Algeria, and the mass protests in Hong Kong, anger against social inequality is mounting among workers. The economic crisis presents this emerging movement with vast revolutionary tasks.

Writing in 1934, as he fought to mobilize the working class against the approaching danger of World War II, the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky warned: “The national state with its borders, passports, monetary system, customs and the army for the protection of customs has become a frightful impediment to the economic and cultural development of humanity.” The task facing the working class, he stressed, was “not to bind itself to the national state in time of war, to follow not the war map, but the map of the class struggle.”

Averting a new relapse into economic depression and war requires an international revolutionary struggle to take state power out of the hands of the financial aristocracies that are driving the trade war, expropriate their ill-gotten wealth, and build a socialist society on a global scale.

Ukraine government announces large-scale privatizations, threatening mass layoffs

Jason Melanovski

While the government of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky has become embroiled in a political crisis between President Donald Trump and the Democrats in the United States, in its domestic policies Zelensky’s administration has continued to move forward with plans to privatize and sell off many state-owned enterprises and much of the country’s land area to wealthy speculators.

Zelensky ordered the Ukrainian Parliament to submit a bill regarding land reform with a goal to open the country’s land market on December 1, 2019. Last week, the newly appointed Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk set out a definitive timeline to open Ukraine’s land market on October 1, 2020, regardless of the bill’s outcome.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its state-owned farms, a moratorium on the private sale of arable farm land was enacted in 2001. Despite rabid opposition from Western imperialism, the moratorium on sales of farm land has been renewed 10 times, most recently in December 2018.

In August 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the Ukrainian government’s ban on the sale of agricultural land, declaring that it violated “human rights” and was illegal according to the European Convention on Human Rights.

The opening of the Ukrainian agricultural land market to investors has long been a goal of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank: it has featured in its loan agreements with Ukraine ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine, long known as the “bread basket” of Europe, has an estimated 32 million hectares of arable land. By comparison, Germany—which has roughly double the population of Ukraine—has just 12 million hectares of arable land. In addition, Ukraine is home to 54 percent of the world’s “black earth” soil, which is particularly valuable because it is highly fertile and can easily grow a multitude of crops such as grains, cereals and oilseeds.

Global warming will further increase the value of Ukraine’s land. A 2014 World Bank report titled Ukraine: Soil Fertility to Strengthen Climate Resilience noted that Ukraine, which faces significant issues due to soil erosion and increased droughts due to global warming, has a “highly competitive advantage” relative to other agricultural areas under warming conditions due to its “advantageous geographical location” and “its proximity to large and growing neighboring markets—the Russian Federation and the European Union.”

The IMF and Ukraine’s Western imperialist creditors view the opening of Ukraine’s land market as a priceless opportunity for foreign investors to buy the country’s highly valued fertile “black earth” at rock-bottom prices in comparison with land prices in their own countries.

Zelensky’s proposed outline for agricultural reform seeks to ensure that the Ukrainian bourgeoisie will not be cut out entirely by the interests of imperialism. It is aimed at enabling Ukrainian oligarchs to purchase the land for themselves or function as intermediaries for Western investors. Only Ukrainian citizens or Ukrainian legal entities will be permitted to buy and sell land. Foreign companies and citizens will only be able to purchase land through Ukrainian legal entities.

The opening up of Ukraine’s agriculture to foreign capital is part of a large-scale program of privatization that will entail mass layoffs and far-reaching attacks on the living standards of the working class.

During the same announcement on September 2 that calls for the adoption of land reform, Zelensky tasked Honcharuk with transferring at least 500 state-owned enterprises to a State Property Fund, from which they will then be sold off at auction to the highest bidders.

Making clear that the jobs of tens of thousands of workers will be on the line, the cabinet announced on Monday, September 30: “More than 1,000 inefficient enterprises will be liquidated. The state will no longer spend taxpayers’ funds to support inefficient loss-making enterprises.”

Algerian regime jails top generals, Workers Party leader Louisa Hanoune

Kumaran Ira & Alex Lantier

On September 25, after a two-day trial, an Algerian military court imposed 15-year jail sentences against top figures linked to deposed former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. They were accused of “conspiring against the army” and “the authority of the state.” The accused were Bouteflika’s younger brother and adviser, Said, ex-spy chiefs General Mohamed Mediene (known as “Toufik”) and General Athmane Tartag (“Bachir”), and Louisa Hanoune, the leader and three-time presidential candidate of the petty-bourgeois Workers Party (PT).

The aim of the trial was not to reveal the real crimes of Bouteflika’s allies, but to terrorize the movement in the working class against Algerian strongman Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah’s military regime. It was a reactionary attack on democratic rights. Algeria is paralyzed by mass protests that erupted in February against Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth presidential term.

The military court was silent on the crimes committed by Mediene and Tartag while they led the armed forces in the bloody 1991-2002 Algerian civil war. Hanoune, on the other hand, was arrested after she criticized Salah and the military, warning that the military could launch a bloody coup against mass protests similar to the one launched in 2013 by Egyptian General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. She was charged with “attacking the authority of the army” and “conspiracy against the authority of the state.”

Hanoune’s lawyer, Mokrane Ait Larbi, said the court was “surrounded by military checkpoints” and that “journalists were not authorized to approach the court.” While his client’s close ties to the Bouteflika clan are a matter of public record, he noted that the military had furnished “no proof that there was a conspiracy” in which she participated.

Said Bouteflika, Mohamed Mediene and Bachir Tartag were arrested in May over a meeting in which they allegedly discussed imposing a state of emergency and firing Salah in a last-ditch effort to keep Abdelaziz Bouteflika in power. They were accused of meeting in late March to discuss forming a new body led by ex-President Liamine Zeroual to lead a post-Bouteflika “transition.” The meeting was held shortly after Salah called for Bouteflika to step down. On April 2, Bouteflika resigned.

The late March meeting was part of the ruthless infighting the protests provoked within the Algerian ruling class. Ex-Defense Minister Khaled Nezzar, who has since fled to Spain, stated in May that Saïd Bouteflika contacted him at the time to warn that Salah could move against Bouteflika, and that he was planning to “remove the army chief, impose a state of emergency and keep his brother in power.” He also told Nezzar that Salah could move against the Bouteflika clan “from one instant to the next.”

During the trial, Hanoune’s lawyer confirmed that his client participated in one of these meetings, on March 27, as a “parliamentarian and head of a legal party.”

The military defendants in the trial, with whom Salah worked for decades, were infamous for their role in torturing and murdering approximately 200,000 Algerians during the civil war. However, they faced only the limited charge of plotting against Salah; they were not prosecuted for the army’s crimes against humanity, in which they and Salah are all implicated.

Gen. Mohamed Mediene led the Algerian secret services, the Intelligence and Security Department (Département du renseignement et de la sécurité, DRS), from 1990 to 2015. Trained by the KGB, the Soviet bureaucracy’s intelligence agency, he was infamous for his role in the Algerian civil war, during which he went only by the name “Toufik” in order to preserve his anonymity as he planned savage repression of the Islamist militias. He led a faction of the army brass known as Les éradicateurs (“the Eradicators”), working closely with the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) party.

Jeff Bezos’ Whole Foods slashes medical benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers

Eddie Haywood

Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods Market announced last month that it is eliminating medical benefits for nearly 2,000 part-time workers employed at its stores across the United States. The cuts come after the company announced in March that it would cut workers’ hours to between 20 and 30 hours per week. The cuts to healthcare benefits will go into effect January 1, 2020 and will affect approximately 1,900 workers.

Whole Foods was bought by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. The grocery chain employs more than 91,000 workers at 500 stores in the US, Canada and the UK.

The healthcare cuts for his employees stands in sharp contrast with the vast wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who sits atop a personal fortune of $115 billion. Analysis provided by consumer tracking group Decision Data found that Bezos makes enough money in 2 to 6 hours to more than cover the cost of an entire year of benefits for all of the workers facing cuts.

Justifying the benefits cut, Whole Foods stated it “made the change to better meet the needs of our business and create a more equitable and efficient scheduling model.” Translated, this means that the economic interests of workers are to be sacrificed by the profit considerations of Amazon, with the burden of skyrocketing of health care costs placed squarely on the backs of workers.

Underlining this, the company stated that it is “working to help employees find resources for alternative health care options or to explore moving them to full-time positions offering health benefits.” In other words, Whole Foods fully intends to shift the cost of health care to workers.

The costs of health insurance for workers are enormous. The slashing of insurance for Whole Foods workers follows the overall trend set by Obamacare, which shifted the burden of the rising cost of health insurance from corporations to workers.

In 2017, only 56 per cent of workers acquired their health care coverage from their employers, down from 75 percent in 2008.

According to figures published by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), the decline since 1979 in health care coverage for workers in the US is drastic. Between 1979 and 2008, employer-based coverage dropped 12.4 per cent. Presently, over 28 million workers, 8.8 percent of the population, have no insurance.

In its announcement of the cuts, Whole Foods attempted to minimize the news by stating that “only” two percent of the total workforce would be impacted. In reality, the gutting of benefits and slashing of wages for workers is part of the decades-long social counterrevolution carried out against the working class by the financial aristocracy, impacting workers across all economic sectors.

Since the pay increase to $15 per hour announced in October by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Whole Foods workers at nearly every store location have seen a corresponding cut in their hours to as little as 20 per week. Notably, the cutting of work hours has left workers to perform the same workload in less time, with Whole Foods not hiring new workers to take the slack.

The cutting of hours and medical benefits expose the fraudulent character of Jeff Bezos’ wage increase as a cynical public relations ploy to halt mounting opposition to Amazon’s brutal exploitation of its workers. The wage increase is to be more than offset with hours cuts and the gutting of benefits.

In an interview with Business Insider, a 15-year worker at Whole Foods stated she was “devastated” by the news of the medical benefits cut. She reported that her family was covered by the health-insurance plan she is enrolled in through her job at Whole Foods, and that she would now have to increase her hours or look for a second job, as well as face increased cost for childcare.

“I am in shock. I've worked here 15 years. This is why I keep the job — because of my benefits.”

The gutting of workers’ benefits and hours by Whole Foods is not surprising in the least. After the announcement of workers getting hours cuts in March, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “The cut in hours to Whole Foods workers lines up with the experience of workers at Amazon itself, who discovered that their modest pay increase was tied to the elimination of stock bonuses and other benefits.”

The attack on the social and economic position of workers is by no means isolated to Whole Foods and Amazon workers, but rather a calculated strategy by the financial aristocracy to eradicate every social gain won by the working class through immense struggle in decades past.

Workers from all sectors—autoworkers, teachers, public and private—have experienced their standard of living drop over the last half century, with wage and benefits cuts and gutting of workplace safety regulations all part of a coordinated attack by both the Republican and Democratic parties carrying out the dictates of the financial aristocracy against the working class.