Australian Labor Party and unions agree to slash income support and working conditions

Mike Head

The Australian Labor Party confirmed yesterday that it will back legislation, drawn up in backroom talks by the federal government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), to reduce JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments and allow employers to keep cutting workers’ hours and wages.

Labor’s parliamentary caucus agreed to vote for the Liberal-National government’s bill, ensuring it will pass through parliament during the current fortnight sitting, after its provisions were finalised during negotiations between ACTU secretary Sally McManus and Workplace Relations Minister Christian Porter.

In its assault on workers, the ACTU-designed deal goes far beyond the initial JobKeeper package drafted by McManus and Porter in April-May. After that agreement was reached Porter called McManus his BFF (“best friend forever”) and Prime Minister Scott Morrison phoned McManus to thank her for the ACTU’s “constructive” role.

The “JobKeeper 2.0” measures will throw about five million workers onto poverty-line payments from next month amid the worst unemployment since the 1930s Great Depression. At the same time, it will allow companies to continue slashing wages and conditions even if they no longer qualify for JobKeeper wage subsidies.

The clear purpose of these measures is to give workers no choice but to accept the gutting of their conditions and push them into unsafe workplaces, regardless of the danger of infection, amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The ACTU-Labor-government deal is a centrepiece of the drive to “reopen” the economy and exploit the pandemic to further restructure workplace relations at the expense of the working class.

The bill extends employers’ powers to reduce workers’ hours and adjust their duties and location of work. This is both for businesses still claiming wage subsidies and for “legacy employers” who no longer qualify for the subsidies but claim to be suffering just a 10 percent decline in revenue due to COVID-19.

The main “limit” is that workers’ hours and wages cannot be cut by more than 40 percent. Also, they cannot be called in to work fewer than two hours on a single day. In other words, the bill is another green light for the casualisation and impoverishment of millions of workers.

When the ACTU and the government struck their initial deal on the JobKeeper legislation, which Labor helped pass in May, the unions claimed that this was only a temporary measure, confined to employers that qualified for wage subsidies. This pretence has now been abandoned.

The 3.5 million or so workers currently receiving a bare minimum wage of $750 a week, via JobKeeper subsidies handed to their employers, will have their incomes reduced to just $500 a week by the end of the year, and to only $325 a week for part-time or casual workers. These amounts are not enough to live on.

The approximately 1.6 million jobless workers now receiving JobSeeker unemployment allowances of $550 a week will have these pittances cut by $150 a week to just over $400. That is just above the starvation level of $280 a week for the pre-COVID Newstart jobless payment. And the government has foreshadowed cutting this level further after December 31.

After yesterday’s caucus meeting, Labor’s leaders said they would back the bill even if the government rejects any Labor amendments to adjust the pace of slashing these payments. Labor is trying to posture as having some concerns about workers bearing the burden of the pandemic-triggered economic crisis, while pledging its support for the bill to satisfy the demands of the corporate elite.

Another pretence by the government, Labor and the unions—that JobKeeper is for the benefit of workers—was shattered last week. Annual profit reports by companies confirmed that the JobKeeper wage subsidies are propping up and inflating the profits of large companies, even as they axe thousands of jobs.

At the top of the list was Qantas, the former government-owned airline. It obtained $267 million from JobKeeper by June 30, plus as much again in direct government subsidies, while standing down 20,000 workers. Yesterday it announced the dismissal of 2,500 ground crew members, on top of 4,000 retrenchments last week.

By last week, companies listed on the stock exchange had reported receiving at least $625 million in JobKeeper payments, often while reporting increased profits based almost entirely on these subsidies. The true level of the corporate handouts remains hidden because the government refuses to provide a list of all the companies and the amounts they are receiving.

While the ACTU and its affiliates feigned opposition to Qantas’s job destruction, they are working night and day to block any struggles by workers against it or any other attack on jobs and conditions. At the same time, they are collaborating behind closed doors with the government and the major employers in five working groups on how to impose more “industrial relations reforms.” These “round table” groups are due to report next month.

McManus told a recent Griffith University online event that making industrial awards “simpler and less complex” was an area for potential agreement. She denied media reports that the process had produced impasses, saying agreement could be reached with some employer groups.

Her comments were a reminder of her interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship “Insiders” television show in April, when she told employers: “You can get everything you want through co-operation.”

McManus boasted that she and the unions had worked to make “changes” to industrial awards and agreements affecting 2.5 million restaurant, hospitality and clerical workers in “about a week.”

In one typical “change”—made without any consultation with these millions of workers—the Australian Services Union allowed employers to force 1.3 million clerical workers to work any hours from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. from Mondays to Fridays, and 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays without overtime rates. It also permitted casuals to be allocated shifts as short as two hours.

This week’s proceedings in parliament again demonstrate how much the ruling class depends on the Labor Party and the unions to quash unrest in the working class over the mass unemployment, cuts to wages and conditions, and exposure to unsafe conditions in workplaces, including schools, hospitals and aged care facilities, amid the pandemic.

After months of recess, parliament has been recalled for a fortnight just to rush through this bill and other legislation to hike university students’ fees. Parliament will not meet again until October 6, when another brief session will be organised to rubber stamp an austerity budget.

The country remains governed by a de facto coalition with the Labor Party via a self-proclaimed “national cabinet,” which sanctions emergency decrees issued by the federal, state and territory government leaders.

This collaboration takes to a new level the partnership forged for decades between the unions, employers and government to suppress the opposition of workers to the endless attacks of the financial elite. These have produced a soaring gulf between the super-rich and the working class, especially since the union-employer-government Accords reached by the ACTU and the Hawke-Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today’s government-corporate-union offensive underscores the necessity for workers to break from Labor and the unions, and to turn to an alternative socialist perspective: The fight for a workers’ government that would place the banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic workers’ control to reorganise production for human need and health, not private profit.

Rising COVID-19 death toll underscores decades-long crisis in Australian aged care

Clare Bruderlin

The catastrophic spread of COVID-19 throughout more than 130 aged care facilities in the Australian state of Victoria has so far resulted in the deaths of at least 304 residents and over 1,700 infections.

Data from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services shows that residential aged care accounted for the majority of coronavirus outbreaks between June 1 and August 11. In total, 335 of the 525 people who have died from coronavirus in Australia since the pandemic began were aged care residents.

The pandemic has exacerbated a decades-long crisis. Extensive privatisation and the gutting of public healthcare carried out by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, has meant that the needs of the elderly and infirm are subordinated to the profit requirements of the corporate and financial elite.

Since 1997, there have been 18 separate government inquiries into residential aged care. An interim report, handed down last year by an ongoing Aged Care Royal Commission, conceded that many of the failings identified in previous inquiries remain widespread.

The decades-long assault on the elderly has created the conditions for the rampant spread of the virus in aged care facilities. Recent reports have revealed catastrophic conditions, including widespread malnutrition, dehydration and untreated sores and infections. Victorian state Labor and federal health authorities blocked some aged-care residents infected with COVID-19 from being transferred to hospital—a policy that amounts to social murder.

One nurse at St Vincent’s hospital in East Melbourne told the Guardian that she treated an elderly resident from the private Kalyna Care facility who was transferred to the emergency department only after she was found with infected wounds and 18 sores on her body. The nurse said the woman had been “left in a room to rot,” and her death last week was “the culmination of six to eight weeks of neglect.”

In the same facility, where more than 20 residents and 15 staff have been infected with COVID-19, photos emerged showing a 95-year-old woman with ants crawling over a wound on her leg.

An audit of Kalyna Care by the aged care regulator some three weeks earlier found that the wounds of residents were not being properly treated, and an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission assessment team found that the facility failed all five requirements it was tested on. Staff, it stated, did not “have the knowledge and competency to perform their roles effectively.”

However, it was not until Kalyna Care became severely understaffed, as aged care workers were forced into quarantine, that the Victorian government took over the facility and placed residents under the control of a public hospital. The chair of the board of Kalyna Care stated that at one point there was only one nurse and one personal care assistant responsible for 68 residents. Similar tragedies have played out at facilities across Melbourne.

The vast majority of the facilities where outbreaks have occurred, including Kalyna Care, are privately owned and operated, with some of the largest providers amassing millions of dollars in profits each year.

There are around 2,500 aged care facilities in Australia tasked with caring for over 200,000 people. Forty-one percent are owned by private corporations and 50 percent by “not for-profits,” primarily churches and charities. The remaining 9 percent are government owned.

A report released by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research this month revealed that nine of the largest not-for-profit aged care operators, which received $2.4 billion in Government funding in 2019, collectively paid their executives and board members more than $30 million in compensation.

The report also revealed that “while four of the top six operators reported losses in 2019, losses were driven by property investment... Each of the 6 operators generated between $26 million and $62 million in net cash from operations.”

Furthermore, in a recent audit, one of the largest not-for-profit aged care operators, Uniting, which owns more than 70 facilities, was found to have underpaid 9,561 workers in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory by more than $3.36 million over the past six year. One worker was underpaid nearly $12,000.

The top six private for-profit aged care providers—Bupa, Opal, Regis, Estia, Japara and Allity—received over $2.17 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies in 2015-16 and made substantial additional operating profits, while paying just $154 million in tax.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, the total combined income of all for-profit aged care providers was over $5 billion in 2015-16, with a total profit of $402 million after tax.

The major windfall to private operators is the direct consequence of the pro-business restructuring of the sector spearheaded by the Labor Party.

In the early 1990s, the federal Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating introduced competitive processes for the allocation of funds to aged care and opened up government-funded homes to for-profit organisations. It also pioneered a “user pays” regime by imposing higher fees and introducing entry bonds on residents in aged hostels. By 1997, the number of government-owned aged care facilities had fallen from 19 percent in 1972 to around 11 percent.

The Howard Liberal-National government deepened this process, cutting $1 billion from aged care in the 1996-97 budget, claiming that higher nursing home fees and entry bonds would provide incentives for investors to expand and improve the industry.

In 2011, a Productivity Commission reported brought down by the Gillard Labor government made recommendations that the elderly should pay up to 35 percent of their own aged care costs and that these contributions should be funded from the value of their homes, using “reverse mortgages.”

Acting on these recommendations in 2012, the Gillard government released its “Living Longer, Living Better” package, which it said would deliver “a less regulated, more consumer-driven and market-based aged care system.” What this meant, in practice, was that the cost of providing aged care services was substantially shifted onto elderly residents and their families.

Today, aged care residents can expect to pay a basic daily fee of up to $52.25, which is 85 percent of the single person rate of the aged pension, for day-to-day services such as meals, cleaning, facilities management and laundry.

Additionally, there is a “means-tested care fee” for residents which can be up to $259.15 per day. This is used to cover the cost of residents’ personal and clinical care needs which can include help with bathing, dressing, grooming and going to the toilet, specialised nursing services and medication assistance.

Despite the rising cost of care, a 2018 report submitted to the royal commission found that up to half of all residents in aged care facilities suffer from malnutrition as a result of inedible and non-nutritious food coupled with an inadequate number of staff to assist residents who cannot feed themselves.

Another submission found that in 2017, the average food budget in aged care facilities was just $6.08 per resident per day, which was less than the average in Australian prisons ($8.25 per prisoner per day).

Staffing levels in residential aged care in Australia are substantially below those of other comparable countries.

A study carried out for the royal commission released last October, found that per day, aged care residents receive just 36 minutes of care by registered nurses, 8 minutes by allied health professionals and 144 minutes by personal care assistants.

When this was compared with standards in the US, over half (57.6 percent) of Australian residents were found to be in facilities with substandard care. To bring all residential aged care facilities to minimum adequate average staffing levels would require an overall increase of staff by 37.3 percent.

If Australian practices were brought to the standards of Canadian British Columbia, levels of care would have to be increased by 175 percent.

Moreover, the number of higher-trained aged care staff has decreased. In 2003 registered nurses working in aged care accounted for 21.4 percent of the workforce. By 2016 this was reduced to 14.9 percent. The number of less trained personal care attendants, who are often low-paid, casual employees, increased from 56.5 percent in 2003 to 71.5 percent in 2016.

A submission to the royal commission revealed that the present Morrison Liberal-National government was warned in April that aged care facilities would struggle to find staff during a coronavirus outbreak, based on the experience of outbreaks at the Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch House in Sydney, where an estimated 87 percent of the workforce had to go into quarantine.

Furthermore, aged care workers since March have reported personal protection equipment (PPE) shortages and inadequate infection control.

Despite these warnings, no significant measures have been taken by either state or federal governments to stop the spread of the pandemic in aged care facilities.

On Friday, the Morrison government announced that it would invest $171 million into the aged care sector, claiming this would bring the total investment during the pandemic to $1 billion. However, aged care facilities are not required to report how they are spending this funding.

Jason Ward, of the Tax Justice Network Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that while providers have received additional funding during the pandemic, there is “no evidence that they have spent that money in a way that’s been effective in preventing this disease and unnecessary deaths.”

The tragic deaths and illnesses are an indictment of the capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of life to the profit interests of a tiny corporate elite. As has been the case in Britain and internationally, Australian governments have pursued a homicidal policy of allowing aged care residents to become sick, knowing that many of them would succumb to the virus.

This underscores the fact that the fight for socialism, a society in which social need, not private profit, determines the allocation of resources, is a life and death question.

EU denounces Russia over alleged poisoning of oppositionist Alexei Navalny

Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

On Monday, doctors at Berlin’s Charité hospital claimed they had found indications that Alexei Navalny, the head of Russia’s pro-NATO liberal opposition, had been poisoned. The Charité said its findings indicated “an intoxication by a substance from the active substance group of cholinesterase inhibitors,” although the specific substance is not yet known. Navalny is reportedly being treated with the antidote atropine.

Berlin and the European Union (EU) immediately seized upon the case. German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) issued a joint statement declaring: “In view of Mr Navalny’s major role in Russia’s political opposition, the country’s authorities are urgently called upon to fully investigate this act as a matter of urgency – and to do so in a completely transparent way.” Demanding that those responsible be “be identified and brought to justice,” they added: “We hope that Mr Navalny can make a full recovery. We also send our best wishes to his family, for whom this is a most trying experience.”

Alexei Navalny (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The EU also demanded an investigation. “The Russian authorities must immediately initiate an independent and transparent investigation,” EU foreign affairs representative Josep Borrell demanded in a statement published on Monday evening. Similarly, the French foreign ministry issued a statement yesterday condemning a “criminal act targeting a major figure in Russian political life” and demanding “a rapid and transparent inquiry.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov declared that Moscow has no plans to initiate a criminal investigation of Navalny’s illness. “The medical analyses of our doctors and those in Germany are completely in agreement. But their conclusions are different. We do not understand the haste of our German colleagues,” Peskov said. He asserted that there are “many other medical possibilities” to explain Navalny’s illness; Russian doctors initially diagnosed Navalny as suffering from a metabolic disorder.

What actually happened to Navalny, who fell ill suddenly on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that the drive by Washington, Berlin and other NATO imperialist powers to isolate and secure regime change in Russia, launched with the February 2014 NATO-backed putsch in Kiev, has reached a new and critical stage. An explosive crisis has emerged after the disputed August 9 presidential elections in Belarus. This crisis was complicated, from the point of view of imperialist strategy, by the sudden entry into activity of the working class in Belarus.

In February 2014 in Ukraine, after a Russian-backed government cracked down on pro-EU protests, NATO backed a far-right putsch in Kiev. During this operation, opposition gunmen secretly shot Ukrainian riot police in so-called “sniper massacres,” using the ensuing police crackdown to discredit and then topple the regime. This led not only to civil war in Ukraine, but an explosive military standoff between NATO and Russia along Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe. NATO troops and military advisors are now posted to all the Baltic republics, Poland, and Ukraine.

This month, when opposition forces in Belarus launched protests against incumbent President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s declaration of victory, leading to a brutal police crackdown, strikes erupted in factories and workplaces across Belarus. The upsurge of industrial action by the working class in the former Soviet republic stunned bourgeois forces of all political colors. While the Kremlin is backing Lukashenko, the EU has supported an unelected Coordination Council set up by opposition parties linked to rival candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya.

Moreover, anger at social inequality and the disastrous official handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped drive Belarusian workers into action, extend well beyond Belarus. There is mounting dissatisfaction among both the Russian ruling elite and Russian workers with President Vladimir Putin—reflected, in a highly distorted way, in last month’s protests in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk against the Kremlin’s removal of regional governor Sergei Furgal, of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR).

The Khabarovsk protests have made clear the growing centrifugal tendencies in the Russian state apparatus, as 18 regions in Russia are set to hold regional elections on September 13.

If Navalny has indeed been poisoned, the timing of this attack strongly suggests it was a political operation. However, it remains unclear who would have carried it out and for what ends. Two basic possibilities, with many related variants, emerge. One is that Navalny was poisoned by elements in the Putin regime, acting with or without the knowledge or support of the president, though it is questionable whether a reckless and obvious act would strengthen the Kremlin regime.

Another possibility is that opposition factions in Russia or their imperialist handlers gave a possibly non-lethal dose of poison to Navalny in another “false flag” attack, aiming to discredit the Russian regime by committing an act they expect would be blamed on the Kremlin.

Such an attack could have the politically-convenient consequence of burnishing Navalny’s at best tattered opposition credentials. Navalny, a viciously anti-immigrant politician, reportedly received US government funds funneled via the National Endowment for Democracy in 2006, before heading to Yale University in America to participate in the “Yale World Fellows” program in 2009. He is currently viewed among broad layers of the Russian population as a tool of NATO.

While the attacker in the alleged poisoning of Navalny has not been identified, leading European politicians and media are nevertheless rushing to loudly accuse the Putin regime.

“Although a strong suspicion already existed, the certainty of the poisoning is shocking and a repulsive policy of the Russian leadership,” said Norbert Röttgen (CDU), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag. “The policy of poisoning consists of insidiously eliminating opposition members and sending a clear message to all Russian citizens: Those who oppose democratically live dangerously. Any naivety and trivialization that is repeatedly recommended towards Russia, especially in Germany, is out of place,” Röttgen declared.

The German Greens’ foreign policy spokesman, Omid Noripour, also blamed Russia. “It is now obvious to everyone that this kind of attempted assassination and murder has a system,” he said. Referring to allegations that Moscow poisoned the Skripal family in Salisbury, Britain and shot a former Chechen militia leader in the Tiergarten in Berlin, he added: “The British called the EU Council after the attack in Salisbury, the German government did not do that after the Tiergarten murder. Now it is high time and a good opportunity for this—after all, Germany holds the presidency of the [EU] Council.”

Similarly, in a column titled “What the Navalny Affair reveals of the Putin system,” Le Monde’s Moscow correspondent Benoît Vitkine baldly cited a Twitter hashtag #WeKnowWhoIsGuilty, now used by Russian opposition supporters, as evidence that Putin is responsible for Navalny’s illness: “An ambassador of France, the one for human rights, has echoed this call. Behind these words is a simple truth: political violence is inherent to the Putin system.”

In fact, the 30 years since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s geopolitically suicidal 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union have shown that reactionary violence is inherent to the capitalist system. The NATO war drive in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia made possible by this elimination of the main military counterweight to the imperialist powers left a trail of devastation with millions of dead and tens of millions of refugees. Since the Ukraine putsch, there have been mounting military exercises and preparations for a direct NATO attack on Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

The resurgence of the class struggle inside what was previously the territory of the Soviet Union marks a significant new stage in this political crisis. It is virtually self-evident that the NATO powers are keeping Navalny as a tool to intervene in Russian politics in a period of mounting wars and class struggles. Were the political forces around Navalny to obtain more power inside Russia, moreover, they would be bitterly hostile to the working class.

The danger of war, growing social inequality and the disastrous official handling of the COVID-19 pandemic can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the re-emergence of mass working class struggles based on a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program. In Russia, Belarus and across the region, this means building the Trotskyist movement opposed to the capitalist gangster oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist restoration of capitalism. This would be an integral part of a mass, international movement in the working class against war and the murderous policies adopted by capitalist governments worldwide amid the pandemic.

India emerges as a global epicenter of COVID-19 pandemic

Wasantha Rupasinghe

India is emerging as a global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with the virus spreading rapidly throughout the country, including to rural areas where public health facilities are largely nonexistent.

Home to the world’s largest number of desperately poor people, the South Asian country now leads the world in terms of daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases, with new cases exceeding 60,000 on virtually every day for the past two-and-a-half weeks.

India is on pace to soon surpass Brazil as the country with the world’s second largest total tally of COVID-19 infections.

Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party government began “reopening the economy” at the end of April, the country’s COVID-19 caseload has gone up exponentially, with cases increasing more than a hundredfold.

On May 1, India had just over 25,000 cases and 1,150 deaths. As of Tuesday, according to extremely conservative official figures, total infections rose to 3,170,942 with 58,570 fatalities. A record number of daily infections was registered on Saturday, with 70,488 cases. Underscoring that the spread of the virus continues to accelerate, the past seven days have witnessed the fastest weekly increase in new infections and fatalities since the start of the pandemic, with nearly half a million new infections and 6,666 people losing their lives. The latest one million infections have been registered in just 16 days.

Commuters wearing face masks jostle for a ride on a bus in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

Responsibility for this health and social disaster lies squarely with the entire Indian ruling class, which has pursued policies from the outset aimed at defending the wealth and business interests of the superrich, while leaving the vast majority of impoverished workers and toilers to fend for themselves.

The Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Modi has refused to take any serious measures to strengthen the country’s chronically underfunded health care system and has facilitated the rapid spread of the virus to almost every corner of the country with its homicidal back-to-work drive. It has been supported in this by all of the official opposition parties, which have used their positions in various state governments to throw open the economy so big business can begin extracting profits once again from highly-exploited workers, regardless of what this costs in human lives.

Despite the horrendous toll the coronavirus has taken, especially on the working class and rural poor, Modi continues to insist that his government has mounted an exemplary response. In his August 15 Independence Day speech, Modi said India is “doing well” in the battle against the deadly pandemic. He added that he “believe[s] the indomitable will power and determination of 130 crore [10 million] countrymen will make us win over Corona [pandemic], and we shall definitely win.”

Modi’s rhetoric is aimed at covering up the callous attitude of his BJP government towards the lives of millions of working people and rural toilers. After ignoring the threat posed by the pandemic for more than two months, the government belatedly implemented an ill-prepared countrywide lockdown on March 25 with only a few hours’ notice. The lockdown failed to prevent the spread of the disease, above all, because the government did not use the time to increase desperately needed financial support to the health care system, nor put in place a system of mass testing and contact tracing to identify and contain infections.

Neither did the government provide adequate financial and other support to the tens of millions of workers who lost their incomes overnight, resulting in hunger and social distress on a vast scale. The social misery produced by the government’s policies meant that millions of workers were left with no choice but to return to unsafe workplaces when lockdown measures began to be prematurely lifted from late April onwards.

The Congress Party, Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI), Aam Admi Party (AAP), Shiv Sena and several regional parties are equally to blame for the rapid spread of the pandemic. All of them, whether as part of current or past governments at the central or state levels, have intentionally neglected the public health care system by limiting budget allocations to the meagre level of 1.5 percent of India’s GDP.

Since the onset of the pandemic, none of the state governments involving these parties has challenged the Modi government’s criminal policy of “herd immunity,” which involves allowing the virus to run rampant so that major companies can return to business as usual. It is worth noting in this regard that two of the states hit hardest by the virus, the western state of Maharashtra and the capital of Delhi, are run by a coalition government of the ultra-right Shiv Sena and Congress, and an AAP government respectively.

The “herd immunity” policy, which even its advocates acknowledge will likely lead to a death toll in the millions, is the spearhead of a savage assault being prepared by the Modi government against the working class. The prime minister has vowed to initiate a “quantum jump” in pro-investor reforms, including the further relaxation of India’s already lax labour laws so as to slash labour costs and make India more attractive to global investors.

To downplay the disastrous consequences of its policies, which are becoming ever clearer with the daily increases in new infections and deaths, the Modi government primarily highlights the so-called “recovery rate,” which is "nearly at 75 percent.” It also claims to have presided over a “lower fatality rate” of 1.86 percent, which is “one of the lowest globally,” according to the Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry.

These claims are absurd in many ways. Indian state authorities are notorious for vastly under-reporting death rates, which has no doubt contributed to the comparatively low official fatality rate. Changes made to the procedure for releasing COVID-19 patients from hospitals have also artificially boosted the recovery rate. Whereas a patient initially required two negative coronavirus tests before being discharged, the government adopted new guidelines in April that allowed patients to be discharged if they showed no symptoms for three days. Even patients receiving critical care require just one negative test before being discharged. As a result, there have been repeated reports of patients who have died after leaving hospitals. It remains unclear whether these deaths are being logged as coronavirus casualties.

The attempt to paint a rosy picture of the low death rate also ignores the devastating impact COVID-19 is having on the elderly and other vulnerable sections of the population. According to a study by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, Indians over the age of 60 account for 53 percent of all virus deaths, even though they make up just nine percent of the general population.

The refusal of the Modi government and its counterparts at the state level to make available additional funds for India’s desperately underresourced public health system has also created terrible conditions at many hospitals. There is an acute shortage of medical staff and personal protective equipment for frontline workers. Doctors, nurses and other medical staff have been forced to labour in hellish conditions and have often gone for months without pay. This has triggered a growing number of strikes and protests.

For example, on July 18, sanitation workers and nursing staff of the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) in Patna went on strike to protest the nonpayment of their salaries for the previous two months. Although the facility was designated as a COVID-19 hospital by the state government, striking workers alleged it had become a “hub for VIP patients of COVID-19 like ruling government leaders, ministers, bureaucrats, judges and businessmen.” As they have occupied the majority of the isolation rooms and ICU beds with ventilators, health care workers or their family members have been refused admission and treatment at the hospital where they have worked since the beginning of the pandemic, according to NewsClick.

Across India, around 200 doctors have already succumbed to the virus, 40 percent of whom were general practitioners.

These protests in the health care sector coincide with mounting social opposition among the working class and rural toilers to the pro-corporate agenda of Modi and the ruling elite as a whole. Millions of workers, including social health and child care workers, have participated in various strikes and protests over recent weeks against planned privatisations, cuts to public spending, and attacks on workplace rights.

The growing opposition to the Indian political establishment must find an independent political way forward if it is to put a stop to the ruling class onslaught on working people and save lives amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic. This requires the mobilisation of the working class and rural toilers in a struggle for a workers and peasants government pledged to socialist policies.

American Airlines announces 19,000 to be laid off starting October 1

Jacob Crosse

American Airlines executives announced Tuesday that without additional government funding through the Payroll Support Program (PSR), included in the CARES Act passed earlier this year, it will proceed with furloughing 19,000 workers on October 1. Thousands may still be laid off regardless of whether Congress hands over more public money to the airline.

As part of the bipartisan CARES Act passed at the end of March this year, the major US airlines were bailed out to the tune of $25 billion, with American Airlines receiving a hefty $5.8 billion gratis from the US taxpayer. As part of the terms of the bailout, the airlines were required to use the money to retain workforces through September 30.

With the additional layoffs, American will have 40,000 fewer workers than it did before the pandemic. More than 12,500 workers have already been forced to leave through “voluntary” retirements, buyouts and other schemes.

In addition to American, Delta Air Lines announced on Monday that it will furlough over 1,940 pilots unless the Air Line Pilots Association agrees to a minimum 15 percent pay cut.

American AIrlines Boeing 777 (Image Credit: Steve Lynes)

The mass layoffs in the US airline industry are part of a global restructuring of the airline industry that is destroying the jobs of thousands of airline workers in the UK, Germany, Australia and other countries. It occurs at a time when more than 30 million workers are officially unemployed, and jobless workers have been without their $600-a-week federal unemployment benefit and many face evictions for nonpayment of rent.

All of the major airlines spent billions of dollars in the decade leading up to the pandemic on share buybacks and dividend distributions to stockholders. In a Bloomberg report earlier this year, it was revealed that American, United, Southwest, Delta and Alaska had spent 96% of their free cash flow, (money remaining after capital expenditures) between 2010-2019, buying back their own shares.

American Airlines led all domestic carriers, spending $12.97 billion on buybacks during that time, even though the company had a negative free cash flow of over $8 billion during that same period. Delta and Southwest were close behind, spending $11.4 and $10.65 billion on buybacks respectively.

Despite the bailouts, the airlines have continued to pressure workers into accepting buyouts, taking early retirement, or acceding to leaves of absence for months on end and in many cases unpaid.

Some 17,500 workers—members of the Allied Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants—are being targeted for the new “involuntary staffing reductions,” according to the notice distributed to workers by American Airlines CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom.

The letter included a chart titled “Anticipated furloughs by workgroup,” which identified 1,600 pilots, 8,100 flight attendants, and 2,223 fleet service workers for layoffs with the remaining spread across “dispatch,” “passenger service,” “wholly owned carriers” and “maintenance.” An additional 1,500 management and support staff will be terminated by the end of September.

The executives blamed lower flight volume and the continuing spread of the pandemic for the layoffs while urging workers about to be thrown into a tailspin of financial insecurity and panic to “take heart that we will get through this together.”

As CEO for American last year, Parker pocketed over $11 million, and $12 million the year prior, while Isom “earned” over $7.1 million in 2019, according to salary.com.

There is no “in this together.” The coronavirus has exposed the massive class chasms that exist in US capitalist society. While the rich have never had it better, as their stock portfolios continue to gain value through artificial manipulation of the stock market via injections from the Federal Reserve, workers, the majority of whom own nothing in the Wall Street casino, have been laid off by the millions with prospects of a quick rehiring turnaround looking more remote by the day.

A survey reported in the Washington Post and conducted by Gusto, a payroll firm with small business clients in every US state, found that roughly 33 percent of workers furloughed in March were permanently laid off by July, while only 37 percent have been called back to their previous employer.

The US Labor Department estimates that 3.7 million unemployed workers permanently lost their job by the end of July with that number expected to reach between 6.2 million and 8.7 million by the end of this year, according to an analysis from Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of Harvard University and John Coglianese of the Federal Reserve.

Small businesses continue to suffer under medically necessary lockdowns as deadlines to apply for funding provided through the Paycheck Protection Program long expired, along with any funds thousands of small businesses received. While the bulk of the money through the program was siphoned by large businesses, billionaires, politicians, charter schools and the Catholic Church, millions of small businesses were able temporarily stave off job cuts and closures with the federal aid, which has now dried up.

A database maintained by Oxxford Information Technology, which tracks about 32 million businesses, nonprofits, farms and government entities, expects about four million US businesses to close by the end of the year with only 1.3 million new businesses expected to be established.

In the face of the brutal job cutting of American Airlines workers, the Allied Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA have opposed any strikes or other actions in defense of their jobs.

In a less than seven-minute Facebook video, Sara Nelson, president of the AFA and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, echoed the airline executives’ talking points. She repeated the lie that the pandemic was a crisis that “no one could have prepared for,” adding that “no one thought” the US would continue to be the center of the coronavirus pandemic months after the passage of the CARES Act. In a crude promotion of Biden and the Democrats, Nelson implored workers “not to give up” and continue to “get even more engaged in fighting to extend the Payroll Support Program.” She advised soon-to-be-furloughed workers to “keep up the calls” to the corporate shills in Congress who are currently on vacation to demand they “pass the relief.”

If airline workers, like autoworkers, Amazon and other logistics workers, nurses and health care workers and teachers are to save their jobs, it will be up to them to organize rank-and-file committees, which are independent of the nationalist trade unions and the capitalist Democratic Party.

Pompeo in Middle East to cement Israel-Gulf alliance against Iran

Jean Shaoul

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began a five-day visit to the Middle East in Israel before travelling on to Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Pompeo met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday, where, according to the US State Department, the two discussed “regional security issues related to Iran’s malicious influence, establishing and deepening Israel’s relationships in the region, as well as cooperation in protecting the US and Israeli economies from malign investors,” meaning China.

In a brief press briefing after their meeting, Netanyahu praised Washington for its unilateral sanctions regime against Iran, which he wildly accused of “targeting countries with rockets, with terrorism, with pillage and plunder and murder—

Murder—all over the Middle East.” He also boasted that the US would continue to “ensure Israel’s qualitative edge” in terms of military might in the Middle East, even as it steps up arms sales to the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Image credit: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

While Israel likes to promote itself as Washington’s key ally in the region, Pompeo made it very clear who was the master in this relationship and that China’s increasing trade and investment ties with Israel were unacceptable. The Secretary of State allowed that the two discussed “the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to the entire world.”

The meeting followed the Security Council’s refusal on August 14 to extend a weapons embargo against Iran when the current ban ends in October. Yesterday, the president of the Security Council dismissed the US demand to invoke the “snapback” mechanism and reimpose sanctions on Iran that were in place before the deal on Tehran’s nuclear program in light of Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the treaty. These setbacks have provoked a furious US response accusing the opposing countries of “supporting terrorists.”

Pompeo also met Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi. Following the meeting, Gantz said the two countries would lead “an uncompromising line toward Iran,” which he claimed was a danger to the world, the region and Israel. He added, “We will act across diplomatic, defence and economic lines, and respond with force and determination so as to safeguard regional stability. We will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons and will act on every front and by every means to prevent that.”

Most controversially, Pompeo broke with the tradition for sitting secretaries of state to avoid overt partisan political activity, particularly while abroad, using Jerusalem, which plays well with the Republicans’ Evangelical base, as a backdrop to record a speech for the Republican National Convention,

His visit to Tel Aviv comes in the wake of the US-brokered agreement between Israel and the UAE to “normalise” relations between the two states, whose purpose is to cement an alliance between the Sunni petro-monarchies and Israel against Iran.

The normalisation of relations, which have been covert for years, is supposedly the quid pro quo for Israel halting plans to annex swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank occupied since the June 1967 war. It thereby sidelines the fate of the Palestinians which for decades had at least formally defined the Arab states’ attitude towards the Zionist state. More crucially, it is bound up with the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime targeting Iran.

Tantamount to a state of war, these punishing sanctions are aimed at overturning Iran’s government and installing a client regime that would reinforce American hegemony over the resource-rich Middle East and strengthen its position against China. Israel, as Washington’s chief attack dog in the region, plays a key role in this offensive.

Complementing Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran is Israel’s own policy towards Tehran, known as the “campaign between wars,” involving attacks directed against Iran’s allies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and aimed at preventing Iran from establishing an advantageous position in the event of a direct conflagration. This has included hundreds of attacks on Iranian-backed militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and their weapons dumps and facilities in Syria and on Syrian regime soldiers.

Israeli politicians have begun to acknowledge quite openly that Israel is behind these attacks, transforming its so-called shadow war with Iran into a more open and direct conflict.

Since 2018 and increasingly after the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, this has evolved into the “octopus doctrine,” which Naphtali Bennett, later to become defence minister and now leader of the far-right opposition Yamina Party, described as going after the “head,” meaning Iran. He said, “When the tentacles of the octopus strike you, do not fight only against the tentacle but suffocate its head. Likewise, with Iran.”

This now involves targeting Iranian advisers and officials and their facilities directly, rather than just targeting Iranian allies, with Israeli strikes believed to have killed dozens of Iranians in Syria in recent years, after having been greenlighted by the Trump administration, as well as damaging or destroying installations in Iran itself.

On Tuesday, Pompeo went to Sudan on what he said was the first official nonstop flight between the two countries. There he met Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and Sovereign Council Chairman General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to “express support for deepening the Sudan-Israel relationship.” This is a cover for discussing Washington’s conditions for supporting Sudan’s military-dominated transitional government. The new government was established following last April’s ouster of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, whose Muslim Brotherhood-aligned regime was backed by Turkey and Qatar, in a pre-emptive military coup that was backed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Sudan wants to be removed from the US list of state sponsors of “terrorism,” which is dependent on its finalising a compensation agreement for victims of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Pompeo’s visit follows a meeting between Netanyahu and al-Burhan during Netanyahu’s visit to Uganda last February that secured the opening of a new air corridor shortening Israeli flights to South America. However, Sudanese officials have sent mixed signals about the country’s willingness to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel, widely seen as a necessary but unpopular condition for US support.

Pompeo was also to meet with Crown Prince of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa in Manama, which is home to the US Sixth Fleet and its 9,300 troops and their families. While Bahrain had been identified as one of the states likely to follow the UAE’s lead, the country’s economic and military dependency on its neighbour Saudi Arabia makes this uncertain. Riyadh, which authored the 2002 Arab Initiative making normalisation with Israel dependent upon a Palestinian state, has refused to follow the UAE’s example until Israel signs a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Pompeo is to visit the UAE, which hosts about 3,500 US military personnel at its bases. It is a major purchaser of sophisticated US military equipment, including missile defences and combat aircraft, training and intelligence systems, and supports Washington’s policy toward Iran. Under discussion is the sale of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets and other advanced weaponry to the country.

Netanyahu has opposed the sale in order to prevent any Arab state from gaining military equivalency with Israel, and Abu Dhabi had cancelled a meeting with Israeli and American officials to formalise normalisation, due to Netanyahu’s opposition to the deal. But Pompeo dismissed his concerns with bromides about Washington’s commitment to “maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge” as required legislation passed in 2008.

Pompeo pledged to bolster the UAE’s defence capabilities, saying, “We have a 20-plus year security relationship with the United Arab Emirates as well, where we have provided them with technical assistance and military assistance.” He added, “We will now continue to review that process to continue to make sure that we’re delivering them with the equipment that they need to secure and defend their own people from this same threat, from the Islamic Republic of Iran as well.”

He will conclude the Mideast tour in Oman, strategically located on the Strait of Hormuz through which much of the region’s oil must pass. Israel had maintained secret links with Oman since the 1970s, even setting up an office there after the signing of the Oslo Accords, although this was closed after Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian intifada in 2000-05. Relations have since warmed, leading to an official visit by Netanyahu to Oman in October 2018.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior Middle East adviser, is set to follow up on Pompeo’s visits.

Despite Israel’s pariah status in the Arab world, relations have become increasingly close. Egypt has played a key role in maintaining Israel’s 13-year-long blockade of Gaza, while Israel has bombed ISIS and other Islamist militias in the Sinai Peninsula to help Egypt and allowed Qatar to send millions of dollars every month to Gaza. Israel has supported Saudi Arabia against Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, citing Iran’s “regional subversion,” and steadily built covert links with Riyadh over recent years.

China's Curious Wars

Vijay Shankar

Never to be undertaken thoughtlessly or recklessly wars are to be preceded by measures that make it easy to win.

—Sun Tzu, Art of War (Griffith, p 39)

The Chinese tradition of warfare differs from contemporary understanding. Instead of focusing on their own weaknesses, they seek to avoid exposing their flaws by instituting long-term measures to alter and isolate the environment. This is before subversion and morale-breaking disinformation generate the advantage.

This strategy uses every possible means to manipulate forces at play well before confrontation. In this context, the significance of the clash neither constitutes the ‘moment of decision’ nor would its outcome be the end of the engagement. And, if conclusion is not to China’s terms, it is effectively delayed and kept animated in order to erode the will to resist. A favourable consequence is thus sought through an ‘isolate-subvert-sap’ strategy.  

All of China's recent actions must be viewed in the context of its larger geopolitical ambitions of attaining pre-eminent global hegemon status by 2049 (China’s National Defence in the New Era, July 2019). These include the militarisation of the South China Sea (SCS), build-up and assault in Ladakh, repression in Hong Kong, establishment of the East China Sea (ECS) air defence identification zone (ADIZ), incarceration of Uighurs in Xinjiang, and dubious involvement in the global pandemic set off by the Wuhan virus.

The SCS imbroglio and recent assault in Ladakh will be examined in a little more detail to try and discern the elements that hold sway in a Chinese military campaign.  

Militarisation of the SCS

China has laid claim to all the waters of the SCS based on a demarcation they call the ‘nine-dash’ line. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the origin of the entitlement, bereft of legal legitimacy, could not be used by Beijing to make historic claims on the SCS. The line, first inscribed on a Chinese map in 1947, has “no legal basis” for maritime claims, deemed the Court.

In a brazen dismissal of the Tribunal’s ruling, China persists in its sweeping claims of sovereignty over the sea, its resources, and de-facto control over the trade plying across it that amounts to USD $5.3 trillion annually.

Satellite imagery has shown China’s efforts to militarise the Woody Island while constructing artificial islands and setting up military bases, and rejecting the competing claims made by Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Most of the world along with claimant countries demand the rights assured under UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

In sum, China’s strategy for managing its SCS claims has emphasised delaying dispute settlement. And in time, with swelling military capability, occupation of contested features, building artificial islands, and locating military bases for control of the waters within the ‘nine-dash’ line. In the face of these aggressive moves, the other claimant states are left in awe as they are handed down a grim fait accompli.

In the meantime, the US, Japan, Australia, and India have formed the ‘Quad’ as a response—an emerging alliance to improve their maritime security capacity and deter Chinese aggression. The ‘Quad’ has initiated freedom of navigation exercises intended to affirm that Beijing cannot unilaterally seize control of the waterway.

Ladakh: High Place for a Showdown

China has in the last eight years attempted to put India in a strategically ‘benign’ economic-client slot. Beijing uses its proxy, Pakistan, to keep the Kashmir cauldron on the boil while it presses on with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the UN, it vetoes India's efforts to become a permanent member of the UNSC, and blocks its membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). All the while playing India at Wuhan and Mamalapuram, promoting its dysfunctional non-aligned policy, or at least attempting to nudge India away from the US. This is the ‘isolate-subvert-sap’ strategy at work.

Xi’s military assault in Ladakh has been underscored to assert that geography will not be allowed to come in the way of China’s strategic objectives; be it the CPEC, BRI, or the arterial national highway 219 linking Lhasa to Xinjiang that cuts across India’s Aksai Chin.

India for its part has given a resolute and matching military riposte in Ladakh. It has quite boldly launched surgical strikes on terrorist training camps in Pakistan by air and land forces and robustly rebuffed kowtowing to either Xi’s BRI or his grand economic plans. On the Line of Actual Control (LAC), India has followed a decrepit and emasculated policy of infrastructure-building along the un-demarcated LAC with China for more than half a century. Doklam changed all that, and more strategic infrastructure has come up now than in the past five decades. The more recent Wuhan virus pandemic has provided opportunity for Indian leadership to pin accountability.

All of India’s actions have left Beijing a trifle red-faced.

To Untangle Beijing’s Behaviour

China’s century of humiliation (1839-1949) coincided with the start of the First Opium War and ceding of Hong Kong to Britain. The conflict provided other colonial powers a blueprint for usurping territories from the crumbling Qing dynasty. And so northern China was seized by the tsar, and Formosa taken by Japan, while Germany, France, and Austria carved out coveted real estate through ‘loaded’ treaties.

The period remains etched in Chinese institutional memory—of a rapacious international system over which it had little influence. It has shaped China’s thrust for control in the very same system. More importantly, it provides a rallying point internally, and a persistent reminder to its people of ‘why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Conclusion

Indeed, Xi’s 2017 declaration that “…the world is not peaceful” is turning out to be an engineered self-fulfilling prophecy. When put on a strategic template, the delaying actions to resolve simmering discord effected only to exasperate; Janus-faced policies that serve to deceive and subvert alliances; coercive manoeuvres; lease-for-debt economic deals; and flouting of international norms bear a bizarre semblance to the words of Sun Tzu: “The master conqueror frustrated his enemy’s plans and broke up his alliances. He created cleavages…He gathered information, sowed dissension and nurtured subversion. The enemy was isolated, divided and demoralised; his will to resist broken.” (Griffith, p 39).

Fortunately we are not in Sun Tzu’s times. Strategies are not so opaque, nor are Xi’s people with him. Yet, China would do well to heed Sun Tzu’s sage words: of avoiding a reckless path to unintended war.

Police violence continues unabated three months after the murder of George Floyd

Niles Niemuth

Three months after the murder of George Floyd sparked mass multiracial and multiethnic demonstrations demanding an end to police violence and racism, the police continue their reign of terror across the United States without any sign of slowing down.

Since May 25, the day Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee into his neck for more than 8 minutes, at least 235 people have been killed by police in the US. The pace of killings is on track to surpass 1,000 this year, with nearly 3 people shot dead by the police every day.

The latest incident to produce an eruption of angry protests is the attempted murder of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old African American father of six, shot seven times in the back by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. While Blake amazingly survived the shooting, his father told the Chicago Sun-Times Tuesday that his son is now paralyzed from the waist down and doctors are uncertain if he will fully recover from his injuries.

A cellphone video taken by a bystander and posted on social media shows that Blake was walking away from police officers and attempting to get into his SUV, when a white officer, with gun drawn, pulled him by his shirt and pumped seven shots into his back at point-blank range. Three of Blake’s sons were in the back of the vehicle when he was shot.

“Those police officers that shot my son like a dog in the street are responsible for everything that has happened in the city of Kenosha,” Blake’s father said, referring to incidents of arson and looting after demonstrators were attacked by police. “My son is not responsible for it. My son didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t have a gun.”

Black and white protestors who took to the streets Sunday and Monday night in Kenosha to demand that the responsible officer be charged and arrested were met with tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper balls. Residents attempting to attend a press conference with the city’s Democratic mayor Monday afternoon were similarly met with police in riot gear and pepper spray when they raised demands, heightening tensions.

Protests across the country in recent days against the unending slaughter—from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan—have been met by an unrelenting crackdown by the police. Hundreds, including journalists, have been arrested, and many more have been hit by pepper spray, pepper balls, rubber bullets and other munitions deemed “less than lethal” by the police.

Federal agents were directed by President Donald Trump last month to wage an assault on Portland protestors, including carrying out snatch-and-grab operations using unmarked vans in scenes reminiscent of Latin American dictatorships.

While these forces—including the US Border Patrol’s paramilitary BORTAC unit—have been largely relegated to the background following widespread outrage over their direct use against protestors, the police have taken their cue from Trump, carrying out their own snatch operations by unmarked officers in New York City and Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, hundreds of federal agents have been deployed to work alongside police in multiple large cities, including Detroit and Chicago, with the consent of Democratic mayors.

Trump and the Republicans are openly inciting police violence and attacks on protestors; the term ‘police’ was invoked 25 times on the first day of the Republican National convention, invoked as the guardians of society from “mob rule” by the “far left.” The president has spent much of his time in office building up the police at the local and federal level in defense of his personalist rule.

However, it is important to note that it is the Democratic Party in Wisconsin that is overseeing the reign of police terror against protesters in Kenosha.

After the first night of protests Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers deployed 125 National Guard soldiers to aid the police in enforcing an 8 p.m. curfew. Military Humvees were used to patrol city streets and dump trucks deployed to block off exit ramps from the main freeway into the city. Evers declared a state of emergency Tuesday afternoon to allow for the marshaling of even more resources against anti-police violence protests.

While there has been a lot of talk from Democratic politicians declaring their support for Black Lives Matter—repeatedly mouthing the phrase and having it painted in big block letters on city streets while promising to confront “white supremacy” and “systemic racism”—nothing has changed. Nothing has been done to even slow the pace of police killings.

In fact, the Democrats distanced themselves from demands to defund the police, a popular slogan among protesters, almost as soon as they were pronounced. Minneapolis’s Democratic Party-controlled city council has kicked the can on a much-heralded proposal to “disband” the city’s police force made in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s killing as part of the efforts to corral and disperse popular anger.

In an interview with ABC News Friday, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrat’s presidential candidate, alongside his running mate Senator Kamala Harris, made clear that his administration would work to provide more funding for the police and claimed that it was in fact Trump who would defund the police. “I don’t want to defund the police departments,” Biden declared, “I think they need more help, they need more assistance…”

Biden suggested at a campaign event in June that the solution for police killings would be to train officers to “shoot them in the leg instead of the heart.” Meanwhile, Biden’s former primary opponent and now leading surrogate, Senator Bernie Sanders, has called for officers to be paid higher salaries as a possible solution to police killings!

The United States is a tinderbox, with the mass social crisis intensified by the murderous response of the ruling elite to the COVID-19 pandemic driving the outbreak of explosive protests. Millions of people have been thrown out of work and it has been a month since the $600 federal extension to unemployment benefits was allowed by Congress and the White House to expire. Tens of millions face the possibility of eviction and foreclosure in the coming months as moratoriums expire.

The police, as special bodies of armed men, are essential to the protection of the state and enforcement of class rule, defending the property interests of the rich and policing the immense social gulf that separates them from the bottom 90 percent. Regardless of who sits in the White House in January, police violence will continue and in fact intensify. The more the social tensions rise, the more violence the campaign of police terror overseen by both parties will become.