The “No Kings” coalition, which consists of groups in or around the
Democratic Party, has downplayed the war against Iran in its promotional
material. Indivisible, a central force in the coalition, was founded by
former Democratic congressional staffers and functions openly as an
instrument for Democratic Party electoral operations. The AFL-CIO and
major unions are promoted as “co-organizers” of the demonstrations even
as they maintain silence—or offer empty procedural objections—on the war
and do nothing to mobilize workers’ power against it.
Bernie
Sanders, headlining the flagship Minneapolis rally Saturday, mentions
Iran as one item in a litany of “dangerous times,” a rhetorical gesture
that places no obligation on anyone and commits the Democratic Party to
nothing. The role of Sanders, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
other members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is to
channel opposition behind a pro-war party of the capitalist oligarchy.
*****
The Socialist Equality Party insists that the war against Iran must be
opposed without qualification and brought to an immediate end, along
with the broader US-Israeli assault on the Middle East. But ending the
war and driving out the Trump regime cannot be achieved through appeals
to Congress, the courts or the Democratic Party, which is a party of
Wall Street and the Pentagon and an accomplice in these crimes. It
requires the independent political mobilization of the working
class—workers and young people acting as a conscious force against war,
dictatorship and the capitalist oligarchy.
*****
The choice that confronts the working class is not between Trump and the
Democrats. It is the choice that the great Marxists of the 20th century
identified with increasing urgency and which the developments of the
21st have made undeniable: Socialism or barbarism? Either the working
class develops its own political program, its own organizations, its own
leadership and takes conscious action to overthrow the capitalist
system that produces war, dictatorship and social devastation—or that
system will continue, in ever more violent forms, to destroy the
conditions of human civilization.
Johannes Stern, editor of the German-language edition of theWorld Socialist Web Site:
"The book is a collection of central political analyses and statements
by the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, its chairman
David North, and other SEP and WSWS authors on developments in the
United States and their international implications. It demonstrates that
the rise of Donald Trump is not the result of individual aberrations or
political accidents, but rather the expression of a deep crisis of
American society and of the capitalist system as a whole.
It analyzes the historical roots of this development—the extreme
social inequality, the erosion of democratic rights, the decay of
political institutions—and situates them within the global context of
the crisis of capitalism. Above all, it develops a political perspective
against war and fascism.
It is not a journalistic commentary and
not merely an analysis of individual events. It is the product of a
Marxist method that examines the objective driving forces of social
development.
And for that very reason, the answer it gives is also
international: the building of an independent socialist movement of the
working class."
Simon Mukwarami, a 47-year-old boilermaker, was killed at work on
Saturday March 14 at South32’s Worsley Alumina refinery, near Collie,
200 kilometers south of Perth.
Emergency crews were called to the refinery around 3:50 a.m. and
first aid was attempted, but Mukwarami was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the West Australian,
Mukwarami died after “falling from a significant height through grid
mesh while working on a digester”—a pressurized vessel in which bauxite
ore is cooked in caustic soda to separate alumina hydrate from sand.
Little
more information has emerged since the fatality. Descriptions of the
incident refer to a fall “through grid mesh,” though the condition of
the flooring and exact circumstances remain unclear. Refineries like
Worsley Alumina use grid mesh extensively to provide access to machinery
and elevated areas. These panels are typically heavy and secured in
place but may be removed or repositioned during maintenance.
A police report is underway and the state safety regulator WorkSafe WA is also investigating the death.
*****
The recent tragedy is the not the first at Worsley. In September 2014,
66-year-old electrician Colin Whitton, who had worked at the plant for
24 years, was fatally crushed between a moving lift car and shaft while
doing maintenance work on the elevator.
A 2018 investigation by the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation
and Safety (DMIRS) found “the company had failed to ensure that there
were clear written safety procedures that could have prevented Mr
Whitton’s exposure to the hazards,” according to the Australasian Mine Safety Journal.
Andrew
Chaplyn, then DMIRS mines safety director, said “Bypassing the safety
circuit effectively rendered what was theoretically a safe system
unsafe.… Allowing a person to attempt to resolve technical issues
without enforcing its policy for providing an integrated system for
isolating and controlling hazards led to a dangerous situation.”
South32 pleaded guilty to exposing Whitton to hazards and was fined
$65,000. This was nothing more than a slap on the wrist for a company
which last year reported post-tax profits of $US213 million. Despite the
investigation finding the company had created an ultimately fatal work
situation on its site, the company was able to absorb the death as a
cost of doing business and proceed.
*****
While the Australian Metal Workers Union (AMWU)—which covers workers at
Worsley—has said nothing about Mukwarami’s death on their website or
social media, they did issue a statement to the corporate press.
AMWU WA secretary Steve McCartney told the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation the union would be “investigating this issue” and “making
sure that it never happens again.”
Workers at Worsley should take note—these are the same hollow words uttered by union bureaucrats after every workplace tragedy.
*****
To defend their lives, as well as their jobs, wages and conditions,
workers need to take matters into their own hands. New organizations must be built—rank-and-file committees, democratically run by workers
themselves, not highly paid union bureaucrats—to enforce workplace
safety and fight for demands based on the needs of workers, not the
profit interests of management and shareholders.
Nearly 4,000 meatpackers at the JBS Swift plant in Greeley, Colorado
continued their historic strike on Thursday, in the largest meatpacking
strike in the United States since the 1950s and the first major walkout
in the industry since the Hormel and IBP strikes in the 1980s.
The walkout is part of a broader movement of workers, in the United
States and internationally, who are increasingly entering into struggle
against rising inequality, soaring health care costs and stagnant wages.
At the Greeley plant, many workers make less than $25 an hour and have
not received a raise in nearly a year. JBS, which reported
fourth-quarter net profits of $415 million, has answered workers’
demands with an insulting proposal of a 60-cent raise, followed by just
20 cents the following year.
The strike has underscored the
international unity of the working class. Many workers at the plant are
immigrants, and more than 50 languages are spoken inside the facility.
Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers on Thursday and distributed
hundreds of leaflets and statements in multiple languages, including
Creole, Spanish, French, English and Somali. Workers responded warmly,
with many approaching reporters and simply stating their preferred
language before being handed material they could read immediately.
The UFCW bureaucracy, meanwhile, has sought to suppress and
isolate the strike. On the picket line, union officials questioned why
WSWS reporters were speaking with workers, reflecting their hostility to
any independent discussion among the rank and file. Even as they
attempted to monitor contact with workers, officials acknowledged that
some production is continuing inside the plant.
Sheriff Chad Bianco, a former member of the fascist Oath Keepers,
seized the Riverside County, California ballots cast in in the November
4, 2025 special election over Proposition 50, an anti-Trump
redistricting measure that passed statewide by 7.5 million to 4.1
million votes. The referendum passed in Riverside 370,000 to 285,000, a
smaller but still overwhelming percentage.
The results were a
repudiation of Trump and and undercut Republican efforts to use
gerrymandering in states where they control the election machinery,
including Texas, Florida and North Carolina. With Trump’s approval
rating plunging, the Republicans now fear the loss not only of their
narrow majority in the House of Representatives, but of control of the
Senate as well.
*****
What is unfolding in Riverside County is another chapter in the
national campaign to place elections under the thumbs of pro-Trump
fascists who have demonstrated from January 6, 2021, onward, that they
will not accept unfavorable election outcomes.
Five years ago a
data breach of the Oath Keepers’ internal records revealed that Bianco
had been a dues-paying member of the fascist militia in 2014, prior to
his election as Riverside sheriff. The Oath Keepers formed armed
tactical teams during the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol,
and the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted of seditious
conspiracy and sentenced to a lengthy prison term before he was pardoned
by Trump.
Bianco was also affiliated with the Constitutional
Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a fascist organization built
around the bizarre theory that county sheriffs are the only legitimate
law enforcement officials, and that they outrank state and federal law
enforcement.
In June 2024, the day after Donald Trump was
convicted of 34 felony counts in New York, Bianco posted an Instagram
video in full uniform endorsing Trump for president. “I think it’s time
we put a felon in the White House,” he said, adding “Trump 2024, baby.
Let’s save this country and make America great again.” California law
explicitly prohibits public employees from engaging in overt political
activity while in uniform.
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office is already being investigated for
the extraordinary number of inmates who have died in its jails, at least
91 since the beginning of 2020, making Riverside the second deadliest
jail system in the United States.
*****
Incumbent Gavin Newsom is term-limited, leading multiple Democrats to
enter the race to succeed him. Because of the state’s jungle primary
system, the top two vote-getters in the primary advance to the general
election, regardless of party affiliation. Preliminary polls show Bianco
and Fox News host Steve Hilton leading the crowded field, raising a
remote possibility that these two right-wing Republicans could advance
to the general election despite Democrats holding an almost 2-1
registration advantage in the state.
Bianco’s ballot seizure is
intended to bolster his candidacy by gaining Trump’s approval through
his conducting the kind of armed interference in elections that other
Trump loyalists are threatening on a national scale. On Monday, as Trump
deployed ICE agents to airports, ostensibly to address security delays,
Steve Bannon called the operation a “test run” to “perfect ICE’s
involvement in the 2026 midterms.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, writing in the New York Times on
March 23, concluded with a familiar refrain: “Democrats are united in
opposing the SAVE Act. We know the right to vote is not a partisan
advantage to be engineered or withheld. It is the foundation of American
democracy.”
It is worth asking what, precisely, that unity has
produced? The Democratic Party has held the presidency, controlled both
chambers of Congress, and occupied the offices of attorney general and
secretary of state in numerous battleground states at various points
over the past six years, yet Donald Trump escaped the political and
legal consequence of his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election by
force, and in fact has been reinstalled in the White House.
The Democratic party is incapable of mounting such a fight because it is
bound to the same capitalist oligarchs as the Republicans. The defense
of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to a party that has
demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will not wage a serious fight against
the forces dismantling those rights.
Workers, students, and young people must organize independently of both
corporate parties, building a mass movement against ballot seizures,
voter purges, and all forms of election interference. The political
establishment of both parties fears this prospect far more than they
fear each other.
Committee for Public Education (CFPE) members and supporters interviewed
teachers, education support staff, parents and students at the March 24
statewide strike of Victorian public school educators, when tens of
thousands marched through central Melbourne after walking out of schools
across the state.
The
scale of the rally and determination of workers expressed a desire to
reverse decades of worsening conditions in public education amid a
global assault on living and working conditions which in Australia is
being spearheaded by Labor federal and state governments.
At the
same time, the Australian Education Union (AEU) is already preparing to
continue the role it has played for decades, working through back‑room
negotiations with the Allan Labor government to contain and ultimately
sell out educators’ demands, while that same government carries out a
wholesale assault on the jobs, wages and social conditions of the entire
working class.
Secondary school teacher Nicole told the CFPE:
“We’re understaffed and we’re stretched. We’re run off our feet all the
time. We feel like we’re being undervalued.”
“I think we feel
we’ve been failed by the Labor government. We need to stand up and be
strong and show them that we’re not going to be complicit and they’re
not going to have our support.”
She noted the broad support that striking teachers were receiving from the population.
“I’m
overwhelmed by the support from the parents and the families at our
school as well. I think it’s just acknowledged that we’re doing more
with less.”
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and
Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka urge workers and
students to attend the public meeting, “Stop the US-Israeli war against
Iran,” on April 7 at 3.30 p.m. at the Orient Educational institute in
Hindagala, near the University of Peradeniya.
There is mounting opposition among workers and youth in Sri Lanka to
the US-Israeli war against Iran, which is widely recognised as being
driven by predatory imperialist interests. Anger has intensified amid
statements by the fascistic US President Donald Trump that his
administration will not stop until it fulfils its long-term drive to
fully subordinate Iran.
The war has exacerbated a severe economic
and energy crisis in Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, broad layers of people
recognise the utter hypocrisy of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s
bogus “neutral” posture, even as his government provides tacit support
to the US and Israel.
As part of the global fight to build an
internationalist socialist anti-war movement, the SEP and the IYSSE in
Sri Lanka are holding a series of meetings and campaigns among workers
and university students. A well-attended public meeting was held in
Colombo on March 17 and another will be held on April 7 in Peradeniya,
Kandy.
Those who attended the March 17 meeting responded enthusiastically to the discussion of a socialist anti-war program.
Akalanka Seneviratne, a law student,
listened to the live broadcast of the meeting on Facebook. He said it
exposed the real roots of the war, in contrast to other parties that are
trying to mislead the public.
Hundreds of thousands marched across Argentina on Tuesday to mark the
50th anniversary of the US‑backed military coup of March 24, 1976. It
was the largest demonstration so far under the administration of
fascistic President Javier Milei.
Under the slogan “Memory, Truth
and Justice,” the demonstrations called by human rights organizations
and relatives of the victims of the dictatorship brought massive crowds
into the streets of Buenos Aires and dozens of other cities to denounce
the dictatorship’s crimes and the Milei government’s attempts to
rehabilitate the junta and intensify its attacks on social and
democratic rights.
On March 24, 1976, the Armed Forces moved to
consummate the long‑prepared coup by seizing state institutions in a
coordinated assault. In the early hours, troops surrounded the Casa
Rosada, and detained President Isabel Martínez de Perón, flying her out
of the presidential palace in a helicopter, as tanks and soldiers
established control over Buenos Aires.
A US‑backed junta headed
by General Jorge Rafael Videla assumed power, dissolved Congress, banned
political activity and trade union rights, and set in motion the
machinery of state terror—clandestine detention centers, torture,
disappearances and systematic economic “restructuring” in the interests
of finance capital and the Argentine ruling class.
Media estimates
place the crowd Tuesday in Buenos Aires at between 600,000 and 2
million, with tens of thousands more protesting in Córdoba, Rosario, La
Plata and other urban centers. In the late afternoon, in a packed Plaza
de Mayo, a joint statement adopted by human rights organizations was
read out, highlighting decades of struggle against the impunity enjoyed
by the military officials responsible for a political genocide and the
terrorist operations of the Triple A death squads under the Peronist
government that preceded the coup.
The size and combative mood of
the marches reflected both a living identification with the tens of
thousands murdered between 1976 and 1983 and a mounting anger over the
Milei administration’s authoritarian measures.
*****
The pseudo-left organizations in and around the Left and Workers
Front (FIT-U) that participated in Tuesday’s marches denounced the
complicity of Peronism in paving the way for the coup and its current
role in enabling Milei’s program, only to conceal their own
responsibility in appealing to these forces.
In fact, their
intervention was chiefly aimed at channeling the groundswell of
opposition back behind the Peronist union bureaucracy and the
parliamentary “opposition” through demands for a general strike and
legislative maneuvers.
Central to their agitation was the campaign of the FIT-U leadership
in the tire workers’ union SUTNA around the shutdown of the iconic FATE
tire factory last month. Rather than fighting to independently mobilize
workers, SUTNA and its pseudo‑left leaders have subordinated the
struggle to appeals to bourgeois parties. Their latest move is to lobby
provincial legislators—including right-wing Peronists and Radicals
(UCR)—to pass a bill calling on the Peronist Buenos Aires provincial
government to take over the plant. The main effect of this orientation
is to bolster illusions that Peronism can be pressured into defending
jobs and rights.
The commemorations took place amid a deepening
economic catastrophe and a historic liquidation of whole swathes of
Argentine industry as the Milei government enforces the diktats of
finance capital. Official data indicate that, counting both salaried and
self‑employed workers, some 540,872 formal jobs have been lost in
Milei’s first two years in office, including nearly 90,000 in the public
sector. The adjustment has sunk real incomes, further cutting demand
for goods.
*****
The program being implemented by Milei with the backing of the IMF
and the Trump administration is essentially the same as that pursued
through the 1976 coup: to eradicate what remains of the social gains won
by the working class in the 20th century, which can only be carried out
through dictatorial forms of rule.
Among his most aggressive
attacks on the limited democratic forms restored after 1983 is the de
facto elimination of the right to strike across broad swathes of
“essential” sectors, a strict “anti‑picket” protocol that legitimizes
police repression to clear roadblocks and strike pickets, and a January
executive order granting intelligence agencies powers to detain, arrest
and search people without a court warrant—approaching the unchecked
authority wielded in the junta’s “disappearances.”
Soaring prices
are compounding the crisis. In Buenos Aires, the price of standard
gasoline has jumped 63.6 percent in a year—far above overall inflation
of roughly 33 percent for the same period. This acceleration, the
Argentine media notes, has sped up in recent weeks due to the US-Israeli
war on Iran.
The 1976 coup remains an open wound. Earlier this
month, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) announced the
identification of 12 people who were detained and “disappeared” during
the dictatorship, through painstaking analysis of bone remains recovered
from the clandestine detention center La Perla, where an estimated
2,200 to 2,500 people were held, tortured and disappeared.
These
discoveries underscore that what occurred was not a “counter‑terrorist
operation,” as Milei claims, but the use of military dictatorship and
fascist methods to crush a powerful upsurge of the working class that
posed a revolutionary challenge from below.
To arm the working class with the lessons of this history, it is
necessary to examine the role of the left tendencies at the time. In a
1987 statement, the International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) summed up the role of the Pabloite United Secretariat which
sought to liquidate the Trotskyist movement:
In
Argentina, where the most favorable conditions for the proletarian
revolution were rapidly maturing, the forces of the United Secretariat
were not only divided, they actually found themselves on the opposite
sides of the barricades. [Ernest]Mandel’s faction was liquidated into a
futile guerrilla war and isolated from the working class. At the same
time, [Joseph] Hansen’s faction—led by [Nahuel] Moreno—defended the very
state that was carrying out the physical liquidation of those who were
aligned with Mandel.
Having concluded that “the
dogma that the only class which can accomplish the democratic tasks is
the working class is false,” Argentine revisionist Moreno and his
Socialist Workers Party (PST) pledged allegiance to “constitutional
stability,” joining the Stalinists and Peronists.
On March 28, 1974, amid mounting polarization, President Juan Domingo
Perón convened eight parties including the PST, which then
editorialized: “The participants have confirmed their fundamental
commitment to spare no effort to maintain and consolidate the process of
institutionalization in our country within the context of the
democratic system and through the practice of coexistence and
constructive dialogue.”
On April 5, Juan Carlos Coral of the PST
met again with Perón and opposition forces, describing participation as
“obligatory in all the stages of this laborious process involving
constitutional democracy.” Lenin wrote that such pious appeals to
democracy before the bourgeoisie amount to “preaching morality to the
keepers of a brothel.”
As the ICFI explained, “In such a
situation, the ‘left’ party which appeals to the bourgeois state to
protect the workers—rather than calling upon the workers to arm
themselves and crush the fascists and the state which sponsors them—is
itself part of the whole reactionary bourgeois order.”
After
Perón’s death, the PST joined an October 8, 1974 “multisectoral” meeting
with his widow and successor, Isabel Perón, writing: “Let us say that
our party considers this form of dialogue, which is unprecedented in the
country, to be useful… The PST will continue struggling against all
those factors that create the putschist climate and will struggle for
the continuity of this government because it was elected by the majority
of the Argentine workers and because it permits the exercise of some
democratic rights that, in turn, are conquests of the workers’ and
people’s mobilizations that have shaken the country since the
Cordobazo.”
Meanwhile, the Peronist regime was organizing the Triple A death squads against militant workers and guerrillas.
This
wholesale capitulation to Peronism, on the one hand, and the suicidal
guerrillaism, on the other, led to the political disarming of the
working class before the 1976 coup. Hundreds of militants in both camps
were later murdered, but, as the ICFI noted, “The leaders who had
betrayed them fared better. Moreno escaped to Colombia. As for Mandel,
he continued to eat croissants in Belgium.”
*****
Today, the successors of Moreno continue to claim the mantle of the
Fourth International and Trotsky as they prepare a similar betrayal. The
Morenoites around La Izquierda Diario have renamed themselves the “Permanent Revolution Current”
in order to better appropriate Trotsky’s prestige, only to explicitly
renounce his Theory of Permanent Revolution, which states the need for
workers’ power as part of a socialist revolution extending to the
advanced capitalist countries as the only basis to defeat imperialism
and complete other democratic tasks.
These tendencies are again
leading the working class along a treacherous path, chaining it to
Peronism and the union bureaucracy just as Argentine and international
capital, backed by US imperialism, move headlong toward fascism.
The
immense outpouring on March 24 shows the potential social force for a
genuine reckoning with the crimes of 1976‑83 and for a struggle against
the drive to “abolish” the achievements of the twentieth century. But
this potential can only be realized through a break with all bourgeois
parties, including those in the FIT-U, and the construction of a
revolutionary leadership based on the program of the International
Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the working class in
Argentina and internationally in a socialist offensive against war,
dictatorship and capitalism.
Corpus Christi, Texas, a coastal industrial city of over 300,000
people, is in stage 3 drought restrictions, with regular lawn watering
and automatic irrigation systems not allowed.
Officials are
warning that the city could enter a water emergency in the next two
months and fall short of supply in six months. Two of the city’s three
main reservoirs have shrunk below 10 percent capacity. The city may soon
announce a mandatory 25 percent usage cut for residents.
The
city, the eighth-largest in the state, supplies a number of
water-intensive industries in and around it, which account for 50 to 60
percent of its total water usage.
Corpus Christi has faced
increasingly volatile rainfall patterns, featuring extreme swings
between drought and heavy rain, contributing to the ongoing historic
drought. Last year was the 19th driest year on record, while 2021 was
the wettest in 30 years. These variations are the result of climate
change, induced in no small part by the very same petrochemical
companies operating in and around the city,
The Corpus Christi
water system supplies a total of 500,000 people across seven counties.
Just one plastic plant, the Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a joint venture
between ExxonMobil and SABIC (which is 70 percent owned by Saudi
ARAMCO), accounts for 25 million gallons per day, equivalent to the
consumption of all city residents combined.
The Valero refinery and ExxonMobil ethylene cracker plant combined
consume one quarter of the total system supply. A nearby Tesla lithium
plant in Robstown, Texas is also taking in an estimated 1.1 to 3 million
gallons a day, with a potential peak of 8 million gallons, which would
be eight times the residential water use of Robstown itself. Flint Hill
Resources and Citgo also operate refineries in Corpus Christi.
To safely wind down ethylene crackers and refineries to a point where
water isn’t being consumed could likely be accomplished in days or
weeks. Restarting a plant after restoring water access could take weeks.
However, despite the impending crisis, none of this is being planned.
Clearly the millions in profits these facilities generate weigh far more
than resident’s access to water.
*****
Water experts have warned repeatedly about the mismatch between
projected demand and supply for over a decade. The city already faced
multiple water contamination incidents and boil notices in 2015 and 2016
due to supply not keeping up with demand. Despite this, city and state
leaders have worked to attract more industry to Corpus Christi while
doing little to alleviate the looming water crisis. Abbott has
celebrated billions of dollars in investments in the Coastal Bend
region, including major projects by ExxonMobil and Saudi ARAMCO (Gulf
Coast Growth Ventures) and the Tesla lithium refinery in Robstown.
The
state and local government, in collusion with industry, are conspiring
to force the cost of infrastructure upgrades for industry onto residents
of the city, overwhelmingly the working class. Abbott is trying to get
the city to foot the bill for another $1 billion for a desalination
plant. Essentially, it’s a scam.
This takes the form of an
emergency $757 million loan from the state to the city, to be paid for
by taxpayers of course, for the construction of an almost $1 billion
desalination plant. A previous version of the plan failed with voters
balking at the costs of the originally planned desalination plant, which
ballooned from an estimate of $160 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion by
mid-2025.
Corpus Christi produces around 5 percent of total US refined
products, including gasoline. The mouthpieces of the oil companies in
the corporate media are attempting to use the risk of even higher gas
prices to push through the corporate bailout.
The simple fact of
the matter is that the oil companies can more than pay for higher
projected water costs and to keep higher gas prices at bay, while still
having profits left over.
Daniel Kretinsky, the billionaire owner of Royal Mail, spoke before
the UK parliament’s Business and Trade Committee this week. His arrogant
performance exposed the Communication Workers Union (CWU)’s claim that
he would be held “accountable” for the collapse of the mail service.
Tuesday’s
proceedings were trailed heavily in the media, with Politico claiming
that Kretinsky faced a “grilling”. The CWU’s hyped coverage portrayed
the parliamentary committee as a “serious investigation” into
quality-of-service failures.
The committee reported that, given the current level of dysfunction,
Royal Mail would deliver late 220 million letters this year. MPs
highlighted missed medical appointments and the risk that ballot papers
might not be received in the upcoming May local elections across
England, Scotland, and Wales.
Kretinsky was in denial mode,
stating baldly: “It is not perfect, but it’s not catastrophic”. The
billionaire railed against the retention of First Class letters in the
Universal Service Obligation (USO). It is exempt (for now) from Ofcom’s
recent downgrade of standard mail from 6-day delivery to alternate-day
delivery.
His refusal to display contrition in front of the
cameras, or to acknowledge the evidence, caused some rancour. Liam
Byrne, Labour MP and chair of the cross-party committee, warned
Kretinsky he may be called back under oath, especially over his denial
that parcels were being prioritised over letters, implying he was at
risk of perjuring himself.
But Kretinsky had full measure of his adversaries: representatives of
the same political establishment that handed ownership of Royal Mail to
his private equity firm, EP Group, in December 2024, a prelude to its
carve-up and restructuring by investors.
Notwithstanding the faux
outrage by Labour MPs, every aspect of Kretinsky’s wrecking operation
was rubber-stamped by the Starmer government and by CWU officials Dave
Ward and Martin Walsh, who backed Kretinsky’s £3.6 billion takeover.
*****
In the United States, the entire postal service is being threatened
with bankruptcy. While the Trump Administration and Congressional
Democrats have handed $1 trillion to the military, they are demanding
massive job cuts and “efficiencies” across USPS to prevent its collapse.
Proceedings at Tuesday’s select committee reached absurd levels
when a panel member asked Kretinsky why, as a billionaire, he wanted to
take over Royal Mail. Kretinsky replied that he was “driven by the
challenge, not by profit”.
Kretinsky’s EP Group empire has been
built through buying up undervalued assets and injecting capital to make
long-term profits. It boasts a portfolio spanning energy,
infrastructure, logistics, retail, and media. Its Royal Mail takeover
was leveraged through borrowings of £2.3 billion from major investors
who are demanding their pound of flesh from the company’s workforce and a
carve-up and asset stripping of the company.
The corporate
oligarchy cannot be made “accountable”. Its parasitic interests are
incompatible with secure, well-paid jobs, safe working conditions and a
reliable mail service. The oligarchy’s grip over society must be broken.
This means building up a network of rank-and-file power and a new
leadership in the working class to prepare for the mass struggles
ahead.
An exhibition by Art Against War Club (AAWC) in Bristol, England, has
been censored by the Greens-led Bristol City Council (BCC).
Just
one day after “Anatomy of Solidarity” opened at Bristol’s M Shed,
artists arrived to find the venue roped off and their artworks taken
down.
The artists explained, “M Shed requested that we remove the
names of specific arms companies, as well as any representations of
individuals associated with them. In response, we literally took a knife
to our art and cut out the ‘offending’ material.”
References to
Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (which operates a factory in
nearby Filton) and British-owned BAE Systems, embedded in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs in local
schools, were cut from the artwork, leaving gaping holes.
A
collage depicting Bristol’s statue of 17th-century slave trader Edward
Colston, his head rendered as a quadcopter killer drone (of the type
manufactured by Elbit Systems), was removed in its entirety but later
reinstated.
*****
Visitors expressed disbelief that Green Party councillors were
complicit in the censorship of artwork, saying they planned to
investigate. Libby asked whether they had intervened to request changes
so that the exhibition could proceed. But she concluded, “Aesthetically,
it’s censored the artists’ right to freedom of speech, which is a
massive problem.
“If we start censoring art and music and culture, then we really are living in a different world.”
The
WSWS asked Greens MP for Bristol Central, Carla Denyer, to comment on
BCC’s censorship of local artists, but she has refused to answer.
The UK military will be sent to board ships suspected of being part
of Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet”, threatening shoot-outs
between British and Russian soldiers.
Labour Prime Minister Keir
Starmer perversely declared that this was about “keep[ing] this country
safe and protect[ing] British interests here and abroad” in “an
increasingly volatile and dangerous world”. In fact, it threatens direct
conflict between nuclear-armed powers.
A government announcement
makes clear how reckless the plans are: “Military and law enforcement
specialists have been put through their paces in preparation for a
number of scenarios in recent weeks, including boarding vessels that don’t surrender, are armed, or use high-tech pervasive surveillance to evade capture [italics added].”
According to the BBC: “Specialist military units have been
undertaking training in recent weeks to wargame different scenarios,
including how to deal with armed crews.
“That training is
understood to now be complete and Ministry of Defence officials are
working on the assumption that the first operation of this type will
happen sooner rather than later.
*****
This January, the British military facilitated an American operation to seize the Russian-flagged Marinera
in the sea south of Iceland—in connection with the US blockade of
Venezuelan oil. From that point, UK government lawyers were set to work,
formulating the legal basis for British soldiers carrying out these
raids themselves; they have decided on the 2018 Sanctions and Money
Laundering Act.
Other European nations have already seized alleged
Russian shadow fleet ships. According to the International Institute
for Strategic Studies, Belgium, Finland and France have seized or
detained tankers; Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway and Sweden have boarded
or detained cargo and bulk vessels.
These operations have largely
been carried out on the charge of ships flying a false flag,
interpreted as the ship being “without nationality” and therefore liable
to boarding by government vessels of any other state under Article 110
of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Belgian special forces boarded and seized the Ethera oil tanker in the North Sea earlier this month for falsely flying the Guinean flag; French forces seized the Grinch in the Mediterranean in January for falsely flying the Comoros flag.
The
interests at stake, and hence the potential for armed clashes, are
enormous. The US and Europe have collectively identified and sanctioned
over 540 shadow fleet vessels. According to the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), these and others move an estimated
$87bn–$100bn worth of oil per year, around 65 percent of Russia’s
seaborne oil trade.
*****
Moscow has responded by selectively reflagging ships as Russian,
affording them state protection. In January, the sanctioned tanker General Skobelev was escorted through the Channel by the missile corvette Boykiy.
The Labour government has not said, and the media has not asked, what the British military would do in such a case.
Given
Starmer has declared seizing Russian ships a matter of protecting
“British interests”, and his housing minister Steve Reed told the BBC
this week, “There is no precedent for a vote in Parliament for
defending British people,” Labour’s position is that a shooting war can
be started with Russia without so much as a press conference.
*****
Speaking ahead of a summit of the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force,
encompassing Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the
Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, Starmer told reporters, “We have to
accept that there’s a war on two fronts—there’s the Iranian conflict and
the continuing Ukrainian conflict.”
The
fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an
essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide,
dictatorship and fascism.
