Simone McDonnell

Israel’s war on Lebanon: ‘a mortal threat to the whole region’

The Palestinians have many enemies. One requires special damnation for its role in the current genocide—the monstrous counter-revolutionary Egyptian military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Of all the Arab regimes, Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, could most directly come to the aid of the Palestinians and challenge Israel. But it doesn’t lift a finger. 
The reasons for this are known to the millions of Egyptians struggling to survive under tyranny: Egypt is the second largest recipient of military aid in the Middle East, second only to Israel. US dollars fund not only the genocidal military machine slaughtering Palestinians, but the dictatorship that represses Egyptians. 
The priorities of the Egyptian military are self-enrichment, cementing their dictatorial power across every institution of Egyptian capitalism and crushing the Egyptian population through violence and poverty. They are supported by the Arab gulf monarchies—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—like-minded regimes determined to prevent the region’s working classes from repeating the mass revolts and revolutionary uprisings that shook governments to the core between 2011 and 2019. 
From Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria in 2011, to the uprisings in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria and Sudan in 2019, every regional revolutionary struggle raised the Palestinian flag, and the demand for Palestinian liberation. 
In Egypt, the second Palestinian intifada (2000-05) ignited and inspired a decade of resistance to the country’s authoritarian regime. This led to a re-consolidation of the left and the growing militancy of powerful sections of the Egyptian working class, which in turn erupted into the revolution of 2011 that overthrew Hosni Mubarak and his corrupt ruling party.
The Palestinian cause is a lightning rod for resistance in Egypt because it embodies the struggle against the capitalist forces that repress both the Arab working classes and the Palestinians—the regional ruling classes in partnership with Israel and US imperialism. 
Sisi and his military know it, which is why their counter-revolutionary repression of Egyptians—economically, politically and socially—has been so comprehensive. Indeed it is worse than under Mubarak’s dictatorship. 
Egyptians endure a level of destitution not seen since the historic bread riots of 1977. Inflation is officially 40 percent, although on the streets people report up to 100 percent inflation on some essential items. In 2020, the poverty rate had jumped to 32 percent in a population of 105 million. Sixty percent of Egyptians hold ration cards, needed for buying subsidised essential goods, including food staples. Real wages have declined, and the youth unemployment rate stands at 17 percent (50 percent of the population is under the age of 25).
Against this backdrop of deprivation, the Egyptian military’s top brass has been living large while reducing social spending and subsidies for workers and the poor. Military elites have spent billions in the past decade on mega-projects that are little more than multi-billion-dollar profiteering ventures for the generals, who own an ever-increasing share of Egyptian industry. 
Languishing in Egyptian jails are 60,000 political prisoners—mostly Muslim Brotherhood members, but also leftists—who have been rounded up, tortured and imprisoned since the 2013 military coup that deposed the democratically elected but increasingly unpopular Muslim Brotherhood government. 
Sisi has exacted a brutal revenge on the millions of Egyptian workers and students who rose up in 2011 demanding “bread, freedom and social justice”. The military has eliminated the small democratic spaces that existed under Mubarak, spaces that allowed some, albeit limited, organising—be it in solidarity with Palestinians, or industrial campaigns in state-owned industries. Student unions are banned, public protests are banned, the military has shut down NGOs and human rights organisations. There are no independent trade unions and independent media is virtually non-existent. 
The military has embedded itself in all layers of the capitalist state, purging it of opposition figures and factions. The judiciary is essentially a military court and there are no mass or smaller civilian political parties with representation in parliament. Even the mosques have been raided and purged of preachers aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood or sympathetic to the 2011 revolution. The regime even demands oversight of scripts for Friday prayers at the central Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo—a place known as a rallying point for solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
In spite of the outlawing of dissent, when Israel began its war on Gaza, Egyptians began to raise their voices in anger. Small protests broke out. Sisi knew what was coming, and when criticisms of him started to mount, albeit in muted tones, he tried to co-opt and circumvent mass rage at Israel and frustration that the Egyptian regime was doing nothing to defend the Palestinians.
Sisi called a state-sanctioned protest on 20 October, releasing a list of locations at which legal demonstrations could take place. The places—such as in stadiums and mosques—were chosen to stop people massing in the streets. 
However, in both Cairo and Alexandria, some protesters defied the official list, including students who walked off university campuses, filling the streets and heading to Tahrir Square, the iconic centre of protest in the 2011 revolutionary uprising. They chanted “The people want the downfall of Israel!” Some also chanted against Sisi’s regime. 
Thousands marched through downtown Cairo but were stopped by the armed forces when they arrived at Tahrir and tried to break through security barriers. Hundreds were beaten. More than 100 were arrested in Cairo and Alexandria. Since then, only a handful of small, but nonetheless significant, protests have been held, such as those called by the Journalists Syndicate outside their office in downtown Cairo.
The Journalists Syndicate, alongside BDS Egypt, has bravely continued solidarity actions. They called for a <a href="https://globalconscienceconvoy.org/about">Global Conscience Convoy</a> to travel to the border with Gaza, shortly after Israel began its war on the territory, and to demand entry for aid trucks. Activists and medical professionals from across the world converged on Cairo to be part of the convoy and to show solidarity with Palestinians. So far, the government has not issued the permits required for any convoys to leave Cairo. 
Instead, the regime is collaborating with Israel. Since the 2013 coup, more than 50,000 Egyptians have been forcibly evicted from their homes in Rafah, many of them Palestinian Bedouins. Thousands of residential homes and administrative buildings have been demolished and thousands forced out of their historical homelands under the pretext of Egypt fighting ISIS and other Islamic militants in the northern Sinai. 
The principal reason, however, is Egypt’s collaboration with the US and Israel’s plan to create a “buffer zone” on the Egyptian side of Gaza. The regime has destroyed vast tunnel complexes that once stretched from Egypt into Gaza, providing a lifeline through which food and building materials were transported into the territory to mitigate the strangling effects of Israel’s illegal siege and blockade. 
While Sisi struts the stage at pan-Arab summits, crowing about his regime’s undying support for the Palestinians, he has submitted to Israeli demands that the drops of aid allowed through the Egyptian border into Gaza must pass through an Israeli checkpoint first. Unbeknownst to many, when aid travels through the Rafah crossing, it must divert almost 80 kilometres on a round trip to an Israeli checkpoint at Al-Awja/Nitzana, where the Israeli military holds up essential supplies and has the final say on what aid, if any, may enter Gaza through the Egyptian border. 
Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979—the first Arab state to officially recognise the apartheid regime. Since then, the Palestinians have had no peace and successive Arab states have “normalised” relations with Israel. The only way in which these relationships can be viewed as “normal” is when they are understood from the perspectives of the ruling classes of Israel, the Arab regimes and the US. 
For them, “normal” is the exploitation and oppression of their own working classes. For them, “normal” is collaboration between their own despotic states in the service of power and profits for their ruling elites. 
Sisi says that he will never support the transfer of Palestinians into northern Sinai. The Palestinians should never be forcibly transferred anywhere. But Sisi doesn’t care about the Palestinians. His regime could and should be doing whatever is needed at the Gaza border to defend and protect the Palestinians. He won’t do it. 
There is a power that could—the restive and momentous power of the Egyptian working class, alongside the other working classes of the region. Together, their shared exploitation and oppression at the hands of all the regional powers, the US and the West could be overturned and all of the Sisi’s of the region crushed. Then, the permanent liberation of Palestine could be realised.

Egypt’s genocidal embrace of Israel

Remember the COVID mental health crisis of 2021? Such was its magnitude that the Business Council of Australia, never before (or since) interested in anyone’s mental health, issued a statement in September about Australia’s “mental health emergency”.
Mental health and the crisis of it were on the lips of almost every organisation that was campaigning against public health measures to contain the virus. The Herald Sun in Victoria ran countless articles highlighting the strains that lockdowns in particular were causing children and high school students.
While the strains were often real, the political right never argued for more social support to ameliorate the hardships caused by strict COVID public health measures—they just argued by implication that the medicine was worse than the disease.
But the evidence coming out of the United States and other countries was clear: the disease was much worse. And it wasn’t just the hundreds of thousands of deaths, but the millions of people who lost friends and loved ones.
“You think about the holidays that are behind us that 140,000 children in the US losing a parent or grandparent—what a different holiday season this was”, Christopher Russo, a doctor, told a journalist from the NBC-affiliated 8WGAL in Pennsylvania in late December.
And there reportedly is a genuine crisis of mental health among children who have caught the disease.
“Although the symptoms of COVID have been mild, the effects that it has had on children's mental health has been severe”, Russo said. “We’ve seen a rise in teenage suicide attempts, particularly among girls, and a rise in hospitalisations for mental health reasons in the adolescent population, markedly during the COVID pandemic.” 
On this mental health crisis there was deafening silence from those who purportedly were so concerned about mental health in Australia. Now the Liberals and the business lobby have gotten what they wanted: fewer restrictions and a lot more virus. But they have gone silent on the crisis that has resulted. A New South Wales emergency nurse <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/05/the-foundations-of-our-healthcare-system-have-been-washed-away">writing in the Guardian</a> today captures the scope of the catastrophe:
“‘Our healthcare system remains strong’, says our premier. It’s hard to explain that to the 91-year-old woman who slept in a chair last night in the emergency department I work at. Or the patient with cancer, receiving chemo, stuck at the cancer treatment centre for more than 24 hours, her journey delayed because she became a close contact while waiting for a bed. 
“The patient with suicidal ideation, who has been scheduled under the Mental Health Act, was told they have COVID-19, and is being forced to wait indefinitely for days as there are no beds at the specialised mental health facility ...
“We feel defeated: we are not able to provide the level of care we could pre-pandemic. What is most wearing, though, is the lack of recognition from our leaders about how hard this pandemic is for the nursing workforce ...
“We have already lost so many of our best senior nurses and paramedics over the past few months due to the fatigue of this pandemic. I just know that with this fourth wave of infections, we are going to lose many, many more. My colleagues and I are beyond fatigued. We feel hopeless, we feel scared. There is nothing left for us to give.”
Where’s the press release from the Business Council demanding something be done for the sake of nurses’ and patients’ mental health? There isn’t one, because the capitalists have their freedom back—the freedom to make money at the expense of our safety and health. No more of those pesky lockdowns, border closures and mass public health measures that were our defence against mass illness and the mass suffering that comes with it. 
Across Australia this week, news headlines are screaming that health workers are burned out, that hospitals are overwhelmed and dangerously short staffed and that people are going to die as a result. The Australian Medical Association is saying it, epidemiologists are saying it, the nurses’ union is saying it, aged care providers are saying it. 
There have been reports of older and sick people passing out in hours-long queues in the heat waiting for PCR tests, not to mention sick babies and children waiting in lines in the heat. The most vulnerable members of our community—including Indigenous communities, people with disabilities and older people—cannot access or afford RAT tests, major COVID testing sites are shutting down because of overload and COVID positive cases and hospital admissions are rising fast.
ABC News reported at the end of December that doctors are reporting a “wave of patients” who are “sick with worry”. “Anxiety around catching and passing on COVID-19 is well known, but GPs are now warning of alarming levels of fear in the community”, the report noted.
It sounds like something approaching a mental health crisis. So where is the campaign from the Murdoch press and the Liberal Party to do something to address the source of it? 
Those of us who work in the mental health sector, or in social services and health, are hearing and witnessing horrendous stories and incidents every day. Going to work, you have to brace yourself for helplessness and despair, knowing there will be very little you can do for people in deep crisis because our underfunded and privatised or corporatised systems of care were already broken prior to the COVID outbreak.
The federal government threw millions of dollars at telehealth mental health counselling lines last year. While telehealth has been valuable for a range of people, it is well past time to call bullshit on the government’s approach: overseeing the wholesale erosion of genuine mental health, health and social services while making a big show about funding call centres such as Lifeline or Beyond Blue or 1800RESPECT.
What we cannot do from the other end of that telephone line is give you money to buy food for your kids, or pay your rent or mortgage if you’ve lost income because of being away from work sick without COVID sick leave, find you a safe refuge if you’re fleeing domestic violence—because state and federal governments have shut them down—find money to pay for the care your kids with disabilities need because the NDIS has cut you off, or find care for your elderly parents who are dying waiting for a My Aged Care package or a place in a residential home. 
And what we’re very unlikely to be able to do is find you adequate mental health care—because the public mental health system in Australia is a basket case. If you can afford private counselling, good luck finding a specialised therapist. So many of them have closed their books for months because of the overwhelming need.
Right now, the mantra from governments is to “take personal responsibility” as they relinquish responsibility for public health, for providing people with adequate welfare and guarantees around housing and income support. Governments are encouraging everyone to trust the capitalist market to solve our health care needs. Yesterday, Finance Minister Simon Birmingham’s advice for people who can’t obtain unavailable PCR and RAT tests was to be “agile”. Maybe we are supposed to just try to outrun the coronavirus now.
We’re in survival of the fittest—or the wealthiest—mode when it comes to the pandemic. That’s exactly how the people at the top want it—everyone fearing for their or their family’s health and being grateful when a $10 test kit becomes available. The cure for this ill is to organise however we can, to fight them tooth and nail for every protection we can get.

Where is the hue and cry about the COVID mental health crisis now?

Australian politicians and business leaders have very suddenly become interested in mental health. It’s not the kind of interest we’re accustomed to—hollow weasel words, patronising gestures like RUOK day or bosses badgering workers to “take responsibility” for their wellbeing by doing mindfulness and yoga in personal time they don’t have. Instead, it comes with a clear action plan: “live with covid”.
According to this plan, re-opening the economy and ending lockdowns must happen for the sake of our mental health. Never mind the mental health impacts of the deaths that will result, or the mental and physical trauma that will be inflicted on health workers in grossly under-resourced hospitals. And never mind the impact of potentially life-long disabilities associated with long-covid, or the effect on unvaccinated children who, returning to school, risk contracting the virus and spreading it to vulnerable relatives.
The deep cynicism and shameless hypocrisy of federal and state politicians and business leaders pretending to care about the mental health of workers is sickening. The state of the public mental health system, which they are responsible for, has been in crisis for more than a decade. Workers, students and the poor who come into contact with it know the system is struggling to cope. This criminal lack of support has never worried the anti-lockdown hand-wringers before.
I am a mental health professional on the frontlines, and have been for 24 years. Everyday my colleagues and I contend with the appalling state of public mental health “care” in Australia. The problems are not just a product of the pandemic. Patrick McGorry, Professor of Youth Mental Health at Melbourne University, recently described how the mental health sector “was already woefully unable to meet the level of need for care even prior to the pandemic”.
Ask any mental health worker what that looks like and they’ll tell you: there are no hospital beds for people who have tried kill or harm themselves, prisons are filled with young men with serious health and substance use problems, Indigenous youth who need help can’t access it, and parents with severe burnout trying to look after kids with complex and life-threatening illnesses can’t get the care they and their children need.
Frequently in mental health emergencies, there is just no help available at all. Speaking to the ABC in August, Professor McGorry detailed how he had spent the previous weekend trying to find a bed for a young woman in Victoria at high risk, but was not able to find one. He is the executive director of the Orygen Youth Health service and a former Australian of the Year. If he can’t find a bed for a critically unwell and at-risk young person, who can?
Ask any one of the thousands of mental health workers, nurses, paramedics and other health workers about their experience and they will tell you heartbreaking stories of people who cannot get the help they need, both now and before the pandemic.
This takes a toll on the workers themselves. There are constant reports emerging in the mainstream media about burnout and breakdown of health staff in Melbourne and Sydney in the face of the COVID-19 onslaught. There will be more trauma impacts and severe burnout as the crisis unfolds. It happened in Victoria’s outbreak last year—we know nurses have been leaving the profession, resigning or taking significant time off. Recovery from trauma and burnout is possible, but at a minimum people need time out for stabilisation and restoration and some will need specialised support. For this to happen, there needs to be leave available and other workers able to replace those taking time off. Otherwise, the burden on others is intensified and there is pressure on workers to resume work before they are ready. But there is no indication that those in charge are preparing for this eventuality.
The workload on mental health workers is only becoming larger. Calls to Lifeline have increased by 40 percent compared to two years ago and calls to Beyond Blue are up 30 percent since the start of the NSW outbreak. Patrick McGorry in the Saturday Paper reports there is an overall 30 percent increase in demand for youth mental health services. Waiting lists for therapists and counsellors in Melbourne and Sydney have blown out, with many waiting six months for an appointment.
Liberal governments are keen to put this down to the strain of lockdowns, and to use it to aid their relentless campaign to reopen. Lockdowns are of course difficult. Human beings are socially and neuro-physiologically wired for connection. When we feel alone, abandoned and that our survival is at risk, we suffer.
But it’s as much about how lockdowns are implemented that make them difficult to cope with, rather than that they are implemented at all. A new mental health think tank comprising 14 mental health experts across Australia recently reviewed the literature about the drivers of mental distress during lockdown. Speaking to the Guardian, Professor Maree Teesson said they found, “Economic insecurity, unemployment and importantly the prospect of unemployment were key drivers in multiple studies”. The first policy paper of this think tank has called on the government to urgently reintroduce the coronavirus supplement for jobseeker and youth allowance participants.
It’s a no-brainer that financial security along with a range of other properly-funded community, therapeutic and social supports help people get through lockdown. As does the sense that the effort is collective and worth making to prevent deaths. But all that is currently missing, and it’s exactly what those who profess to care about mental health don’t want to provide. They’d rather force us to accept the virus than provide the resources needed to eliminate it.
There is plenty that could be offered to people to greatly reduce, or even stop mental distress, even in prolonged lockdown situations. But it won’t come from our governments or the 80 CEOs of Australia’s largest businesses who signed an open letter to government in September imploring them to stop lockdowns and open up the economy.
These are the people who have been savagely gutting health and social services for decades and who refused to lift unemployment and welfare payments, even after almost three decades of uninterrupted growth in the Australian economy.
To improve our collective mental health, a struggle against the priorities of the cynical hypocrites who are weaponising mental health to protect their profits is sorely needed.

Crocodile tears on mental health

Iran faces a crisis unparalleled since the 1979 revolution. The most significant strikes in 40 years and a new wave of anti-regime protests have swept the country since June. Crushing US sanctions, endemic regime corruption, the costs of Iran’s imperialist interventions in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the Middle East have crippled the Iranian economy. 
The price for these monstrosities has been paid by the working class and the poor, 60 percent of whom now live at or below the poverty line in a country of 84 million people. The rich—including the clerical, military and political elites of the regime—have fared differently. As the crisis for workers has worsened, wealth for the richest in Iran has increased. 
Iran now has more millionaires than Saudi Arabia. “In 2020, the number of high-net-worth individuals in Iran grew by 21.6 percent, way above the global average of 6.3 percent”, notes Forbes magazine. “The collective wealth of these dollar millionaires grew even faster at 24.3 percent.” The wealth of the military core of the regime—the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the de facto state and an economic industrial monolith that controls the official and black economy—has been estimated to be equivalent to between one-third and nearly two-thirds of Iran’s GDP. 
The reinstatement of economic sanctions by the US in 2018 has hit the Iranian working class hard and exacerbated the devastation of the pandemic. Coupled with the corruption and mismanagement of the economy by the regime, the impacts of the broader economic crisis are devastating. Inflation has soared to 50 percent. The average price of basic food items has increased by more than 70 percent in urban centres in the past year. The cost of bread has increased by 30 percent and the cost of meat by more than 120 percent, meaning it is now out of reach for most Iranians, as are other staple proteins like eggs. Rental costs have risen by 39 percent in Iran’s cities in the past month at the same time as the Iranian currency’s value has dramatically declined. 
Youth unemployment rose to 24 percent in the last quarter of 2020, and official estimates of jobs lost during the pandemic are around 2.5 million, a figure likely to be lower than reality given the unreliability of government statistics. Iran is facing its fifth wave of COVID-19, and a picture is beginning to emerge of the horrific consequences of the regime’s failure to address the pandemic. Fewer than 3 percent of Iranians have been vaccinated. While US sanctions have greatly restricted access to essential medical equipment, in January, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banned the importing of Western vaccines. 
Immense class inequality, poverty and systemic discrimination of oppressed minorities, as well as the failure of the regime to provide economic relief and essential health and welfare infrastructure during the outbreak, have resulted in the deaths of a conservatively estimated 100,000 people. Almost 4 million people are estimated to have contracted COVID-19 so far. Sistan and Baluchestan province in the south is experiencing a worse outbreak than the whole of neighbouring Pakistan. This week, health officials warned that hospitals have reached capacity; Iran Daily, the government’s official newspaper, reported that people are being buried in mass graves in several provinces. 
Alongside the worsening pandemic, a series of power blackouts hit major cities, including Tehran, in recent weeks, and environmental disasters—including a drought, severe sandstorms and a life-threatening water crisis created by the corrupt management practices of the regime—have triggered a wave of protests during a dangerously hot summer. Those protests began in the oil rich southern province of Khuzestan on 15 July and triggered anti-regime solidarity protests around the country in parallel with a nationwide strike wave in the oil and petrochemical sector that began on 16 June. 
Khuzestan, which is central to Iran’s economy and national security, and a particularly explosive microcosm of Iran’s crisis, was the first province to launch protests in November 2019, which then swept the country into an uprising against the regime’s decision to triple fuel prices. Khuzestan is home to 80 percent of Iran’s oil fields and 60 percent of its gas reserves, and, with the largest area of harvestable land, is the country’s top producer of wheat, grain and legumes. It also produces much of Iran’s sugar cane and sugar beet and is home to Iran’s biggest steel exporter in the capital city, Ahvaz. 
Despite being the wealthiest province in Iran, it is one of the most underdeveloped and has been one of the regions hardest hit by the pandemic; one-quarter of all Iranian cases in 2020 were in Khuzestan. The south-western province, bordering Iraq, is an ethnically diverse territory that is home to the majority of Iran’s oppressed ethnic Arab population—a population, alongside other ethnic minorities in Khuzestan, that has long been the target of intense repression and racism by the regime. 
On 15 July, protests broke out over severe water shortages and collective rage against decades of environmental mismanagement. Khuzestan used to have a third of Iran’s water resources. But because of reckless decisions to build poorly planned dams and the diversion of water to other parts of the country, the province has been ravaged by cyclical droughts, floods and dust storms that have intensified for a decade. Thousands of people visit hospitals in Ahvaz each year with respiratory problems associated with dust storms. 
The province was a front line in the Iran-Iraq war. Forty years later, infrastructure has still not been rebuilt. Privatisation of industry has resulted in wages being eviscerated and local oppressed minorities locked out of employment in favour of poorly paid workers from other regions. Arab activists have been protesting the confiscation of local land for development projects for decades. 
“There is no injustice bigger than sitting on an ocean of oil and gas and even seeing oil wells from your houses but struggling with unemployment”, an unemployed protester from Khuzestan told the Financial Times in 2019. More than 300 protesters were killed in the 2019 uprising in Khuzestan alone. This time, at least ten have been killed in the protests that began in July, at which people chanted, “The people want the regime to fall!”, “Down with Khamenei!”, “We don’t want an Islamic republic!” and “Down with dictatorship!” 
Solidarity with the protests in Khuzestan spread to other regions. In Fardis, Alborz province, people gathered to express their solidarity with the protests in Khuzestan and chanted “Death to the dictator!” In Isfahan in central Iran, a large night protest chanted, “Isfahan, Khuzestan, unity, unity!” while protesters tore down a banner depicting Ali Khamenei. Further protests erupted in Tehran, both in solidarity with Khuzestan and against a series of blackouts, blamed on regime mismanagement of hydroelectric resources. Protesters in Tehran chanted, “Shame, Khamenei, let go of this country!” and “Mullahs, get lost!”
Several prominent unions, key to the development of the labour movement in recent decades, expressed solidarity with Khuzestan protesters, including the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers Syndicate (located in Khuzestan) and the Tehran Bus Workers Syndicate. In their statement of solidarity with Khuzestan, the Tehran Bus Workers Syndicate said:
 “The lack of water in Khuzestan today is rooted in the unprofessional, rapacious and profit-centred policies of the prior decades of capitalism in oil extraction and use of water for the steel industry, the income from which does not go to the people. These insatiable policies have deprived the people of Khuzestan of safe drinking water. Water is shut off for long hours and it is lacking for basic needs. Farmers and cattle growers have also been damaged and lost their livelihoods.” 
Strikes of contract workers in the oil, gas and petrochemical sector began on 19 June—the day after the election of new hardliner President Ebrahim Raisi. It was the lowest voter turnout for any Iranian election in four decades. The strike began at the Biqdoon power plant in Asaluyeh and spread to workers in 100 petrochemical plants across fifteen provinces. Reports of the number of workers on strike range between 20,000 and 60,000. 
The strikers are skilled manual workers—like welders, plumbers, electricians, scaffolders, moulders and warehouse workers—employed in oil, gas and petrochemical plants. The strike wave has been overseen by an informal council, established by militant workers, called the Organising Council of Contract Oil Workers, under the banner “1400 campaign”. (The year 1400 marks 2021 in the Persian calendar.) 
The Organising Council, while not an elected representative group or a formal union, has tried to cohere contract workers in the petrochemical industry who are employed on a temporary basis, in appalling conditions, without the pay or benefits that permanent oil and gas workers receive. As part of a generalised neoliberal offensive in recent decades, the regime has constructed what it calls “special economic energy zones”, such as the Pars Special Economic Energy Zone in Asaluyeh, home to the South Pars gas field—the largest in the world. In these zones, designed as export zones for gas and oil, regular Iranian labour laws do not apply. The “special” thing about them is that workers can be employed on temporary contracts, without the protections, wages and entitlements of other workers. 
Working in parallel with the special economic zones is a vast consortium of private contractors established within the oil and gas sector, widely understood to be controlled by corrupt regime officials within the Oil Ministry and senior figures in the Revolutionary Guards, who channel revenues back into regime coffers. These subcontractors employ contract workers like those tens of thousands who have been on strike since June. Interviews conducted with some striking workers by the paper Kayhan Life provide a glimpse into conditions. 
“No-one monitors the Oil Ministry’s operations”, Reza, a contract worker in the oil sector, told the publication. “No-one knows the relationship between the contractors and state officials or how much bribes change hands under the table.” 
“They boast about their so-called resilient economy, when in fact, they line their pockets with the fruits of our labour”, Alireza, a welder with more than a decade of experience, said. Milad, an engineer who works on a temporary contract, joined the strike and outlined some of the conditions in the sector:
“I can give you several examples. After a twelve-hour shift under a scorching sun, a worker returns to his dormitory, where his dinner comprises two boiled potatoes and an egg or a bowl of lentil soup. For lunch, he most likely had a bowl of macaroni with soya sauce. Even prisoners would refuse to eat these foods, let alone a worker who has worked for twelve consecutive hours and needs a nutritious meal.
“Dormitories resemble makeshift silos built to house victims of war or earthquake. They are more like tents set up in deserts, crawling with scorpions and other creatures. Many workers put the legs of their beds in gasoline-filled containers to stop scorpions from crawling up.
“There are not enough clinics or infirmaries, at work sites or in dormitories, to provide adequate health and medical care to workers. The buses that transport workers to various project sites have broken seats and no air conditioning. Just imagine a worker who has worked all day in temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius must ride this bus back to his dorm.”
The Organising Council has issued demands for an increase in wages, collective bargaining, payment of wages in arrears, on-time payment in the future and for permanent job security for those currently employed on contracts. Other workers in Iran have staged strikes and solidarity protests in unison with the contract workers in the oil and gas sector. Teachers and nurses, and truck drivers who transport oil, have been on strike and issued statements of solidarity. Reflecting a growing class consciousness in a developing labour movement in recent years, eight key unions at the forefront of the struggle issued the following statement of solidarity with the nationwide strike of contract oil and gas workers on 28 June:
“To the striking contract workers in the oil and petrochemical industry. As you have correctly concluded, to stage an effective protest against contractors, fixed-term contracts and low wages, and other issues, we workers must, above all else, organise our efforts and unite globally. Only through unity and solidarity can we move forward and achieve our demands. We welcome you and offer you our sincere support. We will benefit significantly from your experience during the current strike.
“To continue our efforts in achieving our demands, we must create trade unions and independent labour organisations; promote greater unity and communication between employees in different sectors; strengthen our solidarity with workers on permanent contracts; maintain vigilance in confronting employers; and establish funds to help the striking workers and their vulnerable families.
“We call on all workers, retirees, teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, journalists and all hardworking and honourable men and women in our society to support this labour movement and help the striking workers to achieve their rightful demands. Workers’ struggle to achieve their demands is like a mighty unstoppable wind and roaring wave. Long live the unity and solidarity of the workers!”
The response of the Iranian regime to the strikes has been a mixture of concessions and repression. According to rights groups and social media posts,700 contract workers were fired at a Tehran refinery. Contract workers have been fired around the country and starved by their employers, who withheld their food rations and locked them out of dormitories. The securitisation of the petrochemical industry and the restructuring of the sector by the regime in past decades impose restrictions on contract workers attempting to organise. 
Specifically, the division of workers between permanent, more highly paid oil and gas workers who are fewer in number and more industrially powerful, and insecure workers on temporary contracts, is an obstacle created and leveraged by the regime. In the recent strike wave, the regime has offered pay rises and concessions to these more powerful oil and gas workers and repression to contract workers. 
Unfortunately, while some permanent workers registered an intent to join the contract workers in their nationwide strike towards the end of June, this did not eventuate. For the strike movement in the oil sector to succeed, these workers must be drawn into the struggle. While the oil and gas sector in Iran remains a core centre of industrial power, it is a divided sector. And the Iranian regime has diversified the economy in recent decades, expanding the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. 
This has provided more space for the regime to hold out under the crushing weight of US sanctions, as have the generalised impacts of a global slowdown in oil production and mobility worldwide related to the pandemic. For these reasons, and more, some caution is required in drawing comparisons between the current strike wave in the oil and gas sector and the strike wave of oil workers that was central to catalysing the 1979 revolution.
The election of Ebrahim Raisi with so few votes is both a signal of a crisis of legitimacy for the regime and a warning sign that it is hardening its approach to internal crisis, repression and foreign policy ambitions in the region. Before being elected president, Raisi was the head of the judiciary. In his 20s, he was appointed to the “death commission”—a collection of judges that ordered the executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Throughout his career, he has been involved in the repression of political dissidents and ordered the execution of two protesters involved in the Green Movement in 2009. 
Raisi will brook no resistance from protesters and striking workers in regions like Khuzestan, which borders oil-rich Iraqi cities such as Basra, where oil workers have been on strike in recent years alongside protesters raising similar demands against their own government—a government into which Iran has increasingly inserted itself. 
This latest wave of protests and strikes in the oil and gas sector reflect both the depth of the crisis in Iran—politically, socially, economically and environmentally—and the growing confidence and organising potential of the Iranian working class. That leading sections of organised workers are emphasising solidarity among oppressed minorities and other workers and urging unity between contract workers and tenured workers is an inspiring and hopeful sign that demonstrates an intent to overcome divisions manufactured by the regime and the bosses. 
The militancy of leading organisers in those and other unions, including teachers and nurses, and the militant organising of women’s rights activists and students, all of whom are facing down regime violence, torture and imprisonment, reflect the burgeoning potential and determination of growing layers of workers and radicals in Iran.

Iran's new wave of strikes and protests

A riot has broken out in the Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, much of which, as of early Wednesday morning, was in flames. The rioters are men who want people to know what Peter Dutton and his Australian Border Force are doing to them. They want us to know about the crime being committed against them, and the unbearable torment they and their families are enduring. Their riot is an act of resistance that demands our solidarity.
The riot broke out on Tuesday afternoon around 3pm local time. The men who started it are among the roughly 240 people recently transported to Christmas Island from the Australian mainland—people facing up to the possibility of indefinite detention within a labyrinthine system specifically designed by the Australian government as a mechanism of torture.
A large number of them are New Zealanders, Maoris and Pacific Islanders. Alongside them are Sri Lankans, Rohingya, Iranians, Italians, Irish, and Malaysians. These are people who have been building lives in Australia—some for decades, some since they were children.
Many of the men are long-term or permanent residents in Australia—people who have no family or connections in the countries to which the Australian government is attempting to deport them. The deportations are being carried out in line with an increasingly draconian section of the Migration Act—Section 501—that grants Dutton, the Minister for Home Affairs, the power to cancel visas on “character grounds”. It is a legal instrument that functions, within the broader framework of Australia’s barbaric immigration and refugee policies, to divide people between “desirables” and “undesirables” and categorise foreigners as suspicious and a potential risk to Australian society.
According to Section 501 of the Act, visa holders who have been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison, and are considered by the Minister for Home Affairs to be of unsound character, can be snatched from their homes and thrust into the living hell of Australia’s immigration detention regime while awaiting deportation. Sometimes they are left to rot there for years.
The formula by which a visa holder is determined to have failed the character test is unknowable, because it doesn’t exist. People’s lives can be destroyed at the whim of the racist authoritarians in the Department of Home Affairs and Border Force, with Dutton himself having the final say on all decisions.
Among the men transported to Christmas Island are people who have committed drink driving offences, drugs offences, assaults—crimes considered small and some larger. There are men there who have completed their prison sentences only to be abducted by Border Force agents upon their release. There are men who have been compelled to undertake independent assessments by psychologists and psychiatrists who conclude they are not a risk to the Australian community but whose appeals against their deportation on character grounds fail nonetheless. Some are forced to complete rehabilitation programs and told that when they do so their appeals will be strengthened. They do it. They fail.
These are men with families in Australia. They are workers who were raising children. They are men who were sending money to impoverished family members in other countries. Now with cancelled visas they have no incomes at all. This has rendered partners and children homeless and families destroyed. 
Before their transportation from immigration facilities and prisons on the Australian mainland some of these men could receive visits from loved ones. Now they can barely, if at all, get internet access to see and speak to them. Without incomes few of these men can access legal support. Many of them have lived lives scarred by trauma, poverty, childhood sexual abuse and racism—systemic injustices compounded now by the system of state-sanctioned torture that is Australia’s immigration detention regime. 
There are men on Christmas Island who have never been charged with any crime, but who nevertheless have been deemed to be of unsound character and a risk to the Australian community. There are some who have signed agreements to be deported back to countries they’ve barely set foot in—people who have run out of hope and are just desperate to escape the trap they’ve been forced into.
Some have been waiting for six months or more, but now cannot leave, either because of COVID-19 restrictions or because the Australian government is intent on prolonging their torture. And there are men who are stuck in a horrifying catch-22—weighing up the prospect of returning to continents and countries ravaged by COVID-19 against the alternative of enduring the endless torture of immigration detention.
Around 2pm on Tuesday, men from two separate compounds within the detention centre began a peaceful protest that escalated into a collective attempt to fight their way out of their trap. They fashioned battering rams and other devices to get themselves onto the roofs of the buildings meant to lock down their collective rage—to break down the barriers and walls meant to silence them, and keep them from telling us what is happening to them. They went to the roofs to shout into the night, demanding their basic human rights—demanding their freedom.
Sources inside the detention centre want us to know it is a protest against their transportation, against their incarceration, against racism, the lack of access to legal representation, their treatment at the hands of the hired thugs from SERCO who police their lives, their forced separation from family and friends, and the psychological and physical torture that fills each moment they struggle to survive.
To the extent that the Australian government is allowed to treat people like this, it affects us all. Their immigration detention program, and particularly Section 501 of the Migration Act, is designed to encourage the belief that we’re under attack from within and without. Out of the fear of the “others” locked-up in Australia’s offshore gulags they expect to generate consent, and stifle opposition to their racist, authoritarian, anti-poor, and anti-worker agenda at home. 
The more riots and protests there are against this the better off we are. The more detention centres are burnt to the ground, the more strongly will flare those flames of dissent that alone keep alive the hope for a society built on solidarity rather than division, on justice and equality rather than the barbaric reality of capitalism today. The detainees on Christmas Island are striking a blow for the freedom of us all. They deserve our full support.

Detainees have set fire to the Christmas Island Detention Centre. They deserve our full support.

At what point do the calculated, macabre, executions of innocent human beings perpetrated by the Australian defence force in Afghanistan, provoke the outrage of the liberal media? At what stage in the reporting of the ritualistic slitting of 14-year-old children’s throats, severing of people’s hands, beer guzzling out of the prosthetic legs of the dead, or shooting handcuffed and fleeing civilians in the back for sport, summon some deep reckoning by the Australian liberal press, about the truth of war and what Australia’s military attack on Afghanistan has really been about? 
When will the liberal media in Australia give the same level of care to humanising the Afghans who have suffered atrocities at the hands of Australian soldiers as they do to humanising those soldiers? When will Afghans have the chance to speak about their PTSD, their nightmares, their mental health, their broken lives, after the Australian SAS and military came to their country and blew it and them to bits? When will they invite the parents of two children whose throats were carved open by SAS soldiers and whose bodies were then bagged and dumped into a river, into the oh-so-genial newsrooms of the ABC, where journalists politely question ex-SAS soldiers about why it’s a travesty that their mass murdering buddies will have their medals of honour stripped from them for butchering children?
The liberal press eschew the raw anger, the very impolite rage, or eviscerating pain or hatred of Afghans towards Australian troops, because the liberal press just like the rest of the mainstream media in Australia fall in behind the wars waged by the western powers in Afghanistan and Iraq, like they do all imperialist wars that Australia is involved in. From the ABC to SBS and the Guardian, the establishment liberal press wheeled out the big-gun journalists to report on the deranged killing spree of SAS soldiers in Afghanistan. But who amongst them railed against it, who burned with rage at the spurious basis on which Australian troops were sent there in the first place? Which ones agonised, and poured out their so-called bleeding hearts about the innocent slain, or the suffering families left behind? Now is the time for hearts to genuinely bleed. None are.
Just as the liberal media co-created a decades long campaign of vile Islamophobia with their good-muslim, bad-muslim brand of racism to justify Australia’s military interventions in Afghanistan and the Middle East, so too now they spin the usual lies about war. Like caricatures of themselves, they’ve lined up the standard routine of justifications vying with each only over who can “nuance” the same banal, racist, pro-war apologies the best. A common refrain is that the SAS’s abominations are an anomaly in an otherwise noble and honourable history of upstanding behaviour by Australian troops at war. The whole framework of war, imperialism, illegal occupations and invasions is accepted, and therefore all the racist assumptions that underpin them—after that it’s just a downhill run into a sewage dump of liberal excuses for monstrosities. The 60-page section of the Brereton Report cataloguing the history of Australian war crimes from the Boer War to the first Gulf War is apparently of no relevance to those who want to insist there is not a systematic problem, but one of “bad apples”.
Almost universally, articles detailing the SAS’s horrors are accompanied by a series of phone numbers for services that defence force personnel can call to get mental health support. The magnitude of indifference to the suffering of Afghans—the actual victims—is breathtaking, and echoes the very attitudes and logic of the soldiers who treated Afghans like they were sub-human. They don’t matter, fuck them. The supposedly so enlightened liberal press happily report Jacquie Lambie’s claims that veteran suicides are “one of Australia’s most pressing problems”, but don’t think to promote the same sort of compassion for Afghans who have been used as target practice for these same troops. 
At its heart, the liberal media in Australia accepts the logic of capitalism and its workings. It doesn’t seriously challenge it, and provides explicit and implicit justification for the necessary ugliness of the system—including, when necessary, war crimes. The Afghan and other refugees being brutalised in Australian detention centres right now could tell you that—if anyone bothered to ask them—since the liberal press has contributed to their suffering by failing to properly discredit government lies and scapegoating of refugees. 
You can dig deep into the trove of liberal reporting about the monstrous and entirely typical actions of the Australian defence force in Afghanistan and you’ll struggle to find the levels of empathy and outrage commensurate with the barbarity of the crimes. And forget any sort of honest explanation for why these events occurred beyond the most superficial platitudes. Or any responsibility taking for the media having failed to challenge the justifications for war in the first place. Ultimately, the media lines up behind power, whatever is done in its name.

The liberal media is normalising war crimes

The Iranian state kills workers to save itself

Three things are clear about the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran. First, its scale is far greater than in many other countries – officially, it has the sixth highest death toll, after the US, Italy, Spain, France and the UK. Second, the true extent of the devastation is unknown – sources within the country claim that the situation is much worse than the government is letting on. Third, it has dampened overt resistance to the regime, but this is likely to be temporary.
The Iranian regime, confronted last year by the biggest mass protests since the revolution of 1979, responded to the virus with a mixture of obfuscation and cover-ups. After regime officials contracted the virus and the death of a senior adviser to supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the government took belated action. It was, however, nothing like what is needed to arrest the suffering and death now disproportionately ravaging the poor, the working class and ethnic minorities.
The virus emerged in February, in the holy city of Qom – the global centre of Shia scholarship, which attracts more than 20 million Muslims pilgrims each year. Situated 150 kilometres north of the capital, Tehran, Qom became a transmission site, spreading the coronavirus across the country. By early March, satellite images provided by a US space technology company appeared to show mass graves being dug at a cemetery in the city. Footage of body bags strewn across the floor of a local hospital was widely circulated. The hospital worker who filmed it was arrested. 
There are widespread reports that, after the first cases appeared in Qom, the regime covered up the virus’s rapid spread and failed to implement quarantining. “The regime response was weak and exacerbated the health crisis”, Hussein, a student from the south of Iran, says via email. “As the outbreak of the virus coincided with the anniversary of the 1979 revolution celebration and the presidential election, the regime did not reveal to its own people that the coronavirus had already appeared.”
The neoliberal period has inflicted a heavy toll on the working class and the poor while regime elites have amassed untold fortunes. World health experts report that the number of cases and deaths in Iran could as many as five times higher than the official figures. People inside the country say it could be even worse than that. “Everyone you know, knows someone who has it”, Hossam, another student from the south of Iran, says via telephone. “Everyone knows someone who has died.” State-led privatisation under both moderates and hardliners has ravaged public health and social services. And austerity and attacks on wages and workers’ rights have deeply impoverished large sections of the population. 
The regime’s standing was not helped by attempts to downplay the pandemic. This year’s parliamentary elections had the lowest turnout since the founding of the Islamic Republic. In Tehran, only 25 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in February as, unbeknownst to many, the virus was spreading throughout the country. Voter turnout overall was about 42 percent, down from 62 percent in 2016. The drop was due to the same factors that drove mass protests, and the growing militancy of workers and students, in recent years – a broadening and deepening resistance to the country’s political and economic crisis. 
The parliament is increasingly recognised as a farce. Unelected military and security bodies such as the Supreme National Security Council and religious bodies such as the Guardian Council wield unchecked power over policy and lawmaking and vet electoral candidates. This year, the Guardian Council disqualified half of all the reformist candidates – moderates who compete with hardline conservatives for control. It stacked the parliament with hardliners beholden to the military and security apparatus, which controls most of the country’s economy. 
“In the last two to three years we have a lot of reports about people looking for food in rubbish bins or living in empty graves”, says Reza Akbari, an Iranian socialist living in Australia. Compounding the problems are devastating US economic sanctions, which have contributed to an acute shortage of life-saving medicines and medical equipment such as ventilators, face masks and hand sanitiser. A state television journalist, Dr Afruz Eslami, issued a terrifying warning to Iranians less than a month ago on state TV. Citing a study by Tehran’s prestigious Sharif University, she announced that in the worst case scenario, the country faces several million deaths. The study estimated that the best case scenario – with social distancing and quarantine measures strictly observed – will be 12,000 deaths. 
“The situation of the health crisis is bleak and has become worse with the spread of the coronavirus”, Hussein says. “Most of the hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients and many more lining up for their turns to be treated. There are reports talking about people who died in their houses just because they were not able to make it to hospital or did not have enough money to visit private clinics. And the private hospitals themselves are full of patients.”
US rhetoric about medical supplies and food items being exempt from sanctions is a twisted lie. There are many ways in which vital medicines, supplies and equipment cannot be purchased, including that state and private medical entities cannot secure credit to do so. In January, the US announced additional measures against Iran after president Trump issued an executive order authorising action against “any individual owning, operating, trading with or assisting sectors of the Iranian economy, including construction, manufacturing, textiles and mining”. 
The sanctions reimposed by Trump in 2018 – after they were lifted three years earlier by the Obama administration (the so-called Iran nuclear deal) – were part of a US attempt to maintain imperial dominance in the face of a rising China and the growing regional power of Iran in the Middle East. They have taken large quantities of Iranian oil off world markets and inflicted great suffering on Iranian workers, who well understand the threat of US imperialism. The sanctions have not, however, diverted rage and anger away from their own ruling elite.
“The government always uses the excuse of sanctions to justify its incompetence”, Reza Akbari says. “The main problem is distribution of wealth in the community, not lack of wealth. In the current situation, a vast majority are unable to have three meals per day. While the government attributes it to the sanctions, a minority, mainly related to the government and ruling class, are living in palaces.”
The regime’s expansionist project in the Middle East has also funnelled the country’s resources into military campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It has also financed Hezbollah, its regional ally and proxy military in Lebanon. “The sanctions imposed by the US are so bad and detrimental”, says Hussein. “But there is one side that should be blamed for the current miserable life of the Iranians and this side is the Iranian regime ... Instead of spending on the health system, the regime squandered billions on its regional proxy wars and its militias in the neighbouring countries.”
There is an unfinished fight between a regime committed to waging a nationalist war for regional expansion and the people at whose expense this project is pursued – the working class and oppressed of Iran. Protesters have burned down banks and police stations and held running battles with police and security forces. Students have shut down universities, women have protested against sexist laws, posters of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been burned in the street, and there have been an increasing number of workers’ strikes. 
The regime murdered hundreds and imprisoned thousands in the November uprising. When it released 85,000 prisoners as the pandemic spread in March, it excluded political prisoners. That provoked riots and breakouts. “There have been uprisings in 10 prisons. They attempted to escape. In some they successfully ran away but in some, police intervened and killed the prisoners”, Reza Akbari says. While the pandemic crisis has stalled a growing and radicalising social movement, not unlike the stalled revolutionary processes in countries across the Middle East including Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan, the fight is nowhere near ended. As Hussein says: 
“While there are no signs to indicate that the movement will soon resume its activities against the regime, the past protests have proved that Iranians have been against the regime for political, economic, environmental and cultural reasons. As long as these issues have not been resolved, Iranians will continue to protest against the regime.”
As the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic worsens, inter-imperialist tensions between the US, China and regional powers in the Middle East will intensify. In January, the US assassinated Iran’s most powerful military commander, Qasem Soleimani, in a drone strike in Iraq. Tensions will continue to flare over who controls key global shipping channels such as the Strait of Hormuz – the only sea passage to the Persian Gulf, through which 25 percent of global oil passes – or who controls the government of Iraq. Indeed, they may intensify if there is a deep and protracted global economic crisis. 
With war on the list of options the US and Iran will consider as the global crisis unravels, hope lies with the revival of the unfinished movements of workers and the oppressed across the Middle East against US imperialism and all of the regional powers. While the COVID-19 crisis has interrupted the fight in Iran, the escalating death toll could add another dimension of anger to an already aggrieved population.

Iran's struggle interrupted – for now

The sun is an orange-red fireball. It hangs menacingly in a shroud of thick haze. Sometimes the dense ashen fog merges with the blazing incandescence of the sun and everything from the ground up is aglow. Intermittently, the sky rains ash over the metropolis from fires all along the NSW coast. Three immense fires north of Sydney have joined up to create what has been called a “mega-blaze”. The city feels like a giant crematorium.
Casting our eyes out over the Anzac Bridge near Sydney Harbour, a co-worker and I seal windows and doors because smoke is penetrating our office building. A friend who’s an occupational therapist working in a public hospital in western Sydney, says that the internal fire alarms were triggered. The smoke from outside was so thick it came inside the building, and the entire place shut down while the firies came. Thick smoke triggering false alarms across the city has now been widely reported in the media – and over-stretched firefighters have to attend each one.
“It’s like Armageddon”, my workmate says. If you venture outside, you chew on the air, now like a paste of grit that sticks in your throat. So you stay inside, but the smoke gets trapped there, creeping in under doors and around window frames. We stock the first aid kit with paracetamol because people are getting headaches. We’re talking about clothes reeking of smoke, fatigue, itches, coughs and nausea. Everyone is talking about all of it.
Someone mentions face masks. Should we wear them? Which ones are best? This is what workers all around Sydney are mulling. The EPA says being exposed to the toxic haze is equivalent to smoking 30 cigarettes a day and that there are dangerous levels of PM2.5 particles in the air. Last week we knew nothing about PM2.5 particles; now we’re talking about how they can trigger asthma attacks or even heart attacks for people with respiratory and heart problems, and how inhaling them could cause cancer. 
Parents at work are agonising about their children and what exposure to the toxic atmosphere means for little bodies. There was a spike in emergency department presentations and ambulance call-outs in the first week of December. New South Wales Ambulance fielded 2,330 calls for help with asthma or breathing difficulties, which is 30 percent more than in an average week. Over the same period, there was a 25 percent increase in presentations for respiratory issues at hospital emergency departments, with the biggest spike in the areas worst affected by smoke.
What sorts of air filters could we use inside at work to mitigate against the dangers of toxic smoke and its particles entering our bodies, and how on earth are outdoor workers coping with all of this? The EPA keeps advising people to stay indoors, so our conversations turn to the blatant contradictions involved in workers being able to follow these instructions. How do you do that when you are forced to turn up to work each day? 
What do the state and federal governments think millions of workers should do in view of the mass poisoning of people taking place in Sydney and NSW right now? What plans do they have to accommodate and care for thousands of people evacuated from fire areas, or people who lose their homes? What about the dead? How will the state government explain to the families of the dead that, according to the Fire Brigade Employees’ Union, $12.9 million was cut from Fire and Rescue NSW in the last state budget and $26.7 million from the Office of NSW Rural Fire Services?
It’s not as if they hadn’t been warned – and by the most knowledgeable sources. Twenty-three former fire and emergency leaders tried for months to warn Scott Morrison that Australia needed more water-bombers to tackle bigger, faster moving and hotter bushfires. He couldn’t find time for them.
The New South Wales Fire and Rescue former chief, Greg Mullins, made clear the unmet need. A giant water-bomber is on its way to Australia from the USA. “We’re only going to have seven of those [aircraft] this year. I’ve just come back from California and they had about 30 on one fire.” He also fears that it will become increasingly difficult for Australia to get firefighting help from the US, as climate change means the bushfire seasons in the two countries begin to extend and therefore to overlap.
While governments refuse to acknowledge that this crisis has anything to do with climate change, United Firefighters Union vice-president Mick Tisbury says there are “no climate sceptics on the end of a fire hose”. Scott Morrison, he said, “likes to make out that he supports firefighters. Supporting firefighters is not bringing lumps of coal into parliament and denying climate change. Let us get on with the job, give us the help we need”.
This was far from Morrison’s mind. As fires raged around us, the prime minister attended the lavish annual Christmas party of Australia’s richest and most powerful people at the harbourside mansion of Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch. “Le Manoir” – the Murdoch’s $23 million Bellevue Hill mansion – hosted a who’s who of the Australian ruling elite, including Gerry Harvey of Harvey Norman, Crown Casino boss John Alexander, Sky News chief executive Paul Whittaker and NSW former premier and now banking charlatan Mike Baird. 
No doubt there was plenty of chatter as the Moet flowed; but when it comes to a real response to the human and environmental crisis of the fire tempest engulfing the state, there has been deathly silence from the federal and state governments (and very little from the Labor opposition as well). Nonetheless, during the crisis of fire and smoke, the minister for coal, Matt Canavan, and his Labor shadow Joel Fitzgibbon, found time for a photo with World Coal Association CEO Michelle Manook.
Year after year, governments have denied the approaching climate emergency and expanded the fossil fuel industry while cutting funding to fire and other essential services and mismanaging vital river and water systems. Now the result is here: unprecedented drought and bushfires, and now a massive health crisis – millions choking, with no escape, and severe consequences for people’s immediate and long term health. 
While the state and federal governments can do nothing but double down on their climate change denialism, people are rallying in Sydney on 11 December. The rally, initiated by Uni Students for Climate Justice and Greens MLC David Shoebridge, demands immediate action on the climate emergency, starting with no new coal, oil or gas projects, and a transition to renewable energy and job creation for all fossil fuel workers and communities. 
Because the governments are going in the opposite direction, the rally demands increased funding for the RFS and NSW Fire and Rescue. There are obvious and immediate demands for action to address toxic smoke and protect workers. Bosses must cease operations immediately in areas where air pollution reaches dangerous levels. Extra sick leave must be made available for those affected by the toxic smoke. All hospitals, aged care facilities, schools and childcare centres must be fitted with proper air filters or air conditioning. There must be publicly funded, free P2 masks, and those particularly vulnerable to respiratory conditions need to be offered government-supplied HEPA air purifiers, or fully funded evacuation to clean areas for the duration of the crisis.
That’s a short list of the many things that could and should be done. But we know from their past behaviour – and their appalling responses to the current crisis – that the governments’ ears will be deaf to these demands unless we protest and build a radical movement able to respond to every manifestation of the climate emergency. We can’t rely on them, or our employers, to do even the basics to keep people safe right now. For that we need to rely on ourselves, not as individuals, but collectively. Environmental disaster is increasingly going to be part of the industrial landscape. To combat it, our unions are going to have to get into shape for a fight. 
The Maritime Union of Australia recently provided an example of how it’s done. On 5 December, roughly 100 union members stopped work at Port Botany due to the thick smoke. Dan, an MUA member who works at DP World, was on the first shift to walk off in response to the dangerous air quality, right at the end of their shift, after the safety committee decided to act to protect workers’ health. He told Red Flag: 
“We stopped 10 minutes before the end of day shift. Once the call over the radio says to go home it was pretty unceremonious ... [I’m] proud of my safety committee and the MUA today for shutting down the waterside terminal where I work due to the extreme hazardous smoke conditions. We do not have an inclement weather clause for smoke levels, but we stopped anyway. Good on the MUA for taking the lead; hopefully other unions follow suit.”
It was only the day before that the MUA Sydney branch convened the inaugural Port Botany safety committee of health and safety representatives elected from each of the three terminals. The committee opened by dealing directly with the hazardous air quality. The committee took the decision to stop work to MUA members, who walked off the job, saying that they “would simply not perform unacceptably hazardous work in unacceptably hazardous conditions”. 
The MUA’s statement went on to say: “As has been the case for generations – management is pushing back, trying to force workers to perform dangerous work. Well the MUA port safety committee will not cop it. Catastrophic climate change is real, and is right now having an effect on workers on the job”.
Red Flag also spoke to Justin Timmins, who is part of the DP World safety committee and secretary of the Sydney-wide port safety committee, about what happened next. He argued that the decision to stop work was a necessity if the union were to stand up for members. “The management, some of them at least, are too concerned about productivity to see the health and safety issues”, he said. “So we have to act ... Some of them have accepted what we have done, but there’s been an attempt to push back against the union as well, threatening to take us to the Fair Work Commission, what we sometimes call the Unfair Work Commission, for illegal industrial action. We don’t accept that.”
DP World MUA members on night and evening shifts followed with a resolution stating not only that they “detest the management’s decision to order personnel out in unsafe conditions” but also that they reject the shift manager’s attempt to “stand down, off pay, any personnel not reporting to their point of work”. Instead, their resolution concluded with the demand that DP World provide a safe work environment.
The action of the MUA in taking industrial action needs to be replicated. The response from other union leaders, such as Unions NSW urging employers to give non-essential workers the option of staying home, is laughably weak. Relying on the good will of employers has never got us anywhere. Nor is it much better when all union leaders have done is make statements alerting their members that they have the right not to work in dangerous conditions. Without organisation being rebuilt on the job, who will individually stick their neck out?
From postal workers to public transport, construction, maritime, parks, health and all manner of others, we need to be calling union meetings in our workplaces, discussing the issues, proposing strategies and raising demands on employers and taking stop-work action wherever we can. This includes indoor workers whose offices and buildings are trapping toxic smoke inside. Workers using their own sick leave and annual leave because of health problems caused by exposure to fire-related hazards at work is an outrageous injustice. 
We cannot be asked to pay for the bosses’ climate crisis. They’re not paying for it. Ambulance, hospital and other health services have been chronically under-funded for years. Public housing, homelessness, Centrelink and myriad other social services are already at breaking point when there isn’t a giant social, economic or environmental crisis taking place. It’s time to stop begging and hoping for the best. It’s time to start fighting back to demand real action.

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Iran's new wave of strikes and protests

Detainees have set fire to the Christmas Island Detention Centre. They deserve our full support.

The liberal media is normalising war crimes

The Iranian state kills workers to save itself

Iran's struggle interrupted – for now

Morrison parties while Sydney chokes

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