It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, October 02, 2022
British defender of Assad regime backs Russian referendums in Ukraine
"International observer" Beeley (right) at the news conference
A British woman who became a prominent defender of Syria’s Assad regime resurfaced this week as an “international observer” for Russia’s sham referendums in Ukraine.
“I have seen absolutely no violations,” she said. “I have seen complete professionalism among the electoral committees. I have seen a high level of security, a huge amount of solidarity, compassion for people who may be struggling to get to the polling stations, and for me – what is very important – there has been complete respect for people’s privacy.”
Beeley was among a group of “observers” from various countries apparently selected by Russia to give the referendums an air of legitimacy. The polls took place in four Ukrainian regions which are currently occupied by Russian forces. Voters were asked if they wanted the territories to become part of Russia and more than 97% allegedly said yes.
At the news conference Beeley hailed this result as a sign that the people were liberating themselves from “an imposed Nazi regime”.
Meeting with Assad
Beeley first visited Syria in July 2016 when she joined a delegation from the US Peace Council. During their trip the group had a two-hour meeting with President Assad and posed for a photograph with him. Beeley, who was seen standing next to the president, later described it as her proudest moment.
She had clearly made a favourable impression in Damascus because a month later she was granted a visa for a second visit, this time lasting three weeks. Its main purpose, she wrote, was for research “into the multi million Nato and Gulf State funded, terrorist-linked White Helmets”.
Vanessa Beeley (fourth from right) with President Assad in 2016. She described it as her proudest moment.
The following November Beeley was invited to visit Russia in order to “report on the illegal Nato state intervention and dirty war on Syria”. While in Moscow she was treated to meetings with Mikhail Bogdanov, the deputy foreign minister and Maria Zakharova, head of the ministry’s press department.
Beeley wrote numerous misleading reports from Syria which were posted on conspiracy-theory websites and turned her into an internet celebrity. She denied the regime was using chemical weapons, claiming the attacks were faked by rebels to make the regime look bad. She also waged a campaign against the White Helmets, a civil defence organisation which carried out search-and-rescue operations in rebel-held areas of Syria.
Beeley’s output meshed neatly with the propaganda lines spun by Russia, Syria’s chief ally in the conflict, and to some extent her articles helped to shape it. Meanwhile on Twitter, supporters hailed her as a brilliant reporter who was “putting the truth out there”.
Russia’s annexation puts world ‘two or three steps away’ from nuclear war
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony in Moscow on Sept. 30, 2022, to declare the annexation of four regions of Ukraine. (Grigory Sysoyev/Sputnik/pool via Reuters.)
LONDON — President Vladimir Putin’s declaration of the annexation of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine signals the onset of a new and highly dangerous phase in the seven-month old war, one that Western officials and analysts fear could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in 77 years.
Putin has previously threatened to resort to nuclear weapons if Russia’s goals in Ukraine continue to be thwarted. The annexation brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that “the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” as he put it in his speech last week.
He renewed the threat on Friday with an ominous comment that the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a “precedent” for the use of nuclear weapons, echoing references he has made in the past to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as setting a precedent for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. and Western officials say they still think it unlikely that Putin will carry out his threats. Most probably, they say, he is hoping to deter the West from providing ever more sophisticated military assistance to Ukraine while the mobilization of an additional 300,000 troops allows Russia to reverse or at least halt its military setbacks on the battlefield.
But the threats appear only to have strengthened Western resolve to continue sending weapons to Ukraine and the Ukrainian military is continuing to advance into Russian-occupied territory. Even as Putin was announcing the annexation in Moscow on Friday and newly conscripted Russian troops were arriving in Ukraine, Ukrainian troops were in the process of encircling Russian soldiers in the eastern city of Lyman, extending their reach from their recent advances in Kharkiv into the newly annexed region of Donetsk.
In all four regions that Putin said he was annexing — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Russia only controls part of the territory.
Now that the areas being fought over are regarded by Moscow as Russian, it is possible to chart a course of events toward the first use of a nuclear weapon since the 1945 atomic bombing of Japan.
“It’s a low probability event, but it is the most serious case of nuclear brinkmanship since the 1980s” when the Cold War ended, said Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It is a very dangerous situation and it needs to be taken seriously by Western policymakers.”
U.S. and European officials say they are taking the threats seriously. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that there would be “catastrophic consequences” if Russia resorts to the use of nuclear weapons. He refused to specify what those would be but said the precise consequences had been spelled out privately to Russian officials “at very high levels.”
“They well understand what they would face if they went down that dark road,” he said.
European officials say the threats have only strengthened their resolve to support Ukraine.
“No one knows what Putin will decide to do, no one,” said a European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. “But he’s totally in a corner, he’s crazy … and for him there is no way out. The only way out for him is total victory or total defeat and we are working on the latter one. We need Ukraine to win and so we are working to prevent worst case scenarios by helping Ukraine win.”
The goal, the official said, is to give Ukraine the military support it needs to continue to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory, while pressuring Russia politically to agree to a cease-fire and withdrawal, the official said.
And the pressure is working, “slowly,” the official said, to spread awareness in Russia and internationally that the invasion was a mistake. India, which had seemed to side with Russia in the earliest days of the war, has expressed alarm at Putin’s talk of nuclear war and China, ostensibly Russia’s most important ally, has signaled that it is growing uneasy with Putin’s continuing escalations.
But the annexation and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of extra troops have also served as a reminder that the Western strategy hasn’t yet worked enough to convince Putin that he can’t win, said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was based in Moscow until earlier this year.
The West had been hoping that Ukrainian successes would force Putin to back down, but instead he is doubling down. “Time and again we are seeing that Vladimir Putin sees this as a big existential war and he’s ready to up the stakes if he is losing on the battlefield,” Gabuev said.
“At the same time I don’t think the West will back down, so it’s a very hard challenge now. We are two or three steps away” from Russia failing to achieve its goals and resorting to what was once unthinkable.
Those steps to secure its positions include Russia pushing hundreds of thousands more men onto the battlefield; escalating attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure in Ukraine; and perhaps also embarking on covert attacks on Western infrastructure.
Although the United States and its European allies have refrained from making direct accusations, few doubt that Russia was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, said the E.U. official.
“I don’t think anyone has doubts. It’s the handwriting of the Kremlin,” he said. “It’s an indication of, ‘look what is coming, look what we are able to do.’ ”
Nuclear weapons would only likely be used after mobilization, sabotage and other measures have failed to turn the tide, and it’s unclear what Putin would achieve by using them, Gady said.
Despite some wild predictions on Russian news shows that the Kremlin would lash out at a Western capital, with London appearing to be a favored target, it is more likely that Moscow would seek to use one of its smaller, tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield to try to gain advantage over Ukrainian forces, said Gady.
The smallest nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal delivers an explosion of around 1 kiloton, one fifteenth of the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which would inflict massive destruction but on a more limited area.
Because the war is being fought along a vast, 1,500-mile front line, troops are too thinly spread out for there to be an obvious target whose obliteration would change the course of the war. To make a difference, Russia would have to use several nuclear weapons or alternatively strike a major population center such as Kyiv, either of which would represent a massive escalation, trigger almost certain Western retaliation and turn Russia into a pariah state even with its allies, Gady said.
“From a purely military perspective, nuclear weapons would not solve any of Vladimir Putin’s military problems,” he said. “To change the operational picture one single attack would not be enough and it would also not intimidate Ukraine into surrendering territory. It would cause the opposite, it would double down Western support and I do think there would be a U.S. response.”
That’s why many believe Putin won’t carry out his threats. “Even though Putin is dangerous, he is not suicidal, and those around him aren’t suicidal,” said Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe.
Pentagon officials have said they have seen no actions by Russia that would lead the United States to adjust its nuclear posture. War in Ukraine: What you need to know
The response: The Biden administration on Friday announced a new round of sanctions on Russia, in response to the annexations, targeting government officials and family members, Russian and Belarusian military officials and defense procurement networks. President Volodymyr Zelensky also said Friday that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO, in an apparent answer to the annexations.
By Liz Sly is a correspondent-at-large covering global affairs. She has spent more than 17 years covering the Middle East, including the first and second Iraq wars. Other postings include Washington, Africa, China, Afghanistan and Italy. Twitter
How Does Putin Stay So Popular While Losing the War in Ukraine?
Analysis by Tobin Harshaw | Bloomberg
October 1, 2022
Seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we’re faced with a serious paradox: As things go from bad to worse for President Vladimir Putin’s troops on the ground, he remains overwhelmingly popular at home. But what does overwhelming popularity actually mean in a nation with virtually no political opposition, little free press and a siege mentality?
For an answer, I turned to the people behind some of those polls: Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center in Moscow — which has been surveying Russian public opinion monthly since before Putin assumed the presidency — and his frequent collaborator Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center. And their answer was ... well, it’s complicated. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:Tobin Harshaw: Putin gave a speech this week proclaiming that Russia was annexing four territories in Ukraine . How is this being received by the Russian people?
Andrei Kolesnikov : There was a double motivation: Electoral, which is designed to provoke joy over the fact that Russia is regaining its ancestral lands, and military, which should support the electoral. But there is no joy. It is a bloodbath.
Putin is forcing Russian men to share responsibility for the war with him [with] the announced mobilization of 300,000 new troops. That is why even if formally the numbers of support for Putin and the war decrease only slightly, the distrust of the regime will increase.
TH: Do you feel you are able to get an accurate picture of public sentiment, or are people who may be displeased by Putin’s actions too intimidated to say so?
Denis Volkov: The social climate has become more tense. But up until now the response rates, which we calculate for each poll according to the recommendations of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, haven’t changed much since February. Also, our additional research does not back up assertions that people who do not approve of the country’s leadership are more likely to refuse to take part in a poll, or that polls only represent people who are prepared to engage and answer questions. So, I believe that polling in Russia is still informative.
We try to supplement polling with qualitative data from focus groups. This helps us to listen to the language people use, explanations they make. Also, we regularly use open-ended questions in our surveys to get people’s reactions, not just making them choose from the predetermined options. This helps to make our research more nuanced and adaptable to the changing situation.
TH: The data in the new September poll on Russian attitudes toward the war show some change since the invasion : Those who “definitely” or “mostly” support has dropped from 81% to 75%, and those who mostly or definitely do not support has risen from 14% to 20%. Still, that’s an overwhelming majority that favors the invasion, so is the change significant?
AK: When analyzing big polls, it’s a good idea to look at the details. Less than half of Russians definitely support the special operation. An average of 30% are wavering, hesitant, passive conformists who have no opinion of their own and are often afraid to have one in the face of very strict authoritarianism. But they are the reservoir of discontent.
About 20% of respondents do not support the special operation, and they openly say so. And in September, there were slightly more of them. Within each of these groups there are a lot of subgroups and a variety of motivations. So the situation is more complicated than it seems.
TH: Have opinions changed because of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and Putin’s order for mobilizing more forces?
DV: The Ukrainian counteroffensive was noticeable, but the partial mobilization announced on Sept. 21 had a much more significant effect on public opinion. The mobilization brought Russian society out of a coma. Over six months, Russians more or less got used to the war, as it became a distant war, waged by the government with the help of professional soldiers. Many convinced themselves that it would not affect them directly.
The news of mobilization came as a shock, and we see a significant rise of pessimism and uncertainty about the future, as people realize that the war is much closer that they used to think. Yet, this has only limited effect on the ratings of the authorities. Putin’s approval rating went down from 83% to 77%, approval of the government from 68% to 63%, and so on.
The support for the military operation didn’t change much, but the number of people supporting peace negotiations rose from 44% to 48%, shifting the balance of opinion slightly in favor of the talks. The limited scale of these changes can be explained by the rally-behind-the-flag effect that happened in spring and is still in place.
TH: As you note in an article you co-authored, hopes that Russians would oppose the war have been dashed. Why?
AK: First of all, passivity and indifference: “The boss knows best, his opinion is my opinion; I do not want war, but Putin had nowhere else to go — NATO was at the gate.”
For many respondents, of course, both fear and unwillingness to reveal their opinions are at work, but one should not exaggerate the proportion of such people among those who support Putin.
There is also a considerable group of ideologized supporters; nationalists and imperialists who possess — sometimes consciously, sometimes intuitively — ultra-conservative thinking.
There are also those who are simply accustomed to Putin and have no idea who else could be the leader of Russia. Putin has been in power de facto for 23 years — an entire generation has been born and raised.
TH: You note that only 9%–10% of respondents say they are “prepared to attend a protest.” Can you explain why?
DV: The price of open protest is very high. The nationwide ban on holding mass events introduced during the coronavirus pandemic has not yet been lifted; on this ground, officials refuse to grant permission for any antiwar rallies. Taking part in unsanctioned protests is punishable by hefty fines and prison sentences for repeat offenses. Incitement of others to take part in unsanctioned protests and “the discrediting of the Russian Armed Forces” have also been criminalized.
At the same time, people see the protest activity as futile and pointless. The dominant feeling is that the authorities will have their way anyway. And still, some people are going out to protest — youngsters out of bravery and recklessness; mothers and wives out of despair and fear for their loved ones.
TH: Do you see any scenario in which Putin is toppled from power?
AK: For the moment, there are no scenarios for Putin’s departure. He has, of course, gone too far with the militarist craze, and replaced public mobilization with military mobilization, which causes frustration and dissatisfaction among the population. But now all the power is concentrated in his hands. The elites are disunited, do not trust each other, are under sanctions — and all they can do is to be near Putin.
Russia is unlikely to go the way of the Arab Spring in 2011. Putin’s power will degenerate, mobilization will undermine confidence to a certain extent; if he can end the war by fixing the losses and calling it a victory, public opinion will accept this with relief and mechanically continue to support him. Putin needs to offer something for the elections of 2024, and it seems that it should be something peaceful and material, given the clearly impending problems with the economy, rather than purely military.
TH: Putin announced the troop mobilization and made an overt nuclear threat in a televised speech. It looked to me like the actions of a man finally admitting he is losing badly. How far will the Russian people support him toward nuclear Armageddon?
AK: In recent years, fear of a world war has come second on the list of fears of Russians (second only to “illness of loved ones”). In January 2022, 65% said they feared a world war. By comparison, even in post-Crimea 2015, 32% of respondents said they were afraid of a world war. Putin’s nuclear blackmail should inspire the masses, making them proud of how strong we are. But here, as with military mobilization, he may overstep the mark, and nuclear war will be feared more than he will be feared himself. And this, too, would to some extent undermine the foundations of his overly bellicose regime.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and writer on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was an editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.
Australia: Knauf locks out plasterboard workers in Melbourne
The global building products company Knauf has indefinitely locked out around 70 workers at its Port Melbourne plant in Victoria as part of a dispute over a new enterprise agreement.
Locked-out workers at Knauf in Port Melbourne [Photo by CFMEU Vic-Tas]
The lockout began on September 16, in response to a series of one- and two-hour stoppages and overtime bans by workers. One worker told World Socialist Web Site reporters that management had called him at home and threatened legal action if he continued to refuse overtime.
Workers voted unanimously on August 24 for protected industrial action, after rejecting a proposed agreement containing a 5 percent pay increase in 2022, followed by 4 percent increases in each of the next three years, far short of the rapidly rising cost of living.
The proposed agreement would also have allowed the company more discretion to use labour-hire casuals instead of permanent staff. Currently, Knauf uses a pool of five labour-hire workers to replace permanent workers when they are on leave, but the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) claims the company is seeking to increase this to 50 percent of the Port Melbourne workforce.
The CFMMEU is asking for annual pay “rises” of just 6 percent, less than the official June quarter inflation rate of 6.1 percent and well below the expected rise to at least 7.75 percent by the end of the year. Significantly, these “official” inflation figures do not include the impact of increased mortgage payments, which have skyrocketed after successive interest rate rises by the Reserve Bank.
One of the locked-out workers told the WSWS he had been working up to 60 hours per week in order to earn enough to support his family. The rise in interest rates had hit particularly hard, with his mortgage payments increasing by almost 50 percent from $2,100 to $3,100 per month. Another worker said the increases in the cost of petrol and food were crippling.
A third worker said he was going to have to get another job if the dispute continued. This is because of a conscious decision by the CFMMEU bureaucracy to starve these workers out.
Workers have not been given any strike pay, despite the immense resources of the CFMMEU, one of the largest unions in Australia. The Victoria-Tasmania branch’s Construction and General subdivision alone holds some $80 million in net assets.
Rather than tap into its vast wealth, the union and the Victorian Trade Hall Council have started a crowd-funding page with a goal of raising $30,000. To date it has raised less than $15,000 as the unions have done little to promote it. Even if the target is met, with the lockout now entering its third week, the total would amount to less than $30 per day, per worker.
Under already difficult economic conditions, the CFMMEU is ensuring that the lockout will financially cripple the workers, leaving them with no choice but to accept whatever rotten deal the company puts before them.
The same strategy was used by the United Workers’ Union at Coles’ Smeaton Grange distribution centre, where around 350 workers were locked out in November 2020. On more than ten occasions, the workers rejected essentially unchanged union-management offers until, after more than three months with no financial support from the union beyond a couple of supermarket vouchers, the proposed agreement was accepted by a narrow margin.
The unions are also doing everything possible to isolate the Port Melbourne workers. The CFMMEU has said nothing about the dispute on its national Facebook page, and most of the unions which cover workers at Knauf facilities in other states have been similarly silent. The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union made its first post yesterday.
This has allowed the company to mitigate any financial impact of the lockout, with production elsewhere in the country unaffected. A worker told the WSWS the company was bringing stock in from other states in order to fulfil contracts.
Knauf is headquartered in Germany with global revenues estimated at $24 billion and operations in every region of the globe. In Australia, Knauf has revenues of over $1 billion and operates three very large plants including the one at Port Melbourne in Victoria, Camellia in New South Wales and Pinkenba in Queensland.
Workers at the Port Melbourne site also expressed concerns over safety. One told the WSWS production had recently been halted for three weeks in order to install a safety guard on a machine, following the death of a worker using similar equipment at a Knauf factory in Russia. He also reported a recent gas leak, in which the plant was only partially evacuated and said the site did not have adequate first-aid facilities.
Workers are also concerned about the presence of cancer-causing silica dust in the factory. They have been provided with face masks but want laundry facilities so they do not have to take contaminated clothing off the premises to wash.
While the CFMMEU has recently made a show of opposition to these conditions, the reality is the union is responsible, having allowed these safety issues to exist without challenge over many years.
The Knauf dispute once again shows that the role of the union bureaucracy is as an industrial police force of management. The CFMMEU is consciously seeking to wear down the locked-out workers and keep them isolated from their counterparts at other Knauf facilities around the country and the world, in order to prevent any opposition to the company’s attack.
In order to fight for decent wages and conditions, and a safe working workplace, Port Melbourne Knauf workers must break with the union and take matters into their own hands.
Workers must take up a fight to build a rank-and-file committee to democratically determine a set of demands based on the needs of workers, and prepare a plan of action to fight for them.
In direct opposition to the isolation tactics of the unions, the locked-out workers must reach out to other workers at Knauf, throughout the manufacturing and construction industries and more broadly across the working class.
Australia is in the early stages of a surge in industrial action, with working days lost to strikes rising to levels not seen for a decade. The new federal Labor Government came to power in May this year and immediately replaced its campaign promise of a “better future” with an insistence that workers had to make “sacrifices.”
As is taking place around the world, the rapidly rising cost of living has pushed workers to the limit, as the ruling class seeks to pass the cost of massive handouts to big business during the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating military expenditure on to the backs of workers.
It is to this developing movement that Port Melbourne Knauf workers must turn, in order to take up a fight, not just against their employer, but against the unions, Labor and all other representatives of big business and the capitalist profit system.
Norway sent KV Sortland vessel to guard a North Sea gas platform
OSLO ($1=10.89 Norwegian Krones) — Norway takes security action on the Troll A platform in the North Sea. The Ministry of Defense of the Scandinavian country announced this action through its Twitter account. The patrol vessel dispatched is the KV Sortland.
Troll A is a gravity platform for natural gas extraction located off the west coast of Norway. It is considered one of the most complex engineering structures in the history of mankind. It is currently managed by the Equinor company. Troll A is part of the Troll site. In addition to Troll A, Norway has the Troll B and Troll C platforms. The three together serve the gas field on the Norwegian continental shelf and extract 40% of the total gas reserves on the shelf.
Norway took protective measures against Troll A because of exploded gas pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. These are pipes that are part of the gas delivery structure along the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines. In reality, these are the main gas pipelines for the delivery of Russian gas to Europe.
“Following what happened in the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian Armed Forces are now present and more visible in the areas around our oil and gas installations. The picture shows the coast guard vessel KV Sortand patrolling in front of Troll A,” said the Norwegian Ministry of Defense [Forsvarsdepartement].
Screenshot
Nord Stream sabotage
As expected, Europe and the US accuse Russia of sabotaging the gas pipelines. Russia denies and blames the other side. Different opinions appeared, even from Western countries, which “thank you US” for stopping the supply of Russian gas to Europe
The most popular version of how exactly the sabotage took place is by placing charges on the seabed, weeks before they were detonated. Russian research vessels are said to have transported a military group of submariners that placed the charges on the pipes. There is no information from the Norwegian Ministry of Defense whether Norwegian submariners are checking the condition of the underwater part of the “four legs” of the Troll A platform, as well as whether they are checking the gas supply pipes.
About KV Sortland
KV Sortland is a Norwegian patrol vessel built in 2010. It is a Barentshav-class offshore patrol vessel. Norway has a total of three patrol vessels of this class. The other two are W340 Barentshav and W341 Bergen.
KV Sortland is powered by a combined gas and diesel engines. The maximum cruising speed when both types of engines are used is 20 knots [37 km/h]. The main armament of the Norwegian patrol ship is the Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun.
Photo credit: Twitter
F-35s involved too
Shortly after the patrol ship mision was announced, Norway’s defense minister confirmed that F-35s were patrolling Swedish and Danish waters to monitor the gas leak. “We take the gas leaks in Swedish and Danish waters very seriously and have strengthened our preparedness. The Danish Armed Forces has a good overview of the activity in our immediate areas”, says Bjørn Arild Gram
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A Railroad Megamerger Could Be A Boon To Canada’s Dirty Oil Industry
Alexander C. Kaufman Sat, October 1, 2022 A railroad megamerger could create a new route for shipping crude oil from Canada into the U.S. (Photo: Illustration: Kyle Ellingson For HuffPost)
It was hardly the first accident of its kind. In 1996, a train carrying propane and natural gas flew off the tracks and exploded in an inferno that burned for weeks in a rural Wisconsin town, forcing 3,000 people to evacuate for nearly a month. Miraculously, no one was injured.
Deregulation on both sides of the border has allowed railroads to rake in cash by cutting costs and consolidating the continent’s railways from 40 major rail companies in 1980 to just seven today.
Now Canadian Pacific is eying an even bigger prize — with a potential payoff from connecting Canada’s uniquelydirtyoil fields to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico and creating what analysts say could be an attractive new backup route for crude producers if pipelines shut down. If successful, it could increase how much oil is passing by rail through certain parts of the United States, despite a long line of catastrophes. Since 2013, at least 20 more oil-freighting locomotives — dubbed “bomb trains” by environmentalists — went off the rails across North America.
The Calgary-based giant is seeking approval from U.S. regulators to buy rail giant Kansas City Southern in a $27 billion deal that would fuse the two smallest of the remaining so-called Class 1 railways into the first system with connections to the U.S., Canada and Mexico — but leave the continent with just six separate operators. The so-called “NAFTA super railway” could increase rail traffic of fast-moving, miles-long trains by over 300% in some regions.
At a regulatory hearing on the deal Wednesday, Daniel Gluba, the former mayor of Davenport, Iowa, gave a grave assessment of what that could mean for a stretch of his Mississippi River city that hosts baseball games and festivals.
“When one of those trains derails while passing through one of these events,” Gluba said, “it won’t be 47 people killed like tragically happened in Canada, it will be hundreds of people.”
“This is a disaster of monumental proportions just waiting to happen.”
A Canadian Pacific Railway freight train follows the Bow River at Morant's Curve in Banff National Park, Canada. (Photo: Arterra via Getty Images)
Currently, crude mostly makes its way from the tar sands producers in Alberta down to refiners in Texas and Louisiana via pipelines, which analysts say will continue to be the case, since rail shipments are always more expensive. The fraction of U.S. imports that do travel by train come by way of Canadian National Railway, which boasts North America’s longest rail network.
But Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern have long sought a piece of that market. Last year, Canadian Pacific started running specialized new oil trains carrying Canadian imports through Minnesota. The company declined to tell the Minneapolis Star Tribune how many of the new trains it was running. But the railroad’s chief marketing officer told Wall Street analysts in a July 2021 earnings call that he expects “the business to ramp up to 15 or 20 trains per month” as they travel down to Port Arthur, Texas.
In 2019, the two firms inked an unprecedented 10-year deal to haul oil bitumen — a thicker, more viscous type of crude that operators say is less prone to accidents because the flammable diluting substances are removed — from Canada down to the U.S. Gulf, using a new technology Canadian Pacific said is much safer and less likely to explode.
Railway officials say the flow of oil won’t be impacted by any merger.“The volume of crude oil shipments from source to refinery is determined by macroeconomic forces that will not be affected by the transaction, so the [Canada Pacific-Kansas City Southern] combination will not cause more crude oil to be shipped by rail,” Patrick Waldron, a Canadian Pacific spokesperson, wrote in an email.
But if the U.S. Surface Transportation Board gives the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger the green light, the new route could make it cheaper and easier to ship crude that may have otherwise flowed through the now-defunct Keystone XL pipeline.
“It is a deliberate, intentional workaround for the loss of Keystone; at least, the fossil fuel industry is viewing it that way,” said Conan Smith, president of the Michigan Environmental Council, which opposes a merger that would likely increase shipments of oil through an area of Detroit known as the Great Lake State’s most polluted ZIP code.
“The oil industry has been looking to increase transport to those southern states by any means necessary,” he added. “The introduction of a secondary route is going to make that more viable.”
The federal regulator earlier this month extended the deadline for environmental comments on the proposed merger to Oct. 14.
Firefighters spray wagons at the site of the train wreck in Lac-Megantic July 14, 2013. (Photo: Mathieu Belanger via Reuters)
Canadian Pacific said it’s hoping to see the biggest bump in profits after the merger from hauling cargo shipments. Known as “intermodal” shipments, the category has been one of the few sectors where railroads have seen significant growth in recent years as trucking gobbled up the freight market.
As a result, the railroad giant said its deal would help take long-haul trucks off the road. Railroads have often complained that trucking companies are unfairly subsidized in that they don’t pay to maintain federal highways, despite the damage increased tractor-trailer traffic causes, while rail operators are solely responsible for maintaining rail lines.
Intermodal shipping, Waldron said, would be the “primary driver” of new traffic, and could actually be a climate benefit, since the company projects it could reduce demand for as many as 64,000 tractor-trailer trucks.
U.S. imports of Canadian oil increased by nearly 50% between 2013 and 2021, according to Energy Information Administration data. But shipments by rail peaked in 2019 and plunged in 2020, when pandemic-induced lockdowns sent oil markets into chaos. Rail shipments returned to 2018 levels again in January 2021, but have declined steadily since.
The reason: Two pipelines got up and running. Last October, the Line 3 replacement project, a hotly protested 1,031-mile pipeline carrying crude from Alberta to Wisconsin, started operation, marking the first expansion of Canadian export capacity in at least six years.
Then Marathon Petroleum reversed the flow of the Capline Pipeline, a 632-mile conduit that had carried crude drilled off the Gulf Coast northward to refiners in the Midwest. The reversal project, completed in January 2022, will at maximum capacity ship 200,000 barrels of oil per day from Illinois to Louisiana. Its initial shipments are “100% Canadian crude,” the pipeline’s operator, Plains All American Pipeline, said in a November earnings call.
“Shipping oil by rail, no matter how you slice it, is going to be more expensive than shipping oil by a pipeline,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an oil analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit research outfit. “It is unlikely that oil by rail would be the first choice for Canadian producers to try to get oil down to the Gulf, because it’s so expensive.”
What this does is make that second option more attractive and a little more beneficial to oil producers because they may be able to get it to the Gulf at a slightly lower cost.Clark Williams-Derry, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis
But part of what makes it so costly is that every time a railcar switches to another company’s tracks, it pays that railroad a fee. Since rail shipments are usually a “backup policy, almost like insurance if the pipeline system fails, or it’s overloaded, or there’s too much production,” he said the combined railroads could offer a cheaper route.
“What this does is make that second option more attractive and a little more beneficial to oil producers because they may be able to get it to the Gulf at a slightly lower cost,” Williams-Derry said.
Analysts polled by S&P Global last year said a spike in rail shipments would only come if more pipelines shut down. The Dakota Access Pipeline, which primarily conveys crude from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to U.S. refineries, will face a legally mandated environmental review that activists hope could lead to the closure of a project that has already leaked multiple times. In Canada, opposition is mountingagainst the contentious Trans Mountain Pipeline, which would funnel oil from Alberta to British Columbia.
If those projects fail, or if legal challenges or activists disrupt the flow of oil through operating pipelines, then there would likely be an uptick of shipments by rail.
The Surface Transportation Board’s approval of the Canadian Pacific-Kansas City Southern merger is not guaranteed. The Biden administration has signaled greater skepticism of industry consolidation, and appointed multiple members to the five-person board with backgrounds in passenger rail.
Indeed, President Joe Biden, known throughout his career as “Amtrak Joe” for his enthusiastic commutes on the Northeast rail corridor, has vowed to vastly expand the nation’s network of passenger trains.
“We have an opportunity to transform our train systems as essential infrastructure of this country,” environmental activist Winona LaDuke wrote in an op-ed opposing the merger. “After all, trains are the most efficient way to move freight. And those trains should be safe, full of people and not dangerous freight.”
Kansas City Southern workers repair a broken railroad signal after a massive tornado passed through the town killing at least 123 people on May 25, 2011, in Joplin, Missouri. (Photo: Mario Tama via Getty Images)
Outside the Northeastern U.S., Amtrak’s trains use freight rail lines, and federal laws require passenger locomotives to get priority access.
“There’s a lot of friction there because they don’t mix too well, operationally speaking,” said Lawrence Gross, a freight transportation analyst and founder of Gross Transportation Consulting. “Freight trains are supposed to get out of the way, but freight trains are two miles long, so they’re not agile.”
Compared to the lucrative cargo shipments, the passenger trains with only a few coaches “carrying 60, 70, 100 people” are “gumming up the works from a railroad perspective,” he said.
While unions representing rail employees nearly crippled the U.S. freight system in a fight over working conditions, others in the labor movement have opposed a merger they say could reduce jobs at West Coast ports. The deal would “greatly harm our maritime and industrial labor by diverting the cargo coming through our US ports in favor of Canadian ports,” United Steelworkers Local 592 President Jared Moe told Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) in a February 2022 letter.
“This will ultimately cost much of our community their livelihoods,” he said.
Warning that the merger would mean Canadian Pacific decamps from its Minneapolis headquarters for Kansas City, Missouri, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) urged the Surface Transportation Board Chairman Martin Oberman to “strongly consider” the “potential negative economic impacts on our community” in a letter sent earlier this month.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) said in a five-page letter to the board: “The proposed merger represents a grave threat to competition in the domestic rail industry, which is already highly consolidated. It would likely lead to job losses, harm to other industries reliant on railroads, and more fragility in American supply chain infrastructure.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, rival Class 1 railroads have raised objections to the deal. But “while there’s the feeling that if you had a combination of two of these giants, it would create a behemoth that others would have to match,” ending up “with just two or three railroads in North America,” Gross said the merger would allow two of the smallest companies to compete in a system already dominated by bigger giants.
“You could make the case that this is bringing the system more into balance than it was before,” he said.
The Surface Transportation Board held three days of hearings on the merger this week in Washington, D.C. On Friday, the regulator added another three days of hearings, set for next week.
Whether the oil shipments will weigh on the approval is difficult to tell.
“If you don’t have the pipeline and it makes economic sense, the stuff is going to move by rail, one way or the other,” Gross said. “This becomes more of a story of how it moves rather than whether it moves.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated. Related...
Montevideo, Sep 30 (EFE).- Dressed in the rainbow colors associated with the LGBTQ community, Uruguayans took Friday to the streets of the capital to demand for rights and answers from a state they feel, still marginalizes them.
The new edition of the March for Diversity, held every year at the end of September in Montevideo, had as its motto “The streets are ours, the State has to give answers” and took place in a joyous, festive and music-filled atmosphere.
The participants marched from the central Plaza Eduardo Fabini towards the Legislative Palace passing through Libertador Avenue, which was transformed into a sea of color with drag queens modeling and people dancing.
Trans activist Paula Moreno, a member of the Coordinator of the March, told EFE that the march was about “taking to the streets in a bright and festive way” while at the same time demanding that “the rights and public policies for which a lot of work was done” by the community be implemented.
“What we have been claiming and demanding is the little commitment of the State in terms of public policies that social movements have achieved, for example the Comprehensive Law for Trans People, which was approved four years ago but still does not allow us access to work, education, to have decent healthcare,” she said.
According to Moreno, the march came amid a difficult time, especially for the trans collectives.
On Sep. 6, Salome, a trans woman from the Eastern city of Pando, was murdered in a crime that the attorney general’s office initially classified as a trans-femicide.
However, the sentence handed in the case was for murder, according to Colectivo Trans del Uruguay president Colette Spinetti, who stressed the need for the definition of a trans-femicide to be worked out with the country’s legal institutions. EFE
Mahamati, Mahatma and the Syncretism of the Pranamis, an Unknown Chapter in the Life of Gandhi
We all know about Gandhi's favourite bhajan, ‘Vaishnava Jan To’, written by Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta. But hardly anything has been written about the influence of the Pranami sect on Gandhi during his childhood. Mahatma Gandhi circa 1941. Photo: Kanu Gandhi/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
“As you can see, my city is a sea city. Always full of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Persians. My family’s sect was the Pranami. Hindu, of course. But in our temple, the priest used to read from the Muslim Koran and the Hindu Gita, moving from one to the other as if it mattered not which book was read as long as God was worshipped,” said Gandhi, superbly portrayed by Ben Kingsley, in the 1982 film Gandhi by Richard Attenborough.
Much has been written about Gandhi’s childhood and we all know about his favourite bhajan, ‘Vaishnava Jan To’, written by Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta. But very less is written about the influence of the Pranami sect and its philosophy of syncretism on Gandhi during his childhood.
Gandhi was born in a Bania caste, which traditionally follows the Vaishnava sect of Hinduism. Gandhi’s mother Putlibai was from Dantrana village. She was a follower of the Pranami sect. Gandhi in his childhood, accompanying his mother, had often visited the Pranami temple near his home in Porbandar. “The outstanding impression my mother has left on my memory is that of saintliness. She was deeply religious,” Gandhi wrote in the first chapter of his autobiography.
Pranami Temple, Porbandar. Photo: Mehul Devkala
Contrary to this, Gandhi was not particularly inclined towards the Vaishnava faith. In the tenth chapter – ‘Glimpses of Religion’ – of his autobiography, he wrote,
“Being born in the Vaishnava faith, I had to often go to the Haveli (place of Vaishnava worship). But it never appealed to me. I did not like its glitter and pomp. Also I heard rumours of immorality being practised there, and lost all interest in it. Hence I could gain nothing from the Haveli.”
Ramachandra Guha, in his book Gandhi before India, wrote, “Mohandas’s mother introduced him to the mysteries – and beauties – of faith. Putlibai was devout, but not dogmatic. Born and raised Vaishnavite, she became attracted to a sect called the Pranamis, who incorporated elements of Islam into their worship.” He adds:
“The sect’s founder was a Kshatriya named Prannath who lived in Kathiawar in the 18th century. He was widely travelled, and may even have visited Mecca. The Pranami temple in Porbandar that Putlibai patronised had no icons, no images: only writing on the wall, deriving from the Hindu scriptures and from the Koran. Putlibai’s ecumenism extended even further, for among the regular visitors to her home were Jain monks.”
I visited the same Pranami temple in Porbandar in 2019. It was difficult to locate, despite its proximity to Gandhi’s home – Kirti Mandir. A local resident and a historian, Narottam Palan, helped me find the place.
The temple is located in a very narrow lane where only a single motorcycle can pass at a time. It is on the first floor of the building. I immediately realised that the temple has been renovated and it has no sign of its past.
As Guha mentioned, the temple has no idols. In the Pranami sect, idol worship is not practised; instead, a holy book of the sect, Kuljam Swaroop, is kept at the place of worship.
Prannath aka Mahamati (1618-94), the central figure of the Pranami sect, was born in Navanagar (now Jamnagar) in an affluent Thakur family. His original name was Mehraj Thakur. Like Nanak, he travelled for a long period of time in Arabia, Persia, and what is currently Iraq, studying the Quran and other Islamic scriptures.
Kuljam Swaroop was dictated by Prannath Swami; words kept flowing for years, the devotees standing by used to write them down exactly the way they heard them. The first compilation of its total 18,758 verses was prepared in three years from 1692-1694 AD. It is mainly in Hindustani, which was the prevalent language, in addition to Gujarati, Sindhi, Persian, and Arabic.
However, the entire scripture was transcribed, and is presently available in Devanagari script. In addition to the use of Hindu scriptural terminology, it also contains numerous references and the use of non-Hindu scriptural terminology of various other faiths, including Islam. No change was made by the compilers or is permitted by anyone either in its material content or in its original verse style. It was then consecrated after Swami left this world in 1694.
Mahatma Gandhi was born precisely 175 years after the passing away of Mahamati. The two men have many similarities. For instance, both were born in wealthy Kathiawari families, and Mahamati’s father, Keshavrai Thakur, was Diwan of Navanagar state, while the Mahatma’s father, Karamchand Gandhi, was Diwan of Porbandar. Both of them were jailed during their lifetime and wrote extensively during their time in prison, and also attracted followers from all strata of society, young and old, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Mahatma Gandhi’s home. Photo: Mehul Devkala
Mahamati had even sent 12 of his devotees – both Hindu and Muslim – to the Red Fort to meet Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and had explained to him the real interpretation of the Quran and its message of religious tolerance.
Maharaja Chhatrasal of Bundelkhand, his Muslim wife Ruhaani Begum and their daughter Mastani (wife of the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao) were staunch followers of Mahamati.
Mahamati was the guru of Chhatrasal in the same way as Samarth Ramdas was the guru of Chhatrapati Shivaji. Chhatrasal and Chhatrapati crossed paths at Sinhagad fort near Pune. Kavi Bhushan was a famous poet in their courts at different times and wrote biographies of them.
In his paper ‘Brotherhood and Divine Bonding in the Krishna Pranami Sect’, Gerard Toffin provides a detailed account of the beginning of the Pranami. He writes, “It was with Prannath’s blessing that his devotee, the Bundela king Chhatrasal, fought against Aurangzeb’s Islamic rule. Chhatrasal raised a powerful army with wealth accumulated from a diamond mine revealed to him by his guru. In 1671, he occupied a large province, south of the Yamuna River. Assisted by the Marathas, this Hindu king conquered the whole of Bundelkhand, where he supposedly established an ideal kingdom in which Hindus and Muslims lived like brothers.”
Chhatrasal built a marvellous temple at Panna in the memory of his guru Mahamati. It is a very important place of worship for followers of the Pranami sect.
The Mahamati temple at Panna. Photo: pannalive.com
Mahamati and Gandhi were, undoubtedly, champions of secular values. They left no stone unturned for awakening people against religious and caste fanaticism in their lifetime. It is unfortunate that the teachings of Mahamati are little known and have received insufficient attention outside of the Pranami sect. Mahamati’s historical connection with Gandhi is largely forgotten in the pages of history. Mehul Devkala is a poet and an award-winning filmmaker. His short film Kaun Se Bapu is based on Mahatma Gandhi.
INDIA SC’s Abortion Verdict Has Paved Way for Decriminalisation, Bodily Autonomy, Say Experts
'There is almost no restriction, because it [the SC] has read the categories of women very broadly,' said an expert, noting how the decision has paved the way for anyone in India to now access abortion till 24 weeks. Representative image. Reuters/Mario Anzuoni
New Delhi: In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court on September 29 held that all women – both unmarried and married – are equally entitled to safe and legal abortions for pregnancies in the term of 20 to 24 weeks.
Referring to Rule 3B of the MTP Act – which laid down specific categories of women whose pregnancy can be terminated up until a period of 24 weeks – the top court noted that a “restrictive and narrow interpretation” of this provision would render it close to “holding it unconstitutional”.
The order by the three-judge bench comes after a plea by a 25-year-old woman who had approached the Delhi high court seeking to terminate her 23 weeks pregnancy, which was denied. The woman, who was in a consensual relationship, had said that her partner refused to marry her.
The Delhi high court’s division bench of Chief Justice S.C. Sharma and Justice Subramanium Prasad had observed that the provisions under the MTP rules did not cover pregnancy of an unmarried woman resulting from a consensual relationship. The apex court, however, observed that the “artificial distinction” between married and single women is “not constitutionally sustainable”.
Terming this a ‘fantastic judgment’, Dipika Jain, director of the Centre for Justice, Law and Society (CJLS) at the Jindal Global Law School, noted how until now, the MTP Act and Rules enlisted specific categories of women including mentally ill women, persons with disabilities, persons caught in humanitarian disasters, etc., but not ‘unmarried women’. Hence, this matter was challenged in the apex court.
Emphasising how the decision has paved the way for anyone in India to now access abortion till 24 weeks, she said, “There is almost no restriction, because it has read the categories of women very broadly.”
While noting some takeaways from the apex court’s decision, lawyer Anubha Rastogi told The Wire: “Firstly, it clarifies that if there’s something that’s available for pregnant married women, then it needs to be available for any woman irrespective of her marital status. Second, this judgment is clarifying that in cases where a minor engaging in consensual sex approaches a registered medical practitioner (RMP) for termination of pregnancy, then the RMP does not have to report the identity of the minor seeking termination of pregnancy, as mandated by Section 19(1) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.”
The judgment in paragraph 81 stipulates that on request of the minor or the minor’s guardian, the RMP would not have to disclose to police the minor’s identity or any other personal details. In doing so, it stressed upon the need to prevent any conflict between the POCSO provision versus the right to privacy and reproductive autonomy as enshrined under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.
Crucially, the order also noted that doctors “must refrain from imposing extra-legal conditions on women seeking to terminate their pregnancy in accordance with the law”.
Rastogi, who is also associated with the Pratigya Campaign for Women, added that “[t]his judgment also recognises that as far as medical termination of pregnancy is concerned, the reason of pregnancy as a result of rape includes forced sexual intercourse taking place within a married set-up or marital rape.”
While the apex court is yet to decide on whether the offence of marital rape is recognised as one by the Indian law, experts concur that the judgment sets a crucial precedent by recognising it as reason for accessing abortion.
Jayna Kothari, senior advocate and co-founder of the Bengaluru-based Center for Law and Policy Research, added, “This will make the fight for the removal of the exception of marital rape under Section 375 of the IPC easier.”
Paving the way for rights-based jurisprudence, bodily autonomy and decriminalisation
Pointing out how there continues to be pervasive stigma and shame when single or unmarried women get abortions, Kothari noted the “huge significance” of the court “recognising this as a form of discrimination under Article 14 of the Constitution”.
Former Patna high court judge, Justice Anjana Prakash, told The Wire that she welcomed the judgment “[b]ecause I am of the view that a woman must have full autonomy over her body, her life, her finances, planning her and her family’s future, and so on. This also naturally means she has a right to decide when and whether she wants to have children.”
Meanwhile, lawyer Rastogi and professor Jain opined that the order sets a rights-based jurisprudence on abortions. The decision observed that reproductive autonomy in India is a fundamental right. “So every woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy, keep a pregnancy, have access to sexual health and education, and have access to contraception. This judgment has spelt it out. It’s not just an abortion judgment, it’s one that looks at sexual, reproductive and health rights,” Jain said.
Stressing upon this, Rastogi added that the judgment “has brought in not only privacy, but also the right to life, health, bodily autonomy, and all such aspects”.
Both legal experts also pointed to the expansive scope of the term ‘woman’ as anybody who has the capacity to get pregnant, with the order paving the way for inclusion of transgender persons.
The judgment observed: “We use the term “woman” in this judgment as including persons other than cis-gender women who may require access to safe medical termination of their pregnancies.”
“We arguably will have one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world, and this judgment has paved the way for decriminalisation of abortion,” Jain said.
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