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A tragedy unfolded in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Pylos, Greece, on Wednesday, June 14, 2023, when a fishing vessel carrying hundreds of migrants capsized and sank. 78 people have been confirmed dead and 104 were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard in a rescue operation that utilized six Coast Guard vessels, a Greek Navy frigate, a military transport plane, an Air Force helicopter, several private vessels, and a drone from the European Union border protection agency.

At least 650 people were estimated to be on board when the boat began to sink at around 2:30 a.m. local time, though this has not been confirmed. None of the rescued were reported to be wearing life jackets. The survivors have been brought to a hospital in Kalamata, a city in Southern Greece.

The Greek Coast Guard had been alerted on Tuesday midday as the fishing boat traveled through international waters. A ship approached the fishing boat with supplies later on Tuesday, but the migrants refused to accept aid, stating that they wanted to continue on their path to Italy.

Recent statistics on illegal border crossing detected in the Central Mediterranean are staggering. According to Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, the number of such crossings nearly quadrupled in the first four months of the year from the previous period. More than 42,200 crossings were recorded from January to April, indicating the highest level since Frontex began collecting data in 2009.

Organised crime groups are taking advantage of political volatility in some countries to increase the number of migrants smuggled across EU borders. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration has called for comprehensive action, including more pathways for legal migration, in response to the tragedy. This most recent incident is a reminder of the urgent need to create long-term solutions to the international migration crisis.

Residents of remote desert areas in Maricopa County, Arizona, are concerned about their safety after discovering a body in a bonfire pile in Bulldog Canyon.

On June 12, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) received reports of a body found in Bulldog Canyon, an off-highway vehicle area in the Tonto National Forest. Upon further investigation, officers discovered the remains in the rubble of a bonfire in a remote desert area that nearby neighbors describe as being overrun with homeless people, drug users, and criminals. The discovery of the body is sparking fears among local residents, who express concern about the lack of patrols in the area and the escalating illegal activity.

Sharon Allison-Brown, a resident of the area and witness to the discovery of the body, stated: “We’re just tired of it. We live here because of the serenity, but all the commotion has made it hard to maintain that luxury. With the discovery of a dead body, concerns about safety in the area are higher than ever.”

The Maricopa County Sherriff’s Office Homicide Unit is currently investigating the death. However, the identity and cause of death for the victim remain unknown.

Residents of the area, which is home to around two dozen affluent custom homes, are calling for increased vigilance and safety measures. The discovery of the body serves as a reminder of the potential dangers of remote desert locations and the need for increased patrols to ensure the community’s safety.

Workers at the Erie, Pennsylvania, train manufacturing complex Wabtec are poised to walk off the job should they decide the company’s contract offer is insufficient. One of their main priorities is a rarity for US unions: the right to strike over grievances.

Picket signs stacked in the UE Local 506 union hall outside Wabtec in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Alex N. Press)

ERIE, PA — “What do you think of the company’s contract proposals?” asked a man at the head of a contingent of workers marching down the avenue that cuts through the mile-long, mile-wide Wabtec locomotive manufacturing complex.

“Fuck you!” responded members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), their voices echoing off the walls of the buildings around them.

A few blocks down Main Street inside Irish Cousins, the bar across from the union hall of Local 506, which represents the plant’s workers — save for the handful of clerical employees, members of Local 618 whose jobs have not been eliminated through automation — one patron’s “How are you doing?” was answered by another customer with “Waiting on the word.”

It was the afternoon of Friday, June 9, and roughly 1,400 workers at the four-million-square-foot plant were preparing for the possibility that when their four-year contract expired at midnight, they would be on strike.

The week prior, union members voted overwhelmingly to authorize local leadership to call a strike should negotiations with Wabtec (an abbreviation of Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation) fail to produce a tentative agreement. Updates during this week, printed on flyers disseminated throughout the plant, suggested that they would do so.

“Over the past 4 weeks UE Locals 506 and 618 have attempted to patiently bargain and convey the needs of our members in good faith, with the goal to get a fair contract,” read one flyer distributed on Friday. “Meanwhile the Company has done everything to raise the temperature in the plant.”

A flyer distributed by UE Local 506 and 618 describing Wabtec’s union busting tactics.

As the clock ticked down to midnight, the two sides were far apart on a range of issues in their negotiations for a second contract. The first contract was negotiated when General Electric (GE) sold the $4-billion-a-year division to Pittsburgh-based Wabtec in 2019, ending more than a century of the company’s operations in Lawrence Park township on Erie’s east side.

UE has represented the plant’s workers since 1937, the year before the union negotiated its first national agreement with GE. Thanks to decades of plant closures, corporate reconfigurations, and outsourcing both overseas and to nonunion plants in the United States, the shop, whose product is sold to domestic and international railroad companies, was the last remaining facility covered by the national agreement.

On Friday night, with less than an hour until the contract expired, a federal mediator now involved, and letters of solidarity flooding in from workers across Wabtec’s international supply chain, the union’s executive board agreed to a twenty-four-hour contract extension to allow for an additional day of bargaining. The next day, the board announced they would bring Wabtec’s final offer to a membership vote on June 22. Should they reject it, they will be on strike. As of this writing, the board has not decided whether they will recommend the offer. The members are now working without a contract.

Right to Strike Over Grievances

One priority among Wabtec workers is the right to strike over grievances. They had that right in the GE contract, and while a nine-day strike in 2019 defeated some of Wabtec’s most egregious proposals, members ratified a first contract that didn’t include it.

The result has been a disaster for workers, who say Wabtec has turned the grievance process into a tool of management rather than a method for settling disputes, increasing shop-floor friction.

The number of grievances has ballooned, a May report from the Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations found. Grievances are less likely to reach closure than they were under GE, more likely to drag on for months or even years, and more than twice as likely to be rejected.

A union flag for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) in the UE Local 506 hall in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Alex N. Press)

“Had the company treated the grievance process with the respect it and the members deserve over the last four years, this wouldn’t be an issue today,” said Local 506 president Scott Slawson. “But they chose to do just the opposite and drive everything to arbitration — which takes time, meaning issues don’t get resolved, creating a lot of angst and consternation on the shop floor. Unfortunately, the company we work for doesn’t see an issue with that.”

According to chief steward Leo Grzegorzewski, 95 percent of grievances that reach the third and final step are rejected by Wabtec, forcing the union to go to arbitration, a route that costs it around $9,000 each time. Since 2019, around sixty-eight grievances have reached arbitration.

The Erie workers rarely struck over grievances when the plant was owned by GE — they did it only four times from 2005 to 2019, for a total of thirteen hours — but the possibility of a strike forced management to treat them with respect. Without it, workers say contract violations are rampant, with management empowered to do as it pleases.

The first contract allowed strikes over timeliness in the grievance process and any permanent subcontracting or transfer of work. Slawson said Wabtec’s new offer as of Tuesday morning expands the right to strike to include cases in which the company does not follow an arbitrator’s ruling or takes the union to court over that ruling.

In other words, it falls well short of what was in the GE contract. UE would still be forced into expensive, lengthy arbitration proceedings before it could move toward a strike.

“One of the great tragedies of the American labor movement is that in the McCarthy era, most of the labor movement decided to give up the fight over controlling conditions on the shop floor,” says UE general president Carl Rosen. “That’s what having the right to strike over grievances allows you: the ability to keep the employer from imposing their will at any point during a contract while you’re stuck and can’t do anything until that contract expires.”

Green Locomotives

There is also the urgent matter of upgrading the locomotives built by Wabtec’s workers to pollute less.

UE’s Erie locals have been leading the union’s national Green Locomotive Project, which calls for upgrading locomotive stock to modern “Tier 4” standards for long-haul routes and to zero-emissions technologies in rail yards. Last month, UE members, including workers from Wabtec, testified in favor of proposed new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules allowing states to set higher standards for diesel emissions from locomotives.

Building green locomotives in the Erie plant would create between 2,600 and 4,300 new Wabtec jobs, according to a report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well three to five thousand additional jobs in Erie County as a result of the increased production. Lawrence Park, built by GE a century ago as a company town, still depends on the plant’s wages, and the effect of such an initiative would be transformative for an area whose fate is still tied to the plant.

“It’s a high-priority issue for a number of reasons,” says Slawson. “It’s gainful employment, and it’s contributing to the solution rather than the problem” of climate change.

The union wants Wabtec to commit to a joining push for higher EPA standards. But Slawson says the company has “flat out rejected” collaboration on this issue.

“The right to strike forces mutual respect and dialogue in the workplace,” says Association of Flight Attendants (AFA)-CWA president Sara Nelson, who spoke on a recent press call about the fight for the right to strike over grievances at Wabtec. “Not having that right — and management fighting so hard not to have it — is a clear sign that they have no intention of moving forward on climate initiatives that involve the workers’ knowledge about the workplace and about what’s necessary to maintain the jobs and put and make a good product.”

Wabtec workers also want to eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, the wage progression agreed to in their first contract. Under the 2019 contract, a new worker hired as a production technician (the plant’s lowest job classification) started at $20.47 an hour and after ten years reached the $31.49 hourly wage earned by a “legacy” counterpart in that same classification. While an improvement over Wabtec’s initial 2019 proposal, which called for a starting wage of $17 an hour with an eighteen-year progression, the inequality is an issue, creating the potential for resentment among workers and, according to Local 506, leading some new workers to qualify for government assistance.

Legacy workers, those not subject to the wage progression, want a raise too. While Wabtec authorized a $750-million stock buyback earlier this year, the workers haven’t received a pay bump since around 2016, when the plant was still run by GE. That amounts to a roughly 19-percent pay cut when adjusted for inflation.

Wabtec’s offer includes an immediate 3.4-percent raise plus a $3,000 lump-sum payment upon ratification for legacy workers, and a $1 hourly increase plus a $3,000 lump-sum payment upon ratification for those under the wage progression. All workers will then receive a 2.5-percent raise in 2024, a $2,000 lump-sum payment in 2025, and a 2.5-percent raise in 2026. The company rejected proposals to shorten the ten-year progression.

As negotiations were taking place, workers say Wabtec told them that if they hadn’t already scheduled vacation for the remainder of the year, the company was going to schedule it for them. This move, yet another contract violation, inflamed members.

“When they unilaterally schedule your vacation, that means you’re essentially getting no vacation, because it’s likely going to be at a time when the rest of your family can’t join,” says UE president Rosen. “They’re undermining the family, and that undermines the community.”

Workers say another issue is Wabtec’s practice of temporarily transferring a worker within a classification to wherever they want, for however long they want, without regard to seniority. While the union won an arbitration over a grievance concerning the problem, Wabtec appealed the decision to federal court.

“The company’s offer potentially resolves a little bit of future conflict with that issue,” says Slawson before adding that cause for concern remains. The company “would not change the language in the contract and would only resolve it via a side letter stating that they would, with prejudice, withdraw the federal appeal.”

“We have a very large facility that encompasses hundreds of acres and more than twenty buildings,” explains Slawson, who before serving as the local’s president was a heavy fabrication welder. “Say I bid on a weld job in the plant. What I actually do is bid on a weld job in building five at station one on day shift. The problem with temporary transfers is that the company is saying they can move me anywhere they want inside the plant for any period of time, without respect to seniority or specific to a shift. I could bid on a day-shift position and they could say, ‘We don’t need you on day shift, so we’re going to put you on second shift in a completely different area.’”

Additionally, if a worker is laid off, as they frequently are at the plant, Wabtec has not been counting that time toward seniority. Members entered bargaining hoping to change that. According to Slawson, Wabtec’s offer resolves part of that conflict, crediting workers some amount of seniority for past and future layoffs.

“The Company’s Number-One Whipping Post”

“Our CEO has publicly stated that employees are the company’s number-one asset,” says Slawson. “But when you survey the employees, nobody feels like the company’s number-one asset. They feel like the company’s number-one whipping post. Wabtec has made no bones about not respecting its employees, demoralizing its employees, and showing a complete lack of compassion to their employees.”

“Business has become not only more consolidated to the C-suite in corporate America, but decisions have been moved away from production in general too,” says AFA-CWA’s Nelson. “What we’re seeing with the outside stressors of stock buybacks, the consolidation of ownership by hedge funds, and the relentless focus on driving down labor costs in order to push greater profits to Wall Street is that those decisions are taken away from the shop floor.”

So why bring the offer to membership rather than call a strike over the weekend? Slawson said the board wanted members to decide based on where negotiations stand now — not where they stood when the strike authorization vote was taken.

“If the members say, ‘We can’t live with this,” that’s a much louder message,” he said.

He also made reference to threats by Wabtec, telling me, “We deal with an employer that negotiates with threats, and that has to be taken into consideration. It’s difficult to negotiate with somebody when they put a gun to your head rather than looking you in the eye.”

Slawson declined to elaborate. But he may have been referring to a letter a Wabtec representative handed to him on the evening of June 9.

The company writes that it has been assessing the Erie plant’s “long-term viability” and refers to its unfavorable “competitive position” relative to Wabtec’s nonunion plants. Citing the union’s stubborn insistence on raises and proposals that would limit its “operational flexibility,” the company lists 275 union jobs that it is considering “permanently subcontracting.”

A sign for the UE Local 506 union hall in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Alex N. Press)  

Such saber-rattling has a long history in this plant. GE in 2017 moved hundreds of jobs to a nonunion plant in Fort Worth, Texas, but ended up moving them back to Erie after struggling to hire and retain enough skilled workers. Nonetheless, a similar threat from Wabtec played a role in the 2019 settlement.

Even so, there’s little reason for Wabtec to feel confident that workers will accept its offer. Orders are up, increasing members’ leverage. And because they’re now without a contract, there’s no longer a no-strike, no-lockout clause.

Wabtec has begun bringing scabs in, and workers say management is nervous, aware that its actions — including sending everyone a letter explaining how to legally cross a picket line and how to resign from the union — may backfire.

When I stopped into Irish Cousins on Monday night, workers were discussing their frustration. Across the street, piles of strike signs and tents sat in the Local 506 hall; should members decide to do so, it would only take a moment to bring them to the plant gates.

Copublished with Labor Notes.

The Israeli leader promise to “act responsibly for our country.”

By World Israel News Staff

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged Yesh Atid chief Yair Lapid and National Unity head Benny Gantz of wanting to sabotage the judicial reform negotiations, following the opposition members’ decision to freeze the talks after their candidate was voted on the Judicial Selection Committee in a dramatic showdown earlier in the day.

“Today it finally became clear that Gantz and Lapid looked for any way to blow up the talks,” Netanyahu said in a video statement released after the vote.

The opposition has further “rejected every proposal — even the most limited” that the coalition has proposed at the talks at the President’s Residence, Netanyahu claimed.

“Gantz and Lapid don’t want real negotiations,” he said. “I promise you that unlike them, we’ll act responsibly for our country.”

In a shock vote hours earlier, the Knesset voted to approve opposition Yesh Atid MK Karine Elharrar to the Judicial Selections Committee, with 58 votes in favour and 56 votes against.

An additional vote will be held within 30 days in order to select the Knesset’s second candidate.

Four coalition members voted for Elharrar in the secret ballot, pushing Tali Gottlieb, a member of Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, out the race. Gottlieb was backed by 15 MKs, and opposed by 59.

Elharrar’s win marks a triumph for the opposition, which had hinged the continuation of judicial overhaul talks on the selection of its candidate to the committee.

The nine-member panel is responsible for appointing judges at all levels of Israel’s civil court system.

Lapid and Gantz responded to Elharrar’s win by hailing the “good news” but saying that the talks would be suspended until the panel is formed.

“Once Netanyahu was a fraud and strong. Today he’s a fraud and weak,” Lapid said.

“Without a committee, there are no talks,” he added.

Gantz argued that there was “no point” carrying on the talks.

“I am concerned, because Netanyahu collapsed,” Gantz said. “His conduct raises a large question over his judgment in fateful questions and raises a large question over his ability to control the coalition and respect agreements. In the current state of affairs, where there is no committee functioning as required, there is no point in holding talks at the President’s Residence,” Gantz said.

The post Netanyahu says opposition not interested in talks after Gantz, Lapid freeze them appeared first on World Israel News.

Menachem Ordman called for the Israeli government to launch a counterterror offensive.

By JNS

One of the survivors of Tuesday’s terrorist shooting in northwestern Samaria recounted the incident, saying that he “saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at me at point-blank range.”

Speaking from his hospital bed on Wednesday before undergoing surgery to remove shrapnel from his arms, 33-year-old Menachem Ordman said that he was sitting in his car when the vehicle with the terrorists pulled up to him.

“They opened heavy fire; it took me a moment to realize that I was still alive. I saw a rifle barrel aimed at me from point-blank range. I was standing at the junction to talk on the phone, and then a car from the opposite lane passed by, from which they fired at me,” the father of five from the Samaria town of Mevo Dotan explained.

“I noticed that I had been wounded, there was blood all over the car. I was sure that I was going to die.”

Four IDF soldiers were lightly wounded during the attack that occurred between the Israeli communities of Hermesh and Mevo Dotan, near the Arab village of Ya’abad.

The terrorists escaped. The hunt to catch them is ongoing.

“My arms were wounded by bullets, and I will undergo surgery today to remove the shrapnel, and God-willing, I will be released tomorrow,” said Ordman, who is being treated at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera.

Ordman called for a massive military operation to root out the terrorism in Judea and Samaria.

“I have looked death in the face. They shot at me from point-blank range while I was inside the car. We need to go on the offensive and finish this saga,” he said.

On May 30, a 32-year-old Israeli man was killed in a nearby terrorist shooting, close to the Jewish community of Hermesh in Samaria.

The post Israeli terror shooting survivor: ‘I saw the rifle barrel pointed at me’ appeared first on World Israel News.

President Joe Biden laughed off a reporter’s questions about whether there were any recorded tapes of his involvement in a $5 million bribery scheme with a Ukrainian executive from Burisma Holdings when he was the vice-president.

The post WATCH: Biden laughs off $5 million bribery allegations appeared first on World Israel News.

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This weekend,  friends and family will be meeting up in Montreal to celebrate Kari Polyani Levitt’s 100th birthday.

While Kari’s health is fragile, she remains firm in her incisive understanding and analysis of World events, committed to national sovereignty and …

The post Prof. Kari Polyani Levitt: Regaining Canada’s Sovereignty: June 14, 2023 We Celebrate Kari’s 100th Birthday appeared first on Global Research.

The Bharatiya Janata Party saw last month’s state election in Karnataka as a crucial test of its ability to win votes in South India. The party’s loss to Congress suggests it could be more vulnerable than anticipated ahead of next year’s national election.

India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waves to the his supporters during a political event organized by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Davangere, India, on March 25, 2023. (Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images)

On May 10, the Indian state of Karnataka went to the polls, and the result was a surprising and decisive defeat for Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi and his movement have faced setbacks before, but the nature of the BJP’s ambitions in Karnataka made this one especially striking.

Karnataka was the only BJP-ruled state in South India. It took decades of social engineering and political mobilization to make the BJP a viable party in the state, paving the way for its meteoric rise during the 2000s and 2010s. This time, however, the BJP’s momentum was halted.

The nature of its defeat reveals the limits of its overall electoral strategy and sheds light upon the weaknesses of the BJP more generally, as well as the state of India’s opposition with national elections due to be held next year.

A Southern Strategy

The BJP came to power in Karnataka in 2019 through the mass defection of members of the state parliament, part of its wider strategy of orchestrating defections through Operation Kamala. After the 2018 elections, the BJP had become Karnataka’s largest party without winning an overall majority. The Indian National Congress (INC) and a smaller regional party, the Janata Dal (Secular) or JD(S), won the rest of the seats and formed a coalition government under JD(S) leader H. D. Kumaraswamy.

The JD(S) is dominated by the family of H. D. Deve Gowda, who briefly served as India’s prime minister in 1996–97. Its base lies among the Vokkaliga caste and among religious minorities of the Old Mysore region of Central Karnataka. It has struggled in recent years to remain relevant since it lacks a clear ideology beyond wanting to win power, compared to the Hindu nationalist BJP and secular INC.

The BJP came to power in Karnataka in 2019 through the mass defection of members of the state parliament.

The coalition government seemed set to govern for several years. However, in 2019, fifteen INC and JD(S) members resigned from their respective parties and joined the BJP. This defection caused the coalition government to lose its majority, with by-elections due to be held for the seats of the defectors.

The BJP went on to win twelve of those fifteen seats in December 2019, a few months after Modi’s landslide victory in that year’s national elections, enabling the BJP to take power outright. The BJP made a veteran regional kingpin, B. S. Yediyurappa, chief minister.

Yediyurappa had done more than anyone else to help the BJP become a force in the state. He is a member of the Lingayat community, a Hindu sect and one of the largest communities in Karnataka. His leadership of that community assisted the BJP in forging a cross-caste coalition along with its traditional Brahmin, upper-caste, and urban middle-class base. However, this would be the high-water mark of the BJP’s ambitions in Karnataka.

The BJP in Power

Relations between Yediyurappa and the BJP high command have never been good. Yediyurappa has a reputation for being more moderate on communal issues than the rest of the BJP and more focused on development than ideological purity. These poor relations resulted in him creating a breakaway party in the 2013 state elections. That split resulted in a heavy BJP defeat, with Congress forming a government under long-time regional politician Siddaramaiah.

Yediyurappa and the BJP later reconciled, but he never regained the trust of the BJP high command. In July 2021, he resigned after calls for his resignation by BJP cadres over corruption and nepotism charges and was replaced by Basavaraj Bommai, another Lingayat, as chief minister. With Bommai taking power, problems began to show themselves with the BJP administration in the state.

The BJP’s top brass flagged up this year’s Karnataka election as key to maintaining its project of winning power across South India.

Bommai himself was less charismatic and popular than Yediyurappa, which made him a more pliable figure who was more in line with the BJP’s top leaders. His policies in the state took a right-wing turn from those of his predecessor, engaging in explicit communal policies associated with the BJP’s hard-line wing — most famously through banning the hijab for students.

Bommai’s administration quickly went off track. Allegations that there was a 40 percent commission fee for contractors stoked up public discontent at corruption within the government. At the same time, rural communities were angry about low payments for crops — a recurring criticism of BJP administrations — and the highly unequal patterns of growth over the past two decades. The state government’s low spending on health and education exacerbated the latter problem. There was also countermobilization from Muslims and caste communities that had been left out by the BJP’s reservation changes.

Because of these challenges, the BJP’s top brass flagged up this year’s election as a vital key to maintaining its project of winning power across South India. The situation also created hope in the opposition camp for a breakthrough.

The Congress Challenge

Congress went into the Karnataka election with much to prove. The party has been in the doldrums ever since Modi’s rose to power, losing states it had controlled for decades and experiencing its worst ever national-level performances in 2014 and 2019. There was a general sense that the party had hit rock bottom under the well-meaning but ineffectual leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the family that had dominated Indian politics since 1947.

This prompted efforts at inner-party reform. First Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress president after the 2019 defeat and asked his party to choose a new leader. They finally elected one in 2022 through the first competitive election for party chief in decades, choosing an experienced parliamentarian from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge. Kharge, who comes from a Dalit background, became the first Congress leader from outside the Gandhi family since 1999.

Congress has been in the doldrums ever since Modi’s rose to power, losing states it had controlled for decades.

Rahul Gandhi also decided to launch a nationwide yatra, or march, across India from late 2022 to early 2023, covering over twenty-two hundred miles across one hundred fifty days. His goal was to revitalize the grassroots of the party, put forward a defense of Indian secularism, and attack the BJP’s “pro-rich” economic policies. The march earned plaudits for Gandhi and boosted the morale of long-suffering INC party workers, although its electoral impact had not been proven.

Thirdly, the party has sought to forge opposition unity and create a united front against the BJP. Progress in this area has been slow, especially since Congress has been unable to prove to the other parties that it should be the dominant partner in any alliance. The party thus hoped that a win in Karnataka would allow it to recover its image as the main national challenger to the BJP.

BJP Missteps

The BJP and Congress conducted two very different campaigns. The BJP relied heavily on its national leadership, especially the omnipresent pair of Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah. Modi crisscrossed the state, cutting ribbons, giving speeches, and hoping to focus the election on his personal charisma and appeal, which is still a potent asset even after nine years in power.

However, there was a contradiction in the BJP campaign. Figures like Yediyurappa focused on development issues to de-communalize the election, amid fears that the appeal of Hindutva ideology had peaked in the state. Yet others like the BJP’s Karnataka party president, Nalin Kumar Kateel, wanted to prioritize communal polarization.

Kateel’s campaign was heavy-handed. He told party members in January in the run-up to the election to concentrate on “love jihad,” a far-right conspiracy theory which claims that Muslim men are attempting to seduce and brainwash Hindu women, over the poor development outcomes of the BJP administration. He also urged them to mobilize Hindu nationalist anger against the famous nineteenth-century Muslim ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan.

The BJP relied heavily on its national leadership, especially the omnipresent pair of Narendra Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah.

In addition, the BJP’s candidate selection process was fraught and poorly managed. The national leadership of the BJP chose younger party members at the expense of veteran incumbents, specifically Lingayat party members including Yediyurappa and another former chief minister, Jagadish Shettar. This prompted many of those passed over to defect to Congress or run as independents.

The reasoning behind this counterproductive move seems to have been a desire to avoid anti-incumbency sentiment by bringing in new faces, as well as to ensure greater loyalty to the BJP on the part of its representatives, but the strategy backfired. It provoked the old guard of the party and sparked fears that a BJP victory would result in a hard-line Hindutva and Brahmin chief minister. The JD(S) particularly warned about the danger of a North Indian Brahmin becoming chief minister and focused much of its campaign on anti-Hindi and pro-Kannadiga concerns.

The architect of this ill-fated policy seems to have been B. L. Santosh, a Brahmin from Karnataka, national general secretary of the BJP, and member of the hard-line Hindu nationalist paramilitary group the RSS, of which Modi and most key figures of the BJP are longtime members. Santosh has an image as a hard-liner and is personally opposed to Yediyurappa.

The problems with the BJP campaign highlight the difficulties the party faces in maintaining its complicated coalition: trying to strike a balance between moderation and communalism, low caste and high caste, regional languages and Hindi. In addition, it has trouble preserving its reputation for good governance when it pushes unpopular policies or faces corruption allegations. In the face of such challenges, it is easier to focus on Modi’s personal popularity, which explains his role at the center of the BJP campaign.

Strong but Not Invincible

In comparison to the BJP, Congress ran a very decentralized campaign based on a strong grassroots organization. The party lacked a single face, divided as it was between Siddaramaiah and Congress state leader D. K. Sivakumar, both of whom hoped to be chief minister after the election. Yet the two men avoided rowing in public and kept the focus on attacking the BJP.

The party’s candidate selection reflected this emphasis on unity, as Congress intentionally selected figures who were considered most likely to win instead of rewarding established party workers. However, Congress managed to avoid the costly defections that hurt the BJP. Its campaign focused on the corruption allegations that had undermined Bommai’s popularity and included pledges to alleviate poverty through social welfare programs and support for farmers and women, while rolling back the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies.

In comparison to the BJP, Congress ran a very decentralized campaign based on a strong grassroots organization.

Rahul Gandhi and his family campaigned widely in the state — the first time he had campaigned alongside his mother and his sister in years. This helped drum up support among Congress loyalists by highlighting how important the election was to the party’s first family.

The results vindicated the Congress strategy. The party achieved its best result in the state since 1989, both in terms of popular vote and seat share, with 43 percent of the vote and 135 seats. It consolidated its traditional base among Dalits and Muslims while also increasing its vote share in other communities across Karnataka.

Votes
%
+/-
Seats
+/-

Indian National Congress
16,789,272
42.9
+4.75
135
+55

Bharatiya Janata Party
14,096,529
36
-0.35
66
-38

Janata Dal (Secular)
5,205,489
13.3
-5
19
-18

While the BJP’s vote share only dipped slightly from 2018, Modi’s party lost a third of its seats, dropping from 104 to 66. For its part, the JD(S) lost more than half of its seats due to defections of its Vokkaliga and Muslim base to Congress — probably because of strategic voting from both communities to defeat the BJP and assist its main rival.

The results were a stinging blow for the BJP and Modi personally, who invested so much personal prestige in campaigning for his party.

The results were a stinging blow for the BJP and Modi personally, who invested so much personal prestige in campaigning for his party. There has been a vicious blame game within the party, with fingers pointed at Yediyurappa for not bringing enough Lingayat votes and Santosh for poor candidate selection as well as criticism of overreliance on Modi. Meanwhile, Congress was jubilant, having succeeded beyond its wildest hopes.

The Karnataka election has demonstrated that the BJP is not invincible. There are weaknesses that the opposition can exploit at state level, and Modi’s personal appeal can only go so far when he is not directly on the ballot. The popular resonance of Hindutva campaigns can also reach a saturation point. The BJP is thus in a weaker position going into 2024 than seemed likely this time last year, even though the opposition still faces extremely long odds in its bid to oust Modi.

Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45 chronicles how Labour ended many of the UK’s worst barbarities through socializing key industries and creating public goods like the National Health Service. That project is now on the back foot — but won’t ever be fully defeated.

Still of Labour leader and prime minister Clement Attlee surrounded by supporters in Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45.

When I first watched Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or–winning drama I, Daniel Blake in 2017, it was one of the rare moviegoing experiences I have had where you could audibly feel the entire audience’s empathy come out for the central character. The weighted sighs, the squirming in the seats, the grabbing of tissues, the shaking of heads were all constant and only increased as the film went on. Ken Loach has a tendency to bring that out of his audiences.

It’s not cynical, and it’s not artificially manufactured, either. Loach says what he means, and he says it loudly and clearly.

Art should communicate its politics through its formal visual language first. This approach goes against recent trends of artists rejecting any subtext to deliver cheap political pandering. But Loach, like Sergei Eisenstein, Bimal Roy, or Jean-Luc Godard, is the rare artist whose work doesn’t feel hackneyed when he gets out his megaphone. It’s because what he stands for is unmistakable, both in his words and his images.

The Spirit of ’45 is likewise forthright. It goes through the years starting from mid–World War II in 1935, explaining the trajectory of England’s social progress through the Labour Party’s reforms like nationalization of utilities, creation of public housing, and development of the National Health Service (NHS), then walks the viewer through the bit-by-bit collapse of those same reforms from the year of Margaret Thatcher’s decisive election victory onward. The documentary includes old footage of all kinds of laborers, working-class, and poor people, as well as political speeches. Interspersed is commentary from writers and analysts like John Reese and Raphie de Santos as well as people who lived through World War II and the 1945 election like Labour minister Tony Benn.

Still from The Spirit of ’45.

In classic Loach style, the words of these men and women are precise and concise, relaying the impact of capitalist depredations and socialist reform in simple terms. This becomes key in discussing the vast difference between the Labour Party of the past, and the mealy mouthed and unprincipled politicians rampant in every political party (including Labour’s leadership) today.

In the documentary, George Lansbury, Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935, gives a speech to a large crowd of working-class Brits and tells them, “You don’t make profit and wealth by pushing business papers around.” Labour leaders who led the fight for publicly owned services in England speak in refreshingly direct terms and relay the benefits of policies to working people in understandable and relatable language.

The manifesto they wrote is defiantly direct, including phrases like, “The Labour Party is a socialist party and proud of it,” and “The great interwar slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.” These are contrasted with the words of conservatives like Winston Churchill and Thatcher, who both spoke in vague, theoretical platitudes and meaningless buzzwords.

The reforms were won rapidly: nationalization of health care in 1946, transportation and mines in 1947, electricity in 1948, water and gas in 1949, the docks in 1965. Like in I, Daniel Blake, the National Health Service, perhaps the single most positively influential British policy of the twentieth century, is a major focus of The Spirit of ‘45. It’s the central beam of the film’s success story of Labour’s postwar political sweep, because all sense of livability in a civilized society comes down to the maintenance of health and the right to life.

A man named Sam Watts recalls his childhood shortly after the war where his family lived in squalor, in beds infested with fleas, gnats, bedbugs, and cockroaches. He recalled “getting in bed and sleeping amongst them,” then “waking up in the morning to go to school with bites and dirty legs.” Scenes of miners digging on the slopes of a large pile of coal as thick black smoke swirls around them periodically like a tornado are particularly harrowing. Eileen Thompson, a former nurse, recalls that after World War I, she saw limbless soldiers on roads and in alleys; Britons shared a widespread national belief that they should never have to see such misery among their fellow citizens again.

One of the most compelling arguments the film makes is at the beginning, in the trenches of the war, where soldiers discussed how the propaganda of war asks young men to join a collective project to fight fascism. As they came back from the victory against Nazi Germany, many pondered why the collective power marshaled to wage war could not be mustered in times of peace. The rallying cry became, “If we can produce so much for war, much can be done for peace” — a missile against the arguments that we can’t afford social services but can afford infinitely expanding war budgets.

Still from The Spirit of ’45.

The Spirit of ’45 showcases how labor movements can create decisive political victories and how a global conservative movement can slowly destroy those progressive reforms beyond repair over a long-term project. The documentary paints today’s version of Labour government reform as not about the people but rather “just state bureaucrats having replaced corporate bureaucrats.” Loach paints a slow destruction over time in the final hour of the film: one hundred eighty-four working mines fall to just fifteen after privatization and a changing economic climate that made importing coal cheaper; railroads see an upswing of crashes, broken rails, and deaths after being handed over to private corporations (some of which later had to actually be brought back under government ownership because they had gone bust in the free market).

Loach’s hopeful message at the end of the film may seem rather ominous and even disheartening considering the movie came out ten years ago, before the global embarrassment of Brexit, the shamelessly dishonest public flaying of Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer’s pledging fealty to the inhumane disenfranchising of the working poor led by Tory politicians. Today, Labour looks all but dead.

But throughout his long career as a filmmaker, Loach has never admitted defeat. Reese says in the film, “All the way through human history, in one guise or another, this thought,” that working-class organizing can actually transform society, “is constantly being reiterated, suppressed, goes underground, and explodes again in a different form.” This is the essence of “the spirit of ’45.” In the United Kingdom and much of the world, it may appear snuffed out now. But it will surely come again.