Wall Street plunges amid fear and panic

Nick Beams

Wall Street saw another plunge in stocks yesterday, with the Dow Jones index falling by 1,032 points—the second time in four days it has dropped by more than 1,000 points. A large portion of the sell-off, which impacted on all other market indexes and went across the board, took place in the last hour, indicating that further selling may be yet to come.

The Dow finished down by 4.2 percent, the S&P 500 dropped 3.8 percent, taking the fall from its January high to 10 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 3.9 percent. The interest rate on the benchmark 10-year treasury note rose to touch 2.9 percent, but fell back to 2.82 percent as money moved out of stocks into government debt.

Markets across Asia plunged dramatically today and remain in the red. With several hours of trading remaining, the Nikkei index in Japan had fallen over 2.5 percent; the STX in Singapore was down 1.8 percent; the All Ords in Australia down 1 percent; and the Kospi in South Korea down 1.6 percent. The Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges in China were the worst impacted, with the Hang Seng down 3.3 percent and the Shanghai composite down 4.1 percent by lunch.

Six days after the Wall Street sell-off began last Friday, some of the market mechanisms driving it have become clearer. The initial fall was triggered by the news that wage growth in the US last year was 2.9 percent, above market expectations. This intersected with a rise in bond market interest rates, with the yield on the 10-year treasury bond rising to its highest point in four years, following earlier forecasts that the decades-long bull-run in bonds, which has seen interest rates fall to historic lows, is coming to an end.

The violent reaction of the market to a marginal increase in wages resulted not from the increase itself but what it might portend: a resurgence in the class struggle in the US and internationally as workers push back against the continuous suppression of wages that has been a feature of the global economy for 30 years and particularly since the global financial crisis of 2008.

The suppression of wages has been a key factor in the surge in stock prices, fuelled by the quantitative easing policies pursued by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to pump trillions of dollars into financial markets.

The return of volatility to the equities market last Friday had such a significant impact because of a complex set of new financial products created by the financial markets over the past period, centring on the volatility, or VIX, index.

Through a process of “financial engineering,” finance houses and major banks, including some of the biggest names such as Barclays, Credit Suisse, UBS and Citigroup, created a series of financial products, based on the VIX, that could be traded on the markets. This involved “shorting the VIX,” that is, placing bets that the volatility index, which set record lows throughout 2017, would continue to remain calm.

Before the eruption of this week’s sell-off, the S&P 500 index had gone more than 400 days without recording a drop of 5 percent or more, a situation not experienced since 1959.

Betting on low volatility was one of the major sources of gains from the stock market throughout 2017, when the VIX averaged 11—its lowest point since records began in 1990. In trade this week it has risen as high as 50.

The assumptions behind this strategy bear a striking resemblance to those that drove the trading in mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2008 crisis, which was set off by the bursting of the sub-prime bubble. Those in the sub-prime market assumed that it would always provide a positive return because, while there may be ups and down in regional markets, the national market as a whole would not fall. That assumption was shattered by the nationwide fall in US house prices in 2007–2008, leading to the meltdown.

Likewise “shorting the VIX” was based on the assumption that the calm in the markets over the past year would continue indefinitely. That was upended last Friday, setting in motion the sell-off and forcing major traders to unwind their positions.

A major feature of the turmoil, pointing to the growth of fear and panic, has been the speed of events.

On Monday, the market finished down by 1,157 points, after crashing by 900 points in the space of just 11 minutes during the last hour of trading.

On Tuesday, the market opened at more than 500 points down, then finished up by 567 points. From bottom to top, it saw a swing of 1,200 points, with 29 changes of direction during the day.

On Wednesday, it hit an intra-day high of 381 points before closing 19 points down. This was followed by a continuous fall from the time markets opened yesterday.

Exacerbating the sell-off is the fact that much of the trading is based on borrowed funds, subject to margin calls—the borrower has to return cash to the lender if the asset on which the loan is based falls in value. Faced with demands for cash, borrowers have to liquidate investments, leading to a further market downturn and a negative feedback loop as lower asset values trigger further margin calls.

Margin trading is only the tip of the international debt iceberg. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that the ratio of global debt to gross domestic product (GDP) is 40 percent higher today than a decade ago. Standard and Poor’s has reported that global non-financial corporate debt has risen by 15 percentage points to 96 percent of GDP in the past six years, with 37 percent of companies deemed to be “highly leveraged,” compared to 32 percent in 2007. With interest rates on the rise, the ability of companies and even governments to service this debt is called into question.

While trading in complex derivatives based on the VIX has been the immediate trigger for the market plunge, broader developments indicate this is a financial inflection point.

One of the continuous themes of the commentary on the market gyrations, including in a tweet by US President Donald Trump, is that the market is acting at variance with the direction of the real economy, which is showing signs of growth.

Such commentary ignores what has been the central feature of the rise and rise of the financial markets since 2008. The surge in US stock prices, rising by more than 350 percent from their low in March 2009, has taken place amid low growth—the weakest recovery from a recession in the post-war period. The “real economy” is characterised by historically low levels of investment and low productivity as profits have been diverted into ever-more risky forms of financial speculation.

The key factor in sustaining the markets has been the inflow of cheap money from the Federal Reserve, which has expanded its balance sheet from around $800 billion before 2008 to more than $4 trillion today. Speculators have operated on the assumption that the Fed is ready to step in and ensure the market will not fall precipitously, a key factor in the decline in market volatility.

That assumption is now being called into question. Confronted with an uptick in US economic growth, the Fed has started to lift interest rates, indicating that three rises may be enacted this year. Other central banks are moving in the same direction. The Bank of England indicated yesterday that interest rate rises in the UK may come sooner and be larger than expected. The European Central Bank is also under pressure to start winding back its program of quantitative easing which has sent interest rates to record lows, in some cases into negative territory.

The Fed and other central banks are concerned that if they intervene with more cheap money this may lead to a rise in inflation. That is how they characterise their greatest fear of all: an intensification of the class struggle as workers seek to regain the losses in their wages and living standards.

The market crisis is also being fuelled by the key policies of the Trump administration, supported by the Democrats, of massive tax cuts for the corporate and financial elites and a boost to military spending for war. These measures are set to push the US budget deficit toward $1 trillion from its current level of close to $700 billion.

The result will be more government bonds on the market, leading to a fall in their price, and lifting interest rates, as the two move in an inverse relationship. Even before the announcement of the latest measures to vastly increase military spending, New York Federal Reserve president Bill Dudley said in a speech last month that the current fiscal path was unsustainable and the adverse effects of the tax cuts on the budget bottom line would outweigh any positive effects on capital spending and output.

The likelihood of these measures causing interest rate rises is being exacerbated by geo-political tensions. Under conditions in which the Fed is withdrawing from bond purchases, the US is mounting a trade war against the second largest purchaser in the recent period, China. Last month, in anonymous comments, high-placed Chinese financial officials told Bloomberg they were considering pulling back on bond purchases, partly in response to the more aggressive moves by the US on trade. If this takes place, for either financial or political reasons, it can only further roil US financial markets.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the present turmoil, some clear economic and political facts of life have been established. None of the contradictions of the capitalist system, which exploded to the surface in 2008, has even been tackled, let alone overcome.

The past period has been marked by the drive to war, with the growing danger of a nuclear conflagration either on the Korean peninsula or elsewhere. At the same time the banks, finance houses and capitalist oligarchs, along with the world’s central banks, have responded to the disaster into which they plunged the world a decade ago by creating new speculative “weapons of mass financial destruction,” setting up the conditions for the eruption of a crisis even more serious than that of 2008.

The world working class must take stock of the situation. The response of the ruling classes to the current meltdown will be to impose ever-deeper attacks on its social rights than those initiated a decade ago.

The capitalist system has no political and economic legitimacy, and threatens to plunge the mass of humanity into a disaster. It must be overturned in the struggle for an international socialist program by the world working class.

Falling US life expectancy: The product of a deliberate ruling class policy

Kate Randall

An editorial in a British medical journal has focused renewed attention on the shocking reality that life expectancy in the United States is declining. “Failing health of the United States: The role of challenging life conditions and the policies behind them,” published Wednesday in BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal, builds on reports in December by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that revealed US life expectancy declined in 2016 for the second year in a row.

The editorial’s authors, Steven H. Woolf and Laudan Aron, both sat on a joint panel of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine in 2013 that investigated US health disadvantage compared to other member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to World Bank Data, the average life expectancy of an aggregate of 35 OECD countries stood at about 75.5 years in 1995. By 2015 the rate had risen to 80.3 years, while the US lagged behind at 78.7 years.

The editorial points to the myriad diseases and behaviors contributing to decreased lifespans in America, as well as to the social and economic factors driving them. The picture emerging is one of a society wracked by burgeoning social inequality, a catastrophic health crisis, and a government health policy aimed at deliberately lowering life expectancy while catering to corporate profit.

The opioid epidemic, alcohol abuse and suicides are leading causes of death in the US. The rate of fatal drug overdoses rose by 137 percent from 2000 to 2014. In 2015 alone, more than 64,000 people died from drug overdoses, exceeding the number of US fatal casualties in the Vietnam War. The suicide rate rose by a staggering 24 percent between 1999 and 2014.

These “deaths of despair” have disproportionately affected white Americans, including adults aged 25-59, those with limited education, and women. The sharpest increases have been in rural areas.

As to why the rise in mortality has been greatest among white, middle-aged adults and some rural communities, the editorial points to possible factors, which all relate to class issues. They include “the collapse of industries and the local economies they supported, the erosion of social cohesion and greater social isolation, economic hardship, and distress among white workers over losing the security their parents once enjoyed.”

The 2013 panel found that “Americans had poorer health in many domains, including birth outcomes, injuries, homicides, adolescent pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.” It found that Americans are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors, such as intake of high-calorie foods, drug abuse and firearm ownership.

The editorial also notes that such behaviors are linked to “weaker social welfare supports and lack of universal health insurance.” What does this mean in the lives of workers and their families? It means cuts to food stamps and cash welfare assistance, the shutdown of community clinics and scarcity of substance abuse programs, lack of health insurance and/or burdensome medical bills. All these factors contribute to poor health outcomes and premature deaths.

Falling life expectancy—one of the most important measures of the social health of a society—has elicited no response from any faction of the US political establishment, neither the Trump administration nor the Democratic Party. On Thursday evening, the US Senate was deliberating on a two-year budget agreement that would increase military spending by $305 billion.

At his weekly press conference, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that the main factor contributing to the government’s increasing deficit is not the Pentagon’s gargantuan budget, which funds the US military’s aggression around the globe, but the so-called entitlements—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—programs that workers depend on for their retirement and their families’ health.

As the Democratic Party continues its obsession with claims of Russian meddling in the 2018 US elections, the Trump administration has pursued its assault on social programs. After failing in numerous attempts to repeal and/or replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the White House repealed the ACA’s individual mandate as part of the corporate tax overhaul, and has allowed states to begin imposing work requirements for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and the disabled.

Discussion of health care and the well-being of American workers has become a non-issue for the Democrats, as they have emerged as the most adamant representatives of the military-intelligence agencies, supporting an impending war against Russia—in opposition to Trump and the Republicans and their saber-rattling against North Korea.

In reality, the war against the health of American workers has been a bipartisan conspiracy conducted over decades as part of a conscious strategy to pare back the gains won through the social struggles of the working class begun over a century ago.

Under the Obama administration, the implementation of the ACA was a key volley in the ruling elite’s social counterrevolution in health care. Sold as an expansion of health care, it was in fact aimed at limiting and rationing workers’ access to vital medical treatments and medicines as “unnecessary” and “lavish.” At the same time, through the universal mandate, it required individuals and families to purchase coverage from private health insurers under threat of tax penalties.

Both the Democrats and Republicans bemoan the high cost of health care in America. But the reality is that the high cost of health care—Americans pay on average $10,000 per person, per year—is not the result of actual spending on health care for workers and their families for vital treatments. It is because the US leaves the vast majority of pricing for drugs, procedures and hospital stays in the hands of the private sector. While hospitals and drug companies charge outrageous prices, millions of people remain uninsured and untreated.

For the ruling class, the increasing number of deaths of working men, women and youth is a “cost of doing business.” Indeed, it is seen as a positive good, as early deaths mean fewer costs associated with caring for the elderly—and more resources to pump into the stock market.

The US health care crisis is a national emergency. The ruling classes of the world, moreover, look to the US as a model for their own ruthless assault on jobs and social programs. To address this crisis requires a frontal assault on the wealth of the corporate and financial elite.

The Socialist Equality Party calls for the expropriation of the wealth of the corporate and financial aristocracy, and the transformation of the giant drug and health care corporations into public utilities, run on the basis of social need. The vast resources currently monopolized by the top one percent must be made available to finance a universal health care system, in which everyone has access to high-quality care as a basic social right.

Such a social and economic reorganization requires the building of a mass movement of the working class, in opposition to both Democrats and Republicans, uniting workers of all races and nationalities in a fight against the capitalist profit system.

Canada’s defence minister touts new offensive cyberwar powers

Laurent Lafrance

Canada’s Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has reaffirmed his support for the new offensive cyberwar capabilities that are to be granted the Communications Security Establishment (CSE)—Canada’s signals intelligence agency and close partner of the US National Security Agency (NSA)—under the Liberal government’s Bill C-59.

The Liberals have promoted Bill C-59 as a corrective to Bill C-51, the draconian legislation that the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper passed in 2015, with Liberal support, under the guise of fighting “terrorism.”

The “reforms” in Bill C-59 will leave most of the sweeping powers granted the security agencies under Bill C-51intact. Canada’s premier domestic security agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, will retain the power to break virtually any law in actively “disrupting” threats to national security. In some respects, especially cyber war, Bill C-59 goes beyond Bill C-51.

Claiming that the new powers were “just about us evolving to the various threats,” Sajjan declared last month, “We will always reserve the right to be able to defend our soldiers regardless what type of (tactics are) being used against them.”

The attempt to portray the CSE’s new cyberwar powers as “defensive” terms is a flat out lie. For the first time in CSE’s history, the highly secretive agency will be legally authorized and given the capabilities to launch offensive cyber-attacks on foreign targets, including individuals, state organizations, and alleged terrorist groups deemed a threat to “national security.” CSE’s function was in the past limited—at least officially—to intelligence gathering, defending government networks, and assisting CSIS, the RCMP and other domestic security agencies.

Under Bills C-51 and C-59, CSE is also empowered to lend support to CSIS in exercising its powers to disrupt internal threats to national security, including presumably through cyberwar tactics.

Researchers from the University of Toronto’s CitizenLab and the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) made a detailed analysis of Bill C-59 that shed light on its anti-democratic character. They noted that CSE’s cyber-attacks and espionage campaigns have “the potential to seriously interfere with Charter-protected rights and freedoms.”

The report states: “From mass dissemination of false information, to impersonation, leaking foreign documents in order to influence political and legal outcomes, disabling account or network access, large-scale denial of service attacks, and interference with the electricity grid, the possibilities for the types of activities contemplated in (Bill C-59) are limited only by the imagination.”

CitizenLab also points to a “loophole” contained in the new CSE Act that would allow the agency in its overseas operations to “cause death or bodily harm,” and to interfere with the “course of justice or democracy.”

The new powers granted to the intelligence agencies under Bill C-59 flows from the ruling elite’s recognition that control over cyberspace is essential for waging war and suppressing social opposition at home.

Since coming to power in 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have expanded Canadian imperialism’s involvement in all of Washington’s wars and military-strategic offensives around the world, including by deploying hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as part of NATO’s aggressive encirclement of Russia, and participating in provocative military exercises in the Asia-Pacific aimed at China.

Since the emergence of the hysterical campaign led by the US Democratic Party over unsubstantiated claims of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US elections, governments around the world have used this pretext to augment the powers of their intelligence agencies. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, an anti-Russia hawk, warned last March that Canada should be prepared for Russian hacking in the next Canadian federal election, even though CSE reported last June that it had never detected any attempt by a foreign power to interfere in a Canadian election.

The head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, attended the Security Forum in Halifax last November where he encouraged all of its members to beef up their cybersecurity protocols and to share “best practices.” Stoltenberg accused Russia of waging a digital disinformation campaign against the Canadian soldiers deployed to Latvia as part of NATO’s military buildup against Russia in Eastern Europe. Without providing any details, he said social media have been spreading false or misleading stories accusing Canadian soldiers of bad behaviour or living at Latvia’s expense.

The Trudeau government and its NATO allies invoke the Russian bogeyman the better to prepare their own aggression.

As Christopher Parsons, a researcher with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab observed, the CSE’s new mandate will “normalize” Canadian state-sponsored hacking and disinformation operations, exactly what Canada regularly accuses Russia of doing.

While the Liberals have tried to cloak Bill C-59 in progressive garb with the creation of a new “super watch-dog” committee to oversee the activities of CSE and CSIS, the CitizenLab researchers note that, in reality, cyber-attacks will be waged with “a complete lack of meaningful” oversight. Cyber war operations will require sign-off from the minister of national defence and the minister of foreign affairs, but not approval by the proposed new independent Intelligence Commissioner and will remain permanently secret.

Armed with new offensive capacities, CSE will seek to integrate itself more deeply with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to play a greater role in imperialist war abroad. The Liberals’ new defence policy made public last June, which announced a 70 percent increase in military spending over the next decade, called for the creation of a new job category of “cyber operator” to “increase the number of military personnel dedicated to cyberwar functions.”

CSE has been collaborating for years with the military. In 2016, CSE spokesman Ryan Foreman admitted that the agency was assisting the CAF under the umbrella of Operation Impact, the name of Canada's mission in support of the US-led military intervention in the Middle East. CSE also played a key role during the Afghan war, providing the Canadian military with half of the battlefield intelligence it used to track and monitor Taliban militants and commanders.

Just like CSE’s foreign activities, its domestic operations are largely unknown to ordinary people because the intelligence agencies are legally entitled to safeguard the “covert nature” of their operations in the name of national security.

Government officials have long sought to conceal the fact that CSE is spying on Canadians by asserting that the agency is only concerned with “foreign threats,” even though it is officially mandated to support CSIS, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other police agencies in countering “domestic subversion.”

But in 2013, thanks in part to revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it became public knowledge that CSE has been systematically mining the metadata generated by Canadians’ electronic communication since at least 2005. Through the analysis of metadata, the state can draw a detailed profile of an individual or an organization. This includes identifying daily patterns of behaviour, friends and associates, workplaces, and political opinions.

Moreover, as a member of the “Five Eyes” partnership, which in addition to the NSA includes the signals intelligence agencies of the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, CSE can use information gathered by its partners, who are under no legal obligation to disregard information that they obtain on Canadians.

The CitizenLab report also explains that an exception contained in Bill C-59 grants license to the CSE to collect “in bulk” information on Canadians published or available through social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. That includes “facial imagery, posts, photographs, videos, relationships, public location data, behaviour patterns and more.”

Bill C-59 not only grants expansive new powers to CSE. It expands CSIS’ power to store and analyze electronic data and share it with other spy and police agencies.

The strengthening of the intelligence agencies’ authoritarian powers is bound up with the ruling elite’s turn to militarism and aggression abroad. These policies, which will be paid for by an intensification of the assault on the working class, are incompatible with any form of democratic rule. The increased repression makes clear that what the ruling elite fear above all else is the emergence of social opposition, including an anti-war movement in the working class, against its right-wing agenda of war, austerity and social reaction.

Spain to double its military spending

Alejandro López 

Defence spending will double by 2024, Defence Minister María Dolores de Cospedal has told Spain’s parliamentary Defence Committee. The defence budget will increase from 0.8 percent of GDP (€8.7 billion) to 1.53 percent (€18.47 billion).

To limit popular opposition to war and anger against increased military expenditure, while austerity has decimated public services and made life more precarious for millions of workers and youth, Cospedal refused to publish the letter addressed to NATO outlining the increase, as she had initially promised. She claimed that part of the content was classified as secret.

Secrecy also surrounds the real level of current military spending. According to the pacifist organisation Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, there is a whole swathe of military related expenditure that is excluded from the defence budget. If social security, pensions and insurance for the military, missions abroad, state aid for military research and development at private companies, the budget of the militarised Civil Guards and NATO fees were included, then the true figure would stand at around €18.8 billion. By 2024, it will really be “the implausible figure of €28 billion a year,” the Centre declared.

Spain’s increase in military expenditure is in response to the agreement made at last May’s NATO summit, under intense pressure from the Trump administration, for all NATO members to increase defence spending by 2024 to 2 percent of GDP.

Cospedal admitted that the increase to 1.53 percent fell short of NATO’s objective, but insisted it would “facilitate the achievement of that horizon in future years” and was in line with targets set by other European countries.

An idea of the scale of the upgrade and renewal of the military can be gathered from the list of new equipment that will be purchased. Included are 348 new Piranha 5 armoured infantry vehicles, which are designed for close combat situations, five F-110 frigates, four S-80 submarines, three Multi Role Tanker Transport refuelling aircraft, 23 NH-90 helicopters, a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a new training aircraft. In addition, the army will acquire a new Command and Control System and the renovation of its barracks, 17 Chinook helicopters will be modernized, and Spain will contribute funds towards the replacement for the F-18 fighter jet.

Cospedal confirmed that the military spending in Spain’s participation in 17 military missions around the globe last year was €835 million, 8.2 percent more than the previous year. Spain will participate in the European Union’s (EU) Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) on security and defence and will head the Command and Control System for EU Missions and Operations. PESCO was agreed last November by 23 of the EU’s 28 member states “to jointly develop defence capabilities and make them available for EU military operations.”

Spain’s commitment to PESCO reflects the attempt by the ruling elite in Spain and in Europe to defend their economic and military positions vis-a-vis actual and potential competitors, in a situation threatened by Brexit and the Trump administration’s “America First” policy.

The Spanish government is attempting to straddle the contradictions of supporting both the German-led PESCO and the US-led NATO, two militarist projects that are incompatible in the long term. This was reflected in a resolution proposed by the government to be debated in an upcoming parliamentary session, which calls for improvements to EU-US relations in the sphere of defence, while concluding that “Europeans must assume more than ever before the responsibility of our own security.”

The growth of Spanish militarism, as elsewhere globally, is the response of the ruling class to rising inequality, the deepening economic crisis and the growing conflicts between the major powers. Its aim, as recently expressed in the new US National Security Strategy, is the conquest of new spheres of influence, markets and raw materials—above all in conflict with Russia and China—and to deflect social tensions outwards.

The main obstacle for the Spanish ruling class is the population’s traditional hostility towards the military. This was recently revealed in the attempt to open a debate to re-impose conscription, following the example of France under President Emmanuel Macron. All the main dailies published articles and opinion pieces bemoaning the population’s hostility to such a measure.

The pro-militarist senior researcher for the Real Instituto Elcano, Félix Arteaga, complained to El Mundo, “Raising it [conscription] here would be political suicide, first because there is no military need to justify it, and second, because the concept of obligation is not liked by Spanish society. There is no mentality or culture of national identity and, of course, no one believes that you should lose your life for the defence of the country.”

The ability of Spain’s ruling elite to pursue its military ambitions is to a large extent due to the role of the pseudo-left Podemos, which has been virtually silent on these developments or has openly endorsed them. Last month Podemos covered up for increased Spanish intervention in Mali, where an EU “Training Mission” still continues five years after jihadist groups overran the north of the country in 2012, prompting a wave of refugees. Thousands attempted to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, and many drowned.

On January 24, Cospedal appeared before the Defence Commission to get belated authorisation for approving Spain’s taking over control of the mission and sending in more troops on January 9. She warned the commission that increased involvement in the EU intervention was “fundamental” and that North Africa was “a strategic place” for Spain.

Juan Antonio Delgado, the Podemos spokesperson for military affairs, complained that Cospedal had “broken the law” by sending in the troops before parliamentary approval. He revealed, “I was in Mali three months ago and I learned that Spain would take over the operation,” before asking Cospedal, “In that time has there not been time to ask for authorization?”

The obvious question is why Delgado himself did not pursue the issue… and when it came to the vote [on authorisation] at the commission he merely abstained.

Even more explicit was Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias, who attacked Cospedal from the right over the death of a pilot killed in a jet crash last October. He told her, “Patriotism is defending the rights of the professionals of our Armed Forces. It is shameful that in this country some who fill their mouths talking about our homeland do not respect the rights of workers who are here to protect us all and whose lives cannot be endangered.”

Such statements prove Podemos is a pro-war party, offering itself as a reliable political platform for Spanish militarism. Since its foundation, Podemos has created branches in the army and made an explicit effort to articulate its main demands. Former Chief of the Defence Staff Julio Rodríguez Fernández has stood as a Podemos candidate in recent parliamentary elections and is the general secretary of Podemos in the municipality of Madrid, where he will be the party’s main candidate in next year’s elections.

Belgium: terror trial begins of Saleh Abdeslam, “Europe’s most wanted man”

Anthony Torres 

The trial of the sole survivor of the team that carried out the 13 November 2015 attacks in Paris, Saleh Abdeslam, opened Monday in Belgium. Saleh Abdeslam and co-defendant Sofiane Ayari face up to 40 years in jail for shooting at policemen during a search shortly before Abdeslam’s arrest on 18 March 2016 in Brussels. Abdeslam would then face trial in France over the November 13, 2015 attacks, though the date of the trial has not been fixed. Ayari is also a suspect in the attacks, and the French courts have asked for his extradition.

From the outset, these trials are essentially cover-ups, with the guilty parties hiding under the cloak of the accusers. US and European intelligence services provided cover and official protection to the Islamist networks of which Abdeslam was a part, which waged a bloody NATO proxy war in Syria before organizing terror attacks across Europe. But these trials are passing over their role in the attacks. Abdeslam and Ayari are alone in the defendants’ box, but most of the heads of state of Europe deserve to be there as well.

The European Union’s (EU) “war on terror” and its reactionary security build-up is an illegitimate policy founded on political lies. The ruling class exploited these attacks to impose states of emergency or large-scale police operations across Europe, repress mass opposition to France’s anti-worker labor law, and carry out mass surveillance of the population—as supposedly the only way to deal with the terror threat.

The issues involved in the Abdeslam trial are explosive, and the trial was organized extremely slowly and under enormous pressure. It began two years after the arrest of Abdeslam, who now suffers from psychological disorders after having been held in solitary confinement in France’s Fleury-Mérogis prison.

On Monday, Abdeslam initially refused to reply to questions. He told the court, “I do not fear you, I do not fear your allies, associates, I place my trust in Allah and that is all, I have nothing to add.” Later, he declared, “My silence does not make me guilty or a criminal. There is tangible and scientific evidence in my file, I would like to be judged on that.”

Given Abdeslam’s silence, the Tuesday session was canceled and the trial may end as early as today, according to Luc Hennart, the president of the lower-level court in Brussels: “It cannot be ruled out that the proceedings will go more quickly than we had planned. Everything will depend on the attitude of the accused; if they decide to exercise their right to silence, clearly the proceedings will go more quickly than if they express themselves.”

Total silence still reigns on the role of the European intelligence services, though it can be extensively documented based on reports in the mass media. A few days after Abdeslam’s arrest, remarkable revelations had already emerged on the inexplicable failures of the Belgian and allied services. They involved both the March 22, 2016 attacks in Brussels that killed 31 and wounded 270, and the role of Abdeslam in the November 13 attacks in Paris.

According to Gilbert Dupont’s article in La Dernière Heure-Les Sports, which was cited by other francophone dailies, elements in the Belgian police were aware of where Abdeslam—who the media was then universally calling “Europe’s most wanted man”—was hiding in the Brussels area.

Dupont wrote, “According to our sources, a Malines policeman had cited, since 7 December 2015, in a confidential report to the anti-terror section of the federal judicial police in Brussels, the address of 79, rue des Quatre Vents in Molenbeek, where Saleh Abdeslam was found on Friday. The confidential report (in official jargon a RIR, Rapport Informatief Rapport ) was not passed on. It was held and stayed stuck for three months in the Malines police department.”

The Comité P, the Belgian police’s oversight committee, was forced to open an investigation of this failure, but it produced nothing. It is still unknown where the report was blocked and how far it went up the chain of command. Malines police have denied having blocked or even seen the report.

As unidentified sections of the Belgian police force were hiding Abdeslam, other policemen arrived on March 15, 2016 to an apartment in the Forest neighborhood in Brussels to carry out searches. They were greeted with gunshots. Police then began tracking the cell phones of two men who had fled the building during the attacks, one of whom turned out to be Abdeslam. Remarkably, Abdeslam did not get rid of either his telephone or his SIM card during or after the encounter with police, thus allowing police to follow and capture him.

For fourth months since the November 15 attacks, however, a large terror network had been allowed to prepare the Brussels attacks of March 22, 2016—three days after Abdeslam’s arrest. Russian, Turkish and Israeli intelligence had identified members of those networks and warned Belgian and allied intelligence agencies that Brussels’ subway and Zaventem airport were targets. Yet the network was still free, shortly after the arrest of “Europe’s most wanted man,” to launch its attack.

The network had benefited from a new series of inexplicable failures by police. Belgian liaison officers in Turkey supposedly failed to check their email to discover that Turkey had expelled Ibrahim El Bakraoui to Europe on suspicion of terrorism in July 2015. Remarkably, when they did in fact notify their superiors in the Brussels judicial police, they received no response and no decision was taken to follow El Bakraoui.

At the time, the WSWS wrote, “It is clear that the individuals who carried out the March 22 bombings and the November 13 and Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris are part of a broader group of people who have been allowed to freely travel to and from the Middle East. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the ease with which these forces permeate national borders and conduct operations is that there are protocols in place to ease their passage and lower any red flags. They operate under a veil of official protection.”

What little has emerged from official investigations confirmed this analysis. It is now known that, well before the November 13 attacks, Abdeslam was well known to European authorities, who had documented evidence of his links to terrorist networks. Turkish authorities had arrested him in January 2015, preventing him from traveling to Syria and deporting him to Belgium, after which Belgian intelligence identified him as a threat.

The Belgian police committee’s report on intelligence failures claimed that anti-terrorist services lost Abdeslam’s GSM card and failed to look at his USB key after confiscating them from Abdeslam in February 2015, fully nine months before the Paris attacks. According to La Dernière Heure, “Indeed, there were on that phone, at that time in February 2015, phone numbers of people known today for being implicated in the Paris and Brussels attacks.”

This underscores that, for many years, the framework on which Paris, Brussels and their European allies based and justified their austerity and law-and-order measures was based on political lies.

UK High Court rejects Lauri Love’s extradition to US

Margot Miller

Alleged computer hacker Lauri Love celebrated with his family and friends on Monday, after winning his appeal in the UK High Court against extradition to the United States.

The High Court judges agreed with Love’s legal team that, on medical grounds, he should be tried in the UK, not the US.

Love has Asperger’s Syndrome, eczema and a history of depression. He has threatened to commit suicide should he be extradited to the US, where he would be facing a possible lifetime prison sentence and fines of up to £6.3 million.

Love’s ordeal began in October 2013 when he was arrested in Suffolk under the UK Computer Misuse Act, accused of breaching the security of NASA and the FBI. He was not charged with any crime, and in October 2014 the Crown Prosecution Service said they no longer intended to prosecute.

However, in 2015 Love was charged, this time under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, with hacking into the Federal Reserve Bank and the Department of Defense.

UK police executed an extradition order against Love on behalf of the US, and the following year Westminster magistrate’s court ruled in favour of the extradition request—signed off on by Home Secretary Amber Rudd in November 2016.

Speaking on the steps of the High Court in London, Love, 33, explained why he had fought extradition. He said it was “not just to save myself from being kidnapped and locked up for 99 years in a country I’ve never visited, but it’s to set a precedent whereby this will not happen to other people in the future. If there is suspected criminality, then it will be tried in the UK, and America will not be able to exercise exorbitant territorial jurisdiction.”

The head of legal casework for the campaign group Liberty, Emma Norton, declared her delight that the court had “recognised Lauri’s vulnerability, close family connexions to the UK and the potentially catastrophic consequences of extraditing him.”

The judges ruled, “The support of his family, in particular, would mean that he would be at far lower a risk of suicide” if he remained in the UK.

They added that there is “no satisfactory and sufficiently specific evidence” that Love would receive the necessary treatment for his medical conditions in a US prison.

The judges, nevertheless, urged the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service to “bend its endeavours” to prosecute Love. “If proven, these are serious offences indeed,” the ruling states.

Authorities in the US now have up to 14 days to request an appeal at the UK Supreme Court. Love has not denied the charges against him, but the US has refused to reveal any evidence it has until he is on US soil.

Love allegedly took part in OpLastResort 2012-2013, a hacking operation by the “hacktivist” group Anonymous to protest the treatment of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while awaiting trial on alleged hacking and fraud charges. Among the complaints of Anonymous was the “disproportionate prosecution” of hackers by prosecutors operating “in the interests of oppression or personal gain.”

Swartz’s “crime” was to download more than four million documents from JSTOR, a database of academic journals not freely available due to the high cost of access fees, even though the research was publicly funded. At the time, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu said “JSTOR suffered no economic loss.”

Swartz also co-authored DeadDrop—software enabling whistleblowers to send sensitive documents securely to journalists, used today under the name SecureDrop.

Love’s case is the first application of the forum bar, introduced by Prime Minister Theresa May when she was Home Secretary as section 83A of the Extradition Act.

This was a consequence of the US extradition request against Gary McKinnon, which May blocked in October 2012 after facing a mountain of criticism. McKinnon faced up to 60 years in a US jail if convicted of hacking charges.

Like Love, McKinnon has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers with depression, and had to fight extradition for ten years. He was permitted to remain in the UK because his condition gave rise “to such a high risk of him ending his life” that it would breach his human rights.

May said that the forum bar meant that “where prosecution is possible in both the UK and in another state, the British courts will be able to bar prosecution overseas if they believe it is in the interests of justice to do so.”

Sarah Harrison, director of the Courage Foundation, which organises Love’s defence campaign, previously stated, “Clear assurances were given that legal changes would prevent the McKinnon situation from happening again and, frankly, if the forum bar can’t help Lauri Love, it’s very difficult to understand how it could ever help anyone.”

The US authorities pursue whomever they deem an enemy of the state with the ruthlessness of a vendetta. This was the case with Chelsea Manning—the former US Army private jailed for seven years for passing documents to WikiLeaks exposing US government atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan—and with Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks founder Assange has been a virtual prisoner in the Ecuadorian Embassy for the past five and a half years. He entered the Embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden on trumped up allegations of sexual misconduct--and from there to the US. The US administration has kept live a grand jury empowered in 2010 to bring secret, unspecified charges against Assange that could carry the death penalty.

In the case of Love, his US lawyer Tor Ekeland declared that the “punishment that they’re [US authorities] seeking is disproportionate to any alleged harm.”

Love’s father, Reverend Alexander Love, speaking on the BBC’s Radio 4, described the pursuit of his son by the US as “state vengeance.”

He explained that “three servers and three different states are involved... three different trials and cumulative sentences…[This is] punitive justice...to punish my son to deter others.”

In relation to the Extradition Act 2003, passed by war criminal Tony Blair’s Labour government, Reverend Love said, “This is a very bad law…This law was signed by Tony Blair when he was cosying up to the Americans.”

It should be Blair—who dragged the UK in an illegal war against Iraq based on lies about weapons of mass destruction—standing in the dock.

Workers should demand that all charges against Lauri Love are dropped. The US, Britain and other capitalist governments are jealously guarding their state secrets, war crimes and financial wrongdoings, fearful of opposition in the working class when such information reaches the public domain.

Thousands of workers in Puerto Rico continue to live without running water

Antonio Castro

Antonio Castro lives just outside San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, on the far east side of the island. Since Hurricane María made landfall on the US territory in late September, conditions have been difficult for Antonio and his family. Like hundreds of thousands of other workers and youth on the island, Antonio continues to struggle without the basic amenities of modern life,including electricity and running water. The following is part of a series of reports on conditions in Puerto Rico.

February 20 will mark five months of life without power for thousands of us here on Puerto Rico since Hurricane María made landfall in September. It is not well known that it has in fact been even longer for many because the smaller Hurricane Irma caused major power outages the month prior to María.

Hurricane María changed our way of life quite dramatically. In addition to being without power, many of us on the island have faced months without running tap water in our homes. As I explained in an earlier article, electricity is needed to pump water to the elevated rural areas and also to power treatment plants. In our community, as in other ones across the island, this means that we must look for alternate sources of water for our daily needs.

Before the storm, most families stored enough supplies for one to two weeks. However, these resources eventually ran out, and everyone had to scramble to replenish their food and clean water supplies however they could. Chaos struck. Gasoline for cars was very scarce, which meant people were largely stranded where they had passed the storm. They could not check on family in other parts of the island, travel long distances for needed supplies, or get medical care.

The few stores that were able to open had lines that went on for hours and very limited supplies. Many stores took advantage of the situation and raised prices for the most sought-after items, including water. Before the storm, we could by a 12-bottle pack or water for around $2 to $3, but prices rose to $8 to $12 dollars after. Containers for both gasoline and water became scarce and expensive. What most of us did was to save any plastic container we could find to keep water. It could be anything from an old detergent jug to recycled paint buckets.

Water being delivered to workers who still do not have power or running water

Not having access to clean running water, something so essential for life, has had a serious impact on us. For months we have had to go and fetch water from several resources on a daily basis. Water that is safe enough for cooking and drinking has to be from bottled sources or from an oasis in the downtown area shared by the entire community. The local city government took ages before it provided tank trucks from which we could gather and save drinking water for a few days. For the washing and tasks other than drinking, we head to the local stream or creek. I know of many places on the island where entire families had to gather at rivers and streams to do the washing, dishes, bathing and even drinking.

To collect water from creeks and springs we would reuse an old PVC or metal pipe, improvise a funnel with a plastic bottle and use whatever was at hand to hold the pipe in place often with rocks. This made water collection from the stream efficient, given the circumstances. This was not potable water, so we couldn’t drink it or cook with it. Tragically, many people in other parts of the island didn't have such a choice; they had to use whatever source of water they could find. In the weeks following the hurricane, images emerged of residents in the town of Dorado collecting water from a federally designated hazardous-waste site. Water from this location could be potentially contaminated and be harmful if consumed.

The creek used by Antonio and his community for washing dishes and clothes

In another town, Canóvanas, people were using spring water that was contaminated with rat urine. The use of river and stream water for drinking led to a leptospirosis breakout among the population in several towns. Local authorities were warning residents not to use unsafe water sources and only use bottled water or safe tap water, as if the people were drinking unsafe water by choice. There was no tap water in homes, limited supplies in stores, in many places still no access to roads and no tank trucks provided by local city government. We had no option but to use whatever water source was available; even rainwater was saved.

I recognize many of the struggles of workers in Kentucky, Flint and Cape Town, South Africa for the right to clean water as part of my own. Thousands of families are living without access to safe water, while government authorities do little to nothing to resolve the issue. We Puerto Rican workers stand in solidarity with workers in all these regions. We are facing the same difficulties because of government indifference to the conditions of the working class. Instead, the capitalists continue to enrich themselves off the labor of the workers and by exploiting situations like the natural disaster that struck Puerto Rico.

Earthquake hits Taiwan, killing eight people and injuring hundreds

Eric Ludlow

A magnitude-6.4 earthquake hit eastern Taiwan’s port city of Hualien just before midnight local time on Tuesday, causing some buildings to tilt severely and crumble. At least eight people were killed and over 260 injured. Rescue teams are still searching in the rubble for at least 60 missing people.

Built in 1977, the 10-storey Marshall Hotel’s lower floors collapsed, trapping residents and leaving the building slanting on its side. Many people remain stuck in the bottom two floors. Emergency workers used large beams, raised with a crane, to prop up the building in a bid to prevent it from toppling further.

Rescuers have been digging “nonstop on the backside of the building” in an attempt to rescue people caught on the lower floors, Hualien County fire commander Zhu Zhe-min said.

Six hundred military personnel and more than 750 firefighters have been aiding the rescue efforts, according to Taiwan’s Central Emergency Operation Center. Volunteer rescue worker Yang His Hua said it was “the worst earthquake in the history of Hualien, or at least over the past 40 years that I’ve been alive.”

Apart from the Marshall Hotel, the worst-hit structures were in a nearby residential area. Five more buildings were badly damaged, including a hospital and the 12-storey Yunmen Tsuiti apartment block, which is now leaning at a more than 40-degree angle.

One Yunmen Tsuiti apartment resident told Agence France-Presse: “I saw the first floor sink into the ground. Then it sunk and tilted further and the fourth floor became the first floor.” An elderly resident who was inside his apartment at the time of the quake said: “Everything fell down. My bed was completely vertical, I was sleeping and suddenly I was standing.”

Hualien is a popular tourist destination and home to around 100,000 people. After the earthquake, about 40,000 homes were left without water and an estimated 1,900 without power. Water supply has been returned to some 5,000 homes and power to around 1,700. The government reported that two bridges in the city were either cracked or could not be used and that many roads were buckled and dangerous.

The earthquake’s epicentre was about 9.5 kilometres deep and 21 kilometres northeast of the city, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Taiwan is part of the “Ring of Fire”—a geological formation that runs around the Pacific Ocean where large continental tectonic plates meet. It is known for regular volcanic and seismic activity. The island sits on the boundary between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, which are converging at 80 mm per year.

Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau said at least 15 aftershocks, measuring as much as 4.8 in magnitude, shook the area yesterday afternoon and evening and warned that more—up to magnitude-5.0—are expected in the next two weeks. A 5.7 quake occurred near Hualien later that day, hampering recovery efforts.

Residents have been told to stay away from their damaged homes. About 800 have taken shelter in community buildings, including a newly-built baseball stadium, where relief organisations provided emergency supplies. However, with the powerful aftershocks and the warnings of more, many people have resorted to sleeping in tents and cars.

Tuesday’s quake followed about 100 smaller tremours that hit the area in the preceding three days, including two shocks, magnitude-5.3 and -6.1, recorded within 45 minutes of each other on Sunday night.

Chen Kuo-chang, the acting director of the Central Weather Bureau’s Seismology Center, said the seismic pattern was stronger than anything previously recorded in the area. “It is unprecedented and not a normal release of energy,” he told CNN. While earthquakes were common, he added, it was rare to have so many quakes in short succession.

Taiwan’s worst earthquake in recent decades was a 7.6-magnitude quake in September 1999 that killed around 2,400 people. Just two years ago, a 6.4-quake, the same magnitude as this week’s, struck the southern city of Tainan in February 2016, killing 117 people. Many of those killed were residents of the 16-storey Wei-kuan apartment complex, which toppled on its side, burying many of its residents in the rubble.

An investigation into the safety of that building revealed that metal cans and foam had been used as fillers in the concrete. Five people were charged, including the developer and two architects. Prosecutors said they “cut corners,” affecting the building’s structural integrity.

Thus far, no similar issues have been raised in regard to Tuesday’s earthquake. But the fact that so many structures were badly damaged is a further indication that building standards in the earthquake-prone island are inadequate. Without proper infrastructure and earthquake-proof buildings, many more lives will be lost in future events.

Senate Democrats agree to massive boost in military spending

Josh Varlin

Senate Democrats on Wednesday agreed to a bipartisan two-year budget deal boosting defense spending by $160 billion, well above what the Trump administration requested in its budget proposal. The agreement demonstrates that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, support preparations for new and more bloody wars, including with major nuclear-armed powers such as Russia and China.

The deal comes within the context of the recently released National Defense Strategy and Nuclear Posture Review, which declare that the new axis of American military strategy is preparation for “great-power competition,” i.e., world war. The documents single out Iran, North Korea, China and Russia—three of which are nuclear-armed—and outline a plan for the development of so-called “low-yield” nuclear weapons to be used in battle.

The budget deal also includes some $120 billion in additional domestic spending, of which $20 billion is earmarked for infrastructure and $6 billion for the opioid crisis. Bloomberg News reports, “The deal would be at least partly paid for by cuts to mandatory spending programs elsewhere in the budget, according to the Republican summary.”

The agreement does not provide protection for some 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants who are enrolled in or eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This program is slated to end March 5 due to President Donald Trump’s rescinding of it last fall. The 800,000 DACA enrollees, having given the government their names and addresses and admitted that they are undocumented, are threatened with being deported en masse starting in less than a month.

The budget plan, agreed to by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Charles Schumer, demonstrates that both big business parties agree on military escalation and further attacks on immigrant rights. From start to finish, the budget negotiations have been a cynical charade in which two right-wing parties determine how best to fund US imperialism, deport immigrant workers and attack vital social services.

The right-wing character of the Senate deal is underscored by the fact that Defense Secretary and retired General James Mattis is a major supporter. Mattis appeared before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, where he warned against passing repeated continuing resolutions instead of a full budget. He spoke not as a supplicant, but rather as a commander addressing his subordinates, issuing Congress its marching orders to end the uncertainty and get on with the business of approving a huge increase in the Pentagon budget.

Mattis told the committee: “Should you stumble into a year-long continuing resolution, your military will not be able to provide pay for our troops by the end of the fiscal year, not recruit the 15,000 Army soldiers and 4,000 Air Force airmen required to fill critical manning shortfalls ... and delay contracts for vital acquisition programs necessary to modernize the force.”

After Senate leaders announced the agreement, Mattis praised it at a news conference in the White House briefing room, where he repeated almost verbatim his warning to the House Armed Services Committee. He also reiterated that he was providing the White House with options for a military attack on North Korea.

The $80 billion in additional military spending per year surpasses Trump’s budget request for the fiscal year, which asked for an added $54 billion, itself a 10 percent increase. The legislation provides $700 billion for defense programs in 2018 and $716 billion in 2019.

It also includes some $80 billion for disaster relief from the hurricanes and wildfires that have devastated Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida and California, months after the disasters occurred. This entirely inadequate amount will do next to nothing to aid the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes and possessions or build the infrastructure needed to minimize the impact of future natural disasters. Some 40 percent of Puerto Ricans are still without power, suffering for months in the longest and biggest blackout in US history.

The Senate deal also extends the deadline for lifting the nation’s debt ceiling from next month to March 2019.

It is well understood by both parties that the increase in the budget deficit resulting from the new spending, most of which is for the military, will be used as a pretext to cut major domestic programs and entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The deal comes less than two days before the deadline to pass a continuing budget resolution. If neither a full budget nor a stopgap measure is passed by 12:01 a.m. Friday, the government will shut down, during which “non-essential” services will be suspended and hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be furloughed.

The Senate is expected to pass the budget today, after which the House must pass it before it can go to Trump for his signature. Although the Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress, a group of ultra-right budget-hawk Republicans organized in the Freedom Caucus is expected to vote against the deal, necessitating Democratic support.

House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that she and many other Democrats would not support the Senate budget deal unless House Speaker Paul Ryan pledged to allow a discussion on a bipartisan immigration deal including protection for DACA recipients following any extension of spending to keep the federal government open.

Pelosi took to the House floor in a political stunt, speaking for eight hours on her demand that Ryan agree to discuss immigration reform. Ryan has said that he will debate immigration legislation only if it is supported by Trump, who has proposed a draconian 12-year-long citizenship process for DACA-eligible youth, coupled with his border wall and other measures to militarize the US-Mexico border, along with drastic cuts to legal immigration.

The Democrats broadly support this agenda, as indicated by immigration bills introduced in both houses of Congress and co-sponsored by Democrats and Republicans.

Pelosi’s speech and declared opposition to the Senate deal plumb new depths of cynicism, even for the Democratic Party. Pelosi worked with Schumer on the spending bill for weeks, according to CNN.

Last month, the Democrats forced a partial government shutdown, supposedly to demand that any budget resolution include protection for DACA youth faced with deportation in a matter of weeks. In less than three days, the Democrats agreed to reopen the government and decouple immigration from the budget on the basis of McConnell’s promise to discuss immigration reform. Now, Pelosi is demanding in the House what Schumer settled for in January in the Senate—a worthless promise, this time from Ryan.

Any immigration bill eventually passed by both houses and signed by Trump will provide for a buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Border Patrol police; an expansion of immigration courts and jails; further curtailment of due process rights for immigrants; an end to the diversity lottery system, which permits entry by a small number of immigrants from African countries and other underrepresented regions; and abolition of the right of legal immigrants to petition to bring their parents and other family members to the US. It will effectively sanction Trump’s policy of terrorizing undocumented immigrants and deporting them en masse.

Pelosi’s stunt is an effort to provide political cover for the Democrats’ support for this right-wing immigration policy and promote the illusion that Democratic Party defends the Dreamers.

For his part, Trump, emboldened by the Democrats’ capitulation, said on Tuesday that he would favor a shutdown if it could result in his xenophobic immigration policies being implemented. “I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of,” Trump said at a White House roundtable.

The Democrats’ agreement on a right-wing budget plan is part of their broader collaboration in implementing Trump’s social and economic agenda, including his tax cut for the rich. The contrast between this and their escalating conflict with the White House over the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into fabricated charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign and continuing subversion, and collusion by Trump officials and the president himself, underscores the entirely right-wing basis of their opposition to the administration.

Aligned with the dominant sections of the intelligence/military complex, the Democrats’ opposition is focused on differences over US imperialist foreign policy. In the political warfare between equally right-wing factions within the ruling class and the state, they speak for the camp that demands there be no retreat from the belligerent anti-Russia policy of the Obama administration.

Berlin Senate plans increase in police powers

Katerina Selin

Last week, the Berlin Senate, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Left Party and the Greens, discussed a far-reaching new security plan for the German capital. The “red-red-green” coalition plans to step up both the militarisation of the city’s police force and the prosecution of alleged “perpetrators.”

According to a report in the Berliner Morgenpost, the plan is aimed at “reorganising the police force in the sphere of Islamism and increasing personnel.” The reference is to the department for Religious Ideology (Islamism), which is attached to the department of “Police State Security,” which is in turn part of the State Office of Criminal Investigations (LKA).

Also planned is a new unit of the intelligence service to concentrate on “Islamist terrorism.” The additional funding for these agencies will be provided from the country’s current budget surplus.

In response to an inquiry by the World Socialist Web Site, senate spokesman Martin Pallgen said that the internal security paper, entitled “Living Safely in Berlin,” presented by Interior Senator Andreas Geisel (SPD) and Justice Senator Dirk Berehndt (Greens) at a closed-door meeting, was not intended for public consumption.

But Pallgen did confirm that about €100 million from the budget surplus would go towards domestic security. In all, 802 new jobs are planned for the police in the years 2018-2019, with 150 allocated to the LKA, Pallgen said. In addition, 1,100 police officers will be promoted in the first quarter of this year.

According to the Morgenpost, police in Berlin will receive five “mobile centres” for €500,000 to start work this summer. In addition, each Berlin police department will receive its own new mobile station. One has already been set up in the city centre, known as the “Alex-Wache.” The armoured police container on Alexanderplatz, which cost around €1 million, was opened in mid-December last year.

The Senate is thereby continuing and intensifying the reactionary law-and-order policy of Berlin’s previous conservative-led administration. Back in 2012, then-Interior Senator Frank Henkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), set up the first mobile police unit at Alexanderplatz, which remains there in the form of a tactical vehicle. The locations of the new mobile units are to be determined by the police.

A second aim of the security plan is the prosecution of so-called foreign perpetrators by accelerating their processing and transfer to deportation centres. For this purpose, a former juvenile detention facility in the district of Lichtenrade in south Berlin is to be turned into a deportation centre. Crimes that fall under the rubric of “Islamist terrorism” will then be dealt with exclusively by the relevant department of the LKA and the Berlin Attorney General.

Simultaneously, new police structures are to be implemented at a local level. This is the purpose of the “prosecutor on site” initiative, which was launched as a pilot project in Neukölln in October 2017 under the aegis of the SPD, and is now to be extended to other districts. Arguing she wanted to crack down on organised crime, the SPD mayor for Neukölln, Franziska Giffey, set up an office in the district court where three prosecutors cooperate with different authorities such as the departments for schools, youth welfare, and public order and employment, to identify offenders and prosecute them more ruthlessly—especially immigrant youth.

The new security paper is part of a series of measures directed at establishing a veritable police state in Berlin. After the state elections in 2016, the red-red-green Senate used coalition negotiations to prepare a massive upgrading of the police. Shortly before the election, Berlin had already announced the arming of the police with potentially deadly Tasers. The controversial three-year test run of the Tasers began in February 2017. The stun guns have been used twice since, and repeatedly used to threaten assumed offenders.

In mid-January, Interior Senator Geisel presented a long list of proposed acquisitions for the police to the Interior Committee of the Berlin Senate: 10,000 new service pistols, better protective helmets, tablet computers for emergency vehicles, modern radio equipment, assault rifles and an armoured vehicle. According to local media, €33 million are to be invested in the new equipment. In addition, five new training centres with modern shooting ranges are planned, at an estimated cost of €125 million.

The automatic face-recognition pilot project at Südkreuz station, which has been running since mid-2017 and was due to finish at the end of January, is also being extended. The introduction of surveillance cameras that scan and recognise the faces of passersby in an automated process is a blatant attack on basic democratic rights. Despite fierce criticism, Federal Interior Minister Thomas De Maizière (CDU) drew a positive balance of the surveillance measures last December and extended the test run for another six months, after which facial recognition could be extended to other locations.

At the same time, a large-scale personnel and structural expansion of the special unit of the federal special operations unit, GSG9, is planned. The anti-terrorist force is to receive one-third more staff and a second headquarters in Berlin. Until now, the GSG9, founded in 1972, had its headquarters in St. Augustin, near the former federal capital of Bonn. It has been deployed on average around 50 times a year, and since December 2015 has been assisted by the paramilitary Proof and Arrest Unit plus (BFE +).

The commander of GSG9, Jérome Fuchs, justified the unit’s expansion to Berlin with the supposed increased threat of terror in capital cities. This means you have to “be better organised,” Fuchs declared. “The aim is clear: faster reaction in the capital.”

This all follows a well-established pattern: The ruling class uses the lie of the “fight against terror” and protection from “foreign dangers” to massively upgrade its security forces at home and abroad. In fact, it is preparing to suppress coming class struggles. The latest strikes in the metal industry and the growing opposition of workers and youth to the entire political establishment are harbingers of the turbulence to come.

Ruling class fears of worker resistance are especially pronounced in Berlin, where the SPD and the Left Party shared power for many years, implementing wave after wave of austerity policies. Their response to the resulting devastating social inequality is more police, more surveillance, and more repression.