Hypersonic Weapons and National (In)security- Why Arms Races Never End

Rajan Menon

Hypersonic weapons close in on their targets at a minimum speed of Mach 5, five times the speed of sound or 3,836.4 miles an hour. They are among the latest entrants in an arms competition that has embroiled the United States for generations, first with the Soviet Union, today with China and Russia. Pentagon officials tout the potential of such weaponry and the largest arms manufacturers are totally gung-ho on the subject. No surprise there. They stand to make staggering sums from building them, especially given the chronic “cost overruns” of such defense contracts — $163 billion in the far-from-rare case of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Voices within the military-industrial complex — the Defense Department; mega-defense companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Raytheon; hawkish armchair strategists in Washington-based think tanks and universities; and legislators from places that depend on arms production for jobs — insist that these are must-have weapons. Their refrain: unless we build and deploy them soon we could suffer a devastating attack from Russia and China.

The opposition to this powerful ensemble’s doomsday logic is, as always, feeble.

The (il)logic of Arms Races

Hypersonic weapons are just the most recent manifestation of the urge to engage in an “arms race,” even if, as a sports metaphor, it couldn’t be more off base. Take, for instance, a bike or foot race. Each has a beginning, a stipulated distance, and an end, as well as a goal: crossing the finish line ahead of your rivals. In theory, an arms race should at least have a starting point, but in practice, it’s usually remarkably hard to pin down, making for interminable disputes about who really started us down this path. Historians, for instance, are still writing (and arguing) about the roots of the arms race that culminated in World War I.

The arms version of a sports race lacks a purpose (apart from the perpetuation of a competition fueled by an endless action-reaction sequence). The participants just keep at it, possessed by worst-case thinking, suspicion, and fear, sentiments sustained by bureaucracies whose budgets and political clout often depend on military spending, companies that rake in the big bucks selling the weaponry, and a priesthood of professional threat inflators who merchandise themselves as “security experts.”

While finish lines (other than the finishing of most life on this planet) are seldom in sight, arms control treaties can, at least, decelerate and muffle the intensity of arms races. But at least so far, they’ve never ended them and they themselves survive only as long as the signatories want them to. Recall President George W. Bush’s scuttling of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Trump administration’s exit from the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in August. Similarly, the New START accord, which covered long-range nuclear weapons and was signed by Russia and the United States in 2010, will be up for renewal in 2021 and its future, should Donald Trump be reelected, is uncertain at best. Apart from the fragility built into such treaties, new vistas for arms competition inevitably emerge — or, more precisely, are created. Hypersonic weapons are just the latest example.

Arms races, though waged in the name of national security, invariably create yet more insecurity. Imagine two adversaries neither of whom knows what new weapon the other will field. So both just keep building new ones. That gets expensive. And such spending only increases the number of threats. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, U.S. military spending has consistently and substantially exceeded China’s and Russia’s combined. But can you name a government that imagines more threats on more fronts than ours? This endless enumeration of new vulnerabilities isn’t a form of paranoia. It’s meant to keep arms races humming and the money flowing into military (and military-industrial) coffers.

One-Dimensional National Security

Such arms races come from the narrow, militarized definition of “national security” that prevails inside the defense and intelligence establishment, as well as in think tanks, universities, and the most influential mass media. Their underlying assumptions are rarely challenged, which only adds to their power. We’re told that we must produce a particular weapon (price tag be damned!), because if we don’t, the enemy will and that will imperil us all.

Such a view of security is by now so deeply entrenched in Washington — shared by Republicans and Democrats alike — that alternatives are invariably derided as naïve or quixotic. As it happens, both of those adjectives would be more appropriate descriptors for the predominant national security paradigm, detached as it is from what really makes most Americans feel insecure.

Consider a few examples.

Unlike in the first three decades after World War II, since 1979 the average U.S. hourly wage, adjusted for inflation, has increased by a pitiful amount, despite substantial increases in worker productivity. Unsurprisingly, those on the higher rungs of the wage ladder (to say nothing of those at the top) have made most of the gains, creating a sharp increase in wage inequality. (If you consider net total household wealth rather than income alone, the share of the top 1% increased from 30% to 39% between 1989 and 2016, while that of the bottom 90% dropped from 33% to 23%.)

Because of sluggish wage growth many workers find it hard to land jobs that pay enough to cover basic life expenses even when, as now, unemployment is low (3.6% this year compared to 8% in 2013). Meanwhile, millions earning low wages, particularly single mothers who want to work, struggle to find affordable childcare — not surprising considering that in 10 states and the District of Columbia the annual cost of such care exceeded $10,000 last year; and that, in 28 states, childcare centers charged more than the cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges.

Workers trapped in low-wage jobs are also hard-pressed to cover unanticipated expenses. In 2018, the “median household” banked only $11,700, and households with incomes in the bottom 20% had, on average, only $8,790 in savings; 29% of them, $1,000 or less. (For the wealthiest 1% of households, the median figure was $2.5 million.) Forty-four percent of American families would be unable to cover emergency-related expenses in excess of $400 without borrowing money or selling some of their belongings.

That, in turn, means many Americans can’t adequately cover periods of extended unemployment or illness, even when unemployment benefits are added in. Then there’s the burden of medical bills. The percentage of uninsured adults has risen from 10.9% to 13.7% since 2016 and often your medical insurance is tied to your job — lose it and you lose your coverage — not to speak of the high deductibles imposed by many medical insurance policies. (Out-of-pocket medical expenses have, in fact, increased fourfold since 2007 and now average $1,300 a year.)

Or, speaking of insecurity, consider the epidemic in opioid-related fatalities (400,000 people since 1999), or suicides (47,173 in 2017 alone), or murders involving firearms (14,542 in that same year). Child poverty? The U.S. rate was higher than that of 32 of the 36 other economically developed countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Now ask yourself this: how often do you hear our politicians or pundits use a definition of “national security” that includes any of these daily forms of American insecurity? Admittedly, progressive politicians do speak about the economic pressures millions of Americans face, but never as part of a discussion of national security.

Politicians who portray themselves as “budget hawks” flaunt the label, but their outrage over “irresponsible” or “wasteful” spending seldom extends to a national security budget that currently exceeds $1 trillion. Hawks claim that the country must spend as much as it does because it has a worldwide military presence and a plethora of defense commitments. That presumes, however, that both are essential for American security when sensible and less extravagant alternatives are on offer.

In that context, let’s return to the “race” for hypersonic weapons.

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Although the foundation for today’s hypersonic weaponry was laid decades ago, the pace of progress has been slow because of daunting technical challenges. Developing materials like composite ceramics capable of withstanding the intense heat to which such weapons will be exposed during flight leads the list. In recent years, though, countries have stepped up their games hoping to deploy hypersonic armaments rapidly, something Russia has already begun to do.

China, Russia, and the United States lead the hypersonic arms race, but others — including Britain, France, Germany, India, and Japan — have joined in (and more undoubtedly will do so). Each has its own list of dire scenarios against which hypersonic weapons will supposedly protect them and military missions for which they see such armaments as ideal. In other words, a new round in an arms race aimed at Armageddon is already well underway.

There are two variants of hypersonic weapons, which can both be equipped with conventional or nuclear warheads and can also demolish their targets through sheer speed and force of impact, or kinetic energy. “Boost-glide vehicles” (HGVs) are lofted skyward on ballistic missiles or aircraft. Separated from their transporter, they then hurtle through the atmosphere, pulled toward their target by gravity, while picking up momentum along the way. Unlike ballistic missiles, which generally fly most of the way in a parabolic trajectory — think of an inverted U — ranging in altitude from nearly 400 to nearly 750 miles high, HGVs stay low, maxing out about 62 miles up. The combination of their hypersonic speed and lower altitude shortens the journey, while theoretically flummoxing radars and defenses designed to track and intercept ballistic missile warheads (which means another kind of arms race still to come).

By contrast, hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs) resemble pilotless aircraft, propelled from start to finish by an on-board engine. They are, however, lighter than standard cruise missiles because they use “scramjet” technology.  Rather than carrying liquid oxygen tanks, the missile “breathes” in outside air that passes through it at supersonic speed, its oxygen combining with the missile’s hydrogen fuel. The resulting combustion generates extreme heat, propelling the missile toward its target. HCMs fly even lower than HGVs, below 100,000 feet, which makes identifying and destroying them harder yet.

Weapons are categorized as hypersonic when they can reach a speed of at least Mach 5, but versions that travel much faster are in the works. A Chinese HGV, launched by the Dong Feng (East Wind) DF-ZF ballistic missile, reportedly registered a speed of up to Mach 10 during tests, which began in 2014. Russia’s Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, or “Dagger,” launched from a bomber or interceptor, can reportedly also reach a speed of Mach 10. Lockheed Martin’s AGM-183A Advanced Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), an HGV that was first test-launched from a B-52 bomber this year, can apparently reach the staggering speed of Mach 20.

And yet it’s not just the speed and flight trajectory of hypersonic weapons that will make them so hard to track and intercept. They can also maneuver as they race toward their targets. Unsurprisingly, efforts to develop defenses against them, using low-orbit sensors, microwave technology, and “directed energy” have already begun. The Trump administration’s plans for a new Space Force that will put sensors and interceptors into space cite the threat of hypersonic missiles. Even so, critics have slammed the initiative for being poorly funded.

Putting aside the technical complexities of building defenses against hypersonic weapons, the American decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty and develop missile-defense systems influenced Russia’s decision to develop hypersonic weapons capable of penetrating such defenses. These are meant to ensure that Russia’s nuclear forces will continue to serve as a credible deterrent against a nuclear first strike on that country.

The Trio Takes the Lead

China, Russia, and the United States are, of course, leading the hypersonic race to hell. China tested a medium-range new missile, the DF-17 in late 2017, and used an HGV specifically designed to be launched by it. The following year, that country tested its rocket-launched Xing Kong-2 (Starry Sky-2), a “wave rider,” which gains momentum by surfing the shockwaves it produces. In addition to its Kinzhal, Russia successfully tested the Avangard HGV in 2018. The SS-19 ballistic missile that launched it will eventually be replaced by the R-28 Samrat. Its hypersonic cruise missile, the Tsirkon, designed to be launched from a ship or submarine, has also been tested several times since 2015. Russia’s hypersonic program has had its failures — so has ours — but there’s no doubting Moscow’s seriousness about pursuing such weaponry.

Though it’s common to read that both Russia and China are significantly ahead in this arms race, the United States has been no laggard. It’s been interested in such weaponry — specifically HGVs — since the early years of this century. The Air Force awarded Boeing and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne a contract to develop the hypersonic X-51A WaveRider scramjet in 2004. Its first flight test — which failed (creating something of a pattern) — took place in 2010.

Today, the Army, Navy, and Air Force are moving ahead with major hypersonic weapons programs. For instance, the Air Force test-launched its ARRW from a B-52 bomber as part of its Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) this June; the Navy tested an HGV in 2017 to further its Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) initiative; and the Army tested its own version of such a weapon in 2011 and 2014 to move its Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) program forward. The depth of the Pentagon’s commitment to hypersonic weapons became evident in 2018 when it decided to combine the Navy’s CPS, the Air Force’s HCSW, and the Army’s AHW to advance the Conventional Prompt Global Strike Program (CPGS), which seeks to build the capability to hit targets worldwide in under 60 minutes.

That’s not all. The Center for Public Integrity’s R. Jeffrey Smith reports that Congress passed a bill last year requiring the United States to have operational hypersonic weapons by late 2022. President’s Trump’s 2020 Pentagon budget request included $2.6 billion to support their development. Smith expects the annual investment to reach $5 billion by the mid-2020s.

That will certainly happen if officials like Michael Griffin, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering, have their way. Speaking at the McAleese and Credit Suisse Defense Programs conference in March 2018, he listed hypersonic weapons as his “highest technical priority,” adding, “I’m sorry for everybody out there who champions some other high priority… But there has to be a first and hypersonics is my first.” The big defense contractors share his enthusiasm. No wonder last December the National Defense Industrial Association, an outfit that lobbies for defense contractors, played host to Griffin and Patrick Shanahan (then the deputy secretary of defense), for the initial meeting of what it called the “Hypersonic Community of Influence.”

Cassandra Or Pollyanna?

We are, in other words, in a familiar place. Advances in technology have prepared the ground for a new phase of the arms race. Driving it, once again, is fear among the leading powers that their rivals will gain an advantage, this time in hypersonic weapons. What then? In a crisis, a state that gained such an advantage might, they warn, attack an adversary’s nuclear forces, military bases, airfields, warships, missile defenses, and command-and-control networks from great distances with stunning speed.

Such nightmarish scenario-building could simply be dismissed as wild-eyed speculation, but the more states think about, plan, and build weaponry along these lines, the greater the danger that a crisis could spiral into a hypersonic war once such weaponry was widely deployed. Imagine a crisis in the South China Sea in which the United States and China both have functional hypersonic weapons: China sees them as a means of blocking advancing American forces; the United States, as a means to destroy the very hypersonic arms China could use to achieve that objective. Both know this, so the decision of one or the other to fire first could come all too easily. Or, now that the INF Treaty has died, imagine a crisis in Europe involving the United States and Russia after both sides have deployed numerous intermediate-range hypersonic cruise missiles on the continent. 

Some wonks say, in effect, Relax, hi-tech defenses against hypersonic weapons will be built, so crises like these won’t spin out of control. They seem to forget that defensive military innovations inevitably lead to offensive ones designed to negate them. Hypersonic weapons won’t prove to be the exception.

So, in a world of national (in)security, the new arms race is on. Buckle up.

Crisis of unmet need in New Zealand’s health system

Harry Hall

The New Zealand public health system is in deep crisis. After the 2017 election the Labour Party-Greens-NZ First coalition government promised an end to decades of underfunding of essential services. Instead it has continued to starve hospitals of funds and staff, while funnelling more resources into military spending. As conditions continue to worsen throughout the government’s second year in office—falsely touted as its “year of delivery” on election pledges—Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s claims to be “transformational” stand exposed as a lie.

New Zealand is divided into District Health Boards (DHBs), which are under constant government pressure to be in surplus, despite rundown hospital buildings, growing demand and stagnant funding. Nineteen of the country’s 20 DHBs are in deficit, with the health system’s total deficit more than doubling over the last year.

An analysis by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists and the Council of Trade Unions estimated that health funding is $139 million less than what is required to cope with this year’s increased costs and population growth. They concluded that the health system urgently needs an extra $2.5 billion to return to the funding levels of 10 years ago.

In August, Health Minister David Clark blamed the previous National Party government’s neglect, but then demanded further cuts: “Some DHBs manage to post small surpluses, break even or only post small deficits while maintaining services. It can be done,” he told the media.

Underfunding affects all areas of the health system and has resulted in many cases of serious harm, including deaths.

In mental health, the suicide rate has reached an all-time high despite the government holding a mental health inquiry and approving $1.9 billion in extra mental health funding. The rate for Pacific Islanders, among the poorest people in New Zealand, rose by an extraordinary 48 percent over the past year. Of the nearly $2 billion in extra funding, only $10 million per year is in suicide prevention.

Although the government has announced it will train 1,600 new mental health workers over the next five years, it is not clear that they will recruit enough workers to meet demand. The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions says specialist mental health services are still being underfunded by $55 million, taking population growth into account.

Maria Baker, chief executive of indigenous health organisation Te Rau Ora, told Newsroom, “socio-economic deprivation is a major issue for us,” and getting people out of poverty would make the most difference to suicide rates. Poverty and inequality have continued to soar under the Labour-led government.

There is a dire lack of treatment for cancer patients. A damning report commissioned for Southern DHB found that it had the country’s highest rates of bowel cancer, but the lowest rate of colonoscopies.

Report co-author Dr Phil Bagshaw said the DHB had “lost the war against bowel cancer.” A review of 20 cases found that 10 had undue delay to diagnosis or treatment. Patients have been denied procedures and medication despite clear signs they may have cancer, forcing them to wait for months or pay for care in private hospitals. Some have resorted to crowd-funding to access medicines that are not subsidised by the government’s drug funding agency Pharmac.

Southern DHB’s only neurosurgeon Dr Ahmed Taha says patients are also at risk because of a drastic shortage of specialist staff. “We have experienced a few unfortunate incidents where I was not covering where patients lost lives,” he recently told Radio NZ. Taha says that 30–40 percent of New Zealand’s 22 neurosurgeons in public hospitals may retire over the next 10 years. It takes 10 to 15 years to train a consultant-level surgeon, but New Zealand has not trained one for the last 10 years.

New Zealand is in the midst of a major measles outbreak, with more than 1,443 confirmed cases as of September 24. Of these, 1,203 are in the Auckland region, with the centre of the outbreak in economically deprived South Auckland. On September 27, Stuff reported that many children are “being turned away from pop-up clinics and GP offices” due to a shortage of vaccines.

Chinese 70th anniversary parade testifies to a crisis-stricken regime

James Cogan

The 70th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 was commemorated in Beijing with a display of military power and obsequiousness to President Xi Jinping. Some four decades after it restored capitalist property relations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is wracked with perplexity and internal divisions over how to contain workers’ struggles for their social and democratic rights, and how to respond to the economic and strategic offensive of US imperialism.

In an attempt to impress and intimidate the Chinese people and the imperialist powers, the CCP marched some 15,000 troops from various branches of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) through the streets of the capital.

A detachment of the People’s Armed Police was included in the parade. The official television commentary lauded the force as “an important apparatus for social stability”—that is, for suppressing the opposition within the working class to the unchecked exploitation and political corruption that enriches the CPP-connected capitalist elite.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is shown in a painting and on screen during a parade for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

In Hong Kong, where the anniversary was answered with ongoing demonstrations against the Beijing-backed government, the regime’s police gunned down a young student with live ammunition, leaving him with a serious bullet wound.

The state violence in Hong Kong is a microcosm of what takes place across China. The police are used to suppress tens of thousands of protests each year over poverty-level or unpaid wages and pensions, unsafe working conditions and the polluted environment. While precise figures are not possible due to pervasive media and internet censorship, the China Labour Bulletin reported a sharp increase in workers’ strikes in 2018.

The years leading up to 2019—which was also the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre—witnessed the wholesale arrest, interrogation and imprisonment of worker and student activists, academics, journalists, lawyers, artists and advocates for ethnic minorities.

Beside repression, the regime’s only answer to the rising unrest over widening social inequality is to promote reactionary Chinese nationalism, hoping that appeals to “national unity” will contain irreconcilable class antagonisms.

Xi declared in his anniversary speech: “There’s no force that can shake the foundations of this great nation. No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead!”

The militarist parade featured trucks towing long-range, nuclear-armed inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and submarine-launched missiles that can strike across the continental US, as well as medium- and short-range cruise missiles and anti-shipping missiles.

Effusive television commentators did not observe that US military spending is at least triple China’s, and the US nuclear arsenal is at least 10 times’ larger. Moreover, the response of American imperialism to the expansion of China’s nuclear capacities has not been to step back from a military build-up and provocations against China. Under President Barack Obama and now Trump, Washington’s reaction has been to make strategic plans for war that include the option of a “first strike” nuclear attack.

The Chinese capitalist regime faces a global economic environment wracked by instability and a trade and economic war by the Trump administration that is aimed at driving major Chinese-based companies to the wall. In recent press conferences, Trump has gloated that US tariffs have destroyed three million jobs in China and plunged the country into its worst economic situation in decades.

In the past year, foreign direct investment into China has fallen sharply as a result of US policies. Even the questionable official rate of 6.2 percent growth this year is the slowest pace since 1992—the year the CCP fully opened the country to the global economy.

New industrial “integrity” laws seek to head off working class eruption in Australia

Terry Cook

The Liberal-National Coalition government is pushing ahead with legislation aimed at bolstering Australia’s industrial laws, already among the most repressive in the world, in anticipation of convulsive working-class struggles.

The government’s Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill, rejected by the Senate in 2017, was one of the first bills pushed through the lower house in July, less than two months after the government scraped back into office at the May 18 election.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government and employers have depicted the Bill as being directed against “unlawful” and “corrupt” conduct by trade unions. The real target, however, is not the union bureaucracy, but the working class. The (Ensuring Integrity) Bill (EIB) is a pre-emptive move by the corporate establishment, which views with trepidation the strikes that have developed around the globe despite the efforts of trade unions to hold them back.

The ruling class fears similar eruptions in Australia under conditions of falling real wages, rising unemployment and casualisation, economic slump and widening social inequality.

The government is lobbying crossbench senators to secure support for the EIB when it goes to a vote in the Senate, likely to be next month. Labor and the Greens oppose the Bill in its current form but it has the support of far-right Senator Cory Bernardi, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Centre Alliance, which is seeking minor amendments via a brief Senate committee inquiry.

The government is evidently hoping that EIB provisions that threaten the privileged positions of unions and their officials will provide the union bureaucrats with pretexts to even more ruthlessly enforce the Fair Work legislation, imposed in 2009 by the last Labor government. The Fair Work laws ban most strikes and the unions have used them to suppress struggles by workers against the intensifying corporate assault on jobs, wages and working conditions.

The anxiety in corporate circles is shared by the unions themselves. Last December, Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Sally McManus warned of a looming “tsunami” of working-class discontent and urged the election of a Labor government to derail it.

The EIB implements recommendations handed down by a royal commission inquiry into the unions, which sought “to ensure greater compliance with the existing legislative regimes and relevant criminal laws.”

That inquiry’s report actually underscored the reality that the unions have absolutely nothing to do with defending workers’ conditions. Its case studies revealed the unions’ role as labour management businesses, hostile to the interests of workers. Union bureaucrats and corporate managers conspired daily to tear up workers’ conditions to try to make companies “competitive” on the global market. To the extent that conflicts emerged between the unions and corporations, they centred on which business entity will obtain a greater share of the profits extracted from workers’ labour.

The EIB will allow the Federal Court to cancel the registration of a union or “make alternative orders” on grounds that include the “unlawful or otherwise improper conduct of the affairs of the organisation.” More significantly, the Bill allows for deregistration of a union for “repeated breaches of a range of industrial laws by its members, and “failure to comply with a court order or injunction by the organisation or a substantial number of its members.”

Just one instance of unauthorised “obstructive industrial action” could result in deregistration if it interfered with an employer’s activities, the provision of a public service or is “likely to harm safety, health or welfare of part of the community.” Likewise, union officials could be disqualified “if they fail to take reasonable steps to stop their organisation from breaking the law.”

The Labor Party has no genuine opposition to such laws. In 1986, the Hawke Labor government, working closely with the ACTU and other construction unions, used earlier versions of such powers to deregister the Builders Labourers Federation in order to try to suppress militancy by construction workers.

How giant tea companies exploit Kenyan plantation workers

Saman Gunadasa

This writer visited Kenyan tea estates earlier this year and witnessed first-hand the ruthless regime maintained by multinational companies. Sri Lankan and Indian plantation companies often cite Kenya to demand similar conditions in order to compete in the world tea market.

Lucrative Kenyan tea plantations are owned by British corporate giants, including Unilever and James Finlay. As in other former colonial countries, tea plantation companies started in Kenya under British rule.

However, major British firms, such as Brooke Bond and Lipton, which initially operated in Sri Lanka, shifted to Kenya in the early 1970s after the Colombo government of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike “nationalised” tea estates under state control. Today Kenya is the world’s largest tea exporter, contributing 25 percent of black tea exports.

Tea estate employees about to start work

Kenya was a British colony until 1963. Britain brutally suppressed the anti-colonial Mau Mau uprising from 1952 to 1960. According to the Kenya Human Rights Commission, 90,000 Kenyans were killed, many more were maimed and hundreds of thousands were held in concentration camps.

While Kenya’s first leader Jomo Kenyatta pursued nationalist policies, foreign investment dominated the economy. Kenyatta’s son, President Uhuru Kenyatta, remains in power, manipulating elections and suppressing workers’ struggles. Under the banner of fighting “terrorism,” he is running a police state.

During British rule, workers were brought to the Kenyan plantations from oppressed tribes in Kenya, as well as from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Workers were subjected to iron discipline, with companies even conducting canings.

Today the brutality continues. Child labour, along with casual labour without job security and underpayment are prevalent.

A study published in India titled “Production and Export of Value Added Tea in India and its Global Competitiveness” (Economic Affairs, Vol. 62, December 2017) noted that the “labour productivity in kilograms per man was the highest in Kenya followed by India,” partly due to the use of “domestic labour” and “quality plucking.”

“Domestic labour” refers to seasonal workers who are employed from a pool of labour in the plantation region, only during the peak season. Once laid off, seasonal workers must quit the plantations and look for other employment. “Quality plucking” includes mechanised harvesting methods, with higher targets than manual plucking.

Permanent workers in Unilever’s Kericho county plantation can make 515 Kenyan shillings ($US5.15) a day, barely sufficient for daily expenses. A very basic meal costs around 100 shillings and a fast food restaurant meal is well over 500 shillings. Manual plucking workers get 16 shillings per kilo of plucked and sorted tea. To take home 515 shillings, she or he will have to pluck a back-breaking average of 32 kilos.

According to the 2016 report of True Price, a non-governmental organisation, titled The True Price of Tea from Kenya, a permanent plantation worker’s wage was only 62 percent of a living wage.

Four workers are assigned to each mechanised plucking machine. Two operate the machine, while another carries the tea leaves to the weighing station and the fourth sorts the plucked leaves, choosing only the most tender.

This method can harvest 700 to 1,500 kilos per day, depending on the richness of the tender leaves and how fast workers operate. Supervisors drive workers to achieve daily targets set by managers. In the Unilever plantations, “clerks” in police-type uniforms ride bikes, monitoring the activities of workers.

In large plantations, one can see many workers’ quarters or villages, consisting of single room or two-room houses comparable to plantation workers’ houses in India and Sri Lanka. Often more than one family lives in a house.

Tea estate workers' homes

In Kericho, plantation corporations run schools and basic hospitals, with school fees deducted from workers’ pay. According to workers, most children do not continue to higher grades because the families cannot afford the schooling, and the children must work for a living. Even students who have studied up to college level are unemployed.

Thousands of children under age ten arrested every year in the United States

Casey Gold

The recent arrests of two 6-year-old children at their elementary school in Orlando, Florida has shone light on the shocking number of child arrests and detainments in the United States. A report by ABC News on Monday noted that nearly 30,000 children under the age of 10 have been arrested just between 2013 and 2017.

The arrest and detainment of children for the crime of acting their age will continue, and indeed increase, as social inequality worsens and the ruling class marches toward authoritarian rule.

The FBI recently released its annual crime statistics for the year 2018. While the report boasts that the arrest of juveniles decreased by 11 percent from 2017, the number of arrests of individuals under 18 still stands at a staggering 718,962. This number includes 3,500 children under 10, more than 38,000 children between 10 and 12, and more than 355,000 children between the ages of 13 and 16.

These statistics only account for 28 specific offenses, and the FBI’s website where this data is available notes, “The program does not collect data regarding police contact with a juvenile who has not committed an offense, nor does it collect data on situations in which police take a juvenile into custody for his or her protection.”

It is not clear under what circumstances the police would make contact with juveniles who have not committed an offense, nor is it understandable in what situation a child should be arrested for “protection.”

Thirty-four states have no minimum age for delinquency, meaning that any child can be held criminally responsible for their actions, and 24 states have no minimum age for charging a juvenile as an adult for alleged crimes.

If it were not so sickening that tens of thousands of children have been forced to undergo the traumatic experience of arrest and detainment, the breakdown of crimes for which these children were arrested would be laughable.

For example, in 2018, there were 155 arrests of children under 10 for carrying or possessing weapons; 340 arrests were made for “disorderly conduct;” nearly twenty arrests of children under 10 were made for motor vehicle-related infractions, including driving under the influence.

For the felony charge of aggravated assault, which is defined as causing or attempting to cause bodily injury to another “purposefully, knowingly or recklessly, with an extreme indifference to the value of human life,” 145 children under 10 were arrested in 2018. The twisted irony of arresting a child for alleged “indifference to the value of human life” is further highlighted when some specific examples of these arrests are examined.

Austrian far-right FPÖ loses massively in parliamentary elections

Markus Salzmann

Yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Austria resulted in considerable losses for the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the social-democratic SPÖ. The conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) of former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and the Greens benefited from the shift. Kurz can now form a government coalition with the FPÖ, the SPÖ or the Greens to continue his right-wing policy.

According to the preliminary final result—postal votes will not be counted until Monday night—the ÖVP total will reach more than 38 percent, an increase of around 7 percent. The SPÖ will lose over five percent, with 21.5 percent of the vote. It is the worst-ever SPÖ result in an election for the National Council, the lower house of the Austrian parliament.

The FPÖ will lose 9 percent compared to the previous elections, for a total of 17 percent. Just behind are the Greens, who failed in the last election at the four percent hurdle, now increased to 12 percent. The liberal Neos will also be represented in parliament, with slightly more than 7 percent.

The result shows that the far right has no mass support. The so-called “Ibiza affair” was only the most striking expression of this. The ÖVP-FPÖ coalition government fell at the end of May after only 18 months. A video, secretly recorded in Ibiza, which showed then-FPÖ boss Heinz-Christian Strache offered government contracts to a supposed Russian investor in exchange for election assistance, triggered the crisis. Since then, Austria has been temporarily governed by a technocratic government.

The FPÖ reacted with an aggressive, far-right election campaign, attacking refugees and foreigners. A few days before the election, the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office announced it was investigating former Vice-Chancellor and FPÖ leader Strache on suspicion of embezzlement. Strache, his former office manager and his former bodyguard allegedly submitted inadmissible invoices to the party, thereby damaging its assets.

As the election results became known, a mood of crisis developed in the FPÖ. “We do not interpret it as our goal to want to enter into government negotiations here. The voters did not make us strong enough to do this,” Strache said in his explanatory statement. Voters had given the party a “mandate for a new start,” he said. There was also talk of a split in the FPÖ on election night.

In the SPÖ there was a mood of crisis as well, after its historic collapse. In 1979 the party ruled alone with 51 percent of the votes; by 1999 it had fallen to 33 percent; and in the last two elections it reached its lowest point to date, with 26 percent. This decline is also expressed in the fact that the party’s top candidate, doctor Pamela Rendi-Wagner, had only recently joined the SPÖ.

Politically, the SPÖ was barely distinguishable from the ÖVP and FPÖ in the election campaign. When it comes to the issues of refugee policy, internal security and social “reforms,” all the parties are on the same line. Most recently, the SPÖ had dropped any criticism of the introduction of the 12-hour day by the ÖVP-FPÖ government. Rendi-Wagner had declared that they would form a coalition with Sebastian Kurz to prevent the FPÖ from participating in the government.

At the same time, Rendi-Wagner left the field to the right wing within the party. The SPÖ leader in the Tyrol region, Georg Dornauer, who indirectly demanded an alliance with the FPÖ in an interview with a right-wing radical magazine, and Hans-Peter Doskozil, who has already formed a coalition with the FPÖ in Burgenland, set the tone in the party.

Protests after death in fire at Greece’s Moria concentration camp

Robert Stevens

Brutal anti-migrant policies claimed the life of at least one woman and possibly a child in a fire at the Moria camp on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos.

Moria is a hellhole, established by the 2015-2019 pseudo-left Syriza government, where refugees and asylum seekers are held under intolerable conditions, pending deportation. Ostensibly built to house 3,000 people, it now hosts 12,000 in squalid conditions.

According to reports, after months of protests and repression by riot police, two fires broke out. One was contained but the other quickly spread, with large sections of the camp engulfed in flames.

Migrants and refugees stand next to burning house containers at the Moria refugee camp, on the northeastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, Sunday, Sept. 29, 2019 [InTime News via AP]

On Sunday, the authorities at first reported no fatalities. But UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) Greece tweeted, “we learned with deep sadness that the lives of a woman and a child were lost in a fire on Lesvos today.” The BBC later reported, “They say the charred body of a woman was found at Moria camp. But unconfirmed reports say there was another victim, a child.”

The Guardian reported, “The body of the woman was taken to the island’s general hospital while the body of the child was handed over to authorities by migrants.”

It added, “The death toll, however, was unclear. One witness said three people died as a result of the fire, which spread to six or seven containers used as shelters. ‘We found two children completely charred and a woman dead. We gave the children covered in blankets to the fire brigade,’ Afghani migrant Fedouz, 15, said.

“An AFP [Agence France-Presse] correspondent saw two bodies, one surrounded by weeping family members.”

Other sources Monday cited the Greek Health Ministry that only one person died. The Greek Reporter website said, “A child which was initially thought to have been also killed, is injured but is recovering at a local hospital having sustained burns.”

It is unclear how the fires started. Greek daily Kathemerini reported, “The fire inside the camp started shortly after 5 p.m., about 20 minutes after another blaze in an olive grove just outside the facility where hundreds of asylum seekers who cannot be accommodated inside the overcrowded camp are living in tents and other makeshift shelters.”

In an indication of the appalling conditions endured by thousands at the camp, the main fire started in one of the converted shipping containers the migrants live in, in grossly overcrowded circumstances.

After some of the migrants protested that firefighters were too slow to respond to the blaze, riot police met them with volleys of teargas. Harrowing photos and video with the camp burning in the background show men, women and children desperately seeking to flee the fire and teargas attack.

A video accompanying a Reuters news report showed scenes from the fire and its aftermath, revealing more of the horrific conditions that those in the camp live in surrounded by high fences and razor wire. Among the shocking scenes in the clip are those showing burnt out shipping containers stacked on top of each other with migrants packed around them like sardines.

A photo of a half-naked man carrying a similarly clad child—with both engulfed in teargas and fleeing past dilapidated wooden sheds that serve as shelters, with bin bags strewn by his feet—was taken by Giorgos Moutafis of Reuters. It and other photos can be viewed here .

The conservative New Democracy government is planning further repression, with the Guardian reporting, “Additional officers were sent from Athens in C-130 army planes, although local police sources said calm had returned to the camp by 11 p.m. GMT [Sunday].”

Built on land that once housed a military compound, the refugees and asylum seekers are held captive in a place that Human Rights Watch in 2017 described as “unfit for animals.” Migrants at the camp have long demanded that they be transferred to more hospitable and civilised living conditions on the Greek mainland.

Hunter Biden made $850,000 on board of Ukraine gas company

Patrick Martin

The son of Vice President Joe Biden, a lawyer-lobbyist with no known expertise in the production, transport, or distribution of natural gas, or in the complex financial operations of such a business, was placed on the board of the largest gas company in Ukraine in April 2014 and remained there until spring of this year, netting some $850,000 in payments.

The Hunter Biden-Ukraine connection has become the trigger for the opening of impeachment proceedings against President Trump, but the connection itself is worth examining in its own right. The younger Biden’s career sheds light on the decay of American democracy and the vast social gulf that has opened up between the ruling elite and the vast majority of the population, struggling to survive from paycheck to paycheck, and, as a recent survey found, unable to afford paying an unexpected bill of $400.

Hunter Biden, now aged 49, is the former vice president’s younger son, and the sole survivor among his children. Naomi, then a year old, was killed in the 1972 car crash that also took the life of Biden’s first wife. Beau Biden, the older son by one year, died of brain cancer in 2015.

The younger Biden has always been the black sheep of the family, even according to various sympathetic accounts, most of them appearing in publications—The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post—favorable to the Democrats.

The New Yorker piece, at more than 10,000 words by far the longest, published in July, was obviously planted by the Biden campaign for the purpose of venting all the bad news about Hunter Biden as a preemptive measure against anticipated stink bombs from the Trump campaign.

It was prepared through lengthy interviews by reporter Adam Entous with Hunter Biden. And it delivers a lot of bad news about a career devoted apparently to influence-peddling and drug abuse, both on a scale that matches or exceeds that of any dubious relative of any previous president, at least until Donald Trump.

Hunter Biden was hired by MBNA bank in Delaware, fresh out of Yale Law School, and paid a six-figure salary at the age of 26 because his father was a senator from that state and a fervent defender of the bank and credit card industries. MBNA was then the largest US issuer of credit cards.

He then moved to Washington to take a position in the last years of the Clinton administration. Once the Republicans came to power with the George W. Bush administration, in 2001, he became a lobbyist, helping Jesuit Catholic colleges insert earmarks into congressional appropriations bills.

When earmarks became more difficult to obtain, and after losing money in a speculative venture on the eve of the 2007-2008 financial crash, Biden formed a “consulting” group with Christopher Heinz, stepson of Senator John Kerry and an heir to the Heinz fortune, and a Yale friend of Heinz’s, Devon Archer.

Inevitably, after his father’s election as vice president, given a prominent international role in the Obama-Biden administration, Hunter Biden’s consulting firm branched out into global deal-making, focusing on countries where influence-peddling would be most lucrative and actual business credentials least necessary, among others, China and Ukraine.

In China, the younger Biden traveled on Air Force Two in 2013 with his father, who was making an official trip to Beijing. In the course of this, Hunter Biden introduced a Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, to the vice president. He left China with promises of future investments, although not with the $1.5 billion that Trump now falsely claims. According to Hunter Biden’s attorney, no money has yet flowed from that particular connection.

Another Chinese business prospect gave Hunter Biden a diamond worth either $80,000 (according to his ex-wife’s divorce suit) or $10,000, according to Biden’s response to the suit, but in any case, much beyond the normal range of business gratuities.

But Ukraine is where Hunter Biden has apparently cashed in most extensively, trading on his father’s name and position. In 2013-2014, a right-wing populist movement backed by the CIA and the German government gained the upper hand in an internal power struggle within the Ukraine capitalist class.

The Maidan “revolution” was actually a right-wing coup, spearheaded by outright fascist forces, some of whom marched under Nazi insignias, against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was aligned with the Russian government of Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine has been a “wild west” for the operations of foreign intelligence services and capitalist oligarchs at least since the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004, the first successful effort by Washington to bring to power a US-backed regime in one of the major countries emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Draw the political lessons from the bankruptcy of Maoism

Peter Symonds

Today marks 70 years since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power and its leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square.

The current CCP regime headed by President Xi Jinping will commemorate the occasion by mounting a huge military parade in Beijing today and staging extravagant celebrations in the evening, complete with singing, dancing and fireworks. Xi is due to deliver a speech in Tiananmen Square that is certain to be saturated with Chinese nationalism and feature his “dream” of national rejuvenation and making China great again.

The Chinese Revolution was a monumental social upheaval that ended the imperialist subjugation of China, unified the country, lifted the living conditions of the population and eliminated much that was culturally and socially backward. However, political heirs of Mao Zedong cannot explain how and why the dreams and aspirations of working people for a socialist future, for which so many sacrificed 70 years ago, have resulted in the dead end of capitalism.

Mao proclaims the People's Republic of China, 1949

The staggering levels of economic growth in China over the past three decades have resulted in a huge and widening social gulf between the tiny layer of billionaire oligarchs who are represented by the CCP and masses of Chinese workers and peasants struggling to survive in a social order dominated by profit, the market and “user pays.”

For the international working class, particularly for workers in China, it is essential that the political lessons be drawn from the betrayal of Mao and the CCP. Any struggle for socialism today necessarily has to answer the question: why did the revolutions of the 20th century, above all in Russia and China, end in capitalist restoration?

In both cases, the answer lies in the emergence of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, which usurped power from the working class. It justified its privileges on the basis of the reactionary nationalist perspective of “socialism in one country,” which was diametrically opposed to the socialist internationalism that guided the Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917.

In China, Stalin subordinated the newly formed Chinese Communist Party to the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) with disastrous consequences. In the revolutionary upheavals of 1925–27, Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT turned on the CCP in April of 1927, slaughtering thousands of workers and Communists who had seized control of Shanghai. A month later, the so-called “left” KMT, which Stalin insisted represented a progressive wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie, launched its own wave of murders. As the revolutionary tide receded, Stalin flung the battered CCP into a series of adventures, all of which failed with tragic consequences for the working class and peasantry.

Leon Trotsky had warned of the dangers of subordinating the CCP to the Kuomintang and his analysis of Stalin’s policies won support among CCP members and leaders who were expelled from the party. His theory of permanent revolution, which had guided the Russian Revolution, explained that the bourgeoisie in countries with a belated capitalist development such as China was incapable of meeting the democratic and social aspirations of the masses. Those tasks would fall to the working class, which would be compelled, with the support of the peasant masses, to take power into its own hands and implement socialist measures.

The CCP, however, retreated to the countryside and increasingly based itself, not on the working class, but on peasant guerrilla armies. Its perspective was based on the discredited “two-stage theory”—first a national democratic revolution under the domination of the bourgeoisie, and second, in the distant future, a socialist revolution. This nationalist perspective damaged and deformed the revolution when it took place 22 years later.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was part of a worldwide upsurge of the working class and colonial masses following the end of World War II. For two years after Japan’s defeat, Mao sought to form a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek—the Butcher of Shanghai—in line with Stalin’s instructions to Communist parties internationally. So as not to alienate the bourgeoisie and landlords, the CCP deliberately blocked the rising struggles of workers and restricted the scope of land reform. Chiang Kai-shek used the time to consolidate his grip over the cities and, with arms and aid from US imperialism, launched military offensives against the CCP.

It was only in October 1947 that the CCP finally called for the overthrow of the corrupt and hated KMT dictatorship. The speed with which Chiang and his regime imploded demonstrated that it could have been far more speedily ousted if the CCP had, from the outset, mobilised the workers in the cities, rather than instructing them to passively await their “liberation” by the party’s peasant armies. The CCP’s hostility to the independent struggle of the working class has been the chief hallmark of its rule over the past 70 years.

The People’s Republic of China, proclaimed by Mao in 1949, was based not on a socialist program, but on his “New Democracy”—the implementation of the first, bourgeois democratic stage. The CCP nationalised the enterprises only of “bureaucratic capitalists” who had fled to Taiwan with Chiang, while protecting the profits and property of the majority of capitalists. Its government was based on a coalition with bourgeois parties, some of which held prominent posts.

Mao’s perspective of a self-sufficient China rapidly led into a dead end. US imperialism, whose plans to exploit China had been abruptly ended in 1949, aimed to use the 1950–1953 Korean War as a means to undermine and ultimately bring down the CCP regime. Consequently, Mao was compelled by the US economic blockade and war threat to nationalise companies, foreign and national, that were sabotaging the war effort, and to institute bureaucratic economic planning along the lines of the Soviet Union.

In 1955, the American Socialist Workers Party, then the Trotskyist party in the US, concluded, based on the discussion in the Fourth International on the buffer states of Eastern Europe, that China had become a deformed workers’ state. It was a transitional regime. Nationalised property and economic planning had been established, but the new state was deformed at birth, with the working class lacking any political voice or democratic rights. Either China would proceed towards genuine socialism, which required the overthrow of the Maoist bureaucracy at the hands of the working class in a political revolution—as advocated by the Trotskyist movement—or it would relapse back to capitalism.

As a result of its nationalist program, based on the anti-Marxist perspective of socialism in one country, the Maoist regime lurched from one crisis to another—from the catastrophic Great Leap Forward in the 1950s to the Sino-Soviet split and the disastrous Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Confronted with a stagnant economy and a rising danger of war with the Soviet Union, Mao turned to US imperialism just 22 years after the 1949 revolution. While Deng Xiaoping is always cited as the author of pro-market policies and capitalist restoration in China, he simply carried out the logic of Mao’s rapprochement with US President Richard Nixon in 1972.

Deng’s “reform and opening” from 1978 coincided with the rapid development of globalised production, spearheaded by the US and other capitalist powers. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which was above all directed at suppressing the rebellious working class, foreign investment flooded into the country to take advantage of the infrastructure and basic industry built up after the revolution and the cheap yet educated and regimented labour.

In his speech today, Xi will undoubtedly boast of China’s achievements, pay homage to the Maoist revolutionaries and evoke his dream of restoring China to greatness—a dream that represents the ambitions of the grasping Chinese capitalist class. The economic rise of China, however, has brought it face to face with the imperialist world order dominated by the United States, which is intent on using every means at its disposal, including military, to prevent China from challenging its global hegemony.

Xi and the CCP bureaucracy have no answers to the US war drive—other than attempting conciliation while engaging in an arms race that only heightens the danger of conflict. Likewise, the only response of the Maoist apparatus to growing signs of unrest in the working class—signaled in particular by the protests in Hong Kong—is to whip up nationalism to divide workers. This is combined with increased police state repression.

While the Beijing bureaucracy faces US aggression in the form of trade war and a military build-up in Asia, it fears the working class even more. It spends more on internal security than on the military.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) calls on the international working class to draw the necessary political conclusions. The betrayals of Maoism have created one disaster after another, not only in China but, through its pernicious influence, throughout Asia and internationally. Amid the deepening crisis of capitalism globally, the only answer to the danger of war, fascistic forms of rule and the continuing decline of living conditions is the program of socialist internationalism that animated the October Revolution in 1917 and for which the Trotskyist movement alone has consistently fought.

To unite workers in China and around the world to fight for a socialist future it is necessary to build the ICFI as the revolutionary leadership for the class battles ahead. In China, that means constructing a section of the ICFI based on all the theoretical and political lessons of the struggle against Stalinism in all its forms, including Maoism.

New Zealand PM promotes internet censorship at UN

Tom Peters

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern used her visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly to accelerate global efforts to censor the internet. Her government is playing a leading role in exploiting the March 15 Christchurch terrorist attack to promote international mechanisms to block or take down online material that governments deem “extremist.”

The so-called Christchurch Call, an agreement between several governments and tech companies launched in May in Paris, was expanded at a special UN meeting with the addition of 33 signatories, including Denmark, Mexico, Belgium and South Korea. The agreement is intended to further concentrate power in the hands of governments and technology giants to remove content from the internet.

The Christchurch Call has nothing to do with preventing attacks such as the massacre of 51 Muslim worshipers in March. The gunman, Brenton Tarrant, like numerous mass killers in the US, was inspired by US President Donald Trump and other extreme-right leaders, who are being consciously promoted by the ruling elites internationally. Trump’s fascist rant to the UN on September 24 echoed Tarrant’s manifesto with its violent hostility to socialism and glorification of nationalism.

Jacinda Ardern

The day before Trump’s speech, Ardern gushed to reporters that she had “an excellent meeting” with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien. Ardern said Trump showed “interest” in the Christchurch Call. Washington, while not a formal signatory to it, had “a really good level of participation and support,” and US-based tech companies had signed.

Ardern’s speech at the UN, with its references to “kindness” and diversity, and criticism of “fierce nationalism or self-interest,” was widely contrasted in the media with Trump’s statements. Such statements were thoroughly hypocritical. Ardern’s Labour Party-led coalition includes the right-wing populist NZ First Party, which has made numerous anti-Muslim and anti-Chinese statements. The government has restricted immigration and enforced a racist ban on refugees from African countries.

Ardern’s speech stressed global “interconnection,” mainly in order to argue for a crackdown on social media and the internet. This was needed, she said, to counter the promotion of terrorist violence and “language intended to incite fear” of religious and ethnic groups.

No one should believe the lie that these powers are aimed at terrorists. As mass movements of the working class against austerity and war spread throughout the world, the ruling class is responding by expanding the definition of terrorism and “extremism” to criminalise left-wing and anti-fascist groups.

Trump’s UN speech, for instance, described “open border activists” as “evil” and supporters of “criminals.” His administration has threatened to label Antifa a terrorist organisation. French President Emanuel Macron’s government, a key supporter of the Christchurch Call, has vilified the “yellow vest” anti-austerity protesters as “extremists.” Germany’s secret service has branded the Socialist Equality Party an “extremist” organisation to justify state surveillance.

India’s Hindu chauvinist BJP government, a signatory of the Call, has blocked all communications in Kashmir, in the name of fighting “extremism.” The Indonesian government responded to recent mass protests by shutting down the internet in its two Papuan provinces.

Democrats praise CIA whistleblower on Ukraine, persecute Manning, Assange and Snowden

Andre Damon

Over the past week, congressional Democrats have suddenly discovered their support for whistleblowers. They have rushed to the defense of the CIA agent assigned to the White House who has been at the center of the conflicts within the state over Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president in July.

On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee released the complaint by the agent claiming that Trump sought to “solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 US elections.

When Trump condemned the author of the report as a “spy,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff praised the author of the report, urging others to “show the same kind of courage and patriotism that this whistleblower has shown.”

“Congress must do all it can to protect this whistleblower, and all whistleblowers,” he declared.

All whistleblowers? One might remind Schiff of what he had to say about Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who in 2013 released documents showing that the NSA and other intelligence agencies had, in flagrant violation of the US Constitution, spied on every single electronic communication transmitted by every American.

In 2016, Schiff wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging him “not to pardon Edward Snowden, who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nation’s history.”

He concluded, “The US government must hold him accountable for his actions.”

Then-Secretary of State John Kerry echoed these sentiments, declaring that Snowden “damaged his country very significantly” and “betrayed his country.”

In retaliation for his disclosures, which resulted in Pulitzer Prizes for the journalists with whom he worked, Snowden faces espionage charges potentially carrying the death penalty. He has been living in forced exile in Russia for six years.

The Democrats under Obama also presided over the jailing of Chelsea Manning in conditions tantamount to torture. The Obama administration oversaw her drumhead military court trial and conviction for the “crime” of helping to expose mass murder by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among Manning’s most explosive revelations was the video released by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” which showed a US attack helicopter gunning down civilians in Baghdad, murdering over a dozen people including two Reuters photographers, and injuring more unarmed civilians, including two children.

After having her sentence commuted by Obama at the end of 2016, Manning was re-imprisoned this year, this time without criminal charges, to force her to testify against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who published her revelations. She has been imprisoned now for more than six months.

As for Assange, he remains jailed in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison. In addition to exposing massive US war crimes, Assange and WikiLeaks made public the diplomatic intrigues and corrupt relations of Washington with governments around the world, helping to trigger the 2011 popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

The Democrats hailed the illegal revocation of Assange’s asylum and abduction from the Ecuadorian embassy in London last April at the behest of the Trump administration, with the party’s 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cackling, “The bottom line is he has to answer for what he has done.”

She echoed the Trump administration’s lie that it was charging the courageous journalist only with hacking. “I think it is clear from the indictment that came out it’s not about punishing journalism,” she said.

She offered no retraction after the Justice Department brought espionage charges against Assange, explicitly targeting his publishing activities and attacking the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom.

The hypocrisy of the Democratic Party is limitless, but it is a hypocrisy that is politically motivated. The attitude of the Democrats to whistleblowers is determined, as with everything else they do, by the interests of American imperialism and the ruling class.

In the case of the CIA agent who has leaked information about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president in July, the report is part of a bitter feud within the ruling elite that has persisted throughout the Trump administration.

This conflict is motivated above all by divisions over foreign policy. In particular, dominant sections of the state, including Republicans as well as Democrats, are concerned that Trump has failed to take a sufficiently confrontational approach to Russia and that his unilateralist and nationalist geopolitics are cutting across the predatory interests of US imperialism.

It is for this reason that the Democrats have now used the claims of the CIA “whistleblower” to either remove Trump or pressure him to adopt a foreign policy more in line with the intelligence agencies for which they speak.

In the cases of Snowden, Manning and Assange, what is involved are leaks by individuals that have exposed the crimes of American imperialism itself. This cannot be tolerated by any faction of the ruling class, which is why the vicious persecution of these individuals has overwhelming bipartisan support.

Millions of workers and young people rightly hate Trump as a fascistic representative of the American financial oligarchy: the torturer of immigrant children and the builder of concentration camps. But no one should trust the jailers of Manning and Assange and pursuers of Snowden.

The Democrats merely represent a different faction of the same corrupt financial oligarchy that produced Trump. To the extent that the struggle against the fascist in the White House is tied to the Democrats, it allows Trump to posture as an opponent of the “deep state” while he seeks to turn the United States into a personalist dictatorship.

There is only one way out of the dangerous political crisis: the mobilization of the working class against the Trump administration independently of the Democratic Party. The defense of democratic rights cannot be subordinated to any faction of the ruling class. It must be based on the independent mobilization of the working class against capitalism and for socialism.

This is inseparable from the fight to defend Manning, Assange, Snowden and all those persecuted by the capitalist ruling class and its political mouthpieces.