Judge rules in favor of Amazon, halts work on JEDI contract by Microsoft

Kevin Reed

On Thursday, a federal judge granted Amazon’s request and imposed an injunction that stopped work on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project between the Department of Defense (DoD) and Microsoft. The sealed opinion by Judge Patricia E. Campbell of the Court of Federal Claims found that the $10 billion contract award to Microsoft could not proceed until a lawsuit filed against the agreement by Amazon was resolved.

The selection of Microsoft as the provider of the 21st-century JEDI cloud computing and massive 10-year military contract came as a surprise last October, with Amazon widely recognized as the front runner. Until the decision on JEDI, Amazon had been the preferred supplier of ultra-secure infrastructure as a service computing technology for the military-intelligence apparatus.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) protested the DoD’s decision in a November 22, 2019 filing that stated “egregious errors” were committed during the process of selecting Microsoft. Amazon’s lawsuit also stated that the errors “were the result of improper pressure from President Donald J. Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy-Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and CEO of AWS’s parent company, Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”), and owner of the Washington Post.”

The AWS filing, which argues that its solution was superior to that of Microsoft, further stated, “DoD’s substantial and pervasive errors are hard to understand and impossible to assess separate and apart from the President’s repeatedly expressed determination to, in the words of the President himself, ‘screw Amazon.’”

In response to the court decision, Microsoft Vice President of Communications Frank Shaw said, “While we are disappointed with the additional delay we believe that we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.” Shaw added, “We have confidence in the Department of Defense, and we believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft.”

For its part, DoD spokesperson Lt. Col. Robert Carver told CNBC, “We are disappointed in today’s ruling and believe the actions taken in this litigation have unnecessarily delayed implementing DoD’s modernization strategy and deprived our warfighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need. However, we are confident in our award of the JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft and remain focused on getting this critical capability into the hands of our warfighters as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

In addition to the injunction, the AWS lawsuit demands that the October 25 contract award be invalidated and that the DoD reopen the bidding process. The fact that the judge halted Microsoft from initiating work on the JEDI project is legally significant. Had the program been started, it would have been very unlikely that Amazon’s lawsuit would prevail given the costs associated with rebidding a contract that was already in process.

In imposing the injunction, Judge Campbell also ordered Amazon to earmark $42 million for future court costs in the event that Thursday’s ruling is determined to have been issued “wrongfully.” The company that ultimately wins out in this contract battle is expected to earn roughly $40 billion in federal government cloud computing contracts that will be awarded in the next several years.

As reported previously on the WSWS, the DoD JEDI program was conceptualized in 2017 as a secure global computing platform that will modernize the US military’s information infrastructure. Among the major concerns of the White House and Pentagon is that the US military—with a technology infrastructure that is from the 1970s and 1980s—is rapidly falling behind China in the development of artificial intelligence warfare technology that depends upon state-of-the-art and robust cloud computing capabilities.

It appears that Judge Campbell’s decision is in part an attempt to cut across Amazon’s court filings of February 10 that are seeking the deposition of seven “individuals who were instrumental” in selecting Microsoft for the JEDI project. Among those that Amazon wants to depose are President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former Defense Secretary James Mattis along with the DoD’s chief information officer, Dana Deasy.

The Amazon filing states, “While other individuals can testify about specific conversations he had with them individually, President Trump is the only individual who can testify about the totality of his conversations and the overall message he conveyed. Moreover, President Trump has unique knowledge about whether he had other, previously undisclosed conversations with individuals not previously identified, and who therefore do not appear on the deposition list.”

At the time of these filings, CEO of AWS Andy Jassy told CNBC that when a sitting president is very vocal and specifically dislikes a company and its CEO, “it makes it difficult for government agencies, including the DoD to make objective decisions without fear of reprisal. And I think that’s dangerous and risky for our country.”

The flare-up of a legal battle between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—the world’s richest individual with $130 billion in personal wealth—and President Trump, over a strategic military sourcing decision, must be seen as part of the broader conflicts within the American ruling class that were behind the Mueller probe and the failed impeachment of the president by the Democrats over foreign policy issues.

The competition between Microsoft and AWS for a $10 billion military contract shows that these tech giants—among the four trillion-dollar corporations on Wall Street—are willing and eager collaborators in the ongoing wars of US imperialism in the Middle East and Africa as well as the preparations for “great power conflict” with Russia and China, which include plans for the use of nuclear weapons, and pose the danger to the entire world.

There are many indications that tech workers at Google, Amazon and Microsoft are opposed to the cooperation of their employers with the US war machine. Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California on December 9, Amazon’s Bezos said, “One of the things that’s happening inside technology companies is there are groups of employees who for example think that technology companies should not work with the Department of Defense. I think it’s a really important issue, and people are entitled to their opinions, but it is the job of a senior leadership team to say no.”

Bezos concluded his remarks with, “My view is if big tech is going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That just can’t happen.”

Renault announces “no taboos” cuts as planned layoffs in auto industry exceed 100,000

Tom Hall

French auto company Renault announced plans for $2.2 billion in cuts last Friday after a dismal economic performance in 2019. The company lost 141 million euros last year after making 3.3 billion in profit in 2018, and overall sales fell 3.3 percent. Dividend payouts from its corporate partner Nissan fell from $1.6 billion to $262 million as a result of the deep crisis at the Japanese automaker.

Acting Renault CEO Clotilde Delbos pledged that nothing would be “taboo” as the company reviewed areas to slash costs. This includes the possibility of job cuts, as well as a review of “performance across all factories,” according to Reuters.

The phrasing of Delbos’ statement recalls the incendiary speech last month by Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, who pledged to slaughter “sacred cows” as the company pursued a “radical restructuring,” including 20,000 job cuts in Germany alone. Volkswagen’s former brand manager Luca de Meo is set to take over the reins at Renault later this summer.

Renault’s announcement is only the latest in a series of announced layoffs, which constitute a global jobs massacre in the auto industry. More than 500,000 auto-related jobs were shed last year, including tens of thousands in Europe and North America.

Analysts expect job losses to increase over the course of 2020. More than 80,000 job cuts were already planned by auto companies worldwide in December, according to Bloomberg News. This figure does not include the announced cuts at VW, meaning the current number is at least 100,000.

The estimate also does not include parts suppliers, which employ a far higher percentage of the global auto workforce. Volkmar Denner, CEO of German supplier Bosch, speculated in the press last month that the world economy may already have passed “peak car” production. Indian parts suppliers warn that if global auto sales continue to decline as expected, as many as 1 million out of the country’s 5 million auto part jobs may be at risk.

Other announced job cuts throughout the industry include: 9,500 cuts at VW subsidiary Audi, 10,000 at Daimler, 12,000 cuts by Ford throughout Europe and 12,500 at Renault’s corporate alliance partner Nissan. Nissan is reportedly considering an additional 4,300 white collar job cuts and the closure of two plants. Additional layoffs are also a real possibility at Ford, which announced a reshuffling in its top leadership after experiencing a 99 percent decline in profits last year. Ford is already under intense pressure by Wall Street to speed up job cuts under its “global fitness” program.

While these layoffs are occurring worldwide, Europe is particularly vulnerable. Europe is a lower-margin region for automakers due to higher proportional sales of sedans and other small vehicles, rather than the high-profit pickup trucks and SUVs which are more popular in North America. In addition, European autoworkers still retain certain job and income protections although the European unions are rushing to catch up to their American counterparts in abolishing such gains to boost the “competitiveness” of car companies in Germany, France and Italy.

Many auto companies complain of excess capacity in their European plants, making workers on the continent more at risk for new plant closures. Facilitating plant closures was no doubt a major goal of last year’s abortive merger between Fiat Chrysler and Renault, whose plants are the most underutilized in Europe. Fiat Chrysler is now moving ahead with merger plans with Renault’s French rival Peugeot.

The most immediate cause of the cuts is the onset of what is expected to be a prolonged industry slump. Global auto sales, which peaked in 2017 at 95.2 million cars, fell year-on-year by 4 percent in 2019. Renault’s internal outlook for the year is that sales in Europe and Russia will decline a further 3 percent in 2020.

A major driver of the downturn is slumping sales in emerging economies, especially China, where the auto market has exploded from virtually non-existent to the world’s largest in the space of three decades. Chinese vehicle sales fell for the first time in a generation in 2018. Major urban markets in China are reaching saturation, according to industry analysts.

However, vehicle ownership rates in China remain low, with only 181 vehicles per 1,000 people, less than Ukraine, Thailand and North Macedonia. For the vast majority of the Chinese working class, who toil for long hours for low pay, car ownership remains a financial impossibility.

A major aggravating factor is the impact of trade war measures by the Trump administration and other governments, to which the auto industry, which relies on highly integrated global supply chains, is especially vulnerable. Supply chains have already been severely disrupted by the near-total shutdown of the Chinese auto industry in response to the coronavirus, whose outbreak is centered in China’s “motor city” Wuhan. Renault jointly operates a plant in Wuhan with Chinese automaker Dongfeng, whose idling impacted production at Renault’s plants in Korea.

Global job cuts are also being driven by the industry’s transition to electric and self-driving vehicles, anticipated to be the most disruptive technologies in the industry since Henry Ford’s assembly line. However, the research and development costs are enormous, and the technologies may not reach maturity for a generation. Electric vehicles will not achieve cost parity with gas-burning vehicles until 2027 and are not expected to overtake traditional vehicles in overall sales until 2040. The timeline for self-driving vehicles is even further out.

The costs associated with these technologies is driving automakers to cut expenditures through layoffs. However, the layoffs are also part of a restructuring of the industry’s labor force for the new technologies, which will require a vastly reduced workforce.

For Renault, another major factor is the chaos surrounding its corporate alliance with Japanese automakers Nissan and Mitsubishi after the arrest and prosecution of former chairman Carlos Ghosn.

“Le Cost Killer,” as Ghosn was affectionately known in financial circles, exercised an unprecedented personal control over the alliance, which he engineered in the 1990s. He was arrested by Japanese police in 2018 on allegations of financial misconduct and fraud, including misusing tens of millions of company dollars for private jets, yachts, overseas residences and investment in his son’s company. Since his ouster, Nissan’s financial performance has plummeted. The company’s stock is at its lowest in 10 years, and Nissan last week cut its profit forecast for the year by 43 percent.

While the charges against Ghosn are certainly credible, they emerged out of a bitter conflict within Nissan’s top executives, who secretly began an internal investigation against him. Nissan executives blame the company’s disastrous performance on Ghosn’s policy of aggressive expansion. Another major point of friction between Renault and Nissan is the imbalanced cross-ownership between the two companies. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan, but Nissan owns only 15 percent of Renault and has no voting rights. Nissan has pushed for years to get Renault to reduce its stake.

Ghosn, who escaped from house arrest last year and fled Japan for Lebanon, where he holds citizenship, has used extremely favorable treatment in the Western media to present himself as the victim of a conspiracy and denounce Nissan’s current top leadership and the Japanese legal system.

Eurozone growth slows to lowest level in seven years

Nick Beams

The eurozone economy is experiencing its worst downturn since the currency crisis of 2012, according to official data released last week, even before the impact of the coronavirus outbreak in China makes itself felt.

The figures shattered claims that the European economic outlook had started to improve, revealing that growth in the single currency area was just 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Germany, the eurozone’s leading economy, recorded no growth in the fourth quarter, coming in below the expectations of analysts, after growth of 0.2 percent in the third.

The chief driving force of the downturn is the fall in industrial production. Eurostat reported last week that output fell by 2.1 percent in December, bringing the total decline for the year to 4.1 percent. Factory production was down in Germany, France and Italy.

The data indicates that other areas of the economy are also turning down. There was a 1.6 percent fall in retail sales in the eurozone in December, the steepest decline in a decade.

Commentary on the latest figures by economic and financial analysts was universally gloomy.

Anatoli Annenkov, the senior economist at the French financial firm Société Générale, said: “The numbers so far have been just awful, not only industrial production but also retail sales.”

Nadia Gharbi, senior economist at Picet Wealth Management, said: “At the beginning of the year we saw surveys pointing to a recovery and the resilience of services in the eurozone. But the hard data we have seen recently has been pretty horrible.”

ING economist Carsten Brzeski described the industrial situation as a “horror show.” “Despite some tentative positive signs from soft data that point to a bottoming out of the manufacturing slump, the hard reality looks completely different.”

The situation is expected to worsen over the coming period as the economic effects of the coronavirus spread, with predictions that Germany, as well other economies, could slide into recession.

The head of forecasting at Ifo, the Munich-based research organisation, Timo Wollmerhäuser said: “Greater production losses in Chinese industry could appreciably intensify the effects of the coronavirus on the German economy.” Germany, he noted, could be more heavily affected than other countries in Europe because 9.4 percent of German intermediate goods, forming part of industrial supply chains, come from China.

Germany is also going to be hit on the demand side. Exports to China account for 7 percent of all German exports, comprising around 2.8 percent of national output.

Stefan Schneider, chief economist for Germany at Deutsche Bank, pointed out that weak Chinese demand was an important factor in the deceleration of exports in 2019. He predicted that the coronavirus outbreak could cut 0.2 percentage points from first quarter growth that would make a “technical recession”—defined as two quarters of negative growth—“quite probable.”

“The outbreak of the coronavirus provides a substantial risk for the expected global recovery, as hopes were pinned on an improvement of the Chinese economy,” he said.

Estimates for the impact of the coronavirus on the Chinese economy are steadily being escalated as large areas of the economy remain locked down. The Australian bank ANZ has forecast that growth in the first quarter of the year will fall to 3.2 percent, half the rate for the first three months of 2019, which showed the lowest annual growth rate in 30 years.

But even these significantly lower estimates are regarded as far too optimistic. “I can’t believe that it’s going to grow by even 2 percent,” Jörg Wuttke, head of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, told the Financial Times. Other estimates are that the Chinese economy will flatline in the first quarter.

Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, delivers a speech before the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France [Credit: AP PhotoJean-François Badias]

Even before the latest data came out, former International Monetary Fund chief and now president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, warned that the coronavirus outbreak had replaced the US-China trade war as the main risk to economic growth.

“Downside risks are multiple and when some of them phase out, new risks come up,” she said.

Even though the economic outlook is worsening, stock markets in Europe, like Wall Street, continue to surge.

On Friday, the Stoxx 600 index, covering the eurozone’s biggest companies hit a record high. Bond prices also rose, pushing interest rates even lower—with the yield on Greek 10-year bonds, once an anathema for financial investors, going to an all-time low of 1 percent.

As it is in the US, the reason for this divergence between financial markets and the real economy is the belief that more cheap money will be pumped into the financial system, fueling the ongoing speculation.

The expectation is that the ECB will loosen its monetary policy still further at its next meeting in March by pushing its base interest rate deeper into negative territory and possibly increasing its purchases of financial assets from their present level of €20 billion a month to €40 billion.

There are warnings that the capacity of central banks to keep propping up the financial system and providing a stimulus is becoming ever more limited.

Earlier this month Lagarde said the already low interest rates, coupled with low inflation and low growth throughout the eurozone, had “significantly reduced the scope for the ECB and other central banks worldwide to ease monetary policy” if there were another crisis.

Across the Atlantic, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, issued the same warning.

“I worry about low interest rates because they are a symptom of a deeper problem in the global economy,” she said. “And it has put central banks in a position where they don’t have a lot of ammunition. If we have a serious recession, we’re probably not going to be able to count on central banks to offer up a significant response.”

US threatens Europe over Huawei at Munich Security Conference

Andre Damon

Amid a sharp deterioration in US-European Union relations, Washington sent a bipartisan delegation of White House officials and members of Congress to the Munich Security Conference to pressure and threaten European countries not to do business with the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were joined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who had just concluded a failed impeachment of the president, in support of the White House’s anti-China campaign.

Nancy Pelosi attends a news conference with with members of the U.S. delegation during the Munich Security Conference, Sunday, February 16, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Jens Meyer]

The conference followed announcements by Germany, France and, most recently, the UK that they would not ban Huawei from their telecommunications networks.

While the US argues that infrastructure supplied by Huawei would allow China to spy on the communications of its allies, Beijing counters that Washington wants to keep control of global communications infrastructure to carry out its own wiretapping.

Just days before the Munich Security Conference, the Washington Post reported that US intelligence had been spying on the encrypted communications of governments all over the world for the past five decades, through the CIA’s secret ownership of a global security firm based in Switzerland.

Huawei’s 5G telecommunications infrastructure is far more advanced than that of its European rivals Nokia and Ericsson, and a decision by any country not to use Huawei’s technology would put it at a significant disadvantage.

In this context, Pelosi framed the conflict as a moral question, arguing that the dispute “is about choosing autocracy over democracy on the information highway.”

But the American officials, with their combination of threats, demagogy and empty promises, got a chilly reception from the European representatives. This was summed up in an extraordinary exchange between Pelosi and Fu Ying, a Chinese diplomat, who asked the speaker of the House why, given that US companies had operated in China for decades without changing China’s political system, a Chinese company would threaten Western “democracy.”

“Do you really think the democratic system is so fragile that it could be threatened by this single hi-tech company, Huawei?” she asked.

To Pelosi’s dismay, the diplomat’s remarks were met with loud applause. “Let me just say to you that are applauding back there, that Huawei was created by reverse technology of American initiatives,” she said.

In a separate speech Pelosi threatened, “There’s a big price to pay.”

On Sunday, Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, indicated that the White House is considering ending intelligence sharing with its European allies. He posted on Twitter, “@realDonaldTrump just called me from AF1 and instructed me to make clear that any nation who chooses to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardize our ability to share Intelligence and information at the highest level.”

Such a move would mark a reversal from an earlier statement by a White House advisor that “there will be no erosion in our overall intelligence sharing” regardless of countries’ decisions over Huawei.

After the UK announced late last month that it would not ban Huawei from its telecommunications networks, Trump was reportedly “apoplectic” in a phone call with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who responded by canceling a planned trip to the United States.

The most explicit threat came from Defense Secretary Esper, who declared that “we are now in an era of Great Power Competition, with our principal challengers being China, then Russia, and we must move away from low intensity conflict and prepare once again for high-intensity warfare.”

Esper called on US allies to “wake up” to the “nefarious strategy” being carried out by China in seeking to sell 5G technology to Europe. He said, “If we don’t understand the threat and we don’t do something about it, at the end of the day it could compromise what is the most successful military alliance in history—NATO.”

He then reiterated the US position, stating, “I want to focus on the Pentagon’s top concern: the People’s Republic of China.”

While China was at the center of the conflict, the summit was riven by a range of divisions between the United States and Europe. Last week, the White House announced it would raise tariffs on European aircraft, in an attack on Airbus, the rival of Boeing.

Meanwhile, US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette gloated over the success of the United States in forcing Germany to abandon the Nord Stream II pipeline, raising doubts whether Russia would be able to finish construction of the pipeline after US sanctions forced the European company building it to back out. “It’s going to be a very long delay, because Russia doesn’t have the technology,” Brouillette said.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, sharply criticized US policy toward Russia, which he said was too aggressive. “It is not a policy, it’s a completely inefficient system,” he said.

Macron added, “There is a second choice, which is to be demanding and restarting a strategic dialogue, because today we talk less and less, conflicts multiply and we aren’t able to resolve them.”

The theme of the conference, embodied in its official report, was the crisis of the “West,” with its introduction concluding that “the West is indeed in serious trouble.” The report added that “there was no common understanding of what the West represents.”

In his speech, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier declared, “And our closest ally, the United States of America, under the present administration itself, rejects the idea of an international community.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech was framed as an inane response to this reality, in which he declared, “Those statements don’t reflect reality… I’m happy to report that the death of the transatlantic alliance is grossly exaggerated. The West is winning.”

Commenting on Pompeo’s speech, the New York Times published an article with the headline: “‘The West Is Winning,’ Pompeo Said. The West Wasn’t Buying It.” 

India: BJP loses Delhi election as voters reject communalism

Rohantha De Silva

Rattled by the eruption of mass protests against its anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sought to use the assembly elections in Delhi, the country’s National Capital Territory, to mount a political counter-offensive.

However, its efforts to polarize the electorate though an incendiary communalist campaign largely failed.

When the votes were counted last Tuesday, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP—Common Man's Party), which captured power in Delhi in Dec. 2013 just 13 months after its formation, remained firmly ensconced in office.

The underserving beneficiary of mass popular anger against the BJP’s vile communalist agenda and pro-investor socio-economic policies, the AAP won 62 of the 70 seats in the Delhi assembly. With support surging among Muslim voters who were determined to prevent a BJP victory, the AAP captured 53.57 percent of the vote, 0.73 percent less than the previous election in 2015.

The BJP did increase its share of the vote from with the 2015 Delhi assembly election. But its 38.9 percent vote-share was down sharply from last May’s national election, when it won 56.5 percent of the vote in the National Capital Territory and all seven of Delhi’s Lok Sabha seats.

The Congress Party, the historic party of the Indian bourgeoisie and till recently its preferred party of national government, saw its vote-share almost halved, from 9.7 percent to a derisory 5.44 percent.

An ethnically and culturally diverse Union Territory of 18.5 million people, Delhi has been a focal point of the nationwide protests against the CAA. While students from Jamia Millia Ismalia University and Muslim housewives in the working-class Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood initiated the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, they have been joined by students, workers, and professionals of all faiths and religious backgrounds.

Because it is India’s national capital and the center of its largest urban agglomeration, Delhi plays an outsized role in the politics of India. But this year’s state assembly elections took on added political significance, as the BJP in the hopes of seizing back the political initiative choose to fight the campaign on so-called “national issues”—that is, by championing its noxious Hindu supremacist agenda, which includes placing Indian-held Jammu Kashmir under permanent central government trusteeship, and pressing forward with the building of a Hindu temple on the site of the razed Babri Majid (mosque) in Ayodhya.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi twice spoke at election rallies. But with the BJP declining to nominate its choice for Delhi’s chief minister, the dominant figure in the BJP campaign was Modi’s chief henchman, the central government Home Minister Amit Shah. Shah spoke at some 52 BJP meetings and rallies.

Invariably, he used them to denounce opponents of the BJP’s Hindu chauvinist policies as “anti-national” and for being in league with India’s arch-enemy Pakistan. Shah accused the Congress and AAP of creating “mini-Pakistans like Shaheen Bagh,” a reference to the continuous all-day, all-night sit-in Muslim women have mounted on a major through road in that south Delhi neighbourhood since the CAA was adopted in mid-December.

Yogi Adityanath, the BJP chief minister from Uttar Pradesh and an infamous Hindu chauvinist, was also a star election campaigner, appearing at a dozen rallies. Adityanath who ordered a violent crackdown on anti-CAA protests in his state in December that left 20 people dead, insinuated that the Shaheen Bagh protesters were “terrorists” who should be fed with “bullets not biryani.”

Two other examples will suffice to give the fascistic tenor of the BJP campaign. BJP MP Parvesh Verma “warned” that the anti-CAA protesters at Shaheen Bagh would enter Delhi residents' houses and “abduct your sisters and mothers, rape them, kill them—that’s why today is the moment.”

Modi’s junior finance minister, Anurag Thakur, was caught on video leading BJP supporters in chants of “shoot them down”—a Hindu right war-cry that gained currency after the head of the West Bengal BJP, Dilip Ghosh, boasted that the BJP state governments in Uttar Pradesh, Assam, and Karnataka had shot anti-CAA protesters “like dogs.”

Seeking to act on these criminal incitements, three Hindu supremacists opened fire at or near Shaheen Bagh in the days immediately following Thakur’s provocation.

In a further attempt to whip up reaction, stoke communalism, and incite fear in the run-up to the Feb. 8 election, the Delhi Police—who are directly under the control of Shah’s Home Ministry—repeatedly launched violent attacks on anti-CAA protests. And when thugs from the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), the student movement of the RSS, the BJP’s ally and ideological mentor, savagely attacked students at Jawaharlal Nehru University on January 5, the Delhi police stood down, failing to intervene till the pre-planned assault was finished.

The BJP’s defeat in Delhi is the latest in series of state election setbacks for India’s ruling party since it won re-election last May. The state election results are a distorted reflection of the mounting social anger among India’s workers and toilers that has animated the anti-CAA protests and a wave of social struggles, including a general strike against the Modi government’s neo-liberal policies on January 8 in which tens of millions of workers participated.

BJP governments were unseated after elections in October in Maharashtra and in Jharkhand in December. In Haryana, which borders Delhi, the BJP lost it majority in last October’ state election, but was able to cling to power with the support of smaller parties.

Although the Congress Party won the Jharkhand election and now has a share of power in Maharashtra because it has agreed to serve in a government led by the BJP’s erstwhile ally, the fascistic Shiv Sena, it has failed to gain significant traction nationally from the mounting anger against the BJP.

Its election result in Delhi, where it formed the government under Sheila Dikshit for 15 consecutive years, from December of 1998 to December 2013, was nothing short of disastrous. Predictably the Congress is trying to explain away its debacle in Delhi, saying it was due to voters’ determination to thwart the BJP. But the reality is the Congress is deeply discredited, having for decades spearheaded the bourgeoisie’s drive to make India a cheap-labor hub for global capital and a strategic partner of US imperialism.

The AAP was able to suddenly come to political prominence in 2013 by exploiting the growing anger against the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance national government, which during its 10 years in office presided over a massive growth in social inequality.

The AAP undoubtedly benefited in the 2020 election from the determination of much of Delhi’s population, Hindu and Muslim alike, to strike a blow against the BJP and its rabid Hindu chauvinist politics.

But the AAP, like the rest of the Indian political establishment, is steeped in communalism.

During the election campaign, AAP leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal conspicuously failed to speak out against the BJP’s Hindu chauvinist policies. Nor did he visit the centers of popular opposition to the BJP, from the Shaheen Bagh sit-in to JNU and Jamia Millia Ismalia University, or even publicly campaign in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods. Kejriwal did, however, have time to visit a Bajrang Bali Hindu temple and to publicly recite a Hindu hymn, the Hanuman Chalisa.

The AAP supported the BJP’s “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan in Feb. 2019, which brought the nuclear-armed countries to the brink of war, and backs the building of a temple in Ayodha where Hindu chauvinists tore a 16th century mosque to the ground at the instigation of the BJP leadership.

Speaking to the News18 channel on December 18, Kejriwal attacked the BJP’s CAA not because it discriminates against Muslims, but for purportedly opening the door to mass migration to India of non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Echoing the BJP’s vile anti-immigrant campaign, Kejriwal demagogically proclaimed, “Who will give them jobs, where will you make them stay? Will you give them housing in Delhi, Mumbai, Assam, Tripura?”

The AAP use populist phrases in an attempt to mask that it is a bourgeois party, no less beholden to India’s billionaires and multi-millionaires than the BJP and Congress. During its seven-year-rule, social conditions in Delhi have worsened.

Delhi is one of the most air-polluted cities in the world, with air pollution last year surpassing the WHO limit by as much as 40 times.

Together with the BJP central government, the AAP provides employers free rein to use Delhi as a cheap-labour sweatshop. The Global March Against Child Labor noted in 2017 that around 100,000 children work for more than 14 hours a day in the illegal sweatshops in and around Delhi. In December a fire in a four-storey building housing more than a dozen illegal factories making garments, toys and other consumer goods killed more than 40 workers.

US assassinated Suleimani to quash Iran’s talks with Gulf monarchies

Bill Van Auken

The Trump administration ordered the January 3 assassination of Major General Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s most senior officials, not because he posed some “imminent threat,” but rather in a calculated bid to disrupt Tehran’s attempts to reach an accommodation with Washington’s allies in the region.

This is the inescapable conclusion flowing from a report published Thursday in the New York Times, citing unnamed senior officials from the US, Iran and other countries in the Middle East.

It recounts the arrival last September in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, of a plane carrying senior Iranian officials for talks aimed at achieving a bilateral peace agreement between the two countries.

The trip came in the context of a steady sharpening of US-Iranian tensions as a result of Trump’s abrogation of the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2018 along with the imposition of a punishing sanctions regime tantamount to a state of war. This was followed by a major escalation of the US military presence in the region a year later.

While the US dispatched an aircraft carrier strike group and a B-52-led bomber task force to the region in May of last year, the same month saw the use of limpet mines to damage four oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic “chokepoint” through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped.

In June of last year, the Iranians downed a US Navy spy drone over the same area, with the Trump White House first ordering and then calling off retaliatory air strikes against Iran. And in September, Saudi oil installations came under a devastating attack from drones and cruise missiles.

Washington blamed both the attacks on the oil tankers and the strike against the Saudi oil installations—for which the Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility—on Iran, charges that Tehran denied.

As early as last August, there were reports indicating concerns within Washington that the UAE was veering away from the anti-Iran front that the US has attempted to cobble together, based upon Israel and the Gulf oil sheikdoms. The Emirates’ coast guard had signed a maritime security agreement with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the UAE had clashed openly with Saudi Arabia over the control of southern Yemen’s port city of Aden. At the time, the Washington Post warned that the UAE “is breaking ranks with Washington, calling into question how reliable an ally it would be in the event of a war between the United States and Iran.”

According to the Times report, the meeting with the Iranian delegation in Abu Dhabi, which had been kept secret from Washington, “set off alarms inside the White House ... A united front against Iran—carefully built by the Trump administration over more than two years—seemed to be crumbling.”

Both the Emirati monarchy and its counterpart in Saudi Arabia had become increasingly distrustful of Washington’s Iran policy and concerned that they would find themselves on the frontline of any confrontation without any guarantee of the US defending them.

Saudi Arabia also began a secret diplomatic approach to Tehran, using the Iraqi and Pakistani governments as intermediaries. Suleimani played the central role in organizing the talks with both Gulf kingdoms, the Times reports.

In October, according to the report, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Yossi Cohen, the chief of Mossad, who warned him that “Iran was achieving its primary goal: to break up the anti-Iran alliance.”

Last month’s assassination of General Suleimani was initially defended by Trump and administration officials as a preemptive strike aimed at foiling supposedly “imminent” attacks on US personnel or interests in the Middle East. This pretext soon fell apart, however, and the US president and his aides fell back to justifying the extra-judicial murder of a senior state official as revenge for his support for Shia militias that resisted the US occupation of Iraq 15 years earlier and retaliation for a missile strike that killed an American military contractor last December.

That strike was launched against a military base housing American troops in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk. Iraqi security officials have since contradicted the US claim that an Iranian-backed Shia militia was responsible for the attack. They have pointed out that the missiles were launched from a predominantly Sunni area where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is active, and that Iraqi intelligence had warned US forces in November and December that ISIS was preparing to target the base.

The US responded to the missile strike on the base in Iraq by targeting Iraqi Shia militia positions on the Syria-Iraq border, killing 25 members of the Kataib Hezbollah militia. The attack provoked an angry demonstration that laid siege to the US embassy in Baghdad on December 31.

Two days later, a US Reaper drone fired missiles into a convoy at Baghdad International Airport, killing Suleimani along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a central leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, the coalition of militias that constitutes an arm of Iraq’s security forces, as well as eight others.

In the wake of the drone assassinations, US Secretary of State Pompeo sarcastically told the media: “Is there any history that would indicate that it was remotely possible that this kind gentleman, this diplomat of great order—Qassem Suleimani—had traveled to Baghdad for the idea of conducting a peace mission? We know that wasn’t true.”

As the Times report indicates, that was precisely what Suleimani was doing in Baghdad, the US knew it and that is why it assassinated him. Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi said at the time that General Suleimani had flown into the country, on a commercial flight and using his diplomatic passport, for the express purpose of delivering an Iranian response to a message from Saudi Arabia as part of talks aimed at de-escalating tensions.

The more that emerges about the assassination of Suleimani, the more the abject criminality of his murder becomes clear. It was carried out neither as a reckless act of revenge nor to ward off unspecified attacks. Rather, it was a calculated act of imperialist terror designed to disrupt talks aimed at defusing tensions in the Persian Gulf and to convince the wavering Gulf monarchies that Washington is prepared to go to war against Iran.

This is the policy not merely of the Trump administration. Among the most significant moments in Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this month was the standing ovation by Democratic lawmakers as he gloated over the murder of Suleimani, a war crime.

The resort to such criminal actions is a measure of the extreme crisis of a capitalist system that threatens to drag humanity into a new world war.

Coronavirus cases continue to increase and spread internationally

Benjamin Mateus

On Friday morning, Chinese health authorities announced 5,090 new cases of Covid-19, the coronavirus that emerged in Hubei province’s capital Wuhan in December, raising the total across mainland China to 63,581. The death total climbed to 1,380, with 121 additional deaths reported. Worldwide, the total case number stood at 64,453, with 1,383 total deaths. There have been only three fatalities outside of China. The latest was in Japan, where an 80-year-old woman from Kanagawa died. She had been on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, that is moored in Yokohama with over 3,700 passengers and crew being held under strict quarantine.

On Thursday, confusion arose internationally when officials in Hubei announced 14,840 previously undeclared cases and 242 additional deaths—dramatically increasing the numbers. Provincial authorities explained that testing kits to confirm a coronavirus infection were in such severe shortage that many individuals suffering from respiratory infections or who may have perished could not be tested. A decision was therefore made to change the criteria for designating someone with Covid-19 using clinical judgments or imaging diagnostics.

If the more than doubling in fatalities noted on Thursday implies cases are now being reclassified that were otherwise missed, the total number of deaths across mainland China may be far higher than the current estimate. According to Alessandro Vespignani, a physicist and director of the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems at Northeastern University, various models suggested on February 5 that there were far more infections than the official figure. He said: “I believe every modeling approach [was] pointing to something that [was] over 100,000 cases in the best-case scenario.”

With Covid-19 registering a 2 percent fatality index, a more robust estimate of the death toll would therefore be over 2,000.

More worrisome has been signs of growing rates of infections in countries bordering or within the geographic boundaries of mainland China. Singapore now has 67 confirmed cases. Two recent confirmed cases occurred in Singaporeans who developed symptoms on February 1 and February 3, respectively. Assuming a virus incubation period of two to three weeks, it raises the possibility that many more infections outside of China will be diagnosed over the next several weeks, as people appear to be able to infect others before symptoms surface.

Changi Airport in Singapore is one of the busiest hubs in the world. Just in 2019, it handled 68,300,000 passengers, making it the third busiest airport in Asia and seventh internationally. Several of the international cases in the United Kingdom and South Korea have been traced back to Singapore.

Apparently, a gas meter sales meeting held in January at the Grand Hyatt, a luxury hotel in Singapore, adjacent to a beehive of racy nightclubs and busy restaurants, may have been the nexus for the international spread of the coronavirus. Global health authorities are seeking to confirm this possibility.

Dale Fisher, chair of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network that is coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), said: “We do feel uncomfortable obviously when we diagnose a patient with the illness and we can’t work out where it came from… the containment activities are less effective.”

China National Pharmaceutical Group, also known as Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, announced on Friday that it has been able to recover neutralizing antibodies from patients who have recovered from Covid-19. Their press agents reported that, in laboratory trials, they were able to show that these antibodies effectively killed the virus. Additionally, they have successfully prepared plasma from patients and have used it in the treatment of 11 others in critical condition and noted significant results. The first phase of the trial occurred on February 8.

Sinopharm stated: “The plasma product to treat the novel coronavirus is made from plasma loaded with antibodies donated by recovered patients. It went through virus inactivation and was tested against virus-neutralizing antibodies and multiple pathogenic microorganisms.”

The containment of the epidemic, however, let alone its end, remains unpredictable. In a concerning development, the first case in Africa was confirmed today in Egypt, with the patient reported only as a “foreigner.” Suspected cases are under quarantine in several other African countries.

The World Health Organization is particularly alarmed about the implications of the virus taking hold in populations where the medical system is vastly ill-prepared to cope with a sudden rush of people requiring intensive care.

Michel Yao, WHO Africa program manager for emergency operations, told the Lancet journal: “We all know how fragile health systems [are] in the African continent, they are already overwhelmed by many outbreaks. For us, it is critical to detect coronavirus earlier [so] that we can prevent spreading within communities that can trigger a number of cases that can overwhelm the treatment capacity.”

In China, the national government is seeking to placate widespread popular outrage at the belated response of authorities to the virus outbreak. Beijing has sacked two senior officials from Hubei Province. Zhang Jin, the Communist party chief of the health commission in Hubei province, and Liu Yingzi, the director of the health commission, were both removed for their “failures” to act decisively early in the epidemic or to offer appropriate care to their people. They have been replaced by close allies of President Jinping.

According to the Guardian, “337 officials in Hubei were ‘penalized,’ including six officials who were fired for dereliction of duty. Officials from the Red Cross Society in Hubei were also removed. A team from China’s anti-corruption agency, the national supervisory commission, has been sent to Hubei to investigate Dr. Li Wenliang’s death.”

Chinese authorities have confirmed 1,716 health care workers have been infected, many during the early course of the epidemic when there was a shortage of special protective gear and clothing, and no warnings that they were dealing with a new virus. At least six have died, including Doctor Li Wenliang, who was threatened by police in December for raising concerns.

President Xi Jinping has called for an overhaul of the health emergency response system and a review of laws on infectious disease prevention and treatment, including wildlife protection. He admitted: “There is not enough preparation for a catastrophe, the risk assessments, research, and in-depth management for emergencies are not in place. There are inadequate monitoring and early warning systems, and the foundations of emergency management need to be strengthened.”

Borrowing from the populism of Chairman Mao, Xi has declared a “grassroots people’s war” against the virus. China’s vice premier Sun Chunlan proclaimed: “Hubei and Wuhan must not delay in taking decisive measures to identify all suspected and confirmed cases without compromise and ensure all those who must be rounded up are rounded up.” Authorities have launched a campaign to enforce mass quarantine of the infected and feverish, including those with close contacts with the afflicted.

Trump administration’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow asserted that they were disappointed with China’s response to the coronavirus and that China had not invited US health officials to help with the outbreak. “We thought there was better transparency coming out of China, but it doesn’t appear to be.”

Kudlow’s remarks come on the heel of US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Bass’s gloating comment that the Covid-19 epidemic will weaken China and “help accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” Such statements are attempts to exploit a human tragedy to undermine the perceived main economic rival of US capitalism in the eyes of financial investors.

The Conscience of a Conservative

Bob Topper

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them

—Barry Goldwater, Conservative Republican, 1981

There are many good people from other cultures, with quite different faiths, who live moral and productive lives. Judeo-Christian principles are not the only path to morality. Hinduism and Buddhism teach similar principals and have equally interesting mythical histories. The very fact that similar sets of principles were developed simultaneously by different cultures implies that rather than being handed down from the gods, they evolved along with their respective cultures.

Western culture is rooted in ancient Greece. Plato’s rules of logic defined how we reason, and Socrates, who lived 400 years before Christ, was the first moral philosopher. He developed his moral principles using reason. He did not rely on Christian revelation.

Christianity and Islam, argue that each of their moral codes is their God’s law and is therefore supreme. That argument did not sit well with the framers of the Constitution who treated all religions equally and based our government and laws on reason, not religion or mysticism or superstition.

The Enlightenment thinkers rejected Christian revelation and replaced it with reason. Consequently our Constitution, the most important document to come out of the Age of Enlightenment, is derived from reason. It is neither an endorsement nor a denial of God or religion. That does not mean that the founders were indifferent to religion. On the contrary, they believed in God and defended religious beliefs. Many were Deists and Christians. But when it came to writing the Constitution, they took the Deist’s position and wisely rejected revelation as its foundation. Consequently, our Constitution is a secular document that guarantees religious freedom.

So it is that politicians must reconcile their personal religious beliefs with reason and a secular constitution. With courage and grace Senator Mitt Romney recently showed how that is done. Faith guided his conscience, but his objective consideration of the facts led to the truth, and his decision to vote “guilty” in the Trump impeachment trial on one Article of Impeachment.

The idea that one can appeal to a “higher power,” as some members of Congress claim, is contrary to the entire concept of America. To allow religious belief to trump the Constitution invites lawlessness. “Honor killings,” for example, while not uncommon in some countries, could never be acceptable here. For obvious reasons the Constitution overrides the any religious code that egregiously violates our rights.

Interestingly, the Christian Bible also demands honor killings, though Christians no longer believe that preserving a man’s honor requires that he kill his daughter for promiscuity. Here common sense has clearly triumphed over the Biblical mandate.

Democracy requires thoughtful deliberation, debate based in fact and truth, not faith, or fantasy. Members of Congress who refuse to reason, who appeal to scripture and reject evidence, fail to understand what the Constitution requires of them. They do a great disservice to our nation. To choose Christian revelation over reason is to do what our enlightened founders rejected. It is not the American way. As Goldwater remarked 40 years ago, “politics and governing require compromise.”

Goldwater also had this to say:

I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’

Unfortunately, the religious right has changed what it means to be a conservative. The Republican Party of today bears little resemblance to Goldwater’s. And the religious right seems hell-bent on dictating “their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism,’” as they try to rewrite American history, and change the meaning of the Constitution. Should they succeed, it will be sad day for everyone,…Christians included.

Megachurch Mess

James Haught

Billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey helped create a four-season television series – “Greenleaf” – about a black megachurch where worshipers whoop, sway, dance, wave arms, squeal, shout and shell out truckloads of money.

Some commentators say the series “shows the best and worst of Christianity,” but I can’t find much best, only worst.

The founder-preacher endlessly connives for money, and burned a previous church for insurance (accidentally killing a custodian). He trades his private jet for a sleeker one. He slept with his sister-in-law (played by Oprah), which angered his wife, who slept with a different man.

A middle-aged church manager rapes 15-year-old girls at the church’s camp.

The star singer’s husband is secretly gay and undergoes grotesque religious “conversion therapy” (through which God supposedly will make him “straight”) but it doesn’t work.

A married sub-preacher grabs one of the cast’s few whites, a female secretary, for sex in anterooms.

A rival preacher gambles away church money.

All the while, episodes reverberate with “God is good!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Praise God!” and “Amen! Amen!” at almost every breath. It’s a carnival of sanctimony and sin.

I suspect that Oprah and other producers deliberately hatched this series to make megachurches look like zoos of absurdity – places more laughable than laudable.

My wife and I are watching the whole tale. Since one-fourth of all the world’s Christians now “speak in tongues,” we wonder if any Greenleaf worshipers will burst into glossalalia. They engage in all the rest of holy hoopla. Teen-age gospel singers leap like kangaroos. Worship services are Show Biz extravaganzas.

Actually, the series has plenty of intriguing romance, human struggles, teen puppy-love and other staples of fiction. But there’s an underlying current: megachurches – supposedly symbolizing successful Christianity – are frauds.

Lots of real-life evidence supports this claim. Here are some notorious examples:

Evangelist Bill Hybels was forced to leave his 24,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois after several women accused him of sex abuses.

Evangelist Ted Haggard ranted against all sorts of sex at his 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado – and became president of the National Association of Evangelicals, visiting President George W. Bush in the White House. Then he was caught in gay sex and driven out.

Evangelist Bill Gothard of the Gothard Institute of Basic Life Principles drew up to 10,000 at weeklong “religious right” seminars – but he was dethroned when 34 women accused him of crude sexual affronts.

Evangelist Tony Alamo toured in giant revivals – until he was sentenced to 175 years in prison for child rape and other sex crimes.

Evangelist Bob Coy led a huge Fort Lauderdale church with 25,000 members – visited by President George W. Bush – but he resigned in disgrace after admitting numerous sex messes.

Evangelist Jim Bakker ruled the enormous PTL Club in the Carolinas – until he was accused of rape and sentenced to 45 years in prison for accounting fraud.

Evangelist Dave Reynolds of the large Cornerstone Bible Fellowship in Arkansas was wiped out by 70 counts of child pornography.

Evangelist Jon Petersen of World Ambassadors pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly all of his church’s money “to pay for a sex addiction.”

Evangelist Mario Leyva toured in southern revivals – then was sent to prison for sodomizing multitudes of underage boys.

On and on it goes. Literally hundreds of megachurch scandals fill the news. Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast once counted many culprits, including: Josh Duggar, Bishop Eddie Long, George Rekers, John Paulk, Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jack Schaap, David Loveless, Grant Storms, Isaac Hunter, Larry Durant, Sam Hinn, Paul Barnes, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Barnes, Joe Barron, Michael Hintz and Todd Bentley.

Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention identified 400 ministers and church leaders convicted of sex crimes in the past decade. A “Black-Collar Crimes” registry maintained by the Freedom From Religion Foundation contains thousands of entries.

Not all these scandals involve megachurches. However, the big spectacle houses of worship – supposedly representing a triumph of religion – especially constitute a cesspool.