The U.S. Military is Hell-Bent on Trying to Overpower China

Vijay Prashad

On April 1, Admiral Philip Davidson—the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command—told the U.S. Congress that he would like $20 billion to create a robust military cordon that runs from California to Japan and down the Pacific Rim of Asia. His proposal—titled “Regain the Advantage”—pointed to the “renewed threat we face from Great Power Competition. … Without a valid and convincing conventional deterrent, China and Russia will be emboldened to take action in the region to supplant U.S. interests.”

The real focus is China. In January 2019, Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told U.S. military officials that the problem is “China, China, China.” This has been the key focus of all U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominees for the Defense Department, whether it be Shanahan or the current chief Mark Esper. Esper cannot open his mouth without blaming China; he recently told the Italian paper La Stampa that China is using the coronavirus emergency to push its advantage through “malign” forces such as Huawei and by sending aid to Italy. As far as Trump and Esper are concerned, China and—to a lesser extent—Russia are to be contained by the United States with armed force.

The Missile Gap?

Senator Tom Cotton (Republican from Arkansas) has pushed the view that China’s military modernization program has created a missile gap in China’s favor. In March 2018, Cotton asked Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command (now U.S. ambassador to South Korea) about China’s missiles. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China has ground-based ballistic missiles that threaten our basing in the western Pacific and our ships,” Harris told Congress. To remedy this, Harris suggested that the United States exit from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which Trump did in early 2019 (Trump blamed Russian non-compliance, but it was clear that the real target was this fear of a Chinese missile advantage). In August 2019, the U.S. tested an intermediate-range missile, signaling that its intentions long preceded its withdrawal from the INF.

In March 2019, Cotton went to the Heritage Foundation to say that the United States should start production of medium-range ballistic missiles, which should be deployed on bases at the U.S. territory of Guam and on the territories of U.S. allies; these missiles should directly threaten China. “Beijing has stockpiled thousands of missiles that can target our allies, our bases, our ships, and our citizens throughout the Pacific,” Cotton said in characteristic hyperbole. Exaggeration is central to people like Cotton; for them, fear-mongering is the way to produce policy, and facts are inconvenient.

The United States has used the concept of the “missile gap” before. John F. Kennedy used it for his 1958 presidential campaign, even though it is likely he knew that it was false to say that the USSR had more missiles than the United States. Little has changed since then.

In November 2018, before the U.S. left the INF, Admiral Davidson spoke at a think tank in Washington on “China’s Power.” In 2015, Davidson said, his predecessor Harry Harris had joked that the islands off the coast of the People’s Republic of China were a “Great Wall of Sand”; now, said Davidson, these had become a “Great Wall of SAMs,” referring to Surface-to-Air Missiles. Davidson, from the military side, and Cotton, from the civilian side, began to say over and over again that China had a military advantage by the “missile gap,” a concept that required no careful investigation.

The United States has the largest military force in the world. In April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the United States military budget rose by 5.3 percent over the previous year to total $732 billion; the increase over one year was by itself the entire military budget of Germany. China, meanwhile, spent $261 billion on its military, lifting its budget by 5.1 percent. The United States has 6,185 nuclear warheads, while China has 290 nuclear warheads. Only five countries in the world have missiles that can strike any country on the earth: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. Whether it be in terms of intercontinental weapons or through U.S. air power, there is no doubt that China simply does not possess a military advantage over the United States.

Every known inventory of weapons shows that the United States has a much greater capacity to wreak havoc in a military confrontation against anyone—including China; but the U.S. now understands that while it can bomb a country to smithereens, it can no longer subordinate all countries.

Withdrawal

The United States Navy is both overstretched and threatened. The two U.S. Pacific-based carriers—USS Ronald Reagan and USS Theodore Roosevelt—are in trouble; USS Reagan is in Japan, where it is being repaired, while USS Roosevelt is in Guam, with its crew devastated by COVID-19. Meanwhile, the U.S. has sent an aircraft carrier group to threaten Venezuela using the excuse of counter-narcotics. Threatening several countries far apart from each other makes it difficult for the U.S. to focus its superior military power against any one country.

Missile capacities shown by Iran and by China have meant that the U.S. continuous bomber presence at al-Udeid Air Base (Qatar) and at Andersen Air Force Base (Guam) has been withdrawn. These bombers are now at Minot Air Force Base (North Dakota) and Barksdale Air Force Base (Louisiana). General Timothy Ray of the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command put a brave face on these withdrawals, saying that it gives the U.S. greater flexibility. The real reason for the bombers leaving Qatar and Guam is that the U.S. military fears that these strategic assets are in harm’s way.

Neither Iran nor China has the capacity to defeat the U.S. in a military confrontation. But alongside both of their borders, Iran and China have the capacity to strike U.S. targets and U.S. allies. This capacity hampers the U.S. ability to establish the complete subordination of these countries. It is this local power developed by China and Iran that the United States wants to extinguish.

Regain the Advantage

Admiral Davidson’s April report calls for “Forward-based, rotational joint forces” as the “most credible way to demonstrate U.S. commitment and resolve to potential adversaries.” What the Indo-Pacific Command means is that rather than have a fixed base that is vulnerable to attack, the U.S. will fly its bombers into bases on the soil of its allies in the Indo-Pacific network (Australia, India, and Japan) as well as others in the region (South Korea, for instance); the bombers, he suggests, will be better protected there. China will still be threatened, but Chinese missiles will—so the theory goes—find it more difficult to threaten mobile U.S. assets.

Davidson’s report has a stunning science-fiction quality to it. There is a desire for the creation of “highly survivable, precision-strike networks” that run along the Pacific Rim, including missiles of various kinds and radars in Palau, Hawaii, and in space. He asks for vast amounts of money to develop a military that is already very powerful.

Furthermore, the U.S. is committed to the development of anti-space weapons, autonomous weapons, glide vehicles, hypersonic missiles, and offensive cyber weapons—all meant to destabilize missile defense techniques and to overpower any adversary. Such developments presage a new arms race that will be very expensive and that will further destabilize the world order.

The United States has unilaterally increased a buildup around China and has ramped up threatening rhetoric against Beijing. Anxiety about a possible war against China imposed by the United States is growing within China; although sober voices are asking the Chinese government not to get drawn into an arms race with the United States. Nonetheless, the threats are credible, and the desire to build some form of deterrence is growing.

The absence of a strong world peace movement with the capacity to prevent this buildup by the United States is of considerable concern for the planet. The need for such a movement could not be greater.

Falling Consumer Prices, Except for Food

Dean Baker

Food prices rose 2.6 percent in April, reflecting a large increase in store-bought food. 

The overall Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell 0.8 percent in April, driven again by large price declines in sectors that were hit hard by pandemic-related shutdowns. Gas prices fell 20.6 percent, following a drop of 10.5 percent in March. They are now 32.0 percent below their year-ago level. Apparel prices had an extraordinary 4.7 percent decline, following a drop of 2.0 percent in March. Prices are now 5.7 percent below year-ago levels.

There were also huge declines in hotel prices and airfares, with the former dropping 8.1 percent and the latter dropping 15.2 percent. These April declines followed March price declines of 7.7 percent and 12.6 percent, respectively. These sharp price declines led to a drop of 0.4 percent in the core CPI, following a decline of 0.1 percent in March. This was the largest drop in the core CPI on record.

Much of the story in this report, as in the March report, is that we are seeing sharp declines in the price of items that people are not buying, while the prices of many of the items people are buying are rising rapidly. Because the CPI is a fixed-weight index, the impact on the index of drops in the price of items such as hotels, restaurants, and airfares is not affected by the fact that demand for these items is down by more than 50 percent from the pre-crisis level.

The most important item with a sharp increase in price is food purchased at home, for which prices increased 2.6 percent in April, following a 0.5 percent increase in March. The price of medical care services rose 0.5 percent in April, the same as its March increase. Prices are now up 5.8 percent over the last year.

There was a drop in the rate of inflation for both rent proper and owners’ equivalent rent with both showing 0.2 percent increases for the month, well below the pace of their respective 3.5 and 3.1 percent rises over the last year. (The slowing was even sharper if we remove the rounding, getting April increases of .196 percent and .175 percent, respectively.) This indicates that landlords are asking for lower rents to keep units occupied.

As we move forward, it will be interesting to see how rents may change across cities. One of the almost certain lasting effects of the pandemic will be an increased amount of telecommuting. Since it is as easy to telecommute from a place with low housing costs as a congested metropolitan area with high housing costs, we may see sharp reductions in rents in some of the high-priced cities.

In this respect, it is worth noting that the index for owners’ equivalent rent in San Francisco fell by 0.7 percent in April. While this could be the beginning of sharp declines in rent in the Bay area, this index is highly erratic (it rose 0.6 percent in February), so we definitely need more data before attaching much significance to this price drop.

In other areas, the price of new vehicles was flat in April after dropping 0.4 percent in March. The index is down by 0.6 percent from the year-ago level. Used car prices fell 0.4 percent, after rising 0.8 percent in March. There is clearly no free fall in car prices for now.

The college tuition index rose 0.2 percent in April, the same as in March, while tuition at technical schools rose 0.7 percent, following a 0.2 percent rise in March. This is perhaps a harbinger of a shift in demand.

The index for food away from home rose just 0.1 percent in April after rising 0.2 percent in March. Both increases lagged the much sharper rise in food purchased at home, reflecting the plunge in demand for restaurant meals.

The overall inflation picture from this report is confusing since it hugely overstates the importance of price declines in items that almost no one is buying, such as airplane tickets and hotel rooms. We are likely to see the reverse of this story as the economy starts to reopen this month and next. Restaurants, hotels, and airplanes are likely to be seeing much higher costs due to the measures necessary to limit the spread of the coronavirus. This means that they will be driving the overall CPI higher. This is not inflation that should concern the Fed, but we need not have any fears of a deflationary spiral.

India-A Decaying Civilization

Javeed Ahmad Raina

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great-grandmother of tradition…Mark Twain

India has ever been the land of peace and harmony. It has been a heaven for co-existence, brotherhood and religious tolerance. The country managed to sustain secular values in the face of striking, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. The country is well-known for vibrant democracy, independent judiciary, rich literature, secular ethos and cultural diversity. Historians, poets and travelogue writers have frequently praised this ancient land of mystic majesty. The American born poet T. S Eliot calls India as the land of “Shantih (Peace)”. He saw hope and re-generation in the Indian culture amidst the barbarism and disillusionment of the modern West. Similarly, the German poet Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, in his collection of lyric poems, West-Eastern Diwan, expresses disdain towards the spiritual bankruptcy of the West and believes that the East is the seat of spiritual power. The spirit of Eastern culture was best represented by India.

These secular principles were further preserved by the country’s constitution. The modern constitution of free India promoted compassion and self-control, because it believes that everyone was one with each other, and therefore, everyone should share and help in each other. The very idea of India invoked in the constitution is one of secularism, freedom and sagacity. It is due to these ideals that the Indian constitution does not insist on a single language or religion but embraces diversity of languages, cultures and customs. It was due to these distinctive features that various regions liberally aligned with the main domain of India.

But, over the course of time, the beautiful soul of India has been defaced. The land has been battered by a tsunami of religious hatred. The country is lamenting on the loss of its soul. The very word, India, has come to represent repression of marginal sections- Muslims, Christians and Dalits. Even, the ordinary Indians have serious reservations with the idea of new majoritarian India. The transformation of a great democracy into seemingly anarchy and apathy should be a grave concern for all of us. This un-wanted transition has not only disfigured the image of country, it has also fractured the muti-cultural heritage of the nation. The land which used to attract people from diverse faiths has turned into the land of despair.

The multicultural heritage of the country is slowly losing a common ground that used to hold different ethnic communities together. The harmony that once existed between different communities, regardless of the religious differences has been torn apart. The feelings of goodwill and pride towards the motherland are now replaced with bitterness and contempt. The very land once used to stand as a rock for communal harmony, a gathering of everything and everybody, but now it provokes the feelings of disgust and dissatisfaction in the saner voices. The historians no longer record the famous legends of the country. They have no means to do so, because the very land is in lament for the loss of its incredible inclusiveness.

The beautiful soul of the country is tormented by the unruly collaborators- despotic leaders, sellout media and ultra nationalists. The sheer egoism of politicians, the deceptive mass media and the self-serving regimes have collectively betrayed the nation. They have manipulated and misguided the masses. They, re-write history, impose majoritarian ideology, erode identity and enforce vilifying narratives. They, in the long process cultured a class of people who exclude everything from their exclusive design, including those very Indian in colour and blood. In all these years, the mainstream media in particular acted as the right arm of tyranny by enforcing majoritarian ideology. The vibrant democracy is fast shrinking in the direction of Hobbes’ leviathan, the rule by absolute sovereign. The land of Saints and Sufi’s has slowly changed into the land of religious extremism. This land does not inspire us anymore; this land only inspires lament and dirges!

India’s calamitous COVID-19 lockdowns leave more than 120 million jobless

Wasantha Rupasinghe & Keith Jones

More than one hundred million workers and toilers in India have lost their jobs as the result of the now seven-week-long anti-COVID-19 lockdown that the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government imposed on the country on March 25 without any forewarning or planning.

The vast majority of the newly jobless have been left without any income, as India has no jobless benefits. Moreover, most had little to no savings.

Two days into the lockdown, the government announced a derisory 1.7 trillion rupee (US $22.4 billion) package of relief measures, much of it consisting of money recycled from existing programs. Many of India’s poorest workers and toilers, including tens of millions of migrant workers and their families, have yet to see any of this starvation-style relief.

Whilst the lockdown, which was originally slated to end after 21 days, has twice been extended, and even the corporate media has had to acknowledge that tens of millions of unemployed workers face hunger and potentially starvation, the BJP government has callously refused to provide any additional relief.

The central government does not publish regular jobless reports. But surveys conducted by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) are considered to provide a reasonably accurate portrait of the evolution of India’s workforce.

Summarizing the findings of its latest labour market surveys, the CMIE report on its website last week is entitled, “The jobs bloodbath of April 2020.”

According to the report, a staggering 114 million persons lost their jobs in the month of April alone, and 8 million in March, for a total of 122 million jobs lost.

As a result, India’s unemployment rate had shot up to 27.1 percent by May 3 and is even higher in urban areas.

The most impoverished and vulnerable sections of working people——daily-wage workers and street vendors and hawkers—have suffered the largest job losses in both real and proportionate terms. An estimated 91.3 million workers, representing more than 70 percent of all workers in the “informal” or unregulated sector, lost their livelihoods in April.

However, the unfolding social catastrophe has heavily impacted all sections of the working class, as well as significant sections of the middle class, including managerial staff and professionals,

Among the formal or salaried sector, which includes full-time workers and managerial and technical staff at large manufacturing and industrial companies, state-owned enterprises, and IT firms, 17.8 million workers have been furloughed. This represents at least one in every five workers in this sector which employed 86 million people on average in the 2019-20 fiscal year, which ended March 31.

The CMIE adds that its survey indicated that 18 million “businesspeople,” many of whom used to employ wage workers, lost their jobs in April. This category is comprised of highly disparate layers, from artisans and small shop and restaurant-owners to the proprietors of what the survey calls medium-sized businesses. A businessperson, observes the report, would generally not describe himself as unemployed unless he or she believes their “business is destroyed for all practical purposes.”

The report further notes that its data shows that in April 5.8 million more people came to be employed in the agricultural sector. This apparent anomaly is in all likelihood the result of newly unemployed workers focusing their energies on trying to eke out a living on small plots of land that previously had served to supplement their earned income. The CMIE itself comments wryly that the new agricultural “employment is mostly disguised unemployment.” This would mean the true number rendered jobless in March and April was in the order of 130 million.

A further measure of the jobs slaughter is provided by the Labour Force Participation Rate, which has been falling for years, further underscoring that the gains in wealth and income from India’s capitalist expansion over the past three decades have been monopolized by big business and the most privileged sections of the middle class.

Out of the approximately 900 million Indians of working-age (defined as 16 to 64), just 396 million were economically active in March. In April this total fell to 282 million.

Even prior to the lockdown, India’s economy was being roiled by a multisided crisis, including falling investment and consumer demand, and a financial system weighed down by massive corporate debt. Already last August, the BJP government announced a spate of pro-investor reforms, including massive corporate tax cuts and an accelerated privatization drive, in an attempt to spur investment. But this failed to prevent the slowing of the economy, causing the Reserve Bank of India, the IMF, and other major financial institutions to repeatedly pare back their growth projections for the country’s economy in 2020.

Modi’s announcement on the evening of March 24 that the country would go into a total lockdown at midnight came out of the blue. For weeks the prime minster and his aides had boasted that India was providing a model for the region and even the world in how to counter the pandemic. Then suddenly it reversed gears, without taking even the most rudimentary steps to mobilize state resources to either fight the spread of COVID-19 (through mass-testing, systematic contact-tracing, and the humane quarantining and treatment of those who came into contact with the virus) or to provide support for the tens of millions deprived of their jobs and incomes by the lockdown.

The results have been calamitous. This is exemplified by the cruel fate of the migrant day-labourers of Delhi, Mumbai, and other major urban centres. Left by the authorities to fend for themselves, millions of migrant workers set out to return to their villages on foot so they could find refuge with their kith and kin. When the government realized that it had recklessly set in motion a mass migration that threatened to spread COVID-19 to rural India, it ordered security forces to herd the migrant workers into cramped makeshift camps, where many remain trapped to this day,

While the Modi government’s lockdown has had a ruinous economic impact on India’s workers and toilers, it has failed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and the very real threat—given India’s mass poverty, ramshackle healthcare system, and densely packed urban slums—that the virus will yet kill hundreds of thousands, even millions.

When Modi announced the impending lockdown on March 24, India had announced 564 confirmed COBID-19 cases and less than 10 deaths. As of last night, 77,975 people had contracted the disease, and it had killed 2,528 people. However, the official tallies undoubtedly grossly understate the disease’s deadly impact. Among countries with more than 50,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, India has performed among the fewest tests per capita.

Recently, health officials inadvertently discovered that five COVID-19 patients from Mumbai’s densely packed Dharavi slum who had been discharged from hospital last month subsequently died of the disease. Ominously, data from Maharashtra state health authorities indicate a high COVID-19 death rate in Dharavi, with at least 40 deaths to date from just 1,028 confirmed cases.

Egged on by big business, the Modi government is now pivoting to implement a precipitous return to work, and cynically citing the hardship and suffering its lockdown has inflicted on the working people as justification for making them put their lives and those of their families and co-workers at risk.

The Hindu supremacist BJP government’s effective embrace of a criminal policy of “herd immunity,” that is, of mass death to ensure big business profits, is the spearhead of an all-out class war. In a speech Tuesday, Modi promised a “quantum jump” in pro-investor “reforms.” A foretaste of this has been given by the BJP state governments of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. In the name of attracting investment and “reviving” the economy, India’s largest and fifth most populous states have “suspended” virtually all labour laws to enable companies to force workers to work 72 hours per week without any overtime pay, lay off workers at will, increase precarious contract labour jobs, de-recognize unions and forego all collective bargaining.

Iran destabilised by US amid COVID-19 pandemic

Jean Shaoul

Iran is reeling under the impact of the world recession, the collapse in oil prices and one of the worst manifestations of the COVID-19 pandemic with one of the world’s highest mortality rates.

This is being deliberately exacerbated by Washington’s provocative military deployments in the Persian Gulf and unrelenting “maximum pressure” sanctions that have been ramped up amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

While official figures place the number of confirmed cases at more than 110,000 and deaths at just under 7,000, mainly in Tehran Province, the real figures are far higher. In March, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the total number of cases might exceed official tallies by a factor of five, concealed due primarily to limited testing capacity. Last month, the Iranian parliament’s research arm estimated that the number of cases could be up to 10 times higher and the death toll nearly twice the official figure.

The police have censored online blogs that question official figures, with the police chief announcing that his forces had identified and dealt with 1,300 websites and arrested 320 individuals for “spreading rumours” about the spread of COVID-19.

Refusing to acknowledge the spread of the virus before the February elections, the government only reluctantly imposed a lockdown early in March, fearful of its economic and social consequences. Last month, in the run-up to the holy month of Ramadan, it ordered a partial return to work, including many shops, factories and workshops, but did not lift the ban on mass gatherings as the number of cases continued to rise.

Mosques are to reopen for three nights this week at the highpoint of Ramadan. Congregational prayers have resumed in 180 towns and cities across the country, although not in Tehran and other major cities, amid reports of tensions between the government and the clerical establishment over the closures. Schools are set to reopen next week.

On Sunday, the authorities were forced to reimpose a lockdown on southwestern oil region bordering Iraq, due to the sharp rise in new cases across Khuzestan Province.

In 2018, before the US unilaterally revoked the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, oil accounted for 15 percent of Iran’s GDP. Following Washington’s ending of waivers to key importers, oil production fell to just 500,000 barrels a day (bpd) and exports to a mere 300,000. That too has fallen due to plunging global demand, while the price of oil has also plummeted, which, together with the discounts Tehran offers buyers as compensation for the risk of skirting sanctions, is gutting revenues.

The petroleum industry, including oil and petrochemicals, accounted for about 55 percent of Iranian exports but has been hit by the global recession and the partial shutdown of production due to the lockdown. Iraq, the biggest regional importer, announced a temporary closure of its land borders, while total Chinese trade with Iran in January and February fell by nearly 27 percent compared with November-December, with exports to Iran down nearly 22 percent and imports from Iran down over 34 percent in the same period due to the COVID-19 outbreak in China.

Previously, Tehran relied on oil revenues to cover 30 percent of its budget. This year it was expecting oil, based on $50 a barrel, to provide just 10 percent, but now even that figure is widely considered optimistic.

Iran has seen its currency, the rial, plummet: from 32,000 to the US dollar to 166,000 and more than fivefold against major currencies. This has led the Rouhani government to introduce legislation slashing four zeros from the currency and renaming it “toman,” in a bid to reduce the psychological impact of soaring inflation, running at 40 percent.

With US sanctions preventing access to global capital markets and Washington’s veto of Tehran’s appeal for a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund—its first such request in more than half a century—the supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, authorised President Hassan Rouhani to take $1 billion out of the National Development Fund.

US sanctions have shattered the country’s economy and blocked access to critical food, pharmaceutical and industrial supplies, making it more difficult for Iran to respond to the pandemic. To cite one example, at the end of last year, at least 20 vessels carrying more than a million tonnes of grain were idling outside Iranian ports due to Tehran’s difficulty in paying its creditors.

Iran is now seeking unconventional routes to buy millions of tonnes of wheat, corn and soybeans to boost its reserves, despite Rouhani’s claims that the coronavirus would not endanger food supplies. The government has allocated just $300 million for food subsidies and unemployment benefits so far, despite widespread economic hardship. Some 5 million people are without work as a result of the closures, while the minimum wage is not enough for one person to live on, let alone a family. The prices of basic goods have increased by about 5-10 percent on a daily or weekly basis.

The Iranian parliament’s research centre predicted last year—before the pandemic—that as many as 57 million people, or 75 percent of Iran’s 80 million-strong population, would be living in poverty this year due to inflation and rising unemployment. Last month, former President Mohammad Khatami, largely banned from speaking on Iranian media, warned in an online speech that people might resort to violence due to hopelessness and despair.

These terrible conditions are the result not only of US sanctions, but also of the Iranian ruling elite’s moves to overturn the social concessions made to the working class after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Over the past four years, this has included severe austerity and price hikes for basic commodities. Water shortages, unaffordable groceries, and high unemployment are common complaints.

There are constant strikes and protests among many sections of workers, including teachers and professional workers, that have continued amid the coronavirus pandemic—ever since December 2017 and January 2018, when mass protests against unpaid wages, high prices and joblessness swept Iran. This was part of a broader global upsurge of the class struggle, which saw strikes and protests internationally including against Iranian-backed regimes in Iraq and Lebanon last year.

Last November, a 300 percent hike in gasoline prices provoked countrywide protests that were bloodily suppressed, with Amnesty International reporting that around 300 were killed in a week of bloody reprisals, and thousands of protesters as well as journalists, human rights defenders and students were arrested, while the state cut off Internet access.

Further opposition to the regime erupted after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jetliner at the height of the war crisis over the US assassination of IRGC commander General Qassem Soleimani in January. The downing of the plane, killing all 176 aboard, and the Iranian authorities’ attempts to cover up their responsibility sparked angry protests, mainly among students and middle-class professionals.

Tehran also faces US political and economic pressure on its allies Iraq and Lebanon, where Washington is seeking to undermine Iran’s influence. This is in addition to the systematic military build-up across the Middle East, aiming to consolidate US imperialism’s regional hegemony by building an anti-Iranian alliance including Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms.

These aggressive actions targeting Iran have included Israel’s stepped-up air strikes on Iranian or allied targets in Syria and tense encounters between Iranian and US vessels in the Gulf. Last month, Trump tweeted that he had told the US Navy to “shoot down and destroy” Iranian gunboats that “harass” US ships.

Yesterday, despite Israel’s quarantining of overseas visitors, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has not travelled abroad since his trip to Afghanistan in March and is making no other stops, visited Israel.

German armed forces deploy 300 soldiers to EU mission “Irini” in Mediterranean

Martin Kreickenbaum

Germany will participate in the European Union’s military mission “Irini” in the Mediterranean with up to 300 soldiers. The marching orders for the Bundeswehr (armed forces) were approved by the Bundestag (parliament) last Thursday.

Officially, Irini is to monitor and enforce the arms embargo against Libya decided by the United Nations in 2016 and prevent oil smuggling from the country, which has been battered by civil war. In reality, however, the EU and the German government plan to push back their rivals—Turkey and Russia—for control of the rich oil reserves off the Libyan coast and in the eastern Mediterranean, and to be in the front line in the new scramble for Africa.

The Bundeswehr is providing a P3C-Orion maritime patrol aircraft, which requires 80 service personnel to operate. The aircraft can stay aloft for up to 13 hours and is designed for optical long-range reconnaissance. In addition, a good dozen soldiers will be deployed to the operations headquarters in Rome. From August, a frigate with a crew of around 200 will be made available. Originally, the defence ministry had refused to send a warship, but the German government knows it can assert its strategic interests in the region only if it takes a leading role in the European military operation.

The Irini mission was decided by the 27 EU member states in mid-February and launched at the end of March. Its mandate, which incorporates the deployment of aircraft, ships and reconnaissance satellites, includes not only gathering information on violations of the arms embargo, but also, and above all, stopping and searching ships suspected of transporting weapons to Libya. Oil smuggling is also to be monitored.

The notorious Libyan Coast Guard, which acts as the European Union’s henchman in its actions against refugees, will be further upgraded under the Irini programme. The rescue of shipwrecked refugees, however, is explicitly not being planned. Naval units will therefore operate only in the eastern sea area off Libya and thus outside the main refugee routes towards Italy.

At the end of March, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell declared that Operation Irini was “of the utmost importance” and would “make a clear contribution to promoting peace in our immediate neighbourhood by ensuring a lasting ceasefire.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea for the Irini mission originated at the Libya Conference held in Berlin in mid-January. At that time, the German government invited 16 powers and parties involved in the Libyan conflict to the conference, where they signed a 55-point plan that included a ceasefire, compliance with the UN arms embargo, the withdrawal of foreign forces and mercenaries, and the demobilization of the fighting militias.

The World Socialist Web Site warned at the time that the conference was not about “peace” in the war-ravaged country, but about sharing the spoils, and that it was a “preliminary stage to a military occupation of the country.” We compared the Libya Conference with the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884, which promoted the colonial subjugation of Africa and aggravated the tensions between the imperialist powers. These warnings have been confirmed.

Since the Libya Conference and the EU’s decision to launch the Irini mission, the situation in Libya has escalated. According to the UN, the ceasefire has been broken almost 900 times since January and several thousand tonnes of arms have been brought into Libya by ship or plane and across land borders.

In the Bundestag debate, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) justified Germany’s participation in the military mission by saying that the situation had escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. He declared, “When you consider that there are apparently some in the world who want to use this crisis to gain military advantage in the conflict in which they are engaged, you can’t help calling it perverse.”

But that is exactly what the German government is doing. Maas stressed it is important “that we now create instruments that are effectively suited to better monitor this arms embargo.” He then described the operation as an example of Germany assuming “more responsibility in the world.”

This “responsibility” has nothing to do with humanitarian motives. Behind the official propaganda of a “peace” or “stability” mission lie brutal power-political interests. The continuing breaches of the ceasefire and the arms embargo serve to provide Berlin with the appropriate excuse to intervene into the Libyan conflict with increased military force—and with unforeseeable consequences. The EU mission will not only contribute to a further escalation in Libya, but also threatens to escalate into an open war between the regional and major powers behind the rival militias in Libya.

The civil war in Libya has been raging ever since a military alliance led by the US, Britain and France bombed the North African country in 2011 and assassinated long-time ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi. Since 2016, Fayez al-Sarraj has been prime minister of an official transitional government based in Tripoli. Al-Sarraj has long been supported within the EU, especially by Italy and Germany, and since November has received massive military aid from Turkey and Qatar. The arms transports for al-Sarraj are carried out mostly by sea.

His biggest adversary is Khalifa Haftar, whose official residence is in Tobruk. Haftar is supported by France, but above all by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Russia, among others. He obtains his arms supplies mainly by land and air.

The civil war between the militias and warlords in Libya has been raging for a long time, but with the massive intervention by Russia and Turkey, the European powers, and Germany in particular, see their strategic interests in the region threatened. Last year, Haftar, with the support of the Kremlin-affiliated Wagner Group, initially achieved massive territorial gains, which allowed his militias to advance as far as the gates of Tripoli.

Haftar’s offensive came to a halt when Turkey sent several thousand mercenaries of the Free Syrian Army from the Turkish-occupied territories in northern Syria to support al-Sarraj. The Turkish army also intervened directly in the fighting, with drones and warships positioned off the Libyan coast. In return, al-Sarraj signed an agreement on the “delimitation of areas of influence at sea,” which divides the eastern Mediterranean between the two countries. Based on this agreement, Turkey claims large gas deposits, which Greece and Cyprus also claim.

How the European Union intends to enforce the arms embargo in practice remains an open question. Since the mandate for Irini, which runs until 31 March 2021, initially provides only for the enforcement of the arms embargo by sea, it would be above all the arms deliveries of NATO member Turkey that would be the focus of the European military powers. Such an intervention by the EU could provoke a direct military conflict with Turkey. In the current edition of the Welt am Sonntag, a southern European diplomat warns that “it is still completely unclear what happens if EU soldiers are to stop smuggling ships belonging to NATO member Turkey, but the weapons are not handed over and a violent clash even ensues.”

Fayez al-Sarraj has protested to the UN Security Council against operation Irini because the mission favours his rival, Haftar.

In an April position paper, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is close to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), demanded that Irini also “record and document violations of the arms embargo by land and air in the context of air and satellite surveillance.”

The authors feared that “the new EU mission threatens to degenerate into a purely symbolic operation” if member states “continue to engage unilaterally with conflict parties in Libya.” The authors argued that “the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, but also Germany, as initiator of the Berlin process, is now called upon to take action.”

Germany and Europe are already preparing to intervene more forcefully in Libya and Africa. In the Bundestag debate, Johann David Wadephul, deputy leader of the Christian Democratic parliamentary group and a reserve major in the Bundeswehr, told the parliamentarians, “Ladies and gentlemen, we can make as many efforts as we want in Central Africa, in the Sahel region. If we do not pacify Libya, we will not get the situation under control.” Significantly, last week the Cabinet also decided to extend the German combat mission in Mali.

German companies plan layoffs, attacks on wages and benefits amid coronavirus pandemic

Peter Schwarz

The premature lifting of measures designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus is forcing countless workers back to work, where they are exposed to the risk of being infected with the deadly virus. In parallel with this, companies and public authorities are preparing job cuts, the lowering of wages, and the slashing of social spending programs. There is a close connection between these two developments.

The German government’s response to the pandemic was conditioned from the outset by the interests of the major corporations and banks. The government established at lightning speed a bailout program for big business that has now risen to €1.2 trillion, four times more than the total annual federal budget. It is being financed by state debt, loans from state-owned banks, and reserves in the social insurance funds. By contrast, the government has firmly rejected increased taxes for the rich, a tax on wealth, or similar measures.

Thanks to the flood of cash, the stock markets have rapidly recovered. The Dax, which fell to a low of 8,442 points on 18 March, is drawing close to the 11,000 mark, an increase of 30 percent in just eight weeks. But this orgy of wealth accumulation can only be sustained if workers are forced back to their workplaces and exploitation ratcheted up, regardless of how many lives are lost.

The return to work is being combined with sweeping attacks on jobs, wages and social rights. The major companies and the state are exploiting the coronavirus crisis to restructure businesses and public administration, and launch attacks on the working class that in many cases have been long prepared. While production is restarting and services are reopening almost everywhere, several companies have announced the destruction of jobs.

This was shown by a new poll from the Ifo Institute. Although around 750,000 businesses have registered for their employees to receive short-time work, meaning that the income and social insurance contributions are paid for by the Federal Labour Agency, 18 percent of businesses announced job cuts in April.

The figure was especially high in the auto sector, where 39 percent of businesses eliminated jobs. Among companies providing temporary contract workers, 57 percent carried out job cuts, 48 percent among producers of leather, leather goods and shoes, 30 percent among printers, and 29 percent among producers of metal products. Large numbers of businesses also slashed jobs in the restaurant sector (58 percent), hotels (50 percent) and travel agencies (43 percent).

The numbers were weighted according to a company’s size, meaning that small businesses do not have a major impact on the statistics. States dominated by the auto industry, including Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, saw job cuts carried out by 22 percent and 20 percent of firms respectively.

The Ifo Institute predicts that these numbers will grow in May and the coming months, as German industry expects the largest downturn of production in history. All sectors, apart from pharmaceuticals, have been badly effected.

Calls are also growing for the huge financial handouts provided to the super-rich to be paid for through radical austerity measures that will inevitably hit the most vulnerable sections of society.

One example was a study conducted by economists from the Ifo Institute on behalf of the employer-aligned organization New Social Market Economy, which argued against abandoning the debt brake in Germany’s Basic Law due to the pandemic. To keep state finances sustainable over the long-term and cope with demographic change, the federal government must achieve a budget surplus of between 1.5 and 4 percent annually, stated the study.

In the face of dramatically declining tax revenues—experts estimate a €100 billion drop this year and €300 billion by 2024—this can only mean a social counter-revolution that will go further than anything else before, including the Hartz laws.

In addition, big business is demanding even more cash from the state. An economic stimulus program worth €450 billion is reportedly being discussed, a demand supported by the trade union-aligned Hans Böckler Foundation and the business-aligned German Economic Institute (IW).

A further mechanism to offload the cost of the crisis onto the backs of working people is the municipal budgets. These are responsible for financing of theaters, museums, sports facilities, swimming pools, kindergartens, school buildings, fire services, health authorities and several other areas of social and cultural infrastructure, as well as a portion of welfare budgets.

Municipalities are not permitted to take on debt, even though their most important source of income, business tax revenues, will collapse. The head of operations for the German Conference of Cities, Helmut Dedy, calculates that German municipalities will experience a shortfall of €18 billion in business taxes in 2020, while they will have between €4 billion and €6 billion in additional spending due to the coronavirus. He told public broadcaster SWR that this would bring the cities to the verge of dysfunction.

The trade unions are in the process of offloading the costs of these developments onto the backs of their members. After the IG Metall union concluded a wage freeze in March until the end of the year for 4 million workers in the metal and electronics industries, the services trade union Verdi has now initiated talks on postponing the next round of wage bargaining until next year. For most public sector workers, who are already poorly paid, this would mean deep pay cuts.

The consequences of the coronavirus pandemic are making ever clearer the irreconcilability of the basic necessities of life for the working class and the capitalist profit system, which subordinates all aspects of economic life to the enrichment of a tiny super-rich elite. The defense of the health, incomes and social interests of the vast majority of the population requires a socialist program.

Over 90,000 health care workers worldwide have been infected with COVID-19

Gary Joad

Last week, the International Council of Nurses (ICN) reported that more than 90,000 nurses, doctors, and other health care workers have tested positive for COVID-19 worldwide, with over 260 health care workers succumbing to the disease.

The Geneva, Switzerland-based organization represents some 20 million nurses of 130 national organizations. ICN’s CEO Howard Catton insists that both figures are a serious underestimation of the true scale of infections and deaths among health care workers, given the refusal of governments around the world to keep records of the pandemic’s spread to these front-line workers. The numbers reported to the ICN are from only 30 countries’ governments, nursing associations, and the media, representing merely 15 percent of all countries in the world.

One month ago, ICN estimated that 23,000 nurses were infected. Catton stated, “If the average health worker infection rate, about 6 percent we think, is applied to that, the figure globally could be more than 200,000 health worker infections today. The scandal is that governments are not systematically collecting and reporting on this information. It looks to us as though they are turning a blind eye which we think is completely unacceptable and will cost more lives. If governments do not count the number of nurses who have lost their lives, if they continue to turn a blind eye, it sends a message that those nurses’ lives didn’t count.”

Catton added, “This failure to record both infection rates and deaths among health care workers is putting more nurses and their patients in danger.”

The World Health Organization (WHO), struggling with many of its uncooperative 194 member governments, reports that countries are not supplying the necessary comprehensive data to track the spread of the disease among their health care personnel and their populations more broadly.

The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a paper April 14 in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) regarding health care workers’ infections across the US. In states and populations that included data for occupations of those infected, HCPs accounted for fully 11 percent of the total. Women accounted for 73 percent of HCPs with coronavirus, and 38 percent of infected health care workers had at least one underlying chronic illness.

Ninety percent from the CDC study were not hospitalized, but 2 to 5 percent were admitted to an intensive care unit, with 0.3 to 0.6 percent dying. Thirty seven percent of the HCPs who died were age 65 and older.

The study’s authors noted, “It is critical to ensure the health and safety of HCPs, both at work and in the community. Improving surveillance through routine reporting of occupation and industry not only benefits HCPs, but all workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

52-year-old Angeline Bernadel of Stratford, Connecticut worked at a Milford nursing home, telling her husband in mid-March that she was deeply worried about the new coronavirus that was sweeping through the country’s chronic care facilities. As reported in the Hartford Courant April 15, her husband Jean Bernadel said, “She was panicked. She told me, ‘I can die, because this virus is terrible.”

Bernadel fell ill on March 30, and in two days she obtained a high fever and cough, and was advised to quarantine at home, where her husband cared for her until she died April 4. Angeline was the primary wage earner, since her husband worked as a driver and had become unemployed. “I have a mortgage I have to pay, but I don’t have any work,” he reported.

On May 1, the LA Times reported on the death of Brittany Bruner-Ringo, a 32-year-old nurse at Silverado Beverly Place, an upscale memory care facility in the Los Angeles Westside community. After the facility had locked down as part of the statewide shelter-in-place mandate, the dementia care unit notified Bruner-Ringo that she would be admitting a 69-year-old retired surgeon from New York City, en route on a cross country flight to LAX with his daughter.

Bruner-Ringo alleged that the older man was ill when she accompanied him to his room from the parking garage at the care unit, and became ill enough the following day that she had to summon an ambulance for his transport to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19. He fully recovered and was later re-admitted to the care facility. In subsequent days, 63 other residents and staff at the facility have tested positive for the virus and 9 have died.

When the new resident tested positive, Bruner-Ringo moved out of her shared apartment to a hotel for self-isolation. She tested positive for COVID-19 and in a week became symptomatic herself, and in early April she was taken by ambulance to Harbor UCLA hospital, admitted to an ICU and intubated for ventilation.

While Bruner-Ringo was in her second week on the ventilator, the consortium ownership of the upscale care home appealed to California Governor Gavin Newsom for liability protection, requesting he sign an executive order indemnifying the company.

Her mother, Kim Bruner-Ringo, also a nurse, drove from Oklahoma City to be near her daughter, though she never saw her until after she died April 20.

Aljazeera News reported May 7 on the severe lack of testing in Afghanistan, and that out of 925 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Kabul, 346 were health care workers. At least 13 physicians have died in the country since early April. Practitioners are fearful enough to have closed their offices, further straining the systems remaining.

A Kabul cardiologist told Al Jazeera News, “I have decided to suspend my practice for two months, many doctors will not open their clinics and private nursing homes. Pregnant women are being told to find midwives instead of coming to hospitals.”

The war-torn country of 37 million, which has been continuously oppressed by American imperialism since 2001, has a total of 172 hospitals and approximately 4 doctors for every 10,000 people, according to a 2019 report. Physicians have reported to Reuters that the country’s hospitals are on the verge of collapse, and that many doctors have elected to stay home during the pandemic due to the catastrophic conditions.

COVID-19 and the Insurgency in Kashmir

Mohammed Sinan Siyech


The COVID-19 pandemic has had a multi-dimensional impact across the world, including in conflict theatres. This commentary explores strategies that terror outfits might employ vis-à-vis the insurgency in Kashmir.

Infiltration AttemptsThe most immediate threat is likely to pertain to the volume of infiltration attempts by terrorist groups into the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC). According to Indian officials, several areas across Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) remain popular infiltration points for militants, especially those affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The 5 April 2020 shootout between Indian security forces and LeT operatives unearthed the group’s plots to target locations in India.

At present, troops in J&K have been mobilised to help maintain the COVID-19-induced lockdown, and provide medical aid and information to people living in remote corners of the Union Territory. Though essential, these services provided by the military could place a strain on government resources and efforts to police borders, thereby increasing the risk of infiltrators exploiting the situation. Security officials have been warning of militants and potential infiltrators mobilising along the LoC in Kashmir since February 2020. Furthermore, according to some reports, the newly formed group called ‘The Resistance Front’ claimed responsibility for various attacks leading to the deaths of Indian army personnel in April 2020. This also follows the general pattern in the Kashmir conflict wherein border skirmishes and terrorist activities often witness an uptick during summer months. Deploying the army for pandemic-related activities at such a juncture adds to the strain on the security scenario.

Image-Building ActivitiesAnother tactic that terror outfits might employ to increase their presence in Kashmir is by propagating a narrative of assistance in fighting the pandemic and serving affected populations. Such activities could paint them in a positive light as aid providers, thereby potentially increasing their credibility  among target populations. Pandemic responses by groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in Syria, have included implementing social distancing measures and cancelling Friday prayers.

The possibility of the JeM and LeT implementing similar measures is not inconceivable. In the wake of natural disasters in 2005, 2010, and 2015 in Pakistan, LeT’s parent organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), positioned itself as a major aid organisation to various affected Pakistanis. Although they did not fundraise as much as legitimate aid agencies, they marketed themselves quite well during this time.

If these past trends are any indication, LeT and JeM could try to increase recruitment by providing medical aid to affected Pakistanis. In addition to medical aid, the group could exploit secondary issues arising from the pandemic, such as hunger and job losses. Recently, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, announced that the country could fight only one of the two issues, i.e. the pandemic or poverty, due to a lack of sufficient state services. In this backdrop, it is not inconceivable that these militant groups might try and derive benefits from the pandemic (such as by increasing recruitment), which might then be directed towards India. 

PropagandaAnother strategy the terrorist groups might employ would be linking their propaganda activities with pre-existing grievances in Kashmir. Groups like LeT and JeM might attempt to enlist Kashmiris from India as well, by capitalising on their grievances. However, this may be the weakest aspect of terrorist strategy at this time because in addition to the lockdown, internet restrictions are still in place in Kashmir, with only 2G speeds available. Security analysts must keep an eye out for propaganda in local languages. Even if terror outfits with considerable infrastructure and capacity manage to launch a major media campaign, groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) will still struggle to gain traction. This is because they  lack ground presence in Kashmir due to the localised nature of the conflict. Further, various stakeholders in the region oppose the two groups for fear of diluting the goals of their own respective agendas. For example, although al Qaeda affiliate Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind and the Islamic State Jammu and Kashmir have garnered support online, their ground presence is shaky and limited to proxies that are often successfully countered by the security forces.

Looking AheadResearchers have highlighted the pandemic’s potential to widen pre-existing schisms. In the context of the insurgency in Kashmir, terror outfits might still fall back on older tactics such as infiltrations, aid work, and propaganda to shore up support and target India. However, various factors will have a bearing on the potency of such attempts.