Sweden initiates massive military buildup in preparation for war with Russia

Gabriel Black

Sweden’s Social Democratic government announced last month a massive, multi-year plan to increase military spending and activities—the largest such expansion in 70 years.

Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist announced that the country’s defense budget would be increased by 27 billion Swedish kronor (US$3.13 billion) between 2021 and 2025, a 40 percent increase.

The military budget hike comes on top of significant increases enacted since 2014. Forbes estimates that the total increase in the defense budget between 2014 and 2025, including the new bill, could be as much as 85 percent.

In addition to increased spending, the massive 181-page defense spending bill calls for the enlisted forces to grow from 60,000 troops to 90,000. It proposes the completion of a new submarine to join Sweden’s world-class submarine stealth submarine fleet as well as a new mechanized brigade for its army. Likewise, it proposes the development of a new, more advanced submarine program to replace its famous Gotland-class submarines by 2025.

Swedish forces in Afghanistan (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The bill will also involve a boost to Sweden’s “Civil Defense” force. At a press conference on October 15, Hultqvist told reporters, “Sweden’s capabilities to handle a state of heightened alert and, ultimately, war need to be strengthened on a broad front.” Investment will also be made in a variety of other features of the armed forces—new fighter jets, artillery platforms and cyber warfare programs.

The planned massive build-up of military force in this small but significant country testifies to the immense danger of war as the global economic and political situation deteriorates under conditions of the greatest capitalist crisis since the 1930s.

Throughout Eurasia, the threat of war has never been as great since World War II. In 2019, global military spending reached $1.9 trillion, the highest level since the end of the Cold War.

The global cockpit of militarism and war is the United States. Since 2008, first under Obama and now Trump, a massive build-up of military spending has taken place aimed at preparing for “great-power conflicts,” above all with Russia and China.

The claim of the American, and, for that matter, Scandinavian, ruling classes that they are engaged in “defense” preparations against the great ‘Russian threat’ is a lie to justify rearmament and aggression. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US and NATO have engaged in a systematic military build-up against Russia, as they, one-by-one, brought former member states of the Eastern bloc and Soviet Union into NATO as part of a larger plan to break up Russia into smaller states that could be easier for US imperialism and its allies to dominate.

It is impossible to see Sweden’s massive plans for rearmament, and, as defense minister Hulqvist says, “war,” outside of the broader efforts of the United States and its allies to prepare for war against Russia and the drive of global capitalism toward war and militarism. The Democratic Party’s main criticism of the fascistic-minded Donald Trump over the past four years has been that he has been insufficiently aggressive towards Russia.

A Swedish government statement from October 14 clearly placed the increase in defense spending in the context of the drive to war with Russia. Hulqvist told reporters that previous cuts to defense had gone “too far” and that “Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine” suggests that “an armed attack on Sweden cannot be ruled out.”

However, an armed attack by Russia on Sweden would be suicide. Sweden, while not a formal member of NATO, is, and has been, a very close ally of the US military and intelligence agency for over 50 years. Notwithstanding its official posture of neutrality during the Cold War, Stockholm served as a key partner of US intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, Sweden has established many mutual-defense treaties with NATO and the US. An attack by Russia on Sweden would therefore lead, almost immediately, to a response of every major European, NATO- and US-aligned power against Russia. The real threat the Baltic region faces is not Russian aggression, but the general descent of global capitalism towards inter-imperialist rivalry and the advanced preparations of US imperialism for war against both Russia and China.

Conflicts in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Israel, Libya, or the Azerbaijan-Armenian war, could very easily and quickly spiral into a conflict involving major armed powers. In that context, in which one of these flashpoints triggers a major war between the US and Russia, Sweden, allied with the US, would be on the doorstep of Russia, including St. Petersburg. In such a scenario, control over the Baltic would be essential for the US.

It is notable that the historic surge in military spending in Sweden is not being carried out by the traditional “right” parties but rather the Social Democrats and the Greens. The Social Democrats have a long record of militarism. It was under the Social Democrat-led government of Göran Persson in 2002 that Sweden gave up its much-vaunted position of formal neutrality, which had existed for almost 200 years, in order to support the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and participate more fully in joint military exercises with NATO.

This is not merely a Swedish phenomenon. As the World Socialist Web Site has documented, Europe’s “left” parties have been at the forefront of calls for rearmament. This can be seen clearly in Germany, where a massive rearmament of German imperialism is underway spearheaded by the Social Democratic Party and met with great support and enthusiasm from both the Left Party and Green Party.

Sweden’s huge rearmament program is all the more significant politically given that outside of the country, Sweden and its “social democratic” political parties are upheld by pseudo-left organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as “socialist” models to be aspired to. These nationalist, pro-capitalist organizations combine this with the promotion of politicians and parties that defend militarism in the name of “national defense,” like Bernie Sanders in regards to China.

There is nothing “socialist” about Sweden. In striking contrast to the billions lavished on the military to train troops in killing and to purchase weapons of death, the ruling elite has starved the country’s health care and social services amid a raging pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 6,000 people in a country of just 10 million.

During the pandemic’s first wave, elderly care homes were ravaged by COVID-19 infections and deaths as low-paid, precariously employed care workers were overwhelmed and lacked even the necessary employment protections to shelter safely at home if they showed symptoms. Hospitals were so overstretched after decades of privatization and cost-cutting that they adopted a policy in the Stockholm region of refusing to treat care home residents over the age of 80.

British Medical Journal accuses UK government of the “suppression of science”

Thomas Scripps

The British Medical Journal has published an extraordinary editorial accusing the Boris Johnson’s Conservative government of the “politicisation, “corruption,” and “suppression of science”.

Last Friday’s article concluded, “Politicisation of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies. The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of science to aggrandise and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more successful, richer, and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.”

The editorial by the journal of the British Medical Association is an indictment of the British ruling class’ “herd immunity” response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has created a humanitarian disaster. At every stage, the government ignored scientists’ calls for a national lockdown and warnings about the dire implications of keeping open workplaces, schools, colleges and universities.

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 [Credit: Neil Hall Pool via AP]

On November 11, the UK passed the terrible milestone of 50,000 deaths. This is the official number, now standing at 52,745, including only those who died within 28 days of receiving a positive COVID test. But according to the government’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) and statistics agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there have been more than 64,000 fatalities in which COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate. Since the pandemic began, the UK has suffered more than 70,000 “excess deaths”.

On average over the last week, more than 410 people were being killed by the disease every day, roughly four times the average death rate a month ago. As of last Thursday, almost 15,000 people were in hospital with COVID-19, more than triple the number a month ago, and more than 1,300 on ventilators, more than double the number a month ago.

These are the consequences of a surge of infections encouraged by the reckless reopening of the economy, schools and universities in the summer and autumn months. Officially, the seven-day average for the number of new daily cases is 25,331. But this figure is kept artificially low by the effective collapse of the government’s testing system. The ONS estimates there are around 50,000 new cases each day.

Commentators in the corporate media have seized on the ONS data to proclaim that the pandemic is “stabilising” and Johnson’s one-month “lockdown”— begun on November 4 and leaving schools, universities and many workplaces open—is working. This is cynical propaganda for the government and its murderous policies. The ONS data only shows that the rate of increase in infections is slowing, meaning the epidemic is still expanding, and from an extremely high level.

More than 710,000 people across the UK were infected with COVID-19 in the week to November 6. The R0 (reproduction rate) is estimated to be between 1 and 1.2 nationally, signifying a growing number of cases, and infection rates are increasing nationally among the more at-risk older age groups and regionally in the south east, south west, and north east of the country. Hull’s infection rate recently soared to 783 per 100,000 people—triple the average for England.

Professor Neil Fergusson, a respected epidemiologist at Imperial College London, believes the current lockdown restrictions will reduce the R0 to just 0.8 or 0.9 and even the most optimistic modelling suggests 0.6 is the lowest it will go. By December 2, when the lockdown ends, rates of infection will still be dangerously high and free to explode once again. The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has warned that the government’s “Tier system”, which will be reimposed once the current restrictions end, will not prevent another surge of the virus in the winter.

The government only implemented the current lockdown to stave off a feared social backlash over mounting deaths and a widely predicted collapse of the National Health Service this winter. Their intention was to buy enough time to throw open the whole economy again in the lead up to Christmas and in January, when a vast percentage of retail and hospitality trade is done.

Indicative of the profits before lives agenda is the government’s decision yesterday—after big business demanded it—to exempt seasonal poultry workers arriving in the UK from abroad from lockdown rules so that they can start work straight away during what should be a 14-day quarantine. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said it meant that food producers can “keep up with the Christmas demand” for turkey.

The corporations’ Christmas profits will be bought at the cost of tens of thousands more lives. Government officials have raised the prospect of a third lockdown or a series of so-called “circuit breakers” to come, acknowledging that new waves are on the way.

Johnson is under orders from up to 100 of his MPs not to introduce any additional national restrictions that would hinder profit-making. A backbench Tory rebellion over the current lockdown was only averted with the promise that Johnson committed that it would not be extended beyond December 2. According to the Financial Times, Johnson told Tory donors over the weekend “that further coronavirus lockdowns could be avoided.”

Another healthcare catastrophe is building up. In the summer, the NHS Confederation was warning that the waiting list for NHS treatment could reach 10 million by Christmas. The NHS reported in September that 2 million people had been waiting for more than 18 weeks. As of last week, nearly 140,000 of people had been waiting more than a year—the highest level since 2008. The number was just 1,600 this February.

There have been 19 million fewer dental treatments since March compared to the same period last year and as of September-October dental practices were still operating at just one third of the normal level.

Roughly 300,000 fewer people have seen a cancer specialist for an urgent check-up this year compared to last—a drop of a quarter. And the number of people starting cancer treatment is down by a fifth. In July, the Health Care Research Hub for Cancer predicted that the UK could suffer between 7,000 and 35,000 additional cancer deaths within a year due to this disruption. The British Heart Foundation reports that Britain has already seen an additional nearly 5,000 deaths caused by heart problems since the pandemic began—a 7 percent increase.

The death merchants in ruling circles trying to sell these figures as an argument against lockdown restrictions are advocating a crime against humanity. All experience shows that, left unchecked, the COVID-19 virus spreads rapidly through the population and overwhelms healthcare systems.

A concerning phenomenon is “long COVID”—a battery of long-term symptoms following a COVID-19 infection, which most commonly include fatigue, brain fog, breathlessness, and body pains. Little is known about this condition, but it points to the disease’s potential to do lasting damage to an even greater number of people than it kills.

Preliminary data from a University of Oxford study of 58 hospitalised COVID patients found that 60 percent had abnormalities in their lungs, 29 percent in their kidneys, 26 percent in their hearts and 10 percent in their livers two to three months after their infections. The study also found tissue changes in parts of the brain.

A separate study issued preliminary findings into the impact of “long COVID” on low-risk individuals—the young and those with no major underlying health conditions. The Coverscan study reported that of 200 low-risk individuals, 70 percent had impairments in one or more organs four months after infection, and 25 percent had impairments in two or more organs.

MPs have been told that up to 500,000 people in Britain are living with such long-term effects. Yet only a paltry £10 million has been allocated to the NHS to set up specialist treatment centres and provide care.

The healthcare crisis is being exacerbated by widespread socio-economic distress. The Resolution Foundation reported Sunday that “three-in-ten adults who have seen their income fall throughout the crisis are now experiencing material deprivation.” Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned the government in response, “If they don’t announce a new anti-poverty programme they will face a rebellion across the country.”

Nothing short of a massive redistribution of social wealth from the coffers of the financial and corporate oligarchy can address this catastrophe. The pandemic must be brought under control through the necessary public health measures until a vaccine can be deployed, with full support for children required to miss school and workers kept off work. Billions must be poured into health care, public health, and social care infrastructure.

As Mexico records 1 million coronavirus cases, 53 percent of tests are coming out positive

Andrea Lobo

Mexico reached 1 million recorded coronavirus cases on Saturday and is expected to top 100,000 deaths sometime this week, the fourth highest death toll in the world after the United States, Brazil and India.

The seven-day moving average of daily new cases has risen 30 percent since September 23 and is approaching the level of around 7,000, reached during the height of the first wave in July. About three weeks after infections rebounded, daily deaths began to surge as well. The seven-day moving average for daily deaths has risen from 295 to 502 since October 13.

What is most striking is that more than half of the COVID-19 tests are coming out positive. According to the latest records available to World in Data up to November 9, Mexico has the highest COVID-19 positivity rate in the world, 53.4 percent. This is slightly higher than its previous peak in July.

This striking figure has been reached after a low of 18 percent on October 20. By comparison, in the United States, the seven-day moving average of daily cases has almost quadrupled since September 23, while the positivity rate has increased from about 4.3 percent to 12.3 percent.

The unavoidable conclusions are that the virus is spreading out of control and that the official data offers a very incomplete picture of the current increase in cases and even deaths. Through September 26, the Mexican government reported 193,170 “excess” deaths, while officially recognizing just 78,000 of them as caused by COVID-19.

Mexico’s chief COVID-19 coordinator, Hugo López-Gatell, has acknowledged that the coronavirus death toll will not be known for at least two years, and that the task will be left to statisticians.

The government has responded by seeking to minimize the danger of the increase in cases and present it as an inevitable phenomenon.

On Monday, Mexican Director-General of Health Promotion Ricardo Cortés Alcalá brought up the positivity rate during the entire pandemic, which is 42 percent, and mentioned that 311,000 suspected cases they have documented were never tested, only to argue clumsily that the government is not “covering up” the extent of the pandemic.

Despite this, he and the Mexican corporate media have highlighted the claim that “only” 47,099 recorded cases are active.

On the question of why so many suspected patients were logged but never tested, Cortés said “some were never tested or their tests never arrived at the laboratory or were poorly taken or spilled en route” while “some were not taken because it didn’t correspond or didn’t have a chance of giving a result.”

Meanwhile, workers who have gotten infected in the factories have reported to the WSWS and other news media that the public hospitals have simply refused to test them despite clear symptoms, instead sending them back to work.

Cortés then insinuated that daily deaths have fallen since they remain well below their highest point in July. He also acknowledged hospital occupancy is increasing nationally and has reached 33 percent, but said this increase was not affecting beds with ventilators. Not until a journalist asked him specifically did he refer to hospital occupancy in the state of Chihuahua, indicating that it is “really high” at about 75 percent, but that “surely” some hospitals there have an occupancy as low as 50 percent.

A few days earlier, Chihuahua governor Javier Corral had declared that the are “no beds available” in the state and that the real occupancy rate is above 90 percent.

In fact, the states of Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo León—all in the central region next to the US border that has the highest concentration of manufacturing plants— have occupancy rates of over 65 percent.

Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the epicenter of the pandemic, the authorities said last Thursday that new daily hospitalizations had increased from 20 to 100 in five days, but still refused to raise the risk level, instead implementing the barest minimum of precautions, requiring bars, movie theaters and casinos to close at 7 p.m. instead of 10 p.m.

On Monday, López-Gatell said the 1 million case milestone was “somewhat insignificant” since what matters is the vast understatement that “the epidemic remains active.” He added that cases “are increasing concurrently with the flu season, just as we’ve been predicting since March.” Yet, nothing was done to prevent it.

In response to the patently dishonest and indifferent COVID-19 policies of the ruling class, workers need to take matters into their own hands. In April, following a wave of wildcat strikes forcing shutdowns in Europe, the United States and Canada, thousands of workers at maquiladora sweatshops across the cities on the US-Mexico border struck, and forced most nonessential production to stop.

Bowing to pressure from Wall Street and the White House, the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered nonessential production to begin reopening at the end of May, a murderous policy applied with the help of the trade unions.

In late October, the Chihuahua authorities were the first in the country to return to a “red” alert level, which officially means manufacturing plants have to work at 60 percent capacity. Having already experienced that corporations refuse to abide by such restrictions, workers in Chihuahua, the second main auto-parts producer in the country, have again taken independent action.

The same day the change was announced, on October 23, workers walked out at three maquiladoras to demand that the measures be enforced, citing numerous infections and deaths of co-workers. The plants included refrigerator-maker Electrolux and two auto-parts plants owned by APTIV—one in Ciudad Juárez and the other in Hidalgo del Parral. Workers at other maquiladoras in the state took to social media, threatening to join the strike.

Workers on strike in Matamoros, Mexico in early 2019. Sign reads: "Unions and bosses kill the working class."

The strikes had an immediate effect. Employer groups have since lobbied the health authorities unsuccessfully to raise the 60 percent limit. The right-wing government in Chihuahua was compelled to impose a mask-wearing mandate to attempt to reduce hospital occupancy rates and bring down the risk level.

In the United States, General Motors announced that its Bowling Green Assembly Plant in Kentucky was forced to close down November 12-13 because of a shortage of parts arriving from Mexico due to “COVID-19 restrictions.” The only explanation for this is the strikes, enforcing a cut in production in Chihuahua.

The brave initiative of workers in Chihuahua points the way forward for workers everywhere to use their immense economic power and take control of the response to the pandemic. The limited restrictions in Chihuahua, aimed at quelling opposition and maximizing the extraction of profits, are not enough. In order to control the pandemic and be able to even trace the virus, experts insist that nonessential production needs to shut down with full compensation for lost wages and income for the unemployed, while essential and frontline workers are given the necessary protective gear.

Workers in Mexico must form rank-and-file factory and workplace committees to fight for these necessary steps to prevent the unnecessary death of hundreds of thousands more. Being so closely connected through the production process, these committees must coordinate their struggle with their class brothers and sisters in the United States and internationally.

COVID-19 drastically impacts Bangladesh students and youth

Wimal Perera

A recent webinar in Bangladesh points to the escalating social crisis facing students and youth throughout the country. The online event, held in late October by the Citizen's Platform for included the results of a survey entitled “COVID-19 and Bangladesh: A Youth Agenda for Recovery.”

More than two-thirds of survey respondents were from rural areas with the remainder from Dhaka and other cities. Over 89 percent of young people employed in Bangladesh work in the informal sector.

The survey, which was conducted between October 18 and 27, involved just over 1,160 people between the ages of 18 and 30 years. It revealed that 28 percent of those participating had abandoned their studies to support their families amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Students, like other poor sections of the society, have been ignored by the Awami League government.

The Citizen’s Platform for consists of 104 organisations from across the country involved in the 2015 United Nations’ “call to action to end poverty and protect the planet.” The platform’s supposed objective is to assist in the development and implementation of sustainable development goals.

A volunteer of Mission Save Bangladesh distributes food packages at a Cancer hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Al-emrun Garjon)

The survey found that almost 80 percent of respondents had experienced income reductions during the pandemic. Although many youth had abandoned their studies in order to find work, a substantial number had not found jobs. Some 33 percent said they were still “looking for jobs” with 9 percent of graduate students reporting that they “faced difficulties” securing employment.

According to the International Labour Organisation, a total of 94.4 percent of Bangladesh’s workforce is aged between 18 and 35 years, with over 4 million employed in the country’s 4,500 officially registered garment plants.

Another study by the South Asian Network on Economic Modelling (SANEM)—a Bangladesh research organisation—found that about 8 percent of garment workers were unemployed in September, up from 5 percent in August. It reported that employers had responded to the pandemic by cutting jobs and intensifying the exploitation of its low-paid workforce.

In April, when plants were running at lower capacity, the median monthly working hours for women and men was around 43 and 42 hours respectively. In June, July, and September, however, work hours began to return to 2019 rates of 246 hours per month. Most garment workers rely on overtime, which often accounts for 20 percent of their monthly income, to meet basic living expenses.

One garment factory owner, who supplies European and North American retailers, told bdnews24.com: “Now the second wave has started. We don’t know what the future holds for us.” He added that he had cut one in five jobs at his plant.

The World Bank reported last month that the average wage of salaried and daily workers dropped by 37 percent compared to usual earnings immediately prior to COVID-19.

Another aspect of the pandemic’s social impact has been rising rates of depression and mental stress, particularly amongst the young. According to the platform’s survey almost two-thirds of respondents said they were depressed about future income prospects and 96 percent reported mental stress.

Indifferent to these disastrous figures, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina continues to implement the social spending cuts dictated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

According to “The Protection We Want: Social Outlook for Asia and the Pacific,” which is jointly produced by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and the ILO, Bangladesh currently spends only a tiny fraction of its gross domestic product (GDP) on welfare programs.

Published on October 15, the report noted that Bangladesh allocates only 0.7 percent of its GDP for “social protection,” lagging behind Sri Lanka’s 5.2 percent, India’s 3.2 percent, and Pakistan’s 1.9 percent. The European Union’s statistical office defines social protection as welfare benefits, or transfers in cash or in kind, to households and individuals.

Addressing the 14th international conference of the Finance Ministers of Asia-Europe on November 6, Prime Minister Hasina boasted that her government had so far announced “21 stimulus packages equivalent to $US14.14 billion for various sectors, as well as support to different segments of the society.”

The hypocrisy of Hasina’s claims is exposed by last month’s Citizen’s Platform for survey, which reported that almost 80 percent respondents stated that they “did not get any support from the government.”

Justice Department attorney tells appeals court the government can kill US citizens without judicial review

Harvey Simpkins

On Monday, an attorney with the Justice Department asserted in federal appeals court in Washington D.C. that the government can kill US citizens without judicial review on the basis of the “state secrets” privilege.

Attorney Bradley Hinshelwood was arguing before the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in a case brought by Bilal Abdul Kareem, a US citizen, and Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, a Pakistani-Syrian. The two journalists are challenging their placement on the US “kill list,” compiled by the government at least since the early years of the Obama administration, to carry out extrajudicial political assassinations.

Kareem claims he was targeted for death by the US government while he was in Syria reporting on the civil war there. He says that his interviews with Al Qaeda-linked militants resulted in his being placed on the “kill list.” In June and August of 2016, he maintains, the US targeted him five times, including a drone strike involving a US-made Hellfire missile.

Bilal Abdul Kareem (Image credit: Screen capture)

The government has refused to release any information regarding the two journalists on grounds of national security and the “state secrets” privilege in relation to alleged national security questions.

In 2019, the FBI denied a Freedom of Information Act from WSWS International Editorial Board chairman David North on similar state secrets grounds. The FBI declared that acknowledging whether it had records on North would threaten national security and foreign intelligence. The FBI also refused to admit or deny whether it placed North on any lists.

During the hearing, Attorney Bradley Hinshelwood declared that the government had the power to target and kill alleged national security threats, including US citizens, and that planning or committing such acts was not reviewable by the courts.

The bald assertion of the government’s unlimited “right” to murder its own citizens evidently stunned Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, part of a three-judge panel hearing the case. She asked Hinshelwood, “Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is?” She went on to paraphrase his claim as giving the government the power to “unilaterally decide to kill US citizens.”

Kareem says that soon after the assassination attempts, a Turkish source told him he had been placed on a US target list at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where American drones are launched.

In August, Kareem and a British citizen, Tauqir Sharif, were seized by the radical Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria’s Idlib Province. He remains in HTS custody.

Kareem’s case was dismissed last year by US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who sided with the Trump administration’s invocation of the “state secrets” privilege to withhold information from Kareem on national security grounds.

Trump administration lawyers argued that disclosing whether Abdul Kareem was on the “kill list” could allow him to evade capture, and risked revealing “the existence and operational details of alleged military and intelligence activities directed at combating the terrorist threat to the United States.”

In response to that ruling, Kareem’s counsel, Tara J. Plochocki, explained that, “For the first time ever, a United States federal court ruled that the government may kill one of its citizens without providing him the information necessary to prove that he is being wrongly targeted and does not deserve to die. The US government could have provided this information but chose not to, and the court found that the government’s assertion of national security trumps his right not to be killed.”

In Monday’s hearing before the appeals court, Plochocki said, “Whether it’s in a parking lot in the United States or abroad in Syria, the government has claimed—for the first time ever in this case—that it has the unfettered and unreviewable discretion to kill US citizens at will.”

Hinshelwood dismissed Plochocki’s statement as speculation, citing the intense fighting that was taking place in Syria in 2016. He said, “In all of these circumstances, he [Kareem] is not even the only person present, much less is there anything to suggest that he’s actually the target of any of those specific attacks.”

A second judge on the panel, Karen Henderson, a George W. Bush appointee, appeared to side with the government, calling Kareem’s claims of being targeted for assassination “a spectacular delusion of grandeur.”

The Trump administration’s despotic assertion of the right to kill people, including US citizens, without any judicial review is a continuation and extension of powers asserted and acted upon by the Obama administration. In 2011, the US assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan, in a drone strike in Yemen. Two others were also killed in that strike. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, was assassinated in another drone strike while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen.

In 2017, the Trump administration killed al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter as part of a murderous military raid in Yemen that left at least eight women and seven children between the ages of 3 and 13 dead.

Two lawsuits filed by al-Awlaki’s father, one challenging his son’s placement on the Obama administration’s “kill list” before he was assassinated and another challenging the government’s right to kill US citizens without due process, were dismissed by federal courts on the basis that the courts cannot interfere with the executive branch in the exercise of “wartime” powers, or where “national security” concerns are raised.

In rubberstamping the “right” of the president to kill US citizens, the courts have abandoned the basic constitutional framework of the “separation of powers,” under which the courts are supposed to act as a check on the executive branch.

In March of 2013, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, defended the assassination of Awlaki in testimony before Congress and refused to rule out targeted assassinations of American citizens on US soil.

A year earlier, Holder made a mockery of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which declares that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” when he stated, “‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

Holder’s arguments, as the World Socialist Web Site explained at the time, had fascistic implications:

Holder’s pseudo-legal arguments in favor of military tribunals and assassinations bear more than a passing similarity to Nazi jurisprudence. Under legal doctrines developed by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose ideas enjoy growing interest and influence in America’s legal academia, national security and military urgency can justify a “state of exception,” under which basic democratic rights can be abrogated, the rule of law suspended, and the executive branch granted exceptional powers.

The Trump administration, in keeping with its fascistic politics, is asserting in more categorical terms the authoritarian logic of the policies adopted by previous administrations and supported by both parties of American imperialism.

Amid electoral coup plot, Trump threatens catastrophic war on Iran

Bill Van Auken

On November 14, the World Socialist Web Site asked the question, Is Trump plotting a war against Iran? The answer has not been long in coming.

The New York Times has revealed in a November 16 article that the US president last Thursday convened an Oval Office meeting of his national security cabinet to discuss “options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks.”

Present at the meeting, convened as Trump waged his campaign to nullify the results of the presidential election, were Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, newly appointed acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.

The pretext for this ominous discussion was a report issued last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium had reached 5,386 pounds, 12 times the limit set by the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 between Tehran and the world’s major powers. The accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, traded the lifting of United Nations sanctions for Iran’s agreement to sharply curtail its civilian nuclear program and submit to a rigorous inspection regime.

Trump pulled out of the agreement in 2018, imposing an endless series of steadily escalating unilateral sanctions aimed at strangling Iran’s economy and starving its people into submission, while engaging in relentless military provocations. This culminated in the drone assassination last January of top Iranian leader Qassim Suleimani at Baghdad international airport, a criminal act that brought the two countries to the brink of all-out war.

The size of Iran’s uranium stockpile—still far smaller than before the 2015 accord—is of no strategic significance and represents no violation of international law. Tehran has increased the stockpile and exceeded other limits of the treaty in response to Europe’s failure to resist Washington’s unilateral sanctions. Iran has taken no steps to enrich uranium to the over 90 percent level necessary to produce fissionable material, nor is there evidence that it has the capacity to do so. Iran has repeatedly insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, and has accepted international inspections that would reveal anything to the contrary.

The Times article repeats the propaganda lie peddled by the US and Israeli governments that Iran could be “close to a bomb” as early as next spring. It bears pointing out that the article’s authors include Eric Schmitt and David Sanger, both of whom contributed pieces to the Times campaign in service of the Bush administration’s fabrication of a “weapons of mass destruction” pretext for a US war of aggression against Iraq in 2002-2003.

According to the Times, “Any strike — whether by missile or cyber — would almost certainly be focused on Natanz”, Iran's largest uranium enrichment facility located south of the capital Tehran.

The Times report cited unnamed administration officials as stating that “After Mr. Pompeo and General Milley described the potential risks of military escalation, officials left the meeting believing a missile attack inside Iran was off the table ... ”

There is absolutely no reason to accept such assurances as good coin. Planning for a US strike is continuing apace, and definite measures are being taken for its execution.

The Pentagon reported Monday the redeployment of an F-16 fighter squadron from Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany to Al-Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi in what an Air Force commander told the media was a demonstration of “CENTCOM's commitment to allies and partners to bolster security and stability in the region.” The aircraft are equipped to deliver both conventional and nuclear bombs against targets. Meanwhile, the US Navy’s Nimitz Carrier Strike Group continues operations in the Persian Gulf, while the US has some 35,000 troops deployed in the region.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in Israel today for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, not unlike Trump, is threatened with being ousted from power to face multiple criminal charges. The principal issue to be discussed in Pompeo’s visit—as it will be in his subsequent stops in the Persian Gulf oil monarchies that are part of Washington’s anti-Tehran axis—will be war against Iran. The Israeli press is filled with speculation over whether the US will strike Iran before Trump is forced from office, or whether Washington will assist Netanyahu in doing so.

One thing is certain. The bombing of Natanz or any other Iranian nuclear facility would be a war crime of world historic proportions, threatening to kill thousands—if not tens of thousands—outright, and subjecting many more to death and disease from the release of uranium hexafluoride gases and subsequent radioactive fallout.

Behind the pretext of Iranian uranium stockpiles, the immediate driving force for such a war crime against Iran lies in the unprecedented political crisis gripping Washington in the face of Trump’s attempt to stage a post-election coup to remain in power.

Trump has carried out a purge of the top Pentagon leadership, installing a cabal of fascistic loyalists in top positions, all of them fanatically anti-Iranian. Sacked acting Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a former lobbyist for the arms industry, was removed both because of his reluctance to support an Iran strike and his public opposition to Trump’s proposal to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy regular Army troops in the streets to attack anti-police-violence demonstrations.

An attack on Iran, and the inevitable Iranian retaliation with the potential deaths of large numbers of US troops, would provide Trump with the pretext for imposing martial law and refusing to surrender the White House. With 62 days before the scheduled presidential inauguration, the danger of such a provocation is ever present.

Biden and the Democrats have ignored the threat of a catastrophic war against Iran. Instead, they warn of the supposed dangers of a “precipitous” withdrawal of US troops from the nearly two-decade US war in Afghanistan and from Iraq, while proclaiming that Trump’s stonewalling of the transition process is a threat to “national security,” leaving US imperialism vulnerable to its “enemies.”

The war threat against Iran and the danger of a new world war are fundamentally rooted not in the crisis of the Trump regime, but rather in its source, the historic crisis of US imperialism. In its merciless aggression against Iran, Washington is pursuing geo-strategic interests. It seeks to exert unfettered hegemony over the Persian Gulf and its vast energy resources, while denying them to its chief global rival, China.

Should Biden succeed in being inaugurated on January 20, this threat of war will only continue to escalate. The Democratic Party has made this abundantly clear through a campaign attacking Trump from the right for being too “soft” on Russia and China.

The overriding concern of the Democratic Party is not to defeat Trump’s conspiracies, but rather to prevent popular opposition to them from threatening the interests of Wall Street and US imperialism.

The fight against war and in defense of democratic rights—along with workers’ lives being sacrificed to the ruling class’s “herd immunity” response to the COVID-19 pandemic—can be waged only by the working class in opposition to Trump and the Democrats and the capitalist system that they both defend.

The whole world is watching the extraordinary events that have followed the US elections, and if American workers initiate an independent political struggle, it will be backed by workers across the globe. The common interests of workers in the United States and every country lie in breaking the grip of the financial-corporate oligarchy and taking power into their own hands in order to restructure economic life internationally on the basis of equality and socialism.

Second wave of coronavirus pandemic hits New York and New Jersey

Josh Varlin

The coronavirus pandemic is resurging in New York and New Jersey, which were the global epicenter of the pandemic for much of the spring, prompting totally inadequate responses from their state governments. Cases, test positivity rates, hospitalizations and deaths have begun rising in both states after months of relatively low numbers, even while the rest of the country experienced worsening conditions.

The most recent testing data for New York show that more than 3 percent of COVID-19 tests came back positive on Nov. 16—the first time since May that such a benchmark had been met. The seven-day rolling average was 2.9 percent, indicating that community transmission is steadily growing out of control. The Mid-Hudson region and Central New York have more than 4 percent test positivity; Western New York was at 6.5 percent on Monday.

In this Nov. 10, 2020, file photo, a resident uses a swab to take a coronavirus test at the Central Family Life Center in the Stapleton neighborhood of the Staten Island borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

Raw case numbers are likewise growing to levels not seen since the spring, recently reaching over 4,000 per day (and over 5,000 on Tuesday) compared to 600–700 daily during the summer.

Nearly 2,000 New Yorkers are hospitalized, a level also not seen since May. In the past month alone hospitalizations have doubled. Deaths are also beginning to climb; on Nov. 16 COVID-19 killed 36 people, bringing the state’s total deaths over 34,000, an underestimate given dismal testing in the early stages of the pandemic.

The situation is similar in New Jersey, which was even worse hit on a per capita basis than New York earlier in the year.

New cases have risen to over 4,000, with 4,026 cases Nov. 16. The test positivity rate has also risen substantially, hitting 12.1 percent on Nov. 17, a level not seen since May. COVID-19 killed 20 people in New Jersey on Nov. 16.

Both states are experiencing a rate of reproduction of greater than 1, meaning that each sick person will pass along COVID-19 to more than just a single person on average. Rt.live, which estimates the reproduction rate based on data from the COVID Tracking Project, estimates New Jersey’s rate at 1.24 and New York’s at 1.23, both toward the high end of the spectrum of US states despite the large case numbers in other states.

These reproduction rates mean that if the pandemic is not curbed immediately, both states will see cases in the tens of thousands daily again, overwhelming the health care system and heralding a return of the scenes of the spring: mass graves, bodies stacked in portable morgues and health care workers pushed past the brink.

Given the scale of the disaster approaching—with the disastrous first wave fresh in millions of minds and the present scenes from across the country playing out in the news—the response of the state governments has been nothing short of criminal. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, both Democrats, have implemented the most meager restrictions at a time period when decisive measures now could save thousands or tens of thousands of lives, just as the delays in the spring killed tens of thousands.

With much economic activity resumed across the region, Cuomo announced that as of Nov. 13, bars and restaurants with liquor licenses as well as gyms would have to close at 10 p.m. and private gatherings would be capped at 10 people.

New Jersey is likewise limiting indoor gatherings to 10 people as well as reducing percentage capacity for religious services and weddings.

To call such measures “inadequate” is being generous. There are no substantial restrictions on factories and other workplaces, educational facilities and most dining, the 10 p.m. curfew notwithstanding. These are the three areas identified in detailed data compiled by the Illinois Department of Public Health as the largest centers of COVID-19 outbreaks in that state.

New York City schools have been kept open for in-person classes, with parents and educators alike waiting to hear each day if the schools will be closed due to rising test positivity rates. Besides causing unnecessary stress and creating the need for back-up plans, each extra day of instruction during rising cases provides opportunities for cases to spread in the schools. The Democratic Party-aligned New York Times has been among the main voices demanding schools be kept open so that workers remain on the job, even at the cost of indoor dining, which was also dangerous to resume.

Workers in New York and New Jersey have sacrificed much in the fight against COVID-19. Cases have been kept fairly low over the summer months in large part due to adherence to physical distancing measures and mask wearing. Parents have kept hundreds of thousands of New York City schoolchildren in online classes rather than engage in the dangerous “hybrid” teaching. Similarly, economic activity has dramatically declined in large part due to the lack of support provided to workers and small businesses during the lockdowns in the spring.

With vaccines in an advanced stage of development, workers cannot allow for cases to rise and unnecessary deaths to happen on a mass scale again. They must fight for the closure of all nonessential workplaces and full compensation for workers and small businesses.

Austria to tighten lockdown, but factories remain open

Markus Salzmann

Given the dramatic infection figures and a catastrophic situation in hospitals, the Austrian government was forced on Saturday to announce new measures to contain the coronavirus. They come far too late and are completely inadequate.

In terms of population, Austria currently has the highest rate of reported new COVID-19 infections worldwide, according to the data platform “Our World in Data.” On a 7-day average, Austria is ahead of Georgia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic, with 831 new infections per million inhabitants per day. Also, in terms of deaths in Europe, only Slovenia, Belgium and France are currently ahead of Austria. On Friday, almost 9,600 new infections and 53 deaths were reported, in a country with 8.9 million inhabitants.

The responsibility for this disastrous development lies with the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose right-wing conservative Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP) is ruling together with the Greens. After the first lockdown in the spring, infection rates and deaths fell in April. From May 1, the government then lifted all relevant protective measures again, although scientists warned strongly against this and experience from other countries confirmed their warnings. Kurz took a pioneering role in Europe in lifting the protective measures when it came to the interests of industry.

Even when the infection figures rose exponentially again in September and October, Kurz and his Green coalition partner insisted on the course they had taken. Politicians from all parties declared that the country could not afford another lockdown. Businesses and schools had to remain open without restriction, and tourism not be allowed to suffer.

Chancellor Kurz with his green coalition partner Werner Kogler (Photo: Federal Ministry of Finance CC-BY-SA 2.0)

It was only when the infection figures reached five times the peak of the spring—as more and more experts sounded the alarm and the outrage in the population became unmistakable—that the government enacted some disjointed and half-hearted measures starting on November 3. Gastronomy, recreational, cultural and sports facilities would close by the end of November. But factories remained open and schools continued to provide face-to-face instruction. Only in high schools and universities would there be a switch to online teaching. Hospitals were not prepared for the new situation, nor were testing facilities significantly expanded.

Finally, on November 9, four renowned scientists sounded the alarm in an open letter, expressing the widespread mood in the population.

The government measures were partially wrong and much too lax, wrote mathematician Peter Markowich, computer scientist Georg Gottlob and the two physicists, Christoph Nägerl and Erich Gornik, all four winners of the Wittgenstein Prize, Austria’s highest award for the promotion of science. According to all the scientific evidence, the country “has, for weeks, been heading unchecked into the catastrophe of overstretched hospitals, where doctors are having to follow triage procedures,” i.e., treating some patients and allowing others to die.

The scientists demanded the immediate closure of all schools and the “obligation to work from home wherever possible.” The assertion that schools were particularly safe could not be sustained. They were “one of the drivers of respiratory viruses, that is a proven fact. Austrian studies that try to prove the opposite are methodologically false or outdated,” they wrote. Schools may not be the sole cause of the explosion in case numbers, but were “certainly a significant contribution,” and their closure “one of the most effective individual measures ever.”

“Even if all the major disadvantages of school closures are taken into account,” the scientists said, “the catastrophe of overloading hospitals weighs more heavily. All those who now speak against closing schools must say that they are in favour of a triage approach, at the latest starting from November 18.”

The Austrian Institute for Economic Research (Wifo), which is supported by both the employers’ associations and the trade unions, objected. From an economic point of view, school closures would entail “high individual and social costs,” Wifo declared in a “Research Letter.”

After shedding some crocodile tears about the psychological strain and the lack of progress of students, Wifo came to the point: Schools must remain open and the spread of the virus and thousands of deaths must be accepted to secure the profits of the corporations!

School closures would also have consequences on the labour supply of parents, the “Research Letter” said. About 31 percent of employees had children under the age of 15 in their household and about 25 percent had no potential caregiver, i.e., no adult without employment, in the same household. A total of 12.5 percent of employees had caring responsibilities for children in the event of school or kindergarten closures, with 9 percent of all working hours in Austria being performed by these people.

“Even if those affected find creative ways of combining employment outside the home, or with working from home and [conducting] home schooling, the direct effects on the labour supply are negative,” the economic institute found.

Until two days ago, the Health Ministry, which is run by the Greens, also spoke out against the closure of the schools.

Given the looming catastrophe, the pressure on the government, and its fear of a rebellion should scenes occur like the ones in northern Italy in the spring, became too great. On November 14, Chancellor Kurz announced a tightened lockdown that would apply from November 17 to December 6.

All schools will be closed and shifted to distance learning. Day-care centres will also remain closed, except for emergency care. In addition to catering and leisure facilities, retail outlets will also be largely closed. Excluded from this are grocery stores, post offices, banks, pharmacies and similar businesses. Service providers, such as hairdressers and beauty salons, are also no longer allowed to open. The curfew, which currently applies from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., will be extended to cover the entire day. Leaving the house is only possible for those travelling for work reasons, to meet basic needs as well as to provide support and care for others. Walking and sports are also permitted.

In contrast, production can continue in factories, even if this is not for essential needs. This means that one of the main sources of infection remains. As in schools, numerous infections occur in workplaces due to a lack of protective measures. In the summer, when the infection figures were significantly lower, dozens of infections occurred in several meat processing factories in the country. But the government continues to put the profits of big business above the lives of the people.

Before the announcement of the lockdown, the situation had worsened dramatically. On Friday, 3,922 COVID-19 patients were in hospitals, 567 in intensive care. In the most severely affected provinces of Vorarlberg and Upper Austria, intensive care units are already operating at full capacity. Hospitals in Vorarlberg announced on Friday that they were concentrating only on acute emergencies and COVID-19 patients. Applying a triage approach—the selection of patients who are left to die without treatment—is imminent in the coming days.

Hospitals in other parts of Austria are also reaching their limits, postponing non-essential operations and preparing to admit more coronavirus patients. Most recently, there was a 70 percent increase in patients requiring intensive care.

On Saturday, Susanne Rabady, vice president of the Austrian Society of General Medicine (ÖGAM), sounded the alarm that the health care system in Austria was “now at full capacity.”

Klaus Markstaller, president of the Austrian Society for Anaesthesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care Medicine (ÖGARI), warned of the impending need to implement triage. “When more than a third of all available intensive care beds are no longer available,” then triage will begin, he said. If the number of hospital admissions increased in the next few days—which can be assumed based on the current figures—triage was inevitable.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to get patients into intensive care beds who need them,” Markstaller said. “We are right at the limit. We will have to start deciding over the next few days to what extent we can treat which patients with intensive care.” As soon as there was a need for “hard triage,” prognostic factors, the patient’s will, surrounding conditions and comparison with other patients would decide who would be treated and who would not, the Kurier quoted him as saying.

In this dramatic situation, the government’s measures are completely inadequate. Both the extreme right and the Social Democrats, trade unions and the Chamber of Labour continue to openly advocate a policy of herd immunity, allowing the virus free rein among the population.

The extreme right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), the ÖVP’s former coalition partner in government, has attacked the measures as “completely excessive.” FPÖ parliamentary faction leader and former Interior Minister Herbert Kickl warned that they were driving Austria to ruin. Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner, herself a doctor, called the closure of the schools “highly irresponsible.” Like other SPÖ politicians, she is concerned about maintaining uninterrupted production in the factories, which she sees as being endangered by the school closures.

The head of the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions, Wolfgang Katzian, and the president of the Chamber of Labour, Renate Anderl, have been up in arms against lockdown measures for weeks. Despite all the warnings from experts, they are demanding that schools and kindergartens remain open.

Both question the necessity of a lockdown, the Kurier reports. Katzian would “be careful not to comment on the measures advocated by virologists and experts.” In the style of a coronavirus denier, Anderl said, “I don’t know if it really makes sense to shut everything down now.” She was not aware that there had been many infections in restaurants, for example.

The facts refute this reactionary twaddle. Only recently, a study in Austria showed that the prevalence, i.e., the proportion of illnesses in the total population, is effectively the same among pupils and teachers. The fact that symptoms occur less frequently in children and adolescents does not affect the risk of transmission. The only differences are in the social structure at schools. According to the scientists, the risk of infection is 3.6 times higher at schools with many children from socially disadvantaged families than at schools with fewer socially disadvantaged children.