Sharp rise in cost of living, high unemployment portend renewal of class conflict in Chile

Mauricio Saavedra

Soaring costs of basic consumer goods triggered by the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, the normalization of COVID-19 infections and deaths, high unemployment and historic levels of social inequality once again have brought to the surface immense social tensions in Chile. 

Chilean President Gabriel Boric arrives to La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, Monday, May 2, 2022. [AP Photo/Esteban Felix]

As in October 2019, the eruption of the class struggle is a specter that brings jitters to the ruling class and the newly installed government of the pseudo-left-Stalinist coalition Apruebo Dignidad (I approve dignity).

Confronted in the last month with the outbreak of hunger riots and looting, school occupations, road blockades by truck owner-operators and striking port and health workers, the immediate reaction of the government of Gabriel Boric has been to unleash the murderous Carabinero special forces. 

Although the right-wing corporate media has all but censored the police-state repression and deliberately distorted the narrative to paint students, workers and the poor as common criminals, dozens have uploaded video and photos on social media reporting scenes of militarized riot police and special forces violently beating striking workers and protesting children with truncheons, indiscriminately using water cannon and tear gas and conducting mass arrests.

Up to 400 people were involved in a hunger riot culminating in the looting of a supermarket on the outskirts of Santiago last Monday, a gauge of the desperate situation facing the working class. What started off with 40 or 50 people setting up barricades in Talangante, a working class commune in the Metropolitan Region, quickly attracted hordes of desperate people ransacking a Tottus supermarket. 

The militarized police responded swiftly, arresting 48 people. Egged on by the right, baying for law and order, several parties in the coalition government condemned the riots as criminal and criticized the Prosecutor’s Office for releasing 33 of them. 

“All these were a bunch of criminals that the only thing they came to do was to steal, to loot,” the mayor of Talagante Carlos Álvarez (Socialist Party), told Expreso Biobio. “In the theory of criminal law, the state of necessity is an exoneration of responsibility in famine theft, which means that it is theft by hunger. Here nobody took something to eat … they were taking household appliances.” 

Álvarez’s contemptuous attitude betrays the cynicism of the government’s propaganda campaign of “empathizing” with “the people.” 

Gabriel Boric’s administration, which includes the pseudo-left Broad Front, the Stalinist Communist Party and sectors of the parliamentary left, came to power promising the masses that it would put an end to the “neo-liberal” free-market model. Yet the series of reforms that he has announced to date amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what is required to address entrenched poverty and social inequality, now exacerbated by steeply rising costs. 

Data from the National Statistics Institute indicates that the March Consumer Price Index reached a historical increase of 1.9 percent on top of a 9.4 percent inflation rate over the last 12 months. 

The surge in prices is in large part the outcome of the policies of the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera approved by former deputy Boric and his associates in the parliamentary left, which mimicked those of the US and Europe during the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. 

Piñera introduced economic “reactivation” programs that consisted of providing collateral for credits to predominantly medium to large firms, guaranteeing up to US$20 billion in bank loans. It also covered the payroll by up to 80 percent of small and medium sized businesses. Beginning in May 2020, Mario Marcel—current finance minister and the former chief of the autonomous Central Bank—massively expanded the bank’s balance sheet to prop up the financial markets. 

All these measures helped increase the fortunes of the super-rich by 73 percent between 2020 and 2021. The combined wealth of the eight richest billionaires reached US$42.7 billion last year.

Forbes' list of Chilean billionaires in 2021

It now has come to light that the large supermarket chains in the country have over the last year artificially jacked up prices of basic consumer goods over and above inflation.

The 2022 World Inequality Report, coordinated by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman and Lucas Chancel, places Chile as among the most unequal countries in the Latin America. 

According to the report: “Available estimates suggest that inequality in Chile has been extreme over the past 120 years, with a top 10 percent income share constantly around 55%-60 percent and a bottom 50 percent income share around 9-10 percent.” 

Household wealth (the sum of all financial assets plus non-financial assets plus net debts) is even more skewed. In 2021, the average wealth for the bottom 50 percent in Chile was negative—meaning half of the population was in debt. On the other hand, the top 10 percent and top 1 percent of the population held 80 percent and 50 percent of total wealth, respectively. 

Fundación Sol infographic illustrating the sharp rise in basic consumer products over the last year. (Source: National Institute of Statistics)

Most significantly, the report explains that since 1995, that is, under the so-called socialist administrations of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) and Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010, 2014-2018), the wealth of the bottom half remained at zero or less while the shares of the top 10 and top 1 percent more than doubled.

This persistence of extreme inequality in Chile, whether under military or civilian rule, is key to understanding the profound social eruption that shook the country in late 2019 and the beginning of 2020 and threatens to erupt today in response to catastrophic food and energy prices rises.

Pelosi pledges war “until victory is won”

Andre Damon

Over the weekend, Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in the line of presidential succession, traveled in secret to the war zone of Kiev, Ukraine and pledged a commitment by the United States to ensure “victory” against Russia.

Repeating the false premise that the United States’ involvement in the war with Russia is about helping Ukraine, an embattled ally, Pelosi told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.” She added, “We stand with Ukraine until victory is won.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits the 82nd Airborne Division stationed in Rzeszów, Poland. (Credit: @SpeakerPelosi)

Democratic Representative Jason Crow, who accompanied Pelosi on her trip to Ukraine, was even more emphatic in asserting that the United States is a party to the war, declaring at a press conference in Poland, “The United States of America is in this to win, and we will stand with Ukraine until victory is won.”

Pelosi’s pledge, coming just one week after similar assurances by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, amounts to an unlimited commitment of treasure and blood to the pursuit of sweeping, open-ended war aims that threaten to draw the United States into what Biden called “world war.”

What does “victory” in Ukraine mean? In the span of just one week, Biden, Austin and leading members of the president’s political party have all given conflicting and irreconcilable answers as to what the United States is trying to achieve in Eastern Europe.

On one hand, Biden claimed that it is “not true” that the United States is engaged in a proxy war with Russia. On the other, Austin said at a press conference in Poland last week that the United States is seeking to “weaken” Russia. The New York Times has raised the prospect of “bringing Russia to its knees,” while former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges called for “breaking the back” of Russia.

To which of these goals is Pelosi committing the United States?

If one accepts Pelosi’s statements in the most limited and most literal sense, they mean that the United States will assist Ukraine in achieving its military aims in regard to Russia. But Ukraine’s own military goals, developed in close cooperation with US military planners, are sweeping.

On March 24, 2021, Zelensky signed a document pledging to “implement measures to ensure the de-occupation and reintegration of the [Crimean] peninsula.” This means that Ukraine is formally committed to the seizure of Crimea, territory that Russia claims as its own, through military means.

If Ukraine succeeds in breaking the Russian offensive in the Donbas, routs the attacking Russian forces, and pushes into Russian territory, would the United States be “committed” to support Ukraine in this “fight”?

In another scenario, what will the United States do if Russian forces continue their advance toward Western Ukraine, encircling pockets of the Ukrainian army and leading to its disintegration? What does Pelosi’s open-ended commitment to “victory” against Russia mean if Ukraine is threatened with strategic defeat?

Pelosi’s statement makes clear that, forced to choose between the prospect of reneging on its “commitment” and the deployment of troops—or even the use of nuclear weapons—the United States will choose the latter.

Last week, Democratic Senator Chris Coons called for a “conversation” about sending US troops to fight against Russia in Ukraine.

Asked about Coons’s statements, Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, merely called the measure “premature”—effectively an admission that plans are already in the works. On Sunday, Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger announced that he has introduced an Authorization for Use of Military Force that would allow Biden to deploy US troops in a full-scale war with Russia.

In the course of the Vietnam War, the United States was drawn into an ever more bloody and brutal war that followed the logic of the military commitments it had made.

The Pentagon Papers, first published in 1971, revealed that in the early 1960s, under President John F. Kennedy, American imperialism transformed its involvement in Vietnam, which had up to that point been called a “limited-risk gamble” into a “broad commitment.”

One of the most damning components of the Pentagon Papers was an internal Defense Department memo, drafted in 1965, that concluded that the main reason for US involvement was to uphold the United States’ “commitment,” the breach of which would lead to a “humiliating U.S. defeat.”  The United States’ goals were ranked as follows:

• 70% – To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
• 20% – To keep [South Vietnam] (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
• 10% – To permit the people [of South Vietnam] to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
• NOT – To help a friend

A memo published as part of the Pentagon Papers

In pursuit of enforcing the global position of the United States in the post-war period, 58,220 American soldiers lost their lives, hundreds of thousands were physically and psychologically destroyed, and over 1 million Vietnamese men, women and children were killed.

The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent to which American foreign policy is made in secret. The public is presented with a set of facts and arguments that bear no relationship to the actual goals that are propelling the conflict. The aim of media discussion is not to allow the people to democratically control the conduct of foreign policy, but to condition public opinion to accept the outcome desired by the American state apparatus.

The stakes in the present war are vastly higher than they were in Vietnam. From its origins as a US proxy war aiming to “bleed Russia white,” the conflict over Ukraine is rapidly spiraling into a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states.

Within the entire US political establishment, there is no serious attempt to explain what the war is about. There simply exists no opposition to a reckless and insane policy that threatens to end human civilization through the eruption of a nuclear third world war.

China holds “emergency” conference over sanctions threat

Nick Beams

With China next in line to be targeted by US imperialism and the likely use of unprecedented financial sanctions, such as those employed against Russia, Beijing is seeking ways to counter the threat.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing, China, Friday, Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

According to a report in the Financial Times (FT) published over the weekend, Chinese financial regulators held an “emergency meeting” on April 22 with domestic and foreign banks to discuss how they could protect the country’s overseas assets from the type of measures imposed on Russia.

In a well-prepared operation going back at least several months, involving officials from the White House and the European Commission, the US and the European Union excluded Russia from the SWIFT international financial messaging system and froze much of its $630 billion worth of foreign currency reserves within days of the invasion of Ukraine.

Citing “people familiar with the discussion,” the FT said Chinese officials were “worried that the same measures could be taken against Beijing in the event of a regional military conflict or other crisis.”

Already US officials have been keeping a close watch on China’s financial dealings with Russia. This has provoked fears in Beijing that China will be hit with punitive measures if it is seen to infringe on the anti-Russia sanctions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has expressed opposition to the US proxy war against Russia, calling for negotiations, and has refused to line up behind US-sponsored resolutions directed against Russia in the UN. But at the same time Chinese banks and firms have been wary of doing anything that could provoke a US reaction.

The conference involved officials from the central bank and the finance ministry as well as executives from “dozens of local and international lenders such as HSBC,” the FT report said. All large foreign and domestic banks operating in China were represented.

The meeting began with a briefing from a senior official from the finance ministry who said the government had been put on alert by the punitive sanctions against Russia. No doubt there are also concerns in Beijing that the measures against Moscow could go well beyond the existing sanctions.

There is already discussion in the imperialist capitals that Russia’s assets be completely expropriated to pay for the war damage in Ukraine.

No specific scenario was raised at the conference as to what could be the circumstances for the use of financial sanctions against China, but the issue of Taiwan was on the minds of participants.

Over the recent period the US has been steadily moving to abandon its “one China” policy agreed to when diplomatic recognition was accorded to China in 1979.

The provocations by the US over Ukraine which led to the Russian invasion will have raised concerns in Beijing that Washington will adopt a similar scenario in relation to Taiwan, possibly through a US military build-up on the island or encouraging Taiwan to declare formal independence.

Such actions could provoke Beijing to take military action in the same way as the NATO expansion goaded Russian President Putin to invade Ukraine.

Taiwan may not be the only issue to spark a US escalation. The US, backed by its ally Australia, has issued threats against the Solomon Islands over the decision of the Sogavare government to sign a security pact with China.

During a visit by senior White House official Kurt Campbell to Honiara, the Solomon Islands capital, last month, the White House issued a threatening statement that the US would have “significant concerns and respond accordingly” if steps were taken to establish a “de facto” Chinese military presence in the island nation.

The terms of the statement are so wide that an aggressive US response could follow from virtually any action that Washington interprets as inimical to its interests. There is already considerable US hostility to the decision by the Sogavare government to switch its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing.

It appears, at least from the FT report, that the conference was unable to come up with concrete measures if the US decided to impose sanctions.

A person briefed on the meeting said: “No one on site could think of a good solution to the problem. China’s banking system isn’t prepared for a freeze of its dollar assets or exclusion from the SWIFT messaging system as the US has done to Russia.”

It cited Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, who said Beijing was right to be concerned “because it has very few alternatives and the consequences [of US financial sanctions] are disastrous.”

The effect of any sanction measures, even if they were milder than those imposed on Russia, would go beyond the considerable financial turmoil the Russian ban has produced.

China’s weight in international financial markets is far greater than that of Russia. China is estimated to hold $1.5 trillion worth of US securities, including more than $1 trillion worth of US Treasury bonds. All told China holds $3.2 trillion in foreign assets.

According to some bankers present at the meeting, it was doubtful that the US could impose significant sanctions because of China’s huge holdings of dollar financial assets and the massive effect any freeze would have on the US and global financial system.

“It is difficult for the US to impose massive sanctions against China,” Collier said. “It is like mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war.”

But in conditions where the use of nuclear weapons has become an ever-greater danger in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the use of the financial “nuclear option” can by no means be ruled out.

Moreover, the issue goes beyond China. The imposition of sanctions on Russia has already delivered a major blow to the international financial system based on the use of the dollar. Its weaponisation means that any country that crosses the US can find itself under attack, including major countries.

At present the major imperialist powers, above all those in Europe, have aligned themselves behind the US drive to “break the back” of Russia in the hope they may obtain some benefit from the plunder of its resources.

But they have conflicting interests which could rapidly emerge. The US has already used its control of the dollar to enforce unilateral sanctions against Iran by compelling European companies and financial institutions to abide by them or face large penalties.

The longer-term and not so long-term implications of the US measures against Russia are emerging clearly. So-called free market operations in the global system are being done away with. It is increasingly being placed on a war footing as the prospect re-emerges of the division of the world into rival currency and financial blocs, as took place in the lead-up to World War II.

Climate change will lead to increasing spillover of viruses to humans, potentially causing new pandemics

Philip Guelpa

A groundbreaking study newly published in the journal Nature (Carlson, Albery et al., “Climate change increases cross-species viral transmission risk”) concludes that ongoing climate change will dramatically increase the potential for viruses that already exist among animal populations to be spread to humans, as has already happened with SARS-CoV-2, and others such as HIV and Ebola, collectively known as zoonotic (animal derived) disease spillovers.

This alarming finding is based on the development of a model by these researchers which projects how the warming of the planet will likely cause displacement in a sample of over 3,000 mammal species over the next 50 years, assuming a likely increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in average global temperature.

Geographically shifting ecozones will force animals, plants and other organisms to adjust their territorial distributions as the spatial limits of the habitats to which they are adapted are altered. This will involve the actual movement of individuals and/or the gradual adjustment of ranges as some populations die off and others, located in more favorable environments, are more successful.

These changes will not, due to a whole variety of factors (e.g., topography, latitude, rainfall patterns), simply displace existing ecozones intact. Rather, wholesale alterations will result in “mixing and matching” of varied environmental constituents, consequently bringing together species not previously in close proximity to each other and creating adaptive stresses which will likely favor some species over others, resulting in extinctions. Overall, the result will be a significant decrease in the stability of ecosystems.

As a result, the opportunity for viruses to spread not only between different, formerly dispersed populations of the same species but also between species, including to humans, will be increased.

An estimated 40,000 viruses exist that infect mammals. Of these, 10,000 are thought to have the potential to infect humans but are currently only found in animals. The model projects that climate change will result in approximately 300,000 “first encounters” between species not previously in contact. It is estimated that cross-species dispersal of viruses will occur on the order of 15,000 times, with over 4,000 of these among mammals alone, within the model’s timespan.

This map visualizes projected novel viral-sharing events near human population centers in equatorial Africa, south China, India and Southeast Asia in 2070. These will increasingly overlap with projected hotspots of cross-species viral transmission in wildlife. (Image courtesy of Colin Carlson/GUMC)

Furthermore, as new host species are infected, creating new selective environments for the viruses, it can be anticipated that novel variants will evolve, as we are currently experiencing with SARS-CoV-2. It must also be anticipated that viral exchanges between non-human species will also severely affect wild animal populations, resulting in their own unanticipated impacts.

Many factors influence whether any given interaction between species will result in effective viral transfer. The study does not project how many viruses will ultimately cause disease in humans, but the potential is significant. These findings augment earlier studies that examined how other forms of habitat disturbance and human incursion into existing wild areas will also increase the potential for animal to human viral transmission.

The effects will likely be especially pronounced, at least initially, in species-dense areas with high human population densities and significant economic inequality, such as tropical Africa and Asia, which experience massive numbers of “climate migrants” and thus a growing “interface” between animals and humans.

A co-author of the study, Gregory Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University, told The Guardian that already occurring climate change is “shaking ecosystems to their core,” which means that significant animal to human viral transmission is already underway and likely to worsen.

In an interview with The Atlantic, another co-author of the study, Georgetown global-change biologist Colin Carlson, stated that the planetary network of viruses and wildlife “is rewiring itself right now.” He found the revelations “so large and heavy to behold that even as we were writing them, we didn’t want to.”

Commenting on the study to The Guardian, Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University, said, “Vaccines, drugs and tests are essential but without major investments in primary pandemic prevention, namely habitat conservation, strictly regulating wildlife trade, and improved livestock biosecurity, as examples, we will find ourselves in a world where only the rich are able to endure ever more likely infectious disease outbreaks.”

The outbreak of pandemic diseases has been projected for decades. Urgent warnings that preparations should be made in advance have been issued repeatedly, and largely ignored, with the interests of business having been taken as paramount. Responses to every new outbreak have been short-lived. When the peak of the crisis has passed or pretended to have passed, as is currently the case with COVID-19, resources are quickly redirected into more profitable undertakings for the capitalist class. As a result, the rapid mobilization which should be undertaken to stop the spread of a new disease early in its development is significantly hampered.

The anticipated scenario based on the new model is truly sobering, Carlson told The Atlantic. It predicts that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely only the beginning of repeated outbreaks of new diseases, some of which may reach pandemic proportions. Given the disastrous response to COVID-19 by most nations of the world, the consequences of which are still unfolding, the prospect of wave after wave of such catastrophes would devastate humanity, not to mention a good portion of other living things on earth. The rate of change is such that multiple deadly pandemics may occur simultaneously.

The effects of climate change extend well beyond the spread of zoonotic diseases. The wholesale disruption of ecosystems and consequent ecological instability will certainly result in widespread extinctions, possibly the earth’s sixth mass extinction, but, in contrast to the previous five, this will be anthropogenic in origin. The biological systems on which humans rely for food will be severely impacted, if not totally devastated.

The growing understanding of the processes driving the increasing appearance of zoonotic diseases provides another nail in the coffin of reactionary attempts to blame China for somehow being responsible for the spread of COVID-19.

Chevron strike in seventh week as oil industry announces first quarter profit bonanza

Gabriel Black

Oil companies around the world are announcing massive first quarter profits amidst the surging cost of oil and natural gas.

Chevron, the $307 billion global oil company, quadrupled its profits in the first quarter of 2022. It made $6.5 billion in the first three months of 2022, up from $1.7 billion the year before. In the meantime, the energy giant has refused to budge on its demands that Chevron refinery workers in Richmond, California, who have been on strike since March 21, accept a deep cut in real wages.

ExxonMobil, the largest private oil company in the United States, doubled its profits. The company registered $5.48 billion in profits. This came even though ExxonMobil has effectively given up its Russian operations—for the current moment—losing $3.4 billion of revenue. Overall, Exxon made $90.5 billion in revenue, about $30 billion more compared to the same quarter last year.

Oil workers on strike at Chevron in Richmond, California, early in the morning on March 25, 2022 (Photo: United Steel Workers union)

Internationally, the Italian oil behemoth Eni saw its profits surge by more than 1,000 percent—as its net profit increased from 0.27 billion euros in the first quarter of last year to 3.27 billion euros this quarter. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has announced that booming oil revenues drove its economic growth the fastest it has seen in a decade—a 9.6 percent year-on-year increase in GDP.

These massive profits are the result of the surge in the price of oil and natural gas. The average monthly price of the West Texas Intermediate benchmark price for crude oil rose from $64 in March 2021 to $100 in March 2022.

The price of oil has risen for a variety of reasons. Demand continues to recover following the initial lockdowns at the beginning of the pandemic in Spring 2020 that decimated oil prices.

Although demand is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels next year, the oil companies have barely increased production, refusing to rehire the thousands of workers they laid off or reopen the refineries they closed when oil prices tanked. The gap between supply and demand has driven up oil and gas prices, allowing the companies to reap huge profits while oil workers are worked to the bone, and the working class consumers are punished at the pump.

The US Federal Reserve also continues its policies of pumping $120 billion of digital cash into financial markets to prop up the speculative activity of the ultra-rich, a part of a global policy of easy money and low interest rates that drives up costs.

On top of this, the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has further driven the price of oil higher, especially as sanctions have been levied by the United States against Russia.

While the oil companies are making near-record profits, this excess money is neither going to workers nor towards substantial new investments.

Chevron and Exxon Mobil, for example, have both announced massive shareholder buyback programs. Exxon said it would triple its buyback program to $30 billion a year. Chevron will now have a record buyback program of $10 billion a year.

Buybacks effectively take the value created by workers in their workplace and funnel that money directly into shareholders’ pockets. It is a completely parasitic use of profit that diverts funds from new hiring and investment and into the hand the super-rich.

Warren Buffett, the fifth richest person in the world, just substantially increased his share of Chevron and Occidental Petroleum. Through his company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett now owns $26 billion worth of Chevron, one-twelfth of the company. He also bought $7 billion worth of Occidental Petroleum in March.

Buffett is also a major shareholder of BNSF railroad, which is conducting a brutal attack on the jobs and working conditions of locomotive engineers and other railway workers. This includes the imposition of a new punitive attendance policy aimed at purging the railroad of higher-paid experienced workers.

The refusal of Chevron, Marathon, ExxonMobil and other big refiners to rehire thousands of laid off workers has led to chronic, unsafe understaffing at refineries around the country.

“The company puts our lives in danger to save pennies,” Tom, a striking oil refinery worker in Richmond, California, told the WSWS. “They don’t hire enough. Because of this, we are forced in a lot, and this causes fatigue. Your sleep suffers. Your family life suffers. And when you’re on stand-by, you can’t have a life.”

Tens of thousands of refinery and petrochemical workers were prepared to strike when their contracts ran out on February 1. But the United Steelworkers (USW) union collaborated with the Biden administration to block the strike by 30,000 workers, which would have undermined the White House’s efforts to ramp up for war against Russia.

After weeks in which the USW claimed it was miles apart from an agreement with Marathon, the lead negotiator for the oil industry, USW President Tom Conway suddenly announced a deal, which he boasted, “does not add to inflationary pressures.”

In fact, the agreement was a steal for the oil companies. It included an average annual raise of only 3 percent over four years, which amounts to a huge pay cut in real terms given the 40-year high inflation rate of 8.5 percent. At the same time, the deal did nothing to force the companies to rehire workers and end the understaffing and overtime policies, which endanger workers and rob them of their family lives and health.

While the USW conducted a campaign of lies and intimidation, including forcing workers to revote on the contract if they rejected it the first time, 500 Chevron workers in Richmond, California, threw a wrench into the efforts by the USW to push through this pro-company deal.

After Richmond workers voted down two local contracts pushed by the USW, which were based on the national sellout deal, the union was forced to call a strike. From the beginning of the walkout, Conway and the rest of the USW have deliberately isolated the Chevron workers, kept them on starvation-level strike benefits and kept workers in the dark about ongoing “negotiations.”

In fact, the only talks between the oil bosses and the USW going on is how best to wear down the strikers and impose the company’s dictates. In an effort to conceal this conspiracy from workers, the USW is organizing toothless publicity stunts, including a protest tomorrow in Beverly Hills, California, at a conference where Chevron Executive Vice President Mark Nelson is speaking.

Biden administration sets up Disinformation Governance Board ahead of 2022 elections

Kevin Reed

The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed last week during several appearances before Congress that the Biden administration was creating a Disinformation Governance Board in advance of the 2022 midterm elections.

Speaking before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, called to discuss the DHS budget for 2023, Mayorkas said that the board had just been established to combat disinformation and misinformation and to “bring the resources of [DHS] together to address this threat.”

Mayorkas added that the department is focused on the spread of disinformation in minority communities and that the new board would help DHS be more effective in combatting the purported threat “not only to election security but to our national security.”

A report by the Associated Press on Thursday said that DHS is “stepping up an effort to counter disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading information that human smugglers circulate to target migrants hoping to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border.”

The story quoted from a DHS statement that said, “The spread of disinformation can affect border security, Americans’ safety during disasters, and public trust in our democratic institutions,” but no one from the department would respond to AP requests for an interview on the matter.

Alejandro Mayorkas (Photo: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services/Wikipedia)

Although no details about the functioning of the governance board, its purpose or duties had been published prior to Mayorkas’ testimony, the secretary told the House hearing that it would be co-chaired by Undersecretary for Policy Rob Silvers and principal deputy general counsel Jennifer Gaskill.

An indication of the reactionary nature of the DHS board was revealed in the appointment of Nina Jankowicz as executive director. According to her official bio, Jankowicz was a “disinformation fellow” at the Wilson Center—a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank named after Woodrow Wilson—and she “advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry” and oversaw “Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute (NDI).”

The NDI is a well-known nongovernmental organization that engages in US imperialist and CIA-sponsored political interventions in countries, particularly in Latin America, under the banner of “human rights,” “democracy” and “entrepreneurship.”  The NDI has counted among its board of directors leading figures of US militarism and war such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz, Madeleine Albright and Elliott Abrams.

In a tweet on Wednesday morning, Jankowicz posted, “Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I’ve been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here. Honored to be serving in the Biden Administration @DHSgov and helping shape our counter-disinformation efforts.” In plain language, this means that Jankowicz and the Disinformation Governance Board will be working on shutting down the flow of information that runs counter to the interests of American imperialism, both within the country and abroad, especially as it applies to the war in Ukraine.

Following the hastily prepared announcement by Mayorkas before Congress, a barrage of attacks were launched by right-wing and fascistic Republicans, claiming that the board was the Democrats’ response to the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and part of a plan to suppress the free speech rights of the ultra-right.

On Monday, DHS published a “Fact Sheet” about the board aimed at clarifying what it is now calling an “Internal Working Group” that will “address disinformation that threatens the security of the United States.” Among the primary targets of the DHS initiative is “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran.”

Significantly, amid all the topics listed by DHS as national security threats—including the activity of “transnational criminal organizations,” “human smugglers” and “malicious actors”—there is not one reference to elected Republican politicians or fascist groups and individuals outside the government who are actively working to disrupt the democratic process in the 2022 elections and previously attempted to overthrow the US Constitution to keep Trump in the White House.

In a tweet on Monday, Trump devotee Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri summed up the Republican response, “There’s no ‘confusion’ over the Biden Disinformation Board. Everyone understands exactly what it is—a censorship committee to punish free speech. Dissolve it now.”

Other Republicans called the board “Orwellian.” The Wall Street Journal injected its own anticommunist voice by comparing the DGB to the Soviet-era KGB. Far-right Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert tweeted. “Today’s news of a Biden backed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ is dystopian. They can't afford to let the truth be anything but what they say.”

In reality, the Republican response to the DHS disinformation board is part of the ongoing conspiracy against democratic rights that was being run out of the White House during the Trump administration and culminated in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections with a right-wing coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

While the DHS disinformation effort may cut across some of the conspiracy theories embraced by a faction of extreme right-wing Republicans, the US political establishment and corporate media as a whole have embraced the Biden administration’s militarist arming of Ukraine in the war with Russia, including the preparations for the use of nuclear weapons.

Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion

Eric London

Yesterday evening, Politico published a leaked US Supreme Court draft opinion authored by Samuel Alito overturning the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade and granting states the power to criminalize abortion. The existence of a “draft opinion” means a majority of the court has already voted on the outcome of the case and is merely finalizing the language.

“We hold that Roe…must be overruled,” the draft opinion reads.

The decision is an assault on the democratic rights of the entire population, and particularly on tens of millions of working class women who will not be able to travel for necessary medical procedures. It raises the likelihood that the court will move to abolish gay marriage, move to further end the separation of church and state, and eviscerate a broad range of basic democratic and civil rights won through decades of social struggle.

The United States Supreme Court (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The decision (in a case named Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization) is an unlawful ruling by an illegitimate court and should be treated as such. All but one judge ruling with the majority was appointed by a president who lost the popular vote. Two of the Supreme Court’s nine justices were appointed by George W. Bush, who lost the 2000 election outright (Alito and John Roberts). One justice, Clarence Thomas, is married to an organizer of the January 6 coup to overturn the Constitution, and three Justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were appointed by Donald Trump, who led that coup attempt.

The decision overturning Roe v. Wade evidently received votes from five or six of the justices. It is not known whether Roberts will support the majority, write a concurring opinion, or dissent with the court’s Democratic Party-appointed rump. His vote is not necessary to the majority.

The content of the decision is politically, legally and morally abhorrent.

The draft opinion calls Roe “egregiously wrong” and compares it to the 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation of railroad dining cars under the pseudo-legal “separate but equal” doctrine. In a footnote, Alito’s decision claims that proponents of abortion are eugenicists who are “motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”

The decision is an open attack on the population of the United States and is thoroughly imbued with the oligarchic principle. According to the Supreme Court, the interests of masses of people are of no consequence whatsoever:

“We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work,” the opinion states.

Elsewhere, the decision reads, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” In reality, 60 percent of Americans support abortion rights, the highest percentage in US history.

The Supreme Court’s legal rationale is that because the word “abortion” was not mentioned in the Constitution, there can be no right to abortion. This paves the way for a massive and unprecedented assault on all democratic rights not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Other “unenumerated rights” include the right to vote, the right to travel, the right to privacy, and the right to the presumption of innocence.

The Supreme Court is also paving the way for overturning past decisions clarifying and establishing fundamental rights, the importance of which the framers could not have recognized in the society of the 1780s and 1790s. The decision states, “For the first 185 years after the adoption of the Constitution, each state was permitted to address [abortion] in accordance with the views of its citizens. Then, in 1973, this Court decided Roe v. Wade.”

By this token, very little stops today’s court from reversing almost all of the decisions of the court’s brief liberal period of the 1950s to early 1970s, culminating in Roe. This includes the right to a public defender (Gideon v. Wainwright), the right of arrestees to hear their constitutional rights read to them upon arrest (Miranda v. Arizona), the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v. Virginia), and the ban on mandatory prayer in public schools (Engel v. Vitale).

The decision even opens the door to overturning the court’s prior decision holding that the Equal Protection Clause applies not only to the actions of the federal government, but also to the governments of the states (Bolling v. Sharpe). In fact, the content of Alito’s decision undermines his attempt to equate Roe v. Wade with Plessy v. Ferguson since the text of the Constitution makes no reference to barring racial segregation either.

Blame for the fact that the Supreme Court has come to be dominated by a gang of bigots and arch-reactionaries falls squarely at the feet of the Democratic Party. Democrats capitulated to Republicans when the latter stole the 2000 election and rubber-stamped it with the Supreme Court’s illegitimate decision in Bush v. Gore, which declared that the population does not have the right to vote for president.

For the last half century, the Democrats have refused to oppose the Republicans as the latter have legitimized all forms of backwardness and religious obscurantism.

Most recently, in 2017, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats would not defend the right to abortion for fear of alienating the far right. She said the issue would not be a “litmus test” for Democrats, adding:

“I grew up Nancy D’Alesandro, in Baltimore, Maryland; in Little Italy; in a very devout Catholic family; fiercely patriotic; proud of our town and heritage, and staunchly Democratic. Most of those people—my family, extended family—are not pro-choice. You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic Party?”

The Democratic Party is as feckless in defending democratic rights as it is ruthless in prosecuting the interests of American imperialism.

The Supreme Court decision also explodes the lie that the US government’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is being fought for the sake of “democracy.” Russia’s right-wing abortion laws allow legal abortions only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, but even this reactionary standard is now more liberal than many American states inhabited by tens of millions of people.

Sri Lanka: Opposition JVP seeks to divert mass struggle into dead-end of parliamentary politics

Pani Wijesiriwardena

Sri Lankan opposition parties, trade unions and big corporates are desperately making every effort to derail, diffuse and suppress the mass upsurge of the working people against the President Gotabhaya Rajapakse fearing that it threatens capitalist rule.

Mass opposition erupted in early April demanding the resignation of President Rajapakse and his government and defied attempts to use the police and military to suppress protests.

Now the working class has begun entering into struggle as a class. Millions of workers took part in a one-day general strike on April 28 despite roadblocks placed by the trade unions. Amid a groundswell of anger among workers, the unions have been compelled to call another one-day strike on May 6. 

The mass protests have been fueled by the spiraling prices and shortages of basic foodstuffs, medicines and fuel as well as lengthy daily electricity cuts. As in every country, Sri Lanka is facing economic turmoil triggered by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake [Source: Anura Kumara Dissanayake Facebook]

Speaking to the media last Tuesday, opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented his party’s so-called proposals to “solve” the country’s crisis. He insisted that “the economic crisis cannot be resolved without alleviating political instability”—in other words, a way must be found to suppress mass protests and strikes.

The JVP was supportive of the proposals made by the main parliamentary opposition party Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and other groups for the president and the government to step down to make way for a short-term interim government, a general election and the opportunity “to build a stable government.”

Dissanayake declared that these proposals appear to be “fair solutions,” but stopped short of committing the JVP to an interim government, noting those joining such a regime “can break that agreement at any time.”

Dissanayake offered a proposal only marginally different. After the resignation of the president and government, “then we have to build some inter-parliamentary administration for a very short period of time and go to the polls very soon.” He provided no explanation of how an “inter-parliamentary administration” would be formed, who would participate or indeed how it differed from an “interim government.”

However, the political purpose of the JVP’s proposals is absolutely clear—to suppress the protest movement. Like the SJB, it is to divert the anger of workers, youth and the poor into the dead-end of parliamentary elections on the basis of a false hope that a new combination of capitalist parties would alleviate the worsening social crisis.

The JVP’s intervention has a particular significance. Unlike the SJB—a right-wing breakaway from the equally right-wing United National Party (UNP)—the JVP had its origins in the petty-bourgeois radical movement of Sinhala youth in the 1960s and 1970s and advocated the “armed struggle” based on a toxic mixture of Maoism, Castroism and Sinhala patriotism.

Having long ago abandoned its disastrous “armed struggle” and socialistic and Marxist pretensions, the JVP is now thrusting itself forward as the savior of the capitalist class and its rule.

Addressing the JVP’s May Day rally on Sunday, Dissanayake shamelessly boasted that his party had kept President Chandrika Kumaratunga and her Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in power in 2001. In 2004, it had backed her decision as president to sack the UNP government. JVP leader boasted: “We offered to support her at that time to ensure political stability in the country.”

In 2001, a number of MPs deserted the Kumaratunga government to the opposition UNP to back its call for peace talks with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The JVP, a virulent Sinhala chauvinist party, opposed any peace talks with the LTTE, demanded the continuation of the communal war and supported Kumaratunga administration from “outside.”

The JVP also backed Kumaratunga’s decision to sack the UNP government in 2004 in order to scuttle peace talks with the LTTE. It then entered into an electoral alliance with Kumaratunga to contest new general elections and joined her government, accepting four ministerial posts. Its ministers played a key role in imposing the IMF’s pro-market dictates.

Dissanayake refers to the JVP’s treacherous past, not to offer any way out of the current social crisis facing working people, but to convince the ruling class that his party is always ready to ensure “political stability” and save capitalist rule.

The JVP leader declared that “the situation has changed.” People did not accept the president or the government, he said. The instability would not be resolved by forming an interim government or all-party government. Only solution was to go to a general election.

The call for new elections is at odds with many of the protest slogans raised in the past month, including “No to the curse of 74-year rule,” “Those who ruled the country for 74 years are responsible for the crisis today!” and the “225 in the parliament are responsible for the crisis.”

These slogans indicate a growing awareness that all of the parliamentary parties are responsible for the current crisis and that the entire bourgeois political establishment defends the interests of the rich at the expense of working people—and has done throughout the 74 years since formal independence in 1948.

The JVP, like the other establishment parties, is desperate to gag and divert this movement. Dissanayake maintains a guilty silence on what any new capitalist government formed after an election would do, as it would inevitably seek to impose even greater burdens on the population in line with the demands of the IMF.

The Rajapakse government has already sent a delegation to Washington for talks with the IMF for an emergency bail-out package and is now pushing for a full implementation of its dictates. This entails a huge assault on the living conditions of workers and the rural poor, through the slashing of jobs, wages, pensions and social subsidies, and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises as profit-making companies.

While the SJB and UNP have slammed the government for not going to the IMF sooner, the JVP and its leaders have said nothing, well aware that it will have devastating consequences for working people. Instead, the JVP seeks to divert blame for the economic crisis from the capitalist system, based on the private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of profit, onto the corruption and mismanagement of the Rajapakse government.

“The cause for this crisis is the decisions taken by a gangster group, including Gotabhaya Rajapakse, in order to earn hundreds of thousands of money for their cronies,” Dissanayake told parliament recently.

Undoubtedly the Rajapakse government, like all its predecessors, is mired in forms of corruption, but to blame the entire economic crisis on “corruption” is absurd. The JVP is promoting a fantasy—that a new government will simply wave away the immense crisis of global capitalism and thus all the social ills facing working people.

The JVP and opposition parties, supported by pseudo-left groups including the Frontline Socialist Party, are politically disarming the working people by restricting the protests to demanding Rajapakse resign and peddling the illusion that there is a solution to the social disaster within the capitalist system. 

Dissanayake blustered last week that if Rajapakse did not resign, the JVP, its NPP (National People’s Power, an electoral front of intellectuals and professionals), its trade unions and farmers’ organisation will hold a large number of agitations to force him out. All of its demonstrations, however, have the same aim—to divert the masses into the dead-end of electoral politics.

The JVP trade unions are already limiting workers struggles to demanding an interim regime and elections. Last year the JVP unions were also in the forefront of selling out a series of struggles by sections of workers for better pay and conditions, thus strengthening the hand of the Rajapakse regime.