United States seeks to provoke Russia into escalation in Ukraine

Andre Damon

The New York Times and NBC News have published reports, based on the statements of US officials, that amount to an attempt to deliberately escalate the conflict over Ukraine into a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia.

In its report published online Wednesday evening, the Times cited White House officials confirming that the US has provided intelligence to the Ukrainian military used to target and kill Russian generals, about 12 of whom have been killed during the war. 

Ukrainian tanks move down a street in Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, April 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

“The United States has focused on providing the location and other details about the Russian military’s mobile headquarters, which relocate frequently,” the Times wrote. This has allowed Ukrainian forces “to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian officers.” 

The intervention by the US has had a “decisive effect on the battlefield.” It added that the scale of “actionable intelligence on the movement of Russian troops that America has given Ukraine has few precedents.”

The next day, NBC News reported that the US was critically involved in coordinating the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, in the greatest Russian military disaster in decades.

With increasing frequency, attacks are being directed inside Russian territory, with US assistance. The Wall Street Journal pointed to “a series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets.”

The article cites Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, saying the strikes “could be a result of increased intelligence sharing between the West and Ukraine.”

Any notion that the NATO powers, above all the United States, are not direct participants in the conflict over Ukraine lies in tatters. The declaration by US President Joe Biden that it is “not true” the US is engaged in a war, or even a proxy war, is a bald-faced lie. The US-NATO are providing tens of billions of dollars in military equipment and, as these reports document, direct intelligence used by the Ukrainian military and far-right militia forces.

The reports in the US media have been clearly orchestrated by the White House.

The Times writes, “The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield intelligence secret, out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.”

If that is the case, why is the administration now publicizing its direct involvement in the war?

The release of this information to the Times and NBC, based on off-the-record statements by multiple administration officials, is a deliberate effort on the part of the Biden administration to increase pressure on the Russian government to retaliate against NATO forces. This would create the context for further US escalation, up to and including the direct engagement of US troops or the invocation of Article 5 of NATO.

Just as the United States succeeded in provoking Russia into invading Ukraine by turning the country into an armed camp on its borders and refusing to negotiate over Ukraine’s relationship with NATO, so too it is seeking to place the “burden of escalation” onto Russia by carrying out attacks on the Russian military through Ukrainian forces under its effective control.

Evelyn Farkas, the former top Defense Department official for Russia and Ukraine in the Obama administration, is quoted by the Times as saying, “Clearly, we want the Russians to know on some level that we are helping the Ukrainians to this extent, and we will continue to do so.”

In other words, the US-backed attacks on Russian generals, on the Moskva, and attacks on Russian territory are designed to be maximally provocative, while remaining, in the words of the Times, “deniable.” The goal of the United States is exactly to “provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war.”

As the United States expands the goals and scope of the war, it is seeking to goad Russia into a response that would allow the propagandists of US imperialism to claim the United States’ offensive actions are defensive in nature.

While Russia has sought to carry out negotiations to conclude the war, the United States has made clear its opposition to any resolution to the conflict short of the total military defeat of Russia and the re-occupation of Crimea and the Donbas.

This is further demonstrated by an earlier article in the Times, which is co-authored by one of the same individuals who wrote the article posted Wednesday, which pondered why Putin was not being more aggressive. 

The article “Why Isn’t Putin Hitting Harder on the Battlefield?” noted, “American and European officials also say that President Vladimir Putin’s tactics in recent weeks have appeared to be remarkably cautious, marked by a slow-moving offensive in eastern Ukraine, a restrained approach to taking out Ukrainian infrastructure and an avoidance of actions that could escalate the conflict with NATO.”

While Washington has publicly denounced Russia’s “total war,” privately US officials have been puzzled by Putin’s “remarkable caution.” Washington’s eyes are on May 9, the day that commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, and it hopes to provoke Putin into escalatory measures in his speech and declarations.

The ultimate aim of the United States, as Biden made clear in March with his declaration that Putin “cannot remain in power,” is regime change in Russia and its total subordination to US imperialism.

But domestic pressures play an equal if not greater role. The United States is seeking to provoke a major escalation of the war in order to divert massive internal tensions outward. The cost of living is soaring. In order to head off a wages push by workers, the Federal Reserve is massively increasing interest rates, likely leading to a recession. And the COVID-19 pandemic remains out of control.

The desperate efforts by the White House to escalate the war are the actions of a ruling class that sees itself as besieged and encircled by mass opposition. It seeks through war and its accompanying attacks on democratic rights to delegitimize domestic political opposition.

Bavarian constitutional protection law ruled largely unconstitutional

Justus Leicht

The German Supreme Court ruled on April 26 that the Bavarian Constitutional Protection Law of 2016 is largely unconstitutional, almost five years after a constitutional complaint was filed against the law.

The Supreme Court in Karlsruhe

The Bavarian Constitutional Protection Law (BayVSG) was considered the state law with the most far-reaching surveillance powers. As such, it was the model for similar regulations in other states.

The ruling will not significantly restrict the work of the Secret Service. Nevertheless, it is politically damning: the agency that is supposed to protect the Constitution is itself a danger to it and tramples elementary fundamental rights underfoot in its work.

The constitutional complaint had been initiated by the Society for Freedom Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitrechte, GFF) in 2017 and was directed against a number of regulations contained in the BayVSG. The case was heard orally in Karlsruhe on December 14, 2021.

The GGF filed the constitutional complaint on behalf of three plaintiffs, all of whom are members of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VVN-BdA), an association that was placed under surveillance by the Bavarian Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Secret Service) for a long time. The decision by a Berlin tax office to strip the VVN-BdA of its non-profit status, which threatened the organisation’s financial existence, was based upon this surveillance.

Among the powers in the Bavarian Constitutional Protection Law which the GFF declared disproportionate and therefore unjustifiable under constitutional law are the collection of telecommunications data (Article 15(3)), large-scale eavesdropping (Article 9), online searches (Article 10) and the use of undercover agents and informants (Articles 18 and 19).

The Bavarian Verfassungsschutz was the only state intelligence agency allowed to access data retention records, which are reserved for investigating police authorities. The Supreme Court declared this regulation not only unconstitutional, but also null and void with immediate effect. The norm violated “Article 10 (1) of the Constitution [secrecy of correspondence, post and telecommunications] because it authorises data retrieval without the service providers concerned being obliged or entitled under federal law to transmit this data to the state office.”

The regulation on widespread snooping attacks (“acoustic and optical surveillance of living quarters”) was also not compatible with the Constitution. According to the judges in Karlsruhe, Article 13 (4) of the Constitution (restrictions on the inviolability of the home) only allows acoustic or optical surveillance of living quarters to avert urgent dangers. The measure had to be definitively aimed at “averting” the danger. The BayVSG did not contain such a limitation. Moreover, the constitutional requirements for the “protection of the core area of private life” were not fully met in the case of home surveillance.

An online search may only be permitted to “avert” a danger that is at least concrete in a police sense. However, the measures permitted by the BayVSG were not limited to this purpose.

The regulations on “undercover agents” and “confidential informants” are unconstitutional because there were no sufficient thresholds for intervention and there was no provision limiting the circle of permissible surveillance addressees, provided that the use is specifically directed against certain persons. In other words, it is up to the discretion of the Secret Service to determine when and against whom it uses informants and provocateurs. In addition, there was a lack of the “necessary independent prior control.”

The regulation on “surveillance outside the home,” which allows the state office to observe a person covertly for longer than 48 hours or on more than three days within a week, also using technical means, violated the fundamental right to informational self-determination. The regulation also “does not contain sufficient thresholds for intervention.”

Finally, the Supreme Court judges criticised the fact that according to Article 25, the Secret Service is allowed to pass on the information it obtains to other state agencies, including police authorities, practically without limit. This largely abolished the separation of police and the secret services, a lesson learned from the Nazi regime with its powerful Secret State Police (Gestapo).

When the new law on the Bavarian Verfassungsschutz was enacted in 2016, the World Socialist Web Site had warned:

This same authority has now been freed from further parliamentary scrutiny and is receiving expanded powers. It is clear that the issue is not about the protection of the population, but rather the build-up of an apparatus with close ties to the far-right terrorist scene which can be used against future social opposition.

It would be illusory to expect the judges in Karlsruhe to provide fundamental protection against the Secret Service. The restrictions imposed on the Verfassunschutz are not critical. Rather, the court declared that it should work more systematically, in a more targeted manner and more effectively. In addition, the agency, which has been deeply discredited by the NSU scandal, is to receive a renewed basis of legitimacy.

Karlsruhe has not banned surveillance of living quarters, online searches, observations, mobile phone tracking, the use of undercover agents and informants or the passing on of intelligence, but only stipulated when and how. The Legal Tribune Online commented:

For the work of the intelligence authorities, the Karlsruhe ruling brings further legalisation in an area that has so far been characterised by loopholes, internal guidelines, and case-by-case examinations.

The Bavarian State Interior Minister, Joachim Herrmann, who had campaigned in 2016 for the then most far-reaching powers of “his” Verfassungsschutz, was pleased that the ruling strengthened the Secret Service in Germany overall. It made clear that the court considers the activities of the intelligence authorities “fundamentally important and correct and necessary.”

In addition, the Police Tasks Law (PAG), which was amended in 2018, contains similarly far-reaching powers for the Bavarian police. Lawyers describe it as the toughest German police law since 1945. Four years ago, 40,000 people took to the streets against it in Munich. The Society for Civil Liberties and the #noPAG alliance have also filed a constitutional complaint against it.

Century-Old Racist US Supreme Court Cases Still Rule Over Millions of Americans

Eric Bellone

The 4 million inhabitants of five U.S. territories – Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Northern Marianas Islands, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands – do not have the full protection of the Constitution, because of a series of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1901 that are based on archaic, often racist language and reasoning.

A call from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to overturn more than a century of precedent has been joined by advocates for equal citizenship for everyone born in those U.S. territories. If the court decides to take up the question, it would review a long-standing status quo.

Now, no U.S. citizen living in any of those places can vote for president. They don’t have a voting representative in Congress, either.

But this inferiority is inconsistent. Puerto Ricans are American citizens and can vote in federal elections if they reside in a U.S. state, but not if they live in Puerto Rico or one of the other territories.

However, American Samoans are not U.S. citizens, so they can’t vote for president even if they live in the 50 states. That is being challenged in federal courts.

It’s all a result of a political and legal mindset that is more than 100 years old, but is still in force.

Superiority complex

Up until the end of the 19th century, everyone assumed that all U.S. territories would, eventually, become full-fledged states, whose residents would become U.S. citizens with rights fully protected by the Constitution. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 outlined the process: As new lands opened to Americans, Congress would initially appoint a governor and judges for the territory and establish a rule of law. When the territorial population exceeded 5,000 adult men, voters would elect a legislature and send a nonvoting delegate to Congress. When the territory reached a population of 60,000, the territory would petition for statehood and be admitted to the union.

That process assumed the territories would be in North America and that most of the territorial population would be people of European descent. Those assumptions changed when the United States claimed Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam in 1898 as spoils of war at the end of the Spanish-American War. Puerto Rico and Guam are still U.S. territories.

That expansion gave Americans a clear sense of the nation’s purpose and power in the world, summarized effectively by U.S. Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana in a congressional speech on Jan. 9, 1900: “[God] has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among the savage and servile peoples.”

A new type of territory

Starting in 1901, a set of court cases, collectively called the “Insular Cases,” created new constitutional law regarding the United States’ relation with its territories. They began when import companies challenged tariffs imposed on goods transported from the newly acquired territories into the U.S. The companies claimed there should not be tariffs, because the goods were moving from one part of the U.S. to another.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the companies were correct, that transport within the U.S. was not subject to tariffs, but created an exception in which the new lands were neither foreign countries nor part of the U.S.

Those territories, the Supreme Court would rule in the first of the Insular Cases, Downes v. Bidwell in 1901, were “foreign in a domestic sense,” “inhabited by alien races,” and therefore governing them “according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.”

The ruling included other prejudice-revealing statements, too, such as, “It is obvious that in the annexation of outlying and distant possessions grave questions will arise from differences of race, habits, laws, and customs of the people, and from differences of soil, climate, and production, which may require action on the part of Congress that would be quite unnecessary in the annexation of contiguous territory inhabited only by people of the same race, or by scattered bodies of native Indians.”

As a result, the court created a new distinction: “Incorporated” territories of the U.S. were expected to one day become states. “Unincorporated” territories, by contrast, were not – and, therefore, their inhabitants were, and still are, denied some of their constitutional rights.

A 2020 referendum vote in Puerto Rico favored statehood; Guam officials have called for statehood; and Stacey Plaskett, who represents the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands in Congress, says her constituents deserve the full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote.

The cases and context

Both at the time and since, the Downes decision has been described as meaning “the Constitution does not follow the flag.” The territories might be ruled by Congress, but not necessarily by the Constitution.

What that meant for the people of those territories was unclear. And despite five other cases in 1901, and others in the subsequent 20 years, the Supreme Court has never truly clarified which constitutional protections were available to whom and which weren’t. It left open questions about whether key elements of the Constitution, like trial by jury, or even the Bill of Rights, were available in the unincorporated territories.

Hawaii was also acquired in 1898, but was treated differently and ultimately became a state. The differences were probably for reasons to do with partisan politics and a Republican-Democratic balance in Congress.

Supreme Court interpretation over the years

Since the mid-20th century, the court has made incremental changes to the Insular Cases’ effects, tweaking technical definitions concerning taxes, trade and governmental benefits such as Social Security, Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But the court has not addressed the overall inferior constitutional status of the territories and the people who live there.

It wasn’t until 1957, for instance, in Reid v. Covert, that the Supreme Court ruled that defendants in the territories had a right to trial by jury – a right that citizens have because of Article III of the Constitution. Several justices made clear that “neither the cases nor their reasoning should be given any further expansion.” That statement was widely viewed as a signal that the influence of the Insular Cases was declining.

In Torres v. Puerto Rico (1979), the court further weakened the Insular Cases. Although narrowly applied to the territory at hand, the Supreme Court made clear that the Bill of Rights actually did apply in a U.S. territory.

In its 2008 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, the court held that detainees at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had the constitutional right of habeas corpus to challenge the validity of their detention. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion said, “It may well be that over time the ties between the United States and any of its territories strengthen in ways that are of constitutional significance,” and said the federal government did not “have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

But in its 2020 ruling in Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Investment, the court pulled back from its trend of extending constitutional protections to the unincorporated territories. It ruled that President Barack Obama’s appointments to the board, a government body focused on helping Puerto Rico return to financial stability, were local officials, not “officers of the United States,” and therefore did not require Senate confirmation.

Into the future

Many legal scholars view the court’s mention of U.S. territorial connections strengthening “over time” as a possible key to overturning the Insular Cases. The original distinctions assumed that the U.S. would “govern temporarily territories with wholly dissimilar traditions and institutions.” Most acknowledge those perceived distinctions clearly no longer exist.

These territories have established institutions and principles grounded in American traditions. The internal governments of these territories have established laws, governmental institutions and legal traditions that are indistinguishable from any state in the union. They hold elections, have residents serving in the U.S. military, and play a role in building the nation.

But without equal voting rights and congressional representation, the Americans living in these territories cannot remedy their status at the ballot box.

Miners force ANC President Ramaphosa to abandon May Day speech

Jean Shaoul & Chris Marsden

In extraordinary scenes, striking gold miners booed and barracked South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, overwhelmed the police and stormed the stage, forcing him to abandon his speech at a Workers’ Day rally on Sunday and flee the stadium in his limousine.

Having completely underestimated the miners’ hatred of Ramaphosa and the African National Congress (ANC) government, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had invited the president to address their flagship rally in the northwestern city of Rustenburg, the centre of the country’s mining region. Their other guest speaker, general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) Blade Nzimande, was likewise unable to take the floor.

President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses nation on South Africa's response to Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic (Credit: GCIS/Flickr)

Workers at Sibanye-Stillwater’s mines have been on strike since February in support of their demand for a wage increase of 1,000 rands ($63) per month in a labour contract set to last three years, having rejected the company’s offer of 850 rands ($54).

Ramaphosa started his address with a call for the striking workers and other members of COSATU to calm down and listen to what he had to say, telling them, “We have heard that you want your 1,000 rands. We will deal with that matter.” The miners would have none of it and forced him to quit.

They were furious when they found out that Neal Froneman, the company’s CEO, had an eye-watering R300 million-plus pay package in 2021, including a R12.42 million salary, R7.8 million bonus and R246 million share scheme. It comes courtesy of a year with record-high prices for gold, platinum and other base metals, even as the company refused a paltry increase for the workers who generated its profits.

The company’s super-exploitative practices have led to such terrible fatality rates (20 of the country’s 45 mining deaths in 2018 took place in Sibanye-Stillwater’s mines) that rival unions the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Solidarity and UASA The Union all called for its closure until safety compliances were met. This demand was rejected by Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, who derided the unions as “populists” and praised Sibanye-Stillwater for making a great contribution to South Africa’s economy.

Ramaphosa is a particularly hated figure in Rustenburg, where his demand for a police clampdown precipitated the Marikana massacre of 34 striking miners, shot dead in 2012 at a mine owned by the Lonmin group. Having headed South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers, during the struggle against Apartheid, Ramaphosa had in the following years become a multimillionaire through exploiting the structures of Black Economic Empowerment established by the ANC’s leadership to feather their own nests at the direct expense of the workers. He was a non-executive director of Lonmin in his role as its “BEE partner”.

It was in the aftermath of this murderous action, carried out with the full backing of the COSATU-affiliated NUM, that “the butcher of Marikana” was elected as the ANC’s general secretary. In June 2019, Sibanye-Stillwater took over Lonmin, making it the world’s largest primary producer of platinum and rhodium.

No less significant than Ramaphosa being booted off the May Day Rally was COSATU’s desperate warning to the ANC, with which it has for decades formed a triple alliance along with the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP). Together, they suppressed workers’ struggles and prevented them taking a revolutionary approach to ending Apartheid, thereby ensuring the survival of South African capitalism.

Official COSATU spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said in a statement issued Monday that while Ramaphosa being howled off the stage by workers on May Day was “regrettable” and “unacceptable,” it was an understandable expression of workers’ frustration with the ANC government. The ANC, he wrote, was “threatening the coherence and the legitimacy of the Alliance [with the SACP and COSATU] in the eyes of the working class.”

This was followed by the extraordinary statement, “Historically Worker’s Day is a day where workers reflect on their struggles and push for change. This is a message that the ANC cannot claim to misunderstand and that cannot be ignored anymore. The Marxist revolutionary and political theorist Leon Trotsky once said: ‘The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave’.”

To cite such a passage from Trotsky in a milieu schooled for decades in the counter-revolutionary politics of Stalinism by the SACP is the equivalent to a slap in the face for the ANC leadership.

But it was done on behalf of the bureaucrats responsible for policing the working class as a warning to their ANC partners, who move in the more rarified circles of corporate boardrooms and government officialdom, that they have massively underestimated the anger building among miners and the entire working class.

The COSATU statement continues, “The fact that we are the most unequal country in the world is a sign that South Africa is slowly sinking in the abyss. A 46 percent real unemployment rate, stagnant wages, and budget cuts have all exhausted the patience of South African workers.” Pamla added that workers have reason to be livid when 2.2 million people have lost their jobs in the last two years, a reference to the government’s inadequate response to the pandemic that has led to more than 100,000 people losing their lives and millions being driven into poverty.

Pamla was forced to admit that COSATU had in 2017 backed Ramaphosa as the successor to Jacob Zuma, who was forced to resign amid mounting allegations of corruption. And whatever belated measures are taken by the union bureaucracy to distance themselves from the ANC, no one is likely to forget this record. As Pamla himself stated, “We are in no position to predict what will happen at future labour gatherings…”

Leading analyst and former head of the South African Institute of Race Relations, Professor Sipho Seepe, told Cape News, “Cosatu failed to see this coming, which suggests its disconnect with its own constituency. At the same time, workers are saying they are gatvol [totally fed up] with Ramaphosa, his administration and the ANC. They see him as a stooge of white capital and anti-worker… In him they see a person who has sold his soul.”

Germany’s preparations for a third world war in full swing

Peter Schwarz

The United States and its NATO allies are intensively preparing for a third world war. Looking back on the First World War, the great powers were said to have “slithered” into the war, but now they are racing open-eyed into disaster.

The claim that the Ukraine war is about defending democracy and national independence is proving more specious by the day. In reality, it is about control over Russia’s vast landmass and rich mineral resources and the re-division of the world among the major imperialist powers. The Ukraine war joins those in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa with which the US and its allies have tried to secure their world domination.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz visiting Japanese head of government Fumio Kishida (Photo: Bundesregierung/Bergmann)

The reactionary and short-sighted decision to attack Ukraine militarily by Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to NATO’s encirclement of his country provided the latter with the welcome—and desired—pretext for a massive military escalation.

The US is flooding Ukraine with weapons and promising that there will be no let-up until Russia is “defeated” and its “backbone broken.” Germany is using the war to remove all obstacles that previously stood in the way of unrestrained rearmament.

What was considered a “red line” one day is crossed the next. First, the German government increased the arms budget by €100 billion in one fell swoop, without prior consultation, and abandoned the principle of not supplying weapons to war zones. Ukraine was first supplied with light and then with heavy weapons. In the meantime, Ukrainian soldiers are also being trained on German soil, although according to an expert opinion by the Bundestag (parliamentary) Scientific Service, this constitutes participation in war under international law.

The German government’s preparations for a Third World War are not limited to arming the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and providing military support to Ukraine. Economic, foreign and even climate policy are also being put at the service of war policy.

The former editor-in-chief of finance daily Handelsblatt, Gabor Steingart, speaks bluntly about this in his “Pioneer Briefing” on Tuesday. Without the slightest qualms, he discusses the question of what is required to make a world war “manageable”:

“The waging of a Third World War is not just a military issue,” he proclaims. It is “first and foremost an economic issue. For without economic disentanglement along the power and military blocs, effective warfare that can be sustained over a longer period is impossible, as we can already see from Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas.”

“Whoever wants to make world warfare manageable must first unbundle world trade,” Steingart emphasises. “Economic independence is more important than billions more for the Bundeswehr. So, it is not only the soldiers and their military equipment that must be gathered into an offensive formation, but also economic resources.”

“Viewed with this economic eye,” he then states, “the preparations for making a Third World War manageable are in full swing.”

Unfortunately, Steingart is right about that. Although a third world war would mean the end of humanity, the German government is busily making the economic and geopolitical preparations for it, in addition to the military ones. In recent weeks, it has set a course to re-organise trade and economic relations for a war against Russia and China.

For example, in his first trip to East Asia after taking office, Chancellor Olaf Scholz made a demonstrative visit to Japan. Unlike his predecessor Angela Merkel, who paid twelve visits to China and only five to Japan during her 16 years in office, Scholz did not go to Beijing. At €246 billion, Germany’s trade volume with China is six times as high as that with Japan. The value of German direct investment in China, at €96 billion, is also many times its €16 billion in Japan.

But Scholz, who travelled to Tokyo accompanied by a large business delegation, wanted to demonstrate that Germany is again committed to close cooperation with Japan. He agreed on closer cooperation in the strategically important high-tech sector and in the production and supply of liquid hydrogen as an alternative energy source. Regular government consultations with Japan, previously only held with China, were also agreed.

The escalating conflicts with Russia and China played a central role in the talks conducted by Scholz and the Japanese head of government Fumio Kishida. Germany and Japan also want to cooperate more closely militarily. After the German frigate Bayern conducted exercises with Japanese forces last year, six German Eurofighters are to take part in manoeuvres in Australia this autumn, from where they will also fly to Japan.

With his orientation towards Japan, Scholz is following bad historical traditions. Japan was allied with Nazi Germany in the Second World War and, along with Italy, was one of the so-called Axis powers. While Germany waged a murderous war of extermination in the Soviet Union, Japan committed terrible war crimes in China and other Asian countries, for some of which it still denies responsibility today.

While Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) are concerned with strengthening the international war front against Russia, Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) has taken on the task of cutting off Europe from Russian energy supplies that date back to Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik of the early 1970s.

Having already imposed an import ban on Russian coal in April, the European Union is expected to decide this week on an oil embargo as well, thanks to Habeck’s efforts. Because the share of Russian oil in Germany’s oil consumption has fallen from 36 to 12 percent, the German government has given the green light for an embargo. Countries like Hungary and Greece, which are far more dependent on Russian oil, are to be given a transitional period.

In 2021, the EU was still buying 3.4 million barrels of oil and oil products a day, about a quarter of its needs, from Russia. How these are to be replaced is not clear. Sanctions are also in place against Venezuela and Iran, two major oil producers. OPEC, of which Russia is a member, has so far refused to increase production accordingly.

It is certain that the embargo will lead to a further increase in energy prices, which are already at record levels and are among the main drivers of inflation. So, it is the population who will foot the bill. Even Habeck had to admit that such a measure would not leave Germany unscathed. However, he considers the embargo important “because we are relieving ourselves of some of the moral guilt of keeping the Putin regime alive with our payments.”

The insane policy of preparing a third world war and making it “manageable” is supported by all parties represented in the Bundestag, up to and including the Left Party, which only expresses reservations on secondary issues.

The Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), now they are no longer in government, have lost all inhibitions. Yesterday, they published a “Cologne Declaration” advocating unbridled militarism under the title “Security in New Times.”

Germany must “urgently define its national interests against the background of the new reality” and “adopt a national show of strength to implement and safeguard them,” it says. “To meet this challenge, comprehensive military capabilities are needed, which will also entail many a sacrifice and burden.”

In addition to a “new security strategy” that addresses not only external but also internal threats—“such as targeted disinformation campaigns and all forms of extremism”—the document also advocates a “new globalisation strategy” focusing on Europe, the US and Africa and which “reassesses dependence on other states [meaning Russia and China].”

“Globalisation strategy and security strategy are two sides of the same coin and make it clear that Germany will have to assume more responsibility in the world,” it then says. Put in plain English: The global interests of German big business and the use of military means are two sides of the same coin, which Germany must use more of worldwide.

More than 15,000 construction workers on strike across Ontario

Roger Jordan

More than 15,000 construction workers have been on strike across Ontario since last weekend. The workers, who include high-rise and low-rise residential builders, floor fitters and operating engineers for cranes and other heavy equipment, are demanding wage increases to keep pace with skyrocketing inflation.

The center of the strike is in the Greater Toronto Area, where real estate speculators and banks have made a killing in recent years from astronomical and still-rising prices for residential properties built by the strikers.

Ontario building site (Photo Credit: IUOE)

The construction companies prevailed on the Ontario government to declare construction workers “essential employees,” so as to force them to work throughout the pandemic on job sites that lacked even the most elementary anti-COVID protection measures. Now they are demanding that construction workers accept below-inflation pay increases for the next three years.

Described as the largest strike in the sector for 20 years, the Ontario construction workers’ job action is part of an international upsurge of the class struggle. Recent months have seen strikes by rail workers and grocery store workers in Canada, nurses in the United States and bus drivers in Britain and India, driven by soaring inflation and decades of concessions and stagnant wages. In Sri Lanka, nationwide anti-government protests over the spiraling cost of living have been accompanied by strikes involving millions of workers.

The strikers are members of the Labourers International Union of North America (LiUNA) Local 183 and International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 793. Six groups of LiUNA affiliated workers walked out Sunday, the first day they were in a legal position to strike. The operating engineers joined the strike the next day, after voting down a three-year tentative agreement recommended by the Local 793 bargaining team. Although details are scant, the engineers appear to have been offered a wage increase of just 9 percent, spread over three years. With inflation currently rising at an annual rate of 6.7 percent, its highest in 30 years, workers were all but guaranteed to suffer a huge real-wage cut under the IUOE endorsed deal.

The builders are insisting that two earlier sell-out agreements should serve as a “pattern” for the industry. In February, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers imposed a three-year deal on electricians containing an “increase” of just 8.6 percent, while ironworkers accepted a 9 percent rise with a 0.5 percent premium for Toronto in March.

While the striking construction workers are no doubt determined to fight, they are being straitjacketed by LiUNA and the IUOE within a rigged labour relations system designed to give the employers most everything they want.

Every three years, collective agreements for all 30 trades in Ontario’s construction sector expire simultaneously on April 30. Provincial labour relations law stipulates that workers can only stage job action in support of their contract demands during a 45-day period beginning May 1 and ending June 15. If a negotiated settlement is not reached by mid-June, workers are forced to immediately return to work and any and all outstanding issues in dispute are sent to binding arbitration. Under this anti-democratic process workers are robbed of their legal rights to strike and bargain collectively, and their future terms of employment are dictated by a government-appointed arbitrator, who invariably sides with the employers.

Binding arbitration has become a favoured mechanism for the unions and employers to suppress workers’ struggles across all economic sectors. In March, the Teamsters turned an overwhelming vote for strike action by 3,000 CP Rail workers into a groveling capitulation to the demand of CP management and the federal Liberal government the dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. Not only have the CP Rail workers been stripped of any legal means of fighting for improved wages and the reversal of punishing pension cuts imposed in 2012. At CP Rail’s insistence, key issues for rail workers, including a brutal scheduling regime and serious safety concerns, have been excluded from the arbitration process, thereby guaranteeing that the anti-worker status quo endures.

Earlier this week, signal operators represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers were sent back to work at Toronto’s Union Station after the union accepted binding arbitration to bring a sudden end to a two-week strike.

LiUNA and the IUOE are undoubtedly preparing a no less rotten betrayal of the construction workers’ strikes behind the scenes. Both unions refused to lift a finger to defend their members’ safety during the pandemic, including when the Doug Ford-led Progressive Conservative government classified them as “essential workers” to ensure that the profits of property developers and rich investors were not endangered during lockdowns.

LiUNA officials have regularly boasted about their role in keeping workers on the job. In a comment summing up the friendly relations that exist between the LiUNA top brass and construction management, Local 183 spokesman Jason Ottey said, “We didn’t ask for pandemic pay, we do not have a work from home option, and as a result, we thought that our management partners would show their appreciation in this round of bargaining.”

While Ottey and the rest of the LiUNA bureaucracy never called for pandemic pay, thousands of construction workers most certainly would have done so if they had possessed their own fighting organizations committed to the shutdown of all nonessential activity with full pay for workers until COVID-19 was brought under control. Instead, because the privileged trade union bureaucrats wanted to stay on good terms with their “management partners,” they were forced to get infected on the job with COVID-19 and spread the deadly virus to their friends and loved ones.

Construction workers were not alone in making this bitter experience. Unions across all sectors played a similarly disgraceful role, from the teacher unions in the education sector to Unifor in the auto plants and the UFCW in the meat packing industry.

If any doubt remained about whose side LiUNA is on, it was dispelled last week when its international vice-president for eastern and central Canada, Joseph Mancinelli, came out in support of the re-election of the Ford government in the June 2 Ontario election. In a laudatory op-ed comment in the Toronto Sun, a far-right tabloid, Mancinelli asserted that Ford, who has gutted public spending, attacked workers’ rights, and prioritized corporate profits over the protection of human life during the pandemic, had introduced “fair labour laws” and “cut red tape” over the past four years.

The construction strike is unfolding amid a provincial election campaign dominated by the impact of the rising cost of living for working people. None of the political parties have any intention of improving workers’ living standards and guaranteeing decent-paying, secure jobs. In fact, the Liberals and New Democrats, who are routinely hailed as “progressive” parties by most trade unions, are preparing to collaborate in the formation of a pro-austerity government. They are already in a governmental alliance at the federal level, where they are leading the charge to war with Russia, massively hiking military spending and enforcing “fiscal responsibility.”

National intelligence report found FBI searched the data of Americans millions of times in 2021

Kevin Reed

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched through the electronic data of Americans 3.4 million times in 2021.

FBI headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington D.C. (Credit: cisko66) [Photo by cisko66]

The searches were revealed in the ODNI’s “Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities” for calendar year 2021. The data shows that there was nearly a tripling of these unconstitutional searches from 1.3 million in 2020.

In typical fashion the ODNI report waives away this intensification of the surveillance state by claiming it was a technical matter related to vital national security matters, the details of which are never explained. The report says, “In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors.”

This is the ninth such annual report issued by the ODNI. As with everything associated with the Orwellian world of the US intelligence community (IC), there are a large number of acronyms and terms that can be generally understood to have the exact opposite meaning of what they purport to be about.

For example, this annual report was drafted by a sub-department of the ODNI called the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency. However, the content of this document shows that civil liberties, privacy and transparency are nowhere to be found when it comes to the FBI and its use of US intelligence data.

Contrary to the misinformation spread by the political establishment and the media that the US government has stopped its unconstitutional dragnet of everyone’s electronic communications, the National Security Agency (NSA) is still vacuuming up and storing a massive repository of data under the authority of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

Under the terms of Section 702, US intelligence can routinely collect both upstream and downstream communications of both Americans and non-Americans without a warrant under the guise of “targeting” foreign intelligence. Even though the existence of this program was exposed to the world by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden in 2013—and he has been threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act for it—and promises were made by the Obama administration that it would be halted, mass surveillance continues.

Even when the Section 702 NSA program was officially “ended” in 2017, it was revived and renewed by Congress and signed back into the FISA law by President Donald Trump in 2018. According to Snowden, the program was never stopped, and it has only grown more comprehensive and invasive in the nine years since he made his exposures.

While the ODNI report acknowledges a massive number of searches of the NSA database by the FBI—3,394,053—it does not say that these “queries” were illegal or unconstitutional. Instead, the report presents these searches as being entirely consistent with FISA rules.

In response to public outrage over the ongoing illegal spying by the US government, several corporate media sources have claimed that more than half of the 3.4 million queries—about 1.9 million—were part of an FBI investigation into an alleged “cyber threat from Russia,” as though this makes it legitimate.

Although this detail is not in the ODNI report and no details have been provided about the purported Russian threat, it is reminiscent of justifications made by the Bush administration about mass domestic electronic surveillance that violated the democratic rights of Americans as part of the “war on terror.”

The FBI searches the NSA database for up to 10 US Person (USP) identifiers, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, passport numbers, company names and IP addresses. These identifier queries are combined with hundreds and thousands of other search terms to find and identify individuals, their whereabouts and communications. None of the thousands of search terms are disclosed in the report.

In a report by the Wall Street Journal, it is pointed out that the ODNI does not say that there are any “systemic problems” with the searches even though “judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with privacy rules.”

When the Journal asked the Biden administration about the information in the report, unnamed officials said that the actual number of searches is “likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from US data.” In other words, there is a massive number of queries being conducted by the FBI in which there is no way to distinguish between who is a “citizen” and who is a “foreigner.”

The ODNI was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 Commission Report, released on July 22, 2004, and was a central part of the assault on democratic rights associated with the illegal and aggressive wars launched by the administration of George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The officer, which was established based on a proposal from leading congressional Democrats in 2002, is a senior, cabinet-level government official who is essentially a figurehead who reports to the president but is not in charge of the primary departments of US intelligence, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the NSA. 

The Biden administration’s Director of National Intelligence is Avril Haines, the first woman to hold the position. Haines was the first Biden nominee confirmed by the Senate in an 84-10 vote on January 20, 2021 and was sworn in the next day by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Previously, Haines served as Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the CIA under Obama. In 2015, as deputy CIA director, Haines protected the agency personnel who hacked the computers of Senate staffers during the investigation into CIA torture programs. Once the Senate issued its report, Haines was involved in redacting 6,200 of the 6,700 pages of the document. 

Haines also worked closely with Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and CIA Director John Brennan on the extra-judicial targeted assassination program of the Democratic Party administration. According to a report in Newsweek in 2013, Haines was repeatedly called in the middle of the night to help make the decision as to whether a “suspected terrorist” could be “lawfully incinerated” in a drone strike.

Like the lawyers working in the Bush White House who came up with the infamous legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Haines specialized in establishing the legal framework and guidelines for the drone assassination program, which targeted individuals for death in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. According to a report in In These Times, Haines is responsible for policies that “made targeted killings all over the world a normal part of US policy.”

With such people in charge of auditing the activities of US intelligence and issuing reports that claim to “ensure compliance with the Constitution and laws of the United States” and “enhance public understanding of intelligence activities,” the only thing that is transparent is that they are engaged in covering up the criminality of US imperialism both within America and throughout the world.