German government imposes war costs on working class

Peter Schwarz

If the German government has its way, the working class will pay for the cost of its participation in the Ukraine war and the biggest rearmament programme since Hitler with mass poverty and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

PCK refinery in Schwedt (Photo: Ralf Roletschek/Roletschek.at)

Decades of social cuts, the enrichment of the financial oligarchy as well as exploding inflation and inhumane pandemic policies have already led to an unprecedented social crisis.

In its latest issue, Der Spiegel asks the anxious question, “Is Germany going to the barricades?” “Food and fuel prices are rising, heating is becoming more expensive, the social crisis is coming to a head,” the article says. “Lower income groups are being hit particularly hard.” What is different is that “the acute social need is increasingly catching up with new population groups. Not only those who are going to the food bank. In the meantime, things are getting tight for people who have somehow managed to make ends meet with their money up to now: Single parents, single earners, pensioners, students.”

The sanctions with which Germany and the EU are trying to ruin Russia economically are exacerbating this social crisis. They affect not only the people of Russia, but also those of Germany and all of Europe. The consequences of the sanctions are being dumped on the working class, while energy and arms companies are swimming in money and the danger of a third world war is growing.

The EU Commission is finalising a sixth package of sanctions against Russia, which will see a complete ban on imports of crude oil and oil products from Russia by the end of the year. Only Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic will be subject to longer deadlines. The embargo became possible because Germany gave the green light for it. A year ago, the EU had still purchased a quarter and Germany as much as 35 percent of its oil imports from Russia.

The economic consequences of the embargo are devastating. Economists agree that it will further fuel inflation, which is already at 7.4 percent. Back in March, when discussions about a possible embargo drove the price of oil to $140 a barrel, Gabriele Widmann, commodities expert at Dekabank, warned in an interview with broadcaster RTL/ntv: “In extreme cases, we may have to pay up to three euros per litre of fuel.” Cheap energy from Russia is now a thing of the past, he said. Car drivers would have to get used to diesel and petrol prices of more than €2 per litre in the long run.

However, price increases are not only affecting petrol, heating oil and other oil products, which have already become horrendously more expensive, hitting households on low and medium incomes particularly hard. Since oil also serves as a raw material in the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries and the price of energy determines transport and production costs in all sectors, prices are also rising there. Food is becoming more expensive due to rising fertiliser and transport costs. Energy-intensive industries such as steel and glass production are threatened with collapse.

The east of the country—whose oil supply, dating back to the days of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), is completely dependent on Russia—is particularly hard hit. The PCK refinery in Schwedt an der Oder, on the border with Poland, for example, is threatened with complete closure. This would directly destroy 1,200 jobs and indirectly thousands more in the structurally weak region in northeastern Brandenburg.

The refinery began operation in the GDR in 1960, and from 1963 until today has processed oil from the 3,000-kilometre-long pipeline Druzhba (Friendship), which runs to the Ural region. It is technically equipped to process heavier Russian oil. Switching to other types of oil, which would have to be transported by ship from the Polish port of Szczecin, would be very costly. Moreover, the refinery’s majority owner, the Russian oil company Rosneft, is unlikely to be interested in making such investments.

The second East German refinery in Leuna (Saxony-Anhalt) is also used to process crude oil from the Druzhba pipeline. Annually, Schwedt and Leuna each processed up to 12 million tonnes. However, at the Leuna refinery, which is owned by the French energy company TotalEnergies, a technical changeover is considered easier.

If both refineries cease production, all oil products would have to be imported from western Germany, which would make prices much more expensive and endanger many more jobs. The East Brandenburg Chamber of Industry and Commerce warns that if the refinery in Schwedt no longer supplied raw materials for further processing, road construction, the chemical industry and plastics processing would be affected.

Brandenburg’s State Economics Minister, Jörg Steinbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD), said that Schwedt “supplies northern Germany, BER Airport and regions in western Poland with diesel, petrol and paraffin. Without PCK, there would largely be a standstill there.” State Premier Dietmar Woidke (SPD) warned that a sudden oil embargo “would have catastrophic regional effects that we cannot cushion in any way in the short term.”

Deutsche Welle reported on the mood in the city: “I know from my friends who work at the plant that they are afraid for their jobs,” the broadcaster quoted a young woman as saying.

“The closure of the refinery would not only be terrible news for the people who work there, but for the whole town,” according to the owner of a small grocery shop. “We are talking about thousands of employees of the plant and various suppliers, and many of them are my regular customers. If they leave to find work elsewhere, I can close my shop.”

The federal government has promised help, but it is completely unknown how this will happen. Schwedt is directly affected by the oil embargo, but hardly a day goes by without other, indirectly affected companies announcing mass layoffs.

For example, the detergent manufacturer Henkel (Persil, Schwarzkopf, Schauma, Pattex, etc.) announced 2,000 job cuts. The reason given was the increase in raw material prices by more than 20 percent and the withdrawal from Russia, where the company had operated 11 production sites.

Far more devastating than the oil embargo would be a gas embargo against Russia, which Germany and the EU are also seeking in the longer term. It is also possible that Russia will react to the oil embargo by turning off the gas tap on its own initiative.

The Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle (IWH) has calculated the consequences of an immediate Russian gas supply stop. According to this, the economy would shrink by 2 percent in 2023, net domestic product would fall by €200 billion, which would correspond to the loss of 2.7 million jobs.

The German government and the EU justify the oil embargo by saying that “Putin’s war chest” should not be financed. But this hides the real reasons.

The official narrative that NATO is defending freedom and democracy in Ukraine against an imperialist aggressor is false and mendacious. In reality, it is waging a proxy war in which the Ukrainian population serves as cannon fodder.

The Russian attack on Ukraine is reactionary and must be rejected. But it was systematically provoked by NATO—through the wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, which were contrary to international law and with which the US wanted to secure its world domination, and through the systematic advance of the most powerful and aggressive military alliance in the world towards Russia.

NATO has not only provoked the war, it is doing everything to prevent a ceasefire and negotiated peace. It is flooding the country with weapons and supporting the Ukrainian army with advisers and intelligence information. Its goal is the complete defeat of Russia and regime change in Moscow to gain unhindered access to the country’s vast land mass and valuable raw materials. Geostrategically, the war against Russia serves to prepare for war against China, which the US and the major European powers regard as their most important economic and political rival.

Economically, the consequences of the oil embargo for Russia are rather minor. Although many Western traders stopped buying oil from Russia in April, the country shipped more oil than usual. India, which urgently needs it, bought large quantities. Thanks to the high world market price, Russia was even able to grant discounts without making losses. Although the EU wants to ban tankers flying the flag of an EU member state from transporting Russian oil, this will have little effect.

The real reason for the oil embargo is that Germany wants to disentangle and reorganise its global economic relations—as the former editor-in-chief of finance daily Handelsblatt, Gabor Steingart, put it—to make a world war “manageable.”

“Whoever wants to make the world war manageable must first unbundle world trade,” Steingart stressed in his Pioneer Briefing. “Economic independence is more important than more billions for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). So, it is not only the soldiers and their military equipment that must be gathered into an offensive formation, but also the economic resources.”

Since the 1970s, Germany and the Soviet Union—and from 1991, Russia—maintained a so-called privileged partnership, with energy relations at its core. Germany began to break with this as early as 2014, when together with the US, it supported the right-wing coup in Kiev. Now, as in 1914 and 1941, it is again using military force to pursue its imperialist interests in the East.

To do this, the German ruling class must also declare war on the working class, which is to bear the costs and burdens of militarism, while arms and energy companies and other profiteers enrich themselves from the war and high energy prices.

Shell announced record profits on Thursday. The oil giant earned $9.13 billion in the first quarter of 2022, 43 percent more than in the same period last year. BP posted a quarterly profit of $6.2 billion, up 138 percent from $2.6 billion a year earlier. BP CEO Bernard Looney called the energy market a “money machine.” Exxon Mobil, Chevron and TotalEnergies also reported profits in the billions. Their shares rose by an average of 58 percent last year.

Only the defence industry did better. The shares of the German arms company Rheinmetall have risen by 150 percent since the beginning of the year.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. wins Philippine presidential election

Joseph Scalice

The results of the election staged on Monday in the Philippines are still being tabulated, but nearly all precincts have now reported, and it is clear that Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the country’s former dictator, has been elected president with a substantial lead over his nearest rival. 

Over 50 million people queued in the scorching heat to cast their ballots. Problems with polling machines meant that many had to stand for four or more hours in line order to vote. There were reports of election violence and broken voting machines, but no more than is standard for national elections in the country.

Partial results from the Commission on Elections (Comelec), with 93 percent of precincts reporting show Marcos receiving 29.8 million votes. His nearest rival, current Vice President Leni Robredo, has 14.2 million votes, while the third, boxer-turned-senator Manny Pacquiao, trails with a distant 3.3 million. 

The president and vice president are voted for separately in the Philippines, and Marcos’ running mate, Sara Duterte-Carpio, daughter of the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, is on track to win by an even larger margin. She currently has 30.1 million votes to the 8.8 million of her leading competitor, Kiko Pangilinan, running mate of Robredo.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)

The senatorial slate of Marcos and allied political forces is poised to secure a substantial majority of the 12 available seats. It is too soon to tell, but it appears possible that as many as three of Robredo’s candidates will win seats. Among those assured of Senate seats are movie star and right-wing populist, Robin Padilla, and the fascistic shock radio journalist Raffy Tulfo. 

The top vote-getter among party-list organizations competing for seats in Congress, with over 2 million votes, twice as many as any other party, is ACT-CIS (Anti-Crime and Terrorism through Communist Involvement and Support). ACT-CIS is a fascistic party, associated with the Tulfo family, that was founded by former police chiefs. It is dedicated to creating anticommunist vigilante organizations with government funding.

The Duterte Youth—an organization deliberately modeled after the Hitler Youth organization with black uniforms, red armbands and the Duterte raised-fist fascist salute, advocating violent anticommunism and mandatory military training—received over 500,000 votes. Its election statement in the 2019 election, when it received 350,000 votes, warned allegedly “communist” youth that “We will finish you in the streets along with your rapist, criminal and terrorist comrades.” 

The outcome of the 2022 election in the Philippines represents an unqualified victory for the most reactionary forces in Philippine politics. 

What does a Marcos presidency bode? 

First, in terms of geopolitics, Marcos has explicitly stated his intention of continuing the policies of the outgoing Duterte administration of improving diplomatic and trade relations with Beijing. This strategy runs afoul of Washington's openly bellicose moves against China and has placed Manila largely outside the geostrategic ambit of its former colonial ruler. 

In 2016, as Duterte took office, the outgoing Benigno Aquino III administration had concluded a deal with Washington, known as the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that effectively returned US military bases to the country after a more than 20-year absence. The ruling handed down by the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in The Hague, invalidating much of China’s claim to the South China Sea, was poised to be a weapon in the hands of a US proxy to increase pressure on China. 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte shows ink on his finger to mark that he has finished voting at a polling center in Davao city, southern Philippines on Monday May 9, 2022 (Credit: Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division) [AP Photo/Toto Lozano/ Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division]

Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation meant that these prepared weapons were removed from Washington’s hands for six years. Marcos’ election consolidates Washington’s diminishing hold over its former colony.

This is expressed in the alignment of ruling class forces behind Marcos’ candidacy. The political kingmaker, who brokered the deal that saw Sara Duterte take the vice presidential slot on Marcos’ ticket, was former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Arroyo now stands as the single most influential political force behind the scenes of the Marcos presidency. It was under her presidency that the Philippines began to reorient its ties toward China.  

She is joined in this by a man who had been her mortal enemy, former President Joseph Estrada. Arroyo took office after ousting Estrada through a constitutional coup with the backing of the military. They share a common alignment toward China, however, and common relations with the Marcoses, and Estrada has publicly pledged his enthusiastic support for Arroyo.  

There are growing signs that a majority of the Philippine ruling class favor the country’s orientation to China at the expense of Washington. They have expressed alarm at Washington’s war drive in Ukraine and fear that similar moves against China could see the Philippines caught up in a bloody global war. Significant sections of the business community, particularly those based outside the capital city of Manila, favor relations with China, as they see possible infrastructure investment from China as a means of improving their access to the world market. 

Second, Marcos represents advanced political preparations in the ruling class to carry out the repression of growing social unrest in the country, including the stripping away of basic constitutional rights and the possible imposition of open military dictatorship.

Fifty years ago, in 1972, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., citing the danger of “communism,” imposed martial law on the country to suppress an immense social crisis—demonstrations in the streets and a growing strike wave in the working class. The overwhelming majority of the ruling class backed Marcos in this, even his political opponents. 

Marcos Sr. used his military dictatorship to ban all strikes. Under martial law over 70,000 people were arrested without warrant; nearly 4,000 were killed, and thousands more were tortured by the military. This brutal dictatorial rule continued until 1986, when Marcos was ousted in a popular uprising, coupled with an attempted military coup, which led to the installation of Corazon Aquino, the candidate of the bourgeois opposition. Marcos and his family, including Ferdinand Jr., were given a comfortable life in exile in Hawaii by the US government, which had backed his dictatorship from the day it was declared.

Marcos Jr. has made the claim that martial law was a “golden age” in Philippine history will be the center of his campaign. This is not just a lying attempt to use his family name to secure votes, it is a promise as well. Marcos is telling the ruling class that he is running as the candidate of dictatorship.  

When Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were ousted in 1986, their rule was detested. They were corrupt, they were brutal. They were guilty of mass murder and the theft of billions of dollars. This was symbolized in popular consciousness by Imelda’s thousands of pairs of shoes, in a country where most people are lucky to afford a single pair and treat them with great care. 

How is it possible that 36 years later, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has won election on the basis of the preposterous lie that his parents’ dictatorship was a golden age? 

Marcos bought a good deal of his support, deploying the stolen wealth that his family still possesses. It is obvious from numerous grassroots accounts throughout the country that the crowds gathered at his rallies were brought in with the promise of envelopes of cash. The average sum of 500 pesos (about $10 USD) per person is widely reported. There is a long established tradition of vote buying in the Philippines, and there can be no doubt that Marcos engaged in this practice. 

The purchase of support extended to the use of online troll farms. Marcos was backed by a systematic network of disinformation, creating videos and posts circulated on TikTok and Facebook that claimed to demonstrate that Marcos’ rivals were secretly communists, that martial law improved social conditions of the Philippines, that Marcos was personally possessed of immense wealth that he intended to redistribute if elected, and so on. 

Vote buying and the production of disinformation cannot alone account for the election results. The question must be asked regarding disinformation, in particular, much of which was quite crude, why did it spread? Why did it find a mass audience which deemed it credible?

When Corazon Aquino took office in 1986, there were immense illusions placed in the social changes that her government would carry out. After two decades of Marcos rule, things would finally change for the better. Aquino, one of the largest landowners in the country, changed very little. She incorporated many of the leading criminals of the martial law regime into her cabinet. By the end of her six years in office, she found it expedient to allow the Marcoses to return to the country.

No truth commission was ever set up; no investigation of the nature of the dictatorship was conducted. Aquino covered up the crimes of those who are now her allies. History textbooks were written on this basis. No one was taught what martial law had been. For a good many years, people repeated the phrase “never again,” but it gradually lost its meaning.

Much of the country now suffers from a systematically cultivated historical illiteracy. The Duterte administration has removed the teaching of history from high schools entirely, replacing it with the abstract and largely empty Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies). 

This historical illiteracy makes possible the influence of disinformation, but it does not explain its appeal. 

As it has for workers around the globe, the living standards of the Filipino working masses has declined over the course of the past three decades. Real wages have fallen. The immense social crisis gripping the country finds expression in the mass export of migrant labor. Fully 10 percent of the country’s population has been compelled to seek work overseas. Families are riven apart. There are very few working families that do not have a father or a mother, sister or son torn from them to work in Singapore or Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia or Taiwan. 

The illusions in liberal democracy under the rule of the successors of martial law were shattered irretrievably. Leni Robredo, the leading opponent of Marcos and chair of the Liberal Party, long associated with the Aquinos and the ouster of Marcos, was the inheritor of these shattered illusions. That she knew that her own banner was tattered and tainted was manifested in her decision to run as an independent and avoid public affiliation with her own party.

There is a degraded character to much of official democracy in the Philippines. Elections are conducted as public spectacles, nothing more. They are marked by singing, dancing, fireworks and the absence of coherent political thought. Elite politicos deliberately make fools of themselves in pursuit of votes.

Robredo did not break with this tradition but within its parameters staged a deliberately conservative, even right-wing campaign. She presented democracy as a question above all of civility and effectively counterposed herself as the decent, kindly opponent of Marcos. Day after day she staged rallies of hundreds of thousands, who wore pink and danced to the music of her campaign. 

Doubtless the millions who voted for Robredo did so out of hostility to Marcos and all that he represents, but she had no concrete appeal to the tens of millions who sought not civility but an end to their poverty.  

And while presenting herself as a quietly democratic force, Robredo met with the leading generals and pledged support for the continuation of the McCarthyite anticommunist apparatus, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), created under Duterte.  

The Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) played an integral role in the victory of Marcos. The various legal organizations that follow its political line, operating under the umbrella organization BAYAN, campaigned alongside Marcos in 2010, when he ran for Senate, and they shared a slate behind real estate billionaire Manny Villar. The CPP enthusiastically promoted Rodrigo Duterte for president and claimed that the fascist political leader was a “socialist.” The far-right atmosphere that hangs over the country today has been made possible by the role of the Stalinists. 

The Stalinists threw themselves into support for Leni Robredo, campaigning for her with an intensity without precedent in the history of the party. On May 1, 2022, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May One Movement), the labor union umbrella of the Stalinists, instructed their members that they were not to wave red flags nor were they to denounce the NTF-ELCAC. They did not want to offend  their bourgeois allies.

There is a democratic tradition in the Philippines with deep historic roots in the revolutionary struggles of the working masses, but it has no connection with the country’s constitution and elections. These democratic traditions were hard won in the nation's formative anti-colonial struggles against Spain and the United States. 

The democratic tradition that persists in the Filipino masses consists of a passionate commitment to freedom of speech, a courageous willingness to jeer the powerful and, above all, a highly developed belief in the need for social equality. 

The constitution and the parliamentary politics of the Philippines, however, were set up by the United States in a quest to stabilize the rule of their elite partners in the country. The representatives of American imperialism wrote martial law as an executive power into the country’s legal code and kept trial by jury out. Formal democracy has proven to be nothing but the apparatus of elite rule. 

The Stalinists make no effort to build upon the democratic tradition of the Filipino working class; they seek to prop up the formal democratic rule of their bourgeois allies. 

The victory of Marcos in the Philippines is a stark manifestation of a global trend. Marcos has political counterparts around the world: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi. Their rise expresses the fact that formal democracy has been hollowed out by social inequality. Confronting the intensifying growth of social unrest, driven by immense crisis now exacerbated by the pandemic, the ruling class is turning to authoritarian forms of rule. 

For more than four decades, the traditional liberal parties of the bourgeoisie have had nothing to offer, no progressive social measure of any substance. As the social crisis intensified over these decades, they lurched further and further to the right. It is this patent bankruptcy of bourgeois liberalism, aided and abetted by the pseudo-left, in the context of intense social crisis, that enables the rise of far-right forces basing themselves on populist lies.

Foreign lenders continue to strangle Ukraine

Andrea Peters

Foreign lenders continue to saddle Ukraine with billions of dollars of debt, even as experts predict that the country’s GDP will fall by 45 to 50 percent this year. While massive amounts of arms and money to purchase weaponry are flooding Ukraine free of charge, the financing Kiev needs to stay afloat and address extensive damage to infrastructure is a fraction of what is required, primarily aimed at paying off current debts, and frequently coming in the form of relatively short-term loans.

In early March, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced a $1.4 billion assistance package for Ukraine. Since the invasion, the EU and the World Bank have respectively pledged financial support of $1.2 and $3 billion, with funds being released in stages.

IMF Headquarters, Washington, DC. (Credit: IMF)

The IMF has additionally created an international account through which other states, thus far including Canada, Poland, and the Scandinavian and Baltics countries, can funnel money to Kiev in the form of “loans and grants.” The World Bank too has set up a “Multi-Donor Trust Fund” that is drawing in financing from the UK, Japan, Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere. Ukraine is also tapping into a $2.7 billion tranche of IMF funds released late last year.

The pledges of these institutions and foreign governments are nothing compared to Ukraine’s needs. Experts expect the cost of the damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure to be from $220 billion on the low end to nearly $600 billion. The School of Economics in the capital city estimates that about $4.5 billion of destruction is happening every week. In mid-April, the Zelensky government declared that without receiving $7 billion each month through the summer, it could no longer function.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the BBC, “We found [the money] for the first and second month,” but not yet for subsequent months, as the lending agency is banking on an economic recovery in parts of Ukraine outside the war zone and “remittances from those who now work somewhere else starting flowing.”

In other words, the millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine—overwhelmingly women, children, and elderly men because adult men under the age of 60 cannot leave the country—are, having become a low-wage labor force across the EU, expected to bear the cost of the destruction of the already impoverished country in a war provoked by the US and NATO.

Even prior to Russia’s invasion, Ukraine was already shouldering massive external debt. It was built up over the course of three decades of endless borrowing, with every new cycle requiring the imposition of austerity measures that made millions destitute and opened up new profit-making opportunities for foreign investors.

According to World Bank data, the country owes external lenders $129 billion in prewar debt, the equivalent of 78.8 percent of its GDP. Kiev expects to repay $16 billion this year. In addition to outstanding loans and accumulated interest, Ukraine is also coping with various penalties and fees for failing to meet criteria set by international lenders. In 2022, Ukraine is supposed to fork over $178 million in loan surcharges to the IMF.

In an April 20 article in Deutsche Welle, Ukrainian economist Oleksandr Kravchuk objected to the fact that the “sums [from international lenders] are clearly not enough for financial stability,” noting that “the country's debt dependence and debt burden will only grow,” even if interest rates are low. He called for, as have some other political figures and commentators in the West, the cancellation of Ukraine’s debts. No such measure has been forthcoming.

The terms of the current IMF agreements with Ukraine clearly state that all of the loans are subject to the requirements of “precautionary and liquidity lines,” “stand-by agreements,” “financial credit lines,” and other restrictions and obligations. These include an escalating series of financial punishments when the debtor exceeds certain dollar thresholds and time frames. In short, interest rates increase as the loan amount grows and the length of the time that it takes the borrower to pay it back extends. The loan recipient has at most five years to extinguish his debt.

The EU announced a few days ago that it would suspend imports on Ukrainian goods for one year and work to speed up progress on a free-trade agreement in an effort to help the country’s economy. With a GDP that is falling by half, what exactly Ukraine is supposed to sell to the EU is unclear.

Ukraine’s debt is growing with private lenders, both individuals and institutions, as well. So far Kiev has sold $1 billion of war bonds. They are to be paid, with an interest rate of 11 percent, in a year’s time. According to CNN Business, the Zelensky government is now appealing for crypto-currency donations and seeking funding with “non-financial tokens.”

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other major lenders all see the war as a means to dramatically extend their control over the resources of Ukraine and force the country to further cut social spending and open up its economy to outside investors. Ukraine is, for instance, home to one-third of the world’s “black earth” soil, among the most fertile land to be found.

Writing in the Atlantic on April 11, David Frum, a well-known political commentator and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, insisted that the measures taken by the West to help Ukraine “prove not a burdensome gift to charity but a mutually beneficial investment.” He insisted that the country would have to address “internal corruption” and “predation” and endorsed the suggestion of the leading economist Anders Aslund that Ukraine “overcome the deficiencies of its judicial system by opening new trade courts, staffed by foreign judges who earn international salaries but apply Ukrainian law.”

About a week later, former US Ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan and currently a fellow at the RAND Institute, William Courtney, penned a piece with colleague Khrystyna Holynska in the American newswire UPI underscoring similar themes. The authors castigated Ukraine for inhibiting investors and having “backtracked” on previous promises to the IMF to liberalize Ukraine’s economy. They demanded that the rebuilding process come with extending “an efficient market for private land” and speeding up the privatization of 3300 state-owned enterprises. They also insisted on the full implementation of “gas price reform,” a euphemistic way of demanding that Kiev completely end all price controls on home heating and cooking fuels.

While a tight grip is being kept on economic aid to Ukraine, NATO countries are tripping over themselves on a nearly daily basis to announce the dispatch of ever-more lethal weaponry to the country. As of mid-March, according to the US State Department, Washington alone had sent $2 billion of “security assistance” to Kiev since President Biden took office. Congress is now on the verge of approving the White House’s request for another $33 billion in aid, of which more than $20 billion will be of a military character. The UK, France, Germany, and every other EU state are rushing weapons to the east European country and areas near Russia’s border. They have not the slightest qualms about turning the region into a wasteland, a factor that might figure into their calculations as to the wisdom of handing the Kiev government a great deal of “no-strings-attached” money.

Questions over May Day demonstration shootings in Santiago, Chile: Who ordered the attack on unarmed protesters?

Mauricio Saavedra

So brazen are the forces of repression in Chile—due to the infinitesimally small probability of being charged with human rights crimes—that Carabineros Special Forces nonchalantly provided protection to at least 11 gunmen and dozens of other right-wing gangsters, who in broad daylight shot at and threw projectiles at unarmed demonstrators commemorating May Day in Santiago, Chile.

Gunmen speaking with cops and shooting at demonstrators (source: Piensa Prensa)

The actions of the riot police and other state forces in protecting these criminals is all the more brazen given that hundreds of smart phones were there to capture these events.

Five people including three journalists from independent media organizations were shot at while reporting on the demonstrations. One reporter, Francisca Sandoval from independent media Señal 3 La Victoria, was rushed to the capital’s main emergency hospital after receiving a bullet to the face. She remains in critical condition. Another reporter, known as Aby, of Radio 7 Bajos de Mena, was also shot in the shoulder with live ammunition, and three others were taken to the same hospital.

In an interview for La Red, Benjamín Lillo, director of Señal 3, said that the gunmen “were shooting directly at us. Of the five people who were injured, three are from the independent press. The attack was premeditated.”

There is every reason to believe that this attack was premeditated and politically motivated. One of the recently identified assailants has connections to the fascistic Republican Party.

Authorities had granted permission for the Central Clasista de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras (Class-conscious Workers’ Central, CCTT)—an anarcho-syndicalist organization ostensibly created in opposition to the official trade union apparatus, the corporatist Central Unitaria Trabajadora (CUT)—to hold a counter-march to the CUT’s official rally.

The shootings occurred at midday as the CCTT rally away from the city on Bernardo O’Higgins Avenue, Santiago’s main thoroughfare, and had reached a spot known as Barrio Meiggs, a neighborhood that has become notorious because of its connection with organized crime. In that neighborhood hundreds of ambulant stores in blue tarpaulins are daily set up by desperate petty shopkeepers trying to eke out an existence. Here deeply oppressed, declassed and criminal layers comingle. From these elements cops hatch their informants and assets.

Although having earlier received permission and garnered a police escort until that point, the marchers found themselves unexpectedly confronted with being shot at by a throng of criminal elements that surfaced from the makeshift blue tarps on the north side of Bernardo O’Higgins Avenue, and on the other side with a thicket of Carabinero Special Forces, equipped with water cannon trucks and armored vehicles.

In the surreal situation that unfolded, which is possible only in a country where the police have complete license to commit crime with impunity, Carabineros not only did not arrest a single gunman but cracked down on the marchers with tear gas and water cannon.

In an interview, Aby, one of the injured journalists, explained that she and a member of a human rights brigade who came to her assistance had to beg the police to allow her to receive medical attention.

Another member of the independent media, photographer Manuel Iturra witnessed Sandoval being shot. He told Agencia Uno that he approached the Carabineros to warn them that the marchers were being fired at but was totally ignored. “Behind me came another colleague raising the same concerns, and they ignored him. The only thing we achieved at that moment was for the Carabineros to tear gas and drench us with contaminated water on the south sidewalk, where we and the demonstrators were. Meanwhile, we were being shot at from the north sidewalk.”

Special Forces had been mobilized to deal with disturbances that were occurring at exactly the same place and time as the column of marchers was passing through Barrio Mieggs. Dozens of hooded men uniformly dressed in black began breaking into the strip mall stores closed for the May Day public holiday and proceeded to erect barricades with the ransacked goods and furniture. It remains to be verified if they were agents provocateurs, but it created the intended effect of associating their actions with the march.

Christian Democrat-linked Cooperativa wrote, “Parallel to the march organized by the [CUT] which marched from Plaza Baquedano along the Alameda to the west, a second demonstration—or ‘counter march’—of the (CCTT) took place, which resulted in looting of commercial premises in Estación Central, in addition to the burning of the blue tarps installed in the Barrio Meiggs sector and confrontations with Carabineros personnel.” The other right-wing corporate and state-run media followed suit in the misinformation campaign.

In the three days since, demonstrators and independent media have uploaded on social media a mass of photos and videos showing just how closely the Carabineros worked with the anticommunist gunmen and criminals.

Gunmen speaking with cops and shooting at demonstrators (source: Piensa Prensa)

It can be safely said that without the independent media groups identifying at least 11 gunmen, not one would have been arrested. As it is, only three have been arrested: Marcelo Naranjo was booked and placed in preventive detention for shooting Francisca Sandoval; and Luis Flores and Yonaiker Fuenmayor were booked and placed under house arrest for illegally carrying and using firearms. The gunmen responsible for shooting the other four victims remain at large.

“The family expresses its rejection and repudiation of the actions of the Prosecutor’s Office, which did not request preventive detention for carrying, possession and shooting against the demonstrators,” declared the Sandoval family’s lawyer.

He continued: “The family wants to express its rejection of the opportunistic acts of the Minister of the Interior (Izkia Siches), who was present yesterday to talk with them, and other political operators of the government, who have sought to come here to lower the profile of the situation and not assume their responsibility for the actions of the Carabineros, who acted in collusion and protected the gangsters.”

While the parliamentary left sectors of the government have made empty noises calling for an investigation into the police, calling for the resignation of the director of Carabineros, and even dredging up the call to “refound” or “democratize” the institution, the pseudo-left administration of Gabriel Boric has felt no compunction to follow suit.

Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches, announcing strengthening Carabineros Wednesday 3rd May (source: Ministry of the Interior)

On the contrary, this Wednesday the Ministry of the Interior seized on Sunday’s shooting spree to fully back the Carabineros and its chief and to announce measures to increase police presence in the Metropolitan Region and in the regions. This, they reason, is necessary to strengthen the National Intelligence System “in order to have a State with information that will allow us to anticipate conflicts.”

Sri Lankan workers defy curfew, government-organised violence

Peter Symonds

A government-organised attack yesterday by armed thugs on Sri Lankan protesters encamped on Galle Face Green in central Colombo was meant to set the stage for a far broader crackdown on the month-long anti-government protest movement. It has backfired.

Medical students joined by workers protesting at Ragama on May 9, 2022 against the attack at Galle Face [Photo: WSWS]

Using the violent attack as the pretext, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse imposed an indefinite nationwide curfew and mobilised the military, sending armed troops to Galle Face Green to bolster the heavy police presence already on hand.

Far from suppressing the opposition, thousands of people angered by the violent attack defied the curfew and heavy police-military build-up to flood into Galle Face to demonstrate their solidarity with the anti-government protests. Across the island, hundreds of thousands reportedly took to the streets to do the same.

Sections of workers, including health workers at the National Hospital in Colombo and postal workers, stopped work spontaneously to take a stand against the government’s actions.

Mass protests have been taking place across Sri Lanka over the past month demanding the resignation of the president and his government and an end to the social disaster facing working people due to skyrocketing prices, lengthy power outages, and shortages of essentials, including basic food items, fuel and medicines.

People line up to buy kerosene at Kandana, a Colombo suburb, on May 9, 2022. [Photo: WSWS]

Working people are compelled to wait in queues for hours and even days. Many are having increasing difficulty in providing food for their families and are reducing the number of meals each day. There is a worsening breakdown of essential services. Hospitals are running out of medicines and equipment. Transport is becoming prohibitively expensive.

The groundswell of opposition in the working class has compelled the trade unions, which initially did nothing, to call one-day general strikes on April 28 and again last Friday. The strike on Friday—supplemented by what is known as a hartal, a general shutdown of small businesses—brought the economy to a halt. Millions of workers throughout the island stopped working, including in the free enterprise zones, hospitals, schools, public administration, and transport.

The strike was especially significant as working people unified across communal lines—Sinhala and Tamil, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists—around their common class interests. For decades, especially in times of crisis, Colombo politicians have whipped up anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim chauvinism and organised communal provocations and pogroms to divide workers against each other.

The powerful support for the general strike and hartal sent a shiver of fear through the entire political establishment—government and opposition alike as well as the trade unions, which were clearly shocked at the extent of support.

Late on Friday night, President Rajapakse, who already has the extensive powers of the executive presidency, imposed a state of emergency enabling him to mobilise the military, impose curfews and censorship, make arbitrary arrests and ban strikes and protests.

As the government prepared to mobilise the military, the trade unions called off an indefinite general strike due to start this Wednesday, replaced with limited lunch-time protests by workers. By demobilising the working class, the trade unions only encouraged a desperate government to act.

The prime minister, Mahinda Rajapakse, the president’s brother, yesterday assembled hundreds of ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) supporters, many of them bussed in from other parts of the island, to his official residence in central Colombo. After a deliberately inflammatory speech, they were sent out armed with sticks and clubs, firstly to attack protesters outside the residence and then those occupying Galle Face Green about a kilometre down the road.

The police, although armed with tear gas and water cannon, did nothing to stop them until the rampage on Galle Face Green was complete. More than a hundred people were hospitalised with injuries caused by the thugs.

Masses at Galle Face after the attack on May 9, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

What the Rajapakse brothers did not count on was the angry reaction of broad layers of the population who were prepared to defy the curfew and the security forces. As the extent of the opposition became apparent, Mahinda Rajapakse tendered his resignation as prime minister, effectively dissolving the cabinet.

President Rajapakse has now called on all parliamentary parties—government and opposition—to form a “national unity government” to find solutions to the country’s unprecedented economic and political crisis. The country faces an acute foreign exchange crisis, meaning it has very limited funds to buy imports including fuel, and has declared “a temporary default” on its large foreign loans. The International Monetary Fund has insisted on draconian austerity conditions for an emergency bailout loan that will only worsen the social crisis facing working people.

The entire Colombo political establishment—the opposition parties, the trade unions, corporate representatives and media commentators—is pinning its hopes on the formation of an interim or national unity or all-party government to find some way to demobilise or suppress the protests of workers, youth and rural masses.

To date, the main opposition parties—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)—have insisted that the president has to resign before they will consider joining or supporting an interim government to prepare for early elections. Under the impact of the events of the past few days, they may well reconsider. Undoubtedly behind closed doors, frantic discussions are taking place in ruling circles to patch together such a government.

Children’s Lives in a Dangerous World

Cesar Chelala

Several studies over many decades show that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) negatively affect the cognitive development of children, and their physical and mental health. Children suffer several threats to their wellbeing, from being victims of sexual and physical abuse to being isolated from their family environment. Children that are separated from their families become prone to being abused and trafficked.

 Child trafficking

Child trafficking is a widespread phenomenon. Children make up 27 % of the 40 million victims of trafficking worldwide. Two out of every three identified child victims are girls. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report states that the number of child victims of sex trafficking in the United States increased 55% compared to 2019.

Children who are trafficked are forced or persuaded under false pretenses to leave their homes. They are moved to an unknown location -frequently in other countries- to work as sex workers; work under abusive conditions; marry men who are much older and also may be abusive; or commit crimes. These children are also used as drug couriers or dealers, and frequently ‘paid’ in drugs, so that they become addicted and are further entrapped.

The reasons underlying trafficking include poverty; unemployment; low status of girls; lack of education (including sex education) of children and their parents; inadequate legislation; lack of or poor law enforcement; and the commercial sexual exploitation of children by the media, a phenomenon increasingly seen worldwide.

Children exploited for sex work are prone to sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS. In addition, girls can have multiple pregnancies and frequently they are forced to abort. Because of the conditions in which they are placed, children can become malnourished, and develop feelings of guilt, inadequacy and depression. They usually have no access to education and lack opportunities for social and emotional development.

In South Asia, traditional practices that perpetuate the low status of women and girls in society are at the core of the problem. More than 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are brought annually to the United States and forced into sex work or work as indentured servants. The US government has prosecuted case s involving hundreds of victims. In other countries which face this problem, the prosecution rate is low.

Child sex tourism

Child sex tourism is another form of trafficking. It is concentrated in Asia and Central and South America. According to UNICEF, 10,000 girls annually enter Thailand from neighboring countries and end up as sex workers. Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reports that child sex workers make up 40% of prostitutes in Thailand. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls are transported across the border to India each year and end up as commercial sex workers in Mumbai, Bombay or New Delhi.

Although the greatest number of children forced to become sex workers is in Asia, children from Eastern European countries, such as Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic, are increasingly vulnerable. Child sex work does not show signs of abating. In many cases, individual traffickers and organized groups kidnap children, take them across national borders and sell them for sex work, with border officials and police serving as accomplices.

There are special social and cultural reasons for children forced into entering the sex trade in different regions of the world. In many cases, children from industrialized countries enter the sex trade because they are fleeing abusive homes. In countries of Eastern and Southern Africa, children who became orphans as a result of AIDS frequently lack the protection of caregivers and become more vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.

Impact of sexual exploitation of children

Besides the moral and ethical implications, the effect that sexual exploitation has on children’s health and future development demands urgent attention. Throughout the world, many individuals and non-governmental organizations are working intensely for the protection of children’s rights.

The work of international non-governmental organizations and U.N. agencies should be a complement to national governments’ actions to solve this problem. Those actions should include preventing sexual exploitation through social mobilization and awareness building, providing social services to exploited children and their families and creating the legal framework and providing resources for psychosocial counseling and for the appropriate prosecution of perpetrators. The elimination of the abuse and sexual exploitation of children around the world is a daunting task, but one that is achievable if effective programs are put in place.

Sinn Féin wins Northern Ireland Assembly election

Steve James

Sinn Féin have won the largest number of first preference votes in the May 5 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and will hold the largest number of seats.

This is the first time since Ireland was brutally partitioned in 1921-2 that an Irish nationalist party has won an election in the six counties, which remain part of the UK and whose political structures have been designed to ensure pro-British, unionist dominance. Sinn Féin, the one-time political wing of the disbanded Irish Republican Army, is committed to securing a border poll on Irish unification within five years.

Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald and Vice President Michelle O'Neill in 2018 (Credit: Kelvin Boyes / Flickr)

Sinn Féin polled 250,388 first preference votes (29 percent) against 184,002 (21.3 percent) for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Sinn Féin’s vote increased by 1.1 percent from 2017, while the DUP’s share fell by 6.7 percent. Sinn Féin won 27 seats in the 90-seat assembly, while the DUP took 24. Although Sinn Féin’s final seat tally did not increase, the DUP’s loss of 3 seats means Sinn Féin can nominate a First Minister to the Northern Ireland Executive. The party is currently led in Northern Ireland by Michelle O’Neill, the party’s vice president, a republican since her teens.

Although Sinn Féin won the poll, the unionist share of the overall vote largely held up and much of the working population remains politically polarised along nationalist/unionist and Catholic/Protestant lines.

Under the sectarian rules of government power sharing in Northern Ireland, established by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, a new executive has to be agreed with the largest parties of both the unionist and nationalist “communities”. Northern Ireland has not had a functioning government since the DUP’s Paul Givan resigned as first minister in February as part of the party’s attempt to undermine the Northern Ireland Protocol arrangement for Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU).

Northern Ireland is currently ruled by caretaker ministers, who are not able to pass new legislation or budgets. Should a new government not be formed within six months, either new elections must be held, or some new arrangement cobbled together by the British government’s Northern Ireland Minister, Brandon Lewis.

As well as hostility to its right-wing sectarian outlook, the DUP’s losses are bound up with its support for Brexit. The DUP worked closely with Tory Brexiteers in Westminster to extract the most hardline Brexit terms, while propping up the government of Theresa May. After May’s downfall and Boris Johnson’s landslide victory of 2019, the DUP were dumped and the implausible promises made to them, the most ludicrous of which was a tunnel to Scotland, dropped.

The border between the north and the Republic of Ireland is now an EU frontier, albeit still invisible. To avoid a “hard border”, under terms of the Northern Ireland Protocol negotiated with the EU, certain goods, particularly some foodstuffs and medicines being transported from the British mainland to Northern Ireland, are required to be checked and documented at considerable expense.

This trade barrier down the Irish Sea is viewed by unionists as a mortal threat to their position in the UK, despite their own role in creating it, and has forced a hardening of unionist opinion.

The DUP’s current leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who joined the Ulster Defence Regiment at the age of 18, has linked any revival of the assembly to the removal of the protocol and Irish Sea trade barriers.

Last year, DUP leaders, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party signed a joint anti-protocol declaration. Donaldson participated in a series of anti-protocol rallies and shared a platform with TUV leader, Jim Allister, far-right loyalist commentators such as Jamie Bryson and leaders of the Protestant Orange Order.

Some election candidates were subjected to loyalist intimidation and violence. People Before Profit (PBP) candidate Hannah Kenny was grabbed by the neck and abused by three men in East Belfast. Elsie Trainer, a Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) candidate, was assaulted after she chased and filmed two youths who had ripped down her election posters.

The UUP lost 1 seat, leaving it with nine, winning only 11.2 percent of first preferences. The TUV still only won one seat, although its share of first preference votes increased to 7.6 percent, mostly at the expense of the DUP.

The Johnson government may yet include legislation to unilaterally scrap the protocol in its next Tuesday’s Queen’s Speech, as part of its ongoing feud with the EU over Brexit.

Other major shifts include a surge towards the Alliance Party, which took 116,681 first preferences, 13.5 percent, an increase of 4.5 percentage points. Unlike Sinn Féin or the DUP, the Alliance does not define itself as representing one or other of Northern Ireland’s “communities” under the sectarian designation scheme built into the Good Friday Agreement. It appears to have picked up votes both from business and middle-class supporters of both main unionist parties and the nationalist SDLP, who also lost votes to Sinn Féin.

The Alliance opposed Brexit, puts forward a pro-business liberal image, and has more than doubled its representation in the assembly to 17 seats. The SDLP, with seven seats, has lost four. The Alliance also won at the expense of the Greens, who lost both their seats.

Sinn Féin’s success also partially expressed the deepening class tensions gripping the entire island. Its election pitch was focused primarily on social questions. In this way, Sinn Féin benefited from profound hatred for the Johnson government in Westminster, intensified by the pandemic.

Sinn Féin, however, offers no way forward to any section of workers. It is increasingly viewed as a viable coalition partner of the main right-wing bourgeois parties in the South and was the largest party at the last election. In power in the North since 2007, Sinn Féin has worked closely with the DUP in imposing the austerity measures demanded by the British government. Its proposed border poll, a call for a united capitalist Ireland, provides no means of combating sectarian divisions between Catholic and Protestant workers, based on a socialist appeal to their shared class interests and opposition to the bourgeoisie, north and south of the border.

Sinn Féin also gained at the expense of the pseudo-left People Before Profit. Although PBP stood their largest number of candidates, its share of first preference votes declined. Their manifesto was only a slightly more left version of Sinn Féin’s own Stormont-oriented policy. In line with much of the pseudo-left in Britain, however, PBP supported Brexit while criticising the DUP’s “Tory Brexit”. Only their current assembly member, Gerry Carrol, was elected.

The last weeks in Northern Ireland have seen a dramatic intensification of the class struggle. Thousands of workers in transport, local government, manufacturing, education and the gig economy have recorded large strike votes. Many, including Caterpillar and education authority workers, have been on strike against sub-inflation pay offers, while the largest transport strike in 20 years, at Translink, was called off at the last minute by the Unite and GMB trade unions.

Council workers protested across the road from the Belfast election count centre against their miserable 1.75 percent pay offer. PBP’s manifesto made no criticism of the trade unions’ main role in suppressing the class struggle.