Andy Warhol 1964 painting sells for $195 million, breaking auction record

Erik Schreiber

A painting by Andy Warhol sold for a final price of $195 million last week, breaking the auction record for an American artist and for any 20th century art work. At a sale for charity at Christie’s in New York, four bidders competed for Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964). After less than four minutes of bidding, the painting was sold to art dealer and gallerist Larry Gagosian. It is unclear whether he bought the painting for himself or on behalf of a client. According to Forbes, Gagosian’s super-rich clientele includes “billionaire mega collectors such as David Geffen, Leon Black, Steve Cohen and Leonard Lauder.”

The previous auction record for an American artist was set only five years ago. In 2017, a painting of a skull by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a friend and collaborator of Warhol, sold for $110.5 million at an auction at Sotheby’s. The price of Shot Sage Blue Marilyn was almost double the previous auction high price for a Warhol work. Double Disaster (1963), one of his car crash paintings, was sold for $105.4 million in 2013.

In fact, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn has become one of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction. Its price surpassed that of Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (“Version O”), which Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani of Qatar bought for $179 million in 2015. 

Andy Warhol, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, 1964, silkscreen and acrylic on linen, 40 x 40'. Photo- Christe’s Images, Ltd.

This series of rising prices and broken auction records reminds us that the world of fine art, which is part of the cultural heritage of mankind, is dominated by a tiny, extraordinarily wealthy elite. For this layer, works of art are not aesthetic objects but investments and tokens of prestige.

The Warhol sale took place at the beginning of a spring auction season once again being held in person. The ongoing pandemic is of no importance. The focus of the participants is the potential profit to be made. “There’s been a huge amount held back for two years, and there’s a huge amount of pent-up demand from new clients,” art adviser Philip Hoffman told the New York Times. “Everyone was waiting for the right moment, and the right moment has come.”

The way that auctioneers, gallerists and collectors talk about the artwork is revealing. “We did sell the most expensive painting of the 20th century,” Alex Rotter of Christie’s told the Times. “This is a big achievement.” One imagines him licking his lips. 

“The top of the market is still strong, and there is a lot of demand for quality,” art dealer Bill Acquavella told the Times. “Look what real estate is selling for. There are other assets that are bringing prices that you haven’t seen before [emphasis added].”

“Within the greater market for trophy art, the figure of $200 million is very much in keeping with prices realized in the private dealer market for quite a few years [emphasis added],” art appraiser David Shapiro told ARTnews.

In fact, some had speculated that Shot Sage Blue Marilyn would bring in as much as $400 million and were disappointed in its final price. “It was an incredibly healthy price, but at the same time, I believe the buyer got a deal,” art adviser Abigail Asher told the Times.

In The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020), author William Deresiewicz noted that a 2009 study “revealed a direct correlation between the run-up in [art] prices and the growing concentration of wealth, consistent with the behavior of markets in other luxury goods like high-end real estate. ‘A one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent,’ the researchers discovered, ‘triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.’ The new money is hedge-fund money, oligarch money, Asian-billionaire money. More than half of the global art market, by aggregate value, consists of sales of $1 million or more. Art collecting at that level is an affair of ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals,’ people with liquid assets of $30 million or more—though one insider told me that the bar is more like $250 million.”

That the largest sum ever paid for a piece of 20th century art was spent on a trivial, empty work is not unimportant or coincidental. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is a 40-inch-by-40-inch silk-screened painting of iconic actress Marilyn Monroe. The well-known image is based on a promotional photo for the movie Niagara (1953), in which Monroe starred alongside Joseph Cotten. The work is one of five “Marilyn” paintings that Warhol executed in 1964, almost two years after Monroe herself had died by probable suicide. It is likely that Warhol chose his subject not only for her glamor, but also for the scandal surrounding her death. 

The painting’s title reflects what happened to the work after Warhol had completed it. In 1964, a woman named Dorothy Podber walked into Warhol’s studio (which he dubbed the Factory) and shot at a stack of Marilyn paintings. Sources differ on the questions of whether Warhol had invited her to do so and whether he believed Podber intended to “shoot” photographs of the paintings. This legend reflects the anarchy that prevailed at the Factory, as well as Warhol’s own penchant for sensation.

Four Shot Marilyns by Andy Warhol (1964)

The silk-screening technique, which Warhol borrowed from commercial art, removes any trace of the artist’s hand from the painting. Nor does the work convey any critical or in-depth analysis of its subject. In his most prominent work, Warhol borrows from advertising and tabloid celebrity journalism, passing on reality as it immediately appears in those debased realms. With this passivity, Warhol implicitly denies any significant role for the artist. 

As we argued in 2019, Warhol “did not encourage us to develop ourselves or build a better world. His is the art of the voyeur or, at worst, the self-promoter. He reinforced and actively participated in the cult of celebrity. In uncritically bringing the banality of popular culture into the world of fine art, he relinquished all that is most vital and nourishing in art, for the artist as well as for his audience: the imaginative reinterpretation of reality.”

That element apparently appeals to art collectors with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend. In the 1980s, Gagosian began amassing the enormous wealth with which he bought Shot Sage Blue Marilyn by reselling works by well-established and highly regarded modern artists. Like the stock traders who were rising to economic dominance during the same period, Gagosian appropriated profits for himself without creating anything of value. 

Little wonder that Gagosian (or whichever moneyed client on whose behalf he acted) would “invest” in a “blue-chip” celebrity artist like Warhol. The artist’s reputation is international and largely unquestioned. For the social layer that Gagosian represents, the name Warhol has a significance like that of Cartier or Hermès. 

The orgy of wealth in the art market must encourage demoralization and cynicism among artists, on the one hand, and intense outrage, on the other. The way forward in art can only take in direct opposition to the concentration of fabulous riches that leads to the cultural impoverishment of society.

Profits over lives: The New York Times demands China end its Zero-COVID policy

Benjamin Mateus

Since the beginning of March, China has confronted the highly contagious Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, brought into the country from outside, with a high degree of social mobilization and considerable difficulty, but so far with considerable success. That has not stopped the American corporate press from repeatedly and severely denouncing China’s Zero-COVID policy, condemnations that rise in vitriol in proportion to China’s progress in beating back the tide of infections. 

Residents line up for the first round of mass COVID testing in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Chen Si, File)

In this regard, the recent New York Times report by the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau chief, Alexandra Stevenson, who reports on the news of the financial world, is particularly foul. Headlined, “The World Tried to Move Beyond COVID. China May Stand in the Way,” it caters to the prejudices of a deranged reactionary upper-middle-class layer who have staked their fortunes on ever-rising financial markets.

Stevenson opens with a provocative statement: “As the rest of the world learns to live with COVID-19, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, wants his country to keep striving to live without it—no matter the cost.”

Before addressing the various assertions the Times article makes, it bears reviewing the present state of the pandemic in China.

The current wave of infections across mainland China began in early March. Since then, China has documented close to three-quarter million cases, of which a significant majority were asymptomatic. Because of broad public health measures that included lockdowns and business closures, dynamic mass testing, and redirection of resources to build isolation centers and bolster medical treatment facilities, deaths were kept to less than 600, essentially all occurring in Shanghai except two in the northeast province of Jilin. By comparison, over the same period, the US reported 90,000 deaths from COVID.

The Chinese health authorities reported that there were 1,789 COVID cases on Sunday, of which 71 were newly imported. After reaching a peak of almost 27,000 in mid-April, the number of cases in Shanghai, China’s financial hub and the epicenter of the Omicron wave, had dropped to 1,369, of which 166 were symptomatic. The seven-day average has fallen below 3,000 daily cases, down more than 90 percent from its peak four weeks ago. Outside of Shanghai, only 349 new cases were registered across mainland China.

Already, many Shanghai-based companies are resuming operations. City officials are targeting mid-May for opening after achieving zero-COVID community transmission. More than 99 percent of all new cases are currently among those under lockdown or quarantine, accounting for 2 million of the city’s 26 million inhabitants. Nearly 18 million residents (70 percent) are in designated precautionary areas, including communities, villages, companies and other sites without a positive case for more than two weeks.

The elimination strategy appears promising despite repeated claims in the corporate media that Omicron can’t be eliminated. Deaths have been kept to the lowest possible level, life has been preserved, and the country is transitioning to reopening its production and distribution centers. Given this premise, Stevenson should be asked what she means by China’s intent to live without COVID “no matter the cost?” The cost for who? Obviously she cares only about the financial cost for Western investors, not the cost in human lives for the Chinese people.

The day before Stevenson’s report appeared in the Times, President Joe Biden acknowledged in a perfunctory prerecorded statement, using only 213 words, that over 1 million Americans have died from COVID. This is the same president who said, as a candidate in October 2020, that a president like Trump, who had allowed more than 200,000 deaths from COVID, should be considered disqualified from office. Under Biden’s tenure in the White House, more than 600,000 have lost their lives to the pandemic.

Stevenson made no mention of this as part of the “cost” of living with COVID. 

Nor does she acknowledge that the Times has played a central role in promoting the “herd immunity” policy that has morphed over the last two years into “living with the virus,” as the ruling classes in the imperialist countries have repeatedly prioritized profits over lives, allowing the pandemic to run wild, rather than impose temporary lockdowns on business operations that have been proven effective in halting the spread of the virus. This “let it rip” policy has led to the deaths of more than 20 million people globally, pushed hundreds of millions into poverty, and forced billions to face the manifold health consequences of chronic infections with a virus that will re-infect populations again and again.

Thomas Friedman pioneered the phrase “the cure can’t be worse than the disease” in a Times column published March 23, 2020, which asserted that measures such as lockdowns and school closures to block the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were off limits because they would destroy the economy. This slogan was picked up by the Trump administration and the media because it served the interests of finance capital. Now it serves as the basis of the policy of the Biden administration.

Stevenson is duplicitous when she writes, “For more than two years, China kept its COVID numbers enviably low by doggedly reacting to signs of an outbreak with testing and snap lockdowns. The success allowed the Communist Party to boast that it had prioritized life over death in the pandemic, unlike Western democracies where deaths from the virus soared.”

First, the issue of prioritization isn’t life vs. death. Stevenson conceals the real issue: it’s life vs. profits. And if “Western democracies” were envious of China’s low COVID numbers, then why didn’t they emulate the lessons of Chinese public health experiences and save the lives of their populations? Finally, it is a basic tenet of well-established public health policies, going back to the 19th century, to insist on “doggedly” chasing every infection to prevent mass outbreaks. This is not a specifically Chinese doctrine and has nothing to do with the Stalinist politics of the Chinese Communist Party.

Instead of dealing with these facts, however, Stevenson first depicts the lockdowns as harrowing and anti-democratic and then cites the observation of an “unnamed economist” that the policy is “zero movement, zero GDP.” 

The realities are otherwise, however. China’s economy remains intact. Its per capita death rate of four per million from COVID versus the US with 3,068 deaths per million has shown the superiority of the Zero-COVID strategy. Stevenson’s “no matter the cost” is only a more obscene version of the formula proposed by Friedman, openly declaring that when human life clashes with corporate profit, profit must win out.

It is telling that the one prominent health official whom she cites as part of her anti-China diatribe against Zero-COVID is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He said last Tuesday, “We have discussed this issue with Chinese experts, and we indicated that the approach would not be sustainable. And considering the behavior of the virus, I think a shift would be very important.”

The WHO director’s comment is a reactionary statement refuting his previous statements that the world should fight to save every life possible. This is the same organization that for two years resisted accepting the scientific evidence that the virus was airborne rather than carried in large droplets. The comment only betrays, objectively, the subordination of all public health measures to the interests of international corporations. Like the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the UN health agency has been transformed into an appendage of global finance capital.

Stevenson does cite an important study published in Nature from Fudan University in Shanghai, which found that if Omicron were allowed free rein in China, in six months, the country could expect 112 million symptomatic cases, 5.1 million hospital admissions, 2.7 million ICU admissions and 1.6 million deaths, as well as the catastrophic collapse of its health system.

The clear import of this study is that unleashing COVID in China would be a colossal catastrophe, not only for China, but for the world, since 100 million more cases means 100 million more opportunities for the virus to mutate into even deadlier and more infectious variants.

But Stevenson ignores this in favor of her obsession with financial rather than human cost. She proceeds to write, “Investors and business leaders worry that China’s rigid adherence to its Zero-COVID policy could send the economy into free fall. ‘It is high time for the government to change its strategy,’ said Fred Hu, a prominent Chinese investor. The benefits of Zero-COVID no longer outweigh the economic costs, he added. ‘Sticking to the Zero-COVID strategy would decimate its economy and undermine public confidence.’”  

In support of this concern, Stevenson writes, “By one estimate, nearly 400 million people in 45 cities have been under some form of lockdown in China in the past month, accounting for $7.2 trillion in annual gross domestic product.”

This is a number created in the spirit of Mark Twain’s aphorism against “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” China’s lockdown procedures are highly segmented, with cities broken up into small districts, each with rules enforced by local committees. If one district in a city of 10 million is under lockdown, generally because of a single positive test, then the entire 10 million is counted in the estimate prepared by Nomura Bank. Hence the slippery phrase employed by Stevenson: “some form of lockdown.”

The Times writer also ignores a salient fact that entirely refutes her portrayal of the Zero-COVID policy as repressive and undemocratic: it is widely popular among the Chinese people, something that is generally acknowledged even in hostile media reports.

Americans living in China have praised this policy, including one who commented on Stevenson’s article. Sean, who is now working from home in Shanghai, writes:

As an American living in China, I click on every article regarding China, and many, many are like this: taking perverse delight in putative failure of China’s zero Covid policy. This is unseemly but also factually delusional.

The USA has nearly 3,000 deaths per million from Covid.

China has 3...

China’s economy has not gone into recession:

China’s gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded 114 trillion yuan (about $18.1 trillion) in 2021, registering an increase of 8.1 percent over the previous year and an average growth of 5.1 percent over the preceding two years.

He concludes: “there is so much ideologically motivated disinformation in Western media it’s infuriating to someone who lives here.”

Sean’s post attracted more than 100 favorable responses in the comment section following Stevenson’s article, becoming the second highest rated by readers.

Rather than deal with this dose of reality, the Times evidently prefers to suppress it, engaging in its own form of political censorship, no less noxious than the Stalinist variety. Sean’s comment praising the Zero-COVID policy has now been deleted.

ICE has created a “surveillance dragnet” for accessing the personal information of all US citizens

Kevin Reed

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal police body under the direction of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has built a digital surveillance infrastructure and is accessing the personal information of Americans. This operation has nothing to do with immigration enforcement and has no outside oversight.

This is a primary conclusion of a two-year investigation by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology into the contracting and procurement practices of ICE. An extensive report on the investigation was published on May 10 under the title “American Dragnet: Data Driven Deportation in the 21st Century.”

In its Executive Summary, the report states, “Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives.”

The report summary continues, “By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”

The report states that ICE conducts its work, “without any judicial, legislative or public oversight,” and that the “personal information about the vast majority of people living in the US” is ending up in the hands of immigration officials, “simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.”

The Georgetown Law investigation is based on hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a review of more than 100,000 ICE spending transactions. Nina Wang, a policy associate with the Georgetown center, told the Guardian, “I was alarmed to discover just how easily federal immigration agents can pull detailed records from the most intimate corners of all our lives. In its attempts to target an ever-growing number of people for detention and deportation, ICE has reached into the private homes and lives of almost every person in America.”

Wang went on to tell the Guardian that ICE has an unfettered ability to trace the movement of anyone’s vehicle on the road, look up an address from utility bills and conduct facial recognition searches of photos on government-issued ID cards such as driver’s licenses, all without needing a search warrant.

Since 2008, the Georgetown report says ICE increased spending on new surveillance infrastructure fivefold from $71 million to $388 million. During that timeframe, the agency spent $1.3 billion on geolocation technology, which included contracts with private companies that own license plate scanning databases.

The report also details that the federal police agency spent $96 million on biometrics, especially facial recognition databases, $97 million on data lists provided by private brokers that gather information on US citizens from a host of sources, including more than 80 utility companies. The report said that ICE spent more than $500 million dollars on data analytics that enable it to sift through the enormous amount of information that it maintains.

Special Response Team (SRT) within Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) participates in a training exercise utilizing an armored vehicle at Fort Benning in Georgia [Credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]

Another critical aspect of the Georgetown investigation exposes the way in which ICE has used surveillance tools to intensify its attacks on immigrant rights. The report says, “The federal government built its immigration enforcement system on top of already unjust systems of policing and punishment.”

ICE was created with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and the signing into law of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 by George W. Bush on November 25, 2002. The act established DHS and the cabinet-level position of the Secretary of Homeland Security, which both began operations in 2003 just before the launching of the US invasion of Iraq. The creation of DHS was the largest federal government reorganization next to the establishment of the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1947.

DHS incorporated 23 previous federal agencies and consolidated them into 16 sub-departments including ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the US Coast Guard and the US Secret Service.

The adoption of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 amounted to the domestic side of the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act, the law passed six weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 which authorized the various US federal law enforcement organizations—including the FBI, NSA and CIA, and later the DHS—to violate the democratic rights of Americans and foreigners with impunity under the aegis of the “national security” needs of the US government.

According to the official verbiage of DHS, the purpose of ICE is to “protect America from cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.” However, the Georgetown investigation says, “ICE began broadening the scope of its data collection in response to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an overarching federal initiative to radically increase domestic surveillance under the auspices of the ‘war on terror.’”

As the Georgetown report explains, US Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia) was one of just nine senators to vote against the Homeland Security Act. At the time, Byrd called it an “enormous grant of power to the executive branch,” and he warned that DHS would function as “a massive chamber of secrets,” and “without any real mechanism to ensure those powers are not abused.”

Byrd added that the Homeland Security Act gave the Secretary of DHS, “almost unlimited access to intelligence ... without adequate protections against misuse.” On November 19, 2002, six days before President Bush signed it into law, Byrd said the White House “told us it is not planning to create a new domestic spy agency in the United States.”

The White House, as usual, was lying. The authorizations for domestic emergency “national security” measures led to the most extensive electronic surveillance program anywhere in the world. As detailed in 2013 by NSA and CIA intelligence analyst and whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the US government used the “war on terror” to move forward with a program to gather the electronic communications of everyone in the world. Meanwhile, with the use of specially designed software tools, as Snowden explained, security and law enforcement agencies are observing the online activity of targeted individuals in real time.

It is a fact that the imperialist wars launched by the Bush White House in the aftermath of 9/11, the continuation and extension of those wars by the Obama and Trump administrations and the present US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, have required an ever-deepening series of attacks on democratic rights within the US.

The revelations about the electronic dragnet operated by ICE are the latest in a series of reports that demonstrate—despite reassurances from Congress and the US judiciary that such programs either do not exist or function in accordance with constitutional protections—the US government is spying on the public continuously and preparing advanced electronic tools such as biometrics and facial recognition for repressive purposes.

Well aware of the popular opposition to war and expanding resistance to the criminal government response to the pandemic and the deepening economic crisis of the capitalist system, the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the state is preparing the surveillance infrastructure for mass repression. The working class can place no confidence in any section of the political establishment or the US government to defend its democratic rights. It must take up the fight with its own strength against the 24-hour electronic surveillance of the public by the government.

Madrid doctors and nurses on indefinite strike against temp work, poor conditions

Alejandro López

For a week now, 11,000 doctors and health workers in Madrid, Spain’s capital and most densely populated region, have been striking in defence of staffing levels and services, as well as for better pay and conditions in the sector.

Around the world, strikes are erupting against conditions created by over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as decades of privatisations and subordination of health care to profit. In Los Angeles, thousands of health care workers have been on strike at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for safe working conditions, improved staffing and better wages. Throughout the United States, tens of thousands nurses have mobilised to defend nurse RaDonda Vaught from being jailed for a medical error in 2017.

In Germany, the strike by nursing staff at university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia has spread to university hospitals in Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne and Münster. In Turkey, 20,000 doctors went on a nationwide strike last week, demanding better wages and benefits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and other staff internationally have worked without proper personal protective equipment and under horrific conditions. The ruling class’s “profit before lives” policy jointly implemented by governments and trade unions led to constant overwork taking care of an endless stream of deathly ill patients, with no end to the pandemic in sight.

This criminal COVID-19 policy has led to close to 20 million deaths worldwide. Many health workers have contracted COVID-19 and died. Many more have endured the psychological and emotional trauma of witnessing death on a mass scale.

The Madrid strike was sparked by the decision of right-wing Popular Party (PP) Madrid regional government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso to unexpectedly call new civil service exams, allowing her to sack several thousand health workers. Many have worked for years or decades in health care, amply demonstrating their qualifications for the jobs they currently hold as temporary contract workers. Ayuso’s move would be unprecedented, leaving thousands of experienced medical staff jobless.

Last month, Ayuso refused to renew the contracts of over 6,000 health workers who had been contracted as reinforcement health personnel during the pandemic.

The PP Madrid regional government has for decades abused the temporary employment contracts for its public hospitals, using national labour reforms passed by successive Socialist Party (PSOE), PP and now PSOE-Podemos governments with the support of Spain’s main trade unions, the social-democratic General Union of Labor (UGT) and the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO).

Among the 12,000 doctors in public hospitals under the control of the regional government, 55 percent have been on temporary contracts for years, including 82 percent of the doctors in ICUs. More than 6,000 doctors in the Madrid region do not have a long-term contract and have been going on temp contracts for years. In some specialties, civil service examinations required to obtain greater job security have not been called for twenty years.

Last year, after years of protests and strikes, the PSOE-Podemos government passed the National Law 20/2021 on the Reduction of Temporary Employment in Public Employment. The aim was to reduce the temporary contracts of 800,000 civil servants who were at risk of losing their jobs after 10, 20 or 30 years of going on temporary contracts. The new law, however, allowed each region to choose how it wanted to proceed. Jobs, minimum working conditions and staffing levels, and professional development were never guaranteed.

Days before the law passed, the PP regional government called for civil service examinations for 4,726 positions. This is a reactionary measure. Applicants will have to fill in multiple choice questions, based on memorisation of general medical knowledge. Doctors are demanding that the PP-run regional government suspend the traditional civil service examinations and replace them with a merit contest.

The indefinite strike has been called by the platforms of Doctors United for their Rights, Non-fixed Doctors and Physicians of Madrid, Somos Urgencias (We are Intensive Care Units) and the Amyts medical union. The unions CCOO, UGT, CSIT and Satse called off the strike after the region’s Ministry of Health reached an agreement with them to make 1,600 health professionals permanent through a merit-based examination. Amyts considers this 'insufficient,' as' it does not cover the thousands of temporary doctors.'

The PP regional government has reacted by attempting to crush the strike with draconian minimal service requirements. In outpatient consultations, 50 percent of workers are required to go to work; in urgent care units, this rises to 100 percent. Such units include dialysis, emergency, resuscitation, critical care, hospitalization, operating rooms, pathological anatomy, oncology day hospital and AIDS, pharmacy, diagnostic imaging, laboratories, organ extraction and transplantation, radiotherapy, hemodynamics, and admission and filing.

Effectively, doctors’ right to strike has been de facto outlawed. The trade unions, including the smaller Amyts that has continued the call to strike, have refused to mount a struggle against the minimum services and to expand the struggle to other civil servants facing similar struggles, such as in education.

Nonetheless, strikers have organised large demonstrations and rallies in front of several hospitals in the city of Madrid. Last Tuesday, hundreds of doctors gathered in front of the Madrid Assembly shouting 'We take care of you, we are mistreated' and 'Professional dignity, permanent contracts now.'

At the Doce de Octubre Hospital in Madrid, large group of about 200 doctors, with green suits and white coats, occupied the entire wide entrance staircase and the doors of the hospital. There, they shouted against job instability, megaphone in hand, behind a large banner that reads “Professional Dignity”. These protests have been repeated in front of each major hospital in the region in recent weeks.

Another indefinite strike in Ciudad Real of “home help” workers who assist those with disabilities or complex health care needs living at home resumed again last week, after it was suspended by the CCOO and UGT last week “as a sign of good faith.” Workers are fighting low pay and widespread abuse by employers of part-time, precarious contracts. As in Madrid, minimum service requirements of 50 to 100 percent of staff during strikes were imposed.

Such attempted union sabotage must be taken as a warning by health care staff and broader layers of workers in Spain and internationally. A powerful, international movement of health care workers is emerging. Fighting for its demands requires, however, breaking with the trade union bureaucracies and opposing reactionary pseudo-left parties such as Podemos, which in government has pursued a policy of accepting mass infection with COVID-19.

Spanish unions have isolated and allowed police forces to violently attack mass strikes by steelworkers in Cadiz and by truckers across all of Spain. Politically affiliated to the two ruling parties, they are implicated in all the policies that have needlessly made health workers’ lives intolerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

German government extends combat mission in Mali and Sahel

Johannes Stern

Berlin is playing an increasingly aggressive role in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. Almost daily, the federal government announces new sanctions against Moscow and the delivery of more heavy weapons to Kiev. Now it is also pushing ahead with German imperialism’s offensive in Africa. On Wednesday, the cabinet approved a massive expansion of the German war mission in Mali and throughout the entire Sahel region.

MINUSMA deployment in Mali

The government’s proposal, which will be voted on in the Bundestag (parliament) next week, increases German participation in the UN mission MINUSMA by 300 soldiers. The additional personnel are to be used primarily to take over tasks from French combat troops, who are expected to be withdrawn from Mali in the next few months and redeployed to neighbouring countries.

The WSWS described this drawdown, announced by French President Emmanuel Macron on February 17, as driven by “explosive popular opposition to French imperialism, notably in the aftermath of NATO’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan last year and after repeated massacres committed by French troops or local militias set up with tacit French backing in the Sahel region of Northern Africa.”

Germany is now responding to the end of the infamous French-led “anti-terrorism” missions “Barkhane” and “Tabuka” in Mali by increasing its own presence in the geostrategically important and resource-rich country.

“The personnel ceiling will increase from 1,100 to 1,400 soldiers in order to do justice to the envisaged German contribution to compensate for capabilities previously taken on by France…” the German government’s motion states. This concerns medical services, support forces for the continued operation of the airfield in Gao, as well as “an additional security company for property protection” and efforts “to support the operations of our ground-based reconnaissance forces.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that Berlin is preparing, behind the backs of the population, a massive combat operation in Mali—and increasingly throughout the Sahel—for which more and more soldiers are being mobilised. “For redeployment phases as well as in the context of troop rotations and in emergency situations,” the mandate text states, “the personnel ceiling may be temporarily exceeded.”

In this context, MINUSMA is “authorised to take all necessary measures, including the use of military force, in order to fulfil the mandate…” Although “German participation” in Mali is for air transport, air refueling and “logistical and other support,” the Niamey military base in Niger is also “part of the area of operations.”

European police missions are also being extended to the whole region. “Another pillar of Germany’s engagement” would be “support for the further development” of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions EUCAP Sahel Mali and EUCAP Sahel Niger. Germany would participate in these with a total of 30 soldiers and “thus complement the police participation in MINUSMA.”

In addition, the EU mission EUTM will focus on Niger and other Sahel states. According to the corresponding government proposal, up to 300 Bundeswehr soldiers are to help improve the “operational capabilities of the security forces of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Niger and of the Joint Task Force of the G5 Sahel states.” This involves “military advice and training, including pre-deployment training” and “escort duties.”

Massacres carried out by the Malian regime, which came to power in a coup in June 2021 in alliance with Russian forces, are cited as official justification for the relocation of EUTM. “The reports of human rights violations by Malian and Russian troops, which we read in the newspapers here and have of course also heard about on the ground, are terrible,” complained Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the Bundestag. It was now a matter of “standing with the people on the ground against these forces that care nothing for human rights, nothing for democracy and nothing for a rule-based order.”

This is nothing but absurd propaganda. Berlin is in a pact with the Malian coup regime against the “people on the ground” who oppose the occupation of their country by the imperialist powers. The German government’s mandate states that it wants to “exert pressure on the Malian transition government on the one hand, but at the same time keep channels of dialogue open and offer support in a spirit of partnership.”

The massacres are being committed by the very forces that the Bundeswehr has trained over many years. Parliamentarian Katja Leikert, who sits on the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee for the Christian Democrat (CDU/CSU) parliamentary group, had to admit that the perpetrators were “Malian troops—it has to be said here—who were trained by German officers with good intentions and who are now murdering alongside Russian troops.”

And even that is not the whole truth. In fact, the imperialist powers and their troops on the ground have no “good intentions” but are the main perpetrators of terror and massacres of civilians.

Mali, in particular, is a tragic example of this. The country was plunged into the abyss by the NATO war against Libya in 2011. After an influx of weapons and militias into Mali in the wake of Libya's destruction, Tuareg fighters and Islamist forces began an uprising in the north of the country against the central government in Bamako in early 2012.

When the official Malian army was on the verge of collapse, after fierce fighting and a military coup in March 2012, the former colonial power France intervened in early 2013 to secure the north of the country, which is particularly rich in raw materials. The mission was presented as a “fight against terror”. In reality, it was part of a renewed scramble for Africa by the imperialist powers.

Germany was involved from the beginning and supported the French intervention—initially with logistics and personnel. At the end of April 2013, the Bundeswehr began training the first soldiers on the ground. Since then, mandates have been repeatedly extended and expanded—and with them the brutalisation of the war.

The anger in the population escalated after imperialist crimes—such as the French airstrike on a wedding party in Bounty in early 2021, in which 22 people were killed—and numerous massacres that occurred under the eyes of the occupying forces. In May 2021, the military carried out another putsch, significantly, after the Malian trade unions had called off a planned general strike in the capital Bamako.

A declared war aim of the imperialist powers is to suppress the impoverished masses in the region and prevent them from fleeing to Europe. The Sahel is characterised by “a high level of instability..., combined with a massive increase in flight and migration, which may also affect Europe”, the German government warns in its mandate text.

At the same time, the aim is to pursue economic and geopolitical interests and to push back the influence of other powers—first and foremost Russia. “If MINUSMA were to withdraw from Mali, the vacuum would be filled even more by other forces,” Baerbock warned in the Bundestag. This would apply “to Islamist fighters”, but “also to Russian forces”.

As in the NATO war against Russia, the Bundeswehr's overt display in Africa is part of German imperialism's return to the world stage. On behalf of the entire ruling class, Baerbock proclaimed that they were not only “concentrating on what is happening on our own doorstep” but were “continuing to assume our responsibility in the world”. This was also “the message we are sending by supporting this MINUSMA mandate”. Germany was “the largest Western troop contributor in Mali” and was “not withdrawing from the world”.

NATO, G7 threaten military escalation against Russia and beyond

Alex Lantier

The NATO alliance is preparing a vast escalation of its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and of imperialist wars and intrigue around the globe. This emerged from two summits this weekend in Germany by the foreign ministers of NATO and of the G7 group of the world’s wealthiest countries: the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan, France, Italy and Canada.

Yesterday, Finland and Sweden confirmed that they would join NATO against Russia. Sweden’s ruling Social-Democrats said they will apply to join NATO, after Finland declared it would do so this week. “Today the Swedish Social Democratic Party took a historic decision to say yes to apply for a membership in NATO,” Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted, as Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson pledged to “assure that there is broad parliamentary support in the Riksdag for a Swedish membership application.”

At the same time, NATO military exercises unfolded all along Russia’s western border. “Defender Europe” exercises involve 18,000 NATO troops in Poland and other Eastern European countries; “Hedgehog” exercises, 15,000 NATO troops in Estonia; “Wettiner Heide” exercises, 7,500 in Germany; and “Iron Wolf” exercises, 3,000 in Lithuania. In Finland, the Arrow 22 exercise involves Finland’s Armored Brigade and tanks from the United States, Britain, Latvia and Estonia.

The official fairy tale that NATO is helping innocent Ukraine against an unprovoked invasion by Russia is dissolving, as NATO uses Ukraine to justify a drastic reshaping of global geopolitics. Indeed, the remarks of NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg closing the NATO summit made clear that, long before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine this February, NATO was arming Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.

“NATO is stronger than ever. Europe and North America are solidly united. Ukraine can win this war,” Stoltenberg claimed. He added that NATO “Allies have committed and delivered security assistance to Ukraine worth billions of dollars, and over the years, NATO and Allies have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces. All of this is making a real difference on the battlefield every day.”

Stoltenberg was echoing former US Army-Europe commander Ben Hodges, who has said Washington should declare that in Ukraine, “We want to win.” Hodges also called for “breaking the back of Russia.”

Stoltenberg said this was part of a global expansion of NATO operations: “Ministers also discussed our upcoming Madrid Summit. We will make important decisions to reinforce NATO’s deterrence and defense to reflect the new security reality in Europe; to further support and engage with like-minded partners, near and far; and to adopt our next Strategic Concept, NATO’s blueprint for an age of strategic competition.”

Beyond current NATO member states, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, Ukraine and Georgia are also expected to attend the June 28-30 NATO summit in Madrid. Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government will respond to mass protests that are expected by deploying 25,000 riot police to lock down Spain’s capital.

A preview of the new NATO strategic concept came in the G7 foreign ministers’ communiqué on Saturday. This gigantic 30-page document is not in fact a summary of summit discussions, but a sprawling list of demands from the most powerful imperialist countries to virtually the entire globe. It addresses Russia, ex-Yugoslavia, the Indo-Pacific area, China and the East and South China Seas, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, the Sahel, Gulf of Guinea countries, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran and North Korea.

On the Ukraine war, the G7 communiqué especially targets, beyond Russia itself, China and Belarus. It denounces Belarus as “complicit” in the war by “enabling Russia’s aggression” and warns that Belarus has failed “to abide by its international obligations.”

The G7 demands China cut off trade with Russia, which faces sweeping US financial sanctions, and abandon its claims in the South China Sea. It orders China “not to undermine sanctions imposed on Russia” and to “desist from engaging in information manipulation, disinformation and other means to legitimize Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.” It also tells China to give “immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang and Tibet,” two strategic regions of western China, to UN officials and other observers.

On Russia, the G7 declares: “Russia has violated the UN Charter ... and will have to face consequences for its actions. We reject any notion of spheres of influence and any use of force that is not in compliance with international law. We will never recognize borders Russia has attempted to change by military aggression, and will uphold our engagement in the support of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea, and all states.”

What NATO is proposing is a global eruption of imperialist militarism. In the 30 years since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union eliminated the main military counterweight to NATO, it has gone on a neo-colonial rampage. It has bombed, organized coups against, invaded or militarily occupied the territory or officials of virtually every country listed in the G7 communiqué. NATO wars like those that shattered Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Mali altogether cost several million lives.

Putin’s decision to respond to NATO’s arming of Ukraine by a pre-emptive invasion is reactionary, but one must make one obvious point: NATO’s condemnations of Russia for violating international law reek of hypocrisy. From the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 to its unilateral bombing of Syria in 2017, NATO has dispensed with the pretense that its wars are governed by international law.

Workers must take NATO’s military escalation against nuclear-armed Russia and the megalomania of its geopolitical ambitions as an urgent warning. As the war in Ukraine drags on, and the Russian army consolidates its military hold over largely Russian-speaking areas in the south and east of Ukraine, the danger of an uncontrolled military escalation between NATO and Russia, ending in all-out nuclear war, is mounting by the day.

It is ever clearer that for NATO to “win” the Russia-Ukraine war, as Stoltenberg and Hodges demand, it will have to attack Russia directly. The integration into NATO of Finland, with its large army and 1,300-km border with Russia, and the constant drumbeat of NATO war games along Russia’s borders show that preparations for such a suicidally reckless policy are well advanced.

The force that must be mobilized against the mounting danger of a nuclear Third World War is the international working class. This includes, in particular, the Russian and Ukrainian working class, mobilized on the basis of the Bolshevik revolutionary traditions that led to their unification, a century ago, in the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of the Soviet Union.

The massive hardship and suffering caused by the NATO war on Russia is preparing revolutionary eruptions of the class struggle internationally. The G7 foreign ministers called to build a “Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance,” declaring, “The geopolitical landscape has fundamentally changed. Russia’s unprovoked and pre-meditated war of aggression has exacerbated the global economic outlook with sharply rising food, fuel and energy prices.”

Around the world, strikes and anti-government protests like the mass movement in Sri Lanka demanding the toppling of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse are mounting. The G7 statement on the food crisis is, however, another political fraud: it blames Russia for the food crisis, threatening hundreds millions of lives, which NATO played a central role in creating.

The central banks of the United States, Japan, Britain and the European Union are freezing hundreds of billions of dollars of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, making it impossible to pay Russia in dollars for its products on world markets. While the Russian invasion keeps much of Ukrainian grain from reaching world markets, draconian NATO sanctions have thus made it impossible to export Russian grain and fertilizer inputs. Lithuania, a NATO and EU member state, has likewise blocked the export of potash from Belarus through its ports.

Cryptocurrency market in turmoil

Nick Beams

The cryptocurrency market was thrown into turmoil last week as the market value of bitcoin, the most widely used cryptocurrency, continued to fall and so-called “stablecoins” are collapsing.

An advertisement for Bitcoin cryptocurrency is displayed on a street in Hong Kong, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. [AP Photo/Kin Cheung]

The use of stablecoins has increased over the past two years because they are supposed to provide some protection against the wild swings in the cryptocurrency markets, above all for bitcoin which has experienced several plunges in its history.

Stablecoins have been likened to chips in a gambling casino. They can be used to buy cryptocurrencies without the use of government-backed currencies, principally the US dollar, enabling the user to make more rapid transactions. Deals involving regular currencies often take days to complete.

Stablecoins are supposed to provide a degree of security because they can be cashed in, like a chip in the casino, at their face value, dollar for dollar.

There are two types of stablecoin: those that are backed by holdings of financial assets, including cash, government bonds, corporate debt and those that seek to maintain their dollar-for-dollar peg through financial engineering based on the use of algorithms.

But last week one of the latter type, TerraUSD and its associated stablecoin, Luna, collapsed. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) their demise “saddled investors with billions of dollars in losses and ricocheted back into other cryptocurrencies.”

Seven days ago, Luna was trading at $81. It is now worthless, and Terra has been delisted from major exchanges meaning it is effectively finished after once being valued at $40 billion.

The Financial Times (FT) reported that, according to the research firm, CryptoCompare, the Luna episode was “the largest destruction in this amount of time in a single project in crypto’s history.”

Another trader and enthusiastic supporter of crypto told the FT Luna’s failure was “one of the greatest catastrophes crypto has ever seen” and a “real wake-up call” that it is possible crypto prices can fall to zero.

The FT commented that while Terra’s demise was not systemic to the broader crypto market, it had far-reaching implications.

“What matters more is that the episode has renewed concerns potential cracks in other stablecoins, including the biggest of them all, Tether, calling into question the foundations behind the crypto industry.”

These cracks became evident when Tether, which is regarded as crucial to the functioning of the crypto market, “broke the buck” for a period and was at one stage trading at 95.11 cents, well below the $1 peg. It recalled a key episode in the 2008 financial crisis when a mutual fund went the same way.

Tether operates on a different basis from Terra. It claims to maintain the dollar peg by holding reserves of traditional financial assets such as government and corporate bonds. It is the biggest player in the $180 billion stablecoin market and is supposedly worth $80 billion.

But money flowed out last week.

“We had pretty much $3 billion [in] redemptions, and they were liquidated pretty quickly through our banking channels,” Tether’s chief technology officer Pail Ardiono revealed in a live audio Twitter conversation on Thursday. Redemption requests ranged from $100,000 to as much as $600 million.

In an interview with the FT, Ardiono committed to maintain the dollar peg and claimed the company had bought a “ton” of US government debt which it could sell to meet that objective. But he refused to give details of the holdings of government bonds because he did not “want to give out our secret sauce.”

He said Tether was not a public company and would keep that information to itself “but we are working with many big institutions in the traditional financial space.”

The FT report noted that last year the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million because it said the company had made “untrue or misleading” statements about its reserves.

The fall of Terra and the failure of Tether to maintain dollar parity, even if only for a short period, has sent a shock wave through the crypto markets raising major concerns.

“Cash is supposed to be cash. When it’s not, like when money markets froze during the financial crisis, sheer panic ensures,” Andree Beer of the US investment firm Dynamic Beta told the FT.

And because Tether and other stablecoin firms have large holdings in the short-term credit market efforts to maintain dollar parity by selling their assets could have spillover effects.

Last year the rating agency Fitch warned that if Tether holders were to seek to turn their tokens into cash it could destabilise short-term credit markets where the company holds much of its assets.

“The rapid growth of stablecoin issuance could, in time, have implications for the functioning of short-term credit markets,” it said, pointing to the “potential contagion risks linked to the liquidation of stable coin reserve holdings.”

Since that warning was issued, credit markets have become more fragile because of the rise in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve and the prospect that further significant rises are to come.

If Tether were forced to unload a significant portion of its holdings of $24 billion worth of commercial paper, its $35 billion of Treasury bonds or $4 billion worth of corporate bonds it could cause reverberations in these markets.

Calling for increased regulation of the crypto market, an FT editorial noted that if Tether did have $80 billion of assets this would place it among the world’s biggest hedge funds.

“If a fire sale of these assets ensues as Tether tries to retain its dollar peg, or faces a wave of redemptions, the sheer size of such moves could make already jittery financial markets even more volatile,” it said.

The crypto crisis also attracted the attention of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Testifying at a Senate hearing last week, she pointed to the run on TerraUSD.

“I think that simply illustrates that this is a rapidly growing product and that there are risks to financial stability.

“I wouldn’t characterize it at this scale as a real threat to financial stability but they’re growing very rapidly. They present the same kind of risks that we have known for centuries in connection with bank runs.”

FT journalist Katie Martin warned that while the stable coins TerrasUSD and Tether did not operate in the same way the differences were small.

“Either these things can maintain the one-for-one peg with the dollar or they can’t. If they can’t, then the belief system underpinning crypto is in trouble.”

The fall in the main cryptocurrency, bitcoin has been dramatic. After reaching a record high of almost $69,000 last November, it went down to as low as $25,000 last week before moving up again slightly. The decline means that anyone who got into the market after the end of 2020 and stayed there is now under water and the losses could extend to hedge funds.

According to the WSJ over the past six weeks at least $1 trillion in supposed crypto currency value has simply evaporated.

It remains to be seen how the crypto turbulence will play out this week and in the coming period. But whatever ups and downs may take place, it is yet another indication of the deepening crisis of the financial system as the massive inflow of trillions of dollars from the Fed and other central banks over the past decade has promoted new and ever more arcane forms of speculation and outright swindling and criminality in some cases.