Report points to corporate price gouging amid soaring inflation in US

Shannon Jones

As household budgets stagger under the impact of soaring prices for fuel, food, rent and other necessities, the oil companies and other sections of big business are enjoying massive profits, in part through gouging consumers.

Gas prices in downtown Los Angeles, California on Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

According to a new report issued by the liberal think tank Roosevelt Institute, a review of data from 3,698 US-operating companies found that both markups and profits soared to their highest level since the 1950s.

In 2021, the average markup reached 1.72, meaning that the typical price charged by a company was 72 percent higher than their costs. That is up from a markup of 1.56 throughout the 2010s. Last year saw the largest rise in markups since the 1950s and two and a half times higher than the next largest annual markup. Among the sectors that the study found having the largest markups were oil and gas, real estate, quarrying and mining. The study found that the financial sector had the largest single markup overall, pointing to massive profiteering by the Wall Street banks.

The report also looked at net profit margins, net income divided by net sales. “Here we see a more consistent range, with net profit margins increasing from a yearly average of 5.5 percent from 1960 to 1980 to averaging 6 percent during the 2010s. In 2021, it jumped to 9.5 percent—again its highest value on record. Profits were consistently up across definitions.”

Oil companies in particular enjoyed massive profits in the first quarter of 2022, bolstered by the price rises triggered by the war in Ukraine. Oil giant ExxonMobil alone saw $5.5 billion in profits, double its results in the first quarter of 2021. Shell raked in $9 billion during the first quarter, its best single quarter result ever. BP reported $6.2 billion for the quarter, not counting a loss for offloading its holdings in a Russian-controlled oil company. It was BP’s best quarter in 10 years and Shell also reported a significant rise. Chevron saw a rise and Conoco’s profits showed a more than fivefold increase since 2020. All told, the Big Five oil giants raked in $35 billion in the first quarter. The 25 top oil companies made $205 billion in profits in 2021.

According to a recent New York Times article, profits in the S&P 500 were up 70 percent in 2021 from 2020 and 33 percent higher than in 2019 before the pandemic. The same report noted that on the whole companies made an “estimated $200 billion in additional operating profits last year because of that increase in margins.”

These figures further debunk the pro-business claims that inflation is the result of a “wage-price spiral” where supposedly excessive wage increases are driving up the prices of goods. The Roosevelt Institute study concluded, “We find that 2021 was largely driven by increased sales, with costs (including wages) increasing only slightly. This is inconsistent with any indication of a wage-price spiral.”

It added that “changes to labor and worker compensation are not driving factors in recent markups. Indeed, workers are not the only economic agents that affect business pricing decisions.”

The claim that wage demands are a driving force of inflation is further undermined by the fact that real hourly earnings fell 3.0 between May 2021 and May 2022, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Inflation rose at an 8.6 percent annual rate in May. The Consumer Price Index, a more realistic measure of inflation based on a sampling of goods and services purchased by typical urban customer, rose 9.2 percent. Wage increases were far below that level, ranging from between 2 and 4 percent for most contracts negotiated by unions in 2021, which were below the average increase for nonunion workers.

Last February, a day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United Steelworkers (USW) announced it had reached a new contract settlement for 30,000 US oil refinery workers, blocking a strike. USW President Tom Conway boasted that it was a “responsible” settlement, which “did not add to price gouging and inflationary pressures,” as though the crass profiteering of ExxonMobil et al. was somehow the fault of workers. The deal imposed a minuscule 2.5 percent raise in 2022, ensuring a massive further cut in the living standards of oil workers, whose wages have already been slashed by inflation.

Despite the sabotage by the unions, strikes are on the rise as workers struggle to keep pace with inflation. According to the Cornell University School of Industrial Relations Strike Tracker, there have been 153 strikes involving about 73,500 workers from January through May of this year, compared to 78 strikes involving some 22,500 over the same time period in 2021. That is a near doubling in the number of strikes and a threefold increase in the number of workers on strike

The fiction of an “overheated” labor market is being used to justify a series of sharp interest rate increases by the US Federal Reserve aimed at undermining workers’ attempts to defend their living standards by provoking a recession and increasing unemployment. The rate hikes will further hit the budgets of working-class families by increasing the amount they must pay for credit cards, car loans, mortgages and other debt.

While there is no question that powerful corporations have used the crisis to further gouge the public, surging global inflation is fundamentally the result of the financial policies both parties have conducted since the crash of 2008. Central banks have poured literally trillions of dollars into the financial markets and directly into the coffers of the corporations. In addition, the criminal decision to allow the pandemic to spread unchecked in every country but China has led to the disruption of supply chains and chaos more broadly in the economy. This has been aggravated by the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Add to this the staggering cost of the arms buildup underway in the US and the countries of Western Europe, absolutely nonproductive from the standpoint of social needs. This will be paid for by the working class through cuts in social spending and the further driving up of prices.

Biden has blamed Russia for surging inflation calling rising living expenses “Putin’s price hikes.” At the same time, he has wagged his finger at the oil companies for price-gouging “in a time of war.” But the president will do nothing to stop the profiteering by Big Oil. Meanwhile, working with unions, he has imposed a de facto cut in real wages on workers.

While the authors of the Roosevelt Institute study document corporate price gouging, they offer only tepid solutions, suggesting stepped-up antitrust enforcement or an excess profits tax. Along these lines, US Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden of Oregon has introduced legislation for an excess profits tax on gas and oil companies with more than $1 billion revenue.

Aside from the fact that these measures are political theatre and stand little to no chance of being enacted, they do not tackle the fundamental problem, which is the private ownership of banking, oil and gas, transport and other vital economic pillars. The oil companies will evade an excess profits tax just as they use an army of accountants to avoid paying corporate taxes now.

Inflation is part of a broader catastrophe being inflicted on mankind by the failure of the capitalist profit system, which has allowed the unchecked spread of a preventable pandemic and is now threatening to unleash a global war.

Afghanistan earthquake exposes disaster caused by decades of US occupation

Jean Shaoul

A 6.1-magnitude earthquake in a remote area of Afghanistan has killed at least 1,000 people and injured at least 1,500. While the worst affected area is the mountainous Paktika province, deaths have also been reported in the eastern provinces of Khost and Nangarhar. Many more bodies are thought to be buried in mud as heavy rain hampers rescue efforts.

The quake is the deadliest since 2002, when a 6.1 magnitude tremor killed about 1,000 people in the north of the country. It struck early Wednesday morning about 30 miles southwest of Khost, southeast of the capital Kabul, according to the United States Geological Survey. Its relatively shallow depth of six miles worsened its impact, with “strong and long jolts” felt in Kabul and tremors felt as far away as Lahore in Pakistan, 300 miles from the epicentre.

Thousands have been forced to sleep outside in unseasonable, near freezing temperatures as entire villages, largely built from clay and straw, have collapsed. The severely limited infrastructure in the country is making it very difficult to provide relief. Afghanistan’s skeleton health care system is unable to cope under normal circumstances, let alone handle the natural disasters that plague the country. With few airworthy planes and helicopters, the government had to call off the emergency search and rescue after 24 hours and issue an urgent appeal for international aid.

These appalling conditions are the result of the catastrophic encounter of Afghanistan with American imperialism. This began, in 1979, with the intervention of the Carter administration and the CIA to finance and arm Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in a proxy war against the Soviet-backed government.

US imperialism believed it could use the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an opportunity to overcome its economic decline abroad and its social conflicts at home, using its military might to oversee a “New World Order” in the interests of its corporate and financial elite.

In October 2001, following the attacks of September 11, the United States launched a war and occupation, undertaken in pursuit of economic interests concealed from the public under the guise of the “war on terrorism” against a government it claimed was harbouring bin Laden.

The human and social costs of the war in Afghanistan have been catastrophic and are ongoing today. According to official figures that undoubtedly understate the casualties, 164,436 Afghans were killed during the war, together with 2,448 US soldiers, 3,846 US military contractors and 1,144 soldiers from other NATO countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans and tens of thousands of NATO personnel were wounded. The war and occupation have cost the American public some $2 trillion, with a further $6.5 trillion to be paid out in interest payments over the years.

The war has produced one of the largest refugee populations in the world. As of the beginning of this year, before the war in Ukraine, about 1 in 10—that is, 3 million—refugees are Afghan by birth, mostly living in neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Three in four Afghans have suffered internal or external displacement in their lifetime.

According to the World Bank, Afghanistan is the sixth poorest country in the world, with a gross national income per capita of only $500. The United Nations estimates that 23 million Afghans, or more than half of the population, suffer from acute hunger. An estimated 8.7 million are at risk of famine, while 5 million children are on the brink of starvation. And this is before the surge in the prices of basic commodities over the past several months.

The Afghan war, bizarrely named Operation Enduring Freedom, spawned a whole new lexicon of criminal activities: extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, drone warfare and waterboarding, to mention but a few.

It was WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, by publishing the Afghan war logs in 2010, a vast trove of leaked US military documents, brought to the world’s attention evidence of the criminality of the war. The Afghan war logs exposed the myth that the occupation of Afghanistan was a “good war,” supposedly waged to defeat terrorism, extend democracy, and protect women’s rights.

They revealed the mass killings of civilians by both US and UK forces, the underreporting and cover-up of civilian deaths and war crimes, including numerous occasions when US and British troops opened fire on civilians. But not one of the criminals responsible for the war has been prosecuted, much less punished. Instead, it is Assange who has languished in London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison for the last three years, awaiting extradition to the US on charges under the Espionage Act that carry 175 years in prison.

Afghanistan’s plight has been further exacerbated by Washington’s theft of Afghanistan’s financial assets and imposition of an economic blockade—tantamount to starving the country to death—on the country after the Taliban took control last summer amid the US military’s humiliating withdrawal from its longest-ever war.

The White House left the country in ruins facing an enormous humanitarian catastrophe. Throughout the 20 years of occupation, the US and its allies did nothing to develop Afghanistan. Instead, its economy was shattered, its agriculture undermined by aid. This, along with the insecurity, drought, and natural disasters, played into the hands of Afghanistan’s warlords and drug dealers as impoverished farmers turned to poppy cultivation and the opium trade.

The disastrous state of Afghanistan underscores the devastating impact of US imperialism’s four decades of covert operations, war, and occupation on what was already one of the poorest countries on the planet. It must serve as a warning to workers throughout the world about what the US and NATO have in store for Ukraine.

In her last piece for the New York Times, published on February 23, the late Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton from 1997 until 2001, warned—as did several other commentators—that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “It would be far from a repeat of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014; it would be a scenario reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

She was referring to the US’s use of proxy forces during the 1980s, supported, hosted, and trained by Pakistan and funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, to unseat the Soviet Union-aligned Afghan government and undermine Moscow’s influence in the Caspian basin and the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan itself is a treasure trove of untapped minerals, variously estimated at $1 to $3 trillion.

In the conflicts and mass destruction that followed, the Taliban was nurtured and brought to power with Washington’s blessing in the belief that the Taliban would help stabilize Afghanistan after 15 years of war while at the same time exert increasing pressure on China and Russia.

Albright’s words should be taken seriously. In 1996, when as US ambassador to the United Nations, she was asked by the 60 Minutes news show whether she thought about the price to the Iraqi people of the devastating sanctions imposed by the US on Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War that had starved Iraq of medicines and food and killed at least 500,000 Iraqi children at that time. Albright replied, without disputing the figure, “We think the price is worth it.”

After two decades of US-backed proxy wars and military occupation, Afghanistan has been brutalized and impoverished. Its fate is a warning for what US imperialism holds in store for everything it touches, whether its nominal “allies” or the targets of US regime-change operations.

With the ever-expanding US war against Russia, the US is preparing to bring the type of devastation wrought upon Afghanistan and Iraq to Europe, at an even greater cost in lives and treasure.

German Ford factory faces closure, with the collusion of the union

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Ford workers demonstrate after the announcement of the closure of the Saarlouis plant, June 22, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

The result has come that many workers had feared. On Wednesday, Ford Motor Company officially announced its decision to build its next generation of electric vehicles in Almussafes, Spain, and not its German plant in Saarlouis. The 4,600 workers employed in Saarlouis, plus around 1,500 workers in the adjacent supplier park, face redundancy when production of the Ford Focus ceases at the end of 2025, when the factory is slated to close.

At the same time it was made clear to the 6,000 workers in Spain that they will also suffer as a result of the decision: with wage cuts, longer working times, increased flexibility and, above all, three-digit job cuts.

Many workers in Saarlouis, with whom the WSWS was in contact before, during and after the works meeting, were angrier with the union and the hypocritical charade by works council Chairman Markus Thal than with the company announcement. “This is nothing but lies and deception,” one worker declared directly after the works meeting.

Last September the company announced it would close either the German plant in Saarlouis or the Spanish factory in Almussafes near Valencia. At that time the WSWS warned that the works councils of both plants were outbidding one another with offers to make cuts, thereby “trying to prove to the company board that their respective site could produce more profitably than the other.” The losers would be Ford employees in both plants.

The works councils in Germany are now pretending they fought to keep the plant open. “We were lied to, cheated and fooled,” claimed Saarlouis works council Chairman Thal. The works councils refer to a “stitch-up” and “sham procedure.”

This turns reality on its head. Yes, it was a “stitch-up,” but the works council and the IG Metall union were and are part of the game. The works council had sent out notice of the works meeting Wednesday to inform workers about the “status of the bidding competition” more than two weeks ago. Then, allegedly, shortly before the meeting, the works council was informed that the company had decided in favour of the Spanish plant—but nobody believes this.

The works council’s notices informed the workforce they should prepare for an extended meeting Wednesday beginning at 2:00 p.m. that would then reconvene at 7:30 a.m. the next day, “depending on the decision.” It is clear the works council already knew the decision.

While the works meeting was still in progress, flyers were distributed under the heading “breach of promise,” calling for a demonstration and rally. Everything was prepared, the police and the public order officials were informed about the action and were waiting for workers when they left the factory.

“You can’t organise and do something like this in a quarter of an hour,” said one Ford worker. “They knew about it beforehand. I feel like I’ve been had, by the company and the works council.”

The version of the bidding process put forward by IG Metall and the works council at the meeting, the protest rally and in leaflets prepared beforehand can only be described as bold-faced lies. The leaflet of the general works council, signed by its chairmen Benjamin Gruschka and Thal, claims in its very first sentence that the works council had only been informed on the same day.

As if they take the workers for idiots, the pair declared they had “roundly” condemned the bidding competition they had themselves spent months organising! They even had the nerve to claim they had tried to act in concert with their Spanish colleagues. In fact, they did everything they could to ensure the closure of the Spanish plant by offering job and wage cuts and subsidies in Germany, instead of organising a common struggle against Ford.

It was this spineless and submissive attitude, oriented solely towards the company’s profits, that encouraged management to demand even more cuts in Spain and wind up production in Saarlouis.

The works council is now boasting it would have offered up wage cuts not only in Saarlouis but in all of Ford’s German plants. According to the twisted thinking of the union bureaucrats, allowing workers in other factories to suffer in the bidding competition amounts to a “declaration of solidarity.” Instead of a joint struggle, the joint renunciation of jobs and livelihoods is the new type of solidarity IG Metall is trying to impose.

Thal and Co. are now huffing and puffing about the fact that the company failed to take into account the cuts the union had organised and that Valencia was unfairly awarded the new contract. Their cries of “scandal,” “breach of promise” or “fraud” are akin to the pickpocket who shouts, “Stop thief!” They themselves organised the bidding process, hid it from workers and sabotaged any serious struggle to defend jobs.

Even now, the works council and the unions reject any struggle to keep the plant open and are offering their services to Ford management to organise the smooth liquidation of the factory. Employees were due to be informed about further plans on Thursday.

“We will now have to work on alternatives for the Saarlouis plant.” This, Thal said, was the most important task for the coming weeks and months. “We, as the general works council, will do that just as intensively as we have done in the last few months.” At Wednesday’s press conference Thal announced he planned to negotiate social plans and tariffs. He said that workers may strike to achieve these ends, i.e., strikes for more favourable redundancy payments instead of defending the factory.

Wednesday’s rally gave a foretaste of the toothless protests the union now plans to organise. The workers were given whistles to blow and let off steam, and the protest was deliberately organised far away from the factory gates, in other words, to prevent workers from contemplating occupying a gate or even the plant and actually going on strike. Instead they were told that after 2025 the production of a model would end and were then carted off to a demonstration and rally where once again Thal and another representative of IG Metall feigned their surprise and anger just as they had done prior to the factory meeting.

Workers must draw the lessons from the past few years and especially the last six months. If the workforce in Saarlouis allows the works councils and IG Metall to continue where they have now left off, it will lead to a disaster. The gradual closure of the plant will impact the entire region, leading to a rapid decline in wages and prospects. Workers have reported that when they apply for alternative jobs, they are offered very low wages, such as 12 euros an hour working in logistics. This is the future the works council is organising.

Child hospitalisations rise as new UK COVID wave begins

Liz Smith & Margot Miller

Behind the Johnson government’s pretence that the pandemic is over and we should “live with the virus”, the number of COVID cases is surging in Britain. Infections shot up last week by 43 percent, with 425,800 new cases. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), one in 50 people in England had the virus.

The rise may be driven by new variants BA.4 and BA.5. Alongside another variant, BA.2.12.1, these variants replicate more effectively in the lungs than BA.2, indicating they could be more lethal.

Total daily hospital admissions for all age groups in England rose gradually from 443 on June 4, to 842 on June 15.

Parents take children to a primary school in Bournemouth, UK following the reopening of schools nationally. March, 2021 (WSWS media)

In the week from June 5-June 11, hospital admissions among children (0-17) rose 50 percent from 147 the previous week to 220, after falling steadily since April. For the youngest children (0-5), for whom a vaccine has not been approved in the UK, the rise was 60 percent, from 94 to 150.

On June 17, 39 children aged 0-17 were admitted to hospital, of whom 33 were aged 0-5 and 6 aged 5-17. There were 978 new child (0-19) COVID cases, 8.1 percent of the total 12,065 new cases in England.

On June 16, 36 children were admitted overnight, including 22 in the 0-5 age bracket and 14 aged 6-17. Total child cases in 0-19 age range rose by 914, or 7.5 percent of total new cases in England of 12,080.

The figures for the day before were 40 children (0-17) hospitalized overnight, including 31 aged 0-5 and 9 aged 6-17. Total new child cases were 1,053, that is 7.8 percent of the 13,401 total new infections.

Total child (0-17) hospital admissions due to COVID were 25,971 on June 16. By June 21, total hospital admissions of child COVID cases rose to 26,207, a rise of 56 overnight. This included 44 aged 0-5, and 12 aged 6-17. On that date there were 1,565 new child COVID cases. These figures are extrapolated from coronavirus.data.gov.uk by Twitter user Tigress.

Total UK child COVID deaths stand at 188 and cases among children well over 3 million.

In the US, National Centre for Health Statistics, based on data from March 1, 2020-April 30, 2022, reported COVID as the leading cause of death among children aged 0-19.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) noted as early as January a rise in hospital admissions in young children who contracted Omicron. The “proportion of children admitted to hospital with covid-19 who were aged under 1 was 42.2% in the four-week period studied (14 December 2021 to 12 January 2022), much higher than earlier in the pandemic.” Children hospitalised with Omicron were not as sick as those admitted during the Alpha and Delta waves. The fear is the new Omicron subvariants may prove far more dangerous.

After prevaricating throughout 2021, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised in February 2022 that all children in the 5-11 age group be offered two 10 microgram doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine.

Introducing the roll-out as a “non-urgent offer of the vaccine,” the Johnson government downplayed the dangers, leading to a situation where nearly three months on only 346,924 or 7 percent out of five million eligible children aged 5-11 have been inoculated.

Pulse magazine noted, “NHS England had previously said that primary care networks (PCNs) would not be expected to lead on the vaccine rollout for five-to-11-year-olds, due to ongoing workforce pressures.”

The JCVI and the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health were at pains to stress that COVID is mild in children and the benefits of vaccination minimal.

While vaccines are a valuable tool in preventing serious illness, they do not prevent transmissibility.

A joint study across 130 countries conducted by a team from the University of Manchester and Imperial College London—with results published in BMC Public Health—found the closure of schools and workplaces the most effective measure in reducing deaths during the first wave of the pandemic.

The example of China, with a population of 1.4 billion, underlines this. China pursued a strategy of elimination, and consequently managed to limit the number of COVID fatalities to just 5,226, implementing a gamut of public health measures including mass testing and lockdowns whenever an outbreak occurred.

In UK schools all mitigation measures were lifted as in the wider community, with the virus given free rein. Schools are instructed to record all absences including due to COVID as non-specific illness. Prior to the lifting of all mitigations, headteachers informed parents if someone tested positive in their child’s class. The government did not make public which schools had outbreaks and neither did the trade unions.

Parent and grassroots campaigner Daniella Modus-Cutter took it upon herself to collate data showing a list of schools with outbreaks, to warn Clinically Extremely Vulnerable families like her own so they could shield their children at home. With the ditching of mass testing, there is no longer any reporting of infections in the education sector, making even such efforts made by Daniella impossible and putting more lives at risk.

The full implications of infection and repeated infections with COVID are still emerging. The virus can cause widespread damage, and its assault on the immune system is a possible causative factor in the otherwise inexplicable rise in hepatitis in children after infection. Last week UK child hepatitis cases passed 250 (251 confirmed cases), and 12 children, mostly under-fives, needed a liver transplant.

Children may also develop the rare, but life-threatening condition known as PIMS or MIS-C. The prognosis for those suffering Long COVID is still unknown. But for the education unions COVID is a non- issue.

The press releases of the National Education Union (NEU) makes no mention of COVID after April, when Joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney made a hypocritical statement regarding Long COVID, as he commented on motion 44 passed at the NEU’s annual conference.

Courtney acknowledged that the pandemic “is far from over” and that the prevalence of Long COVID was “highest among those working in teaching and education.” Declaring “employers owe these staff a duty of care” he outlined a series of demands regarding safety which he and the NEU have no intention of fighting for. This would mean mobilising its membership for online learning and the closure of schools until the virus is suppressed. This is anathema to the NEU leader who spent much of the pandemic insisting that children and staff remain in school as he ranted against “education disruption”.

Courtney never mentioned the prevalence of Long COVID among children. On June 16, the i newspaper reported the comments of clinical epidemiologist Dr. Deepti Gurdasani that Long COVID affects “2 percent of young children in the community to a level that is causing restriction of day-to-day activity… A small proportion of millions is still tens of thousands of children… I can’t think of another childhood illness that has had the same impact on children…we’ve done so little to prevent this from mitigations in schools to vaccination.”

The unions played a vital role keeping workplaces open before the virus was suppressed, allowing the emergence of more transmissible variants resistant to antibodies whether through prior infection or vaccination. The education unions were key to keeping schools, colleges and universities open, sharing responsibility for the deaths of over 500 educators.

In January 2021, the NEU released its Education Recovery Plan January 2021, urging the government “to create the conditions to sustain education throughout and beyond the pandemic.”

This was predicated on the fiction that it was possible to reopen schools safely before the virus was eliminated, smoothing the way for the government to end lockdown restrictions then in place. At the time, the UK passed the milestone of 100,000 COVID deaths. Within 18 months that figure has doubled.

Emboldened by the cooperation of the unions, and despite cases of COVID-19 rising among school children, the government is pushing ahead with its threats to fine parents for non-attendance.

In the past week, new measures were announced beginning in September that track electronic attendance records centrally to streamline the issuing of fines for non-attendance, currently up to the head teacher or Local authority.

With Modi's support, BJP governments waging bulldozer campaign of state lawlessness and terror targeting Muslims

Kranti Kumara

Using blatantly unconstitutional and outright thuggish methods akin to those the Israeli Zionist regime routinely employs against Palestinians, BJP-ruled states and municipalities across India are illegally bulldozing the homes and shops of Muslims they have targeted for retribution.

This campaign of state lawlessness and terror is being spearheaded by the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s most populous state, and its chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Adityanath—who was under criminal indictment for inciting violent attacks on Muslims when India’s prime minister and BJP supremo, Narenda Modi, made him UP chief minister—revels in his new nickname of “Bulldozer Baba.” 

The ruins of the bulldozed home of Mohammad Javed and Parveen Fatima and their family. (Twitter)

On the orders of BJP led-governments, homes and shops owned by Muslims are being demolished without due process, and invariably with little to no warning.  The authorities suddenly paste a notice that this or that portion of a building was constructed illegally and will be demolished forthwith, despite it being in existence for decades. Then a day later, bulldozers, accompanied by a huge contingent of police, arrive and in a few hours there is only a pile of rubble.

The homes and shops of prominent Muslims who have spoken out against the Modi government and the BJP’s continual anti-Muslim incitement and provocations are being targeted. So too are those of Muslim protesters, frequently under the pretext that they threw stones at police. The BJP-led North Delhi Municipal Corporation mounted a so-called “anti-encroachment” drive in April, supposedly targeting illegally built houses and shops—all Muslim-owned—just days after a communal clash during a religious procession provoked by Hindu far-right activists. 

In a recent and especially egregious case of state terrorism, municipal authorities in  Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad), acting under the direction of UP Chief Minister Adityanath, demolished the home of Mohammad Javed, a leading figure in the Muslim-led Welfare Party of India.

The notice to demolish the home was served to Javed despite the fact that it was owned by his wife, Parveen Fatima. She had inherited it from her father more than two decades ago. Subsequently, the house was expanded and two more floors were added. The notice declared that some parts of the expansion were “illegal,” despite the fact that the authorities had never previously complained about it. The notice announcing the house would be demolished the next day was pasted on the wall of the house only around 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 11. The following day, a bulldozer and a phalanx of police wearing riot gear descended upon the house, and within a few hours, reduced it and all of its contents to rubble. The municipal authorities did not even give the family time to collect the most minimal belongings, such as photos, let alone furniture, utensils and appliances.

The UP authorities have accused Javed of being the “mastermind” of protests that erupted in Prayagraj and numerous other towns across north India on Friday, June 10. The protests were in opposition to the insulting remarks made against Islam by senior BJP officials in late May in what was a transparent case of communal incitement. The remarks sparked an international outcry from some 20 countries, many of which summoned Indian diplomatic representatives to hand them strong protest notes.

Javed appears to have been singled out because his daughter, Afreen Fatima, is a prominent anti-government activist who organized mass protests in December 2019 and the first months of 2020 against the Modi government’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act. At the time, Afreen was a prominent student leader at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) where she was pursuing graduate studies. Along with others at JNU, Afreen organized demonstrations that helped spark an India-wide movement that saw millions across India take to the streets to protest against the CAA, pushing the BJP government for a time onto the backfoot.

The UP police responded to the June 10 protests with state violence, beating protesters and arresting hundreds. The BJP-led authorities also demolished the homes of two protesters whom they accused of throwing stones at the rampaging UP police.

Adityanath’s media adviser tweeted a photo of a bulldozer on Saturday, the day after the protests, brazenly adding: “Unruly elements remember, every Friday is followed by a Saturday.”

Such brutish invective constantly pours from the mouths of top BJP officials. In kicking off the campaign for India’s 2019 general election, Amit Shah, the home minster and Modi’s chief henchman, made bloodthirsty comments referring to desperate refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma) as “termites.” “Infiltrators are like termites in the soil of Bengal, “ he thundered. “A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.”

Communalist incitement and provocations by BJP politicians and their Hindu far-right allies have been systematically facilitated by the Indian state. The police are notorious for turning a blind eye to communalist attacks on Muslims, and often participate in them. The courts—including India’s Supreme Court, which never tires of posing as a solemn defender of citizens’ constitutional rights—have time and again failed to convict those guilty of fomenting communalist atrocities and sanctioned, through acts of omission and commission, one communalist outrage after another.    

The current wave of demolitions are in defiance of notices the Supreme Court issued on April 21, after a spate of bulldozer demolitions in the preceding months in UP, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, and Delhi. But India’s highest court has taken no action to enforce its own orders. The Supreme Court stood by when municipal authorities in the Delhi neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh, the center of the anti-CAA protests, bulldozed numerous shops and homes in early May in what was a transparent and patently illegal act of revenge.

Most notoriously, in a judgment issued November 9, 2019, the Indian Supreme Court legitimized the Dec. 6, 1992 razing of the 16th century Babri Masjid (mosque) by the BJP and its allied Hindu communal organizations—an action carried out in direct violation of the orders of India’s highest court and that precipitated the worst communal violence across India since the 1947 communal partition that divided the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India.

In its 2019 judgment, the Supreme Court “ordered” the Modi-led government to carry out one of its longstanding ambitions and oversee the building of a temple to the mythical Hindu god Lord Ram on the site of the razed Babri Masjid. In so doing, it effectively endorsed the absurd, Hindu-extremist obscurantist argument that the grounds upon which the Babri Masjid had stood was Lord Ram’s birthplace.

In UP and Madhya Pradesh (MP), the BJP chief ministers have unleashed bulldozer terror against what they called “love Jihad,” that is a reference to inter-faith relationships between Hindus and Muslims. In MP, in late April, after a Muslim boy and a local Hindu girl eloped, MP authorities razed the home of the boy’s father and three of his shops.

This gangster-style political rule is being overseen by Modi and his thuggish second-in-command Amit Shah. Several BJP leaders have commented to the press that “muscular politics” is being actively promoted by Modi, Shah and the Hindu-fascist RSS, the BJP’s parent organization. There is now reportedly “an immense competition” for BJP Chief Ministers (CM) to join the “muscular CM” club, so as to get on the good side of Modi and Shah.

The lawless actions of Modi, his BJP and the Hindu supremacist right as a whole are the malignant expressions of a crisis-ridden, diseased social order. They are relentlessly whipping up communal strife in an attempt to divert mounting mass social anger, frustration and anxiety along reactionary channels, embolden their far-right followers, and divide the working class.

Over the past two years there has been a mounting wave of strikes and protests involving workers from all parts of India and cutting across all communal and caste divides. Tens of millions have taken to the streets to oppose precarious contract labour jobs, privatization, dilapidated public services and the ruling class’ ruinous profits-before-lives response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The BJP’s communal incitement and lawlessness has caused some elements in the ruling elite to wring their hands and voice fears that the Modi government could reap a whirlwind by further communalizing and discrediting all the institutions of the state. Recently more than a dozen retired senior judges, including three former Supreme Court justices, accused Adityanath’s government of “making a mockery of the Constitution.” In a letter to the current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, they urged the court to intervene against “violence and repression by state authorities against Muslim citizens.” They further noted that “Such a brutal clampdown is an unacceptable subversion of the rule of law and a violation of the rights of citizens.”

But the dominant factions of the ruling class, which over the past decade have embraced the BJP and made it their principal political instrument, consigning the Congress Party to life-support, continue to back the Modi government. Terrified of an eruption of the working class, they cling to the would-be Hindu strongman Modi and his toxic communalist BJP, calculating that it is their best means to intensify worker exploitation and aggressively assert their predatory interests on the world stage.  

On Thursday, June 16, the Supreme Court, in response to a plea filed by the Jamiat-Ulama-I-Hind organization, asked the UP government to file an affidavit in three days about the recent bulldozer demolitions. Instead of condemning this whole practice of bulldozer-razing homes and shops, India’s highest court sheepishly asked the UP government to ensure that no further demolitions of properties are carried out in the state without following “due process.”

France’s hung parliament, rising class struggles stagger Macron

Alex Lantier

Last night, President Emmanuel Macron addressed the French people for the first time since the debacle that his “Ensemble” coalition suffered in Sunday’s legislative elections. The result was a perfunctory, 10-minute address that outlined no concrete policies but made clear that the election has led to a historic crisis of rule in France.

Claiming that “on April 24, you renewed your confidence in me by electing me president of the Republic,” Macron said, “No political force can today make laws by itself. Indeed, the presidential party now holds a plurality in parliament. … To act in your interests and those of the nation, we must collectively learn to govern and write laws differently.”

Macron was silent on his plans to raise the retirement age by three years to 65, make welfare recipients work for benefits, massively raise university tuition and spend billions of euros on building up the army for war with Russia. Instead, he called to “clarify in the coming days how much responsibility and cooperation different groups in the National Assembly are willing to take on. … Enter into a coalition for government and action? Just agreeing to vote certain texts, our budget, which ones? It is now up to political groups to say very transparently how far they will go.”

Macron is setting a course for a confrontation with the working class, which not only in France but across Europe and internationally is rebelling against the policies he aims to impose. Thrusting aside the results of the elections—in which the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (NUPES) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the most votes, beating out his “Ensemble” group—Macron is proclaiming that he will impose his agenda, running roughshod over working class opposition.

Before Macron’s speech, former Health Minister Olivier Véran, who is now tasked with relations with the parliament, said he was consider including the right-wing The Republicans (LR), the Greens, the big business Socialist Party (PS) or the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF) in a governmental alliance with the deputies currently supporting Macron. Véran said: “What is on the table is identifying a majority to advance, reform and transform our country.”

Prior to Macron’s speech, moreover, PCF General Secretary Fabien Roussel indicated that he was considering the possibility of joining a national unity government under Macron. Roussel said, however, that it would be hard for the PCF to join a national unity government at the current time, given Macron’s deep unpopularity.

Unexpectedly, however, Macron did not clearly state in his remarks whether he would try to form a government of national unity or simply move ahead with a minority government. His remarks ended in a peculiar ultimatum to the leaders of other parliamentary parties to adopt his reactionary program as their own.

“Most of the leaders I spoke to have ruled out the possibility of a government of national unity. This is a hypothesis that, moreover, from my standpoint is not currently justified. … I think thus that it is possible in this crucial moment we are living, to find a larger, clearer majority to act,” he said, adding, “I hope that in the coming weeks, this political process will continue with clarity and responsibility.”

In reality, less than two months after his re-election on April 24, Macron’s administration is teetering on the brink of collapse. This is not, however, principally due to the fact that the legislative elections ultimately produced a hung parliament. Indeed, factoring in LR, PS and Green deputies, there is an open consensus among a majority in the National Assembly for a program of rapid and aggressive austerity attacks against the working class and military build-up against Russia.

Indeed, NUPES leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon last week publicly declared his support for Macron’s trip to Kiev to escalate European arms delivery to the far-right nationalist regime in Ukraine for the war against Russia.

The parliamentary parties are not willing to turn these endorsements of Macron’s agenda into active participation in his government, however, under conditions of an explosive growth of the class struggle not only in France, but across Europe and internationally.

Across the English Channel, British rail workers are launching a strike action aiming to reverse decades of social attacks on the working class and police-military build-up since the defeat of the 1985 miners strike. This is, however, the most explosive conflict of an entire series of struggles that are breaking out across the European continent against the impoverishment of workers by inflation and the evermore aggressive military policy targeting Russia.

Belgian transport workers were on strike on Monday, protesting low wages and NATO aggression against Russia, and French truckers will go out next week to protest rising fuel prices. Health care and airport workers across Europe and in France will be going on strike in the coming weeks to demand higher wages and better working conditions amid the continuing fall-out of the official mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The struggles of the working class, to be victorious, must be taken out of the hands of national union bureaucracies tied to organizations like the NUPES in France, and waged as a political struggle against the governments of the European Union (EU). The Macron administration and the entire EU will wage a ruthless struggle against workers’ wage demands and opposition to war, which they view as intolerable. Against this, the decisive question is the conscious, international unification of the working class in a struggle for socialism.

This struggle against inflation, the pandemic and imperialist war can only proceed via a struggle that seeks to bring down the Macron government and its EU allies, and transfer power to the working class. The drawing in of ever broader layers of workers into struggle will bring them into headlong conflict with organizations such as the PCF or the NUPES, which—though the capitalist media falsely presents them as “left”—are seeking a compromise with Macron.

Macron is grooming the entire NUPES alliance as potential supporters for his administration against the workers. This includes not only Roussel’s PCF but also the Unsubmissive France (LFI) party directly led by Mélenchon.

While LFI presents itself as a more intransigent opposition to Macron, it is also signaling that it is seeking a deal with Macron. Top LFI official Adrien Quatennens visited Macron in the Elysée Palace for talks and afterwards said: “We are not candidates for any arrangement, any combination, any participation in a government with the president of the Republic because our political diagnosis, is that we need a government that will do the opposite of what his government is doing. I told him that it would be totally incoherent and improbable for us to participate in this type of coalition.”

At the same time, Quatennens said, “We have never been an opposition on principle,” adding that LFI hoped that it would be possible for the majority of the National Assembly to vote a “great law dealing with the social emergency situation” during Macron’s term. He also boasted that Macron had personally told him that he believes LFI is a party compatible with the existing French republic. That is, Macron and LFI know they are united against the danger of revolution.

The nearly 8 million votes for Mélenchon in the April presidential elections and the vote of over one-quarter of the electorate for the NUPES reflect support not for LFI’s maneuvers with Macron but for a determined political struggle against Macron. As the class struggle intensifies, this support will only grow and draw ever broader layers of workers into struggle.

Bipartisan gun bill passes procedural vote in US Senate

Jacob Crosse

In response to rising social anger over mass shootings at schools, grocery stores, churches, malls, sporting events and virtually every other public space in the United States, in a procedural vote on Tuesday, the Senate advanced the 80-page Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Leading senators have indicated that they expect the bill to clear the Senate this week, perhaps as early as Thursday, at which point it will be sent back to the House of Representatives for a vote. On Wednesday, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters she expected that the House would pass the bill before the weekend and the two-week Fourth of July recess for Congress.

According to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), so far this year, 20,753 people in the US have died after being shot by a firearm. Of these, nearly half, 11,418 people, used a gun to commit suicide.

There have been more mass shootings in the US this year than days on the calendar. The GVA, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed, has documented 278 incidences this year. The gruesome total is nine more mass shootings than the GVA recorded in all of 2014.

In a routine report over the weekend, ABC News documented nine such incidences across the US. Shootings took place in Maryland, South Carolina, New York, Washington D.C., Florida and Texas, leaving six people dead and 42 injured.

While the bill advanced by the Senate Tuesday night is ostensibly aimed at reducing such gun-related killings, it will have little or no impact on the epidemic of mass shootings. This bill includes none of the limited proposals advanced by President Joe Biden in a speech earlier this month, such as a ban on high-capacity magazines, a reinstatement of the 1994 assault weapons ban, or a rise in the legal age to purchase a gun.

The bill provides meager social and health care spending, such as increased “tele-health” and grants for Child Health Insurance Programs (CHIPS), but the “gun control” provisions are toothless.

The “Safer Communities Act,” unlike the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, does not restrict the sale of semi-automatic rifles, such as those used in the recent Buffalo and Uvalde massacres, or raise the age limit to purchase the high-powered weaponry.

In fact, the “gun bill,” does not include the words “gun,” “magazine,” “rifle,” “AR-15,” “M-16,” “semi-automatic,” “pistol,” “automatic,” “revolver” or “shotgun” anywhere in the text.

However, the legislation does provide hundreds of millions in additional funding to local, state and federal police, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
This, no doubt, explains the bipartisan support for the bill and the effusive praise it has received in the capitalist press, which has presented the bill as the most consequential reform on firearms in decades.

The toothless character of the legislation is evident from the support it received from a section of Republicans. Despite opposition from the powerful National Rifle Association gun lobby, the bill advanced Tuesday night by a 64-34 margin, with 14 Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joining all 50 Democratic senators in overcoming the filibuster hurdle and bringing it up for a floor vote.

On Tuesday, McConnell called the bill “a commonsense package of policies that will help make these horrifying incidents less likely, while fully upholding the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

Emphasizing the dearth of any “gun control” measure in the bill, McConnell added, “For years, the far left falsely claimed that Congress could only address the terrible issue of mass murders by trampling on law-abiding Americans’ constitutional rights. This bill proves that false.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who has led the Democrats in bipartisan Senate talks to rein in gun violence, talks with reporters, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 22, 2022. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

Lead Democratic Senate negotiator Chris Murphy (Connecticut), revealing the political purpose behind the measure, said it was a “breakthrough,” but “more importantly, it’s a bipartisan breakthrough.”

Murphy and the Democrats’ “bipartisan breakthrough” includes $100,000,000 to the FBI for “salaries and expense” to meet “additional resources needs of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.”

The system, commonly referred to as NICS, is used to screen potential buyers for previous crimes that would prevent them from owning a weapon. The bill includes for the first time a search feature that would allow NICS to have access to juvenile justice and mental health records.

It also appropriates $1.4 billion for “state and local law enforcement assistance,” which is “to remain available until expended, for grants to be administered by the Office of Justice Programs.” The bill calls for $280,000,000 to be spent each year on such programs.

Additionally, the bill appropriates another $100,000,000 for “Community Oriented Policing Services,” otherwise known as the COPS program, which is also overseen by the Department of Justice. In a White House statement released this past March, Biden boasted that his budget had already more than doubled money for the COPS hiring program.

As for funds that are in the bill but are not directly given to the police, the measure calls for $750 million in funding for states to implement and/or bolster “red-flag” laws or extreme protection orders. These laws allow a judge to order someone to relinquish his firearm if the person is deemed a threat to himself or others. While 19 states and the District of Columbia have “red-flag” laws, 30 states do not.

The robust funding for police in the “bipartisan” bill testifies to the fact that the US government and its capitalist ruling class have no solution to the epidemic of gun violence outside of more police repression.

Lithuania to expand blockade of Russian goods as Ukraine war widens

Andre Damon

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told Reuters on Wednesday that Lithuania, in cooperation with the European Union, is preparing to expand the list of goods that it is blocking Russia from transporting to its semi-exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

Earlier this week, Lithuania implemented a partial blockade of Kaliningrad, prompting threats of retaliation from Moscow.

“We are looking forward to implementing the next stages of the sanctions,” Nauseda told Reuters. “We feel the support of the European Union (EU), because this is a decision made by the European Union.”

Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, said the blockade would prompt a Russian response that would “have a serious negative impact on the people of Lithuania.”

“Of course, Russia will respond to hostile actions. Appropriate measures are in the works and will be adopted in the near future,” he said Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the EU Ambassador to Russia in a “resolute protest” of the transit ban. The ministry said it “demanded an immediate resumption of the normal operation” of transit to Kaliningrad, threatening that “retaliatory measures will follow.”

Nauseda all but dared Russia to respond militarily, declaring, “I do not believe that Russia will challenge us in a military sense, because we are a NATO member.”

The escalation of the EU/ Lithuanian blockade of Kaliningrad comes amid a rapid expansion of the war, both in geographic scope and in intensity.

On Monday, the Ukrainian armed forces hit several oil drilling platforms of the company Cherneftegaz on the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces carried out an attack 150 kilometers inside the Russian border, in Novoshakhtinsk in the Rostov region, using kamikaze drones.

In this handout photo released by Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service, Russian Emergency Situation ministry's firefighters work at the scene of a fire at the Novoshakhtinsk oil processing plant in the Rostov-on-Don region in Russia, Wednesday, June 22, 2022. [AP Photo/Russian Emergency Ministry Press Service]

The attack came just weeks after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the country was “not interested” in carrying out attacks inside Russia and after US President Joe Biden said the US would not encourage “Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”

Although it was not clear what kind of drone was used in the attack, the United States has provided Ukraine with hundreds of kamikaze drones, known as the “switchblade.”

The Financial Times reported that “A post by Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade read: ‘For some reason, the Novoshakhtinsk Oil Refinery is on fire in Russia,’ later adding that hitting such a target with a ‘kamikaze drone’ 150km deep into the enemy-controlled territory is ‘not bad!’”

Russia, meanwhile, continued to unleash devastating attacks inside Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that a Russian strike on a shipbuilding plant in the Ukrainian port of Nikolaev killed up to 500 troops on Tuesday, in a shocking display of the lethality of the war that is raging on the European continent.

Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that up to 500 troops are dying each day of the war, with up to 1,000 daily casualties. Just three weeks ago, Zelensky put the daily death toll at 60-100.

These strikes exemplify the expanding scope and lethality of the war, which is rapidly spreading throughout Ukrainian and Russian territory, and threatens to become a direct shooting war between Russian and NATO forces.

Meanwhile, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol has warned that Europe should be prepared for a total shutdown of Russian gas exports into the European Union. “Europe should be ready in case Russian gas is completely cut off. The nearer we are coming to winter, the more we understand Russia’s intentions,” he said.

The New York Times cited Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CAN as saying that the key cities of  “Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, could fall in the near term,” in what the US-based Institute for the Study of War called “a clear setback for Ukrainian defenses.”

Amid these continued military setbacks on the battlefield, the EU and NATO are rapidly integrating Ukraine in the US-backed alliance system. Alexey Arestovich, a prominent adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Wednesday that Ukraine’s eventual membership in both the EU and NATO is a mere formality, declaring that Ukraine was already a “de facto” member of the NATO alliance.

On Tuesday, the European Union officials said the EU will accept Ukraine as a candidate member this week.

Moreover, Polish President Andrzej Duda announced that the so-called Trimarium forum or Three Seas Initiative, a revival of the inter-war Intermarium alliance, has created  “participatory partnership” status for Ukraine. The Triumarium is openly aimed at curtailing Russian influence across Eastern Europe. It already encompasses the majority of countries between the Black and the Baltic Seas, including Poland, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Slovenia.

Zelensky’s advisor Arestovich boasted, “We became the 13th country of the Trimarium… And 12 Trimarium countries are EU members. That is, almost half of the EU countries. This means that our integration with the EU has gone much further than everyone is currently assessing.”

Even as the Ukraine war spins out of control, the US is rapidly escalating military tensions with China. Pentagon Spokesman Ned Price declared that the US intends to continue sending warships in so-called “freedom of navigation” operations in the Taiwan Strait, after Chinese officials allegedly told the US in private that the waterway was closed to US ships.

“We’re concerned by China’s aggressive rhetoric, its increasing pressure and intimidation regarding Taiwan.” He added, “and we’ll continue, as we have said before, to fly, to sail, and to operate wherever international law allows, and that includes transiting through the Taiwan Strait.”

China, meanwhile, sent one of the largest sorties of military aircraft toward Taiwan so far this year, with 29 aircraft entering Taiwan’s air defense identification zone Tuesday.

As the war in Ukraine rapidly expands, and the US showdown with China over Taiwan escalates, US President Joe Biden gave a speech on “Putin’s price hike” on Wednesday, declaring that “this is a time of war,” and that the US population must accept rising prices as part of the war effort.

With the cost of the war surging, last week the Senate Armed Services committee proposed to increase the 2023 military budget, already the largest on record, by a further 6 percent.

The further expansion of the war, both in its European and Pacific theaters, will have devastating consequences on the US population, already reeling from runaway inflation and facing the prospect of a major recession within the next year.