Rajapakse formally resigns as Sri Lankan president after fleeing to Singapore

Saman Gunadasa

Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s official resignation as Sri Lankan president has been sent to Colombo, and its formal acceptance was announced this morning in the capital. Rajapakse was elected president three years ago with a large majority. He fled to Maldives early Tuesday, following more than three months of massive nationwide protests and three general strikes demanding that he quit as president and that his government resign.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Rajapakse flew into Singapore yesterday afternoon. He emailed his resignation letter last night to Parliamentary Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena. Singapore announced that Rajapakse was on a private visit, indicating that asylum was neither granted nor requested.

The widely despised Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was previously appointed acting president by Rajapakse, immediately instructed the military and police to do “what is necessary to restore order.” He has appointed a committee, including Chief of Defence Staff General Shavendra Siva and the heads of military tri-forces and the police, to “prevent the destruction of property and life.”

Wickremesinghe imposed a curfew in the Colombo administrative district from noon yesterday until today 5 a.m. This followed his declaration of an island wide state of emergency and a 24-hour curfew the previous day for the Western Province. These curfews were largely ignored, with thousands of people last night celebrating Rajapakse’s resignation.

While Wickremesinghe has wide-ranging powers under the executive presidency to unleash the military against opposition, there are nervous concerns within the ruling class that full-scale violent state repression at this moment will backfire, leading to a further intensification of the anti-government rebellion.

As the Hindustan Times reported, “Ranil wants the military to use force, Sri Lankan army says no to firing on protesters.”

US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie Chung warned in a tweet yesterday, “We condemn all violence and call for the rule of law to be upheld.” She urged all parties to work together to “implement solutions that will bring long-term economic & political stability.”

In other words, the military and police should not be unleashed at this juncture, and opposition parties must intensify their efforts to contain and dissipate the mass movement while preparing an interim regime to implement brutal International Monetary Fund austerity measures.

Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, General Shavendra Siva appealed to the public, and especially youth, “to help the tri-forces and the police to maintain law and order until a new president is elected.” Notwithstanding these appeals, the military and police attacks on protesters continue, with at least 84 protesters hospitalised and one youth killed from injuries sustained in clashes with security forces over the past week.

The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), Rajapakse’s ruling party, issued a statement on Wednesday calling on Acting President Wickremesinghe and law enforcement authorities to “restore law and order” immediately. The statement referred to agitators as law breakers who “had murdered several individuals, including a parliamentarian as well as destroyed public and private properties.”

In the meantime, SLPP sources told Reuters that Wickremesinghe was the party’s first choice for presidency. These moves underscore the ongoing collaboration between Rajapakse’s party and Wickremesinghe for a future military-police crackdown on protesters and far-reaching state repression.

Army spokesman Brigadier Nilantha Premaratna told a media conference yesterday afternoon that 16 soldiers have been injured in clashes with protesters. He also alleged that two army soldiers had been “brutally assaulted and their weapons and ammunition were stolen by protesters.” These weapons, he said, could be used by protesters to spread violence, a clear indicator that future state provocations against demonstrators are being prepared.

In a televised address on Wednesday, Wickremesinghe denounced the occupiers and said he had instructed security forces to remove them. The protesters should not be allowed to occupy Temple Trees (the prime minister’s residence), the President’s Secretariat and the President’s House, he said, because they would take or destroy documents. Anti-government protesters announced yesterday that they were ending their occupations of these buildings.

Yesterday, Parliamentary Speaker Abeywardane, a close confidante of Rajapakse and an SLPP veteran, canceled the parliamentary session scheduled for today. He said it will resume within three days after receiving the president’s resignation letter. Nominations for the presidency were to be submitted on July 19 and a new president elected by the parliament on July 20.

None of these parties of the political establishment, including opposition parties, has condemned Wickremesinghe’s dictatorial moves. At most, they have issued feeble appeals to the military and the acting president.

Sajith Premadasa, leader of the parliamentary opposition and the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya, appealed to the military, declaring, “I am asking our dear security forces not to be pawns of an oppressive regime.”

Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) leader and former president, Maithripala Sirisena, appealed to Wickremesinghe, “I am pleading in the name of God for Ranil Wickremesinghe to resign fast.” Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), issued similar appeals.

Scottish health workers ballot on strike action as doctors call for 30 percent rise

Ben Trent & Richard Tyler

Health workers in Scotland represented by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are being balloted on a 5 percent pay offer, with a recommendation to reject and support strike action. Results are expected in early August.

Last month the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors and consultants, passed a motion at its annual conference calling for its members’ pay to be restored to the real terms’ level of 2008, which would mean a 30 percent increase.

The conference also passed a motion calling for industrial action in opposition to new contract conditions that would see GPs having to open their surgeries on Saturdays and offer evening and weekend appointments. The new working arrangements are seen as too inflexible and overly bureaucratic by many doctors, who argue they take away their ability to allocate resources to best serve their own communities.

While the motion calling for pay restoration was passed, there was considerable opposition from delegates who were critical of the 5-year time frame being proposed, according to the BMA’s own report of the conference.

Nursing staff in an NHS hospital [Photo: WSWS]

Aizemea Okojie, a Brighton-based gynaecologist, told the conference, “I’m moving against this motion not because of the content but because of the five-year timeframe. I would prefer it to be shorter. I get anxiety attacks looking at my bank balance every month.”

Consultant Kevin O’Kane said the motion gave the message to government that they had “five years to sort out pay” and “that’s not good enough”.

“Our members deserve better, and they deserve it now. Don’t waste our opportunity with a five-year flaccid fudge. We need action this side of the general election.”

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Dr Faisal Bhutta explained the pressures affecting GPs across the country. “Normally, we get a quieter period in June and July, but it’s just been relentless”. Outlining the reasons to strike, such as pay and the new contracts he said, “As GPs, our pay has been frozen for four to five years, limited to around one percent increase. But all the while, the workload is going up, we’re asked to do more and more, including possibly starting seven-day working.”

Falling living standards, rising costs, wage freezes and ever-growing workloads are a tinderbox for NHS staff across the UK. These issues have caused huge numbers of staff to leave their posts, which has fueled a massive staff shortage across all parts of the health service.

The most recent data from NHS England shows a vacancy rate of 10 percent on March 31, 2022, within the Registered Nursing staff group (38,972 vacancies), up on the same period the previous year when the vacancy rate was 9.2 percent (34,678 vacancies).

A survey of more than 2,000 NHS staff in June found that more than half had considered leaving in the last 12 months, with one in five actively looking for other jobs or already in the process of leaving. Four out of five said poor pay was one of the main reasons they would quit the NHS. According to survey organiser @WithNHSStaff, “Stress due to pressure of work and the ongoing impact of the pandemic was a factor for 63 percent of staff. Understaffing, stress, and burnout, compounded by low wages, are leaving many feeling they would be better off working anywhere else.”

The BMA conference took place in the aftermath of the three-day stoppage by rail workers belonging to the RMT union. London GP Dr Jacqueline Applebee, moving the resolution for strike action in opposition to the imposition of new contracts effectively imposing seven-day working, told delegates to channel their “inner Mick Lynch”, referring to the RMT General Secretary.

“We should take our lead from the RMT, they have quite rightly said enough is enough. No more pay erosion, no more service cuts. The RMT’s issues very much chime with those we face in the NHS—solidarity to them.”

Doctors and other health workers should look critically at the role being played by Lynch, the RMT and wider trade union bureaucracy, including the health unions.

After three days of solid strike action by rank-and-file rail workers, it was back to business as usual for the RMT, sitting down with management to try and cobble together a deal while all cuts remain on the table: including mandatory 7-day working, new grading structures, salaries and roles, lower pay and longer hours contracts, and massive attacks on the railways pension scheme.

At the Durham Miners’ Gala last weekend, Lynch was fêted as a militant union leader who was standing up for the working class. But in his speech, he made clear that despite Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer having explicitly opposed the strike and banned his MPs from supporting RMT picket lines, he wanted a Starmer-led Labour government.

Lynch says this of a party which speaks as a defender of big business and the “national interest”, which opposes workers taking strike action to defend their pay and conditions. In a recent visit to Leeds General Infirmary, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said NHS strikes were “not what we in the Labour Party want to see”.

For its part, the last time BMA members took industrial action, during the 2016 junior doctors’ strike, the union sought to curtail the stoppages at every opportunity, eventually selling out the strikes in a craven capitulation.

Despite the government imposing a 3 percent pay “rise” on NHS staff last year, and the NHS Pay Review Board likely to recommend a below inflation rise this year of only 4 or 5 percent, none of the health unions have announced concrete plans for strike action. The votes of their members in various “indicative” ballots are used as bargaining chips to persuade the employers to “negotiate”, which almost invariably ends in a sellout, and to preserve the role of the union bureaucracy as a management partner.

The unions are not the organisers of class struggle to defend the interests of working people, but its saboteurs. They are an industrial police force that divides workers by sector, location, and profession, cutting across all forms of unified action and stifling strikes by agreeing back-door deals.

BBC’s Panorama exposes British war crimes in Afghanistan

Jean Shaoul

BBC TV’s flagship “Panorama” programme has revealed further evidence that UK special forces killed unarmed detainees in Afghanistan and planted weapons near their bodies to justify their crimes.

The BBC also found evidence that senior officers, including recently retired General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith who headed the Special Forces at the time, were aware of concerns within the Special Air Service (SAS) but failed to pass on evidence to the military police.

British soldiers storm a building in Afghanistan, 2007 [Photo by Defence Imagery / Flickr / CC BY-NC 4.0]

Last Tuesday night’s screening of SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime? broadcast interviews and evidence based on official files from police investigations and a four-year probe showing that one SAS unit in Helmand province had killed 54 people in suspicious circumstances between 2010 and 2011. The unit’s tour of duty resulted in a total Afghan death toll more than double that number, yet none of its members sustained any injuries in the raids, indicating their lives had not been at risk.

The Ministry of Defence had been forced to hand over a tranche of emails and documents during a long-running hearing of a civil case in the High Court brought by Afghan citizen Saiffulah Yar into the deaths of four family members at the hands of the SAS, after previously suggesting it had no such documents. Further documents were obtained via Freedom of Information requests.

The documents, written by SAS officers and military personnel, provide evidence of war crimes. They show that while the government claimed—and continues to claim—that there was no credible evidence of criminality, the evidence had been sitting in Whitehall all this time.

According to the 1977 Geneva Conventions, shooting civilians is only lawful if they are participating directly in hostilities. Under UK domestic law, a soldier can use force to defend him/herself and others, including lethal force, only if it is reasonable in the circumstances, while the failure of a commanding officer to inform the military police if he or she becomes aware of potential war crimes is a criminal offence.

The airing of SAS Death Squads Exposed: A British War Crime? comes at a sensitive time amid furious claims by Britain that Russia’s armed forces have committed multiple war crimes in Ukraine and calls for Russia’s referral to the International Criminal Court.

Last week, the MoD lambasted the BBC for engaging in “irresponsible, incorrect” journalism by broadcasting the allegations, arguing it could put British soldiers at risk because it “jumps to unjustified conclusions” with its claims that both investigations by military police resulted in no prosecutions. It said, “Neither investigation found sufficient evidence to prosecute. Insinuating otherwise is irresponsible, incorrect and puts our brave armed forces personnel at risk, both in the field and reputationally.”

Members of parliament have called for an urgent investigation into the BBC’s “deeply disturbing” claims.

Tobias Ellwood, Conservative chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, said, “The optics of this don’t look good,” and called on armed forces minister James Heappey to explain the situation. Heappey gave the now standard government response that the claims “have been investigated, I believe, twice and on each occasion haven’t met the evidential threshold.”

This was a reference to the launch in 2014 of Operation Northmoor by the Royal Military Police, an investigation into 657 allegations of abuse, mistreatment, and killings at the hands of British forces that was wound down in 2017 and closed in 2019, with the MoD finding no evidence of criminality. The BBC said members of Operation Northmoor disputed the MoD’s conclusion that there was no case to answer.

Heappey pledged yet another whitewash investigation, should the BBC’s evidence justify it.

The programme noted a “quite incredible” pattern of “strikingly similar reports” of SAS operations, aimed at killing or capturing Taliban members, in which the SAS shot and killed Afghan men during night raids. After capturing family groups, soldiers would force one of them to enter the building and then shoot him, claiming the man had produced a hand grenade or an AK47 rifle. Typically, the number of rifles were far fewer than the number of men detained, while the position of the bullets in the walls indicated that the victim was lying on the ground and not in a position to fire a rifle.

So standardised were the reports that they begged the question whether the raids amounted to war crimes. Internal emails described one incident as the “latest massacre.” A senior SAS officer warned in a secret memo that it sounded like a “deliberate policy” of unlawful killings. But following the commissioning of a rare formal review of the squadron’s tactics, the investigating officer sent to Afghanistan accepted the SAS version of events at face value.

According to the BBC’s sources, SAS units competed to get the highest number of kills on their six-month tours of duty, with the unit at the centre of the investigation seeking a higher body count than its predecessor.

Colonel Oliver Lee, a commander of the Royal Marines in Afghanistan in 2011, told the BBC its allegations of misconduct were “incredibly shocking” and merited a public inquiry. He said the apparent failure by special forces leaders to disclose evidence was “completely unacceptable.”

Britain’s Special Forces, which have carried out operations in 19 countries since 2011, are not subject to any parliamentary oversight, reporting only to the MoD. With their exemption from Freedom of Information requests, any information that does become available is leaked by whistleblowers who risk serious criminal charges.

The killings and cover-up flow inexorably from the filthy and criminal nature of the war carried out by British imperialism, starting from the very top. It was Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who lined up “shoulder to shoulder” with US President George W. Bush in the US-led coalition’s illegal war of aggression and occupation of Afghanistan, persuading NATO to support the war on behalf of US and British imperialism. He never retracted his support, maintaining it was a war to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Last August, he berated President Joe Biden for the “tragic, dangerous, unnecessary” US withdrawal from the country.

The illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has led to more than 175,000 deaths, although the real toll, including deaths caused indirectly by the war, is closer to a million, with hundreds of thousands of wounded and millions more forced to flee their homes. One of the poorest countries on the planet, its population suffers grinding deprivation and oppression.

While the British government claims the military costs of Operation Herrick were £23 billion, Frank Ledwidge, author of Investment in Blood published in 2013, estimates the total cost is now around £40 billion, including the human and financial cost of long-term care for more than 2,600 British troops injured, more than 5,000 “psychologically injured” and the pittance paid in compensation to the families of the 7,000 civilians the UK government has officially admitted were killed, injured or lost their homes due to its operations.

The UK government had sought to introduce a statutory “presumption against prosecution” for British soldiers over events five or more years old, giving the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians. Ministers were forced to concede that the five-year limit would not include war crimes in the legislation enacted last year.

It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of the imperialist powers who have gone unpunished. Crucially, those at the very top of the political and military ladder who planned and executed a criminal war have escaped punishment. Blair, like Bush, has never been held to account for his role in ordering the invasion of Afghanistan or his central role in the Iraq war in 2003.

The only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported war crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison and faces extradition to the US to serve 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act.

Pro-corporate Workers Party signals sweeping attack on public education in Brazil

Eduardo Parati & Guilherme Ferreira

In the run-up to Brazil’s October presidential elections, the right-wing, nationalist and pro-corporate character of the program of Workers Party (PT) candidate Luís Inácio Lula da Silva has emerged ever more openly. In recent weeks, Lula and PT officials have met with businessmen and bankers to assure the markets that a PT government will place the full weight of the growing global capitalist crisis upon the backs of the Brazilian working class. They are promising to escalate the attacks carried out under the PT when it governed Brazil between 2003 and 2016 as the party of choice of the national and international ruling elite.

A central figure in these meetings has been Lula’s vice-presidential running mate, the right-wing politician Geraldo Alckmin, now in the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). Before joining the PSB to run with Lula, Alckmin’s entire political career was in the hated Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso pursued a brutal “neoliberal agenda” against the Brazilian working class. During the 14 years that Alckmin was governor of São Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most populous state, he followed the script of Cardoso’s administration, applying pro-corporate programs in public education and harshly repressing social protests.

In pursuit of the PT’s right-wing agenda, Alckmin met in mid-June with representatives of the pro-herd immunity movement, Escolas Abertas (Open Schools). The meeting took place during an offensive by this movement against any measures to close classrooms in the face of the rising fourth wave of the pandemic in Brazil.

Geraldo Alckmin with Open Schools representatives, June 2022 (Instagram)

With the rapid spread of more transmissible and vaccine-resistant Omicron BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants in the schools, where the most basic mitigation measures, such as mask mandates, have been abandoned, Open Schools protested on social media against “schools that are illegally closing entire classrooms! There hasn’t been a [National Public Health Emergency] as a result of coronavirus since May 22, 2022.”

Working closely with the ruling elite, Open Schools met in late June with São Paulo Mayor Ricardo Nunes, who soon after issued a decree abandoning the recommendation to send students with confirmed COVID infections home from class.

The Open Schools movement was created in 2020, ostensibly by a small group of elite private school parents who were protesting against temporary school closures. Behind it, however, were powerful sections of the ruling elite determined to carry out the full reopening of the economy and end all measures to contain the spread of the virus. Before denouncing the suspension of classes in this current wave of the pandemic, Open Schools played a prominent role in making education an “essential service”, enabling schools to reopen even with the pandemic out of control, and in ending the mandatory wearing of masks in the country’s precarious classrooms.

Like the ruling classes around the world, the Brazilian capitalist elite saw the pandemic as an opportunity to increase corporate profits and personal wealth. The Open Schools’ pro-herd immunity program, aimed at keeping parents in their workplaces, is connected to its broad defense of the privatization of public education and attacks against teachers, whom the movement claims are “left-wing indoctrinators.”

Recently, the movement has allied itself with fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in promoting homeschooling, and has been one of the most vocal advocates of “vouchers” in public education, a policy modeled upon the brutal experience of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

Members of Open Schools have been received on several occasions by the João Doria (PSDB) government of the state of São Paulo. After being elected governor on a far-right platform and directly supporting Bolsonaro in 2018, Doria broke with the fascistic president, demagogically posing as a “defender of science”, while fully reopening both schools and the economy during the pandemic. Doria copied the strategy of the global ruling elites, limiting pandemic control measures to vaccinations. The same strategy was followed by PT state governments in the Northeast, and Lula praised Doria for his supposed fight against the pandemic in São Paulo.

Alckmin was Doria’s principal political patron, preceding him as governor of São Paulo. Alckmin’s terms as governor were marked by extensive attacks on public education, with the introduction of full-time charter schools, external evaluations, and corporate management policies, which cut teachers’ salaries in the state to among the lowest in Brazil. In 2015, he announced a sweeping “school reorganization” that would result in the closure of 1,000 schools across the state. The announcement sparked an explosive school occupation movement by high school students in 2015-6, forcing the government to abandon its project.

The rapprochement between Lula and Alckmin was largely mediated by Fernando Haddad, one of the most right-wing figures within the PT. Haddad is one of the biggest advocates of a “broad front” against Bolsonaro, i.e., the subordination of the popular anger against the fascistic president to the same sections of the ruling class and bourgeois state that enabled him to freely implement his herd immunity policy and attacks on the Brazilian working class. During his time as minister of education in the Lula administration (2005-2012) and as mayor of São Paulo (2013-2016), Haddad , like Alckmin, had a record of attacks against teachers and public education.

In 2005, he implemented the first national external evaluation for basic education, the Prova Brasil (Brazil Exam). Like external evaluations around the world, it opened the way for privatizing public education, as was the case with the high school reform during the government of President Michel Temer in 2016. Haddad himself, as education minister, had defended key aspects of the educational reform later implemented by Temer.

It was also during the period when Haddad headed the education ministry that Brazil saw exponential growth in private higher education. The increase in university enrollments, driven by the “commodities boom” during Lula’s administrations, was fueled by massive federal subsidies to low-quality private colleges, which turned Brazilian higher education into a highly profitable business.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of this process was education businessman Walfrido dos Mares Guia, who also served as a minister under Lula. In 2013, he created Kroton Educacional, which became the largest private educational group in the world. Returning favors received from PT governments, he provided million-dollar donations to Haddad’s campaign for mayor of São Paulo in 2016, to the Lula Institute, and even lent his private jet to Lula. Today, Mares Guia is serving as one of the intermediaries between the PT and the corporate world, repeating that “businessmen need not be afraid” of Lula.

As mayor of the city of São Paulo, Haddad’s policies also benefited private education, which now administers practically all the day care centers inaugurated under his mandate. Haddad’s administration was also marked by large strikes of municipal teachers. In 2015, he attempted to force through a pension reform that would result in cutting the pensions of teachers and other public employees and create a retirement plan administered by private funds. After Haddad vowed to withdraw his pension reform plan, he sent the proposal to the São Paulo City Council three days before leaving office, paving the way for it to be approved the following year with even harsher attacks on São Paulo’s teachers and public employees.

It was during his term as mayor that Haddad began his fruitful political relationship with Alckmin, then governor of the state of São Paulo. In a recent interview, Haddad said: “I have a well-known personal relationship with Alckmin, and when I was mayor I got along very well with him as governor. We had disagreements, but we knew how to build together and we built a lot of things.”

Among the things they “built together” is the brutal repression unleashed by the São Paulo Military Police against demonstrations over the increase in public transportation fares in 2013. This crackdown sparked what became known as the “Brazilian Spring,” the largest mass movement in the last 30 years against widespread corruption, poor social services, social inequality, and the entire political establishment, including the PT governments.

The attacks on public education by Alckmin and Haddad could not have happened without the complicity of the São Paulo state teachers union, APEOESP, and its pseudo-left apologists, particularly the so-called opposition to the PT leadership in APEOESP headed by Morenoite and Pabloite groups within the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). They have a long record of isolating and sabotaging teachers’ strikes, which allowed then governor Alckmin to carry out his broad attacks on public education in the state, while Haddad did the same as mayor of São Paulo.

During the pandemic, the betrayals of APEOESP and the pseudo-left took on a criminal character as they sabotaged strikes “for life” before the second deadly wave early last year. Today, these political forces are supporting Lula, Alckmin and Haddad, who will be the PT’s candidate for governor of São Paulo, claiming that these bourgeois politicians will “rebuild Brazil. Quite the contrary, for decades they have spearheaded the destruction of public education and the living conditions of the working class, paving the way for the election of Bolsonaro in 2018.

In the midst of a growing global economic crisis and a pandemic still out of control, the world ruling elites are unleashing a broad assault on social and democratic rights, with the advancing threat of dictatorial forms of rule and a nuclear world war. Under these conditions, the guarantee of quality public education is ever more inseparable from a political struggle against the capitalist system. This means confiscating the wealth of the likes of Mares Guia and the other Brazilian billionaires with whom Lula and Alckmin are now meeting to assure the financial markets that there is nothing to fear from a PT administration.

Biden arrives in Israel to begin four-day tour courting dictators and war allies

Patrick Martin

US President Joe Biden arrived in Israel Wednesday to begin a four-day trip whose major purpose is to align the main US client states in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Washington’s plans for war against Russia and Iran. After two days in Israel and the West Bank, he will move on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to meet with Saudi leaders and with representatives of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes the five other Persian Gulf sheikdoms as well as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

President Joe Biden speaks during a welcoming ceremony upon his arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel Wednesday, July 13, 2022. [AP Photo/Ariel Schalit]

In pursuit of this military agenda, Biden is simply dropping the issues of “human rights” that have been used to screen the policies of American imperialism. In particular, Biden will hold a face-to-face meeting with the de facto Saudi ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he once denounced as a “pariah” because of his role in ordering the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Israel too has been given a pass on murderous actions against the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, although that is nothing new for the US government. Only a week before Biden left for his visit to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the State Department issued a report on the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akhlef, who was shot to death by an Israeli sniper while she was reporting on Israeli military operations in the West Bank city of Jenin for Al Jazeera Arabic.

The report found that an Israeli soldier likely killed Abu Akhlef, but the State Department claimed that there was no evidence the shooting was deliberate, despite the journalist wearing a bullet-proof vest and a sign clearly identifying her as press. Her death was merely a “tragic accident,” the US government agency declared.

Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia has been prepared by a whole series of diplomatic maneuvers and tap-dancing around the well-established fact that bin Salman sent the squad of Saudi security officers who grabbed Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, seeking a document to permit him to marry his Turkish fiancée.

They killed him and chopped up his body with a bone saw which they had brought to Turkey for that purpose, then disposed of the pieces so thoroughly that no physical evidence of his death has been recovered by Turkish authorities.

Over the past six months, French, British and Turkish leaders have visited bin Salman in Riyadh, while the Saudi ruler has visited Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, in each case bringing piles of cash taken from the $100 billion in additional Saudi revenue from the runup in prices for the country’s enormous oil exports.

Money has made the prince persona grata once again throughout the Middle East, and money brings Biden to Riyadh, seeking an increase in Saudi oil production to help bring down world oil prices and US gasoline prices. The price at the pump in the United States is both a major driver of wider inflation and a huge political problem for the Biden administration, facing an upsurge in the class struggle and a midterm election in less than four months.

A report in the New York Times July 13 suggested that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would agree to a joint increase in production of about 1.25 million barrels a day, but that it would not be announced until a few weeks after Biden’s visit in order to avoid the unseemly appearance of a blood-for-oil exchange.

Besides the immediate political and economic pressures, Biden is pursuing the more long-term strategic goals of American imperialism. It has not gone unnoticed in Washington that neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia has jumped on the bandwagon of the war against Russia in Ukraine.

The Israeli government has to deal with both a large Russian-speaking minority within the country and close economic and political ties to Moscow, developed over a long period of time. The Saudi government is playing hard to get in relation to Ukraine, to gain leverage in its efforts to block Biden from reviving the seven-nation JCPOA nuclear pact with Iran, from which the Trump administration withdrew.

Discussions on Iran will undoubtedly occupy first place on the agenda in both Jerusalem and Riyadh. Washington is seeking to promote a more coordinated effort between Israel and the various Mideast sheikdoms, particularly in relation to preparations for air strikes against Iran, which would require Israeli or Saudi warplanes to cross a number of countries in order to reach their targets.

Biden will portray even the most minimal concession on human rights by the Saudi monarchy as a step in the right direction, while remaining silent on such barbaric events as the recent mass beheading of 81 prisoners, executed mainly for being political activists on behalf of the oppressed Shiite minority in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Aside from the ferocious internal repression of political dissidents, religious minorities and immigrant workers, the Saudi monarchy is up to its elbows in blood through its war against the people of Yemen. The Saudi military, with US backing, has been engaged in military intervention for more than seven years, seeking to overthrow the Houthi-led regime in Sana, which it accuses of being allied with Iran.

The two principal Saudi tactics have been indiscriminate terror bombing—with the United States supplying the bombs, the warplanes and the targeting information—and a naval blockade to shut off food supplies to the impoverished country, the poorest in the Arab world.

Biden and congressional Democrats in Washington have cried many crocodile tears over the crimes committed by the Saudi regime in Yemen, which are far worse than anything done by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. But these atrocities will be swept under the rug in pursuit of the interests of American imperialism in the Middle East and globally.

There are many signs of mounting instability in the region, which could trigger another military explosion, side-by-side with the war in Ukraine. Russian and American forces are at close quarters in Syria, with a Russian air strike hitting near the US-held base at Tanf, close to the Iraq border, last month.

In Israel, the government of Naftali Bennett, a coalition of ultra-right, “center-left” and Arab parties, fell last month, forcing the calling of new elections for November 1, which could lead to a return to power by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid met Biden Wednesday and accompanied him on two ritual visits, to observe the operation of Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile system, and to pay tribute to the millions murdered in the Holocaust, at the Yad Vashem memorial.

The Biden administration has continued the brazenly anti-Palestinian policies of Donald Trump, including legal recognition for Israeli settlements on the West Bank, keeping the US consulate in Jerusalem closed to Palestinians, and keeping the Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. closed.

Publisher’s lawsuit seeks to take down Internet Archive’s digital lending library

Kevin Reed

The Internet Archive is an online digital library based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 1996 with the stated mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The archive enables the public to view large collections of digitized music, books and film for free.

Internet Archive servers at the headquarters in San Francisco.

As of May 2022, the Internet Archive had accumulated over 35 million books and texts, 7.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 842,000 software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips and 237,000 concerts. Access to the massive repository is available to researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities like low vision and dyslexia and the general public.

Among the platform’s most popular assets is the Wayback Machine. This is a digital archive of the World Wide Web that allows users to go “back in time” and see how websites looked up to 25 years ago. The Wayback Machine has recorded 682 billion web pages because, as explained by the publisher, “Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral—but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it.”

While the Internet Archive provides a window into the potential for online information and digital media to be made available to everyone in a manner similar to that of a public library, the repository has come under a vicious attack by powerful corporate and financial interests.

In June 2020, four major publishers—John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five US publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming the non-profit organization, “is engaged in willful mass copyright infringement.”

The lawsuit stems from the corporate publishers response to an innovative temporary initiative launched by the Internet Archive during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic called the National Emergency Library. Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once.

Up to that point, the Internet Archive had established a practice of purchasing copies of printed books, digitizing them and lending them to borrowers one at a time. When it kicked-off the emergency lending program, the Internet Archive made it clear that this policy would be in effect until the end of the pandemic. Furthermore, the archive’s publishers said that this program was in response to library doors being closed to the public during the pandemic. Under conditions where the Internet Archive was the only means of access to titles for many people, the policy was justified and a creative response to COVID-19.

However, even if the claim by the $25 billion publishing industry were true that the emergency lending program was damaging—and it is not—it is clear that the aim of their lawsuit is nothing less than the complete shutdown of the Internet Archive.

In their suit, the publishers have identified 127 titles they claim were shared digitally in violation of copyright laws and they are seeking to recoup $19 million, according to one estimate, which is equivalent to one year of the Internet Archive’s operating budget.

On July 8, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) submitted a 45-page brief in support of the Internet Archive’s motion that the federal court in New York City throw out the publisher’s lawsuit on the grounds that it is an attempt to criminalize library lending. The EFF memorandum supporting a motion for summary judgment argues that the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program constitutes fair use as covered by copyright law and preserves traditional library lending in the digital world.

In an accompanying press release, the EFF explained, “The Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.”

The EFF presents evidence that the big publisher’s did not lose money from the Internet Archive program due to the fact that, when the titles in question were removed from the online library, “their print sales slightly worsened relative to other books.”

Computer engineer and free and open internet activist Brewster Kahle, 61, is the founder of the Internet Archive. Speaking in an online forum about the lawsuit, Kahle argued that Internet Archive is as important to the preservation and circulation of digital media as any other library is to physical media and that the nature of libraries themselves are under attack in the lawsuit.

“The Internet Archive is a non-profit library,” Kahle said. “We do what libraries have always done. What libraries do is we buy, we preserve, and we lend books to one reader at a time. … This lawsuit is not just an attack on the Internet Archive. It’s an attack on all libraries. The publishers want to criminalize libraries owning, preserving, and lending books in digital form.”

EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry said, “The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world.”

Benjamin Saracco, a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey, told the EFF, “The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since.”

The lawsuit by the four giant publishers—the product of the increasing consolidation of the industry and with combined revenue of $13.4 billion in 2021—highlights several important features of present-day capitalist society.

It is not an accident that the corporations have seized upon the Internet Archive’s emergency lending program which was launched during the pandemic. Not one section of the ruling establishment was prepared to lift a finger to provide the public with resources necessary to respond adequately to COVID-19 and defeat the virus.

While the publishing companies were generating record sales in 2020 and 2021, they saw the pandemic as a means to increasing profits and an opportunity to go on the offensive against the non-profit online resource that is free to the public, and viewed it as an enemy that should be eliminated.

Finally, the publisher’s lawsuit is part of the broader assault on basic democratic rights, attacking the principle of library lending, a concept pioneered by the American revolutionary, inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1731. Franklin viewed the establishment of the public library as an all-embracing cultural institution that provided for the common benefit of a non-elite membership. The early library not only lent out books but a microscope and a telescope.

Of the Library Company of Philadelphia, which eventually served as the first Library of Congress, Franklin wrote, “these Libraries have improved the general Conversation of Americans, made the common Tradesmen and Farmers as intelligent as most Gentlemen from other Countries, and perhaps have contributed in some Degree to the Stand so generally made throughout the Colonies in Defence of their Priviledges.”

As with everything else related to the revolutionary democratic traditions of America, the present-day capitalist elite sees library lending as a threat to its maniacal appetite for profits and personal wealth accumulation.

Living and dying with COVID-19

Benjamin Mateus & Evan Blake

“The Omicron sub-variant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen. It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level.”—Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute

The highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron BA.5 subvariant is now dominant throughout much of the world and is fueling yet another wave of infections, hospitalizations, debilitation with Long COVID and deaths. Since reaching a trough on May 30, the official seven-day average of daily new cases worldwide has nearly doubled to 926,123.

While Europe is currently the epicenter of the BA.5 surge, in recent weeks cases have risen precipitously in countries throughout the world, including Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Tunisia, Iraq, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and more.

Official infection figures in every country are significant undercounts. Over the past seven months, the political establishment and corporate media of nearly every country outside China falsely claimed that Omicron was “mild” and dismantled testing and data tracking systems. While telling everyone it was safe to take off their masks, they universally adopted the mantra that society must “learn to live with the virus” without ever explaining the real implications of this new reality.

Masses of people are not living with the coronavirus. They are dying or being debilitated by COVID-19. The new status quo, enforced through relentless propaganda and economic compulsion, means that populations can expect recurring waves of COVID-19 at evermore frequent intervals. As many experts have predicted and the World Socialist Web Site warned since last year, two or three waves of infections and reinfections every year are becoming the norm.

Despite the fact that the European Union has among the highest vaccination rates in the world, the entire continent is undergoing a massive surge of infections, with hospitalizations and deaths rising in tandem. On a per capita basis, the worst-impacted countries in Europe are now France, Italy and Greece.

In France, an average of 127,212 people are officially being infected each day, up more than eight-fold from the trough reached on June 13. In the past week alone, COVID-19 hospital admissions have risen 40 percent in France, while this figure has risen by more than 20 percent in several other European countries. In the past three weeks, official deaths from COVID-19 have nearly doubled in France and Spain, while across the EU deaths have risen by 60 percent.

In Greece, the seven-day average of daily new cases has risen nearly five-fold in the past month and now stands at 17,750 cases per day. Over 2,000 people are presently hospitalized with COVID-19 across the country, and official deaths from COVID-19 have more than doubled in less than a month. In an effort to conceal the increasingly dire situation, this week the National Public Health Organization (EODY) switched from daily to weekly reporting.

In Italy, an average of 104,078 people are now officially infected with COVID-19 each day, up more than six-fold since June 3. According to official figures, more than 11 percent of all new cases are now reinfections of people previously infected with COVID-19, the highest such figure to date. Official deaths from COVID-19 have doubled in the past month.

In the United States, BA.5 became dominant at the end of June. While the number of official infections has hovered just above 100,000 cases per day for the past two months, the true figure has been estimated to be up to six times higher. Test positivity has soared nationally to 18 percent from a low of 2 percent in March. Official deaths from COVID-19 are once again beginning to rise, with Los Angeles County reporting a doubling in average daily deaths over the past week and other cities reporting similar surges.

Virologists and infectious disease experts are particularly concerned about BA.5 due to its enhanced immune-escape properties and its ability to cause reinfections and breakthrough infections. A preprint study from the Kirby Institute in Australia also found that the tissue tropism of BA.5, or ability to infect cells, appears to favor an increased infection of the lungs instead of the upper airways, causing increased disease severity in animal models. Their study also found that BA.5 produces a higher viral load than all other Omicron subvariants.

What can people expect from “living with COVID,” in which waves of mass infection and reinfection hit global society at least twice per year?

A recent preprint study by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, et al. from Washington University in St. Louis, found that people with reinfections compared to those with only one previous infection had a doubling of their all-cause mortality, as well as heart and respiratory illnesses. They faced a three-fold risk of hospitalization after the acute phase of their infection ended. Three or more infections became cumulatively worse, affecting every major organ and metabolic system in the human body.

With massive waves of infection, which in reality are infecting hundreds of millions or even billions of people, as took place last winter, tens of millions more patients will go on to develop lingering symptoms known as Long COVID, which can impact roughly 10-30 percent of those infected. Previous vaccinations minimally reduce these risks and reinfections continue to predispose one to acquiring Long COVID. One-third of those with Long COVID may face such debilitating consequences that they are unable to care and provide for themselves or their families.

The latest real world data from the surge of BA.5 and recent scientific studies once again expose the lie that the coronavirus will evolve to become milder and harmless. The current global surge of infections is occurring amid high levels of population immunity from previous infections or vaccinations, debunking any notion that “herd immunity” will ever be achieved with existing vaccines or through the homicidal strategy of allowing the virus to spread unchecked.

New variants are now waiting in the wings. Omicron BA.2.75 has been detected across several countries, with most cases seen in India so far. Offshoots of BA.5 are growing steadily in Germany (BA.5.3.1), the UK (BA.5.1), and elsewhere. A CDC spokesperson speaking on conditions of anonymity told Fortune that “the variants and sub-variants are fragmenting quickly. There’s not one or two, but hundreds of variants and sub-variants.”

In the US and many other countries, health officials have begun to adopt a more worried tone. On Tuesday, for the first time in weeks White House COVID Response Team Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha advised Americans to wear masks. He framed this as an individual choice and said nothing about mask mandates.

Clearly nervous about the worsening surge of BA.5, Dr. Jha stated, “[t]here are obviously a lot of Americans who got infected with BA.1 — BA.1.1 in the January wave. I think we have very clear evidence that their level of protection at this point is very minimal, certainly against infection, from BA.5.”

This was echoed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said, “[i]f you were infected with BA.1, you really don’t have a lot of good protection against BA.4 or 5 … the overall principle is that we know immunity wanes with coronaviruses, whether that is natural infection or vaccination.”

It must be recalled that these two health authorities, along with the entire political establishment and corporate media, last winter welcomed the supposedly “mild” and highly contagious Omicron variant as the long-awaited variant to finally achieve “herd immunity” by sending the virus into an “endemic” state.

On January 17, a day when over 800,000 Americans were infected with COVID-19 and 1,397 died from the disease, Dr. Fauci stated during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “It is an open question as to whether or not Omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for.”

That same day, Dr. Jha appeared on CNBC and stated, “I’m hoping Omicron gives us the lessons we need to manage the rest of this pandemic, however long it lasts, and move to a new normal, where we treat this virus much more as an endemic thing. And so I’m hoping that this really is the transition variant that gets us into a different footing for future variants and lets us manage them much more effectively.”

This was part of a global trend. Also in January, World Health Organization Regional Director for Europe Dr. Hans Kluge stated, “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame.”

In his March 1, 2022, State of the Union address, US President Joe Biden stated, “I can say we’re moving forward safely, back to more normal routines … thanks to the progress we’ve made in the past year, COVID-19 no longer need control our lives.”

These were all lies intended to disarm the population to accept “living with COVID.” As early as August 2020, the WSWS warned of the potential for new variants to evolve and continue to wreak havoc, writing, “With SARS-CoV-2 virus proliferating around the world, the opportunity arises for further mutations and the emergence of new strains of the virus.” We have repeatedly stressed this danger and the possibility that more infectious, vaccine-resistant and lethal variants could emerge.

According to a tracker of excess deaths from The Economist, 3.8 million people have died since January 3 as a result of the continued pandemic and the efforts to force society to “live with COVID.” This deepening catastrophe must be stopped, and those responsible must be held accountable!